U.S. and Iran begin peace talks as Trump’s White House goes to war against the media, insider traders, and the Pope

Good morning. On Fortune’s radar today:

- Markets: Good times!

- EXCLUSIVE: Has Anthropic built something too dangerous and too expensive to commercialize?

- Get ready for nation-state oil hoarding.

- Peace talks begin as the White House goes to war against the media, insider traders … and the Pope.

- Without immigrant workers the U.S. will need robots, Pimco says.

- EXCLUSIVE: Eva Longoria on her days as a headhunter who closed deals from her soap opera dressing room.

THE MARKETS

Global stock market rally underway

Oil rose marginally to $97 per barrel this morning. S&P 500 futures were flat before the open in New York. The index closed up 0.62% yesterday. Asia was up strongly today: Japan’s Nikkei 225 rose 1.84%, China’s CSI 300 gained 1.54%, and South Korea’s KOSPI added 1.40%. The optimism spread to Europe, too. The Stoxx 600 climbed 0.35% and the U.K.’s FTSE 100 put on 0.21% before lunch.

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- New inflation number incoming: The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics will publish the Consumer Price Index for March—the first full month of the war—later today. The expectation is that it rose one percentage point to 3.4%, per ING.

Get ready for oil hoarding

Oil prices will stay “high for longer” even if the U.S. and Iran can make a peace agreement because governments don’t believe the peace will last, according to Macquarie analysts Thierry Wizman and Gareth Berry. Even if the Strait of Hormuz is reopened, nations will start hoarding it in fear of a resumption of hostilities, they advised clients:

- “It's the risk of renewed disruption (or control of the Strait by Iran) that will make crude oil appear scarce, and why the industrialized countries will want to hoard supplies immediately. That will push the spot and futures prices higher than they would otherwise be without the tension. And hoarding of crude oil could be just as inflationary as a shut-in of crude oil.”

“Dated Brent” is becoming a problem: There are already signs of stress in the oil market, according to CNBC. The price of “dated Brent,” which reflects cargoes at sea due for delivery between 10 days and a month from now, was at $131.97 per barrel on Thursday.

ONE BIG THING

EXCLUSIVE: Has Anthropic built something too dangerous and too expensive to commercialize at scale?

Anthropic says its new AI model, “Mythos,” is too dangerous to be released because it can be used by hackers to find cyber security vulnerabilities that humans don’t even know exist. That’s an unusual stance for a company valued at around $380 billion and preparing for an IPO, according to Fortune’s Bea Nolan. The company is rolling out Mythos via an invitation-only initiative restricted to organizations focused on security risks, such as Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Cisco. That looks like pretty great brand-building, according to Paulo Shakarian, a professor of artificial intelligence at Syracuse University. It “plays really well with the chief security officers of the world,” he said.

But it may also be the case that Mythos is so large, and requires so much computing power, that the company cannot afford to support its release to the general public. “I think it is likely that they simply do not have the GPU and other compute resources available to serve it at scale,” says Richard Whaling, lead researcher of cybersecurity startup Charlemagne Labs.

- Scott Bessent called in U.S. bank CEOs to discuss Anthropic model’s cyber risks - FT

IRAN

U.S.-Iran peace talks begin as the White House goes to war against the media, insider traders, and the Vatican

Peace talks between Iran and the U.S. are scheduled to start today in Islamabad, Pakistan. Conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy terror group in Lebanon, continued overnight and this morning. Live coverage from the BBC here.

President Trump accused Iran of violating the ceasefire agreement: “Iran is doing a very poor job, dishonorable some would say, of allowing Oil to go through the Strait of Hormuz. That is not the agreement we have!” he said on Truth Social.

- Only 12 ships have passed through the strait in the last 24 hours, according to this live monitoring site. That’s up from seven ships the previous day. Normally, 130-plus ships navigate the gap daily.

Inside the White House, staffers were formally warned to stop placing insider bets on commodity indexes and prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket. Fifteen minutes before Trump announced there would be peace talks with Iran, $760 million of oil futures contracts changed hands “in less than two minutes,” the Wall Street Journal reports. On Polymarket, three accounts earned $600,000 by correctly predicting the exact time of the Iranian ceasefire.

Trump was angry at the Wall Street Journal last night: “The Wall Street Journal, one of the worst and most inaccurate ‘Editorial Boards’ in the World, stated that I ‘declared premature victory in Iran.’ Actually, it is a Victory, and there’s nothing ‘premature’ about it! Becaus