Good morning. Donald Trump steps up pressure on Russia. Tesla’s troubles deepen. And the race for artificial general intelligence is on—but what is it? Listen to the day’s top stories.

— Lucy Meakin

The price of oil jumped after the US announced sanctions on Russia’s biggest oil producers, as Donald Trump intensifies pressure on Vladimir Putin to end the war in Ukraine. He’s also seeking to squeeze Russia’s key crude buyers—India and China. Flows of Russian oil to major Indian refiners are expected to fall to near zero, executives said. 

Adding to trade tensions, the Trump administration is weighing export curbs on China that would bar the purchase of a wide swath of critical software. Futures struggled for momentum as traders’ anxiety over trade and corporate earnings grows.

Canada has its own plans to counter US tariffs. In a rare prime-time televised speech, Prime Minister Mark Carney laid out a strategy to double the country’s exports to markets outside the US within a decade, making it less reliant on its neighbor. He’s also hoping a new immigration plan will lure some of the talent that may previously have headed to the US.

Tesla showed more signs of strain, reporting a plunge in profit as rising costs undercut a record quarter of vehicle sales. As for Elon Musk, he spent the end of the company’s earnings call pleading with investors to ratify his proposed $1 trillion pay package and blasting those that oppose the plan.

The final debate before New York City’s mayoral election saw Andrew Cuomo seeking to overturn a double-digit polling deficit by slamming frontrunner Zohran Mamdani as unprepared and inexperienced. In return, Mamdani cast Cuomo as a failure, who during a decade as governor, couldn’t bring change to the city. But no matter who wins, higher taxes are inevitable.

Deep Dive

AI companies are in a race to create artificial general intelligence, seeing it as the catalyst for an “intelligence explosion” that’ll reshape the economy and society. The problem is, they can’t agree on what AGI would actually look like, and how, or when, it might be achieved.

• Adding to the confusion, there’s no single definition of artificial general intelligence and even the vocabulary keeps shifting, with tech gurus often preferring terms from “powerful AI” to “artificial capable intelligence,” or, more recently, “superintelligence.”
• OpenAI offered a roadmap toward AGI last year by detailing the five stages it expects for AI. The list starts with the chatbots, progressing in its final stages to AI systems that “aid in invention” and models that can “do the work of an organization.”
• The dream is an AGI system so sophisticated that it can cure diseases and accelerate human progress. Skeptics warn it’s overhyped, and as developers experience diminishing returns from their costly efforts to build more advanced AI, fears of a trillion-dollar bubble are growing.

The Big Take

Computer Village in Lagos, Nigeria. Photographer: Taiwo Arifayan

DeepSeek is making AI cheaper and less power-hungry, putting it within reach of millions of people in Africa. Chinese officials tout the benefits of democratizing the technology, while some critics see it as a power grab.

Opinion

American support for the Argentine peso hasn’t stopped the bleeding, John Authers and Richard Abbey write. The swap line may not be helping Argentina’s economy, but simply investors who were already headed for the exits—and Uncle Sam might have to take quite a loss.

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Before You Go

Joshua Wander departs federal court. Photographer: Bing Guan/Bloomberg

A $500 million fraud case is exposing soccer’s shaky finances. Joshua Wander is charged with conspiracy and fraud for allegedly cheating lenders and investors in his investment firm, 777 Partners (at one point using Microsoft Paint to doctor financial records), as he sought stakes in some of Europe’s biggest teams.