Good afternoon and welcome to Markets Desk.
Equities are under pressure today as the AI trade takes a breather. The S&P five hundred is off just over one percent, but the real pain is in the Nasdaq one hundred, down nearly two and two thirds percent as investors rotate out of the high-multiple tech names that have led this year's rally. The Dow is essentially flat, which tells you this is a sector story, not a broad macro selloff.
Staying with artificial intelligence, but shifting to the battlefield — the British Army's top general says an AI system called ASGARD has compressed military headquarters planning cycles from seventy-two hours down to just one. General Roly Walker says a UK corps can now strike ten times as many targets in a single day. That is a strategic compression of decision-making speed that defense analysts will be watching very closely.
And on the lighter side of AI costs — fintech firm Slash is dealing with a rather expensive lesson in access controls. An employee used company AI credits to build a, quote, brainrot shooter game, running up a bill of eighty thousand dollars in tokens. Slash's response? Encourage people to play it and reclassify the spend as a marketing expense. Creative accounting, or a masterclass in damage control — you decide.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
