Good evening and welcome to Markets Desk.
Tech stocks led a broad selloff on Friday, with the Nasdaq one hundred dropping nearly one and a half percent and the S&P five hundred shedding just over one percent. The move reflected mounting pressure on the sector as rate expectations and competitive anxiety weighed on sentiment heading into the weekend close.
That competitive anxiety has a name, and it is Kimi K three. Moonshot AI, the Chinese startup behind the model, has released an open-weight system that benchmarks are placing in the same conversation as Anthropic and OpenAI. For investors already nervous about AI valuations, another credible challenger out of Beijing is not a comfortable headline.
And the policy dimension of that AI race just got sharper. The Trump administration is moving to control who can access frontier AI models, with the White House effectively inserting itself as a gatekeeper between the major labs and their customers. That shift in access authority is significant — it moves pricing power and strategic leverage away from the companies themselves and into the hands of federal policy.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
