Regulators Delay Approval for Boeing’s 737 MAX 10

In video launches the largest ever U.S. doc buyback, plus more researchers call for oversight of AI while President Trump plans to meet with tech executives tomorrow. The industry is very divided on this issue, and as a result, so is the administration, and both sides are often pointing the finger at one another. And the FAA is delaying approval of Boeing's 737 MAX-10. It's Monday, September 28. I'm Alex O'Sola for the Wall Street Journal. This is the PM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories that move the world today. First on today's show, an update on the suspected terrorist plot on an airbase in the U.K. that hosts U.S. forces. British counterterrorism police said that they were releasing five men on bail who were arrested over the foiled attack. The five men are all U.K. nationals in their 20s, but investigators are probing whether Iran or an Islamist group had orchestrated the plot. The five men remain under investigation and security officials suspect that U.S.-B-1 bombers at the base were a likely target of the plot. Iran's embassy in the U.K. said today that it rejects attempts to link Iran to the U.S. And in the U.S., a report out from Senate Democrats today says that Iran has relied on digital dollars issued by crypto company Tether to bypass U.S. sanctions. A Tether spokesman didn't return requests for comment. The company has worked with law enforcement to freeze some wallets tied to the regime. Nvidia is launching the largest ever U.S. stock buyback. Today the chip giant said its board had approved a $150 billion increase to its share repurchase program, bringing the total buyback authorization to $235 billion. The company is flushed with cash from the A.I. boom. This stock closed up 1.7%. Separately today, Nvidia launched a software platform to help developers test A.I. agents in a secure environment after a number of A.I. agents went rogue in recent months. It's part of a broader conversation going on about A.I. safety. What started as a warning from some of the biggest names and artificial intelligence has become an international conversation about weather and how to regulate A.I. for safety. Another exclusively reporting that research leaders at OpenA.I. and Thropic, Meta and Microsoft have asked policymakers to probe the degree to which their companies have made A.I. research automated. In a paper published today, the researchers wrote that automating A.I. research could compress the work so much that humans might no longer be able to understand it. And that could prevent people from being able to catch problems with A.I. models or from being able to solve those problems. The President Trump is also weighing what A.I. safety regulation might look like. For more on what's going on in the White House, I'm joined now by WSJ Tech Policy Reporter, Amrith Rumkumar. Amrith initially, Trump was very dismissive of calls to regulate A.I. but more recently, he's promised to do things like create an A.I. force and recruit a new A.I.s are. What did he change his tune on this? I don't think we should look at this as the President changing his tune much. He's definitely sort of caught in two minds on A.I. He is super focused on beating China and A.I. race and a minimal regulatory stance, essentially. But the President has spoken over the years about the risks with A.I. and he's said at times that there needs to be a kill switch where a human can take control of the system if it's spiraling out of control. And we know that many of his top advisors have been warning him in recent months that the risks of cyber attacks caused by A.I. are going up. So I think he knows he needs to show some action here. This issue is very unpopular with voters and voters want to see some actions. So I think that's why you're seeing some conflicting messaging and pure chaos, frankly, in recent days. Well, one thing we know he has done is, have dinner last night with Anthropics CEO Dario Amade. He's supposed to meet with several other tech CEOs at the White House tomorrow. What is the purpose or goal of these meetings? So a gathering like this can just serve as a way to let people talk things out. But the industry is very divided on this issue and as a result, so is the administration. And both sides are often pointing the finger at one another. So we'll see whether anything comes out of it. This could be the type of venue where you see the President announce his pick for A.I. Zare. It's still not clear what that person would do or what impact that would have on A.I. policy. The jury's still out on where this all lands. This A.I. force concept, the President has also talked about. There have been few details. People were also disappointed last week in the U.S.-China talks that the A.I. dialogue basically resulted in a high-level threat-sharing agreement where the U.S. and China will give the other a heads up if there's a major national security threat caused by A.I. So for all the bluster about A.I. in Washington over the past month, there's really a little to show for it. General reporter Amrith Ramkumar, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. A.I. which has invested more than $100 billion in A.I. is under pressure to show investors how it plans to make money from that spending. Now it's starting a new A.I. business aimed at enterprise customers. The division will bring together sales of several A.I. tools Meta already has, like its viral news productivity agent, a coding tool, access to its top models, and agents for businesses. SpaceX's Starship entered orbit for the first time today. The launch from a pad in Texas this morning is the 14th test of Starship. It carried 26 satellites that SpaceX added to its current constellation, which delivers internet service to customers around the world. The launch and satellite deployment are key steps as the company wants to move the rocket from a research and development phase to one where it carries payloads that can generate revenue. In markets, the start of a new week brought more new highs for treasury yields. The yield on benchmark 10-year notes settled at more than 5.24%, a fresh 19-year high, while the 30-year closed at a 24-year high. Stock slid with the NASDAQ leading the losses in the major indexes, it closed down 0.9%. Boeing was a big decliner today after the Federal Aviation Administration, the FAA, said it would delay certifying Boeing's latest model of its 737 MAX plane. The FAA says it's assessing a software glitch, an issue that some industry officials worry is a potential safety risk during landings. The journal reported over the weekend that Boeing had identified a glitch that could cause an automated navigation feature to fail. Boeing stocks lid almost 7% today. Coming up, a personnel shake up at the top of the FBI, and a prosecutor reopens an investigation into an alleged gang rape at Cornell University. These stories and more after the break. Three pieces of news from the Trump administration. First, the government rolled back regulations that required cars to be more fuel efficient. The Biden administration had mandated more than 50 miles a gallon for new vehicles, but the Trump administration today said it would bring that down to an average of 34.5 miles a gallon by model year 2031. Administration officials say the changes will help make cars cheaper by easing expensive engineering requirements for automakers. Critics like environmental groups say those savings are overblown and will be quickly eclipsed by higher fuel costs. So today, President Trump announced that a company called Missabi Metallix plans to build a $15 billion steel mill in Iowa. Missabi, which is based in Minnesota, is part of Indian conglomerate SR Group. The proposed mill, which would be one of the largest in the U.S., is a win for President Trump as he looks to counter voter frustration with the economy ahead of the midterm elections. A White House official said that the plant could begin operating in 2030 and that it would support 1700 jobs. And at the FBI, one of director Cash Patel's top deputies is quitting after roughly a year on the job. Andrew Bailey, a co-deputy director, said in a social media post today that he needed to spend more time with his family. Bailey's departure comes amid a slew of departures and turmoil at the agency, and his last day at the bureau is Friday. In New York State, prosecutors have reopened an investigation into an alleged 2024 gang rape of a Cornell university student. Earlier this month, her lawyer filed a civil suit against the school, saying that the victim was forcibly drugged with ketamine at the Chi-5 fraternity house and gang raped by seven of the fraternity members. The district attorney for Tomkins County, where Cornell is located, said today that his office would present the case against the seven men to a grand jury for potential criminal charges. An attorney for one of the accused men denied the allegations in the civil suit. And finally, back in 2023, my colleague, Evan Gershkovic, was arrested by Russia's security forces. He was the first U.S. journalist to be charged with espionage there since the Cold War. If you're like me, you might wonder how did he deal with the absolute terror of his arrest than more than a year in Moscow's infamous Left 4-0 prison? By treating it, like a reporting trip. It kind of felt like this would be the most interesting way to spend my time. I'd already been planning a book before, and then when I got arrested, it sort of made sense that I just simply became a character in that. And so I sort of just started taking notes. He took those notes old school with a pen and paper. As he recently told Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Emma Tucker, he wrote in notebooks he treated as diaries. So I would copy them each week onto a separate show. sheet of paper by hand, and then mail them out to my lawyers so I would have a backup essentially. But everything presumably was being read on the way out. So they have the record of my diaries, but I just figured everything I was saying in the diaries, I didn't have anything to hide, so I was fine with them reading it and having it. Evan's written a book about his experience. It's called "This Curse Beautiful Land" and it's out tomorrow. One of the things he talks about in it is the experience of being arrested during an interview with a source. When I went to that interview, it wasn't completely blind to the risks, still the thought of taking a foreign correspondent, a prisoner, you know, just still felt like a bar that they wouldn't cross. So when I was at the interview and they stormed in, the first feeling was pure fear and your heart starts beating really quickly. After 16 months in prison and a global campaign for his release, Evan was freed in August 2024. And he says that now, even with the experience behind him, it's changed the way he thinks about journalism. The accepted rules and norms are changing of what a foreign correspondent is, what they're allowed to do. More countries are becoming authoritarian. More countries are more willing to no longer treat a foreign correspondent and, you know, not a diplomat, but kind of a diplomat where you, if you're really unhappy with an outlet or a certain journalist, you don't extend their visa, you cancel their accreditation, you kick them out, you don't take them hostage. So I've thought about that a great deal about the, you know, the risks we take, the situations we put ourselves in. You can watch Evan's full interview with Emma Tucker on WSJ.com. We'll leave a link in the show notes. And that's what's news for this Monday afternoon. Today's show is produced by Danny Lewis and Anthony Bansy with supervising producer Tully Arbel. I'm Alex O'Soleff for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back with a new show tomorrow morning. Thanks for listening. [Music]