The Rundown — September 25, 2026
THE WORLD · SEPTEMBER 25, 2026
What's going on right now, in one place. The ↗ links out to the original source; the item's own text turns into a link only once it becomes a full entry here.
World
- Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announces on September 24 that the US and China will extend their trade truce two more months, through January 10, 2027, as President Xi Jinping begins a White House state visit and the two sides work toward a broader deal on tariffs and rare earths. ↗
- President Zelensky says on September 25 that Washington has proposed a technical-level, three-way meeting between Ukraine, Russia and the US in the United Arab Emirates, with the Kremlin saying such talks could happen soon. ↗
Business & markets
- Akamai Technologies shares surge more than 20% in premarket trading on September 25 after the company discloses an $11.6 billion, seven-year cloud-computing deal with Anthropic, plus a warrant that could give Anthropic up to roughly 5% of Akamai's common shares. ↗
- The S&P 500 closes essentially flat on September 24 at 7,704.13 (down 1.90 points), the Dow falls 161.61 points (0.3%) to 51,349.98, and the Nasdaq edges up 3.34 points to 26,939.37, as Treasury yields hold near two-decade highs. ↗
Bitcoin & crypto
- Bitcoin opens September 25 at $84,378.12, roughly flat from Thursday, before climbing to $85,199.84 by 7:14 a.m. ET. ↗
- The Federal Reserve proposes on September 24 that payment-stablecoin issuers hold reserves almost entirely in short-term Treasury bills or other highly liquid assets, its most concrete stablecoin rulemaking since Congress passed the GENIUS Act. ↗
Technology
- Anthropic says its Claude model spent 21.5 hours and 949 autonomous agent sessions sifting roughly 200,000 bacteriophage enzyme clusters down to 3,564 candidates, surfacing a previously undescribed, CRISPR-like enzyme system it calls array-associated reverse transcriptases (ART). ↗
- Amazon opens its Seller Central APIs to outside AI agents at its Accelerate conference on September 23, launching a US beta plugin that lets sellers manage inventory, pricing, listings and analytics through Anthropic's Claude in about 60 seconds with no coding. ↗
- OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei tell the UN Security Council on September 23 that the AI industry needs binding international standards, with Amodei warning that, managed poorly, AI "could be a risk to humanity as a whole." ↗
Science & space
- A study published in Icarus finds Uranus's moon Ariel may once have held a subsurface ocean more than 100 miles (170 km) deep, based on tidal-stress modeling of the fractures and ridges across its surface. ↗
- SpaceX completes a wet dress rehearsal on September 24 ahead of Starship Flight 14, targeted for September 28 as the vehicle's first-ever orbital launch attempt, set to carry 26 upgraded Starlink V3 satellites roughly 171 miles above Earth. ↗
Health & medicine
- A Bayesian meta-analysis of 110 randomized trials and 22,608 patients, published in JAMA Network Open, finds a 94.4% probability that the antibiotic cefepime carries higher all-cause mortality than other beta-lactam antibiotics — 6.6% of cefepime patients died versus 6.2% on other beta-lactams. ↗
- A study of 1,496 US healthcare personnel in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine finds 169 of them, or 11.3%, reported at least one persistent moderate-or-severe long-COVID symptom at both three and six months after infection. ↗