Good morning. Artificial intelligence—both its promise and its risk—dominated discussions at Journal House in Singapore this week.

Over a lively three days, panels and small-group conversations among risk managers, compliance officers and chief executives included volatile geopolitics, diverging energy policies, supply-chain upsets and trade policy.

Tan See Leng, Singapore’s minister for manpower, sees AI as a way to decrease risks from an aging labor force in the coming years, keeping the country competitive.

“We’re coming in a synchronized manner to see how we can get a large swath of our country to embrace it,” Leng said.

Large language models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT need to be reined in, Chee Kin Lam, group head of legal and compliance at DBS Bank, said on a panel hosted by Dow Jones Risk Journal.

Lam said that while his financial services firm is jumping into AI, precautions are in place around which employees can access which data. For AI applications that face the internet, DBS has created a middle layer of software between the user and the prompt to protect data and information about the bank’s operations, he said. “Customer information never goes to the LLM provider,” he said.

See more coverage from the Singapore conference:

• How businesses diversifying across the supply chains trade one risk for another
• How FedEx, Citibank and DBS Bank are rolling out AI to identify potential issues and suspicious activity
• Why energy users need to diversify their sourcing
• Signals from the Trump administration that can help businesses navigate risk
• How companies risk getting swept up in geopolitically motivated cyberattacks
• How a Wirecard executive blew the whistle on fraud at the defunct payment giant

Watch coverage of the sessions on demand: 

• Double Trouble: Where Cybercrime and Geopolitics Meet
• How the Cyber Threat is Changing
• How AI is Helping with Corporate Risk
• How to Identify, Act on Emerging Risk
• Bringing Constant Innovation to Compliance
• Managing Risk with Supply Chains in Flux 
• What We Have Learned About Policy Under Trump 
• Where to Focus on Trade Risk 
• Exposing the Wirecard Scandal 
• How Geopolitics Has Scrambled Energy Policy

How China secretly pays Iran for oil and avoids U.S. sanctions.

U.S. sanctions make it nearly impossible to pay Iran for its oil. China has figured out how to do it anyway, in an arrangement that has largely been secret.

The barter-like system works like this, according to current and former officials from several Western countries, including the U.S.: Iranian oil is shipped to China—Tehran’s biggest customer—and, in return, state-backed Chinese companies build infrastructure in Iran.

Completing the loop, the officials say, are a Chinese state-owned insurer that calls itself the world’s largest export-credit agency and a Chinese financial entity that is so secretive that its name couldn’t be found on any public list of Chinese banks or financial firms. The arrangement, by sidestepping the international banking system, has provided a lifeline to Iran’s sanctions-squeezed economy.

Congress let cyber-intel sharing act lapse. Does it matter?

The expiration this week of decade-old legal protections for companies sharing cyberattack intelligence with the federal government is sending a chill across the cybersecurity industry, with experts fearing a wave of attacks ahead.

The law: The 2015 Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, or CISA, which lapsed on Wednesday after Congress failed to approve an extension, set out liability and antitrust safeguards aimed at encouraging private- and public-sector cooperation in combating cybercriminals and state-sponsored hackers. Stripping away those safeguards will keep many companies on the sidelines, experts say.

• Investigators at the Securities and Exchange Commission have recently probed Chicago-based startup Dream Exchange and its ties to the Church of Scientology.
   
• A healthcare-staffing business and labor unions are suing the Trump administration over huge new fees for H-1B visas, saying the president doesn’t have the authority to demand $100,000 for every new application in the popular program for foreign professionals.
   
• The U.S. Supreme Court is set to weigh in on a pair of cases in which ExxonMobil and a former Havana dock owner are seeking financial compensation from companies that allegedly used property confiscated during the Cuban revolution, Risk Journal’s Max Fillion reports.
   
• California Attorney General Rob Bonta says the business community shouldn’t shy away from addressing climate risks, Risk Journal reports. 
   
• President Trump ordered another lethal military strike on an alleged drug-trafficking boat in the Caribbean early Friday, signaling the administration is undeterred by mounting legal questions about the campaign.
   
• Finance ministers from the Group of Seven agreed this week to maximize pressure on Russia’s oil exports by targeting countries that have increased purchases since the Ukraine invasion while also phasing out their own remaining energy imports from Moscow.
   
• OpenAI is changing its handling of copyright works in Sora, its AI video-generation app, to give copyright holders more control over how their characters are used, Chief Executive Sam Altman said in a blog post.

Starbucks’s roller coaster week of job cuts and store closures.

In Starbucks’s Seattle headquarters, it was known as “Project Bloom.” Launched earlier this year, the hush-hush undertaking evaluated thousands of the company’s coffee shops across North America on profitability, and the experience of customers and baristas.

It led to a roller coaster of a week in late September, in which the company abruptly closed hundreds of stores and laid off thousands of employees. It was Starbucks’s second round of corporate layoffs in less than a year under Chief Executive Brian Niccol and among the chain’s biggest closing of cafes since 2008.

“The reality is the business has not performed and we needed to recognize that aspect,” Niccol said in an internal company forum Tuesday, a recording of which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. “We needed to make some changes.”

Apple drops ICE-tracking apps from app store.

Apple blocked apps that enable users to track U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents after pressure from the Justice Department.

ICEBlock, a widely used tracking app, was dropped from the company’s App Store after concerns were raised by the Justice Department that it could put law-enforcement officers at risk.

• Delegations from the U.S., Israel, Hamas and Middle Eastern countries are set to meet in Egypt on Monday for highly anticipated talks that could pave the way for a cease-fire in Gaza and the release of hostages. But ending the nearly two-year-old war remains a more distant goal.
   
• Sanae Takaichi’s victory in a leadership election in Japan represents another notable win for a resurgent global conservatism that is drawing strength from voter anger over issues such as immigration and stubborn inflation.
   
• A multibillion-dollar deal to send Nvidia’s artificial-intelligence chips to the United Arab Emirates is stuck in neutral nearly five months after it was signed, frustrating Chief Executive Jensen Huang and some senior administration officials.
   
• For weeks, drones have been mysteriously appearing in European skies, closing airports from Warsaw to Munich. Western officials suspect that Russia is behind the campaign, seeking to sow fear in European capitals, probe NATO weaknesses and raise the stakes over the continent’s support for Ukraine.
   
• Economic activity among U.S. services firms was unchanged last month, an unexpected result hurt by a pullback in business and weaker employment, a monthly survey said Friday.
   
• Cracker Barrel cut ties with the marketing firm behind the chain’s troubled rebranding campaign, including its new logo and redesigned restaurants.
   
• For Elon Musk, ground zero of the artificial intelligence arms race is a 114-acre tract of grass and swamp on the state line of Tennessee and Mississippi.
   
• Asahi Group’s Japanese beer production is largely offline due to a cyberattack, delaying shipments and new product launches.

• France’s Sébastien Lecornu resigned as prime minister on Monday after less than a month in office, underscoring President Emmanuel Macron’s struggle to forge a stable government as the country’s fiscal woes deepen. Lecornu’s tenure is the shortest in the history of France’s modern Fifth Republic, and his resignation marks the fourth prime minister to leave in just over a year.
   
• A federal judge in Oregon temporarily blocked the deployment of any National Guard under the Trump administration’s control inside Oregon in an emergency hearing Sunday night.
   
• The federal government shutdown is dragging toward its second week in a partisan staring contest, lacking for now the political or practical consequences that would create enough pressure to break the impasse.
   
• The Supreme Court officially returns for a new term Monday after a summer break that wasn’t much of a reprieve.
   
• As the mayor of the capital of South Korea’s steel industry, Lee Kang-deok met this summer with local officials to discuss the steelmaking city’s economic emergency. President Trump had just doubled steel tariffs, and Lee made a bold suggestion. “Maybe I need to go to the U.S. to protest,” the 63-year-old recalled saying. His colleagues laughed. Lee wasn’t joking.
   
• Sharpie maker Newell Brands invested nearly $2 billion to onshore manufacturing, increasing the speed of Sharpie production without raising prices.

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