ten-year gilt yield reached 5.13%, the highest since 2008. Higher yields mean the government pays more to service its debt. Anduril, a defence startup that is seeking to challenge the industry’s dominant companies, saw its valuation soar to $61bn after its latest round of fundraising. Founded by Palmer Luckey, a 33-year-old entrepreneur with a taste for shorts and Hawaiian shirts, Anduril was valued at $30bn last June. The firm has won several Pentagon contracts and is ramping up production at its factory in Ohio that makes drones and other weapons. Marty Makary resigned as head of America’s Food and Drug Administration. He reportedly left over the FDA’s decision to approve fruit- flavoured e-cigarettes, which he opposed. But his year-long tenure included clashes with food and drugs companies, leading to speculation that Donald Trump was about to sack him. General Motors had a clear-out of its IT department, according to reports, laying off about 600 workers, or 10% of its IT staff. The carmaker is hiring new employees to work in roles such as AI adoption, data engineering and analytics and agent and model development. Best known for its bright-green rental e-bikes strewn across city streets around the world, Lime filed for an IPO on the Nasdaq exchange. The startup, which is based in San Francisco, is backed by Uber. It reportedly hopes to attract a valuation of $2bn upon its stockmarket debut. An influential adviser to Lee Jae-myung, the president of South Korea, suggested that all the country’s citizens should receive a payout from the soaring market valuation of domestic chipmakers. Samsung recently reported a quarterly operating profit larger than its annual profit for all of 2025. SK Hynix’s quarterly profit was up by 405%, year on year. Mr Lee quickly pointed out that any payments to citizens would come from the government’s extra revenue generated by the profits, and not a tax on actual profit. Amazon rolled out its 30-minute delivery service in Atlanta, Dallas, Philadelphia and Seattle. Residents of those cities can get groceries, household goods and other items in about the time it takes to prepare and eat

breakfast. Amazon Now is expanding in other cities, such as Houston and Phoenix, soon, and elsewhere by the end of the year. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//the-world-this-week/2026/05/14/business

· The weekly cartoon

May 14th 2026 Dig deeper into the subjects of this week’s cartoon: Trade or Taiwan? Trump and Xi struggle to set the terms The Trump-Xi summit will expose a dysfunctional duo China is pushing Donald Trump for Taiwan concessions The editorial cartoon appears weekly in The Economist. You can see last week’s here. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//the-world-this-week/2026/05/14/the-weekly-cartoon

· Leaders

Prepare for an AI jobs apocalypse Sir Keir Starmer has failed abjectly. He should go Oil prices could soon rise convulsively Indonesia, the biggest Muslim-majority country, is on a risky path Mothers who cannot breastfeed have been given terrible advice Not all Donald Trump’s peacemaking boasts are empty

Leaders · Leaders | Our cover

Prepare for an AI jobs apocalypse It is not here yet. But governments should lay a safety-net May 14th 2026 The launch of ChatGPT in 2022 ignited the artificial-intelligence boom— and elicited a chorus of warnings from AI bosses of an impending jobs apocalypse. Never mind that they have reason to talk up the disruptiveness of their products, or that rich-world employment is near all-time highs—the dark message has landed. Seven in ten Americans think AI will make it harder for people to find work; nearly a third fear for their own jobs. A dearth of openings for college graduates—especially computer programmers —amplifies the dread. The past offers some solace for the anxious. Labour markets constantly change. Today’s offices would be unrecognisable to a worker from 50 years ago. Never in modern history has technological progress hurt the overall demand for human labour. Economic historians now play down the

magnitude of “Engels’ pause”, the period during the Industrial Revolution in which working-class wages grew more slowly than the wider economy. Yet history is not always a good guide to the future, as the Industrial Revolution itself showed. The top AI models are awesome. They can tackle much more complex coding tasks than people were predicting a year ago. The number of AI agents has exploded. Spending on AI by businesses is up dramatically. Annualised recurring revenue of Anthropic, a hot model- maker, is set to reach $50bn by the end of June. There is no evidence yet in the labour-market data of AI destroying many jobs. But given how fast it is improving, it would be rash to dismiss fears that it will. Society may be on the verge of a profound reallocation of resources, and political upheaval. Economists’ prediction that work will stay plentiful is less reassuring than it looks, especially over a long horizon. Though the market will find uses for human labour even as models and robots become more capable, the quality of those jobs and the wages they pay are not guaranteed. Data centres will account for 8.5% of America’s peak power demand in 2027, up from 4.1% in 2025, predicts Goldman Sachs, a bank. As AI firms bid up the price of land and energy, the dollars people earn will go less far. Eventually humans could, like horses in the age of the car, become uneconomical. Income may go mostly or entirely to owners of capital, who then go on to spend it on things that are made by AI and robots using natural resources that they monopolise. This dystopian possibility is behind Silicon Valley’s admonitions that state intervention, and perhaps a universal basic income, will be necessary. That remains a long way off, if it ever happens. But governments may have to act sooner, for you do not need a cataclysm to stoke popular fury. Perhaps 2m Americans lost their jobs between 1999 and 2011 owing to China’s entry into the global trading system. That is no worse than a typical month’s lay- offs in America’s churning labour market. Yet the “China shock” helped propel Donald Trump to office and led to the highest tariffs since the 1930s. The white-collar employees threatened by AI have more political and social clout than factory workers hurt by Chinese competition. Even a small number of lay-offs could provoke a backlash against the technology; furious opposition to new data centres is a hint of what may be to come. Severe

disruption to the security and status of many people could lead to widespread unrest, even revolution. What should governments do? One set of ideas involves slowing down change. China has urged its companies to adopt AI, but not to lay off workers. Prominent economists around the world have proposed higher taxes on capital and lower ones on labour. Some campaigners want levies on data centres. Inhibiting technology is not, however, a wise path to choose. Humanity is likely to reap enormous benefits from AI: not just greater wealth, but progress fighting diseases and solving problems such as climate change and poverty. Had the Luddites stopped the automation of textile mills in early 19th-century England, the world would be far worse off today. A second category of countermeasures would be better. If employment falls, income that once went to workers is likely to show up as high profits in AI firms, chipmakers, data centres or elsewhere in the supply chain. Clever tax reforms, such as levies on corporate profits that are above a normal return on capital, on land and on natural resources, could capture these rents. The case for inheritance taxes to prevent the entrenchment of a capital-owning elite looks even stronger than before. At the same time governments could help workers adjust. Public wage- insurance, which smooths out falls in income after job losses, can help workers find better opportunities (and so can eventually pay for itself). Denmark’s active labour-market policies, in which the state helps people find and train for new occupations, have been proved to cut spells in unemployment. These ideas would make the economy more efficient and fairer regardless of AI. Would they satisfy voters facing disruption and uncertainty? In a populist era technocratic reforms are a hard sell. Past efforts to help workers adjust to trade liberalisation failed to stop the “China shock” backlash. In an all-AI workforce, humans will need help surviving, not adjusting. Hence a last set of radical ideas, such as the partial nationalisation of AI firms. This week a South Korean presidential adviser floated a citizens’ “dividend” from AI businesses, sending the local stockmarket down by 5%, before backtracking. In America politicians murmur about giving citizens

shares in AI companies via “Trump accounts”. In economic terms there is little difference between a well-designed tax system and a government stake in the private sector—and countries without AI giants will have to rely on taxes rather than seizing shares in foreign companies. But America may find that some public ownership is the best way to make the social upside from the technology transparent. Concentrations of rent must be confronted early, before the power of rentiers is too great. The jobs apocalypse is not yet here. But if governments wait for conclusive evidence before creating a safety-net, it will be too late. Better to start now. ■ For subscribers only: to see how we design each week’s cover, sign up to our weekly Cover Story newsletter. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//leaders/2026/05/14/prepare-for-an-ai-jobs-apocalypse

Sir Keir Starmer has failed abjectly. He should go Britain is not ungovernable—it just needs better governance May 14th 2026 LESS THAN two years ago Sir Keir Starmer was elected promising to save Britain from populism. As with Emmanuel Macron in France and Friedrich Merz in Germany, his mission was to show that the fruits of sober, competent policymaking are worth more than the empty promises of demagogues. This week it became clear how abjectly Sir Keir has failed. A drubbing for Labour in elections for councils in England and parliaments in Scotland and Wales on May 7th has sparked a revolt in the parliamentary party. As we went to press, the prime minister was about to face at least one serious challenger for his job. It would be in Britain’s interest for him to go.