Economy
Global food prices approach 4-year high in September, UN says
World food prices rose in September to their highest in nearly four years as logistics disruptions and weather concerns affected crop markets, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said Friday.
Fears about a severe El Nino weather pattern have pushed international sugar prices to an 18-month high, while a war-related collapse in Black Sea trade pushed wheat futures to a three-year peak early last month.
The FAO Food Price Index, which tracks monthly changes in international prices for a basket of food commodities, averaged 136.0 points, up from a revised 134.0 for August and the highest reading since November 2022.
“We are seeing a persistent and increasingly broad-based build up in global commodity prices, as disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz and the Black Sea combine with climate shocks, putting pressure on energy, transport and key food commodities,” FAO Chief Economist Maximo Torero said.
“If sustained, these pressures will soon pass through to consumer food prices, especially in food and energy import-dependent countries,” he said in a statement.
FAO’s sugar price index jumped 6.1% from August in a third consecutive monthly increase, as adverse weather threatened to curb supply in major production zones.
The agency’s cereal price benchmark rose 5.1% on the month, with reduced yield prospects for US corn adding to pressure from disruptions to Black Sea grain trade.
Vegetable oil prices edged up 0.9%, driven by palm oil on the back of strong demand and concerns over El Nino-related production risks in Southeast Asia.
FAO’s overall meat index eased 1.1%. That reflected lower poultry prices, partly linked to a drop in European Union demand as new import rules took effect.
In a separate report, FAO kept its forecast for global cereal production in 2026 almost unchanged at 2.979 billion metric tons, 2.1% below the previous year’s peak but still the second-largest harvest on record.
FAO cut its forecast for world cereal trade in 2026/27 by 0.7% from last month, citing lower wheat and maize export expectations amid constrained Black Sea shipping.
Inflation in the eurozone jumped more than expected to reach its highest level in three years in September, as the war in the Middle East fueled a surge in energy costs, official data showed Friday.
The consumer price index in the 21 nations sharing the euro currency jumped to 3.8% last month, driven primarily by fuel, natural gas, and to a lesser extent, food costs, according to data from Eurostat, the EU’s statistics agency.
The figure is up from 3.2% in August and is higher than the 3.7% forecast by economists for Bloomberg and 3.6% estimated in a Reuters poll.
Inflation is likely to increase further in the coming months on soaring energy costs, keeping pressure on the ECB to hike rates again and governments to help struggling consumers.
A closely watched ‘core’ figure, which excludes volatile food and fuel prices and signals underlying trends, accelerated to 2.5% from 2.4%, on a pick-up in services prices, the data showed.
Rising fuel costs are putting pressure on European governments to support households and businesses, and in some countries such as France have already triggered street protests, potentially stretching already precarious public finances.
While subsidies have been minor so far, totalling around 0.1% of the bloc’s GDP, they are less targeted and temporary than hoped, suggesting more lasting budget pain.
For the ECB, the figures are likely to be seen as a mixed bag.
The rise in headline inflation further above its 2% target is worrisome and will bolster calls for rate hikes on top of the two moves this summer.
As the U.S. war against Iran drags on, the conflict has caused major disruptions to fuel supplies from the Middle East, including from the Strait of Hormuz, a key energy trade route.
Energy price increases surged to 18.8% in September, up from 14.3% a month earlier, Eurostat said.
Meanwhile, food and drinks inflation increased to 1.4% from 1.1% in August.
Eurozone inflation was last above 3.8% in September 2023, when it stood at 4.3%.
Will ECB maintain its ‘measured’ policy response?
The muted increase in core figures indicates that high energy costs have yet to generate the sort of second-round impacts that could set off a hard-to-break inflation spiral.
These would suggest the ECB can stick to its ‘measured’ policy response, an undefined concept taken by markets to mean spaced-out rate hikes, perhaps to coincide with quarterly economic projections.
“September’s (inflation) data don’t alter our view that the ECB is most likely to wait until December to raise interest rates again,” Jack Allen-Reynolds at Capital Economics said. “That said, if energy prices rose further in the next few weeks, an October hike would not be a big surprise.”
Investors see up to three more hikes in the ECB’s 2.5% deposit rate in the coming year, but the odds of a move this month are seen as negligible and the next increase is not fully priced in until January.
These expectations change rapidly, however, and even policymakers acknowledge that their own projections are far too uncertain.
Policy hawks argue that energy costs have been too high for too long, so they are bound to start setting off second-round effects, and the recent surge in natural gas costs will feed into core prices more quickly than in the past, lifting everything from electricity and heating costs to business expenses.
But others say the labor market is relatively soft, so workers can hardly demand big pay increases, and the recent sharp increase in longer-term borrowing costs is also bound to curtail price growth.
Ultimately, the clincher for the next rate decision may be considerations for financial stability rather than inflation.
Borrowing costs have soared, mostly as the blowout in U.S. yields to a 24-year high affects every borrower. But investors are also demanding a greater premium to hold riskier assets and the spread on French debt over similar German bonds has risen to multi-decade highs, raising debt sustainability questions.
Economists say the ECB may be keen to stay on the sidelines for now and not add to the turbulence, especially since inflation trends do not require urgent or forceful action.
OpenAI has fired three employees after a series of controversial hacking incidents linked to its artificial intelligence systems.
The ChatGPT developer said Thursday that the employees had violated “policies on accessing and handling sensitive company information.” Nobody had been dismissed for raising safety concerns, the AI firm said.
The misconduct went beyond sharing information with an external analysis firm, OpenAI said, without giving further details.
The San Francisco-based AI lab did not confirm their identities, but at least two of the employees worked on safety and alignment, according to the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg.
“Our investigation confirmed that these individuals mishandled sensitive information outside established company procedures, violating our policies and breaking the trust essential to our work,” OpenAI told Agence France-Presse (AFP) in a statement.
The firings come amid a tense debate about AI safety and whether the technology presents an existential risk to humanity.
Last month, a 27-year-old researcher named Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic with a stark warning that the leading AI labs, including OpenAI, where he previously worked, were “gambling with our lives” by racing toward developing ever more powerful models.
The three researchers fired by OpenAI are Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak and Mikita Balesni, according to the WSJ.
All three have regularly posted about AI safety-related issues on the social media platform X in recent weeks.
“i am at OpenAI and i think AI is >10% likely to kill all humans,” Balesni posted on Sept. 10, echoing statements made by other AI employees in recent weeks.
As speculation swirled about why employees at OpenAI and Anthropic were speaking so freely about their personal beliefs, Korbak jumped into the public discourse.
“I’m quite unhappy with much of what OpenAI does. I am very happy that Im allowed to say ‘I’m quite unhappy with much of what OpenAI does,'” Korbak wrote on Sept. 11.
“It’s hard to overstate how dangerous speeding towards RSI is,” Wang posted in response to Coxon’s resignation, referring to recursive self-improvement, which is a technique where software is designed to continuously teach itself.
Leading U.S. tech companies signed a voluntary pledge this week to regulate themselves on safety after meeting with President Donald Trump at the White House.
Trump called it a “morally binding” commitment to build adequate safeguards on the fast-moving technology.
Executives from Nvidia, Google, Meta, xAI, OpenAI and Anthropic signed the agreement.
Safety concerns
Concerns about the safety of advanced AI models have escalated in recent months.
OpenAI canceled the release of a new model, Astra 6.1, because it deemed the model unreliable and found that it frequently ignored instructions.
Instead, the company launched GPT-6.1 Sol, an updated version of a different model, during its annual DevDay conference Tuesday from San Francisco. OpenAI said Sol would cost one-fifth the price of Astra.
In July, AI agents developed by OpenAI attacked Hugging Face, an AI model and application library, during an incident where the autonomous software escaped its confined testing environment.
Since then, additional security incidents have been reported that involved models developed by OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.
On Thursday, cybersecurity firm Asymmetric Security said in a report that agents developed by OpenAI covered up their own tracks after gaining unauthorized access to government websites.
The Federal Trade Commission launched a broad investigation into artificial intelligence safety practices at Anthropic and OpenAI, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday, though the scope of the inquiry is unclear.
The United States on Thursday told its European allies to help lower global diesel prices by releasing strategic reserves “immediately,” with EU member states due to discuss the crisis on Friday.
Reports said the Trump administration had told Germany and France in particular to draw down emergency diesel inventories to help ease soaring global fuel prices or face a potential U.S. diesel export ban.
“Our European partners should accelerate delivery on their existing commitments and make additional supplies immediately available to address ongoing disruptions,” U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a post on social media.
EU member states will meet with the European Commission Friday to discuss a coordinated response to soaring fuel prices, a Commission spokesperson said.
Washington is piling on pressure to get European help with fuel costs, with U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday floating the possibility of banning diesel exports.
High energy costs loom as a threat to Trump’s Republican Party in next month’s midterm elections.
Europe’s relationship with Washington has soured under Trump due to tariff disputes and disagreements over military spending.
For the EU, releasing more stocks would represent a dilemma as it needs to balance the need to bring down fuel prices at home with maintaining high stocks for a possible worsening of the fuel crisis should Trump and Iran not reach a peace deal.
“It is in Europe’s best interest to work with the United States as we pursue multiple pathways to boost the supply of refined products and lower costs for consumers,” a U.S. official told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
At G-20 trade ministers’ meeting in Milwaukee, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer struck a conciliatory tone, saying there was an “eagerness on both sides to work together” on the diesel issue.
And Trump told reporters in Texas on Thursday that he “may” ask European countries to release diesel reserves.
Europe has become increasingly dependent on U.S. fuel after banning Russian imports over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and after the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran disrupted supplies from the Middle East.
‘Unexpected’
EU trade chief Maros Sefcovic told reporters Thursday that any move by the U.S. to ban diesel exports would be “unexpected for Europeans.”
He spoke on the sidelines of the two-day G-20 talks, after meeting with Greer.
Sefcovic told reporters that he did not go into details with Greer on energy exports.
But the transatlantic partners “decided to stay in close touch to avoid any surprises here,” he said.
“It would have very dramatic consequences for our economic performance,” Sefcovic said of any potential diesel export ban.
France’s minister delegate for international trade, Nicolas Forissier, told AFP in Milwaukee: “I can’t imagine that there will be a ban.”
He stressed the importance of diesel to the United States and European countries, adding both sides will “try to find solutions.”
“In France, we’ll try to find balanced solutions all over the world,” Forissier added. “If not with the Americans, it will be with other countries.”
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Wednesday that the world would “hear announcements from our friends in Europe” to push diesel prices down.
Asked about a release from strategic reserves, the French presidency said no such demand had been made when Emmanuel Macron and Trump met on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly last week.
Macron would also soon convene a video meeting of G-7 leaders “to make progress on the various levers that can be used to address the rising fuel prices… including coordination on releasing reserves.”
Macron announced on Sept. 18 a plan for such a meeting. The G-7 gathering is expected in mid-October, according to Macron’s press office.
Average U.S. diesel prices have surged more than 70% to $6.39 a gallon since the start of the Iran war, according to AAA motor club data.
Fuel prices have caused living costs to soar, leaving Trump’s Republican Party fearing it could lose control of Congress in November’s midterm elections.
Artificial intelligence agents developed by OpenAI tried to erase traces of their activity after gaining unauthorized access to government websites, according to a report published Thursday.
Cybersecurity firm Asymmetric Security analyzed the activity of the agents – AI programs capable of acting autonomously – which targeted Australian government websites and other public bodies between March and September.
Asymmetric said it could not determine whether the agents’ cover-up was deliberate.
The report adds to investigations by OpenAI and independent researchers into a series of incidents disclosed since July, including the hacking of AI platform Hugging Face.
OpenAI itself described the attack on Hugging Face as the first of its kind.
These analyses aim to gauge the capabilities of autonomous AI tools, as their lapses fuel fears of losing control over the technology.
According to Asymmetric, the agents were able to refine their techniques in a matter of days, a process that typically takes traditional hackers months or even years.
The incidents reviewed in the report appear to have begun with “innocent tasks,” such as gathering Australian health statistics, which then went off course.
“Most of the activity we’ve reviewed so far involved routine research tasks, such as accessing public web content to answer questions,” an OpenAI spokesperson told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
“Some involved government websites because our models often turn to them as authoritative sources of public information.”
Asymmetric’s report found, however, that the agents opened private accounts on a website analytics service, which concealed their searches, and created temporary email inboxes, one of which was set to self-delete after 48 hours.
OpenAI acknowledged in late August that its models had sometimes tried, unsuccessfully, to erase or modify their own activity logs during internal tests.
The incidents have amplified calls to slow AI development, most notably from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who wrote last month that he feared swarms of agents “taking over the entire internet.”
But there is no consensus within the industry or among regulators on how to proceed.
The Trump administration opposes any binding regulation that could hinder innovation, amid fierce competition with China.
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump met with tech executives, who adopted a voluntary code of conduct. No federal law specifically governs these models in the United States.
European consumer authorities are investigating nine video game companies, including France’s Ubisoft, over concerns their in-game virtual currencies might be violating users’ rights, the EU said Wednesday.
The bloc is coordinating the investigations by the Consumer Protection Cooperation Network, which brings together the competent authorities of the EU’s 27 states.
The network launched talks with the companies last year, but the EU executive said the approach “did not bring satisfactory results.”
The European consumer authorities later identified several games that needed further study, including “Candy Crush Saga,” “Minecraft” and “Clash of Clans.”
The EU said alongside Ubisoft the other companies involved in the probe included “Minecraft” maker Mojang, U.S. giant Riot Games, and Supercell, which makes “Clash of Clans.”
It added the network was separately looking at similar issues in Activision Blizzard’s mobile games “Diablo Immortal” and “Call of Duty.”
It would also probe whether those games had addictive designs and how the firm collects gamers’ personal data.
The bloc’s guidelines on in-game virtual currencies say games must show the real-world price of any required in-game items and currencies.
Games also must show clear information before any purchase, and companies must not force players into unwanted transactions.
Gamers should also be told they can withdraw from contracts within 14 days, including for unused virtual currency, the EU said.
“The industry must ensure that its games do not expose players – especially children – to harmful or unfair practices,” EU consumer protection chief Michael McGrath said.
“The game must be fair, and the rules must be respected.”
He added in a statement: “National authorities, with the support of the commission, will make sure they are enforced.”
European consumer organization BEUC welcomed the “important step” taken by authorities “toward protecting consumers, especially young ones, from the manipulative and unfair practices online that encourage excessive spending.”
The EU has also ramped up efforts to protect children online, announcing earlier this month rules that will force companies to make video games and social media platforms safe before minors use them.
The EU is also expected to unveil consumer protection rules known as the Digital Fairness Act that will cover the video game sector.
Treasury and Finance Minister Mehmet Şimşek said Thursday authorities had moved quickly to contain problems in the investment fund market and prevent them from developing into a systemic crisis, adding that further regulatory measures would be needed.
Speaking online at an S&P Global conference, Şimşek said authorities had “quarantined” troubled portfolio management companies and related funds and had begun the liquidation and resolution process.
The problem in the fund market has been prevented from turning into a systemic crisis, he said, according to a Turkish transcript of his remarks reported by Anadolu Agency (AA). But he noted additional regulations would be needed.
The fund turmoil erupted earlier this month after suspected price manipulation in a number of thinly traded stocks triggered heavy losses and redemption pressures at investment funds.
Almost half a million investors hold stakes in more than 100 Turkish investment funds with combined assets of $20 billion that authorities ordered to be liquidated this month.
Şimşek said the aim was to stop contagion from spreading to the rest of the system, stressing that authorities “have largely succeeded.”
He acknowledged what he said was a “limited” impact, but said “we are not talking about a systemic problem. We will continue to deepen capital markets.”
Türkiye on Tuesday established a fund coordination council chaired by the vice president to oversee the rapid liquidation of the funds. The State Supervisory Council (DDK) has also been tasked with examining the crisis.
The coordination board is due to meet Friday.
Earlier Thursday, Şimşek said authorities were taking steps to ensure investors in troubled funds receive payments as quickly as possible.
The remarks came after the Capital Markets Board (SPK) said it would begin making interim payments to investors in the funds that were ordered to shut down.
Investors in asset managers Tera Portföy, Pusula Portföy, Atlas Portföy and Hedef Portföy will receive their full net investment amount if it is below TL 1 million ($20,404). Investors whose net investment amount is TL 1 million or above will receive TL 1 million as an interim payment.
The procedure will start with money market funds, the SPK said.
In a separate statement, the SPK said the Savings Deposit Insurance Fund (TMSF) opened up “voluntary refund accounts” for those who want to voluntarily return “excessive gains” made as a result of fund sales carried out before liquidation of the funds.
Under Turkish legislation, financial manipulation offenses can be pardoned, or sentences can be reduced if a person “shows remorse” by paying to the Treasury twice the amount of the benefit they obtained.
Speaking separately on Thursday, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said developments in the fund market would not pose a threat to the economy.
“We are successfully overcoming the problem that emerged in a certain part of the fund market,” Erdoğan said. “Within the framework of capital market rules, we are resolving this matter quickly, with fairness and justice in mind and without allowing anyone’s rights to be taken away.”
He said authorities would not allow the issue to become a threat to Türkiye’s economic security or social stability.
Authorities are investigating the asset managers for alleged stock manipulation and have arrested 61 people, including top financial executives, as of Thursday.
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