President Donald Trump holds a chart as he delivers remarks on reciprocal tariffs during an event in the Rose Garden (Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images)

Amazon and Apple surge on China tariff reprieve

Amazon and Apple both had a lot to lose from sky-high tariffs on China.

Rani Molla

5/12/25 8:39AM

Amazon and Apple, the megacap tech stocks with the most skin in the game regarding China, are soaring premarket after a temporary bilateral agreement was reached between the US and China. For the next 90 days, US tariffs on Chinese goods will drop to 30%, from 145%, and Chinese tariffs on US goods will drop to 10%, from 125%. In other words, they’re much closer to where they were before President Trump said anything about tariffs in the Rose Garden.

Apple makes the vast majority of its iPhones, which account for nearly half its total revenues, in China, and would have seen its bottom line hurt by high tariffs. In its latest earnings call, the company said the existing tariffs — Apple had been temporarily spared from tariffs on China but was awaiting sector-specific levies — would have cost it $900 million in the current quarter.

The stock is up 6% premarket.

Amazon ships many of its goods from China, so tariffs were set drive its prices up and its bottom line down. Amazon, which makes a good deal of cash from advertising, also had to worry about knock-on effects from the loss of some Chinese advertisers. The company’s latest earnings beat was clouded by the specter of tariff uncertainty.

Both Amazon and Apple — like Meta — would have incurred higher costs for equipment shipped from overseas that help power their AI ambitions.

Amazon is trading up more than 8% this morning.

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Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5