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WTI Sinks 14% in Two Days Amid Global Unrest

Oil tumbled to a four-year low, following a surprise output increase by OPEC+ and a rapidly escalating global trade war that’s also rattling commodities markets from metals to gas. Oil’s rout was triggered Thursday by US President Donald Trump deluge of tariffs, which threaten the global economy and energy consumption. Hours later, OPEC+ tripled a […]

Oil tumbled to a four-year low, following a surprise output increase by OPEC+ and a rapidly escalating global trade war that’s also rattling commodities markets from metals to gas.

Oil’s rout was triggered Thursday by US President Donald Trump deluge of tariffs, which threaten the global economy and energy consumption. Hours later, OPEC+ tripled a planned output hike for May, in what delegates called a deliberate effort to lower prices to punish members that were pumping above their quota.

West Texas Intermediate futures have fallen about 14% in just two days — settling near $61 a barrel in a move similar to steep losses seen during the pandemic — while Brent also ended the day at the lowest since 2021. The declines were exacerbated on Friday by China’s retaliation against the US duties, including a 34% tariff on all imports from the US starting within a week.

Other commodities also slumped as wider financial markets took a hit and fears mounted about weaker demand for raw materials. Copper slid as much as 7.7% to the lowest since January, while benchmark European natural gas futures at one point tumbled more than 10%. Glencore Plc shares plunged more than 9%, with fellow major miners BHP Group and Rio Tinto Group also sliding.

Oil’s retreat represented a dramatic breakout from a price band of about $15 that has paralyzed trading and spurred bets on low volatility for much of the last six months. During that period, OPEC+ supply curbs were seen to put a floor under the market, while the group’s ample spare capacity acted as a ceiling. This week’s unexpected production increase raises questions about whether the alliance will continue to defend higher prices.

The dual hit from OPEC+ and tariffs has prompted a rush by traders and Wall Street banks to reassess their outlook for the market. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and ING Groep NV are among those lowering their price forecasts, citing risks to demand and higher supplies from the producer group.

“The two key downside risks we have flagged are realizing: namely tariff escalation and somewhat higher OPEC+ supply,” Goldman analysts including Daan Struyven wrote in a note. “Price volatility is likely to stay elevated on higher recession risk.”

At its lowest point on Friday, global benchmark Brent was down more than $10 over the last two days, a scale of decline that would have put it in the 10 largest ever and on a par with some of the steep drops during the pandemic and when prices retreated away from $100 after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The pullback has also had a broader impact on key market gauges. Timespreads softened in a sign of expected looser balances, particularly further along the futures curve. At the same time, bearish oil options volumes soared to the highest level on record yesterday. Oil has also edged into oversold territory on the nine-day relative strength index, suggesting a reversal may be in the cards.

Meanwhile, commodity trading advisers, which tend to exacerbate price swings, switched to 73% short in WTI, compared with 9% short just one day ago, according to data from Bridgeton Research Group. Such a dramatic shift in positioning has only ever occured in the event of a major economic meltdown, most recently the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in 2023, the group added.

Still, some supply risks remain. The Trump administration has threatened a maximum-pressure policy on oil-producing nations that are subject to US sanctions, including Iran and Venezuela. Any retreat in prices offers a bigger opportunity to restrict output in those nations without having an inflationary price spike.

“With potential supply disruptions stemming from sanctions and tariffs — on both sellers and buyers — oil prices are unlikely to stay below $70 for long,” said Mukesh Sahdev, global head of commodity markets at Rystad Energy.

Oil Prices:

  • West Texas Intermediate for May delivery dropped 7.4% to $61.99 a barrel in New York.
  • Brent for June settlement slid 6.5% to $65.58 a barrel.

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WTI Sinks 14% in Two Days Amid Global Unrest

Oil tumbled to a four-year low, following a surprise output increase by OPEC+ and a rapidly escalating global trade war that’s also rattling commodities markets from metals to gas. Oil’s rout was triggered Thursday by US President Donald Trump deluge of tariffs, which threaten the global economy and energy consumption. Hours later, OPEC+ tripled a planned output hike for May, in what delegates called a deliberate effort to lower prices to punish members that were pumping above their quota. West Texas Intermediate futures have fallen about 14% in just two days — settling near $61 a barrel in a move similar to steep losses seen during the pandemic — while Brent also ended the day at the lowest since 2021. The declines were exacerbated on Friday by China’s retaliation against the US duties, including a 34% tariff on all imports from the US starting within a week. Other commodities also slumped as wider financial markets took a hit and fears mounted about weaker demand for raw materials. Copper slid as much as 7.7% to the lowest since January, while benchmark European natural gas futures at one point tumbled more than 10%. Glencore Plc shares plunged more than 9%, with fellow major miners BHP Group and Rio Tinto Group also sliding. Oil’s retreat represented a dramatic breakout from a price band of about $15 that has paralyzed trading and spurred bets on low volatility for much of the last six months. During that period, OPEC+ supply curbs were seen to put a floor under the market, while the group’s ample spare capacity acted as a ceiling. This week’s unexpected production increase raises questions about whether the alliance will continue to defend higher prices. The dual hit from OPEC+ and tariffs has prompted a rush by traders and Wall Street banks to

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New Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan begins to lay out technology roadmap

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Tariff war throws building of data centers into disarray

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New MLCommons benchmarks to test AI infrastructure performance

The latest release also broadens its scope beyond chatbot benchmarks. A new graph neural network (GNN) test targets datacenter-class hardware and is designed for workloads like fraud detection, recommendation engines, and knowledge graphs. It uses the RGAT model based on a graph dataset containing over 547 million nodes and 5.8 billion edges. Judging performance Analysts suggest that these benchmarks will make it easier to judge the performance of various hardware chips and clusters based on documented models. “As every chipmaker seeks to prove that its hardware is good enough to support AI, we now have a standard benchmark that shows the quality of question support, math, and coding skills associated with hardware,” said Hyoun Park, CEO and Chief Analyst at Amalgam Insights.  Chipmakers can now compete not just on traditional speeds and feeds, but in mathematical skill and informational accuracy. This benchmark provides a rare opportunity to add new performance standards on cross-vendor hardware, Park added. “The latency in terms of how quickly tokens are delivered and the time for the user to see the response is the deciding factor,” said Neil Shah, partner and co-founder at Counterpoint Research. “This is where players such as NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel have to get the software right to help developers optimize the models and bring out the best compute performance.” Benchmarking and buying decisions Independent benchmarks like those from MLCommons play a key role in helping buyers evaluate system performance, but relying on them alone may not provide the full picture.

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European cloud group invests to create what it dubs “Trump-proof cloud services”

But analysts have questioned whether the Microsoft move truly addresses those European business concerns. Phil Brunkard, executive counselor at Info-Tech Research Group UK, said, commenting on last month’s announcement of the EU Data Boundary for the Microsoft Cloud,  “Microsoft says that customer data will remain stored and processed in the EU and EFTA, but doesn’t guarantee true data sovereignty.” And European companies are now rethinking what data sovereignty means to them. They are moving beyond having it refer to where the data sits to focusing on which vendors control it, and who controls them. Responding to the new Euro cloud plan, another analyst, IDC VP Dave McCarthy, saw the effort as “signaling a growing European push for data control and independence.” “US providers could face tougher competition from EU companies that leverage this tech to offer sovereignty-friendly alternatives. Although €1 million isn’t a game-changer on its own, it’s a clear sign Europe wants to build its own cloud ecosystem—potentially at the expense of US market share,” McCarthy said. “For US providers, this could mean investing in more EU-based data centers or reconfiguring systems to ensure European customers’ data stays within the region. This isn’t just a compliance checkbox. It’s a shift that could hike operational costs and complexity, especially for companies used to running centralized setups.” Adding to the potential bad news for US hyperscalers, McCarthy said that there was little reason to believe that this trend would be limited to Europe. “If Europe pulls this off, other regions might take note and push for similar sovereignty rules. US providers could find themselves adapting to a patchwork of regulations worldwide, forcing a rethink of their global strategies,” McCarthy said. “This isn’t just a European headache, it’s a preview of what could become a broader challenge.”

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John Deere unveils more autonomous farm machines to address skill labor shortage

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2025 playbook for enterprise AI success, from agents to evals

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OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI has taken a more aggressive approach to red teaming than its AI competitors, demonstrating its security teams’ advanced capabilities in two areas: multi-step reinforcement and external red teaming. OpenAI recently released two papers that set a new competitive standard for improving the quality, reliability and safety of AI models in these two techniques and more. The first paper, “OpenAI’s Approach to External Red Teaming for AI Models and Systems,” reports that specialized teams outside the company have proven effective in uncovering vulnerabilities that might otherwise have made it into a released model because in-house testing techniques may have missed them. In the second paper, “Diverse and Effective Red Teaming with Auto-Generated Rewards and Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning,” OpenAI introduces an automated framework that relies on iterative reinforcement learning to generate a broad spectrum of novel, wide-ranging attacks. Going all-in on red teaming pays practical, competitive dividends It’s encouraging to see competitive intensity in red teaming growing among AI companies. When Anthropic released its AI red team guidelines in June of last year, it joined AI providers including Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and even the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which all had released red teaming frameworks. Investing heavily in red teaming yields tangible benefits for security leaders in any organization. OpenAI’s paper on external red teaming provides a detailed analysis of how the company strives to create specialized external teams that include cybersecurity and subject matter experts. The goal is to see if knowledgeable external teams can defeat models’ security perimeters and find gaps in their security, biases and controls that prompt-based testing couldn’t find. What makes OpenAI’s recent papers noteworthy is how well they define using human-in-the-middle

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