Black Friday sales have been rolling out for days — but millions of shoppers will still head to stores early Friday for doorbusters, giveaways and one-day-only deals.
Why it matters: Nov. 28 is expected to be the busiest shopping day of the entire year, in stores and online, according to early holiday forecasts from the National Retail Federation and Sensormatic Solutions.
Senate Democrats and Republicans are squaring off about vehicle safety requirements that are intended to save lives, but which also push up the price of new cars.
The big picture: It's an awkward debate for lawmakers to confront when 40,000 people die each year in motor vehicle crashes — and yet the country faces an affordability crisis with broad economic consequences.
There have been plenty of ominous warnings this year about the job market, trade war-fueled inflation, asset bubbles, and more. The mighty U.S. economy has chugged ahead in 2025 despite them all.
The big picture: There may be cracks in the expansion that is now five years old, and we spend plenty of digital ink in this newsletter chronicling just that.
But the biggest-picture indicators point to this being one of the better economies of modern times.
The House Homeland Security Committee has asked Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to testify at a Dec. 17 hearing on how Chinese state actors used Claude Code in a wide-reaching cyber-espionage campaign, according to letters first shared with Axios.
Why it matters: It would mark the first time an Anthropic executive appears before Congress about the espionage campaign disclosed earlier this month — the first documented case of an AI-orchestrated cyberattack.
Speed will determine what country or military becomes top dog, according to Thomas "TRob" Robinson, the COO at Domino Data Lab.
"The side that iterates fastest will win. Theaters change, threats change. Look at the pace of the technology developed in Ukraine. The pace is going to require rapid redeployment of AI and software," he told Axios in an interview.
"The Defense Department is already working to do 90-day sprints. We need day-to-day-sprint sorts of technology."
Why he matters: Robinson has years of experience with software, data, the workforce and the big-picture orchestration of it all. His company is also working with the U.S. Navy.
Moog, an established aerospace-and-defense supplier, and Aeon Industrial, a defense-tech upstart, are now collaborating, with plans to integrate their respective turrets and missiles.
Why it matters: Moog's products are widely used, including by the U.S. military. That:
Quickly opens doors for Aeon, which in April announced a contract with the Army Applications Laboratory
Means troops could get new loadouts or variants of existing weapons relatively quickly, on both manned and unmanned vehicles
To understand whether AI is in a bubble, and what could happen next, you have to think of it like railroads. Or maybe fiber-optic cable. Or perhaps oil drilling?
Why it matters: Everyone in the business world is anxiously trying to figure out which historical boom-and-bust comparison is the right one so they can be ready for what they fear comes next.
President Trump is flirting with one of the most toxic ideas in American politics — a new foreign military intervention — at one of the most precarious moments of his second term.
Why it matters: Trump's push toward regime change in Venezuela threatens to deepen a MAGA rift that detonated last week with the resignation of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.).
Despite two very visible settlements with ABC and CBS in the past year, President Trump's legal pressure on media companies has still faced ample pushback in court.
Why it matters: Lawsuits, even if eventually dismissed, are extremely costly and burdensome for news organizations to fight.
Major banks are scrambling to understand the fallout of a recent cyberattack on just one technology vendor.
Why it matters: The security of customers' sensitive information could be hanging in the balance as large banks and financial services companies investigate how much hackers made off with.
Three in 10 fraud attempts targeting major retailers are now AI generated, according to estimates from deepfake detection firm Pindrop.
Why it matters: Heading into the holiday shopping season, scammers and hackers are using deepfakes to trick employees of corporate retailers and steal thousands of dollars per attack, on average.
For an economy that's rapidly expanding, the usual drivers of job creation sure aren't carrying their weight.
Why it matters: Anemic job growth in key sectors is a sign that there is more underlying weakness in worker demand than the low unemployment rate might suggest.
TikTok on Tuesday named veteran government affairs executive Ziad Ojakli as its new head of public policy for the Americas, replacing longtime policy lead Michael Beckerman.
Why it matters: Ojakli will become the public face of TikTok's policy strategy as it looks to get sold and save itself from a ban.
Clover Security has nabbed $36 million in funding from a slew of high-profile industry stalwarts, including Wiz co-founders Assaf Rappaport and Yinon Costica and executives from Cato Networks, Snyk, CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, Atlassian and Google.
Why it matters: AI security startups need big names and major name recognition to gain traction in an increasingly crowded cybersecurity market.
An abundance of AI-related bonds have come to market, yet investors still have an appetite for the debt of cash-rich hyperscalers like Google.
Why it matters: Not all tech debt is created equal. Investors will need to suss out the winners from losers to avoid getting burned if the AI promise fails to turn out as hoped.
The world's most popular chatbot, ChatGPT, faces new threats from its biggest competitor: Google's Gemini.
Why it matters: Google was caught on the back foot when OpenAI released ChatGPT three years ago. With the release of, and rave reviews for, Gemini 3 Pro, the script has flipped.
