The holiday shopping wars have sparked an AI arms race — the retail industry's biggest technology experiment since the dawn of e-commerce.
Why it matters: Retailers and tech giants — from Target and Walmart to Amazon, Google and Meta — are rushing to deploy smart shopping assistants that promise to help consumers find gifts faster, spend smarter and even complete purchases.
Etiquette experts advise not talking about politics and religion at the holiday dinner table, but there's good reasonto talk about AI, especially with older relatives.
Why it matters: Seniors are already prime targets for scams, and AI is making it easier and cheaper to generate convincing text, audio and video fakes pretending to be relatives in desperate need.
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.
