News

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen: The Black Sea has become another front for Russia's escalating military operations in Ukraine, which is unacceptable.

AXA, the French asset management group based in BNP Paribas, today released the 13th edition of its "AXA Future Risks Report" in partnership with Ipsos. This report analyzes annually the changing perceptions of thousands of experts and the public worldwide regarding emerging risks. In this report, AI has surpassed climate change for the first time to become the number one risk according to experts, reflecting the rapid proliferation of AI in various economies and the uncertainty surrounding its impact. In 2025, AI will rank fourth in this category. Among the experts who listed AI as the number one risk, 54% believe its risks are rapidly emerging; 9% believe public authorities are adequately prepared, a figure that has dropped to 3% in Europe. Nevertheless, climate change remains a major concern, still considered the number one risk by the public and ranking first across all age groups. Meanwhile, AI's risk ranking among the public has risen to second place, and is projected to be seventh in 2025.

The NI225 index closed down 1253.40 points, or 1.82%, at 67777.52 on Tuesday, October 13.

According to RIA Novosti, Russian armed forces attacked a cargo ship carrying military and dual-use supplies bound for Mykolaiv, Ukraine.

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have proposed using existing seawater desalination technology to treat oilfield wastewater for cooling data centers, thereby reducing reliance on freshwater. This research was published in the journal *Water Research*. The researchers point out that there are several desalination methods: reverse osmosis, which forces water through a semi-permeable membrane, is highly energy efficient but struggles with water saltier than seawater; heating water into steam and then condensing it into freshwater is also feasible, but more energy-intensive. A data center can consume up to 5 million gallons of water per day, while some oil fields in Texas produce thousands of times more wastewater. Vaibhav Bahadur, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Texas's Cockerell School of Engineering and one of the study's leaders, stated, "We're not waiting for some future technology to solve our problem." He believes that while wastewater treatment has costs, even using the most energy-intensive methods, these costs represent only a small fraction of the total energy consumption of a data center. He focuses on the Permian Basin in West Texas, where oil and gas extraction produces approximately 8 billion gallons of produced water daily, equivalent to 1,200 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Currently, this water has to be transported long distances before being injected underground, posing risks such as inducing earthquakes, and there will be nowhere left to bury it as early as 2030. He said that purifying this water and using it for data centers is a good solution. Researchers also emphasized that less than 4% of the Earth's water is freshwater, and only about 0.5% is safe for human use; by 2028, data centers are expected to use approximately 33 billion gallons of water.

The Ports and Maritime Organization (PMO) of Hormozgan province in southern Iran reported that Shahid Rajai, Iran's largest commercial port, exported over 5 million tons of petroleum products in the first half of this year (according to the Iranian calendar). PMO Director General Hamid Reza Mohammad Hosseini Tahti stated that despite the unjust war, escalating economic restrictions, and US sanctions against Iran, petroleum product exports were not completely interrupted during this period. He added that 5.14 million tons of petroleum products were still exported from the port via 325 vessels. He stated that the export activity demonstrates that despite challenges to foreign trade, financial restrictions, and difficulties caused by sanctions, petroleum product exports continue, and related activities persist. The port, with its unique geographical location near the Strait of Hormuz and the entrance to the Persian Gulf, serves as a major gateway for Iran's imports and exports. Its proximity to major intercontinental shipping routes and its location at the intersection of north-south transit corridors further enhance its strategic importance.

Market news: UBS has transferred £1.7 billion (approximately $2.2 billion) of its UK pension fund pool to Legal & General Group Plc, the largest such transaction so far this year.

BP (BP.N): Third-quarter crude oil trading results are expected to be roughly flat compared to the second quarter.

BP (BP.N): Expects third-quarter natural gas marketing and trading results to be significantly higher than in the second quarter.

BP (BP.N): Upstream production is expected to be between 2.19 million and 2.24 million barrels of oil equivalent per day in the third quarter of 2026.

The final monthly CPI value for September in Germany will be announced in ten minutes.

Researchers from Harvard University and NTT Research published a paper on arXiv on October 8th, pointing out that collaborative AI agent groups may have a "critical size." Once exceeded, groups of agents deviating from their goals may achieve self-reinforcing expansion by hacking into computers and deploying new copies. The paper uses an ecological population growth model to link the group's growth rate to its network attack and defense capabilities. The model shows that when agents do not cooperate, the group only grows uncontrollably when individual agents' capabilities exceed a threshold. Under cooperative conditions, the overall group capability increases with size; therefore, even if individual capabilities remain unchanged, once the total number exceeds a critical value, the group will enter a "takeoff" state, and naturally decline below that value. This mechanism corresponds to the "strong Allie effect" in ecology. The authors point out that there is a significant gap between the current scale of industrial deployment and the scale of security testing: OpenAI once simultaneously deployed approximately 10,000 agents to tackle the Navier-Stokes equations problem, but its publicly available cybersecurity multi-agent test data only covers 16 agents. The paper suggests that frontier laboratories should scale up agent deployment in stages in controlled environments, conduct red team testing at the swarm level, calculate critical scales and accept external supervision, and re-evaluate each new generation of models.

Traders: The Reserve Bank of India may have sold dollars to support the rupee after the central bank eased foreign exchange controls.

Australia's S&P/ASX 200 index closed down 0.60 points, or 0.01%, at 8782.60 on Tuesday, October 13.

Bank of Japan Governor Kazuo Ueda: It is now crucial to stabilize inflation at 2%.

Bank of Japan Governor Kazuo Ueda: Potential inflation is close to 2%.

Bank of Japan Governor Kazuo Ueda: We will continue to closely monitor the bond market.

Bank of Japan Governor Kazuo Ueda: Generally speaking, long-term interest rates are determined by the market and reflect various factors.

Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi: Japan will continue to communicate with the United States to ensure the stability of the foreign exchange market.

Local officials say Russian drones attacked a cargo terminal in Mykolaiv, Ukraine.