DailyBrief: May 7
Iran peace push, Shell and AMD earnings beats, Anthropic tops OpenAI
Markets & Economics
US-Iran Peace Deal Hopes Drive Oil Down 7%, Send US Stocks to Record Highs
Diplomacy moved markets sharply on Wednesday after reports that the United States and Iran were nearing a one-page memorandum of understanding to end the war and establish a framework for nuclear negotiations. West Texas Intermediate crude settled down 7.03% at $95.08 per barrel and Brent fell 7.83% to $101.27, their steepest single-session declines in months, as investors priced in the potential for an end to Strait of Hormuz disruptions. The S&P 500 advanced 1.46% to close at a new all-time high of 7,365.12, the Nasdaq Composite gained 2.02% to 25,838.94, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average added 612 points to close at 49,910.59, with both the S&P and Nasdaq touching fresh records. President Trump cautioned that a deal had not yet been finalized, calling it "perhaps, a big assumption" that Iran would agree to the proposal, and threatened to resume military strikes if talks collapsed. Core sticking points remain on uranium enrichment limits, with Washington demanding a halt or freeze and Tehran insisting on its right to low-level enrichment. Source: CNBC, Bloomberg
AMD Q1 2026 Results Beat on All Lines, Shares Surge 18% as AI Chip Demand Accelerates
Advanced Micro Devices delivered first-quarter results well ahead of Wall Street expectations, driven by strong demand for AI data center hardware. Revenue came in at $10.25 billion, up 38% year-over-year versus the $9.89 billion consensus, and adjusted EPS of $1.37 beat estimates of $1.29. Management guided Q2 revenue of $10.9 billion to $11.5 billion, a midpoint that topped the $10.52 billion analyst forecast. On the call, AMD projected server CPU revenue would grow more than 70% year-over-year in the second quarter and outlined expectations for a $120 billion global CPU market by 2030, driven by AI workloads. Shares jumped 18.6% on Wednesday, adding to the broader market rally. Source: CNBC, AMD Investor Relations
Shell Q1 2026 Profit Beats at $6.9 Billion; Dividend Raised as Iran War Boosts Energy Revenue
Shell reported first-quarter adjusted earnings of $6.92 billion on Thursday, surpassing analyst estimates of $6.1 billion, with profits lifted by elevated oil prices stemming from the US-led conflict against Iran and ongoing disruptions to Strait of Hormuz shipping. Revenue reached $69.69 billion, up 0.7% year-over-year. The company raised its quarterly dividend 5% to $0.3906 per share and launched a new $3 billion share buyback program for the next three months. The results arrive at a notable moment: the same day Shell posted its conflict-driven earnings beat, markets were rallying on hopes that a US-Iran peace deal could reverse the oil price conditions underlying those profits. Source: CNBC, StockTitan
Trump Accuses China of Violating Trade Truce; Tariff Tensions Resurface
Trade relations between the United States and China deteriorated further this week after President Trump accused Beijing of violating the 90-day tariff truce negotiated at Geneva in early May. The two countries had agreed to mutually reduce elevated tariffs and ease restrictions on critical minerals exports, but Trump publicly stated that China had breached the deal. China's Ministry of Commerce responded by launching two separate investigations into US trade practices: one targeting measures that "hinder the trade of green products" and another addressing measures that "disrupt global production and supply chains." The breakdown adds further uncertainty to global trade conditions, with the US average effective tariff rate now standing at 15.8%, up sharply from 2.3% at the end of 2024, representing the largest US tax increase as a percentage of GDP since 1993. Source: US News, Tax Foundation
Tech & AI
Anthropic CEO Discloses 80-Fold Revenue Growth in Q1, Company Passes OpenAI in ARR
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei stated Wednesday that the company's revenue and usage grew approximately 80 times on an annualized basis during the first quarter of 2026, an acceleration he cited as the primary reason for ongoing constraints on compute availability for users. The disclosure implies Anthropic's annualized recurring revenue reached approximately $30 billion as of April 2026, placing it ahead of OpenAI's $24 billion by the same measure. The trajectory represents a dramatic shift: 15 months ago, Anthropic stood at $1 billion ARR while OpenAI reported $6 billion. Claude Code, launched publicly in mid-2025, has been a key driver, reaching $1 billion in annualized revenue within six months and quadrupling enterprise subscriptions in 2026. OpenAI disputes the methodology, arguing that Anthropic's gross revenue accounting inflates the figure by approximately $8 billion, which would place Anthropic below OpenAI on a net basis. Source: CNBC
OpenAI Releases GPT-5.5 Instant as ChatGPT's New Default Model
OpenAI released GPT-5.5 Instant on May 5 as the new default model powering ChatGPT, with improvements focused on reducing hallucinations in high-stakes domains including law, medicine, and finance while maintaining low latency. The release follows GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.5 Pro becoming generally available in the API on April 24. OpenAI describes the model as its most capable and intuitive to date, with particular improvements in agentic coding, computer use, and scientific reasoning tasks, while matching the latency profile of its predecessor. The launch comes as competition at the frontier of AI models intensifies: rival Anthropic this week disclosed that its annualized revenue has surpassed OpenAI's for the first time, and Chinese lab DeepSeek has released a trillion-parameter open-source model priced at $0.14 per million input tokens. Source: OpenAI, TechStartups