Good morning. On Fortune’s radar today:

Anthropic’s IPO of $2 trillion would eclipse SpaceX.

Markets: Q2 was excellent.

The futures market for “compute” could reach $150 trillion.

Iran wants to prolong the war as long as possible.

AI is not yet eating jobs, but it is nibbling at the edges.

Biofuel is pushing up food prices.

“Time billionaires.”

Sam Altman was “peer-pressured and tricked” into an “unbelievably terrible” internship at Goldman Sachs.

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IT’S HAPPENING!

Anthropic targets $2 trillion IPO in October—largest ever public float

Anthropic is planning an initial public offering in October at a predicted valuation of $2 trillion, which would be larger than SpaceX and would make it the biggest stock offering ever, the Financial Times reports. The scale of the reported target underscores how quickly investors have come to benchmark leading AI labs against the public markets even before a listing is formally set.

Investors told the paper they expect the AI lab’s annual revenue run rate to reach between $100 billion and $120 billion by the end of the year. The IPO is still under discussion, and sources said the valuation has not been formally fixed within the company.

Anthropic Said to Be in Talks to Buy ‘World Model’ Startup Decart for $6 Billion - Bloomberg

THE MARKETS

U.S. stocks rise as a benign inflation reading makes rate increases less likely

Traders in Fed futures now expect the central bank to keep interest rates at 3.5% in September, according to CME FedWatch, which shows 64% favor the “hold” position. Equity investors welcomed the news, since higher rates are generally negative for stocks, and the S&P 500 rose 0.26% yesterday. Futures were up slightly this morning before the opening bell in New York.

Retail investors also supported markets, with net purchases of $7.2 billion, mostly through exchange-traded funds, in the most recent week tracked by Arun Jain and his colleagues at J.P. Morgan.

S&P 500 futures were up 0.1% this morning. The index rose 0.26% yesterday.

In Europe, the Stoxx 600 was up 0.15% in early trading and the U.K.’s FTSE 100 was down 0.35% before lunch.

In Asia, South Korea’s KOSPI rose 3.56%, Japan’s Nikkei 225 gained 1.16%, India’s Nifty 50 fell 0.25%, and China’s CSI 300 declined 0.57%.

Brent crude was at $87 per barrel this morning.

Bitcoin was at $63,759.

Q2 was one of the best earnings seasons of the last 20 years

More than 1,500 companies have reported second-quarter earnings so far, and “this has been one of the strongest earnings seasons relative to expectations in the last couple of decades,” according to Bespoke Investment Group. In total, 77% of companies beat expectations on earnings per share.

“That’s about ten percentage points higher than the 67% EPS beat rate we’ve seen across the 90,000+ earnings reports that have occurred over the last ten years,” the group said. Here’s how it broke down by sector:

MORE FROM FORTUNE

The Philippines needs “power of all sorts” to build energy security following a nationwide crisis, says Prime Infra CEO Guillaume Lucci - Angelica Ang

Nvidia found a new way to keep the AI boom funded: your retirement money - Eva Roytburg

AI was supposed to power Canva’s next act. It also exposed software’s most expensive problem - Mia Osmonbekov

Nearly a dozen firms are already paying up to $100,000 per month for early access to Trump’s Truth Social posts - Sasha Rogelberg

Japan and the U.S. just spent billions to try to save the yen. Why is it already losing ground? - Nicholas Gordon

THE FUTURE OF FUTURES

Compute is the new crude — and it needs a new futures market

According to Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour, “compute” — the chips and electricity powering the AI revolution — will surpass oil as the world’s most valuable commodity and eventually support a futures market for hedging it. He recently said compute could become a $10 trillion industry by 2030. If its derivatives market follows the pattern of other commodities, its futures market could grow to 10 to 15 times the size of the underlying spot market, meaning compute futures could eventually be worth $100 billion to $150 trillion, Jeff John Roberts reports for Fortune.

THE GULF

Iran will keep the Strait of Hormuz closed and prolong the war for as long as possible

Only 13 ships per day are currently passing through the Strait of Hormuz, according to Kpler, the maritime monitoring firm.

The Persian Gulf Strait Authority said, “the Strait of Hormuz remains blocked and will not be reopened until Iran’s conditions are accepted,” according to CNBC.

Mohammad Reza Naqdi, an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps official, told PBS that the blockade is deliberate. Iran aims to prolong the war as long as possible “so that if anyone else wants to attack Iran, they will know there is a cost,” he said. He also said the U.S. military was “weaker than what we perceived.”

President Trump disagreed. “The U.S.A. has total control over the Strait of Hormuz. I THINK WE WILL KEEP IT! Our Naval Blockade is being called, by everyone, ‘A WALL OF STEEL,’ and there is nothing Iran can do about it,” he said on social media. “They have no Navy, they have no Air Force, their remaining soldiers are unpaid, the IRGC is decimated and fleeing, and their ‘Leadership’ is uncertain, at best! They have No Money - Their country is ‘shot.’ All they have is FAKE NEWS and 300% INFLATION, and getting worse! Iran is all talk and no action, the Bully of the Middle East No Longer. Praise be to Allah!”

JOBS-POCALYPSE NOW

AI appears to be killing jobs at entry-level and in IT services

New data from Jefferies and Bank of America suggest AI may be reducing hiring in IT services and among entry-level jobs for college graduates, though it remains unclear whether the trend amounts to a broader jobs crisis.

At Jefferies, Surinder Thind and his colleagues track job openings at nine IT services companies, including Accenture, Globant, CGI Inc. and Cognizant. Job listings fell last month at five of the nine companies. While the data can be volatile because of “idiosyncratic factors at each company,” the longer-term trend appears more clear: these companies are not hiring at the pace they were five years ago. They are also heavy users of AI and are all engaged in “decoupling revenue growth from headcount growth driven by AI,” Thind said in a note.

CHART OF THE DAY

Is biofuel pushing up food prices?

About 3.5 million barrels of biofuel are burned each day, mostly for transport in the U.S., the E.U. and Brazil, which together consume about 80% of global biofuel, according to Daan Struyven and his team at Goldman Sachs. As the Gulf crisis has pushed oil prices higher, government mandates for biofuel — a blend of ethanol from corn or sugarcane and diesel, or diesel and vegetable oil — have also increased.

“In the U.S., the share of soybean oil used for biofuels has risen from 40% in 2020 to ~55% in 2026,” Struyven said in an email. With less of those crops ending up in the food system, food prices have risen as a result, as the chart suggests.

NUMBER OF THE DAY: Time billionaires

31.7 years

That is the number of years that have elapsed after 1 billion seconds. If you believe you have more than 31.7 years of life left, then you are a “time billionaire.”

The term was popularized by Graham Duncan, co-founder of East Rock Capital, on the Tim Ferriss podcast in March 2019. Duncan uses it to encourage young people to think of wealth in terms of time left on earth and to start investing as early as possible in order to benefit from compounding. It is another way of expressing the idea that time in the market beats timing the market.

THE FRONT PAGES TODAY

Forbes Fired Top Editor After Discovering He Received Secret $6 Million Payment - NYT

Smile, you’re on camera: when the boss wants to read your mood - FT

South Korea’s Kospi has staged a stunning comeback. How long will the bull market last? - CNBC

Trump's ballroom costs are rising. What we know about the secret underground bunker - Axios

Inside North Korea’s Operation to Conquer the American Job Market - WSJ

Iger and Kushner Landed Lakers Deal in a Day, No Bankers Needed - Bloomberg

ONE MORE THING

Sam Altman: I was “peer-pressured and tricked” into an internship at Goldman Sachs that would have been “unbelievably terrible”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he once applied for an internship at Goldman Sachs, was accepted, and then backed out at the last minute because he was “peer-pressured and tricked into it,” according to Fortune’s Mia Osmonbekov and Catherina Gioino.

“It sounds like unbelievably terrible now, but at the time that was the cool thing, that was what everybody wanted to do,” he said on stage at the Z Fellows Internapalooza conference. Watch the video here.

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