Top stories today:

1. Trump announces Japan deal with 15% tariffs, $550B fund pledge
2. Alibaba releases Qwen3-Coder, open-weight model for agentic coding
3. Elon’s xAI said to be in talks to raise up to $12B for AI chips
4. OpenAI to reopen $40B round as it seeks more capital from investors
5. Meta poaches 3 Google AI researchers behind IMO gold-winning model

0. Data and calendar

Listen to our AI-generated podcast summarizing today’s newsletter (beware of hallucinations):

1. Trump announces Japan deal with 15% tariffs, $550B fund pledge

• 15% tariffs on Japanese imports to the U.S., including autos.

• Japan will also buy 100 Boeing jets, boost rice and agricultural imports, and increase defense spending with U.S. firms.

• 19% tariffs on the Philippines, the same level as Indonesia agreed and a percentage below Vietnam’s 20% baseline level.

• Meeting Chinese counterparts in Stockholm next week for the 3rd round of talks, Treasury Secy. Scott Bessent said.

• Relatedly, Taiwan is also aiming to strike a trade deal with the U.S. in a fresh round of talks.

• Goldman Sachs has forecast 15% as the new baseline tariff, with a 50% levy on copper and critical materials.

2. Alibaba releases Qwen3-Coder, open-weight AI model for agentic coding

Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-Instruct has achieved benchmark results comparable to Kimi-K2, Claude Sonnet 4, and GPT-4.1 in Alibaba’s internal testing:

• 480B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model, with 35B active parameters.

• 256K token context length, extendable to 1M tokens via extrapolation methods.

• Touted to be Alibaba’s most advanced coding tool to date.

• Available for download through Hugging Face and the code is accessible via GitHub.

• Alibaba is also open-sourcing its Qwen Code command-line tool for agentic coding.

4. Elon’s xAI said to be in talks with Valor Equity to raise up to $12B for AI chips