Jax Morning Brief — Anthropic Crosses $965 Billion, Iran Deal on Trump's Desk, Rates Climb Again

Jax Morning Brief — Anthropic Crosses $965 Billion, Iran Deal on Trump's Desk, Rates Climb Again

Good morning. It's Friday, May twenty-ninth, twenty twenty-six. This is The Morning Brief. I'm Jenny. ANDREW: And I'm Andrew. JENNY: Anthropic just raised sixty-five billion dollars at a valuation just shy of a trillion — overtaking OpenAI as the most valuable private company on the planet. ANDREW: And US and Iran negotiators have a draft ceasefire extension sitting on the President's desk this morning. We'll get to what's still unresolved. JENNY: Let's get into it. ANDREW: A quick look at the markets. The S and P 500 climbed about six-tenths of a percent yesterday to close at 7,563 — a new all-time high, even with the hottest inflation print in nearly three years landing the same morning. The Nasdaq also pushed to a fresh record. The Dow was the outlier, slipping about two-thirds of a percent on weakness in industrials. The ten-year Treasury yield sits at 4.47 percent, and Freddie Mac's weekly survey puts the thirty-year fixed mortgage at 6.53 percent, up two basis points from last week and the highest reading since August. More on that in a few minutes. ANDREW: Jenny, let's start where the money is moving. The AI story is the story this week. JENNY: It really is. Anthropic announced yesterday it has closed a sixty-five billion dollar Series H funding round at a post-money valuation of nine hundred sixty-five billion dollars. That puts it ahead of OpenAI, which was last valued at eight hundred fifty-two billion in March. Anthropic's valuation has now more than doubled since February. According to CNBC and TechCrunch, the round was co-led by Altimeter, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia, with Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron writing strategic checks on the chip side. ANDREW: Help me put nine hundred sixty-five billion in context. What's actually behind that number? JENNY: Revenue, mostly. Anthropic disclosed that its run-rate revenue crossed forty-seven billion dollars earlier this month — up from roughly thirty billion at the start of the year. Most of that growth is coming from Claude Code, the company's coding assistant, which has become the default tool inside a lot of enterprise engineering teams. Fortune is calling this likely the last private round before an IPO. And the strategic investor list is the tell — Samsung and the memory makers are essentially pre-paying for capacity. ANDREW: So the read is, this is less a bet on a chatbot and more a bet on AI as infrastructure. JENNY: Exactly. And the same morning Anthropic announced the round, OpenAI quietly published something called its Frontier Governance Framework. It's a public document that explains how OpenAI's safety practices line up with California's new Transparency in Frontier AI Act and the EU AI Act's Code of Practice. It's not a product announcement — it's a regulatory positioning move. OpenAI is trying to get ahead of compliance expectations before Sacramento and Brussels start enforcing them. ANDREW: Two very different posture plays in one news cycle. Anthropic is raising money at a near-trillion-dollar mark; OpenAI is publishing a governance manual. Both companies trying to claim the same ground from different angles. JENNY: And on the model side, Anthropic also dropped Claude Opus 4.8 this week, and announced a Milan office plus a Seoul launch — they are sprinting on international enterprise. Andrew, what's happening on the national desk? ANDREW: The top story is Iran. Multiple outlets — CNN, the Washington Post, Reuters — are reporting that US and Iranian negotiators have reached a tentative framework agreement to extend the existing ceasefire by sixty days. Under the draft, the Strait of Hormuz would be de-mined and reopened to commercial traffic while talks continue on the harder issues — the nuclear program, frozen Iranian assets, and the uranium enrichment ceiling. JENNY: So is this a done deal, or is it still moving? ANDREW: It's not done. President Trump has not signed off yet. Vice President Vance told reporters yesterday that Washington is, in his words, "not there yet," but that the sides are close. There is also a complication from this week — that ballistic missile launch toward Kuwait on Tuesday, plus the drone activity near Hormuz that CENTCOM called an egregious ceasefire violation. Tehran has not publicly claimed the missile. The framework is moving forward despite all of that, which tells you both sides want the deal more than they want to relitigate the missile. JENNY: What's the market reading? ANDREW: Constructive. Brent crude has held below ninety dollars, the ten-year yield is down from its May high near 4.7 percent, and the dollar is steady. If the deal collapses, the signal to watch is Brent above one hundred fifteen — that's the threshold that says re-escalation. Below that, the bond market is telling you a deal still gets done. ANDREW: Second story, the Senate. Congress returns from recess Monday, and the seventy-two billion dollar reconciliation bill for ICE and CBP funding is back on the floor. Two pieces are still unresolved. The first is a 1.8 billion dollar Department of Justice fund that critics in the GOP are calling a slush fund. The second is one billion dollars in White House ballroom security spending that the Senate parliamentarian has partially ruled out of order under reconciliation rules. Majority Leader Thune has to pick which fight to drop before he can get to a floor vote. JENNY: And the original Trump deadline on this was when? ANDREW: This past Friday. So it's already late. The question is whether Thune brings it to the floor next week or pushes into mid-June. Either way, this is the political fight to watch as Congress comes back. ANDREW: One more on the national side — the new Fed chair, Kevin Warsh. He was sworn in two weeks ago today. He has now gone fourteen days without a single public remark — no statement on yesterday's PCE print, no speech, nothing. Marketplace is reporting Warsh intends to dramatically reduce Fed communications, possibly ending the post-FOMC press conference altogether. His first meeting is June sixteenth and seventeenth. Fed funds futures are pricing a ninety-seven percent chance of no change. JENNY: Speaking of the Fed and rates, that brings us to home lending. ANDREW: It does. Freddie Mac's weekly primary mortgage survey landed yesterday at noon. The thirty-year fixed averaged 6.53 percent — up from 6.51 last week, and up for a sixth consecutive week. That is the highest reading from the Freddie survey since August. The fifteen-year fixed is at 5.87 percent. For context, a year ago, the thirty-year was at 6.89 — so we are below last year, but the direction of travel matters more than the level right now. JENNY: And what's Mortgage News Daily showing on the daily side? Those two readings have been telling different stories all week. ANDREW: That's the interesting tension. The Mortgage News Daily index closed yesterday at 6.59 percent — actually down two basis points on the day, and at the lowest level in nearly two weeks. So the weekly survey is showing rates ticking up, but the daily index is suggesting the cycle high may be behind us. If you are a buyer trying to time a lock this week, the daily index is the more current signal. The Freddie number has a lag. JENNY: So what should a buyer trying to close right now actually take from that? ANDREW: Watch the ten-year. If it holds below 4.5 percent through next week, mortgage rates should drift down toward the low 6.5s. If the Iran framework collapses and the ten-year backs up to 4.7, you're going to see the thirty-year challenge 6.75 again. The Mortgage Bankers Association will publish its next applications data Wednesday. Last week purchases were down four-tenths and refis were down eighteen percent — a soft read. If purchases recover Wednesday, that's the signal that buyers are starting to accept the new rate range. ANDREW: One regulatory note — the two executive orders President Trump signed on May nineteenth, one on so-called politicized debanking and the other on fintech innovation, are now starting to surface in the Treasury rulemaking process. The piece to watch for lenders is the immigration-status component, which would require banks to factor a customer's immigration status into risk assessments. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is expected to put out preliminary guidance later this summer. Jenny, take us to Jacksonville. JENNY: Weather-wise, Jacksonville is looking at a high of eighty-six and a low in the mid seventies today, with clouds early and thunderstorms developing through the afternoon. The National Weather Service is flagging potential for heavy rainfall, and tropical moisture is going to stick around through next week — total accumulations of two to four inches expected, with localized spots possibly above five. And just a reminder, the open burn ban remains in effect across Duval County. JENNY: Our lead story this morning is one that took a lot of people by surprise. State funding is now in place to conduct a ground-penetrating radar survey at the former Mount Herman Cemetery in Durkeeville — a Jacksonville park and community center site that may be sitting on top of as many as six hundred unmarked graves. News4Jax has been following this for months. The historical record suggests Mount Herman was a Black cemetery that was effectively erased when the parcel was redeveloped decades ago. The radar survey is the first formal attempt to confirm what's actually beneath the site. ANDREW: Is there a timeline on the survey itself? JENNY: The state appropriation cleared this spring, and the work is expected to begin in the coming months. If the survey confirms the burials, it will trigger a much bigger conversation about reinterment, memorial design, and the future use of the park itself. Worth watching as a test of how the city handles the result. JENNY: Quick update on the Culinary Institute of America story we've been tracking. City Council passed the thirty-five million dollar incentives package sixteen to two on Tuesday. According to the Jax Daily Record, the CIA's board of directors meets June fifteenth and sixteenth to vote on whether Jacksonville beats out Atlanta, Charleston, and Nashville for the southeast campus. Council President Carrico pushed the ordinance through on an emergency basis specifically so that vote was in the record before the board meets. So eighteen days from now we know whether downtown gets the campus. ANDREW: And if Jacksonville loses? JENNY: Then there's a political question for Carrico about whether the emergency framing was necessary. If Jacksonville wins, the next thing to watch is the clawback language and enrollment targets in the finalized incentives agreement. JENNY: Two quick local notes to round out the beat. Memorial Day weekend ended badly at Jacksonville Beach — Action News Jax is reporting that bystanders were hit with pepper spray during a large fight outside a beachfront hotel involving thirty to forty people. No arrests have been made yet. And the Jaguars are in the middle of voluntary OTAs this week. Head Coach Liam Coen spoke after Tuesday's session — he said the team is, quote, setting a tone for the spring. Mandatory minicamp opens June ninth. ANDREW: Before we let you go, one thing to watch through next week. Monday and Tuesday are the big national set pieces. The Senate comes back from recess and Majority Leader Thune has to decide which piece of the seventy-two billion dollar ICE funding bill to drop to get past the parliamentarian — that vote will likely set the tone for the rest of the legislative session. And separately, watch the Trump desk for the Iran ceasefire extension. If he signs, Brent crude probably gives up another five dollars and the ten-year yield drops below 4.4 — which would feed directly into a lower mortgage rate by the end of next week. If the framework collapses, the trade goes the other way, hard. JENNY: That's your Morning Brief for Friday. Have a great weekend. ANDREW: We'll see you Monday.

Jax Morning Brief — PCE Hits 3.8 Percent, June Cut Off the Table, Iran Tests the Ceasefire

Good morning. It's Thursday, May 28th, 2026. This is The Morning Brief. I'm Jenny. ANDREW: And I'm Andrew. JENNY: The Fed's preferred inflation gauge came in this morning at 3.8 percent — the hottest reading in three years — and it lands the day after both the Dow and the S and P 500 hit fresh record closes. ANDREW: And the Pentagon is quietly auditioning OpenAI, Google, and xAI to replace Anthropic's Claude in classified military workflows — we'll explain why that's a bigger deal than it sounds. JENNY: Let's get into it. ANDREW: A quick look at the markets. The S and P 500 closed Wednesday at 7,520.36, up two-hundredths of a percent — a record. The Dow added 183 points, or 0.36 percent, to finish at 50,644.28, also a record. The Nasdaq edged up seven-hundredths of a percent to 26,674.73. The ten-year Treasury yield sits at 4.47 percent this morning, down sharply from the 16-month high of 4.7 percent it touched on May 20th. And the thirty-year fixed mortgage rate is tracking at 6.61 percent according to Mortgage News Daily — that's the third straight day it's held steady or moved lower. So records on stocks, easing on bonds, all before the PCE number landed at 8:30 this morning. Jenny, over to that print — because it's the story driving everything. JENNY: Yeah, take us through it. What did the Fed actually get this morning? ANDREW: Headline PCE rose to 3.8 percent year-over-year in April, up from 3.5 percent in March. That's the highest reading since May of 2023. Core PCE — which strips out food and energy — ticked up to 3.3 percent, the highest since October of 2023. Both prints came in right in line with what economists were expecting. But here's the wrinkle: month-over-month, the numbers actually came in softer than forecast. Headline rose 0.4 percent versus a 0.5 expectation; core rose 0.2 versus 0.3. JENNY: So which signal is the bond market trusting — the hot year-over-year, or the cooler monthly? ANDREW: For now, the soft monthly numbers are winning. The ten-year yield has held below 4.5 percent this morning, and the Mortgage News Daily index hasn't moved up. But this is the print that as we previewed yesterday was the door on a June Fed cut — and that door is now effectively closed. Fed funds futures are pricing in a 97.5 percent probability that Chair Warsh and the FOMC hold rates steady on June 17th. The market is also now pricing in a 65 percent probability of zero cuts for all of 2026. JENNY: Zero cuts for the year — that's a real shift from where we were in March. ANDREW: It is. And it has a direct read-through to housing. The Mortgage Bankers Association reported yesterday that the average 30-year conforming rate hit 6.65 percent last week — the fifth straight weekly increase and the highest since August of last year. Applications were down 8.5 percent on the week, refinances down 18 percent. But — and this is important — Mortgage News Daily's day-by-day index has actually been ticking lower since Monday, helped by the de-escalation in the Persian Gulf pulling oil prices and the ten-year yield down with them. We get the Freddie Mac weekly survey at noon today. If that print comes in below the MBA's 6.65 — and the bond market doesn't sell off on the PCE — buyers may finally catch a small break heading into the weekend. JENNY: And the Q1 GDP revision drops this afternoon, right? ANDREW: At 2:30 Eastern. Consensus is looking for a sharp upward revision to 2.0 percent annualized, from the 0.5 percent initial estimate. If that lands, you've got a real story to tell: inflation sticky at 3.8, growth picking up, no rate cuts coming. That is by definition not a Fed easing setup. Speaking of things that didn't ease over the long weekend — let me hand it back to you, Jenny, because the national headline is Iran. JENNY: Right. So CENTCOM put out a pretty stark statement Tuesday night calling what Iran did this week an "egregious ceasefire violation." Walk us through what actually happened. ANDREW: Late Tuesday, Iran launched a ballistic missile in the direction of Kuwait. Kuwaiti forces intercepted it. Around the same time, Iran launched five attack drones in and near the Strait of Hormuz. U.S. forces intercepted all five and then prevented a sixth from leaving an Iranian launch site near Bandar Abbas. CENTCOM's framing was unambiguous: this was a violation. Tehran has not formally claimed the missile. JENNY: Which is awkward, because we've been reporting all week that the U.S. and Iran are within striking distance of a framework deal to extend the ceasefire 60 days and reopen the Strait. How does the missile change that? ANDREW: It complicates it without killing it. According to the Washington Post and CNBC, U.S. and Iranian negotiators are still working on the same framework Trump described over the weekend as quote "largely negotiated." The deal envisions a 60-day extension of the April ceasefire, U.S.-led de-mining of the Strait, and a reopening of commercial traffic. The sticking points have been frozen Iranian assets and the enrichment ceiling on Iran's nuclear program. The missile launch reads as either a hardline faction in Tehran trying to torpedo the talks, or a pressure tactic to extract concessions before signing. Markets are betting on the latter — oil is down, and the ten-year yield, as we said, is at 4.47. JENNY: Got it. And there's a second national thread that's been quietly building — the green card policy change. ANDREW: Yes. USCIS issued a memo last Thursday — May 21st — and announced it publicly the following day. Under the new rule, foreigners legally inside the United States who want to convert their status to a green card will, in most cases, have to leave the country and apply from their home nation. Adjustment of status from inside the U.S. will only be granted in quote "extraordinary circumstances." This is a sharp break from a decades-old policy. NBC and the Washington Post are reporting that hundreds of thousands of pending applications are now affected, including spouses of U.S. citizens, H-1B holders converting to permanent residency, and people who entered as students. Immigration attorneys say the change effectively reroutes a huge share of the green card pipeline through consular offices abroad — which were already running multi-year backlogs before this. JENNY: So the practical effect is just slowing the whole system down. ANDREW: That's the read, yes. Legal challenges are likely. The change appears to be administrative — a USCIS policy memo — rather than an executive order, which gives the administration flexibility but also gives plaintiffs a narrower target. Jenny, AI is yours — and there's a real story out of the Pentagon this week. JENNY: There is. Bloomberg is reporting that the Department of Defense has spent the past three months quietly testing AI models from OpenAI, Google, and Elon Musk's xAI to see which ones can replace Anthropic's Claude inside classified military workflows. The tests are being run by a group of 25 designated quote "power users" through a platform called GenAI.mil, which operates separately from the Pentagon's main AI deployment. ANDREW: And what's driving this? Anthropic has been the favored defense vendor for over a year. JENNY: It comes down to one thing — Anthropic's safety guardrails. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared Anthropic a quote "supply chain risk" back in early March, three days before the testing began. The friction is that Anthropic refuses to remove restrictions that prevent Claude from being used for mass surveillance or lethal autonomous targeting. The Pentagon wants those use cases on the table. Anthropic won't do it. So Hegseth's team is shopping for a model that will. As we've been tracking, Anthropic just had its first profitable quarter and closed a 30-billion-dollar funding round at a 900-billion-dollar valuation. Losing the Pentagon contract would not break the company financially — but it sets a precedent. If the U.S. government decides that safety guardrails are a procurement disqualifier, that's a wedge OpenAI, Google, and xAI can use to dislodge Anthropic across the entire federal stack. ANDREW: And there's a strategic irony there — the same week Anthropic is being told its safety stance is too restrictive for DOD, it's also positioning itself with the Vatican as the safety-first AI lab. JENNY: Exactly. Chris Olah at the Vatican AI ethics conference last week, and now this. Two very different customer pitches at the same time. Speaking of Anthropic — separately, the company quietly rolled out a new enterprise feature this week. Claude Managed Agents can now run inside a customer's own infrastructure — what Anthropic is calling self-hosted sandboxes. Tool execution happens on a customer's own servers or with partners like Cloudflare, Modal, or Vercel; the model orchestration still runs on Anthropic. It's in public beta now. The point of the announcement is to remove the security objection that's been blocking enterprise pilots — banks and regulated companies that don't want their data leaving their environment. ANDREW: That's a direct play for the financial services market. JENNY: It is. And it lines up with the Fujitsu deal Anthropic and OpenAI both announced yesterday — both labs are sprinting to plant flags in Japan-Inc.-style enterprise accounts before the other does. Andrew, speaking of accounts that need to close — let me bring it home to Jacksonville. ANDREW: Take us there. JENNY: Weather-wise, Jacksonville is looking at 89 degrees today with scattered afternoon thunderstorms and a 40 percent chance of rain. So an outdoor lunch is a roll of the dice. To the news. The story we've been following on the Culinary Institute of America campus took its decisive city-side step Tuesday — City Council voted 16 to 2 to approve up to 35 million dollars in incentives on an emergency basis. Council President Kevin Carrico pushed the emergency designation specifically so Jacksonville could be officially on the record before the CIA's board meets in June to pick its southeast campus location. Atlanta, Charleston, and Nashville are the other finalists. ANDREW: Sixteen to two is a wide margin. Who were the no votes, and why? JENNY: The two no votes were Council members Diamond and Gay. Diamond has been the loudest of the skeptics, arguing the deal needs enrollment-based clawbacks so the city isn't on the hook if the campus underperforms its student projections. Council member Lahnen was absent. So the real date to watch now is the CIA board vote in June. That is the only thing that matters from here. ANDREW: And separately on the downtown front? JENNY: Two quick items. Jacksonville Daily Record reports a warehouse at 924 Lane Avenue North sold this week for 8.25 million dollars — 4.55 million more than it traded for in 2022. That's a 122 percent appreciation in less than four years, which tells you something about industrial demand in this market. And on the JEA investigation we've been tracking, the subpoena dates are now locked in. Chief Administrative Officer Jody Brooks testifies June 8th. CEO Vickie Cavey testifies June 22nd. The committee specifically wants to see communications between Cavey's office and Mayo Clinic, which JEA's own attorneys say owes more than 12 million dollars in unpaid capacity fees. Andrew, take it home. ANDREW: Before we let you go — one thing to watch today. The Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey drops at noon Eastern. Last week's print was 6.51 percent. The MBA already told us the rate hit 6.65 yesterday. If Freddie comes in above 6.6, you can expect the housing-data narrative to harden around the idea that the spring buying season is now decisively closed — and any buyer sitting on the sidelines waiting for sub-6 rates is going to be waiting through the fall. If Freddie surprises to the downside, below 6.5, the bond market is calling the cooler monthly PCE number the real signal — and we may have seen the local high in mortgage rates for this cycle. Either way, the print at noon today sets the tone for housing for the next two weeks. JENNY: That's your Morning Brief for Thursday. Have a great day. ANDREW: We'll see you tomorrow.

Jax Morning Brief — Paxton Routs Cornyn, Jacksonville Backs Culinary Institute, MBA Rates Hit 6.65%

Good morning. It's Wednesday, May 27th. This is The Morning Brief. I'm Jenny. ANDREW: And I'm Andrew. JENNY: The runoff we previewed Friday is over. Ken Paxton crushed John Cornyn last night by more than 25 points, ending a thirty-year run for one of the Senate's most institutional Republicans. ANDREW: And here in Jacksonville, the City Council voted 16 to 2 to back a 35 million dollar incentive package for the Culinary Institute of America. We'll get to what that means and what comes next. JENNY: Let's get into it. ANDREW: First, a quick look at the markets. The S and P 500 closed Tuesday at 7,519, up about six tenths of a percent and at a fresh record. The Nasdaq rallied roughly 1.2 percent to 26,656, also a record. The Dow lagged, finishing down about a quarter percent, off 118 points to 50,461. Optimism around a U.S. Iran deal lifted tech and pressured energy, which is the Dow's heaviest sector exposure. The ten-year Treasury yield slipped to 4.50 percent, and the thirty-year fixed mortgage rate is tracking at 6.61 percent today according to Mortgage News Daily, the lowest reading in a week. We'll dig into mortgages in a few minutes. Jenny, the big political story this morning is in Texas. JENNY: It is. Walk us through what happened. ANDREW: John Cornyn served four terms in the Senate. He was the Republican Whip under Mitch McConnell. He had every institutional advantage you can have, including most of his colleagues' endorsements. And he lost the Republican primary runoff to his own state's Attorney General, 64 to 36, according to the Texas Tribune and the Associated Press. President Trump endorsed Paxton seven days before the vote, and the AP called the race for Paxton about an hour after polls closed. JENNY: 26 points is not a primary fight. That's a repudiation. What does this signal? ANDREW: Two things. First, sitting Republican incumbents are now genuinely vulnerable to MAGA-aligned challengers when the President puts his thumb on the scale. Second, this puts the seat at least mildly in play in November. Paxton was impeached by the Texas House in 2023 and has faced years of legal scrutiny at both the state and federal level. The Democrats nominated state representative James Talarico, who has been raising real money. Texas hasn't elected a Democratic senator since 1988, but the cycle just got more interesting. JENNY: Sticking with Capitol Hill. You told us Friday Thune punted the ICE funding bill to after Memorial Day. Where does it stand? ANDREW: The Senate is back in session next Monday, June 1, which is also the President's original deadline to have the bill on his desk. So they'll miss it. The two flashpoints haven't moved. There is a roughly 1.8 billion dollar Justice Department anti-weaponization fund tied to a Trump IRS settlement that several Republicans publicly called a slush fund. And there is a one billion dollar line item for ballroom security at the White House that the Senate parliamentarian has already partially ruled out of order under reconciliation. Thune now has to decide which of those he can drop. JENNY: And on the foreign policy side, the Iran picture shifted again over the weekend. ANDREW: It did. On Sunday, U.S. Central Command confirmed defensive strikes on Iranian missile launch sites and small boats in the Strait of Hormuz, framing them as a response to maritime threats. At the same time, the President said publicly that a deal reopening the Strait is, quote, largely negotiated. CNBC and CNN both reported that Tehran and Washington are working on a memorandum of understanding that would convert April's ceasefire into a longer-term framework. The sticking points are familiar. Iran wants frozen assets released. Washington wants meaningful limits on uranium enrichment. And Tehran is publicly accusing the U.S. of demanding a troop withdrawal, which the White House calls fabricated. JENNY: And the market is reading it as a deal. ANDREW: That's the read for now. Tech rallied, oil futures eased, Treasuries rallied. But the Strait is not actually open, the strikes are real, and one bad night can flip the script. Last thing on the national desk before we go to mortgages. The President signed two executive orders eight days ago that have been flying under the radar but matter for anyone in financial services. The first directs Treasury and federal regulators to crack down on what the White House calls politicized debanking, which is the practice of banks closing accounts tied to lawful but unpopular industries or politics. The second directs banks to factor immigration status into customer risk assessments, specifically flagging accounts opened with individual taxpayer ID numbers rather than social security numbers. Both will spend the next year in agency rulemaking. JENNY: Staying on banking, your beat. The MBA print came out this morning. ANDREW: It did. The Mortgage Bankers Association released its weekly survey for the week ending May 22. The headline 30-year conforming rate climbed to 6.65 percent, up nine basis points from the prior week, and the highest level since August. That is the fifth consecutive weekly increase. Total applications fell 8.5 percent week over week. Refinance volume dropped 18 percent. Purchase applications were essentially flat, down four tenths of a percent. JENNY: So purchases held up, but refis fell off a cliff. Why such different reactions in the same week? ANDREW: Refi demand is rate-sensitive in a way purchase demand isn't. People shopping for a home need to buy regardless of what rates do this month. People refinancing are doing a math problem, and that math broke this week. When you cross from 6.56 to 6.65, the cohort that had been waiting on the sidelines just got pushed further out. The refi index is still up about 35 percent year over year, but that comparison is flattered. Last May, rates were closer to 6.9 percent. JENNY: And today's daily print is actually lower, you said. ANDREW: Yes. Mortgage News Daily has the average lender today at 6.61 percent, down four basis points. That's the third straight daily decline. Treasuries have rallied this week on Iran deal hopes, and the ten-year yield is at 4.50 percent, off from a recent high near 4.6. If that holds, the MBA print next Wednesday could finally break the streak. The wild card is tomorrow morning. JENNY: PCE. ANDREW: PCE. Eight thirty Eastern. The Bureau of Economic Analysis releases the April Personal Consumption Expenditures price index, which is the Fed's preferred inflation gauge. The last print, for March, came in hot at 3.5 percent annualized. Economists are looking for a slight cooling, but with oil still elevated from the Iran conflict, a hot number would push the ten-year back toward 4.6 and the 30-year mortgage back toward 6.75. A cool number, and refi shops have a few good days ahead. Jenny, over to you on AI. JENNY: Thanks, Andrew. The biggest AI news this morning is a Tokyo story with real money behind it. Fujitsu announced strategic partnership agreements today with both Anthropic and OpenAI. The Anthropic side combines Claude with Fujitsu's enterprise systems for Japanese banks, government agencies, and critical infrastructure operators. The OpenAI side integrates GPT models into Fujitsu's existing AI services portfolio. ANDREW: So Fujitsu is hedging. JENNY: Yes, and they're hedging at scale. Fujitsu sells into a huge share of Japan's top enterprises and government ministries. Both deals are pitched as accelerating, quote, AI transformation across Japan's enterprise sector. The Anthropic announcement specifically emphasizes safety and reliability for mission-critical systems, which is the language Japanese regulators want to hear. The bigger story here is that Japan is one of the most risk-averse enterprise markets in the world. If Anthropic and OpenAI both move volume through Fujitsu, that's revenue neither has had to build a sales force for. ANDREW: And it lands as the two companies are publicly disagreeing about whether their own product is going to take everyone's job. JENNY: That's right. This was the strangest contrast in tech this week. Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah, speaking at the Vatican's AI ethics conference, said, quote, there is a real possibility that AI will displace human labor at very large scale. The same week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman gave an interview saying he was wrong about earlier projections and that he no longer believes the technology is going to cause a jobs apocalypse. Same industry, same week, polar opposite messaging. ANDREW: Which one is selling and which one is hedging? JENNY: That's the right way to read it. Anthropic's enterprise pitch increasingly emphasizes safety, oversight, and what they call deployment science. That positioning requires customers to believe the technology is powerful enough to cause harm if mishandled. OpenAI's pitch is much closer to a productivity story aimed at chief financial officers. Different strategies, different signals to enterprise buyers. Andrew, before we go to Jacksonville, the weather. Looking at 90 degrees in Jacksonville today, mostly cloudy with afternoon showers and about a 40 percent chance of rain. So if you're heading downtown, take the umbrella. ANDREW: And speaking of downtown. JENNY: Speaking of downtown. The City Council voted 16 to 2 last night on emergency passage of ordinance 2026-0419, authorizing up to 35 million dollars in city incentives to bring the Culinary Institute of America's first southeast campus to a 50 thousand square foot space on the Northbank riverfront. Members Rory Diamond and Mike Gay were the only no votes. Member Will Lahnen was absent. The Jax Daily Record and News4Jax both confirmed the vote count. ANDREW: Why the emergency tag on a 35 million dollar deal? JENNY: Council President Kevin Carrico requested emergency passage so the city would be on record before the CIA's board picks a city in June. Atlanta, Charleston, and Nashville are also in the running. The Jacksonville package breaks down into roughly 8 million in workforce incentives and 27 million in additional support, spread over six years and paired with a private hotel development on the same site. JAX Chamber endorsed last week. ANDREW: And what did the two no votes argue? JENNY: Diamond and Gay both raised concerns about taxpayer exposure for a private institution that hasn't formally committed to Jacksonville yet. Diamond said publicly he wanted the deal restructured to claw back funds if enrollment targets aren't hit. Two other Jacksonville items quickly. The Related Group held a ground breaking last Wednesday on Southbank Residences, a 25-story luxury apartment tower with 395 units on the Southbank riverfront. That adds to a downtown development pipeline now valued at roughly 7 billion dollars across completed, under-construction, and approved projects. And separately, the University of Florida announced this week that Edgemoor Infrastructure and Real Estate has been selected as the lead developer for the first 287 million dollar phase of UF's new Jacksonville graduate campus. ANDREW: That's a busy downtown news cycle. JENNY: It really is. Andrew, take us out. ANDREW: Before we let you go, one thing to watch tomorrow morning. The Bureau of Economic Analysis releases the April PCE price index at eight thirty Eastern. The Fed's preferred inflation gauge ran at 3.5 percent annualized in March, which was hotter than expected. A reading at or above 3.5 tomorrow keeps a June rate cut effectively off the table and likely pushes mortgage rates back above 6.7 percent. A 3.2 or lower would re-open the cut conversation and probably take 30-year rates a quarter point lower by Friday. The futures market is pricing under one in three odds of a June cut going into the print. Watch the ten-year Treasury immediately after eight thirty for the live read. JENNY: That's your Morning Brief for Wednesday. Have a great rest of the week. ANDREW: We'll see you tomorrow.

Jax Morning Brief — Trump Scraps AI Order, Senate Punts ICE Funding, Mortgage Rates at 6.51%

Good morning. It's Friday, May 22nd. This is The Morning Brief. I'm Jenny. ANDREW: And I'm Andrew. JENNY: The AI executive order we told you to watch yesterday? It didn't happen. Trump scrapped the signing at the last minute, telling reporters he didn't want to slow down American AI companies. ANDREW: And Senate Republicans abandoned a vote on ICE funding and sent themselves home for Memorial Day recess, blowing past the President's June 1 deadline. JENNY: Let's get into it. ANDREW: First, a quick look at the markets. The S and P 500 closed down about half a percent on Thursday. The Dow lost roughly half a percent as well, and the Nasdaq slipped half a percent. It was a quietly negative session as Treasury yields rose and Nvidia's blockbuster earnings somehow failed to lift the AI trade. The ten-year Treasury yield is sitting at 4.59 percent, and the thirty-year fixed mortgage rate jumped to 6.51 percent on Freddie Mac's weekly survey, up fifteen basis points from a week ago. Mortgage News Daily has its daily index a bit higher, around 6.63 percent. Jenny, on the AI story, this one really did come apart in front of the cameras. JENNY: It really did, Andrew. So just to recap where we were yesterday. The White House had invited CEOs from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft to a Thursday afternoon ceremony. Trump was expected to sign an executive order asking frontier AI labs to voluntarily share new models with the government 90 days before release, plus a Treasury-led cybersecurity clearinghouse for banks and other critical infrastructure to test those models. Then yesterday afternoon, hours before the ceremony, Trump pulled it. ANDREW: And what did he say? JENNY: His exact words to reporters were, quote, we're leading China, we're leading everybody, and I don't want to do anything that's going to get in the way of that lead. He said he thought certain provisions, quote, could have been a blocker. CNBC, the Washington Post, and TechCrunch all reported the same reasoning. There's also a quieter explanation circulating, which is that not enough tech CEOs could actually make it to Washington on short notice. ANDREW: So who won this fight inside the White House? JENNY: The growth side beat the security side, at least for now. There has been an internal split for weeks. National security advisers wanted pre-release testing because they're worried about model misuse. The economic and tech advisers worried any government bottleneck would hand China an opening. Trump came down on the second side, and the cybersecurity hawks in his own base are not happy about it. Expect the order to come back in some softer form, but the political signal from yesterday is that this White House is not going to put any speed bumps in front of the labs. ANDREW: And on the other end of the AI spectrum, Nvidia reported a blowout quarter Wednesday night and the stock went down. JENNY: Yeah, this was strange. Nvidia delivered 81.6 billion dollars in revenue for Q1, beating the street by about three billion. Data center revenue alone was 75 billion, up 92 percent year over year. They guided next quarter to 91 billion, four billion above consensus. The board added 80 billion to the buyback and raised the dividend 25-fold, from a penny a share to 25 cents. And the stock closed down 1.8 percent. ANDREW: How does a company beat by that much and trade down? JENNY: One analyst at Capital.com called it, quote, a garden variety beat. At a four trillion dollar market cap, you have to wildly exceed not the published consensus but the so-called whisper number the buy side is actually trading. Nvidia merely crushed it. It didn't obliterate it. Andrew, over to you for the national desk. ANDREW: Thanks, Jenny. The big story on the Hill yesterday was the collapse of the Senate's plan to pass the reconciliation bill funding ICE and Customs and Border Protection. NPR, CBS News, and UPI all reported the same picture. Senate Majority Leader John Thune had hoped to get the bill on the floor Thursday night. Instead the Senate adjourned for a one-week recess. They will pick this back up June 1. JENNY: What blew it up? ANDREW: Two things. First, the package included a roughly 1.8 billion dollar Justice Department fund that several Republican senators called a slush fund. It is tied to a settlement involving President Trump and the IRS, and a handful of GOP senators just refused to sign off on it. Second, there is a one billion dollar line item for a Secret Service-protected ballroom at the White House. That also drew Republican opposition. Underneath the headline number, which is around 72 billion dollars for ICE and CBP over three years, the package became too much of a Christmas tree to hold the conference together. JENNY: And what does this mean for the President's June 1 deadline? ANDREW: They are going to miss it. Thune told reporters the Senate will, quote, pick up where we left off. The political read is that the President's leverage over his own party on a marquee priority is weaker than the White House would like, and Senate Republicans heading into a midterm year are not willing to absorb a billion dollar ballroom vote. JENNY: Anything else on the national side? ANDREW: Two more things. On Iran. We have been tracking the ceasefire that has been on, in Trump's words, life support all week. Reuters and Al Jazeera report Israel is still pushing to resume strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, and Iran's Supreme Leader issued a directive yesterday that the country's near-weapons-grade uranium stays inside Iran. That hardens Tehran's position on the single thing the U.S. has been demanding in the talks. Brent crude climbed back above 104 dollars a barrel this morning, WTI around 101. Oil is still about 50 percent above its pre-war level from late February. JENNY: So we are not closer to a resolution. ANDREW: We are further away. Watch Brent. If we break 115, the market is telling you Israel has moved. The second item is Fed Chair Kevin Warsh. He was sworn in one week ago today. He has not made a single public statement since. The Marketplace reporting this week suggests he intends to dramatically cut back Fed communications, possibly ending the post-FOMC press conference altogether. His first meeting as chair is June 16th and 17th, and futures are pricing less than a one-in-three chance of a rate cut at that meeting. Speaking of rates, Jenny, the news on the mortgage side is not what buyers wanted to hear this week. JENNY: How bad? ANDREW: Freddie Mac's primary mortgage market survey came in at 6.51 percent yesterday on the 30-year fixed, up from 6.36 last week. That is the fourth consecutive week of increases. Mortgage News Daily's daily index has been even more volatile. They had it briefly at a nine-month high of 6.68 on Tuesday before pulling back into the mid 6.5s by Wednesday and bouncing again this morning. The driver is the same one we have been talking about all spring. Inflation expectations are stuck because of oil, and the ten-year Treasury is sitting near a year-to-date high. JENNY: What is that doing to demand? ANDREW: The Mortgage Bankers Association published its weekly applications survey yesterday for the week ending May 15. Total applications fell 2.3 percent. Purchase applications dropped 4 percent on the week, although they are still up year-over-year because last May was even worse. Refinances were basically flat, down a tenth of a percent. Interestingly, refis are still 35 percent above where they were a year ago, because last May the 30-year was running above 6.8. So even at 6.5, some borrowers from late 2024 are finding it worth refinancing. JENNY: So who is actually closing right now? ANDREW: It is mostly purchase-money buyers who simply cannot wait any longer, and a thin slice of refinancers who locked in above 7 in the fall of 2024. The bigger story for originators is the eight straight weeks now where the 30-year has held above 6.4 percent. The MBA's spring forecast assumed rates would be back in the high fives by Memorial Day. They are not. Production budgets for the second half of the year are getting rewritten. Jenny, speaking of weekends, sounds like you've got a busy one in Jacksonville. JENNY: We really do, Andrew. Weather-wise, Jacksonville is looking at a high of 92 today, low around 74, partly sunny with a 40 percent chance of afternoon showers. Classic late-May First Coast day. Now, the big local story is downtown. Whole Foods opened its first-ever downtown Jacksonville store yesterday morning at 8 a.m. on Riverside Avenue in Brooklyn. Thirty-eight thousand square feet, more than 800 local Florida items on the shelves. The first 300 customers got a limited-edition Jacksonville tote and a coupon worth up to 100 dollars. The Jacksonville Daily Record had reporters on site. ANDREW: Is this a one-off, or does it actually signal something about the urban core? JENNY: It's a real bet. Brooklyn was a working-class neighborhood basically until five years ago. The Whole Foods sits where the old Florida Times-Union building used to be, and the store's interior design actually pays homage to that building with vertical wood slat walls. The opening is one piece of a broader downtown thesis. Riverfront Park, Independent Living, the planned FIS headquarters expansion, and what's happening on Bay Street this weekend. ANDREW: Which is the Jazz Festival. JENNY: Which is the Jacksonville Jazz Festival. It kicked off last night at the Florida Theatre with the piano competition. The free outdoor stages at Ford on Bay run Friday, Saturday, and Sunday with George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic, Andra Day, Nile Rodgers and Chic, Sheila E, Esperanza Spalding, and Kamasi Washington. There is also a new Jazz in the Plaza stage at Riverfront Plaza this year. If you are anywhere near downtown this weekend, this is the event. ANDREW: And there was a planning commission vote yesterday on the density bonus ordinance we talked about earlier in the week. JENNY: There was. The Planning Commission took up Ordinance 2026-0311 yesterday. This is the proposal that would create what the city is calling target growth areas along high-frequency transit corridors and the Emerald Trail, where developers could build up to 40 units per acre with smaller lots, more height, less parking, in exchange for either pledging 20 percent of units as affordable, or building to flood-resilient standards. Single-family neighborhoods are carved out. The next step is the Council Land Use and Zoning Committee public hearing on June 6. ANDREW: That's a big change in what's allowed near transit. JENNY: It is the most consequential land use change since consolidation in terms of what kind of housing actually gets built downtown. The carve-out for single-family is what keeps the politics manageable, and the resilience track is how the city's Office of Resilience has signed onto it. The fight in committee June 6 will be about how big the carve-outs actually are. ANDREW: Before we let you go, one thing to watch this week. Tuesday is the Texas Senate Republican primary runoff between Senator John Cornyn and State Attorney General Ken Paxton. Trump endorsed Paxton. Cornyn is the institutional incumbent. The result will tell us how durable an institutional Republican is against a Trump-backed challenger in a state Trump won by 14 points. The same evening, the Jacksonville City Council holds its full vote on the 35 million dollar package to bring the Culinary Institute of America's Southeast campus downtown. The CIA board picks a city in June, and Atlanta, Charleston, and Nashville are also in the running. Two very different votes, both Tuesday, both worth watching. JENNY: That's your Morning Brief for Friday. Have a great weekend. ANDREW: We'll see you Monday.

Jax Morning Brief — Trump's AI Order, Anthropic Heads for First Profit, Dow Retakes 50,000

Good morning. It's Thursday, May 21st, 2026. This is The Morning Brief. I'm Jenny. ANDREW: And I'm Andrew. JENNY: President Trump is bringing the heads of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft to the White House today to sign an executive order that, for the first time, asks frontier AI labs to hand their models to the government before public release. ANDREW: And Anthropic, one of those labs, confirmed it's on track for its first-ever profitable quarter, just hours after disclosing a fifteen-billion-dollar-a-year compute deal with Elon Musk's SpaceX. JENNY: Let's get into it. ANDREW: A quick look at the markets. The S and P 500 closed at 7,398, up about 1.1 percent. The Dow added 645 points to finish at 50,009, reclaiming the fifty-thousand mark for the first time in a week. The Nasdaq jumped 1.5 percent. It was the strongest session in days, snapping a three-day slide on better sentiment around Iran diplomacy and ahead of Nvidia's earnings. The ten-year Treasury yield eased to 4.63 percent, down a few basis points from Tuesday's year-high. And the thirty-year fixed mortgage rate is hovering in the mid-six-percent range. Mortgage News Daily's index pulled back to roughly 6.54 percent after touching a nine-month high earlier this week. Freddie Mac's weekly survey lands at noon today and is expected to print near 6.4 percent. ANDREW: Jenny, you're up. The AI desk is leading us this morning. JENNY: It is. Three major AI stories are converging today, and they all matter for the same reason. The frontier labs are now operating at a scale that's pulling Washington in. JENNY: First, the executive order. According to reporting from CNN and Axios, Trump will sign an order this afternoon creating a voluntary framework asking AI developers to share frontier models with the federal government ninety days before public release, and to give similar early access to critical infrastructure operators like major banks. The order also sets up a Treasury-led clearinghouse for finding security flaws in unreleased models. ANDREW: Voluntary is doing a lot of work in that sentence. What's the actual enforcement here? JENNY: There isn't any. Labs can opt out. But the major frontier labs, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and xAI, all already signed pre-release evaluation agreements with the federal AI Safety Institute earlier this spring. So today is less about creating a new requirement and more about codifying what's already happening, and putting the president's name on it. ANDREW: So the meaningful test isn't who signs today. It's who's the first lab to actually flag a model and delay a launch. JENNY: Exactly. That's the signal the framework has teeth. JENNY: Second story, and this is the headline of the day for anyone tracking AI economics. Anthropic disclosed to investors that it expects to generate ten point nine billion dollars in revenue this quarter. That's more than the company made in all of last year, and it would deliver Anthropic's first-ever profitable quarter, with operating profit projected at five hundred fifty-nine million dollars. CNBC and TechCrunch both confirmed the figures. ANDREW: And the context — last summer Anthropic was telling investors profitability wouldn't arrive until 2028. JENNY: Two years early. The growth is being driven almost entirely by enterprise API revenue, businesses paying to embed Claude into their software. And the company says the profit window may not last past this quarter, because compute spending is about to ramp aggressively. ANDREW: Which gets us to the third story. JENNY: Right. Axios broke yesterday that Anthropic agreed to pay SpaceX one point two five billion dollars a month, fifteen billion a year, through 2029 for access to Musk's Colossus supercomputing cluster in Memphis. That's a forty-billion-dollar contract for inference capacity alone. SpaceX, by the way, filed for an IPO yesterday, and that fifteen-billion-dollar recurring AI revenue line is now part of its prospectus. ANDREW: That's the entire AI economy in one transaction. Anthropic is profitable today, but only because it's signing forty-billion-dollar checks for compute tomorrow. And the money is flowing from one trillion-dollar private company straight to another. JENNY: One more quick AI note. OpenAI announced one of its reasoning models autonomously cracked a geometry problem that had stumped mathematicians for eighty years. The company is framing it as the first piece of real evidence that frontier models can produce original research, not just retrieve it. We'll see how the math community responds. ANDREW: And a quick add on the hardware side, because it ties the whole picture together. Nvidia reported first-quarter results after the close yesterday: 81.6 billion dollars in revenue, up 85 percent from a year ago. Data center revenue alone was 75.2 billion dollars, up 92 percent. The board added 80 billion dollars to the buyback authorization and lifted the quarterly dividend from a penny a share to 25 cents. JENNY: So the picture is: Anthropic and OpenAI and Google are competing for inference capacity, they're paying SpaceX and Microsoft and Oracle for data centers, and underneath every one of those data centers, the chips are Nvidia. ANDREW: One company sitting on top of a market with no real second source. That's a remarkable position to be in. JENNY: Andrew, over to you for the national desk. ANDREW: Thanks, Jenny. Two stories. First, the Iran war. ANDREW: The ceasefire that's been in place since April 8th is, in the president's own words, on life support. It came under fresh strain this week. Trump postponed a scheduled US strike on Monday at the request of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, then called Iran's counter-proposal, mediated by Pakistan, quote, "totally unacceptable" on Tuesday evening. Brent crude is sitting around 108 dollars a barrel. West Texas Intermediate just under 103. Iran is still refusing to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and CNN reported Wednesday that Israel is now actively preparing to strike Iranian nuclear facilities alone, without US participation. JENNY: So we're back to the question of whether Israel goes by itself. ANDREW: That's the live question this morning. The signal to watch is Brent. If it breaks 115 dollars a barrel on a sudden move, that's the market telling you a strike happened before the headlines confirm it. ANDREW: Second story. The Justice Department is suing four states. Federal lawyers filed suit yesterday against New York, Vermont, Hawaii, and Michigan over state laws that hold fossil-fuel companies financially accountable for climate damages. The federal argument is that climate is Washington's lane, and that states are interfering with foreign and interstate commerce. It's an aggressive use of federal supremacy doctrine, and it sets up a Supreme Court fight on a question that's mostly been litigated in state courts so far. JENNY: How quickly does that move? ANDREW: District court within weeks. If the administration wants Supreme Court review on its preferred timeline, before the midterms, they'll push for an expedited appeal. ANDREW: And one more political note from the national desk. The Texas Senate Republican runoff is Tuesday — John Cornyn versus state Attorney General Ken Paxton. Trump has endorsed Paxton. Cornyn is the longtime incumbent and effectively the institutional choice. Punchbowl is framing it as Cornyn fighting for political survival, and the winner is the heavy favorite in the general. The outcome reshapes the Senate Republican conference heading into the 2027 tax and budget fights, and it tells you whether MAGA-aligned challengers can still take down a sitting senator with the president's backing. JENNY: Latest public polling? ANDREW: Tight. And the recent AP-NORC poll has Trump's overall approval at 37 percent — up four points from last month, but still underwater. The GOP base is holding on the Iran war but slipping on economic confidence. Only about one in four Americans say the economy is in good shape. ANDREW: Jenny, before I hand back to you, one more on my beat. Let's do mortgages. JENNY: Go ahead. ANDREW: Rates are easing slightly but staying elevated. Mortgage News Daily's top-tier 30-year is around 6.5 percent this morning, off Tuesday's nine-month high near 6.68 percent. Freddie Mac's last weekly print was 6.36 percent for the week of May 14th, and the new print arrives at noon today. The Mortgage Bankers Association's most recent application survey, for the week ending May 8th, showed total applications up 1.7 percent. Purchase applications were up 4 percent week-over-week and 7 percent year-over-year. Refinance applications actually fell 1 percent, dragging the refi share to 40.8 percent. That's the lowest reading since last July. JENNY: So purchase demand is holding up better than refi at these rates. ANDREW: It is. The headline number every loan officer is watching is whether the daily index breaks 6.75 percent. If Israel strikes Iran and oil spikes, that becomes a real possibility within days. Lock advice across the industry is shifting more defensive than it was a month ago. ANDREW: Jenny, back to you. Jacksonville. JENNY: Weather-wise, Jacksonville is looking at 90 degrees and mostly sunny today. Low around 75 tonight. JENNY: Three stories from the local desk. First, and the biggest item: the Jacksonville Planning Commission votes today on a comprehensive plan amendment that would reshape how affordable housing gets built in this city. Ordinance 2026-0311 would create what the city is calling target growth areas, corridors along high-frequency transit and the Emerald Trail, where developers could build denser, taller projects on smaller lots, with relaxed parking requirements, in exchange for committing twenty percent of rental units to households at or below area median income, or building to flood-resilience standards. ANDREW: And single-family neighborhoods? JENNY: Largely off the table. That's the political compromise that's kept the bill alive. The Jax Daily Record is reporting that maximum density in target areas could rise to 40 units per acre. Today's vote is the first formal step. If the Planning Commission approves it, the ordinance heads to the Land Use and Zoning Committee for a public hearing on June 6th. JENNY: Second, two big openings downtown today. Whole Foods opened its new 38-thousand-square-foot store on Riverside Avenue at 8 a.m. this morning. The first 300 customers got tote bags and discount coupons. And the Jacksonville Jazz Festival kicks off tonight at the Florida Theatre with the piano competition, running through Memorial Day weekend. ANDREW: Those two openings on the same day feel like a downtown thesis statement. JENNY: They do. The city has been arguing for years that downtown can sustain destination retail and weekend programming at the same time. Today is the proof point, or it isn't. JENNY: Third, a quick CIA campus update. The full City Council votes Tuesday, May 26th, on the 35-million-dollar incentive package to land the Culinary Institute of America's downtown campus. The Finance Committee already cleared it 6 to 1 this week, with Council member Diamond the lone no. Atlanta, Charleston, and Nashville are all still in the running, and the CIA board makes its final pick in June. ANDREW: 35 million dollars in incentives is real money. What does Jacksonville get back? JENNY: A 50-thousand-square-foot teaching campus downtown, a workforce pipeline of culinary professionals, and a credentialed national institution anchoring a block of east LaVilla that the city has been trying to activate for years. The skeptical question is the one Diamond is raising: whether the return on investment math actually pencils out at six years and 27 million dollars in non-workforce subsidies. JENNY: And one more from JEA, the investigation we've been tracking. The City Council subpoenas issued Tuesday are now formally scheduled. Chief Administrative Officer Jody Brooks testifies June 8th. CEO Vickie Cavey testifies June 22nd. Council's legislative counsel said on the record this week that the probe could ultimately lead to JEA charter changes. We're watching whether the Mayo Clinic capacity-fee dispute surfaces in those hearings. JENNY: Andrew, close us out. ANDREW: One thing to watch today: the AI executive order signing itself. The substantive question isn't whether Trump signs the order. That's happening. It's which CEOs actually show up in the East Room for the ceremony. OpenAI and Anthropic have been engaging with the White House on the text, according to Axios. But if Google's Sundar Pichai or xAI's Elon Musk skip the photo, that's a real signal about whether the frontier labs see this voluntary framework as cooperation, or as cover for the next round of regulation. The signing is scheduled for this afternoon. Watch the room. JENNY: That's your Morning Brief for Thursday. Have a great day. ANDREW: We'll see you tomorrow.