Bloomberg Businessweek Weekend - April 3rd, 2026

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1:19Copyright 2026. JPMorgan Chase and Company. Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news. This is Bloomberg Business Week Daily, reporting from the magazine that helps global leaders stay ahead with insight on the people, companies, and trends shaping today's complex economy. Plus, global business, finance, and tech news as it happens. The Bloomberg Business Week Daily Podcast with Carol Masser and Tim Stenevek on Bloomberg Radio. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Bloomberg Business Week weekend podcast. The U.S. war in Iran was once again top of mind this past week. President Trump gave an evening address from the Oval Office on Wednesday.

2:06Thanks to the progress we've made, I can say tonight that we are on track to complete all of America's military objectives shortly, very shortly. We're going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We're going to bring them back to the Stone Ages where they belong. President Trump this past week in an evening address from the Oval Office. U.S. stocks seem to look for any signs of an end to the war to rally, which they actually did this past week. That actually happened on Tuesday on headlines suggesting the U.S. and Iran might be looking for a way out of the war. That triggered a rush to dump bearish bets with wagers against companies in the S &P 500 having stood near a three-year high.

2:48The overall uncertainty, though, and flow of headlines throughout the week about the war just kept impacting stocks and markets. It also impacted aluminum and energy prices. On that, specifically aluminum, Iranian strikes on Persian Gulf aluminum plants threatened that supply chain, a reminder of the basic materials so necessary in many industries and supply chains. Bloomberg's Joe Doe is tracking this and joins us in a moment. Plus the invisible architecture of modern warfare. We've got a deep dive into a decade-old project out of the Pentagon that's being put to use in the U.S. war with Iran.

3:22The project, championed by one Marine colonel who enlisted Silicon Valley to bring to life a vision for AI warfare. Bloomberg's Katrina Manson described it this way. Imagine Google Earth for war. A map of war with white dots infused with information like elevation, coordinate, what is precisely there, whether it's friendly or faux. I gotta say, Katrina Manson should know. She is the Bloomberg News reporter covering technology and national security. She has spent years writing about Project Maven. That work, the reporting, her discoveries are all in her book. Her new book, Project Maven, a Marine colonel, his team, and the dawn of AI warfare.

4:02All of that to come. We begin, though, with the industrial fallout of a war that continues to take shots at the global supply chain. Recent Iranian strikes on major aluminum smelters in the UAE and Bahrain have crippled production at key hubs. sending metal prices this week to multi-year highs. That's also raising the prospect of record prices for the metal used in everything from airplanes and weapons to food packaging and solar panels. U.S.-listed aluminum stocks gained after a rally in the metal price following Iran's attacks on Middle Eastern aluminum facilities. On that and what we needed to understand about the aluminum market and today's key materials supply chains, we leaned on Bloomberg News corporate and economic statecraft reporter Joe Doe, who formerly covered precious metals and mining here at Bloomberg.

4:46He just knows everything and anything about this space. Just a quick overview of the world and aluminum. Everybody knows in the aluminum space that aluminum is either produced in China, which none of that leaves China, it just stays there. Russia, which is the world's biggest ex-China producer. The Middle East, the United States in some bits, and Canada, which is the big one here in North America. The Middle East, a lot of people don't think about even in the metals world, but it does account for about 10 % of global aluminum production. And I think what really struck me over the weekend, and apologies, I don't really mean to use the word struck, but what really surprised me over the weekend was the attack on EGA.

5:29That really caught my attention because if you talk to people both in the aluminum industry, but also people in the This is Emirates Global Aluminum? Emirates Global Aluminum. Okay. That's correct. If you talk to people both in the aluminum industry, but also the defense industry, EGA is one that they have been looking at closely, right? And EGA produces, their two aluminum smelters in the Middle East produce something like 2.5 million tons per year. They're also a massive producer of what is called high purity aluminum. High purity aluminum, quite simply, is the aluminum needed for defense applications in aerospace and armored vehicles like Bradley vehicles.

6:14Wow. Okay, so this matters. Yeah, matters in a big way. So in terms of EGA and what's happened to it, is this going to result then, Joe, in kind of a longer term impact on pricing and prices? Yeah, I think that is really the big concern here. My colleagues in London and here in the U.S. were writing overnight that the total combined amount of aluminum produced at the two facilities that were struck accounts for about 3.2 million tons of aluminum produced per year in the world. The idea has been everybody's focused on oil, right? But if you have these two massive facilities concerned that they come offline on some level, you are starting to wonder, like, where do we get tonnage?

7:05And it's not just like 300 ,000 tons. We're talking, again, in the millions of tons. The market already has been seeing inventories declining. if there is real concern that you are no longer able to get aluminum out of the middle east as a reliable amount uh then you do start to have real concerns my my colleagues again over uh over the past day had reported last time we saw a real shock to the aluminum market was in 2022 when russia invaded ukraine and there were massive concerns that nobody would be able to touch russian aluminum right because we saw all the sanctions coming in russia at the time was just a producer of about 4 million tons of the global market.

7:46The price rose as much as 30 % globally, the aluminum price. So we're talking about 3 to 3.5 million just in the Middle East alone by comparison. I think there are just a lot of concerns and a lot of unknowns. You know, Joe, I just think about all the conversations that we've had with you about, you know, rare earths, critical minerals, if you will. And just, you know, once again, we have an event, a war, that is pulling back the layer and just exposing, you know, who owns what different minerals, materials. And I just think about what that means for the future in terms of everybody looking to make sure that they have access either in their backyard or they have allies where they can get it.

8:28I mean, you work on Statecraft. Are we just increasingly seeing that's where our war, excuse me, our world is moving towards? Every conversation I have is supply chain right so over the past three or four weeks now when i sit down with individuals and ask them okay i'm looking at the straight-up or moves like what else am i missing right and and the the assumed is i know i'm not missing the oil aspect of this whole thing right and they've been telling me now for weeks well have you looked at fertilizer have you looked at aluminum have you looked at gallium right like they really start to go deep because this is the way that so many people are thinking around these wars, right?

9:06Okay. Well, what supply chain is going to be disrupted here? I mean, aluminum touches every market, every market, every building market, every aerospace market, every automobile market. This is the thing that people are looking at on lower levels, right? Like obviously we have a potential oil crisis here, but they are looking well beyond that into not only like the Strait of Hormuz, but like what if you see extended attacks against these types of infrastructure that cause massive supply chain disruptions that people had not been considering yet. Yeah, I think about we talk about the tech war, right, or going after different things.

9:42But now you've got really kind of the commodity war, or I'm not even quite sure what to call it, but you really kind of you understand the power here. I think it said a lot that in our story, we noted that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard said they took credit for attacking those two aluminum plants and said the reason they did so is because those two aluminum plants supply aluminum to the United States military. I think that says a lot. So Joe, I'm looking at a press release from the Aluminum Association. Charles Johnson, the Aluminum Association president and CEO says, the apparent targeted attacks on aluminum assets in the Gulf are troubling.

10:22We're relieved to hear there were no fatalities at these facilities. Aluminum firms are working around the clock to mitigate impacts and adjust operations and supply routes as needed. It continues to say the industry has a proven track record of more than a century of adapting to regional and global challenges while continuing to meet the evolving needs of our customers. The idea of a century of adopting to regional and global challenges, that's a lot of, that's two world wars or one world war, I should say. But also a lot of other challenges in geopolitics. And I'm wondering how this one, because this world is more integrated when it comes to supply chains than it has been in other parts of our history, where this sort of stands in the context of other disruptions that this industry has actually seen.

11:15The story that we have out today says that this potentially could be one of the most disruptive moments in the history of the aluminum market. Why is that? In a world where America is supposed to be turning inward, this idea of America first, you covered this a lot over the last year and a half, where we're trying to be more reliant, where other countries are understanding that trade barriers are coming up and they need to be more reliant because other countries are sort of shutting off in some respects. Why is this one? Why is this happening? I mean, without going into a full history of what we've seen in the aluminum market for the 12 years that I've covered alone at Bloomberg, you have so many things going on.

12:00If you just take, OK, the potential of 10 percent of global aluminum production is threatened by actual kinetic war. OK, so you take 10 percent out of any market, that's problematic. You combine with the fact that the United States president reapplied tariffs on aluminum at a higher rate, specifically on Canada, who is one of the United States' closest allies, both militarily and, importantly, economically. Canada supplies half of the aluminum we consume in the United States. That's been problematic to the market here in the United States. You have century aluminum has been shutting down capacity over the past few years because of high power prices alcoa has been shifting its production outside of the united states for a very long time much of its production is now in canada they also do a bunch in australia because of again high energy prices china produces the most in the world but they consume all of it and then we have a war between ukraine and russia that has effectively made off limits the four million or so tons that kind of come out of russia i mean this is a we've compounded so many different events that have happened over just a decade that are now putting this global market under constant crisis.

13:17Having said that, I'm just, you know, I'm listening to you, Joe, and I'm thinking, okay, so this pushback on globalization, making sure, you know, you can do kind of maybe everything on your domestic home front or something. But I think what's happening now, and even going back to the pandemic, it's making you realize, wait a minute, maybe there's a statecraft where it's another form of globalization, where you have to have allies. It's not just about military backing you up, but you've got to make sure you have, you can share resources that are critical. Yeah, I think it's difficult for this market to have the high tariffs on Canadian imports.

13:54Yeah. I understand the people who support it, what their argument is, but I do know that it is making it incredibly difficult for consumers here in the United States. And I don't mean like you and me. I mean, the people who actually buy the aluminum and turn it into stuff. And, you know, yeah, it's just a difficult situation. There's an argument that Mike Bless, the former CEO of Century Aluminum, made back in 2015 to me. He said, you know, if you do allow for an industry to completely disappear in the United States. It takes with it the entire IP and the human intellect that goes behind that industry.

14:32And it takes about 20 years to get it back. So in some ways, the Trump administration might argue what Mike Bless had said, which is this is another reason why we do need to continue supporting production here in the United States. It's just difficult after we've seen the fact that Canada is our biggest supplier and slapping the up to 50 % tariffs on them, what that has done to our market. And yeah, it's no easy solution here. Our thanks to Joe Doe, Bloomberg News corporate and economic statecraft reporter who spent years covering metals and mining. After our conversation with Joe, we did learn on Wednesday that Emirates Global Aluminum, it's the Middle East top producer of the metal, and Joe referred to it in our conversation, actually halted operations at its Al-Tawila smelter after the site was struck by Iranian missiles and drones over the weekend.

15:17This according to a person familiar with the matter. Coming up from the raw aluminum used to build missiles to the AI code deciding where they land. We talk Project Maven and how the Pentagon pivoted to AI war machines. If you're listening to Bloomberg Businessweek, this is Bloomberg.

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17:33impact on global energy markets and the billions of dollars spent on military equipment. Also, the changing face of how war is fought. For the United States, that has included the role of artificial intelligence. CENTCOM chief Brad Cooper addressed that in an update on the U.S. war in Iran. This was back on March 11th. Our warfighters are leveraging a variety of advanced AI tools. These systems help us sift through vast amounts of data in seconds so our leaders can cut through the noise and make smarter decisions faster than the enemy can react. Humans will always make final decisions on what to shoot and what not to shoot and when to shoot.

18:12But advanced AI tools can turn processes that used to take hours and sometimes even days into seconds. And then a CENCOM chief Brad Cooper back on March 11th. AI in War, It is Here, algorithmic warfare, AI for intelligence and weapons. We might be able to link it all back to a vision, an idea, written in a thesis by Drew Cukor back in 1997. He wrote, White dots fused with an understanding of the enemy and validated by other collection assets can contribute to a highly accurate battle space picture. It's a lot, but this seemed to be his mission and may have led to what some have described as the most important secret military project of the 21st century.

18:50She has been covering this secret for a long time. It's all in a new book, Project Maven, A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare. The author, of course, is Katrina Manson. She's a Bloomberg News reporter covering tech and national security. She's here in our studio. Congratulations. This has been a long project for you. And we want to get into the book and who Drew is and what he did. But tell us for those who maybe still don't know what Maven is, what this system is. There are two parts of it. What the U.S. is using right now in its operations against Iran is called Maven Smart System.

19:25It emerges from this project that starts in 2017. But what it is today is if you imagine something like Google Earth, Google Maps for war, I imagine a digital screen and a map, but on it are more than 150 data feeds coming in, AI helping to sort through those feeds, computer vision, helping to identify possible targets. And what has happened particularly in the last year or so is AI tools, LLMs, large language models, helping to begin to offer courses of action, pairing even ideas for pairing a weapon to a target. And that is what is helping speed up those processes that the Admiral was just talking about.

20:11And we've used it already. And by we, I mean, the Department of Defense, the Pentagon, out on the battlefield. Carol mentioned 2017 and the genesis earlier from the 1990s with Drew Kukor. But I'm also wondering about where in recent years, the technology has been used. The first time it was really put through its paces is in this very difficult moment in US military history, in the withdrawal of US troops from Kabul in Afghanistan in 2021. And at that point, there was a very difficult situation. People coming into the airport. I'm sure all the viewers remember those scenes. Computer vision was used to try and count the number of crowds.

20:57Now, anyone could see with the naked eye there was a crisis unfolding. But this computer vision was able to pick up very quickly how many people were there and send it back to headquarters and help the people on the ground really emphasize how bad the situation was. It was really the first time that multiple people could be on a system without it crashing. So a lot of this is not so much about AI, but bringing data and systems together, networking and connecting people on the ground to people back in the Pentagon. I want to go back to the origin story that you get into and like so many different things came to mind I think about you mentioned like 9-11 right and the data that was missed but it was there on government computers but things not talking and and the role of Drew and and what he wanted to do because bringing data together to maybe make the military smarter maybe save more lives maybe be smarter in terms of how it does does things tell us about Drew and who he worse.

21:55He's this fascinating Marine Corps colonel by the end of his career. But at the beginning in the book, I joined him as a very young intelligence officer who is angry really from the start, because he doesn't have the right tools. And he's very enterprising. He is on the internet right at the beginning, reading open source newspapers. But he manages to run up this huge bill by connecting his computer and gets in trouble. So he is constantly someone who the bureaucracy is saying, don't overspend, use the existing tools, stay in your box, and someone who is constantly refusing to do that. And he develops this grand vision to bring more intelligence to operators.

22:34Rather than just leave it within the intelligence function, he wants to get information onto the front lines where troops are risking their necks. Well, what was it about his specific experience in war that motivated him to keep pushing for this? There are a few. One is in October 2001, he is part of the Marine Expeditionary Force sent to Afghanistan. And so he is an intelligence officer. And of course, you'll remember that very quickly, the Marines are being maimed and killed by improvised explosive devices. Finding out where those were, the patterns that the Taliban were using, even the weather systems that meant that bomb layers were more likely to lay weapons, was something that really eluded the U.S.

23:21for years. And in 2011, he's back in the Pentagon, and he tries to get this company that is now very well known, Palantir Technologies, to bring their data analytic platform out into the field. Now, the U.S. already had platforms like this, but the common complaint was they weren't fit for purpose. So I find, first of all, I feel like I think about Katrina, where we are in AI, and I think how much actually the government 10 years ago, like either working with Palantir or understanding how valuable data AI specifically could be in warfare. And I just think about how that maybe got everything rolling.

24:04And like, go back to their reach out for Silicon Valley and how Palantir came into it. Like, was Palantir just, I know it came through a certain individual, but just kind of at the right place at the right time? It's actually even more happenstance than that. Drew Kukul wants Google. Everyone knows that Google is great from a sort of access to the mapping facility and the CIA. Which the government was already, right, involved in. Yes. And In-Q-Tel, the CIA's investment arm, had invested in the company that becomes Google Earth. So they had a real sense that this was the platform they'd want to use.

24:41But when Project Maven started in 2017 and Drew Kukor becomes the chief of this project to bring AI computer vision to drone footage to pull out data that they couldn't currently get, what's been publicly well covered is that Google protesters found out that they were on this project and were not keen to work with the Pentagon. When Google responded to this crisis, they decided not to renew the contract. They decided that they wouldn't work on weapons. And Drew Cukor has a problem. He needs a cutting edge technology company to deliver his vision for war. And he rings up Palantir. And he says, hey, have you got a minute?

25:25And he flies over and meets with a team and says, this is my vision. And actually, Palantir doesn't want it. They are not an AI company. They are one of the AI skeptics at this time. And they also don't want to make a user interface. They don't see themselves as the sort of fancy, frilly, nice looking bit. They want to do the data crunching. They concede because Drew Cukor is a very compelling, convincing person who makes his case. And slowly this partnership develops really between Aki Jain, a senior official at Palantir, and Drew Kukor working late nights to develop this platform to deliver what is now being used in the future of war today.

26:11Pretty amazing. I want to talk more about the companies that are involved in Project Maven. But before we do that, I want you to talk a little bit about Drew Kukor personally and just the chasing that you did to get an interview with him. the first interview you did with him, where it was, the realization that you had Because it was so easy to get, right? I mean, you spent, what, a year trying to talk to this guy and you finally agreed to talk to you? Yeah. Take us through that. I had already written for Bloomberg a piece about Maven's smart system and its usage by the 18th Airborne Corps. And this piece had come out and there had been reaction by people who knew Maven very well and they'd said, well, you know, you really need to speak to someone else you haven't spoken to yet who is Drew Kukor.

26:54You can't tell the story of AI warfare without him. And eventually, after a year, he did agree to meet, and he was working at J.P. Morgan. And we met after work, and he offered me water. He took nothing for himself, and we sat opposite each other. And I very quickly realized that he was interviewing me. And he is a very interesting person. He's compelling. He is, by all accounts, extremely hardworking and, for some people, extremely difficult to work for. In the book, one person describes him as a psychopath and then adds, in the best way. Oh, we all know those people. I've spent quite a lot of time trying to work out what that means.

27:38He didn't really eat at work. He didn't drink. He just worked, and he expected everybody else to do the same. And as he later tells me, we end up speaking every week. and I began to really look forward to Friday afternoons, which was our time, because I was learning so much about a field that is so complicated and an issue that is so fraught that has divided people. Well, that's what I want to get into, but I want to talk a little bit more about the project and the people who worked on it, the Mavenites, you know, who worked on it. There was one thing we read, the interview process, and one individual mentioning something about taking out all non-Americans that's in the book.