Zelenskyy doesn’t mince words about Trump

0:00This episode is brought to you by Hard Lessons, a Morgan Stanley podcast. Iconic investors like Stan Druckenmiller, John Gray, and Rick Reeder break down calls that worked. I knew that this stock would go up for at least two or three years and go up a lot. Ones that didn't. I quite frankly thought the company could have reversed course. They didn't. And what they learned in between. When you buy everything and it goes up, it doesn't train you to be a great investor. It's these hard lessons that make all the difference. Listen to Hard Lessons wherever you get your podcasts.

0:32Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Thursday, October 15th, and this is your FT News Briefing. U.S. inflation can't stop, won't stop. And we look at what's next after an alleged espionage plot at OpenAI. Plus a story about a top law firm that reminds us why it's incredibly important to double check your email's recipient field. The email was retracted about half an hour after it was sent and completely deleted from the system. but unfortunately for them, not before some people had taken some screenshots of it. Mark Filippino, and here's the news you need to start your day.

1:13Over the past two days, Ukrainian defense officials say that they've been at a serious disadvantage in the ongoing war with Russia. There have been massive gaps in the intelligence they usually receive from their Western partners. And as a result, Russia has been able to strike Kiev with devastating effect. All this comes just days after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to cut off arms to Ukraine. BFT's Alec Russell just spoke with the Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky and joins me now. Hi, Alec. Hello, Mark. So you met with Zelensky in London. What was he doing there, Alec? So Zelensky has just been to see the British prime minister and the king, indeed, and is on his way to Brussels to speak to European leaders.

1:54To be clear, Zelensky is in a difficult position, he's also enraged. He was very, very combative in his interview with us. Putin is an enemy for us. And he is a real evil of today. I mean, absolutely. He was very outspoken about the nature of Donald Trump's relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin. How Trump can be friends with him? I think that it's a mistake, is his choice. I think he was more openly critical of Donald Trump than I remember ever, actually. He said, look, Trump likes autocratic people who stay in power for 20, 30 years or so. He did not use the word autocratic, but that's exactly what he was saying.

2:43He said Trump likes rich people. He also said that this is also to do with business deals in the energy sector, gas, oil, and so on. Yeah. And speaking of, that's a sector that's had a lot of updates lately. A few days ago, Trump announced a surprise deal with Putin that'll release Russian diesel into the global market. He also claimed that Putin and Zelensky agreed to a supposed energy ceasefire. Did you talk to Zelensky about that? We talked a lot about this because obviously it's immensely important. I mean, Zelensky clearly regards the American move to effectively lift sanctions on Russian diesel as despicable.

3:20And what he did say was he said that actually for the last three days, he, Zelensky, had made clear to his military chiefs that they should not be hitting Russian refineries. I said that, look, don't attack energy. They will say that we broke energy. She's fire. I don't want to play this game. That's why three days we didn't attack any energy, diesel and etc. systems of Russia, and three days they attack us. He said that all the while the Russians had been hitting Ukraine as hard as ever, if not harder than in recent times. Alec, is it fair to say that he was in London and then moving on to Brussels to try and shore up support because he doesn't feel like the US is a valid source of support anymore?

4:08I don't think he wants to give up on American support at all. And he absolutely hasn't given up on the Trump administration, of course. But what he did make clear was that the support of Europe is now as important as it has ever been. And shoring up Europe's support is immensely important to him. Alec, what are you expecting him to say to Brussels? And do you think that Brussels will be responsive? I think he's just going to have to say what he's been saying pretty much consistently in the last few years, that this is Europe's fight, that the war is coming to Europe, whether Europe likes it or not, that there have been drones landing in Moldova, in Romania, there have been strange drone incidents in airports in other countries, and that Europe has to face up to the fact that this is not just about defending Ukraine, but it's also about defending Europe.

5:01So fundamentally, it's going to be a message of heart and soul and saying this war is at a slightly bleak phase at the moment. And he wants to remind people why they have to support Ukraine. That's the FT's Alec Russell. He's our foreign editor. Thanks, Alec. Thank you, Mark. Very good to be back with you.

5:27Inflation in the U.S. just keeps getting hotter. The annual consumer price index figure jumped to 3.7 % in September. That's up from 3.4 % the month before, and it's higher than what economists expected. The FT's U.S. economics correspondent, Miles McCormick, has more on what's driving the jump. In a word, fuel, petrol, diesel prices are on the up again, having eased off from the initial surge we saw in the wake of war with Iran. And fuel prices have been climbing in recent months. And that's really clear in this data. And there's also increasing evidence that this fuel price burst is feeding through to other parts of the economy.

6:09Core inflation, which strips out more volatile food and energy prices, also climbed, suggesting that there are a rising level of underlying price pressures that might take a long time to go away. Miles says the timing of this CPI report is not great for U.S. President Donald Trump and his Republican Party. The reason this matters is twofold. The first is political. This is the last CPI inflation report we're going to get before the midterm elections where price is very much on the ballot. Voters are increasingly frustrated with Donald Trump over an ongoing cost of living crisis. and polling suggests they're going to lash out at the Republican Party when they go to the polls next month.

6:55Second reason it matters is monetary policy. This kind of revives pressure on the Federal Reserve to tackle this burst of inflation. And traders are increasingly betting that the Fed will be forced to raise interest rates again in the near term, perhaps as soon as their next meeting later this month. That's the FT's Miles McCormick in Washington, D.C.

7:24Have you ever forwarded an email by accident and the person who got it really wasn't supposed to? This happened to a top partner at the law firm Freshfields who accidentally forwarded an email to a full list of staff over the weekend. That email outlined plans to sell off its in-house legal AI unit. Eventually, that email made its way to our colleague Susie Ring, who joins me now to talk about it. Hi, Susie. Hi there. Hi there. So Susie, what happened here? So this was, as you say, a classic email blunder situation. Last weekend, there was an email chain and the firm's global managing partner accidentally forwarded it to a much larger distribution list than was intended.

8:05The email, though, interestingly, was discussing a carve out potentially of the AI business that the firm has and whether they could monetize it through investment. And they were spinning around ideas. the email was retracted about half an hour after it was sent and completely deleted from the system. But unfortunately for them, not before some people had taken some screenshots of it. Why was this email blunder such a big deal? So this was an early stage idea, we should say. We obviously had conversations since the email for the story. And there's a sense that this is maybe a bit half-baked. So for this to be leaked to the entire firm at this stage was less than ideal.

8:46And this is a big talking point in the industry at the moment as well. There's been lots of discussion around private equity money and investment in law firms and investment in AI businesses by law firms themselves and also outside investors. This is a very hot topic right now, which is why I think people reacted so much to receiving this email. Yeah. Tell me a little bit more about this AI business that they were considering spinning off. So it's quite opaque to the outside world at the moment in terms of the size or the revenues. It's a lab that they have. It's based in Germany. They are developing tools for themselves.

9:19They also have a partnership with Anthropic. Like a lot of firms, they're experimenting with quite a few different tools at the moment and a sort of build versus buy plan. So some are doing deals with Harvey and Lagora, which are big legal tech firms in the industry. Some are doing deals with Anthropic and others, and also some are building their own. Freshfields appears to be doing both. But the idea at the moment really is who are the winners and losers going to be? Who is backing the right horse? So it's just interesting that Freshfields is thinking this way, thinking about how it can monetize the decisions that it's making around this space.

9:53Given that this, a half-baked plan is generating so much discussion, what does it tell you about how important AI legal tech has become for the sector, Susie? It tells us how much money is at stake here. So big law, particularly by that, I mean, you know, corporate law firms make a lot of money and they're making an increasing amount of money. The last few years, the industry has blown up. Compensation has gone crazy. We're seeing partners paid at the top of the market like$30 million,$40 million. But AI, like most industries, is going to be a disruptor. There is a recognition that with large firms, they have potentially the money and the scale to invest in tools that are going to be really transformative.

10:34So it's about who's going to make the right bet. How are they going to monetize that? How are they going to make that investment work for their long term future? Because it feels like we're at a bit of a crossroads now where people are going to make the right and wrong decisions here and the industry could look very different in a few years. Susie Ring is the FT's legal correspondent. Thank you so much, Susie. Thank you. Thank you.

11:23a lot of concerns about whether AI labs are becoming prime targets for espionage and what that means as the artificial intelligence race continues to ramp up. Here to discuss those concerns is the FT's tech correspondent, Christina Criddle. Hi, Christina. Hi. So what does this incident tell us about the AI race? This is something that's been a fear at lots of the companies I speak to in Silicon Valley for a while, and that might be corporate espionage from a rival company or state-sponsored espionage. There's this sense that AI labs in the U.S. are going to be a target for foreign nations. And what has the person who's been arrested said?

12:01Anything in response? The lawyer for Abdulrahman, Al-Fazan, said that his client came to this country years ago as a young person with a dream and that these allegations appear wholly out of character for him. So they're investigating all of the evidence that's produced by the government, and we will have more details in the coming weeks. And what are AI companies doing to address security concerns? It's really difficult. And I've reported in recent months about how OpenAI has been cracking down on its security. It has started introducing quite specific vetting processes for employees. It has things like biometric scanning, where it will scan fingerprints to enter some rooms in its offices.

12:44And it really has tried to do this thing called tenting, where it's limiting the access that some employees have to certain parts of the building or certain information or training of the AI systems. This is a really interesting story. What are you looking out for next, Christina? How many other cases there are of this is something that we're going to have to find out in the coming weeks and months. I've had a lot of people internally at OpenAI and other labs be quite worried that if you find one or two ants in the kitchen, there's probably going to be more. That's the FT's Christina Criddle in San Francisco.

13:27Before we go, you won't believe what they're feeding the fish in Europe. Salmon producers are giving them chicken. The price of traditional fish food has almost doubled over the past two years. Giving the fish the bird has been a taboo practice for a long time. Grocery stores in Europe have refused to sell salmon that's raised on livestock byproducts. They're worried that some consumers might find it unnatural. But major producers are now shrugging that off in the name of cost cutting.

13:59You can read more on all these stories for free when you click the links on our show notes. This has been your daily FT News Briefing. Check back tomorrow for the latest business news.

14:47We'll see you next time. When you build credit scores the right way, everybody wins. Get started at VantageScore.com. Capital raising is being redefined in real time, from macro disruptions and shifting investor expectations to AI-driven demand and the rise of private credit. When headlines can tilt markets overnight, how can companies stay on course? Strategic Alternatives, the RBC Capital Markets podcast, explores how corporates and investors are navigating new pathways to raise capital, create value, and drive growth. When conditions change, alternatives matter. Listen to Strategic Alternatives, available wherever you get your podcasts.