As a wise woman once said: “Ain’t about how fast I get there / Ain’t about what’s waiting on the other side / It’s the climb.” Even if the climb is…extremely minimal.

Consumer spending in the US climbed slightly in February as the war in Iran threatens to push inflation higher.

While consumer spending ticked up $103.2 billion, or 0.5% on a monthly basis, when adjusted for inflation, it rose just 0.1%, according to a report the Bureau of Economic Analysis released Thursday.

“Make no mistake, households are increasingly running on fumes,” Greg Daco, EY-Parthenon chief economist, wrote in a report, per CBS News.

The personal consumption expenditures index climbed 0.4% from January and 2.8% YoY. Core PCE, the inflation measure preferred by the Federal Reserve, which excludes more volatile food and energy costs, also rose 0.4% in February, but increased 3% YoY.

The bulk of consumer spending’s rise came from a rally in motor vehicle and vehicle parts purchases.

Keep reading.—NP

Greenland. Venezuela. Iran. And a healthy dose of trade disputes to boot. Geopolitical conflicts and tensions have dominated headlines—and world leaders’ headspace—in recent months.

CFOs haven’t stood idly by while all this volatility unfolded. Finance executives are concerned about geopolitical risks and are likely trying to control what they can internally to weather the storm, according to McKinsey’s latest CFO Pulse survey.

The online survey of 152 global financial leaders, conducted in late 2025, found that 37% of respondents identified geopolitical instability or conflicts and 32% indicated changes in trade policies or relationships “as the biggest risks to their companies’ growth” over the next year.

Specifically, CFOs’ biggest geopolitical concerns were tariffs and other trade barriers, domestic industrial policies, and technology and cybersecurity. “Taken together, these external pressures are likely compelling CFOs to control what they can by closely tracking performance, stress testing their plans, and ensuring their companies can adjust without abandoning long-term strategies,” the consulting firm noted.

Among the actions they planned to take in the next 12 months, CFOs most often cited increasing cash and liquidity buffers, planning for expansion or diversification into new markets, and optimizing supply networks.

Keep reading.—AZ

TL;DR: Anthropic announced a limited preview of Claude Mythos—an AI model allegedly so dangerous that the company is keeping it off the market entirely. Instead of a public release, Anthropic launched Project Glasswing: a coalition of some of the world’s biggest tech companies given exclusive access to use Mythos for defense. The bigger warning: Rival models with similar capabilities could be just months away.

What happened: Mythos can find decades-old vulnerabilities, chain multiple flaws together into novel attacks, and write working exploits autonomously (things previous models couldn’t come close to). What makes this especially alarming is that Mythos wasn’t trained to do any of this. These capabilities emerged on their own, according to Anthropic. Launch partners in the Glasswing coalition include Apple, Google, Microsoft, Cisco, and Broadcom.

According to reports, Anthropic has also briefed a handful of senior US officials on Mythos’s offensive and defensive abilities, but declined to say whether any at the Pentagon, which recently designated the company a supply chain risk, were among them. Anthropic says it has no plans to release Mythos broadly, though it aims to eventually ship Mythos-class models once safeguards are in place.

Keep reading on Tech Brew.—WK