US President Donald Trump on Monday appeared indifferent about the future of negotiations with Iran, saying he would not be concerned if the talks collapsed amid rising tensions in the Middle East.

“I don’t care if they’re over, honestly,” Trump told CNBC in a phone interview. “I really don’t care. I couldn’t care less.”

The remarks came after reports suggested Iranian negotiators were considering ending discussions with Washington and moving to block the Strait of Hormuz following Israel's military operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Asked whether Tehran had informed him that negotiations would cease, Trump replied, “No, they haven’t.” “If they’re over, they’re over ... frankly, I thought they started to get very boring,” he added, criticizing the pace of the talks.

Trump said he planned to speak with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the situation in Lebanon. Later, he wrote on Truth Social that he had a “very productive call” with Netanyahu and claimed that Israeli troops heading toward Beirut had been turned back.

“There will be no Troops going to Beirut, and any Troops that are on their way, have already been turned back,” Trump wrote.

He also said he had spoken with Hezbollah “through highly placed Representatives,” adding that “they agreed that all shooting will stop, That Israel will not attack them, and they will not attack Israel.”

“If Hezbollah does not cease attacking our cities and citizens, Israel will attack terror targets in Beirut,” the Israeli prime minister wrote on X, adding that the Israel Defense Forces would continue operations in southern Lebanon.

Despite downplaying the importance of the negotiations, Trump maintained that engagement with Tehran was continuing.

“Talks are continuing, at a rapid pace, with the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he wrote in a separate Truth Social post.

Earlier in the day, Trump had also said that Iran “really wants to make a deal” with his administration.

The comments came days after Trump met senior administration officials in the White House Situation Room to discuss extending the ceasefire, reopening the Strait of Hormuz and laying the groundwork for future talks on Iran’s nuclear programme. No decision was announced following the meeting.

Iranian officials, including Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, accused Israel of violating the ceasefire framework agreed upon in early April.

“Any violation of this ceasefire on one front shall be considered a violation of it across all fronts,” Araghchi wrote on social media. “The United States and Israel bear responsibility for the consequences of any breach of the truce.”

Trump also dismissed concerns over rising oil prices after reports that Iran could tighten control over the Strait of Hormuz.

“I think the oil will be dropping like a rock in the very near, you know, the very near distance,” he said.

While acknowledging that conflict could temporarily increase fuel costs, Trump argued that Americans would accept higher prices if they understood the stakes.

Anthropic PBC pulled ahead of OpenAI with its confidential IPO filing Monday, as the free-spending artificial intelligence startups battle for a fundraising edge that’s set to determine who will win the ultimate battle for computing power.

The oneupmanship in the firms’ private funding rounds, and now their progress toward going public, isn’t just about bragging rights. The risk for both firms is that the first to tap the US market’s unparalleled depth and liquidity will gain an immediate advantage in securing access to the chips, data centers and talent needed to build their AI models.

With Elon Musk looking to turbocharge SpaceX’s nascent AI offerings by strapping them to a hyperscaler with a chipmaker joint venture and doing an IPO, OpenAI and Anthropic can’t risk falling behind. Being first to market — and the first to show their cards — comes with a potential downside, too, though.

“The bankers are telling them that the time is right,” according to Matthew Kennedy, senior IPO market strategist at Renaissance Capital, citing the double-digit gains this year for the S&P 500 Index and the Nasdaq 100 Index. The advantage of listing first may diminish once both firms are public, he cautioned.

“Whoever goes first will be able to set the tone, and whoever goes second could look like an also-ran and be ultimately forced to compare itself with the other one in the marketing discussions,” Kennedy said in an interview.

Anthropic’s move to file confidentially for an initial public offering adds to the sense that its momentum is increasing. The maker of the Claude chatbot leaped to a $965 billion valuation in its latest private funding round — above OpenAI’s for the first time — as its revenue surged. The company also signed a surprise pact with SpaceX for AI compute that could total nearly $45 billion by May 2029, if neither party cancels it first.

“Anthropic’s latest funding round values it more than $100 billion above OpenAI, chiefly reflecting its edge in frontier models, while recent pacts with SpaceX, Amazon.com’s AWS and CoreWeave have helped narrow the compute gap,” Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Mandeep Singh and Robert Biggar wrote in May.

“We believe its hypergrowth in annual recurring revenue to around $47 billion, about five times compared with December, points to Anthropic’s model lead over large-language-model rivals in areas such as coding agents,” they wrote.

By going public, Anthropic and OpenAI would gain access to a much wider range of buyers, including millions of individual private pension investors. A listing also provides capital and lets companies use their stock for acquisitions and to reward employees with shares they can more easily sell.

Some are warning that the enthusiasm for AI themes can’t continue, and that time is of the essence for the two IPO candidates. The Philadelphia Stock Exchange Semiconductor Index is up 83% this year.

The two companies face similar questions about their enormous capital expenditures and what their profit margins are going to be, said Jay Ritter, director of the IPO Initiative at the University of Florida.

“SpaceX is a unique business but OpenAI and Anthropic are much more similar and it would be surprising if one was to trade at a significantly higher price-to-sales ratio than the other,” Ritter said in an interview.

See: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DY93IzGyYUb/?igsh=MTlnNDVmeDQybmZ2ag==

Oil prices rose more than 2% in early trading on Monday after Israel ordered troops to move further into Lebanon in the battle with the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militant ​group, despite a ceasefire announced more than six weeks ago.

U.S. crude futures rose $2.37 or ‌2.71% to $89.73 a barrel as of 0028 GMT. Brent futures rose $2.16 or 2.37% to $93.28 a barrel.

The stepped-up fighting, coming just after the U.S. hosted Israeli-Lebanon peace talks in Washington on Friday, dimmed expectations that the U.S. and Iran could ​soon announce an extension to their ceasefire agreement, which had driven Brent and WTI to settle ​up 1.8% and 1.7%, respectively, on Friday.

The Israel-Lebanon conflict has been the broadest ⁠spillover of the Iran war. It started on March 2 when Hezbollah began firing rockets and ​drones across the border into Israel to back its ally Iran.

The two sides reached a ceasefire ​in mid-April but have continued to trade fire. U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday that he would soon decide on a proposed deal to extend a ceasefire with Iran announced in early April, giving negotiators more time to seek ​a permanent end to the conflict and find a solution to the underlying dispute over Iran's ​nuclear program. Israel would be key to any such deal, and Iran has also said repeatedly that Hezbollah must ‌be included.

⁠Meanwhile, concerns are rising about mines in key oil and gas shipping lane the Strait of Hormuz, IG analyst Tony Sycamore said in a note. That could slow the process of reopening the strait and mean that relief comes more slowly for the oil market even after it is reopened.

US President Donald Trump said he had secured guarantees from Iran that it would not develop nuclear weapons, as reports emerged he had sent a tougher peace proposal back to Tehran.

Any tweaks to the proposal could prolong even further an agreement to formally end the Middle East war and open the Strait of Hormuz maritime route after weeks of efforts to secure a deal despite fractious rhetoric and the occasional flare up of armed conflict.

The New York Times and Axios media outlets reported on Saturday that Trump had sent back a new framework to be considered by Iran with "tougher" terms, though it was not immediately clear what that entailed.

Trump has said his priorities for any deal include stopping Iran from any nuclear weapon development and re-opening the blockaded Strait of Hormuz.

"The one guarantee that I have to have is that there will be no nuclear weapons. They've agreed to that, and it was very interesting," he told his daughter-in-law Lara Trump in an interview broadcast on her Fox News program on Saturday night.

But Tehran has previously cast doubt on Trump's assertions and the parties appeared far apart on their key priorities.

Iran has said it requires the release of $12 billion in frozen assets before it moved to substantive talks on issues such as its nuclear program and called earlier Trump comments that its enriched uranium -- a precursor for nuclear weapons -- would be destroyed "baseless", according to Iranian media.

Tehran has also insisted that Lebanon must be included in any end to the war despite ongoing fighting, with Beirut accusing Israel of a "scorched-earth policy" as its forces advanced and carried out further airstrikes it says target Iran-backed group Hezbollah.

US President Donald Trump has criticised a federal judge who ordered the removal of his name from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and blocked plans to temporarily shut the institution for major renovations.

In a lengthy post on Truth Social, Trump accused the judiciary of repeatedly obstructing his agenda and argued that the Kennedy Center was in urgent need of extensive repairs.

“There has never been a President of the United States who has been treated so unfairly by the Courts as I,” Trump wrote, adding that he would continue serving the country despite what he described as judicial interference.

The dispute follows a ruling by US District Judge Christopher Cooper, who found that the Kennedy Center's board of trustees exceeded its authority when it voted to add Trump's name to the institution. Cooper ruled that only Congress has the power to alter the centre's official name, which was established by federal law in honour of former President John F. Kennedy.

The judge also halted plans to close the venue for two years for renovations, citing concerns about the board's decision-making process and the lack of sufficient information provided to trustees before approving the proposal.

Reacting to the decision, Trump said his administration would seek to transfer responsibility for the Kennedy Center back to Congress.

“Based on the fact that the Radical Left Democrats care more about opposing your favorite President, ME, than saving a dying Performing Arts Center, almost all of which lose large amounts of money throughout the Country, we are going to be working with Congress to transfer this failing Institution back to them so they can make a determination as to what to do with it.”

Trump added that he had instructed the Department of Commerce to facilitate the handover.

“I have instructed the Department of Commerce to make all necessary arrangements with Congress to allow a full and complete transfer of this Institution, giving them the responsibility for its Operation, Maintenance, and Management.”

The president defended his renovation proposal, claiming the Kennedy Center had suffered years of financial losses, neglect and structural deterioration. He argued that the institution required both safety-related repairs and a broader modernisation effort.

Caution has become the most expensive position on Wall Street.

A hot inflation reading this week — sending the annual gauge to its highest in about three years — landed alongside fresh strikes in the Persian Gulf and enduring expectations that the Federal Reserve may need to keep policy tight. Stocks extended their longest weekly winning streak since 2023 to fresh records anyway. Junk bonds rallied, Brent crude headed for its worst month since 2020 and the cost of insuring against a selloff tumbled.

The gains across risk assets owed less to conviction than to the rising cost of being left behind. Investors who have spent months doubting the rebound find themselves underexposed as the S&P 500 extends its climb from the March lows, corporate-bond spreads narrow toward multi-decade lows and bearish wagers are steadily squeezed. Across a slew of options markets, the fear of missing another leg higher appeared to outweigh the fear of a downturn.

The retreat from caution is clearest in the options market. The cost of protecting against an ordinary selloff fell to its lowest since early 2025 by one measure, while the cost of insuring against a sudden crash dropped to its lowest this year. Demand for bullish calls, by contrast, has proved relentless across semiconductor stocks, underscoring how concentrated the market’s optimism remains in a narrow group of AI winners.

Yet for all the risk-taking, investors are not fully committed. Hedge funds and trend-following funds have rebuilt equity exposure, Barclays Plc noted, but long-only buying has cooled, retail participation has stayed light and plenty of cash remains on the sidelines, leaving the market crowded in places but far from all-in.

The protection that would cushion a selloff, meanwhile, has been stripped away just as the economic data has softened: consumer confidence has weakened, income growth has slipped and new-home sales fell in April. Stocks closed at records all the same, on reports of a US-Iran deal that President Donald Trump has yet to confirm.

India and the United States are close to finalising an interim trade agreement, with only the remaining one per cent of negotiations left to be completed, US Ambassador to India Sergio Gor said on Friday. He expressed confidence that the deal could be signed in the coming weeks as both sides work towards concluding discussions.

Speaking at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi during an event on the US-India TRUST Initiative, Gor said an American delegation led by the country's chief trade negotiator is expected to visit India from June 1 to 4 to continue negotiations. The visit follows talks held in Washington earlier this year between officials from the two countries.

“President Trump’s goal is to facilitate bilateral trade in a way in which it creates unprecedented opportunities for American businesses and workers. Just last week, India had sent a team to Washington, DC, to finalise the last one per cent of that trade deal. Next week, we will welcome a US delegation here to continue those talks. We fully expect the new trade deal to be signed within the next few weeks and months,” Gor said.

Highlighting the expansion of economic ties, Gor noted that bilateral trade in goods and services has grown from about $20 billion to more than $220 billion in just over two decades.

The ambassador described India as one of America's key economic partners and said trade growth is being driven by innovation, investment and high-value sectors such as digital trade, advanced manufacturing, energy and emerging technologies.