Oil prices tick up on worries of escalating US-Iran tension
June 12 (Reuters) - Oil prices edged higher on Thursday to their highest in more than two months, after U.S. President Donald Trump said U.S. personnel were being moved out of the Middle East, which raised fear that escalating tensions with Iran could disrupt supply.
Brent crude futures rose 15 cents, 0.2%, to $69.92 a barrel at 1230 am GMT, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude 22 cents, 0.3%, to $68.37.
Both Brent and WTI surged more than 4% to their highest since early April on Wednesday.
Trump on Wednesday said U.S. personnel were being moved out of the Middle East because "it could be a dangerous place," adding that the United States would not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.
Reuters reported earlier on Wednesday that the U.S. is preparing a partial evacuation of its Iraqi embassy and will allow military dependents to leave locations around the Middle East due to heightened security risks in the region, according to U.S. and Iraqi sources.
Iraq is OPEC's No. 2 crude producer after Saudi Arabia.
A U.S. official said military dependents could also leave Bahrain.
Meanwhile, Iran's Minister of Defense Aziz Nasirzadeh said Tehran will strike U.S. bases in the region if nuclear talks fail and conflict arises with Washington. Trump has repeatedly threatened Iran with bombing if it does not reach a new nuclear deal.
Optimism around a trade deal between the U.S. and China, which could boost energy demand in the world's two biggest economies, also buoyed oil prices.
In the U.S., crude inventories fell by 3.6 million barrels to 432.4 million barrels last week, the Energy Information Administration said. Analysts polled by Reuters had expected a draw of 2 million barrels.
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The Independent
39 minutes ago
- The Independent
Live updates: Israel attacks Iran
Israel attacked Iran's capital early Friday, with explosions booming across Tehran. An Israeli military official said that the Israeli Air Force targeted Iranian nuclea r and military sites, without identifying them. The official spoke to journalists on condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing operation. Air-raid sirens preventatively rang out in Israel. The attack comes as tensions have reached new heights over Tehran's rapidly advancing nuclear program. The Board of Governors at the International Atomic Energy Agency for the first time in 20 years on Thursday censured Iran over it not working with its inspectors. Iran immediately announced it would establish a third enrichment site in the country and swap out some centrifuges for more advanced ones. Israel for years has warned it will not allow Iran to build a nuclear weapon, something Tehran insists it doesn't want — though officials there have repeatedly warned it could. ___ Here's the latest: Headquarters of Iran's paramilitary Revolutionary Guard is ablaze An Israeli attack on Iran has set the headquarters of Iran's paramilitary Revolutionary Guard ablaze, state television reported Friday. A reporter on air said he was unable to get closer due to the intensity of the fire in Iran's capital, Tehran. Multiple sites in the capital had been hit in the attack, which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said targeted both sites of and officials leading Iran's nuclear program and its ballistic missile arsenal. Netanyahu says Israel struck nuclear and missile sites Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel targeted Iran's main enrichment facility in Natanz and the country's ballistic missile program, as well as top nuclear scientists and officials. He said Iran was working on a new plan to destroy Israel after its old plan, its circle of proxies, failed. He called it an intolerable threat that must be stopped. US Sen. Reed calls Israel's strike 'a reckless escalation' U.S. Sen. Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, called the Israeli strike 'a reckless escalation that risks igniting regional violence.' 'These strikes threaten not only the lives of innocent civilians but the stability of the entire Middle East and the safety of American citizens and forces,' he said. Reed added: 'I urge both nations to show immediate restraint, and I call on President Trump and our international partners to press for diplomatic de-escalation before this crisis spirals further out of control.' Dozens of commercial flights over Iran as attack begins Dozens of commercial airliners were in Iranian airspace as the strikes took place, according to flight tracking websites. More than an hour after the Israeli attack, some were still making their way out of Iranian airspace, but some abruptly altered course to more quickly exit the area. Many nations' jets already did not overfly Iran because of regional tensions. Scope of attack remains unclear The extent of Israel's strikes remained unclear early Friday. Explosions could be heard across Tehran, Iran's capital city. There were some images circulating of damaged residential buildings. Iranian state television also was being careful in how they described the assault, suggesting that some areas outside of Tehran that had also been hit. Netanyahu says strikes respond to threat to Israel's survival Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an address on YouTube that the country launched 'a targeted military operation roll back the Iranian threat to Israel's very survival.' He added that the attacks will continue 'for as many days at it takes to remove this threat.' Israel closes its airspace Israel closed its airspace in anticipation of Iranian retaliation. Israel's Defense Minister Israel Katz warned that attacks were expected. 'In the wake of the state of Israel's preventive attack against Iran, missile and drone attacks against Israel and its civilian population are expected immediately,' he said in a statement. The statement added that Katz 'signed a special order declaring an emergency situation in the home front.' 'It is essential to listen to instructions from the home front command and authorities to stay in protected areas,' it said Rubio says Israel took 'unilateral action' U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Israel took 'unilateral action against Iran' and that Israel advised the U.S. that it believed the strikes were necessary for its self-defense, while warning Iran not to target U.S. forces in retaliation. In a statement, he said: 'Tonight, Israel took unilateral action against Iran. We are not involved in strikes against Iran and our top priority is protecting American forces in the region. Israel advised us that they believe this action was necessary for its self-defense. President Trump and the Administration have taken all necessary steps to protect our forces and remain in close contact with our regional partners. Let me be clear: Iran should not target U.S. interests or personnel.' Israeli official says Air Force is targeting nuclear and military sits An Israeli military official says that his country targeted Iranian nuclear and military sites, without identifying them. The official spoke to journalists on condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing operation. The Israeli official said Iran poses three threats to state of Israel: First, he alleged that the Iranian government is advancing a 'secret program' to develop nuclear weapons. The U.S. intelligence community assesses that Iran is not actively pursuing a nuclear weapon. Second, the Israeli official said, Iran has thousands of ballistic missiles. Finally, he said Iran has been distributing weapons and arms to proxy groups across the region like Hezbollah and Hamas. — Josef Federman Trump on White House lawn as explosions begin As the explosions in Tehran started, President Donald Trump was on the lawn of the White House mingling with members of Congress. It was unclear if he had been informed but the president continued shaking hands and posing for pictures for several minutes. Earlier in the day, Trump said an Israeli attack over Iran's nuclear program was not imminent 'but it looks like it's something that could very well happen.' The U.S. has been preparing for something to happen, pulling some diplomats from Iraq's capital and offering voluntary evacuations for the families of U.S. troops in the wider Middle East. The White House did not have an immediate comment Thursday night.
The Independent
39 minutes ago
- The Independent
Meta invests in AI firm Scale and recruits its CEO for 'superintelligence' team
Meta said Thursday it is making a large investment in artificial intelligence company Scale and recruiting its CEO Alexandr Wang to join a team developing 'superintelligence' at the tech giant. The move reflects a push by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to revive AI efforts at the parent company of Facebook and Instagram as it faces tough competition from competitors such as Google and OpenAI. Meta announced what it called a 'strategic partnership and investment' with Scale late Thursday but didn't disclose the financial terms of the deal. Scale said the added investment puts its market value at over $29 billion. Scale said it will remain an independent company but the agreement will 'substantially expand Scale and Meta's commercial relationship.' Meta will hold a minority of Scale's outstanding equity. Wang, though joining Meta, will also remain on Scale's board of directors. 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Wang dropped out of MIT, following a trajectory similar to that of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who quit Harvard University to start Facebook more than a decade earlier. Scale's pitch was to supply the human labor needed to improve AI systems, hiring workers to draw boxes around a pedestrian or a dog in a street photo so that self-driving cars could better predict what's in front of them. General Motors and Toyota have been among Scale's customers. What Scale offered to AI developers was a more tailored version of Amazon's Mechanical Turk, which had long been a go-to service for matching freelance workers with temporary online jobs. More recently, the growing commercialization of AI large language models — the technology behind OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Meta's Llama — brought a new market for Scale's annotation teams. The company claims to service 'every leading large language model,' including from Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta and Microsoft, by helping to fine tune their training data and test their performance. It's not clear what the Meta deal will mean for Scale's other customers. Wang has also sought to build close relationships with the U.S. government, winning military contracts to supply AI tools to the Pentagon and attending President Donald Trump's inauguration. The head of Trump's science and technology office, Michael Kratsios, was an executive at Scale for the four years between Trump's first and second terms. Meta has also begun providing AI services to the federal government. Meta has taken a different approach to AI than many of its rivals, releasing its flagship Llama system for free as an open-source product that enables people to use and modify some of its key components. Meta says more than a billion people use its AI products each month, but it's also widely seen as lagging behind competitors such as OpenAI and Google in encouraging consumer use of large language models, also known as LLMs. It hasn't yet released its purportedly most advanced model, Llama 4 Behemoth, despite previewing it in April as "one of the smartest LLMs in the world and our most powerful yet.' Meta's chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, who in 2019 was a winner of computer science's top prize for his pioneering AI work, has expressed skepticism about the tech industry's current focus on large language models. 'How do we build AI systems that understand the physical world, that have persistent memory, that can reason and can plan?' LeCun asked at a French tech conference last year. These are all characteristics of intelligent behavior that large language models 'basically cannot do, or they can only do them in a very superficial, approximate way,' LeCun said. Instead, he emphasized Meta's interest in 'tracing a path towards human-level AI systems, or perhaps even superhuman.' LeCun co-founded Meta's AI research division more than a decade ago with Rob Fergus, a fellow professor at New York University. Fergus later left for Google but returned to Meta last month after a 5-year absence to run the research lab, replacing longtime director Joelle Pineau. Fergus wrote on LinkedIn last month that Meta's commitment to long-term AI research 'remains unwavering' and described the work as 'building human-level experiences that transform the way we interact with technology.'
Reuters
an hour ago
- Reuters
Meta finalizes investment in Scale AI, valuing startup at $29 billion
June 12 (Reuters) - Meta Platforms (META.O), opens new tab has finalized an investment in Scale AI that values the startup at over $29 billion, Scale AI said on Thursday. Scale CEO and co-founder Alexandr Wang will join Meta to work on its AI efforts, with Scale's chief strategy officer, Jason Droege, to serve as its interim CEO, Scale AI added. Two sources familiar with the matter said that Meta's investment in Scale AI is $14.3 billion. The sources said that Wang will join a new "superintelligence" unit inside Meta to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), a term that refers to machines that can match or surpass human capabilities.
