The Manifest
Maersk nearly doubles its 2026 EBITDA outlook as ocean freight rates surge globally, South Korea commits close to $1 trillion to anchor chip and humanoid robot supply chains, and Deloitte warns its own consultants that AI agents will displace the billable hour within a decade.
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Today's Top
- 01Maersk boosts 2026 guidanceThe Loadstar
- 02Samsung and SK Hynix plan $590 billion chip investment as AI demand sends memory prices soaringThe Decoder
- 03Land bridge 'the best option' as confusion reigns over Hormuz transitsThe Loadstar
- 04U.S. Bank Freight Payment Index shows spot rates surging 31%FreightWaves
- 05Deloitte tells its own consultants: AI is coming for the billable hourThe Decoder
Models & Releases
4 storiesDeepseek's DSpark boosts AI speed by up to 85 percent, a strategic win under tightening US export controls
A speculative-decoding framework that lets a small model propose token batches for a larger model to verify, squeezing 60-85% more throughput from the same hardware. For teams evaluating China-based AI vendors, this signals that export controls are not slowing Chinese inference capability as quickly as intended.
Claude Code runs a GitHub repo's hidden malware without verification, giving attackers full control
Mozilla's 0DIN researchers showed how a compromised repository can load malicious code at runtime via a DNS query, invisible to static scanners and to the AI agent itself. Any team using AI coding tools to automate supply chain software should audit which repositories those tools are permitted to execute against.
Amazon engineers are reportedly distilling Anthropic models to cut costs before new token-based pricing kicks in
Amazon is building cheaper internal versions of Anthropic models ahead of a shift to per-token billing that takes effect next year. Enterprise teams running high-volume AI workflows should start modeling what token-based pricing does to their unit economics now, before contracts renew.
Crypto exchange OKX wants AI agents to hire and pay each other
OKX is building a marketplace combining payments, identity, and reputation so AI agents can contract and compensate each other autonomously. Still early and crypto-native, but worth tracking if your organization is beginning to experiment with multi-agent procurement or logistics workflows.
Supply Chain & Ops
5 storiesMaersk boosts 2026 guidance
Maersk now expects $8-10 billion in underlying EBITDA for 2026, up sharply from a prior range of $4.5-7 billion, citing sustained Far East demand and rising spot rates. Shippers who locked in annual contracts earlier this year are insulated; those buying spot should expect continued rate pressure through Q3.
U.S. Bank Freight Payment Index shows spot rates surging 31%
Dry van spot rates climbed 31% year-over-year in May 2026 as capacity tightens across the truckload market. Transport planners should review routing guide compliance and prepare for higher tender rejection rates heading into Q3 peak season.
Land bridge 'the best option' as confusion reigns over Hormuz transits
Tehran is asserting control over ship movements through the Strait of Hormuz and the IMO has not clarified who holds final authority. Shippers with Middle East origins or destinations should accelerate contingency planning around overland Gulf routes, which have become the operational default.
Carriers pour capacity into booming East Asia-Australia trade
Rates on the East Asia-Australia lane have jumped more than 30% in a single month, prompting CMA CGM and OOCL to jointly launch a new Australia-China Express service. Importers sourcing from East Asia into Australia should expect continued rate volatility as fresh capacity chases demand through H2.
Last-mile AI: Pointed at the wrong problems
Most last-mile AI investment is concentrated in routing, but the higher-cost and lower-satisfaction problems sit in appointment scheduling, exception handling, and customer communication. Worth reading before signing any last-mile technology contract.
Deals & Market
5 storiesSamsung and SK Hynix plan $590 billion chip investment as AI demand sends memory prices soaring
Samsung and SK Hynix are committing $590 billion in new chip capacity backed by the South Korean government, as Jefferies projects memory prices could climb 50% per quarter through 2027. Electronics and tech-hardware buyers should factor sharply higher component costs into 2027 sourcing plans now.
Hapag-Lloyd's Hanseatic Global Terminals to acquire 20% stake in Eurogate Container Terminal Hamburg
Hapag-Lloyd's port arm is buying into one of Hamburg's main container terminals, continuing the trend of carriers vertically integrating into terminal infrastructure. Shippers using Hamburg as a primary European gateway should monitor how carrier-owned terminals affect berth priority and slot allocation over time.
Taiwan raids Super Micro offices in probe over Nvidia chip smuggling to China
Taiwanese authorities raided Super Micro's offices as part of a probe into alleged Nvidia chip smuggling. For procurement teams managing AI hardware supply chains, enforcement actions like this signal tightening scrutiny across the full distribution chain, not just at the point of end use.
Crunchbase Data: Q2 Brought The Most Billion-Dollar Startup Exits Since 2021
Billion-dollar startup exits through M&A and IPO are running at their highest rate since the 2021 peak. For supply chain tech buyers, a wave of exits typically accelerates vendor consolidation and reduces the pool of independent alternatives available at renewal time.
Arena, the AI leaderboard everyone uses, is now a $100M business
Lmarena crossed $100 million in revenue just nine months after launching its commercial model evaluation service. Enterprise teams using the Chatbot Arena leaderboard to benchmark AI vendors should be aware it now has commercial interests alongside its academic rankings.
Research & Frontier
4 storiesRecursive Self-Evolving Agents via Held-Out Selection
Researchers benchmarked self-improving agent methods head-to-head and found they typically help on their target benchmark while hurting performance on others. Teams evaluating vendor claims about self-improving AI agents should require cross-task validation before committing to production deployment.
Can OEM axle weight data and satellite imagery help identify cargo theft?
Class 8 analyzed 3.2 million truck unload events across 68,000 commercial vehicles, combining axle weight telemetry, satellite imagery, and behavioral scoring to flag roughly 42,600 high-risk events. The data-fusion approach deserves attention from loss-prevention teams and cargo insurers evaluating next-generation detection methods.
An Agentic AI Pipeline for Appliance-Level Energy Anomaly Detection and LLM-Driven Recommendations
Researchers combined deep time-series forecasting, variational anomaly detection, and an LLM reasoning layer to generate prioritized maintenance alerts from building energy data. Warehouse and DC facility managers dealing with noisy sensor alerts should watch this pattern as a practical template for facility operations AI.
GPTNT: Benchmarking Real-Time Collaboration Between Multimodal Agents on Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes
A new benchmark exposes significant gaps between what multimodal AI agents can do in isolation versus under real collaboration conditions involving time pressure and information asymmetry. The results matter for anyone designing multi-agent systems for operations tasks where real-time coordination between agents is required.
Org & AI Architecture
4 storiesDeloitte tells its own consultants: AI is coming for the billable hour
An internal Deloitte presentation projects hourly billing will shrink to a small fraction of the consulting market by 2035 as AI agents take over, with McKinsey and BCG already exploring alternative revenue models. Supply chain leaders who rely on consulting firms for major project support should expect engagement structures and fee models to shift materially over the next several years.
The AI jobs debate just got messier
Companies with the highest AI adoption intensity grew total headcount 10.2%, with entry-level roles up 12%, complicating the simple narrative that AI eliminates junior jobs. The effect varies sharply by industry and adoption depth, so aggregate figures are less useful than sector-specific data for workforce planning.
Meta restricts use of Claude Code and Codex to keep rival AI out of its training data
Meta is barring engineers from using Anthropic and OpenAI coding tools over concerns that tool outputs could contaminate its own training data. Enterprise AI governance teams should treat this as an early precedent for how large organizations will start segmenting which AI tools are permitted to touch which internal workflows.
The US military used AI to pick thousands of targets but missed a note saying one was a school
An investigation found that AI-assisted targeting processed thousands of candidates but failed to surface a human-written annotation flagging a school as off-limits. For any ops team deploying AI in high-stakes decisions, this is a clear argument for keeping human-in-the-loop verification mandatory at the final approval step.