A ceasefire overnight offsets the war premium; only one of the three cracks has been sealed | Rewire News Morning Briefing

Trump announced a two-week ceasefire before the deadline of his ultimatum expired. Oil prices plunged by nearly two-tenths in a single night, and global stock markets rebounded across the board. The risk premium for a 38-day war was squeezed out in one go, but the three cracks planted in March only close up one.

1｜A two-week ceasefire wipes out the war premium overnight; short-sellers are squeezed in reverse

Before the deadline of his ultimatum expired on Tuesday evening at 8 p.m., Trump announced that as long as Iran reopens the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. would pause strikes on Iranian power plants and infrastructure for two weeks. WTI crude oil recorded its biggest intraday drop of 19%, falling from around 117 dollars all the way to 93 to 96 dollars—its largest single-day decline in nearly six years. S&P 500 futures rebounded 2.5%, Dow futures jumped by 1000 points, Nasdaq 100 futures were +3%, Japan’s Nikkei was +4%, and South Korea’s Kospi was +6%. Pakistan’s prime minister invited both the U.S. and Iran to negotiations in Islamabad on April 10.

Reuters cited Goldman Sachs Prime Brokerage data: in March, hedge funds sold global equities at the fastest pace in 13 years. The MSCI Global Index fell by 7.4%, and the S&P 500 fell by 5.1%. Every reason pointed to expectations of an Iran war. After the one-month consensus was nailed down, a single ceasefire statement issued late on April 7 flipped all short positions overnight into a reverse squeeze. Two cycles of time limits were traded for a night of risk clearing—now the countdown to the next selloff has begun. The market is not pricing “peace” now; it is pricing April 21, this new ultimatum day.

(Source: Bloomberg / CNBC / NBC News / Reuters / Financial Times / Goldman Sachs Prime Brokerage)

2｜Anthropic overtakes OpenAI; “Glasswing” locks the strongest model into a partner whitelist

Anthropic disclosed on Monday that its annualized revenue has surpassed $30 billion, more than tripling from the $9 billion at the end of 2025, and for the first time it overtook OpenAI’s $25 billion. In the enterprise LLM API market, Anthropic accounts for 32%, while OpenAI accounts for 25%. Claude Code accounts for 54% in AI programming, and the October IPO valuation points to $380 billion.

Immediately on Tuesday, it rolled out the “Glasswing” program, partnering with eight collaborators: Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Broadcom, Cisco, the Linux Foundation, Palo Alto Networks, and CrowdStrike. It will deploy an unreleased frontier model, Claude Mythos Preview, to scan open-source software vulnerabilities. In the initial stage, it has already found thousands of high-severity flaws across all major operating systems and browsers. Mythos is not released to the public; it only authorizes these partners and about 40 infrastructure institutions. The Pentagon only classified Anthropic as a “supply-chain risk” last week, and in the same week, the office of the UK prime minister, in turn, drafted a London dual-listing plan for it. OpenAI pushes its strongest model to everyone; Anthropic locks it for a handful of partners. The era of consumer monopolies is being taken over by enterprise contracts and choices driven by sovereignty.

(Source: Bloomberg / Financial Times / CyberScoop / Fortune / Engadget)

3｜In March, all three kinds of risks explode at once; the ceasefire only short-circuits one

March is the month when U.S. risk assets are being flushed. Three streams of pressure burst at the same time, but they cannot resonate with each other. First, hedge funds sold global stocks at the fastest pace in 13 years, driven by expectations of an Iran war. Second, a Wall Street Journal report said private equity fundraising has fallen to the slowest level in 10 years. Blue Owl’s flagship fund OCIC posted a record 21.9% redemption rate in a single quarter, and the private credit industry totaling $1.8 trillion cracked open the first gap. Third, on April 2, Trump signed an executive order imposing a tariff of up to 100% on patent drugs: big pharmaceutical companies will take effect after 120 days, and smaller drug firms after 180 days.

The ceasefire announced the evening of April 7 only short-circuited the first one. Redemption pressure in private credit comes from expectations that AI will disrupt software companies’ cash flows—not from the situation in the Middle East. The 120-day buffer for drug tariffs means the true pricing day is in mid-August. Tariffs won’t disappear just because the Strait of Hormuz reopens. What’s called a “reversal day” is really a “stay-of-execution day.” After the books for the first crack are cleared, the market still has to go back and face the other two cracks. With long-covering by hedge funds, the wave of private credit redemptions, and tightening cash flows at big pharma happening in parallel, the round of volatility from late April into May could look worse than March.

(Source: Bloomberg / Wall Street Journal / CNBC / White House Fact Sheet / STAT News)

4｜NVIDIA Rubin ramps up to full production capacity; frontier labs collectively re-sign deals

NVIDIA announced on Monday that the Vera Rubin platform has entered full production capacity, and partners will begin shipping starting in the second half of 2026. The new platform consists of 6 chips, including Vera CPU, Rubin GPU, NVLink 6 switches, ConnectX-9, BlueField-4, and Spectrum-6. NVIDIA claims that inference Token costs will drop by 10 times, the number of GPUs needed to train mixture-of-experts models will be reduced by 4 times, and performance per watt will increase by 10 times. At GTC 2026, Huang Renxun added Blackwell to Rubin for cumulative orders through 2027, pointing to $1 trillion in total orders.

The press release names Anthropic, Black Forest, Cohere, Cursor, Harvey, Meta, Mistral, and OpenAI as lining up to use Rubin. But Anthropic also signed 3.5 GW of Google TPU deals. OpenAI’s Stargate has been added to the Iran strike blacklist. And Meta is building its own MTIA. Frontier labs continue to appear prominently on NVIDIA’s official list, while privately assembling non-NVIDIA compute pools. This “tri-polarization” performance is far more interesting than the theme keynote at GTC. Huang Renxun still has the skills to sell cards, but for the first time, pricing power has been split away by buyers with a long-term contract and a single blacklist.

(Source: NVIDIA Newsroom / Data Center Knowledge / CNBC / The Information)

Also worth knowing ↓

Bloomberg reports that fees for transiting the Strait of Hormuz have been required to be settled in RMB, and as a result, Chinese payment-sector stocks have strengthened. During Iran’s wartime period, its fiscal system turned sanction channels into a hands-on experiment in de-dollarization. This happened before ceasefire negotiations, and the ceasefire does not change this mechanism. It adds a wartime precedent for Beijing beyond its bilateral local-currency settlement agreements in 2025. One of the physical nodes of U.S. dollar hegemony—the strait transit fees—has seen its first non-U.S.-dollar accounting. (Source: Bloomberg)

The Financial Times reports that Ukrainian drones wiped out half of Russia’s wartime oil windfall. Over the past three weeks, deep attacks by the Ukrainian military on Russia’s refineries and export terminals caused the wartime premium on Russia’s gasoline and diesel exports to shrink at once. At the same time, that portion of the oil-price premium boosted by the Iran fighting was fully given back as well, along with the ceasefire announced late on April 7. In the same week, two oil-producing countries driven by war lost both capacity and premium—on two sides at once. (Source: Financial Times)

OpenAI’s consumer business head Fidji Simo applied for medical leave, and the executives in her product lines took over in her place. On the same day, 《The New Yorker》’s investigative report “The Problem Is Sam Altman” and a leaked set of 70 pages of internal documents from Ilya continued to ferment in Silicon Valley. Anthropic used revenue to squeeze into the narrative space by overtaking OpenAI, and now internal personnel changes also show signs of loosening. With the commander of the consumer business line not in place, it is precisely the moment when the ChatGPT story needs its strongest counterattack. (Source: CNBC)

The Wall Street Journal reports that private equity fundraising fell to the slowest level in 10 years in Q1, but KKR’s Peter Stavros said, “This could be the biggest exit year in our history.” With fundraising slowing down and exits speeding up on one side and slowing down on the other, it shows that GPs want to offload inventory to the secondary market and older LPs, but they don’t have the confidence to bring fresh money back in. This is the second liquidity crack—on top of hedge funds’ fastest selloff in 13 years—where private money is squeezed at the entry point and rushed out at the exit point. (Source: Wall Street Journal / CNBC)

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