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TIRANA, Albania (AP) — Albania’s prime minister on Friday tapped an Artificial Intelligence-generated ‘minister’ to tackle corruption in his new Cabinet, a project launched with the help of Microsoft.

Officially named Diella — the female form of the word for sun in the Albanian language — the new AI minister is a virtual entity.

Diella will be a “member of the Cabinet who is not present physically but has been created virtually,” Prime Minister Edi Rama said in a post on Facebook.

Rama said the AI-generated bot would help ensure that “public tenders will be 100% free of corruption” and will help the government work faster and with full transparency.

Diella was created in cooperation with Microsoft, using AI’s up-to-date models and techniques to guarantee accuracy in offering the duties it is charged with, an official at Albania’s National Agency for Information Society said.

The official was not authorized to talk to reporters and spoke on condition of anonymity. The agency manages the administration’s information systems.

Diella, depicted as a figure in a traditional Albanian folk costume, was launched earlier this year as a virtual assistant on the e-Albania public service platform, where she has helped users navigate the site and get access to about 1 million digital documents.

Rama’s Socialist Party secured a fourth consecutive term after winning 83 of the 140 Assembly seats in the May 11 parliamentary elections. The party can govern alone and pass most legislation, but it needs a two-thirds majority, or 93 seats, to change the Constitution.

The Socialists have said it can deliver European Union membership for Albania in five years, with negotiations concluding by 2027. The pledge has been met with skepticism by the Democrats, who contend Albania is far from prepared.

The Western Balkan country opened full negotiations to join the EU a year ago. The new government also faces the challenges of fighting organized crime and corruption, which has remained a top issue in Albania since the fall of the communist regime in 1990.

Diella also will help local authorities to speed up and adapt to the bloc’s working trend.

Albanian President Bajram Begaj has mandated Rama with the formation of the new government. Analysts say that gives the prime minister authority “for the creation and functioning” of AI-generated Diella.

Asked by journalists whether that violates the constitution, Begaj stopped short on Friday of describing Diella’s role as a ministerial post.

The conservative opposition Democratic Party-led coalition, headed by former prime minister and president Sali Berisha, won 50 seats. The party has not accepted the official election results, claiming irregularities, but its members participated in the new parliament’s inaugural session. The remaining seats went to four smaller parties.

Lawmakers will vote on the new Cabinet but it was unclear whether Rama will ask for a vote on Diella’s virtual post. Legal experts say more work may be needed to establish Diella’s official status.

The Democrats’ parliamentary group leader Gazmend Bardhi said he considered Diella’s ministerial status unconstitutional.

“Prime minister’s buffoonery cannot be turned into legal acts of the Albanian state,” Bardhi posted on Facebook.

Parliament began the process on Friday to swear in the new lawmakers, who will later elect a new speaker and deputies and formally present Rama’s new Cabinet.

On Tuesday, tech firm Oracle$ORCL ( ▼ 6.02% ) announced one of the most transformative contracts in modern business history. OpenAI will pay Oracle $300 billion over five years to host AI applications on Oracle’s servers. The news sent Oracle shares up as much as 43%, and secured OpenAI’s ability to offer its large language models to clients. It’s also put Oracle founder and CEO Larry Ellison, now 81, just ahead of Elon Musk as the world’s richest man, according to Bloomberg. BBTW editor Peter Green sat down with AI consultant Lee Gaul, founder of Long Horizon AI Consulting, to understand the transaction.

Lee Gaul: Oracle! Like Obi-Wan Kenobi, this is a name I haven’t heard in years. But it makes a lot of sense: Companies are scrambling for what they call “more compute”, which means more servers on which to do their calculations. There are two competing ideas around the amount of compute that AI needs. Most commonly, when people hear about computers, they think of training these models. But it’s serving that AI that really is the name of the game.And it’s a real bottleneck for a lot of companies. There’s a limited number of real players out there, and the big three, Azure [Microsoft] $MSFT, Google Cloud $GOOG, and Amazon $AMZN Web Services, only have so much capacity.

OpenAI is buying, or essentially renting space in the Oracle cloud to run their AI models. So, when you make a call to ChatGPT, that is happening in the cloud on Azure.And now it’ll also happen with Oracle.OpenAI also uses Google, because they have to have that serving of that whole exchange with their chatbots on a massive cloud infrastructure. And that’s why it’s such a smart move for Oracle to get those big investments.

OpenAI uses the Azure cloud to train, to provide inference, or serve the product to their end users. They’ve been going to Google and now they’re going to Oracle, as well.

They’ve already got this capacity in place and with plans to continue to scale out the cloud infrastructure that they have. They’ve been shopping their capacity around and saying, look, we can support this amount and this capacity of cloud infrastructure and advanced AI processing capabilities today.They’re by no means building this up from scratch.

That’s the problem.The chips are only state-of-the-art for a year or so.So the data centers all have to be continually buying the most recent state-of-the-art chips.

I don’t think it’s in any way saving them from anything.Oracle is still ubiquitous and databases basically all run on Oracle, so that means that they’ve been quietly part of everyone’s tech stack in the enterprise for forever.Oracle had been overlooked as anything but a necessary evil. Now, they are able to say, hey, look, we have tons of advanced computing that we are ready to provide to all the cutting-edge AI systems out there. It’s all over Twitter and it’s all over the news, it’s been good for their brand.

This interview has been edited and condensed for brevity and clarity.

—Peter S. Green

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• It’s not just the milk that’s getting steamed at Starbucks  $SBUX ( ▼ 0.53% ) : Baristas at Starbucks’ 17,000 U.S. stores are finding new CEO Brian Niccol’s hyper-caffeinated charge to rebuild the brand’s reputation and bring back a welcoming coffeehouse environment to be a tall order, and they’re vente-ing to the New York Times. Making a six-step Strawberry Matcha Strato Frappuccino in under a minute while handling new orders, looking customers in the eye and scrawling thank you notes on cups is getting to be too much, one Barista told the paper. And it’s not working: July marked Starbucks’ sixth consecutive quarterly decline in same-store sales open for at least a year. Starbucks shares are down nearly 11% in the past year. 
• Oh thank heaven: Slurpees may no longer be the “Coolest thing on Earth.” 7-11’s Japanese parent company, Seven & i wants to spend $13 billion to improve its 13,000 U.S. stores, bringing the kind of prepared foods that make 7-11 a go-to pit stop in Japan. They’ve even talking about bringing their famous egg salad sandwiches, which the late chef Anthony Bourdain called “pillows of love.” They need to, because in the U.S., 7-11s are known more for late-night robberies than their food, and because after fending off a Canadian takeover, Seven & i’s share price is down 15% this year. 
• Coders of the World, Unite! Mark Zuckerberg’s AI hiring spree, and the 7- and 8-figure salaries that went with it have created a new class divide at Meta $META ( ▼ 0.09% ) . As the old programming elite becomes the proletariat of the AI era, their faded stars are growing resentful of the new elite, the Wall Street Journal gleefully reports. But some clever Meta employees have figured out how to play their employer: After receiving offers from rivals, they went back to Meta and got bigger offers and a chance to join the new cool club, the superintelligence lab known as the TBD Team. 
• iPhone Umpteen: Those slick folks at Apple $AAPL ( ▲ 1.58% ) have unveiled their latest piece of pocket candy, the iPhone Air, and while it’s not quite made of ether, it’s a third less thick than previous models and sells for, er, only $999. How many consumers will feel it’s time to upgrade is an open question, just as Apple needs help. Delays in releasing promised AI-powered devices and consumers who say they’re tired of paying for expensive upgrades helped shares drop 4.6% since the new product announcement Tuesday. They’re down 7% so far this year. 

• Keeping it Cracker: Not only will the Old Timer stay put on Cracker Barrel’s $CBRL ( ▲ 4.76% ) signs, but a move to declutter the chain’s restaurants and remove the kitschy Americana that gives the shops their identity, is also out the door. De-cluttered restaurants and a new menu didn’t bring in more customers, the firm said, so its sticking with what works. Shares are down 10% this year, though they are still up 34% in the past 12 months.
• Shoe Fly: Two of the greatest of NBA greats are battling for the wallets of Chinese consumers. Athletic footwear is a $33 billion market and growing in China, and LeBron’s Nike $NKE ( ▲ 0.05% ) sponsors and Steph’s Under Armour $UAA ( ▲ 0.8% ) brand have been giving their respective pitchmen tours of China to boost sales, which are falling against local brands. Nike’s China sales dropped 13% to $6.6 billion last year, and Under Armour’s Asia Pacific sales slipped 14% to $755 million. But local brand Anta $ANPDF ( ▲ 2.77% ) saw its total revenue jump 14% to $9.9 billion, with ad campaigns led by Kyrie Irving and Klay Thompson. 

• Hyundai is left High and Dry: The real story of the ICE raid on Hyundai’s $HYMTF ( ▼ 7.44% )  $5.5 billion Georgia Metaplant seems to be that foreign carmakers can’t find enough specialized U.S. workers to build their high-tech plants, and when they turn to their home-country employees, they can’t get the visas they need in time. President Trump has promised to make it easier to get those visas, but the U.S. still needs to tackle job training. The industry says 67,000 jobs will go unfilled unless the U.S. beefs up job training programs. Without Americans or foreigners to fill those jobs, South Korea’s promised $350 billion in investments and hundreds of billions more from other countries may never happen. 
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• Crazy for Copper: As AI and electric cars promise a future of unmatched productivity and prosperity, one element will be in demand: Copper. With supplies stable, prices for copper are expected to rocket. Now, U.K.-based mining giant Anglo-American $AAUKF ( ▲ 0.93% ) is proposing a $53 billion merger with Canada’s Teck Resources $TECK ( ▲ 3.02% ) . Another impetus: As the Russian invasion of Ukraine has pushed NATO states to increase defense spending, a lot more copper will be going into bullets and shell casings.

• The numbers game: The last time a bad bunch of employment data came in, President Trump fired the head of the agency that collects the data. Now, annual revisions to the jobs, data, based more on hard data and less on surveys, shows employers added 911,000 fewer jobs than had been assumed, from March 2024 through March 2025. Thats a 52% shortfall. For Trump, it’s a double-edged sword. It shows his economic policies have failed to create many new jobs, but it bolsters the case for a rate cut, which has sent markets up this week.
• Ken Griffin breaks his silence: U.S. businesses have been remarkably silent as President Trump has attacked the independence of the Federal Reserve. Now Trump supporter Ken Griffin, the founder and CEO of hedge fund firm Citadel, has taken to the conservative opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal to warn Trump to keep his hands off Fed chair Jerome Powell. “The president’s strategy of publicly criticizing the Fed,” wrote Griffin, “carries steep costs. These actions raise inflation expectations, increase market risk premiums, and weaken investor confidence in U.S. institutions.”
• “I’m Gonna Punch You in Your _____ Face”: Last month, Trump’s housing finance chief, Bill Pulte, whose family of homebuilders also offers financing for the tract houses they build, accused Fed governor Lisa Cooke of mortgage fraud for allegedly claiming two different homes with government-backed mortgages were both her primary residence. Pulte hasn’t shown any evidence. Now, Fed watchers are reaching for the popcorn. First, a Federal judge ruled that Trump’s ouster of Cooke may have been illegal, since the alleged fraud would have taken place before Cooke began her term on the Fed. Then, Reuters dug into public records and found that Pulte’s dad, Mark, claimed homes in both Michigan and Florida as his primary residences, the same allegation Pulte junior made against Cooke. Then Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who was suspected of having given Elon Musk a black eye, confronted Pulte over reports the housing scion had been badmouthing him to Trump. “Why the ___ are you talking to the president about me? ____ you,” Bessent told Pulte at   dinner with Trump. “I’m gonna punch you in your _______ face,” Politico reported he said. Bessent also offered to “go outside.” “To do what?” asked Pulte, “to talk?” No, Bessent replied. “I’m going to ________ beat your ___.”
• Tariffs: So what happens when the Supreme Court finally rules on whether Trump’s tariffs are legal? Economists and businessowners note that U.S. companies have been absorbing most of the tariffs so far, fearful that passing on the added costs would scare away consumers. That means that killing the tariffs would be like a massive tax cut for business. “You would be doing a tax cut,” Alex Durante, an economist at the Tax Foundation told the New York Times. “You would be undoing a tax increase, and you would provide relief to lots of businesses and consumers.” 

• Trillions and Trillions: If Elon Musk can increase Tesla’s$TSLA ( ▲ 5.88% ) share price eight-fold over the next decade, he could collect nearly $900 billion, the world’s largest incentive pay package ever, and become the world’s first trillionaire. That’s what Tesla’s board is proposing to shareholders. To do that he’d have to raise Tesla’s market cap to $8.5 trillion, but it would leave him with nearly 29% of the company. He could only cash in after 7 ½ years, and would have to stay 10 years for the full payout.And then there are the targets: deploy 1 million autonomous taxis and a million humanoids, and boost profit 24-fold. Tesla’s board says it’s the only way they can keep Musk’s full attention on the company.But as BBTW discussed recently, keeping Musk’s eye on the ball has become increasingly difficult. Meanwhile, the median salary for a Tesla employee was $57,000 last year.

The Federal Trade Commission has launched an inquiry into several social media and artificial intelligence companies about the potential harms to children and teenagers who use their AI chatbots as companions.

The FTC said Thursday it has sent letters to Google parent Alphabet, Facebook and Instagram parent Meta Platforms, Snap, Character Technologies, ChatGPT maker OpenAI and xAI.

The FTC said it wants to understand what steps, if any, companies have taken to evaluate the safety of their chatbots when acting as companions, to limit the products’ use by and potential negative effects on children and teens, and to apprise users and parents of the risks associated with the chatbots.

EDITOR’S NOTE — This story includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988.

The move comes as a growing number of kids use AI chatbots for everything — from homework help to personal advice, emotional support and everyday decision-making. That’s despite research on the harms of chatbots, which have been shown to give kids dangerous advice about topics such as drugs, alcohol and eating disorders. The mother of a teenage boy in Florida who killed himself after developing what she described as an emotionally and sexually abusive relationship with a chatbot has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Character.AI. And the parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine recently sued OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, alleging that ChatGPT coached the California boy in planning and taking his own life earlier this year.

Character.AI said it is looking forward to “collaborating with the FTC on this inquiry and providing insight on the consumer AI industry and the space’s rapidly evolving technology.”

“We have invested a tremendous amount of resources in Trust and Safety, especially for a startup. In the past year we’ve rolled out many substantive safety features, including an entirely new under-18 experience and a Parental Insights feature,” the company said. “We have prominent disclaimers in every chat to remind users that a Character is not a real person and that everything a Character says should be treated as fiction.”

Meta declined to comment on the inquiry and Alphabet, Snap, OpenAI and X.AI did not immediately respond to messages for comment.

OpenAI and Meta earlier this month announced changes to how their chatbots respond to teenagers asking questions about suicide or showing signs of mental and emotional distress. OpenAI said it is rolling out new controls enabling parents to link their accounts to their teen’s account.

Parents can choose which features to disable and “receive notifications when the system detects their teen is in a moment of acute distress,” according to a company blog post that says the changes will go into effect this fall.

Regardless of a user’s age, the company says its chatbots will attempt to redirect the most distressing conversations to more capable AI models that can provide a better response.

Meta also said it is now blocking its chatbots from talking with teens about self-harm, suicide, disordered eating and inappropriate romantic conversations, and instead directs them to expert resources. Meta already offers parental controls on teen accounts.