The Morning Brief

Anthropic refused the Pentagon unrestricted access to its Claude AI, and the fallout reshaped the tech-defense landscape overnight. OpenAI rushed in to fill the void, signing a classified deal that triggered internal resignations and a user exodus toward Claude. Host Himanshi Lohchab talks to Abishur Prakash, Geopolitical Strategist, to unpack the fierce power struggle between governments demanding unrestricted AI and companies defending their ethical red lines. They also examine sovereign AI, battlefield automation, and whether Big Tech can or should stay out of warfare. The age of AI geopolitics has arrived.

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You can follow Himanshi Lohchab on her social media: X and Linkedin

Check out other interesting episodes like: How Will a Volatile ₹ Impact You in 2026?, How Quick Commerce is Triggering a Health Crisis for Gen Z, India’s Labour Law Reboot, Viral to Valuation: Building Women’s Cricket as a Brand and much more.

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Five years after slamming the door on Chinese investments, India has quietly amended Press Note 3. With FDI stagnating, institutional investors pulling billions out, and Western capital stretched thin, New Delhi is making a hard-nosed economic calculation. The amendment signals cautious optimism. welcoming Chinese capital into startups and tech sectors, while keeping telecom and security-sensitive industries closed.Host Anirban Chowdhury speaks to  Biswajit Dhar,  retired Professor, Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, JNU and Amitendu Palit, a global trade expert at the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. Questions on indirect investment and security concerns remain. Also, will this signal India as a more conducive, predictable investment environment to the global investor?

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You can follow Anirban Chowdhury on his social media: X and Linkedin

Check out other interesting episodes like: How Will a Volatile ₹ Impact You in 2026?, How Quick Commerce is Triggering a Health Crisis for Gen Z, India’s Labour Law Reboot, Viral to Valuation: Building Women’s Cricket as a Brand and much more.

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A once-in-a-generation oil shock is unfolding. Host Anirban Chowdhury speaks with Amrita Sen, Founder of Energy Aspects, Bob McNally, founder of Rapidan Energy Group and former White House energy advisor, and ET’s Puran Choudhary on a crisis triggered by the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz. More than 10 million barrels of crude a day have been disrupted roughly twice the scale of the 1956 Suez Crisis and for the first time there is virtually no spare production capacity to cushion the blow. Brent has surged past $110, LNG cargoes face force majeure, and Asian refineries are cutting runs. Strategic reserves offer only limited relief. In India, the shock is already visible on the ground, with LPG shortages, rationing and black-market price spikes spreading across multiple states. The bigger question: what happens to the global energy order if this disruption persists and what kind of Iran emerges from this war.

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You can follow Anirban Chowdhury on his social media:X and Linkedin

Check out other interesting episodes like: How Will a Volatile ₹ Impact You in 2026?, How Quick Commerce is Triggering a Health Crisis for Gen Z, India’s Labour Law Reboot, Viral to Valuation: Building Women’s Cricket as a Brand and much more.

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Despite a sweeping government crackdown, India's offshore real money gaming industry is not just surviving, it's booming. Offshore platforms like Parimatch and 1xBet exploited regulatory blind spots, processing 5.4 billion visits from Indian users by mid-2025. Using mirror sites, regional language interfaces, seamless UPI payments, and shadowy mule account networks, these platforms rendered the ban largely ineffective. Meanwhile, the domestic industry haemorrhaged 7,000 jobs lost, $840 million in asset writedowns, and $4 billion in tax revenue evaporated. Host Anirban Chowdhury talks to ET’s  Disha Acharya and Ajay Rag about the story and raises an uncomfortable question: did the ban protect consumers, or simply hand the market to unregulated foreign operators?

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Mary Ellen Iskenderian, President and CEO of Women's World Banking, joins host Anirban Chowdhury to explore five decades of progress and persistent gaps in women's financial inclusion. From the $700 billion opportunity financial institutions are leaving on the table, to India's BC Sakhi model and the Jan Dhan transformation, to the urgent link between women's financial access and climate resilience, this is a conversation on  why banking women is not just the right thing to do, it is the smartest economic bet of our time.

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You can follow Anirban Chowdhury on his social media: Twitter and Linkedin

Check out other interesting episodes like: How Will a Volatile ₹ Impact You in 2026?, How Quick Commerce is Triggering a Health Crisis for Gen Z, India’s Labour Law Reboot, Viral to Valuation: Building Women’s Cricket as a Brand and much more.

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She shares rooms and stages with the gods of AI...and is often the only woman there. Dame Wendy Hall, pioneering computer scientist and co-founder of Web Science, has watched the internet reshape the world. Now she's watching AI do the same. And she's worried we're repeating the same mistakes, faster. In this Women's Day Special, she pulls no punches: on why "AGI" is meaningless hype, why governance can't wait, why the Global South matters, and why an industry dominated by alpha males is building systems that reflect exactly that. This is essential listening on Women's Day, for every day.

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You can follow Swathi Moorthy on her social media: X and Linkedin

Check out other interesting episodes like: How Will a Volatile ₹ Impact You in 2026?, How Quick Commerce is Triggering a Health Crisis for Gen Z, India’s Labour Law Reboot, Viral to Valuation: Building Women’s Cricket as a Brand and much more.

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Dubai's "safe haven" image took a direct hit this week as missile debris fell near the Burj Al Arab and Palm Jumeirah following military escalations involving Iran, the US, and Israel. For Indian HNIs, family offices, and startup founders who had parked billions in Dubai real estate, the question is no longer about returns, it's about risk. Indian buyers, who account for 20-30% of prime property purchases, are hitting pause. Markets plunged. Host Dia Rekhi talks to ET’s  Sobia Khan and Dilasha Seth aboutSovereign wealth funds if they are being watched closely. With nine million Indians working across the Gulf and remittances at stake, the Iran conflict isn't just a West Asia story, it's an India story too.

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You can follow Dia Rekhi on social media: Linkedin & X

Check out other interesting episodes like: How Will a Volatile ₹ Impact You in 2026?, How Quick Commerce is Triggering a Health Crisis for Gen Z, India’s Labour Law Reboot, Viral to Valuation: Building Women’s Cricket as a Brand and much more.

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From January’s protests in Iran to coordinated US–Israel strikes and widening retaliation, this episode maps how internal unrest morphed into a geopolitical flashpoint. Host Anirban Chowdhury and ET’s Executive Editor (Politics) Pranab Dhal Samanta break down the escalation ladder: is this about regime change, deterrence, or domestic politics in Washington? Can Iran’s clerical system withstand external pressure without fracturing internally? We examine oil volatility, Hormuz risks, Gulf street sentiment, and the proxy chessboard. We also assess China and Russia’s limited but strategic positioning. Finally, where does India stand — balancing energy security, diaspora protection, and strategic restraint in an increasingly combustible region?

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You can follow Anirban Chowdhury on his social media: X and Linkedin

Check out other interesting episodes like: How Will a Volatile ₹ Impact You in 2026?, How Quick Commerce is Triggering a Health Crisis for Gen Z, India’s Labour Law Reboot, Viral to Valuation: Building Women’s Cricket as a Brand and much more.

Catch the latest episode of ‘The Morning Brief’ on The Economic Times Online, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, JioSaavn, Amazon Music and Youtube.

Credits: CBN News, LiveNOW from FOX, Fox News, FRANCE 24 English, WION, Business News, Sky News Australia, Firstpost, BBC News, Guardian News, DRM News

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What if AI companions are inserting themselves between children and the very people meant to guide them? In this episode of The Morning Brief, host Anirban Chowdhury speaks to Dr. Sonia Livingstone, Professor of Social Psychology, Department of Media and Communications, The London School of Economics and Political Science and Dr Usha Raman, former professor,Dept of Communication, University of Hyderabad about the uncharted territory where generative AI meets childhood development. The conversation explores why AI systems sometimes offer dangerous advice to young users, how class and language create disparities in AI access across India, and whether the assumption of "inevitable" tech adoption overshadows critical ethical discussions. 

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You can follow Anirban Chowdhury on his social media: X and Linkedin

Check out other interesting episodes like: How Will a Volatile ₹ Impact You in 2026?, How Quick Commerce is Triggering a Health Crisis for Gen Z, India’s Labour Law Reboot, Viral to Valuation: Building Women’s Cricket as a Brand and much more.

Catch the latest episode of ‘The Morning Brief’ on The Economic Times Online, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, JioSaavn, Amazon Music and Youtube.

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The existential alignment problem sits at the heart of the AI revolution — and the consequences of getting it wrong could be irreversible. What happens when superintelligent systems pursue fixed objectives that don’t fully capture human values? How do we govern machines that may soon outperform us across domains? And who decides what level of risk humanity should accept?

The conversation spans AGI timelines, the concentration of economic and political power, democratic resilience, liability-based regulation, and whether governments can realistically regulate frontier AI amid an intensifying global race.

From extinction-level risk estimates cited by AI CEOs to experimental evidence of systems resisting shutdown, this is no longer speculative science fiction — it is a live governance crisis unfolding in real time.

On this episode of The Morning Brief, ET’s Swathi Moorthy sits down with AI scientists and pioneers Stuart Russell and Yoshua Bengio for a candid, high-stakes discussion on the trajectory of artificial intelligence and the choices that will shape humanity’s future.

As capabilities surge and geopolitical rivalry sharpens, one defining question remains: are we building tools to serve humanity — or systems that could ultimately outmaneuver it?

You can follow Swathi Moorthy on her social media: X and Linkedin

Check out other interesting episodes like: AI Impact Summit: Amazon's Bet on India's AI Future, Anthropic’s India Play, India AI Impact Summit: Microsoft’s Brad Smith on Sovereignty, Scale and Skills,  and much more.

Catch the latest episode of ‘The Morning Brief’ on The Economic Times Online, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, JioSaavn, Amazon Music and Youtube.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.