DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis was everywhere—except the office

Good morning. On Fortune’s radar today:

Exclusive: The inside story of how Demis Hassabis lost the CEO role at DeepMind.

OpenAI’s revenues are plateauing.

Profits are not showing up at AI labs.

Iran and the U.S. wait each other out over the Strait of Hormuz.

U.S. unemployment would be 5% if people weren’t giving up on work.

The Fed’s Warsh won a round vs. his critics.

President Trump’s love of grass.

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At Google’s DeepMind, absence did not make the heart grow fonder

There’s an extraordinary quote in Bea Nolan’s account for Fortune of how Demis Hassabis lost his role as CEO of DeepMind, the London-based lab that created Google’s Gemini AI product. Apparently, Hassabis was largely absent from company offices: “I can’t say that I’ve ever seen Demis walk around the office in the Gemini area,” one DeepMind engineer said. (To be fair, he made plenty of media appearances.)

DeepMind had also seen a recent exodus of talent—in June, Google lost Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer to OpenAI and Nobel laureate and AlphaFold co-inventor John Jumper to Anthropic. And the product had fallen behind its competitors in terms of capabilities. So it is perhaps not surprising that parent company Alphabet, based 6,000 miles away in Mountain View, California, wants more direct control. Hassabis, who will now become the company’s chairman, will be replaced by DeepMind’s chief technology officer, Koray Kavukcuoglu, who is based in Mountain View and will report directly to CEO Sundar Pichai at Alphabet. 

The price of oil ticks up again

S&P 500 futures were up 0.14% this morning. The index closed up 0.62% in its last session. 

In Europe, the Stoxx 600 was down 0.02% in early trading and the U.K.’s FTSE 100 was down 0.3% before lunch.

Asia: South Korea’s KOSPI was up 0.65%. Japan’s Nikkei 225 was up 2.08%. India’s Nifty 50 was down 0.05%. China’s CSI 300 was up 0.16%. 

Brent crude was back over $84 per barrel this morning.

Bitcoin was at $65.1K.

‘Sell America’ never happened—at least in stocks

As this chart from Wells Fargo’s Ohsung Kwon shows, foreigners never really stopped buying U.S. equities:

Forget DeepSeek. China’s real ‘Sputnik moment’ is happening on campus as American universities lose their advantage - Mia Osmonbekov

By propping up the yen, the U.S. and Japan are actually admitting dollar dominance isn’t what it used to be, top economist warns - Jason Ma

Trump is betting that the U.S. naval blockade choking Iran’s economy can achieve what bombs and missiles couldn’t as more oil sneaks out of the Gulf - Jason Ma

‘Millennials are not punk kids anymore’ — Ocasio-Cortez sees a ‘generational tidal wave’ driven by anger over economic futures sidelined by boomers - Jason Ma

Mysterious drone flights continue plaguing Europe after an........

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