Axios

Creator commerce has evolved from an experimental marketing tactic into a core strategy for retailers, as brands bet that trusted human recommendations will matter even more in the AI era.

Why it matters: The shift is motivating brands to rethink how they recruit, manage and measure creator relationships.

Live shopping is projected to more than triple in the U.S. by the end of the decade as retailers, creators and streaming platforms embrace the format.

Why it matters: After years of failed attempts to replicate China's livestream shopping boom, the U.S. market is finally gaining momentum.

Commerce is spreading across more channels than ever, making it more difficult for marketers to prove what actually drove the sale.

Why it matters: The old consumer funnel is breaking faster than marketers can measure it, with last-click attribution becoming even less useful.

The retail industry is emerging as one of AI's biggest commercial winners, forcing companies to embrace bots as buyers and incentivizing rivals to work together to capture new business.

Why it matters: While creative sectors try to prevent AI companies from scraping their content, retailers are inviting them in and betting AI shopping assistants will become a new source of customers.

China just changed the AI race with the debut of the Kimi K3 model, posing an immediate threat to the United States as the world's leader in the innovative technology.

Why it matters: The advent of AI has led to a global competition for supremacy, perhaps with the highest stakes since the development of the nuclear bomb.

David Sacks, AI investor and White House tech advisor, warned Friday that the U.S. is in danger of losing the AI race to China following the release of Kimi K3, a Chinese model that beats frontier American systems on several benchmarks.

Why it matters: Sacks is pitching a hands off regulatory approach to AI that he frames as do-or-die for America to hold onto its dominance.

WASHINGTON — AI is speeding up the pace of digital attacks and the need for resilient systems, defense and tech leaders said at an Axios House D.C. event.

Why it matters: Public and private entities must quickly adapt new security protocols for emerging threats or they'll risk dangers like data theft, ransomware, or bad actor infiltration.

Axios' Colin Demarest moderated the July 14 roundtable discussion. The event was sponsored by Accenture.

5 big takeaways from the conversation:

1. Traditional risk guidance prioritizes "visibility into the risk, and then the means to mitigate the risk," CrowdStrike chief privacy officer Drew Bagley said. But the adoption of AI has led to an increase in potential targets and reduction of visibility into the technology, he added.
2. Leaders should treat AI like "a trusted insider … with variability," Domino Data Lab chief information security officer Chris Talevi said. Consider what the technology is authorized to do, its guardrails, and its potential for "chaos."
3. Resiliency "starts at the code level," Sublime Security head of threat intelligence and research Alex Orleans said, but also warned that secure and high-quality code is "cyber vegetables. Nobody wants to eat it."
4. Asking the right questions can help build an AI cyber strategy, said Halcyon senior director of government affairs and public policy Meredith Burkart. "Depending on what you're guarding, you're going to have a different answer … and you're going to be able to talk about your risks in a different way."
5. Hesitating to adopt AI has its own stakes, said Robert Kolasky, Exiger senior vice president of critical infrastructure. "There's a backlash [against generative AI] right now that's going to create a friction on the system" and disrupt necessary implementation, he added.

Content from the sponsor's remarks:

In opening remarks, Accenture Federal Services managing director and cyber lead Amanda Satterwhite said that AI is "the most consequential technology we've seen in decades."

• "We now have our first official cyber arms race, where both the offense and the defense have the same tools and techniques at the same time, and it's a matter of who's going to deploy them fast."

As executives question whether their massive AI bills are paying off, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar is pitching a new scorecard for measuring AI's success, according to a new blog post viewed by Axios.

Why it matters: The framework is OpenAI's response to a growing enterprise AI cost reckoning, as companies increasingly route work to cheaper models and demand clearer returns on their investments.

Ukraine's drone attacks on refineries have hammered Russia's oil infrastructure, creating an economic shock that is increasingly visible worldwide, including in the U.S.

Why it matters: The effectiveness of the Ukrainian drone campaign is helping drive up world energy prices already elevated by the Iran war.

SpaceX closed below its IPO price Thursday after the stock declined for the eighth time in nine sessions.

Why it matters: The selloff suggests that investors' knees have gone somewhat wobbly, as the first restrictions on selling — known as lockups — are set to be lifted in less than a month.

The latest: The stock closed at $131.11 Thursday.

• That's down 42% from its intraday high of $225.64 reached on June 16.
• It's also below the stock's symbolically important $135 offering price.

Zoom in: According to SEC filings, up to 1.37 billion shares could hit the market starting in the days after SpaceX reports second-quarter results, which is projected to be on Aug. 6, according to FactSet.

• That includes 911.5 million of class A common shares.
• And it could include an additional 455.8 million shares if the stock price meets certain conditions. (The shares would have to close at or above $175.50 on a certain number of trading days surrounding the Q2 earnings release.)

Reality check: The actual SpaceX IPO — the largest ever, raising $86 billion — involved the sale of only 639 million shares.

• That means the first lockup expiration could roughly quadruple the supply of tradable SpaceX shares.

The intrigue: Will the buying public be eager to buy them? Especially after the recent drop?

Between the lines: The SpaceX IPO last month was a masterpiece of financial engineering.

• SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was able to generate a surge of retail interest.
• The company was also fast-tracked into some key indexes, like the Nasdaq 100, ensuring some steady purchases from index-based investors.
• Those factors, along with a surge of online hype and a relatively constrained amount of stock to sell — about 5% of all SpaceX shares — generated more than a satisfying pop in the price.
• At its closing high, the company was valued at $2.64 trillion, on paper.

Yes, but: That valuation always deserved to be viewed pretty skeptically.

• All things being equal, the constrained supply of stock in the face of strong demand results in an elevated price and a potential overvaluation of the company.

The bottom line: As more SpaceX shares are released into the wild, we'll get a more accurate picture of what the market thinks SpaceX's "true value" is.