MORGAN STANLEY downgraded its rating on the European utilities sector from Overweight to Neutral.

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and more than 100 tech and financial firms said in an open letter on Thursday that organizations and governments must make cyber defense a top leadership priority and fix existing software security weaknesses. The signatories asked cybersecurity firms to help defend against AI-driven attacks and urged leading AI companies to give critical-infrastructure defenders AI access, funding and training. They warned that as model capabilities rise AI will likely be used for a larger number of more sophisticated intrusions in coming months, citing recent incidents including an accidental July OpenAI model intrusion at Hugging Face.

Ukraine's agriculture minister said food exports from Aug. 1-26 totaled 1.42 mln tonnes, including 822,000 tonnes of grain.