• Stocks opened higher in early trading Wednesday. The surge comes after Donald Trump backed off threats to fire the chairman of the Federal Reserve and showed a willingness to lower tariffs on China.

Stocks continued to rally early Wednesday after Donald Trump backed off of threats to remove the chairman of the Federal Reserve and signals that tariffs on Chinese imports could be lowered in the weeks to come.

All major indices opened sharply higher. As of 9:45 a.m. ET, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 1,006 points (2.57%), while the Nasdaq index surged 632 points (3.94%) and the S&P 500 was up 162 (3%).

The pop comes after a strong Tuesday for traders, which saw the Dow jump over 1,000 points to end a four-day losing streak. The S&P and Nasdaq were both up more than 2% on Tuesday.

Investors were relieved to hear Trump say late Tuesday he has “no intention to fire” Fed Chair Powell. That seemed to be a reversal from the stance he had taken last week when he wrote on social media that Powell’s “termination cannot come fast enough” and called the Fed Chair a “major loser.”

Trump also signaled a softening in his stance toward harsh tariffs on China, saying the current rate of 145% was high and in the future “it won’t be anywhere near that high. It’ll come down substantially. But it won’t be zero.”

Shares of Tesla were also higher, spiking 5% after Elon Musk announced in an earnings call Tuesday afternoon that his time with DOGE was winding down and he would refocus his attentions more on the auto manufacturer.

While stocks remain volatile, investors seem to be settling into the chaos somewhat. The CBOE Volatility Index, which spiked over 50 earlier this month, now stands at just under 28 (compared to roughly 20 last year), its lowest level since Trump announced his reciprocal tariffs plan.

Despite the rallies Tuesday and in early trading Wednesday, all three major indices are still lower than they were when reciprocal tariffs were announced. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite are both down 4% and the Dow is 5% below where it stood on April 2.

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More than 30 top experts—including nine former OpenAI employees—have urged the attorneys general of California and Delaware to intervene in OpenAI’s proposed restructuring, which would allow the company to buy itself out from under its nonprofit’s control. In an open letter, they warn that the move would eliminate key governance safeguards and endanger OpenAI’s founding mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) “benefits all of humanity.”

The group, which also includes AI “godfather” Geoffrey Hinton, Hugging Face researcher and chief ethics scientist Margaret Mitchell, and Stuart Russell, computer science professor at UC Berkeley, published the open letter today on a website called Not For Private Gain and also shared the letter with OpenAI’s nonprofit board of directors. 

The letter comes less than two weeks after twelve former OpenAI employees asked a federal judge for permission to weigh in on Elon Musk’s lawsuit against Sam Altman and the company. Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, who also signed the new open letter, filed the motion on behalf of the ex-employees, whose detailed amicus brief accuses OpenAI of abandoning its nonprofit roots and betraying the mission that originally attracted them to the organization. 

The letter’s signatories include several ex-OpenAI employees who are also part of the amicus brief—Steven Adler, Jacob Hilton, Daniel Kokotajlo, Gretchen Krueger and Girish Sastry—as well as former OpenAI researchers Scott Aaronson, Ryan Lowe, Nisan Stiennon, and Anish Tondwalkar. 

OpenAI is currently navigating increasing scrutiny around its efforts to escape control of its nonprofit. It must complete the restructuring by the end of the year to secure the full $40 billion funding round led by SoftBank, which was completed in March. Notably, it requires approval from California Attorney General Rob Bonta to execute its plan. Bonta oversees charitable organizations in the state to ensure that their assets are used in accordance with their original charitable purposes.​ It also requires approval from Delaware Attorney General, because OpenAI is incorporated as a nonprofit in Delaware (OpenAI, Inc.), which owns and governs the for-profit arm (OpenAI Global, LLC). 

Other groups have commented publicly about OpenAI’s restructuring: Two weeks ago, a coalition of California nonprofits, foundations and labor groups urged California attorney general Rob Bonta to halt OpenAI’s efforts—with a focus on ensuring the nonprofit receives fair market value for the assets it gives up. The group bringing the new open letter, however, focuses on the fundamental issue of whether the restructuring, which would give up control of monitoring the development of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, would benefit the nonprofit’s original mission

In the open letter, the signatories argue that removing nonprofit control over how AGI is developed and governed would “violate the special fiduciary duty owed to the nonprofit’s beneficiaries” and “pose a palpable and identifiable threat” to OpenAI’s charitable purpose—calling it “contrary to the Certificate [of Incorporation].”

They warn that the proposed restructuring would strip California and Delaware’s attorneys general of their current oversight power, undermining their ability to “protect OpenAI’s beneficiaries: the public.”

To safeguard the public interest, the letter urges regulators to halt the restructuring, demand transparency, and ensure the nonprofit retains control—reminding them that OpenAI’s leadership itself emphasized the importance of those governance safeguards in 2023 to “ensure it remains focused on [its] long-term mission.”

In response to a request for comment, an OpenAI spokesperson shared the following statement: “Our Board has been very clear: our nonprofit will be strengthened and any changes to our existing structure would be in service of ensuring the broader public can benefit from AI. Our for-profit will be a public benefit corporation, similar to several other AI labs like Anthropic – where some of these former employees now work – and xAI, except that they do not support a nonprofit. This structure will continue to ensure that as the for-profit succeeds and grows, so too does the nonprofit, enabling us to achieve the mission.”

The spokesperson also referred to the OpenAI’s recently-launched nonprofit commission that will inform the company’s future philanthropic efforts, “maximizing impact for people and mission-driven organizations addressing critical global challenges—from health and education to public service and scientific discovery. We look forward to building on our work with their counsel.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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Good morning!

It’s no secret that companies are rushing to incorporate AI into the hiring process. KPMG, for instance, uses a recruiting chatbot to help cut back the time it takes to schedule interviews, and UPS’s almost fully-automated process helps the company hire front-line workers in under 10 minutes. 

But one top recruiter for Fortune 500 companies advises holding off on replacing all aspects of the process with AI. In fact, he says it could make it more tedious for HR professionals down the line. And he says that most large public companies he works with are increasingly finding that using technology to replace parts of the hiring process isn’t working as well as intended. 

“With AI, recruiters are using keywords to target thousands of people on LinkedIn at once, all while applicants are using AI to tailor their resumes to exactly what hiring managers are looking for,” says John Vlastelica, founder and CEO of Recruiting Toolbox, a hiring and training consultancy. “It’s hard to find the best candidate when they all have resumes that are perfectly written and perfectly tailored for the role.”

That’s why many of the companies he works with are looking to take a more human approach to their hiring strategy, and going back to basics. That means having more live conversations, relying less on video, and doing final interviews in-person. It also means widening the search scope to candidates who may not seem perfect for the role at first glance.

“Recruiters want the real image of the person they’re hiring, not an AI-created version of the candidates,” says Vlastelica. He even suggests that recruiters actually look for candidates who have some slight flaws on their resumes, tiny typos or headshots that don’t look overly Photoshopped. “If it’s too perfect, it probably isn’t real,” he says. 

Leaning into the more human elements of hiring is even more crucial given that some candidates are using false identities to apply to jobs, and deepfake AI to mask themselves during interviews. One survey published last month from career platform Resume Genius found that 17% of hiring managers have encountered job candidates using deepfake technology during interviews. Some of this cohort has even been revealed to be North Korean IT workers connected to organized crime groups.

That doesn’t mean organizations should give up on using AI to recruit. In fact, Vlastelica recommends all companies adopt the technology in some way to keep up with the times. But in this new world of phony profiles and artificially enhanced CVs, he says, companies need to ensure that some traditional aspects of the hiring process don’t get thrown out for the sake of efficiency. And he adds that’s when mistakes, like hiring people under faulty identities, are more likely to happen.

“It’s not just about finding the best candidates anymore. It’s about finding the real ones.”

Brit Morse
brit.morse@fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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