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Switzerland warns its companies that no, they can’t dodge Trump’s tariffs by routing goods through the tiny neighboring country of Liechtenstein

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The Swiss government is telling its domestic companies that they have not, in fact, found a clever way to skirt President Donald Trump’s tariffs by routing goods through the tiny neighborhood country of Liechtenstein.

Switzerland and Liechtenstein share a 102-year-old customs treaty allowing the 25km-long principality to share the Swiss economic area. But that agreement, which makes it nearly impossible to measure trade between the two closely linked countries, does not mean they are tariffed similarly. While U.S. tariffs on Swiss exports swelled to 39% in Trump’s latest round of tariffs, levies on goods from Liechtenstein are only 15%. The Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) has said Swiss firms cannot pass off goods as Liechtensteiner by routing them through the principality because they would still be recognized as Swiss in origin.

“Such circumvention via Liechtenstein is fundamentally impossible. The United States applies its non-preferential rules of origin when levying additional tariffs,” a SECO spokesperson told Fortune in a translated email statement. “For a product to be considered ‘Liechtenstein origin,’ it must either be entirely manufactured in Liechtenstein or [have] undergone sufficient processing.”

Liechtenstein head of government Brigitte Haas said last week there’s concern, though improbable, of Swiss companies looking to Liechtenstein for ways to dodge import taxes, but the risks are high.

“There’s a fear that there might be some circumvention, but those are subject to a 40% tariff,” Haas said in an interview with Swiss outlet SRF. “I hardly think anyone would want to go through that.”    

Trump’s transshipment crackdown

Last month, the White House imposed a 40% penalty tax on “transshipments,” or the movement of goods to an intermediate destination, meant to disincentivize this particular behavior.

The Trump administration is aware that countries with lower reciprocal tariff rates than its neighbors are incentivized to reroute their products, according to Robert Lawrence, Albert L. Williams Professor of International Trade and Investment at the Harvard Kennedy School. For years, China has used Mexico and Vietnam, among other countries, as transshipment bases prior to exporting goods to the U.S., according to a Brookings Institute report from June. These transshipments are having meaningful impacts: As China’s trade surplus with the U.S. decreases, it has been completely offset by the increase in its trade surplus with other trading partners, the report found.

While the transshipment penalty was meant to address China, Lawrence told Fortune, it would apply to any country engaging in the behavior—despite some experts arguing the order lacks key details that would help enforce it.

“It was really important with the response to China,” Lawrence said. “But there’s always this incentive to arbitrage between countries who are close to one another but have differentiated tariff treatment.”

High stakes in Switzerland

With Switzerland and the U.S. failing to come to a trade agreement before the Aug. 1 deadline, Swiss companies now fear Trump’s steep tariffs could roil domestic businesses, particularly in the industrial machinery, cheese, and chocolate industries. While Switzerland may rely on the U.S. as a key importer, the U.S. may be able to find suitable alternatives elsewhere, Lawrence said, putting the onus on Swiss companies to absorb the cost of tariffs in order to keep prices competitive in the U.S. market.

Liechtenstein could likewise suffer, according to head of government Haas, who said last week that although the principality has stopped trade negotiations with the U.S. and accepted the 15%, Switzerland’s economic health could waver and impact Liechtenstein, which counts Switzerland as its domestic market. Haas also said many Liechtensteiner products don’t list Liechtenstein as their certified place of origin, leaving uncertainty about how explicit the U.S. was in outlining the reciprocal tariffs for the principality.

U.S. consumers could meanwhile begin to feel the impacts of these steep reciprocal tariffs, responding differently to the alternatives available from other countries, should Swiss imports no longer be as readily available or affordable. For example, according to Lawrence, U.S. consumers may now buy more Cadbury chocolate from the UK—where tariffs sit at 10%—despite not finding the product as appealing as Swiss chocolates, but because it’s theoretically cheaper and more abundant.

But these ramifications are about more than just chocolate.

“There’s going to be a lot of inefficiency,” Lawrence said. “Americans are going to buy inferior products.”

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Coupang CEO resigns over historic South Korean data breach

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Coupang chief executive officer Park Dae-jun resigned over his failure to prevent South Korea’s largest-ever data breach, which set off a regulatory and political backlash against the country’s dominant online retailer.

The company said in a statement on Wednesday that Park had stepped down over his role in the breach. It appointed Harold Rogers, chief administrative officer for the retailer’s U.S.-based parent company Coupang Inc., as interim head.

Park becomes the highest-profile casualty of a crisis that’s prompted a government investigation and disrupted the lives of millions across Korea. Nearly two-thirds of people in the country were affected by the breach, which granted unauthorized access to their shipping addresses and phone numbers.

Police raided Coupang’s headquarters this week in search of evidence that could help them determine how the breach took place as well as the identity of the hacker, Yonhap News reported, citing officials.

Officials have said the breach was carried out over five months in which the company’s cybersecurity systems were bypassed. Last week President Lee Jae Myung said it was “truly astonishing” that Coupang had failed to detect unauthorized access of its systems for such a long time.

Park squared off with lawmakers this month during an hours-long grilling. Responding to questions about media reports that claimed the attack had been carried out by a former employee who had since returned to China, he said a Chinese national who left the company and had been a “developer working on the authentication system” was involved.

The company faces a potential fine of up to 1 trillion won ($681 million) over the incident, lawmakers said.

Coupang founder Bom Kim has been summoned to appear before a parliamentary hearing on Dec. 17, with lawmakers warning of consequences if the billionaire fails to show.

Park’s departure adds fresh uncertainty to Coupang’s leadership less than seven months after the company revamped its internal structure to make him sole CEO of its Korean operations. In his new role, Rogers will focus on addressing customer concerns and stabilizing the company, Coupang said.

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Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi says company will be worth $1 trillion by doing these three things

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Ali Ghodsi, the CEO and cofounder of data intelligence company Databricks, is betting his privately held startup can be the latest addition to the trillion-dollar valuation club.

In August, Ghodsi told the Wall Street Journalthat he believed Databricks, which is reportedly in talks toraise funding at a $134 billion valuation, had “a shot to be a trillion-dollar company.” At Fortune’s Brainstorm AI conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, he explained how it would happen, laying out a “trifecta” of growth areas to ignite the company’s next leg of growth.

The first is entering the transactional database market, the traditional territory of large enterprise players like Oracle, which Ghodsi said has remained largely “the same for 40 years.” Earlier this year, Databricks launched a link-based offering called Lakehouse, which aims to combine the capabilities of traditional databases with modern data lake storage, in an attempt to capture some of this market.

The company is also seeing growth driven by the rise of AI-powered coding. “Over 80% of the databases that are being launched on Databricks are not being launched by humans, but by AI agents,” Ghodsi said. As developers use AI tools for “vibe coding”—rapidly building software with natural language commands—those applications automatically need databases, and Ghodsi they’re defaulting to Databricks’ platform.

“That’s just a huge growth factor for us. I think if we just did that, we could maybe get all the way to a trillion,” he said.

The second growth area is Agentbricks, Databricks’ platform for building AI agents that work with proprietary enterprise data.

“It’s a commodity now to have AI that has general knowledge,” Ghodsi said, but “it’s very elusive to get AI that really works and understands that proprietary data that’s inside enterprise.” He pointed to the Royal Bank of Canada, which built AI agents for equity research analysts, as an example. Ghodsi said these agents were able to automatically gather earnings calls and company information to assemble research reports, reducing “many days’ worth of work down to minutes.”

And finally, the third piece to Ghodsi’s puzzle involves building applications on top of this infrastructure, with developers using AI tools to quickly build applications that run on Lakehouse and which are then powered by AI agents. “To get the trifecta is also to have apps on top of this. Now you have apps that are vibe coded with the database, Lakehouse, and with agents,” Ghodsi said. “Those are three new vectors for us.”

Ghodsi did not provide a timeframe for attaining the trillion-dollar goal. Currently, only a handful of companies have achieved the milestone, all of them as publicly traded companies. In the tech industry, only big tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta have managed to cross the trillion-dollar threshold.

To reach this level would require Databricks, which is widely expected to go public sometime in early 2026, to grow its valuation roughly sevenfold from its current reported level. Part of this journey will likely also include the expected IPO, Ghodsi said.

“There are huge advantages and pros and cons. That’s why we’re not super religious about it,” Ghodsi said when asked about a potential IPO. “We will go public at some point. But to us, it’s not a really big deal.”

Could the company IPO next year? Maybe, replied Ghodsi.



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New contract shows Palantir working on tech platform for another federal agency that works with ICE

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Palantir, the artificial intelligence and data analytics company, has quietly started working on a tech platform for a federal immigration agency that has referred dozens of individuals to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for potential enforcement since September.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency—which handles services including citizenship applications, family immigration, adoptions, and work permits for non-citizens—started the contract with Palantir at the end of October, and is paying the data analytics company to implement “Phase 0” of a “vetting of wedding-based schemes,” or “VOWS” platform, according to the federal contract, which was posted to the U.S. government website and reviewed by Fortune.

The contract is small—less than $100,000—and details of what exactly the new platform entails are thin. The contract itself offers few details, apart from the general description of the platform (“vetting of wedding-based schemes”) and an estimate that the completion of the contract would be Dec. 9.Palantir declined to comment on the contract or nature of the work, and USCIS did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

But the contract is notable, nonetheless, as it marks the beginning of a new relationship between USCIS and Palantir, which has had longstanding contracts with ICE, another agency of the Department of Homeland Security, since at least 2011. The description of the contract suggests that the “VOWS” platform may very well be focused on marriage fraud and related to USCIS’ recent stated effort to drill down on duplicity in applications for marriage and family-based petitions, employment authorizations, and parole-related requests.

USCIS has been outspoken about its recent collaboration with ICE. Over nine days in September, USCIS announced that it worked with ICE and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to conduct what it called “Operation Twin Shield” in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, where immigration officials investigated potential cases of fraud in immigration benefit applications the agency had received. The agency reported that its officers referred 42 cases to ICE over the period. In a statement published to the USCIS website shortly after the operation, USCIS director Joseph Edlow said his agency was “declaring an all-out war on immigration fraud” and that it would “relentlessly pursue everyone involved in undermining the integrity of our immigration system and laws.” 

“Under President Trump, we will leave no stone unturned,” he said.

Earlier this year, USCIS rolled out updates to its policy requirements for marriage-based green cards, which have included more details of relationship evidence and stricter interview requirements.

While Palantir has always been a controversial company—and one that tends to lean into that reputation no less—the new contract with USCIS is likely to lead to more public scrutiny. Backlash over Palantir’s contracts with ICE have intensified this year amid the Trump Administration’s crackdown on immigration and aggressive tactics used by ICE to detain immigrants that have gone viral on social media. Not to mention, Palantir inked a $30 million contract with ICE earlier this year to pilot a system that will track individuals who have elected to self-deport and help ICE with targeting and enforcement prioritization. There has been pushback from current and former employees of the company alike over contracts the company has with ICE and Israel.

In a recent interview at the New York Times DealBook Summit, Karp was asked on stage about Palantir’s work with ICE and later what Karp thought, from a moral standpoint, about families getting separated by ICE. “Of course I don’t like that, right? No one likes that. No American. This is the fairest, least bigoted, most open-minded culture in the world,” Karp said. But he said he cared about two issues politically: immigration and “re-establishing the deterrent capacity of America without being a colonialist neocon view. On those two issues, this president has performed.”



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