Daily Briefing — April 9, 2026

Iran is now demanding that oil tankers pay tolls in cryptocurrency to pass through the Strait of Hormuz during the current two-week ceasefire. Hamid Hosseini, a spokesperson for Iran's Oil, Gas, and Petrochemical Products Exporters' Union, told the Financial Times that Iran wants to collect fees from every tanker and assess each ship individually. The stated justification is monitoring weapons transfers during the ceasefire, but the mechanism they have chosen is telling.

Hosseini's remarks suggest Iran will require tankers to use the northerly route close to its coastline, raising questions over whether Western or Gulf state-linked vessels will be willing to risk transit. "Everything can pass through, but the procedure will take time for each vessel, and Iran is not in a rush," he said. Decisions on the conditions for passing the strait are taken by Iran's Supreme National Security Council.

Meta just dropped Muse Spark, its first significant AI model since Zuckerberg reshuffled the company's AI org into something called Meta Intelligence Labs. Zuckerberg said Meta's goal is to build AI that "don't just answer your questions but act as agents that do things for you," a step toward what the company calls "personal superintelligence." It's available on meta.ai and the Meta AI app right now, and unlike the Llama models you may have played with, this one is closed source at launch.

The context matters. Llama 4 landed in April and the industry basically shrugged. Calling it a disappointment would be generous in some circles. So Muse Spark is a do-over, a signal that Meta is serious about competing with OpenAI and Anthropic for the frontier model crown, not just the open source niche. Whether it actually belongs at that table is something developers are going to stress test very quickly.

Elon Musk has amended his lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman, now clarifying that any recovered damages should go to OpenAI's original nonprofit arm, not to Musk personally. His lawyer, Marc Toberoff, told the Wall Street Journal that Musk "is not seeking a single dollar for himself" and wants the court to "return everything that was taken from a public charity."

The timing matters more than the gesture. This pivot came after US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers issued an order that risked severely limiting the remedies Musk could seek if he did not change his strategy. So this is less a sudden burst of altruism and more a legal recalibration to keep the case alive.

The broader context: Musk co-founded OpenAI as a nonprofit, left, and is now suing because the organisation converted to a for-profit structure under Altman's leadership. Musk's argument is that this conversion betrayed the original mission. OpenAI's counterargument has consistently been that the lawsuit is a competitive weapon, given that Musk now runs xAI, a direct rival. By stripping the personal financial claims, Musk's legal team is trying to neutralise that line of defence.

Whether this changes the case's trajectory is an open question. The core legal dispute over whether OpenAI's conversion was lawful remains unresolved. But the signal is clear: this lawsuit is not going away, and it will continue to shape the governance conversation around AI companies structured as nonprofits that later seek profit.