The three major U.S. stock index futures continue to rise, with Nasdaq and S&P 500 futures both turning positive.

Breaking from Beating AI Insight: OpenAI announced that Jill Hazelbaker, Uber’s president, will join in early December to take on the newly created role of Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, responsible for global PR, brand reputation, and external communications, reporting directly to OpenAI President Greg Brockman. The recruitment was far from smooth. OpenAI’s former Chief Communications Officer Hannah Wong left in January, leaving the role vacant for nearly 10 months. OpenAI offered Hazelbaker the position as early as spring, but she turned it down; the company later even hired a headhunter to continue the search. Hazelbaker was only promoted to Uber president in May this year. A veteran tech industry crisis PR and policy expert, Hazelbaker spent 11 years at Uber, where she helped manage the company’s crisis following founder Travis Kalanick’s ouster, and led the campaign for California’s Proposition 22—securing Uber drivers’ status as independent contractors in the state, avoiding a full shift to employee classification. Before Uber, she held executive roles at Google and Snap, and worked on communications for US presidential candidate John McCain. OpenAI is currently grappling with AI safety controversies, regulatory pressure, and IPO preparation challenges. For the company, this hire is more than a brand PR head: it’s a seasoned professional skilled in navigating corporate reputation, regulatory battles, and public trust crises.

Among the seven swing states deemed competitive in the final stretch of the midterm elections, the Democratic Party has swept six. The six states are Texas, Kansas, Ohio, Iowa, Maine, and Michigan. Texas has not elected a Democratic U.S. Senator since 1988, while Kansas has not done so since 1932; their wins are expected to be major upsets in U.S. political history. Ohio, the state where JD Vance previously served as a U.S. Senator, also failed to reverse Republican losses. Additionally, the Democratic Party flipped two Republican-leaning states, North Carolina and South Carolina, bringing total flipped seats to seven. As a result, the Democratic Party is projected to secure 54 Senate seats. Due to a controversy over candidate homonym, the winner of the last swing state, Alaska, has not yet been determined.

CNN Washington Bureau Chief and Political Director David Chalian analyzes the power shift in Washington: A major change has occurred in the U.S. power structure, with the Democratic Party seizing control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Trump's final two years in office will be drastically different from his first two terms. Voters delivered a strong rebuke and rejection of Trump in the election. In key Senate states, even deep-red states, the president's approval rating remained underwater. The Democrats won seats in Texas, Ohio, Iowa, South Carolina and other states—states that Trump had carried by double-digit margins two years prior, and had won in his three consecutive presidential election campaigns. Shifting factors include alienation of independent voters, a return of Latino and young voters to the Democratic Party, Trump's failed economic governance, and public concerns over the cost of living, all of which contributed to the Republican Party's crushing midterm election defeat.

Beating AI News Flash: Oracle has canceled its roughly $7 billion AI computing power lease deal with Tencent amid pressure from the Trump administration. The deal was originally Tencent’s largest overseas computing power contract, set to run for five years, with multiple data centers across Southeast Asia, providing up to around 100,000 advanced AI chips. Tencent turned to overseas chip leasing because the U.S. restricts exports of advanced AI chips to China, though Chinese firms can still remotely lease computing power deployed abroad. This channel has not been fully banned, but U.S. officials directly approached Oracle to raise concerns over the transaction. The day prior, NVIDIA was also reported to have required overseas cloud service providers to allocate at least 51% of their services to non-Chinese customers; the requirement is currently non-mandatory guidance. The two incidents point to the same shift: the U.S. is tightening access to overseas computing power for Chinese AI companies, with restrictions expanding from chip exports to overseas leasing transactions.

According to TradingBeats’ monitoring, a crypto whale opened five short positions in U.S. stock-linked contracts this morning amid a market downturn, then fully covered all positions during the afternoon rebound, with a total trading volume of approximately $17.33 million and a combined trading loss of around $220,000. The short positions were established after the decline had already begun. When the whale initiated short positions on SpaceX and Tesla this morning, their respective contracts had already fallen by about 3.6% and 2.7%; the whale subsequently added to short bets and opened new short positions on Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta. The average entry prices for the SpaceX and Tesla short positions were $133.13 and $381.15 respectively, only roughly 1.1% and 0.7% higher than their morning lows. Notably, the Tesla short position was opened precisely in the minute when the morning low was hit. As the market rebounded in the afternoon, the whale covered the SpaceX and Tesla shorts at average prices of $135.08 and $384.22, incurring losses of approximately $108,800 and $48,300; the Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta shorts incurred additional losses of around $24,700, $21,400, and $16,800 respectively.

Fiat and crypto payment service provider Alchemy Pay announced it has obtained a Money Transmitter License (MTL) from the Mississippi Department of Banking and Consumer Finance. This brings the total number of U.S. states where Alchemy Pay holds an MTL to 20, with additional license applications underway in multiple jurisdictions. The company stated that expanding its U.S. compliance coverage will help advance fiat-to-crypto conversion and payment services, and support its stablecoin-related initiatives as well as Alchemy Chain, a Layer 1 network designed for stablecoin payments.