Trump Faces Headwinds on Iran, Inflation; Tech Sector Buzzes

Hello, this is Hui Jie writing to you from Singapore. Welcome to another edition of CNBC's Daily Open.

From a Senate rebuke on Iran war to surging Treasury yields and accelerating inflation, U.S. President Donald Trump is facing several headwinds ahead of the midterms.

Meanwhile, the tech sector continues to make headlines with Google unveiling new AI models, SpaceX tapping Goldman Sachs for its IPO, and Anthropic hiring OpenAI co‑founder Andrej Karpathy.

U.S. President Donald Trump has said that he is holding off on striking Iran at the request of Gulf countries, but even at home his military operation against Tehran has come under sharp scrutiny with the Senate advancing a resolution to halt action against the Mideastern country.

While the resolution stands little chance of becoming law due to Trump's veto power, the vote does show increasing headwinds to the war with Iran, especially as gas prices continue to soar ahead of the summer driving season and the midterm elections.

Trump came under more scrutiny, as Vice President JD Vance was asked at the White House press briefing about the heavy stock trading on display in the president's latest financial disclosures, which revealed transactions totaling hundreds of millions of dollars over just three months.

"He's not making these stock trades himself," the vice president said, while accusing the reporter of suggesting otherwise.

Meanwhile, yields on U.S. 30-year Treasurys climbed to their highest level since July 2007, hitting 5.197% Tuesday amid worries over rising inflation.

Treasurys have seen a sell-off following reports last week that pointed to increasing inflationary pressure, as the Iran war pushes energy prices higher.

Rising yields have pressured stocks, with the S&P 500 notching its third straight losing session and the Nasdaq Composite and Dow Jones Industrial Average also suffering losses overnight.

Over in the tech world, Google announced Gemini 3.5 Flash, which CEO Sundar Pichai described as a lighter-weight addition to the company's AI suite that offers cutting-edge capabilities at half, or in some cases close to one-third, the price of comparable frontier models.

Competition for top talent in AI continues to intensify, with former OpenAI co-founder and Tesla AI leader, Andrej Karpathy, moving to Anthropic.

Anthropic said Karpathy starts this week and will be building a team focused on using Claude to accelerate pre-training research that helps the company's models acquire their core knowledge and capabilities.

Moving from AI to rockets, SpaceX has picked Goldman Sachs to lead what's likely to be a record IPO, sources told CNBC. Elon Musk's reusable rocket company, most recently valued at $1.25 trillion by Musk, could make its prospectus public as soon as Wednesday.

— Lim Hui Jie