Top stories today:

1. China vows “fight to the end”, as Trump threatens 50% tariffs
2. Meta addresses allegations of artificially boosting Llama 4's scores
3. Apple said to source more iPhones from India to offset China tariffs
4. Colossal Biosciences revives dire wolves through genetic engineering
5. Elon’s net worth falls below $300B for 1st time since Nov.

0. Data and calendar

No major events today.

Listen to our AI-generated podcast summarizing today’s newsletter (beware of hallucinations):

1. China vows “fight to the end”, as Trump threatens 50% tariffs, says 0% EU tariff not enough

The U.S. increasingly represents a smaller share of Chinese exports:

• “The U.S. threat to escalate tariffs on China is a mistake on top of a mistake,” the Chinese commerce ministry said on Tue.

• The Chinese commerce ministry also called for dialog to resolve the disputes.

• Mon.: Trump threatened 50% more import taxes on China, while readying negotiations with Japan and Israel.

• “The European Union has been very bad to us,” Trump said while rejecting EU’s tariff-drop proposal.

Chinese trade volume has so far been resilient despite tariff uncertainty

• Threats “not the right way to engage,” the China’s embassy in Washington said.

China’s central bank has weakened the yuan past 7.20 per dollar to potentially boost exports

3. Meta addresses allegations of artificially boosting Llama 4's benchmark scores

• Claims of training Llama 4 to perform better on benchmarks surfaced after its weekend launch.

• Llama 4 Maverick’s experimental version was used by Meta to achieve better scores on lmarena.ai.

• “Meta’s interpretation of our policy did not match what we expect from model providers,” lmarena.ai said.

• “Variable quality” on Llama 4 acknowledged by Meta’s GenAI VP Ahmad Al-Dahle.

4. Apple said to source more iPhones from India to offset China tariffs