Hello 👋 get a brew on because these are the top emerging risks between June 3rd, and June 17th, 2026…
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Our main risk this fortnight is…
1. Technological: Government Pulls Frontier AI Model
Anthropic received a US Commerce Department letter on Friday 12 June, signed by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, ordering it to suspend all access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models by any foreign national, inside or outside the United States. The directive arrived at 5:21pm Washington time, with roughly ninety minutes to comply.
With no mechanism to verify citizenship across its user base across AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Foundry, Snowflake, and its own APIs, the only compliant path was a full global suspension. Fable 5, launched only three days earlier and according to Anthropic already serving hundreds of millions of users, went offline within hours.
Anthropic publicly disputed the framing. The company stated the letter offered no specific national security details and that the underlying jailbreak appeared narrow and non-universal. Critically, Anthropic also disclosed publicly that OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 produces the same outputs without any jailbreak at all. If this standard applied across the industry, Anthropic argued, every frontier model deployment would need to halt.
This is not Anthropic’s first conflict with Washington. In July 2025, the company refused a US$200 million Department of Defense contract because the Pentagon required Claude be available for any lawful purpose, including autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance. In February 2026, the White House ordered federal agencies to cease using Anthropic models. In March, the Pentagon designated Anthropic a supply chain risk, a classification never previously applied to a US company. Anthropic is challenging that classification in federal court, where a judge has already issued a preliminary injunction.
The June 12 directive used a different agency under a different statute, but produced the same operational outcome. According to reporting from Fortune and Politico, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy first raised concerns with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent after Amazon researchers found a way to extract cybersecurity information from Fable 5. Amazon is one of Anthropic’s largest investors and provides its core cloud infrastructure. Anthropic filed a confidential IPO prospectus earlier this month at a US$965 billion valuation. The commercial timing is significant.
Sources
You should be concerned if…
Your business is built on a single AI model: A vendor outage can now halt your operations overnight, with no warning. The episode strengthens the case for open-weight or self-hosted models that cannot be cut off externally. If your team has been pushing for redundancy, this is the moment to take it seriously.
You’re a global enterprise employing foreign nationals: The directive applied to foreign-national employees regardless of physical location. Multinational teams can lose access to critical tools by passport alone. Workforce-wide tooling decisions now carry unexpected geopolitical and compliance exposure.
You’re an AI vendor or pre-IPO investor: The shutdown lands at a commercially sensitive moment for Anthropic. Regulatory unpredictability now materially threatens AI company valuations and product roadmaps. Investors and partners should review the political exposure of any AI vendor before doubling down.
You lead a security or engineering team: The capability at the centre of the dispute is one defenders use routinely. A globally available dependency disappearing within ninety minutes is a concrete argument for redundancy, multi-vendor strategies, and continuous visibility into where AI lives in your stack.
You operate in a regulated industry with embedded AI workflows: A model lawfully available one day can vanish the next without warning. Firms embedding AI into compliance, healthcare, or finance pipelines face continuity and audit risks if a core dependency is abruptly withdrawn. Force majeure clauses written before this week may now be insufficient.
These items are generic assumptions. We recommend considering your own unique risk landscape against your critical dependencies. If you don’t know what they are, get in touch.
Preventative actions
Maintain multi-model redundancy
Keep enough model redundancy that no single provider is a hard dependency. Test failover paths quarterly. Know where AI lives in your stack and put guardrails around what it can do, rather than reaching for kill switches when crises hit.
Map your AI dependencies
Audit every product, workflow, and tool that depends on a specific model or vendor. Document fallback options and switching costs now. A sudden suspension should be an inconvenience, not an existential operational shock.
Evaluate open-weight and self-hosted options
For mission-critical workloads, assess whether open-weight or self-hosted models can serve as backups. These cannot be remotely disabled by a third party. The cost story depends on volume, but the continuity story is unambiguous.
Build vendor-continuity clauses into contracts
Negotiate service-level guarantees, advance-notice provisions, and exit support with your AI vendors. Where possible, secure contractual remedies covering sudden loss of access driven by regulatory action. Liability and downtime risk should not fall solely on you.
2. Geopolitical: Compounding Crises Choke Global Shipping
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps closed the Strait of Hormuz on 2 March 2026, following joint US and Israeli strikes on Tehran. Brent crude moved from the low US$70s to a peak near US$120 a barrel in early March. The World Trade Organization recorded a 95% reduction in crude vessels and a 99% reduction in LNG vessels using Persian Gulf ports across the months that followed.
The closure forced shippers to reroute toward the Panama Canal, surging demand for transit slots. PBS reporting in April documented some last-minute auctions surpassing US$4 million for a single vessel, although container traffic patterns have since normalised.
A peace deal between the US and Iran is reportedly being signed in Switzerland on Friday 19 June, and Brent has fallen back below US$80 ahead of an expected resumption of Iranian oil exports. But two compounding events set in motion by the conflict will not resolve when the strait reopens.
On 18 and 19 March, Iranian missiles struck Qatar’s Ras Laffan facility, the world’s largest LNG export plant, destroying two production trains. QatarEnergy estimates repairs will take three to five years, taking roughly 17% of Qatar’s total LNG export capacity offline and an estimated US$20 billion in lost revenue. Italy’s Edison has already had its force majeure extended into August. This hit to global LNG supply stays in place for years, not months.
At the same time, NOAA upgraded to an El Niño Advisory in early June, with conditions present and expected to strengthen into the 2026 to 2027 northern hemisphere winter. There is a one in three chance the event intensifies into a Super El Niño between October and February. The worst hydrological impacts of an El Niño historically arrive the year after onset, putting the real Panama Canal pressure into 2027, not 2026.
The canal is currently running well at 38 transits per day with Gatún Lake near maximum capacity. That is the trap. The route that absorbed all the Hormuz overflow looks healthy today, which can drive false confidence. The Canal Authority’s long-term solution, the Río Indio reservoir, will not be operational until the early 2030s.
We will be diving further into these parallel crisis events, including the Panama Canal threat and the LNG market reset, in dedicated deep-dive articles coming soon.
Sources
Israel/US-Iran conflict 2026: Reopening the Strait of Hormuz | House of Commons Library | June 2026
QatarEnergy LNG force majeure extends into mid-August | Riviera Maritime Media | May 2026
The Panama Canal Responds to the Risk of El Niño | Panama Canal Authority | May 2026
Strait of Hormuz Closure 2026: What It Means for Your Supply Chain | Carra Globe | May 2026
You should be concerned if…
You’re a European LNG importer with long-term Qatari contracts: Utilities in Italy, Belgium, and South Korea are most exposed. Force majeure cover is real, but spot market replacement costs remain elevated, and pressure will hold through summer storage refill and likely into next winter. Edison’s experience replacing nine of seventeen lost cargoes points to the current procurement reality.
You’re an Asia-Pacific shipper using Panama as a Hormuz alternative: Year-end traffic looks viable, but if El Niño intensifies on schedule, 2027 slots will be rationed first. Container vessels held up reasonably well during the 2023-24 drought at six to seven per day, but draft restrictions cost real cargo on every transit.
You run an energy-intensive or oil-dependent business: Even with the strait reopening, the Ras Laffan damage means 17% of Qatari LNG capacity is locked out for years. Expect structural energy price volatility through 2027 rather than the short-term spike most planning currently assumes.
You operate in Australia, India, or Latin America: S&P Global’s May PMI for Australia attributes weaker output and rising prices directly to the Middle East war. Seven of ten El Niño years have produced a poor Indian monsoon. Latin America faces a projected 0.6 to 1.7 percentage point GDP hit from a moderate to strong event, with 50% of regional hydro power exposed.
You’re an insurer or risk manager: War risk premiums on Gulf shipping may stay at twenty times pre-conflict levels for months, even after a ceasefire holds. Layered against the parametric climate exposure building across agriculture, correlated exposure is stacking faster than most underwriting models currently recognise.
Preventative actions
Diversify routing and book early
Pre-qualify alternative ports, carriers, and overland corridors, and model the cost of each. Book Panama Canal slots now for Q4 2026 and Q1 2027 via the canal’s forward auction system. Do not wait for the next NOAA update to act.
Audit LNG contracts for Ras Laffan exposure
If you hold long-term Qatari LNG contracts, run the maths on three years of partial supply, not three months. Review force majeure clauses for cascading trigger language. Tier two and Tier three supplier dependencies in El Niño impact zones should be mapped now.
Stress-test compounded scenarios
Treat Hormuz reopening, Ras Laffan offline for three years, and Panama transits cut by 30% as a single combined scenario, not three independent risks. The data supports this as the consensus base case, not a stretch.
Review insurance correlation
War risk and climate parametric covers were typically written as independent risks. They no longer are. Talk to your broker about layered exposure and document scenario planning that treats them as one.
Quick snippet stories
China Escalates AI-Targeted Cyber Espionage
CrowdStrike’s 2026 Technology Threat Landscape Report, released 9 June, warns that China-linked groups accounted for more than 58% of state-sponsored cyberattacks targeting the technology sector over the year to March. The report names five Chinese groups including MURKY PANDA, whose password-spraying campaign alone compromised more than 340 US-based entities. AI capabilities are the prize. Firms should harden access controls, monitor for persistent intrusions, and protect proprietary models.
Main link to resourceMicrosoft Dev Tools Poisoned to Steal Passwords
Microsoft cut off access to dozens of open source projects hosted on GitHub after hackers injected password-stealing malware into projects connected to its Azure cloud and developer tools used with Claude Code, Gemini’s command line, and VS Code. At least 70 projects were disabled. This is Microsoft’s second such breach in weeks, suggesting the first clean-up did not remove the attackers. These are supply chain attacks targeting code used across many products. Rotate credentials and audit your dependencies.
Main link to resourceUAE Firms Overestimate Their Crisis Readiness
New research from risk management firm Optro, published via MIT Sloan Middle East, finds that 73% of UAE organisations are confident they can meet recovery objectives during a major disruption. When disruption actually struck, 62% failed to recover within those objectives, with roughly 35% exceeding targets by more than double. Only 19% have a formal disaster recovery plan, compared to a global average of 31%. Confidence is not capability. Run independent readiness audits and rehearse realistic scenarios rather than relying on assumptions.
Main link to resourceOne in Four Australian Firms Hit by AI’s Dark Side
A new QBE Insurance study of Australian businesses with 100 to 2,000 employees finds 26% of those who experienced a cyber incident in the past year believe AI was used against them. That spans AI-assisted vulnerability identification, AI-generated malware, deepfakes, and business email compromise. Critically, 66% of incidents traced back to a supplier relationship. Train staff on AI-driven scams, verify communications, and review your third-party risk closely.
Main link to resourceAustralian Manufacturing Squeezed by Weak Demand
S&P Global’s May PMI shows Australian manufacturing weakening as inflation and supply disruptions persist. The index eased to 50.7 from 51.3 in April, with new orders falling at their fastest pace in seven months. Output price inflation hit its highest level since August 2022. Critically, S&P attributes a large share of this directly to the Middle East war, with international shipping delays lengthening to the second-greatest extent in nearly four years. A clean reminder that the Hormuz story is already showing up in your local PMI numbers.
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