Good morning. Here’s what matters today.

The Chief of the Defence Staff, Sir Richard Knighton, told the BBC that the UK is in “the most dangerous period I’ve known,” citing Russian incursions into UK defences that risk crossing a line. It’s the most direct public warning from the military’s top officer in some time and lands in the same week the FT reported that teenagers are being recruited by Russia and Iran to carry out hostile acts across western Europe. Neither story is abstract background noise — they’re the kind of signals that shift the calculus on defence spending commitments and the durability of the government’s fiscal headroom.

The Makerfield by-election is worth watching. Andy Burnham and Reform’s candidate faced off on Question Time last night ahead of the vote. The seat is a bellwether for whether Labour’s northern base is genuinely softening toward Reform or whether the threat remains more rhetorical than electoral. A strong Reform showing would add pressure on the government’s positioning going into the autumn fiscal statement.

On AI revenue, Anthropic’s Daniela Amodei disclosed that annualised revenue crossed $47 billion in May, up from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025. That is an extraordinary trajectory. Separately, the FT reports the US National Security Agency is using Anthropic’s Mythos model for cyber operations — a significant signal about where government AI procurement is heading, and notable given Anthropic is simultaneously in a legal dispute with the Pentagon over its Claude model.

SpaceX is lining up retail investors for what the FT describes as a record IPO allocation, with up to a quarter of the $75 billion float set aside for individuals. The separate FT note that SpaceX won’t qualify for the S&P 500 — due to its corporate structure — is a material point for any passive or index-constrained fund considering exposure.

The FT’s piece on AI productivity is worth five minutes of your time. The argument is that eye-opening changes to speed and volume of work are not consistently translating into measured productivity gains — a useful counterweight to the Anthropic revenue numbers and relevant to anyone modelling AI’s macro impact on growth.

Cambridge scientists have announced the world’s first AI-designed vaccine, tested against whole families of viruses. Too early to price in, but the direction of travel for AI in drug discovery is becoming harder to dismiss as speculative.

The Makerfield by-election result is expected later today.

Sources

BBC News, Al Jazeera, Politico, The Economist, FT, Guardian, TechCrunch, Ars Technica, Telegraph — 2026-06-05