Category: 3. Business

• New Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server integrations with Amazon Quick Suite enable seamless access to S&P Global data
• Partnership expands the reach of S&P Global’s trusted market, financial and energy intelligence across the AI ecosystem

NEW YORK, Dec. 1, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — S&P Global (NYSE: SPGI) today announced new integrations with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to enable customers to use AI agents to ask complex market, financial, and energy-related questions and receive reliable answers from S&P Global directly within their AWS environments. S&P Global’s trusted data is now available through two new Model Context Protocol (MCP) server integrations with Amazon Quick Suite.

Through these integrations, customers of S&P Global and AWS can now combine S&P Global’s data with their own enterprise information and AI workflows, unlocking real-time insights and transforming decision-making through S&P Global MCP servers in Amazon Quick Suite. S&P Global Market Intelligence provides a range of financial datasets, including Capital IQ Financials and earnings call transcripts, through the S&P Global MCP for the Kensho LLM-ready API. S&P Global Energy’s trusted commodity and energy market news, insights and research are delivered via the S&P Global AI Ready Data MCP Server.

“We are excited to collaborate with AWS to bring S&P Global’s data to customers through the next generation of agentic AI experiences,” said Bhavesh Dayalji, Chief AI Officer of S&P Global and CEO of Kensho. “Our goal is to ensure customers can access our trusted data wherever their workflows take place, whether through cloud platforms, LLMs, or AI agents, enabling greater flexibility and innovation across industries.”

“Bringing S&P Global’s data to Amazon Quick Suite enables financial professionals to harness the power of agentic AI and trusted market, financial, and energy intelligence directly in their workflows,” said Scott Mullins, Managing Director of Worldwide Financial Services at AWS. “This integration reflects our shared vision to deliver access to financial intelligence through advanced AI capabilities, together with the security, resiliency, and reliability required when working with mission-critical data and AI-driven insights.”

These integrations expand the reach of S&P Global across the growing ecosystem of generative and agentic AI solutions and underscore S&P Global’s ongoing commitment to meeting customers wherever they work. S&P Global’s solutions and integrations create value for customers across the full spectrum of GenAI needs, from boosting the performance of large language models with S&P Global’s trusted data to enabling more efficient workflows across applications.

Media Contacts:

Orla O’Brien
S&P Global
+1 857-407-8559
[email protected]

Madeline McSherry
Kensho
[email protected]

About S&P Global

S&P Global (NYSE: SPGI) enables businesses, governments, and individuals with trusted data, expertise and technology to make decisions with conviction. We are Advancing Essential Intelligence through world-leading benchmarks, data, and insights that customers need in order to plan confidently, act decisively, and thrive economically in a rapidly changing global landscape.

From helping our customers assess new investments across the capital and commodities markets to guiding them through the energy expansion, acceleration of artificial intelligence, and evolution of public and private markets, we enable the world’s leading organizations to unlock opportunities, solve challenges, and plan for tomorrow – today. Learn more at www.spglobal.com.

Learn more about Artificial Intelligence at S&P Global: https://www.spglobal.com/en/research-insights/market-insights/artificial-intelligence

About Kensho

Kensho is S&P Global’s hub for AI innovation and transformation. Acquired in 2018, our vision is to help S&P Global leverage cutting-edge tech to become the world’s most trusted and innovative data, benchmarks, and ratings company. Kensho develops powerful AI capabilities that underlie S&P Global offerings, enable innovation across the enterprise, and add value for customers. The Kensho LLM-ready API seamlessly integrates a set of complex, high-priority S&P Global datasets into Generative AI models, enabling customers to accurately and effectively retrieve a set of S&P Global’s trusted data via any GenAI application.

SOURCE S&P Global

Satellite imagery has long served as a tool for observing on-the-ground activity worldwide, and offers especially valuable insights into the operation, development, and physical features related to nuclear technology. This report serves as a “start-up guide” for emerging analysts interested in assessing satellite imagery in the context of the nuclear field, outlining the steps necessary […]

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There tend to be strong reactions to AI-generated art, often forming pro- and anti-AI camps based on how AI is understood and who the AI directly impacts. But the reality of how AI intersects with creativity is much more complicated than a binary understanding allows.

Broader and faster (creative) intelligence

AI is helpful for rapid visualization in the creative process, effectively acting as a time-saving tool by increasing the number of variations or iterations an artist might make anyway while producing work. Generative AI can also broaden an artist’s effective skillset. Contemporary artistic practices are increasingly interdisciplinary and artists often need to learn various skillsets to complete projects.

AI-generated art that is created purely from text prompts makes for a clear example of AI use in creative endeavors. Some artists laud the depth of the iterative process in prompt engineering, while others deride the reliance on text to creative visual output, deeming it low-effort and low-skill. Historically speaking, however, effort (i.e., perceived effort) and technical skill are poor metrics for creativity, as many art movements and famous works of art that are now considered canon in the fine art world lack these qualities; see the readymade art pioneered by Marcel Duchamp (a urinal recontextualized as an art object), and conceptual art like Sol Lewitt’s Wall Drawings (which were simply instructions for drafts people to implement). Both art forms champion creative ideas over the artist’s technical execution and make for a useful reminder about what exactly is new and what is not-so-new in how AI is changing the landscape of creativity.

“Intelligence” is everywhere

Generative AI is finding its way into all creative processes that use digital tools. Adobe has not only integrated generative AI within its programs, but it is also encouraging artists to use these tools and sometimes making it difficult not to use them. For example, Photoshop’s relatively new Contextual Task Bar will give just one suggested action for the user, usually beginning with “Generative…”

However, I see generative AI having a broader and more subtle contribution and challenge to traditional notions of creativity in otherwise “non-AI” processes. “Intelligent” assistive tools have been around for a lot longer than “Generative AI” – face detection in camera software, smart selection tools in Photoshop. Even if they don’t rely on a large language model, there is a long-evolving history of technological tools aiding creative activity and production. I make sure my students are aware of this so they can see the contours of this technology and make their own determinations about when to outsource a technique to an automated system.

Opting out

There are also plenty of reasons for artists to resist or reject the use of AI for moral and ethical reasons, from the environmental impact of AI data centers and use of AI in military operations and its possible role in committing war crimes, to the proliferation of political propaganda, disinformation and deepfakes more broadly. Some artists don’t want to be associated or implicated with the technology.

Many artists and designers are also rightfully concerned about AI replacing their jobs – this is a return of the “low effort” critique; it’s faster and cheaper for an employer to use AI than to hire an artist or designer. Often this low effort AI approach is visible in the result, so projects or jobs that demand more sophisticated results still need artists, even if the artists may be implementing AI tools in a broader creative workflow.

One of the sharpest critiques of AI-generated art by artists themselves is the use of their own work in the data sets that train AI. If an artist’s work has been fed into an AI model for anyone to use, their work has, in a sense, been stolen. Artists have taken multiple approaches to these concerns, including creating a search tool to allow artists to see if their work has been included in data sets used by Stable Diffusion. Adobe is trying to work around this concern by drawing from proprietary and public domain in its generative AI models. This will likely be an increasingly popular approach for AI tools made for artists.

A new slop kitsch

While AI generated art is able and sometimes virally infamous for, being able to change the style of any artwork, generative AI is doing something else with our visual culture. Rather than simply replacing all human creativity, it’s also defining a new aesthetic. Artists can now work in a style determined by the behemoth computing power and aesthetic limitations of generative AI tools. Different users tend to get remarkably consistent stylistic results when using the same AI models, flattening out potential aesthetic variation. This is why AI art can be so immediately recognized.

In such a quickly evolving field, the latest and most powerful generative AI models have been able to generate images and video that are convincing enough to “pass” as real, yet across the broad generative AI ecosystem, there is also a growing body of improbable and unconvincing AI content that is saturating our visual environment. I see this AI slop becoming a new camp or kitsch. When AI-generated content is unsettling it contributes to a real aesthetic that artists can replicate and respond to. Strangely non-human movement or facial expressions can act as pop cultural references that viewers recognize and normalize, and this makes them viable artistic subject matter.

Moving forward, artists may find themselves asking if they should embrace the imperfections of the handmade or the imperfections of AI.

About the professor

Tyler Calkin, MFA, is an associate professor of art and head of digital media at the University of Nevada, Reno, in the College of Liberal Arts, who specializes in visualizing social experience through interactive XR and connecting AI and machine learning workflows to motion capture, 3D modeling and digital simulation.

In a Chinese phase II trial reported in The Lancet Oncology, Hou et al found that the addition of the antifibrotic pirfenidone to glucocorticoid treatment significantly improved the carbon dioxide diffusing capacity (DLCO%) in patients with grade 2 or 3 radiation-induced lung injury.

Study Details

In the multicenter open-label trial, 134 patients were randomly assigned between November 2021 and December 2023 to receive pirfenidone plus glucocorticoids (n = 67) or glucocorticoids alone (n = 67). Pirfenidone treatment consisted of three times daily dosing of 200 mg in week 1, 300 mg in week 2, and 400 mg in weeks 3 to 24. Glucocorticoid treatment consisted of the prednisone equivalent of 40 mg per day in two doses for 2 weeks, followed by tapering to 10 mg every 2 weeks over 6 to 8 weeks. The primary endpoint of the study was the change in DLCO% at week 24.

Key Findings

Median follow-up was 9.2 months. At week 24, changes in DLCO% were an improvement of 8.0% in the pirfenidone group vs a reduction of 2.4% in the control group (least-squares mean difference = 10.4%, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 4.3%–16.5%, P = .0010). Numeric improvement in DLCO% at week 24 was observed in 78% vs 54% of patients.

The most common adverse event of any grade among all patients was pneumonia (9% in the pirfenidone group vs 25% in the control group). The most common grade 3 or worse adverse events included pneumonia (6% vs 12%) and rash (3% vs 0%). Serious adverse events occurred in 18% vs 16% of patients. No treatment-related deaths were reported.

The investigators concluded: “Pirfenidone in combination with glucocorticoids provides a potential therapeutic strategy for grade 2 or grade 3 radiation-induced lung injury, addressing the unmet clinical need for effective antifibrotic therapy in patients receiving thoracic radiotherapy. Further investigation is needed to validate these findings in patients with worse radiation-induced lung injury than was studied here.”

Ming Chen, MD, of State Key Laboratory of Oncology in South China, Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center, Guangzhou, China, is the corresponding author for The Lancet Oncology article.

Disclosure: The study was funded by the Noncommunicable Chronic Diseases–National Science and Technology Major Project, National Key R&D Program of China, and others. For full disclosures of all study authors, visit thelancet.com.

The world’s biggest car-sharing company, Zipcar, has said it will close its UK operation, removing access to its shared fleet across London at the end of this year.

The company, owned by the US car rental group Avis Budget, said it will suspend new bookings after 31 December, pending the outcome of a consultation on possible redundancies. The UK operating company had 71 staff last year, according to its latest accounts.

The closure will be a blow to advocates of car sharing as a more sustainable form of personal transport, as well as to some car clubs that relied on Zipcar to share private vehicles.

James Taylor, Zipcar UK’s general manager, wrote in an email to customers that “we are proposing to cease the UK operations of Zipcar and have today started formal consultation with our UK employees”. Taylor directed customers to the website of CoMoUK, a national charity for shared transport, to find other car sharing options.

The closure will follow a tricky period for car sharing companies. The Guardian reported in March that Avis Budget had quietly downgraded the valuation of its Zipcar subsidiary in March, amid declining revenues in come key markets.

The proposed closure would come after Zipcar (UK) reported an £11.7m loss for 2024.

The company said it would honour existing bookings, including over the Christmas period. It also said it would contact users with bookings running into the new year, while paying subscribers will receive refunds for the period after 31 December.

The concept of car sharing gained popularity during the coronavirus pandemic as Zipcar, Enterprise Car Club and Share Now offered app-based car rental by the hour, while the likes of Hiyacar, Turo and Getaround opened up the ability to rent neighbours’ cars.

However, companies running their own fleets have struggled to make a profit, with relatively high maintenance costs for fleets scattered around cities.

Zipcar in the UK had pioneered the “flex” model of running a fleet of cars with no set parking space, allowing users in London to park in residents’ bays almost anywhere in the centre of the city.

Car sharing is generally seen as more sustainable because it avoids the extra carbon emissions needed to produce vehicles for every individual household.

Last year the UK government set out its Clean Power 2030 plan which will involve doubling onshore wind capacity and trebling solar PV, which will require £40 billion of investment each year. Similarly, the European Union recently set a new target of 42.5% renewable energy. This new partnership between CVC DIF, its investors and Low Carbon will allow the company to remain at the forefront of this transition to a clean, secure and affordable electricity sector in the UK and across Europe. 

With a 16 GW pipeline and 1 GW of highly contracted operational and in construction asset base, the new capital from CVC DIF will help to grow Low Carbon’s presence across core markets including the UK, Germany, and Poland, where it aims to bring a 3 GW portfolio of operational utility-scale solar, onshore wind, battery storage and co-located assets into operations in the coming years. 

It also demonstrates confidence in the expertise of Low Carbon’s team across the value chain of 170 people to develop, construct and operate world-class renewable infrastructure by leveraging its in-house AI technology platform to optimise its assets and returns, essential to long-term value creation.

CVC DIF brings significant renewable energy experience to this new partnership, with a dedicated sector specialist team and having invested in a diverse portfolio of assets and platforms across wind, solar, hydropower, BESS and biogas. It has a proven 20-year track record of value creation within this sector and can also leverage the strength and depth of the broader CVC network, providing on-the-ground local market expertise and insights.

MassMutual, a significant shareholder in Low Carbon after forming a strategic partnership in 2021, will continue to support the growth of the business with additional investment and will work closely with CVC DIF to accelerate the build out of Low Carbon’s renewables pipeline.

Founder and Chief Executive of Low Carbon, Roy Bedlow, commented “I would like to thank CVC DIF and their investors for the confidence they have placed in Low Carbon and our ability to develop, build and operate high-quality renewable assets in the UK and Europe. In addition, MassMutual’s continued investment in Low Carbon underlines our shared ambition of delivering long-term value across the full investment cycle of renewables that will help accelerate our goal to deploy renewable energy at scale to help tackle climate change.”

Caine Bouwmeester, Partner and Head of Renewable Energy at CVC DIF, added: “We are excited to partner with Low Carbon, a best-in-class renewable energy company which we have known well for more than a decade. This investment reflects our shared conviction in the critical role renewables will play in the energy transition. Low Carbon’s talented team, strong culture, and disciplined development strategy position it to lead the next phase of growth in the sector. Together with Roy, his team, MassMutual, and our highly supportive co-investors, we look forward to building on this momentum and generating attractive risk adjusted returns for our investors.”

Drew Dickey, Head of Alternative Investments at MassMutual, added: “Significant strides have been made since our original investment in Low Carbon to distinguish it as a top performing renewable energy company. We welcome the combination of capital and experience that CVC DIF brings to Low Carbon, which will provide important leadership to the buildout of our ambitious pipeline of renewable energy projects.”

The CVC DIF investment will be made through DIF Infrastructure VIII (“DIF VIII”) and is expected to close during the fourth quarter of 2025, subject to customary closing conditions. 

Evercore acted as advisers for Low Carbon on the transaction.

Switzerland’s federal prosecutor has filed charges against the failed bank Credit Suisse and its new owner, UBS, over the long-running “tuna bonds” loan scandal that crashed Mozambique’s economy nearly a decade ago.

The Swiss attorney general said on Monday that it had brought money-laundering charges against an unnamed employee of Credit Suisse, but was also taking action against the lender and its rival-turned-owner UBS.

The attorney general’s office accused the banks of “organisational deficiencies” that ultimately failed to prevent wrongdoing and meant the suspicious transactions were not reported until 2019, after the US Department of Justice announced it was launching its own criminal proceedings.

The prosecutor added: “In 2016, in particular, considerable defects existed in the companies’ risk management, compliance and internal directives systems in connection with combating money laundering.”

UBS took over Credit Suisse as part of an emergency rescue deal brokered by Swiss authorities in 2023. UBS said: “We firmly reject the office of the attorney general’s conclusions and will vigorously defend our position.”

The tuna bonds scandal arose from $2bn (£1.5bn) worth of loans that Credit Suisse arranged for the Republic of Mozambique between 2013 and 2016. The loans were said to be going to government-sponsored investment schemes including maritime security projects and a state tuna fishery, located in the south-east African country’s capital, Maputo.

However, a portion of the funds went unaccounted for, with one of Mozambique’s contractors later found to have secretly arranged “significant kickbacks” worth at least $137m, including $50m for bankers at Credit Suisse, meant to secure more favourable deals on the loans, according to the Financial Conduct Authority.

The scam snowballed and eventually caused the International Monetary Fund to suspend its assistance to Mozambique, leading to a crash in the country’s economy.

Credit Suisse had already settled the case with US and UK regulators in 2021, having paid $275m to American watchdogs and £147m to Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority.

UBS also subsequently agreed to settle the case with Mozambique in October 2023, shortly before a trial was due to kick off in London courts. Mozambique had been pursuing $1.5bn in damages over economic losses after the IMF and international donors pulled their financial support.

The Swiss attorney general’s office accused Credit Suisse and its owner of “not taking all the required and reasonable organisational measures in the relevant period in 2016 to prevent the money laundering that was allegedly committed”.

Credit Suisse was sold to UBS in an emergency deal in March 2023, when customers started to pull money from the lender amid a mini-banking crisis that primarily affected US lenders but later spread to Zurich.

Credit Suisse had for years been mired in scandals, but panic over its future grew after its largest shareholder, Saudi National Bank, ruled out any extra funding for the Swiss lender despite the growing turmoil.

The crisis of confidence eventually forced Swiss authorities to offer emergency loans to Credit Suisse, before eventually orchestrating a shotgun takeover by Switzerland’s largest bank, UBS, which bought the lender for a cut price of 3bn Swiss francs. It left UBS handling a raft of legacy scandals from its former rival.