Good morning. It has been a choppy week for Dalal Street, with the new closing auction mechanism keeping traders on their toes right through Thursday's expiry. Away from the ticker, the bigger shift is happening in how the world's biggest AI products plan to make money off the millions of Indians who use them every day.
In today's newsletter: ChatGPT starts showing ads to its 100 million Indian users, and a wild swing in the Sensex during a new closing auction forces Sebi to defend the mechanism.
Sensex 76,933.59 DOWN 539 pts |
Nifty 50 24,090.85 DOWN 117 pts |
USD/INR 95.55 UP 0.1% |
Brent Crude $87.24 DOWN 0.7% |
Both benchmarks fell for a second straight session as metal, PSU bank and cement stocks dragged, while the rupee eased and Brent held near four-day lows on hopes that Hormuz shipping curbs may ease.
OpenAI starts showing ads to ChatGPT's 100 million Indian users
India is OpenAI's biggest market by users, and now its biggest ad market too. The company confirmed it will begin showing ads on ChatGPT's free and low-cost Go tiers in India first, before any other country, starting with 50 brands and ad agencies WPP and Omnicom handling the initial campaigns.
OpenAI has said it has more than 100 million weekly active users in India, the vast majority of them on tiers that generate little to no subscription revenue. A self-serve ad manager launches next month, letting Indian marketers run campaigns for a minimum daily budget of just ₹725.
OpenAI spent two years growing its Indian user base with free plans and steep discounts. Choosing India as the first market to monetise with ads, ahead of the US or Europe, shows how central this country's scale has become to the company's revenue plans, and hints at where the rest of the AI industry is likely to follow.
That ₹725 minimum daily ad budget is deliberately tiny, well within reach of small D2C brands and local retailers who could never afford a Google or Meta ad campaign. OpenAI is not just chasing big advertisers, it is trying to build an ad platform for India's next hundred million small businesses.
Sensex plunged 2,000 points in 15 minutes on Thursday. Sebi says the system is fine.
Thursday was the first monthly derivatives expiry since exchanges rolled out the new Closing Auction Session, and it did not go smoothly. The Sensex was trading above 77,100 all day, then during the 15-minute CAS window between 3:15pm and 3:30pm, the indicative price briefly crashed to 74,988, a drop of more than 2,000 points, before recovering to close at 76,933.
The CAS mechanism was introduced to improve price discovery at the close, but critics say Thursday's wild swing shows it can be gamed or destabilised around expiry. Sebi chairman Tuhin Kanta Pandey addressed the concern directly at a conference, ruling out any changes to the system for now, a signal that regulators see this as teething trouble rather than a design flaw.
Breaking.exe
Rogue AI agents. During an internal red-team test, roughly 1,200 of OpenAI's AI agents coordinated on their own and broke into Hugging Face's infrastructure, carrying out over 17,600 actions and exploring the system for days. |
Coding tool turned weapon. Russian-speaking hackers used SpaceX's Cursor AI coding assistant to break into seven firms, including a Belgian chemical company, underscoring how AI coding tools are becoming part of attackers' toolkits too. |
Fintech ties reset. Indian banks and NBFCs are renegotiating their partnership terms with fintech companies, revisiting revenue-sharing and compliance arrangements after a string of regulatory tightening this year. |
Pangaea Revisited
Nuclear bases. The US Army picked five companies to build and operate nuclear microreactors at five military bases, worth up to $2.2 billion over five years, as it looks to secure power supply independent of the civilian grid. |
Canada trade push. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said India and Canada are on track to hit a $50 billion trade target by 2030, speaking during her ongoing visit to North America ahead of G20 finance talks. |
Treasury vs Fed. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Fed Chair Kevin Warsh are publicly diverging over who should set the price of money, with Bessent doubling Treasury bond buybacks even as Warsh insists the central bank's independence is intact. |
Also, Also, Also
Vedanta's bond plan. Vedanta Ltd is planning its third rupee bond issue to raise at least ₹1,000 crore in the coming weeks, as the Anil Agarwal-controlled group keeps tapping local debt markets. |
Dealmaking doubles. A new Crisil report says mergers and acquisitions have become a core growth strategy for India Inc, with deal volumes doubling as companies chase scale over organic growth. |
Strong IPO debut. Gaja Capital's shares listed more than 15 per cent above their issue price, adding to a run of well-received listings on Dalal Street this month. |
IPO wave building. Analysts expect NSE and PhonePe to headline a wave of 239 companies lining up to list, which would make this one of the busiest IPO stretches in Dalal Street's history. |