Market brief: OpenAI launches Astra for Law
OpenAI released Astra for Law, a legal build of GPT-6 Astra indexing over 230 million URLs of US case law, answering 54.0% of a legal research benchmark correctly versus 38.7% for the base model.
☕️ GM! Here are the most important market events over the last 24 hours: 🌍Market Overview: 🔸 The Bank of Japan raised its policy rate 25 basis points to 1.25%, the highest level since 1995, on a split 7-2 vote. Cheap yen funding has underwritten risk-taking for years, and it keeps getting dearer. #BOJ 🔸 OpenAI shipped Astra for Law, a legal build of GPT-6 Astra indexing more than 230 million URLs of US case law. It answered 54.0% of a legal research benchmark correctly, against 38.7% for the base model. #OpenAI 🔸 US stocks clawed back most of the post-Fed selloff as oil fell and bond-market pressure eased. The S&P 500 rose 1.1% to 7,637.76, the Nasdaq 1.7% to 26,418.30, Brent slipped 1% and the 10-year yield fell to 4.93%. 🔸 A US government website, the Federal Register, was running an AI search tool built on Alibaba's Qwen model, a week after the FBI accused Alibaba of malicious copying of Anthropic's technology. It came down Wednesday. 🔸 The average 30-year mortgage rate jumped to 6.95% from 6.76%, a fourth straight weekly rise and the biggest one-week jump in 16 months. That is the highest since January 30, 2025. 🔸 Anthropic published numbers on its own build pace: roughly 30,000 AI agents doing research and engineering on its main internal platform at once, with 6% of AI R&D compute going to safety, 12% for AI-run research. 🪙Crypto Updates: 🔸 Solana cut its target slot time to 250 milliseconds from 300, running the chain nearly 17% faster at four slots a second, up from 3.3. Capacity is unchanged, since each slot carries proportionally less work. #Solana 🔸 The SEC issued a five-year Innovation Exemption, effective immediately, letting venues trade tokenized US stocks while holders keep dividends and voting rights, two days after the CLARITY Act failed in the Senate. 🔸 Ethereum gave client teams until Sept. 29 to ship Sepolia-ready Glamsterdam software, seven days before the fork and half the usual 14-day review. Devs warn free test ether lets fake builders withhold payloads. 🔸 Public companies added only about 5,900 bitcoin over three months, against more than 100,000 in the same stretch a year earlier, per Glassnode. An average cost basis near $80,500 leaves that group underwater. #Bitcoin 🔸 Zcash is targeting Nov. 5 for NU7, an upgrade that cuts block times to 25 seconds, after holders backed it with 99.9% of ZEC-weighted votes. Testnet activates Oct. 6 and the final mainnet decision comes Oct. 20. 🔸 XRP Ledger shipped version 3.4.0 on Sept. 16 with LendingProtocolV1_1, adding closed-ended vaults and cash-basis accounting to its proposed native lending. Validators still have to vote the amendments in first.