Alibaba Cloud chose Singapore — the headquarters of its international business unit — to launch its latest flagship model, Qwen 3.7-Max, plus a suite of agentic cloud products, at its first international Qwen Conference.
The pitch from Alibaba Cloud: AI is shifting from a tool that summarizes knowledge to a digital workforce capable of taking independent action.
Alibaba Cloud is doubling down on agentic AI, with Singapore serving as the launchpad for international enterprise deployments across media, gaming, retail and e-commerce.
A joint initiative with the NTUC Tech Talent Assembly and ST Telemedia Global Data Centres will equip more than 1,000 local SMEs and students with practical skills in generative and agentic AI starting June 2026. Eligible employees from NTUC union companies will receive tokens to access Alibaba Cloud’s advanced AI tools, plus subscriptions to Qoder and hands-on training workshops.
Lee singled out the company’s collaboration with AI Singapore on Sea-Lion, Southeast Asia’s first large language model. Fine-tuned from Qwen’s architecture, Sea-Lion is being deployed by enterprises across ASEAN to handle complex translations and capture the region’s unique linguistic and cultural nuances.
The launch lands the same week SAP unveiled its Autonomous Suite, Kore.ai launched the Artemis edition of its multi-agent platform on Microsoft Azure, and FPT launched its Flezi Foundry “agentic engineering” platform. Hyperscalers and enterprise-software incumbents alike are now competing for what Kore.ai’s CEO Raj Koneru called “the third wave” of enterprise AI — one defined by governance, observability and trust at scale.
Citigroup and HPS Investment Partners — the private credit business that BlackRock acquired in 2025 — announced a €15 billion (~$17.5 billion) Private Capital Program on May 18, 2026. The five-year program will originate direct loans to companies across Continental Europe, the United Kingdom and the Middle East.
The deal is the European sequel to Citi’s $25 billion direct-lending pact with Apollo Global Management announced in September 2024, and it formalizes a pattern that has reshaped corporate debt markets: big banks originate, private credit funds hold the paper.
| Program | Bank | Private credit partner | Size | Geography | Announced |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Citi-Apollo Direct Lending Program | Citigroup | Apollo (with Mubadala, Athene) | $25.0B | North America | Sep 26, 2024 |
| Citi-HPS Private Capital Program | Citigroup | HPS (BlackRock subsidiary) | €15.0B (~$17.5B) | EMEA | May 18, 2026 |
Citi’s Corporate and Commercial Bank will source opportunities from existing borrower relationships; HPS contributes the balance-sheet capital. The program targets sub-investment-grade debt — sometimes called “junk debt” — and will eventually include junior and mezzanine financings.
Direct lending funds account for an estimated 15–20% of leveraged finance origination across the EU and UK, compared with north of 80% in U.S. middle-market sponsor deals. European corporates have historically leaned on bank revolvers and the broadly syndicated loan market, but the same regulatory and capital pressures that pushed U.S. banks to step back are now squeezing European lenders.
For HPS, getting a marquee bank origination channel locked in for EMEA is a structural advantage. Apollo, Ares Management, Blackstone and Goldman Sachs Asset Management are all chasing the same European deal flow, often through their own bank tie-ups. A five-year program with Citi gives HPS a way to deploy capital faster than competitors who have to source deals one at a time.
“This collaboration will allow us to benefit from Citi’s extensive network and origination pipeline in Europe and the Middle East,” Boulanger said.
McAuley said the deal will help the bank “meet the growing demand from corporate clients and sponsors for customized private lending solutions.”
Salesforce reported record first-quarter fiscal 2027 results today, with revenue of $11.1 billion — up 13% year-over-year — and a sweeping capital-return program that quadrupled the company’s long-term debt load.
The quarter ended April 30, 2026.
| Metric | Q1 FY27 | YoY Change |
|---|---|---|
| Total revenue | $11.1B | +13% |
| Subscription & support | $10.6B | +14% |
| GAAP operating margin | 21.1% | — |
| Non-GAAP operating margin | 34.8% | — |
| GAAP diluted EPS | $2.42 | +52% |
| Non-GAAP diluted EPS | $3.88 | +50% |
| Operating cash flow | $6.7B | low single-digit |
| Free cash flow | $6.6B | low single-digit |
In the quarter Salesforce returned $27.5 billion to shareholders — $27.1 billion in share repurchases and $365 million in dividends — and entered into a $25 billion accelerated share repurchase with upfront delivery of 103 million shares (~80% of the total expected to be repurchased) and final settlement targeted for Q3 FY27.
The ASR was funded by new debt. Noncurrent debt jumped from $10.4 billion to $39.3 billion as of April 30, 2026 — nearly a fourfold increase in a single quarter. The company updated its full-year free cash flow growth guidance to roughly 4% to 5% to reflect the debt issuance.
For FY27, Salesforce now guides:
For Q2 FY27, the company guides revenue of $11.27 billion to $11.35 billion, up 10% to 11% year-over-year.
The combination of accelerating growth, expanding margins and a debt-funded buyback signals a company prioritizing capital efficiency and shareholder returns. The “AI CRM” framing also points to where management expects the next leg of growth to come from — agentic AI products built on top of the Salesforce platform and the recently integrated Informatica data fabric.
The flip side: leverage. The balance sheet now carries materially more debt than it did at the start of the quarter, and the buyback was structured at the same time other enterprise-software peers — including Workday, Zoom, Box and Lightspeed — are reporting their own Q1 FY27 results with shareholder returns front-and-center.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission formally rescinded its no-admit, no-deny settlement policy on May 18, 2026, ending an informal Rule of Practice — Rule 202.5(e) — that had been in force since 1972 and conditioned almost every SEC settlement on a defendant’s promise not to publicly deny the agency’s allegations.
The rescission was announced by SEC Chairman Paul Atkins with a statement framing the policy as a First Amendment issue.
Under Rule 202.5(e), settling defendants were required to neither admit nor deny the SEC’s allegations — and, more pointedly, were barred from publicly denying them under threat of having the settlement vacated. Critics across the political spectrum called it a “gag rule” and a content-based prior restraint on speech.
In rescinding the policy, the SEC said it will:
The policy had been challenged repeatedly. The Ninth Circuit upheld it in August 2025 in Powell v. SEC — acknowledging “legitimate First Amendment concerns” but holding that defendants could voluntarily waive constitutional rights as part of a settlement. A certiorari petition is pending at the U.S. Supreme Court; the SEC’s response was due May 20, 2026 — just two days after the rescission was announced. The New Civil Liberties Alliance is pressing the Court to take the case anyway, “to ensure the policy cannot return.”
Mark Cuban and Elon Musk had publicly backed earlier legal challenges to the policy.
The repeal looks like a win, but securities lawyers warn the practical implications are mixed.
The CFTC’s Chairman Michael Selig signaled on May 12 that the agency is considering a similar rescission. Foot Locker’s $148,000 whistleblower-waiver penalty, announced the same week as the rescission, was a reminder that the SEC continues to police separation-agreement language even as it retreats from settlement-language constraints.
Zscaler announced today that it has agreed to acquire Symmetry Systems and is launching Project AI-Guardian, an initiative aimed at extending Zero Trust governance from human users to AI agents.
The acquisition will fold Symmetry’s identity-mapping and data-access technology into Zscaler’s platform. Project AI-Guardian adds a services and implementation layer through global systems integrators Cognizant, EY, HCLTech, Infosys, TCS and Wipro.
In Chaudhry’s framing, the corporate identity-and-access model built for human users and Active Directory cannot scale to a world where millions of AI agents make decisions and call applications on behalf of those users.
“As enterprises rapidly adopt AI, the old playbook for governing access built around users and directories cannot scale to millions of AI agents,” Chaudhry said in the announcement. “With Symmetry Systems, we are adding the access graph that maps how every identity, application, and data source connects across the enterprise. This foundational visibility is what Zscaler’s Zero Trust Exchange will use to govern agent-to-application and agent-to-agent communication at scale, giving customers the actionable control they need to safely embrace AI.”
Tiwari described the combined company’s ambition: “As AI disintermediates applications, endpoints, and traditional network boundaries, identities and data become the new control plane for enterprise security. In this world, legacy security models centered on endpoints, applications, or perimeter networks increasingly operate at the wrong layer of abstraction.”
Under Project AI-Guardian, global systems integrators will use Zscaler’s AI Protect portfolio to help clients:
The launch underscores how large consultancies are positioning themselves around AI governance work. EY said clients were seeking stronger visibility into AI use across data, networks and applications. Infosys described AI security as a governance challenge requiring continuous control enforcement. Wipro and TCS pointed to a broader attack surface and the need to measure risk exposure as AI becomes more embedded in software and cloud workflows.
Financial terms were not disclosed.