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These three vessels, owned by The Metals Company’s strategic partner Allseas, are seen here performing a pilot nodule collection system trial and environmental monitoring program for The Metals Company. Photo courtesy The Metals Company.

Photo courtesy The Metals company

The debate over collecting minerals from the bottom of the deep sea in international waters has gained new urgency ahead of a pending rule-making deadline.

As all matter of stakeholders gather in Kingston, Jamaica, to try to reach a consensus over regulation, a fierce debate is growing between supporters who say we need the rules urgently as demand for the minerals at the bottom of the deep sea grows, while opponents argue that the rush to open the seafloor in international waters could be a damaging decision that’s impossible to reverse.

One area of particular focus is a part of the Central Pacific, about 1,000 miles from the coast of Mexico, called the Clarion Clipperton Zone. Proponents say that deep-sea mining there is a less damaging way to gather metals like nickel, copper, manganese and cobalt. That’s especially true when the mining happens in areas like rain forests, which are rich in biodiversity and also serve as major carbon sinks that slow climate change.

“We have to take a planetary perspective. We have to look at the planet as a whole,” said Gerard Barron, the CEO of The Metals Company, which has permits to explore mining in the area under consideration. The Metals Company was founded in 2011, has raised $400 million from investors, and has been working for the last dozen years to do the research and get the regulations completed to be able to collect metals from this region in the deep sea.

“We don’t suggest that there’s zero impact,” Barron said. “But what we do say is that there’s very minimal impact, and we can manage those impacts.”

Opponents of deep-sea mining say there is not enough information to make that kind of decision.

“If mining does move forward, the damage caused will be irreversible,” said Diva Amon, a deep-sea marine biologist who is representing the Deep Ocean Stewardship Initiative.

Deep-sea creatures have adapted over millions of years to living in a dark, quiet place with little sediment. Many of these creatures have unusually long life spans: There are individual corals that have been living for more than 4,000 years and sea sponges that live for 10,000 years, Amon said. It’s also an impressive source of biodiversity, as scientists had never seen 70% to 90% of the many thousands of lifeforms discovered there.

“This is a thriving ecosystem,” Amon said. “Sure, many of the animals are small in size, but that doesn’t make them any less important.”

This image is of a new species from a new order of Cnidaria collected at 4,100 meters in the Clarion Clipperton Zone. This creature depends on sponge stalks attached to nodules to live. Photo courtesy the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Photo courtesy National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The deadline pulling everyone to the table

From March 21 to April 1, the International Seabed Authority is meeting at its headquarters in Kingston, Jamaica.

Formed in 1996, the ISA has 168 countries as members and issues rules that govern 54% of the world’s oceans — all the oceans outside of the Exclusive Economic Zones of the countries that border them. It’s charged with managing mineral resources in the floor of the ocean “for the benefit of humankind as a whole,” and “has the mandate to ensure the effective protection of the marine environment from harmful effects that may arise from deep-seabed-related activities,” the organization says on its website.

The ISA has granted approvals for 22 contractors to explore metals in the deep seabed, and 19 of these exploration applications are for polymetallic nodules in the Clarion Clipperton Zone.

The Boston Metal Company holds three of the licenses, which it was able to obtain by being sponsored by the tiny Pacific island nations of Nauru, Tonga and Kiribati. But actually taking the metals from the seabed requires an exploitation license.

This map from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows where the nodules are most abundant in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone.

Photo and map courtesy the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

On June 25, 2021, the President of Nauru submitted a letter to the ISA requesting that the organization have the rules and regulations finalized so that this exploitation application could be approved to begin work in two years. That two-year deadline is coming due in a matter of months.

Critics of the idea of deep-sea mining have said the process is being rushed.

The letter from Nauru was submitted “right in the middle of the pandemic when no meetings were held face to face, triggered a rule in the Law of the Sea that puts pressure on the ISA and its member states to finalize regulations within two years – or consider giving Nauru and its company a provisional license to begin mining with no regulations in place,” Jessica Battle, the lead for World Wildlife Fund‘s global No Deep Seabed Mining Initiative, told CNBC.

The rule was meant to be a sort of “safety valve” in case negotiations got stuck, but the negotiations are happening and Battle says that rule has placed too much pressure to reach a decision before all the research is done.

“Should Nauru be given a license, then the race is on to mine the ocean, with unknown but certainly dire consequences for the ocean,” Battle said.

Pradeep Singh, an expert on ocean governance, environmental law and climate policy told CNBC that “allowing mining activities to commence at this point in time would be a decision that could be legally challenged.”

Singh said the future of deep-sea mining is still undecided because it is the ISA’s duty to represent all of the 168 member states’ viewpoints. The members can “agree to delay or postpone” the move to mining.

“Putting legality aside, such a decision would also lack legitimacy,” said Singh, who is a member of the International Union for Conservation of Nature‘s delegation to the ISA. “The ISA was established to act on behalf of humankind as a whole and for the best interest of humankind — and not to promote the interest of industry or rather one private actor in this case.”

Billions of dollars on the line

The looming deadline comes as demand for these metals increases.

Nickel, copper, manganese and cobalt are strategic minerals in the push toward clean energy, as many of them are essential in batteries and electrical infrastructure, according to Andrew Miller, chief operating officer of the metals intelligence company Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.

“There is of course an opportunity for this to fill some of the void facing strategic battery raw material markets over the years to come,” he said.

A a polymetallic nodule collected during environmental baseline campaigns off the floor of the deep sea by The Metals Company.

Photo courtesy The Metals Company

“The drive towards decarbonization requires development of new technologies, which often depend on supply of more scarce or strategic materials,” Miller told CNBC. “If we are to meet these demands, the supply base of these materials will have to scale at an unprecedented rate. That’s what’s behind the drive for diversity of supply on land-based mining, as well as exploration of alternatives such as deep-sea mining.” 

Barron estimates that The Metals Company’s single NORI-D Project, has a lifetime adjusted earnings value of $85 billion, after paying about $8.5 billion to the countries that are sponsoring it. And that single project is only about 22% of the total resources the company can claim.

The Metals Company isn’t alone in its interest in the region of the international waters.

On March 16, Norway’s Loke Marine Minerals announced it acquired two deep-sea mineral licenses located in the Clarion Clipperton Zone previously owned by Lockheed Martin’s UK Seabed Resources.

For Barron, seeing Lockheed sell its stake in the space is a positive sign for the industry.

“Lockheed has been a pure passenger in this industry,” Barron told CNBC. “They were there in the 1970s, but they’ve been no help to the industry whatsoever. They are a big name, but they don’t do anything. They are a defense contractor. Their business is making bombs and warplanes. So the fact that we’ve got an active company from Norway, owned by some of the state entities of Norway, I think it’s a massive positive for the industry and we’re delighted about it.”

Finding consensus for the Wild West of the sea

The pilot nodule collector vehicle designed by Allseas for use by The Metals Company. Photo provided by The Metals Company.

Photo courtesy The Metals Company

The WWF and Greenpeace worked together to coordinate the call to get businesses to sign on to the moratorium.

“Our goal is to eliminate primary users from the market, so that even if the industry passes political hurdles, there will be less of a demand for metals extracted from the seafloor,” said Arlo Hemphill, the global corporate lead of Greenpeace’s Stop Deep Sea Mining Campaign. “Companies like Volkswagen and Google have substantial influence in the countries they work, so their support of the political moratorium on deep-sea mining is also of value here.”

The Metals Company, on the flipside, published on Tuesday a lifecycle assessment finding that determined the environmental impact of the metals coming out of the NORI-D project will be less damaging than land mining for nearly every category of battery components.

But Amon worries that the thesis being measured is wrong in the first place, and that deep-sea mining will simply add to, rather than replace, terrestrial mining.

“What is likely to happen is that if deep-sea mining begins, both will occur, one is not going to cancel out the other,” she said.

She also said that further innovation in battery technology could provide an alternative to the current technologies that are so heavily dependent on these minerals, So the decision shouldn’t be rushed.

A 40-centimeter long elasipod sea cucumber seen here about to be collected as part of an expidition of the Clarion Clipperton Zone by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This sea cucumber has92 feet, seven lips, and numerous spikey processes, and was found at 3,500 meters.

Photo courtesy the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“Ultimately, this is, this is about collective decision making,” Amon said. “We’re talking about areas beyond national jurisdiction, or international waters, which is where mineral resources belong to everyone on the planet.”

But Barron says mining will happen regardless, as the need for these metals is growing. So it’s better to decide than to wait.

“The problem is if we don’t get this agreed, it will just happen without regulations,” Barron said. “And that’s going to be really bad. Imagine that there’s no reporting. You could just not take the care and consideration that companies like us do. It could be the Wild West, and that would be a disaster for our oceans and for our planet.”

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Tesla must pay portion of $329 million in damages after fatal Autopilot crash, jury says

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Tesla must pay portion of 9 million in damages after fatal Autopilot crash, jury says

A jury in Miami has determined that Tesla should be held partly liable for a fatal 2019 Autopilot crash, and must compensate the family of the deceased and an injured survivor a portion of $329 million in damages.

Tesla’s payout is based on $129 million in compensatory damages, and $200 million in punitive damages against the company.

The jury determined Tesla should be held 33% responsible for the fatal crash. That means the automaker would be responsible for about $42.5 million in compensatory damages. In cases like these, punitive damages are typically capped at three times compensatory damages.

The plaintiffs’ attorneys told CNBC on Friday that because punitive damages were only assessed against Tesla, they expect the automaker to pay the full $200 million, bringing total payments to around $242.5 million.

Tesla said it plans to appeal the decision.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs had asked the jury to award damages based on $345 million in total damages. The trial in the Southern District of Florida started on July 14.

The suit centered around who shouldered the blame for the deadly crash in Key Largo, Florida. A Tesla owner named George McGee was driving his Model S electric sedan while using the company’s Enhanced Autopilot, a partially automated driving system.

While driving, McGee dropped his mobile phone that he was using and scrambled to pick it up. He said during the trial that he believed Enhanced Autopilot would brake if an obstacle was in the way. His Model S accelerated through an intersection at just over 60 miles per hour, hitting a nearby empty parked car and its owners, who were standing on the other side of their vehicle.

Naibel Benavides, who was 22, died on the scene from injuries sustained in the crash. Her body was discovered about 75 feet away from the point of impact. Her boyfriend, Dillon Angulo, survived but suffered multiple broken bones, a traumatic brain injury and psychological effects.

“Tesla designed Autopilot only for controlled access highways yet deliberately chose not to restrict drivers from using it elsewhere, alongside Elon Musk telling the world Autopilot drove better than humans,” Brett Schreiber, counsel for the plaintiffs, said in an e-mailed statement on Friday. “Tesla’s lies turned our roads into test tracks for their fundamentally flawed technology, putting everyday Americans like Naibel Benavides and Dillon Angulo in harm’s way.”

Following the verdict, the plaintiffs’ families hugged each other and their lawyers, and Angulo was “visibly emotional” as he embraced his mother, according to NBC.

Here is Tesla’s response to CNBC:

“Today’s verdict is wrong and only works to set back automotive safety and jeopardize Tesla’s and the entire industry’s efforts to develop and implement life-saving technology. We plan to appeal given the substantial errors of law and irregularities at trial.

Even though this jury found that the driver was overwhelmingly responsible for this tragic accident in 2019, the evidence has always shown that this driver was solely at fault because he was speeding, with his foot on the accelerator – which overrode Autopilot – as he rummaged for his dropped phone without his eyes on the road. To be clear, no car in 2019, and none today, would have prevented this crash.

This was never about Autopilot; it was a fiction concocted by plaintiffs’ lawyers blaming the car when the driver – from day one – admitted and accepted responsibility.”

The verdict comes as Musk, Tesla’s CEO, is trying to persuade investors that his company can pivot into a leader in autonomous vehicles, and that its self-driving systems are safe enough to operate fleets of robotaxis on public roads in the U.S.

Tesla shares dipped 1.8% on Friday and are now down 25% for the year, the biggest drop among tech’s megacap companies.

The verdict could set a precedent for Autopilot-related suits against Tesla. About a dozen active cases are underway focused on similar claims involving incidents where Autopilot or Tesla’s FSD— Full Self-Driving (Supervised) — had been in use just before a fatal or injurious crash.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration initiated a probe in 2021 into possible safety defects in Tesla’s Autopilot systems. During the course of that investigation, Tesla made changes, including a number of over-the-air software updates.

The agency then opened a second probe, which is ongoing, evaluating whether Tesla’s “recall remedy” to resolve issues with the behavior of its Autopilot, especially around stationary first responder vehicles, had been effective.

The NHTSA has also warned Tesla that its social media posts may mislead drivers into thinking its cars are capable of functioning as robotaxis, even though owners manuals say the cars require hands-on steering and a driver attentive to steering and braking at all times.

A site that tracks Tesla-involved collisions, TeslaDeaths.com, has reported at least 58 deaths resulting from incidents where Tesla drivers had Autopilot engaged just before impact.

Read the jury’s verdict below.

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Crypto wobbles into August as Trump’s new tariffs trigger risk-off sentiment

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Crypto wobbles into August as Trump's new tariffs trigger risk-off sentiment

A screen showing the price of various cryptocurrencies against the US dollar displayed at a Crypto Panda cryptocurrency store in Hong Kong, China, on Monday, Feb. 3, 2025. 

Lam Yik | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The crypto market slid Friday after President Donald Trump unveiled his modified “reciprocal” tariffs on dozens of countries.

The price of bitcoin showed relative strength, hovering at the flat line while ether, XRP and Binance Coin fell 2% each. Overnight, bitcoin dropped to a low of $114,110.73.

The descent triggered a wave of long liquidations, which forces traders to sell their assets at market price to settle their debts, pushing prices lower. Bitcoin saw $172 million in liquidations across centralized exchanges in the past 24 hours, according to CoinGlass, and ether saw $210 million.

Crypto-linked stocks suffered deeper losses. Coinbase led the way, down 15% following its disappointing second-quarter earnings report. Circle fell 4%, Galaxy Digital lost 2%, and ether treasury company Bitmine Immersion was down 8%. Bitcoin proxy MicroStrategy was down by 5%.

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Bitcoin falls below $115,000

The stock moves came amid a new wave of risk off sentiment after President Trump issued new tariffs ranging between 10% and 41%, triggering worries about increasing inflation and the Federal Reserve’s ability to cut interest rates. In periods of broad based derisking, crypto tends to get hit as investors pull out of the most speculative and volatile assets. Technical resilience and institutional demand for bitcoin and ether are helping support their prices.

“After running red hot in July, this is a healthy strategic cooldown. Markets aren’t reacting to a crisis, they’re responding to the lack of one,” said Ben Kurland, CEO at crypto research platform DYOR. “With no new macro catalyst on the horizon, capital is rotating out of speculative assets and into safer ground … it’s a calculated pause.”

Crypto is coming off a winning month but could soon hit the brakes amid the new macro uncertainty, and in a month usually characterized by lower trading volumes and increased volatility. Bitcoin gained 8% in July, according to Coin Metrics, while ether surged more than 49%.

Ether ETFs saw more than $5 billion in inflows in July alone (with just a single day of outflows of $1.8 million on July 2), bringing it’s total cumulative inflows to $9.64 to date. Bitcoin ETFs saw $114 million in outflows in the final trading session of July, bringing its monthly inflows to about $6 billion out of a cumulative $55 billion.

Don’t miss these cryptocurrency insights from CNBC Pro:

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Google has dropped more than 50 DEI-related organizations from its funding list

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Google has dropped more than 50 DEI-related organizations from its funding list

Google CEO Sundar Pichai gestures to the crowd during Google’s annual I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California, on May 20, 2025.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Google has purged more than 50 organizations related to diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, from a list of organizations that the tech company provides funding to, according to a new report.

The company has removed a total of 214 groups from its funding list while adding 101, according to a new report from tech watchdog organization The Tech Transparency Project. The watchdog group cites the most recent public list of organizations that receive the most substantial contributions from Google’s U.S. Government Affairs and Public Policy team.

The largest category of purged groups were DEI-related, with a total of 58 groups removed from Google’s funding list, TTP found. The dropped groups had mission statements that included the words “diversity, “equity,” “inclusion,” or “race,” “activism,” and “women.” Those are also terms the Trump administration officials have reportedly told federal agencies to limit or avoid.

In response to the report, Google spokesperson José Castañeda told CNBC that the list reflects contributions made in 2024 and that it does not reflect all contributions made by other teams within the company.

“We contribute to hundreds of groups from across the political spectrum that advocate for pro-innovation policies, and those groups change from year to year based on where our contributions will have the most impact,” Castañeda said in an email.

Organizations that were removed from Google’s list include the African American Community Service Agency, which seeks to “empower all Black and historically excluded communities”; the Latino Leadership Alliance, which is dedicated to “race equity affecting the Latino community”; and Enroot, which creates out-of-school experiences for immigrant kids. 

The organization funding purge is the latest to come as Google began backtracking some of its commitments to DEI over the last couple of years. That pull back came due to cost cutting to prioritize investments into artificial intelligence technology as well as the changing political and legal landscape amid increasing national anti-DEI policies.

Over the past decade, Silicon Valley and other industries used DEI programs to root out bias in hiring, promote fairness in the workplace and advance the careers of women and people of color — demographics that have historically been overlooked in the workplace.

However, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision to end affirmative action at colleges led to additional backlash against DEI programs in conservative circles.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order upon taking office in January to end the government’s DEI programs and directed federal agencies to combat what the administration considers “illegal” private-sector DEI mandates, policies and programs. Shortly after, Google’s Chief People Officer Fiona Cicconi told employees that the company would end DEI-related hiring “aspirational goals” due to new federal requirements and Google’s categorization as a federal contractor.

Despite DEI becoming such a divisive term, many companies are continuing the work but using different language or rolling the efforts under less-charged terminology, like “learning” or “hiring.”

Even Google CEO Sundar Pichai maintained the importance diversity plays in its workforce at an all-hands meeting in March.

“We’re a global company, we have users around the world, and we think the best way to serve them well is by having a workforce that represents that diversity,” Pichai said at the time.

One of the groups dropped from Google’s contributions list is the National Network to End Domestic Violence, which provides training, assistance, and public awareness campaigns on the issue of violence against women, the TTP report found. The group had been on Google’s list of funded organizations for at least nine years and continues to name the company as one of its corporate partners.

Google said it still gave $75,000 to the National Network to End Domestic Violence in 2024 but did not say why the group was removed from the public contributions list.

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