General Motors’ announcement on Tuesday that its upcoming quarterly results will include a $1.6 billion charge from its electric vehicle investments is the latest in a string of troubling EV-related disclosures from big automakers.

Ford CEO Jim Farley said late last month that he expects demand for fully electric vehicles to be slashed in half following the end of a federal tax credit program. His prediction came after Stellantis, the parent company of auto brands including Chrysler and Jeep, said it was scrapping its target of producing nothing but electric vehicles in Europe by 2030, and backed off ambitious targets for the U.S., notably for Chrysler.

The industry, which was already facing hurdles imposed by the Trump administration, faces a hefty dose of uncertainty now that consumers can no longer take advantage of $7,500 tax credits for purchasing EVs. The incentives expired at the end of September as part of President Trump’s signature spending bill.

As automakers reset investor expectations, one name has been notably absent from the conversation: Tesla.

Elon Musk’s company is by far the largest seller of EVs in the U.S., though its market share has been sliding as competition has increased and its brand value has declined. Tesla’s share of the all-electric market in the U.S. was estimated at 43.1% at the end of September, down from 49% at the end of last year, according to data provided to CNBC from Motor Intelligence

Tesla is slated to report third-quarter results next week, and Wall Street will be eager to hear what kind of demand the company expects with the credits no longer available. Tesla recently unveiled stripped-down, lower-cost variants of its popular Model Y SUV and Model 3 sedans, offsetting some of the effective price increases that come with the loss of incentives.

Steve Greenfield, general partner at investment firm Automotive Ventures, said the retreat of legacy automakers from the segment could be good news for Tesla as its market share may start to rebound. He said in an email that the company has “very strong brand loyalty.”

“Chances are, most Tesla buyers will continue to stay in the brand, as they buy their next new car,” Greenfield said.

However, significant challenges loom. Interest in battery electric vehicles “is very likely to shrink dramatically” in the fourth quarter, he said, due to the “pull-ahead of demand,” as consumers rushed to buy EVs before the credit expired. As the year ends, Tesla will likely face a “double whammy,” Greenfield said, from reduced BEV sales and lower margins on the cars they do sell.

Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Investors have become more bullish. Following a 36% slump in the first quarter, the stock has rallied and is now up more than 7% for the year, aided by Musk’s purchase of about $1 billion worth of Tesla stock in September.

The brutal start to the year was linked to a consumer backlash in the U.S. and Europe in response to Musk’s incendiary political rhetoric, his work for President Trump slashing the federal workforce, and his endorsements of far-right groups including Germany’s AfD party.

Earlier this month, Tesla reported a 7% year-over-year increase in quarterly vehicle deliveries for the third quarter. That marked a turnaround after two consecutive quarterly declines to start the year.

“It’s not just a retreat of everybody else, and Tesla gets to run away with the market,” said Mark Wakefield, global automotive market lead at Alix Partners, in an interview.

Even before the Republican spending bill in July, consumer demand for fully electric vehicles had “already kind of flatlined a bit,” said Wakefield. Car buyers have been looking for a “breakthrough moment” where EVs would become cost competitive with hybrid or gas-powered models.

Wakefield added that “this market needs a sense of newness,” and that the new, lower-priced Model Y and Model 3 options are not exactly “earth shattering.”

The Trump administration isn’t making life easy.

Robbie Orvis, a senior director at Energy Innovation, a nonpartisan climate policy think tank, told CNBC the automakers’ writedowns were expected and stem entirely from policy changes beyond just the tax credits.

The Trump White House has also “revoked California’s waiver to set its own vehicle standards, revoked billions in funding for EV chargers and for auto plants to retool to build EVs, and is in the process of undoing vehicle tailpipe standards that would encourage the adoption of EVs,” Orvis said.

Those policies, along with tariffs, have already caused billions of dollars in losses for U.S. automakers, which means they aren’t in a position to invest in new market segments, Orvis said.

Tesla is experiencing its share of that pain, and it’s showing up most acutely in international markets.

“Chinese automakers are rapidly displacing U.S. automakers in foreign markets as they are able to offer cheaper, higher-quality new cars, particularly EVs, in markets where there is large and growing demand for these cars,” Orvis said.

Musk, meanwhile, continues to try and focus investor attention elsewhere.

He insists the future of the company hinges on robotaxis and humanoid robotics, two markets that Tesla has yet to meaningfully crack. Tesla is testing its Robotaxi-branded service in limited capacity in some cities, but is way behind Alphabet’s Waymo, which is rapidly expanding commercial operations.

Musk said in March that Tesla aimed to make 5,000 of its Optimus robots this year, but key departures from the group have thrown that plan into question.

In September, Musk wrote on X that “~80% of Tesla’s value will be Optimus.” Last year, he predicted that Optimus robots would someday turn Tesla into a $25 trillion company, which was equal to more than half of the entire value of the S&P 500 at the time of his comment.

It’s a story that’s compelling enough for some longtime Tesla bulls and Musk fanboys. But at the moment, the company still relies on sales of EVs to drive its business. And in the U.S., while Tesla’s market share may be poised to rise, the overall pie — at least in the near term — appears to be shrinking.

— CNBC’s Mike Wayland contributed to this report

WATCH: Former Ford CEO says EV market didn’t develop way automakers thought

Anthropic on Wednesday announced Claude Haiku 4.5, a small artificial intelligence model that’s available as a lower-cost offering for all of the company’s users. 

The model is fast and can outperform other larger models that were considered cutting edge just months ago, Anthropic said. 

Claude Haiku 4.5 is better at using computers than Claude Sonnet 4, for instance, which is a midsized model the company launched in May. It performs similarly to Claude Sonnet 4 and OpenAI’s most recent model, GPT-5, at coding, according to SWE-bench Verified, a test set that measures an AI system’s software coding abilities.

“It punches way above its weight,” Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s chief product officer, told CNBC in an interview. 

Claude Haiku 4.5 is available to Anthropic’s free users, and it’s now the cheapest model available to paid users.

Anthropic is an AI startup that develops a family of large language models called Claude. The company assigns new numbers to the models as they advance across generations, but the smallest model in the family is typically called Haiku, the midsized model is called Sonnet and the largest model is Opus. 

After OpenAI burst onto the scene with the launch of its chatbot ChatGPT in 2022, Anthropic launched a rival product, Claude, the following year. It’s powered by Anthropic’s family of models, and users can choose between free and paid tiers. 

The launch of Claude Haiku 4.5 comes just weeks after the company announced Claude Sonnet 4.5 in September and Claude Opus 4.1 in August. Anthropic is working to release another model, likely an updated version of Opus, by the end of this year or early next year, Krieger said.

For paid users, Haiku models are typically around one-third of the cost of Anthropic’s Sonnet models, while Sonnet models are one-fifth of the cost of its Opus models, Krieger said. Anthropic’s free users can still choose to use Claude Sonnet 4.5, but they’ll get more capacity out of Claude Haiku 4.5 since it’s smaller, he added. 

Claude Sonnet 4.5 is still Anthropic’s best-performing model, but the company said Claude Haiku 4.5 is ideal for users looking for fast, accurate answers.

“Even for my own use, even though it is not as smart as Sonnet, I’ve started defaulting to it on Claude, especially in the mobile app, because it’s just much faster getting an answer,” Krieger said. 

The two models can also work together. Anthropic said Claude Sonnet 4.5 can create multi-step plans to solve complex problems, and Claude Haiku 4.5 can complete subtasks within those plans, for example. 

Running the models in parallel could be particularly useful for businesses that want to use AI to tackle longer-term projects, Krieger said.

“You could have Haiku monitoring financial streams of data – and because it’s a smaller, cheaper, faster model, it can do that at a higher volume – and then pass off its early insights to Sonnet to do some deeper analysis,” he said. 

Anthropic, which was No. 4 on CNBC’s 2025 Disruptor 50 list and is valued at $183 billion, serves more than 300,000 business customers. Its annual revenue run rate is approaching $7 billion this month, according to an Anthropic spokesperson.

The company has been racing to keep up with competitors like Google and OpenAI, whose valuation has swelled to $500 billion. Following the launch of GPT-5 in August, OpenAI has inked several multibillion-dollar infrastructure deals and released a short-form video app called Sora.

The breakneck pace of the industry doesn’t afford Anthropic much time to get comfortable after a launch. While the company was carrying out the training for Claude Sonnet 4.5, it had already kicked off work on Claude Haiku 4.5.

“We’re really firing on all cylinders,” Krieger said. 

WATCH: Anthropic unveils overseas hiring push as rivalry with OpenAI goes global

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Here are five key things investors need to know to start the trading day:

The volatile U.S.-China relationship hit another bump yesterday when President Donald Trump said he is considering placing a cooking oil embargo on Beijing in retaliation for it’s refusal to buy U.S. soybeans. The ongoing feud has led to choppy stock market trading over recent days.

Here’s the latest:

• In a Truth Social post published shortly before yesterday’s closing bell, Trump wrote that China’s refusal to buy American soybeans is “an Economically Hostile Act.” Trump threatened blocking all business with China “having to do with Cooking Oil.”
• China was the top buyer of the U.S. crop last year but has not purchased any soybeans since May, as the countries have sparred over trade policy.
• The White House has criticized China in recent days and threatened a new 100% tariff, following China’s tightening of export restrictions for rare earth materials.
• U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told CNBC yesterday that China’s future actions will determine if the higher levies are actually implemented. Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said China’s latest moves are an attempt “to pull everybody else down with them.”
• Stocks have whipsawed in recent sessions as investors monitored the latest developments. The S&P 500 ended yesterday’s session in the red after Trump’s post stymied the index’s attempted comeback.
• Follow live market updates here.

While Trump has repeatedly said that his administration’s mass layoffs are targeting “Democrat Agencies” amid the shutdown, the cuts also appear to be affecting bipartisan efforts. At the Treasury Department — where nearly 1,450 federal employees have received reduction-in-force notices — the entire 83-person staff of the bipartisan-supported Community Development Financial Institutions Fund was cut.

As the shutdown enters its third week, air traffic controllers have handed out leaflets at some airports urging the public to pressure Congress to reopen the government. Some airports meanwhile are refusing to play a video from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem blaming Democrats for the shutdown.

With September’s figures now in the books, Boeing is on track for its highest annual plane delivery count since 2018. The company said yesterday that it delivered 55 aircraft last month, bringing its total to 440 airplanes in the first nine months of 2025.

As CNBC’s Leslie Josephs notes, Boeing has been able to stabilize its production following several safety and production crises. Executives are aiming to increase production of Boeing’s pricey 737 Max planes.

Boeing on Tuesday also received approval from European Union antitrust regulators for its $4.7 billion acquisition of Spirit AeroSystems. The plane maker agreed to sell some of Spirit’s businesses to remedy competition concerns.

The Justice Department seized around $15 billion worth of bitcoin from the cryptocurrency wallets of Chen Zhi, who prosecutors allege ran a large-scale “pig butchering” fraud operation in Cambodia. Zhi, who remains at large, is charged with wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy.

It is the largest-ever forfeiture action sought by the DOJ.

Survey results from JPMorgan highlight just how differently Americans in different income brackets view the economy.

— CNBC’s Leslie Josephs, Dan Mangan, Lillian Rizzo, Kevin Breuninger, Spencer Kimball, Jeff Cox and Liz Napolitano contributed to this report. Josephine Rozzelle edited this edition.