The Centaur Weekly | AI acceleration, geopolitical risks, and economic disruptions are converging at the same time. This newsletter, curated by Cenk Sidar, breaks down the major news, analyzes why it actually matters, and highlights the risks and opportunities shaping power, markets, and technology.US–Iran Negotiations: What to Negotiate?
Iran’s president said Tuesday that he has instructed the country’s foreign minister to pursue “fair and equitable negotiations” with the United States. The statement came hours after a U.S. military aircraft shot down an Iranian drone that was approaching its flight path. Despite the incident, the White House confirmed that talks remain on track, with Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff expected to meet Iranian officials in Turkey later this week. The administration framed the engagement as part of a broader effort to reduce regional tensions and reopen dormant diplomatic channels.
Diplomacy is always preferable to escalation, but the question here is not how to negotiate it is what, exactly, is being negotiated. The Iranian regime is not simply a difficult counterpart; it is the core problem. Iran’s population faces an entrenched authoritarian system that has shown little willingness to reform, let alone move toward meaningful democratization or secular governance. Recent protest waves, met with mass arrests and thousands of deaths, underscored that reality. External engagement that stops short of addressing the regime’s internal behavior has a long track record of stabilizing power structures rather than changing them.
This pattern is familiar. In Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro was effectively cornered and briefly neutralized, yet Washington ultimately returned to negotiations with the same regime, trading pressure for limited concessions while the power structure remained untouched. The same risk applies here. Washington appears focused on short-term objectives de-escalation, regional calm, and likely energy considerations—rather than outcomes that would alter Iran’s domestic trajectory. Oil, implicitly or explicitly, is almost certainly part of the calculus. That may serve immediate U.S. interests, but it sends a clear signal to Iranian protestors and pro-democracy groups that their leverage is expendable. If these talks deliver limited concessions without systemic change, the result will not be resolution, but managed stagnation—and a further erosion of hope inside Iran.
Trump Ties Tariff Relief to India’s Russian Oil Purchases
President Trump announced a new trade deal with India that cuts U.S. tariffs on Indian goods to 18% from as high as 50%, following a call with Prime Minister Modi. The tariff hike, imposed last August, had been justified by the White House as retaliation for India’s purchase of discounted Russian oil, which Trump argued was indirectly funding Moscow’s war in Ukraine. The new agreement also includes commitments from India to lower trade barriers for U.S. goods. Trump said Modi agreed to halt Russian oil imports and instead increase purchases from the United States and potentially Venezuela.
The deal comes even as India signals strategic autonomy, deepening engagement with both China and Russia while keeping U.S. ties transactional. Whether New Delhi truly shifts its energy sourcing remains uncertain. What matters more is the pattern. Trade policy, energy flows, and geopolitics are now tightly coupled, with tariff negotiations quietly reshaping supply chains and diplomatic alignments across Asia. These moves lack the drama of Middle East crises, but they are far more durable in setting the medium-term balance of power. India has long balanced between Washington, Beijing, and Moscow. A closer relationship with Trump could pull it back toward the U.S. orbit—but only if economic and energy incentives hold. Rhetoric will matter less than price, access, and reliability.
SaaSpocalypse
Fears that AI will displace traditional software models rippled through markets on Tuesday, hitting shares of legal and enterprise software providers. The sell-off followed Anthropic’s rollout of new legal drafting and research tools within its AI assistant, fueling concerns that AI systems can increasingly replicate functions once delivered by specialized software. Investors are reassessing software’s long-assumed durability as AI reshapes value creation.
The selloff across SaaS reflects a deeper structural shift rather than a cyclical tech wobble. As the build barrier collapses (see my article a few months ago), execution is no longer scarce. AI-native tools have compressed the distance between idea and product, eroding the historical advantage of generic software vendors whose value rested on distribution and implementation friction. When companies can cheaply build tools tailored to their own workflows, the logic of buying horizontal SaaS weakens quickly. Markets are therefore moving down the software stack, penalizing smaller, task-specific vendors first. These businesses sit closest to commoditization: limited data moats, shallow integration, and low switching costs leave little protection once model capabilities become cheap and widely accessible.
The deeper shift is structural. Economic power is migrating away from software producers toward operators who pair domain expertise with judgment and execution. When building becomes trivial, differentiation moves upstream to problem selection, system design, and decision-making under ambiguity. Code is no longer the bottleneck; clarity is. That does not mean the incumbents are passive. Players like Salesforce and SAP retain distribution, balance-sheet capacity, and organizational leverage, and they will deploy that ammunition aggressively. The contest now is not about who can ship features fastest, but who can reassert control over the value chain before it finishes reordering.
📄 Why the “Why” Is the New “How.” A sharp argument for strategic independence in an era where execution is cheap and conviction is scarce. The core insight: leverage accrues to those who can define objectives clearly, not those who merely assemble tools.
https://www.globalaileaders.com/p/why-the-why-is-the-new-how?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=3plf2&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
📄 Why Does the U.S. Government Keep Shutting Down? Bloomberg’s clear-eyed breakdown of incentives, procedural traps, and political theater. Useful not for the headlines, but for understanding why shutdown risk is now structural rather than episodic.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-02/what-caused-the-2026-government-shutdown-what-are-its-effects?srnd=phx-politics
🎥 Cathie Wood: “AI and Bitcoin Are Moving Faster Than We Expected.” Cathie Wood comments on the emerging technologies and her forecasts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoW13oUTTV0
📄 “Software Is Dead.” Andreas Steno’s provocation is intentionally blunt but in the right direction. The margin is shifting away from code itself toward distribution, control, and interpretation. https://x.com/AndreasSteno/status/2018775502639796313?s=20
🎥 Why the Laws of Startup Physics Have Changed | Ben Horowitz. grounded discussion of power, scale, and durability in a post-venture-abundance world. The implicit message: strategy now matters earlier, and mistakes are more expensive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ID27juNvAfc