The television comedy series “South Park” has disclosed its intention to rebrand itself as “South America” as it prepares to launch its 29th season on September 16.

The show’s creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, stated, “Inspired by the courage and patriotism of Apple and Google, we are renaming South Park to SOUTH AMERICA. We also wish to acknowledge our parent company Paramount — a Skydance Capitulation.”

Parker and Stone’s remarks follow U.S. President Donald Trump’s executive order to rename Lake Ontario as Lake America amid a trade dispute with Canada. Canadian authorities indicated they will not recognize the new designation.

Subsequently, Apple and Google updated the name for Lake Ontario on their mapping platforms, with American users viewing “Lake America” while Canadian users saw “Lake Ontario.”

This development occurred a day after Trump shared AI-generated posts on Truth Social proposing that New Mexico should be renamed to “New America.”

In the previous year, the president employed an executive order to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, prompting international criticism.

“South Park” received an Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program for the “Sermon on the Mount” episode, which debuted last year and satirizes Trump’s presidency.

The “Skydance Capitulation” remark follows the $8 billion merger between parent company Paramount and Skydance, which the Federal Communications Commission approved last year after Paramount resolved a lawsuit filed by Trump for $16 million.

Trump claimed that an interview aired on CBS’s “60 Minutes” in 2024 with then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris was edited in a misleading manner.

Paramount’s CBS News division announced in July 2025 that it was discontinuing comedian Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show,” attributing the decision to financial constraints, shortly after Colbert accused Paramount of giving Trump a “big fat bribe.” The final episode of the program was broadcast in May.

Paramount and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

President Donald Trump said the U.S. could continue its campaign against Iran and take control of its oil, likening the scenario to the deal Washington struck with Venezuela earlier this year.

“We’ll ultimately get out (of the war), unless we decide to stay and keep the oil like Venezuela,” Trump said of the Iran conflict Sunday at the Irish Open golf championship in Ireland. He added that U.S. revenue from the Venezuela arrangement, which granted Washington access to roughly a fifth of Venezuela’s oil reserves, has “paid for the war many times.”

Under the agreement reached in August, Venezuela ceded majority U.S. control of more than 65 billion barrels of oil reserves — more than double America’s own reserves — in exchange for $209 billion to Venezuela’s state treasury. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the deal would also bring close to $100 billion in private investment to reinvigorate its economy.

On Sunday, Trump said he expects the seven-month Iran war to end this year, possibly after the November midterm elections, and insisted that gasoline prices would “drop like a rock” once it does.

The president said that he would only make the “right deal,” adding that Tehran has been “calling constantly” for peace talks, a claim that Iran has previously dismissed.

Trump’s comments came as diplomacy over the Strait of Hormuz stalled.

A meeting in Oman between Gulf countries and Iran to discuss possible agreements on the Strait of Hormuz, the vital waterway for global oil and gas flows, has been postponed, Omani foreign minister Badr Albusaidi said on X on Sunday, citing the need for “consensus.”

Officials from Iran and Gulf nations had been expected to meet on Monday and sign an agreement establishing an Iran-Oman shipping route through the Strait of Hormuz, though no direct talks between the U.S. and Iran were ongoing.

The Strait of Hormuz has been subjected to an Iranian and later U.S. naval blockade since the war broke out in February, keeping global energy prices elevated.

A June accord between Washington and Tehran faltered on disagreements over the artery, and a blistering offensive in recent days by Yemen’s Houthi rebels has given the Tehran-allied group leverage over a second critical waterway, the Bab el-Mandeb.

Ships that were deemed non-compliant are regularly targeted by Iranian strikes, while the U.S. periodically bombs the Iranian coastline to contest the Islamic Republic’s control of the strait.

Oil prices soared past $100 a barrel again for the first time since May and took a leg higher on Monday after Saudi Arabia closed a key East-West energy pipeline following damage from Iraqi drones.

U.S. West Texas Intermediate futures were up 2.3% to $102.39 per barrel. Brent crude, the international benchmark, traded 2.4% higher to $107.11 a barrel.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman now says his company will not go public this year, citing growing concerns about AI safety.

In an interview with Fortune published Saturday, Altman said that an IPO now would be “ill-advised.” The decision pushes one of the most anticipated IPOs in history until at least 2027 and gives the clearest sign yet that mounting concerns about increasingly powerful AI are beginning to reshape the industry’s business plans.

OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told employees just last month that the company would likely go public in 2027 or even sooner, if “our business continues to inflect.”

Altman’s comments came on the same day that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging AI companies to slow how quickly they improve their most advanced models. Altman and Elon Musk quickly backed the proposal in social media posts, an unusual show of agreement among three fierce rivals.

In his essay, Amodei proposed a three-step plan aimed at tempering the pace of development without “sacrificing commercial advantage or the United States’ lead in AI.” Anthropic is actively gearing up for what is expected to be a historic IPO, though the company has not officially disclosed when it plans to debut.

The sudden alignment among Altman, Amodei and Musk shows how quickly concern over AI has moved from the margins to the center of the industry — and is now beginning to collide with its enormous commercial ambitions.

The essay urged artificial intelligence companies to pace how quickly they improve model capabilities. The move comes amid a growing chorus of researchers calling for a coordinated deceleration.

Pressure is building in Washington, where lawmakers in both parties are calling for new AI safeguards and demanding tech leaders testify after a rash of cyberattacks were carried out without direct human control.

Beyond the nation’s capital, state and local officials are also confronting growing outrage against AI data centers and their demands on power, water and communities. With midterm elections approaching, AI is becoming a key issue for both parties.

Concerns around AI’s capabilities

Anthropic has “unilaterally” committed to the first step of the plan, Amodei said, which grants third-party evaluators employee-level access to the company to verify safety practices and report incidents. The second step encourages leading AI companies within democratic countries to coordinate and establish common safety standards, and the third calls for coordination between democratic governments and authoritarian governments.

“To be clear, pacing does not mean halting model training or technical progress, but ensuring companies take adequate time to align and safeguard their models, and for third party evaluators to confirm this,” Amodei wrote.

The essay landed after an Anthropic researcher set off a firestorm on social media this week by announcing he quit his job at the company. Jacob Coxon, who has also worked as a researcher at Anthropic’s chief rival, OpenAI, said he resigned out of concern that Anthropic and OpenAI are “gambling with our lives.” He said the people building AI “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

While extreme, concerns about the potential for AI to cause human extinction or other catastrophic events are not new in AI research circles. In 2023, for instance, prominent AI researchers and executives, including Amodei and OpenAI’s Altman, signed a statement that said, “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

Amodei said Saturday that while pausing or slowing AI development has been floated since 2023, it made “little sense” to do so at that time. He said models were not powerful enough to take action in the real world at that point, and they were also not yet capable of “significant deception, manipulation, cheating, or cyberattacks.”

“I continue to believe that AI can enormously improve the quality of human life. My desire to achieve these benefits is undimmed,” Amodei wrote. “But the benefits will only be achieved if we build the technology in the right way, and — so long as we use the time we gain well — it is worth taking unusually deliberate care to get it right.”

After his essay published, Amodei emphasized that finding the right speed of development will be paramount. Slowing down too much could give autocratic governments an edge, he said in a CNN interview that aired later Saturday.

“If we go too slow, I still believe that the wrong people will be in charge of the technology. And that, again, will bring the probability of things going wrong very high,” he said.

Sarah Heck, Anthropic’s head of public policy, lauded the essay and called on lawmakers to do their part in building guardrails.

“The government has a critical role to play here, including blocking the sale of the most advanced chips to adversarial nations like China, enacting a national law requiring testing of frontier models, with the power to block the most advanced models that prove to be unsafe,” she said, in an X post.

Support for a voluntary slowdown

Amodei’s essay received cheers from many industry researchers and executives on Saturday, including Altman. In a post on X, Altman said he agreed with Amodei that the industry needs to pace the development of advanced AI capabilities. Altman said the subject has been a “primary topic” of discussion at OpenAI in recent weeks.

“Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same,” Altman said. “We’ll have more to share soon.”

Earlier this month, OpenAI’s chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, published a blog post warning that no AI company has “solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer.” In the AI industry, alignment refers to the work by AI developers to ensure that the system behaves in accordance with human values and intentions.

Pachocki said he expects and hopes for voluntary slowdowns to become “commonplace until shared safety bars are established.”

Musk also expressed support for a slowdown on Saturday, writing in a post on X that, “Dario is right.”

Musk, whose competing AI startup xAI was acquired by his rocket company SpaceX

“Everyone I met was highly competent and cared a great deal about doing the right thing,” Musk wrote at the time. “No one set off my evil detector.”

Amodei wrote Saturday that he believes AI could still “dramatically raise the quality of human life,” but that the risks need to be taken seriously.

“I believe that if slowing down bought us even an extra year or two before models reach critical levels of capability, and we used that time to advance alignment, we could greatly reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong,” he said.

WATCH: Anthropic AI researcher says company is ‘gambling with our lives’

Correction: A previous version of this story misspelled the name of OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar.