Commercial vessels are likely to continue navigating the perilous Strait of Hormuz despite the sinking of a Singapore-flagged container ship this week, as strong demand for Middle Eastern energy and lucrative shipping opportunities keep some operators willing to brave escalating attacks, maritime experts said.

The latest attacks on two Singapore-flagged container ships have heightened concerns over the safety of commercial shipping through one of the world’s most important maritime chokepoints. But analysts say the incidents are unlikely to bring remaining shipping activity through the Strait to a halt, even as major container lines largely stay away.

Collin Koh, a senior fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, said shipping companies were likely to continue seeking opportunities to transit the strait despite heightened security threats.

“I don’t see in the short term, that Singapore flagged ships or Singapore shipping companies would necessarily avoid taking the transit if there is an opportunity,” Koh told CNBC.

His comments follow attacks on two Singapore-registered container ships, GFS Pride and GFS Giselle, this week. GFS Pride sank after being struck by a projectile and catching fire, while GFS Giselle was damaged. Crew members from both vessels were reported safe.

Crossings through the Strait of Hormuz fell to 131 in the week ended Oct. 14, from 176 the previous week, according to maritime analytics firm Kpler, although the decline cannot be attributed solely to the latest incidents.

Dimitris Ampatzidis, maritime risk and compliance manager at Kpler, said the attacks underscored Iran’s continuing ability to threaten commercial vessels, with the risks extending beyond oil and gas transportation.

Commercial incentives persist

Koh said shipping companies around the world have continued looking for opportunities to navigate the Strait since the conflict erupted, with some operators prepared to accept higher risks and costs.

Strong demand for oil, particularly from Asia, continues to provide an incentive for tanker operators to transport energy supplies from the Persian Gulf, even as security threats complicate voyages.

Some operators may be willing to take their chances even if doing so involves paying a premium, Koh said.

Singapore Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan offered an example of how higher oil prices could make voyages through Hormuz commercially worthwhile despite the dangers.

Speaking at the Milken Institute Asia Summit last week, Balakrishnan recounted a conversation with an unnamed Gulf counterpart who said his country was earning more from oil exports than before the war by operating a so-called “Hormuz shuttle” involving about 20 very large crude carriers.

The vessels were effectively self-insured against attacks, according to the official’s account, with higher crude prices making the voyages financially worthwhile despite the risks.

“Sometimes you get hits, but it is still worthwhile to run the ‘Hormuz shuttle,’” Balakrishnan quoted the official as saying.

Despite the risks, vessels continue to transit the Strait, reflecting its commercial importance, particularly for energy shipments to Asian markets, Ampatzidis said.

However, further attacks could deter more operators from making the passage, with the impact likely to differ depending on vessel type and individual companies’ assessments of the risks, he added.

The Singapore Shipping Association also played down the prospect of a broad withdrawal of commercial shipping from the region, suggesting operators would instead adapt to changing trade conditions.

“Rather than signalling a broad withdrawal from the region, these developments are more likely to result in adjustments to trading patterns as markets respond to shifts in the supply and demand of goods and energy,” said association president TS Teo.

Shipowners would continue weighing commercial considerations against security developments and crew safety when making operational decisions, he added.

Wider shipping disruptions

While some operators remain willing to transit Hormuz, much of the global container shipping industry has already adjusted its networks to avoid the strait.

Jayendu Krishna, a director at Drewry Maritime Advisors, said none of the major container shipping lines had resumed services through Hormuz since suspending operations following the outbreak of the war in February. Only some regional operators have continued sporadic services, generally using smaller feeder vessels.

That means the immediate impact of the latest attacks on container shipping could be limited, he said.

However, a further escalation into the Gulf of Oman could pose a more serious threat to regional supply chains, particularly if it disrupts alternative ports like Khorfakkan in the United Arab Emirates and Oman’s Sohar that have become critical gateways for cargo entering Gulf countries.

“If the Gulf of Oman became a zone of kinetic activity, a significant part of supplies to the Gulf countries would be cut off, since Khorfakkan and Sohar have been a lifeline for them,” Krishna said.

In Bangkok, Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh did not indicate if another interest rate increase will occur this month, while noting the coordinated tightening by central banks worldwide and the absence of free riders.

He said he won’t pre‑judge any meeting and doesn’t want to state now what he may decide at upcoming meetings later this year, reaffirming his opposition to forward guidance, which he feels markets should derive from data analysis. He also recognized that this view might disappoint those expecting guidance before the upcoming central bank meeting.

“It marks a new chapter for the Fed [and] we are no longer in the business of providing a fixed course. We can move in any direction you prefer,” he added.

Warsh delivered his remarks during a fireside chat with IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva, on Friday, as part of the week‑long IMF‑World Bank Annual Meetings in Bangkok. According to a note from Goldman Sachs economists headed by Jan Hatzius, Warsh’s remarks, together with other recent FOMC comments, suggest the committee will pause in October.

“We still anticipate a second and final rate hike in December.” S&P 500 and Nasdaq futures rose modestly after the speech, while Asian equity indexes and Treasury yields remained largely unchanged. Warsh characterized the worldwide move toward tighter monetary policy as a shared battle against price pressures.

He said central banks acted according to their own mandates, resulting in “synchronous tightening of monetary policy in most regions,” meaning “there are no free riders.” Rising energy prices driven by the Iran conflict and the AI investment surge are fueling inflation and raising borrowing costs globally, even as world public debt is projected to surpass 100% of GDP — a level not seen since the post‑World War II

era.

The U.S. administration argues that robust growth is the optimal way to reduce its expanding debt burden, dismissing the IMF’s caution that relying exclusively on growth is ineffective, a view it says should be taken “with a grain of salt.” Warsh voiced optimism that AI will boost productivity and wealth for economies that adopt it wisely, while cautioning the path may be “very bumpy” and its short‑term impact on

jobs remains uncertain.

“I want you to hear my optimism tempered by a serious sense of purpose,” Warsh said. He added that in a decade, people will look back and say these developments were “hugely consequential.” The Fed lifted rates to a 3.75%‑4% range last month, its first increase since 2023.

Market participants assign a 72.3% probability that the Fed will hold rates steady at the Oct. 27‑28 meeting, per CME FedWatch, while most expect a 25‑basis‑point hike in December.

Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg have clashed for years, but with John Ternus taking the reins at Apple

Meta

The collaboration centers on Muse Spark Open, the most capable open-weight model released under a license that allows for limited commercial use, according to Meta. It’s an 816-billion-parameter model using a so-called mixture-of-experts architecture. As an open-weight model, developers can download the technology’s parameters, or weights, from the internet and run the model on a wide range of hardware.

Customers will be able to pair between two and four Mac Studio PCs to use Muse Spark to code, analyze video or do other agentic work. The model runs locally, instead of in the cloud, adding a layer of security and saving users money, the companies said.

Thursday’s announcement, following months of collaboration, is a sign that the AI boom has shifted historical alliances in Silicon Valley. For years, Apple and Meta regarded each other warily and avoided public partnerships, and the relationship hit rock bottom after Apple introduced privacy changes in 2021 that limited the targeting capabilities of digital ad companies.

Meta estimated in early 2022 that the change would cut its revenue that year by $10 billion.

Representatives from Apple and Meta declined to say if the Muse Spark Open collaboration was the start of a deeper relationship.

Zuckerberg posted a picture on X showing the Meta agent working on a Mac computer. He wrote, “Muse Spark Open — weights releasing today — runs great on new Mac Studios thanks to work with @johnternus and Apple.”

Ternus responded, “Congrats to the team! Amazing to run a model of Muse Spark Open’s caliber and scale this efficiently, right from your desk. Mac Studio keeps pushing the boundaries of on-device AI!”

Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang said in an interview that many powerful open-weight models are too big to be run on the majority of personal computers, but Apple’s Mac Studios make enough memory available to users so that it’s practical to run Muse Spark Open.

The move represents an important show of confidence in Meta’s rebooted AI efforts and could pose a challenge to OpenAI and Anthropic. It could also signal Apple’s growing strength in AI chips, a market that Nvidia

″We worked with Apple to bring leading Agent capabilities to your desktop for the first time on the Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios, so you know we’re really excited about this,” Wang said. Developers can download a version of the AI model from websites like Hugging Face without extra configuration for Apple’s silicon.

Muse Spark Open has also been tuned to run faster on Apple’s hardware, and the iPhone maker revealed new benchmarks for its chips and published technical documentation about its MLX AI framework’s ability to split open-source models across multiple machines.

Mac Studios aren’t cheap though, and this AI model requires the fastest Apple chips and as much memory as possible.

Currently, a Mac Studio with the required M5 Ultra chip and 256GB of memory costs at least $10,799. A more expensive version with 512GB of RAM will be released later this month.

Plus, users will need to buy multiple machines.

Common ground on open source

The two companies are collaborating on open-source AI, which has become a point of contention in Washington as politicians worry that free Chinese models could undercut American AI.

Although Meta once centered its AI strategy on its older open-weight Llama family of models, it has since focused on creating proprietary models under the leadership of Wang, who joined Meta when the company invested more than $14 billion into his former startup Scale AI last year.

While Apple and Meta, then known as Facebook, partnered on iPhone extensions over a decade ago, they haven’t struck any public partnerships since 2017 after Apple removed system-level Facebook integration from the iPhone.

“Most of the animosity predates my tenure at the company, but obviously there’s been a long history between Meta and Apple,” Wang said, pointing to one member of his team, AI researcher and former Apple director Daniel Gross, as a reason for the collaboration. Gross, along with former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, was a major Zuckerberg hire last year as the Facebook founder was overhauling his company’s AI strategy.

Their leaders have also traded harsh words.

Cook, who was Apple CEO until Ternus succeeded him last month, took a shot at Zuckerberg in 2018, during the Cambridge Analytica scandal, saying, “I wouldn’t be in this situation.” Cook often criticized Meta for compromising user privacy.

Ternus, a hardware engineer, has already started changing things at Apple, including when it releases products.

And Meta’s developers haven’t been able to resist Apple’s products. The company bought hundreds of Mac computers so its Superintelligence team could experiment with local AI and agents earlier this year.

Apple’s multiple partners

Meta is just the latest AI model developer to team up with Apple.

In 2024, Apple announced a partnership with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into Siri, although the integration “dramatically underperformed” and didn’t lead to OpenAI user growth, OpenAI said in a filing that’s part of a legal dispute with Elon Musk’s xAI. Apple sued OpenAI in July, alleging trade secret theft, a claim OpenAI denied.

Earlier this year, Apple announced a deal with Google

Still, Apple’s AI strategy has drawn criticism from investors and customers in part because its new version of Siri, released last month, isn’t as advanced as chatbots and agents from leading labs.

Meanwhile, Meta has bet big on becoming a leading lab but has struggled to keep up with the competition and its business remains almost entirely reliant on ads. Recent developments, such as Meta’s Muse personal agent app and its latest proprietary foundation model, Muse Wonder, released earlier this week, have begun to excite investors who are optimistic about new AI business opportunities.

Open source remains part of Zuckerberg’s AI strategy. In August, Meta debuted a small open-weight AI model dubbed Muse Glimmer, with Zuckerberg pledging to eventually release something bigger and more powerful.

Muse Spark Open isn’t as advanced as Muse Wonder, a proprietary offering, but Wang said it’s good enough to potentially entice more coders to upgrade.

“These aren’t the most capable models that we’ve developed or released,” Wang said. “But we think that there will be a lot of companies and developers who sort of use this model and tinker with it at small scale and then seek to ramp up and scale up their usage.”

WATCH: Apple makes its biggest smart-home push yet under CEO John Ternus.