Business
Trump Pulls Back Plans to Double Canadian Metal Tariffs After Ontario Relents
President Trump escalated his fight with Canada on Tuesday, threatening to double tariffs on steel and aluminum imports and pressing to turn one of America’s closest traditional allies into the 51st state. After several tense hours, both sides backed down, at least for now.
It was the latest in a week of chaotic trade moves, in which the president startled investors and businesses that depend on trade and clashed with some of the country’s closest trading partners.
In a post on his social media platform Tuesday morning, Mr. Trump wrote that Canadian steel and aluminum would face a 50 percent tariff, double what he plans to charge on metals from other countries beginning Wednesday. He said the levies were in response to an additional charge that Ontario had placed on electricity coming into the United States, which was in turn a response to tariffs Mr. Trump imposed on Canada last week.
By Tuesday afternoon, leaders had begun to relent. The premier of Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, said he would suspend the electricity surcharge, and Mr. Trump said at the White House he would “probably” reduce the tariff on Canadian metals.
Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, said Tuesday afternoon that Mr. Trump’s threats had succeeded in getting Canada to back down. “President Trump has once again used the leverage of the American economy, which is the best and biggest in the world, to deliver a win for the American people,” he said.
As a result, he said that Canada would face the same 25 percent tariff on metals as all of America’s trading partners will when they go into effect at midnight.
Still, that levy could reignite trade tensions. The Canadian government has vowed to retaliate against the 25 percent tariffs that Mr. Trump will introduce on global steel and aluminum on Wednesday.
“The Government of Canada has been clear on this issue since the beginning — should the United States move forward tomorrow with the imposition of tariffs on Canadian products, including steel and aluminum, we will be ready to respond firmly and proportionately,” said Gabriel Brunet, spokesman for Dominic LeBlanc, the finance minister who is leading Canada’s trade response.
Mr. Trump’s new confrontation with Canada tariffs sent jittery markets tumbling, with major indexes closing down for the day. In addition to doubling the metal tariffs, the president threatened more levies if Canada didn’t drop various tariffs it imposes on U.S. dairy and agricultural products.
“If other egregious, long time Tariffs are not likewise dropped by Canada, I will substantially increase, on April 2nd, the Tariffs on Cars coming into the U.S. which will, essentially, permanently shut down the automobile manufacturing business in Canada,” he threatened.
Mr. Trump went on to say that “the only thing that makes sense” is for Canada to become the 51st U.S. state. The idea of joining the United States has been angrily rejected across Canada.
The president reiterated those comments Tuesday afternoon, saying that Canada would no longer have a tariff problem if it became part of the United States.
“When you take away that artificial line that looks like it was done with a ruler,” he said, referring to the border, “and that’s what it was, some guy sat there years ago and they said, well, when you take away that, and you look at that beautiful formation of Canada and the United States, there is no place anywhere in the world that looks like that.”
Doug Ford, Ontario’s premier, said in a news conference in Toronto Tuesday afternoon that he would suspend the 25 percent surcharge on electricity exports to Michigan, Minnesota and New York that went into effect on Monday.
“The temperature needs to come down,” Mr. Ford said.
In a statement jointly issued with Howard Lutnick, the U.S. secretary of commerce, Mr. Ford said that the sides would meet in Washington on March 13, and discuss a “renewed U.S.M.C.A.,” referring to the trade agreement between Canada, Mexico and the United States, ahead of more tariffs to come on April 2.
Mr. Trump’s earlier comments significantly escalated a confrontation with one of America’s largest trading partners, and called into question his intentions.
Canadian officials first thought Mr. Trump’s idea of absorbing Canada into the United State was a joke, but they have more recently begun to take the president’s threats seriously.
Last week, outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada called Mr. Trump’s ostensible reason for imposing tariffs on Canada — to stop the flow of fentanyl into the United States — “completely bogus.”
Mr. Trudeau suggested that what Mr. Trump wanted to see was a collapse of the Canadian economy “because that’ll make it easier to annex us.”
“That’s never going to happen,” he said.
Mr. Trump spent much of his social media post on Tuesday essentially cajoling Canada to become part of America, writing that it would make tariffs “totally disappear,” lower Canadian taxes and make the country more secure militarily.
In calls between Mr. Trump and Mr. Trudeau in early February, the American president told the Canadian prime minister that he did not believe that the treaty that demarcates the border between Canada and the United States was valid, according to people with knowledge of the conversations.
When questioned in a news conference in January about whether he planned to use military force to annex Canada, Mr. Trump replied that he would use “economic force.”
Mark Carney, who will succeed Mr. Trudeau as prime minister of Canada within the next few days, called the latest tariff threat “an attack on Canadian workers, families, and businesses” in a social media post.
He added: “My government will ensure our response has maximum impact in the US and minimal impact here in Canada. My government will keep our tariffs on until the Americans show us respect and make credible, reliable commitments to free and fair trade.”
Mr. Trump, in his post, also targeted the Canadian dairy industry, saying that the country “must immediately drop their Anti-American Farmer Tariff of 250% to 390% on various U.S. dairy products, which has long been considered outrageous.”
The Canadian dairy industry has become a frequent target of Mr. Trump’s in recent weeks, although his description of those barriers is misleading. Canada allows a certain amount of U.S. dairy products to come in to the country tariff-free, as long as they don’t exceed certain import quotas, which increase every year. After imports hit a certain level, they are hit with high tariffs, for example 298.5 percent for butter. The system is known as a “tariff-rate quota.”
For a variety of reasons, American dairy exporters, who shipped about $1.1 billion of their products to Canada last year, have never exceeded those quotas, so those tariffs have never been activated. The United States also has tariff-rate quotas for some dairy imports, and other goods, though its tariffs tend to be much lower.
Mr. Trump also said Tuesday that he would declare “a national emergency on electricity within the threatened area” that would “allow the U.S. to quickly do what has to be done to alleviate this abusive threat from Canada.”
“They will pay a financial price for this so big that it will be read about in History Books for many years to come!” he said in a subsequent social media post.
Ryan Young, a senior economist at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said that putting tariffs on foreign countries’ goods would almost always incite them to retaliate, increasing costs for consumers and worsening concerns about a recession. “Sometimes the only way to win is not to play,” he said. “This is true of nuclear war, and it is true of tariffs.”
Mr. Trump’s head-spinning tariff threats and quick reversals against America’s largest trading partners have caused anxiety for investors and businesses. The president imposed a 25 percent tariff on imports from Mexico and nearly all imports from Canada last Tuesday.
But Mr. Trump partly lifted the measure after stock markets sank and various industries pushed back. By Thursday, the president suspended those tariffs indefinitely for all products that comply with the North American free trade deal, U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or U.S.M.C.A. — about half of all imports from Mexico and nearly 40 percent of those from Canada.
The president has repeatedly promised that more tariffs are on the way. He has said that he would impose tariffs on foreign cars as well as “reciprocal” tariffs on foreign nations on April 2.
Eswar Prasad, a professor of trade policy at Cornell University and a former official at the International Monetary Fund, said that the threats against Canada would have important repercussions not just for the North American economies “but for the stability of the world order.”
“Trump’s aggressive tariff actions against a country long seen as a close U.S. economic and geopolitical ally puts the entire world on notice that strong historical relationships are no guarantee of future cordiality,” he said.
Matina Stevis-Gridneff and Danielle Kaye contributed reporting.
The rolling robots that deliver groceries and hot meals across Los Angeles are getting an upgrade.
Coco Robotics, a UCLA-born startup that’s deployed more than 1,000 bots across the country, unveiled its next-generation machines on Thursday.
The new robots are bigger, tougher and better equipped for autonomy than their predecessors. The company will use them to expand into new markets and increase its presence in Los Angeles, where it makes deliveries through a partnership with DoorDash.
Dubbed Coco 2, the next-gen bots have upgraded cameras and front-facing lidar, a laser-based sensor used in self-driving cars. They will use hardware built by Nvidia, the Santa Clara-based artificial intelligence chip giant.
Coco co-founder and chief executive Zach Rash said Coco 2 will be able to make deliveries even in conditions unsafe for human drivers. The robot is fully submersible in case of flooding and is compatible with special snow tires.
Zach Rash, co-founder and CEO of Coco, opens the top of the new Coco 2 (Next-Gen) at the Coco Robotics headquarters in Venice.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
Early this month, a cute Coco was recorded struggling through flooded roads in L.A.
“She’s doing her best!” said the person recording the video. “She is doing her best, you guys.”
Instagram followers cheered the bot on, with one posting, “Go coco, go,” and others calling for someone to help the robot.
“We want it to have a lot more reliability in the most extreme conditions where it’s either unsafe or uncomfortable for human drivers to be on the road,” Rash said. “Those are the exact times where everyone wants to order.”
The company will ramp up mass production of Coco 2 this summer, Rash said, aiming to produce 1,000 bots each month.
The design is sleek and simple, with a pink-and-white ombré paint job, the company’s name printed in lowercase, and a keypad for loading and unloading the cargo area. The robots have four wheels and a bigger internal compartment for carrying food and goods .
Many of the bots will be used for expansion into new markets across Europe and Asia, but they will also hit the streets in Los Angeles and operate alongside the older Coco bots.
Coco has about 300 bots in Los Angeles already, serving customers from Santa Monica and Venice to Westwood, Mid-City, West Hollywood, Hollywood, Echo Park, Silver Lake, downtown, Koreatown and the USC area.
The new Coco 2 (Next-Gen) drives along the sidewalk at the Coco Robotics headquarters in Venice.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
The company is in discussion with officials in Culver City, Long Beach and Pasadena about bringing autonomous delivery to those communities.
There’s also been demand for the bots in Studio City, Burbank and the San Fernando Valley, according to Rash.
“A lot of the markets that we go into have been telling us they can’t hire enough people to do the deliveries and to continue to grow at the pace that customers want,” Rash said. “There’s quite a lot of area in Los Angeles that we can still cover.”
The bots already operate in Chicago, Miami and Helsinki, Finland. Last month, they arrived in Jersey City, N.J.
Late last year, Coco announced a partnership with DashMart, DoorDash’s delivery-only online store. The partnership allows Coco bots to deliver fresh groceries, electronics and household essentials as well as hot prepared meals.
With the release of Coco 2, the company is eyeing faster deliveries using bike lanes and road shoulders as opposed to just sidewalks, in cities where it’s safe to do so. Coco 2 can adapt more quickly to new environments and physical obstacles, the company said.
Zach Rash, co-founder and CEO of Coco.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
Coco 2 is designed to operate autonomously, but there will still be human oversight in case the robot runs into trouble, Rash said. Damaged sidewalks or unexpected construction can stop a bot in its tracks.
The need for human supervision has created a new field of jobs for Angelenos.
Though there have been reports of pedestrians bullying the robots by knocking them over or blocking their path, Rash said the community response has been overall positive. The bots are meant to inspire affection.
“One of the design principles on the color and the name and a lot of the branding was to feel warm and friendly to people,” Rash said.
Coco plans to add thousands of bots to its fleet this year. The delivery service got its start as a dorm room project in 2020, when Rash was a student at UCLA. He co-founded the company with fellow student Brad Squicciarini.
The Santa Monica-based company has completed more than 500,000 zero-emission deliveries and its bots have collectively traveled around 1 million miles.
Coco chooses neighborhoods to deploy its bots based on density, prioritizing areas with restaurants clustered together and short delivery distances as well as places where parking is difficult.
The robots can relieve congestion by taking cars and motorbikes off the roads. Rash said there is so much demand for delivery services that the company’s bots are not taking jobs from human drivers.
Instead, Coco can fill gaps in the delivery market while saving merchants money and improving the safety of city streets.
“This vehicle is inherently a lot safer for communities than a car,” Rash said. “We believe our vehicles can operate the highest quality of service and we can do it at the lowest price point.”
President Trump on Friday directed federal agencies to stop using technology from San Francisco artificial intelligence company Anthropic, escalating a high-profile clash between the AI startup and the Pentagon over safety.
In a Friday post on the social media site Truth Social, Trump described the company as “radical left” and “woke.”
“We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again!” Trump said.
The president’s harsh words mark a major escalation in the ongoing battle between some in the Trump administration and several technology companies over the use of artificial intelligence in defense tech.
Anthropic has been sparring with the Pentagon, which had threatened to end its $200-million contract with the company on Friday if it didn’t loosen restrictions on its AI model so it could be used for more military purposes. Anthropic had been asking for more guarantees that its tech wouldn’t be used for surveillance of Americans or autonomous weapons.
The tussle could hobble Anthropic’s business with the government. The Trump administration said the company was added to a sweeping national security blacklist, ordering federal agencies to immediately discontinue use of its products and barring any government contractors from maintaining ties with it.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who met with Anthropic’s Chief Executive Dario Amodei this week, criticized the tech company after Trump’s Truth Social post.
“Anthropic delivered a master class in arrogance and betrayal as well as a textbook case of how not to do business with the United States Government or the Pentagon,” he wrote Friday on social media site X.
Anthropic didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Anthropic announced a two-year agreement with the Department of Defense in July to “prototype frontier AI capabilities that advance U.S. national security.”
The company has an AI chatbot called Claude, but it also built a custom AI system for U.S. national security customers.
On Thursday, Amodei signaled the company wouldn’t cave to the Department of Defense’s demands to loosen safety restrictions on its AI models.
The government has emphasized in negotiations that it wants to use Anthropic’s technology only for legal purposes, and the safeguards Anthropic wants are already covered by the law.
Still, Amodei was worried about Washington’s commitment.
“We have never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit use of our technology in an ad hoc manner,” he said in a blog post. “However, in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values.”
Tech workers have backed Anthropic’s stance.
Unions and worker groups representing 700,000 employees at Amazon, Google and Microsoft said this week in a joint statement that they’re urging their employers to reject these demands as well if they have additional contracts with the Pentagon.
“Our employers are already complicit in providing their technologies to power mass atrocities and war crimes; capitulating to the Pentagon’s intimidation will only further implicate our labor in violence and repression,” the statement said.
Anthropic’s standoff with the U.S. government could benefit its competitors, such as Elon Musk’s xAI or OpenAI.
Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and one of Anthropic’s biggest competitors, told CNBC in an interview that he trusts Anthropic.
“I think they really do care about safety, and I’ve been happy that they’ve been supporting our war fighters,” he said. “I’m not sure where this is going to go.”
Anthropic has distinguished itself from its rivals by touting its concern about AI safety.
The company, valued at roughly $380 billion, is legally required to balance making money with advancing the company’s public benefit of “responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity.”
Developers, businesses, government agencies and other organizations use Anthropic’s tools. Its chatbot can generate code, write text and perform other tasks. Anthropic also offers an AI assistant for consumers and makes money from paid subscriptions as well as contracts. Unlike OpenAI, which is testing ads in ChatGPT, Anthropic has pledged not to show ads in its chatbot Claude.
The company has roughly 2,000 employees and has revenue equivalent to about $14 billion a year.
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