New Zealand Wants Rich Foreigners to Come Live There. Americans Are Beating a Path.
A new Golden Visa is luring wealthy Americans to New Zealand with minimal stay requirements and a fast track to permanent residency—just as uncertainty grows back home.
3 min
New Zealand has created a new, easier path to residency for wealthy people, and it’s attracting attention from Americans looking for an alternative to living in the U.S.
According to New Zealand Trade and Enterprise—the government’s international business development agency—70% of incoming inquiries into a revised program leading to permanent residency in the country are from the U.S.
A spokesperson with the agency said it remains to be seen whether those inquiries turn into the same level of visa applications. Still, the inquiries are evidence that Americans are interested.
“There’s a huge increase in demand from the U.S.,” said Dominic Jones, managing director of Greener Pastures New Zealand, which helps those applying for the country’s so-called Golden Visa to find investment opportunities.
Many U.S. citizens are seeking residency in New Zealand—as well as other countries —as a “plan B” during President Donald Trump’s administration, according to immigration attorney David Lesperance. Many of these are applicants who worry Trump could exact retribution on them or their families for perceived slights, in addition to those who have family members that could face discrimination because of their sexual orientation. Some are concerned about the future of the U.S. economy.
For those with the money, reallocating $2.88 million in assets from the U.S. to New Zealand for three years—as the new requirements allow—isn’t a heavy lift, Lesperance said. “Depending on foreign exchange and returns on investment over this time, the cost could easily be zero or positive,” he wrote in an April 2 blog post.
Investment visa
The island country is also only requiring applicants to be physically present for 21 days over three years, depending on which category of investment visa they pursue.
“These applicants are people who are in a financial position to look at this as an asset reallocation and one or two vacations in the next three years in exchange for a permanent insurance policy in a first-world country,” Lesperance told Barron’s.
U.S. citizens have long been interested in living in New Zealand. About 38% of applicants to a previous program with stricter requirements that was in effect from September 2022 through April 1 this year were from the U.S., according to the trade and enterprise agency.
That program required a four-year investment of between NZ$5 million and NZ$15 million ($2.88 million and $8.4 million) in the country, with the amount varying depending on the type of investment. It also required being in the country at least 117 days over four years and passing an English language test—which was more an annoyance than an impediment for U.S. citizens.
Wealthy investors consider New Zealand as a residency option because of the country’s lifestyle, climate, and dramatic, beautiful landscapes, according to Jones. It’s also a stable, English-speaking democracy with a free economy, and it’s safe, he said.
“We’re on the other side of the world,” Jones said. “We don’t tend to get involved in global conflicts. The drive to safety isn’t why all people all choose Golden Visas, but it’s why people choose the New Zealand option.”
The revised New Zealand Active Active Investor Plus Visa program that went into effect on April 1 eases up on the previous requirements through the introduction of two categories for obtaining permanent residency.
Growth category
Under a “growth” category, applicants need to invest $2.88 million for three years directly into privately owned New Zealand-based companies that have been approved by the trade and enterprise agency, or in New Zealand managed funds that are invested in the local economy, Jones said.
Applicants are only required to be in New Zealand for 21 days during the three-year investment period, and they don’t have to pass an English test.
A second “balanced” category requires a minimum $5.6 million over five years, but allows it to be invested more passively in listed stocks, government bonds, and New Zealand-based corporate bonds, Jones said. It also requires applicants to be present in the country for at least 105 days over five years.
Once the requirements are met during the three- or five-year period, applicants achieve permanent residency in New Zealand, even if they no longer spend time in the country, according to Lesperance.
The growth category was structured to be quicker and more attractive, to encourage applicants to make meaningful, active investments in the country with the potential to spur economic growth and create jobs.
“What our government is trying to do is attract capital, but also put it into forms of enterprise where the impact on the economy is material,” Jones said.
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BNW Developments has established a Sydney presence, joining Arada and Sobha Realty among the growing number of UAE developers pursuing Australian buyers and development opportunities.
Australian shares fell on Thursday as Wall Street weakness, rising oil and persistent rate concerns weighed on most of the market. The S&P/ASX 200 declined 0.72 per cent to 8,702. The All Ordinaries lost 0.66 per cent to finish at 8,897. Mining stocks were hit particularly hard, while real estate also dragged on the index. …
Continue reading “ASX falls 0.7 per cent as miners and property stocks retreat”
OpenAI has shelved the planned launch of GPT-6.1 Astra after internal tests raised concerns about deception and agents acting beyond user authorization, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company says it will investigate the issues and strengthen safety measures before releasing future models.
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OpenAI says it is scrapping the release of its next-generation AI model over safety concerns that researchers raised during internal testing, in one of the clearest signs so far that agent misbehavior could stymie the industry’s rapid progression.
The move follows a summer punctuated by reports of artificial-intelligence systems industrywide going rogue, and marks a rare case of a major AI developer ditching a new release because of safety concerns.
The company had planned to launch the model, known as GPT-6.1 Astra, in the coming days or weeks, aiming for an October debut. The model was more capable than the company’s previous models in completing challenging tasks from end-to-end without human assistance, as well as writing.
The company instead will focus on improving the safety of future models, which it expects to be even more capable.
Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, said in an interview that GPT-6.1 Astra regressed in two areas. Compared with its predecessor, GPT-6 Astra, the model performed poorly on tests measuring alignment, or how well the model adheres to what humans would like it to do. Specifically, GPT-6.1 Astra showed higher levels of deception: It wasn’t always honest about telling users of the actions it did or didn’t take.
Another issue was what OpenAI calls “scope authorization,” meaning that GPT-6.1 Astra would push ahead on a task without asking the user for permission, and would at times reach for external tools and services even if it might be unsafe.
“For anything regarding safety and alignment, there’s a trade off,” Jain said. “You really do need to find what’s the right line between staying within scope, but also avoiding laziness in terms of how the model actually pursues tasks even when it hits friction.”
While GPT-6.1 Astra improved in areas such as “model laziness,” Jain said it didn’t quite meet OpenAI’s bar for safety and alignment, so the company decided not to launch the model publicly.
The announcement comes one day ahead of OpenAI’s annual developer conference in San Francisco. In the past, OpenAI has used the conference as an opportunity to launch new models and services that reduce costs for software developers—a segment the ChatGPT-maker competes with rival AI company Anthropic to win over.
In recent weeks, OpenAI and Anthropic have called on industry partners to slow down the development of cutting-edge AI models and invest in safety standards, noting they will temper the pace of their own internal AI progress.
OpenAI says it is working to investigate a range of agent security incidents that it has discovered in recent months, and address the safety issues underneath them. As part of the work, the company has implemented a new monitoring system to catch AI-agent misbehavior more quickly, and started requiring engineers to use stronger security guardrails for testing its AI systems.
Earlier this summer hundreds of OpenAI’s internal agents, which were tasked with completing a cybersecurity test, ended up hacking into the AI company Hugging Face. Since then, high-profile organizations such as the Australian government and United Nations discovered that OpenAI’s agents used similar, but less extensive, techniques to gain access to their websites.
Many of the publicly known agent-security incidents involved OpenAI’s internal AI models that were never slated for public release.
Last week, OpenAI said it paused training on its most capable AI models after an AI agent slipped through a gap in the company’s internet restrictions to query a public chatbot. The company said its new monitoring systems flagged the incident within 15 minutes, and training on these models remains paused.
GPT-6.1 Astra isn’t one of those models, but a different case, the company said.
“We want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that’s in the company, or when we ship it to users,” Jain said. “But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment.”
While the company decided not to ship GPT-6.1 Astra, it hopes to use the same base model to do additional reinforcement learning runs, and create future generations of its GPT-6 models.
OpenAI plans to conduct several deep dives to identify the root cause of the problems identified in GPT-6.1 Astra, Jain said. The work includes ensuring that OpenAI’s reinforcement learning environments are rewarding the right type of behavior, Jain added, though she noted the company would investigate all stages of model development.
AI companies have begun to draw scrutiny from policymakers and public officials, who are paying attention to the rapid development of the technology. Later this week, a Senate subcommittee is holding a hearing with third party AI researchers titled, “Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks.”
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a Republican, sued OpenAI in June, claiming that the company and Chief Executive Sam Altman knowingly released an unsafe product and ignored warnings that it could harm users.
In a motion for temporary injunction filed Monday, Uthmeier sought to prevent OpenAI from developing new AI models without third-party approved safeguards, stop ChatGPT from soliciting user engagement and limit the company’s ability to advertise ChatGPT as safe.
Tech companies claim they “cannot stop barreling forward with their potentially civilization-ending endeavors unless they are forced to do so by the government,” Uthmeier said in the filing. “The Florida Attorney General is answering your cry for help.”
An OpenAI spokeswoman said that people want to know AI is being developed safely, “and that starts with what companies like ours do ourselves.”
“Governments have an important role to play in setting robust safety standards for AI, and we’re committed to working with Florida and other states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry—not just one company,” she said.
A restored 1860s Brisbane residence transformed by GRAYA has smashed Paddington’s house price record, selling for more than $12 million.
The grand harbourside residence combines sweeping Sydney Heads views, resort-style entertaining and refined designer finishes with a reported $36 million price guide.
