Why U.S. Steel Stock Is Down Even Though Everyone Wants a Piece of It

United States Steel has become an unlikely darling, with many parties vying for control of the century-old-plus American icon.

The interest hasn’t translated into significant gains for existing shareholders, though. Investors appear confused , and no one knows exactly how the U.S. Steel drama will end .

On Wednesday, Ancora , a Cleveland-based activist investor with about $10 billion in assets under management, held a conference call outlining its plan for the steel maker.

Ancora nominated a majority slate of directors on Jan. 27, making a play for control of the company. The call outlined a “multi-billion dollar capital investment plan to revitalize U.S. Steel,” led by Alan Kestenbaum, former CEO of Canadian steel maker Stelco.

Kestenbaum reflected on his success in turning around Stelco, which was sold to Cleveland-Cliffs in 2024 , adding he has a history of improving labor relations. Many U.S. Steel workers are represented by the United Steel Workers. U.S. Steel has a labor negotiation coming up in 2026.

Ancora, of course, wants U.S. Steel to abandon a proposed deal with Nippon Steel , which values U.S. Steel at $55 per share.

That deal faced stiff opposition from both sides of the political aisle. President Donald Trump said it was psychologically important for U.S. Steel to remain American-owned.

Control concessions by Nippon Steel and plans to invest billions didn’t sway American politicians. Trump did appear to soften his stance recently, saying at a press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba that Nippon Steel would invest in U.S. Steel.

Nippon Steel and U.S. Steel declined multiple requests for comments about investment details.

The Nippon Steel deal emerged in late 2023 after Cleveland-Cliffs offered to buy U.S. Steel for about $35 a share in August 2023. Cleveland-Cliffs CEO Lourenco Goncalves hosted a combative January press conference where he indicated consolidation among large U.S. players could help restore consistent profitability to the sector.

Cleveland-Cliffs and America’s largest steel producer, Nucor , are reportedly interested in some U.S. Steel assets. Nucor would be interested in U.S. Steel’s electric arc furnace assets, which use electricity to melt scrap steel and other metallics.

Keeping track of things on the table: U.S. Steel could be sold to Nippon Steel, get an investment from Nippon Steel, be broken up into pieces, merge with Cleveland-Cliffs, or make a go of it as a standalone company investing in existing operations.

Investors are just waiting. U.S. Steel is down about 15% over the past 12 months, and the share price has bounced between roughly $30 and $40 since President Joe Biden indicated he would block the deal in early 2024.

Ancora’s main message was that U.S. Steel doesn’t need external capital to turn around operations. “It’s about brain power,” said Kestenbaum. Time will tell if that’s correct.

U.S. Steel looks like it could use capital. It’s America’s third-largest steel producer, and a relatively high-cost producer. Since 2021, U.S. Steel has made roughly $150 in per ton operating profit annually. Cleveland-Cliffs has made roughly $100 per ton over the same span. Nucor earned closer to $300 per ton. Nippon Steel is the world’s fourth-largest steel producer, and about three times the size of U.S. Steel, but its per-ton profit is closer to Cleveland-Cliffs and U.S. Steel than to Nucor.

U.S. Steel shares might have got a small Ancora boost on Wednesday. The stock closed up 2% at $39.04, while the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average rose about 0.2%.

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.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attended a United Nations Security Council meeting about AI last week. Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images

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.