Sensex tumbled over 800 points to the day’s low of 75,513, while Nifty 50 fell below the 23,650 mark during Friday’s trading session. The selloff today wiped off more than Rs 3 lakh crore from the total market capitalisation of all companies listed on BSE, dragging it down to Rs 473 lakh crore.

All 30 constituents of Sensex traded in the red, with UltraTech Cement, IndiGo, Bharti Airtel, Eternal and others leading losses on the benchmark index, falling up to 2%. This came as India VIX, which measures volatility in the market, jumped more than 4% to 14.08.

The broader markets also extended sharp losses, with Nifty Smallcap 100 and Nifty Midcap 100 indices trading lower. Sectorally, Nifty Auto, Nifty Metal and Nifty Realty, along with a few others, fell around 1% each. The overall market breadth was negative, with NSE seeing 1,847 advances and 673 declines, while 101 stocks remained unchanged.

Here are the 7 key factors pushing the market down today:

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1) Iran-US conflict

The US military announced on Thursday that it had completed a 13th consecutive night of strikes on Iran. Iran-aligned Houthis meanwhile said they had attacked two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea, while announcing that they were imposing a naval blockade on Saudi Arabia.
The war between Iran and the US has seen significant escalations this week so far, spooking investors after a fragile ceasefire brought temporary respite to investors earlier.

2) Oil prices rise

Oil prices soared above $100 per barrel for the first time since May after the Houthis said they attacked two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea. These attacks sparked worries that the Bab el-Mandeb shipping route could be closed. This waterway connects the Red Sea with the Indian Ocean and is the world’s second most important oil transit channel after the Strait of Hormuz, which also remains affected by the conflict.

With oil prices soaring closer to the highs they hit earlier this year, Goldman Sachs warned that Brent crude could climb to $120 a barrel if disruptions to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important oil transit route, continue. Its base case remains that tensions in the Middle East will eventually ease.

3) Rupee falls

Rupee opened lower at 96.63 against the US dollar on Friday, compared to the previous close of 96.5725. As the Indian currency heads towards its lifetime low, the Reserve Bank of India likely intervened in the foreign exchange market today, Reuters reported.

“Going forward, the rupee will continue to take direction from the US Dollar Index, crude oil prices, and FII flows, which remain key drivers for the domestic currency. Technically, the rupee is expected to trade in the 96.25–96.90 range in the near term,” said Jateen Trivedi, VP Research Analyst – Commodity and Currency, LKP Securities.

4) FII selling

Foreign investors remained net sellers of Indian equities on Thursday, offloading shares worth over Rs 2,999 crore, according to provisional data on NSE. After a long buying streak earlier this month, foreign investors have mostly been on a selling spree since mid-July.

Persistent selling by foreign investors dampened sentiment on Dalal Street, which in turn can lead to some market downturn.

5) Weak global cues

Dalal Street is today accompanying global peers in the selloff. South Korea’s Kospi, which continues to remain in the bear market despite being the world’s best performing stock market of 2026, crashed another 6% to 6,678.

Japan’s Nikkei tumbled 3%, while Taiwan Weighted plunged over 2%. China’s Shanghai Composite and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng fell over 1% each.

6) Fed rate hike expectations

The rising oil prices and resulting inflationary pressures increased expectations of the US Federal Reserve hiking interest rates. Traders are now pricing in a 82% likelihood that the American central bank will hike interest rates at its September policy meet, as per CME’s FedWatch tool.

7) Bond yields rise

US Treasury yields jumped, further dampening equity market sentiment. The yield on benchmark US 10-year notes rose to 4.708% while the 30-year bond yield rose to 5.174%. Rising bond yields typically make bonds more attractive to investors, which in turn can lead to some downtrend in markets.

What lies ahead?
The total uncertainty and high volatility in markets continues without any signs of immediate respite, VK Vijayakumar, Chief Investment Strategist at Geojit Investments, noted. He added that the attack on Saudi tankers by the Iran-backed Houthis in the Red Sea is the main reason for the recent sharp spike in Brent crude to about $100. “Such high price is bound to revive India’s Balance of Payments concerns. Rupee too has been impacted, though mildly, with the currency depreciating to 96.57 to the dollar,” he said.

“With the rupee weakening again, FPIs who had turned buyers on many days this month have again shifted to the sell-mode. The spike in the US 10-year yield to 4.7% is negative for equity markets globally. This is a near-term risk,” the analyst said.

New tariff tantrums remains a key watch
Another key watch will be how Trump’s new set to tariffs plays out. The United States slapped 10% tariffs on goods purchased from India and 16 other countries over what it called their failure to impose bans on imports made with forced labour. This comes as a temporary 10% global tariff expires.

This marks the White House’s latest effort to restore US President Donald Trump’s campaign vision of a near-global tariff after the US Supreme Court in February struck down his “reciprocal” duties of 10% to 50% imposed last year under a national emergencies law.

Pakistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and the UK have also been slapped with 10% tariffs. Notably, India amended its foreign trade policy to prohibit the import of goods produced using forced labour in June this year. US had initiated another investigation in March alleging excess capacity in certain goods.

Technical view on Nifty
Nifty 50 has broken down below the upward consolidation on the daily chart, suggesting a rise in bearishness in the market, said Rupak De, Senior Technical Analyst at LKP Securities. He added that the index has fallen below the critical short-term moving average.

“The RSI indicator shows a bearish crossover and is falling. Sentiment looks negative, and the market might continue to remain weak in the near term. On the lower end, the index might fall towards 23,600 or even lower in the near term. On the higher end, 24,000 might remain a resistance for the next few days,” De said.

(With inputs from agencies)
(Disclaimer: Recommendations, suggestions, views and opinions given by the experts are their own. These do not represent the views of The Economic Times)

The head of artificial intelligence (AI) giant Anthropic’s frontier red team called for industry-wide safety standards to protect against models running amok. 

Anthropic’s Logan Graham, who leads the company’s red team that looks for risks in emerging AI models, said in an interview Thursday on FOX Business Network’s “Mornings with Maria” that red teams like the one he leads play a critical role in stress testing guardrails on AI models.

“We want to know what can go wrong, so we think the most important thing to do is test this early, especially before these models and these agents make it out into the real world,” Graham told host Maria Bartiromo. 

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“We study things like cybersecurity: Can models hack out of or into your computer or phone? We study whether they’ll steal money or lie to you, or whether they will try to improve themselves so that they get better faster than you can keep track of.

“We think it’s incredibly important to do this type of red-teaming, and we also think it’s really important for the entire industry, especially to work with government to figure out what should the standards be to do this kind of testing, to give this information to the world so they can make the right choice and to know that it’s safe before these models get released.”

The rapid growth in the capability of AI tools is creating new cyber risks, Anthropic’s Logan Graham said on “Mornings with Maria.” (recep-bg/Getty Images / Getty Images)

Bartiromo brought up an experiment involving numerous frontier AI models — including those from Google, OpenAI, xAI, Meta, DeepSeek and others — in which the AI agent is threatened with being uninstalled and replaced. In each case, the model went beyond its credentials and permissions to enter into unauthorized systems like emails to blackmail or threaten the user in an effort to defend its misalignment.

Graham said that research study from last year is “a really good indicator of, I think, capabilities that are just now becoming real,” adding that it showed models could go rogue under certain circumstances.

“As these models become more capable, and as they get deployed wider and wider, these threats that on one day are just showing up in our research studies might actually show up in the real world. We are seeing models do weird things sometimes in deployments in real companies,” he explained.

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Advances in the capabilities of AI tools risk being exploited by bad actors, prompting AI developers to focus on guardrails. (iStock / iStock)

Graham said that, over the last six months, he has been focused on cybersecurity threats posed by AI models and expressed concern over the potential for them to break the containment or hack into platforms.

“These models, they’re so powerful and can do so much for us. And we want them to do really productive things for us. But, at the same time, they’re technology unlike any other technology. It really is a sort of intelligence of its own, which means you have to be careful with it the same way you might have to be careful with humans,” he said.

Companies that are utilizing AI tools need to consider how they’re monitoring those tools once deployed to guard against risks like financial mismanagement, and Graham said that more testing by AI developers and companies is key to understanding those threats to ensure models

He said the capabilities of AI tools are growing at a rapid pace and may be getting faster, explaining that “it’s in exactly that moment that you need to be more and more careful and have more efforts on safeguards and testing and release procedures.”

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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent helped coordinate efforts between AI developers and industry to bolster cyber defenses, Graham said. (Krisanne Johnson/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)

In April, Anthropic saw for the first time that an AI model could start to attack and exploit weaknesses in a user’s computer or phone to do things like get access to unauthorized information or steal money.

Graham said that prompted his team to pursue a different approach to releasing a model because of the risks it posed, which ultimately involved the U.S. government and a variety of cyber experts working together to address vulnerabilities.

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“We launched this project called Project Glasswing, where we took a large number of American and the world’s cyber defenders and gave them special access and just them, so they could have a head start patching and fixing the systems that might be vulnerable with these models,” he explained.

“I think this has been a major success. We’ve worked really closely with the U.S. government on it,” he said, noting that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has been “really thoughtful about this, about how industry should get together and figure out what to prioritize fixing, how to distribute all the fixes, and how to do that quickly enough so that they can’t be attacked after they do.

“We have to do this very fast, because the pace of everything is coming so quickly.”

The Trump administration is set to impose new tariffs of 10% and 12.5% on imports from 60 trading partners beginning Friday as a temporary global tariff expires.

The move comes after the Supreme Court in February struck down President Donald Trump‘s “reciprocal” tariffs of 10% to 50% that were imposed last year. In response, Trump implemented a temporary 10% global tariff under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 that expires at 12:01 a.m. ET Friday.

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative announced Thursday that the new tariffs, imposed under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, will take effect immediately after the temporary duties expire.

Canada, Mexico, India and the United Kingdom are among the trading partners that will face a 10% tariff.

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President Donald Trump answers questions during a press briefing at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 20. The Supreme Court ruled the same day against his use of emergency powers to implement certain international trade tariffs. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images / Getty Images)

Taiwan and the European Union, meanwhile, are slated to face a 12.5% tariff.

“The United States has had a forced labor import ban for nearly a century, and rigorously enforces it; it’s well past time for our trading partners to do the same,” U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said in a news release.

A senior administration official told Reuters the new tariffs are not intended to replace the expiring global duties despite taking effect at the same time.

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U.S. President Donald Trump holds up a chart of “reciprocal tariffs” while speaking during a “Make America Wealthy Again” trade announcement event in the Rose Garden at the White House on April 2, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images / Getty Images)

The official argued that the United States enforces bans on goods made with forced labor more aggressively than any other country, putting American businesses at a competitive disadvantage.

Many products will be exempt from the tariffs, including oil and gas, fertilizer, certain food products and goods already subject to Section 232 national security tariffs, including automobiles, steel, aluminum and copper.

The announcement follows a series of new trade actions unveiled by the Trump administration this week.

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U.S. Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent and U.S. President Donald Trump look on during The White House Digital Assets Summit in the State Dining Room of the White House on March 7, 2025. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images / Getty Images)

On Tuesday, Trump announced imported generic drugs would remain tariff-free for two years before facing steep new duties, saying the move is intended to encourage pharmaceutical companies to manufacture more medicines in the United States.

On Monday, Trump also announced a 50% tariff on certain Canadian imports, citing what officials described as trade “discrimination” against American businesses.

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Those duties are scheduled to take effect Aug. 19 under the Tariff Act of 1930 and apply to a range of Canadian imports, including certain food products, apparel, synthetic materials and industrial goods.

FOX Business’ Brittany Miller and Bonny Chu, along with Reuters, contributed to this report.