As you’ve likely seen, a strange and perhaps positive chain of events unfolded over the weekend in the world of AI and what we might call human extinction discourse. Dario Amodei, CEO and cofounder of Anthropic, posted an essay calling for a global slow-down in AI development to allow more time to prioritize safety and what the industry calls “alignment” and pledging that Anthropic would take a series of steps in that direction unilaterally. Somewhat surprisingly, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and archvillain Elon Musk stepped forward and said they agreed and appeared to agree to join Anthropic in the proposed slowdown.

Regardless of what one thinks of AI and its possible dangers — existential or otherwise — it’s hard not to see this as at least a somewhat good development. And I say that with full cognizance of the various arguments about financial overextension or heading off sterner regulation that may make these moves self-interested. (AI critic Gary Marcus gives it a qualified endorsement along with a good cross-section of responses.) But I wanted to step back for a moment and talk more generally about the question of “externalities” which has always been the problem lurking in the background of Big Tech’s road to national and global domination.

Our publisher Joe Ragazzo is going to be hosting biweekly YouTube lives with members of our team, on Tuesdays and Fridays. Join him at 1 p.m. ET today for a conversation with editor Nicole LaFond and reporter Kate Riga on the 25th anniversary of 9/11; the start of the NFL season; President Trump’s bribe offer/proposal to give Americans $5,000 if Republicans win the midterms; and Vivek Ramaswamy’s widely-mocked batting cage campaign video.

We’ll see you then!

David Kurtz has a good run-down of the overnight Joe diGenova story in today’s Morning Memo. DiGenova went rogue, then resigned or got fired, then publicly went rogue (essentially claimed that Trump Main Justice wanted to bring evidence-less indictments) and then tried to sort of un-rogue, I guess so as not lose his seat on the Trump gravy/TV hit train. DiGenova is no innocent; he’s a GOP partisan knife-fighter going back to the early ’90s. He made the still-significant shift to team Trump basically at the first opportunity. And here we are.

We’re now flooded with articles about the threat of AI. Here’s another one from the Times op-ed page by a tech journalist, Stephen Witt, who’s written a history of Nvidia, the chip maker powering a lot of the AI boom. Witt describes a few possible approaches to legal intervention. Interestingly, he points to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX) as two legislators pitching new laws to get in control of the situation. Casar has a quote that captures it all and illustrates how absent “externalities” are to anything about how we regulate tech: “If the A.I. companies understood that their products have to be safe before they can advance, then they will make the kinds of investments that we need.” Of course, having two left-wing legislators from the party which isn’t even in power as the two guys on the case doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence that anything is going to happen any time soon.

Following up on my previous post, I want to point your attention to this post by Gary Marcus, a highly respected and knowledgable critic/skeptic of AI. You should read it just to get a range of views on this question. The gist is this. He points to two recent warnings. One is the one I describe below in the previous post. The other recently came from a leading mathematician named Terence Tao, who was recently interviewed by Matteo Wong in The Atlantic. Tao warns that the evolution and use of AI is creating a new dynamic in which AI is in the process of shutting down collaboration and information sharing in mathematics and, Tao suspects, soon in the sciences as well. (This part isn’t just asserted. It’s detailed and interesting.) That’s not human extinction, but it’s not great, to put it mildly.

Marcus then turns to the Coxon story. I’ll quote his overview reaction in full.

I happen to disagree with him around timing, and I would argue that Coxon is exaggerating what AI is likely to do anytime soon. But it is nonetheless overall a disconcerting (and plausible) firsthand perspective on the transparently self-indulgent and dangerous thought processes in two of the leading frontier labs

So too alarmist as to time horizons but not implausible and not something to laugh off, either.

You’ve probably seen these reports of an employee of the AI company Anthropic who quit his job and issued a warning on X that suggested AI could, in next few years, escape control and lead to the extinction of humanity. These sound like not just wild but science fiction-type claims. And they’ve lurked around frontier AI labs for years. It’s one of the many weirdnesses of the AI world and those who lead it. The basic pitch: AI is awesome. We need to built it as quickly as possible. Also it might lead to human extinction. Quite an attractive offer! There’s always been a strong sense among many observers that these claims or suggestions or warnings are part of the AI hype machine itself, albeit of a kind of contradictory or paradoxical variety.

But this warning by the ex-Anthropic employee, Jacob Coxon, seems different and is unquestionably being reacted to very differently. That’s the one part of this that is new and real – the reaction to this warning/comment etc is much bigger and operating in the tech, financial and general media. Wired has a good interview with him here. (I think you can read it as a free article if you haven’t read other Wired articles this month.) The gist is that Coxon says it’s imperative to create a regulatory structure, or at least an ad-hoc agreement that can slow the competition between OpenAI and Anthropic, the two most advanced AI engines and research entities. (The inflection point people are focusing on is something called “recursive self-improvement,” which is when this generation of AI model builds the next one.) The problem is that you really need an agreement that brings China into some common framework too. Because they’re in this same hunt, running these same risks, even though I think the common consensus is that Chinese companies are running at least somewhat behind the most advanced U.S. companies. China’s strength has been building models which are only a bit behind the U.S. models but at dramatically lowest costs.

You’ve probably seen that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has now tried to knock down interest rates on US debt – and thus secondarily general rates – with a series of buy backs. But it’s failing. I was actually going to reach out to some economists I know about this because in addition to the real factors – not just momentary crises of confidence – the scale of the interventions seem quite small. $6 billion? In any case, I noticed this update on Paul Krugman’s substack. And he adds something important. Clearly there are an endless list of things Donald Trump has done over the last twenty months or so which would create very rational loss of confidence in the management of the US economy and particularly the US Treasury. But he doesn’t think this is about Trump or falling confidence in US institutions, in large part because the run up is affecting other countries’ borrowing as well. The immediate issue is that there’s only a finite about of money in the world to borrow and the AI build out is taking up enough of it that it’s simply driving up the cost of money. Here’s Krugman’s take.

On Tuesday the United Kingdom announced a series of sanctions against Israeli settlements in the West Bank. They were joined in this by Canada and France. The sanctions include a ban on imports on goods produced in the West Bank as well as those who provide services including “construction, infrastructure, financing or real estate for settlement expansion.” That sounds like it involves sanctions on banks funding settlements. The Times refers to this as a “symbolic step.” But I’m not sure that’s the case. The devil is really in the details of that clause I quoted, how it is interpreted and enforced; just what counts as services, direct or incidental; and what counts as expansion. It also, of course, matters a great deal whether other countries adopt the same policy.

This is a wise, judicious and necessary policy. If Barack Obama had put measures like this at least on the table back in 2009 when he tried to force a resumption of final settlement talks we might be living in a much better and very different reality today. When the then-newly elected Benjamin Netanyahu rejected Obama’s overtures Obama mostly walked away and gave up. In his semi-defense he wasn’t elected to bring about a final settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict and it would have required an immense amount of political capital simply to set the stage for it, let alone accomplish it. The key feature of this new British policy is that it distinguishes between what is legitimate (Israel within its internationally recognized 1967 borders) and what is not (its settlements on the West Bank).

The Israeli daily Haaretz published a big and consequential exposé today alleging that weeks before the October 7, 2023 massacres in southern Israel the head of the UAE, Mohamed bin Zayed, warned Prime Minister Netanyahu in a direct phone call lasting some 45 minutes that something big was coming from Hamas. For additional context, Israel holds elections on October 27 of this year. And as it has for the last three years, Netanyahu’s degree of responsibility for what happened remains a central question in the election. So while it’s not explicitly noted in the article, the electoral implications are clear. The investigation itself appears to be essentially an excerpt from a soon-to-be released book. So it’s not precisely a Haaretz story, more one that they’re publishing, though that’s fine print. The article is long and detailed and I think quite credible. But it’s paywalled. So I wanted to walk you through the key details and provide some general analysis.

It’s best to think of this piece as three separate revelations. The first is that — all according to this article — Israel and Hamas in 2023 were pretty close to finalizing a semi-normalization of the situation in Gaza in a longterm truce, or “hudna,” between Hamas and Israel. The details of this aren’t fully sketched out but basically an end to the blockade, freer commerce and travel through Israel and Egypt, etc. Second is the warning from MBZ in the weeks before the attack. Then, finally, it claims that in the immediate aftermath of the attacks Hamas, was willing to free most or all of the hostages, probably excluding military-aged men in or out of uniform, with few if any conditions.

As part of their overarching plan to reduce the power of blue states and promote myths about noncitizen voting, the Trump administration is pushing all types of changes to how the census operates. TPM reporter Layla Jones will talk to publisher Joe Ragazzo and executive editor John Light about what these schemes involve and what’s at stake.

Join them live at 2 p.m. ET on YouTube Live.

Yesterday I was kind of randomly rereading some details about Spain’s transition to democracy after the death of Francisco Franco in 1975, as one does. And I noticed that Spain had finally released the last classified documents tied to the attempted coup of 1981. The non-disclosure of these documents had helped maintain various conspiracy theories and counter-narratives about whether King Juan Carlos played quite the heroic role history has assigned him. In brief, Franco groomed Juan Carlos to succeed him believing he would maintain the Franco-ist dictatorship. But Juan Carlos quickly set about putting Spain on a path to democracy and when Francoist dead-enders in the army mounted a coup in 1981, Juan Carlos famously went on television, denounced the coup, thus leading to its total collapse. The counter-argument or claim is that Juan Carlos knew about the coup or perhaps even supported it and only pulled the plug when it looked like it was failing.

The release of the documents was just this last February. And they basically confirmed the established story, that there was no reason to believe Juan Carlos knew about the coup in advance and acted decisively to undermine and bring it to an end. But it was a small note in the Times article I read about this that got my attention: one of the reasons for the release, overseen by Spain’s current center-left government, was to combat historical revisionism and growing nostalgia for Franco among young men.

Over the last day or so, a number of the big inside DC sheets have run pieces striking a skeptical note about the GOP’s 2025-26 redistricting — Axios and Politico, for examples. It’s not just that they maybe aren’t strong enough to withstand a Democratic wave (no gerrymanders are impregnable) but that they are fundamentally based on the assumption that the 2026 electorate would look basically like the 2024 electorate, as Axios put it. That’s not quite the same as saying “as popular as.” It’s more the shape of the electorate. And that’s why it’s not quite as silly as it might sound, though not wholly unsilly. And one example of this is that Republicans made a bet that things like the big Hispanic shift toward the GOP, especially in places like Texas and the Southwest, represented a kind of realignment as opposed to just a really bad year for Democrats.

Sort of a minor point of interest. But still notable. The Italian government of Giorgia Meloni has now become the longest lasting government in the country since World War II at 1,413 days. Since the Italian Republic began at the end of World War II — specifically in a June 1946 national referendum on whether to maintain the monarchy or become a republic — it’s the longest lasting government in the 80 year history of the Italian Republic. Silvio Berlusconi is still the longest-serving prime minister. But he did that non-consecutively and over four separate governments. The average length of a government since World War II is about 13 months — a somewhat notorious parliamentary, if not political, instability for which the Italian Republic has long been known.

Don’t miss Layla A. Jones’ piece this morning, which details a kind of census corollary to Trump’s 2020 big lie. Republicans and assorted social media influencers are claiming bureaucrats used the 2020 census to hand seats in Congress to Democrats. That is, of course, not true. The conspiracy theory is nonetheless important, because it is now making its way into Census Bureau policy. Layla looks at where it came from, and how it is animating the administration’s war on the census.

Longtime election analyst Charlie Cook has a piece up on his Substack looking at the fast-approaching midterms. It’s an interesting piece, an artifact of the moment, not simply because of what it predicts but because of the nature of the writing in which Cook seems to be grasping for metaphors about just how bad a situation Republicans face — a bit more stream of consciousness and performance art than one is used to in election analysis.

Let’s start with the lede …

With 64 days before Election Day (although the first mail-in ballots will go out in a matter of days), Republicans should brace themselves: The three most plausible outcomes are that it will be bad, really bad, or truly horrible. 

A few sentences later he describes what he considers the most likely scenario.

Let’s start with the most likely scenario: that this is a “really bad” election for Republicans, losing between 26 and 35 seats in the House, and either four or five seats in the Senate. 

He then describes a less drastic and merely “bad” scenario in which aggressive gerrymandering on both sides keeps House losses in the 15 to 25 range. But he thinks that this scenario still nets Democrats four to five Senate seats. He calls the GOP’s worst-case scenario the same 26 to 35 House seats lost but “at least six” Senate seats gone too.

Maria Bartiromo is out at Fox News and Fox Business. And apparently with so little advance warning that they barely had a chance to line up guest hosts for her various shows across the Fox ecosystem, let alone permanent replacements. As is so often the case in our current media environment, the news is both pretty significant as well as being fundamentally stupid. Bartiromo was once a big and reasonably well-respected business news anchor/reporter. But in recent years she banked very hard in the direction of hardcore Trumper and fairly big conspiracy theory yakker. I’ve never known the precise logic of her trajectory. But I’m not sure that matters that much.

It’s safe to say these things — this kind of zero-notice, one sentence press release defenestration — don’t happen without brass discovering something very, very bad. “We thank Maria for her work over the last 12 ½ years and wish her all the best on her next chapter.” And since being a crazy nutball isn’t bad at Fox News it points in the direction of some hard to ignore rule-breaking or reputational stinkbomb. Of course, we can’t rule out Bartiromo waking up this morning and deciding to spend more time in Connecticut … forever. But I’m leaning against that.

In response to my post about this data center backlash outside of Kansas City (specifically Independence, Missouri), I’ve been fielding the range of ideas people have about hyperscale AI data centers. As you’d probably expect, the vast majority of people are against them and excited to see this kind of backlash through the architecture of local government. But there’s a small but vocal group saying: no, this is all a kind of NIMBY moral panic driven by anger at Big Tech when a lot of these deals, maybe most, actually are good deals for the local communities.

The last part isn’t totally crazy. Or at least they’re certainly on to something that a big part of the punch behind the data center backlash is fueled by a broad politico-economy anger about tech platforms, AI, and nascent oligarchy which in this one set of circumstances people can actually fight back against. I discussed this in a post at the end of last month. Part of the big sour mood that seems to pervade every nook and cranny of our society today is focused on Big Tech, the central and most visible moneyed power in the U.S. today. Everyone has this sense that these guys can simply do anything and there’s no accountability — no democratic control — over any of it. It’s their world and we’re just living in it. But here you have a case where you need to build a super big data center, where finally you have to come and ask permission from some sleepy town council or county commission. And all that pent up powerlessness just comes out as, No! Or, really, Fuck no! And along with that is comment that amounts to, I don’t even care what you’re doing. The answer’s still no. Because you guys have way too much power and someone has to say no to you.