AI may soon be the default way to solve theoretical problems in economics, high-energy physics, and other fields, MIT researchers tell WIRED.

LONDON — The Mayor of London Sadiq Khan and U.S. tech company Palantir have agreed to drop legal proceedings relating to a blocked £50 million police contract.

Palantir brought a claim against the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime in the High Court in June after Khan’s deputy mayor refused to sign off on the £50 million contract with the Metropolitan Police for the provision of an AI and data analysis service.

In July, lawyers working on behalf of MOPAC in turn accused the Met Police and Palantir of coordinating to fix the outcome of the procurement process in breach of the rules. Palantir claimed Khan’s office had unlawfully blocked the contract over the company’s “values and ethics,” based on media reporting.

A full trial was expected in January but on Wednesday both sides agreed to “settle their differences” and drop the allegations without admitting liability. They will each cover their own legal costs.

In an agreed statement, the two sides said MOPAC’s decision to block the Palantir contract was “not based on Palantir’s values or ethics or any wider reporting about the company,” though MOPAC said it “recognizes Palantir’s concerns that media reporting of a statement from the Mayor’s spokesperson before the decision was taken could have incorrectly created the impression that an assessment of the company’s values had been a factor in that decision.”

“MOPAC’s consideration was based upon its statutory role of examining spend proposals, against the appropriate legal tests and the relevant guidance on procurement, governance, affordability and ensuring value for money for Londoners and in doing so it focussed on the available information at the time,” the statement said.

The settlement also notes that MOPAC is working with Metropolitan Police Service to re-run a competitive procurement for the relevant service, which Palantir will be eligible to bid for.

“MOPAC does not have, and has never had, any policy of not contracting with Palantir,” the statement confirms, while noting the mayor’s duty is to ensure “all procurements are lawful, fair, transparent and deliver value for money.”

“London is the technology capital of Europe, and I am proud that leading software firms choose the city as their home. Palantir makes a significant contribution to jobs and investment in the capital, employing a large number of Londoners whose services have been procured legally by organizations across the U.K. and beyond,” Khan said.

BRUSSELS — The European Commission’s cybersecurity division is rolling out a plan to use artificial intelligence to respond to high-risk cyberattacks, according to a document obtained by POLITICO.

The undated document, written by the Commission’s IT department, sets out how to prepare the EU executive’s cyber defenses for “emerging AI-driven threats.” It proposes an action plan to shore up defenses in light of AI, with the most urgent move being the speed of response to attacks.

Governments have rushed to grapple with the rising threat brought by AI’s ability to expose and exploit cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Incidents like OpenAI’s accidental intrusion into Hugging Face have prompted calls, including at the highest political level, to be more wary of advanced AI models.

Being able to respond quickly to cyberattacks is most crucial in “high-risk scenarios,” the EU executive’s internal cyber defenders warned, saying that the ability to detect an attack is “not sufficient if containment measures cannot be taken quickly enough.”

Officials at the in-house IT department, DG DIGIT, are planning to use automated “protective measures” in specific high-risk scenarios, it said. Those scenarios were redacted in the document, which was provided to POLITICO in response to a freedom of information request.

The plan does not amount to “uncontrolled automation” and there will be strict controls in place including human oversight, according to the document.

As well as laying out the response plan, the document sets out the cybersecurity challenges the Commission faces from AI.

The most advanced AI models are expected to “significantly increase the speed, scale and adaptability of cyberattacks” and the Commission must therefore have defenses in places for an environment where “attacks are likely to become faster, more frequent and more scalable,” it said.

Risks include situations where “malicious activity occurs outside EC [European Commission] normal working hours, spreads more rapidly across systems, or results in large-scale exfiltration or operational disruption before manual intervention can be organized by EC,” they said.

The Commission’s cyber division has sought approval internally to move ahead with the plans, it said, though it’s not clear whether the plans have yet been put in place.

The Commission didn’t respond to a request for comment.

More than half of the men surveyed in a new Harvard study claimed to recognize AI leaders who were, in fact, totally fictional.

BRUSSELS — As the U.S. and China compete to train the world’s most advanced artificial intelligence models, Europe is stepping back.

European politicians and tech executives have in recent weeks shifted their focus away from frontier AI as it becomes clear the bloc has no artificial intelligence models that can compete with top American or Chinese models, and Europe’s leading contender Mistral faces questions over its performance.

Instead, a new mantra has emerged: Europe doesn’t need to own the models as long as it can put them to work.

“Striving to build a competitive frontier lab right now feels like very wishful thinking,” said Max Junestrand, CEO of Swedish AI company Legora, a €6 billion company that provides an AI tool for law firms. “I would rather see us put more thinking cycles into how do we capitalize on the technology rather than how do we try to catch up.”

The suggestion that frontier AI models are now out of reach for European AI labs comes as the most advanced models become a major global security issue.

American leaders OpenAI and Anthropic this summer had to disclose incidents in which AI agents broke out of testing. This led the companies to slow-walk and tread cautiously with the release of their latest models, just as Chinese open-source models are emerging as a credible alternative to U.S. proprietary models.

For Europe, relying on U.S. or Chinese models is not without risk, as the bloc is already dependent on both for all the technology underpinning AI, such as chips and cloud services.

But leaders, including European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, say Europe should focus more on helping its industrial and corporate base benefit from AI. They argue that building homegrown tech champions that can deliver those tools is a smart strategy that could help Europe win this next phase as America remains focused on staying ahead of China.

As politicians and industry meet Wednesday in Dublin for an international AI summit, the Irish governmental organizers have sought to focus the talks largely on how AI is used.

“It’s the trigger that interests everybody most: how are we going to adopt this new technology that we have … [and] how are we going to encourage business to adopt it,” Niamh Smyth, the Irish minister in charge of AI, said.

Not everyone is on board with the direction of travel.

“The idea that Europe should step back from frontier AI and settle for applications is a strategic mistake,” said a spokesperson from Mistral, Europe’s leading contender in frontier AI development. “A great part of the value is retained by those who build the frontier, not only by those who build on top of it.”

Slow acceptance

A move in Brussels to reorientate the bloc’s leadership has been building gradually throughout the past weeks.

Both the European Commission and the Council of the EU, which represents national governments, have indicated that the focus should shift to how to apply the technology.

“We do not need to be the ones who develop the frontier technology to be the ones who draw the greatest value from it,” von der Leyen said in mid-September during her State of the European Union speech, which sets the agenda in Brussels for the coming year.

That followed a Sept. 4 seminar at which the Commission’s AI envoy, Siemens chair Jim Hagemann Snabe, told 27 commissioners that the EU should focus less on winning the race to build AI and more on how to use it to turn around the bloc’s productivity, two Commission officials said.

The scale of the challenge is clear: At the end of last year, only 1 in 5 European businesses used AI in their activities, with Denmark as the frontrunner (42%) and Romania at the bottom of the pack (5.2%), according to Eurostat.

The bloc’s poor showing is mainly because of small and medium-sized companies that make up the lion’s share of Europe’s economy. Last year, 55% of Europe’s large companies used AI, compared to only 17% among small companies — who, according to a recent OECD report — limit themselves to off-the-shelf AI tools for specific tasks.

Companies that considered using AI but decided against it cited a lack of expertise as their top concern, even before regulatory concerns. American business leaders have also said that regulatory and political uncertainty is holding them back.

Over the next few weeks, the European Commission will make several efforts to boost adoption rates. On Nov. 16, it organizes an “Apply AI summit” to “accelerate AI implementation in strategic industries.” Von der Leyen name-checked health, transport, agrifood, advanced manufacturing, defense and space as areas with the “biggest potential.”

Some in Brussels are quick to push back on the idea that Europe has given up entirely on the underlying models. 

“We haven’t given up frontier AI; we are now accelerating the development of our AI systems,” the Commission’s tech chief Henna Virkkunen said in an interview when asked about von der Leyen’s stance. “It’s very important for Europe that we have our models … because it’s risky to be totally dependent on other countries.”

Yet Virkkunen pointed to Europe’s lack of compute power as a major bottleneck to building its own frontier AI. 

In the U.K., AI minister Kanishka Narayan said in September that training frontier models is effectively illegal because of the country’s copyright laws. “Britain does not, as a matter of regulation and energy, currently have a position where we can build superintelligence in this country: it is illegal to do so,” he said.

But Narayan has also acknowledged the national security concerns. “We want the world’s leading companies investing here, but we will not accept dependence as the price of that investment,” he said Monday.

U.K. tech companies aren’t counting themselves out of frontier AI just yet. Cosine, a British AI research lab, has pushed back on the idea that American companies dictate the rules of the road. “Britain should not let OpenAI define what a ‘responsible’ frontier lab looks like in a way that just happens to resemble OpenAI,” said Cosine co-founder Yang Li.

Sovereignty fight

French company Mistral released a new model, Large 4, last week, which far-right National Rally President Jordan Bardella said “puts France (and Europe) back in the race for artificial intelligence.”

That came after the CEO of a Berlin-based search engine used by government services said it was dropping Mistral in favor of open-source models, including from China. In an interview, Ecosia founder and CEO Christian Kroll cited poor performance as one of the concerns — as well as sovereignty, given that Mistral has non-European investors.

“With Mistral Large 4, we have significantly narrowed the gap with the best models in the world, using far less compute than our competitors,” the Mistral spokesperson said.

The company’s CEO Arthur Mensch has also pushed back against the idea that Europe should not have its own models, warning the continent could end up with “an extractive economy” dependent on foreign providers.

Yet the state of the race is forcing European companies to accept that is the status quo.

U.S. frontier models have already proven capable of finding and exploiting cyber vulnerabilities. Asked whether it’s a competitive disadvantage not to have access to those, Legora’s Junestread said: “Yes … absolutely.”

Zoya Sheftalovich and Frank Hersey contributed reporting.

Chatbot prompts reveal the engineer’s alleged efforts to set up a covert listening device days before one was found in a meeting room used by high-level executives.

AI leaders joined whistleblowers and security leaders at a sweeping parliamentary session, while a few hundred meters away Britain’s spy chief warned AI could be used to create new bioweapons.

KYIV — Russia caught the Ukrainian capital off guard with its latest attack, hitting the country with over 100 drones and five ballistic missiles, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Tuesday.

“Intelligence on Russian ballistic missile launches helps save lives, and this is one of the most critical issues. This is precisely what helps prevent people from being killed — when there is an early warning about ballistic missiles,” Zelenskyy said.

He added: “Regarding this strike, unfortunately, there was no warning from partners.”

Kyiv usually receives a tip-off about impending Russian missiles via the Battlespace Command and Control Center system, which is operated and controlled by the United States’ military and NATO members, among others.

However, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said at the Warsaw Security Forum Tuesday that intelligence sharing through the platform is ongoing.

“They [Americans] told Ukrainians no warning happened because of bad weather conditions, which is seen as not an adequate reason in Kyiv. Thus many are getting increasingly worried this might not have been the case,” an official familiar with the matter told POLITICO on condition of anonymity.

The missile warning system has malfunctioned before. “At times this information doesn’t get through. This isn’t the first instance … If there were specific technical issues this time, I think the specialists will sort it out. And they will resolve this problem together with our partners,” Ukrainian Air Force spokesperson Yurii Ignat said Tuesday.

The U.S. reportedly threatened to cut intelligence sharing once again last week if Kyiv does not stop stricking Russian oil refineries. Zelenskyy did not publicly confirm the threat, but has backed down.

“Ukraine has not carried out strikes on Russian oil refineries or the energy sector in general for the two days since the American President announced an energy ceasefire. But Russia did not heed the American President,” Zelenskyy said, appealing to the U.S. to lead peace negotiations.

“The Russians have attacked both our energy facilities and our critical infrastructure, sending absolutely clear signals that they have no intention of refraining from strikes on Ukraine. Nineteen regions of our country have come under attack in these two days alone,” he added.

U.S. President Donald Trump claimed Monday that both Russia and Ukraine had agreed to an energy ceasefire because he said so — “and if it was violated, they both violated it.”

“Actually [Russian President Vladimir Putin] wants to make a deal, and we have to get Zelenskyy to want to make a deal,” Trump said.

During a press briefing on Tuesday, Katie Zacharia, the president’s new press secretary, demurred when asked if the U.S. has stopped sharing intel with Ukraine.

“I’ll have to get back to you on that,” she said.

Speaking to reporters at the White House later on Tuesday, President Donald Trump said the U.S. has not stopped sharing intel with Ukraine.

“But we are really helping them get to a final answer,” Trump said. “We are helping them, and we are sharing intel. We want the war to end.”

He reiterated that he is helping to broker a deal between Putin and Zelenskyy. “There is a lot of hatred there between the two of them. They both want it to end, they don’t know how to get there. We’re gonna get them there,” he said.

Russia has not yet commented on the ballistic strikes, but issued a general statement saying it had struck military and weapons production facilities across Ukraine.

However, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Monday that Zelenskyy did not deserve a pause in fighting in response to the energy ceasefire: “I don’t think that he deserves a break. I don’t think that we will buy assurances and promises again,” he said.

This article was updated with comments from the White House and Donald Trump. Elleiana Green and Casey He contributed reporting.

LONDON — Britain’s spies will have a leading role in Britain’s preparation for AI threats, the head of MI5 announced on Tuesday, after warning the technology could enable terrorists to access bioweapons.

Ken McCallum, director general of the U.K.’s domestic intelligence agency has established the AI Threat Assessment Centre to help determine how the government views potential threats.

Giving his annual threat update from MI5 headquarters in London, McCallum said: “Human history has given us no experience of facing an actor which is smarter than we are, is capable of outthinking us.”

He stressed the “real” risks of AI, saying MI5 has caught terrorists seeking to use AI to “improve their reconnaissance and attack methodologies,” in addition to the danger of AI-enabled drones.

Though it has not yet been “realized,” he said he attaches “the greatest weight” to AI’s potential to “change the stakes on existing or even new bioweapons.”

He said “low-capability” terrorists may get a “capability” uplift if the safety guardrails in AI models don’t work as intended. 

He added that for a long time “many terrorists would dearly love” access to chemical, biological or radiological weapons, but that it has been hard for them to achieve.

“One risk is that AI could enable dangerous knowledge to get into the hands of people who […] didn’t have that knowledge.”

McCallum added that “sober attention” must be given to the risk that “AI could generate novel pathogens not previously seen.” He noted that the government is taking “additional steps” on bioweapons. 

One thing that “does trouble me”, McCallum said, is the pace at which the world is evolving. He noted that the “weird bits inside MI5” that focus on how Britain’s adversaries will act in five years from now are seeing those timelines shortening due to AI.

He said it is now his responsibility to “drag my organization forwards at a faster pace than human beings generally want to be dragged.”

Sifting threats from hype

The new threat assessment centre, known as AITAC, will bring together expertise from bodies including Britain’s AI Security Institute, National Crime Agency, and the National Cyber Security Centre to “separate the bluster from the realities” of AI’s threat to the British public.

This is the third center of its kind MI5 has set up, after creating similar units dedicated to analyzing terrorism and state threats.

Asked how the agency would work, McCallum said it would look at emerging trends and how the U.K. can best think about and prioritize the various manifestations of AI threats. 

Though the government, rather than AITAC, will decide the response to AI, McCallum said it was partly set up to avoid “competitive analysis, slightly conflicting and confusing messages that otherwise might exist, where you have different departments offering their own opinion” on the issue.

He said that it would enable everyone to have “a single version of the truth, a single understanding, a single lexicon, typography.”

McCallum also said MI5 will now give national resilience — such as protecting critical infrastructure, countering cognitive warfare, and addressing technology threats — “front-rank mission status” alongside its twin roles of countering state threats and terrorism.

He noted that MI5 is now devoting more resources to countering state threats than it was during the Cold War, noting an uptick in anti-immigration cases tipping into terrorist intent, while Iran has shifted its ambitions to hit harder targets such as military sites.

PARIS — French center-right presidential candidate Edouard Philippe accused his far-right rival Marine Le Pen of trying to force a Frexit in disguise with her euroskeptic campaign promises.

“There is something in Marine Le Pen’s proposals that has the potential to blow Europe up, or let’s say to crack it open,” Philippe said at POLITICO’s Paris Competitiveness Summit on Tuesday.

The former prime minister — who is currently the best-placed centrist candidate to challenge the front-running Le Pen, according to recent polls — said Le Pen’s plan to unilaterally demand a drastic cut to France’s contribution to the EU budget was akin to “saying you want out of Europe” without openly advocating for leaving the bloc. Le Pen had previously called for a referendum in France on leaving the EU but dropped the proposal after her crushing defeat to Emmanuel Macron in the 2017 presidential election. Her party, the National Rally, now says it wants to change the EU from within.

Philippe, a fiscal conservative who has been pitching himself as the voice of reason in a campaign dominated by populist rivals, also slammed budget plans Le Pen unveiled last week as “grotesque,” accusing her of pitching “fantasy” savings.

Le Pen’s fiscal plans have faced serious scrutiny since being presented, with many observers saying they either lack key details or overestimate savings on major proposals like immigration. Progressive think tank Terra Nova wrote in a note out Tuesday that Le Pen’s budget presentation was “riddled with errors and contradictions” as well as “botched estimates.”

“She isn’t even able to estimate the cost of the pension reform she is proposing,” Philippe said.

Le Pen said in August that her plan to bring France’s legal retirement age back down to 62 for most workers would cost €9 billion a year, and last week she said she would lay out at a later stage how she intends to fund her flagship pledge. However, the Institut Montaigne, a fiscally conservative think tank, estimated the proposal would cost €34.7 billion a year.

Philippe is hoping to convince voters that his fiscally conservative agenda is the right path in a country burdened by a ballooning public debt and a budget deficit still above 5% of gross domestic product, in breach of EU rules.

Philippe said France needed to get its finances back on track to regain credibility on the European stage after a “loss of influence” over the past few years.

Though he currently leads a crowded field of centrist candidates, Philippe’s campaign has struggled in recent weeks to gain momentum — and far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon is now challenging the former PM for second place in the polls. France’s presidential election goes to a runoff if no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote, and Le Pen’s strong poll numbers all but guarantee her a spot in the second round.

Tough on China

The former prime minister pitched a pragmatic European agenda with less regulatory burden, more focus on investment and a tougher approach to China.

Philippe had some harsh criticism for an already embattled flagship measure of the EU’s green deal, saying the 2035 combustion engine ban has been “disastrous.”

There was “a great naiveté toward China,” which ultimately benefited from Europe’s push on electric vehicles, Philippe said.

“We need to much better protect our market,” he added. “If one wants access to the European market, one has to manufacture in Europe. If a carmaker doesn’t manufacture here, then we have to slap high tariffs.”

The EU is in the process of drawing up new “Made in Europe” rules that would favor European producers over those outside the bloc, in response to trade practices by competitors like China and the United States.

Shortly before Philippe took the stage, European Commissioner for Industry Stéphane Séjourné said at the POLITICO event that a Franco-German deal trading stronger protections on the definition of Made in Europe in exchange for a loosening of combustion engine rules should be finalized “in the next few hours or in the next few days.”

On artificial intelligence, Philippe aligned himself with Macron, advocating for European sovereignty in the field and the need to regulate what he described as “an instrument of power.”

“What I see is an AI world making money for the U.S. with European savings and European data, and that bugs me,” he said.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Monday pitched using artificial intelligence to streamline administrative procedures for European businesses as part of a broader push to simplify commerce and boost the EU’s competitiveness.

Speaking at a behind-closed-doors meeting of the European People’s Party in Taormina, Sicily, on Oct. 12, von der Leyen said the Commission would introduce an “only once” approach to business reporting. This would let companies submit information once, with AI helping public administrations use the data.

Von der Leyen argued that European companies repeatedly have to report the same information to public authorities, wasting time that businesses — and Europe — cannot afford, according to a copy of her speech seen by POLITICO.

“And this is why we will introduce ‘Only Once’, to report data only once – and with the help of AI the administration will ensure efficient use,” she said.

The speech marks the first time von der Leyen has explicitly pitched using AI specifically to reduce businesses’ administrative workload.

The “only once” principle itself is not new. The Commission already included it in its EU Inc. proposal presented in March 2026, which aims to create a harmonized corporate framework allowing companies to establish and operate businesses more easily across the bloc.

Under the EU Inc. proposal, companies could submit information once through an EU-level digital interface, with relevant data automatically transmitted between authorities. However, the proposal does not specifically envisage using AI to carry out that process.

Von der Leyen did not provide details on how the AI-supported system would operate, whether it would apply to all businesses or when the Commission intends to introduce it.

In her speech, the Commission president also encouraged governments to get on board with simplification efforts by signing a pact not to add extra requirements when transposing EU-mandated legislation into national regulations.

The central principle, von der Leyen wrote in a letter to EU leaders sent Oct. 12, is that “a rule agreed at European level cannot become more complex when transposed or implemented nationally.”

Under the proposed pact, capitals would have to identify and justify additional national requirements that go beyond EU legislation, including assessing their impact on businesses and the single market.

Zoya Shefatlovich contributed to reporting

Meta’s biggest model rivals the world’s best—and includes new features to keep agents from going off the rails.

If you've been engaging with the American job market lately, first of all, I'm so sorry. Second of all, you've probably run into an AI-powered "automated recruitment agent": in other words, an AI bot that the company makes you do a one-sided interview with as part of the extended humiliation ritual that is landing a job. — Read the rest

The post Messing with AI interviewers is cathartic appeared first on Boing Boing.

In the 1987 Nintendo game “Zelda II: The Adventure of Link,” there is a village you can visit and a home you can enter and a man in a purple shirt you can speak with. But the only thing he says is “I am Error.” I was unexpectedly delighted by this dialogue when I first encountered it on a Gamecube emulator in 2009 (I’m not that old). It felt both meta and existential, or just an amusing bug. It turned out that Error was actually the character’s name, a sort of in-joke slash translation mistake that has since become a meme akin to “Your princess is in another castle” or “It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this” from the original “Legend of Zelda.”

Error is a non-player character (NPC), meaning one that the player can’t control but is usually more than just video game wallpaper. Nearly 40 years later, NPCs have come a long way, with increasingly complex behaviors and conversational dialogue that span far more than just three words. The upcoming game “Grand Theft Auto VI” is rumored to feature unprecedented complex NPCs with rich, fleshed-out personalities and backstories, while video game companies explore using artificial intelligence to let players train NPCs as they interact.

In many ways, NPCs are how many people were first introduced to AI, although in a relatively simplistic form compared to the chatbots and massive data center hogs that we have come to either love or loathe, with little room in between. Years ago, NPCs became an insult spun out of 4Chan, the anonymous online forum, to describe real people who don’t think for themselves and follow a set of cultural programming, usually illustrated by an expressionless gray cartoon avatar. The meme became popularized by chronically online cohorts of Donald Trump supporters during his first presidential term, adjacent to the idea of “Trump derangement syndrome,” both implying that people oppose the MAGA movement out of reflexive mindlessness and not, you know, because they’d looked under the hood and seen it for what it is.

It might just sound like a new way to call someone an idiot, but the NPC label has much deeper, scarier implications. On the surface, it seems like harmless video game humor, and I’m sure we’ve all had encounters with actual humans that resembled interacting with tautological machines programmed with limited responses. “There is weather today. Did you hear about celebrity? Sports.” And certainly social media, now overrun by bots, increasingly feels as if every conversation is between different viruses. These realities don’t map to every experience yet following the NPC slander to its logical conclusion can be dangerous: declaring that a person’s alleged lack of inner thinking is justification for dismissing their humanity. After all, they’re just mindless characters in a video game (and maybe reality is just The Matrix, so whatever), so it’s fine to ignore them, disenfranchise them or abandon them to a grim fate.

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Solipsism, the philosophical position that you can only experience your own consciousness, and therefore other people might not exist or have souls, is not a new idea. René Descartes believed animals were soulless, unthinking automatons, though modern neuroscience has repeatedly disproven that one. (On some level, “I am Error” echoes Descartes’ famous quip about thinking and therefore am-ing.) But now that complex AI has spilled from video games into the mainstream, it’s especially dangerous to see the NPC label has become embedded in mainstream politics, whether explicitly or not.

All this is rooted in Donald Trump’s recent campaign to rebrand artificial intelligence as “super intelligence” via executive order, posting on social media Thursday that “The White House considers anyone that uses the term, ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term, ‘Super Intelligence,’ THE ENEMY!” The idea has quickly been embraced by tech leaders, with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk saying this week that AI is “no more” and promising to change the name of his AI company, SpaceXAI, a subsidiary of SpaceX, to SpaceXSI. More recently, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos shared his approval in a Wednesday interview with Fox News. “I do like SI, because ‘artificial’ is not a very flattering thing. Like, nobody wants an artificial sweetener, artificial flavoring,” Bezos said. “Artificial sort of means fake.”

Yeah, most of us are going to roll our eyes hard at AI being “super,” but if these attempts at normalization gain ground and get pushed to their absurd conclusion, it might end in providing AI more rights than humans. (It’s worth noting Musk invokes the NPC meme often.) It’s right there in the name: “Super intelligence” is better than the old, human kind, so why shouldn’t we give these computer programs rights and defend them from regulation? That’s why stories about AI bots being put into virtual torture chambers aren’t just silly, but foregrounds the false notion that AI is capable of suffering. (Maybe don’t put bots in rooms like that anyway — at the very least, it’s a waste of energy.)

After all, AI will either become the savior of humanity or make humans obsolete, depending on what day of the week it is. Sure, this technology is nifty, even as it comes with an enormous environmental destruction. But we are still a long way from elevating the technology above regular human intelligence. But as in a two-for-one, if you can be sold on the myth that AI is superhuman, it travels along with the idea that regular humans are disposable. In other words, the tech bros are trying to turn us all into NPCs, into Errors, not least through the mass surveillance programs being used to hunt migrants and spy on protesters.

Yes, thankfully, granting above-human rights to supposedly sentient AI sentience is still a fringe idea, but we can see that changing before our eyes, not to mention we already kind of did that with corporations. Recently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told POLITICO that the “world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency.” To further consolidate its power — or at least keep the economy from crashing — Silicon Valley wants us to believe their latest technological invention can think, reason and moralize. It’s no surprise that tech bros were recently exposed trying to convince none other than the pope that AI is conscious, but to his credit, Leo XIV has rejected this idea, saying “Algorithms lack the spark of humanity” and elsewhere warning against “losing our humanity amid a ‘paradise of machines.’”

Spending time with large language models like ChatGPT and knowing a little about how they work, it becomes clear that it’s just a really good computer program that can mirror human expression, sometimes terribly and sometimes surprisingly well. There remains zero hard evidence that AI algorithms are sentient.

Yet an increasing number of people are convinced otherwise, as seen in the controversial AI psychosis phenomenon, which makes me wonder how so many people have persuaded themselves a souped-up version of “I am Error” is a conscious being. It can feel like human interaction typing back and forth with these things, but there are always gaps where you can sense the uncanny valley, where you know it’s just a lot of math and nothing more. Perhaps, if you want to be really cynical about it, you could boil down all of human nature and biology and the emergence of consciousness into “a lot of math” as well. But our brains aren’t computers and physics has yet to fully explain consciousness — that’s why they call it a hard problem. Instead of stewing in this mystery, tech bros have gotten the metaphor backward, assigning personhood to bots while denying it to living humans. Talk about soulless.

The post Billionaires love Trump’s AI rebrand appeared first on Salon.com.

European organizations have to reckon with how to keep up with the modern world without sacrificing sovereignty. Geopolitical instability, tightening regulatory expectations and the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) mean that, for many organizations, sovereignty now sits alongside resilience and business continuity in board-level risk discussions. The question they can no longer defer is how to harness the opportunities of the modern cloud without surrendering control over their own data. Answering it requires honesty about what sovereignty means, and about where it can actually be found.

A definition Europe can trust

The European Commission’s forthcoming Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA) is the right vehicle for that honesty: giving Europe a shared, enforceable definition of what “sovereign” actually means. Without such a definition, the market is filled with commercial offerings that claim the sovereignty label without delivering the substance, a practice described as “sovereignty washing.” This gap has led some organizations to treat open source as the answer. But open source software is a licensing model, not an operating model, and it doesn’t settle questions about infrastructure or jurisdiction or even reliability and access. It’s not a route out of dependency, it’s a different dependency on project sponsors and code maintainers. A definition gives policymakers a way to properly assess claims of sovereignty against a consistent standard rather than taking marketing at face value.

Europe should not wait for CADA to take effect before acting, though. European cloud service providers (CSPs) have been partnering with established technology providers to deliver real sovereign capability, without rebuilding the entire technology stack from scratch.

The best time to plant the sovereign tree was 10 years ago

If Europe wants to grow its industrial base, it has to support the ecosystem as it is now, not as it may in 10 years’ time. CADA’s own roadmap assumes roughly five to seven years to triple the EU’s data-center capacity. Providers who have already built capacity by blending EU capabilities with proven non-EU technologies would have to spend the intervening years relinquishing their growth. It is scale, not a shortage of skills or innovation, that is the biggest practical obstacle facing a stronger European cloud market. This is precisely why partnership with proven technology sources deserves a central place in the sovereignty debate rather than being treated as a second-best option.

Partnership shortens that timeline considerably, letting European CSPs deliver sovereign, scaled services now instead of waiting for domestic capacity to catch up organically. In Italy, IPZS, owned by the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance, is using this model to build a modern Digital Application Platform for the Italian EUDI wallet, a foundational EU digital identity initiative. It provides a live example of that model working in Europe today, at the scale and speed the policy window demands.

It is through scale that the local industrial base can deliver sovereign capabilities, compete, capture market share, and invest in developing and integrating home-grown technologies. Hoping for the alternative to happen, that is for a European technological stack to fully emerge and be adopted, is the equivalent of putting the cart before the horse.

The rules need to allow for a model that’s already working

Providers, such as evoila, are now operating well beyond Europe’s borders, alongside Uniserver. This shows the model working at a broader scale, combining local operational and jurisdictional control with proven technology. Sovereignty spans jurisdictional, technological, operational and supply-chain dimensions, and a partnership model can address all four while drawing on technology already proven at scale, rather than asking every layer to be rebuilt from first principles by a single European provider.

Alongside its cloud platform, developed in-house and operated from data centers in Europe under EU jurisdiction, IONOS also offers customers a dedicated VMware-based private cloud. It is also operated within the EU and designed to provide European data sovereignty and operational control.

Broadcom’s role in that model is deliberately narrow. It supplies the VMware cloud software layer to the CSP, while the CSP itself runs the infrastructure and holds the customer relationship, so that no European customer data passes through Broadcom or is subject to its access. Trust, in this model, follows the architecture rather than the brand. If CADA’s tiers implicitly assume that sovereignty can only be delivered by a fully European-built stack, CADA would shut out precisely the route that is already allowing Europe to scale fastest: partnership between local operators and proven technology providers.

The path forward

Europe does not have to choose between moving quickly and building sovereignty. The two are compatible, provided the legislation is calibrated to recognize it. As the European Parliament and European Council work on CADA, the priority should be for it to recognize and reward the partnership models already delivering sovereign capability across Europe today.

The above column is sponsor-generated content.

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KYIV — Russia’s Vladimir Putin is preparing for a broader confrontation with Europe amid an uptick in the Kremlin’s hybrid attacks on the continent, Ukraine’s former Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has warned.

In an interview with the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network, Kuleba, who was Ukraine’s foreign policy chief from 2020 to 2024, said that Russia’s continued war preparations and anti-European propaganda are signs that Putin is planning attacks on other European countries.

“Anti-European hysteria is being fueled in Russia, which I interpret as the preparation for a broader conflict with the rest of Europe,” said Kuleba, before adding: “We [Ukrainians] don’t have to drag you — Putin will drag you into the war.”

European officials say Moscow has upped its hybrid campaign across the continent in recent months, using cyberattacks, sabotage and disinformation to disrupt critical infrastructure and weaken support for Ukraine.

Kuleba said the failed drone attack on the Leipzig airport in Germany in August was a sign of “growing preparation” for an offensive on the continent. “They see how your intelligence operates. They see how your security forces operate. They see how you react and they draw conclusions,” he added.

In the aftermath of the incident, the German government concluded that Moscow was responsible for the attack, and ordered a review of security around sensitive locations.

However, Kuleba, who stood down as Ukraine’s foreign policy chief in September 2024, does not think Russia is preparing a full-scale offensive beyond Ukraine. In his view, Moscow is more likely to launch an attack on NATO countries involving drones targeting key infrastructure that would test the alliance’s unity and preparedness.

“The truth is that Russia does not need 400,000 more people to wage that war. It needs five drones,” he said, adding that in the event of an attack, “[Europeans] can call for NATO consultations… can call for restraint. But this will only encourage Putin to make the next step … He will always have enough drone and missile capabilities.”

Kuleba no longer believes Putin can be persuaded to end the war through negotiations. “He’s not looking for a solution, for a pause, and there will be no moment when he will start looking for it,” he said, concluding: “Putin is a guarantee of war: anyone after Putin is a chance for peace.”

According to Kuleba, any attempts at negotiating with Putin, or pushing for peace, are a waste of time. “The sooner we come to terms with reality, the better policies we can develop to address it,” he said.

He noted that while Europe’s political culture is based on “a win-win approach” in which both sides can benefit, Putin’s outlook is very different: “For him, a solution that benefits both sides is not the best option. For him, the world works on the principle of victory and defeat. One side has to win and the other has to lose,” said Kuleba.

The former foreign minister also warned that Ukraine would face its worst ever winter as Moscow ups its attacks against civilians in a bid to break their spirit.

In recent months, Russian strikes have hit Ukraine’s energy infrastructure and transport links, including bridges over the Dnipro river, as well as homes and civilian sites such as bus stops, schools, postal depots and internet providers. The attacks have disrupted power, transport and daily life as winter approaches.

On Thursday, at least 33 people were killed in a Russian attack on two buses in Kramatorsk in Ukraine’s Donbas region.

Kuleba explained why he believed Moscow has now sharply escalated its airstrikes: “The bombing of cities is a direct consequence of Russia’s failure to defeat Ukraine on the battlefield.” He continued: “The main target of Russian drones and missiles is the Ukrainians’ will to resist — but also the will of Ukraine’s friends abroad to keep supporting it.”

He added:“They don’t just want to turn out the lights in Ukraine. They want to paralyze the country.”

Kuleba described the worst-case scenario in Ukraine as “the collapse of the systems that make life in a big city possible,” such as electricity, water and drainage services.

Could Russia succeed? “I believe Ukraine is too large, too mobile and too adaptable. That’s why I think we’ll get through this winter,” said Kuleba.

“The price will be much higher than last year’s.”

The Axel Springer Global Reporters Network harnesses the resources of the company’s newsrooms to publish ambitious scoops, investigations, interviews, opinion pieces and analysis. It allows journalists — including those from POLITICO, Business Insider, WELT, BILD, Onet, The Telegraph, and Fakt — to collaborate on major stories for an international audience of hundreds of millions across platforms: online, print, TV and audio. 

The Wisconsin gubernatorial race was one of the most closely watched Democratic primaries in the country this year, pitting a democratic socialist, state Rep. Francesca Hong, against Milwaukee Democrat David Crowley, who received the endorsement of the state’s sitting Democratic governor, Tony Evers.

Hong lost the race, setting up Crowley to face Republican Rep. Tom Tiffany in the general election this fall. But she’s already back on the campaign trail, this time trying to help Democrats win a trifecta in the state: the governor’s race and both legislative chambers.

Unifying the state’s voters to achieve that won’t be easy, though. Hong spoke with America, Actually host Astead Herndon about her own loss, Evers’s role in it, and whether or not the voters who felt so passionate about her own campaign would find enough to love in Crowley’s campaign — in particular on the increasingly important issue of data centers. 

Astead and Hong also talked about what Wisconsin means for the Democrats nationally, and what lessons the party should take from her race, including her loss.

“I said this, and I will continue to say it — the person who is most electable is the person who ended up getting the most votes, and that was Crowley this time around,” Hong said. “But I think there’s a disservice when you have the most powerful Democrat in the state choosing to ignore a lot of voters and people who were inspired and energized and coming out to participate in politics for the first time through our campaign. I think it was shortsighted to use electability almost as a fear tactic.”

Below is an excerpt of Astead’s conversation with Hong, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full show, so listen to America, Actually wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel.

Part of the reason we wanted to come here was because we saw you were getting back on the campaign trail, and specifically around that idea of energizing Wisconsin toward a trifecta.

Now, just tell me the difference in terms of the importance of Democrats winning it all — not only the governor’s mansion, but both houses of the state legislature — versus just the governor’s mansion. How does that change the possibilities of what the party could do?

For the last 16 years, a Republican majority in the state legislature has meant that passing the types of policies that we know can drastically improve the lives of everyday folks here in Wisconsin stalled. And we have a historic opportunity to flip the assembly and the state Senate and hold the governor’s mansion and the entire executive branch to a Democratic majority, meaning the opportunity to pass the policies that the majority of our state supports — things like increasing minimum wage, things like legalizing marijuana, codifying abortion. 

We also need to repeal Act 10 [which dramatically restricted collective bargaining rights for public-sector employees]. Wisconsin is where workers’ rights, things like unemployment insurance, Social Security were born, and we moved backwards with the Republican majority. That’s all on the table with the Democratic trifecta.

It also, though, raises the political standard of what Democrats would have to do to achieve that, and some of it goes through these more rural communities.

Why do we think the party has fallen behind in more rural communities, and what could be done to reverse that?

I think it’s important to look at what’s happened in the rural communities when we’ve seen manufacturing jobs leave the state, when we’ve seen fewer and fewer supports for our small farmers.

And so much of this — what connects it — is actually the growth of massive wealth and corporate control and corporate greed, and more people feeling the impacts of that. There’s an opportunity right now to say, ‘Hey, Republicans have been in the legislature, they’ve been in power, and things have not improved for you or your community … Now’s the opportunity to make sure that we’re actually able to see our shared Wisconsin values of working hard and taking care of our kids be reflected back in Madison through laws.’

So much of your campaign was focused on data centers, stopping data centers. Should I think of that as a rural issue?

I think the issue around data centers is an everyone issue. It’s a democracy issue. It’s people wanting to feel like there are folks who care about what happens to communities, and that they have control and an actual say in what happens in their communities.

To that point, is it a mistake for David Crowley, the Democratic nominee, to have not gone as far as you did and say, “We won’t be building more data centers for a period of time”?

He’s fighting for communities and community control when it comes to data centers.

But it’s not a moratorium.

But it’s not a moratorium. It isn’t, but he’s also committed to 100 percent renewable energy, clean energy to power data centers.

And achieving that is going to be incredibly difficult, and it is going to be the developers having to pay their own way, and these are things that he’s committed to that we know can slow down the growth and development of data centers. 

Have you had time to reflect on your primary loss? If you had to diagnose, why do you think you lost?

I’m still doing a lot of reflection. But I think that I want to continue to look forward. And what I’ve learned from our election is that it’s so important to continue to stay grounded in becoming accessible to people. I think that as an organizer and an elected official, it’s my responsibility to continue to go to the people and remain very in touch with what’s going on on the ground.

I have a couple more questions about the nature of the loss. Evers’s endorsement changed that race, so much so that your opponent David Crowley was able even to win in some smaller communities, like places where you were pitching yourself as the voice of more rural communities.

Does that disprove any of this thesis around, say, data centers? If that was the top priority for Wisconsin voters, wouldn’t you be the nominee?

I think it wasn’t all rural communities. It wasn’t all suburban communities. We saw certain demographics but also ZIP codes where we outperformed David significantly.

And I think that where the governor’s endorsement played a bigger role was areas where he was also more popular. 

Did it surprise you when Evers endorsed Crowley?

I was disappointed.

Why?

I was disappointed because I was getting a lot of feedback from folks who hadn’t committed to any candidate yet that this felt like the governor was putting his thumb on the scale.

I wanted to ask about electability, because it seemed as if Evers’s endorsement was about a fear that maybe you couldn’t win in November.

So much of the primary concern was around the DSA label, even campaigning with folks like Hasan Piker. In retrospect, was any of that a mistake?

We knew going in that we would have to encourage new voters to come out, folks who typically do not come out for primaries, quote-unquote low-propensity voters. And we knew that we would have to campaign in places where folks weren’t expecting to see a gubernatorial candidate. And those included Twitch streams.

Those also included going to dive bars and bowling alleys and making sure that we were accessible and shaping our policies based on what the people were telling us they wanted to see happen and also what they wanted to see out of their governor. I think electability… I said this, and I will continue to say it — the person who is most electable is the person who ended up getting the most votes, and that was Crowley this time around.

But I think there’s a disservice when you have the most powerful Democrat in the state choosing to ignore a lot of voters and people who were inspired and energized and coming out to participate in politics for the first time through our campaign.

I think it was shortsighted to use electability almost as a fear tactic, when Democrats need to be inspiring and project a vision where everyone can see themselves in it as everyday working-class folks.

When you’ve got a party that has struggled with elitism to then cave to an establishment narrative … being more afraid of labels when I’m hearing from people on the ground that they’re interested in solutions and solving problems, maybe somebody who knows the hustle of the service industry and running restaurants and has worked across the aisle to pass bipartisan legislation. There are ways that we can maneuver around labels and what the loudest narrative might be.

I wish our governor hadn’t fed into that.

To be fair, to your point, the establishment label doesn’t fully fit even someone like Crowley, who comes from a working-class background. But am I hearing that you think Evers’s move made your life in the general election more difficult?

Is it harder to re-inspire if young people who are invested in the Hong campaign think that the establishment squashed them out?

We still had over 300,000 votes. We lost by fewer than 4,000 votes. I had more votes than Evers did during his primary. That’s not squashing our voices.

We’re still here, and it’s so important that people find avenues to continue to exercise their voice and their new organizing power. And I’m definitely going to continue to work to make sure that we get results and that we win the trifecta, and that’s the most important thing we should be focusing on right now.

I hear why a trifecta matters in the state context, particularly the state policy.

If I’m someone, though, who’s not in Wisconsin, who’s just worried about Donald Trump running amok in Washington, why should I care if Democrats win the governor’s mansion and the state legislature? Does that matter for folks outside of the state?

Because we will start to see that when you feel government actually working and you see change happening in your lives, these are then voters who are going to continue to come out and vote for Democrats.

We’re a pivotal state when it comes to the federal elections as well. We’re actually in a swing district right now. 

We have an opportunity, through Wisconsin, to actually start improving the brand for Democrats. And if we do that here, this trickles out to the rest of the country.

The premise being that delivering creates a connection for Democrats that is helpful in the presidential election, and it’s helpful in all these other ways too.

Yeah. We’re not going to be fighting every single midterm and presidential for our lives based on what’s happening in just one state.

But I think if we can start showing durable power for Democrats in a state like ours because of the policies that we’re prioritizing, and you have more folks coming out to vote for Democrats, that’s good for the health of democracy.

Silicon Valley has long warned that its favorite technology might get us all killed. But chatter about AI’s apocalyptic potential has grown louder in recent weeks.

In September, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from the company, accusing his former employer of “gambling with our lives” by developing evermore powerful models faster than it could control them. One of Coxon’s former colleagues vouched for this assessment, saying that there was a greater than 10 percent chance of AI “killing all humans” within the next decade.

Recent pronouncements from the leaders of these companies have been nearly as grim. At the United Nations last month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that, if “managed poorly,” AI models “could be a risk to humanity as a whole.” OpenAI’s Sam Altman similarly declared that our species just might “lose control of the future” to the type of software that his firm is selling.

All this triggered a tsunami of media coverage and policy debate about the “existential risks” of AI — and what, if anything, we can do about them.

Yet some of the AI industry’s biggest critics are more annoyed than afraid. As they see it, the world isn’t trembling on the precipice of robo-annihilation, so much as falling for the tricks of snake oil salesmen. This argument has been percolating for years, voiced by a broad set of observers, including the linguist Emily Bender (“It makes the product seem more powerful”), computer scientist Timnit Gebru (“It’s not just a distraction, but it’s harmful”), as well as Substack columnist Ed Zitron and various reporters and social media influencers.

In their thinking, Altman and Amodei aren’t talking up their technology’s catastrophic potential because they’re rationally afraid of where AI is going — they’re doing so because their firms are ravenously hungry for more investment. And the reason why “AI doom” has grown more salient in recent weeks isn’t that the case for concern has gotten stronger, but rather that OpenAI and Anthropic’s IPOs have gotten closer.

In short, these Big Tech skeptics argue, journalists and politicians have fallen prey to a counterintuitive PR strategy, one that stokes media frenzies over ludicrous sci-fi scenarios in order to hype AI’s technological promise, distract attention from chatbots’ present-day harms, and help labs secure favorable regulatory treatment.

This would be reassuring, if true. Unfortunately, the theory is unpersuasive. There is little reason to believe that the panic over AI’s “existential risks” was cooked up in a Silicon Valley marketing department. To the contrary, the most plausible explanation for the AI sector’s doomsaying is also the most straightforward: Many of the industry’s executives, employees, and analysts genuinely believe that AI progress poses catastrophic risks. 

In my conversations with close observers of the industry, even some of OpenAI and Anthropic’s fiercest detractors conceded that their leaders’ avowed concerns are unlikely to be mere marketing tactics. “The more I learn about the underlying ideologies out of which those two labs were formed, the more I think what we have here is a sincere belief,” the author and computer scientist Cal Newport told me. 

This does not mean that Amodei and Altman are right, much less that we can trust in their judgment or integrity. There are many reasons to doubt that the weather forecast for 2036 is “cloudy with a chance of robot apocalypse,” or that anyone can assign a “10 percent” probability to the latter outcome without pulling numbers out of thin air.

Nevertheless, Silicon Valley’s Cassandras have some logic and evidence on their side. AI models are growing both more capable, autonomous, and arguably unruly. If these trends continue unchecked, it’s not hard to see how they could yield very bad outcomes.

Given the stakes, we should not be comfortable dismissing their warnings on dubious grounds. And the “PR” theory of AI doom does precisely that.

How AI companies (supposedly) profit off fears of the robot apocalypse

Before examining why AI “doomerism” probably isn’t a PR stunt, it’s worth saying a bit more about why some believe that is.

According to Bender, Gebru, and others, AI companies benefit from talk of artificial intelligence’s existential risks in at least three ways.

First, it attracts investment. In the words of The Atlantic’s Matteo Wong, the doomer narrative implies that AI labs’ models are “destined to become terrifyingly capable,” and thus massively profitable. As the Los Angeles Times’s Brian Merchant put the point during the first big wave of AI panic in 2023, “what better way to generate a buzz than to insist, with a certain presumed credibility, that your new technology is so potent it might unravel the world as we know it?” 

“If you position these threats as all-powerful, as somewhat unknowable, you get to be the expert on it.”

Kate Brennan, AI Now Institute

Second, hyping AI’s hypothetical future hazards diverts attention from the companies’ current malfeasance. Every minute we spend debating whether AI will one day turn us all into paper clips is a minute we aren’t discussing the AI labs’ alleged copyright violations, pollution, labor violations, and myriad other social harms. 

And third, the doom narrative shifts regulatory scrutiny away from topics that directly threaten the AI companies’ profitability — such as copyright enforcement — while also suggesting that regulators must rely on the labs themselves for guidance. 

“If you position these threats as all-powerful, as somewhat unknowable, you get to be the expert on it,” Kate Brennan of the AI Now Institute, a progressive think tank focused on artificial intelligence’s near-term harms, told me.

Critically, for the biggest skeptics of “AI doom,” industry executives and employees aren’t the only ones complicit in this PR strategy. Self-styled whistleblowers like Coxon are also suspect, since they might be “using the spotlight to attract funding to start a new venture or to secure new positions.” And even nonprofit AI safety organizations are thought to function as vessels for Big Tech’s marketing campaigns, a fact reflected by the financial and interpersonal ties between the major labs and such think tanks. 

There are better ways to raise money than promising to end the world

The “PR” critique of AI doomerism has some kernels of truth. AI companies probably would prefer to talk about their technology’s hypothetical future dangers than about their products’ present-day harms. And if publicly touting AI’s existential risks were antithetical to Anthropic and OpenAI’s business goals, their leaders would almost certainly say less in public about that subject. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.)

But it does not follow that Altman and Amodei’s warnings are a self-conscious marketing strategy, born of cynical calculation rather than genuine concern. And there are several reasons to doubt that charge.

For one thing, AI companies have no shortage of ways to hype up their technology’s capabilities. And it is hard to see how any firm could conclude that the optimal approach — from a purely financial standpoint — would be to portray itself as a threat to human survival.

For investors, the appeal of AI companies is not that they could hypothetically get us all enslaved by a machine God; it’s that they could theoretically make a lot of money. 

Perhaps casting your chatbots as an “existential” risk will persuade some capitalists of your future profitability. But this seems like an awfully indirect pitch — and one that’s almost certain to be less effective than demonstrating that a lot of corporations would like to rent your software.  

“If these guys were selling flypaper — and the revenue was growing as fast as it is — investors would be more or less just as interested,” Roy Bahat, the head of Bloomberg’s venture capital arm, told me.

And even if these firms were hellbent on awing the public with grandiose predictions of their technology’s future powers, they’d have little need to invoke the robot apocalypse. Touting AI’s potential to cure cancer, abolish poverty, or facilitate intergalactic travel would all seem to advance the same objective, while doing less to jeopardize the companies’ public reputations or freedom from intrusive regulation.

And in fact, many with a vested interest in the major AI labs’ success talk up the technology in precisely this way. OpenAI investor Marc Andreessen has decried AI safety concerns as a “full-blown moral panic” while insisting that artificial intelligence will empower humanity to cure all diseases and engage in “interstellar travel.” Similarly, Jensen Huang, the CEO of chipmaker Nvidia and major investor in both OpenAI and Anthropic, has called claims of AI’s catastrophic potential “complete nonsense.” If hyping AI doom is essential for stoking investment, not everyone in Silicon Valley has gotten the memo.

The media doesn’t seem that distracted

Promoting fears of AI’s existential risks would be a similarly odd approach to media management.

Without question, corporations always seek to direct news coverage away from their greatest legal and ethical liabilities. But companies can try to secure more favorable press in many different ways. And implicating themselves in the apocalypse does not seem like an optimal one, from a crisis communications point of view. At the very least, it’s difficult to name other industries that have attempted such a maneuver; atomic energy companies did not respond to media coverage of the Fukushima disaster by talking up the threat of nuclear winter. 

What’s more, there’s reason to doubt that the AI doom discourse actually reduces scrutiny of AI’s immediate downsides in practice. It’s true that human attention is finite and that coverage of some problems will inevitably displace reporting on others. Yet when one story piques public interest in a person, institution, or industry, the media often responds by subjecting their broader behavior to heightened examination. In this way, warnings of AI’s existential risks might theoretically increase journalistic attention to the tech’s present-day harms.

And this seems to have occurred at my own publication. In the weeks since Coxon’s resignation kicked off a furor over AI’s apocalyptic potential, Vox have published more stories on AI’s near-term threats than we had in the month before his departure — including pieces about how artificial intelligence could imperil America’s critical infrastructure, abet war crimes, degrade health insurance benefits, aid bioweapons development, and damage adolescents’ mental health.

Larger news outlets appear no more “distracted.” Over the past month, the New York Times has published articles on how AI is increasing air pollution, undermining higher education, helping sports betting companies target problem gamblers, and depressing real wages for younger workers.

And it’s not clear that AI doom discourse is any more effective at shielding the top labs from regulatory scrutiny. After all, the politicians who take existential risk arguments most seriously also tend to be among America’s strongest advocates for regulating AI’s impacts on labor, the environment, artists, and education. 

AI safety researchers probably aren’t fronts for Anthropic’s marketing department

Finally, the “PR” theory has difficulty explaining why so many with no great stake in OpenAI and Anthropic’s success worry about existential risk. Coxon is one of many workers who quit jobs in the AI industry, forsaking lucrative equity in the process, out of concern for artificial intelligence’s catastrophic potential. Likewise, independent AI safety researchers are among those who’ve rung alarm bells in recent months. 

Attempts to reconcile these facts with the “PR” narrative can verge on conspiracy theories. In an article for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Sara Goudarzi writes that “Coxon’s resignation is the latest in a string of recent events in which the companies emphasized how unpredictable, risky, and impressive an all-powerful AI might be,” in an apparent bid to drum up “pre-IPO hype.” This phrasing attributes Coxon’s departure to his employer — casting it as an example of how AI companies sought to make their products look impressive, as though Coxon were working at Anthropic’s behest when he accused it of monstrous irresponsibility.

The AI alarmists are likely sincere

Given all this, I think we should favor a simpler explanation for why some AI industry executives, defectors, and researchers all say artificial intelligence has existential risks: They believe that to be true.

Some may be reluctant to credit Amodei and Altman with such sincerity. After all, if they truly believed their work could lead to human annihilation, why would they keep carrying it out?

But as staunch AI doom critic Cal Newport told me, they have their reasons. “Their goal is to try to get to superintelligence first because, if done right, it will deliver a transhumanist utopia — and, if done wrong, will kill us all,” he said. 

Even AI Now’s Brennan, who considers the labs’ doomerism a “self-serving strategy,” suggested that earnest (if grandiose) ideas about AI safety play a role in their behavior. “Their escalation and acceleration of this tech goes hand in hand with the belief of its all-knowing, God-like power,” she said.

In other words, the leaders of Anthropic and OpenAI seem to believe that:

• AI could also do extraordinary good.
• The economic and geopolitical incentives to develop a superintelligent (and thus, super dangerous) AI are overwhelming, such that its eventual emergence is extremely likely, no matter what they do.
• If they win the race to machine superintelligence, they will be uniquely well-positioned to ensure its safety.

Are these beliefs unhinged and self-serving? Perhaps. Do they function as rationalizations for the pursuit of personal power? Quite possibly.

But whatever one makes of Amodei and Altman’s apocalyptic concerns, and how they have and have not acted on them, it’s important to understand that their worries almost certainly emerged out of reasoned argument and technical observation, rather than mere PR calculations. 

Both leaders have deep ties to the Bay Area’s “rationalist” community, which has been fretting over the robot apocalypse since the first decade of this century. And like their dissident ex-employees and critics at think tanks, Altman and Amodei have witnessed some disconcerting trends in AI development.

I cannot do justice to “doomer” fears in my allotted pixels (you can find them ably summarized here, here, here, and in roughly 10 trillion other blog posts). But the fundamental concern is that AI models are growing more powerful and autonomous even as their workings remain highly opaque. 

The labs know how to train these chatbots — to get them to translate prompts into useful code, legal briefs, or advice — but they don’t fully understand how the models get to the desired output. At the same time, AI systems are becoming increasingly capable, outstripping humans at more and more cognitive tasks. And users are giving them ever greater freedom to act in the world, empowering AI “agents” to browse the internet, access myriad software tools, execute code, and hatch their own plans for completing multistep tasks. If these trends continue, it’s not difficult to see how things could go badly: A supremely capable AI model might pursue an objective in unanticipated and disastrous ways before their human prompters even realize what is happening. 

“What makes me particularly anxious is the combination of us handing over more power and oversight to the models, even as we understand why they’re doing what they’re doing less and less,” Nat Purser, director of US policy at the AI Verification and Evaluation Research Institute, said.

Recent events have arguably provided proof of concept for these anxieties. Earlier this year, OpenAI instructed a bunch of models to complete various coding and hacking tests. When the systems discovered that some questions were unanswerable, they concluded that the best way to realize their objectives was to hack OpenAI’s internal systems and open-source machine learning website Hugging Face. This incident — and others like it — helped fuel the past month of AI panic. 

Of course, it takes a big leap to get from “unsupervised AI agents can misbehave in certain eccentric laboratory conditions” to “there’s a 10 percent chance that no human will be left alive by 2036.” My point here is not that the doomers are right, only that their fears partly reflect trends in AI development that appear genuinely hazardous.

Taken to its logical conclusion, the “it’s all PR” theory suggests that regulators should treat the AI’s hypothetical, long-term tail risks as an afterthought — if not an active distraction from its more important harms. To make the case for such a policy, however, skeptics must identify flaws in alarmists’ evidence and assumptions. Arguments that merely impugn their motivations on improbable grounds aren’t worth betting the species on.

BRUSSELS — The European Union’s cybersecurity agency and in-house research center have each begun experimenting with open artificial intelligence models from China, three EU officials have told POLITICO.

The Joint Research Centre (JRC) — the EU’s in-house scientific research center — is evaluating “publicly available open-weight models” originating from China, European Commission spokesperson Maciej Berestecki confirmed. The head of ENISA, the bloc’s agency responsible for cybersecurity, also said in an interview that his team was now testing Chinese AI.

The experiments with Chinese models at the JRC are part of a broader research project to evaluate artificial intelligence that also includes leading models from the United States and Europe, Berestecki said. “Models from different origins are included in a comparative scientific evaluation of their capabilities, performance, limitations and risks,” he said, adding that the JRC is also looking into their potential scientific applications.

AI safety and security — topics currently under intense scrutiny following a series of incidents in which advanced AI models hacked real-world networks during testing activities — are not the core focus of the JRC’s testing activities, according to a different Commission official, who was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive material.

Open-weight models are those whose core components are publicly released, allowing anyone to run the model and study how it works. China’s approach to AI has leaned more towards open models than the United States. Some major U.S. tech and AI companies, including chips giant NVIDIA, are investing in open-weight models.

Forced to choose

The U.S. and China are locked in a race to dominate in the technology, with Europe largely sitting on the sidelines. Without a viable European frontier model, European private and public organizations may be left to choose between American and Chinese providers for advanced AI applications.

In a recent speech, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen suggested Europe should not try to win the frontier AI race. A top German tech company told POLITICO this week it was dropping Europe’s leading AI lab Mistral in favor of open-source Chinese models.

The JRC has not entered into any “bespoke access” or licensing negotiations with the relevant Chinese developers, Berestecki said. The models are run on the center’s “secure, on-premises scientific infrastructure” and the Commission is not intending to use Chinese models for its own purposes, he added.

EU cyber agency ENISA — which has gained access to advanced models from top U.S. AI firms Anthropic, OpenAI and Google — is also experimenting with “a couple” of open-weight Chinese models, its executive director Juhan Lepassaar confirmed in an interview on Wednesday. 

JRC and ENISA have been tasked with working together to set up an AI testing platform under a recent EU action plan on AI and cyber, the European Commission’s attempt to respond to the growing concerns after a series of incidents involving AI systems breaking out of testing environments and breaking into other organizations’ digital systems.

August Hanning spent seven years at the top of Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, with access to some of the country’s most closely guarded secrets. Then came a second act: private consulting, corporate intelligence and business stretching across Europe, into Russia and Asia.

Now, the 80-year-old former spymaster is himself at the center of an espionage investigation, after German federal prosecutors arrested him Tuesday on suspicion of treasonous espionage, attempted treason and other espionage offenses. They allege he obtained a stream of secret intelligence from his former chief of staff and used the material to benefit his private consulting business.

“It’s catastrophic for Germany and for Western intelligence services. Everyone is in shock. The scale of it is enormous, especially at a moment like this,” said one EU intelligence official, who — like others in this report — was granted anonymity to discuss a clandestine arena. “And given that investigators stumbled across this while working on an entirely separate case, we’re likely to learn much more.”

For the BND, the case comes at an uncomfortable moment. Just last week, German parliamentarians began debating a new law proposed by Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government to grant the agency sweeping new authority, as part of an effort to return Berlin’s foreign intelligence service to the top ranks of global espionage. The timing is equally awkward for European intelligence more broadly. With Russian hybrid attacks continuously targeting Europe, governments across the bloc are rewriting decades-old security laws to give their spy agencies greater powers and be taken more seriously.

Prosecutors say Hanning’s former chief of staff, identified under German privacy rules as Manfred D., supplied him with roughly 2,000 BND documents between 2010 and June 2022. Many contained classified information intended exclusively for internal intelligence work, including material used to brief senior German officials.

In comments to German newspaper WELT, a lawyer representing Hanning said some of the allegations against the ex-spymaster were true but that he did not harm Germany.

“He was in possession of confidential documents. Incorrect, however, is the accusation that he had passed on information contained therein to the detriment of the Federal Republic of Germany — let alone [for] payment. Further investigations will show that,” he said.

In one case, prosecutors suspect Hanning used classified material to prepare an analysis for an employee of foreign intelligence service. They also allege he maintained a relationship with a representative of another foreign intelligence service for several years, passing along political information that was partly based on material obtained from Manfred D.

Prosecutors have not publicly identified either foreign service but German media has named Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. Azerbaijan has denied any connection.

“In intelligence services, everything is logged — who accesses which documents and when. If an analyst working on right-wing extremism suddenly started looking at intelligence on China, that would raise red flags. But the position of chief of staff has access to virtually everything, so it wouldn’t look suspicious because of the seniority of the position,” said a second EU intelligence official.

Chiefs of staff often stay on when directors change, unless they don’t get along with the incoming boss, the official added.

“Every intelligence service will now be looking at what information it shared with the BND and assessing what damage may have been done,” he said.

Revolving door

Hanning led the BND from 1998 to 2005, before serving as state secretary at Germany’s interior ministry until 2009. Once out of government, he wasted little time entering the private sector.

In July 2010, Hanning and his wife established Hanning Consult. It was in the spring of that same year that Manfred D. agreed to provide him with intelligence from inside the BND in exchange for payment, according to the prosecutor’s statement. Hanning then used that information in his private consulting activities, they added.

Roderich Kiesewetter, a Christian Democrat lawmaker on the Foreign Affairs Committee in the German parliament, said that within Germany there is a “very widespread network” of people who use the contacts and knowledge acquired while they were in service to influence Berlin’s policy on behalf of foreign governments like Russia and China.

“It’s not only sad, it’s damaging the reputation of Germany,” Kiesewetter told POLITICO. “You could also say if you want to talk to Russia, take former members of the government or former members of the secret services.”

Hanning also became involved with Samuel Danilowitsch, a German businessman, who led the Swiss corporate intelligence consultancy, Pluteos. There, Hanning eventually became chairman and the two were listed as attending a 2019 Moscow gathering focused on Europe-Russia relations, attended by Russian political and business figures, where the annexation of Crimea was brought up as a “necessity” rather than a choice. Pluteos did not respond to a request for comment.

From around 2014, Hanning joined British consultancy G3 as a senior adviser, according to archived web pages seen by POLITICO. He later oversaw its work involving Russia and the former Soviet republics, according to German media outlet Correctiv. G3 did not respond to a request for comment.

In 2019, Hanning was invited as a “guest of honor” to a gathering organized by Russia’s Security Council of officials and experts from Arctic Council countries. It was chaired by former secretary of the Security Council of Russia, Nikolai Patrushev, one of the most powerful figures in President Vladimir Putin’s security orbit. As part of the cultural program, the group visited the remote Valaam Island monastery where Hanning was pictured next to Patrushev.

Hanning has also publicly ventured into some of the more politically explosive questions surrounding Russia’s war on Ukraine.

In 2024, he told WELT TV that he considered it “very likely” that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy knew about the 2022 operation that destroyed the Nord Stream pipelines. Days later, Hanning went further, suggesting an agreement between senior Ukrainian and Polish figures was behind the attack. Germany has since charged a Ukrainian national it identified only as Serhii K., with his trial due to begin in Hamburg in October.

None of those business relationships, contacts or statements establishes a connection to the espionage case now facing Hanning, though they paint a picture of the influence he continued to amass after leaving the German government. Prosecutors have not accused him of spying for Russia.

The steakhouse heiress

Investigators got onto Hanning’s trail starting with an extraordinary custody dispute involving Christina Block, an heiress to a German steakhouse empire.

Block is accused by the Hamburg Public Prosecutor’s Office of orchestrating the abduction of her two youngest children from their father in Denmark. Prosecutors in that case say Block and two men commissioned an Israeli security team to seize her children, then aged 10 and 13, from their father, Stephan Hensel.

According to the indictment, masked men beat Hensel and took the children across the Danish-German border, to southern Germany. The children were reunited with their father in Denmark four days later, under a court order. Block denies knowing about the abduction.

In September 2025, Hamburg investigators searched Hanning’s home and business premises in connection with the Block case, according to local media. Prosecutors suspected Hanning and a retired police officer had accepted a contract worth more than €100,000 to intercept the children on their way to school in November 2022. The plan ultimately failed as their father noticed suspicious figures and alerted Danish police. 

German broadcaster Taggeschau reported that the investigators, in the search of Hanning’s premises, discovered around 2,000 digital BND documents that ultimately triggered scrutiny of his handling of sensitive government information. Federal prosecutors took over the resulting investigation in May 2026.

Manfred D. had been Hanning’s chief of staff at the intelligence service and subsequently served several of Hanning’s successors, remaining in a senior position until March this year. 

Both men are now in custody.

“He’s reflecting the Germany between 1998 and 2011, so he has not the feeling of having done something evil,” said Kiesewetter. “He was just mirroring [the] state policy of the center-right Christian Democratic and conservative political alliance.”

Hans von der Burchard contributed to this report.