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Throughout his second term, President Donald Trump has saddled his party with no shortage of political liabilities — from the mass pardons of January 6 convictions to ICE killings of US citizens to questionable Reflecting Pool redesign choices.

For voters, however, there is one stain on Trump’s record more unsightly than all the rest: his failure to reduce Americans’ cost of living.

As the midterm campaign enters its home stretch, Americans’ expenses are rising — and the GOP’s prospects are consequently dimming.

Last month, consumer prices were 3.7 percent higher than they had been one year earlier, according to a Consumer Price Index report released on Wednesday. That represented an acceleration in the inflation rate, one driven largely by skyrocketing fuel prices: Gasoline was 9.1 percent more expensive in September than it had been in August. As a result, America’s average real wage has fallen by 44 cents since January.

In less than three weeks, Americans will head to the polls to decide which party controls Congress, along with a slew of state and local offices. As we count down to that momentous and potentially messy day, this newsletter is partnering with our colleague Astead Herndon and Vox’s The Midterms, Actually team for weekly editions on the biggest issues shaping the midterms. We’re breaking down one issue each week and suggesting further reading and races to watch in November.

Last week, we tackled the data center backlash. And this week, we’re digging into affordability.

Go a little deeper

These upward trends in prices aren’t lost on voters. In a recent Pew Research survey, just 21 percent of Americans said economic conditions were “excellent” or “good” — while 65 percent said that Trump’s policies had made the economy worse.

The high cost of living is weighing on Republican candidates in all battleground races. Maine provides just one example of how potent the issue could prove on Election Day.

From one angle, the state’s Senate race might seem like a gimme for Democrats. Kamala Harris won Maine by nearly 7 points in 2024. Thus, in 2026 — when Democrats are poised to win in a national landslide — one might expect the party to easily triumph.

But Republican incumbent Susan Collins is an unusually formidable foe. The race has been a dead heat, with Democratic nominee Troy Jackson leading by just 2 points in a recent Suffolk University poll.

Fortunately for Jackson, Mainers’ energy bills are expected to soar in the campaign’s final weeks, plausibly increasing voters’ appetite for change in the process. 

Maine is America’s second coldest state and unusually reliant on oil for home heat. As autumn advances, its residents will use more heating oil, thereby driving up both their personal bills and market prices. Thanks to the global energy crunch, a gallon of such fuel is already nearly twice as expensive as it was this time last year. 

Jackson has been hitting Collins on the issue relentlessly. That could put a chill in Collins’s reelection odds — and thus, the GOP’s hopes of retaining Senate control.

➨ Other races to watch:

• Similar dynamics are playing out in perennially icy Alaska, where Democratic Senate candidate Mary Peltola has hammered incumbent Republican Dan Sullivan for his complicity in sky-high diesel prices, which many Alaskans use for home heat.  
• In Ohio’s Senate race, Democrat Sherrod Brown has tried to pin rising electricity bills on Republican Sen. Jon Husted, due to his support for data center development. 
• And in Texas, Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico has attacked his Republican rival, state Attorney General Ken Paxton, for supporting “this disastrous war in Iran that’s driving up our costs.” 

In other news

• A brief ceasefire ends: Ukrainian drones attacked a Russian oil refinery early Thursday, days after Trump demanded both Russia and Ukraine halt such attacks.
• Execution livestream canceled: Trump canceled a plan to livestream the execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan by firing squad.
• On the podcast: A recent rash of violence between Saudi Arabia and Yemen’s Houthis threatens to destabilize the region — and make the Iran war much larger. Listen to the whole thing here.

One link for later

Rethink confidence. Research shows confidence is good for your job and good for your romantic prospects. Unsurprisingly, then, a whole industry has sprung up teaching people to be more confident. One writer signed up to work with a confidence coach for the first time, and ended up doubting that her self-doubt was all that bad.

Before you go…

• Did you know…there are four state laws regarding real estate and paranormal activity in the US? That’s because purported hauntings are just one of many factors that can affect home prices.
• Today’s trivia: What is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: We asked which percussion instrument is famously played by Mississippi State University fans at home football games. That would be the cowbell.

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.

On most fronts, President Donald Trump has shown little concern for reducing Americans’ cost of living ahead of November’s midterms. 

Trump has refused to accept Iran’s ceasefire proposals, even as the conflict pushes fuel costs to new heights. And he’s declined to abandon his trade wars — with US adversaries and allies alike — even as tariffs nudge up Americans’ expenses. 

Yet there is one area where Trump has recently tried to lower consumer prices in an economically coherent way, and it’s been a political disaster.

In late August, the president lowered tariffs on up to 661 million pounds of imported lean beef trimmings, a key ingredient in hamburger meat.

This policy directly addressed a genuine problem facing US consumers: Ground beef prices were roughly 8 percent higher last month than they had been one year earlier. And unlike many of the White House’s other ideas for increasing affordability, the meat imports proposal comported with conventional economic logic: If you reduce input costs for meat processors, they’ll be able to sell beef at lower prices. 

By endorsing this reasoning, the Trump administration was implicitly rebuking its own theory of trade economics (which holds that tariffs increase costs for foreign companies, not American consumers). In doing so, Trump also put voters’ material interests — and economists’ conventional wisdom — above his ideological hangups.

And he’s paying dearly for it. 

Instead of appeasing cash-strapped shoppers, the beef imports policy has mostly just aggravated (already aggrieved) agricultural firms. All across the farm belt, cattle ranchers are incensed by Trump aiding their foreign competition — after the president had already depressed their sales through tariffs and increased their costs via his Iran war and immigration policies. 

Cowpokes aren’t alone in resenting the White House’s affronts to agricultural interests. In dark red states like Kansas and Iowa, Democratic candidates have become highly competitive, while Republicans are racing to distance themselves from the president, in part by going after his beef plan directly.

Which raises the question: How and why did Trump’s plan for cheaper hamburgers go so wrong?

The answer partly concerns that measure’s particular flaws. But it also reflects broader problems with the administration’s governance, which now threaten to cost Republicans badly: A persistent failure to account for its policies’ economic consequences, a reliance on symbolic, last-minute fixes instead of far-sighted planning, and inattention to the material concerns of voters — even those as deeply conservative as cattle ranchers.

Trump’s cheap beef policy is small potatoes

As a political matter, the fundamental flaw with Trump’s beef import policy is simple: Its benefits to individual consumers are minuscule while its costs to certain cattle ranchers are substantial.

Trump’s tariff exemption has a tiny impact on consumer prices for two reasons. First, it just doesn’t affect that much meat. Although 661 million pounds may sound like a lot, that adds up to only about 6.8 percent of America’s annual ground beef supply. And most of these imports go to restaurants and fast-food joints, since grocers tend to prefer fresh, domestic ground beef. 

Second, only a small fraction of beef importers’ savings is likely to pass through to consumers. When a meat processor sees the costs of imported beef fall, it will generally try to pocket as much of its savings as it can, perhaps passing a small chunk along to the distributors it contracts with.

The distributors will then try to retain as much of that small chunk as they can before passing a slimmer fraction of the initial savings along to retailers or restaurants, who will then try to do much the same before selling to customers. In this way, past USDA research has suggested that only about 19 percent of any decline in wholesale beef prices reaches consumers.

Combine this reality with the narrow scale of Trump’s tariff relief, and the consumer benefit becomes microscopic. According to the Purdue University economists Ken Foster and Bernhard Dalheimer, Trump’s policy will reduce wholesale ground beef prices by at most 1.41 percent. If only 19 percent of that decline passes through to consumers, as the USDA’s research suggests, then shoppers will pay just 0.27 percent less for ground beef. In other words, in the best-case scenario, Trump’s policy would knock about two cents off the price of a pound of hamburger meat. 

For context, that price has risen by $1.32 cents — or 23 percent — since Trump took office.

Why cattle country is beefing with the White House

Looking at these numbers, one might ask: So what are these ranchers complaining about? If Trump’s policy only lets in enough cheap foreign beef to cut prices by a couple cents, how much could it really hurt domestic cattle producers?

It is true that the president’s tariff relief has not condemned cattle ranchers to penury. But it does hurt farmers more than it helps individual consumers for two reasons.

First, the impact is highly concentrated on certain cattle operations. The new imports soften demand for domestic cull cows — breeding females who’ve gotten old enough to be worth more dead than alive — because their meat tends to be low-fat. No ranch specializes in producing such cattle. But ranchers who happen to have older herds at the moment are more reliant on cull cow sales. 

Second, from the perspective of all ranchers, Trump’s policy sets a disconcerting precedent. To build a herd, ranchers must hold back young female cows today — passing up immediate earnings from selling their meat — so as to breed more future cattle, which won’t come to market for years. 

In effect, this means that ranchers must perennially sink money into bets on the trajectory of future beef prices. If there happens to be a hamburger glut when today’s calves become ripe for slaughter, then their investments could produce a shabby return. But this downside risk is typically offset by the potential for outsize gains: If beef prices soar three years from now, ranchers who rebuild their herds today will reap large profits.

Yet Trump policy threatens this upside: If the government makes a habit of letting in cheap foreign beef every time hamburger prices spike, then it will effectively lower the ceiling on domestic ranchers’ future profits. 

As Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran, and dozens of other farm-state members of Congress put the point in a letter to Trump, “Cattle markets are cyclical, and ranchers use the upswings to prepare for the inevitable downturn.” The lawmakers therefore urge Trump to abandon any “intervention in the natural system” that might depress those upswings, so as not to “undermine the long-term viability of family-owned cattle operations throughout the supply chain.”

Trump’s unintentional war on agriculture

For these reasons, Trump’s beef tariff exemption was inevitably going to attract more complaints from ranchers than applause for consumers. What’s made it especially politically toxic, however, is the broader policy context it emerged from. 

Simply put, when your foreign policy costs the average US household more than $500 in excess gasoline expenses — while your tariffs cost them $1,100 in elevated consumer prices — they’re probably not going to thank you for making a pound of ground beef two cents cheaper.

Meanwhile, ranchers may have been a bit less apoplectic about heightened foreign competition if Trump hadn’t already been squeezing them with his broader agenda.

Thanks largely to the president’s trade war with China, American beef exports fell 12 percent in 2025, as Beijing erected retaliatory barriers to US meat. This year, Trump’s trade war with Canada has further cut American farmers’ sales.

And while their foreign markets have been shrinking, US agricultural firms’ expenses have been skyrocketing due to the Iran War.

Farmers in general — and ranchers in particular — rely heavily on diesel fuel to power tractors, trucks, trailers, and myriad other agricultural machines. Thus, as the Iran War has throttled the global energy supply and triggered a record-breaking surge in diesel prices, US farmers have been hammered. 

In July 2026, American farms were paying 22 percent more for fuel than when Trump took office. Over the same period, fertilizer costs have risen by 8 percent, due to the Iran War’s impact on natural gas prices. 

If this weren’t enough cause for farmbelt consternation, Trump’s immigration enforcement surge has provided an additional source of pain. Ranchers, like other farmers, rely heavily on the labor of immigrants, some of whom are undocumented. For this reason, US agricultural businesses have been wary of Trump’s approach to interior enforcement, despite their deeply conservative bent. 

Bizarrely, even as the administration has tried to placate rancher anger in recent weeks, it also launched a series of ICE raids targeted at beef-producing areas. These actions have triggered “work force disruptions” at feed yards and dairies — as immigrant workers were intimidated into staying home — according to a joint statement from the Cattlemen Associations for Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. The groups allege that thousands of cattle shipments have been delayed as a result, saddling producers with millions in lost revenue and unexpected costs.

Ironically, by engineering these ICE-induced disruptions, the White House also plausibly raised beef prices for consumers, undermining its own politically costly push for hamburger affordability.

Republicans are losing ground in the countryside

The political fallout from Trump’s beef policies — and broader affronts to agricultural interests — has been profound. 

Trump won Kansas in 2024 by more than 16 points. Yet Democratic minister Adam Hamilton is polling just 1.5 points behind sitting Republican Sen. Roger Marshall, according to a RealClearPolitics polling average. 

By itself, this could be chalked up to some peculiar, race-specific factor. But in Iowa, a farm belt state that went for Trump by 13 points in 2024, Democrats are also mounting improbably competitive campaigns. Democratic state representative Josh Turek leads Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson (who is publicly concerned about the beef issue) by half a point in polls of Iowa’s Senate race, while Democratic state lawmaker Lindsay James narrowly leads the House race in Iowa’s Second District, which Trump won by 10 points in 2024.

Meanwhile, in heavily agricultural Nebraska — where Trump beat Kamala Harris by more than 20 points — Democrat-aligned independent Senate candidate Dan Osborn is attacking Trump’s beef imports policy and running neck-and-neck with incumbent Republican Sen. Pete Ricketts. And in the Cornhusker State’s First District, which backed Trump by 13 points two years ago, Democrat Chris Backenmeyer is polling about two points behind the Republican incumbent Mike Flood.

Critically, Democrats’ gains in these jurisdictions don’t merely reflect the nationwide backlash against Trump and his party. The Democratic Party margin over Republicans in the national generic ballot is now about 9 points — a 10.5-point improvement over Harris’s showing in 2024. In the Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska Senate races, Democrats are outperforming Harris’s showing by 13 points or more. 

Now, it’s conceivable that Democrats’ apparent strength in the farm belt could reflect some kind of systematic polling error. For example, if pollsters were undersampling less-educated rural white voters, then that might inflate Democratic candidates’ numbers more in agricultural states than in the country as a whole. 

But Republicans in the farm belt seem to think the rural backlash is real — and driven, at least partly, by Trump’s unintentional assaults on the agricultural sector.

A little bit of free trade goes a short way

Ultimately, the lesson of Trump’s ground beef fiasco isn’t that the president should have just ignored voters’ demands for cheaper meat — or economists’ warnings about tariffs’ negative impacts on affordability.

Had Trump prioritized low prices — and heeded basic economics — from day one, ranchers might still have ended up bitter about facing heightened foreign competition. But in a world without Trump’s trade conflicts or Iran War, such cattle producers would enjoy lower costs and larger foreign markets — and might therefore be more willing to take higher beef imports in stride. 

Meanwhile, if the prices of fuel and consumer goods were broadly lower, shoppers might be more appreciative of Trump’s economic governance. To be sure, even in that scenario, Americans probably wouldn’t notice the impact of loosening constraints on foreign lean beef trimmings. But if the administration were replicating such affordability measures across all policy fronts, the consequent savings could eventually add up to something large enough to attract voters’ notice and approval. 

In our world, however, Trump’s half-hearted embrace of ground-beef globalism was too little, too late. And in November, his party’s farm-belt candidates might pay the price.

To no small extent, Americans have grown accustomed to being watched.

For more than a decade, CCTV cameras have recorded a hefty portion of many people’s public movements, while ubiquitous smartphones have made us all perpetually vulnerable to unsolicited documentation (if not, social media notoriety).

Until recently, however, technical limitations constrained the reach of government surveillance (at least, in the physical realm). Police may have been swimming in CCTV footage. But using such videos to track any given person’s movements was an extremely time-intensive endeavor. To do so, an officer would need to sift through hours of footage captured on many different cameras.

Yet AI is now making it possible for the government to trace ordinary citizens’ movements with unprecedented ease and precision. Or at least, this is what the security firm Flock Safety has effectively promised — and the company’s critics have loudly warned. 

Flock provides police departments with networks of surveillance cameras — primarily, automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) that photograph each vehicle that passes them. 

The firm’s main selling point is also its chief political liability: Its ALPRs log not only license plate numbers, but also generate textual descriptions of all vehicles they detect and store this information in a nationally integrated, searchable database. This makes it technically feasible for police to monitor the travels of most any driver with a few keystrokes. 

Alas, some cops cannot be trusted with that power. In August, the Washington Post reported that at least 50 law enforcement officers had been charged or accused of using license-plate readers for illegitimate purposes, often to stalk their exes or romantic interests. Even more alarmingly, some police departments appear to have used ALPR data to surveil their own critics and protesters. 

These revelations fortified an already growing movement against license plate readers. In August alone, more than 90 cities and counties canceled contracts with Flock. And this backlash has been remarkably bipartisan. Deep blue cities like Los Angeles, Austin, Texas, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, have backed out of partnerships with Flock, while Republicans in Florida have barred local police from installing ALPRs on state highways, and the Texas GOP has paused funding for Flock cameras.

The anti-ALPR movement is responding to real problems with how that technology has been deployed. And yet, according to Flock and many police departments, these cameras are also helping to nab car thieves and locate missing persons.

All this raises the questions: Do ALPRs really have significant public safety benefits? And if so, is there a way to have our license plate surveillance and civil liberties too? 

To find out, I reviewed the latest academic research, dug through the worst horror stories in the news, and reached out to criminologists about the risks and rewards of ALPRs. Although the available evidence is limited, the technology appears to have modest — but genuine — crime-fighting benefits. And while the ALPR databases have been badly misused, this is in part because the tech has gone largely unregulated. With stringent safeguards, there may be a way to make it much harder for creeps and authoritarians to monitor law-abiding citizens’ comings and goings without forfeiting a useful law-enforcement tool.

The case for ALPRs

On a late summer day in Chamblee, Georgia, Leslie Barrera was pushing her 1-year-old son Mateo in a stroller when a car pulled up next to her. A man sprung out of the vehicle, pointed a gun at Barrera, and tried to grab the baby from his carriage. But he’d chosen his victim poorly: Barrera charged him, wrested away his gun, and tried to shoot the kidnapper, only for the firearm to jam. A woman (oddly, disguised as a man) then emerged from the car and snatched the child. The baby-nabbers proceeded to pile back into their vehicle and speed away.

With the aid of surveillance cameras, police quickly identified the car as a maroon Acura SUV. Unfortunately, the abductors had swapped out its valid license plate with a paper dealer tag. Decades earlier, that might have delayed, if not thwarted, the recovery effort. But this was 2020 — and Chamblee police had access to a Flock ALPR system. By searching through its database of vehicle photos, the cops discovered a shot of the same Acura with its registered metal license plate from days earlier. The plate led them to the suspect’s name and address — and thus, within just five hours of his abduction — to Mateo.

Flock has a lot of stories like this. The company boasts that their cameras “supported more than 1 million criminal investigations” and helped locate “more than 10,000 missing persons” last year. 

“Every single day, law enforcement across this country is using FLOCK technology to solve crime and find missing people faster,” Paris Lewbel, a spokesperson for Flock, told me. 

The limited evidence suggests that Flock’s claims about its cameras’ public safety benefits are overhyped.

But Flock’s colorful anecdotes and raw tallies tell us only so much. A Flock camera can be used in an investigation without making a decisive difference in its outcome. Without ALPR photos, Chamblee police may still have been able to tie the maroon Acura to Mateo’s kidnappers. 

To gauge Flock’s actual impact on public safety, we need (at a minimum) some quasi-experiments: When jurisdictions deploy advanced ALPR systems, do they see lower crime or higher clearance rates — both compared to their own past record and to simultaneous trends in Flock-less places?

There has been remarkably little research into these questions. But a recent study from the University of South Carolina’s Ian Adams and Scott Mourtgos sheds some light into them. 

Drawing on Flock’s installation records, the criminologists identified the month that 216 law enforcement agencies activated their first camera. They found that during the first year after Flock deployment, these areas saw an 11 percent decline in motor vehicle theft, relative to similar places that remained un-Flocked. Jurisdictions that put up the ALPRs also saw the success rate of their car theft investigations rise by 16 percent. 

These findings should be taken with a few grains of salt. For one thing, police departments will be more likely to invest in an ALPR system if they’ve got a serious stolen vehicle problem. And if car thefts in an area spike, they are liable to regress back toward historically typical levels, no matter what the local police department does. 

What’s more, agencies will often install ALPRs as part of broader anti-vehicle theft efforts, which may include deploying more officers to high-crime areas, among other things. Adams and Mourtgos’s data suggests that such simultaneous actions may be responsible for a portion of their results: Although Flock adopters solved stolen car cases at a higher rate after putting up the cameras, this rise tended to begin before the ALPRs were installed.

Nevertheless, the working paper indicates that Flock cameras do make some difference. “We’re not talking huge numbers here,” Mourtgos told me, “but it’s not nothing either.”

And there is reason to think that ALPRs have greater potential to deter and solve crimes than existing results suggest, as police departments may be deploying them in suboptimal ways. 

Consider a 2025 study of Atlantic City’s ALPR rollout. On paper, the municipality was an ideal candidate for the technology: As a barrier island, Atlantic City has only eight access points, so an ALPR network could easily capture every car entering and exiting the city. 

As one would hope, the research found that car theft declined after the cameras were erected, although the authors could not rule out other explanations. Perhaps more significantly, however, they discovered that the cameras produced vastly more leads than the department was capable of logging or investigating. Between November 2022 and November 2024, the city’s ALPRs issued 12,384 stolen vehicle alerts, virtually all of which went unnoticed or ignored by department personnel; over the studied period, the ALPR system prompted only 72 vehicle stops, of which just 52 concerned stolen cars. 

“In an ideal world, someone would be monitoring the alerts in real time and dispatching an officer, who would successfully make a traffic stop,” the paper’s co-author, Rowan University criminologist John Shjarback, told me. “But yeah, that kind of rarely happened.” 

Shjarback concludes that the department lacked enough patrol officers to respond to a significant portion of alerts, while its civilian surveillance center monitors appeared to simply miss a large proportion of serious hits. “They have a lot to do in that real-time crime center,” Shjarback said. “There’s a relatively high amount of crime and gun violence and whatnot in Atlantic City. One or two retired officers on duty just weren’t enough to do the live monitoring.” 

Similar operational flaws and resource constraints may have limited the efficacy of Flock systems in at least some of the areas analyzed by Adams and Mourtgos. Indeed, Mourtgos noted that many departments in his study lacked enough ALPRs to cover most significant thoroughfares. “Even in jurisdictions that are at the higher end on cameras, you’re still covering an extremely small minority of these roadway structures,” Mourtgos said. “So, that’s probably another reason why we see only modest effects.”

Taken together, the limited evidence suggests that Flock’s claims about its cameras’ public safety benefits are overhyped; its ALPR networks do not appear to be the “single greatest change” in policing tech “since DNA,” as the company touts on its website. But, as common sense might suggest, automatically logging all license plates on major highways and intersections seems to make it at least a bit harder to get away with stealing cars (and perhaps, babies).

Mass surveillance has its downsides

Of course, the fact that ALPRs offer some benefits to public safety does not mean that they’re necessarily worthwhile. Sewing a GPS chip into every American’s forearm would surely make crimes easier to solve and less tempting to commit. But most would regard such trackers as dystopian infringements on privacy and invitations to authoritarian control. 

And Flock’s ALPRS are much the same, in the view of their staunchest critics.

The “DeFlock” movement’s fundamental argument is that the cameras give police departments more information than they can be trusted with. One danger is that wayward cops can exploit the data to stalk their exes. The more profound threat, however, is that police agencies will use ALPR systems to deter or punish lawful dissent. 

And that hazard is not entirely hypothetical. After a writer named Canyen Ashworth published an op-ed criticizing local police in Lenexa, Kansas, that town’s police began tracking his movements with its ALPRs (apparently, because Ashworth’s column led the police chief to conclude, incorrectly, that he must have been the dastardly perp behind a recent spree of…unpermitted poster-hanging incidents).

More broadly, a 2025 investigation from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) found that more than 50 federal, state, and local agencies had run hundreds of searches related to protests or activist groups through Flock’s ALPR system. It’s not clear how many of these queries were motivated by an illiberal desire to monitor dissenters. In theory, a police officer could search for, say, “red sedan at No Kings protest” because a car of that description tried to run over protesters or committed some other criminal offense in the demonstration’s vicinity. And some of the searches tallied by EFF appear to fall into that category. But many others had no discernible purpose beyond the surveillance of activists.

We need to watch the watchmen

All this is unquestionably alarming. And if widespread misuse of ALPR networks were inevitable, then their costs to civil liberties would likely outweigh their modest (and as yet, not wholly certain) benefits for public safety.

But this probably isn’t the case. Rather, governments can likely limit ALPR’s downsides — while preserving their utility to law enforcement — by more stringently regulating the technology.

“In something like half of the states, there is no regulation. Virtually none, in our view, have adequate regulation.”

Barry Friedman, founding director of NYU School of Law’s Policing Project

Until recently, legislatures had placed scant guardrails on ALPRs. As the Congressional Research Service noted in 2024, there is “no specific federal legislative framework” governing law enforcement’s use of such cameras. And most states have no comprehensive ALPR regulations. Thus, if we’re failing to prevent police departments from misusing these cameras, it may be because most state and local governments haven’t actually tried. 

“In something like half of the states, there is no regulation,” Barry Friedman, the founding director of NYU School of Law’s Policing Project, told me. “Virtually none, in our view, have adequate regulation. The police decided to do this on their own. Them and their vendors made the decision and didn’t disclose what was happening.”

Fortunately, there is a long list of ways for policymakers to constrain abuse of ALPR data. To name just a few, governments could:

• Require police departments to delete logged location records after three weeks (or less), unless they are connected to a specific investigation (thereby leaving would-be stalkers and tyrants with less surveillance data to sift through). 
• Permit ALPR searches for only an enumerated set of law enforcement purposes, such as tracking stolen vehicles or suspected violent offenders. 
• Create an audit trail for every query documenting who searched for what, when, and under what justification.
• Mandate the use of software that automatically flags suspicious queries — such as someone searching for the same license plate over and over, without attaching an actual case number — and that temporarily locks out users who appear to be misusing the database. (Flock currently offers software with similar features, but most police departments with ALPRs are not legally required to adopt such systems.)
• Expressly forbid the use of the ALPR system for tracking people on the basis of protected speech.
• Punish intentional, unauthorized searches of the database with jail time.

Virginia’s recently enacted ALPR law includes many of these provisions, while several other states have embraced a subset of these policies.

Some may still want to get de-Flocked

To be sure, for some, even heavily regulated ALPR systems will entail intolerable costs to privacy and unacceptable risks of authoritarian misuse. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) supports efforts to regulate license plate readers, but only as a second-best alternative to banning the technology outright. 

“No guardrails can completely address the chilling effect of mass surveillance,” Chad Marlow, senior policy counsel at the ACLU, said. “When people know that they are being surveilled all the time, they may not intellectually dig into the, ‘Well, what exactly is happening with this data? What’s it being collected for? How long is it being stored?’ The average person isn’t going to go through all those steps.” 

Rather, Marlow argues, many will simply see cameras and fear that they’re being watched — and fearful of those doing the watching. 

“Someone who is an alcoholic and wants to go to an AA meeting — but doesn’t want the public or any of their insurance companies or the government knowing they’re an alcoholic — and knows there’s a camera outside of the church that hosts the meeting may just say, ‘You know what? It’s really important for me to keep this struggle private. And so I can’t go to that AA meeting,’” he said. 

These are legitimate concerns, although there is little hard evidence that license-plate readers have a chilling effect on protests or personal behavior. And given how much sensitive information people publicly share on social media — or willingly generate, through their internet activity — there’s some reason to doubt that many will refrain from lawful activity, merely because they spotted an ALPR by the side of the road. In fact, license plate readers have actually been in wide use for more than a decade and, until recently, few seemed to register their existence, much less, reorganize their lives around avoiding the cameras’ gaze. 

Still, reasonable people can disagree about how to weigh ALPRs’ trade-offs. My point here is merely that governments may be able to secure modest but meaningful public safety benefits from the cameras — while greatly reducing their misuse — by giving regulation a chance. Using the ALPRs of 2026 probably doesn’t require accepting the authoritarian nightmares of 1984.

AI will be the death of me. And you. And everyone we know.

At least, this is what a growing number of technologists and policymakers fear. 

Last week, a lead researcher at Anthropic declared that there was a greater than 10 percent chance of AI “killing all humans” within the next decade. This nerve-racking forecast, combined with recent AI-initiated cyberattacks, have fueled calls for slowing the progress of artificial intelligence — a proposal that Anthropic and OpenAI subsequently embraced.

Not all prophets of AI doom agree about precisely how this apocalypse would come about. Many focus on scenarios reminiscent of The Terminator films, in which superintelligent machines conspire to exterminate humanity — perhaps in the same not-quite-intentional way that humans laid waste to the dodo, or passenger pigeon.

But there is another, arguably more intuitive way that AI could bring about mass death, if not human extinction: by making it easier for people to develop and deploy catastrophic bioweapons. 

Importantly, this hypothetical doesn’t require AI models to become conscious or superintelligent; it merely requires them to accelerate preexisting trends in biotechnology. 

For those alarmed by this hypothetical, the threat AI poses is essentially twofold. First, when combined with technological progress in gene editing and DNA synthesis, chatbots could vastly increase the number of people capable of assembling dangerous viruses already known to medical science. And the more potential bioengineers there are in the world, the higher the odds that one will prove to be a diligent psychopath.

Second, AI could help highly trained biologists to discover — or engineer — a custom supervirus, which could then fall into the wrong hands. 

Recent headlines have lent some credence to both of these fears. 

Earlier this year, biologists warned that, with a few simple prompts, they’d gotten chatbots to dispense detailed instructions for engineering a treatment-resistant strain of an infamous pathogen, step-by-step protocols for recreating a once-pandemic virus, and advice on dispersing biological payloads via weather balloon.

In August, a team of scientists revealed that an AI model trained on DNA sequences had generated blueprints for deadly viruses unseen in nature (albeit, viruses deadly to bacteria, not animals). And last week, Anthropic announced that it had thwarted several suspected attempts by state actors to use Claude for bioweapons research.

Precisely how much AI is increasing the risk of an artificial pandemic is unclear. Even before ChatGPT, advances in synthetic biology were already making bioengineering tools more potent and accessible. And even after four years of rapid AI progress, the technical barriers to engineering novel superviruses remain formidable.

Regardless, there is a great deal more that governments can — and should — be doing to protect us from synthetic pandemics, both manmade and natural. No matter what AI’s ultimate impact on biosecurity proves to be, now is the time to both prepare for the worst-case scenario and, ideally, preempt it.

Why synthetic superviruses are scary

Before we dig into how AI could raise the risk of a man-made pandemic, it’s worth spelling out why that prospect is so unnerving. 

Put simply, few things could more credibly destroy civilization — and/or, the human species — than a synthetic supervirus.

Infectious diseases have killed more humans than any other force on Earth. The Black Death wiped out at least 30 percent of all Europeans in the 1300s, while the 1918 flu killed 50 million people worldwide. You don’t need me to tell you what things were like in 2020 (or how much worse they could have been, if vaccines hadn’t been rolled out in record time). 

And nature kicked off these catastrophes without even trying. A bioterrorist consciously seeking to maximize human death could theoretically improve on evolution’s handiwork. If biotech continues to advance — and scientists identify viral genomes that reliably yield high transmissibility and lethality — a malicious actor might one day be able to manufacture a virus that’s both as contagious as measles and as deadly as Ebola. 

Natural selection generally disfavors viruses that are both highly transmissible and profoundly fatal; bugs that kill their hosts too reliably often have difficulty spreading. Yet a virus with a long asymptomatic period could escape this tradeoff. For example, HIV can live in a person’s body for a decade before generating noticeable symptoms. In theory, a highly contagious respiratory virus could similarly lie in wait for many weeks, months, or even years.

If bioterrorists ever managed to unleash an easily transmitted, highly fatal virus, they could shake the foundations of modern existence. In that scenario, reliably showing up for work might require accepting a 50-50 chance  of getting yourself — and your family — brutally killed. Covid never required essential workers to assume risks anywhere near this high (the virus had a less than 1 percent case fatality rate among prime-age workers, before vaccines became available). Although there are many heroes among us, plenty of doctors, nurses, warehouse workers, power plant technicians, delivery drivers, and other essential laborers might not tolerate a coin flip’s chance of wiping out their loved ones. And if enough sheltered in place, systems for producing and distributing healthcare, food, water, and power could swiftly break down.

Humanity’s “Joker” problem

All this invites the question: Who would ever want to do this? 

After all, viruses are terrible weapons: They’re difficult to make, impossible to control, and jeopardize the lives of those who cultivate and distribute them. Partly for these reasons, biological weapons have hardly ever been used; the last fatal bioterror attacks were the anthrax mailings of 2001.

To this, anxious biosecurity experts might reply, to quote the former British intelligence officer Alfred Pennyworth: “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

Mass shooters regularly forfeit their lives to the cause of killing others at random. And brilliant iconoclasts periodically develop murderous ideologies; Ted Kaczynski, the Harvard mathematician turned Unabomber, wished to bring about the collapse of industrial civilization.

And every once in a while, an aspiring supervillain gets graduate training in virology. In the 1990s, the Kyoto University-educated genetic engineer Seiichi Endo joined Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo death cult. Drawing on the group’s $1 billion in funds, Endo sought to weaponize Ebola, Q fever, botulinum, and anthrax — with the aim of killing as many nonbelievers as possible. 

Of course, Endo failed. And lone wolf psychopaths have never gotten their hands on anything more lethal than an assault weapon, bomb, or airplane. 

But some scientists believe that technological advances — including generative AI — may provide the Endos and Kaczynskis of tomorrow with catastrophic power. 

How AI and biotech could democratize bioterrorism

MIT biologist Kevin Esvelt is among his field’s most prominent Cassandras. And he has voiced two fundamental concerns. The first is that breakthroughs in synthetic biology and AI are rapidly expanding the pool of people who can engineer known viruses. 

Over the past 15 years, the cost and difficulty of editing genomes have plummeted. In 2012, to modify a specific site in a genome, you often needed access to custom-engineered proteins that cost upward of $5,000 and still tended to work poorly, according to Olivia Scharfman, a biotechnology fellow at the Institute for Progress. Thanks to the gene-editing tool CRISPR, a scientist with minimal lab training can execute such a modification for as little as $30. Meanwhile, DNA synthesis has also grown radically more affordable.

This might not be such a big deal, if dangerous biological materials were hard to legally access. But Esvelt and his colleagues recently demonstrated that this isn’t the case. As an experiment, they had a student place orders for pieces of the 1918 influenza genome using a pseudonym and fake position. Thirty-six of 38 DNA synthesis companies shipped the genomes without asking whether the applicant had government permission or sound intentions. Together, these fragments were enough to create the virus many times over.

Crucially, in Esvelt’s account, reverse engineering known viruses using modern tools does not require elite skills. Any random biology graduate student may be up to the job. 

And AI may be making such rudimentary viral engineering even easier. 

In theory, a chatbot can help you plan a bioweapons attack in much the same way that it can walk you through fixing a dishwasher: By finding and synthesizing the internet’s vast trove of information, offering step-by-step instructions for navigating unfamiliar challenges, and fielding all troubleshooting queries that might subsequently arise.

And there’s evidence that AI models will in fact provide would-be bioterrorists with precisely this kind of assistance.

In a 2023 study, MIT researchers asked students to seek guidance on engineering a pandemic from that era’s chatbots. Within an hour, the AI models had suggested four promising pathogens, offered detailed protocols for manufacturing them with with synthetic DNA, provided a list of DNA synthesis retailers with low screening standards, and advised that — if users still found themselves unable to make the virus, even with all this help — they could purchase the assistance of a contract research organization to do some of the bioengineering for them. 

And of course, frontier models have gotten a lot better since 2023. Last year, SecureBio, Esvelt’s biosecurity nonprofit, found that one OpenAI model outperformed 94 percent of expert virologists on troubleshooting complex laboratory problems. 

Anthropic’s internal research has produced similar results. In one experiment, the company tasked amateurs with drafting a bioweapons acquisition plan. It gave some participants access to basic internet resources and others the assistance of Claude models (with the safeguards turned off). Those working with AI developed far more viable blueprints, according to the biodefense experts who scrutinized the proposals for critical errors.

Thus, there’s reason to think that the number of people with the skills and resources necessary for reverse engineering a virus from genomic blueprints is sharply rising — and with it, the risk that a bloodthirsty nihilist or ideologue gets their hands on a dangerous pathogen.

AI might help scientists learn too much

What’s even worse than bringing back smallpox? Esvelt’s second concern is that these same technological forces — combined with top scientists’ often reckless ambitions — will lead to the discovery or development of a supervirus, a new or custom-designed pathogen even more dangerous than what nature has come up with in the past.

Today, some scientists are actively trying to discover — and publicly identify — novel viruses circulating in nature that could theoretically trigger the next pandemic. Others conduct so-called gain-of-function experiments, altering pathogens to discern which mutations make them more transmissible, lethal, or difficult to detect (some have alleged that Covid-19 emerged from precisely this kind of research, though that theory is widely rejected among epidemiologists). This work is generally intended to anticipate future epidemiological threats, so that we can develop vaccines before they arrive. But their work could inadvertently provide bad actors with recipes for reverse engineering mass-casualty bioweapons. 

Separately, advances in gene editing and AI may enable breakthroughs in viral engineering that yield apocalyptic pathogens. 

A recent study from researchers at Stanford and the Arc Institute fed such fears. The scientists trained an AI called “Evo” on the DNA sequences of bacteriophages, the simple viruses that infect bacteria. They then used this “genomic language model” to generate blueprints for hundreds of bacteriophages found nowhere in nature. Sixteen of these designs yielded viable pathogens, some of which were better at killing bacteria than their natural ancestors. 

What is clear, however, is that novel pathogens are among the greatest security threats our species faces.

Theoretically, scientists may one day be able to engineer novel human viruses using the same basic techniques. What’s more, even if genomic-language models fail at that task, they might still be able to help users tweak existing viruses in ways that render them more transmissible, deadly, or vaccine-resistant.

These discoveries could theoretically filter down to amateur bioterrorists or well-funded extremist groups like Aum Shinrikyo. Alternatively, a state-sponsored weapons program could develop a catastrophic supervirus, then unleash it on the world through a lab leak or (perhaps, more improbably) a deliberate attempt at genocide. 

There is some precedent for the former scenario: The Soviet Union tried to weaponize smallpox and the Marburg virus, despite the considerable hazards and dubious military utility of such bioweapons. In the process, Soviet scientists accidentally triggered a smallpox outbreak during testing, while also letting anthrax leak from a laboratory, killing at least 64 people.

Bioweapons ain’t easy

All this said, there are reasons to question whether AI is truly making a synthetic pandemic more likely. 

Chatbots may solve some of the challenges facing an amateur biologist with omnicidal aspirations. But it doesn’t necessarily clear the biggest obstacles in that person’s path. 

Viral engineering is a complex, difficult, and physical undertaking. Performing it successfully requires what scientists call “tacit knowledge” — practical skills and understandings that are difficult to explain in words: knowing how to suppress the hand tremors that could rip delicate DNA strands, or how to recognize when the DNA in your solution has reached the proper concentration, or how to smell when a sample has been contaminated.

And these are things that Claude still can’t reliably impart. In studies, amateurs with access to a large language model tend to perform better on written biological challenges — but not on actual lab work. In a 2026 randomized study, non-scientists working with frontier AI systems were no more likely to complete a multistep laboratory assignment than those relying on the internet alone. 

Of course, tacit knowledge wouldn’t necessarily be a problem for aspiring bioterrorists in the mold of Seiichi Endo — graduate-trained scientists with extensive lab experience. But at a minimum, chatbots don’t appear to have turned every malcontent who once took AP Bio into a competent virologist.

And while AI will likely help top biologists advance their field’s frontiers, the barriers to custom engineering doomsday viruses remain formidable. The “Evo” experiment is arguably a case in point. Although the model did generate working blueprints for a few novel bacteriophages, nearly all of its suggested genomes didn’t work. Researchers had to arduously test hundreds of DNA sequences to arrive at 16 viable strands. And engineering slightly modified versions of an extremely small, well-known bacteriophage capable of infecting E. coli in a lab — and creating a novel virus more fearsome than any nature has yet devised — aren’t especially similar tasks. 

To offer a strained analogy: The fact that I can dunk on Victor Wembanyama in NBA 2K26 does not imply that I’m making progress toward being able to dunk on him in real life.

Even in the age of CRISPR and ChatGPT, biology remains an exceptionally difficult discipline that resists reliable modeling. The effects of modifying a single gene can often yield unpredictable and inconsistent results, varying with host biology, immune responses, and environmental conditions that scientists only partly understand. AI may help us overcome these complexities. It also might not.

We need to be preparing for the next pandemic

Scientists disagree about how serious a risk synthetic pandemics pose — and how much AI is magnifying it.

What is clear, however, is that novel pathogens are among the greatest security threats our species faces. Even if synthetic biology and artificial intelligence did not exist, natural selection would keep churning out new viruses — and periodically hitting upon ones that befuddle human immune systems. 

For this reason, there would be an urgent need to make our societies less vulnerable to future pandemics, irrespective of AI’s implications for viral engineering. In a world where chatbots and CRISPR are plausibly making bioterrorism easier, failing to invest aggressively in public health is all the more reckless.

The good news is we already know — from hard-earned experience — many steps that we can take to reduce the risk of a new pandemic and prepare to respond to one if needed. 

Governments can limit the destructive power of novel contagions by investing in vaccines that protect against entire families of viruses (or ideally, all of them) and broad-spectrum antivirals; raise our odds of catching outbreaks early by funding meticulous wastewater and clinical surveillance; ensure that essential workers don’t have to choose between staying alive and keeping civilization going amid a pandemic by developing and then stockpiling foolproof personal protective equipment; make indoor spaces less hospitable to airborne viruses by upgrading ventilation and filtration systems; and reduce the the threat of bioterrorism by mandating rigorous screening of synthetic-DNA orders.

Fears that humanity will be done in by superintelligent machines are currently galvanizing media attention and political concern. And this may be warranted. But we should pay at least as much attention to our species’ age-old, organic adversaries as we do to our hypothetical, robot ones — and not just because the latter could start teaching the former new tricks.

If the midterms were a referendum on whether trans athletes should be barred from women’s sports, or the White House ballroom should be gorgeously renovated, or God should be identified as “nonbinary,” then Republicans would have a clear and confident closing message.

Unfortunately for the GOP, voters are less concerned with the Christian deity’s preferred pronouns than with their own cost of living. Which is understandable: Diesel fuel prices just hit a record high, mortgage rates are climbing, and groceries keep getting more expensive. 

Due partly to these trends, Republicans are poorly positioned to win an argument about inflation — and are only growing more so, as Election Day nears. This was apparent before President Donald Trump convened the first-ever Republican midterm convention in Dallas this week. But the festivities underscored the GOP’s predicament and the many ways that Trump is personally exacerbating it.

Many Republican speakers did address the subject of affordability in Dallas. And the party’s broad narrative is straightforward enough: Democrats created the cost-of-living crisis, Republicans alleviated it by cutting your taxes.

But this is a tough line to sell. Americans might still disdain President Joe Biden’s economic management. Yet they’re far more likely to blame high prices on the current president than the previous one, according to polls. 

And not without reason. After all, it was Trump — not Biden — who engineered an oil shock and global trade war. Tellingly, on Wednesday night, all four battleground state Senate candidates — Ken Paxton, Jon Husted, Michael Whatley, and Mike Collins — made no mention of the Iran war or of Trump’s tariffs.

If Republican frontliners are clear-eyed about their party’s liabilities, Trump seems largely indifferent to them. Historically, presidents have often made an effort to limit election-year price increases — and/or, to reduce the salience of their party’s worst issues. Yet Trump has been doing the very opposite. 

In recent weeks, the president has escalated his conflict with Iran and his trade war with US allies, driving up Americans’ costs in the process. And he’s been remarkably frank about his refusal to prioritize affordability. 

In his remarks to the convention Wednesday, Trump impersonated a disaffected constituent, saying, “You know, I wish you didn’t do the war in Iran. Gasoline’s up, ba ba ba” — before explaining to this critic that preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon took precedence over their energy costs. 

Republicans may still weather a midterm backlash. The party remains narrowly favored to retain the Senate, while gerrymandered maps should limit its losses in the House. But if this year’s “blue wave” proves less than tidal, it will be in spite of Trump’s efforts, not because of them.

The GOP’s very simple problem

The Republican Party’s fundamental problem is simple: Voters’ top concern is the cost of living — and American purchasing power has fallen sharply in 2026, as a direct result of the president’s policies.

In virtually every poll, a plurality of voters name “inflation,” “the cost of living,” or “affordability” as their most important issue. And they are not impressed with Trump’s record on that front. In a recent Ipsos survey, 74 percent of respondents said that their cost of living is “off on the wrong track.” Meanwhile, in Nate Silver’s poll tracker, more than 70 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of inflation, up from just 41 percent when he took office. 

During his first year in office, Trump could have reasonably argued that voters were giving him a bad rap on the economy. After all, real wages — how much Americans earn per hour, adjusted for inflation — actually rose in 2025, even as disapproval of the president’s economic record surged.

But in February 2026, Trump brought nearly three years of real wage growth to a screeching halt: By launching a war with Iran — and thus, triggering its closure of the Strait of Hormuz — Trump triggered the first sustained decline in Americans’ purchasing power since 2022.

According to an estimate from Brown’s Watson School, the Iran war has cost the average US household more than $780 through elevated energy prices. 

Politically, this seems to have made a real difference. At the beginning of March, Trump’s net approval rating on inflation was -28, according to Nate Silver’s polling average; as of this writing, it is -45.9.

At this point, there may be little Trump can do to gain broad public trust on the cost of living. But political science research suggests that economic trends in the runup to Election Day can shift votes at the margin. And precisely because this year’s price spike is largely self-inflicted, Trump has an unusual amount of power to increase affordability before Americans head to the polls. All he’d need to do is reach a ceasefire (or, ideally, peace deal) with Iran.

We know Trump could bring down energy costs by pursuing peace because he already has. Throughout 2026, oil prices have consistently fallen whenever the US-Iran war has cooled off  — and risen whenever it has intensified. 

When Trump signaled an imminent ceasefire deal in early June, the price of an oil barrel swiftly fell, dropping below $75. Once that ceasefire broke down early the next month, oil prices resumed their climb, until Trump paused US strikes on July 25.

Hostilities resumed over the ensuing months. But Tehran appeared to offer Trump a preelection off-ramp on September 1, when Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said that his country would be willing to restore June’s memorandum of understanding — a deal that had temporarily eased restrictions on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.

The Iranian regime’s good faith cannot be assumed. And peace negotiations are doubtlessly complex. At the very least, however, Trump had an opportunity to try to reduce fuel prices ahead of November’s elections earlier this month. Embracing a ceasefire would not have prevented the US from resuming attacks after Election Day (Trump is manifestly comfortable with reneging on agreements with Iran). Nevertheless, Trump opted instead to launch a new round of strikes against Iranian military targets and oil tankers, sending crude prices hurtling past $100 a barrel.

Americans have paid a price for Trump’s trade war

The Iran war has been by far the biggest drag on American living standards since Trump took office. But his trade policies certainly haven’t helped.

Back in May, the Dallas Federal Reserve released an analysis of how Trump’s tariffs had impacted consumer prices. In its report, the bank compared America’s core inflation rate to what that rate would have been, if the US charged no tariffs. The two lines diverged sharply after “Liberation Day,” when Trump imposed large tariffs on nearly all of America’s trade partners.

Of course, Trump backed off his most gargantuan Liberation Day tariffs. And in February, the Supreme Court gave Trump a chance to abandon much of his inflationary trade agenda by ruling that the bulk of his tariffs were unconstitutionally enacted. At that point, he could have insisted that his overturned import taxes had been brilliant, but that the courts had left him no choice but to withdraw them (thereby easing price pressures in an election year). Instead, Trump immediately enacted temporary 10 percent across-the-board tariffs with alternative legal authorities. Then, when those were set to expire in late July, he replaced them with nearly identical levies, now legally justified as a means of combatting forced labor abroad.  

More recently, Trump escalated commercial tensions with Canada into an all-out trade war. In late August, Trump imposed a 50 percent tariff on $20 billion worth of Canadian imports, declared that Lake Ontario was now “Lake America,” and threatened to extend that levy to Canadian trucks, cars, and auto parts in the new year. Ottawa hit back with up to 50 percent tariffs on $20 billion in US goods. This week, Trump upped the ante again, announcing outright import bans on some Canadian alcohol, dairy, and motorcycle products. 

On Wednesday night, Trump signaled that he’s in no rush to reach a compromise with our neighbors to the north, saying that Canada was “dying to make a deal.”

The trade war with Canada is unlikely to have a huge impact on the American economy nationally. But it will be felt in regions heavily integrated with the Canadian economy, including much of Maine, where Republican Sen. Susan Collins is fighting to hold onto her seat.

And the political costs of Trump’s trade actions may be as much optical as economic. When Trump deliberately increases the price of various imported goods by 50 percent, he sends voters a clear message: The GOP’s leader simply does not care very much about lowering the cost of living.

The connection between tariffs and prices is not lost on voters. In a Guardian poll taken earlier this year, seven in 10 Americans said that the Trump’s tariffs had forced them to pay higher prices. 

And even Trump understands that his trade agenda is bad for affordability. While he has been enacting new trade restrictions willy-nilly for months, he did pause plans to dramatically raise ground beef tariffs last month, in order to ease meat costs for consumers. Still, Trump has refused to apply the logic of his hamburger policy to broader realms of international commerce.  

Crass pandering has its upsides

On one level, Trump’s deprioritization of his party’s short-term political interests might seem noble. As a general matter, we want presidents to put America’s long-term well-being above immediate electoral considerations. If seeking a ceasefire with Tehran would jeopardize American national security — or if allowing imports of Crown Royal whiskey would condemn our grandchildren to Canadian economic tyranny — then it would be bad for Trump to do those things, just to help Susan Collins.

In reality, however, Trump’s war with Iran doesn’t seem to be furthering any of America’s geopolitical goals. Nor has his trade war been a boon to US industry. Whatever Trump is prioritizing over Americans’ purchasing power and Republicans’ midterm odds, it doesn’t seem to be a robust theory of foreign policy or international economics.

To be sure, Trump has not wholly forsworn pandering to voters’ pocketbook concerns. On Wednesday night, the president promised to deliver a $5,000 check to every American adult, if Republicans retain control of Congress in November. But Trump’s audacious giveaway boasts little support on Capitol Hill, in part because high deficits are already putting upward pressure on inflation and interest rates — yet another cost-of-living issue his own policies have exacerbated.

For now, ordinary shoppers are bearing the brunt of Trump’s eccentric and counterproductive priorities. But come November, Republican battleground candidates may also find themselves paying the price.

Abdul El-Sayed is trying to win over undecided Jewish voters in Michigan — without compromising his substantive positions on Israel or disavowing his most radical allies.  

During both his primary and general election campaigns, El-Sayed’s opponents have portrayed him as insensitive to Jewish concerns, if not outright antisemitic. These charges have often rested on falsely equating El-Sayed’s opposition to Zionism (he is not committed to Israel’s existence as a majority Jewish state) with a hostility for Jewish people.

But in recent weeks, two other concerns came to the forefront. One was El-Sayed’s response to an antisemitic attack on a Michigan synagogue. In March, a 41-year-old named Ayman Mohamed Ghazali drove a truck into Temple Israel’s Jewish preschool. Days later, El-Sayed condemned the attack, while also noting that Ghazali had recently lost family members to an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon. El-Sayed suggested that these events illustrated how “hurt people hurt people” and that “violence is a cycle,” one that had led Ghazali to perpetrate “an evil act of displaced rage.”

Separately, El-Sayed had campaigned with the far-left streamer Hasan Piker during his primary campaign. This had always sat poorly with many Jewish and centrist Democrats in Michigan. But Piker made his association with the Democratic Senate candidate more conspicuous in late August. During a broadcast, Piker lambasted Jeremy Moss, a pro-Israel Jewish Democrat running for Congress in Michigan who had not endorsed El-Sayed but was in active conversations with the candidate about how to bridge lingering divides with Jewish voters. More explosively, Piker said, among other things, that “if Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually somebody is going to come around and take action, not against the State of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.” He subsequently insisted he was merely spotlighting the hazards of portraying all Jews as ardent Israel supporters, not making some kind of veiled threat, as his detractors alleged.

Nonetheless, this triggered a new round of calls for El-Sayed to both disavow Piker, and to take other measures to reassure Michigan Jews that he cares about their safety. 

These disagreements between El-Sayed and moderate Jewish voters reflect broader tensions within the Democratic Party nationally.

El-Sayed declined to disown the streamer. But he did defend the right of all Americans “to advocate for what they believe without fear of violence,” saying this was “particularly true for communities that have been intimidated for their beliefs in the past.”

Some Jewish Democrats found this insufficient. In an open letter Wednesday, 400 Democratic Jewish Michiganders — including donor Rob Orley — announced that they would be supporting Republican Mike Rogers in their state’s Senate race.

Days earlier, El-Sayed had sought to mend fences with such voters at a summit held by the Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus. During his appearance there, he apologized for his remarks following the Temple Israel attack, saying “I should have issued a statement, of course condemning it, and it just should have been the full stop.”

Among those in attendance was Charles Gaba, a healthcare analyst and major Democratic fundraiser; Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow has called him “the biggest powerhouse democratic donor wrangler that nobody has ever heard of.”

Gaba was a strong supporter of Rep. Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary. And he has expressed serious reservations about El-Sayed, even while committing to voting for him and raising money for his candidacy.

These disagreements between El-Sayed and moderate Jewish voters reflect broader tensions within the Democratic Party nationally: over how far Democrats can and should go in criticizing Israel, whether the left takes antisemitism seriously, and if centrists are using allegations of anti-Jewish bigotry to stigmatize legitimate dissent. 

To explore these debates — and clarify the concerns of “Sayed-skeptical” Jews in Michigan — I spoke with Gaba this week. 

 Our conversation has been edited for clarity and concision. 

From your vantage point, what are undecided Jewish Michiganders’ biggest reservations about El-Sayed — and how many are actually addressable by his campaign? 

I’d say that there’s probably four main ones. Two are connected to his comments about the Temple Israel attack. And he definitely addressed one of those complaints with his statement: that it was awfully timed. In other words, that days after the attack was not a good moment to raise other issues instead of simply condemning the violence full stop.

But the larger issue to me — and to a lot of other folks I’ve spoken with — is he seemed to be under the impression that timing was the only problem. That it was just too soon and if he’d waited a month and then made the exact same comments about “context,” that would have been fine. He doesn’t seem to get that trying to put it in context at all is the larger problem. Because a bunch of preschoolers at a synagogue in Michigan have absolutely nothing to do with a military conflict overseas, just nothing. If a family member of someone who died in the September 11th attacks had gone and attempted to kill Muslim children, their loss wouldn’t be relevant context. You couldn’t say, “Oh well, but he was upset about that attack.” 

I think an El-Sayed supporter might say: There’s a difference between explaining an abominable act and excusing it. In his original statement, El-Sayed did say explicitly that “there is never a justification for attacking innocent people or houses of worship” and described the violence as “heinous” and “evil.” Taken literally, he was arguing that the strike that had killed Ghazali’s family members led to his act of antisemitic terrorism, even as nothing could possibly justify it. 

There was just no reason to try to put it in context at all. Pretty much everyone understands that the Israel-Hamas war has brought emotions to a fever pitch for a lot of people.

I don’t think we needed someone to say, “Hey, that whole mess in the Mideast might have inspired this!” Yeah, no shit. Who was the audience for this? Who was he trying to give context to? Certainly the Jewish community understands the situation. I think the Muslim community understands the situation. And so does everyone else. I don’t think it served any purpose other than to upset and offend a bunch of people. So he was lecturing to no one essentially, in my view. Which I get; I have a tendency to do that myself sometimes in other ways. But it isn’t helpful. And shifting the timing wouldn’t have made it helpful.

So, what are the other two big sticking points for Jewish Democrats not sold on El-Sayed?

The third is this Hasan Piker guy. The media certainly seems to be pretty focused on that. If memory serves, El-Sayed seemed to be trailing Mallory McMorrow and Haley Stevens in the primaries up until around March. And then it was announced that he was going to be rallying with Piker at Michigan State and the University of Michigan.

A combination of that and the reaction to it — namely the McMorrow campaign heavily criticizing him for the rally — generated a bunch of attention and certainly raised Abdul’s profile tremendously. I don’t know how much credit to give Piker, but it made some difference. And next thing you know, he’s kind of running in the lead. 

So, it’s pretty clear that Piker was brought in specifically to help him win the primary with a very young, progressive crowd. To that effect, it worked. But that doesn’t mean he’s helpful for winning a general election.

So, why do you think El-Sayed refuses to distance himself more explicitly from Piker, if the influencer’s support is not helpful in the general election?

I don’t know. Maybe he thinks that he’s being noble or something by not throwing him under the bus. But the guy just seems to be kind of an asshole, and I would not want to be associated with him in either the primary or the general. And so associating himself with Hasan Piker makes me think less of Abdul. 

And I have a lot of respect for Abdul. I’ve met him about a half-dozen times or so, back when he ran for governor and then several times during this campaign. And we’ve also been in contact a few times in between to discuss healthcare policy. And I know he’s a very intelligent guy, very thoughtful guy, and very passionate about universal healthcare. I respect him for all of that. But I think less of him for associating with Piker. And I think a lot of Jewish Michiganders feel that way.

So, what’s the fourth issue?

Well, this is not so much about Abdul specifically as it is about the left. A lot of progressives get that you should condemn antisemitism, or bigotry against the Jewish religion. But many don’t seem to grasp that Judaism is not just a religion; it is also a people. And we do have a several thousand-year connection with the land of Israel — not the leadership, not the current government — but with the land itself. And so that makes the distinction between antisemitism and anti-Zionism complicated. You know, to try to say, “Well, as long as you give up Israel, then Judaism is fine” — many of us can’t do that because it’s an intrinsic part of who we are. 

Is there not a distinction between recognizing Jews’ historical and religious connection to Israel — and being committed to the maintenance of a majority Jewish state in the Middle East?

In other words, there are anti-Zionists who deny Jews’ roots in Israel — or the right of Jewish Israelis to live in the region. But I think most progressive anti-Zionists would dispute neither of those things. Rather, they’d argue that Israeli Jews have a right to live in their land — but that maintaining a majority Jewish Israel should not take precedence over allowing Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return to their ancestral territories.

It’s definitely true that there’s more than one type of anti-Zionism. I think there’s several groupings and different shades between them. And that also holds true on the Zionist side. There are right-wing extremists like [Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar] Ben-Gvir who say, “We should annex both the West Bank and Gaza.” And then there’s others that go even more extreme and say that Israel should dominate the entire region, including Lebanon and Egypt.

And then, at the other end, there’s Hamas and other extremists who literally want to either kick out or slaughter every Jew in the region.

And those extremes have led people to think that Zionism means “Jews get to take over the region” and that anti-Zionism means “Jews have to be kicked out.”

I think for most people, it’s somewhere in between. I’ve started calling myself a “small-z Zionist,” which is basically a more mainstream, two-state solution type. I don’t know how feasible that solution is. There’s only a slim chance these days. But the odds of a two-state solution are still better than those of creating a single “kumbaya, let’s all live together in peace” nation, in my view.  

How were El-Sayed’s remarks to Michigan’s Jewish Caucus received, from your vantage point?

They were better received than I expected, to be honest. Although, I suspect that those most opposed to him probably didn’t show up at the event at all, since they’ve made up their minds. 

Having said that, I did have discussions with several people afterwards, and there was definitely still concern about the whole “context” thing. People were polite and it was a reasonably warm reception. And to his credit, he did stick around afterwards and had one-on-one personal conversations. He was there for quite a while, so I give him credit for that.

From a purely electoral perspective, how much does El-Sayed actually have to lose, if he fails to consolidate the Jewish vote? In demographic terms, the bloc of Jewish voters who are open to voting for El-Sayed — but still need to be persuaded — would seem to be tiny. After all, we’re talking about a small minority of small minority; Jews account for only about 1.4 percent of Michigan’s electorate. So, what’s at stake here politically?

In terms of activism, organizing, and donations, the Jewish community punches far above our weight. 

But yeah, we’re a fraction of a fraction. I think the biggest thing is just reassuring moderate Democratic voters in general. Basically, if the headlines start to read, “Jewish leaders seem reassured by Abdul apology,” then some non-Jewish folks — who aren’t sure about El-Sayed — might say, “Oh, well, if the Jews signed off on this guy, I guess he’s okay.”

Update, September 3, 3:30 pm ET: This piece was originally published on September 3 and has been updated with new developments and later clarified Charles Gaba’s title.

In the United States, building a data center now polls roughly as well as abolishing the police. If current trends continue, server warehouses may soon be less popular with Americans than pizza topped with pineapple and shattered glass.

In an August survey from Heatmap Pro and Embold Research, just 15 percent of Americans said they would support a data center being built in their area, while 75 percent expressed opposition. One year earlier, 43 percent of respondents in the same poll had approved of nearby data center development, while just 42 percent opposed it.

This soaring backlash is visible in other surveys — and in the actions of elected officials. In recent weeks, Wisconsin’s gubernatorial candidates sparred over who hates data centers more, Pennsylvania’s center-left Gov. Josh Shapiro enacted new restrictions on AI infrastructure projects (after previously championing such investment), and even Texas’s staunchly pro-business Republican government announced a temporary moratorium on new approvals. 

Meanwhile, data center projects are being canceled at a record rate, as local opposition mounts.

This has led some in the pro-tech minority to worry that the data center buildout is about to collapse — and take the US economy down with it. Anti-AI commentators, for their part, are cheering the industry’s impending crisis. 

But such panic and celebration are both premature. 

In truth, despite exploding opposition, the data center boom is still going strong. Interviews with industry experts and recent construction data suggest that the economic forces driving the buildout remain more powerful than the political winds blowing against it. And unless Congress enacts a national moratorium, AI companies will almost certainly be able to continue finding jurisdictions willing to tolerate hyperscale campuses, in exchange for sufficient revenue and incentives. 

America’s data center boom can be slowed and geographically shifted. But it probably can’t be killed, absent a collapse in demand for computing power or a much bigger revolution in American politics. 

The boom is bigger than the backlash

There are two fundamental facts about today’s data center boom: 1) The backlash against it is huge, and 2) the buildout is even bigger.

The climate news outlet Heatmap has kept a tracker of new data center restrictions and cancellations. As of late July, it found that more than 500 jurisdictions had enacted severe constraints or bans on data center construction. The vast majority of these measures had been enacted since the beginning of this year. 

The publication also found that contested data center projects face a skyrocketing cancellation rate. In late 2024, 20 percent of disputed developments were canceled; in the first half of 2026, that figure was closer to 50 percent. By Heatmap’s tally, more than 100 data center projects have been nixed this year in the face of local opposition, while more than 200 are currently being fought. 

This surge of mass resistance is remarkable. And yet, it is also nowhere near sufficient to end the AI buildout. 

Although the number of places with severe restrictions (or outright bans) on server farms is rapidly rising, more than 90 percent of US counties had no significant constraints on data center development at July’s end.

What’s more, many of the most eye-catching recent policy changes are less significant than they appear. For example, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s pause does not actually halt data center construction in the Lone Star State. Rather, it essentially establishes a more thorough screening process, when server farms apply for electricity from the state’s grid. Projects that supply all of their own power through on-site natural gas — as a rising share of new data centers do — are exempt.

Pennsylvania and New York’s recently enacted restrictions on data center development are more substantial. Yet neither of those states are particularly important to the AI buildout. Taken together, New York and Pennsylvania host only about 6.5 percent of America’s data centers, according to Data Center Map. 

And their share of all pending developments is even more negligible, as the trade publication Construction Connect has illustrated: 

Meanwhile, although half of contested data center projects are now failing, many still go undisputed. In the aggregate, cancellations have not kept pace with construction or new development. In the first quarter of this year, at least 3.5 gigawatts of data center capacity were canceled amid local opposition, in Heatmap’s tally. During the same three months, at least 36 GW of capacity were added to the US pipeline of proposed and active projects, according to the analytics firm Wood Mackenzie. As of April 1, that pipeline contained a total of 106 GW worth of developments that had already survived the permitting gauntlet. 

To be sure, cancellations have risen sharply since March. By Heatmap’s count, at least 13 gigawatts of capacity have been nixed so far this year. But the capacity of permitted projects has also grown since April 1. And the ratio between blocked and active developments has not radically changed, according to industry analysts. 

“At this point, we do not think the recent wave of opposition and policy intervention has materially changed our national capacity growth trajectory,” Maya Barkin, an analyst at the AI industry research firm SemiAnalysis, told me.

Indeed, monthly construction spending on data centers in the US hit a record high this June.

In short, data centers are marching forward despite taking heavy fire, like a pack of gut-shot zombies.

The secrets of the AI buildout’s success

Why has the AI buildout proven so resilient? There are at least two reasons.

First, and most importantly, demand for computing power remains astronomical. As frontier AI companies have built out larger models — and consumers and companies have increased their use of artificial intelligence and digital services — our economy’s appetite for computation has far outstripped supply. According to a recent report from the commercial real estate firm JLL, 99 percent of North America’s data centers are occupied. What’s more, of the 66 GW of data center capacity currently being constructed in JLL’s count, 95 percent has already been reserved.

Second, data center projects are unusually location-flexible. If a housing developer gets chased out of San Francisco’s suburbs by zoning rules and local opposition, it can’t relocate its condo tower to a mostly uninhabited stretch of Nevada desert. By contrast, data centers can — and do — operate in the middle of nowhere. 

For certain purposes, these facilities need some proximity to the users they serve; you can’t adequately support online gaming in New York City with data centers on the West Coast. But even in such cases, servers merely need to be in the same broad region. The hyperscale facilities used to train AI models, meanwhile, can be located virtually anywhere with land, fiber optic cables, a modicum of labor, and electricity (and now that many data centers are powering themselves through on-site natural gas plants, even the latter is potentially expendable).

Taken together, these two realities make data center construction extremely difficult to choke off. Sky-high demand for compute means that hyperscalers can afford to throw a lot of money at localities, in order to secure a project’s approval. And location flexibility makes it very difficult for data center developers to run out of host jurisdictions, particularly when so many rural counties throughout the United States are starving for revenue and investment. Thus, unless Congress imposes a national moratorium, development deals will almost certainly keep getting struck. 

“I think companies will need to open up their wallets and make sure that communities receive clear benefits,” John Arnold, a billionaire investor and philanthropist who sits on Meta’s board (and whose foundation has given funding to Vox), told me. “There will be places that raise their hands and say, ‘For X amount of benefit, we will welcome you into the community.’”

Just this week, West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey signaled that he was moving forward with plans to encourage data center development and use the consequent revenue to slash the state’s income tax.

Municipal permitting won’t preempt the robot apocalypse

On one level, all this may seem to validate anti-data center activism: If there are countless potential locations for these facilities, then why should any community host one it doesn’t want? 

This said, many oppose new data centers out of concern for their aggregate impacts, rather than their local ones. Climate activists fear that the AI buildout will generate perilous increases in carbon emissions. Populists on the right and left, meanwhile, want to slow the progress of artificial intelligence, so as to prevent the technology from causing mass unemployment — and/or human extinction.

For these factions, the buildout’s resilience has more complicated implications. If state and local bans are unlikely to end the boom, then green groups might be unwise to push for such measures in relatively climate-conscious areas. After all, doing so could shift development toward jurisdictions with less renewable energy, and/or fewer restrictions on carbon pollution. Given that risk, blue-state environmentalists may do more to mitigate AI’s climate impacts by regulating data center development than by banning it. Specifically, climate groups could demand that hyperscalers help bankroll the vast expansions of clean energy and transmission infrastructure that the green transition has always required.

For AI doomers, on the other hand, local bans may have some instrumental value. Moratoria and other restrictions are surely slowing the data center buildout at the margin. Still, as long as hyperscale facilities remain location-flexible — and tech companies stay well-capitalized — AI infrastructure will get built somewhere. A national moratorium could buy significant time. But ultimately, humanity’s security from the risks of AI hinges less on whether data centers get built than on what companies are allowed to do with them — and how the wealth they generate is distributed.

The data center rebellion is among the most remarkable popular movements in recent memory. But it is arrayed against one of the largest investment frenzies in human history. Unless or until the AI industry’s alleged “bubble” bursts, its buildout will be exceptionally difficult to stop. Yet where that buildout happens, how it’s powered — and what communities extract from it — are all up for grabs (and, increasingly, being grabbed).