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‘We’ve had enough of experts’ – US-style

APRIL 22, 2026

Mike Phipps reviews American Carnage: How Trump, Musk, and DOGE Butchered the US Government, by Sasha Abramsky, published by OR Books.

Within days of taking office, President Trump empowered Elon Musk to make swingeing cuts to the US’s most important government agencies. The ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (DOGE) was not a properly constituted government department, set by Congress. It was a shadow government agency, aimed at destroying government functionality.

For those on the receiving end, some of its operations were truly Orwellian. Workers at the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau were told not to come into the office, which was closed, and not to perform any work tasks. Eighteen days later they were required to fill out a Musk-mandated questionnaire listing what they had done over the previous week. Their limited answers would be used to justify their dismissal. Elsewhere, remote workers were instructed to return to offices with no furniture, where the heating and air conditioning had been turned off.

American Carnage follows eleven federal workers in eight different agencies following the moment they were fired. But tens of thousands of people were affected by the deletion of Congressionally mandated programmes deemed antithetical to the prejudices of the new government. Some were frog-marched out of the building; many lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in expected earnings, and were unlikely in late middle age to find new work. Some lost their vital medical insurance; many suffered extreme anxiety.

The breadth of destruction was vast. It hit services to disabled veterans, health care, cancer research, anti-corruption investigations and much more. The US Agency for International Development (USAID) was denounced by Musk as a “criminal organization”. Its termination would lead to millions of preventable deaths worldwide.

Many who lost their jobs had only just started: sacking probationary workers was easy, ‘low-hanging fruit’ for Musk’s eager, ignorant teams. They would get no severance pay or anything else. One woman who was recruited to a post at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and had to relocate from Pennsylvania to Boulder, Colorado, took a five-day road trip 2,000 miles out to her new job when she was told it had been deleted – along with her health insurance. She suffered from Crohn’s disease.

Some of the fired workers applied unsuccessfully for hundreds of jobs. One was told to tone down her USAID employment history, since in the new Trump era, potential employers would regard it as “toxic”.  

The human stories here are shocking. Many of the victims of this purge are now on medication, exhibiting symptoms akin to trauma. The firings also underline how precarious one’s existence in the US can be, with so much healthcare provision dependent on one’s easily terminated employment. But what’s especially galling is how little Congress did to defend the programmes which it had itself created – and the way many of the courts rolled over to let Trump do whatever he wanted.

What DOGE did was never about improving government efficiency. It was intended primarily to cow the civil service, to show those who kept their jobs the fate that could await them if they failed to comply with the new regime.

The project’s wide brief also allowed the incoming administration to break down the departmental barriers between different sets of data. Put bluntly, the information gathered from the Housing and Social Security Departments could be used by ICE to hunt down migrants. It also allowed Musk to harness huge amounts of data for his own tech empire.

Speaking in London recently about his book, Sasha Abramsky underlined some of the other consequences of the purge. Now that Trump is bombing Iran with no clear aim in a war that many say Israel has been trying to involve the US for decades, it’s obvious that the key expert energy analysts were simply no longer there to tell Trump about the likely consequences of his action – they had all been fired, courtesy of Elon Musk’s attack on the federal government.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.

Big Brother and the Israel Advocacy Machine

Roy Eidelson

April 20, 2026

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Photo by Simone Dinoia

Note: This opinion piece reflects my personal views and not those of any group with which I am affiliated.

In George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Oceania is a totalitarian society where Big Brother demands unquestioning conformity and obedience; where the Thought Police constantly monitor and punish every infraction of the rules; and where the Ministry of Truth proclaims, “War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” and “Ignorance is Strength.” According to the story’s protagonist, the greatest heresy in Oceania is common sense, and the most essential command is to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. Ultimately, nobody escapes this total surveillance state — “Big Brother Is Watching You!” — because those who rebel in any manner are identified, captured, broken, and often “vaporized” as if they had never existed.

I sometimes find myself recalling Orwell’s Oceania when I read the daily distressing and outraging news from Palestine and the broader region. I think about how, much like Big Brother, today’s Israel Advocacy Machine demands complete allegiance, compliance, and submission. And how it, too, often goes to extraordinary lengths to silence and discipline those who question or reject its deceptive and deceitful propaganda.

For example, Oceania’s ruling Party “freezes history” whenever necessary to fit their preferred narrative, convinced that “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” Israel advocates attempt something similar when they promote the view that Israel’s relevant history seemingly begins and ends with the horrific Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023. Through this distorted lens, they disregard decades of Palestinian suffering and oppression while claiming that, in any moral reckoning, nothing Israel has done since that day can be counted against it. By their account, all Israeli atrocities over the past two-and-a-half years either never happened or are fully justified (Israel’s own version of Oceania’s “doublethink.”) Of course, incontrovertible evidence of Israel’s war crimes and disdain for basic human decency has exposed that fiction. In recent weeks, Israel’s indiscriminate assault on residential neighborhoods and civilian infrastructure in Lebanon and Iran has also laid bare any lingering pretense that “self-defense” is always the sole basis for its acts of mass violence and devastation.

Consider too that in Nineteen Eighty-Four Big Brother rewrites history as needed and ensures that Oceania’s citizens live in constant fear for their safety. During a daily mandatory ritual called “Two Minutes Hate,” telescreens everywhere display rage-inducing fabricated images of enemy soldiers — a reminder that Oceania is in a state of perpetual war and loyalty must therefore be absolute. For many years, beginning long before October 7th, the Israel Advocacy Machine has been pursuing its own Orwellian campaign of control and disinformation focused on the demonization and delegitimization of the Palestinian people. Palestinians of all ages have been dehumanized and portrayed as animals posing an existential threat to Israel’s survival. And their brutal and merciless expulsion decades ago from what is now the state of Israel has been repeatedly discounted or denied.

But Israel and its staunch supporters are losing ground on all of these public relations fronts. Despite the killing of hundreds of journalists and media workers, heart-wrenching reports from Gaza, including images of some of the thousands of children who’ve been slaughtered or orphaned, have proven difficult for the world to simply ignore. Fanatical West Bank settlers ransacking and razing entire villages have prompted expressions of concern from even some of Israel’s most friendly allies. Newly discovered official documents from Israel’s founding leave no doubt that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were driven from their homes by ruthless terror offensives. And at least some sympathizers who’ve opted for willful ignorance are now finding it increasingly difficult to overlook the unfolding livestreamed genocide.

There’s one more parallel with Nineteen Eighty-Four worth highlighting here. To eliminate noncompliant speech and independent thought, Big Brother creates “Newspeak” — a new language with far fewer words. A Party disciple explains it this way:

It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words…The great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well…The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought…In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.

The Israel Advocacy Machine appears to have adopted its own version, with a similar goal: to control the narrative about Israel by tightly restricting language so that unwelcome ideas and truths become much harder to express or even think. Words like “Palestine,” and “Palestinian” therefore don’t appear in the “Newspeak for Israel” dictionary. They’ve been replaced with “anti-Israel,” anti-Zionist,” and similar expressions that blur the distinction between victim and perpetrator. This figurative erasure of the Palestinian people matches their literal removal and destruction, and it facilitates the fading of Israel’s war crimes from minds and conversations. In much the same way, “occupation,” “apartheid,” “genocide” and other Israel-offending words are also missing from the “Newspeak for Israel” dictionary. They’ve all been supplanted by one word that Israel advocates are encouraged to use as often and as loudly as possible: “Antisemitism” (with an implicit exclamation point). The ultimate goal is a “Greater Israel” in both word and deed.

Big Brother’s iron grip persists throughout Nineteen Eighty-Four, but the novel’s appendix suggests that Newspeak is never fully adopted in Oceania, and that the regime is eventually overthrown. So too, the Israel Advocacy Machine is showing signs of faltering. Here in the United States, the longstanding “Palestine Exception” — the vigorous suppression and punishment of speech defending Palestinian rights and freedom — is losing its hold. Today, the American public increasingly understands who the Palestinian people are and how they’ve been profoundly misrepresented and mistreated by Israel and its supporters. National polling data confirm these promising developments, as do recent statements and shifts in the positions of many political leaders in Washington, DC.

We don’t know exactly how Israel’s dedicated advocates will now respond as their hall of mirrors collapses, their propaganda balloons burst, and their desperation grows. But what’s clear is that we can’t take for granted the growing tide of support for Palestine. It reflects the tireless efforts of many courageous defenders of human rights who’ve risked their livelihoods, their freedom, and, in some cases, their very lives. In ways large and small, we can all help fight the erasure of the Palestinian people by elevating their cause in our thoughts, our words, and our actions. You won’t hear it from the Israel Advocacy Machine, but “Never Again” is now, and for all people.

Roy Eidelson, PhD, is a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, a member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, and the author of Doing Harm: How the World’s Largest Psychological Association Lost Its Way in the War on Terror (forthcoming in September 2023 from McGill-Queen’s University Press). Roy’s website is https://www.royeidelson.com/and he is on Twitter at @royeidelson.

 

Anthropic's Mythos AI model triggers crisis meetings among top global officials

Dario Amodei. / bne IntelliNewsFacebook

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By bne IntelliNews April 17, 2026

A recently announced powerful AI model built by Anthropic has prompted emergency meetings among finance ministers, central bankers and Wall Street chief executives after it demonstrated the ability to discover and exploit cybersecurity weaknesses across major banking systems, operating systems and web browsers.

The Claude Mythos Preview model was discussed at a meeting convened by US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell with the chief executives of the country's largest banks, including Bank of America's Brian Moynihan and Goldman Sachs's David Solomon.

Anthropic said the model represents a "step change" in AI performance and is the most capable it has built to date. The company has not released Mythos publicly, citing internal tests that found it too dangerous in its current form.

JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley are among the institutions testing the model through Anthropic's early access programme called Project Glasswing, which grants select financial firms access under controlled conditions. The White House has encouraged banks to use Mythos to audit their own systems before hostile actors gain access to similar capabilities.

Barclays chief executive CS Venkatakrishnan told the BBC on April 16 that the threat was serious. "We have to understand it better, and we have to understand the vulnerabilities that are being exposed and fix them quickly," he said, adding that the situation reflected a more connected financial system with both opportunities and risks.

Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey said regulators were examining what the development could mean for cybercrime risk. "The consequence could be that there is a development of AI, of modelling, which makes it easier to detect existing vulnerabilities in core IT systems, and then obviously cyber criminals could seek to exploit them," Bailey said.

Banks are seen as exposed because they operate mixed technology stacks where modern infrastructure runs alongside decades-old legacy systems. Security researcher Costin Raiu told Reuters that IBM-built banking systems from decades back would be particularly vulnerable, saying "a model like Mythos would have a field day finding exploits" in such technology.

Anthropic briefed senior US government officials on the model's capabilities before its limited release, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The company also reported that hacking groups linked to the Chinese government had already attempted to exploit an earlier version of Claude in real-world cyberattacks, including a coordinated campaign targeting around 30 organisations before Anthropic detected and shut it down.

Anthropic has since released a separate update, Claude Opus 4.7, which includes new cyber safeguards, saying it would test protections on less capable models before eventually working towards a broader release of Mythos-class systems.

Financial industry sources told the BBC that another prominent US AI company could soon release a similarly powerful model without the same safeguards.

James Wise, a partner at Balderton Capital and chair of the UK's Sovereign AI unit, said Mythos was "the first of what will be many more powerful models" that could expose system weaknesses.

Former White House AI czar David Sacks was sceptical, saying on the "All-In" podcast that Anthropic was skilled at "scaring people" alongside product launches.

The rapid ascent of Anthropic: Inside the strategy behind an $800 billion valuation

Copyright AP Photo/Patrick Sison

By Quirino Mealha

Published on 18/04/2026 - EURONEWS

The AI firm Anthropic has emerged as a dominant force in the global technology sector, attracting investor interest that values the company at approximately $800 billion (€678.3bn), but what is behind the success?

Anthropic’s recent financial trajectory has stunned market observers, with venture capital offers now placing the firm’s value at $800 billion (€678.3bn), on par with its main rival OpenAI.

According to various reports, the company has seen its private valuation more than double in a matter of months, supported by a revenue run-rate that has reportedly climbed to $30 billion (€25.4bn).

As the San Francisco-based AI developer prepares for a potential IPO, rumoured to happen as early as next autumn, it finds itself at the centre of an industry-wide debate regarding the balance between rapid growth and responsible scaling.

The company’s latest model, Mythos, has become the focal point of this tension, as its capabilities have drawn both praise for efficiency and warnings from high-profile leaders regarding security risks.

In a high-level convergence of financial oversight and national security, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell reportedly convened an urgent and closed-door meeting with the chief executives of the nation's major banks last week in Washington.

The summit, organized on short notice, was intended to warn Wall Street leadership about the profound systemic risks posed by Anthropic's new Mythos model.

Before Mythos, the company already found itself in a delicate position regarding its relationship with the state as it resisted allowing the US Department of War to use its models for offensive military purposes.

The stance cost the firm lucrative contracts with the Pentagon but that did not stop Anthropic from successfully expanding its business.

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The shift from research to enterprise workflows

The driving force behind this $800 billion (€678.3bn) figure is a fundamental transition in how Anthropic approaches the market.

While its early years were defined by a research-heavy, safety-first philosophy, the current growth is being propelled by aggressive enterprise adoption.

Large-scale corporations are increasingly turning to Anthropic’s Claude models to automate complex internal processes, a trend that has significantly boosted the firm's bottom line.

Unlike competitors such as OpenAI that have sought broad consumer appeal, Anthropic has focused on becoming the primary infrastructure for professional and technical workflows.

Speaking to Euronews, Ben Barringer, head of technology research at Quilter Cheviot, suggests that this specific focus is the reason the market is willing to accept such high premiums in valuing Anthropic.

"Anthropic differs from OpenAI in that it looks to sell to enterprises more than it does to the end consumer, so the business models are very different," Barringer noted.

In a way, a comparison can be drawn between Anthropic today and Microsoft last century, when software businesses first appeared, as they both focus on enterprise applications.

Anthropic is aiming for their AI models to be just as used by companies, and difficult to switch away from, as the Microsoft Office suite is currently for firms. This strategy appears to be insulating the company from the volatility and added competition often seen in more consumer-facing tech.

Barringer further highlighted to Euronews that the valuation is "primarily down to its product set, rather than the values it is looking to exude," noting that the proliferation of AI agents has provided a clear path to sustainable income.

By introducing consumption charges for its most intensive enterprise users, the company has demonstrated a clear ability to monetise its most advanced intellectual property.

Mythos and the security paradox

While the financial metrics are strong, the technological capabilities of the new Mythos model have introduced new complexities.

Mythos is touted as a significant leap forward in autonomous reasoning, but its power has raised alarms in the financial sector.

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, has voiced concerns regarding the potential misuse of such advanced systems suggesting that the capabilities of Mythos, particularly in identifying software vulnerabilities, could potentially be used to orchestrate sophisticated cyber-attacks against global banking infrastructure.

This "security paradox" is at the heart of Anthropic’s current dilemma.

The model is reportedly so effective at finding flaws in code that it is a transformative tool for cybersecurity, but in the wrong hands, those same features could be catastrophic.

This has led the company to implement strict access controls, a move that aligns with its safety-first branding but complicates its relationship with various stakeholders.

The firm is essentially attempting to sell its most powerful tool while simultaneously restricting how it can be used, a strategy that will certainly be under intense scrutiny during a future IPO roadshow.

Navigating the Pentagon and the public market

Anthropic’s ethical stance has also led to a standoff with the US Department of War.

Reports indicate that the company has resisted pressure to allow its most advanced models to be used for offensive military operations, citing its "Constitutional AI" guidelines.

This stance has created a unique dynamic where the company is arguably the most valuable AI startup in the world while being at odds with one of the world’s largest potential customers, the Pentagon.

Related

• Anthropic v. US Department of War: AI company challenges government in court
• Judge rejects Trump administration's 'Orwellian' branding of Anthropic as national security threat

This friction highlights the firm’s commitment to its founding principles, even at the cost of lucrative government contracts.

However, this perceived friction does not seem to have dampened investor enthusiasm for the rumoured IPO.

The market is currently experiencing a wave of momentum, with other major players like SpaceX also looking toward public listings.

Barringer noted that Anthropic may want to "take advantage of the momentum" in a crowded field of high-profile offerings.

An IPO would provide the necessary capital to sustain the massive costs associated with training the current and next generation of AI models.

As the company moves toward the final quarter of 2026, the question remains whether it can satisfy the relentless growth demands of public shareholders while maintaining the strict safety boundaries that define its corporate identity.