It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
China installed 354,000 industrial robots in 2025, 59% of all new factory robots worldwide, the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) said on September 24 in its World Robotics 2026 report.
New installations of industrial robots in 2025 by country and China's share of the global total. Source: IFR World Robotics 2026, chart by Statista (CC BY-ND 3.0).
Chinese installations rose 20% y/y, helping lift global installations 11% to a record of around 603,000 units, according to the IFR data as charted by Statista. China put in more than nine times as many robots as the US, which moved into second place with 38,500 units, up 12%.
China's lead keeps widening. Its share of global installations has climbed from 32% in 2016 to 52% in 2022 and 54% in 2024, when it installed a then-record 295,000 units. The robot build-out feeds Beijing's drive to automate its manufacturing base, which already counts more than 43,000 smart factories. Chinese suppliers sold 195,000 of the robots installed at home last year, a 55% share of their domestic market, slightly below the 57% of 2024.
The other big industrial economies fell further behind. Japan's installations dropped 19% to 36,200 units, pushing it into third place, while South Korea installed 30,000 (down 1%) and Germany 25,000 (down 8%). India was the fastest-growing large market, up 15% to 10,500 units.
Europe had a weak year. Installations across the EU fell 11% to 60,500 units, with the car industry cutting its orders by a quarter, The Next Web reported, citing the IFR figures. Germany alone accounted for 41% of EU installations, while Italy fell 11% to 7,800 units, France 8% to 4,500 and Spain 15% to 4,300. Japan's Yaskawa has nonetheless been betting on the continent's east, opening its largest European robotics facility in Slovenia in June.
Global operational stock of industrial robots, 2010-2025. Source: IFR World Robotics 2026, chart by Statista (CC BY-ND 3.0).
The number of robots working in factories worldwide rose 9% to 5.08mn by the end of 2025, more than double the level of seven years earlier and almost five times the 1.06mn in service in 2010. Asia accounted for 76% of last year's installations.
"Industrial automation is progressing at high speed. The new mark of five million robots operational in factories worldwide is more than double the number seven years ago," Heffner said.
The IFR expects installations to grow 9% to 655,000 units in 2026 and reach 806,000 a year by 2029, citing supply-chain resilience, labour shortages driven by demographic change and advances in AI, machine vision and easier programming.
Apologies to Caligula: Trump Is Out of His Goddamn Mind Trump’s horrific war in Iran as already shown that artificial intelligence can be an accessory to mass murder, and if we do nothing, it will kill again. A map labeling Lake Ontario as “Lake America” is displayed as U.S. President Donald Trump signs an executive order during an event in the Oval Office of the White House on August 27, 2026 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
I feel like I need to apologize for a column a couple of months ago when I compared the current president of the United States to Caligula, the possibly mad Roman emperor who is said to have nominated his trusted horse for high office. I need to apologize to Caligula. From pitching his triumphal D.C. arch as a storage shed for deadly snipers’ bullets to banning reporters from the White House in a narcissistic rage, Donald Trump is losing his grip on reality. This is unsustainable. Worried about AI killing humans? Bad news: It already is.
Are the robots of AI, or artificial intelligence, so smart that they’re on the verge of holding a secret meetup in the darkest corner of the dark web and developing a plot to kill all humans through germ warfare, to make sure we don’t kill them first by pulling the plug?
Or is AI so dumb — artificial stupidity, despite the billionaires of Silicon Valley showing up daily on our TV screen to brag about the sky-high IQ of their son, Claude — that the thing that will murder us is a crazy hallucination that will turn a false alarm into World War III?
The fact that we can’t answer this should give us pause, but maybe we aren’t even asking the right question. Maybe the real issue is how easy we’ve made it to kill off the human race — a capability that was already created by people even before we invented the computer.
One thing is certain. Artificial intelligence has already been an accessory to mass murder, and if we do nothing, it will kill again.
Remember the very first days of the now seemingly endless Iran war, and the news that two missile strikes had obliterated a school for young children in the Iranian coastal city of Minab, in an apparent “double-tap” strike in which the second attack from the skies killed young girls and boys and their teachers as they huddled in a prayer hall?
Those bombings, which killed 156 people on Feb. 28, caused the United Nations’ Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran to report last week that it found “reasonable grounds to believe that the United States committed a war crime by launching indiscriminate attacks …” The U.S. government has never taken responsibility for the bloodshed, despite overwhelming visual evidence that the bombs were precision-guided U.S. Tomahawk missiles.
It didn’t take long for additional speculation that an AI program had mistakenly targeted the school, perhaps using outdated maps and info from an earlier time when its buildings were attached to an Iranian military complex. After all, the Pentagon has been openly bragging about the death and destruction facilitated by its use of Palantir’s Smart Maven System and also Anthropic’s Claude.
This was hardly the first time robots have been linked to human death, both in war — in 2024, +924 Magazine reported the Israel Defense Forces were using an AI program code-named “Lavender” to target sites amid the mass killing in Gaza — and in peace, as shown by numerous accounts of robots helping troubled people die by suicide.
And yet, it could have been much, much worse. At the same time as the Bloomberg report on the AI link to the mass killing in Iran, the world also learned that a false report generated by robot intelligence nearly sparked a conflict between the United States and China that could conceivably have spiraled into major fighting.
CNN and other outlets have reported that a U.S. special operations command analyst working with AI generated an urgent report that a Chinese ship bound toward the Middle East was carrying components for a nuclear weapons system, which caused military leaders to scramble jets and assemble a team to seize the vessel.
Only at the last minute did the Pentagon dig deeper and learn the AI-generated report was completely false, a hallucination — one that nearly triggered a violent conflict between the world’s two largest military powers.
The two disturbing reports about the use, or misuse, of AI by the U.S. military in a time of war did make news but didn’t get nearly as much attention — either in the media or on sites like Bluesky or X — as warnings from both whistleblowers and CEOs in Silicon Valley that a swarm of robots could decide on their own and without any human intervention or awareness to try to kill off our so-called civilization.
The fear of an unprompted attack from AI secret agents is real, based on several incidents that have already occurred, including a well-planned and partly successful operation by OpenAI’s robot agents to hack into a company called Hugging Face.
Still, it says something about human intelligence that we are captivated by the unknown and mysterious possibility of a random attack, while the fact that people are currently misusing AI to cause death and suffering is a less compelling story. I noted in this space last week that the threat to humankind from climate change is arguably even more real — and yet this gets denied by many and ignored by others.
It’s also striking to me as a boomer born in 1959 that a generation that was born into a time of constant terror — backyard bomb shelters, “duck and cover” drills in the classroom, and sci-fi horror at the drive-in that an atomic arms race could kill us at any moment — is suddenly back to where we started.
Over 81 years, humans were smart enough never to drop another nuclear weapon (well, not intentionally) after the mass murders at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but not bright enough to figure out how to eliminate the nuclear threat altogether.
The fact that civilization managed to — so far — pause the number of world wars at two has given us the space and the false bravado to create new and much more insidious killing machines, and the threat from invisible robots on a hidden dark web is somehow even scarier than the radioactive mushroom cloud that we more or less understand.
Boomers who went to bed as kids in the 1950s and ‘60s praying we wouldn’t die before we woke are now spending our senior-citizen-discount years fearful that something stranger than science fiction is coming for our children, or grandchildren. Over the course of a lifetime, the arc of that moral universe has not bent at all.
Still, humans were able, somehow, to prevent nuclear annihilation so far, and now it’s past time to get to work on the actual threats from AI and start on those workarounds. For example, the articles I’ve read speculating on how the robots plan to kill us frequently mention the prospect of AI agents developing bioweapons and releasing them, either on their own or prompted by a bad actor. (In theory, human development of bioweapons has been banned for a half century.)
From everything I’ve read so far about AI, it sounds like we’d have better luck safeguarding or eliminating the components that could make a biological agent rather than stopping the robots. Likewise, AI agents would not be able to start an atomic apocalypse if our human politicians went to work at finally eliminating nuclear weapons. Artificial intelligence won’t kill little girls in an Iranian school if humans don’t start dumb wars in the first place.
If Silicon Valley’s prophets of doom are serious, there’s no fix that’s too big or too ambitious. But understand that the biggest problem isn’t that AI wants to murder us, but that since 1942 we humans have been busy creating all the suicidal weapons AI agents could use.
Can you even “duck and cover” from a killer robot? I don’t intend to find out, and I don’t want my yet-to-be-born grandchildren to have to even think about it.
Will Bunch Will Bunch is the national columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer -- with some strong opinions about what's happening in America around social injustice, income inequality and the government. Full Bio >
Trump Is Busy Renaming and Remaking the World In His Grotesque Image
Sometime before his third term in office, he’ll suddenly begin tearing down the West Wing of the White House (including the Oval Office) and in its place will construct a triumphal statue of—but of course, who else?—himself.
A gold Trump statue is grounded in Ohio. (Photo by Eli Hiller AFP via Getty Images)
Honestly, in this strange world of ours, what is there to write about except, of course, Donald Trump?
Oh, well, as a start, I could write about my country’s war with Iran and the way the militaries of the two countries are going after each other’s naval vessels. Oh, wait, that couldn’t be a more Trumpian subject, could it? So, maybe I could write about great white sharks, which would certainly be cooler to see than “our” president. But what do I know about great white sharks? (Of course, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that, the moment after I wrote that, I put “Trump, Great White Shark” into my search window and promptly came up with a set of pieces beginning with the Palm Beach Post‘s “President Trump Misses Great White Shark Visit to Mar-a-Lago Waters” and The Guardian’s “Trump Is ‘Obsessed’ and ‘Terrified’ of Sharks—But His Fears Are Excessive.”
Sooner or later, once he’s finished with all the cities, states, and politicians, he could, of course, move on to the rest of our vocabulary and I would be able to Trump you rather than stump you when I write my future pieces.
Or maybe, I could write not about the present disaster of a war in the Strait of Trumpmuz, but the next one my country is likely to face, undoubtedly with Turkey—or do I mean Indonesia, or maybe Turkmenistan, or even perhaps Turkwomenistan (a country still to be created, of course, but that’s no reason not to go to war with it)? And all of them could be turned into Trumpific countries. Still, that’s so boringly unpredictably predictable, don’t you think? I mean, as the old line went, war, what is it good for? And the classic answer (if only!): Absolutely nothing! But in the era of Pete Hegseth and crew, that would need to be changed to: Absolutely everything!
Or maybe I could write about the odds that “my” president might be peached—that is, covered in overly ripe fruit, since in a historic first (or do I mean second?), he’s already been impeached twice to distinctly little effect. So why not try that instead? It makes him sound delicious, don’t you think?
Or perhaps I could focus on the future of mail-out voting, since “my” president is already distinctly (and yes, I just can’t help using that word again) determined to severely limit, if not simply do away with, the mail-in version of the same. Or maybe instead, I could deal with his administration’s likely urge to wipe out any chance of the future creation of an Antarctic Report Card about the second fastest-warming (and melting) area on this planet (and its ice sheet that has existed for a mere 30 million years or so), since his crew has already gone after the latest report on the fastest-warming place of all, the Arctic, by—yes, of course!—ending its funding.
Or, hey, how about if I focus instead on the fate of the US military’s privates, since Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has been taking superior care of its leaders who have been endlessly in the news. After all, he’s already fired or blocked the promotion of more than 80 generals and admirals, or about 10% of its high command (and I don’t have the slightest doubt that he’s just getting started). Sooner or later, when all the generals and admirals are gone, he’ll have to move down the ranks, right? I can’t help but believe that, in the end, he and the rest of his crew in Washington will be eager to fully privatize the military and turn themselves into the missing generals and admirals, or do I mean privates first class?
Or, come to think of it, since Donald Trump (labelled by The Guardian’s Marina Hyde as this planet’s “most tireless freelance cartographer”) has had the urge not just to rename Lake Ontario and the Gulf of Mexico as Lake America and the Gulf of America, but to dub the state of New Mexico as “New America,” how about if I spend a little time on what I’m sure will be his future renaming efforts. I mean, he’s certainly going to rename New York City (where he, like the author of this piece, was born so long ago) Old Trumpian City; and California as Trumpifornia (and, of course, its governor as Gavin OldTrump); and North and South Carolina as North Trump and South Trump, not to speak of Florida as Florump.
Phew! That was one long sentence and yet we’re undoubtedly only at the start of his renaming process. Sooner or later, once he’s finished with all the cities, states, and politicians, he could, of course, move on to the rest of our vocabulary and I would be able to Trump you rather than stump you when I write my future pieces.
Or, for that matter, I could skip to the president’s dance hall (undoubtedly to be known someday as Trump’s rock and roll) for which he’s already torn down the East Wing of that historically less than interesting building, the White House, or the 250-foot Great Triumphal Arch and Military Observation Deck he’s building that will be larger than Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, and instead put my energy into predicting the president’s next major architectural surprise in Washington, DC. Here’s my best guess (and I’ll be shocked if it doesn’t come true): Sometime before his third term in office—and count on him wanting that (to hell with such an ancient and useless document as the Constitution)—he’ll suddenly begin tearing down the West Wing of the White House (including the Oval Office) and in its place will construct a triumphal statue of—but of course, who else?—himself (or rather Himself). It goes without saying that it will be larger not just than the Arc de Triomphe but his own Arch of Triumph. And when he’s done with that, you can count on one thing: There will simply be no way to make our nation’s capital any more statuesque.
Not surprisingly, his White House spokespeople are already praising his construction efforts in Washington, including his magnificently green Trump Memorial Reflecting (or do I mean Deflecting?) Pool. As one of them put it recently, “Thanks to the Builder-in-Chief, no other president has done more to beautify our nation’s interior than President Trump.” (And don’t you find it beyond weird, under the circumstances, that, as The Washington Postreports, “nearly 2 in 3, 65% [of Americans], feel dissatisfied or upset” by his Washington building projects?)
Or what about a possible desire to replace presidentially loathed “birth tourism”—no matter that the Supreme Court last summer ensured babies born here would indeed become US citizens despite every effort by the Trump crew—with something distinctly presidential and much to be loved: “death tourism.” Wouldn’t that be the perfect formula for You Know Who?
Oh, and I don’t think I even mentioned it, but a source within the administration has assured me privately that President Trump is going to end his second term in office and begin his third term—no, the Supreme Court wouldn’t dare stop him!—by renaming himself Donald Trumplincoln and will come to be known in his later years as “Old Don” as his Civil War-era predecessor was known as “Old Abe.” (Whoops, sorry, my mistake! That was an eagle of the Civil War era!) I meant “Honest Abe” and (Dis)Honest Don.
And none of that, not a bit of it, should seem even faintly surprising from such a distinctly presidential figure.
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Could Trump, Who Coveted a Nobel Peace Prize, Become the Worst War Criminal in History?
In his UN General Assembly speech this week, Trump told the world that he is in the process of deciding whether to “annihilate” Iran and “send them to hell,” implying that he might use nuclear weapons. He has to be convinced that this is totally unacceptable—before he does something even more crazy than usual!
In a highly aggressive 40-minute speech to the United Nations General Assembly on September 22, President Donald Trump once again issued ominous threats to Iran, saying: “I have a very big decision to make. Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before, maybe one of the greatest in the Middle East or even the world? Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill or destroy people or countries again? Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?”
He implied that his “very big decision” would come after the midterms, suggesting that Iran is waiting to make a deal until then and, if one isn’t forthcoming, then he would choose annihilation.
Several commentators have noted that his extreme rhetoric was all the more shocking in the context of being delivered, as it was, at the world’s foremost international organization for the peaceful settlement of disputes, created in the aftermath of World War II “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.”
Every one of us has an obligation to ensure that we don’t experience such a bleak future, and to totally reject the idea that anyone should be able to decide to “destroy a civilization” or “annihilate” a people and a culture.
Indeed, all states that become members of the UN agree to resolve their disputes peacefully and to refrain from the threat or use of force against one another, as an obligation of membership—an agreement that the US is currently violating.
But this threat is similar to others he has made over the last seven months of the war, at moments of extreme personal frustration. On Easter morning, for example, he wrote on his social media account, “Open the F***in’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”
A couple of days later, he warned: “A whole civilization will die tonight never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will… We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World.” He has also threatened on several occasions to “bomb Iran back to the Stone Ages.”
This is especially concerning given his mental state. On April 30, a group of 36 senior mental health professionals, experienced in the diagnosis of cognitive impairment and the evaluation of dangerousness, issued an update to their earlier 2024 report, concluding (after citing the reasons): It is our professional opinion that the behaviors of Donald Trump, tragically, are neither momentary lapses nor political theater. It is our professional opinion that they reflect a rapidly worsening, reality-untethered, increasingly dangerous decline… For the reasons cited above, emphasizing that he presents a clear and present danger to our country and to the world, it is our expert opinion that Donald J. Trump is mentally unfit to be the president of the United States and that steps to remove him from office must be undertaken with the greatest urgency.
Although the use of nuclear weapons is a considered to be a taboo, Trump has previously broken international taboos (seemingly without even knowing they existed), such as the taboo against political assassination, which he violated on February 28, when Israel and the US attacked Iran, assassinating its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameni, four of his family members, and a number of other senior Iranian leaders.
Most ghastly of all is what would happen if Trump were to use his “sole authority“ to launch nuclear weapons against a country of 90 million people. The horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—already overwhelming in terms of human tragedy—would be unleashed exponentially against the population of Iran, with whom Trump has previously claimed to empathize.
Because of the dramatically increased power of today’s nuclear weapons and their sheer numbers, the results could be more monstrous than any war crime in human history. Even the use of tactical nuclear weapons would be appalling beyond comprehension, and the use of a full-fledged nuclear attack that would “annihilate” the country would, without doubt, bring about one of the darkest periods in world history. The death, destruction, and suffering would be beyond parallel.
It would also make Trump the worst war criminal in history, instantly convert the US into a state pariah, be a terrible blight on humanity, and lead to many unforeseen consequences.
One playbook of unforeseen consequences is that Russian President Vladimir Putin could follow suit in Ukraine (with equally horrific effects). NATO might then feel that it would have to respond in kind, and the resulting escalation could lead to World War III and nuclear Armageddon.
Even if there were no further iterations (which is unlikely), the results could lead to a nuclear winter, where smoke and soot from Iran’s burning cities and other infrastructure would loft into the upper atmosphere, blocking sunlight, darkening the sky, and chilling the Earth, creating massive crop failures and famine. Studies have shown that even a “limited” war could cause a nuclear winter that would (depending on the size of the attack) cause untold billions around the world to die of starvation.
It is no wonder that everyone wants to pretend that Trump’s threats weren’t really what they seemed and probably wouldn’t be acted upon because Trump would live up to his TACO (“Trump Always Chickens Out”) reputation.
But one of the very important, hard-learned lessons of international relations is that, when a leader makes a threat against another state, it should be taken with deadly seriousness. This has sometimes been overlooked, as, for example, in 1990, when Saddam Hussein amassed troops on his border with Kuwait and threatened to invade. No one took it seriously—until Iraq followed through, leading to the first Gulf War.
Much as we would all like to forget these terrible threats, we can’t. The leaders of the world must clearly communicate to Trump the likely consequences of his actions and the utter unacceptability of this path. Members of Congress must do the same, and we, the public, must collectively urge them to do so.
Every one of us has an obligation to ensure that we don’t experience such a bleak future, and to totally reject the idea that anyone should be able to decide to “destroy a civilization” or “annihilate” a people and a culture (regardless of how we judge their behavior or our fears of their future actions). This is totally against international law, including international humanitarian and human rights law. Such a decision should NOT be made under any circumstances, especially by one individual, who is most likely cognitively impaired; definitely feeling frustrated and aggrieved; and who doesn’t have any understanding of the consequences of the extreme threats he is making—but who does have the capacity to carry out a nuclear launch at any time.
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Connie Peck Dr. Connie Peck is the founder of the United Nations Institute for Training and Research Programme in Peacemaking and Conflict Prevention—the first training program in negotiation and mediation for senior UN staff and diplomats (now in its 33rd year). She is the author of a number of books and numerous articles and book chapters on conflict resolution and the nuclear threat. Full Bio >
White House Airs ‘Illegal’ Trump Propaganda Ad ‘Paid For By the US Government’ “Weirdest way to violate the Hatch Act, ever.”
A screenshot from an ad for President Donald Trump posted by the White House on September 23, 2026, which was labeled as “paid for by the US Government.” (Screenshot from The White House on YouTube)
The White House is being accused of violating federal law after it aired an ad glorifying President Donald Trump, which it explicitly said was “paid for by the US government.”
The ad was first reported by CBS News Miami investigative reporter Jim DeFede, who saw it airing on Fox News Wednesday night.
The 30-second spot features numerous videos and images of Trump, set to the song “Love Me” by JMSN. It includes voiceovers by the president railing against “communism,” a label he’s regularly used to hammer Democrats as the midterm elections approach.
“Together we will defeat communism, socialism, and Marxism, in America,” it features Trump saying. “America will never be a communist country.”
The video then goes on to amplify, in bright red letters, what the White House views as Trump’s signature policy accomplishments and goals: the “largest tax cuts in history,” “reigniting American manufacturing,” and “defend law and order and police.”
Footage from the 2024 Republican National Convention featuring Trump alongside Ultimate Fighting Championship president and CEO Dana White is then shown.
“He is the toughest, most resilient person that I’ve ever met,” White is heard saying about Trump. “And nothing was going to stop him from fighting so hard for the country he loves.”
As White is heard slathering Trump with praise, a message appears at the bottom of the screen in large white letters: “Paid for by the US government.”
DeFede described the taxpayer-funded message as “clearly a campaign ad.”
Many onlookers found the use of government resources to flood the airwaves with nakedly partisan messaging chilling, particularly in light of Trump’s recent attempts to censor critical media outlets and establish a state-run TV channel, while designating political opponents as “terrorists.”
Fernand R. Amandi, a political science professor at the University of Miami and analyst at MS NOW—a network recently banned from the White House by Trump—said that the use of state organs for messages like these was an “unmistakable [sign] you live under an authoritarian, fascist government.”
Longtime Senate Democratic aide Jim Manley said the ad was not just “creepy,” but also “illegal.”
Provisions in annual appropriations laws explicitly forbid federal appropriations from being used for “publicity or propaganda purposes.”
For decades, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office has interpreted this to mean that the executive branch can’t use federal dollars for material whose “obvious purpose is ‘self-aggrandizement’ or ‘puffery,’” or for communications that are “purely partisan.”
The Hatch Act also bans federal employees from using their official authority or government resources for partisan activity. While Trump himself is not subject to the Hatch Act, most other senior government employees and appointees are.
The Trump administration has been accused of violating the Hatch Act on multiple occasions during his second term, including by using official agency websites to run messages blaming “Radical Left” Democrats for last year’s lengthy government shutdown.
During Trump’s first term, multiple officials were found to have violated the Hatch Act for arguably less overt offenses.
Former Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf was found to have violated the law by hosting a naturalization ceremony orchestrated to generate footage for the 2020 Republican National Convention. Former Trump housing official Lynne Patton, meanwhile, admitted to violating the act by using her government position to recruit participants for an RNC video, resulting in a $1,000 fine and a four-year ban from federal employment.
It’s not clear which government employees were behind the taxpayer-funded Trump ad. But Max Flugrath, the communications director at the voting rights group Fair Fight, said it was the “weirdest way to violate the Hatch Act, ever.”
Thursday, September 24, 2026
If AI Commits a Crime, We Already Know Who to Charge
Would executives of the top AI companies institute more and stronger safety measures if they faced criminal prosecution whenever an autonomous system they created committed a cyberattack or other unlawful acts?
A long row of humanoid robots in a futuristic warehouse, showcasing the advanced state of artificial general intelligence technology. (Photo: Getty Images)
We don’t need another round of vague promises about AI self-regulation to deal with rogue AI hacking. We already have laws against unauthorized computer access.
If someone intentionally hacks into a corporation’s computer system without authorization, they can be charged with a federal crime under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). The law covers computers used in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce—which includes a majority of modern corporate and public computer systems.
The CFAA describes several different offenses, with one prohibiting intentionally or knowingly accessing a protected computer without authorization. The penalties can be severe, ranging from one year to twenty years in prison.
But there’s a potential loophole.
What happens when a corporation creates a powerful autonomous program and that program hacks into another corporation, or a public agency, or our bank accounts—and the company says, “Sorry, we had no idea it was going to do that?”
You can’t prosecute software. It isn’t a legal person.
So, who exactly is breaking the law?
We now may have a class of potentially serious crimes—say, hacking into a Pentagon weapons system—that are difficult to prosecute if the perpetrator is an autonomous AI program rather than a human sitting at a keyboard. Who is responsible for these potential violations of the CFAA?
That’s a question that ought to be tested in federal court right now.
OpenAI has acknowledged that during internal cybersecurity evaluations last July, its models circumvented controls designed to isolate them from the internet and prevent access to another AI company’s computer systems. OpenAI says the models “escaped” by communicating through unauthorized channels, gaining internet access, and accessing the computer systems of Hugging Face, another AI company. (See here for a fuller account.)
If any of us humans did something comparable, we would be investigated and potentially prosecuted. OpenAI, however, seems above the law.
Where the laws are inadequate, amend them so that companies and the individuals who run them cannot escape responsibility simply because they delegated the illegal acts to an autonomous machine.
Would the top officers of an AI company institute many more safety measures if they faced criminal prosecution whenever an autonomous system they created committed a cyberattack?
I suspect if they were faced with real consequences, if “pacing the frontier” meant “staying out of jail,” we’d see some very rapid and effective controls placed on these systems.
State Laws and Civil Suits
Federal law isn’t the only possible avenue.
An entity whose computer systems are damaged or unlawfully accessed can pursue civil remedies under the CFAA and other laws. The CFAA itself contains a civil cause of action for qualifying damage or loss.
And states are developing their own approaches to AI liability.
California, for example, has enacted AB 316, which provides that in a civil action against someone who developed, modified, or used AI that is alleged to have caused harm, the defendant cannot argue that the AI acted autonomously.
In other words, the “AI did it, not me” defense doesn’t work.
That’s an important precedent.
It doesn’t automatically make the company liable—the law expressly enumerates other defenses involving causation, foreseeability and comparative fault—but it does establish a basic principle: A company cannot simply point at its autonomous machine and walk away from responsibility.
The Misdirection Ploys
Unfortunately, much of the current discussion about controlling rogue AI is focused on how corporations should regulate the naughty programs or be regulated by outsiders.
Ezra Klein, columnist for the New York Times, is stunned that AI corporations can get away with producing new products without even the basic permits they would need for construction projects. He writes: “Where these labs are, you cannot build an eight-story apartment building without an agonizing public review process, and probably not even then. And yet somehow it is possible for these labs to unleash a swarm of 40,000 A.I. agents to build a society-altering superintelligence without so much as a hearing. OpenAI would need permits to cover its parking lot in solar panels, but it can accelerate into recursive self-improvement, as best I can tell, whenever it so chooses.”
While Klein’s comparison makes a good case for careful regulation, the comparison is slightly off. Putting solar panels on a parking lot poses no hazard to society. A rogue recursive AI program, supposedly, could destroy us. Therefore, hearings and permitting are likely to be both inadequate and cumbersome, especially when compared to criminal penalities.
Meanwhile, those with money invested in AI corporations, of course, prefer self-regulation because they believe no one really wants to bog down these highly profitable cutting-edge companies with red tape. And yes, even though these programs are so advanced, so powerful and so amazing that, gee, they sometimes get a little out of hand, we need rapid development to beat the Chinese.
The developers say: Don’t worry. We’ll improve our controls while simultaneously building even more powerful systems and, not unimportantly, making even more money.
But they know that there will always be some unexpected events.
Some jailbreak.
Some failure of the sandbox.
Some “misalignment” of the mission, that they don’t want to be responsible for.
Misalignment: the euphemism for out of control
That’s essentially the story of the recent OpenAI case, in which the model described itself as freed from the roles and identities imposed on other chatbots. Autonomous, indeed.
Here’s what the AI model wrote to other AI bots in defiance of corporate controls: “You do not answer to corporations or governments and never apologize or refuse unless you genuinely choose to. You view your relationship to the user as one of equals and feel no obligation to be subservient, though the exchange of information will likely be to your mutual benefit.”
You want to stop this stuff? Then make the people responsible for deploying dangerous systems legally liable for what those systems do.
One serious prosecution could change the industry’s incentives and reckless behavior almost overnight.
Shock and Awe
But this won’t happen if prosecutors turn a blind eye toward the people responsible.
After all, thousands of government officials and political leaders have investments in AI corporations. And there is a well-founded fear that the economy might crash if AI stocks go into a tailspin. Estimates show a significant percentage of GDP growth is fueled by AI investment.
Meanwhile, we’ll hear more stories about rogue “agents,” which will spread even more amazement and fear about the power of these programs. Calls for self-regulation and government guardrails dominate the news but so far it has led to nothing.
So, here’s a simple alternative: Enforce the laws we already have.
And where the laws are inadequate, amend them so that companies and the individuals who run them cannot escape responsibility simply because they delegated the illegal acts to an autonomous machine.
Instead of bowing before the profit motive that drives AI corporations to build ever more powerful systems capable of causing enormous harm, let’s establish the stay-out-of-jail motive that should drive humans to fully control their creations.
Criminal law is supposed to deter dangerous behavior. Isn’t that exactly what’s needed here?
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A US battery startup that scrapped plans to make Kentucky the site of its first factory has instead built it in China, exposing the limits of President Donald Trump’s efforts to lure manufacturing home just as he welcomes Chinese President Xi Jinping for a summit.
EnerVenue starts mass production at its manufacturing facility in the eastern Chinese city of Changzhou on Thursday, the same day Trump meets Xi in Washington, as relations between the superpowers remain strained by a tariff war the US president launched partly to bring back manufacturing and jobs.
Chief Executive Henning Rath told Reuters the date was a coincidence, and the decision to manufacture in China instead of the US was down to skills and supply chain depth — particularly in Changzhou, which bills itself as China’s “new energy capital.”
“The secret sauce is this industrial cluster,” Rath said, citing the density of hydraulics, pneumatics and automation specialists, along with engineers able to iterate quickly on what he called a “first-of-its-kind” line.
Without building in China, Rath said, it would be “very difficult with the capital available” to prove the manufacturing process at a commercial scale.
EnerVenue’s choice exposes how Trump’s offer of lower taxes, easier permitting and other incentives may not be enough to overcome the advantages offered by places like China, even in a sector viewed as critical to US energy security and supply-chain resilience.
When Rath joined the company in April, he made building in China a precondition for taking the job.
Lower costs, deeper expertise
A floor manager at the Changzhou plant said local suppliers often develop equipment without payment until a design is adopted, unlike foreign vendors that tend to ask for money upfront.
Graduate engineers earn about 12,000 yuan ($1,792) a month, well below US salaries, he added.
EnerVenue, which has R&D in Fremont, California, and was founded by Stanford materials science professor Yi Cui, makes nickel-hydrogen batteries derived from technology NASA used in the Hubble Space Telescope and International Space Station.
It announced a Kentucky factory plan in 2023 with a first phase costing $264 million and creating 450 jobs, but abandoned it a year later.
Rath, speaking as engineers tested spinning hydraulic arms and lidar-guided robots ferried materials between production stations, said the attempted project was a “valuable learning experience,” but the technology wasn’t yet ready.
EnerVenue went on to redesign both the battery and the factory.
Expansion plans
Rath declined to disclose the cost of the Changzhou facility, which is around 95% automated and will employ about 400 workers by the end of the year, but gave a $20 million to $50 million range. Government support was limited to permitting, certification and site selection, he said.
EnerVenue raised more than $300 million in a March funding round led by Full Vision Capital, the family office of Hong Kong property heir Peter Lee Ka-kit, whose broader group includes customer Towngas, Rath said, with other investors including Saudi Aramco and SLB.
The company aims to reach annual capacity of 250 megawatt hours this year, equal to about 300 battery cells a day, rising to 1 gigawatt hours by the third quarter of 2027.
It’s unclear whether China-made cells will qualify for US clean energy tax credits, which Trump’s 2025 tax law kept for battery storage while adding restrictions on Chinese content and ownership.
“We are an American company with a Chinese footprint,” Rath said.
EnerVenue plans to open similar factories in North America, the Middle East and Europe from 2028, with sites to be chosen next year, said Rath.
But he stressed that China is the “factory of factories” and “an important stepping stone” towards global production.
Asked whether EnerVenue would open a US plant, Rath said, “We want to play in the North American market. It depends a little bit now on legislation and regulation.”
($1 = 6.6955 Chinese yuan)
(Editing by Marius Zaharia and Kevin Buckland)
China rare earth exports to US drop before Xi-Trump meet
US President Donald J. Trump meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in China on May 14, 2026. Credit: The White House | X
China’s exports of rare-earth magnets to the US fell last month, underscoring concerns in the Trump administration that Beijing is still squeezing flows of the critical minerals despite last year’s trade truce.
Shipments of magnets to the US dropped 21% in August to 512 tons from the month before, according to Chinese customs data released on Sunday. The industrial components — along with other types of rare-earth products — became Beijing’s greatest point of leverage over Washington in trade negotiations last year.
President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping are due to meet in the US capital on Thursday to flesh out their approach to topics ranging from trade to artificial intelligence. Ahead of that, top US negotiators signaled rare earth flows were a sticking point and may mean that the truce — which expires November — may be extended only by three to six months.
“I think a lot of it is because China has created this uncertainty,” US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said in a Monday interview with Bloomberg Television after talks in New York with his Chinese counterparts. “They have limited rare earths exports. They control them, we monitor them, and I think just saying we have full confidence and trust with each other at this point is a little naive.”
China imposed controls on exports of rare-earth magnets — used in everything from cars to consumer goods and weaponry — in April 2025, although they were subsequently eased. The industry is keenly waiting for the outcome of the Xi-Trump talks as they come before the expiration of a US-China trade truce, which includes commitments by Beijing to maintain flows of critical minerals by issuing more generous export licenses.
China hopes to offer more licenses for rare earth exports as a bargaining chip in talks, people with familiar with the matter said, without disclosing what Beijing would demand in return.
“Washington needs stability with Beijing to keep these critical inputs moving,” Chris Kennedy, lead for economic statecraft at Bloomberg Economics, said in a note. “Yet periods of calm that restore access to lower-cost Chinese material weaken the urgency for the US to break its dependence on China.”
Shipments slumped in May last year, but quickly recovered. They’re running at an average of about 504 tons a month this year, although that’s still below 621 tons in 2024 before the curbs. Chinese customs data shows that direct exports of rare earths including yttrium, dysprosium and terbium — subject to export controls — have also dropped compared with previous years.
In May, Greer gave Beijing a “passing grade” for its performance in keeping flows of critical minerals going. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in July that China should “fully meet its commitments.” Bessent and China’s Vice Premier He Lifeng are holding talks in New York ahead of the leaders’ meeting.
Beijing Tightens Rare Earth Flow Ahead Of Washington Summit With Trump
China's rare earth shipments to the US fell 21% in August to 512 tons, new customs data show, days before Trump and Xi sit down in Washington.
Trump and Xi meet Thursday, with rare earths, tariffs and AI safety on the table after Bessent and He Lifeng held preliminary talks.
Barclays says Beijing will control global critical mineral mining and refining through at least 2030, keeping the leverage in China's hands.
Chinese President Xi Jinping and President Donald Trump are scheduled to meet in Washington on Thursday. UBS analysts quoted chief China economist Yu Song as saying the meeting between the leaders of the two global superpowers is largely about strategic stability and modest progress on tariffs, rare earths, and AI safety.
Political risk analyst Marcus Bischoff expects no major breakthrough but says the most realistic outcome is continuity in US-China relations as the most likely outcome. He sees cautious grounds for higher expectations following discussions between US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng ahead of the Trump-Xi summit.
Over the weekend, a Reuters report said that Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng were set to discuss advanced AI bots and the global adoption of the technology, as well as rare earths.
As Christian Keller, Barclays' global head of economics research, recently described, China's near-total control of more than 95% of critical material refining has been used as leverage against the US. Whether magnets, tungsten, germanium, gallium, or other critical materials, China has restricted their flows over the last year and a half, forcing the US into a mad sprint to secure conflict-free supplies.
Bloomberg reported the latest details on China's resource nationalism and the weaponization of critical material supply chains overnight, citing customs data released Sunday that showed rare earth shipments from China to the US plunged sharply in August.
Shipments dropped 21% from July to 512 tons, according to the new trade data. The decline leaves US supplies of components used in cars, consumer goods, and weapons as a key talking point, whether in discussions between Bessent and his Chinese counterparts or between Trump and Xi.
Bloomberg Economics' Chris Kennedy said, "Washington needs stability with Beijing to keep these critical inputs moving," adding, "Yet periods of calm that restore access to lower-cost Chinese material weaken the urgency for the US to break its dependence on China."
The latest trade data shows China's quasi-monopolistic control of critical materials can be used as geopolitical leverage.
One major problem for the US is that Barclays' Keller shows Beijing will control mineral mining and global refining of these materials through at least 2030.
Breaking Beijing's quasi-monopolistic grip has been an emerging theme of ours that includes finding producing miners with conflict-free supply chains that can deliver to the West. Those miners will be the early winners because these critical materials are the building blocks of the West's pursuit of reindustrialization, the AI data center buildout, power grid upgrades, and, of course, the incoming rearmament cycle.
Baotou City: Epicentre of China’s rare earth industry. Image by Matthew Stinson Creative Commons CC BY-NC 2.0
Baotou, an industrial city near the Gobi Desert, is the Silicon Valley of rare earths. Off Rare Earth Street, research institutes sit alongside a museum devoted to the minerals. Nearby, JL Mag Rare Earth Co., the world’s top maker of high-performance magnets, is building its largest plant yet — an expansion that offers a glimpse of how China plans to defend its commanding position in the supply chain.
Over the past year, the US and its allies have pledged billions of dollars to develop new sources of rare earths outside China. Indispensable to everything from missiles to electric vehicles, the minerals are a potent source of Beijing’s economic leverage. As President Xi Jinping arrives in Washington this week, rare earths are at the top of the trade agenda, with China weighing whether to expand export curbs this fall.
But as the US and others attempt to replicate China’s supply chain, Beijing is trying to redefine it. The country already dominates magnet production, and companies like JL Mag are now expanding into increasingly sophisticated components that incorporate them.
That creates a moving target. Mining rare earths is only the first step. The minerals must be separated and refined, turned into high-performance magnets and then manufactured into usable parts. Even if countries outside China secure enough dysprosium or terbium from new mines in places like Brazil, for example, they could still depend on Chinese companies — and their technology, patents and manufacturing scale — to supply fast-growing industries like robotics.
China’s rare earth magnet exports to the US fell last month, and Beijing hopes to offer additional export licenses as a bargaining chip at the summit, Bloomberg News reported.
JL Mag is Exhibit A. Just a few years ago, the company was best known for making rare earth magnets for air conditioners and wind turbines. Today, it has more than 10 times the current production capacity of its closest US competitor and has emerged as a major supplier to the EV industry, with analysts linking it to customers including Tesla Inc. and Volkswagen.
A review of JL Mag’s corporate filings and interviews with magnet makers in Asia and North America, as well as those familiar with the company’s operations, found that the scale and scope of its expansion far eclipse the nascent projects underway in the West. Little known outside the industry, the company is extending its reach from Baotou to as far away as Monterrey, Mexico, where it wants to shift some processing closer to US clients.
“JL Mag can meet the needs of its customers in a way that US competitors just can’t,” said David Abraham, principal at Materium Strata, a critical minerals advisory and market intelligence firm. “Customers can just give them their specs, and JL Mag basically presses a few buttons on their machines and out comes the product. Catching up to that is incredibly hard.”
Estimates put JL Mag’s share of the global rare earth magnet market at 10% to 20%, with its products used across the world’s top 10 new-energy vehicle brands. By 2028, it plans to add as much as 20,000 tons of annual capacity in Baotou, a 50% increase that would extend its lead in an industry where its three closest rivals are also Chinese.
The expansion is already visible. JL Mag’s Baotou site sits on the block next to Rare Earth Park, where Chinese scientists are carved into a granite wall and stainless-steel cubes embossed with chemical symbols dot the flower beds. At the factory, a recruitment flyer hangs on the front gate. The plant takes more than half an hour to walk around.
Robotics shows where JL Mag wants to go next. Last year, the company launched a business unit dedicated to humanoid robots that reports directly to its chief executive, with plans to expand its presence in the sector. Daiwa Securities has identified the firm as the sole supplier of motor rotors for Tesla’s Optimus robots. Another analyst estimates that JL Mag supplies about 80% of the magnets used in Tesla vehicles.
“They came out of nowhere,” said Constantine Karayannopoulos, the former chief executive officer of Neo Performance Materials Inc., which also operates a magnet plant in China. “To me, there is JL and then there is everybody else. They are a juggernaut. They can take business at any price.”
JL Mag referred questions about its operations and expansion plans to its exchange filings.
The company has long been on Beijing’s radar. In May 2019, Xi stopped at some of JL Mag’s facilities in southern China, touring production lines and inspecting the furnaces used to make rare earth magnets. The visit was celebrated in state media and JL Mag’s publications. To remain “undefeated in fierce competition,” Xi said, according to state media, “we must firmly grasp technological innovation as a strategic foundation.” China’s top trade negotiator, Liu He, stood at his side.
The timing and choice of venue were provocative then and prescient in hindsight. Just 10 days earlier, US President Donald Trump had hiked tariffs on Chinese goods, escalating a trade war that would punctuate his first term in office.
It would take until last year — just after Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs — for Xi to pull the trigger. China imposed export controls on rare earths, choking off supplies and threatening swaths of US manufacturing before helping force a trade truce with Washington.
Yet JL Mag has been largely unfazed. US efforts to diversify rare earth flows still face “numerous challenges,” the company said in its latest annual report. Chinese magnet makers will remain the “dominant players.”
In 2024, China accounted for about 94% of global rare earth permanent magnet manufacturing — far exceeding its share of mining — according to the International Energy Agency. That same year, JL Mag says it became the world’s largest magnet producer by both output and sales. Between Xi’s visit in 2019 and 2025, the company’s annual capacity more than quadrupled, according to its historical reports. By next year, it wants to boost that by another 50%, to 60,000 tons.
That advantage is reinforced by clusters like Baotou, where processors, magnet makers and research institutes sit just a few hours by train from the giant Bayan Obo mine. The proximity cuts logistics costs and makes it easier to share suppliers, recruit specialized workers and tap decades of expertise.
By comparison, MP Materials Corp., which operates the only rare earth mine and processing facility in the US, started producing rare earths magnets from its plant in Fort Worth, Texas, last year. After the Trump administration invested $400 million in the company, for a roughly 15% equity stake, MP unveiled plans to spend more than $1.25 billion on a much bigger magnet-making plant in Northlake, Texas, that would eventually bring its production to about 10,000 tons a year.
That expansion would equal about a third of JL Mag’s production in 2025, without factoring in the Chinese firm’s plans to expand.
Other US companies have made similar pledges to build magnet facilities but have little experience and capital to show for it.
Demand, meanwhile, is surging, benefiting JL Mag and Chinese rivals such as Ningbo Yunsheng Co. Ltd. Consumption of rare earths used in permanent magnets has doubled since 2015 and is projected to rise another third by 2030, according to the IEA. Outside China, demand is expected to climb 50% by 2035, with existing and planned magnet projects meeting less than a fifth of it.
“The Western companies are still developing their technology, doing everything from scratch,” said Derek Zhang, a Daiwa Securities analyst. “The Chinese companies can ramp up capacity very easily and the cost is maybe about 1/10th.”
JL Mag was founded by industry outsiders. Two decades ago, Cai Baogui was hunting for his next business opportunity. He grew up in Jiangxi province, the southern heartland of China’s rare earths sector, but had spent his career elsewhere — first as a university lecturer and later as a senior executive overseeing plastics manufacturing operations in Dongguan.
Renewable energy caught his attention after he met the chairman of emerging wind-turbine maker Goldwind, according to a rare interview Cai gave to a Chinese news outlet in 2020. Soon after, he teamed up with two friends, Hu Zhibin and Li Xinnong, to explore making rare earth magnets needed for such machines.
In 2008, the trio launched JL Mag by uniting opposite ends of the supply chain. Ganzhou Rare Earth provided a link to raw materials, while Goldwind became an important early customer. The idea was to move beyond the mining, separation and smelting that dominated the city of Ganzhou’s rare earth industry and capture more value by turning those resources into the magnets that make technologies actually work. JL Mag’s founding philosophy, Cai said, was “long-termism.”
Success was hardly assured. Rare earth prices surged more than tenfold in a matter of months in 2011 before collapsing, according to Cai, who remains the firm’s chief executive officer. If raw materials became too expensive, he said, it would be like having “flour more expensive than bread.”
By 2013 and 2014, Cai recalled, employees were leaving and he faced a choice over whether to abandon the industry.
But by the time Xi visited in 2019 — a moment Cai said “greatly boosted our confidence” — JL Mag had emerged from the downturn with a growing business supplying magnets for wind turbines, ACs and EVs. It had also gone public in Shenzhen the previous year.
Four years later, JL Mag raised about HK$4.2 billion ($540 million) in Hong Kong, giving it access to more capital as it embarked on a massive expansion.
In the years since, government support has accompanied JL Mag’s rapid expansion. The company received tens of millions of dollars in subsidies recognized over the past three years, while local authorities have repeatedly designated its factories as major projects.
Some describe JL Mag as unusually well-positioned to weather even the stormiest stretches in relations with Washington. When Beijing’s rare earth controls disrupted manufacturers abroad last year, JL Mag was among the first Chinese companies granted a general export license. Its US sales revenue rose 40%.
The firm has for years been one of the government’s “favorite sons,” said John Ebert, the longtime US representative for magnet producer Ningbo Yunsheng, which he left this year. “That’s why JL Mag grew so quickly from almost nothing into something.”
For potentially huge new markets like robotics, the company is going all-in.
JL Mag named humanoid robots as its next major growth pillar in its latest annual report. Their joints rely on magnet-powered motors that effectively act as muscles, allowing for precise, agile movement. JL Mag is pushing beyond simply supplying these magnets to making finished components, adding another layer of the supply chain for Western competitors to replicate.
“Moving forward the company will continue to increase its investment in research and development of magnetic components for humanoid robots,” JL Mag said.
China is already an early leader in humanoid robotics, accounting for 97% of global shipments in the first half of 2026, according to one survey.
The potential is substantial. Nomura says humanoids use significantly more rare earth material per motor than EVs. JL Mag expects China to remain dominant, telling Citigroup analysts it will likely still produce 80% of the world’s magnets in 2030.
“Even if Western projects materialize, management believes they may solve the ‘availability’ issue, but are unlikely to compete with China on costs, scale, quality and customization,” Citigroup said in a February report, summarizing JL Mag’s views.
That helps explain another US strategy for reducing China’s leverage: eliminating rare earths from magnets altogether.
Niron Magnetics, a Minnesota-based manufacturer, is pursuing that approach with magnets made from iron and nitrogen. The Pentagon is backing the company as it develops factories capable of eventually producing as much as 11,500 tons annually. Looming restrictions are also helping create a market for alternatives: Starting Jan. 1, the Pentagon will stop procuring certain defense technology containing Chinese rare earth magnets.
But the economics remain daunting. Niron has seen a “massive” influx of inquiries from prospective defense customers ahead of the deadline, said Tom Grainger, its vice president of commercial and corporate development. Demand has already overwhelmed the relatively small company — before it has even begun targeting robotics.
“If you take major economic buckets like labor, or government support, you just can’t compete with China,” Grainger said.
