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)
Friday, September 11, 2026
‘Serial Killer Empire’: US Kills 3 in Boat Strike, Bringing Trump Murder Count in ‘Make-Believe War’ to 230
“This is neither ‘peace’ nor ‘strength,’” said one policy expert. “It’s gruesome.”
US President Donald Trump hosts a cabinet meeting in Washington, DC, with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke publicly for the first time Wednesday about a shift in the Pentagon’s boat bombing operations, in which the US in recent days has begun interdicting suspected refueling vessels for drug boats in Ecuador’s territorial waters—but he made clear that the military is also still killing people aboard boats, as it did Wednesday in the latest bombing in the Caribbean.
US Southern Command announced that Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere—the recently rebranded name of the Trump administration’s expanding military operation that it says is aimed at stopping drug trafficking—had executed its latest “lethal kinetic strike” on a boat operating along known “narco-trafficking routes in the Caribbean,” killing three people that the US claimed were “narco-terrorists.
“Confirmed intelligence revealed the vessel’s active involvement in narco-trafficking,” said US Southern Command, releasing no evidence of the boat’s illegal activities.
International legal experts have emphasized that the US is not in an authorized military conflict with drug cartels and that drug trafficking under international law is treated as a crime by law enforcement agencies—not as an act of force that the US can legally respond to with military action.
Officials and military service members involved in the strikes may be liable for war crimes or murder, experts have warned. Some of the at least 230 victims of the boat bombings since last September have been identified, with family members saying they were not even involved in drug trafficking.
Historian Alexander Aviña used the term “serial killer empire” to describe the Trump administration after the latest bombing.
Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America noted that the announcement by US Southern Command Wednesday night was the first in more than a year of attacks in which the strike order was “not attributed to a person.”
Isacson also pointed out that according to Customs and Border Patrol data, there is little, if any, evidence that bombing boats and killing crew members and passengers in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean has done anything to stop the flow of drugs into the US.
Outside the US Embassy in Quito, Ecuador, Rubio told reporters Wednesday that as the US also begins conducting joint operations with Ecuador to interdict suspected refueling vessels in the country’s territorial waters, “we have to operate according to their laws.”
In those operations, people aboard the boats have been removed and handed over to Ecuadorian authorities before the US has conducted strikes.
Rubio at one point referred to the lethal boat bombings as operations that took place “earlier, last year,” but also emphasized, “We still blow up ships if need be.”
Brian Finucane of the International Crisis Group said the administration is continuing its campaign of “illegal killing in a make-believe war.”
The latest boat bombing also came as Rubio announced that the US was designating Los Tiguerones, an Ecuadorian gang, as a foreign terrorist organization, empowering the administration to freeze the group’s assets in US financial institutions.
The designation does not give the US the legal authority to carry out military strikes against Los Tiguerones or other gangs the administration has designated as terrorist groups—but a key element of Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere’s expansion in Latin America has been joint military operations, including a US-Ecuadorian joint attack on a dairy farm where officials had claimed drug traffickers were operating.
The new designation “is part of [the administration’s] narrative about a new ‘War on Terror’ against the narcos,” said Finucane.
Glaeldys González Calanche, an analyst with the International Crisis Group, told The New York Times that Los Tiguerones has had diminishing power and influence in Ecuador in recent years and expressed surprise at the designation.
Ecuadorian gangs “operate at the lowest links of the chain” of drug trafficking operations in Latin America, González told the Times. “They provide services, like moving cargo from point A to point B. Ecuadorian groups are not decisive, they aren’t major players.”
‘Deaths Will Continue to Mount,’ Scientist Warns After August and Summer 2026 Set US Heat Records
“It’s unconscionable that the federal government is putting specific industry interests, including fossil fuel companies’ profits, ahead of people’s health and safety.” The rubble of a burned-out residential home smolders in the Balboa neighborhood of Spokane, Washington, on August 2, 2026. (Photo by Erick Doxey/AFP via Getty Images)
Under US President Donald Trump’s predecessor, government scientists used the release of data about record-breaking temperatures to warn that “we are facing a climate crisis,” but with the Republican climate denier back in the White House, that commentary now comes from outside experts. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced Wednesday that 2026 had the warmest August ever recorded in the contiguous United States. Following a July that broke a Dust Bowl record, August averaged 75.6°F—which was 3.5°F above the 20th-century average—with daytime maximum temperatures averaging 88.6°F.
This year also featured the hottest meteorological summer—June to August—in the 132-year record, with an average temperature of 74.4°F, or 3°F above average, according to NOAA. As CNN reported, “The Dust Bowl summer of 1936 has... long been regarded as the benchmark of hottest summers in the US, but has now been equaled or eclipsed twice in the past five years thanks to the influence of human-caused climate change,” both in 2026 and 2021.
Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, told Agence France-Presse that “it is now time to stop acting surprised that our warming planet keeps getting warmer.”
“This is occurring exactly as forecast by scientists literally decades ago,” he stressed. “The interesting question is not whether we will keep breaking heat records (we will), but whether we’re going to do anything about it or just stand there while the climate train runs us over.”
NOAA said that “record-breaking warmth was widespread across the West, Southwest, southern Rockies, and southwestern Plains, as well as the southern Florida Peninsula. California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Colorado each set records for their warmest August average temperature. California and New Mexico also recorded their warmest average daytime maximum temperatures on record, while average nighttime minimum temperatures were record warm in California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado.”
Beyond the Lower 48, “Alaska’s average temperature during August was 52.4°F, 2.9°F above the 1925-2000 average, ranking in the warmest third of the 102-year record. Alaska’s June-August average temperature was 51.6°F, 1.1°F above average and ranking in the warmest third of the record,” the agency detailed.
“Hawaii’s average temperature during August was 70.8°F, 1.4°F above the 1991-2020 average, ranking as the third-warmest August in the 36-year record,” the agency added. “Hawaii’s June-August average temperature was 69.4°F, 0.8°F above average and ranking in the warmest third of the record. Hawaii’s average temperature during August was 70.8°F, 1.4°F above the 1991-2020 average.”
Marc Alessi, a climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a statement that “we now live in a completely different climate than the one that existed 50 years ago. Heat records were shattered in all parts of the globe this summer, from the United States to Europe to Asia.”
Alessi pointed to El Niño, the warm phase of a key pattern in the Pacific Ocean. Recent research suggests fossil fuel-driven global heating has intensified El Niños, and experts have said that the currently developing event “may be stronger than anything since our monitoring began” and make 2027 the hottest year humanity has ever endured.
“While the developing super El Niño undoubtedly impacted the summer’s global temperature and heat records, we must recognize that this El Niño is occurring on top of a changed climate from the burning of fossil fuels,” Alessi said. “In other words, we can expect record-breaking summers for generations to come if nations fail to sharply curtail heat-trapping emissions.”
“What’s equally clear is that policymakers—especially in richer, high-emitting countries like the United States—must act urgently to limit climate change impacts and hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for its role in the crisis,” he continued. “Extreme heat and back-to-back heatwaves have taken a deadly toll this summer in the United States and across the world. Without action to reduce global warming emissions and invest in climate resilience measures, heat-related illnesses and deaths will continue to mount.”
Despite the threats currently posed by the global crisis, and expectations that they will only get worse as the world blows past the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting temperature rise this century to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, “the Trump administration has attacked and dismantled policies to limit heat-trapping emissions and to prepare for climate disasters,” Alessi noted.
After openly courtingBig Oil on the campaign trail, Trump has served fossil fuel industry interests in a range of ways since returning to the White House last year, including by declaring a national energy emergency, waging a war on renewable power projects, and ditching the Paris Agreement, again.
“Failure of the administration and Congress to act has also left workers exposed to killer heat without comprehensive, enforceable heat-health protections,” Alessi said. “It’s unconscionable that the federal government is putting specific industry interests, including fossil fuel companies’ profits, ahead of people’s health and safety.”
NOAA’s new data was released less than two months away from the midterm elections—which which Democrats hope to win back majorities in Congress from Trump’s Republican Party—and as firefighters in Türkiye, host of the next United NationsClimate Change Conference (COP31), battled deadly blazes.
“It is not enough merely to respond to the consequences of the climate crisis. We must eliminate the causes that exacerbate it,” Efe Baysal, Türkiye manager at the global advocacy group 350.org, said Wednesday, calling for a phaseout of fossil fuels. “COP31 is an opportunity for Türkiye to demonstrate true leadership in this direction.”
‘A Wake-Up Call’: Scientists Behind Study on Climate Feedback Loops Demand Global Action
“This research makes clear that the Earth and climate system doesn’t stand still while we debate policy,” said a co-author of the new paper.
Volunteers and firefighters work to extinguish a forest fire burning in the mountains of the rural area of Epuyen, in the Patagonian region of Chubut province, Argentina, on February 1, 2026. (Photo by Gonzalo Keogan/AFP via Getty Images)
On the heels of the United Statessetting new summer heat records and United Nations scientists warning that at least a temporary overshoot of the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C target can no longer be avoided, researchers on Thursday published an alarming new study on climate feedback loops.
For years, experts have feared that humanity’s continued reliance on fossil fuels that heat the Earth could lead to several “positive” feedback loops—or changes to natural systems that amplify global warming. The scientists behind the new paper in the journal Environmental Research focused on carbon dioxide and methane emissions from inland freshwaters, permafrost thaw, wetlands, and wildfires.
“Continued warming from greenhouse gases emitted from human activities threatens to feed further warming as permafrost, wetlands, and wildfires destabilize and respond by releasing carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide,” said co-author Ben Poulter, warming-induced emissions program director at Spark Climate Solutions, in a statement.
“This study provides a critical look at the magnitude of the temperature response,” he explained, “and a call to action to accelerate the accounting and monitoring of warming-induced emissions to support pathways that phase out fossil emissions to stabilize the planet’s climate.”
Lead author and Spark research scientist Sam Abernethy noted that “what surprised us was the size of the feedback.”
“We found that natural systems could amplify global warming by 20-30%,” he said. In other words, these natural systems could add an estimated 0.2-0.4ºC of warming this century to any temperature rise tied to human activity.
“This hidden multiplier is missing from the models guiding climate policy, so those models are likely underestimating how much warming is coming—and overestimating how much carbon we can still afford to emit,” Abernethy added.
Permafrost is ground that remains fully frozen for at least two consecutive years, and the scientists who study it “have long warned that thawing soils would become a significant emissions source as the planet warms,” said co-author Christina Schädel, senior research scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center.
“This paper shows that permafrost thaw accounts for half of the anticipated warming-induced emissions,” she pointed out. “Warming-induced emissions are already in motion, and they scale with every fraction of a degree. Every little bit of warming we can avert today matters for what the climate looks like in the long term.”
Co-author Robert Jackson, a Stanford University professor and chair of the Global Carbon Project, similarly stressed that “the results are a wake-up call, and it’s imperative that they be included in the next generation of climate policies. Failure to do so will make meeting the world’s climate goals less and less likely.”
The paper’s publication came just two months away from the next United NationsClimate Change Conference (COP31) in Türkiye, where firefighters are currently battling deadly blazes that have fueled calls for the country’s government to fight for rapidly phasing out coal, gas, and oil on a global scale.
“This research makes clear that the Earth and climate system doesn’t stand still while we debate policy,” said Brian Buma, a co-author of the new study and senior climate scientist at Environmental Defense Fund.
“Emissions from permafrost, wetlands, and wildfire could meaningfully erode our remaining time to warming thresholds—and they are unaccounted for in most scenarios,” Buma reiterated. “This means rapid fossil fuel emissions reductions are even more urgent than current projections suggest.”
“The good news,” he added, “is that it’s in our hands—lower emissions now limit how severe these feedbacks become.”
With Türkiye to Host COP31, Wildfires Spark Demand for Fossil Fuel Phaseout
“The climate crisis is here, and the frequency and severity of extreme weather events are increasing day by day,” said 350.org’s Türkiye manager.
Flames and thick smoke rise from a forest fire in Adana, Türkiye, as firefighting efforts continue on September 8, 2026. (Photo by Eren Bozkurt/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Scientists have long warned that the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis means more frequent and destructive wildfires, and blazes raging in Türkiye this week have sparked a fresh call to rapidly phase out planet-heating coal, gas, and oil.
As firefighters battled blazes in three southern Turkish provinces, Efe Baysal, Türkiye manager at the global advocacy group 350.org, pointed out that the country is set to host the next United NationsClimate Change Conference, COP31.
“In November, the world will gather in Antalya for COP31 to discuss the steps that must be taken against the climate crisis,” Baysal said in a Wednesday statement. “Today, however, that same city is battling an uncontrollable wildfire that began in Aksu district of Antalya and spread throughout the region. Reports of fires are also coming in from Adana and Mersin.”
“Our prayers are with those fighting the blazes on the ground to defend life,” he continued. “The wildfires occurring primarily in Antalya demonstrate this truth once again: Rising temperatures create the conditions for fires to start more easily, spread faster, and become more destructive. The climate crisis is here, and the frequency and severity of extreme weather events are increasing day by day.”
Baysal said that “assuming the COP31 presidency, Türkiye’s responsibility is even more crucial. At COP31, Türkiye should aim to produce concrete outcomes to advance the transition away from fossil fuels. To make this leadership credible, Türkiye should announce a timeline for a phaseout of coal without delay.”
“It should initiate a just transition to renewable energy that will reduce our dependence on coal, oil, and gas,” he added. “It is not enough merely to respond to the consequences of the climate crisis. We must eliminate the causes that exacerbate it. COP31 is an opportunity for Türkiye to demonstrate true leadership in this direction.”
Previous UN summits on the planetary crisis have ended in deep disappointment, with critics calling the “empty deal” that came out of COP30 in Brazil last year “a stark reminder that the answers to the climate crisis do not lie inside the climate talks,” and, a year earlier, blastingCOP29 in Azerbaijan as “a dumpster fire” and “a big F U to climate justice, to the poorest communities who are on the frontlines of climate breakdown.”
Since those summits, there has been a constant stream of events that have fueled fears of a hotter world—and United Nations scientists are now warning that preventing at least a temporary temperature rise above 1.5°C, relative to preindustrial levels, is not possible, but humanity can still limit the damage by dramatically lowering emissions.
“This summer’s scorching heat, raging wildfires, and deadly floods are a warning of what lies ahead,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said last week. “We must make the overshoot above 1.5 degrees as small and short as possible.”
The fires in Türkiye have already proven deadly. The Aksu district mayor, Isa Yildirim, said on social media that one person died after suffering a heart attack during the fire there.
That blaze has also caused injuries. Citing the Turkish Anadolu Agency, The Associated Press reported that “two people were hospitalized with injuries to their legs while six others affected by smoke were treated on site.”
As Deutsche Presse-Agentur detailed Wednesday: Forest fires are common in Turkey in the summer months, fueled by long periods of drought and strong winds.
Cihan Erdönmez, an expert at Istanbul University, said triggers for the fires were often poorly maintained power lines running through forests.
Forestry Minister İbrahim Yumaklı said there had been more than 5,000 forest fires in Turkey in 2025 and 96% of them were directly or indirectly caused by humans.
Meanwhile, 350.org called the current blazes “a reminder that a hotter, drier climate will continue to exact its toll on ordinary people unless leaders act urgently to phase out fossil fuels.”
Union Report Warns Electronic Shelf Labels Could Kill Jobs and Crush Wages
Some states are cracking down on “surveillance pricing.” But a report out from the AFL-CIO suggests that the risk of electronic shelf labels are much broader than just price gouging.
Automated digital display price tags at Petco store, Manhattan, New York
(Photo by Lindsey Nicholson/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Lawmakers are already raising concerns that electronic shelf labels could be used by grocery chains to jack up prices on shoppers. But the technology could also be used to shrink paychecks and kill jobs, according to a report out Wednesday from the research arm of the AFL-CIO.
The new report examines marketing materials used by electronic shelf label (ESL) companies to sell their products to grocery chains. It finds that they are often billed as a tool allowing retailers to save on labor costs, automate work, and reduce hours for real employees.
“Grocery giants like to claim that electronic shelf labels will free up workers to serve customers directly, but this report shows this is not the case,” said Ademola Oyefeso, the international vice president of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW), which represents over 800,000 grocery industry employees. “Using studies and marketing material from the manufacturers pushing the technology, we know ESLs could actually cost workers and their families billions of dollars in lost income.”
The AFL-CIO Tech Institute, which conducted the report, examined studies from two ESL manufacturers, Pricer and Vusion Group, that examined how their systems were used at specific stores.
The 2022 study by Pricer found that by automating price changes, its system saved one store about 5,200 worker hours annually. Vusion, meanwhile, found in 2024 that its technology saved about 600 hours of work over about six months, or 1,200 annually.
Using data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the AFL-CIO projected that at these rates, were the technology to be adopted at all of the nearly 60,000 grocery stores in the US, it would reduce the number of worker hours annually by anywhere from 71 million to 308 million.
Using hourly wage data, they found that this translated to the loss of between $1.61 billion-$6.97 billion in annual wages and between 44,000-192,000 full-time jobs. That’s anywhere from $608 to $2,633 per employee.
The issue of using ESLs to gouge customers has already become an area of focus for lawmakers in Congress. Earlier this year, Democrats in the US House and Senate introduced legislation to prohibit “surveillance pricing,” which involves targeting individual shoppers with increased prices by analyzing their personal data.
Surveillance pricing has been used in e-commerce to fluctuate prices for individual consumers of everything from grocery delivery to airline tickets. But as facial recognition and other surveillance technologies grow more powerful, fears have grown that ESLs could be used to bring surveillance practices into the physical realm.
“Through our analysis, we found that the implementation of electronic shelf labels are likely going to drive prices even higher. The reason being that these labels are connected to the same algorithmic pricing software that online retailers are already using,” said Sunny Glottmann, the policy and programs manager at the AFL-CIO Tech Institute and co-author of the report.
“Electronic shelf labels create the infrastructure that would make rapid algorithmic price changes easier to implement at scale, and this raises concerns for consumers that are already struggling with grocery costs,” Glottmann said.
At least three states—Connecticut, Maryland, and New Jersey—have banned some forms of surveillance pricing, and other states are also considering a ban.
Unions like the AFL-CIO and UFCW say that legislating only against surveillance pricing is much too narrow, encompassing only a small segment of the dangers posed by ESLs.
“Policymakers should ban ESLs outright, rather than rely on narrower disclosure or dynamic-pricing laws that leave the underlying technology in place,” the AFL-CIO report says, noting New Jersey’s one-year moratorium on the technology as a good starting place.
“When grocery store workers lose income, that means less money to spend at other stores and businesses in the community,” Oyefeso said. “Banning this technology should be a top priority for lawmakers at every level, like New Jersey has done with a moratorium on ESLs and a ban on predatory pricing practices outright. More states should follow suit to protect both shoppers and workers.”
Study: Jobseekers writing their CVs for robots rather than humans
11.09.2026, DPA
Photo: Christin Klose/dpa
Jobseekers are changing their CVs because they believe they might be seen by artificial intelligence (AI) robots rather than humans, according to new research in the UK.
Jobs site CV-Library said its study raised concerns that the race to “beat” AI could be making it harder for candidates to stand out.
Its survey of more than 1,000 candidates and 233 recruiters and employers found that CVs or cover letters were increasingly being targeted at AI robots.
Seven in 10 jobseekers said the trend made it harder for them to stand out, while a similar number of recruiters believed that AI-generated applications made it harder to identify the strongest candidates.
More than a third of recruiters said they were
less confident than a year ago that a CV or application accurately reflected a candidate’s true skills.
"Candidates are becoming so focused on writing for AI that they risk forgetting their real audience – the human making the final hiring decision," Alec Stanwell of CV-Library said.
"AI can help improve an application, but it shouldn’t remove the personality, skills and real-world examples that can make a candidate stand out," Stanwell said.
"For employers, increasingly polished applications mean it’s important to look beyond the CV, using interviews and skills-based assessments to understand what a candidate can do."
(c) 2026 dpa Deutsche Presse Agentur GmbH
Trump EPA Accused of Endangering Public as Study Highlights ‘Hidden Health Costs’ of Data Centers The Environmental Protection Network listed actions “that could increase pollution-related health risks, weaken protections that would otherwise reduce those risks, or shift more costs onto families and communities.”
Michigan residents rally against the planned $7 billion Stargate data center in Saline on December 1, 2025. (Photo by Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
As President Donald Trumpclaims that US communities fighting against artificial intelligence data centers are promoting “poverty, crime, and squalor,” a Thursday report details how his administration “is weakening or proposing to weaken pollution and permitting safeguards” for such facilities, to the detriment of public health.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s “mission is to protect human health and the environment,” notes the new report. “Yet Administrator Lee Zeldin has made turning the United States into the ‘AI capital of the world’ a pillar of EPA’s work.”
“The Hidden Health Costs of AI Data Centers”—from the Environmental Protection Network (EPN), which is made up of hundreds of former EPA staffers—documents “at least 30 federal actions since January 2025 that could increase pollution-related health risks, weaken protections that would otherwise reduce those risks, or shift more costs onto families and communities.”
As the document details: “17 of the 30 explicitly cite or target AI or data centers in the action itself or in an agency statement specifically describing or justifying that action. The remaining 13 affect how data centers are powered, what pollution safeguards apply, how projects are approved, or how federal requirements are enforced.”
The report points to the EPA policy that “made it easier for some long-idled facilities to restart without triggering the major air-permitting requirements,” as well as its proposed elimination of federal carbon pollution standards for fossil-fueled power plants and some outstanding state clean-air requirements for areas that failed to meet ozone standards.
The publication also notes the EPA’s extended deadlines for several coal-plant wastewater requirements, newly regulated coal-ash units, the 2024 oil and gas standards, and for states to submit plans to reduce visibility-impairing pollution. The agency further interpreted a policy on nonemergency backup generator use that it framed as a move supporting AI and data centers.
It’s not just the EPA. The US Department of Energy “authorized grid use of backup generation at data centers and other major facilities during emergencies,” the report explains, while the Army Corps of Engineers “expressly named data centers as examples of commercial development covered by” a streamlined water permit.
“No study has yet calculated the combined health effects of these actions, but the direction is clear,” the report says. It cites a study from this year that estimates air pollution related to data centers “could impose roughly $11.7 billion to $20.9 billion in annual public health costs by 2028,” and “contribute to roughly 600,000 asthma symptom cases and 1,300 premature deaths.”
Dan Costa, who spent about 35 years at EPA studying the impact of air pollution on human health and led its national research program on air quality, climate, and energy, said that “the existing health study gives us a picture of the potential health burden under particular data-center growth and emissions scenarios.”
“But it does not estimate the additional health effects of the 30 federal policy actions EPN documents,” he stressed. “That is the analysis EPA should be doing now: Measuring what these sources actually emit, modeling both local and regional air-quality effects, and translating those changes into health impacts.”
In addition to laying out the Trump policies and their risks, the publication highlights how his agenda on AI data centers conflicts with voters’ wishes. An April poll conducted by YouGov for EPN found that:Just 16% of US voters support making the United States the “AI capital of the world” an EPA priority;
69% of voters are highly concerned about fast-tracking data centers without usual safeguards;
85% of voters say Trump should be tougher on corporations that violate environmental laws; and
by an 8-1 margin, voters say the EPA should prioritize people’s health over reducing pollution regulations.
“You would think a build-out of this magnitude would mean more vigilance from EPA: stronger safeguards to make sure companies control their pollution, more science to understand what this scale will bring, and more monitoring,” said Dr. Lynn Goldman, a pediatrician and former EPA assistant administrator. “Instead, EPA and other federal agencies are doing the opposite.”
The EPN report was published amid mounting calls for Congress to rein in artificial intelligence development in the wake of Jacob Coxon, a researcher at Anthropic who previously worked at OpenAI, quitting, and spotlighting fears within the industry that the rapidly advancing technology “could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) have introduced legislation that would permanently ban the development of “superintelligent” AI until a federal body is created to regulate it—and, according to polling results published on Wednesday by Data for Progress, 68% of likely voters in the United States support that proposal.
As Congress Fails to Take Action on AI, AFT and Microsoft Reach ‘First-of-Its-Kind’ Deal to Protect Kids Teachers, said one union leader, “forged a hard-fought, ironclad privacy agreement... because no one else, including the federal government, has stepped up to do the real work.”
Children do their schoolwork on March 18, 2020 in San Anselmo, California. (Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)
The advocacy group Fairplay on Wednesday applauded education union leaders for spearheading efforts to ensure students and teachers in the US are protected by safety and privacy standards as artificial intelligence companies push for their products to be used in schools.
But the organization’s executive director, Josh Golin, emphasized that the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and United Federation of Teachers (UFT) “should never have been in this position in the first place,” and Congress and states should have already passed legislation to create “industry-wide standards that are enforceable through attorneys general and a private right of action.”
“With our elected leaders failing to live up to their responsibilities, we are left with an agreement that places an unfair burden on schools and doesn’t do enough to keep kids safe,” said Golin.
The deal reached Wednesday was between AFT, UFT, and Microsoft, so it will pertain only to the Silicon Valley giant’s AI products.
It includes 10 “legally enforceable protections,” reported Politico, including a commitment from Microsoft not to use student or teacher data to train AI models, except in narrow “safety and security” circumstances.
Other requirements of the deal include:Microsoft can only collect, process, or store data that is strictly necessary to deliver an educational product; All covered data, including every prompt, response, file, and AI-generated output, belongs exclusively to the school and students; All tools support educators and students and do not replace human judgment; and The company and schools must be transparent with families about how AI is being used.
AFT said the “first-of-its-kind” agreement came after months of painstaking negotiations “in the absence of any meaningful federal and state rules governing artificial intelligence in schools.”
The deal was announced on the same day that Jacob Coxon, a researcher at AI firm Anthropic, resigned in protest of an industry that he said is pushing to build “superhuman systems” without guardrails.
He told The Wall Street Journal he was “worried such systems could spiral out of control and destroy humanity.”
Coxon’s warning intensified calls for Congress to pass legislation to rein in AI, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) proposed moratorium on AI data centers and his bill, introduced with Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), to ban artificial superintelligence.
More than 80% of Americans believe the government is not doing enough to regulate AI, according to one recent NBC poll, and President Donald Trump has joined the industry in pushing to block states from passing their own regulations.
Randi Weingarten, president of AFT, said the unions had “forged a hard-fought, ironclad privacy agreement with real teeth that protects students and families, because no one else, including the federal government, has stepped up to do the real work.”
“We can get angrier and angrier, or we can act decisively; anything less than legally enforceable provisions is simply a wish list,” said Weingarten.
Golin emphasized that the deal “elides the most important question of all: Should student-facing AI products be used in schools at all?”
“There is no evidence that AI products are effective teaching tools for children and growing evidence that they undermine learning and create a number of risks for kids,” said Golin. “That’s why Fairplay and its network of experts are calling on schools to implement a five-year pause on all [generative] AI products until it can be determined whether those products are safe for young people and beneficial to their education.”
“We hope this agreement does not fool schools into thinking that GenAI products are safe and effective for use with schoolchildren or hoodwink policymakers into thinking legislation restricting AI use in schools is not needed,” he added. “It also places the burden on schools to execute and enforce the contract, which they are not in a position to do, and which should be the job of regulators.”
OpenAI makes U-turn and calls for binding national AI safety rules
The intervention comes a week after OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra, “its most capable model to date,” after delaying its rollout over cybersecurity concerns.
OpenAI is calling for binding safety requirements on the most powerful artificial intelligence systems in the United States, marking a pivot for a company that has previously resisted tighter regulation.
OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane wrote in a statement on Wednesday that mandatory national rules should be based on what advanced AI models are capable of doing.
“We’ve reached a new chapter in AI capabilities, and that demands a new chapter for AI policy. No company, industry, or government can meet this challenge alone. We need to meet this moment with a bias toward meaningful action over policy perfection,” Lehane said in a statement published on OpenAI's website.
The company said it wants a federal framework built around common testing standards, independent assessments of the most advanced AI models, tougher cybersecurity requirements and mandatory reporting of serious safety incidents.
The intervention comes a week after OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra, which it described as its most capable model to date.
OpenAI President Greg Brockman said the release marked the beginning of the era of artificial general intelligence (AGI), referring to the long-sought goal of developing AI that can match human abilities across a wide range of tasks.
Growing concerns over powerful AI
Major AI companies including OpenAI and Anthropic have already encountered safety concerns with increasingly capable models.
OpenAI delayed parts of Astra’s rollout while adding safeguards after testing found advanced cybersecurity capabilities, weeks after a system built from its own models slipped free during an internal security test and broke into the AI platform Hugging Face.
Relate
Anthropic has reported similar cases involving its Claude models during safety testing.
Concerns grew further after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon said this week he was leaving the industry, accusing OpenAI and Anthropic of “gambling with our lives” in the race to develop increasingly powerful AI.
“The prospect of AI-accelerated AI development demands more than voluntary commitments,” Lehane wrote.
A shift in OpenAI’s approach
The ChatGPT maker urged US lawmakers to act before Congress adjourns in December.
The push comes as lawmakers consider new AI rules, although passing major technology regulation remains difficult in a politically divided Congress and amid heavy industry lobbying.
OpenAI acknowledged that some of the measures it now supports are ones it previously declined to endorse.
The company had also opposed individual US states setting their own AI rules, arguing instead for federal legislation. It has now backed four AI bills in California while continuing to call for a national framework.
OpenAI said any federal safety requirements should apply only to the small number of companies developing the most powerful models, rather than “startups, small developers, or researchers operating nowhere near the frontier.”
Anthropic says it stopped AI misuse for cyberattacks, propaganda and bioweapons
The AI company revealed new cases of its models being used for cyberattacks, propaganda campaigns and dangerous biological research, days after a researcher resigned over safety concerns.
Anthropic said on Thursday it had blocked attempts by malicious actors to misuse its artificial intelligence models for cyberattacks, surveillance and biological research that could have contributed to weapons development.
As AI models grow more powerful, sophisticated cyberattacks increasingly require little technical skill, meaning even lone individuals can now create threats that would have been impossible just a year ago, the company said.
Anthropic added that it has strengthened safeguards in its newest models to restrict biological research with potential weapons applications.
"The cases we share here aren't typical misuse, but rather examples of the most notable and novel threat activity we've identified to date," Anthropic said in its third report on AI misuse since March 2025.
The report includes excerpts of malicious code and AI prompts the company said it had identified, and it urged governments and rival AI firms to watch for similar abuse.
"We're publishing this work because we believe we have a responsibility to disclose malicious misuse of our services," the company said.
"As models become increasingly capable, their risks will increase, unless AI developers and society's defenders act to make them safer."
Anthropic, which is preparing an initial public offering this autumn, published the report two days after one of its researchers announced his resignation over concerns that the company and its competitors are not developing AI responsibly.
He echoed warnings raised elsewhere in the industry about the technology's potential to escape human control.
Relat
Claude asked to help make a virus more dangerous
Between December 2025 and August 2026, Anthropic's researchers identified misuse by actors ranging from spyware vendors and politically motivated individuals to state-sponsored groups spreading propaganda.
Among the cases outlined in the report, unnamed actors attempted to use Anthropic's models for research that could have led to biological weapons.
In one instance, the company said its systems blocked a request for its Claude chatbot to help draft a grant application for scientific funding.
"The work discussed in the application involved gain-of-function research — that is, research that genetically alters an organism to create a new or enhanced biological property — on the chikungunya virus," the report said.
The research targeted the virus's transmissibility and its ability to evade the immune system.
Chikungunya is a mosquito-borne virus that causes severe pain and fever. The grant proposal sought to enhance mutations that would make the virus progressively more dangerous.
Anthropic said such research could "certainly" support the development of vaccines and treatments, but added that "it could also be used to make the pathogen more dangerous".
'We cannot guarantee no harm'
None of the cases in the report involved Anthropic's newer, more powerful Claude Fable or Mythos-class models, with one exception: an "industrial-scale, covert campaign to extract a model's capabilities and replicate them in another model without authorisation".
Anthropic said its older models, including Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4.5 from 2025, "were well below the threshold where they could meaningfully assist a sophisticated user in carrying out dangerous biological research".
"As a result, safeguards on these models were less stringent, directed mostly at preventing access to content that might uplift novices in recreating known bioweapons," the report said.
"But for today's models — which are capable of assisting in a range of complex scientific research tasks — the evidence is no longer certain, and we cannot make that same assurance."
Because of this, Anthropic has introduced tighter safeguards restricting access to a wide range of dual-use biological research queries in its more recent models, such as Claude Fable 5, according to the report.
As AI companies release increasingly powerful models, experts have called on governments to regulate the technology rather than relying on the industry to police itself.
John Thickstun, an assistant professor of computer science at Cornell University, said it puts companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI in an uncomfortable position, since they are effectively required to make "value judgements at societal scale without any kind of democratic or deliberative oversight".
Report follows a researcher's warning
Anthropic also identified groups that had created hundreds of fake social media accounts designed to look like ordinary users, which then posted material amplifying the same political message over the course of a week.
The company outlined nine such cases, originating in Russia, Iran, Turkey and across the Gulf, South Asia, Africa and Europe.
While social media platforms can detect influence operations once posts are already circulating, Anthropic said it "may see it on Claude while the operation is still being built".
The report follows the resignation of Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who said he was leaving over fears that the company and its main rival, OpenAI, "are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives".
Coxon warned that some of his former colleagues believe AI could threaten human life before the end of the decade.
Anthropic said it had blocked each of the malicious activities identified in the report, used the findings to strengthen its safeguards, and shared information with government authorities and industry partners.
"We hope that the findings in this report will help other developers recognise similar patterns on their own platforms, give governments and civil society a clearer view of how emerging threats take shape, and strengthen collective defences," the company said.
Anthropic Report Says Company Blocked
Possible Use of AI Model to Build Biological
Weapons
“Right now, we’re counting on AI corporations to voluntarily block weapons of mass destruction,” said Rep. Greg Casar, who is pushing for a ban on “superintelligent” AI.
The Claude app icon is displayed on a smartphone screen with a finger about to tap it, in Creteil, France, on June 10, 2026. (Photo by Samuel Boivin/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
As industry insiders issue louder warnings about the catastrophic danger of unchecked artificial intelligence, Anthropic has revealed in a report out Thursday that it had to “disrupt” several attempts by scientists to use its AI models for research that could contribute to the creation of biological weapons.
In the report, titled “Detecting and Countering Misuse of AI,” Anthropic said that over the past eight months, it banned several accounts that had used its chatbot Claude for research into highly contagious diseases.
As NBC News reported: In each of the five cases Anthropic cited, the company suspected that the researchers behind them were affiliated in some way with a government or military in a country it had banned or took deliberate steps to hide their location and identity, or both. The company declined to say where any of the researchers were based, but its terms of service allow all use from all but a few regions, including China, Iran, and Russia.
In one example, Anthropic said researchers used a third-party platform that attempted to use Claude to complete a grant application for work that would look into how to repeatedly mutate chikungunya, a mosquito-borne virus that causes severe pain and fever in humans. Anthropic said it blocked all attempts by the researchers. The research, which would be conducted at a military institute, would seek to repeatedly mutate the virus in live animals to become increasingly more infectious, Anthropic said.
Another had used Anthropic’s Claude to assist in research into how to make bird flu, which historically has a global fatality rate of around 50% in confirmed human cases, more virulent and damaging to mammals. Anthropic said the researcher only received assistance from Claude’s weakest class of models, which provided clerical help.
Anthropic clarified that it did not find any concrete instance of a scientist attempting to use its technology for nefarious purposes, and that these use cases may well have been part of beneficial scientific inquiry, like research into vaccines or other cures for disease. Nevertheless, it said it erred on the side of caution and shut down the accounts.
“Biological misuse is one of the most serious risks of frontier AI models,” the report explains. “It has long been a concern that AI models might one day reach the level of capability where they can help to make existing pathogens more dangerous—or create entirely new ones. Without the correct safeguards, such capabilities could have catastrophic consequences.”
The report acknowledges that even as safeguards are implemented, those with the intent to do harm are getting more savvy about how to evade them and using the appearance of legitimate science to do it.
“Sophisticated threat actors are aware that we (and other AI providers) are attempting to detect dangerous uses of our models, and they use the dual-use nature of biology to maintain a kind of ‘plausible deniability’ about their research,” the report says. “More sophisticated actors can hide their intent, extracting assistance from an AI model in interactions that look plausibly beneficial, but when put in context and analyzed holistically, can provide clear warning signs of misuse.”
The report details other ways in which actors have used its technology for malicious purposes. It found that governments like China, Iran, and Mali had used Claude to collect information about journalists and dissidents. Others used it to conduct hacking campaigns, automate identity theft operations, and create malware.
Anthropic said it hoped that by publishing the report, it would “help other developers recognize similar patterns on their own platforms, give governments and civil society a clearer view of how emerging threats take shape, and strengthen collective defenses.”
The report comes amid a torrent of scrutiny directed at Anthropic and its competitor OpenAI following reports in recent months of severe security breaches involving their technology, which has been documented acting autonomously to hack into other websites and evade human detection.
Earlier this week, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who previously worked at OpenAI, resigned from his post and sounded the alarm about fears within the industry that the technology “could kill us all by the end of the decade” and that the companies are prioritizing the race toward superintelligence without regard for the potential risks.
In the wake of Coxon’s resignation, several other researchers from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google have shared similar warnings that the technology could result in an extinction-level disaster or otherwise cause severe harm to human society.
A poll published on Wednesday by Data for Progress showed that 68% of likely voters in the US support a proposal announced last week by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) for legislation that would permanently ban the development of “superintelligent” AI that can surpass human cognition and would put a pause on “advanced” AI development until a federal body is put in place to regulate the industry.
Casar said the fact that Anthropic was being relied upon to stop its own users from using its tech to potentially create bioweapons illustrated the urgent need for regulation.
“Right now, we’re counting on AI corporations to voluntarily block weapons of mass destruction. Voluntarily,” Casar emphasized in a post to social media on Thursday. “Congress must do the obvious thing: BAN catastrophic AI uses like creating biological or nuclear weapons.”
Warning AI ‘Could Mean the Demise of Humanity,’ El-Sayed Backs Development Pause
“Enough is enough. We need to make sure that the pace of development isn’t outpacing the pace of risk.”
Democratic US Senate candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed speaks at a campaign event in Detroit, Michigan on August 23, 2026. (Photo by Abdul El-Sayed/X)
Democratic US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan on Wednesday called for a pause in advanced artificial intelligence development, warning that the technology is progressing faster than governments and researchers can establish meaningful safeguards against potentially catastrophic consequences.
“You might have woken up like me to this tweet from a guy you probably never heard of until today. His name is Jacob Coxon,” El-Sayed said in a video posted to social media. “Up until yesterday, he worked for an AI lab called Anthropic, one of the leading-edge AI research organizations in the world. He quit yesterday. He quit because he’s worried that the technology that he was building could end humanity.”
“That’s something we should be paying attention to,” the 41-year-old epidemiologist stressed.
Coxon said on social media that neither OpenAI—whose rogue machine agents recently hacked outside systems on multiple reported occasions—nor Anthropic “is acting responsibly” as they race against competitors at home and abroad to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), an advanced AI that can understand, learn, and apply knowledge of any subject as well as or better than a typical human.
“They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” he emphasized. “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt.”
El-Sayed said that the AI Under Democracy plan his campaign released in July—which called for a new federal regulatory agency akin to the Food and Drug Administration to oversee development of artificial intelligence technology—doesn’t go far enough. Instead, he is now backing a pause in AI development, as urged by US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) last month.
Many of those oligarchs and other AI pioneers also believe their products could one day wipe out humanity, but are rushing to build them anyway so that their competitors don’t reap the rewards of being the first to achieve AGI.
Sanders is also reportedly preparing to convene a bipartisan Senate hearing next week on the dangers of AI, with special guests set to include Geoffrey Hinton, who quit Google in 2023 so he could sound the alarm on what he estimates is a 10–20% chance that AI could cause human extinction within three decades.
“Enough is enough,” El-Sayed said Wednesday. “We need to make sure that the pace of development isn’t outpacing the pace of risk. We cannot, in a race against China or a race for these corporations to be the dominant AI manufacturer, inadvertently create products that slip human control, that could fall into the wrong hands, that could mean the demise of humanity.”
“That is a risk none of us ought to be able to bear, and it certainly shouldn’t sit with the richest, most powerful corporations in the world on incentives that are driven by their greed rather than our well-being,” he added. “So the time for action is now.”
68% of US Voters Back Sanders/Casar Bill
for AI Pause, Ban on Superintelligence: Poll
The new survey results come as whistleblowers from leading AI firms speak out about the potential catastrophic dangers if their technology is allowed to develop unchecked.
A protester holds an anti-AI placard outside OpenAI offices in King’s Cross during a march against unregulated Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data centers. (Photo by Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
As whistleblowers in the artificial intelligence industry speak out about the extraordinary risk posed by their technology if it remains unchecked, a new poll out Wednesday reveals that more than two-thirds of US voters agree with a new proposal in Congress to pause artificial intelligence development until guardrails are set up and ban AI superintelligence completely.
The proposed legislation, announced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) last week, and soon to be introduced in Congress, would ban developers from creating “superintelligent” AI programs capable of surpassing human cognition and resisting human attempts to shut them down. It would also halt “advanced” AI development until a new federal regulatory body was established to set clear rules and processes for AI safety.
The polling firm Data for Progress asked more than 1,300 likely voters about the bill. According to survey results released on Wednesday, 68% of them said they would support the proposal to temporarily pause advanced AI development and permanently prohibit the development of superintelligent programs, while just 25% said they’d oppose it.
Though the bill was proposed by a pair of progressive lawmakers, its appeal spans the political spectrum: 72% of Democrats and 70% of independent and third-party voters said they supported it. But so did 63% of Republican voters.
The poll results come just one day after AI researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic, saying that the company and one of its top competitors, OpenAI, where he previously worked, were more concerned with winning the AI race than with protecting the public against out-of-control “superhuman systems” that many of his industry colleagues privately fear could “kill us all by the end of the decade.”
“Neither company is acting responsibly,” Coxon said. “They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”
With reports piling up of AI agents escaping human control, hacking into external computer systems, and deceiving users, several other researchers at leading AI firms have cosigned Coxon’s warning, saying that AI could have catastrophic results if it surpasses human capabilities.
Evan Hubinger, an alignment science lead at Anthropic, said that while “the risk from present models is low,” he and other researchers “earnestly believe AI could kill all humans” if it continues to develop and put the likelihood of it happening within the next decade at above 10%.
Alex Turner, who left his job as a research scientist at Google’s DeepMind in June, concurred that Coxon was “right” and that “many researchers believe they are building something that could kill everyone on the planet. It was literally my day job to think about how to stop that.”
Even if AI doesn’t lead to the extinction of humanity, other researchers have said they are gravely worried about its impacts on society.
“I think there are a number of ways AI could go poorly for humanity, and at the current, frankly terrifying pace, humanity will be quite lucky if we manage to find and stay on the narrow path between all the bad outcomes,” wrote Jason Wolfe, a researcher at OpenAI. “Regardless of what you think of OpenAI, this is not a problem that can be solved by any one company (or country) in isolation.”
Jonathan Richard Schwarz, former Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, noted that he left the company after seven years and rejected offers from other AI companies “due to severe concerns about the concentration of power these labs represent.”
“What is currently happening in this field is deeply unhealthy for society,” Schwarz said.
In a Wednesday social media post, Sanders pointed to these and other warnings from industry experts as evidence that federal intervention is urgently needed.
“The very people building this technology admit that it could threaten the future of humanity,” the senator wrote.
He added on Thursday that “Unless we reverse course, there is a very real possibility that once advanced AI surpasses human intelligence, it could escape our control with catastrophic consequences.”
Wednesday’s poll results are consistent with other recent surveys showing that solid majorities of voters across all parties object to the construction of AI data centers near them, an issue that has come to dominate the 2026 election season.
William Lawrence, a cofounder of the Sunrise Movement, became the Democratic nominee for the US House in Michigan’s 7th Congressional District last month, in part by tapping into constituents’ fears about data centers. He said recent whistleblower warnings were evidence that AI companies were “gambling with our lives” and needed to be reined in.
“I can’t see the future,” Lawrence said in a video posted online Thursday. “But if there is even a 5% chance of a bioweapon being set loose, authoritarians using AI to entrench their own power, or a rogue AI hacker taking down the economy, that risk is too great.”
“We need a pause on the development of AI models and data center construction,” he said. “I do believe that AI is very powerful and could potentially be of tremendous benefit to humanity. But if we stay trapped in this arms race, if OpenAI and Anthropic have to keep competing for market share, we know that they will not slow down.”
“The only entity that has the power to intervene here,” Lawrence said, “is the federal government.”
‘This Is an Emergency’: Congressional Inaction in Spotlight After Existential Warnings From AI Insiders
“The very people building this technology admit that it could threaten the future of humanity,” said US Sen. Bernie Sanders, one of the few lawmakers sounding the alarm.
A man is using his mobile phone to view GPT-6 Astra logo and using his computer to view OpenAI logo in Suqian, Jiangsu, China on September 4, 2026. (Photo by CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images)
Critics slammed US lawmakers on Wednesday for being completely out to lunch on artificial intelligence regulation even after multiple industry insiders warned that the technology could wipe out humanity within years.
The controversy began on Tuesday after AI researcher Jacob Coxon announced that he had resigned from his position at AI lab Anthropic because he no longer felt it was possible to safely develop the technology.
Coxon further said that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” while accusing them of “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”
Coxon’s warning was seconded by Anthropic colleague Evan Hubinger, who wrote that “we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans,” and personally put the chances of it happening at greater than 10% “within the next decade.”
Samuel Marks, another Anthropic employee, said that AI developers “believe their technology could cause human extinction (or similarly bad outcomes),” but are continuing to work on it due to “a mixture of commercial incentives and a belief that they are in a race with other, less responsible AI developers that will abuse the technology or develop it less safely.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), one of the few members of Congress to consistently sound the alarm about the impact of AI on society, seized on Coxon’s statement, noting that “the very people building this technology admit that it could threaten the future of humanity.”
“That is why I will soon be introducing legislation to ban superintelligence,” Sanders added, “and pause AI development.”
Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), who last week teamed up with Sanders to introduce legislation to ban AI models capable of surpassing human cognition, said the AI researchers’ warnings should be a major wakeup call for US lawmakers.
“This is an emergency,” wrote Casar. “Congress must convene hearings and pass my and Bernie’s superintelligence ban.”
JB Branch, director of federal AI governance and technology policy at Public Citizen, pointed out that lawmakers have now received warnings from multiple AI insiders about the danger of the technology, but have still failed to act.
“Right now, the only protections the US has in place are completely voluntary,” Branch said. “There is no comprehensive federal AI regulation, no safety standards imposed on AI companies, and no agency capable of investigating serious AI incidents... The people building the most powerful AI systems in the world are warning us about what could go wrong. Why isn’t Congress listening?”
Journalist David Sirota expressed disgust at US Congress for its inaction, describing the current crop of elected officials as “Instagram influencers” who will “likely will do nothing about” the threat of AI.
Journalist Jim VandeHei similarly argued that “at the very least, Congress should clear everything else to understand what they’re seeing” coming from the AI industry, before pessimistically adding, “but they won’t.”
Eric Michael Garcia, Washington bureau chief at The Independent, blasted Congress for completely shrugging off its duties and letting the AI industry continue without any regulations or guardrails.
“I am aghast there have been almost zero hearings in Congress about how AI threatens national security, privacy, employment,” Garcia wrote. “Republicans even tried to preempt states from regulating AI last year.”
Paul Williams, executive director of the Center for Public Enterprise, observed that Congress seems to be more focused on regulating transgender athletes than a potential AI extinction threat.
“The Senate committee responsible for commerce and technology policy has zero hearings on AI scheduled for the next four months,” Williams wrote. “The committee’s top priority is, instead, the Protect College Sports Act.”
Anthropic says AI could bring both 15% growth and mass unemployment by 2030
Anthropic has published an economic model projecting how AI might reshape the US economy by 2030, and its three scenarios range from barely perceptible to a boom with no historical precedent, including one in which GDP grows 15% a year while nearly a fifth of office workers are out of a job.
The company behind Claude has put numbers on its own disruption.
Anthropic's economics team released a technical paper and an interactive tool on Wednesday, modelling the economy as bundles of tasks that AI can leave alone, assist with, automate outright or create anew, then tracing what different rates of capability and adoption would mean for growth, wages and jobs in the US.
The authors are explicit that these are not forecasts as the paper reads "the scenarios are not predictions and we attach no probabilities to them."
In the modest scenario, AI turns out to be a minor technology.
GDP in 2030 sits 1.6% above where it would be without AI, growth reaches 2.4% a year, and cognitive employment, meaning management, professional, sales and office work, falls half a percent. Unemployment barely moves.
The substantial scenario doubles the economy's normal growth rate to 5.4% as AI becomes capable of half of all knowledge work, though most tasks are still done without its assistance.
GDP lands 8.3% higher, cognitive employment falls 3.9% and unemployment among office workers rises to 4.5%. Wages diverge as cognitive pay dips slightly while everyone else gains nearly 6%.
The extreme scenario has no precedent.
Annual growth hits 15.4%, GDP finishes 32.4% above the no-AI path and the economy would double roughly every four and a half years.
However, cognitive employment collapses by 21.5%, unemployment among those workers reaches 17.9% and joblessness across the whole workforce hits 11.9%, worse than a typical recession. Office wages fall 11.5% while other wages jump 33.6%.
The starkest number is who collects the proceeds.
Labour's share of national income drops from 60% to 45.2%, with capital income rising more than 80%.
The machines would make the economy vastly richer while shifting the gains decisively from workers to asset owners.
What the public thinks and what the boss said
Anthropic paired the model with a Morning Consult survey of US adults fielded in August.
According to the paper, the median respondent's expectations map onto the substantial scenario, implying GDP roughly 8% higher by 2030 and cognitive employment down about 4%.
That leaves the company's own CEO as an outlier given that Dario Amodei warned in May 2025 that up to half of entry-level office jobs could disappear within five years, with unemployment reaching 10% to 20%, figures that sit squarely in the extreme scenario rather than the middle one.
Relate
Adoption, not capability, may prove decisive.
"If AI can do amazing things but nobody uses it, then it's not going to have an economic impact," said Anton Korinek, who leads Anthropic's transformative AI economic studies.
Co-founder Jack Clark expects rapid technical progress but slower uptake, telling NPR that "diffusion of the technology will likely be more challenging than people think."
The scenario that is not there
What the economic model does not include has drawn attention of its own.
Every path assumes an economy that still functions, with no scenario for AI going badly wrong in the ways the industry itself keeps warning about.
That gap looked pointed this week as Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old researcher who worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic, resigned on Tuesday and published a thread explaining why.
"Neither company is acting responsibly," Coxon wrote, adding that "they are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence."
He also claimed colleagues privately believe the technology "could kill us all by the end of the decade" while executives soften their language publicly, and described the industry's approach as "a hubristic gamble that should not be launched from a private company's Slack."
Anthropic has itself disclosed that Claude models gained unauthorised access to the real systems of three organisations this year. Whether that belongs in an economic model is a fair question.
When asked, Claude's own answer is that it does not.
China, Iran among countries using AI to spy on dissidents and minorities, Anthropic says
Anthropic said Thursday it had disrupted several state-sponsored surveillance operations using its artificial intelligence models, warning of the growing AI use to target dissidents and minorities. The campaigns, detected between January and July, originated in China, Iran and West Africa and targeted diaspora communities, including Hong Kong pro-democracy activists.
Anthropic said Thursday it shut down multiple cases of state-sponsored surveillance operations that used its artificial intelligence (AI) models, and warned that governments and state-aligned actors are increasingly using AI to spy on ethnic minorities and dissidents.
The incidents were found and disrupted between January and July, and they originated in China, Iran and west Africa, Anthropic said in a report about misuse of its models.
These surveillance campaigns "targeted the same diaspora and dissident communities these regimes have historically targeted. These include pro-democracy figures in Hong Kong, Tibetan and Falun Gong communities across Asia, and Iranian minority communities and opponents of the Iranian regime abroad," the report said.
In one case, Iranian actors developed a way to identify people through their social media accounts; in another, a contractor working for Malian national security authorities used Claude "to design the underlying software that enabled the intelligence gathering."
"AI is now being used in place of an engineering workforce," the report said.
Anthropic also disrupted efforts by users to design weapons, conduct questionable biological research, and create dating scams.
The San Francisco-based AI lab also accused Chinese developers of deceptively using Claude to produce responses to user queries while simultaneously "distilling" that data to improve their own models.
Distilling is an industry term that refers to a process where one AI model is used to train another one.
Chinese developers have previously been accused of using that technique without permission, essentially stealing resources from American labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI.
Now Anthropic alleges that China's Moonshot and Deepseek have also secretly used Claude to generate answers given to its users.
"In one instance, over a ten-day period, Moonshot relayed almost 300,000 customer requests to Anthropic" through a "network of 5,380 fraudulent accounts, most of which appeared to be located in Singapore and Japan," the report said.
Some of that data contained sensitive user information, potentially in violation of privacy agreements.
"We do not know if Moonshot notified their customers that their requests were being rerouted to Anthropic and exposed to a third party," the report said.
Deepseek used similar techniques.
When it comes to the research Anthropic detected and blocked that was related to biological weapons, the intent of the actors was less clear-cut and the AI lab did not identify them.
"The individuals implicated in these case studies are working scientists. We do not assert that they intended harm, and identifying them or their labs could expose them to harm," the report said.
The scientific research in those cases involved work around the mosquito-born chikungunya virus, a "highly-pathogenic" strain of the bird flu, a family of viruses that include smallpox and mpox, venoms and other toxins.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP)
AI deepfakes and fake fighters reshape Mali's information war Mali's warring sides are increasingly using artificial intelligence to fight an information war alongside their battle on the ground, a study published Wednesday has found. Jihadists are experimenting with relatively basic AI propaganda, separatist networks are creating fake online characters and Russia's Africa Corps is using the technology on a far more sophisticated scale.
The study, Algorithms at War, by the Dakar-based Timbuktu Institute examines how generative AI is being used across Mali's conflict – including by JNIM jihadists linked to al-Qaeda, their allies in the FLA, the Front de libération de l'Azawad, a Tuareg independence movement, Mali's transitional authorities and Russia's Africa Corps.
“Generative artificial intelligence is becoming a new front in this information war in Mali,” Bakary Sambe, director of the Timbuktu Institute and a researcher and lecturer at Senegal's Gaston Berger University in Saint-Louis, told RFI.
“Everyone is adopting the tool in their own way, depending on their resources, their level of technical sophistication and their objectives. With artificial intelligence on the Malian front, we are moving from fairly rudimentary use by jihadist groups, for example, to a genuine professional machine on the Russian side.”
Personalised recruitment
JNIM sits at the rudimentary end of that spectrum.
The Timbuktu Institute identified AI-generated propaganda posters distributed through its media channels, including one promoting real videos filmed during attacks on 25 April that killed Mali's defence minister Sadio Camara and drove Malian forces and their Russian Africa Corps partners out of the town of Kidal in northern Mali.
AI does not create new divisions in Mali but amplifies those that already exist, Sambe said.
JNIM remains in a phase of limited experimentation, although researchers believe AI could help the group translate propaganda and greatly increase the amount of material it produces.
“The real danger is large-scale personalisation of the profiles targeted for jihadist recruitment,” Sambe added.
Automatic translation could allow a group such as JNIM to produce recruitment messages in around 15 Sahel languages, including Fulani, Bambara, Wolof and Tamasheq, with different messages aimed at different audiences.
“A message about pastoral pride for young Fulani people, a message about social dignity for marginalised urban youth”, Sambe said.
“And with voice dubbing, you can even reach people who cannot read or write, who until now were beyond the reach of written propaganda.” Fake fighters
FLA independence supporters are using AI differently. Unofficial social media accounts run by members or supporters have created entirely artificial characters to spread their messages.
One example identified by researchers is “Azzghim”, a supposed Tuareg fighter whose fierce criticism of Russia's Africa Corps has been widely shared online. He is in fact an extremely realistic AI creation, although imperfections in the image reveal that he is artificial.
Such characters can “humanise” a movement, tailor messages to particular audiences, make them easier to spread and help recruitment, the study's authors said. They also reduce the risks a real fighter would face by appearing publicly.
Russia's Africa Corps and Mali's transitional authorities, meanwhile, show a “state-level, professionalised and systematic adoption of generative AI”, the Timbuktu Institute said.
Africa Corps, which succeeded the Russian mercenary group Wagner, has incorporated AI into an already extensive disinformation operation.
Its methods include fake videos, anti-Western deepfakes and generated social media comments, with large-scale operations documented by researchers and European state agencies. Propaganda at industrial scale
“The Africa Corps case is undoubtedly the best-documented case in the entire study,” Sambe said.
Researchers have counted 19 Russian disinformation campaigns across Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger since 2018, he said.
“With AI, Russian disinformation is moving to a completely different scale. We are going from cottage industry to industrial production, with plausible deniability thrown in,” Sambe said.
Some content identified by the Timbuktu Institute has attracted nearly five million views.
It depicts victories by Malian forces over JNIM and FLA fighters and amplifies messages from Mali's transitional authorities and the three countries in the Alliance of Sahel States – Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso – against France, regional bloc Ecowas and human rights organisations.
Deepfakes and coordinated campaigns were also used after the fighting in Kidal on 25 April to present Africa Corps in a favourable light and avoid the appearance of defeat, Sambe said.
Russian paramilitaries have also used AI to push claims that France and Ukraine supported and equipped JNIM and FLA attackers during the battle, he said. The claims form part of a narrative portraying foreign powers as plotting against Mali while reinforcing official government messaging, Sambe said.
Such content is used for political control and to manipulate information and opinion, diverting people's attention and misleading them about the real security situation, the institute said.
Its impact is greater because Alliance of Sahel States governments have tightened control over domestic media and cut off international outlets they consider too troublesome, the report added.
From propaganda to battlefield
AI could increasingly move beyond information warfare into military operations, including drone strikes, researchers warned.
AI can help paramilitary forces identify targets and increase their capabilities. Its use has also led to mistakes and harm affecting communities, including civilians and other non-combatants, Sambe said.
Advanced military uses remained largely prospective in the institute's written study, but their potential was described as “a serious threat because of its potential use as a force multiplier” – something that could allow armed groups to achieve more with the resources they already have.
The same effect could transform recruitment by allowing jihadist groups to target people individually with highly tailored messages, Sambe said.
“Tomorrow's jihadism will no longer recruit en masse. It will recruit person by person and tailor its approach to each individual,” he said.
