In Focus delivers deeper coverage of the political, cultural, and ideological issues shaping America. Published daily by senior writers and experts, these in-depth pieces go beyond the headlines to give readers the full picture. You can find our full list of In Focus pieces here. Gallup released its annual findings on Americans’ religious views earlier […]
In Focus delivers deeper coverage of the political, cultural, and ideological issues shaping America. Published daily by senior writers and experts, these in-depth pieces go beyond the headlines to give readers the full picture. You can find our full list of In Focus pieces here. Gallup released its annual findings on Americans’ religious views earlier […]
Vice President JD Vance predicts that Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, best known as AOC, could be the front runner for the Democrats’ 2028 presidential nomination.
The fight that scrubbed the world's most powerful AI models from the internet featured personality clashes, industry confusion, and international backlash.Why it matters: Anthropic's models are back online, but the impact of its 20-day showdown with the Trump administration will be long lasting.Behind the scenes: It began when Amazon, Anthropic's partner and investor, sounded an alarm that was later disputed by cybersecurity experts.It warned about a "jailbreaking" issue it found with the AI lab's latest models, Mythos and Fable — meaning a technical flaw that could have caused a failure of their guardrails.Amazon flagged its concerns to the administration, triggering sweeping export controls. A U.S. official said the government conducted its own tests once it became apparent that the issue needed to be addressed.Cybersecurity experts, however, later wrote in an open letter to the administration that other leading AI models have the same issue Amazon warned about with Anthropic.On June 12, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, at the direction of President Trump, called Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Lutnick made clear to Amodei the issue needed to be resolved fast and alerted the CEO that the company would be receiving a letter imposing sweeping export controls, the U.S. official said.Amodei called Lutnick back that night after receiving the letter, realizing it effectively meant the models would have to be taken offline — to which Lutnick responded that was indeed the goal.That decision led to a three-week, multi-agency crash course in AI safety.Anthropic deployed engineers to Washington D.C. According to a U.S. official, the company wanted to prove everything was already resolved and further changes were being fine tuned.But the federal Center for AI Standards and Innovation and the National Security Agency said those changes weren't good enough, prompting further fixes, according to the U.S. official.Gradually, various agency heads approved of the changes, and on July 1 the models were released, the official said.Out of all of the administration officials Amazon's Andy Jassy could have called, it was Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent who first heard about the jailbreaking issue found in the company report, according to a separate source familiar.Bessent was early to sound the alarm on Mythos, work with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles to re-engage the embattled company, and help get a cybersecurity executive order across the finish line.While technical discussions to address the jailbreaking issue took place in D.C., it was Bessent who stood next to President Trump during the G7 where allies called for global cooperation on safety standards.At the center of the showdown was Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who also flanked Trump at the G7 meeting while his department's teams led technical discussions.National cyber director Sean Cairncross, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Treasury Department chief information officer Sam Corcos, and the NSA also all participated in technical discussions, according to various sources.Washington mobilized faster to hold scores of meetings and pulled in far more agencies than one would expect for a single technical issue, one source said.The tension spiraled amid personality clashes and poor communication.Anthropic eventually understood that in order to be successful they needed to be on the same side as the government, the U.S. official said.As discussions turned more technical, Anthropic policy chief Sarah Heck and Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown got more involved. Brown also had multiple conversations with Lutnick and Cairncross the weekend of June 12.There was never a moment where Dario stepped offstage and someone else replaced him, one source said, adding that Brown's technical expertise allowed him to sit in a room with government specialists and go line‑by‑line through how models behave under stress.Between the lines: It remains uncertain when and how Anthropic's models will be released to ally countries around the world — which proponents say is key to beating China — or how other labs from OpenAI to Google will release their latest models.OpenAI, whose latest model GPT-5.6 is on hold, did not have visibility into discussions between Anthropic and the White House and is engaged in daily technical discussions on the release of its own model, a source said.The bottom line: There's a lot of work left to be done on a framework for approving future models with a clear inclusive process that has transparency standards and timelines, sources familiar said.
As part of our July Fourth special broadcast, we continue our extended interview with Karen Hao, author of Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI. The book documents the rise of OpenAI and how the AI industry is leading to a new form of colonialism. “One of the things that you really have to understand about AI development today is that there are what I call quasi-religious movements that have developed within Silicon Valley,” says Hao. “The concept of artificial general intelligence is not one that’s scientifically grounded.”
President Donald Trump's own government is warning residents in the Washington, D.C., Virginia, and Maryland area that the July 4 fireworks display will likely cause air quality to reach the worst safety ratings on the scale.Politico's E&E News reported on Thursday that, ahead of the "massive" fireworks display, the president's planned activities for Saturday are likely to cause “hazardous” conditions.The National Park Service included the detail in a draft analysis given to Politico, saying that the 35- to 40-minute program will deploy more than 850,000 fireworks shells. That's more than 100 times what is typically launched on Independence Day, which shoots off 17,000 to 20,000 shells, said Northern Virginia Magazine. The usual event is touted as among the largest in the country each year. This year, Trump wants to set a record for the most fireworks ever used. The current record is 810,904, held by Iglesia Ni Cristo (Church of Christ) in the Philippines. It was set on New Year's Eve in 2016, according to Guinness World Records.The “worst-case” scenario, the National Park Service estimated that the explosions that are set to go off in 10 different locations will "create more than 2,000 micrograms of fine particulate matter — PM2.5 — per cubic meter on the National Mall." It's the kind of air quality seen during the 2023 wildfires in Canada, which blew smoke into the Northeast US. Los Angeles air quality has long been the worst air quality in the U.S. and at no point in the past 20 years has it reached the level that Washington will on the 4th, the American Lung Association data shows. A similar comparison would be Loni, India, is the worst and most polluted in the world currently, the "Live Air Quality Map" shows. In their case, the micrograms of fine particulate matter reach approximately 46.6 µg/m³. On the evening of the 4th of July, the Washington metro area will be approximately 4,190 percent worse than the most polluted city in the world. "The Capital Weather Gang," the irreverent local weather outlet for the city and the immediate area of the National Mall, will be the worst of the worst as the wind blows the smoke to the east. It means that southeastern Washington will get the brunt of the blast. Dr Tracey Lynn Perez Koehlmoos commented that those wards of Washington have "the worst pediatric asthma population in the U.S." The second-worst or "very unhealthy" category level will cover the lower half of the entire district. The northern part of the district and all of the northeast Virginia suburbs and Maryland east of the district, will likely be exposed to particulate matter that could be bad for those with existing breathing problems like asthma. That part of Maryland that is farther north of D.C. will have "moderate" air quality. According to the Washington Post, neither the Interior Department nor the National Park Service responded to questions about the warnings.
The Supreme Court spent its just-completed term sidelining Congress and amassing power for the ascendant branches of government: the presidency and the court itself.Why it matters: As the court strips Congress of its power, decisions over people's money, jobs, votes and health shift toward the president and nine justices appointed for life.After this term, Congress can't insulate regulators from the president, limit political parties' spending or require race-conscious voting districts.The big picture: For decades, conservative lawyers have argued the Constitution grants all executive power to one person: the president.The theory, called the unitary executive, holds that no one who enforces federal law is independent of the president. This term, it won out again and again.Between the lines: The justices overturned precedents, second-guessed Congress, brushed aside facts found by lower courts and applied textualism in ways even some adherents questioned.The result is a court increasingly willing to cast off constraints.Take the Federal Trade Commission case. In Trump v. Slaughter, they chose which parts of the FTC to keep (the powers Congress gave it) and which to shed (the independence Congress designed)."The Roberts Court has adopted for itself a line-item veto," Boston University legal historian Jed Shugerman, a well-known critic of unitary executive theory, tells Axios. It keeps the parts of a law it likes and tosses the rest.Zoom in: The court made it nearly impossible to use the Voting Rights Act to challenge maps that dilute Black and Latino voting power.It struck down limits on coordinated political party spending that the court had upheld in 2001.It curbed Congress' power to make state officials pay damages when they violate federal funding laws, in a case brought by a Rastafarian inmate whose head prison guards forcibly shaved.The court also allowed the president to keep withholding $4 billion in congressionally-appropriated foreign aid, at least for now — a move critics said encroached on Congress' most fundamental power, the purse."The real headline of the current term is 'Supreme Court rules for itself, 6–3,'" Georgetown Law professor Steve Vladeck tells Axios, even if it comes at the expense of Congress, lower courts, and, "every once in a while," President Trump.More and more of the court's power now flows through its so-called shadow docket, in which cases skip full briefing and argument, and orders arrive fast, unsigned and often unexplained.There, the justices have refereed Trump's most contested moves: immigration crackdowns, frozen foreign aid, mass firings of federal workers, changes to voting maps, transgender passport restrictions and more.Reality check: The president didn't win everything. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote all three major rulings against Trump: blocking emergency tariffs, sparing Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook for now, and rejecting his order to end birthright citizenship.The court reached for whatever legal philosophy delivered the result it wanted, Shugerman says.To end the FTC's independence, the court invoked a rigid rule: the president controls the executive branch. To spare the Fed's autonomy the same day, it carved out an exception that Justices Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett rejected as an unprincipled "contradiction."Race was a constitutional problem when Louisiana relied on it to protect Black voting power. But allegations that racial animus motivated the Trump administration's decision to end protections for Haitian immigrants didn't stop the court from green-lighting the policy."Some days the court is originalist, and other days it's not," Vladeck says. The justices, he says, use history and text "the way a drunk uses a lamppost: for support, not for illumination."Yes, but: Trump's biggest defeat doubled as the term's loudest warning.On birthright citizenship, four justices were willing to say Trump's order didn't violate the 14th Amendment.The fact that a position deemed "outlandish as recently as a decade ago got four votes," Vladeck says, will "embolden" the next wave of once-fringe constitutional arguments.The bottom line: Congress grows weaker every year, the executive branch gets stronger, and everyone waits to hear from the strongest branch of all: the Supreme Court.
The Oversight Project unveils a plan to combat birthright citizenship effects through mass deportation, ICE at hospitals, and birth tourism crackdowns.
