Iran, China and groups in Israel used artificial intelligence in novel ways in recent months to create first-of-their-kind influence campaigns on social media, ratcheting up concerns among U.S. officials and security researchers about the fast-evolving technology.

The countries and groups combined A.I. tactics to ramp up the speed and scale of online campaigns beyond what people could easily achieve and with minimal human interaction, U.S. officials and security researchers with knowledge of the efforts said.

First, the countries and groups turned to Chinese “open-source” A.I. models, which are increasingly powerful systems that are freely available to download and modify. Then they used those A.I. models to create “agents,” which are bots that can operate software and complete tasks on their own.

Once hundreds of those A.I. agents were let loose, they autonomously opened networks of fake accounts on platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, X and TikTok, the officials and security researchers said. The agents then rapidly seeded the fake accounts with false posts about politics and current events to sway opinions and inflame issues.

Read it all.

there’s more to the effect of our modern screen life on our reading habits than merely the choice between glass and paper. The personal computers of the 1980s gave us word processing, making the typewriter obsolete; the early internet of the 1990s gave us email (I remember thinking that this was reviving the lost art of letter writing that had been killed by the telephone); and by the turn of the century the bounty promised by the web looked truly impressive: digitized books and primary sources for research, online journals, a proliferation of news and commentary. (Yes, also the logorrhea of early blog culture, now reappearing on Substack.) Then came the smartphone, the jazziest (though not the first) being the iPhone, debuting in 2007. Now in the hands of billons worldwide, these devices have fundamentally changed our daily lives, for good and for ill. They are designed to seize and keep our attention, to amuse us endlessly with ever-changing stimuli, and to lure us into an in-the-cloud world that contains much of the human race’s knowledge yet also makes us dumber. As Wolf writes: 

No self-respecting internal review board at any university would allow a researcher to do what our culture has already done with no adjudication or previous evidence: introduce a complete, quasi-addictive set of attention-compelling devices without knowing the possible side effects and ramifications for the subjects (our kids). 

What we are all experiencing—and Wolf confesses her personal struggle to return to deep reading of books—are “decreasing attention spans, pushed beyond their cognitive limits by a flotsam of distractions and information that will never become knowledge.” 

Convinced that consistent, attentive reading is essential for the development of both our reason and our compassion, Wolf is worried about the effects of our contemporary screens on our capacity for self-government. This is even more explicitly the concern of British writer James Marriott, a journalist at The Times. Marriott’s The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society has been out for a few weeks in the UK, and is soon to be published here in the U.S. (This one, dear reader, I acquired on paper from the publisher.) 

Marriott is a worried man, and he works hard not to be too alarmist—to use his indoor voice, as it were. But The New Dark Ages, which I hope will be widely read, is a brief, brisk, and persuasive book about the damage our screen life is doing to our social and political life. He puts the matter starkly in his introduction: “As reading fades I believe that we may find ourselves facing a post-literate future that resembles the pre-literate past: mystical, tribal, and autocratic.” We fill our eyes (and now increasingly our ears, too) not with the pages of books or even with the extended narratives and arguments to be found in newspapers and magazines, but instead with TikTok and YouTube videos, podcasts, X memes, Instagram posts, and Reddit rants.  

Read it all.

“As reading fades I believe that we may find ourselves facing a post-literate future that resembles the pre-literate past: mystical, tribal, and autocratic.”https://t.co/1igjBHxPox

— Jordan J. Ballor (@JordanBallor) September 21, 2026

In December, Edward Hughes and Louis Kirsch, two of the world’s leading artificial intelligence researchers, left Google. Their goal: to build an A.I. system smart enough to build a better A.I. system.

At their new London start-up, Inherent, they now spend their days working alongside a prototype called Faraday. Named for the 19th-century English physicist Michael Faraday, it gathers mountains of data capturing the daily activities of Dr. Hughes, Dr. Kirsch and Inherent’s other researchers: emails, instant messages, meeting transcripts and their ongoing chats with Faraday itself. The company then uses this data to build a better version of Faraday.

“Faraday has access to everything that goes on at the company,” Dr. Hughes said. “We want to give it data describing the process we go through, to discover something.”

Though Inherent pledges to keep humans involved in this elaborate process, many other companies are building similar technology, and some leading researchers believe A.I. systems will eventually be powerful enough to improve themselves with little or no help from human developers — a mind-bending goal that computer scientists call recursive self-improvement, or R.S.I.

Two Silicon Valley start-ups — each valued at $4 billion — are proudly pursuing this dream, and leading labs like OpenAI and Anthropic are chasing it too. They hope to accelerate the development of artificial intelligence that discovers drugs, creates new materials, speeds other forms of scientific discovery and, one day, surpasses human intelligence in practically every way.

Read it all.

The Liftoff Scenario That Terrifies A.I. Doomsayers: “Recursive self-improvement” is the idea that artificial intelligence could learn to build & train itself, creating exponential new progress — & risk (NYT) https://t.co/y5RXO0VbEu

— Candice Rose (@CandiceRose) September 16, 2026

Two things should make you consider what artificial intelligence could mean for humanity. One is that those working with the technology are warning about it leading to a catastrophe—human extinction, even. The other is how technological innovation is aggravating the destruction of Ukraine. These things offer conflicting lessons for whether AI’s rapid progress can or should be slowed down.

For years, leading AI bosses have signalled that their technology could become lethal. Bots may become brainy enough to outwit their creators before they are “aligned” with humanity’s goals and ethics. Bad people could use AI to wreak havoc. These warnings have become more credible as AI agents have escaped their sandboxes during testing, co-ordinated with one another and hacked organisations, including an AI lab itself. Anthropic, one model-maker, has caught people using its models for malign ends, from Mali’s intelligence services getting a mass-surveillance system built, to Houthi rebels in Yemen thought to be writing software for ballistic missiles.

Following the recent resignation of a researcher at Anthropic, public fear of AI doom has spread. In a post viewed more than 170m times, he said that it and OpenAI were “gambling with our lives”. AI is rapidly growing more potent, for good and ill. In May prediction markets priced a less-than-one-third chance of AI solving any millennium prize maths problem before 2030; on September 8th OpenAI said it had solved one of them, causing angst among mathematicians. On September 12th Sam Altman and Elon Musk, two AI titans, endorsed a call by Dario Amodei, the head of Anthropic, to “pace the frontier”, ie, to slow AI’s progress. Those in favour of a slowdown include Bernie Sanders, a left-wing senator, and Steve Bannon, a right-wing populist.

Read it all.

Can the AI arms race be stopped?https://t.co/iuG0rZA8CW

— Héctor Dedrick Guerrero (@hectordguerrero) September 17, 2026

Julian Atkins, the Church of England’s Net Zero Carbon Programme Director, said: “As Christians, we believe we have a responsibility to care for God’s creation and to bear witness to the love we have for our neighbours, particularly those who are most vulnerable to the devastating effects of climate change. That is not about politics, but about living out our faith in a practical and demonstrable way. 

 “Across the country, parishes are taking action in ways that make sense for their own buildings and communities – raising money locally, making buildings more energy efficient and finding other practical solutions to reduce carbon emissions. 

“We are deeply grateful to all our many committed volunteers who make this possible. Our role through the national Net Zero Carbon Programme is to create the conditions and provide the funding and expertise to help them do that. 

“For many churches, this is about much more than reducing carbon.

“It is about creating warmer, more welcoming buildings that can serve their communities well, while using resources wisely and, where possible, reducing energy costs so that more can be invested in mission and ministry. 

“That is why this work matters. 

Read it all.

As energy prices surge, I spoke to churches that have got rid of oil fired boilers in favour of 'green' heating alternatives and energy efficiency measures, backed by the @churchofengland Net Zero carbon programme. https://t.co/aYXtN5nTsp via @churchofengland

— Martha Linden (@MarthaJLinden) September 16, 2026

In its latest (fourth) report on AI “misuse”—more essential reading—Anthropic revealed that its most popular models (Claude Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus) are being, or have recently been, misused by a variety of Generative Threat Groups (GTGs) in “seven harm areas: cyber operations, influence operations, surveillance, scams and fraud, biological misuse, conventional weapons development, and distillation.” In each case, AI was making bad human behavior much more effective, until Anthropic spotted what was going on.

The interesting thing is who out there is up to no good. GTG-20006 (Anthropic gives each case a number) was the inevitable Russians, “attacking military intelligence targets in Ukrainian and European governments as well as diplomatic and defense organizations and individuals connected to U.S. foreign policy.” Putin and his little green men have been doing this kind of thing for years, of course. But AI makes the mobile exploitation kit, the credential-stealing tool, and the phishing platform all work better and faster as well as helping evade detection.

I have long shared the view articulated by Gregory Conti, a professor of politics at Princeton, that “even if AI does not end life on Earth, it will destroy our way of life”.…..To understand why Conti is right, you need to grasp the four forces inexorably driving p(Doom) upward above 10 percent: Recursive self-improvement, The unscrupulousness of Sam Altman, The complete confusion in Washington, The utter cynicism in Beijing.

Read it all.

Niall Ferguson: AIpocalypse Now
It’s not just the next 9/11, enabled by AI, that is coming. It’s the next global financial crisis. It’s the next pandemic. It might even be the next world war. What, if anything, can we do about it? https://t.co/DRLqpVxqKF

— Juan Carlos Zapata S. (@jczapata_s) September 14, 2026

Among the growing fears about artificial intelligence, one threat has proved particularly alarming: the possibility that A.I. could be used to create a new wave of biological weapons.

In April, biosecurity experts warned that it was disturbingly easy to get advice from chatbots about making pathogens more dangerous. In June, scientists and A.I. executives signed an open letter calling for new controls on the fabrication of DNA because A.I. can now speed up the design of toxins and viruses.

In August, scientists reported that they had used A.I. to build viruses not seen in nature. And on Thursday, Anthropic announced that it had blocked several attempts to use its models by people who might have been trying to weaponize pathogens.

Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, followed up with a call on Saturday to slow down the development of A.I., with a set of proposals to keep it safe.

Read it all.

A.I. Queries From Abroad Raise Fears of a Biological Weapons Race
Today’s chatbots aren’t likely to help lone actors invent a deadly pathogen, experts say. But newer models, trained in biology, may need stronger safeguardshttps://t.co/x3XhW9s4ph

— Emily Turrettini (@textually) September 14, 2026

OpenAI has appointed to its foundation’s board a senior US government official who warned that advanced versions of AI could kill “most people” without more robust safeguards.

Paul Christiano, who tests model safety at the commerce department’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation, said on X on Wednesday that the risk of losing control over AI systems “is now acute” and requires more work to align with human interests.

“If we build superintelligence without more robust alignment, I expect we will permanently lose control of it,” he said when announcing his new role at OpenAI. “If that happens then most people could die. I believe we would need domestic and international co-ordination to ensure global consistency and reduce risk to an acceptable level.”

Christiano previously led AI safety at Caisi. He designed and ran government tests on frontier AI models from leading companies and assessed them for national security risks.

Read it all.

Top US official named to OpenAI non-profit board warns advanced AI could be ‘deadly’ https://t.co/5bZXexRldI

— FT World News (@ftworldnews) September 9, 2026

A friend you haven’t heard from in a while suddenly calls. You don’t pick up, but in a matter of seconds, the damage is already done.

The call wasn’t actually from an old companion looking to reconnect, but from a hacker who had hijacked that number. Worse, the assailant now secretly has control over your account, including access to your private messages, and is already using your number to reach your saved contacts and compromise them, too.

Like a raging, highly contagious virus, the attack keeps spreading. Within hours, millions of people have suffered the same fate.

A year ago, such a cyberattack might have sounded far-fetched to even the most paranoid digital experts, or at least like something only the world’s most elite spy agencies could have pulled off.

Read it all.

A Hacking Tool Built With A.I. Can Breach Phones Without a Click

An attack discovered by A.I. researchers could have compromised hundreds of millions of devices within hours, experts said.https://t.co/xDCxrJmJdm via @NYTimes

— Walter Appling (@WalterAppling) September 9, 2026

Nvidia was  named in 1993 after the Latin word for envy. Sure enough, the American colossus inspires plenty of it. Insatiable global demand for its graphics-processing units (GPUs), the chips that power artificial intelligence, has made Nvidia the world’s most valuable company, worth $5.4trn. Next year it may also become the most profitable, generating $370bn in net income. By 2029 its sales could hit $1trn.

Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s boss, is truly the magician at the heart of the AI boom. His firm’s share price is 14 times what it was on ChatGPT’s release in late 2022. The ten biggest public companies championing AI make up 40% of the value of the S&P 500 index. Nvidia alone accounts for 8% and unlike, say, Apple or Tesla, which make smartphones and cars, it is almost solely a bet on AI. The company has produced about 15 cents of every dollar the American stock market has returned since 2023—returns that have kept consumers spending despite rising interest rates, tariffs and a war with Iran.

Yet many also see Mr Huang as a magician in a more worrying sense, fearing that he is an illusionist inflating a dangerous bubble. Through $1trn-worth of deals, Nvidia provides data-centre landlords and AI labs with cash or guarantees so that they can buy its GPUs. Some call it the “bank of AI”. At the very least, Nvidia’s critics say, its financial engineering smacks of the “vendor financing” which pumped up the revenues of networking-gear makers like Cisco in the dotcom mania of 2000-01, whose collapse brought about a recession.

Look more closely, however, and the worries are mostly unjustified. If Nvidia’s bets on ai come good, they could accelerate the technology’s adoption, boosting productivity and living standards. If they misfire, the cost will fall chiefly on Nvidia’s shareholders. That is how capitalism is supposed to work.

Read it all.

Tapa y tema principal de The Economist esta semana dedicada a Jensen Huang, Nvidia y su liderazgo en la revolución de la #InteligenciaArtificial.
👉🏼https://t.co/ai8ulqpCSo pic.twitter.com/zhOJP63BVm

— Aldo Lema – Uruguay (@AldoLema_uy) September 3, 2026

Investigators believe a cyberattack this week on dozens of municipal water systems in Minnesota was probably the work of Iranian hackers, according to U.S. and state officials and others familiar with the matter, a potential act of aggression that comes at a precarious moment in the U.S. war against Iran.

Officials cautioned that they had not definitively determined who was responsible for the attack and that the preliminary assessment could change as the authorities collected more technical data.

They also warned that the hackers could be attempting to pose as Iran-based in an effort to ratchet up tensions between the two countries, though former intelligence officials said such a scenario was unlikely.

Local officials reported that the well and treatment plant in at least one city was temporarily offline on Monday, while other cities in the state had to use manual workarounds to cope with attempted attacks on automated operations.

Read it all.

New: Investigators believe a cyberattack this week on dozens of municipal water systems in Minnesota was probably the work of Iranian hackers, a potential act of aggression that comes at a precarious moment in the U.S. war against Iran. https://t.co/Huut3WBM34

— Dustin Volz (@dnvolz) July 30, 2026

“Biological War” is a heavily researched book about contagious and potentially civilization-ending pathogens. Though banned by international treaty, these germs have been weaponized and hoarded by countries that include Russia, North Korea and Syria.

By “weaponized” I don’t mean merely that they’ve been placed at the business end of ballistic missiles. I mean that these pathogens have been genetically engineered, in diabolical ways, to trick first responders and be all but untreatable. Even a small accidental spill, like wine sloshing out of glass, like Covid slipping out of a lab, could be the last mistake our species makes.

Jacobsen has interviewed everyone, from former high-ranking members of the military, the C.I.A., FEMA and NATO to former secretaries of defense, counterterrorism experts, epidemiologists and Sam [expletive] Altman. That so many were willing to talk to her, and have their names affixed to this book, indicates the esteem in which she is held, especially after the publication of “Nuclear War: A Scenario” (2024), a best seller that stirred new interest in nuclear policy, technology and risks worldwide.

The reason “Biological War,” like Jacobsen’s previous book, is so consuming is that she packs a lot of dense and particulate information into a ticking-clock scenario: into a story. It’s more pulverizing than a Kathryn Bigelow movie. Some of the chapter headings are phrases like “Day Two” or “Day Three.” Not to ruin your mood, but “Day Six” is about as far as civilization gets. A later chapter is titled “The Last Day of American Democracy.”

Read it all.

New, likely terrifying look into reality of biological warfare, book by @AnnieJacobsen just arrived. All her books are must-reads… Nuclear War, Area 51, Surprise Kill Vanish, Operation Paperclip, etc pic.twitter.com/qLmZNPoEu4

— Luke Fischer (@lukefischer) July 28, 2026

A new resource has been launched to “help churches of all denominations use AI thoughtfully, faithfully, and well” amid the “silent adoption” of AI in church life.

The AI Guidelines for Christian Ministry has been produced by the AI Christian Partnership (AICP), a not-for-profit organisation made up of Christian groups, theologians, technologists, and academics.

The guidelines have been created to avoid AI “gradually seeping into church life without proper discussion”, and to support churchpeople to understand the long-term impact on congregations, AICP said. “Although aimed at church ministers, leaders, and volunteers, they contain principles, ethics, and practical tips that all Christians can apply and use.”

Its founder, Chris Goswami, said: “AI can be a great asset for ministry, or it can leave us with a fast-food version of ministry. As with social media, it may only be much later, with hindsight, that we understand the impact of AI — therefore, we encourage churches with foresight to give serious consideration to this now.”

Read it all.

A new resource has been launched to “help churches of all denominations use AI thoughtfully, faithfully, and well” amid the “silent adoption” of #AI in church life 💻https://t.co/xsPcd5RdrY

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) July 28, 2026

There are important policy interventions on the table, especially regarding young people’s exposure to AI in pedagogical contexts and at formative times in their life. Strong stances from the major mainstream institutions of American life would also be wonderful. But I suspect there is little point in waiting around for either D.C. or Harvard to lead the way.

We need schools, families, fraternal organizations, reading groups, secret societies, oratories, shared houses of civility — a thousand cells as diffuse and decentralized as all those compounding micro-engagements by which the image of a boot stomping on a human face forever is now being replaced with that of a human face slack-jawed and dribbling on itself. These cells of resistance will be different from one another. They may involve a semi-annual meeting, and they may involve the whole of life. They can be organized around reading Boethius or reciting limericks, sharing meals or shooting guns. Some will correspond only by letter. Some will employ Claude to manage their mailing lists. What all will have in common is: an insistence that we, and only we, will decide how we live; an explicit prohibition on new technologies in the spaces and activities where they gently and slowly degrade us; and a pledge to hold each other to the path we have jointly chosen.

This, I think, is where Magnifica Humanitas will prove most inspired and invaluable in the years to come. Regardless of whether the powers that be heed the pope’s injunctions and warnings, that striking opening image will be available to all the faithful, and to every person of goodwill. If you find yourself in a ruin, staring at the crumbling remnants of a wall and the world it protected, what do you do? You assemble your people, you stake out a section, and you start to build.

Read it all.

On forming cells of resistance: pic.twitter.com/90kSAIU9sS

— The New Atlantis (@tnajournal) June 3, 2026

Artificial Intelligence poses a double challenge to the human mind. Not only will the most advanced models soon be able to think better than people, but AI has consequences for humanity which are so uncertain, so potentially vast and are approaching at such a rapid pace that even the best brains flinch. An example is Elon Musk.

In our long interview with him this week, featured in The Insider and our Business section, the engineer and entrepreneur sets out two paradoxes and one contradiction. The first paradox is that one of the world’s most power-hungry tycoons is enthusiastically helping create a technology that he says will render him—and all other human beings—powerless after as little as five years. The second is that the world’s richest man says he is preparing for a world of infinite abundance, where money, including his $750bn fortune, no longer matters. And the contradiction is that, despite these stated beliefs, Mr Musk continues to act as if they were not true.

Mr Musk is divisive. His political views, disseminated to his 240m followers on X, strike many as plain-speaking and strike many more, including The Economist, as plainly bigoted. By his own admission, his attempt to use DOGE to scythe through the federal bureaucracy went wrong.

But he is also one of a handful of men who are pioneering AI and who thereby have an outsize influence on its trajectory. When he speaks, he reflects the debates they are having. His data centres in space could power AI’s future. For all his political polemics, he has a record of being right about technology in fields such as electric cars, rockets and satellite communications that confounded other engineers and entrepreneurs. For those reasons, his claims about AI repay examination. Unfortunately, such an exercise only underlines how ill-prepared the world is for a technology that may soon throw everything up in the air.

Read it all.

AI is charging ahead. Not even its creators—including @elonmusk—know how to keep up https://t.co/8UwsIS9FQY pic.twitter.com/TndVl6q8ir

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) July 23, 2026

The United States may only have nine to 12 months to protect its critical infrastructure from AI-powered attacks. Currently, two American companies, Anthropic (for which I consult) and OpenAI, have publicly demonstrated AI models advanced enough to detect flaws in software far beyond the human capacity to find, and they are restricting the use of these models to defensive cybersecurity work.

But the United States’ adversaries, and the criminals in their orbit, will soon wield the same offensive tools. China, in particular, is already racing to build and acquire these AI capabilities and may be closer to developing its own Mythos than many U.S. policymakers hope. Advanced AI will sharpen an instrument that Beijing already prizes: the credible threat to deter a fight over Taiwan before it begins by disrupting the island’s critical infrastructure and that of any nation that seeks to defend it….

The United States has a window to bolster its critical infrastructure’s defenses, but that window is short, and those defenses are weak to begin with. In a campaign called Volt Typhoon, Chinese state-linked hackers already demonstrated how deeply they can burrow into U.S. critical infrastructure, including organizations in the water, power, and transportation sectors. Now is the time to put policy options on the table that were previously considered out of bounds: taking dramatic steps to preempt would-be attacks, making once-in-a-generation investments in cyberdefense, and helping U.S. AI labs protect themselves against the most advanced threats.

Read it all.

“As firms use Mythos to hunt and fix flaws in their products, a more urgent question looms: how to defend the United States and its allies from AI-powered cyberwarfare,” writes Michael Sulmeyer.https://t.co/uskGVY48uZ

— Foreign Affairs (@ForeignAffairs) July 22, 2026

Without fail, David Liu of the Broad Institute gets at least 20 messages every week from desperate parents. Their child, they’ll explain, has an ultrarare and devastating disorder caused by a mutant gene. Can he help them develop a gene therapy?

Dr. Liu, a gene-editing researcher, answers honestly: Although the science is there — researchers can edit and silence the genes that cause disease relatively easily — the system for developing treatments for rare diseases is just not economically feasible. It typically takes years and hundreds of millions of dollars.

The catchphrase, said Dr. Wendy Chung of Boston Children’s Hospital, is “too rare to care.”

Now, Dr. Liu, Dr. Chung and their colleagues at the Broad Institute, Boston Children’s and the Jackson Laboratory are hoping to change that mentality. On Tuesday, they announced the start of a new nonprofit, the Center for Therapeutic Genetics, to develop gene therapy treatments that can be used and reused in disease after disease.

Treatments developed by the center would be viewed more like routine procedures than drugs. In each case, all that would be changed are the instructions to a gene editor. There would be no need to start anew for every patient.

Read it all.

‘Too Rare to Care’? A New Center for Rare Diseases Hopes to Change That https://t.co/ahZC0LpW1d

— Global Health Observ (@GlobalPHObserv) July 21, 2026

On a clear afternoon this month, high above the Mojave Desert, an A.I.-powered drone launched a missile in a test that could reshape modern warfare.

Since the dawn of the jet age, the U.S. military has used the isolation over this stretch of sand to push secret, experimental aircraft to their aerodynamic and technological limits. It’s doing the same today: fine-tuning machines capable of engaging in aerial combat with barely any human intervention. These drones’ flight is controlled not by a pilot, not by human remote control, but entirely by onboard software. It’s a historic advancement in drone technology that aims to incorporate artificial intelligence into everyday war-fighting.

Today’s conflicts are increasingly defined by unmanned weapons, delivering destruction over battlefields in Ukraine, Iran and Sudan. But in almost all these cases, there is a human operator sitting somewhere, steering each robot toward its target.

The two types of next-generation drones being tested over Southern California today, built for the Air Force by Anduril and General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, can fly entirely on their own. They make hundreds of split-second decisions to maneuver, evade and attack enemy targets, based upon countless hours of flight data and computer processing. A human is involved at just a few key moments in their flight: to program the drone’s mission, to start and stop it and to decide whether or not it should launch a weapon. Late last year, the companies’ drones flew for the first time. Anduril fired its first missile two weeks ago, and General Atomics says it is not far behind.

Read it all.

A.I. Drones Are Coming. We Are Not Ready. https://t.co/Mi1VD9f8ep

— Avner Gidron (@AvnerGidron) July 20, 2026

The questions that define civilizations don’t always announce themselves cleanly. They can arrive wrapped in the language of progress—faster, smarter, more efficient—until one day we realize that what has arrived isn’t what we wanted.

In the case of artificial intelligence, choices made in boardrooms and research labs will have far-reaching consequences. We need to understand that clearly, before the changes become irreversible. Even more, to make serious decisions about our future, we need to state the moral definitions of what it means to be human and the limits on AI’s influence on the social order.

AI development is outpacing ethical deliberation, and people are already being harmed. We’ve seen teens counseled toward suicide, a proliferation of child sex-abuse material and communities strained by sprawling data centers. And that’s only what’s come to light. This technology is permeating our lives in ways beyond our awareness. The risks of AI superintelligence run from economic upheaval to the concentration of power in the hands of whatever corporation or government wins the AI technology race.

At the same time, we have to see clearly the good of AI. 

Read it all.

We need a Christian vision for the future of AI. The development of the technology is beginning to outpace ethical deliberation, writes @revwalterkimhttps://t.co/mFl7oPAl8C

— Wall Street Journal Opinion (@WSJopinion) July 10, 2026

A pediatrician recently asked one of Emily Harrison’s children a logical question during pre-exam paperwork: Do you have a smartphone?

Doctors often ask children practical questions, such as whether they’re getting enough sleep, have seen changes in their appetites or have started playing sports. These days, they may ask about anxiety or depression.

A smartphone question makes sense after years of research into how these devices, and social media programs, affect mental and physical health. The question is why are church leaders not discussing these issues in sermons and education programs, said Harrison, author of the Dear Christian Parent online newsletter. 

“This is a safety issue, yet we’re hesitant to say it’s a safety issue,” she said, reached by Zoom.

Read it all.

Mental health professionals and parents say they're worried about children spending too much time on devices. What we know about potential harm and how to start making changes.https://t.co/LvDFwuypix pic.twitter.com/YzF5BmmbwC

— WMUR TV (@WMUR9) July 8, 2026

Wendell Gilliard spent the hottest days of his childhood summers praying for a cool breeze.

Gilliard, a state lawmaker who represents parts of the peninsula and West Ashley in the S.C. House of Representatives, grew up in Charleston’s low-income housing before it had air conditioning. His family would cool off by purchasing a large block of ice and setting it in the middle of a room surrounded by fans and open windows.

“ That was our air conditioning,” Gilliard recalled. “Mom would always say, ‘ You need to stay still and pray for a cool breeze.’   Then, when everybody stayed still in that one room, you would notice the curtain would pick up from the breeze, and everything changed.”

Charleston Housing Authority properties now have air conditioning, but many households across the state still don’t. As South Carolina enters the dog days of summer, heat-vulnerable residents — who are predominantly elderly, those with chronic illnesses and the “homebound,” per the S.C. Department of Public Health — face life-threatening risks.

Read it all.

July through mid-August are historically the hottest time of year in South Carolina. For some households, the dog days of summer can be deadly — a risk that's growing with each passing year. https://t.co/DTeNvoEZck

— The Post and Courier (@postandcourier) July 9, 2026

Someday real soon, most of us — starting with young adults — will carry an always-on AI. This agent will help us navigate our journeys, answer our questions, tutor and teach us new skills, remember people we have met before, remind us of what we once knew before, offer advice and recommendations, do simple errands, and remember everything we say and do. Before long, it will know us better than we know ourselves. It will be our exoself.

While we will use more than one agent, we’ll primarily favor just one that knows us best. Always-on means this agent is listening, watching, tracking, present during all our waking hours, and maybe even while we sleep. We will allow this intimate access to our inner life because it gives us superpowers: knowledge, judgment, decisiveness, confidence, and most important, speed. We will feel productive, creative, smart, capable, and on top of it when it is on. When it is off, we will feel amputated.

This entity is clearly not our self. But at the same time, this always-on AI will be so close to us, understanding us so well and so deeply — better than almost any human could — that it will not be an other, or an outsider either. It can model us too well to be an other. It will be an exoself: something in between our self and an other self. Neither us, but also not outside of us. A new category.

It won’t feel strange, because we don’t feel strange wearing eyeglasses all day, or hearing aids, or carrying a computer in our pockets. Machines like this have been moving closer to us since they were invented. Smart machines started out as room-sized apparatus, then moved nearer as appliances alongside a desk, then onto the desktop in front of us, then onto our laps, then into our pockets — and soon, they will sit on our skin, perhaps on our heads. We already see prototypes of smart glasses, where the exoself can perch, whispering into our ears and illuminating our eyes.

Read it all.

I write about the controversial idea of an "exoself" as if it were inevitable: https://t.co/nds5pW2b0r

— Kevin Kelly (@kevin2kelly) July 7, 2026

As you read this sentence, circuits in your brain are adjusting your posture, controlling your breathing, and transforming lines and curves on the screen into recognizable words. Most of this processing is invisible to you. But some of what takes place in your brain you do have access to—an image that pops into your head, or a deliberate plan you make about where to go shopping. Neuroscientists and philosophers sometimes refer to the latter type of brain activity as “consciously accessible,” to distinguish it from all the other processing that goes on unconsciously. This activity has special properties: we can describe it, control it, and use it for deliberate reasoning, in contrast to all the automatic processing that goes on without our awareness.

In a new paper, we present evidence that a similar distinction has emerged in modern language models like Claude. We find that Claude has developed a small collection of internal neural patterns that, compared to all its other internal processing, play a special role.

We call the collection of these patterns the J-space—named after the technique we used to find them, involving a mathematical concept called the Jacobian. Each J-space pattern is linked to a particular word. But when one of these patterns lights up, it doesn’t mean the model is saying that word—just that the word is on its mind. If you’ve heard of language models having a “scratchpad” or “chain of thought”—text they write to themselves while reasoning—the J-space is something different. It operates silently, in the model’s internal neural activations, allowing the model to think about a concept without writing it down. Notably, the J-space wasn’t designed or programmed by us, but instead emerged on its own during Claude’s training process.

Read it all.

Wow! Unexpected results from Anthropic's experiments in exposing the inner thoughts of Claude. They call its unconscious a J-space. The short video they made is good place to start. https://t.co/07cr8aJlxr

— Kevin Kelly (@kevin2kelly) July 8, 2026

The U.S. labor force participation rate has quietly returned to levels last seen in the 1970s (outside the recent pandemic). It increasingly seems to signal a structural shift in how society works, with a shrinking share of adults participating directly in the production of goods and services. The consequences extend well beyond slower economic growth.

Some implications:

• A growing share of U.S. society has no direct stake in labor markets.
  • As fewer adults work or seek work, a larger fraction of voters experience the economy mostly as consumers, retirees, or rentiers, not as workers.
  • That changes political incentives around wages, immigration, AI, taxation, and redistribution.
• The economy becomes increasingly dependent on a shrinking core.…

Read it all.

Many researchers are now convinced that humanlike AI, or artificial general intelligence (AGI), will require more than mastering language and images. It will require AIs that can reason about space, causality, and the consequences of actions—especially if they are to control humanoid robots, operate factories, and explore other planets.

Few people have argued for this need more forcefully than AI pioneer Yann LeCun. “I joke that the smartest systems we have today are not as smart as a house cat,” he says. A cat can’t code like an LLM, but it can survive by its wits. The notion that simply scaling an LLM will get to AGI is “complete nonsense,” he says. “It’s like saying you’re going to get into orbit by scaling airplanes. There’s a very powerful delusion circulating in Silicon Valley that this is the case.”

LeCun left a top job at Meta to co-found one of a growing number of labs and startups developing “world models”—systems that build representations of how the world works—and agents that operate within them to learn or plan. Ultimately, these researchers hope that more closely mimicking how the human mind learns will give AI stunning new powers.

The gaps between humans and LLMs are not merely quantitative. In a 2024 study, LLMs that were trained on sequences of directions from New York City taxi rides could generate new routes reliably, suggesting they had turned those directions into an accurate map of the city. But when researchers looked under the hood to examine their internal representations, they found not a clean city grid, but an incoherent mess of tangled streets. LLMs “are so alien and so unhumanlike,” says Brenden Lake, a cognitive scientist at Princeton University.

Read it all.

Words vs. worlds: As building bigger and better chatbots gets harder, AI researchers turn to systems that learn to simulate the worldhttps://t.co/DC8Q7QNoWp via @SilverJacket pic.twitter.com/OoMXTX5ZAD

— Ash Paul (@pash22) June 26, 2026

For decades, the tech industry has relied on the ability of semiconductor companies to wring more power out of computer chips, making the smartphones that fit in a hand today more capable than the computers that filled entire rooms 40 years ago.

While some experts worry that era of increased miniaturization is ending, IBM is saying not so fast.

The big tech company on Thursday released details of its next advance in chip manufacturing technology, which it says could keep that innovation going for another 10 years.

Using a novel approach to making smaller transistors that act as tiny switches in microprocessors and other chips, IBM said, the new production process can squeeze nearly twice as many transistors on a fingernail-size chip as the last technology it introduced in 2021. That will offer 50 percent greater computing performance and 70 percent better energy efficiency, the company said.

Read it all.

$IBM unveiled a 0.7nm “nanostack” 3D transistor design which it calls the first sub-1nm chip technology.

IBM says it could fit 100B transistors on a fingernail-sized chip, reach production within ~5 years and deliver up to 70% better efficiency versus 2nm. pic.twitter.com/psH3RxKGmC

— Shay Boloor (@StockSavvyShay) June 25, 2026

Yet this backlash is itself dangerous. AI promises to change the world for the better, much as electricity or the steam engine did. Not long ago, the era-defining problem for the rich world was stagnant economic growth and the populism it unleashed. Now it has a technology that could power a surge in productivity and incomes, help find cures for untreatable diseases and improve everything from education to green tech.

All this could be lost if countries starve the technology of computing power or regulate it into uselessness. Look at mRNA vaccines research, which has been held back after a backlash during the covid-19 pandemic.

Scenarios in which some countries give in to popular rage but others forge ahead are also worrying. If America succumbs, it could cede the global ai frontier, and the attendant cyber and military capabilities, to authoritarian China. Europe and Canada are more risk-averse than America. If they choked off AI while the rest of the world kept pushing forward, their losses could be unrecoverable. More than two centuries after the Industrial Revolution, few countries have managed to catch up with the first movers.

So the stakes are high. Can governments do anything about it? Grand proclamations about the shape of a “social contract” for a post-AI world are good fodder for blog posts but offer little help today. Besides, the unknowns are still large enough to make the exercise almost futile.

Better to be incremental. 

Read it all.

Persuading voters that their interests are being served by AI’s disruption has become as important as making models better. The failure to do so would destroy vast opportunities for humanity https://t.co/5S9EGzPIHg

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) June 25, 2026

The news is full of how an ignominious peace deal with Iran exemplifies a decline in American power. That conclusion could hardly be more wrong. On June 12th the Trump administration ordered Anthropic to block foreigners from Fable and Mythos, its latest and most capable frontier AI models. In an instant, everyone learned that the American government can decide who may use the world’s most important technology. You don’t get much more powerful than that.

The administration was responding to a supposed jailbreak for Fable, meaning a prompt that circumvents defences against uses such as hacking computers or making bioweapons. The chances are that it wanted Anthropic to switch off the models for everyone, and that targeting foreigners was a means to an end. Sure enough, that is what Anthropic did, while claiming that the concern about its model was overblown. The legal basis of the order remains unclear, and the ban seems unlikely to last.

What matters, though, is the demonstration that global access to the best AI may come down to a decision in the Oval Office. The administration showed in March that it is prepared to trample on the frontier AI companies, when it designated Anthropic a “supply-chain risk”. Now it has shown that it is prepared to trample on users, too.

America must decide how to wield this vast new power. The rest of the world must decide what to do about it. Even as it plans for an unreliable America in everything from defence to trade, it now has to cope with a new way of being captive to the world’s biggest economy.

Read it all.

Even as the world plans for an unreliable America in everything from defence to trade, it now has to cope with America’s dominance in AI https://t.co/xrMSKZAFWb

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) June 18, 2026

Is it ethical to alter the genetic makeup of children? Should we create children with three parents? What about creating sperm from female stem cells to the end of creating a child with two biological mothers? Is it ethical to incubate a growing baby in an artificial womb? Could a womb like that end the perceived need for abortion?  

These questions might seem like science fiction, and indeed they were when Aldous Huxley, an agnostic, published his dystopian novel Brave New World nearly one hundred years ago. Huxley wove a fictitious world in which progeny were designed and grown in laboratories, children were raised by the state rather than in families, promiscuity was encouraged and monogamy considered grotesque, and the government endorsed self-medication with a “harmless” drug that kept its users in a placated state. 

Yet these are the questions up for debate in today’s public square, as evidenced by a recent debate hosted by The Free Press: “Is Designing Babies Unethical—Or a Moral Imperative?”  

All things considered, one has to wonder if Huxley wasn’t more a prophet than a novelist.  

Read it all.

https://t.co/vb0gflsCQ0 The elimination of suffering will not produce joy. If we seek to be truly free, we must acknowledge our responsibilities to one another. We will flourish to the extent that we all can flourish.

— Public Discourse (@PublicDiscourse) June 14, 2026

“It’s going to be an absolute nightmare,” says an executive at a big American tech company. He is talking about an emerging problem for businesses that use artificial intelligence. AI agents—bots that can read, interpret and act—use masses of processing power and have started to run up huge bills. As they proliferate, the problem will grow. Big companies, the executive points out, typically use hundreds of software programs. If each of those offer agents (as they probably will), AI costs could easily spiral out of control.

Budget management is a new worry for AI adopters. Not long ago employees were encouraged to binge on the technology, as bosses and investors saw spending as a sign of innovation. Burning through vast numbers of tokens—the chunks of text that models process, which are often used as a unit of pricing—became a badge of honour; techies dubbed it “tokenmaxxing”. Companies showed off staff’s AI use on internal leaderboards. Meta’s display awarded top users titles like “Token Legend”.

Such incentives partly explain the boom in AI spending. Another contributing factor is a change in the way enterprises use the technology. Token-heavy applications, such as reasoning models and agents, are growing more popular. In some cases agents build their own agents, sending costs higher still. Ramp, a corporate-credit-card provider, analyses its clients’ transaction data to shed light on how they use AI. It reckons their overall spending has risen 13-fold in the past year. In April Uber said that it had already spent its annual AI budget in four months. Other firms are experiencing similar problems. One reportedly spent $500m on AI tokens in a month. Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI, has described mounting customer costs as “a huge issue”.

For now, the problem is concentrated. The top spenders tend to be tech firms….

Read it all.

Burning through vast numbers of tokens—the chunks of text that models process, which are often used as a unit of pricing—was once a badge of honour. Now budget management is a worry for AI adopters https://t.co/TZsf1H2BHC

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) June 16, 2026