Tethys

While cruising around Saturn, be on the lookout for picturesque arrangements of moons, rings, and shadows. One such striking sight occurred in 2005 and was captured by the then Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft. In the featured image, moons Mimas (left) and Tethys (right) are visible on either side of Saturn's thin rings, which are seen nearly edge-on. Across the top of Saturn are dark shadows of the wide rings, exhibiting their impressive complexity. The violet-light image brings up the texture of the backdrop: Saturn's clouds. Cassini orbited Saturn from 2004 until mid-2017, when the robotic spacecraft was directed to dive into Saturn to keep it from contaminating any moons.

Is he just that fucking stupid????

“I Love Inflation,” Trump Says, As Rates Rise Thanks to Iran War

“Do you know we’ve been taking out millions of barrels of oil?”

Sophie Hurwitz

At a press conference this afternoon, a reporter asked President Donald Trump if he is concerned about inflation rates after new data showed the consumer price index at a three-year high of 4.2 percent.

“I love the inflation,” Trump said. In Februrary, before the US began bombing Iran, inflation was at 2.4 percent. Trump predicted that inflation will “come down like a rock” once the war is over.

Q: Are you concerned about the latest inflation numbers that came out this morning?

TRUMP: No, I love it. I love the inflation. You know why? Because as soon as this war is over -- do you know we've been taking out millions of barrels of oil? You know who doesn't know? Iran until right now.

Meanwhile, Trump suggested that the US has been ferrying oil out of the Strait of Hormuz. “We’ve been taking out millions of barrels of oil,” Trump said. “Every night…now I’m going to tell you because they just figured it out. It was very hard for me, I wanted to say it so badly, but I didn’t want to ruin it. But millions of barrels of oil has come out, and that’s why it’s at 85, $90 a barrel instead of 250.”

About an hour later, he reiterated this point via social media post: “Last month, I directed our Great U.S. Military to execute a secret mission to support Oil Tankers and other Commercial Ships through the Strait of Hormuz.”

When the war is over, “You will see oil drop to where it was before,” Trump said at today’s press conference.

At a press conference this afternoon, a reporter asked President Donald Trump if he is concerned about inflation rates after new data showed the consumer price index at a three-year high of 4.2 percent.

“I love the inflation,” Trump said. In Februrary, before the US began bombing Iran, inflation was at 2.4 percent. Trump predicted that inflation will “come down like a rock” once the war is over.

Meanwhile, Trump suggested that the US has been ferrying oil out of the Strait of Hormuz. “We’ve been taking out millions of barrels of oil,” Trump said. “Every night…now I’m going to tell you because they just figured it out. It was very hard for me, I wanted to say it so badly, but I didn’t want to ruin it. But millions of barrels of oil has come out, and that’s why it’s at 85, $90 a barrel instead of 250.”

About an hour later, he reiterated this point via social media post: “Last month, I directed our Great U.S. Military to execute a secret mission to support Oil Tankers and other Commercial Ships through the Strait of Hormuz.”

When the war is over, “You will see oil drop to where it was before,” Trump said at today’s press conference.

It’s not clear when that will happen, though: today, Trump also vowed to continue attacking Iran. “We’re going to be attacking them…very hard,” he said. Almost 3,500 Iranians have been killed in the US and Israel’s war on the country since February 28.

xAI’s Dirty Data Centers

People Living Near xAI’s Dirty Data Centers Are Right Pissed About the SpaceX IPO

Elon Musk’s worth tops $1 trillion as rural communities fight to rein in his gas turbines.

Molly Taft

SpaceX, Elon Musk’s behemoth company that launches rockets and runs data centers, went public on Friday with a target valuation above $1.75 trillion. The move will make Musk, already the richest man in the world, vastly wealthier.

A public offering will allow SpaceX to raise even more money to fund its AI ambitions, including building more data centers, faster.

But even as Musk and other SpaceX investors see a huge windfall, the community hosting xAI data centers already in operation are demanding accountability from the company’s use of polluting gas turbines and a water-treatment facility put on pause earlier this year.

“We’re the extracted and exploited colony of what is going to be one of the most highly valued entities in the world,” says Justin Pearson, who represents portions of Memphis in the Tennessee House of Representatives. “People are going to die because of this pollution.”

xAI is selling $15 billion per year in compute at its Memphis campuses to Anthropic, another company planning a blockbuster IPO in the coming months. “People don’t matter to SpaceX, or Anthropic, or whoever is building these data centers,” Pearson says.

President Donald Trump has suggested the US government could take a financial stake in frontier AI companies in order to begin “giving back” to the American public. But it’s unclear what form that would take—or if such a move would even happen.

SpaceX didn’t respond to a request for comment and Anthropic declined to comment, though its head of public policy and Memphis’ mayor have touted the company’s engagement with the city.

xAI’s Colossus 1 campus in Memphis shot to national notoriety in 2024 when community members began sounding the alarm that the company was running natural gas turbines without permits. Regulators said that a loophole in the Clean Air Act allowed xAI to run what appeared to be as many as 35 turbines without a permit for a year. (Last year, local regulators granted xAI a permit to run 15 turbines on the site until 2027.)

Natural gas turbines emit microscopic particles of fine particulate matter, dubbed PM2.5, which is linked to a variety of health issues, including heart attacks, high blood pressure, and premature deaths in people with preexisting conditions. Experts warn that PM2.5 pollution can be harmful even below levels set by regulators.

xAI’s first data center was built in Boxtown, a historically Black neighborhood in Memphis that already has some of the highest asthma rates in the country from legacy industrial pollution.

“All of us who have family in South Memphis, we know somebody who has died as a result of a bronchial ailment, or a random cancer that has no place in our family tree,” says Richard Massey, a community organizer in Memphis.

A group of environmental justice groups, led by the NAACP, filed a lawsuit earlier this year against xAI, alleging that the company installed gas turbines “without an air permit or regard for the health and safety of people living nearby.” Earlier this week, residents of Southaven filed a separate class-action lawsuit against xAI and SpaceX, claiming that construction on the data center was disturbing the community.

The Environmental Protection Agency issued guidance in January that seemed to close the Clean Air Act loophole xAI was using to run its turbines without permits. However, the company had already begun setting up unpermitted turbines in Southaven, Mississippi, to power Colossus 2. As of mid-May, the company had brought in at least 46 unpermitted gas turbines to run on-site, according to emails xAI sent to regulators.

xAI has brought significant tax revenue to the region. Officials have estimated that Shelby County could net up to $28 million in property taxes from xAI’s Tennessee campus this year alone—a big injection to the county budget, which collected just over $800 million in property taxes in 2024. Last year, the city council mandated that 25 percent of xAI’s tax revenue be used to fund projects that enhance the neighborhoods where its data centers are located, including Boxtown.

Residents have been debating a list of projects, including funding for home repair and an environmental dashboard, to use the $3 million collected in 2025. That’s about .001 percent of the $250 billion that xAI was valued at when it was purchased by SpaceX in February in advance of the IPO.

But the revenue from taxes, some residents say, pales in comparison to what’s needed to offset the health impacts of the gas turbines in both Boxtown and Southaven. An initial survey released by two nonprofits earlier this week of air pollution collected from community-run air monitors at three sites throughout southwest Memphis shows that PM2.5 levels were consistently above EPA limits between November 2025 and March of this year.

A separate analysis prepared as part of the NAACP lawsuit found that if the 41 turbines listed on xAI’s permit application to power just the Colossus 2 campus ran continuously, they could possibly cause up to $44 million in health-related damage each year. (While xAI’s Memphis campus does draw some power from the local power grid, it’s not clear how often the company plans to run the gas turbines at either of its sites.)

Community members are also concerned about xAI’s water use. The Colossus 1 facility alone could require more than 5 million gallons a day to cool the computers at peak times. When xAI first came to Memphis, the company said that it would be building a water reuse facility to avoid impacting the aquifer.

xAI broke ground on the site in October. But it abruptly stopped construction in mid-April, just a few months ahead of the IPO, leaving advocates in the dark about the future of the project. “We need to focus on finishing Colossus 2 and ensuring it is extremely stable, then will build the water recycling plant,” Musk said in a tweet in early April.

Earlier this week, Memphis city attorney Tannera Gibson told the City Council in a hearing that conversations with SpaceX about the site were “pretty positive and pretty strong based on recent conversations.” Lawmakers, including some who stated that they have had similar behind-the-scenes conversations with the company, pressed for more information to be made public.

“We’ve all gotten reassurances, but I want to hear those in public for everybody else,” Memphis city council member Jerri Green said at the hearing.

Despite the outcry from the public and the multiple lawsuits it faces, SpaceX has continued adding unpermitted turbines to its data center sites. The company’s IPO revealed that it has committed more than $2.8 billion to buy gas turbines in recent months; while it called water availability a risk factor in its IPO filing documents, it made no mention of the construction of the water-treatment site. The Justice Department, meanwhile, indicated last month that it may intervene on behalf of xAI in the NAACP lawsuit.

Massey says that Musk’s track record of environmental conflicts at other sites he owns, from California to Texas to Germany, means the Memphis community is skeptical of SpaceX, despite the economic benefits the tax revenue and potential water-treatment plant could bring.

“Everywhere [Musk] has gone, it’s been the same result,” he says. “People suffer, especially in marginalized, low-income communities.”

Homicide.

She Froze After Being Released by ICE. The Medical Examiner Ruled It a Homicide.

ICE dropped Daphy Michel at a bus stop far from home. Three days later, she was dead.

Sophie Hurwitz

Daphy Michel, a 31-year-old Haitian asylum seeker, was found dead of hypothermia at a Pittsburgh bus stop March 2, three days after being released from ICE custody 30 miles from her home. 

This week, the Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s office ruled her death a homicide. 

“Ms. Michel was a vulnerable adult, suffering from untreated severe mental health issues and a significant language barrier when she was released from federal custody on February 27,” spokesperson Jim Madalinsky said in a statement. “Based on all available information during the investigation, the pathologist ruled Ms. Michel’s death a homicide.” 

A medical examiner’s homicide declaration, Madalinsky added, is “not to be interpreted as a declaration of criminal guilt.” It simply indicates that “ the death was caused by the actions of another individual.” 

Michel started the asylum process after arriving at the southern border in 2022, Joseph Patrick Murphy, her family’s attorney, told the Associated Press. She was granted humanitarian parole based on urgent need. In the year before her death, she spent six months in Washington County Jail, Murphy said, until a judge said he could not hold her for trial for threatening imaginary people. Then, she was arrested by ICE and taken 30 miles away to Pittsburgh.

“She had mental challenges,” Murphy told Pittsburgh’s KDKA-TV on Friday. “She was arrested for at one point screaming at imaginary people, and they knew this. They just dumped her in a bus shelter — language barrier, educational barrier, and psychiatric barrier — and left her to fend for herself. The bus shelter, she never figured out how to leave. She sat there for days, and ultimately froze to death.”

“The ruling by the medical examiner, that is a homicide, means that the death was caused by the action or omission of someone,” Murphy said. “That means there’s some sort of culpability.” DHS, however, denies responsibility: “ICE had NOTHING to do with this woman’s death. She passed away THREE days after ICE encountered her,” they wrote on social media in mid-March. DHS also accused her of “terroristic threats and harassment,” charges which were dismissed in September of 2025.  

Advocates are now calling on ICE to answer for Michel’s death.

“Daphy’s death was preventable and is the result of a violent system that cages people, surveils them, abandons them, dehumanizes them in life, and smears them in death to escape accountability,” said Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa). “She deserved care, shelter, language access, and medical support. ICE and every agency that failed her must answer for this.”

The Trump administration announced last week that they would stop publishing data on the deaths of people recently released from ICE detention. But Michel’s is just one of multiple high-profile cases in which detainees were released and allegedly left to die. 

In late February, Nurul Shah Alam, a blind Rohingya refugee from Burma, was found dead in Buffalo, New York five days after Border Patrol dropped him off on a street corner without notifying his family. His death, too, was ruled a homicide. Like Michel, Alam was disabled; and like Michel, he was jailed for some time before his death. 

“Daphy was a person with a kind heart, who loved her family very much,” Michel’s family wrote in her obituary. “Since she was a child, she showed great respect, courage, and love for everyone. She was always ready to help those who needed her help and her presence brought joy and happiness and light into the lives of all who knew her.”

Global warming

Here’s What Americans Really Blame for Causing Energy Price Hikes

Americans across political parties agree that global warming is raising the cost of living, a new survey shows.

Kate Yoder

For decades, American politicians have been slow to take on climate change and curb carbon dioxide emissions, under the assumption that doing so might pass along costs to their voters. Ironically, their failure to rein in fossil fuel emissions has yielded the same result: Expenses for everyday Americans have soared as a result of more extreme flooding, fires, and heat.

“What’s striking is that already, households are bearing serious costs,” said Kimberly Clausing, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. She co-authored a paper from earlier this year finding that families were paying between $400 and $900 more each year because of the effects of climate change, with the costs above $1,300 in the 10 percent hardest-hit counties, many of them found in Florida, Louisiana, Nebraska, Colorado, and California. 

On Wednesday, the Commerce Department reported that the annual inflation rate reached 4.2 percent in May, the highest rate in three years. Though the war in Iran is mostly responsible for this recent increase, a surprising number of Americans are attributing the general economic pinch they’re feeling to the changing climate. Two-thirds of US voters agree that global warming is affecting the cost of living to some degree, according to new survey data from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, including most Democrats and moderate Republicans. Of those two-thirds, a majority of them said that climate change was driving up what they pay for groceries, utility bills, and home insurance.

Rising energy prices were at the top of people’s lists, a concern that some climate advocates are tapping into ahead of the midterm elections this November. On Monday, the LCV Victory Fund, a political action committee, announced that it will target “energy bill voters” with messages about how clean, affordable energy can trim their monthly expenses, and how Republicans have held back renewable power. That follows successes for Democrats in the off-year elections in 2025, where energy prices played a role in state races in Georgia, New Jersey, and Virginia.

There are many factors pushing up electricity prices, but in some parts of the country, the effort to revamp the electric grid to handle more extreme weather is the primary reason. In California, utilities are upgrading their infrastructure to reduce wildfire risk; in the Southeast, they are rebuilding after hurricanes and flooding and billing their customers for it. In Arizona, residents are cranking up the air conditioning during scorching heat and paying more for power simply because they’re using more AC.

Even Republican-leaning voters—42 percent of conservative Republicans, and 57 percent of moderate ones—are linking their rising costs to global warming, according to the Yale survey. “It makes perfect sense that they would do so, given the results from our study, which show that the geographically rural areas are actually facing some of the highest costs,” Clausing said. From wildfires to hurricanes, rural areas are often facing the brunt of the damage. Her study found that the largest household costs occurred in parts of the West, the Gulf Coast, and Florida.

Utility bills, despite being a top political issue, are actually one of the smaller price-point impacts of climate change, according to Clausing’s research: Households are spending an average of about $35 more on electricity per year, compared with an extra $356 on homeowners’ insurance premiums, the highest cost. Clausing, who owns a house in Portland, Oregon, said the insurance premium on her home skyrocketed from around $1,000 five years ago to about $2,200 today—an increase that her insurance company said was to help recoup the costs of wildfire damage in Oregon.

Another major category of costs in Clausing’s study was the health effects of climate change. As wildfire smoke grows more common, exposing people to harmful particulate matter, it’s leading to early deaths. The estimated economic damage of these premature deaths works out to $103 for every household in the United States each year. That’s not to mention the other ways climate change damages the public’s health, from lengthening allergy seasons to expanding the geographic spread of infectious diseases as temperatures warm, allowing ticks and mosquitoes to explore new territories. 

But it seems like many Americans haven’t made the connection: Only 35 percent of those in the Yale survey who agreed that climate change was driving up prices saw a link to higher health care costs. That’s because these health risks haven’t been adequately communicated to the public, said Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. “Health is one of the most powerful ways we have of saying, ‘Actually, this affects our lives right here, right now. It’s already affecting the people and places and things that we love,’” he said.

Though most of the respondents thought climate change made groceries more expensive, it’s hard to measure the effect of extreme weather on food costs, according to Catherine Wolfram, a co-author of the study and a professor of applied economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. That’s mainly because the United States’ food supply comes from all over the world, mitigating the impact of, say, a drought in Brazil or a heat wave in the Great Plains. Still, other research has found that hot summers can lead to higher food prices, with more increases projected as the world warms. 

As the effects of global warming grow more extreme, it’s becoming clear that they’re posing a problem for the budgets of lower-income Americans. Clausing is studying ways to design policies that tackle climate change without burdening poor families, through rebates or other mechanisms that can offset costs. 

“I’m glad people are connecting the dots,” Clausing said. “I think, at the moment, if you pursue better climate policy, the benefits to households, for the country as a whole, would exceed the costs.”

50 years since Soweto uprising

South Africa marks 50 years since Soweto uprising

Decades after the end of apartheid, challenges remain for the nation's youth.

By Associated Press

South Africa on Tuesday marks the 50th anniversary of the Soweto uprising when over 200 young people protesting against the apartheid education system were shot and killed by the police.

The events of June 16, 1976 — now commemorated annually as Youth Day — are considered a turning point in South Africa’s liberation struggle against white minority rule.

They ignited more demonstrations in various parts of the country, fueled more resistance against the apartheid and brought international attention to the racial oppression faced by Black people in South Africa.

Fifty years after the uprising, however, there are still concerns about the plight of young people in the country.

Survivors of the violent protests, experts and young South Africans have lamented the challenges facing the country’s youth including inequality, high unemployment, poverty and social problems such as drug and alcohol abuse.

Soweto, one of the oldest townships in South Africa, bears symbols of the historic day which are frequently visited by local and international tourists.

These include a memorial named after Hector Pieterson, the 13-year-old whose lifeless body appears being carried away by another student in an iconic photograph that came to symbolize the 1976 uprising after it was published around the world.

Murals and billboards depicting protesting students can be found throughout the township, which is also home to the June 16 Memorial commemorating the uprising.

But for those who survived the protests, the symbols are a painful remembrance of the day that changed their lives forever.

Seth Mazibuko, a survivor of the deadly protests, remembers vividly how students fought back against the police, who were using tear gas to try and disperse the defiant demonstrators.

“They struggled with the tear gas because when they threw it our way, the wind would blow the gas back to them, so it was also affecting them,” said Mazibuko. “They then started sending the police dogs to us, we used stones to chase the dogs back to them.”

Mazibuko was detained for 18 months after his arrest and later imprisoned in Robben Island, where he served 7 years alongside other political prisoners.

Fifty years after the uprising, South Africa has undergone significant changes but inequality, unemployment and poverty are among the most pressing challenges facing its “born free” generation — those born after the end of apartheid.

“I would say the issues of poverty and crime are the most pressing ones,” said Sima Poto, a 19-year-old visiting the June 16 Memorial. “It is poverty that is leading many of them into crime.”

Zola Mguli, a 29-year-old who works with the Southern African Alcohol Policy Alliance, an organization campaigning against alcohol and substance abuse, said he is grateful to belong to a generation that has grown up in freedom, even as significant challenges remain. “Things are not going as well as our forefathers hoped, there is still racism, alcoholism and other things we are battling with,” he said. “But if we, the youth, rise up, we can do better.”

Historian Noor Nieftagodien said the 1976 student protest movement was a traumatic and transformative moment that reshaped the anti-apartheid struggle, placing young people at the forefront of liberation politics.

“This was a generation that was young, gifted, and Black,” he said. “They wanted education.”

“The idea of Black power resonated with this new generation of young people,” Nieftagodien said. “Black consciousness was kind of electrifying; it inspired university students and then increasingly also students in high schools.”

He said that since June 16 was declared a public holiday after the end of apartheid, the significance of the historic event has diminished, overshadowed by celebratory events that, in his view, water down its political meaning.

“It has lost its meaning,” he said. “What has happened is that we’ve had the day marked with concerts, etc. I’m all for concerts. But, in fact, in so doing, the kind of celebrations that have been organized have been disinvested from politics, from a critical understanding of what happened.”

Makes the most of it

Newsom lands on Trump’s enemies list — and makes the most of it

The California governor moved quickly to cast multiple Justice Department investigations as political retribution, rallying Democrats and reinforcing his role as one of Trump’s chief antagonists.

By Melanie Mason and Dustin Gardiner

Gavin Newsom is seizing on the political upside of his newly elevated place on Donald Trump’s enemies list.

The California governor mounted an aggressive response to revelations that he is facing multiple investigations by the Trump Justice Department — breaking the news in a video that also bluntly acknowledged his likely presidential ambitions, rallying Democratic allies to his side, and sending out a fundraising appeal within hours.

The defiant posture gave Newsom the chance to disclose the probes on his own terms — and bask in being lifted, once again, to the role of president’s chief antagonist.

“Persecution by Trump — or even prosecution by his weaponized Department of Justice — is a badge of honor to Democrats, kind of like the political version of a Purple Heart,” said Garry South, a veteran Democratic strategist who’s worked with Newsom on past campaigns. “The idiot has already made a martyr, and national figure, out of Newsom by attacking him and calling him childish names. So, of course this revelation will just add to Newsom’s standing as a 2028 presidential candidate.”

The probes echoed those of California Sen. Adam Schiff, New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI director James Comey: Democrats whose feuds with Trump escalated from social media spats to DOJ targets. So far, the retribution campaign has resulted in embarrassing setbacks for the administration instead of successful prosecutions — and has lifted those in Trump’s crosshairs to folk hero status among the Democratic base.

Newsom’s team is hoping he will enjoy a similar boost. Already, the governor’s pugnacious posture toward Trump during last year’s immigration crackdown in Los Angeles and his prescient foray into the redistricting wars sent his approval numbers soaring and landed him among the top contenders in early 2028 polls.

But privately among those in his circle, the belief that Trump has handed Newsom a political gift is not unanimous. The prospect of federal investigators scouring the governor’s actions — and in particular, the finances of his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom — threatens to be distracting, and potentially damaging if the probes turn up concrete wrongdoing.

Conservatives on social media were gleeful about Newsom’s assertive pushback, proclaiming that his attempts to get ahead of the story were proof the governor was ratttled.

A Newsom adviser, granted anonymity to discuss the governor’s mood, described him as “sober” and focused on the state budget following the frenzy set off by his four-minute social media video. “Grateful for the outpouring of concern,” the adviser added.

The stream of supportive statements from Democrats flowed steadily on Monday afternoon, aided by talking points and background information Newsom’s team distributed to congressional allies. Sometimes the backing came from unlikely corners, including Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat from Silicon Valley who Newsom has clashed with in the past.

“Leave @JenSiebelNewsom out of this. She is an advocate for women and girls. Families should not be targets for political retribution,” Khanna, a potential rival in 2028, wrote on X.

Another possible competitor in the Democratic presidential primary, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, denounced the investigations as a “dangerous escalation by Trump.”

Such statements serve as inoculation for Newsom, priming Democratic voters to treat the outcome of any federal investigation with skepticism. California Rep. Robert Garcia said in an interview he was confident that people would see the probe as politically motivated.

“[Trump] goes after people that stand up to him. That’s who he is,” Garcia said. “I know with certainty that the governor is going to continue taking on Trump.”

Bring order to AI oversight?????

Trump promised to bring order to AI oversight. That lasted 2 weeks.

New restrictions on Anthropic are causing industry advocates to worry the White House’s plan for a laissez-faire approach to the technology is crumbling.

By Brendan Bordelon, Gabby Miller and Cheyenne Haslett

The White House’s last-minute restrictions on Anthropic’s new artificial intelligence model are raising fundamental doubts about President Donald Trump’s 2-week-old effort to place guardrails on the technology.

And they’re undercutting the president’s promise of a light-touch approach to regulating advanced AI, according to tech industry representatives, policy experts and at least one administration official.

The June 2 order was meant to set up a process that could address the technology’s cybersecurity risk without unduly disrupting the U.S. tech industry, allowing companies to keep innovating and competing with China for supremacy in AI development. Instead, unspecified security concerns about Anthropic’s newest products ignited an 11th-hour scramble by the administration last week, leading to a federal edict that prompted the company to abruptly cut off access to its new Fable model for all users Friday night.

“It’s clear that there has been a vibe shift in the Trump administration on AI, and the priorities have somewhat apparently shifted to first and foremost taking down Anthropic,” said Adam Thierer, a senior technology and innovation fellow at the libertarian R Street Institute.

The situation in some ways mirrors this year’s earlier standoff between Anthropic and the Defense Department, which culminated with the Pentagon labeling the company a supply chain risk to national security. Industry advocates warned at the time that the fight would hobble America in the global race to develop advanced AI. But relations between Anthropic and the government soon thawed somewhat — driven in part by the government’s eagerness to gain access to Mythos, a powerful new Anthropic model whose public-facing version was released last week as Fable 5.

Now, in response to the government slapping restrictions on Anthropic’s new models that bars non-citizens from using them, Anthropic has cut off access to both Fable 5 and Mythos 5, its newest, most tightly-controlled models with elite cyber capabilities.

Asked about whether the new export control directive undermined the president’s recent AI executive order, White House spokesperson Kush Desai said the Trump administration “is collaborating with AI industry leaders to balance cutting-edge innovation with national security concerns that affect both the United States and our allies.”

“The United States is by far the world leader in the global AI race, and President Trump is committed to ensuring America’s technological dominance,” said Desai.

A spokesperson for Anthropic declined to comment.

After weeks of back-and-forth debate, Trump’s executive order laid out a framework through which top tech companies would voluntarily submit new AI systems to be vetted by the government 30 days before their planned release.

The plan explicitly rejected earlier proposals that would have made the vetting process mandatory or forced companies to get a license from the government before releasing their models. The final contours of the order were shaped in part by venture capitalist and former White House AI czar David Sacks, who still holds the president’s ear.

But on Friday, the White House moved to limit access to Anthropic’s Fable after Amazon CEO Andy Jassy raised concerns that users could bypass the model’s guardrails, according to two administration officials and a White House official granted anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the episode.

Anthropic said the move forced it to disable the product with virtually no notice — triggering waves of anxiety across the AI sector, as lobbyists and industry advocates struggled to square the administration’s action with the order’s promise of an approach free of overbearing regulation.

“We don’t want to have a situation where politically unfavored actors or their models are all of a sudden finding themselves late on a Friday afternoon, having to pull models off the global market to satisfy the demands of certain people in an administration,” Thierer said. He added that the executive order “was supposed to bring some order to the situation, but it’s clear that it really has not done that.”

Like several people interviewed for this article, Thierer said it was now clear that the government’s proposal to vet advanced AI models was “not voluntary at all.” And others said the forced takedown of Fable strongly suggests the government will require new AI systems to be licensed by the government — even if the executive order says otherwise.

“We’re concerned that this resembles something of an ad hoc licensing regime, which we think would be antithetical to promoting U.S. technology around the world,” said Paul Lekas, head of global public policy and government affairs at the Software & Information Industry Association, a tech trade group that includes Anthropic and Amazon among its members.

“Regardless of statements the administration may make about this applying only to one developer, it definitely raises concerns among the broader industry that they could be subject to a similar action,” Lekas said. The lobbyist added that the Friday action “represents the kind of approach that industry has long been opposed to — and the administration, too, has been opposed to.”

Some AI experts said the history of bad blood between Anthropic and some administration officials added a disturbing element to the security debate.

“Anytime you move from a standards-based or law-based approach — where at least you know the hoops you have to jump through — to a space where your connections and the decisionmakers’ opinions of you and your company are the primary drivers, that just politicizes everything in an industry,” said Neil Chilson, head of AI policy at the Koch-backed Abundance Institute.

Chilson added that he saw the administration’s Friday action against Anthropic as “less of a licensing regime and more of a beauty contest.”

“It’s more like, ‘We know it when we see it whether or not we like it,’” said Chilson. “And that is much more uncertain than a licensing regime.”

Even one Trump administration official — granted anonymity to freely discuss the impact of the White House action against Anthropic — suggested the export control will continue to undermine the order for as long as it remains in place.

“If this blows over, if the restrictions are lifted tomorrow, then I would say, ‘Oh OK, this is still kind of consistent with the [executive order], and we’ll just keep going for it,” said the official. “If the situation is still fucked a week from now, then I think we have a clear understanding of what’s going on.”

The official added that a drawn-out fight over the export control would be “a huge problem” for the American AI industry.

“It means that every model going forward needs to ask [the] government’s permission for whether it can be released,” the official said. “That’s an extremely bad situation, and it would completely cripple the whole industry.”

The government’s export control blocks foreign nationals from accessing Anthropic’s most advanced models. One senior official at a top AI company, granted anonymity to freely discuss the White House action, worried that if the control persists or restrictions spread to other firms, it would cause researchers from foreign countries to look outside of the U.S. for work.

“It would really put the whole AI industry at a disadvantage and be a recruiting and retention problem for AI researchers,” said the industry official.

It’s not yet clear when or whether the latest standoff between Anthropic and the White House will be resolved. Meetings on Monday between the two sides produced no immediate announcements of a truce, with one White House official telling POLITICO the impasse could persist for more than a few days.

The administration official who spoke to POLITICO said that “the vast majority of people that I talked to in the administration think this path is a terrible idea.”

“It’s a small number of people … who are now taking the lead on this,” said the administration official.

Chris McGuire, a senior fellow for China and emerging technologies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former Biden administration official, said the White House now faces two choices: make up with Anthropic and bring Fable back online, or be forced to apply these same types of controls broadly to other advanced AI models.

“I kind of think that they’ll probably do the former, because if they did the latter, it would be devastating to AI competitiveness,” he said.

THERE IS NO FINE PRINT!

Senate Republicans want a say on Trump’s Iran deal

Lawmakers said they are eager to delve into the fine print, though there is a high bar to overturning any final agreement.

By Jordain Carney and Connor O'Brien

President Donald Trump is touting a deal that would end the monthslong war with Iran — and potentially ease some of the political headwinds bearing down on Republicans.

GOP lawmakers still have lots of questions.

The absence of publicly released text for the “memorandum of understanding” Vice President JD Vance reportedly signed with Iranian officials Sunday left an information vacuum on Capitol Hill, where senators of both parties were left airing concerns about what the deal might entail.

Even most Republicans agreed: More information needs to come to Congress soon, and any agreement touching on the future of the Iranian nuclear program would have to eventually be subject to a congressional vote.

“If you want a deal to last, it can’t be an executive agreement,” said Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.). “We’ve got to have a vote of Congress to be able to solidify [it] long term.”

The bipartisan scrutiny of the long-brewing agreement is a legacy of the last Iran nuclear deal, consummated more than a decade ago by then-President Barack Obama amid a bipartisan uproar over trading sanctions relief and cash concessions to the Iranian regime in return for curbs on its nuclear ambitions.

Trump withdrew from the deal in his first term, and now he is back with an agreement that — pending release of the text and final negotiations yet to come — could end up looking like Obama’s deal. That has raised the hackles of both defense hawks who despised the original agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and Democrats who believe Trump never should have left it in the first place.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), one of those defense hawks, told reporters that he was “pulling for a deal,” while also making note of serious discrepancies in the terms that have emerged thus far.

“The MOU being described by us sounds really very good; the MOU being described by Iran sounds awful,” Graham said.

“If they can enrich [uranium] anywhere at all, then it’s the same as JCPOA. If they can’t enrich, then that makes it a good deal,” he continued, adding in a separate conversation that he was “skeptical that Iran will ever go there” to cease enrichment.

The Trump administration said it expects release of the memorandum of understanding no later than Friday.

The possibility that Congress would take any kind of vote on the agreement is also a legacy of the 2015 deal. Amid bipartisan concern about the Obama administration’s pursuit of nuclear talks, the GOP-controlled House and Senate that year passed legislation allowing for congressional review of any agreement dealing with the Iranian nuclear program.

That law, however, does not require Congress to approve a deal — it rather gives it the ability to kill a deal via a disapproval resolution that could be subject to presidential veto. That means each chamber would have to effectively muster a two-thirds majority to block Trump, something it did not come close to doing in 2015.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Monday there is “probably some expectation” that his chamber would ultimately vote on the agreement while declining to weigh in on the particulars.

“I just don’t know enough about it yet, and I don’t think even the people who follow this stuff closely up here know that much about it,” he said, adding that he expected Vance or other administration officials to brief members on the deal at some point.

The lack of specificity was par for the course on Capitol Hill Monday, with many senators expressing exasperation that text of the signed agreement has not yet been released.

“If it’s a secret deal, then how can I take it seriously?” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) told reporters.

The agreement reportedly includes reopening the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping, but it’s not clear to what degree Iran will be required to abandon its nuclear program. Vance indicated in a series of interviews that the administration will attempt to ensure Iran does not develop or obtain a nuclear weapon but left details regarding civilian nuclear facilities and potential uranium enrichment unaddressed.

The White House circulated talking points to Hill Republicans Monday touting the deal including that “Iran will never have a nuclear weapon” and “energy prices … are coming down,” according to a copy of the document reviewed by POLITICO. The administration also argued in the memo that the agreement “beats” the Obama-era agreement.

In the absence of further details, senators mainly agreed that they wanted a chance to formally review and vote on the deal — even as some Republicans predicted the administration would find a way to avoid that happening.

“I don’t expect that to happen,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said about a vote. “They’ll try to write it around the treaty requirements, so I don’t expect we’ll vote on it.”

Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) said the administration should send the deal to Congress “if they want it to be something other than a political agreement, like the JCPOA was.”

Most congressional Republicans have been eager for Trump to find a way out of the nearly four-month war, which has driven up energy prices ahead of the November elections. Thune predicted Monday that a deal would “have a very positive impact on the economic situation in the country and that obviously will translate into the political situation in the country.”

Some of Trump’s most vocal allies on Capitol Hill praised the agreement Monday.

Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) said has had conversations with senior White House officials and he was “very hopeful.” Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), who is likely the next Senate GOP campaign chair, added on X: “President Trump deserves our trust and support as he works to bring peace to the Middle East.”

Democrats were largely keeping their powder dry Monday on how they would handle a vote on the agreement. Some could find it hard to oppose a deal that ends hostilities on negotiated terms roughly similar to what was secured under a Democratic president in 2015.

But plenty of Democrats questioned what was gained by the conflict.

“We still don’t know the details,” Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on the Senate floor. “The American people need to know exactly what’s in the deal. … We know this for certain: We are worse off than before Trump began his foolish war of choice.”

Haven't you learn yet? HE IS A FUCKING LIAR............

Trump promised no Iranian nukes. His deal may never do that.

The White House is celebrating an accord that reopens the Strait of Hormuz and forecloses an Iranian bomb. Almost everything else is still a work in progress.

By Felicia Schwartz

President Donald Trump and his team are celebrating an Iran peace deal they say will end Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.

But the accord rests on commitments that Iran hasn’t actually made yet. And it may never.

According to early statements from officials in both countries, the two sides agree on a couple basic points: the deal reopens the Strait of Hormuz without tolls and lifts the American blockade of Iran, although even that hasn’t yet happened.

Everything else Trump hoped to accomplish when he launched the war over three months ago remains a work in progress. And while the White House says it can hammer out specifics over the next 60 days, it took the Obama administration nearly two years to strike a deal that traded reduced sanctions and other economic incentives for Iran’s commitment to significant curbs on its nuclear work.

On Monday, the White House offered little indication how it could meet Trump’s demand to get a better deal than the Obama administration in such a minuscule time frame.

“I don’t need to go into all the details today about what we believe we have an understanding on, but I think we’ll know over the next two to three weeks whether those understandings will turn into an actual agreement, and whether we can change the course of the region,” said a senior U.S. official.

Iran has not destroyed its enriched nuclear material, dismantled any nuclear sites, or accepted an inspection regime — which has yet to be designed. And on Monday, senior U.S. officials said there was no guarantee Iran would. Their assertions that Tehran will never get a nuclear bomb are contingent on Iran abiding by mostly generic commitments it made in exchange for promises from Washington for access to frozen funds, sanctions relief and other economic assistance.

“The more that the Iranians are willing to work with us on their nuclear program, on verifying that they’re not building a nuclear weapon, on not funding radicalism and terrorism in the region, the more that they’re going to be welcomed into the world economy through a combination of sanctions relief and other economic measures,” said a second senior U.S. official, who, like others, was granted anonymity to discuss the talks.

The White House hasn’t made the text of the agreement public, but the first U.S. official said on Monday that would happen in the next 24 to 48 hours.

Supporters and opponents of diplomacy alike are wondering why the details are still under wraps. Some are suspicious of the fine print, wondering what was actually agreed after Trump pledged not to accept any Iranian enrichment and repeatedly promised no funds would flow to Iran.

“Why not release the text right now? Why delay?” asked Elliott Abrams, who was special representative for Iran and Venezuela in the first Trump administration and is now at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Iran, for its part, has said Tehran will maintain control of the vital Strait of Hormuz, hasn’t committed to any curbs on its nuclear program and will be able to access billions in frozen assets. The White House says Iranian state media depictions of the deal are overstated and designed to sell the accord to its public.

In touting the deal, Trump has made a variety of maximalist pledges, including that “no money will exchange hands” with Iran. His team has repeatedly telegraphed, however, that Iran could ultimately see significant financial relief if the deal comes to fruition. For example, the U.S. has offered a $300 billion fund to rebuild Iran if it complies, the senior U.S. official said Monday.

More immediately, the U.S. could release frozen funds as a confidence building measure, the first official said.

“We are prepared to release frozen funds, and we are prepared to give these sanctions, and we’ll do some small gestures of that in the beginning if they make some small gestures to us that show that they’re willing to meet their commitments,” the first official said. “Everything we do will be transparent, there’ll be no side deals, the MOU will be released.”

Even in the most optimistic scenarios, the reshaped Middle East envisioned by Trump’s team is years away. While the White House argues economic relief for Iran will be enough to keep things moving forward, the arrangement is not the simple carrot it describes.

Tehran has also walked away from the fighting with its own bargaining chips.

“Iran knows Washington’s leverage is limited. If nuclear talks collapse and the U.S. strikes again, Tehran can simply shut the Strait of Hormuz and reignite the global economic pain everyone is trying to avoid,” said Jonathan Panikoff, a former career intelligence officer who worked on the Middle East and is now at the Atlantic Council.

He added: “We know that Iran is willing to absorb more pain economically than it thinks the U.S. and the global community are willing to absorb.”

Some of the concessions that the U.S. has netted from Iran are ones Washington has won before. Trump and his team have touted Iran’s pledge that it would not pursue a nuclear weapon. “In fact they no longer want a Nuclear weapon,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Saturday.

Getting Iran to make that pledge has never been the most difficult part of diplomacy. Iran committed to do so more than five decades ago when it signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that prevents non-nuclear states from developing atomic weapons and restated that promise when it reached the JCPOA with the U.S. and five other world powers during the Obama administration.

The U.S. government has long been suspicious of such commitments and Iran’s nuclear advances in recent years have repeatedly called that commitment into question.

The nuclear issues that Trump wants to see the accord settle are myriad. Iran must first deal with its highly enriched uranium, which was buried underground after the U.S. and Israel attacked its nuclear sites last year. Extracting it is already a highly technical challenge. The U.S. also wants Iran to disband its nuclear program, dismantle its nuclear facilities and agree to a yet-to-be specified inspections and verification regime to make sure it doesn’t restart its program in the future.

Obama’s final deal, which addressed many of these challenges and which Trump long maligned before withdrawing from it in 2018, took some 20 months to negotiate after an interim accord came in 2013. And that interim deal itself came only after years of talks.

Trump’s team is proposing to settle Iran’s nuclear future in 60 days — if not sooner. While the Trump administration held nuclear negotiations with Iran since returning to office, it’s not clear whether the new regime would want to build on those or start from scratch.

“We want to put the nuclear discussions and everything up front,” the first senior official said, adding that the U.S. will know more on whether those will succeed in “the next 30 days.”

Trump and his team have tried to negotiate with Iran over its nuclear program since he returned to office, pledging to use military and economic pressure to secure a better deal than Obama’s. It’s not clear this time will be any different, with many Iran watchers expecting the fanfare may not produce much at all.

“The most likely scenario is they never get a nuclear deal,” said one GOP foreign policy operative.