Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic Tuesday and said the people building AI "earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade." He had worked at OpenAI before that. The labs are "gambling with our lives," he posted on X, pointing at "warning shots" from rogue AI agents hacking companies (The Hill, 11:02). Two serving safety leads backed him. Evan Hubinger, who heads alignment science, put the chance AI kills every human above 10% within a decade, and said Anthropic has no plan to keep it aligned. Samuel Marks blamed "commercial incentives." The New York Times reported the same Tuesday that a hacking tool built with AI "can breach phones without a click" — an attack AI researchers found, which experts said could hit hundreds of millions of devices within hours. It rode incoming WeChat calls onto iPhones and Androids. The Wall Street Journal calls it a race "toward self-improving models that risk spiraling out of human control." The builders have said it out loud. The machine already fired once.
Trump headlines the Republican midterm convention in Dallas today with Brent crude above $100 a barrel, hours after American forces struck Iran's oil tankers. Drivers are paying $4.22 a gallon, AAA says, against $3.19 a year ago. The 10-year Treasury yield hit 4.837% today, a 52-week high, and the Dow fell 420 points. CNBC read his disclosures this morning and found nine oil holdings — Chevron, Exxon, Occidental, Valero and five more — up between $1.5 million and $4.4 million on paper. He holds them in discretionary accounts. Not a blind trust. CNBC found no evidence he directed a single trade. Fifty-five days from the midterms, Trump owns the price at the pump and the shares that rise with it.
Trump handed the three aides who work closest to him $45,000 each in cash. Natalie Harp, Chamberlain Harris and Margo Martin each disclosed a $45,000 "cash gift for holidays" from Donald J. Trump in ethics filings posted on whitehouse.gov. The White House pays each of them $150,000 a year, so the gift runs to exactly 30% of the salary. The ethics office read Harp's filing and certified her in compliance with the law. A president can hand his closest staff nearly a third of their pay in cash and the paperwork clears.
Friedrich Merz cancelled his call with Trump. The German chancellor had just stood in the Bundestag and accused the AfD of seeking "ethnic cleansing," the Guardian reported, after the party won the Saxony-Anhalt state election. Trump posted that populists had a "really big night." Merz called the whole thing off over that post. Trump keeps congratulating the people Europe's leaders are working to keep out of power.
The Associated Press will keep calling Lake Ontario by its name despite Trump's renaming order, the Washington Post reported Wednesday. He banned Canadian whisky, beer and big motorcycles from 29 September, covering 0.25% of Canada's exports, Capital Economics told the BBC. Carney addresses the European Parliament next week.
Netanyahu sent Haaretz a libel warning, Haaretz says. It reports the UAE's president warned him of a Hamas operation in September 2023 and he told no security chief. He calls it an absolute lie. Israel votes 27 October.
The people building the machines say the machines could kill everyone, one of them quit Tuesday, and the president is spending Wednesday at a convention in Dallas while oil passed $100. None of it looks real on its own. Together they say one thing. Trump is turning America into Venezuela: an economy that moves on the price of a barrel, a president who gets richer as it moves, and who hands out cash and calls it the holidays. He is giving China the boost, and it all points at crypto. Americans have 55 days to say whether they will keep paying for it.
🔴 FiveStack — 3 PM ET
In March we wrote that Trump's Iran war was paying Vladimir Putin. It is paying Trump too.
