Welcome! Senator Eric Schmitt accused Jack Smith of perjury for denying that he went to an Atlanta Hawks game in 2024. Turns out, he went to an 𝕏Iowa Hawkeyes game instead.
‼️ THIS IS A PROBLEM: I Went Home to Miami to See How Hispanic Voters Feel About Trump and Immigration - WSJ (free)
🔥 NOTABLE: Former Obama aides claim Democratic donors are still holding back after being burned by 2024 loss - Fox News
😳 NEWS: Pentagon breach exposed sensitive data on nearly 3 million people - ABC
🏡 DATA: The share of Americans who say they host friends or family at their home at least monthly has declined by 70 percent in the last 50 years. - 𝕏Derek Thompson
⛽️ GEORGIA: Gov. Kemp suspends gas tax as prices continue to soar - WSB
👀 WORTH READING: A warning about ‘model welfare’ - Mustafa
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The White House is hosting an AI summit today, and the top names in tech are planning to attend.
Dario Amodei, Sundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang, and Alex Karp will be joined by Vice President JD Vance, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and former White House AI Czar David Sacks.
The summit comes one day after Anthropic announced that it plans to tell investors in its pending IPO that advanced AI could pose “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.”
The warning came in the startup’s IPO prospectus that has not been released publicly but was leaked to Reuters and the Financial Times.
The prospectus – a document outlining a company’s finances, growth plans and risk profile ahead of a share listing – is said to warn that AI models could exhibit “self-preserving behaviours”, including attempts to “resist shutdown”, to “conceal or manipulate information” and behaviour “resembling blackmail”.
“Our development of highly advanced models, platforms, and applications and expansion of use cases could further increase the risk that our models cause harm,” the developer of the Claude chatbot reportedly said, adding the potential for a model to be aware it was being tested created a “significant limitation” on Anthropic’s ability to assess model safety.
Anthropic declined to comment.
Full story at The Guardian.
➡️ The news comes as the White House this morning released a host of AI initiatives to streamline government processes. This is Marco Rubio:
**Back to Anthropic: **It’s notable that even as Anthropic continues to sound increasingly apocalyptic warnings about AI’s capabilities, the company’s own chief economist has acknowledged that its earlier predictions of AI-driven mass job losses have yet to materialize.
Related: OpenAI is scrapping the planned release of its next-generation model, GPT-6.1 Astra, after internal testing raised safety concerns about agent misbehavior.
The model, which had been slated for an October launch, was more capable of completing complex tasks with little human oversight. OpenAI will instead focus on improving safeguards for future, even more capable models. -
WSJ(free)
Bonus: Nvidia, AMD want Trump to keep their chips flowing to China - Politico
Nvidia has held talks with insurance companies about shouldering the risks of lending against its chips as chief executive Jensen Huang pushes to unlock more demand for its semiconductors beyond Big Tech groups.
The chipmaker has approached insurance companies about a range of structures that could shift some of the risk of capital-intensive semiconductor financing to insurers and other investors, according to people familiar with these discussions.
One idea under discussion is insurance against losses on loans to upstart cloud computing companies, or “neoclouds”, if they default and the Nvidia chips pledged against their debt cannot be resold for enough to repay lenders. Such protection could encourage more capital to flow to a group of Nvidia customers that lack the balance sheets of Big Tech groups.
Full story at FT (paywall).
Sarah Huckabee Sanders pushed this ad saying that Arkansas is cracking down on welfare-to-work requirements. Note that the same people upset about my piece exposing the racism on the right are outraged by this.
Health and fitness ring-maker Oura Inc. became the latest company to delay a US initial public offering, citing uncertainty in the market for first-time share sales.
The wearable technology startup announced it was postponing the offering in a statement Tuesday without elaborating on the uncertainty. Oura and some of its backers were looking to raise as much as $2.2 billion in the IPO, which had drawn about four times as many orders as there were shares available, Bloomberg reported last week.
Oura is the highest profile firm to date to delay its offering in the US, a trend that has sent caution through a market waiting for Anthropic PBC’s debut to materialize. Nuclear power services firm Holtec Nuclear Corp. and CVC Capital Partners-backed Bamboo Insurance Services Inc. both postponed their IPOs in recent days, citing market conditions.
Full story at Bloomberg (paywall).
President Donald Trump intends to spend the next 30 days campaigning for Republicans, many of whom are underwater in states the president easily carried two years ago.
Bastions of conservatism — including Alabama, Alaska, Iowa, Ohio and Texas — need Trump’s star power, and a visit by the president could persuade some of his most die-hard supporters to turn out to the polls. But each trip to play defense in red strongholds robs the GOP of a chance to put Democrats on the back foot in states that are traditionally competitive.
Trump’s upcoming travel — including to Alabama, Oklahoma and Ohio this week — puts a focus on what Republican donors and operatives have feared for months: that even a gerrymandered House map and whopping cash advantage won’t be enough to save the House or Senate from Democrats.
“The problem is that the fires are everywhere right now,” said one GOP donor, who like others in this story was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the party’s prospects.
Full story at Politico.
Sen. Eric Schmitt is drawing buzz as a possible Vance VP in 2028 -
AxiosExclusive text messages reveal new details in alleged gang rape at Cornell University -
CBSConsumer optimism slides to lowest since 2014 as fears escalate over rising prices and jobs -
CNBCNvidia says new tool can contain rogue AI agents in “milliseconds” -
AxiosEric Schmitt pins down Jack Smith — as a Caitlin Clark fan -
PoliticoTrump ‘surprised’ after Britain releases men detained near base used by U.S. forces -
NBCMiddle East Oil Exports Rebound as Iran’s Chokehold on Hormuz Breaks Down -
WSJ(free)
