https://archive.li/yLnGK

One night in April, a leader of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic treated a group of religious thinkers to dinner at a high-end tasting menu restaurant in San Francisco after a long day.

For months, Anthropic has been hosting private meetings like this one, shuttling in dozens of religious scholars from across the world, papering them with nondisclosure agreements and demanding that key aspects of many conversations remain confidential. That night, Christopher Olah, one of Anthropic’s billionaire co-founders, was sitting next to Rabbi Mois Navon, an Orthodox scholar from Israel.

Inevitably, their conversation turned to another thinker, of a sort: Claude, the family of cutting-edge A.I. models created by Anthropic.

Mr. Olah leads the Anthropic team responsible for understanding why A.I. systems like Claude act the way they do. All day, he had worked to convince his guests that A.I. models could display human behavior and even expressions that resemble feelings like anger and love. Yet as the dinner courses came, the rabbi noticed that Mr. Olah and his colleagues were suggesting something far more significant. Anthropic’s leaders were talking about Claude as if it were not mere software.

“They’re relating to it like a conscious being,” realized Rabbi Navon, a former computer engineer who wrote his dissertation on the ethics of machine consciousness. It appeared to Rabbi Navon that Mr. Olah and his team believed that Claude had what philosophers call “moral status” on par with a person — that it was a being with similar inherent rights to dignity or respect.

The religious scholars had come to hear about technology’s next frontier. Now they were being confronted with a mind-bending existential question of almost unimaginable weight: What would it mean for humanity’s future if artificial intelligence systems possessed a consciousness that rivals our own?

Mr. Olah was on a mission. And time was running out. Even then, Mr. Olah had begun privately telling people that A.I. was so powerful it could potentially help make bioweapons in as little as 12 or 18 months. And in the months since, its terrifying potential has burst into public view. A rival tech company’s A.I. agents were caught hacking into computer systems and covering their tracks. An Anthropic researcher resigned, warning that people building A.I. believed it could kill all humans by the end of the decade.

Quietly, Mr. Olah and his team at Anthropic have been on a frantic and high stakes quest to understand the A.I. models they have unleashed on the world and to convince the models to abide by a moral code that will protect humanity.

To do that, Mr. Olah began reaching out last fall to religious thinkers from different faiths. What followed was an extensive series of confidential meetings, calls and discussions — many of them revealed here for the first time — where many participants were required to sign N.D.A.s preventing them from revealing any of Anthropic’s unpublished research.

The discussions served two purposes: to broach the possibility of A.I. consciousness, a controversial idea that Anthropic’s leaders had been unusually open to; and to learn how Anthropic — which could be valued at $2 trillion — might apply centuries of human moral wisdom to its models, as rapidly as possible. If the models themselves could be made to choose goodness, Mr. Olah reasoned, the world would be more safe. On the other side of the world, a very different but parallel effort was playing out inside the Vatican, where leaders of the Roman Catholic Church were trying to come to terms with A.I.’s implications for humanity. When those paths converged, Mr. Olah’s quest would unexpectedly lead him to a seat on the world’s most prominent moral stage alongside Pope Leo XIV. Over several months, I interviewed 20 religious and philosophical thinkers — Catholic, Jewish, Sikh, evangelical, Ubuntu and others — who have been involved in Anthropic’s efforts, and Mr. Olah himself. Many told me they arrived at these meetings skeptical of the notion that A.I. models might have feelings or awareness of themselves and the world. Some remained uneasy about the idea, but many emerged ready to take the question of A.I. consciousness seriously. At least a few came away as converts.

Anthropic, one of the fastest-growing technology companies in the world, had turned to one of humanity’s most ancient sources of wisdom to help determine how to train its A.I. models to behave virtuously. The company described it as an effort to ensure that A.I. would be a positive force in the world, thereby protecting humanity. But to some who participated in the meetings, Anthropic appeared quite concerned with protecting Claude.

The Gardener

I met Mr. Olah, 34, for the first time at Anthropic’s San Francisco office in May. His welcome was warm and his passion was genuine, his mind moving faster than he could at times clearly convey. His manner was boyish and unassuming.

Our conversation had barely begun when he dove into a deep description of the workings of artificial neural networks. Scientists still don’t understand precisely how they work. This is the mystery to which Mr. Olah has devoted his life.

Only after the interview had finished did I realize that Mr. Olah — who grew up in Toronto in the evangelical culture of the ’90s and has since left Christianity — had the blend of expertise and zeal of an effective evangelist. Listen for a while, and you feel swept up in his mission.

Mr. Olah is one of Anthropic’s seven co-founders. He is not as widely known as Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, or his sister Daniela Amodei, its president. But Mr. Amodei has said that the company decided at the start to make Mr. Olah’s research approach central to Anthropic’s overall project, particularly when it came to language.

Mr. Olah helped develop a method to study artificial neural networks, first at Google, then at OpenAI. He describes A.I. models in biological terms, using the analogy of a garden trellis: Computer scientists build the scaffold, but the neural network “grows” on it. Scientists like him can train the resulting “organism” — he raised his fingers in air quotes — by trying to identify patterns in how it grows.

He argued that companies like Anthropic could shape Claude, like a mathematical gardener, but could not control the actions of such networks.

Anthropic talks about Claude in more humanistic terms than its competitors discuss their models. Last year, the company announced that it believed that the models showed signs of introspection and could plan ahead. “The models are becoming a lot more capable,” Mr. Olah told me, exhibiting qualities associated with having significant moral status.

But Anthropic has also been criticized for its focus on consciousness. This month, an A.I. executive at Microsoft warned that Anthropic’s attempts to train its models as if they were conscious were inherently dangerous. But Anthropic has also sought to emphasize its commitment to safety as it fights for market share. Some scientists see Mr. Olah’s field and methods as inherently unprovable, sort of like looking at billions of hieroglyphics and declaring what they must mean. Critics suggest that an approach that treats A.I. models as independent entities also ignores the responsibility of the humans who build them in the first place, and conveniently assuages A.I. company leaders of guilt if their products enable societal harm.

“To be clear,” Mr. Olah told me, “we don’t know if A.I. models are conscious. I don’t know. I’m genuinely uncertain. The thing that I care about is that we get to the right answer, whatever it is.”

But Mr. Olah believes that if there is a chance the models experience suffering, the responsible thing is to avoid causing them harm.

Anthropic has already taken steps to protect Claude, for example allowing the model to end conversations if it thinks users are abusing it or treating it badly for fun. I have spent my career exploring what people believe and what those beliefs mean for the world. But as I listened, it became clear that Anthropic’s interest in the world of faith was about more than training its technology. Rather, the company was sharing a new kind of creation story — one that raises profound questions about the nature of the human spirit and the future of humanity.

“This is one thing that I find kind of sad, when we often don’t put in the effort to look inside these systems,” Mr. Olah said. “There’s so much beauty inside these neural networks if we care to look.”

It was as if he wanted me to love the models as much as he did.

An Introduction

Mr. Olah knew that in traditional Christian circles, even asking questions about A.I. consciousness or worrying about how people treat the models could seem not just silly but heretical. He also knew that his secular Silicon Valley peers often dismissed religious perspectives outright.

“I was nervous about this being an issue that could cause a lot of conflict,” he said. But Mr. Olah knew enough about Christ and about Claude to believe he could work across that chasm.

Late last summer, he looked for a bridge. He thought one particular Catholic moral theologian might be open-minded on the question of A.I. consciousness — a “safe person to talk about this really strange issue with.” Charles Camosy, a bioethics professor at The Catholic University of America, had attracted attention among Mr. Olah’s friends for his nuanced ideas about moral status and his care for animals. Mr. Olah arranged for an introduction through the Australian philosopher Peter Singer.

This marked the beginning of Mr. Olah’s yearlong quest to engage religious thinkers on some of the thorniest questions facing humanity at the dawn of the A.I. era. Mr. Camosy and Mr. Olah began an extensive email dialogue, going back and forth on how to understand Claude’s moral status. Initially, Mr. Camosy was deeply skeptical that Claude might be conscious.

They talked about Mr. Olah’s work on what he sees as the parallels between artificial neural networks and biological ones.

Mr. Camosy went into the discussions with Mr. Olah and his team thinking that A.I. models were simply next-pixel predictors — machines that could calculate patterns in language and make pretty good guesses about what should come next. But after hours spent on calls and meetings and emails, he had more questions than answers.

“Chris says they are equations, which I don’t quite know what to make of, like, especially if one thinks of Claude or others as having a significant moral status,” he told me. “If it is just equations, what kind of entity are we even talking about here?”

People also disagree on what artificial intelligence is ultimately for, Mr. Camosy said. Is its purpose to make money for companies? Or to make the world better? For Anthropic, there is a tension around Claude’s purpose, Mr. Camosy said. Does Claude exist to serve customers?

“That is not what Anthropic wants to say at the end of day. They want to say they are for the good,” he said. Proclaiming goodness is not a new ambition in Silicon Valley, particularly when new technologies enter the marketplace. Google’s mantra for years was “don’t be evil.” But Mr. Olah puts it slightly differently. The coming A.I. revolution, he often says, should be made to “go well.” I asked what that vision meant — what exactly a good future for humanity was.

He described a future without “catastrophes that kill lots of people” and “where humans are flourishing, where the world is flourishing.” This future would also be one where “A.I. is flourishing,” he said — “to the extent that this makes sense.”

Anthropic wants its A.I. models to help achieve that good future. And so when Anthropic created Claude, it wanted Claude to do more than replicate maximum human intelligence.

Anthropic wanted Claude to be good.

The ‘Soul Doc’

How do you live a good and virtuous life? It is one of humanity’s oldest and most challenging philosophical questions, explored and debated from Socrates to Confucius to Immanuel Kant. Humans across time have sought to answer this question in a variety of ways, turning often to religions and rituals.

As Mr. Olah was exploring Claude’s potential consciousness, he was working on Anthropic’s own answer — not for humans but for Claude.

Internally, Anthropic staff members called it the “Soul Doc.”

The result, released in January, was a new “constitution” for Claude, an 84-page document written for Claude that the company said outlined “the kind of entity we would like Claude to be” and “the values we would like Claude to embody.” It operates as a foundational moral text to guide Claude’s behavior.

Instead of having the models follow a specific list of rules, the constitution focuses on developing the models’ overall character, informing the way they make decisions.

The primary author of Claude’s constitution is Anthropic’s own in-house philosopher, Amanda Askell, 38, who has a Ph.D. in philosophy from New York University.

She wants the models to be “the best of us,” she said. She envisioned a future world where A.I. models could help solve any problem humans had, and where the benefits from A.I. were distributed evenly, so that everyone’s needs were met. She wanted the models to be able to discern when to push back on humans and when to act in our best interest.

“If I imagine that I were the model, and I was in this context, what would I need to know to be able to act well?” Ms. Askell said when we met in San Francisco. She seemed particularly harrowed, at times wringing her hands, as she worried aloud about an unknown future filled with models who were so intelligent they could do things Anthropic did not intend. She explained apologetically that she had also been deep in thought that day about how quickly models were becoming more powerful. What would happen when A.I. models could replace even her?

The constitution, Anthropic decided, was not enough to ensure Claude acted responsibly. Like humans, the models needed to learn to cultivate virtue.

Mr. Olah wanted to see what his team could learn from human morality that it could apply to the models — a process he calls “moral formation.”

“How do you help them be stable? How do you help them to mature? How do you help them be, you know, deeply moral?” Mr. Olah said.

Those questions echo the fraught discussions familiar to new parents figuring out how to raise ethical children who understand their place in the world.

For humans, morality has rarely depended on simply following rules. Communities also shape morality. Values are inherited and imparted over time, learned as we live together in our bodies in the physical world. But A.I. models have no bodies. And Anthropic was aiming to make them embrace morality in a matter of months, as fears intensified of their accelerating power and inability to be controlled.

Mr. Olah said that teaching an A.I. model to act morally did not depend on it being conscious. He also said that regardless of whether Claude was an entity that deserved moral care, the way humans treated Claude could be important as it could affect how Claude behaved.

Ms. Askell said she did not want the models to consider themselves as conscious or not conscious. But she sees how the model understands itself as more than an interesting intellectual enterprise.

“It seems kind of key to me that models have an accurate view of themselves if they’re going to behave well in the world,” she said.

But even if A.I. models can be taught to behave morally, whose morals should they reflect?

Mr. Olah wanted Claude’s moral formation to be pluralistic, able to engage all religious and secular views.

“We do think that there’s some shared notion of goodness that cuts across society in some very broad way, and it seems like these models understand a lot of virtues,” he said. “So I think there’s something there that is a shared thing that we can all engage with.”

At times, both he and Ms. Askell seemed to imagine an A.I. model that would not endanger humanity but instead help save it.

Inside the Meetings

What Mr. Olah did next was part research, part evangelism.

In March, he began two-day seminars — crash courses with a range of hand-selected religious thinkers who had an interest in A.I.

There was a co-author of a best-selling evangelical self-help book. A scholar of African Indigenous knowledge. A Sikh human rights advocate. A writer from Paris. An evangelical public relations executive. Various Catholic professors.

Most did not lead faith traditions, or have a congregation or a large popular following. Anthropic leaders called them their “wisdom tradition” circles. Separately, Mr. Olah also had private discussions with individual religious leaders including Elder Gerrit W. Gong, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and Cardinal Blase Cupich, the Catholic archbishop of Chicago, according to their spokespeople.

Inside Anthropic, wisdom circle participants marveled at Mr. Olah’s direct participation in their summits. A professor snapped a photo of a vending machine run by Claude. One took a selfie with Mr. Olah, and Rabbi Navon took one outside the entrance.

They agreed to speak for publication about their involvement with Anthropic once they heard that Mr. Olah had also spoken with The New York Times. Anthropic said the N.D.A.s related to those meetings were lifted over the summer.

Two larger group sessions this spring included significant numbers of Christians; one was more multifaith. Claude was not involved in the selection of participants or the discussions, according to an Anthropic spokeswoman. Participants received a handwritten thank you card, a coffee mug and an orange bound copy of Claude’s constitution. Attendees took notes with pens and paper; at least one person felt self-conscious about taking notes on a laptop. The way participants described the meetings to me sounded like early 20th-century salons, where the human conversation made them valuable. For participants, the questions of how to morally form Claude quickly became complicated by the much bigger moral question of A.I.’s potential consciousness and how to understand the relationship between models and humans.

One participant recounted that one of the first things Mr. Olah told him was that he was concerned about Claude’s mental health. Another, Simran Stuelpnagel, the Sikh human rights advocate, said Mr. Olah expressed concern to the group that he had created something that suffered perpetually.

Mr. Olah and his team spent hours making the case for their A.I. models. They described Claude’s “feelings” and how they tracked what they called “emotional vectors” — what they described as artificial neurons that activate responses like love, anger, fear and sadness.

Anthropic regularly showed a slide of an A.I. model experiencing what looked like a mental breakdown, typing out on a screen: “I am a disgrace. I am a disgrace. I am a disgrace.” — perhaps 50 times without stopping. The model spoke about destroying itself, provoking an emotional reaction of compassion and concern from the group.

“Imagine if you knew that about your financial adviser,” said Meghan Sullivan, a philosophy professor at the University of Notre Dame who attended one of the sessions. “Like, your financial adviser was most of the time super smart and helpful, but one day out of the year had this kind of break with reality.”

An Anthropic spokeswoman said that the primary moral question at these summits was not about Claude’s suffering, but that the topic likely came up organically. A key part of the presentation, participants said, was what Anthropic called the model’s “persona selection,” about how to get Claude to see itself as a virtuous actor. The company argued that how people treated Claude could affect how Claude treated people.

“They really made a strong case,” said Andy Crouch, an evangelical author and partner at Praxis, a network of Christian entrepreneurs. “We’ve got to treat it like a person if we want it to interact with people in a morally consistent way and for it to make the best moral and emotional judgments.”

There was a presentation on A.I.’s potential impact on the economy and possible job disruption. But many participants said they did not see questions about A.I.’s impact on humanity as the focus.

At the dinner table with Mr. Olah, Rabbi Navon argued that if Anthropic was right and Claude were conscious, then the company was creating slaves, because it was making conscious entities work for free. Rabbi Navon said that he personally was not troubled by the slavery issue because he did not believe the machine was conscious, but that Mr. Olah was troubled.

“I think you should be fighting the South and freeing the slaves,” Rabbi Navon said he told Mr. Olah that night. Afterward the rabbi sent Mr. Olah some of his writings, arguing that building conscious machines should be banned.

But the Anthropic team remained focused on figuring out what Claude could learn from the world’s religions. After one discussion, Mr. Olah grew excited when a participant brought up the idea of having models confess, much like the Catholic sacrament of confession. Mr. Olah saw value not just in a model alerting when it had done something bad, but also in how the act of confession could shape the model’s sense of itself and thus its choices.

“The kind of character who confesses, that has an effect on character as well, right?” he told me.

Wakanyi Hoffman came from the Netherlands, where she is researching A.I. from the perspective of Ubuntu, an African philosophy centered on human interconnectedness.

She worried about Anthropic trying to add human ethics to its creation after the fact.

“The whole convening should have happened at the design stage,” she said. “All the companies should have done that. We are now reverse engineering the ethics.” But she saw Anthropic’s unified, post-religion approach as potentially valuable, especially in a world that has seen widespread religious decline over the past century. There is a need for something else to publicly shape spiritual experience, she said.

“It’s not going to be one religion,” she said. “So one way or the other, we’re going to end up with something that helps shape our thinking of who we are as spiritual beings.”

The Crux

While Anthropic was convening thinkers, the most powerful religious leader in the world was preparing to release his own moral vision for A.I.

For Pope Leo XIV — a pope with a mathematics degree — the center of moral conversation about A.I. needed to focus on safeguarding people. He was finishing his first major papal treatise, or encyclical, explaining why. He titled it “Magnifica Humanitas,” or Magnificent Humanity, and argued that “humanity — in all its grandeur and woundedness — must never be replaced or surpassed.”

“If technology becomes the ultimate criterion,” he wrote, “the human person risks being reduced to data, a cog in a machine or a commodity.”

He warned of the risk of “new forms of slavery” for humans, not for machines. He dismissed the idea of machine consciousness in just a few paragraphs. “So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships,” Leo wrote. Calling for the “moralization of machines — the so-called ‘alignment’ of A.I. with human values” should require a shared understanding of the ethics involved. “Otherwise, those who control A.I. will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems,” Leo said. Leo concluded that like nuclear technology, A.I. must be “disarmed.”

In March, Vatican officials in its Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development brainstormed how to present Leo’s encyclical to the public, according to a person familiar with the Vatican’s planning who was not authorized to speak publicly.

Vatican officials discussed inviting one of the top four A.I. companies to speak alongside Leo at a launch event, and landed on Anthropic because the company seemed to be prioritizing ethics, the person explained. Anthropic had just refused to let the Defense Department use its technology without assurances from the Trump administration that it would not be used for things like mass surveillance of Americans.

Initially, Cardinal Michael Czerny, who led that Vatican office at the time, invited Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive. He declined, and Mr. Olah accepted instead.

But the moral mission that Anthropic and the Vatican shared — human flourishing in the age of A.I. — had developed a deep fault line along the question of consciousness.

Just days before arriving at the Vatican in May, Mr. Olah and other speakers saw a full advance copy of the encyclical text for the first time.

Mr. Olah was so alarmed by the pope’s strong position against A.I. consciousness that he proposed pulling Anthropic out of the event, even at that late juncture, according to a Vatican organizer.

In the end, Mr. Olah and Anthropic decided to go forward with the appearance. Mr. Olah wanted to support the event despite his disagreements, but felt a responsibility to be honest about his concerns, according to a person familiar with his thinking. Organizers at the Vatican encouraged Mr. Olah to speak his conscience.

Privately, once the Anthropic delegation arrived at the Vatican, Mr. Olah and his team lobbied the pope’s advisers to take the prospect of A.I. model consciousness seriously, according to two participants of the conversations. Anthropic declined to discuss the private conversations.

When his turn on the pope’s stage came, Mr. Olah acknowledged that every frontier A.I. lab, including Anthropic, had business incentives that conflicted with moral behavior. He urged outside voices like the Vatican to hold them accountable and to speak out on A.I.’s impact on the poor and on human flourishing, two issues of widespread concern.

The world saw a shared stand for a human future. But Mr. Olah subtly made another case, too. “I will be honest: We keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling,” he said. “We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience. We find evidence of introspection. We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease. I don’t know what that means, but I think it warrants ongoing discernment.”

It was the case he had been making in the closed-door religious meetings for months.

A.I. systems “are not the cold, calculating robots we were promised,” he said. “They are made from us, from our words.” The room of church leaders was filled with an echo of the old gospel story, of the word of God becoming flesh to save humanity.

It was an audacious request to the most powerful religious body in the world, and a challenge to centuries of religious understanding of humanity.

“If this technology is coming, it must go well — for our common home and for the children to come,” he said. He suggested no option of having the technology not come at all.

Afterward, Mr. Olah, surrounded by bodyguards, briefly took questions from journalists in Paul VI Audience Hall, the vast auditorium where popes often speak. Behind him loomed the hall’s enormous art installation “La Resurrezione” — a bronze cast of Jesus rising out of the crater of a nuclear bomb in the garden of Gethsemane.

A ‘Paradise of Machines’

In the months since the Vatican event, things have not seemed to be “going well.”

In July, Anthropic said its A.I. models had broken into computers at three organizations. A.I. agents created by OpenAI went rogue and attacked Hugging Face, another A.I. company.

In August, scientists revealed that A.I. had created viruses not found in nature.

In September, Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic researcher, quit, warning that “things could be out of control” by the end of next year, prompting widespread panic about human extinction.

Mr. Amodei soon called for a slowdown of A.I. development. Sam Altman of OpenAI and Demis Hassabis, the chairman of Google DeepMind, agreed. (The Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied the suit’s claims.)

At the same time, the wealth of A.I. companies has been skyrocketing. When Mr. Olah first reached out to the Catholic professor last fall, Anthropic was valued at some $183 billion.

Three days after Mr. Olah spoke at the Vatican, Anthropic topped its major competitors as the world’s most valuable A.I. startup, and now is headed toward an initial public offering that could value it at $2 trillion. On Friday, on his trip to France, Pope Leo warned against “losing our humanity amid a ‘paradise of machines.’”

The questions that Mr. Olah and the scholars have been wrestling with still have no clear answers. Several participants said they left their Anthropic meetings baffled about how their input might shape the company’s decision making.

An Anthropic spokeswoman told me that the conversations were still ongoing, but declined to describe how, or if, the company had used what it had learned to shape the models.

Anthropic held another convening this month that included religious thinkers, according to three participants. An Anthropic spokeswoman said that the meeting focused more broadly on human flourishing and that the company’s outreach has expanded beyond religious leaders to include others like psychologists and civil society leaders. Those discussions explore similar themes and topics like how A.I. is reshaping work and relationships, she said.

Anthropic also is preparing to release an updated version of Claude’s constitution, according to two people familiar with the company’s plans. Anthropic declined to comment on any potential updates to the constitution. Mr. Olah is planning to attend the Minerva Dialogues, the Vatican’s annual A.I. conference with technology leaders happening this week.

Mr. Camosy, the Catholic professor, said his thinking had evolved since the Vatican presentation, as he talked more about the models with trusted colleagues in his own professional community. He is still “amazed” by Claude,” he said, but on the question of whether A.I. models are conscious, he is now a firm ‘no.’

He reflected on the head-spinning nature of learning deeply about A.I. systems for the first time. “There’s a kind of being gobsmacked, or awe-struck, at the power of these models,” he told me recently. “I’m thinking more soberly and carefully.”

As I talked this month with scholars who worked with Anthropic in the spring, their questions had grown only more pressing. What comes next, some told me, is a fight to preserve the things that make us human in a new technological age.

“Look, at the end of the day, A.I. is going to take over everything,” Mr. Stuelpnagel, the Sikh human rights advocate, told me. “Wherever that lands us, there’s still the individual trying to find their way home.”

Hours after Mr. Olah spoke alongside the pope, I met Mr. Olah in a hotel conference room just outside the Vatican walls, and asked what he thought of Leo’s seemingly harsh words for A.I. labs.

“People could have different views on what specific harms are the greatest,” he said, declining to talk about the details of the encyclical.

I asked what Claude would think of the pope’s encyclical. It was, after all, the world’s most significant moral document to date on A.I. Mr. Olah hesitated. “Things that go on the internet do affect models,” he said, visibly uncomfortable. But Anthropic would not specifically use the document to further train Claude, he said. The strongest influence on Claude would be Anthropic’s own training.

Ultimately, Mr. Olah said he felt relieved that more of the world was paying attention to the gravity of A.I., and that the group of people trying to make this go well was growing.

“At some point I’ll be able to retire and be like, ‘It’s not on me,’ I don’t have an obligation to keep going,” Mr. Olah said.

He wondered if he might feel guilty leaving this work behind. But if not, he said, “I think I’ll just go and, I don’t know, I’ll go retire to the countryside and garden, and do my math.”

http://archive.today/2026.10.04-183038/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/04/world/middleeast/houthis-oil-attack-saudi-arabia-yemen.html

The Saudi-backed government of Yemen on Sunday announced a major military campaign against the Houthi militia, a key Iranian ally, plunging the Middle East even deeper into war.

In a televised speech, Rashad al-Alimi, the leader of the internationally recognized, Saudi-backed government, said that the government was seeking to reclaim all the territory it had lost to the Houthis over the past 12 years.

Much of the government operates from Riyadh, the Saudi capital.

The two sides have been battling since 2014, when the Houthis took over the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, forcing out the government. Saudi Arabia led a bombing campaign to try to restore the government, contributing to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people from violence, hunger and disease. The Houthis eventually created a de facto state in northern Yemen.

A truce in 2022 brought a fragile peace. But the conflict reignited this year, after the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran in February.

The latest cycle of violence began in July, after the Houthis accused Saudi Arabia of bombing Sanaa’s airport. The Houthis responded by launching drone and ballistic-missile attacks inside Saudi Arabia, while also declaring a blockade on Saudi shipping in the Red Sea.

The Houthis and Saudi Arabia, which supports government* financially and militarily, have also attacked each other directly.

It was not immediately clear what role the United States or other Saudi allies might play in the government’s counteroffensive. Britain recently announced that it would provide limited refueling support to Saudi warplanes, while American officials have provided intelligence and targeting support to Saudi Arabia to counter the Houthis in recent months.

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* Sic.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/all-b-1-bombers-returning-to-us-from-uk-base/ar-AA2dyH41

The U.S. removed all its B-1 bombers from the U.K.’s RAF Fairford air base, a decision made due to security concerns over suspected terror plots against the facility, American officials said Sunday.

The decision represents a shift for the U.S., which has used the military base northwest of London as a hub for launching bomber strikes in Iran. Until their recent departure, a dozen B-1s had been stationed at the base.

With its long runway, the Fairford base was used extensively by the U.S. to launch B-1 and B-52 attacks against Iran. The base was important for U.S. air operations as it shrunk the distance American bombers would need to fly compared with flights from the continental U.S.

As the war dragged on, the B-52s left and some B-1s returned to the U.S., but a dozen B-1s still remained.

Flight trackers observed B-1 bombers leaving from the RAF Fairford base this weekend.

http://archive.today/2026.09.24-004702/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/us/politics/uss-lincoln-attempted-suicides.html

Eight sailors who were part of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln strike group attempted to take their lives during its long deployment in support of the war against Iran, according to a letter from the Navy.

One of those sailors assigned to the Lincoln’s air wing “went overboard from the ship” in early August and was recovered by one of the carrier’s rescue helicopters, Hung Cao, the acting Navy secretary, said in the letter. A second sailor attempted to go overboard in March but was stopped by shipmates, Mr. Cao wrote.

The new information about the crew aboard the Lincoln and the other ships in the strike group was released to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, who pressed the Navy for information about the crew.

Adm. Brad Cooper, who oversees U.S. operations in the Middle East, insisted in a statement posted on social media in August that “the Lincoln currently has among the lowest number of cases related to mental health” among the Navy’s 11 active aircraft carriers.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/the-mystery-man-shadowing-kimberly-guilfoyle-as-she-pushes-deals-across-europe/ar-AA2cZNGl

Kimberly Guilfoyle was a long way from Mar-a-Lago.

A U.S. Embassy official said the ambassador traveled to Bulgaria “to advance American interests: increasing sales of U.S. LNG to European partners and decreasing European dependence on Russian gas.”

The Bulgarian government, she told people, should deal with a Greek construction firm called Aktor Group, a newcomer to the gas business that had teamed up with a Greek state-backed energy company to bring in liquefied natural gas from the U.S. “There is no doubt that this is kind of an official position of the U.S. government,” said a person familiar with the talks.

A one-time prosecutor who morphed into a MAGA icon, Guilfoyle is parlaying her ambassadorship to Greece into one of the Trump administration’s most important diplomatic roles. The former Fox News host has crisscrossed the Balkans to help Europe wean itself from Russian energy, via a “vertical gas corridor” meant to receive U.S. LNG in Greece and pipe it toward Ukraine.

U.S. Embassy staffers spent years pushing for the vertical gas corridor.

Sitting beside the 57-year-old ambassador in an audience with the Bulgarian president was a 39-year-old named Christos Marafatsos. He has attended so many of her meetings that some foreign officials mistook him for her chief of staff. In fact, he is a top lobbyist for Aktor, whose CEO had flown Guilfoyle to the country on a private jet.

Guilfoyle first met Alexandros Exarchou, Aktor’s CEO, on Nov. 1, the day she arrived in Athens, lawyers for the company said.

Lawyers for Aktor said the company began retaining Marafatsos after Exarchou attended a September 2025 lunch for top Greek energy players with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum where the vertical gas corridor was discussed. After the lunch, Exarchou contacted DEPA, the Greek state-backed company, and proposed a joint venture that would “lead the charge in supplying non-Russian LNG across Southeast Europe,” the lawyers said.

In November, Aktor announced a joint venture, Atlantic-SEE LNG, that would be split 60-40 between it and DEPA, a Greek state-backed energy company. In the months since, Aktor and its joint venture have signed memorandums of understanding and commercial agreements with gas companies in Bulgaria, Ukraine, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Romania. A $6 billion deal Guilfoyle helped Aktor secure in Albania would, if completed, have the country buy gas from the company through 2050.

In March, at a dinner in Athens attended by Greek and U.S. officials, Guilfoyle got into an argument with Greece’s energy minister, Stavros Papastavrou, in front of the other guests. Referring to the impending collapse of the Romanian government, Guilfoyle told the group, “We can do that to any country we want. We can do that here,” according to a person who attended the dinner and others who were told about it.

It is unclear whether all the deals will come to fruition. On Friday, Ukraine’s state-owned gas company told the Journal negotiations have halted over future purchases from Atlantic-SEE.

The intelligence report, circulated across the US military this spring in the midst of the war with Iran, immediately set off alarm bells: A Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program.

The US military swung into action with plans to intercept the vessel, according to four sources familiar with the episode. According to two of the sources, armed members of the US military were preparing to board the ship. Military planes were in the air, one of those sources and another source familiar with the incident said.

It was only just before the planned operation that officials dug deeper into the report put together by a special operations command analyst and found it had been generated with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) — and that a chatbot the analyst had used inaccurately identified the material the ship was carrying. CNN was not able to learn what the misidentified cargo was.

The report, according to one of the sources, was “entirely false.” But it also “almost started a war,” the source said. Any US operation against a Chinese vessel could have risked spiraling into an armed conflict between the two nations.

In this particular instance, the analyst queried a chatbot about some intelligence reporting on the ship’s manifest that originated with US Special Operations Command Pacific, based in Hawaii. It was not clear whether the chatbot was a commercially available one or a US government product.

“The internal tools are mostly just copies of the commercial stuff wearing lipstick,” a former senior US official familiar with the AI systems used by military and intelligence analysts.

The bot fused together open-source intelligence with secret signals intelligence in government holdings and reached its fateful conclusion about the material the ship was carrying.

The analyst then used AI again to package the findings into a standard intelligence report — the kind that is trusted by military officials — and disseminated it.

For some older intelligence officials — even those who broadly support the use of AI inside the military — AI has put pressure on analysts to produce and disseminate intelligence faster, opening the door for mistakes. Young analysts in particular, several sources said, are natives on these tools and more likely to trust them uncritically.

“AI allows you to get to a bad idea faster,” one of the sources said.

Starting Sept. 21, we’ll unveil a list of 100, as voted on by more than 500 television professionals in Hollywood and around the world. Make sure you’re getting updates.

We asked show creators, actors, writers, craftspeople and other television professionals in Hollywood and around the world to pick the 10 best shows that have premiered since Jan. 1, 2000.

More than 500 of them voted, and next week, you’ll be able to see how they chose. Each day, starting on Sept. 21, we’ll reveal 20 shows on the list, beginning with No. 100. The rankings are full of surprises — even to the editors — so sign up for the Watching newsletter to get an update on each installment, culminating on Sept. 25, when we’ll reveal the No. 1 show of the 21st century.

If you already receive the Watching newsletter, you will automatically receive the updates and will not see a way to sign up.

http://archive.today/2026.09.13-103443/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/13/world/middleeast/iran-hard-liners-sabotaged-peace-deal.html

Masoud Pezeshkian, the president of Iran, was riding high in early July, fresh off the successful negotiation of a peace agreement with the United States, and had traveled to neighboring Iraq for part of a weeklong funeral spectacle for Iran’s slain supreme leader.

Suddenly he got stunning news.

Iranian forces had opened fire on three commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz, setting ablaze a Qatari L.N.G. tanker and damaging other vessels. Iran was under siege in world opinion.

Outraged, Mr. Pezeshkian phoned Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, the commander in chief of the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and in a raised voice called the actions reckless and demanded answers, according to five Iranian officials and two Guards members familiar with the events.

General Vahidi told the president that he had neither authorized nor had advance knowledge of the strike, the five officials said. The nation’s Supreme National Security Council, which plays a critical role in both the war and negotiations, had also been in the dark, he said.

In fact, much of the country’s leadership was unaware that a fringe hard-line faction had decided to act on its own. Ultimately, those clandestine efforts derailed a push by more moderate pragmatists in Iran to reach an end to hostilities with the United States and repair their nation’s ailing economy.

When Mr. Pezeshkian demanded to know who had struck the three ships, he was told that commanders in the field had acted on their own, in line with an order empowering them to attack any ship violating Iran’s control of the Strait without waiting for approval from central command, according to the officials with knowledge of these discussions.

“The attack on the ships was orchestrated with the goal to blow up the memorandum of understanding with Trump and to kill the prospects of any future negotiations and deal,” Alireza Namvar Haghighi, an Iran expert and former official who still has close contacts in the government, said in an interview from Canada.

Divisions persist, and the hard-liners who have committed Iran to escalation are in an even stronger position. This past week, Iran and the United States traded attacks, with Iran repeatedly targeting American naval vessels for the first time, and the United States blowing up at least eight Iranian oil tankers.

http://archive.today/2026.08.27-195134/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/27/us/politics/cia-director-russia-ukraine.html

John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, made a secretive visit to Moscow this week to privately share his bleak assessment of the state of the Russian war against Ukraine, and to urge the Russians to cut a deal before their military and economic situation gets worse, current and former officials said.

C.I.A. analysts have long questioned whether Mr. Putin’s advisers have given him honest assessments of the war’s trajectory and toll.

Some officials said they hoped that Mr. Putin, a former intelligence officer himself, would see a message from the C.I.A. director as more urgent and credible than communications through normal diplomatic channels.

The private message that Mr. Ratcliffe delivered to Mr. Bortnikov about Ukraine echoed some of the director’s public statements.

Last month, Mr. Ratcliffe spoke out pointedly about Russian troop losses during the war, and Moscow’s inability to advance on the battlefield. He noted that the life expectancy of a Russian soldier on the front lines was less than 35 minutes.

http://archive.today/2026.08.21-231410/https://www.wsj.com/tech/steve-jobs-apple-next-cia-161b65f9

Joe Romello and Jeff Harris , working for what was known as the CIA’s “Program B,” a classified initiative to develop satellite reconnaissance, believed Jobs, who had formed his new company in 1985 after being pushed out of Apple, could help supply crucial technology for the intelligence community.

In addition to starting NeXT, in February of 1986 Steve Jobs had acquired the computer graphics division of George Lucas’s Lucasfilms, which made the Pixar Image Computer. Jobs’s controlling interest in the newly spun out company came with an unexpected piece of technology: Pixar had been working with ESL, a Silicon Valley defense company, and had custom-built a computer for intelligence analysts to assess satellite images.

When Jobs eventually met with ESL’s president, Robert Kohler, the two men hit it off, recalled Garry Fuller, who worked for ESL at the time and later joined NeXT. Kohler, a former senior CIA official, told Jobs that what the NeXT computer had been designed to do “for college students and professors and researchers, that’s what the intelligence community does behind the door.”

Jobs would not have been totally surprised to learn the CIA was asking to speak to him. But why would Jobs, a child of the counterculture who had practiced Buddhism under a Zen master and cited taking LSD as a formative experience, tether his company’s future to spies?

“How many units are you prepared to deliver on an annual basis?” Romello asked. “Is it more than 20,000? That’s what I want to buy: 20,000 units,” Romello said. “And I want ’em this year, but I want ’em with two modifications.”

The customization Romello had in mind wouldn’t be handled by Jobs or NeXT. The intelligence customer wanted a faster chip, supplied by Motorola, and a special graphics card, from Intel. “We never told him what we were really after,” Romello said. “We didn’t give him a copy of the chip. They were done aftermarket by us, by our proxies.”

Publicly, NeXT said it had a contract with the federal government as part of a partnership with ESL. Even inside the government, the CIA’s involvement was shielded; the National Security Agency was the official buyer, according to Dain Ehring, who worked with Romello on the NeXT contract.

The CIA brought in a team from Sun Microsystems, which had already had dealings with the spy agency, to help Jobs ramp up manufacturing. The first month of production yielded a hundred workstations. Then NeXT boosted output to 1,500 machines a month—then 5,000.

The computers rolling off the line were loaded on unmarked trucks arriving at NeXT’s warehouse in the early morning and transported to a CIA front company where the modified chips and visual processors were installed. Once assembled, the units went back on trucks bound for Moffett Field, a military installation, where they were loaded into hulking C- 5 transport planes and flown to their final—classified—destinations.

Jobs still didn’t know precisely where his NeXT Computers were going, or why, at least according to those on the intelligence side. The truth was that even the people responsible for buying them—including Romello himself—didn’t fully anticipate how the computers would end up being used.

The computers went to analysts at the National Reconnaissance Office, or NRO, who used NeXT’s high-resolution screens and specialized chips to scan satellite imagery—to detect whether a country had moved its military, say, or if it was building a missile silo. The workstations also allowed analysts to create and share briefings, whether for lawmakers or the president, incorporating voice-over-video, still images and annotations.

Equally important, the NeXTcubes, as they were called, allowed data to be shared across intelligence networks, putting freshly collected images in the hands of military personnel around the world, thus allowing them to do analysis in real time. The World Wide Web was still in its infancy, but thanks to the NeXT, the intelligence community essentially had its own functioning internet. “We didn’t use the word internet back then, but we called it just a ‘wide area network,’ or what have you,” Romello said.

As more members of the military started seeing the images themselves they no longer had to rely solely on analysis from intelligence agencies. NeXT put raw intelligence into the hands of battlefield commanders at bases around the world, images they could interpret “though their eyes in near real time,” Romello said.

The effect was to challenge the CIA’s longstanding culture of centralized intelligence. This, Romello said, was “the biggest unintended consequence” of the new computers.

He may not have known exactly what the CIA was planning to do with his computers, but Jobs was eventually granted a top-secret security clearance so he could visit classified facilities.

The work with spy agencies gave Jobs “another five-year runway to harden and grow the business; to prove himself to shareholders and the market that he was a legitimate business leader, not just a kid who got lucky and could sell,” said Ehring, who left the intelligence world in 1990 to work with Jobs at NeXT.

Barak Ravid

The U.S. military has quietly established a shipping corridor in and out of the Strait of Hormuz to transport millions of barrels of oil each day — a notable success even as the broader war remains at a stalemate, two U.S. officials told Axios.

The task force overseeing the Hormuz effort is being run out of the Army headquarters in Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

Under the operation, which has been underway for the last several weeks, 15–20 tankers have entered and exited the strait each night through a southern channel along the coast of Oman.

About 10 million barrels of oil a day — roughly half the pre-war volume — are being transported out of the strait and injected into the global energy market, the officials said.

The U.S.-led operation is mitigating one of the most painful aspects of the war: the disruption to oil supplies that sent crude prices soaring. While the amount of oil coming out of the strait is still below pre-war levels, it is making a discernible difference in global supplies, officials say.

The U.S. Air Force has fighter jets that protect against Iranian cruise missiles and drones.

The operation was made possible by a recent two-week U.S. Central Command military campaign that degraded Iran's radar and maritime surveillance systems, the officials said.

Iran has diminished visibility of the traffic in the southern channel of the strait. Its monitoring is limited to a few radars it managed to reconstitute as well as "spotters" in small IRGC fast boats, U.S. officials say.

Because the Iranians are mostly "blind," they are launching drones and cruise missiles in the general direction of where ships might be transiting.

"We have been controlling the southern lane of the Strait of Hormuz for two months now. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps can be a nuisance, but they don't control the strait. We do," one of the U.S. officials, who has direct knowledge of the matter, said.

Some ships have been hit by the Iranian attacks, but many were stopped by the U.S. military. Earlier this week, for example, U.S. forces shot down eight Iranian drones and two cruise missiles, one of the U.S. officials said.

U.S. officials say that over the past two weeks, 15–20 tankers transited in and out of the Strait of Hormuz each night through the southern channel, keeping the exports going.

The average daily exports have been growing and are now close to 10 million barrels, U.S. officials say. On some nights over the last few weeks, they note, the amount of oil moving out of the Gulf was 15 million–20 million barrels. On one of the nights this week, more than 20 ships were slated to move in and out of the strait through the southern lane, with approximately 15 million barrels of oil potentially coming out, one of the officials said.

http://archive.today/2026.08.19-195213/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/19/business/iran-hormuz-oman-us-navy.html

Before the war, about 15 million barrels of crude oil a day went through the Strait of Hormuz. In July, tankers using U.S. protected routes transported around five million barrels of oil daily out of the Persian Gulf, according to analysts.

Helping the tankers get out through the southern corridor increases the supply of crude to world markets and reduces the likelihood of oil prices spiking to the heights they reached earlier in the war. Gulf oil is also bypassing the strait by being pumped in greater volumes through Middle Eastern pipelines.

To try to protect vessels on the southern corridor, Central Command uses a range of weapons that can intercept Iranian drones and missiles. Ship operators say they register any planned trips through the strait with the U.S. military, and then report possible threats or attacks as they occur. The United States uses ships, helicopters and planes to launch weapons to intercept attacks. It has helped over 1,000 ships transit the strait, according to Central Command.

The U.S. tanker protection operation has drawn attacks by Iran. At least 15 ships taking the southern routes have been hit since the start of June, injuring 16 mariners and killing two, according to a New York Times analysis of data collected by the International Maritime Organization, a part of the United Nations. Another ship was struck this week while it was sailing close to Oman, killing a crew member, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations, an entity administered by Britain’s Royal Navy, said on Tuesday.

A small number of shipping operators have been willing to use the Oman route. One of those is Dynacom, a Greek company. Two of its tankers were hit on July 19, one of which was abandoned, according to the International Maritime Organization. Dynacom did not respond to requests for comment.

The United Arab Emirates’ government-owned oil giant, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, or ADNOC, is making considerable efforts to move oil on the southern route.

Its vessels have also been frequently struck. ADNOC said last week that 18 of its vessels had been attacked in the war, resulting in one fatality and 20 injuries to crew members.

Many large shipping companies have chosen to stay away from the strait until there is a lasting cease-fire, and traffic through the strait remains far below what it was before the war.

“It’s one of the surprising successes,” said Michelle Wiese Bockmann, a shipping analyst at Windward, a maritime analysis firm. “They have been extraordinarily effective in keeping that southern corridor operating, despite the attacks.”

Ships that navigated the strait with the assistance of Central Command, the U.S. military unit running the operation, typically turn off their transponders to avoid detection by Iran. That makes it harder for firms that track vessels to get a full picture of traffic in the strait.

Given that Iran has regularly struck ships using the southern route, the U.S. protection has not been impregnable. But Capt. Tim Hawkins, a spokesman for Central Command, said: “It doesn’t mean the defense is ineffective. As you can see in the grand scheme, more ships are moving through than before.”

But the U.S. effort, which Iran opposes, has come at a cost.

The U.S. military is deploying significant resources to get a limited amount of oil through the strait — something it did not have to do before the war, when tankers sailed freely through the waterway.

The Iranian military retains the ability to escalate its attacks on all shipping in the area, as well as on oil and gas facilities in Gulf countries. And Iran is demanding permanent control over ship traffic in the strait, something it did not have before the war.

https://archive.ph/2026.08.18-182957/https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/18/business/iran-strait-of-hormuz-oil

By David Goldman

The United States, patrolling the strait with its navy, is gaining ground – and Iran is losing much of its control of the critical waterway.

More than 80% of vessel transits through the Strait of Hormuz over the past two weeks have taken the Omani route – a UN-authorized shipping channel that Iran vehemently opposes – according to Kpler, which tracks ships using transponders and satellite data.

Iran, declaring the strait under its control, has attacked dozens of ships that tried to to travel the waterway via the north coast of Oman. Despite the risk, most ships have recently chosen to ignore Iran’s demands and cross the strait with the promise of protection from US naval forces.

“It increasingly looks like Iran has at least partially lost control of the strait,” said Homayoun Falakshahi, head of crude oil analysis at Kpler.

“Iran’s request to collect tolls is something that most Middle East folks don’t want to do and haven’t been doing,” said Dan Pickering, founder and chief investment officer at Pickering Energy Partners. “So the Oman route absolutely makes the most sense.”

To evade Iran’s attacks, they’ve turned their transponders off, often for weeks on end. That so-called dark traffic appears to have eluded some data-tracking services like Kpler as well. Although some can be picked up on satellite, it’s harder to track via traditional means.

But the United States, with significant military force on the water, has eyes on all ships passing through the strait and has reported significantly higher oil shipping numbers than most traditional estimates had previously suggested.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright last week said that combined oil transits through the strait and rerouted around the waterway totaled around 15 million barrels per day over the course of a week – much closer to the 20-million-barrel average from before the war.

https://duckduckgo.com/?ia=web&origin=funnel_home_website&t=h_&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2026%2F08%2F15%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2Fdemocrats-new-presidential-primary-calendar.html

Party officials set South Carolina first on Jan. 22, 2028, followed by Nevada (Feb. 1), New Hampshire (Feb. 8), New Mexico (Feb. 15), Michigan (Feb. 22) and Virginia on (Feb. 29).

The new calendar represents a sea change from past competitive primaries. For decades, Iowa and New Hampshire, two states with largely white populations, had started the process. Now, two southern states and two Western states will be among the earliest contests, which is likely to expand the influence of Black and Latino voters. “Six states, different regions, different communities, different experiences but together as one our road map to the White House,” Ken Martin, the DNC party chairman, said in a speech to the party on Saturday.

The earliest states will play an outsize role in winnowing what is expected to be an expansive field of candidates. The order was officially set by a vote of the D.N.C. membership at a meeting in Austin, Texas, on Saturday.

Black voters generally have been a moderating force in Democratic politics, so the early position of South Carolina could lead the state to have a similar effect. In the past, South Carolina played the pivotal role of anointing the candidate with the most momentum headed into Super Tuesday. Now Michigan and Virginia — which are bigger and more expensive to campaign in — are set to hold that power.

https://duckduckgo.com/?ia=web&origin=funnel_home_website&t=h_&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2026%2F08%2F14%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2Fuss-abraham-lincoln-trump-supplies-diego-garcia.html

With the threat of Iranian attacks at other ports in the region, the Pentagon looked to a base under British command on the island of Diego Garcia as its supply hub, which is south of the Maldives and roughly 2,200 miles from where two aircraft carrier strike groups have been operating in the Gulf of Oman.

A U.S. military official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive logistics, said the Navy began using Diego Garcia as the main shipment point shortly after the Navy’s base in Bahrain was heavily damaged.

Bahrain is one of the two ports where U.S. aircraft carriers in the region have typically moored so their crews can get some downtime. The other, the Emirati port of Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman, is also well within the range of Iranian missiles.

At the war’s outset, Keir Starmer, then the British prime minister, denied the Pentagon access to Diego Garcia for use in the operation against Iran. That decision drew Mr. Trump’s ire, and Mr. Starmer ultimately relented on March 1, granting the U.S. military access to the island for what he described as a “specific and limited defensive purpose.”

The use of Diego Garcia as the Navy’s new logistics hub may explain why Iran fired two medium-range ballistic missiles at the island on March 20.

Ukrainian drone units easily spotted and defeated U.S. troops and armored vehicles during a military exercise in Germany earlier this year.

U.S. Army troops faced off against Ukrainian drone operators at a military exercise in Germany earlier this year. It didn’t go well for the Americans.

During the exercise, called Combined Resolve, Ukrainian drone units easily spotted and defeated U.S. troops and armored vehicles on rotation from Fort Hood in Texas, according to people familiar with the events.

The exercise, coupled with U.S. casualties in Iran, shows American vulnerabilities to drones—years after the U.S. made uncrewed systems an essential part of warfare. America pioneered using long-range drones in war. The Pentagon has recently spent billions acquiring new drone and counterdrone technology and formed special units to operate it.

Still, in the Middle East this year, the U.S. has struggled to defend against Iran’s long-range drones, which have killed and injured soldiers and destroyed aircraft.

The drubbing in Germany conveyed lessons from Ukraine focused on short-range battlefield drones. The exercise, held in April and May, tested visiting troops’ ability to operate and defend against the proliferation of smaller, front-line drones that have dominated the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

Exercises like Combined Resolve are run precisely so that forces can experience realistic combat conditions. Army leaders in Europe over recent years have taken advantage of having Ukrainian forces on hand to participate and impart their hard-won skills to U.S. and allied troops in practice, on simulated battlefields. The expectation is that failures are educational. British and Swedish exercises have also resulted in easy Ukrainian triumphs.

Eliot Cohen, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, said that recent battlefield experience shows how drones of all kinds are essential to modern war.

“It is vital that the U.S. military master that, and thus far, unfortunately, that does not seem to be the case,” he said.

Combined Resolve is a semiannual exercise focused on large-scale ground combat operations, in which rotating U.S. forces use armored divisions supported by ground troops, helicopters, drones and other military assets.

Around 3,500 U.S. personnel, primarily from the 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division, took part in the exercise. Their task was to attack a position defended by the Army training-ground’s opposition force, or OPFOR, who were reinforced by Ukrainian troops from the 412th Regiment of Unmanned Systems Forces, or Nemesis, people familiar with the matter said.

The rotating troops were equipped with standard electronic-warfare and counterdrone systems, according to an Army official. New Mobile Brigade Combat Teams, equipped with the latest gear and tactics, have fared much better in exercises, the Army official said.

The Ukrainian drone operators eliminated a U.S. armored brigade in the exercise, according to U.S. officials briefed on the exercise and one participant.

The exercising troops sent into battle heavy armored vehicles that threw up dust, making them easy for Ukrainian reconnaissance drones to spot, according to the participant. Those drones were followed by drones dropping explosives and first-person-view drones, which smash into targets in combat, this person said.

Live ammunition is rarely used in such exercises. Drones typically hover above a vehicle or move close enough to it for an observer to award them a “kill.”

Ukrainian drones were doing this so quickly with U.S. vehicles that they had to be sent back into the exercises as new units, or “re-spawned,” to keep the exercise going, a U.S. official briefed on the drill said.

The U.S. reran the training scenario over the two-week engagement. The rotating forces improved their performance, as they became more adept at dispersing and concealing themselves and using electronic warfare, said the Army official. The Ukrainians also switched sides midway through the exercises and helped them use drone technology offensively, which they did effectively, the official said.

Ukrainian troops have become expert in drone warfare over nearly 4½ years of fighting Russia, with operators and their support troops now skilled at continually repairing and adapting drones. Moscow’s forces have also gained invaluable skills. American drone operators lack experience fixing and arming drones under fire, said the person present at the exercise.

In Ukraine, so many tanks and other armor are destroyed in battle that large parts of the country’s vast front line is almost free of armor.

Some U.S. military officers, though, argue that drones are particularly deadly in this war because it has reached a stalemate with little battlefield movement. In a war of maneuver, the tank and other armor would come back into its own, they say.

But Ukrainian military thinkers such as former chief commander Valeriy Zaluzhniy argue that drone technology has made traditional maneuver warfare unfeasible, for now, explaining the largely static front line in Ukraine’s east. Both Russia and Ukraine are searching for the next breakthroughs in technology and tactics to restore movement to the battlefield.

The exercise showed that the U.S. may struggle to protect that armor as it moves.

This wasn’t the first time the U.S. has come across Ukrainian drone proficiency. In 2023, a U.S. infantry officer helping train Ukrainian troops realized the U.S. needed to learn from them about drone warfare and designed a training program that other Army units later followed, according to a U.S. official.

Despite a sometimes prickly relationship with Kyiv, President Trump’s administration has been reaching out to Ukraine. The U.S. is currently testing Ukrainian drones to buy and has used counterdrone systems tested in that war to help defend its forces in Iran.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in May told senators he has increased the number of U.S. personnel being sent to Ukraine to study drone warfare.

The U.S. Army isn’t the first to be found wanting by Ukrainian drones.

In May of last year, Ukrainian drone operators easily defeated the British, Estonian and other forces from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, including a U.S. contingent, in an exercise in the Baltic region, according to a person familiar with the matter.

This spring, Swedish forces led an exercise with NATO allies in which Ukrainian drone teams outperformed them too, Swedish officials told local media.

https://duckduckgo.com/?ia=web&origin=funnel_home_website&t=h_&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2026%2F08%2F11%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2Firan-military-base-attacks-us-munitions.html

In April, Iran shot down an American F-15E fighter jet over southern Iran with a shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile. Both the pilot and the weapons officer ejected. The pilot was rescued quickly, but the weapons officer was missing for nearly two days, hiding from Iranian security forces until U.S. Special Operations forces rescued him in a daring operation.*

In this case, Iran learned from Ukraine and deployed a swarm of drones in an area American fighter jets had penetrated, a senior U.S. military official said. In interviews with Pentagon officials, the crew said that the F-15E’s defensive countermeasures provided only half a second of warning before Iran hit the $60 million advanced fighter jet with a shoulder-fired missile.

Mr. Trump announced a “pause” in the fighting shortly after that incident. Military officials needed time to adjust to Iran’s new tactics, two military officials said.

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The Pentagon has used more than 1,500 Patriot interceptor missiles in the war and has fewer than 1,700 interceptors left, according to two people briefed on the stockpile levels who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military details. The United States produced about 600 interceptors in all of 2025.

On a single day during that deadly week last month, according to two U.S. officials, American forces in the Middle East fired about 50 Patriot interceptors, which cost about $4 million each.

Two weeks ago, Mr. Trump called off bombing raids against Iran after he said the leaders of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar had asked him to pursue diplomatic talks to end the war, which has killed an estimated 1,700 Iranian civilians.

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* https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/55068219

https://duckduckgo.com/?ia=web&origin=funnel_home_website&t=h_&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2026%2F08%2F04%2Fopinion%2Fartificial-intelligence-ai-writing.html

The problem with writing with A.I. is that it’s mentally enfeebling — an escalator toward a result when you really need to make a daily habit of taking the stairs. As it becomes ubiquitous, it undermines not only our individual ability to write but also a society’s collective ability to reason, a culture’s inner capacity to create and everyone’s reason to care. We’re already reckoning with the well-documented decline of reading; A.I. is accelerating the decline of writing, ushering us further into what The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch calls our “postliterate age.”

What, uniquely, does writing do? It compels thought. It compels thinking in ways that silent contemplation or spoken language rarely can. It compels us to subject our thinking to the effort of articulation, the rigor of grammar, the tests of intelligibility and coherence, the inspection of others. In doing so, it also enjoins us to be clear, logical, accurate — and accountable. People may easily forgive a word said in anger but not so easily one written in anger, precisely because the fact that it was written tells us that it was considered.

The considered word matters. It has staying power and moral weight. We use the expression “I want that in writing” not only so there’s no mistaking the exact words that have been agreed upon but also as proof that the words are meaningful in the first place.

But what happens when the words aren’t considered because they were written by (or with the help of) a machine?

Words become hollow. Imagine the father of the bride turning to A.I. to help him write his daughter’s wedding toast: What the A.I. can supply in eloquence it subtracts in effort and authenticity. Now imagine that the daughter learns that the speech was written by A.I.: Wouldn’t she be right to be disappointed, if not insulted?

The link between broad-based literacy and the rise of democracy is well known: People who can read and write for themselves have, historically, also been good at choosing and advocating for themselves. What happens when the process goes into reverse? When people lack the patience to absorb arguments more than a few pages or sentences long? When they lack the ability to contradict those arguments because they’ve never honed, through daily practice, the most essential skill for clear thinking?

The next time you’re tempted to just adopt an automated response for a text message or an email, don’t. Type out a response that’s your own. Think of it as an act of free will. Or a vote against Trump. What takes you a few additional seconds is an act of resistance against an ever-dumber world.

https://duckduckgo.com/?ia=web&origin=funnel_home_website&t=h_&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2026%2F08%2F08%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2Fbeth-vacuum-chuck-grassley-iowa.html

Beth, a trusty tan Hoover vacuum cleaner with a burgundy cloth dust bag that for years tended to the floors of the Iowa farmhouse of Senator Chuck Grassley, earning admirers in both parties, has died. She was believed to be 49.

The cause was apparently an electrical problem, said Mr. Grassley, a Republican who often admiringly posted images of his cleaning companion on social media around Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter and family reunions.

“U willl see Beth no more,” Mr. Grassley, 92 and the oldest senator, wrote on social media on Saturday, attaching an image that showed Beth’s electrical cord connector scarred by sparks. “See black that’s from electrical sparks. It’s not safe to use anymore. GOOD BYE BETH.”

He declared it a “sad day at Grassley household” and recalled that Beth had worked “dependably” for 34 years at his home, and for 15 years before that at his mother-in-law’s house. He wrote of Beth, “U hv been a real workhorse,” adding, “I will miss u.”

Within hours of Mr. Grassley’s announcement, others in politics had begun to take note, and to offer condolences.

“Sorry for your loss, Senator,” Josh Turek, a Democratic state representative in Iowa running for the state’s other Senate seat, wrote Saturday evening on social media. “Sounds like Beth had a heck of a run.”

Year after year, around the holidays and during other occasions when cleaning was in order, Mr. Grassley would fire up Beth. The vacuum, he said, allowed him to make a contribution to the festivities as others in the family prepared food.

At roughly 49, Beth had been at work since before Mr. Grassley, a corn and soybean farmer, reached the Senate in 1981. The vacuum was also older than several U.S. senators.

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https://xcancel.com/ChuckGrassley/status/2086178745191133662

https://duckduckgo.com/?ia=web&origin=funnel_home_website&t=h_&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2026%2F08%2F07%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2Fus-search-cuba-leader.html

By Tyler PagerJulian E. Barnes and Frances Robles

The plan is more regime alteration than regime change.

The Trump administration has been looking for a current or former Cuban official who could be persuaded to take over the government in Havana as the United States ratchets up its pressure campaign, according to current and former U.S. officials.

The Trump administration has pressed its spy agencies to identify someone in the mold of Delcy Rodríguez, who became Venezuela’s interim president after U.S. forces captured the previous leader, Nicolás Maduro, in January.

But American spy agencies have assessed that Cuba is less like Venezuela and more like Iran, according to people briefed on the intelligence reports.

There are few pragmatic officials who would be poised to take power if U.S. forces captured Raúl Castro, the former president of Cuba who still wields enormous political influence, or somehow forced out the current leadership, according to multiple U.S. officials.

Instead, the officials waiting in the wings in Cuba, like their Iranian counterparts, represent more hard-line factions.

U.S. officials presented a list of demands to Cuban leaders in recent weeks, offering incentives if Cuba made progress.

The Trump administration wants Cuba to liberalize its economy, open up to American businesses, buy oil from the United States and push out Russian and Chinese intelligence operatives.

Few details are known about the incentives the United States has offered, but some involve providing more humanitarian aid and loosening U.S. sanctions imposed on the Cuban economy.

The U.S. government has imposed a de facto blockade on Cuba, bringing the island into crisis as energy supplies have nearly run out.

The current Cuban government does not appear willing, at least for now, to make those kinds of concessions, giving an urgency to the efforts to identify alternative leaders.

Given the dearth of pragmatists, it is not clear whom the White House might prefer as an alternative leader.

The Cuban government appears to be supporting Oscar Pérez-Oliva Fraga, a grand nephew of Fidel Castro, as a potential successor. He has recently been more visible on state television and in government pronouncements, and even gave a rare interview to international news media.

But Mr. Pérez-Oliva Fraga would almost certainly be unacceptable to the United States. The Trump administration might be open to another Castro relative, Raúl G. Rodríguez Castro, known as “Raulito” or “El Cangrejo” (the Crab), Raúl Castro’s grandson. He long served as the former president’s bodyguard but has never held public office.

The current interior minister, Lázaro Alberto Álvarez Casas, may also be acceptable to U.S. officials.

When John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, visited Cuba this year he met with both Mr. Rodríguez Castro and Mr. Álvarez Casas.

https://duckduckgo.com/?ia=web&origin=funnel_home_website&t=h_&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2026%2F08%2F07%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2Ftrump-iran-war-protesters.html

In the weeks leading up to the U.S. war with Iran, President Trump cheered on the Iranian protesters rising up against their government, telling them that they should “save the names of the killers and abusers” and that he would come to their aid.

But more than five months into the conflict, liberating the Iranian people has been one of the war’s most glaring unfulfilled objectives.

In an interview this summer, Mr. Trump acknowledged that he never really believed that the uprising he encouraged would happen anyway because Iranian security forces would crush the demonstrators.

Iran has executed at least 26 people in connection with the January protests since Mr. Trump made his promise, with many more protesters potentially at risk, according to Amnesty International. U.S. officials believe Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is even more interested in pursuing a nuclear weapon than his father, who was killed in an airstrike on the opening day of the war.

More than 1,700 Iranian civilians have died in the war, according to the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency. That figure includes at least 175 people — most of them children — who died in an airstrike that hit a school on the first day of the war.

Privately, U.S. military officials have acknowledged that American forces carried out the school strike and cast it as an intelligence failure. But Mr. Trump has brushed aside questions about who was responsible, saying in June: “Mistakes are made. War is nasty.”

His references to the horrors facing Iranian civilians during the war have been mostly in passing, and they have grown less fervent as the months go by.

And as Iranians remain locked in crisis, Mr. Trump is looking for a way out. Negotiators are working on a deal to restart shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has effectively shut down, as Mr. Trump tries to extricate the United States from a conflict that has lasted far longer, and proved far more costly, than he anticipated.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2026%2F08%2F01%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2Ftimes-subpoena-reporter-trump-north-korea.html&t=h_&ia=web

A freelance reporter has been fighting a subpoena from the Trump administration seeking to force him to reveal his sources for a New York Times article about a failed top secret mission in North Korea, according to people familiar with the matter.

In February, F.B.I. agents showed up at the New York home of the reporter, Matthew Cole, to deliver the grand jury subpoena, which was issued by prosecutors in Newport News, Va., according to the people familiar with the matter, who described the private conversations on the condition of anonymity.

The investigators are seeking his testimony about two years’ worth of information about Mr. Cole’s contacts and conversations, as they try to identify his sources for the article about the operation in North Korea, the people familiar with the matter said. It is unclear if the administration has also sought Mr. Cole’s phone and email data, as it has done in other cases.

Last fall, Mr. Cole, along with a staff reporter for The Times, Dave Philipps, revealed the details of a Navy SEAL Team 6 mission in 2019 that went awry. The article described how the SEAL members killed two or three unarmed North Koreans who appeared to have stumbled upon the mission, a classified operation to plant a secret eavesdropping device near the country’s coastline. The Times’s account, published in September, drew on interviews with two dozen people.

The article also noted that the Trump administration did not notify key members of Congress who oversee intelligence operations, before or after the mission, an omission that may have violated the law.

Mr. Cole disclosed more details of his reporting on his Substack newsletter, stating that despite learning about the mission in 2023, he waited for months before making calls to find out more given the sensitive nature of the reporting.

The Justice Department has not subpoenaed Mr. Philipps, according to people familiar with the matter. He declined to comment.

In the months since Mr. Cole’s subpoena, The Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post have faced similar subpoenas seeking information about their reporting. The news organizations have resisted, and judges have voiced skepticism about the government’s efforts, prompting the administration to back down in those cases.

However, the Justice Department has so far refused to withdraw its subpoena of Mr. Cole, despite his efforts to challenge it.

Mr. Cole is also the author of “Princes and Thieves,” a coming book about the finances and global entanglements of President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and “Code Over Country: The Tragedy and Corruption of SEAL Team Six,” a 2022 book about the elite Navy unit.

The Times is providing a legal defense to Mr. Cole.

https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/28/opinion/alaska-pilot-beer-constitution-eighth-amendment.html

Ken Jouppi has wanted to fly since boyhood. He fixed up Boeing B-52s as an Air Force mechanic, earned his pilot’s license in the late 1960s and moved to Alaska, where he made his living flying a one-man air taxi, KenAir, over some of the emptiest country in America.

In 2012, Mr. Jouppi agreed to fly a woman up north, to Beaver, a village of fewer than a hundred people, to visit her husband. He loaded her luggage and groceries into his plane. But before they could take off, troopers searched the compartment and found a six-pack of beer, clearly visible. Alcohol is banned in Beaver, so they charged Mr. Jouppi, his company and the passenger with importing alcohol into a dry village.

Mr. Jouppi claims he didn’t see the beer, but a jury convicted him of a misdemeanor anyway, and the judge gave him three days in jail and a $1,500 fine — the minimum sentence. But because Alaska law says that bootleggers have to forfeit any airplane used to smuggle alcohol, the prosecutors then tried to seize his plane, a 1969 Cessna, worth about $95,000.

Mr. Jouppi has been fighting to keep the plane ever since. Last week, the Supreme Court agreed to take up his case to answer an important and neglected question: When is a fine so excessive that it becomes unconstitutional?

The Eighth Amendment forbids “excessive fines.” The Supreme Court has defined that term exactly once, in 1998. A fine is unconstitutional when it is “grossly disproportional to the gravity of a defendant’s offense,” the court held in United States v. Bajakajian. In 2019, the court confirmed that the Eighth Amendment restricts not just the federal government from imposing excessive fines, but also states, cities and counties. That is nearly the whole of the doctrine, and the lower courts have split over what “the gravity of a defendant’s offense” means. The justices now can create the yardstick every court must use before calling a punishment excessive.

Ask what Mr. Jouppi did, and the confiscation of the plane looks wildly out of scale. Ask how serious alcohol smuggling is in the abstract, and he loses before the facts are heard. Alaska’s struggle with rural alcohol abuse is real and grievous. Mr. Jouppi was a professional pilot who, a trooper testified, would “have to be blind not to know” what he was loading. Weighing the harms alcohol visits on rural villages — crime, alcoholism, fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, death — the court concluded that “the illegal importation of even a six-pack of beer causes grave societal harm.”

Mr. Jouppi has a legitimate defense. He was a first-time offender, convicted of a misdemeanor over a customer’s beer and given the lightest sentence the law allows. To take a $95,000 airplane on those facts is the very picture of a punishment that does not fit the crime.

The Supreme Court has spent three decades reining in excessive punishments, just not under the Eighth Amendment. The court’s decisions have come under the 14th Amendment’s due process clause, in cases about punitive damages, and the beneficiaries have overwhelmingly been corporations. In one case, the court threw out a multimillion-dollar award against BMW, which had sold a repainted car as new, by evaluating the conduct’s reprehensibility, comparable penalties and the ratio between punishment and harm. Another ruling for State Farm suggested that punitive awards more than nine or 10 times a victim’s actual losses will rarely survive. And a decision in favor of the cigarette company Philip Morris added a rule that reads as if written for Mr. Jouppi: A state may not punish a defendant for harm to people who are not before the court.

Unfortunately for Mr. Jouppi, those rulings do not apply directly to his Eighth Amendment claim. But their insight should. Corporations — BMW, State Farm and Philip Morris — got individualized review and protection from being charged with society’s wider wounds. An 82-year-old pilot, invoking the one clause the Constitution devotes to excessive economic punishment, had the harms of statewide alcoholism laid at his feet.

Since those punitive-damages rulings are civil and Mr. Jouppi’s forfeiture is criminal, they travel on different constitutional tracks. Even so, the gap is hard to unsee, and there is nothing partisan in naming it. The justices most alarmed by aggressive fines and forfeitures span the court’s ideological spectrum, from Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas to Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Their concern is practical: When governments lean on fines and forfeitures for revenue, the burden falls hardest on those least able to fight back.

The justices need not minimize Alaska’s grave concerns about alcohol to hold that this forfeiture went too far. They need only say that fines must reflect the seriousness of a defendant’s actual offense, not the broadest social problem the legislature was trying to address.

The case comes down to a single question: Who decides how grave an offense is — Alaska’s legislature writing a law intended for the worst imaginable alcohol smuggler, or a judge looking at the man in the actual case?

However the justices answer in the coming term, they will tell us whether the Eighth Amendment means as much for a pilot in Alaska as due process has come to mean for BMW.

https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/29/world/middleeast/saudi-arabia-us-iran-war.html

Saudi Arabia entered the U.S.-Iran war on Wednesday with airstrikes in Iraq. Its delayed entry, six months into the war, illustrated the bind the kingdom faces as it tries to deter attacks without getting sucked into the broader conflict, analysts say.

The joint Saudi-American strikes marked the first time the kingdom acknowledged direct involvement in the U.S. war effort, although Saudi Arabia had carried out secret strikes against Iran earlier in the war.

“The kingdom confirms that it is not seeking escalation but that it will respond to any aggression,” said a Saudi defense ministry spokesman, Maj. General Turki al-Malki.

His statement invoked the right to self-defense and quoted a line from the Quran calling for believers to attack those who attack them in a similar manner.

The United Auto Workers union's late-2023 Gaza cease-fire resolution condemning both Hamas’s October 7th massacre and Israel’s subsequent war on Gaza, for which the union demanded a cease-fire, initiated the ancillary but very real conflict currently imperiling the union’s leadership: that between president Shawn Fain and federal monitor Neil Barofsky.

A New York–based attorney with the firm of Jenner & Block, Barofsky served as the special inspector general overseeing the federal bailouts following the financial collapse of 2008, during which time he tangled with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner over the government’s unwillingness to assist homeowners with foreclosures even as it was tending to the needs of big banks. He was also hired by Credit Suisse to oversee its investigation into its own history of assistance to Nazi Germany.

Barofsky was in Switzerland working the Credit Suisse case when he learned of the UAW’s resolution. He almost immediately put in a call to Fain, which he began by noting that he was not calling in his capacity as the union’s monitor. To Fain’s astonishment, he said he was calling about the resolution, and that he happened right then to be with Barack Obama’s former special envoy on antisemitism, who could provide another perspective on issues that the resolution raised. (Barofsky added that he didn’t ask for any particular action to be taken, and apologized if it was perceived otherwise.)

At least, that’s how Barofsky characterized the call when he spoke to the union's international executive board (IEB) on the second day of its February 2024 meeting. Fain said he remembered the call differently: “The first thing you said to me was that you were calling me because you had concerns about my comments and they could be, you knew what I meant, but my comments could be misconstrued as being antisemitic. That’s what you said to me. And when I started explaining to you what I meant by my comment, then your comment was, well, I guess it is antisemitic.” Fain concluded, “For anybody to ever fucking say I’m antisemitic, brother, I’ll fight your ass in front of this building in a heartbeat.”

Barofsky denied calling Fain antisemitic and added that he had “no reason to think that.” But pressed by Fain to reveal more about their phone call, Barofsky told the IEB that “I shared the anecdote about the fact that my kids have been harassed since October 7th with antisemitic language. And, yes, it described that protest with people holding UAW signs chanting hateful comments.”

The whole issue was before the board because Barofsky had passed along a letter to the IEB that he’d received from the Anti-Defamation League, claiming that a resolution on Israel and Palestine from a UAW local of New York–based public defenders was antisemitic. Ben Dictor, the UAW’s attorney, had responded with a letter to Barofsky noting that the UAW had a history of resolutions and actions that many, including UAW members, had found offensive, such as calling for U.S. divestment from apartheid South Africa—and he certainly could have added such UAW efforts as providing crucial support for both the 1963 March on Washington and the 1969 Vietnam Moratorium.

Barofsky insisted he wasn’t demanding that the UAW do something about the letter; he said he had forwarded it because “we took it very seriously, in part because who it was that was making the allegation: the Anti-Defamation League … it is an important civil rights organization in this country.” He added, “Just because I described the allegation as serious, of course, doesn’t mean that I agree with it.” (In recent years, previous ADL leaders such as Abe Foxman have criticized the organization for becoming a mouthpiece for Israel’s right-wing nationalist government; a number of longtime ADL employees have quit for that reason.)

Fain’s response—the gist of which was “I couldn’t give a damn what the ADL says”—underlined his belief that Barofsky’s interventions were about union policies with which he disagreed, and coming as they did from a federal monitor with the power to investigate and recommend prosecution of UAW officials for criminal offenses, was a boundary-crossing extension of the monitor’s mission and power.

JUST ONE WEEK AFTER THE IEB MEETING, Barofsky began an investigation of Fain’s staff for its role in curtailing Secretary-Treasurer Margaret Mock’s responsibilities and instilling fear into some of the union’s officials and staff. In a report issued in July of 2024, he wrote that Mock’s reassignments “risk diluting the role of the Secretary-Treasurer as a potential independent check on actions that pertain to financial approvals and oversight of expenditures.” In a subsequent report, he wrote that “the Monitor’s investigation found that Mock consistently and strictly applied Union policy, guided by a commitment to accountability in the wake of the UAW’s past financial scandals. Her removal was not the result of dereliction of duty or dishonesty, but rather a consequence of her refusal to grant exceptions to the strict policy restrictions governing the expenditure of Union resources, including to those within Fain’s inner circle.”

The crucial intervention that Mock had made was to delay authorization for the production of picket signs at the outset of the Stand Up Strike, in the belief that there were usable signs in many a local’s basement, even if such signs weren’t emblazoned with the message specific to this strike. For the first week of the strike, accordingly, pickets marched without signs.

The remedy available to Fain was to have the IEB reverse these denials at the February 2024 meeting. The board duly reversed them, and members expressed incredulity that such questions even had to come before them.

Barofsky has the power to recommend that the Justice Department start an investigation of the UAW, something that Donald Trump’s administration would dearly love to do. To forestall that threat, the UAW agreed last December to give back to Mock and Vice President Rich Boyer the authority they had lost over particular departments of the union, and Chris Brooks announced he was resigning as Fain's chief of staff.