Driverless car travel more than doubles in California

Driverless cars are rapidly becoming more widely used in the US. Waymo has expanded to 11 cities, and in existing markets, travel keeps rising. In California, monthly passenger kilometers more than doubled between December 2024 and December 2025.

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The political salience of AI will only grow with time

As I’ve previously reported, Americans are increasingly concerned about the impact of AI on society. On the Odd Lots podcast, Byrne Hobart said that this makes him worry about misguided regulation, but he also gave a reason this might not happen after all (lightly edited for clarity).

The thing that makes me more optimistic is that the salience of these different issues fluctuates over time. Maybe AI deployment is so fast that it becomes part of the background noise, like the internal combustion engine or electricity or even the internet, which is not a campaign issue right now. It was sort of an issue in 2000, there were internet-y issues in 2016 and 2020, but it’s becoming less and less salient. We just don’t think about it in terms of ‘are you pro or anti the internet?’

This kind of habituation is no doubt very common, but I don’t think it will happen with AI. The reason the internet has faded into the background is that it hasn’t changed much in recent years. By contrast, AI promises to improve rapidly. As it grows more pervasive, so will its political salience.

Electric vehicle sales are surging in Southeast Asia

Southeast Asian countries are highly dependent on fossil fuel imports, which has proved costly during the recent supply disruptions. But their rapid adoption of electric vehicles could reduce this dependence. In Singapore and Vietnam, EVs already have a larger market share than in Europe.

Why Japan’s railways are so successful

More than a quarter of all passenger travel in Japan is by rail. In Works in Progress, Matthew Bornholt and Benedict Springbett explain why. One reason is that driving isn’t as subsidized as in other countries: motorways are tolled and parking is expensive. But the railways also have a smart ownership structure. They’re mostly run by private companies that own not just the trains and tracks but also part of the surrounding land. This gives them an extra reason to grow their ridership, as it raises the value of that land. Conversely, they can increase their ridership by developing the land. A large share of the railway companies’ revenue comes from these developments: everything from retirement homes to amusement parks. It’s a model that other countries could learn from.

A one-person billion-dollar company?

In 2024, Sam Altman predicted that AI would make it possible for a single person to run a company worth one billion dollars. On a recent podcast, he suggested this has now happened. The company is Medvi, an online seller of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs that’s on track for $1.8 billion in revenue this year. However, Medvi actually has two employees and nine contractors. While AI does enable startup founders to do more with less, they’re more reliant on human labor than it might seem.

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In brief

• Anthropic withholds new Mythos model from public release, citing cyberattack capabilities

• Developed democracies virtually never break down

• Major works of literature are written by much older authors today than a century ago

• Hollywood jobs have fallen sharply since 2022

• Large Nature project finds that many studies in the social and behavioral sciences don’t replicate

  • Paul Novosad argues these results aren’t as bad as many say

• Study finds that light skin color arose earlier in East Asia than in Europe

• Gene therapy improves hearing for some people born deaf

• After Anthropic’s clash with the Pentagon, the British government is trying to get the company to expand in the UK

• New OpenAI paper on how to manage economic disruption from AI

• OpenAI puts Stargate UK data center on hold, citing energy costs and regulations

• METR-like study finds that AI is rapidly improving at performing complex tasks in a wide range of domains

  • Another paper applies METR’s methods to cyberattack capabilities and finds fast progress

AI and economic growth, continued

The debate about the economic impact of AI continued over Easter. Quotations have been lightly edited for clarity.

Tom Cunningham:

As far as I can tell, every coauthor on the FRI econ-impacts-survey who’s tweeted about it thinks the respondents are underestimating the impacts of rapid capabilities growth.

Itai Sher gave a critical response:

So now we do surveys and the methodology is if the authors (actually just the ones who tweeted about it) think the survey respondents underestimated something, we treat that as evidence that they did?

Tom:

I’m not dismissing the survey results, but the observation from these authors seemed notable. I personally thought most of the respondents are misinterpreting the questions, or are mistaken, and then it was notable to me that four authors of the paper publicly stated they felt the same way.

As I mentioned on Thursday, I also wonder whether respondents fully understand and accept the scenario with rapid AI progress. It’s hard to survey people on hypothetical scenarios with so many moving parts.

There has also been further debate on the object-level question: how fast growth will be. Andrey Fradkin:

I am more optimistic than my fellow economist forecasters about annual GDP growth by 2050. That said, even my forecast is not as high as the >10 percent forecasts that some are predicting. A few reasons why:

1. The spread of AI capabilities is greatly increasing variance (which includes substantial weight on the negative scenarios including war and revolution).

2. It’s likely that AI will cause a greater decoupling of apparent progress and GDP, so that focusing on GDP will miss something.

3. A lot of economic bottlenecks in the US are regulatory, and in many states of the world, it will take more than 20 years for governance to adjust to let AI subsume these.

4. Healthcare is a large share of GDP, and even though AI will drastically increase medical progress, we may still need RCTs before medicines are widely used and affect GDP.

Nonetheless, the possibility of extremely fast growth cannot be dismissed, and I place about 10 percent weight on these scenarios.

Andrey clarified that his forecast doesn’t assume rapid AI progress by 2030:

Yes, this forecast is unconditional. I believe the capabilities in the ‘rapid’ scenario will almost certainly be achieved within 20 years, just not necessarily by 2030. In the survey, I didn’t take enough time to consider the conditionals (was lazy), but my weight on the > 10 percent annual GDP growth scenarios is much higher in that case (probably 30 percent probability). I still think that my points above apply. Will AI capabilities result in more housing in SF?

Tom Cunningham:

Just to push on this because I feel this is a critical ambiguity in all this discussion: if you *literally* believe that AI can do all intellectual work, including robotics, then things get crazy, right? Like outputs of goods and services will double every year? Housing in the Bay Area seems totally irrelevant somehow. Maybe I need to write something more concrete about this.

Andrey:

Does GDP make sense in that world? Housing is a major component. I still think humans will want to live in SF. But would love to read anything you write on this topic.

Ajeya Cotra:

Rather than talking about GDP we could consider, e.g., energy production or production of robots in that world (though I think GDP would still likely be meaningful and grow enormously like it did during the Industrial Revolution).

Jason Abaluck also had a thread about how transformative AI could make GDP a less useful metric of economic progress:

In worlds where you get full automation and a production explosion, GDP ceases to be a decent proxy for welfare. We should really be forecasting other metrics in those worlds.

. . .

If automation drives the price of many or most goods to zero, then GDP growth will be a very bad proxy for welfare growth.

If robots make a free pill that makes you live forever, GDP does not increase. If robots send whatever food you want to your doorstep for free, GDP does not increase.

So really, forecasts about GDP in a world with complete automation are irrelevant. What matters is forecasts of welfare. Makes me think that next time I coauthor a paper asking partly about such futures, we should use alternative measures of growth!

This measurement issue is interesting, but I don’t think it explains why respondents predicted relatively muted economic growth. The fact that they thought that labor force participation rates would remain fairly high even in the scenario with rapid progress suggests they simply don’t expect a radically transformed economy by 2050.

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Why does the US take AGI more seriously than Europe?

As a European, I’m struck by how much this debate is dominated by Americans. Almost all contributions I found came from people working in the US.

The same pattern holds in broader public discourse, as far as I can tell. In the US, the prospect of transformative AI is taken very seriously. Bernie Sanders recently said that ‘we are at the beginning of the most profound technological revolution in world history’. I don’t hear that kind of language from European politicians. While there obviously is a debate about AI here, too, it isn’t as ‘AGI-pilled’. Why is that?

1. AI adoption

One possibility is that the difference is driven by Americans’ greater use of AI. However, I doubt it’s the main explanation, since adoption rates are fairly high in some European countries, too.

2. AI leadership

Since all leading AI companies are from the US, Americans may believe they can shape how AI develops. By contrast, few hold this belief in my own country, Sweden.

3. Cultural openness to speculation

Another possibility is that Americans are simply more willing to entertain speculative questions. I think this may well contribute.

4. Safety nets

It’s also been suggested that a thinner safety net may make Americans more worried about AI leading to job losses. But my sense is that this factor is somewhat exaggerated, since unemployment hurts in Europe, too.

5. Scale of public discourse

Lastly, the US is such a large country that there’s room to debate a range of issues at the same time. Since European countries are much smaller – and since there’s no pan-European public discourse – a topic like transformative AI can more easily be sidelined.

There may be further factors I’ve not considered. Please comment if you have a view.

American birth rates are falling much faster in cities

The recent fall in American birth rates is disproportionately an urban story.

The relationship between fertility and density was weak as recently as 2005, but since then it has grown much stronger.

In some cities, the trend toward fewer children has accelerated since Covid. Manhattan had 19 percent fewer 0–4-year-olds in July 2024 than it had in April 2020.

Most Y Combinator founders are now under 25

Startup founders in the elite incubator Y Combinator are much younger than just a few years ago, according to Rebel Fund estimates. This may be related to the rising share of AI startups.

American electricity consumption is expected to rise

Several forecasts predict that American electricity consumption will increase again, after having remained flat for many years.

You might think it’s all about AI and data centers, but actually, a broad range of sectors are expected to contribute.

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In brief

• Saloni Dattani on why she’s skeptical of accidental discoveries. (See also the good discussion in the replies.)

• Polymarket gives Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz a 31 percent chance of winning Sunday’s Hungarian election

  • Sentinel gives him a 44 percent chance

• The Burn Selection Hypothesis: humans may have adapted to fire injuries

• Younger Democrats always disapproved more of Biden’s foreign policy, but the Israel–Gaza war widened the gap

• Daniel Kokotajlo and Eli Lifland shorten their (already short) timelines to advanced AI

  • As does Ryan Greenblatt

• Helen Toner argues that the term ‘artificial general intelligence’ has become almost useless

• Two METR researchers present a model of how AI could accelerate its own development

• Contamination from laboratory gloves may have inflated some estimates of microplastic prevalence

• Paper finds that censuses disproportionately undercount poor people, both within and across countries

  • Population estimates are often wrong for other reasons too

How much will AI increase economic growth?

Elon Musk and Dario Amodei predict that AI will transform the economy within the next few years. But a new paper from the Forecasting Research Institute finds that most experts disagree. By 2030, they expect AI progress to be slow or moderate.

And while they predict that growth will be higher if AI progress turns out to be more rapid, they don’t think it will take off dramatically. The economists are the most conservative:

This paper triggered a lively debate on X. Quotations have been lightly edited for clarity.

METR’s Tom Cunningham:

This is a great paper but contains a puzzle: forecasters expect even if we automate most labor and wait 20 years, GDP will only increase by 45 percent.

I would love to hear how people are thinking about this.

. . .

Specifics: the median prediction for 2025–2050 GDP growth with ‘rapid’ progress is 1.5 percent above the slow scenario, meaning that after 20 years of diffusion and AI progress GDP will increase above trend by 45 percent (=1.015²⁵).

Some comparisons for a 45 percent increase in GDP per capita:

• This is roughly the difference between US and Canada in GDP per capita

• This is the growth the US would typically get in 15 years

• This is the growth that China had in 5 years (over 1992–2019)

. . .

Some explanations:

1. Diffusion takes centuries, not decades.

2. Forecasters expect that there will still be thousands of critical tasks which AIs cannot do, even in 2050, but then it seems there’s an ambiguity in the scenario.

3. Powerful AI causes counterbalancing effects pushing GDP down – e.g. war, or disengagement from the market (but then would expect confidence intervals to explode further).

Basil Halperin, who coauthored the paper, also finds it puzzling that respondents don’t expect rapid AI progress to lead to higher growth. He tries to steelman them, but finds both of his attempts unconvincing:

1. Yes bottlenecks will slow progress, this is extremely important. But the rapid scenario under consideration has already chewed through most bottlenecks.

2. Political backlash + regulation could prevent rapid capabilities progress from accelerating GDP.
   But again, in the rapid scenario, it’s plausibly too late. Also, to my understanding, this wasn’t a common justification (underrated IMO).

Arvind Narayanan thinks that the backlash will be powerful:

Many people seem surprised by the prediction in this report that even rapid AI progress won’t lead to explosive GDP growth. Couldn’t AI be different from past patterns?

In my view the fundamental barriers aren’t technological or even regulatory but social. Explosive economic growth implies a pace of social change that I predict the public in most countries will vehemently reject.

Take self-driving cars. Assuming continued rapid AI progress, there will soon come a time when it would be great for growth if you could get human drivers off the roads. Freed from the need to accommodate the limitations of human drivers, roads could be dramatically redesigned and land use patterns transformed.

But my head hurts even trying to imagine the backlash. I think banning human driving will remain completely outside the Overton window no matter the daily death toll. The actual debate we’re having now is whether to allow self-driving cars at all.

AI boosters are right that regulation is not a fixed constraint, and that if AI is powerful enough, it will be a force for change. But they get the direction wrong! It is true that regulation is largely a reflection of social preferences, but those preferences tend to be even more strongly opposed to rapid change than is reflected in policy at any given time. As AI-driven social change kicks in, we will see regulation start to change – in the direction of erecting more barriers, not tearing them down.

If your mental model of AI impacts starts and ends with capability growth, you’ll miss the layer that actually matters. Far from AI being a wild west, the diffusion layer is already highly constrained, and it’s quite possible that those constraints will tighten.

Economist Paul Novosad:

Economists and AI experts have very similar forecasts on what AI will be able to do in 20 years.

But the AI experts think it will have a much bigger effect on the economy than the economists do.

Why? Because economists study this stuff.

Self-driving cars have been considerably safer than human drivers for about 3–4 years. How many people have access to self-driving cars? Even 20 percent penetration is years and years away.

Adoption is slow, society doesn’t transform instantaneously, sometimes it doesn’t transform at all.

We still don’t have high-speed trains in the US and we are banning windmills. Technology is a constraint but it’s far from the only one.

Fellow economist Alex Imas responds:

My worry is that economists’ forecasts of AI’s impact on growth is colored too much by historical precedent. Historical precedent is important, but we should be humble about the possibility of AI being more transformative than prior technologies.

For example, the speed of transformation is at least partly determined by adoption and diffusion through the economy. If one’s model is based on AI being adopted within existing organizational structures, then diffusion will be quite slow – this is what we’re seeing now.

But consider the possibility of a ‘Coasean Singularity’ – a scenario where AI drives the transaction and coordination costs that traditionally dictate firm size to near zero. This could lead to the (potentially fast) emergence of smaller, more nimble AI-first firms, new types of organizations that are outside of our current models, that don’t have historical precedent. These firms will not have the sort of bottlenecks of traditional firm structure, and the transformation and resulting impact on economic growth would be much closer to the technological frontier.

I know that many economists are already thinking through these transformative scenarios. My guess is that as these ideas are developed further, forecasts will change as well.

I think this debate is excellent. What should we make of it? Why don’t people expect higher growth under the rapid AI progress scenario?

I agree with Basil that belief in a political backlash is unlikely to be a major driver. People often fail to fully account for this factor. Instead, I think they simply believe that integrating AI into existing workflows will be painful, as it is today. But it’s not obvious how to square this with the powerful capabilities the rapid progress scenario assumes. As Basil points out, many of the current bottlenecks should no longer apply given this scenario. You don’t need to worry as much about workflow integration when AI can autonomously do complex jobs end-to-end. Here’s part of the paper’s description of the rapid progress scenario:

A single AI agent can generate a Pulitzer (or Booker Prize-) caliber novel according to current (2025) standards, adapt the book into an engaging two-hour movie, negotiate the resulting book and movie contracts, and launch the marketing campaigns for both while its sibling agents manage the book publishing company and movie studio at the level of highly competent CEOs.

It could be interesting to study a limiting case: even more rapid progress, where AI quickly reaches superintelligence. Is there any scenario where people would expect ten percent growth or more? If not, one might suspect they simply don’t take these kinds of scenarios fully on board.

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Europe replaces American aid to Ukraine

American aid to Ukraine has fallen to almost nothing, but as Europe has increased its support, the net decrease has been muted.

Source: Kiel Institute

Financial and humanitarian aid mostly comes from the EU budget, but military aid is provided by individual countries. Some of them give much more than others. The Nordic and Baltic countries account for just 8 percent of the GDP of the tracked European donors, but provided 33 percent of military support in 2025. Conversely, Southern Europe has 19 percent of GDP but its share of military support was only 3 percent.

Source: Kiel Institute

Philosophy has grown more empirical

Philosophy is often viewed as an armchair discipline that barely engages with empirical science. But in a new paper, Michael Prinzing shows that this view is increasingly outdated. In leading analytic philosophy journals, citations of empirical sources have risen substantially since the 1970s.

I think too many philosophers still ignore relevant empirical research, but this is a welcome change. Lagging curricula should be updated.

Poorer countries have very little mental healthcare

While richer countries have better healthcare across the board, the difference is especially striking in mental healthcare. High-income countries have roughly 70 times as many psychiatrists per million people as low-income countries. In terms of spending, the gap is even wider.

Climate change has different drivers over the short and long term

In public discourse, climate change is primarily associated with carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions. But many other emissions also affect the climate, such as methane from agriculture and fossil fuel extraction.

Why then the focus on CO₂? Because most emissions break down within a few decades, whereas CO₂ persists. If you’re pessimistic about long-term climate prospects, it makes sense to prioritize CO₂ emissions.

Source: IPCC. Legend abbreviated.

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In brief

• Benjamin Stubbing and Oscar Sykes on why it proved so hard to make good instant coffee

• Iran increases repression to forestall protests

• Paper finds that noncompete agreements reduce American wage growth

• Bioarchaeology links violence to weak state institutions

• Study suggests that reducing top income taxes would increase tax revenue in Norway

• Ethan Mollick argues that the chatbot interface doesn’t realize AI’s potential

• Luis Garicano and Jesús Saa-Requejo on how Europe could take the lead in AI adoption

• Sam Harris interviews Will MacAskill on the ups and downs of effective altruism

• David Oks on the rise of scientific citation metrics and the problems they cause

• Robert Long argues that LLMs are neither mere parrots nor similar to humans

• American literacy isn’t as poor as recent discourse has suggested

• March newsletters from Coefficient Giving and the Institute for Progress

How smart can AI become?

There’s little reason to think that AI couldn’t become smarter than humans. But how much smarter? On Sunday, François Chollet initiated a debate on that question (quotations have been lightly edited for clarity):

One of the biggest misconceptions people have about intelligence is seeing it as some kind of unbounded scalar stat, like height. ‘Future AI will have 10,000 IQ’, that sort of thing. Intelligence is a conversion ratio, with an optimality bound. Increasing intelligence is not so much like ‘making the tower taller’, it’s more like ‘making the ball rounder’. At some point it’s already pretty damn spherical and any improvement is marginal.

Now of course smart humans aren’t quite at the optimal bound yet on an individual level, and machines will have many advantages besides intelligence – mostly the removal of biological bottlenecks: greater processing speed, unlimited working memory, unlimited memory with perfect recall… but these are mostly things humans can also access through externalized cognitive tools.

I do believe that a large collective of the smartest humans, aided by external tools, sits very close to the optimality bound – i.e. humans should be able to solve any solvable problem (where the required information is available) if they pay enough attention to it.

This received plenty of responses. alz:

This is basically my view: infinite free intelligence will not hyperaccelerate science (though it may well put all the humans out of a job!) because science in 2026 is not actually intelligence-bottlenecked. We have basically enough intelligence already.

However, I don’t think this follows from François’s tweets. Here’s Toby Ord’s response to him:

So it sounds like you are using a definition of intelligence where time is factored out (so you wouldn’t count a society that could discover calculus in 5 minutes as more intelligent than one that took 300,000 years).

. . .

And it would make the consequences of your claim weaker than people would assume. i.e. it is compatible with this that humans are 99 percent (or 100 percent) of perfect intelligence, yet future AIs could run rings around us, inventing the next thousand years of technology within months, etc.

So François’s claims are consistent with AI hyperaccelerating science. alz misinterpreted him in exactly the way Toby warned about, suggesting he wasn’t clear enough.

Ryan Greenblatt makes a point similar to Toby’s:

I probably agree with a claim like ‘human civilization with cognitive tools and unlimited time and attempts could eventually reproduce any specific cognitive feat AIs could do’, but the quantitative factor may be extremely large!

We are nowhere near the limits on how much cognitive firepower is possible.

Notice that Ryan replaces the word ‘intelligence’ with ‘cognitive firepower’, which carries fewer associations. Many debates get stuck over definitions. When that happens, it’s often a good idea to reformulate your claims in other terms. ‘Cognitive firepower’ is well-chosen, since it makes his claim hard to dispute. Clearly, we’re far from maximum cognitive firepower.

Ryan also gives another argument, referencing human individual differences:

AIs could have way higher data efficiency/learning speed/fluid intelligence than humans. Humans vary wildly in these attributes and there isn’t a clear cliff/sigmoid in the human population!

Máté Bedő makes the same argument:

I find it strange that smart people look at how smart the average human is and then consider how smart von Neumann was with macroscopically indistinguishable thinking parts (running on 20W) and they conclude there is minimal headway for improvement for terawatt minds.

However we define the word ‘intelligence’, sufficiently advanced AI would have a tremendous real-world impact. There’s an argument that such AI is still far away, but I don’t think there’s an argument that its impact would be moderate.

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The US leads Europe in AI adoption

A new paper from the St Louis Fed finds that a larger share of workers use AI in the US than in Europe.

Within Europe, people in richer countries use AI more:

There are differences across industries, but perhaps not the ones you’d have expected. Many have argued that AI would disproportionately affect white-collar industries, but this study doesn’t seem to bear that out.

Note also that there’s no clear evidence that AI adoption is affecting employment at the industry level.

Electric vehicle batteries have become 99 percent cheaper

In China, some of the best-selling electric vehicles now cost as little as $10,000. How have they become so cheap? The key reason is the falling cost of batteries: 99 percent in the last three decades.

How microbubbles can carry drugs to the right place in the body

Standard methods often fail to deliver drugs to their targets, especially the brain. In Works in Progress, Ambika Grover writes about a possible solution: microbubbles, tiny gas-filled spheres injected into the bloodstream. Doctors direct ultrasound at the target – such as a tumor or clot – bursting the bubbles to release the drugs where they’re needed. This spectacular technology could improve the treatment of everything from stroke to brain cancer.

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In brief

• Iran is now earning nearly twice as much from oil sales as it did before the war

• US troops in the Middle East relocate from bases to hotels and offices to avoid Iranian attacks

• Tech philanthropy isn’t nearly big enough to replace government science cuts in the US

• Speed reading shortcuts don’t work, writes Tom Stafford

• How the quest to amplify electromagnetic signals led to four major inventions

• YouGov retracts poll on surging church attendance among young Brits over fraudulent responses

• GiveWell uses AI to red team its research with mixed results

• Data centers aren’t raising the temperatures of the surrounding land

• Stuart Ritchie and Tom Chivers on studies about power posing that failed to replicate

• People believe we’re less cooperative than we used to be, but the opposite is true

• Paper claiming liberal reforms harmed the Global South receives plenty of criticism

• How Demis Hassabis tested Mark Zuckerberg and went with Google instead

How to disagree about AI risk

There have been some public disputes in the AI safety community recently:

I think it exemplifies a pattern we’ve seen many times before: people being overly inclined to pick fights with others working for the same cause. But these disputes aren’t just a strategic concern: they also raise an epistemological question. If other smart and knowledgeable people disagree with you, to what extent should you trust your own judgment, and to what extent should you defer to theirs? Under the name epistemic modesty, this has received plenty of attention in the effective altruism and rationalist communities.

In this debate, I come down on the side of modesty. We instinctively trust ourselves too much and others too little, and need to adjust for that. Besides making our beliefs more accurate, I think more modesty could lead to less conflict in the AI safety community. If you’re less sure that you are right and others are wrong, you’ll be more inclined to cooperate.

How to be modest without killing the debate

But there is a further wrinkle. On Wednesday, Ian Leslie tweeted about Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei:

This is a modesty argument: Ian is saying that economists have relevant expertise and that Dario should defer to them. I agree in part: Dario seems too confident, given how much disagreement there is on this question. And yet, I don’t think he should simply fall in line with the economists. Dario is probably one of the people with the most knowledge about AI progress, and we need such people to share their personal views.

How can we be modest without killing the debate? Greg Lewis suggests an elegant solution: ‘distinguishing “credence by my lights” versus “credence all things considered”’.

So one can say ‘Well, by my lights the credence of P is 0.8, but my actual credence is 0.6, once I account for the views of my epistemic peers.’

I think this is a good norm, and encourage people to follow it whenever they can. But I doubt it will fully resolve the problem. It’s not just that public discourse doesn’t reward this kind of careful distinction. It’s that the distinction itself is hard to draw. Our private views are tacitly infused with deference to others.

But while I wouldn’t require Dario to state his credence by his lights and his credence all things considered, he could acknowledge that relevant experts disagree with him and indicate if it moves him. I think that if people did this more, the debate would be both better informed and less heated. Most of us are more likely to engage with someone who signals that they take our views seriously.

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Self-driving cars could cause gridlock unless we tax them

How will self-driving cars change the way we use roads? In Works in Progress, Ben Southwood argues they could cause widespread congestion. When you can sleep or work in the car, people will use it far more. To prevent gridlock, Ben proposes road pricing for self-driving cars. And he suggests we do it now, as people will resist it far more once self-driving cars are common.

The US drops in NATO’s spending ranking

In 2014, the US spent more of its GDP on defense than any other NATO member. But as the threat from Russia has led European countries to increase their spending, the US has dropped to seventh place.

Airlines could cut the climate impact from contrails by two thirds

Two percent of humanity’s climate impact comes from contrails, the clouds that form when planes fly through cold and humid air. A recent trial found that rerouting planes to slightly different altitudes can cut this impact by nearly two thirds. But as adoption was voluntary, airline planners chose the alternative route for only 15 percent of flights – and 40 percent of them weren’t flown as planned. The technology is here: now we need airlines to use it properly.

Source: Hannah Ritchie

Rising protests in Cuba

Over the last five years, Cuba’s economic crisis has led almost a quarter of the population to emigrate. Now the US has tightened its blockade further, threatening tariffs on countries that export oil to Cuba. Blackouts and fuel shortages have sparked a wave of protests, including an attack on a Communist Party office. Polymarket gives a 64 percent chance that Cuba’s leader Miguel Díaz-Canel is out by the end of the year.

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In brief

• Judge pauses the blacklisting of Anthropic

• Fewer American newborn boys are being circumcised

• Britain expected to suffer the most from the Iran War out of all large economies

• Drones intrude on Louisiana air base, forcing it to shut down

• Iran says it will charge fees for shipping in the Strait of Hormuz after the war

• How a TB vaccine became a treatment for bladder cancer

• A remembrance of the evolutionary theorist Robert Trivers

• AI models are much worse when queried in languages other than English

• How to train science funders

• Scotland’s financial system drove its success during the Industrial Revolution

• David Oks argues that the spreadsheet made American companies more shortsighted

• Asimov Press is pausing

Right-wing parties avoid Trump effect in Danish election

Many outside commentators expected Donald Trump’s demands for Greenland to help the Danish left, but this wasn’t borne out in yesterday’s election. The right-wing bloc actually gained ground against the left compared with 2022.

It was specifically the right-wing parties most opposed to immigration that grew, contradicting the narrative that the Social Democrats’ stricter stance has undercut them.

As neither bloc won a majority, most experts expect a new broad coalition, but with different parties from the previous one. Social Democrat Mette Frederiksen is predicted to remain prime minister.

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First-time homebuying in the US keeps getting delayed

In 1975, first-time American homebuyers had a median age of only 28, but today, they are almost eight years older.

The growing ideological divide between young men and women

The Financial Times has previously reported that the political views of young men and women are drifting apart in several countries:

Now they report on the same thing happening in Spain:

One driver may be that questions young men and women often disagree on – such as gender and immigration – have gotten more attention.

Cutting the knot of AI understanding

Do AIs possess real understanding, or are they actually little more than stochastic parrots? Matthew Adelstein argues it matters less than it might seem.

We know that AI can code, discover novel math proofs, provide original analysis of philosophical arguments, and more. We know that AIs can complete programming tasks that take humans a number of hours, and this has been doubling consistently, only to speed up recently. If you ask an AI to analyze a political issue, you’ll get a much more sensible answer than you’d get from 99 percent of the population – and not just in terms of knowing more facts but also in terms of reasoning better. We similarly know that AI is being designed to complete increasingly long tasks and function as an artificial agent.

The case for AI being a big deal, and potentially a serious threat to the world, simply depends on extrapolating out these trends. If AI is getting smarter, more ingenious, and more agentic by the day, then in the limit, we should expect AIs that are very smart and agent-like. That poses a number of quite severe risks. It also has the potential to radically upend the global economy by replacing most human workers.

You don’t have to sort out any of the interesting philosophical questions to evaluate this case. Whether the AI really understands what it’s doing . . . just isn’t relevant to this case.

I think this is mostly right. Too much of the current AI debate consists of people with different intuitions about the meanings of words refusing to see each other’s point of view. Sometimes the best approach to philosophical knots is not to undo them but to cut them.

That said, some underlying disagreements are substantive, and not merely verbal. Extrapolating current AI trends is less straightforward than this passage might suggest. As I’ve reported previously, smart and well-informed people disagree on how to extrapolate from METR’s time horizon studies of AI capabilities. And a major reason they disagree is that they hold different views on how AI systems work.

Bluesky is gradually declining

After Elon Musk acquired Twitter (now X) in 2022, some users left for Bluesky, a platform with similar functionality. The number of posters surged in late 2024 in response to Musk’s campaigning for Donald Trump. But since then, posting has gradually declined. Though activity has fallen at X, too, it is estimated to be around 10–30 times larger than Bluesky, depending on the metric.

Running AI models now costs more than training them

During the first half of this decade, most money invested in AI went into training better models. But now, the bigger expense is inference – actually running the models. This could widen the gap between free and premium models, as it becomes too costly for AI companies to give access to good models for free.

Coal is all but over in Britain

Coal has a special place in British history, as it helped launch the Industrial Revolution. It was the dominant source of electricity as late as the 1980s, but since then, the decline has been steep. In 2025, only 0.1 percent of British electricity came from coal.

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In brief

• Many carmakers are delaying their shift to electric vehicles

• Venezuela opposition leader María Corina Machado says US pressure is leading to reforms

• Jobs that are more exposed to AI aren’t necessarily more likely to be displaced

  • Another paper finds that a key factor is how tightly job tasks are bundled together

  • A third one claims moderate AI exposure benefits workers but high AI exposure harms them

• Automation may have increasing returns

• Ben Todd publishes a book on how to do good with your career, with a special focus on AI

• Rob Wiblin interviews Samuel Charap on the new dangers that may follow a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine

• Fermented foods may have contributed to the evolution of bigger brains

• Kenyan field experiment finds dramatic effects of cheap GMO biofertilizers

• Social science papers lean left, and increasingly so since 1990

• Stuart Ritchie and Tom Chivers on the different theories of Tourette’s syndrome

Trump approval rating hits a second-term low

Silver Bulletin reports that Donald Trump’s net approval rating has fallen to -15.9, a second-term record low. A key driver is inflation, which is expected to rise as a result of the Iran War and could drive Trump’s ratings lower still.

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Why the standard redistribution playbook may not work with AI

AI may eventually lead to widespread job automation and wealth concentration. How should governments respond? Matt Bruenig writes in The Argument:

There is a well-established playbook for achieving economic security and equality that can be applied to an AI-infused economy just like any other advanced economy. Countries can levy taxes to fund universal welfare states in order to hold down income inequality and keep people’s material lives stable over time. They also can increase social ownership and impose targeted corporate taxes to put a lid on wealth inequality and excessive accumulation in specific industries.

The reason why the solutions to economic inequality and instability are always the same is because the problems are fundamentally the same. Capitalist economies distribute income by paying people for their labor and paying returns to people who own capital (wealth). Due to certain feedback loops, capital factors – or wealth – end up overwhelmingly concentrated in the hands of a small percentage of people.

I agree that there are similarities to previous economic paradigms, but a crucial difference is that a single country may come to dominate the AI economy: the United States. Since redistribution has so far mostly taken place within countries, that could make Matt’s well-established playbook insufficient. Deena Mousa (lightly edited for clarity):

One (big) problem: these solutions assume the country redistributing will have captured some gains from AI advancement. This is true for the US, but not for most of the world.

. . .

This isn’t an issue with Matt’s piece specifically; it’s intentionally US-centric. But when we talk about labor market impacts, we usually mean ‘for US white collar workers’, and I am much more concerned about people in countries that won’t capture as much value from AI.

Deena’s focus is on low- and middle-income countries, but this could also be a problem for rich countries that lack competitive AI companies.

Canadian brain drain

In the last decade, Canada has seen poor per capita growth, both compared with the US and the OECD as a whole.

Part of Canada’s problem is that a large fraction of the most skilled workers emigrate to the US. The top one percent of earners in Canada make only forty percent of what the top one percent make in the US. Consequently, at least forty percent of this group of Canadians emigrate, according to an estimate from a Bank of Canada working paper. This share almost doubled between 2005 and 2019, likely reducing Canadian growth. Net migration has also risen among Canadians in the top 2–10 percentiles, whereas it has remained low for those who earn less.

The EU introduces duties on cheap Chinese goods

In the last few years, a huge influx of cheap Chinese goods to the EU has overwhelmed customs authorities. At the Liège airport, officers can check less than one percent of packages – and of those that they do check, almost a third are unsafe, counterfeit, or misdeclared. The EU now plans to introduce duties on goods worth less than €150, which have so far been exempt.

Source: European Commission. LVC: packages worth less than €150.

Chinese girls are now taller than American girls

Thanks to better nutrition, average height has increased significantly in China. By 2019, Chinese 19-year-old girls were taller than their American peers, and boys were catching up as well. But they remain much shorter than the Dutch, one of the tallest peoples in the world.

What does it actually mean to be unemployed?

Economic statistics are often harder to interpret than it might seem. A good example is youth unemployment. According to Eurostat, Sweden has the second-highest unemployment rate among people under 30 in the EU.

But if we instead look at young people neither in employment nor in education or training, Sweden ranks second-best. One reason is that Sweden has many students seeking part-time work. Perhaps surprisingly, they count as unemployed – but since they’re obviously in education, they don’t show up in the second category.

Adapted from Eurostat

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In brief

• Electric vehicle batteries that charge in less than ten minutes

• We don’t have AGI yet by the most established definitions

• Liberal Robert Golob is expected to remain prime minister of Slovenia after Sunday’s election

• Why AI struggles with revolutionary science

• Moderation is only a winning election strategy if applied to the right issues

• Why GLP-1 weight-loss drugs need a far higher dose as an oral pill than as an injection

• Peter Singer and Kasia de Lazari-Radek interview Will MacAskill about effective altruism and the possibility of an intelligence explosion

• Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni loses referendum to overhaul Italy’s justice system

• Sentinel forecasters believe:

  • There’s a 37 percent chance that at least 1,000 US troops will enter Iran before July

  • The chance of two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth (often used as a definition of recession) in 2026 is 29 percent in the US and 39 percent in the EU

• Many countries generate more power from coal to compensate for lost oil and gas supply

• Stock markets rise as Trump suggests a diplomatic solution to the Iran War may be near

Corn farming alone uses over 100 times more water than AI

Many people worry that AI uses too much water, but this is a hugely exaggerated concern. Andy Masley has put together an interactive graphic of American water consumption that lets you compare AI with other industries, such as agriculture. The difference is striking:

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Canada’s population is shrinking for the first time on record

A few years ago, Canada’s population grew at more than three percent per year. But since then, stricter rules have led to a collapse in temporary migration. As a result, Canada’s population declined in 2025 for the first time since records began in the 1940s.

The Anglosphere is falling in life satisfaction rankings

The US, Britain, Canada, and Australia are falling in the rankings in the World Happiness Report (which despite its name asks participants to evaluate their lives, not rate how happy they are).

American elites have become much more Democratic

Republicans used to have higher incomes and more education than Democrats, but over the last few decades, this has changed. A new paper studies this shift among white Americans and finds that it’s strongest in elite groups, who have quickly become more Democratic.

Anthropic could overtake OpenAI

Recently, Epoch AI projected that Anthropic could be on track to pull ahead of OpenAI in revenue. According to the latest estimates, OpenAI’s annualized revenue is $25 billion and Anthropic’s $19 billion.

While OpenAI still dominates the consumer market, higher-paying enterprises have increasingly turned to Anthropic. The Wall Street Journal reports that OpenAI plans to respond by focusing on its coding and business tools.

Americans find their compatriots immoral

Americans have become very negative about their society in recent years. This negativity extends to moral judgments about other Americans. In a recent Pew survey, American respondents were more likely to find their compatriots immoral than respondents from other countries.

The Argument has put together an interesting comparison between these moral judgments and measures of interpersonal trust. In all countries, participants are less likely to say that people are trustworthy than that they are moral. One possibility is that the bar for trusting others is higher, since even a relatively low chance of being cheated may be viewed as unacceptable. It’s also possible that people are more generous when judging their compatriots’ character in the abstract than when deciding whether to actually rely on them. The chart suggests this may be especially true in some countries.

Southern Europeans live longer than richer northerners

Eurostat has released life expectancy data from 2024. While richer regions generally have higher life expectancy, there’s an exception: people live longer in poorer southern Europe than in the richer north. Meanwhile, the formerly communist countries are lagging, with Bulgaria being last.

The US economy will suffer from the Iran War despite energy independence

The US was long dependent on foreign oil, but that has changed in recent years, largely thanks to fracking. This attenuates the economic impact of the Iran War, but Goldman Sachs still estimates that it will lower American GDP growth by 0.3 percentage points this year.

Americans think AI companies should pay for the jobs they eliminate

American voters find AI much more important than they did last year, according to a survey from Blue Rose Research.

How should people who lose their jobs to AI be supported? The survey found that Americans want the government to create good-paying jobs, not just hand out money.

They also think that AI companies should be held financially responsible for the jobs they eliminate.

Across these questions, the differences between Democrats and Republicans are relatively small. As I’ve noted previously, AI is not yet a particularly polarizing topic among American voters.

Surging sales of electric trucks

The share of new trucks that are battery-powered is rising steeply in China.

In Europe, the shift is more modest, but there are exceptions.

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In brief

• Alex Chalmers writes for Works in Progress on how Britain turned its fragmented electricity systems into a national grid

• Denmark and Slovenia both vote on Sunday

  • Social Democrat Mette Frederiksen is forecast to remain prime minister of Denmark

  • Right-wing hardliner Janez Janša is the slight favorite to become prime minister of Slovenia

• The Icelandic government proposes a referendum on resuming EU membership negotiations, with the aim of joining in 2028

  • A narrow majority of Icelanders want to join the EU

• Austin rents are falling fast thanks to a housebuilding boom

• Patients quit weight-loss drug trials after figuring out they got a placebo

• Regulatory reforms that could help old, sick, and poor Americans

• Freelance workers are worse off relative to employees than they think

• The Economist explains Iran’s drones and how they can be fought

• Iran destroys 17 percent of Qatar’s liquefied natural gas capacity (Qatar has roughly a fifth of the global market)

• The US may remove sanctions on Iranian oil tankers currently at sea to slow the rise in oil prices

Society won’t ignore AI risk

In recent years, many people have warned that advanced AI could cause large-scale harm or even lead to human extinction. But how will society respond? That factor is crucial, yet often overlooked.

Pessimists believe that the response will be too little and too late. This rests on two claims: that we won’t get clear signs of the risk in advance, and that even if we do, the response will remain feeble.

In a new post, Coefficient Giving’s Nick Gabrieli takes issue with the first of these claims. There will soon be what he calls ‘weak agents’: AI systems that can ‘complete tasks that would take humans days or weeks, but not months’. He argues that if there is indeed a risk that we will lose control of advanced AI, then weak agents will give us early signs. The mere experience of using agents that independently execute tasks can make the risk feel real. Moreover, there will be concrete evidence of misalignment (first two links mine):

Weak agents will probably act misaligned reasonably often . . . [They] will probably:

• Be hijackable by prompt injection attacks

• Be subtly sycophantic in their text responses

• Tell ‘white lies’ to users, e.g. failing to mention mistakes they have made while completing a task

• Actively deceive users, e.g. comment out errors in code or spoofing results

• Engage in weird/concerning if not actively harmful behavior in some contexts, e.g. scheming against humans on moltbook

I agree that weak agents will likely display concerning behavior. Likewise, human misuse of AI is set to grow more salient as the systems improve.

And if we do get these warning signs, I expect society to react forcefully. A politician as influential as Bernie Sanders has already called for urgent action on AI risk. In my view, the AI safety community has long underestimated society’s likely response. People don’t tend to sleepwalk into disaster.

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Flash mob shoplifting is falling in the US

A few years ago, videos of shoplifting teenagers swarming American stores went viral on social media.

But as Jeff Asher reports, these incidents are now becoming less common.

AI will make smartphones and PCs more expensive

On the Dwarkesh Podcast, SemiAnalysis founder Dylan Patel argued that the price of smartphones and PCs will increase drastically as semiconductor production shifts toward data centers for training and running AI models. He estimates that this will add $250 to the price of the next iPhone. The impact on demand could be dramatic, especially toward the lower end of the smartphone market:

It used to be that 1.4 billion smartphones were sold a year. Now we’re at about 1.1 billion. Our projections are that we might drop to 800 million this year, and down to 500 or 600 million next year.

Dylan argues that the impact on PCs will be similar:

This probably leads to people hating AI even more. Today, you already see all the memes on PC subreddits and gaming PC Twitter. It’s cat dancing videos saying, ‘This is why memory prices have doubled and you can’t get a new gaming GPU or desktop.’ It’s going to be even worse when memory prices double again.

Though note that other forecasters suggest the effects on prices and demand will be somewhat less severe.

Mosquitoes and snakes are the world’s deadliest animals

There are many animals that can kill humans, but some do so much more frequently than others. A new Our World in Data chart shows that mosquitoes are by far the deadliest animal, mostly through spreading malaria. Number two is snakes, which kill around 100,000 people per year (see Mathias Kirk Bonde in Works in Progress on how to reduce that number).

The British public says a near-term world war is likely

More than half of Britons now think another world war within the next 5–10 years is fairly or very likely.

But forecasters on Metaculus estimate that there is only a 25 percent chance of a world war before 2050. The public is often overly pessimistic in surveys of this kind.

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In brief

• Study finds that AI lowers skill requirements and reduces wage inequalities

• High school teachers who grade students too leniently reduce their test scores and future earnings

• The case that the world is still unipolar

  • Previous note of mine on the same theme

• The government research institute that nurtured Taiwan’s chip industry

• How to fund biotechnology projects that academics and venture capitalists don’t pursue

• Many hiring managers admit to ‘AI-washing’ of job cuts

• Stuart Ritchie and Tom Chivers on the mystery of dark oxygen at the bottom of the ocean

• Africa is predicted to remain energy poor through 2050

• Land readjustment: pooling plots to let landowners share the gains from housebuilding

• Student loan defaults are rising in the US

• Agricultural bioterrorism may be a more likely threat than bioweapons targeting humans

Democrats now favorites to win both the House and the Senate

Forecasters have long expected a split result in the November midterm elections, with Democrats flipping the House and Republicans holding the Senate. But in the last month, Democrats’ chances of taking the Senate have risen steeply, on the back of falling approval ratings for Donald Trump.

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Only half of Ukrainian refugees wish to return

Since Russia’s invasion, Ukraine’s population is estimated to have declined from 41 to roughly 31 million, as people have fled or died and fertility has fallen. How much could it recover if the war came to an end? Modestly, if a recent survey of refugees (excluding those in Russia and Belarus) is correct. Only 43 percent say they wish to return to Ukraine after the war, whereas 36 percent say they would prefer not to.

Lower-ranked American colleges have lost nearly half their students

Since 2010, the number of students at American universities has fallen.

As the American Enterprise Institute’s Preston Cooper shows, the decline has been uneven. While enrollment has held up at the top 40 percent of institutions – as measured by completion rates and economic outcomes – it has plummeted at middle- and low-ranking institutions.

Source: Preston Cooper, American Enterprise Institute

American companies are diverging, but consumer spending and incomes aren’t

In recent years, many have described the American economy as K-shaped, with one group pulling ahead and another falling behind, like the two diverging arms of the letter K. But is this true? When it comes to companies, yes. As Stripe’s chief economist Ernie Tedeschi shows, the most profitable firms have increased their share of the stock market.

Household wealth has also become more concentrated at the top, likely driven by the strong stock market.

But spending growth has been relatively equal across the income distribution.

And incomes have actually converged: the lowest third has done the best, and the highest the worst. As Ernie argues, lower earners have likely benefited disproportionately from the tight labor market.

Shipping in the Strait of Hormuz has collapsed

Despite Donald Trump’s call for ship captains to ‘show some guts’, few of them dare to risk an Iranian attack in the Strait of Hormuz.

Since a large share of vital commodities such as oil and fertilizer is transported through the Strait of Hormuz, the world economy could be disrupted if it remained closed.

In particular, many low- and lower-middle-income countries stand to suffer.

Markets expect a short war in Iran

But in fact, oil futures suggest markets don’t think the war will last very long. While a barrel of Brent crude costs more than $100 if delivered in May, contracts for delivery later this year are much cheaper.

Adapted from oilprice.com.

In line with this, inflation expectations haven’t followed the oil price the way they usually do.

Richer countries generate much less plastic pollution

The degrowth movement argues that economic growth is bad for the environment and that we therefore need to shrink our economies. But this isn’t right. Richer countries are in many ways better at protecting the environment. For instance, they generate far less plastic pollution even though they use more plastics.

China is aging fast

In 1965, China had a very young population with a median age of just 18. But since then, it has aged rapidly due to falling birth rates and increasing life expectancy. China’s median age has caught up with the UK’s and is projected to be ten years higher in 2050.

The EU employment rate keeps climbing

In the EU, the employment rate of people aged 20–64 hit a new record of 76.3 percent in the last quarter of 2025, thanks to increases in southern Europe. Likewise, unemployment and underemployment are at record lows.

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In brief

• Cuba struck by national blackout

  • Protesters attack Communist Party building over food and energy crisis

• Andy Masley has put together a calculator for your personal carbon emissions

• Astera Institute commits $500 million to research infrastructure for the life sciences

  • It also launches an essay competition on systemic bottlenecks in science

  • Via Coefficient Giving’s Abundance and Growth Team’s latest reading list

• American growth revised to 0.7 percent in Q4, sharply down from Q3

• How can we make AI-produced science legible to humans?

• Ethan Mollick: ‘Comments on my posts are no longer worth reading due to AI bots. That was not the case a few months ago.’

• AI lab founders hold smaller shares of their companies than the Google and Facebook founders did

• Sentinel forecasters think major US attacks on Iran will cease on 19th April

• Dan Williams argues that wishful thinking is a myth

Background

From 2024, Anthropic had a contract with the Pentagon that included restrictions on mass surveillance and the use of fully autonomous weapons. The Trump administration demanded that those restrictions be removed, and when Anthropic refused, the Pentagon designated Anthropic a supply chain risk. Initially, some thought this could force Amazon and Google to cut ties with Anthropic and even cause the company to collapse. The Pentagon’s decision was widely criticized, including by the lead writer of the White House’s AI Action Plan, Dean W. Ball:

The US government just essentially announced its intention to impose Iran-level sanctions, or China-level entity listing, on an American company. This is by a profoundly wide margin the most damaging policy move I have ever seen the US government try to take (it probably will not succeed).

Democratic control

But Anthropic also has its critics. Stratechery founder Ben Thompson argues that Anthropic assumes a power it’s not supposed to have:

Who decides when and in what way American military capabilities are used? That is the responsibility of the Department of War, which ultimately answers to the President, who is elected. However, Anthropic’s position is that an unaccountable Amodei can unilaterally restrict what its models are used for.

Anduril CEO Palmer Luckey takes a similar view:

Do you believe in democracy? Should our military be regulated by our elected leaders, or corporate executives?

Palantir CEO Alex Karp is characteristically blunt:

If Silicon Valley believes we’re going to take everyone’s white collar jobs AND screw the military . . . If you don’t think that’s going to lead to the nationalization of our technology – you’re retarded.

This debate has to an extent inverted standard patterns: left-wingers side with a private company, and right-wingers talk about democratic control. Noah Smith, quoting Marc Andreessen:

Some might say this shows that people are being hypocritical, but I don’t think it does. Consider Rutger Bregman, who has defended Anthropic forcefully:

This is the most important thing happening in the world right now.

The administration wants killer drones + mass surveillance of Americans.

Anthropic refuses to build it. While most tech companies fall in line, they are prepared to pay the price for their principles.

This is entirely consistent with thinking that elected governments should generally have more power than private companies. People don’t make judgments based on their general stance alone, but also consider the specifics of the question at hand. That’s not hypocritical but common sense.

Monopoly on violence

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has compared selling advanced chips to China with selling nuclear weapons to North Korea. Thompson now turns this analogy against him:

Why would the US government want to kneecap one of its AI champions?

In fact, Amodei already answered the question: if nuclear weapons were developed by a private company, and that private company sought to dictate terms to the US military, the US would absolutely be incentivized to destroy that company.

. . .

There are some categories of capabilities – like nuclear weapons – that are sufficiently powerful to fundamentally affect the US’s freedom of action; we can bomb Iran, but we can’t North Korea.

To the extent that AI is on the level of nuclear weapons – or beyond – is the extent that Amodei and Anthropic are building a power base that potentially rivals the US military.

. . .

It simply isn’t tolerable for the US to allow for the development of an independent power structure – which is exactly what AI has the potential to undergird – that is expressly seeking to assert independence from US control.

Noah Smith writes in support of Thompson’s argument.

This isn’t a question of law or norms or private property. It’s a question of the nation-state’s monopoly on the use of force.

To exist and carry out its basic functions, a nation-state must have a monopoly on the use of force. If a private militia can defeat the nation-state militarily, the nation-state is no longer physically able to make laws, provide for the common defense, ensure public safety, or execute the will of the people.

I think these arguments go too far. Whatever you think of Anthropic’s refusal to the Pentagon’s request, it’s not remotely akin to building a private militia. Setting conditions on how the military uses your products is categorically different from building military power of your own.

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Regulation skepticism

Anthropic has also received criticism from the opposite direction. The company has long called for more regulation of AI to ensure that it is safely deployed. In some critics’ view, this is now coming back to bite them. Dwarkesh Patel:

The AI safety community has been naive about its advocacy of regulation in order to stem the risks of AI. And honestly, Anthropic specifically has been naive here in urging regulation, and, for example, in opposing moratoriums on state AI regulation. Which is quite ironic, because I think what they’re advocating for would give the government even more power to apply more of this kind of thuggish political pressure on AI companies.

Rob Wiblin responds:

Dwarkesh argues that AI safety regulation is risky because it hands wannabe authoritarians easier options for seizing control of AGI and permanently consolidating their power (among other reasons).

But he also appears to oppose state-level AI regulation, and indeed supports a moratorium on it.

If you’re worried about losing democracy then you should naturally be much more worried about federal-level regulation where the military and intelligence services are located and which no external actor can meaningfully check.

California or Texas or Florida creating their own safety office for frontier models actually distributes influence over AI more widely than it stands currently, and doesn’t easily lead to dictatorships that can’t be challenged or escaped.

So this actually seems to be an argument in favour of abandoning federal regulation and aiming to do things at the state level long-term.

I agree with that. Too much of the debate focuses on regulation in the abstract. This is a good example of how much the specifics matter.

Rob continues:

You might also say that avoiding federal regulation now wouldn’t stop a bad actor cynically imposing and then exploiting them in future. But that’s a general problem with all arguments that say we shouldn’t do good things now because they’ll be turned to bad ends later.

If you don’t do good things now, the bad things can and often will be done later anyway.

I broadly agree with this, too, though I think there are some nuances. Since bad actors typically don’t have unlimited power, what legislation they can refer to can make a difference. The Pentagon might have been able to act even more forcefully against Anthropic if other legislation had been in place. Dwarkesh warns that ‘a purpose-built regulatory apparatus on AI’ could have this effect, though he doesn’t specify which particular regulations are liable to misuse.

Like nukes or the Industrial Revolution?

Dwarkesh also engages with the comparison between AI and nuclear weapons.

Ben Thompson had a post last Monday where he made the point that people like Dario have compared the technology they’re developing to nuclear weapons – specifically in the context of the catastrophic risk it poses, and why we need to export control it from China. But then you oughta think about what that logic implies: ‘if nuclear weapons were developed by a private company, and that private company sought to dictate terms to the US military, the US would absolutely be incentivized to destroy that company.’ And honestly, safety-aligned people have actually made similar arguments. Leopold Aschenbrenner, who is a former guest and a good friend, wrote in his 2024 Situational Awareness memo, ‘I find it an insane proposition that the US government will let a random SF startup develop superintelligence. Imagine if we had developed atomic bombs by letting Uber just improvise.’

In Dwarkesh’s view, this analogy is misconceived:

AI is not some self-contained pure weapon. A nuclear bomb does one thing. AI is closer to the process of industrialization itself – a general-purpose transformation of the economy with thousands of applications across every sector. If you applied Thompson’s or Aschenbrenner’s logic to the industrial revolution – which was also, by any measure, world-historically important – it would imply the government had the right to requisition any factory, dictate terms to any manufacturer, and destroy any business that refused to comply. That’s not how free societies handled industrialization, and it shouldn’t be how they handle AI.

People will say, ‘Well, AI will develop unprecedentedly powerful weapons – superhuman hackers, superhuman bioweapons researchers, fully autonomous robot armies, etc – and we can’t have private companies developing that kind of tech.’ But the Industrial Revolution also enabled new weaponry that was far beyond the understanding and capacity of, say, 17th-century Europe – we got aerial bombardment, and chemical weapons, not to mention nukes themselves. The way we’ve accommodated these dangerous new consequences of modernity is not by giving the government absolute control over the whole industrial revolution (that is, over modern civilization itself), but rather by coming up with bans and regulations on those specific weaponizable use cases. And we should regulate AI in a similar way – that is, ban specific destructive end uses (which would also be unacceptable if performed by a human – for example, launching cyber attacks).

But while AI has some similarities with the Industrial Revolution, there are also important differences. The Industrial Revolution only led to aerial bombardment and chemical weapons after a massively distributed process spanning several centuries. That gave governments ample time to act. By contrast, many people think individual AI companies can develop extremely powerful capabilities in a matter of years. If so, government intervention may have to be more proactive.

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Tenuous connections

Many of the arguments in this debate are very broad, and the link to the dispute between Anthropic and the Pentagon is sometimes tenuous. The state’s monopoly on violence and safety regulation of AI are important questions, but this episode sheds less light on them than it might appear. I think the debate would gain if the arguments became more specific.

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The myth of American religious revival

Americans have grown less religious for a long time, but recently it has been suggested that this trend is reversing. In particular, some claim that young people are becoming more religious.

It would be a surprising turn, but it’s not supported by our best evidence. In Gallup’s latest survey, the share of Americans reporting no religion continues to rise.

Americans also attend religious services less.

And the youngest generations remain the least religious.

Could religious people’s higher fertility be what breaks the secularization trend? Over the long term, it’s possible, but currently this effect is outweighed by the number of people losing their faith.

Source: Pew

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MAGA isn’t antiwar

Steve Bannon, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and other prominent figures in the MAGA movement have long argued that the US should stay out of foreign wars. This may suggest that Republicans who identify as MAGA would be less likely to support the American attack on Iran than other Republicans. But in fact, the opposite is true. MAGA Republicans are especially enthusiastic about the war.

And about military intervention in general.

MAGA isolationism may be mostly a thought leader phenomenon.

The Iran war could cut global growth

The world has become less sensitive to oil shocks than it was in the 1970s, but the war in Iran could still reduce this year’s economic growth. Capital Economics suggests that many Asian countries would be severely affected by a prolonged war, while the impact on the US economy would be more muted. The Gulf countries will obviously suffer the most, as they’re under Iranian fire.

Can the Gulf still become an AI hub?

The war in Iran could also have a longer-term impact on the Gulf countries’ efforts to position themselves as an AI hub. In recent years, they have invested heavily in AI infrastructure in partnership with American companies such as xAI, OpenAI, Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, and Google. But as drone strikes have already hit three Amazon data centers, the Gulf countries might now find it harder to convince their partners that they’re safe.

Progress on poverty is stalling

In the last few decades, extreme poverty has fallen fast thanks to a rapid decline in South and East Asia (in particular, China). But now this decline may be coming to an end. Almost all of the remaining extremely poor people live in countries with low growth and rapidly increasing populations, such as Mozambique, Madagascar, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. As a result, World Bank researchers project that extreme poverty could even increase in the coming decades.

Clinical trials show we keep improving the scientific method

The standard framing of the history of science can lead you to think of the scientific method as a monolithic whole that we discovered during the Scientific Revolution. But in fact, our methods have gradually become more rigorous. Clinical trials are a case in point, as Saloni Dattani shows. Though it’s difficult to know whether a drug works without randomized controlled trials – where patients are randomly assigned to receive either the treatment or a placebo – they only became standard after 1962. Though it’s easy to find a positive result if you haven’t specified how you’ll analyze your data in advance, preregistration only became a requirement in the early 2000s. And though there’s often little incentive to report null and negative results – leading to inflated estimates of drug efficacy – it only became mandatory to do so in 2007 or later (depending on jurisdiction). Saloni argues that the next step is to require researchers to share anonymized data on individual patients so that other researchers can use it. The scientific method keeps improving.

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In brief

• In February, Russia’s advance in Ukraine slowed to a quarter of last year’s average

• Microsoft files in support of Anthropic’s challenge to being designated a supply chain risk

• The Works in Progress podcast on what long-lived animals can teach us about extending human lifespans

  • Aria Schrecker’s article on the same theme

• Companies that work on some of the world’s most pressing problems can’t get funded

• As Claude passes DeepSeek, the four most visited AI websites are all American

• Several merchant ships are attacked in the Strait of Hormuz

• A data scan finds serious errors in three percent of scientific datasets

• Do you prefer AI or human writing? (Try a new browser if it doesn’t work.)

• Study finds that people underestimate other people’s honesty

On Thursday, METR’s Ajeya Cotra wrote that she had ‘underestimated AI capabilities again’:

For the first time, I don’t see solid evidence against AI R&D automation *this year.*

Naturally, this got quite a lot of attention. If AI could be used to create its own successor, progress would be accelerated. (Though note that Ajeya’s estimate is lower than it might seem: she later clarified that she thinks the chance of AI R&D automation in 2026 is ten percent.)

Superforecaster Peter Wildeford weighed in:

I think I’d forecast:

~2026-2030 -- AI replaces ~all AI researchers

~2027-2033 -- AI replaces ~all white collar industry

~2032-2040 -- AI replaces ~all human industry

~2033-2042 -- All humans dead or obsolete

Eli Lifland, one of the authors of the AI Futures Model (the successor to AI 2027), responded:

Do you have a sense of the crux of why your takeoff is so much slower than https://aifuturesmodel.com?

(Eli’s median estimate is that it will take around two years – depending on how you interpret key terms – from Peter’s first step to his last.)

Peter:

Does your model account for bottlenecks in diffusion?

That is, does it allow for the fact that it may take time for individuals and companies to adopt new AI systems?

Eli:

Not in a very smart way. We mostly focus on AI R&D capabilities. I don’t think those particular bottlenecks are very large though.

. . .

At a high level, I think superintelligence will be so capable that there will be extreme costs to not adopting it quickly. And thus there will be race dynamics, even if people don’t adopt it readily in the first place.

It’s striking that Eli and Peter take such different views on this, since both expect AI progress to be fast and both are top forecasters.

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The benchmark-reality gap

Ajeya’s update was motivated by surprisingly fast progress on METR’s time horizon metric for AI capabilities, which evaluates AI systems by how long the tasks they can complete would take a human expert. On 14th January, she estimated that by the end of the year, AI would be able to complete 24-hour software tasks at a 50 percent success rate. Seven weeks later, that figure had more than quadrupled, to over 100 hours. In Ajeya’s view, this means we may be drawing near to a crucial threshold. Once AI systems can reliably handle tasks lasting several weeks, she thinks they might be able to decompose longer tasks into smaller ones. This could allow them to complete arbitrarily long projects, opening the door to AI R&D automation.

As I’ve discussed previously, METR’s time horizon metric plays a central role in the AI debate. But some are skeptical about how much it tells us. On Saturday, Matthew Barnett wrote:

I want to preregister that even once AIs can complete month-long tasks on the METR task suite (or rather, a future task suite capable of measuring at that scale), I don’t expect large, transformative effects on the world to quickly follow. There will be a benchmark-reality gap.

To make this claim more precise: within 3 years of AIs being capable of month-long tasks on the METR task suite, I don’t expect AIs to take over the world, elevate US economic growth by >10 percentage points, cause the US labor force participation rate to fall by >30%, or cause a billion people to die.

Why not? Because the METR task suite measures only a narrow slice of economically valuable tasks, mainly software tasks that can be easily graded. Even once AIs excel at these tasks, overall impact will be muted by numerous bottlenecks in the economy.

AIs capable of software engineering tasks won’t necessarily be good at management, long-term planning for fuzzy goals that lack clear criteria for success, or efficiently operating computers via mouse and graphical user interface interactions. I think all of these will be important bottlenecks.

I don’t anticipate wild, transformative effects on the economy, such as double-digit US GDP growth, until AIs are capable of general, highly reliable, open-ended autonomy on ambiguously defined goals. I don’t think the METR task suite currently measures this capability well.

Interestingly, many people agreed with Matthew and very few pushed back. The belief that METR’s tests are representative of real-world tasks may be rarer than it sometimes seems.

But what about automating AI R&D? Matthew thinks the benchmark-reality gap applies to that, too:

I expect strong performance on METR tasks translates into partial, not complete, automation of AI R&D. Moreover, I think even complete automation of AI R&D would probably only modestly accelerate AI progress, since progress would quickly become bottlenecked by compute and data.

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Who should we trust?

Some of the forecasts in this debate can seem aggressive. In reaction to Peter Wildeford’s tweet, economist Itai Sher wrote:

Economist Jason Abaluck responded:

If someone with a demonstrably excellent forecasting record makes predictions that seem outlandish to you, the correct response is to update your beliefs, not mock them.

I have a lot of respect for Itai, but I agree with Jason. I don’t have very short AI timelines either, but the fact that some very smart and knowledgeable people do makes me worry that I may be wrong. We tend to trust our own judgments too much and should put more weight on the judgments of others.

That said, we should also be aware of a selection effect. If you believe that AI timelines are short, you’re more likely to find it important to develop relevant expertise. In this way, the pool of experts on AI timelines can become systematically skewed. Weighing all these considerations against one another is fiendishly difficult.

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Brian Potter on America’s failed plan for prefab housing

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Why does population decline matter?

Falling birth rates are leading many people to worry about population decline. But why exactly is that a problem? There’s often a lack of clarity on that question. I think it’s useful to distinguish between three kinds of problems.

The transition problem

The most common worry is not about having a smaller population, but about the process of getting there. As birth rates fall, each new generation is smaller than the one before. Over time, this could mean too few workers to support all the pensioners.

I think this problem is somewhat overblown, and that we will manage it as long as completed fertility doesn’t fall too low (say, approaching 1.0). Those who worry about it often focus on the old-age dependency ratio, defined as the ratio of people over 65 to people between 18 (or 20) and 64. This has two problems. First, the fixed cutoff at 65 neglects that people are retiring later. Second, it doesn’t account for children, who are also dependents. Falling birth rates obviously mean fewer children, offsetting some of the burden from having more pensioners.

The size problem

But a smaller population can also be bad in itself. Is the world better if it contains more people (provided they live typical, reasonably happy lives)? Many population ethicists think it is. If so, that’s an argument to prevent population decline.

A smaller population can also reduce economic growth as it reduces both the returns from innovation and the number of innovators. And some worry that it could eventually lead to human extinction by weakening our resilience to disasters.

The balance problem

The third argument is that well-functioning democracies like Japan, South Korea, and Germany will be disproportionately affected by population decline. These countries drive much of global innovation and contribute to peace and stability. If their share of the global population continues to shrink, the world could become both poorer and more volatile.

Population decline is slow

How serious are these problems? While I think the transition problem is a bit overblown, I take the size and balance problems seriously. At the same time, population decline is a slow process (depending on how low birth rates fall) and the global population is set to peak only in the second half of this century. By then, we may live in a very different world, given the speed of AI progress. It could well make our population forecasts obsolete.

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Cutting NIMBYs a deal

A major reason many cities don’t build more housing is that homeowners pressure local government to block it. Housing reformers often respond by trying to persuade higher levels of government to step in and overrule these restrictions. But as David Foster and Joseph Warren show in a new article for Works in Progress, this strategy has a checkered track record. NIMBYs have influence far beyond the local level, and they use it to water down reforms and obstruct implementation. Instead of trying to steamroll residents, Foster and Warren suggest an alternative: offer them a cut of the profits, upgraded homes, or better amenities in return for accepting new development. From London to Tel Aviv, this has already helped get more homes built.

Trump’s wars haven’t changed his approval numbers

The conventional wisdom in American politics used to be that war has a big impact on the president’s popularity. War typically produced a rally around the flag effect, which could be reversed if it dragged on and casualties mounted. But as Nate Silver writes, this pattern hasn’t held up during Trump’s second presidency.

One possibility is that American politics is now so polarized that wars no longer move the needle the way they used to. It could also be that the relatively small wars Trump has started drown in the chaos of his second term.

Rising gas prices remain far from 2022 levels

While gas prices have increased sharply due to the war in Iran, it’s important to put this increase in perspective. Compared with the dramatic spike after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it’s still fairly small.

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In brief

• Work from home could raise the birth rate

• Polymarket estimates a 61 percent chance that US forces will enter Iran this year

• Dan Williams argues that AI could improve public discourse

  • Previous post of mine on that theme

• Since the number of moderate Democrats has fallen, they may struggle to dictate party strategy in 2028

• The man who gave America nuclear power

• Evidence of complex proto-writing from 40,000 years ago

  • It may go back even further

• A third of claims in economics papers are based on causal inference, up from eight percent in 1990

• IVF patients favor less regulation of polygenic embryo selection than clinicians do

That’s all for today. If you like The Update, please subscribe – it’s free.

Trump proves the US presidency is broken

Since his return to power, Donald Trump has pardoned the assault on the 2020 election, sent the Department of Justice after his enemies, and talked ominously about ‘nationalizing the voting’. How could a country that has done so much to spread democracy go so wrong at home?

To an extent, Americans can blame bad luck: few people are as flawed as Donald Trump, and the chance that one of them would end up in the White House was fairly low. But even so, Trump exposes the shortcomings of the American political system. You shouldn’t have to rely on luck.

One problem is that binding primaries and an increasingly outrage-driven media environment have opened the door for populists. But the deeper problem is the presidency itself. Even though concentrating power in the presidency is a bad idea, successive American presidents have done exactly that. Now this power rests with Donald Trump.

Once he’s gone, the US should drastically rein in the president’s power – but I’m not optimistic it will happen. In today’s partisan environment, the governing party lacks incentives to reform. The world’s most powerful democracy seems stuck with a broken system.

Share of Americans saying Trump goes ‘outside the bounds of our system of checks and balances’. YouGov, 17th September 2025.

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Not all green choices are created equal

What can we do to save energy? Many people are almost as meticulous about turning off the lights as about taking shorter showers and turning down the heating. But as Hannah Ritchie shows with a new interactive tool, these choices are not in the same league. Leaving an LED light on for an hour uses just ten watt-hours – roughly 0.1–0.5 cents, depending on where you live. Taking a ten-minute shower uses roughly 160 times more energy, and heating a room for an hour uses 270 times more. This is where the big savings can be found. Turning off the lights matters much less than you might think.

Source: Hannah Ritchie.

The same lopsidedness shows up in our food choices. Meat generates more greenhouse gas emissions than plant-based food, and buying local food obviously reduces transport emissions. But which choice is more important? Is it better to eat locally produced beef or imported fruit and vegetables?

The difference is enormous: since transport only accounts for five percent of greenhouse gas emissions from food, what you eat completely dominates where it comes from.

We don’t prioritize enough between these choices. Part of the reason is that we don’t like admitting that one good thing matters much less than another. But another part is that we’re simply mistaken. We think the world is relatively flat – that different choices are roughly as important – whereas in fact, it’s full of tall peaks and deep valleys.

American emigration is rising

In nearly all EU countries, the number of arriving Americans is at a record high. In total, more than 1.5 million Americans now live in Europe.

Adapted from The Wall Street Journal.

Overall, US net migration likely turned negative last year, for the first time since the Great Depression.

Cameras replace lapsed traffic policing in San Francisco

Over the last decade, the San Francisco police all but stopped issuing traffic tickets, leading to widespread speeding. But in the last few years, ticketing has increased again, thanks to a new tool: cameras. A study of 15 camera locations found that speeding fell by 72 percent after installation.

American stocks are lagging the rest of the world

The American stock market had an extraordinary run in the 2010s and early 2020s, but that has come to an abrupt end. The S&P 500 underperformed other markets by more than ten percentage points in 2025, and 2026 has started even worse.

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In brief

• ‘“AI laundering” – blaming AI for layoffs you were going to do anyway – is going to be a real thing’

• Indian IT services stocks fall as AI automation tools improve

• Aria Schrecker on how to hack the dating market

• Male Neanderthals interbred more with female Homo sapiens than the other way around

• The war in Iran could help Russia by raising energy prices

• Luisa Rodriguez interviews Robert Long on why AI consciousness is so hard

• David Nash’s monthly links roundup about global development is very comprehensive

  • He is looking for paid or volunteer help to estimate the population and GDP of African countries

• What the Institute for Progress was up to in February

• Coefficient Giving summarizes its work on global health and well-being in 2025

That’s all for today. If you like The Update, please subscribe – it’s free.

• When the environment recovers, no one talks about it

• Britain’s inactivity crisis is receding

• Western power is underestimated

• Pride in being an American has fallen fast

• Americans now sympathize more with Palestinians than with Israelis

• In Spain, Catholic marriages have collapsed

• In brief: obstacles to African growth, soaring organ donations, and more

When the environment recovers, no one talks about it

Environmental reporting is one-sided: when problems arise, they get enormous attention, but when we solve them, they are all but ignored. This makes people far more pessimistic than they have reason to be. We need to look beyond the alarms of the day and see the bigger picture.

Consider oil spills: while the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska made headlines for years, few people know that oil spills from tankers have fallen by 90 percent from their peak.

No one does more to counter overblown pessimism than Our World in Data. Max Roser’s piece on forest cover is another case in point. The world has been losing forests for thousands of years, but in recent decades, many rich countries have reversed that trend.

Economic growth is often viewed as harmful to the environment, but past a certain point, it tends to help. Part of the reason is that environmental concerns become a higher priority once our material needs are met. A similar example is the remarkable comeback of wild animals in Europe.

Our World in Data’s Hannah Ritchie has written a book about these kinds of environmental success stories, Not the End of the World. I highly recommend it.

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Britain’s inactivity crisis is receding

Reporting on social and economic problems has the same negative skew. A few years ago, British media couldn’t stop talking about the country’s rising economic inactivity rate, but the recent return to pre-pandemic levels has been met with almost complete silence. The Economist’s Callum Williams quote tweets an account with just 19 followers:

Unbelievable. And it’s true! The number of pieces I read a year, two years, three years ago on this. And no one has bothered to follow up except an anon???

Western power is underestimated

Geopolitical discourse is just as rife with alarmism. For years, commentators have insisted that Western democracies are losing ground to a coalition of authoritarian rivals. But whatever you think of the strikes on Iran and Venezuela, they show which side is strongest. Since Maduro was captured and Khamenei killed, their Russian and Chinese allies have remained notably passive.

Geopolitical alarmism has several sources, but I think one of them is strategic exaggeration. During the Cold War, Western hawks routinely overestimated Soviet strength to justify bigger armies. Today, Mark Rutte plays the same game as he presses member states to spend five percent of GDP on defense. Claims about what the world is like are often better understood as attempts to change it.

Pride in being an American has fallen fast

Americans used to be almost universally proud of their national identity, but that is changing. While 87 percent took pride in being an American in early 2001, that number was only 58 percent in the most recent survey. This decline is driven both by people changing their values over time and by generational replacement: old people dying and young people with different values growing up.

As pride in being an American has fallen, a partisan gap has opened up. The difference between Republicans and Democrats used to be negligible, but has grown to over 50 percentage points.

Americans now sympathize more with Palestinians than with Israelis

A similar pattern can be found in Americans’ attitudes toward the Israel–Palestine conflict. Until ten years ago, Americans’ sympathies were firmly with the Israelis, but in Gallup’s latest survey, the balance has tipped in the Palestinians’ favor.

This value shift is also driven by a mix of people changing their minds and generational replacement.

Adapted from Gallup.

The partisan pattern is another parallel between the Israel–Palestine question and pride in being an American. While Democrats’ and independents’ sympathies have shifted rapidly toward the Palestinians, Republicans’ sympathies haven’t changed.

In Spain, Catholic marriages have collapsed

Under the Franco dictatorship, Spain was a deeply Catholic country where you had to prove you weren’t Catholic to have a civil marriage. But in the last 50 years, Spain has secularized rapidly. Today, only one marriage in five is Catholic.

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In brief

• Saarthak Gupta on why Africa will struggle to grow through manufacturing

• Posthumous organ donations have nearly tripled since 2000 in the US

• American software engineering job postings show signs of a modest rebound

• Young computer science graduates earn a record salary premium over other graduates in the US

• Saloni Dattani and Jacob Trefethen on why more people should take statins to lower their cholesterol

• Since AI has to wait for clinical outcomes, it can only speed up drug trials so much

• Thanks to its nuclear power, France is a major electricity exporter

• Lawfare claims the Pentagon’s designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk won’t hold up in court

• Sentinel forecasters give a 72 percent chance that the designation will be removed by the end of next year

  • If it isn’t, Sentinel estimates a 24 percent chance that the company collapses

That’s all for today. If you like The Update, please subscribe – it’s free.

• Iranian leader Ayatollah Khamenei killed in airstrikes informed by months of CIA tracking

• Polymarket traders estimate a 52 percent chance of regime change in 2026

• Iran retaliates by firing at targets in Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Iraq, Oman, and Cyprus

• Oil prices are up ten percent since Friday and gas prices are up too

• Americans disapprove of the attack by 43 percent to 27 percent and think that Trump uses too much military force by 56 percent to 40 percent

Pentagon turns on Anthropic

• Anthropic refuses to let the US military use its AI for mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons

• US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth orders companies supplying the military to cut ties with Anthropic

• OpenAI signs contract with the Pentagon to replace Anthropic

• Consumers respond by downloading Claude at a record rate, faster than ChatGPT

• Manifold puts the chance that Amazon has to divest from Anthropic by the end of the year at 13 percent

• Since Friday, Anthropic’s valuation is unchanged while OpenAI’s is up in the (small) Ventuals markets for private valuations

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• Technological resentment is not a long-term plan

• China expected to close the American lead in AI by 2040

• Education splits religious belief and attendance in the US

• China’s growing economic sophistication pits it against the G7 countries

• In brief: the Works in Progress podcast on Europe’s stagnation, how AI splits the stock market, and more

Technological resentment is not a long-term plan

Should we increase the human lifespan? Should we extend women’s fertility window? Should we automate the jobs we don’t want to do? To a surprising number of people, the answer is no. They argue that life extension is self-centered, that fertility extension crowds out social reform, and that automation is never good for workers.

I think much of their resistance is rooted in status quo bias, as it’s improbable that we’ve just happened to end up in a situation so good it can’t be improved. But I also wonder how the tech skeptics are thinking about the longer term. If current trends continue, these technologies will eventually arrive. Do they wish to stop them indefinitely?

Like capitalism, technological transformation of life is part of the modern condition: what happens by default, given human nature and the structure of society. Given that people are fairly rational and self-interested, it’s hard to avoid capitalism. And given that people can find new knowledge and accumulate it over time, it’s hard to avoid transformational technological progress.

This analogy suggests that tech skeptics have two options. Like the communists who tried to abolish capitalism, they could try to stop technologies like life and fertility extension altogether. That’s unlikely to succeed. It’s more promising to learn from the social democrats – who reformed capitalism from within – and try to shape how technological progress affects society.

People who have qualms about transformational technologies still need to develop a vision of the good life that includes them. The social democrats didn’t just grudgingly tolerate the version of capitalism that they built: they reshaped their values and grew to like it. Don’t grow resentful of the society you live in – come to terms with it and try to shape it.

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China expected to close the American lead in AI by 2040

American AI systems such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are currently ahead of their Chinese competitors by a substantial margin. But will it last? In a survey conducted by the Forecasting Research Institute, experts and superforecasters predicted that by 2040, the best AI systems from China and the US will be on par.

The best Chinese AI systems were nine points behind on the Epoch Capabilities Index in January 2026.

While the US has the best AI systems, more than 90 percent of the best chips for training and running AI are produced in Taiwan. As both China and the US find it strategically important to produce more chips of their own, their market shares are expected to rise. Still, the experts and forecasters predict that Taiwan will retain half the market in 2040.

Education splits religious belief and attendance in the US

Americans with low education are more likely to be sure that God exists:

They’re also more likely to believe in creationism:

You might think these beliefs mean that Americans with low education are more likely to attend religious services. But it’s actually the other way around:

One possibility is that this reflects Americans with low education being less inclined to participate in community institutions in general.

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China’s growing economic sophistication pits it against the G7 countries

Twenty years ago, China ran a trade surplus in both basic and high-tech goods, from clothes to electronics. But since then, the basic goods balance has swung into deficit, while the high-tech surplus has surged.

As China’s economy becomes more sophisticated, it increasingly competes with the G7 countries:

In brief:

• The Works in Progress podcast on Europe’s stagnation and how to turn it around

• AI splits the stock market into winners and losers

• Opposition to data centers is NIMBYism, not AI skepticism

• More than half of Swiss inheritances go to people over 55

• Daniel Litt on how AI might be used for mathematics in the years to come

• The Economist estimates Russian and Ukrainian casualties

• Study finds that AI use makes people work more intensely and for longer hours

• Alan Cole wins $128,000 betting that Musk’s DOGE would fail to reduce federal spending

• Updated edition of Will MacAskill’s Doing Good Better

• To improve state capacity, we need to measure it better

That’s all for today. If you like The Update, please subscribe – it’s free.