America

For the first time, the United States government has switched off frontier artificial intelligence and forced the world to go without it. Two of the most capable AI systems ever built, Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5, went dark last week. Not just in China or Iran. A researcher in London, a developer in Tokyo, an entire company in Berlin, all cut off at once, all treated as equally dangerous. A letter reached Anthropic at 5.21 on a Friday afternoon from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, citing national security authorities. It told the company to suspend access for every foreign national, anywhere in the world. There is no switch that lets in Americans and keeps out everyone else. To comply, Anthropic said it had to take the models down for all users at once.

Spencer Pratt may not be the next mayor of Los Angeles. But he’s not letting his primary defeat subdue him into silence. On Saturday, Pratt announced his plan to team up with Karen Bass’s brother to sue the Mayor for her carelessness during the Palisades fire. “I am proud to be teaming up with Karen Bass’ brother in suing his sister for her reckless negligence that led to the destruction of our homes. I hope their Thanksgiving dinner isn't too awks. I know ours hasn't been the same since last year…” Pratt said on X yesterday. Last month, Mayor Bass’s brother Kenneth sued the City of Los Angeles, the state of California and other agencies involved in the wildfires for their handling of the crisis.

The UFC event today at the White House has been widely dismissed as an absurdity. Inevitably, the administration’s critics have portrayed the event – officially part of America’s 250th celebrations but curiously taking place on Donald Trump’s 80th birthday – as an odious example of Trumpian excess. Supporters, meanwhile, celebrate it as evidence that Trump is uniquely in touch with ordinary Americans.  Politicians are increasingly asked to function as cultural icons But what media commentators think of the UFC event is beside the point. The significance of this event lies not in the UFC itself, but in what it shows us about the changing nature of political authority. Beneath the headlines and Reddit threads, American politics is undergoing a profound change.

Andy Ogles, a Republican congressman from Tennessee, chose an unorthodox way to mark Pride month yesterday: by tweeting, “Homosexuality has no place in America. Happy Nuclear Family Month.” The backlash was swift and came from all quarters, even Ogles’s fellow Republicans. "The behavior of consenting adults is their business," Senator Ted Cruz said. "Andy, you have family, friends, neighbors, colleagues and constituents who are gay and lesbian," tweeted Representative Mike Lawler. "What an absolutely idiotic statement to make.” Some of those colleagues include Trump appointees such as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Under Secretary of State Jacob Helberg, as well as the President's top pollster Tony Fabrizio. Then came the climbdown.

In 2014, Vladimir Putin notoriously described the internet as originally a "special project of the CIA" that "is still developing as such." He is also averse to mobile phones, not using or owning one himself and banning them from his offices. These two concerns have come together in today’s announcement by the Federal Security Service (FSB) that it had uncovered a massive "multi-level operation" to hack the smartphones of Russian officials. The FSB’s official announcement states that: Using the technical capabilities of large international IT corporations and mobile communications, representatives of foreign intelligence agencies carried out the covert, unauthorized collection of various types of information from the devices of cyberattack targets.

Another weekend, another failed and frankly pathetic attempt to kill the President of the United States. On February 22, a Sunday, Secret Service shot dead an armed 21-year-old male called Austin Tucker Martin, who had entered the Mar-a-Lago complex, although Donald Trump wasn’t there at the time.  America is in a strange condition when a shoot-out at the White House will be soon forgotten On the Saturday night of April 25, the 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen tried and failed to storm the White House Correspondents’ Dinner at the Hilton hotel in Washington DC. And we all saw what happened there.  Earlier this month, in an incident the news cycle quickly moved past, Secret Service shot an armed individual at the National Mall.

Air Force One is in the air as I write, whizzing from Beijing back to Washington – and Donald Trump leaves China with many questions unanswered. There were warm words on both sides and plenty of friendly symbolism in the President’s big summit with Xi Jinping. But the fundamental great power tensions remain – over trade, technology, and war and peace in the Middle East and Taiwan. Washington and Beijing agree that Iran should never have a nuclear weapon – though it remains unclear the extent to which China will help reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Its closure hurts the Chinese economy, of course, but China has significant energy reserves and Xi knows that the pain spreads around the world to his advantage.

I long took for granted that US opinion polls break down respondents into white people, black people and Hispanics. But I’ve come to look askance at this convention. Reporting on political views by race now seems perverse. It implies that a citizen’s primary identity is grounded in skin color, and it reifies a way of thinking about the American people that is regressive, divisive, inaccurate and downright un-American. I was reminded of this recent point of annoyance when the Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana congressional map that none too subtly contrived to create an additional majority-black district. (The district in question drizzled and blobbed diagonally from one northern corner of the state to the far southern one like a trail of ink on blotting paper.