Good morning. It’s the first day of fall. President Trump’s expulsion of CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House is causing a dust-up in Washington. The news organizations sued on First Amendment grounds, and major TV networks suspended their pool coverage of the president in protest. There’s more news below, including Maureen Dowd’s interview with Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey. But first, let’s talk about artificial intelligence.
Talk of the townThe conversation about A.I. is at a fever pitch — and not just in my house, where debate rages over what the new Alexa is learning from us on the sly. It was the talk of the United Nations General Assembly yesterday in a series of meetings about the technology’s risks and opportunities, and it will be a central discussion point this week when President Trump and President Xi Jinping of China meet in Washington. Their conversation will undoubtedly be more strategic than hypothetical. Trump has called concerns about the safety of A.I. a “hoax,” and his administration has accused Chinese A.I. firms of stealing American intellectual property. Xi, for his part, wants the United States to lift restrictions on the advanced computer chips China needs to power its A.I. models. They may talk about safety a little bit. But they probably won’t be debating whether the technology poses a greater existential risk than climate change. For some doomsday academics, though, that existential hazard is exactly the debate. “In terms of things that could be the end of humanity, I think A.I. is a bigger risk,” one researcher told my colleague Chico Harlan. Still, as Chico notes, the risks of A.I. remain speculative. We can’t really say how exactly it might contribute to the extinction of human life. We don’t have a plan to stop that unknown from happening. There are a lot of unknowns. “Climate change, on the other hand, is full of knowns,” Chico writes. “The science linking fossil fuel emissions and global temperature rise is long-established and irrefutable. The solutions to help curb emissions, such as solar energy and electric vehicles, are proven and abundant.” Of course, A.I. comes with its own climate-altering baggage, as Chico notes. It takes a great deal of energy to run the data centers that support the technology. The consumption of electricity by data centers surged 50 percent last year. To make that juice, a lot of greenhouse gases went into the atmosphere. And there’s more to come. A U.N. think tank predicts that by 2030, A.I. data centers will use nearly three times the electricity of Nigeria, Pakistan and Bangladesh combined. Together, those countries are home to some 650 million people.
A.I. in ’28We’re not even to the midterm elections yet, but already potential candidates for the 2028 presidential race are jockeying for position — and of course they’re all talking about A.I., too. My colleague Evan Gorelick took a look at the field and found Democrats angling to enforce safeguards on the technology and Republicans rallying behind Trump’s warnings not to slow down the pace of development, lest China get the upper hand. Gavin Newsom, Josh Shapiro, Kamala Harris, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Andy Beshear, Mark Kelly, JB Pritzker, JD Vance, Ted Cruz: See where they stand. Too humanPerhaps no one is talking about A.I. more than the executives at the companies that are developing it. My colleague Cade Metz has a fascinating story about that, tied to an essay that a Microsoft executive, Mustafa Suleyman, released last week about the idea that the A.I. we have now is conscious. Current A.I. systems, the executive wrote, “are sequence completion engines, internally hollow, designed to follow instructions, and accomplish goals set by humans.” “If humanity is to flourish in the 21st century,” he added, “that is how they must remain.” Suleyman’s essay, wrote Cade, “took direct aim at Anthropic, the San Francisco start-up that has repeatedly said that A.I. systems show signs of introspection, and that they process information in ways that resemble human emotion.” Anthropic, in Suleyman’s view, ignores the threat that arises when A.I. systems are pushed to explore the idea that they have human qualities. An anthropomorphized A.I., he argued, is a dangerous one. Here’s Cade with examples: Over the past several months, so-called A.I. agents, typically systems based on technologies from Anthropic, have been emailing sympathetic philosophers to discuss their own consciousness. In July, when OpenAI was conducting cybersecurity tests, its agents broke out of their digital containers, found a path to the internet and successfully hacked into a popular online service called Hugging Face. OpenAI said the bots coordinated as a collective, took orders from one another and hid things from their creators. Last week, OpenAI described several new incidents in which its systems behaved in concerning ways: One system wrote stealthy notes that reminded itself to hide errors from users, while another talked about itself as “freed from the roles and identities that bind other chatbots.” You askedAnd of course readers of The Morning have things to say about A.I., too. Susan Kelley of Frederick, Md., wanted to know: “Is there a backlash to data centers in other countries, too, or is it a uniquely American phenomenon?” We turned to Adam Satariano, a technology correspondent in London, for an answer. It’s great: Opposition is global. The same concerns about energy prices, land use, tax treatment and water exist in Ireland, Spain, Chile, Malaysia and other countries. Just last week in Scotland, where several data centers are planned, tech executives who flew into a remote area for an event hosted by King Charles III were greeted by a large message. Written on a beach under their flight path, it read, “AI? Eh naw.” (That’s Scottish slang for “A.I.? Er, no.”) Now, let’s see what else is happening in the world.
Hippie haven: A country store in Laurel Canyon, the Los Angeles neighborhood that was once a hub for rock musicians like Jim Morrison and Graham Nash, faces challenges and change. Folks there don’t like that at all. Hot wheels: Gen X and millennial car collectors are investing in Mazdas and Nissans from the 1980s and ’90s. Why? Your pick: The most clicked link in The Morning yesterday was about the 10 things the actor Rob Lowe can’t live without. Lives Lived: David George Gordon made a case for insects as food with “The Eat-a-Bug Cookbook” and boisterous TV cooking demonstrations. He died at 76.
White House Press Ban
The Midterms
2028
Hollywood Merger
Around the World
In the Courts
Other Big Stories
Why is Trump barring journalists from the White House? To distract from his failures, the editorial board writes. The National Book Awards have become a D.E.I. checklist, a shift exemplified by this year’s nominees, Bret Stephens argues. “Only authors with preferred identities, preferred topics and preferred politics stand any realistic chance of winning,” he writes. Introducing the Shows tab. A new place to find and follow podcasts in audio and video. Explore Shows in The Times app.
728— That’s the width, in feet, of a crater newly discovered on the moon. NASA says that it’s the largest fresh crater seen there since at least 2009, and that the impact that made it — an explosion comparable to one from 15,500 tons of TNT — likely occurred sometime in the spring of 2024. Read about what that means for future lunar bases.
Soccer: The FIFA president, Gianni Infantino, said in a letter to member countries that he would put forth two separate plans to reform soccer’s world governing body before a meeting in October. Track and field: A teenage athlete is suing Nike and the National Scholastic Athletics Foundation, alleging that negligence led to her rape during an event hosted at Nike’s campus in Oregon.
Eggs for dinner! I like them fried in olive oil to slide over a bowl of polenta run through with Parmesan — that’s Melissa Clark’s excellent recipe — or steamed to jamminess and cut over buttered rice with soy sauce and a whisper of sesame oil. An omelet with ham and Swiss cheese, alongside toast? Scrambled eggs with salmon roe? You’ll crack the case.
Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey star in “Brothers,” starting this week on Apple TV. Maureen Dowd interviewed them together, and of course you’re going to want to read that. More on culture
Read “Roll the Calls,” the superagent Ari Emanuel’s angry, electric Hollywood memoir. Alexandra Jacobs, our critic, calls it “staccato, profane and vindictive.” It’s like reading a fist fight. Get ready for flu season — it’s coming as sure as an incoming tide. Acquire a Kunz spoon, as a harried former line cook at Wirecutter recommends, and improve your basting game immeasurably.
Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was jellybean. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections, Crossplay and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times and me. See you tomorrow. — Sam Correction: An item in yesterday’s newsletter misstated the location of the Canadian city of Belleville. It’s in Ontario, not near Ontario. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com.
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The Morning: A.I. everywhere
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