‘Pretend I’m on the ballot,’ says Trump. What New York’s governor saw on 9/11. Kat Rosenfield on the state of modern men. And more.
This week, Silicon Valley—and most of the rest of us—are fixated on one unnerving question: Is AI going to kill us all? (Karl Mondon/AFP via Getty Images)
It’s Thursday, September 10. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Audrey Fahlberg reports on Trump’s midterm infomercial. Maya Sulkin talks 9/11, Mamdani, and more with former New York governor George Pataki. Kat Rosenfield reviews Jon Ronson’s new book about the masculinity crisis. The latest Free Press poll. And much more.
But first: None of that will matter if the AI kills us all.
The stakes of the fast-moving debate over the pros and cons of artificial intelligence are almost too high to fathom. This week, Silicon Valley—and most of the rest of us—are fixated on one unnerving question: Is AI going to kill us all?
It began Tuesday night, when 27-year-old Anthropic and OpenAI researcher Jacob Coxon announced on X that he had resigned. The companies, he wrote, “are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. . . . The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
By Wednesday night, the post had been viewed more than 125 million times, and counting. It also set off a wave of responses from AI researchers, including Anthropic Alignment Science Lead Evan Hubinger, who wrote: “[W]e really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.”
The tricky thing about this debate isn’t just that it can get pretty technical pretty quickly. It’s that the news is full of doomsday warnings. It’s next to impossible to know which to tune out, and which to take seriously.
We’ve worked hard to separate the signal from the noise on this issue here at The Free Press. And lately, our resident polymath economist Tyler Cowen has injected some healthy skepticism into the conversation about the harm AI may cause.
But Coxon’s post went viral for a reason. It was one of the bluntest statements yet of the case for AI catastrophe—and it has coincided with breathtaking new evidence of the technology’s growing power, from last month’s Hugging Face hack to the Millennium Prize math problem Open AI claimed it solved this week. So today we’re leading with an essay by someone who, like Coxon, worked at the bleeding edge of AI research before resigning because of what he saw.
Daniel Kokotajlo is a former OpenAI researcher who resigned in 2024. Writing in The Free Press today, he explains why he left, and why he believes Coxon’s fears are well-founded. His warning is stark, and worth engaging with: Yes, says Daniel, AI might really kill us all.
“Pretend I’m on the ballot,” said Donald Trump in his prime-time address to the first-ever GOP midterm convention last night. The party faithful were all smiles at the made-for-TV event in Dallas. But, as The Free Press’s Audrey Fahlberg reports from the convention floor, there are plenty of nerves behind that cheery facade. Read her dispatch on a party inextricably linked to a president whose approval rating sits below 40 percent, and whether that will doom the GOP come November.
Jon Ronson has spent his journalism career getting close to some of the world’s strangest people and writing about what he finds. He does that again in his latest book, called “The Castle,” which centers on Chris Mark, a Connecticut millionaire who used his Gilded Age fortune to build an 18,000-square-foot home and fill it with young women he called his “princesses.” But this time Ronson goes further, and turns this weird tale into an allegory about the masculinity crisis. Read Kat Rosenfield’s piece on this story about a “very wealthy, very horny” man—and what he has to do with other “unraveling men.”
Have billionaires rigged our political system? Is Western civilization a force for good? How do Americans view Israel? In our latest installment of our polling series, The Honesty Project, we ask Americans what they really think about some of the most charged questions in public life and compare their “private” answers with what they’re willing to say out loud. Dive into the most recent results.
Twenty-five years ago, Governor George Pataki helped lead New York through the deadliest terrorist attack in American history, which killed nearly 3,000 people and left the nation’s financial capital in ash and rubble. Today, he joins Maya Sulkin to wrestle with the question that has troubled him ever since: Did the terrorists ultimately win? Not on the battlefield, but by unraveling the country from within? What did the governor see that day, and how does he believe the country has fared since?
A federal judge ruled Wednesday that Andrew and Tristan Tate must remain in custody while they fight extradition to the United Kingdom. (Andrei Pungovschi via Getty Images)
A federal judge ruled Wednesday that Andrew and Tristan Tate must remain in custody while they fight extradition to the United Kingdom on rape and human trafficking charges. Andrew faces 42 charges in Britain and Tristan 17, including allegations involving seven victims.
The Trump administration proposed overhauling the 2030 census Wednesday, seeking to strip undocumented immigrants from the population count used to allocate congressional seats. The Census Bureau argued illegal immigrants should not be counted because of their “lack of a sufficient tie and allegiance” to the country. The proposal would also eliminate questions about race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation from census forms.
The Treasury Department announced it will purchase up to $6 billion in government bonds in an effort to bring down borrowing costs, as the 10-year Treasury yield hit its highest point since 2023. Critics say the move fails to address the root cause: national debt that recently topped $40 trillion.
Missouri’s congressional maps landed before the Supreme Court for the second time in two days Wednesday, as conflicting state and federal court rulings have left voters uncertain which district they live in ahead of November’s midterms. A resolution is urgently needed, with absentee ballots due to military and overseas voters next week.
President Trump said he came away from a phone call with Vladimir Putin confident that the Russian leader is ready to end the war in Ukraine, after U.S. envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff visited both Moscow and Kyiv in the past week. “I think more than anything else, it’s two people that hate each other,” Trump said when asked what was standing in the way of a deal.
The widow of one of five people who died when an Amazon cargo jet slid off a runway at Miami International Airport on Sunday took legal action against Amazon and the operating airline, filing a wrongful death suit yesterday. The suit argues the disaster was avoidable, pointing to pilot error and inadequate training as factors.
Apple unveiled its first foldable iPhone, called Duo, marking the most significant redesign of the device since its debut in 2007. The book-style phone, which Apple calls its largest iPhone display ever, will start at $1,999 and hits stores in October.
Ben Shelton ousted defending champion Carlos Alzaraz in the U.S. Open quarterfinals early Wednesday morning, completing a five-set comeback that wrapped up at 3:33 a.m. in what became the tournament’s latest-ever finish. Shelton now faces Frances Tiafoe in tomorrow’s semifinal, guaranteeing an American man in Sunday’s final for the first time in two decades.
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