Share

(‘Alternate Shots’ with Richard Haass and John Ellis. Recorded 21 May 2026. Produced by Dale Eisinger)

After a brief hiatus, ‘Alternate Shots’ returns with a kind of status report on (1) the war in the Gulf, (2) Diverging U.S.-Israeli interests, (3) “strategic ambiguity”, Taiwan and the mainland, (4) Ukraine’s resilience, Putin’s paranoia, (5) the GOP’s rock and a hard place, and (6) The rise of Wemby and, in the NBA’s Eastern Conference Finals, the New York Knicks.

If you prefer, you can listen to this episode and all the previous episodes on Apple, Amazon, Spotify and most of the other major podcast platforms.

Give a gift subscription

Ed. Note: News Items is off the grid for the long Memorial Day weekend. It returns on Tuesday, 26 May. We will be posting some notes at Political News Items.

1. Ukraine and its allies are increasingly confident that Russia’s invasion is running out of steam as Kyiv stabilizes the front line and stalls a spring offensive by Moscow. Ukraine’s growing effectiveness at deploying drones to inflict heavy Russian troop losses is being matched by strikes behind the front lines and deep inside Russia that are stoking increasing domestic criticism of President Vladimir Putin. Alongside an economic slowdown and restrictions on the internet, that’s leading to a deepening war fatigue among ordinary Russians. The nervous mood is shared by many in Russia’s elite, with some senior Kremlin officials believing the conflict has reached a dead end with no clear way to resolve it, people familiar with the situation said. (Source: bloomberg.com)

2. Robert Kagan:

The outlines of President Trump’s endgame in the Iran war are now emerging. In a phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (on Wednesday), Trump reportedly explained that the United States was negotiating a “letter of intent” with Iran that would “formally end the war and launch a 30-day period of negotiations” on Iran’s nuclear program and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. The purpose and effect of such an agreement should be clear: The United States is walking away from the crisis. Trump may launch another limited strike to look tough and satisfy the demands of the war’s supporters, but it would be a performative gesture. Endgame in this case is a euphemism for “surrender.”

Trump’s repeated threats to resume attacks since then have proved to be bluffs. The leaders in Tehran have been calculating for two months that Trump would not launch another attack, and for this reason they have made no concessions despite the damage they suffered from 37 days of relentless strikes. On the contrary, their terms for a settlement are those of a victor: They demand war reparations, no limits on uranium enrichment, recognized control of the strait, and an end to sanctions.

For Trump to respond to this defiance by now calling for another 30 days of cease-fire and talks is a tacit admission of defeat. If he does launch a performative attack in the next few days, the Iranians will understand it for what it is. No one believes that he is going to resume a full-scale war a month from now. (Source: theatlantic.com)

3. An attack on a nuclear power plant in the United Arab Emirates has raised fears about the scope of Iran’s retaliation to a potential US resumption of strikes, with experts highlighting the greater role Tehran-backed militias in Iraq are playing in the war. The UAE said this week that a drone targeting its Barakah plant on Sunday was launched from Iraq, condemning it as a “terrorist” act. Anwar Gargash, a senior adviser to President Sheikh Mohamed Bin Zayed, blamed “Iranian militias in Iraq” for the incident, in a social media post. It’s “a grave indicator of the scale of the threat facing the region,” Gargash said. The incident forced the plant to activate backup power, one of the last lines of defense to maintain nuclear safety. (Source: bloomberg.com)

4. Iran’s Supreme Leader has issued a directive that the country’s near-weapons-grade uranium should not be sent abroad, two senior Iranian sources said, hardening Tehran’s stance on one of the main ​U.S. demands at peace talks. Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei’s order could further frustrate U.S. President Donald Trump and complicate talks on ending the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. Trump vowed on Thursday that the United States will not ‌allow Iran to have its stockpile of highly enriched uranium. “We will get it. We don’t need it, we don’t want it. We’ll probably destroy it after we get it, but we’re not going to let them have it,” Trump told reporters at the White House. Israeli officials have told Reuters that Trump has assured Israel that Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium, needed to make an atomic weapon, will be sent out of Iran and that any peace deal must include a clause on this. (Source: reuters.com)

5. Iran has discussed partnering with the Gulf state of Oman — an American ally — in a system charging fees for vessels passing through the Strait of Hormuz, ignoring the Trump administration’s warnings against demands for payment to pass through the critical international waterway. It is unclear whether anything concrete will come out of the discussions. But the talks appear to signal that the United States and Iran are no closer to ending a war that has badly damaged the global economy despite repeated claims to the contrary by President Trump. At least publicly, neither side has shown a willingness to compromise. (Source: nytimes.com)

Read more

Sebastian Mallaby is the Paul A. Volcker senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). A two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, he is the author of six books, including More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite and The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future, which have become investment classics. His latest book is The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence; the Financial Times wrote that “Mallaby has done full justice to his kaleidoscopically interesting subject.” He also co-hosts a weekly CFR podcast, The Spillover, which examines the ripple effects of global events across policy, geopolitics, economics, technology, and financial markets.

It’s rare that a book about computer science can be described as a “page turner,” but Mr. Mallaby’s latest book is exactly that. Demis Hassabis is (in)arguably one of the most important people on the planet, because he’s doing the most important work on the planet: the pursuit of artificial general intelligence.

I’ve done a fair number of podcasts over the years. I’ve never done one more interesting than this one.

(News Items Podcast interview with Sebastian Mallaby. Produced by Dale Eisinger. Recorded 19 May 2026)

You can find this podcast, and previous News Items podcasts, on most of the major platforms, including Apple, Amazon and Spotify.

Get 14 day free trial

Give a gift subscription

1. Dr. Alan Thompson:

An internal general OpenAI model has autonomously disproved Paul Erdős’ planar unit distance conjecture (1946), an 80-year-old central open problem in combinatorial geometry. The model constructed an infinite family of point sets achieving n^(1+δ) unit-distance pairs (Will Sawin later showed δ=0.014), overturning the long-held belief that rescaled square grids were essentially optimal. The proof bridges algebraic number theory (infinite class field towers, Golod–Shafarevich theory) to elementary geometry. Verified by external mathematicians including Fields medalist Tim Gowers, who called it ‘a milestone in AI mathematics.’ According to leading number theorist Prof Arul Shankar (University of Toronto):

In my opinion this paper demonstrates that current AI models go beyond just helpers to human mathematicians – they are capable of having original ingenious ideas, and then carrying them out to fruition.

Read the OpenAI announcement, read the proof, read the companion paper.

No one wants to say it, so I will. While definitions keep shifting and goalposts move again and again, the evidence is clear: when a system outthinks our brightest human minds on problems human experts couldn’t solve, we’ve entered ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence) territory.

OpenAI’s internal model represents early ASI capabilities, though the truly transformative superintelligence systems are still ahead. History will mark this moment (20 May 2026) as the first publicly visible ASI achievement. (Sources: openai.com, lifearchitect.substack.com, substack.com, ams.org, ias.edu )

2. Interesting Engineering:

Thomas Bloom, one of the mathematicians involved in the companion work, said the discovery suggests deep number theory may hold answers to several unsolved questions in discrete geometry. He added that many mathematicians will likely revisit older problems using these newly revealed connections.

The result also highlights how rapidly AI reasoning systems are evolving. Unlike specialized theorem-proving software, OpenAI said this proof came from a general-purpose reasoning model. Engineers did not specifically train it on the unit distance problem or build dedicated search tools for this task.

That detail matters because it hints at broader scientific applications. Researchers believe systems capable of managing long chains of reasoning could eventually assist in fields such as physics, biology, engineering, and medicine.

For now, the unit distance breakthrough stands as a landmark moment. A problem that resisted human effort for nearly eight decades fell to an AI system that approached geometry from an entirely unexpected direction. (Sources: thomasbloom.org, interestingengineering.com)

3. Chris McGuire:

Artificial intelligence (AI) policy will be the most important issue in the 2028 U.S. presidential election. To most Americans, that statement probably seems absurd. AI policy was a total nonfactor in the 2024 presidential election. It does not even appear on Gallup’s latest tracking poll of the most important issues to American voters.

Read more

1. A weeks-long selloff in government bonds has intensified in recent days, threatening to drive up borrowing costs across the globe and knocking some momentum out of what had been a furious stock rally. With bond prices sliding, the yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury note, a key benchmark for mortgage rates and other borrowing costs, reached as high as 4.687% Tuesday, its highest intraday level since January 2025. (Source: wsj.com)

2. John Authers:

It’s a while since we’ve been here, and it’s not a good place to be. The yield on 30-year Treasury bonds rose Tuesday to 5.19% for the first time since June 2007.

A similar headline appeared on a piece I wrote with my colleague Michael Mackenzie about that 2007 landmark for the Financial Times, our employer at the time, and it makes uncomfortably relevant reading today. The concern was that rates at these levels might burst higher, bringing down the then-booming stock market and putting unbearable pressure on credit markets. As I argued:

“Money just seems too cheap. Bond yields are not high by historical standards, but the suddenness of their move might dislodge the financing that underpins stocks. If that scenario turns out to be true — and it is still too early to say that it will — the bond selloff might presage the end of an era for stocks.”

I hedged by saying that it was too early to tell, but that bond selloff did indeed signal the end of an era for equities. Within weeks, subprime credit was selling, two Bear Stearns hedge funds collapsed, and the long spiral into what we now call the Global Financial Crisis had begun. (Sources: bloomberg.com, ft.com)

3. The New York Times:

Days after Israeli strikes killed Iran’s supreme leader and other top officials in the opening salvos of the war, President Trump mused publicly that it would be best if “someone from within” Iran took over the country.

It turns out that the United States and Israel went into the conflict with a particular and very surprising someone in mind: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former Iranian president known for his hard-line, anti-Israel and anti-American views.

But the audacious plan, developed by the Israelis and which Mr. Ahmadinejad had been consulted about, quickly went awry, according to the U.S. officials who were briefed on it.

Mr. Ahmadinejad was injured on the war’s first day by an Israeli strike at his home in Tehran that had been designed to free him from house arrest, the American officials and an associate of Mr. Ahmadinejad said. He survived the strike, they said, but after the near miss he became disillusioned with the regime change plan.

He has not been seen publicly since then and his current whereabouts and condition are unknown. (Source: nytimes.com)

Read more

Get 14 day free trial

1. John Authers:

Across the developed markets, bond markets are staging a slow-motion car wreck. Even Japan is joining in now, and the phenomenon is truly global. Looking at the drastic moves in the US, Japan, the UK and France, Barclays’ Ajay Rajadhyaksha commented:

“Last week, long bonds broke. Not in one country. In all of them. Simultaneously. Four countries. Four different political systems. Four different central banks. But the same trade — ‘get me out of duration!’”

Each country has its own contributing political problems, but the uniformity of the shift out of long-term bonds with high duration makes clear that something broader is afoot. For Rajadhyaksha, it is “simple and uncomfortable.” The developed​ world “has too much debt, too little fiscal discipline, and no political appetite for fixing either.” If there’s a trigger, it has been the Iran war and the resulting shock to oil supply. The ongoing failure to come up with a political or military resolution to the blockades of the Strait of Hormuz has steadily raised inflationary pressure. (Source: bloomberg.com)

2. Global finance chiefs are coming to terms with the new economic reality that a consumer-price shock they had hopes of skirting is looking likely to endure. As the second day of Group of Seven discussions proceed in Paris, the aftermath of a bond-market readjustment factoring in more inflation has raised the burden of proof needed to keep borrowing costs unchanged. The prospect of higher interest rates is looming, with associated stress to growth and budget deficits. The talks with finance ministers and central bankers on Tuesday will now continue against a backdrop of 30-year Treasury yields hovering close to the highest since 2007. With the Iran war that caused the energy shock still unresolved, officials will survey the uneven topography of global prosperity and touch on monetary policy too, before turning to discuss terror financing. (Source: bloomberg.com)

3. Tehran’s latest peace proposal to the United States involves ending hostilities on all fronts including Lebanon, the exit of ​U.S. forces from areas close to Iran, and reparations for destruction caused by the U.S.-Israeli war, state media reported on Tuesday. In Tehran’s first comments on ‌the proposal, Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi said Tehran also sought the lifting of sanctions, the release of frozen funds and an end to the U.S. marine blockade on the country, according to IRNA news agency. The terms as described in the Iranian reports appeared little changed from Iran's previous offer, which President Trump rejected last week as "garbage". (Source: reuters.com)

4. President Trump said Monday that he’d planned to strike Iran “tomorrow” but was holding off to give negotiations another chance. He claimed he made the decision at the request of several Arab leaders. “I have been asked by the Emir of Qatar, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia and the President of the United Arab Emirates to hold off on our planned Military attack of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which was scheduled for tomorrow,” Trump wrote Monday on Truth Social. He added that the Arab leaders told him that “serious negotiations are now taking place, and that, in their opinion, as Great Leaders and Allies, a Deal will be made, which will be very acceptable to the United States of America, as well as all Countries in the Middle East, and beyond.” (Sources: axios.com, truthsocial.com)

5. Institute for the Study of War:

Read more

An impressive resume!

Stephen Roach is a Senior Research Scholar of the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School. He joined the Yale faculty in 2010 after 30 years at Morgan Stanley, mainly as the firm’s chief economist heading up a highly regarded global team followed by several years as the Hong Kong-based Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia.

He was the first senior fellow to join the faculty of Yale University’s Jackson Institute of Global Affairs at its inception in 2010 and remained in that capacity until 2022; over that period, he was also a Senior Lecturer at Yale’s School of Management. A passionate teacher, he has drawn on his rich experience and developed popular new courses on Asia — notably “The Next China” and “The Lessons of Japan.” His prolific writings include the new book, Accidental Conflict: America, China, and the Clash of False Narratives (2022), and Unbalanced: The Codependency of America and China (2014). His work has also appeared in academic journals, congressional testimony and has been disseminated widely in the domestic and international media. His commentary is published regularly on Project Syndicate’s global, multi-lingual platform. He joined Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center in 2022. (Source: law.yale.edu)

The U.S.-China summit wrapped up on Friday of last week. I spoke with Mr. Roach the day before, when the news reports were in the “written statements” phase. So this podcast is not a “post-game” analysis of the summit. It’s a more general discussion about the state of U.S.-China relations, as seen by someone who is widely (and correctly) viewed as one of the world’s leading experts on the subject.

(News Items Podcast with Stephen Roach. Recorded 14 May 2026. Produced by Dale Eisinger.)

You can find this podcast, and previous News Items podcasts, on most of the major platforms, including Apple, Amazon and Spotify.

Get 14 day free trial

Give a gift subscription

1. U.S. officials say Trump wants a deal to end the war, but Iran’s rejection of many of his demands and refusal to make meaningful concessions on its nuclear program has put the military option back on the table. Trump is expected to convene his top national security team in the Situation Room on Tuesday to discuss military options, two U.S. officials said. Trump spoke Sunday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the situation in Iran. (Source: axios.com)

2. Bloomberg:

The US and Iran remained far apart on a deal to end weeks of war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, with President Donald Trump expressing renewed frustration with Tehran as a selloff in global bonds heightened concern about the conflict’s economic fallout.

Trump signaled his patience was wearing thin, posting on social media Sunday that “For Iran, the Clock is Ticking, and they better get moving, FAST, or there won’t be anything left of them. TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE!”

Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency said the US had set five main conditions for a peace deal, including transferring uranium tied to Iran’s nuclear program to the US, providing no reparations to Tehran and unfreezing less than a quarter of Iran’s frozen assets. Fars cited no source, and the US hasn’t publicly commented on the reported terms.

Meanwhile, the semi-official Mehr news agency said Washington offered “no tangible concessions” while seeking demands it failed to secure during the war, a stance the agency said was leading to an impasse in negotiations. (Source: bloomberg.com)

3. Robert Pape:

Three indicators will determine whether the next shock of the Iran war occurs over the next 10-30 days.

First, inventories. Watch U.S. East Coast diesel inventories, European LNG storage levels, and Asian jet fuel reserves. U.S. distillate inventories are already running roughly 11–18 percent below seasonal norms, while European gas storage remains near 30–35 percent full — far below the roughly 55 percent level Europe normally enters summer with. Historically, once inventories fall below roughly 20–25 days of forward demand coverage, governments begin losing the ability to stabilize shortages through temporary releases and subsidies alone.

Second, industrial slowdown. Watch for refinery utilization cuts in India and South Korea, fertilizer shutdowns tied to LNG shortages, falling container freight volumes, and airline route reductions across Asia and Europe. If major Asian refiners begin reducing throughput by 10–15 percent, or if airlines begin cutting summer schedules by another 5–10 percent because of jet fuel shortages rather than weak demand, the crisis has likely entered synchronized contraction.

Third, political intervention. Export controls, diesel allocation programs, anti-price-gouging measures, emergency food subsidies, and fuel rationing indicate governments are entering the political phase of the crisis. Early warning signs include limits on diesel purchases, restrictions on fertilizer exports, government fuel-allocation orders, and emergency price caps spreading across multiple countries simultaneously.

That is the real historical threshold. (Sources: political-science.uchicago.edu, escalationtrap.substack.com)

4. A criminal complaint against an Iraqi man that was unsealed in a U.S. court on Friday, accusing him of plotting attacks in the United States, has raised fears that Iran is increasingly wielding its proxy forces to target Western interests far beyond the Middle East. The accusations against the Iraqi man, Mohammad al-Saadi, describe him as a high-ranking figure in Kataib Hezbollah, an Iraqi militia backed by Iran. The complaint has led to a heightened level of concern following a series of attacks in Europe that prosecutors said Mr. al-Saadi was involved in. “They’ve expanded their scope into actual Western countries now beyond just the war zone,” said Aaron Y. Zelin, an expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, referring to Kataib Hezbollah. (Source: nytimes.com)

Read more

2. President Trump endorsed one of Sen. Cassidy’s primary challengers, Rep. Julia Letlow, and celebrated his defeat Saturday night. “His disloyalty to the man who got him elected is now a part of legend, and it’s nice to see that his political career is OVER!” Trump wrote on social media. Ms. Letlow did not defeat Cassidy outright because she did not win a majority of the vote. Instead, she advanced to a June 27 primary runoff in which she will face John Fleming, the state treasurer. Letlow led Fleming 45 percent to 28 percent with almost all of the vote counted. Cassidy trailed with 24 percent of the vote. (Source: washingtonpost.com, truthsocial.com)

3. Amy Walter:

I think of this election as a battle between two very powerful forces in politics: One is the political environment (things like inflation, the war in Iran, etc.), and the other is partisanship (the fact that voters are now more cemented into their party identities than ever and less willing to give the other party their vote). The political environment helps Democrats; the structural partisanship helps Republicans.

Read more

Get 14 day free trial

1. China has unveiled its latest photonic quantum computer, Jiuzhang 4.0, with researchers saying it can outperform the world’s fastest classical supercomputer by a vast margin, further strengthening Beijing’s push towards quantum supremacy. The results, published on May 13 in the peer-reviewed journal Nature, mark the latest milestone in China’s rapidly advancing quantum program led by a team of scientists at the University of Science and Technology of China headed by Chinese quantum physicist Pan Jianwei. Jiuzhang 4.0 completed a Gaussian boson sampling task in just 25 microseconds – a calculation they estimated would take the world’s most powerful supercomputer, El Capitan in the United States, more than 10⁴² years to finish, according to the university in the eastern city of Hefei. A Gaussian boson sampling task is a quantum computing task that is computationally difficult for classical computers to handle. “No realistic classical computing resources, to our knowledge, can bring the MPS [matrix product state] algorithm anywhere near the accuracy achieved by our experiment,” the team said in a statement. (Sources: scmp.com, nature.com. Ed. Note: 10⁴² years is roughly 100 trillion trillion times longer than the age of the universe.)

2. Eurointelligence:

The Chinese State Council issued two new laws in April: Decree No 834 on Security of Industrial and Supply Chains and Decree No 835 on Countering Foreign Improper Extraterritorial Jurisdiction by Foreign States, both taking effect immediately. These two decrees operationalise a structured mechanism to identify, block, and respond to foreign measures. A key sector list can be adjusted, with particular focus on supply chains, and monitored whether they comply with Chinese or non-Chinese law. Based on investigation findings, the administration can implement countermeasures.

Putting the justice ministry in charge suggests that this is now elevated to a rule-of-law concern that goes beyond trade issues. The decrees allow China to establish a malicious entity list that could become subject to a broad range of measures that extend to entities controlled by the one listed or are operating in partnership with it. China is increasingly accompanying administrative countermeasures with private litigation as enforcement tool, and allowing Chinese entities and individuals to pursue civil claims.

These laws present a compliance dilemma for international companies engaged with Chinese counter-parties as well as multinationals operating through China-based subsidiaries. It may even become impossible to be fully compliant: either they comply with US sanctions or Chinese law but not both. Even information gathering in China for their due diligence surveys of supply chains, including on human rights and forced labour, now have to comply with Chinese law. In practice, even if not enforced fully, it could mean that Chinese counterparts may adopt a cautious stance and become more reluctant to cooperate with international companies.

A legal quid-pro-quo response to US sanctions? It certainly means that China can now punish companies, governments, and institutions that comply with US sanctions.

The war in Iran could be a first test case. China is also challenging the dollar’s role as a denomination currency for oil. Cradle writes that negotiations are ongoing about a yuan-traded oil for the safe passage through the strait of Hormuz. Deutsche Bank wrote that the Iran war could be the making of the petroyuan and that this could be the end of the US dominance over global finance. The petrodollar was the foundation over the extra-territorial role of the US-dollar for world trade. It is the reason why central banks held a high proportion of their currency reserves in US dollars. It is the biggest leverage the US has to sanction others into compliance.

If we now have two compliance schemes that are in contradiction with each other, it reduces the extraordinary privilege the US had. Together with a less dollarized global trade market, it could turn the world into a multipolar one in finance, trade and law. (Sources: eurointelligence.com, thecradle.com)

3. Chinese leader Xi Jinping hailed the results of his meetings with US President Donald Trump and touted an agreement on a new relationship for their countries, projecting optimism despite unresolved tensions and limited deals announced so far. “This visit is a historic and landmark visit. Thus far, we have established a new bilateral relationship — a constructive strategic stable relationship — which constitutes a milestone event,” Xi said while hosting Trump in Zhongnanhai, the secretive headquarters of the ruling Communist Party and residence of its top leaders. “We have achieved many cooperative outcomes.” The two countries reached an “important consensus” on maintaining stable economic and trade relations while expanding cooperation in various fields, according to a readout published Friday by the official Xinhua News Agency before Trump departed on Air Force One. Neither side have released details of their commercial deals, which may be announced in the coming days. (Source: bloomberg.com)

4. Bloomberg:

President Donald Trump said the US and China share common goals for ending the Iran war, while Beijing struck a measured tone in urging further diplomacy.

Trump said during a briefing with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on Friday that the two leaders agreed the Islamic Republic shouldn’t possess a nuclear weapon and that the Strait of Hormuz should reopen.

The US administration has signaled it wants China’s help pressuring Tehran into negotiations to end the conflict, which began after the US and Israel started bombing Iran and has effectively closed Hormuz, disrupting global energy flows. But Beijing, Iran’s largest oil buyer and a key diplomatic partner, has remained cautious, with the foreign ministry saying disputes over Tehran’s nuclear program should be resolved through dialog.

Iran maintains a degree of control over the strategic waterway, through which a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas flowed before the conflict began, on Feb. 28. Its semi-official Fars news agency said on Thursday that it would allow Chinese vessels to transit Hormuz following discussions with Beijing. (Source: bloomberg.com)

5. President Donald Trump said the US objective of recovering highly enriched uranium from Iran was “more for public relations than it is for anything else,” while reiterating his commitment to removing the nuclear material. Mr. Trump said in an interview with Fox News aired on Thursday evening in the US that the mission to recover the uranium, which is thought to be buried beneath the rubble of bombed nuclear sites, could be viewed as unnecessary because the US was maintaining round-the-clock surveillance. “We have nine cameras on that site, on those three sites, 24 hours a day,” Trump said. “We know exactly what’s happening. Nobody’s even gotten close to it.” Still, the president said, he ultimately would rather get the material out of the country. (Source: bloomberg.com)

6. The United States and China will discuss guardrails on artificial intelligence, including establishing a protocol for keeping powerful A.I. models out of the hands of non-state actors, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Thursday. Mr. Bessent, who was speaking from Beijing in an interview with CNBC, did not give more details, including when these discussions would take place. But Xi Jinping, China’s leader, and President Trump had been expected to discuss A.I. during their summit in the Chinese capital. If these talks happen, it would be the first time the two countries formally take up the issue during Mr. Trump’s second term. The capabilities and usage of A.I. have grown rapidly, and so have concerns that this technology could be weaponized by hackers and terrorists, or spiral out of human control. (Source: nytimes.com)

7. The New York Times:

When companies like Anthropic, Google and OpenAI build their artificial intelligence systems, they spend months adding ways to prevent people from using their technology to spread disinformation, build weapons or hack into computer networks.

But recently, researchers in Italy discovered that they could break through these protections with poetry.

Read more

Get 14 day free trial

1. Nikkei Asia:

Chinese President Xi Jinping issued a warning about Taiwan to U.S. President Donald Trump in Beijing earlier today, as the leaders kicked off two days of meetings and festivities aimed at showcasing the stability of the rival powers’ relationship.

Huddling for two hours and 15 minutes, Xi told Trump that the Taiwan question is “the most important issue” in their ties, according to a readout published by state news outlet Xinhua.

“If handled well, bilateral relations can maintain overall stability,” Xi was quoted as saying. If “handled poorly,” the two countries risk a “clash” that could push “the entire China-U.S. relationship into a very dangerous situation.”

It was not immediately clear whether the topic of Taiwan was discussed further, or if Trump commented on it. The readout mentioned that the two exchanged views on the Middle East, Ukraine and the Korean Peninsula. (Source: asia.nikkei.com)

2. The US government has sold 30-year debt at a 5 per cent yield for the first time since 2007 amid mounting signs that Donald Trump’s war in Iran has unleashed a new surge in inflation. The Treasury department issued $25bn of new 30-year bonds on Wednesday, with the high yield at auction reaching 5.046 per cent. Earlier in the day, yields on US debt, which move inversely to prices, rose after official data showed wholesale inflation had jumped to 6 per cent in April, its highest level since 2022. “Financing the debt is getting much more expensive,” said Ed Al-Hussainy, a portfolio manager at Columbia Threadneedle. (Source: ft.com)

3. US wholesale inflation accelerated in April to the fastest pace since 2022 on a war-driven increase in energy prices that’s feeding into higher freight transportation costs. The producer price index rose 6% from a year ago, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data out Wednesday. That topped all estimates in a Bloomberg survey of economists. The monthly gain was also the sharpest since 2022. A core measure of wholesale inflation that excludes food and energy increased 5.2% from April 2025 — the biggest advance in more than three years. (Source: bloomberg.com)

4. US efforts to end the war with Iran were dealt a setback after a commercial vessel was apparently seized by unauthorized personnel near the United Arab Emirates, increasing uncertainty over control of the critical Strait of Hormuz. The ship, whose identity wasn’t immediately clear, was taken 38 nautical miles off the UAE coast and is now bound for the Islamic Republic, the UK Maritime Trade Operations said in a statement on Thursday. (Source: bloomberg.com)

5. Since April, Somali pirates have launched a hijacking campaign against oil tankers and cargo ships, posing their biggest threat to the Red Sea corridor in over a decade. These activities pose a major threat both to the global economy and to regional security, as they disrupt the oil and derivatives trade and risk enabling al-Qaeda’s Somali affiliate, al-Shabaab, to increase its revenue and strengthen its ties with the Houthis. From April 21 to May 2, Somali pirates hijacked four ships off the coast of northern Somalia’s Puntland state, long the hotbed of Somali piracy—a rate unseen since at least 2012. (Source: nationalinterest.org)

6. Russia unleashed the largest aerial attack on Ukraine over a two-day period since the war began, pounding the capital ‌Kyiv and other cities across the country with hundreds of drones, Ukrainian officials said on Thursday. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said that Russia had launched more than 1,560 drones since the start of Wednesday. Overnight on Thursday, Moscow fired more than 670 attack drones and 56 missiles against Ukraine, he said. Air defence units ​shot down 41 missiles and 652 drones overnight, the air force said. (Source: reuters.com)

7. Cuba has completely run out of diesel and fuel oil, the country’s energy minister said on Wednesday, as Havana faces its worst rolling blackouts in decades amid a US blockade that has strangled the island of fuel. “We have absolutely no fuel (oil), and absolutely no diesel,” the energy minister, Vicente de la O Levy, said on state media, adding that the national grid was in a “critical” state. “We have no reserves.” Fuel oil is a product derived from crude oil distillation used to generate heat or power. The minister said blackouts had increased dramatically across Havana, with many neigbhourhoods in the capital without light for up to 22 hours a day. (Source: theguardian.com)

Read more

1. The Trump administration’s public portrayal of a shattered Iranian military is sharply at odds with what U.S. intelligence agencies are telling policymakers behind closed doors, according to classified assessments from early this month that show Iran has regained access to most of its missile sites, launchers and underground facilities. Most alarming to some senior officials is evidence that Iran has restored operational access to 30 of the 33 missile sites it maintains along the Strait of Hormuz, which could threaten American warships and oil tankers transiting the narrow waterway. People with knowledge of the assessments said they show — to varying degrees, depending on the level of damage incurred at the different sites — that the Iranians can use mobile launchers that are inside the sites to move missiles to other locations. In some cases they can launch missiles directly from launchpads that are part of the facilities. Only three of the missile sites along the strait remain totally inaccessible, according to the assessments. (Source: nytimes.com)

2. Javier Blas:

Facing an unprecedented shortage, the global oil market has called on the US, the world’s top producer, for help. And thanks to the shale revolution, America has been able to respond: Over the last four weeks, US net exports of crude and refined products have averaged a record high of 5.9 million barrels a day, up from 3.3 million a year ago. Only a decade ago, the US was a net importer in excess of 5 million.

Can the US sustain that level of net exports forever? No — the American shale revolution is extraordinary, but not miraculous. The question, however, isn’t whether the nation can keep up with no end in sight; instead, it’s whether it can do it for long enough to keep oil prices from exploding before it reaches a deal with Iran. Looked through that lens, the US has the ammunition, thanks to its emergency stockpile, to sustain its outsized oil exports for several more weeks, perhaps even a couple of months….

On balance, Trump probably has the rest of May and probably into June before the combination of the shrinking SPR and growing pressure on the commercial inventory start to stir up market anxiety. That’s probably enough time for the White House find an exit to its quagmire in Iran. Still, the clock is ticking: America is sustaining an enormous flow of oil using a stockpile. (Source: bloomberg.com)

3. Global oil inventories are plummeting at a record pace with the ongoing disruptions caused by the Iran war threatening further price spikes, the International Energy Agency warned on Wednesday. Stockpiles of crude oil and refined fuel declined at a rate of almost 4 million barrels a day in April — the equivalent of more than the UK and Germany’s consumption combined — threatening to erode the buffer countries rely on to weather supply shocks. “The world is drawing oil inventories at a record pace as importing countries confront disruptions to Middle Eastern supplies,” the IEA said in its closely watched monthly report. “Rapidly shrinking buffers amid continued disruptions may herald future price spikes ahead.” (Source: ft.com)

4. (The) Iran war is ripping across the US economy at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars in lost output, as soaring fuel prices, rising borrowing costs and supply chain snags erode Americans’ prosperity. While early estimates by the Trump administration have put the direct price tag to US taxpayers at $29 billion, economists foresee a far larger toll once the full military bill and higher financing costs are considered. “The budgetary costs that have been announced are really just the tip of the iceberg,” said Linda Bilmes, a Harvard professor and expert on the cost of US conflicts. “It might not be felt immediately — you can patch something up for a while. But the scale of this financially is such that you can’t cover it up forever.” The conflict comes at a time when Trump’s popularity is already near record lows, fueled in part by a worsening cost-of-living crisis that has left many Americans struggling to make ends meet. (Source: ft.com)

5. Consumer prices rose 3.8% in April from a year earlier, a clear impact of higher gas prices since the start of the war with Iran. The figures, reported yesterday by the Labor Department, surpassed the previous month’s reported increase of 3.3%. The April increase was the highest in three years. Prices excluding food and energy categories—the so-called core measure economists watch in an effort to better capture inflation’s underlying trend—rose 2.8%, a pickup from 2.6% the previous month. High and rising prices have become a flashpoint for Americans, who had expected the steep inflation that hit the U.S. right after the pandemic to be off their plates by now. Price increases have been especially sharp for some items that people buy all the time, like coffee and gas. (Source: wsj.com)

Read more

1. At the heart of the US retirement industry, underpinning the later-life plans of millions of Americans, is a set of financial products that hardly anyone can tell you a thing about. No one knows exactly how much money they control. No one can say how it’s all allocated. No single financial regulator is in charge of them. Yet Collective Investment Trusts are now a multi-trillion dollar business to rival mutual funds or ETFs — and are poised to become the backdoor through which more private assets are added to Americans’ retirement savings. (Source: bloomberg.com)

2. Iranian leaders are trying to dictate the terms for ending the war, which illustrates that the Iranian regime perceives that it has the upper hand in the conflict at this time. Iran’s proposed terms would require the United States to give up its leverage over Iran before any negotiations could take place, which would likely make it more challenging to extract nuclear concessions from Iran. Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Baghiyatollah Sociocultural Headquarters Commander Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari stated on May 11 that Iran will not enter negotiations with the United States until the United States accepts Iran’s terms. Jafari stated that Iran’s terms include an end to the war on “all fronts,” the lifting of sanctions, the release of frozen Iranian assets, compensation for war-related damages, and recognition of Iran’s sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz. (Source: understandingwar.org)

3. President Trump yesterday said the U.S. ceasefire with Iran was “on life support” after he received what he called Tehran’s “garbage” response to a U.S. proposal for ending the war. “It’s unbelievably weak,” Trump said of the Iranian reply. “After reading that piece of garbage they sent, I didn’t even finish reading it. ... I would say the ceasefire is on massive life support.” His comments to reporters at the White House came a day after Trump branded Iran’s response “totally unacceptable.” The latest exchange between Washington and Tehran follows hostilities around the Strait of Hormuz in recent days that highlighted the fragility of a ceasefire the two sides reached more than a month ago. (Source: washingtonpost.com)

4. The United Arab Emirates has carried out military strikes on Iran, people familiar with the matter said, casting the Gulf monarchy as an active combatant in a war in which it has been Iran’s biggest target. Its military is well-equipped with Western-made jet fighters and surveillance networks. And the attacks suggest the country is now more willing to use them to protect its economic power and growing influence across the Middle East. The strikes, which the U.A.E. hasn’t publicly acknowledged, have included an attack on a refinery on Iran’s Lavan Island in the Persian Gulf, the people familiar with the matter said. (Source: wsj.com)

5. Saudi Aramco has warned that the world’s stocks of gasoline and jet fuel could reach “critically low levels” ahead of the summer months if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, in a pointed intervention by the world’s largest oil company. Amin Nasser, Saudi Aramco’s chief executive, said on Monday that the depletion of “onshore inventories” was “rapidly accelerating” with refined fuels like gasoline and jet fuel showing the fastest decline. He added that since the start of the Iran war and the near closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the world had lost a cumulative 1 billion barrels of oil supplies, with another 100 million barrels lost every week that the strait stays closed. Inventories are “the only buffer that is available today” but they have been “materially depleted”, Nasser said. Nasser’s comments, which he made after the company reported an increase in earnings in the first three months of the year, add to a chorus of voices warning that the oil shock created by the Iran war could be on the brink of a new and more disruptive phase. (Source: ft.com)

6. Commercially available maritime data appears to indicate that some vessels may be complying with Iran’s new transit regulations in the Strait of Hormuz. Recognition of Iran’s “sovereignty” over the strait would fundamentally remake regional and global maritime norms in a manner extremely detrimental to US interests. Commercially available maritime data shows that 21 vessels have transited through the Strait of Hormuz since ISW-CTP’s last data cutoff, including nine vessels that entered the strait and 12 that exited it. Eight of the 21 vessels used the Iranian-approved transit route. (Source: understandingwar.org)

7. Eurointelligence:

The Tasnim and Fars news agencies, affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, came up with a new proposal (recently), arguing that Tehran should monetize and assert sovereignty over the undersea cables connecting the Persian Gulf with the open sea. Is this just a threat, or a viable plan?

Read more

(Interview with Taegan Goddard, founder and editor of Political Wire. Recorded 27 April, 2026. Produced by Dale Eisinger.)

Back in the pre-internet dark ages of election night broadcasts, the major television news outlets relied, in large measure, on AP and UPI newswires cranking out updates on the latest results. There were actually “runners” who ripped the reports off the wires and rushed them to the network news “anchors”.

Taegan Goddard provides a similar service for political news, every day, 365 days a year. A typical day might consist of 20 or 30 political news “items”, most of them concerning U.S. politics.

People who follow American politics closely follow three sources religiously: UVA’s Center for Politics, The Cook Political Report and Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire. With the mid-terms upcoming, we asked Taegan to give us his assessment of the political landscape at this stage of the campaign(s). The result is this podcast.

Get 14 day free trial

You can find this podcast, and previous News Items podcasts, on most of the major platforms, including Apple, Amazon and Spotify.

For those interested in subscribing to Political Wire, a 20% discount is available by entering the coupon code: “newsitems”.

Give a gift subscription

1. Axios:

President Trump told Axios in a short phone call yesterday that he would reject Iran’s response to the latest draft agreement to end the war. The U.S. waited 10 days for the Iranian response, which came on Sunday. The White House hoped Iran’s positions would show further progress toward a deal, but Trump’s initial reaction signals the opposite. “I don’t like their letter. It’s inappropriate. I don’t like their response,” Trump said, declining to go into further details about what was in the response…..In a post on Truth Social shortly after the call, Trump called the Iranian response “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE!” Iranian state media reported the Iranian response focused on ending the war and enshrining guarantees it won’t resume, before anything else. (Source: axios.com)

2. Oil surged after US President Donald Trump rejected Iran’s latest response to his proposal to end the war in the Middle East, prolonging the effective closure of the crucial Strait of Hormuz. Brent crude futures advanced as much as 4.6% to $105.99 a barrel, while West Texas Intermediate traded near $100. The near-closure of Hormuz since the start of the war at the end of February has choked off supplies of crude, natural gas and fuels to global customers, driving up energy prices and raising inflation fears. The International Energy Agency says the conflict is causing the biggest supply shock in history. (Source: bloomberg.com)

3. Benjamin Netanyahu has said the war with Iran will continue as long as the country has a stockpile of highly enriched uranium (HEU), which could be used to make nuclear warheads. “It’s not over, because there’s still nuclear material – enriched uranium – that has to be taken out of Iran. There are still enrichment sites that have to be dismantled,” the Israeli prime minister told the CBS program ‘60 Minutes’. Asked how the HEU should be removed, Netanyahu said: “You go in and you take it out,” adding that the best way would be to enter Iran to secure the fissile material as part of an agreement. He said that President Trump had told him he wants “to go in there”. (Source: theguardian.com. A full transcript of the ‘60 Minutes’ interview is here.)

4. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he would like to end US financial support for Israel’s military over the next decade. “I want to draw down the American support for Israel to zero,” he said in an interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes that aired Sunday. “We’ve come of age.” He added, “I think that it’s time that we weaned ourselves from the remaining military support and go from aid to partnership.” The US currently provides Israel with $3.8 billion a year in military assistance under a 10-year agreement originally negotiated by the Obama administration that lasts through 2028. (Source: bloomberg.com)

5. Gallup Poll (2/27/2026):

Forty-one percent of Americans now say they sympathize more with the Palestinians in the Middle East situation, while 36% sympathize more with the Israelis. The five-percentage-point difference is not statistically significant, but it contrasts with a clear lead for the Israelis only a year ago (46% vs. 33%) and larger leads over the prior 24 years.

Read more

Get 14 day free trial

(‘Alternate Shots” Episode #27. Hosts: Richard Haass and John Ellis. Produced by Dale Eisinger.)

In this episode of America’s “fastest-growing” podcast, Richard Haass and I begin with a discussion of President Trump’s three options at this stage of the war in Iran: (1) cut a deal, (2) escalate or (3) carry on as before (with sanctions and the blockade), hoping the Iranians will buckle under the pressure.

Each option carries its own risks. Each option makes some Trump supporters or aligned “interest group” unhappy. Each option reverberates across the Middle East, across continents and across the United States.

The president clearly wants out. That’s easier said than done (obviously). The risks for the president are enormous. He dare not be perceived as weak. The mission cannot be perceived as a failure. Post-war analysis cannot say that Iran “won”. How to emerge from the conflict as a “winner” gets more difficult by the day.

So we talked about that.

Moving along, we discuss the upcoming China “summit” meeting, Xi’s leverage on “the Taiwan issue”, the slimmed-down “World War II Victory Day” parade in Moscow, the astonishing resilience of the Ukrainian people and the escalating U.S. redistricting wars.

That and a (very) brief discussion of the New York Knicks, all in 27 minutes.

If you prefer, you can listen to this episode and all the previous episodes on Apple, Amazon, Spotify and most of the other major podcast platforms.

Get 16% off for 1 year

Read more

Jerry Seib served as The Wall Street Journal’s Executive Washington Editor and wrote the weekly “Capital Journal” column for 29 years. He is the author of ‘We Should Have Seen It Coming” a book about the transformation of the Republican Party and American politics. He is currently working on a biography of former Sen. Robert Dole and is a Visiting Fellow at the Dole Institute of Politics. Most important, he’s a contributor to News Items and Political News Items. This piece looks at “a rogue state with an estimated 50 nuclear warheads. And counting.”

Get 14 day free trial

The U.S. went to war with Iran because the Trump administration decided a rogue state that regularly threatens the U.S. can’t be allowed to have a nuclear weapon alongside a missile program capable of delivering that weapon to American soil.

Most people seem to have forgotten, though, that there already is a rogue state with an estimated 50 nuclear warheads and counting, as well as a missile program on its way to being able to deliver one of those warheads to the American homeland.

That rogue state is North Korea, and it is getting little attention for the nuclear threat it already poses while time, attention and billions of dollars are focused on the nuclear threat Iran might pose, someday. Don’t take my word for it; President Trump’s own national defense strategy, released early this year, is pretty blunt about the danger from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, also known as North Korea: “The DPRK’s nuclear forces are increasingly capable of threatening the U.S. Homeland. These forces are growing in size and sophistication, and they present a clear and present danger of nuclear attack on the American Homeland.”

The obvious question: Why worry so much about Iran, and so little about North Korea?

There are various answers to that question, including that North Korea’s program is so far out of the bag that there may be little that can be done about it. But there’s a deeper difference as well. North Korea uses its nuclear program to run a kind of protection racket, designed mostly to keep its regime safe and comfortable. Iran appears to have far broader aims. It can plausibly believe that a nuclear-weapons program, alongside its stranglehold of the critical Strait of Hormuz, can be used to turn Iran into a global superpower.

In short, the stakes with Iran are much higher. Whether the current, stalled-out war has thwarted Iran’s hopes of becoming a global force by setting back its nuclear program, or actually enhanced those hopes by illustrating the power it can exert over the world economy by blocking the Strait—well, that is the mega-question.

For now, there’s no comparison between the lethality of North Korea’s nuclear program and Iran’s. For a sobering analysis of where North Korea stands, have a look at a detailed report released last year by the Congressional Research Service. It says North Korea’s constitution now officially describes the country as a “nuclear-armed state,” and that its leadership has described this status as “irreversible and permanent.” North Korea has conducted six tests of nuclear devices, and appears to be prepared to conduct a seventh.

“Some nongovernmental experts estimate that North Korea has produced enough fissile material for up to 90 warheads but may have assembled approximately 50,” the CRS report says. Last year, North Korea’s supreme leader, Kim Jong Un, said his country was pursuing a “rapid expansion of nuclearization,” and a new report suggests North Korea can produce enough fissile material to add as many as 20 nuclear warheads annually. That means it could field 290 warheads by 2035, putting its arsenal on a par with France’s.

To carry these nuclear weapons, North Korea is developing a ballistic missile force specifically designed to evade the defenses of the U.S. and its allies and to put American forces at risk. Beyond short- and medium-range missiles, North Korea already has tested intercontinental ballistic missiles “capable of reaching the entire [U.S.] Homeland,” according to an intelligence community report this year. To make matters worse, North Korea also is developing ballistic missiles that can deliver a nuclear warhead from a submarine.

North Korea has reached this state by simply defying all international efforts to stop it. Over the years, the U.S. and the international community have used various combinations of threats, sanctions and enticements to alter North Korea’s course, to no avail.

President Trump in his first term and President Biden after that tried widely differing approaches to little effect. In his first go-around as president, Trump started by using blunt insults and threats against Kim, who he labeled “Little Rocket Man.” But then Kim started a charm offensive, and before long he and Trump had a summit meeting after which Trump simply declared there was no long a nuclear threat from North Korea. Subsequent negotiations to turn that pleasant thought into reality went nowhere.

For his part, Biden focused on beefing up military relations with friendly nations around North Korea, expanding security discussions with Japan and South Korea and launching AUKUS, a trilateral security partnership encompassing the U.S., the United Kingdom and Australia that, among other things, opened the door to providing nuclear-powered submarines to Australia.

Kim seems unfazed. Instead, he has used rising tensions between the U.S. on the one hand and China and Russia on the other to buy protection for himself from Moscow and Beijing. The Congressional Research Service report says that Russia now is giving Pyongyang more nuclear technology and expertise in return for North Korean help in the war in Ukraine. Meantime, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi recently visited North Korea for the first time in seven years, and declared that the two countries are entering a “new phase” in their relationship.

Still, the idea that North Korea would actually launch an attack on the U.S. seems implausible, despite all the anti-American rhetoric it has spewed out. If instead the goal of North Korea’s nuclear program is to gain security for the Great Leader and his potential successors—his sister or his daughter—it has worked marvelously. Kim still has plenty of big problems that might make him vulnerable to international pressure, particularly the prospect of drought-induced food shortages, but overall he has maneuvered himself into a far more advantageous position, particularly with China and Russia.

“The dawn of a new era of great-power competition has been an unwelcome development for many small countries and middle powers, but North Korea has fared better than most by leveraging its nuclear arsenal to avoid getting trampled by bigger players,” writes Jung H. Pak in a new article in Foreign Affairs magazine.

For its part, Iran behaves far more like an expansionist power than North Korea ever has. It has long used proxy forces—in Lebanon, Iraq, the Gaza Strip and Yemen—to project power around the region. The paradox of the moment is that the war launched by the U.S. and Israel, designed to cut down the threat from Iran, actually has shown that Iran can, at a moment’s notice, exert a far wider power over the global economy by driving up the cost of not just oil but also fertilizer, liquified natural gas, helium and aluminum.

Maybe it will turn out that Iran’s Strait of Hormuz play backfires in the long run by creating a giant incentive for the Persian Gulf’s oil producers and their customers to find alternative routes to get products out of the region, principally through a network of new pipelines that bypass the Strait of Hormuz.

But that will take a long time to develop. And meanwhile, if Iran’s proxy friends, the Houthis in Yemen, figure out a way to imperil shipping through the Red Sea, the logical exit point for pipelines carrying oil away from the Persian Gulf, Iran’s ability to threaten the global economy actually could end up being enhanced.

The robust state of North Korea’s nuclear program may be the best argument for dealing with Iran’s program now, before it reaches a state where it can’t be reversed. But the North Korean example, which suggests a kind of invincibility accompanies a regime with a nuclear arsenal, may simply deepen Iran’s resolve to get a nuclear weapon eventually.

In sum, the geopolitical equations are far more complex in Iran, the law of unintended consequences more prominent, the price of failure potentially much higher than it has been with North Korea. In aiming for Iran’s nuclear program, the Trump administration may have unleashed forces far beyond that.

Get 14 day free trial

1. Artificial intelligence (AI) will soon add biology to its list of superhuman abilities. Anthropic’s Mythos model—already withheld from general release owing to its hacking skills—recently succeeded on a third of the most difficult data-crunching tasks pulled together by biology experts. Mythos could do things that were beyond all of the tested humans, such as reverse-engineering a cell type from raw DNA data. As we report, problem-solving like that means AI may soon grant people extremely dangerous powers: to synthesize viruses, generate novel neurotoxins or assemble omnicidal “mirror life”. Such dangers are the dark side of AI’s wonderful promise to democratize intelligence. It is even conceivable that an AI could give a misanthropic loner the power to end humanity. (Source: economist.com)

2. Anthropic, the AI lab whose identity is wrapped around warning the world about AI risk, is claiming “early signs” of AI not just coding its own products but building itself. Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark predicted this week that there’s a 60%+ chance of an AI model fully training its successor by the end of 2028. “What I’m looking at is a technological trend where, if anything, the speed will accelerate further,” Clark told us. In the new research agenda for The Anthropic Institute — first shared with Axios — the company says it’s seeing signs of “AI contributing to speeding up the research and development of AI itself,” a process known as recursive self-improvement. And Anthropic researchers think the world should know. “My prediction is by the end of 2028, it’s more likely than not that we have an AI system where you would be able to say to it: ‘Make a better version of yourself.’ And it just goes off and does that completely autonomously,” Clark, who heads the institute, told Axios from Anthropic headquarters in San Francisco. (Sources: axios.com, anthropic.com, substack.com)

3. A confidential CIA analysis delivered to administration policymakers this week concludes that Iran can survive the U.S. naval blockade for at least three to four months before facing more severe economic hardship, four people familiar with the document said, a finding that appears to raise new questions about President Donald Trump’s optimism on ending the war. The analysis by the U.S. intelligence community, whose secret assessments on Iran have often been more sober than the administration’s public statements, also found that Tehran retains significant ballistic missile capabilities despite weeks of intense U.S. and Israeli bombardment, three of the people familiar with it said. Iran retains about 75 percent of its prewar inventories of mobile launchers and about 70 percent of its prewar stockpiles of missiles, a U.S. official said. The official said there is evidence that the regime has been able to recover and reopen almost all of its underground storage facilities, repair some damaged missiles and even assemble some new missiles that were nearly complete when the war began. (Source: washingtonpost.com)

4. The US and Iran clashed near the Strait of Hormuz, an escalation that threatens to further fracture a fragile ceasefire as the two sides discuss a permanent end to the war. US forces targeted missile and drone launch sites and other military assets in Iran that they said were responsible for attacking three US warships transiting the strait. No vessels were hit, US Central Command said. A monthlong ceasefire remains in effect, President Donald Trump said. The clashes risk undermining talks over a US-proposed deal to end the war that began in February. Iran is expected to send a response via Pakistan, acting as a mediator, in the next two days, a person familiar with the matter said on Wednesday. Trump threatened more intense strikes if Iran refuses his terms, raising the risk of a longer war that has already killed thousands and sparked a global energy crisis. (Source: bloomberg.com)

5. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have lifted restrictions on the U.S. military’s use of their bases and airspace imposed after the start of the American operation to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, according to U.S. and Saudi officials, removing a hurdle that had tripped up President Trump’s effort to move ships through the vital waterway. The Trump administration is now looking to restart the operation to guide commercial ships with naval and air support that it had paused after 36 hours this week, U.S. officials said. It isn’t clear when that could happen though Pentagon officials gave a timeline of as early as this week. (T)he mission set off the biggest dispute in Saudi-American military relations in recent years, triggering a spate of high-level phone calls between Trump and the kingdom’s crown prince and raising the risk of a breakdown of a security deal between Washington and Riyadh. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait blocked the U.S. military’s use of their bases and airspace after senior American officials played down Iranian attacks on the Persian Gulf in reaction to the operation in the strait, Saudi officials said. The Saudis and other Gulf states were also concerned that the U.S. wouldn’t protect them amid the escalation in fighting, the officials said. (Source: wsj.com)

6. The Trump administration has approved sales of thousands of air defense interceptor missiles and related services valued at $17 billion to Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, according to State Department and congressional officials. The exports were approved despite alarm among some Pentagon officials over the dwindling U.S. stockpiles of such missiles, which have been expended in large numbers during the war against Iran. (Source: nytimes.com)

7. (A) confidential document obtained by The Economist from a trusted source suggests that Russia has offered to provide Iran with un-jammable drones and training on how to use them against American troops in the Gulf and perhaps elsewhere. Until now, Vladimir Putin’s government is thought to have provided intelligence that enabled Iran to target American forces in the Middle East. This is the first evidence that it may also have offered to supply innovative weapons in large enough numbers to inflict many casualties on American and allied forces, we can exclusively report. (Source: economist.com)

Read more

Get 14 day free trial

1. The Wall Street Journal:

Iran and the U.S. are working with mediators to hammer out a 14-point memorandum of understanding that would lay out a framework for a monthlong period of talks to end the war, people familiar with the matter said.

The discussion points would be the focus of talks that could resume as early as next week in Islamabad, they said. Iran has expressed openness to discussing its nuclear program, easing its earlier resistance, the people added.

President Trump said on Wednesday that the U.S. has had “good talks” with Iranian negotiators and the country has agreed not to have a nuclear weapon. Iran claims its nuclear activities are for peaceful purposes.

Details around the length of any suspension of Iran’s uranium enrichment or the possible removal of enriched uranium from the country, along with Iran’s assertion of a permanent role in overseeing the Strait of Hormuz, remain unresolved and are expected to complicate any talks, some of the people said. Other issues that could snarl talks include any sanctions relief.

2. Iran struck a defiant tone on Wednesday as President Trump pressed for a deal to end the war, but also acknowledged that its economy is being squeezed. As Iran reviews the latest U.S. peace proposal, lifting the U.S. military blockade of its ports and relieving pressure on its oil industry is one of the main incentives for Tehran to seek a deal. The blockade has halted Iran’s oil exports, choking off crucial revenues, and the country risks running out of places to store its oil. It is also affecting the import of other goods, forcing Iran to seek alternative routes through neighboring countries and its smaller ports on the Caspian Sea. And the economic pain inside Iran, already dire before the war, is becoming much worse. “The sea blockade is a much more serious threat than even war, and the current stalemate must be broken because the export of our oil and energy and the fate of our refineries is now at risk,” said Hamid Hosseini, an expert on Iran’s oil sector who serves on the energy committee of Iran’s Chamber of Commerce, in an interview from Tehran. (Source: nytimes.com)

3. The Economist:

The blockade is….hurting Iran, which has already had to trim oil production and press derelict tankers into service as floating storage. Its economy is a mess. But America has not achieved its goal of compelling Iran to make major concessions to get a deal, nor is it likely to do so soon.

Hence the effort to break the deadlock in the strait. American destroyers did manage to escort two us-flagged ships through Hormuz on May 4th. But the “project” was never likely to help the hundreds of others still stuck. Shippers still see transiting the strait as an intolerable risk—particularly after Iranian attacks this week that hit a tanker owned by the UAE’s national oil company and a South Korean vessel.

What it did do was offer Iran a pretext to resume attacks on its neighbors. Iran fired at least 19 missiles and drones at the UAE on May 4th, the first such strikes since shortly after the ceasefire was called on April 8th. The drones caused a fire at the oil terminal in Fujairah, the UAE’s only major port outside the Persian Gulf and thus its only wartime outlet for crude exports. The Emiratis were understandably furious, and many officials in the Gulf assumed America would retaliate. Instead it played down the attacks. Mr Trump soon said that he was suspending “Project Freedom”, ostensibly at the behest of Pakistan, which is mediating between America and Iran. (Source: economist.com)

4. Since the start of the Iran war, crude exports through Fujairah have risen 38%, pushing towards the upper limit of the pipeline that feeds the port. At Khor Fakkan, terminal operator Gulftainer said the number of containers it handles has jumped roughly 25-fold. Iran reminded the Gulf region on Monday, ​however, just how exposed the ports are when its drones hit the Fujairah Oil Industry Zone, sparking a fire at one of the UAE’s most critical energy facilities and injuring three workers. Hours earlier, Iran's Revolutionary Guards Navy ​had published a map appearing to extend its zone of control along the UAE's eastern coastline, encompassing both ports. Shipping sources said on Tuesday that neither port had yet been ⁠affected, but the message from Tehran was clear. (Source: reuters.com)

Read more