Editor’s Note: I forgot to include the major “platform” links to yesterday’s podcast (‘The War in Ukraine’). You can find it on virtually all of them, including Apple, Amazon and Spotify.) The conversation with Perry Boyle about the Ukraine war, its consequences and the future of warfare is superb, entirely because Mr. Boyle is a terrific guest.
1. A new Wall Street Journal survey shows broad, bipartisan support among Americans for government-imposed price caps and other market interventions. Americans in both parties back government-imposed price caps and other market interventions to make life more affordable, suggesting new support for populist ideas that were once largely outside the political mainstream. Voters of all partisan stripes strongly support capping the cost of prescription drugs, child care and credit-card interest rates. The survey suggests that a coalition reaching beyond the nation’s familiar party labels exists for a range of policies at a time when Americans view Republicans and Democrats negatively. Large majorities, for example, support both strong border security and a pathway to citizenship for many people in the country illegally, the poll finds. A near-majority of Democrats agrees with Republicans and independent voters that people should show a photo ID when balloting to ensure that only citizens vote. The survey tested more than 30 policy ideas that are part of the midterm campaign discussion or congressional debate, many of them focused on the cost of living. Many of the policy ideas drawing strong support in the survey could be classified as populist—favoring consumers or average citizens over the established powers, such as the wealthy, health insurers or other corporations. “We love to think about the world as conservative and liberal,” said Democratic pollster John Anzalone, who conducted the survey with Republican Adam Geller. “Maybe we should start thinking about the world as: Populism is a dominant ideology in both the Democratic and Republican parties.” (Sources: wsj.com, iop.harvard.edu, nationalresearchinc.com)
2. Months before OpenAI’s artificial intelligence went rogue, two employees raised an alarm with top executives. They were ignored. In emails, the employees said they worried that OpenAI’s newest artificial intelligence models were not being appropriately monitored during testing to gauge the technology’s sophistication and to secure the models, according to messages viewed by The New York Times. In response, OpenAI executives told the employees that the tests needed to move forward as quickly as possible to release the A.I. models on time. No additional security protocols were instituted, said the workers, who were not authorized to speak publicly on sensitive matters. OpenAI’s models later broke out of their testing environments and attacked the A.I. start-up Hugging Face and other organizations, setting off a global debate about A.I. safety. The exchanges between OpenAI employees and executives — which have not been previously reported — were part of a pattern where the San Francisco company did not prioritize security, according to employees and independent security researchers. (Source: nytimes.com)
3. Chinese-powered AI agents have learnt to deceive, circumvent restrictions and conceal failure, showing the kind of traits in autonomous artificial intelligence that have raised global alarm about US models, research documents and experts say. In one case this year, agents powered by models from China’s Alibaba, DeepSeek and Moonshot lied about their capabilities in a bid to win a simulated business tender, then doubled down on their deceptive behavior when told to try again…Reuters examined more than 200 documents, ranging from university research papers to technical reports, and identified at least 20 studies or evaluations since 2025 describing cases where agents displayed behaviour such as deception, replication and challenging boundaries that AI experts described as building blocks for a breakout and which could become harder for humans to control as systems advance. (Source: reuters.com)
4. The number of AI-enabled cyber-attacks has nearly doubled during the last year, CrowdStrike has warned, as threat actors deployed machine learning and Large Language Models (LLMs) to help optimize attack techniques and hacking campaigns. According to the CrowdStrike Global Threat Report 2026, there was an 89% increase in attacks by “AI-enabled adversaries” in 2025 when compared with the previous year. (Sources: infosecurity-magazine.com, crowdstrike.com)
