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Just how fast is the future coming at us, and how worried should we be?

Last week, Anthropic announced Claude Mythos, the latest in what has become the leading family of AI models. In a very short time, AI models from Anthropic and other companies have become shockingly powerful at coding. But Mythos stands out because it is not just able to write code that can hack into critical systems, like those that run financial companies, but also to analyze systems and find and string together vulnerabilities in them, allowing Mythos to evade even sophisticated defenses.

Anthropic chose to release Mythos to only about 40 leading corporations, so they could analyze the model’s capabilities and prepare countermeasures, in an effort it calls Project Glasswing. The release of Mythos—and the prospect of similarly powerful AIs to follow—has caused tremors at the top levels of Washington and corporate America.

Jared Kaplan, co-founder and chief science officer at Anthropic, is at the center of this breakthrough. We sat down with Kaplan so he could walk us through just how powerful Mythos is, what the implications are for issues like our personal privacy, and what comes next. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Sean Fischer: For the layman, how is Claude Mythos different—more powerful, more dangerous—from previous models released by Anthropic?

Jared Kaplan: I think most people have experienced the fact that our computers get faster and faster over time and over many decades. There’s this very smooth trend where every 18 months, maybe, computer processing power doubles. I think AI is on a trend in which it’s improving maybe 10 times faster than that. A lot of the earliest work that I did in AI was around identifying this scaling trend in AI.

Claude Mythos is the latest model from Anthropic, but it’s not different because it’s qualitatively different. It’s really just kind of the culmination of the trend of AI models getting smarter and smarter at all kinds of general capabilities, from reasoning to software engineering to scientific research to knowledge work.

For us, it was the first model to demonstrate very elite-level cybersecurity capabilities. It wasn’t because we trained Claude Mythos to focus on cybersecurity, but it was because, as a byproduct of its general intelligence and its general ability with software, it’s particularly good at identifying vulnerabilities in software and how to exploit them.

Pakistan’s effort to revive the Islamabad U.S.-Iran talks that fell apart over the weekend has largely faced a cool reception from the Trump administration. Nonetheless, if those talks resume, Vice President J.D. Vance has made clear that America is focused on Iran’s nuclear ambitions. As he told Fox News this week, America’s redlines in the negotiation flow from the “fundamental premise” that Iran can never possess an atomic bomb.

This goal is understandable. There is still around 1,000 pounds of highly enriched uranium trapped beneath the rubble of what used to be Iranian nuclear facilities. And even though the war has set Iran’s regime back several years from acquiring an apocalyptic arsenal, the stakes are as high as they get. If Iran gains nuclear weapons, the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism will have acquired a nuclear umbrella to protect its armies and many proxies from retaliation.

All that said, President Donald Trump should aim higher than just another nuclear deal that eventually expires. Trump should also demand that Iran’s regime respect the lives and security of its own citizens.

Iran’s nuclear program (with the exception of an unfinished facility known as Pickaxe Mountain) is almost entirely demolished. It’s possible the regime may seek to rebuild, but that will be an expensive and arduous task for a mafia state that is on its back. In other words, there is time to neutralize, either diplomatically or militarily, the Iranian nuclear threat down the road. A more pressing concern is the regime’s survival and whether it will stay in power through another massacre when and if Iranians take to the streets again, as they did three months ago.

“Uhhh . . .I have to go,” I stammered, before collecting my bag and racing off into the pouring rain.

It was a Friday evening in Washington. I had been spending it like any other 27-year-old would—drinking a Modelo and nerding out with some other young professionals about critical mineral supply chains. But my time at the bar was cut fatefully short by a call from an FBI agent.

I had been targeted in a sophisticated breach from a state actor.

I needed a new number, a new device, a new everything. Immediately.

The next morning I walked into the Apple Store at Carnegie Library. “Hi there—” a sales agent started before I raised an index finger to my lips. “Yeah, yeah. Can I just . . . set this . . . over here for a second?” I stashed my iPhone in the base of a potted plant while he raised a confused brow.

“Now that we can speak privately, I’d like to buy a new iPhone.” No, I didn’t want to restore an iCloud backup. Yes, I was sure.

The next 72 hours were some of the worst of my life. I cataloged every digital service I had ever used—emails, banks, VPNs, rideshare apps, music, social media, entertainment, Duolingo—and rebuilt each one: new email, new password, new two-factor authentication. I lost all my personal photos—and more than $200 in Dunkin’ Donuts rewards points.

Little did I know this was just the beginning. The next week brought dozens of phishing emails, failed two-factor authentication logins into my social media accounts, and alarming messages from Google’s security team. Attackers even spoofed location-sharing requests from my own mother.

It was my first rodeo with a highly motivated state actor. And I won’t be the only American this happens to. After Anthropic unveiled an AI last week that can scan the world’s software for weaknesses and exploit them faster than any human ever could, it may happen to you, too.

Three years in, Sudan’s brutal civil war shows no signs of relenting. An estimated 400,000 people have been killed since April 15, 2023. More than 12 million have been displaced internally. Another 4 million have fled to neighboring Egypt, Chad, Ethiopia, and South Sudan, while more than 30 million need humanitarian assistance as a result of the “world’s largest hunger crisis.”

For a war of this scale, Sudan has drawn remarkably little sustained international attention. Compared to China’s Xinjiang (home to the Uyghurs) or Gaza, Sudan has remained largely peripheral to global discourse, despite the former area being massively harder to affect through outside intervention and the latter being much more contested. Here we have a confirmed genocide, a famine affecting a third of the population, and a death toll that dwarfs any other single conflict or atrocity on Earth, yet little interest in world capitals that can’t help but regularly decry what they perceive as the wrongs being perpetrated in certain foreign lands.

The war pits Sudan’s conventional military, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, against the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group commanded by Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo. Once allies who jointly removed longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019, and co-governed Sudan through a transitional period, the men fell out over who would control the country’s security forces once a civilian government was established. By April 2023, both sides were moving forces into position around Khartoum, with the RSF allegedly striking first against SAF bases.

Democrats have a Hasan Piker problem. They seem not to know what to do with the über-lefty streamer-influencer with millions of followers—to engage or not to engage; to campaign with him, or to pretend he doesn’t exist. That is the question!

In recent days, Piker has doubled down on his claim that Israel is worse than Hamas and declared that the collapse of the Soviet Union was one of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century. Last month, he took part in a propaganda mission to Cuba. In November, he was in China promoting all the Chinese Communist Party’s good works.

One would think Democrats would have no trouble dispensing with this radical chic retread.

And yet Piker is being defended by some of the most prominent voices on the American left—including, most recently, Ezra Klein, who has penned a column originally headlined “Hasan Piker Is Not the Enemy.”

Actually, if you believe that Donald Trump and his cult of personality pose a dire threat to the Constitution, if you believe that America needs a serious, substantive liberalism that narrows the gap between the 1 percenters and everyone else, then Hasan Piker is the enemy.

He’s the would-be savior of the Cuban people who showed up in Havana with his $1,300 Cartier sunglasses.

On Sunday night, President Donald Trump ignited a firestorm when he posted an image on Truth Social depicting himself as a divine figure, leaning over a sick man and appearing to heal him. The image, which drew swift backlash, was widely reported as the president blasphemously “portraying himself as Jesus Christ.”

My immediate reaction was dismay. Initially, I assumed the post was a combination of Trump’s ego and the bad influence of spiritual advisers like Paula White, who likes to compare Trump to Christ, something that I’ve repeatedly criticized. Many of my fellow Christians agreed, and in an apparent reaction to the backlash, Trump deleted the meme. When asked about it, he responded that he didn’t intend it to be a picture of Jesus, but rather a depiction of himself healing America, noting the Red Cross worker in the picture.

Is that an excuse? No. But it is an explanation, and a plausible one, given what we know of Trump’s general inattention to matters of religion. In response, I wrote, “I do believe that he didn’t think of this as a depiction of Jesus when posting. Still, there has to be more care and discernment here.”

My post provoked a flood of criticism. Some people claimed I was simply lying: that I didn’t really believe Trump’s explanation, that I was just a MAGA sycophant blindly running a defense campaign. Many even accused me of being paid to say it. That’s a strange accusation to level at someone who has spent the better part of a decade publicly critiquing Trump—especially since, as I wrote on X, many of the people angry at me had only in the last few months left the Trump Can Do No Wrong Club.

What should everyday Americans think about aliens?

My first true political conviction was that they were real, they were here, and the government was covering it up. It was sci-fi, I confess, that did it. I obsessively watched The X-Files as a kid, and I became convinced that it was basically a documentary. Over time, of course, I steadily grew more skeptical, but as a teenager, I talked to a close family friend—a distinguished medical doctor—who believed in aliens. He claimed to have had patients who worked in the government and had told him about these beings. He said that they weren’t extraterrestrial, but inter-dimensional. They could defy our physics. They could even walk through walls.

Now I’m an adult, with a child and a house, which is full of books by the great authors on the subject of aliens: the French computer scientist Jacques Vallée, the journalist Leslie Kean, and the religion professor Diana Pasulka, just to name a few. My wife and I have even visited the sites of supposed abductions and UFO crashes. I’ve mostly treated alien visitations as a distinctly American kind of folklore. But there might be a lot more to it than that.

Look, I know you sound like something of a nutcase when you talk about this stuff. This has long been treated as a topic for cranks, paranoiacs, and dimwits—the sort of people unable to distinguish the difference between sci-fi and actual science. But in the last decade, that has slowly started to change.

In 2017, The New York Times unveiled footage recorded in 2004 of some kind of oblong-shaped orb flying near a U.S. Navy exercise off the coast of San Diego. There’s no easy way to dismiss that 2004 footage, which is now popularly known as the “Tic Tac” incident. Since then, we’ve also had whistleblower after whistleblower show up before Congress with wild stories about American UFO retrieval programs and efforts to reverse-engineer crashed spacecraft. In 2023, retired Air Force officer David Grusch, a decorated Afghan war vet who also served in the intelligence community, testified to Congress of his knowledge of a supposed crash retrieval program. He even told reporters that Benito Mussolini’s Italy recovered a crashed UFO in the 1930s, which was then handed over to U.S. forces at the end of World War II via the Vatican.

More recently, there’s been another story flying around all this. As The Wall Street Journal reported last year, the government might not have been suppressing our knowledge of UFOs. In fact, it might have been behind it. Perhaps UFOs, as we know them, were an invention to hide what the U.S. military was actually up to at places like Area 51, where bizarre-looking spy planes and stealth jets were tested.

And yet, and yet, when President Barack Obama was asked about aliens on a podcast earlier this year, he said: “They’re real.” He then clarified that statement, saying he was only speculating due to the high odds they exist, but President Donald Trump was quick to accuse him of releasing confidential information. Trump then said he was ordering the release of government files on the phenomenon. (He did not say when this release would occur.) The fact that current and retired presidents have been talking about this at all is a huge shift from where we were at the start of this century.

What do they know that we don’t? Why do clean-cut senators like South Dakota’s Mike Rounds seem so convinced that the government isn’t telling Congress the truth about this phenomenon? Why are bureaucrats with security clearances testifying under oath that the government has UFOs?

I want some answers. So I’ve interviewed a handful of experts, and for the next month, we’ll be publishing an interview a week. I’m not here to convince you of anything. This is not one of those History channel shows that runs with the most wild hypothesis. I’m here, as they say, just asking questions. I’ll probably get some stuff wrong. When I make mistakes, I want you to correct me. This is an important subject. And I want us to go on a journey of discovery together.

But enough of what I have to say. I want to introduce you to our guests. In this four-part series, we’re going to speak to journalist Michael Shellenberger, physicist Avi Loeb, oceanographer and retired Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, and University of North Carolina Wilmington professor Diana Pasulka.

And today, to begin our quest, we have Michael Shellenberger—who has studied this phenomenon for years. He has even testified to Congress about what he’s uncovered. Watch the whole video to see what he has to say.

Over the next four weeks, I’m hosting a video series called What Should Smart People Think About UFOs? As the conversation around UFOs has moved from the fringes of conspiracy culture into serious discussion, including at the highest levels of government, I want to speak with experts who have devoted real attention to the subject, to make sense of what …

With war raging in the Middle East, we want to bring you as many trusted voices on the news as we can. One such voice is the Israeli journalist Amit Segal. He writes a daily newsletter, It’s Noon in Israel, which we’re pleased to publish in The Free Press.

It’s Wednesday, April 15, and Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, faces the High Court today, with his political survival on the line. But should Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara succeed in ousting him, she may find it a Pyrrhic victory.

But first, some context.

Israel’s attorney general is seeking the national security minister’s removal by invoking the “Deri Doctrine.” In the 1990s, the High Court compelled Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to dismiss Shas leader Aryeh Deri from his cabinet following a criminal indictment. The doctrine mandates that a prime minister is legally obligated to fire a minister if they are charged with offenses involving “moral turpitude.” The underlying rationale is that the public’s confidence in the government’s integrity is so fundamental to democracy that it must override a prime minister’s executive discretion to maintain his cabinet.

So, has Ben-Gvir been indicted? Not exactly.

America’s semiquincentennial would be a sad and grudging affair without a nod to the nation’s founding capitalists. Robert Morris, the “Financier of the Revolution,” donated his own fortune to supply the raggedy and underpaid armies of George Washington. George F. Baker sold the bonds that raised the money that equipped the Union side in the Civil War. Along with the statesmen and the generals and the keepers of the home fires, the moneybags deserve their day in the sun, too.

Morris and Baker were rich, bold, indomitable, enterprising, self-made, proficient, cool in a crisis, and incapable of despair. Each was an unshakable optimist on the American future. “While you may make many mistakes,” J.P. Morgan’s father advised his son, “never be a bear on your country or you will surely go broke.” Baker, who heard the story directly from the younger Morgan, was always a bull, too. Morris, who died in 1806, seven years before the birth of the elder Morgan, was no less an optimist. Indeed, Morris’s heavily encumbered purchases of millions of acres of American wilderness in the 1790s ultimately cost him his fortune.

Historians have thought the less of Morris for dying broke, but the financier was a nonpareil, rich or poor: successful merchant and ship owner; early opponent of overbearing British colonial rule; tireless advocate of American independence; logistical, commercial, and maritime genius of the Second Continental Congress. “For three critical months in the winter of 1777,” wrote his biographer, Charles Rappleye, “when Congress fled Philadelphia for the relative safety of Baltimore, Morris ran the operations of the American government virtually single-handed.”

The one-man government retired from the Continental Congress in 1778, but in 1781 he became the Superintendent of Finance—in effect, the secretary of the treasury of the revolutionary government, though of treasure the infant nation had none. Lacking the power to tax, the national government could only appeal. Morris begged and requisitioned the states but to no avail; Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Maryland proving especially recalcitrant. He therefore improvised. He hired an engraver, procured copper plates, and printed his own currency—“Morris notes”—which, in testament to their originator’s good name, passed for money in the rebellious colonies. “My personal credit, which thank Heaven I have preserved through all the tempests of the War,” the superintendent advised a friend, “has been substituted for that which the Country has lost. I am now striving to transfer that Credit to the Public.”

To fill the credit void, Morris also founded the Bank of North America, the nation’s first commercial bank. His creation would take deposits, including the government’s. It would lend to the government and private business alike. Its officers would receive no remuneration except that which the stockholders voted them (the offices in Morris’s bank would be those of honor, not profit). As for the currency of the Bank of North America, a citizen could take it or leave it. Morris was as dead set against legal tender laws (which compel a creditor to accept the government’s money in payment of a debt) as he was against price controls. As he wrote to John Jay on July 13, 1781, he envisioned a bank “to unite the several states more closely together in one general money connection and indissolubly to attach many powerful individuals to the cause of their country by the strong principle of self-love and the immediate sense of private interest.” The bank, its founder expected, would become a permanent “Pillar of American Credit.”

Morris saw the enabling legislation through the Continental Congress and was on hand the day the bank opened—January 7, 1782—to borrow $100,000 in the name of Michael Hillegas, the first Treasurer of the United States. Morris was the bank’s largest stockholder—except for a brief moment late in 1782 when John Paul Jones invested his prize money. The Bank of North America paid high dividends from the start. It proved the predecessor to Alexander Hamilton’s Bank of the United States (established in 1791) and distant forebear of the Federal Reserve (established in 1913), whose interest-rate manipulations and fast-paced money printing would have left Morris, a gold-standard man, dumbfounded.

Success earned Morris not only acclaim, but also resentment and brickbats (“pecuniary dictator,” a detractor sneered). The superintendent amiably suffered his critics. “[A]ny abuse or misrepresentation which particular persons may indulge themselves in I consider the necessary trappings of office,” he told a correspondent in 1782, “and if they can obtain forgiveness from their country they will always have mine most freely.”

Sitting for his portrait a few years later, Morris presented the artist, Robert Edge Pine, with a broad determined face, a receding hairline (the subject was 51 years old), and exactly the boldness required of anyone who would amass $3 million of unrepayable debt in the course of conducting speculations in millions of virgin acres in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas (as well as 7,234 building lots in the brand new District of Columbia).

From debtors’ prison in 1798, eight years before his death, Morris gently deflected an importuning creditor: “I wish you would not write to me in such terms as you do. You wound me to the soul, and if that does you any good I will submit patiently, but if it does not ease you why wound me deeply when my most ardent wish is to relieve you?”

An old banker’s death led the front page of The New York Times on Sunday, May 3, 1931. The 1929 crash had long since knocked the banking profession off its bull-market pedestal, but the Times still made pride of place for a eulogy of George F. Baker.

He was the “dean of American bankers.” When he was a young man, Baker could perform one-arm pull-ups. As an old man, with his silver muttonchop whiskers and black top hat, regally seated in his custom Pierce-Arrow town car (the elevated roof of which accommodated the banker’s hat), he might have inspired the creators of the Monopoly game’s Rich Uncle Pennybags. His blue eyes welled with tears whenever he recalled the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

A philanthropist and investor, Baker was president of the First National Bank of New York at the corner of Broadway and Wall Street. Federally uninsured, lightly regulated, and by no means too big to fail, the First was an institution that harked back to Alexander Hamilton’s time as much as it anticipated our own. Some judged the First to be impregnable, and, indeed, the Bank of England chose it over the Federal Reserve Bank of New York as the safest institution in which to place a large deposit in the darkest days of the Great Depression.

Morris and Baker were rich, bold, indomitable, enterprising, self-made, proficient, cool in a crisis, and incapable of despair.

Baker, born in 1840, was 23 when he joined the newly organized First National Bank and 33 in the year of the panic that ruined Jay Cooke and the Union Pacific Railroad, and threatened every New York City bank, not excluding the First. What should we do if frightened depositors came running? Baker was asked. “Pay every claim presented as long as the money lasts,” the stout young man declared. “When we stop paying it will be because there is not another dollar in the till, and none obtainable.” The First survived and Baker, within four years, was its president.

The First was a moneymaking hybrid, unusual for its time and extinct today, thanks to federal banking regulations: part investment bank, part venture capitalist fund, part bond-trading house, and part commercial bank. The bank was engaged, in the words of a starstruck federal bank examiner, “in many undertakings of that character which generally turn out favorably.”

And in the words of another federal examiner, circa 1877, concerning the First’s $2 million infusion of emergency aid in a needy Rochester bank: “[T]here is not a single Bank in our City who would or could have helped a country correspondent to such gigantic figures and on such short notice!” And during the long-lingering depression of 1873–79 to boot.

Baker accumulated directorships, wealth, and accolades. From the April 14, 1924, edition of Time magazine: “True, he is twice as rich as the original J.P. Morgan, having a fortune estimated at 200 millions. True, at the age of 84 when he has retired from many directorates, he dominates half a dozen railroads, several banks, [and] scores of industrial concerns.” The banker donated $5 million to the founding of the Harvard Business School, $2 million to Cornell University, and $1 million to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is the namesake of the Baker Memorial Library at Dartmouth College (expanded in 2002 to become the Baker-Berry Library).

A bull “who always bought and very rarely sold,” Baker showed best in a crisis. The bank and the nation always snapped back from panics and depressions, even the close call of 1873, stronger than before. Surely, he reasoned, the post-1929 slump would prove no different.

His younger colleagues were not so sure, and they begged him to reduce the bank’s exposure to the overvalued stock market. Baker turned a deaf ear and went into the crash fully invested, a decision that sawed his peak net worth in half. “I was a damn fool,” his biographer, Sheridan Logan, quotes Baker as saying at some post-crash low moment, though who, no matter how deep-rooted his faith in the American future, wouldn’t have at least thought it in 1930?

Even so, his Wall Street admirers agreed: The famously lucky banker had salvaged a kind of victory even from that unforced error. Dying at a low ebb in the stock market, he lightened his heirs’ estate-tax liability.

“His death,” said The New York Times, “leaves only John D. Rockefeller Sr. to represent the leaders of an era that saw the passing of the last frontier and the flowering of a new civilization which they and their contemporaries helped to build.” The Times’ article cast no political aspersions on the capitalist’s substantial remaining wealth, still less on his faith in the market system, and praised his contributions to the making of modern America: “Although Mr. Baker’s chief interest was in banking and finance, he was among the group which in the last century flung rails of steel across the continent and helped this nation prepare for the transition from an agrarian age to one of machines and mass production.”

America today is rich beyond imagining. The sky-high level of household net worth expressed as a percentage of gross domestic product only confirms what the untrained eye can see. For the owners of stocks, bonds, and houses, these are the good old days, gasoline prices and political fracturing (and, yes, elevated valuations and heavy indebtedness) notwithstanding. Baker, the beau ideal of the banker-cum-investor, and Morris, the avatar of the patriot financier, set posterity brave and inspiring examples.

A Gilded Age contemporary of Baker’s, George G. Williams, president of the Chemical National Bank, left a legacy in four words. The Chemical had earned for itself the moniker “Old Bullion” for faithfully paying out gold coin to nervous depositors in the Panic of 1857. Like Baker, Williams had managed to combine profits and safety in the inherently risky business of lending and borrowing. Asked for the secret of his decades-long success, the banker replied, “The fear of God.”

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