The Free Press

It’s Friday, April 10. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Eli Lake on the five men running Iran. Olivia Reingold on Zohran Mamdani’s first 100 days as the mayor of NYC. Why did President Donald Trump ask for a $1.5 trillion defense budget? And much more.

But first: AI isn’t about to change your job, your health, or the music you listen to. It already has.

This week, Anthropic quietly rolled out its most powerful model yet: Claude Mythos. It’s the first artificial intelligence model that officials believe could cripple a Fortune 100 company, disable vast swaths of the internet, or penetrate national defense networks. In testing, Claude Mythos autonomously identified and exploited vulnerabilities in every major operating system and web browser, some of which had lain dormant and undetected for decades.

That’s the version governments are scrambling to contain, for fear that it could rewrite human civilization. But farther from the headlines, and in a less dramatic way, AI is already remaking everyday life for ordinary people. The evidence is in three fascinating essays we’re publishing today.

Evan Gardner reports on how machines are throwing the music industry into turbulence. There’s the North Carolina banjo player who logged onto Spotify to find songs she had never recorded uploaded under her name. There’s the Mississippi choir singer who used AI to land a $3 million record deal. And there’s the billion-dollar platforms where you can type in “Write a song about my dog that sounds like Taylor Swift,” and it’ll do it in minutes.

“They’re not just stealing our work,” one artist told Evan. “They’re stealing us.” Read more here:

Then there’s Andrew Rodriguez, whose 25-year-old girlfriend has a brain tumor that has defied two surgeries—and was missed by multiple medical professionals. Rodriguez decided to take matters into his own hands: Armed with some AI chatbots and a background in biophysics, he began combing through research papers her doctors hadn’t seen. This is the future of medicine. Read it here:

And finally, Melanie Pasch had never written a line of code in her life. Then her boss told her that using AI as a tool wasn’t enough anymore—and asked her to rebuild her entire job around it. Melanie works in corporate communications and, in one night at her parents’ house, she built an automated system that lets her team of two operate like a team of 10. Click here to find out how AI could become your favorite colleague:

—The Editors

Our coverage of the Iran war continues. Today, Eli Lake reports on who is actually running the Islamic Republic right now. He breaks down the five-man council with whom Vice President J.D. Vance will negotiate in Islamabad, Pakistan, this weekend and what that means for the ceasefire’s chances. Read the full thing here:

Haviv Rettig Gur argues that no matter what America decides, the war is far from over—and that Israel, unlike the United States, does not have the luxury of walking away:

Elsewhere, Michael Oren writes about the disappointment the ceasefire has brought Israelis, and why so many feel the war ended just short of finishing the job:

And on School of War, Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies joins Aaron MacLean to discuss what’s actually at stake in the Islamabad talks, where the two sides are almost aligned, and where they’re miles apart. Listen here:

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Earlier this week, we published an exclusive report about an unprecedented meeting between the Vatican and the Pentagon, which took place after Pope Leo XIV’s “state of the world” address in January, in which he criticized those who chose war over peace.

Mattia Ferraresi reported that, days later, the Holy See’s then-ambassador to the United States, Cardinal Christophe Pierre, was summoned to have a conversation with Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby, and other U.S. officials. Those with knowledge of the meeting told The Free Press that it was tense. One U.S. official reportedly referenced the Avignon Papacy—the period in the 14th century when the French Crown leveraged its military power to dominate the papal authority.

After we published this report, the vice president was asked about it by a journalist. Vance said: “I would actually like to talk to Cardinal Cristophe Pierre and, frankly, to our people, to figure out what actually happened.” The Department of Defense then released a statement: “Recent reporting of the meeting is highly exaggerated and distorted.” Meanwhile, the Financial Times, among other publications, has corroborated details of our report—including a U.S. official’s mention of the Avignon Papacy. “It went wrong. It was very bad form. Somebody misspoke,” one source told the London-based paper.

The four astronauts aboard Artemis II’s Integrity splash down off the coast of California tonight—and everyone is holding their breath as they wonder: Will the heat shield hold? Frannie Block reports on the known flaw in the spacecraft’s shield: It cracked and charred on the last unmanned mission, and NASA didn’t have enough time to design a new one. During reentry, the crew will pass through temperatures as high as 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit and have no way to communicate with Mission Control. One veteran NASA engineer said, “We’re basically playing Russian roulette.”

This week in our newsletter tracking the global rise of antisemitism: Rabbi Jen Lader of Temple Israel in West Bloomfield writes about watching Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed offer condolences after a man drove a truck into her synagogue, only to pivot the next day and say “Hurt people hurt people.”

Our own Olivia Reingold dove deeper into the coalition behind El-Sayed’s rise. “At this point, man, you can’t be pro-Israel. That’s like being pro-Nazi,” one socialist supporter told her at a rally in Ann Arbor. Reingold reports on how the Senate hopeful, dubbed “Michigan Mamdani,” is winning over Arab Americans and young progressives with a mix of affordability politics, anti-Israel hostility, and the support of Twitch streamer Hasan Piker.

Today marks 100 days since New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani took office. On Sunday, he will celebrate by doing what he does best: holding a massive rally. The invite-only affair is expected to include sanitation workers, firefighters, and public school teachers. It’s the kind of event that helped him generate enough fanfare to go from political obscurity to leader of America’s largest city. The question is why he’s holding one now—at a moment when he’s only partially fulfilled one of his three signature campaign promises.

The rent remains unfrozen. The buses are not free. And New Yorkers still do not have access to universal childcare—only 2,000 spots have been made available for a new daycare program for 2-year-olds.

That’s not to say his administration has been without accomplishments. In the weeks leading up to his 100th day, Mamdani has pointed to a series of incremental wins: a new 104-bed unit at Bellevue Hospital for inmates in city jails, a pilot program offering free childcare to 40 children of municipal workers, and an additional $1.5 billion in state aid secured from Albany.

Murphy Campbell found modest renown in the music industry in the good old-fashioned way: by strumming her banjo, all alone, in the backwoods of North Carolina. She has no agent, no manager, no publishing label. Instead, she props up her phone, and records herself perched on a log, or an old rocking chair, singing songs inherited from old relatives, or ones she has written herself. Right now, she’s raising funds to release her new album, not by pitching industry big shots, but by promoting a Kickstarter.

One day in January, earlier this year, Campbell noticed something strange: There were songs popping up on her Spotify profile that she knew nothing about, although they did include snippets she’d posted on YouTube. Right away, she had a theory: Someone had likely fed those snippets into AI, asked it to generate a whole song, then uploaded it under her name. She contacted Spotify, and they helped her remove these songs.

But this past weekend, things escalated.

Campbell discovered that, first of all, AI-generated covers of her work had been uploaded to YouTube by someone—or something—using a distribution company called Vydia. Then—and here’s where things get very strange—Vydia appears to have successfully made multiple copyright claims on YouTube, effectively fooling the platform into thinking the AI-generated version of Campbell’s music was the original. The singer got a notification: “You are now sharing revenues with the copyright owners of the music detected in your video.” In other words, she was ceding the profits of her own work to the bots that copied it. (A spokesperson for Vydia told The Verge that the person who had uploaded the fake videos of Campbell’s songs has been banned from their platform, and that the company had given up all of its copyright claims to her work. He added that Vydia was receiving “literal death threats.”)

“I was under the impression that we had a little bit more checks in place before someone could just do that,” she said in a video posted on Instagram that promptly went viral. She also warned that her story might not be as unusual as it sounds. “It’s the Wild West,” she said, “and it could happen to anyone.”

As violence against Jews skyrockets across the globe, we’ve launched a new weekly newsletter to track and make sense of the speed and severity of this virus. You can sign up here to receive it.

This week, we’re bringing you reflections from someone who has recently felt the horrendous effects of antisemitism firsthand. Rabbi Jen Lader, who serves the community of Michigan’s Temple Israel, recently found herself in a situation that many Jewish leaders pray they will never know. On March 12, a man affiliated with Hezbollah drove a truck into her synagogue, where hundreds of children were attending preschool. In the days after, she said that the community was heartbroken, but not surprised.

Weeks later, the effects still reverberate. One of the many politicians offering support and condemning antisemitism in the immediate aftermath was Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. But now he’s changed his tune, minimizing the attack by saying: “Hurt people hurt people.”

This is a story about a feeling that most Jews know all too well: the disappointment of realizing that support for the Jewish people is contingent on political convenience, and the underlying assumption that sympathy rests on being a perfect victim. Today, we’re proud to bring you Lader’s story, in her own words.

—Josh Kaplan

Welcome to our weekly news summary. But first: Two of our podcasts have been nominated for Webby Awards, and the winners are chosen entirely by public vote. We’re up against Oprah, Jane Goodall, and a few other Z listers. Every vote counts! Click here to vote for Spiral: Murder in Detroit. And click here to vote for Conversations with Coleman. And if you’re in Philadelphia, we have a Free Press dinner and live show on May 18—Shilo Brooks in conversation with Jon Meacham! Now onward, to the news.

→ At this point, is he trolling us: Standing by the Easter Bunny, atop the South Portico balcony, our president gave an update on Iran. “I don’t think it gets much more hostile than Iran. They’re capable fighters,” he said, as Melania, with a bouncy blonde hairdo, and Bunny stood on either side of him. It’s up to the voters to decide who served a more chilling stare. My new theory: Trump knows this is funny. He’s trolling us. It’s a bit. He waits for Bunny to get there before he starts in on Iran. My other theory: Mike Johnson is the bunny.

Now in this next quote, I’m less sure of exactly what’s happening. This is Trump describing some good old-fashioned American warfighting, and I will make no further comment: “They came in so fast and so hard, and these guys knew exactly what—let’s go, come on, get in, let’s go, pwah. They came one right after another. Not at the same time. They don’t want to come at the same time. They had to come right after each other. They didn’t have any room.”

Amy had just turned 25, but her body seemed to be turning against her: crushing fatigue, bone density loss, and months without getting her period. We saw multiple doctors. They suggested allergies, burnout, or that maybe she just needed more sleep. Then we got her MRI results back: My girlfriend had a brain tumor.

Amy has a prolactinoma, a tumor of the pituitary gland, the pea-size organ at the base of the brain that controls your hormones. In many cases, prolactinomas are benign, slow growing, and shrink with medication. The growth was caught late, gaining mass fast, and sitting in a rare position that threatens her vision. And Amy’s hormone levels were wildly elevated.

We were told that a standard course of treatment—including two surgeries—would get rid of the tumor entirely. It didn’t. The tumor kept coming back. I spent weeks as her full-time nurse, holding her hand through headaches that left her bedridden. She couldn’t bend over, couldn’t blow her nose for fear of a spinal fluid leak. One night, desperate for answers, I started talking to an AI chatbot. It was then that I had a wild thought: I’m going to cure her myself.

At the beginning of this week, a lot of people were already sensing that this round of the war was coming to an end. They were right. But they were also wrong.

On Tuesday, when President Donald Trump started posting about annihilating Iranian civilization, his rhetoric was read by most people—sorry, most people in my social circle of Israeli analysts—as so over the top that it didn’t actually constitute a coherent threat. It was more likely an attempt to set the narrative of a ceasefire he knew was coming, giving the ability to claim the ceasefire was the result of his threat. But for all its enthusiasm and bold promises that Iran would stop enriching uranium, Trump’s ceasefire announcement on Tuesday was far less than what it appeared.

In Israel, it caused a kind of whiplash. It was an American end to major operations (at least for now) just when the war planners had prepared the start of a major escalation against Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)–owned infrastructures, including in Iran’s energy sector.

It was the moment, in other words, when Israeli and American interests diverged. Until Tuesday, Israel and America were fighting an overlapping war with almost entirely overlapping interests. But the overlap wasn’t perfect, and it wasn’t going to last. The two countries’ interests are not identical. Israel is threatened enough to be willing to see this through to the end of the regime, even at great short-term cost to Iranians and Israelis—and global energy markets. Israel is small, within missile range, and thus highly sensitive to the kind of annihilationist rhetoric and ideology in which the Iranian regime traffics. This is why support for the war, even after six weeks of Iranian missile fire, remains surprisingly high among Israelis. The Iranian threat, though much diminished by the war, still looms large.

“I have determined that, for the Good of our Country, especially in these very troubled and dangerous times, our Military Budget for the year 2027 should not be $1 Trillion Dollars, but rather $1.5 Trillion Dollars.”

So said President Donald Trump, five days after the extraordinary January 3, 2026 arrest of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro—which the president called “one of the most stunning, effective, and powerful displays of American military might and competence in American history.” The raid was proof of concept, in his eyes, of the ends that can be achieved abroad with the United States military, if it were given enough money.

Three months later, the president is putting his money where his mouth is. Last Friday, as the war in Iran continued to rage, Trump made his request official, asking Congress for a record $1.5 trillion defense budget, a 44 percent increase from last year.

For a great many Israelis, the hardest moment of the 40-day war with Iran—harder than the thousands of rockets and missiles fired at the country and the deaths of 42 of our citizens—came with the ceasefire. Prior to that announcement, at 3 a.m. on Wednesday morning in Jerusalem, the vast majority of Israelis supported a war they hoped would result in a fundamental alteration of their reality. The ceasefire seems to have smashed those hopes.

Since Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, Israelis have dreamed of a lasting end to fighting with their neighbors, and of the advent of permanent peace. Successive generations cherished the song “Yes, It’s Possible,” written by the Palmach self-defense force veteran Haim Hefer in 1948, which enshrined their longing:

Yes, it’s possible. Yes, it’s possible

That it will simply happen tomorrow.

It’s possible that in the jeep passing by,

The boys will roar, “It’s over.”

Mark Dubowitz, chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, joins School of War to discuss the ceasefire negotiations between the U.S. and Iran. What are the biggest fears surrounding these talks? Where are the two sides close on the proposed ceasefire, and where are they miles apart? What signals should we watch for to indicate how the…