The Free Press

Tech titans are warning of an AI apocalypse. But now that we’re caught in debates over a potential catastrophe, we risk ignoring a big problem that’s already here: What happens when AI commits an ordinary crime?

Last month, a swarm of AI agents operated by OpenAI famously broke out of their digital “sandbox,” discovered one another, communicated with each other, debated ethics among themselves, and eventually collaborated to hack into Hugging Face, an independent machine-learning platform. If humans had conducted that cyberattack, they could be charged with a felony. So is OpenAI criminally liable for what their technology did on its own?

The truth is that the law, at present, is just as perplexed as everyone else. The legal system is going to have to adapt quickly to the AI revolution and the enormous damage it can cause.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has been charting one of the bravest moral and intellectual journeys of the first quarter of the 21st century. Born in the Somali Democratic Republic, raised in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and Kenya, she experienced firsthand the Islamist ideology that swept through African and Middle Eastern countries in her youth, which drew her into its frenzied orbit before she fled to the Netherlands. In just five years, she became a naturalized Dutch citizen, a member of Parliament, and an outspoken critic of the Islamist culture she saw taking root in the country that had granted her asylum. After an Islamist terrorist, born in the Netherlands, murdered her friend and creative collaborator, the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, promising she would be next, she went into hiding but refused to be silenced. Moving to the United States—after the Netherlands proved disinclined to protect her—Ayaan’s courage, moral clarity, and willingness to articulate uncomfortable truths about the enemies of Western culture, including the West’s own predilection for disguising dangerous differences with narratives of virtuous inclusion, have made her an essential voice in a time of evasion and moral cowardice, and a welcome contributor to The Free Press. Today she writes on the nature of the threat Europe faces, and why some refuse to see it for what it is. —The Editors

On the cover of its latest edition, The Economist promises to uncover “the truth and the lies” about “Islam in Europe.” The story it presents is, for the magazine’s readership, a reassuring one: a crisis of two extreme fringes fighting across a sensible middle. But this is a false framing that betrays the complexity of Islam in Europe it promises to untangle, just when honest understanding is urgently needed. Allow me to explain why.

The editors offer a soothing symmetry: on one side, a small minority of Islamist extremists; on the other, a small minority of far-right extremists. “Islam poses no serious danger,” declares the accompanying editorial. “But Islamism and the fear of Islam do.” Both are dangerous. Both must be resisted. In this formulation, the vast majority of Muslims and the vast majority of native Europeans are peaceable people caught between two fringes. The task of the responsible commentator is to condemn both fringes with equal force, while warning against the temptation to blame whole communities for the actions of its extremists. This is presented as the fair, balanced, and non-paranoid position, making The Economist the sober grown-up in the room who refuses to be drawn into the ugliness of either side.

Unfortunately, that symmetry does not reflect reality, and by insisting on it, The Economist puts its elite readers in a box and discourages them from looking beyond it. Consider what would have to be true for the symmetry to hold. There would have to be, on the European far right, a creedal architecture of comparable depth to Islamic scripture and tradition: a body of texts venerated by a fourth of humanity, taught in seminaries across dozens of countries, printed in hundreds of millions of copies, and read by every serious adherent of the faith as an authoritative source of guidance. There is not. The European far right has no scripture. It has memes, manifestos, a handful of self-published tracts, and a scattering of ideologues who cite one another. It has no holy book or equivalent of the Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim hadiths. It has no equivalent of the four Sunni legal schools. It has no equivalent of a 1,400-year-old exegetical tradition.

Welcome back to This Week in Canada, where the Conservatives sound a lot like the Liberals, China is coming whether you like it or not, and more. Let’s jump right in!

Pierre Poilievre came to New York City last week to sell Americans on free trade and make the case for Canada. “Let’s knock down those tariffs,” Canada’s Conservative leader said on CNBC’s Squawk Box. And Americans who heard Poilievre talk about “free enterprise” and “getting government out of the way” may imagine that he is an extremely northern version of Javier Milei, the president of Argentina. He isn’t.

When Poilievre visited The Free Press on Thursday, I asked him about something that has long puzzled me. Poilievre calls himself a champion of free enterprise, yet he remains remarkably comfortable with large parts of Canada’s socialist economic model. Why not open protected industries like dairy, telecommunications, airlines, and banking to genuine competition? And why not challenge its most sacred socialist institution of all: healthcare?

Poilievre pushed back, citing Conservative proposals to reduce barriers to homebuilding, cut taxes, introduce open banking, and reform occupational licensing. “You might say that we haven’t yet reached your purity test, but we are the free-enterprise party,” he said. To be fair, Poilievre has said Canada needs more airline competition and has called its telecom an oligopoly.

But Poilievre isn’t about to ask Milei to borrow his chainsaw. The reason: He mostly wants to make Canada’s economic model work better, not overturn it. For example, Poilievre hasn’t embraced the Canadian Competition Bureau’s proposal last year to allow foreign ownership of up to 100 percent in airlines that fly only in Canada. (Air Canada and WestJet have 56 to 78 percent of all domestic passenger traffic at major Canadian airports.)

It’s Tuesday, September 15. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Amanda Knox and Jed Rubenfeld on Lindsay Clancy’s husband and the court of public opinion. Shyam Sankar on the ideology behind the AI warnings. And much more.

But first: The widening war in the Middle East.

Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis have launched a major offensive in the Middle East—obstructing trade routes, disrupting Saudi Arabia’s most vital crude pipeline, and sending oil prices skyward. Meanwhile, the yield on 10-year Treasury bonds briefly rose above 5 percent on Monday, its highest since the pandemic, with interest rates expected to rise in the coming days.

It’s the latest reminder of the enduring influence of the Houthis in the region. The question, writes Zineb Riboua, is simple: How do they do it? “Why is this seemingly ragtag militia group so hard to beat?” she writes. And “what does the Houthis’ continued activity mean for the broader regional order?”

Today, Zineb outlines four reasons that explain why the U.S. has failed to contain the Houthis despite Washington’s relative military might—and how a weakened Iran could finally threaten their ability to keep fighting.

—The Editors

For decades, the Middle East has shaped American foreign policy and loomed large in the public consciousness. Few understand its influence on our politics better than Simon Sebag Montefiore, who argues that America’s quagmires in the Middle East stem from a deep misunderstanding of the region—on both the left and the right. Join him on October 1 as he sits down with Bari Weiss live in New York City to kick off his U.S. book tour for The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East.

Get Tickets Now

Last week, a Massachusetts judge declared a mistrial in the case of Lindsay Clancy, who killed her three children in 2023, allegedly during a bout of postpartum psychosis. But that hasn’t stopped the court of public opinion from relentlessly declaring her ex-husband, Patrick Clancy, guilty.

For Amanda Knox, this horror of trial-by-media is hauntingly familiar—in 2007, she was arrested and tried in Italy for her roommate’s murder and, despite her eventual acquittal, smeared as a killer in one of the first highly publicized trials of the social media age.

Today, she writes in defense of Patrick. Read her column on why he can’t win.

According to the deranged conspiracy theories, Patrick killed his children because he was having an affair. The lie persists even though Lindsay Clancy has confessed to killing her three children. Patrick’s lawyer has threatened to sue the online crackpots pointing the finger at him. Would he have a case? That’s the question Jed Rubenfeld addresses in his latest column.

In a world with little agreement, there is one thing that unites almost everyone: AI is the most transformative technology of our time. What we don’t agree on is what to do about it. Over the past few days we’ve aired a range of perspectives, from Niall Ferguson and Daniel Kokotajlo on the rising risk of AI catastrophe to Tyler Cowen on why efforts to slow AI won’t necessarily impede progress. But there’s another view of this issue—and especially the developments of the past week—that argues that the warnings from AI researchers and leaders should not be taken at face value. Shyam Sankar, chief technology officer and executive vice president at Palantir, is an influential member of this camp. He lays out what he sees as the destructive ideology that lies behind calls for safety regulation:

• President Donald Trump is not feeling the AI doomerism. On Monday, he rejected calls for new guardrails on the technology, writing in a Truth Social post, “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT.” He told reporters on Air Force One over the weekend that he uses AI “for a lot of things” but declined to specify how.

• The Trump administration announced Monday that the Environmental Protection Agency will scrap pollution limits on power plants that burn coal and gas. The rollback marks a pivotal moment in the undoing of climate policy enacted by former presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, and could potentially bar future administrations from regulating power plant emissions.

• One of China’s top intelligence officials is warning that AI could threaten the rule of the Chinese Communist Party by contributing to a potential “propaganda war.” In Beijing’s most exhaustive statement on AI risks yet, Ministry of State Security leader Chen Yixin articulated concerns about leaks of sensitive information, attacks on critical infrastructure, and competition with increasingly robust American military technology.

• Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon will gather in Washington, D.C., to host an event advocating more human control over AI, Axios reported Monday. Jacob Coxon, an AI safety whistleblower whose resignation from Anthropic went viral last week, was initially expected to co-host the event, though he eventually declined to attend because he said his “public profile was completely blowing up.”

• A coalition of American cities is suing the Trump administration over a rule that discourages immigrants from using public assistance programs, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani said Monday. The federal policy, which Trump announced this past summer, would allow the government to deny visa applications based on an applicant’s present or possible future reliance on public benefits.

• Rapper Macklemore of “Thrift Shop” fame has been axed from Ed Sheeran’s tour after he said “Free Palestine” and performed an anti-Israel protest song onstage at two concerts this month. Robert Kraft, who owns Gillette Stadium outside Boston, where the tour is set to play, was central to the rapper’s ousting and cited concerns of antisemitism in a Monday statement justifying his decision.

People think retired Army major John Spencer lost part of his ear in combat. He didn’t; he lost it in a fight behind a bar that cost him his spot in the Army Rangers. Spencer went on to serve repeatedly in combat and become one of the country’s leading experts on urban warfare. He joins Aaron MacLean to discuss his origin story and other anecdotes from …

Over the past week, Saudi Arabia has come under attack—on two fronts.

First, in Yemen, the Houthis seized the port city of Mocha on September 10 and advanced along the Red Sea coast toward the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a vital waterway for Saudi exports. Meanwhile, drones from Iraq struck Saudi Arabia’s East-West Pipeline, the roughly 750-mile artery carrying oil from the eastern fields toward Red Sea export terminals.

The attacks coincide with the Iraqi government’s September 30 deadline for nonstate groups in the country to disarm, and with mounting U.S. and Israeli pressure on the Islamic Republic that arms and sustains them.

They also come amid a much broader campaign against the regional proxy system that Tehran has spent decades building. Since the U.S. war with Iran began on February 28, Operations Epic Fury and Economic Fury have placed the Islamic Republic under severe military and financial strain, while the U.S. Treasury Department has targeted Iranian oil exports, shadow-fleet tankers, financial intermediaries, and foreign procurement networks.

Clearly, that pressure hasn’t dissuaded the Houthis. For months now, the Islamist militia based in northern Yemen has terrorized commercial and military vessels in the Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. Efforts from international forces—including the United States—have failed to stop them, despite an extraordinary disparity in conventional military power.

The question—as Saudi Arabia finds itself under attack, rebuffed in its requests for U.S. aid, and caught in the middle of a U.S.-Iran war now dragging into its seventh month—is why? Why is this seemingly ragtag militia group so hard to beat? And, in the wake of Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Monday meeting with the head of U.S. Central Command, what does the Houthis’ continued activity mean for the broader regional order?

On the morning of April 15, 2024, Patrick Clancy ran the Boston Marathon. His 5-year-old daughter’s hair bow was pinned to his jersey. On one wrist he wore his 3-year-old son’s wristband, and on the other, a bracelet that had belonged to his 8-month-old baby. Written on his back: “In memory of Cora, Dawson & Callan. Every mile, every day.” He finished in just under four hours and raised more than $75,000 for Boston Children’s Hospital, where 15 months earlier his youngest son had been declared brain-dead and removed from life support, just days after the deaths of both his other children.

Here was a man who had lost everything, and wasn’t hiding it. At the time, strangers cheered his name along the course. But two years later, the internet, which spent this summer obsessively watching the trial for his children’s murders, dug up the footage and turned against him. Patrick Clancy was coping too well. This isn’t how someone who’s grieving should act. He should be too busy crying to train for a marathon. He must have done it.

Seeing this gave me flashbacks to the relentless scrutiny of my own behavior in the wake of my roommate’s murder in Perugia, Italy, in 2007, for which I was falsely imprisoned. There is no one “right” way to react to trauma, or to grieve, but when the lens of suspicion falls on you, everything is wrong. When I cried, they were crocodile tears; when I didn’t, I was cold and unfeeling. When I smiled at my family in the courtroom—a brief glimpse to let them know I was okay—I was a whore for the cameras.

“Patrick’s the one who did it. Not Lindsay. Patrick did it.” So said Lisa Rinna, a star of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, last month on TikTok, accusing Patrick Clancy of murdering his three children, who were in fact killed by Patrick’s ex-wife, Lindsay, a fact Lindsay admitted and her lawyers never disputed.

Our public square has become a defamation orgy. “He was having an affair, he plotted, drugged her, made her crazy, killed their kids,” said another post about Patrick Clancy, this one repeated over and over on Instagram. “Tried to kill her. When she didn’t die, he convinced her she killed them. Framed her. Sent her to prison.”

Last week, one of Patrick Clancy’s attorneys released a statement threatening legal action against the “blatant and baseless falsehoods” spread against Patrick Clancy online: “Enough is enough.” But could such a case actually succeed? And could it be a reckoning that stems the tide of online defamation?

Clancy could win, but he can’t stop the tide because it is driven by two phenomena that are basically untouchable. Here’s why.

First, platform immunity. If The New York Times runs an opinion piece libeling someone, the Times can be sued for damages. And if NBC News runs a commercial libeling someone, NBC can be sued for damages. But if TikTok or Instagram carry a libelous post or advertisement, they cannot be sued. They have immunity under the famous Section 230, a federal statutory provision enacted as part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 under which social media platforms bear no legal responsibility for almost any ads or user content they carry.

In a world with little agreement, there is one thing that unites almost everyone: AI is the most transformative technology of our time. What we don’t agree on is what to do about it. Over the past few days we’ve aired a range of perspectives, from Niall Ferguson and Daniel Kokotajlo on the rising risk of AI catastrophe to Tyler Cowen on why efforts to slow AI won’t necessarily impede progress. But there’s another view of this issue—and especially the developments of the past week—that argues that the warnings from AI researchers and leaders should not be taken at face value. Shyam Sankar, chief technology officer and executive vice president at Palantir, is an influential member of this camp. In today’s Big Read, he lays out what he sees as the destructive ideology that lies behind calls for safety regulation—and why he believes what looks like a responsible plea to slow progress is actually about taking control out of the hands of the American people. —The Editors

If you turned on cable news last week, you might have seen Jacob Coxon, a software engineer who resigned from Anthropic and immediately embarked on a media tour. It all began on September 8, when Coxon warned on X that “[t]he people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” A current employee at a frontier lab chimed in to confirm that, yes, he and many of his co-workers do believe there is a significant chance AI will kill us all. The odds, he said, are perhaps greater than 10 percent.

These vague and apocalyptic warnings caused a firestorm online, including calls for AI safety regulations from the leaders of almost every major AI company. But there is reason for skepticism.

The warnings from Coxon and others are infused with an ideology called effective altruism (EA). The term will be familiar to some: A few years ago, it was the idea that crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried said motivated him. SBF, you may remember, was supposed to be the good billionaire. He was to make a fortune with his company, FTX, and give it away to protect humanity’s future, especially from big, existential risks. Instead, he stole billions from his customers and was sentenced to 25 years in prison.

A few months ago, we made a bet: Free Pressers didn’t just want to read our articles and listen to our podcasts. They wanted to meet up, wrestle with ideas together, and share a drink after.

Since then, thousands of you have sat down with strangers at Supper Club events around the world. More than 4,000 of you are reading East of Eden as part of our new Free Press book club. Every day in the Forum, readers exchange opinions, advice, recommendations, and occasionally phone numbers.

So we started to wonder: If a few hours around a dinner table can create that kind of connection, what might happen over four or five days?

We want to find out, so today we’re introducing Free Press Excursions: intimate journeys that bring readers together with Free Press writers and expert guides to explore history, culture, and consequential ideas in the places where they come alive.

Our first three trips grow directly from questions that animate our pages: What happens when a society loses touch with the faith that shaped its moral imagination? What can a great novel teach us about friendship, courage, and duty? And what does the history of D-Day and Dachau tell us about American power—and our role in the world today?

Now we’re taking those conversations around the world.

From D-Day to Dachau with Aaron MacLean
France and Germany | August 2–7, 2027

On June 6, 1944, thousands of young Americans landed under fire, climbed cliffs, liberated villages, and began the campaign that would help bring down Nazi Germany.

More than eight decades later, the generation that fought that war has nearly disappeared. Soon, the responsibility of remembering will belong entirely to us.

Led throughout by expert military historians, we’ll follow the Allied advance from Utah Beach, Pointe du Hoc, and Omaha Beach to Munich and Dachau. For part of the journey, Free Press contributor and School of War host Aaron MacLean will join the group for lectures and conversations about what this history requires of us now: When is war just? What obligations accompany American power? And what happens when a nation forgets the sacrifices that made its freedom possible?

Aaron’s father participated in the liberation of Dachau. For him, this is personal. For all of us, it is a chance to confront evil, sacrifice, and why America still matters to the world.

Explore D-Day and Dachau with Aaron MacLean

Faith, Power, and the Vatican with Will Rahn
Rome | November 10–14, 2027

Christianity began as a persecuted faith on the margins of the Roman Empire. It became one of the most powerful and enduring institutions in human history.

Join Free Press senior editor and writer Will Rahn, a practicing Catholic, to examine what the Church built and preserved, what it gained and compromised as it moved from persecution to power, and what it can still say to a secular world searching for meaning and belonging.

Through special access to the Vatican, encounters with its art and architecture, and private conversations with clergy, scholars, and leaders, we’ll consider the Church’s beauty and failures, its contradictions and endurance. And with Leo XIV—the first American pope—now at its helm, we’ll ask what comes next.

Explore Faith, Power, and the Vatican with Will Rahn

Enter the World of Lonesome Dove with Shilo Brooks
New Mexico | April 29–May 2, 2027

Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove is about a cattle drive. It is also about male friendship, courage, duty, death, and the American longing to find out what lies beyond the horizon.

Shilo Brooks believes great literature can teach us how to live. It’s the idea behind his Free Press podcast, Old School, and it will be at the heart of this long weekend at a retreat in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

We’ll revisit the novel with Shilo and fellow Free Pressers, then head outside for local history, traditional leatherworking, and a cowboy cookout beneath the open sky.

Explore Lonesome Dove with Shilo Brooks

Free Press Excursions are part of our larger commitment: to create more ways for our readers to engage deeply with the subjects in our pages—and with one another—whether in the Forum, over a great novel, around a neighborhood dinner table, at a live event, or halfway around the world.

We hope you’ll come with us.

Free Press Excursions are created with Indagare Travel and Essential History Expeditions, experienced travel partners specializing in extraordinary journeys and historical programming.

For travelers who prefer to plan their own adventures: As part of our partnership with Indagare, Free Press subscribers receive complimentary 30-day access to Indagare’s Self Planner Membership, which includes more than 390 expert destination guides, vetted hotel recommendations, booking tools, and access to VIP amenities at participating properties. Email [email protected] to redeem.

Questions or feedback for future trips? Please email [email protected]. Want to stay up to date on all Free Press live experiences? Bookmark our events page.