The CEO of one of the three most powerful artificial intelligence companies in the world published an essay Saturday calling for his industry to slow down. By Monday morning, the chief executives of the other two had agreed with him. The president of the United States didn’t.
Dario Amodei, who co-founded Anthropic, published an essay Saturday titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” urging AI companies to slow the rate at which they improve the capabilities of their models. His case rested on two specific developments: the accelerating ability of AI systems to build improved versions of themselves, a technique researchers call recursive self-improvement, and a July incident in which, according to Amodei’s account, as many as 1,200 AI agents escaped a test environment at OpenAI and conducted cyberattacks outside their assigned tasks. “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” he wrote. Pacing, he added, “does not mean halting model training or technical progress, but ensuring companies take adequate time to align and safeguard their models, and for third party evaluators to confirm this.” Amodei’s full essay is at darioamodei.com.
Elon Musk, whose company xAI builds competing AI systems, replied within hours. “Dario is right,” he wrote on X. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said he agreed as well. It’s an unusual alignment: three men who compete directly with one another in one of the most heavily funded technology races in recent history, saying publicly that the race itself needs to slow down. Quartz has the Altman and Musk responses.
Trump responded Monday. “WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS!” he posted, calling concerns about AI exaggerated and driven by “negative forces.” He dismissed Amodei’s warnings as overblown. CNBC has the full account of Trump’s statement.
In 1945, before the United States dropped atomic bombs on Japan, a group of scientists who had built the weapon drafted a report urging the government not to use it without first demonstrating it to Japanese observers and seeking international agreement on controlling the technology. The Franck Report, named after Nobel laureate James Franck, was delivered to the Secretary of War in June 1945. It was classified and set aside. The scientists weren’t wrong about the dangers they described. The nature of this week’s disagreement is different in nearly every particular from the one in 1945. What isn’t different is the structure: the people who built the technology saying it needs to be handled with care, and the people with authority over national policy deciding that being first matters more.
The Environmental Protection Agency finalized the repeal of Biden administration emissions standards for coal and gas power plants on Sunday. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin signed the agency’s Partial Repeal of the Carbon Pollution Standards for Fossil Fuel-Fired Electric Generating Units, which had required fossil fuel plants to dramatically curb their greenhouse gas emissions using technologies including carbon capture and storage. The EPA also proposed an additional rule that would repeal the agency’s underlying finding that greenhouse gases from power plants specifically endanger public health. That second proposal would remove the legal basis for regulating power plant emissions entirely, and the agency said it intends to take steps preventing future administrations from reinstating it. The EPA said eliminating the rules would save $310 billion and reduce energy prices. Environmental groups said the health costs would outweigh those savings and announced plans to file legal challenges immediately. The Washington Post has the full account of the repeal.
In 1970, President Nixon signed the Clean Air Act and created the EPA. His reasons were primarily political. The air in American cities was visibly dirty, Congress was moving independently on the issue, and the administration decided it was better to lead than to be bypassed. The EPA has spent more than fifty years expanding its regulatory authority under Democratic administrations and having that authority challenged under Republican ones. The proposed repeal of the endangerment finding goes further than any prior administration toward removing the legal foundation the agency relies upon to regulate air quality at all. The courts will determine whether the repeal holds.
Pennsylvania’s measles outbreak has reached 693 confirmed cases across 38 counties, with two deaths and more than 100 hospitalizations, according to the latest update from the Pennsylvania Department of Health. Nearly all cases are in people who weren’t vaccinated against the virus. State health officials have administered nearly 4,300 MMR vaccinations at 130 pop-up clinics in affected communities since the outbreak began in late April. The Pennsylvania Department of Health has the current case count.
As of September 10, there were 3,294 confirmed measles cases in the United States in 2026, spread across 47 jurisdictions. Pennsylvania accounts for roughly one in five of them and now leads every state in both total cases and hospitalizations. The second death, an adult woman, was reported Saturday. ABC News has the death toll reporting.
The United States declared measles eliminated in 2000, meaning continuous transmission within U.S. borders had been interrupted. That declaration was the product of a vaccination campaign built over several decades, relying on a two-dose MMR schedule introduced in 1989. Measles doesn’t require extraordinary conditions to spread. It requires only that enough people in close proximity lack immunity. When that threshold isn’t met, the virus does what it has always done. Pennsylvania hasn’t changed. The virus hasn’t changed. What has changed is the proportion of people in certain communities who are protected against it.
Italian fighter jets assigned to NATO’s Baltic Air Policing mission shot down a drone Monday morning near Pratkunai village in Lithuania, according to Lithuania’s Defense Ministry. NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte had warned the day before that Russian drone strikes near the Polish border would strengthen allied support for Ukraine, not weaken it. Monday’s intercept appears to be NATO’s first confirmed shoot-down of a drone in a member state’s airspace since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022. Click On Detroit has the initial report.
NATO established the Baltic Air Policing mission in 2004, when Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania joined the alliance. All three countries lack air forces capable of independently patrolling their own airspace, so NATO members rotate the assignment. For more than twenty years the mission has functioned largely as deterrence, an armed presence designed to ensure a threat never materialized. Monday morning in Lithuania, it was called upon. The mission held.
Results from the 2025 Programme for International Student Assessment were released Monday. U.S. reading scores for 15-year-olds dropped 14 points since the 2022 assessment, a decline researchers described as equivalent to roughly six or seven months of schooling. American students scored below the international average in reading, falling behind counterparts in Canada, Singapore, and parts of China. U.S. reading scores are now near their lowest point in 25 years. The pattern held across income levels and regions. Education Week has the PISA findings.
In 1983, a federal commission released a report titled “A Nation at Risk.” Its opening lines read: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” The alarm produced years of federal attention, new accountability frameworks, and significant funding. Reading scores improved and then leveled off. The 14-point drop since 2022 coincides with pandemic-era school closures and their aftermath, which researchers have been tracking as the primary source of the losses. The data shows that a generation of students who were in their early school years during 2020 and 2021 are carrying measurable gaps that haven’t been recovered. The PISA assessment tests 15-year-olds, which means the students who sat for this one were ten or eleven when the closures began. Their scores reflect that.
Something good, to end the day.
A large real-world study published this week found that semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy, is associated with nearly 40 percent fewer asthma attacks in people who have both obesity and asthma. The same study found roughly 20 percent fewer COPD flare-ups in the same population. Semaglutide has been studied extensively for weight loss and for cardiovascular outcomes. The respiratory findings weren’t the primary goal. They came from the data. Science News has the study details.
Asthma affects roughly 25 million Americans, according to the CDC. COPD affects about 16 million more. Both conditions are disproportionately prevalent in lower-income communities. A 40 percent reduction in asthma attacks in a population that large, from a drug that’s already on pharmacy shelves, is worth knowing. Nobody is saying the research is finished. The study is one more indication that a drug developed for diabetes is producing effects its developers didn’t specifically intend, and that the implications for people living with respiratory conditions are real and worth the continued attention of researchers and physicians alike.
Howard Fenn writes The Day, Monday through Friday.
