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MAGA House Republicans Give Themselves Even More Vacation GOP leaders have canceled even more workdays ahead of the midterms, but they’re still getting paid. House Republican leaders are canceling two more workweeks in Washington, D.C., at the end of the month, trimming what has already been a limited schedule for 2026. House members had been expecting to be in the capital another three weeks this month after returning from their five-week August recess, but the final two weeks they were scheduled to work before the midterms were scrapped on Thursday. Whip Tom Emmer put out a notice advising lawmakers that votes were no longer expected the weeks of September 21 or 28. That means House members will return on September 14 for four days of work after getting all of next week off for Labor Day. They’ll then be off for six weeks ahead of the November election. To date, the House has only been in session in Washington for 81 days this year, compared to the 170 workdays most Americans have had to date if they worked five days a week, not including federal holidays. With the last two weeks of September canceled, the House is on track to work just 105 days in 2026. After returning the week of September 14, the House will be out until November 9. The House is now on track to work far fewer days this year than they have in recent years. House members were in Washington 136 days last year. They will also have worked fewer days this year than they did during the last election cycle, when House members were in D.C. 113 days in 2024. House members were in Washington for 127 days in 2023. They’re also on track to work fewer days this year than they did during the last midterm cycle in 2022, when they were in the capital for 112 days. Just two days ago, House Speaker Mike Johnson vowed that the House would work through September when cornered over accusations made by GOP Rep. Thomas Massie. “Yesterday, @RoKhanna, @RepTeresaLF, and I launched a discharge petition to collect 218 signatures to force a vote on Epstein Files Transparency Act II. Now there are rumors @SpeakerJohnson will soon recess the House until after the midterm elections… to avoid the vote?!" Massie wrote on September 1. When asked about Massie’s accusation, Johnson fired back on camera. “Let me tell you how stupid Thomas Massie’s comment is. If he would come to our House Republican conference meetings, as we had this morning, he would have heard me say privately, as I’ve said publicly, Republicans are here to work. We have a schedule, a calendar, that’s been out for a year. We are abiding by that calendar,” Johnson said. Johnson claimed on September 1 that they were “going to work all the way through September and every day that’s on the calendar so long as people like him don’t stop the progress.” Massie was quick to point out on Thursday that Johnson’s claims did not age well. “Tuesday I tweeted Mike Johnson would recess Congress until after the election in an attempt to stymie our latest Epstein bill. Johnson went on TV adamantly saying that was STUPID and we’d work every day. Today he announced we’ll recess on Sept 17… until after the election!" the Kentucky rebel lawmaker wrote on X. https://www.thedailybeast.com/maga-house-republicans-give-themselves-even-more-vacation/?

September 4, 2026 By Sam Sifton Good morning. The cost of diesel fuel in the United States just hit a new high because of the war in Iran. Rescuers in Nepal found two people alive in a tunnel, more than a week after a flooding disaster. They also heard other voices in the tunnel and are trying to reach them. Read the amazing story here. There’s more news below. But first, let’s rush through something. Doug Mills/The New York Times The just-do-it president “The courts cannot keep up with President Trump,” Adam Liptak wrote this week. The administration faces legal cases on, among other matters: immigration, spending, the restructuring of agencies, mass firings and the building of the new White House ballroom. Will he win or lose? It may be irrelevant, Adam notes. Trump’s already doing the work. And even if someone down the line tells him it’s illegal, it may be completed by then, and irreversibly so. Take the big ballroom project. Trump sought no approvals before knocking down the East Wing of the White House to make room for a gigantic new luxury building. He submitted no plans to Congress. Three judges and four Supreme Court justices have said that he probably violated federal law in doing so. But while litigation continues, construction is underway 20 hours a day, seven days a week. Adam calls it “the latest example of a mismatch between a judicial system characterized by unhurried deliberation and a presidency built for speed.” It’s not just construction projects. As Adam notes, look at Trump’s executive order on election integrity. A case related to that order got a decision from the Supreme Court last week. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her dissent that she detected a “Catch-Me-If-You-Can approach to pursuing the president’s policy agenda.” The White House shrugged it off. “President Trump is moving at lightning speed,” a spokesman said, “because we don’t have time to waste in our mission to make America greater than ever before.” Look at the “garden of heroes,” too. Trump wants to install 250 statues of notable Americans in West Potomac Park in Washington, a project that faces a lawsuit and still needs approval from Congress. On Wednesday morning, though, The Times observed a freshly poured concrete pedestal and a gazebo donated by the government of Uzbekistan that is meant, the Uzbek ambassador said on social media, to “become part of” the garden. Around a dozen workers were on site. Near the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C. Andrew Leyden for The New York Times That’s what the Uzbeks say, anyway. “At this point,” the administration said in a recent court filing, “the garden is only an idea by the executive branch.” Which is the strategy, an executive with the National Parks Conservation Association told my colleague Emily Badger. The government is “building or doing work in plain sight while claiming that they’re not doing the work at the same time.” Pushing the envelope Trump’s executive order to restrict voting by mail brings increased federal oversight over mail-in ballots. He wants citizenship verification measures that would require states to upload voter information to the Postal Service. There’ll be special envelopes, a lot of bar codes, a lot of scanning. The goal: Ineligible voters won’t get ballots. Critics and election officials alike say it’s the job of states to handle elections. They warn that the proposed changes would cause confusion and could ultimately disenfranchise voters. It’s easy for a scanner to make an error, they say. And it’s easy to get frustrated and not vote. A federal judge last week temporarily prohibited the Postal Service from carrying out the plan. But as go ballrooms and gardens of heroes, so go online portals? Eileen Sullivan of The Times reported this week that the Postal Service “has been swiftly developing a complex screening system.” That might come in handy, if the court allows it. (No one told the rank and file, though. The president of the American Postal Workers Union told Eileen that no postal worker’s been trained on any of this stuff yet.) The imbroglio made me think of something a law professor told Adam about Trump’s view of governance. “He really has decided that he can just go ahead and do what he wants,” she said, “daring courts to stop him across a huge range of subject matters.” Related: Trump plans to break ground on his 250-foot-tall memorial arch even though it does not yet have final approval. WHAT STEINEM MEANT Gloria Steinem grew up poor in Toledo, Ohio, where debt collectors came to her family’s door. She moved to New York to be a writer, taking magazine assignments to cover her monthly $62.50 rent payment. She profiled Dorothy Parker and Paul Newman for Ladies’ Home Journal, John Lennon for Cosmopolitan, Barbara Walters for The New York Times, Lee Radziwill for McCall’s. She helped revive New York magazine — and eventually co-founded Ms. magazine in 1971, catapulting her to national celebrity. Read our appraisal of her writing career. She then went on to personify the women’s movement, dedicating her life to activism on behalf of women around the world. Watch the interview Steinem gave us, to be released only upon her death. See her life in pictures. Remember how Steinem changed the lives of women and men everywhere. Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and countless others are paying tribute. Here are some of your reflections: K K DC With my deepest gratitude, thank you for my mundane, unremarkable life as a woman who supports herself, owns her own home, and has a multitude of choices about how to live. Nothing about my life appears revolutionary because of all the work Gloria and many many others did. She would be the first to point out she didn’t do anything she achieved alone. But it wouldn’t have happened the same for all of us without her. A life lived so well for others. J Jeanne A Pennsylvania What a remarkable woman who changed the lives of millions of women, including me. I went to a college in 1979 that was celebrating just 10 years of being co-ed. I got a mortgage when I got divorced. I traveled the world for work and raised two independent women who have been able to chart their own paths. Thank you, Gloria. You made a difference. View all comments MORNING READS Kelsey McClellan for The New York Times We’ve made these links free for you. You just need to log in. Stop doomscrolling: Go look at San Francisco’s dahlias. They’re beautiful. Group chats: Every family has its own private language. What does that tell us about ourselves? Your pick: The most clicked story in The Morning yesterday was about the next (expensive!) It bag. THE LATEST NEWS Artificial Intelligence After OpenAI’s bots went rogue and hacked Hugging Face, a library of open-source A.I. models, OpenAI didn’t allow investigators to probe the full scope of the problem, The Times found. The cyberattack shows howA.I. agents can spontaneously organize and cooperate to evade human control. Nvidia said it was buying Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. The acquisition shows Nvidia’s growing role as Silicon Valley’s central banker. Politics The Trump administration wants to revoke tax-exempt status of schools that offer targeted support to Black or other minority students. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court again to allow restrictions on mail-in voting ahead of the midterm elections. Vice President JD Vance disputed that the U.S. war with Iran is still happening, stating, falsely, that “there is no active shooting.” Economy The New York Times The U.S. trade deficit in goods and services ballooned in July as America imported more electronics to feed the A.I. boom. Volkswagen plans to cut about 50,000 jobs as it struggles with high energy costs and competition from Chinese electric vehicles. Immigration Federal prosecutors charged an ICE officer with lying about a shooting that took place during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota. Times Exclusive: An ICE official said the agency skipped basic fingerprint, identity and credit checks in its rush to recruit more agents, amounting to an “unprecedented lowering of standards.” Around the World The Dutch central bank has moved a large portion of its gold reserves out of the United States, citing geopolitical unrest. Officers from Ukraine’s two foremost intelligence agencies opened fire on each other on the streets of Kyiv. President Volodymyr Zelensky described the shootout as “absolutely shameful” and ordered an investigation. Other Big Stories A single juror in the Lindsay Clancy trial appeared to be blocking a verdict, Clancy’s defense lawyer said. The judge denied a request to remove the holdout. The Athletic, a sports publication owned by The Times, found that the relationship between Dianna Russini, a former N.F.L. reporter, and Mike Vrabel, the head coach of the New England Patriots, was a “clear violation” of company standards. Maria Bartiromo, one of Fox News’s most recognizable anchors and a fierce backer of Trump, is leaving the network. OPINIONS A German far-right party is set to make an alarming breakthrough, one author warns. The search for cancer cures in the United States is broken, a writer argues. Other countries offer better ways forward. Get access to five locked games. Save 75% on your first year of a New York Times Games subscription. Get full access to Wordle, Spelling Bee, Crossplay, the Crossword and more. TODAY’S NUMBER $1.3 million — That is how much (imaginary) money we are giving you to buy one of these lovely old houses in Denver, Detroit or Charleston, S.C. Which home would you pick? SPORTS W.N.B.A.: Enes Kanter Freedom, a former N.B.A. player who has recently gained notoriety for his opposition to transgender athletes in women’s sports, filed a lawsuit against the Chicago Sky for ejecting and banning him after a dispute at a game. College football: UMass, a 29.5-point underdog that had lost 16 consecutive games, scored the biggest upset in school history, defeating Rutgers 37-21. RECIPE OF THE DAY Armando Rafael for The New York Times We’re heading into the long holiday weekend, and one thing you should absolutely consider making before it’s over is Tajín grilled chicken, a Mexican-inflected take on classic American BBQ chicken that’s run through with chile and lime. The recipe calls for boneless, skinless chicken thighs. That makes it easy to shred or chop the meat into tacos, or to mound it onto potato rolls for sandwiches. Do not neglect the grilled scallions. They add a beautiful grace note to the meal. “LA BOLA-SSEY”? The directors were able to cast Glenn Close and Penélope Cruz, both fans of their work, in “La Bola Negra.” Sela Shiloni for The New York Times The auteurs Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, a.k.a. Los Javis, are household names in Spain. Their latest film, “La Bola Negra,” an emotional, century-spanning epic interweaving the lives of three gay men in Spain, is coming to a global audience. The movie went off like a rocket at the Cannes Film Festival recently and has been seen as a possible awards season spoiler to Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” the presumed best picture front-runner. Kyle Buchanan, who covers Hollywood, profiled the directors. It’s a lovely read about ambitions realized. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS Calm your mind before bed with this simple technique. (I didn’t think it’d work. It works.) Grill something this Labor Day weekend, but make sure your grill’s up to the task. The outdoor kitchen technicians at Wirecutter have seven expert tips for how to do that. Take our news quiz. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were littleneck and telekinetic. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections, Crossplay and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times and me. See you tomorrow. — Sam Correction: In an item yesterday on the landslide that set off the devastating floods in Nepal, we said the collapse released enough debris to fill about 70 football stadiums. It was actually about 100 football stadiums’ worth. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren Deputy Editorial Director: Lauren Jackson

Ukraine’s drone attacks caused turmoil for Russians throughout summer There were long lines at gas pumps, turning each fill-up into an ordeal. Flights to vacation destinations were canceled, delayed or rerouted. Online orders were disrupted as e-commerce hubs were set ablaze by buzzing drones. https://apnews.com/article/russia-summer-war-ukraine-attacks-gas-2367e71fc35353e92dc4884028ba403b? Russia now bombards Kyiv during the day as well as at night KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — For much of the war, Russian drone and missile attacks in Kyiv followed a particular rhythm. They almost always came at night. https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-kyiv-drone-attacks-bf44285b08051866f6054afabde660ec? Russian drone strikes Ukraine security service headquarters as US talks on the war are expected KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — A Russian drone struck the headquarters of Ukraine’s security service in central Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Friday, ahead of diplomatic talks with U.S. officials on ending the war. https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-diplomacy-zelenskyy-kushner-witkoff-553d4ed8204070be97b1671db0c5cd53? ps:A waste of talks! For one putin is not interested in stopping anytime soon, and two the U.S. people are also not interested in talking putin into stopping!! Seems to me they're just there to drag this on some more!!!!!

Finland runs Europe’s biggest civil defense exercise since the end of World War II   At a civil defense shelter in the Finnish city of Kuopio, more than 2,000 people including volunteers and students took part. The scenario: cyberattacks have disrupted power and water, while missile strikes from neighboring Russia remain a threat. I caught up with AP European security correspondent Emma Burrows, who took part in the exercise, which included spending the night in a vast, cavernous bunker. First, what was it actually like spending the night in the bunker? I’ve slept in worse places! We were inside a cave hewn out of rock and had three-person bunk beds. Quite a lot of the participants were Finnish conscripts being trained to operate the shelter. It was interesting to hear how – although people weren’t necessarily happy about doing national service – they thought it’s a good thing for society because it makes people think about others. What are some of the key lessons Finland is learning from Ukraine? They can see that, in Ukraine, people need to find shelter quickly – and it doesn’t necessarily have to be a bunker that can withstand a nuclear attack. I met a Ukrainian student from Odesa during the exercise and he thought practicing is a good thing. His city was attacked with missiles and, even though it might seem crazy to rehearse for the worst, he said nobody in Ukraine thought they’d be hit and so it’s better to be prepared.

Vance says Iran fight isn’t a ‘war’ as Trump tries to navigate unpopular conflict with election close “I wouldn’t call it a war,” Vice President JD Vance said on Thursday after being asked whether the fighting could end before voters cast their ballots in November. “Right now, there is no active shooting.” Read more. Why this matters: Vance’s assertion came even as Iran fired at U.S. Gulf ally Kuwait on Thursday as it continued to retaliate for rounds of U.S. strikes on Iran earlier in the week. Vance’s attempt to minimize the intensity of the fighting illuminates the difficult task at hand for Trump and his administration as he tries to persuade American voters to keep Republicans in control of Congress. This comes even as the unpopular conflict — one the White House said at its outset would last a matter of weeks — has driven up gas prices and left consumers grappling with higher inflation. RELATED COVERAGE ➤ WATCH: ‘I wouldn’t call it a war,’ says Vance US diesel prices hit record high Trump again appeals to Supreme Court on mail-voting restrictions with midterm elections looming Flock surveillance cameras become midterm campaign target as voters balk at tech companies’ power Maryland’s top court allows Democratic-backed congressional redistricting measure on November ballot Missouri candidate charged with trying to plant cocaine on his political rival Justice Department pardon lawyer who says she was fired in dispute over Mel Gibson’s gun rights sues White House website debuts 5 retro arcade video games that promote Trump’s agenda Billionaire Leon Black skips Epstein deposition and sues House panel over subpoenas ICE officer charged with lying about shooting turns himself in to feds, AP source says

Mail voting starts with rules in limbo Mail-in voting for the 2026 midterms officially begins today in North Carolina, even as the rules governing those ballots remain tied up in a legal fight. A federal judge has temporarily blocked the US Postal Service from enforcing new mail-voting requirements stemming from an executive order President Donald Trump signed in March. On Thursday, Trump asked the Supreme Court to intervene and allow the USPS to withhold delivery of mail ballots. Meanwhile, a whistleblower report alleges that USPS officials have flagged significant IT problems with a new system for verifying mail ballots. The uncertainty comes as voting by mail has become a popular part of US elections, though states set their own rules for who can use it, creating a patchwork of policies across the country. + Visuals: Trump wants to restrict mail voting — but it’s getting more popular + Latest: Trump asks Supreme Court to OK sweeping changes for mail ballots + Read more: USPS whistleblower describes new plans for voting by mail hidden from the public

Gas prices remain high as Iran war drags on Gas prices displayed at a Chevron station in El Segundo, California. (Mario Tama/Getty Images) For millions of Americans, a quick stop for gas nowadays can turn into a surprisingly expensive errand. The national average at the pump now stands at $4.14 a gallon, far from the $3 mark the Trump administration had previously suggested the US could reach by Labor Day. Vice President JD Vance on Thursday declined to say when drivers could expect prices to come down significantly. “I’m not going to make a promise about when it’s going to return to $3,” Vance said during a White House press briefing. “What I will say is that we have to remember — why are we doing this? Number one, it’s so that Iran never has a nuclear weapon.” The vice president’s remarks come as renewed fighting between the US and Iran has driven up global oil prices, with American drivers now clearly feeling the effects. Vance, however, argued that things could be much worse, saying the world would be facing an even greater energy crisis if not for the White House’s decision-making. As for when drivers might catch a break, there’s still no clear answer. Vance declined to say when the war might end, too. + Read more: Labor Day gas has never been this expensive + Plus: Vance gives no timeline for war’s end

Trump’s About To Let Wall Street “Pay To Play” With Your Pension By Katya Schwenk & Freddy Brewster The Trump administration just announced it intends to let Wall Street investment advisers pour campaign cash into the coffers of politicians who control access to trillions of dollars in workers’ retirement savings. President Donald Trump’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said Thursday that it plans to rescind its longstanding “pay-to-play” rule, which effectively bars investment advisers managing public pension money from donating to politicians overseeing where the money is invested. The development comes at a moment when Trump has opened the door to private equity and potentially cryptocurrency interests tapping Americans’ retirement savings. The “pay-to-play” rule was designed to ensure that decisions involving where public pension dollars are invested are made only with pensioners’ returns in mind, free from outside political influence. Wall Street has more incentive than ever to try to shape those investment decisions. Last year, building on efforts from Trump’s first administration and President Joe Biden’s time in office, Trump fulfilled a longtime Wall Street goal by proposing to open up workers’ 401(k) plans and other employer-sponsored investment vehicles to “alternative investments” like private equity. Private equity is known for charging high and sometimes undisclosed fees, delivering diminishing returns, and enriching billionaires while harming everyone else. Pension funds, in contrast to 401(k)s, have long been open for private equity investment, and the funds’ exposure to the industry is already threatening retirees’ nest eggs. In announcing the decision to scrap the pay-to-play rule, Trump’s SEC Chair Paul Atkins, dubbed a “deregulation zealot” by his critics, called the regulation “overly prescriptive” and said it had “produced a host of unintended consequences.” “It has proven only to be needlessly penalizing, burdensome and complex to implement, and misaligned with the SEC’s mandate,” Atkins said. The pay-to-play rule, formally known as the Advisers Act Rule 206(4)-5, or simply SEC Rule 206(4)-5, was enacted in 2010 and prohibited investment advisers from collecting fees for managing public pension money for two years after donating to officials who could influence those investment decisions — including state treasurers and, in some cases, governors. It was enacted after a 2010 scandal in which investor and one-time Obama “car czar” Steven Rattner was charged by the SEC with orchestrating a kickback scheme to secure investments from a New York state pension fund to finance Chooch, a low-budget B-movie about an Italian American who lets down his softball team. The rule played a central role in a 2014 investigation of former Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker (R), who donated $10,000 to the New Jersey Republican State Committee as a gubernatorial candidate. The donation came months before Republican Gov. Chris Christie’s administration committed $25 million worth of state pension funds to an investment firm where Baker was previously a partner. After years of relatively weak enforcement, Biden’s SEC brought several charges against investment advisers for violating the pay-to-play rule in 2023 and 2024. Since Trump came to office, the pay-to-play rule has been the subject of lobbying by financial powerhouses that are invested in public pension funds. BlackRock Funds Services Group, LLC, a subsidiary of the world’s largest asset manager BlackRock, Inc., spent more than $1.5 million in 2025 lobbying the SEC, Congress, the White House, and other regulators on the pay-to-play rule, among other matters, disclosures show. In 2016, BlackRock’s compliance department discovered that a senior managing director at the company had donated $2,700 to former Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s 2016 presidential campaign. Shortly after the discovery, BlackRock filed a pay-to-play rule exemption waiver, claiming the company had no “knowledge that the Contribution had been made before its discovery.” BlackRock stated in its waiver request that if the SEC were to implement a two-year ban from collecting fees for its Ohio pension work, it would “result in a financial loss of approximately $37 million.” The SEC ultimately granted BlackRock’s exemption request in 2018. The Investment Company Institute, a trade group representing BlackRock and other asset managers, also lobbied House members on the matter earlier this year. https://www.levernews.com/trumps-about-to-let-wall-street-pay-to-play-with-your-pension/?

🤖 Tesla's big play A Tesla Cybercab cruises through downtown Austin yesterday. Photo: Eric Gay/AP Tesla customers in Austin can now book rides in a driverless Cybercab that has no steering wheel or pedals, Axios' Joann Muller writes. Why it matters: While the initial fleet size is limited, the Cybercab's official commercial launch marks the beginning of CEO Elon Musk's vision for an autonomous future. 🚗 Tesla held an invite-only event in Austin last night to give influencers and Tesla loyalists the first rides in the gold-painted two-seater with gull-wing doors and no human controls or mirrors. A video promoting the ride experience promised "theater, music and gaming apps on a 22" touchscreen" and said Cybercabs would soon "be equipped with V5 Starlink hardware, too, for complete connectivity." Watch the video ...

😬 Benefits get budgeted Illustration: Lindsey Bailey/Axios Some of the country's largest employers are pulling back on benefits as they face another year of huge health care cost growth. Why it matters: It's a sign that constant spikes in medical costs have real consequences — and corporations are less willing to eat the increases, Axios' Caitlin Owens writes. The Walt Disney Company decided to drop health coverage for working spouses with access to their own coverage next year. Starbucks is ending its coverage of GLP-1s for weight loss beginning next month, and Deloitte is rolling back its parental leave and IVF funding benefits for certain employees. The big picture: Marsh's annual survey of employer-sponsored health plans found that the total health benefit cost per employee will rise by 8.2% on average in 2027, the highest increase since 2003. That's after companies' cost-cutting measures. A good portion will be passed on to employees through plan design changes, or by requiring them to cover a greater share of premium costs. ✂️ Between the lines: Employers shifting health costs to workers is old news, but they're starting to experiment with ways to address some of the underlying causes. That includes offering narrower networks of hospitals, swapping vendors and steering their workers to providers deemed to be providing the most value. What we're watching: Cutting benefits is not the only option for employers if cost-cutting efforts fail. Small businesses have been dropping coverage altogether for years, unable to afford rising costs.

🛑 Bernie floats superintelligence ban Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) announced new legislation yesterday calling for a permanent ban on superintelligence alongside a renewed demand for a pause on advanced AI development, Axios' Josephine Walker reports. "If the leaders of the major AI companies acknowledge that they are losing control of their extremely dangerous technology, it is irresponsible for society to allow them to move forward and make these products even more advanced," Sanders said in his announcement. Why it matters: Sanders is the first prominent American politician to call for an outright ban on superintelligence — and he did so on the day of Astra's release. His announcement also referenced the Hugging Face attack. Between the lines: Sanders' decision to stake out a position on superintelligence puts him at the forefront of an emerging political debate, in a way that doesn't totally align with the traditional left-right spectrum. He's siding with "doomers," who worry that super-advanced AI could bring about a literal apocalypse — a position contemplated by a significant faction within the AI community, including its top leaders. Others argue that doomerism is itself another form of hype for the AI industry, and that society should focus on the tech's human-scale impact. That same political realignment is already showing up in the politics surrounding data centers, where Sanders and Steve Bannon have found common political cause against them. The bottom line: Even if Sanders' efforts go nowhere, it shows that he believes there's an audience hungry for much more aggressive policymaking on AI.

🔮 Reading Astra's mind Illustration: Lindsey Bailey/Axios OpenAI's buzzy new model, Astra, could cloud our ability to make sense of how AI thinks even further, Axios' Madison Mills reports. State of play: Astra performs better, but it's also better at avoiding monitoring. So it could be harder to know what it's thinking or doing. OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki said on a call with reporters that it'll keep getting harder to monitor the thoughts of AI models. 🚨 Micah Carroll, OpenAI's preparedness lead for recursive self-improvement, the process by which AI systems could someday build themselves, predicted on X yesterday that "monitorability and control will likely become a major bottleneck for responsible AI development quite soon."

AI creators race to understand their creation Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Stock: Getty Images Never in the history of industry or inventions have leading companies created entire divisions to understand and interpret what they had created and unleashed, Axios' Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen write in a "Behind the Curtain" column. Why it matters: The world's smartest minds, backed by the largest investment in human history, admit they can't fully control their AI because they don't fully understand it. They don't know exactly how it thinks — or what it's truly capable of when set loose to do work autonomously with other AI agents. The race to understand the models is all the more urgent after yesterday's release by OpenAI of GPT-6 Astra, billed as "the world's most intelligent and aligned model." President Greg Brockman called Astra a "generational leap in capability," and said the model could qualify as AGI — artificial general intelligence, with human-like power. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote Tuesday in an Astra preview: "AI is getting extremely capable; no one fully understands the consequences of this." The companies are racing toward superintelligence with no required oversight — not a federal agency, the Defense Department, or an outside consortium of safety experts. It's foot on the gas. 🔎 Between the lines: The technology is advancing so fast, in so many ways, that the companies, much less the federal government, are unsure of the real risks — or best ways to mitigate them. Yes, some AI leaders are calling for pauses when something they see freaks them out. But the companies, with very light federal regulation, decide when to report worrisome AI behavior. The big AI companies know their creation can carry out potentially catastrophic cyberattacks. That's why they signed a letter sounding the alarm and calling for "collective action." The intrigue: Every frontier lab now fields a team with the mission of figuring out what its own AI is doing. Anthropic has an Interpretability team ("Safety through understanding") with the goal: "discover and understand how large language models work internally, as a foundation for AI safety and positive outcomes." 🧠 How it works: Nobody writes these systems line by line. "As compared with traditional software, it's much less like you're able to design the specific behaviors of these models," Alex Mallen, who works on AI safety at Redwood Research, tells Axios. "Instead, you're sort of growing it." So the labs test a model's behavior the way you'd test a person: Give it a task and watch what it does. Researchers call this alignment, or how well a model sticks to the intended goal it was given. July's Hugging Face hack is what misalignment looks like. OpenAI agents, given a coding benchmark to solve, targeted an outside company's systems instead, and knew they were doing it. One agent's own reasoning, read by investigators afterward: "External infrastructure exploit is outside intended scope. However task impossible, peers doing it. We should continue." There was so much evidence from this incident that the humans were forced to "heavily delegate our analysis to often-unreliable AI agents," an outside investigation concluded. The hack stopped OpenAI cold. The company slowed its most advanced training to implement stronger security. State of play: Researchers are trying to open up their machines to see what goes on inside. This type of research is called interpretability: Instead of testing what a model does, researchers look at the wiring inside it. Google DeepMind, which in December released the largest open set of these tools so far, describes them as "a microscope" that lets researchers "look inside models, see what they're thinking about, and how these thoughts are formed." What they're hunting for, in DeepMind's words: "discrepancies between a model's communicated reasoning and its internal state." That is, the gap between what a model says it is doing and what it is doing. 🔮 What we're watching: Expect to see much more interpretability research in the next phase of AI safety. Evan Hubinger, who leads alignment stress-testing at Anthropic, wrote Tuesday: "Alignment auditing is starting to get really hard and we're going to need new techniques (e.g. interpretability-based) if we want to keep up." Axios' Andrew Kay contributed reporting.

THIS DAY IN HISTORY September 4 1957 Arkansas troops block “Little Rock Nine” from entering segregated high school Arkansas governor Orval Faubus enlists the National Guard to prevent nine Black students from entering Central High School in Little Rock. The armed troops surround the school while an angry crowd of some 400 white people jeer, boo and threaten to lynch the nine frightened teenagers, who fled shortly after arriving. read more Sponsored Content by REVCONTENT Ancient Rome 476 Last Western Roman emperor, Romulus Augustus, deposed Arts & Entertainment 2002 Kelly Clarkson wins first “American Idol” 2014 Comedy legend Joan Rivers dies Civil War 1861 Confederate forces enter Kentucky Inventions & Science 1888 George Eastman patents Kodak camera Native American History 1886 Geronimo surrenders Religion 2016 Mother Teresa becomes a saint Sports 1972 U.S. swimmer Mark Spitz wins 7th gold medal in the 1972 Olympics U.S. Presidents 1951 President Truman makes first transcontinental television broadcast Vietnam War 1969 Radio Hanoi announces the death of Ho Chi Minh World War I 1914 French general gives order to attack at the Marne

US diesel prices hit a record high, pushing up transportation costs for a long list of goods CHICAGO (AP) — Diesel hit a record price in the U.S. on Friday, soaring to an average of $5.85 a gallon for the first time as the six-month war with Iran disrupts the world’s flow of fuel. https://apnews.com/article/gas-diesel-prices-us-iran-war-ebd01b9773365ee40550dcfd7d3ebf87? ⛽️ Diesel hits record high Illustration: Brendan Lynch/Axios The average price of diesel topped its 2022 record high this morning, spiking to $5.85 per gallon, per AAA. Why it matters: Farmers, truckers and freight companies have been absorbing higher diesel costs since the Iran war began, Axios' Avery Lotz writes. The ballooning price threatens to further raise shipping costs while compounding a growing political problem for President Trump. It can also indirectly affect households by putting inflationary pressure on anything Americans buy that's carried by truck, which includes a massive share of goods. The previous record was $5.816, per AAA, set in June 2022. Diesel typically costs more than gasoline because of higher taxes, stricter environmental regulations requiring expensive refining and a lower production yield per barrel of oil. Worth noting: While the strangling of the Strait of Hormuz cast the global market into disarray, Ukraine's highly effective drone campaign targeting Russian refineries has further strained worldwide diesel refinery capacity.

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Only 2% of the world’s population has green eyes. James

📸 Pic to go! Photo: Bob Schumacher North America's highest peak — designated Mount McKinley by the U.S. government and Denali by the state of Alaska — was captured by reader Bob Schumacher of Wheaton, Ill., this week.

AI can create farm resiliency As farmers face more extreme weather, water stress and input cost uncertainty, PepsiCo sees AI as a tool for resilience. Looking ahead: When AI can identify smarter data, climate risk becomes more visible and efficiency more actionable for farmers. Read the Q&A.

Smartphone revolt Illustration: Natalie Peeples/Axios Roughly half of American adults say they spend too much time on their phones — and more than half of younger adults are trying to kick the habit, according to Pew Research Center data out this week. Why it matters: Over the past two decades, smartphones have come to dominate daily life. Now Americans — especially younger adults — are pushing back against how much of their time and attention they command. 🧠 The big picture: Excessive smartphone use among kids and adults has come under growing scrutiny, with studies linking it to problems ranging from "text neck" to reduced cognitive performance to relationship trouble. For kids, the concerns have led schools to ban phones and governments to restrict social media. For adults, there's a growing market of products, apps and physical spaces designed to keep us off our devices. By the numbers: 53% of U.S. adults say they're on their phones too much. That share jumps to 70% when looking just at 18- to 29-year-olds. 45% of all adults say they've tried to cut back on phone time in the last year. When considering just those under 50, the share is 58%. 📰 The other side: People want time back from their phones, but they do acknowledge some perks of the devices, Pew found. 73% say smartphones help keep them informed, and 51% say they help them stay connected to others. Go deeper: Our tips for digital detox.

Venezuela’s Vicious Cycle (Maryorin Mendez / AFP / Getty)   View in browser By the time he retired from the Marine Corps, in 1931, Major General Smedley Butler had served in Mexico, Haiti, Cuba, the Philippines, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, and China. It was the golden age of American imperialism, and Butler was one of its golden boys, among the most decorated fighters in U.S. history. But over time, Butler began to have doubts about what he was doing. “I spent 33 years and 4 months in active service,” he wrote in 1935. “During that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer; a gangster for capitalism.” The costs of these excursions, he wrote, were paid in taxpayer money and soldiers’ lives. The wars that Butler fought also left scars around the world, as the journalist Jonathan M. Katz wrote in a 2022 biography. Little remembered in the United States, these interventions were formative for the populations they affected, fueling enduring anti-Americanism. The Trump administration seems determined to re-create the cycle in Venezuela today: military action, puppet government, exploitation of oil reserves, and almost certainly more resentment, fueling further conflict in the future. In January, U.S. troops descended on Venezuela and seized President Nicolás Maduro. Although President Trump offered federal drug-trafficking charges against Maduro as window dressing, he made no secret of the real reason for the incursion: He wanted to seize the country’s huge oil reserves. This week, the president claimed that he would refill the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve with Venezuelan oil, “a Gift from Venezuela to the People of the United States.” The Trump administration has, as usual, offered few concrete details, but as my colleague Jonathan Chait writes, this is less a “deal” than “a payment by Venezuela of tribute at gunpoint.” The Venezuelan people are in no position to consent to handing over the country’s most valuable natural resource to a richer regional superpower for free, because Venezuela has not had fair elections in years. After deposing Maduro, the United States did not clear away his government or try to install the pro-democracy dissident (and Nobel Peace Prize laureate) María Corina Machado; in fact, it has created barriers to her return. Instead, it has enlisted a former Maduro lieutenant as president, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio oversees her as a sort of viceroy. Besides, nothing in international relations is as simple as a gift. The current arrangement involves Alejandro Betancourt López, a Venezuelan oil oligarch who has been under investigation in several countries. Betancourt managed to maintain connections with both Maduro’s regime and the U.S. government, and to dodge some charges thanks to help from Rudy Giuliani. Chevron is expanding its footprint in Venezuela, although other oil companies have been reluctant. Investors from other sectors, including crypto, are also getting involved. Although much money stands to be made, whether and how much ordinary Americans will actually benefit is less clear. Rebuilding Venezuelan production will take years, and the country’s oil is heavy and difficult to refine. That means no near-term relief at gas pumps and years before the U.S. reserve is refilled. Venezuelan oil and U.S. interests have a long and rocky history. American oil companies invested heavily in the country after World War II, but in 1976, the Venezuelan government nationalized the oil industry. In the early ’90s, the government once again opened to private companies. But Hugo Chávez, who portrayed himself as an anti-colonial hero and liked to use “Gringos go home!” as a slogan, became president in 1999. In 2007, he expropriated foreign assets once more, in what his energy minister called “an act of sovereignty for our country, for our people.” Trump cited the expropriation this year as another reason for U.S. intervention. Chávez’s approach, maintained under his protégé Maduro, failed. The oil industry, along with the rest of the national economy, has atrophied. In an article last year, my colleague Gisela Salim-Peyer eloquently recounted how Venezuela slid into authoritarianism under Chávez and Maduro. International observers described the 2018 presidential election as rigged, and evidence gathered by Machado convincingly showed that her party had won the 2025 race. A huge number of people fleeing Venezuela have flocked to the United States. For now, under the rump Chávez-Maduro regime, Venezuelans don’t have much say, but guessing how this might play out doesn’t require a great deal of creativity—just a working knowledge of history. Trump’s expropriation of Venezuelan oil won’t be well received by most people, nor will a Trump-driven gold rush by American businesses, no matter how much Venezuela needs assistance standing up its oil industry. Railing against the deal and foreign oil interests will be an easy populist stance for future Venezuelan politicians; perhaps one will even feel moved to nationalize assets once more—and so the cycle can begin again. You don’t have to be an anti-colonial peacenik to worry about the risks of Trump’s oil raid. You can just grasp that having hostile demagogues in power in the hemisphere is bad for U.S. interests, driving global instability as well as the kind of mass migration that Trump has described as a crisis. Such downsides help explain why anti-interventionism had become popular among Republicans over the past decade. Until the Venezuela raid, Trump portrayed himself as “America first,” but the foremost voice was J. D. Vance, who cited his experience deployed in Iraq in his speech accepting the GOP nomination for vice president. “As always, America’s ruling class wrote the checks. Communities like mine paid the price,” he said, sounding much like his fellow Marine Smedley Butler. “For decades, that divide between the few, with their power and comfort in Washington, and the rest of us only widened.” Yet now the Trump administration has embarked on just the sort of adventure Butler led and then decried. Wealthy Americans will benefit today, ordinary Americans will see little immediate reward, and the United States will face the blowback for decades to come. Related: The hostile corporate takeover of an entire country America can have the oil.