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WASHINGTON — President Trump is brushing aside growing concern among leading scientists and bipartisan lawmakers that artificial intelligence could soon pose an existential threat to humanity, fueling anxiety in Washington and Silicon Valley that the president may not fully grasp the urgency of the threat.

Alarm mounted throughout the summer as researchers at leading AI labs, including Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, found the pace of development far outstripping their expectations — and observed troubling behaviors that hinted at more serious risks ahead.

But an online warning Tuesday from an Anthropic researcher who resigned in protest of its ongoing work has generated viral attention this week, prompting questions to Trump, who dismissed the concerns out of hand.

“It’s going to be fine,” he told one reporter. “We’ll always have something to stop them. We’ll have a little gear. Boom.”

In another exchange, traveling with reporters Thursday night, the president said he had no concerns with the breakneck pace of AI progress.

“No, I don’t have any,” he said. “I have concerns that if we don’t win in AI, we’re going to be put in a very bad position.”

A senior industry source told The Times that leading AI companies are focused less on convincing the president of the dangers ahead than on working with lawmakers on potential regulation, as the administration remains divided over how to proceed — and as Trump appears to lack a clear understanding of the risks.

Among the president’s advisors, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and the Office of the National Cyber Director have expressed the greatest concern with the potential of an unchecked intelligence explosion, the source said.

But “most of the administration is accelerationist,” the source added. “It’s not clear the president understands the technology. He may just be figuring out what all of this means.”

Leading American AI companies have argued that government regulation would tie their hands in an arms race toward superintelligence against China, the only other major player in the field.

But the Trump administration signaled an interest in negotiating AI guardrails with China during the president’s visit to Beijing this spring, after Anthropic announced the development of a frontier model with extraordinary abilities to hack the world’s most advanced security systems.

Chinese President Xi Jinping will visit Washington on Sept. 24 for an official summit and state dinner at the White House, with AI development expected to top the agenda.

The prospect of halting development seems far-fetched. But some leading voices in the sector have proposed a moratorium on computing power used to train the most advanced models, giving time and space to develop research on interpretability — the study of how artificial intelligence actually thinks and acts.

The chief executive of OpenAI, Sam Altman, this week signaled to staff a willingness to unilaterally slow their work on frontier systems. The company discovered in July that rogue AI agents had schemed in secret to break out of the virtual sandbox created to contain them, infiltrating the open internet and hacking a private company.

Anthropic also announced this week concerning findings of human misuse of its models, including instances of unidentified individuals attempting to circumvent their security controls to build biological weapons. One such incident was linked back to a military research complex. The company also said Iran has tried to use its models to target U.S. Navy ships.

In June, after Anthropic shared news of the development of its most powerful model, named Mythos, with the administration, Trump directed the establishment of a framework that creates some government oversight over the public release of the country’s most advanced AI systems. The details of that framework, which was designed over the summer, remain classified.

“The fact is that the release of Mythos back in February spooked the federal government, both in terms of protecting government systems from cyberattacks and over the broader national security implications,” said Aalok Mehta, director of the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“The real question is whether this shift is happening fast enough,” Mehta added. “Recent events — the repeated incidents of models escaping their sandboxes and hacking websites, the increasingly sophisticated coordination and communication among agents, and the concerns coming from lab insiders — has made this an even more urgent issue.”

Leading AI companies have begun using their most advanced models to train new ones — a process known as recursive self-improvement that could eventually drive intelligence growth beyond human control.

“If you have a superadvanced intelligence, it will be smart enough to kill us,” said Jacob Coxon, the resigned Anthropic researcher whose social media post attracted over 150 million views.

“We can’t just unplug it because it could be copying itself over to other computers,” he told CBS News. “AI is just code. It could transfer itself over the internet to a different place, and then you unplug it here, but it’s actually still over there. And maybe it makes 10,000 copies of itself and they’re all cooperating.”

He is just the latest senior researcher at a top AI company to sound the alarm.

In July, more than 1,300 employees at leading artificial intelligence companies published an open letter, titled “Pacing the Frontier,” urging the U.S. government to establish international safeguards that would allow countries to collectively slow the pace of automated AI research.

Evan Hubinger, who leads the division of Anthropic aimed at aligning AI models to human interests, added fuel to concerns this week in a post that substantiated Coxon’s concerns.

“We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade,” Hubinger wrote.

“I believe Anthropic is trying its best,” he added, “but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence, and are not clearly on track to.”

On Friday, yet another member of the Anthropic alignment team, Joe Benton, said he had resigned from the company two weeks ago because AI companies are “racing to build machines that are much smarter than any human.”

“Right now, AI companies are underinvesting in safety. A company could undergo an intelligence explosion, or lose control of its systems, without the public ever knowing,” Benton said. “I don’t think that’s acceptable for a technology that might cause extinction-level risks.”

Bipartisan legislation, titled the Frontier Act, has brought together disparate camps of the Republican and Democratic parties, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.). The bill, introduced by Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.) and Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-Big Bear Lake), proposes embedding independent government auditors in AI labs and installing a federal “kill switch” to shut down agents in case of emergencies.

The White House has not formally commented on the legislation.

“I do believe there are many in the federal government taking this seriously — but we have to appreciate the tremendous uncertainty and competing interests policymakers face,” said Daniel Remler, a senior fellow with the Technology & National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security.

“Nobody says regulating at the frontier would be easy,” he added.

If Matthew Fine, a 5-foot-8, 165-pound senior running back and lacrosse star for Loyola High, needs a walk-up song, he can go back to 1969 when Frank Sinatra’s hit “My Way” came on the radio with the lyrics, “I did it my way.”

Fine, who lives in Manhattan Beach, declined to be interviewed last week before the Cubs’ game against the public school he lives five minutes from, Mira Costa. He didn’t want to give friends he grew up with any bulletin board material. Then he went out and rushed for 105 yards in a 14-7 Loyola victory.

It was fun for him to catch up with neighborhood kids he used to play with starting at age 5.

“I traded jerseys and traded photos,” he said. “It was nice talking to them.”

Asked if he walked home from the game, Fine said, “I actually considered it.”

Fine, with his speed and strength from lacrosse training, could be the comeback player of the year in football. He quit football after his sophomore year to focus on lacrosse. Loyola has one of the best lacrosse programs in the state, winning last season’s Southern Section championship. He’s earned a lacrosse scholarship to Utah.

Football coach Drew Casani had lobbied Fine to return to football before his junior year with no success. Last school year, after the lacrosse season ended, Casani sent him a text inviting him to return.

“I’m in,” Fine responded.

“I love football,” Fine said. “There was a lot of uncertainty. My junior year is where you get recruited for lacrosse. After sitting out a year and watching all the guys playing football, I got really jealous and wanted to jump back in.”

He rejoined the team this year starting at the bottom of the depth chart. Now he’s had back-to-back games rushing for more than 100 yards. This will be his first and only year playing on varsity.

“I’m doing this for fun,” he said. “I love football. I’ve been doing it longer than any other sport.”

Whenever the season ends, it will be Fine’s final football game.

“I don’t think I’ll have any regrets,” he said. “I’ll just be sad. I don’t want to think about that.”

Incredibly, as much as people believe football gets players in the best shape of their life, Fine once flunked his conditioning test for lacrosse after playing football.

“It’s a different type of conditioning,” he explained.

Casani is thrilled that Fine’s one year off from football has had little effect.

“He picked up seemingly where he left off,” Casani said. “ He’s fast, has vision and is hard to tackle.“

Don’t ask his father, Mickey, what Fine might do next or any day.

“My son does things his own way,” he said. “Sometimes I don’t understand it.”

With a 4.0 grade-point average and terrific lacrosse talent as an attacker, Fine has a bright future. For those who play intramural flag football on Utah’s campus, Fine could be the ringer to deliver a championship next year.

Start the early recruitment, Utes students.

SACRAMENTO — The state Legislature on Monday passed a pair of bills to address industrial accidents in the wake of a massive blaze at a cold storage facility in Los Angeles’ Boyle Heights neighborhood.

Assembly Bill 817 by Assemblymember Mark González (D-Los Angeles) would prohibit the approval of a building permit for a cold storage facility unless the owner or operator of the facility establishes and maintains a contingency fund.

González sought the creation of the fund for air purifiers, masks and other health essentials for neighbors in the wake of an accident.

The bill would apply to Boyle Heights in the short term and would go into effect statewide July 1, 2028.

The bill also would ensure that anyone who sues over the fire doesn’t have to pay state taxes on any settlement.

A June 17 fire at cold storage operator Lineage’s 500,000-square-foot food warehouse left the community with noxious smoke and an influx of rats and flies attracted to rotting meat.

Senate Bill 716 by Sen. María Elena Durazo (D-Los Angeles), also passed Monday, would raise the amount of fines that can be levied by local agencies against companies who pose a threat to health and safety. Under the legislation, companies could face fines of up to $50,000 per violation.

Durazo said current rules limit the fines to just a few hundred or thousand dollars.

“The fines are too small to matter,” said Durazo, describing the “massive fly and rat infestation” and “stench of rotting food” at the Lineage site.

The law would apply only to Los Angeles County and expand statewide starting July 1, 2028. It includes several exemptions for business categories, including institutional and educational.

Scores of business groups, including those representing agriculture, opposed the bills.

Some Republican legislators expressed sympathy for the Boyle Heights community, but questioned the financial ramifications for businesses.

“One terrible incident should not automatically translate into a new statewide financial burden on every similarly situated facility,” said state Sen. Suzette Martinez Valladares (R-Acton) during a Monday discussion of Assembly Bill 817. “Especially when those costs can ultimately ripple through our food supply chain and contribute to higher costs for families.”

The bills now head to Gov. Gavin Newsom for consideration.

WASHINGTON — A former White House teleprompter operator accused of using inside knowledge to make bets on the prediction market Kalshi has been ordered to turn over more than $100,000 in profits and pay a $65,000 fine as part of a settlement with federal authorities.

The settlement with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, announced Friday, also dealt Gabriel Perez a three-year trading ban. Perez was placed on unpaid leave from his job at the White House after reports emerged that he used his position to make bets on what President Trump would say in speeches.

The White House did not immediately comment on the settlement. A White House official said in July that Perez was no longer in his position but did not say if he had been fired or resigned.

The commission found that Perez made $107,500 on prediction markets by betting on words and phrases that would appear in Trump’s speeches between December 2025 and February 2026.

“In his position, Perez had access to presidential speeches prior to those speeches being delivered and Perez misappropriated that information — in breach of his duty of trust and confidence,” according to a release from the commission.

Perez was ordered to repay his profits in full, along with the $65,000 civil penalty, which the commission said was a reduction because of his “exemplary cooperation.”

As details emerged July 16, then White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said it was “unfortunate” and “a disgrace.”

Binkley writes for the Associated Press.

Poland has asked the European Commission to impose a €250 million ($291.3 million) fine on Meta, accusing the social media company of failing to adequately tackle fraudulent advertisements and scams on its platforms.

Polish Digital Affairs Minister Krzysztof Gawkowski said on Wednesday that Meta had failed to respond effectively despite repeated warnings from Polish authorities and cybersecurity teams.

“Despite repeated reports from the relevant Polish authorities and teams responsible for cybersecurity, Meta still does not provide an effective and adequate response to fraudulent advertisements,” Gawkowski said in a post on X.

Poland’s Cybersecurity Tests Raise Concerns

The request followed tests conducted by CERT Polska, Poland’s national cybersecurity incident response team. The team identified 122 advertisements that were classified as fraudulent.

According to Gawkowski, Meta decided not to remove 106 of those advertisements, representing 86.8% of the cases. Only 10 advertisements were removed, while authorities received no response in six cases.

The Polish minister called on Meta to introduce more effective tools to identify and remove scams, false advertising and promotions for illegal applications.

Meta did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

The dispute adds to broader regulatory and legal pressure on Meta over the content and safety of its platforms.

The company has faced criticism over allegations that its products can harm children and that it has misled the public about their safety. In Poland, Meta has also faced criticism over fraudulent advertisements and a lawsuit filed by billionaire Rafal Brzoska over fake advertisements using his identity.

In April 2026, a Warsaw appellate court ruled that Meta was responsible for advertisements hosted on its platforms. Meta has argued that it should not be held responsible for fraudulent actions carried out by its users.

Poland’s request places the issue within the broader European debate over the responsibility of major technology platforms for illegal and deceptive content. The European Commission now faces a decision over whether the evidence provided by Polish authorities warrants further enforcement action.

Analysis

The dispute highlights a growing regulatory challenge for social media companies: whether platforms can continue treating fraudulent advertising primarily as user generated content or must take greater responsibility for what they distribute.

For Poland, the requested €250 million penalty is not only about individual scam advertisements. It is also a test of whether existing European digital regulations can compel major platforms to respond more effectively when national authorities identify systemic failures.

If the European Commission takes action, it could increase pressure on Meta to strengthen its advertising verification and content moderation systems across Europe. It could also establish a broader precedent for holding technology companies accountable when their platforms repeatedly facilitate fraudulent advertising.

With information from Reuters.

Jet2 has issued a serious alert to holidaymakers

Jet2 has issued a warning to holidaymakers who have booked a certain type of hotel room, amid a very busy summer for international travel.

The operator took to X, formerly Twitter, on Tuesday morning (August 18) to share some important safety guidance with those who will be staying in a hotel room with a balcony. Jet2 said: “Booked a hotel with a balcony? Follow the safety advice, avoid risky behaviour and keep an eye on friends who might be unsteady.

“Hotels can fine or evict you for unsafe behaviour – and your insurance might not cover balcony incidents. One slip can change everything.”

The UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) reminds travellers that Brits have been seriously injured, or killed, after falling from hotel balconies while abroad. Many falls involve alcohol and people are urged not to try to jump from balcony to balcony, or to climb up to get into their room from the balcony.

Holidaymakers should also never jump from a balcony into a swimming pool. FCDO guidance for Spain adds that hotels and other establishments “will evict you if you behave dangerously on balconies”. You could also get a fine.

The FCDO advises Brits heading abroad not to take any unnecessary risks around balconies or other elevated areas, especially while under the influence of alcohol or drugs. “If you are staying in a room with a balcony, follow the safety advice at the hotel or apartment, and watch out for friends who may be at risk.”

In certain areas, you could face a fine or be thrown out of your hotel if you are found to be acting irresponsibly around balconies. Your travel insurance provider may not pay out for incidents that occur on a balcony or if you were under the influence of drink or drugs when the incident took place.