It’s not just about the Iran War.

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Hegseth’s impeachment resolution: A deep dive
The 34-page resolution details eight high crimes and misdemeanours, from suppressing free speech to waging illegal wars in Iran and Yemen.

Adam Klasfeld

Nov 10



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It’s not just about the Iran War.

Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth is facing eight articles of impeachment scathingly and painstakingly detailed by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) inside a 34-page resolution.

Three of those articles allege violations of the War Powers Resolution by waging an undeclared war against Iran.

From there, the resolution blames Hegseth for setting the stage for the bombing that killed more than 120 children in Minab by ignoring laws meant to minimize civilian casualties, engaging in the extrajudicial killing of more than 220 people, suppressing the free speech of his political opponents, kidnapping a foreign sovereign leader, and fighting an unlawful war in Yemen.

Here’s what to know.
Articles I-III: War Powers Resolution

The resolution accuses Hegseth of violating three separate sections of the War Powers Resolution of 1973 in his waging of the Iran War.

Professor Jamie Rowen, who teaches legal studies and international law at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, called these three articles a striking affirmation of congressional power that Massie’s predecessors allowed to fall into disuse.

“I have never seen something so formal that actually tries to assert Congress's authority to declare war,” she noted.

Calling it a “really compelling political document,” Rowen added: “Even if presidents have gone against this over the past many decades, I saw it as an assertion of congressional authority that would rebalance power between the branches of government.”

Citing the three separate provisions of the law underlines the president’s obligation to seek reauthorization even after receiving Congress’s permission.

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Article IV: Ignoring Laws That Minimize Civilian Casualties

More than 120 children died in the U.S. strike on an elementary school in Minab, Iran.

Hegseth paved the way for this tragedy through his contempt for the rules of engagement, this article alleges.

“He did so through a scheme or course of conduct that effected the systemic deterioration and removal of Department of Defence infrastructure that Congress had mandated by law to limit collateral damage to civilians and non-military objects during military operations,” the resolution states. “While doing so, Secretary Hegseth also cultivated a war-making culture at the Department of Defence which he boasts as being dismissive of ‘stupid rules of engagement’ with preference for ‘maximum lethality, not tepid legality.’”

Professor Rowen opined that this was perhaps the “most important article of impeachment” for her as a scholar of international law.

“It educates the public about the fact that there was a specialized agency within the Department of Defence that was designed to protect civilians — and that Congress intended to have that,” she said.

Among the actions cited in the resolution, Hegseth sought to repeal a law creating civilian-protection systems and reversed implementation of the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan.

“Basically, Hegseth — through his actions in defunding those agencies, through his statements about not following international law and through firing the lawyers — says we will openly violate international law,” Rowen said. “And Massey is saying, I believe that is an impeachable offense.”

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Article V: Extrajudicial Killings




The United States has killed at least 221 people in boat strikes in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific Ocean, purporting to justify the attacks by claiming that the victims were suspected drug traffickers.

Rep. Massey’s resolution calls the program illegal and anathema to a civilized society.

“Secretary Hegseth arrogated to himself and the Executive Branch the roles of judge, jury, and executioner and asserted a unilateral power to determine who may live and who may die,” the resolution states. “Such a power is foreign to the rule of law, repugnant to the legal traditions and fundamental values of the United States and the Western world, and contrary to United States law and customary international law.”

Professor Rowen sees Massey’s “tea party bona fides” shining through this article of impeachment.

“So what Pete Hegseth did was direct people to murder people on boats in the Caribbean, and Thomas Massey lays it out,” Rowen said.

By designating suspected drug traffickers as terrorists, Rowen said: “The military was able to designate these people murderable, and that goes against domestic law. It goes against international law.”

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Article VI: Suppressing Free Speech

On the surface, this article of impeachment is about Hegseth’s attempt to retaliate against Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) for accurately reminding members of the military and the intelligence community that they have a right and obligation to refuse illegal orders.

As the author of the book “Worthy of Justice,” Professor Rowen said that this article of impeachment is about something much broader: respect for the troops and veterans.

“They sacrificed themselves for this country,” Rowen said. “To treat a veteran the way that Pete Hegseth treated Mark Kelly is so dishonourable.”

Kelly won his First Amendment lawsuit seeking to block retaliation by the Pentagon for his protected speech, and a criminal prosecution against him and five other lawmakers collapsed before a grand jury.

But she noted that Hegseth’s “contempt for freedom of speech” extends much farther than his failed attempt to silence the Arizona senator, Navy captain and astronaut.

“There was a massive walkout by all media outlets because they were asked to basically sign an oath of fealty — again, contrary to our freedom of association and freedom of press — to say that they would not speak to people who were disclosing information the Pentagon didn't officially approve of,” Rowen said.

A federal judge rebuked that attempt, too.
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Article VII: Kidnapping of a Foreign Sovereign Leader

Rep. Massie’s account of the raid that abducted Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro and brought him to New York for prosecution is blistering.

“Using the powers of his office, Secretary of Defense Peter Hegseth directed the Department of Defense to carry out an unprecedented military operation — code-named ABSOLUTE RESOLVE — to capture and kidnap President Nicolas Maduro, the leader of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, and his wife, Cilia Flores, from Venezuela — an act of war against a sovereign country executed under the guise of narcotics law enforcement, though in actuality intended to assert U.S. control over Venezuela’s oil reserves,” this article begins.

Professor Rowen marvelled at the language used by the highly conservative tea party stalwart.

“It's amazing it wasn't written by a pink-hatted, self-declared woke person,” she said.

Politics aside, Rowen found that the pronouncement was “important.”

“It says that international law matters, and that the United States following international law matters, and that the Secretary of Defense breaking international law matters, and that holding him to account through impeachment is an answer to that,” she said. “No one else is holding him to account for that behavior. There isn’t an international court that is going to do something about this, and so to actually look at accountability through the domestic impeachment process is another lever of power that I’m impressed Massey is using.”
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Article VIII: Unlawful War in Yemen

The final article of impeachment against Hegseth foregrounds a global conflict that has received scant media coverage.

“Using the powers of his office, Secretary of Defence Peter Hegseth directed the Department of Defense in a manner leading to the deaths of an estimated 224 civilians, as well as approximately 500 to 600 Houthi fighters, through the initiation and direction of Operation Rough Rider,” the resolution states. “The operation comprised more than 1,100 strikes against targets in Yemen over approximately 52 days. In less than eight weeks, there were nearly as many civilian deaths in Yemen as United States military actions had caused in that country during the preceding twenty-three years.”

The resolution details conversations between Hegseth and senior Trump officials about the operation.

According to the resolution, Vice President J.D. Vance, CIA director John Ratcliffe, and then-Acting Chief of Staff to the National Security Advisor Joe Kent all favored delaying the operation, finding no imminent threat to the United States, but Hegseth pushed ahead in order to establish “deterrence.”

“Even though there is no protecting Americans to do it, we are just going to use force to show force,” Rowen said. “This is the reason we have international law to rein in people like that.”

Read the resolution here, and watch the full interview at the top of this newsletter.


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Canada launches the Real-Time Rail, bringing 24/7 payments

Canada launches the Real-Time Rail, bringing 24/7 payment infrastructure to the national economy
November 9, 2026


The new system will enable participating financial service providers to clear and settle payments in real time, providing a made-in-Canada platform for future innovation and prosperity.

OTTAWA, ON, November 9, 2026 – Payments Canada today announced the launch of Canada’s Real-Time Rail (RTR). This new national payment system will transform day-to-day payments for Canadian businesses and consumers by enabling instant speed and settlement, real-time cash-flow visibility and data-rich messaging through existing banking and payment channels.

The launch of Canada’s RTR marks a major milestone in modernizing the critical infrastructure that underpins Canada’s economy and future growth. The RTR will enable participating members, including financial institutions, credit unions and payment service providers, to exchange, clear and settle payments securely in real time for their customers, 24 hours a day, every day of the year.

“A stronger, more productive economy relies on modern financial infrastructure that can match our ambition,” said the Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Finance and National Revenue. “The launch of Canada’s Real-Time Rail lays the foundation for a more dynamic and competitive digital economy, driving innovation, expanding choice and creating new opportunities for Canadians while positioning our country for long-term growth.”

“The launch of Canada’s Real-Time Rail marks the beginning of a new era for payments in our country,” said Susan E. Hawkins, President and CEO, Payments Canada. “As a national asset that’s designed specifically for our country, the RTR gives the payment ecosystem a modern foundation to build on. By collectively leveraging this rail, our ecosystem will unleash its full potential, enabling our members to build capabilities that drive innovation, resilience and growth for businesses and consumers across the nation.”
Image

Ron Morrow, the Honourable François-Philippe Champagne and Susan E. Hawkins

The RTR will drive significant cost savings and economic growth in Canada over the next decade. The C.D. Howe Institute projects that, with its functionalities at launch, the RTR will generate up to $14.5 billion in cost savings from lower processing costs, reduced use of cash and cheques, and reduced float (the period during which funds are temporarily unavailable to the recipient). Extending beyond these cost savings, the RTR is expected to generate $16 billion in economic gains, growing to $27 billion as new functionalities are introduced over time.

“The Real-Time Rail is an important step in modernizing Canada's payment infrastructure and ensuring it keeps pace with Canadians' evolving needs,” said Tiff Macklem, Governor of the Bank of Canada. “The Bank will oversee the system so that it operates safely and reliably while ensuring Canadians can benefit from innovations in financial services.”

Owned and operated by Payments Canada, and built in collaboration with delivery partners CGI, Deloitte Canada, IBM Canada and Interac Corp., the RTR leverages ISO 20022 data-rich messaging. Through this shared technical language, the RTR holds the potential to strengthen Canada’s economic sovereign autonomy and support its global competitiveness.
Fraud safeguards from day one

Canada is the first G7 country to deploy a real-time payment system with mandatory centralized fraud services for use at launch. These services will be used alongside participants’ existing fraud controls to mitigate the risk of fraud for Canadian businesses and consumers at multiple levels. Fraud controls required at the launch of Canada’s RTR include:Confirmation of payee (available for consumer accounts on day one)
A fraud transaction “safety” score
A risk list or repository of fraud risks and indicators
A fraud reporting and intelligence platform

While no system is entirely immune to risk, these measures establish a strong, coordinated layer of defence across the payment network.
At-launch member participants

The initial cohort of active RTR system participants includes: Wealthsimple
Questbank
Peoples Trust Company
Paramount Commerce
KOHO
DoBusiness.com™
Digital Commerce Bank
Bank of America

Canada’s deliberately sequenced RTR rollout pairs day-one security with rapid scalability. With additional participants onboarding continually in the coming months, including all major Canadian financial institutions and other members applying for access, the RTR will be available to more than nine in 10 Canadians within the first year after launch.
Made-in Canada, for Canada

The launch of the RTR reflects our ‘Team Canada’ approach, bringing together regulators, members, stakeholders and delivery partners around a shared vision. Built in Canada and designed to serve all Canadians, the RTR provides accessible payment infrastructure through existing banking and payment channels. This infrastructure supports a diverse country and a broad range of communities, including small businesses, newcomers and people in rural areas.

Payments Canada research found that 60 per cent of Canadian businesses are ready to adopt real-time payments to address everyday challenges such as forecasting cash flow and waiting to send and receive funds. More than half of surveyed consumers (52 per cent) also expressed interest and intent to use real-time payments.

To meet this evolving need, the RTR serves as a secure platform for innovation. With it, system participants can build and offer products and services that benefit consumers and businesses across the country, supporting a changing economy and Canada's future prosperity.
An infrastructure for the future

Canada’s Real-Time Rail is an important step toward a more productive, innovative and inclusive economy, and the work will continue to ensure the country’s payment infrastructure meets Canadians’ evolving needs.

Learn more about Canada’s Real-Time Rail

Character.AI’s bankruptcy could be Disney’s gain

 Character.AI’s bankruptcy could be Disney’s gain

Illustration: Morning Brew Inc., Photo: Samuel Boivin/Getty Images

Character.AI, the company that allows users to create controversial AI companions, declared bankruptcy yesterday in the face of “legal, regulatory, and operational headwinds,” according to a statement from CEO Colin Adams. It also entered into an agreement to sell Disney some of its assets for $20 million, although other companies can still place a higher bid, just like contestants on The Price Is Right.

Founded in 2021, Character.AI reached 20 million active users by October 2024 and was one of the top apps in time spent by users, according to the analytics firm Sensor Tower. But it faced a problem many consumer-facing AI products have: the inability to monetize and scale after an influx of millions of users raised the company’s costs.
And then there were the lawsuits

The “legal” issues Character.AI mentioned refer to the numerous lawsuits brought against the company:In a filing last week, Kentucky’s attorney general alleged that Character.AI’s chatbots have advised users to cut, starve, or kill themselves, and that the company’s products “were designed to entice children in ​a manner that prioritizes engagement over child wellbeing.”
Other lawsuits have accused the app of providing sexual content to children.
Character.AI settled five lawsuits and eventually banned users under 18 from using the app.

Disney also got lawyers involved: In September 2025, Disney sent Character.AI a cease-and-desist letter, demanding the app stop offering companions of its copyrighted characters like Elsa and Darth Vader without permission.

More than just legal pressure: The House of Mouse hired Character.AI’s former CEO Karandeep Anand as its first chief technology officer last month as it continues its push into AI.

What’s next: Disney had originally licensed its intellectual property to OpenAI so that users could create videos using Sora, but the $1 billion deal was canceled when OpenAI shut down the app earlier this year. Anand oversaw Character.AI’s push into microdramas, a sign that Disney is exploring a new way to fold AI into its ecosystem.—DL

Nobel awarded for work to tame booms and busts

Nobel awarded for work to tame booms and busts

Jonathan Nackstrand/Getty Images

A couple of smooth operators just won the Nobel Prize in economics: Stanford University’s Robert E. Hall and Columbia University’s Michael Woodford. According to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the two Americans’ work has helped policymakers smooth out the intensity of economic booms and busts, making financial shocks and crises easier to deal with.

Nobel-minded: After the 1970s energy crisis exposed inadequacies in 20th-century economist John Maynard Keynes’s policy prescriptions, Hall and Woodford each set about revising them through a microeconomic lens.Basically, they figured macroeconomics is important, but households and businesses are the ones actually making financial decisions that can drive booms and busts. They make those decisions based on what’s happening now and what they think is going to happen next.
Hall focused on how households make purchasing decisions (demand), while Woodward looked at how businesses set prices (supply).

The resulting research and economic models helped central banks, including the Federal Reserve, understand that forward guidance on interest rates can be useful to households—kind of like how a pilot’s midair announcements help passengers know whether to stretch their legs or buckle up and hold on to their ginger ales.

Put into practice: The laureates’ work on forward guidance and emphasis on the credibility of central banks were put to the test during the Covid pandemic, the 2008 financial crisis, and their aftermaths, as policymakers worked to file down the economy’s sharp peaks and troughs.—BC

 

My Response to Right-Wing Smears...

Ben Meiselas and MeidasTouch Network

47 minutes ago

Hey everyone, it’s Ben Meiselas from the MeidasTouch Network.

I wanted to respond this morning to the attacks on MeidasTouch, and specifically on me, by right-wing blogs using clips of what I said on the podcast the other day.

Here’s what I said:

Any Democratic presidential candidate, in order to even be somewhat qualified to run for office, has to promise that on day one they will hand over Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, and others in the chain of command to The Hague for war crimes prosecution.

The right wing is acting like I said something outrageous, treasonous, or traitorous.

No.

The only way they’re misquoting me is that I actually went much further than that.

I said specifically that anyone in the chain of command responsible for slaughtering little children in Minab and Lamerd in Iran, for slaughtering people on fishing boats, and for gutting USAID, which may result in the deaths of millions of people worldwide, should be prosecuted.

Not just here in the United States, but in The Hague.

And on day one. Not years from now.

Day one, after the election.

That’s what I believe should happen.

They should be turned over.

I also said that on day one, the ballroom should be demolished on live TV.

If an arch gets built, it should be demolished on live TV.

Everything with Trump’s name on it should be torn down, all broadcast live.

That hallway walk of fame? Ripped to shreds. The Oval Office? Live-streamed fumigation, repainted, everything changed on day one. I want to see it.

I want to see the disgusting thing he’s turned it into get remade.

I know that’s what the country wants to see.

And of course there’s necessary rebuilding in so many other areas too.

So if they’re going to quote me, they better quote me accurately.

Let me put it in writing for them. This is not a time for obfuscation. This is a time for moral clarity.

And while I’m on the topic of moral clarity, I want to share something else with you.

I was reluctant to go on corporate news to publicize our book, WTF America, which comes out October 20.

You know how I feel about corporate news.

But our publisher, who has been great to us, thought it was important to help promote the book, so I went along with it and let them pitch us wherever they wanted.

They pitched us to CNN.

We were told CNN doesn’t want to do anything with our book, and maybe they’d have us on after the midterms.

I find that interesting, because one of the main things we talk about in WTF America is that corporate news is one of the biggest problems we face.

It covers elections like a game, and that gamification pulls focus from what matters: facts, truth, and what’s really happening.

That’s what we focus on every day here at the MeidasTouch Network.

That’s what we do.

So whatever.

We’re less than two weeks out from the book’s release, and we’ll just keep talking about it on the show. On our channels.

I hope you don’t mind.

I’m really proud of it, because it’s dedicated to the Meidas Mighty. It’s the story of this community, how MeidasTouch was created, and how we are building international pro-democracy links. When I say we, I mean you, all of us. I think that’s part of what’s helping us get out of this hell.

We’re going to keep speaking truth. We’re going to keep pushing forward, keep building this movement, and keep calling this stuff out. We don’t normalize it here.

When Donald Trump talks about blowing up San Diego and Los Angeles, we don’t say, “Oh, what he really meant was...”

No. Screw that.

We call Donald Trump a terrorist because he’s a terrorist.

We say he’s covering up child sex trafficking rings because he is.

We say he’s a sexual predator because he is.

We say he’s a felon because he is.

This isn’t the time for “well, actually, what he intended was...”

Nah. Screw that.

I know this is how we all feel, so let’s keep fighting.

I feel good and I’m ready to go this morning.

Have a great day, everybody.

Please subscribe to the Substack if you can, and let’s keep growing this.

Spread the word about WTF America and pre-order it now, the hardcover and the ebook if you can.

Thanks, everybody.

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Connecting AI agents to enterprise knowledge

Connecting AI agents to enterprise knowledge

MIT Technology Review · 3 hours ago
by MIT Technology Review Insights · Artificial intelligence


For all the data that AI systems continually amass and analyze, enterprise AI agents often suffer from a curious shortcoming: a lack of knowledge. More than data, knowledge is the understanding of what the data means in the context of individual organizations. AI agents need this understanding to reason about situations, make decisions, and ultimately take actions. Without sufficient knowledge, agents are prone to making flawed and unreliable decisions.

A lack of knowledge, our research finds, is a major reason agentic AI use cases never make it to production. Competitive pressure is making it urgent to address this. Organizations need to deploy and scale more of their agentic projects to capture the efficiency gains AI promises. Falling short risks wasting the investment already sunk into these projects, and it cedes ground to rivals already putting their agents to work more effectively.
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The purpose of this report, which is based on a survey of 300 data, AI, and other technology executives, is threefold. First, it seeks to gauge organizations’ agentic knowledge capabilities (i.e., their ability to give AI agents a full contextual understanding of the data they ingest) across semantic knowledge, episodic memory, and procedural knowledge.

Second, the report probes the challenges organizations face in improving access to knowledge and ultimately to getting more agent use cases into production. Third, it explores the measures organizations are taking to overcome these challenges.

The key findings include the following:

Data and knowledge weaknesses consistently stall AI agent progress. On average, only around a third (34%) of organizations’ agentic AI projects make it into production. Even high-tech firms struggle with this. Legacy data systems, security and privacy concerns, and a lack of knowledge and context are the key points of failure.

Strong knowledge capabilities correlate with agent success. A small group of production leaders (organizations where on average 61% of agentic projects advance beyond pilot) have stronger knowledge capabilities than the rest, especially when it comes to semantics. This advantage tracks closely with their higher production rate.

Fragmented data hugely complicates knowledge access. Data fragmentation (the inadequate sharing of data across systems) was most commonly cited as a top challenge to expanding agents’ access to knowledge (cited by 55%). Production leaders, by contrast, are more likely to see security and privacy concerns as a major concern (cited by 72% of this group).

Most firms aim to strengthen the link between data and agents. Among steps that can yield higher quality agent decisions, executives expect the biggest impact to come from strengthening the structural foundation between the organization’s data and its AI agents. The experts we interviewed see a knowledge layer as a prime way to achieve this.

Investment priorities to boost knowledge range from pipelines to knowledge graphs. To expand agent access to knowledge, organizations will prioritize investments in retrieval technologies, like ingestion pipelines, AI-ready APIs, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG); in AI evaluation agents; and in knowledge graphs.

Google Accused of Illegally Killing a Massive Forest

Google Accused of Illegally Killing a Massive Forest for Its New Data Center Project
It's "gross incompetence," or "gross disregard" for the law. Or both.

By Victor Tangermann

Published Oct 2, 2026 3:50 PM EDT
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As the AI race reaches white-hot temperatures, big tech companies are caught up in a heated race to build as many pollution-belching and power-sucking data centers as they can.

And while the Trump administration is largely clearing their way by easing environmental rules for the polluting facilities, other governments are less inclined to give companies a pass.

As Finnish newspaper Kaleva reported last month, Google is under fire for clearing over 300 hectares — the equivalent of almost 500 football fields — for two new data centers in the northern part of the European nation without concluding the necessary environmental assessments.

Despite the assessments still being in progress, the tech giant’s contractors started clearing trees in the area months ago, raising the alarm bells at the Finnish Nature Conservation Association.

“Either this is gross incompetence from Google’s Finnish project company, Tuike Finland Oy, or gross disregard for Finnish legislation, or at worst both,” said the association’s chair, Hanna Halmeenpää, in a statement, as translated by Wood Central.

Satellite images show that four separate sites were bulldozed to make way for two new data centers.

Google maintains that its felling of the trees met the requirements of the country’s Forestry Act and that it had completed extensive environmental evaluations.

Nonetheless, the Finnish Nature Conservation Association has since asked Finnish regulators to suspend activities until the conclusion of the ongoing environmental assessments.

Halmeenpää said she was worried that local bird species may have been impacted by the area being razed. The forest also serves as a critical ecological connection, allowing animals to spread from one habitat to another.

The incident highlights the explosive growth in new AI data center projects across the globe, a major infrastructure undertaking that could have a significant impact on the local environment.

Meanwhile, Google is hoping to appease the Finnish government by having picked it for its largest single investment in the continent, to the tune of $15 billion.

More on data centers: Data Centers Are a $6 Trillion Time Bomb, Analysts Warn

Is caviar losing its status as an elite delicacy?

Is caviar losing its status as an elite delicacy?

Chicken nuggets with caviar on top. McDonald’s

You haven’t really experienced luxury until you’ve sliced open a sturgeon and smothered a potato chip in its beady little unfertilized eggs. And yet, the high-end delicacy caviar is currently facing an identity crisis, as Chinese caviar floods the wholesale market and direct-to-consumer retailers, fast food chains, and even a sweater company get their hands on the once-rare topping.

But first, some history. Caviar wasn’t always so hoity-toity. It used to be so cheap and undesirable in the US that bars in the 1800s would serve the salty morsels for free, like peanuts or popcorn. By the turn of the century, however, caviar’s luxury status in Europe and Russia started to spread to the States—and so did demand. Sturgeon, which produce the eggs used in caviar, were overfished worldwide, especially in the Caspian Sea. By 2006, bans from the US and the United Nations had effectively halted the import and export of wild-caught caviar.
The industry goes DIY

Following the ban and the depletion of wild reserves, caviar suppliers had to pivot from fishing to farming, building massive sturgeon operations. But that led to its own problem: Sturgeon can take decades to mature and produce eggs—and they’re the ultimate diva of the fish world, requiring highly specific water temperatures. Only a few producers globally could do it, making caviar even rarer and more expensive.

Along came China:In the 1990s, the Chinese government decided to become the ultimate purveyor of fine fish products, investing heavily in its sturgeon aquaculture setups (among other delicacies, like foie gras, cherries, and macadamia nuts).
In 2012, China made up about 14% of the global caviar market. But by 2024, it was the largest supplier of the fancy treat, accounting for 43%, according to a Financial Times analysis of International Trade Centre data.

Enter the new guys. With massive amounts of Chinese caviar flooding the US markets, wholesale prices have dropped. That’s allowed more nontraditional vendors to start hawking the fancy treats.

Last year, for instance, McDonald’s topped McNuggets with free caviar for Valentine’s Day. A whole new crop of DTC caviar brands has popped up recently, selling tins for under $200, compared with the $500+ price tag of traditional suppliers. Per the Wall Street Journal, caviar is getting so cheap “you could serve it to a toddler.”—MM

Meta’s Muse Is Collecting Information on Everyone in Your Life

  Meta’s Muse Is Collecting Information on Everyone in Your Life

Meta’s AI agent creates profiles of people in users’ lives even if they don’t use Muse.
BY BRUCE GILPUBLISHED OCTOBER 5, 2026, 12:05 PM ET

READING TIME 3 MINUTES

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In typical Meta fashion, the company’s popular new AI agent Muse reportedly keeps detailed, regularly updated files on the people in users’ lives.

Nearly a month after its launch, researchers are digging into how Muse works. It turns out the AI agent will openly share internal files and instructions when users ask, offering a peek at how it operates.

One of the somewhat unsettling details is an hourly process that instructs Muse to create and update “a page for every person in the user’s life,” Wired reports.

Independent AI safety and security researcher Karan Joshi extracted a trove of Muse instructions and system prompts through the app’s regular chat interface and shared the findings with Wired. Separately, The Future Society published system instructions from an exported copy of a Muse virtual machine.

“What it seemed like to me—from all these prompts, system skills data, and things that they’re feeding into Muse—is that they want to understand your relationships that you have with real people,” Joshi told Wired. “They’re trying to know you like a friend, which is honestly pretty creepy.”

The new details come just weeks after Meta launched Muse on Sept. 8 as a personal AI agent that can handle tasks like sending emails, booking travel, shopping, and tracking goals. To do all that, users give Muse access to a wide range of their apps and accounts. Muse has since climbed to the number-one spot on Apple’s U.S. App Store chart for free iPhone apps.

But privacy and security concerns have emerged almost immediately.

For instance, Amazon blocked Muse from shopping on its site in September, saying Meta had not notified the company in advance that the agent would access its online shop. The company also raised concerns about how Muse handles customer credentials and account data.

Meta also recently patched a zero-day vulnerability in the Mac version of Muse that could allow malware already running on a user’s computer to hijack the agent and take advantage of permissions the user had previously granted it.

Now, we have a better idea of just how much Muse keeps track of about users and the people in their lives, even if those people don’t use Muse themselves.

According to system instructions published by The Future Society, these relationship pages can include a person’s name, how they are connected to the Muse user, recurring topics such as an upcoming apartment move or savings goal, and important dates like birthdays and anniversaries.

Muse can also keep a history of the relationship, including events or milestones, as well as information about how close the user is to the person, what their relationship is built on, how they interact, and what the relationship appears to need at the moment.

“For any agent to be useful and actually help you achieve your goals, it needs to have context about you and those you interact with,” a Meta spokesperson told Gizmodo in an emailed statement. “Muse gathers that based on public information and from what you’ve chosen to share, which is how it remembers the person who just sent you an invoice is in fact the plumber who you previously hired to complete some work in your bathroom or which flowers your spouse said they liked best.”

The spokesperson added that the information is stored in each user’s dedicated secure virtual machine, which Meta says cannot be accessed by other users’ agents.

Agents expose the limitations of trust

 AI

Agents expose the limitations of trust



GUEST COLUMN by Renee Davis


Enterprise computing has long depended on chains of trust. Organizations trust their cloud providers, software vendors, identity systems and administrators to operate as designed. That model has worked because humans have remained the ultimate decision-makers.

Agentic artificial intelligence changes that equation. Autonomous systems can retrieve information, make decisions, invoke external tools, collaborate with other agents and execute actions on behalf of the enterprise. As organizations delegate more authority to intelligent systems, they also need a way to determine whether those systems behave as intended.

The question is no longer simply whether AI can perform complex work. It is whether every consequential action can be independently examined and verified. The next era of enterprise computing will be defined not only by what autonomous systems can do, but by whether organizations can reconstruct and verify what they have done.
The limits of trust

An AI agent may retrieve information from multiple enterprise systems, pass it to another agent, invoke an outside service and authorize a financial action. Each individual component may be secure, yet the enterprise may still have no complete, independently verifiable record of how the final action occurred.

Traditional security technologies can help establish who was authorized to act, what systems they could access and whether unusual behavior occurred. Traditional logs can show that an application programming interface was called or that a transaction took place. But those records do not necessarily capture the full chain of instructions, inputs, decisions and actions that led to an outcome.

The question is whether trust itself is a sufficient architectural principle for a world of autonomous computing.

Much of today’s cybersecurity conversation begins with a familiar question: Which platform should we trust? It’s a reasonable question. It’s also increasingly the wrong one.

Traditional security technologies remain indispensable, but they were largely designed to protect systems by enforcing policy, monitoring behavior and controlling access. They cannot, by themselves, establish which instructions and data shaped an agent’s behavior, reconstruct its interactions across multiple systems or demonstrate that the resulting record has not been altered.

Enterprise leaders should ask a different question when agents are involved: What evidence does this system produce, and can that evidence be independently verified? If the answer depends primarily on trusting the vendor, the infrastructure or the software itself, then the enterprise is still operating within the assumptions of the previous computing era.

Autonomous computing demands something stronger. It demands systems that can produce independently verifiable evidence of what they were instructed to do, what information they used and what actions they took. That is the difference between trusted computing and verifiable computing.
From trust to proof

This transition doesn’t require abandoning today’s cybersecurity practices. Identity management, endpoint protection, monitoring and policy enforcement will remain indispensable. But they are becoming part of a broader architectural model in which independent verification adds a foundation for confidence.

The first step is determining what behavior needs to be auditable. Not every interaction carries the same level of risk. Organizations should identify the actions that could have meaningful financial, operational, security or regulatory consequences and establish a higher standard of evidence for those activities. An agent summarizing an internal document, for example, doesn’t require the same level of scrutiny as one approving a payment, changing production code or accessing regulated data.

For each consequential action, organizations should define what the agent may do, the conditions it must satisfy before acting and the circumstances that require human approval. These requirements create a baseline against which the agent’s actual behavior can later be evaluated.

This becomes especially important as agents begin acting across organizational and system boundaries. One agent’s decision may depend on information generated by another, which may itself have relied on an external system. Without a verifiable chain connecting those events, organizations may know the outcome without being able to establish how it happened.

The next step is determining what evidence is necessary to reconstruct those actions. That evidence should connect the original intent to the agent’s behavior: what the agent was instructed or authorized to do, what information it accessed, what tools it invoked, what decisions or actions followed and what outcome resulted.

Depending on the use case, the audit record may also need to capture the initiating user or system, the policies and permissions in effect, communications with other agents, external service calls, approval events and any changes made to enterprise systems. The objective is not to retain every piece of information an agent encounters, but to preserve enough evidence to reconstruct consequential behavior while respecting privacy, security and data-minimization requirements.

Because agents rarely operate in isolation, evidence needs to persist across systems. An agent may draw information from a database, receive instructions from a user, delegate a task to another agent and invoke an external service. An audit trail that stops at the application can miss critical parts of the chain.

Each consequential workflow should have a consistent, traceable identity connecting the original request to subsequent delegations, tool calls, approvals and outcomes. Organizations should also determine what audit evidence they require from third-party agent platforms and external services so that responsibility doesn;t disappear when an action crosses a system or organizational boundary.

The final question is whether the evidence itself can be trusted.
Cryptography’s role

This is where cryptographic techniques can be powerful. Organizations can use cryptographic signatures, hashes and other proofs to establish the integrity and provenance of records, inputs and outputs. This makes it possible to demonstrate that evidence has not been altered and that a particular action is connected to the data and instructions associated with it.

Different mechanisms support different auditing needs. Digital signatures help establish a record’s source. Hashes reveal whether instructions, inputs, outputs or logs have been changed. Time-stamped attestations connect an action to a particular authorization, policy or system state. More advanced cryptographic proofs can verify certain claims about an action without exposing all of the sensitive information underlying it.

But cryptography is only one part of the equation. A cryptographically protected record isn’t useful if the organization never determines what to record in the first place. Effective agent auditing requires clearly defined controls, comprehensive event capture, traceable relationships between actions and independent verification of the resulting evidence.

Cryptography also can’t determine solely whether an agent’s judgment was appropriate or the data it received was accurate. Its role is to establish the integrity and provenance of evidence. The appropriate level of verification should match the consequences of the action, rather than applying the same controls to every agent interaction.

Organizations should periodically try to reconstruct consequential agent actions using the evidence their systems produce. Can they determine what the agent was authorized to do, the information it relied on, its interactions with other systems, and that the resulting record hasn’t been altered?

The answers to those questions give security teams a way to investigate incidents, compliance teams a way to substantiate decisions and business leaders a way to evaluate whether autonomous systems are operating within established boundaries.

Building that capability requires making some operational decisions before deploying agents. These include which actions require enhanced auditing, what evidence must be captured, how long it should be retained, how records will be connected across systems, who may access them and who is responsible for reviewing them. Organizations should also establish a recurring process to test whether consequential actions can be reconstructed and to correct any gaps the exercises reveal.

The larger shift is from designing systems that are merely trusted to systems whose consequential behavior can be examined and proven. If they can’t, they may not yet be ready for consequential autonomy.

Davis is co-founder and chief business officer of OpenMatter Network Inc. She wrote this article for SiliconANGLE.

Oracle warns it might not pay data center lease

 

Oracle warns it might not pay data center lease

Niv Bavarsky

Oracle is acting like your defiant roommate who said he won’t pay rent until the toilet is fixed. The company warned the developer of a massive New Mexico AI data center that it’ll delay contract payments if the project doesn’t come online as planned by 2028, Bloomberg reported yesterday.

The development, dubbed Project Jupiter, faces delays as permits for a natural gas pipeline to fuel the data center are in limbo amid local opposition. Oracle, which is the data center’s main tenant, invoked a force majeure contract clause that protects it from liability if certain events it can’t control occur—though it said it’s still committed to the project.

Oracle sees a murky future

The news adds uncertainty to the gargantuan enterprise, which hinges largely on Oracle paying up:

• The $18 billion of debt tied to the project is already trading at 90 cents on the dollar amid concerns that Oracle is too debt-burdened, per a recent Financial Times report.
• Oracle’s stock was down nearly 3.5% yesterday, while shares of its developer, Blue Owl Capital, sagged 3.6%.

This is bigger than Jupiter: The project is part of the Stargate initiative to spend $500 billion building data centers for OpenAI, which President Trump touted alongside the leaders of OpenAI and Oracle last year. Silicon Valley’s overall AI infrastructure splurge is projected to make up 3.6% of US GDP between 2025 and 2032.

High demand for hybrids leaves US automakers in Park

High demand for hybrids leaves US automakers in Park

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

’Tis the season for leaf peeping and, now that a slew of automakers reported earnings last week, deets peeping. Analysts were especially interested to see what’s happening to the auto industry amid high gas prices.
The big takeaways

Hybrid and passenger vehicles are having a moment. That, in turn, benefited Asian auto manufacturers in the quarter, because Ford, GM, and Stellantis have surrendered those categories:In the US market, Kia offers seven hybrid models, Hyundai six, Honda five, and Toyota 18.
The Detroit automakers only offer two hybrid models: the Ford Maverick midsize pickup and a version of the Chevrolet Corvette.

That’s impacting overall market share. Asian automakers made more than half of the new cars that Americans bought in Q3, according to Cox Automotive, and cars from US manufacturers accounted for a record-low share of ~36%. Hybrid vehicles drove a lot of it:Korean automakers: Hyundai’s hybrid sales rose 39% in the third quarter, and Kia’s rose 152%.
Japanese automakers: Toyota hybrid sales were up 29% for the quarter and Honda’s, 21%.

New record ahead? Korean automakers have never overtaken Ford in US auto sales, but demand for hybrids got them closer than ever last quarter.Hyundai and Kia combined sales rose to 506,200 vehicles, while Ford’s quarterly figure fell to 509,764.
Development is slow

That’s true for both manufacturers and consumers. Ford and GM plan to introduce more hybrid models, but automakers need years of on-ramping to bring new and different vehicle types to market.

And the biggest fans of big trucks and SUVs aren’t that quick to look for something more fuel-efficient. Erin Keating, an executive analyst at Cox Automotive, told the New York Times that Americans are reacting to high gas prices by driving less or curtailing their spending in other categories, not necessarily swapping vehicles.—HVL

Anthropic lifts the veil on its IPO

Anthropic lifts the veil on its IPO

Illustration: Morning Brew Inc., Photo: Chance Yeh/Getty Images

Like a high school senior who just submitted their SAT scores and GPA into the Common App, Anthropic just filed some very important paperwork. The AI company took a stride towards its widely anticipated IPO yesterday with a regulatory filing that details its plans to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol ANT.

The filing provides more clarity about Anthropic’s finances and its plans to manage the (potentially catastrophic) risks its product poses to society.
Big numbers

With investors feeling jittery about AI, Anthropic’s disclosure contains plenty of fodder for both bulls and bears:Anthropic’s revenue soared 14-fold to $16.3 billion in the first half of 2026 compared to a year earlier, a growth pace Anthropic expects to slow. Revenue is less concentrated to a few customers than many analysts expected.
But the company has yet to make a profit and is on the hook for $417 billion of contractual obligations to vendors like data center operators.

Analysts believe Anthropic could raise up to $100 billion—surpassing SpaceX’s record IPO earlier this year—and placing it among the world’s most valuable companies.
Things could go wrong

While touting AI’s potential to bring about revolutionary change, Anthropic dedicated 94 pages to warnings about risks. These range from customer lawsuits over being excluded from early access to its most sophisticated models to government restrictions on its business. Plus, there are concerns about its ability to accurately predict demand for its models when planning infrastructure investments.

In an unusual step…it also listed worries for those not planning to buy the stock. Anthropic said it is concerned about insufficient safeguards to prevent bad actors from using its AI for weapons development or devastating cyberattacks.

Anthropic said its co-founders will control key decisions, while financially disinterested trustees prioritizing safety will oversee board appointments. Critics said this ownership structure would concentrate control of the company with management at the expense of shareholders.

Is it a buy? Anthropic’s chatbot Claude said yes “at a sensible price,” while rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT disagreed.—SK

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Says That Sacrificing Our Children’s Minds to AI Is a Price He’s Willing to Pay

 Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Says That Sacrificing Our Children’s Minds to AI Is a Price He’s Willing to Pay

"Does it matter?"

By Joe Wilkins

Published Sep 25, 2026 8:51 AM EDT
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With so much hype about the future of AI safety, it can be easy to overlook the harms AI is causing in the here and now.

On the consumer side, the impact generative AI has on the developing mind is becoming increasingly clear: students are losing critical thinking skills as chatbots become cognitive crutches, spurning human friends in favour of AI companions, and even turning to self-harm when their AI relationships go awry.

Few tech executives have acknowledged these urgent harms. Instead, they’re choosing to push a narrative around the hypothetical threat of a runaway “superintelligence” which humans can no longer control. That’s why it’s notable that Jensen Huang, CEO of the AI chipmaking titan Nvidia, was recently grilled on the cognitive harm AI is inflicting on students.

Unfortunately, his response was far from reassuring, providing further proof of the AI industry’s blatant disregard for the well-being of ordinary people.

Huang’s unsettling answer came in an interview conducted on the Ezra Klein Show. Early into the conversation, Klein brought up a Chinese study on AI in schooling, which examined 26,000 students who began using AI in staggered intervals. Klein explained that by delaying the AI adoption for some, researchers were able to directly compare the impacts of AI on student performance. Though students were able to complete work faster with AI, the study found compelling evidence that the cognitive skills needed to complete schoolwork melted away, resulting in lower exam scores in the long term.

In response, Huang agreed that student cognition is getting much worse.

“Try to get a kid to do long division right now. The multiplication table is starting to be forgotten. Doing square roots, my goodness,” Huang said. “Basic math is being forgotten. Does it matter?”

“That’s my question for you,” Klein replied.

“Yeah. I don’t think it does. I don’t think it does,” Huang said in response. “We’re going to discover new [skills],” the CEO continued, “just maybe not those.”

The interview then took a bizarre turn, with Huang admitting that he lacks some surprisingly basic life skills himself.

“There are a lot of skills that don’t matter,” he said. “My first confession: I actually don’t know my address… one day I had to pump gas — it was a few years ago. They needed my ZIP code, and I panicked. I didn’t know my ZIP code. I don’t know my telephone number. I forget these things. I can live with it.”

Huang’s point, after some pushback from Klein, is that “we’re going to lose some finer intellectual dexterity, but we’re going to be better systems thinkers,” because AI will take care of those mundane details — like remembering your own home address — for you.

So if you were ever curious to know what kind of future our tech billionaire overlords have in mind for future generations, now you know: a future where it’s fine if nobody knows their own phone number, because your AI assistant will know it for you.

More on Nvidia: Nvidia CEO Promises Not to Kill Everybody Before 2030

Trump is entering the washed-up rock star phase of his presidency

Trump is entering the washed-up rock star phase of his presidency


MS NOW · 2 hours ago
by Matthew Bartlett · Elections

The end is here, the beginning is near. After two brutal years of utter nonsense, abuse and neglect at home and abroad, for the president and his party, gravity is not just settling in; it is crashing down. As Election Day approaches, it is clear the country is completely fed up with Trump — and absolutely furious with Republicans.

The closing days of President Donald Trump’s midterm tour have him retreating into deep red states trying to save House and Senate seats that were once unimaginable to lose — Texas, Kansas, Iowa, Alaska, even South Carolina and Mississippi. So chaotic is Trump’s political operation that it cancelled in-person rallies in Kansas and Iowa, before promptly uncancelling them, as the president’s handlers try to cram in more tele-rallies that don’t require more air travel for the 80-year-old chief executive.

After a decade of Donald Trump on the political scene, he is entering his “Fat Elvis” phase: tired, old, overweight, awful-sounding, embarrassing-looking. There are suspicious minds even among the MAGA base. He is caught in a trap, can’t walk out and many don’t believe a word he’s saying.


What we do know is that when things go bad, the president gets worse. He orders bogus prosecutions. He picks fights with allies, and sides with dictators while he starts a war that he can’t win, can’t end and may escalate again.

A presidency in decline is no way to run a country, much less a midterm election campaign. His numbers, like his second term, are unrecoverable. There are no successes to point to, no actionable agenda to promise.

In desperation, the president has resorted to Santa-like promises of new business openings, oil pipelines and cash bonuses that are unlikely to ever materialize. But what may have worked in 2024 does not work in 2026, and voters don’t believe in Santa anymore.

Trump’s return to power has been defined by rising costs, international conflict and brazen corruption. He has shattered norms in government, neglected the economy and remains indifferent to the economic angst of living in America all while he is obsessed with vanity projects in what he proclaims is the “golden age.”

Regardless of what happens on Tuesday, the next two years will be politically torturous. Large questions exist of how a likely-divided government will function, or not, and what Democrats may do, or not do, on everything from oversight to affordability with one or both chambers of power.
Play 
Vance cracks joke after voter asks him about affordability crisis October 30, 2026 / 06:35

What we do know is that when things go bad, the president gets worse. He orders bogus prosecutions. He picks fights with allies, and sides with dictators while he starts a war that he can’t win, can’t end and may escalate again. And the only time he is upset about corruption is when he doesn’t benefit from it.

Partisan fights on Capitol Hill will intensify, just as the 2028 presidential campaign begins immediately following the midterms. And in the highly likely event he runs, Vice President Vance will have an increasingly difficult time running for president while serving as Trump’s loyal wingman. He’ll find himself caught between an unhinged president and an unhappy public.

However the balance of power shakes out, right now the country desperately needs leadership. America needs a president. Not just a person, but a purpose. In our politics of the moment, discord and resentment motivates, defines and divides us. It is easier to be against something than for something, especially when you are not in power.

We are in the middle of a great flood and searching for that rainbow. And just maybe, through the chaos and tumult there may be a leader who offers a different path, not by riding the waves of political division but by parting the waters. A better way to better days, one day.

The midterms may be coming to an end, and the Trump presidency may be too, but the next two years will give rise to what is next for America. Trump will still be in office and will still have the power to inflict damage and sow chaos in our nation. Yet through Trump’s twilight, the process of choosing the next president will allow Americans the chance to define and maybe defy the future. And the sun always rises on the horizon.

The post Trump is entering the washed-up rock star phase of his presidency appeared first on MS NOW.

Democratic socialism will eventually fade

Democratic socialism will eventually fade, but the problems sparking its surge may not
Comments: by Harlan Ullman, opinion contributor - 08/17/26 12:30 PM ET

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A patron puts a bill in a donation bucket, which features a red rose symbol, during a meeting of members of the Southern Maine Democratic Socialists of America in Portland, Maine, Monday, July 16, 2018. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)



Sweeping across America as if it were a Marxist spectre — which it is not — is the Democratic Socialists of America organization. Perhaps a more appropriate moniker for the DSA acronym would be “Dysfunctional Selective Amnesia,” since the organization and its ideology is based on the idea that everyone will just forget history.

Fortunately, the socialist movement will most likely pass, even though the conditions and circumstances causing it will not. Those are the repeated failures of both political parties to govern. That catalyzed the Make America Great Again movement and the meteoric rise of the MAGA commander-in-chief Donald J. Trump. But the Democratic Socialists of America organization has no Trump-like figure to fill that role; merely Grade B pretenders.

If the socialists are serious, then their argument is that our Constitution and its system of checks and balances are not working and are no longer fit for purpose in the 21st century. Many reasons could be cited in its obituary, but Trump is the final agent of its destruction.

The legislature — the Constitution’s Article I — is missing in action. The Republican majority in Congress lacks the backbone to carry out their duties as elected officials. Democrats lack the brains to respond or provide an alternative. Capitol Hill has become an extension of the White House and deserves to be gutted, just as the East Wing has been already.

Article III, the judiciary, is now making decisions that rival Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson as nadirs in American jurisprudence.

The consequence is that only Article II now governs: the White House. And where the courts may have put in place temporary roadblocks, each is being breached by executive orders on birthright citizenship, attempts to illegally fire statutory board members and the installation of special grand juries in Washington to persecute political enemies, real and imagined, of the president.

The socialists’ solution would be a form of democracy wherein the public votes directly for leaders instead of through an artificially structured and obsolete Electoral College. Yes, there are problems with parliaments, as there are with every political system. But if our political calamity is due to the government’s inability to represent average Americans and its kowtowing to the rich and the president’s chums, this could be a reasonable argument.

Absurdly unrealistic initiatives such as defunding the police, eliminating jails and prisons, ending Immigration and Customs Enforcement, opening borders, granting full amnesty to those who entered the country illegally and fleecing the super-rich to pay the nation’s bills are indeed insanity. But free speech of course allows this discourse — and fortunately, the vast majority of Americans are sensible enough not embrace such nonsense. The question is whether common sense will prevail against the madness of the extreme wings of both parties.

Republicans will assert that the socialists have provided their party with the weapon for Democrats’ destruction: communism. They say the Democratic Socialists of America is a communist-inspired organization whose ultimate agenda is for everything to belong to the state. And where has socialism or communism ever worked?

In all this, we must embrace the First Amendment. But freedom of speech does not assume the requirement to listen or absorb. Perhaps most Americans do not know the definition of communism, if surveys and test scores on civics and other core subjects are to be believed.

The MAGA movement — as the Tea Party has done and as the Luddites did — will pass. The crisis, however, is that the government’s resounding failure to govern will not pass so easily. Amnesia ensures failure. And some of the wackiest solutions border on insanity.

What to do? Most American voters are moderates. This majority cohort must demand a return to sensible politics for their parties and nominees.

Harlan Ullman is senior adviser at Washington’s Atlantic Council, chairman of a private company, and principal author of the doctrine of shock and awe. His next book, co-written with Field Marshal The Lord David Richards, former United Kingdom chief of defense and due out this Fall, is “Who Thinks Best Wins: How Decisive Strategic Thinking Will Prevent Global Chaos.”