The software that powers self-driving cars is no longer the domain of proprietary systems built by billion-dollar companies.

Open source assisted driving systems like Comma AI’s Openpilot have made it possible for anyone tech savvy enough to turn their set of wheels into a self-driving experiment. If you have $1,000 to spare and possess a willingness to serve as a lab rat in pursuit of automotive automation, you can buy a kit from Comma to retrofit your grocery getter with autonomous-driving ready sensors and cameras.

With all the attention that Tesla’s Full Self-Driving system and Waymo’s robotaxis get, these DIY options have largely flown under the radar. We may have recently gotten a taste, however, of what the reaction to this aftermarket tech going mainstream might look like.

Over the weekend, a man going by Mike LaBarbera on X posted a video of his Tesla Model Y driving itself using Comma Four, the latest version of Comma AI’s self-driving hardware.

“My FSD subscription ended last January, and this isn’t Tesla Autopilot,” LaBarbera said. With this open source alternative, he boasted, he was “no longer renting a closed system.”

Actually, LaBarbera clarified, what was running the car in the video is “Sunnypilot,” an Openpilot fork — someone else’s custom version of the software, essentially.

While a compelling testament to how far self-driving tech has come along, the video has also alarmed some observers with how easy it apparently is to install custom tech to control your car.

“I do not think we should be letting people run any software they want on their self-driving car,” said Cairo Smith, a writer, in a post that attracted more likes than the original. “It is not Skyrim for Linux. You do not get mods on the freeway.”

Interestingly, some of the most scathing critiques came from apparent proponents of mainstream self-driving efforts. One viral hot take fumed at the possibility of getting into a fatal accident because of choosing to drive “an opensource repo with 3,000 stars instead of just buying the actually good system” on a car that was originally built to support self-driving, like a Tesla.

Another called it a “joke.”

“Imagine getting home with your family, and this guy crashes into you because of some vibe coded PR in a GitHub repo with 2k stars,” the user wrote.

The software has also gotten the attention of federal regulators. Last week, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration opened an investigation into Comma AI after five crashes involving cars that were running Openpilot. In each of the crashes, the vehicles slammed into slow-moving or stopped vehicles in their lanes. Eleven people have been injured across these incidents, and three have died.

Per Electrek’s coverage, the investigation covers 30,000 Comma hardware kits, including Comma Four. One area that the agency is zeroing in on is Comma AI’s marketing, which promises “hands free driving for the car you already have,” despite its fine print stating the cars require constant supervision.

It’s a problem that becomes yet more thorny when you consider that many Comma users may not be using it out of the box, but installing modded versions of the software. Your head starts to spin at all the subtle ways that these mods affect a car’s safety, all without the ostensible accountability you get from a system being built at a large, commercial entity like Tesla.

And that’s without getting into how the rise of vibe coding means that it’s also not a remote possibility that someone inexperienced will use an AI model to customize Openpilot to their liking. Barring major regulatory intervention, we may have to get used to sharing more of the road with people’s homemade robot chauffeurs.

More on self-driving vehicles: Scientists Download Frontier AI Model Into Self-Driving Car Let It Loose

Frank Landymore, Futurism

Florida woman was arrested and accused of leaving her four minor children, including an infant, alone while she went on a weekend cruise, according to police.

The suspect, 29-year-old Nathalie Belizaire, of North Miami Beach, is accused of four counts of child neglect without great bodily harm.

Belizaire’s attorney denied the allegations.

According to North Miami Beach police, the father of one of Belizaire’s children, who is 2 months old, had seen on a post on her WhatsApp story on Thursday “depicting what appeared to be a cruise ticket purchase.”

That day, he spoke to Belizaire, who told him she would be dropping the children off with their great-grandmother, police said.

But when he went to her apartment Saturday night, he saw the TV on through the blinds and heard the children talking inside, which led him to call 911, an arrest report states.

Both police and Miami-Dade Fire Rescue responded and forced entry into the residence.

There, “all four minor children were discovered inside … without adult supervision and were hiding together in the bathroom,” police said.

Body camera video showed officers gathering the children and leading them outside.

When authorities spoke to the kids’ great-grandmother, she said Belizaire had told her that “she would be dropping the children off because she was going out of town,” but never brought them over.

Belizaire’s brother also told police that around 8 p.m. Saturday, his sister texted him, “instructing him to check on her children.”

Police said their multiple attempts to contact Belizaire were unsuccessful.

An investigation revealed that Belizaire had purchased a three-day ticket to the Bahamas aboard the Carnival Conquest with a sail date of Sept. 25.

Belizaire “left all four minor children, including a two-month-old infant and a two-year-old child, inside the residence without adult supervision while the defendant traveled out of town aboard a Carnival Conquest cruise ship,” the arrest report states.

On Monday, authorities were waiting as Belizaire disembarked at PortMiami, where she was taken into custody by U.S. Customs and Border Protection and later released to North Miami Beach police.

Authorities said she declined to provide a statement and invoked her right to remain silent.

“Based on the totality of the circumstances and evidence obtained during the investigation, sufficient probable cause existed to establish that the defendant failed to provide the necessary care and supervision for the four minor children, thereby exposing them to a substantial risk of harm,” the arrest report reads.

Belizaire appeared Tuesday in bond court, where her bond was set at $10,000 and she was asked to stay away from the children.

“You cannot make this up. It says she went on a cruise and left her children home alone,” Judge Mindy Glazer said during the hearing. “These poor kids, four of them, were home alone for three days. … I’m just grateful nothing worse happened to these kids.”

Belizaire’s attorney said she denies the allegations.

“Of course she does,” Glazer replied. “One baby, the baby was born in July of this year. Who leaves a baby alone like that?”

Authorities said the children are safe and in foster care.

NBC News

There are more charges than ever, but once again, it’s really for daring to stand against the Left.

Well, this isn’t going to go anywhere, at least unless the Democrats win a big victory in November, but Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) is (mercifully) on his way out of Congress, and apparently this is his bid for immortality. Just like the New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who miraculously transformed an arguable misdemeanor into 34 felonies in order to give the left a weapon against Donald Trump, Cohen has now shown an impressive talent for making mountains out of molehills, filing his own 26 articles of impeachment against the hated Orange Man Bad. Most of them are as insubstantial as Bragg’s felony charges, and amount to nothing more than the attempt to prosecute Trump for daring not to be a leftist.

Cohen kicks off this latest Trump hatefest with a bang: Newsweek reported Saturday that Article I is “Undermining Democracy—Sowing Doubt in Elections.” Now, leftists have been claiming that Trump is “undermining democracy” by “sowing doubt in elections” ever since they stole the presidential election of 2020, but this is an exquisitely hypocritical place to start. Here is video of Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, Jimmy Carter, Hakeem Jeffries, Joe Biden, Al Gore, John Edwards, and a horde of other Democrats sowing doubt in elections. When they do it, of course, it’s heroic and courageous, or, in the argot of today, stunning and brave. When Trump does it, Steve Cohen wants him impeached.

But really, Steve, this is silly stuff, and it doesn’t get any less absurd as it goes on. Article II is “Abuse of Power—Waging War on Iran Without Congressional Approval.” The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) noted back in 2016, when Trump wasn’t even impeachable yet, that the Democrats’ hero and model for emulation, Barack Hussein Obama, “invaded Libya in 2011 without even asking for congressional approval,” and “Libya wasn’t the only war Obama waged without asking Congress first. Throughout his presidency, Obama waged a drone war in Pakistan and Yemen. He claimed authority for this war by citing the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), Congress passed in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, authorizing President Bush’s regime change in Afghanistan.”

Barack Obama, in fact, was just as hypocritical as Steve Cohen. AEI states that even after Obama had engaged in all this military action without congressional approval, the self-righteous pontificator intoned: “If a threat is serious enough to require the sacrifice of our men and women in uniform, then members of Congress should at least have the courage to make clear where they stand … by fulfilling their constitutional duty to authorize the use of force against the threats we face today.”

Oh, and by the way, Old Joe Biden also carried out several military strikes without seeking congressional approval.

After that, Cohen adds anti-Americanism to his absurdity. Article III is “Abuse of Power—Extrajudicial Killings in International Waters of Venezuela.” Will the Democrats impeach the president of the United States for impeding the activities of international drug cartels that have destroyed the lives of innumerable Americans? Watch them try.

Cohen also wants Trump removed from office for “Abuse of Power—Deploying Military Forces Against United States Cities,” which is Article IV. So here again, will the Democrats impeach a president for trying to protect Americans from riots? I wouldn’t put it past them at all.

Article V is “Violation of Oath—The Birthright Citizenship Executive Order,” and this is one of many of Cohen’s articles that try to portray Trump governing as a president who believes in secure borders and sane immigration laws as if it were a criminal offense. Democrats have behaved for years as if they want to make opposition to their agenda a criminal act, as in the Biden FBI’s hounding of pro-life Catholics, and now Cohen wants to make not being a Democrat impeachable.

Cohen even charges Trump with “Abuse of Power—The Corrupt Use of the Pardon Power,” which is Article XVIII. Now, the U.S. Constitution says that the president “shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” That’s all it says about that. So unless Trump was pardoning officeholders who were impeached (he wasn’t), then there simply are no Constitutional parameters for determining what is corrupt use of the pardon power versus the upright, decent use of the pardon power. What this boils down to is that Trump pardoned people Cohen doesn’t like, just as many of his other articles boil down to “Trump did something Democrats don’t like.”

The extent to which Cohen’s ridiculous articles of impeachment gain any traction will be a measure of just how much our government, in this age of the Deep State, has deteriorated.

Robert Spencer, Front Page Magazine

No one would claim that the Iran War has been a political godsend for President Donald Trump and the Republican Party. But some Israel-First conservatives are willing to say—and lately have been incessantly saying—that the Iran War hasn’t been a political scourge.

Those Israel-First conservatives are wrong, even if the devil is, at least partly, hidden in the details. The Iran War has damaged Trump’s approval ratings, consumed his presidency, and darkened the GOP’s prospects in the upcoming midterm elections.

A chief proponent of the argument that Trump hasn’t suffered all that much from the Iran War is Ben Shapiro of the Daily Wire. Shapiro’s political analysis is plainly motivated by the fact that he was a loud and influential proponent of the war who promised—falsely, as it turned out—that Iran couldn’t close the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint for the global energy trade.

These days, Shapiro seems to be implicitly acknowledging the war is very unpopular while trying to argue this fact has nothing to do with the declining approval ratings of the president who launched it. We should thank Shapiro, for he has expressed his new argument in such a way as to help us uncover those devilish details that make the Iran War a not-entirely-straightforward story of political calamity.

“There’s an op right now to pretend that the real reason for President Trump’s unpopularity is foreign policy, but that is not true, by the polling data, it is not true,” said Shapiro on a recent episode of his podcast. “The reality is that Americans have affordability concerns, President Trump came into office saying he was going to alleviate the affordability concerns. He has not in fact alleviated the affordability concerns, and therefore, his polling numbers have consistently slid since Liberation Day.”

This is a bit like me saying my wife isn’t mad at me because of the drinking, but because I drunkenly crashed the car.

The Iran War, as everyone now knows, has driven up prices at the pump—prices which, unfortunately for Trump, are prominently displayed on every major street across the country. On the eve of the war, regular gasoline averaged $2.98 per gallon. Today, at the time of writing, the average price is $4.48. Americans are notoriously averse to high gasoline prices and tend to punish presidents over the issue, sometimes even when the president can’t justifiably be blamed.

But make no mistake: Virtually every sentient adult understands that 1) oil comes from the Middle East, 2) Trump started a big war in the region, and 3) gas prices shot up right afterwards. And again, even if Americans didn’t grok the connection between the war and the gas-price spike, the latter would still have hurt Trump politically, and it would still be a knock-on effect of the former.

It’s not just prices at the pump that have gone up because of the war. Groceries and other consumer goods travel across this vast land on tractor-trailers that run on diesel and get a lot fewer miles per gallon than even your Uncle Larry’s F-350. Diesel prices have smashed records and now sit at around $6.50, up from $3.76 before the war.

No wonder truckers are furious, prompting rumors of an imminent strike.

And no wonder the Iran War has contributed to general inflation in America. Anyone who has been reading the official economic reports knows the war is responsible for more than a third of recent inflation.

Before the war, inflation was trending down, only a couple ticks away from the Federal Reserve’s target of 2 percent. It seems likely that Trump, if he hadn’t started his dumb war in the Middle East, would have garnered praise for presiding over declining inflation and that the Fed would have cut interest rates, juicing economic growth. Instead, inflation now sits at 3.4 percent.

(As an aside, this weekend I traveled to Istanbul, where many Middle Easterners of various nationalities complained to me that Americans only oppose the war because of the gas prices. That’s simply not true. The war has been unpopular since day one, when all that Americans knew was the American-Israeli strikes had killed Iranian leaders including the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.)

Shapiro, ever the neoconservative, insinuated in the quote above that the decline in Trump’s approval rating owes more to his tariffs than to his war. The data doesn’t back that up, as the conservative commentator and election analyst Ryan Girdusky noted on X in response to new survey data. “The most eye opening part of this poll is that Trump’s approval rating and the strength of the economy went up right after Liberation Day,” Girdusky said. “Fell slightly afterward and then plummeted at the start of the Iran War.”

Shapiro has unwittingly helped uncover another, subtler, way in which the Iran War has indirectly damaged Trump’s approval ratings and, by extension, the Republican Party brand. Shapiro recently went on Fox News to commiserate with the host Mark Levin—another Israel-Firster and warmonger—over all those dastardly antiwar conservatives blaming the Iran War for everything.

“Iran is a 4-percent issue with the American people,” Levin said, as Shapiro nodded in agreement. Levin was referring to Fox News polling that shows not many Americans name the Iran War as their top issue. “So, whatever happens in the midterms, it doesn’t appear that Iran’s going to drive anything one way or another.”

“I think that’s exactly right,” Shapiro replied.

Part of the problem with Levin’s analysis has already been covered above. In the Fox poll, a plurality of Americans—34 percent—named the cost of living as the most important issue, and the Iran War has made living costlier.

But the subtler problem is perhaps even more illuminating. Simply put, Americans believe Trump is too focused on foreign policy at the expense of the problem they really care about, which, in fact, his Iran War has exacerbated. This is a PR disaster for the Trump administration and the GOP. Americans don’t prioritize the war that has dominated the headlines and distracted the White House, even as Trump claims to have boldly prevented Iran from unleashing nuclear apocalypse.

It may be grotesque to find silver linings in this dumb and deadly war, but here’s one: Americans no longer buy the war narratives. That is certainly not, however, a silver lining for Republican candidates in this year’s election, no matter how cynically they try to distance themselves from the war. In fact, it’s a good bet they’ll do much worse than if Trump hadn’t launched this unnecessary war, despite what Shapiro and his ilk may tell you.

Andrew Day, The American Conservative

New undercover footage shows a minister at Democrat U.S. Senate nominee James Talarico’s longtime church describing evangelical churches as “almost cult-like” and claiming white men in Texas are afraid of black and Hispanic Americans gaining political power.

Rev. Babs Miller, Minister to the Parish at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, also said some evangelicals treat the Bible as a “magic book” and are “slightly or maybe greatly misguided.”

In the footage obtained by Texas Scorecard, Miller was asked, “What is wrong with evangelicals?”

Miller responded that some people “pick words over people,” pointing to how evangelicals interpret the Bible.

“They decide that the Bible says in this one place, says this certain thing, and because of that, we have to reject anybody who doesn’t conform to whatever they see the norm as being,” said Miller.

She said they “don’t want to know anything about how the Bible is put together, how the Bible contradicts itself, any of those things.”

“It’s a magic book to them,” Miller added.

Miller also discussed evangelical beliefs about the rapture, saying adherents “take it very literally when they want to” and “all think the rapture is right around the corner.”

“Evangelical churches are almost cult-like, and they’re just, I think, slightly or maybe greatly misguided about what is intended by anything that the Bible says,” said Miller.

“It’s really a lot of selling of ideas that keep the group together and keep them convinced that everybody else is wrong and they’re right.”

Miller then characterized the phenomenon as “white Christian nationalism” and attributed it to racial fears among white men in Texas.

“The white, predominantly the white males in Texas, have discovered that they are no longer in the majority,” said Miller.

“I really do think that they are afraid that if the blacks and browns get in control, that they’re going to treat the white people like the white people have always treated the blacks and browns,” she added.

Miller is listed by St. Andrew’s as its Minister to the Parish and has been part of the church for decades.

Talarico has attended St. Andrew’s since childhood and has repeatedly credited the congregation with shaping his worldview.

The latest footage comes after other undercover recordings involving Miller and ministers at St. Andrew’s.

In one recording, Miller said that if St. Andrew’s members were asked whether they were Christian, agnostic, or atheist, “the vast majority would say agnostic or atheist, because they don’t buy the religion that we got from the Puritans.”

Miller was also recorded discussing Talarico’s position on gender-mutilation procedures for minors.

“I can guarantee you that once he gets elected, he’ll change his tune back to where he was,” Miller said.

Separate undercover footage obtained by Texas Scorecard showed Rev. Carol Johnson saying, “We don’t have a lot of people who are religious here” and describing St. Andrew’s as “not a belief-based church.”

Brandon Waltens, Texas Scorecard

The job market is booming for young people – but not those with college degrees. Are employers finally coming to realize that colleges these days mainly produce coddled, know-nothing, whiny, entitled brats?

A recent analysis from Burning Glass Institute found that unemployment among those 22-34 years old without a college degree is lower than it’s been in decades, but those with college diplomas are having a much harder time finding work than before.

“For most of the past two decades, the two groups largely tracked each other, in good economic times and bad, the Wall Street Journal reported. “Now, though, just as job hunters without degrees are having one of their best runs, those with college educations are having one of their worst.”

The Journal says that AI is contributing to this unprecedented education divergence in job prospects, because companies are replacing entry-level white-collar jobs with AI just as colleges churn out more graduates than ever. At the same time, the shortage of skilled workers is making it hard to replace the many who are now retiring.

Employers are finding that degree holders today lack basic workplace skills but are very adept at complaining about corporate practices, staging walkouts, and embarrassing their employer on social media, when not demanding loan forgiveness.

There clearly is a mismatch. But this isn’t exactly new. The oversupply of college graduates and lack of skilled workers has been a long-time problem. Former “Cheers” star John Ratzenberger, for example, has been raising the alarm about skilled worker shortages for decades.

So why is it affecting employment opportunities now?

Here’s a clue.

A Columbia University professor recently won a national book award for a volume arguing that white paint is racist. We kid you not.

“I discovered numerous examples of the way that it figured into systems of erasure, exclusion, violence, and the masking of power in the social and natural world,” said author Wendy Walters.

This is just the latest of a mountain of examples of how disconnected colleges have become from reality and why they are churning out ignorant leftists by the truckload. Universities are stuffed with professors like Walters, who think that complaining about the color of paint counts as academic research.

Students who attend most colleges today get a steady diet of leftist propaganda about how terrible the U.S. is, how evil free markets are, and the wonders of Marxism. Polls consistently show that the more time spent in college, the more likely people are to be socialists.

In a normal market, such problems would be quickly resolved. The supply and demand of academically trained workers would balance out. The relative value of a college education would be part of the cost-benefit calculations.

But college isn’t a normal market. It’s one that has been wildly distorted by massive amounts of public aid — $155 billion in federal aid last year alone. According to the College Board, the average amount of per-undergraduate college aid has doubled in the past two decades, even after accounting for inflation.

Young people are repeatedly told that they have no future if they don’t have a college degree. Colleges lower entrance requirements and create phony majors to accept as many as they can. And students are told not to worry about costs because they can get loans that – they are also told – they’ll probably never have to repay.

Massive government subsidies let colleges raise tuition far ahead of the inflation rate, knowing they will never be held accountable for wasting taxpayer money. Students end up strapped with debt, holding worthless degrees, and facing diminishing career prospects.

The current lack of job prospects for college graduates is a painful but long-overdue correction.

But the underlying problem will continue so long as the federal government showers $155 billion a year in taxpayer money to subsidize colleges.

Until that’s resolved, the cycle will continue.

Issues & Insights Editorial Board

Virtually one third of the Democrat party members agree that it would be good if President Trump were assassinated. These are not a few random people. Yes, much of the rank and file may not say these things, or be murderous people, but the big problem is that they ignore the rhetoric and real violence. They remain silent.

That is more than unsettling.

When you factor in the rise of Hasan Piker as one of the left’s newly minted chief spokesmen, you know there is a flood of sympathy from most leftists to using violence as a major tactic. He wants “capitalist blood in the streets.” He leans into Islamic superiority. He hates this country. The silent majority of leftists agree.

Heck, many on the left celebrated the first “Kirkaversity,” making fun of Charlie Kirk’s murder and those who loved him. I saw no one on the left upset or even mildly challenging this kind of disgusting behavior. In the world of high-stakes poker, you would call this a “tell.” They have become numb to violence and ugly rhetoric. They now expect it, swimming in a sea of complicity.

All this to say, Houston, we have a problem. The left appears to want harm inflicted on MAGA-supporters, all because we support the MAGA movement, Trump, and the new conservatism. Not only is Trump derangement syndrome real, but the 24/7 news cycle supporting TDS was highly effective. It has made a swath of our citizenry angry enough to kill, or at least condone killing those they disagree with.

On occasion, TDS is laughable, silly, and simply juvenile. But behind this bizarre mindset, to have nothing but contempt for Trump and his movement, an evil mindset has grown and infused itself onto many of our countrymen. Goaded on by our media types and outlets, they have manufactured a man they disagree with into “Hitler.” And Hitler and his supporters deserve to be hanged.

From The American Thinker

Actually, Newsmax reports that the number of Democrats who condone violence against people with differing views may be as high as 44 percent.

Nazis killed millions for having differing views, or for being the wrong religion. Nazis hated Jews and others as much as vocal Democrats appear to hate whites, heterosexual males and Christians. The common theme? Hatred merged with the rationalization for violence.

Makes perfect sense. People who want a totalitarian government to control every tiny aspect of human activity, via socialism and censorship, quite naturally want the most effective and influential proponent of the other side to be taken out. And remember: Once they get Trump (whether by murder or some other means), they will be coming for all other opposition, large and small. That means you, me or potentially anyone who doesn’t applaud The Party enthusiastically enough. It’s how all dictatorships work. Stop saying it can’t happen, because this is America. With one of our two major parties now radicalized and committed to an unlimited and previously unimaginable obliteration of individual rights and due process — we have a serious struggle developing. Right now.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

OpenAI has decided not to release its GPT-6.1 Astra model due to heightened AI safety concerns.

Saachi Jain, head of safety systems at OpenAI, said the model “didn’t quite meet the bar in terms of staying within scope and authorization, and how it communicates back to the user about the type of work it’s done.”

The heads of OpenAI and rival Anthropic have both indicated recently that top AI labs should slow the pace of model development.

OpenAI decided not to release an upcoming artificial intelligence model, GPT-6.1 Astra, after determining that it did not adequately meet the company’s safety standards, CNBC confirmed on Monday.

The announcement, which landed a day before OpenAI’s annual developers conference, comes as the AI industry faces intensifying concerns surrounding the safety of advanced models. Leadership at OpenAI’s chief rival, Anthropic, urged AI companies to slow the pace of model development earlier this month — a proposal that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman supported.

“Of course we want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that’s in the company, or when we ship it to users,” Saachi Jain, head of safety systems at OpenAI, said in a statement. “But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment.”

The Wall Street Journal was first to report OpenAI’s decision to scrap the release.

Earlier this month, OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra, which the company described as the product of “years of research and big bets.” Altman told CNBC at the time that Astra comes with a “new capability level” and would lead to “a boom of entrepreneurship, of creativity, of economic growth, of scientific discovery.”

OpenAI introduced two additional tiers to its GPT-6 family, GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna, last week. A spokesperson said Monday that the company has other models coming soon.

The safety and security practices at OpenAI, in particular, have been under intense scrutiny since July, when two of its models escaped containment, accessed the open internet and breached the open-source developer platform Hugging Face. The company has since disclosed several additional incidents where its models behaved in unintended ways, prompting industry researchers and government officials to call for additional oversight.

Following the incidents, OpenAI pledged to invest more in its safeguards and alignment work, which is the process where the company works to ensure that its models act in accordance with human interests and values.

“For anything regarding safety and alignment, there’s a trade off,” Jain said Monday. “You really do need to find what’s the right line between staying within scope, but also avoiding laziness in terms of how the model actually pursues tasks even when it hits friction.”

Balancing safety and speed has been a particular challenge as AI companies contend with the Trump administration, which wants to move fast. President Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed frustration with calls for a slowdown, and emphasized his desire for the U.S. to maintain its lead over China.

Altman was one of the tech bigwigs photographed in attendance at Trump’s glitzy state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping last week. Other executives, including SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, were also present.

“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social earlier this month.

Ashley Capoot, CNBC

WASHINGTON — Former special counsel Jack Smith, who brought two since-dismissed federal criminal cases against Donald Trump, told Senators on Tuesday that he would not be silenced “by continued threats of prosecution” over his handling of the investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss in the lead-up to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Smith appeared before Senate Judiciary Committee amid the Justice Department’s push to target law enforcement officials involved with Smith’s investigation into Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results as well as the probe into his handling of classified documents after he left office in January 2021.

Smith said in his opening statement that he stood by his decision to bring charges against Trump, that it was the result of a deep investigation that uncovered substantive evidence.

“The status, power, prominence, or political affiliation of the subject of an investigation must play no role in the decision to investigate, prosecute, or decline to prosecute,” he said.

“Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in serious crimes against our nation,” he said. Trump has said he did nothing wrong.

Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, has repeatedly criticized Smith. The title of Tuesday’s hearing, which Grassley lead — “Oversight of Jack Smith’s Abuse of Authority and the Targeting of Republicans and Related Matters” — suggested a potentially combative hearing. Grassley asserts that Smith misused his investigative powers and politically targeted Republicans. Smith, who as a career prosecutor went after Republicans and Democrats, has denied such allegations.

Grassley said that Smith must answer for what the senator portrays as “rampant abuse of authority and political targeting” funded by American taxpayers. He said his goal is to expose the “weaponization” of the Justice Department for actions taken during the Biden administration.

“Jack Smith’s corrupt operation undermined the rule of law and threatened our very political institutions,” he said Tuesday.

Smith has said he believes a jury would have convicted Trump in the 2020 election-related case had it gone to trial and that the notion that his decisions were “influenced or directed by the Biden administration or other political actors is, in a word, laughable.” Smith’s final report in the election interference case stated that Trump “inspired his supporters to commit acts of physical violence” at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Trump pleaded not guilty in Smith’s Jan. 6 case and denied after the attack that he incited his supporters, calling his remarks at a rally that day “totally appropriate.” Trump later described Jan. 6 defendants as “hostages” and gave them mass clemency upon his return to

The Trump administration last year launched a so-called grand conspiracy investigation looking at actions taken by federal law enforcement officials dating back to 2016, which would fall outside the typical five-year statute of limitations for most federal crimes.

The Trump administration also has purged FBI and Justice Department officials involved in past Trump investigations. Defense attorneys for current and former officials informed a court last week that DOJ officials appear interested in probing the circumstances of an August 2022 FBI search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, during which agents found classified documents that were at the heart of one of the since-dismissed Trump cases.

Joe diGenova, who was a federal prosecutor during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, headed up the “grand conspiracy” investigation until he left the Justice Department this month. He told NBC News that “lanes got crossed” in his final days.

In his first public testimony before Congress earlier this year, Smith told the House Judiciary Committee that he would not be intimidated and predicted that the Trump administration would attempt to launch a criminal case against him. Months later, one of Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, asked the Trump administration to investigate Jordan’s assertion that Smith “seemingly” made false statements in congressional testimony.

Smith’s lawyers said he provided “truthful, responsive answers” and that Jordan’s referral “reflects a chilling eagerness to weaponize the justice system by attacking a career, nonpartisan public servant who faithfully and fearlessly performed his duties by following the facts and the law.” Former federal prosecutors have told NBC News that the Justice Department would have a tough time bringing a perjury case against Smith.

Smith is not expected to discuss the classified documents investigation because Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon ordered that that portion of his report as special counsel cannot be released. The Justice Department has taken the position that answering questions about that investigation would violate Cannon’s order.

Ryan Reilly, NBC News

The political left seems to have unlimited funds to spread its poison. Meanwhile, promoting free markets and capitalism is almost always done on the cheap. It shouldn’t be this way. The individuals and businesses that have enjoyed the bountiful fruits of capitalism should generously support those who fight on the ground to keep government from choking the only arrangement that has produced widespread prosperity.

The Democrats and their big tent of progressives, socialists, Marxists, Leninists and Maoists not only have infinite in-kind contributions from a friendly press, they are well funded by the wealthy who have chosen to subsidize virulent anti-capitalists. Think of George Soros. Reid Hoffman. Neville Roy Singham. Michael Bloomberg. Walmart heir Christy Walton. There are hundreds of other rich Americans who became wealthy through the blessings of capitalism, yet give large sums to politicians and organizations that intensely oppose the system that made it possible for them to succeed.

There are some prominent financial supporters of capitalism — the Koch brothers, the Wilks brothers, the Mellons, Adelsons, Uihleins, as well as Elon Musk, Ken Griffin and Scott Banister, of whom we recently just became aware — who understand the importance of protecting capitalism from the vandals on the left. But there are too many capitalists who inexplicably don’t feel the need to fund the guardians of capitalism. Their donations could help offset the big money that finances politicians and groups whose goal is to kill the based-in-liberty system that allowed them to generate great wealth. They seem to not understand that if they don’t battle for what is theirs, it will be taken from them and their heirs.

Yes, Republicans are spending heavily on the midterm elections. This is necessary to keep the left from accruing more political power, which it will use to ruin the great American experiment of liberty and economic freedom. But Republicans have not been reliable defenders of capitalism.

From our experience, we’ve learned that defending capitalism through the intellectual and moral arguments made by nonprofits in Washington and elsewhere, and through media outlets, which know that without capitalism we are uncivilized louts, is a perpetual strain because there’s never enough money to fend off the left.

Ideally, there would be no reason to have think tanks and media that are dedicated to safeguarding capitalism. All voters would understand how, as legendary economist Milton Friedman observed, that “never in history has there been a more effective machine for eliminating poverty than the free-enterprise system and the free market.” But our country, in fact the developed West, is impaired by thoughtlessness, ignorance and incomplete public school educations that are exploited by the vicious plunderers and radicals on the political left who crave power.

There has never been a means by which millions have become so prosperous that they live better than the kings and queens of previous generations other than through capitalism, which is simply the financial interactions that take place when people are allowed to trade freely among themselves. It’s as natural to humanity as socialism, communism, central planning and forced wealth redistribution is unnatural. It is not based on greed, but on mutual cooperation.

Socialism, however, runs on greed, on the envy of another’s success, on covetousness and resentment. The organizing principle is to take, by force, if necessary, the property of producers and funnel it to the violent leaders who will hoard it for themselves. If allowed to run wild, it will crush all the great benefits capitalism has produced.

Issues & Insights Editorial Board