Jim Vandehei

The White House, Congress and the country's leading AI companies have allowed AI to grow faster, stronger, more powerful and wildly lucrative (and dangerous), with no serious effort to control it or spread the benefits beyond the super-wealthy. It's not too late to change this. But if they all dither, duck or dance around it, the chances of AI worst-case scenarios will explode, likely early in 2027, according to people who truly understands AI. Yes, President Trump opposes regulation or bipartisan efforts. Yes, AI companies are obsessed with more money, more speed.

Two seemingly contradictory realities are true at once:

Never in the history of industry or inventions have leading companies created entire divisions to un

Forget energy. Forget chips. Forget China. The most clear and present danger to AI and any AI-related economic boom is rapidly rising public opposition to U.S. data centers. Republicans and AI CEOs are in full panic mode watching politicians and the public turn on the physical engines of AI growth. In private, they tell us they can't find a compelling message to shift opinion fast enough. Their nightmare—a political and economic daisy chain that cripples the AI revolution—is already taking shape:

We ask almost every AI architect and leader the same thing in private: What AI risk worries you most? Almost all of them fire back the same response: a killer pathogen, spreading too silently, widely and quickly to stop. The rare agreement among AI experts flows from the belief these advanced models could help a bad actor create a deadly pathogen before the government and industry perfect detection and prevention systems. This isn't a likely scenario.

Three AI trends are accelerating and colliding, forcing government, business and investors to rethink strategies in real t

The Five Eyes intelligence alliance issued a rare joint warning this week that frontier AI capable of crippling governments and businesses is close.

Few AI use cases elicit more outrage than writing. So here's the nitty-gritty of how I use AI for writing:

We're living through the most disorienting societal moment since World War II.

Six facts. No hyperbole. All in the past 60 days.