OUR PICKSElection Rules Designed to Create Chaos | Why It’s Difficult for Tech Companies to Rein In A.I. | Reviving Cold War Doctrines to Lower the Threshold for Nuclear War, and more

Rules Designed to Create Chaos  (Quinta Jurecic, The Atlantic)
The Trump administration is hoping to put so many restrictions on mail-in balloting that people simply won’t be able to vote that way at all.

He Showed Up for a Routine Green Card Appointment. Then Ice Detained Him.  (David J. Bier, CATO)
Arresting legal immigrants at their immigration appointments has become part of a new and terrifyingly common strategy for immigration enforcement.

Inside the Snowballing Conversations at A.I. Companies About a Doomsday  (Mike Isaac and Kate Conger, New York Times)
Researchers at Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta and Google are increasingly trying to raise awareness about the risks of artificial intelligence.

Why It’s Difficult for Tech Companies to Rein In A.I.  (Sheera Frenkel and Dylan Freedman, New York Times)
Researchers say artificial intelligence is developing faster than the systems put in place to monitor and control it.

‘I’m Really Terrified’: A Mathematician Grapples with AI’s Recent Breakthroughs  (Isabella Ward, Wired)
Steven Strogatz coauthored a book about how math is moving beyond human understanding. He spoke with WIRED about the seismic impact artificial intelligence has had on his life’s work.

Gen AI Tools Are Now Being Used to Push ‘Slop Jihad’  (David Gilbert, Wired)
A new generation of Islamic terror supporters are using AI to spread ‘Slop Jihad’ to new audiences on TikTok.

Pentagon’s Secret Plan: Reviving Cold War Doctrines to Lower the Threshold for Nuclear War  (Joe Cirincione, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)
A new nuclear policy is taking shape in secret, crafted by a small group of Pentagon officials, that will give President Donald Trump more ways to start a nuclear war. Little is known about the strategic nuclear review now under way in the Trump administration, but officials’ comments suggest that it may bring back one of the most dangerous policies of the Cold War: the proliferation of battlefield nuclear weapons and their early use in a conventional war.

Rogue AI Didn’t Breach Hugging Face, Human Decisions Did  (Eryk Salvaggio, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)
On August 26, when OpenAI released its full technical report on the Hugging Face hacking incident, alongside an independent report from the non-profit research institute Model Evaluation & Threat Research (METR), it sparked hundreds of headlines about “rogue AI,” and fueled a wave of panic.
The incident, as described by the media, involved more than 1,000 autonomous AI agents breaking out of their testing environment and coordinating an attack on the open-source platform, Hugging Face. Phrases such as “breaking containment” and “going rogue” fed a misunderstanding of the mechanisms behind these actions.
The real story is more banal.The emphasis on the model has steered attention away from human accountability. At the core of this incident were a series of human choices that traded security for speed. Focusing on the human decisions, rather than treating the system as an entity with its own agency, opens the door to a more rigorous analysis of what went wrong and what can be done about it.