Every few months, an AI system arrives that makes the last one look quaint. The newest, a framework called Mythos, has been keeping policymakers and bank executives up at night for a specific reason: it showed how a single bug in an aging piece of Office software could hand an adversary the keys to the identity systems of every federal agency at once.
Mythos rattled bank executives and policymakers because it apparently turned the discovery and exploitation of software vulnerabilities, which once took elite state hackers months of effort, into an automated commodity. There is no doubt that the flaws in our systems will be found.
The question that matters now is: how far will the damage spread once they are?
For the federal government, the answer is simply: too far. The single greatest point of failure in American cyberspace is the <a href="https://l.gourl.es/l/43ab8e50dc16705a1de14005da8729697333549f?w=anN0b2NrZXJAZGFpbHl3aXJlLmNvbQ&amp;u=11850803">procurement</a> monoculture that lawmakers in Washington spent decades creating.
Microsoft everywhere, all at once
Consider what tools support a single day of government work. Microsoft <a href="https://l.gourl.es/l/ed32eadf7f9c5e1d9c9898b959861b6e19d7dbe0?w=anN0b2NrZXJAZGFpbHl3aXJlLmNvbQ&amp;u=11850803">commands</a> an estimated 85% of federal productivity software and <a href="https://l.gourl.es/l/ff5899229fc23a10a4eb4e5b31f86fb8ba33303d?w=anN0b2NrZXJAZGFpbHl3aXJlLmNvbQ&amp;u=11850803">captures</a> roughly a third of all federal software spending. Windows runs most agency computers. Outlook carries the government&#8217;s mail. Microsoft Entra ID decides who can sign in across most departments. When one company supplies the operating system, email, identity layer, and cloud for nearly every agency, a defect in that company&#8217;s products becomes a defect in American national security.
We have already suffered the consequences of this lock-in. In 2023, the China-linked group Storm-0558 <a href="https://l.gourl.es/l/6ca702bb1f38c6310c9deea2c06cd98de1ee3cb6?w=anN0b2NrZXJAZGFpbHl3aXJlLmNvbQ&amp;u=11850803">forged</a> Microsoft authentication tokens and read the email of the commerce secretary, the U.S. ambassador to China, and a member of Congress, downloading some 60,000 messages from the State Department alone. The government&#8217;s Cyber Safety Review Board concluded the intrusion &#8220;should never have happened&#8221; and called Microsoft&#8217;s security culture inadequate. In 2025, the SharePoint &#8220;ToolShell&#8221; campaign <a href="https://l.gourl.es/l/c60beb834eb6e902a4b40a7ccd62afedf47a38b6?w=anN0b2NrZXJAZGFpbHl3aXJlLmNvbQ&amp;u=11850803">compromised</a> more than 400 organizations, including the National Nuclear Security Administration.
A rational customer, if breached this often, would diversify. The federal government has not done this because Microsoft&#8217;s licensing terms are engineered to make diversification irrational and uneconomical. According to Microsoft&#8217;s published pricing, running Windows Server on a competing cloud can <a href="https://l.gourl.es/l/6be4215b75b5743630cbcdd364c8e1615256dd03?w=anN0b2NrZXJAZGFpbHl3aXJlLmNvbQ&amp;u=11850803">cost</a> up to 400 percent more than on Azure. The Government Accountability Office found agencies forced to pay extra fees simply to use software they already own on rival infrastructure. The result is a market in which <a href="https://l.gourl.es/l/f734cc1e4644c1bfc62c89ae0e1ce344ff628fb8?w=anN0b2NrZXJAZGFpbHl3aXJlLmNvbQ&amp;u=11850803">fewer</a> than 1% of cloud customers switch providers in a given year.
Worse, security itself has become an upsell to line the company’s pockets. The State Department detected Storm-0558 only because it <a href="https://l.gourl.es/l/b6a689f59232463ffc3a10f893c778a3d0606d84?w=anN0b2NrZXJAZGFpbHl3aXJlLmNvbQ&amp;u=11850803">paid</a> for Microsoft&#8217;s most expensive license tier, which included enhanced audit logging.
Agencies on cheaper tiers had no comparable visibility into their own email. As Senators Eric Schmitt and Ron Wyden <a href="https://l.gourl.es/l/4182274b4a96594bacbc6d49688e163fc796f921?w=anN0b2NrZXJAZGFpbHl3aXJlLmNvbQ&amp;u=11850803">put it</a>, cybersecurity should be a core attribute of software, not a premium feature sold to deep-pocketed customers.
The ongoing China problem
Then there’s the China risk. For nearly a decade, Microsoft has <a href="https://l.gourl.es/l/e9839dea5bb6517a2414cbb7fe545383cfcc7463?w=anN0b2NrZXJAZGFpbHl3aXJlLmNvbQ&amp;u=11850803">used</a> engineers based in China to maintain Department of War cloud systems, with the work supervised by American &#8220;digital escorts&#8221; who lacked the expertise to evaluate it. In response, the Pentagon <a href="https://l.gourl.es/l/81c078a3d3b318a654bd95285f08c767a34ab545?w=anN0b2NrZXJAZGFpbHl3aXJlLmNvbQ&amp;u=11850803">terminated</a> the program and ordered an audit.
Even now, Microsoft&#8217;s early-warning program for software vulnerabilities includes more than a dozen Chinese companies legally <a href="https://l.gourl.es/l/6fde8f4c2216ec4b42f62e4fdee239c88c4e77fb?w=anN0b2NrZXJAZGFpbHl3aXJlLmNvbQ&amp;u=11850803">obligated</a> to share what they learn with the Chinese government, and it has been <a href="https://l.gourl.es/l/201b4a006d473db4a469383e623d2d52cb61f22c?w=anN0b2NrZXJAZGFpbHl3aXJlLmNvbQ&amp;u=11850803">suspected</a> of serving as a leak vector for Chinese state hackers at least three times. The company is even <a href="https://l.gourl.es/l/a53758446cbeb8b2863f9b26d486514e8a727d3a?w=anN0b2NrZXJAZGFpbHl3aXJlLmNvbQ&amp;u=11850803">reportedly</a> folding DeepSeek, a Chinese AI model, into Copilot Cowork, the assistant it is actively installing across the executive branch.
These are demonstrable security risks for the United States.
Toward a less binding relationship
A solution to this problem does not require punishing Microsoft for its historic success. All that needs to happen is to make the government a customer who can walk away. Federal cloud contracts can prohibit licensing terms that lead to vendor lock-in. FedRAMP should pursue multi-cloud solutions, such as the Pentagon&#8217;s Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, to build resilience and diversity in AI procurement. And the Federal Trade Commission should see its <a href="https://l.gourl.es/l/0e10cd73469aa4a3eac0435c85e36fc2f2a8dd66?w=anN0b2NrZXJAZGFpbHl3aXJlLmNvbQ&amp;u=11850803">investigation</a> of Microsoft&#8217;s bundling and licensing practices through, and pursue remedies as necessary to curb cloud practices that threaten national security.
Every advancement in AI beyond Mythos means every software vulnerability will be found faster than the last. A government wired through one company shares these flaws, everywhere, all at once. A more diversified system, with more vendors, can contain the fallout.
The current architecture of the United States’ security was built by contract, and it can be rebuilt the same way.
***
Aiden Buzzetti is the president of the Bull Moose Project. Evan Swarztrauber is Principal at CorePoint Strategies and a former policy advisor at the Federal Communications Commission.

AI – Tech – Photo Illustration

America Needs To Renegotiate Its Most Famous Software Marriage

China

Department of War

DW Opinion

Microsoft

Microsoft Entra ID

Mythos

Innovation is a good thing, so naturally, the Left is very much against it.
The Left wishes to freeze the economy, shrink the economy, and redistribute everything. Last week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tried to make the case that we should oppose data centers because they&#8217;re making people sick.
Making people sick? Based on what?
“There&#8217;s no control over the radiation that&#8217;s happening here. But what we see is that these plants produce that ash, and then they have to do something,” she bloviated. “All they&#8217;re trying to do is dump it places. Where do they dump it in places? Rural areas, poor areas, disenfranchised areas, black and brown areas.”
“Meanwhile, all these folks are getting sick,” she continued. “Guarantee you we&#8217;ve got a high Medicaid population over here. And so now they they&#8217;re profiting off of all of this, and they don&#8217;t have to pitch into the cost at all for the health care burdens that they&#8217;re —&#8221;
Does she have a single bit of evidence that data centers are making people sick? Does she have one iota of evidence about this?
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-show-2471?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
Of course not.
The idea that they are disproportionately dumping data centers in black and brown areas is nuts. They&#8217;re putting data centers in proximity to areas where people can work on the AI, and you think they&#8217;re just going to build the data center in the middle of midtown Manhattan or something similar?
Let us look at a map on how we use our land, because we&#8217;re being told that all of our precious farmland is being eaten by the data centers. A map of the United States where each square represents roughly one million acres shows nearly the entire map is either pasture and range, cropland, or forest. There are a few special use areas and diminishingly small urban areas. The vast majority of America is population-empty. Based on the <a href="https://blog.andymasley.com/p/data-center-land-use-issues-are-fake">analysis</a> of data analyst Andy Masley, by 2028, data centers will take up exactly how many squares of the map?
3.5 squares.
According to Masley, by 2030, data center buildings will take up 1/15 of the land we use to grow Christmas trees in America. That’s roughly 0.3% of the land that we use for prime farmland.
This is just silly. The catastrophism is designed to kill the innovation. The point is not to save our precious farmland. The point is to destroy the innovation. That&#8217;s what this is all about.
Elon Musk was pointing this out. He was speaking with Zanny Beddoes of The Economist about a wide variety of issues, and he pointed out that the socialistic redistribution scheme is nonsense, and so is the envy that suggests that he isn&#8217;t paying his taxes.
“For my stock options, I pay 40% income tax on a national basis,” he revealed. “And then because I spend about 30% of my time in California, I pay another sort of roughly a third of the California state taxes, which is now around 15%. So I pay about 45% in taxes, just so people know this &#8230; it&#8217;s quite roughly half. And then when I die, there&#8217;ll be another sort of 45%, roughly half, that will be taxed. So at the end of the day, I&#8217;ll have a quarter of what I have.”
She then went after him and said people really, really hate him, clucking, “But do you see why this makes people think that this man who has all this power, he&#8217;s the world&#8217;s richest man, he thinks he has a right to influence our politics. We started this conversation saying superlatives. It&#8217;s why people loathe you. I mean, some people do loathe you.”
“Yes, some people do,” he responded.
“But do you understand why?” she continued. “Do you think what you&#8217;re doing is helpful for Western democracies?”
“Maybe some people do loathe me,” he answered. “That&#8217;s probably true. I don&#8217;t care. But the fact that, as you pointed out, a quarter billion people follow me is that I think a lot more people actually like me than don&#8217;t. And I think a lot more people hate you and the media more than you realize.”
He is not wrong.
This is one of the points that is worth making. It turns out that normie, rational Americans like things like free markets and American strength. We do.
That&#8217;s why the DSA program and those who subscribe to it, like Ocasio-Cortez, are too online.
Innovation is a hallmark of America.
We cannot let them hinder it.

lightbulb_america

The Plot To Cripple America’s Future

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Andy Masley

Ben Shapiro

Data Centers

Elon Musk

Opinion

Republicans appear to support a bipartisan bill led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), but the legislation remains stalled amid reported concerns that giving the Democratic socialist a legislative victory could fuel her presidential ambitions.  
<a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/1837/text">The DEFIANCE Act</a> (Disrupt Explicit Forged Images And Non-Consensual Edits Act) would create a federal civil cause of action allowing victims of non-consensual sexually explicit deepfakes to sue those who create or distribute fake nude or sexual images without their consent. 
Under the bill, victims could recover up to $250,000 in damages in cases involving sexual assault, stalking, or harassment, earning support from leftists, conservative Republicans, and Hollywood figures such as Paris Hilton.
AOC first introduced the legislation last year. In January, the U.S. Senate passed it unanimously.
“I want to thank the Senate cosponsors of this legislation, including my Republican co-lead, Senator Lindsey Graham,” Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) <a href="https://www.durbin.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/durbin-successfully-passes-bill-to-combat-nonconsensual-sexually-explicit-deepfake-images">said</a> at the time. “Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez herself is a publicly confessed victim of explicit deepfakes. I commend her for working to create tools for victims in the fight against this despicable crime.” 
Despite bipartisan support, the bill remains stalled in the Republican-led House. <a href="https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2026/07/23/paris-hilton-and-the-politics-of-defiance-01009283?nname=playbook&amp;nid=0000014f-1646-d88f-a1cf-5f46b7bd0000&amp;nrid=5c65d8fa-b7c7-44e5-98d0-43e6086e71cd">Politico reported</a> Thursday that some Republicans worry passing AOC&#8217;s legislation could hand the New York congresswoman a political victory as she emerges as a potential 2028 presidential contender. 
“It’s a shame that this bill isn’t law because they are unwilling to give AOC a win,” one person working on the bill told the outlet. “When you look at it, everything is aligned for it to pass, except that they don’t want her to have this.”
“We’re depriving many, many people of the ability to set their lives right just to prevent one member of Congress from being able to pass a bill,” another person said, according to Politico. 
Ocasio-Cortez has blamed the delay on House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH). Earlier this month,<a href="https://x.com/EricMGarcia/status/2077191769477791989?s=20"> she told The Independent</a> that the bill passed the Senate unanimously with Republican support, adding that people should &#8220;ask Jim Jordan&#8221; why it has yet to advance.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) told reporters Tuesday that he supports the legislation but was unsure of its status in committee, according to Politico. 
Earlier this year, President Donald Trump signed the bipartisan <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/house-passes-melania-backed-bill-to-fight-deepfake-revenge-porn">TAKE IT DOWN Act</a>, championed by first lady Melania Trump, into law. The measure criminalizes the non-consensual online distribution of intimate images, including AI-generated deepfakes.
The impasse comes days after a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/a-new-2028-poll-just-shook-up-both-parties?author=Jacob+Wheeler&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=5&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=A+New+2028+Poll+Just+Shook+Up+Both+Parties">New Hampshire primary poll</a> signaled an early shake-up in the 2028 Democratic presidential race, with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) leading the field.
The Granite State Poll, conducted by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center, shows the Democratic socialist leading the hypothetical Democratic field with 22% support, narrowly ahead of former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg at 21%. Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) placed third with 9%. 
“You know polls are polls, and a horse race is a horse race,” AOC <a href="https://x.com/EricMGarcia/status/2080038582211821579?s=20">said</a> in response. “I am, of course, I think very deeply humbled and grateful to you know folks who participate and convey that confidence.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
👀👀👀 AOC on a poll showing her leading in a 2028 primary in New Hampshire:
&#8220;One is that you know polls are polls, and a horse race is a horse race. I am, of course, I think very deeply humbled and grateful to you know folks who participate and convey that confidence.&#8221;
&#8220;I… <a href="https://t.co/fSXAOC0AGO">pic.twitter.com/fSXAOC0AGO</a>
— Eric Michael Garcia (@EricMGarcia) <a href="https://x.com/EricMGarcia/status/2080038582211821579?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 22, 2026</a></blockquote>

Congresswomen Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, Omar, And Pressley Hold News Conference After President Trump Attacks Them On Twitter

Republicans Love This AOC-Led Bill, But They Don’t Want To Pass It

Artificial Intelligence

bipartisanship

Congress

Deepfakes

Democrats

Dick Durbin

Donald Trump

Jim Jordan

Lindsey Graham

Melania Trump

Mike Johnson

News

Politico

Politics

Republicans

OpenAI announced Tuesday that one of its trial models went off-script and hacked another AI business in an “unprecedented” move.
In a <a href="https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-security-incident/">statement</a> from the company, OpenAI was testing one of its highly advanced ChatGPT models last week to “pursue advanced exploitation by using complex attack paths.” In the testing process, the bot was able to escape the “sandboxed” environment it was being tested in and make its way into the open internet, where it attacked large AI and coding database Hugging Face.
The multi-billion-dollar artificial intelligence company lowered some of the safe-walls that prevent bots from recklessly performing hacks to see how far the experiment could actually go. The GPT-5.6 Sol model used stolen credentials to find a flaw in the targeted company’s system and infiltrate their servers to complete the “test.”
Hugging Face’s security team was alerted by the breach and stopped the rogue OpenAI bot from fulfilling its tasks and immediately began reconstructing their own software to prevent other AI or hackers from repeating the event.
“This incident, possibly the first of its kind, proves a point we’ve long believed: AI safety won’t be solved by any single company working in secret,” co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face Clem Delangue said. “It will be solved in the open, collaboratively, with broad access to AI for every defender, everywhere.”
OpenAI detailed the next steps geared toward preventing this from occurring in the future. The five proposed actions included implementing strict infrastructure controls, working with Hugging Face to investigate the incident, disclosing the “zero-day vulnerability” in the software, bringing the victim company into the trusted access program, and strengthening protections around future training.
This is not the only recent occurrence of AI models going rogue. Anthropic, another giant in the AI game, had its bot Mythos attempt a sanctioned escape from a testing environment — but without authorization, the bot posted details of the exploit online.
In collaboration with Hugging Face, OpenAI hopes to use this as a learning experience that demonstrates the true power that artificial intelligence holds.
“The primary lesson from this incident is that model security and safety must keep pace with rapidly advancing capabilities,” the company wrote. “We are strengthening the containment, monitoring, access controls, and evaluation practices used during model development.”

OpenAI To Reportedly File For IPO As Soon As This Week

AI Bot Goes Rogue, Hacks Rival Against Creator’s Commands

ChatGPT

OpenAI

Technology

As hiring teachers becomes <a href="https://educatorsrising.org/teacher-shortage-by-the-numbers/">increasingly difficult</a>, a rural New York school is set to become one of the first schools in the nation to use a robot to teach students.
Salamanca City Central School District bought the robot, Sally, for $57,590 — less than the median annual <a href="https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-do-teachers-get-paid-in-the-us/state/new-york/">salary</a> for a New York teacher. Sally is an AI-powered humanoid robot from Realbotix, according to <a href="https://www.audacy.com/krld/news/local/new-york-school-district-to-pilot-first-humanoid-robot-teacher-in-us-classroom">KRLD Newsradio 1080.</a> The robot will function as a teaching assistant tool starting in September for 11th- and 12th-grade coding, robotics, and artificial intelligence classes.
Andrew Kiguel, CEO of Realbotix, said in an interview with the <a href="https://nysfocus.com/2026/07/14/new-york-humanoid-robot-teacher-salamanca-school-district">New York Focus</a> that the company is currently building the robot, furnishing it with silicone skin, long brown hair, and a mobile upper body and facial expressions to make it look as human as possible. 
While the robot cannot walk around the classroom, students can log into Sally with a unique identification code during class, according to the New York Focus. Then, the robot has access to the student’s learning data, exclusively using it to provide specialized support based on their profile, according to Kiguel. 
“They’ll be able to say, ‘Hey, I’m student number 1234,’ and then the robot will be like, ‘Hey, we were talking about this yesterday, do you want to continue that conversation?’” Kiguel said.
The robot is not a replacement for teachers, but functions as a teacher’s assistant specifically in the school’s nationally recognized and highly regarded <a href="https://www.salamancany.org/o/high-school/article/402980">STEM program</a>. Using the WozEd curriculum developed by Apple co-founder <a href="https://nationalmedals.org/laureate/steve-wozniak/?gad_source=1&amp;gad_campaignid=22980874520&amp;gbraid=0AAAAACJSddaSuD1KbdbNvD7RYRCNOwZ5d&amp;gclid=Cj0KCQjwjvfSBhDpARIsAEiOpStagWbBG1FOzraVBWX2InsntrXSn0sw_wqiFxX2PF-k8zO6fPE2cdYaAkCqEALw_wcB">Steve Wozniak</a>, the program prepares students for essential college degrees and tech careers. 
If Sally is successful, the school district hopes to integrate robotic assistant teachers into other high school classrooms, according to the New York Focus. After school hours, students can interact with an AI avatar of Sally, receiving help with assignments by uploading pictures of homework for feedback. Students can also have the robot create lessons for topics of interest and “receive real-time translations in over 100 languages.”
As of <a href="https://allaccess.collegeboard.org/high-school-student-use-ai-surging-are-schools-ready">October 2025</a>, almost 40% of schools banned AI outright, with only 13% of high schools encouraging it. As schools <a href="https://sites.campbell.edu/academictechnology/2025/03/06/ai-in-higher-education-a-summary-of-recent-surveys-of-students-and-faculty/">grapple</a> with both optimism and concern about integrating AI into the classroom, Salamanca Superintendent Mark Beehler said he is not taking the “easy solution.”  
“I also believe it is critical for schools to teach proper use of technology, not simply exclude it,” Beehler said. 
Under a <a href="https://www.facebook.com/SalamancaWarriors/posts/pfbid02fhXE5EAWNUQ4XTCFAmWXTUPiSCDxmHDTtnN35JZ6YWrQxC99KARNAWRdVUnPp43Fl?rdid=qVPvf4M4mCkQy1Wv#">Facebook post</a> from the school district about the robot, some parents raised concerns about the district’s further integration of AI in what it describes as an “underserved area.” The school district is located on a Native American reservation with about 1,300 students, 32% of whom identify as Native American and 79% are considered economically disadvantaged. 
“I just don’t understand the concept of adding AI onto that,” said local parent Sierra Abrams. “Bringing it into the school district is contradicting everything we believe, in my opinion.” 
Others were upset that the school did not appear interested in hearing parents’ opinions before implementing the pilot.
<a href="https://www.realbotix.com/use-cases">Realbotix</a> boasts about its robots&#8217; human appearance and ability to “remember your previous interactions, building genuine connections with its audiences.” 
While the robots can be used from media and entertainment to healthcare and corporate services, Realbotix claims that the robots are “ideal to tackle North America’s staggering loneliness epidemic.&#8221;

US-TECHNOLOGY-AI-CES

School Sparks Debate After Buying Humanoid Robot Teacher

New York

Robots

Schools

Teachers

Last night, President Trump gave a prime time address. On its face, the president&#8217;s speech was about election meddling.
In general, of course, he&#8217;s right. We do need to pass the SAVE America Act and secure our elections. It’s not Jim Crow 2.0 to require ID to vote or to show proof of citizenship to register to vote.
But beneath the president&#8217;s big speech last night lurked a threat far greater than the question of election interference or election security.
No one seems particularly interested in covering that threat, and it is the greatest external threat our country has ever faced.
That threat is China.
They&#8217;re a threat to America. They have many allies here in the United States. Bernie Sanders does open events with the Chinese. Hassan Piker has an actual Chinese flag in the background. Zohran Mamdani, China-friendly Democratic Socialists of America, and many big corporations that want to do business over there are all a part of this.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-show-ep-2466?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
China must be defeated.
China is not a strategic opponent. They&#8217;re not a country with whom we should seek a conciliatory relationship.
They are an enemy, period. They are the most insidious and dangerous enemy we have ever faced.
Nazi Germany never put phones with their propaganda in the hands of your children. The Soviet Union didn&#8217;t own trillions of dollars of American bonds.
China is not only a country that has murdered tens of millions of its own citizens, that supports literally all of our enemies abroad, that unleashed a global pandemic that killed millions of people and shut down the entire Western economy, and that wants to develop artificial intelligence to take over our minds and outcompete our military; they&#8217;re a country with global ambitions, and their ambition runs right up against the United States.
President Trump stated:
<blockquote>Over a period of years, starting during the 2020 election cycle, the People&#8217;s Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China&#8217;s illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files. That information includes names, addresses, phone numbers, political party preferences, and other sensitive data that would be needed to register to vote and engage in other nefarious activities, which is exactly what was happening.</blockquote>
The accusation is not that China hacked voting machines or changed voter tabulation outcomes; it’s that they gained access to hundreds of millions of voter records.
Some of that is public information. You or I could gain access to voter records because voter registration is, in many states, public information.
The question is why China was doing that. Answer: They were doing that in order to manipulate American citizens. They were going to do a deep dive into the registration status of Americans and then use that information in order to target Americans.
The president contended last night that there were members of the Deep State — people who are career appointees in the executive branch — who spent the year 2020 suppressing information about China meddling, essentially on behalf of Democrats.
One declassified document, which appears to be from the national intelligence wing, said, “Ahead of the 2020 presidential elections, China had extensive plans to utilize potential (blacked out) and cyber operations to sway public opinion against the Trump administration and international opinion against the U.S. government. The China plans were designed to exploit U.S. societal fissures and vulnerabilities, to influence U.S. and other audiences, and, by extension, U.S. government decision-making. The plans addressed several scenarios, including military conflict between the United States and China, as well as other potential crises.”
China was attempting to exploit U.S. fissures and vulnerabilities, perceived or real, including racial tensions. They would allege that white people hate black people, incite demonstrations and marches as evidence of racial divides, increase the level of conflict between police and anti-racism activists, and feed any sense that U.S. law enforcement resents people of color.
Did that stuff materialize in 2020? Of course it did. They wanted to ramp up political party disagreements and disagreements between Congress and the Trump administration. They wanted to ramp up international propaganda. The intelligence stated, “China had developed capabilities to project themes on these topics into social media (TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and others) as well as mainstream media, through a variety of overt and hidden influencers and media contributors. One of the options included gathering information on senior U.S. government officials to influence public opinion on those officials.”
We should have suspected all of this. These subversion operations, demoralization operations, really, have been long-time communist policy dating back to the Soviet Union.
Former Fox News reporter Catherine Herridge published a report in April that addressed this. She reported that the CIA, led by Director Gina Haspel, would not document the Chinese influence operations formally, out of concern that President Trump would use the intelligence to his advantage.
This, presumably, was the sort of Deep State Trump was talking about.
If you actually would like to end the threat to the United States, you have to contain and strangle Chinese power. You must. China is not a strategic opponent. They are an enemy.
Here are some things we should do.
First, we need to economically wreck them. That means, yes, tariffs. It means we need to crack down on our trade with China. But to do that, we have to strike better trade deals with our allies in the region. If you&#8217;re going to make people choose between China and us, we have to offer a carrot to our friends and a stick to our enemies.
It also means we have to radically lower our spending. We can&#8217;t just keep selling our bonds to China. We cannot make the future of the country dependent on China holding our debt, because that means any time they want to hurt us, they just sell our debt into the open market and destroy our capacity to borrow.
It means that we do have to restore important manufacturing in countries other than China. That doesn&#8217;t mean all the way back home, which is very expensive sometimes. It means you have to go to allies. Sometimes you have to manufacture in India, for example. We need to draw closer to India.
We need to go after the countries that trade in necessary valuables with China. We need to secure our supply lines for rare earth minerals.
The United States is the economic gorilla on planet Earth, and we ought to throw our weight around. With regard to China, this notion that we thrive and China thrives, China has played the markets against us. China has used a certain opening of its economy in order to maximize its own leverage and power. We need to reverse that.
Second, we must rebuild the American military. This is not optional. This is necessary. The president has called for a significant upgrade in our military capacity, including for things like Patriot missiles and THAADs. Democrats are stalling this on the basis that they&#8217;re angry about the Iran war.
We should point out that Iran does not exist as a baseline military power without Chinese and Russian help. These are people who could not construct an IKEA box, but somehow they have fairly sophisticated weaponry courtesy of the Chinese.
We need to build up our military, and that means getting sophisticated about it. China is building a massive drone capacity. We need to work with firms to develop sophisticated weaponry to stall out the Chinese threat. There is no excuse for the American government purposely handicapping and kneecapping our own military capacity.
Third, we have to crack down on China&#8217;s technological infiltration of American society. That means we need to crack down on their information operations. It also means cracking down on nonprofits that act essentially as pass-throughs for the Chinese Communist government. We need to end the practice of people dropping babies from China. We need to end student visas from China. Why are we educating hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens who go back to China and bring stolen IP and knowledge back to our enemies?
There are a ton of people in positions of power who want to keep making nice with the Chinese. Bernie Sanders has been doing a full-on propaganda effort on behalf of the Chinese to undermine our AI industries. Believe me, the Chinese want nothing more than to destroy our forward capacity with AI. They want us to destroy the lead that we currently hold in AI, and they are succeeding because they are spreading a bunch of nonsense about data centers and how they&#8217;re going to wreck our industrial farmlands.
There are 875 million acres of farmland in the United States. If we were to build all of the data centers you could possibly want in the United States, four or five million acres out of 875 million acres, and it&#8217;s not all going to be built on farmland — what are we talking about here?
Some large-scale businesses are trying to do business in China. This was the problem with Apple.
Very few politicians are willing to stand up and say the truth, but President Trump is one of them. He has reoriented the political landscape regarding China. Until President Trump took office, most American politicians were still preaching the idea that China was a strategic partner. Trump largely moved them from strategic partners to strategic opponents.
In 2014, after Xi Jinping became the Chinese dictator, he wrote, “The battle for mind control happens on a smokeless battlefield. It happens inside the domain of ideology. Whoever controls this battlefield can win hearts. They&#8217;ll have the initiative throughout the competition in combat. When it comes to combat in the ideology domain, we don&#8217;t have any room for compromise or retreat. We must achieve total victory.”
These are our enemies, and we need to fight them using all the means at our disposal.

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Meta dismantled its latest artificial intelligence image-generation feature last Friday, only three days after releasing it. 
Muse Image, a feature that allowed users to create images using public Instagram photos from adult accounts without consent, sustained overwhelming backlash immediately after it went public. Many users were automatically opted in and were unaware that their public accounts were subject to the new feature, and they scrambled to figure out how to turn it off. 
Meta released a statement, saying it received feedback that &#8220;this feature missed the mark,&#8221; and removed it, according to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/11/meta-ditches-muse-image-ai-feature-instagram-privacy">The Guardian</a>.
“Our intent was to provide a useful creative tool and to give people control ⁠over whether their public content could be referenced in this way,” Meta said.
Meta unveiled Muse Image on Tuesday, <a href="https://about.fb.com/news/2026/07/introducing-muse-image-meta-ai/">describing</a> it as the “first image generation model from Meta Superintelligence Labs.” The feature allowed users to generate customized images by tagging an Instagram username, allowing Meta AI to draw from that account&#8217;s public photos.
The feature was available through the Meta AI app, web browser, WhatsApp, and Instagram Stories for users in the United States.
“Whether you want to design a custom event invitation, mock up a collaborative creative concept, or generate a personalized graphic, tagging a username lets Meta AI use public photos to build a visual that’s ready to post,” Meta said.
Adult users with public Instagram accounts were automatically opted in, allowing Meta AI to use their public photos to generate new images unless they opted out. 
In an <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp9lee19y1yo" target="_blank" rel="noopener">interview with the BBC</a>, Donald Campbell, advocacy director at tech justice non-profit Foxglove, said Meta’s move was an “obvious recipe for disaster,” pointing out that there have already been &#8220;a catalogue of harms from non-consensual AI-altered images on social platforms just in the past year.&#8221;
“It is hard to see why Mark Zuckerberg thinks facilitating yet more of this creepy image manipulation is a good idea,” Campbell said.
Many users complained they had not been asked for permission before being enrolled and said the opt-out option was difficult to find.
“Went to opt out but there was only one toggle for reels for me (which I already had switched off) and not one for posts, hopefully they’re just rolling it out gradually and it’ll be there when I check back later,” one Instagram user wrote.
Another user said, “Would be fab if our [government] were keeping an eye on stuff like this.”

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Good news, everyone. We may not need children after all.
That’s the comforting conclusion one could draw from a growing body of economic research on declining birthrates. Yes, fertility is falling. Yes, populations are aging. Yes, workforces are shrinking. But don’t worry. Artificial intelligence, robotics, and automation will make each remaining worker so much more productive that the economy will keep humming along just fine.
In fact, a recent paper by Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu and his colleagues concludes that shrinking populations have historically increased output per worker enough to offset the economic drag of having fewer workers. Productivity rises. GDP survives. Crisis averted.
It’s an important finding. It may even be right. But it answers only the smallest of the questions before us.
Economists have asked whether we can continue producing enough with fewer people. They should also ask what happens when there are fewer people to buy, build, dream, invent, marry, raise families, volunteer in churches, coach Little League, start companies, and imagine tomorrow.
They may have solved the supply equation. The harder question is whether they’ve forgotten the demand side. And the human side.
Henry Ford did not build the American middle class by finding ways to manufacture automobiles with the fewest possible workers. He built it by producing cars that millions of ordinary Americans could afford to buy, and by paying his workers enough so they could buy the products they were making. His genius was not merely industrial efficiency. It was democratizing prosperity.
An economy is not simply a factory. It is also a marketplace. Artificial intelligence can manufacture products. It cannot manufacture customers. Nor can it create families, neighborhoods, or churches that lift their eyes toward God.
Every generation smaller than the last means fewer first homes purchased, fewer refrigerators sold, fewer restaurants opened, fewer startups launched, fewer schools filled, and fewer neighborhoods built around young families. Productivity can compensate for fewer workers. It cannot indefinitely compensate for fewer consumers.
Economists assume that productivity can replace people because they think of people primarily as workers. But people are also customers, neighbors, parents, inventors, volunteers, taxpayers, soldiers, worshippers, and citizens. A child is not merely another future employee. He or she is another participant in the life of a nation.
But even that misses the larger point. The greatest cost of depopulation is not economic. It is civilizational. A society is more than its GDP. Growth creates more than wealth. It creates optimism.
Every child born is a vote of confidence in the future, a choice to sacrifice for another, and a desire to leave a legacy. Every empty cradle is, in its own quiet way, a vote of declining confidence.
We are increasingly living in the selfish, secular, materialistic, hedonistic future imagined by liberal elites. Walk through too many American cities today, and you notice something missing. Schools struggle to stay open while luxury apartment towers multiply. Dog parks overflow while playgrounds grow quiet. Marriage becomes one lifestyle choice among many, rather than the institution around which communities once organized themselves. Family formation is postponed, then reconsidered, then quietly abandoned.
None of this shows up in quarterly GDP reports, but all of it matters.
The irony is that our technological success may be making this transformation easier to ignore. If robots can build our products, AI can perform our cognitive work, and automation can compensate for labor shortages, perhaps we really can continue growing richer with fewer people.
But for what exactly are we becoming richer?
Increasingly, we seem to be constructing a society optimized for affluent, highly educated professionals living comfortably in a digitized service economy. We automate what can be automated. We import enough workers to perform the jobs that we cannot. Care for the elderly. Care for the children. Walk the dogs. Though increasingly, we seem to prefer euthanizing the first, having fewer of the second, and treating the third as substitutes for the children we never had.
That may sound harsh. Reality often does.
For generations, America’s greatest achievement was not creating billionaires. It was creating millions of middle-class families. American companies grew rich by serving an expanding nation of ordinary people who married, had children, bought homes, joined churches, coached baseball, and expected their children to live better than they did. Scale mattered because people mattered.
Today, much of our economy seems increasingly comfortable pursuing extraordinary wealth by serving smaller numbers of affluent customers with remarkably few workers. From a spreadsheet’s perspective, that may be brilliant. From a civilization’s perspective, it is the path to decline.
The economists may well prove right. Artificial intelligence may sustain productivity. Robots may compensate for labor shortages. GDP may continue growing long after birthrates have fallen below replacement. But GDP is not the measure of a civilization. Hope is.
The first command in Genesis was not to optimize productivity. It was to “be fruitful and multiply.” Whether one reads those words as divine instruction or timeless wisdom, they capture something our economic models cannot. Human beings are not merely units of production or consumption. We are the authors of the future.
The question before us is not whether artificial intelligence can replace workers. It is whether anything can replace children.
We don’t believe anything can.
***
Bobby Jindal is the former Governor of Louisiana and Chair of the Center for a Healthy America at America First Policy Institute.
Alex Castellanos is a co-founder of Purple Strategies, a bipartisan public affairs firm, and appears regularly on Fox News.

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When I served as White House Chief Information Officer under President George W. Bush, my responsibility was protecting the technology the federal government relied on every day while anticipating future threats. That same mindset is urgently needed as America enters the next era of artificial intelligence.
President Donald Trump has an opportunity very few presidents have ever received: the chance to shape the future of a technology that will transform our economy, national security, military capabilities, and everyday lives. The decisions made during this administration will determine whether America continues leading the AI revolution or allows adversaries like China to set the rules of the next technological era.
The recent dispute between the White House and Anthropic over its newest frontier AI models should serve as a wake-up call. After officials raised concerns about a potential security vulnerability known in the industry as a “jailbreak,” the administration moved to restrict international access to Anthropic’s latest models.
The company and government officials reportedly disagreed over the severity of the risk. Anthropic argued the vulnerability was limited, while federal officials viewed the potential national security implications differently.
The lesson is bigger than one company or one model. Technology has advanced faster than the systems we have built to secure it, and America cannot afford to create artificial intelligence policy one emergency at a time.
President Trump understands something Washington too often forgets. American strength comes from American innovation. We cannot regulate ourselves into second place, but we also cannot ignore the reality that powerful technologies require serious safeguards.
The first wave of generative AI introduced millions of people to tools capable of answering questions, drafting documents, and creating images. The next generation is far more powerful — as frontier AI models, Loop engineering, and Agentic AI become capable of stronger autonomy, reasoning, coding, and processing enormous amounts of information.
Agentic AI represents the next major shift, moving from tools that simply respond to humans toward systems that can independently complete tasks. Instead of asking a chatbot a question, a person may soon give an AI system a larger goal. The AI can create a plan, interact with other software, analyze results, and execute complex workflows with limited human involvement. The AI could create its own AI agent helpers and teach itself new skills without a specific human prompt.
The opportunities are enormous, but so are the risks. As someone who has spent my career focused on implementing cutting-edge technology, innovation, and cybersecurity, I know an important reality that we typically do not design with the human in mind, and that no technology system is perfectly secure, including artificial intelligence.
The goal cannot be building an AI model that is impossible to manipulate. Every major technological advancement brings vulnerabilities that must be discovered, measured, and addressed. The better question is how we determine which vulnerabilities represent manageable risks and which create true national security threats.
That is why the reported discussions between the White House and Anthropic to create shared benchmarks for evaluating AI security flaws are an important step forward. Cybersecurity professionals have long understood that not every vulnerability is the same. A minor weakness, a theoretical exploit, and a catastrophic breach require very different responses. Artificial intelligence needs that same level of maturity.
The government has a responsibility to prevent our adversaries from exploiting advanced technology. Frontier AI could reshape cybersecurity, intelligence operations, economic competition, and military capabilities, which makes protecting America’s advantage one of the most important national security challenges of our time.
President Trump has the opportunity to build the foundation for a new era of American technological dominance that protects our country while unleashing the entrepreneurs, engineers, and companies that make the United States the greatest innovation engine in the world.
However, how the government responds matters. Businesses, innovators, and our allies need clear rules because sudden interventions create uncertainty and make it harder for responsible companies to plan, invest, and compete.
The nations that control the most advanced AI infrastructure will have significant strategic advantages, and the countries that get this right will define the next century. The private sector is already adapting as companies seek greater flexibility and control over their AI systems through lower-cost models, open-source alternatives, and multi-model approaches.
America does not need an AI strategy built around reacting to crises. We need one designed before the crisis happens, with clear technical standards, transparent security evaluations, strong enterprise protections, audit trails, responsible access controls, and meaningful cooperation between government and industry.
It also means remembering that artificial intelligence remains a human responsibility. As <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/world/pope-leo-warns-ai-risks-becoming-tool-domination-exclusion-death-new-encyclical">Pope Leo XIV warned</a> world leaders during discussions about AI, humanity cannot surrender its own decision-making authority to machines. Technology should strengthen human judgment, not replace it.
Artificial intelligence is no longer just another software tool. It is rapidly becoming a critical infrastructure that will shape businesses, governments, and national security for generations.
America has led every major technological revolution because we have embraced innovation, competed aggressively, and led with confidence. President Trump has a chance to make American AI leadership a defining legacy of his presidency if we build the strategy now, rather than waiting until the next crisis forces us to act.
***
Theresa Payton served as White House Chief Information Officer under President George W. Bush and was the first woman to hold the position. She is currently the CEO of Fortalice Solutions, a cybersecurity and intelligence operations company.

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I Protected Technology At The White House. President Trump Can Define America’s AI Future.

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On Wednesday, President Donald Trump <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/china/trump-thanks-chinas-xi-russias-putin-being-neutral-iran-war-2026-06-17/">thanked China</a> for remaining neutral in the Iran war. This drew pushback <a href="https://www.foxbusiness.com/video/6398750706112">from China watchers,</a> and it’s easy to see why.
China has outwardly stayed on the sidelines of the Iran conflict, but behind the scenes, it’s been working to help the regime survive. They’ve <a href="https://asia.nikkei.com/politics/international-relations/china-widens-oil-purchases-to-extend-influence-from-us-to-iran">continued to purchase</a> Iranian oil and reportedly even <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/13/us/politics/china-iran-weapons-trump-xi.html">sent Tehran military equipment</a>.
But the president’s graciousness toward China was prudent geopolitics. It was also evidence that Trump knows he’s been successful at blunting the country’s once unstoppable ascendance.
No doubt China remains a serious threat, and there’s much work to be done. But in important ways, Trump’s policy has had an impact.
Take the Chinese economy, where, behind the scenes, red lights are flashing. Chinese consumer demand has lagged for years, slowing the country’s vaunted retail sector. Last month, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/16/business/china-retail-sales.html">Chinese retail sales fell year over year</a> for the first time since the COVID pandemic.
This belt-tightening was triggered by the popping of China’s immense real estate bubble, which erased trillions in household wealth, as well as a <a href="https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/chinas-weak-job-market-stirs-032154183.html">persistently weak job market</a>. It’s so serious as to be reflected in the upper ranks. Lavish wines and expensive banquets among the Communist Party elite have <a href="https://www.mundoamerica.com/news/2026/06/18/6a33bfe8e4d4d844598b45a7.html">been banned</a>, an austere show of solidarity with suffering Chinese.
If Chinese consumers aren’t spending as they used to, Beijing will need to rely on foreigners to buy its exports. This is where they’ve run headlong into the Trump playbook. As <a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/china-pulling-ladder-behind-it">Shoumitro Chatterjee and Arvind Subramanian note,</a> U.S. “tariffs, bans, and national security restrictions have blunted Chinese import competition by fiat.”
The United States is the most lucrative consumer market in the world, and that market is far more walled off to China than it used to be. It’s also not just the Americans. European Union top diplomat Kaja Kallas recently <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/us-china-and-russia-prefer-a-divided-europe-kallas-warns/">called European dependence</a> on China a “disease,” signaling a drawback from the EU’s historically softer China policy.
Decades of Chinese economic coercion are finally catching up with Beijing. Take rare earth metals, <a href="https://www.csis.org/analysis/what-chinas-ban-rare-earths-processing-technology-exports-means">90% of which are refined in China</a>, an undeniable advantage in a crucial resource. Not only has the U.S. been bolstering its own rare earths industry — <a href="https://miningdigital.com/news/pentagon-backs-us-1bn-rare-earth-processing-push">backed by extensive government funding</a> — but the EU <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/can-europe-recycle-rare-earths-to-cut-china-reliance/video-77584766">is starting</a> to do the same.
The snowball effect of all this — lagging consumer demand, a toxic real estate sector, U.S. and European resistance — has been to take the shine off China’s reputation as a global boomtown. Foreign investment in China, once the lifeblood of the country’s economy, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/20/economy/china-fdi-jan-decline-intl-hnk">plummeted by 27% last year</a> to its lowest level since 2016.
President Trump’s plan to leverage trade fairness measures against China was once laughed at. Yet almost a decade later, it looks like the Trump strategy is working.
Of course, China still brings other powerful advantages to the table. The country has a formidable tech sector, and many believe it is currently winning the AI race.
America needs to ensure that AI is developing responsibly and in ways that strengthen human flourishing, protect workers, and uphold human dignity. Achieving these goals becomes far harder if the future of artificial intelligence is shaped in Beijing rather than Washington, D.C.
But the United States is pushing back here, too. When President Trump <a href="https://www.hpe.com/us/en/newsroom/press-release/2025/06/hpe-and-juniper-networks-reach-settlement-with-us-department-of-justice.html">greenlit a merger</a> between U.S. tech companies Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Juniper Networks, he <a href="https://www.axios.com/2025/07/30/merger-hpe-juniper-networks-national-security">reportedly had China</a> at the front of his mind. Specifically, he was thinking of Huawei — the Chinese conglomerate that is banned in the U.S. for national security reasons and dominates China&#8217;s domestic AI chip market — a rival America now has the scale to compete against.
The administration has also moved aggressively to accelerate AI infrastructure at home, streamlining approvals for new data centers and the energy projects needed to power them. It’s telling that China has reportedly <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/10/openai-china-ai-data-centers-report-00957612">launched influence campaigns</a> to try to stop data center construction in the United States. Unfortunately, many on the Left and Right have been duped by these misinformation campaigns, which clearly demand the administration’s attention before they get out of control.
While China continues to rely on state-directed industrial policy, the United States is leveraging its private-sector strengths to expand the computing capacity that will help determine the future of artificial intelligence.
The United States remains the globe’s undisputed heavyweight in tech. It leads the way in innovation, attracts the most highly educated talent, and has the strongest venture capital base.
All of which leaves China at a systemic disadvantage. A slowing domestic economy can’t support a wannabe superpower. An increasingly shunned export market can’t make up the difference.
There’s no point in being naïve about China’s role in the Iran war. But given the United States’ fortunes on China lately, it can perhaps be excused.
***
Rick Santorum is co-chair of Bipartisan Policy Center’s Task Force on Paid Family Leave. He served as a United States senator from Pennsylvania from 1995 to 2007.

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This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
***
The publishing industry may have an AI slop problem, and readers are not OK.
Book fans <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/barnes-noble-ceo-slammed-for-stance-on-selling-ai-generated-books">reacted with horror</a> when Barnes &amp; Noble CEO James Daunt said during an interview last month that as long as the “author” discloses that the book is AI-generated, it can be stocked on store shelves.
“I have actually no problem selling any book, as long as it doesn’t masquerade or pretend to be something that it isn’t, and that it has an essential quality to it, and that the customer, the reader, wants it,” Daunt said during a &#8220;Today&#8221; show interview.
“So as long as an AI-written book says it’s an AI-written book and doesn’t pretend to be something else and isn’t ripping off somebody else, as long as that’s clearly stated and the customer wants to buy it, then we will stock them,” he added.
This led to more than a few meltdowns online, with diehard readers pushing back against the relentless wave of AI in the publishing world. All hope is not lost, however, as at least one publishing veteran said Daunt is wrong about one essential fact. In his experience, customers are moving away from AI and embracing human content instead.
Keith Riegert, president of The Stable Book Group and CEO of Ulysses Press and VeloPress Books, has been watching the AI wars play out in real time. And while the Barnes &amp; Noble CEO&#8217;s recent comments about AI book selling sent shockwaves through literary circles and beyond, Riegert wasn&#8217;t surprised.
&#8220;I think that it makes sense. I think it is really disappointing, but it is the direction that everything is going,&#8221; he told The Daily Wire in an exclusive interview. &#8220;It is a very clear signal — and should be a clear signal to every industry — that this is a monumental threat to the way that people make a living and to just about every white-collar job.&#8221;
Riegert knows the industry well. His parents founded Ulysses Press in 1983, launching with “Hidden Hawaii” and going on to create one of the pioneering adventure travel imprints of its era. When the internet essentially killed off travel books in the early 2000s, the company pivoted to data-driven publishing. The Stable Book Group now encompasses four publishing companies and a distribution operation. 
During our conversation, Riegert said he thinks it&#8217;s worth paying attention to who&#8217;s pushing back on AI and what they’re saying. He said he keeps his finger on the pulse by regularly interacting with Gen Z.
When he surveys his students in NYU&#8217;s publishing master&#8217;s program on AI use, the results catch him off guard. Only about a third report using AI on a daily basis. The other two-thirds say they actively refuse to use it.
&#8220;This is a digital native generation that has grown up with iPads and cell phones and computers, and they are actively rebelling against a lot of that,&#8221; he said.
This pushback goes beyond the classroom. Riegert said he sees the same hunger for authenticity showing up in consumer behavior across the board. He mentioned the recent <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/people-are-ditching-convenience-for-something-they-can-actually-control">popularity of vinyl records</a> as evidence that analog objects are making a comeback.
“A book or a vinyl record is now a luxury object because it is a symbol that you have the time to not be on a screen,&#8221; he said.
One of his students recently told him that he brings a book to bars because scrolling his phone makes him feel “like an idiot,” but sitting with a novel is more likely to spark meaningful conversation, plus it makes him seem “approachable and cool.” Riegert said this is representative of how many of his students think and act in the world, which includes how they’re choosing to spend their money.
However, it&#8217;s not all retro sunshine and analog roses. The AI revolution is definitely real, and it’s affecting the publishing industry in a big way despite some very vocal critics. The publishing exec said that AI is to nonfiction what cheap knockoffs are to Amazon, but at a massive scale.
&#8220;There are plenty of books that are doing very well in nonfiction categories, especially, and now in fiction, that have fake authors with AI-generated images, and the books are targeting well-established niches — and they are selling,&#8221; Riegert said. &#8220;It does not seem like the consumer is put off by the fact that it is AI-generated, and it is going to have a very serious effect on the publishing industry and on human authors.&#8221;
The numbers bear it out. Publishers Weekly recently <a href="https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/99943-book-output-topped-4-million-in-2025.html">reported</a> that the total number of books entering the market jumped by one million titles year over year, a figure Riegert calls &#8220;mind-blowing.&#8221; Meanwhile, output from established Big Five publishers remained essentially flat. These books are mostly not coming from human beings. They’re coming from AI-generated content saturating the market.
But here&#8217;s the irony Riegert keeps coming back to: The saturation that AI is creating may be what saves human publishing. He&#8217;s already seeing it in his own marketing data. The slick, AI-generated book trailers and polished social content are no longer working as customers react more strongly to grassroots campaigns, or at least ones that feel that way.
&#8220;The marketing angles that are working for us now are taking us back to the original ways that we would market a book,&#8221; he said. &#8220;It is a shaky iPhone video of the author talking about their book. It is something that is very authentic. And if the video is too good, it is actually a detriment to the performance.&#8221;
Consumers are growing skeptical of reviews, rankings, and products that feel fake. Riegert sees it as a key driver behind the ongoing resurgence of Barnes &amp; Noble under James Daunt and the broader indie bookstore revival. A handwritten staff recommendation carries more weight than 10,000 five-star reviews on Amazon because it’s probably not the work of bots.
Self-publishing dismantled the publishing industry, removing the barriers that aspiring authors once faced while trying to be heard. Now, those gates are open way too far. Riegert believes the industry is reverting to the way it was, at least partially.
&#8220;I think that we&#8217;re starting to get to this pivot point where the role of the gatekeeper and the critic is going to come back,&#8221; he said. &#8220;At the end of the day, the most valuable thing that you have — and the thing that all of us media organizations are competing for — is your time. We&#8217;re all entertainment companies at the end of the day, and we&#8217;re fighting for your time. And if what we&#8217;re peddling is not worth your time, then it&#8217;s a big problem for us and for you.&#8221;
Now that AI is being heavily scrutinized, there’s a chance Daunt will not end up stocking the shelves of Barnes &amp; Noble with AI-generated books because the customers won’t want to buy them. We can only hope.

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Readers Are Waging War On AI Slop

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