Dean Ball helped devise much of the Trump administration’s AI policy. Now he cannot believe what the Department of Defense has done to one of its major technology partners, the AI firm Anthropic.
After weeks of negotiations, the Pentagon was unable to force Anthropic to accede to terms that, in Anthropic’s telling, could involve using AI for autonomous weapons and the mass surveillance of Americans, as my colleague Ross Andersen reported over the weekend.
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In the days since the U.S. and Israel first launched strikes against Iran, nearly 800 Iranians, six American service members, and at least ten Israelis have been killed. Israeli forces took out Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, over the weekend.
Updated with new questions at 3:50 p.m. ET on March 3, 2026.
There’s an old rule of thumb that you retain about 10 percent of what you read, 20 percent of what you hear, 30 percent of what you see via image or video, and so on up the ladder of experiential learning, until you get to a 90 percent retention rate for the things you learn by doing yourself.
The agent asks an Iranian: “Are you willing to work for Israel and the United States to overthrow the Khamenei theocratic regime?”
The Iranian replies: “I am willing!”
The agent says: “That’s awesome! A hundred thousand dollars!”
The Iranian looks troubled, hesitates for a moment, grits his teeth and says: “A hundred thousand it is! But I can’t come up with that much all at once—can I pay in installments?”
That joke, which I happened to come across today, sheds light on what’s happening in Iran.
When General Mark Milley outlined the U.S. Army’s future priorities in 2017, he said that new long-range missiles, improved tanks, and better-armed, better-trained infantrymen were vital to America’s domination of the next major conflict. But those plans, the then–Army chief and soon-to-be chairman of the Joint Chiefs said, came with an important caveat: The upgrades would be useless unless the military came up with a more effective air defense.
We speak with economist Michael Hudson, who details how President Trump opted to attack Iran despite progress at indirect U.S.-Iran negotiations. “The whole reason that America has attacked Iran has nothing to do with its getting an atom bomb,” but instead the aim was U.S. control of oil, says Hudson. The Trump administration may have been after the ability to “turn off the power” to countries that don’t follow U.S. foreign policy, he says.
Ofer Cassif, a member of leftist Hadash-Ta’al coalition in the Israeli Knesset, speaks with Democracy Now! from Israel about the war on Iran. As U.S. and Israeli officials claim that their military actions are against the regime, Cassif says their real goal is pursuing “imperialist interest” at the “expense of the peoples, including the people of Iran and the people of Israel.
Rami Khouri, Palestinian American journalist and distinguished public policy fellow at the American University of Beirut, speaks with Democracy Now! about the historical context of Western colonialism in the Middle East amid the war against Iran. Khouri says the U.S.-Israeli attack is the latest act “causing people across the world to look at the idea of … Western liberal democratic tradition as a hoax.
The U.S. is sending more troops and fighter jets to the Middle East as the regional war expands four days after the U.S. and Israel assassinated Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and struck sites across Iran. At least 787 people have died so far in Iran, according to local authorities. Iranian American journalist Negar Mortazavi says the feeling on the ground is of “horror and anxiety” and that U.S.
Hillary Frey and Anna Szymanski join Emily Peck to unpack the wild ride that was ‘Industry’ season 4.
A week after the Supreme Court ruled Trump’s tariff unconstitutional , no one really knows how or if tariff refunds will happen.
The Ellisons might have beat Netflix, but their $111 billion deal still needs to survive lawsuits, regulators, and a mountain of debt.
When the city needed digging out, it called its emergency shovelers. One Queens resident describes the pay, the crosswalks, and the yellow snow.
No one knows what happened. That explains what’s unfolding just north of Tucson.
Our friends at Planet Money have written a book! Author Alex Mayyasi takes us through a few of the best chapters.
The Trump administration wants to tackle fraud. Oz, a famed television host, has put his skills to the task.
Two Republican senators told POLITICO they were undecided after Means faced tough questions on her vaccine views at a nomination hearing.
Longstanding Republican orthodoxy on free markets and scant details are making Trump’s drug pricing law push difficult.
Supporters of the health secretary’s Make America Healthy Again movement are worried Kennedy is selling out.
The Trump administration is capping student loans, but doctors and dentists opposed to the health secretary will get more than his wellness allies.
Outward’s hosts sit down with the host and co-creator of When We All Get to Heaven.
The neighborhood changes, the church moves, people forget and remember “the AIDS years,” but AIDS isn’t over.
The AIDS cocktail opens new possibilities. And MCC San Francisco tries to use the experience of AIDS to make bigger social change.
The church’s minister gets sick and everyone knows it.
The church’s “it couple” faces AIDS, caregiving, and loss as part of a pair, part of families, and part of a community.
The president stopped in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s old district to defend his economic record.
A brief swing through the farm state underscored administration fears about the midterms.
Sixty-one percent of voters told a CNN poll released Friday that they disapprove of the way Trump is handling the economy.
Cori Bush is running for Congress again. Bush previously served two terms as a Democratic congressmember for Missouri, until she was unseated in 2024 following a multimillion-dollar attack campaign run by pro-Israel groups. Bush, a community activist who participated in the 2014 Ferguson uprising over the police killing of Michael Brown, was an outspoken critic of Israel in Congress and introduced a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza in October 2023.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Donald Trump has taken America into war with a country whose population is approximately the size of Iraq’s and Afghanistan’s combined. He has done this without making a case to the American people, and without approval of any kind from their elected representatives.