Ternus, senior vice president of hardware engineering and a 25-year Apple veteran, is, by all accounts, calm, collegial, and technically formidable. No doubt there are people who will lament the choice, yearning for someone more like Jobs and designer Jony Ive. That partnership, from 1997 to 2011, forged the soul of Apple with a spate of hit products including the candy-colored iMacs and iBooks, plus the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Back then Apple’s achievements weren’t just in tech; they were in design, even human spirit. Jobs wanted to build products that “make our hearts sing.” And he did.

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But the centerpiece of my talk went further. AI, I argued, could not only help us live healthier and more sustainably, but has the potential to help us live more morally. To illustrate my point, I described my process of giving GPT-5 the following prompt:

Drawing from the full spectrum of human history including philosophy, religion, spiritual teachings, indigenous wisdom, and humanist traditions, what are the 10 most fundamental rules that, if sincerely followed by all people, would most likely create the highest levels of love, peace, mutual respect, and justice across humanity?

The response I received was simple and profound:

1. Treat every being with compassion and dignity.

2. Do no harm; actively protect the vulnerable.

3. Speak and act truthfully, with integrity and humility.

4. Share generously, especially with those in need.

5. Seek to understand others before judging them.

6. Resolve conflict with fairness, forgiveness, and the intent to heal.

7. Live in harmony with nature and all forms of life.

8. Value wisdom over dominance; cultivate inner growth.

9. Honor the freedom and uniqueness of others.

10. Remember the sacredness of life. Live with awe, gratitude, and love.

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“I’m an electrician,” he said. Chase, 24, did what he describes as a pointless semester at Southern Virginia University. “I went for criminal justice and they gave me a bunch of random classes—English, some communications class,” he said. He dropped out and started working for the Long Island, New York, firm RMD Electric—and he has no regrets. “I have friends who went to college and now they have to get jobs in things their degrees aren’t even related to.”

If you believe the hype about the AI apocalypse, his trajectory is about to become a lot more common. “Learn a trade” has become, in the words of The Wall Street Journal, “a rallying cry,” spurred by “fears of an AI ‘jobpocalypse.’ ”

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It was only 11 a.m., but he’d spent the entire morning lugging campaign yard signs around town in his blue Chevy pickup truck. Smith jokes he’s been “living in” the truck for the past few months as he campaigns to keep his seat as county commissioner.

The race has become one of the most hotly contested in the county. In January, 67-year-old Smith and his two fellow county commissioners voted to grant Google a 75 percent tax abatement to build a data center in Franklin Furnace, the rural town of about 1,500 that sits on the bank of the Ohio River in the shadow of the Appalachian Mountains. Google is seeking nearly 800 acres of land by the river and has plans to build at least 1.7 million square feet of data centers in up to 10 phases over the course of two decades.

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If that name sounds familiar, it’s because this week he was charged with attempting to kill OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. In the early hours of Friday morning, authorities say, he hurled a Molotov cocktail at Altman’s home. He then allegedly traveled to OpenAI’s headquarters and threatened to burn the building down.

Months earlier, my colleagues and I had found Moreno-Gama on a Discord server called Stop AI, where he was posting under the username Butlerian Jihadist (apparently he is a Dune fan). We were reporting an episode of our podcast series The Last Invention, where we’ve been documenting the debates around the attempt to create artificial general intelligence (AGI)—the digital supermind that the leading AI labs believe may profoundly change human life forever.

In our series, we’ve been attempting to cover all sides and all the beliefs shaping our world’s view of this fascinating, bewildering technological moment. In these debates, Moreno-Gama belonged to a small but hard-line camp: His posts suggested he believed that the time had come to use violence to stop AGI. In a post on Discord that caught our attention, he asked the group whether he would get banned for talking about violence.

One of our reporters DMed him asking him to elaborate, and he said he was interested in “Luigi-ing some tech CEOs.”

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Last week, Anthropic announced Claude Mythos, the latest in what has become the leading family of AI models. In a very short time, AI models from Anthropic and other companies have become shockingly powerful at coding. But Mythos stands out because it is not just able to write code that can hack into critical systems, like those that run financial companies, but also to analyze systems and find and string together vulnerabilities in them, allowing Mythos to evade even sophisticated defenses.

Anthropic chose to release Mythos to only about 40 leading corporations, so they could analyze the model’s capabilities and prepare countermeasures, in an effort it calls Project Glasswing. The release of Mythos—and the prospect of similarly powerful AIs to follow—has caused tremors at the top levels of Washington and corporate America.

Jared Kaplan, co-founder and chief science officer at Anthropic, is at the center of this breakthrough. We sat down with Kaplan so he could walk us through just how powerful Mythos is, what the implications are for issues like our personal privacy, and what comes next. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Sean Fischer: For the layman, how is Claude Mythos different—more powerful, more dangerous—from previous models released by Anthropic?

Jared Kaplan: I think most people have experienced the fact that our computers get faster and faster over time and over many decades. There’s this very smooth trend where every 18 months, maybe, computer processing power doubles. I think AI is on a trend in which it’s improving maybe 10 times faster than that. A lot of the earliest work that I did in AI was around identifying this scaling trend in AI.

Claude Mythos is the latest model from Anthropic, but it’s not different because it’s qualitatively different. It’s really just kind of the culmination of the trend of AI models getting smarter and smarter at all kinds of general capabilities, from reasoning to software engineering to scientific research to knowledge work.

For us, it was the first model to demonstrate very elite-level cybersecurity capabilities. It wasn’t because we trained Claude Mythos to focus on cybersecurity, but it was because, as a byproduct of its general intelligence and its general ability with software, it’s particularly good at identifying vulnerabilities in software and how to exploit them.

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It was a Friday evening in Washington. I had been spending it like any other 27-year-old would—drinking a Modelo and nerding out with some other young professionals about critical mineral supply chains. But my time at the bar was cut fatefully short by a call from an FBI agent.

I had been targeted in a sophisticated breach from a state actor.

I needed a new number, a new device, a new everything. Immediately.

The next morning I walked into the Apple Store at Carnegie Library. “Hi there—” a sales agent started before I raised an index finger to my lips. “Yeah, yeah. Can I just . . . set this . . . over here for a second?” I stashed my iPhone in the base of a potted plant while he raised a confused brow.

“Now that we can speak privately, I’d like to buy a new iPhone.” No, I didn’t want to restore an iCloud backup. Yes, I was sure.

The next 72 hours were some of the worst of my life. I cataloged every digital service I had ever used—emails, banks, VPNs, rideshare apps, music, social media, entertainment, Duolingo—and rebuilt each one: new email, new password, new two-factor authentication. I lost all my personal photos—and more than $200 in Dunkin’ Donuts rewards points.

Little did I know this was just the beginning. The next week brought dozens of phishing emails, failed two-factor authentication logins into my social media accounts, and alarming messages from Google’s security team. Attackers even spoofed location-sharing requests from my own mother.

It was my first rodeo with a highly motivated state actor. And I won’t be the only American this happens to. After Anthropic unveiled an AI last week that can scan the world’s software for weaknesses and exploit them faster than any human ever could, it may happen to you, too.

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“This should be a nightly occurrence.”

“All I can say is I’m disappointed that they didn’t train their aim.”

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

These were just some of the messages on Reddit and social media in the hours after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was attacked. The point, in all of them, was the same: Altman had it coming.

On Friday, April 10, at 3:45 a.m., Daniel Alejandro Moreno-Gama allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at Altman’s San Francisco home while Altman, his husband, and his baby were asleep. It set the exterior gate on fire.

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“By 2025/26, these machines will outpace many college graduates. By the end of the decade, they will be smarter than you or I,” he wrote. “Along the way, national security forces not seen in half a century will be unleashed.”

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Over the years, the message has gotten through: As of the end of last year, index funds and exchange traded index funds held a combined $30 trillion. Stock picking has become extinct, almost. Since 2000, the S&P 500—the most commonly used index among fund companies like Fidelity and Vanguard—has gained over 630 percent.

The trouble is that Bogle’s original premise no longer holds: Index funds have stopped being a proxy for the entire market.

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A New York Times investigation by John Carreyrou published last week is the latest effort to unmask Satoshi’s true identity. Based on evidence that ranges from an early interest in anonymous digital cash to hints in his writing style, the Times article concludes that Satoshi is British crypto CEO Adam Back. Two years ago, an HBO special, Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery, identified Satoshi as Canadian programmer Peter Todd, but as possibly working with Adam Back, giving the nod to Todd on the programming side. To be clear, Back denies the claims, as does Todd.

The identity of Satoshi isn’t just the greatest mystery of the crypto world, it’s one of the great mysteries of the world, period. So it’s no surprise that historians, journalists, crypto enthusiasts, and casual crypto watchers (I include myself in that latter category), are eager to know who Satoshi really is. In 2014, Newsweek identified him as an unemployed Japanese American programmer, in a scoop that quickly fell apart. Wired pinned him as Craig Wright, an Australian cryptographer, who turned out to be an imposter. There have been many other guesses over the years.

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Amy has a prolactinoma, a tumor of the pituitary gland, the pea-size organ at the base of the brain that controls your hormones. In many cases, prolactinomas are benign, slow growing, and shrink with medication. The growth was caught late, gaining mass fast, and sitting in a rare position that threatens her vision. And Amy’s hormone levels were wildly elevated.

We were told that a standard course of treatment—including two surgeries—would get rid of the tumor entirely. It didn’t. The tumor kept coming back. I spent weeks as her full-time nurse, holding her hand through headaches that left her bedridden. She couldn’t bend over, couldn’t blow her nose for fear of a spinal fluid leak. One night, desperate for answers, I started talking to an AI chatbot. It was then that I had a wild thought: I’m going to cure her myself.

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I love that he thinks you pick a thing, learn it, and become it. I’m not ready to tell him it’s more complicated than that.

Because the answer that I was raised to believe in—“work hard”—is incomplete. Hard work alone doesn’t win, and I’m not sure it ever did. Especially now, in the age of artificial intelligence, what wins is working smarter—letting go of what you think you know about the best way to work and building skills that compound instead of expire.

In other words, you may think the biggest threat to your career right now is artificial intelligence. It’s not. It’s that nobody is making you reckon with it.

I know this because my boss did make me reckon with AI, and it’s the best thing that’s happened to me in my career. In February, my boss forwarded us a message from our CEO mandating that every team rethink how work gets done in light of massive advancements in AI.

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As it begins its reentry, the spacecraft Orion will enter what’s called the thermosphere, where they will travel through heat that can reach 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. “You’re in the middle of a fireball for about 15 minutes,” Charlie Camarda, a retired astronaut and senior engineer at NASA, told me.

He speaks from personal experience: He flew to space in 2005. That was two years after one of the worst disasters in NASA’s history, when the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated during reentry into Earth’s atmosphere, killing the seven astronauts on board.

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It was the spring of 2022. After 20 years of developing software, Shawn had worked his way up the ladders of Silicon Valley to a senior engineering position with a $150,000 salary. He was coding for the next big thing, the metaverse—a new version of the internet that existed as a virtual world people could enter with headsets. Shawn had reached the point in his career at which you should be able to breathe a sigh of relief.

But as he sat at his desk that day, something caught his eye: OpenAI had gone live with a special demonstration of their first model that could code. He clicked the link—and, in the span of five seconds, he watched as all his assumptions about what his future would look like came crashing down.

The men doing the demonstrating, a group that included Sam Altman, “just spoke commands—Draw a square on this HTML page, and color it in blue—and then the language model just did it,” Shawn said. “It took me five seconds of going through the whole range of emotions before I was like: Okay, my career is cooked.”

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That’s what 43-year-old Isaacman, who is the administrator of NASA, told me—and if you look at his biography, it’s easy to see what he means. Isaacman is a billionaire who, after dropping out of high school in New Jersey, built a credit card processing company that’s now valued at nearly $3.5 billion. In his early 20s, he earned his pilot’s license. In his late 20s, he started another business—this time a defense company, which uses its fleet of privately owned fighter jets to train the U.S. military for aerial combat.

But what Isaacman had always dreamed of being was an astronaut—ever since he was a toddler, and his eldest brother brought home a telescope. “I remember in kindergarten, holding a picture book of the Space Shuttle and telling my teacher that I was going to be an astronaut someday,” he told me. “And I remember her saying: ‘I’ll be sitting in my rocking chair watching when it happens.’ ”

In his late 30s, it happened. His first company, Shift4, powers the payment system for SpaceX’s internet service, Starlink, and Isaacman said that at the end of a business call with them he made an offhand remark about how much he dreamed of going to space. That’s how he ended up financing and commanding two SpaceX missions. With the first, Inspiration4, he raised more than $240 million for St. Jude Children’s Hospital. Three years later, he commanded a second, Polaris Dawn—and became the first civilian ever to walk in space, using a brand-new, lightweight space suit.

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Can an oil price spike cause a global recession?

Absolutely. In fact, a significant portion of recessions, at least since the advent of fossil fuels, have been caused by spikes in the price of energy. Maybe you are still smarting from the collapse of real-estate prices in 2008, but historically, problems with energy costs have been a bigger problem. Those days are back.

The most vulnerable nations here include South Korea and Japan, which have little in the way of domestic fossil fuels. They also are used to purchasing much of their oil from the Middle East. Import-dependent Latin American nations also are in dangerous positions. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz also has effects beyond oil; much of Africa faces a crisis in food prices, which depend indirectly on affordable fossil fuels.

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You see the rocket before you can hear it. The fire shooting out of the ground looks otherworldly. Logically you know it’s a feat of engineering, but it seems like magic: The force lifting the nearly 6 million–pound machine into the air and propelling it higher and higher up until it disappears. All you can see by the end is the thick white jet stream it left behind. About 60 seconds later, the ground starts to shake.

I was standing on a beach more than 10 miles from the Kennedy Space Center, but I could still feel the roar of the engines as we had liftoff. This was the launch of Artemis II, the first NASA-crewed space mission to head toward the moon since the Apollo missions. The astronauts and their ship, which they’ve nicknamed “Integrity,” are headed for a 10-day journey through space, circling the moon one time before returning to Earth off of America’s West Coast. If all goes according to plan, they will go farther from Earth than any human has ever been before.

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A conservative Catholic news site appeared to have acquired all these records through an advertising broker linked to Grindr, the gay dating app. And it’s not just hookup apps. Virtually every app we use collects data that can get leaked in unexpected ways. The Strava cycling and running app has been used to locate military bases (and just weeks ago, the location of a French aircraft carrier). And then there is spyware, software designed to illicitly extract data, like the Pegasus tools used to surveil Mexico’s opposition politicians and journalists.

It’s all part of the shadowy data industrial complex that exists in the 21st century world of apps and smartphones. That world exists to a large extent because one device enabled it: the iPhone.

Apple didn’t build this surveillance economy. But it built the platform on which the surveillance economy runs, often taking a 30 percent cut of its revenue through the App Store. The introduction of the iPhone in 2007—and the steady improvement, from the addition of GPS in the next model to the current panoply of sensors and features—set the stage for the world of tracking we live in now.

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