What JD Vance Knew About the War, and New Warnings About A.I.

From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Friday, September 11th, here's what we're covering. Over the past six months, the President of the United States says we have the cards. We have the military advantage. We now have additional economic pressure that we're applying on them through the blockade that we. Vice President JD Vance has been one of President Trump's key messengers about the war in Iran. I think that they're losing their capabilities by the day. I think they're realizing, by the way, that their control over the Strait of Hormuz is effectively gone. He has publicly echoed Trump's confident tone about the American military campaign. We are not going to have a deal that allows the Iranians to have a nuclear weapon, so as the President just told me, we're locked and loaded. Now, my colleagues in the Times Washington Bureau have learned how, behind the scenes, Vance has gone out of his way to get his own updates about the war directly from US military commanders and how that information has sometimes been vastly different from what the administration presented to the public. According to interviews with more than half a dozen current and former administration officials, Vance, who opposed the war from the outset, has taken the unusual step of personally contacting commanders in the field before their views are consolidated by the Pentagon. Of the course of the spring and summer, Vance reached out to officers in the Middle East, Europe, and Asia, asking them about everything from battlefield tactics to casualty estimates to how they assessed Iran's resilience. He also asked for a detailed accounting of what weapons remained in US stockpiles and how any shortages could affect the US's ability to deter China, Russia, and North Korea. The commanders gave him a blunt sobering assessment, saying their stocks of critical munitions like interceptor missiles were the lowest they'd ever seen. According to people who spoke to Vance, the Vice President came away from some of his conversations with deep concerns about the overall strategy in the war. The commanders made clear to him that the US had limited ability to block Iranian strikes and deal with threats elsewhere in the world, and that the Iranian government was prepared to endure huge amounts of pain to fight for its survival. The officials the Times talked to said Vance communicated those concerns in his private talks with President Trump, though they could not say whether that factored into the administration's decision to scale back its bombing campaign earlier this year. In response to questions from the Times about how Vance has gathered information on the war, a Pentagon spokesman confirmed that the Vice President and other White House officials had been connected directly with commanders, quote, "to ensure the President's team receives all available data points." Meanwhile, in the Middle East, an Iranian-backed militia made a major battlefield advance yesterday that could snarl global oil shipping even more. According to officials in Yemen, the Houthis there seized control of a strategic port city on the Red Sea, fighting off government forces backed by Saudi Arabia. With the Strait of Hormuz largely closed for months, the Red Sea has become a crucial alternative route for tankers and other ships. But the Houthis have been partially blockading it, firing on Saudi vessels. And this new victory puts an Iranian ally one step closer to controlling another critical maritime choke point. Also, amid all the disruption in the global energy trade, a new report from the International Energy Agency says that this year, the world is on track to burn more coal than it ever has before. For years, leaders in nearly every country had pledged to cut back on coal, which produces more air pollutants and more greenhouse gases than any other energy source. But with the current shortages of oil and gas, countries have been burning more and more coal to meet their power needs. The AI Giant Anthropic released a report yesterday about the increasingly concerning ways people may be abusing the technology. The company outlined a number of incidents over the last few months where it said it stepped in to disrupt users whose actions set off alarms. That included Russian state media asking the chatbot "clawed" to generate online propaganda. Suspected Chinese and Iranian government-linked actors using AI tools to try and target dissidents and attempts to use "clawed" to design missiles, drones, and bombs, and one of the most troubling examples. Anthropic said it blocked possible efforts to use AI to build biological weapons. The report detailed how people located in regions that were supposed to be blocked from using the tech got around safeguards. In one case, a scientist asked for "clawed"'s help with a project that involved mutating chicken guinea, the mosquito-borne virus, in a way that would make it more harmful. Vikaviyat to all this is that Anthropic says it couldn't determine what the user's motives were. That's especially hard when it comes to things like biological research. Because the same kind of work that can lead to breakthroughs like vaccines can also help engineer dangerous pathogens. Still, Anthropic said it aired on the side of caution and blocked a number of accounts, because the consequences of not catching malicious activity could be so severe. To me, this report really shows not just the risks out there for how these platforms are being used, but the sort of hard decisions that are having to be made every day by Anthropic and other AI labs, as they consider what is appropriate use, how careful and restrictive should we be in controlling queries on, clawed, and other chatbots? My colleague Dustin Vols covers cybersecurity and intelligence for the times. So this is landing at a time when there's rising concern about AI models and whether or not there needs to be a regulatory framework in place to limit their acceleration, limit how they can be used, and how we're going to govern them going forward. And right now, it remains to be seen what steps if any policymakers in Washington or internationally are going to take. But for the time being, this is like very much a voluntary effort by Anthropic and its peers to try to curtail abuses on their models. The times has learned that the federal government is about to declare that this summer's big cyclospor outbreak is over, according to senior officials in the administration. The outbreak sickened a record number of people and had Americans throwing out their lettuce and saying no to salad for months. In all, more than 11,000 cases were definitively linked to iceberg lettuce sold by Taylor Farms, one of the country's biggest produce companies, and thousands more cases were reported. By comparison, there were only roughly 1,200 cyclospor cases over the same period last year. Generally, the CDC deems a food-born outbreak to be over when it determines that new illnesses are no longer being reported, and that the product causing the issue has been cleared from shelves. And finally, today on the 25th anniversary of September 11th, theaters across the US and around the world are putting on a musical called Come From Away, which is emerged as one of the most popular pieces of art reflecting on that day. Recently, it's been performed by more regional theaters in the US than almost any other show, according to one survey. The musical is set in a small town way out on Canada's Atlantic coast, Gander, Newfoundland, where more than 30 passenger planes were diverted on 9/11, once American airspace had been shut down. Within hours, the town's population almost doubled, with some 7,000 passengers stranded there for days. The people of Gander rushed to help, letting people sleep in their homes and cooking them meals. What do you remember about when you heard this was going to be some of musical? We didn't know how to think it was interesting and maybe a little crazy. To us, we wondered aloud, you're going to write a musical about a bunch of people making sandwiches. It must be a better use of your time than that. My colleague, Michael Paulson, who covers theater, recently went to Gander to talk to the town's mayor, Percy Farwell, and other residents who were there on 9/11, some of whom inspired characters in Come From Away. The mayor told Michael that he and others were initially skeptical that their experience was worthy of a Broadway show, but over time, they came to see the musical as capturing something bigger than them. Michael needed a reassurance of humanity, and the story provides that. I think that's why it's so enduring is because that's the story. It's not about Gander's toll through the people of Gander because this particular example of what happened in Gander, but it's a reminder to everybody that there is goodness out there in the world, too, right? You know, it's not all, the world is not all bad, it's not all gone, there is still hope. Those are the headlines. If you'd like to play the Friday news quiz, stick around, it's just after these credits. And if you are not a time subscriber yet, you can get a full month of free access to all of the journalism we publish when you download the Times app now. This show is made by Will Jarvis, Margaret Kadifah, Jake Lucas, Jan Stewart, and me, Tracey Mumford, original theme by Dan Powell. Special thanks to Isabella Anderson, Sam Dolnick, Lauren Jackson, Miles McKinley, Zoe Murphy, and Chris Wood. Now time for the quiz. Every week we ask you a few questions about stories the Times has been covering. Can you get them all? Okay, here we go. Mr. President posted on his social media sites of photo showing the map of New Mexico with Mexico crossed out, and of course, replaced with the word America. This week, President Trump started publicly toying with the idea of renaming another part of the U.S., saying the state of New Mexico should change its name to New America. Now the president has no legal authority to do that. It's a state level decision. In New Mexico, the state's democratic leaders have already rejected the idea, but another state actually did change its official name, shortening it just a few years ago. Your question, what state was it? A hint, it's one of the thirteen original colonies, and before the change, its name had referenced plantations. The answer? Road Island. Its full official name used to be the state of Rhode Island and Providence plantations. But in 2020, after mass protests against systemic racism, Rhode Islanders voted to remove the plantations reference. Okay, next question. I'm not that person. I can promise you that. This week, a new documentary stunned audiences during its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado. The project was actually a complete secret. People in the audience weren't even told what they were about to see until they stepped into the theater. The film, which is called "You Can See Everything," centers around an infamous, disgraced, tech entrepreneur. You're being real right now. You're always being real. Your question, who is the movie about? Maybe you recognize that deep voice. The answer? Elizabeth Holmes, who invited a documentary crew into her home just before she had a report to prison for defrauding investors in Theranos, her infamous blood testing startup. Nathan Fielder, who's known for his very absurd, sometimes cringe-inducing mix of comedy and documentary, is shown in the trailer interviewing Holmes. He said that the time he and the film crew spent talking to her was so strange and unnerving that none of them could "reach a consensus on what was happening." The film will be out in theaters in mid-October. In last question, the school year is back in full swing, and just in time for students to return to campus, Cornell University in Upstate New York has put a very specific new rule in place for the communal kitchens in its dorms. Your question, what is no longer allowed in those kitchens at Cornell? A little bit of a hint here. Holmes in more urban areas probably don't have to deal with this. To give you the answer, I'm going to turn it over to my colleague, Matt Yon, who's the host of the Times' newly relaunched newsletter for college students, called Extra Credit. Matt has the answer. Recently, Cornell banned students from processing wild game in residential kitchens on campus. Apparently, it became an issue after two students, who were also licensed hunters, killed a black bear, and brought it back to campus to make pastrami out of it. The spokeswoman for Cornell said for students who do hunt their plenty of certified meat processors near campus. So there you go. No more butchering wild game in the dorm kitchen. For more college news and everything relevant for life on campus, sign up for the Extra Credit newsletter, you can find it at nytimes.com/newsletters. They even share some great cheap and easy recipes you can pull off in your dorm room, but likely, no DIY bear pastrami. That's it for the news quiz. If you want to tell us how you did, our email is the headlines at nytimes.com. I'm Tracy Mumford. Have a great weekend. We will be back on Monday.