2025-10-01 07:31:08
On Friday, the Supreme Court handed down an order that could completely upend the balance of power between Congress and President Donald Trump. The order effectively permits Trump to cancel $4 billion in foreign aid spending that he is required to spend under an act of Congress.
Trump claims the power to “impound” funds, meaning that he will not spend money that has been appropriated by Congress. Until Trump’s second election, legal experts across the political spectrum agreed that impoundment is unconstitutional. Indeed, many doubted whether someone could even make an argument supporting impoundment. As future Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote in a 1969 Justice Department memo, “it is in our view extremely difficult to formulate a constitutional theory to justify a refusal by the President to comply with a congressional directive to spend.”
The justices, however, appear to have voted entirely on partisan lines in Friday’s decision, in a case called Department of State v. AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition. All three of the Democratic justices dissented, while none of the six Republicans publicly disagreed with the Court’s decision. (The Court did not reveal how each of the Republicans voted, so it is theoretically possible that one of them quietly dissented.)
The Court’s decision, moreover, is wrong. The justices in the majority explained why they voted to let Trump cancel this spending in a single sentence. While they did not actually rule that Trump acted lawfully, they determined that “the Government, at this early stage, has made a sufficient showing that the Impoundment Control Act precludes” this suit, seeking to restore the funds in question, from moving forward.
But, as Justice Elena Kagan writes in dissent, the Impoundment Control Act states that “‘nothing contained in this ActLee Jun Seong…shall be construed’ as ‘affecting in any way the claims or defenses of any party to litigation concerning any impoundment.’” In other words, the Impoundment Control Act states that it must not be read to cut off lawsuits challenging a president’s decision to cut off federal spending. So the justices in the majority read that law in a way that is explicitly forbidden by the law’s text.
In fairness, the Republican justices’ decision does include a line suggesting that they may revisit the question of whether Trump can unilaterally repeal a federal spending law in the future. But even if these justices eventually admit their error and reverse course, their initial decision is likely to cause an extraordinary amount of harm to the nation while it is in effect.
That’s because the AIDS Vaccine decision came right as the federal government was about to shut down. To reopen it, Congress will need to find the votes to enact a new spending law. And the Supreme Court just made that task exceedingly difficult, because Trump can’t be trusted to honor the terms of any deal that reopens the government if he can cancel federal spending that is part of that deal.
The timing of this decision could not have been worse — at least if you believe in continuity of government. At midnight on Wednesday, funding for much of the federal government will expire, which means that the US government is entering a shutdown. Trump has threatened to slash federal benefits and fire many government workers during this shutdown.
Although Republicans control both houses of Congress and the White House, the Senate’s rules ordinarily require 60 votes to pass legislation — and Republicans only hold 53 seats in the Senate. Democrats proposed giving Republicans the additional votes to keep the government open in return for canceling looming cuts to Obamacare and Medicaid.
This sort of negotiation is very normal. Democrats and Republicans typically have different spending priorities, and they ordinarily reach some sort of compromise eventually that will allow them to fund the government.
Historically, however, these compromise agreements were possible because both parties could rely on the other to honor the agreement after it became law. But the Supreme Court’s decision in AIDS Vaccine suggests that, even if congressional Democrats and Republicans reach a deal where Democrats get some of the health care spending that they seek, Trump can simply cancel that spending after the bill ending the shutdown is signed into law. If he could cancel the foreign aid spending Congress authorized, as the Court just indicated he can, why couldn’t he cancel anything else the legislators agree to?
That implication of the justices’ decision means we may be in for a very long shutdown. Negotiating something as important and as complicated as the US federal budget is a difficult task under any circumstances. But it may be impossible when one of the parties cannot trust the other one to keep its side of any bargain.
Alternatively, Republicans may change the Senate rules to allow the bill to pass by a simple majority vote. That would likely mean that the minority party would be cut out of all future budget negotiations, unless it controls at least one house of Congress. But both parties have historically included senators who are reluctant to allow legislation to pass by a simple majority. So it is unclear that Republicans have the votes to end the shutdown that way.
The United States, in other words, may now be entering a prolonged period of extraordinary dysfunction. And the Republican justices bear as much blame for that dysfunction as anyone.
2025-10-01 06:40:00
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: The federal government is hours away from the start of a near-certain shutdown — and, potentially, an unprecedented power grab by President Donald Trump.
What’s going on? Government funding runs out tonight at midnight, which means the government will shut down at 12:01 am tomorrow unless Congress passes a funding bill first. After talks between Trump and congressional Democrats fell through on Monday, that doesn’t look like it will happen.
Why hasn’t Congress passed a funding bill? Even though Republicans have unified control of the government, they need Democratic votes in the Senate to pass a bill under current rules. Democrats are withholding those votes unless Republicans agree to also extend health care subsidies that are about to expire and reverse earlier cuts to Medicaid.
Outside of the specific health care fight, this shutdown has broader stakes for Democrats: Their base is increasingly furious with party leadership for not doing more to resist Trump, and the shutdown is a way to do that — or at least look like they’re doing something.
So what happens now? The government will shut down — and then it’s hard to say. As my colleague Eric Levitz wrote yesterday, Democrats are taking a big risk by moving forward with a government shutdown and hoping that Trump is bluffing.
If he isn’t bluffing, however, this shutdown could look far different from those in the past: The Trump administration has already threatened to fire federal workers outright rather than furlough them, and to further gut the regulatory state.
When — and how — does this all end? We don’t know. The longest (partial) government shutdown in history, during Trump’s first term, lasted 35 days and ended after Trump backed down. In this case, it’s possible Democrats could relinquish their health care demands and agree to pass a short-term measure to reopen the government — or the shutdown could push Senate Republicans to do away with the filibuster and obviate the need for Democratic votes.
Hi readers, I have another Unexplainable podcast for you tonight; they’re featuring an episode of Sean Illing’s wonderful podcast The Gray Area with author Olga Khazan. Sean and Olga go deep on whether it’s really possible to change who you are as a person — it’s a great episode and you can listen here. We’ll see you back here tomorrow!
2025-10-01 04:55:00
When it comes to AI, as California goes, so goes the nation. The biggest state in the US by population is also the central hub of AI innovation for the entire globe, home to 32 of the world’s top 50 AI companies. That size and influence have given the Golden State the weight to become a regulatory trailblazer, setting the tone for the rest of the country on environmental, labor, and consumer protection regulations — and more recently, AI as well.
Now, following the dramatic defeat of a proposed federal moratorium on states regulating AI in July, California policymakers see a limited window of opportunity to set the stage for the rest of the country’s AI laws. On September 29, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed SB 53, a bill requiring transparency reports from the developers of highly powerful “frontier” AI models, into law.
The models targeted represent the cutting-edge of AI — extremely adept generative systems that require massive amounts of data and computing power, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, xAI’s Grok, and Anthropic’s Claude.
AI can offer tremendous benefits, but as the law is meant to address, it’s not without risks. And while there is no shortage of existing risks from issues like job displacement and bias, SB 53 — also called the Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act — focuses on possible “catastrophic risks” from AI.
Such risks include AI-enabled biological weapons attacks and rogue systems carrying out cyberattacks or other criminal activity that could conceivably bring down critical infrastructure. These catastrophic risks represent widespread disasters that could plausibly threaten human civilization at local, national, and global levels. They represent risks of the kind of AI-driven disasters that have not yet occurred, rather than already-realized, more personal harms like AI deepfakes.
Exactly what constitutes a catastrophic risk is up for debate, but SB 53 defines it as a “foreseeable and material risk” of an event that causes more than 50 casualties or over $1 billion in damages that a frontier model plays a meaningful role in contributing to. How fault is determined in practice would be up to the courts to interpret. It’s hard to define catastrophic risk in law when the definition is far from settled, but doing so can help us protect against both near- and long-term consequences.
By itself, a single state law focused on increased transparency will probably not be enough to prevent devastating cyberattacks and AI-enabled chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons. But the law represents an effort to regulate this fast-moving technology before it outpaces our efforts at oversight.
SB 53 was the third state-level bill to try to specifically focus on regulating AI’s catastrophic risks, after California’s SB 1047, which passed the legislature only to be vetoed by the governor — and New York’s Responsible AI Safety and Education (RAISE) Act, which recently passed the New York legislature and is now awaiting Gov. Kathy Hochul’s approval.
SB 53, which was introduced by state Sen. Scott Wiener in February, requires frontier AI companies to develop safety frameworks that specifically detail how they approach catastrophic risk reduction. Before deploying their models, companies would have to publish safety and security reports. The law also gives them 15 days to report “critical safety incidents” to the California Office of Emergency Services, and establishes whistleblower protections for employees who come forward about unsafe model deployment that contributes to catastrophic risk. SB 53 aims to hold companies publicly accountable for their AI safety commitments, with a financial penalty up to $1 million per violation.
“With a technology as transformative as AI, we have a responsibility to support that innovation while putting in place commonsense guardrails to understand and reduce risk,” said Wiener in a press release. “With this law, California is stepping up, once again, as a global leader on both technology innovation and safety.”
“The science of how to make AI safe is rapidly evolving, and it’s currently difficult for policymakers to write prescriptive technical rules for how companies should manage safety.”
Thomas Woodside, co-founder of Secure AI Project
In many ways, SB 53 is the spiritual successor to SB 1047, also introduced by Wiener.
Both cover large models that are trained at 10^26 FLOPS, a measurement of very significant computing power used in a variety of AI legislation as a threshold for significant risk, and both bills strengthen whistleblower protections. Where SB 53 departs from SB 1047 is its focus on transparency and prevention
While SB 1047 aimed to hold companies liable for catastrophic harms caused by their AI systems, SB 53 formalizes sharing safety frameworks, which many frontier AI companies, including Anthropic, already do voluntarily. It focuses squarely on the heavy-hitters, with its rules applying only to companies that generate $500 million or more in gross revenue.
“The science of how to make AI safe is rapidly evolving, and it’s currently difficult for policymakers to write prescriptive technical rules for how companies should manage safety,” said Thomas Woodside, the co-founder of Secure AI Project, an advocacy group that aims to reduce extreme risks from AI and was a sponsor of the bill, over email. “This light touch policy prevents backsliding on commitments and encourages a race to the top rather than a race to the bottom.”
Part of the logic of SB 53 is the ability to adapt the framework as AI progresses. The law authorizes the California Attorney General to change the definition of a large developer after January 1, 2027, in response to AI advances.
Proponents of the bill were optimistic about its chances of being signed by the governor. On the same day that Gov. Newsom vetoed SB 1047, he commissioned a working group focusing solely on frontier models. The resulting report by the group provided the foundation for SB 53. “I would guess, with roughly 75 percent confidence, that SB 53 will be signed into law by the end of September,” said Dean Ball — former White House AI policy adviser, vocal SB 1047 critic, and SB 53 supporter — to Transformer. He was right.
But several industry organizations rallied in opposition, arguing that additional compliance regulation would be expensive, given that AI companies should already be incentivized to avoid catastrophic harms. OpenAI lobbied against it, and technology trade group Chamber of Progress argued that the bill would require companies to file unnecessary paperwork and unnecessarily stifle innovation.
“Those compliance costs are merely the beginning,” Neil Chilson, head of AI policy at the Abundance Institute, told me over email, before SB 53 became law. “The bill, if passed, would feed California regulators truckloads of company information that they will use to design a compliance industrial complex.”
By contrast, Anthropic enthusiastically endorsed the bill in early September. “The question isn’t whether we need AI governance – it’s whether we develop it thoughtfully today or reactively tomorrow,” the company explained in a blog post. “SB 53 offers a solid path toward the former.” (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI, while Future Perfect is funded in part by the BEMC Foundation, whose major funder was also an early investor in Anthropic. Neither organization has editorial input into our content.)
The debate over SB 53 ties into broader disagreements about whether states or the federal government should drive AI safety regulation. But since the vast majority of these companies are based in California, and nearly all do business there, the state’s legislation matters for the entire country.
“A federally led transparency approach is far, far, far preferable to the multi-state alternative,” where a patchwork of state regulations can conflict with each other, said Cato Institute technology policy fellow Matthew Mittelsteadt in an email. But “I love that the bill has a provision that would allow companies to defer to a future alternative federal standard.”
“The natural question is whether a federal approach can even happen,” Mittelsteadt continued. “In my opinion, the jury is out on that but the possibility is far more likely that some suggest. It’s been less than 3 years since ChatGPT was released. That is hardly a lifetime in public policy.”
But in a time of federal gridlock, frontier AI advancements won’t wait for Washington.
The law’s focus on, and framing of, catastrophic risks is not without controversy.
The idea of catastrophic risk comes from the fields of philosophy and quantitative risk assessment. Catastrophic risks are downstream of existential risks, which threaten humanity’s actual survival or else permanently reduce our potential as a species. The hope is that if these doomsday scenarios are identified and prepared for, they can be prevented or at least mitigated.
But if existential risks are clear — the end of the world, or at least as we know it — what falls under the catastrophic risk umbrella, and the best way to prioritize those risks, depends on who you ask. There are longtermists, people focused primarily on humanity’s far future, who place a premium on things like multiplanetary expansion for human survival. They’re often chiefly concerned by risks from rogue AI or extremely lethal pandemics. Neartermists are more preoccupied with existing risks, like climate change, mosquito vector-borne disease, or algorithmic bias. These camps can blend into one another — neartermists would also like to avoid getting hit by asteroids that could wipe out a city, and longtermists don’t dismiss risks like climate change — and the best way to think of them is like two ends of a spectrum rather than a strict binary.
You can think of the AI ethics and AI safety frameworks as the near- and longtermism of AI risk, respectively. AI ethics is about the moral implications of the ways the technology is deployed, including things like algorithmic bias and human rights, in the present. AI safety focuses on catastrophic risks and potential existential threats. But, as Vox’s Julia Longoria reported in the Good Robot series for Unexplainable, there are inter-personal conflicts leading these two factions to work against each other, much of which has to do with emphasis. (AI ethics people argue that catastrophic risk concerns over-hype AI capabilities and ignores its impact on vulnerable people right now, while AI safety people worry that if we focus too much on the present, we won’t have ways to mitigate larger-scale problems down the line.)
But behind the question of near versus long-term risks lies another one: what, exactly, constitutes a catastrophic risk?
SB 53 initially set the standard for catastrophic risk at 100 rather than 50 casualties — similar to New York’s RAISE Act — before halving the threshold in an amendment to the bill. While the average person might consider, say, many people driven to suicide after interacting with AI chatbots to be catastrophic, such a risk is outside of the law’s scope. (In September, the California State Assembly passed a separate bill to regulate AI companion chatbots by preventing them from participating in discussions about suicidal ideation or sexually explicit material.)
SB 53 focuses squarely on harms from “expert-level” frontier AI model assistance in developing or deploying chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons; committing crimes like cyberattacks or fraud; and “loss of control” scenarios where AIs go rogue, behaving deceptively to avoid being shut down and replicating themselves without human oversight. For example, an AI model could be used to guide the creation of a new deadly virus that infects millions and kneecaps the global economy.
“The 50 to 100 deaths or a billion dollars in property damage is just a proxy to capture really widespread and substantial impact,” said Scott Singer, lead author of the California Report for Frontier AI Policy, which helped inform the basis of the bill. “We do look at like AI-enabled or AI potentially [caused] or correlated suicide. I think that’s like a very serious set of issues that demands policymaker attention, but I don’t think it’s the core of what this bill is trying to address.”
Transparency is helpful in preventing such catastrophes because it can help raise the alarm before things get out of hand, allowing AI developers to correct course. And in the event that such efforts fail to prevent a mass casualty incident, enhanced safety transparency can help law enforcement and the courts figure out what went wrong. The challenge there is that it can be difficult to determine how much a model is accountable for a specific outcome, Irene Solaiman, the chief policy officer at Hugging Face, a collaboration platform for AI developers, told me over email.
“These risks are coming and we should be ready for them and have transparency into what the companies are doing,” said Adam Billen, the vice president of public policy at Encode, an organization that advocates for responsible AI leadership and safety. (Encode is another sponsor of SB 53.) “But we don’t know exactly what we’re going to need to do once the risks themselves appear. But right now, when those things aren’t happening at a large scale, it makes sense to be sort of focused on transparency.”
However, a transparency-focused bill like SB 53 is insufficient for addressing already-existing harms. When we already know something is a problem, the focus should be on mitigating it.
“Maybe four years ago, if we had passed some sort of transparency legislation like SB 53 but focused on those harms, we might have had some warning signs and been able to intervene before the widespread harms to kids started happening,” Billen said. “We’re trying to kind of correct that mistake on these problems and get some sort of forward-facing information about what’s happening before things get crazy, basically.”
SB 53 risks being both overly narrow and unclearly scoped. We have not yet faced these catastrophic harms from frontier AI models, and the most devastating risks might take us entirely by surprise. We don’t know what we don’t know.
It’s also certainly possible that models trained below 10^26 FLOPS, which aren’t covered by SB 53, have the potential to cause catastrophic harm under the bill’s definition. The EU AI Act sets the threshold for “systemic risk” at the smaller 10^25 FLOPS, and there’s disagreement about the utility of computational power as a regulatory standard at all, especially as models become more efficient.
As it stands right now, SB 53 occupies a different niche from bills and laws focused on regulating AI use in mental healthcare or data privacy, reflecting its authors’ desire not to step on the toes of other legislation or bite off more than it can reasonably chew. But Chilson, the Abundance Institute’s head of AI policy, is part of a camp that sees SB 53’s focus on catastrophic harm as a “distraction” from the real near-term benefits and concerns, like AI’s potential to accelerate the pace of scientific research or create nonconsensual deepfake imagery, respectively.
That said, deepfakes could certainly cause catastrophic harm. For instance, imagine a hyper-realistic deepfake impersonating a bank employee to commit fraud at a multibillion-dollar scale, said Nathan Calvin, the vice president of state affairs and general counsel at Encode. “I do think some of the lines between these things in practice can be a bit blurry, and I think in some ways…that is not necessarily a bad thing,” he told me.
It could be that the ideological debate around what qualifies as catastrophic risks, and whether that’s worthy of our legislative attention, is just noise. The law is intended to regulate AI before the proverbial horse is out of the barn, and it’s now one of the strongest US AI regulations on the books. The average person isn’t going to worry about the likelihood of AI sparking nuclear warfare or biological weapons attacks, but they do think about how algorithmic bias might affect their lives in the present. But in trying to prevent the worst-case scenarios, perhaps we can also avoid the “smaller,” nearer harms. If they’re effective, forward-facing safety provisions designed to prevent mass casualty events will also make AI safer for individuals.
Now that Gov. Newsom signed SB 53 into law, it could inspire other state attempts at AI regulation through a similar framework, and eventually encourage federal AI safety legislation to move forward.
How we think about risk matters because it determines where we focus our efforts on prevention. I’m a firm believer in the value of defining your terms, in law and debate. If we’re not on the same page about what we mean when we talk about risk, we can’t have a real conversation.
Update, September 30, 2025, 4:55 pm ET: This story was originally published on September 12 and has been updated multiple times, most recently to reflect the California governor signing the bill into law.
2025-09-30 19:30:00
TikTok is not just the most downloaded app in the world; it’s the most powerful information platform on the planet.
The app is also a political flashpoint. TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company under the shadow of Beijing. For years, US lawmakers have tried to rein it in, either by banning it outright or forcing a sale to American investors. Now, with Donald Trump back in office, that fight has entered a new phase that could reshape the social media landscape. Last week, Trump signed an executive order approving the creation of a new entity — TikTok US — that would allow the app to remain available in America despite the “ban” that Congress passed in 2024. Trump’s allies — Larry Ellison (the CEO of Oracle), Michael Dell (of Dell Technologies), and the Murdochs — will reportedly be involved in running the new company. China still has to approve the deal.
Emily Baker-White is a senior writer at Forbes and the author of Every Screen on the Planet: The War Over TikTok. Her reporting exposed how ByteDance employees accessed American users’ data and how TikTok’s internal systems gave the company enormous influence over what we see.
I invited Baker-White onto The Gray Area to talk about the latest news in the potential US-China TikTok deal, how Washington and Beijing are playing this game, and why the app has become a cultural superpower. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
TikTok isn’t just another social platform. Why is it so addictive?
TikTok’s founder, Zhang Yiming, believed information could find people better than people could find information. On older platforms, you followed accounts and searched for things. On TikTok, you open the app and it just goes. It watches how long you linger, how you interact, and the experience is so frictionless that it figures you out while you do nothing.
And it’s designed to take away agency — it feeds you what you’ll want without you asking.
Exactly. And it’s sneaky because we like it. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t use it. We’re giving up agency without noticing, because the product is pleasant.
Is part of the pleasure not having to think?
Decision fatigue is real. You didn’t used to have to do anything in the checkout line. You could just stand there and be a person waiting your turn. Now you can’t just, you know, raw dog the checkout line. When did that become intolerable? When did we have to be doing something in every tiny pause of daily life?
TikTok’s For You feed is a prediction machine based on revealed preferences, not what we say we like. How does that change user psychology? Which content thrives, compared with Facebook/Instagram/X?
TikTok helped lead a broader shift: We now see far less from people we actually know and far more from professional creators. That’s true on TikTok and, increasingly, on Instagram and Facebook. It’s as much like Netflix as OG Facebook — people don’t go there to see friends.
I held out for a long time but finally experimented with TikTok for this interview. It’s pure, uncut social media heroin. From the second you log on, you can see it learning your mind, predicting what you want, and feeding you the perfect digital drug designed just for you.
Most people who’ve tried it agree — and Instagram Reels knows it.
Let’s talk moderation. We’ve discussed the algorithm; what’s the human role at TikTok?
Today it’s similar to other big UGC [user-generated content] platforms. Algorithms flag likely violations; large teams of human moderators enforce rules and tune those systems. Policies in the US now look broadly like competitors’. Early on, it was different — more “Chinese” policy defaults that were later “Westernized.” One distinctive piece is the internal heating tool.
“Remember, you’re making fewer choices about what to see. That means you’re ceding more control over your information diet to a faceless machine — and the people who build and govern it.”
The heating button — what is it?
It lets certain staff give a video a fixed number of impressions — 5,000, 50,000, 5 million — overriding the recommender. That initial shove often triggers further organic growth. Early on, many people had access. Humans used it to teach the system what “good” looked like when the algo was still rough. Marketing later used it to woo creators and partners. TikTok eventually restricted access and wrote stricter policies, but misuse did happen — and with a tool like that, some misuse likely persists.
Other platforms boost and demote content too. What makes this different?
Everyone tunes distribution. What stood out here was how explicit, granular, and widely available the “big red button” was — at least historically. (If folks at other platforms have similar tools, my Signal is open.)
How do you see TikTok’s cultural and political force compared with Facebook and Twitter?
Facebook and Instagram are more comparable in size, and YouTube is enormous. But TikTok is really, really big — on the order of a 2019 or 2020 Facebook, if not bigger. And remember, you’re making fewer choices about what to see. That means you’re ceding more control over your information diet to a faceless machine — and the people who build and govern it.
How much control does Beijing have over TikTok? Or is “leverage” the better word?
Leverage. In China, authorities can coerce employees — “do this or else” — including by threatening family. If a China-based ByteDance/TikTok employee can access US data or influence ranking, the state could compel them. That capability is the concern. There’s limited public evidence they’ve exercised it extensively — capability does not equal action — but the leverage is real as long as China-based staff exist with relevant access.
Is there evidence China has used TikTok as an ideological weapon?
In the US, I’ve seen no public evidence of PRC manipulation of discourse via TikTok. Years ago, TikTok had restrictive policies around China topics; those changed. There’s classified material — referenced obliquely in TikTok’s court filings — that US officials say involves manipulation abroad, but I haven’t seen it.
ByteDance’s answer to America’s ban on TikTok was Project Texas — walling off US data under Oracle. How did that go?
Conceptually, “driver carries no cash”: [The US] cut China-side access [to Oracle] so coercion can’t yield US data. They spent billions trying to bifurcate. But there are hundreds of internal tools and data pipes; closing every last pathway is Sisyphean. They got far, but the “last mile” is hard to guarantee. The US eventually doubted a solution, short of full separation, would be foolproof.
What made that technical challenge so daunting in practice?
If you’ve ever worked inside a big tech company, you know how many internal tools there are and how much they talk to each other. TikTok is propped up by hundreds of them. The consumer app you see sits on top of 500 internal apps. Cutting off data flows across all of them was a maze-like, Sisyphean task. They closed most pathways, but the last mile was nearly impossible.
Walk me through the policy saga.
Trump first tried to ban [TikTok], then to force a sale; he used the wrong legal mechanism and lost in court. Biden’s team negotiated Project Texas for about 2 years, then pivoted to “sell or be banned,” pushing Congress to pass a law. ByteDance challenged; the case went to SCOTUS, which upheld the law. On the eve of [Trump’s second] inauguration, TikTok briefly “flickered” off; after taking office, Trump ordered DOJ not to enforce the law. TikTok has lived in that purgatory since.
And TikTok publicly thanked Trump for “saving” it.
Quite a turn from their early “Donald Trump isn’t on TikTok — download now” ads.
After all your reporting, how do you feel about TikTok now?
Personally, I hate autoplay video — on any platform. I downloaded TikTok to report on it; cute animals aside, I’m not a natural video consumer. That probably saved me from addiction.
You end the book noting Zhang Yiming is already moving on to AGI (artificial general intelligence). That seems…interesting.
He’s a builder. TikTok’s hard problems are largely solved; generative AI is the next frontier. The TikTok story isn’t about AI, but the core questions — agency, control, who steers your reality — are the same.
When you think about an algorithm, replace the word with a guy named Bob. If Bob shouldn’t be fixing prices across industries, an algorithm shouldn’t either. If Bob shouldn’t have access to everyone’s Social Security numbers, neither should an algorithm. Algorithms are made by people, for people’s interests — and when we forget that, we give them far too much power.
We don’t usually do addendums, but the legal future of TikTok might have changed after we spoke. What do we know now?
More than before, but details are thin. Both the US and Chinese sides say they’ve made progress. Trump is calling it a deal and extended non-enforcement of the ban law. Reporting suggests he’ll sign an order declaring the deal meets last year’s statute — he has wide latitude there. The prospective US buyers/overseers include Oracle (already TikTok’s cloud/TTP), Andreessen Horowitz, and possibly the Murdochs. Terms — and who gets what power — remain unclear.
Are there contours of the deal we do know?
Both sides say ByteDance keeps ownership of the recommender algorithm; US TikTok would license it. “License” can range from “do whatever you want” to heavily restricted. How open it is will determine real separation. You’ll also see the word “lease”; the label matters less than the control terms.
Oracle says it will “retrain the algorithm from the ground up.” What could that mean?
Models are only as good as their training data. TikTok’s was built over years on vast, mixed corpora (including scraped public web). Will ByteDance hand over those corpora? Do they still have them? If the new owners can’t replicate inputs, users may notice “new TikTok” isn’t as good — which is a business risk.
Will Oracle keep American users’ data walled off from China?
Likely similar to today’s TikTok US Data Security setup: new US user data housed in Oracle-controlled TTP, [trusted technology partner] walled from ByteDance. The draft deal would formalize and continue that.
What do the new US stakeholders get besides a shit ton of money?
Money is plenty. But there’s also influence over speech rules: bullying/hate policies, moderation posture, priority signals. Many on the left see this as handing a massive speech platform to Trump allies. Savvy owners won’t overtly politicize fast — that’s bad business (just look at what happened to Twitter/X). But ownership ultimately steers policy.
Well, it does appear to be Trump handing it over to his powerful political allies. People like Larry Ellison of Oracle, Marc Andreessen, the Murdochs of Fox News — they’re all involved in this potential deal and it has a whiff of corruption. Am I missing something here?
I don’t think that’s wrong. If the Soros group wanted in, or Warren Buffett, I’m not at all sure Trump would be interested in making that happen. You’re looking at a president who has involved himself in the private sector, and in private deals, far more than any president in recent history.
He’s delivering an organ of speech to his allies — to people he believes will use it in ways he approves of. It’s a very weird deal. When I think about the law Congress passed, in a way they were trying to curtail presidential authority, but the way it was written still gave an immense amount of power to the president. And I think a lot of the people who passed it didn’t imagine a president so willing to engage in naked self-dealing.
If they had, they might have written it differently. That’s just true — I don’t think many would have done it this way if they’d foreseen the moment we’re in now.
How much better is this arrangement than Beijing controlling TikTok?
The book’s “authoritarian shakedown” concern was always the foil to a state that can’t do that. We’re now watching a US executive attempt to shape distribution and punish critics. We’re about to find out which is “better,” but the CCP-like tactics are worrying.
Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
2025-09-30 19:00:00
When a shooter opened fire on an immigration facility in Dallas last week, killing at least one migrant detainee in the process, it fit into a recent pattern of escalating tension — and violence — that has increasingly defined President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
At the center of this growing strain is one agency in particular: the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, which has been deputized to carry out Trump’s anti-immigrant directives across the nation.
The Republican response to the Dallas shooting was uniform: They condemned it as the latest example of left-wing inspired violence against law enforcement. Politicians, activists, and commentators rushed to count it as evidence that Democrats specifically were “inciting” aggression against ICE, aiding criminals, and hampering Trump’s agenda. “This violence is the result of the Radical Left Democrats constantly demonizing Law Enforcement, calling for ICE to be demolished, and comparing ICE Officers to ‘Nazis,’” Trump posted on Truth Social. The White House then released a list of Democrats’ criticism of ICE, calling their words “a battle cry for violence.”
Democratic responses, meanwhile, were splintered. Most national Democrats have remained quiet — including candidates running in competitive battleground races like Sen. Sherrod Brown in Ohio and former Gov. Roy Cooper in North Carolina, and progressives in Congress. House and Senate leadership condemned violence against law enforcement, while Texas Democrats said, “no one — those in uniform, civilians, or immigrants — should be subject to the senseless violence.”
There are plenty of reasons more Democrats haven’t spoken up — many details are still unknown. But this split in reactions reflects a deeper divide between the parties and among Democrats. Republicans are all-in on ICE, while Democrats are coming to realize that they need to decide what to say, and what to propose to do, about the agency.
This debate stands to explode during the midterms and the run-up to 2028. Americans are growing more positive on immigration and more negative on ICE. Parts of the Democratic base are yearning for their leadership to fight Trump’s push for dramatic numbers of deportations. And it’s increasingly clear that the question of what to do about ICE, especially if and when Democrats regain power, is looming over the party’s leadership and prospective 2028 candidates.
The past few weeks have also seen a growing number of examples of apparent ICE agent overreach: viral videos of manhandling of civilians, arresting or harassing Democratic politicians themselves — such as those of a mayor and congresswoman in New Jersey and a mayor and congressional candidate in Illinois — and street patrols in major cities. The result? The debate among Democrats about ICE is going to grow more intense.
Since Kamala Harris’s loss last year, the conventional wisdom has solidified: Americans backed Trump and the GOP over Democrats last year in part because of distrust and dissatisfaction with the incumbent party’s handling of the economy, but also because of its leftward drift on border policy and liberalizing of immigration policy during the Biden years.
Particularly during the 2020 presidential primary cycle, Democratic hopefuls tried to outflank each other on immigration from the left, embracing a series of reforms, like abolishing ICE, executive actions, and positions that were more welcoming and accepting of both legal and illegal immigration.
That more humanitarian and progressive Biden-era approach to immigrants, to asylum-seekers, and to the border ended up turning much of the country against high immigration levels. It also turned many toward the Trump campaign — which promised more aggressive border enforcement, increased deportations, and stricter restrictions on migration.
Seeing signs of this drift, Harris, once she became the nominee, and other Democratic candidates moved right, embracing additional funding for border enforcement, and less welcoming rhetoric on immigration.
It didn’t work. Post-election surveys and analyses all tend to find that aside from the economy, voters most concerned about immigration and the border sided with Trump over Harris. And some signs suggest this problem is lingering for Democrats.
“People still don’t trust Democrats on this issue,” Tré Easton, vice president for public policy at the newly launched center-left think tank Searchlight, told me, describing the common view among some on the center-left of the party that the Biden administration immigration policy ended up being an overcorrection to Trump’s first term. This camp of the coalition also views a focus on immigration politics in general (as opposed to tariffs, prices, or health care) as a risk for Democrats because of their unpopularity.
Some public data supports this stance: recent polls finding declines in Trump’s approval ratings or dissatisfaction with the status quo on immigration and the economy do not show the public siding with Democrats on these policies.
The most recent Washington Post/Ipsos poll from mid-September, for example, shows a 17 percentage point advantage for Republicans among registered voters when they’re asked which party they trust would do a better job in handling immigration. Forty-six percent of these voters trust the GOP, 29 percent trust the Democrats, and 24 percent say they distrust both parties.
The result is a hangover of 2020 and 2024: fear of too directly engaging ICE and Trump’s immigration policy, wariness of embracing too positive a message or position on immigration, and a desire to take border security and enforcement concerns seriously, while focusing on the kitchen-table issues that many Democratic leaders think they need more credibility to win back the working class and future elections.
ICE is probably the most visible arm of the Trump administration’s growing executive power in this second term: Images of masked federal agents, aggressively detaining and manhandling people, are now commonplace.
It’s led to some Democratic elected officials seeming more comfortable in joining liberal activists in protesting the agency, calling out ICE as a “secret police” force that is “disappearing” people suspected of being in the country without documentation, and trying to conduct more oversight of the agency with the limited powers they have, over the last few months.
“ICE is not suddenly going to become more popular as it multiplies the atrocities it commits around the country. … And politicians right now that are refusing to stand up are going to look like they’re not leaders.”
Ezra Levin, co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible
Meanwhile, polls show Americans are turning on Trump’s immigration policy and warming toward immigration in general (especially Democrats). Democratic outrage at ICE specifically is growing. One recent analysis from CNN’s Aaron Blake found that ICE is now even more unpopular than it was during Trump’s first term, when progressive calls to “Abolish ICE” first picked up.
ICE is also playing a bigger role in progressives’ pushback to party leaders to be more confrontational. “No Kings” protests being organized by grassroots groups for later this month are planning to center ICE and Trump’s use of the National Guard and federal agencies as a “secret police” in American cities as a rallying cry against Trump’s “authoritarian” turn, for example.
“People are seeing what a mass deportation agenda looks like in real life…and [Democrats] are seeing what a police state looks like,” Vanessa Cardenas, the executive director of the pro-immigrant advocacy group America’s Voice, told me. “They can speak up and denounce what’s happening…but this is an opportunity for Democrats to take positions that, yes, call out the extreme tactics that ICE is deploying and present alternative ways, but don’t just allocate billions of dollars to the enforcement machine in this country.”
This fervor fits a recurring theme over the last few months: an anger from the progressive and liberal base that has been consuming the party over its perceived inability to resist Trump, obstruct his agenda, or “do something” as the White House takes an authoritarian turn.
“Things are bad now, and things are going to get much worse, and the question for politicians proposing that they’re the ones to lead into the future, [is] going to be to contend with that reality,” Ezra Levin, a co-founder and co-executive director of the progressive activist network Indivisible, told me. “ICE is not suddenly going to become more popular as it multiplies the atrocities it commits around the country. It’s only going to become less popular. And politicians right now that are refusing to stand up are going to look like they’re not leaders. It’s going to look like they’re followers, because they are. It’s an untenable position and it’s just going to become ridiculous pretty soon.”
So far Democratic resistance has meant a handful of protests at ICE offices or facilities by some within the party, visits by congressional delegations to detention centers, and statements and social media posts condemning agents’ mask-wearing and frequent lack of identification.
It’s not yet the kind of political risk some want them to take: Over the summer Axios reported that Democratic lawmakers were hearing demands from their constituents that they “fight dirty” and “not be afraid to get hurt” — including to be “willing to get shot” when visiting ICE facilities. That kind of escalation is starting, as ICE tackles bystanders, tear-gasses Democratic candidates, and arrests Democratic lawmakers.
Combined with the sheer amount of money that ICE is just starting to receive, the pressure for more Democrats to call out ICE abuses and pledge to do something about the agency will only grow, various activists and progressives told me. After the passage of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, ICE is set to receive more than $75 billion in funding over the next four years; its funding boost this year is already essentially triple its annual budget, and it’s earmarked primarily for these mass deportation efforts.
This all sets up two coming tests for Democrats striving to lead their party: to take the anti-ICE stance that many in the base are calling for during primaries and races in the 2026 midterms, and to stake out that ground in the future run-up to the 2028 Democratic primaries.
“I do not think any Democrat in a competitive primary [in 2026] should win that primary unless they commit to using the full power of a future Democratic Senate majority or House majority to provide oversight of these out-of-control federal agencies,” Levin said.
That’s likely to create some tension with those in the coalition who have been calling for the party to moderate, pick out other liabilities for the GOP (like on the economy, tariffs, affordability, and health care), and seriously engage immigration concerns that rose among the public during the Biden years.
“It’s coming — it’s going to be the hand-raising [on the debate stage] all over again,” Easton told me, referencing the infamous moment in the 2020 Democratic primary debates when presidential candidates pledged to decriminalize border crossings should they be elected. “But the thing is: Democrats should not mistake Trump losing support…as that being that Democrats are credible on this issue.”
As this pressure from the party’s faithful builds, it will likely tear open another split within the coalition that has been fraying since 2024: the debate over the direction the party should take as it rebuilds.
“The images are not great, and we’re seeing visceral responses to that. …The Democratic base, depending on who or what that means — there’s a desire to showcase action. People want to see things happening,” Easton told me. “It’s absolutely going to become an issue,” he said, but emphasized it would be a misread to move too far to the left since “people still don’t trust Democrats on this issue.”
It’s obviously too early to tell whether calls for stronger anti-ICE posturing by Democrats — including potential calls to defund or abolish the organization in coming years — result in a similar Biden-era overcorrection, but this tension will build.
“People feel very burned by Biden’s overcorrection on immigration, and Democrats [in leadership] are still super aware that this is a salient issue,” Easton said. “[There’s a recognition that] as bad as Trump policies are, there cannot be a reversion to…not enforcing the law.”
Even some who are advocating for immigrant rights and stronger Democratic resistance concede this. Cardenas, for example, told me embracing the 2018-2020 era progressive calls for “abolishing” ICE would be foolhardy.
“Defunding” or “abolishing” are certainly catchy slogans, she told me, but Democrats should offer actual plans that balance real concerns about security and law enforcement, while also reforming the current system, instead of potentially muddling impressions of what the party stands for.
Easton struck a similar note: Those phrases and campaigns from the peak-woke, pre-Trump 2.0 era would worsen the problem of trust. “When you say things like ‘defund’ ICE or ‘abolish’ ICE — people who are not online hear that you are not for immigration enforcement. It can be true that they need to be gutted or reformed or restructured, but Democrats need to understand that they are not trusted — it sounds like you are calling for lawlessness.”
The coming months may end up seeing Democrats debate and craft solutions or proposals that strike this middle ground. Some, including those in the party’s New Democrats Coalition in Congress, are already offering suggestions.
But as ICE actions continue to gain attention, Democratic lawmakers ramp up confrontation, and the agency receives more funding and discretion to operate across the country — it launched more show-of-force and enforcement operations in Chicago over the weekend — one side will probably have most of the momentum.
2025-09-30 18:30:00
Rupert Murdoch has influenced every facet of our modern media. The scion of a newspaper baron in Australia, Murdoch built a vast empire that now spans the globe. In the US, he owns the Wall Street Journal, New York Post, and Fox News. He gave us The Simpsons, Page Six, and Bill O’Reilly.
And at 94 years old, he’s never been more powerful. Which is why a succession battle among his four oldest children had all the trappings of a Succession episode but with higher stakes, such as: Who gets a direct line into the Trump White House?
Earlier this month we learned the answer to that question. Rupert’s son Lachlan, a man philosophically aligned with his father’s conservative ideals, will run the empire after Rupert’s death.
But how was the empire created? How did the son of a somewhat obscure newspaper magnate in Melbourne go on to reshape the way we consume news and understand politics?
Today, Explained spoke with several experts who have tracked Murdoch’s rise and dominance across the globe. In the first episode of a two-part series, we focus on how Murdoch transformed his father’s holdings into a world-beating company, and how he bent people in power to his will.
Today, Explained’s Sean Rameswaram spoke with Matthew Ricketson, a professor of communication at Deakin University; Des Freedman, a professor of media and communication studies at Goldsmiths, University of London; and Graham Murdock, professor emeritus at Loughborough University London. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
For more on our miniseries about how Rupert Murdoch took over the world, listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. And please check back later today for the second installment of the miniseries.
Is Rupert Murdoch a nepo baby?
Des Freedman (Goldsmiths, University of London professor): Murdoch is absolutely a nepo baby.
Matthew Ricketson (Deakin University professor): If the term nepo was in existence in 1931, yes, he is a nepo baby.
One of our former prime ministers, Malcolm Turnbull, who tangled with Rupert Murdoch, has described him as Australia’s deadliest export.
His whole presentation is of this kind of scruffy, rebellious outsider figure, shaking his fist at the establishment and the elites. The reality is that when he was born in 1931, his father was the managing director of a big newspaper group in Australia. He went to Oxford University, and then his father dies in 1952 and leaves him one afternoon newspaper in Adelaide, which is another city here in Australia.
Graham Murdock (Loughborough University London emeritus professor): His father, Keith, really pioneered tabloid journalism in Australia. Keith Murdoch realized that newspapers had the power to bring down politicians. So Rupert inherited not just newspapers, but actually a whole kind of philosophy, if you like, of what newspapers could do and how to, how they operated.
MR: [Rupert Murdoch is] very clear from very early on that he wants to learn everything about running newspapers and then, very quickly, from about 1954, he starts expanding.
GM: He always had the reputation for being quite ruthless.
DF: The main ambition was to make his father proud and to do better than his father, to internationalize the father’s operation. And he was willing to throw everything at it to get there.
GM: When he came to Britain [in the 1960s], he bought the News of the World, which was this humongous bestselling Sunday tabloid, a huge commercial success. He began looking around for a daily title, and he fixed on The Sun.
He immediately converted it into a tabloid, became famous for having these semi-nude models.
MR: Topless women on page 3. Tabloid newspapers have been sensational for a long time. and for him, that is the key message. Those kinds of stories will drive circulation.
GM: His rise in the UK coincides with the rise of Margaret Thatcher. And they share a kind of notion — they’re both outsiders. She’s a grocer’s daughter from a provincial town, not part of the old English establishment and the old English establishment, also very hostile to Rupert. They share a kind of neoliberal philosophy to free markets and antagonism to public ownership. And Murdoch’s papers were very much in support of that Thatcher agenda.
MR: He already owns two of the most popular newspapers. And he wants to buy more. An opportunity comes up to buy The Times and the Sunday Times. And under the law at the time, there’s a requirement this matter is referred off to the monopolies and merger commission. Thatcher ensures that that doesn’t happen so that he’s able to buy The Times and The Sunday Times.
“He has had this fascinating, but for many people, poisonous impact on political discourse, on politics more generally.”
GM: The classic kind of paper of record in the UK, because he wanted to have that entree into the elite. If you look at Rupert’s career, he’s always had a popular newspaper that can address the masses, but you also have an elite newspaper so you’re speaking to the insiders, but you’re also speaking to the mass of the people.
These stories you’re telling us about Rupert’s time in the UK in the ’70s and the ’80s ‚ they establish I think some major themes: one, ruthlessness, a willingness for a newsman to lie if it sells more papers or does good business, and then not just a desire to inform the public about politics, but to drive politics himself.
MR: That is a good summary and you can see the bitter fruits of this decades later in the form of the phone-hacking scandal in the United Kingdom in the mid-2000s.
GM: The newspapers were declining in revenues and readership. So that kind of forced them to be even more militant in looking for sensation.
DF: Newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch, that is mostly The Sun and the News of the World had hacked into the phones of members of the royal family, celebrities, but also, and this is crucial, also ordinary people, not famous people.
GM: It’s discovered that they’ve hacked a phone of this dead teenage girl, Millie Dowler. People are revolted. It creates a huge public reaction.
MF: You know, the Murdochs could not control the revulsion. They could not kind of put a lid on it. They were forced to do something that Murdoch has almost never done in his career, which is to close a newspaper.
DF: He closed that newspaper, the News of the World, instantly. This is a newspaper that had been around for over a century. It folded overnight.
GM: And then, of course, an official government commission of inquiry
DF: Murdoch sat down in front of a parliamentary committee; he looked old. It was an amazing performance. He forgot all the details when they were put to him, and he said, pretty soon after that, once he got out of the committee room, he magically regained his memory and regained his posture and his poise. And of course, he has gone on to live his life in full.
Rupert Murdoch’s first foray into the American media isn’t on TV.
DF: So he bought the New York Post in…
MR: …the mid-1970s…
DF: … to establish a base.
MR: He gets access to heavy hitters in the commercial world, in the political world, in the cultural world.
Trump’s relationship with Murdoch does go back to the 1980s. And to the New York Post.
GM: Murdoch had a very low opinion of him. This is a man who lost money running a casino.
MR: But a good gossip column is another one of Murdoch’s must-haves in his formula for newspaper success. Page Six is most definitely a very successful gossip column. Trump is one of its key sources. They kind of have that symbiotic relationship where they’re constantly pumping him up, and he’s constantly feeding them stories because he’s a bit of a gossip magnet himself.
DF: The brashness of Trump is very different to the much more considered strategic, studious, long-term thinking of Murdoch. It is not like it’s an immediate marriage.
MR: But he realizes pretty quickly that he can make a lot more money in television.
DF: And that’s when, you know, he buys 50 percent of 20th Century Fox. And that’s the beginning of the Fox Network, of the legacy we’re all now very familiar with.
The Simpsons ideologically is not the kind of thing you might think would sit that easily with a small-c conservative like Rupert Murdoch. This is a man who will do anything to increase the ratings and the audiences.
GR: He’s also buying up film studios.
DF: With Titanic as a movie that his studio financed; it could have ruined him — the gamble that he took on Titanic. And instead it made him — was it over a billion dollars that Titanic took?
But I think his ambition is always to come back to news. The Simpsons doesn’t get you into the White House or the front or the back door of Number 10, Downing Street. Being a news mogul does.
MR: The other piece of the puzzle, in helping him develop in America is the regulatory environment. There was this thing called the Fairness Doctrine, which came up after the Second World War.
GM: What that said was that if, if you were, if you were gonna cover contentious affairs on television, you had to present both sides of the story.
MR: Reagan was all about deregulation, getting rid of as much regulation as you can. So the Fairness Doctrine goes and what happens then is that it unleashes or unlocks the door for the rise of people like Rush Limbaugh. The idea of balance and Rush Limbaugh don’t exist in the same sentence, you know?
GM: It opened the space for overtly partisan television, because you didn’t have any longer to give the other side of the story.
MR: Roger Ailes, who was the key founding person for Fox News, and, Murdoch look at what the success that Rush Limbaugh is having, and they look to see if they can transplant that into television.
GM: And that opened the space for Fox News.
MR: Ailes and, um, Murdoch, they realize that instead of having lots and lots of correspondence everywhere, they’ll have the bare bone — so you’ll do the reporting of the news, but it won’t be a lavish suite of foreign correspondents. It’s much, much cheaper.
And you will bring in guys primarily from radio like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity and so on, to provide opinions about the news, what it means, how to think about it, etc.
And so you put those people on in the evening and they bloviate on demand. They have big opinions and theatrical opinions. It changes the media landscape. It’s an enormously profitable business.
DF: Tabloidization — that’s what is applied to Fox News.
MR: You’ve ceased being a news or journalism outfit at that point, and you’ve become something quite different, which bears a much closer relationship with propaganda.
Do you think Rupert Murdoch surpassed his own expectations?
MR: Oh, undoubtedly. Undoubtedly. Look, who knows, I’m not in his head, so I don’t know. But if he could have looked into the crystal ball and seen himself from 1952 to 2025, I think it would’ve been very hard for him to conceive of being where he’s now.
DF: He certainly transformed the British media, the Australian media, and the US media. He has had this fascinating, but for many people, poisonous impact on political discourse, on politics more generally.
MR: Now we can see how much damage the company has done to journalism, to democracy. You know, they’ve created a monster, which has now gotten away from them. And there’s actually two monsters. The first monster is the Fox News audience, and the second monster is Donald Trump.