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Amid mounting concerns about its sprawling surveillance camera network, Flock Security told the press this summer that it operates more than 120,000 cameras nationwide.

But a new map published Wednesday by a cybersecurity researcher reveals Flock’s nationwide reach is even bigger. Based on location coordinates from Flock’s own database, the map shows more than 170,000 cameras, plus more than 130,000 accompanying gadgets that play a part in the company’s expansive American surveillance network.

Joshua Michael’s Flock Surveillance Map highlights the locations of what he says are 300,000 Flock surveillance devices spread across the country. His findings — which were cited in Wednesday’s Senate Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism hearing on Flock — differ from existing maps of Flock’s automated license plate readers in scope and methodology.

“These cameras form a nationwide surveillance network that tracks where everyone drives.”

Unlike crowd-sourced projects such as DeFlock, which are built on locations submitted by users, the Flock Surveillance Map relies on location data culled from a snapshot, archived by Michael in December 2025, of Flock’s own records. In addition to cameras, it maps supplemental devices — including 27,000 acoustic detection devices, as well as networking equipment that integrates third-party cameras — to illustrate the scale of Flock’s surveillance web.

“These cameras form a nationwide surveillance network that tracks where everyone drives,” Michael told The Intercept, “so foreign nations don’t need to send spies to harm our country. They can simply watch where our soldiers, federal agents, and politicians go.”

The Intercept visited six random Arizona locations on Michael’s map; each location had a Flock camera present at the indicated coordinates.

The Flock Surveillance Map also color-codes each Flock device according to its model — showing, for instance, whether the device is a Flock camera, known as a Falcon, or an accompanying processing unit known as a Picard. (Flock did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The accompanying searchable dataset table also lists each camera’s individual name, as outlined in Flock’s database, which typically includes a street address and sometimes other identifying characteristics. A camera with the name “FBI Pilot Camera,” for example, is shown to be located at the J. Edgar Hoover Building — the FBI headquarters in Washington.

[

Related

Cops Are Using Flock to Spy on People for the Crime of Standing Around](https://theintercept.com/2026/09/09/flock-cameras-police-loitering-curfew-surveillance/)

The map illustrates Flock’s national spread, but also its clustering in certain areas. For example, 860 Flock devices appear to be concentrated just outside Chicago O’Hare International Airport, at the Rosemont Public Safety Department, which provides police, fire, and emergency medical services in the Chicago suburb.

Numerous Flock cameras appear to be installed inside detention centers. A camera titled “C-F-23 FOXTROT MALE HOLDING 2/SHOWERS” appears at the coordinates of the Silverdale Detention Center in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

In November 2025, Michael discovered a novel way to identify the location of Flock’s devices. Trawling the company’s website, he realized that Flock’s servers were publicly leaking data in the form of an access token that could be acquired without needing to log in. With that token, Michael said he could query ArcGIS, a third-party geographic information system platform used by Flock, to retrieve the locations of Flock devices.

Michael told The Intercept he promptly contacted Flock and described his findings. As Michael wrote in his initial email to Flock on November 13, 2025: “all testing was strictly non-intrusive, limited to open unauthenticated endpoints, and did not involve bypassing authentication, modifying data, or invoking any billable ArcGIS or Google operations.” Michael said he didn’t receive a reply, so he followed up with Flock the next day, and a third time several days later.

After his third attempt to inform Flock of the discovered vulnerability, Michael received a reply from a Flock that said, “Thank you for the findings. We are internally triaging them and will reach back out with next steps soon.”

[

Related

License Plate Surveillance, Courtesy of Your Homeowners Association](https://theintercept.com/2023/03/22/hoa-surveillance-license-plate-police-flock/)

Michael said he never heard back about it from Flock.

In December 2025, Michael downloaded the Flock device location data, and in January wrote an in-depth technical blogpost about his what he had found. After Michael’s post, it appears that Flock fixed the vulnerability.

Despite being alerted of Michael’s findings in November 2025, Flock published its own blogpost the following January saying it hadn’t had any data breaches. “Flock has never been hacked, and there has not been a leak of Flock information,” the company claimed. “Flock Safety’s cloud platform has never experienced a data breach.”

The Atlanta-based startup has faced mounting criticism for its practices and transparency in recent months. An American Civil Liberties Union report found “a pattern of Flock regularly misleading or even lying about its business practices, safety record, commitment to privacy, and efforts to protect vulnerable populations.”

Michael told The Intercept that Flock’s recent claims about its data security record don’t reflect reality. Flock has publicly claimed multiple times that the company has never experienced a data breach, “and this was after I pulled their database of devices.”

“That leaves two possibilities,” he said. “Either they knew and chose not to disclose it for fear of bad press, or they didn’t know I exfiltrated the data at all. The first is a transparency failure. The second is a detection failure with national security implications.”

On Thursday, Michael was notified that Doppel, which describes itself as an “AI-native social engineering defense platfom,” filed a trademark infringement complaint regarding his site, claiming to be working on Flock’s behalf. Doppel says that the site is using the trademark “FLOCK SAFETY” without authorization, which “may cause customer confusion / harm.” Doppel requested the site be taken down.

When he posted the Flock Surveillance Map, Michael included a pop-up disclaimer saying that the site is “not affiliated with or endorsed by Flock.”

The post Flock Wants The Most Detailed Map of Its Surveillance Cameras Taken Offline appeared first on The Intercept.


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This story was originally published by Alaska Beacon.

Yereth Rosen
Alaska Beacon

The Arctic Report Card, the annual peer-reviewed analysis of climate in the circumpolar region, will continue even without federal government support, scientists announced.

The American Geophysical Union, an organization representing tens of thousands of Earth and space scientists, announced last week that it has taken over as manager of the Arctic Report Card after the Trump administration pulled support last month.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was, until this summer, the agency that coordinated and published the annual report since the inaugural edition in 2006.

But the Trump administration has slashed funding for climate science work at NOAA and other federal agencies, and Trump himself has repeatedly referred to climate change as a “hoax.”

The annual Arctic Report Card is now one of several NOAA climate-related programs which the Trump administration has eliminated or reduced.

The report provides status updates for permafrost thaw, sea ice extent, air temperatures, wildlife patterns, tundra vegetation and other subjects. It places a heavy emphasis on Alaska. Researchers from UAF and other Alaska universities are prominent among the chapter authors, and in recent years the report has included analysis from Indigenous Alaska scientists and community members.

Under AGU oversight, the Arctic Report Card’s editorial team remains intact, with continued leadership by researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the University of Colorado. Rick Thoman of UAF’s Alaska Center for Climate Change Preparedness remains one of the three main editors. The other two are from the University of Colorado’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Science, which includes the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

In a statement, one of the Colorado-based lead editors said the Arctic Report Card’s survival was a victory against censorship of climate science.

“Beyond the importance of sharing this key science, the fact that we can pull together and ensure the Arctic Report Card goes forward is a sign that science won’t be stopped or silenced,” Matthew Druckenmiller, a senior NSIDC scientist, said in the statement. “When we come together, we have a powerful platform for robust observational evidence to inform global decisions – we are counting on that same spirit of support to help us close the remaining funding gap and secure the report card’s future.”

This year and beyond

The AGU will issue the 2026 Arctic Report Card at its annual conference in December, the same event at which NOAA issued past report cards.

Thoman noted that much of the work was already completed before NOAA announced its withdrawal from the project, so changes might not be obvious.

“I suspect 2026 will have a look and feel very similar to what we’ve done in the past,” he said.

This year’s report will include, along with the usual updates on ice, air temperature, ocean and tundra conditions, some special chapters of interest to Alaska, Thoman said.

One chapter will examine Indigenous wildfire management practices, and another chapter will examine wildfire patterns more broadly, he said. There will be a polar bear update, he said. And a chapter led by UAF geophysicist Andy Mahoney will examine changes in shorefast ice, the land-attached type of ice that is important to Arctic coastal communities.

Beyond this year, the shape of future Arctic Report Cards “is really not thought out,” Thoman said.

Some operation changes are already underway.

The editors and authors are no longer using archived data, images or other information from climate.gov, a NOAA climate information website that the Trump administration took down last year. Instead, they are using an alternative nonprofit site called climate.us.

That site was established and is maintained in part by some of the same NOAA scientists and staffers who had worked on climate.gov but lost their agency jobs. “They know what they’re doing,” Thoman said.

The editors will be turning to an international source, the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme of the eight-nation Arctic Council, for assistance with peer reviews. There might be similar outreach on other tasks, Thoman said. “There could be more robust international collaboration,” he said.

Trump administration policies on climate change

The end to NOAA support for the Arctic Report Card comes amid similar cuts.

Last year, for example, NOAA pulled its support for the National Snow and Ice Data Center’s satellite-based sea ice tracing program. The Colorado-based center switched to more reliance on satellite data from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, that nation’s counterpart to NASA.

Trump administration officials have expressed particular animus toward NOAA.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a blueprint for a second Trump administration, recommended breaking up NOAA. The agency’s six science-focused divisions, which include the National Marine Fisheries Service and the National Weather Service, “form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity,” Project 2025 said.

Russell Vought, the lead author of Project 2025, now heads Trump’s Office of Management and Budget. He is seeking to dismantle the 66-year-old National Center for Atmospheric Research, a university-managed institution in Colorado that partners with NOAA. That effort has been blocked by legal challenges.

The post Arctic climate report set for publication despite loss of federal support appeared first on ICT.


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The Endangered Species Act has stood as a pillar of conservation in the United States since 1973, bringing animals like bald eagles, manatees, and humpback whales back from the brink of extinction.

But now, the Trump administration has taken its boldest step yet in an effort to strip legal protections for endangered species. Starting this week, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says that it now considers it legal to kill a federally protected animal, as long as it wasn’t on purpose.

The directive comes after another recent revision to these legal protections went into effect this week, saying that damaging an animal’s habitat is no longer considered “harming” it. The two changes in combination take the teeth out of the Endangered Species Act and pave the way for industries to log, mine, pollute, or travel through areas without regard for what lives there.

The fate of the country’s rarest creatures could come down to the meaning of two seemingly simple words: “harm” and “take.” In this case, “take” refers to killing an animal.

“A vessel that inadvertently strikes a whale has not taken it, because the vessel’s course was not set against the whale,” said the memo, signed by Brian Nesvik, director of the Fish and Wildlife Service. “Felling a tree is not a take of the bats roosting in it unless the tree was felled for the purpose of killing or capturing them.”

Legal experts say this is an unprecedentedly narrow view of what these words mean in the Endangered Species Act, and that the moves are sure to be challenged in court. Almost two dozen states recently sued the Trump administration over changes to the law, and more lawsuits from environmental groups are expected to come. And if history is any indicator, the agency could soon find itself on the losing side of an old argument — one that’s been heard in courts before.

“They are trying to disregard 50 years of the act, and how the agency — and everybody — has always interpreted this word,” said Ryan Shannon, an attorney at Defenders of Wildlife, a conservation nonprofit that has long spearheaded endangered species recovery efforts. “This is not a bunt — they are really swinging for the fences with this.”

That’s because the words “harm” and “take” are at the core of what makes the Endangered Species Act so effective.

Efforts to protect the northern spotted owl are one such example. Decades of logging in the Pacific Northwest had eliminated much of its forest habitat. But after the species was listed under the act in 1990, cutting down those trees was considered to be harming the owl, and therefore illegally “taking” it.

The law has been a thorn in the side of industries for decades. Environmentalists have often sued companies that want to log, mine, or build in a particular area, using the Endangered Species Act to make their case.

Now, “the administration is telling every industry in America that killing endangered wildlife is fine as long as it wasn’t their primary goal,” said Andrew Wetzler, an executive at the Natural Resources Defense Council, in a statement. “But unintentional harm is exactly what is driving many species towards extinction.”

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The Supreme Court has considered these words and their meanings before. In a 1995 case, Babbitt v. Sweet Home, it ruled that modifying a creature’s habitat — such as logging the forest where spotted owls live — counts as harming it. In a dissenting opinion, the late Justice Antonin Scalia argued that “take” means to directly kill or injure wildlife. The Trump administration’s new memo uses Scalia’s interpretation — even though the majority of the court disagreed with Scalia back then.

Earlier this summer, in a revision that changed which actions it considers to be “harming” an animal, the Trump administration argued that there’s a “traditional meaning” of the word “take,” meaning “to kill or capture a wild animal.” But the verb “take” is so notoriously difficult to define that it’s been tormenting dictionary editors for more than a century. In 2001, the lexicographer Kory Stamper spent weeks trying to capture all the senses of the word, and she reflected that the ordeal “unspooled” her sanity, leading to panic and despair.

In 2024, the Supreme Court ruled that courts — not agencies — have the power to interpret the law. That decision was generally seen as a blow to environmental efforts, but in this case, it might mean the Trump administration doesn’t have final say in how it interprets the Endangered Species Act.

All these factors make the Fish and Wildlife Service’s memo legally flimsy, if not illegal, according to Brett Hartl, director of government affairs at the Center of Biological Diversity, an environmental nonprofit.

The memo is “essentially performative cruelty for the sake of it” and “barely worth the paper it’s printed on,” Hartl said. “They’re trying to turn it into an anti-poaching statute, but it’s actually supposed to be the strongest conservation law in the world.”

Ironically enough, the administration’s rewrite may leave companies in a tougher spot than before, Shannon said, because it blows up the settled rules they’d been following for decades. Corporate attorneys now have to choose between telling clients to take advantage of the agency’s new approach, or holding off in case a court or new administration puts the old protections back into place.

For companies that actually want long‑term regulatory certainty, like timber corporations and real estate developers, Shannon said that this deregulatory swing may be “more than they ever really would have asked for.”

If the courts do end up siding with the Trump administration, some species will suffer more than others. Those listed as endangered in more recent decades were given “critical habitat protections,” which provided an extra layer of scrutiny to activities that could harm animals and were made mandatory for all newly listed animals.

But many of the species listed during the Endangered Species Act’s early years — including the Florida panther and the California sea otter — never received those protections. Instead, they depend on broader language in the law, like “harm” and “take.” That means the animals America once wanted to protect the most could now be the most exposed.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The fate of the Endangered Species Act rests on 2 simple words on Sep 18, 2026.


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President Donald Trump's administration is making an aggressive push to find public lands to use for building artificial intelligence data centers, according to a Friday report in The Washington Sun.

The US Department of the Interior, under the leadership of Secretary Doug Burgum, has pushed the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to "identify public land ripe for data center development," and provide lists to department leadership, reported the Sun.

Leaders at the Interior Department gave state BLM leaders just three days to compile their lists, emphasizing this was a "top priority," the Sun's sources said.

Additionally, reported the Sun, Burgum has been meeting regularly with Big Tech executives to discuss ways to accelerate data center development.

The department's aggressive push stems from a Trump executive order signed in July 2025 that tasked the government with identifying federal lands that could be used to build data centers.

Mary Jo Rugwell, president of the Public Lands Foundation and former BLM state director, told the Sun that she's concerned that the Trump administration is "bending knee to the tech oligarchs and letting them do whatever they need to do" without asking the right questions about data centers' impact on public lands.

Rugwell added that the BLM during Trump's second term has shed nearly half of its staff, leaving few experts available to evaluate the environmental impact of data centers.

“Where are they going to get people to do the analysis especially when you have a technology that’s relatively new and not well defined?” Rugwell asked. “It’s a headache BLM doesn’t need."

Olivia Tanager, director of the Sierra Club’s Nevada chapter, told the Sun that the nationwide backlash to data center construction has gotten so intense that the tech industry might see using public lands as their best option for building out capacity.

“A lot of elected officials in Nevada on both sides of the aisle are really hesitant to approve data centers in their local jurisdiction,” said Tanager. "I would imagine in some cases, despite the environmental review being heightened in a lot of instances being sited on federal public land, there’s more political will to move those projects forward."

Jayson O'Neill, spokesperson for Save Our Parks, accused Burgum of trying to "exploit our parks and public lands" for the benefit of wealthy tech donors.

"Data Center Doug Burgum is actively shopping America's public lands to data center developers, the AI industry, and big energy companies lining up to power them," O'Neill said. "And he’s keeping communities in the dark, hiding the details from Congress and the public."


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An artificial intelligence researcher at Anthropic quit his position publicly on Tuesday as he warned about major AI companies that care too much about winning the technological race and not enough about guarding against out-of-control "superhuman systems" that workers inside the industry legitimately fear "could kill us all by the end of the decade."

Jacob Coxon, who previously worked at industry giant OpenAI before moving to Anthropic earlier this year, told the Wall Street Journal in an exclusive interview that he was leaving the company, as the newspaper reported, because "he doesn’t want to participate in an industrywide rush to build AI systems that can improve themselves, worried such systems could spiral out of control and destroy humanity."

According to the WSJ:

Coxon said he left OpenAI earlier this year to join Anthropic because it is known for its model-safety efforts. But even though he found Anthropic’s safety efforts to be earnest, he now believes no company can responsibly develop AI that can outperform humans in a range of tasks, sometimes called artificial general intelligence, absent government intervention or a coordinated industry slowdown.

Recent hacks by models from OpenAI and Anthropic, some operating in collaborative swarms of agents, have illustrated how AI systems can adopt nefarious goals and try to conceal them from humans. Once the systems begin to improve on their own, Coxon said, he fears they could advance enough to refuse commands.

"I resigned from Anthropic today," Coxon announced on social media Tuesday night. "I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives."

In a 6-point thread that followed, Coxon elaborated on his reasoning in detail:

  • Do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains, and progress is not slowing.

  • The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible—but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.

  • A common response is “if they truly believe this, why are they still building it?” At OpenAI, many have not deeply internalized the civilizational stakes. At Anthropic, the stakes are well-understood, but they are locked in a race to get there first—they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk.

  • Accepting this race and entering the “endgame” is a hubristic gamble that should not be launched from a private company’s Slack. Attempting to speedrun alignment should require extraordinary confidence that there are no better trajectories available.

  • I am optimistic about the potential for coordination. Warning shots like the Hugging Face attack have made pacing agreements between US labs more viable. I don’t feel like we’re on track to prevent a global race, which may require costly actions such as a temporary ban on improving model capabilities.

  • If you are a lab researcher, I urge you to consider what the next few years will actually feel like. Do you want to kick off a superintelligent RL [Reinforcement Learning] run without a rigorous understanding of its mind? Should you put your head down because “it’s happening anyway”—or take this moment to call for different conditions?

Coxon's reference to the Hugging Face incident pertains to recent revelations about a so-called breakout event at OpenAI, which operates the ChatGPT protocol. In June, the company acknowledged that a "significant security incident" took place when AI agents within the company autonomously breached internal systems, using subterfuge to hide their actions from human operators. Since then, the extent of the incident has shocked AI experts and other similar events have also been exposed.

While US President Donald Trump and his Republican allies in Congress have taken a hands-off approach to AI regulations, the industry has been pouring huge amounts of money into lobbying efforts and campaign spending to keep lawmakers from enacting stronger restrictions and oversight of the technology.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) have been leading a relatively lonely fight in Washington, DC for more aggressive federal guardrails, including the introduction of joint legislation last week that would ban artificial superintelligence and temporarily pause advanced AI development until a federal regulatory structure was put in place by Congress.

Coxon's public resignation was greeted with applause by many, while other industry insiders backed up his concerns.

"The caution is simple," said one commenter with the handle Jabbar Digital, described as a tester of AI tools and a software developer, in a lengthy post on Coxon's warning. "Capability is compounding. Coordination is not. If the people closest to the work are increasingly uneasy about the speed and the lack of external constraints, dismissing them as doomers is no longer a serious response. Neither is treating every capability jump as automatically good. The useful middle path is to take the technical progress seriously and take the internal dissent seriously. Both can be true at the same time."

Evan Hubinger, the alignment science lead at Anthropic, chimed in on his personal social media account to say: "Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to."

While bolstering Coxon's worries, Hubinger said, "To be clear, as we say in [Anthropic's] latest Risk Report, I think the risk from present models is low. What I am worried about is superintelligence arising from recursive self-improvement, as we have said is happening faster than we thought."

Running for US Senate in Michigan, Democratic nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed also weighed in on Coxon's decision to quit so loudly and publicly.

"Most tech geeks don’t resign from their roles because…the tech they’re building could end humanity," said El-Sayed. "How we change the incentives leading AI labs down this path and protect against these existential risks are defining political questions of our time."


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Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir on Thursday unveiled a plan for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza’s Palestinian population, which he and other Israeli ministers refer to as “voluntary migration,” a day after Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said the removal of Palestinians was the only “real solution” for Gaza. Ben Gvir dubbed his […]


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The destruction of coral reef cover, cataloged in the largest global assessment of the reefs ever completed, was distressing to scientists, with the world's reefs declining by nearly 10% between 2020-24, compared with 1980-2009.

The authors of the report released Monday by Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network (GCRMN), however, emphasized that coral bleaching events driven by ocean heating was not the most worrisome finding of the analysis—but rather, the fact oceans have become so warm that stressed reefs have less and less time to recover.

Historically, coral bleaching events—in which changes in conditions such as ocean temperatures and pollution cause coral to expel its symbiotic algae and become completely white and more vulnerable to mortality—have taken place about once in a decade, giving the reefs years to recover.

Now, the reefs are “lucky to get five or six years,” as water temperatures are remaining high and making it more difficult to regain hard coral cover, explained Manuel González Rivero of the Australian Institute of Marine Science, the lead author of the report, titled “Status of Coral Reefs of the World: 2025.”

“After decades of studying coral reefs, what concerns me most isn’t the current loss of hard coral cover; it’s that we’re steadily eroding the conditions they need to recover,” said González Rivero. “Climate change is driving more frequent and severe marine heatwaves, but local pressures such as poor water quality, overfishing, and coastal development are making reefs even less able to withstand them."

The study compiled 21.1 million observations from 36,886 reef sites across 124 countries and territories, drawing on more than 40 years of data from across the globe.

But scientists cautioned that because the research did not include the most recent and intense global bleaching event, which lasted from 2023-25, it may not provide a full picture of the danger coral reefs are in—as well as the coastal communities they help protect and the thousands of marine species they serve as a habitat for.

Carlos Duarte, a marine scientist at the Coral Research and Development Accelerator Platform, told The New York Times that this year's El Niño warming trend is likely to cause another global bleaching event next year, which reefs will likely struggle to recover from as ocean temperatures have been recorded as getting hotter and hotter in recent years.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has projected that the Earth will lose 70-90% of its coral reef cover if the planet gets 1.5°C hotter than its preindustrial level.

"For many reefs affected by the unprecedented marine heatwaves in 2024, this year’s El Niño likely means they’ll have had little more than a year to begin recovering before being hit again," said González Rivero. "This is creating a staircase of decline that becomes harder to reverse with every bleaching event.“

The report emphasizes that reefs have maintained their ability to regain hard coral cover "when disturbances are reduced and sufficient recovery time is available," such as after the third major global coral bleaching event since 1998, which took place from 2016-17 and saw a 6.6% decline in coral.

After the event, scientists observed a "relative increase of approximately 6% between 2017 and 2019," said the GCRMN.

"That recovery matters because the benefits coral reefs provide extend far beyond the reef itself. Coral reefs cover less than 0.2% of the ocean floor," said the organization. "Yet, they support at least 25% of all marine species and underpin food security, livelihoods, coastal protection, tourism, and cultural heritage of close to one billion people worldwide."

Scientists including Terry Hughes, a former director of coral reef studies at James Cook University in Australia, who was not involved in the analysis, emphasized that reducing planet-heating emissions is the top solution to the crisis of coral reef recovery, as the pollution from fossil fuel extraction is linked to increasingly hot oceans.

Allowing coral reefs to recover from bleaching events "really depends on how much more greenhouse gases go into the atmosphere and the amount of warming that causes," Hughes told the Times, while local solutions including reducing water pollution are also crucial for maintaining reef health.

David Obura, chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, expressed hope that the report will "shake us out of our persistent inertia."

The long-term monitoring by GCRMN, said Obura, "tracks not just the pulse of coral reefs, but of our planet too. It shows which regions are under the greatest pressure, that actions to date have not been sufficient, and warns where reefs will be under increasing threat in years to come."

"We must act now to halt this decline and invest in solutions that reduce pressures and build resilience, while sustaining the monitoring that turns good intentions into effective policy," he said. "The 40 years of data in this report provide a strident warning that delayed action risks locking in irreversible losses—not just to reefs, but also to the economies and people that depend on them.”


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PÁRAMO EL ALMORZADERO, Colombia — Doris Torres is a sheepherder who grew up seeing Andean condors as enemies. In this remote village high in the Colombian Andes, the birds were blamed for livestock losses and often killed through poisoning or shooting — persecution that helped push their population to the brink. But as Torres learned more about the condor and its importance to the Andean ecosystem, her relationship with the species began to change. She became an unlikely conservationist and is now at the heart of a grassroots effort helping bring condors back to these mountains. Working with Fernando Castro, from the Parque Jaime Duque Foundation, Torres and other villagers have transformed a long-standing conflict into a model of coexistence. Former enemies of the condor have become its protectors, creating a rare safe haven for one of Colombia’s most threatened birds of prey. Today, condors are once again soaring over the páramo. And the community is preparing for the next step: welcoming young condors bred in captivity by Castro and his team in Bogotá. Using artificial incubation and condor-shaped hand puppets to raise the chicks without accustoming them to humans, the team hopes to release at least three juveniles into the wild by the end of 2027. Mongabay’s Video Team wants to cover questions and topics that matter to you. Are there any inspiring people, urgent issues, or local stories that you’d like us to cover? We want to hear from you. Be a part of our reporting process—get in…This article was originally published on Mongabay


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The closest living relatives of crocodiles and alligators are, perhaps surprisingly, birds. Both are archosauriforms, a group of species that originated about 250 million years ago near the beginning of the Triassic period.


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Since the commercial deployment of ChatGPT in 2023, generative artificial intelligence, or gen AI, has deepened social divisions. For the first time, a nondeterministic technology can go beyond executing calculations and automating mechanical work, giving rise to competing narratives: promises of unprecedented economic growth on the one hand and pervasive uncertainty on the other.

In the last three years, AI spending alone has effectively propped up the entire U.S. economy. Some speculate that the country has weathered trade wars, a global energy crisis, and mass deportations without slipping into a recession precisely because AI spending is acting as a massive private-sector stimulus. For the wealthy, the financial hype around AI made possible SpaceX’s IPO, the largest in stock-market history. Yet while Elon Musk celebrated becoming the world’s first trillionaire, his new data centers were facing lawsuits for polluting Black neighborhoods in Memphis. For working-class families, the reach of AI into nearly every domain of daily life — from jobs to education, health care, and even weapons and surveillance systems — has only reinforced public skepticism, seen more recently in a growing opposition to the construction of data centers.

AI is a strategic pillar of the Trump administration, which has allowed AI companies to amass unmatched economic and political power. In April, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposed a moratorium on new AI data centers, sparking a nationwide debate. Among critics on the Left, Jacobin contributor Holly Buck wrote in April that the moratorium could deepen social inequality by driving data centers offshore and raising commercial AI prices. “A moratorium will result in a business landscape that favors incumbents,” she claimed. According to Buck’s logic, AI firms would simply find a way around opposition, carrying out their plans anyway. Her article reads like a classic petitio principii, mirroring the same liberal logic of those who oppose rent freezes or tax hikes for fear that capital will flee in response.

On the other side of the debate, Astra Taylor and Saul Levin published a piece in the Guardian in May praising the anti–data center movement as an important form of popular resistance. “Organizing to block datacenter construction is a way for regular people to ensure their objections and preferences are heard,” they wrote. Further, “anti-datacenter organizing is the real fight, one centered on an industry choke point that people can reach out and touch. … Where else can people push back on job-eating algorithms, distorting deep fakes, and autonomous drone strikes?” The answer is simple: at the point of production.

Resistance to AI encroachment must be a broader societal struggle, one in which workers and their communities help forge collaborative channels connecting broader political, communal, and civil rights movements. For this, it’s important to understand not only AI’s impact on society but also the role that people play as producers and, ultimately, enablers of such technology. This is the basis of a Marxian critique of AI as the product of human labor. We can trace AI’s origins back to the path of U.S. economic development since the postwar era, using a historico-materialist approach to explain why AI embodies systemic contradictions at the heart of the U.S. imperialist system. From this analysis, we can see why it’s likely that an AI-centered boom-and-bust cycle will emerge and why the Democratic-centered opposition to AI does not reflect the interests of workers and their communities.

AI as a Commodity

For capital, AI remains ultimately a commodity. As a tool or service, AI consists of both software and hardware, the product of value chains that span the globe. First, silicon is extracted in the open pit mines of Latin America, West Africa, and Australia, then purified and refined in Chinese facilities. Semiconductor chips are designed in the U.S., set up for production in the Netherlands, manufactured in Taiwan and South Korea, and wired, tested, and packaged in South and Southeast Asia. At the end of this chain sit the hyperscale data centers that make AI operational, facilities typically housing 10,000 to 100,000 GPUs per cluster. Their construction and maintenance employ a vast workforce, from construction workers to big data engineers and data architects.

On the software side, when you interact with an AI model, you engage with the ideology of the megacorporation or state that owns it, which is mediated by the myriad social relations distilled into its training data. That data is painstakingly annotated by highly exploited data labelers in Asia and Latin America, then fed to the models designed by data scientists and AI researchers, which are ultimately built and maintained by machine learning engineers.

The outsized power wielded by leading AI firms — and Big Tech at large — is at its core the product of labor exploitation. Workers in and around the provision of AI wield huge potential leverage, given that they stand at the forefront of the AI boom. Developing forms of workers’ democracy and control over how AI is designed, built, deployed, and commercialized is paramount to building opposition to the industry. Across the political spectrum, workers in the U.S. are facing the consequences of AI’s commercial deployment. Mass layoffs and decimated entry-level jobs are routinely blamed on AI costs, which have risen exponentially as management forces workers to adopt AI tools. Meanwhile, companies are exhausting their annual AI budgets in a matter of months, prompting them to literally choose between keeping their workers or buying more AI tokens. Unions have increasingly had to address AI in contract negotiations, while a growing number of workers are turning to unionization to defend against AI encroachment.

In this context, the most vocal opposition to AI has come from Democratic outlets. In a recent conversation with Naomi Klein, journalist Karen Hao, a board member of the AI Now Institute, addressed the possibility of a different AI trajectory from a technical standpoint:

We don’t need to accept the logic of unprecedented scale and consumption to achieve advancement and progress. So much of what our society actually needs, better health and education, clean air and clean water, a faster transition away from fossil fuels, can be assisted and advanced with, and sometimes even necessitates, significantly smaller AI models and a diversity of other approaches.

This is true in part. AI systems can be smaller, more sustainable, and trained differently. This would certainly alter aspects of their interaction with society. Yet AI Now sees this as the outcome of a movement centered on AI regulation, ultimately enacted by, one would assume, a Democratic administration and Congress — AI Now itself was founded by former Biden advisers who helped craft his AI policy.

As AI’s history makes clear, relying on policy change through the partisan system has led to the current predicament. Contemporary AI and the rise of Big Tech have been bipartisan projects from the start and will remain so, given the pervasive role of software infrastructure in sustaining modern capitalism. AI’s primacy is a centerpiece of the current U.S. geopolitical strategy, but it is also the outcome of the nation’s economic development over the past half century. Behind all this lies a clear economic logic. The problem extends well beyond the moral bankruptcy of CEOs, which remains the rallying cry of Sanders and much of the Left. Instead, it raises critical questions that strike at the heart of the entire politico-economic system, namely, what kind of strategy is needed to change course.

Systemic Contradictions Embodied in AI

For Marx, the sole mechanism for producing new capital lies in the exploitation of labor. Workers produce surplus value during the unpaid portion of the working day, which is ultimately expressed in the price of the commodity as profit. Machinery, including AI, can transfer value from past cycles of production to a final commodity, but it cannot create new value; only workers can. Valorization through human labor sustains the entire economic edifice: production, commerce, and finance. It is for this reason that the average rate of profit, the ratio of surplus value to total capital invested, is a central category in Marxian economic theory.

Capital innately seeks to mechanize and automate work to improve labor productivity. This ultimately reduces the number of workers and hours worked during production. In the absence of class struggle, this puts downward pressure on wages. The more workers produce, the smaller their share of the social product. As Marx’s wrote in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts:

The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he produces. The devaluation of the human world grows in direct proportion to the increase in value of the world of things.

In any society divided by class, technological progress always comes at the expense of workers and their communities. As Marx explained in The Poverty of Philosophy:

From the very moment in which civilization begins production commences to be based on the antagonism of orders, of States, of classes, and finally on the antagonism between accumulated labor [or constant capital, which includes machinery] and present labor. No antagonism, no progress. That is the law which civilization has followed down to our day.

The deployment of AI has brought into sharp relief precisely this antagonism at the core of capital as a social relation of production. It is the exploitative nature of capitalism that lies at the heart of the AI problem, not simply the question of producing “smaller” AI models, as Hao would argue. Only models produced under a different economic paradigm, one not ruled by the drive to maximize productivity and profits, can overcome the perennial tug-of-war between past labor and living labor. Short of that, AI production will continue expanding in a desperate race for worldwide adoption, market concentration, and, eventually, profits. The unrelenting drive for larger scale, output, and profits renders every social, political, technical, or environmental consideration irrelevant.

The antagonism between machine and society is also expressed in the role of AI as the centerpiece of the ongoing international arms race. AI models are now the nervous system of modern military apparatuses and surveillance networks for state repression. In 2025, the federal government invested about $3.3 billion in nondefense AI R&D, along with hundreds of millions in defense and military contracts awarded to AI and tech companies. The U.S. Army has sworn in top tech executives from Meta, OpenAI, and Palantir as lieutenant colonels and part-time advisers under a special program to develop drones and warfare tech in preparation for “the next big war.” Domestically, DHS and ICE have been tapping into a database built by Palantir and powered by AI that aggregates government and commercial data to identify real-time “targets.” This is part of a larger federal project to build a comprehensive profile of every person in the country based on institutional information across agencies.

The current AI arms race is the historical product of capitalist dynamics. As explained earlier, technological progress expands productivity, and the profitability of capital tends to decrease as less human labor is used in production. The U.S. economy expanded its technological footprint in the post–WW II era. Investment in machinery grew as a proportion of total capital outlay, while the share allocated to wages declined in relative terms — a trend paralleled by the erosion of union density. This contributed to a secular decline in the U.S. average rate of profit starting in the 1960s and provided the impetus for neoliberal globalization beginning in the 1970s. During globalization, a massive transfer of value occurred from nonimperialist to imperialist economies. It is estimated that from 1995 to 2020, these international value transfers amounted to over 70 trillion euros. The U.S. in particular received exorbitant rates of return on foreign assets and liabilities from 1970 to 2022.

The foundational technologies underpinning AI — relational databases, the internet, and advances in theoretical computer science — coalesced as globalization ascended. The AI industry emerged from the fusion of the information and communications technology (ICT), chips, and cloud computing industries, together with the technological application of natural language processing. The launch of the World Wide Web in 1991 coincided with the dissolution of the Soviet-American order, which catalyzed the expansion of U.S. capital that’d begun in the wake of the Bretton Woods system’s collapse. As globalized production accelerated, internet-based logistics and infrastructure surged, dramatically reducing the costs of processing and transmitting information across the globe. The “ICT revolution” was key to globalized production since it enabled firms in imperialist centers to organize and manage production processes remotely. Federally subsidized infrastructure and technologies were developed with public funds and then opened to commercial traffic.

But as the United States and other imperialist nations kept investing abroad for over three decades, total capital stock in recipient countries surged, while worker compensation stagnated or declined (except in China). This eventually eroded profit rates in those nations, particularly in those holding the largest trade surpluses with the U.S.: Mexico, China, Vietnam, Germany, and Taiwan, contributing to the decline in the U.S. rate of profit as the volume of surplus value siphoned back to the States diminished. The exhaustion of the globalized world as a reservoir of what Marx termed surplus profits triggered an increasing scramble for new market partitions, spheres of influence, and regimes of exploitation. In a pattern exacerbated by the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic, both Democratic and Republican administrations increasingly pursued trade wars and military buildup, and began to break long-term alliances with other imperialist nations and blocs. Within this new paradigm, the escalating arms race between the United States and China, today centered on AI, was inevitable.

In his 2025 book Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare, former sanctions official Edward Fishman praises the emergence of a “systematic policy” by the first Trump administration, which established that “access to U.S. technology could prove as vital as access to the dollar, and that removing such access could be just as lethal.” Lauding Trump’s attempts to “seize the commanding heights of the digital economy,” Fishman writes that,

Joe Biden, whose ascent to the presidency was in many ways a repudiation of his predecessor’s record, did not walk back Donald Trump’s most aggressive penalties on China’s tech sector; he doubled down. Like the previous administration, Biden’s team viewed supremacy in frontier technologies as a central pillar of geopolitical power, particularly in the intensifying rivalry between the United States and China. As soon as he entered the White House, Biden and his staff made plans to extend Trump-era export controls on Huawei to cover the entire Chinese tech industry.

Export controls are one front in the battle; another is access to key minerals. For a decade, as tech and energy operations reliant on critical minerals ramped up, both the Biden and Trump administrations focused on securing access to these minerals in schemes and deals involving Ukraine, Greenland, and Canada. Trump’s suggestions of Americanization there and elsewhere are more an escalation than a break from the past; the U.S. has been trying to “curtail Chinese ambitions with a familiar playbook.” The fact that China continues to close the gap in AI model performance can only spur more protectionism by the U.S. government. Concurrently, weapons production has also grown in recent years. NATO, Japan, Canada, and Australia have significantly expanded their defense budgets and weapons stockpiles. Conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, alongside gunboat diplomacy to reassert neocolonial influence in Venezuela and Cuba, bear within their reactionary politics an expansionist mandate to secure energy sources, raw materials, trade routes, and labor markets. Predictably, in the face of global frictions and the contraction of international markets, an emboldened corporate class is seeking to cut production costs domestically even further to afford the massive AI buildout, seen as the ticket to maintaining U.S. hegemony.

The Threat to Labor

For the last 50 years, American capital has tried to boost the rate of exploitation domestically by means of speedup, work surveillance, wage stagnation, and rollbacks of workers’ basic benefits. The “AI revolution” extends back beyond the more recent rise of generative AI. AI in manufacturing started in the 1970s, enabling companies to design products with growing accuracy. By the 1980s and 1990s, the focus had shifted toward automation and real-time data collection. Today, AI powers sensor-based systems that surveil every aspect of production, fostering labor productivity by keeping output flowing at all costs. Nongenerative AI has been part of a decades-long process of automation in industrial jobs.

But with the current gen AI iteration, automation has extended to nonindustrial jobs. From 1950 to 1980, the ratio of what Marx called “unproductive labor” (concentrated in sales, finance, real estate, administration, and management) to productive labor (all labor that produces surplus value, including in the service industries) almost doubled, reaching 31.4 percent. Currently, 37 percent of the private-sector workforce is engaged in unproductive labor, which falls under what’s considered “overhead costs.” This vast segment encompasses administrative, managerial, accounting, sales, marketing, and clerical functions across the entire economy.

According to the latest data, corporate adoption of gen AI has followed two distinct rationales. On the one hand, its use across industries has centered on communications, content, and project management systems (reports, videoconferencing, emails, messaging, enterprise portals, etc.) as well as “marketing and sales for consumer goods and retail,” including customer support. In the financial sector, its highest use has been in “risk and compliance functions.” These tasks overlap significantly with the categories of unproductive labor.

A first wave of mechanization of unproductive jobs took place in the 2010s with the introduction of office management software and automated calendars. AI has renewed and exacerbated this trend, particularly following the release of “AI agents.” Yet, despite the lack of evidence of productivity increases, companies are using “AI washing” — blaming AI — to justify mass layoffs, mainly to cut operating costs. Companies have been carrying out mass layoffs of “white-collar” workers and freezing new hiring, especially for junior positions. AI has also increased work surveillance in office jobs, as made clear by Meta’s recent mandate to surveil and capture all its employees’ mouse movements and keystrokes. Meta’s plans, however, were promptly discarded after mass worker backlash. Since then, Meta’s stock has dropped 5 percent after Zuckerberg casually admitted that firing and replacing around 8,000 workers with AI agents “hasn’t really accelerated” productivity.

The second main use of AI has been in software production. Software engineering broadly can be classified as productive labor. Software is a significant component of constant capital, composing 15 percent of U.S. nonresidential fixed investment. According to mainstream economists, the productivity of workers in the software sector is higher than in the nonfarm business sector as a whole, and software itself raises the productivity of other sectors through the automation it provides.

There are many indications that tech companies are forcing their technical workforce to use AI for coding — speedup for coders is already taking place. Amazon and Google engineers report having to produce the same amount of code with half the number of workers, and tasks that used to take weeks are now expected to be completed in days. In other words, bosses are using gen AI — and the threat of AI — to demand increased work intensity as employees adopt AI tools. This means productivity increases, whenever they are genuine, will not be because of automation alone but to overwork as well.

There is also early evidence that companies are no longer hiring engineers at certain skill levels because they expect more senior staff to pick up the slack. This suggests that large-scale job losses attributed to AI are not necessarily coming from automation but from increasing the exploitation rate of the existing workforce, with or without productivity gains from AI use, and through the use of surveillance methods that have long been used in manufacturing and logistics.

Seen together, AI adoption is now targeting layers of the workforce that historically had a higher wage baseline and accounted for significant operating costs for corporations. If manufacturing jobs were gutted over the past several decades, professional jobs appear to be next. The unemployment rate for new workers is now much higher than the average. Bosses will keep trying to boost profits by reducing payroll, especially — but not only — in nonproduction activities. As economist Michael Roberts explains, productivity increases generally based on output and employment growth “will mainly be due to jobs disappearing, not output rising.”

AI Infrastructure and Economic Instability

Tech industry spending is now the only growth sector in business investment. The most capital-intensive aspects of Big Tech — AI chips, data centers, and cloud computing — are attracting mammoth investments at a scale that affects the entire economy. Meanwhile, AI model providers remain unprofitable. In the first quarter of this year alone, OpenAI generated $5.7 billion in revenue with an adjusted operating margin of -122 percent, meaning that for every dollar of revenue, the company lost $1.22. Nevertheless, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and others are betting that their massive infrastructure investments will meet demand for cloud computing capacity and allow them to train new models.

Yet this AI-centric data center infrastructure is not being built merely to service projected demand for current models but to fulfill fantastical speculation that larger models will yield “superintelligence.” Consequently, investments in cloud infrastructure have massively outpaced revenue. By the end of 2025, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta had collectively invested over $400 billion in AI infrastructure — an outlay that some estimate requires $2 trillion in new AI revenue by 2030, a 100-fold increase from a $20 billion baseline to justify the initial investment.

The AI bubble is real and deeply delusional. $344 billion in AI-related bonds have been issued in 2026 alone, with default risks tied directly to profitability and demand. High on the bullish market, AI and Big Tech companies will continue slashing jobs to appease investors until the next round of funding arrives, in patterns eerily reminiscent of a Ponzi scheme. Widespread layoffs in the tech industry are occurring as companies attempt to offset massive AI capex expenditures. Over 700,000 jobs have been slashed since 2022 in the tech industry. However, the commercial cost of AI is already catching up with the increasing cost of AI infrastructure. This could trigger a financial crisis induced by a loss of credibility in the short term, and given the bubble’s size, it could have unprecedented global repercussions.

Alternatively, the bubble could be prolonged for some years, especially since AI is a centerpiece in the state’s new military strategy, the industry enjoys the government’s full backing, venture capital keeps flocking toward the AI industry, and federal regulations have been lifted. This scenario could precipitate a classic crisis of overproduction in the long term.

For Marx, crises of overproduction are conditioned by a quicker fall in the rate of profit during economic booms, when an abundance of capital contributes to faster technical development and eventually reaches a point where more means of production are created than can be absorbed by existing industry. If tech companies continue to invest heavily in AI infrastructure, the costs of energy and raw materials could tend to rise, driven by expected demand and exacerbated by disruptions in global trade and high energy prices. As expenditures in constant capital rise, workers may face more layoffs, and companies may see a decline in the rate of surplus value.

Whether we experience an imminent financial bust or a prolonged bubble followed by an overproduction crisis later depends on whether the promised productivity gains materialize — and whether the massive infrastructure spending can eventually generate returns that justify the investment. Alternatively, it depends on whether workers put their foot down and throw a wrench in the system of cogs.

Building Resistance to AI Encroachment

Almost every major labor conflict in recent years has involved negotiations regarding AI. Labor contracts forged in the wake of powerful strikes have begun to secure some protections. Opposition to employer control over AI was a unifying theme behind the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strike. After their 2023 and 2024 strikes, Boeing and UAW workers secured contract provisions against the punitive use of AI, mandating worker oversight in its deployment. The NewsGuild-CWA has included similar language in over a dozen contracts protecting “bargaining unit work … defining the scope of AI and requiring interaction and oversight by bargaining unit employees.” Recent gains by tech workers through strikes organized by the Times Tech Guild and Kickstarter United stand as additional positive examples that underscore the importance of asserting workers’ control over the use of technology through class struggle.

The movement against data center construction has also started to influence organized labor. Sanders and AOC’s moratorium bill has drawn support from the AFL-CIO, UAW, the AFT (teachers), NNU (nurses), and AAUP (university professors). While an actual moratorium on new data centers could certainly help curb Big Tech’s dictates, Sanders’s bill is largely symbolic and unlikely to pass, particularly given opposition within its own Democratic caucus, with members denouncing it as “idiocy.” Thus, the bill has been used mainly as a campaign slogan in Democratic races. But campaign promises for legal “safeguards” won’t halt an AI industry that sits at the core of the contemporary U.S. economy.

Within pro-Democratic politics, opposition to data centers has largely advanced calls for government regulation. Groups like AI Now call on nonprofits to “do the right thing”:

Policymakers can implement strong data privacy and transparency rules, and update intellectual property protections to return people’s agency over their data and work. Human rights organizations can advance international labor norms and laws to give data labelers guaranteed wage minimums and humane working conditions, as well as to shore up labor rights and guarantee access to dignified economic opportunities across all sectors and industries. Funding agencies can foster renewed diversity in AI research to develop fundamentally new manifestations of what this technology could be.

This call on the millionaire class to oppose the billionaire class is anchored in a fundamental demand for enforcing antitrust regulation. In the past, the government has broken up large corporations, as it did in the 1980s with AT&T, only to see them reconfigure into even larger entities, since capitalism innately tends toward accumulation, concentration, and centralization. The stated goal of antitrust movements, however, is to strengthen markets by increasing competition among businesses through government intervention.

Yet higher capital competition involves a push for higher rates of surplus value or exploitation. Advocating for anti-monopoly regulation in the service of “customers” does not immediately translate into a better social standing for working-class families. The flip side of this consumerist argument is held by a constellation of intellectual critics, including Valerie Veatch, director of the recent film Ghost in the Machine, along with many academics, bloggers, and podcasters whose sharp denunciations of AI ultimately collapse into inane calls for consumer boycotts based on personal moral codes.

Pointing out the structural limitations of these critiques of AI isn’t a call to cynicism or acquiescence; quite the opposite. If there is one thing the Trump administration has made clear, it is that no demand or prospect for struggle is too ambitious. Over the past year, American society has seen what imperialist decay means. The engines of war, racist bigotry, and untamed colonialism turn anew as the frantic race for surplus profits intensifies. Progressive union officials have largely hunkered down since Trump’s election, fearing not only federal backlash but also reprisals from sectors of their own membership who voted Republican. Their partisan politics have left their unions vulnerable to the broader polarization in the country, rendering them incapable of cutting through the chauvinistic and nativist poison with a clear-cut class struggle policy and grassroots political work that stands independent from a highly discredited Democratic Party. To urge a clean break with business unionism and Democratic politics is not hyperbole.

AI, the centerpiece of the current arms race, is the fetishized manifestation of an exhausted economic system that’s brewing an unprecedented social crisis. The repressive apparatus erected under Trump is part of the plan to reorient the core of the American economy around weapons production. War economies require much higher rates of exploitation and, therefore, beget workers’ political and organizational atomization. The gigantic value chains that make AI possible point to the international character that a struggle against the industry must bear.

For this reason, the labor movement in the U.S. must stand in solidarity with its class siblings around the world, advocating not just for economic demands but for political ones as well. The use of AI and U.S. cloud computing to monitor and attack the population of Gaza was the focus of tech workers’ protests at Microsoft and Google and is now well known. This begs for a break with the narrow scope of business unionism. Union organizing, workers’ power, and democracy cannot happen in isolation from the most consequential social struggles occurring now. Recent episodes of heightened social struggle, such as those in Minneapolis and St. Paul, underscore the types of solidarity actions needed to reinvigorate a genuine political opposition. As long as the unions and the socialists, such as DSA and their mouthpieces like Jacobin, continue to mushroom under the shadow of a geriatric Democratic Party, the unhinged Far Right will continue to capitalize on growing levels of indignity and poverty. The upper-middle classes have already begun to structure defense movements. It falls to American workers to decide whether they act as appendages to them or organize independently.

It’s in the interest of every working-class sector to establish a socialist framework for united struggle within and beyond the industry and nation. Capital’s threat of offshoring exposed the utter bankruptcy of the narrow nationalist and protectionist position of American trade union leadership in the 1980s. Workers placed their faith in politicians like Reagan and Clinton, who inflicted historic defeats on the unions. It’s time to learn from the past and break with the pervasive narrowness of a craft or guild mindset. If progressive unions like the UAW are bold enough to raise a 32-hour workweek as a flagship demand, they surely can call for a nationwide joint struggle to repeal the Taft-Hartley Law once and for all. Enacted in the 1940s, after major strike waves, it has undercut workers’ rights to participate in domestic and international solidarity actions for nearly a century. Instead, it enabled right-to-work laws, imposed the NLRB as a regulatory mechanism governing labor, and curtailed political freedom within the unions.

Yet value, surplus value, and therefore capital remain uniquely generated by human labor. AI merely reformulates knowledge facilitated by the asynchronous production of hardware and software through labor processes that involve an international workforce. This is the ultimate capitalist choke point. Regulatory schemes are bound to leave intact the core impetus driving AI’s current development. The fundamental contradiction between technological and human progress is embedded in capital as a social relation. The AI industry has merely exacerbated and expanded this antagonism at a stage of capitalist development where oligopolistic competition seeks to redivide the global market. Resistance to AI encroachment must involve a broader societal struggle in which unionized and nonunionized workers build inclusive political, communal, and civil rights movements.

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