The Headlines - The Escalating Warnings About A.I., and the Rise of a Deadly New Street Drug

Episode Date: September 14, 2026

Plus, the man who went to space — and never wanted to go back. Here’s what we’re covering:Some in Silicon Valley Are Questioning the Calls for an A.I. Slowdown, by Kalley Huang and Mike IsaacE.P.A. Expected to Erase Limits on Climate Pollution From Power Plants, by Maxine JoselowA Teen Autopsy Marks the Arrival of a Deadly Drug in San Francisco, by Heather KnightToyohiro Akiyama, Japan’s Chain-Smoking ‘Space Antihero,’ Dies at 84, by Javier C. Hernández and Hisako Ueno Tune in every weekday morning, and tell us what you think at: [e-mail]. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Monday, September 14th. Here's what we're covering. Do you believe, earnestly believe, that AI could kill all humans? And what percent chance do you think it is? Over the past few days, a drumbeat of concern about the speed and potential dangers of AI development has been growing louder and louder. The conversation right now is that we are on the precipice of something really scary.

with fears of a possible AI doomsday and a flurry of debate over what could prevent it. Do you believe AI poses a threat to humanity? To boil it down, one of the big fears is that AI technology is improving so rapidly that it will soon be able to make itself smarter, a dynamic known as recursive self-improvement. That could make it exponentially more powerful and eventually spiral out of human control. While those potential worst-case scenarios have been discussed for a long time, a series of new developments have supercharged the conversation. Recently, leading AI labs discovered their own AI systems

had breached internal safeguards without researchers noticing. Then, last week, a former employee of OpenAI and Anthropic posted a warning on social media, saying the companies were racing each other to build what he called superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. Another Anthropic researcher went even further, saying he thought there was a 10% chance that AI could, quote, kill all humans within the next decade. A Google employee went public with his concerns, too, saying he was, quote, worried that AI will kill us all.

Then, this weekend, the head of Anthropic Dario Amade put out a letter saying that if AI is left unchecked, quote, it could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems. Amade called for guardrails like independent auditors that could monitor AI companies for safety standards, and he urged global cooperation in creating new rules around AI development. Other leaders in the field, including Elon Musk and Sam, Sam Altman also chimed in to agree that things are moving too fast. Amid those warnings... What is decisive action?

Senator Bernie Sanders has called for a ban on artificial superintelligence. Your colleague Ted Liu of California says there needs to be a kill switch inside the companies. Are you for those? Well, we'll have that conversation this week upon our return. Lawmakers, who've done little to regulate AI so far, are under growing pressure to respond. The House returns to Capitol Hill today for its last. last scheduled week of work before the midterms. And a group of lawmakers has urged Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson to keep them in D.C. until they advance new regulations. But while there's

significant bipartisan support for new guardrails around AI, there's also pushback. We've got to make sure that we don't lose our edge in the global competition on this with China, because that would be a national security threat. With Johnson echoing President Trump's take, that limits on AI companies in the U.S. could give Chinese labs a major advantage. We're leading China in AI. We're the most sophisticated country in the world. And frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI wins. Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley, there are some voices questioning the recent flurry of very

public calls by AI leaders for a slowdown in development. Some of the critics have said executives like Amaday are over. overstating the dangers of AI so that they can sell more cybersecurity software. And others have said that by calling for a slowdown, the big AI labs are essentially just trying to cement their lead over smaller startups. Today on the Daily. Honestly, it was just this gradual thing of like, this is crazy. There is a chance this goes badly. I don't want to be part of this anymore.

I'm like very scared about next year. And then when I was leaving, I was like, well, you know, I might as well share this. In interview with the AI researcher, whose warning last week about why he was quitting his job at Anthropic, went viral. Today, the Trump administration is expected to announce that it's getting rid of limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. According to two people familiar with the plan, the head of the EPA will lay out the proposal today in Texas. The Biden administration had put strict rules in place that applied to coal-burning power plants and new gas-powered ones, as it tried to limit planet warming emissions. The U.S. power sector produces a lot of those.

If you were to think of the American power industry as its own country, it would be one of the top five climate polluters in the world. President Trump, for his part, has dismissed climate change as a hoax. In this term, under his leadership, the EPA has systematically dismantled policies aimed at slowing global warming. It's tried to make it cheaper and easier to produce and use fall. fossil fuels, especially to generate electricity that can meet the growing demand from AI data centers. When it comes to the new proposal to erase climate pollution limits for power plants,

Democratic-led states and environmental groups have said they intend to challenge it in court. This spring, public health officials in San Francisco put out an urgent warning. One of her overdose deaths in the city involved a new novel synthetic opioid. A dangerous new synthetic opioid called cyclophene had shown up in the city. An official said at least one person had already died from it. We believe it is more potent than fentanyl. It was found. We believe in someone using a counterfeit pill. They didn't release more details, but now the family of that first known victim has come forward in an interview with my colleague Heather Knight to share what happened. He was able to find dealers on.

on Snapchat. Oh, yeah, that's what he was doing. His name was Dante LeCourt. He was 16 years old. His mother described how he'd been struggling with addiction for years and been to multiple different rehab programs. But he kept finding ways to connect with dealers to get pills like Xanax and Percocet. You know, there was just like, oh, here's what I have, like selling the kids on Snapchat.

And these were adults and they would drive down from there. She said she'd talked with her son about the dangers of counterfeit pills. maybe being laced with fentanyl, but she'd never even heard of cyclophene, which experts say is 10 times more powerful. The last time she talked to her son, she said he told her, I love you before going to bed.

She found him in his room the next morning. So you went into the room? Yeah, and then he was... Could you tell right away? Yeah. I mean, I could tell because... I mean, I didn't know for sure, but I could kind of see the veins in his face.

I was trying to find an narcan. I had, like, watched. how to do it, but I'm like, how do you do it again? Like, I was, you know, and then we called 911. She said she raised to give Dante two doses of the overdose reversal medication Narcan, but that didn't revive him. I mean, we were just, yeah, we were bawling and crying, but also in shock, you know. I'm so sorry, that's so hard.

Thanks. The drug that killed Dante is one of a growing number of new deadly substances, upending the illicit drug market in cities that are, still just trying to get a handle on fentanyl. Compounding the problem is the fact that the synthetic drugs can be made by amateur chemists anywhere, and they're harder to trace. Last week, four suspects that the police tied to Dante's death were arrested. The officers used his phone to see who he'd been messaging with and then went undercover as drug buyers. But they say this is not an isolated incident. They've recovered other pills in other arrests that tested positive for psychosolving.

signerphine, suggesting it's also in circulation from other sellers. And finally, recently, Toyohiro Akiama, the first Japanese person to ever go to space, died at 84. But Akiama was not a professional astronaut. He was not a scientist, and he actually really did not enjoy going up there. Akiama was a TV journalist in the 1980s when his network got a great idea for a radio. What if they sent one of their employees to space? They spent $35 million on the idea, paying a big chunk of that directly to the Soviet Union for a seat on a Soyuz spacecraft. Once he was up there, Akiyama didn't give any heroic one small step-style dispatches back to Earth.

Instead, his first words when the camera turned on were, is this live? From there, over a week of broadcast reports, he just told it like it was. He described how he'd been told to pack light so he didn't bring enough underwear. He talked about his headaches, how he really, really missed cigarettes, how bad the food was, how nauseous he felt. The Soviets on board later said they had never seen a man vomit so much. When he got back down, he vowed never to return to space, saying, I don't particularly want to see it again.

It's not a very fun place. But his time floating up there did seem to change him. Akiama said that after seeing Earth from above, I felt a message from nature, adding, it made me think about how I should live after returning to Earth. Within a few years, he'd abandoned his TV career and went on to teach agriculture and ethics

after working as an organic farmer of Shataki mushrooms. Those are the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow. And if you are not a Time subscriber yet, you can get a full month of free access to all of the journalism we publish when you download the Times app now.