WSJ What’s News - AI CEOs Warn of Biological Weapons Risk

Episode Date: June 4, 2026

A.M. Edition for June 4. The leaders of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind are calling on Congress to pass a law protecting against biological threats posed by AI. Plus, a flesh-eating screwworm has arrived in the U.S., creating a headache for U.S. ranchers and livestock producers. And the Journal's Douglas Belkin explains why college professors are urging schools to reinstate entrance exams after years of looser policies. Luke Vargas hosts. Sign up for the WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

AI CEOs call on Congress to act, fearing that criminals could use the tech to unleash biological weapons. Plus, after months of warnings, a flesh-eating parasite is confirmed in U.S. livestock, and higher ed tries to get a grasp on pandemic learning loss. The elite schools in the country have been bringing back the SAT and the ACT to try to give themselves one more tool or data point to figure out if kids are going to be able to do the work in college. It's Thursday, June 4th. I'm Luke Fargis for the Wall Street Journal, and here is the AM edition of Watts News, the top headlines and business stories moving your world today. President Trump has told his aides that he won't resume an all-out war with Iran unless it kills American troops.

Private comments that shed light on his reluctance to reignite the conflict, even if it means withstanding weeks or months of smaller flare-ups. Speaking yesterday, following some of the most intense fighting since a ceasefire when in the war, into effect in early April. Trump told reporters he was willing to keep it in place. How do you define ceasefire? Pretty much your way it is. It's a different part of the world. You know, I'd say in that part of the world, ceasefire is when you're shooting in a more moderate manner. While Trump has indicated that a pact to end the war could be close, he said in a New York Post interview published yesterday that a U.S. blockade could last until September's Labor Day.

Elsewhere in Washington, top AI executives and security experts are urging Congress to protect against biological threats posed by the technology, adding to mounting pressure on lawmakers to address its risks. Journal Tech Policy reporter Amrith Ram Kumar says that the leaders of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google Deep Mind are among the signatories of a letter calling for action. In particular, these executives and researchers are worried about gene synthesis screening, which is when companies order citizens. synthetic DNA and RNA, a key step to developing certain vaccines and biotech breakthroughs that can also be used to develop new pathogens and bioweapons. Amrins says that experts have been worried about that threat for some time, but because of recent breakthroughs within AI, the risk is rising dramatically by potentially giving criminals the tools to unleash new pathogens.

Many people see biological risks as the next frontier in protecting against AI threats. Congress is under pressure in general because lawmakers haven't passed any significant AI legislation. Earlier this week, President Trump signed an executive order, largely focused on cybersecurity and model oversight of powerful tools before they're released. But a lot of experts say there's more to be done in the area of biology. President Trump previously revoked a Biden-era screening framework for gene synthesis. While the White House last year promised to replace it with its own guidelines, a replacement policy has not yet been published. A White House official said the administration remains committed to balancing safety with innovation.

A flesh-eating screwworm has arrived in the U.S. A calf in southern Texas has tested positive for the New World screw worm, the first detection of the deadly fly-borne parasite in U.S. livestock since 1966. The finding creates a headache for U.S. ranchers and livestock producers. The American cattle herd is already at its smallest since the 1950s, according to USDA data, helping drive beef prices to record highs for U.S. consumers. Despite the alarming headline, the USDA says that human cases are uncommon. And Ag Secretary Brooke Rollins said that food safety isn't at risk.

Top line, this pest does not cause any sort of a food safety issue. It is not a disease, but simply an insect that feeds on living tissues. Once removed and cleaned, animals treated early enough, including the calf that we're talking about, the eight-week-old bovine, that calf and those animals, if they're treated early enough, will recover and are safe to enter the food supply system. The USDA isn't taking chances, though, setting up a more than 12-mile infection zone

subject to stepped-up surveillance. It said that severely infested animals would be removed from the food supply, but that producers won't need to cull their herds, even if cases are found among their livestock. Shares of SpaceX are set to go on sale next week for $135 a piece in what could be the largest IPO in history. It's an unconventional IPO strategy given the companies usually set a price range. That's then refined in meetings with investors. But reporter Becky Peterson says that SpaceX is used to doing things differently.

The company said they're going to sell 555 million shares, which means they could raise $75 billion. And at that share price, the implied valuation for SpaceX is $1.75 trillion. That makes it one of the most valuable companies in the world. But more interesting to prospective investors is that it doesn't have the same revenue as other companies at that level. The SpaceX valuation is almost 94 times its revenue for 2025. It's the company brought in less than $19 billion. If you compare that to the S&P 500, the act. aggregate company in that index had a multiple closer to 3.4.

SpaceX is expected to start trading on NASDAQ on June 12th. Pattern Day trading is back. Starting today, Robin Hood markets and other brokers are lifting restrictions on rapid-fire stock and options trades dating back to 2001 after the SEC signed off on the move in April. Under the new rules, brokerages will need to monitor their customers trading throughout the day and alert them to any deficits. Shares of Broadcom are down sharply after hours following the chipmaker's latest earnings in which it reported an almost 50% jump in Q2 revenue but left its 2027 outlook unchanged.

That guidance, which failed to live up to some investor expectations, appears to have paused a global tech surge, sending NASDAQ futures lower and triggering a retreat among other chip stocks. And oil prices are easing after Israel and Lebanon agreed to renew their season. fire, potentially resolving would have become a sticking point in talks between the U.S. and Iran to end the war. Coming up, we'll look at why college professors are urging schools to reinstate entrance exams, and beyond that, what careers for college graduates could look like.

Those stories after the break. The fallout from pandemic learning loss is now hitting higher education around the world, and schools are responding, citing a severe preparer. deficit among students. Professors from the University of California wanted to bring back entrance exams. And the journal's Douglas Belkin joins me now with more on this story. Doug, what is going on here? Since the pandemic, the decline in learning and just the learning loss in general across the spectrum from the youngest kids through high school and into college has been significant.

And these kids who were at home, often being educated online, are now entering college and their study skills are generally not up to snuff. And the pandemic learning loss is a big chunk of it. You know, the phones came online and I think in 2012 and things began to fall apart at that point. AI has accelerated that even more. Academic integrity is really just a lot of cheating in schools across the country. Kids aren't doing the work.

And as a result, that you haven't learned as much when they enter college. Right. So tell us more, Doug, about what these 1,100 University of California math and science professors actually want to see. here. Entrance exams, I guess, back in the picture, maybe raising the caliber of people coming into their classrooms, but that doesn't necessarily fix the underlying situation. Right. So to step back just a bit, the pressure to get rid of the SATs and the ACTs had been building for years before the pandemic because it tracks with demographics, race and class really play a significant

part in how well you do in this exam. And so when the pandemic came, schools jettisoned it full force. happened is it turned out to be a pretty good predictor of how well students were going to do, especially since grade inflation in schools has been so dramatic that even if a kid is graduating with A's or A's and B's, it doesn't tell admissions officers that much about their acumen anymore. So the elite schools in the country have been bringing back the SAT and the ACT to try to give themselves one more tool or data point to figure out if kids are going to be able to do the work in college. the professors at UCLA say this is showing up in math. The kids haven't been tested.

They're not prepared. And there's a big gap in some classes between those who are prepared and those who are not. And as a result, these University of California professors say sort of dragging down the overall experience on campus and complicating the work that they have to do. There's two buckets it falls into at UC San Diego, the percentage of kids who have to take remedial classes, which goes back all the way to elementary school and middle school math in some cases, has risen. from about 0.5% of the freshman class to about 9%. And then when the kids get into the STEM classes, the level of preparation is really disparate. So you end up with professors who are trying to bridge these learning gaps in class,

which ends up slowing down the progress they can make and the amount of the curriculum they can cover. We should note, Doug, that in response to this letter from professors, the University of California's academic Senate chair said it's going to examine admissions, policies, and requirements. So maybe we see something come out of that. But more broadly, are we seeing any other signs about how academia is responding to these concerns? This is the $64,000 question across the education spectrum right now from elementary school through college.

If kids aren't plugged in and engaged and focused, then they're not going to learn as much. And they're just not. And so the gaps are significant. There's a lot of experimentation right now going on about how best to teach and reach these kids at different levels. You know, in the K-12 system, there was a big push on individuals. individualized tutoring. And the hope was that that, if you sat a student next to a teacher or a mentor or tutor, they could pull them up. So that's been helping. There's been a lot of experimentation of getting rid of phones in classrooms. There's been a lot of experimentation of using blue books for college exams and even oral examinations so that kids can't cheat on these examinations. We just saw Princeton University update their honor code so that students will now be monitored by professors in classrooms because there was concern about cheating there. So it's sort of all over the map, and there's not been a good silver bullet. One of the more interesting issues we're seeing is schools just incorporating AI wholesale.

And, you know, the results aren't in yet. I've been speaking to Wall Street Journal reporter Douglas Belkin, who covers higher education for us. Doug, a pleasure. Thanks so much. Thank you. And finally, as AI reshapes the world of work, new research from LinkedIn shows that the current cohort of grads entering the workforce are likely to have double the amount of jobs in their lifetime. LinkedIn predicts people entering the workforce today are going to have twice as many jobs over the course of their careers

as people who started out 15 years ago. Now, that's partly because people are just working longer and longer, but the big thing, of course, is artificial intelligence. That's Wall Street Journal on-the-clock columnist Callum Borshers, who says that given the unknowable impact of AI, it's hard to imagine there won't be a seismic effect on Gen Z's careers. but there are ways to get ahead. The best thing we can do might be to hone foundational skills,

and, this is big, get really good at articulating how we can use them in a range of roles. We're going to have to be able to explain how the abilities we developed in the past are transferable. Reflective people are going to be better at this, and they're the ones who will have an edge. There are ways to practice reflection. One is to create a personal one sheet.

One other exercise, too, is to fill out the soft skills and technical skills sections of your LinkedIn profile. while. I know a lot of us leave these fields blank, but LinkedIn tells me that recruiters are actually filtering job candidates more and more by the skills listed in their bios. And that's it for what's news for this Thursday morning. Today's show was produced by Hattie Moyer. Our supervising producer was Michael Cosmides, and I'm Luke Vargas for the Wall Street Journal. We will be back tonight with the new show. Until then, thanks for listening.

Thank you.