WSJ What’s News - Why the Social Security Shortfall Is Coming Sooner

Episode Date: June 9, 2026

P.M. Edition for June 9. The fund that helps pay out Social Security benefits is now projected to run out by late 2032, earlier than was previously expected. WSJ reporter Anne Tergesen walks us through why… and what it could mean for retirees. Plus, today Anthropic rolled out a new AI model, Claude Fable 5, that gives the public access to Mythos–a model the company previously said was too dangerous for general release. Bob McMillan, who covers computer security for the Journal, explains how Anthropic aims to prevent bad actors from using the new model for hacking and bioweapons. And President Trump accused Iran of downing an Apache helicopter near the Strait of Hormuz last night, saying the U.S. must respond and threatening the fragile ceasefire. Alex Ossola hosts. Sign up for the WSJ's free What's News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

President Trump says the U.S. must respond after Iran downed a U.S. Apache helicopter near the Strait of Hormuz. Plus, the fund that helps pay for social security benefits is now expected to run out even earlier. And Anthropic releases its latest AI model, giving the public access to a tool that has spooked companies and the White House. Anthropic announced this new technology, and then they said, it's too dangerous to be released publicly. You know, naturally that's going to get everybody's attention. The company says this model protects against those dangerous capabilities. It's Tuesday, June 9th. I'm Alex O'Sulloch for the Wall Street Journal.

This is the PM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories that move the world today. President Trump has accused Iran of shooting down a U.S. Apache helicopter near the Strait of Hormuz and says the U.S. must respond. The development threatens to. a shatter of fragile ceasefire between Iran and the U.S. The downing of the helicopter late yesterday set off a race to find the two American crew members before Iranian forces could close in on them. The military says that in a first-of-its-kind operation at sea, a drone boat rescued the crew who had spent two hours in the water off the coast of Oman.

Iran didn't deny that it shot down the helicopter, but the country's foreign minister suggested that taking it down had been an accident. And NASA has chosen four astronauts for its next Artemis mission as it prepares for a moon landing in 2028. There is mission commander Randy Bresnik, a retired Marine Corps colonel who became a NASA astronaut in 2004. Also coming on the mission are Andre Douglas, who served in the Coast Guard as a naval architect, Frank Rubio, who once spent more than a year aboard the International Space Station, and Luca Parmatano, who's representing the European Space Agency. Artemis 3 won't take them to the moon or around it as the previous flight. did. Instead, it will test hardware and vehicles that NASA intends to use for the eventual moon landing.

Their flight is expected to launch next year. It will spend about two weeks in low Earth orbit. If you're American, you may already know that the fund that pays out Social Security is expected to be depleted within the next decade. Social Security's trustees said today that the deadline is actually coming a few months earlier than they had previously projected. Now it'll be in late 2032. Anne Turgerson, who covers retirement and personal finance for the journal, says there are a few reasons why the shortfall is coming earlier. The tax cuts that Congress passed last year means that a lot of Social Security beneficiaries are not paying as much tax on their Social Security benefits. And so that tax revenue is declining. And both fertility rates are declining and also immigration.

Those declines mean that they're projecting fewer numbers of workers who are going to be paying into the system in the future. And that means less revenue for the Social Security trust funds. But Anne says there's no need to panic quite yet that the fund only pays for a portion of the overall Social Security benefits. The payroll taxes that come in don't cover 100% of the benefits that have been promised. So we have to draw down on the trust fund, which is like a savings account, that Social Security has amassed. That trust fund will be depleted at some point in 2032. People who are receiving benefits are still going to get their benefits. In a worst case scenario, they're going to get about 78 percent of their promised benefits because that's what the payroll tax will cover.

There will be no Social Security trust fund to make up the difference. That is one source of serious alarm for people, is that when they hear that the trust fund's going to be depleted, they think that all of their benefits are going to go away, and that that's not the case. I think Congress is likely to come up with some kind of funding system to avert a situation in which 22% of Social Security benefits just disappear overnight. It's important for people to try to take a long-run perspective and try not to panic about this. Turning to the U.S. economy, new data from the Commerce Department show that the trade deficit was almost unconstitutional. unchanged in April, coming in at about $56 billion. One big change was U.S. crude oil exports, which rose by more than $6 billion as the Iran conflict rippled through global energy markets.

But overall, it's the latest indication that the Trump administration's tariffs have done little to rebalance the U.S. trade position with the rest of the world. Home sales last month posted the biggest increase this year. They rose 3.2% in May from the month before, beating Wall Street's expectations. Journal reporter Nicole Friedman says this is a sign of life for the housing market, but the trend might not last. Mortgage rates did come down somewhat in April, and so that probably lured some buyers off the sidelines. But the big obstacle is that mortgage rates have started rising again. And now there's increased expectations that the Federal Reserve could actually raise short-term rates. That would really push mortgage rates

higher and could stall some of this momentum in the housing market. Mortgage rates are really the big determiner here. And so this could be just a one-month increase and not necessarily a more sustained improvement. Coming up, what's weighing down tech stocks today? That and more after the break. The NASDAQ stock dropped one percent today, and an index that tracks chip stocks dropped almost 2%. Analysts say there's a few reasons investors may be dumping AI stocks that could taking profits from the big tech run-up we've had. There's ongoing worries about the Fed raising interest rates, and also investors may be rotating out of some of the major tech names ahead of the SpaceX IPO on Friday. After all, there's only so much money to go around. The S&P slipped 0.3%, and the Dow

added 0.2%. Meanwhile, oil prices closed down about 3%. We're exclusively reporting that some people making bets on prediction market Kalshi will have to disclose their employers. It's an effort to stop potential insider trading and market manipulation. The changes come after two recent high-profile cases, a U.S. soldier who was charged with using classified information about the arrest of former Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro to trade on polymarket, and a Google employee charged with using insider information about Google's annual search trends report to make more than $1 million, also on polymarket. Congress has also opened a probe into how both Kalshi and Pali Market manage insider trading risk. Kalshi says it expects that betting on some

sensitive issues like company performance and national security, including the Iran War, will require an employment disclosure. People making bets will submit a form saying where they work. But Kalshi says that it won't usually need to actually verify that information unless it sees suspicious activity. The changes are set to be ruled out in the coming weeks. Polymarket has a data partnership with Dow Jones, the publisher of the Wall Street Journal. Chrysler is recalling more than one million vehicles. The company is concerned that the wiring of the car's electric power steering pump may overheat and cause a fire, even when the car is parked with the ignition off. The recall includes Jeep Wrangler and Jeep Gladiator models manufactured

between 2021 and 2025. If you own one of the recalled cars, until it's repaired, you should park outside and away from structures. Today, Anthropic is releasing its most recent model called Claude Fable 5. It'll let people use the company's Mythos AI model, which Anthropic previously thought was too dangerous for the general public. Mithos has spooked the White House as well as banking executives and cybersecurity professionals around the world. Bob Mcmillan, who covers computer security for the journal,

has been following its rollout and joins me now with more. Bob, since Mithos was announced in April, it has made a lot of waves specifically because it's so powerful. Can you remind listeners what made people so nervous about it? Well, Anthropic announced this new technology

and then they said, it's too dangerous to be released publicly. Naturally, that's going to get everybody's attention. But Anthropics says that there are a bunch of things that mythos can do that are just dangerous, right? So it could provide advice on how to build a bioweapon or build a bomb. But the thing that's got the most attention is it's cybersecurity capabilities. Anthropics started a program called Project Glass Wing, and they gave early access to the model to software companies mostly.

And people who were building products that could be hacked. and they basically were invited to train Mythos on their software and see how good it was at finding bugs and writing code that could be used to take advantage of these bugs and hack the systems. And by early indications, Mythos was pretty good at this. So it's created a lot of turmoil with makers of software uncovering just an unprecedented number of software bugs and rushing to patch them before other models develop the same kinds of. capabilities. So after all of this kind of buildup, all of these concerns about the bugpocalypse, now Anthropics giving the public access to mythos, kind of. It says it's put guardrails in place. What kinds of guardrails are we talking about? Well, this is the secret sauce, I guess. The new model is called Fable Five. It's not mythos, but it's like the essence of it is the same as

mythos, right? And basically, they've developed a set of technologies that can ostensibly figure out what you're asking about. So if you ask about the weather, that's okay. But when you're asking about something scary, like how to build a bioweapon or how to hack a computer, they kick you back to an older model, Opus 4-8, the previous version. I think it's fair to say that hackers are still going to try anyway. What is Anthropic doing to prevent hackers who are still trying to get access to the full mythos version? Yeah, this is what they call jailbreaking. And it's sort of an ongoing issue with trying to control these models because people have been, for years, been able to get them to do things they're not supposed to do. Anthropic has tested internally,

and they've also hired these what they call red teamers, these external consultants to come in and just kick the tires of it. So they're confident that they've done some good work here to prevent the jailbreaking, but we'll see what happens. That was WSJ reporter, Bob McBillan. Thanks, my pleasure, Alex. And that's what's news for this Tuesday afternoon. Today's show is produced by Danny Lewis and Anthony Bansy with supervising producer Tali Arbell. I'm Alex Osala for the Wall Street Journal.

We'll be back with a new show tomorrow morning. Thanks for listening.