Newsweek is reporting in its "The 1600" newsletter that Saudi Arabia says a major pipeline that served as its best route for exporting oil while circumventing the Strait of Hormuz is completely offline after being attacked late last week by drones that came from Iraq. It said the Houthis are making territorial gains across Yemen that bring them close to the Bab al-Mandab Strait, another key chokepoint for oil and gas transit. Newsweek said the effects have not yet fully rippled through the markets, and that it paid $5.10 to fill its tank over the weekend. It said the national average for a gallon of diesel is above $6, a record.
Newsweek is also reporting that a significant development is unfolding among frontier artificial intelligence labs, after a coordinated call over the weekend from OpenAI and Anthropic to slow the pace of AI development. It said Anthropic's Dario Amodei opened the push with an essay published Saturday titled "We Must Pace the Frontier," arguing that the industry must slow down immediately and offering ideas for doing so responsibly with help from Western governments. Newsweek said the argument was immediately endorsed by OpenAI's Sam Altman as well as Elon Musk, and that the unified front is significant given that the three men dislike one another.
Newsweek said the question is one of motives, and it laid out two possibilities. It said the first is that something happened recently at the frontier labs that alarmed them and is being kept secret, including talk that frontier models are becoming capable of recursive self-improvement, meaning the AI trains itself without humans. Newsweek said the second, which it said it is closer to, is that the labs are covering for a plateau in AI progress and seeking to form a cartel through regulatory capture, noting they are burning money without approaching positive cash flow.
Newsweek said Amodei's essay offers two options for regulating AI now: Congress passing legislation, or the federal government granting an "antitrust waiver" allowing frontier labs to coordinate on regulating themselves. It said Amodei and the others know President Donald Trump is captured on the issue and that Congress has ceased to be of value, so the answer must be to let the labs "pace" the frontier together. Newsweek said that if none of the AI billionaires can be trusted beyond their own bottom lines, the industry's current moment might be cause for relief, and that the alternative is that a threshold on superintelligence has been crossed.