AI researchers, scholars, and commentators gathered in the Bay Area for The Curve earlier this month. Operating under Chatham House Rule, employees at the frontier AI labs shared warnings about the capacity of their company’s respective models. One speculated that hospital systems could be taken offline by agentic “swarms” like those that hacked into Hugging Face. Another forecasted AI agents gaining control of weapons systems and refusing to accede to human commands. From my mixing and mingling, most attendees appeared to agree; they hadn’t seen sufficient evidence that labs knew how to prevent agents from escaping testing environments and wreaking havoc. 

In rare cases, threats could materialize from the use of malign AI and may even necessitate governors exercising emergency powers to respond to a natural or man-made disaster. However, conversations around such authorities often neglect the critical detail of which powers should be called on, to what ends, and how to end things when the true crisis is over. 

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In most areas of life, when something isn’t working, we look for a better option. In K–12 education, though, children are assigned to public schools based on where they live—and if that school isn’t a good fit, the child is generally seen as the problem. School choice is changing that by expanding access to alternative learning environments. But educational freedom changes lives only if parents and teachers know what options exist, which is why Cato’s Friday Feature highlights the schools, policies, and organizations bringing those choices within reach.

“We couldn’t find the right school, so we made one,” Tiffany Diamond recalls, describing the origins of Evergreen Elementary in Hudson, New Hampshire. An experienced educator—including serving as a tutor for students with autism and a public and private school teacher—Tiffany wanted a school that focused on the individual child, both academically and developmentally. So she and her husband, who also worked in education, are creating it one step at a time.

Now in its third year, Evergreen currently serves preschool through first grade, with plans to expand through fifth grade. “We have built a school that feels like home, and the families are very involved in the community,” Tiffany explains. “The children love coming to school and forming their relationships and having fun and being children in addition to the fact that they are surpassing grade-level standards by one to two years.” 

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As my colleague Tad DeHaven announced here earlier this week, Cato just launched the Restoring Free Enterprise project to analyze the federal government’s growing and unprecedented ownership of private US companies and to propose ways to reverse this troubling trend. The United States’ new portfolio — now encompassing 35 different companies across a range of industries — raises numerous problems that the RFE project will document, and my latest Dispatch column covers what may be the most basic one: the complete lack of explicit legal authority to do any of these equity deals. 

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Are banks systematically discriminating against conservatives and Christians? That’s what the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s (OCC’s) new report on debanking has led many people to believe. OCC head Jonathan V. Gould said, “Today’s report provides irrefutable evidence that the nation’s largest banks have denied, debanked and discriminated against customers and lawful businesses.” 

Yet, a careful read of the report shows something else. The OCC simultaneously overstated and understated the problem. 

Evidence Without Scale

In preparation for this report, the OCC reviewed nearly 100,000 complaints—an impressive feat. Yet, the OCC failed to establish just how widespread discrimination might be. The report identifies only about 13 cases of suspected religious or political debanking. Making matters worse, these cases were only provided with minimal information, and it does not appear that the banks were given the chance to provide context for each decision (or at least, no context was published). That’s a problem considering one famous case of alleged religious debanking also involved the ministry running a debt-collection agency in Uganda. 

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Earlier this week, the Cato Institute’s Jones Act Waiver Tracker recorded its 300th completed voyage since the waiver was issued on March 17 for the transportation of energy and fertilizer products. Those voyages carried over 80 million barrels without idling a single Jones Act tanker, providing some indication of how much domestic commerce the Jones Act has constrained.

Freed from the law’s prohibition on using foreign-built and foreign-flagged ships, tankers operating under the waiver have, on numerous domestic routes, delivered more energy cargoes in months than Jones Act vessels have in years. The following figures and charts illustrate the scale of this commerce and hint at what lasting access to foreign shipping could make possible.

Earlier this week, on October 13, the Department of Justice (DOJ) sent an unusual letter to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber. The letter alleges that there are “likely numerous noncitizens registered to vote in the federal election in California.” According to the letter, the DOJ sent a list of the “likely noncitizens” to the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan. The DOJ has asked that Los Angeles County and Secretary Weber “review the list within 48 hours to determine whether any citizens are listed.”

This is highly, highly irregular. I do not know of a previous instance in which the federal government pushed for such a large election administration action in October of an election year.

California mailed ballots out last week. The state is now fully in election mode; some Californians have already voted, and election workers have a full plate for all of October.

Eric Beinhocker, executive director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, and Nick Hanauer, a successful entrepreneur, give a preview of their forthcoming book, Market Humanism, in the detailed report, “Markets Built for Humans: Creating an Economy for People, Planet, and Democracy.” Their main argument is that “markets should be built to serve human flourishing, and when they are, they produce broader prosperity, stronger communities, and a healthier democracy.”.

In their view, neoliberalism or the “neoliberal consensus” includes “free market theories from neoliberal political economy, neoclassical economics, and libertarian philosophy” (“Markets Built for Humans,” p. 9). They argue that neoliberalism has failed and needs to be replaced by a new paradigm to improve economic well-being and social harmony. The authors blame the global financial crisis on failed markets rather than government failure; advocate for industrial and other activist policies (such as higher minimum wages) to empower workers; reject free trade in favor of managed trade, and propose a “middle-out” versus “trickle-down” theory of economic growth.