Pippa Bailey

🔔 Personal news news: I'm stoked to be joining the @NewStatesman as executive editor, working with @TomMcTague @tanjil_rashid_ @piptbailey and the team. I'll be writing, talking and podcasting about the state of the world and maybe some ⚽️. Get a sub: secure.newstatesman.com/subs…

THE SUSPICIOUS RELATIONSHIP by @freddiejh8 Ask what people in Washington DC think about Burnham and it soon becomes clear that he does not make them think at all. A scoff, a shrug, a quizzical raise of the eyebrow, a look of bored pity: these are the common responses when the Prime Minister is mentioned. “He’s new, and the last one was new, and the one before that was new, and the one before that was new,” a White House official told me. “The thinking is: all right, well, on the current trend, he’ll probably be gone next year, too.” The high turnover of UK leaders has only added to the idea that Britain has little to contribute – it simply does not have the cash, warships or AI firms to matter much to those in Washington looking at their global chessboard. “Burnham has the weight of the governor of South Dakota,” is how a Maga official put it to me. Underneath all this is an emotional critique – that successive British governments have been poor custodians of America’s ancestral homeland. The concern is genuine among Maga figures and the tone is proprietorial, as if it were their responsibility to correct what the British elite has got so wrong. The millions of immigrants who have entered Britain over the past decade make the American right shake its head in disappointment. “You go to the UK, and it is not the UK of ten years ago or 20 years ago,” one official lamented. Earlier this year, a senior administration official was listening to a British counterpart complain about the rise of the radical right in the UK. The Brit blamed disinformation. The American suggested that they take the public on tours of Birmingham and Blackburn to show that the disinformation was wrong and, in fact, those places were ethnically the same as they were in the 1950s. Some in the administration think there is little chance that Britain can recover under Burnham. “You’re an ally. Sort your stuff out, and we’ll get back to you when you have done that,” one White House official said. Many in the US government hope that Nigel Farage takes Downing Street at the next election. He is seen within Maga as Britain’s best, and probably last, chance. While some on the online right think that Rupert Lowe’s ethno-nationalism is closer to what is needed – Lowe was recently on Joe Rogan’s popular podcast and his posts on X are pushed by Elon Musk – this is not yet a widespread view in the administration. “I see him as a slop purveyor,” one official said. Maga figures are still concerned that Reform lacks a professional operation but, by comparison, they think that Lowe’s Restore is little more than a social media party. One figure remarked to me that Farage is increasingly thought of as a man standing in a DC bar waiting for someone to recognise him. But he is still seen as being on the same side as Maga. The US government is increasingly protective of right-wingers in Europe who they think are being persecuted by the liberal establishment. It was noted in Washington that when announcing a new centre to counter Russian disinformation in his UN speech, Burnham said he wanted to counter “far-right narratives”. Those narratives are often identical to the administration’s own policy. Cover art by Cracked Hat

WILL AI KILL US ALL? by @willydunn What can we say we actually know in this fast-moving and contentious story? Having spoken to more than 20 AI experts, government officials and advisers, politicians and researchers, I suggest we know the following: a lot of highly intelligent people believe that there is an unacceptably high chance that AI might kill us all. We can only guess at how that would happen, or what the probability of it happening is. But we also know that whatever these people say about the danger of what they are building, they will not stop building it. They can’t. They are locked into the most expensive competition in history. Spending on AI infrastructure this year alone is expected to exceed $1trn; this is more than three times what it cost America (in today’s money) to develop a nuclear weapon and put a person on the Moon. AI spending is now the main driver of US economic growth. About 80 per cent of all gains in US stock markets last year were from AI companies and related enterprises. No one will deliberately puncture this bubble, and even if they did, the geopolitical importance of AI means the US government – which has always aggressively advanced the interests of domestic companies – would probably not let them. This is not only a race between tech companies, but between superpowers. The only option for a company such as Anthropic is to run through capitalism at breakneck speed, raising and spending titanic sums, to build a world-changing technology and, hopefully, prevent it from wiping us off the face of the Earth. There has never been so much money in the apocalypse business. Cover art by Sam Green.