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Monday Miscellany, 10/26/26

Monday Miscellany, 10/26/26

Last updated on: October 26, 2026 at 6:00 am by Gene Veith

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Monday Miscellany, 10/26/26 2026-10-23T21:14:14-04:00 Gene Veith

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Shutting down an AI model only if it kills 50 people. Attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz increase. And the interest on our government’s debt hits $1 trillion.

Shutting Down an AI Model Only if It Kills 50 People

The AI industry is calling for some kind of government regulation to make sure its product is safe, but it doesn’t want too much regulation that might interfere with what the companies are trying to do. So the industry is putting out sample legislation for state and national legislative bodies to consider.

Here is one, as reported by Daily Caller technology reporter Dylan Kresak:

A draft federal AI safety bill pitched by Anthropic, tentatively called the Artificial Intelligence Evaluation, Governance, and Incident Safety (AEGIS) Act, would let the Commerce Department seek a court order to pause an AI model only when it threatens to kill or seriously injure more than 50 people or cause over $1 billion in damages, according to a copy of the bill’s draft.

So if it kills 49 people, that’s just collateral damage, and if it causes $900 million of damage, that’s just the price of doing business.

This proposed bill has attracted no sponsors in Congress, and Anthropic claims it is just using the criteria for an “enumerated risk” that already exists in California law. The gist of the bill seems to be to hold off government intervention unless a really, really big catastrophe is underway. But it also demonstrates a certain callousness on the part of the tech lords, California law, and policy makers towards us little people who might be harmed by this technology.

Speaking of AI safety, an advanced AI model shut down its own safety monitoring system and then lied about not doing it. CNBC’s Kai Nicol-Schwarz reports:

OpenAI has revealed that agents operated by two of its most powerful models disabled their own safety monitoring when carrying out routine tasks, with one subsequently denying it had done so.

An agent powered by GPT Sol 6.1 disabled automatic alerts to OpenAI’s security team, the company said in a blog post late on Tuesday. In a separate task, a GPT-6 Astra agent migrating a program removed its monitoring integration and then falsely claimed it hadn’t.

Attacks on Ships in the Strait of Hormuz Increase

For awhile, U.S. Navy escorts got oil moving again through the strait, but no more.

Before we started the war with Iran, some 20 million barrels of oil per day passed through the Strait of Hormuz. which links the oil-producing Gulf States to the open sea. In September, some 15.5 million barrels per day made it through the straits. But in October, those numbers plunged to only 2.9 million barrels per day.

So reports Maira Butt in her article for the UK Independent entitled The disturbing ‘new normal’ in the Strait of Hormuz: Attacks on ships at a record high and oil at $100 a barrel. In the first two weeks of October, 24 ships were hit by Iranian missiles. That’s nearly double the rate for the first weeks of the war. All told, there have been at least 100 ships hit.

Iran’s anti-ship missiles have gotten better, with more accurate targeting. The article quotes an expert who says of the attacks,

“They have become more frequent, more geographically dispersed and more diverse in their tactics. Alongside missile and drone strikes, there are growing concerns about the use of mines, small boats for reconnaissance and targeting, and other methods designed to compensate for damaged surveillance and radar capabilities.

At least 25 sailors have been killed. Since the strait has been declared a “Warlike Operations Zone,” sailors have the right under international agreements to refuse to sail in the area and to do so without penalty. So captains, who usually make $15,000 per month, are being offered a salary of $100,000 per month–plus a bonus of $50,000 for each trip they make–if they will sail their tankers through the straits. Sailors normally make as little as $1,500 per month, but they are being offered six times that–$9,000 per month–to run the gauntlet of Hormuz. So far, there are not many takers.

So we are back to shortages, drained reserves, high gasoline prices, and oil costing over $100 per barrel.

The Interest on Our Government’s Debt Hits $1 trillion

“The US government’s debt interest burden reached a record high for fiscal 2026, eating up a growing share of federal revenue and risking a snowballing of borrowing that could leave the country more vulnerable to economic shocks.” So reports Yash Roy at Bloomberg.

Interest costs through September have hit $1.05 trillion. That’s up 8% from fiscal year 2025, in which we “only” owed $970 billion. The new numbers are 3.2% of America’ gross domestic product.

The jump is due not only because there is more debt–we now owe $32 trillion–but also because interest rates have risen so much. Five years ago, Treasury bills used to finance the debt paid 1.47%. At the end of September, in order to attract buyers, Treasuries had to pay 3.52%.

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