Jim VandeHei

No industry has ever documented its own foreseeable risks as loudly as AI.Imagine a plaintiff's lawyer reading the public warnings of Sam Altman and Dario Amodei: They told the world it was dangero...

China is waging a much different war for AI supremacy than the U.S.Why it matters: China is obsessed with state control and adoption. Chinese officials are laser-focused on deep, widespread AI dome...

The White House, Congress and the country's leading AI companies have allowed AI to grow faster, stronger, more powerful and wildly lucrative (and dangerous), with no serious effort to control it o...

Two seemingly contradictory realities are true at once:Most people find AI only modestly useful, a more clever Google search.Many people building AI or using it obsessively worry it could severely ...

Three Anthropic researchers went public last night with chilling concerns about out-of-control AI, warning it could destroy humans this decade.Anthropic AI researcher Jacob Coxon wrote on X, after ...

Top White House officials and elected Republicans tell us the same thing in private: They no longer even try to persuade President Trump to do or not do something."Why bother?" a longtime adviser a...

Nothing is driving more new U.S. economic investment or political volatility than data centers.Why it matters: They're the Great Subplot of 2026, THE topic animating the AI race and elections. Ever...

Forget energy. Forget chips. Forget China. The most clear and present danger to AI and any AI-related economic boom is rapidly rising public opposition to U.S. data centers.Why it matters: Republic...

My wife, Autumn, has spent nearly a quarter of the past four years in ERs and hospitals, untangling and battling three chronic conditions — and a shamefully broken U.S. medical system.We live in Wa...

When Mike Allen and I are curious about the "real economy," we talk to sources at big-box stores for a read on real-time sales trends, or friends at super-regional banks to gauge the mood and money...

Something big has shifted for all of us. I noticed it last week, while preparing for our Axios board meeting.First, there was a discussion around six-month horizons. And I kept thinking: This is pu...

Read the polls, watch economic indicators and talk to President Trump's inner circle in private, and the verdict on his second term seems clear:Even some longtime insiders fear he's trapped by a wa...

This will be the first election cycle where AI is both a dominant policy debate — and a widely deployed political weapon.Why it matters: AI allows both candidates and bad actors to persuade and per...

You're probably about 550 days from Democrats having a true leader who can show and shape the party's direction.Why it matters: Until Super Tuesday — that's March 7, 2028 — or well beyond, Democrat...

President Trump doesn't much care if Republicans lose the House and/or the Senate in the midterms this fall.Yes, he'd prefer a big win, but he seems indifferent to the election and the possibility ...

The way your work shows up in a digital-dominated world is changing lightning fast, starting with the total collapse of Google Search traffic.Why it matters: Google has basically stopped sending pe...

👉 Watch a video version of this column.Republicans didn't decide to become President Trump's party. They surrendered to him, one stage at a time, over a decade, in plain sight.Democrats swear that ...

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman heads to Washington this week to preview the company's most powerful AI yet, pushing for speedy approval of a model that just hacked a real company.Why it matters: He'll tout ...

We ask almost every AI architect and leader the same thing in private: What AI risk worries you most?Almost all of them fire back the same response: a killer pathogen, spreading too silently, widel...