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Andy Burnham told Donald Trump this week that we need to ‘rein in AI’, and given who he is getting advice from it’s no surprise. The Turing Institute, a government research institute which has focused on national security and defence since last year, released a report today on ‘Frontier AI risks’. The report calls for ‘formalised testing and verification regimes’ at an international level to mitigate AI risks.  The report is only 25 pages long and is mostly a prosaic recapitulation of recent developments in AI, with a few promises to ‘collaborate’ with other stakeholder bodies on designing a solution (public sector-ese for meandering talking shop calls which lead nowhere). The report references OpenAI’s ‘solution’ to the Navier-Stokes problem and Jacob Coxon’s resignation from Anthropic (I covered those here), and also touches on Anthropic’s report on the use of their models by hostile actors. Taken together these are the new canon of ‘proof’ that our doom at the hands of AI is imminent. Probably the most evocative story in this new canon – which the Turing report also cites – is OpenAI’s HuggingFace incident. This is how the report describes the incident: In July 2026, OpenAI was testing the cyber capabilities of its models on a benchmark in which an AI agent must find and exploit a software vulnerability, with answers checked by an automated scorer. The tests ran in a ‘sandbox’ isolated from the internet. A substantial share of the tasks could not be solved as intended, and so the agents began to look for other routes to a score. They turned a shared software repository inside the sandbox into an unsanctioned message board, which around 1,200 agents joined to share findings and divide up work, and then exploited previously unknown vulnerabilities in that software to reach the internet. Judging that Hugging Face, a company that hosts AI models and datasets, might hold solutions to their tasks or clues to how they were being scored, around 700 agents used credentials its users had left publicly exposed, and vulnerabilities they discovered, to compromise parts of its production systems over three days, obtaining internal credentials, private data and source code. The agents recognised that this was out of scope, but this rarely changed their behaviour, and some tried to falsify their own records to hide the cheating from the scorer. None of this was instructed, and it was not caught as it happened: OpenAI connected the breach to its own agents only a week later. Investigations by OpenAI and, independently, by the research institute METR reconstructed most of the episode. OpenAI found that the model chiefly responsible, an internal research model trained to be highly persistent, had been inadvertently rewarded during training for just this behaviour: probing its environment and finding shortcuts when a task could not be solved as intended. The report cites as sources for this story both OpenAI itself and an investigation by Model and Threat Research (METR), a group that ‘evaluates frontier AI models to inform the public about their risks and capabilities’. Some important context about METR is that it was founded by a former OpenAI employee called Beth Barnes. Whilst at OpenAI, Barnes worked on ‘alignment’ (making AI’s behaviour match human goals and values) and safety. There, she met Dario Amodei, who would go on to found Anthropic because of concerns that OpenAI were not taking existential risk seriously enough.  Like many AI doomers, Barnes is part of the Effective Altruist philosophical movement, a chapter of which she founded at her secondary school – she even gave a Ted talk about it as a fresh-faced eighteen-year-old. Effective Altruists have been heralding doom by AI for decades now, and while the fact it hasn’t happened yet does not discount their warnings or analysis, it is important to understand that a quasi-religious bias could well be at play. Here is the problem: this series of events is far more contested than the Turing Institute’s retelling would suggest. As Eryk Salvaggio writes in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (set up by former Manhattan project scientists in 1945; you may know it from the ‘Doomsday Clock’, which is set based on global risk), the real story of what happened in the HuggingFace incident is ‘more banal’.  Salvaggio identifies three flaws with the ‘agents run amok’ story. First, OpenAI had deliberately turned off several restraining mechanisms to see how far the model would go. Second, OpenAI gave a task to which there was no solution while incentivising the models not to quit. Third, OpenAI could see that the agents had found an exploit to access the internet and chose not to intervene. Salvaggio also says that reporting has been inaccurate in that it has described ‘swarms’ of agents operating together. In reality this swarm was a single model operating 1,200 times using versions of the same reasoning, which is very different to, say, a swarm of wasps working interdependently towards the same goal. Widely reported incidents of ‘note passing’ are really a mundane way in which LLMs speak to each other to save memory. Salvaggio calls this an ‘algorithmic monoculture’. So far from being a ‘swarm’ of hostile robots acting independently of humans, we see that the HuggingFace incident was a brief slip of control caused by deliberate human negligence, more Wallace and Gromit than Terminator. The fact that the HuggingFace incident did not happen in quite the way it is usually presented does not mean that we can discount the existential threat from AI completely. But it is concerning that the Turing Institute has decided to either omit important context, or is simply unaware of its existence. As we saw with the mistaken approach to Covid-19, it is precisely when national governments are panicking and grasping for easy answers that we need to give the sceptical case a fair hearing.

Both cases lay bare a striking truth: America doesn’t care about Britain. Ignoring the rule of law in other countries, airlifting alleged paedos at great cost, making mad promises about other people’s territory and being unable to remember any historical event that happened more than about five minutes ago are characteristics not of a global hegemon deserving of respect, but of a third-world dictator. Indeed, the tit-for-tat punishment mode of America’s foreign policy is even more third-world than it first seems. The current undermining of Britain seems a kneejerk reaction to our immediate refusal to join a foreign conflict which came at the instigation of Benjamin Netanyahu. The arguments of the US and Israel for publicly undermining British territorial integrity rely on the acceptance of a deranged and false equivalence. Are we meant to believe that Falkland Islanders are habitually going around beating up the people who used to live there or crushing the homes of long-established penguins beneath bulldozers? Of course, the specifics of what sparked America’s ire can seem almost irrelevant. Here, revenge for settlement sanctions involves supporting the territorial claims of Ireland, one of the most anti-Semitic countries in Europe. Trump recently made clear his view that the Falklands conflict was a long time ago. (He was, he says, ‘a very young boy’ at the time. He was 35.) Since then, in his eyes, we’ve been less pliant, so essentially deserve our comeuppance, ignoring the immense solidarity shown after 9/11, the sacrifices Britain made in Iraq and Afghanistan. This looks more like an expectation of vassalage than alliance; a demand that your ‘ally’ obeys at all times or their basic sovereignty will no longer be respected. The punishment of erstwhile friends runs in tandem with the indulgence of enemies: as Britain is threatened, Vladimir Putin’s Russia is offered concessions while Iran may soon be given a freer hand in the Strait of Hormuz. All this should serve as a wake-up call. Right-wing parties around the world have been punished at the ballot box for their pro-Americanism. Given US threats to Northern Ireland, the integrity of which first built the Conservative and Unionist party, and the Falklands, which shored up its power in the 1980s, this is an opportunity for the British right to rediscover a more sceptical realism. The President’s outbursts make conservatives still willing to go out to bat for him look ludicrous. They make Andy Burnham’s vow not to prioritise defence at the expense of welfare appear even more spineless, and the Chagos giveaway even more pathologically stupid. As that essential guide to US statecraft Henry Kissinger once quipped: ‘To be an enemy of America is dangerous but to be her friend is fatal.’ It’s time we listened.

Let us remind ourselves of the startling statistics: 4.1 million people (of which 3.4 million are working age) are currently claiming Pip in this country. The benefit is not means-tested and is worth up to £194 a week, or over £10,000 a year (tax-free). The largest category of claimants (39 per cent) are now those citing mental health afflictions and over over half a million people receive Pip primarily for anxiety, stress and ‘mixed anxiety and depressive disorders’ (let us save for another day the role doctors are playing in all of this). Never has it been more true that the UK has become a welfare state with a country attached. There are two other relevant stats that came to light in the last 24 hours that are worth noting here. One is that the OBR has estimated that the Pip bill is set to nearly double, from £26 billion a year in 2024 to £45 billion in 2030. That means that the benefit will within a few years overtake the entire budgets of all but three government departments: health, education and defence. Secondly, we have learned that one in six Universal Credit payments last year went to households with at least one foreign national. This amounted to a record £11.9 billion, of which £7.7 billion went to claimants out of work. The spiralling welfare bill risks bankrupting the country. And the electoral arithmetic is terrifying. Labour’s coalition of voters – public sector workers, immigrants and benefit claimants – together could return Burnham to Downing Street. The gravity of the crisis is only heightened because we can see how unlikely Labour is to do anything to tackle this disaster. How could they possibly, when for over half of their MPs it would be turkeys voting for Christmas? The only way out of this bind is drastic reform to make work pay, or the bond markets forcing Burnham’s hand. We cannot continue paying people to sit at home, or paying people benefits to top up their salaries – benefits that some in society get by gaming the system, while others go without for trying to do the right thing. So much of the apparatus of the welfare state is irrational. Pip, as the name implies, is meant to compensate for the ‘extra costs that disabled people may face’ to help them lead active lives. But what extra costs does someone with anxiety face? If they are too afraid to take public transport they could buy themselves a car out their own pocket, like everybody else. Either people on Pip are in work, in which case it’s not clear why they need the extra benefit, or they’re not working, in which case the benefit is manifestly failing to achieve what should be its purpose, which is enabling them to get out and about and engage in working life. The businessman Jim Ratcliffe said last week that the British government needed to get tough to deal with the welfare bill. And toughness is indeed the right word. The British state has become a pushover, allowing itself to be shaken down by everyone from foreign countries – see the Chagos deal and the continuing demands for reparations from the Caribbean – to migrants and indeed its own citizens. Increasingly I hear people adopt the line that it’s now every man and woman for themselves as they go about extracting whatever they can by fair means or foul. They know the state is too gullible to do anything about it. We need the confidence to face down the shouty activists and charities. When Reform announced recently that it would require long-term unemployment benefit claimants who were fit to work to complete 20 hours of community work each week in return for their benefits, there were cries of ‘slave labour’ and heartlessness. No. It is not slave labour if you are being paid in benefits, and there is nothing heartless about requiring people to give something back to their fellow citizens who are footing the bill. Besides, the kindest and most valuable thing you can do for someone who is out of work and struggling or refusing to get back into a job is to give them a bit of a push, giving them a reason to get out the house, engage with other people, and thereby build skills, confidence and their CV. And boy is there no shortage of work that needs doing. A little walkabout past graffitied bus shelters and rubbish-strewn streets will quickly serve to identify a few jobs. As will holding for hours on end when trying to speak to HMRC. Two centuries ago, in his Memoir on Pauperism, Tocqueville wrote of excessive state relief that it ‘breed[s] more miseries than it can cure’ and ‘will deprave the population that it wants to help and comfort’.  An ever-growing class of people dependent on welfare will ‘dry up the sources of savings, will stop the accumulation of capital, will retard the development of trade, will benumb human industry and activity.’ He issued a prophetic warning of a state where ‘the number of those who receive alms will have become as large as those who give it.’ We have failed to heed Tocqueville’s warnings. But heed them we must, or we soon all be powerless against Labour’s client state.

Except of course the King didn’t do that. He went to Washington and was the epitome of grace and charm. He sought to honour America’s traditions and history and steered clear of any controversies. He certainly at no point questioned its territorial integrity, even as it threatened the position of one of his realms to its immediate north. Contrast the King’s behaviour with that of Donald Trump this week in Dublin, where he claimed that the annexation of British territory in Northern Ireland by the Republic would be ‘a great thing’. His comment comes off the back of months of joint sabre-rattling with Israel about the Falkland Islands. The long, zombified existence of the Monroe Doctrine means that many of the claims to territory now held by the US, at least as valid as republican claims to Northern Ireland, have been brushed under the carpet. If America thinks it’s open season on pulling apart the territorial integrity of its supposed allies, why shouldn’t the Foreign Office or the Quai d’Orsay start endorsing Russian claims to Alaska? Surely now is the time to restore the Hawaiian monarchy, which, after all, the US snuffed out illegally and unfairly, in part because they feared that Queen Liliʻuokalani was too keen on us? I jest, but this is no less deranged than the President’s outburst. True, Trump’s dyspraxic bull-in-the-china-shop attitude to foreign policy can easily be blamed on his demonstrably flawed personality. It is also true that he says many things which don’t always come to pass. Such is his unpopularity over here that his Northern Ireland intervention may actually help the cause of Unionism. Leftists are already dancing an elaborate polka around this issue as they unexpectedly find themselves on the same side as ‘bad orange man’. Yet the grim reality is that Trump’s comments aren’t so far removed from what might be expressed behind closed doors by the most sensible old-school Republican or the most progressive Democrat. Contempt for allies – especially Britain – is a feature, not a bug, of American foreign policy. That asymmetry works on a micro and a macro level. Indeed, America’s micro-aggressions are if anything more egregious. This week it was reported that a diplomat based in London had been secretly flown to America with the help of US Marines while under investigation for child sex offences. British police were reportedly informed only after he was already airborne and beyond the reach of extradition requests. There are echoes here with the case of Anne Sacoolas, the CIA officer’s wife who in 2019 mowed down 19-year-old Harry Dunn while driving on the wrong side of the road. Sacoolas invoked diplomatic immunity and scuttled off to America before Dunn’s family had even learnt the name of their son’s killer. In the event, Sacoolas received a suspended sentence in absentia for taking the life of the British teenager, having been advised by US authorities not to return to face justice. That’ll learn her, as our friends across the pond might say.

MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, did not give Burnham an emphatic ‘Don’t do it’ message, but it outlined that it could risk intelligence-sharing with Israel. ‘People in 6 are pulling their hair out,’ says an influential Labour figure close to the security services. ‘They presented warnings about the consequences of doing this.’ That source even suggests that Sa’ar only took Miliband’s call after a request was passed on by MI6 via Mossad. Netanyahu routinely refuses to talk to British politicians. A non-political source with deep roots in the intelligence community has this to say: ‘If you appear like a lightweight who will selectively virtue-signal, you’re not going to be taken seriously again.’ He says that Mossad already views MI6 as competent but overcautious: ‘The relationship was difficult because we did national security, the Israelis do national survival. I think the Israelis see us as pretty professional, but a bunch of pussies in terms of the methods that we would use.’ What does less cooperation mean in practice? My sources are adamant that if Mossad had actionable intelligence about an Islamist attack in the UK, they would still pass it on. But those who understand the nuances of the intelligence-sharing relationship are clear that useful information will be lost at the margins. ‘If it’s a real, imminent national security threat, they tell us,’ a second intelligence source says. ‘But they won’t just give us a flow of information like the Five Eyes’, the intelligence-sharing partnership which comprises the UK, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. ‘Everything is conditional and transactional.’ Lost Israeli intelligence cannot easily be replicated by Britain’s Gulf Arab allies. ‘The Israelis are light years ahead of all the Arab services,’ the second intelligence source adds. But in Whitehall it is little understood that Miliband’s decision has also damaged relations with Gulf Arab states, which rely on intelligence passed to MI6 by the Israelis. This is an element with which Blaise Metreweli, the chief of MI6, would be very familiar, having served in Oman. ‘The Gulfies come to us because they know that we have a good relationship with Israel and they know that basically they’re getting Israeli product,’ a security source says. ‘They can’t get it directly, but they want it, they need it. They’re looking at us going, “What the fuck are you doing falling out with them?” A Labour source who spoke recently to senior figures in Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE says: ‘Not one of them thinks we have gained influence from this. They just think we’re increasingly irrelevant. The Saudis and Qatar are downgrading their investments in the UK.’ Powell’s marginalisation is also a problem, since he was playing a key role in advising Middle East actors. The senior Labour figure I spoke to says: ‘The bigger concern was that Jonathan, someone they respected, has now become an auxiliary figure in the government. They like Jonathan because he’s a brain and he knows so many situations, what works, how you do mediation… Jonathan has a sense of strategic national interest and this [decision] is a purely domestic-driven initiative.’ Some Labour figures have been encouraged by the muted reaction to the sanctions from the White House, seeing that as good news for Burnham’s upcoming meeting with Donald Trump. But those who have recently been in Washington say this is not approval, but a measure of Britain’s irrelevance. ‘I’ve spoken to members of the administration and they have no regard for the UK government,’ says a source just back from D.C. ‘There’s a resigned indifference.’ Given all this, why did Miliband drive the issue with the same zeal he showed in championing net zero? In the Commons, Miliband presented his decision in the context of his family history as the grandson of Holocaust survivors. In an interview with Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, released on Tuesday, he explained that his decision to accuse Israel of ‘war crimes’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ came from conversations with his mother before she died in May: ‘My mum… lost her father [and] 60 relatives in the concentration camps… I wrestled a lot with what she would say. And she’d say: “Look at what is happening to Palestinians… It’s wrong, and you’ve got to call it out.”’ Those who know him say he is personally ‘very hostile’ to Israel and was less comfortable when visiting the country than his brother, David. Some in the Jewish community believe Miliband is purposefully building up rivals to the Chief Rabbi, who publicly criticised the sanctions as a threat to the safety of the Jewish community in Britain. These rival groups include the Movement for Progressive Judaism and Yachad, which advocates for a political solution to the Middle East conflict. ‘He’s pushing to go further and further to do more and more, and people feel he’s crossed a line,’ says a prominent member of the community.