Conventional wisdom holds that a midterm election only fully comes into focus after Labor Day. That’s when a critical slice of the electorate starts focusing on the election and the choices before them. More or less in line with that, we’ve had a spray of polls out in the last few days showing the congressional generic ballot shifting decisively in Democrats’ favor. Looking only at generic ballots fielded entirely in September by pollsters the New York Times rates as trusted we have D+7, D+9, D+9 and D+11. If that trend or average is representative, it shows Democrats opening a big lead on this measure where the earlier average had been in the 5-7 point range. As Ron Brownstein notes here, history also tells us that in the final weeks of a campaign, this generic ballot measure will bend toward the president’s approval number. That appears to be happening. One of those, from the Times itself, was released today (D+9) with an accompanying write-up which, simply because it’s the Times, will probably draw attention to this trend even though the Times poll is only one of several.

Polls and trends can of course be wrong. But these numbers are extremely bad for the GOP, and if anything in this ballpark is accurate Republicans will likely lose the Senate as well as the House. Indeed, the variability in possible outcomes may be even higher in the Senate since it’s not amenable to gerrymandering. Even the Times, usually eager to find possible downsides for Democrats, frames their poll with declarative statements like this: “Voters see Republicans broadly as more extreme, more elitist and more corrupt than Democrats, according to the poll. And while voters continue to have doubts about both parties, they aligned more with the Democratic Party on both cultural and economic matters than the Republican Party in the survey.”

You’ve probably seen these reports of an employee of the AI company Anthropic who quit his job and issued a warning on X that suggested AI could, in next few years, escape control and lead to the extinction of humanity. These sound like not just wild but science fiction-type claims. And they’ve lurked around frontier AI labs for years. It’s one of the many weirdnesses of the AI world and those who lead it. The basic pitch: AI is awesome. We need to built it as quickly as possible. Also it might lead to human extinction. Quite an attractive offer! There’s always been a strong sense among many observers that these claims or suggestions or warnings are part of the AI hype machine itself, albeit of a kind of contradictory or paradoxical variety.

But this warning by the ex-Anthropic employee, Jacob Coxon, seems different and is unquestionably being reacted to very differently. That’s the one part of this that is new and real – the reaction to this warning/comment etc is much bigger and operating in the tech, financial and general media. Wired has a good interview with him here. (I think you can read it as a free article if you haven’t read other Wired articles this month.) The gist is that Coxon says it’s imperative to create a regulatory structure, or at least an ad-hoc agreement that can slow the competition between OpenAI and Anthropic, the two most advanced AI engines and research entities. (The inflection point people are focusing on is something called “recursive self-improvement,” which is when this generation of AI model builds the next one.) The problem is that you really need an agreement that brings China into some common framework too. Because they’re in this same hunt, running these same risks, even though I think the common consensus is that Chinese companies are running at least somewhat behind the most advanced U.S. companies. China’s strength has been building models which are only a bit behind the U.S. models but at dramatically lowest costs.