Axios C-Suite: What Jim learned for the week of March 28
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I'm going to share intel picked up from top officials in government, AI and business. It was shared confidentially, but with the knowledge I'd use it without sourcing it.
1. Democratic hit list. If Dems win the House (highly likely), they'll use oversight and subpoenas to target monopolies, AI, social media and pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs).
The subpoena list is expected to include:
- Law firms that signed deals with President Trump.
- Media giants that settled.
- Donors to Trump's White House ballroom.
- Top execs who negotiated to give the government a stake in their companies.
- Profit-enablers of Trump family or families of Cabinet members.
- Media moguls Larry and David Ellison.
Get ready: Trump can blow off subpoenas. You can't. If you did deals with Trump or kicked in cash for building his projects, lawyer and lobbyist up.
2. 🚨 New ... Threat alert: I don't mean to freak you out, but Anthropic is privately warning top government officials that its not-yet-released model — Mythos — makes large-scale cyberattacks MUCH MORE LIKELY in '26.
I previewed this more cryptically in a column. The blunter version: The model allows agents to work on their own, with wild sophistication and precision, to penetrate corporate, government and municipal systems. It's a hacker's dream weapon.
- One person briefed said it seems almost certain a large-scale attack will hit THIS YEAR. Businesses are ripe targets.
- Anthropic hasn't released it, but Fortune got its hands on an unpublished blog post from the company describing Mythos: "It presages an upcoming wave of models that can exploit vulnerabilities in ways that far outpace the efforts of defenders."
3. Trump's three war emotions: His war strategy is 75% improvisation, 25% strategy beneath him. I'm big on watching what Trump does, not says. He's moved war machines and people four times now (June strike on Iran, before the current war, plus Venezuela and Middle East reinforcements the past week). So far, he's never moved weapons without using them.
I'm told Trump shifts between three war emotions in this order:
- Fear (rising energy prices, falling stock prices).
- Anger (no credit for military success).
- Happiness (loves the unilateral power and stunning visual results).
Fun/scary fact: Trump gets frequent sizzle reels of the U.S. military blowing stuff up. He eats this up.
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