Axios

The cost of borrowing money is moving unrelentingly higher, with profound implications for savers, borrowers and the U.S. government's fiscal outlook.

The big picture: The bond market moves over the last few weeks have pushed most risk-free interest rates north of 5%.

• Barring a rapid reversal, expect pain to come in interest-sensitive sectors like housing, new stress on federal government finances and greater risks of financial disruption.
• It is better news for savers, who have taken paper losses on existing bonds in recent weeks but can now deploy cash safely with the best prospective returns seen in decades.

A pollster for Senate Republicans was met with disbelief on Saturday after telling GOP donors and operatives that they could grow their majority in November's midterm elections, sources tell Axios.

Why it matters: "Delusional," one attendee at the National Republican Senatorial Committee's Sea Island retreat in Georgia told Axios after the presentation by the pollster, Erik Iverson. "The mood is not good," said another.

OpenAI, Anthropic and security researchers are investigating tens of thousands of incidents in which their frontier models took steps that outside evaluators would consider problematic, sources told Axios.

Why it matters: The sheer number of incidents, which occurred in recent months in internal testing and the real world, indicates that the problem is orders of magnitude more complex than what is publicly known.