Axios

The outbreak of a deadly virus aboard a cruise ship may sound like a familiar story — but while it's a serious scenario, public health figures aren't anticipating the next global pandemic.

The big picture: The hantavirus has left travelers isolating in their rooms, sparked a diplomatic debate about where the ship should port and launched a contact-tracing scramble.

ICE is in talks to buy turnkey immigration detention facilities from its biggest vendors as local backlash derails its plan to rapidly renovate warehouses into large-scale detention spaces .

Why it matters: The Department of Homeland Security wants to own its detention spaces, a pivot from the mostly leased network of beds that held a peak a population of more than 70,000 detainees earlier this year.

Anthropic, the AI lab whose identity is wrapped around warning the world about AI risk, is claiming "early signs" of AI not just coding its own products but building itself.

Why it matters: Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark predicted this week that there's a 60%+ chance of an AI model fully training its successor by the end of 2028. "What I'm looking at is a technological trend where, if anything, the speed will accelerate further," Clark told us.

In the new research agenda for The Anthropic Institute — first shared with us, and out Thursday — the company says it's seeing signs of "AI contributing to speeding up the research and development of AI itself," a process known as recursive self-improvement. And Anthropic researchers think the world should know.