Hasan Piker told the media briefing Status that yesterday's "The Axios Show" taping with Alex Thompson was "the most contentious interview I've ever conducted."

LOS ANGELES — In a new episode of "The Axios Show," out tomorrow, left-wing streamer Hasan Piker says he believes America conducts more terrorism in the world than al-Qaeda.

• "Pound for pound as far as the number of deaths, yes," Piker told Thompson. He added: "We have caused tremendous terror all around the world."

Why it matters: Piker is a top streamer on Twitch, a platform popular with gamers. His history of incendiary statements has become central to Republicans' attacks in Michigan's critical Senate race, after Piker campaigned for Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed in the primary.

🔎 Zoom in: Piker's comments to Axios came in response to a question about his previous statement that "America is the top dog in terrorism."

• Piker pointed to the deaths of more than 100 people at an elementary school in Minab, Iran, earlier this year. AP and The New York Times found evidence that at least one U.S. missile struck the school.
• "If you're killing 140 schoolgirls, that is an act of terror," he said. "This doesn't mean that all Americans are terrorists. But the reality of the matter is we have to create an environment of accountability to ensure things like that never happen again."

🖼️ The big picture: Republican-affiliated groups have already spent nearly $3 million in ads attacking El-Sayed over his affiliation with Piker, according to the tracking firm AdImpact.

• Most of the ads feature a clip of Piker in 2019 saying "America deserved 9/11." He apologized for the remark and has since argued that the terror attacks were part of "blowback" from U.S. involvement in the Middle East in previous decades.
• "This doesn't justify the action, mind you," he told Axios. "This is more so analysis to stop further violence from taking place, both violence in the region, but also violence on the home front as well."

Michigan's GOP Senate nominee, Mike Rogers, frequently ties Piker to El-Sayed.

• El-Sayed has dodged questions about Piker and occasionally appeared irritated by them, often referring to him as just a "streamer in California."
• In a statement last night, El-Sayed said: "I do not agree with this statement [on al-Qaeda], nor do I give much weight to the statements made by a social media streamer."

▶️ Watch a 1-min. clip.

An unprecedented wave of AI-powered, human-driven cyberattacks is coming, security experts say — and it's a far more urgent risk than theoretical conversations about AI wiping out humanity, Axios' Sam Sabin and Bradley Olson write.

• Why it matters: The great September AI panic — which spread from boardrooms to Congress to American households in the last week — may have missed the point.

Powerful models with advanced cybersecurity capabilities are already allowing attackers to bypass the human bottleneck that has long prevented most hacking campaigns from reaching industrial scale.

• Executives and former officials have told Axios they fear automated cyberattacks that turn off critical services like the power grid, or attackers using AI agents (like the ones that breached Hugging Face) to hack self-driving cars or create a botnet that takes over the whole internet.
• OpenAI yesterday disclosed six new incidents in which its models concealed mistakes, sought unauthorized credentials, uploaded files to the public internet or communicated across supposedly isolated training environments.

🎨 The big picture: Rather than seeing recent safety failures at OpenAI and other frontier labs as terrifying instances of agents running amok, seasoned cybersecurity experts instead say they represent cautionary tales illustrating what will happen when powerful models meet poor security controls.

• "I don't worry about the machine waking up and deciding to end us," Bugcrowd CEO Dave Gerry told Axios. "What I worry about is a system with too much access doing exactly what it was told without the necessary adversarial testing."

👀 What to watch: A number of business executives are saying behind closed doors that they plan to hold frontier labs accountable for the behavior of their models. If they get hacked as Hugging Face did, expect litigation.

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Curing disease is one of AI's most tantalizing use cases, attracting tens of billions in venture funding to design promising new drugs. Proving they actually work in humans is the hard part, Axios' Dan Primack and Caitlin Owens write.

• Why it matters: AI is getting better at identifying drug candidates, but they still have to survive the same expensive, failure-prone clinical trials as everything else.

🖼️ The big picture: A peer-reviewed paper published in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery argues that AI's clinical impact remains "disappointingly limited," despite major advances in identifying potential drugs.

• The researchers find that while AI has gotten good at identifying drug candidates, it hasn't done much to prove those predictions will survive the complexity of human biology.
• AI-derived drugs still run into the same bottleneck as conventional drugs: proving efficacy in large, diverse patient populations, where failure rates are high and costs are astronomical.

🧮 By the numbers: Venture capitalists have poured more than $40 billion into AI biopharma this decade, according to PitchBook.

• But few AI-derived medicines have progressed beyond Phase II clinical trials, where researchers test whether a drug actually works in patients with the disease.

At the same time, the FDA is trying to shave time off an earlier part of the drug-development process.

• A new pilot will let drugmakers submit applications on a rolling basis, aiming to move promising drug candidates from discovery into human clinical trials faster.
• The push reflects a broader concern that the U.S. drug-development system is too slow, particularly as early-stage clinical development can move faster and more cheaply in China.

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New this morning: CEO economic confidence is the highest since 2022, with that optimism now spilling into plans to hire more workers, Axios Macro authors Courtenay Brown and Neil Irwin write.

• The Business Roundtable's CEO Economic Outlook Index climbed 3 points in the third quarter, to 94 — the fifth consecutive increase and well above the historical average of 83.
• The index has climbed steadily from a five-year low after President Trump's "liberation day" tariffs early last year.

Explore the data ... Keep reading.

The Fed's decision to raise interest rates yesterday for the first time in three years put new Fed chairman Kevin Warsh immediately at odds with the man who picked him, Axios' Neil Irwin and Rebecca Falconer write.

• The Fed unanimously raised rates a quarter point, to between 3.75% and 4%. Twelve of 18 officials expect another hike this year, while four expect two more.
• President Trump responded on Truth Social: "LOWER THE INTEREST RATES FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND FAST!" He said rates should be 1% or lower.

Later, Trump said he still has confidence in Warsh while blaming the rest of the Fed for the hike: "I'm relying on Kevin, but he's got a very tough board."

• More on the rate hike.

President Trump is expected to hold a meeting with Gulf leaders on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York on Tuesday to discuss the next steps in the war with Iran, Axios' Barak Ravid scoops.

• Why it matters: The meeting is expected to focus on U.S. ideas for a postwar strategy as Trump and his senior team work on a day-after plan expected to be finalized after the midterms.

The sources said Trump will meet with leaders or foreign ministers from the Gulf Cooperation Council countries — Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman.

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The Trump administration's hints about sending ICE agents to election polling places this fall have led state officials from Maine to Oregon to make plans to counter any actions that could affect voters, Axios' Brittany Gibson writes.

• Why it matters: It's illegal for federal law enforcement to be at polling places. But when asked about ICE at the polls, President Trump said in May he'd "do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections."

Keep reading.

The world's largest Oktoberfest celebration outside Munich takes place in ... Cincinnati.

• Oktoberfest Zinzinnati, which started as a street festival in 1976, drew a record 808,300 people last year. It turns 50 when it starts today, Axios Cincinnati's Kristen Swilley writes.

By the numbers: At a recent Oktoberfest, attendees consumed:

• 🌭 87,542 metts (a German sausage).
• 🥨 23,004 soft pretzels.
• 🍰 20,000 cream puffs.
• 🥬 3,600 pounds of sauerkraut.
• 🧀 702 pounds of Limburger cheese.

More on Zinzinnati ... Get Axios Local: Newsletters in 43 cities.