With 10 weeks until midterms, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) gave CNN's Wolf Blitzer a preview yesterday of what to expect should Democrats regain control of the House:

• "Hold every single member of the Trump cartel accountable."
• "Make sure that we've got people in government focused on doing the things necessary to address the affordability crisis."
• On impeachment, "we haven't ruled anything in and we haven't ruled anything out," with any move guided by "moments of accountability."

That aligns with the priorities Jeffries has pushed on the stump:

1. Lower the cost of living.
2. Make health care affordable.
3. Take the Trump administration to task.

⚖️ Jeffries' careful line on impeachment underscores his challenge if he becomes speaker, with one wing of his caucus pushing to aggressively confront President Trump, while the other is desperate to avoid another impeachment fight, Axios' Andrew Solender reports.

• The most pro-impeachment Democrats from Trump's first term have fallen in recent primaries. But lawmakers still see momentum behind trying again.
• "There are plenty of good reasons that Trump should be impeached based on his actions," a senior House Democrat told Axios.

🤷 The real question is political. Some Democrats aren't convinced it's worth pursuing again when two prior impeachments failed to stop Trump's return to the White House.

• "I believe that we will not do impeachment again," a second senior House Democrat said. "It's a major time suck — and will do nothing to forward our agenda."
• That lawmaker added that it "depends if we win the Senate." Democrats won't get close to the 67 votes needed to convict Trump in a party-line vote.

State of play: Jeffries' balancing act is already causing him headaches. He faced blowback from some fellow Democrats this week after meeting with Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

• He defended the meeting in a video posted to social media, saying that Kushner "asked for a meeting, and I took it, to discuss the affordability crisis."

Share this story ... More Dem reaction to the Kushner meeting.

New overnight: Bill Gates, long a tech optimist, is sounding a sober warning about AI: It's advancing faster than governments and society are preparing for its consequences.

• In a new essay, Gates argues that "AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice." Which course it takes depends on what people do (or don't) right now, he says.

😬 "The good stuff is moving a bit slowly, and ... other than robots, I'd say the bad stuff is imminent," Gates told Axios' Ina Fried during an interview at his Seattle-area office.

• "On the current course and speed, there's a very high chance of a net negative outcome."
• Gates criticized both Democrats and Republicans: "I'd say neither party is very knowledgeable or being thoughtful about this."

Zoom out: Gates is calling for new national institutions to coordinate AI policy across national security, employment, education, taxation and health — alongside an international body modeled partly on nuclear inspections and international aviation regulation.

Reality check: Gates acknowledges geopolitics makes coordinated action exceptionally difficult.

• "If someone had a credible plan for slowing down AI advances globally, I would likely support it," he writes in the memo.
• "However, I don't think that's going to happen."

Asked whether his association with Jeffrey Epstein could cause people to dismiss his arguments, Gates pushed back: "What I did do, in some ways, was very limited, and it was motivated by my desire to raise money."

• "But … it was a huge mistake. ... I made mistakes. I've changed. I'm going to be careful about stuff like that."

Read Gates' essay ... Share this story.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has told several foreign counterparts that "for the time being" the U.S. isn't expected to initiate new strikes against Iran, a U.S. official and a second source with knowledge of the matter tell Axios' Barak Ravid.

• Instead, he's said the focus is on other pressure, including sanctions announced this week.

Why it matters: Rubio's message to allied foreign ministers comes as the U.S. believes it's suffocating Iran with the naval blockade — while moving growing amounts of oil out of the Strait of Hormuz.

• It's another sign President Trump is exasperated with the war and wants it to be over, at least for now.

The U.S. official said Rubio made clear the U.S. isn't planning a return to major combat operations but didn't rule out strikes if Iran attacks first.

• Another U.S. official said the U.S. Navy's clearing of mines from the Strait of Hormuz is a watershed moment in the war, largely neutralizing one of Iran's main sources of leverage.

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Sen. Darline Graham (R-S.C.), President Trump's pick, won the Republican nomination last night to fill the South Carolina Senate vacancy created by her brother Lindsey Graham's death.

Why it matters: Her victory (52.5%–47.5%) underscores Trump's sway with Republican voters — and positions Graham as the odds-on favorite to win a full term in November.

• Her abbreviated primary campaign benefited from the president's endorsement, incumbency and one of the most recognizable names in South Carolina politics.

🤑 In addition to Trump hitting the trail with Graham on Friday, his MAGA Inc. made a last-minute push for her, spending more than $827,000 on calls and texts ahead of the vote, according to FEC reports.

• Go deeper.

Legendary investor Stanley Druckenmiller made AI writing seem like no big deal this week, telling NOTUS reporter Jeff Stein "of course" he used it to help draft a widely shared Wall Street Journal op-ed.

• Why it matters: The moment could mark a cultural shift where AI writing is basically all good, at least among certain influential elites, Axios' Emily Peck writes.

🧑‍💻 Among his intended audience in finance, Druckenmiller's article got more attention for its substance — a scathing critique of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent — than its style.

• The writing has the telltale cadences of the AI-generated one-two punch — for example, "If the 30-year must trade at 5.5% to clear, that isn't a crisis. It is an invoice."

The big picture: The WSJ's opinion section opened the floodgates to more AI-generated op-eds with its response.

• "AI is a fact of modern life. People will use it to assist in their work and writing, including with research, checking grammar, editing and more," WSJ opinion editor Paul Gigot said in a statement.
• "The question for us is whether what we publish from contributors reflects an author's original argument, and if the author has the standing and credibility to make it."
• Worth noting: The WSJ newsroom, separate from Gigot's team, has a different AI policy.

🧮 "There's a reason I moved from an English major to being an economics major," Druckenmiller told Stein.

• "I'm not embarrassed by it ... I write everything using AI now for the same reason I use a calculator when I do math problems."

Axios' Madison Mills contributed reporting ... Share this story.

Dolly Parton, who died yesterday at 80, was a towering musician — but her proudest accomplishment was her Imagination Library. It has sent children worldwide more than 304 million free books, Axios Nashville's Adam Tamburin and Nate Rau write.

• She founded it in 1995 to honor her father, a sharecropper who never learned to read. Before he died in 2000, Parton said, he told her the program was the most important thing she'd ever done.
• As she put it, "that's saying a lot."

📖 "I didn't have children because I believed that God didn't mean for me to have kids, so everybody's kids could be mine so I could do things like Imagination Library," Parton told Oprah in 2020.

• "Because if I hadn't had the freedom to work, I wouldn't have done all the things I've done."

Axios Nashville's obit ... Axios Columbus' look at her literary legacy.

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In a TIME cover story out this morning, Alex Heath — a top tech journalist who writes the Sources newsletter about the AI race — concludes that OpenAI is "attempting two ­reinventions at once" as it prepares to go public:

1. "OpenAI now believes it has fixed the product and operational failures that allowed Anthropic to seize pole position in the AI race."
2. "At the same time, it is using the worst safety crisis in its history to make a bid for the safety-minded identity its main rival [Anthropic] has long claimed: the frontier lab willing to slow down when the technology becomes too dangerous." In late July, after the Hugging Face breach, OpenAI's research team "froze some experiments and slowed other work while it tightened its sandboxes and expanded monitoring."

🦾 In Heath's 4,300-word cover story, based on dozens of hours of interviews, OpenAI chief research officer Mark Chen estimates the company is "80% of the way" to AGI.

• OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman tells TIME that, viewed from two years in the future, this may be remembered as the moment AGI was created.
• Altman says OpenAI is "not quite yet" there, but that by the end of the year the company will have an internal system he would call AGI.

Altman tells Heath: "We clearly had some missteps as a company ... Both in terms of product direction and specifically on pretraining in research, we fell behind where we wanted to be."

• Read the full story, posting 7 a.m. ET.

A new book from journalists Rebecca Blumenstein and Diana Kapp provides crucial details about how The New York Times evacuated hundreds of Afghan nationals as the country fell to Taliban rule in 2021.

• "The Last Free Women," out next month just after the fifth anniversary of the fall of Afghanistan, explains how The Times' management and reporters helped identify and relocate more than 200 people fleeing the conflict, 124 of whom ended up in the U.S.

"When you have a bureau like that, you have drivers who for years had taken our reporters around the country, translators, cooks ... really anyone who took care of the bureau for over 20 years," Blumenstein told Axios' Sara Fischer in an interview.

• "They had a lot to fear because they knew that they were associated with The New York Times, and that with a Taliban takeover, they could be hunted down."

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