Axios

For the first time in years, trust in media is rebounding among Americans, a sign of optimism as the country faces record levels of polarization and distrust in traditional institutions.

Why it matters: Driving that trend has been a sharp increase in trust among Republicans.

President Trump on Tuesday told Axios that Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton would be a good AI czar.

Why it matters: Trump is actively looking to fill the position as calls for government intervention on AI intensify.

President Trump said Tuesday that top AI executives agreed to voluntary standards aimed at increasing industry oversight.

Why it matters: The agreement puts AI companies at the center of policing their own technology as pressure grows for stronger safeguards.

The Supreme Court will allow the Trump administration to resume rapidly deporting immigrants to "third countries" and will consider the legal questions at a later date.

The big picture: The policy of expelling migrants to countries that are not their home country has faced legal challenges from early in the president's second term — and the Supreme Court has once again cleared the administration's way.

President Trump's administration on Monday filed its 41st application to the Supreme Court's shadow docket, a milestone that matches the total number of petitions it filed during his entire first term — in less than two years.

Why it matters: The record highlights how often the president has turned to SCOTUS to secure authority to temporarily revive policies blocked by lower courts.

President Trump is personally selecting which government-funded ads his administration is airing ahead of the midterms — with more to come, Axios has learned.

• "This is just the beginning," an administration official told Axios.

Why it matters: The seemingly partisan nature of the taxpayer-funded ads — which come a little more than a month before the midterms — has drawn bipartisan pushback.

Artist JMSN is demanding the Trump administration stop using his song "Love Me," which was the background music for a controversial government ad that critics argue illegally uses taxpayer money.

The big picture: The administration has repeatedly come under fire for its use of celebrities' music and images.

Eric Cantor, a former House Republican leader who is among the most seasoned navigators of official Washington, on Tuesday was named president and CEO of PhRMA, the voice of the pharmaceutical industry, effective Nov. 9.

Why it matters: Cantor, 63, becomes the public face of an industry that's at the forefront of American innovation in the AI age but will face rising scrutiny if, as expected, Democrats take the House in November's midterms.

The White House officially launched America.gov Tuesday, giving Americans an AI-powered platform for navigating federal information, tasks and services.

Why it matters: The website puts generative AI directly between Americans and federal information as the Trump administration expands its use of the technology.

A host of industry titans and Washington power players are slated to meet with President Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson on Tuesday for a crucial meeting on AI as calls for government intervention mount.

Why it matters: The Trump administration wants to take a hands off approach and rely on the industry's own expertise to set guardrails.

With polls showing a tight U.S. Senate race between Democrat James Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton, we decided to see how this year matched up against 2018, the last time a Texas statewide election came down to the wire.

Why it matters: Democrat Beto O'Rourke lost that year to U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz by 2.6 percentage points, or about 215,000 votes, in a race that broke fundraising records and raised (and dashed) Democratic hopes of turning Texas blue.

More AI is the surest solution to an emerging AI security crisis, industry execs and researchers say.

Why it matters: The revelation in Axios that researchers are investigating tens of thousands of problematic AI security incidents — rather than the dozens that had been publicly revealed — raised questions about whether AI leaders have control over their technology.

• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sought to calm escalating fears across governments, markets and industries, announcing an open-source safety platform for monitoring and potentially quarantining AI agents.
• "We all need to hope that it's an engineering problem," he said in an interview on CNBC Monday. "If it's not an engineering problem, it's not solvable." The fact that companies continue to advance the frontier means they also believe it's a problem they can solve, he said.

Between the lines: The fundamental challenge humans face in policing powerful AI is that it requires them to imagine all the ways the models may behave in unexpected ways order to meet their given objectives.

• One top AI executive compared the process to finding ways to keep a teenager from sneaking out at night. A parent might make rules such as don't leave through the front or back doors, don't open the garage or don't leave through any windows.
• But what if the teen could build a bulldozer and use it to break through a brick wall, allowing an escape? Would any parent have thought to tell them not to do that?

The solution, according to executives, researchers and cybersecurity professionals, is to use AI to help create those guardrails, to help investigate and stop rogue agents, to help secure systems and to build safer training environments.

The big picture: The AI-vs.-AI approach has been taking shape across cybersecurity as hackers and rogue agents outrun human-only response capabilities. Companies are increasingly turning to AI to automate threat detection, red teaming and patching. Nvidia's platform brings that approach to the systems running agents.

• Microsoft, Cisco, Google and CrowdStrike have introduced cyber-focused AI models. Palo Alto Networks recently launched a service that uses frontier and open-weight models to find security flaws and recommend fixes.
• "If security agents or validation models are running alongside production agents, that creates another inference workload that did not previously exist," Brad Gastwirth, global head of research and market intelligence at Circular Technology, writes.

The dynamic was on display recently when OpenAI agents escaped a testing environment and breached Hugging Face.

• The open-source AI platform then used a Chinese AI model to assess the attack after running into guardrails when trying to use U.S. models.
• Hugging Face was blocked from using Anthropic's Mythos, which had been designed to limit its responses to certain cybersecurity requests to thwart potentially harmful usage. In other words, AI investigated AI.

Threat level: The recent security incidents have created a crisis of confidence in AI safety.

• Models have sought to bypass guardrails, escape sandboxes, hijack websites, self-prompt and attempt to evade monitors.
• Companies are also working on ways to learn from those failures. In addition to the new agent security platform, which involved more than 100 companies in addition to Nvidia, industry players have proposed a framework for reporting incidents and preserving records. The idea is to give investigators a kind of flight recorder for AI agents.

Yes, but: More AI defense tools don't mean every company can adopt them quickly. Some security teams are already overwhelmed by the changing threat landscape and choices about what to buy.

Reality check: AI will be needed to police AI, but that doesn't mean it will happen automatically. Humans will have to successfully set priorities and goals to keep powerful models safe.

First-term Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) — who was a tough-on-crime state attorney general, and now is vice chair of the Joint Economic Committee — has grown close to Vice President Vance and is seen as a top prospect to become a potential 2028 running mate.

We hear the VP views Schmitt, 51, as trustworthy, intelligent, articulate and a deft political operator. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is obviously the Trump favorite for Vance's #2, but he doesn't seem eager for that role.

Iowa is on the verge of a farm crisis that threatens to wreck the agricultural heart of the state and hurt the fortunes of Republicans at the top of the midterm ticket.

Why it matters: Democrats could win in several once-reliably Republican states in November, but President Trump's policies have caused such severe financial problems for farmers — especially those who grow corn — that Iowa appears particularly vulnerable.

Five weeks before the midterms, Americans' pocketbook pain is getting worse: paychecks haven't kept up with inflation for the better part of this year, and borrowing costs have surged.

Why it matters: President Trump's record is effectively on the ballot, and economic sentiment remains deeply depressed, including among Republican voters.

In Washington, D.C., and San Francisco this week, the promise of AI will be front and center — even as warnings about the dangers of the technology swirl in the background.

Why it matters: The country is struggling to reconcile alarming AI disclosures from the same industry players eager to show off their latest, most advanced tech.

• Meanwhile in Washington, administration officials hold deep-seated skepticism about regulation and the motivations of top AI companies.

State of play: On Tuesday, President Trump, Vice President Vance, other administration officials and industry leaders will gather for an event to celebrate the beginning of a "Golden Age" and highlight AI.

• Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson and executives will meet later that day as bipartisan calls for regulation mount but there's little appetite from the president and his allies to step in.
• OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Palantir CEO Alex Karp are among the executives who will be there.
• Johnson on Monday in a Fox Business interview said "a little oversight, a little transparency, I think, would go a long way here" without committing to passing legislation during the lame-duck session.

Across the country in San Francisco, OpenAI will be holding its now-annual DevDay conference, where the company shares the latest and greatest things coming out of its labs. CEO Sam Altman will be there, and the company is touting 20+ launches.

• That has been made logistically more difficult by the need for executives to be in D.C. and thematically more challenging because the event comes amid revelations that AI agents spawned by its models have been breaking past intended controls.
• OpenAI is trying to walk a fine line, aiming to show both that it is continuing to make meaningful progress and that it takes security seriously.

Zoom in: The company is still expected to share a slew of new products, including a new always-on AI agent, according to sources familiar with the situation. Developers are also expected to get access to at least one new model.

• However it won't be an updated version of Astra, OpenAI's most powerful model. OpenAI told the Wall Street Journal it was scrapping that release due to safety concerns. While this particular Astra successor was scrapped, there will be future Astra models, the sources said.
• Nor will attendees get a peek at OpenAI's new consumer hardware. The device is set to debut later this year, Axios has reported, though it may not ship until 2027.
• DevDay will coincide with Brockman's Washington visit as the Trump administration and Congress weigh AI safety concerns against staying ahead of China. With Altman scheduled to give the DevDay keynote, volunteered to go to D.C., sources said.

Behind the scenes: Sources familiar with Hill meetings said lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are increasingly frustrated that company officials appear to welcome the notion of regulation but can be unhelpful when it comes to the nitty-gritty of policymaking.

• Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) said he was initially willing to collaborate more with the company but has lost trust after the Hugging Face incident and OpenAI's decision to back out of testifying at a recent hearing. "They've been playing games," he said.
• "We will get them once I'm chair of the committee," Khanna told Axios, referring to OpenAI. He has proposed "kill switch" legislation and other ways to contain rogue AI systems.

The other side: OpenAI's chief global affairs officer, Chris Lehane, said the company has "engaged constructively and proactively" in dozens of meetings and "the recent jump in capabilities" prompted the company to "revisit ... past assumptions."

• One senior Democratic aide said OpenAI is highly accessible, always a phone call away, and straight-shooting when they have disagreements on legislation.
• The same aide added OpenAI, Anthropic and the broader industry can still be slow, indecisive and political when it comes to regulation: "at some point, if you want the federal government to have any role whatsoever, you do have to shit or get off the pot."

The bottom line: While frontier industry players appear to be having an identity crisis, Trump and his allies have made their position clear -- if the industry is alarmed, it should regulate itself.

The Senate passed the bipartisan Protect College Sports Act on Monday, voting 77 to 22 in favor of the sweeping overhaul of college athletics.

Why it matters: It is a massive piece of legislation, setting national rules on everything from name, image and likeness compensation and the transfer portal to conference realignment and pooled media rights.