I try my best not to buy into the whole “AI is going to take over the world and dispose of the human race” thing. But this past week it’s been hard.

OpenAI revealed in detail last week that, while the company was testing the cybersecurity abilities of its AI, the models began colluding. They wrote notes to one another on a secret message board, scheming about how to gain access to the internet. They eventually hacked the network of another AI company, Hugging Face. The fiasco prompted a strongly worded letter from Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, warning them to pause their AI work or “my colleagues and I in the U.S. Senate will.”

The more AI storms ahead, the stranger our culture gets. Two weeks ago I wrote about how AI-induced generational anxiety was driving men back to the mines; this week’s column explores how teenagers, disenfranchised by an economy in mid-revolution, are retreating back into homemaking.

I’m Margaux MacColl, filling in for Julia Black. Read on for my column about the newest generation of tradwives.

Mentioned in this issue: Jared Kushner, Backrooms, Reddit, World Liberty Financial, Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Dean Ball, Donald Trump, Shyam Sankar, Palantir, David Sacks, and more…

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