A group of 40 @wto Members have now condemned Belarus for its complicity in Russia's aggression. Those who do not support the rules-based international order cannot benefit from it. We will not further consider its application for WTO accession. Read our statement here 👇🏼

Very sad day here at Stimson as we say goodbye to Brian Finlay, our CEO. I will be forever greatful to Brian for welcoming me to Stimson; for his cheerful, never defeated personality; and for his genuine belief in work that improves the world. RIP. stimson.org/2026/stimson-rem…

One thing that's struck me from observing hyper-competitive, male-dominated fields like the Army is that grown adult men can often act like teenage girls with their petty feuds and gossip. It really explains a lot of the absolute chaos in the Pentagon right now.

NEW | Record exports of solar, batteries and EVs last month 📈 China’s exports for the ‘new three’ industries reached a record high of $21.9bn in March 2026, up 70% year-on-year, in the wake of the US-Israel war with Iran and changing export rebates for solar and batteries.

NEW US electricity data ⚡️ In March, renewables produced more than a third of US electricity for the first time ever, even overtaking gas generation! Wind and solar combined reached over a quarter (26%) for the first time.

One of the deepest fears about AI is that it concentrates power so dramatically that it enables a new kind of dictatorship, whether by a government that wields it or a company that controls it. The current confrontation between the Department of War and Anthropic brings both fears to life at once. Anthropic has genuine, well-founded concerns that its technology could be used in ways that are deeply problematic and that exist in a legal gray area. No serious person should want AI companies handing over their most powerful capabilities to the military without any thought as to whether they are ready to be used in life-or-death situations. We know what happens when the government gets unchecked access to powerful new technology and decides the rules don't apply. But the government’s concerns are critical, too. I wrote last month about how Anthropic has behaved at times like an “enlightened absolutist” and the current flashpoint underlines this point. Under normal circumstances, a private company should be free to take or leave contracts from the federal government. That's how markets work, and no one thinks twice when a consulting firm turns down a Pentagon engagement. But AI is not a normal technology. The decisions Anthropic is making about what the military can and cannot do with its models are not ordinary business decisions. They are, functionally, determinations about the future of American national security made by a private company whose leadership answers to no electorate. When the technology is this profound, corporate discretion starts to look less like market freedom and more like an unaccountable veto over sovereign functions. That should trouble anyone who cares about democratic governance, regardless of whether Anthropic's specific judgments are correct. Both concerns are legitimate, and there is no clean principle that resolves the tension. "The government is always right" is a road to tyranny. "The company is always right" is a road to corporate oligarchy. The answer depends on the specific circumstances of specific cases, which means someone has to evaluate those circumstances with both technical competence and democratic legitimacy. Historically that someone has been Congress and the courts. The reason this feels like a crisis is not that the problem is unprecedented but that the institutions designed for exactly this kind of problem are operating so poorly that nobody trusts them to do it. Congress has demonstrated almost no capacity to regulate technology intelligently. Courts move too slowly for a technology evolving this fast. So the vacuum fills with direct confrontation between executive power and corporate power, with no democratic input and no neutral adjudication. That is the real danger. Not that Anthropic is wrong or that DoW is wrong, but that the democratic machinery for deciding who is right has rusted to the point where the question defaults to whoever has more leverage in a given moment. Generals and CEOs end up making judgments that belong to the public, not because they seized that authority, but because nobody else showed up to claim it. I hope that in the coming months the American system will do what it still does well—bring messy issues to the fore, galvanize public interest, marshal new information, and find the right compromise to this particular flashpoint, which sounds based on Sam Altman’s comments today like it may already be starting. But we also need to be thinking much more expansively about how we can use AI to transform our ability to bring democratic input and independent expertise to bear on deciding who can do what with this technology and how, before it's too late.

➡️Indian and U.S. trade negotiators had been due to hold talks in Washington, D.C., this week. ➡️The “meeting will be rescheduled at a mutually convenient date,” a person familiar with the matter tells CNBC. ➡️U.S. President Donald Trump increased some of the U.S.’s global import levies after the Supreme Court struck down his tariffs implemented under a separate act. 🔗For more, please click here: cnb.cx/4rwpBRS