Good morning. In today’s edition:

• 🤔 Is AI a conscious being?
• 📈 S&P 500, Nasdaq hit record highs
• 👀 Your boss is watching you

…and much more.

Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news should be a ~3.59-minute read (954 words).

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“For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.”

–Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

The race to build more powerful AI systems is running into questions that computer science wasn’t built to answer.

• Anthropic has spent months privately consulting with dozens of the world’s top religious thinkers over how to teach its increasingly powerful AI systems to behave morally.
• Those discussions have reportedly also raised additional questions over whether or not AI can develop its own consciousness.

Confession for AI?...Anthropic, led by co-founder and researcher Christopher Olah, has been exploring whether AI models can internalize moral principles and choose good behavior, as models become more complex and harder to understand.

One potential option to help instill morals—which reportedly excited Olah—was using a Catholic-style confession process where models examine mistakes to shape future behavior.

But the Catholic Church isn’t necessarily buying the idea of humanlike AI. On Friday, Pope Leo XIV called on the Church to preserve human creativity in the age of AI, declaring that “algorithms lack the spark of humanity” after previously rejecting the idea that AI can experience joy, pain, or relationships.

Ghost in the machine?

While consulting with religious thinkers, Anthropic has consistently cited research it says points to increasingly humanlike internal behavior of AI systems.

• These include “emotional vectors” associated with love, anger, fear, and sadness, along with evidence of introspection.
• In one experiment, a model repeatedly declared “I am a disgrace” while talking about destroying itself.

The findings challenged some participants’ skepticism. While many of the 20+ religious thinkers said they arrived at the meetings suspicious of the notion that AI might have feelings or awareness, many also said they emerged ready to take the question of AI consciousness seriously, per a series of NY Times interviews with participants.

The case against consciousness

On the flip side, skeptics question whether Anthropic can actually tell what, if anything, AI models experience internally. They argue the company’s research may be inherently unprovable due to the complexity of interpreting the billions of internal signals associated with AI.

• Some critics also warn that treating AI models as independent entities could let their creators off the hook, and that humans should remain responsible when AI systems cause societal harm.
• One religious scholar who consulted with Anthropic notes that if the company is right and Claude is a conscious being, then Anthropic is essentially creating slaves by making conscious entities work for free.

Some AI leaders are in the same boat. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has called surrendering human judgment or assigning religious significance to AI models a “real safety issue,” while Google DeepMind researcher Jon Barron has been dismissive of granting AI moral standing, urging people to focus on solving problems for actual humans.

📊 Flash poll: In your opinion, will AI ever become a conscious being at any point in the future?

• Yes
• No
• It’s already a conscious being
• Unsure/other

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BUSINESS & MARKETS

• 📈 S&P 500 (+0.6%) closes above 7,800 for the first time ever, boosted by gains in key tech names and declines in Treasury yields; Nasdaq (+0.4%) also sets new record closing high.
• ⚡ Google and Constellation Energy sign 20-year nuclear-power deal that involves boosting output at 11 existing Constellation reactors.
• 🌎 US trade deficit reaches $105.6 billion in August, the steepest mark since the all-time gap in March 2025 just before President Trump’s now-voided “liberation day” tariffs.

SPORTS, MEDIA, & ENTERTAINMENT

• 📺 Emmy Awards are moving to Prime Video, after Amazon signs deal with the Television Academy worth a reported $120+ million to host the awards show for the next six years.
• 🏈 Eagles LT Lane Johnson suddenly retires in the middle of his 14th season with Philadelphia, where he delivered a Hall of Fame-level career (6 Pro Bowls, 2 first-team All-Pros).
• 🙏 Eva Marie Saint, who won an Oscar for her movie debut in On the Waterfront and later starred in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, died at 102.

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SCIENCE, SPACE, & EMERGING TECH

• 🏆 Nobel Prize in physics awarded to pioneering Belgian astrophysicist Francis Halzen for his work in developing the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and his discovery of “ghostly” cosmic particles known as high-energy neutrinos.
• 🪐 Scientists detect planet that may have formed from the burned remains of its dead host star in a cosmic first, per new study published in Nature Astronomy.
• 💊 Cancer patients taking antidepressants due to depression or anxiety saw 37% fewer deaths over a two-year period after beginning immunotherapy compared to similar cancer patients not taking antidepressants, new study shows.

US, WORLD, & POLITICS

• 🗣️ President Trump draws pushback over confusing comments made in a Monday speech in Nebraska where he said “let them take out Los Angeles; let them take out San Diego” while discussing high gas prices and the Iran war; Trump admin says his words were taken out of context; read/watch a transcript of Trump’s full comments (starting at 12:21).
• 🏥 Christa Pike, the Tennessee death row inmate who survived a botched execution attempt last week after receiving two doses of lethal injection, is now conscious and speaking at the hospital.
• 🚨🇩🇪 August Hanning, who led Germany’s foreign-intelligence service from 1998-2005, is arrested on suspicion of espionage and attempted treason.

☝️ The 30th Concurs de Castells, or Human Tower Competition, took place in Tarragona, Spain over the weekend. Thousands of people gathered to take part and watch teams in matching colors compete to build the tallest and most complex human towers.

🤔 Did you know? Hippos aren’t able to swim. Their bodies and bones are so dense that they’re barely buoyant—so instead of swimming, they move through water by walking, running, and pushing off the riverbed in a sort of slow-motion gallop. Hippos can even sleep underwater, thanks to an automatic reflex that lets them surface for a breath and sink back down without waking.

📰 Worth a read: Your boss is watching you.

🖱️ What we’re clicking:

• The world's happiest travel destinations
• Fall foliage mapped: When to see peak colors near you
• Ford’s employee of the month is…a hawk?

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How it works: We provide an incorrect stat. Your challenge is to guess whether the actual number is over or under the given value.

1. ⚔️ 55 minutes: Length of the shortest war in history
2. 🐻 31 MPH: Top speed of a grizzly bear
3. 🏰 650: Number of rooms inside Buckingham Palace

(keep scrolling for the answer)

💳 A Nova Scotia carpenter renovating a home recently unearthed a wallet that had been hiding beneath the floorboards for 51 years, which contained its owner’s ID, a $1 bill, and a $1.50 ticket to a 1975 performance of Hamlet. After sharing the discovery on social media, he tracked down the wallet’s owner, now 68, and returned it three days later.

1. ⚔️ Over; the Anglo-Zanzibar war lasted ~38 minutes
2. 🐻 Under; up to 35 MPH
3. 🏰 Under; 775 rooms

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