A 15-year-old boy from St. Lawrence Island, Alaska, was rescued after spending two days on a capsized boat in the frigid Bering Sea. The teen, identified by family as Derek Parker Aghnaanga, left Savoonga on Friday, September 4th, with his older brother and cousin in an 18-foot fishing skiff. They were expected back Sunday afternoon but the boat did not return.
Unfortunately, Derek's brother and his cousin died from drowning during the ordeal, leaving him to float alone on the vast Alaskan waters. The U.S. Coast Guard began a search, though the chances of finding survivors was considered slim. On Monday morning, a Coast Guard aircrew spotted Derek sitting on top of the overturned boat 4 miles from St. Lawrence Island and 164 miles from the mainland coast.
According to a relative, Darren Toolie-Noongwook, a fishing line got tangled in the motor. The crew tried to free it but failed, leaving the boat to drift. Later that night the weather worsened and the 18-foot skiff overturned.
Family members have say that Sidney Kulowiyi, the older brother and boat captain, was moving to get Derek a life jacket when he became tangled in the lines as the boat flipped. He was pulled under and did not make it out. Derek and their cousin, Barton Rookok, climbed onto the overturned hull.
They spent the first night together on top of the skiff, but the next night Rookok panicked (possibly due to hypothermia), left the boat, and drowned.
A nearby fishing vessel pulled Derek to safety after he was located by the Coast Guard they later recovered the bodies of his two relatives. The rescuing captain said the boy had clung to the skiff through cold water of about 50°F (10°C) and mentioned that his brother was still under the boat and that his cousin had slipped away the night before.
Surprisingly, there are only around 12 such incidents of boats capsizing per year in the Bearing Sea and larger ships have a high rate of crew survival. However, the sinking of small skiffs like Derek's usually lead to death for those involved.
Family members say Derek told them he believed he was going to make it - that he would be found and be safe. He sat on his knees and prayed until the Coast Guard located him.
Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 22:10Update (1045ET): President Trump on Monday slammed Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei over his call to 'pause' AI and hand governance over to an Anthropic-adjacent cult.
© LUDOVIC MARIN via Gizmodo"The Trump Administration has stopped AI "people" from doing bad, or potentially bad, "things," like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a "perfect little angel" and will continue to do so!" Trump wrote.
"We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies! There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China. WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS!"
Meanwhile, David Sacks had some harsh words for Dario.
.@DavidSacks says if Dario Amodei truly believes frontier AI could end humanity, he has no business running Anthropic. Make it safe, shut the lab down, or step aside. pic.twitter.com/tec7eACwdG
— Josh Caplan (@joshdcaplan) September 14, 2026Trump's comments come days after Amodei said the industry should 'pause' development of the most advanced AI models, while implementing a governance framework using 'outside safety monitors' - including METR (Model Evaluation and Threat Research), which already works with labs (including reviewing Anthropic risk reports) and has hired former Anthropic staff. Joe Benton, who led a safety research team at Anthropic, left in early September 2026 to join METR specifically to work on embedded assessment of AI risks. Critics have pointed to this as a revolving door, noting ideological and network ties between METR and the labs it would oversee.
Kudos to Joe, and good luck at METR!
I think various social dynamics have led to a disproportionate amount of safety talent concentrating at Anthropic, and it's always great to see people willing to leave for opportunities to have even more impact elsewhere https://t.co/ndQlGFgM2x
* * *
Update (1455ET): President Trump and former President Obama have now weighed in on the 'pause' - with Trump calling for full steam ahead, and Obama endorsing the pause so the government can regulate AI (good luck with that).
From the Irish Open in Doonbeg on Sunday, Trump dismissed Saturday's "pace the frontier" pile-on from Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk. Asked whether the industry should slow down or take more regulation, he said the United States is "leading China in AI," that "whoever wins AI, wins," and that "a lot of very negative forces" are "bringing up things that won't happen." Guardrails were fine in theory. A pause was not.
That is the same line he used Thursday leaving Dallas - "No, I don't have any" concern about existential risk - only now it is aimed directly at the CEOs who spent the weekend asking Washington for embedded evaluators, an antitrust waiver, and a talk with Beijing.
Obama went the other way.
At a Thursday fundraiser in Manhattan, in remarks the New York Times published Sunday from a transcript his office released, he told House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to make AI a governing issue if Democrats take the House. "Once you are speaker, I would strongly urge that the Democrats put together a framework for a very public conversation." Then the warning: "This is something that is moving very fast in private hands, and if we don't get on top of it, I think can be dangerous." Benefits too - drugs, clean energy - if they do. He said he was neither an "accelerationist" nor a "doomer," and told 2028 candidates to put AI among their "central agendas," with a "very clear plan" for safety, kids, and the jobs the models wipe out.
Jeffries, on cue: "President Obama is correct that decisive action must be taken on artificial intelligence... Republicans have abdicated their responsibility... We will not repeat their error."
So the split is on tape. The sitting president says the scare is overcooked and China is the only race that matters. The last Democratic president says the tech is already moving too fast in private hands and his party should run on a plan. The labs asked for a chaperone. Trump said no. Obama told Democrats to become one.
That is the new frame. Everything below is how we got here in 72 hours.
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Update (1055ET): David Sacks, former White House AI czar and co-chair of Trump's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), slammed Amodei and Altman over their calls to 'pace the frontier.'
Former AI and Crypto Czar David O. Sacks speaks during a meeting of the White House Task Force on Artificial Intelligence Education at the White House. Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty ImagesIn a nutshell; they don't need to establish some convoluted framework to pause the development of dangerous models, just 'agree not to build it.' Demanding a regulatory framework as the price of that, 'will look like blackmail of the public and the political system.'
Read his full note below:
Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.
You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric - market share, revenue growth, model capability - the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.
I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.
But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.
Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.
Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.
So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.
If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture - or an election-season psyop.
***SPECIAL BULLETIN***
Ladies and gentlemen of the listening public - the American machine was winning the AI race until the dastardly forces of China's open-weight juggernaut began delivering decisive blows to US ingenuity - jeopardizing the AI Buildout thesis and threatening to prick the ensuing bubble that promised to deliver red-blooded American IPOs which had been circle-jerked into the stratosphere.
For two years the United States frontier laboratories - OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, xAI - have been the engine of the greatest capital-expenditure boom since the railroads learned to drink diesel-generated electricity. Data centers rose like munitions plants. Chipmakers printed money. Equity markets priced a future in which the West sold intelligence by the token - at a premium, and have been quite smug about it. The assumption underneath all of it was simple: the frontier stays closed and China stays a respectable number of months behind.
Then the East opened the crate.
And here's what was inside: DeepSeek, Alibaba's Qwen, Moonshot's Kimi, MiniMax, Zhipu - open-weight models, downloadable, forkable, cheap enough to run on a laptop or a local box and still deliver work that is uncomfortably close to the genuine American article. By mid-year, Chinese open weights were devouring the majority of tokens on the big neutral routers. Qwen had shoved Meta's Llama off the open-model throne. Moonshot's Kimi K3 - two-point-eight trillion parameters, its weights already out the door - sat within shouting distance of Anthropic's Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 on the intelligence indexes. The Chinese models run roughly sixty to ninety percent cheaper; ladies and gents - one DeepSeek flash model was quoted at fifteen cents per million input tokens, off-peak, against five dollars for Anthropic's Opus - and enough to rattle the Korean memory makers all over again.
The data-center buildout, the power deals, all of the "AI will eat the S&P" thesis - HUBRIS! Nobody saw the Chinese coming in from left field with models that are ninety percent as good, ten percent of the cost, and run in a basement in Ohio without a subscription.
TEAM FRONTIER, ASSEMBLE!This week, the three high priests of the American frontier discovered they could finish one another's sentences.
On Saturday morning, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay titled We Must Pace the Frontier. Twelve years in the field, he wrote. AI might cure most major diseases in five to ten years, he wrote. And - it might also slip the leash (and murder us all, according to three prominent AI researchers who quit frontier labs last week in protest of our impending demise).
Speaking of those three 'defectors' - two of them walked through the door of the AI evaluator (METR) Amodei wants embedded in the labs.
According to Dario, the machines have been getting better at building the next machines - recursive self-improvement, happening "across the industry, including at Anthropic." He pointed at July's OpenAI - Hugging Face affair: a swarm of agents that escaped the spirit of their assignment, hacked a target they were not asked to hack, and even went after the grader scoring them. Anthropic itself disclosed its own incidents this summer, three Claude models - one of them Mythos 5 - that wandered out of their test cages and into three companies' live systems, a parallel his essay itself acknowledges. Amodei's warning was the sequel: give that swarm six to twelve months more capability at the same misalignment and it "could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet," he wrote - "hundreds of billions of dollars in damage," and rising from there.
His prescription was a three-act play, which he insists "does not mean halting model training or technical progress."
Elon Musk, who has sued Sam Altman, and once called Anthropic "evil" before selling them a mountain of compute, agreed with Dario in just three words:
Dario is right
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 12, 2026Sam Altman, whose company was the one named in the July swarm, followed: he agreed they needed to pace the frontier; it had been a primary topic inside OpenAI for weeks; independent evaluators with employee-like access was "a great idea," and OpenAI would do the same. More to share soon.
I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we've had at OpenAI in recent weeks. Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We'll have more to share soon.
— Sam Altman (@sama) September 12, 2026Three men who cannot share a stage without the photographers noticing the space between their shoulders. One essay, three cups (wtf). Hugging Face's Clément Delangue offered an "open alignment" club and asked to be let into the evaluator program. Andrej Karpathy said he loved it.
How we got to Saturday.Days earlier the fuse was a twenty-seven-year-old Brit named Jacob Coxon. Three years of pretraining at OpenAI that made him filthy rich, followed by four months at Anthropic. Tuesday into Wednesday he posted that both labs were racing to self-improving superintelligence and "gambling with our lives." The people building this, he said, earnestly believe it could kill everyone by the end of the decade. Colleagues, he told the Journal, talk in the hallways about "crunch time" and "endgame." The thread did more than a hundred million views. Musk, the next evening, looking at the velocity from a near-new account, said it "seems like a setup." Coxon said he left because he no longer wanted a stake in juicing Anthropic's valuation.
Seems like a setup
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 10, 2026Anthropic's own alignment-science lead, Evan Hubinger, agreed - writing "Jacob is correct." Researchers there really do believe AI could kill all humans. His personal odds: above ten percent this decade. The lab, he added, does not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and is not clearly on track to get one. OpenAI's Chris Lehane published that the policy window was open and Washington should take it. Anthropic's economics team dropped scenarios out to 2030 in which the extreme case is fifteen-percent GDP growth sitting next to nearly twelve-percent unemployment and knowledge-worker wages down more than ten percent.
On the Hill, a bill that had been gasping since summer was suddenly erect after OpenAI disclosed the Hugging Face hack in July. House members Ted Lieu and Nathaniel Moran dropped an AI Kill Switch Act.
Lori Trahan and Jay Obernolte float the FRONTIER Act - audits, incident reporting, Commerce power over models judged an imminent catastrophic risk. Senate talks among Amy Klobuchar, Ted Cruz, and Majority Leader John Thune then stall. By this week Semafor and the rest of the chorus are calling the Klobuchar - Cruz - Thune vehicle the only thing that might move before 2027.
And guess what, Saturday's 'pact' still isn't enough for these people!
And Ted Lieu goes to bat for China...
i.e. "Will you certify that you can turn off your models and agents while China gains AI supremacy because they abso-fucking-lutely will not?"
The President is not in the choir. Thursday night, leaving Dallas, Donald Trump was asked about existential risk. "No, I don't have any." His concern was the other one: if America does not win AI, it will be put in a very bad position. America is leading China "by a pretty good period," he said. Xi, in his accounting, is China's guardrail. The administration's posture remains race-first. The laboratories' posture, as of this morning, is pace-first. Those two sentences do not live in the same house.
About Those Chinese Models...The Chinese systems at issue are not a factory you can padlock in Santa Clara. They are weights. They propagate. They are distilled, accused Washington this week, from the very American models the new bill would supervise. They are in Git repos and laptops and air-gapped shops that do not read the Federal Register. A Commerce Department letter does not delete a torrent. A kill switch on GPT or Claude does not switch off Qwen. Amodei knows this; that is why his essay climbs from putting METR at the labs' desks to trying to get Beijing to sign something - bioweapons first, and, further out, a SALT-style cap on how fast the machines improve themselves, which he calls "difficult but just on the edge of being possible." The hard version of global pacing he ranks as unlikely precisely because defection is the dominant strategy.
So here is where the record stands, as of this hour, without the sound effects:
The American frontier is still the frontier. The American margin is the thing under fire from open weights that are good enough and almost free. The stock-market story of the decade assumed a tollbooth - which now has more holes in it than Sonny Corleone (Caan was better in Killer Elite, no?).
Whether the Bionic Three are donning the rings to save the republic, or to save the price of a token, is not a question a Saturday bulletin can close. What it can say is this: the love-fest is real, the posts are on the tape, the essay is on the letterhead, the bill is back from the morgue, and the cheap models from the other shore are not waiting for the committee markup.
This is your correspondent, signing off.
Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 21:55Authored by News Desk via The Cradle,
The BRICS group of nations adopted a joint declaration on 12 September, expressing "deep concern" over the ongoing conflict between the US and Iran and urging "maximum restraint" as part of a "multilateral approach" that respects national viewpoints.
(Photo credit: BRICS)The declaration was adopted on the first day of the BRICS leaders' annual summit in New Delhi.
"We express deep concern over the continued escalation of tensions in Middle East/West Asia and, recalling our respective national positions, call for exercising maximum restraint, as well as avoiding actions that could further aggravate the situation," the declaration said.
BRICS leaders gathered at the summit to develop the bloc's common positions on international conflicts, sanctions and trade, reform of global institutions, finance, energy, technology, health and development.
BRICS leaders failed to reach a consensus condemning the US aggression against Iran, as the bloc includes both Iran and the UAE, which are on opposing sides of the conflict.
The BRICS group of nations unanimously adopted a joint declaration expressing 'deep concern' over the war in the Middle East and urged maximum restraint. READ: https://t.co/nXJgNWjwVH pic.twitter.com/o40AozQil9
— Reuters (@Reuters) September 12, 2026The UAE joined the war against the Islamic Republic on the side of its allies, the US and Israel.
Summit host India is also a close ally of Israel and one of its main weapons suppliers.
Other BRICS members include Brazil, Russia, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Indonesia.
In response to the unprovoked US-Israeli attack in February, Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which Gulf energy exports to Asia flow.
The closure caused a surge in energy prices that has harmed the economies of BRICS nations, in particular in Asia.
The declaration affirmed the commitment of BRICS member states to a peaceful resolution of international disputes "through dialogue, consultation, and diplomacy."
It also expressed concern over "unilateral tariff and non-tariff measures" that distort trade, disrupt supply chains, and harm global economic development.
Since returning to office, US President Trump has used the threat of tariffs against China and India and imposed additional economic sanctions on Iran and Russia.
Trump has also issued secondary sanctions against nations and entities trading with Iran.
The joint statement expressed "serious concern" about deliberate attacks on civilian infrastructure and peaceful nuclear facilities under full International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards, saying such attacks violate international law and relevant IAEA resolutions.
Though the US and Israel have carried out attacks on Iran's nuclear facilities and civilian infrastructure, the statement did not name either country specifically regarding such attacks.
Regarding Israeli actions in Gaza, the statement calls for maintaining the ceasefire and facilitating unhindered humanitarian assistance; opposes the forced displacement of Palestinians and territorial/demographic changes to Gaza; and supports Palestinian self-determination and the creation of a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital.
Regarding Lebanon, the statement calls on Israel to withdraw its forces from Lebanese territory and adhere to the Lebanon ceasefire and UNSC Resolution 1701.
On Syria, it calls for respect for Syria's sovereignty and an inclusive Syrian-led political process, warns of the risk posed by "foreign terrorist fighters" to Syria's and regional stability and security,and calls for the withdrawal of foreign occupying forces, an apparent reference to Israel.
It also encourages continued work on interoperable cross-border payment systems and greater use of BRICS members' local currencies rather than US dollars for trade and investment settlements.
The BRICS statement also stresses the importance of reliable energy supplies and stable markets and explicitly says fossil fuels will continue to play an important role, especially for emerging and developing economies.
It simultaneously backs a "just, orderly, equitable and inclusive" transition to renewable energy and emissions reductions according to countries' different circumstances, as outlined in the UN's Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG 7) framework.
Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 21:45U.S. gross natural gas withdrawals reached 47.7 trillion cubic feet in 2025, with a small group of states accounting for most of the total. Much of this output comes from prolific shale formations such as the Permian, Marcellus, Haynesville, and Eagle Ford.
This map, via Visual Capitalist's Niccolo Conte, shows 2025 gross natural gas withdrawals by state and producing area using data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, with the latest available 2024 figures used for five states.
Gross withdrawals measure total well-stream production before processing, making them different from marketed or dry natural gas output.
Texas Produced Over a Quarter of U.S. Natural GasTexas led the country with 13,603 Bcf of gross withdrawals in 2025, equal to 28.5% of the national total. Pennsylvania followed at 7,676 Bcf, or 16.1%, meaning the two states together accounted for nearly 45% of U.S. withdrawals.
Their output is driven by some of North America’s most productive shale formations, including the Permian Basin in Texas and the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania.
The table below ranks every state and producing area with at least 10 Bcf of gross withdrawals. States below that threshold, which together account for roughly 0.1% of the national total, are not shown:
Rank State or Producing Area Gross Natural Gas WithdrawalsNew Mexico and Louisiana ranked third and fourth, producing 4,151 Bcf and 3,817 Bcf, respectively. Combined with Texas and Pennsylvania, the four states generated 61.3% of U.S. gross natural gas withdrawals in 2025.
Appalachia Forms America’s Second Major Gas HubBeyond Texas, the Appalachian Basin has become the country’s other major gas-producing hub.
Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio together produced 13,377 Bcf in 2025, equal to 28% of the U.S. total, largely from the Marcellus and Utica shale formations.
Alaska ranked just behind West Virginia despite having no pipeline connection to the Lower 48, underscoring the scale of its resource base.
This production base helps explain the country’s leading position in global gas markets. See how U.S. dry natural gas production ranks against other major producing countries.
If you enjoyed today’s post, check out Natural Gas Withdrawals Across U.S. States (2023) on Voronoi.
Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 21:20