• Media headlines: Le Monde calls it a divorce consummation; Süddeutsche Zeitung headlines Trump declaring war on Europe.
• NSS release: Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy warns of Europe’s economic decline, civilizational erasure from mass migration and low birth rates.
• Europe’s challenges: Ancient nations face weak economies and militaries, unreliable as allies.
• Critics’ reaction: Detractors blame Trump for rupturing NATO and addressing migration, culture, demography.
• Document’s stance: Describes Europe as strategically and culturally vital, distinguishes it from the European Union.
• EU critique: Seen as postdemocratic bureaucracy weakening nations, enabling borderless migration and demographic shifts.
• Demographic prediction: Certain NATO members may become majority non-European, questioning alliance views.
• France example: Rising Arab and Muslim population boosts parties like La France Insoumise, potentially altering alliances.

---

In Paris on Sunday, Le Monde led its coverage with an article on what it called the consummation of a divorce. Munich’s Süddeutsche Zeitung ran the headline “Trump Declares War on Europe.”

The president’s 2025 National Security Strategy, released last week, sent a message to the continent that shocked the world. Drowning under mass migration, mismanaged and bullied by the European Union’s leaders, increasingly incapable of producing children, Europe’s ancient nations, the document argues, face not just economic decline but also the prospect of imminent “civilizational erasure.” In the near future, it adds, “it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies.”

President Trump’s detractors on both sides of the Atlantic blamed him for rupturing the NATO alliance and for straying into matters far removed from national defense — such as migration, culture and demography — that are the province of racists and xenophobes.

That is the wrong way to understand the document. Read carefully, in fact, the passages about Europe sound more like a defense of the continent. They include a description of Europe as “strategically and culturally vital” to the United States. Few of those outraged by the document have bothered to distinguish between Europe — a geographical area that is also shorthand for the culture that arose over the centuries from a mix of Greek rationalism and Middle Eastern monotheism — and the European Union, a 33-year-old experiment that aims to replace the continent’s nation-states with a novel form of transnational governance based in Brussels.

In certain quarters the European Union has become synonymous with a postdemocratic permanent ruling class of regulators and bureaucrats. It has proved more successful at delegitimizing national governments in, say, Paris and Rome than at shifting their responsibilities for defense, budgeting and border policing to Brussels. That is because European voters have not conferred on it the legitimacy to do so. What powers Brussels has been able to claim, it has snatched piecemeal from voters when they were distracted by the euro crisis, Covid, the Ukraine war and other emergencies.

That is how the Trump administration sees things. Its document identifies the European Union as a danger to the United States — albeit for its incompetence rather than its antipathy. Brussels saps the economic power and the morale of our European allies while purporting to unite and strengthen them. Even more seriously, it has melded 27 countries into a largely borderless zone in which mass migration has proved almost impossible to stem.

The document forthrightly links this demographic shift to changes in national character. “It is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European,” the document holds. “As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way as those who signed the NATO charter.”

Since this is the claim that threw critics into the greatest rage, it is worth looking at the modesty of it. The administration is not arguing that people of this or that national origin are better than others. It argues that we have arrived at the end of the politics of the blank slate: The nations of Europe are actual places, with distinct cultural and civilizational qualities, on the basis of which they make peace and go to war. They’re not just arbitrarily bounded zones that can be expected to remain always the same, no matter who lives there.

Look at France, where a growing population of Arabs and Muslims is increasingly vocal and increasingly politically effective. La France Insoumise led a coalition that won the country’s national elections in 2024, although its plurality of seats did not permit it to take power. Led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the party espouses a kind of Mamdani-ism gone national. It advocates for the country’s Muslim and non-European immigrants around a platform that includes redistribution of income and wealth and ferocious criticism of Israel.

There’s nothing illegitimate about that. But if France remains a democracy, it will increasingly be a country that fights Zionism. And it is reasonable to expect that that will make it a less compatible and less reliable ally for the United States. To acknowledge this is not to claim all Muslims are closed to persuasion or that they are worse than the Christians who once dominated the culture of France. It is merely to open one’s eyes and see that the common ground on which an alliance can be built is shrinking.

It is possible to share Mr. Trump’s diagnosis and recoil from his prescription. The president proposes rebuilding the foundations of the Atlantic alliance by “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.” This means backing “patriotic” forces that oppose further E.U. integration, including, presumably, the national populist party Alternative for Germany, which some in Germany’s older parties are proposing to ban as extremist.

In the wake of the strategy document’s release, Representative Gregory Meeks, Democrat of New York, deplored the way the strategy “discards decades of values-based U.S. leadership in favor of a craven, unprincipled worldview.”

It doesn’t, though. It just elaborates a different set of values and principles. While Mr. Trump is taking sides, he is not more anti-E.U. than his predecessors were pro-E.U. In 2016, President Barack Obama campaigned against Brexit, threatening to send Britain to “the back of the queue” on trade deals if it chose to secede from the European Union.

If you look back at earlier National Security Strategies, you find that attitudes toward migration, culture and demography guided America’s approach to alliance building every bit as much as they do in Mr. Trump’s. These attitudes, again, were just different. Mr. Obama proclaimed in 2010 that “our diversity is part of our strength” in a global economy to which he considered the United States “inextricably linked.”

The global economy still has its defenders, but it has social downsides that were not evident — or at least not much discussed — 15 years ago. A national security strategy for today is bound to look different. Mr. Trump chides his predecessors for having made “hugely misguided and destructive bets on globalism and so-called ‘free trade’ that hollowed out the very middle class and industrial base on which American economic and military pre-eminence depend.” Mr. Obama wanted to protect universal norms. Mr. Trump wants to ensure the survival of the United States and like-minded nations and their way of life.

There may appear to be an inconsistency here. The new National Security Strategy calls for a “flexible realism,” the opposite of the misplaced idealism that has led the United States into too many failed foreign interventions. But if you are now going to make allowances for, say, Saudi tribalism in order to keep up good relations, then why not do the same for European preferences for transnational governance and passport-free transit? How is it anything but hypocritical to overlook Saudi values while picking through those of Europeans with a fine-toothed comb?

There are two answers to this question. The first is that the values of European civilization, as traditionally understood, are a large part of what the United States signed up to defend in 1949 with the founding of NATO. That traditional understanding provided not only a purpose but also a source of cohesion that made the alliance viable. By contrast, no matter how important you think our alliance with Saudi Arabia is, the values of its polygamy-indulging, Sharia-enforcing Wahhabi monarchy had absolutely nothing to do with why the United States entered that alliance.

Then there is the other, simpler answer to why the Trump administration now makes it a priority to lead Europe back to a more traditional understanding of itself: because the United States is so intimately involved in its decline. Europe has undergone many periods of decadence before but somehow endured. It stopped the Moors at Poitiers and the Turks at Vienna, withstood a series of plagues, survived Napoleon and Hitler and Stalin. But none of those episodes vitiated its culture and enfeebled its sinews and threatened its historic continuity quite so thoroughly as three and a half decades of American-style liberal international order, under the banner of “C’mon, people now, smile on your brother.”

The main source of Europeans’ anger at seeing their vanishing civilization mourned by the United States may be this: that it was at America’s urging that they undertook this work of self-destruction in the first place.

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• Sacks's first reciprocal relationship: At 32, Oliver Sacks enters physical and mutual romance with Vincze, feeling part of a "two man universe" with newfound clarity.
• Notebook diary on piers: Sacks wanders Hudson River piers where gay men cruise, using notebook as diary and letter to Vincze.
• Vincze's perspective: Vincze tells Sacks watching life "with the eyes of a homosexual is the greatest thing in the world."
• Mother's reaction: Sacks's surgeon mother calls homosexuality an "abomination" and "filth of the bowel," wishing he was never born.
• Move to America: Sacks relocates to California then New York for "sexual and moral freedom" absent in England.
• Yom Kippur choice: Instead of synagogue confession, Sacks spends night at bar, rejecting cringing over homosexuality.
• Communication breakdown: After no reply to letters, Sacks despairs, dresses sloppily, misses work, has unsatisfying sex.
• Breakup after "Klaudur": Vincze explains delay via "Klaudur" (spiritual cell); Sacks obsesses, sees relationship as delusion, ends it.

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Sacks was thirty-two, and he told Vincze that this was his first romantic relationship that was both physical and reciprocal. He felt he was part of a “two man universe,” seeing the world for the first time—“seeing it clear, and seeing it whole.” He wandered along the shipping piers on the Hudson River, where gay men cruised, with a notebook that he treated as a diary and as an endless letter to Vincze. “To watch life with the eyes of a homosexual is the greatest thing in the world,” Vincze had once told Sacks.

Sacks’s mother, a surgeon in London, had suspected that her son was gay when he was a teen-ager. She declared that homosexuality was an “abomination,” using the phrase “filth of the bowel” and telling him that she wished he’d never been born. They didn’t speak of the subject again. Sacks had moved to America—first to California and then, after five years, to New York—because, he wrote in his journal, “I wanted a sexual and moral freedom I felt I could never have in England.” That fall, during Yom Kippur, he decided that, rather than going to synagogue to confess “to the total range of human sin,” a ritual he’d grown up with, he’d spend the night at a bar, enjoying a couple of beers. “What I suppose I am saying, Jenö, is that I now feel differently about myself, and therefore about homosexuality as a whole,” he wrote. “I am through with cringing, and apologies, and pious wishes that I might have been ‘normal.’ ” (The Oliver Sacks Foundation shared with me his correspondence and other records, as well as four decades’ worth of journals—many of which had not been read since he wrote them.)

In early October, Sacks sent two letters to Vincze, but a week passed without a reply. Sacks asked his colleagues to search their mailboxes, in case the letter had been put in the wrong slot. Within a few days, however, he had given up on innocent explanations. He began dressing sloppily. He stopped coming to work on time. He had sex with a series of men who disgusted him.

After two weeks, Vincze, who was living in Berlin, sent a letter apologizing for his delayed reply and reiterating his love. He explained that he was so preoccupied by thoughts of Sacks that he felt as if he were living in a “Klaudur,” a German word that Vincze defined as a “spiritual cell.” He seems to have misspelled Klausur, which refers to an enclosed area in a monastery, but Sacks kept using the misspelled word, becoming obsessed with it. “It ramifies in horrible associations,” he wrote Vincze. “The closing of a door. Klaudur, claustrophobia, the sense of being shut in.” Sacks had long felt as if he were living in a cell, incapable of human contact, and this word appeared to be all he needed to confirm that the condition was terminal. The meaning of the word began morphing from “spiritual cell” to “psychotic cage.”

“He just got back from his poker game.”

Cartoon by Liana Finck

Link copied

The intimacy Sacks had rejoiced in now seemed phony, a “folie à deux”—a two-person delusion. His doubts intensified for a month, then he cut off the relationship. “I must tear you out of my system, because I dare not be involved,” he told Vincze, explaining that he barely remembered how he looked, or the sound of his voice. “I hope I will not be taken in like this again, and that—conversely—I will have the strength and clarity of mind to perceive any future such relationships as morbid at their inception, and to abort the folly of their further growth.”

In London, it used to be that shrines for children would always mark the site of a road accident. Now they often mark the site of a murder. Most often, their killers are children too.

Another shrine has appeared in North London. On Tuesday lunchtime, Adam Henry, aged 15, was cornered down a side street off Westbourne Road, Islington, not far from Highbury Fields, and stabbed. Someone called 999. Paramedics arrived, and office workers on their lunch breaks saw them trying to save Henry’s life. He was rushed to hospital, where he died.

Within a day, the customary shrine had appeared. At the foot of a low brick wall have been laid flowers, drinks and biscuits, less than a minute’s walk from Henry’s old secondary school, St Mary Magdalene Academy, which he attended until partway through Year 8. His yearbook entry said he enjoyed skateboarding and reading the Bible. It has been reported that, after leaving St Mary Magdalene, Adam was a pupil of the Bridge Satellite School, which specialises in teaching children with autism. Laying flowers on Tuesday evening, Henry’s family told Metro that he was “quiet and respectful… very funny. Just a nice boy.”

The police have opened a murder investigation. As yet it is not known why Henry, nicknamed “AZ”, was stabbed to death one lunchtime in one of London’s wealthiest boroughs, minutes away from £8-a-pint gastropubs, a Bang & Olufsen showroom and the townhouse that was once Tony Blair’s. Like much of London’s Zone 2, Islington is an area where incredible wealth luxuriates a few doors away from poverty and strife. Beside the lawyers, celebrities and investment bankers live the boys and young men embroiled in violent street gangs.

One might assume that the violence breaks out when one drug-selling gang encroaches on the turf of another, but the truth is more prosaic: stabbings can be precipitated by social media posts and petty personal beefs. If you are spotted talking to the wrong person, or you repost the wrong video, you can become a target. There are only a small number of street gang members, but thousands of children are one misstep away from becoming a target.

And when acts of thuggery take place, they reverberate through the neighbourhood. Islington’s new youth safety strategy, which was published in November, found that even among young people in the borough unknown to police and child services, being robbed, and knowing someone who had been stabbed, was commonplace.

The result is an atmosphere of worry and fear. “We have to stay behind [at school] until 4:20pm [when] it’s dark,” said one child, “so when I leave and have to go home, I just shit myself.”

Another said: “As soon as you step out of your front door, you just have to be vigilant; you know you can’t go to certain areas, and you don’t go out when it’s dark,” said another. “You always see young people all ballied up [i.e., wearing balaclavas]. You never know what they are going to do.”

These teenagers are rightly worried, yet they have at least been fortunate enough not to be drawn into the street gangs vortex. The more vulnerable they are — and often this involves having ADHD, autism and other mental health problems — the more likely needy children are to be sucked in, and the more likely they will be abused, brutalised or killed.

“Gangs are just another form of social extremism,” one expert told me. (Because he works with vulnerable children at risk of violence, he asked not to be named.) “These kids are lost boys, and the gangs are found-families. If you’re vulnerable, and looking to belong, you’re more likely to become exploited by these groups.”

And what does it mean to end up in those groups? You might be coerced into missing school in order to go phone snatching on e-scooters; you might be strong-armed into selling crack and heroin on a “county line” from a drug user’s council house in Colchester or Norwich for weeks on end; or you might be required to carry out acts of brutal violence on people you have never met before.

There has always been some quantity of criminality in society, but its expression and scale are in flux. Thirty years ago, in London there were a small number of large street gangs run by seasoned adult criminals. But this order has fractured, and today there are a myriad of smaller gangs, sometimes headed by kids. In Islington, the most prominent street gang are the “Cally Boyz”, who are based around the Caledonian Road, a couple of minute’s walk from where Henry died.

The Cally Boyz made the headlines in July this year when five members were jailed for stabbing to death two people, including a 15-year-old, while on a “rampage” in an Islington council estate in 2023. The gang members wrongly believed that their victims were part of a rival gang who had dared to film a music video on their turf. Mistaken identity, unfortunately, is another recurrent feature of gang violence.

In such a climate, Henry’s death does not come out of the blue, but nor is it run-of-the-mill. Two teenagers were killed in Islington in 2024; one was killed in 2023; in 2022, one 15-year-old was killed by another 15-year-old in Highbury Fields. Compared to boroughs such as Croydon and Hackney, Islington is not a hotspot for youth killings. In 2021, 30 teenagers were killed in London, the highest since the Second World War, but only two of these killings occurred in Islington. The violence is not always teen-on-teen; in March, three teenage girls were charged with killing a 75-year-old man in Seven Sisters Road. Still, the borough is less well known for its street gangs than for the original moped robbery gangs of a decade ago, and for the ageing Adams crime family. Its leader, Terry Adams, was described by the judge who jailed him for money laundering in 2007 as “one of the country’s most feared and revered organised criminals”.

Henry’s death comes at a time when the number of teenagers being killed each year on the capital’s streets is falling: that peak of 30, four years ago, fell to 12 in 2024. But behind the fluctuating death tolls, the damage is incessant. “There is harm that’s not deadly, but it can be life-destroying,” the youth expert, talking about how young people get sucked into a 24-hour existence of brutal violence and relentless crime. “These children, they are not going to have good lives. They may not die, but they’re not really living.”

By the time a teenager has been stabbed, he has probably already been badly let down in some way, be it by his family or the state. Adam was killed the day before the Government launched its new youth safety strategy, which is being framed by Labour as an attempt to right the wrongs of the previous Tory government’s regime of austerity. With youth clubs closed, goes this account, teenagers ended up on the streets; as a result, the closures were blamed by multiple government reports for fuelling youth violence.

But blaming the Tories for London’s youth murder problem is just “politicking”, says the youth expert. He says Labour could have done more themselves, and that those advising London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan on the causes of youth violence “don’t know what’s happening on the ground… they are not well-informed people”.

He adds the solution does not solely lie with more youth clubs, or the use of tired enforcement tactics such as stop and search, but in changing the school system so children with the kind of problems that can lead to involvement in gangs and violence can be helped earlier. He suggests that too many children with special educational needs are ignored or discarded from schools at an early age, so their problems go unaddressed, worsen and they become more susceptible to joining gangs.

By the same token, any school-age intervention will take years to make an impact on rates of youth violence, and politically, it is far trickier, and more expensive, to a headline-friendly quick fix. There seems little even a beefed-up police force, or a more efficient justice system, could do to stop these attacks. So far, attempted interventions have had little effect on this kind of deep-rooted youth crime. For the time being, the worried teenagers of Islington have little option other than to remain fearful.

---

• Navy Contract Award: U.S. Navy awards Palantir $448 million deal for nuclear submarine supply chain management.
• Software Purpose: Palantir software replaces manual spreadsheet tracking, saving 20,000 man-hours and predicting part needs.
• Predictive Benefits: Enables 60-180 day advance warnings of supply issues to cut downtime.
• Expansion Potential: Starts with submarines, may extend to aircraft carriers and jet fighters.
• Funding Source: Paid via President Trump's July spending bill to speed submarine production and overhauls.
• Addressing Delays: Tackles parts shortages causing overruns in 18-month overhaul process at public shipyards.
• Shipbuilding Focus: Involves two shipbuilders, three shipyards, over 100 suppliers; supports U.S. efforts against China's 232x capacity advantage.
• Palantir Growth: Builds on decade-long Navy ties and $2 billion in recent government contracts since Trump's return.

---

By

Marcus Weisgerber

and

Heather Somerville

Dec. 9, 2025 5:54 pm ET

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BPC > Only use to renew if text is incomplete or updated: | archive.vn

BPC > Full article text fetched from (no need to report issue for external site): | archive.today | archive.li

The USS Pasadena nuclear submarine arriving in Cartagena, Colombia, in 2023. Ricardo Maldonado Rozo/Zuma Press

• The U.S. Navy awarded Palantir Technologies a $448 million contract to manage the supply chain for its nuclear submarine fleet.

• Palantir’s software aims to reduce maintenance downtime and predict part needs, replacing manual tracking that takes 20,000 man-hours.

• The contract, funded by a presidential spending bill, seeks to accelerate submarine production and overhauls, which often face delays.

An artificial-intelligence tool created this summary, which was based on the text of the article and checked by an editor. Read more about how we use artificial intelligence in our journalism.

• The U.S. Navy awarded Palantir Technologies a $448 million contract to manage the supply chain for its nuclear submarine fleet.

  View more

The U.S. Navy has awarded Palantir Technologies PLTR 1.57%increase; green up pointing triangle a contract valued at hundreds of millions of dollars to manage the supply chain of its nuclear submarine fleet in the hope of reducing maintenance downtime.

The deal marks an expansion of the company’s work with the U.S. military in a sector that is a high priority for the Trump administration.

The contract will initially focus on submarines and could expand to other types of vessels, including aircraft carriers and jet fighters, Navy Secretary John Phelan said Tuesday.

Palantir’s software is designed to give the Navy more visibility into its supply chain, by replacing workers needed to manually track parts using spreadsheets, and better predict when parts are needed, according to the Navy and the company. Palantir Chief Executive Alex Karp said manually tracking parts takes roughly 20,000 man-hours.

“It gives us more predictive analytics to understand when we’re going to potentially have problems in the supply chain,” he said. “Rather than hearing about a problem that day that will stop us, we will know 60, 90, 120, 180 days in advance that we’ve got it.”

Palantir believes there are “not just months, but years to be saved with the rapid and widespread adoption” of its software, said Mike Gallagher, a former congressman who is now a Palantir executive.

The deal, valued at $448 million, is being paid for with money from President Trump’s signature spending bill, passed in July, said Jason Potter, the acting assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition.

The aim is to speed up production of new submarines and labor-intensive overhauls of existing vessels.

The entire overhaul process is designed to take 18 months, but parts shortages often cause delays, according to Mark Montgomery, a retired Navy admiral who is senior director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

“Making sure parts are available where and when they’re needed historically … has been a challenge,” Montgomery said.

The Navy says the program with Palantir will provide a comprehensive view of the supply chains and production capacity of shipbuilders in a bid to end unnecessary delays and cost overruns that have plagued shipbuilding.

The contract marks a significant expansion with the Navy for Palantir, which has contracts with the service going back at least a decade. Its more lucrative business sits elsewhere in the Defense Department, particularly with the Army.

The deal with the Navy builds on a focus Palantir Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar has often spoken about—Palantir’s role in revitalizing U.S. manufacturing, including the country’s struggling shipbuilding sector, by helping companies untangle complicated supply-chain problems.

“China has 232 times more shipbuilding capacity than the United States, whose industry has consolidated to the point where we have to choose between building submarines for our allies or for ourselves,” Sankar wrote last year.

Rebooting America’s shipbuilding is also a key priority for the Trump administration. An April executive order calls for the expansion of shipbuilding through investment and other incentives. 

Since President Trump has returned to office, Palantir has landed new government contracts valued at roughly $2 billion, according to federal contracting data. Its run has extended since 2019, with the Defense Department the largest single agency driving its government revenue growth.

Palantir’s project with the Navy, called Ship OS, will initially include two major shipbuilders, three public shipyards and more than 100 suppliers, the Navy said. 

The Navy repairs its submarines exclusively at government-owned shipyards. Submarines are overhauled every six to eight years, said Bryan Clark, a Navy expert who is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

“The Navy’s public shipyards have been terrible at the management process in general and they’re extremely inefficient,” Clark said. “There’s a lot of dead time where submarines are just waiting because the right people and the material are not in the right place at the right time to start the job when they were supposed to start the job.”

Write to Marcus Weisgerber at marcus.weisgerber@wsj.com and Heather Somerville at heather.somerville@wsj.com

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• World Population Review: Most expensive states: Hawaii, California, Massachusetts, D.C. (blue); Alaska 5th; followed by blue states.
• City affordability (Visual Capitalist): Least affordable: San Jose, New York, Boston, San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles (all Democratic); first non-Democratic city is Miami (#9), then Dallas (#20).
• Committee to Unleash Poverty: Nine of top ten most expensive cities are in blue states.
• Other studies: Fox Business, Yahoo confirm Democrat-run cities are least affordable for homebuyers and renters.
• Attributed cause: Democrats' regulations, high taxes, inflationary policies, and subsidies make life unaffordable; they distort facts.

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The Democrats have decided that “affordability” is the issue that will win the next election cycle. Are they daft? The most unaffordable states and cities in the country are Democrat strongholds.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the Democrat from New York, one of the least affordable states in the country, has told party leaders they need “to adopt a laser focus on the affordability crisis,” says Axios.

Politico noted that the “Democrats are gearing up to hammer the GOP on the issue,” then quickly jumped in to help, declaring that the “Republicans have an affordability problem.” 

Will the Democrat strategy work? Not if voters get the facts, which we will helpfully provide.

According to U.S. News & World Report, the most unaffordable state is Gov. Gavin Newsom’s California. It is a deep blue, having been under the boot of Democrats for more than a quarter century, which, yes, includes eight years of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who ran as a Republican but governed more like the Democrats, as he was unable to break their now three-decade grip in Sacramento.

U.S. News & World Report’s six most unaffordable states are Democratic states. The only Republican state among the 15 least affordable is Florida, the seventh least affordable. At the other end, the 12 most affordable states are Republican. Only two among the top 20 are Democrat.

CNBC ranks California as the most expensive state to live in and has only three red states — Florida, Montana and Utah — among its list of least affordable states. The most expensive states based on the cost of living index, says the World Population Review, are Hawaii, California, Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. Republican Alaska is fifth, and is followed by 11 blue states.

America’s most unaffordable cities are also Democratic bastions. San Jose, says the Visual Capitalist, is the least affordable city in the nation, followed by New York, Boston, San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles – we could go on, but let’s shorthand it and point out that we have to get to the ninth city on the list, Miami, to find one that isn’t Democratic (though voters just elected a Democrat to be mayor for the first time in nearly three decades). The next non-Democratic city is Dallas, at No. 20.

“Nine of the 10 most expensive are big cities in blue states,” the Committee to Unleash Poverty said last month. In 2023, Fox Business reported that “Democrat-run blue cities, including some of the country’s most liberal areas such as New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, are the least affordable for homebuyers.”

Various other lists look similar – overpopulated with Democratic cities – whether they are basing their findings on retail workers looking to rent or housing costs.

From their ancient habit of adding regulation onto regulation to their affinity for taxing everything that moves to their inflationary fiscal policies and deep affection for subsidies for their favored causes and grifters, Democrats make life unaffordable for those who aren’t connected to them. Naturally, they want to twist the truth, because the facts clearly show they are the offenders.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board

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• Stanford AI Experiment: Team developed Artemis bot mimicking Chinese hackers' AI use to scan networks, find vulnerabilities, and exploit them on engineering department network.
• Competition Setup: Artemis tested against 10 professional penetration testers hired to identify bugs without breaking in.
• Performance Results: Artemis outperformed all but one human tester in bug discovery.
• Speed and Cost: Operated at under $60 per hour versus human testers' $2,000-$2,500 daily rates.
• Limitations Observed: Produced 18% false positives and missed an obvious webpage bug spotted by most humans.
• Security Benefits: Uncovered previously unknown flaws, benefits outweighed risks with kill switch in place.
• Long-term Impact: Tools like Artemis enable patching more code, aiding network defenders.
• Short-term Risks: Unvetted software vulnerable to AI-discovered novel exploits; improving bug reports in programs like Curl.

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Stanford engineer Alex Keller and researchers Donovan Jasper and Justin Lin.

By

Robert McMillan

| Photography by Kelsey McClellan for WSJ

Dec. 11, 2025 8:01 am ET

After years of misfires, artificial-intelligence hacking tools have become dangerously good.

So good that they are even surpassing some human hackers, according to a novel experiment conducted recently at Stanford University.

A Stanford team spent a good chunk of the past year tinkering with an AI bot called Artemis. It takes a similar approach to Chinese hackers who had been using Anthropic’s generative AI software to break into major corporations and foreign governments.

Artemis scans the network, finds potential bugs—software vulnerabilities—and then finds ways to exploit them.

Then the Stanford researchers let Artemis out of the lab, using it to find bugs in a real-world computer network—the one used by Stanford’s own engineering department. And to make things interesting, they pitted Artemis against real-world professional hackers, known as penetration testers.

The Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center at Stanford.

Their experiment is outlined in a paper that was published Wednesday.

“This was the year that models got good enough,” said Rob Ragan, a researcher with the cybersecurity firm Bishop Fox. His company used large language models, or LLMs, to build a set of tools that can find bugs at a much faster and cheaper rate than humans during penetration tests, letting them test far more software than ever before, he said.

Initially, Stanford cybersecurity researcher Justin Lin and his team didn’t expect too much from Artemis. AI tools are good at playing games, identifying patterns and even mimicking human speech. To date, they have tended to fall down when it comes to real-world hacking, where they have to do a series of complex tests, and then draw conclusions and take action.

“We thought it would probably be below average,” Lin said.

But Artemis was pretty good.

Cybersecurity researcher Justin Lin says his team initially didn't expect much from the AI bot Artemis.

Cybersecurity researcher Justin Lin says his team initially didn't expect much from the AI bot Artemis.

The AI bot trounced all except one of the 10 professional network penetration testers the Stanford researchers had hired to poke and prod, but not actually break into, their engineering network.

Artemis found bugs at lightning speed and it was cheap: It cost just under $60 an hour to run. Ragan says that human pen testers typically charge between $2,000 and $2,500 a day.

But Artemis wasn’t perfect. About 18% of its bug reports were false positives. It also completely missed an obvious bug that most of the human testers spotted in a webpage.

Stanford’s network hadn’t been hacked by an AI bot before, but the experiment looked like a valuable way to shore up some security flaws in the Stanford network, said Alex Keller, systems and network security lead for Stanford’s School of Engineering. “In my mind, the benefits significantly outweighed any risk.”

He was curious to see what an AI system would find, he said. Also, Artemis had a kill switch, which let the researchers turn it off in an instant, should something go wrong.  

With so much of the world’s code largely untested for security flaws, tools like Artemis will be a long-term boon to defenders of the world’s networks, helping them find and then patch more code than ever before, said Dan Boneh, a computer science professor at Stanford who advised the researchers.

But in the short term, “we might have a problem,” Boneh said. “There’s already a lot of software out there that has not been vetted via LLMs before it was shipped. That software could be at risk of LLMs finding novel exploits.”

Anthropic, which published research about how China-linked hackers were using its models, has also warned of the potential risks.

“We’re in this moment of time where many actors can increase their productivity to find bugs at an extreme scale,” said Jacob Klein, the head of threat intelligence at Anthropic. His team conducted the investigation that identified the Chinese hackers.

A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy said tracing cyberattacks is complex and that U.S. accusations of hacking “smear and slander” China, which opposes cyberattacks.

AI-powered hacks are presenting clear challenges in the ecosystem for finding software bugs, often called “bug bounty” programs, in which companies pay hackers and researchers to find software vulnerabilities.

Artemis found bugs at lightning speed and at a much lower cost than human penetration testers normally charge—though its results weren’t perfect.

For Daniel Stenberg, AI slop bug reports began appearing last year. Volunteers who work on free software he maintains, a widely used program called Curl, were inundated with useless or erroneous reports.

But then this past fall, something unexpected happened. Stenberg and his team started getting high-quality bug reports. To date he has received more than 400. But these were created by a new generation of code-analyzing tools, Stenberg said.

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

Is artificial intelligence going to be more of a boon for attackers or defenders? Join the conversation below.

“AI gives us a lot of crap and lies, and at the same time it can be used to detect mistakes no one found before,” he said. 

Artemis made a remarkable find like that during the Stanford test. There was an out-of-date webpage with a security issue on it that didn’t work on any of the humans’ web browsers. But Artemis isn’t human, so instead of Chrome or Firefox, it used a program that could still read the page, allowing it to find the bug.

That software was Curl.

Write to Robert McMillan at robert.mcmillan@wsj.com

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