The establishment political consensus has long held that it’s impossible to rein in illegal immigration until Congress passes “comprehensive immigration reform.” The Congressional Budget Office has recently made clear that all it really takes is a president willing to enforce federal immigration laws, as he is constitutionally required to do.

The CBO recently revised its estimates concerning the number of illegal aliens entering or leaving the United States. More than a year ago, just before Inauguration Day, the CBO estimated that a net 1.1 million “other foreign nationals”—those lacking “a legal immigration status”—would be added to the U.S. population in 2025. Now the CBO has revised that estimate downward by a whopping 1.5 million illegal aliens—from an increase of 1.1 million to a decrease of 360,000. This downward revision of 1.5 million people is equivalent to the population of San Antonio.

What caused this “significant reduction?” The congressional scorekeeper’s answer is clear. The decline was “driven largely by administrative actions taken since January 20, 2025.” The CBO particularly emphasizes an action that President Donald Trump took on his first day in office: “Executive Order 14165 reinstated the policy of Migrant Protection Protocols, which require people who want to apply for asylum in the United States to return to the territory from which they came.” The CBO adds, “That order also ended all categorical parole programs and ceased the use of the CBP One app as a method of paroling or facilitating the entry of people into the United States.”

Under President Joe Biden, illegal aliens who “arrived between official ports of entry”—that is, along the open (southwestern) border—“were generally released into the United States,” writes the CBO. It adds, “People could also use the CBP One app to schedule an appointment at a port of entry” and then “be released into the United States.”

The Trump administration almost immediately stopped the Biden administration’s lawless practice of releasing illegal aliens into the U.S. interior. This accounts for the CBO estimate that 1.5 million fewer illegal aliens were living in the U.S. at the end of 2025 than would have been the case with a continuation of Biden’s policies. The 46th president’s “equity”-based policies brought about a border crisis by design.

While the mainstream press emphasizes ICE raids and deportations, the Trump administration’s removal of aliens from the U.S. interior accounted for less than one-tenth of the CBO’s downward revision in net illegal immigration—it estimates that 120,000 people were removed from the U.S. interior in 2025. Far from being driven by deportations, more than 90 percent of the Trump administration’s success in reducing illegal immigration has come from limiting border crossings, per the CBO’s figures.

The CBO estimates that 540,000 illegal aliens arrived along the open border in 2024, between the ports of entry, and were released into the U.S. by the Biden administration. In 2025, such releases dipped to 20,000—a 96 percent decrease. Similarly, 960,000 illegal aliens arrived at the ports of entry and were released into the U.S. in 2024, compared with only 60,000 in 2025—a 94 percent drop. (Many of those released under Trump were unaccompanied minors, required by law to be released to sponsor families.)

What’s more, only about half of the 2025 releases occurred from February through December. Most of the releases at the ports, and many of the releases along the open border, occurred in January, when Biden was still in office for most of the month. In fact, roughly the same number of illegal aliens were released into the country during three weeks of Biden as during 49 weeks of Trump.

In addition, the Trump administration dramatically cut the number of people who evaded capture and snuck across the border. The CBO estimates that about 300,000 people escaped across the border in this manner in 2024 but only about 50,000 did so in 2025—an 83 percent reduction. In a 2023 immigration case, U.S. District Court Judge T. Kent Wetherell said the Biden administration’s “actions were akin to posting a flashing ‘Come In, We’re Open’ sign on the southern border.” When the Trump administration effectively unplugged that sign, the number of people trying to sneak across the border dropped dramatically.

In all, the CBO estimates that about 80,000 people lacking “a legal immigration status” were released into the U.S. last year (roughly half of them during the 20 days of Biden), while 50,000 snuck across the border and 260,000 overstayed their visas. Meanwhile, 400,000 decided to leave voluntarily, 120,000 were removed from the interior of the U.S., and 225,000 attained permanent legal status. That amounts to a one-year reduction in the illegal alien population of about 360,000, whereas the CBO had previously projected an increase of about 1.1 million.

The CBO now projects that over the first three years of the Trump administration, the number of illegal aliens living in the U.S. will decrease by 1 million (with reductions of 360,000 in 2025, 330,000 in 2026, and 330,000 in 2027). Over the last three years of the Biden administration, the CBO estimates a 5.7 million increase (2 million in 2022, 2.4 million in 2023, and 1.3 million in 2024) in the number of illegal aliens living in the U.S. That 6.7 million swing—from 5.7 million to negative 1 million—exceeds the combined populations of Los Angeles and Phoenix. That’s the difference between three years of Biden’s policies versus three years of Trump’s, according to the CBO.

The success that the Trump administration has had in reversing the flow of illegal immigration—simply by enforcing existing laws—was broadly thought to be impossible. Less than a year before Trump took office, the Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote that “the President needs Congress to fix the underlying incentives at the border.” A few months later, the Biden White House issued a fact sheet that began, “Since his first day in office, President Biden has called on Congress to secure our border.” When asked about illegal immigration during a 60 Minutes interview in October 2024, Vice President Kamala Harris said that “we need Congress to be able to act to actually fix the problem.”

It turns out that fixing the problem required only executing the laws already on the books—specifically the law requiring that asylum-seekers be detained while their cases are heard, rather than being released into the interior of the country. The Immigration and Nationality Act declares that “if an alien asserts a credible fear of persecution, he or she shall be detained for further consideration of the application for asylum.” Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito writes that these detention “requirements, as we have held, are mandatory.”

The foreign-born portion of the U.S. population rose from 4.7 percent in 1970 to 16.2 percent in 2023, and probably reached about 16.8 percent in 2024—easily breaking the previous all-time record of 14.8 percent set in 1890, at the height of the great waves of nineteenth-century immigration. It will take many years of enforcing existing immigration laws to see that percentage dip back down to something approaching historical norms. But as the CBO now acknowledges, the Trump administration is making significant headway—even if the congressional scorekeeper didn’t see it coming.

LLM (google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite-20260507) summary:

• Flawed Methodology: the cited analysis from the university of chicago justice project relies on inconsistent timeframes that fail to account for seasonal variations in crime and emergency call volumes.
• Data Discrepancies: local reporting highlights that the underlying data used to justify shotspotter removal is unreliable and suffers from significant statistical oversights.
• Subjective Comparisons: the research team cherry-picked a winter period for post-shotspotter response times, essentially comparing cold months with statistically lower call volumes to warmer, high-activity months.
• Hidden Variables: the study conveniently excludes gunshot-related calls from its response time metrics without providing transparent justification for why these were omitted from broader analysis.
• Contextual Distortion: chicago's recent fluctuations in crime align with national trends, making it impossible to attribute local improvements specifically to the administrative decision to axe public safety technology.
• Questionable Impact: statistical evidence suggests the purported gains in response efficiency are drastically overstated, with the proposed improvements potentially losing half their significance if a proper control group were applied.
• Implementation Challenges: while proponents frame the removal as a success, actual operational outcomes are obscured by the city's broader staffing deficits and inability to effectively leverage existing policing tools.
• Ideological Bias: the current municipal rhetoric prioritizes political performance over rigorous evidence, settling for superficial metrics rather than addressing the core complexities of urban public safety.

Courtesy Scott Olson/Getty Images

“The data proves we’re doing what works: investing in communities, improving response times, and giving police officers tools that are effective,” Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson announced on X last week. “Not wasting taxpayer dollars for walkie talkies on poles that overpolice communities without improving safety.”

He was referring to a brief analysis from the University of Chicago Justice Project, which purported to show a 4.2-minute improvement in response time to “Priority 1” 911 calls—calls that require an immediate response—as well as a decline in violent crime after the city ended its use of ShotSpotter.

ShotSpotter is, basically, a system of microphones that monitor for the sound of gunshots in designated areas and, after human review of any gunfire-like bangs, turns the audio and estimated coordinates over to the cops.

The Justice Project’s analysis is weak sauce, despite the intense coverage it’s received in the Chicago media. The results have little bearing on the question of whether Chicago did the right thing by ending ShotSpotter in late 2024, or whether Johnson’s administration is doing the wrong thing by dragging its feet as it searches for a replacement.

To begin with, as the crime-watchers at CWBChicago promptly reported, the underlying data are less than perfect—the city doesn’t record response times as reliably as it should. Further, there are two significant sleights of hand in the analysis itself, key details the authors buried in fine print at the bottom of the web page where they presented their results.

First, the analysis uses two different time periods. When analyzing crime rates, the authors contrast the first nine months of 2024 and the first nine months of 2025—a sensible way of addressing the fact that crime is seasonal, rising in the summer and plummeting in the (frigid, if you’re in Chicago) winter. They explicitly note this time period not just in the fine print but also in the main text of the analysis.

By contrast, when they look at response times, the main text merely refers to an unspecified period “after ShotSpotter was removed.” Only by reading the fine print do we learn they are comparing “the six months right before the shutdown of ShotSpotter in 2024 and the first six months right after the shutdown.”

Which is to say that they are comparing, basically, a spring and summer with ShotSpotter to a fall and winter without it. This is a problem because, much like crime in general, Chicago’s Priority 1 calls have a strong seasonal pattern:

Chicago Priority 1 911 Calls

Source: Chicago Inspector General 911 call data, subset to Priority 1 calls.

There are simply fewer calls to respond to at colder times of the year. Further, this will have a bigger impact on the higher-crime areas where ShotSpotter was installed—which helps explain why, according to the analysis, ShotSpotter areas had twice the response-time improvement that non-covered areas did.

Incidentally, that same number implies that if the authors had used non-covered beats as a control group, rather than just comparing response times in ShotSpotter areas at two different parts of the year, their headline 4.2-minute result would have been cut in half.

The other issue CWBChicago flagged is that the researchers removed gunshot calls from the data. To be clear, there’s nothing inherently wrong with analyzing high-priority non-gunshot calls specifically. If, for example, ShotSpotter improved responses to gunshot calls but undermined responses to other calls, that would be worth knowing. But this is something readers should have been told up front, rather than being buried in fine print.

I’d like to add a few points to those raised by CWBChicago as well.

One is that Chicago’s recent crime decline has mirrored an improvement for the overall U.S.; over the past four years, murders have fallen by nearly half in both. This makes it difficult to tell what’s driving trends in the Windy City specifically, either citywide or in the higher-crime neighborhoods that had ShotSpotter—and it shows why accounting for the annual seasonality of crime trends, while necessary, does not isolate the impact of ShotSpotter itself.

If you thought ShotSpotter magically cut crime by 75 percent everywhere it’s installed, I suppose the similar crime declines in Chicago and the rest of the country should disabuse you of that notion. More realistically, though, the system might modestly reduce crime by getting cops to scenes a bit faster and producing extra evidence, and this analysis can’t distinguish such nuances from broader trends and noise in the data.

The balance of work between Priority 1 911 calls and ShotSpotter alerts is also worth pondering. As depicted in the chart above, Chicago police receive around 30,000 to 50,000 Priority 1 calls per month. Under ShotSpotter in 2024, the department was also getting about 2,000 to 3,000 monthly ShotSpotter alerts that weren’t accompanied by a 911 call about the same noises. The department’s work is divided amongst 11,500 officers.

What to make of such figures? The department has a lot on its plate, its current staffing is not sufficient for the challenges it faces, and responding to ShotSpotter calls certainly can have some impact on response times for other matters. Given that Priority 1 response times exceed ten or even 15 minutes on many beats even in the authors’ second period, these are clearly serious concerns. Nonetheless, the high ratio of top-priority 911 calls to ShotSpotter alerts should make us skeptical of a big role for the latter in overall response times.

ShotSpotter comes with real tradeoffs, which I laid out in considerable detail in a report last year. In general, it does seem to get cops to the scene of likely gunfire more quickly than 911 calls and boost evidence recovery, and it does sometimes alert cops to incidents they wouldn’t have heard about otherwise.

It also leads cops to scenes where they can’t find physical evidence of gunfire, though, and making the most of it requires manpower than some departments are lacking, with studies divided at best as to whether it leads to concrete improvements in crime and clearance rates. Eric Piza’s studies of Chicago have showed improved response to gunshots and increased firearm recoveries but no measurable improvement in crime or clearances.

I could buy that Chicago wasn’t making the most of the technology or simply didn’t have the staff to do so. And I’m eager to see more studies on the impact of shutting the system off. But hopefully future studies will feature more serious analysis than what the mayor is pushing.

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From the Manhattan Institute

• Chris Pope on reining in Medicaid managed care.

• Over at City Journal’s main site, Barry Latzer and Kristofer Bret Bucklen break down the crimes of parolees.

Other Work of Note

• Nature Human Behavior publishes a critique of a study that had claimed “anti-transgender” laws increased suicide attempts among trans and non-binary teens.

• Ride-sharing might be good for the environment in dense cities. Apparently, it enables people to rely less on their own cars and more on public transit (presumably using ride-sharing to fill in the gaps).

• A CBO tool for projecting discretionary spending.

• New data on the ideological diversity of college faculty.

• Big new survey of parents.

• AI vs. people for reproducing scientific findings.

• Have we bent the health-care cost curve?

• Global support for gender egalitarianism has plateaued, partly because “fertility is higher in countries where average support for gender equality is lower.”

• Trends in maternal mortality.

• Who pays the aluminum tariff?

• Testing a (fairly silly?) 1972 conjecture from Ronald Coase about the behavior of monopolists.

• If top colleges reduce graduate enrollment in response to the endowment tax, will that slow scientific progress?

• What does free community college achieve?

• Tax competition and economic growth.

• Ideas for bringing down crime in D.C. with hot-spots policing.

• Who cares for kids when mothers go to prison?

• “Does violent delinquency predict premature death?” (Spoiler alert: Yes.)

• Breaking down substance abuse among men who are not employed or in school.

• More small-but-positive impacts from school cell-phone controls, this time in Brazil.

• More podiatrists, fewer amputations for diabetics?

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Jim “Fergie” Chambers, the Communist millionaire and heir to the Cox media fortune, has long bankrolled one of the nation’s most militant protest networks. But in recent weeks, he has turned his fire on a putative ally: Shanghai-based tech billionaire Neville Roy Singham, who himself funds a transnational web of far-left groups.

What’s going on? In a series of X posts, Chambers alleged that Singham’s network of nonprofits and activist groups has tried to redirect insurgent organizing into tightly controlled institutions linked to the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), a U.S.-based revolutionary Communist party. Chambers sees Singham’s operation as “turn[ing] their back on direct actionists”—implying that Singham prefers exercising control over the movement to enabling the sort of serious radicalism Chambers endorses.

The conflict between the two is in part another example of the Left’s tendency to collapse into infighting. But more importantly, Chambers’s criticism offers a rare public window into the inner workings of the Singham network, one of the radical Left’s most effective and prolific organizing operations. And, in its surfacing of the importance of the PSL to that network, Chambers’s X commentary highlights a potent target for policymakers looking to dismantle Singham’s influence operation.

Chambers is one of the main funders of America’s radical Left. His money has flowed to a host of projects in the “anti-imperialism” organizing space. These include a recent $1 million Ramadan donation to Palestinian causes, including a group that advances terrorist-sympathetic messages in America’s schools.

Chambers claims that he and Singham are effectively the two primary financiers of the “US radical left.” Despite this, the two have apparently been at loggerheads—a conflict that has now gone public.

Chambers’ attack appears to have been triggered by the Singham-aligned People’s Forum’s choice to host an event with Kat Abughazaleh, the former Media Matters journalist turned congressional candidate. The event drew backlash from more militant-aligned factions of the radical Left. Radical activist Calla Walsh, a Chambers friend, has denounced Abughazaleh as a “neocon” over her support for arming Ukraine and Taiwan.

Whatever the trigger, the break was a long time coming. According to Chambers, the roots of the conflict go back to the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attacks. Shortly afterward, Walsh—the 21-year-old DSA activist turned mouthpiece for America’s adversaries—launched Palestine Action US with Chambers’s support. The group is an offshoot of Palestine Action U.K., a designated terrorist organization in Great Britain.

Chambers claimed that senior Singham network figures responded to the launch by discouraging “direct actions”—a movement euphemism for illegal vandalism, destruction, and force—targeting the Israeli defense firm Elbit Systems. Those figures allegedly urged Chambers and Walsh to travel to New York City for meetings aimed at persuading them to reconsider the campaign, including warnings to “stop this direct action and go back to school.” The effort failed, and Palestine Action US continued its direct-action campaign and caused nearly $100,000 in damage to an Elbit facility.

According to Chambers, Singham quietly instructed affiliates to distance themselves from Palestine Action, eventually creating Shut It Down 4 Palestine as the network-approved vehicle for pro-Palestine direct action. Chambers described the PSL leadership as having “actively interfered, sought to control [Palestine Action US], snuff it out, hurt its reputation, and isolate its actionists.”

It’s not clear why Singham’s network, no stranger to radical action, tried to discourage attacking Elbit. But it is consistent with the network’s longstanding view that revolutionary mass movements will fail unless they are guided by an educated vanguard—a strategy Chambers criticized as resulting in “a vanguard party comprised of liberal arts theater kids.”

At the same time, the split between the far-Left’s two most serious backers suggests that Singham’s network was not looking to collaborate, but to exercise centralized control over the whole of the extreme anti-Israel movement.

The same tendency is apparent in Chambers’s claims that the Singham operation had previously courted him. In 2023, Chambers operated a commune-style activist compound in Massachusetts centered on political agitation, ideological training, and physical conditioning. He also financially supported a network of young militants that included figures such as Walsh.

According to Chambers, Singham network-aligned figures proposed to use his property for a People’s Forum training facility. Chambers said the proposal gave him insight into how the Singham network operates, especially after he reviewed a sketched organizational chart. That structure made it clear that, regardless of the project, the PSL is at the center of the network, with each initiative ultimately designed to build the party.

Neville Singham, too, appeared to exercise an iron grip on the network. While the network may rely on various public-facing figures and young-adult activists for social-media promotion, Chambers said Singham still advances a “firm agenda” and coordinates activity through private chats.

The allegations leveled across Chambers’s multiday airing of dirty laundry paint a picture of the Singham network as focused on unifying the often fractious and disorganized radical Left under the control of one man and one party. At the same time, they leave opponents of the Singham Network with lots of questions. If not Chambers, then who else might have capitulated to their proposals—and under what terms? If the Party for Socialism and Liberation sits at the fulcrum of the Singham network’s American arm, should lawmakers focus more closely on that organization?

Congressional scrutiny of the Singham network has recently intensified. Several House committees have sought documentation from affiliated organizations. Lawmakers have also referred The People’s Forum to the IRS, urging review and possible revocation of its tax-exempt status, and asked then-Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate Singham under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

The congressional inquiries now underway may help establish a public record concerning this influence network, but Singham’s cooperation is unlikely. Since he lives in China, he can refuse cooperation indefinitely or simply wait out the current administration. More effective scrutiny would likely focus on the PSL’s domestic infrastructure, especially insofar as it is involved in coordinating large-scale unrest.

The PSL does not publicly disclose official membership figures, but it claims to operate in “over 50 cities.” The party’s financial structure is similarly opaque. Donations to the PSL are processed through Liberation News, the organization’s official newspaper.

The organization also invests heavily in long-term physical infrastructure. Over the past several years, the PSL has established more than a dozen Liberation Centers in multiple American cities, including a soon-to-be-opened facility in Washington, D.C. These centers function as hubs for protest coordination, coalition-building, political education, and cadre development.

Taken together, Chambers’s allegations, the congressional inquiries, and the Singham network’s footprint raise a pointed question about the entire ecosystem: Is this a loose collection of allied organizations and projects, or a coordinated influence operation shaped by a small circle of confidants around Neville Roy Singham together building a “vanguard” party? The evidence increasingly points toward the latter.

In the course of the public feuding, Chambers has also inadvertently drawn attention to the network’s core organizing hub, the PSL, which he says ultimately anchors the broader system. If that is the case, government scrutiny should not be applied piecemeal across the broad array of peripheral organizations. It must reach the structure at the center of the system, where influence and coordination converge, and where critics, both left and right, argue real control ultimately lies.

LLM (google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite-20260507) summary:

• Ipo Urgency: the artificial race between openai and anthropic seeks to capture investor capital before market sentiment for inflated tech valuations sours
• Market Saturation: limited pools of available cash mean that companies trailing in the public offering timeline risk being starved of necessary funding
• First Mover Advantage: listing status provides early access to liquidity which can settle internal pressures and satisfy employee compensation demands regardless of share performance
• Clustered Listings: historical data suggests that industry groupings of initial public offerings lead to diminishing returns for those that hesitate
• Capital Competition: inevitable liquidity drain from massive planned offerings like spacex will likely force greedy ai firms to accelerate their timelines
• Valuation Inflation: absurdly high target valuations in the trillions reveal a speculative fever that thrives on unchecked optimism regardless of fundamental worth
• Precedent Risks: using the lift and uber collapse as a cautionary tale demonstrates how early failures can poison the well for subsequent market entrants
• Transformation Doubt: the outcome of these listings will likely expose whether the ai industry provides genuine value or represents another classic bubble in the making

By

Asa Fitch

June 1, 2026 5:30 am ET

18

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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, left, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Florian Gaertner/Photothek/Getty Images; Chance Yeh/Getty Images

In the bitter rivalry between AI heavyweights OpenAI and Anthropic, it will mostly be who has the best technology that determines the ultimate victor. But which one of them gets to its public offering first matters a great deal, too.

The window for initial public offerings is decidedly open, with a receptive market. Cerebras, an AI-chip company, rose 68% on its first day of trading last month. Only digital-design platform Figma’s absurd 250% rise last year was bigger for a company valued at more than $10 billion at listing in the past five years, according to FactSet data.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX plans to follow up this summer in what may well be the largest IPO in history—with a targeted valuation of $1.5 trillion. That will add more heat to the IPO cauldron.

Created with Highcharts 9.0.1Hot MarketLargest first-day price rise, IPOs of firms worth over $10 billion since June​2021Source: FactSet

Created with Highcharts 9.0.1FigmaCerebras SystemsToastFermiOn HoldingMedlineArxisMobileye GlobalGitLabFreshworks0%50100150200250300

This is all the more reason for OpenAI and Anthropic to try to be the first big artificial-intelligence-model developer to go public.

There are some clear advantages to being first out of the gate. Just as importantly, there are major disadvantages in being second.

Academic research has shown that IPOs tend to come in industry clusters, and that companies listing later in a cycle don’t tend to perform as well. That stands to reason, given that higher-quality companies with deeper moats tend to go public early, triggering a barrage of followers that might not be as strong.

And even in a hot market, there isn’t an infinite amount of money to go around. Investors may rotate out of other stocks to pile into SpaceX, then do more reshuffling to make bets on OpenAI and Anthropic later this year or next. The one that goes first is likely to gobble up more of the increasingly scarce capital.

And both OpenAI and Anthropic are looking for sky-high valuations. Anthropic raised money recently at a valuation approaching $1 trillion. OpenAI was last valued in March at $852 billion.

“There’s only so much oxygen in the room,” said Patrick Healy, founder of Issuer Network, which advises companies going public on leading U.S. exchanges. “SpaceX is going to consume an absolute ton of capital, and the guy that goes second is going to have a better position than the guy that goes third.”

For the better-run company—in this case Anthropic, headed by Dario Amodei—the cost of waiting may be especially large. A lukewarm market reception for an early OpenAI listing, which seems plausible given the steady drumbeat of dysfunction at the Sam Altman-led company, could force Anthropic to delay or scale back.

That is just what happened in 2019, when ride-hailing rivals Lyft and Uber Technologies went public. Lyft, the smaller of the two, was first out of the gate with an IPO that didn’t live up to its hype.

A post-IPO decline in the stock directly affected Uber’s listing two months later. Uber cut its target valuation, but its shares still fell after its debut, even in a market where other tech listings had been doing well.

Going first isn’t risk-free either, of course. The first to list risks that the market takes time to reflect its value, given that it is in a nascent industry without much of a track record. 

That has happened with tech listings in the past. Facebook’s stock lost more than half its value in its first three months of trading in 2012 amid worry about whether it could adapt to a shift toward mobile-phone ads. It later went on a sustained upward run as the company showed its resilience and investors grew more comfortable with its business model. But other companies that had been itching to list—notably Twitter—ended up having to wait.

Importantly though, even when the market’s initial verdict is negative, Facebook and other early IPO movers got to reap the benefits of being public as they waited for their shares to recover. This includes whatever money is raised from the IPO, and keeping employees happy by allowing them to cash out.

Those factors add urgency to OpenAI and Anthropic’s IPOs, both of which could come this year. OpenAI has been working with bankers to file initial IPO paperwork and could do so shortly. Anthropic’s timeline is less clear.

Which gets there first—and how markets react to it—could help shape the future of the two companies and the next phase of the AI boom, either underlining the market’s confidence in AI’s transformative power or delivering a warning about its excesses. The stakes are high indeed.

Copyright ©2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Asa Fitch is a writer covering technology for The Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column, based in New York. He also co-writes the Journal's weekly AI & Business newsletter. Asa previously reported on semiconductor companies from the Journal’s San Francisco and New York bureaus, where he covered Nvidia’s rise amid the AI boom and Intel’s struggles to turn itself around.

Prior to that, Asa spent a decade as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East. He joined the Journal in Dubai, where he initially covered business and finance before shifting to covering regional politics and conflicts. He covered the Gaza War in 2014, the military campaign against Islamic State in Iraq, the Yemeni civil war, and Iranian elections and politics, including the country’s nuclear deal in 2015.

Asa began his career as a general-news reporter in Connecticut and a personal finance reporter in New York. He is a graduate of Carleton College and Columbia University's journalism school.

LLM (google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite-20260507) summary:

• Technological Incompetence: autonomous vehicles consistently malfunction by stranding themselves in floods and obstructing critical emergency services.
• Public Nuisance: suburban cul de sacs and urban intersections are suffering from robotic gridlock caused by flawed navigation patterns.
• Safety Failures: despite corporate claims of superior statistics, the machines struggle to handle edge cases like construction zones and blackout conditions.
• Regulatory Scrutiny: federal investigators and state authorities are probing multiple incidents involving collisions with children and standard mechanical failures.
• Corporate Denial: market players rely on questionable data comparisons to brush off legitimate community concerns regarding reckless machine behavior.
• Scaling Delays: aggressive expansion goals are hitting reality as software confusion leads to repetitive loops and necessary fleet recalls.
• Growing Backlash: local governments and labor unions are actively resisting the deployment of these automated systems due to safety and displacement fears.
• Fairy Tale Illusion: the promised innovation is currently functioning as an unreliable novelty that frequently collapses under basic environmental pressure.

A driverless Waymo in downtown Austin, Texas. Bob Daemmrich/ZUMA Press

By

Sean McLain

May 29, 2026 9:00 pm ET

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

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

• Robotaxi companies like Waymo and Tesla face mounting criticism and scrutiny from the public and local governments as problems appear in police report and viral social-media posts.
• Waymo vehicles have been involved in incidents like getting stuck in flooded streets, impeding traffic and briefly blocking an ambulance responding to a mass shooting.
• Waymo recalled 3,800 vehicles for a software update, and both the NTSB and NHTSA are investigating the company.

This summary was generated with AI and reviewed by an editor. Read more about how we use artificial intelligence in our journalism.

• Robotaxi companies like Waymo and Tesla face mounting criticism and scrutiny from the public and local governments as problems appear in police report and viral social-media posts.

  View more

This was supposed to be the year that robotaxis hit Main Street across the U.S., as companies like Alphabet’s GOOGL -2.51%decrease; red down pointing triangle Waymo, Tesla and Amazon.com’s Zoox launch AI-powered autonomous rides in dozens of cities. 

But as hundreds of robot cars collide with humans, both literally and figuratively, tensions are rising. The problems cropping up in police reports and viral social-media posts range from the concerning to the comical.

Over Mother’s Day weekend, Andy Milheizler’s quiet Atlanta cul-de-sac was overrun with empty Waymo vehicles. 

Her neighbors put up a barricade to block the vehicles. The next day, the robotaxis stopped at the barrier one after another, boxing each other in for around two hours.

“We started realizing that there might be a problem here,” said Milheizler, a 48-year-old civil engineer and mother.  

Empty Waymo vehicles recently clogged an Atlanta cul-de-sac.

The passengers in two Waymo vehicles in Atlanta last week were in a less-humorous predicament. Their taxis drove into flooded streets during a storm and became stranded. 

Now, criticism is mounting from drivers, law enforcement and local governments from California to New York—and as the companies attempt to scale, robotaxis face more scrutiny than ever before.

Waymo and other robotaxi operators point to the safety records of autonomous vehicles, saying they are involved in far fewer accidents than a human-driven car. 

“Reducing serious car crashes is core to our mission, and we’re incredibly proud of our record that shows we can make roads safer,” a Waymo spokesperson said. “At the same time, we know trust is earned.”

Waymo said peer-reviewed research showed its vehicles had over 80% fewer injury-causing crashes compared to human drivers operating on the same streets. The company said it would soon begin offering rides in a new vehicle dubbed the Ojai, which it says offers superior safety.

Tesla’s TSLA -1.43%decrease; red down pointing triangle robotaxis use a version of its Full Self Driving software, which is also available to consumers. The company maintains that FSD is safer than a human, able to travel 1.6 million miles before a minor collision, compared with the national average of 220,000 miles.

“Robotaxi companies want safety to be the number of crashes per mile,” said Phil Koopman, an autonomous-driving safety expert and professor emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University. “As long as they get lucky and no one gets hurt, they don’t think that’s a safety problem, but humans see that as a safety problem.”

A police officer on a motorcycle following a Waymo through downtown Los Angeles this month. Mike Blake/Reuters

Recent advancements in AI allow robotaxi companies to train their vehicles better and more quickly, leading to bold expansion goals. Waymo, the current market leader operating in 11 cities, including San Francisco and Orlando, said it aims to add 19 more cities.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said earlier this year that he hoped to expand its robotaxi service to a dozen states this year as the company puts artificial intelligence at the core of its business. New players like Zoox, Hyundai-backed Motional and Nuro are seeking a piece of the pie as well.

The autonomous vehicle space is expected to account for around 30% of the U.S. rideshare industry by 2032, according to Morgan Stanley.

But delivering safer-than-human transit depends on solving what the industry calls edge cases: rare, unusual incidents beyond everyday driving. Those edge cases cause the biggest headaches. 

Waymo vehicles in December froze up during a San Francisco blackout, blocking traffic when they were unable to navigate traffic signals; in March, a Waymo vehicle in Austin, Texas, briefly blocked an ambulance responding to a mass shooting. The vehicles also faced a backlash in Austin for passing stopped school buses.

A blackout in December knocked out traffic lights in San Francisco, causing Waymo robotaxis to idle at intersections. Jeff Chiu/AP

In April, an unoccupied Waymo became stuck after it drove into a flooded street in San Antonio, Texas, leading the company to recall all 3,800 vehicles with a software update. In its recall report, Waymo said vehicles traveling at higher speeds might slow but not stop when confronted with “a potentially untraversable flooded lane.”

A month later, after the software update, two Waymo vehicles in Atlanta got stuck in flooded streets. Last week, the company also halted rides on freeways in some cities for a few days to tweak how the vehicles responded to construction zones.

Many of the robotaxi issues being reported involve Waymo, in part because the company accounts for the overwhelming majority of self-driving taxis on the road today. But it isn’t alone.

In August, a Zoox vehicle pulled partially into oncoming traffic while making a right turn, leading the company to issue a software update to correct the issue. 

Musk has said Tesla is exercising caution in its robotaxi rollout after finding issues with how the vehicles behave on the roads. 

He said during the company’s earnings call in April that Tesla robotaxis still get confused when faced with atypical traffic situations, stopping in traffic—or endlessly driving in circles.

“We have also had literal infinite loops where the car might want to make a turn into a road, but there’s construction and then it goes around the block,” Musk said.

The National Transportation Safety Board opened an ongoing investigation into Waymo after a robotaxi struck a child in Santa Monica, Calif., near an elementary school. The company said the vehicle had hit the brakes, reducing the car’s speed from 17 mph to 6 mph at the time of impact.

Waymo said in a blog post that the accident demonstrated the relative safety of a computer-driven vehicle, adding that a human in the same situation would have made contact at 14 mph.

A separate investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is examining whether Waymo’s software behaves with the appropriate caution around schools during drop-off hours.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul had been pushing to allow robotaxi companies to operate a commercial service this year. But in February, she reversed course, and Waymo’s testing permit wasn’t renewed.

The Boston City Council has debated putting restrictions on robotaxis, supported by labor unions fearful of losing driver jobs. In Seattle, home of some of the biggest technology companies, robotaxi operators have been hit by protests.

Musk last year promised Tesla’s robotaxis would soon be available to half the U.S. population. He is now striking a more cautious tone as the service rolls out more slowly than projected. 

Tesla registered 42 robotaxis that operate in portions of Austin, Dallas, and Houston, according to state filings. By comparison, Waymo has 577 vehicles registered in Texas.

“We haven’t had any injuries and certainly no fatalities to date with the unsupervised FSD and Robotaxi expansion,” Musk told analysts on a call in April. “We want to keep it that way.”

During a hearing in March about San Francisco’s blackouts, city Supervisor Bilal Mahmood said autonomous cars are “a technological miracle” that he likened to one of “Cinderella’s magical carriages.”

“But just like in the fairy tale,” Mahmood said, “We can now see that those carriages can turn into pumpkins at the drop of a hat.”

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LLM (google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite-20260507) summary:

• State Longevity Initiative: the russian government has authorized a 26 billion dollar vanity project focused on staving off biological decline.
• Dubious Scientific Focus: researchers are chasing fantasies involving organ printing and the harvesting of mini-pigs for potential human transplantation.
• Optimistic Timeline: official claims suggest human organ replacement will be achieved by 2030 despite significant technological hurdles.
• Lack Of Transparency: unlike private western initiatives, this state-sponsored effort has produced almost no verifiable evidence in international peer-reviewed journals.
• Questionable Metrics: the initiative set a goal of saving 175,000 lives, a figure observers sarcastically link to massive wartime losses.
• Speculative Research Methods: extreme measures including exposure to ultralow temperatures are being touted as legitimate anti-aging interventions.
• Technological Grandiosity: the program mirrors common authoritarian tendencies to prioritize showy scientific breakthroughs over practical public health outcomes.
• Geopolitical Parallel: the project attempts to frame state-directed resource allocation as a cutting-edge technological race against western billionaire investment.

By

Conor Grant

May 29, 2026 12:00 pm ET

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Alexei Druzhinin/Associated Press

This is an edition of The Future of Everything newsletter, a look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. If you’re not subscribed, sign up here.

Silicon Valley billionaires such as Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman and Peter Thiel are not the only powerful men fascinated with antiaging research: Russian President Vladimir Putin has made his quest to stave off decline a state priority.

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This week, Bojan Pancevski reports on Putin’s $26 billion longevity initiative, which encompasses methods as wide-ranging as organ printing, harvesting mini-pigs and exposure to ultralow temperatures.

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175,000

How many lives Putin’s national longevity initiative promised to save by the end of the decade (the figure had an awkward wartime echo, roughly matching independent estimates of Russian troop losses in the invasion of Ukraine, as critics noted)

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Russian state scientists appointed by Putin have focused on two key technologies: bioprinting, or 3D-printing living tissue, and xenotransplantation, or growing human organs inside mini-pigs, a porcine breed deemed genetically compatible to humans. 

Russian scientists working with government agencies claim to have bioprinted human cartilage tissue and a mouse thyroid gland, with the aim of achieving human organ replacement by 2030. A similar timeline has been discussed for growing organs inside pigs.

Yet unlike similar research funded by Bezos, Altman or Thiel, the work promoted by Putin’s circle has produced little peer-reviewed research in major international journals.

More on this topic:

• These billionaires are fueling the quest for longer life. (Read)
• The longevity business is booming—and its scientists are clashing. (Read)

🤔 What do you think about Vladimir Putin’s longevity push? Send me your thoughts, questions and predictions at future@wsj.com (if you’re reading this in your inbox, you can just hit reply).

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More of What’s Next: Putin’s Longevity Push; AI Investing; China’s High-Tech Sedan

Investors are betting big on “physical AI,” or autonomous machines that can understand and perform complex real-world tasks, as they search for new investment opportunities in a landscape where AI is disrupting many software businesses.

Robinhood is letting customers use AI to trade stocks and make credit-card purchases. The brokerage is part of a crowded field of financial firms that have introduced AI tools into a range of services they offer individual customers.

China’s answer to a Rolls-Royce is stuffed with gadgets. The battery-powered Maextro S800 sedan is manufactured with the help of more than 1,000 robots in Hefei, China, and runs on tech from Huawei, best known as a maker of mass-market phones.

Mistral is chasing AI superintelligence to counter U.S. dominance. The French AI company says it’s working as fast as it can on the moonshot race to develop so-called superintelligence because Europe can’t afford to rely on U.S. tech giants.

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Future Feedback

Last week, we reported on business leaders who are creating AI versions of themselves. Readers shared their thoughts on these so-called digital twins:

• “I’m in the process of making a digital twin for my own use, mostly to synthesize my thinking or make papers, presentations and email responses faster. But I wouldn’t ever trust it to act or create material without me in the loop. It’s my reputation on the line if it hallucinates or behaves inconsistently.” —Richard Fray, United Kingdom
• “We’ve developed a tool at the Drucker School of Management at Claremont Graduate University to access Peter Drucker’s extensive legacy with accuracy. We explored the use of images, video and synthetic voice but chose not to. Why? This is not a reincarnation of Peter Drucker—it’s a highly reliable and accurate access to his volumes of material. The idea of a digital twin is catchy, but misleading. Presenting such creations as live and anthropomorphic is incorrect. Presenting them as ‘here’s what Reid might say if he had the time’ is correct. That clarity reflects morals and values, and should be the standard.” —Steven C. Tarr, Washington
• “Leveraging technology for one-way communications—with authenticity—could be a good use of the ‘digital twin.’ To me, that’s the key point: Simulating a CEO visiting with employees in a location she’s never actually been would be falsifying the authenticity and empathy that real leaders need to demonstrate.” —John Dabbar, New York
• “I would use a digital twin, were I still a CEO. Only now I’m 89. Back in my startup days (1973), I was so busy I had to forgo many things, like keeping up correspondence with old pals. Since this was before start-uppers were ‘founders’—with the attending glorification—my friends thought I was just rude. Now, at my grand old age, I have so much I could feed my AI doppelgänger that it would surely fool my pals (though most are dead, alas). Surely the AI twin would be more ‘me’ than I am now. I think we (my twin and I) will go do another startup!” —Willis ‘Scooter’ Duff, New Mexico

(Responses have been condensed and edited.)

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Elsewhere in the Future

• A new extraction process could unlock the world’s lithium. (MIT Technology Review)
• This $6 billion Chinese startup is trying to build hands for every robot. (Wired)
• This writer tried to sell his house with a chatbot. (The New York Times)

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About Us

Thanks for reading The Future of Everything. We cover the innovation and tech transforming the way we live, work and play. This newsletter was written by Conor Grant. Get in touch with us at future@wsj.com. Got a tip for us? Here’s how to submit.

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