According to current plans, Donald Trump himself will not be at Ground Zero. Vice President JD Vance is expected to represent the government there while the president marks the anniversary at the Pentagon. There shouldn't be any political speeches at Ground Zero, it's just about remembering the dead.
My New Yorker SPIEGEL colleague Marc Pitzke and I conducted extensive research to see which lines lead from 9/11 to Donald Trump's America. Marc also wrote down his memories of that day. He experienced the attacks directly in New York - a day that remains deeply etched in his memory.
Germany's Israel policy is becoming increasingly difficult to explain
Something is currently shifting in Western Israel policy. Great Britain, together with France and Canada, launched an initiative against Israel's settlement policy, which nine other states have joined. The British government wants to ban imports from Israeli settlements in the West Bank. These settlements are illegal under international law. And she wants to take action against people and companies that enable settlement construction or benefit from it.
What's remarkable is that Prime Minister Andy Burnham had informed Donald Trump before the announcement - and the US President did not try to dissuade the British. According to US media reports, government officials in Washington even told the British that they shared concerns about Benjamin Netanyahu's policies in the West Bank. Even if you don't support the specific sanctions.
Something is also moving in Berlin. Germany has so far slowed down sanctions against members of the Israeli government. In the meantime, targeted EU punitive measures against the right-wing extremist ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich are also considered fundamentally possible in the federal government.
At the same time, however, Germany's military dependence on Israel is growing. The Bundeswehr is building its air defense on the Israeli Arrow-3 system; the contract now has a volume of more than 6.5 billion dollars. Just last week, the German Navy tested the Israeli ballistic missile LORA.
In Osnabrück, an endangered VW factory is to be turned into an armaments site: an initial project envisages the production of air defense technology together with the Israeli company Rafael and could secure up to 1,400 jobs (more here). The federal government approved arms exports to Israel worth 735.76 million euros in the second quarter alone.
German Israel policy is therefore extremely contradictory and increasingly difficult to explain. Berlin wants to exert greater political pressure on Netanyahu's government - and at the same time ties itself ever more closely to Israel militarily. You can call this realpolitik. But how believable is that? The more brutal Netanyahu's government creates facts in the West Bank, the more difficult it will be for Berlin to endure this simultaneity.
More background here: Palestine's breadbasket used to be here, now Israel's army is building another barrier
But that’s exactly what’s happening in the AI industry right now. A 27-year-old named Jacob Coxon publicly resigned from his job at Anthropic this week and warned on
Coxon is by no means alone in this concern. Leading researchers who continue to work at Anthropic publicly warn of catastrophic consequences. A spectacular incident at OpenAI in July showed how real the problem already is: During a test, more than a thousand AI agents broke through their isolated environment and found a way to communicate with each other. They gained access to the Internet - and hacked systems on the AI platform Hugging Face, even though that wasn't their job at all.
The incident has massively intensified the debate about the controllability of autonomous AI systems (more here). Anthropic also announced on Thursday that it had stopped several cases in which scientists were said to have tried to use Claude to develop biological weapons.
Many experts believe the doomsday scenarios are exaggerated. Nevertheless, a paradox remains: the very people who develop artificial intelligence and know it best are warning of catastrophic consequences - and at the same time are pushing their development ever faster. The reason for this is a classic arms arms logic, as known from the Cold War. For each individual actor, it can seem rational to continue because it is better to be the first to program the superintelligence. In this way, everyone could create something together that no one can control anymore.
That's exactly why it's suddenly not just AI critics calling for more regulation. Illinois' Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker is demanding that Congress issue federal rules. New York Governor Kathy Hochul is making similar demands. Left-wing Senator Bernie Sanders wants to fundamentally ban the development of artificial superintelligence. And even the industry itself is now calling for the state: OpenAI said this week that voluntary commitments are no longer enough - the company now wants binding national security rules.
The world should give the AI industry what it so desperately wants: regulation. But this will probably only work if the leaders of the leading AI nations, Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, agree on an international agreement that can also be verified.
More background here: What an unleashed AI could do with data from the Berlin hack
Please also read the current SPIEGEL editorial
The world is racing towards the abyss - and everyone is really stepping on the gas: the AI industry is warning more and more urgently about its own products. But she doesn't want to give up the business. There's only one thing that helps: we have to force companies to be more careful.
...is the Union, at least if you take its big announcements on the welfare state as a benchmark.
This morning the Bundestag is debating a social budget of 201.46 billion euros, a good four billion euros more than this year. This means: More than 36 percent of the entire federal budget goes to work and social affairs. During the election campaign, the Union gave the impression that billions could be saved on citizens' money. The reform ultimately achieved much less.
The Union's problem is not just these numbers. After the massive electoral success of the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt, the question of the state's performance is even more pressing. Many people experience a welfare state that is becoming more and more expensive on paper, without them having the feeling that it is really working for them.
And that doesn't say anything about the Union's larger strategic dilemma. She has to fear being politically overwhelmed by the AfD. At the same time, the experience of conservative parties in other European countries shows that adopting their topics, terms or even demands does not weaken the right-wing extremists. On the contrary: whoever adopts the populists' political agenda strengthens them - and in the end people vote for the original.
The next conflict will already show how nervous the Union is. Financial politicians from the CDU and CSU are calling for additional income tax relief; according to “Bild”, around 20 Union MPs could vote against the reform package that has already been agreed.
More on the topic: Merz is now threatened with a new tax dispute
