Day: August 14, 2025

The rise of artificial intelligence is the single most important trend of our time. The changes it will wreak on human life eclipse not only all other contemporary technological developments, but also any since the Industrial Revolution. The new pope recognizes its salience, choosing as his regnal name “Leo XIV,” because just as Leo XIII was confronted with the social change from the Industrial Revolution, he seeks to confront the even more dramatic change from AI.

Breakthroughs happen monthly now. OpenAI’s o3 model recently scored higher than 99.8 percent of competitive programmers—while the same lab’s Sora engine, launched in February and now being integrated into ChatGPT, can already generate minute-long, high-definition video from text. In July, frontier models from both Google DeepMind and OpenAI sat the International Mathematical Olympiad under the same four-and-a-half-hour rules given to the world’s brightest teens, solved five of the six problems, and earned gold medals. In April, a University at Buffalo team unveiled Semantic Clinical AI (SCAI), an architecture that grafts formal medical knowledge onto a large language model. SCAI scored as high as 95 percent on Step 3 of the US Medical Licensing Examination—better than most practicing physicians and ahead of every previous AI benchmark—showing that well-structured retrieval can turn AI into a skilled general diagnostician.

AI’s new methodological phase is the emergence of AI agents, systems that autonomously execute sequences of tasks in pursuit of a goal. This phase is called agentic AI, which builds on Large Language Models (LLMs) that have dominated AI in the last few years. Those LLMs are neural networks that understand the relation of words in text and can use that understanding to generate competent, even expert, answers on every subject.

Agentic AI marries the predictive eloquence of LLM to an institutional framework of memory, goal-seeking, and tool use. No longer confined to completing sentences, the system can now formulate a purpose, decompose it into ordered tasks, engage external software, monitor its own performance, and revise its course when it makes mistakes. In short, where the LLM offers fluent speech, the agentic overlay supplies the infrastructure necessary for transforming mere words into coordinated action. One way of measuring progress in agentic AI is the uninterrupted duration of its competent autonomy at human tasks.

A year ago: a few minutes spent sorting e-mail, drafting a paragraph of code, or a short speech.

Now: twenty to thirty minutes in which Deep Search on ChatGPT and other similar services produces memos on any subject. As Tyler Cowen observes, the answers “wipes [sic] the floor against any humans, pretty much across the board.”

By 2026–27: several hours, during which an agent can redesign a software module, or plan a fortnight of coordination for a business.

As the decade closes: days or even weeks, in which an agent may conceive a research project, run simulations, draft the article, and submit it for peer review.

Because of its current and future power, progress in AI has become a central national concern. For example, AI may offer a solution to the intractable fiscal situation in which the United States finds itself. The United States’ national debt stands at approximately 120 percent of gross domestic product. And it is rising since we are also running an annual deficit of about 6 percent a year. Neither party offers any solution to the problem. The Republican Party just renewed the tax cuts of Trump’s first term and added more without compensating cuts to the budget. When the Democrats were last in power, they added programs and government spending that also added to the budget deficit. Neither party provides plausible reforms to the middle-class entitlements that drive future deficits in an aging population. Both are committed not to raise taxes on any but the top two percent, which is completely insufficient to curb deficits and debt. The result is a sea of red ink as far as an economist can project.

Given the fiscal plight and political constraints, the only solution is sharply increased economic growth. AI provides the most plausible engine for that growth. As a general-purpose technology, like electricity, it can make almost every human enterprise more efficient. In business enterprises, AI can match output to demand in real time and trim the staffing once required to execute routine tasks. In medicine, it can help deliver correct diagnoses faster with fewer people. In my own field of law, it can draft contracts and briefs with human lawyers just doing the work of tweaking and revising.

In geopolitics as well, AI offers both opportunity and danger. If the West wins the AI race, it will be in a better economic and military position, particularly given that the battle will now be fought with AI technology—both to surveil the enemy and to launch attacks and create defensive shields. But if China gains mastery before the United States, it could replace it as the global superpower.

As a result of AI’s centrality, the Trump administration has created “Winning the AI Race: America’s AI Action Plan,” encompassing three companion executive orders issued on July 23. Together, they erect a federal legal architecture for artificial intelligence that seeks to secure US primacy by accelerating innovation, expanding infrastructure, and projecting American standards abroad. The plan sets out more than ninety actions, from specific regulatory sandboxes encouraging innovation at the FDA and SEC to a more general revision of federal rules that “unduly burden AI innovation,” all premised on the proposition that prosperity and power in the twenty-first century will flow to the nation that commands the AI frontier.

The plan recognizes that AI will succeed in rapidly increasing economic growth only if it is not stymied by bottlenecks. It has substantial demands for computational infrastructure and the energy needed to power that infrastructure. Indeed, one way to think of AI is that it converts electricity into intelligence without the biological constraints on such conversion in humans. But electricity generation faces regulatory constraints.

As such, the first executive order in Trump’s bundle, “Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure,” attacks the bottleneck of the computational power needed for AI. It aims to shave years off construction times for the facilities needed for frontier model training by creating exclusions to environmental regulations for AI infrastructure. Cheaper and faster computing is the indispensable fuel of the AI age. Thus, unclogging permits promises to liberate AI progress.

This executive order aids AI development more by deregulation than subsidization. The promise of AI is so powerful that the efficient capital market ecosystem is sufficient to supply funds. The roadblock is government regulation. Thus, the focus of the executive order is to ease the regulations that may block its smooth development.

The second executive order, “Promoting the Export of the American AI Technology Stack,” turns US economic strength outward. A new American AI Exports Program authorizes the Commerce and State Departments to finance and shepherd “full-stack” AI packages, including chips, models, software, and cyber safeguards, to trusted allies. Wiring friendly nations with American technology locks in governance norms, buoyant markets, deepens supply-chain reliance on US firms, and denies strategic rent to adversaries.

Thus, the second order is designed to deploy AI to strengthen our international alliances. For all the talk of Trump’s “America First” foreign policy, this executive order at least indicates the administration recognizes the importance of bringing allied nations within the ambit of America’s growing AI technology network. In the Cold War, the United States strengthened and integrated the West in two principal ways. First, it placed much of the West under a US security umbrella through NATO, additional multilateral pacts, and a web of bilateral alliances. Second, it was a principal mover in international trade agreements, like the GATT, which encompassed most Western nations and sought to tie them together economically. But today, the rise of AI makes our AI technological network the essential mechanism of integration and strength. And it is not Russia that is the principal challenger, but China.

As Dario Amodei (creator of the Claude Model) puts it in a memo that preceded the executive order:

a coalition [of liberal democracies integrated thought AI] would aim to gain the support of more and more of the world, isolating our worst adversaries and eventually putting them in a position where they are better off taking the same bargain as the rest of the world: give up competing with democracies in order to receive all the benefits and not fight a superior foe.

The third order safeguards viewpoint neutrality. “Preventing Woke AI” bars federal agencies from procuring language models that embed ideological filters, mandating “truth-seeking” and “ideological neutrality” as procurement conditions.

The aim is to make sure that AI does not compromise epistemic understanding by skewing answers to questions ideologically. There have been instances in which AI models seem to provide politically correct or biased answers. For instance, when asked to show a set of Founding Fathers, Gemini initially assembled a multiracial group of images in an obvious gesture to political correctness. Just as the Data Infrastructure executive order avoids subsidies to AI, this order avoids actual legal orders to the AI companies to be ideologically neutral—a matter fraught with First Amendment concerns. But the order does direct the government not to contract with companies that engage in distortions. The government has a substantial, indeed compelling interest, not to have its work distorted by ideological bias.

Taken together, the three executive orders clear the regulatory thickets at home, wire friendly nations into an American-led AI ecosystem abroad, and insist on ideological neutrality in the models the government pays for. If the bet pays off, long after the daily controversies of the Trump administration are forgotten, this set of actions may be remembered as the most important set of executive orders in the history of the American government’s relation with science.

When I was in middle school, I remember gathering wood each spring with my friends. The task grew into a passion or even a competition, as we raced to collect more. Did someone you know have a crate they were ready to part with for a good cause? What about a broken dining room chair? Why not clean out the loose sticks from the park on the other side of town? 

No, we were not Dickensian orphans desperate to heat our homes. Our quest was more pyromaniac in nature: We were stocking up for a special bonfire—Lag Ba’Omer, celebrated in May. The holiday’s origins are obscure, and there are several different stories connected with it. In modern Israel, where I spent my late elementary and middle school years, however, it has a special significance, as a celebration of the Bar Kokhba Revolt.

Wait, you might say, this is awkward. Bar Kokhba, the enigmatic messianic figure, did lead a revolt against the Roman Empire in AD 132–136, but it failed. He and his men were defeated utterly, with devastating consequences for the Jews. In addition to the high cost in human life, the Roman Emperor Hadrian punished the Jews by wiping off the map the very name of their land, changing Judea to Syria Palaestina, and paving the way to the modern name of “Palestine.” Hardly cause for celebration, right?

And yet, in his new book, Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World’s Mightiest Empire, military historian Barry Strauss does find things to admire. His researched yet highly readable account covers the three major revolts of the Jews against Rome, but also explains the long-term significance of these revolts (and the Jews’ military losses) for the present. At a basic level, “This is a tale of empire and resistance. It is also a story of resilience, an intangible but essential factor. Resilience refers to the strength of a society’s sense of its national identity and values. A resilient society has the will to withstand defeat and to recover from it. That, in turn, requires a certain culture, leadership, and institutions. … Ancient Jewry is one of history’s great examples of how a people can lose on the battlefield and yet prevail.” 

The modern Israeli celebration of Bar Kokhba’s revolt, the final one in Strauss’s narrative, makes a lot more sense in this larger context. Sometimes a military loss leads to long-term victory through forging a stronger sense of national identity.

Ironically, the Romans knew this as well. Resilience, after all, was their theme song too. In 280–275 BC, for instance, the Romans fought King Pyrrhus of Epirus, who joined forces with Greek city-states in southern Italy to challenge Rome. Pyrrhus won two major battles, but at such extreme cost as to give rise to the expression “Pyrrhic victory.” As the biographer Plutarch reports, Pyrrhus remarked that another victory of that sort would finish him off. Why? Because the Romans’ losses had no effect on their willingness to keep going. Time and again in early Roman history, we hear of devastating losses like these. And every time, the Romans simply raised a new army and kept fighting—eventually winning the war. But with the Jews, more than any other people under Roman control, the Romans seem to have met their match—at least, when it comes to resilience.

Strauss structures the book around the story of three major revolts of the Jews against Rome: the Great Revolt that ended with the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in AD 70; the Diaspora Revolt in AD 116–117; and the Bar Kokhba Revolt in AD 132–136. While the focus is on the Jews and the Romans, the third wheel accompanying this awkward “date” is Parthia, the major empire to the east, which has been a thorn in Rome’s side since at least the defeat of Crassus and his army at Carrhae in 53 BC. Parthia was just as interested in expanding westwards as Rome was in expanding eastward. It also had a significant Jewish population and was practically next door to Judea. “Empires do not have friends; they have interests,” Strauss observes. This applies to both Parthia’s and Rome’s interest in Judea. Had Parthia taken over Judea, this could have become a base for taking over other portions of the Roman Empire.

Strauss opens his narrative with some important background on the history of Judea under Rome. This matters because “Judea had been in Rome’s orbit for 225 years when it rebelled in 66. Rome couldn’t tolerate humiliation in an established part of the empire like Judea.” This leads to the key question: why would “an established part of the empire” rebel? 

When it comes to the Great Revolt, historians have, in a way, struck gold. Of particular significance is the Jewish historian Josephus. A Jewish leader in the revolt early on, he then defected to Rome and ingratiated himself into Roman citizenship and the patronage of the Flavian dynasty, although still retaining his Jewish faith. Following the precept of “write what you know,” Josephus proceeded to spend the rest of his life writing about Jewish history. And in his history of the revolt, The Jewish War, he argued that the vast majority of the Jews had no desire to revolt from Rome. The war—and the devastation that followed because of it—was all the fault of a few radicals. 

But, Strauss notes, Josephus had goals of his own in blaming just a few individuals for the war. Other sources suggest, rather, that Judea was a powder keg waiting to blow up for a while. Indeed, there were several close calls earlier—murmurs of revolts nearly averted. There were many reasons for this tension—for instance, no one likes living under occupation. But the most important reason has to do with the Jews’ religious differences from other residents of the empire. Because the monotheistic Jews considered God their king, no other authority could supersede him. Yet the Romans required emperor worship as part of their polytheistic state religion. Most of the time, the Jews got exemptions, but occasional crackdowns threatened their ability to practice their religion faithfully. In such an environment, all that was needed for a full-blown war was the right conditions. And so, “the outbreak of war in 66, disastrous for Judea and destabilizing for Rome, demonstrates the absence on both sides of what is essential for peace: statesmanship. Hope, fear, and wishful thinking, all replaced realism.” 

Nero, the emperor when the war broke out, was known for many things. Statesmanship is not one of them. But Nero inadvertently paved the way for the establishment of the next imperial dynasty, the Flavians, by appointing the elderly statesman and seasoned general, Vespasian, to subdue this revolt. Nero’s reasoning? Vespasian was of too low a birth to be a candidate for power. Therefore, he could be trusted to not take advantage of access to multiple legions during this war to do something bigger, like make an imperial bid. 

The history of the tail end of the decade proves Nero wrong. The revolt of Vindex in Germany in AD 68 was just the first in a series of revolts across the empire and indirectly precipitated Nero’s suicide. (Vindex has also yielded top-notch modern Roman historian jokes about “windexing” Nero out of power.) In the empire-wide chaos that was AD 69, the Year of the Four Emperors, Vespasian rightly decided that he could make a successful bid after all. Leaving his son Titus to manage the siege of Jerusalem, Vespasian departed Judea for Italy. Just three years after Nero appointed him to lead the Roman forces in suppressing the Jewish Revolt, Vespasian was emperor. Having a military commander for a son proved to be key for his ability to subdue a rebellious province and defeat another imperial contender all at the same time.

Throughout this revolt, the best documented of the three in this book, Strauss provides the play-by-play reports of military action that armchair military historians love. But I appreciated even more his interest in humanizing the various actors through trying to understand their motives. Who was Josephus? Who was Vespasian? Who was Titus? How and why did they do what they did? We get to know them at least a little bit in the process. 

Adding further depth to the story Strauss tells, reminding us of the complexities of history, lesser-known figures come out of the historical shadows—like Helena, a queen from Adiabene on the edge of Parthia, who converted to Judaism a generation before the revolt, and whose descendants supported the Jews in the war. And then there is another Jew in Roman service, in addition to Josephus—one Tiberius Julius Alexander, who was Titus’s chief of staff during the war. What must it have felt like for him to serve the Roman commander in defeating his own people? He was, in fact, not the only one.

Then there were the ordinary residents of Jerusalem, who were sold into slavery afterwards. Strauss brings up the story of one young woman, whose tombstone yields details about her life: Claudia Aster (perhaps her Jewish name was Esther) was enslaved in Jerusalem and taken to Italy. The man who bought her freed her and married her. It is he who set up the tomb, mourning the death of his wife, aged just 25. Was she captured as a child, or was the capture close to her time of death? We don’t know. But we see how some of the captives, at least, were incorporated into Roman society. Such was the Roman way. 

But this was not the end of the revolt—or its mystique. The siege of the Jewish rebels’ final stronghold at Masada, once Herod’s luxury refuge castle-cum-palace, did not conclude until AD 74, another four years after the fall of Jerusalem. Yet again, we have every reason to question Josephus’s account: was this operation quite so spectacular and heroic as he recounts? In this case, it’s not the winners who tell history, but the losers: “Josephus makes Masada into a parable. He pits Jewish love of freedom—romantic, foolish, doomed, but noble—versus Roman power—brutal, relentless, irresistible, and yet ungrudging in its admiration of courage, even on the part of its enemies.” This view of Masada became the bedrock of modern Zionism, the mystique of the tragic loss continuing to be held up as a model of bravery and perseverance—national resilience against all odds. 

Strauss devotes nine chapters to the Great Revolt, supplying the context and then detailing the war. The other two revolts receive only a single chapter each. The reason is familiar to historians of ancient history—it has to do with the nature of evidence available. We simply do not know nearly as much about either the Diaspora Revolt or the revolt of Bar Kokhba. Neither had a Josephus to document it. We are, as a result, at the mercy of archaeology and occasional references from other writers—although in the case of Bar Kokhba’s revolt, a few letters from the man himself have survived. 

Still, the mere existence of these two revolts after Rome’s crushing defeat of the Jews in the first one says something in and of itself. “The Diaspora Revolt (AD 115–116) demonstrates the enduring military traditions of the Jewish people, even without a state of their own.” So does the Bar Kokhba Revolt, which also shows the Jews’ mastery of guerrilla warfare—the one type of warfare the Roman legions had a difficult time countering. The legions were just too well-trained and used to fighting in formation. 

Nevertheless, the Romans eventually prevailed, and following the crushing defeats in three successive revolts, the Jews finally learned the lesson: “war was not the proper means to ensure national survival.” Instead, the answer was spiritual. In this way, Strauss notes, the revolts and their consequences inspired the rise of Rabbinic Judaism, a Judaism that did not rely on the Temple for spiritual access to God. This period of successive Jewish revolts also saw the solidification of the split between Judaism and Christianity. Military events, after all, have ramifications beyond simply geopolitical. 

Nearly two millennia later, we see the continued resilience of the Jewish people—and continued testing of that resilience by Israel’s modern neighbors. True, Strauss notes, we should not underestimate the horrors of antisemitism, both historical and more recent. And yet, the same resilience is now on display in the nation of Israel, into whose stories of patriotism the revolts against Rome have been woven—cue my middle school Lag Ba’Omer celebrations. 

And yet, there’s a warning here as well. Patriotism’s relationship to history is bound to be complicated. Good historians take what seems simple and straightforward and make those straight paths crooked—and, as a result, more factually accurate. Strauss is a skilled guide to these crooked paths in all their complexities.