Category: Nation & World

PARIS — The last time the leaders of the world’s richest countries gathered in Évian-les-Bains, France, in June 2003, the United States had just invaded Iraq over the strident objections of France and Germany. President George W. Bush got chilly handshakes, but he and the other leaders worked to maintain the veneer of like-minded countries uniting to confront the perils of an unruly world.

Twenty-three years later, as leaders gather in the same town amid another American war in the Middle East, the veneer has been stripped away.

When President Donald Trump arrives Monday afternoon in Évian, an Alpine spa town on the southern shore of Lake Geneva, he will be greeted by European leaders who no longer view the United States as a partner on key issues such as climate change and security. In some cases, they view the United States as a threat, after Trump’s destabilizing attacks on Iran that have roiled the world economy, his deepening disdain for NATO, and his threats to take over Greenland.

“From the beginning of Trump’s second term, up until Greenland, the rule of thumb for America’s allies was, ‘Let’s bite our tongue and be nice to Trump,’” said Charles A. Kupchan, a professor of international relations at Georgetown University. “Greenland and Iran are a double whammy, where allies now say, ‘We’ll work with Trump where possible, but we have to say no when necessary.’”

However rancorous the split over the Iraq War in 2003, Kupchan said that it did not fracture the foundations of NATO or of other multilateral institutions like the Group of 7. “That’s not where we are now,” he said, adding, “There isn’t a consensus within the G7 about what to do.”

That does not mean the leaders will not seek to find some common ground. Wars are rumbling on in Ukraine and Iran. Global energy supplies are being disrupted by Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Worries about how artificial intelligence will upend the labor force are prompting calls for government regulation.

But the split does mean that France’s goals for the meeting are necessarily less ambitious than at previous such gatherings. For the host, President Emmanuel Macron, the biggest challenge will be personal: persuading Trump not to bail out early, as he has from previous G7 summits.

Macron made progress on that score by inviting Trump to dine with him at Versailles, the opulent palace of France’s kings, on Wednesday, after the meeting ends. The dinner will celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence, which, French officials noted, was enshrined in a treaty signed at Versailles in 1783. Macron had pushed back the start of the G7 to accommodate Trump, so he could attend an evening of cage fights at the White House on Sunday, his 80th birthday.

Jeremy Shapiro, a director at the European Council on Foreign Relations, a research group with offices in Berlin and London, said, “The recipe for this summit, as with every summit involving Trump, is not to have a blowup, and to suggest that everything is OK, which none of them believe anymore.”

Trump’s mercurial style has long made these meetings unpredictable. He cut short his attendance at two G7 gatherings hosted by Canada, in 2018 and 2025. But Shapiro said the rupture between the United States and its allies had become more profound after the start of the Iran war, which Trump began without consulting Europe’s leaders, and especially after his threats to take over Greenland.

On the security issue that most concerns Europe’s leaders, Ukraine, Trump shows little interest in reengaging in a peace negotiation. On Iran, the issue that has most preoccupied Trump, the G7 leaders have refused to join the war effort, drawing bitter rebukes from the American president.

Part of the problem for Europe’s leaders is that Trump’s vitriol toward Europe has made it harder to support the United States. The president has become so unpopular with Europeans that even onetime political allies, like Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy, are distancing themselves from him.

“Trump has made everything so toxic,” Shapiro said. “The leaders in Europe are saying, ‘It is so hard to help the U.S. because he has been so nasty to them.’”

Yet the leaders of the G7 diverge on how far to pull away from the United States, differences that reflect history and geography. Germany and Japan are situated closer to threatening neighbors — Russia and China — than is Canada. Analysts said that allowed the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, to speak more freely than his German and Japanese counterparts about a definitive split from Washington.

France has historically charted a more independent course toward the United States than Britain has. Macron began calling for Europe to pursue “strategic autonomy” in Trump’s first term. Until recently, Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, had emphasized the need to stay in sync with Washington on key security issues.

But that is changing, too. London refused to allow American warplanes to use British air bases for offensive operations in Iran, though it does let U.S. planes take off for what it describes as “defensive” ones. Some Britons were inflamed when Vice President JD Vance waded into domestic issues, like the stabbing of Henry Nowak, an 18-year-old college student, which he blamed on the “politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants.”

“Trump is practicing foreign politics, not foreign policy,” said Ben Judah, who advised David Lammy when he was Britain’s foreign secretary and is now a visiting fellow at Chatham House, a London think tank. “On a political level, it is very clear that the United Kingdom has an America problem.”

Macron has scheduled topical lunches and dinners for the leaders and invited guests, including President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi of Egypt. But French officials cannot predict what role Trump will play.

The French also want to focus on economic imbalances between China and the West. Trump, who has just returned from a meeting with President Xi Jinping in Beijing, would be well placed to lead a discussion on that issue. But French officials said they were not certain what to make of Trump’s China policy.

According to Shapiro, “What they’d like to do is to get the U.S. in a room and hash out some issues.” Instead, he added, half in jest, “Six of them will excuse themselves and go to the bathroom.”

Then, he said, “They’ll have those conversations.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

In 2019, Kash Patel, then a White House aide, objected to how news outlets portrayed his role in President Donald Trump’s dealings with Ukraine. “It’s time that I began fighting back,” Patel said at the time. He sued Politico, the New York Times, and CNN.

In 2023, Patel, then a roving pro-Trump commentator, took offense at the work of a blogger who had bashed his record and called him a “chud,” a derogatory term progressives use to describe MAGA followers. He sued the blogger, Jim Stewartson, for $10 million in damages.

And in April, Patel, now the director of the FBI, seethed over an article in the Atlantic that reported alarm among some colleagues over his “erratic” behavior and alleged heavy drinking. He soon sued the publication, demanding $250 million in damages.

Patel has yet to reach a settlement or a favorable jury verdict in the cases. Each of the news organizations he has sued has defended its journalism and said it was protected by the First Amendment.

But the strategy is a familiar one. Trump, the man who appointed Patel to lead the FBI, has long turned to the courts when faced with unfavorable press coverage. And perhaps no one in his two administrations has followed his lead as closely as Patel, who has filed at least six defamation lawsuits against news media companies and commentators in nearly seven years.

In some of the cases, Patel filed strongly worded complaints only to allow them to languish in the ups and downs of civil litigation — a trajectory that some legal experts said raised questions about his objectives.

“The goals here,” said Sonja R. West, a professor at the University of Georgia School of Law, “appear to be to muddy the narrative, run up opponents’ legal bills, and send a message to journalists that if you cover us critically, it’s going to cost you a lot of time and money.”

Jesse R. Binnall, a lawyer in Virginia who represents Patel, said in an email, “Director Patel pursues these cases to win them — and anyone who thinks he would tolerate anything less than aggressive, expeditious accountability simply doesn’t know the man.” He added that the number of defamation lawsuits filed by Patel is a “direct reflection of the volume of lies published” about him.

The suits constitute another front on which news organizations have been forced to spend time and money to defend their work in the Trump era. Others include steady public criticism from top officials, including Trump; limitations on access to the White House and the Pentagon; leak investigations that ensnare national security reporters; and investigations by the Federal Communications Commission.

Exact numbers on public officials who file defamation claims are hard to come by, said Michael Norwick, a lawyer at the Media Law Resource Center, a group that assists news organizations. Even so, Norwick, who has worked at the center for 15 years, said, “I don’t remember this being a thing, and now it’s a thing.”

RonNell Andersen Jones, a professor at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law, said via email that there were examples of defamation suits from officials who had completed their time in public service, but that she was unaware of cases predating Trump in which officials had wielded “law enforcement or other executive-leverage power that they can couple with the pressure of the suit.”

Andersen Jones said the suits against news media companies had forced her to remove a line she had used in lectures for her entire career, which had said top government officials, including the president, do not sue for libel.

An FBI spokesperson said that even government officials should have recourse to address what they deemed to be malicious lies in the news media.

Patel and Binnall face an uphill battle in court. To recover damages in a defamation suit against a news organization, a public official like Patel would have to prove not only that the journalists had published a damaging falsehood, but also that they had done so knowingly or with reckless disregard of the truth — a legal standard known as actual malice.

When Patel sued the Times in 2019 over its coverage of Trump’s dealings with Ukraine, his complaint contained about 750 words of biography. He called himself a “brilliant attorney, trusted adviser, staunch proponent and defender of the rule of law”; and he demanded nearly $45 million in damages, along with “prejudgment interest” and “postjudgment interest” at 6% per year.

After all that buildup, Patel failed to serve court papers to the Times and later dropped the case.

A similar situation unfolded after Patel sued Politico for what he argued were “malicious efforts” to destroy his career through its coverage of Trump’s interactions with Ukraine. Politico moved to dismiss the case after Patel did not serve the company with court documents for more than a year, leading to a “reasonable presumption that he had abandoned his claims,” according to a court filing.

Patel dropped that suit but filed a new one, which is still active. (His suits against the Times, Politico, and CNN were filed by his previous counsel, not by Binnall’s firm.)

And Patel drew a rebuke from a federal judge in Nevada for failing to pursue his case against Stewartson, the blogger, for more than a year, a gap that Binnall, in an email to the Times, attributed to a careful and deliberate legal strategy. The litigation is ongoing.

In his public statements, Patel is prone to sweeping condemnations of news organizations. Traces of that language surface in his lawsuits. His complaint against CNN, for instance, included claims of a “brutal attack on Kash’s reputation” and a “continuation of past smear campaigns to discredit Kash.”

It also said CNN had defamed Patel by reporting that he “worked to discredit” special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election — an odd claim from a man who would go on to characterize that investigation in a book as a “taxpayer-funded hit job from a group of government gangsters.” He abandoned his claims related to the matter during an appeals court hearing.

In affirming the dismissal of Patel’s 2020 suit against CNN, a Virginia appeals court found that his claims were “conclusory and not binding” and fell short of actual malice. It also awarded CNN $150 in damages. The network declined to comment on whether Patel had paid.

The Supreme Court declared in 1964 that public debate may feature “vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks” on government officials, as Patel is now learning.

In April, a federal judge in Texas dismissed a lawsuit filed by Patel against Frank Figliuzzi, a retired FBI official and TV commentator who had knocked Patel’s work habits last year on the MS NOW program Morning Joe, saying the FBI director was “far more” visible at nightclubs than at the agency’s headquarters. The judge dismissed the suit on the grounds that Figliuzzi’s remark amounted to “rhetorical hyperbole that cannot constitute defamation.”

In an email, Binnall said, “Although we agree that Mr. Figliuzzi is not a serious person, the notion that the more you exaggerate a lie, the more legally protected you become, is not a coherent reading of the law.” Patel is appealing the ruling.

Stewartson, the blogger, also stood by the insults that he had slung at Patel on social media. “I thought it was hysterical that he put that in there,” Stewartson said in an interview, referring to Patel’s references to being called a “chud.” “Because how do you prove he’s not a chud?”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

WASHINGTON — The feud between Anthropic and the Trump administration escalated again Saturday after the government took the unusual step a day earlier of demanding that the artificial intelligence company cut off foreign access to its latest models, as top officials suggested the dispute was unlikely to resolve quickly.

Late on Friday, Anthropic disclosed in a blog post that it had disabled access for all customers to its most advanced AI systems, known as Fable 5 and Mythos 5, after receiving a directive from the administration to suspend access to any foreign national. The move shocked former U.S. officials and cybersecurity experts, many of whom questioned the validity of the action and noted that it diverged from the hands-off approach to policing the booming AI industry that President Donald Trump had endorsed earlier this month.

Anthropic said the directive did not explain the national security concerns that prompted it. But the company added that the government had said that it became aware of a method to “jailbreak,” or bypass, security restrictions on Fable 5 intended to limit a customer’s ability to abuse the product for hacking or other potential harms. Anthropic countered that the fears about the jailbreak method were overblown.

The announcement inflamed tensions between the Trump administration and Anthropic, which earlier this month confidentially filed for an initial public offering following a funding round valuing it at nearly $1 trillion. The two sides have sparred for months over how Anthropic’s AI systems could be used in military and intelligence settings, culminating with the Pentagon labeling the company a supply-chain risk.

On Saturday, top Trump administration officials and allies of Trump’s stepped up their attacks on Anthropic.

“Three months ago, @DeptofWar kicked @AnthropicAI out of our building — forever,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on the social platform X. “Every passing day proves why that was the right move.”

David Sacks, a venture capitalist who until recently worked in the administration as an AI czar, accused Anthropic in a lengthy social media post Saturday of being reckless with the release of its latest model, dubbed Fable 5.

Sacks, who said he had spoken to many people inside and outside the administration about the directive, said the administration had asked Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, to fix the jailbreak issue after a “highly credible trusted partner” of Anthropic’s and the government’s came forward with research.

“Dario refused,” Sacks said.

A person briefed on Amodei’s conversations disputed the account, saying that Anthropic was happy to discuss the concerns.

Sacks did not name the “trusted partner” he referred to in his post. But multiple technology firms, including Amazon, spoke with the White House about the security issues, according to people familiar with the matter. Several of the people said a message from Amazon’s CEO, Andy Jassy, detailing security issues was the most influential, raising concerns about the capabilities of the new Anthropic model.

But several of these officials said a separate document from Amazon explaining the security concerns with Anthropic’s model was misleading. The concerning capabilities that the document highlighted with Anthropic’s model are also present in OpenAI’s top model, 5.5.

An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on the exact nature of its discussions with the White House. “It’s not uncommon for governments to seek our counsel on potential security risks,” the spokesperson said. “When they occur, we don’t share the details of these discussions.”

Administration officials called Anthropic officials at 1:15 p.m. Friday and gave them 90 minutes to pull their most advanced models down, citing an undefined national security concern, according to people briefed on the discussions. Anthropic officials asked for more information and worked to learn what the precise concern was, since the Commerce Department’s review and testing of Fable did not reveal significant concerns.

Then, at 5:21 p.m., Anthropic was notified that the Trump administration was imposing export controls that effectively forced the company to pull down its model, which consumers had just begun to have access to.

Discussions about resolving the dispute are continuing. Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, spoke to Anthropic officials Friday, and was set to have another session with senior company officials Saturday evening, according to people briefed on the discussions and plans.

Some experts said the Trump administration was either misunderstanding or deliberately misconstruing what transpired. Katie Moussouris, the CEO of Luta Security, said on social media that she had seen the research paper that prompted the administration’s actions.

“It’s not a jailbreak,” she said, but rather a defensive maneuver designed to limit the misuse of a model. “If national defense is the goal, this is an own goal.”

Earlier this month, the Trump administration issued an executive order that asked technology companies to voluntarily let the government review their new models before releasing them to the public. But it did not give the government an official role in approving their release.

The order had been delayed after a fierce debate in which AI companies — and some sympathetic government officials — had pushed back against the government interfering in model deployment. The dispute came on the heels of Anthropic’s very limited release of Mythos, an AI model so good at discovering and weaponizing new cybersecurity vulnerabilities that it sparked widespread concerns about its potential to wreak havoc.

The new restrictions on Anthropic have raised questions about the implications for other AI models that may have similar capabilities. Former officials and technology experts said the administration did not appear to have thought through the longer-term ramifications of such a move.

But the measure could be limited to Anthropic, which received a fusillade of attacks from the administration in recent months.

In February, amid the Pentagon’s clash with Anthropic, Trump called the company a “radical left, woke company” and “Leftwing nut jobs” working to dictate how the government wins and fights wars.

“I am directing EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology,” the president wrote on social media. “We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again!”

Some administration officials have in recent weeks been looking for an off-ramp in the dispute, U.S. officials say. White House and intelligence officials have pushed forward a classified contract between Anthropic and the National Security Agency, which would allow the spy agency to use the company’s technology for a variety of purposes, including intelligence analysis and detecting new computer vulnerabilities.

Officials at the NSA, which is responsible for digital eavesdropping and government cybersecurity, were not involved in Friday’s decision, according to people familiar with the matter.

Many U.S. officials said the new technology Anthropic had developed was too important to national security to allow the dispute with the Pentagon to block cooperation. But inside the top ranks of the Pentagon, officials remain upset with the company, insisting that the firm sign on to the same contractual provisions that other AI companies have embraced.

In a June 12 letter viewed by the New York Times, Lutnick told Amodei that a special license would be required for the company to distribute its Mythos and Fable 5 models “to all destinations worldwide,” as well as to share them with non-U.S. citizens.

“Failure to comply will result in prompt criminal and civil penalties, as provided for by law,” Lutnick wrote.

The government has controlled AI models before, but past restrictions were more targeted. A measure introduced early last year by the Biden administration placed restrictions on companies’ ability to export the so-called weights for specific AI models — the proprietary numerical values that tell the model how much importance to place on different pieces of data.

The measure taken by the Trump administration goes far beyond that, by barring Anthropic from sharing the model with any foreign country or any foreign national without first obtaining a license.

The restrictions on the involvement of foreign nationals, even those with green cards, could be particularly chilling in an industry that relies on foreign talent. In the past, government officials have often reserved that type of restriction for the most sensitive technologies, like weapons systems.

Chris McGuire, a former Biden administration technology official who is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said that the administration’s current policy is that AI chips can be exported to China, but Canadian green card holders in the United States cannot access leading U.S. models.

“That’s absurd,” he added.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.