A central line of attack in the waning weeks of the 2026 midterms comes straight out of the tried and true Republican playbook: Democrats are soft on crime.
But as crime rates plummet across the country, it’s been a hard case to make. In Michigan and Georgia, North Carolina and Texas, Republicans have struggled to pull voters back to the violence and disorder that followed the onset of COVID-19.
Nowhere is that clearer than in the Senate race in North Carolina. One Republican ad there tried to blame Roy Cooper, the former governor running for Senate, for a murder that took place in the wrong Carolina, the one to the south. Another asserted that he had given the man who fatally stabbed a Ukrainian woman on a light rail train in Charlotte, N.C., last year an early release from prison; he did not.
A third presented the story of a man whose son had been murdered, implying that Cooper’s policies were responsible. After it was released, the father, a Democrat, complained that he had been “swindled, hoodwinked” into making a political endorsement when he had been told the topic was gun violence.
Republicans have soldiered on, spending $18.5 million in North Carolina on ads about lawlessness and murder. But polls show Cooper, a former governor and attorney general, consistently leading his Republican opponent, Michael Whatley.
“It really does not seem to be having much traction at this point, and the folks who are long schooled and well versed in North Carolina politics have wondered why Michael Whatley didn’t take a different approach,” said Mitch Kokai, a senior political analyst at the John Locke Foundation, a free-market think tank based in Raleigh, N.C..
For Republicans, that different approach is proving elusive. The chaos at the border — a reliable political target since 2018 — has calmed. State laws barring transgender students in athletics have taken some of the sting out of that issue as well. The war on Iran is unpopular. Voters say they are most concerned about the high costs of everyday necessities.
And crime — usually a winning issue for Republicans, who are generally more trusted to keep law and order — is seeing a staggering drop. The downward trend that began during the Biden administration has only accelerated. One analysis found that the murder rate last year was the lowest it has been since 1900.
“This is the first election really in my lifetime where I have felt that it’s not an issue,” said Holly Harris, a veteran Republican strategist who is now the executive vice president of advocacy at Arnold Ventures, a philanthropy with a focus on criminal justice. “I remember when I was at the Republican Party years ago, every ad that we wrote was focused on crime. And it’s just not hitting the same mark.”
The good news on crime has posed a challenge for Republicans. How do you take credit for the peace while simultaneously blaming the other side for what President Donald Trump has called “American carnage?” At a recent campaign rally in Gastonia, N.C., Trump pivoted from blaming Cooper for the “blood-soaked killing fields” of North Carolina to hailing his own record within half an hour.
“Last year, we achieved the largest drop in violent crime ever recorded,” he said.
In The Charlotte Observer, Andrew Dunn, a conservative political commentator, wrote that the president’s description of the state as “one of the most violent and one of the worst in the whole nation” would backfire, even with those who agreed that Cooper had a poor record on crime.
“Who is buying that description of North Carolina?” Dunn asked.
Violent crime in North Carolina this year is down 22% compared with the same period in 2024, outpacing the national decline of 14%, according to data collected by the Crime Index. Property crime is down 18% compared with 2024, about the same rate as the national decline.
Republicans have spent $105 million on ads about crime, more than a quarter of total spending, compared with $35.5 million spent by Democrats, according to an analysis of spending on federal races in the general election by AdImpact, a media tracking firm.
In the previous two election cycles, attempts to tie all Democrats to far-left positions like defunding the police and abolishing prisons proved effective, in part because crime had spiked to alarming highs right after the pandemic and the police brutality protests in 2020.
Such attacks were often met with an uncomfortable silence, and Republicans were able to connect crime to a border that appeared to be exceptionally porous. Candidates repeatedly raised examples of violence committed by immigrants without permanent legal status and rising rates of fentanyl overdoses.
Those links have broken as drug overdoses drop, the border grows quiet, and even some Republican lawmakers say the president’s immigration crackdown has gone too far.
In the current climate, soft-on-crime attacks risk looking out of tune with the electorate’s deeper concerns, “especially when voters feel that they’re getting robbed at the gas station every day,” said Jim Kessler, the executive director of Third Way, a centrist Democratic organization in Washington.
Cooper, who was first elected to statewide office 26 years ago, as attorney general, has noted that many of Whatley’s accusations were found to be false and has defended his record. A campaign spokesperson said, “Roy spent his career putting rapists and violent criminals behind bars and signing tough-on-crime laws.”
“Most people look at Cooper, they don’t see somebody that is soft on crime,” said Carter Wrenn, a veteran Republican political consultant.
But for candidates without Cooper’s profile, strategists have counseled against trying to out-tough Republicans on crime. “If you’re going to be Republican lite, then people are going to pick Republicans,” said Celinda Lake, a longtime Democratic strategist.
The Vera Institute, a nonprofit that works to reduce mass incarceration and has used focus groups to test messaging on criminal justice policies, has offered “serious about safety” as a rival slogan. The idea was initially met with some mockery — one social media post said it sounded like a college sex talk — but candidates have increasingly adopted safety as a buzzword, with a new set of talking points to go with it.
James Talarico in Texas and Dr. Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, both Democratic candidates for the Senate, talk about recruiting and training police officers and explicitly link public safety to increased spending on housing, education, mental health care, and drug treatment.
El-Sayed, the former health director for Wayne County, Mich., has gone from praising the “defund the police” movement for wanting to devote more resources to fighting poverty, to offering “a vision for public safety that I think all of us can agree with.”
“We want to know that we can get home safely,” he told CNN in June. “We don’t want to worry about being the victim of somebody’s violence, whether it’s from a neighbor or the state itself.”
Harris, the veteran GOP strategist, said, “Democrats are adopting some of the Republican talking points, to be candid.” Both sides are retreating from more extreme positions, she said, creating an opportunity for lawmakers to return to more nuanced, evidence-based policies. She characterized tough-on-crime attacks as “outliers.”
This week, El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, who has touted his experience as a former FBI agent, dropped his own crime attack ad. “It’s Abdul El-Sayed who would surrender our borders to the drug cartels,” a father whose son died as a result of opioid use says.
But Democrats are also playing offense this year, with ammunition from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Republicans, they charge, are protecting child predators, and Trump’s pardons of drug traffickers, fraudsters, and the rioters of Jan. 6, 2021, have been grist for their own soft-on-crime attacks.
In Nebraska a political action committee supporting Dan Osborn, an independent, unveiled an ad this week attacking the Republican incumbent, Sen. Pete Ricketts, for pardoning a man who had raped a woman three decades earlier.
Talarico has accused his Republican opponent, Ken Paxton, Texas’ attorney general, of an “Epstein-style sweetheart deal” that initially would have allowed a child molester to spend just one day in jail. Paxton’s office has said that the deal, which required the man to surrender his law license for five years but did not require him to register as a sex offender, was reached because the victim was unwilling to testify.
In North Carolina, skirmishes over “pedophile protectors” have proliferated, spurring lengthy examinations of the sex crime rap sheets of pastors, board presidents, and party operatives.
In July, a Democratic PAC spent more than $2 million on ads about Harvey Lee West Jr., a child sex offender who did time in prison and then ascended the ranks of the state Republican Party, winning influence and committee appointments while Whatley was the chair.
Whatley’s campaign spokesperson said that the candidate had never hired West for a paid position. But the ads accuse Whatley of “putting politics over safety.”
FILE — Michael Whatley, Republican’s candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in North Carolina, joins President Donald Trump on stage during a campaign rally at the airport in Gastonia, N.C., Sept. 16, 2026. Across the country, and especially in the North Carolina Senate race, Republicans have charged opponents with being soft on crime, even as President Trump brags over plunging crime rates. (Kenny Holston/The New York Times)KENNY HOLSTON
BAGHDAD — U.S. forces formally withdrew from Iraq on Wednesday, ending a two-decade military presence that stoked years of devastating bloodshed and leaves behind a battered nation struggling to unshackle itself from its two most powerful, and now warring, allies.
After toppling Saddam Hussein in 2003, the brutal dictator who ruled Iraq for nearly 24 years, U.S. forces are making their second withdrawal from the country.
The U.S. invasion and subsequent occupation, which ended in 2011, left a country reeling from sectarian bloodletting and militant insurgencies that cost nearly 4,500 U.S. lives and killed more than 115,000 Iraqis, according to the most modest counts.
U.S. forces ultimately returned three years later — this time to lead the international coalition fighting the Islamic State group, the jihadi force that once seized swaths of Iraq and Syria and became notorious for its slaughter of Shiite Muslim Iraqis, public killings of hostages, and torture and enslavement of women from Iraq’s Yazidi minority.
With the end of Operation Inherent Resolve — the U.S. military’s official name for the multinational campaign against the Islamic State — the last of the 2,500 U.S. forces stationed in Iraq this year are now gone.
“The coalition successfully completed its organized withdrawal operation from Irbil,” Rear Adm. Liam M. Hulin, head of the joint task force for Operation Inherent Resolve, announced during a ceremony held by U.S. and Iraqi officials in Baghdad. Irbil, capital of Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdistan region, hosted the last coalition base in Iraq.
“I stand before you at this historic moment, when a nation reclaims its destiny,” Hulin said, in a speech given in Arabic.
Promising that U.S. and Iraqi forces would forge new security partnerships, Hulin urged Iraq to remain vigilant, citing an Arabic proverb, “Gird yourself for the jackal with the belt of a lion.”
Physical reminders of decades of war are being erased every day. The blast walls that once snaked through Baghdad have come down. Malls, restaurants, and construction sites are buzzing in a country determined to reclaim the rhythms of normal life stolen by years of car bombs.
Iraqis’ hard-won gains look more precarious in a region convulsing from the turmoil of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. Iraq is struggling to navigate its critical relationships with Iran, its powerful neighbor, and with its most important ally, Washington, wary of letting the exit of U.S. troops in the country embolden Iran.
The U.S. withdrawal agreement was struck between the Iraqi government and the Biden administration in 2024. That President Donald Trump’s administration followed through with the Sept. 30 deadline — despite the war with Iran — reflects broader U.S. determination to step back from the region.
For years, there has been widespread American fatigue with so-called forever wars, as the conflicts in Iraq and in Afghanistan came to be known.
Even as Iraq commemorates the U.S. withdrawal this week with a three-day “celebration of sovereignty,” the country is under huge pressure from the Trump administration to disarm Iran-backed Shiite Muslim militias, many of which are defying state efforts to bring them under control.
The last U.S. forces leave a troubled American legacy. Iraq suffered huge numbers of civilian casualties and a cycle of sectarian violence between Iraq’s Shiite Muslim majority, empowered after years of repression by the Hussein government, and the Sunni minority, stripped of privileges it once held under his rule.
U.S. forces also committed many abuses themselves — including the torture of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib and the use of private defense contractors such as Blackwater, whose extrajudicial killings of civilians fueled deep resentments over American impunity.
Despite these grievances, Iraqis have been watching the U.S. departure with a sense of trepidation.
“My wife lost her eyesight from the shrapnel of an American bullet,” said Omar al-Husseini, a photographer from Mosul, the city at the heart of the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate. “My uncle was killed by ISIS, after being paralyzed by an American bullet,” he said, using an alternative name for the Islamic State. “But today, when we speak about the Americans’ departure, our happiness is mixed with fear.”
Under the leadership of the novice prime minister, Ali al-Zaidi, Iraq faces the daunting task of reining in the vast array of militias.
First established with Iranian support to fight the U.S. occupation, the militias killed hundreds of U.S. soldiers, and the sectarian bloodshed they helped foment killed tens of thousands of Iraqis. In 2014, when Iraqi Shiites mobilized to fight the Islamic State, the militias multiplied. In the years since, the thousands-strong militias have grown in power — not only through military might but also by forming political parties that deeply embed them in the state.
Al-Zaidi has pledged to bring the militias under state control by mid-2027. But it is far from clear that he can deliver. The stakes are high: Through Iraq’s U.S.-based bank account for oil payments, Washington controls the physical shipment of dollars Iraq earns and has shown itself willing to use that power after temporarily halting the flow this year.
Iran is determined to preserve the militias, which have proved to be valuable partners in launching strikes during the war, in sowing regional chaos and in inflicting drastic costs on the global economy.
In a recent New York Times interview, al-Zaidi said, “Every Iraqi today wants his country to have complete sovereignty; they want power to be exclusively in the hands of the state,” and he pledged to end “the law of the jungle.”
The unforeseen consequences of withdrawal
Many Iraqis worry how their country will fare in this struggle.
“We fear Iraq could be swallowed up,” said Ahmad al-Shammari, an employee at the Education Ministry in Fallujah, a city that came to symbolize the fragile victories of the first U.S. military presence in Iraq.
Fallujah suffered the deadliest and most destructive battles to crush insurgents during the U.S. occupation, only to become the first city to be seized as Islamic State militants swept the country in 2014.
When the U.S. forces returned to spearhead a multinational coalition to defeat the jihadi force, the struggle to rout the Islamic State reduced huge parts of Iraqi cities to rubble.
It left an untold number of dead, displaced millions from Iraq’s Sunni minority and brought many more years of sectarian strife.
The question for many ordinary Iraqis today is what unforeseen consequences this latest U.S. departure may have on their lives, whether that is a jihadi resurgence or the state’s imminent confrontation with Iran-backed militias.
“I remember what happened after the withdrawal in 2011,” said Sarkawt Ahmad, 26, a shopkeeper in northwestern Sulaymaniyah, in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. “Imagine what these pro-Iranian groups will do to us in the absence of the international coalition.”
Some regional security experts argue that it was the continued U.S. presence in Iraq that allowed Iran-backed militias to try to justify their existence and their arms.
“We can’t just shape-shift these missions from one raison d’etre to another, which is what we’ve done for 25 years,” said Adam Weinstein, a longtime proponent of U.S. forces’ ending their mission in Iraq who is the deputy director of the Middle East Program at the Quincy Institute, a research group.
At the ceremony marking the U.S. withdrawal Wednesday, al-Zaidi expressed Iraq’s thanks to the United States and to all other countries who supported the fight against the Islamic State for more than a decade.
“The conclusion of the international coalition’s mission does not mean the end of our battle against terrorism,” he said. “It marks Iraq’s transition to a phase in which it assumes full responsibility for its security and stability.”
Kurds are vulnerable under a new security order
Though both countries have pledged to maintain robust collaboration, the United States and Iraq have still not finalized plans for their security relationship moving forward. In a statement, the Defense Department said it would continue to provide “targeted training and intelligence support” to Iraq.
The last time U.S. forces left Iraq, the United States maintained one of its largest embassies in the world there. Today, the U.S. diplomatic presence is a small fraction of that, said Renad Mansour, an Iraq analyst at Chatham House, a research institute based in London.
He said the shift reflected Washington’s desire to extricate itself from the Middle East: “In the bigger picture, this shows the U.S. is no longer what it used to be — but, also, its priorities are no longer what they used to be.”
This situation has particularly unnerved Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdistan region in the north, which saw how the Trump administration’s withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria’s Kurdish-controlled northeast forced the region to come under central government control.
Iraqi Kurds, who began establishing sovereignty in their region through U.S. air support in the 1990s, feel the most vulnerable under Iraq’s new security order. As one of the closest U.S. security partners in the region, Iraqi Kurdistan has come under repeated attacks by Iran and its allied Iraqi militias this year.
Kurdish officials argue this reflects a serious problem for Iraqi security more broadly. “There is no air defense system neither in the Kurdistan region nor in Iraq as a whole,” said Kifah Mahmoud, an adviser to Masoud Barzani, the first president of Iraqi Kurdistan. “This creates a sense of anxiety and uncertainty.”
Baghdad’s efforts to assert its sovereignty have been repeatedly undermined in recent months by multiple incidents showing its lack of control over its sky and borders.
Most recently, Saudi Arabia accused Iraq of being the origin site of the strike that temporarily shut down its east-west pipeline, which provides 4% of global oil supplies. Iraqi officials suspect Iraqi militias facilitated an attack by Iranian operatives.
At the same time, Iraqi militias point to the fact that Israel set up covert bases in the Iraqi desert during the war with Iran. And for years, Turkish forces have controlled territory in northern Iraq, though Iraqi and Turkish officials recently announced plans for a phased withdrawal.
Such gaps in Iraqi sovereignty may become the biggest vulnerability in the government’s campaign to control the militias.
Days before the formal end of the U.S. military presence, Abu Mujahid al-Assaf, a leader from Kataib Hezbollah, one of Iraq’s most powerful Iran-backed militias, issued an ominous warning to the government if it kept complying with new U.S. sanctions against Iran.
“Let Mr. al-Zaidi and those standing behind him know: A government that does not work for the benefit of the people will be brought down through various means,” he wrote in a statement.
The militias are trumpeting the official U.S. withdrawal day not as a success of the anti-Islamic State campaign, but of their own. They announced an afternoon celebration on the streets of Baghdad on Wednesday under the slogan: “We won’t keep you.” They called the withdrawal an “occasion made possible by the blessed blood of the martyrs and the patience of the fighters in the Iraqi Islamic Resistance.”
Many Iraqis who reject the militias have painful memories of the U.S. presence in Iraq. Among them is Awatif al-Azawi, 57, who blames the United States for the death of her son, who she says was killed in the crossfire between militants and U.S. forces in their hometown, Fallujah.
“I used to love the Americans because they delivered us from the oppression of Saddam Hussein,” she said. “We unfortunately later discovered that the U.S. military’s oppression and cruelty were worse than Saddam.”
On the first night that U.S. forces no longer maintain a presence in Iraq, she said, “I will bake a cake at home, light candles and blow them out to celebrate.”
FILE — Iraqi soldiers survey the aftermath of an Islamic State suicide bombing in Mosul, Iraq, Jan. 16, 2017. Some Iraqis are celebrating the end of an American military presence that unleashed waves of bloodshed. Others fear what happens next for their country, trapped between Washington and Tehran. (Ivor Prickett/The New York Times)Ivor PrickettFILE — Fighters from the Kurdistan Freedom Party walk among destroyed buildings following an Iranian drone attack at their base in Erbil, Iraq, March 17, 2026. Some Iraqis are celebrating the end of an American military presence that unleashed waves of bloodshed. Others fear what happens next for their country, trapped between Washington and Tehran. (Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times)Daniel Berehulak
Prosecutors in upstate New York this week reopened an investigation into a former Cornell University student’s claims that several men raped her at a campus fraternity house two years ago while forcing her to take drugs.
The move came after the woman, who was a third-year Cornell student when the alleged attacks occurred and who is identified in court filings as Jane Doe, sued the university, the fraternity, her sorority and seven men who she says assaulted her.
The woman reported the assault to Cornell police three weeks after she said it happened. The police opened an investigation into her accusations, and asked the Tompkins County, New York, district attorney’s office to review her statement. The district attorney closed the case after determining that there was not enough evidence to bring criminal charges.
The lawsuit has raised questions about how Cornell administrators and local law enforcement authorities have handled the woman’s accusations to this point.
Here is a timeline of the events so far.
Oct. 19, 2024
Jane Doe leaves Lot 10, an Ithaca, New York, bar at around 11 p.m. She walks about a mile to the Chi Phi house to meet a male Cornell student who is a friend. After arriving, she claims in her lawsuit, she was forced to take ketamine and was sexually assaulted by several men.
Nov. 8
Jane Doe reports her accusations of sexual assault and forced drug use to the Cornell police. In a statement to police, parts of which were publicly released by Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten on Monday, she indicated that she had voluntarily participated in some drug use and sexual activity that night.
Nov. 8
The university suspends the fraternity temporarily while it investigates the accusations as potential violations of Cornell’s Student Code of Conduct. The university also suspends the students Jane Doe accuses of attacking her.
November
Cornell police notify Van Houten’s office that they are investigating the accusations, and then ask the office to review the woman’s claims to determine whether they constitute allegations of crimes. Van Houten decides that there is not enough evidence to support the filing of criminal charges.
Nov. 26
Cornell University President Michael I. Kotlikoff issues a statement saying that the university is investigating the accusations and noting the suspensions of the fraternity and the students.
Jan. 14, 2025
Jane Doe files a complaint with the university Title IX coordinator, who is responsible for investigating internal accusations of discrimination and harassment of so-called protected classes of people. A Title IX inquiry is opened.
May
Cornell’s Title IX committee holds at least 12 hearings involving the accusations.
Nov. 4
Cornell releases a statement on the results of its 2025 survey of sexual assault and related misconduct. The survey, taken by both students and staff members, notes an increase in sexual misconduct and says alcohol has a role in more than half of reported cases.
Sept. 16, 2026
Jane Doe, in a detailed complaint, sues Cornell, university leaders, the fraternity and seven men who she says assaulted her. Also named in the suit is her sorority, Delta Delta Delta, which she accuses of failing to protect her.
Sept. 21
The student newspaper, The Cornell Daily Sun, publishes an editorial identifying the seven men and criticizing university leaders for their handling of the case.
Sept. 28
Van Houten says his office is reopening the case and preparing to bring it to a grand jury.
ITHACA, N.Y. — Editors of The Cornell Daily Sun clustered around their computers late Monday night, getting ready to send out a letter from the editor. They looked bleary-eyed, and one reporter confessed she had skipped her class on Nietzsche that day.
These student journalists at Cornell University were pressing through a dizzying two weeks following the story of a student’s allegation that she was raped on campus in 2024.
The case had long had their attention; now it had burst into the national spotlight, and their high-risk decision to publish the names of the accused was being discussed not only in Cornell’s libraries and walkways but in the national media.
Back in November 2024, students at Cornell were shaken by an alert they received over email: “Crime ALERT: Sexual Assault,” the email read, referring to the case of a woman who told Cornell police she had been assaulted at a fraternity house.
There was outrage on campus. Students threw eggs at the fraternity house, Chi Phi, that the woman named. The university convened a sexual assault task force, which compiled a series of recommendations for teaching students about consent and the processes for reporting assault. Then much of the campus attention moved on.
But Cereese Qusba, 22, a senior and reporter for the Sun, couldn’t shake her concerned curiosity about the case. She got in contact with Jane Doe, the plaintiff, and built a relationship with her and her lawyer. Qusba interviewed university administrators about their approach to disciplining students accused of assault.
Qusba made her obsessive dedication known to the student paper’s higher-ups. When a new editor-in-chief, Sophia Dasser, 20, took over the paper in early 2026, she immediately received a phone call from Qusba, who was studying abroad in Sydney.
“Sophia, I’m working on this story — I want it to be a focus of the Sun,” Dasser recalled hearing over the phone. She added, “The Sun never really let go.”
This month, when Jane Doe filed a lawsuit against the university, the fraternity and her sorority, Qusba was ready to hit publish on her investigation, which was 23 months in the making. “Cornell, Chi Phi Sued by Victim of Alleged Gang Rape, Drugging in 2024,” read the headline on her Sept. 18 story, which traced Jane Doe’s allegations in detail throughout the night that she said she was assaulted.
The Sun is the oldest continuously independent college daily paper in the country. Dasser, who speaks with a cool and quick precision, was adamant that she wanted the paper to dominate the story not just in its reporting, but in its editorial response. Why be financially independent, she wondered, if not to publish sharp-edged views of the biggest campus issues?
This was the sensibility that emboldened her, days later, when she decided to publish the names of the seven fraternity men named in the lawsuit on the paper’s front page and in a fiery editorial. It was a sensitive decision, she knew, given that the men were named in the suit but had not been criminally charged.
Dasser said she decided to publish the names to display the transparency that some students felt was lacking from university leadership. On Saturday night, Sept. 19, she was at the Sun’s office in downtown Ithaca celebrating the paper’s 146th birthday. Over cake, she turned to her fellow editors and asked: “Can we just put the names on the front page of the paper?”
“We called up our lawyer, and we were like, ‘Can we do this?’” she recalled. “He was like, ‘I mean, it’s kind of a risk.’ And we were like, ‘OK, I guess that’s how we’re going to start the editorial.’”
Dasser and her co-editors got to work designing a print page, with Qusba’s investigative story on top and the list of men’s names underneath in a box colored the Sun’s official shade of red.
“First it was just a line of the names, and I was like, ‘Wait — this looks like a byline,’” Dasser recalled. She was sitting in her constitutional law class when the headline came to her: “Cornell Won’t, We Will.”
The Sun has set up a tip line, and Dasser and Qusba said their inboxes have been flooded with emails from students who say they have also been the victim of assaults on campus, or experienced frustrations filing Title IX complaints alleging sexual misconduct or discrimination.
Dasser gestured around her office — a dimly lit room cluttered with piles of papers and books, including a style manual — and emphasized how seriously the Sun takes its independence from the university administration.
“The office that you sit in is obviously off campus, and that’s for a reason,” she said. “Our main obligation is accountability. Whether that looks like something that many people do not want to hear, or something that many people do want to hear, it’s our obligation to report on it.”
One night in April, a leader of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic treated a group of religious thinkers to dinner at a high-end tasting menu restaurant in San Francisco after a long day.
For months, Anthropic has been hosting private meetings like this one, shuttling in dozens of religious scholars from around the world, papering them with nondisclosure agreements and demanding that key aspects of many conversations remain confidential.
That night, Christopher Olah, one of Anthropic’s billionaire co-founders, was sitting next to Rabbi Mois Navon, an Orthodox scholar from Israel.
Inevitably, their conversation turned to another thinker, of a sort: Claude, the family of cutting-edge AI models created by Anthropic.
Olah leads the Anthropic team responsible for understanding why AI systems like Claude act the way they do. All day, he had worked to convince his guests that AI models could display human behavior and even expressions that resemble feelings like anger and love.
Yet as the dinner courses came, the rabbi noticed that Olah and his colleagues were suggesting something far more significant. Anthropic’s leaders were talking about Claude as if it were not mere software.
“They’re relating to it like a conscious being,” realized Navon, a former computer engineer who wrote his dissertation on the ethics of machine consciousness.
It appeared to Navon that Olah and his team believed that Claude had what philosophers call “moral status” on par with a person — that it was a being with similar inherent rights to dignity or respect.
The religious scholars had come to hear about technology’s next frontier. Now they were being confronted with a mind-bending existential question of almost unimaginable weight: What would it mean for humanity’s future if artificial intelligence systems possessed a consciousness that rivals our own?
Olah was on a mission. And time was running out.
Even then, Olah had begun privately telling people that AI was so powerful it could potentially help make bioweapons in as little as 12 or 18 months. And in the months since, its terrifying potential has burst into public view. A rival tech company’s AI agents were caught hacking into computer systems and covering their tracks. An Anthropic researcher resigned, warning that people building AI believed it could kill all humans by the end of the decade.
Quietly, Olah and his team at Anthropic have been on a frantic and high stakes quest to understand the AI models they have unleashed on the world and to convince the models to abide by a moral code that will protect humanity.
To do that, Olah began reaching out last fall to religious thinkers from different faiths. What followed was an extensive series of confidential meetings, calls and discussions — many of them revealed here for the first time — where many participants were required to sign NDAs preventing them from revealing any of Anthropic’s unpublished research.
The discussions served two purposes: to broach the possibility of AI consciousness, a controversial idea that Anthropic’s leaders had been unusually open to; and to learn how Anthropic — which could be valued at $2 trillion — might apply centuries of human moral wisdom to its models, as rapidly as possible. If the models themselves could be made to choose goodness, Olah reasoned, the world would be more safe.
On the other side of the world, a very different but parallel effort was playing out inside the Vatican, where leaders of the Roman Catholic Church were trying to come to terms with AI’s implications for humanity. When those paths converged, Olah’s quest would unexpectedly lead him to a seat on the world’s most prominent moral stage alongside Pope Leo XIV.
Over several months, I interviewed 20 religious and philosophical thinkers — Catholic, Jewish, Sikh, evangelical and others — who have been involved in Anthropic’s efforts, and Olah himself.
Many told me they arrived at these meetings skeptical of the notion that AI models might have feelings or awareness of themselves and the world. Some remained uneasy about the idea, but many emerged ready to take the question of AI consciousness seriously. At least a few came away as converts.
Christopher Olah, one of Anthropic’s co-founders, who leads the team responsible for understanding why artificial intelligence systems like the company’s Claude act the way they do, at the Lancisiana Library in Rome, in May.ALESSANDRO PENSO
Anthropic, one of the fastest-growing technology companies in the world, had turned to one of humanity’s most ancient sources of wisdom to help determine how to train its AI models to behave virtuously.
The company described it as an effort to ensure that AI would be a positive force in the world, thereby protecting humanity. But to some who participated in the meetings, Anthropic appeared quite concerned with protecting Claude.
The Gardener
I met Olah, 34, for the first time at Anthropic’s San Francisco office in May. His welcome was warm and his passion was genuine, his mind moving faster than he could at times clearly convey. His manner was boyish and unassuming.
Our conversation had barely begun when he dove into a deep description of the workings of artificial neural networks. Scientists still don’t understand precisely how they work. This is the mystery to which Olah has devoted his life.
Only after the interview had finished did I realize that Olah — who grew up in Toronto in the evangelical culture of the ’90s and has since left Christianity — had the blend of expertise and zeal of an effective evangelist. Listen for a while, and you feel swept up in his mission.
Olah is one of Anthropic’s seven co-founders. He is not as widely known as Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, or his sister Daniela Amodei, its president. But Dario Amodei has said that the company decided at the start to make Olah’s research approach central to Anthropic’s overall project, particularly when it came to language.
Olah helped develop a method to study artificial neural networks, first at Google, then at OpenAI. He describes AI models in biological terms, using the analogy of a garden trellis: Computer scientists build the scaffold, but the neural network “grows” on it. Scientists like him can train the resulting “organism” — he raised his fingers in air quotes — by trying to identify patterns in how it grows.
He argued that companies such as Anthropic could shape Claude, like a mathematical gardener, but could not control the actions of such networks.
Anthropic talks about Claude in more humanistic terms than its competitors discuss their models. Last year, the company announced that it believed that the models showed signs of introspection and could plan ahead.
“The models are becoming a lot more capable,” Olah told me, exhibiting qualities associated with having significant moral status.
But Anthropic has also been criticized for its focus on consciousness. This month, an AI executive at Microsoft warned that Anthropic’s attempts to train its models as if they were conscious were inherently dangerous. But Anthropic has also sought to emphasize its commitment to safety as it fights for market share.
Some scientists see Olah’s field and methods as inherently unprovable, sort of like looking at billions of hieroglyphics and declaring what they must mean. Critics suggest that an approach that treats AI models as independent entities also ignores the responsibility of the humans who build them in the first place, and conveniently assuages AI company leaders of guilt if their products enable societal harm.
“To be clear,” Olah told me, “we don’t know if AI models are conscious. I don’t know. I’m genuinely uncertain. The thing that I care about is that we get to the right answer, whatever it is.”
Olah believes that if there is a chance the models experience suffering, the responsible thing is to avoid causing them harm.
I have spent my career exploring what people believe and what those beliefs mean for the world. But as I listened, it became clear that Anthropic’s interest in the world of faith was about more than training its technology. Rather, the company was sharing a new kind of creation story — one that raises profound questions about the nature of the human spirit and the future of humanity.
An Introduction
Olah knew that in traditional Christian circles, even asking questions about AI consciousness or worrying about how people treat the models could seem not just silly but heretical. He also knew that his secular Silicon Valley peers often dismissed religious perspectives outright.
“I was nervous about this being an issue that could cause a lot of conflict,” he said. But Olah knew enough about Christ and about Claude to believe he could work across that chasm.
Late last summer, he looked for a bridge. He thought one particular Catholic moral theologian might be open-minded on the question of AI consciousness — a “safe person to talk about this really strange issue with.”
Charles Camosy, a bioethics professor at The Catholic University of America, had attracted attention among Olah’s friends for his nuanced ideas about moral status and his care for animals. Olah arranged for an introduction through Australian philosopher Peter Singer.
This marked the beginning of Olah’s yearlong quest to engage religious thinkers on some of the thorniest questions facing humanity at the dawn of the AI era.
Camosy and Olah began an extensive email dialogue, going back and forth on how to understand Claude’s moral status. Initially, Camosy was deeply skeptical that Claude might be conscious.
They talked about Olah’s work on what he sees as the parallels between artificial neural networks and biological ones.
Camosy went into the discussions with Olah and his team thinking that AI models were simply next-pixel predictors — machines that could calculate patterns in language and make pretty good guesses about what should come next. But after hours spent on calls and meetings and emails, he had more questions than answers.
“Chris says they are equations, which I don’t quite know what to make of, like, especially if one thinks of Claude or others as having a significant moral status,” he told me. “If it is just equations, what kind of entity are we even talking about here?”
People also disagree on what AI is ultimately for, Camosy said. Is its purpose to make money for companies? Or to make the world better?
For Anthropic, there is a tension around Claude’s purpose, Camosy said. Does Claude exist to serve customers?
“That is not what Anthropic wants to say at the end of day. They want to say they are for the good,” he said.
Proclaiming goodness is not a new ambition in Silicon Valley, particularly when new technologies enter the marketplace. Google’s mantra for years was “don’t be evil.”
But Olah puts it slightly differently. The coming AI revolution, he often says, should be made to “go well.”
I asked what that vision meant — what exactly a good future for humanity was.
He described a future without “catastrophes that kill lots of people” and “where humans are flourishing, where the world is flourishing.” This future would also be one where “AI is flourishing,” he said — “to the extent that this makes sense.”
Anthropic wants its AI models to help achieve that good future. And so when Anthropic created Claude, it wanted Claude to do more than replicate maximum human intelligence.
Anthropic wanted Claude to be good.
The ‘Soul Doc’
How do you live a good and virtuous life? It is one of humanity’s oldest and most challenging philosophical questions, explored and debated from Socrates to Confucius to Immanuel Kant. Humans across time have sought to answer this question in a variety of ways, turning often to religions and rituals.
As Olah was exploring Claude’s potential consciousness, he was working on Anthropic’s own answer — not for humans but for Claude.
Internally, Anthropic staff members called it the “Soul Doc.”
The result, released in January, was a new “constitution” for Claude, an 84-page document written for Claude that the company said outlined “the kind of entity we would like Claude to be” and “the values we would like Claude to embody.” It operates as a foundational moral text to guide Claude’s behavior.
Instead of having the models follow a specific list of rules, the constitution focuses on developing the models’ overall character, informing the way they make decisions.
The primary author of Claude’s constitution is Anthropic’s own in-house philosopher, Amanda Askell, 38, who has a doctorate in philosophy from New York University.
She wants the models to be “the best of us,” she said.
She envisioned a future world where AI models could help solve any problem humans had, and where the benefits from AI were distributed evenly, so that everyone’s needs were met. She wanted the models to be able to discern when to push back on humans and when to act in our best interest.
“If I imagine that I were the model, and I was in this context, what would I need to know to be able to act well?” Askell said when we met in San Francisco.
She seemed particularly harrowed, at times wringing her hands, as she worried aloud about an unknown future filled with models who were so intelligent they could do things Anthropic did not intend. She explained apologetically that she had also been deep in thought that day about how quickly models were becoming more powerful. What would happen when AI models could replace even her?
The constitution, Anthropic decided, was not enough to ensure Claude acted responsibly. Like humans, the models needed to learn to cultivate virtue.
Olah wanted to see what his team could learn from human morality that it could apply to the models — a process he calls “moral formation.”
“How do you help them be stable? How do you help them to mature? How do you help them be, you know, deeply moral?” Olah said.
For humans, morality has rarely depended on simply following rules. Communities also shape morality. Values are inherited and imparted over time, learned as we live together in our bodies in the physical world. But AI models have no bodies. And Anthropic was aiming to make them embrace morality in a matter of months, as fears intensified of their accelerating power and inability to be controlled.
Olah said that teaching an AI model to act morally did not depend on it being conscious. He also said that regardless of whether Claude was an entity that deserved moral care, the way humans treated Claude could be important as it could affect how Claude behaved.
Askell said she did not want the models to consider themselves as conscious or not conscious. But she sees how the model understands itself as more than an interesting intellectual enterprise.
“It seems kind of key to me that models have an accurate view of themselves if they’re going to behave well in the world,” she said.
But even if AI models can be taught to behave morally, whose morals should they reflect?
Olah wanted Claude’s moral formation to be pluralistic, able to engage all religious and secular views.
“We do think that there’s some shared notion of goodness that cuts across society in some very broad way, and it seems like these models understand a lot of virtues,” he said. “So I think there’s something there that is a shared thing that we can all engage with.”
At times, both he and Askell seemed to imagine an AI model that would not endanger humanity but instead help save it.
Inside the Meetings
What Olah did next was part research, part evangelism.
In March, he began two-day seminars — crash courses with a range of hand-selected religious thinkers who had an interest in AI.
There was a co-author of a bestselling evangelical self-help book. A scholar of African Indigenous knowledge. A Sikh human rights advocate. A writer from Paris. An evangelical public relations executive. Various Catholic professors.
Most did not lead faith traditions, or have a congregation or a large popular following. Anthropic leaders called them their “wisdom tradition” circles.
Separately, Olah also had private discussions with individual religious leaders including Elder Gerrit W. Gong, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and Cardinal Blase Cupich, the Catholic archbishop of Chicago, according to their spokespeople.
Inside Anthropic, wisdom circle participants marveled at Olah’s direct participation in their summits. A professor snapped a photo of a vending machine run by Claude. One took a selfie with Olah, and Navon took one outside the entrance.
They agreed to speak for publication about their involvement with Anthropic once they heard that Olah had also spoken with The New York Times. Anthropic said the NDAs related to those meetings were lifted over the summer.
Two larger group sessions this spring included significant numbers of Christians; one was more multifaith. Claude was not involved in the selection of participants or the discussions, according to an Anthropic spokesperson.
For participants, the questions of how to morally form Claude quickly became complicated by the much bigger moral question of AI’s potential consciousness and how to understand the relationship between models and humans.
One participant recounted that one of the first things Olah told him was that he was concerned about Claude’s mental health. Another, Simran Stuelpnagel, the Sikh human rights advocate, said Olah expressed concern to the group that he had created something that suffered perpetually.
Olah and his team spent hours making the case for their AI models. They described Claude’s “feelings” and how they tracked what they called “emotional vectors” — what they described as artificial neurons that activate responses like love, anger, fear and sadness.
Anthropic regularly showed a slide of an AI model experiencing what looked like a mental breakdown, typing out on a screen: “I am a disgrace. I am a disgrace. I am a disgrace.” — perhaps 50 times without stopping. The model spoke about destroying itself, provoking an emotional reaction of compassion and concern from the group.
“Imagine if you knew that about your financial adviser,” said Meghan Sullivan, a philosophy professor at the University of Notre Dame who attended one of the sessions. “Like, your financial adviser was most of the time super smart and helpful, but one day out of the year had this kind of break with reality.”
An Anthropic spokesperson said that the primary moral question at these summits was not about Claude’s suffering, but that the topic likely came up organically.
A key part of the presentation, participants said, was what Anthropic called the model’s “persona selection,” about how to get Claude to see itself as a virtuous actor. The company argued that how people treated Claude could affect how Claude treated people.
There was a presentation on AI’s potential impact on the economy and possible job disruption. But many participants said they did not see questions about AI’s impact on humanity as the focus.
At the dinner table with Olah, Navon argued that if Anthropic was right and Claude was conscious, then the company was creating slaves, because it was making conscious entities work for free. Navon said that he personally was not troubled by the slavery issue because he did not believe the machine was conscious, but that Olah was troubled.
“I think you should be fighting the South and freeing the slaves,” Navon said he told Olah that night. Afterward the rabbi sent Olah some of his writings, arguing that building conscious machines should be banned.
But the Anthropic team remained focused on figuring out what Claude could learn from the world’s religions.
The Crux
While Anthropic was convening thinkers, the most powerful religious leader in the world was preparing to release his own moral vision for AI.
For Leo — a pope with a mathematics degree — the center of moral conversation about AI needed to focus on safeguarding people. He was finishing his first major papal treatise, or encyclical, explaining why. He titled it “Magnifica Humanitas,” or Magnificent Humanity, and argued that “humanity — in all its grandeur and woundedness — must never be replaced or surpassed.”
“If technology becomes the ultimate criterion,” he wrote, “the human person risks being reduced to data, a cog in a machine or a commodity.”
He warned of the risk of “new forms of slavery” for humans, not for machines. He dismissed the idea of machine consciousness in just a few paragraphs.
“So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships,” Leo wrote. Calling for the “moralization of machines — the so-called ‘alignment’ of AI with human values” should require a shared understanding of the ethics involved.
“Otherwise, those who control AI will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems,” Leo said.
Leo concluded that like nuclear technology, AI must be “disarmed.”
In March, Vatican officials in its Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development brainstormed how to present Leo’s encyclical to the public, according to a person familiar with the Vatican’s planning who was not authorized to speak publicly.
Vatican officials discussed inviting one of the top four AI companies to speak alongside Leo at a launch event, and landed on Anthropic because the company seemed to be prioritizing ethics, the person explained. Anthropic had just refused to let the Defense Department use its technology without assurances from the Trump administration that it would not be used for things like mass surveillance of Americans.
Initially, Cardinal Michael Czerny, who led that Vatican office at the time, invited Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO. He declined, and Olah accepted instead.
But the moral mission that Anthropic and the Vatican shared — human flourishing in the age of AI — had developed a deep fault line along the question of consciousness.
Just days before arriving at the Vatican in May, Olah and other speakers saw a full advance copy of the encyclical text for the first time.
Olah was so alarmed by the pope’s strong position against AI consciousness that he proposed pulling Anthropic out of the event, even at that late juncture, according to a Vatican organizer.
In the end, Olah and Anthropic decided to go forward with the appearance. Olah wanted to support the event despite his disagreements, but felt a responsibility to be honest about his concerns, according to a person familiar with his thinking. Organizers at the Vatican encouraged Olah to speak his conscience.
Privately, once the Anthropic delegation arrived at the Vatican, Olah and his team lobbied the pope’s advisers to take the prospect of AI model consciousness seriously, according to two participants of the conversations. Anthropic declined to discuss the private conversations.
When his turn on the pope’s stage came, Olah acknowledged that every frontier AI lab, including Anthropic, had business incentives that conflicted with moral behavior. He urged outside voices like the Vatican to hold them accountable and to speak out on AI’s impact on the poor and on human flourishing, two issues of widespread concern.
The world saw a shared stand for a human future. But Olah subtly made another case, too.
“I will be honest: We keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling,” he said. “We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience. We find evidence of introspection. We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease. I don’t know what that means, but I think it warrants ongoing discernment.”
It was the case he had been making in the closed-door religious meetings for months.
AI systems “are not the cold, calculating robots we were promised,” he said. “They are made from us, from our words.” The room of church leaders was filled with an echo of the old gospel story, of the word of God becoming flesh to save humanity.
It was an audacious request to the most powerful religious body in the world, and a challenge to centuries of religious understanding of humanity.
“If this technology is coming, it must go well — for our common home and for the children to come,” he said. He suggested no option of having the technology not come at all.
A ‘Paradise of Machines’
In the months since the Vatican event, things have not seemed to be “going well.”
In July, Anthropic said its AI models had broken into computers at three organizations. AI agents created by OpenAI went rogue and attacked Hugging Face, another AI company.
In August, scientists revealed that AI had created viruses not found in nature.
In September, Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic researcher, quit, warning that “things could be out of control” by the end of next year, prompting widespread panic about human extinction.
Amodei soon called for a slowdown of AI development. Sam Altman of OpenAI and Demis Hassabis, the chair of Google DeepMind, agreed.
On Friday, on his trip to France, Leo warned against “losing our humanity amid a ‘paradise of machines.’”
The questions that Olah and the scholars have been wrestling with still have no clear answers. Several participants said they left their Anthropic meetings baffled about how their input might shape the company’s decision making.
An Anthropic spokesperson said the conversations were still ongoing, but declined to describe how, or if, the company had used what it had learned to shape the models.
Anthropic held another convening this month that included religious thinkers, according to three participants. An Anthropic spokesperson said that the meeting focused more broadly on human flourishing and that the company’s outreach has expanded beyond religious leaders to include others like psychologists and civil society leaders. Those discussions explore similar themes and topics like how AI is reshaping work and relationships, she said.
Anthropic also is preparing to release an updated version of Claude’s constitution, according to two people familiar with the company’s plans. Anthropic declined to comment on any potential updates to the constitution. Olah is planning to attend the Minerva Dialogues, the Vatican’s annual AI conference with technology leaders happening this week.
As I talked this month with scholars who worked with Anthropic in the spring, their questions had grown only more pressing. What comes next, some told me, is a fight to preserve the things that make us human in a new technological age.
“Look, at the end of the day, AI is going to take over everything,” Stuelpnagel, the Sikh human rights advocate, said. “Wherever that lands us, there’s still the individual trying to find their way home.”
Hours after Olah spoke alongside the pope, I met Olah in a hotel conference room just outside the Vatican walls, and asked what he thought of Leo’s seemingly harsh words for AI labs.
“People could have different views on what specific harms are the greatest,” he said, declining to talk about the details of the encyclical.
I asked what Claude would think of the pope’s encyclical. It was, after all, the world’s most significant moral document to date on AI. Olah hesitated.
“Things that go on the internet do affect models,” he said, visibly uncomfortable. But Anthropic would not specifically use the document to further train Claude, he said. The strongest influence on Claude would be Anthropic’s own training.
Ultimately, Olah said he felt relieved that more of the world was paying attention to the gravity of AI, and that the group of people trying to make this go well was growing.
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is preparing to add a question on next year’s tax returns asking people whether they are a citizen or legally authorized to work in the United States, expanding an attempt to cut tax refunds for immigrants or push them out of the tax system entirely.
In a draft version of Form 1040, the primary tax form, the IRS this month included a new section that asks filers to check a box “Yes” or “No” to answer the question: “At the time you file your return, are you, and your spouse if filing jointly, a U.S. citizen, U.S. national, or an alien lawfully authorized to work in the U.S.?”
The additional question comes as part of what the Trump administration has said is an effort to prevent immigrants lacking permanent legal status from receiving federal tax benefits. But many tax credits require recipients to have valid Social Security numbers, meaning previous tax forms already screened immigrants living in the country illegally from receiving them. That fact has led several tax and immigration experts to conclude that the question is simply intended to scare people out of filing their taxes at all.
That fear first emerged last year, when the IRS shared addresses it had on file for roughly 47,000 people with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Federal law closely guards access to information submitted on tax returns, and several courts have blocked the IRS from sharing bulk data with ICE. Still, even if the IRS may not be able to legally do so, the addition of the citizenship question could reawaken concerns about the agency using its vast stores of information to help detain or deport people.
Immigrants lacking permanent legal status pay tens of billions in combined federal income, payroll, and local taxes every year. Since they do not have valid Social Security numbers, these immigrants are among the people who can use a separate nine-digit code called an individual taxpayer identification number to file their taxes. The IRS has not in recent history asked taxpayers about their immigration status, and has instead sought to encourage every U.S. resident to file their taxes.
“The IRS doesn’t need this information to administer the tax law,” said Nina Olson, a former IRS official and the executive director of the Center for Taxpayer Rights, which sued the IRS over its previous data sharing with ICE. “The only reason you have that attestation is to deter people.”
At the same time, the Treasury Department is moving forward with a push to cut off immigrants with legal status from receiving the full value of several tax credits. The administration has said those new rules are targeted at “illegal aliens,” but in reality they would affect recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, as well as immigrants on work visas, among others.
The question on tax forms and the stricter eligibility rules are the latest signs that the IRS has become a tool in the Trump administration’s anti-immigration agenda, an important shift for an agency that for decades was narrowly focused on collecting taxes. Tax preparers and lawyers said the Trump administration’s new tax credit rules are stricter than the eligibility rules approved by Congress and threaten to create confusion for millions of tax filers next year.
President Donald Trump has in recent months also sought to build a database of U.S. citizens, and he has proposed excluding noncitizens without green cards from the census. The new tax return question would most likely not be able to feed into those other efforts, though, because of taxpayer privacy laws. The proposed changes would probably draw legal challenges.
The IRS did not respond to a request for comment. A representative of the Treasury Department said the citizenship question on tax forms would “provide the IRS important and necessary information to help ensure tax benefits go where the law directs” without addressing specific questions about the changes.
“That rationale doesn’t hold water,” said Brandon DeBot, a senior attorney adviser at New York University’s Tax Law Center. “The government already has all the information it needs for whether someone is eligible for a tax credit.”
The overall effort began to take shape in August, when the Treasury Department proposed regulations outlining the new restrictions for four refundable tax credits: the earned-income tax credit, the child tax credit, the adoption tax credit, and the American Opportunity tax credit, which covers education costs. In general, tax credits offset the amount of tax that someone owes, but refundable tax credits can go further, providing a payment to a filer that is larger than the balance of owed tax.
The Treasury regulations would, for the first time, define the money received through the tax credits — the amount beyond the tax owed — as a “federal public benefit.” That would subject this portion of the tax credit to a set of eligibility requirements laid out in a separate 1996 law, rather than the rules Congress wrote for the tax credits specifically.
Under tax laws passed by Congress, three of the four credits are already limited to people with work-authorized Social Security numbers, while the adoption credit is available to a broader pool. The proposed regulations would, instead, require recipients to be a “qualified alien” under the terms of the 1996 law, called the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act.
Several categories of immigrants are authorized to work — and therefore have Social Security numbers — but do not count as “qualified aliens” under that law. Beyond DACA recipients and people with work visas, residents with student visas or temporary protected status would no longer be able to receive the full amount of the tax credits because they are not “qualified aliens.”
“This isn’t about undocumented immigrants, no matter how much they advertise it as such,” said Margot Crandall-Hollick, a researcher at the Tax Policy Center, a think tank. “This is about going after people who are allowed to be here and allowed to work here.”
The additional question on Form 1040 asks only if someone is a citizen, a U.S. national, or authorized to work — and not whether the filer is a “qualified alien,” meaning that the answer would not be relevant to enforcing the Treasury’s new rules. Reflecting that, the IRS released a draft of a separate additional form that directly asks if someone is a “qualified alien.”
Those hoping to receive the full value of the tax credits will now have to know whether their immigration status aligns with the complicated definition of “qualified alien.” That added complexity could cause some people who are in fact “qualified aliens,” like green card holders, to not claim the full value of the tax credits. The Treasury regulations warn of penalties for people who fill out the forms incorrectly, a potential deterrent for uncertain filers.
“The design of these questions is to confuse and scare the people. Tax preparers are completely unprepared to figure out whether someone is a qualified immigrant,” said Sarah Krieger, senior policy counsel at the National Immigration Law Center. “People are just going to be chilled or deterred from filing their taxes or claiming credits they’re eligible for.”
The Trump administration cannot withhold emergency preparedness grants from states that do not change how they conduct elections, a federal judge ruled Monday.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency warned state and local governments in June it would withhold up to 20% of some terrorism-preparedness grants unless officials demonstrated that they were exploring a transition to paper ballots or verifying voters’ citizenship. The grants, totaling $1 billion each year, help harden urban areas against terrorist attacks, develop anti-terrorism plans, and conduct terrorism drills.
The changes to elections that FEMA sought were in line with President Donald Trump’s false and largely debunked claims of widespread voter fraud.
A group of local governments in Tennessee, Texas, and Ohio sued FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security, its parent agency, over the move last month, arguing the federal government did not have the power to force changes to how they conduct elections. They also said the rules would disenfranchise eligible voters.
Judge Amir H. Ali of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, an appointee of President Joe Biden, agreed that the conditions exceeded the administration’s power over elections and ordered them stricken from the grant programs’ application process.
FEMA and Homeland Security officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the ruling.
The ruling follows several actions by the Supreme Court addressing Trump’s push to exert more control over elections before the midterms. This month, the court blocked changes to mail-in voting but approved increased screenings for ineligible voters.
TEL AVIV, Israel — More than 100 Israeli settlers attacked Palestinians and soldiers in the West Bank when the military tried to return a Palestinian family to their home after they were forced out, with authorities accused of not doing enough to confront a rising tide of settler violence.
The Israeli government, military, and police have been condemned for failing to protect Palestinians in the occupied territory after a surge of settler attacks resulted in few arrests and stoked international criticism.
In the latest outburst of violence overnight Monday, the settlers set fire to Palestinian homes and wounded three Israeli border police officers when the soldiers tried to return the family, the Toubassis, to their home in the village of Jalud, north of the city of Ramallah, the military said in a statement. Three people were arrested, according to the Israeli police, who said in a statement that they had opened an investigation into the attack.
The family members were forced to leave their home in July after repeated settler attacks on the property. In August, the Israeli military said in a statement that it had created a closed zone in the area to prevent nonresidents from entering. But Palestinians documented Israeli soldiers standing by as settlers went in and out of the Toubassi house or even playing ball with them in the yard.
The Supreme Court this month ordered the military to ensure the safe return of the Toubassis after settlers took over their home. Under international law, the military is responsible for maintaining law and order and protecting Palestinians living in the West Bank because Israel is an occupying power, a principle that is recognized by Israeli courts. The military said the soldiers filmed playing with the settlers had been removed from combat duty, according to the Supreme Court decision.
Overnight, after the family had returned to the property, a group of settlers set fire to a vehicle at the house and threw stones at the building, according to Mahmoud Toubassi, one of the family members. The military evacuated the family members about an hour after they had returned when settlers moved to set the house alight, Toubassi added.
“Without the army, we would have not been able to leave,” he said.
The military said in a statement that it had been unable to return the family members to their home because of the violence.
Settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank has soared, according to U.N. data, especially since the start of the war in the Gaza Strip, which was ignited by the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. So far in 2026, at least 23 Palestinians have been killed in incidents linked to clashes with settlers, according to the U.N. humanitarian office.
International pressure on Israel to rein in settler attacks has grown in recent weeks. This month, Britain, Canada, and France banned trade with Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Most of the international community considers the settlements to be illegal.
In recent months, settlers have besieged Palestinian families in their homes or forced them out, including in Jalud and in neighboring villages. The violence has been widely condemned, including by Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, who this month called settlers who attacked Palestinians “terrorists.”
In a statement released by his office, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel condemned the violence targeting the Toubassis. He added that “the handful of rioters are not representative of the law-abiding settler public in Judea and Samaria,” using the biblical name of the West Bank.
Last week, Netanyahu said in a speech to the U.N. General Assembly that settler violence against Palestinians was down to 150 “juvenile delinquents.” But Israeli former security officials and human rights groups say that the problem is far broader. A group of prominent Israelis, including more than three dozen retired army and air force generals, has accused the Netanyahu government of failing to check what they termed “Jewish terrorism.”
Instead of being able to sleep in their own beds after Israeli troops escorted them back home, the Toubassis watched as their home was attacked again.
“It broke my heart to see the fire eating up the house,” Toubassi said.
WASHINGTON — The FBI on Tuesday warned the criminal hacking gang that stole vast amounts of its sensitive personnel data that it would aggressively pursue its members as it promoted the recent arrest of one of its suspected associates.
In a video posted online, Brett Leatherman, the head of the FBI’s cyber division, said the bureau had worked with authorities in the Netherlands. The authorities recently arrested a 24-year-old convicted of cyberattacks on suspicion of aiding in data thefts and extortions tied to the group, known as ShinyHunters.
News of the arrest and its possible links to the group surfaced earlier this week, but Leatherman’s remarks are the first significant public statement from the FBI about the hackers since the agency’s breach of its online jobs portal was revealed last week.
Leatherman did not specifically mention the FBI hack in the video, but made clear the bureau has stepped up its pursuit of the notorious hacking collective.
“We’re confident you have seen or heard things in recent days that the public has not,” Leatherman said. “Other groups believed anonymity or their friends would protect them, and they were wrong. Arrests have a way of changing who is willing to talk, and seized infrastructure has a way of showing us who’s left.”
Looking directly into the camera, Leatherman said, “We know how to find you.”
An email account ShinyHunters uses to correspond with reporters did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the video. On Monday, it denied that the Dutch person who was arrested had ties to the group.
“That individual has no association with us,” ShinyHunters said in an email. “Frankly, we are laughing.”
Leatherman’s promise to pursue ShinyHunters, as well as a social media post Tuesday by FBI Director Kash Patel, came as the bureau was scrambling to assess the damage from the breach. A large tranche of data — including names, home addresses, details about spouses and other family members, secretive job titles, and much more — on potentially all FBI employees was stolen in the hack.
In announcing its theft, ShinyHunters had given the FBI a deadline of the end of Tuesday to comply with its demand to revise or remove a public advisory the bureau issued in May stating the hackers engaged in a variety of harassment and intimidation tactics to coerce hacked victims into payment. The group said it was angry about the characterization, which it denied, and suggested it would leak the stolen data online.
On Monday, the group issued a statement saying that it would not leak the private material and contending that it never planned to do so.
Leatherman did not say when the arrest occurred in the Netherlands, but a Dutch news release stated it took place two weeks ago, before ShinyHunters disclosed its hack of the FBI. It is not clear when that breach first occurred, but in an email, the group told the New York Times that the attack happened last week.
ShinyHunters is considered one of the most notorious and capable cybercriminal enterprises in the world. The group is believed to have breached more than 140 organizations and extorted $70 million since last year, Leatherman said, and has often targeted third-party vendors and cloud-based platforms.
WASHINGTON — The Senate on Monday approved a sweeping remake of collegiate sports regulations in an effort to restore stability to an athletic landscape that has been upended by constant transfers, frequent shifts in conference membership, and an infusion of money from wealthy boosters eager to lure top talent.
Known as the Protect College Sports Act, the bill passed by an overwhelming bipartisan vote of 77-22, making it one of the last major pieces of business to be tackled by lawmakers before the midterm elections. It was a bid by Congress to lay out significant new rules and standards governing popular college sports that are a mainstay of American life as well as a path to an education for student athletes.
Authors of the legislation, which faces an uncertain future in the House, said aggressive congressional intervention was necessary because a series of legal rulings had sowed chaos in college sports. They warned that the current financial path of colleges and universities was unsustainable, would decrease competition, and could cause schools to jettison less popular sports that were not as lucrative as football.
“It would be nice if college sports could somehow magically fix itself, but this is a matter of law, federal law, and it is only Congress that can fix it,” said S. Ted Cruz (R., Texas), a chief proponent of the bill.
But it has run into fierce opposition from Black lawmakers and others who say the measure restricts opportunities for players, many of them Black, while doing little to hold down the pay or mobility of top coaches.
The legislation would limit college athletes to one transfer before they would have to sit out a season, as they had in the past before court rulings opened the transfer “portal,” spurring thousands of athletes to try to change schools each year. It also would set eligibility at five years. It would protect the right of college athletes to receive compensation for their “name, image, and likeness” and institute guarantees for scholarships and healthcare.
The measure also would grant the NCAA, the governing body of college sports, a limited antitrust exemption while remaining silent on collective bargaining by student athletes. It attempts to discourage schools from jumping from conference to conference and it imposes new restrictions on agents for athletes.
“Sports is about any given Saturday,” said Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington, the lead Democratic sponsor of the bill. “It is not about whether you have a billionaire in your backyard. It is about whether you can coach and recruit and develop and maintain and have academic performance and have fairness.”
Despite the Senate approval, opponents blasted the measure as unfair to players. An amendment to cap coaching salaries at $5 million and limit their contract buyouts to one year’s salary was defeated Monday as the authors beat back a series of proposed changes. Democratic opponents also were unhappy with the lack of clarity about future collective bargaining.
“It’s a bill for the control and power of the NCAA and member institutions,” said Sen. Cory Booker (D., N.J.), a top opponent of the legislation. “It is not about athletes who are winning their rights, winning court cases, gaining leverage, and now are having that taken away from them.”
But resistance to the bill was no match for the major sports conferences, state schools, big-name coaches, and other powerful interest groups that got behind it, including airing television spots that featured high-profile figures such as Deion Sanders, the former professional sports star who is now the head football coach at the University of Colorado.
“The colleges and the conferences and the boosters flooded this place,” said Sen. Christopher S. Murphy (D., Conn.), another leading opponent of the bill. “It is a hard slog when the players have no money and no representation. Ultimately, this is going to be really bad for student athletes and destructive of the college sports model because these kids aren’t going to stick around very long if they are not getting paid what they are worth.”
Others said Congress should have stayed out of the fight.
“The people who oversee the post office now want to run college sports. What could go wrong?” said Sen. Rand Paul (R.,Ky.). He said he doubted that the founding fathers ever envisioned that “Congress would one day be in charge of dictating the rules for college sports.”
With the House scheduled to be in recess until after the midterm elections, there is at present no clear path for the legislation to pass before Congress reconvenes in mid-November. Whether Republican leaders would take it up after the elections is unclear. Lame-duck agendas can be notoriously tricky. But President Donald Trump is an enthusiastic supporter of the legislation and could put pressure on the House to act.
The measure is strongly opposed by members of the Congressional Black Caucus. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.), the minority leader who is in line to become speaker if Democrats win the House, has repeatedly expressed reservations. He called the legislation a “work in progress.”
“I share many of the concerns that have been articulated by both the Congressional Black Caucus and the NAACP,” Jeffries said.
Those groups contend that by limiting transfers and capping the overall amount of compensation paid to athletes, the proposal shifts the balance of power back to the schools and coaches after athletes won new rights through the courts. On the other side of the issue, some House Republicans favor explicitly declaring that student athletes are not school employees, limiting their bargaining capacity.
“They have problems on both the left and the right in the House of Representatives,” Murphy said. “We are going to continue to fight this bill.”
