The State Of The Union & The FBI Raids LA's School District

Hi readers, happy Tuesday! Today we’re covering the State of the Union, Anthropic's spat with the Pentagon, a gunfight in Cuba, a lethal year for journalists, the FBI raids on LAUSD, our next surgeon general (maybe), and a facial recognition software facepalm.

“I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing that I wanted to do.” ― Georgia O'Keefe

Big Don’s Big Speech

On Tuesday night, President Trump delivered the first State of the Union address of his second term. The speech ran almost two hours, but here’s the rundown. Trump seemed to start off in a positive mood, claiming that the economy is “roaring like never before.” Citing lower gas prices, stock market gains, and lower drug prices, the president said that “millions and millions of Americans are all gaining.” That’s despite just 39% of voters agreeing with his handling of the economy, and consumer concern about the job market reaching a five-year peak in February. Trump also decided that the event was the perfect time to hand out medals like candy, granting awards to the U.S. men’s hockey team and various war heroes in attendance.

As for future policy efforts, things were relatively sparse. Trump called on his Republican Congress to “codify” his attempts to lower drug prices, pass an act that would restrict members of Congress and their spouses from trading on Wall Street, and also pass two bills requiring proof of citizenship for the ability to vote and obtain commercial licenses. He also seized the occasion to offer up an official narrative for the looming conflict with Iran, telling the country that Iran would “soon” be able to strike the U.S. with the nuclear missiles it’s allegedly developing. 

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Trump speech without a little negativity, too – he blamed the Democrat side of the room for rising health care premiums, the growing problems facing Social Security, and the country’s general affordability problems. “These people are crazy, I’m telling you, they’re crazy,” he said. “Democrats are destroying this country.”

Claude In The Crosshairs

Earlier this week, the Pentagon warned Anthropic (the AI firm behind Claude) that it has until Friday to grant the Department of Defense unrestricted access to its AI models. If that doesn’t happen, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has warned the company that it could lose the Pentagon as a client or even be labeled a “supply chain risk.”

Anthropic’s Claude is one of the world’s most effective large language models, and it’s currently the only AI model approved for use in the military’s classified systems. Despite finding success in that niche, the company doesn’t want its tech to be used for mass surveilling Americans or the development of weapons that can be used without human oversight. “The only reason we're still talking to these people is we need them and we need them now. The problem for these guys is they are that good,” a Defense official said.

As Friday approaches, a few developments have occurred. On Tuesday – unrelated to its spat with the Pentagon – Anthropic loosened its strict core safety principles in order to make the company more competitive with rivals like OpenAI. Meanwhile, the Pentagon ratcheted up tensions on Wednesday, asking Boeing and Lockheed Martin to provide reports about their current reliance on Claude – analysts have interpreted this as the government’s first step towards labeling Anthropic as a supply chain risk.

They’re Havana Gunfight Over There

• Yesterday, Cuba’s embassy in the U.S. announced that Cuban border guards had shot and killed four armed gunmen in a violent encounter on Tuesday. The clash, according to the embassy, left six of the gunmen’s companions (they were all riding a speedboat) injured, and one Cuban border guard was injured in the shootout. 

• “In the face of current challenges, Cuba reaffirms its determination to protect its territorial waters, based on the principle that national defense is a fundamental pillar of the Cuban State in safeguarding its sovereignty and ensuring stability in the region,” the embassy wrote in a social media post. Later, the government announced that the gunmen were a group of anti-government Cubans who had launched their bot from the U.S. mainland.

• The deadly confrontation is likely to spike U.S.-Cuba tensions during an already-fraught period. The U.S. “operation” in Venezuela cut Cuba off from its biggest oil supplier, and the White House has also tightened its embargo on the country, putting it into a dire oil shortage. Yesterday, though, the Treasury Department announced that it would be allowing certain companies to sell Venezuelan-origin oil to Cuba in order to “improve living conditions and support independent economic activity” in the country.

The Press Needs Protections

• In 2025, according to a new report by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), 129 journalists and media workers were killed across the globe. That figure unfortunately breaks the previous record set in 2024, when 104 journalists were killed worldwide. According to the CPJ report, Israeli forces killed 86 journalists in 2025, meaning Israel was behind two-thirds of all journalists deaths in the world. Israel was also reportedly responsible for 81% of the 47 intentional journalist killings tracked by the CPJ.

• As we’ve written multiple times, Israel has blocked foreign journalists from entering Gaza since the war began in October 2023, meaning local Palestinian journalists are the only ones able to provide non-Israeli reporting on the conflict. Israel has deliberately targeted these journalists in multiple attacks, justifying the violence by claiming that the reporters are linked with Hamas (without providing evidence for those claims). The Israeli military, according to the report, “has now committed more targeted killings of the press than any other government’s military on record,” at least since the CPJ began collecting data on press killings 30 years ago.

Additional World News

• Exxon presses bid for over $1B compensation from Cuba at US Supreme Court (Reuters)

• U.S. Supreme Court tariff ruling will likely allow India to keep buying Russian oil (CNBC)

• ‘Tinderbox’ UK may be one shock away from food riots, experts say (Guardian) 

• Exclusive: Iran nears deal to buy supersonic anti-ship missiles from China (Reuters)

• We’ll find a way to get round Hungary and deliver Ukraine’s €90B loan, EU vows (Politico)

• US military boards third oil tanker in the Indian Ocean after tracking it from the Caribbean (AP) 

Ooooh, The Teacher’s Boss Is In Trouble!

• It must be a crazy time to be a student in Los Angeles. Yesterday, the FBI conducted high-profile searches of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) headquarters as well as Superintendent Alberto Carvalho’s home. They also searched a third site near Miami, where Carvalho had previously worked as the head of Miami-Dade County Public Schools.

• So far, federal officials have declined to comment on the searches, as the affidavits providing the legal basis for the search warrants are still sealed from the public. However, we do know that Carvalho has a strange history of his school districts signing off on shady business deals – in 2024, LAUSD signed a contract with the company behind an AI chatbot named “Ed” which was supposed to help students. That company went bankrupt months after the district paid it $3 million. During his stint in Miami, a nonprofit he founded received a $1.57 million donation from a company that Carvalho’s school district was planning to work with, before that contract was abruptly terminated. 

• Carvalho has become a target of the Trump administration due to his criticism of the White House’s immigration crackdown in LA last year. He also clashed with Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, over DeSantis’ order for Florida schools to not require masking during the pandemic. 

Searchin’ For Our Surgeon General

• Trump’s nominee for U.S. surgeon general, Casey Means, testified before the Senate health committee yesterday. Means is an unlicensed physician (she dropped out of her residency program 6 months before it ended), health writer, and health-adjacent entrepreneur, meaning if Trump gets his way, the nation’s top doctor won’t have an active medical license.

• Back to her Senate testimony – during the two-hour hearing, Means dodged questions about vaccine regulations while also defending her lack of medical credentials. She also harped on the country’s chronic disease problems, blaming them on “ultra‑processed foods, industrial chemical exposure, lack of physical activity, chronic stress and loneliness, and over‑medicalization.” To be fair, she might be slightly correct about most of those things contributing to chronic diseases, but we’re not sure how “over-medicalization” would cause obesity or cancer.

• When asked whether she would encourage parents to have their children given the measles vaccine, Means very conspicuously declined to give a solid yes-or-no answer. “I do believe that each patient, mother, parent, needs to have a conversation with their pediatrician about any medication they’re putting in their body and their children’s bodies,” she replied instead, despite the country facing multiple measles outbreaks at the moment. She also danced around the fringe idea that vaccines cause autism.

Additional USA News

• Larry Summers Will Resign From Harvard After Jeffrey Epstein Revelations (NYT, $) 

• Supreme Court rules the Postal Service can't be sued, even when mail is intentionally not delivered (AP)  

• Trump administration weighs citizenship requirement for bank account holders (Semafor)

• Justice Department withheld and removed some Epstein files related to Trump (NPR)

• ICE says Cuban detainee’s death from use of force (Texas Tribune)

• Musk's xAI, Pentagon reach deal to use Grok in classified systems (Axios)

A Facial Recognition Facepalm

• Facial recognition software in the U.K. has caused police to confuse one South Asian man for another, leading to the wrong person being arrested. In January, police knocked on the door of Alvi Choudhury, a 26-year-old software engineer. After he opened the door, the cops put him in handcuffs, drove him to a local police station, and kept him in custody for 10 hours before realizing they had the wrong guy. The police based their arrest off the judgement of a facial recognition program, which told them that Choudhury was the perpetrator of a £3,000 burglary that took place 100 miles away from his home.

• Human eyes would have noticed that the actual suspect appeared much younger than the software engineer, as the only similarity between the two is their curly hair. “I was very angry, because the kid looked about 10 years younger than me,” said Choudhury, who has a beard. “Everything was different. Skin was lighter. Suspect looked 18 years old. His nose was bigger. He had no facial hair. His eyes were different. His lips were smaller than mine. I just assumed that the investigative officer saw that I was a brown person with curly hair and decided to arrest me.”

• The bogus arrest highlights a recurring problem with facial recognition algorithms and their deployment worldwide: their false positive rate for black (5.5%) and Asian (4.0%) people is quite literally 100 times worse than their false positive rate for white people (0.04 %), and police are often too lazy to use their god-given eyeballs to double check the computer’s work.

Additional Reads

• The DJI Romo robovac had security so poor, this man remotely accessed thousands of them (Verge) 

• Parasitic ant species where every individual is a queen discovered in Japan (Independent)

• Data Center Outlook: Half of 2026 Pipeline May Not Materialize (Sightline Climate) 

• This App Warns You if Someone Is Wearing Smart Glasses Nearby (404 Media)

• What Are Chinese People Vibecoding? (China Talk)

• This Looks Like a Kalshi Insider Bet on Aliens (Atlantic, $)

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Peanut For Your Thoughts

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