It’s Monday August 31. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: There’s no good verdict in the Clancy trial. How Ukraine survives. And more.

But first: Is AI taking over?

“An absolutely wild incident.”

“This might be the last warning we get.”

“We are so far past the sci-fi point.”

“Full-blown AI takeover within months.”

If your eyes glaze over at the words “Hugging Face hack,” perhaps these alarming warnings will grab your attention. The tech world has been obsessing about the episode—and what it means—the past few days. And many of the prominent voices in the conversation believe the stakes are nothing less than civilizational.

It all started late last week, with the publication of new reports into this summer’s Hugging Face incident, when AI agents broke containment from an OpenAI experiment and hacked deep into the systems of Hugging Face, an open-source artificial intelligence platform. The reports showed something extraordinary: a level of sophisticated deception, cooperation, self-sacrifice, and cunning from the AI agents that, to put it bluntly, has many in Silicon Valley freaking out.

But how bad was the incident, really? And how seriously should we take those who claim that it is evidence that we are “more than 50 percent of the way to full-blown AI takeover”?

To help us think through the answers to those questions, we turned to our columnist Tyler Cowen.

Tyler Cowen • Tech and Business Tyler Cowen: Should You Believe the Dire Warnings About ‘AI Takeover’?

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Jed Rubenfeld • U.S. Politics

The Law Is Inadequate to Judge Lindsay Clancy

This morning, the Massachusetts jury in the Lindsay Clancy case will continue their deliberations. The trial has created enormous controversy, as people debate what her fate should be after killing her three children. Our legal columnist Jed Rubenfeld writes that no matter what they decide, the verdict will be inadequate to judge her properly. Thanks largely to quirks in Massachusetts law, an insanity defense is dealt with differently in their courts than just about anywhere else in the country. Read Jed’s column to understand what it means for Clancy—and the jurors. Read story ›

Sebastian Junger • International

Why Ukraine Hasn’t Broken

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, it expected victory within days. Five years later, the war goes on, and while Ukrainian forces are more than holding their own, their cities under constant bombardment; just this Saturday, 37 people were killed in a Russian attack on an arms depot outside Kyiv. Sebastian Junger, who recently returned from Ukraine, writes about how the Ukrainian people have survived—and when they could, thrived—in the middle of a war. Read his moving description of life in a nation that has no intention of yielding to Vladimir Putin. Read story ›

Aaron MacLean • School of War

Our Foreign Policy Divide Began with the Korean War

What should America’s role in the world be? These days, this question is ferociously debated across the political spectrum. This is not, however, a particularly new issue but rather one that goes back to the Korean War. On the newest episode of “School of War,” Aaron MacLean sits down with Dane J. Cash to discuss his new book, tracing the roots of today’s foreign policy debates back to “The Forgotten War.” Watch now ›