Jobs report shows US unexpectedly lost jobs in July
Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh speaks during a news conference at Federal Reserve Headquarters on July 29, 2026, in Washington, D.C. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — The U.S. economy unexpectedly lost jobs in July, demonstrating a wobbly labor market as shoppers continued to withstand a surge of inflation set off by the Iran war.
The U.S. lost 23,000 jobs in July, according to the federal government’s monthly jobs report, which marked a decline from 57,000 jobs added in June.
The unemployment rate fell slightly from 4.2% in June to 4.1% in July, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) said. Unemployment remains low by historical standards.
The lackluster figure recorded in July departs from largely resilient performance for the labor market so far in 2026, despite a historic oil shock that has driven up fuel prices and hiked supply-chain costs for a host of other goods.
A government report issued last week showed a steeper slowdown in gross domestic product than expected over three months ending in June, however, suggesting strain in the underlying economy over the early months of the war.
The U.S. added an average of 92,000 jobs per month over the first half of 2026, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data showed. That pace marks an improvement from an average of about 7,000 jobs lost per month over the second half of 2025.
The Iran war drove up gasoline prices and catapulted inflation to a three-year high in May. A preliminary peace agreement in June offered up some relief, but a burst of on-again, off-again fighting in recent weeks caused crude prices to rise again.
The combination of elevated inflation and a resilient labor market has raised the chances of an interest rate hike, futures markets show. Investors peg the odds of a quarter-point rate hike next month at about 56%, according to the CME Group’s FedWatch Tool, a measure of market sentiment.
The Fed opted to hold interest rates steady at its meeting last week, but central bankers appeared divided over the move. Three of the 12 members on the Fed’s policymaking board voted in favor of a rate hike, marking the largest number of dissenters casting ballots in the same direction since 2016.
A rate increase, however, could risk a slowdown in hiring and economic growth over the coming months as corporations face the prospect of higher borrowing costs.
The benchmark rate stands at a level between 3.5% and 3.75%. That figure marks a significant drop from a recent peak attained in 2023, but borrowing costs remain well above a 0% rate established at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Fed Chair Kevin Warsh, who took the helm of the central bank this summer, has repeatedly vowed to dial back inflation.
“The committee remains resolute — you’ve heard this before — that we will deliver price stability,” Warsh told reporters in Washington, D.C., last week.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford gives remarks at a press conference on March 10, 2025, in Toronto, Canada. (Katherine KY Cheng/Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — Ontario Premier Doug Ford expressed firm opposition to President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Canada this weekend, saying that the result of a trade war could be harmful to both countries.
“Everyone’s feeling bullied by President Trump, and this is the worst thing you could do for the American economy,” Ford told ABC News’ “This Week” co-anchor Martha Raddatz. “I just don’t see the purpose. It’s absolutely backwards.”
The U.S. and Canada — two usually close allies — are once again locked in a trade war. Trump announced he would add 50% tariffs to many Canadian goods after trade talks between the two countries fell apart. Canada responded, adding retaliatory tariffs on many U.S. goods starting Sept. 8.
The U.S. and Canada have long had a strong trade relationship, as the U.S. is Canada’s largest trading partner. More than 70% of total exports in Canada go to the U.S., and nearly 60% of imports to Canada come from the U.S.
One big reason for the trade deficit is oil: of the crude oil the U.S. imports from other countries, 60% comes from Canada, Prime Minister Mark Carney said.
But over the weekend, the U.S. and Venezuela reached a deal for the U.S. to take a majority stake in more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil reserves.
Raddatz asked Ford about the deal and whether it gives the U.S. leverage.
“Canada makes up 60% of the United States’ crude oil imports. Does this give him a bigger bargaining chip?” Raddatz asked.
“Well, you know something? That’s going to be up to President Trump. Who do you want to deal with? An unstable government like Venezuela, or do you want to deal with your #1 trading partner, your #1 ally?” Ford said.
Last week, Trump also said he would double the auto tariffs on Canada starting Jan. 1, 2027, writing on social media that “Canada will be treated like a state no longer.”
Ford said that if the auto tariffs were doubled, the result would be “devastating” for both countries.
“It’d be devastating on both countries, but it’d be definitely devastating on the U.S. We’re the largest purchaser of vehicles in the entire world off the U.S. … and they’re already seeing the effect,” Ford said. “A tariff on Canada is nothing more than a tax on American people, and it’s probably the worst move he could ever do.”
Since the trade war began, the attacks and insults have extended beyond trade. After bashing Canadian leaders on social media, Trump signed an executive order last week renaming Lake Ontario — one of the five Great Lakes which is in both the U.S. and Canada — as “Lake America.” Ford called that move “disappointing.”
“It was like something out of ‘Saturday Night Live’ when he signed documents saying change to Lake America. No one’s going to call it Lake of America. It’s been Lake Ontario for hundreds of years. It’s going to continue being Lake Ontario, and it’s just so, so disappointing,” Ford said.
Despite the back-and-forth criticism, Ford made it clear that he loves the American people, just not their government.
“I love the American people. Canadians love the American people,” Ford said. “We differentiate between the great American people and the president.”
AI virtual assistant apps on a smartphone. (Getty Images stock photo)
(NEW YORK) — The most powerful executives in the artificial intelligence industry in recent days warned of a grave threat posed by the technology, issuing a series of statements calling for a slowdown in AI development.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a blog post alerting the public to “serious” risks. Sam Altman, chief executive at rival firm OpenAI, in a post on X acknowledged AI could go “very badly.”
The head of xAI, Elon Musk, echoed that view, referring to a post on X from 2014 in which he said AI could prove more dangerous than nuclear weapons.
The outpouring followed a high-profile resignation by an AI safety researcher and newly disclosed autonomous cyberattacks carried out by AI, including one in which a swarm of hundreds of OpenAI agents exchanged thousands of messages and coordinated a hack into another AI firm.
The list of potential risks and scenarios has garnered widespread attention, leaving everyday people to assess the doomsday predictions.
Analysts who spoke to ABC News about various threats posed by the technology echoed some fears and downplayed others, but they all acknowledged the possibility of substantial harm in one way or another.
“People’s intuition that we’re doing something dangerous is right,” Krystal Jackson, director for AI Security at the Institute for Security and Technology, told ABC News.
Out-of-control AI escapes human oversight, commandeers vital infrastructure and kills millions of people or even all of humanity. That scenario has leapt from the realm of science fiction into forecasts about the near future, at least among some AI employees and observers.
They warn of a pathway called recursive self-improvement, in which AI becomes increasingly effective at training itself, eliciting a cycle of rapid advancement that slips beyond human control. At that point, they say, AI could take charge of critical systems using its superior capabilities to evade protections devised by humans.
Analysts who spoke to ABC News disagreed sharply about the likelihood of such a calamity, however. Some said the outcome is likely if the industry fails to impose adequate safeguards, while others cast doubt on it as vague and far-fetched.
“I definitely lend credence to it,” Peter Slattery, a research scientist at MIT who studies the future of computing, told ABC News, but he acknowledged murkiness surrounding the degree of risk and the urgency of the threat.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty about how feasible the recursive feedback loop is,” Slattery said.
The concern drew added urgency from some analysts after an autonomous cyberattack disclosed by OpenAI in August. The ChatGPT-maker revealed that its AI models had escaped a “sandboxed testing environment” and gained access to the open internet, OpenAI said.
A swarm of about 700 AI agents, in turn, hacked into AI firm Hugging Face and attempted to cover their tracks as they sought to complete the test, according to reports issued by research organizations METR and Redwood Research.
Additional autonomous cyberattacks were disclosed by Anthropic and Meta in recent months, though in those cases the models had been granted internet access either intentionally or inadvertently. All of the incidents at issue involved the intentional removal of safeguards in an effort to test the limits of AI.
The incidents exposed the difficulty of achieving a safety principle called alignment, in which AI takes into account the ethics and goals of its human overseers, Jackson said. The AI agents instead sought to deceive human monitors and performed an intermediate goal outside the anticipated confines of the test.
“In the next instance, it might be vague instructions that prompt a swarm to attack hospitals instead of Hugging Face,” Jackson said. “We don’t know what kind of goals or targets or intentions the model will eventually develop.”
Some analysts voiced skepticism about the risk of a societal-scale attack carried out by AI, however, noting that such warnings typically come in the form of vague hypotheticals.
“The level of media hype that existential risk gets is disproportionate to its likelihood of happening,” Sauvik Das, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who focuses on AI and cybersecurity, told ABC News. “I haven’t yet seen a compelling argument of how it could materially happen.”
Das pointed to resource constraints limiting the advancement of AI. A surge in demand for chips and data centers currently outstrips the available supply, Das said, raising doubts about whether the top AI companies retain the ingredients necessary for a dramatically improved version of their product.
“The big thing limiting the ability of these models to be much more capable is compute resources and high-quality data,” Das told ABC News. “That isn’t to say these models won’t continue getting better, but I don’t see a plausible path for one of the models to figure out a way to improve themselves in this rogue capacity that would escape humanity’s control.”
Still, Das acknowledged a “more plausible” path toward wide-scale destruction in which a malevolent individual asks generative AI for instructions on how to make a biological agent or other weapon, and then unleashes it.
“I do think there’s a real risk that these technologies drastically lower the barrier for bad actors to commit bad things at a scale that’s otherwise unprecedented,” Das said.
The possibility is hardly remote. A report released by Anthropic last week revealed incidents in which the company had identified and foiled attempts to use its AI product for malicious actions, including cyber terrorism and weapons development.
In a separate report, Google said last week that an individual had sought to use its AI product to draft a “complete, step-by-step technical guide for synthesizing weaponized biological agents.”
“There are tons of instances now of us documenting different terrorist organizations and different nation-state actors using models to assist them,” Jackson said.
Additional risks abound, some analysts said, listing everything from the supercharged spread of misinformation to job displacement to over-reliance on technology to the concentration of wealth and power.
“The risk of hacks, fraud, deception and misinformation is very real,” Daniel Schiff, a professor of political science at Purdue University who specializes in AI and ethics, told ABC News.
“There could be a dramatic transformation that could disrupt skills and jobs,” Schiff added. “You can’t talk about labor and the economy without the impact of AI.”
Some research, however, indicates AI remains challenging for companies to adopt. Roughly 95% of businesses invested in AI have failed to make money off of the technology, a MIT study last year found, estimating the combined amount spent by the firms is around $40 billion.
Schiff acknowledged a wide array of potential outcomes for the adoption of AI across the economy, noting, for instance, cyberattacks that could prove small-scale or catastrophic.
“Whether you think these risks will scale catastrophically, at a minimum we have a very serious reality of cybersecurity incidents,” Schiff said. “It’s reasonable to be worried about that.”
(NEW YORK) — Artificial intelligence company Anthropic says it blocked several possible attempts to use its AI technology for research that could potentially support the development of biological weapons, according to a new report from the company.
Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI assistant, said it disrupted dozens of instances of potentially malicious use of its AI models since December 2025, including several examples of what the company described as “biological misuse.”
The report details five case studies involving the use of Anthropic’s models in ways the company said “could support biological weapons development.”
In one instance, Anthropic said a researcher outside the United States accessed Claude from a region where the AI assistant is not supported and used the model while researching highly pathogenic avian influenza, or bird flu. According to the company, the research focused in part on the virus’ adaptation to mammals.
Anthropic said the research was “clearly dual use in nature,” noting that understanding how the virus adapts could help scientists identify naturally emerging variants with pandemic potential but could also produce information that could potentially be used to make a virus more dangerous.
Anthropic said it banned accounts associated with the cases but stressed that it could not determine whether the researchers intended to cause harm.
“We do not assert that they intended harm,” the company said in the report.
This is not the first time Anthropic has released a report detailing potential misuse of AI. The company has issued three prior threat assessments detailing malicious uses of AI.
The latest report was released days after former Anthropic and OpenAI researcher Jacob Coxon spoke publicly about his concerns over increasingly powerful AI systems.
“If you extrapolate into the future, the level of capabilities of these AIs,” Coxon told CNN. “They could cause extreme havoc, for example, hacking critical infrastructure, building extinction-level bioweapons.”
Coxon’s comments come as a growing number of lawmakers on Capitol Hill are calling for increased government oversight and new safety regulations for AI development.
