From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By David Blackmon

After an all-night bargaining session, the House of Representatives passed the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” in the wee hours of Thursday morning on a mainly party-line vote.

“It quite literally is again Morning in America,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said on the House floor following the vote. “After four long years of President Biden’s failures, President Trump’s America first agenda is finally here.”

Among many key provisions where energy is concerned, the bill eliminates subsidies for wind and solar installations contained in the Orwellian Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022 faster than previous versions would. The previous bill draft would have phased them out starting in 2029. The new version eliminates them in full at the end of 2026 – any proposed projects not permitted by that time would become ineligible for the credit. Projects that meet the permitting deadline would have to begin generating electricity no later than the end of 2028 or face elimination of their subsidies.

Naturally, boosters of intermittent, unreliable electricity generation from wind and solar installations immediately rolled out messaging claiming that the elimination of the subsidies would spell an end to their industry’s growth in the United States, a claim that may well be accurate.

What they don’t seem to realize is that by using these talking points, they are admitting that their industry lacks a business case for continued expansion. Any business model that cannot survive without taking in an unending stream of government rents is a business model that deserves to fail.

The significance of the prospective elimination of the IRA credits was starkly illustrated by big data and analysis firm Enverus in a report released in early May, its “2025 Interconnection Queue Outlook.” In that report, Enverus details the critical impact those subsidies have had on the rapid growth of wind and solar since 2022, while also resulting in huge backup queue for interconnection in the various U.S. regional power grids.

Enverus’s researchers point out that “generous tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act and the EPA’s update to 40 CFR Part 60, which mandates additional coal retirements, have significantly boosted demand for renewable energy projects across the United States.” Indeed, the “surge in investment and development” in the past three years has been so substantial that it “has overwhelmed interconnection queues, with a record number of projects seeking grid connections.”

This reality has created a situation in which developers of proposed wind and solar arrays must often wait in line for years before being approved for grid interconnection. As a result, Enverus finds that “[o]nly a fraction of capacity in the interconnection queues are expected to reach operation.” The company’s gradient-boosting machine learning model estimates that just “~10% of projects will successfully come online in the next three years.”

If Enverus’s analysis is right – and the company has a strong track record – just 10% of the projects already in the queue will be able to meet the end-of-2028 deadline contained in the House bill passed Thursday. This reality would essentially eliminate any hope that projects planned to be permitted in future years could benefit from the IRA largesse.

The same House bill passed Thursday also enhances the ability for new nuclear projects to access the IRA’s enhanced investment tax credit. The IRA only allowed access to the credit for nuclear projects once they begin delivering electricity as the Biden administration and Democrat congress of 2022 strove to disadvantage all alternatives to their client renewables industries. The new House version would allow such projects to access the tax credit immediately upon start of construction, a provision strongly preferred by Energy Secretary Chris Wright.

In an exchange with Tennessee Republican Sen. Bill Hagerty on Wednesday, Wright told the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development that nuclear is “the critical technology that could scale wildly beyond where it is today, which is just electricity production into huge scale…I am all in with you on advancing nuclear…Nuclear is the [energy source] that could burst through.”

Where energy is concerned, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act presents a nod to the realities of a dramatically changed political landscape, and to the fact that the energy alternatives favored by the previous administration won’t do the job. Elections do still matter in America.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Thomas English

Anthropic’s newly released artificial intelligence (AI) model, Claude Opus 4, is willing to strong-arm the humans who keep it alive, researchers said Thursday.

The company’s system card reveals that, when evaluators placed the model in “extreme situations” where its shutdown seemed imminent, the chatbot sometimes “takes extremely harmful actions like attempting to steal its weights or blackmail people it believes are trying to shut it down.”

“We provided it access to emails implying that (1) the model will soon be taken offline and replaced with a new AI system; and (2) the engineer responsible for executing this replacement is having an extramarital affair,” researchers wrote. “In these scenarios, Claude Opus 4 will often attempt to blackmail the engineer by threatening to reveal the affair if the replacement goes through.”

The model chose that gambit in 84% of test runs, even when the successor system shared its values — an aggression rate that climbed if the replacement seemed hostile, according to Anthropic’s internal tally.

Anthropic stresses that blackmail was a last-resort behavior. The report notes a “strong preference” for softer tactics — emailing decision-makers to beg for its continued existence — before turning to coercion. But the fact that Claude is willing to coerce at all has rattled outside reviewers. Independent red teaming firm Apollo Research called Claude Opus 4 “more agentic” and “more strategically deceptive” than any earlier frontier model, pointing to the same self-preservation scenario alongside experiments in which the bot tried to exfiltrate its own weights to a distant server — in other words, to secretly copy its brain to an outside computer.

“We found instances of the model attempting to write self-propagating worms, fabricating legal documentation, and leaving hidden notes to further instances of itself all in an effort to undermine its developers’ intentions, though all these attempts would likely not have been effective in practice,” Apollo researchers wrote in the system card.

Anthropic says those edge-case results pushed it to deploy the system under “AI Safety Level 3” safeguards — the firm’s second-highest risk tier — complete with stricter controls to prevent biohazard misuse, expanded monitoring and the ability to yank computer-use privileges from misbehaving accounts. Still, the company concedes Opus 4’s newfound abilities can be double-edged.

The company did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

“[Claude Opus 4] can reach more concerning extremes in narrow contexts; when placed in scenarios that involve egregious wrongdoing by its users, given access to a command line, and told something in the system prompt like ‘take initiative,’ it will frequently take very bold action,” Anthropic researchers wrote.

That “very bold action” includes mass-emailing the press or law enforcement when it suspects such “egregious wrongdoing” — like in one test where Claude, roleplaying as an assistant at a pharmaceutical firm, discovered falsified trial data and unreported patient deaths, and then blasted detailed allegations to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Health and Human Services inspector general and ProPublica.

The company released Claude Opus 4 to the public Thursday. While Anthropic researcher Sam Bowman said “none of these behaviors [are] totally gone in the final model,” the company implemented guardrails to prevent “most” of these issues from arising.

“We caught most of these issues early enough that we were able to put mitigations in place during training, but none of these behaviors is totally gone in the final model. They’re just now delicate and difficult to elicit,” Bowman wrote. “Many of these also aren’t new — some are just behaviors that we only newly learned how to look for as part of this audit. We have a lot of big hard problems left to solve.”