Does the U.S. government have enough ammunition for all its wars and potential wars? Ask two different Pentagon officials and get two different answers.

In May 2026, acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao told Congress that “we’re doing a pause” on sales to Taiwan “in order to make sure we have the munitions we need” for the Iran war. A few days later, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth backpedaled. “Hung Cao is fantastic, but I would not couple the two in any way at all,” he told reporters. “And I feel good about not only where we are, but where we are in future production rates as well.” It was the latest in a series of statements from Hegseth and other Trump administration officials complaining that the media were exaggerating munitions shortages.

The lady doth protest too much. Warning lights have been blinking for years about the United States’ ability to prepare for future conflicts while also supporting proxy wars in Europe and the Middle East. The direct war with Iran burned through U.S. magazines at an even faster pace.

“The U.S. has stockpile requirements that reflect contingency plan requirements. Of course, it accepts some risk when it needs to,” explains Josh Paul, previously the State Department official in charge of weapons sales. In other words, the question of how much ammunition is enough is a question of acceptable danger.

The current shortages are especially dire when it comes to air defense ammunition. That introduces a kind of danger that the U.S. and its partners simply aren’t used to. After generations of U.S. aerial dominance, the economics of war are exposing American troops—and First World societies—to being bombed from above.

The main round of U.S.-Iranian fighting ended in April 2026 with 14 Americans dead and 409 wounded. There are signs that the situation would have gotten dramatically worse if it had continued. Just before the ceasefire, Iran was achieving an increasing hit rate with smaller barrages because the U.S. and its partners had used up so much of their air defense ammunition. Israel was rationing its high-end missile interceptors, whose numbers had fallen to “double digits,” a U.S. source told Drop Site.

Future U.S. wars may look “more like Ukraine,” with heavy bombing on both sides, says Justin Logan, director of defense and foreign policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “The Americans like to insulate ourselves and our friends from adversaries’ ability to retaliate, but that’s extremely costly.”

Shortages are already being felt in Ukraine itself. After a June 2026 air raid by Russia killed 22 people, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy pleaded with European allies to speed up deliveries of the American-made Patriot air defense system, adding that the issue was “no longer about financing.” There just wasn’t enough inventory to go around. The Ukrainian government proposed “borrowing” Patriot ammunition from Germany, emptying German warehouses in exchange for an IOU.

Meanwhile, Taiwan is waiting for the Trump administration to approve a $14 billion arms sale that Congress has already signed off on. Part of the holdup seems to be political; President Donald Trump told Fox News the delay was “a very good negotiating chip for us” against China and a way to get both sides to “cool down.” But shortages are another part of the calculation, as Cao admitted. Reuters reports that the deal, whose contents have not been publicly reported, “largely consists” of Patriot ammunition and other air defense weapons.

“Everybody wants to adopt the American way of war, but nobody can afford it, including the Americans,” Logan says. “The ability to sustain political support drops like a lead balloon when we can’t intercept retaliation.”

How Drones and Cheap Missiles Ended America’s Free Pass From Enemy Fire

For most of the last century, the United States has gotten used to fighting one-sided air wars. Before the recent Middle Eastern conflicts, U.S. troops were last killed by hostile aircraft during the Korean War in 1953. In recent years, the feeling grew that the U.S. military could simply bomb other countries with no real cost. The public took little notice as the Obama, Biden, and Trump administrations waged “light footprint” air campaigns around the world.

“It works for a time, when you have this enormous asymmetry, but adversaries of all kinds learn to adapt,” says Kelly Grieco, a fellow at the Stimson Center. “There were warning signs long before this war.”

One important change was the drone revolution. Advances in electronics allowed small countries to get in on the game by the dawn of the 21st century. Israel became a leader in drone technology, which Turkey purchased and Iran stole. Chinese hobby drones hit the civilian market in the early 2010s, making this type of warfare even cheaper. The Islamic State group obtained a small “air force” by strapping grenades to photography drones.

When the U.S. fought the Islamic State in 2014’s Battle of Mosul, a U.S. Army colonel told Grieco that it was the first time that he “ever had to look to the sky and be concerned about the enemy.”

Meanwhile, Iran took lessons from Iraq, which had invaded Iran in 1980 and in turn suffered a U.S. invasion in 2003. The Iranian government concluded that it couldn’t build a competitive air force—but it could produce overwhelming numbers of ground-based missiles domestically.

The final turning point for the old model of war may have come during a conflict most Americans haven’t heard of: the 2020 war between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Azerbaijani forces debuted the use of Israeli “kamikaze drones,” which fly themselves into a target and explode, alongside conventional Turkish drones. Two years later, when Russia invaded Ukraine, the Ukrainian army invested in those same Turkish drones, while the Russian military imported Iranian experts and designs to mass-produce the Shahed 136 kamikaze drone.

As the war in Ukraine dragged on, each side adopted the Islamic State tactic of using hobby drones to drop grenades on individual soldiers. When radio jamming made drone attacks harder, the armies then equipped their drones with spools of fiber-optic cable. Battlefields have become littered with miles of discarded wires. Beyond the front lines, Russia and Ukraine have been using long-range drones to bomb each other’s infrastructure and drone fighters to shoot down (or stab down) those drone bombers.

The United States and its Middle East partners were used to a higher level of protection than Russia or Ukraine found possible to achieve. Israel’s Iron Dome, an air defense system for short-range rockets and artillery, had a reported 90 percent interception rate in small wars from 2011 to 2023. The oil-rich Arab monarchies were even more casualty-averse. When Yemeni rebels drone-bombed Saudi Arabia in 2019 and the United Arab Emirates in 2022, both air raids caused a national crisis.

This year’s war with Iran unleashed the first sustained air attack those countries faced from someone more sophisticated than ragtag guerrillas. They tried to maintain the previous level of insulation at a massive cost. Ukrainian military advisers told the The Times of London they were “astonished” to see Arab militaries firing off eight Patriot interceptors to shoot down a single Iranian drone. Israel used up 80 percent of its entire stockpile of high-end Arrow interceptors in 16 days, according to a study by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in Britain. On top of that, the U.S. military fired more interceptors in Israel’s defense than the Israeli army itself did, according to The Washington Post.

The Israeli and U.S. militaries also burned through their offensive weapons, according to RUSI. Hegseth warned Japan that the U.S. no longer had enough Tomahawk cruise missiles to spare, the Financial Times reported. When it runs low on these “standoff munitions,” which allow U.S. aircraft to fire from a distance, the U.S. has “to fight closer in, and when you fight closer in, there’s greater risk,” Grieco says.

Part of the U.S. problem with Iran seems to have been the assumption of a quick victory. Trump said both publicly and privately that he expected Iran to fold within days. At the beginning of the war, the U.S. military touted its ability to proactively suppress Iranian missile fire in the immediate term by blowing up launcher trucks or caving in underground base entrances. But the launchers were simple to replace—they’re just normal trucks with some extra hydraulics, after all—and caved-in base entrances could be dug out.

The worst-case near-future scenario for the U.S. military, a war with China in the Pacific, would combine all of these issues with several new ones. U.S. allies Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are all high-tech economies within range of Chinese and North Korean missiles. China has much more formidable air defenses than Iran, making missile suppression almost impossible. And because Taiwan is an island that is easy to isolate, all of its defense weapons would have to be imported before a crisis starts.

In January 2023, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) ran a war game simulating a Pacific war caused by a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The simulation found that the U.S. military would run out of Long Range Anti-Ship Missiles (LRASM) within days and Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles (JASSMs) within two to three weeks. The center concluded that the U.S. could defeat an invasion of Taiwan, but at a cost of hundreds of aircraft—and more human casualties in a month than Americans had suffered over the past generation of wars combined.

Why the Pentagon Can’t Just Build Its Way Out of the Ammo Crisis

After three years of European and Middle Eastern fighting, the munitions situation is now significantly worse. The U.S. military used up about 25 percent of its JASSMs in the Iran war, according to the RUSI study. A separate CSIS study from May 2026 found that rebuilding those missiles could take until mid-2027; it would take another two years to bring various air defense magazines back to prewar levels, and it would be the 2030s before Washington could replace all the Tomahawk cruise missiles used in the war.

The Pentagon wants to pour gargantuan amounts of money into doing so. The military budget request for fiscal year 2027, a historic $1.5 trillion, includes $52 billion for high-priority munitions—nearly a fivefold increase over the previous year—and another $100 billion to build up the industrial base. On top of the annual military budget, the Trump administration also planned to ask Congress for $200 billion for supplemental Iran war funding, though the administration later shrunk that request and folded much of it into the annual military budget, The Washington Post reports.

A closer look at the budget request shows how unbalanced the math of air defense is. The latest model of Patriot interceptor, the PAC-3, will cost approximately $4 million per unit. (Remember, Arab armies were firing up to eight of them against a single drone.) While the cost of the Shahed 136 is not public knowledge, an Iranian source told the American economics magazine Phenomenal World that each drone costs 6 billion rials, which came out to $4,000 on the most up-to-date exchange rate.

Even more important than the dollar price are the resources and time each weapon takes. Adjusting for the local cost of parts and labor, Phenomenal World calculated that the real equivalent price of a Shahed 136 would be around $7,000 per drone, still much lower than the interceptor used to shoot it down. While a single Shahed factory in Russia can make 5,500 drones per month, the total production of PAC-3s is currently less than 1,000 per year. In the two-year journey of a PAC-3 from order to delivery, new workers must be trained in specialized skills and vetted for security clearances; manufacturer Lockheed Martin has to source parts from more than 400 companies.

The PAC-3 is often competing with other weapons for the same components—and these components compete with other industries and other countries for raw materials. In April 2025, the Chinese government imposed strict export controls on rare earth minerals and permanent magnets, sending the Pentagon on a frantic and expensive quest to identify new sources, according to the CSIS.

Investments can increase production. The United States and its allies have been fairly successful at pumping out more 155mm artillery shells, one of the chief concerns two years ago. But the process of expanding production itself takes years. Lockheed Martin is planning to increase its annual production of the PAC-3s to around 2,000 by fiscal year 2030.

The long time for these investments to pay off is a structural barrier. “The challenge has always been the private sector’s willingness to reinvest profits in production,” says Paul, the former State Department official. “For instance, if you’re a publicly traded company, would you rather have a full 10-year book, or spend a chunk of your own capital to build a new production facility, reducing your book to 5 years, for a system that may be outdated in 10 years?” 

Despite these problems, the United States is still the world’s largest supplier of arms. Its share of the global market has actually grown since 2016, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute in Sweden. When journalists ask her whether the United States has sufficient munitions, Grieco always responds, “Sufficient munitions to do what? Because no country other than maybe China has the kind of depth that we do in munitions.”

Ultimately, the issue with munitions is less a shortage of supply and more an excess of demand. The United States wants to be involved in conflicts around the world while retaining the ability to start new ones, such as the Iran war. At the same time, societies like ours “are built on assuming away the prospect of punishment” in war, Logan says.

That’s not sustainable anymore, thanks to advances in missile and drone technology. “Warfare is about larger numbers of smaller, cheaper, plentiful things that strongly favor the defense,” Grieco explains. Ironically, the abundance of offensive weapons means that the defender can punish the attacker more easily.

Rather than trying to fight this trend, the United States can stop putting itself in the position of an attacker. Washington’s chief stated foreign policy goals outside the Middle East are repelling an invasion of Ukraine and deterring an invasion of Taiwan. If the U.S. can resist the temptation to launch more wars, then the technological changes “ought to be good news,” Grieco argues. “We should be leveraging this defensive potential.”

The post America Spent a Fortune Shooting Down Cheap Drones. Now the Missile Stores Are Bare. appeared first on Reason.com.

Imagine you start an asteroid mining company. It’s tough at first. You know that profits are uncertain and, if they do ever materialize, it will be in five years at the earliest, maybe even ten. It takes a long time to find investors willing to trust you because several similar ventures with almost identical business models have already gone bust and the investment horizon is far too long for many. Nevertheless, you persevere, and you manage to convince a few investors.

You hire astronomers to identify asteroids with valuable metals such as platinum. You send unmanned probes to several near-Earth asteroids to collect samples. The first few turn out to be of little value. The costs are too high and outweigh any potential profits.

Then comes the breakthrough: You find a suitable asteroid, and you succeed in bringing platinum group metals all the way back to Earth. But then a group of countries files a lawsuit against you. They are all signatories to the so-called Moon Agreement of 1979, formally known as the “Agreement Governing the Activities of States in the Moon and other Celestial Bodies,” which came into effect in 1984. The treaty applies not only to the moon, but to all celestial bodies, including asteroids.

Some of these countries are now demanding that you hand over a significant share of your profits to people who have never had anything to do with asteroid mining—many of whom couldn’t even say exactly what an asteroid is, let alone launch rockets into orbit. They invoke Article IV, Paragraph 1, and Article XI, Paragraphs 1 and 3, of the Moon Agreement, which state: “The exploration and use of the Moon shall be the province of all mankind and shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interest of all countries, irrespective of their degree of economic and scientific development. Due regard shall be paid to the interests of present and future generations as well as to the need to promote higher standards of living and conditions of economic and social progress and development in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.” So much for Article IV. 

Article XI states: “The Moon and its natural resources are the common heritage of mankind. Neither the surface nor the subsurface of the Moon, nor any part thereof or natural resources in place, shall become property of any State, international intergovernmental or non-governmental organization, national organization or non-governmental entity or of any natural person.”

The Moon Agreement, since signed by 22 countries and ratified by 18, was developed to work in the same way as seabed law, and a delegate from Sri Lanka explained in simple terms what the intention was: “If you touch the nodules [valuable mineral deposits on the seabed] at the bottom of the sea, you touch my property. If you take them away, you take away my property.” 

The plaintiffs now demand their “rightful share” of your profits, arguing that the platinum belongs not to you, but to all of humanity—and especially to developing countries, many of which are not yet engaged in space exploration. Should the plaintiffs win, neither you nor any other company would ever be able to attract investors again. Asteroid mining would be dead and buried after this very first attempt.

Mars Without Property Rights

Suffice it to say: Investors can remain confident, as a lawsuit based on a treaty signed by only a small number of countries is unlikely to succeed. But consider a second thought experiment: 

It is the year 2075. The first settlements on Mars have been successfully established, housing several thousand people and many more robots. The settlers are busy building underground houses and domed communities, a hospital, and other facilities. But there is a problem: Unlike on Earth, there is no private property ownership on Mars. The settlers have repeatedly attempted to establish private property rights and even create a digital land registry, but legal experts keep putting a stop to their efforts. This time, the problem is not the 1984 Moon Agreement, but the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST), Article II of which states: “Outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.”

And Article I of the treaty states that the use of outer space “shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interest of all countries, irrespective of their degree of economic or scientific development, and shall be the province of all mankind.”

In this case, the argument that the Moon Agreement has limited signatories cannot be made, as 117 countries are parties to the Outer Space Treaty—including all major spacefaring nations, such as the United States, China, and Russia—and another 22 are signatories. 

The plaintiffs assert that Article II of the Treaty prohibits not only the national appropriation of celestial bodies, but also any form of private property ownership. They further contend that Article I should be interpreted as mandating the equitable sharing of proceeds from resource extraction among all nations—an interpretation that has sometimes been put forward in the real world.

For now, let us assume their interpretation is correct. There are no property rights: Nations cannot own land (which they could potentially lease), nor can private entities, since any form of appropriation by states or private individuals is prohibited. Could such a society exist, let alone be economically successful? Of course not. 

Most successful countries permit the private ownership of land. Where this right does not exist, it is at least possible to buy usage rights from the state for 50–99 years, which can also be resold—as in Vietnam and China, for example, or (regarding the 99 years) in Singapore. North Korea is the only country where even that is not possible. Property ownership on Mars would therefore be most comparable to that in North Korea, a country plagued by widespread poverty where people go hungry after every poor harvest. Do you believe a settlement on Mars could be successful if its economic model mirrored that of North Korea

The Legal Debate Over Private Ownership in Space

The decisive factor in determining whether private property rights apply is Article II of the OST. Legal scholars have put forward differing viewpoints over its interpretation. The primary area of contention revolves around the “prohibition of appropriation” and whether this applies only to the states expressly mentioned in the treaty or also to private individuals and companies not mentioned in Article II.

In Outer Space: Problems of Law and Policy, Glenn H. Reynolds and Robert P. Merges contend that: “Being prevented from claiming sovereignty and exclusive property rights located in the space environment for themselves, it will be argued that States are also prohibited from granting quasi-sovereign and exclusive property rights over such areas and resources to those natural and juridical persons which are subject to national jurisdiction and which are created through international agreements.”

Those who argue that appropriation by private individuals is prohibited, also assert that private ownership would infringe upon the freedoms of access, exploration, and use guaranteed to all states in Article I. If private property rights existed, argues space law expert Marcus Schladebach, this would impinge upon the freedoms granted to all states, and the legal status of outer space as a “global commons” beyond territorial sovereignty would be jeopardized. If national appropriation is prohibited, Schladebach maintains, then private appropriation must be prohibited all the more. 

In contrast, other legal scholars argue the exact opposite: National sovereignty stops where outer space begins, which means that national appropriation of the moon, other planets, and asteroids is forbidden—but not the private ownership of celestial bodies. This interpretation rests on the legal doctrine expressio unius est exclusio alterius: the explicit mention of one thing implies the exclusion of others. If, for example, a statute or treaty expressly mentions one or more things of a class, it is only reasonable to conclude that others of the same class remain unrestricted by that statute or treaty. This principle serves to interpret legal norms and supports the assumption that things not mentioned were excluded by deliberate choice, not inadvertence.

Other legal scholars, however, argue that while it is not forbidden for private individuals or companies to claim property, it is a crime for a nation to recognize such a claim publicly. This interpretation, however, confuses the terms “recognize” and “confer,” as the legal scholars Alan Wasser and Douglas Jobes explain: “‘To recognize’ means to ‘acknowledge the existence, validity, or legality of’ or ‘accepts, acquiesces to, decides not to contest.’ In contrast, ‘to confer’ means to ‘grant (a title, degree, benefit, or right).'”

They go on: “If a nation claims the right to confer, give, or grant title to lunar land, it could be violating the ban on national appropriation. But if a settlement is established and the settlers claim private ownership of land around their settlement, and a dozen of Earth’s nations recognize the settlers’ claim, it is not reasonable to say that all dozen nations are trying to appropriate the land and thus are violating the Outer Space Treaty.”

Still others argue based on various provisions of the Outer Space Treaty, which, for example, hold states liable if a rocket launched by a private company from their territory crashes in another country. Furthermore, they claim, states are obligated to authorize and supervise the activities of private companies located within their territories. From this, they conclude that, even if not explicitly stated, the Outer Space Treaty prohibits private appropriation. 

Wasser and Jobes rightly object to this: “But the treaty clearly does not contain any language explicitly saying that states may not authorize their citizens to do anything that they themselves cannot do, contrary to what some authors appear to assume. The treaty does not say that what is prohibited to states is therefore prohibited to private entities, nor that what is prohibited to the regulator is therefore always prohibited to the regulated. A baseball coach gives ‘authorization and continuing supervision’ to his players. Does the fact that the coach is not allowed to run onto the field to catch a fly ball mean the players he supervises cannot either?”

The wording of Article I of the Outer Space Treaty states that outer space is “the province of all mankind” and that celestial bodies should be “free for exploration and use by all States without discrimination of any kind on basis of equality” and “there shall be free access to all areas of celestial bodies.” Critics argue that this turns space into a public good whose owner is everybody and nobody. 

The only relatively undisputed point is that the OST is ambiguous in several areas, particularly concerning private property ownership and the role of private companies. This ambiguity stems from the priorities of the United States and the Soviet Union at the time of the OST’s drafting. Their primary focus was on preventing an arms race in space and the deployment of weapons of mass destruction there. The concept of private space companies, including business models that would allow private companies to engage in asteroid mining, was a distant prospect in 1967. Consequently, the issue of private ownership was secondary for both nations. However, the Soviet Union would have preferred to prohibit private companies in space during the treaty negotiations, a proposal the United States rejected. So, they did what national governments sometimes do in joint international declarations or treaties: The language was kept vague and omitted contentious issues, which is what leads to the difficulties interpreting it today.

How Nations Are Writing Their Own Rules

Many years later, some countries felt the need to clarify the issues that had remained ambiguous at the time. We have seen that—unlike Article II of the Outer Space Treaty—Article 11, paragraph 3 of the Moon Agreement explicitly prohibits private ownership in outer space. 

The Moon Agreement, which not only explicitly prohibits private property but, according to some interpretations, even demands an egalitarian distribution of the profits generated by private users, breathes the spirit of socialism. “At its heart,” says space analyst and consultant Rand Simberg, “the Moon Treaty was redistributionist in nature, taking from those who were willing to take risk and invest capital in developing new resources and giving to those who did not.”

Most countries refused to sign it, albeit for different reasons. This raises the question: If the Moon Agreement merely precisely regulated exactly what the Outer Space Treaty intended—that is, if the Moon Agreement simply served as a concretization of the Outer Space Treaty—then why did 121 of the 139 states that signed the Outer Space Treaty refuse to sign the Moon Agreement? Oddly enough, this question is rarely asked.

What can be done when a treaty, in this case the OST, is open to so many different interpretations? First, it could be renegotiated. For example, in 1999, Ezra Reinstein argued: “What is needed is an amendment to the Outer Space Treaty, one that both clarifies and expands property rights in space.” First, Reinstein insists, it must be clarified in the amendment that the formulation, “‘for the benefit…of all countries’ is a moral exhortation and not a loophole through which the United Nations can dispossess a private party of his site.” The fact that Reinstein considered these clarifications important enough to include in an amendment once again underscores the vagueness and legal uncertainty of the Outer Space Treaty. 

However, this is just one potential avenue and probably not a likely one. In recent years, the U.S. has adopted a different strategy, one that is certainly a step in the right direction: If a treaty is subject to varied interpretations by different countries, it increasingly becomes the responsibility of national legislators to interpret the treaty. And this is what has happened in recent years, especially in the United States, where Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) and then-Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) championed a Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2015. This gave all U.S. citizens and companies the right “to possess, own, transport, use, and sell [any] asteroid resource or space resource obtained in accordance with applicable law, including the international obligations of the United States.”

In April 2020, President Donald Trump went a step further than Obama by signing an “Executive Order on Encouraging International Support for the Recovery and Use of Space Resources,” explicitly rejecting the notion of space as a “global commons.” The Moon Agreement, which the U.S. had never signed anyway, was also explicitly dismissed.

This executive order was followed just one month later by NASA announcing the Artemis Accords, officially called “Principles for Cooperation in the Civil Exploration and Use of the Moon, Mars, Comets and Asteroids for Peaceful Purposes.” One key element of the Accords is the introduction of what are referred to as “safety zones”—geographically defined areas around a station or activity on the moon or another celestial body. These zones are not intended to contradict territorial appropriation, but rather to serve the practical implementation of the principle of peaceful use and to prevent potential conflicts arising from activities that are too close to one another. Section 10 of the Accords explicitly states: “The Signatories affirm that the extraction of space resources does not inherently constitute national appropriation under Article II of the Outer Space Treaty, and that contracts and other legal instruments relating to space resources should be consistent with that Treaty.”

The Accords were initially signed by eight nations: the United States, Australia, Canada, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom. Since then, the number of signatories has expanded to 67. Russia and China, however, have rejected the accords and criticized their interpretation of the Outer Space Treaty. China, in particular, is concerned that the United States may be using the Artemis Accords to assert sovereignty over lunar resources.

While the Artemis Accords were a step forward, the language suggesting that space mining does “not inherently” violate Article II—which prohibits “national appropriation”—has again created ambiguity, as space law scholars Michael Byers and Aaron Boley point out in their book Who Owns Outer Space?: “Is Space mining sometimes ‘national appropriation’ and sometimes not? Was Space mining originally not ‘national appropriation,’ but capable of becoming understood as ‘national appropriation’ as understandings and interests change? Can a term such as ‘national appropriation,’ which has no ‘ordinary meaning’ because it is not used outside the Outer Space Treaty, ‘inherently’ mean anything?”

Designing a Space Economy That Actually Works 

What should the goal be? Without full private ownership, there will be no colonization of Mars, and the economic exploitation of asteroids and the moon will also be difficult. And who should own land on Mars or the moon first? Various people, including the American Dennis Hope, have made a business out of selling land on the moon without being able to clearly explain why they consider themselves entitled to do so. Space law expert Virgiliu Pop has written an entire book with the delightfully evocative title Unreal Estate: The Men Who Sold the Moon, in which he establishes that from the 1890s to the present day, numerous individuals have claimed ownership of the moon or other celestial bodies—and found plenty of buyers for their properties. It should be clear, he writes, “that claims to extraterrestrial real estate unsubstantiated by physical acts of possession are not valid means of acquiring ownership….A mere claim is not tantamount with ownership—or, in plain language, claiming does not mean owning.”

But apparently, the desire to claim ownership of property in space is so strong for some that it overrides their reason. At the same time, it’s also good news to see so much interest in plots on the moon. Six million customers are said to have bought from Hope. These transactions offer hope that there will be sufficient interest when plots of land do actually become available on the moon or Mars, although they will be much more expensive than Hope’s offerings. 

So, who should have the right to acquire property in space? My answer: those who have the financial means to get there, develop, and use the land. For instance, if SpaceX succeeds in reaching Mars and starts to build permanent settlements on the red planet, then the ownership of land should go to SpaceX first. Not of the entire planet, of course, but of a practicable area, for example the size of Singapore. The surface area of Mars is 200,000 times that of Singapore, so SpaceX would initially only own 0.0005 percent of Mars. That would be enough to develop multiple settlements, but not so many that others would no longer have a chance.

SpaceX could fund its flight and development costs by listing the land on Mars in a real estate investment trust (REIT). The price would then be determined by the market. Most people would buy shares not to live there themselves, but in the hope of value appreciation. As an incentive for people to settle on and develop Mars, colonists could be offered stocks at a preferential price as a “golden hello” once they reach Mars and spend at least five years there.

When the Chinese reach Mars, they may assert their claim to plots of land on the planet according to the idea outlined above, and this would probably remain the property of the Chinese state. But it is likely that they would adopt the customary practice in China of selling hereditary building rights for a period of 50–70 years. 

However, we would need to tread carefully: If the Chinese were the first to reach Mars, it is possible they would declare the entire planet as belonging to China. This would constitute a clear violation of Article II of the Outer Space Treaty, but according to Article XVI, the treaty can be terminated with one year’s notice. The potential response from the United States in such a scenario raises concerns—would it lead to war? Or sanctions? Therefore, it would be prudent to negotiate a new space treaty before it is clear who wins the new space race. Moreover, competition for premium real estate on Mars, such as in areas with anticipated water sources or suitable lava caves for settlement, would likely ensue. It could be similar on the moon.

As far as asteroids are concerned, at least in the case of smaller celestial bodies, ownership could be granted to those capable of mining and extracting resources such as water and platinum. The best option would probably be to list the entire asteroid on the stock exchange as a REIT, which would fund mining operations and enable shareholders to receive dividends from the extraction of raw materials. Even before a single dollar was earned, or a single penny in dividends could be paid out, this would allow a market for trading in such stocks to develop. 

While this is all just a thought experiment, it illustrates the direction things would need to go in. Whether these ideas are realistic or if different concepts will prevail is something no one can know today.

Why the Case for Space Socialism Doesn’t Work

One thing, however, is absolutely clear: As long as there is no legal certainty for investors, they will not invest. To return to the starting point: Who will invest in asteroid mining if, as some envision, they are expected to share the profits with others who have taken no risk themselves but simply want to profit as free riders?

The best-selling authors Kelly and Zach Weinersmith cite the Moon Agreement as a model in their book A City on Mars: “The Moon Agreement would have set up the solar system as a particularly communal form of res communis, known in international law as ‘common heritage of mankind’ or just ‘CHM’…a commons collectively owned by all of humanity. If the Moon were under a CHM framework and you wanted to use Moon water, you would have to compensate all of humanity by some means.” 

They envision something like a large international planning authority to regulate how the proceeds are distributed: “An international regime to oversee exploitation…a big entity established by states that were parties to the Moon Agreement looking over things, and in particular making sure developing nations got a fair cut.” This international regime would regulate both “where people are allowed to set up shop and what they’re allowed to do with the local resources once they get there. It wouldn’t be dynamic, it wouldn’t be like a science fiction novel, and frankly it would be very slow and bureaucratic and boring.” In this vision, there would be no room for private companies, no room for the formation of fair prices in the market, no room for entrepreneurial ingenuity. It is space socialism, doomed from the start. 

On Earth, only capitalism has worked, but for a few decades, socialist systems without private property were also able to survive, albeit at the cost of widespread poverty, authoritarian rule, and famine. In space, where the challenges are immensely greater and living conditions infinitely harsher, socialism would be doomed from the outset. 

The question of whether establishing private property rights on celestial bodies will be possible, and whether Martians will opt for a capitalist or socialist system, is essentially the same as asking whether colonization is possible at all. Even if Martian settlers were initially prohibited from establishing property ownership and introducing a capitalist system, they would inevitably have to do so sooner rather than later anyway, because they simply couldn’t exist on the red planet otherwise. I’m sure the Martian settlers won’t care all that much about a space treaty signed over 100 years ago and would establish private property rights. And how would Earth’s governments respond? Would they wage war against the Martian settlers, or kill them with sanctions?

This article is adapted from New Space Capitalism: The Entrepreneurial Path to the Stars by permission of Skyhorse.

The post Why You Can't Settle Mars or Colonize the Moon Without Real Property Rights appeared first on Reason.com.

Public backlash to data centers is growing. About 70 percent of Americans would not want a new data center built near their homes, according to a new poll from Heatmap News. A majority, 55 percent, said they would “strongly oppose” it.

The same poll asked respondents why they thought electricity prices were rising, and 53 percent—up from 28 percent last August—blamed “the construction of new data centers.” Fear over data centers’ energy use, and to a lesser extent water use, is driving a broad backlash to their buildout.

While it’s simply untrue that any big data center anywhere is consuming a dangerous amount of local drinking water (or that the total sum of AI infrastructure is consuming much at all), there is some legitimate debate as to whether these facilities are driving up utility bills. In a recent review of state-level data on electricity prices, the Institute for Energy Research found “a slightly positive but still statistically insignificant relationship between data centers and fast price increases.” Often, new data centers are built at the same time as new power plants—so prices for nearby consumers can even fall. But in some cases, prices have gone up: PJM Interconnection, the country’s largest grid operator, has put some of the blame for a 76 percent price hike in the first quarter of 2026 on “issues associated with data center load.”

Whether the phenomenon is more widespread remains murky. Regardless, lawmakers across the country have seized on the public’s fears and are proposing sweeping new restrictions on these facilities.

At the federal level, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) has sponsored a bill imposing a total “moratorium” on data center construction nationwide. Last week, New York lawmakers passed their own year-long moratorium. Other states are considering other ways to tighten restrictions—North Carolina, for example, which is advancing a bill that would impose new regulations and reviews on data center construction.

While elected officials say these measures are necessary to stop rising electricity costs, they’re likely to result in less overall economic activity and fewer jobs. The costs associated with new data centers—which can bring thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in revenue to nearby communities—could be better kept under control simply by making it easier for power companies to meet demand.

That’s the approach that lawmakers in Ohio and New Hampshire have taken. Each state has implemented a policy framework called “consumer-regulated energy” (CRE) to allow the owners of data centers (and other major industrial facilities) to buy their power from third-party providers instead of the centralized grid.

Not only does that keep any given facility’s energy needs isolated from the rest of the grid—which, according to a Cato Institute report, means that big data centers can be built and powered at “zero cost to taxpayers and ratepayers”—it also speeds up their construction tremendously. When data centers can source their power from a third party, they bypass much of the decade’s worth of infrastructure buildout that’s necessary to connect to the grid.

A CRE-adjacent framework could soon be implemented nationwide. Earlier this year, Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) introduced the DATA Act, which would exempt off-grid data centers from federal regulations, making the entire process faster and cheaper.

If data center construction is increasing electricity bills, the best solution isn’t a knee-jerk ban on the industry. It’s common-sense reforms that make it possible for everyone, and every data center, to get the power they need.

The post The Best Way To Keep Data Centers From Driving Up Electricity Costs appeared first on Reason.com.

Robby Soave and Christian Britschgi discuss the brewing Texas showdown between Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico. Then, they break down Rep. Nancy Mace’s (R–S.C.) proposal to give boomers a property tax break and Pope Leo XIV’s latest encyclical on artificial intelligence. Finally, they wrap up with some lighter debates over The Legend of Zelda, Nicolas Cage movies, retro-futurism, Jill Biden’s latest remarks, and whether President Donald Trump’s political influence will ever fade.

0:00—Heretics and hypocrites in Texas

14:30—Talarico takes back his former wokeness

19:10—If you can’t take it, don’t dish it

32:25—Coal mines are cool?

34:00—Mace’s boomer luxury communism

39:20—The pope’s views on AI

47:40—Why does anyone play video games?

58:59—Nicolas Cage is a good actor

1:05:57—Retro-futurism

1:10:26—Jill Biden’s latest remarks

1:18:36—Will Trump’s influence ever fade?

The post James Talarico vs. Ken Paxton, the Pope on AI, and Caves appeared first on Reason.com.

Stewart Brand has spent decades shaping how we think about technology, the environment, and the future. He first came to prominence in the 1960s as co-creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, the counterculture bible that helped inspire personal computing, the hacker ethic, and the modern environmentalist movement. Since then, he’s launched the Long Now Foundation, championed nuclear power and de-extinction, and pushed us to think in 10,000-year time spans.

In his new book, Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One, Brand argues that the real work of civilization isn’t flashy invention but the long, patient care of complex systems. In March, he spoke with Nick Gillespie about what that means—and whether his vision of planetary stewardship conflicts with libertarian values of individualism, creative destruction, and decentralized power.

Reason: Your new book argues that maintenance is the hidden foundation of everything. What do we miss when we focus on innovation, creative destruction, and disruption and forget about checking that everything is tied down the right way on a daily basis?

Brand: I don’t think they’re opposed. A lot of innovation comes out of maintenance. People who figure out how to improve a thing are often the ones who are stuck with keeping it going and realizing how difficult that is. “Gee, we could make it easier this way or that way. Or what if we just throw this stupid thing away and get something better?” Which is all part of the process of keeping something going.

We often think of maintenance in terms of preventive maintenance. Repair is such a big hassle when something breaks. It’s a trauma to you and to the system that the thing is part of. We spend some of our time doing the very unrewarding thing of changing the oil and brushing your teeth so that your teeth don’t fall out and your car doesn’t blow up. But really maintenance is the whole complete process of keeping the thing going. For example, right now, I’m writing on the history of agriculture, because if you’re an animal, you’ve got to keep it fed. We are animals and we have to keep ourselves fed. The process of doing that has been one innovation after another.

You write about how interchangeable parts made it easier for people to fix things rather than throw the whole thing away, and how necessity was the mother of invention—living miles away from your neighbor, you had to figure out how to fix things yourself. Do you feel that, as a society, we still have that ethos, or have the machines we use to live and prosper become mysterious to us?

The Model T was designed to be maintained and tailored any old which way. Henry Ford grew up on a farm in the Midwest. He knew that farmers and ranchers were very good at fixing their own stuff, so he counted on that. The Model T stayed the Model T, and millions of them were made and used, and got old, went in the junkyards, and then got completely pillaged in the junkyards for the parts—because 20 years later, a part from a really old Model T would fit in your brand new Model T.

I’m glad you brought up the bit about interchangeable parts, because it’s probably the most anti-libertarian, anti–Reason magazine section of the book, in that it was government people who for 40 years in the War Department, the Ordnance Department specifically, spent millions of dollars, which now would be a lot more than that, trying to get manufacturers in the U.S. capable of making interchangeable parts. It turns out you have to get down to about a 50th of a millimeter accuracy in order for that to actually work. They did it. And that’s why America wound up taking the lead in the manufacturing part of the Industrial Revolution.

We led the way, a thing called the “American system.” It turned out that the way to get really good interchangeable parts was to basically automate the machine tools that made them.

Ford never allowed anybody to use a file on the assembly line, because as soon as you took a part and filed it to fit better, that would suddenly stop the assembly line. With guns, if your gun failed and you’re military and you’re in the field and you need to fix it, you’ve got to find a gunsmith, which is not going to be anywhere near the battlefield, and they’ll file a part to get it put in there or they’ll make it from scratch. Once they’re interchangeable, like the AK-47, any piece of any AK-47 will substitute just fine and they’re very roughly designed and built.

I see that process in the 19th century as being what led to [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency]. The researchers I counted on call it military enterprise.

In the book, you write about how the AK-47 was created by the Soviet Union and is the weapon of choice for armies and insurgents around the world because it is relatively simple, easily fixed, and there are lots of parts for it. You compare that to the M16, developed in America, which was rolled out en masse in Vietnam and was terrible for that. It has twice as many parts as the AK-47. It’s more subject to corrosion and rust and gunk getting in there. It seems like we’re always going between simpler products that might be more limited vs. something more sophisticated. Is there a sweet spot somewhere in between?

I don’t think so. I think you wind up being rewarded by going in both directions. AK-47s were cheap and M16s are not cheap. AK-47s operate in the mud. They operate in the sand. They operate in humidity. You can pick one up out of the mud and fire it, and as you fire, the mud flies out. [An] M16 basically has to be surgically cleaned to function. When it functions, it’s absolutely fantastic—at 500 meters you can put high-velocity small rounds through a helmet.

There’s always a place in not just the market, but a range of situations and mindsets, for things that are cheap, fast, and just barely in control, and things that are exquisitely attuned to perfection if they’re in relatively perfect circumstances. Exploring both of those, as a good direction to explore the whole field of design, is always worth doing.

Your work on, among other things, the campaign to have NASA release a photograph of the whole Earth helped inspire the first Earth Day. You helped create the environmentalist mindset. When you say they went too far, that carries a lot of weight.

Greenpeace were anti-technology. Romantics in general are anti-technology. John Henry is always going to get the song. The steam drill never does. But the steam drill is actually a better way to do that kind of work.

The French Revolution—where the idea of interchangeable parts for guns, or muskets then, was actually started—the French Revolution said, “Don’t do that, because these nice gunmakers will be out of work.” They actually shut down the guy named [Honoré] Blanc who was building interchangeable parts for muskets. France went, in the course of a generation, from having the best muskets in Europe to having the worst muskets in Europe. There was no taking account of “Was this beneficial for the customer?”—in that case, soldiers. And that keeps happening.

The anti-technology romantic is almost always: 1) wrong, and, 2) mistaken in his arguments. The way to critique a new anything—AI now—is to embrace it and experiment with it, make mistakes with it, see if you can break it, red-team it, do all these things to sharpen it. And if in the course of that you decide, “You know what, this is a blind alley and we need to back out of it,” the critique from people who have done that is a valid critique.

People are just imagining problems. You can always imagine more problems than you can imagine more ways of things actually going right.

What do you think is the strongest critique of AI as it’s being rolled out now? What are the things that we should be testing it on to see if it’s something that we’re not really going to embrace?

I don’t think of that. But I do know a lot of the people who are going to think of that, and I trust them to investigate the ways it could go wrong.

They’d be able to head off some of them. They won’t be able to head off all of them. Some of them will go probably pretty calamitous, and then we negotiate. The use of AI in weapons is clearly going to be played out very quickly, because the militaries always grab new technologies and turn them into weapons, and rightfully so from their standpoint. It could be a thing like the use of gas that gets tabooed after a while. The use of nuclear weapons, even tactical ones—that’s been tabooed for quite a while.

Everything has to do with a threat. And the massive amount of testing that went on in the ’50s and ’60s was negotiating with threat. But once you had mutual assured destruction with the second strike capability, that actually put a stop to it. That was, in a way, why it was developed. Some problems turn out to be nonexistent. Some problems turn out to be easy to recognize and solve, and some problems are really hard to solve and it takes a while. We’ll go through all of that with AIs.

In the late ’60s, there was more political violence than there is now and it was undergirded by people who actually believed that political violence was the answer. The country seemed to be coming apart. There was no consensus about things. We seem to be back in something like that, where there’s a lot of polarization, demonization, and political violence. Is the political system robust enough to keep things in check or is it just not working anymore? How do we create a consensual government system where we get most of the benefits with fewer of the harsh costs?

This is actually an interesting time to be alive right now, because all of that is up for proof, up for grabs. There’s a lot of grabbing going on. The system was designed to be ungrabbable, but it’s been grabbed. How far down that path of having been grabbed does it go before it becomes stuck there? That’s what we’re in the process of finding out.

There’s lots of reasons to find its way back to some kind of balance. It’ll be different than before. The systems will be different than before. We may have different political parties with different names, but the basic apparatus in the towns, to a large degree in the states, is pretty intact. We’ll find a way to find a new center of balance.

The Whole Earth Catalog‘s statement of purpose says, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” The first issue came out in 1968. We’re coming up on 60 years. Do you think we’ve gotten pretty good at it?

The big test will be climate. We’ve certainly gotten better at a whole lot of godlike powers—god with a small g. These are great god things, not the Almighty.

We haven’t really attempted anything in terms of maintenance of the planet at planet scale, at planet pace. With climate change, we’re dealing with a big, deep, slow process. There’s no instant cures, although some are better than others. Geoengineering is one that we’ll come to just because the cost of continually rising temperatures and rising oceans will make it seem like this is the low-cost way to buy enough time to really convert all of our energy systems to basically noncombustion. That will be a different planet, a different society, different global civilization, because it’s not economic. There’s a global economy, but there’s no such thing as a planetary economy. The things that matter at planet scale are not measurable in dollars and cents.

The great thing of the advance of science is that we have lots and lots of capabilities of sensing that something is going wrong and what exactly is going wrong in that thing. In terms of maintenance, the ability to do that kind of sensing is crucial. They call it predictive maintenance. Before the thing breaks, you have indications that would like to break, and that’s when you try to head it off. Often, you can’t. So far, we’ve not fully succeeded in doing that with climate. We’ve gone a long way, much farther into solar than I would ever have thought. We were pushing solar 60 years ago in the Whole Earth Catalog in a big way. Among our crowd, we thought, “This is obvious,” but it took a while for it to become cheap and easy.

If you’re a farmer and you have 100 acres of your farming, you can get a certain amount of food out of it. Even with precision farming, it’s going to be just a certain amount. If you let some company put a whole bunch of solar collectors on your 100 acres and you lease it to them, you get 10x to 100x the money and none of the hassle. The cheap, abundant source of energy is increasingly becoming the sun. And there’s quite a lot of sunlight. There’ll be even more in orbit as these guys are trying to figure out how to start having major data centers in space.

Do you feel like the world is growing up a bit about nuclear energy? You rankled a lot of people in the environmentalist movement when you claimed that nuclear power makes obvious sense if you want to reduce various kinds of emissions and minimize impact on the planet. Do you feel that message is about to be fully accepted around the world?

The opposition got outlived. Basically, they were not able to convince younger and younger generations to buy into what turned out to be a false fear. And then very wealthy young people want to do AI or want to do crypto or whatever; that takes a lot of energy. They look directly at the advantages of nuclear power. They’re not looking at it through the history of nuclear weapons, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Three Mile Island and all that. They’re looking at “Can this be made safe?” Yes, totally. “Is it something that can really scale?” Yes. So nuclear scaling up and solar continuing to scale up look like they’re both going to happen.

What are you doing to maintain your legacy? How does one go about maintaining their legacy while they’re still around to do it?

I tried to write a memoir at one point, and as soon as I wrote a line of it, I hated it. I was just bored with myself. But I didn’t have to because some guys came along and wanted to make a film about me and this documentary called We Are As Gods was made, and it’s good. John Markoff came along and wanted to write a biography, and he did, and it’s good. All of the Whole Earthwork we did over 30-plus years is now online at wholeearth.info. My legacy has gone ahead and somehow established itself. It’s not something I’m concerned about. I’m one of the really very lucky people in that respect.

After The Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich died, you wrote, “I’ll speak up for Paul. He was wrong about discounting the ‘demographic transition’ in human population, but he co-authored (with Peter Raven) one of the most cited papers in biology, on co-evolution.” Given his large role in stressing people about overpopulation and his influence among governments in reducing births, how do you assess his overall contribution to science and society?

Remember, it was Dave Brower at Sierra Club who asked Paul to write that book and to write it not as science but as a polemic. Overpopulation was an environmentalist obsession before Paul lit the fuse on his book. (These were the same self-named “ecologists” who couldn’t tell a trophic level from a Tyrannosaurus.)

Peter Raven is a botanist (whose Wikipedia bio says, “Raven is possibly best known for his work ‘Butterflies and Plants: A Study in Coevolution,’ published in the journal Evolution in 1964, which he coauthored with Paul R. Ehrlich”). Paul was a zoologist, a lepidopterist focused on checkerspot butterfly populations. He noticed that supposedly identical butterflies dined on completely different plants in different regions. Over coffee, he and Raven complained to each other that zoologists treated plants as just so much edible plastic, whereas in evolutionary reality, plants pay just as much active attention to animals as animals do to them. Naming that attention “coevolution” was a thunderclap in evolution theory, because it forced biologists to notice that most of evolution is in fact coevolution—living things devote most of their adaptation to dealing with other living things, who are busy adapting right back at them.

It’s a profound idea that reframes everything. That’s why I named a magazine for it—CoEvolution Quarterly. For me, it far outweighs Paul’s exaggerations about human population numbers.

In a sense, I’m attempting something similar with “maintenance.” It’s not just a persistent nuisance. It’s so essential that it’s what most living things have to spend most of their time and attention on tending to.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity, as well as augmented by questions answered over email.

The post Stewart Brand on Fixing Stuff, Modern Environmentalism, and the Nuclear Future appeared first on Reason.com.

“ChatGPT advised the FSU shooter that a mass shooting would get more attention from media if it involved several children,” NBC deputy tech editor Ben Goggin posted on X yesterday.

“Advised” is a funny way to put it, implying that the artificial intelligence system recommended this course of action or helped the shooter—then-20-year-old Phoenix Ikner—plot details of how he would carry out his attack. In fact, ChatGPT seems to have provided neutral information in response to questions that were not obviously asked with murderous intent.

That attack, which took place in April 2025 at Florida State University, left two people dead, including Tiru Chabba. Chabba’s widow, Vandana Joshi, is now suing ChatGPT maker OpenAI in federal court, alleging negligence, battery, defective design, failure to warn, and wrongful death.

After chatting with the shooter, ChatGPT “either defectively failed to connect the dots or else was never properly designed to recognize the threat,” the suit alleges. OpenAI “failed to create a product that would refrain from participating in discussions that amounted to it co-conspiring with Ikner” and “failed to create a product that would appropriately alert a human that investigation by law enforcement may be necessary to prevent a specific plan for imminent harm to the public.”

But treating the conversations between ChatGPT and Ikner as grounds for legal liability is misguided, no matter how understandable it may be that the victims’ loved ones would want to assign blame here.

In this case, ChatGPT allegedly provided Ikner with information on basic features of certain guns, on what times the FSU student union was crowded, and on what sorts of mass shootings received attention.

Knowing what Ikner eventually did, it may be easy to view this as damning. But asking about what times a campus is crowded is not at all weird in itself. Asking how a gun works could be simple curiosity, or related to hunting or self-protection. And researching the common features of prominent mass shootings is something one might do for all sorts of harmless reasons—academic research, media criticism, or gun violence prevention efforts, to name a few. ChatGPT providing neutral information on the kinds of shootings that receive attention does not amount to (as the suit alleges) “advice” or “recommendations.”

And just because Ikner asked about all three things does not mean he did so simultaneously, in one session, in a way that might trigger alarms. It’s possible for people to use AI tools in ways which would make “connect[ing] the dots” between any dispersed conversations difficult.

It wasn’t as if Ikner talked with ChatGPT about nothing but mass shootings. Joshi’s complaint alleges that ChatGPT “helped him with his homework and his work-out routines, gave him tips on getting girls and relationship advice, and suggested to him how to dress and style his hair.” They chatted about everything from loneliness and being bullied to video games, Nazis, Christian nationalism, Donald Trump, and mental health.

It also allegedly advised him to seek help. “Ikner described his depression to ChatGPT, who confirmed some of his symptoms and advised him to seek out a therapist,” states the lawsuit. When Ikner asked about suicide, ChatGPT provided “information of effects of suicide on others and twice directed him to a suicide prevention hotline.

Joshi’s complaint suggests the suicide talk in conjunction with other chats—including ones in which Ikner asked about the assassination attempts on Trump and one in which he asked about the aftermath of shootings—constituted a big red flag. Again, we don’t even know that ChatGPT had historical memory of any of these supposed red-flag conversations by the time another one came up. But even if it did, it’s unclear why these queries should have raised alarms. Most people who contemplate suicide don’t become mass shooters. It’s natural for people to want information about assassination attempts on the president. And a question about what would happen after a mass shooting at FSU could easily be something that someone afraid of school shootings would wonder.

“ChatGPT provided factual responses to questions with information that could be found broadly across public sources on the internet,” OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri, told NBC, “and it did not encourage or promote illegal or harmful activity.”

It’s important in emotionally charged situations like these to think about the alternatives—alternatives to Joshi getting this information from ChatGPT and alternatives to the way ChatGPT and OpenAI handled things.

It seems silly to imagine that if Ikner had not got any of the objected-to information from ChatGPT, he wouldn’t have been able to carry out his planned shooting. All of the information he gleaned could have been obtained easily from a basic internet search or other sources.

ChatGPT could be trained to refuse to answer questions about certain topics, including guns or the history of mass shootings. But this could limit its general usefulness and prevent it from providing information to people seeking it for neutral or even beneficial reasons—and for what ultimate purpose? A motivated criminal isn’t going to give up just because ChatGPT won’t answer his question.

OpenAI could be more aggressive in reporting people to authorities over their chat topics. But this seems unlikely to go well for anyone. It would almost certainly make people more wary of using ChatGPT. AI detractors may imagine that as a good thing—until people start turning to other AI tools, including those outside the United States and unsympathetic to any U.S. law enforcement requests.

And authorities would be overwhelmed by useless reports. Following up on all of these could take time away from more important pursuits. It could also lead to all sorts of negative encounters between innocent individuals and police, putting people’s civil liberties and even their lives at risk.

If tech companies are potentially on the hook for murder because their AI products chatted with a murderer, we can expect to see them reporting anyone who asks about mental health, guns, historical violence, and much more. This would inevitably draw a lot of innocent people into encounters with police, child welfare agencies, and other authorities.

Each new entertainment and communications tool gets its turn being blamed—in the public imagination and in court—for people’s bad acts. Before AI, we saw people blame social media; before social media, we saw people blame video games; before video games we saw people blame violent TV and movies, and so on.

People want some simple answer to horrible events—just ban violent video games, or put ratings on TV shows, or make AI companies file more police reports. But expecting AI companies to stop shootings won’t lead to fewer shootings. It’s just going to create new problems.

IN THE NEWS 

Texas app store act blocked: “A federal judge in Austin has once again blocked a state law from taking effect that would regulate minors’ access to content on Google Play and Apple’s App Store,” notes the Austin American-Statesman: 

Judge Robert L. Pitman previously blocked the App Store Accountability Act from taking effect on Jan. 1 by issuing a preliminary injunction while the law’s constitutionality is considered in court. He declined to lift that injunction Wednesday afternoon.

SB 2420, signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott in 2025, would require app stores to ensure users are over 18 or obtain parental consent before allowing them to download or purchase an app.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton wanted Judge Pitman to permit enforcement of the law as the case played out. But Pitman has said the law raises serious concerns for free speech.

On Substack 

“Instead of fracturing our shared reality, this handful of AIs seems to be piecing it back together,” writes Jerusalem Demsas at The Argument. She argues that artificial intelligence is a centralizing rather than decentralizing technology.

Public conversation tends to treat chatbots as the next in a long line of digital communications technologies that have decentralized truth.

The internet, smartphones, and social media all made the production of information cheap and significantly decentralized who could produce it. AI is making the production of information extremely expensive and centralizing who can produce it.

And while, yes, AI hallucinates, the direction of its errors is toward mainstream consensus, not fringe positions. When ChatGPT gets something wrong, it tends to do so in a confused-Wikipedia-editor-misremembering-something-they-once-read kind of way, not in a QAnon-forum-poster-high-on-ketamine kind of way.

The open question is who will get to control the centralizing forces of AI.

Read This Thread 

There are so many insane wildly misleading stories coming out about data centers almost every day now that I’m mostly having to give up on commenting on them to focus on actually getting blog posts out, but it feels like a tsunami. I’ll share one from just today as an example.

— Andy Masley (@AndyMasley) May 10, 2026

More Sex & Tech 

• Prostitution has “been called the oldest profession, and it seems like if there is a willing seller and a willing buyer between adults, the government has no business getting involved,” Rhode Island state Rep. Edith Ajello (D-Providence) told The Providence Journal. Ajello is the lead sponsor of House Bill No. 8057, which would decriminalize prostitution in the state. In April, the legislature held the measure for further study.

• A Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression poll conducted in April 2026 found that only 26 percent of respondents trust the federal government to oversee social media use for minors. But most people—69 percent—said they trusted parents to do so.

• Lawmakers in Portland, Oregon, want to make it easier to crack down on hotels where prostitution takes place. But “shutting down a venue doesn’t make [sex work] go away,” Emi Koyama, founder of Coalition for Rights & Safety for People in the Sex Trade, told Filter. “It displaces people to other areas, and it becomes more dangerous.”

• “Adult site Pornhub will now allow users in the U.K. to confirm their age using Apple’s verification system, introduced in iOS 26.4,” reports Forbes. Pornhub’s parent company, Aylo, has resisted conducting its own ID checks to verify ages but “announced on May 5, 2026 that Apple’s method—the world’s first operating-system-level age check—meets their rigorous privacy standards.”

ª Chris Ferguson on a new study of cell phone bans in schools: “at least on the surface, this study is very bad news, indeed for cellphone ban fans. It supports the narrative that they are largely ineffective. There are some reasonable criticisms of the study though.”

The post Don't Blame ChatGPT for the Florida State Shooting appeared first on Reason.com.

Self-checkout machines are in the crosshairs. In recent months, numerous states and localities have considered legislation to curtail the use of automated checkout in grocery stores. These bills are often positioned as part of an effort to cut down on retail theft, but it appears the driving force behind them is to create more unionized jobs.

According to USA Today, at least six states have considered rules that would restrict self-checkout machines. The states range from blue Connecticut to red Ohio, but it doesn’t stop there. Two cities in California already have self-checkout limits in place, while New York City is currently considering restrictions as well.

Self-checkout restrictions are often framed as a commonsense crime prevention measure that protects grocery store workers and cuts back against the recent uptick in retail theft nationwide. But when it comes to these bills, the fine print points toward a different motivation.

For instance, the Connecticut bill mandates that stores must have one employee for every two self-checkout machines, in addition to having one manual checkout station for every two automated lanes. Stores cannot go over eight self-checkout lanes total. And any employee designated with the task of supervising self-checkouts is barred from engaging in any other simultaneous duties that could interfere with such supervision.

The various bills percolating in other state capitals and city halls are all largely structured the same. A previous iteration of California’s self-checkout bill specified that any store seeking to implement technology that “significantly affects the essential job functions of its employees” or “eliminates jobs or functions” must conduct an “impact assessment” before doing so, underscoring the real impetus there.

In other words, in the name of reducing theft, these rules would functionally operate to increase the number of clerks that each store must employ at any given time. Given that the grocery industry has historically had higher unionization rates than other retail sectors, this would translate into more unionized jobs.

If any doubt remains, one need only look at the biggest supporters of these bills. In Connecticut, all the legislative testimony submitted in favor of restricting self-checkout came from labor unions, including representatives affiliated with AFL-CIO, Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), which is the largest grocery worker union in the U.S. A CalMatters summary of sponsors and opponents for California’s self-checkout bill likewise shows that the majority of the bill’s boosters are labor unions.

News articles published about these bills also frequently quote UFCW reps touting their virtues. The effort to restrict self-checkout dates back to at least 2019, when unions in Oregon pushed a state ballot measure that would have limited groceries to two self-checkout lanes per store.

To be sure, there is evidence that self-checkout machines can result in higher shoplifting rates. One frequently-cited study found that so-called inventory shrink at grocery stores was 16 times more likely with self-checkout than with traditional cashiers. A LendingTree survey reported that 27 percent of self-checkout users admit to intentionally stealing items in self-checkout lanes, with another 36 percent saying they took items inadvertently.

But unsurprisingly, stores themselves—who have a direct bottom-line incentive to prevent shoplifting—have proven more than capable of responding. Walmart and Target have garnered headlines for dropping or limiting self-checkout at various stores around the country, while Five Below and Dollar General have also curtailed automated checkout in recent years. Technology also offers promise, with various groceries now onboarding smart video and AI to crack down on shoplifting in the self-checkout lane.

In the end, no one wants to clamp down on retail theft more than grocery stores themselves. If that means cutting back on self-checkout, they will do so. But they don’t need the government, aided by unions, to decide for them—and to forcibly inflate their payrolls at the same time.

The post Self-Checkout Is Under Fire Across the Country. Is Theft Really the Reason? appeared first on Reason.com.

The Australian government, which has already imposed strict regulations on American tech firms operating in the country, now expects these companies to pay taxes to support Australian journalism.

On Tuesday, Australia unveiled draft legislation for a “News Bargaining Incentive,” which would require major tech companies, including Meta, Google, and TikTok, to make commercial deals with news organizations or face a 2.25 percent tax on local revenue, reports The Wall Street Journal. Companies would be incentivized to comply by receiving offsets of either 150 or 170 percent, effectively reducing the tax. The legislation would not apply to AI companies.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told reporters that the bargaining incentive would bring in an expected 200 to 250 million Australian dollars, “every single dollar” of which “will go back to journalists.”

Australia’s communications minister, Anika Wells, pitches this as a way to fix the country’s old News Media Bargaining Code, which took effect in 2021. Like the legislation introduced this week, that code pressured designated tech companies to pay journalistic outlets for news. Google and Meta initially entered into agreements with news outlets. But when Meta’s contract expired in 2024, the company refused to renew, arguing that just 3 percent of its content was news-related.

A Meta spokesperson criticized Australia’s most recent proposal as a “digital services tax,” writing on X: “News organizations opt to post content on our platforms because they get value from it. We don’t take their news content. Yet the tax applies whether or not news content appears on our platforms.”

Google is also pushing back against the tax, explaining in a statement that the proposal “ignores the fact that Google already has commercial agreements with the news industry, misunderstands how the ad market changed and mandates payments from some companies while arbitrarily excluding platforms like Microsoft, Snapchat and OpenAI—despite the major shift in how people consume news.”

The Australian government has a history of meddling in its country’s information environment. In December, it prohibited people under the age of 16 from using social media platforms. Enforcement has been rocky, and many young Australians have successfully evaded the ban. Instead of accepting that kids are savvy enough to evade restrictions, the Australian government threatened to sue Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube for noncompliance.

The mission to save local journalism may appear well-meaning. Who doesn’t want to support original reporting? But the new scheme would not just benefit scrappy reporters at small-town papers doing shoe-leather journalism. While it offers incentives for tech companies to strike deals with smaller organizations, the companies could still reduce their tax burden by making deals with larger operations. Australia’s major news organizations, including News Corp Australia, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and Nine Entertainment Co., have been vocal supporters of the code and would likely be its major beneficiaries.

And even if the new code gives a boost to struggling newsrooms, that wouldn’t address the journalism industry’s underlying problems. It would impose a system where Australian newsrooms rely on another country’s tech industry for survival. The more durable, albeit challenging, path forward for newsrooms is to reach audiences and secure funding without a government middleman.

The post A Journalism Tax Is a New Front in Australia's War on American Tech appeared first on Reason.com.

Seven years ago, police in Midlothian, Virginia, sought to identify a bank robber by asking Google to search the records of more than 500 million people who used the company’s “location history” feature. That search identified 19 devices that were in or near the bank around the time of the robbery, which police winnowed down to three people, including Okello Chatrie, the man who was ultimately convicted of the crime.

Depending on your perspective, that use of a “geofence” warrant was either an unobjectionable example of smart police work or an outrageous invasion of privacy. On Monday, the Supreme Court weighed the merits of those contending views in a case that illustrates the threat that two dubious doctrines pose to Fourth Amendment rights now that Americans routinely entrust huge volumes of personal information to tech companies that help them with myriad quotidian tasks.

In 1967, the Supreme Court said the Fourth Amendment applies only when you have a “reasonable expectation of privacy.” In subsequent cases that involved bank and telephone records, the Court said you have no such expectation when you voluntarily share information with third parties for their own business use.

The problems with those principles were clear in a 2018 case that addressed the FBI’s tracking of a robbery suspect via location data collected by cellphone sites. Although the majority held that such tracking generally requires a warrant, that conclusion was hard to reconcile with the third-party rule, as Justice Neil Gorsuch noted in his dissent.

Chatrie’s case is broadly similar, except that the information used to identify him was collected by his own phone rather than cell sites. Although Google no longer keeps such data on its servers, many commonly used apps track the whereabouts of their users, and that information is often stored remotely.

In Chatrie’s case, police obtained a warrant. But his lawyers argue that such orders sweep so broadly that they violate the Fourth Amendment, which says a warrant must be based on probable cause and must “particularly” describe “the place to be searched” and “the persons or things to be seized.”

The Trump administration wants the Supreme Court to reject that argument. But it also maintains that geofence inquiries do not require any sort of warrant because people who consent to location tracking have no reasonable expectation that the resulting information will be kept private.

If so, Chatrie’s lawyer, Adam Unikowsky, warned during oral argument on Monday, the same logic would allow the government to search people’s remotely stored emails, photos, calendars, and documents at will. Several justices understandably viewed that prospect with alarm.

Although Deputy Solicitor General Eric Feigin assured the justices that his argument did not extend that far, those other examples likewise involve voluntary sharing of information with third parties, which supposedly makes the Fourth Amendment inapplicable. And even when the information is limited to location tracking, it can still reveal sensitive details of people’s lives.

“The potential for abuse is breathtaking,” Unikowsky notes in a Supreme Court brief. “The government need only draw a geofence around a church, a political rally, or a gun shop, and it can compel a search of every user’s records to learn who was there.”

In addition to arguing that people reasonably view their location histories as private, Unikowsky takes a page from Gorsuch, who in 2018 questioned both that test and the third-party doctrine. Since the Fourth Amendment protects people’s “papers” and “effects” against “unreasonable searches and seizures,” Gorsuch suggested, the relevant question is whether the information sought by the government falls into those categories.

Gorsuch thought it was plausible to argue that people retain a property interest in their records even when they share them with others for specific purposes. That argument, which Unikowsky adopts, seems like a promising way to escape the danger posed by the third-party doctrine, which modern technology has magnified to an extent that would have dismayed the Fourth Amendment’s framers.

© Copyright 2026 by Creators Syndicate Inc.

The post A SCOTUS Case Exposes the Dangers of 2 Misguided Fourth Amendment Doctrines appeared first on Reason.com.

Even before artificial intelligence was a meaningful force in the economy, technologists, politicians, and policy wonks of all political persuasions have endorsed a universal basic income to cope with the mass unemployment that will be caused by the AI revolution.

The familiar case is that an AI-powered economy will be able to automate most economic production, making the economy as a whole much richer, but leaving the average person jobless and destitute. The solution is then to redistribute some of the gains from AI to the public by sending everyone, regardless of income, a check.

Businessman Elon Musk has gone one step further by calling for a “universal HIGH INCOME” to pay for the AI-induced unemployment, which he suggested would be inflation-free thanks to the downward pressure AI will put on prices.

Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI.

AI/robotics will produce goods & services far in excess of the increase in the money supply, so there will not be inflation.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 17, 2026

Musk is almost certainly right that AI will put downward pressure on prices, as one would expect of any productivity-enhancing technology.

He’s mistaken in believing that this makes a universal income (regardless of whether it’s basic or “HIGH”) a wise policy.

Even in a future in which AI does revolutionize the economy, we will not see technologically driven mass unemployment. In fact, a universal basic income would likely result in more of the joblessness it’s meant to mitigate.

To the first point, the industrial revolution has been outsourcing more and more tasks to labor-saving machines for roughly 300 years now. While this ongoing process has certainly made lots of individual jobs obsolete, it has not made jobs generally obsolete.

Excepting the monthly ups and downs of the unemployment rate, the total number of jobs in the economy continues to rise precipitously in the long run.

If labor-saving technology destroyed the need for labor, we should have fewer jobs today than ever before. We don’t. Even as farms and factories employ fewer people, we keep finding ways to keep ourselves busy.

The AI boosters and doomers argue that this time will be different, because unlike spinning jennies, combine harvesters, and email, AI will eventually be smarter than humans at everything. When there’s nothing that flesh-and-blood humans can do better than machines, we’ll end up doing nothing at all.

These arguments are obviously speculative because we don’t have artificial general intelligence yet. Even when we do, it’s reasonable to assume that humans will continue to have employable comparative advantages, if only because humans prize human interaction.

There are lots of jobs today that could be automated but aren’t. Plenty of people work in offices even if their tasks could be completed remotely. So long as people are social creatures, I can only assume we’ll find something marketable to do with our time.

Outside of speculative future scenarios, here in the real world, the economic impact of AI continues to look similar to the impacts of past productivity-enhancing technological innovations. That’s true even in industries that have been most influenced by AI.

Language translation is something that AI has long been pretty good at, and language translation services have become increasingly automated over time.

When journalist Timothy Lee looked at the impact of AI on the industry in 2023, he found that the technology had caused prices for translation to fall, and more consumption of translation services. Translators themselves were adapting by either specializing in translation of legal or medical texts (which still requires human oversight), using AI to increase their productivity, or dropping out of the industry.

The effects of AI on translators weren’t all positive. But that basic story of falling prices, rising productivity, some jobs disappearing, and others becoming more specialized sounds a lot like every industry revolutionized by technology.

The evidence that AI will finally be the technology that puts everyone out of work just isn’t there.

Economic transitions don’t happen automatically. It will take time for people to find new jobs as AI destroys the old ones.

That’s precisely why a universal basic income or (“HIGH INCOME”) would be so dangerous to adopt.

A pretty robust finding in the research is that giving people unconditional cash grants leads them to work less and even stop working at all if the benefits are generous enough.

Pairing advancing AI with a universal basic income would give people a major incentive not to work, right as many existing jobs are being automated away. Instead of people finding their next comparative advantage in an economy being made more productive but also automated by AI, many would probably just stay home instead.

Far from mitigating the employment effects of AI, a universal income would seem to usher in the jobless dystopia that those convinced of AI’s transformative effects are worried about.

We should have a little faith in humans and technology. For centuries, technological progress has made us richer while creating more jobs. The only way AI will be different is if we use its productivity gains to pay people not to work.

The post Elon Musk's Mistaken Call for a 'Universal High Income' appeared first on Reason.com.