Hack Back

President Donald Trump just gave the green light to American companies to carry out their own cyberattacks against hackers. This essentially allows for a new form of trench warfare, but one that possibly helps American companies become more formidable to those who seek to harm them.

“Transnational Criminal Organizations (TCOs) pose a growing threat to American citizens, businesses, and national security,” reads the memorandum Trump issued yesterday. “Through Executive Order 14390 of March 6, 2026 (Combating Cybercrime, Fraud, and Predatory Schemes Against American Citizens), I directed the Federal Government to take various actions to combat cyber‑enabled crime harming American citizens. This memorandum expands the fight against TCO-perpetrated cybercrime by incorporating the ingenuity of the private sector.”

Companies will increasingly be able to work with the Homeland Security and Justice Departments to counter criminal cyberattackers and defend their own data. “The move is a sharp pivot from decades of cybersecurity policy across Republican and Democratic administrations that generally prioritized improving corporate defenses and confined offensive cyberoperations to the U.S. military and intelligence agencies,” reports The New York Times. In other words: This allows a much more offensive strategy.

That said, major questions remain about how this will play out in practice. The memo says it must involve only transnational criminal organizations that are separate from foreign governments (“unless clear intelligence exists establishing such connection”), which is a high burden to clear. Little clarity exists about these types of groups, including who exactly they’re composed of and who exactly they report to.

“To some extent, the new order would align the United States more with some of its chief cyberantagonists, including China and Russia, where spy agencies have long relied on contract hackers working in the private sector to further their national security missions, in part to afford the state plausible deniability,” notes the Times.

Dario, our great moral leader: “When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi invited AI leaders to a meeting in New Delhi earlier this year, security protocols allowed each executive to bring one additional person with them. Most brought colleagues, but Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei brought his wife, Cami Clark,” reports The Wall Street Journal. “Clark doesn’t work at Anthropic, but she is often seen sitting in the front row while Amodei talks at events such as Davos or can be found chatting up investors at gatherings such as the Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley. She acts as a sounding board and strategic adviser for Amodei, according to people close to the company. She also brought Anthropic a key early investor, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt—whom she had dated—as it was getting off the ground in early 2021, some of the people said.”

Clark’s “career has included co-founding a women-focused ‘free luxury porn’ company that she unsuccessfully tried to persuade convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to invest in, and starting a women’s ‘social dieting app’ that morphed into a women’s healthcare AI company.” The porn company was called Eddice, after her grandmother (ewwww). John Brockman, a literary agent, introduced Clark and her friend to Epstein in March 2011, per the Journal‘s reporting. “Hello Jeffrey! We would love to have dinner with you this evening,” wrote Clark, after being introduced by email. One year later, Clark reached back out to Epstein, saying: “We have the free luxury porn company. Does that ring a bell?”

“Yes, a loud gong,” replied Epstein. “Haha, I was going to say, you would be the first person that didn’t remember us,” replied Clark. She pitched him again on investing in her porn company and asked, “Are you still interested?” to which he replied: “Can’t do sex TV.” (He was a registered sex offender by this point.)

Anyway, now she’s married to Amodei, who has staked his whole career on building the “safe” and moral artificial intelligence company—the one that we can really trust to power our world.

Scenes from New York: “On Thursday, the City Council approved a package of bills authorizing restaurants to again set up dining structures on city streets year-round, and also allowing them to winterize the structures—on both sidewalks and streets—to render them more comfortable in the cold,” reports The New York Times. “Under the previous rules, outdoor dining structures on streets could open no earlier than April 1 and had to be deconstructed by the end of November, a costly and cumbersome process that dissuaded many restaurant operators from participating.” Many restaurants have, of course, already taken down their streeteries due to being caught in regulatory limbo.

QUICK HITS

• “Edward Bellamy once imagined that music on demand would be ‘the limit of human felicity.’ A modern apartment is full of things that once drew the same kind of awe,” writes Jordan Dworkin at Ordinary Abundance. Check the whole project out.
• “A 41-year-old immigrant from Haiti died after suffering a medical emergency within hours of arriving at Delaney Hall, a troubled, privately run immigration detention center in New Jersey,” reports The New York Times. “Months later, a Delaney detainee from Guatemala had what appeared to be a seizure and died after being transported to a hospital, federal officials said on Wednesday. And earlier this month, a man from El Salvador, 41, suffered a medical emergency; the cause of his death remains unknown. The deaths of three Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees in less than eight months have raised urgent questions about the medical services provided at Delaney Hall and at other detention centers, with immigrants and local officials describing haphazard health care.”
• Luigi Mangione, who killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in 2024, is expected to plead guilty in federal court today. He faces two stalking charges resulting in death, which could lead to life in prison for him. It’s also possible he accepts a plea deal. Then, later on, he’ll be tried in state court for a second-degree murder charge. More on the Mangione case and the related fandom that’s disturbingly emerged:

I wonder if kids still roll down their window, and try to get the drivers to honk their horns for them? Probably not. Probably too busy looking at iPads. https://t.co/WmODMPzQ1C

— Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) August 13, 2026