The Earths climate system is now out of balance, according to a new global report with scientists warning that a key measure of warming has reached its highest level on record.

The latest State of the Global Climate report from the World Meteorological Organization finds that the planet is retaining more heat than it releases back into space, a growing gap known as Earths energy imbalance. And that imbalance is now accelerating.

In 2025, it reached its highest level since modern measurements began in 1960, the report found, signaling that heat is building up across the planet faster than before. At its core, the concept is simple: the Earth absorbs energy from the sun and reflects some of it back into space. But rising greenhouse gas emissions are disrupting that balance.

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As more heat gets trapped, it doesnt just stay in one place; it spreads across the climate system. About 91% of that excess heat is absorbed by the oceans, while the rest warms the land and atmosphere or melts ice. Scientists say that buildup acts like a system under pressure.

The total amount of heat stored on Earth is not just increasing but accelerating, the report notes, pointing to long-term measurements showing a sharp rise in heat accumulation in recent decades.

The findings come as multiple other climate indicators continue to break records. Greenhouse gas concentrations, including carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, reached their highest levels in at least 800,000 years in 2024, reducing the planets ability to release heat.

At the same time, ocean heat content hit a new record high, glaciers continue to lose mass, with most of the worst years occurring since 2016, Arctic and Antarctic sea ice have declined sharply in recent years, and global sea levels are rising at an accelerating rate.

All of those changes are connected and driven by the same underlying imbalance. That trapped heat is a major driver behind increasingly intense and frequent extreme weather events. As energy builds in the climate system, it fuels stronger storms, more severe heat waves, heavier rainfall and prolonged droughts.

The report highlights 2025 as a year marked by high-impact weather events around the world, from extreme heat to flooding and tropical cyclones. Zooming out, it also reinforces a broader trend: the planet is warming at an unprecedented pace. The past three years are the three warmest on record, and the last decade is the hottest period ever observed in modern history.

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Even small changes in global temperature can translate into major shifts in weather patterns, ecosystems and sea levels, amplifying risks for communities worldwide.

Scientists and advocates say the findings underscore the urgency of reducing greenhouse gas emissions; the World Wildlife Fund released a statement detailing that the world isnt accelerating climate action fast enough.

We can bring balance back to the worlds climate, but the window for us to do so before climate impacts spiral out of control is closing fast. The window for climate action is not closing on its own - it is being closed by delay, Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, WWF Global Climate and Energy Lead, wrote in a statement. Solutions that work exist, but without implementation at speed and scale by governments, the private sector and others, the world will not rise to the challenge of addressing the climate crisis To turn promises into real results just requires the will to do so.

President Donald Trump on Friday announced all federal agencies, including the Department of Defense, would immediately stop the use of Anthropic's AI technologies.

"THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WILL NEVER ALLOW A RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY TO DICTATE HOW OUR GREAT MILITARY FIGHTS AND WINS WARS! That decision belongs to YOUR COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF, and the tremendous leaders I appoint to run our Military," the president wrote on social media.

"The Leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic have made a DISASTROUS MISTAKE trying to STRONG-ARM the Department of War, and force them to obey their Terms of Service instead of our Constitution. Their selfishness is putting AMERICAN LIVES at risk, our Troops in danger, and our National Security in JEOPARDY."

The new directive gives federal agencies six months to unwind their use of Anthropic's Claude AI and other products.

"This week, Anthropic delivered a master class in arrogance and betrayal as well as a textbook case of how not to do business with the United States Government or the Pentagon," Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on social media Friday.

"Our position has never wavered and will never waver: the Department of War must have full, unrestricted access to Anthropics models for every LAWFUL purpose in defense of the Republic."

Scripps News has reached out to Anthropic for comment.

An abrupt change of plans

Earlier this week, the Trump administration and Anthropic hit an impasse as military officials demanded the artificial intelligence company bend its ethical policies by Friday or risk damaging its business.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei drew a sharp red line 24 hours before the deadline, declaring his company cannot in good conscience accede to the Pentagons final demand to allow unrestricted use of its technology.

Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude, can afford to lose a defense contract. But the ultimatum this week from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posed broader risks at the peak of the company's meteoric rise from a little-known computer science research lab in San Francisco to one of the worlds most valuable startups.

Military officials warned they would not just pull Anthropic's contract but also deem them a supply chain risk, a designation typically stamped on foreign adversaries that could derail the company's critical partnerships with other businesses.

And if Amodei were to cave, he could lose trust in the booming AI industry, particularly from top talent drawn to the company for its promises of responsibly building better-than-human AI that, without safeguards, could pose catastrophic dangers.

Anthropic said it sought narrow assurances from the Pentagon that Claude wont be used for mass surveillance of Americans or in fully autonomous weapons. But after months of private talks exploded into public debate, it said in a Thursday statement that new contract language framed as compromise was paired with legalese that would allow those safeguards to be disregarded at will, adding, in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values. Some uses are also simply outside the bounds of what todays technology can safely and reliably do.

RELATED NEWS | Hegseth reportedly gives Anthropic deadline to allow unrestricted AI military use

This comes during the same week that the company published a new blog post, outlining its new policy loosening its core safety principle in response to competition. Rather than continuing to operate under the strict internal limits it previously set for building more powerful AI systems, Anthropic is shifting to a more flexible, voluntary safety framework; one the company acknowledges can evolve over time.

In the blog post, Anthropic said parts of its two-year-old Responsible Scaling Policy had become too rigid and could slow its ability to compete in an increasingly crowded and fast-moving AI marketplace.

That was after Sean Parnell, the Pentagons top spokesman, posted on social media that we will not let ANY company dictate the terms regarding how we make operational decisions, and that the narrative that the Pentagon is looking to use AI to conduct mass surveillance of Americans, noting thats illegal, and AI development of autonomous weapons is fake. Anthropic has until 5:01 p.m. ET on Friday to decide if it would meet the demands or face consequences, Parnell said.

Emil Michael, the defense undersecretary for research and engineering, later lashed out at Amodei, alleging on X that he has a God-complex and wants nothing more than to try to personally control the US Military and is ok putting our nations safety at risk.

That message hasn't resonated in much of Silicon Valley, where a growing number of tech workers from Anthropic's top rivals, OpenAI and Google, voiced support for Amodei's stand late Thursday in an open letter.

In the letter, hundreds of Google employees and dozens from OpenAI wrote that the Pentagon is negotiating with Google and OpenAI to try to get them to agree to what Anthropic has refused, noting [the Pentagon is] trying to divide each company with fear that the other will give in. That strategy only works if none of us know where the others stand We hope our leaders will put aside their differences and stand together to continue to refuse the Department of War's current demands.

Elon Musks xAI also has contracts to supply its AI models to the military.

Musk sided with President Donald Trump's Republican administration on Friday, saying on his social media platform X that Anthropic hates Western Civilization after Michael drew attention to a previous version of Claude's guiding principles that encouraged consideration of non-Western perspectives. All of the leading AI models, including Musk's Grok and OpenAI's ChatGPT, are programmed with a set of instructions that guide a chatbot's values and behavior. Anthropic calls that guidance a constitution.

While some Trump-allied tech leaders have joined the fray including Musk and Palmer Luckey, co-founder of defense contractor Anduril the polarizing debate over woke AI has put others in a difficult position.

But in a surprise move from one of Amodei's fiercest rivals, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Friday sided with Anthropic and questioned the Pentagon's threatening move in a CNBC interview, suggesting that OpenAI and most of the AI field share the same red lines. Amodei once worked for OpenAI before he and other OpenAI leaders quit to form Anthropic in 2021.

For all the differences I have with Anthropic, I mostly trust them as a company, and I think they really do care about safety, Altman told CNBC. Ive been happy that theyve been supporting our warfighters. Im not sure where this is going to go.

Also raising concerns about the Pentagon's approach were Republican and Democratic lawmakers and a former leader of the Defense Department's AI initiatives.

Painting a bullseye on Anthropic garners spicy headlines, but everyone loses in the end, wrote retired Air Force Gen. Jack Shanahan in a social media post.

Shanahan faced a different wave of tech worker opposition during the first Trump administration when he led Maven, a project to use AI technology to analyze drone footage and target weapons. So many Google employees protested its participation in Project Maven at the time that the tech giant declined to renew the contract and then pledged not to use AI in weaponry.

Since I was square in the middle of Project Maven & Google, its reasonable to assume I would take the Pentagons side here, Shanahan wrote Thursday on social media. Yet Im sympathetic to Anthropics position. More so than I was to Googles in 2018.

He said Claude is already being widely used across the government, including in classified settings, and Anthropic's red lines are reasonable. He said the AI large language models that power chatbots like Claude are also not ready for prime time in national security settings, particularly not for fully autonomous weapons.

Theyre not trying to play cute here, he wrote.

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The attitude shift follows a meeting Tuesday between Hegseth and Amodei, during which a source familiar with the meeting told Scripps News the tone of the meeting was cordial and respectful and that there were no raised voices. According the source, during the meeting, Hegseth praised Anthropics products, saying they want to continue working with Anthropic. But its also when military officials warned that they could designate Anthropic as a supply chain risk, cancel its contract or invoke a Cold War-era law called the Defense Production Act to give the military more sweeping authority to use its products, even if the company doesnt approve.

Amodei said Thursday that those latter two threats are inherently contradictory: one labels us a security risk; the other labels Claude as essential to national security. He said he hopes the Pentagon will reconsider given Claude's value to the military, but, if not, Anthropic will work to enable a smooth transition to another provider.

The economy is set to be a major theme in President Donald Trumps State of the Union address.

Trump returned to the White House in January 2025 after making bold promises to turn around the economy. But 13 months into his second term, he has delivered mixed results.

"If I had to summarize the economy in one word, it would be uncertainty," said Abby Hall, associate professor of economics at the University of Tampa.

Inflation has eased, but Americans are still paying more for most goods than they were a year ago, especially many grocery items.

One thing that has gotten cheaper is the price of a gallon of gas, which is near its lowest point in years.

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Tariffs have been the presidents signature economic tool. They have helped generate more than $200 billion for the United States but have also contributed to supply chain uncertainty and inflation.

Nearly 90% of the economic burden of tariffs fell on U.S. businesses and consumers, according to a recent analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

"There's no question that higher goods prices that are driving inflation right now are a direct result of tariffs," said Mark Hamrick, senior economic analyst at Bankrate. "The big question yet to be answered is whether we've seen the bulk of that impact and whether we'll see less of that in the current year."

The answer to that is now unclear after the Supreme Court struck down President Trumps tariff authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

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On the jobs front, the labor market has softened.

The U.S. economy added just 181,000 jobs in 2025, far below the 1.5 million jobs the country has averaged annually over the past decade.

The most recent government data suggested improvements in hiring could begin in 2026.

"The overall picture from the job market is still one that really suggests that things are really sluggish," said Hall.

The stock markets performance over the past year may be the economic indicator President Trump has highlighted most prominently.

The S&P 500, Dow Jones Industrial Average and Nasdaq are each up more than 10% since Trump returned to the White House, and all have hit new record highs over the past year.

"The reality is that Wall Street is not Main Street and so Wall Street might be very well," said Hamrick. "There's a broader question about how Main Street is fairing and small businesses are particularly challenged right now and tariffs are part of that."

In the past week, some of the researchers tasked with building safety guardrails inside the worlds most powerful AI labs publicly walked away, raising fresh questions over whether commercial pressures are beginning to outweigh long-term safety commitments.

At OpenAI, former researcher Zo Hitzig announced her resignation in a guest essay published Tuesday in The New York Times titled OpenAI Is Making the Mistakes Facebook Made. I Quit.

Hitzig warned that OpenAIs reported exploration of advertising inside ChatGPT risks repeating what she views as social medias central error: optimizing for engagement at scale.

ChatGPT, she wrote, now contains an unprecedented archive of human candor, with users sharing everything from medical fears to relationship struggles and career anxieties. Building an advertising business on top of that data, she argued, could create incentives to subtly shape user behavior in ways we dont have the tools to understand, let alone prevent.

The erosion of OpenAIs principles to maximize engagement may already be underway, she wrote, adding that such optimization can make users feel more dependent on A.I. for support in their lives.

OpenAI has previously said it is exploring sustainable revenue models as competition intensifies across the AI sector, though the company did not respond to Scripps News request for comment.

RELATED NEWS | Amid rising power bills, Anthropic vows to cover costs tied to its data centers

Meanwhile, at Anthropic, the companys head of Safeguards Research, Mrinank Sharma, also resigned, publishing a letter on X that read in part: I continuously find myself reckoning with our situation. The world is in peril.

While Sharmas note referenced broader existential risks tied to advanced AI systems, he also suggested tension between corporate values and real-world decision-making, writing that it had become difficult to ensure that organizational principles were truly guiding actions.

Anthropic has positioned itself as a safety-first AI lab and was founded by former OpenAI researchers who cited governance concerns in their own departure.

The exits come amid broader turbulence in the AI industry; xAI has faced backlash over outputs from its Grok chatbot, including explicit and antisemitic content generated shortly after product updates.

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Taken together, the developments underscore a mounting tension inside AI labs: how to move quickly in a fiercely competitive market while maintaining robust guardrails around systems that are becoming more powerful, and more integrated into everyday life.

This, all as the 2026 International AI Safety Report has been released, highlighting risks to human autonomy and labor market impacts due to AI development.

As artificial intelligence transforms the workplace, a growing number of young people are turning to blue-collar and skilled-trade jobs as a faster, debt-free path to building a career.

Erika Miguel, for example, left the tech world behind for free training in upholstery, an industry short on skilled workers.

"I wanted to work with my hands, I wanted to be more creative," Miguel said. "When I was working in tech, I felt like I was just a cog in the wheel."

Chris Anderson is general counsel at Rayburn Electric Cooperative, whose front line includes lineworkers, power plant operators and field technicians. He said the economy and technology are pushing more young people to the company's apprenticeship program.

"You're being paid while you're being trained. You're doing the work. You're getting an income," Anderson said, "and you're getting great benefits. You're starting your investment in your own future very, very early on."

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Dubbed the "toolbelt generation," more than half of Gen Z workers, 53%, are seriously considering blue-collar or skilled trade work, according to a survey by the career site Zety. In the survey of 1,000 Gen Z workers, 65% said a college degree won't protect them from AI-related job loss.

"Young people are looking at this and saying, 'Hey, if I go to school for four years and I get out, where is AI going to be?'" said Matt DiBara, co-founder of The Contractor Consultants, a construction hiring service.

DiBara said Gen Z's interest is welcome, with older generations of workers on the path to retirement.

"What keeps me up at night is the statistic that 40% of the workforce is expected to retire in the next decade," DiBara said. "They're the ones who have put in 15, 20 years, 20 years plus in the trades. And they're the ones that pass down the knowledge."

Lisa Countryman-Quiroz is CEO of JVS in the Bay Area, a nonprofit that trains job seekers. She points out that choosing the trades early doesn't shut the door for a future education.

"College can always be there for you," Countryman-Quiroz said. "You may be better informed about what you really want to do after you've done some other kinds of work out in the world. That's a possibility."

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DiBara agrees that skilled trades can serve as a stepping stone to other opportunities.

"You can wake up having put three, four, five years into a hands-on side of a trade and then say, 'You know what? I want to move into management, or I want to move into estimating, or sales,'" DiBara said.

Experts agree the stigma long associated with blue-collar work is fading, helping to attract new workers to companies like Rayburn.

"Blue-collar work is not shunned. It's very well-paying, good jobs, good people," Anderson said.

The pandemic accelerated this shift. Data from the National Center for Education Statistics show that trade school enrollment grew about 5% from 2020 to 2023. During that same span, undergraduate enrollment fell nearly 1%.

For Miguel, learning the ropes in upholstery is building life-long skills and independence.

"I wanted to support myself in a way that I didn't know was possible before," she said.

We've known for years that Jeffrey Epstein cultivated relationships with powerful people in tech and science, but newly released government records are now giving a much clearer look at how broad and how recent some of those connections were.

The latest document release includes millions of pages of emails, schedules and correspondence that reference major figures like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.

The records suggest that Epstein wasn't just socially adjacent to Silicon Valley, but actively sought out influence in these tech circles. He was pursuing investments, introductions, as well as invitations well after his 2008 conviction for sex crimes.

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For example, while Musk has said that he declined invitations to Epstein's private island repeatedly, emails in the files now show him asking at one point what night would be the "wildest party" there, and Reid Hoffman is also referenced in emails discussing visits and gifts sent both for the girls and for the island, though the context of some of those messages remain unclear.

The files also highlight Epstein's outreach into the scientific community. According to reporting in Nature, Epstein kept contact with roughly 30 scientists and academics. Some of them were reaching out for funding or professional opportunities, while others had more troubling exchanges, including one scientist who proposed a study involving undergraduate students to "test our horny virus hypothesis." There were not any further details about what exactly that meant.

There was another scientist who visited Epstein's private Caribbean island.

Both of those scientists mentioned said they regretted continuing their relationship with Epstein.

It's important to note being named in these files does not mean that anyone is being accused of being involved in or aware of Epstein's criminal abuse, and no one's been charged with that.

Meanwhile, Hoffman and Musk have engaged in public social media posting since more details have emerged. Hoffman posted on X that he "deeply regrets" interacting with Epstein post-conviction and has said that it's largely for a fundraising relationship, while Musk maintains that his email correspondence "could be misinterpreted."

Still, what stands out is the timeline. Many of these interactions happened after Epstein was already a convicted sex offender, raising renewed questions about judgment, ethics and how a man with his history remained welcomed in some of the world's most elite tech and academic circles for years.

Artificial intelligence is quickly making its way into city halls across the country, helping local governments sort service requests, manage information and communicate with residents.

"There was general enthusiasm at first, particularly from elected officials, to try to integrate these tools quickly, to get more organizational efficiency out of them, and to try and scale," said Chris Jordan, program manager for AI and innovation at the National League of Cities.

Jordan helps city leaders navigate AI development through his work at the National League of Cities, which has found that AI tools can be most effective in enhancing city services, supporting employee tasks and helping cities make sense of their data.

With 96% of mayors expressing interest in using generative AI, Jordan said building public trust often comes down to establishing clear, uniform standards, including AI-specific privacy policies and labeling when AI is used in public-facing content.

"Public listening sessions or task forces can also be appropriate for cities to use if there's a general sentiment of anxiety or distrust about certain technologies," he said.

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Some cities are going further when it comes to transparency. Lebanon, New Hampshire, posts a public list of every AI tool it uses, while San Jose conducts an annual review examining how its algorithms affect residents.

"For the most part, constituents want faster and more effective city services that make them feel good about how their tax dollars are being spent," said Joe Scheidler, who is building Helios, an AI tool designed for policy work.

A major hurdle, however, is both the perception and reality that AI systems can make mistakes.

"Workforces do not trust generative AI outputs in many contexts and sensitive use cases. And so we've been really laser focused from a product mission perspective on solving the issue of hallucination, AI drift and baking verification, traceability and provenance into the user experience," Scheidler said.

Despite those concerns, successful use cases are already emerging. Dearborn, Michigan, uses a translation bot to better serve non-English-speaking residents. Washington has tested an AI tool to make its open-data portals easier to search. And Tucsons water department in Arizona uses AI to identify which pipes are most likely to fail before problems occur.

For residents curious about how their city is using artificial intelligence, experts recommend asking questions, attending public meetings and paying close attention to how those tools are explained.

Nearly a quarter of working-age adults have health insurance that leaves them underinsured, according to recent estimates. While having some coverage might seem better than none at all, experts say the potential risks are remarkably similar.

"We always see people who avoid the hospital because of costs," said Dr. Anahita Dua, vascular surgeon, associate professor of surgery, and founder of the medical community coalition Healthcare for Action.

Dua says health care providers are seeing more patients skip or delay care out of fear they won't be able to afford it, even with insurance coverage.

"Patients are concerned that if they come in with their wrists sprained, and then they tell the doctor, 'Well, I sprained my wrist by falling down the stairs,' the doctor might say, 'Well, did you hit your head? We need a CT scan of your head,' which we do," Dua explained.

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The numbers paint a stark picture of America's health care coverage crisis.

In findings from the Commonwealth Fund, roughly 9% of working-age adults are uninsured, but another 23% are underinsured meaning the coverage they pay for doesn't provide affordable access to care.

"What we're really saying is that maybe their deductible is too high. They can't get to that high number before their insurance kicks in," Dua said. "Or their insurance doesn't cover the things that they need. It'll cover one doctor's visit, but not four doctors' visits."

As president of Accessia Health, Tiara Green says she sees this issue firsthand. The nonprofit provides support for people living with rare or chronic health conditions.

"They need access to specialty medications and treatments and specialty providers," Green said. "They become underinsured or considered underinsured when they don't have access to those things."

Green says Accessia Health works to close the gap so patients can access the care they need.

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Dua says free clinics can also help bridge coverage gaps. But most importantly, she urges patients to never delay care.

"The most important thing is your life. Everything can be worked out. Hospitals do eat major costs, so do not delay," Dua said.

The situation may worsen with the expiration of enhanced tax credits for those who purchased plans on the ACA marketplace. Experts fear more new cases of people going uninsured and underinsured.

"It could lead to a number of individuals choosing high-deductible plans that may not necessarily cover their costs and lead to higher out-of-pocket costs," Green said.

Immigration enforcement actions in Minnesota over the weekend are now reverberating far beyond the state. Protesters are now forcing new questions about when, and how, corporate America chooses to speak up.

More than 60 CEOs of Minnesota-based companies including executives from Target, 3M, Best Buy and General Mills signed and released an open letter organized by the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce calling for calm and an immediate de-escalation of tensions though the letter did not specifically call out ICE, nor did it directly criticize federal enforcement tactics.

That omission is drawing backlash from immigrant advocates and grassroots organizers, who are urging consumers to pressure or boycott companies they say do business with immigration enforcement agencies. Multiple calls for actions have been circulating online, listing corporations like Amazon, Fedex, and AT&T.

Organizers argue that corporate neutrality isn't neutral at all that companies wield influence over policy through contracts, lobbying and public messaging, leaving companies to decide whether neutrality actually protects their brand, or if silence, or omission becomes its own statement.

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The delicate dance for corporations to balance corporate social responsibility has been a tough one over the last several years some businesses choosing to step up and comment on political issues like the overturn of Roe v. Wade, siding with the desires of their customers. While more recently, weve seen some of these same companies pull back DEI initiatives at the request of the federal government, despite anger from consumers.

In a sharp contrast, several tech CEOs including Apples Tim Cook, were at the White House this weekend for a private-screen of a new Amazon-produced documentary about Melania Trump, underscoring how closely some business leaders remain tied to the administration.