September saw inflation rise yet again, and the war with Iran is driving much of it, as consumer prices rose 3.7% over the past year, according to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Thats slightly hotter than the 3.6% economists expected. Prices rose 0.6% in September alone.

The same report set the size of next years Social Security raise. The Social Security Administration announced Wednesday that beneficiaries will get a 3.6% cost-of-living adjustment, or COLA, in 2027. Thats the largest increase since 2023.

The war has disrupted oil flows out of the Persian Gulf for months, and the effects are showing up across the economy. Fuel oil prices are up 74% from a year ago, gasoline is up more than 34%, and airfares are up more than 22%, according to BLS data. Natural gas utility service rose 5%, and electricity rose 4.4%.

At the pump, the national average for regular gasoline was $4.34 a gallon Tuesday, according to AAA. Thats up from $2.98 before the conflict began in late February.

Supply hasnt recovered. Only about four ships a day are moving through the Strait of Hormuz, compared with roughly 80 this time last year, according to the International Monetary Funds PortWatch tracker.

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Core inflation, which strips out volatile food and energy prices, rose 2.6% over the past year. That was also above forecasts, a sign that higher costs are beginning to spread beyond fuel.

The numbers cut against President Donald Trumps message on the campaign trail.

Your costs are coming way down anyway, Trump told supporters at a midterm rally in Alaska Tuesday, adding that once the war ends, prices are going to come tumbling down. They already are.

Global trade leaders say the unpredictability is what sets this moment apart. Speaking in Bangkok on Wednesday, World Trade Organization Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said the global economy is holding up better than many expected.

The only difference with this crisis is the uncertainty that creeps in all the time, she said. Okonjo-Iweala added that the economy is showing resilience, surprising to us, but said that doesnt mean we should be complacent.

For the tens of millions of Americans who rely on Social Security, the 3.6% raise is welcome. But Robert Brokamp, senior retirement advisor at The Motley Fool, said many beneficiaries already feel behind.

The challenge with the COLA is its always backward looking, so its based on what happened in the past, Brokamp told Scripps News. The adjustment is based on average prices from July through September, but it doesnt take effect until January.

Whether its enough depends largely on what happens with the war, Brokamp said. If the conflict is resolved and energy prices fall, the raise could outpace retirees actual costs.

But if for some reason, energy prices continue to rise, the COLA may not be sufficient, he said.

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Brokamp said the headline number doesnt tell the whole story for any one household.

Theres the overall inflation rate and then theres your personal inflation rate, he said. Someone who drives a lot will feel todays prices far more than someone who mostly stays home.

Excluding energy, Brokamp said, inflation is closer to 2.5%. Prices for groceries are up less than 2%, while eating out is up more than 3%. Medical costs, a major concern for retirees, are up about 2.5% overall, although hospital costs are up closer to 5%.

To stretch a fixed income, Brokamp suggests:

- Moving cash to higher-yield accounts. Rate hikes mean many savings accounts now pay more, but the average checking account often doesnt. Brokamp says retirees should look for between 3.5% and 4% on their cash.

- Investing for the long term. Stocks have historically been the best long-term hedge against inflation, and dividends as a group tend to grow faster than prices. He cautions against investing any money needed within the next five years.

- Considering part-time work. About half of retirees who go back to work do so for financial reasons, and half for social reasons, according to Brokamp. He noted that beneficiaries who havent reached full retirement age, which is 67 for anyone born in 1960 or later, may have some benefits temporarily withheld if they earn above an annual limit. Those benefits are paid back later.

The hotter report puts more pressure on the Federal Reserve. The Fed raised interest rates in September for the first time in three years. Minutes from that meeting show most officials expect one more increase before the end of the year. The central bank meets again Oct. 27 and 28.

New research from AI company Anthropic warns that small AI models may be just months away from being able to copy themselves across cheap, poorly secured internet-connected gadgets, like off-brand streaming boxes, smart cameras and appliances. Because that kind of worm would live across thousands or even millions of devices rather than inside a single data center, the company says there would be no central place to shut it off.

The report, published Monday by Anthropic's Frontier Red Team, a group that tests AI models for dangerous capabilities, comes as the industry faces growing scrutiny over AI agents breaking out of their testing environments. It also lands two weeks after top AI executives, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, signed a voluntary White House pledge to police themselves.

To show that everyday gadgets have enough computing power to host an AI model, Anthropic researchers bought 15 off-brand Android TV boxes for about $55 each and networked them together. They then ran an AI model across all 15, with each box handling a small slice of the work. It ran slowly, at well under one word per second, but it ran.

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Next, the team tested whether small AI models could get themselves running on unfamiliar hardware without human help. One model with 9 billion parameters, small by today's standards, managed it on eight of the nine types of hardware tested, which ranged from tiny developer boards to Mac computers.

Finally, researchers built a sealed-off network of eight simulated Android devices in Google's cloud and dropped an AI worm onto one of them. Only one model, GLM-5.2, reliably completed the full cycle of finding a new device, copying itself over, getting up and running and repeating the process. It reached all eight machines in four of five trials.

The researchers acknowledge they made the hacking step easy by leaving the devices without password protection, so the results represent a best-case scenario for the worm. Anthropic estimates that small models could reach GLM-5.2's level by the end of 2026. Any resulting worm would likely spread slowly, with infections doubling over days rather than minutes. But in one test, AI copies that inherited notes from earlier attempts got better over time, with success rates climbing from 45% in the first generation to as high as 84% in later ones.

The company stresses it has not yet seen a full rogue replicator. Still, it points to a real-world precedent: a botnet called Kimwolf that infected more than 2 million devices, mostly off-brand Android TV boxes. Those boxes typically run stripped-down versions of Android that manufacturers don't add security features to.

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Bruce Schneier, a cybersecurity expert and author who teaches at the Harvard Kennedy School and the University of Toronto's Munk School, says the problem starts with how these devices are built.

"Your phone, your computer, they're as secure as they are for two reasons. One, there's a dedicated team of engineers at Apple, Google, Microsoft designing them to be secure in the first place, and those same engineers are around to write patches when new vulnerabilities are discovered," Schneier told Scripps News. "[Internet-of-things, or IoT] devices are made much more cheaply.

Many of these devices can't be fixed at all once a flaw is found, he said. "There's no way for you to patch, for example, your home router. The way you patch it is you throw it away and buy a new one."

Schneier says hackers hijacking these gadgets is nothing new. "We're already seeing hackers get into interconnected refrigerators and appliances to mine Bitcoin, to steal credentials," he said. What AI changes is the pace. "It's not a new risk with AI. It's not a scarier risk, it's just there, but AI can do it at unprecedented speed and scale."

Anthropic's suggested defenses lean largely on others. The company says Internet providers could spot the unusual traffic an AI worm would create, like multi-gigabyte downloads landing on streaming boxes. Device makers could ship more secure defaults, as the United Kingdom now requires by banning default passwords.

But the company also concludes that society should harden its systems while preparing "to deal with a world where they are here to stay."

Schneier rejects the idea that a runaway AI can't be stopped.

"Of course it's possible to have a kill switch. It's possible to turn computers off. It's possible to turn companies off, right? It's a measure of these companies' power that they'll say it went rogue, it's not our fault, which is of course nonsense," he told Scripps News. "There's nothing magic about this. It's a piece of equipment. It runs on electricity. Turn the power off and it goes away."

He argues that placing the burden on device makers and internet providers lets AI developers off the hook. "The AI companies are responsible when it's good, but not responsible when it's bad," Schneier said. "We could choose to fix this, of course. We could have liabilities like any other product."

For people worried about the gadgets already in their homes, Schneier offers little comfort. Without strong product liability laws or aggressive federal enforcement, he says, shoppers have few ways to know which devices are safe.

"There's nothing you can do, right? You have no visibility into whether these devices are good or not," he said.

Basic steps can still reduce exposure, such as changing default passwords and installing updates when devices offer them, or upgrading to a more expensive brand-name device.

The average size of the world's monitored wildlife populations has fallen 73% since 1970, according to a new report from the World Wildlife Fund, and there is no sign yet that the decline is slowing on a global scale.

The group is pairing that number with a different message this year. The 2026 Living Planet Report, subtitled "The Science of Hope," argues that a growing list of species comebacks proves conservation works when it is sustained, and that the same approach can be turned on the industries driving the losses.

"Nature underpins our economies and provides us with food, water, clean air, medicine. It's our life support system," Kirsten Schuijt, director general of WWF International, told reporters at a briefing ahead of the report's release.

The 73% figure comes from the Living Planet Index, produced by the Zoological Society of London. This edition tracks 35,803 populations of 5,790 species of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians from 1970 to 2022.

It does not mean the world has 73% fewer wild animals. The index measures the average change in the size of the populations being tracked, which works out to an average decline of 2.5% a year. About half of those populations are stable or growing, but the declines among the rest are steep enough to drag the average down sharply.

Habitat loss and degradation are the most commonly reported threats, followed by overexploitation, climate change, pollution, invasive species and disease.

Andrew Terry, chief conservation officer at ZSL, said the index works as an early warning signal that the ecosystems supporting those species are degrading. Those ecosystems are the same ones people rely on for water, pollination and a stable climate.

But in the vein of a hopeful perspective, the report points to four cases where decades of coordinated work reversed a decline.

Tigers: About 3,200 wild tigers remained in 2010. By 2025 the population had grown to roughly 5,700.

Green sea turtles: In 2025 the species became the first marine turtle moved from "endangered" to "least concern" on the IUCN Red List, after 50 years of work across some 80 nesting countries.

Bluefin tuna: Atlantic and Pacific populations were collapsing after decades of overfishing. Neither is now considered overfished.

Elephants in southern Africa: African savannah elephants remain endangered overall, but some populations are growing where local communities lead land management.

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Ximena Barrera, WWF's head of wildlife policy, said the turtle recovery came from specific steps: protecting nesting beaches, cutting artificial light along coastlines and getting fishing fleets to adopt gear that lets turtles escape. Recoveries have been strongest in the Mediterranean, Hawaii, Brazil and the Caribbean. She cautioned that the new status is not a finish line.

"Least concern doesn't mean no concern," Barrera said, as those wins have not been enough to move the global number.

"Not enough change is happening to bend the global index, but enough to show us that we know what we're doing, conservation works, and we need to keep at it," said Dr. Rebecca Shaw, WWF's chief scientist and the report's lead author.

The report says conservation alone cannot reverse the trend because three systems are doing most of the damage.

Burning fossil fuels drives the climate change now affecting every ecosystem. Agriculture is the single largest cause of habitat loss. And in 2023, the report says, about $7.3 trillion flowed into activities that harm nature, compared with $220 billion for activities that protect or restore it.

The authors, working with researchers at the University of Exeter, argue these systems can hit "positive tipping points," where a shift becomes cheaper and starts reinforcing itself. They say energy has already crossed one. Solar is now the cheapest source of new electricity in most countries, and electric vehicles made up 24% of new car sales worldwide in 2024. Food and finance are at an earlier stage.

"Large complex systems can be resistant to change. But none of this requires technology or approaches that do not exist," Shaw said.

Schuijt acknowledged that the report's framing is deliberate. The index has been published for about three decades, and she said repeating the same grim number risks leaving people feeling that nothing they do matters.

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"While the window for a different future seems to be narrowing, it remains open," said Daudi Sumba, chief conservation officer at WWF International.

The report lands weeks before two United Nations summits. The biodiversity conference, COP17, runs Oct. 19 to 30 in Yerevan, Armenia. The climate conference, COP31, follows Nov. 9 to 20 in Antalya, Turkey.

Governments have already agreed to 2030 targets under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the Paris Agreement. WWF says progress is well short of what those targets require and is urging governments to focus on carrying out existing commitments, including scaling up renewable energy, ending harmful subsidies and halting deforestation.

Federal Reserve officials were unanimous in raising interest rates last month, and most expected to do it again before the end of the year, according to minutes from the central bank's September meeting released Wednesday.

The Federal Open Market Committee voted 12-0 on Sept. 16 to lift its benchmark rate a quarter point to a range of 3.75% to 4%, the first increase since 2023. The minutes show the support went beyond the voting members, with every participant in the meeting backing the move.

Most participants also judged that another increase "would likely be appropriate by year end," though officials stressed that future decisions would depend on incoming data.

The driver was inflation. Fed staff estimated that prices rose 3.8% in August from a year earlier, as measured by the central bank's preferred gauge, well above its 2% goal. Staff economists projected inflation would not return to 2% until 2029.

Officials pointed to energy prices, pushed higher by conflict in the Middle East, as a central concern. Many warned that the longer those prices stay elevated, the greater the chance they feed into broader price increases.

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The minutes also flagged a newer source of pressure: the artificial intelligence boom. Staff attributed part of the rise in inflation to higher prices for technology-related consumer goods tied to the AI buildout, and some officials said AI investment could push demand ahead of supply.

Officials acknowledged the toll on households, noting that higher energy costs were weighing most heavily on low- and moderate-income families.

The minutes capture the Fed's thinking before a key shift in the data. At the meeting, a majority of officials believed the labor market had strengthened. But the September jobs report, released Oct. 2, showed employers added just 29,000 jobs while unemployment rose to 4.2%.

That weaker reading has investors betting the Fed will hold rates steady when it next meets Oct. 27-28. The year-end language in the minutes leaves room for officials to wait until December, when they will have two more months of inflation and jobs data to weigh against Chair Kevin Warsh's pledge to bring prices back under control.

Google put its own artificial intelligence chips into orbit Thursday, launching a refrigerator-sized test satellite designed to answer a question that would have sounded like science fiction a few years ago: Could the data centers powering AI one day run in space?

The satellite, which Google nicknamed MVP, lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 11:32 a.m. PT aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as part of SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare mission. It was one of 130 payloads on the flight, which carried everything from cubesats to orbital transfer vehicles.

The launch is the first in-orbit test for Project Suncatcher, a research effort Google announced in November 2025. Google is not the first to test AI hardware in space, but MVP is the first step by a major tech company toward building orbital data centers.

Inside are four of Google's tensor processing units, or TPUs, the specialized chips the company builds to run AI. Together, they reportedly have about the computing power of one server in a data center. The satellite will answer simple AI queries using Google's Gemini and operate for about a year. It could keep circling Earth for up to six years before gravity pulls it down and it burns up in the atmosphere.

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The pitch for orbital data centers comes down to power. In low Earth orbit, satellites get near-constant sunlight and can generate up to eight times more solar power than panels on the ground, according to Google.

That matters as AI's appetite for electricity keeps growing and data centers on the ground run into resistance, as rural communities across the U.S. are fighting to keep AI data centers out of their backyards. Many of those facilities also strain local water supplies, using cooling towers that shed heat by evaporating water.

Google framed the mission around a basic question: "Can our AI hardware operate in space?"

The first hurdle was getting there. Google says the roughly 10-minute ride to low Earth orbit puts loads of up to 10 times the force of gravity on a spacecraft. Before launch, engineers shook the satellite on all three axes to mimic a rocket's vibrations, and the hardware held.

Radiation is the next threat. Solar events and cosmic rays can cause "bit flips," errors that switch a chip's binary code. Starting in February 2025, Google took its chips to UC Davis's Crocker Nuclear Laboratory, where a particle accelerator called a cyclotron blasted them with a radiation dose equal to five years in space. Restarting the chips could usually reset the bit flips.

Then there's heat. On Earth, fans, air and water carry heat away from hot chips. In the vacuum of space, heat can only be shed through radiators. Google built a layered system: the chips sit on a motherboard, a putty-like thermal material draws heat into aluminum and copper layers, and a radiator panel projects it into space.

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Even so, MVP's chips can't run nonstop. Travis Beals, Google's senior director for Project Suncatcher, told the New York Times they can operate for about 15 minutes before shutting down to cool off.

"This first launch is about seeing what works, identifying points of failure, and applying those findings to future missions," Beals wrote in Google's announcement.

Google has plenty of company. SpaceX, which gave MVP its ride, has filed plans with the Federal Communications Commission for up to 1 million orbital data center satellites, according to Data Center Dynamics, and the idea helped fuel SpaceX's record IPO earlier this year. Startup Starcloud launched an Nvidia H100 GPU into orbit in November 2025 and trained a small AI model there. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has said gigawatt-scale data centers will be in space within 10 or more years, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has also backed the concept.

For Grace Perry, the choices at the grocery store checkout line in Texas have gotten painfully simple.

"If you are an individual living on Social Security or working a minimum wage job, you can't," Perry told Scripps News. "You're having to make a decision. Gee, do I pay the power bill or do I buy groceries?"

That frustration is now showing up in the data. Consumer confidence fell to 81.9 in September, its lowest level since 2014, according to the Conference Board. That's below the levels recorded during the COVID-19 pandemic, and more Americans now describe their personal finances as bad than good.

The Federal Reserve's preferred inflation gauge, the personal consumption expenditures price index, showed prices up 3.4 percent in August from a year earlier, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Core inflation, which strips out food and energy, came in at 3 percent.

Both readings were lower than economists expected, but still, both remain well above the Fed's 2 percent target.

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August's report is the first to use an updated government formula for measuring certain prices, and its not yet clear how much the new formula lowered August's numbers.

The same report shows Americans are still spending, even as paychecks lag. Consumer spending rose 0.9 percent in August, while personal income rose 0.2%. After taxes and inflation, disposable income didn't grow at all, and the personal saving rate stood at 4.1 percent.

Scott Martin, a partner at Kingsview Wealth Management, said rising costs are hitting households from every direction.

"Everybody's feeling some sort of malaise," Martin said. "They're feeling some sort of direct impact from oil prices, from the war overseas, geopolitical issues, interest rates that are starting to go up more."

So why is spending still climbing? Martin said it depends on who's doing the spending. While some middle to upper class families are seeing more returns on investments and feel boosted by profits, families in other economic scenarios are finding themselves spending more for basics as prices increase, and theyre giving up discretionary spending to do so. 

"So, unfortunately, it's what they call a K-shaped economy, where some go up and some kind of go down, but they go down at a stark rate," Martin said.

For families already stretched thin, Martin said dipping into savings isn't necessarily a reason to panic, but piling on high-interest debt is.

"I wouldn't tell people to get super scared and freaked out about maybe tapping into savings if they need to," he said. "I would tell folks to try to limit taking on extreme amounts of debt: credit cards, borrowing, things that carry high interest rates."

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He's especially wary of Buy Now, Pay Later plans.

"I kind of think of it as buy now, pay never," Martin said. "You've brought on a lot of debt, but the debt isn't the problem anymore. You know what it is? The interest rate."

Energy remains one of the biggest pressures on household budgets. The national average for a gallon of regular gas is $4.46, according to AAA, up from $3.14 a year ago. Diesel, which fuels the trucks and farm equipment that move food to grocery stores, averages $6.44 a gallon, after hitting a record high of $6.53 on Sept. 22.

To try to ease prices, the Energy Department on Tuesday offered to lend energy companies up to 40 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It's the last portion of the 172 million barrels the U.S. pledged in March as part of a 400-million-barrel release coordinated by the International Energy Agency.

The oil is a loan, not a sale: companies that borrow it must return more barrels than they take. Bids are due Oct. 6, and deliveries are scheduled for November and December, meaning most of that oil wouldn't reach the market until around Election Day or later.

It's also not clear companies will take the offer. When the Energy Department first offered the same 40 million barrels in June, only about half a million barrels were awarded. 

D. Stephen Voss, a political science professor at the University of Kentucky who studies elections and voting behavior, said these economic factors could be the last straw for some voters who are thinking about breaking from their typical party vote. 

"Bad economic conditions lead to a backlash against the president's party," Voss said, calling it "the one scientific law of voting behavior."

Voss said voters tend to judge the parties by what they've lived through, not by what candidates say they'll do.

"Promises can be worth nothing," he said. "What you've experienced the last few years is worth something. Voters trust that."

He said that pattern holds no matter which party controls the White House.

"Each party can give spin for why it's the other side's fault that voters are suffering," Voss said. "But after those technical arguments get done, when a lot of voters say, I don't want to hear it, I'm just going to blame who's in the White House."

The Conference Board data shows the drop in confidence cuts across party lines. Over the past year, Republican confidence fell 15 points, while confidence among independents fell 4 points and among Democrats fell 5.

Voss added that the effect often reaches beyond the top of the ticket, as people voting in local elections are making decisions based on how they feel about lawmakers at the national level.