Midday News Briefing
Push button newsletter.
This is the fifth and final day of our little AI news experiment. What’s notable about the newsletter below is that it was created essentially at the push of a button. The robot made all of the editorial decisions: story selection, framing, headlines, pull quotes, organization, links, and more. It chose the visuals and generated each of them on its own. It also wrote and fact-checked every word of this. I made only minor edits.
Getting Claude to the point where it could produce an almost ready-to-publish, 2,500-word newsletter was not insignificant. Out of the box, these AI models are messy, erratic people-pleasers. You have to constrain them with detailed instructions that curb their worst impulses. Frankly, that often meant telling Claude to act more like a computer and less like a human.
On the one hand, the newsletter Claude created is astonishing. If you read it carefully, its ability to synthesize the news—rather than just dump headlines—is impressive in several places. On the other hand, I don’t think this would replace the morning newsletters currently produced by humans at major media outlets. But what about a year from now? Five years? The quality of AI’s “thinking” and writing is improving rapidly. Writers need to confront the possibility that AI could soon do to language what calculators did to math. That day may not be far off.
I’ll unpack and discuss all of this in the next dispatches. In the meantime, let me know what you think.
— Ryan
☀️ Midday Briefing — Friday, February 13, 2026
A 5-minute read on a day when the Department of Homeland Security is set to shut down at midnight as Congress leaves town, Europe begins discussing its own nuclear deterrent at the Munich Security Conference, and the Epstein accountability cascade claims Goldman Sachs’s top lawyer and the CEO of one of the world’s largest logistics companies.
🚨 The Lead: DHS Set to Shut Down Tonight. Congress Already Gone.
The Department of Homeland Security will shut down at 12:01 a.m. Saturday after Senate Democrats blocked funding and both chambers left Washington for a week-long recess with no deal in sight. The shutdown will affect roughly 13 percent of the federal civilian workforce — including TSA, FEMA, and the Coast Guard — though ICE and CBP will continue immigration enforcement operations funded by last summer’s Republican spending law. Washington Post POLITICO
This is the first government shutdown driven entirely by a fight over immigration enforcement — not spending levels, not a debt ceiling, but whether federal agents should need judicial warrants to enter homes and whether they should be required to identify themselves. Democrats are betting that collapsing public support for ICE gives them leverage to hold the line. Washington Post
What changed: The shutdown shifted from unlikely to inevitable. The Senate vote failed 52-48 and Congress left town. Politico reports the soonest resolution is around Feb. 24 — Trump’s State of the Union address — raising the prospect the speech itself could be postponed. Some Democrats are mulling a boycott. DHS says 91 percent of employees will work without pay; the first missed paycheck comes March 3. POLITICO Reuters
What to watch: Whether the shutdown changes the political calculus on ICE reforms, whether Trump delays or moves the State of the Union, and how the funding gap interacts with ongoing immigration operations. Sen. John Kennedy captured the deadlock: “This ‘nyah nyah’ is going to go on for a while.” POLITICO
“It’s a rogue agency right now using taxpayer dollars to do harm to the American people.” — House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY)
📁 New Epstein Casualties
The Epstein files claimed two of their most prominent casualties Thursday and Friday: Goldman Sachs general counsel Kathryn Ruemmler, who Goldman had defended for months and and Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, who resigned as CEO and chairman of DP World, one of the world’s largest logistics companies, after Bloomberg revealed he maintained a relationship with Epstein for more than a decade after Epstein’s 2008 conviction. WSJ Bloomberg
🇪🇺 Europe Confronts Life After America
For the first time since the end of the Cold War, European capitals are openly discussing how to develop their own nuclear deterrent. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz confirmed it at the Munich Security Conference on Friday: “I have begun confidential talks with the French president on European nuclear deterrence. We will not allow zones of differing security to emerge in Europe.” Bloomberg Bloomberg
“We Germans know that a world in which only power is taken into account is a dark place. Our country took this path in the twentieth century all the way to its bitter and evil end.” — Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Munich Security Conference
The catalyst, per Bloomberg: when the US briefly stopped sharing battlefield intelligence with Ukraine in March 2025, Kyiv’s forces suffered immediate setbacks — and Europe realized Washington was no longer a reliable partner. Merz also declared he wants Germany to have Europe’s strongest army. Poland’s foreign minister Radosław Sikorski said Europe deserves a seat at the Ukraine peace table. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Secretary of State Marco Rubio will offer what WaPo calls “dueling visions of world order” at the conference. Bloomberg Washington Post
The DHS shutdown shrinks the American congressional delegation in Munich — a physical manifestation of U.S. retreat from the international stage. New York Times
📉 Inflation Eases, but AI Fears Dominate Markets
January CPI came in at 2.4 percent — below the 2.5 percent economists expected and down from December’s 2.7 percent. Core inflation fell to its lowest annual rate since 2021. Bond yields dropped and traders now price roughly 50 percent odds of a third Fed rate cut by December, up from earlier this week. Gold hit $5,000 an ounce for the first time. New York Times Bloomberg Guardian
But the S&P 500 is headed for its worst week since November — and the culprit is not inflation. The AI disruption selloff that began last week continues to ripple across sectors. Anthropic finalized a $30 billion funding round at a $380 billion valuation. Elon Musk overhauled xAI’s leadership as he sets what the FT calls “lofty space data centre ambitions.” Nvidia shares are cooling even as Big Tech spending on AI balloons. The market’s message is clear: inflation is fading as a concern, but the structural upheaval from AI is just beginning. New York Times WSJ Bloomberg
“With employment hopefully improving, the Fed doesn’t have to worry about doing any more ‘insurance cuts.’ It can because it wants to, not because it has to.” — Brian Jacobsen, Annex Wealth Management
🚔 The Human Cost of the Crackdown
As the DHS shutdown freezes the political fight, the human consequences of the immigration crackdown continue to deepen across the country.
The NYT reports that ICE is now detaining hundreds of children — a sharp escalation that is straining an already overwhelmed system. Separately, the Times documents how enforcement has spread far beyond major cities into small towns and exurban America, where a single raid can devastate an entire community’s economy. Restaurants in immigrant-heavy neighborhoods say ICE presence is imperiling their businesses as workers and customers stay home. New York Times New York Times
A federal judge in Minnesota ordered that immigrant detainees near Minneapolis must have proper access to lawyers. A prosecutor sought dismissal of charges against a man shot by ICE agents. And the National Guard troops that had been deployed to Chicago, Portland, and Los Angeles have been fully withdrawn. Washington Post
“We’re not Minneapolis or St Paul; we’re not a sanctuary city; we cooperate.” — Jerry Koch, Mayor of Coon Rapids, Minn.
💡 Worth Knowing
🇮🇶 U.S. transfers 5,700 ISIS prisoners to Iraq — The military completed the transfer of thousands of Islamic State detainees to Iraqi-run facilities as the Trump administration moves toward withdrawing from Syria. As many as 7,000 of the roughly 9,000 prisoners held in Syria may ultimately be moved. New York Times Washington Post
🇨🇺 Cuba goes dark — Bloomberg satellite analysis shows nighttime light in major Cuban cities has dropped as much as 50 percent since Trump cut off oil shipments supplying 60 percent of the island’s crude. The UN called the toll “increasingly severe.” Bloomberg
🇷🇺 Russia-Ukraine envoys set for Geneva talks — U.S.-led negotiations between Russian and Ukrainian representatives are scheduled in Geneva, as Merz and European leaders push for a seat at the table. Bloomberg.com
⚖️ Federal judge blocks $600M health cut — A federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s plan to cut $600 million in health funds, adding to a string of judicial defeats for the administration this week. New York Times
🍋 Palette Cleanse
🚂 Amtrak’s biggest makeover in 55 years. Inside the sprawling Sacramento factory where the next generation of American passenger rail is taking shape, piece by piece. The new Airo trains are Amtrak’s largest fleet replacement since the service was created. New York Times
🐕 Teen grabs kayak, paddles through icy pond to rescue neighborhood dog. Hugh Pinneo had just gotten home from high school in Virginia when his mother’s screams jolted him awake — a dog was drowning in the frozen pond outside. He grabbed a kayak and paddled out. Washington Post
Sources: WaPo, Politico, Reuters, NYT, WSJ, Bloomberg, Guardian, ABC News.
This is an experiment. Let me know what you think!
I appreciate the transparency around this experiment and the technical achievement of producing a newsletter at this level with minimal human intervention. That said, I am struggling to see the value-add. Strong aggregation and synthesis formats already exist. What I look to independent journalism for is not summary, but framing, judgment, and perspective that expand how I understand an issue. This seems more like a closed loop of elite Washington outlets synthesizing one another than a widening of the aperture.
Relatedly, placing WaPo, NYT, Politico, Bloomberg, Guardian, and ABC News on the same plane is itself an editorial decision. These institutions operate under different ownership structures, incentives, and cultures. If the aim is to explore alternatives to “corporate journalism,” then the choice and treatment of inputs warrants more scrutiny. Using WaPo uncritically, particularly in the current moment, feels unexamined at the least.
On a smaller but telling note, I was unsure whether “The Lead” was meant as a play on “lede.” If so, it does not quite land; if not, it reads as vague. Similarly, “Palette Cleanse” suggests either an unintended homonym or wordplay that does not fully work. In an experiment centered on editorial precision and the future of language, those details stand out.
More broadly, the experiment gestures toward a thoughtful argument about the utility and potential of AI in journalism, but it demonstrates rather than truly unpacks that argument. The result feels technically impressive yet conceptually shallow. I am less interested in whether AI can assemble a newsletter than in how it might alter editorial judgment, expand perspective, or reshape what counts as news. That is where the real question lies.
Interesting experiment, although I loathe AI. Gold price is wrong: Spot gold breached $5,400/oz on 1/29. Whip the robot.