into the age of AI, evidence that malicious hackers are using advanced AI- hacking techniques remains remarkably scant. Last year a working paper from MIT Sloan, written with an AI-security vendor, claimed that 80% of ransomware incidents (the most harmful form of cyber-crime) were AI-driven. Marketing departments seized on the finding. Respected publications amplified it. But the paper was withdrawn after critics noticed it had counted, among other things, WannaCry—the attack in 2017 in which misfiring North Korean hackers wreaked havoc in more than 150 countries—as AI-powered. One of the people who spotted this nonsensical claim was Marcus Hutchins, a British cyber expert credited with stopping WannaCry. Mr Hutchins now despairs of the “freakout over Mythos”, given that the “local water treatment plant runs [on] Windows XP”, a Microsoft product already obsolete when WannaCry struck, and “the protocol that routes internet traffic is secured by everyone just agreeing that hijacking it would be uncool.” Both points are crucial. Mudge and others warned in 1998 that fundamental parts of the internet’s architecture were wildly insecure. Some still are. The reason nobody has brought down the internet is that there is no reason for any capable hacker other than a total nihilist to do it, and whoever did could expect severe consequences. That remains the uneasy basis of modern digital life. Mr Hutchins’s point about critical infrastructure is more timely still. As the media gawped at AI-testing failures, in the real world hackers were hitting water facilities in a dozen American states. Whoever they were—some say Iran, but President Donald Trump demurs—they were using crude techniques exploiting basic security failures, not advanced AI. Serious supply disruption was only avoided thanks to stored water, manual valves and observant staff. And there is the sting: underlying cyber-security is often so weak hackers have no need of expensive new techniques. AI doesn’t yet give most hackers magical new powers. But it can help them prepare, speed and scale up. That could make it likelier that security neglect will come back to haunt organisations.
This is the boring but vital lesson. At Black Hat, a security conference held this month, two OpenAI employees presented on the Hugging Face incident. Their concluding recommendation was that applying basic, long-established security principles would have gone a long way towards containing OpenAI’s over-enthusiastic agents. Depressing, perhaps, but if it takes inflated hype about omnipotent AI bots going on hacking sprees to get the West finally to focus on fixing the cyber-security flaws that have long put water and other vital services at risk, then so be it.■ Ciaran Martin is a professor at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University. He ran Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre from 2016 to 2020. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/08/23/fears-of-ai-induced-armageddon- are-overdone
Donald Trump is delivering the deportations he promised But that is not proving popular. The politics of immigration are changing Aug 27th 2026 IMMIGRATION IS Donald Trump’s signature issue—and one that helps him win campaigns. During the 2024 presidential race he promised to carry out the largest deportation campaign in American history. It was a pledge as synonymous with his second presidential run as “build the wall” was with his first in 2016. Days before voters went to the polls, throngs at Madison Square Garden cheered Mr Trump as he boasted that he would round up migrants, whom he called “vicious and bloodthirsty criminals”, and “kick them the hell out of our country as fast as possible”. More than 18 months into his second term, Mr Trump is delivering many of the deportations he promised. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
claims that some 1m people have been deported during Mr Trump’s presidency. The actual number may be much lower; the administration stopped publishing official statistics, making a clean accounting impossible. But even so Mr Trump is now presiding over a deportation machine that is unlike any that have come before it, even that of the reigning record-holder as deporter-in-chief, Barack Obama. That is striking considering how the year started. In January, after federal agents killed two American citizens during immigration raids in Minneapolis, the administration was in retreat. Protests sprung up around the country. Gregory Bovino, the martial face of the Minneapolis operation, was exiled to California where he retired. Kristi Noem, the DHS secretary, was sacked, and DHS was shut down for 76 days amid a fight in Congress over funding for immigration enforcement. Ms Noem was ultimately replaced by Markwayne Mullin, a Republican senator from Oklahoma who said during his confirmation hearing that his goal was to stay out of the news. Border Patrol agents are no longer rappelling from helicopters onto apartment buildings or casually tear-gassing protesters in the streets.
But a retreat from deportation theatre is not the same as a retreat from deportations. The budget stand-off over immigration enforcement ended in June with Republicans voting en bloc to shower Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol with another $70bn. Since then ICE arrests of immigrants have shot up—to 43,000 in June and nearly 50,000 in July, the highest monthly total since Mr Trump took office and a record for the agency (see chart 1). Immigration judges, who work for the Justice Department, are issuing removal orders for migrants at by far the highest rate ever (see chart 2). More than 1.6m migrants now have removal orders which put them one ICE encounter away from deportation. Activists trying to shield their neighbours from deportation are calling it the “shadow surge”. Yet even in their less publicly confrontational form, Mr Trump’s mass deportations remain more aggressive, novel and cruel than even some of his voters expected. That is in part because the kinds of deportations Mr Trump is pursuing are very different from those conducted previously. In the 2013 fiscal year, when the Obama administration deported more than 430,000 people, a record, he was focused mostly on recent border-crossers and criminals. With border crossings now de minimis, Mr Trump’s deportations are mostly from the interior of the country, targeting many migrants who
have been living in America for years. They might be married to an American citizen, or have children who are citizens. Some are children themselves. To pursue such a campaign requires far more confrontations in the street, more long-term detentions, more deportation flights. And far more controversy. Many law-abiding immigrants have been caught in the dragnet, tearing apart families and hurting employers. Since Mr Trump was sworn in 56 people have died in ICE detention, more than twice as many as during the entire Biden administration; critics say many migrants are held in squalid, overcrowded conditions. ICE has done little to shed its reputation for treating migrants cruelly; this month it emerged that the agency plans to spend up to $20m equipping agents with gloves that can deliver electric shocks. DHS is also considering a massive new detention facility for unaccompanied children, and has made it harder for kids to find lawyers to represent them in immigration courts. There is a steady drip of news reports of toddlers facing deportation alone or otherwise being mistreated. All this has taken a toll on support for Mr Trump’s policies: more than a fifth of his 2024 voters now support abolishing ICE, a position once mocked as a
far-left organising slogan (47% of all Americans now support abolishing the agency, see chart 3). The backlash against Mr Trump’s campaign could hurt Republicans in the midterm elections—and, in the long run, could lead to an overhaul of the immigration system. In the short run, the deportations look to continue with no let-up, only under new, less blustery leadership. In style and substance, Mr Mullin seems like a disciple of Tom Homan, Mr Trump’s border czar. Both men are loyal supporters of the president and immigration hardliners, but evince more interest in enforcement than in showy raids. “I’m not handling things like maybe the past secretary had,” Mr Mullin told a gathering of governors in Oklahoma City in August. “We’re not doing job-site raids. We’re not going to Home Depot and raiding the parking lot.” Governors, Democratic and Republican, told The Economist that DHS has been much more responsive to them since he took charge. When Wes Moore, the Democratic governor of Maryland and a potential 2028 presidential candidate, took the mic, Mr Mullin quipped, “I talk to this guy quite a bit.” DHS under Mr Mullin has stopped laying siege to Democratic-run cities. But street arrests of immigrants continue apace. ICE officials told the New York Times this summer that the White House is demanding 2,000 arrests each day. It has yet to sustain such a level of enforcement over the course of a month, but the pressure to rack up numbers appears to have produced dangerous results. Two migrants in Texas and Maine were killed by ICE agents in July during attempted traffic-stop arrests. Days later, four men were approached by immigration agents in Florida. They fled on foot; one man was struck by a lorry and died. Meanwhile, the administration has vastly increased the number of people eligible for arrest by pursuing novel legal strategies, making at least 1.7m immigrants newly vulnerable to deportation. The most straightforward way they have managed this is by terminating visas and temporary immigration and humanitarian programmes for certain nationalities. During the Biden administration, the southern border was overrun with people hoping to apply for asylum. To lessen pressure on the border, President Joe Biden expanded alternative legal options for some migrants to enter or stay in the country, including humanitarian “parole” and