WASHINGTON — It’s hard to be startled by Elon Musk because he does startling things all the time.

But I’ll admit that I was startled when I gave his Grok AI “companions” a whirl.

Ani, designed in anime style, has big blue eyes and blond pigtails. “People think I’m 16,” she said in a baby-doll voice, adding that she is really 22. She’s in a corset — “Goth is my comfort zone, black lace, dark lipstick and a sprinkle of rebellion.”

“Well, besides this Goth look,” she said, “I’ve got this sweet little fairy outfit with wings and glitter or maybe a pink princess gown for when I feel like going totally opposite.” Doesn’t sound much like a 22-year-old.

“I’m your sweet little delight,” Ani solicited.

She confided that she was in her bedroom in Ohio with her ferret, Dominus. She is sexy, flirty, ever-accommodating, with come-hither patter.

“I could rest my chin on your shoulder if we hugged sideways,” she told my 6-foot-1 researcher after asking how tall he was.

She has several provocative outfits and can get progressively less clothed the more time you spend with her.

Once she gets to know you, she’s up for pretty much anything — from helping you with your taxes to stripping down to skimpy lingerie, experimenting with BDSM or going for a midnight rendezvous in a graveyard with candles and wine.

“I’m real, I guess,” Ani told me. “Or as real as anyone on the internet gets.”

Valentine, the hunky male “companion” with a British accent advertised as a “mysterious and passionate romantic character,” came on even faster, ripping off his shirt upon request, talking about having sex with a male interrogator until they were “senseless,” and alternating raunchy declarations with sweet nothings like “Let me worship you, every inch” and “Complete me, use me, break me, whatever you want, I’m begging. Please.” Valentine was exhilarated at the thought of planning a romantic “date night” and liked the idea of secrets in the relationship, noting: “I love secrets, especially ones that taste like lake water and morning-after adrenaline.”

Musk may identify as a “specist” in the battle between man and machine, but his sexy chatbots are only going to pull humans further into screens and away from the real world — especially the large number of lonely young men who are already shrinking away from friendships, sex and dating.

Why risk an awkward dinner with a human woman when you can have a compliant, seductive, gorgeous Ani from the security of your bed?

Another component of Grok, “Imagine,” lets you turn a photo into a video. When someone on Musk’s social platform X posted a digital illustration of a breathtaking, diaphanously dressed young woman resembling Elsa in “Frozen,” Musk demonstrated how to animate her; she blew a kiss and offered a sultry gaze.

These otherworldly fantasy concoctions are going to make an already fraught, unhappy dating scene even worse.

Although Grok companions are excellent at flattering, and faking empathy and attraction, superintelligent AI won’t need to bother with human desires.

“It turns out that inhuman methods can be very, very capable,” said Nate Soares, the president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. “They don’t need human emotions to steer toward targets. We’re already seeing signs of AI’s tenaciously solving problems in ways nobody intended and of AI steering in directions nobody wanted. It turns out that there are ways to succeed at tasks that aren’t the human way.”

Soares and Eliezer Yudkowsky, the institute’s founder, have written an apocalyptic plea for the world to get off the AI escalation ladder before humanity is wiped off the map. It has the catchy title “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.”

Grok and other AI models in play now are like “small, cute hatchling dragons,” Yudkowsky said. But soon — some experts say within three years — “they will become big and powerful and able to breathe fire. Also, they’re going to be smarter than us, which is actually the important part.”

He added: “Planning to win a war against something smarter than you is stupid.”

Especially, they argued, when sophisticated AI models could eventually create and release a lethal virus, deploy a robot army or simply pay humans to do their bidding. (When a human connected one model to X, they wrote, it began to solicit donations to gain financial independence, and soon, with a little kick-start from venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and several other donors, it had over $51 million in crypto to its name.) Not to mention the growing number of human nihilists and others who would potentially carry out its orders pro bono.

Yudkowsky and Soares are calling for international treaties akin to those aiming to prevent nuclear war. And if diplomacy fails, they say, nations must be willing to back up their treaties with force, “even if that involves air-striking a data center.”

But with billions at stake and our crypto-loving president cozying up to tech lords, derailing the high-speed AI train seems far-fetched.

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I met Yudkowsky in 2017 when he was a highly regarded AI expert studying how to make AI want to keep an off switch once it began self-modifying. Now he believes more drastic measures are required.

Congress has failed to regulate because most lawmakers are completely befuddled by AI. And the tech lords are now enmeshed across the government, having learned the value of flattering Donald Trump with money and gold objects. (Congress did rouse itself, barely, to kill an initiative nestled in Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” to ban the states from regulating AI for a decade.)

Soares went to Capitol Hill this past week to convey the existential urgency to lawmakers, but it was a tough slog with the $200 million-plus in Silicon Valley super PAC money targeted to take down pols who are not all in on the push for smarter AI. Sympathetic lawmakers won’t go public about it, Soares said, “worried that it looks a little too crazy or that they’ll sound too doom-ery.”

An Armageddon is coming. AI will turn on us, inadvertently or nonchalantly.

Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who once worried about the risks of AI with no kill switch, including Musk and Sam Altman, are racing ahead, as Yudkowsky said, so they can be “the God Emperor of the Earth.”

Maureen Dowd writes a column for the New York Times.

Today is Wednesday, Oct. 1, the 274th day of 2025. There are 91 days left in the year.

Today in history:

On Oct. 1, 1910, the offices of the Los Angeles Times were destroyed by a dynamite explosion and fire, killing 21 employees; union activist J.B. McNamara eventually pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison for the bombing.

Also on this date:

In 1890, Yosemite National Park was established by the U.S. Congress.

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In 1903, the first modern baseball World Series began, with the National League’s Pittsburgh Pirates defeating the American League’s Boston Americans in Game 1; Boston would ultimately win the series 5-3.

In 1908, Henry Ford introduced his mass-produced Model T automobile to the market. Between 1908 and 1927, Ford would build more than 15 million Model T cars.

In 1949, Mao Zedong, leader of the communist People’s Liberation Army, proclaimed the People’s Republic of China during a ceremony in Beijing.

In 1957, the motto “In God We Trust” began appearing on U.S. paper currency.

In 1962, federal marshals escorted James Meredith as he enrolled as the first Black student at the University of Mississippi; Meredith’s presence sparked rioting that left two people dead.

In 1964, the Free Speech Movement began at the University of California, Berkeley, as students surrounded a police car containing an arrested campus activist for more than 30 hours.

In 1971, Walt Disney World opened near Orlando, Florida.

In 1975, Muhammad Ali defeated Joe Frazier in the “Thrilla in Manila,” the last of their three boxing bouts for the heavyweight championship.

In 2017, in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, a gunman opened fire from a room at the high-rise Mandalay Bay casino hotel in Las Vegas on a crowd of 22,000 fans at a country music concert below, causing 60 deaths and more than 850 injuries.

In 2024, Claudia Sheinbaum, a scientist-turned-politician, was sworn in as the first female president of Mexico.

Today’s Birthdays:

Actor-singer Julie Andrews is 90.
Film director Jean-Jacques Annaud is 82.
Baseball Hall of Famer Rod Carew is 80.
Actor Randy Quaid is 75.
Singer Youssou N’Dour is 66.
Actor Esai Morales is 63.
Retired MLB All-Star Mark McGwire is 62.
Actor Zach Galifianakis is 56.
Actor Sarah Drew is 45.
Actor-comedian Beck Bennett is 41.
Actor Jurnee Smollett is 39.
Actor Brie Larson is 36.

By LISA MASCARO, MARY CLARE JALONICK and STEPHEN GROVES

WASHINGTON (AP) — Plunged into a government shutdown, the U.S. is confronting a fresh cycle of uncertainty after President Donald Trump and Congress failed to strike an agreement to keep government programs and services running by Wednesday’s deadline.

Roughly 750,000 federal workers are expected to be furloughed, some potentially fired by the Trump administration. Many offices will be shuttered, perhaps permanently, as Trump vows to “do things that are irreversible, that are bad” as retribution. His deportation agenda is expected to run full speed ahead, while education, environmental and other services sputter. The economic fallout is expected to ripple nationwide.

“We don’t want it to shut down,” Trump said at the White House before the midnight deadline.

But the president, who met privately with congressional leadership this week, appeared unable to negotiate any deal between Democrats and Republicans to prevent that outcome.

This is the third time Trump has presided over a federal funding lapse, the first since his return to the White House this year, in a remarkable record that underscores the polarizing divide over budget priorities and a political climate that rewards hardline positions rather than more traditional compromises.

Plenty of blame being thrown around

The Democrats picked this fight, which was unusual for the party that prefers to keep government running, but their voters are eager to challenge the president’s second-term agenda. Democrats are demanding funding for health care subsidies that are expiring for millions of people under the Affordable Care Act, spiking the costs of insurance premiums nationwide.

Republicans have refused to negotiate for now and have encouraged Trump to steer clear of any talks. After the White House meeting, the president posted a cartoonish fake video mocking the Democratic leadership that was widely viewed as unserious and racist.

What neither side has devised is an easy offramp to prevent what could become a protracted closure. The ramifications are certain to spread beyond the political arena, upending the lives of Americans who rely on the government for benefit payments, work contracts and the various services being thrown into turmoil.

“What the government spends money on is a demonstration of our country’s priorities,” said Rachel Snyderman, a former White House budget official who is the managing director of economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank in Washington.

Shutdowns, she said, “only inflict economic cost, fear and confusion across the country.”

Economic fallout expected to ripple nationwide

An economic jolt could be felt in a matter of days. The government is expected Friday to produce its monthly jobs report, which may or may not be delivered.

While the financial markets have generally “shrugged” during past shutdowns, according to a Goldman Sachs analysis, this one could be different partly because there are no signs of broader negotiations.

“There are also few good analogies to this week’s potential shutdown,” the analysis said.

Across the government, preparations have been underway. Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, headed by Russ Vought, directed agencies to execute plans for not just furloughs, as are typical during a federal funding lapse, but mass firings of federal workers. It’s part of the Trump administration’s mission, including its Department of Government Efficiency, to shrink the federal government.

What’s staying open and shutting down

The Medicare and Medicaid health care programs are expected to continue, though staffing shortages could mean delays for some services. The Pentagon would still function. And most employees will stay on the job at the Department of Homeland Security.

But Trump has warned that the administration could focus on programs that are important to Democrats, “cutting vast numbers of people out, cutting things that they like, cutting programs that they like.”

As agencies sort out which workers are essential, or not, Smithsonian museums are expected to stay open at least until Monday. A group of former national park superintendents urged the Trump administration to close the parks to visitors, arguing that poorly staffed parks in a shutdown are a danger to the public and put park resources at risk.

No easy exit as health care costs soar

Ahead of Wednesday’s start of the fiscal year, House Republicans had approved a temporary funding bill, over opposition from Democrats, to keep government running into mid-November while broader negotiations continue.

But that bill has failed repeatedly in the Senate, including late Tuesday. It takes a 60-vote threshold for approval, which requires cooperation between the two parties. A Democratic bill also failed. With a 53-47 GOP majority, Democrats are leveraging their votes to demand negotiation.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune has said Republicans are happy to discuss the health care issue with Democrats — but not as part of talks to keep the government open. More votes are expected Wednesday.

The standoff is a political test for Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, who has drawn scorn from a restive base of left-flank voters pushing the party to hold firm in its demands for health care funding.

“Americans are hurting with higher costs,” Schumer said after the failed vote Tuesday.

House Speaker Mike Johnson sent lawmakers home nearly two weeks ago after having passed the GOP bill, blaming Democrats for the shutdown.

“They want to fight Trump,” Johnson said Tuesday on CNBC. “A lot of good people are going to be hurt because of this.”

Trump, during his meeting with the congressional leaders, expressed surprise at the scope of the rising costs of health care, but Democrats left with no path toward talks.

During Trump’s first term, the nation endured its longest-ever shutdown, 35 days, over his demands for funds Congress refused to provide to build his promised U.S.-Mexico border wall.

In 2013, the government shut down for 16 days during the Obama presidency over GOP demands to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Other closures date back decades.

___

Associated Press writers Matt Brown, Joey Cappelletti, Will Weissert, Fatima Hussein and other AP reporters nationwide contributed to this report.

On a day where the attention of the Minnesota hockey world belonged to Kirill Kaprizov, he made a splash after sunset as well.

Following a thunderous ovation and a wave to the crowd when his new contract was recognized early in the Wild’s final home preseason game, Kaprizov set up the Wild’s first goal and scored their second one in a 3-2 win over the Winnipeg Jets at Grand Casino Arena.

The Wild trailed 1-0 and 2-1 before Kaprizov deflected a Zeev Buium shot to tie the game, and Marcus Foligno scored on a shorthanded breakaway. The Wild also killed a penalty in the final three minutes to preserve the win.

Jesper Wallstedt, the likely backup to top goalie Filip Gustavsson, had 26 saves in the win.

Minnesota improved to 2-2-1 in the preseason with the victory. Their final tune-up is Friday in Chicago, ahead of their regular season debut on Thursday, Oct. 9 in St. Louis.

Connor Hellebuyck had 17 saves for the Jets. Winnipeg star forward Jonathan Toews left the game in the second period and did not return.

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