By DAVID KLEPPER, MATT O’BRIEN and KONSTANTIN TOROPIN

WASHINGTON (AP) — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth plans to meet Tuesday with the CEO of Anthropic, with the artificial intelligence company the only one of its peers to not supply its technology to a new U.S. military internal network.

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Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude, declined to comment on the meeting but CEO Dario Amodei has made clear his ethical concerns about unchecked government use of AI, including the dangers of fully autonomous armed drones and of AI-assisted mass surveillance that could track dissent.

The meeting between Hegseth and Amodei was confirmed by a defense official who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

It underscores the debate over AI’s role in national security and concerns about how the technology could be used in high-stakes situations involving lethal force, sensitive information or government surveillance. It also comes as Hegseth has vowed to root out what he calls a “woke culture” in the armed forces.

“A powerful AI looking across billions of conversations from millions of people could gauge public sentiment, detect pockets of disloyalty forming, and stamp them out before they grow,” Amodei wrote in an essay last month.

Anthropic is the only AI company approved for classified military networks

The Pentagon announced last summer that it was awarding defense contracts to four AI companies — Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI. Each contract is worth up to $200 million.

Anthropic was the first AI company to get approved for classified military networks, where it works with partners like Palantir. The other three companies, for now, are only operating in unclassified environments.

By early this year, Hegseth was highlighting only two of them: xAI and Google.

The defense secretary said in a January speech at Musk’s space flight company, SpaceX, in South Texas that he was shrugging off any AI models “that won’t allow you to fight wars.”

Hegseth said his vision for military AI systems means that they operate “without ideological constraints that limit lawful military applications,” before adding that the Pentagon’s “AI will not be woke.”

In January, Hegseth said Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok would join the Pentagon network, called GenAI.mil. The announcement came days after Grok — which is embedded into X, the social media network owned by Musk — drew global scrutiny for generating highly sexualized deepfake images of people without their consent.

OpenAI announced in early February that it, too, would join the military’s secure AI platform, enabling service members to use a custom version of ChatGPT for unclassified tasks.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth leaves an oath of enlistment ceremony, Friday, Feb. 6, 2026, held on the base of the Washington Monument in Washington. (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf)

Anthropic calls itself more safety-minded

Anthropic has long pitched itself as the more responsible and safety-minded of the leading AI companies, ever since its founders quit OpenAI to form the startup in 2021.

The uncertainty with the Pentagon is putting those intentions to the test, according to Owen Daniels, associate director of analysis and fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

“Anthropic’s peers, including Meta, Google and xAI, have been willing to comply with the department’s policy on using models for all lawful applications,” Owens said. “So the company’s bargaining power here is limited, and it risks losing influence in the department’s push to adopt AI.”

In the AI craze that followed the release of ChatGPT, Anthropic closely aligned with President Joe Biden’s administration in volunteering to subject its AI systems to third-party scrutiny to guard against national security risks.

Amodei, the CEO, has warned of AI’s potentially catastrophic dangers while rejecting the label that he’s an AI “doomer.” He argued in the January essay that “we are considerably closer to real danger in 2026 than we were in 2023″ but that those risks should be managed in a “realistic, pragmatic manner.”

Anthropic has been at odds with the Trump administration

This would not be the first time Anthropic’s advocacy for stricter AI safeguards has put it at odds with the Trump administration. Anthropic needled chipmaker Nvidia publicly, criticizing Trump’s proposals to loosen export controls to enable some AI computer chips to be sold in China. The AI company, however, remains a close partner with Nvidia.

The Trump administration and Anthropic also have been on opposite sides of a lobbying push to regulate AI in U.S. states.

Trump’s top AI adviser, David Sacks, accused Anthropic in October of “running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering.”

Sacks made the remarks on X in response to an Anthropic co-founder, Jack Clark, writing about his attempt to balance technological optimism with “appropriate fear” about the steady march toward more capable AI systems.

Anthropic hired a number of ex-Biden officials soon after Trump’s return to the White House, but it’s also tried to signal a bipartisan approach. The company recently added Chris Liddell, a former White House official from Trump’s first term, to its board of directors.

The Pentagon-Anthropic debate is reminiscent of an uproar several years ago when some tech workers objected to their companies’ participation in Project Maven, a Pentagon drone surveillance program. While some workers quit over the project and Google itself dropped out, the Pentagon’s reliance on drone surveillance has only increased.

Similarly, “the use of AI in military contexts is already a reality and it is not going away,” Owens said.

“Some contexts are lower stakes, including for back-office work, but battlefield deployments of AI entail different, higher-stakes risks,” he said, referring to the use of lethal force or weapons like nuclear arms. “Military users are aware of these risks and have been thinking about mitigation for almost a decade.”

O’Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island.

By Trisha Walrath Cole

From the first time I heard that three friends had taken on the Herculean task of renovating the 1950s roadside Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel, an hour east of San Diego, I’d been trying to find a reason to go. So when a road-tripping pal moved close to me, I immediately knew where our first Thelma-and-Louise-esque adventure would take us.

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Jacumba today feels like what Marfa, Texas, must have been like before Donald Judd arrived: a quiet, slightly rough-edged desert outpost on the brink of something special. The 20-room hotel and mineral-spring pools lie hidden behind sand-colored walls. You check in at a retro trailer out front, then enter through a massive 500-year-old Moroccan wooden door that is your portal to a bohemian desert version of Wonderland.

Alice could easily whisper “Drink Me” if you go left into the bar with its snake-shaped doorknob, or “Eat Me” if you go right into the sunlit restaurant, Long Shadow. Both are open to the public daily. We chose the latter, settling beneath a wall lined with oil paintings of desert scenes in muted, serene tones.

As we ventured deeper into the hotel, the calming effect of the monochromatic color palette set in.

“I’m obsessed with environmental psychology and how people move through a space,” founding partner Melissa Sturkel told me. “We made an intentional decision to stay in this lane,” said her partner and chief of design, Corbin Winters, about their commitment to the use of desert beiges and soft earth tones found in every room, wall, textile, and vantage point.

Guests see stars on a clear night at the Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel. (Photo by Joey Taylor/Courtesy Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel)

A walk to the end of the first long block of ranch-style rooms surrounding the pools brought us to our room. Stone flooring flows from the walkway into each space, enhancing the sense of continuity. The Siren Suite featured a deep, cushy couch, a cloudlike bed, stuccoed nooks in the open closet, and curated touches like Moroccan pendant lighting and oversized Mongolian sheepskin ottomans.

Sliding into either of the outdoor mineral pools, you can almost feel the energy of the vortex beneath the hotel, working its steady, ancient magic. Guests also have access to the Echo Room, a 24-hour enclosed circular soaking tub. If I lived closer, I’d invest in one of the hotel’s flexible pool passes. A massage in one of the secluded Sahara tents near the Afghan Pines was tempting, but surrendering to the ethereal mineral water felt like more than enough.

“Everyone loves the water — the way it makes them feel, how well they sleep after they’ve soaked, how their skin feels. Just overall … more relaxed,” Winters said.

I couldn’t have agreed more.

As I sank into bed, the spell of the magnesium-rich water took hold. I slept deeply, waking at sunrise for a final soak. Coffee in hand, as heat rose off the water, a new word drifted into my mind: returnasy. The feeling of being in a place while already dreaming of coming back.

By MELISSA GOLDIN

President Donald Trump will deliver the first State of the Union address of his second term on Tuesday. Priorities for the Republican’s administration have centered largely on the economy, immigration, crime, energy and national security.

Trump has spent the last year touting his accomplishments while mocking the record of his predecessor, former President Joe Biden. But much of this bluster is based on false and misleading claims — many of which are likely to be a part of the president’s address to the nation.

Here’s a look at some of the false and misleading statements Trump has made at recent public appearances.

Economy

Trump often says the U.S. is now “the hottest country anywhere in the world” after years as a “dead country.” The U.S. economy was hardly “dead’’ when Trump returned to office last year. But in his second term, it’s generally performed strongly — after getting off to a bumpy start.

In 2024, the last year of Biden’s presidency, U.S. gross domestic product grew 2.8%, adjusted for inflation, faster than any wealthy country in the world except Spain. It also expanded at a healthy rate from 2021 through 2023.

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GDP shrank for the first time in three years during the first quarter of 2025. Growth rebounded in the second half of the year, but slowed again in the fourth quarter. Annual GDP growth in 2025 was 2.2%.

A key measure of inflation fell to nearly a five-year low in January. However, according to the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure, it remains elevated as the cost of goods such as furniture, clothes and groceries increase.

Companies have also sharply reduced hiring. Employers added just 181,000 jobs in 2025, the fewest — outside a recession — since 2002. Economists blame a range of factors: Uncertainty created by tariffs and artificial intelligence likely caused many firms to hold back on adding workers. And many companies hired like gangbusters in the aftermath of the pandemic and have since decided to forgo creating any new positions.

The U.S. stock market did well last year and yet it underperformed many foreign stock markets. The benchmark S&P 500 index climbed 17% — a nice gain but short of a 71% surge in South Korea, 29% in Hong Kong, 26% in Japan, 22% in Germany and 21% in the United Kingdom.

Investments

Trump has repeatedly claimed that the U.S. has secured up to $18 trillion in investments, but has presented no evidence of such a high number. The figure appears to be exaggerated, highly speculative or both.

The White House website offers a far lower number, $9.6 trillion, and that figure appears to include some investment commitments made during the Biden administration.

A study published in January raised doubts about whether more than $5 trillion in investment commitments made last year by many of America’s biggest trading partners will actually materialize and questions how it would be spent if it did.

Immigration

A key aspect of the Trump administration’s agenda is curbing illegal immigration, though the president often uses falsehoods to support his arguments.

For example, Trump has repeatedly claimed that an influx of immigrants has led to a massive increase in crime. While FBI statistics do not separate out crimes by the immigration status of the assailant, there is no evidence of a spike in crime perpetrated by migrants, either along the U.S.-Mexico border or in cities seeing the greatest influx of migrants, like New York. Studies have found that people living in the U.S. illegally are less likely than native-born Americans to have been arrested for violent, drug and property crimes.

The president also frequently references upward of 300,000 migrant children who are allegedly missing. This misrepresents information in an August 2024 report published by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General, which faulted Immigration and Customs Enforcement for failing to consistently “monitor the location and status of unaccompanied migrant children” once they are released from federal government custody.

Energy

Trump consistently lauds coal as the ideal energy source, calling it “beautiful, clean coal.” The production of coal is cleaner now than it has been historically, but that doesn’t mean it’s clean.

Planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions from the coal industry have decreased over the past 30 years, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. And yet United Nations-backed research has found that coal production worldwide still needs to be reduced sharply to address climate change.

Along with carbon dioxide, burning coal emits sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides that contribute to acid rain, smog and respiratory illnesses, according to the EIA.

The president also regularly denigrates wind power, claiming that it is expensive and that windmills kill birds.

Onshore wind is one of the cheapest sources of electricity generation, with new wind farms expected to produce energy costing around $30 per megawatt hour, according to July estimates from the Energy Information Administration.

Wind turbines, like all infrastructure, can pose a risk to birds. However, the National Audubon Society, which is dedicated to the conservation of birds, thinks developers can manage these risks and climate change is a greater threat.

Elections

In the lead-up to the 2026 midterms, Trump has taken to repeating the claim that he won the 2020 presidential election.

This is a blatant falsehood that has been disproven many times over — the 2020 election was not stolen.

Biden’s win has been affirmed through recounts, audits and reviews in the battleground states where Trump disputed his 2020 loss. He and his allies lost dozens of court challenges related to the election, and his own attorney general at the time said there was no widespread fraud that would have altered the results.

Biden earned 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232. He also won over 7 million more popular votes than Trump.

Additionally, the president brags that his 2024 win was a “landslide.” But Trump’s margin of victory was not as large as he makes it seem.

He won the electoral vote 312 to 226, including all seven swing states, according to the Federal Election Commission. The popular vote, however, was far closer, with Trump receiving 49.8% of the vote with 77,302,580 votes cast to Democrat Kamala Harris’ 75,017,613 votes (48.32%).

Crime

Trump takes credit for a significant decrease in violent crime during 2025, claiming the murder rate in the U.S. dropped to its lowest in 125 years. But this is misleading. Crime had already been trending down in recent years.

A study released in January by the independent Council on Criminal Justice, which collected data from 35 U.S. cities on homicides, showed a 21% decrease in the homicide rate from 2024 to 2025.

The report noted that when nationwide data for jurisdictions of all sizes is reported by the FBI later this year, there is a strong possibility that homicides in 2025 will drop to about 4.0 per 100,000 residents. That would be the lowest rate ever recorded in law enforcement or public health data going back to 1900.

FBI reports for 2023 and 2024 show significant reductions in violent crimes.

Crime surged during the coronavirus pandemic, with homicides increasing nearly 30% in 2020 over the previous year, the largest one-year jump since the FBI began keeping records. But violent crime dropped to near pre-pandemic levels around 2022 when Biden was president.

The increase in violent crime during the pandemic defied easy explanation, and experts similarly said the historic drop in violence last year defies easy explanation despite elected officials at all levels — both Democrats and Republicans — rushing to claim credit.

Foreign policy

One of Trump’s most frequent talking points is he has “solved” eight wars, a statistic that is highly exaggerated. Although he has helped mediate relations among many nations, his impact isn’t as clear-cut as he makes it seem.

The conflicts Trump counts among those that he has solved are between Israel and Hamas, Israel and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia, India and Pakistan, Serbia and Kosovo, Rwanda and Congo, Armenia and Azerbaijan, and Cambodia and Thailand.

Associated Press writers Claudia Lauer in Philadelphia and Josh Boak and Christopher Rugaber in Washington contributed to this report.

Find AP Fact Checks here: https://apnews.com/APFactCheck.

It’s the day after Super Bowl LX, and like a lot of people who watched Bad Bunny’s halftime show, David Archuleta can’t get the lyrics to the hit “DtMF” out of his head.

As the former “American Idol” star bounded up to the patio at Tam O’Shanter, the cozy Scottish restaurant off Los Feliz Blvd. in Los Angeles, the Miami-born singer-songwriter was still buzzing from the performance, ecstatic to see Latin representation on a stage as massive as a Super Bowl halftime show.

Archuleta has his own reasons to be happy: His new book, “Devout: Losing My Faith to Find Myself,” hits bookstores on Feb. 17. 

“I feel so great about it,” he said, glancing down at a hardcover copy on the table in front of him. “Ultimately, I hope this story helps people break out of the systems that are holding them back.”  

While this isn’t his first book, it very much feels like it, he insists. 

Back in 2010, he put out “Chords of Strength: A Memoir of Soul, Song and the Power of Perseverance.” This book came less than two years after a 17-year-old Archuleta was named runner-up on Season 7 of the wildly popular reality singing competition, “American Idol.” He was 16 when he auditioned, and he captured the hearts of viewers at home with his innocent appearance and commitment to his faith as a devout follower of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  

“I was supposed to be seen as this wholesome boy, clean-cut and safe,” the now 35-year-old said. “But I was afraid of the world, but for different reasons than people thought. That book, to me, was a continuation of having to make everything superficial – and it all was.” 

Archuleta says that his father, with whom he has a complicated relationship, made sure the book reinforced the squeaky-clean image he’d maintained on the show. 

“That was not my life. But it was the way they wanted me to be perceived, like I’d made it and I’m so happy – but I wasn’t happy. I just had to act like I was,” he says. “Even when I got signed to a record label, I was showing them songs I had written, and they were like ‘This music is too mature,’ but that was what came out of me – that was real, that was how I felt.”

Naturally, he received a lot of attention after appearing on the reality show, which included a record deal that led to his self-titled debut album and hit single “Crush.” He put out several more albums, but he says he felt uncomfortable and unworthy in the spotlight. In 2021, Archuleta publicly came out as queer via a post on social media, and a year later, he officially left The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 

Neither of those decisions came easily. 

In “Devout,” Archuleta details the excruciating mental gymnastics he endured throughout his life when it came to his sexuality and his faith. The book begins with an interaction with a fan in an airport in 2022. The fan was also of Mormon faith, grappling with his sexuality and having suicidal thoughts. 

Archuleta could relate. As he writes in the book: “I contemplated whether it would be better to admit to myself that I was gay or end my life.” 

This is just one of many reasons why he wrote, “Devout,” he said, and he hopes that once it’s out in the world, it can open a dialogue with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 

“I’d love to have that conversation and say ‘Hey, I know there is a way to include queer people in the church and allow them to still be in their same-sex relationships in the church, and I would like to show you how,’” he said. “They just haven’t thought enough about it to think that just maybe there’s room.” 

He doesn’t shy away from talking about numerous sensitive issues. One of five children, he says his family underwent an immense amount of turmoil after relocating from Florida to Utah. Despite the low points vividly detailed throughout the chapters, the book is inspiring as well as heart-wrenching.

If you’re left wondering how he’s feeling now, look no further than songs he released just last year like “Crème Brulée,” a playfully upbeat pop song Archuleta said was inspired a bit by Sabrina Carpenter, and “Can I Call You,” a sultry, sexy ballad in which he confesses “my heart is on the line.” 

He’s more confident these days, especially about the songs he’s written that will be released in the coming weeks. “Old and Young” is about navigating life after you’ve left everything you know to start over; “On Purpose” explores being a little messy and not having everything all figured out; “Stay” is dedicated to those that may be feeling hopeless in the moment. 

Archuleta will be discussing the book and the songs during an in-store event at Barnes & Noble at The Grove in Los Angeles on Feb. 25. The ticketed signing and discussion will be moderated by Imagine Dragons’ frontman Dan Reynolds, another famous musician who parted ways with the Mormon church. 

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“Dan and I met at church here in Hollywood,” Archuleta said. While Archuleta was on his two-year mission in Chile from 2012 to 2014, Imagine Dragons became a huge success. “When I left, Dan was like ‘Oh, we just got signed’ and I was so excited for him. Then I was gone – with no social media and I knew nothing. I was in a cab and the song ‘It’s Time’ came on and I yelled, ‘That’s my friend!’ It was amazing. I had no idea. I came home, and they were one of the biggest rock bands in the world.” 

In all, the experience of writing the book was therapeutic. He’s happy that one of his former “American Idol” judges, singer-songwriter and choreographer Paula Abdul, wanted to write the foreword of the book and that she remains a supportive figure in his life. 

“Paula understood what it was like to be a performer and something that was never spoken but was always understood was that she also knew what it was like to be exploited,” he said. “She knew what it was like to be an artist that was taken advantage of, and she had so much compassion for us. That was never performative. She’s an amazing person – she’s an icon. Paula didn’t care about the performative aspect of it all; she cares about the human connection, and I relate to her a lot in that.” 

Revisiting his childhood for the book also bonded his siblings a little tighter, he shared. And as he watched his teenage self on episodes of “American Idol” to jumpstart some memories from that period of his life, he took a softer approach. 

“I look back and cringe because I didn’t like myself then – I hated who I was,” he said. “But even though it was cringe, I had a lot more compassion for myself.”