July 21, 2025

Good morning. Here's the latest:

Gaza: Israeli forces fired on crowds of Palestinians trying to secure food in two separate deadly episodes over the weekend.
Epstein: Lawmakers, both Democratic and Republican, called for the release of more information related to the Jeffrey Epstein case.
Japan: Voters are swinging right. The country's long-dominant governing party suffered a defeat in parliamentary elections.

More news is below. But first, we examine how A.I. is being used against itself.

A keyboard with a red space bar bearing one of Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics (

Balazs Gardi for The New York Times

Prompt wars

By Evan Gorelick

I'm a writer for this newsletter.

Artificial intelligence isn't just for drafting essays and searching the web. It's also a weapon. And on the internet, both the good guys and the bad guys are already using it.

Offense: Bots and algorithms perpetrate much of the world's cybercrime. Con artists use them to generate deepfakes and phishing scams. Want malware to steal someone's data? A chatbot can write the code. Bots also cook up disinformation. As Israel and Iran fired missiles at each other last month, they also flooded the internet with A.I.-powered propaganda.

Defense: Cybersecurity companies use A.I. to intercept malicious traffic and patch software vulnerabilities. Last week, Google announced that one of its bots had found a flaw in code used by billions of computers that cybercriminals wanted to exploit — likely the first time A.I. has managed such a feat.

Cybersecurity used to be slow and laborious. Human hackers would concoct new attacks, and then security companies would tweak their defenses to parry them. But now, that cat-and-mouse game moves at the speed of A.I. And the stakes couldn't be higher: Cybercrime is expected to cost the world more than $23 trillion per year by 2027, according to data from the F.B.I. and the International Monetary Fund. That's more than the annual economic output of China.

Today, I explain what the arrival of A.I. hacking means for the internet — and the billions who use it every day.

The siege

The newest cybercriminals are robots. They write with flawless grammar and code like veteran programmers. They solve problems in seconds that have vexed people for years.

Malicious emails used to be riddled with typos and errors, so spam filters could spot and snag them. That strategy doesn't work anymore. With generative A.I., anyone can craft bespoke, grammatical scams. Since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, phishing attacks have increased more than fortyfold. Deepfakes, which mimic photos, videos and audio of real people, have surged more than twentyfold.

Because commercial chatbots have guardrails to prevent misuse, unscrupulous developers built spinoffs for cybercrime. But even the mainstream models — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini — are easy to outsmart, said Dennis Xu, a cybersecurity analyst at Gartner, a research and business advisory firm. "If a hacker can't get a chatbot to answer their malicious questions, then they're not a very good hacker," he told me.

Google, which makes Gemini, said criminals (often from Iran, China, Russia and North Korea) used its chatbots to scope out victims, create malware and execute attacks. OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, said criminals used its chatbots to generate fake personas, spread propaganda and write scams. "If you look at the full life cycle of a hack, 90 percent is done with A.I. now," said Shane Sims, a cybersecurity consultant.

Here's something odd: Attacks aren't necessarily getting smarter. Sandra Joyce, who leads the Google Threat Intelligence Group, told me she hadn't seen any "game-changing incident where A.I. did something humans couldn't do." But cybercrime is a numbers game, and A.I. makes scaling easy. Strike enough times, and some hits are bound to land.

People looking at a futuristic head-and-shoulders bust.

Ameca, a humanoid robot created for realistic interactions that uses ChatGPT. Loren Elliott for The New York Times

The fortress

What makes A.I. good on offense — finding patterns in heaps of data — also makes it good on defense. Walk into any big cybersecurity conference, and virtually every vendor is pitching a new A.I. product. Algorithms analyze millions of network events per second; they catch bogus users and security breaches that take people weeks to spot.

Because A.I. is so quick on offense, a mere human can't play good defense anymore. "They're going to be outnumbered 1,000 to 1," said Ami Luttwak, co-founder of the cybersecurity company Wiz.

Algorithms have been around for decades, but humans still manually check compliance, search for vulnerabilities and patch code. Now, cyber firms are automating all of it. That's what Google said its bot had done. Others are on the way. Microsoft said that its Security Copilot bot made engineers 30 percent faster, and considerably more accurate.

There's a risk, though: A.I. still makes mistakes, and when it has more power, the errors can be much bigger. A well-meaning bot may try to block traffic from a specific threat and instead block an entire country.

Related: Robots are taking over food delivery, carting fried chicken through Chicago streets and parachuting Panera strawberry lemonade to Charlotte, N.C., The Wall Street Journal reports.

THE LATEST NEWS

Israel-Hamas War

In Gaza City. Saher Alghorra for The New York Times

Israeli forces killed dozens of people in northern Gaza yesterday, local health officials said, as crowds gathered near a crossing where aid trucks were entering. The U.N. said: "People were simply trying to access food."
The Israeli military said its soldiers had fired "warning shots" after thousands of Gazans gathered. Gaza officials gave the death toll as over 60; Israel said that figure did "not align" with its initial assessment.
A day earlier, Gaza health officials said at least 32 people were killed near a food distribution site in the south. Read what to know about the shootings.

Epstein Investigation

A former Epstein employee said that she twice told the F.B.I. about what she considered a troubling encounter with Trump. Her account suggests how Trump might appear in the Epstein files.
By tapping into other grievances, including mistrust of the mainstream media, Trump has been able to deflect MAGA's wrath over Epstein — at least for now, Erica Green writes.
Your pick: The most-clicked story in The Morning yesterday was about Trump's friendship with Epstein.
"The Daily" is about Epstein and the MAGA base today.

Politics

A man wearing a black mask over his nose and mouth stands in a hallway holding a backpack that says

In Manhattan. David Dee Delgado/Reuters

The mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, criticized ICE agents' use of masks during immigration raids, saying they created a "reign of terror."
President Trump urged the Washington Commanders and Cleveland Guardians to revert to their former names (the Washington Redskins and the Cleveland Indians), claiming, without evidence, that Native Americans wanted this change.

International

Shigeru Ishiba sits in front of microphones. Behind him is a grid of Japanese text, with a few lines marked by red rosettes.

Japan's prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba, at his party's vote counting center. Pool photo by Franck Robichon

Japan's long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party now holds a minority in both houses of Parliament. Two new nationalist parties surged in elections for the upper house.
In South Korea, landslides and floods from torrential rain killed at least 18 people.
Trump's policies, including tariffs and criticism of European allies, have inadvertently brought the E.U. together.

OPINIONS

The Democratic Party is in shambles. To unify, its midterm candidates should campaign against the Republican budget bill, James Carville writes.

Here's a column by Ezra Klein on divisions among American Jews.

Catch up on the biggest news, and wind down to end your day.

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MORNING READS

A woman in an inflatable pool with a clear umbrella.

MJ Cocking Eric Ruby for The New York Times

A.I. friend: Chatbots can get scary if you suspend your disbelief. One woman didn't — and wound up in a relationship that was strangely, helpfully real.

Trader Joe's: The grocery chain has no store in London but its tote bags are all over the city.

Toupee Queen: This woman is working to change the way people talk about men's hair loss.

Travel 101: Learn some of the local language in your destination before you fly. Here's how.

For the lucky few: Some airlines and credit card companies are stocking their elite lounges with caviar, sushi bars and big-name chefs.

Metropolitan Diary: Champagne on the subway.

Lives Lived: Peter Phillips was a vanguard figure in the British Pop Art movement of the 1960s who drew from his working-class background to incorporate images of automotive parts, pinups and film sirens in paintings that captured postwar culture's swirl of sex and consumerism. He died at 86.

SPORTS

Golf: Scottie Scheffler won the Open Championship in Northern Ireland by four shots to capture his second major this year.

N.F.L.: JC Tretter, who was one of the favorites to take over as interim head of the NFL Players Association, resigned from the organization.

ARTS AND IDEAS

A shouting and struggling man in a suit and tie is dragged off by two soldiers with guns.

David Duchovny in a scene from "The X-Files." Doug Hyun/Fox

TV shows like "The X-Files" have taught audiences to invest in conspiracy theories over the years, the critic James Poniewozik argues. "They didn't create the breakdown of public trust," he writes, "but they played it all out on TV." Read more about how conspiracy thrillers fueled our politics.