The Daily Brief: Teaching AI What I Want to Notice

A few weeks ago, I gave ChatGPT a new assignment: twice a day, give me a briefing on what is happening in the world—but don’t give me the news. Give me the news I would want to know.

That qualification has turned out to be the interesting part.

Over months of working together, I have been teaching my AI collaborator, whom I call Virgil, what catches my attention. I am interested in geopolitics and American power, but also in the symbols countries use to project it. I follow China, Russia and Iran, but I am equally interested in space, artificial intelligence, defense technology, propaganda, art, cultural diplomacy and the strange places where those subjects intersect.

I want to know when a missile is launched. I also want to know what was behind the missile in the photograph.

I want to know what the Federal Reserve does, but also whether the cost of servicing American debt eventually limits the number of aircraft carriers, space programs, alliances and wars the United States can afford simultaneously.

I want the major story. I also want the small story that might become the major story six months from now.

So we have been refining the process. I tell Virgil when something is important to me. I tell it when it has missed something. I ask it to follow certain subjects over time. Books I am reading become analytical lenses. Conferences I attend generate new questions. Stories sometimes migrate from one category to another as connections emerge.

The result is becoming something less like a conventional news digest and more like a personalized intelligence brief.

Tonight, September 4, 2026, the connections are unusually clear.

The Price of Power

The central story tonight is not Russia, Ukraine, Iran, China or even the American economy individually.

It is the collision between intelligence, force and finance.

Russia struck the headquarters of Ukraine’s SBU security service in central Kyiv today, injuring at least 12 people. The target is significant. The SBU is responsible for counterintelligence, cyber defense and some of Ukraine’s most ambitious covert operations against Russia.

The geography is significant, too. The building sits opposite Saint Sophia Cathedral, the 11th-century UNESCO World Heritage site that has survived Mongols, wars, revolutions and the Soviet Union.

Ukraine has promised a “tangible” response.

But the attack comes at precisely the moment American envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are preparing diplomatic visits involving Kyiv and Moscow. Ukraine had reportedly requested that attacks be suspended during the visits.

War and diplomacy are therefore occurring simultaneously rather than sequentially.

And behind both is money.

Ukraine is pushing Europe toward an enormously consequential decision: what to do with roughly €210 billion in frozen Russian assets.

There is a considerable difference between preventing Russia from accessing its sovereign wealth and converting that wealth into Ukrainian military capacity. Belgium is particularly nervous because much of the money is held through Euroclear and because the legal precedent would extend far beyond this war.

If Europe crosses that threshold, sanctions will have evolved. The West will no longer merely be freezing an adversary’s assets. It will have begun considering whether an adversary's sovereign wealth can effectively become a resource for defeating it.

That is a very different weapon.

Iran Is Being Pressured Through Institutions

The pressure campaign against Iran is expanding in another direction.

The United States, Britain, France and Germany are seeking an International Atomic Energy Agency resolution that could send Iran back before the United Nations Security Council for the first time in two decades.

The immediate issue is verification. Inspectors have not regained adequate access to bombed nuclear sites, including the ability to account for Iran’s stockpile of uranium enriched to 60 percent.

But the pressure is also moving through the financial system.

Washington has sanctioned a small Turkish investment bank and two subsidiaries over alleged China-Iran transactions connected to the Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force. The bank denies the allegations.

Turkey is a NATO member.

That makes this worth watching beyond the size of the institution involved. The United States is demonstrating that alliance membership does not necessarily insulate financial institutions from the enforcement architecture surrounding Iran.

Meanwhile, the Strait of Hormuz remains dramatically disrupted, and Israel says it has cleared Hezbollah fighters from tunnels beneath the Ali al-Taher ridge in southern Lebanon.

These may look like separate stories: nuclear inspectors, a Turkish bank, shipping traffic and tunnels in Lebanon.

They are not.

They are different pieces of the infrastructure surrounding Iranian power.

China Demonstrates Two Kinds of Leverage

The Pacific offered another useful comparison today.

Most members of the Pacific Islands Forum supported Palau's concerns about China's July intercontinental ballistic missile test, which passed above island states without what they regarded as sufficient warning. Nauru dissented.

Small Pacific nations collectively objecting to the behavior of a great power is significant. So is the inability to produce complete unanimity.

At almost the same time, Chinese rare-earth shipments to some American, Japanese and Indian buyers have reportedly been delayed.

There does not need to be a dramatic embargo for economic power to become geopolitical power.

A license can be delayed. A shipment can wait. An application can remain under review.

The missile demonstrates one form of Chinese power. Administrative friction demonstrates another.

One is spectacular and visible. The other can be almost boring.

Both can alter another country's behavior.

Your Phone Was Designed for Advertising. An Enemy Can Use It for Targeting.

One of today's smaller stories may ultimately be among the most important.

The U.S. Army, Air Force and Special Operations Command have begun disabling mobile advertising identifiers on government devices amid concerns that commercially available location information could help adversaries identify and target American personnel in the Middle East.

Think about what that means.

The advertising economy built an enormous apparatus for discovering where people are, where they go and what they do because that information helps companies sell things.

The same information can have intelligence value.

A technology designed to determine whether someone might want to buy a pair of shoes can potentially help establish patterns around military personnel.

We tend to imagine surveillance as something governments construct.

Increasingly, governments may not have to construct it. Commercial society has already done much of the work.

America Can Still Borrow. The Question Is What It Costs.

Today's American employment report provides the financial half of the briefing.

The United States added 162,000 jobs in August, almost three times the consensus forecast. Unemployment remained at 4.1 percent.

Normally, strong employment is straightforwardly good news.

Financial markets made the story more complicated.

The ten-year Treasury yield moved to approximately 4.77 percent as investors increased their expectations that the Federal Reserve could raise interest rates. The dollar strengthened. Treasury markets remained orderly.

That is important because it means we are not witnessing investors refusing to finance the United States.

The warning is subtler.

They are demanding a higher price.

I have recently been reading about American debt through three different lenses: Edward Chancellor's history of interest rates, Thomas Arndt's treatment of the national debt and Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff's study of centuries of financial crises.

Put together, they suggest a more useful question than simply asking whether $40 trillion in federal debt is “too much.”

Ask instead: What does the price of American borrowing eventually prevent America from doing?

Higher yields increase the cost of refinancing government debt. Rising interest expense competes with defense, infrastructure, research, industrial policy and everything else the government wants to fund.

American power would therefore not necessarily disappear through some cinematic financial collapse.

It could narrow.

The United States might retain extraordinary military, economic and technological power while gradually losing the financial freedom to pursue several enormously expensive objectives at once.

That is the indicator I now want Virgil to watch.

AI Is Becoming a Financial System, Too

Artificial intelligence provides a parallel story.

Anthropic is reportedly moving toward marketing an initial public offering as early as mid-October, potentially testing a valuation approaching $2 trillion. Nvidia, meanwhile, is planning a nearly $13 billion acquisition of Hugging Face.

The extraordinary AI story of the past several years has largely been about capability: What can these systems do?

The next stage is also about ownership, infrastructure and capital.

Who owns the models? Who owns the chips? Who controls the cloud infrastructure? How much capital must be continuously invested to remain competitive? And what happens when public shareholders begin demanding returns from companies pursuing something approaching a technological arms race?

AI may be becoming more intelligent.

It is also becoming institutionalized.

Europe Is Thinking About Space as Sovereignty

Space is undergoing a similar transformation.

A September 9–10 summit in Paris is increasingly becoming a test of European technological sovereignty after reports that Washington encouraged American companies not to attend and SpaceX withdrew.

Europe is discussing accelerating Ariane 6 and Vega-C launches and, eventually, putting European astronauts into orbit aboard European vehicles.

That language should sound familiar.

Energy independence. Semiconductor independence. Defense independence.

Now: launch independence.

Spaceflight is increasingly being understood not simply as scientific infrastructure but as sovereign infrastructure.

NASA's Roman Space Telescope, meanwhile, continues toward Sun-Earth L2 with no verified anomaly reported. I have been following Roman since before its launch, so it remains on Virgil's watch list.

This is another feature of the experiment: not every story disappears after one news cycle.

Some become threads.

And Then There Is Paul Schrader

The briefing ends far away from missiles, Treasury yields and rare-earth minerals—or perhaps not as far away as it initially appears.

At the Venice Film Festival, director Paul Schrader has returned to the subjects that have followed him throughout his career: guilt, sin, redemption and the possibility of forgiveness.

His new film, The Basics of Philosophy, centers on a professor confronting whether he deserves forgiveness. Schrader has connected his recurring preoccupation with these questions to his Calvinist childhood and the doctrine of predestination.

I have recently been exploring sacred music, inherited religious ideas and the possibility that cultural structures can survive long after people cease consciously believing in the theology that created them.

Schrader gives me another way into that question.

What happens when belief disappears but its architecture remains?

Perhaps it becomes music.

Perhaps it becomes cinema.

Perhaps it becomes our sense of guilt.

That is precisely the kind of story I want in my briefing alongside Russia and Treasury yields.

Because one of the things I am learning from this experiment is that personalization should not simply make information narrower.

Done correctly, it should make the connections wider.

The objective is not to build an AI that tells me what I already think.

It is to build a collaborator that knows enough about what I am thinking to show me something I have not noticed yet.

Tomorrow morning, Virgil gets another chance.

AI Disclosure: This article is part of an ongoing human–AI experiment. Ashley Greer directed ChatGPT to produce twice-daily briefings tailored to her developing interests in geopolitics, American power, artificial intelligence, space, defense, art, culture and symbolism. ChatGPT assisted with news synthesis, organization, pattern recognition and drafting. Greer determines the subjects being followed, develops and challenges the analytical connections, provides continuing editorial direction, and decides what is ultimately published. The underlying briefing for this article drew on reporting and information from Reuters, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. Treasury, NASA and other primary or reported sources.