The burger chain announced that Michael Boes will serve as its first “Chief MAHA Officer,” a new executive post focused on “nutritional integrity, ingredient transparency, and the healthiness” of its products, according to a Tuesday post from the company’s X account.

“Steak n Shake believes that burgers, fries, and shakes should be made from real ingredients families know and love,” the chain wrote in the post.

The appointment makes Steak ’n Shake one of the most explicit fast-food adopters of the MAHA brand, a movement associated with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his push to remake parts of the American diet.

“Customers should never have to choose between taste and health,” Boes said in the company’s X post. “When restaurants commit to both, they serve better food and they build lasting trust.”

Who is Boes?

This isn’t Boes’ first rodeo with the MAHA movement, or RFK Jr. for that matter—he used to work with him. He served within the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He was one of the developers behind the newly released Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which inverted the food pyramid and put meat at the top of the upside down triangle, and said it was “the most fulfilling moment of my career.”

Before joining HHS in April 2025, he held senior business roles at Hallmark Health Care Solutions, Job.com, Gifted Healthcare, SnapNurse, AMN Healthcare, Conduent, and Cardinal Health, according to his LinkedIn. His profile says he led Public Health sales operations at Conduent and worked with health systems and departments, and holds an MBA from Southern Methodist University.

Biglari Holdings courts the MAHA movement

The MAHA hire is the latest chapter in a long and turbulent saga for Biglari Holdings and its CEO Sardar Biglari, who took control of Steak ‘n Shake in 2008 when the chain was losing $100,000 a day. Biglari turned it into a cash cow generating more than $250 million in total operational earnings through 2016. It was back in the red by 2018, and by 2024 the company had closed 200 locations and overhauled its model around self-service kiosks.

Now, Biglari is betting that cultural realignment will save the franchise. In its
2025 annual letter, Biglari reported 10.2% same-store sales growth—its best annual same-store performance since current management took control—and credited product-quality improvements as a key driver. In the third quarter of 2025, Steak ‘n Shake led all restaurant chains with 15% same-store sales growth, which the brand attributed in part to Bitcoin payments.

Last week, Bitcoin Magazine reported the chain was teasing “exciting news” for the Bitcoin Conference, quoting the company as saying “our same-store sales have risen dramatically ever since we launched Bitcoin payments.” The chain then announced a “Bitcoin Milkshake” and even offered hourly employees a Bitcoin bonus equal to 21 cents an hour.

“Appointing a Chief MAHA Officer is a sign of our continued commitment to make Steak n Shake the great differentiator in fast food. Michael is ideally suited for such a role, with his deep understanding of nutrition and his experience at the highest level of health policymaking,” said Sardar Biglari, Chairman and CEO of Biglari Holdings, the owner of Steak n Shake, in a statement to Fortune. “To put it simply, good-tasting food should also be good for you.”

Steak ’n Shake already is involved in key spaces where followers of MAHA may be interested in: it sells jars of beef tallow and uses full-fat dairy cues and “real food” messaging. It has strong anti-seed-oil stances and a stronger alignment with the MAHA movement. And even switched all of its fries and onion rings to 100% beef tallow—even cheekily calling them “RFK’d” in social media posts.

In addition to switching fries to beef tallow, promoting cane-sugar Coca-Cola in glass bottles, and removing microwaves from restaurants, it said it wants to restore the “original spirit of American fast food.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

When I heard this, it stopped me in my tracks because 11 years ago, I too was grappling with my relationship with technology. In fact, I nearly ended my own life due to the effects of social media. Since that pivotal moment in my dorm room, I’ve been working to prevent teens from going down the same black hole by equipping them with the tools they need to thrive in the digital world. I’ve spent day after day in rooms with parents who have lost kids to suicide or had their teen’s college application rescinded due to deep fakes. I’ve spent the past year working with policymakers and educators to try to solve the issue of our time: phones in schools. I’ve spent my 10,000 hours in classrooms and in my DMs, listening to teens who will spend an average of 30 years of their lives on their phones.

The conclusion is consistent: phone bans and Big Tech lawsuits are not enough.

As we enter an even more crucial era of AI, we need to learn from the mistakes we made with social media. If social media is the stage, think of AI as the greenroom — the quiet space that our kids are going to not just for homework, but for advice, emotional support, and research, reaching it before they ever turn to a human.

We’ve built a cognitive nuclear weapon, handed it to children, and called it innovation. But this time it isn’t whistleblowers leaking documents from the inside. This time, people are throwing Molotov cocktails — literally and metaphorically. So what do we do?

To save our kids, we need to think bigger, smarter and move faster. I’m proposing a new incentive structure — call it the “Digital Harm Tax” — for Big Tech, modeled on a framework that already works: the Green Tax.

That means reengineering incentives and policies in place for companies and funding for education and solutions for our communities. Big Tech won’t change voluntarily — it’s behaving exactly as the system was designed — to maximize profits at any cost.

The Green Tax was originally created to account for the environmental costs and promote sustainability within businesses. Activities that contributed negatively to the environment were taxed, and environmentally sustainable practices were rewarded with tax deductions. It worked: the EU has halved emissions since implementing their tax structure in 2005. This tax finally gave companies motivation to prioritize accounting for these societal costs. Why? Because it would impact their bottom line. The Green Tax didn’t ask companies to grow a conscience. It made destroying things expensive and protecting them profitable.

So how would a “Digital Harm Tax” apply to Big Tech? Two mechanisms would drive it:

First, tax compulsive design features — infinite scroll, autoplay video, and endless chat — to reduce the number of kids sucked into doomsday content. Similarly, tax algorithmic amplification of distressing content and hyper-personalized targeting of minors so kids’ vulnerabilities and fears aren’t unnecessarily fueled for profit.

Second, reward platforms that protect kids with meaningful deductions. Platforms with safety features that alert parents to children’s mental health concerns would be rewarded. Companies that make AI unavailable for minors under 16, or build stopping mechanisms that give parents the option to slow content flooding their kids’ brains, could also see reductions. AI companies could even get a tax write-off for demonstrating culturally competent design — grounded in equity and built without bias.

The landmark Meta trial ruling last month signaled a shift in the tide. A California jury found Meta and YouTube liable for knowingly building addictive platforms that harmed children, resulting in a $3 million settlement. But $3 million against a trillion-dollar machine isn’t justice — it’s a rounding error. We don’t have time to fight each platform and harm one by one. We need tech on offense — protecting kids before the harm happens, not writing small checks after it does.

This is no longer about screen time, or even mental health alone. It’s about brain health. It’s about preserving the next generation’s ability to think, act, and solve the very crises we’re handing them.

As Laura Marquez-Garrett, senior counsel at the Social Media Victims Law Center, puts it: “These companies will not stop addicting and exploiting kids until we make that particular business decision less profitable than safety by design.”

We taxed pollution because it was killing the planet. It’s time we taxed digital harm before it costs us a generation. The Green Tax didn’t solve everything — but it changed what was possible. It’s time to do the same for tech.

We can’t keep letting Big Tech cash out on our kids.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

It’s exposing a bigger problem for the cybersecurity industry: AI can now find flaws and exploit them so quickly that defenders may be the ones left truly exposed.

A group of AI-fueled Discord info-seekers – one of them linked to a third-party vendor of the AI startup – managed to access the highly gatekept cybersecurity defense system in February, the same day of its debut. 

Using a mixed bag of insider access, web-scouring bots, and some raw ingenuity, the breach is triggering a fresh wave of alarm across an already spooked industry.

Ironically, as the Discord incident was unfolding, the Cloud Security Alliance – in a rapid-response briefing published days after Mythos was unveiled – warned that AI was accelerating vulnerability discovery faster than organizations could keep up, creating the perfect storm for defenders.

Finding thousands of flaws and zero days across hundreds of software systems, the introduction of Mythos has effectively shrunk the patch window defenders have relied on for years – from days to just a few hours.

If released in the wild and adopted by hackers, security teams will inevitably be tasked with building an entirely new playbook to help decide how to prioritize and fix what matters – and there’s still no guarantee they can stem the cyber bleeding. 

More than 250 security leaders helped shape the briefing, which argues the challenge is no longer just finding flaws, but deciding which ones actually pose real risk – and fixing them before they can be turned into working exploits.

It’s a shift some security experts say the industry is still underestimating. The problem is no longer discovery alone. It is remediation, accountability, and whether defenders can keep up as AI moves from identifying vulnerabilities to showing how they can be exploited in the real world.

The Mythos moment may ultimately be less about a single powerful cybersecurity model and more about what happens in the shrinking window between finding a flaw and weaponizing it.

Anthropic’s answer, for now, is Project Glasswing – a tightly controlled effort to use Mythos to help secure critical software before comparable models become more widely available.

But even that highlights the larger issue at hand: the industry knows what is coming and is still scrambling to build that much-needed playbook in time to defend against larger threats, such as nation-state or ransomware attackers.

If a group of AI nerds could get into Mythos – allegedly without malicious intent – imagine the fallout if the next ones to slide through that door were actual criminals.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Will oil prices go up?

Oil prices are inherently unpredictable. While many variables come into play, the basic push and pull of supply and demand is what ultimately matters. In times of heightened concern about recession, war, or other major disruptions, oil can swing suddenly.

How oil prices translate to gas pump prices

Each gallon you pay for at the pump bundles together several costs. Crude oil is one piece, but you also pay for refineries, wholesalers, government taxes, and the price markup set by gas stations.

Because crude oil usually accounts for more than half of the price per gallon, it tends to move the needle the most. Sharp increases in oil almost always show up quickly at the pump. Declines in the price of oil, on the other hand, often translate into slower, more delayed drops in gas prices—the “rockets and feathers” effect.

The role of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve

When an emergency arises, the U.S. has a reserve of crude oil called the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Its chief function is to secure energy during disasters like sanctions, severe storm damage, or war. It can also help take the edge off brutal price spikes when supply gets hit.

It’s not a solution for the long haul. It’s more of an immediate safety net to support consumers and keep crucial sectors of the economy running (think key industries, emergency services, public transportation, and the like).

How oil and natural gas prices are linked

Oil and natural gas are two of the main fuels that keep the world running. A big change in oil prices can end up affecting natural gas. As an example, if oil prices increase, some industries may sub natural gas for certain areas of their operations wherever possible. This can increase demand for natural gas.

Historical performance of oil

The oil market typically tracks two benchmarks:

• Brent crude oil (the main global oil benchmark)
• West Texas Intermediate (WTI) (the main benchmark of North America)

Between the two, Brent offers a clearer view of global oil performance because it prices much of the world’s traded crude. It’s also often the preferred gauge for tracking historical oil trends. In fact, the U.S. Energy Information Administration now uses Brent as its primary reference in its Annual Energy Outlook.

Looking at the Brent benchmark over multiple decades, you’ll find oil has been anything but stable. It’s seen sharp rises due to factors like wars and supply cuts, along with steep declines tied to global recessions and oversupply (called a “glut”). For example:

• The early 1970s saw the first major oil shock when the Middle East slashed exports and placed an embargo on the U.S. and others during the Yom Kippur War.
• Prices fell in the mid-1980s for reasons including lower demand and the entry of more non-OPEC oil producers.
• Prices jumped again in 2008 with increased global demand, but then plunged alongside the global financial crisis.
• During the 2020 COVID lockdown, oil demand collapsed like never before—bringing prices below $20 per barrel.

Bottom line, oil’s historical performance has been anything but smooth. It’s hugely affected by wars, recessions, OPEC whims, evolving energy initiatives and policies, and much more.

Energy coverage from Fortune

Looking to stay up-to-date regarding the latest energy developments? Check out our recent coverage:

• The Iran War just made the clean energy transition non-negotiable
• Officials will flush 50,000 toilets to flood a Utah lake in order to generate electricity
• How the Iran energy crisis is supercharging Southeast Asia’s EV transition

Frequently asked questions

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The latest step came Wednesday when the San Francisco company confirmed it had agreed to acquire Gett’s UK business — one of London’s leading black cab apps — in a deal that will position Lyft as the dominant app for the city’s iconic cabs and cap its third major international acquisition in under a year.

The Gett acquisition follows Lyft’s $197 million purchase of Freenow, the pan-European multi-mobility app, completed last July, and its acquisition of TBR Global Chauffeuring, a Scotland-based luxury chauffeur company operating across 120 countries, in October. Together, the three deals have reshaped a company that as recently as early 2025 had never ventured meaningfully beyond North America.

“This is very transformative for the business,” Jeremy Bird, Lyft’s executive vice president of global growth, told Fortune in an interview. “You combine all of these, and it’s a very big deal for us.”

London is the linchpin of Lyft’s European strategy, he added, “in the same way that New York — if you’re going to be a strong company in the U.S., you have to be a strong company in New York — we see it that way in Europe as well.”

Bird explained that Gett’s platform already connects riders to three-quarters of Greater London’s registered black cab drivers, and combining it with Freenow’s existing London black cab business will nearly double Lyft’s total rides in the capital and establish it as the largest app serving the trade.

Lyft is acutely aware of the cultural stakes. London’s black cab drivers are among the most storied — and prideful — in the world, required to pass “The Knowledge,” a famously grueling multi-year exam covering more than 25,000 streets across 113 square miles of the city. It’s so hard to pass, requiring memorization of London’s sprawling, gridless streetscape, that it actually has been scientifically proven to grow London cabbies’ brains. Bird, a self-described Arsenal fan who travels to London regularly, framed the deal as a partnership rather than a disruption.

“We’re not coming in the way others have come into the city with a goal to disrupt,” he said. “We’re coming in with people who have been working side-by-side with [these drivers], providing the demand for their services for years … We want them to be successful. If they’re successful, we’ll be successful.”

Bird — who previously served as Lyft’s chief policy officer and as national field director for Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential reelection campaign — positioned the acquisition strategy as a long-term play on the inevitable digitization of ground transportation globally.

Beyond the cabs, Lyft’s London footprint is becoming strikingly comprehensive. The company already operates bikes through its Urban Solutions division and private-hire vehicles in the capital, and Bird confirmed that autonomous vehicles via a partnership with Baidu are on the horizon. “Kind of the full ecosystem for anybody that wants to get around in the most important market in Europe,” he said.

What also caught Bird’s attention in the Gett deal was the company’s deep enterprise DNA: long-standing B2B relationships with major London corporations. “This is a company that’s been working with the BBC and Transport for London and all of these iconic companies and brands.”

The Gett acquisition is expected to close in the coming weeks, subject to customary conditions. For Lyft, it represents something it has spent the better part of a decade chasing: a credible path to becoming a truly global company, and in one of the world’s most scrutinized cab markets, no less.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

In a video posted on Tax Day by the NYC Mayor’s Office, Mamdani announced the city’s first-ever pied-à-terre tax: an annual fee on luxury properties valued above $5 million whose owners do not live in New York full-time. The video, which has already drawn nearly 470,000 views and 48,000 likes, was shot outside 220 Central Park South, the building where Griffin owns a four-floor penthouse he purchased in 2019 for $238 million, then the highest price ever paid for a home in the United States.

“When I ran for mayor, I said I was going to tax the rich,” Mamdani said in the one-minute clip. “Well, today we’re taxing the rich.”

But a week later, Griffin’s COO at Citadel, Gerald Beeson, hinted the company might not move forward with a massive undertaking in a Midtown construction project.

“We are about to commence the redevelopment of 350 Park Avenue, creating 6,000 highly paid construction jobs and supporting the creation of more than 15,000 permanent jobs in mid-town New York,” wrote Beeson in a letter viewed by the Wall Street Journal. “The project—if we move forward—will entail more than $6 billion dollars of spending.”

Later in the letter, Beeson called out the mayor personally, for personally calling out Griffin. “It is shameful that he used Ken’s name as the example of those who supposedly aren’t carrying their fair share of the burdens associated with New York City’s often costly and wasteful spending,” the email said, according to the Journal. “In doing so, the mayor has once again manifested the ignorance and disdain of the elite political class towards those who have been consistently committed to building one of the greatest cities in the world.”

“We have nearly 2,500 colleagues who have chosen to build their careers here,” Beeson wrote in the letter, the Journal reported. “We understand that our hard work and success will, on occasion, make us targets for political rhetoric. But it should not diminish the pride we take in building firms that will continue to help New York City thrive for decades ahead.”

Mamdani’s campaign promise to “Tax the Rich”

The pied-à-terre tax, which is backed by Gov. Kathy Hochul and still requires approval from the state legislature, would apply to one-to-three-family homes, condominiums, and co-ops worth over $5 million when the owner’s primary residence is outside New York City. Mamdani’s office estimates the tax would generate at least $500 million annually, with revenue directed toward free childcare, street cleaning, and neighborhood safety.

Griffin relocated Citadel’s headquarters from Chicago to Miami in 2022. Others, drawn by Florida’s lack of a personal income tax, have moved to the city, like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, all of whom recently left high-tax states and now maintain Florida residences. Griffin also recently paid $38 million for a duplex apartment up the block from where Mamdani shot the video, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Mamdani said the tax would fix “a fundamentally unfair system.” “These units are sitting empty,” he said. “And even so, they’re able to reap the huge financial rewards of owning property in, dare I say, the greatest city in the world.”

The pied-à-terre tax has circulated in New York policy circles for years but has repeatedly stalled in Albany. Mamdani recently pushed a wealth tax in New York but said the city would be forced to instead increase property taxes if the tax didn’t get state approval. Neither Griffin nor the mayor’s office responded to Fortune’s request for comment.

In a post on X a few days after the video was published, billionaire Pershing Square CEO Bill Ackman backed Griffin and Citadel in the public back and forth.

“Non-residents who spend millions of dollars on NYC apartments help drive NYC’s economy,” wrote Ackman. “The Ken Griffins of the world make NYC high end development viable, driving high-paying construction, brokerage, legal, marketing, and other jobs in NYC. We should be applauding Ken for spending $238 million in NYC, not attacking him for doing so.”

A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on April 16, 2026.

More on real estate:

• The starter home is dying. Better.com’s CEO says AI is the only thing that can save it
• Florida and Texas are the biggest losers in the housing market as Ohio emerges a surprise winner
• Omaha ranks over NYC, LA because Gen Z has ‘a shot at purchasing a house’ for under $300K

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

“I’m actually leading the AI effort for the company,” Wasserman told me. “It’s an area of a lot of personal passion for me.”

That passion is translating into rapid change. In the fourth quarter of 2022, Huntington had just two AI agents—discrete programs running inside the business. Today, 50 are in production and more than 60 are in development, with roughly 15 new ones entering the pipeline every month. The acceleration, Wasserman said, is deliberate and foundational.

“It’s really a dramatic acceleration of agentic process transformation, which is really important, including in my finance team,” he said. That includes SEC reporting, tax filing, and data management supporting over 200 regulatory reports annually, along with broader productivity gains.

Huntington, No. 351 on the Fortune 500, a $285 billion asset regional bank holding company headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, and operates over 1,400 branches in 21 states. Colleague upskilling is a major focus, with a cultural shift underway as employees move beyond simple AI use. “We’re starting to use it like a thought partner for us,” he said. It’s aiding complex decision-making, software development, and, further out, customer-facing products and services.

To govern this, Wasserman has built a federated model—a central team setting strategy and handling advanced applications, paired with resources embedded in each business segment. Over the past year and a half, Huntington has stood up 13 teams focused on discrete parts of the business, driving data analytics and AI use cases.

“Our philosophy is that this is so foundationally transformational that basically every part of the company needs to start adopting it at pace and at scale,” he said.

A recent report found that when CFOs oversee AI projects and score outcomes, companies extract more value.

Three forces behind the quarter

While Wasserman builds out Huntington’s AI infrastructure, the bank on Thursday reported a strong Q1.

Adjusted EPS was $0.37, topping estimates, while reported EPS of $0.25 reflected $271 million in pre-tax acquisition-related charges. Net interest income rose about 33% year over year, net interest margin reached 3.24%, and average loans and deposits grew roughly 18–19% quarter over quarter.

Wasserman attributed the performance to three factors: strength in core commercial and consumer banking, continued gains from geographic and vertical expansion—including seven new Carolinas branches—and the integration of two partnerships.

Texas-based Veritex, acquired in Q4, was fully converted in January, while Cadence Bank closed on Feb. 1. Early results from Veritex are strong, with deposit growth in that segment up 30% year over year in Q1 2026.

Looking broadly at the industry, Wasserman expressed measured optimism. “Notwithstanding all the environmental factors going on right now, the banking industry looks poised to have a really good year,” he said. 

Have a good weekend.

Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Will oil prices go up?

It’s impossible to forecast oil prices with detailed precision. Many different elements affect the market, but ultimately it boils down to supply and demand. When worries about economic recession, war, and other large-scale disruptions increase, oil’s path can shift fast.

How oil prices translate to gas pump prices

Gas prices at the pump don’t only track crude oil. They also include what it takes to refine and move that fuel, the taxes layered on top, and the extra markup your local station adds to stay in business.

Since crude oil generally makes up a majority of the per-gallon cost, changes in its price have an outsized impact. When oil surges, gas prices typically rise in tandem. But when oil retreats, gas prices often lag on the way down, a trend sometimes described as “rockets and feathers.”

The role of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve

In case of emergency, the U.S. has a store of crude oil known as the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Its primary purpose is energy security in case of disaster (think sanctions, severe storm damage, even war). But it can also go a long way toward softening crippling price hikes during supply shocks.

It’s not a long-term answer and is more meant to provide temporary relief, assisting consumers and keeping critical parts of the economy running, like key industries, emergency services, public transportation, etc.

How oil and natural gas prices are linked

Both oil and natural gas are key sources of the energy we use every day. Because of this, a big change in oil prices can affect natural gas. For example, if oil prices increase, some industries may swap natural gas for some segments of their operations where possible, which increases demand for natural gas.

Historical performance of oil

To gauge oil’s performance, we often turn to two benchmarks:

• Brent crude oil, the main global oil benchmark.
• West Texas Intermediate (WTI), the main benchmark of North America

Between these two, Brent better represents global oil performance because it prices much of the world’s traded crude. And, it’s often the best way to track historical oil performance. In fact, even the U.S. Energy Information Administration now uses Brent as its primary reference in its Annual Energy Outlook.

Looking at the Brent benchmark across several decades, oil has been anything but steady. It’s seen spikes due to factors such as wars and supply cuts, and it’s also seen crashes from global recessions and an oversupply (called a “glut”). For example:

• The early 1970s brought the first big oil shock when the Middle East cut exports and imposed an embargo on the U.S. and others during the Yom Kippur War.
• Prices dropped in the mid-1980s for reasons such as lower demand and more non-OPEC oil producers entering the industry.
• Prices spiked again in 2008 with increased global demand, but it soon plummeted alongside the global financial crisis.
• During the 2020 COVID lockdown, oil demand collapsed like never before—bringing prices below $20 per barrel.

All to say, oil’s historical performance has been anything but smooth. Again, it’s hugely affected by wars, recessions, OPEC whims, evolving energy initiatives and policies, and much more.

Energy coverage from Fortune

Looking to stay up-to-date regarding the latest energy developments? Check out our recent coverage:

• Panama Canal surge pricing: up to $4 million paid out with Strait of Hormuz still closed
• California’s oil and jet fuel supply is getting slammed by a perfect storm of unfortunate timing
• IEA chief warns 13 million barrels a day are gone with no cure in sight

Frequently asked questions

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Suicide deaths among 15- to 23-year-olds were 11% lower than what researchers expected between July 2022 — when the lifeline launched — and December 2024, researchers wrote in a study published Wednesday in JAMA.

“The 988 program is one of the largest federal investments in suicide prevention in U.S. history — roughly $1.5 billion cumulative — and our findings suggest that investment has translated into measurable reductions in young adult suicide deaths,” said Dr. Vishal Patel, a clinical fellow at Harvard Medical School and the paper’s lead author.

___

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988.

___

The researchers used nationwide death certificate records from 1999 to 2022 to model what the suicide mortality would have been had the 988 line not launched. They then compared the estimates to the actual number of deaths.

The researchers can’t say for certain that 988 was the sole cause of the decline, and the U.S. suicide rate is down overall. But they ran several other comparisons to “gut check” their overall findings, Patel said.

They found the 10 states that had the largest increases in call volumes following the launch of 988 also saw significantly larger gaps in expected vs. actual suicide deaths. The reductions were also greater in younger people than people older than 65, who are less likely to use the lifeline. And they saw no similar changes when looking at suicide deaths in England, where no comparable lifeline existed during the study period.

The results are in line with previous research.

“Studies show that after speaking with a trained crisis counselor, most people who contact the 988 Lifeline are significantly more likely to feel less depressed, less suicidal, less overwhelmed and more hopeful,” a spokesperson for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, which funds the hotline, said in response to the study.

Research results ‘very heartening,’ expert says

Jill Harkavy-Friedman, who leads the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention’s research program and was not involved in the study, said the results were “very heartening and very positive.” She wants to see more research replicating the results, but she said the authors did a “great deal of work” to weed out other possible factors for the decline.

The entire mental health system is key to lowering suicide rates, Harkavy-Friedman said. 988’s power to navigate that system, helping callers make safety plans, connecting them to local crisis intervention teams and referring people to longer-term care, has led to “extraordinary” impact, she said. And simply having someone to call in a moment of crisis can also be lifesaving.

“That is the strength of the crisis line,” Harkavy-Friedman said. “When you call, it de-escalates the crisis so the person has greater capacity to address whatever it is that’s driving their emotions at the moment.”

Experts say the overall patchwork of federal and state funding for call centers remains insufficient to meet the true level of need.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s federal budget request maintains stable 988 funding at $534.6 million for fiscal year 2027, in anticipation of 11 million contacts next year.

The hotline “is not a panacea for preventing suicide death,” but the number of lives it has saved “is a really big deal and underscores the need for sustained investment in 988 from federal, and especially state, lawmakers,” said Jonathan Purtle, a New York University mental health policy researcher.

Specialized line for LGBTQ+ youth

In a Capitol Hill hearing Tuesday, Sen. Tammy Baldwin pressed Kennedy to follow through on a “legal requirement” to restore 988’s specialized line for LGBTQ+ youth. The administration abruptly cut the program last summer, despite evidence that the population faces disproportionately high suicide rates.

“Yes, we are working on getting it up now,” Kennedy told the Wisconsin Democrat. Spokespeople for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately provide The Associated Press with any timeline or details of that restoration.

Patel said the specialized services for high-risk groups — including the LGBTQ+ line — are part of what makes the program work.

“Our findings should be read as evidence that this is a program worth preserving and expanding, not one to scale back,” he said.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

As Anthropic Mythos drove a fresh wave of headlines this week—highlighting both its advanced capabilities and how easily such systems could be misused—I made my way to a conference room just outside Washington, D.C. There, a cross-sector group of AI security practitioners, standards-setters, and policy experts had gathered to figure out what securing AI should actually look like.

Outside the industry, their acronyms—SANS, NIST, OWASP, CoSAI, CIS, CSA, BIML—may not mean much. Inside security, they help set the rules organizations around the world follow. But right now, those rules are struggling to keep up.

I had been invited to sit in on the AI Security Policy Forum, organized by Shoshana Cox, global AI policy lead at the security community OWASP AI Exchange, as organizations race to plug AI into everything—handing over sensitive data and critical workflows—even as those same systems are becoming more attractive targets for adversaries.

Leading the session was Rob van der Veer, chief AI officer at software platform Software Improvement Group and a founder of the OWASP AI Exchange. Systems like Mythos, he said, are accelerating how quickly vulnerabilities can be discovered—and shifting the balance toward attackers.

“They show that weaknesses in AI systems can now be found faster and at scale—often before developers are aware of them,” he said. “This shifts the balance toward attackers and reduces the margin for error.” So far, concerns about Mythos have mostly focused on how good it and similar models are at finding so-called “zero-day” vulnerabilities in traditional software, but they can also discover vulnerabilities in the AI models and systems that enterprises are increasingly deploying across their organizations.

The problem is that most organizations aren’t ready to deal with most of the AI security concerns that are already clear and the emerging ones coming down the pike. There’s a growing need for practical guidance—how to identify AI-specific threats, and what to do about them. But the field remains fragmented, with overlapping frameworks, competing recommendations, and little agreement on where to start.

How to secure AI systems is still unsettled

Even some of the basics are still unsettled. What does it mean to measure whether an AI system is secure? How should that differ across use cases, infrastructure, or third-party tools versus underlying models? Should guidance focus on capabilities, or outcomes?

Gary McGraw, cofounder of the Berryville Institute of Machine Learning, pointed to a core gap: Today’s benchmarks tend to measure how well AI systems can perform security tasks—not how secure the systems themselves are. Companies need to keep that distinction in mind when evaluating their tools and defenses.

McGraw warned as far back as 2019 that securing machine learning systems would be “one of the defining cybersecurity struggles of the next decade.” That moment has now arrived.

“These meetings are a way to remind ourselves of the fundamentals,” he said, “as we try to define what machine learning security actually is.”

Another significant concern is that no finite set of guardrails is universally robust against adversarial prompts, said Apostol Vassilev, a research team supervisor working on AI security at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), part of the U.S. Department of Commerce. “This means that the security of AI systems is not a static problem—one that can be solved once and done,” he said. Unlike many traditional software vulnerabilities that can be patched, AI security requires a more dynamic approach: continuously updating guardrails to address known exploits, conducting internal red teaming to uncover new adversarial prompts, patching defenses before attackers strike, and prioritizing resilience so enterprises can limit the impact of—and recover quickly from—inevitable exploits.

“Ultimately, the goal is to reach an equilibrium that makes it difficult and costly for attackers to find new exploits,” he added. “But that can only happen if businesses invest in adopting and maintaining this dynamic posture.”

Similar to transition to securing software

Still, many of the meeting’s attendees remain optimistic the industry will catch up. McGraw noted that security has been through transitions like this before, such as the software boom of the mid-90s. “We didn’t have to panic when software swamped the world,” he said. “I remember when banks realized, ‘Oh my God, we’re a software company.’”

At moments like this, the narrative communicated by companies like Anthropic and OpenAI can run ahead of the reality, he warned. “Security loves a good story with a flaming pile of broken stuff and the fire department coming to the rescue,” he said. “I am still optimistic that we’re making progress towards better security engineering all the time. We can take what we’ve learned and we can apply that to machine learning.” 

And that’s why these kinds of meetings about industry coordination matters, said van der Veer. “Aligning standards and guidance across initiatives reduces fragmentation, improves clarity, and gives practitioners a coherent path forward,” he explained. “It enables organizations to move fast without losing control.”

With that, here’s more AI news.

Sharon Goldman
sharon.goldman@fortune.com
@sharongoldman

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com