The automated future just lurched a few steps closer. Over the past few weeks, nearly all of the major AI firms—OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, Amazon, Microsoft, and Perplexity, among others—have announced new products that are focused not on answering questions or making their human users somewhat more efficient, but on completing tasks themselves. They are being pitched for their ability to “reason” as people do and serve as “agents” that will eventually carry out complex work from start to finish.

Humans will still nudge these models along, of course, but they are engineered to help fewer people do the work of many. Last month, Anthropic launched Claude Code, a coding program that can do much of a human software developer’s job but far faster, “reducing development time and overhead.” The program actively participates in the way that a colleague would, writing and deploying code, among other things. Google now has a widely available “workhorse model,” and three separate AI companies have products named Deep Research, all of which quickly gather and synthesize huge amounts of information on a user’s behalf. OpenAI touts its version’s ability to “complete multi-step research tasks for you” and accomplish “in tens of minutes what would take a human many hours.”

AI companies have long been building and benefiting from the narrative that their products will eventually be able to automate major projects for their users, displacing jobs and perhaps even entire professions or sectors of society. As early as 2016, Sam Altman, who had recently co-founded OpenAI, wrote in a blog post that “as technology continues to eliminate traditional jobs,” new economic models might be necessary, such as a universal basic income; he has warned repeatedly since then that AI will disrupt the labor market, telling my colleague Ross Andersen in 2023 that “jobs are definitely going to go away, full stop.”

Despite the foreboding nature of these comments, they have remained firmly in the realm of speculation. Two years ago, ChatGPT couldn’t perform basic arithmetic, and critics have long harped on the technology’s biases and mythomania. Chatbots and AI-powered image generators became known for helping kids cheat on homework and flooding the web with low-grade content. Meaningful applications quickly emerged in some professions—coding, fielding customer-service queries, writing boilerplate copy—but even the best AI models were clearly not capable enough to precipitate widespread job displacement.

[Read: A chatbot is secretly doing my job]

Since then, however, two transformations have taken place. First, AI search became standard. Chatbots exploded in popularity because they could lucidly—though frequently inaccurately—answer human questions. Billions of people were already accustomed to asking questions and finding information online, making this an obvious use case for AI models that might otherwise have seemed like research projects: Now 300 million people use ChatGPT every week, and more than 1 billion use Google’s AI Overview, according to the companies. Further underscoring the products’ relevance, media companies—including The Atlantic—signed lucrative deals with OpenAI and others to add their content to AI search, bringing both legitimacy and some additional scrutiny to the technology. Hundreds of millions were habituated to AI, and at least some portion have found the technology helpful.

But although plain chatbots and AI search introduced a major cultural shift, their business prospects were always small potatoes for the tech giants. Compared with traditional search algorithms, AI algorithms are more expensive to run. And search is an old business model that generative AI could only enhance—perhaps resulting in a few more clicks on paid advertisements or producing a bit more user data for targeting future advertisements.

Refining and expanding generative AI to do more for the professional class—not just students scrambling on term papers—is where tech companies see the real financial opportunity. And they’ve been building toward seizing it. The second transformation that has led to this new phase of the AI era is simply that the technology, while still riddled with biases and inaccuracies, has legitimately improved. The slate of so-called reasoning models released in recent months, such as OpenAI’s o3-mini and xAI’s Grok 3, has impressed in particular. These AI products can be genuinely helpful, and their applications to advancing scientific research could prove lifesaving. Economists, doctors, coders, and other professionals are widely commenting on how these new models can expedite their work; a quarter of tech start-ups in this year’s cohort at the prestigious incubator Y Combinator said that 95 percent of their code was generated with AI. Major firms—McKinsey, Moderna, and Salesforce, to name just a handful—are now using it in basically every aspect of their businesses. And the models continue getting cheaper, and faster, to deploy.

[Read: The GPT era is already ending]

Tech executives, in turn, have grown blunt about their hopes that AI will become good enough to do a human’s work. In a Meta earnings call in late January, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “2025 will be the year when it becomes possible to build an AI engineering agent” that’s as skilled as “a good, mid-level engineer.” Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, recently said in a talk with the Council on Foreign Relations that AI will be “writing 90 percent of the code” just a few months from now—although still with human specifications, he noted. But he continued, “We will eventually reach the point where the AIs can do everything that humans can,” in every industry. (Amodei, it should be mentioned, is the ultimate techno-optimist; in October, he published a sprawling manifesto, titled “Machines of Loving Grace,” that posited AI development could lead to “the defeat of most diseases, the growth in biological and cognitive freedom, the lifting of billions of people out of poverty to share in the new technologies, a renaissance of liberal democracy and human rights.”) Altman has used similarly grand language recently, imagining countless virtual knowledge workers fanning out across industries.

These bright visions have dimmed considerably when put into practice: Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency’s efforts to replace human civil servants with AI may be the clearest and most dramatic execution of this playbook yet, with massive job loss and little more than chaos to show for it so far. Meanwhile, all of generative-AI models’ issues with bias, inaccuracy, and poor citations remain, even as the technology has advanced. OpenAI’s image-generating technology still struggles at times to produce people with the right number of appendages. Salesforce is reportedly struggling to sell its AI agent, Agentforce, to customers because of issues with accuracy and concerns about the product’s high cost, among other things. Nevertheless, the corporation has pressed on with its pitch, much as other AI companies have continued to iterate on and promote products with known issues. (In a recent earnings call, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said the firm has “3,000 paying Agentforce customers who are experiencing unprecedented levels of productivity.”) In other words, flawed products won’t stop tech companies’ push to automate everything—the AI-saturated future will be imperfect at best, but it is coming anyway.

The industry’s motivations are clear: Google’s and Microsoft’s cloud businesses, for instance, grew rapidly in 2024, driven substantially by their AI offerings. Meta’s head of business AI, Clara Shih, recently told CNBC that the company expects “every business” to use AI agents, “the way that businesses today have websites and email addresses.” OpenAI is reportedly considering charging $20,000 a month for access to what it describes as Ph.D.-level research agents.

Google and Perplexity did not respond to a request for comment, and a Microsoft spokesperson declined to comment. An OpenAI spokesperson pointed me to an essay from September in which Altman wrote, “I have no fear that we’ll run out of things to do.” He could well be right; the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects AI to substantially increase the demand for computer and business occupations through 2033. A spokesperson for Anthropic referred me to the start-up’s initiative to study and prepare for AI’s effect on the labor market. The effort’s first research paper analyzed millions of conversations with Anthropic’s Claude model and found that it was used to “automate” human work in 43 percent of cases, such as identifying and fixing a software bug.

Tech companies are revealing, more clearly than ever, their vision for a post-work future. ChatGPT started the generative-AI boom not with an incredible business success, but with a psychological one. The chatbot was and is still possibly losing the company money, but it exposed internet users around the world to the first popular computer program that could hold an intelligent conversation on any subject. The advent of AI search may have performed a similar role, presenting limited opportunity for immediate profits but habituating—or perhaps inoculating—millions of people to bots that can think, write, and live for you.

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A year ago this week, Senator John Thune and 21 of his Republican colleagues defied Donald Trump and voted to send $60 billion in U.S. aid to Ukraine as it tried to ward off Russia’s invasion. “America cannot retreat from the world stage,” the South Dakota senator later said, explaining his vote. “American leadership is desperately needed now more than I think any time in recent history, and we need to make sure that Ukraine has the weaponry and the resources that it needs to defeat the Russians.”

The vote was gutsy: It drew a rebuke from Trump, who was then heavily favored to capture the GOP presidential nomination. And it was taken even though the bipartisan bill faced uncertain odds in the House, until Speaker Mike Johnson backed it two months later. The measure passed, and assistance continued to flow to Kyiv.

Twelve months later, Ukraine’s future is even more imperiled. Over the past week, the Trump administration has made clear that the United States will no longer be Kyiv’s largest and most crucial supporter, and that it might sideline Ukrainians from negotiations meant to bring an end to the war. But the response from Republicans has been noticeably different. Thune, now Senate majority leader, has remained silent, as have many of his GOP colleagues. He did not respond to interview requests this week.

[Read: The accidental speaker]

Republican capitulation to Trump is a familiar story line, but the moment is nonetheless worth marking. With a few, mostly timid exceptions, the party that once prided itself on standing up to Moscow—the party of Cold Warriors Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush—has bowed to a president who himself is bowing to an adversary. And as Trump officials yesterday embarked on negotiations with their Russian counterparts that could reward Vladimir Putin’s gamble on seizing territory from a sovereign neighbor, Republicans faced a new, extraordinarily high-profile test: whether to prioritize their long-held national-security beliefs or their loyalty to the president.

“The founders intended Congress to be first among equals of the three branches of government, [but] you’d be hard pressed to know it though looking at today’s Republican-controlled Congress,” Richard Haas, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, told me. Haass, who worked in three previous Republican administrations, said that Republicans have been “not just subservient but invisible,” while “not holding hearings or otherwise challenging the Trump administration’s unconditional embrace of Putin’s Russia, the dismissal of Europe’s interests and Ukraine’s demands.”

No representatives from Ukraine or other European nations were present at a hurriedly arranged meeting between U.S. and Russian officials yesterday in Saudi Arabia. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters afterward that Russia and the United States had agreed to work on a Ukraine peace deal and to explore “the incredible opportunities that exist to partner with the Russians” both geopolitically and economically. The message amounted to a dizzying change from President Joe Biden’s isolation of Moscow after the Ukraine invasion, which many Senate Republicans broadly supported.

Last week, Trump’s White House signaled a fundamental shift in relations with both Europe and Russia by stridently dismissing longtime democratic allies while looking to re-establish ties with the nuclear-armed autocracy to the east. The president prioritized a call with Putin over one with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and invited the Russian leader, and not the Ukrainian one, for multiple summit meetings. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ruled out Ukraine joining NATO or receiving substantial future American security guarantees as part of the negotiations to end the war. Vice President J. D. Vance upbraided European leaders for freezing the far right out of government in their nations. And then yesterday, at a Mar-a-Lago news conference, Trump chided Ukraine for the conflict, snapping, “You should never have been there,” and ignoring that it was Russia that invaded.

[Read: The day the Ukraine war ended]

Some Republicans in the Senate offered outright support for Trump’s Putin-friendly view of American security. “I don’t think anybody really believes Ukraine should be in NATO now,” Senator Eric Schmitt told reporters last week. “Unless you want World War III.”

Others took a more measured approach, expressing the wish that the U.S. would still support Ukraine—or at least not yield to Putin—while still avoiding outright criticism of Trump. Senator John Cornyn, who voted for the aid package last year, told reporters after Trump’s call with Putin, “Ukraine ought to be the one to negotiate its own peace deal. I don’t think it should be imposed upon it by any other country, including ours. I’m hopeful.” But he added: “I can’t imagine President Trump giving up leverage. I don’t know what his strategy is for negotiating, but he’s pretty good at it. I think it surprises people, including me, sometimes what he’s able to pull off.”

Few represent the Republican Party’s evolution more than Senator Lindsey Graham, who spent years as the late Senator John McCain’s wingman, earning a reputation as a globe-trotting national security hawk. But he has since become one of Trump’s most obsequious supporters, often offering over-the-top praise of the president in a way that McCain would not have recognized. Over the weekend, Graham highlighted Trump’s plan to seize half of Ukraine’s rare earth minerals as payment for the United States’ support of Kyiv in the war, praising the scheme as “a game-changer.”

Zelensky immediately declined the proposal. But only a few Republican senators—including Mitch McConnell and Susan Collins—publicly opposed Trump’s concessions to Russia. “This was an unprovoked, unjustified invasion,” Collins told reporters. “I appreciate that the president is trying to achieve peace, but we have to make sure that Ukraine does not get the short end of a deal.” Senator Roger Wicker criticized Hegseth’s declaration last week that Ukraine would not recover its territory, deeming the statement a “rookie mistake” on the world stage. But the White House believes those voices of GOP dissent will stay in the minority, a senior administration official told me under the condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategy.

[Read: Trump is remaking the world in his image]

Trump has been eager to strengthen ties with Putin and asked aides to schedule a summit with the Russian leader in the weeks ahead, the official said. The president has told aides he believes that resetting relations with Russia reduces the chances of a nuclear war and will allow the U.S. new economic opportunities. American officials who spoke to reporters after the Riyadh meeting suggested that Biden-era sanctions on Russia could be lifted, and they did not spend much time in their briefing with reporters discussing Moscow’s violation of international law in invading Ukraine or the war crimes allegations against Putin for the attacks.

Instead, Rubio, whose own views have seemingly evolved since his time in the Senate as a Russia hawk who supported NATO, made a point to repeatedly praise Trump’s approach to Russia. “For three years,” Rubio said, “no one else has been able to bring something together like what we saw today, because Donald Trump is the only leader in the world that can.”

Thom Tillis, another Republican senator who strongly supported the funding bill a year ago, has continued to support Kyiv even though he cast the deciding vote to confirm Hegseth. Tillis, in fact, made a trip to Kyiv on Monday with two other senators, pledging support for the war effort even as the Trump team was landing in Riyadh to begin negotiations without Ukraine.

“I believe, first, we should understand that this is just the beginning of a dialogue. There is no specific framework that’s been mapped out yet,” Tillis said. “We expect that that will come to pass very quickly, we hope, and that Ukraine has to be front and center as a part of the negotiations to make sure that it’s something sustainable.”

Tillis then turned to his colleagues for validation. Both assented. But both were Democrats.

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