I’m visiting my mom this week, who still lives in my little Ohio hometown just outside of Amish country. Because the Amish aren’t exactly the partying types, the only source of entertainment here is a dilapidated mall where every store has closed except JCPenney, Bath & Body Works, and H&M, which is basically our Neiman Marcus in this little rustic enclave. 

We decided to make a stop for some “luxury shopping” the first day I got there. I was strolling through the aisles at H&M when this shirt caught my eye.

There’s something comically dystopian about seeing your former workplace immortalized in a shirt like this. I asked one of the workers who was folding shirts across from me if anyone had bought this tee from the collection of four swinging from the clothing racks. He said that it’s a popular shirt at the store and even had to restock a whole new set after the initial batch was running low. Also interesting: it’s all teens scooping them up. 

I asked if he had some theories on why kids would want something like this. Most of them were probably still learning to read when the last issue of Glamour’s print magazine came out in 2019. “I think they think wearing it makes them seem trendy, in an ironic way,” he said. I asked whether he thought these teens were buying the shirt for the Glamour name alone. “I don’t think so,” he chuckled. “I think they know it’s a fancy fashion magazine but that’s it.” 

Clearly, the word about Glamour being stripped for parts and turned into a glorified e-commerce site hasn’t made its way to America’s heartland yet. What I got from that exchange was that legacy magazines like Glamour haven’t disappeared from the American consciousness as much as people think. Who knew that the people helping to keep Condé Nast’s licensing agreement with H&M in business were a bunch of Amish children from Northeast Ohio. 

In today’s paid newsletter: My exclusive interview with CBS News' Jo Ling Kent on grilling AI's biggest CEOs and the question Dario Amodei wouldn't fully answer. Plus: My chat with ‘Social Currency’ host Sammi Cohen, who talks about her new TBPN-style business show aimed at women, the students from Cornell’s paper talk about breaking the “Cornell Seven” open, why influencers are flocking to FiDi, a new WhatsApp group for working moms — and a whole lot more media intel in Seen & Heard. I Said What I Said will return next week, since this is already a very stacked issue!

xoxo,

Stephanie

Calls for a slowdown in AI development from former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon and tech CEOs, plus warnings of possible mass extinction, left everyone with a ton of whiplash but not a lot of real answers on what comes next. If anything, the whole conversation has gotten even more unsettling as reports start to come out, like the news today of OpenAI allegedly ignoring employees’ safety concerns — on the same day many of those CEOs sat down with President Trump at the White House and signed what he called a "morally binding" AI agreement that’s really just a fancy pinky promise.

CBS News’ Jo Ling Kent, the network’s senior business and tech correspondent, has had a front-row seat to the scramble over what comes next for AI. She was able to land a sit-down interview with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei just hours after he published his essay calling for government regulation of AI safety, and has since spoken with other leaders like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and the Trump administration’s former AI czar David Sacks to get to the bottom of things.

She’s one of the few people who has a window into what these tech leaders are thinking and feeling at the moment. I caught up with her about the recent interviews she’s done, what wasn’t said on-air that stuck with her, and some of the women AI leaders you should have on your radar.

You’ve had several big interviews with people like Dario [Amodei] and Jacob Coxon, the former Anthropic employee who raised the alarm about AI safety. What has the whole process been like of coming to terms with what's happening around AI safety right now? What are you seeing behind the scenes from your interviews so far?

The people that I'm interviewing — whether it's Jensen Huang of Nvidia, Dario Amodei of Anthropic or Jacob Coxon, who sort of kicked off this latest cascade of concerns — the common theme here is that everyone is trying to figure it out in real time. And I think that is where real-time reporting — interviews with the principals and everyone around the issue — is so important. Whether you're the CEO of one of these really valuable companies or you're someone who's quit because you're worried about safety, the concern is actually pretty universal. It's a question of how executives and people in power want to handle it.

One part of the interview with Dario Amodei that I really appreciated was when you were questioning him on the severity of the whole AI safety issue — on a scale of one to five. You pushed on his answer when he said, "It doesn't mean that we need to panic today. It doesn't mean that we need to shut it all down." Do you think he was being sincere in his response?

I've sat down with Dario Amodei in two really consequential moments for Anthropic. The first time we did an interview was in the hours after the Trump administration and the Department of War designated Anthropic a supply chain risk, which had never been done to an American company in the history of the United States. And the second time we sat down was in this moment where Jacob Coxon is warning of, potentially, the end of humanity, and all of the safety concerns that he had working at Anthropic and OpenAI.