They say the economy is bad, but they’re spending like it’s booming.

Americans have been pessimistic about the economy for years. Weirdly, that’s seemed to have little impact on their willingness to open their wallets.

Retail sales surged during the pandemic as home-bound workers clicked “complete purchase” on everything from Pelotons to sourdough starter. In 2020, e-commerce sales rose by 43 percent. Stimulus checks gave Americans newfound savings and excess money to burn. Supply chains couldn’t keep up with the demand.

That was all supposed to come crashing down at some point. For more than a year, economists warned about the “death of the consumer” and a resulting recession — neither of which have materialized. Consumers were expected to retreat as inflation skyrocketed, hitting a 9.1 percent peak in June 2022 and remaining stubbornly above the Federal Reserve’s target rate of 2 percent.

Instead, Americans just kept buying more, even accounting for price increases and beyond growth in their disposable income. Their spending helped drive US economic growth in 2023 and remained high in the first months of this year. In March, consumer spending increased by 0.8 percent, exceeding expectations from financial analysts.

There is a sign that Americans’ shopping spree might be finally coming to an end: Retail spending stayed the same in April as compared to the previous month, falling short of analyst projections for growth.

However, those numbers don’t capture spending on services — for example, health care, transportation, and insurance — which has increased markedly this year. And both Preston Caldwell, a senior US economist at Morningstar, and Scott Hoyt, a Moody’s Analytics economist, said those numbers could easily bounce back next month, even if they’re expecting spending to cool by the end of the year.

“I am anticipating that we do see eventually a consumer slowdown over the course of this year,” Caldwell said. “It’s premature to say that that’s already playing out right now.”

Indeed, spending is bound to come down at some point under the pressure of high interest rates, which the Fed isn’t expected to cut until later this year — or potentially at all in 2024. So why, despite all the doom and gloom among consumers, has spending been so resilient?

Who is driving high spending?

Two things are simultaneously true: People feel really negatively about the economy, and that’s not stopping them from spending. In May, the University of Michigan recorded its lowest consumer sentiment reading in six months — an index of 67.4 out of 100 — as part of its long-running survey.

That’s up from this time last year, but still well below pre-pandemic consumer sentiment readings, which hovered in the upper 80s and 90s. The trend in sentiment was widespread across demographic lines: Consumers “expressed worries that inflation, unemployment and interest rates may all be moving in an unfavorable direction in the year ahead,” the University of Michigan report reads.

It’s hard to reconcile that with high spending figures. But in short, the rich currently feel rich and account for a large share of overall spending. The middle class feels a little better off too, and likely still has some savings built up they can burn through. They might not yet have felt the pressure of high interest rates and inflation to the same degree as people who rent and have fewer investments. (But that’s due to change.)

High-income consumers — households in the top 20 percent of income earning at least $244,025 before taxes as of 2022 — have been largely cushioned from economic headwinds and are flush with cash to spend.

The pandemic saw Americans’ average percentage of income saved increase to an all-time high of 32 percent in April 2020 after many households received stimulus checks. That has helped fuel spending, but unlike in other high-income countries where consumers have proved more thrifty, Americans are close to depleting those savings.

“The excess savings [are] still kind of sloshing their way through the system. Depending on how you estimate excess savings, they will be depleted sometime in the middle of 2024 or maybe by as late as mid-2025,” Caldwell said.

Many high-income consumers also locked in low interest rates on their mortgages before the Federal Reserve started raising rates in March 2022, and they’re seeing their home values continue to go up nonetheless. The average US home price increased from $287,000 in 2019 to $450,000 in 2024. This is in part due to persistent low inventory: High interest rates have kept would-be sellers on the sidelines because their mortgage payments would be higher if they bought a new place.

High-income consumers have also seen their investment portfolios balloon in the last year. The stock market repeatedly tested new highs in recent months, with the latest record set on Thursday in the wake of new data showing that inflation is slowing. And wealthy older Americans who allocate more of their portfolios to government bonds are benefiting from higher interest rates.

“That sort of gives consumers an incentive to spend out of their newfound wealth,” Hoyt said. “And since this set of consumers still has excess savings left over from the pandemic, that gives them the easy, relatively liquid monies to do so.”

The question is how long the stock market can sustain this run. Some analysts think stocks are currently overpriced and due for a correction — which might cause some people to finally close their wallets.

“Equity prices are starting to move more into arguably overvalued territory,” Caldwell said. “So that’s probably not going to be a tailwind [for spending] over the next year.”

At the same time, the factors currently fueling spending at the highest income levels aren’t universal. Not all consumers can afford to spend more.

Even though inflation has come down significantly from its 2022 peak, low-income Americans are struggling with higher prices. Consumers in general say they are budgeting more on everyday essentials like fresh produce and baby supplies.

Among people living paycheck to paycheck, pandemic savings (if they ever really had any) might be long gone.

Low and moderate-income consumers are also increasingly weighed down by credit card debt and struggling to pay it down due to high interest rates, which research suggests could be a major contributor to overall economic pessimism.

Though credit card debt levels dipped during the pandemic, they are now returning to pre-pandemic levels, with the average balance per consumer increasing by 8.5 percent in the last year to $6,218. More than half of people earning less than $25,000 carry a balance on their credit cards.

Their only consolation is that the job market remains strong, meaning they might be able to count on another paycheck — but even that might not last. Analysts including Caldwell expect the unemployment rate to rise from 3.8 percent to 3.9 percent and wage growth to slow in 2024.

Ultimately, however, low-income consumers “just don’t account for that big of a share of total spending,” Hoyt said. “It’s the high end of the income distribution that accounts for a disproportionate share of the spending.”

Company insiders explain why safety-conscious employees are leaving.

Editor’s note, May 17, 2024, 11:45 pm ET: This story has been updated to include a post-publication statement that another Vox reporter received from OpenAI.

For months, OpenAI has been losing employees who care deeply about making sure AI is safe. Now, the company is positively hemorrhaging them.

Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike announced their departures from OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, on Tuesday. They were the leaders of the company’s superalignment team — the team tasked with ensuring that AI stays aligned with the goals of its makers, rather than acting unpredictably and harming humanity.

They’re not the only ones who’ve left. Since last November — when OpenAI’s board tried to fire CEO Sam Altman only to see him quickly claw his way back to power — at least five more of the company’s most safety-conscious employees have either quit or been pushed out.

What’s going on here?

If you’ve been following the saga on social media, you might think OpenAI secretly made a huge technological breakthrough. The meme “What did Ilya see?” speculates that Sutskever, the former chief scientist, left because he saw something horrifying, like an AI system that could destroy humanity.

But the real answer may have less to do with pessimism about technology and more to do with pessimism about humans — and one human in particular: Altman. According to sources familiar with the company, safety-minded employees have lost faith in him.

“It’s a process of trust collapsing bit by bit, like dominoes falling one by one,” a person with inside knowledge of the company told me, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Not many employees are willing to speak about this publicly. That’s partly because OpenAI is known for getting its workers to sign offboarding agreements with non-disparagement provisions upon leaving. If you refuse to sign one, you give up your equity in the company, which means you potentially lose out on millions of dollars.

(OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication. After publication of my colleague Kelsey Piper’s piece on OpenAI’s post-employment agreements, OpenAI sent her a statement noting, “We have never canceled any current or former employee’s vested equity nor will we if people do not sign a release or nondisparagement agreement when they exit.” When Piper asked if this represented a change in policy, as sources close to the company had indicated to her, OpenAI replied: “This statement reflects reality.”)

One former employee, however, refused to sign the offboarding agreement so that he would be free to criticize the company. Daniel Kokotajlo, who joined OpenAI in 2022 with hopes of steering it toward safe deployment of AI, worked on the governance team — until he quit last month.

“OpenAI is training ever-more-powerful AI systems with the goal of eventually surpassing human intelligence across the board. This could be the best thing that has ever happened to humanity, but it could also be the worst if we don’t proceed with care,” Kokotajlo told me this week.

OpenAI says it wants to build artificial general intelligence (AGI), a hypothetical system that can perform at human or superhuman levels across many domains.

“I joined with substantial hope that OpenAI would rise to the occasion and behave more responsibly as they got closer to achieving AGI. It slowly became clear to many of us that this would not happen,” Kokotajlo told me. “I gradually lost trust in OpenAI leadership and their ability to responsibly handle AGI, so I quit.”

And Leike, explaining in a thread on X why he quit as co-leader of the superalignment team, painted a very similar picture Friday. “I have been disagreeing with OpenAI leadership about the company’s core priorities for quite some time, until we finally reached a breaking point,” he wrote.

OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

Why OpenAI’s safety team grew to distrust Sam Altman

To get a handle on what happened, we need to rewind to last November. That’s when Sutskever, working together with the OpenAI board, tried to fire Altman. The board said Altman was “not consistently candid in his communications.” Translation: We don’t trust him.

The ouster failed spectacularly. Altman and his ally, company president Greg Brockman, threatened to take OpenAI’s top talent to Microsoft — effectively destroying OpenAI — unless Altman was reinstated. Faced with that threat, the board gave in. Altman came back more powerful than ever, with new, more supportive board members and a freer hand to run the company.

When you shoot at the king and miss, things tend to get awkward.

Publicly, Sutskever and Altman gave the appearance of a continuing friendship. And when Sutskever announced his departure this week, he said he was heading off to pursue “a project that is very personally meaningful to me.” Altman posted on X two minutes later, saying that “this is very sad to me; Ilya is … a dear friend.”

Yet Sutskever has not been seen at the OpenAI office in about six months — ever since the attempted coup. He has been remotely co-leading the superalignment team, tasked with making sure a future AGI would be aligned with the goals of humanity rather than going rogue. It’s a nice enough ambition, but one that’s divorced from the daily operations of the company, which has been racing to commercialize products under Altman’s leadership. And then there was this tweet, posted shortly after Altman’s reinstatement and quickly deleted:

So, despite the public-facing camaraderie, there’s reason to be skeptical that Sutskever and Altman were friends after the former attempted to oust the latter.

And Altman’s reaction to being fired had revealed something about his character: His threat to hollow out OpenAI unless the board rehired him, and his insistence on stacking the board with new members skewed in his favor, showed a determination to hold onto power and avoid future checks on it. Former colleagues and employees came forward to describe him as a manipulator who speaks out of both sides of his mouth — someone who claims, for instance, that he wants to prioritize safety, but contradicts that in his behaviors.

For example, Altman was fundraising with autocratic regimes like Saudi Arabia so he could spin up a new AI chip-making company, which would give him a huge supply of the coveted resources needed to build cutting-edge AI. That was alarming to safety-minded employees. If Altman truly cared about building and deploying AI in the safest way possible, why did he seem to be in a mad dash to accumulate as many chips as possible, which would only accelerate the technology? For that matter, why was he taking the safety risk of working with regimes that might use AI to supercharge digital surveillance or human rights abuses?

For employees, all this led to a gradual “loss of belief that when OpenAI says it’s going to do something or says that it values something, that that is actually true,” a source with inside knowledge of the company told me.

That gradual process crescendoed this week.

The superalignment team’s co-leader, Jan Leike, did not bother to play nice. “I resigned,” he posted on X, mere hours after Sutskever announced his departure. No warm goodbyes. No vote of confidence in the company’s leadership.

Other safety-minded former employees quote-tweeted Leike’s blunt resignation, appending heart emojis. One of them was Leopold Aschenbrenner, a Sutskever ally and superalignment team member who was fired from OpenAI last month. Media reports noted that he and Pavel Izmailov, another researcher on the same team, were allegedly fired for leaking information. But OpenAI has offered no evidence of a leak. And given the strict confidentiality agreement everyone signs when they first join OpenAI, it would be easy for Altman — a deeply networked Silicon Valley veteran who is an expert at working the press — to portray sharing even the most innocuous of information as “leaking,” if he was keen to get rid of Sutskever’s allies.

The same month that Aschenbrenner and Izmailov were forced out, another safety researcher, Cullen O’Keefe, also departed the company.

And two weeks ago, yet another safety researcher, William Saunders, wrote a cryptic post on the EA Forum, an online gathering place for members of the effective altruism movement, who have been heavily involved in the cause of AI safety. Saunders summarized the work he’s done at OpenAI as part of the superalignment team. Then he wrote: “I resigned from OpenAI on February 15, 2024.” A commenter asked the obvious question: Why was Saunders posting this?

“No comment,” Saunders replied. Commenters concluded that he is probably bound by a non-disparagement agreement.

Putting all of this together with my conversations with company insiders, what we get is a picture of at least seven people who tried to push OpenAI to greater safety from within, but ultimately lost so much faith in its charismatic leader that their position became untenable.

“I think a lot of people in the company who take safety and social impact seriously think of it as an open question: is working for a company like OpenAI a good thing to do?” said the person with inside knowledge of the company. “And the answer is only ‘yes’ to the extent that OpenAI is really going to be thoughtful and responsible about what it’s doing.”

With the safety team gutted, who will make sure OpenAI’s work is safe?

With Leike no longer there to run the superalignment team, OpenAI has replaced him with company co-founder John Schulman.

But the team has been hollowed out. And Schulman already has his hands full with his preexisting full-time job ensuring the safety of OpenAI’s current products. How much serious, forward-looking safety work can we hope for at OpenAI going forward?

Probably not much.

“The whole point of setting up the superalignment team was that there’s actually different kinds of safety issues that arise if the company is successful in building AGI,” the person with inside knowledge told me. “So, this was a dedicated investment in that future.”

Even when the team was functioning at full capacity, that “dedicated investment” was home to a tiny fraction of OpenAI’s researchers and was promised only 20 percent of its computing power — perhaps the most important resource at an AI company. Now, that computing power may be siphoned off to other OpenAI teams, and it’s unclear if there’ll be much focus on avoiding catastrophic risk from future AI models.

To be clear, this does not mean the products OpenAI is releasing now — like the new version of ChatGPT, dubbed GPT-4o, which can have a natural-sounding dialogue with users — are going to destroy humanity. But what’s coming down the pike?

“It’s important to distinguish between ‘Are they currently building and deploying AI systems that are unsafe?’ versus ‘Are they on track to build and deploy AGI or superintelligence safely?’” the source with inside knowledge said. “I think the answer to the second question is no.”

Leike expressed that same concern in his Friday thread on X. He noted that his team had been struggling to get enough computing power to do its work and generally “sailing against the wind.”

Most strikingly, Leike said, “I believe much more of our bandwidth should be spent getting ready for the next generations of models, on security, monitoring, preparedness, safety, adversarial robustness, (super)alignment, confidentiality, societal impact, and related topics. These problems are quite hard to get right, and I am concerned we aren’t on a trajectory to get there.”

When one of the world’s leading minds in AI safety says the world’s leading AI company isn’t on the right trajectory, we all have reason to be concerned.

Why is OpenAI’s superalignment team imploding?

Editor’s note, May 17, 2024, 11:20 pm ET: This story has been updated to include a post-publication statement from OpenAI.

On Monday, OpenAI announced exciting new product news: ChatGPT can now talk like a human.

It has a cheery, slightly ingratiating feminine voice that sounds impressively non-robotic, and a bit familiar if you’ve seen a certain 2013 Spike Jonze film. “Her,” tweeted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, referencing the movie in which a man falls in love with an AI assistant voiced by Scarlett Johansson.

But the product release of ChatGPT 4o was quickly overshadowed by much bigger news out of OpenAI: the resignation of the company’s co-founder and chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, who also led its superalignment team, as well as that of his co-team leader Jan Leike (who we put on the Future Perfect 50 list last year).

The resignations didn’t come as a total surprise. Sutskever had been involved in the boardroom revolt that led to Altman’s temporary firing last year, before the CEO quickly returned to his perch. Sutskever publicly regretted his actions and backed Altman’s return, but he’s been mostly absent from the company since, even as other members of OpenAI’s policy, alignment, and safety teams have departed.

But what has really stirred speculation was the radio silence from former employees. Sutskever posted a pretty typical resignation message, saying “I’m confident that OpenAI will build AGI that is both safe and beneficial…I am excited for what comes next.”

Leike ... didn’t. His resignation message was simply: “I resigned.” After several days of fervent speculation, he expanded on this on Friday morning, explaining that he was worried OpenAI had shifted away from a safety-focused culture.

Questions arose immediately: Were they forced out? Is this delayed fallout of Altman’s brief firing last fall? Are they resigning in protest of some secret and dangerous new OpenAI project? Speculation filled the void because no one who had once worked at OpenAI was talking.

It turns out there’s a very clear reason for that. I have seen the extremely restrictive off-boarding agreement that contains nondisclosure and non-disparagement provisions former OpenAI employees are subject to. It forbids them, for the rest of their lives, from criticizing their former employer. Even acknowledging that the NDA exists is a violation of it.

If a departing employee declines to sign the document, or if they violate it, they can lose all vested equity they earned during their time at the company, which is likely worth millions of dollars. One former employee, Daniel Kokotajlo, who posted that he quit OpenAI “due to losing confidence that it would behave responsibly around the time of AGI,” has confirmed publicly that he had to surrender what would have likely turned out to be a huge sum of money in order to quit without signing the document.

While nondisclosure agreements aren’t unusual in highly competitive Silicon Valley, putting an employee’s already-vested equity at risk for declining or violating one is. For workers at startups like OpenAI, equity is a vital form of compensation, one that can dwarf the salary they make. Threatening that potentially life-changing money is a very effective way to keep former employees quiet.

OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment in time for initial publication. After publication, an OpenAI spokesperson sent me this statement: “We have never canceled any current or former employee’s vested equity nor will we if people do not sign a release or nondisparagement agreement when they exit.”

Sources close to the company I spoke to told me that this represented a change in policy as they understood it. When I asked the OpenAI spokesperson if that statement represented a change, they replied, “This statement reflects reality.”

All of this is highly ironic for a company that initially advertised itself as OpenAI — that is, as committed in its mission statements to building powerful systems in a transparent and accountable manner.

OpenAI long ago abandoned the idea of open-sourcing its models, citing safety concerns. But now it has shed the most senior and respected members of its safety team, which should inspire some skepticism about whether safety is really the reason why OpenAI has become so closed.

The tech company to end all tech companies

OpenAI has spent a long time occupying an unusual position in tech and policy circles. Their releases, from DALL-E to ChatGPT, are often very cool, but by themselves they would hardly attract the near-religious fervor with which the company is often discussed.

What sets OpenAI apart is the ambition of its mission: “to ensure that artificial general intelligence — AI systems that are generally smarter than humans — benefits all of humanity.” Many of its employees believe that this aim is within reach; that with perhaps one more decade (or even less) — and a few trillion dollars — the company will succeed at developing AI systems that make most human labor obsolete.

Which, as the company itself has long said, is as risky as it is exciting.

“Superintelligence will be the most impactful technology humanity has ever invented, and could help us solve many of the world’s most important problems,” a recruitment page for Leike and Sutskever’s team at OpenAI states. “But the vast power of superintelligence could also be very dangerous, and could lead to the disempowerment of humanity or even human extinction. While superintelligence seems far off now, we believe it could arrive this decade.”

Naturally, if artificial superintelligence in our lifetimes is possible (and experts are divided), it would have enormous implications for humanity. OpenAI has historically positioned itself as a responsible actor trying to transcend mere commercial incentives and bring AGI about for the benefit of all. And they’ve said they are willing to do that even if that requires slowing down development, missing out on profit opportunities, or allowing external oversight.

“We don’t think that AGI should be just a Silicon Valley thing,” OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman told me in 2019, in the much calmer pre-ChatGPT days. “We’re talking about world-altering technology. And so how do you get the right representation and governance in there? This is actually a really important focus for us and something we really want broad input on.”

OpenAI’s unique corporate structure — a capped-profit company ultimately controlled by a nonprofit — was supposed to increase accountability. “No one person should be trusted here. I don’t have super-voting shares. I don’t want them,” Altman assured Bloomberg’s Emily Chang in 2023. “The board can fire me. I think that’s important.” (As the board found out last November, it could fire Altman, but it couldn’t make the move stick. After his firing, Altman made a deal to effectively take the company to Microsoft, before being ultimately reinstated with most of the board resigning.)

But there was no stronger sign of OpenAI’s commitment to its mission than the prominent roles of people like Sutskever and Leike, technologists with a long history of commitment to safety and an apparently genuine willingness to ask OpenAI to change course if needed. When I said to Brockman in that 2019 interview, “You guys are saying, ‘We’re going to build a general artificial intelligence,’” Sutskever cut in. “We’re going to do everything that can be done in that direction while also making sure that we do it in a way that’s safe,” he told me.

Their departure doesn’t herald a change in OpenAI’s mission of building artificial general intelligence — that remains the goal. But it almost certainly heralds a change in OpenAI’s interest in safety work; the company hasn’t announced who, if anyone, will lead the superalignment team.

And it makes it clear that OpenAI’s concern with external oversight and transparency couldn’t have run all that deep. If you want external oversight and opportunities for the rest of the world to play a role in what you’re doing, making former employees sign extremely restrictive NDAs doesn’t exactly follow.

Changing the world behind closed doors

This contradiction is at the heart of what makes OpenAI profoundly frustrating for those of us who care deeply about ensuring that AI really does go well and benefits humanity. Is OpenAI a buzzy, if midsize tech company that makes a chatty personal assistant, or a trillion-dollar effort to create an AI god?

The company’s leadership says they want to transform the world, that they want to be accountable when they do so, and that they welcome the world’s input into how to do it justly and wisely.

But when there’s real money at stake — and there are astounding sums of real money at stake in the race to dominate AI — it becomes clear that they probably never intended for the world to get all that much input. Their process ensures former employees — those who know the most about what’s happening inside OpenAI — can’t tell the rest of the world what’s going on.

The website may have high-minded ideals, but their termination agreements are full of hard-nosed legalese. It’s hard to exercise accountability over a company whose former employees are restricted to saying “I resigned.”

ChatGPT’s new cute voice may be charming, but I’m not feeling especially enamored.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!

The furor over the painting points to the Crown’s larger problems.

As far back as the 1500s, the British Royal Family has used formal portraits to project a positive and authoritative image. Their most recent entry, however, is giving audiences a very different impression, the latest in a series of public relations blunders at a tenuous time for the monarchy.

The new portrait of King Charles, by British artist Jonathan Yeo, features the monarch looking on serenely while wearing a red Welsh Guards uniform against a red backdrop. Aside from his hands and face, the portrait is covered in red paint strokes, a visual that for some onlookers, recalled flames, blood, and horror films.

“It looks like he’s bathing in blood,” a commenter quipped on an Instagram post announcing the portrait. “To me it gives the message the monarchy is going up in flames or the king is burning in hell,” another commenter wrote.

In his description of the painting, Yeo says a chief aim was to capture Charles’s evolution as a leader and ascension to the throne. The painting also includes a butterfly hovering above Charles’s right shoulder, an addition the king reportedly suggested himself to illustrate his transformation and commitment to environmental causes.

For some, the bold palette of the painting conjured more brutal aspects of the monarchy’s history, however. Certain observers have interpreted the work as a reminder of the Crown’s bloody advancement of colonialism. “It almost alludes to some sort of massacre that he’s been part of,” Tabish Khan, a London art critic, told Business Insider. “Given the royal family’s history and ties to colonialism and imperialism, it’s not hard for people to look at it and then make the leap that it’s somehow related to that.”

Others have dabbled in memes referencing The Picture of Dorian Gray, the painting of a villain from Ghostbusters 2, and the anecdote Charles once told about wanting to be Camilla’s tampon.

And while much of the response has been poking fun at the portrait, the controversy also points to deeper issues the monarchy faces, as it navigates an uncertain transition after Queen Elizabeth II’s death and grapples with its own past.

The painting aimed to capture Charles’s transformation

Yeo, an established artist who has also painted former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair as well as Charles’s father Prince Philip and his wife Queen Camilla, sat with Charles four times for his first portrait as King.

“Royal portraits in the past have had an important role to play in signifying power and projecting an image,” the BBC’s Katie Razzall writes. “They were part of the tools used to ensure the survival of the monarch.”

One of Yeo’s aims with the painting, which he began in 2021, was to underscore Charles’s essence as a person, how he’s changed as he’s taken on the role of king and the struggles he’s endured. “My interest is really in figuring out who someone is and trying to get that on a canvas,” Yeo told the BBC.

Yeo’s website describes the color scheme as injecting a “dynamic, contemporary jolt” to the work, differentiating it from past portraits. The red is also inspired by the bright red color of the Welsh Guards uniform and is intended to give a nod to Charles’s military service; he became a colonel in the Welsh Guards in 1975. It’s also a color Yeo has used in the past, with paintings of actor Giancarlo Esposito and World War II veteran Geoffrey Pattinson featuring similar color schemes.

Many of Yeo’s past works are composed much like Charles’s, with one dominant color serving as the background and the subject’s face seemingly floating in the foreground.

According to Yeo, both the king and queen had previously seen parts of the painting and appeared to respond positively at the time. “Yes, you’ve got him,” Camilla reportedly said about his capturing Charles’s personality. The artist notes that Charles was surprised by the color, but broadly seemed to like the unfinished work he saw. In a video clip of the official unveiling, Charles himself appears initially startled by the painting.

The portrait’s reception recalls the monarchy’s problems

Much like US presidential portraits, the paintings of UK monarchs are intended to send a message about their leadership and character.

In one of former President Barack Obama’s portraits, artist Kehinde Wiley featured him surrounded by green foliage, a move that honored his upbringing in different places, and that marked a break from past presidential portraits.

The red in King Charles’s portrait had much less flattering connotations for some observers, though, as they see allusions to the country’s colonialism. For centuries, the British Empire violently seized power in numerous countries — including India, Kenya, and New Zealand — and the monarchy was a key symbol of its authority in those places.

Even today, the king is still considered a figurehead, and the “head of state” in 15 independent countries that are part of the British Commonwealth. Many — including Jamaica — are actively working to remove Charles as their official “head of state,” a role that’s purely symbolic but nonetheless represents Britain’s history of oppression.

In this capacity, and others, the modern monarchy remains a key symbol of the UK’s governance, even though royals don’t have practical policymaking power like Parliament and the prime minister.

As such, many experts and people from former colonies have been eager to see the monarchy do more to reckon with its imperial history, and to more explicitly acknowledge it.

“Imagine a very different kind of monarchy, where in the name of decency rather than politics, a monarch could say things like, ‘We acknowledge and regret the role of Britain, the British government and the British monarchy in slavery and colonialism.’ That kind of moral leadership could have such a different impact in the world,” Priya Satia, a history professor at Stanford, previously told Time.

The portrait is, in a sense, the least of the monarchy’s recent problems as it navigates a difficult transition following Queen Elizabeth II’s 70-year reign. There was the awkward rupture with Charles’s youngest son Prince Harry and his wife, American actress Meghan Markle. Charles publicly disclosed a cancer diagnosis in February. His daughter-in-law, Princess Catherine of Wales, revealed her own cancer diagnosis in March, following months of rampant speculation about her well-being.

What was once a canvas for projecting royal authority has instead become another reckoning with what the monarchy stands for and the brutal history it’s failed to fully confront.

And why it’s not nearly enough.

The US Department of Defense has completed a temporary pier off the Mediterranean coast of Gaza to deliver urgently needed aid — an important goal, but really only a $320 million bandage on the humanitarian crisis 2.3 million people are currently facing.

The US military announced that on Thursday at 7:40 am Gaza time the pier had been attached to land; trucks began moving supplies Friday. The World Food Program is coordinating aid delivery.

The purpose of the pier is to facilitate the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza, which has been erratic and insufficient for the past seven months following Israel’s initial siege on the territory after Hamas’s attack in October. Both Israel and Egypt have closed border crossings at times over the past seven months, and aid groups accuse Israel of restricting the food, clean water, fuel, and medical aid that passes through even when the borders are technically open.

More than 35,000 people have been killed so far in the war already, primarily due to Israeli bombing campaigns.

People in all parts of the region, especially the north, are facing acute levels of hunger. That’s obviously a crisis in and of itself; it also makes people more vulnerable to dying from communicable diseases, particularly because the Israeli campaign has decimated Gaza’s health care system. Clean water is nearly inaccessible; people in Gaza are living on less than 2 liters a day, according to UN estimates, well short of the 7.5 to 15 liters people need each day for basic consumption and sanitation in emergency situations and 70 liters under normal situations.

The pier is expected to deliver primarily food aid, but also treatment for malnutrition, like high-nutrient food bars and other therapeutic foods for acute cases, according to USAID. US officials have also emphasized the need to get clean water and fuel into Gaza, but have not yet provided specifics regarding how and how much of those commodities will enter through the maritime corridor.

To be clear, there are better, more efficient ways to get aid into Gaza, experts say. The US can use its leverage — access to weapons — with Israel to increase aid via land routes. It could push for a ceasefire agreement that would allow humanitarian organizations to deliver aid in exchange for Hamas releasing hostages it took during its October 7 attack on Israel.

The fact that the US has to resort to building a pier to get aid into Gaza underscores how fraught the US-Israeli relationship has become — and how the Biden administration seems unable or unwilling to make any broader changes in its policy toward Israel.

How will the pier work?

Biden first announced the plans for the maritime corridor in his State of the Union address on March 7, emphasizing the immense need for humanitarian aid in Gaza. Government officials have repeatedly stressed that the pier is meant to be a temporary addition to overland aid flows through border crossings, and that US troops won’t be entering Gaza.

Aid is supposed to come via ship from Cyprus to the new port’s staging area, where the cargo will be inspected by the Israeli military and then handed over to the World Food Program and international NGOs for distribution. The US, the United Arab Emirates, the UK, France, the European Union, Cyprus, and the United Nations are all contributing either logistical support or humanitarian assistance.

The route to get there, though, is immensely complicated.

1. Donors will send humanitarian aid via air or sea to Cyprus, where local authorities and Israeli representatives will screen the cargo and pack it for transit to Gaza — a process which can take between two and three days, Juan Camilo Jimenez Garces, a representative from World Central Kitchen, told the New York Times.
2. Then, commercial ships will transport the approved goods from Cyprus to a floating platform two miles from the floating pier — a journey that can take anywhere from 15 hours to a couple of days, according to the Times, depending on the type of ship and weight of the cargo, as well as weather conditions.
3. Once the ships arrive, the cargo will be loaded onto trucks which are then driven onto US military vessels — much like driving a car onto a ferry. Unlike commercial vessels, those ships can navigate the shallower waters close to the Gaza coastline. The military ships then transit to the pier itself, where the trucks will disembark and drive to the shore, under the close observation of the Israeli military.

As of Thursday, ”We have about 500 tons of humanitarian assistance loaded on ships,” Vice Admiral Brad Cooper said in a news briefing. “That’s about a million pounds ready for delivery in the coming days,” with thousands of tons of aid “in the pipeline.” The Department of Defense says it anticipates about 90 truckloads per day of aid to get into Gaza through the maritime corridor, ramping quickly up to 150 trucks per day.

Why is the pier needed?

One of Israel’s first steps following the October 7 attacks was to launch an all-out siege on Gaza. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant instituted that policy on October 9, saying: “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel. Everything is closed.”

Siege warfare is against international law, and Israel was eventually forced to let in aid, albeit only via the Rafah crossing that Gaza shares with Egypt. That crossing opened to allow aid through in late October but still only allowed in a fraction of the aid Gaza’s population of 2.3 million people had prior to the war. Israel opened the Kerem Shalom crossing, also in southern Gaza, in December, but there have been periodic blocks to aid delivery, right-wing Israeli protests blocking entry to the crossing as well as a closing early in May because of an attack by Palestinian fighters near the crossing killed four Israeli soldiers.

Gaza has been under blockade by Israel to some degree since Hamas took over the region in 2007. Hamas as the governing body has no control over Gaza’s borders, limiting the territory’s ability to trade and leaving Gaza heavily dependent on outside aid.

Though the area is very densely populated and highly urbanized, domestic agriculture was a significant part of the economy prior to the current war; about 44 percent of household food came from Gaza-based production, according to a January report from the International Food Policy Research Institute.

By January, a third of all the agricultural land in Gaza had been rendered unusable, according to the report, and war and displacement had essentially halted the agriculture industry. The outside aid that is still getting in is not nearly enough for people to survive on, experts say.

“One-fourth of calories needed is what’s getting in,” Tak Igusa, a contributor to a joint Johns Hopkins and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine report on death projections in Gaza due to the war, told Vox in March. “So just imagine having one-fourth of what you usually eat for such a long duration. And it’s getting worse.”

There was a temporary increase in aid following international backlash to the Israeli killing of seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen, an NGO that had delivered 43 million meals to Palestinians in Gaza prior to the incident. But the increased aid has not been sustained, especially since Israel began operations in Rafah earlier this month, interrupting the flow of goods through the border crossing there, which Egypt has now closed.

Will this fix the crisis?

In short, no. The scale of this preventable crisis is just too big for this one effort alone to solve.

Other solutions are quite clear: keeping the land border crossings open, pushing the Israeli government to allow sufficient aid in, and prioritizing deconfliction processes so humanitarian workers can safely do their jobs. Overland mechanisms like trucks can move faster, and more than 2,000 trucks filled with supplies are already on the Egyptian side of the Rafah border crossing, according to Jesse Marks, senior advocate for the Middle East at Refugees International, unable to get their cargo to people that need it.

There is also concern about the safety of the people involved in the aid operation, given the fact that more than 250 aid workers have been killed over the course of the war. Just this week, an aid worker was killed by Israeli fire while working for the UN in Rafah. The person was riding in a clearly marked UN car.

USAID and the World Food Program will oversee aid distribution in coordination with other NGOs. USAID Response Director Dan Dieckhaus told reporters in a briefing Thursday that “deconfliction” processes — coordination with the Israeli military so that aid workers can perform their jobs — is a serious concern. “We’re not at all satisfied with where they’re at now,” Dieckhaus said of discussions with the Israeli government around those processes.

Hamas could also see Israeli military presence at the port as a threat, opening the risk of attack.

Ceasefire talks — ongoing in Cairo when Israel launched the Rafah operation — also seem to be stagnant.

“The administration is pushing for more attention to civilian casualties, more humanitarian aid, and a sooner end to widespread military operations,” Jennifer Kavanagh, senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Vox. “On the other hand, they’re continuing to send, maybe not the biggest bombs, but plenty of offensive weapons for Israel to continue to carry out an offensive campaign.”