Ford is once again shifting its electric vehicle manufacturing plans, a response to a year that’s been tough for the powertrain technology that’s still making waves overseas but has seen domestic government support cut and customer enthusiasm weaken.
Instead of planning to make enough electric vehicles to account for 40 percent of global sales by 2030—as it pledged just four years ago—Ford says it will focus on a broader range of hybrids, extended-range electrics, and battery-electric models, which executives now say will account for 50 percent of sales by the end of the decade. The automaker will make hybrid versions of almost every vehicle in its lineup, the company says.
The company will no longer make a large all-electric truck, Ford executives told reporters Monday, and will repurpose an electric vehicle plant in Tennessee to build gas-powered cars. The next generation of Ford’s all-electric F-150 Lighting will instead be an extended-range electric vehicle, or EREV, a plug-in hybrid that uses an electric motor to power its wheels while a smaller gasoline engine recharges the battery. Ford says the tech, which automakers have touted in recent years as a middle-ground between battery-electric vehicles and gas-powered ones, will give its truck extended towing capacity and a range of over 700 miles.
Ford still plans to produce a midsize electric pickup truck with a target starting price of about $30,000, to be available in 2027. That will be the first of the “affordable” electric vehicle models it’s currently designing at a skunkworks studio in California, which are slated to use a “universal” platform architecture that will make the vehicles cheaper to produce.
The new plans leave Ford with a bunch of excess battery-making capacity, which the company says it will use by opening a whole new business: a battery energy-storage sideline. This new business will produce lower-cost and longer-living lithium iron phosphate, or LFP, batteries for customers in the public utility or data center industries.
“Ford is following the customer,” says Andrew Frick, the president of Ford Blue and Ford Model e, the automaker’s gas- and battery-powered vehicle businesses. US customer adoption of electric vehicles is not where the industry expected at decade’s start, he says. (Battery-electric vehicles currently make up about 7.5 percent of US new car sales.) Frick also cited changes in the regulatory environment, including the Trump administration’s rollback of commercial and consumer tax incentives for electric vehicles.
The company has also canceled an all-electric commercial van planned for the European market. Instead, Ford will team up with Renault, in a partnership announced last week, to develop at least two small Ford-branded electric vehicles for Europe—a move that CEO Jim Farley called part of a “fight for our lives,” as US automakers try to compete with affordable EVs out of China.
Ford said Monday that it also plans to produce a new gas-powered commercial van for North America.
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![Anthropic’s Mythos AI Reportedly Hacked the NSA’s Most Sensitive Systems ‘in Hours’
When Anthropic first disclosed Mythos in April, it sent an anxious shockwave through much of the cybersecurity sector. The new AI model was allegedly so ruthlessly effective at finding and exploiting security vulnerabilities in existing software that the company said it was holding off on a public release and would only grant access to a small group of early testers, including the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). Another wave of fear reverberated this week after the NSA reportedly discovered multiple vulnerabilities within its own cybersecurity systems during its tests with Mythos. If that agency—which supposedly boasts the most impenetrable cyberdefenses in the world—can be hacked by Mythos, what hope does the rest of the world’s cybersecurity infrastructure have? This latest round of panic began with what seems to have been something of a game of telephone: Someone says one thing, which gets repeated by another, and another after that, and along that chain of communication, the original statement is distorted. Last week, The Economist reported that during a June 11 hearing before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia said that Mythos had broken into “almost all of [the NSA’s] classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours.” Warner said he’d received that information from the head of the NSA himself, General Joshua Rudd, who also leads the Pentagon’s Cyber Command division. On Monday, a coalition of intelligence agencies—including the NSA and its counterparts in Canada, the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand— issued an unusually public warning that the risk that AI now poses for cybersecurity warrants a “whole-of-society response.”
The Economist’s report was seen by some as evidence that the worst fears about Mythos were true, a reaction that was undoubtedly fueled also by the aura of power and mystery that has coalesced around the model in recent months. That aura has arguably been a boon for Anthropic, which recently usurped OpenAI as the most valuable startup in the world and is preparing for what’s expected to be a historic IPO.
But it’s also been a contributing factor in its latest skirmish with the Trump administration, which ordered the company earlier this month to restrict access for all foreign nationals to Fable 5, a “Mythos-class” model that had recently been made publicly available and which was built with safeguards that to some users were annoyingly stringent. Citing national security concerns, the administration invoked an obscure piece of export control legislation, a move that, according to some legal experts, is spurious. Many cybersecurity experts, meanwhile, argued that the ban would hamstring U.S. cybersecurity defenses and give adversaries like China the upper hand. That argument was seemingly vindicated by a Tuesday report from the New York Times which said that Trump’s ban—which also targeted another model called Mythos 5, which had only been made available to a small group of organizations—had put the kibosh on the NSA’s internal tests with Mythos, and that the administration was now working with Anthropic to reinstate the agency’s access for limited purposes related to national security. The NSA did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.
That same report from the Times also clarified that the NSA’s internal tests with Mythos were less apocalyptic than online rumors might suggest. According to federal officials cited in the report, the tests were carried out in a digital environment so robustly controlled that it’s very unlikely any hacker or foreign intelligence agency could replicate them. The officials also told the Times that even though Mythos was able to identify cybersecurity vulnerabilities, it didn’t actually exploit them. The author of the report in The Economist—the one that had been the initial cause of all the worry—has also admitted that his portrayal of the NSA’s tests with Mythos had been misleading. The tests “surely [involved] using Mythos alongside other tools under very particular conditions,” he wrote in a X post on Sunday. “I quoted [Senator Warner] to give a sense of Mythos’ potency. But it was a mistake not to have added caveats.” #Anthropics #Mythos #Reportedly #Hacked #NSAs #Sensitive #Systems #HoursAI,Anthropic,Mythos,NSA,Trump,White House Anthropic’s Mythos AI Reportedly Hacked the NSA’s Most Sensitive Systems ‘in Hours’
When Anthropic first disclosed Mythos in April, it sent an anxious shockwave through much of the cybersecurity sector. The new AI model was allegedly so ruthlessly effective at finding and exploiting security vulnerabilities in existing software that the company said it was holding off on a public release and would only grant access to a small group of early testers, including the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). Another wave of fear reverberated this week after the NSA reportedly discovered multiple vulnerabilities within its own cybersecurity systems during its tests with Mythos. If that agency—which supposedly boasts the most impenetrable cyberdefenses in the world—can be hacked by Mythos, what hope does the rest of the world’s cybersecurity infrastructure have? This latest round of panic began with what seems to have been something of a game of telephone: Someone says one thing, which gets repeated by another, and another after that, and along that chain of communication, the original statement is distorted. Last week, The Economist reported that during a June 11 hearing before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia said that Mythos had broken into “almost all of [the NSA’s] classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours.” Warner said he’d received that information from the head of the NSA himself, General Joshua Rudd, who also leads the Pentagon’s Cyber Command division. On Monday, a coalition of intelligence agencies—including the NSA and its counterparts in Canada, the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand— issued an unusually public warning that the risk that AI now poses for cybersecurity warrants a “whole-of-society response.”
The Economist’s report was seen by some as evidence that the worst fears about Mythos were true, a reaction that was undoubtedly fueled also by the aura of power and mystery that has coalesced around the model in recent months. That aura has arguably been a boon for Anthropic, which recently usurped OpenAI as the most valuable startup in the world and is preparing for what’s expected to be a historic IPO.
But it’s also been a contributing factor in its latest skirmish with the Trump administration, which ordered the company earlier this month to restrict access for all foreign nationals to Fable 5, a “Mythos-class” model that had recently been made publicly available and which was built with safeguards that to some users were annoyingly stringent. Citing national security concerns, the administration invoked an obscure piece of export control legislation, a move that, according to some legal experts, is spurious. Many cybersecurity experts, meanwhile, argued that the ban would hamstring U.S. cybersecurity defenses and give adversaries like China the upper hand. That argument was seemingly vindicated by a Tuesday report from the New York Times which said that Trump’s ban—which also targeted another model called Mythos 5, which had only been made available to a small group of organizations—had put the kibosh on the NSA’s internal tests with Mythos, and that the administration was now working with Anthropic to reinstate the agency’s access for limited purposes related to national security. The NSA did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.
That same report from the Times also clarified that the NSA’s internal tests with Mythos were less apocalyptic than online rumors might suggest. According to federal officials cited in the report, the tests were carried out in a digital environment so robustly controlled that it’s very unlikely any hacker or foreign intelligence agency could replicate them. The officials also told the Times that even though Mythos was able to identify cybersecurity vulnerabilities, it didn’t actually exploit them. The author of the report in The Economist—the one that had been the initial cause of all the worry—has also admitted that his portrayal of the NSA’s tests with Mythos had been misleading. The tests “surely [involved] using Mythos alongside other tools under very particular conditions,” he wrote in a X post on Sunday. “I quoted [Senator Warner] to give a sense of Mythos’ potency. But it was a mistake not to have added caveats.” #Anthropics #Mythos #Reportedly #Hacked #NSAs #Sensitive #Systems #HoursAI,Anthropic,Mythos,NSA,Trump,White House](https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/06/GeneralJoshuaRudd-1280x853.jpg)

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