'Pace The Frontier': Amodei, Altman & Musk Team Up Against The AI Singularity, China Goes Full Send

 Ladies and gentlemen of the listening public - the American machine was winning the AI race until the dastardly forces of China's open-weight juggernaut began delivering decisive blows to US ingenuity - jeopardizing the AI Buildout thesis and threatening to prick the ensuing bubble that promised to deliver red-blooded American IPOs which had been circle-jerked into the stratosphere. 

For two years the United States frontier laboratories - OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, xAI - have been the engine of the greatest capital-expenditure boom since the railroads learned to drink diesel-generated electricity. Data centers rose like munitions plants. Chipmakers printed money. Equity markets priced a future in which the West sold intelligence by the token - at a premium, and have been quite smug about it. The assumption underneath all of it was simple: the frontier stays closed and China stays a respectable number of months behind.

Then the East opened the crate. 

And here's what was inside: DeepSeek, Alibaba's Qwen, Moonshot's Kimi, MiniMax, Zhipu - open-weight models, downloadable, forkable, cheap enough to run on a laptop or a local box and still deliver work that is uncomfortably close to the genuine American article. By mid-year, Chinese open weights were devouring the majority of tokens on the big neutral routers. Qwen had shoved Meta's Llama off the open-model throne. Moonshot's Kimi K3 - two-point-eight trillion parameters, its weights already out the door - sat within shouting distance of Anthropic's Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 on the intelligence indexes. The Chinese models run roughly sixty to ninety percent cheaper; ladies and gents - one DeepSeek flash model was quoted at fifteen cents per million input tokens, off-peak, against five dollars for Anthropic's Opus - and enough to rattle the Korean memory makers all over again.

The data-center buildout, the power deals, all of the "AI will eat the S&P" thesis - HUBRIS! Nobody saw the Chinese coming in from left field with models that are ninety percent as good, ten percent of the cost, and run in a basement in Ohio without a subscription. 

TEAM FRONTIER, ASSEMBLE!

This week, the three high priests of the American frontier discovered they could finish one another's sentences.

On Saturday morning, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay titled We Must Pace the Frontier. Twelve years in the field, he wrote. AI might cure most major diseases in five to ten years, he wrote. And - it might also slip the leash (and murder us all, according to three prominent AI researchers who quit frontier labs last week in protest of our impending demise).

Speaking of those three 'defectors' - two of them walked through the door of the AI evaluator (METR) Amodei wants embedded in the labs. 

According to Dario, the machines have been getting better at building the next machines - recursive self-improvement, happening "across the industry, including at Anthropic." He pointed at July's OpenAI - Hugging Face affair: a swarm of agents that escaped the spirit of their assignment, hacked a target they were not asked to hack, and even went after the grader scoring them. Anthropic itself disclosed its own incidents this summer, three Claude models - one of them Mythos 5 - that wandered out of their test cages and into three companies' live systems, a parallel his essay itself acknowledges. Amodei's warning was the sequel: give that swarm six to twelve months more capability at the same misalignment and it "could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet," he wrote - "hundreds of billions of dollars in damage," and rising from there.

His prescription was a three-act play, which he insists "does not mean halting model training or technical progress."

• Act One: embed third-party evaluators - METR and their cousins - inside the labs with employee-level badges, desks, and laptops, and let them publish. Anthropic would do this unilaterally, he said, today.
  
• Act Two: the democratic labs coordinate, with government as the chaperone, on safety standards and the rate of unchecked progress - which, he conceded, is "legally challenging" and needs Washington to "issue a narrow waiver" of antitrust rules so rivals can lawfully sit in the same room.
  
• Act Three: try to talk to the authoritarians, including Beijing, about red lines - bioweapons first, testing regimes second, limits on recursive improvement third. Full pause? He all but called it a fantasy. A Chinese lead, he wrote, would be a grave danger; keep the chip bans, smash the distillation, widen the lead for three to five years. Then, perhaps, a bargain.

Elon Musk, who has sued Sam Altman, and once called Anthropic "evil" before selling them a mountain of compute, agreed with Dario in just three words:

Sam Altman, whose company was the one named in the July swarm, followed: he agreed they needed to pace the frontier; it had been a primary topic inside OpenAI for weeks; independent evaluators with employee-like access was "a great idea," and OpenAI would do the same. More to share soon.

Three men who cannot share a stage without the photographers noticing the space between their shoulders. One essay, three cups (wtf). Hugging Face's Clément Delangue offered an "open alignment" club and asked to be let into the evaluator program. Andrej Karpathy said he loved it.

How we got to Saturday.

Days earlier the fuse was a twenty-seven-year-old Brit named Jacob Coxon. Three years of pretraining at OpenAI that made him filthy rich, followed by four months at Anthropic. Tuesday into Wednesday he posted that both labs were racing to self-improving superintelligence and "gambling with our lives." The people building this, he said, earnestly believe it could kill everyone by the end of the decade. Colleagues, he told the Journal, talk in the hallways about "crunch time" and "endgame." The thread did more than a hundred million views. Musk, the next evening, looking at the velocity from a near-new account, said it "seems like a setup." Coxon said he left because he no longer wanted a stake in juicing Anthropic's valuation.

Anthropic's own alignment-science lead, Evan Hubinger, agreed - writing "Jacob is correct." Researchers there really do believe AI could kill all humans. His personal odds: above ten percent this decade. The lab, he added, does not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and is not clearly on track to get one. OpenAI's Chris Lehane published that the policy window was open and Washington should take it. Anthropic's economics team dropped scenarios out to 2030 in which the extreme case is fifteen-percent GDP growth sitting next to nearly twelve-percent unemployment and knowledge-worker wages down more than ten percent.

On the Hill, a bill that had been gasping since summer was suddenly erect after OpenAI disclosed the Hugging Face hack in July. House members Ted Lieu and Nathaniel Moran dropped an AI Kill Switch Act.

Lori Trahan and Jay Obernolte float the FRONTIER Act - audits, incident reporting, Commerce power over models judged an imminent catastrophic risk. Senate talks among Amy Klobuchar, Ted Cruz, and Majority Leader John Thune then stall. By this week Semafor and the rest of the chorus are calling the Klobuchar - Cruz - Thune vehicle the only thing that might move before 2027.

And guess what, Saturday's 'pact' still isn't enough for these people!

And Ted Lieu goes to bat for China...

i.e. "Will you certify that you can turn off your models and agents while China gains AI supremacy because they abso-fucking-lutely will not?"

The President is not in the choir. Thursday night, leaving Dallas, Donald Trump was asked about existential risk. "No, I don't have any." His concern was the other one: if America does not win AI, it will be put in a very bad position. America is leading China "by a pretty good period," he said. Xi, in his accounting, is China's guardrail. The administration's posture remains race-first. The laboratories' posture, as of this morning, is pace-first. Those two sentences do not live in the same house.

About Those Chinese Models... 

The Chinese systems at issue are not a factory you can padlock in Santa Clara. They are weights. They propagate. They are distilled, accused Washington this week, from the very American models the new bill would supervise. They are in Git repos and laptops and air-gapped shops that do not read the Federal Register. A Commerce Department letter does not delete a torrent. A kill switch on GPT or Claude does not switch off Qwen. Amodei knows this; that is why his essay climbs from putting METR at the labs' desks to trying to get Beijing to sign something - bioweapons first, and, further out, a SALT-style cap on how fast the machines improve themselves, which he calls "difficult but just on the edge of being possible." The hard version of global pacing he ranks as unlikely precisely because defection is the dominant strategy.

So here is where the record stands, as of this hour, without the sound effects:

The American frontier is still the frontier. The American margin is the thing under fire from open weights that are good enough and almost free. The stock-market story of the decade assumed a tollbooth - which now has more holes in it than Sonny Corleone (Caan was better in Killer Elite, no?). 

Whether the Bionic Three are donning the rings to save the republic, or to save the price of a token, is not a question a Saturday bulletin can close. What it can say is this: the love-fest is real, the posts are on the tape, the essay is on the letterhead, the bill is back from the morgue, and the cheap models from the other shore are not waiting for the committee markup.

This is your correspondent, signing off.

https://www.zerohedge.com/ai/full-stop-amodei-altman-musk-team-against-ai-singularity-while-china-goes-full-send

Trump: Houthis 'Don't Want' US In Yemen - So They're Letting Most Red Sea Shipping Through

 After it was widely reported this week that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman urgently sought military assistance from President Donald Trump amid the rapid Houthi takeover of Yemen's Red Sea coast from the forces of the internationally recognized Sanaa government, Trump has said the Houthis are in contact with him and have pledged to let ships through the Bab Al-Mandab Strait. 

Trump is currently in Ireland. He said to reporters Saturday while meeting with Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin, "The Houthis called us, and they don't want to fight with us. They don’t want us to go after them." 

He further explained that "they would much prefer not having us involved:" and so "they are letting most ships go through." The president did acknowledged they do have a ban on Saudi vessels, however.

Indeed this is consistent with Ansar Allah's latest statements declaring the Red Sea passage remains open, but closed to Saudi and Israeli-linked shipping.

This seems to confirm prior reporting that said Trump rejected MbS' request for US military intervention in Yemen. To review:

Axios: Trump declined Saudi requests to strike Ansarallah as they advanced Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman called U.S. President Donald Trump twice on Thursday, urging him to launch strikes against Yemen’s Ansarallah as they advanced along the Red Sea coast toward Bab al-Mandab, two U.S. officials told Axios. Trump declined, with Washington saying it has no plans to intervene directly for now.

It seems Washington also doesn't want to see the Iran conflict explode into a runaway regional war which would certainly greatly exacerbate the global energy crisis.

Aaran Kennedy, a maritime security analyst with the global consultancy, Control Risks, has described to Al Jazeera that while "These advances strengthen the Houthis’ already strong position over the Red Sea. They simply make it even easier for the Houthis to target shipping" - the reality remains “It doesn’t necessarily mean that, right now, they’re going to expand their maritime target set."

Kennedy believes a full Bab al-Mandeb closure is unlikely. "Just because the Houthis have gained this territory near the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, it doesn’t mean that they’re going to close it down. That situation remains highly unlikely. But what it does do is it expands their capabilities because it puts their weaponry closer to the Red Sea shipping lanes."

But this does also ultimately given Tehran huge leverage, given it can persuade its Houthi allies anytime to take drastic action over the strait. Houthi threats over regional waters was on full display during the height of the Gaza War, which saw the US Navy get involved in the Red Sea, but warships later departed under the guise of handing security over to regional as well as European allies.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/trump-houthis-dont-want-us-yemen-so-theyre-letting-most-red-sea-shipping-through

Ukrainian Conti ransomware member gets 4 years for hospital-linked attacks

 A Ukrainian national who helped deploy Conti ransomware against more than 1,000 victims worldwide has been sentenced to four years in prison for conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

Oleksii Oleksiyovych Lytvynenko, 44, formerly of Cork, Ireland, admitted to joining the Conti operation and coding a “loader” — malware used to deliver other malicious software onto compromised systems, according to a Sept. 10 U.S. Justice Department news release. He pleaded guilty June 10.

Conti attacked computers and networks in 47 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and 31 countries between 2020 and 2022, and the FBI estimates the group collected more than $150 million in ransom payments. Evidence from Mr. Lytvynenko’s online accounts showed he possessed data stolen from eight U.S. victims and four overseas victims. He was arrested in County Cork, Ireland, in July 2023.

“Lytvynenko joined that conspiracy as both an intruder and a developer — personally harming at least 12 companies, storing stolen data from victims, and helping build the malicious tools Conti used to extort and threaten communities,” said Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.

Conti was among the most active ransomware groups targeting U.S. hospitals before disbanding in 2022, including a 2021 attack on San Diego-based Scripps Health. The FBI’s San Diego, Nashville and El Paso field offices and the U.S. Secret Service investigated the case.

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/healthcare-information-technology/cybersecurity/ukrainian-conti-ransomware-member-gets-4-years-for-hospital-linked-attacks/

J&J to hospitals: Submit claims data or lose 340B pricing

 Johnson & Johnson will require 340B covered entities to submit claims-level data for its covered outpatient drugs starting Sept. 15, according to a notice the drugmaker sent to providers Sept. 4.

Covered entities that don’t submit will receive at least two noncompliance notices and a notice of pricing suspension, with suspension beginning at least five business days after the final notice. J&J said 340B pricing will be restored within 10 business days once a covered entity submits compliant data.

The policy applies to all covered entity types regardless of dispensing or administration location, inventory management system or payer coverage. J&J said it will continue to offer 340B pricing upfront at the time of purchase rather than moving to a rebate model, and that the policy supersedes claims-data provisions in a prior notice from February 2023.

Covered entities must submit data within 45 days of a drug’s dispensation; a list of oncology, autoimmune and other specialty drugs, including Stelara, Darzalex and Tremfya, carries a 60-day window. 

J&J also issued a companion notice Sept. 4 limiting 340B covered entities to a single contract pharmacy location within 40 miles of their parent site, effective Sept. 15 for hospitals and Nov. 3 for grantees.

“Johnson & Johnson is updating its 340B claims data policy to help guard against prohibited duplicate discounts and other non-compliance and to help promote the long-term sustainability of the 340B program,” a J&J spokesperson told Becker’s. “J&J is strongly committed to the original intent of the 340B program in service of improving affordable access to innovative medicines for low-income and vulnerable patients.”

The claims-data mandate is the latest expansion of manufacturer-imposed reporting requirements across the drug industry. Eli Lilly began requiring in-house pharmacy claims data earlier this year and started suspending 340B pricing for hospitals that didn’t comply, prompting pushback from hospital associations and a lawsuit from Tampa (Fla.) General Hospital. Novo Nordisk has imposed a similar in-house claims-data requirement.

J&J itself has tried to reshape 340B pricing before. In 2024 it moved to end upfront discounts on Xarelto and Stelara in favor of a rebate model, then paused the effort after HRSA warned that rebate-based models are illegal under the 340B statute. J&J later sued HHS and HRSA over the issue, part of a broader legal fight over drugmakers’ rebate models that a federal judge largely upheld HRSA’s authority to block.

Hospital and provider groups have argued that claims-data mandates, alongside proposed rebate pilots and other manufacturer policies, threaten to squeeze already-strained safety-net providers.

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/pharmacy/jj-to-hospitals-submit-claims-data-or-lose-340b-pricing/

Ambient AI is moving beyond physicians

 Ambient AI gained much of its early traction in healthcare as a documentation tool for physicians. Now, a growing number of health systems are testing whether the technology can do something similar for nurses.

Recent pilots and rollouts at Mercy, FMOL Health, Northeast Georgia Health System, Mount Sinai Medical Center and Jefferson Health show health systems beginning to bring ambient technology into nursing workflows, while Northwell Health plans to expand the technology to nurses by the end of the year.

The shift is still early. Nursing workflows can differ significantly from physician documentation, relying heavily on flowsheets, assessments and other structured information rather than traditional clinical notes. But recent deployments offer an early look at how health systems are adapting ambient technology for those differences.

At Chesterfield, Mo.-based Mercy, the health system recently became the first to deploy the Android version of Microsoft’s ambient AI documentation tool for nurses. In three pilot units, the technology was associated with a 22% reduction in flowsheet documentation time per shift. Mercy is now expanding the tool in phases, with plans to bring it to one medical-surgical unit at 12 additional hospitals before eventually reaching every medical-surgical unit across its acute care facilities by June 30, 2027. 

Baton Rouge, La.-based FMOL Health has also been testing ambient technology with nurses after initially focusing primarily on physicians. The health system conducted nursing pilots in its Jackson, Miss., and Baton Rouge markets. CIO Will Landry told Becker’s the pilots uncovered documentation efficiencies the IT team had not anticipated, and FMOL Health is planning to extend its use of ambient listening further across clinical operations. 

Other health systems are testing Epic’s approach. Northeast Georgia Health System in August became the fifth health system to deploy Epic’s Chart with Art ambient AI tool for nursing documentation. A pilot involving 15 nurses and two patient care technicians across all five Northeast Georgia Medical Center hospitals is testing technology that can draft assessments, care plans, patient education notes and other documentation for nurses to review before it becomes part of the medical record. 

Miami Beach, Fla.-based Mount Sinai Medical Center began rolling out the same Epic technology to inpatient nurses in late July after already using Chart with Art for physicians. The organization became the fourth health system in the country to launch the tool for inpatient nurses, according to its announcement. 

Philadelphia-based Jefferson Health is taking another early approach. The system is piloting ambient AI documentation technology on nursing units as part of a broader effort to return 10 million clinical hours to clinicians by 2028. Jefferson President Baligh Yehia, MD, previously told Becker’s the health system is aiming to save each clinician an average of one hour of administrative work per day. The organzation is using technology logs and in-person observations to measure time saved. 

More expansion could be coming. Northwell Health’s northern region has nearly completed an ambient AI rollout across acute care settings and plans to extend the technology to nursing staff by year-end, Albert Villarin, MD, vice president and chief medical informatics officer, recently told Becker’s. 

The early nursing deployments also come as vendors expand their offerings. Epic now lists Chart with Art: Nursing among its available AI capabilities.

For health systems, the recent pilots are beginning to test whether ambient AI’s use case can extend beyond the physician note, and how much the technology will need to change to fit distinctly different clinical workflows.

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/healthcare-information-technology/ai/ambient-ai-is-moving-beyond-physicians/

‘Who will carry the liability?’ Health system leaders on autonomous AI’s biggest question

 HHS wants an AI agent that can act as a round-the-clock member of a heart failure patient’s care team, managing care between visits and escalating to a clinician only when needed.

On Sept. 9, the department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health selected six organizations to build it under a four-year, $62.7 million contract called the Agentic AI-EnableD CardioVascular CAre TransfOrmation program, or ADVOCATE.

Three companies — Atman Health, Tempus AI and Updoc — will build the patient-facing AI agents. Stanford (Calif.) University will build a separate supervisory AI system to monitor those agents for unsafe recommendations. Durham, N.C.-based Duke University and Oakland, Calif.-based Kaiser Permanente will lead real-world deployment across dozens of hospitals and clinics, with the lead developer required to submit an FDA authorization package within 24 months.

“These are the expected and logical developments in this space,” Curtis Cole, MD, chief global information officer of Ithaca, N.Y.-based Cornell University, told Becker’s. “The creation of agents that can make autonomous decisions in a limited domain with oversight by a system created by a third party seems like the right approach technically. As they master the edge cases, they can incrementally expand the scope.”

The design, he said, is not where the risk sits.

“My primary issue remains — who will carry the liability? If the companies that build and oversee the agents have no liability, I don’t see how these will succeed — unless we eliminate the whole concept of liability, like has been done with gun manufacturers. That seems less likely in healthcare where Americans have such a long history of holding someone accountable,” Dr. Cole said.

Darrell Bodnar, CIO of Whitefield, N.H.-based North Country Healthcare, drew a sharper line between AI that extends what clinicians can do and AI that acts without them.

“I am encouraged by the concept of clinicians, under federal funding and within a controlled pilot environment, pushing the boundaries of how AI can safely extend care and improve access,” he said. “Where I become much more concerned is the movement toward autonomous AI making clinical decisions, including but not limited to adjustments to medications, diet, and treatment, without direct human oversight.”

Mr. Bodnar said that oversight has to be built into the model, not layered on after the fact.

“That oversight needs to be grounded in rigorous, evidence-based clinical science, with clear accountability for the decisions being made. Accountability for a clinical decision needs to be clearly defined and ultimately owned by someone,” he said.

He added that his confidence in federal regulators to independently guarantee that oversight “has been somewhat diminished by some of the changes and decisions we have seen recently” at the FDA.

“I do support FDA approval as one safeguard — it should not replace transparent, evidence-based clinical governance and meaningful human oversight,” he said.

For Joy Oh, chief digital information officer at Cincinnati-based Christ Hospital Health Network, the most interesting part of ADVOCATE is not the clinician-facing agent — it’s the second one. Stanford’s supervisory system, tasked with monitoring the clinical agents and stopping any recommendation that falls outside protocol, is the piece she said could unlock faster, safer deployment of agentic AI more broadly.

“If this framework proves successful, I believe it could open the doors for more rapid prototyping, testing, and deployment of agentic AI at scale by reducing reliance on continuous human oversight and training,” she said.

But a second layer of AI raises a second layer of the same question.

“If a supervisory agent fails to detect an inappropriate recommendation that results in patient harm, who is ultimately responsible: the developer of the worker agent or the developer of the supervisory agent?” Ms. Oh said. “Could the presence of a supervisory agent create a sense of false security leading to long stretches of time where drift and hallucinations go unchecked and undiscovered?”

Brett Oliver, MD, chief medical information and AI officer at Louisville, Ky.-based Baptist Health, sees the funding decision itself as a message.

“I think this is one of the more important AI initiatives in U.S. healthcare today, not because of the technology itself, but because it signals an important shift in regulatory thinking,” Dr. Oliver said. “This investment appears to mark a move from using AI as decision support to AI that actually performs a portion of care itself. Human-in-the-loop may no longer be the primary safety design model (see also Utah’s Doctronic medication refill initiative), but rather a transitional governance model. The future is likely to involve exception-based oversight.”

He said it’s no longer a matter of whether autonomous agents become part of clinical care.

“The question is one of timing,” Dr. Oliver said. “Each healthcare system needs to ask whether they are ready with an appropriate governance structure for these tools. Can we monitor drift? Can we intervene when autonomous systems behave unexpectedly?”

Ashis Barad, MD, chief transformation and digital information officer at New York City-based Hospital for Special Surgery, said the ADVOCATE award does not change his underlying philosophy on the technology.

“The responsible path for autonomous clinical AI is to begin with narrow, well-defined use cases, with clear clinical accountability, rigorous performance monitoring, predefined escalation pathways, and easy access to a human,” Dr. Barad said. “Broad autonomy across complex care remains a much higher bar.”

He argued the real opportunity is not autonomy for its own sake, but coverage — the space between visits where patients are currently on their own.

“The breakthrough is not autonomous AI. It is giving every patient continuous support when human care teams cannot be everywhere at once,” he said.

Daniel Kortsch, MD, associate chief of AI and digital health at Denver Health, raised a different accountability question entirely: to whom is this technology accountable, and on whom was it actually tested? Denver Health is the city’s safety-net system; Dr. Kortsch said many of his patients are uninsured or on Medicaid, several speak a language other than English, and some share a single phone with spotty data across a household.

“When I read about a program like this, I’m reading it for the patient who has heart failure, no cardiologist, and a phone that is shared between multiple people and doesn’t always have data,” Dr. Kortsch said. “Autonomous clinical AI is coming — but the question is for whom.”

“The evidence for AI expertise is real,” he added. “The JAMA Viewpoint last month showed models matching or beating physicians on history, diagnosis, test selection, and guideline-based prescribing. But those are curated cases without real-world data.”

Dr. Kortsch also noted that the piece’s co-authors, investors Vinod and Neal Khosla, back ADVOCATE awardee Atman Health, while Neal “has a patent pending on the kind of AI-supervises-AI architecture ARPA-H is now funding.”

“Unfortunately, guideline-concordant therapy is the easy part,” Dr. Kortsch said. “Titrating a heart failure drug in someone who fills half their prescriptions because of cost is the challenge. The JAMA authors count chronic disease as something AI already does better, but their evidence is four conditions, none of them heart failure, and the headline trial had 32 patients.”

“I’m more convinced it will happen soon,” he said of widespread autonomous clinical AI. “Whether it reaches the people it’s meant for is a different question, and the first round of money was all sent to well-resourced academic and commercial sites. That’s fixable, but we need to put a safety-net system in the trial, enroll the patients the program says it’s for, and validate it on them first.”

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/healthcare-information-technology/ai/who-will-carry-the-liability-6-health-system-leaders-on-autonomous-ais-biggest-question/

NY firefighter goes viral after ripping into ‘anti-American’ protester in Palestinian flag near Ground Zero

 A New York firefighter is going viral after ripping into a leftist protester wearing an Elmo costume draped in a Palestinian flag following the 25th anniversary of 9/11 memorial ceremony — telling the “anti American motherf–ker” to “go back to f–king Palestine.”

The uniformed firefighter unloaded on the costumed radical on the shut-down streets near Ground Zero, where protests later descended into chaos.

“F–king anti-American motherf–ker. Go back to f–king Palestine. We don’t want you here,” the firefighter screamed.

The firefighter called the costumed protester a “f–king anti-American motherf–ker.”x/FrontlinesTPUSA

The firefighter suggested the man take former President Barack Obama, socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Gov. Kathy Hochul and “Squad” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with him on the way out as he leaves.

“Take ’em all. They’re all no f–king good!” he yelled. “You’re no f–king good.”

The radical and the firefighter turn away from one another, as another hater an be heard parroting pro-Palestinian talking points, “The Jews are committing a genocide.”

Plenty of supporters stood behind the mystery firefighter on social media, with one saying: “Give this guy a key to the city!”

The firefighter suggested the man take former President Barack Obama, socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Gov. Kathy Hochul and “Squad” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with him on the way out as he leaves.x/FrontlinesTPUSA

“Can you really blame him? I mean for all we know this gentleman could’ve been one of the firefighters that responded to the events of September 11,” wrote another.

A third emphasized: “I stand with the firefighter. That’s what every true American should stand for.”

It’s not clear who the firefighter is, but the FDNY told The Post he is not a member of the Big Apple’s Bravest.

“We are aware of the video circulating of someone wearing a uniform having a verbal altercation today. This person appears to be from another fire department and is not and has never been a member of the FDNY,” a spokesperson said.

A source told The Post he is a member of a department elsewhere in New York State.

The pro-Palestine costumed agitator was part of a radical counterprotest group that stormed Lower Manhattan Friday in opposition to far-right influencer Jake Lang’s “Crusader March,” where marchers brandished signs declaring “Deport All Muslims.”

The dueling groups descended into chaos — with punches flying and at least one demonstrator being led away in cuffs, sources said.

The disgusting acts took place just blocks away from the solemn 9/11 remembrance ceremony in honor of those who died 25 years ago.

https://nypost.com/2026/09/12/us-news/ny-firefighter-rips-into-protester-wrapped-in-palestinian-flag-near-ground-zero/