Kai Risdell

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This is Marketplace.

I'm Kai Risdahl.

Here's a news item to set up another news item, which is going to set up a story about a sizable slice of a whole industry.

Lufthansa, the German airline, said today it's going to cancel 20,000 flights between now and October, most of them short haul in Europe because jet fuel has gotten so expensive.

That's item one.

Item two is that low-cost American carriers were in Washington today meeting with the Secretary of Transportation asking for help with, can you guess?

Marketplace of Samantha Fields has that one.

Artificial intelligence is moving fast.

Every time you turn around, there is a new new thing.

And in the last six months in particular, there have been big jumps in what are called agentic capabilities for AI.

Those are programs that take a large language model out of the chat bots that we're used to where you just ask it things.

And you set it loose to actually do stuff in the world, like book a flight or delete your junk mails.

Coding agents like Anthropic's Clawed Code or OpenAI's Codex, they focus on building software.

OpenClaw lets you run agents by messaging them from your phone.

They can work autonomously 24-7 on whatever tasks you give them.

Mildly terrifying?