Madison Mills covers AI for Axios — but she came to the beat from Wall Street, and that changes everything about what she’s looking for. She spent years covering markets, interviewing Jamie Dimon and Ray Dalio, and building one of the most-read financial newsletters in the country. She knows how investors think, how they hedge, and how wide the gap is between what they say publicly and what they actually believe.

That’s the lens she’s bringing to the AI story. And the picture it reveals is one most of the tech coverage is missing entirely.

We talked about the hidden financial exposure in the AI buildout — the small-town bank loans to truckers and construction companies that don’t look like AI bets on paper, but absolutely are. We got into what Wall Street sources are telling her off the record right now about fraud risk, and why she describes those conversations as “a very scary picture.” And we dug into the trillion-dollar question she keeps putting to the AI labs themselves: when are you actually going to be profitable?

We also ended up in a really honest conversation about the jobs debate — why she’s skeptical when public companies attribute layoffs to AI, what’s actually happening with entry-level hiring, and why some of the most enthusiastic AI adopters she’s encountering are the most senior people in the room.

Madison is one of the smartest reporters working this beat. I think you’ll want to listen twice.

Find Madison at Axios — she co-authors the AI Plus newsletter Monday through Thursday — and on Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn.

For years, the Pentagon promised drone dominance would change everything.

Then Iran shot down an American fighter jet.

Colin Demarest has been covering the future of defense at Axios long enough to know the gap between Pentagon strategy and battlefield reality. As the author of the Future of Defense newsletter, he’s been inside the Iran conflict coverage since the first strike — tracking new weapons systems in their first real-world test, watching war costs climb past $16 billion and rising.

We get into whether drone dominance is actually delivering, what the U.S. dismissal of Ukraine’s anti-drone technology offer tells us about how Washington processes advice from allies who’ve been in the fight, and whether the defense industrial base can sustain a long war.

The future of defense isn’t theoretical anymore.

Part Three of the April Axios takeover of The Friday Reporter.

The Pentagon just tried to blacklist an AI company from all government work. Not because its technology failed — because the company refused to let its AI run autonomous weapons or surveil Americans at scale.

That’s not a contract dispute, it’s a new kind of power struggle. And it’s reshaping the entire AI industry.

Maria Curi is the AI+Government reporter at Axios and the author of the newsletter that drives tech policy conversations across Washington. She breaks down how the Defense Department is using procurement as policy — and why the stakes extend far beyond one company’s government contract.

We get into who actually controls AI governance in this administration, what the Pentagon-Anthropic standoff means for every AI lab now doing business with the federal government, and the question Maria says nobody is asking yet — but should be.

It’s Week Two of the April Axios takeover of The Friday Reporter.