This July 4, some Americans are planning to retire their Independence Day barbecues and instead head to the streets in protest against President Donald Trump and his Administration.

The collective demonstrations will be the latest in a long line of protests that have taken place since Trump returned to the White House for a second term. On June 14, as Trump held a national military parade in Washington, D.C.,–the largest the capital city has seen in decades—people across the U.S. gathered for counter-action, attending “No Kings” protests to publicly “reject authoritarianism.” Ahead of the big day, Trump had warned that “people that want to protest will be met with big force,” saying participants are “people that hate our country.”

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Amid the “No Kings” activism, states across the U.S. also encountered immigration protests as people demonstrated against the Trump Administration’s ICE raids. The protests notably started in Los Angeles and garnered national and international attention, especially after Trump deployed the National Guard, and later the Marines, to quell the demonstrations, without the request of California Gov. Gavin Newsom. The decision resulted in much criticism and a legal battle, with an appeals court ultimately ruling that Trump was allowed to keep control of the National Guard in L.A.

In April, people gathered across the U.S. and international cities such as London, Paris, and Stockholm to protest against the actions of Trump and his then-ally, former Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) lead Elon Musk. (The former allies have since had a very public falling out.)

Now, a fresh round of protests are set to take place on July 4, America’s Independence Day. Here’s what we know about the planned action.

Women’s March organizes “Free America Weekend”

Women’s March, which coordinates protests across the U.S. against sexism and oppression, has published a list of over 140 events set to take place on July 4. The displays of protest range from rallies and marches to block parties. Women’s March has invited communities across the country to create even more events.

Per the organization, the Free America Weekend aims to highlight key issues being faced by people across the U.S., such as poverty, unlawful orders, and “the grip of hate and the politics of fear.”

“This July 4th, while the U.S. marks Independence Day, we’ll gather across the country—on porches, in town squares, backyards, and streets—to stand for real freedom and build a vision of a Free America, brick-by-brick,” reads a statement within Women March’s call for action.

“They want us scared, divided, and alone. They don’t want us to dream about freedom. But that’s exactly what we have to do,” said the organization.

“No Kings 2.0” demonstrations

After widespread “No Kings” protests took place throughout the U.S. on June 14, another round of demonstrations are set to take place on July 4.

“No Kings 2.0” events have been scheduled in Wisconsin, Louisiana and Wyoming, along with at least ten other locations across the U.S. While the “No Kings” protests in June were notably rallying against “authoritarianism,” the event page for Wisconsin’s July 4 rally in Green Bay says that the focus this time is on ICE raids and activity amid Trump’s nationwide immigration crackdown.

The protest event page encourages those attending to stand up for “community, justice [in] solidarity with our immigrant neighbors.” In June, ICE arrests conducted in Trump’s second term reportedly reached over 100,000.

Organizers of “No Kings 2.0” events in Louisiana and Wyoming have stressed non-violent demonstrations as a core principle of the gatherings.

What other protests are being held on July 4?

Locals are planning a demonstration outside Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Florida. Protesters are scheduled to gather near the estate on the evening of July 4, equipped with a large balloon depicting the President as a baby.

A similar balloon was hoisted above Trump’s Florida residence on Juneteenth in 2020, in protest against the treatment of Black Americans, in the weeks after the killing of George Floyd.

“We’re supposed to be celebrating America’s independence, and I felt a moral responsibility to stand up and declare our independence from Trump-ism,” Mark Offerman, a local activist, told Palm Beach Daily News.

Meanwhile, The People’s Union USA is encouraging Americans to stay at home on July 4, boycotting large corporations and avoiding parades and firework displays in a show of solidarity against wealth inequality and ICE raids.

Instead, The People’s Union USA, who organized the “Economic Blackout” in February, wants people to focus on supporting their communities and buying locally. Founder John Schwarz has called it the “most important boycott of the year.”

“Do not wave a flag for a country that no longer waves it for you,” Schwarz said in a video. “The 4th of July is supposed to be a celebration of freedom, but what freedom are we actually talking about?” 

Welcome back to In the Loop, TIME’s new twice-weekly newsletter about AI. Starting today, we’ll be publishing these editions both as stories on Time.com and as emails. If you’re reading this in your browser, why not subscribe to have the next one delivered straight to your inbox?

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What to Know

If you talk to staff at the top AI labs, you’ll hear a lot of stories about how the future could go fantastically well—or terribly badly. And of all the ways that AI might cause harm to the human race, there’s one that scientists in the industry are particularly worried about today. That’s the possibility of AI helping bad actors to start a new pandemic. “You could try to synthesize something like COVID or a more dangerous version of the flu—and basically, our modeling suggests that this might be possible,” Anthropic’s chief scientist, Jared Kaplan, told me in May.

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Measuring the risk — In a new study published this morning, and shared exclusively with TIME ahead of its release, we got the first hard numbers on how experts think the risk of a new pandemic might have increased thanks to AI. The Forecasting Research Institute polled experts earlier this year, asking them how likely a human-caused pandemic might be—and how likely it might become if humans had access to AI that could reliably give advice on how to build a bioweapon.

What they found — Experts, who were polled between December and February, put the risk of a human-caused pandemic at 0.3% per year. But, they said, that risk would jump fivefold, to 1.5% per year, if AI were able to provide human-level virology advice.

You can guess where this is going — Then, in April, the researchers tested today’s AI tools on a new virology troubleshooting benchmark. They found that today’s AI tools outperform PhD-level virologists at complex troubleshooting tasks in the lab. In other words, AI can now do the very thing that forecasters warned would increase the risk of a human-caused pandemic fivefold.

We just published the full story on Time.com—you can read it here.

Who to Know

Person in the news – Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare.

Since its founding in 2009, Cloudflare has been protecting sites on the internet from being knocked offline by large influxes of traffic, or indeed coordinated attacks. Now, some 20% of the internet is covered by its network. And today, Cloudflare announced that this network would begin to block AI crawlers by default — essentially putting a fifth of the internet behind a paywall for the bots that harvest info to train AIs like ChatGPT and Claude.

Step back — Today’s AI is so powerful because it has essentially inhaled the whole of the internet — from my articles to your profile photos. By running neural networks over that data using immense quantities of computing power, AI companies have taught these systems the texture of the world at such an enormous scale that it has given rise to new AI capabilities, like the ability to answer questions on almost any topic, or to generate photorealistic images. But this scraping has sparked a huge backlash from publishers, artists and writers, who complain that it has been done without any consent or compensation.

A new model — Cloudflare says the move will “fundamentally change how AI companies access web content going forward.” Major publishers, including TIME, have expressed their support for the shift toward an “opt-in” rather than an “opt-out” system, the company says. Cloudflare also says it is working on a new initiative, called Pay Per Crawl, in which creators will have the option of setting a price on their data in return for making it available to train AI. 

Fighting words — Prince was not available for an interview this week. But at a recent conference, he disclosed that traffic to news sites had dropped precipitously across the board thanks to AI, in a shift that many worry will imperil the existence of the free press. “I go to war every single day with the Chinese government, the Russian government, the Iranians, the North Koreans, probably Americans, the Israelis — all of them who are trying to hack into our customer sites,” Prince said. “And you’re telling me I can’t stop some nerd with a C-corporation in Palo Alto?”

AI in Action

61% percent of U.S. adults have used AI in the last six months, and 19% interact with it daily, according to a new survey of AI adoption by the venture capital firm Menlo Ventures.

But just 3% percent of those users pay for access to the software, Menlo estimated based on the survey’s results—suggesting 97% of users only use the free tier of AI tools.

AI usage figures are higher for Americans in the workforce than other groups. Some 75% of employed adults have used AI in the last six months, including 26% who report using it daily, according to the survey. Students also report high AI usage: 85% have used it in the last six months, and 22% say they use it daily.

The statistics seem to suggest that some students and workers are growing dependent on free AI tools—a usage pattern that might become lucrative if AI companies were to begin restricting access or raising prices. However, the proliferation of open-source AI models has created intense price competition that may limit any single company’s ability to dramatically increase their costs.

As always, if you have an interesting story of AI in Action, we’d love to hear it. Email us at: intheloop@time.com

What we’re reading

‘The Dead Have Never Been This Talkative’: The Rise of AI Resurrection by Tharin Pillay in TIME

With the rise of image-to-video tools like the newest version of Midjourney, the world recently crossed a threshold: it’s now possible, in just a few clicks, to reanimate a photo of your dead relative. You can train a chatbot on snippets of their writing to replicate their patterns of speech; if you have a long enough clip of them speaking, you can also replicate their voice. Will these tools make it easier to process the heart-rending pain of bereavement? Or might their allure in fact make it harder to move forward? My colleague Tharin published a deeply insightful piece last week about the rise of this new technology. It’s certainly a weird time to be alive. Or, indeed, to be dead.

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Recent developments in AI could mean that human-caused pandemics are five times more likely than they were just a year ago, according to a study of top experts’ predictions shared exclusively with TIME.

The data echoes concerns raised by AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic in recent months, both of which have warned that today’s AI tools are reaching the ability to meaningfully assist bad actors attempting to create bioweapons.

Read More: Exclusive: New Claude Model Triggers Bio-Risk Safeguards at Anthropic

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It has long been possible for biologists to modify viruses using laboratory technology. The new development is the ability for chatbots—like ChatGPT or Claude—to give accurate troubleshooting advice to amateur biologists trying to create a deadly bioweapon in a lab. Safety experts have long viewed the difficulty of this troubleshooting process as a significant bottleneck on the ability of terrorist groups to create a bioweapon, says Seth Donoughe, a co-author of the study. Now, he says, thanks to AI, the expertise necessary to intentionally cause a new pandemic “could become accessible to many, many more people.”

Between December 2024 and February 2025, the Forecasting Research Institute asked 46 biosecurity experts and 22 “superforecasters” (individuals with a high success rate at predicting future events) to estimate the risk of a human-caused pandemic. The average survey respondent predicted the risk of that happening in any given year was 0.3%.

Crucially, the surveyors then asked another question: how much would that risk increase if AI tools could match the performance of a team of experts on a difficult virology troubleshooting test? If AI could do that, the average expert said, then the annual risk would jump to 1.5%—a fivefold increase.

What the forecasters didn’t know was that Donoughe, a research scientist at the pandemic prevention nonprofit SecureBio, was testing AI systems for that very capability. In April, Donoughe’s team revealed the results of those tests: today’s top AI systems can outperform PhD-level virologists at a difficult troubleshooting test.

Read More: Exclusive: AI Outsmarts Virus Experts in the Lab, Raising Biohazard Fears

In other words, AI can now do the very thing that forecasters warned would increase the risk of a human-caused pandemic fivefold. (The Forecasting Research Institute plans to re-survey the same experts in future to track whether their view of the risks has increased as they said it would, but said this research would take months to complete.)

To be sure, there are a couple of reasons to be skeptical of the results. Forecasting is an inexact science, and it is especially difficult to accurately predict the likelihood of very rare events. Forecasters in the study also revealed a lack of understanding of the rate of AI progress. (For example, when asked, most said they did not expect AI to surpass human performance at the virology test until after 2030, while Donoughe’s test showed that bar had already been met.) But even if the numbers themselves are taken with a pinch of salt, the authors of the paper argue, the results as a whole still point in an ominous direction. “It does seem that near-term AI capabilities could meaningfully increase the risk of a human-caused epidemic,” says Josh Rosenberg, CEO of the Forecasting Research Institute.

The study also identified ways of reducing the bioweapon risks posed by AI. Those mitigations broadly fell into two categories.

The first category is safeguards at the model level. In interviews, researchers welcomed efforts by companies like OpenAI and Anthropic to prevent their AIs from responding to prompts aimed at building a bioweapon. The paper also identifies restricting the proliferation of “open-weights” models, and adding protections against models being jailbroken, as likely to reduce the risk of AI being used to start a pandemic.

The second category of safeguards involves imposing restrictions on companies that synthesize nucleic acids. Currently, it is possible to send one of these companies a genetic code, and be delivered biological materials corresponding to that code. Today, these companies are not obliged by law to screen the genetic codes they receive before synthesizing them. That’s potentially dangerous because these synthesized genetic materials could be used to create mail-order pathogens. The authors of the paper recommend labs screen their genetic sequences to check them for harmfulness, and for labs to implement “know your customer” procedures.

Taken together, all these safeguards—if implemented—could bring the risk of an AI-enabled pandemic back down to 0.4%, the average forecaster said. (Only slightly higher than the 0.3% baseline of where they believed the world was before they knew today’s AI could help create a bioweapon.)

“Generally, it seems like this is a new risk area worth paying attention to,” Rosenberg says. “But there are good policy responses to it.”