Every morning, one of the most expensive publications on earth goes to press with a readership of exactly one (a study published by the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence ranks it, per page, as the costliest publication since Gutenberg). The President's Daily Brief is a classified intelligence summary prepared overnight for the US President: the most critical global events, threats, and opportunities, condensed into something that can be absorbed before the day's first decision. Avos exists because we think that design, one edition for one reader, is the best container for news ever invented, and that AI agents finally make it available to everyone else.
What is the President's Daily Brief?
The President's Daily Brief, or PDB, is a daily summary of high-level intelligence and analysis produced by the US intelligence community for the president and a small circle of senior officials. Today the Office of the Director of National Intelligence coordinates and delivers it, with contributions from the CIA and other agencies. It has existed in some form since 1946, when President Truman began receiving a "Daily Summary" (the first one appeared on 15 February 1946). President Kennedy's version, the President's Intelligence Checklist, was first delivered in June 1961 and was meant to fit in a breast pocket, and the document took its current name under President Johnson: the first stand-alone PDB was delivered on 1 December 1964. Its defining property has never been secrecy, though. It is tailoring. Each president gets the brief in the form they actually absorb: some read it with a briefer in the room, others took it away to read later, and in 2014, at President Obama's request, it moved from paper to electronic delivery on a tablet. An enormous staff does the reading; one person does the deciding.
If you want the full story, David Priess's book The President's Book of Secrets is the definitive history, and the CIA has declassified thousands of early briefs, roughly 2,500 from the Kennedy and Johnson years and another 2,500 from Nixon and Ford, which you can read online today in the CIA's FOIA reading room.
Why the PDB is the best newsletter design in the world
Strip away the classification stamps and the PDB is a newsletter, and an almost perfectly designed one. It is finite: it ends, every day, and its reader is done. It is scheduled: it arrives before decisions are made, not continuously throughout the day. It is grounded: every line traces back to collection and analysis, not vibes. And it is ruthlessly personal: the entire apparatus exists to answer one question, "what does this specific reader need to know today?", for a readership of one.
Compare that with how the rest of us get news: an infinite feed, ranked by an engagement algorithm, mixing the consequential with the outrage of the hour, that never ends and never asks what you actually needed. The president's problem, too much happening, too little time, real decisions at stake, is now everyone's problem. The president's solution stayed exclusive for eighty years because it runs on something no normal person can afford: a staff that reads everything overnight.
What changed: the reading staff became software
AI agents changed the economics. An agentic news system can do overnight what the PDB's staff does: fetch everything your chosen sources published, follow through to the full text, deduplicate the same story told by a dozen outlets, weigh what survives against your stated priorities, and write it up as briefs with links back to the original reporting. The judgment stays with the reader; the reading itself is delegated. We have written elsewhere about how that pipeline works in Agentic news, explained and What is an agentic RSS reader?
Avos wore this inspiration openly from day one. Our original homepage was literally themed on it, under the headline "Get Your News Like The President".
What Avos borrowed, and what it deliberately changed
From the PDB we borrowed the shape: one private edition, for a single reader, on a schedule, short enough to finish, built by tireless readers working overnight. Avos prints yours every morning.
Three things we changed on purpose. First, the sources are yours: the intelligence community decides what feeds the president's brief, but you decide what feeds yours, from world press to the RSS feeds of individual writers you trust. Second, the beat is yours: your edition can cover European energy policy, your industry, your city, and your portfolio in one issue, with financial data blocks alongside the news. Third, it is not English-only: your brief can be written in any of around 50 languages. The fastest way to see the result is a live sample in the template gallery, starting with the daily brief.
FAQ
Is Avos really comparable to the President's Daily Brief?
In shape, yes; in content, deliberately not. Avos borrows the PDB's design principles: a single reader, a fixed schedule, a finite length, and a staff (of AI agents) that reads far more than the reader ever could. It does not deal in classified intelligence; it deals in the sources you chose, summarized with links back to the original reporting.
Do I need to be a decision-maker for a daily brief to make sense?
The format helps anyone who has more to follow than time to follow it. The PDB exists because attention is the president's scarcest resource, and that constraint now applies to most working people. If your reading list outgrew your reading time, you have the problem this format was designed for.
Where can I learn more about the real PDB?
David Priess's The President's Book of Secrets (2016) is the standard history, written by a former CIA daily briefer. The CIA's FOIA reading room has declassified early briefs, including Kennedy-era checklists, which are worth reading just to see how consistent the format has stayed for sixty years. For the official overview, the intelligence community's own What is the PDB? page covers its history from Truman to today, and the CIA-published study First Callers describes how three administrations used it.