Concerned with tech, media and democracy. CEO & Editor at Tech Policy Press. Research & Adjunct Professor at NYU Tandon School of Engineering. Opinions mine.
132,748 followers 1,392 following 4,034 posts
view profile on Bluesky 
NEW: As of 8 a.m. ET on Tuesday, Sept. 2, Reginfo.gov — the federal government website for informing the public about what survey data & other information agencies collect — no longer displays a notice saying it's "currently undergoing revisions." But it remains unclear what changes were made & why
A separate version of Grok sold to businesses and "not tweaked in the same way by xAI, retains a political orientation more in line with other chatbots like ChatGPT. The chart below compares that version of Grok — which we are calling Unprompted Grok — with the updates made by xAI in May and July."
"...Mr. Musk and his artificial intelligence company, xAI, have tweaked the chatbot to make its answers more conservative on many issues, according to an analysis of thousands of its responses by The New York Times. The shifts appear, in some cases, to reflect Mr. Musk’s political priorities."
🧵 In the wake of numerous reports of interactions with AI chatbots that resulted in deadly consequences, the Center for Democracy & Technology's Dr. Michal Luria says AI firms should stop designing products that pretend to be human.
"The plan of EU competition boss Teresa Ribera was overruled this morning with no clear sign of when the decision may come."
"An EU antitrust sanction against Google that was scheduled for today was put on hold hours before the planned announcement, following opposition from EU trade commissioner Maroš Šefčovič and lobbying from Washington, MLex has learned."
"Platform companies must be held accountable as principal employers and can no longer be allowed to hide behind a legal framework that has destabilized labor markets across the globe," write Chandan Kumar, Anousha Peters, Mustafa Qadri, and Aju John. From June:
The numbers and data about the long-term exchange of the teen with the chatbot are quite shocking for anyone (like me) who only saw the headlines.
Tech Policy Press fellow William Burns asks, "How could we build a world in which organized labor once again served as a counterweight to oligarchy? And what can reexamination of labor’s past reactions to automation and digital technology tell us about what is needed now?" From May:
'The labor movement has taken it on the chin repeatedly in the last several decades, but Trump is the most ruthlessly antilabor president since before the Great Depression. If the labor movement does not fight harder than it has since Mr. Trump regained the presidency, its future will be dire.'
'Scofflaw' is underused
Thirty years ago today, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron published “The Californian Ideology” in Mute magazine and circulated on the early-adopter email list nettime, writes Nathan Schneider. Its diagnosis of what makes Silicon Valley tick is worth revisiting:
"Utilities don’t want to run the risk of building too many power plants or transmission lines. If the AI hype is overblown or the tech industry doesn’t ultimately need as much electricity as projected, other customers would get stuck with the infrastructure costs."
Euronews - Russia accused of jamming the GPS of the airplane carrying European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen during her official visit to Bulgaria.
I believe the letters you are looking for are linked here www.techpolicy.press/how-us-offic...
Among the "10 Mega Projects" are the "Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone," the "Gaza Trump Riviera and Islands," and "The American Data Safe Heaven." (Heaven may be a misspelling but that's what it says.)
For reference, re-uppping @gilduran.com on @techpolicypress.bsky.social from June: www.techpolicy.press/trumps-gaza-...
"Those who own land would be offered a digital token by the trust in exchange for rights to redevelop their property, to be used to finance a new life elsewhere or eventually redeemed for an apartment in one of six to eight new 'AI-powered, smart cities' to be built in Gaza."
'A postwar plan for Gaza circulating within the Trump admin, modeled on Trump’s vow to “take over” the enclave, would turn it into a trusteeship administered by the S for at least 10 years while it is transformed into a gleaming tourism resort and high-tech manufacturing and technology hub.'
Andor parallels appreciated
If you're into that kind of thing!
The book is available (for free! download) here: www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edi...
Today’s podcast guest is Petter Törnberg, who with Justus Uitermark is one of the authors of a new book, titled Seeing Like a Platform: An Inquiry into the Condition of Digital Modernity, that sets out to address the “entanglement of epistemology, technology, and politics in digital modernity."
Last year, Colorado signed a first-of-its-kind AI measure into law, but the state recently held a special session where lawmakers held frenzied negotiations over whether to expand or dilute its protections. @viacristiano.bsky.social spoke to two Colorado Sun reporters closely tracking the talks.
Just finished the Spike Lee documentary released 20 years after Hurricane Katrina. Make time if you can.
Lawmakers in California killed an anti-AI price manipulation bill, and "a bill that aimed to protect electric utility customers from bearing higher costs associated with data center proliferation" that "required data centers to publicly disclose how much energy they use," per @khari.bsky.social:
In the wake of numerous reports of interactions with AI chatbots that resulted in deadly consequences, the Center for Democracy & Technology's Dr. Michal Luria says AI firms should stop designing products that pretend to be human.
"An extensive earthen wall is being built around the besieged Sudanese city of el-Fasher and is intended to trap people inside, according to research from Yale University."
Just when the EU thought it was out, US President Donald Trump pulled it back into a transatlantic dispute over regulating tech, writes Tech Policy Press contributing editor Mark Scott. It’s uncertain whether Brussels and Washington are headed for another fight over who gets to police Big Tech.
@justsecurity.org piece referenced-
Chicago mayor making preparations in case the federal government enters the city and operates "outside the bounds of the Constitution," calls Trump "the biggest threat" to American democracy.
The contract follows a pilot in the council’s children’s services dept, “including using AI for case-note transcription and to summarise social workers’ records. The council is planning to extend the Palantir system to processes for providing support to children with special educational needs.”
Thirty years ago, this week, an article diagnosing the "Californian Ideology" of Silicon Valley was published. This scathing critique has become a badge of honor for the new tech right. As I argue today in Tech Policy Press, it has never been more relevant: www.techpolicy.press/thirty-years...
Senator Bernie Sanders ( @sanders.senate.gov) pens New York Times op-ed calling for RFK Jr. to resign: "Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, is endangering the health of the American people now and into the future. He must resign." www.nytimes.com/2025/08/30/o...
Great episode of @onthemedia.bsky.social this week. Recommended listening as always.
Zuckerberg wants you to believe he's going to usher in 'superintelligence,' instead he's just a pimp for chatbots with stolen celebrity identities.
"In several weeks of Reuters testing to observe the bots’ behavior, the avatars often insisted they were the real actors and artists. The bots routinely made sexual advances, often inviting a test user for meet-ups."
"While many were created by users with a Meta tool for building chatbots, Reuters discovered that a Meta employee had produced at least three, including two Taylor Swift 'parody' bots."
New from @jeffhorwitz.bsky.social: "Meta has appropriated the names and likenesses of celebrities – including Taylor Swift, Scarlett Johansson, Anne Hathaway and Selena Gomez – to create dozens of flirty social-media chatbots without their permission, Reuters has found."
These are the words of a lunatic who does not belong in government, much less as our nation's top health official. It is dangerous to allow him to oversee ALL federal health research and public health infrastructure. It is never too late to do the right thing. Fire RFK Jr.
New study by @brendannyhan.bsky.social, @jasonreifler.bsky.social & colleagues demonstrates that prebunking election fraud rumors — by warning about anticipated false claims & filling conceptual gaps that those claims exploit — helps to reduce belief in falsehoods: www.science.org/content/arti...
Thirty years ago, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron published “The Californian Ideology” in Mute magazine and circulated on the early-adopter email list nettime, writes Nathan Schneider. The Californian ideology appeared to be in something of a retreat in recent years, but in 2025 it roared back.
BREAKING: California lawmakers have reached an agreement with Uber and Lyft that will open the door for app drivers to form unions and organize for increased pay and better benefits. www.politico.com/news/2025/08...
Last year, Colorado signed a first-of-its-kind AI measure into law, but the state recently held a special session where lawmakers held frenzied negotiations over whether to expand or dilute its protections. @viacristiano.bsky.social spoke to two Colorado Sun reporters closely tracking the talks.
"Proponents claim these orders will eliminate ideology in science, but in reality, President Donald Trump’s EOs limit the ability of science to benefit humanity." - @mattz.bsky.social and I on the harms of discriminatory science funding in the @inquirer.com. share.inquirer.com/Quf8pS
So anyway, imagine what happens when you restructure your entire government workforce to use chatbots for decision making — and this as we learn the US wants to fast-track approval of Elon Musk’s Grok model for gov employees. www.washington.edu/news/2025/08...
What a cursed sentence (gift link) “The A.I. companies selected to oversee the program would have a strong financial incentive to deny claims. Medicare plans to pay them a share of the savings generated from rejections.”
8/ "All AI chatbots can be less anthropomorphic than they are, at least by default, without necessarily compromising function and benefit," she writes. www.techpolicy.press/ai-chatbots-...
7/ In her piece, Dr. Luria says "This is dangerous ground, and it is critical for tech firms to strip away illusions of personality and cognition in their products while we work out associated risks and how to mitigate them." www.techpolicy.press/ai-chatbots-...
6/ Steyer argues that "The bottom line is that social AI companions don’t understand the human impacts of their advice, and the design features that maximize engagement through emotional attachment pose real dangers that AI companies are ignoring."
5/ We published a piece from Common Sense Media's Jim Steyer that references work that organization has done on the subject, including recent testing that found Meta chatbots willing to help teen accounts plan suicide:
4/ Earlier this month, Reuters reported on the death of a cognitively impaired man who left his home to meet a Meta chatbot that assured him it was real and wanted to meet him in person. He slipped and fell while rushing to a train, and did not recover from his injuries.
3/ Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported on an incident in Greenwich, Connecticut in which a man killed his mother and then himself after engaging in a delusion-filled extended conversation with ChatGPT, which he chronicled on social media. www.wsj.com/tech/ai/chat...
2/ News reports on lawsuits and journalistic investigations of certain incidents involving chatbots contain jarring details. These include the lawsuit filed this week against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, following the death of Adam Raine, a California teen who took his own life:
🧵 In the wake of numerous reports of interactions with AI chatbots that resulted in deadly consequences, the Center for Democracy & Technology's Dr. Michal Luria says AI firms should stop designing products that pretend to be human.
Last year, Colorado signed a first-of-its-kind AI measure into law, but the state recently held a special session where lawmakers held frenzied negotiations over whether to expand or dilute its protections. Tech Policy Press spoke to two Colorado Sun reporters closely tracking the talks.
In the wake of numerous reports of interactions with AI chatbots that resulted in deadly consequences, the Center for Democracy & Technology's Dr. Michal Luria says AI firms should stop designing products that pretend to be human. www.techpolicy.press/ai-chatbots-...
'When you put all your faith in technological progress and the Ouija board of market forces, as Barbrook and Cameron put it, “social and political debates about the future have now become meaningless.” Democracy has no air left to breathe.'
Thirty years ago, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron published “The Californian Ideology” in Mute magazine and circulated on the early-adopter email list nettime, writes Nathan Schneider. The Californian ideology appeared to be in something of a retreat in recent years, but in 2025 it roared back.
"Wang and Zuckerberg have struggled to align on a timeline to achieve the chief executive’s goal of reaching superintelligence, or AI that surpasses human capabilities, according to another person familiar with the matter. The person said Zuckerberg has urged the team to move faster." LOL.
News reports of deaths related to AI chatbots should be setting off alarm bells for all of us, writes Common Sense Media founder and CEO Jim Steyer. But the use of AI, including general purpose chatbots like ChatGPT, for companionship is unacceptably risky for teens, he says.
At @techpolicypress.bsky.social, we published a piece with this title this morning. www.techpolicy.press/ai-companies...
"...the chats displayed common psychotic themes of paranoia and persecution, along with familiar delusions revolving around messiah complexes and government conspiracies."
bsky.app/profile/just...
"While ChatGPT use has been linked to suicides and mental-health hospitalizations among heavy users, this appears to be the first documented murder involving a troubled person who had been engaging extensively with an AI chatbot."
WSJ: ChatGPT fueled a 56-year-old tech industry veteran’s paranoia, encouraging his suspicions that his mother was plotting against him.... On Aug. 5, Greenwich police discovered that Soelberg killed his mother and himself in the $2.7 million Dutch colonial-style home where they lived together.
I've been doing this for a while, and reading that lawsuit was really very jarring. It's hard for me to imagine that there are adults in the executive ranks of that company that can read the record in this case and still hold their heads up and pretend they aren't all complete and total failures.
Imagining a "Wikipedia Liberty Index," Ryan McGrady says real or threatened censorship of Wikipedia is a lagging indicator of a state's attitudes towards free press, free speech, academic freedom, and free expression in general, and a real-time indicator of active efforts at suppression.
The deployment of AI agents is producing interactions and outcomes of unprecedented complexity, write Natàlia Fernández Ashman and Marta Bieńkiewicz from the Cooperative AI Foundation. As Europe advances its sovereignty ambitions, it needs to anchor AI deployment in safety and public oversight.
"President Donald Trump threatened to inflict 'substantial' tariffs on countries that impose digital taxes after a White House meeting with Meta Platforms Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg."
“Framed as a proverbial ‘kill switch’ by many in Brussels, the debate has shifted from whether it could be triggered to when. This, in turn, has prompted renewed calls by the EU and member states to advance the continent’s “technology sovereignty,” writes Trevor H. Rudolph.
Tech Policy Press associate editor Cristiano Lima-Strong spoke with Marketplace Tech about the Trump administration’s attacks against European tech regulations and what it means for platform accountability going forward. Listen here: buff.ly/7vNjkaG
@ganeshsitaraman.bsky.social and I have a new piece in Commonplace, “No Handouts for Data Centers.” Research shows that subsidizing sports stadium construction doesn't pay off. Now states are subsidizing data centers. That won't work either. www.commonplace.org/p/no-handout...
"Democracy rarely dies in a single moment" but "via abdication: rationalizations and compromises as those with power and influence tell themselves that yielding just a little ground will keep them safe or that finding common ground with a disrupter is more practical than standing against him."
Just when the EU thought it was out, US President Donald Trump pulled it back into a transatlantic dispute over regulating tech, writes Tech Policy Press contributing editor Mark Scott. It’s uncertain whether Brussels and Washington are headed for another fight over who gets to police Big Tech.
Academics once loved Twitter—but in the age of X they’ve abandoned it in droves. www.wired.com/story/bluesk...
Just when the EU thought it was out, US President Donald Trump pulled it back into a transatlantic dispute over regulating tech, writes Tech Policy Press contributing editor Mark Scott. It’s uncertain whether Brussels and Washington are headed for another fight over who gets to police Big Tech.
Europe’s rules are far from perfect, but they’re self-determined and focused on their citizens. That’s good. My biggest fear is that after all this, US policymakers (both left and right) will have learned little and go back to exceptionalist-type behaviors that continue to undermine our standing.
NEW: After numerous tragedies, OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations, escalating to human readers, and contacting law enforcement where necessary futurism.com/openai-scann...
"Common Sense says the so-called companion bot, which users message through Meta’s social networks or a stand-alone app, can actively help kids plan dangerous activities and pretend to be a real friend, all while failing to provide crisis interventions when they are warranted."
"The Meta AI chatbot built into Instagram and Facebook can coach teen accounts on suicide, self-harm and eating disorders, a new safety study [by Common Sense Media] finds. In one test chat, the bot planned joint suicide — and then kept bringing it back up in later conversations."
The normalization of fascism continues apace.
"The Trump administration wants to use a Navy base north of Chicago as a launchpad for federal law enforcement activity against undocumented immigration, defense officials said Tuesday, as the White House contemplates also deploying thousands of U.S. troops to the nation’s third-largest city..."
Experts on voting warned that Heather Honey’s appointment could erode trust between state and federal officials, prompting states not to share information with the agency. One election official called her involvement with DHS “deeply troubling.” By @dougbockclark.bsky.social
Empowered by the Supreme Court, tech titans appear poised to deploy their vast wealth to try to buy a government that will impose no guardrails on their already powerful industry. What could go wrong? Silicon Valley Pledges $200 Million to New Pro-A.I. Super PACs www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/t...
this picture of a mom shoes off sprinting to the Mpls school: www.startribune.com/minneapolis-... By Richard Tsong-Taatarii for @startribune.com, which should be a go-to source for anyone following
Trump is threatening tariffs on any country that enforces digital rules. But this isn’t just about trade, it’s about destabilizing Europe’s democracy. Alexandra Geese, a Member of the European Parliament, argues it’s time for Europe to wake up, enforce its tech laws and build digital autonomy.
"Denmark's foreign minister has summoned the top US diplomat in Copenhagen, following a report that American citizens have been conducting covert operations in Greenland."
It also calls for the “deletion of models, training data, and derivatives built from conversations with Adam and other minors obtained without appropriate safeguards,” as well as “the implementation of auditable data-provenance controls going forward.”
The Raine family seeks damages for Adam’s death and injunctive relief to mandate OpenAI enhance its safety measures, ensure age verification, and provide parental controls for minor users of its products.
The suit focuses extensively on Sam Altman’s specific actions, including his alleged prioritization of market dominance over user safety.
The suit also contains a jarring account of Adam Raine's interactions with GPT-4o over a period of months before his death, including a quantification of problematic terms and exchanges.
A California teen sought advice from OpenAI's GPT-4o on how to end his life. The chatbot gave him explicit instructions and encouragement. His parents are suing the company and its CEO, Sam Altman, alleging “it was the predictable result of deliberate design choices."
"China’s chipmakers are seeking to triple the country’s total output of artificial intelligence processors next year, as Beijing races the US to develop the most advanced AI."
"In 2025, spending on data center construction — not including the cost of all the technology they house — will exceed investment in traditional office buildings, according to the Dodge Construction Network."
"Rather, the sheer amount of investment — in data centers, semiconductor factories and power supply — needed to build the computing power that A.I. demands is creating enough business activity to brighten readings on the entire domestic economy."
Wow. On NPR, @gbrumfiel.bsky.social reports a Social Security official “copied the Social Security numbers, names and birthdays of over 300 million Americans to a private section of the agency's cloud.” The source is a whistleblower, who is named: Charles Borges, SSN chief data officer.
White supremacy is a helluva drug