We’ve complained a great deal about RFK Jr.’s stint running HHS and its effects on the health of Americans in the short and long term because, well, there’s a lot to complain about. His anti-vaxxer stances have begun infecting national vaccine policy, of course, and his stance of essentially ignoring an ongoing 17 month measles outbreak have generated national headlines. Regarding measles cases, by the way, the official case count in America is at roughly 80% of the total of last year already, which was itself the highest case count in several decades. I’ll take this moment to remind you that it’s May, not even half way through the year.

But there has also been an insane amount of chaos at HHS and its child agencies under Kennedy. And that chaos isn’t slowing down, it seems, with the announcement that FDA chief Marty Makary will be resigning his post. And, because this is the dumbest of timelines in which we live, the reason behind it appears to be Trump’s push to allow for flavored e-cigarettes to entice the nation’s youth.

Makary’s insiders said the former Johns Hopkins University cancer surgeon resigned after Trump forced his hand on authorizing fruit-flavored e-cigarettes. Makary had reportedly been resisting the sign-offs out of concern that the kid-friendly flavors could again entice youth use and addiction—something public health officials and experts have for years worked to combat. But Makary’s stance was in conflict with Trump’s “save vaping” campaign promise—and with the tobacco industry’s interests.

Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had called Makary over a weekend to scold him for not moving fast enough to authorize flavored vapes, particularly menthol, mango, and blueberry flavors from the Los Angeles manufacturer Glas. The FDA authorized those flavored products days later and issued a new policy that would make it easier to market flavored vapes.

The ArsTechnica post goes on to note that Makary had pissed off a bunch of lobbyists for tobacco, pharma, and biotech firms, all while health professionals have been complaining about his participation in Kennedy’s anti-vaxxer nonsense at the FDA as well. He essentially managed to piss off everyone, courting zero allies, which is a remarkable achievement itself.

But the larger story here is that HHS is suffering from a rather damning lack of leadership. Not by performance, but through vacancies of Senate-confirmed people to actually run things.

The firing or resignation of Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary is more intra-MAHA chaos at a beleaguered and battered Department of Health and Human Services. 

When you don’t have a CDC Director, an FDA Commissioner, or a Surgeon General, the obvious question is: Why do you have this HHS Secretary? Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is the cause of much of the chaos that has resulted in these job vacancies. HHS is rotting from the head. 

It really is incredible to realize that those three positions, important as they are, are currently being helmed by acting leadership members at best. There’s a reason those positions exist. They’re not unimportant. But currently, we have essentially temp employees filling them.

Does anyone really believe that American health is a ship that can be successfully steered without a rudder? That’s what’s happening right now, because Trump and Kennedy can’t seem to get anyone across the finish line in the Senate for these roles. And if the ship crashes, we’re all going to pay for it.

Following criticism, lawmakers have narrowed the GUARD Act, a bill aimed at restricting minors’ access to certain AI systems. The earlier version could have applied broadly to nearly every AI-powered chatbot or search tool. The amended bill focuses more narrowly on so-called “AI companions”—conversational systems designed to simulate emotional or interpersonal interactions with users. 

That change does address some of the broadest concerns raised about the original proposal, though some questions about the bill’s reach remain. Bottom line: the revised bill still creates serious problems for privacy, online speech, and parental choice.

The new GUARD Act still requires companies offering AI companions to implement burdensome age-verification systems tied to users’ real-world identities. Even parents who specifically want their teenagers to use these systems would still face significant hurdles. A family might decide that a conversational AI tool helps an isolated teenager practice social interaction, or engage in harmless creative roleplay. A parent deployed in the military might set up a persistent AI storyteller for a younger child. Under the revised bill, those users could still face mandatory age checks tied to sensitive personal or financial information before they or their children can use these services.

The revised bill also leaves important definitions unclear while sharply increasing penalties for developers and companies that get those judgments wrong. Congress narrowed the GUARD Act. But it is still trying to solve a complicated social problem with vague legal standards, heavy liability, and privacy-invasive verification systems.

Intrusive Age-Verification Remains In The Bill

The revised GUARD Act still requires companies offering AI companions to verify that users are adults through a “reasonable age verification” system. The bill allows a broader set of verification methods than the earlier version, but they are still tied to a user’s real-world identity—such as financial records, or age-verified accounts for a mobile operating system or app store. 

That approach still raises serious privacy and access concerns. Millions of Americans do not have current government ID, accounts at major banks, or stable access to the kinds of digital identity systems the bill contemplates. Even for those who do, requiring identity-linked verification to access online speech tools creates real risks for privacy, anonymity, and data security. Many people are rightly creeped out by age-verification systems, and may simply forgo using these services rather than compromise their privacy and security.

The revised definition of “AI companion” is also narrower than before, but it’s unclear at the margins. The bill now focuses on systems that “engage in interactions involving emotional disclosures” from the user, or present a “persistent identity, persona or character.” 

EFF appreciates that the authors recognized that the prior definition could reach a variety of AI systems that are not chatbots, including internet search engines. But the narrowed definition could be read to also apply to a variety of chat tools that are not AI companions. For example, many modern online conversational systems increasingly recognize and respond to users’ emotions. Customer service systems, including completely human-powered ones that existed long before AI chatbots, have long been designed to recognize frustration and respond empathetically. As conversational AI becomes more emotionally responsive, a customer service chatbot’s efforts to empathize may sweep it within the bill’s definition. 

Bigger Penalties, Bigger Incentives To Restrict Access

The revised bill also sharply increases penalties. Instead of $100,000 per violation, companies—including small developers—can face fines of up to $250,000 per violation, enforced by both federal and state officials.

That kind of liability creates incentives to over-restrict access, especially for minors. Smaller developers, in particular, may decide it is safer to block younger users entirely, disable conversational features, or avoid developing certain tools at all, rather than risk severe penalties under vague standards.

The concerns driving this bill are real. Some AI systems have engaged in troubling interactions with vulnerable users, including minors. But the right answer to that is targeted enforcement against bad actors, and privacy laws that protect us all. The revised GUARD Act instead responds with a privacy-invasive system that burdens the right to speak, read, and interact online.

Congress did improve this bill, but EFF’s core speech, privacy, and security issues remain.

Reposted from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

Earlier this week, OpenAI became the latest tech company to publicly endorse KOSA, the Kids Online Safety Act. The company, conveniently, tries to frame this as being about its support of child safety. It’s not. It’s about political horse trading, desperation for good publicity, and building a regulatory moat.

KOSA would help create stronger online protections for young social media users through safer default settings, expanded parental controls, and greater accountability for online harms.

The path forward on kids safety, however, also requires AI-specific rules. And we believe KOSA is complementary to the work we’re doing at the federal and state level. Young people should be able to benefit from AI in ways that are safe, age-appropriate, and grounded in real-world support, including referrals to crisis resources and parental notifications in serious safety situations. That means building safeguards from the start, giving families better tools, and taking responsibility for reducing risks before they become harms.

The broader point is an important one: AI companies still have the opportunity to build protections early, before these technologies become fully embedded in everyday life. As OpenAI Chief Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehane has put it, “We can’t repeat the mistakes made during the rise of social media, when stronger safeguards for teens weren’t put in place until the platforms were already deeply embedded in young people’s lives.”

All of this is, of course, nonsense. As we’ve explained repeatedly, the underlying mechanisms of KOSA are deeply problematic and will do real damage. It will, inherently, make the internet worse for everyone. At its heart, KOSA is a surveillance and censorship bill, and it’s the last thing that we need for the internet today.

While it’s positioned as being about something no one can be against (“kid safety!”), that is all too often the facade with which terrible rights-killing laws are passed. And KOSA is no exception.

But a bunch of tech companies have endorsed it anyway. Why? Because they know it makes life way more difficult for smaller upstart competitors. The additional compliance costs it will add for companies will be ruinous to smaller, less well-resourced companies. For big companies with big bank accounts, however, it gives them a leg up.

OpenAI, perhaps more than most others in the space, needs that kind of government-backed protection against growing competition.

Almost exactly three years ago, I wrote a piece about Sam Altman going to Congress and asking for the federal government to regulate the AI space, calling it Sam Altman Wants The Government To Build Him A Moat. As I pointed out at the time, AI researchers were coming to the conclusion that there was little to no real competitive advantage that any frontier AI model could really have for any extended period of time. That situation has only gotten worse since then. The jockeying between the various leading AI models has meant that they’re all effectively comparable, and more and more builders are realizing that since you can separate out the context, the computer, and the agentic tools from the underlying LLM, that technology is quickly turning into a commodity where any one will do (and this situation is becoming even more tenuous as open weight/local models are getting better and better).

While OpenAI has a huge number of users (one of the fastest growing tech companies in history), it’s unclear if those users are particularly loyal. Indeed, there are a few indications that when OpenAI does something stupid, a large segment of users will quickly leave.

Given that, all of the large AI companies keep looking for ways to create some sort of lock-in for users. Most of them haven’t gone down the fully siloed path (knowing at this stage that would probably drive away their most valuable users). For the most part, the focus between the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others is to build in more features to make it more convenient to stay than to swap out an underlying LLM. That and the continued leapfrogging, combined with various experiments regarding how much they’re willing to subsidize with their subscription plans.

But having the government wipe out competitors, or create “mandatory” tools that create lock-in, might be another path towards such a result. And that’s exactly what KOSA would lead to. It certainly wouldn’t protect kids. Indeed, all evidence suggests it would put plenty of marginalized kids at much greater risk.

However, it would create something of a regulatory moat for those larger companies.

On top of that, is there any company more desperate for a headline talking about how it’s “helping” protect children than OpenAI? The company has been accused of being “responsible” for suicide and other harmful behavior. And, even if those claims and lawsuits are misleading (they are!), culturally that message has been sticking. I’ve heard multiple people refer to ChatGPT as a suicide machine.

So, if you need a good headline to claim that you’re “protecting children” and doing so in a way where the law will have little direct impact on your business, but will damage some of your competitors in the space (not to mention the wider open internet), why not? It’s hard not to be cynical about OpenAI’s reasoning here.

Separately, it’s likely that the AI companies see this as a bit of political horse trading. While KOSA would have some impact on AI tools, it’s much more directed at social media platforms than AI. And it’s likely that the bet being made by OpenAI here is “hey, we’ll back KOSA for you, and you get rid of the AI-specific bills.” OpenAI’s Chris Lehane, who announced the endorsement and is featured in every press release about it, is infamous as a political trickster. He’s a political operator, not a tech or policy expert. You roll him out to cut a deal, not to advance a principled position on child safety. And that’s exactly what’s happening here.

You can see the KOSA authors gleefully using the OpenAI endorsement to falsely claim that only Mark Zuckerberg now opposes the law:

Yeah, that’s Senator Richard Blumenthal choosing to spend time on X, a site run by a guy who has made it clear he thinks Blumenthal’s political party is evil and needs to be wiped out, using that platform to lie and claim that the only people opposed to KOSA are “Mark Zuckerberg & his lobbyists.” That ignores the long list of civil society and public interest groups who have made it clear just how dangerous the law would be.

Marsha Blackburn (who has been vocal about how she wants KOSA to silence LGBTQ voices) put out a silly press release about this endorsement, saying:

“Lip service won’t save lives – Congress must take action to establish guardrails in the virtual space. I look forward to chairing a hearing on why the verdicts in California and New Mexico should spur Congress to hold Big Tech accountable for exploiting children to turn a profit.”

What? As bad as the rulings in California and New Mexico are, they seem to suggest that the courts already think they have the authority to order companies to do the impossible and magically stop anything bad from ever happening to kids who also (incidentally) use the internet.

All of this is for show. No one is being honest. Blackburn wants to censor LGBTQ speech she considers “dangerous to kids” because it terrifies her. Blumenthal wants to end encryption and the ability of tech companies to keep information, because he’s always been a cop and wants the ability to spy on your kids. And OpenAI wants Congress to direct their bad policies at social media companies rather than AI companies.

And all of us internet users are simply collateral damage for the mad power dreams of those in charge.

It might be time to do a wellness check on GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen. We had just discussed Cohen’s announced bid to have GameStop buy eBay as part of an absolutely bizarre interview he did on CNBC’s Squawk Box. In that interview, Cohen attempted to explain how GameStop would buy the much more highly valued company, valued at $56 billion, through $20 billion in stock and another $20 billion in private investment with banking partners. If you’re still staring at those numbers trying to figure out where the typo is, don’t bother, there isn’t one. The typo exists only in Cohen’s head, since those numbers don’t match up to eBay’s valuation. Nobody but Cohen appeared to understand how any of this made any sense.

It appears that eBay’s board felt likewise. eBay has now issued a response to Cohen’s bid, which essentially amounts to, “Um, no.”

CNBC reports that eBay’s board wrote to Ryan Cohen on Tuesday, May 12, to make clear its categorical rejection of the silly man’s ridiculous attempt to buy a company five times larger than his own with borrowed money and bad math. A letter signed by eBay’s chairman of the board of directors, Paul S. Pressler, calls his offer “neither credible nor attractive.”

“We have taken into account such factors as 1) eBay’s standalone prospects, 2) the uncertainty regarding your financial proposal, 3) the impact of your proposal on eBay’s long-term growth and profitability, 4) the leverage, operational risks, and leadership structure of a combined entity, 5) the resulting implications of these factors on valuation, and 6) GameStop’s governance and executive incentives.”

That’s the corporate equivalent of a professional UFC fighter explaining to an 11 year old why they won’t agree to a televised fight. I have no idea what Cohen is doing in any of this, but I can’t possibly believe that this proposed purchase was in any way serious. As we said in the previous post, the math simply doesn’t math in this case.

But in follow up comments from journalists after the CNBC interview, things only get more strange. Imagine having a serious shareholder position in GameStop and coming across this portion of a Cohen interview with Business Insider.

“I did not want to be the CEO of GameStop. I want to be the CEO of eBay,” he said. “I’m passionate about eBay. I believe in eBay’s business. I wasn’t passionate about GameStop. That’s the difference.”

Honestly, it’s hard to understand both what Cohen is actually after here and why the board at GameStop even wants him around anymore. He doesn’t want to be there. The company is not doing well. The headlines about buying eBay are the most tangible thing about the story, with everything else being vapor and criticism.

But what’s abundantly clear is that GameStop will not be buying eBay any time soon, no matter how much Game Informer vault merchandise Cohen manages to sell online.

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As was covered here last week, ProPublica’s Hannah Allam reached out to Trump’s “terrorism czar” Sebastian Gorka to ask him about the wreckage he’s caused since being elevated to a position of power he clearly has no expertise to handle.

Gorka’s no expert in domestic security. While his resume may include occasional work for government agencies here in the US as well as in Hungary, he’s mostly known for being a useful font of propaganda in service of the MAGA worldview.

Allam asked him to comment on the apparent dismantling of the government’s counter-terrorism apparatus as Trump reshuffled pretty much every US law enforcement agency to provide manpower for his anti-migrant surges. No comment was given but Gorka decided to attack Allam personally via social media.

Another question that went unanswered?

As of writing, exactly two months into the Iran war, Gorka’s counterterrorism strategy has yet to appear.

Well, we have an answer now. And it’s just as awful as you expect it to be.

Wednesday’s document, masterminded by White House “counterterrorism czar” Sebastian Gorka, does not mention far-right violence at all. It identifies “Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists” as a security threat of equal severity to “Legacy Islamist Terrorists” and “Narcoterrorists and Transnational Gangs.” The administration will now apparently “prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.”

In a bizarre but familiar turn, the document also blames transgender people for the shooting of Charlie Kirk. “Americans have witnessed the politically motivated killings of Christians and conservatives committed by violent left-wing extremists, including the assassination of Charlie Kirk by a radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies.”

The full “strategy” [PDF] can be read below. Brace yourself. It’s horrible and horrific. It contains nods towards “God-given rights” while simultaneously making it clear a lot of people aren’t allowed to access these rights. It’s written by people who truly love their own brand of domestic terrorism — MAGA in-crowd fuckwits who, if given the chance, would rather be John Wilkes Booth than Abraham Lincoln.

It’s stupid and hurtful and harmful and shitty. And it boldly makes the assertion that to oppose this administration and its goals is to attack America and Americans themselves, which is the sort of thing we’ve come to expect from this self-absorbed administration and the death cult that supports it.

It contains lie after lie, beginning with its opening paragraphs:

Our counterterrorism operations will be executed apolitically and founded upon reality-based threat assessments. Our counterterrorism powers will not be used to target our fellow Americans who simply disagree with us.

[…]

The fact pattern under the Biden Administration was clear: individuals at the highest level of the U.S. Government used their significant powers to politically target individuals in the interests of those they favored, wanted to keep in power, or to help win elections.

This is coming from an administration that has turned the DOJ in the Department of Vindictive Prosecutions and continues to blame Biden for things that happened while Trump was still serving his first term as president.

The “CT Strategy” has been written to justify extrajudicial murders committed in international waters by the Department of Defense and its administration partners in this latest bastardization of the “war on drugs.” It’s been written to justify any violence/killings going forward that involve US residents and citizens.

The document claims “mass migration” is a threat to the Western World in general. It also claims religious oppression is a latent threat to world peace… but only if it’s African nations targeting “Christians.” It also baldly states that the US is the center of the universe as far as the world is concerned, so any counterterrorism efforts it puts forth will focus on this nation’s well-being first.

In between all the stuff that might look semi-plausible with GOP-tinted glasses, there’s this:

Our nation has not been well served by its Intelligence Community (IC), which has been mired in old ways of looking at threats, or has been actively weaponized by its leadership as a political tool. Whether plotting against conservative Catholics attending traditional mass in Virginia, parents standing up for their children at schoolboard meetings, Members of Congress, or President Trump and his associates, this Administration will continue to prohibit the IC from being used politically against innocent Americans. As real threats were ignored or underplayed, Americans have witnessed the politically motivated killings of Christians and conservatives committed by violent left-wing extremists, including the assassination of Charlie Kirk by a radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies.

In addition to cartels and Islamist terror groups, our national CT activities will also prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist. We will use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa, and use law enforcement tools to cripple them operationally before they can maim or kill the innocent. We will do the same with the state sponsors of such groups and those governments undertaking lethal plots on U.S. soil or against Americans anywhere.

No other administration would say these things out loud, much less deliver them to the public as a policy statement. This administration simply does not care how this looks to normal Americans. It has no qualms delivering a counterterrorism strategy that sees no difference between international terrorist groups, drug cartels, and people who just want to see transgender people’s rights respected. And, after turning a bunch of people with ideological disagreements into terrorists, it moves on to pretend “Antifa” is an violent, organized, multi-national terrorist organization rather than just the loose collection of people opposed to fascism that it has always been and continues to be.

The biggest threat to this nation is the party running it. And allowing Seb Gorka to oversee this vile interpretation of “existential threats” is worse than simply allowing the foxes to guard the hen house. This is a document that makes it clear the hens brought this violence on themselves by daring to exist in places they’re not wanted.

A new “Christian” mobile phone provider named Radiant Mobile is promising to offer a wireless service that censors all LGBTQ+ content. The MVNO (mobile virtual network operator), which runs on the T-Mobile network, says it’s keen to deliver “faith-focused mobile service,” according to the company’s website.

According to NIT Technology Review, the MVNO is working alongside Israeli cybersecurity firm Allot to impose a network-level blockade of not just all pornography on the internet, but all LGBTQ+ content as well:

“We are going to create—and we think we have every right to do so—an environment that is Jesus-centric, that is void of pornography, void of LGBT, void of trans, Radiant Mobile’s founder, Paul Fisher, told MIT Technology Review.”

“Void of trans,” indeed. Good luck with all that. Porn filter systems, no matter whether device or network centric, are notoriously fickle and routinely make all manner of filtering mistakes that wind up blocking all manner of additional content. They’re also historically easy to bypass, depending on how they’re designed.

The article makes it clear that Fisher’s primary target is porn, and it sounds like censoring gay and trans related content isn’t something that’s been particularly well thought out. They’ll figure out in practice that trying to “sanitize” the internet on the network level to somehow conform to narrow worldviews isn’t technically possible, no matter what promises Allot is making to Reliant to justify their price tag:

“The technology to do this blocking is a blunt instrument: Allot groups website domains into more than a hundred categories, which include pornography but also violence, malware, gaming, and in Radiant Mobile’s case “sects,” which includes websites about Satanism. If one of its users tries to visit a website that belongs to a blocked category, the page won’t load.”

Yes, this would technically violate FCC net neutrality rules if the corrupt U.S. courts hadn’t dismantled them, but even if the rules still existed they wouldn’t have been enforced by the Trump FCC anyway. And yes, this raises all sorts of First Amendment and privacy legal questions, which is probably why T-Mobile tried to distance itself from things when contacted by MIT Technology Review:

“A representative for T-Mobile did not comment on whether these content blocks violate any of its policies. In a statement, the representative added that T-Mobile does not have a direct relationship with Radiant Mobile but instead works through the MVNO manager CompaxDigital.”

Fisher, who is apparently pivoting from a career as a supermodel agent to sell this heavily censored version of the internet to purportedly moral religious folks, is trying to strike brand partnerships with evangelical churches. Fisher’s backed by $17.5 million in investment from Compax Ventures and Roger Bringmann, a vice president at Nvidia.

There’s been a flood of these lazy MVNOs that pander to Trump zealots and operate on the T-Mobile network, not least of which is the Trump Organization’s Trump Mobile, which promised customers an expensive new Trump reskinned phone “made in America” that was being made in China and it never actually delivered (despite a lot of down payments). So: It’s all quite on brand.

Complaining about automagic enforcement of copyrights on the internet through copyright bots is so old hat at this point so as to be cliché. But there is a very good reason for that. Even in the narrower realm of PC gaming, we have seen examples of how copyright enforcement has ensnared totally innocent games, or fallen victim to clear fraud and abuse, resulting in the delisting of those games from platforms like Steam. This often happens in the all important early release windows for these games and, to be sure, it’s smaller indie studios that are hurt the most by this failed process. It’s incredibly frustrating to watch all of this in the macro and then witness the major platforms do absolutely nothing about it.

This, in fact, despite the absolutely absurd situations all of this produces. Take the demo for Wired Tokyo 2007 that was supposed to be released recently, but wasn’t, all because indie dev Daikichi dared to use intellectual property existing outside of the game. Except, of course, that said IP was the property of Daikichi itself.

As reported by VGC via GameSpark, a post to X from the developer lays out the situation, in which they explain that (via machine translation) “the motif of a board game I personally created in the past, placed within the game Wired Tokyo 2007, is getting caught by Steam’s side as third-party intellectual property.” As a result, Valve has blocked the release of the game’s promised demo which is currently listed as “Coming soon.”

The copyright-violating aspects, as claimed by Valve, include “dinosaur themed card-games shown on the environment within your app in gameplay,” which refers to a board game called Dinostone, created by one Daikichi. In Daikichi’s response, they link to the Board Game Geek page for their table-top game, which lists the same developer name.

“It’s not a third party,” says Daikichi on X. “It’s just me wanting to use my own intellectual property rights myself.” They add, “I have no idea what the meaning of this is at all.”

In an incredible response from Valve, the platform is demanding Daikichi provide some form of documented agreement to license the images used in the game, or else provide a documented letter of authorization from an attorney in order to get the demo approved for release. This is a “papers, please!” moment in video gaming, and it makes no sense.

The situation gets even more Monty-Python-esque from there. Daikichi decided their best course of action was to send a signed letter to itself, signed by itself, authorizing itself to use the assets it had created in the game it also had created.

Then over the weekend, rather wonderfully, the developer says they “created a signed document granting myself permission to use all of my created works, including board games, and resubmitted it for the demo review.”

We’ve crossed the Rubicon, folks. And now Valve is in the uncomfortable situation of having to choose between accepting this “evidence” of IP ownership when the evidence is literally a dev writing himself a letter like a crazy person, or else Valve refuses to accept it and a developer remains unable to release a game demo because they used their own property within it.

It’s a choice that only has two wrong outcomes. Sympathy is in short supply, however, as this is the result of the guilty-first process Valve has come up with for copyright takedowns on its platform.

Given how often we’ve seen AI-generated fake citations show up in legal filings and even legal decisions, you’d think the lesson would have sunk in by now: if you’re going to use AI to help draft something, you have to actually check what it produces. Apparently that lesson has not reached every government ministry.

Researcher Damien Charlotin was hunting for hallucinated citations using software he’d built for exactly that purpose, when he flagged something worth pausing on: South Africa’s proposed national AI policy contained at least four citations that don’t appear to exist.

The policy that contained hallucinated citations was, in part, a policy about the dangers of AI-generated misinformation.

And, days later, South Africa withdrew the proposal entirely.

South Africa has withdrawn its first draft national AI policy after revelations that it ​contained fictitious sources in its reference list ‌which appeared to have been AI-generated.

“The most plausible explanation is that AI-generated citations were included without proper verification. ​This should not have happened,” Minister of ​Communications and Digital Technologies Solly Malatsi said.

“This ⁠failure is not a mere technical issue but ​has compromised the integrity and credibility of the ​draft policy,” he wrote in a post on X on Sunday.

Compromised the integrity and credibility of the policy? Bit of an understatement, I’d say.

And, look, it’s perhaps no surprise that those looking to put in place an AI policy would be using the tech themselves, but it’s difficult to think that they can regulate it well when they don’t even appear to understand how to use it well (and when not to use it at all).

Naturally, the minister’s takeaway is that the tech needs more regulation:

“This unacceptable lapse proves why vigilant human ​oversight over the use of ​artificial intelligence is critical. It’s a lesson we take with humility,” ​he wrote.

That really feels a lot like blaming the tech for humans making dumb decisions with the tech. He’s not wrong that we need human oversight of the tool. The power of AI tools is only recognized when they are there to assist humans, not replace them, but it’s not clear how a policy position fixes that.

To me, this is more evidence that we need to do a much better job educating people about what these tools can and can’t do. And that’s harder than it sounds, because the companies selling these products have spent years aggressively overselling what AI can do while burying the caveats about how it should actually be used. The gap between what vendors promise and what the tools actually deliver is a big part of why people keep reaching for them in exactly the wrong contexts.

Malatsi’s instinct — regulate harder — is understandable, but it addresses the wrong problem. The behavior you’re trying to regulate here isn’t malicious; it’s lazy and uninformed. Regulation is reasonably good at deterring bad intent. It has a much worse track record against ignorance. People are going to keep trying to force these tools to do things they’re not good at, regardless of what the rules say, because convenience and overconfidence are powerful forces. The better outcome comes when people learn, through repeated direct experience, that the tool fails in these situations — and when the companies selling these tools are honest about where they fail.

There are still genuinely useful ways to deploy AI, even if stories like this make people think that the tech is never good at anything. But using it to generate citations for official government policy documents, without verifying a single one, is not among them.

Of course, rather than actually dealing with any of this, expect a new crop of startups offering tools that claim to review your AI-generated content for hallucinated citations — and are just as unreliable.

Let’s hope the word “possibly” can be stricken from this headline in the near future. And while contempt charges don’t mean much to an administration that is openly contemptuous of anything that hints at checks or balances, it would, at the very least, encourage other judges to stop treating the Trump DOJ like it’s worthy of anything less than contempt.

If nothing else, federal judge Melissa DuBose has at least forced the government to publicly admit it’s been lying to her.

A federal judge said Monday that the Trump administration had put her security at risk by posting a “patently false” allegation that she knowingly released an ICE detainee with an international warrant for murder.

Justice Department attorney Kevin Bolan profusely apologized to Rhode Island-based U.S. District Judge Melissa DuBose for the press release posted last week by the Department of Homeland Security, which Bolan acknowledged “simply was not true.”

Let’s go live (because — for whatever reason — the press release is still “live”) to the DHS website posting, which leads off with this headline because it’s operated by unserious people who have chosen to serve an autocratic megalomaniac rather than the nation itself:

Activist Biden Judge Releases Violent Criminal Illegal Alien Wanted for Murder

A judge ordering the release of an arrestee on bail is rarely reason for a public statement by a federal agency. Normally, they’ve got better stuff to do that engage in personal attacks on judges who have done nothing more than interpreted the law and ruled accordingly.

Every alleged crime is noted in bold type in the press release, which also includes this statement from the DHS (emphasis in the original):

“Bryan Rafael Gomez is a criminal illegal alien from the Dominican Republic with an international warrant for homicide,” said Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis. “An activist judge appointed by Joe Biden released this wanted murderer back into American communities. This is yet another example of an activist judge trying to thwart President Trump’s mandate from the American people to remove criminal illegal aliens from our communities. Under President Trump and Secretary Mullin, DHS will continue to fight for the removal of criminal illegal aliens who have no right to be in our country.”

Even if you choose to ignore the headline and the politically motivated attacks on the judge, you’re still left with something that isn’t normally the way the federal government does business. After all, judges are part of a co-equal branch, and there’s little to be gained by pretending normal court stuff is “activism.”

There’s even less to be gained when it’s discovered that the government’s lawyers didn’t bother to apprise the judge of this homicide warrant the DHS is now using to attack the judiciary. And what’s left of the DOJ appears to have realized this belatedly. There’s a lot of contrition in this short filing that Assistant US Attorney Charles Calenda (who oversees the affected jurisdiction) hopes will defuse the judge’s righteous anger.

Signed by Assistant US Attorney Kevin Bolan, the response to Judge DuBose’s order to show cause blames ICE for misleading the judge, even though it was Bolan who ultimately did the misleading:

Before the response was filed, I had been informed by ICE about the Petitioner’s pending arrest warrant issued on January 24, 2023, from a court in the Dominican Republic and that I could not disclose that information. I was not aware that ICE had previously disclosed that same information on April 16, 2026. In failing to disclose the information regarding Petitioner’s criminal history, I relied on ICE’s representation that I was not permitted to disclose that information and understood that a legitimate law enforcement reason prevented disclosure. Judge DuBose, therefore, lacked that information about the Petitioner’s criminal background when she granted the petition.

I sincerely apologize to Judge DuBose, personally, and to the entire Court for the consequences of this lack of disclosure.

Sure, contrition is welcomed. But it’s not quite as welcome when (1) ICE had already disclosed this fact, (2) the DHS continues to post an unwarranted attack on this “activist judge,” and (3) nobody in the government appears willing to act honestly until a court forces them to do it.

The DOJ may have some plausible deniability, but that relies on everyone assuming this administration is so disjointed some fingers may not even know what other fingers are doing, which is something that needs to be addressed before we get to larger questions vis-à-vis right hands and left hands knowing what each other are up to.

And while the DOJ may have some legitimate complaints about being both understaffed and overwhelmed by immigration cases, the problem lies with Donald Trump and his cabinet full of bigoted middle managers. The administration is still hoping to eject nearly a half-million more people by the end of the year. Meanwhile, the DOJ continues to bleed talent thanks to loyalty purges and prosecutors walking off the job because they can’t stomach what they’re being commanded to do.

The solution is contempt charges. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s a start. Judge DuBose says she’s looking at both the DOJ and DHS. If any entity should bear the brunt of this, it’s the DHS, which continues to post misleading invective targeting this judge, as well as being instrumental in the burial of information the judge should have had access to while making a release determination.

And while I understand that contempt charges just mean taxpayers will continue to bail out an administration unworthy of its tax dollars, it will at least contribute to the steady drip of adverse rulings. When enough of those pile up, it becomes a flood this administration won’t be able to contain.

John Roberts has a point: the Supreme Court—even this Supreme Court—sometimes gets things right. Maybe one could even fairly say it often gets things right. After all, just recently it produced good decisions in Case v. Montana, Cox v. Sony, and First Women’s Choice Centers v. Davenport, and arguably even Chiles v. Salazar, along with plenty more that have quietly taken their place in the annals of American jurisprudence with little fanfare but the staying power we look to the Court’s opinions for, to continue to speak well into the future about the contours of our law. These were decisions where there was significant accord among all the justices because the legal questions before them were just not that hard to resolve. Either statutory language, constitutional text, or previous precedent required certain results, and Roberts is correct: this Court is fully capable of producing them.

The issue, however, is that it doesn’t always. And when it doesn’t it is not because it’s getting tripped up by close calls where either the precedent or guiding text isn’t clear, or the facts are so unfortunate that they obscure what the law requires. The issue is that the law is as equally clear in cases where the Court produces deviant results as in the cases where the Court gets things right; it just doesn’t care to follow it consistently. If it wants a different result than what the law directs then that is the result it will find the votes for.

Roberts is of course also right that non-lawyers often can’t tell what the law indeed requires; the general public is much more likely to judge a decision based on how it affects the interests they favor. Which is why Roberts has a fair point to think the Court may be unfairly criticized in decisions like Chiles, First Women’s Choice Centers, or even 303 Creative, cases where interests many understand to be harmful to others nevertheless apparently prevailed. It is difficult, for instance, for non-lawyers to see how a win for those who discriminate is nevertheless a win for those who are discriminated against, because while a win for the former may seem like a loss for the latter in the short term, it’s the rationale being upheld by the decision that will ultimately amount to a more important gain for the vulnerable in the long term.

But one reason people are struggling to see these controversial but correct decisions as fortifications of their own future freedom is because they don’t believe that when their interests are at stake the Supreme Court will still apply the same principles this time in their favor. They fear that the Court will instead find a way to advance the interests it prefers, and it’s a fear that is eminently reasonable. The hypocrisy the justices regularly display in their jurisprudence when one of their favored interests is at stake forecloses any rational person having any faith in them as neutral jurists ably applying the law, even if it’s true that sometimes they are.

Roberts only has himself and his Court to blame for so many having that view. They have made it impossible for anyone to believe the Court will uphold principle and precedent because of how often it has not. It is happy to change the rules that we must all play by whenever it suits it, redrawing the rights we depend on as well as the ability to use the courts to shape them. And it’s not just laypeople who’ve noticed the problem but legal professionals. It’s lawyers, including members of the Supreme Court Bar who practice before them. It’s law professors, including those who have been teaching new generations of law students what were supposed to be timeless principles of American jurisprudence, which the Court so regularly and casually upends. It’s legal commentators, including those who specialize in watching this court. It is people who are experienced, if not expert—and if not at least as expert as anyone on the Court—in the American legal tradition who are calling foul. They are noticing how the Court keeps inventing arbitrary and imaginary rules, if not also facts, in order to arrive not where the law points but where the conservative justices steering the Court’s majority instead prefer to go.

It might be one thing if it were the rare case here and there in its busy docket where the Court has simply been sloppy in its jurisprudence. But the cases where the conservative majority has refused to produce jurisprudentially conservative results, instead elevating preferred outcomes over precedential reasoning, are hardly the exception; at this point it has become the apparently deliberate rule that when certain issues are on the table—partisan politics, reproductive freedom, LGBTQ+ rights, race relations, to name just a few areas where the conservative justices have particularly strong views—the Roberts Court will eagerly jump in to advance them, regardless of whether either substance or procedure—or consistency—even invites such an intervention, let alone their favored result. In fact it is fairly shocking to encounter the rare occasion where the Court has instead restrained itself—although it is certainly glad to when other interests the conservative majority is less dogmatically interested in advancing are instead on the table.

Furthermore, that its docket is so busy is entirely because the Court has abdicated any pretense of restraint, greedily helping itself to matters that historically would have been regarded as unripe for its consideration. In fact, it is a bit rich for Roberts to complain how the Supreme Court is being unfairly disrespected given the extent to which its new practice of aggressively insinuating itself in substantive adjudication of matters before there even is a lower court ruling or record ready for review has itself undercut the respect due the lower courts. What the Court has been doing, particularly with its Shadow Docket, goes far beyond the appellate review it is normally entitled to do. Not only does the Supreme Court’s incessant snatching of matters away from the lower courts prematurely arbitrarily diminish the lower courts’ power to render considered opinions on the questions before them, but it has also been having the practical effect of undermining their ability to speak with any authority on the law at all, let alone enforce it. Would only Roberts shed the same tears for the insult the lower courts have actually suffered as he does for himself as the cause of it.

Instead, and apparently without any capacity for introspection or self-reflection, he protests that the criticism increasingly directed at the Court is not also increasingly deserved. We should, he insists, be judging his Court based on what it gets right. But we do not celebrate a reckless driver for all the people he didn’t run over, or careless chef for all the diners he didn’t poison, or distracted doctor for all the patients he didn’t kill. In the American legal tradition we judge harshly those who cause injury to the public well-being, especially with behavior beyond the bounds of what law allows.

And with the Roberts Court there is so much to judge.

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In a ruling that will clearly be remembered as one of the worst in the history of the Supreme Court, two years ago, the court gave Donald Trump a get out of jail free card, which he appears to be trying to take full advantage of with all the criming in his second term. But, as always with this guy, it’s never enough.

We’ve already covered in detail the ridiculous situation in which Donald Trump acting in his supposed personal capacity, while still being the president, sued his own IRS for $10 billion, because a contractor leaked his tax returns a while back (that contractor is currently in prison for doing so). Again, there is zero indication of any actual harm. Every president — and nearly all major candidates — for the past 50 years released their tax returns to the public. Except Trump.

A decade ago he claimed that it was because he was being audited, and promised to release them once the audit was over. But he’s never done anything. And, as many people have noted, when President Richard Nixon started this tradition of releasing the president’s tax returns, he was actually being audited by the IRS, and was able to release his returns without a problem.

Either way, a contractor (not an IRS employee) leaked some of Trump’s returns to ProPublica and the NY Times, which resulted in a few stories before the news cycle moved on within days. It certainly didn’t stop Trump from being elected in 2024. And even though the returns were leaked in 2019 and 2020, Trump waited until he was back in the White House (and, in charge of the IRS and the DOJ) to file this $10 billion lawsuit.

We’ve covered the ridiculous claim that the “two sides” (there aren’t two sides) were “negotiating a settlement” and how the judge in the case has tried to call timeout, noticing that since Trump is effectively negotiating with himself there’s no cause or controversy, and thus there may be no jurisdiction for the court to hear the case. There’s still briefing going on over that, but the NY Times reports that the supposed (not really) “negotiations” have continued, with Trump apparently proposing that the settlement include the IRS dropping audits of Trump, his businesses, and his family, which would just be a shocking level of corruption from an administration that has spent its first year and a half in office trying to be as blatantly corrupt as possible.

One of the settlement options the Justice Department and White House officials are reviewing is the possibility of the I.R.S. dropping any audits of Mr. Trump, his family members or businesses, according to two of the people.

Again, even though the news cycle moved on quickly, perhaps it should return to exactly what those leaked tax returns showed: which is that at a time when Trump was publicly claiming to be rolling in cash, he basically paid effectively no income taxes and was racking up massive losses — figures that raise serious questions about his financial entanglements and what he stood to gain from his first term in office.

To have the audits of what happened during those years completely dropped — and not just for him, but for his entire family and related businesses — is another form of a get out of jail free card. Call it a “tax cheat for life” card.

To do this at a time when the public is struggling, due almost entirely to Donald Trump’s ridiculous policies — tariffs driving up inflation massively, an illegal war quagmire in Iran driving up energy prices — is even more insulting to the public that Donald Trump is supposed to be working for. The same day this story came out, Trump was asked about whether he was thinking about the impact of his out-of-control war on Americans’ financial situation, and he responded “not even a little bit” and that “I don’t think about Americans financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.”

Well, except himself, apparently.