You have less than a week to weigh in on Brendan Carr’s obviously bullshit retaliatory censorial attack on Disney. While it’s quite clear that Carr is likely to ignore the comments, they still very much matter. It needs to be in the public record that the public is against this attack on free speech and fundamental rights, rather than letting MAGA chuds stuff the comment box with nonsense.

Karl and I have detailed much of the history of how we got here. For many years, Carr has presented himself as a true defender of free speech and the First Amendment, but his actions made clear long ago that he only meant when Democrats were in the White House. During the first Trump administration, Trump demanded that his FCC support his plan to wreck Section 230 and enable greater censorship online. When one of the three GOP FCC commissioners — staunch Republican Mike O’Rielly — made a few tepid comments about how the FCC shouldn’t be in the business of messing with 230, Trump pulled his renomination. Carr, however, made it clear he’d be Trump’s little censorial lapdog.

He then spent the four Biden years once again pretending to care about free speech, but the second Trump was elected, Carr made it abundantly clear that if Trump made him chair of the FCC he’d be Trump’s loyal censor in chief. Since then he’s lived up to that promise and more. He’s launched a series of bogus investigations, always into perceived ideological enemies of Trump and MAGA, always pretending that he just has to do this. He held up the Ellisons’ takeover of Paramount and CBS until CBS agreed to pay Trump a bribe. And, most famously, he briefly got Jimmy Kimmel kicked off of TV for making a joke that Carr didn’t like.

His latest move, as we’ve covered, was to go after ABC’s The View for having Texas Senate candidate James Talarico on their show. It was yet another in Carr’s long line of bullshit, censorial investigations designed to intimidate broadcasters (but only those he deems too woke — if you’re MAGA, you get a total free pass) into only letting MAGA and MAGA-supportive guests on the air. This time, though, Disney fought back.

Rather than pathetically caving like CBS, Disney filed a petition for declaratory ruling that The View had done nothing wrong in having Talarico on as a guest. They even hired some big time litigators in Paul Clement and Jennifer Tatel to file the petition.

The underlying issue is the “equal time rule,” which was barely discussed for decades. But Carr has glommed onto it as his tool for attacking ABC for not being obsequious enough to Trump. The rule, which only applies to broadcast license holders, says that they have to provide equal time to competing candidates for public office. But there’s a clear exemption for a “bona fide newscast” or a “bona fide news interview.”

All the way back in 2002, the FCC made it clear that The View, and plenty of other shows like it, qualified for the “bona fide news exemption,” and it has been operating accordingly, as have many right-leaning radio and TV programs. Indeed, most local TV station affiliates (which these rules technically apply to) are owned by MAGA friendly media giants like Sinclair and Nexstar. Did Carr go after any of them? Of course not.

Instead, he manufactured a fake controversy. Most broadcaster affiliates (including Disney’s owned and operated affiliates) didn’t bother to file any paperwork regarding Talarico’s appearance because they (like everyone else) had been relying on the FCC’s granted exemption as a bona fide news interview. But Carr then got a few non-Disney owned affiliates (i.e., those owned by Trump-friendly media conglomerates) to file some paperwork in order to pretend that Disney’s owned and operated affiliates were somehow bucking the normal way of operating. As Disney noted in its filing, the whole thing was manufactured by Carr:

“The Bureau neglected to note, however, that while certain ABC affiliates documented Talarico’s appearance in their online public inspection files, the filings were made more than two weeks after Talarico’s appearance and apparently at the request of the FCC, which reportedly promised to eschew enforcement for the late filing. KTRK Television received no such request and no such offer, despite the Bureau specifically contacting it about the Talarico appearance less than 10 days after it occurred.”

With Disney filing its petition, Carr recognized he basically had to open a public comment period, even though he clearly has no intention of admitting that his entire investigation is bullshit.

But that doesn’t mean we should ignore it. As Karl noted, it’s quite likely that MAGA folks are spinning up their usual fake-comment-orama-generator, which Carr will undoubtedly use to claim there’s widespread public support for him punishing Disney.

But having comments on the record calling out how this is censorial nonsense, a massive abuse of Carr’s power, and blatantly unconstitutional still matter. The record is public, and it will be helpful to make it clear that Carr knows exactly what he’s doing and for whose benefit he’s doing this little charade. MAGA folks won’t be in charge forever, and dismantling the corrupt censorial rot represented by the likes of Brendan Carr needs to start with the basics: getting it on the record that we all know and see what he’s doing.

The first round of comments are due on June 22nd. It’s a simple form and you can just fill it out. Or if you’d prefer, write out a document, save it as a PDF, and attach it via that form as well. Just get it on the record that you don’t support Carr’s censorial retaliation campaign. There will also be a second round of comments due July 6th, but it would be nice to get more people to file in this first round and make it clear that the public knows what Carr is up to.

For what it’s worth, in any such filing, I would recommend making your arguments as clearly and compellingly as possible. I know that sometimes people just file pure angry screeds but those are less effective than a few paragraphs explaining why you don’t support Carr’s censorial campaign and asking the FCC to knock it off.

On Friday, the government’s Section 702 surveillance authority lapsed! It may be temporary, but it’s still an important milestone.

Section 702 was one of the surveillance programs Ed Snowden exposed in 2013 — and even after the exposure, the NSA has continued abusing it to spy on Americans.

It’s the tool that lets the NSA collect communications to and from foreign “targets” — including any American on the other end of those communications, who the NSA is technically not supposed to surveil. It used to be worse. It used to include any communications “about” those targets (which made it very broad) but that was stripped out a few years ago, thankfully. Still, a ton of communications are collected under this program, including communications by and to Americans. The NSA then keeps all those communications, and so-called “backdoor searches” allowed the FBI to query those communications, meaning that even though the NSA has no authority to spy on Americans, the tool is used all the time to spy on Americans.

There was a brief period when Republicans were against it, when they thought that Democrats were using the authority to spy on them, but they quickly seemed to forget that once Trump was back in power, because of course they did.

Every single time it comes up for renewal, Congress dithers and frets, and we hear from the authoritarians in the government (across both parties) about how absolutely necessary it is to keep you safe from terrorists. That’s never been true. They never present any actual evidence for that claim. Just a lot of “trust us or you’ll be sorry.” And every time it comes up for renewal, and reformers push for a discussion on stopping its abuses, we’re told “no time for that, we must renew it, and we can debate reforms afterwards.” But no debate ever comes. They just wait until the next renewal, and we go through the same dance all over again.

But on Friday… the 702 authority expired. And the world hasn’t ended. Amusingly, this is almost entirely Trump’s own doing. It started with his decision to put Bill Pulte (who has zero experience in intelligence and is most famous for abusing his authority to go after Trump’s enemies) as the acting Director of National Intelligence. That caused Democrats to realize that if Pulte was abusing his position as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency to investigate anyone he pleased, imagine what shenanigans he’d pull off with 702 powers. And so they blocked any further discussion on 702, and even got a few Republicans to go along with them. Hell, even Senate Majority Leader John Thune worried about how Pulte would “weaponize” 702.

Meanwhile, Trump (apparently thinking he has more support than he actually does) tried to tie his bogus election interference SAVE America Act to 702 renewal.

That’s Trump posting to his personal emo blog Truth Social:

A few Dumocrats are against FISA, with or without Bill Pulte going to DNI, as Acting. What kind of deal is that. Besides, I’m against FISA if it doesn’t come with The Save America Act (Full version!) firmly attached to it. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP

Except the SAVE America Act, which serves no purpose other than to suppress voting, just doesn’t have the votes. So tying it to FISA renewal, which was already on shaky grounds, means they don’t have the votes for either.

The self-proclaimed ultimate dealmaker managed to kill the surveillance program his allies love by overplaying a weak hand. The intel community’s sky-is-falling routine has been exposed as the theater it’s always been. Congress should leave this one expired.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is not having a particularly good time of being the UK’s leader. Basically everyone thinks he’s doing a terrible job and it seems unlikely that he’ll be in the role much longer. Apparently desperate to turn the tide on being historically disliked, he’s decided to grab the most reliable life preserver in modern politics: the techlash. Over the last few weeks, everything he’s done can be summarized in a single sentence: “let’s blame the internet for everything bad.”

It started a week ago with an announcement that if internet social media companies didn’t wave a magic wand and make all sexting disappear… he would start putting tech execs in prison.

“Today I’m calling on tech companies operating in this country to introduce device controls that prevent children from sending and receiving sexually ​explicit images,” Starmer said in a speech at London Tech Week. “This is not an impossible challenge.”

Under the new plans, firms like Apple and Google ​would have to build or activate technical solutions on smartphones and tablets to detect and block nude images for children. ⁠Adults would still be able to take, share or view nude content through an age verification process.

If companies did not act within three months, the government said ​it would bring forward legislation to force them to do so or risk facing fines or, as a last resort, the threat of criminal liability for bosses.

This is very much the magical “nerd harder” thinking by a technologically clueless bureaucrat who thinks that societal problems can be solved by making tech companies do the impossible: stopping humans from doing stupid things.

That magical wishcasting continued this week with Starmer announcing that the UK would be following Australia’s completely failed experiment in “banning” kids from social media, by putting in place an even stricter ban of teens from even more internet services.

The U.K. plans to follow the same model for a social media ban as Australia, which last year became the first country to bar under-16s from holding social media accounts. Platforms that fail to take reasonable steps to exclude children younger than 16 could be punished with multimillion-dollar fines.

The U.K. said its ban will apply to platforms including Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X, but not YouTube Kids or messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal. Starmer stressed that enforcement action will target tech companies, not children.

The prime minister also said he will go further than Australia’s measures.

He said the government will act to prevent strangers from contacting children on gaming and livestreaming platforms. Authorities are also considering additional measures including overnight curfews and breaks in infinite scrolling for those under 18. More details are expected next month.

This is more nerd harder nonsense. Again, Australia’s ban has been a total joke, with the vast majority of kids figuring out how to get around the ban, and the ones most hurt by the ban being teens who have lost access to the communities that were most important to them. Again, every detailed study on the subject has found that the number of teenagers who have negative experiences on social media is tiny.

But the media and politicians absolutely love to blame the internet for any sort of societal problem, and it makes a wonderful scapegoat for their own policy failures.

Even Ian Russell — a prominent UK child safety activist who has spent years blaming social media for anything bad that happens to children — finds this whole thing particularly pointless. Russell, who became an activist after his daughter died by suicide (which he blames on her social media experience), has pointed out that these kinds of teen bans are the kinds of headline grabbing measures politicians love, but do nothing to actually help kids.

Starmer also promised me personally that he would implement effective measures to strengthen regulation and finally address the harm caused by social media. He has failed to keep either promise.

He also promised bereaved parents after the recent consultation on children’s social media use that he would follow the evidence and take the time to consider his response then act decisively. Instead, he has rushed out a ban.

Indeed, the evidence has long suggested that these kinds of bans actually can make things worse by isolating kids who are at most at risk and who need support. At a time when fear mongering and moral panics have cut off basically everywhere that kids can be kids with each other and without adults hovering over them at every moment, social media became that kind of digital third space. Social media didn’t become the default digital third space because it’s uniquely ‘addictive’ — it became the default because adults have spent decades overreacting and shutting down every other place kids could gather and communicate without supervision.

And that’s not even getting into the fact that pretty much all experts agree that age verification technology itself makes kids way less safe online.

But, even more to the point, the UK spent years supposedly crafting what they insisted was a very balanced policy in the Online Safety Act. We always found those claims to be ridiculous as the bill seemed bad from the very start, but if they spent all these years crafting this policy, which only just went into effect, it seems pretty ridiculous to then immediately jump to a way more extreme and less carefully thought out plan.

However, that’s what we should expect for every single nonsense bit of internet regulation that is being pushed for by a political class “for the children.” Because the bills misrepresent the real problems they do nothing to solve them. Rather than admit that their policies were misguided and a kneejerk reaction to a moral panic, politicians will always blame others: in this case the tech companies, and immediately come up with more draconian regulations that serve no purpose other than to get flailing politicians headlines for “doing something.”

Perhaps the perfect encapsulation of how stupid all this is was the question of how Bluesky would be handled (disclaimer: I am on the board of Bluesky). When the ban was first announced, the government had said it would apply to sites that meet the following description:

This would capture user-to-user platforms, whose purpose is to enable social interaction and which allow users to post material, alongside algorithms. The ban will therefore include platforms like Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X. We do not intend for messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal to be included in the social media ban.

Some right wing nonsense peddler sites absolutely lost their shit at the lack of Bluesky being mentioned, claiming that the extremely centrist Starmer was somehow creating an exemption for the supposedly “left-leaning” Bluesky. However, when asked about it, the UK government apparently said that Bluesky was covered and would be required to ban teens like those other platforms.

But does that even make sense? If the supposed problem with all these sites is that they allow for the sharing of content “alongside algorithms,” Bluesky doesn’t actually do that. There are recommendation algorithms, but they are totally in the control of users themselves. They don’t need to use them. Or they can use one of the over 100k feeds that others have created. Or they can easily create their own feeds. It’s wholly different than all the other platforms named, which focus on telling you what they think you’ll want to see (or what maximizes their own profits).

Either way, this shows how random this policy is. Bluesky either does or doesn’t meet the requirements (depending on how you read “alongside algorithms” which is already painfully vague), but as soon as there was a right wing freakout about it, the UK government said “oh, yeah, sure, them too.”

This is not thoughtful policy. This is not considered policy. This is not protecting children. This is a desperate politician with no clue how any of this works announcing nonsense to grab headlines.

Yesterday we wrote about the Trump administration forcing Anthropic to shut down Fable 5 and Mythos 5. The short version: dumb. Today, Axios got White House officials on the record, and it turns out the real reason is even dumber than we thought. In that original piece, we had pointed out that cybersecurity expert Katie Moussouris had been able to review the jailbreak and found that it was actually a useful way for cybersecurity defenders to fix and patch cybersecurity flaws, rather than a tool to be weaponized.

As we noted in that piece, it’s entirely possible that there was some real danger involved in the jailbreak, but we doubted that the administration would be honest about it. And it sounds like we were right to be suspicious. Axios got White House officials on record with the actual reason: Anthropic had asked Moussouris to review the jailbreak, and the administration decided she was a “radical Democrat.” That’s it. That’s the reason the models are offline.

• “We never wanted this to happen. Our number one priority is innovation but our hands were tied,” the White House official said.
• The optics added fuel to the fire. Anthropic came out with a blog post dismissing the Amazon report. Then the company enlisted a cybersecurity expert viewed by the administration as a “radical Democrat,” who was then by Chris Krebs, who Trump just fired.

First off, Krebs wasn’t “just fired.” Krebs was fired (somewhat famously) all the way back in 2020, and not because he’s some sort of “radical Democrat,” but because he pointed out that the 2020 election was shown to have been quite secure. And since that ruined Trump’s big lie that he had really won the election, he had to fire Krebs (whom he had hired in the first place).

So… it appears that the Trump admin shut down the most advanced versions of Anthropic’s AI tools not because they posed a serious risk… but because Anthropic asked someone to review the supposed threat, and that person got a shout-out from someone Trump hates for once telling the truth about election cybersecurity.

As promised, this story just keeps getting stupider.

Axios, as it’s known to do, doesn’t emphasize how absolutely fucking bonkers all of this is, but does its usual horse race nonsense, suggesting that if only Anthropic had sucked up to Trump’s ego more, all of this mess could have been avoided:

“Anthropic has not done a great job at trying to speak to the administration and appreciate the ideological differences,” one source familiar with the administration’s thinking said.

• “It’s like they just speak in different languages,” the source said, adding that the company has simply not figured out how to communicate with this administration.

Oh come on. This is the presidential administration of the most powerful country on earth, and we’re supposed to accept that companies need to tiptoe around “appreciating ideological differences” or face having their entire service banned? Who in their right mind would think that’s reasonable?

The Axios piece concludes with the dumbest suggestion on this entire thing: that it’s somehow Anthropic that needs “an attitude fix.”

• Absent that, a source familiar with the administration’s thinking said it may simply come down to an attitude fix where, instead of feeling dismissed, “everyone feels safe, secure and happy.”

Anyone who thinks it’s Anthropic’s fault for not hiring a MAGA chud to lobby on their behalf is simply endorsing blatant corruption. But in this era of cowed political journalists, apparently framing capitulation to that corruption as savvy PR advice is the only thing they can think of.

In the meantime, dozens of the biggest names in cybersecurity have signed onto a “Free Fable” letter, telling the administration how incredibly counterproductive all of this is:

It is our understanding that underlying model capabilities in the original research that triggered this action:

• Were focused on determining whether a human-prompted section of code was insecure. This is a necessary capability in any model that is intended to write secure code and should not be considered an offensive capability.
• Can be replicated on GPT-5.5, Opus, Sonnet and even Chinese models like Kimi 2.7. The justification for this unprecedented action was that Fable provides a unique “uplift” of capabilities beyond other AI models, but AI has been finding bugs and generating working exploits at superhuman levels since last year.
• Anthropic is addressing the research. As security professionals, we recognize that our work does not lead to a simple end-state where a system is fully safe, and the purpose of research like this is to enable continuous improvement, not to ban the technology.

As a result, this action has taken the best models away from defenders, created market uncertainty, and risked America’s AI leadership without any real risk to justify it.

Yeah, sure, but did you see that Anthropic hired someone who got a thumbs-up from someone Trump fired six years ago! In the MAGA universe, that’s all that actually matters.

So we have dozens of the top cybersecurity professionals around saying that this administration just deliberately weakened American defenses, handing an advantage to adversaries… all because of some weird partisan freakout. And the administration’s response is that it’s Anthropic that needs an “attitude fix”?

Late Friday, Anthropic shut down access to its just-released Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models after the Trump administration slapped export controls on them — treating cutting-edge AI, in other words, like weapons. The trigger, it turns out, was a jailbreak. And the entity that tipped off the government? Amazon — one of Anthropic’s biggest investors.

Considering how much Trump-supporting VC bros in Silicon Valley insisted that the Biden admin wanted to shut down powerful AI models during the last administration, it’s quite something to see them cheering on the Trump admin actually doing exactly that.

As you’ll recall, a couple months ago, Anthropic talked about its “Mythos-class” LLM models with (depending on your perspective) the greatest marketing hype ever or an appropriate level of caution for the risks with the model (more likely: somewhere in between). When they first talked about it, they said that it was quite good at finding cybersecurity vulnerabilities, and so initially it was only available to a set group of organizations that might find it useful to patch certain holes. From what I’ve heard from people in the industry, the tool is good and useful, but it’s not magical.

Then, a little over a week ago, they rolled out the latest version of Mythos, which was still limited to pre-vetted companies, but then they offered up “Fable 5” as a tool for anyone else. This was described as “Mythos-class” but with extra guardrails, including that if it thought you might do something bad with Fable, it would drop you down to its previous best-in-class Opus 4.8 model. Fable was also twice as expensive on a per-token basis, but apparently much more efficient, so the actual pricing difference was likely less big. And some of the early tests with Fable 5 showed it to be way more impressive at certain coding tasks. There were also some oddities, like Fable only being available in the commercial subscription plans for a couple weeks before switching over to only (way more expensive) API usage.

Still, there were some concerns about the guardrails, and how frequently they were kicking people out to Opus on perfectly normal queries. There were other concerns about its changed data retention policies for large enterprises. Previously, companies could negotiate a zero retention policy with Anthropic and guarantee that no data was being held by the company. But with the latest models, they required you to let them hold onto any data shared with the models for 30 days. Anthropic insisted this was solely for safety reviews, in case something went wrong, they could track down the reasons why, but it scared away some large enterprises that could risk their own data or source code being retained anywhere else.

Either way, all that went silent late on Friday (amusingly, in the middle of me messing around with Fable) when Anthropic announced that the US government had made them shut down access to the models with zero due process. Technically, the US government claimed that for “national security” reasons, no foreign national could be allowed to have access to the models (including Anthropic’s own foreign national employees), and since Anthropic doesn’t know which of its customers are foreign nationals, they had to shut down all access.

There are a number of different threads to pull on from previous events that are all worth mentioning here as useful background:

1. The US government’s plan to ban TikTok by just screaming “national security.” Many of us had called out how problematic that was, but the Supreme Court basically told the US government “all you have to do is say ‘national security’ and you can ban any tech you want” so here we are. What the Supreme Court gifted the US government, the Trump administration has no problem abusing.
2. Remember, many of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley had lined up behind Donald Trump, in part because of this very mild executive order on AI technology from the Biden admin that never, ever got remotely close to the level of banning an entire model by screaming national security. Some are vocally defending Trump for doing the very thing they screamed would destroy American innovation if Biden did it (even though he showed no sign that he would). Others are conspicuously quiet. AI’s got your tongue?
3. Just a few weeks ago, the Trump administration released its own AI executive order that was effectively the same plan Biden had released that drove Silicon Valley VCs crazy, except this plan was less well-thought out and more confusing. But, still, even that plan didn’t include “banning models for national security.”
4. Of course, there is also the ongoing battle between Anthropic and the Trump administration, all because Anthropic wanted to keep some specific terms of use in their contract with the Department of Defense to try to limit a few egregious use cases. The entire Trump admin lost their minds over this, because Pete Hegseth can’t take someone saying no to him.
5. And then there’s also Anthropic’s tightrope walking of asking the US government to build them a regulatory moat. Just days before this came down, Dario Amodei had penned a blog post (or was it Claude) laying out a roadmap for how he wanted Trump to regulate Claude. Be careful what you ask for, Dario.

So all of those things came together to lead to this effective ban.

Soon after it was announced, it was revealed that Amazon (one of Anthropic’s biggest investors) had actually alerted the US government to the supposed “bug” that gave the administration the ammo it needed to shut down the model.

Anthropic said it thinks the government became aware of a method of so-called jailbreaking before Friday’s action. “We reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to identify a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities all appear relatively simple, and we have found that other publicly available models are able to discover them as well without requiring a bypass,” the company said. 

The jailbreak research in question was done by researchers at Amazon, who used a series of prompts to get Anthropic’s model to provide them with information about a handful of security vulnerabilities, said Katie Moussouris, chief executive with the cybersecurity firm Luta Security. Anthropic shared a copy of the report with her, she said.

Now, if you’re thinking “a jailbreak sounds dangerous for this tech” then, sure… except that the reporting says the jailbreak was useful in a different way:

But the information provided by the model in this report would be of more use to people defending computer networks than to those attacking them, she said.

“Who at the White House evaluated this and thought it was a threat?” she said. “It’s a complete overreaction because this is exactly the kind of prompting that defenders would do.”

That almost makes it sound like somebody (NSA?) didn’t want people using this to protect themselves — rather than being worried about malicious uses. It sure wouldn’t be the first time the NSA compromised everyone’s security to make sure they could keep spying on people.

None of this is good or reasonable tech policy — or industrial policy, or any other kind of policy. It’s all just power-seeking Calvinball. Apparently the US government can just scream “national security” with no evidence or explanation and shut down an entire model. That’s ripe for abuse — especially with this administration.

When I wrote recently about how authoritarians seek to grab control over centralized technology choke points, this is the kind of thing I was thinking of, though I didn’t expect them to be so ham-fisted about it.

It’s tempting to read this purely as retaliation by the Trump admin against Anthropic, a company they’re already mad at and already illegally trying to punish. But all of these other issues play into this as well, including Anthropic’s constant refrain of “we’re so dangerous, please regulate us.”

You kept asking for it. Now you’ve got it.

And where are all those Silicon Valley VCs who insisted everyone had to back Trump because Biden was going to seize and shut down LLMs? I looked on X at the feeds of the various of Trump’s biggest supporters who had talked shit about Biden shutting down AI innovation and… of course they’re still supporting Trump. David Sacks came out with a long tweet saying that the administration was totally justified in shutting down Fable because of “safety” saying that Anthropic had “prioritized the continued offering of the consumer model over safety.”

Can you imagine how Sacks would have responded if the Biden admin had demanded an AI company shut down a model because of “safety?” Oh, you don’t have to imagine, because he was pretty clear about how he felt about the Biden EO. He claimed it “hamstrung American AI companies” even though nothing in the Biden admin plans would have ever gotten so far as what the Trump admin did on Friday, shutting down an entire model. All it did was ask companies to voluntarily pre-submit frontier models for an analysis by experts who might make some suggestions on how to keep them secure.

And that was so horrific it was worth effectively blowing up the American democratic order. Yet now Trump goes way further in literally shutting down an LLM and Sacks says it’s all good because it’s for “safety.”

These are not serious people. This is not a serious administration.

They are just power hungry jackasses with poor impulse control.

Here’s what we know: the jailbreak was defensive in nature, according to the cybersecurity expert who reviewed the actual report. Also, the administration offered no public evidence, no due process, and no coherent explanation for why this particular jailbreak required shutting down access for everyone, including Anthropic’s own employees. We also know that this administration pulls out “national security” claims quite frequently that later turn out to be bogus, and thus we shouldn’t trust them without more evidence.

Maybe there’s classified information that changes the picture. But this administration has burned any benefit of the doubt it might have had. What we’re left with is a government that learned it can yell “national security” and make technology disappear — and a roster of Silicon Valley allies who spent years screaming about regulatory overreach from the last administration have suddenly found a new song to sing.

A couple weeks ago and concluded that pretty much everyone involved had made serious mistakes — with the Utah contingent (Bricks & Minifigs corporate, Joshua Johnson, Brandon Best, and the American Fork police) looking the worst of all. That take upset basically everyone: some felt I was too hard on Reckless Ben, some felt I was too easy on the American Fork police, and probably a few people just resented spending that much time reading about legos. Since then, a lot more has come out, and the situation has only gotten murkier. My original read still holds up, but the Utah folks look even worse, and some of the other players are looking sketchier too.

And, I think it’s fair to say, mistakes were made by pretty much everyone involved.

Just as before, many of the new details are in long YouTube videos, but if you want watch just one, start with this one by Stephen Findeisen, who is better known as Coffeezilla and who regularly researches financial and cryptocurrency scams:

That video goes deep — Findeisen gets basically everyone on the phone at some point or another (except the cops), accesses a ton of evidence not previously public, and, unlike most of the earlier YouTube coverage, actually tries to find the truth instead of just stoking outrage.

He makes a few points that are hard to argue with:

• The Lego collection was never actually worth $200k (we had suggested this in our initial post as well). It was probably closer to $100k (and possibly a bit less).
• Some of it was definitely sold before all this, but much of it had not been.
• Plenty of it clearly remained in the store after Brandon Best showed up the night in November 2024 to kick out Law and take over the store.
• Best also showed up with a U-Haul truck, and there are some (slightly conflicting) reports that he subsequently appeared at his other Oregon Bricks & Minifigs store with a bunch of Star Wars Lego sets. Bricks & Minifigs corporate initially insisted this was false and said he showed up in a rental car. But Coffeezilla has visual proof of a U-Haul parked outside that night, which is pretty damning, which led Bricks & Minifigs to revise their story with a complicated one about hauling a camper trailer, which doesn’t make that much sense.
• Coffeezilla dropped this thread, in part because of a disagreement over the timeline, though it’s not clear to me that the timeline doesn’t really line up. It seems entirely possible that Best could have taken a bunch of legos out of the Gormans’ old store and taken them to his other store and then returned the U-Haul truck.
• Law & Gorman appear to have sold some of Mansell’s collection and not paid him for that, and it could be a lot of money. Law admits that she may have been a bit sloppy on the record keeping, saying she hadn’t done an inventory in a while and suggesting employees maybe hadn’t told her when certain sets from the collection were sold. But there’s also a credibility problem regarding sets that were listed as being on layaway, but where the spreadsheet suggests they were actually sold, but not accounted for as sold.
• To her credit, she admits it’s possible she owes Mansell some money and that if she can see evidence of this she will make sure that Mansell is paid what he is owed. But given how quick the Gormans were to insist this was entirely Bricks & Minifigs corporate who were the problem, it’s not a good look.
• Bricks & Minifigs corporate claims that there were about $5k worth of Star Wars legos left. That appears to be bullshit and wouldn’t really help their case, because even if it was just $5k of Mansell’s legos, those are still stolen legos.
• Bricks & Minifigs’ CEO and COO (the McNeff brothers) claim that they never were sent a spreadsheet of the collections, and the best moment in the video is when Coffeezilla points out that the Google Docs spreadsheet he’s been using is owned by their account and has been sitting there since 2024. That really makes the McNeffs look sketchy.

That video also includes dueling photographic and videographic evidence of what was in the store the night Best kicked the Gormans out (as well as a few weeks earlier when Best apparently surreptitiously filmed inside the store to see what was there). There are way more empty shelves the night Best kicked out Law & Gorman, but they say that’s because they had moved the high value consignment items to the safes they had purchased for that purpose, which were in the back. Later in the video Coffeezilla shows the McNeffs additional images from Law that appear to show Star Wars lego sets in what appears to be a safe, and which Matt McNeff (the company’s COO) admits they don’t appear to have listed in their own spreadsheet, which they had originally said was a complete listing of all the Star Wars legos in the store the night they took it over.

The McNeffs still look terrible, and Brandon Best also looks a bit sketchy. But it also appears that Law & Gorman’s record keeping was pretty sketchy as well, and while the McNeffs have gone overboard in claiming that they were responsible for Mansell’s “missing” legos, it does appear likely that Law owes Mansell for a decent number of Star Wars legos her store sold.

As for the American Fork Police department and Brandon Best’s partner, Joshua Johnson, we need a different video, this one from Legal Eagle. It breaks down just how many things they did wrong:

There were a lot of assumptions made about the police department, particularly around how they redacted the footage they released to Schneider. There was plenty of smoke, but no actual fire. As it turns out, beyond possibly being corrupt, the American Fork Police Department might also just be incompetent: they accidentally uploaded all the unredacted bodycam footage, which is now available on the Internet Archive.

Schneider initially claimed a hacker obtained the videos, which raised some questions about provenance. Once the department itself admitted the release was accidental, that question went away — and what’s in the footage is pretty hard to explain away. The police were way too credulous with Johnson. The “refusing to accept service” situation alone is maddening: Johnson claims the lawsuits are fake, the officer calls the court and confirms they’re real, and then… still lets Johnson refuse service. Beyond that, there are the extended traffic stops on no real probable cause, and the arrests on a search warrant instead of an arrest warrant — and they didn’t even find what they were looking for. Legal Eagle walks through all of it, and it’s a long list of failures.

Schneider is a more complicated case. He’s clearly one of the good guys here, and the attention he generated did move the needle when nothing else was. But some of his own claims haven’t held up. He never independently verified the value of the collection — and in the Coffeezilla video, he appears genuinely surprised it’s nowhere near $200k, which is a bad look for someone who made that figure central to his coverage. The small claims court situation is worse: Schneider said Johnson and Best had defaulted on those cases, but they were basically all dismissed for being filed against the wrong defendants, or never properly served. In a followup video, Reckless Ben admits he thought he’d won by default simply because he and his friends filed for default. Which goes back to the original point: talk to a lawyer, even just for an hour.

The Mexico situation is its own category of self-inflicted damage. In multiple videos he’s mentioned that after facing criminal charges he had fled to Mexico and joked about how Utah law enforcement can’t reach him there. Whether or not he actually left the country, publicly bragging about being a flight risk while facing criminal charges is exactly the kind of thing that hands prosecutors an easy argument. He has real defenses available to him. This doesn’t help.

And then there’s Law & Gorman, who aren’t villains, but they aren’t blameless either. It appears Law owes Mansell for a fair number of sets her store sold without paying him out — and the record-keeping problems aren’t fully explained by sloppy bookkeeping. The layaway-versus-sold discrepancy in the spreadsheet is a credibility problem, not just an accounting one. To her credit, Law has said she’ll make it right if shown the evidence. But the Gormans were also quick to frame this entire situation as purely a Bricks & Minifigs corporate problem, and that framing looks increasingly incomplete.

Every side of this story is a disaster. We’ve got a corporation willing to say anything to save face, a police department that accidentally leaked its own bad behavior, franchise owners who likely shortchanged their client, and a YouTuber whose good intentions were undercut by bad execution. About the only thing missing is anyone who actually handled this well.

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on Patreon.

In this week’s episode, Mike and Ben cover:

• Tech bosses threatened with prison if they fail to protect children (The Times)
• Apple and Google given three months to ban nude images on children’s devices (BBC News)
• Keir Starmer’s social media ban for under-16s could backfire, experts warn (OpenDemocracy)
• Apple previews new child safety features (Apple)
• Apple’s WWDC keynote was very different, but this will be the new normal (9to5mac)
• Ottawa introduces bill to restrict social media for teens, regulate AI chatbots (Globe and Mail)
• Australia builds enforcement layer behind age assurance laws (Biometric Update)
• NCAC Welcomes Meta Oversight Board’s New Account Recommendations (NCAC)

And in the extended episode for Patreon supporters, they cover:

• Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 (Anthropic)
• Microsoft restricts Claude Fable for employees over data retention concern (The Verge)
• The Rise of the Compliant Speech Platform (Lawfare)
• Policy on the AI Exponential (Dario Amodei)

Our fun links this week are the 7-0 World Cup game (Ben) and Chipotlai Max (Mike).

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is the podcast where we make sense of the major debates shaping online speech, platform power, content moderation and the future of the internet. It’s co-hosted by Mike Masnick (Techdirt) and Ben Whitelaw (Everything in Moderation).

If you’re already a Patreon supporter, you can get the extended episode on Patreon.

To lose one speech-suppressing SLAPP suit may be regarded as thoughtless. To lose two looks like you’re a censorial hack.

Last month we wrote about how supposed “free speech warrior” Matt Taibbi (who spent years misrepresenting the work of people who study disinformation as inherently censorial, while getting pretty basic facts wrong) had lost his speech suppressing SLAPP suit against author Eoin Higgins. In that case, he argued that some rhetorically hyperbolic metaphors used on the book’s cover defamed him. The court pointed out that’s not at all how defamation works.

Taibbi, who also claimed he somehow had to sue to “protect free speech” (also not how it works) apparently wasn’t satisfied with just a single SLAPP suit. He also had sued congressional Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove in a separate action, claiming that her calling him a “serial sexual harasser” (and entering into the record two articles to support that claim) during a congressional hearing was defamation. If you’re interested, the two articles that were entered into the record were the Chicago Reader’s “Twenty years ago, in Moscow, Matt Taibbi was a misogynist asshole—and possibly worse” and the Washington Post’s “The two expat bros who terrorized women correspondents in Moscow.“

The hearing in question was yet another in a ridiculously long line of congressional hearings (multiple ones where Taibbi has appeared peddling nonsense) about the supposed “censorship industrial complex,” a mostly made-up concept pushed by political hacks trying to shield online trolls and bullies from ever facing consequences from private actors for breaking the clearly stated policies of online platforms.

Kamlager-Dove chose to question Taibbi’s credibility. You could argue she could have focused on the factual problems with his continued confused claims about how disinformation research and trust & safety work — but she went for the more salacious (and widely reported) claims about his time in Moscow from a few decades ago, along with a characterization that reads as a clear opinion based on disclosed facts, which (by definition) cannot be defamatory.

As you may be aware, things said in Congress tend to be protected by the speech and debate clause of the Constitution. Taibbi’s lawyers claimed that because Kamlager-Dove reposted videos of her remarks on social media, that somehow took them outside the clause’s protection. For her part, Kamlager-Dove pointed to the Westfall Act which (as we’ve discussed in the past) allows the government itself to substitute in as a defendant in cases filed against government employees if the lawsuit was based on government work they were doing. In defamation cases, this is fatal: once the federal government substitutes itself in as defendant, the case collapses, because you simply can’t sue the federal government for defamation thanks to sovereign immunity.

Here, the case fails on those grounds exactly. Judge Evelyn Padin finds that the Westfall Act does apply, effectively dooming the case. Taibbi’s lawyers tried to argue that Kamlager-Dove’s statements weren’t part of her job as Congress… because her comments were “partisan communications” and were for “self-aggrandizement on Twitter” rather than serving her constituents. Except politicians making self-aggrandizing partisan communications is (unfortunately) part of their job these days.

Representative Kamlager-Dove’s Statements and republications, however, are precisely the kind of conduct that is “a central part of the job for members of Congress.”…. Indeed, a “primary obligation of a [m]ember of Congress in a representative democracy is to serve and respond to his or her constituents.” …. As the Ranking Member of the Subcommittee holding the Hearing. Representative Kamlager-Dove’s remarks mentioned “taxpayer time and resources” and “foreign policy” topics that are important to members of Congress and that are top-of-mind for their constituents….

Republishing the statements online does not change the analysis. Taibbi claims that the “republications on X, BlueSky, and [Representative Kamlager-Dove’s] website were not legislative work, [and] occurred outside the legislative setting.” …. But members of Congress routinely engage with the public on social media and on the internet as part of their jobs…. (“There is no meaningful difference between tweets and the other kinds of public communications between an elected official and their constituents that have been held to be within the scope-of-employment under the Westfall Act.”). As Taibbi concedes, Representative Kamlager-Dove was simply “talking to voters on Twitter.” …

Thus, while the judge doesn’t get a chance to dismiss the censorial SLAPP suit for being a censorial SLAPP suit, the court does make it pretty clear you can’t sue over this kind of thing.

Two SLAPP suits filed to silence critics. Both dismissed. This is a guy who built his recent brand on the Twitter Files and the “censorship industrial complex” — and who has been a key cog in helping the government suppress speech in the process. He’s now spent quite a lot of time trying to use the courts to shut people up for criticizing him — and failing at that, too.

Last month Terry Godier published a great essay on his website about “the boring internet,” discussing how the internet that many of us grew up with, the wonderful, empowering, exciting internet that moved power to the edges of the network rather than the center, is still there. It’s just hidden beneath enshittified commercial layers put there by companies seeking to extract more and more from you. It’s a great read and here’s just a snippet:

The internet you grew up on is not gone.

Some of its commercial superstructure is, and more of it will go. The next decade is going to be strange for any company whose value proposition was: we host the place where you talk to your friends.

The platforms will keep mutating. The feeds will keep filling. The slop will keep rising. The grief is real and you are not wrong to feel it.

But the actual internet — the protocols, the federated services, the plain-text commands, the open feeds, the small servers, the personal sites, the things people built when user and developer were sometimes the same word — is still right there.

It was not demolished.

It was buried under a louder layer for a while.

Go read the whole thing. You won’t regret it. This is why I wrote Protocols, Not Platforms, it’s why I’ve been so focused for years on helping more people understand the inherent power of distributing technological power.

But, as Godier’s piece notes, protocols are… boring. They change slowly (for a good reason, because you need stability to build on). They tend to change by consensus, which is messy. And rather than having billion dollar companies throwing a whole massive engineering team at making everything work, in the protocol world, we rely on constant experimentation by anyone who wants to experiment.

Sometimes that produces silly things. Sometimes it produces things that only kinda work. And sometimes, it produces wonderful new things that would never have existed in a world of fully centralized services.

But, it takes time. And that can be frustrating for those of us who want to live in that better future. The important thing for people to understand, though, is that while the amazing new breakthroughs in the protocol world may not get giant headlines in the NY Times or flashy stories about trillion dollar IPOs, they are building real things for real people, in which the people are the most important part, rather than the bankers or the billionaire execs looking to get richer.

So I was excited recently to take part as a juror for the Open Social Awards, put on by New_Public and Public Spaces, reviewing a wide range of projects looking to build on open social protocols (mostly ATproto and ActivityPub). The energy among developers right now for what they can do on open social systems is real, and it’s building fast. Tim Trautmann recently wrote about this, saying “the nerds are building a new internet.” As he wrote:

The open web of the nineties didn’t win because the tools were better. It won because a critical mass of people decided that the alternative, a handful of AOL-style walled gardens choosing what everyone saw, was not the future they wanted. Then they built their way out of it. Slowly, unglamorously, in rooms that looked a lot like this one.

Whether atproto ends up being the thing, or a stepping stone to the thing, I don’t know. Nobody in the room claimed to know. But the work is real, the apps are shipping, and the people building them are taking it seriously without taking themselves seriously. That combination is rare, and historically, it’s the one that wins.

You can see that kind of excitement as well in this recent video of a bunch of developers doing an ATproto hackathon, where you see people realizing in real time how powerful ATproto is in allowing you to build a better internet:

It’s so easy these days to get down on the state of the larger internet, increasingly controlled by bigger and bigger companies trying to extract more and more from you. But if you look beneath all of that, genuinely interesting, important things are being built, some of which was celebrated at the Open Social Awards last week.

The grand prize winner was the Newsmast Foundation, which has been helping mission-driven organizations build their own social spaces online, using ActivityPub. They’ve been building some amazing community apps for news organizations, non-profits, and more. Enabling those organizations to have their own social spaces, but built on top of an open protocol.

The two “Excellence Award” winners were equally strong — there was a real argument that either of them could have taken the grand prize. First there’s Blacksky Algorithms, which has built out an entirely separate and differentiated ATproto experience, where thousands of users can have a social media experience interoperable with Bluesky and others on the network, but without ever touching Bluesky hardware or software. The company keeps doing really fascinating things as well, including its use of pol.is for community decision-making, and offering up its ability to build entirely independent ATproto powered communities to others via Acorn.

And there’s one of my personal favorites, Sill, which is a wonderful cross-protocol newsreader app. You login with your Atmosphere (ATproto) handle and/or your ActivityPub handle, and it will find the news that is being discussed among your followers and format it in a nice digest format. I use it as a daily review of what’s happening in the world that’s interesting to me.

And then all of the “honorable mentions” were doing interesting things as well, figuring out ways to make open social more useful: Bounce (a tool for migrating between AcitivtyPub and ATproto while bringing your community with you, from the team who also does BridgyFed, a tool for communicating across protocols). Dandelion, an events platform built on ATproto. Streamplace, which does video streaming on ATproto. Leaflet, which has become one of the go to places for long form blogging within the ATproto world, and Bonfire Networks, which is also working on helping communities build their own communities online.

There were many other entries as well, and the energy developers are bringing to open social projects right now is genuinely contagious. People are learning that they can just build stuff, and specifically the kind of stuff that you had to rely on the goodwill (or perhaps commercial agreements) of a large company to build.

Every day there are more creative new ideas showing up. The one thing I’m looking forward to most is when we start to break out of the “rebuilding this centralized service on open protocols” and finally get to the point where we get entirely new things that are only possible because of open protocols. This is how these things have always worked. A new medium first gets used to rebuild familiar things — almost as a way of learning how the underlying system operates. Then come the breakthroughs that are only possible because of that new medium. If I had one complaint about the entries this year, it’s that too many of them felt like rebuilding the old things, just on a protocol.

We’re already starting to see small examples, though, of what it looks like when we go to the next stage, and it’s not just “this service, but without centralized control” to “we can function entirely differently without centralized control.” That’s just starting to happen, but I expect we’ll see many more examples in the near future.

In the meantime, congrats to the winners (and all the entrants) of the first ever Open Social Awards.

In the last three months I’ve had people forward me four separate examples of a CEO losing his or her mind over AI. What’s been striking to me is the similarity in each case: It would be an “all hands” email in which the CEO talks up how amazing LLM tools are and saying that everyone in the company MUST start learning to use them immediately or they should look for a job elsewhere. Sometimes they talk about hiring “consultants” to come in and teach the team how to use the tools properly. Sometimes they are setting up “office hours” or internal “AI hackathons.”

But in every case the gist is the same “holy shit AI is amazing and you are expected to use it at your job all the time.” The worst case of these were the few companies that set up token leaderboards, which is perhaps the dumbest way possible to encourage learning how to use LLMs well. Good usage of AI includes learning how to view tokens as a scarce resource. Simply counting how much you use as a good thing is ridiculous because it’s incredibly easy to waste tokens on counterproductive uses.

As regular readers of Techdirt know, I actually do think that these tools are powerful and important, but I also think there are many problems with them and limitations to how useful they really are. I think when someone learns how to use them well and willingly chooses to use them as a tool to assist their work, they can be quite powerful. But the willingly choosing to use them part of that is important.

No one who is forced into using these tools will ever learn to use them well.

So CEOs losing their minds over the tech are not being helpful. Box CEO Aaron Levie — himself a genuine AI believer — puts his finger on exactly why.

CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis because they’re sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI.

So when they play with AI, they see the happy path results, often not considering the next 10 or 20 things that have to happen to get sustainable results from agents.

“Look I made this awesome product prototype”. Yes but you didn’t have to review the code before it went into production and fix a bunch of issues.

“Look I generated a contract”. Yes but you didn’t verify all the terms before it goes out to the counterparty and didn’t have to wire up all the past contracts to work with.

The best thing you can do as a CEO is to use AI a ton to figure out the real implications of agents in the enterprise, and come out the other side with an appreciation for both the upside and the real work that goes into them.

I will say that I hate the term “AI psychosis” because the term is extremely misleading, and many psychologists and psychiatrists have complained that it is inaccurate and may cause more problems itself. But the general sense that CEOs are going overboard with AI is definitely happening.

And I think Levie’s thinking as to why is also dead on.

Much of the issue may be in how disconnected the traditional CEO is from the people at a company actually getting stuff done. Normally, they have teams and layers and the actual work of getting things to work in a real way is so far removed from a CEO that they just get snippets of the details that filter back through the various org charts.

The problem tends to show up when a CEO is handed an agentic tool like Claude Code, and has it create something, which will work just fine, and thinks “oh, wait, why do we need so many people, when I can just sit here and make things work?”

This is a bad CEO.

Making things work is different than making things work well. Or well at scale. Or well at scale in a specific environment. Obviously, it depends on the kind of project and what it’s being designed to do, but oftentimes the reason a company has a bunch of employees is to fill in the seemingly small, but incredibly important details that CEOs might not ever get much visibility into: things like security or legal compliance or accessibility or who knows what else.

Using an agentic tool to build something that works is all well and good, but building a product for the mass market to use — and use well, and use safely — involves much, much more. Agentic coding tools can sometimes help with that too, but the leap from “I built a thing” to “therefore anyone can build a thing” misses the entire point of why you hire knowledgeable, experienced people in the first place. It’s also why I think the best case of these tools is building totally personalized tools to assist you in accomplishing a specific task, and not for building mass market tools.

This all reminds me of cargo cult thinking: The CEO knows that somewhere in the org, employees are pecking away at computers and work gets done. So they figure that themselves pecking away with Claude Code and seeing work get done is the same thing. It’s not. All those other steps those people are handling — the ones the CEO never sees — still need to happen.

That’s not to say employees wouldn’t benefit from a deeper understanding of both the power and the limits of these tools — they would. But there’s something darkly comical about watching a CEO go all in on the tech and then immediately conclude it means they can fire half the staff.

It seems pretty clear to me that companies that think they’ll be able to layoff huge swaths of workers because of LLM tools are going to find out they’re mistaken pretty quickly. The power of LLMs is that when used well and used willingly it can help employees to get more done, but that doesn’t mean you need fewer humans. You need more humans who know how to work productively.

Separately, companies pointing to LLMs as a reason for large layoffs are, in most cases, just using it as an excuse. They over-hired, and “AI efficiencies” is a much more palatable story for Wall Street than “we made bad headcount decisions.”

Levie’s prescription, though, is right: CEOs should learn how the tech works, but that includes the limitations of the technology. If a CEO thinks the prototype they vibe coded is production-ready, let them ship it and see what happens. If they think a vibe coded contract is as solid as one a lawyer reviewed, let them find out what the legal bills look like when it falls apart.

Yes, the tools are powerful, but a CEO who thinks they replace the work of employees is simply a bad CEO.