We will need some clear definitions rather quickly…

https://thenextweb.com/news/trump-ai-military-memo-autonomous-weapons

Trump signs memo putting ‘most advanced AI’ into military hands and banning vendors from pulling the plug

President Trump signed a national security presidential memorandum on Friday ordering the US military and intelligence agencies to accelerate their adoption of cutting-edge AI. The directive, NSPM-11, establishes a framework for “rapid onboarding of the most advanced AI models from multiple vendors.” It also bars any company from disabling, degrading, or modifying an AI system that warfighters depend on without prior government approval.

That vendor restriction is the most striking provision. It means an AI company cannot pull a deployed model from military use unilaterally, even if the company has safety concerns about how it is being used. The clause lands directly in the context of the Pentagon’s ongoing feud with Anthropic, which was blacklisted as a supply chain risk after refusing to allow its Claude models to be used for autonomous weapons or mass surveillance.

Let the arguments begin!

https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/jetlaw/vol28/iss3/5/

When Robots Read Westlaw: Linking Inputs and Outputs in Generative AI Fair Use Analysis

Generative artificial intelligence has revealed a novel tension in copyright law: a two-stage act (input and output) of copying that traditional fair-use doctrine never squarely anticipated. In the input stage, vast swaths of copyrighted expression are reproduced and ingested to train large language models. In the output stage, those models generate works that may substitute for or dilute the market of the originals. Courts now face both stages. Their rulings diverge when they consider training and outputs together. In Bartz v. Anthropic PBC and Kadrey v. Meta Platforms, Inc., the courts characterized training uses as “highly transformative,” yet reached opposite conclusions on market harm because the evidentiary records differed. By contrast, in Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence, the fair-use defense failed outright: ROSS’s AI-generated outputs were found to compete directly with Thomson Reuters’s paid research tools. These cases confirm that transformation alone is not dispositive: the fourth statutory factor—whether outputs substitute for or erode the market for the original—can ultimately determine the outcome. This Note therefore advances an “input-output linkage” framework. It would enable courts to evaluate the permissibility of unlicensed training (input) by looking to the commercial purpose, functional use, and market effects of the resulting outputs. This framework helps explain why wholesale copying for training may qualify as fair use when outputs serve new, non-substitutive functions (as Kadrey intimates), yet fails when outputs compete with the original work or its derivatives (as in Thomson Reuters). Aligning fair use doctrine with copyright’s utilitarian goals in this way preserves incentives to create while also permitting socially valuable AI innovation. Still, adjudication alone cannot fully resolve the structural licensing challenges posed by generative AI. This Note argues that to supply ex-ante clarity and enable scalable markets for training data, targeted legislative or regulatory measures are needed. Such interventions would ensure that copyright law protects both creative labor and accommodates the need for training data.

I get the impression that being President is a side-hustle for Trump.

https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2026/0605/donald-trump-presidency-private-wealth-ethics

In Trump’s second term, financial gain has become a defining feature

On matters of personal and family money, President Donald Trump appears to be playing by a different rulebook from other presidents – and even from his own first term in office. By his own admission, he feels little pressure to restrict family business dealings simply because of his role in government.

And then the government can make every citizen rich!

https://thenextweb.com/news/trump-wants-the-american-public-to-own-a-piece-of-openai-nobody-knows-how-that-would-work

Trump wants the American public to own a piece of OpenAI. Nobody knows how that would work.

… Two proposals, very different teeth

Altman’s version is voluntary. OpenAI’s April policy document proposed a “Public Wealth Fund” that would give every citizen a stake in AI-driven economic growth. Under this framing, OpenAI could donate equity to the government to seed the fund. The pitch positions the company as a willing participant, not a target.

Sanders’ version is not voluntary. The senator announced plans for the AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which would impose a one-time 50% tax on the stock of the largest AI companies, paid in shares rather than cash. The government would manage the resulting fund, use its voting shares to secure board representation, and block decisions it deems harmful. The bill targets firms like OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI. The legislation is widely considered unlikely to pass, but it has shifted the boundaries of what Washington is willing to discuss.

Another “sounds good on paper” idea.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/californias-ab-412-still-demands-developers-do-impossible

California’s AB 412 Still Demands Developers Do The Impossible

California lawmakers are again considering A.B. 412, a bill that would require AI developers to identify and disclose copyrighted works used to train generative AI systems.

… A.B. 412 sounds simple: just have AI developers create and keep a list of all the registered copyrighted works they use in AI training. 

That may seem straightforward. In practice, it’s anything but. 

There is no machine-readable “list” of copyrighted works at the U.S. Copyright Office. And many copyright holders can get a copyright without even depositing a publicly viewable sample of the work—for example, software companies may register copyright on proprietary code without revealing it to the public. 

And on the open internet, copyright information is often incomplete, unavailable, or impossible to verify. One image may be registered with the copyright office, while the next is licensed under a free Creative Commons license (like the images that EFF creates), and the next is public domain. A message forum user might post an original story, photograph, or poem without any indication of ownership or registration status. 

No sure I follow the logic.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/elon-musk-tries-again-to-escape-ftc-audits-of-x-data-handling/

Elon Musk tries again to escape FTC audits of X data handling

… According to Musk, the FTC should stop its monitoring because Twitter no longer exists, as X was merged into xAI, and then xAI was folded into SpaceX. Musk also argues that since none of the leadership or engineers responsible for the two-factor authentication error remain at the company, and “X has since built a world-class privacy and data-protection program” that protects consumers, the FTC doesn’t have to intervene anymore.

Soon he entire network will belong to AI.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/06/ai-worm.html

AI Worm

Researchers have prototyped an AI-powered internet worm.

The coolest thing about the prototype is that it carries its own LLM with it, and runs it on computers that have been broken into.

This is the closest to John Brunner’s original 1975 conception of a computer worm that I’ve seen.

Not the first industry I thought of…

https://futurism.com/future-society/ai-bubble-surreal-toilet-industry-toto

The AI Bubble Has Become So Surreal That It’s Now Propping Up the Toilet Industry

With AI company valuations screaming into the trillions of dollars, it can be hard to find the pulse of the AI boom. So to put it in terms the average person might relate to, let’s just say AI hype has gotten so ridiculous that it’s now propping up the Japanese toilet industry.

Absurd as that might sound, it’s now financial reality in our AI-obsessed world economy. According to Bloomberg, the Japanese company Toto Ltd — arguably the most famous smart toilet brand for US consumers — now expects more than half of its total capex in the coming years to revolve around AI.

Tools & Techniques. (For your amusement)

https://www.bespacific.com/deflock-an-open-source-project-mapping-license-plate-readers/

DeFlock An open-source project mapping license plate readers.

DeFlock: “Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs or LPRs) are AI-powered cameras that capture and analyze images of all passing vehicles, storing details like your car’s location, date, and time. They also capture your car’s make, model, color, and identifying features such as dents, roof racks, and bumper stickers, often turning these into searchable data points. These cameras collect data on millions of vehicles regardless of whether the driver is suspected of a crime. These systems are marketed as indispensable tools to fight crime, but they ignore the powerful tools police already have to track criminals, such as cell phone location data, creating a loophole that doesn’t require a warrant…”

Time to re-think your investment choices?

https://thenextweb.com/news/the-ai-hype-cycle-will-slow-down-whats-next-decides-the-winners

The AI hype cycle will slow down. What’s next decides the winners

Artificial Intelligence is entering the late stage of its hype cycle.

Not a collapse. A correction.

For the past two years, AI has dominated venture capital flows, with capital pouring into the sector at unprecedented scale and startups multiplying rapidly as funding concentrates around AI-driven businesses.

What began as acceleration has now started to show the early signs of saturation. The expectations built into the market are beginning to exceed the returns being delivered.

The hype is beginning to fade.

This is the predictable arc of every major innovation cycle. From railroads to the internet, transformative technologies move through a familiar pattern: rapid enthusiasm, inflated expectations, and an eventual reset where economic reality reasserts itself. AI is following the same trajectory.

What is different this time is speed.

Entire market cycles are compressing into a fraction of their historical duration. Adoption, investment, and saturation are happening simultaneously.

As that happens, companies built primarily on narrative rather than durable value creation will come under pressure. Funding will tighten, valuations will reset, and some of today’s most visible players will not survive the transition.

This phase is the beginning of AI’s real test.

But this way Trump isn’t in charge…

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/03/openai-white-house-ai-safety-rules-00948478

OpenAI diverges from White House on AI safety rules

A new OpenAI proposal for regulating advanced artificial intelligence systems splits from President Donald Trump’s recent executive order on at least two key points, with the tech giant now working to nudge the White House and Congress toward its preferred approach to governing AI.

In a new policy paper, OpenAI calls on the federal government to require mandatory evaluations of advanced AI models for potential risks, but places the responsibility for overseeing that process on civilian agencies.

And they don’t see this as an indication that their profession is doomed?

https://www.bespacific.com/law-professors-prefer-ai-over-peer-answers/

Law Professors Prefer AI Over Peer Answers

Reuters: “Law professors overwhelmingly preferred answers drafted by AI over ones written by fellow professors, a new Stanford Law School study found, suggesting that the technology is capable of legal reasoning and that law students may benefit from AI ‌tutoring. Professors from 14 U.S. law schools developed a list of 40 questions representative of those first-year contracts students ask during faculty office hours. The professors wrote answers to the questions, and researchers had two AI platforms — Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro and NotebookLM — also answer them. The same professors blindly judged the short answers head-to-head and chose the AI-generated ones as most beneficial to students 75% of the time. The AI platforms performed just as well as the professor rated most highly in the study. “We were frankly surprised by the magnitude of the results,” lead researcher and Stanford law professor Julian Nyarko said in an article on Stanford’s website  about the study. “These weren’t just simple questions with obvious answers.” The study comes as law schools and the legal profession grapple with how to incorporate rapidly evolving AI into teaching and law practice. Earlier studies have found that AI can pass the bar exam, earn A+ law school grades, ‌and effectively grade law school exams …”

Can you think of any other businesses that are equally vulnerable to an AI takeover?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2026/06/02/thrive-holdings-to-bet-1-billion-on-ai-powered-accounting-roll-up/

Thrive Holdings To Bet $1 Billion On AI-Powered Accounting Roll-Up

In Thrive Holdings’ live-fire testing ground, self-improving AI models are achieving up to 98% data-entry accuracy, offering a blueprint for the automation of professional services.

Is this the only field where the practitioners have an opinion?

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/02/science/ai-mathematics-leiden-declaration.html?unlocked_article_code=1.nFA.v6n1.vQ52ZDoCvFBV&smid=url-share

As A.I. Makes Strides in Mathematics, Mathematicians Urge Caution

Recently there are signs that some branches of higher mathematics, among the most rarefied realms of human achievement, are vulnerable to a shake-up by artificial intelligence. Mathematicians, in turn, have been thinking about how to respond.

On Tuesday, a group of 16 mathematicians, in consultation with colleagues and math organizations worldwide, published the Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics. It aims to “frame the conversation about future directions,” said Dame Ursula Martin, one of the authors, and a mathematician and computer scientist at Oxford.

These are not the droids you are looking for…

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-presidential-records-act-2676990330/

Trump's own library says his DMs don't exist. A federal court disagrees.

The newly operational Trump Presidential Library claims it cannot turn up a single Twitter direct message sent by Donald Trump during his first term in office — a striking claim given that court records confirm such messages exist.

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by The Washington Post at 12:01 a.m. on January 20, 2025 — exactly five years after the end of Trump's first term — the library stated it had been "unable to locate any records" related to any direct message sent from Trump's @realDonaldTrump or @POTUS accounts. The request covered the entirety of his first administration, during which Trump sent more than 25,000 public tweets.

The no-records response stands in direct contradiction to evidence produced in federal court, the newspaper reported. During special counsel Jack Smith's investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, Twitter complied with a warrant and handed over at least 32 direct messages sent to or from the @realDonaldTrump account between October 2020 and January 2021. A Twitter attorney confirmed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that "there are confidential communications" in the account.

Altering reality for fun and profit?

https://www.bespacific.com/won-the-civil-war-now-banning-books-about-why-civil-war-was-fought/

The Side That Won the Civil War is Now Banning Books About Why the Civil War Was Fought

LitHub – Tom Zoellner on the Antebellum Precedent of Trump-Era Censorship: “In the days before the Civil War, the South worked hard to censor any literature that cast slavery in a negative light. Officials in Charleston, S.C. went through mailbags for abolitionist newspapers. Legislatures passed laws banning any publication that may show “a tendency to make our slaves discontented.” In Maryland, the Rev. Jacob Gruber was prosecuted for daring to preach a sermon that hinted that slavery might be sinful. Anyone found with a copy of the explosive novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was subject to arrest. I wrote about this censorious mania to preserve the fiction of “happy and contented slaves” in a recent book about the important role played by enslaved people in achieving their own freedom. It was published in September under the title The Road Was Full of Thorns. I could not have dreamed that my book itself would be censored—by the U.S. Government, the side that supposedly won the Civil War. Censorship often works like this—indirectly, requiring no specified demands but rather a vague climate of intimidation that encourages “an abundance of caution” when making decisions about what voices should be heard.

A little background. In May of 2025, a few months into Donald Trump’s second term, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued Order 3431 entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” It directed the superintendents of national parks and monuments to “review property for inappropriate content” and scrub their facilities of “any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans.” The order to whitewash America’s historic sites of anything less than rosy about the nation’s past has led to some predictable embarrassments. Visitors to Independence Hall in Philadelphia won’t learn much about the enslaved people owned by the founding fathers. The internment camp at Manzanar won’t have anything “negative” about the detention of 120,000 Japanese Americans in World War II. Fort Moultrie National Monument  no longer has information related to rising sea levels that threaten Charleston Harbor.  The order extends to books and materials on sale at the gift stores. Books related to Malcolm X and other Black leaders have been reportedly removed. My own book details the consequential events at a place called Fort Monroe in Virginia that led directly to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the end of American slavery. Yet it is not for sale in the bookstore of the Fort Monroe National Monument. Because the book tells a hopeful story about how enslaved people ran toward the American flag during the Civil War, sought their own freedom and helped tip the military balance against the Confederacy, I would have thought it would have been in alignment with even the narrowest conservative definition of patriotic content. But the cover depicts seven members of the U.S. Colored Troops standing at attention. The jacket copy makes it clear that it is about slavery. It is not hard to imagine it setting off minor alarms on the part of the National Park Service or Eastern National, the concessionaire with the exclusive contract to supply the bookstore…

A strong clue to what happened might be found in a letter that went out to regional Park Service directors on November 25, 2025 asking for a review of “all retail items available for purchase in outlets operated by park cooperating associations and concessioners” to make sure they were in accord with the administration’s ideological goals. “Items identified as non-compliant with this order must be removed from sale immediately,” said the memo, signed by comptroller Jessica Bowron. A leaked database of inspections shows that officials at Yosemite National Park, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, and the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail, among other places, had singled out books in the bookstore for review. At the latter place, an anonymous official wrote that “out of an abundance of caution,” books such as The 1619 Project, which details the origins of American slavery, would be targeted for removal. This was their decision, not that of the Interior Department…”

I hope they are amused.

https://www.bespacific.com/one-company-may-know-everything-about-you/

One company may know everything about you

The American Prospect: “The world’s largest advertising conglomerate has proposed merging with the company that has built detailed profiles on every American. A disturbing story at the intersection of innovations in war and our surveillance economy broke last week. Reuters reported on a letter sent by U.S. Central Command to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) back in April, revealing that U.S. military troop locations had been tracked using commercial location data. Such information collected from phones and other connected devices can uncover patterns and movements to inform attacks on military targets. Wyden told Reuters that we need to “start treating the adtech industry as a national security threat.” I can’t say that this danger was top of mind for us when we opted out of spying on our readers and eliminated programmatic advertising on prospect.org. But it’s indisputable that carrying around a tracking device in your pocket can lead to a myriad of potential dangers beyond getting a geolocated ad for a nearby restaurant. That this information can be sold to third-party data brokers heightens those threats. There are ways for the military to anonymize data on the devices it requisitions, and discourage use of browsers like Chrome that have surveillance embedded inside them. But endless tracking leads to more quotidian outcomes than deciphering troop movements. And soon, the architecture that makes the tracking work could fall into the hands of a foreign acquirer. Publicis Groupe is the largest of the Big Three global advertising conglomerates (the others are WPP and Omnicom), and by itself it captured almost one-third of all global billings last year. A couple of weeks ago, Publicis announced its intention to buy LiveRamp in a $2.5 billion deal. This is the company that combines multiple inputs of an individual’s personal data (web activity, subscriptions, apps, travel, retail, financial, and even medical history) to generate an “identity graph,” a precise profile of our lives and actions.

LiveRamp is said to have built identity graphs on 245 million Americans, virtually every U.S. adult. These can be used in any context, from web to apps to smart TVs. “LiveRamp makes possible the data integration empowering cross-platform tracking,” said Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy. And in the past, it has reportedly sold identity graph information segmented by military or pregnancy status, among others. Publicis, a French multinational, has been gradually acquiring data firms, from data broker Epsilon to “end-to-end data solution” Lotame. Publicis represents global juggernauts like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, and its global reach could expand the identity graph everywhere. It is even the largest Western advertiser in China, with about 20 percent of the Chinese media agency market and partnerships with Tencent and Alibaba. Its clients hold massive troves of personal information which LiveRamp can make more valuable through targeting at the individual level. Regardless of any international ties, the leading ad conglomerate controlling personal data on hundreds of millions of people courts risk on multiple levels.

Repeat?

https://pogowasright.org/connecticut-enacts-omnibus-privacy-law/

Connecticut Enacts Omnibus Privacy Law

Lindsey Tonsager, Laura Kim, Bryan Ramirez & Clare Mathias of Covington and Burling write:

On May 27, 2026, the Connecticut governor signed SB 4, an omnibus privacy law, which among other things, amends the Connecticut Data Privacy Act (“CTDPA”), establishes a data broker registry and accessible deletion mechanism, imposes restrictions on the use of price setting devices and surveillance pricing, and creates requirements for direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies.

The CTDPA amendments, data-driven pricing provisions, and genetic testing provisions take effect on October 1, 2026, while the data broker registration requirements take effect on January 1, 2027. Certain other data broker requirements would phase in between 2027 and 2031.

Read more about the amendments and provisions at Inside Privacy.

It’s not that they left, it’s where they might be going…

https://www.bespacific.com/trump-administration-sees-striking-exodus-of-legal-talent/

Trump Administration Sees Striking Exodus of Legal Talent

The New York Times Gift Article: “President Trump’s upheaval of the federal government has led to an exodus of more than 10,000 lawyers since the beginning of 2025, a striking loss of legal talent that has left some agencies pushing to find attorneys to carry out his agenda. Roughly one in five lawyers who worked in the government at the end of 2024 had left by March of this year, according to a New York Times analysis of federal employment data. Along with the usual retirements and turnover in the federal work force, the last year saw deep staffing cuts and the resignations of some staff members who objected to Mr. Trump’s policies. Their departures show how rapidly the president has eroded the image of the federal government as the gold standard for lawyers seeking public service roles. Instead, many of those looking for such work are flocking to the offices of Democratic state attorneys general and nonprofits that are challenging administration policies in the courts, boosting Mr. Trump’s opponents with seasoned lawyers. “There’s all this awareness that people in the federal government are dissatisfied, are angry, are frustrated, and want no part of it,” said Phil Weiser, Colorado’s attorney general, who has hired 22 lawyers from across the federal government in the last year. “That’s translating directly to people saying, ‘I want to be part of organizations that actually operate with integrity, that people want to be a part of, that people feel good about doing the right thing.’” Wariness of the Trump administration is also palpable inside law schools, where many aspiring lawyers who would have once jumped at the chance to hold a federal government job are seeking alternative paths, according to faculty members and students. “A lot of people my age are asking, ‘Is it worth getting a job, and will that help career wise — having one year of Trump administration experience on your résumé?’” said Matthew Duray, who described himself as a conservative Republican and just finished his first year at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. “Or will that hurt? And that’s the question I guess everyone’s asking, and that’s the bet you have to make ahead of time. But it’s hard to know long term.”

AI does not control nuclear weapons yet, right?

https://thenextweb.com/news/shangri-la-dialogue-ai-dangers-nuclear-weapons-defense

AI eclipsed nuclear weapons as the dominant threat at Asia’s premier defense summit

At the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, senior military officials warned that AI is compressing battlefield decision-making faster than humans can process, eclipsing nuclear weapons as the dominant strategic concern. Ukraine and the US-Iran conflict were cited as live examples of AI already shaping combat operations.