A preview of things to come in
the US?
https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/26/brit_law_maker_fails_to/
Brit
lawmaker targeted by AI deepfake fails to get answers from US Big
Tech
… Last
autumn, Freeman was the
subject of an AI-created fake that
falsely claimed he had defected to a rival party, Reform. This was
plausible enough, given several genuine Conservative defections in
recent months, but entirely fabricated
Not
only was it damaging to his reputation, but allowing political
misinformation to continue to spread unchecked could end the
democratic process in the UK, he argued. Freeman said platforms
spreading the content are failing to respond. "There's no
redress. There was no statement or principle that it was a problem,"
he said in Parliament yesterday, labeling the event a "serious
disruption to democratic representation."
(Related)
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/03/as-the-us-midterms-approach-ai-is-going-to-emerge-as-a-key-issue-concerning-voters.html
As
the US Midterms Approach, AI Is Going to Emerge as a Key Issue
Concerning Voters
In
December, the Trump administration signed an executive order that
neutered states’ ability to regulate AI by ordering his
administration to both sue and withhold funds from states that try to
do so. This action pointedly supported industry lobbyists keen to
avoid any constraints and consequences on their deployment of AI,
while undermining the efforts of consumers, advocates, and industry
associations concerned about AI’s harms who have spent years
pushing for state regulation.
Trump’s
actions have clarified the ideological alignments around AI within
America’s electoral factions. They set down lines on a new playing
field for the midterm elections, prompting members of his party, the
opposition, and all of us to consider where we stand in the debate
over how and where to let AI transform our lives.
Did Iran cross
this line?
https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/25/whats_scarier_than_a_swarm/
Only
Trump can decide when cyberwar turns into real war
There's a
theoretical red line with cyber warfare. Cross it, and the US will
respond with a physical attack like missile strikes. And that line
"is whatever the President says it is," according to former
NSA boss retired General Paul Nakasone.
Nakasone,
speaking during an RSA Conference keynote on Wednesday with three
other former NSA directors and commanders of US Cyber Command, argued
that there shouldn't be a well-defined red line. "The president
should have a lot of leeway in which he determines whether or not the
nation's going to respond kinetically."
Retired US
Navy Admiral Mike Rogers, on the other hand, said he thinks there
should be a "series of minimums, like loss of life, loss of
infrastructure associated with health and well being."
This argument
would seem to apply to any AI system.
https://www.bespacific.com/eff-sues-for-answers-about-medicares-ai-experiment/
EFF
Sues for Answers About Medicare’s AI Experiment
EFF
– Little
Is Known About AI That Could Affect Millions of Seniors’ Care:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today filed a Freedom of
Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Centers for Medicare &
Medicaid Services (CMS) seeking records about a multi-state program
that is using AI to evaluate requests for medical care.
“Tasking
an algorithm with making determinations about treatment can create
unwarranted—and even discriminatory—delays or denials of
necessary medical care,” said Kit Walsh, EFF’s Director of AI and
Access-to-Knowledge Legal Projects. “Given these serious risks,
the public requires transparency that it hasn’t gotten. We’re
suing to get badly needed answers about how Medicare’s AI
experiment works.” Announced by CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet
Oz last year, the pilot program known as WISeR (Wasteful and
Inappropriate Service Reduction) uses AI to assess prior
authorization requests from Medicare beneficiaries. Previously rare
in original Medicare, prior authorization requires medical providers
to obtain advance approval from a patient’s health insurer before
delivering certain treatments or services as a condition of
coverage. Unfortunately, there is little information about how
the AI algorithms used in WISeR work, including what training data
they rely on. It remains unclear whether WISeR has any safeguards
against systemic flaws such as algorithmic bias, privacy violations,
and wrongful denials of care. Healthcare experts, care
providers, and lawmakers have all raised alarms that WISeR may cause
serious harm to patients by relying on AI unless it has the necessary
safeguards. Despite this widespread criticism, WISeR was rolled out
in six states in January, potentially affecting as many as 6.4
million Medicare beneficiaries, according to one
estimate…”
For
the
complaint: https://www.eff.org/document/complaint-eff-v-cms-medicare-wiser-foia
A tool for
wholesale hallucinations?
https://www.bespacific.com/claude-meets-westlaw-and-lexis/
Claude
Meets Westlaw and Lexis
Seth
Chandler –
“Something
remarkable has happened in the last few months, and most of the legal
academy has not noticed. Anthropic’s Claude—the AI assistant
many of us have experimented with for drafting, brainstorming, and
analysis—can now directly control a web browser. That means Claude
can log into Westlaw or Lexis, run searches, read cases, pull up law
review articles and treatises, and synthesize what it finds into
polished work product, autonomously, in minutes, while you watch.
Subscribers to this blog already know about tools like Midpage
AI,
which provides a dedicated connector between Claude and a legal
database. I have described Midpage—rightly—as The
Killer App.
Its technology is sound: it uses modern MCP protocols and direct API
calls, which are fast and reliable. A browser agent, by contrast,
relies on primitive point-and-click methods developed
in the 1970s
that depend on visual interpretation of a webpage—something trivial
for most humans but slower and more error-prone for computers. That
disadvantage, however, is now offset in two important ways. First,
browser access unlocks the far larger compendium of materials held by
the legacy giants. Westlaw and Lexis maintain vast repositories of
foreign-nation materials, far broader coverage of agency decisions,
and enormous collections of secondary sources—law review articles
and treatises whose utility
one can question in
the abstract but that in practice periodically prove invaluable.
Second, the pay structure of legal database access works in your
favor. Most ABA-accredited law schools provide Westlaw and Lexis
access to faculty and students at no additional charge; there is no
marginal cost per query—at least until Westlaw and Lexis move to
shut down external agentic AI access to their repositories. Why pay
$25 a month for a separate legal database subscription when Claude
can navigate the ones you already have? In short, The Killer App is
now even deadlier…”
Life lessons?
https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/still-more-useful-maxims
Still
More Useful Maxims
