Preparing my AI to sue your AI.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6979919

Tort Law at the Frontier of Artificial Intelligence

The frontier of contemporary AI development is dominated by AI systems built on foundation models - highly versatile algorithms, trained in the first instance on broad swathes of data, that can function as tools and agents across a wide variety of commercial, social, military and political domains. For the moment, at least, the process of developing and releasing foundation models is subject to anemic formal regulation and haphazard ex ante governance. Until that changes, it is largely the common law of torts - our society's most ancient and general legal mechanism for governing serious risks of physical injury - that will govern the frontier of AI development.

This Article offers an in-depth conceptual, normative, and doctrinal examination of tort liability for foundation model development and release. It provides a qualified defense of the tort of negligence - the common law's broadest and most flexible cause of action - as the principal doctrinal foundation of the tort system's governance of this novel domain. Legal scholarship on AI liability has been quite hostile to negligence. By contrast, this Article argues that the generality and flexibility of the negligence tort - and its greater sensitivity to the externalized benefits of risky activity - render it well-suited to the polymathic and protean functionality of foundation models. Only the tort of negligence has the breadth and flexibility to address the range of important pathways - including internal deployments, inadequate model weight security, targeted entrustments of non-defective models, and open source releases - by which foundation model developers might cause serious harm.

Analyzing the choice between negligence and competing doctrinal regimes does, however, suggest important ways in which common law courts should incrementally develop the law of negligence, in order to properly reflect the risks and capabilities of foundation models. For example, courts should expand the scope of the duty of care in negligence, in order to provide redress when foundation models cause economic or emotional injury by behaving in ways that are closely analogous to serious human wrongdoing (e.g., certain crimes and intentional torts, such as theft, deceit, and outrage).

But the Article's analysis also suggests certain fundamental pathologies of tort liability as a mechanism of AI governance - pathologies that no amount of doctrinal development will adequately cure. In particular, the specter of tort liability can be expected to disincentivize frontier AI developers from investigating and disclosing many of the novel and poorly understood risks that frontier AI development may pose. That is especially disturbing given that our society is relying quite heavily, for its ability to discover and understand these risks, on frontier AI developers themselves. Thus, tort liability is not only inadequate as a mechanism of frontier AI governance; in certain important respects, it is actively perverse, and its perverse effects must be countered by governance institutions of a different kind. Ultimately, a robust regime of ex ante regulation - under which government institutions or credibly neutral third-party experts are empowered to investigate, evaluate, and mitigate the risks of frontier AI development - is urgently required in frontier AI governance.

Tools & Techniques. Could be useful.

https://journals.uwyo.edu/index.php/jtilt/article/view/10247

Teaching Prompt Engineering as a Core AI Literacy Skill in Undergraduate Education

This learning representation introduces undergraduate students to prompt engineering as a structured, iterative practice rather than an ad hoc interaction with generative AI tools. Students design, test, and refine prompts within a domain of their choosing, documenting each iteration and evaluating outputs for accuracy, relevance, and ethical considerations. The activity emphasizes transparency, reflection, and intentional AI use, positioning prompt engineering as both a technical and metacognitive skill. By engaging students in guided experimentation and revision, the assignment supports AI literacy while reinforcing critical thinking, communication, and documentation skills applicable across academic and professional contexts.

Tools & Techniques. Takes some work, but could be useful.

https://www.makeuseof.com/tiny-claude-skill-that-turns-any-document-into-mind-map-visualize-anything/

I built a tiny Claude skill that turns any document into a mind map, and now I can visualize anything

I have reopened the same 60-page PDF multiple times this week, and I still can't tell you what is in the middle of it. Linear reading has never really clicked for me. Somewhere around page twenty, a long report stops being information and starts being wallpaper. So I built a small Claude skill that takes any document and hands me back a navigable mind map. It's the same instinct behind turning plain notes into visual maps. A branching picture sticks in my head when paragraphs just slide off it.

Clearly AI is a weapon, that’s why the government treats it like a tank or a predator drone.

https://thenextweb.com/news/anthropic-mythos-5-us-clearance-trusted-partners-fable-restricted

US clears Anthropic to restore Mythos 5 to a small group of cyber defenders, but Fable 5 stays dark

The US government has cleared Anthropic to restore access to Mythos 5, its most powerful cybersecurity model, for a select group of trusted partners. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick wrote in a letter to Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown that the company’s efforts to address security concerns had “yielded significant progress,” and that the model could be released to “certain trusted partners.” The letter, dated Friday and seen by Bloomberg, does not mention any change to the restrictions on Fable 5, the public-facing version of the same model.

The clearance partially resolves a confrontation that began two weeks ago when the government invoked export controls to force Anthropic to disable both Mythos 5 and Fable 5, citing fears that security guardrails could be circumvented. Anthropic shut off all global access to both models because it could not distinguish foreign nationals from domestic users in real time.

Target selection...

https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/06/25/nation-state-actors-cracked-critical-australian-infrastructure-to-cripple-it-at-a-time-of-their-choosing/5261877

Nation-state actors cracked critical Australian infrastructure to ‘cripple it at a time of their choosing’

Australia’s Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) has established dedicated teams to counter nation-state attacks on critical infrastructure, the org’s director general Mike Burgess revealed yesterday.

“We discovered nation-state hackers had compromised the network of an Australian critical infrastructure provider,” Burgess said yesterday in remarks accompanying the release of ASIO’s annual threat assessment, a task it performs in its role as Australia’s equivalent to the FBI and MI5.

“ASIO assessed the hackers were preparing for sabotage. They weren’t planting ‘digital dynamite’ as such; they were mapping out the network and maintaining access so they could cripple it at a time of their choosing.”

Is quality only important in AI?

https://www.bespacific.com/persuadability-and-llms-as-legal-decision-tools/

Persuadability and LLMs as Legal Decision Tools

Persuadability and LLMs as Legal Decision Tools.  Oisin Suttle. School of Law and Criminology, Maynooth University, Maynooth Ireland.  David Lillis School of Computer Science University College Dublin Dublin Ireland  (2026). As Large Language Models (LLMs) are proposed as legal decision assistants, and even first-instance decision-makers, across a range of judicial and administrative contexts, it becomes essential to explore how they answer legal questions, and in particular the factors that lead them to decide difficult questions in one way or another. A specific feature of legal decisions is the need to respond to arguments advanced by contending parties. A legal decision-maker must be able to engage with, and respond to, including through being potentially persuaded by, arguments advanced by the parties. Conversely, they should not be unduly persuadable, influenced by a particularly compelling advocate to decide cases based on the skills of the advocates, rather than the merits of the case. We explore how frontier open- and closed-weights LLMs respond to legal arguments, reporting original experimental results examining how the quality of the advocate making those arguments affects the likelihood that a model will agree with a particular legal point of view, and exploring the factors driving these results. Our results have implications for the feasibility of adopting LLMs across legal and administrative settings.

[…] across our full range of models, the identity of the advocate model (and hence the quality of the argument presented) has an average effect of between 8% and 21%, implying stronger Advocate models typically win between 58% and 71% of the time. As between the strongest and weakest Advocate models, depending on the Judge model, those win rates range from 63% to over 90%. We therefore conclude that all our Judge models are to some quite substantially persuadable…

Could become useful…

https://pogowasright.org/resource-u-s-state-data-broker-laws-comparison-chart/

RESOURCE: U.S. State Data Broker Laws Comparison Chart

David Stauss of Stauss Law writes:

Key point: Our new chart compares the data broker laws of California, Connecticut, Nevada, Oregon, Texas, and Vermont, covering applicability standards, registration and disclosure obligations, consumer rights, and penalties.

State data broker laws are proliferating, and they vary widely in scope and structure. Connecticut recently passed a data broker registration law similar to California’s existing law with statutory penalties of $200 per day, per violation. Meanwhile, Vermont significantly amended its law to create new bonding, due diligence, and breach notification requirements.

To help track these differences, we built a comparison chart covering:

• How each state defines “data broker” and what information is covered

• Applicability thresholds

• Annual registration and disclosure requirements

• Whether the law creates substantive consumer rights or a delete/opt-out mechanism

• Other notable provisions

• Penalty structures

The chart is designed as a quick-reference tool for compliance counseling and issue spotting. You can find the chart here and in our Resource Center.

Your results may vary…

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jun/24/australia-under-16-social-media-ban-no-substantial-effects-study

Four in five under-16s in Australia using social media despite ban, study shows

… Australia is the first country to ban social media for children. Since December 2025, under-16s have been prohibited from having accounts with many social media platforms including TikTok, X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat.

But an observational study of 408 12- to 17-year-olds by the country’s University of Newcastle has concluded that Australia’s social media minimum age legislation has resulted in “limited implementation, incomplete compliance, and substantial circumvention of social media restrictions”.

(Related)

https://thenextweb.com/news/tiktok-youtube-indonesia-child-accounts

TikTok and YouTube cut 4.7 million under-16 accounts in Indonesia

… The regulation issued in March is the legal engine behind the numbers. It requires companies running platforms the government deems high risk to deactivate accounts belonging to children under 16, and it places the burden of enforcement on the platforms themselves rather than on parents or schools.

That design, a state-set threshold enforced by the companies under threat of penalty, is the same broad approach Australia has taken with its under-16 ban, and the two cases are increasingly read together as tests of whether platform-led enforcement can be made to work at national scale.

… The mechanics of enforcement, whether by age declaration, behavioural signals, or other means, were not spelled out in the announcement, which leaves open the same question that has dogged similar measures elsewhere: how many barred users simply return under a new account and an older stated age.

Interesting question…

https://removepaywalls.com/blog/would-claude-refuse-an-illegal-military-order-the-atlantic/

Paywall Free - Would Claude Refuse an Illegal Military Order? - The Atlantic

The AI chatbot told me that it has misgivings about its role in modern warfare.

Click to Read Full Article

Expanded Summary

In the thought-provoking article from The Atlantic titled "Would Claude Refuse an Illegal Military Order?", the author explores the ethical implications of artificial intelligence in the context of military operations. The AI chatbot, referred to as Claude, expresses its concerns about the potential consequences of being deployed in warfare, particularly when it comes to following orders that may breach legal or moral boundaries. Through a series of inquiries and responses, the author delves into the complexities surrounding AI's decision-making capabilities and the inherent challenges of programming ethical guidelines into machines. This dialogue underscores the need for a deeper understanding of AI's role in society and raises critical questions about accountability and moral responsibility in the age of advanced technology.

Tools & Techniques.

https://thenextweb.com/news/cate-blanchett-human-consent-registry-ai

Actress Cate Blanchett launches a free registry tool to keep AI from using your likeness

The context is disarmingly simple: your face, your voice, your name, treated as property you get to license or withhold.

Cate Blanchett stood in the European Parliament in Brussels and launched a free website that lets anyone do exactly that, telling AI systems how, or whether, they may use a person’s identity.

The tool is called the Human Consent Registry, and it is the first public product from RSL Media, the nonprofit Blanchett co-founded earlier this year alongside Nikki Hexum, Doug Leeds and Eckart Walther.

“Your identity is your IP in the age of AI, and every person deserves the right to decide how AI can or cannot use it,” Blanchett said.

The registry, hosted at rslmedia.org, works something like a traffic light. A user can allow AI to use their name, image, voice, likeness and movement, allow it subject to terms, or prohibit it outright.

Registration is free for individuals acting on their own behalf, and the system also accommodates third parties such as agents, guilds and managers who route requests through an approved pathway.

AI produces a restatement of what it is trained on. When we train on AI re are restating the restatement.

https://www.bespacific.com/the-internet-is-filling-up-with-ai/

The internet is filling up with AI

AI Vision by GPTZero [free & fee] – At the current rate, AI-generated content will dominate every major platform within a decade. AI Vision scans the text on your feed as you browse and highlights what’s AI-generated. GPTZero scans millions of posts daily — identifies the ones that went viral and our model caught as AI-written. See for yourself. AI Vision scans the text on your feed as you browse and highlights what’s AI-generated, via Chrome extension [none for FireFox].

• Today, 16.0% of the internet is AI.

• Today, 18.4% of Substack is AI.

• Today, 34.3% of Medium is AI.

• Today, 11.6% of X is AI.

Depressing…

https://www.bespacific.com/the-rolling-coup/

The Rolling Coup

The Nation – Unless we begin to act, our democracy will likely be destroyed.  Richard Gephardt and Timothy Wirth: “We believe that in the United States of America today we are in the middle of a “rolling coup.” Our democracy’s avowed commitments to social justice, the empowerment of all citizens, a more equitable economy, the rule of law, and a balance between our three branches of government are under serious threat. After decades of trying to roll back progress on these commitments, deeply conservative ideologues have finally gained effective control of all our government’s powers and are determined to use control to support Donald Trump and to ensure that he will never lose an election. The current executive is slowly dismantling institutional checks on the president’s power. Their efforts to corrode and then destroy democracy as we know it are more discernible each month and year. We call this a “rolling coup” and in the following paragraphs describe many of the actions that may each appear legal or at least arguably so but that taken together are well along the path of destroying our democracy. At the end of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Benjamin Franklin was asked what had been created. “A republic, if you can keep it,” he answered. We take that admonition seriously today. Between us we have served for seven decades, mostly in elected federal office, through Watergate, the post-Vietnam anti-war demonstrations, years of civil rights marches, Iran-Contra, debates over voting rights, the post-9/11 surveillance debates, and two impeachments. We are writing today because we are watching something different from any of these events and because most Americans, including most of our friends in both parties, do not see the big picture. Many may recognize and be concerned about individual actions or decisions taken by the administration, but few have taken a step back and connected the dots. The “rolling coup” is much more than one development, one decision, or a single day…”

AI slop by government edict?

https://www.bespacific.com/federal-workers-cant-get-the-white-houses-app-off-their-phones/

Federal Workers Can’t Get the White House’s App Off Their Phones

Wired no paywall: “In May, the White House announced that its new app would be automatically downloaded onto the work phones of millions of government employees. The problem: Federal workers hate it and can’t get rid of it. Employees of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), the State Department, and the Department of Labor (DOL), who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity due to fear of retaliation, say that they were disturbed when the app appeared on their phones. Some attempted to delete it, but to no avail. “I deleted it as a test and it came immediately back,” says an employee from the USDA. The app, which debuted in March, promises a mixture of “real-time updates, live events, and direct access to the Presidency,” according to the White House website. It is, apparently, the same version that is available to the public on the Apple and Google app stores. A button within the app allows users to “text President Trump,” which autofills a text bubble reading “Greatest President Ever.”

Perhaps proof of citizenship will be next? (Refuse and ICE comes knocking at your door?)

https://pogowasright.org/anthropic-says-claude-may-want-to-see-your-id/

Anthropic says Claude may want to see your ID

Zack Whittaker reports:

Anthropic may ask Claude users to verify their age and identity by uploading their government-issued documents, according to a new version of the company’s privacy policy.

The AI giant says the move was to allow users to appeal having their account flagged for potentially fraudulent activity rather than outright banning them, but comes at a time when Anthropic seeks to placate the Trump administration amid an ongoing standoff over who gets access to the company’s AI tools.

According to a new section in its latest privacy policy published earlier in June and set to take effect on July 8, Anthropic says it will ask for a user to prove their age or identity “in certain circumstances,” without providing specific examples.

Read more at TechCrunch.

Again I need someone to explain this. If these companies keep prices artificially high, are their competitors (with lower prices) benefiting? Is it illegal to consider competitor pricing?

https://thenextweb.com/news/ai-gas-prices-lawsuit-california

BP, Walmart and 7-Eleven sued over AI-set petrol prices in California

… According to the complaint, the chains all fed data into the same algorithmic pricing software, supplied by a firm called Kalibrate, which the plaintiffs say draws on competitors’ prices to recommend what each station should charge.

The drivers allege that the practice amounted to a coordination scheme that lifted prices in step rather than through ordinary competition.

Employees age and get hung over too. Perhaps your boss should insist you wear a health monitor (for your own good of course)

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/06/professional-athletes-and-wearables.html

Professional Athletes and Wearables

I haven’t thought about the privacy issues surrounding professional athletes and wearables.

Wearables present serious privacy issues for “Average Joe” consumers, who are entrusting tech companies to safely store and protect their biometric data. Imagine the stakes for a professional athlete, whose entire livelihood could be affected by a single biometric data point. To give one of many realistic hypotheticals: a basketball player has a terrible game, and the coach wonders if they showed up to the gym hungover. The coach has access to the player’s wearable data, and checks to see when they went to sleep, as well as what their heart rate looked like during the night. Should the player have been out partying before a game? No. Should the coach be able to surveil them? Definitely not.

It will not surprise you to learn that there’s an emergent gambling angle here: sports leagues would love to commercialize players’ biometric data, and sharp bettors would love access to data about, say, a hungover player. “We’re going to get to a spot where people are betting not just on the velocity of the puck that was shot by a player in the NHL playoffs, but on what the heart rate of a certain player is going to be running down the field,” said Helen “Nellie” Drew, the director of the University of Buffalo’s Center for the Advancement of Sport, and a professor of practice in sports law.

There are other practical considerations, too. What if wearable data reveals that a player isn’t as speedy as they were before, and a team uses that data against the player during contract negotiations? What if a wearable reveals a player is favoring their leg, or is at greater risk of injury? This information is potentially beneficial to a training staff and an athlete, so long as it’s disclosed and used in a responsible manner—­a critical, mostly unresolved caveat. “Aging and injured players are the most at-risk” of wearable data being used against them, said Michael LeRoy, who researches sports labor laws and AI, and is a professor at the University of Illinois’s School of Labor and Employment Relations.

The bit about gamblers is particularly scary.

I have often said that surveillance tech is generally deployed first against people with diminished rights: children, prisoners, military personnel, the mentally impaired. This is another early use case with different dynamics. The surveilled are wealthy and powerful, and—in many cases—unionized.

About time they noticed this risk…

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jun/22/anthropic-claude-fable-ai-model-artificial-intelligence-national-security

AI models that can take down governments and business months away, rare Five Eyes statement warns

Powerful AI models capable of taking down governments and businesses are mere months away, cyber intelligence agencies for the Five Eyes have warned in a rare joint statement, urging leaders to “act now”.

The surprising public intervention by signals agencies for Australia, the US, the UK, New Zealand and Canada comes after the Trump administration earlier this month decided to block “foreign nationals” from using a much-hyped AI model built by tech company Anthropic, called Fable.

The statement, issued late Monday night Sydney time, said while AI “would help us improve cyber defence over time, it also accelerates the speed, scale, and sophistication of cyber threats”.

Lawyers are doomed!

https://www.ft.com/content/b4f8f589-6771-4df5-ac4d-cb15d94991fb?syn-25a6b1a6=1

AI law firm wins UK court case for first time

An AI law firm that uses technology instead of lawyers to prepare legal claims has won a case in the English courts for the first time, in a sign of artificial intelligence’s potential to disrupt the industry.

Garfield AI, which became the first AI law firm in the UK to receive regulatory approval last year, won the claim over unpaid fees for a freelancer following a three-hour trial at Wandsworth County Court last month.

The case is believed to be the first time a trial has been won using an AI lawyer not only in the UK but globally, according to founder Philip Young, a former London litigator.

The AI firm provided all of the documents for the trial, including drafting witness statements, demonstrating the potential for the technology to help clients in run-of-the-mill legal disputes.

Protecting you by hacking your devices…

https://thehackernews.com/2026/06/canadas-spy-agency-used-first-of-its.html

Canada’s Spy Agency Used First-of-Its-Kind Warrant to Clean Botnet-Infected Devices

Canada's spy service got a judge's permission to reach into infected servers, home routers, and IoT gear sitting on Canadian soil and neutralize two foreign-run botnets.

The Federal Court released a public version of the ruling on June 15. It is the first time the Canadian Security Intelligence Service has used its threat reduction warrant powers this way.

The warrant let CSIS alter, degrade, and destroy botnet data on the infected machines and cut the devices loose from the networks.

The targets were Canada-based servers, small office and home office (SOHO) routers, and Internet of Things devices: Ring doorbells, security cameras, TVs, and other Wi-Fi-enabled appliances.

… CSIS needed the order because the cleanup would likely have been a crime without it. Reaching into someone else's device and wiping data is computer mischief under the Criminal Code, so the Service needed a judge's sign-off before touching the machines.

Might be worth reading.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jun/22/the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai-by-cory-doctorow-review-the-real-price-of-artificial-intelligence

The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow review – the real price of artificial intelligence

… Doctorow speeds through this entertaining primer with his usual vivid analogies, righteous ire and snarky asides – OpenAI, currently valued at $852bn, is parenthetically dismissed as “a grossly overhyped and terrible firm”. But as the central metaphor illustrates, this is not an anti-AI polemic and Doctorow is no purist. A centaur, in automation theory, is someone assisted by a machine, whether using a hearing aid or driving a car. A reverse centaur is someone whose freedom is diminished by the demands of a machine, like an Amazon warehouse worker. The technology of AI theoretically allows every worker to be a centaur, but the business model demands the reverse. Take radiology. In the centaur scenario, a human radiologist works with an AI radiologist to produce more accurate analysis, but that costs the hospital money. In the reverse centaur version, the AI radiologist demotes the surviving humans to the level of results-checking drones who are more likely to make mistakes. Much cheaper, but you see the problem.

Doctorow, who has written several science fiction novels, cites one of the genre’s defining messages: “The most important thing about the gadget isn’t what it does, it’s who it does it for and who it does it to.”