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)
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
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