Hell of a story right here www.reuters.com/investigatio...

Must-read story on Common Crawl — the scraped internet data behind many LLMs. They tell publishers they are making progress on takedown requests, but ... nope! Glad we have journalists with tech chops like @alexreisner.bsky.social who can test their claims www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

🗣️📈 Today, I'm happy to release a new tool empowering chatbots like AnthropicAI's Claude to create charts with Datawrapper, a leading newsroom tool for publishing data.

I keep a running log of how AI did on real tasks. Notes from the last few weeks: 🧵

So there were some AI-generated videos that purported to show Black women ranting about SNAP benefits, and... Fox News is reporting on this like these are real people. They're not! They're AI! This is truly insane. Total unreality. www.foxnews.com/media/snap-b...

New: Videos show ICE/CBP agents are scanning peoples' faces on the street to verify citizenship. ICE has tool to instantly look up unprecedented number of databases with just a photo “I’m an American citizen so leave me alone” “Alright, we just got to verify that” www.404media.co/ice-and-cbp-...

Lovely image editing evals with before/after sliders https://genai-showdown.specr.net/image-editing

Some personal news: I'm now a visual reporter covering AI for the @washingtonpost.com tech team. I'm a hacker/journalist with a comp sci background. Expect analysis, explainers and experiments on how AI really works and what it means for us. If that interests you, give me a follow/RT? 🙏

ChatGPT’s new Atlas browser doesn’t just see what you read — it remembers it. @eff.org’s Lena Cohen showed me it even logged “memories” of her looking for *abortion care* and her doctor’s name. Out-surveils even Chrome. My @washingtonpost.com column: wapo.st/49bOcVC

Tech giants keep touting a system they built to label AI-generated content. But it only works if everyone uses it. So I checked. They're not using it. 🎁 wapo.st/4qokjaC

Just tried out Atlas (OpenAI's new browser). Asked it to find me some cheap ram. 3 mins later, it told me Microcenter's best price was $299. I checked manually (took 10s) and found one at $183. None are $299. 🥸 (Video sped up 5x)

Trump has posted at least 62 AI-generated images or videos on his socials, which NYT has rounded up here https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/10/21/business/media/trump-ai-truth-social-no-kings.html

New from me: Last year, the best open-weight AI models were made in the U.S. Now, they are all made in China. More data and what it means -> 🎁 wapo.st/4nPUBud

New from me: Last year, the best open-weight AI models were made in the U.S. Now, they are all made in China. More data and what it means -> 🎁 wapo.st/4nPUBud

My colleagues obtained recordings of a private lecture series by tech investor Peter Thiel where he: - calls AI critics are "the Antichrist" - said wealth gives the "illusion of power and autonomy" (he's worth $27 billion) - pitches a religious vision of Silicon Valley 🎁 wapo.st/4q5wR6S

Just saw the end of the Phillies-Dodgers, absolutely brutal. Bartman has nothing on that.

Our personal tech columnist @geoffreyfowler.bsky.social tracked the prices of a bunch of items on Amazon ahead of the latest Prime Day sale. Turns out only a few prices went down, many stayed the same... and several went significantly *up.* www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

I keep a running log of how AI did on real tasks. This week's notes 🧵

The Block Club Chicago newsroom continues to report on today’s federal immigration activity across Chicago. If you have footage of agent activity you filmed, please reach out via this website: blockclubchi.co/3IIYou4

Federal agents handcuffed Humboldt Park Ald. Jessie Fuentes as she confronted them Friday at Humboldt Park Hospital. Agents handcuffed her, forced her out of the hospital and threatened her with arrest, Fuentes told a Block Club reporter. blockclubchi.co/3Wkje5V

Logan Square neighborhood, Chicago. Man wearing a balaclava in a white, unmarked vehicle, pulls the pin on a tear gas canister and tosses it in the road. "Just trying to grab some lunch and these fucking losers showed up. FUCK ICE!" source: www.reddit.com/r/LoganSquar...

Surreal moment for America. Needless to say, if the normal police ever pulled something like this — pulling every single person out of an apartment building and handcuffing them to run warrant checks — they would be sued into oblivion. Yet ICE is going to get away with it entirely.

We're about to get flooded with deepfakes. Here's an AI-generated clip of me "asking" Sam Altman what they train their systems on (made in 10 seconds with Sora 2)

OpenAI employees are very excited about how well their new AI tool can create fake videos of people doing crimes and have definitely thought through all the implications of this

Just ran some evals on Claude Sonnet 4.5. It's better than 4 on some but worse on a lot. LLM progress is so weird. You really gotta test this stuff on what you care about.

Worth a read: OpenAI released an eval for real work tasks across a bunch of industries. They didn't release the individual results (lame), but you can replicate them from the prompts and files. A usable nugget: If you're outputting pdfs, xlsx or pptx, use Claude. https://openai.com/index/gdpval/

New by me: OpenAI won’t say whose content trained its video tool. We found some clues. Gift link: wapo.st/3KeqLR0

Google's blog post on launching Gemini in Chrome does not include the word "privacy" or "security." Am I missing something or are they not addressing the very real threat of prompt injections? https://blog.google/products/chrome/new-ai-features-for-chrome/

Genius LLM eval: Uses Reddit posts on r/AmITheAsshole to test for sycophancy arxiv.org/abs/2505.13995 h/t @gerritd.bsky.social

New lawsuit against Character AI is “third high-profile case to allege an AI chatbot contributed to a teen’s death by suicide” https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/09/16/character-ai-suicide-lawsuit-new-juliana/

A new wrongful death lawsuit alleges that Character AI and Google are liable for the death by suicide of a 13-year-old girl in Colorado, Juliana Peralta This is the third wrongful death claim against a popular AI app for a teen's death by suicide this year www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

Gift link to my developing story on Anthropic's historic settlement with book authors and publishers: wapo.st/47r1gFT More updates to come.

Big news in the AI copyright space: Anthropic reaches landmark $1.5B settlement with book authors https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/09/05/anthropic-book-authors-copyright-settlement/

Great analysis of how Grok's political bias has changed. NYT tested Grok on a political bias survey, using different versions of its system prompt. Shows much tweaking these system prompts affects model outputs. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/technology/elon-musk-grok-conservative-chatbot.html

Published a project I've been wanting to do for years, on how every day is apparently some ridiculous holiday. https://wapo.st/4lVJr5h Oh, and Happy Pierce Your Ears Day, to those who celebrate!

More testing of LLMs for journalism, this time on identifying image location, date, and source. By @aisvarya17.bsky.social and @klaudia.bsky.social with some of my own commentary. www.cjr.org/tow_center/w... @columjournreview.bsky.social

Lovely analysis of how Claude Code works: - Runs on one loop. If task is complex, clones itself, with one loop. - Uses its small model (Haiku) majority of the time - System prompt includes a lot of "IMPORTANT" and "VERY IMPORTANT" instructions, which, lol minusx.ai/blog/decodin...

Devastating story, must read. > ... at one critical moment, ChatGPT discouraged Adam from cluing his family in. ... “Please don't leave the noose out,” ChatGPT responded. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/technology/chatgpt-openai-suicide.html

I'm not saying I called it but I did put on midnights before lunch

This tool looks interesting: runs web search per row in a spreadsheet, and then uses an llm to do something with the results (like categorize, or maybe extract some info) https://globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/fossil-fuels/augmenta-new-tool-for-ai-classification-and-research/

What a fun LLM eval, draw a world map pixel by pixel with this prompt: "If this location is over land, say 'Land'. If this location is over water, say 'Water'. Do not say anything else. x° S, y° W" Somehow, it kinda works? https://outsidetext.substack.com/p/how-does-a-blind-model-see-the-earth

A brutal account: What My Daughter Told ChatGPT Before She Took Her Life https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/18/opinion/chat-gpt-mental-health-suicide.html

The political fundraising email eval is officially too easy https://kschaul.com/llm-evals/evals/political-fundraising-emails/

Released `jump-start` as a CLI. Now you can search and use your starters from the command line! If you don't know jump-start, it's basically a shortcut to your favorite code. Put it in a structured GitHub repo, and jump-start turns it into a website. Here's mine: kschaul.com/jump-start/

Didn't realize Anthropic had created dxt: a one-click install for MCP servers --> www.anthropic.com/engineering/...

Fascinating blog post that rethinks how to use LLMs for programming tasks by writing a "program" in markdown and storing "state" in json files --> mariozechner.at/posts/2025-0...

MCP server for accessing Guardian articles --> https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/07/a-new-tool-lets-your-favorite-ai-model-talk-with-1-9-million-articles-in-the-guardian/

This is by far the most interesting thing I've consumed all week. www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QWP... h/t @kottke.org

New post: Today I’m releasing a new Python command-line library that allows users to ask questions of federal campaign finance filings by leveraging large language models, with some built-in help. thescoop.org/archives/202...

There are some interesting details about how Anthropic trained their models tucked away in today's summary judgement: they bought, chopped up and scanned millions of dollars worth of books! simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/24/...