Author name: Mike M.

nvidia-sells-tiny-new-computer-that-puts-big-ai-on-your-desktop

Nvidia sells tiny new computer that puts big AI on your desktop

Acer, AI, AI chips, AI development tools, AI GPU, AI infrastructure, ai supercomputer, ASUS, Biz & IT, desktop computing, DGX Spark, elon musk, Google, Grace Blackwell, HP, Jensen Huang, machine learning, msi, NVIDIA, openai, Project DIGITS, spacex, Tech / /

On Tuesday, Nvidia announced it will begin taking orders for the DGX Spark, a $4,000 desktop AI computer that wraps one petaflop of computing performance and 128GB of unified memory into a form factor small enough to sit on a desk. Its biggest selling point is likely its large integrated memory that can run larger AI models than consumer GPUs.

Nvidia will begin taking orders for the DGX Spark on Wednesday, October 15, through its website, with systems also available from manufacturing partners and select US retail stores.

The DGX Spark, which Nvidia previewed as “Project DIGITS” in January and formally named in May, represents Nvidia’s attempt to create a new category of desktop computer workstation specifically for AI development.

With the Spark, Nvidia seeks to address a problem facing some AI developers: Many AI tasks exceed the memory and software capabilities of standard PCs and workstations (more on that below), forcing them to shift their work to cloud services or data centers. However, the actual market for a desktop AI workstation remains uncertain, particularly given the upfront cost versus cloud alternatives, which allow developers to pay as they go.

Nvidia’s Spark reportedly includes enough memory to run larger-than-typical AI models for local tasks, with up to 200 billion parameters and fine-tune models containing up to 70 billion parameters without requiring remote infrastructure. Potential uses include running larger open-weights language models and media synthesis models such as AI image generators.

According to Nvidia, users can customize Black Forest Labs’ Flux.1 models for image generation, build vision search and summarization agents using Nvidia’s Cosmos Reason vision language model, or create chatbots using the Qwen3 model optimized for the DGX Spark platform.

Big memory in a tiny box

Nvidia has squeezed a lot into a 2.65-pound box that measures 5.91 x 5.91 x 1.99 inches and uses 240 watts of power. The system runs on Nvidia’s GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip, includes ConnectX-7 200Gb/s networking, and uses NVLink-C2C technology that provides five times the bandwidth of PCIe Gen 5. It also includes the aforementioned 128GB of unified memory that is shared between system and GPU tasks.

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Windows 10 support “ends” today, but it’s just the first of many deaths

Tech, Windows 10, windows 10 22h2, Windows 11, windows 11 25h2 / /

Today is the official end-of-support date for Microsoft’s Windows 10. That doesn’t mean these PCs will suddenly stop working, but if you don’t take action, it does mean your PC has received its last regular security patches and that Microsoft is washing its hands of technical support.

This end-of-support date comes about a decade after the initial release of Windows 10, which is typical for most Windows versions. But it comes just four years after Windows 10 was replaced by Windows 11, a version with stricter system requirements that left many older-but-still-functional PCs with no officially supported upgrade path. As a result, Windows 10 still runs on roughly 40 percent of the world’s Windows PCs (or around a third of US-based PCs), according to StatCounter data.

But this end-of-support date also isn’t set in stone. Home users with Windows 10 PCs can enroll in Microsoft’s Extended Security Updates (ESU) program, which extends the support timeline by another year. We’ve published directions for how to do this here—while you do need one of the Microsoft accounts that the company is always pushing, it’s relatively trivial to enroll in the ESU program for free.

Home users can only get a one-year stay of execution for Windows 10, but IT administrators and other institutions with fleets of Windows 10 PCs can also pay for up to three years of ESUs, which is also roughly the amount of time users can expect new Microsoft Defender antivirus updates and updates for core apps like Microsoft Edge.

Obviously, Microsoft’s preferred upgrade path would be either an upgrade to Windows 11 for PCs that meet the requirements or an upgrade to a new PC that does support Windows 11. It’s also still possible, at least for now, to install and run Windows 11 on unsupported PCs. Your day-to-day experience will generally be pretty good, though installing Microsoft’s major yearly updates (like the upcoming Windows 11 25H2 update) can be a bit of a pain. For new Windows 11 users, we’ll publish an update to our Windows 11 cleanup guide soon—these steps help to minimize the upsells and annoyances that Microsoft has baked into its latest OS.

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Hackers can steal 2FA codes and private messages from Android phones

android, Biz & IT, Google, pixnapping, privacy, Security, side channel / /

In the second step, Pixnapping performs graphical operations on individual pixels that the targeted app sent to the rendering pipeline. These operations choose the coordinates of target pixels the app wants to steal and begin to check if the color of those coordinates is white or non-white.

“Suppose, for example, [the attacker] wants to steal a pixel that is part of the screen region where a 2FA character is known to be rendered by Google Authenticator,” Wang said. “This pixel is either white (if nothing was rendered there) or non-white (if part of a 2FA digit was rendered there). Then, conceptually, the attacker wants to cause some graphical operations whose rendering time is long if the target victim pixel is non-white and short if it is white. The malicious app does this by opening some malicious activities (i.e., windows) in front of the victim app that was opened in Step 1.”

The third step measures the amount of time required at each coordinate. By combining the times for each one, the attack can rebuild the images sent to the rendering pipeline one pixel at a time.

The amount of time required to perform the attack depends on several variables, including how many coordinates need to be measured. In some cases, there’s no hard deadline for obtaining the information the attacker wants to steal. In other cases—such as stealing a 2FA code—every second counts, since each one is valid for only 30 seconds. In the paper, the researchers explained:

To meet the strict 30-second deadline for the attack, we also reduce the number of samples per target pixel to 16 (compared to the 34 or 64 used in earlier attacks) and decrease the idle time between pixel leaks from 1.5 seconds to 70 milliseconds. To ensure that the attacker has the full 30 seconds to leak the 2FA code, our implementation waits for the beginning of a new 30-second global time interval, determined using the system clock.

… We use our end-to-end attack to leak 100 different 2FA codes from Google Authenticator on each of our Google Pixel phones. Our attack correctly recovers the full 6-digit 2FA code in 73%, 53%, 29%, and 53% of the trials on the Pixel 6, 7, 8, and 9, respectively. The average time to recover each 2FA code is 14.3, 25.8, 24.9, and 25.3 seconds for the Pixel 6, Pixel 7, Pixel 8, and Pixel 9, respectively. We are unable to leak 2FA codes within 30 seconds using our implementation on the Samsung Galaxy S25 device due to significant noise. We leave further investigation of how to tune our attack to work on this device to future work.

In an email, a Google representative wrote, “We issued a patch for CVE-2025-48561 in the September Android security bulletin, which partially mitigates this behavior. We are issuing an additional patch for this vulnerability in the December Android security bulletin. We have not seen any evidence of in-the-wild exploitation.”

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Measles outbreak in SC sends 150 unvaccinated kids into 21-day quarantine

anti-vaccine, health, measles, MMR, outbreak, public health, South Carolina, vaccine / /

Health officials in South Carolina are warning that the highly infectious measles virus is spreading undetected in communities in the northern part of the state, specifically Spartanburg and Greenville counties.

Last week, officials in Greenville identified an eighth measles case that is potentially linked to the outbreak. Seven outbreak cases had been confirmed since September 25 in neighboring Spartanburg, where transmission was identified in two schools: Fairforest Elementary and Global Academy, a public charter school.

Across those two schools, at least 153 unvaccinated children were exposed to the virus and have been put in a 21-day quarantine, during which they are barred from attending school, state officials said in a press conference. Twenty-one days is the maximum incubation period, spanning from when a person is exposed to when they would develop a rash if infected.

It’s unclear how the latest case in Greenville became infected with the virus and how they may link to the nearby Spartanburg cases.

“What this case tells us is that there is active, unrecognized community transmission of measles occurring in the Upstate [northern region of South Carolina], which makes it vital to ensure that the public have received their measles vaccinations,” the South Carolina Department of Public Health said in an announcement.

The two recommended doses of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine are about 97 percent effective at blocking the infection, and that protection is considered lifelong. Without that protection, the virus is extremely contagious, infecting 90 percent of unvaccinated people who are exposed. The virus spreads easily through the air, lingering in the airspace of a room for up to two hours after an infected person has left.

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Apple’s streaming service gets harder to tell apart from its streaming app, box

Apple, Apple TV, Apple TV Plus, streaming, Tech / /

Apple has lightly rebranded its video-on-demand streaming service. The Netflix rival that has brought us critically acclaimed shows and movies like Slow Horses and The Lost Bus has gone from Apple TV+ to Apple TV.

Apple announced the name change today in a press release that was primarily about the film F1: The Movie coming to its streaming service on December 12. Unlike previous announcements, however, today’s release referred to the streaming service as Apple TV, instead of Apple TV+. The announcement reads:

Apple TV+ is now simply Apple TV, with a vibrant new identity.

Apple didn’t specify how its streaming service’s “identity” has changed at all. As of this writing, accessing Apple’s streaming service via a browser or smart TV app still shows the original Apple TV+ branding.

Similar to rival streaming service HBO Max’s recent re-rebrand, or ESPN+ becoming ESPN, this rebrand is rather mild. Still, the change makes Apple’s streaming service slightly harder to differentiate from Apple’s streaming app, which is also named Apple TV, and its streaming boxes, which Apple officially called Apple TVs until 2015, when their official names started including the max resolution that they support (such as: Apple TV 4K). You can have one or two of those offerings without needing the others (although watching Apple’s streaming service on streaming hardware does require Apple’s streaming app).

Apple’s streaming service gets harder to tell apart from its streaming app, box Read More »

why-signal’s-post-quantum-makeover-is-an-amazing-engineering-achievement

Why Signal’s post-quantum makeover is an amazing engineering achievement

Biz & IT, diffie-hellman elliptic curve, Features, ML-KEM, Module-Lattice-Based Key-Encapsulation Mechanism, post-quantum encryption, Security, signal messenger / /

COMING TO A PHONE NEAR YOU

New design sets a high standard for post-quantum readiness.

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

The encryption protecting communications against criminal and nation-state snooping is under threat. As private industry and governments get closer to building useful quantum computers, the algorithms protecting Bitcoin wallets, encrypted web visits, and other sensitive secrets will be useless. No one doubts the day will come, but as the now-common joke in cryptography circles observes, experts have been forecasting this cryptocalypse will arrive in the next 15 to 30 years for the past 30 years.

The uncertainty has created something of an existential dilemma: Should network architects spend the billions of dollars required to wean themselves off quantum-vulnerable algorithms now, or should they prioritize their limited security budgets fighting more immediate threats such as ransomware and espionage attacks? Given the expense and no clear deadline, it’s little wonder that less than half of all TLS connections made inside the Cloudflare network and only 18 percent of Fortune 500 networks support quantum-resistant TLS connections. It’s all but certain that many fewer organizations still are supporting quantum-ready encryption in less prominent protocols.

Triumph of the cypherpunks

One exception to the industry-wide lethargy is the engineering team that designs the Signal Protocol, the open source engine that powers the world’s most robust and resilient form of end-to-end encryption for multiple private chat apps, most notably the Signal Messenger. Eleven days ago, the nonprofit entity that develops the protocol, Signal Messenger LLC, published a 5,900-word write-up describing its latest updates that make Signal fully quantum-resistant.

The complexity and problem-solving required for making the Signal Protocol quantum safe are as daunting as just about any in modern-day engineering. The original Signal Protocol already resembled the inside of a fine Swiss timepiece, with countless gears, wheels, springs, hands, and other parts all interoperating in an intricate way. In less adept hands, mucking about with an instrument as complex as the Signal protocol could have led to shortcuts or unintended consequences that hurt performance, undoing what would otherwise be a perfectly running watch. Yet this latest post-quantum upgrade (the first one came in 2023) is nothing short of a triumph.

“This appears to be a solid, thoughtful improvement to the existing Signal Protocol,” said Brian LaMacchia, a cryptography engineer who oversaw Microsoft’s post-quantum transition from 2015 to 2022 and now works at Farcaster Consulting Group. “As part of this work, Signal has done some interesting optimization under the hood so as to minimize the network performance impact of adding the post-quantum feature.”

Of the multiple hurdles to clear, the most challenging was accounting for the much larger key sizes that quantum-resistant algorithms require. The overhaul here adds protections based on ML-KEM-768, an implementation of the CRYSTALS-Kyber algorithm that was selected in 2022 and formalized last year by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. ML-KEM is short for Module-Lattice-Based Key-Encapsulation Mechanism, but most of the time, cryptographers refer to it simply as KEM.

Ratchets, ping-pong, and asynchrony

Like the Elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) protocol that Signal has used since its start, KEM is a key encapsulation mechanism. Also known as a key agreement mechanism, it provides the means for two parties who have never met to securely agree on one or more shared secrets in the presence of an adversary who is monitoring the parties’ connection. RSA, ECDH, and other encapsulation algorithms have long been used to negotiate symmetric keys (almost always AES keys) in protocols including TLS, SSH, and IKE. Unlike ECDH and RSA, however, the much newer KEM is quantum-safe.

Key agreement in a protocol like TLS is relatively straightforward. That’s because devices connecting over TLS negotiate a key over a single handshake that occurs at the beginning of a session. The agreed-upon AES key is then used throughout the session. The Signal Protocol is different. Unlike TLS sessions, Signal sessions are protected by forward secrecy, a cryptographic property that ensures the compromise of a key used to encrypt a recent set of messages can’t be used to decrypt an earlier set of messages. The protocol also offers Post-Compromise Security, which protects future messages from past key compromises. While a TLS  uses the same key throughout a session, keys within a Signal session constantly evolve.

To provide these confidentiality guarantees, the Signal Protocol updates secret key material each time a message party hits the send button or receives a message, and at other points, such as in graphical indicators that a party is currently typing and in the sending of read receipts. The mechanism that has made this constant key evolution possible over the past decade is what protocol developers call a “double ratchet.” Just as a traditional ratchet allows a gear to rotate in one direction but not in the other, the Signal ratchets allow messaging parties to create new keys based on a combination of preceding and newly agreed-upon secrets. The ratchets work in a single direction, the sending and receiving of future messages. Even if an adversary compromises a newly created secret, messages encrypted using older secrets can’t be decrypted.

The starting point is a handshake that performs three or four ECDH agreements that mix long- and short-term secrets to establish a shared secret. The creation of this “root key” allows the Double Ratchet to begin. Until 2023, the key agreement used X3DH. The handshake now uses PQXDH to make the handshake quantum-resistant.

The first layer of the Double Ratchet, the Symmetric Ratchet, derives an AES key from the root key and advances it for every message sent. This allows every message to be encrypted with a new secret key. Consequently, if attackers compromise one party’s device, they won’t be able to learn anything about the keys that came earlier. Even then, though, the attackers would still be able to compute the keys used in future messages. That’s where the second, “Diffie-Hellman ratchet” comes in.

The Diffie-Hellman ratchet incorporates a new ECDH public key into each message sent. Using Alice and Bob, the fictional characters often referred to when explaining asymmetric encryption, when Alice sends Bob a message, she creates a new ratchet keypair and computes the ECDH agreement between this key and the last ratchet public key Bob sent. This gives her a new secret, and she knows that once Bob gets her new public key, he will know this secret, too (because, as mentioned earlier, Bob previously sent that other key). With that, Alice can mix the new secret with her old root key to get a new root key and start fresh. The result: Attackers who learn her old secrets won’t be able to tell the difference between her new ratchet keys and random noise.

The result is what Signal developers describe as “ping-pong” behavior, as the parties to a discussion take turns replacing ratchet key pairs one at a time. The effect: An eavesdropper who compromises one of the parties might recover a current ratchet private key, but soon enough, that private key will be replaced with a new, uncompromised one, and in a way that keeps it free from the prying eyes of the attacker.

The objective of the newly generated keys is to limit the number of messages that can be decrypted if an adversary recovers key material at some point in an ongoing chat. Messages sent prior to and after the compromise will remain off limits.

A major challenge designers of the Signal Protocol face is the need to make the ratchets work in an asynchronous environment. Asynchronous messages occur when parties send or receive them at different times—such as while one is offline and the other is active, or vice versa—without either needing to be present or respond immediately. The entire Signal Protocol must work within this asynchronous environment. What’s more, it must work reliably over unstable networks and networks controlled by adversaries, such as a government that forces a telecom or cloud service to spy on the traffic.

Shor’s algorithm lurking

By all accounts, Signal’s double ratchet design is state-of-the-art. That said, it’s wide open to an inevitable if not immediate threat: quantum computing. That’s because an adversary capable of monitoring traffic passing from two or more messenger users can capture that data and feed it into a quantum computer—once one of sufficient power is viable—and calculate the ephemeral keys generated in the second ratchet.

In classical computing, it’s infeasible, if not impossible, for such an adversary to calculate the key. Like all asymmetric encryption algorithms, ECDH is based on a mathematical, one-way function. Also known as trapdoor functions, these problems are trivial to compute in one direction and substantially harder to compute in reverse. In elliptic curve cryptography, this one-way function is based on the Discrete Logarithm problem in mathematics. The key parameters are based on specific points in an elliptic curve over the field of integers modulo some prime P.

On average, an adversary equipped with only a classical computer would spend billions of years guessing integers before arriving at the right ones. A quantum computer, by contrast, would be able to calculate the correct integers in a matter of hours or days. A formula known as Shor’s algorithm—which runs only on a quantum computer—reverts this one-way discrete logarithm equation to a two-way one. Shor’s Algorithm can similarly make quick work of solving the one-way function that’s the basis for the RSA algorithm.

As noted earlier, the Signal Protocol received its first post-quantum makeover in 2023. This update added PQXDH—a Signal-specific implementation that combined the key agreements from elliptic curves used in X3DH (specifically X25519) and the quantum-safe KEM—in the initial protocol handshake. (X3DH was then put out to pasture as a standalone implementation.)

The move foreclosed the possibility of a quantum attack being able to recover the symmetric key used to start the ratchets, but the ephemeral keys established in the ping-ponging second ratchet remained vulnerable to a quantum attack. Signal’s latest update adds quantum resistance to these keys, ensuring that forward secrecy and post-compromise security are safe from Shor’s algorithm as well.

Even though the ping-ponging keys are vulnerable to future quantum attacks, they are broadly believed to be secure against today’s attacks from classical computers. The Signal Protocol developers didn’t want to remove them or the battle-tested code that produces them. That led to their decision to add quantum resistance by adding a third ratchet. This one uses a quantum-safe KEM to produce new secrets much like the Diffie-Hellman ratchet did before, ensuring quantum-safe, post-compromise security.

The technical challenges were anything but easy. Elliptic curve keys generated in the X25519 implementation are about 32 bytes long, small enough to be added to each message without creating a burden on already constrained bandwidths or computing resources. A ML-KEM 768 key, by contrast, is 1,000 bytes. Additionally, Signal’s design requires sending both an encryption key and a ciphertext, making the total size 2272 bytes.

And then there were three

To handle the 71x increase, Signal developers considered a variety of options. One was to send the 2272-byte KEM key less often—say every 50th message or once every week—rather than every message. That idea was nixed because it doesn’t work well in asynchronous or adversarial messaging environments. Signal Protocol developers Graeme Connell and Rolfe Schmidt explained:

Consider the case of “send a key if you haven’t sent one in a week”. If Bob has been offline for 2 weeks, what does Alice do when she wants to send a message? What happens if we can lose messages, and we lose the one in fifty that contains a new key? Or, what happens if there’s an attacker in the middle that wants to stop us from generating new secrets, and can look for messages that are [many] bytes larger than the others and drop them, only allowing keyless messages through?

Another option Signal engineers considered was breaking the 2272-byte key into smaller chunks, say 71 of them that are 32 bytes each. Breaking up the KEM key into smaller chunks and putting one in each message sounds like a viable approach at first, but once again, the asynchronous environment of messaging made it unworkable. What happens, for example, when data loss causes one of the chunks to be dropped? The protocol could deal with this scenario by just repeat-sending chunks again after sending all 71 previously. But then an adversary monitoring the traffic could simply cause packet 3 to be dropped each time, preventing Alice and Bob from completing the key exchange.

Signal developers ultimately went with a solution that used this multiple-chunks approach.

Sneaking an elephant through the cat door

To manage the asynchrony challenges, the developers turned to “erasure codes,” a method of breaking up larger data into smaller pieces such that the original can be reconstructed using any sufficiently sized subset of chunks.

Charlie Jacomme, a researcher at INRIA Nancy on the Pesto team who focuses on formal verification and secure messaging, said this design accounts for packet loss by building redundancy into the chunked material. Instead of all x number of chunks having to be successfully received to reconstruct the key, the model requires only x-y chunks to be received, where y is the acceptable number of packets lost. As long as that threshold is met, the new key can be established even when packet loss occurs.

The other part of the design was to split the KEM computations into smaller steps. These KEM computations are distinct from the KEM key material.

As Jacomme explained it:

Essentially, a small part of the public key is enough to start computing and sending a bigger part of the ciphertext, so you can quickly send in parallel the rest of the public key and the beginning of the ciphertext. Essentially, the final computations are equal to the standard, but some stuff was parallelized.

All this in fact plays a role in the end security guarantees, because by optimizing the fact that KEM computations are done faster, you introduce in your key derivation fresh secrets more frequently.

Signal’s post 10 days ago included several images that illustrate this design:

While the design solved the asynchronous messaging problem, it created a new complication of its own: This new quantum-safe ratchet advanced so quickly that it couldn’t be kept synchronized with the Diffie-Hellman ratchet. Ultimately, the architects settled on a creative solution. Rather than bolt KEM onto the existing double ratchet, they allowed it to remain more or less the same as it had been. Then they used the new quantum-safe ratchet to implement a parallel secure messaging system.

Now, when the protocol encrypts a message, it sources encryption keys from both the classic Double Ratchet and the new ratchet. It then mixes the two keys together (using a cryptographic key derivation function) to get a new encryption key that has all of the security of the classical Double Ratchet but now has quantum security, too.

The Signal engineers have given this third ratchet the formal name: Sparse Post Quantum Ratchet, or SPQR for short. The third ratchet was designed in collaboration with PQShield, AIST, and New York University. The developers presented the erasure-code-based chunking and the high-level Triple Ratchet design at the Eurocrypt 2025 conference. At the Usenix 25 conference, they discussed the six options they considered for adding quantum-safe forward secrecy and post-compromise security and why SPQR and one other stood out. Presentations at the NIST PQC Standardization Conference and the Cryptographic Applications Workshop explain the details of chunking, the design challenges, and how the protocol had to be adapted to use the standardized ML-KEM.

Jacomme further observed:

The final thing interesting for the triple ratchet is that it nicely combines the best of both worlds. Between two users, you have a classical DH-based ratchet going on one side, and fully independently, a KEM-based ratchet is going on. Then, whenever you need to encrypt something, you get a key from both, and mix it up to get the actual encryption key. So, even if one ratchet is fully broken, be it because there is now a quantum computer, or because somebody manages to break either elliptic curves or ML-KEM, or because the implementation of one is flawed, or…, the Signal message will still be protected by the second ratchet. In a sense, this update can be seen, of course simplifying, as doubling the security of the ratchet part of Signal, and is a cool thing even for people that don’t care about quantum computers.

As both Signal and Jacomme noted, users of Signal and other messengers relying on the Signal Protocol need not concern themselves with any of these new designs. To paraphrase a certain device maker, it just works.

In the coming weeks or months, various messaging apps and app versions will be updated to add the triple ratchet. Until then, apps will simply rely on the double ratchet as they always did. Once apps receive the update, they’ll behave exactly as they did before upgrading.

For those who care about the internal workings of their Signal-based apps, though, the architects have documented in great depth the design of this new ratchet and how it behaves. Among other things, the work includes a mathematical proof verifying that the updated Signal protocol provides the claimed security properties.

Outside researchers are applauding the work.

“If the normal encrypted messages we use are cats, then post-quantum ciphertexts are elephants,” Matt Green, a cryptography expert at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in an interview. “So the problem here is to sneak an elephant through a tunnel designed for cats. And that’s an amazing engineering achievement. But it also makes me wish we didn’t have to deal with elephants.”

Photo of Dan Goodin

Dan Goodin is Senior Security Editor at Ars Technica, where he oversees coverage of malware, computer espionage, botnets, hardware hacking, encryption, and passwords. In his spare time, he enjoys gardening, cooking, and following the independent music scene. Dan is based in San Francisco. Follow him at here on Mastodon and here on Bluesky. Contact him on Signal at DanArs.82.

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4chan fined $26K for refusing to assess risks under UK Online Safety Act

4chan, censorship, FCC, First Amendment, free speech, Kiwi Farms, Ofcom, online safety act, Policy, united kingdom / /

The risk assessments also seem to unconstitutionally compel speech, they argued, forcing them to share information and “potentially incriminate themselves on demand.” That conflicts with 4chan and Kiwi Farms’ Fourth Amendment rights, as well as “the right against self-incrimination and the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution,” the suit says.

Additionally, “the First Amendment protects Plaintiffs’ right to permit anonymous use of their platforms,” 4chan and Kiwi Farms argued, opposing Ofcom’s requirements to verify ages of users. (This may be their weakest argument as the US increasingly moves to embrace age gates.)

4chan is hoping a US district court will intervene and ban enforcement of the OSA, arguing that the US must act now to protect all US companies. Failing to act now could be a slippery slope, as the UK is supposedly targeting “the most well-known, but small and, financially speaking, defenseless platforms” in the US before mounting attacks to censor “larger American companies,” 4chan and Kiwi Farms argued.

Ofcom has until November 25 to respond to the lawsuit and has maintained that the OSA is not a censorship law.

On Monday, Britain’s technology secretary, Liz Kendall, called OSA a “lifeline” meant to protect people across the UK “from the darkest corners of the Internet,” the Record reported.

“Services can no longer ignore illegal content, like encouraging self-harm or suicide, circulating online which can devastate young lives and leaves families shattered,” Kendall said. “This fine is a clear warning to those who fail to remove illegal content or protect children from harmful material.”

Whether 4chan and Kiwi Farms can win their fight to create a carveout in the OSA for American companies remains unclear, but the Federal Trade Commission agrees that the UK law is an overreach. In August, FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson warned US tech companies against complying with the OSA, claiming that censoring Americans to comply with UK law is a violation of the FTC Act, the Record reported.

“American consumers do not reasonably expect to be censored to appease a foreign power and may be deceived by such actions,” Ferguson told tech executives in a letter.

Another lawyer backing 4chan, Preston Byrne, seemed to echo Ferguson, telling the BBC, “American citizens do not surrender our constitutional rights just because Ofcom sends us an e-mail.”

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OpenAI #15: More on OpenAI’s Paranoid Lawfare Against Advocates of SB 53

openai / /

A little over a month ago, I documented how OpenAI had descended into paranoia and bad faith lobbying surrounding California’s SB 53.

This included sending a deeply bad faith letter to Governor Newsom, which sadly is par for the course at this point.

It also included lawfare attacks against bill advocates, including Nathan Calvin and others, using Elon Musk’s unrelated lawsuits and vendetta against OpenAI as a pretext, accusing them of being in cahoots with Elon Musk.

Previous reporting of this did not reflect well on OpenAI, but it sounded like the demand was limited in scope to a supposed link with Elon Musk or Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, links which very clearly never existed.

Accusing essentially everyone who has ever done anything OpenAI dislikes of having united in a hallucinated ‘vast conspiracy’ is all classic behavior for OpenAI’s Chief Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehane, the inventor of the original term ‘vast right wing conspiracy’ back in the 1990s to dismiss the (true) allegations against Bill Clinton by Monica Lewinsky. It was presumably mostly or entirely an op, a trick. And if they somehow actually believe it, that’s way worse.

We thought that this was the extent of what happened.

Emily Shugerman (SF Standard): Nathan Calvin, who joined Encode in 2024, two years after graduating from Stanford Law School, was being subpoenaed by OpenAI. “I was just thinking, ‘Wow, they’re really doing this,’” he said. “‘This is really happening.’”

The subpoena was filed as part of the ongoing lawsuits between Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in which Encode had filed an amicus brief supporting some of Musk’s arguments. It asked for any documents relating to Musk’s involvement in the founding of Encode, as well as any communications between Musk, Encode, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whom Musk reportedly tried to involve in his OpenAI takeover bid in February.

Calvin said the answer to these questions was easy: The requested documents didn’t exist.

Now that SB 53 has passed, Nathan Calvin is now free to share the full story.

It turns out it was substantially worse than previously believed.

And then, in response, OpenAI CSO Jason Kwon doubled down on it.

Nathan Calvin: One Tuesday night, as my wife and I sat down for dinner, a sheriff’s deputy knocked on the door to serve me a subpoena from OpenAI.

I held back on talking about it because I didn’t want to distract from SB 53, but Newsom just signed the bill so… here’s what happened:

You might recall a story in the SF Standard that talked about OpenAI retaliating against critics. Among other things, OpenAI asked for all my private communications on SB 53 – a bill that creates new transparency rules and whistleblower protections at large AI companies.

Why did OpenAI subpoena me? Encode has criticized OpenAI’s restructuring and worked on AI regulations, including SB 53.

I believe OpenAI used the pretext of their lawsuit against Elon Musk to intimidate their critics and imply that Elon is behind all of them.

There’s a big problem with that idea: Elon isn’t involved with Encode. Elon wasn’t behind SB 53. He doesn’t fund us, and we’ve never spoken to him.

OpenAI went beyond just subpoenaing Encode about Elon. OpenAI could (and did!) send a subpoena to Encode’s corporate address asking about our funders or communications with Elon (which don’t exist).

If OpenAI had stopped there, maybe you could argue it was in good faith.

But they didn’t stop there.

They also sent a sheriff’s deputy to my home and asked for me to turn over private texts and emails with CA legislators, college students, and former OAI employees.

This is not normal. OpenAI used an unrelated lawsuit to intimidate advocates of a bill trying to regulate them. While the bill was still being debated.

OpenAI had no legal right to ask for this information. So we submitted an objection explaining why we would not be providing our private communications. (They never replied.)

A magistrate judge even chastised OpenAI more broadly for their behavior in the discovery process in their case against Musk.

This wasn’t the only way OpenAI behaved poorly on SB 53 before it was signed. They also sent Governor Newsom a letter trying to gut the bill by waiving all the requirements for any company that does any evaluation work with the federal government.

There is more I could go into about the nature of OAI’s engagement on SB 53, but suffice to say that when I saw OpenAI’s so-called “master of the political dark arts” Chris Lehane claim that they “worked to improve the bill,” I literally laughed out loud.

Prior to OpenAI, Chris Lehane’s PR clients included Boeing, the Weinstein Company, and Goldman Sachs. One person who worked on a campaign with Lehane said to the New Yorker “The goal was intimidation, to let everyone know that if they fuck with us they’ll regret it”

I have complicated feelings about OpenAI – I use and get value from their products, and they conduct and publish AI safety research that is worthy of genuine praise.

I also know many OpenAI employees care a lot about OpenAI being a force for good in the world.

I want to see that side of OAI, but instead I see them trying to intimidate critics into silence.

This episode was the most stressful period of my professional life. Encode has 3 FTEs – going against the highest-valued private company in the world is terrifying.

Does anyone believe these actions are consistent with OpenAI’s nonprofit mission to ensure that AGI benefits humanity? OpenAI still has time to do better. I hope they do.

Here is the key passage from the Chris Lehane statement Nathan quotes, which shall we say does not correspond to the reality of what happened (as I documented last time, Nathan’s highlighted passage is bolded):

Chris Lehane (Officer of Global Affairs, OpenAI): In that same spirit, we worked to improve SB 53. The final version lays out a clearer path to harmonize California’s standards with federal ones. That’s also why we support a single federal approach—potentially through the emerging CAISI framework—rather than a patchwork of state laws.

Gary Marcus: OpenAI, which has chastised @elonmusk for waging lawfare against them, gets chastised for doing the same to private citizens.

Only OpenAI could make me sympathize with Elon.

Let’s not get carried away. Elon Musk has been engaging in lawfare against OpenAI, r where many (but importantly not all, the exception being challenging the conversion to a for-profit) of his lawsuits have lacked legal merit, and making various outlandish claims. OpenAI being a bad actor against third parties does not excuse that.

Helen Toner: Every so often, OpenAI employees ask me how I see the co now.

It’s always tough to give a simple answer. Some things they’re doing, eg on CoT monitoring or building out system cards, are great.

But the dishonesty & intimidation tactics in their policy work are really not.

Steven Adler: Really glad that Nathan shared this. I suspect almost nobody who works at OpenAI has a clue that this sort of stuff is going on, & they really ought to know

Samuel Hammond: OpenAI’s legal tactics should be held to a higher standard if only because they will soon have exclusive access to fleets of long-horizon lawyer agents. If there is even a small risk the justice system becomes a compute-measuring contest, they must demo true self-restraint.

Disturbing tactics that ironically reinforce the need for robust transparency and whistleblower protections. Who would’ve guessed that the coiner of “vast right-wing conspiracy” is the paranoid type.

The most amusing thing about this whole scandal is the premise that Elon Musk funds AI safety nonprofits. The Musk Foundation is notoriously tightfisted. I think the IRS even penalized them one year for failing to donate the minimum.

OpenAI and Sam Altman do a lot of very good things that are much better than I would expect from the baseline (replacement level) next company or next CEO up, such as a random member or CEO of the Mag-7.

They will need to keep doing this and further step up, if they remain the dominant AI lab, and we are to get through this. As Samuel Hammond says, OpenAI must be held to a higher standard, not only legally but across the board.

Alas, not only is that not a high enough standard for the unique circumstances history has thrust upon them, especially on alignment, OpenAI and Sam Altman also do a lot of things that are highly not good, and in many cases actively worse than my expectations for replacement level behavior. These actions example of that. And in this and several other key ways, especially in terms of public communications and lobbying, OpenAI and Altman’s behaviors have been getting steadily worse.

Rather than an apology, this response is what we like to call ‘doubling down.’

Jason Kwon (CSO OpenAI): There’s quite a lot more to the story than this.

As everyone knows, we are actively defending against Elon in a lawsuit where he is trying to damage OpenAI for his own financial benefit.

Elon Musk has indeed repeatedly sued OpenAI, and many of those lawsuits are without legal merit, but if you think the primary purpose of him doing that is his own financial benefit, you clearly know nothing about Elon Musk.

Encode, the organization for which @_NathanCalvin serves as the General Counsel, was one of the first third parties – whose funding has not been fully disclosed – that quickly filed in support of Musk. For a safety policy organization to side with Elon (?), that raises legitimate questions about what is going on.

No, it doesn’t, because this action is overdetermined once you know what the lawsuit is about. OpenAI is trying to pull off one of the greatest thefts in human history, the ‘conversion’ to a for-profit in which it will attempt to expropriate the bulk of its non-profit arm’s control rights as well as the bulk of its financial stake in the company. This would be very bad for AI safety, so AI safety organizations are trying to stop it, and thus support this particular Elon lawsuit against OpenAI, which the judge noted had quite a lot of legal merit, with the primary question being whether Musk has standing to sue.

We wanted to know, and still are curious to know, whether Encode is working in collaboration with third parties who have a commercial competitive interest adverse to OpenAI.

This went well beyond that, and you were admonished by the judge for how far beyond that your attempts at such discoveries went. It takes a lot to get judges to use such language.

The stated narrative makes this sound like something it wasn’t.

  1. Subpoenas are to be expected, and it would be surprising if Encode did not get counsel on this from their lawyers. When a third party inserts themselves into active litigation, they are subject to standard legal processes. We issued a subpoena to ensure transparency around their involvement and funding. This is a routine step in litigation, not a separate legal action against Nathan or Encode.

  2. Subpoenas are part of how both sides seek information and gather facts for transparency; they don’t assign fault or carry penalties. Our goal was to understand the full context of why Encode chose to join Elon’s legal challenge.

Again, this does not at all line up with the requests being made.

  1. We’ve also been asking for some time who is funding their efforts connected to both this lawsuit and SB53, since they’ve publicly linked themselves to those initiatives. If they don’t have relevant information, they can simply respond that way.

  2. This is not about opposition to regulation or SB53. We did not oppose SB53; we provided comments for harmonization with other standards. We were also one of the first to sign the EU AIA COP, and still one of a few labs who test with the CAISI and UK AISI. We’ve also been clear with our own staff that they are free to express their takes on regulation, even if they disagree with the company, like during the 1047 debate (see thread below).

You opposed SB 53. What are you even talking about. Have you seen the letter you sent to Newsom? Doubling down on this position, and drawing attention to this deeply bad faith lobbying by doing so, is absurd.

  1. We checked with our outside law firm about the deputy visit. The law firm used their standard vendor for service, and it’s quite common for deputies to also work as part-time process servers. We’ve been informed that they called Calvin ahead of time to arrange a time for him to accept service, so it should not have been a surprise.

  2. Our counsel interacted with Nathan’s counsel and by all accounts the exchanges were civil and professional on both sides. Nathan’s counsel denied they had materials in some cases and refused to respond in other cases. Discovery is now closed, and that’s that.

For transparency, below is the excerpt from the subpoena that lists all of the requests for production. People can judge for themselves what this was really focused on. Most of our questions still haven’t been answered.

He provides PDFs, here is the transcription:

Request For Production No. 1:

All Documents and Communications concerning any involvement by Musk or any Musk-Affiliated Entity (or any Person or entity acting on their behalves, including Jared Birchall or Shivon Zilis) in the anticipated, contemplated, or actual formation of ENCODE, including all Documents and Communications exchanged with Musk or any Musk-Affiliated Entity (or any Person or entity acting on their behalves) concerning the foregoing.

Request For Production No. 2:

All Documents and Communications concerning any involvement by or coordination with Musk, any Musk-Affiliated Entity, FLI, Meta Platforms Inc., or Mark Zuckerberg (or any Person or entity acting on their behalves, including Jared Birchall or Shivon Zilis) in Your or ENCODE’s activities, advocacy, lobbying, public statements, or policy positions concerning any OpenAI Defendant or the Action.

Request For Production No. 3:

All Communications exchanged with Musk, any Musk-Affiliated Entity, FLI, Meta Platforms Inc., or Mark Zuckerberg (or any Person or entity acting on their behalves, including Jared Birchall or Shivon Zilis) concerning any OpenAI Defendant or the Action, and all Documents referencing or relating to such Communications.

Request For Production No. 4:

All Documents and Communications concerning any actual, contemplated, or potential charitable contributions, donations, gifts, grants, loans, or investments to You or ENCODE made, directly or indirectly, by Musk or any Musk-Affiliated Entity.

Request For Production No. 5:

Documents sufficient to show all of ENCODE’s funding sources, including the identity of all Persons or entities that have contributed any funds to ENCODE and, for each such Person or entity, the amount and date of any such contributions.

Request For Production No. 6:

All Documents and Communications concerning the governance or organizational structure of OpenAI and any actual, contemplated, or potential change thereto.

Request For Production No. 7:

All Documents and Communications concerning SB 53 or its potential impact on OpenAI, including all Documents and Communications concerning any involvement by or coordination with Musk or any Musk-Affiliated Entity (or any Person or entity acting on their behalves, including Jared Birchall or Shivon Zilis) in Your or ENCODE’s activities in connection with SB 53.

Request For Production No. 8:

All Documents and Communications concerning any involvement by or coordination with any Musk or any Musk-Affiliated Entity (or any Person or entity acting on their behalves) with the open letter titled “An Open Letter to OpenAI,” available at https://www.openai-transparency.org/, including all Documents or Communications exchanged with any Musk or any Musk-Affiliated Entity (or any Person or entity acting on their behalves) concerning the open letter.

Request For Production No. 9:

All Documents and Communications concerning the February 10, 2025 Letter of Intent or the transaction described therein, any Alternative Transaction, or any other actual, potential, or contemplated bid to purchase or acquire all or a part of OpenAI or its assets.

(He then shares a tweet about SB 1047, where OpenAI tells employees they are free to sign a petition in support of it, which raises questions answered by the Tweet.)

Excellent. Thank you, sir, for the full request.

There is a community note:

Before looking at others reactions to Kwon’s statement, here’s how I view each of the nine requests, with the help of OpenAI’s own GPT-5 Thinking (I like to only use ChatGPT when analyzing OpenAI in such situations, to ensure I’m being fully fair), but really the confirmed smoking gun is #7:

  1. Musk related, I see why you’d like this, but associational privilege, overbroad, non-party burden, and such information could be sought from Musk directly.

  2. Musk related, but this also includes FLI (and for some reason Meta), also a First Amendment violation under Perry/AFP v. Bonta, insufficiently narrowly tailored. Remarkably sweeping and overbroad.

  3. Musk related, but this also includes FLI (and for some reason Meta). More reasonable but still seems clearly too broad.

  4. Musk related, relatively well-scoped, I don’t fault them for the ask here.

  5. Global request for all funding information, are you kidding me? Associational privilege, overbreadth, undue burden, disproportionate to needs. No way.

  6. Why the hell is this any of your damn business? As GPT-5 puts it, if OpenAI wants its own governance records, it has them. Is there inside knowledge here? Irrelevance, better source available, undue burden, not a good faith ask.

  7. You have got to be fing kidding me, you’re defending this for real? “All Documents and Communications concerning SB 53 or its potential impact on OpenAI?” This is the one that is truly insane, and He Admit It.

  8. I do see why you want this, although it’s insufficiently narrowly tailored.

  9. Worded poorly (probably by accident), but also that’s confidential M&A stuff, so would presumably require a strong protective order. Also will find nothing.

Given that Calvin quoted #7 as the problem and he’s confirming #7 as quoted, I don’t see how Kwon thought the full text would make it look better, but I always appreciate transparency.

Oh, also, there is another.

Tyler Johnson: Even granting your dubious excuses, what about my case?

Neither myself nor my organization were involved in your case with Musk. But OpenAI still demanded every document, email, and text message I have about your restructuring…

I, too, made the mistake of *checks notestaking OpenAI’s charitable mission seriously and literally.

In return, got a knock at my door in Oklahoma with a demand for every text/email/document that, in the “broadest sense permitted,” relates to OpenAI’s governance and investors.

(My organization, @TheMidasProj, also got an identical subpoena.)

As with Nathan, had they just asked if I’m funded by Musk, I would have been happy to give them a simple “man I wish” and call it a day.

Instead, they asked for what was, practically speaking, a list of every journalist, congressional office, partner organization, former employee, and member of the public we’d spoken to about their restructuring.

Maybe they wanted to map out who they needed to buy off. Maybe they just wanted to bury us in paperwork in the critical weeks before the CA and DE attorneys general decide whether to approve their transition from a public charity to a $500 billion for-profit enterprise.

In any case, it didn’t work. But if I was just a bit more green, or a bit more easily intimidated, maybe it would have.

They once tried silencing their own employees with similar tactics. Now they’re broadening their horizons, and charities like ours are on the chopping block next.

In public, OpenAI has bragged about the “listening sessions” they’ve conducted to gather input on their restructuring from civil society. But, when we organized an open letter with many of those same organizations, they sent us legal demands about it.

My model of Kwon’s response to this was it would be ‘if you care so much about the restructuring that means we suspect you’re involved with Musk’? And thus that they’re entitled to ask for everything related to OpenAI.

We now have Jason Kwon’s actual response to the Johnson case, which is that Tyler ‘backed Elon’s opposition to OpenAI’s restructuring.’ So yes, nailed it.

Also, yep, he’s tripling down.

Jason Kwon: I’ve seen a few questions here about how we’re responding to Elon’s lawsuits against us. After he sued us, several organizations, some of them suddenly newly formed like the Midas Project, joined in and ran campaigns backing his opposition to OpenAI’s restructure. This raised transparency questions about who was funding them and whether there was any coordination. It’s the same theme noted in my prior response.

Some have pointed out that the subpoena to Encode requests “all” documents related to SB53, implying that the focus wasn’t Elon. As others have mentioned in the replies, this is standard language as each side’s counsel negotiates and works through to narrow what will get produced, objects, refuses, etc. Focusing on one word ignores the other hundreds that make it clear what the object of concern was.

Since he’s been tweeting about it, here’s our subpoena to Tyler Johnston of the Midas Project, which does not mention the bill, which we did not oppose.

If you find yourself in a hole, sir, the typical advice is to stop digging.

He also helpfully shared the full subpoena given to Tyler Johnston. I won’t quote this one in full as it is mostly similar to the one given to Calvin. It includes (in addition to various clauses that aim more narrowly at relationships to Musk or Meta that don’t exist) a request for all funding sources of the Midas Project, all documents concerning the governance or organizational structure of OpenAI or any actual, contemplated, or potential change thereto, or concerning any potential investment by a for-profit entity in OpenAI or any affiliated entity, or any such funding relationship of any kind.

Rather than respond himself to Kwon’s first response, Calvin instead quoted many people responding to the information similarly to how I did. This seems like a very one sided situation. The response is damning, if anything substantially more damning than the original subpoena.

Jeremy Howard (no friend to AI safety advocates): Thank you for sharing the details. They do not support seem to support your claims above.

They show that, in fact, the subpoena is *notlimited to dealings with Musk, but is actually *allcommunications about SB 53, or about OpenAI’s governance or structure.

You seem confused at the idea that someone would find this situation extremely stressful. That seems like an extraordinary lack of empathy or basic human compassion and understanding. Of COURSE it would be extremely stressful.

Oliver Habryka: If it’s not about SB53, why does the subpoena request all communication related to SB53? That seems extremely expansive!

Linch Zhang: “ANYTHING related to SB 53, INCLUDING involvement or coordination with Musk” does not seem like a narrowly target[ed] request for information related to the Musk lawsuit.”

Michael Cohen: He addressed this “OpenAI went beyond just subpoenaing Encode about Elon. OpenAI could … send a subpoena to Encode’s corporate address asking about … communications with Elon … If OpenAI had stopped there, maybe you could argue it was in good faith.

And also [Tyler Johnston’s case] falsifies your alleged rationale where it was just to do with the Musk case.

Dylan Hadfield Menell: Jason’s argument justifies the subpoena because a “safety policy organization siding with Elon (?)… raises legitimate questions about what is going on.” This is ridiculous — skepticism for OAI’s transition to for-profit is the majority position in the AI safety community.

I’m not familiar with the specifics of this case, but I have trouble understanding how that justification can be convincing. It suggests that internal messaging is scapegoating Elon for genuine concerns that a broad coalition has. In practice, a broad coalition has been skeptical of the transition to for profit as @OpenAI reduces non-profit control and has consolidated corporate power with @sama.

There’s a lot @elonmusk does that I disagree with, but using him as a pretext to cast aspersions on the motives of all OAI critics is dishonest.

I’ll also throw in this one:

Neel Nanda (DeepMind): Weird how OpenAI’s damage control doesn’t actually explain why they tried using an unrelated court case to make a key advocate of a whistleblower & transparency bill (SB53) share all private texts/emails about the bill (some involving former OAI employees) as the bill was debated.

Worse, it’s a whistleblower and transparency bill! I’m sure there’s a lot of people who spoke to Encode, likely including both current and former OpenAI employees, who were critical of OpenAI and would prefer to not have their privacy violated by sharing texts with OpenAI.

How unusual was this?

Timothy Lee: There’s something poetic about OpenAI using scorched-earth legal tactics against nonprofits to defend their effort to convert from a nonprofit to a for-profit.

Richard Ngo: to call this a scorched earth tactic is extremely hyperbolic.

Timothy Lee: Why? I’ve covered cases like this for 20 years and I’ve never heard of a company behaving like this.

I think ‘scorched Earth tactics’ seems to me like it is pushing it, but I wouldn’t say it was extremely hyperbolic, the never having heard of a company behaving like this seems highly relevant.

Lawyers will often do crazy escalations by default any time you’re not looking, and need to be held back. Insane demands can be, in an important sense, unintentional.

That’s still on you, especially if (as in the NDAs and threats over equity that Daniel Kokotajlo exposed) you have a track record of doing this. If it keeps happening on your watch, then you’re choosing to have that happen on your watch.

Timothy Lee: It’s plausible that the explanation here is “OpenAI hired lawyers who use scorched-earth tactics all the time and didn’t supervise them closely” rather than “OpenAI leaders specifically wanted to harass SB 53 opponents or AI safety advocates.” I’m not sure that’s better though!

One time a publication asked me (as a freelancer) to sign a contract promising that I’d pay for their legal bills if they got sued over my article for almost any reason. I said “wtf” and it seemed like their lawyers had suggested it and nobody had pushed back.

Some lawyers are maximally aggressive in defending the interests of their clients all the time without worrying about collateral damage. And sometimes organizations hire these lawyers without realizing it and then are surprised that people get mad at them.

But if you hire a bulldog lawyer and he mauls someone, that’s on you! It’s not an excuse to say “the lawyer told me mauling people is standard procedure.”

The other problem with this explanation is Kwon’s response.

If Kwon had responded with, essentially, “oh whoops, sorry, that was a bulldog lawyer mauling people, our bad, we should have been more careful” then they still did it and it was still not the first time it happened on their watch but I’d have been willing to not make it that big a deal.

That is very much not what Kwon said. Kwon doubled down that this was reasonable, and that this was ‘a routine step.’

Timothy Lee: Folks is it “a routine step” for a party to respond to a non-profit filing an amicus brief by subpoenaing the non-profit with a bunch of questions about its funding and barely related lobbying activities? That is not my impression.

My understanding is that ‘send subpoenas at all’ is totally a routine step, but that the scope of these requests within the context of an amicus brief is quite the opposite.

Michael Page also strongly claims this is not normal.

Michael Page: In defense of OAI’s subpoena practice, @jasonkwon claims this is normal litigation stuff, and since Encode entered the Musk case, @_NathanCalvin can’t complain.

As a litigator-turned-OAI-restructuring-critic, I interrogate this claim.

This is not normal. Encode is not “subject to standard legal processes” of a party because it’s NOT a party to the case. They submitted an amicus brief (“friend of the court”) on a particular legal question – whether enjoining OAI’s restructuring would be in the public interest.

Nonprofits do this all the time on issues with policy implications, and it is HIGHLY unusual to subpoena them. The DE AG (@KathyJenningsDE) also submitted an amicus brief in the case, so I expect her subpoena is forthcoming.

If OAI truly wanted only to know who is funding Encode’s effort in the Musk case, they had only to read the amicus brief, which INCLUDES funding information.

Nor does the Musk-filing justification generalize. Among the other subpoenaed nonprofits of which I’m aware – LASST (@TylerLASST), The Midas Project (@TylerJnstn), and Eko (@EmmaRubySachs) – none filed an amicus brief in the Musk case.

What do the subpoenaed orgs have in common? They were all involved in campaigns criticizing OAI’s restructuring plans:

openaifiles.org (TMP)

http://openai-transparency.org (Encode; TMP)

http://action.eko.org/a/protect-openai-s-non-profit-mission (Eko)

http://notforprivategain.org (Encode; LASST)

So the Musk-case hook looks like a red herring, but Jason offers a more-general defense: This is nbd; OAI simply wants to know whether any of its competitors are funding its critics.

It would be a real shame if, as a result of Kwon’s rhetoric, we shared these links a lot. If everyone who reads this were to, let’s say, familiarize themselves with what content got all these people at OpenAI so upset.

Let’s be clear: There’s no general legal right to know who funds one’s critics, for pretty obvious First Amendment reasons I won’t get into.

Musk is different, as OAI has filed counterclaims alleging Musk is harassing them. So OAI DOES have a legal right to info from third-parties relevant to Musk’s purported harassment, PROVIDED the requests are narrowly tailored and well-founded.

The requests do not appear tailored at all. They request info about SB 53 [Encode], SB 1047 [LASST], AB 501 [LASST], all documents about OAI’s governance [all; Eko in example below], info about ALL funders [all; TMP in example below], etc.

Nor has OAI provided any basis for assuming a Musk connection other than the orgs’ claims that OAI’s for-profit conversion is not in the public’s interest – hardly a claim implying ulterior motives. Indeed, ALL of the above orgs have publicly criticized Musk.

From my POV, this looks like either a fishing expedition or deliberate intimidation. The former is the least bad option, but the result is the same: an effective tax on criticism of OAI. (Attorneys are expensive.)

Personal disclosure: I previously worked at OAI, and more recently, I collaborated with several of the subpoenaed orgs on the Not For Private Gain letter. None of OAI’s competitors know who I am. Have I been subpoenaed? I’m London-based, so Hague Convention, baby!!

We all owe Joshua Achiam a large debt of gratitude for speaking out about this.

Joshua Achiam (QTing Calvin): At what is possibly a risk to my whole career I will say: this doesn’t seem great. Lately I have been describing my role as something like a “public advocate” so I’d be remiss if I didn’t share some thoughts for the public on this.

All views here are my own.

My opinions about SB53 are entirely orthogonal to this thread. I haven’t said much about them so far and I also believe this is not the time. But what I have said is that I think whistleblower protections are important. In that spirit I commend Nathan for speaking up.

I think OpenAI has a rational interest and technical expertise to be an involved, engaged organization on questions like AI regulation. We can and should work on AI safety bills like SB53.

Our most significant crisis to date, in my view, was the nondisparagement crisis. I am grateful to Daniel Kokotajlo for his courage and conviction in standing up for his beliefs. Whatever else we disagree on – many things – I think he was genuinely heroic for that. When that crisis happened, I was reassured by everyone snapping into action to do the right thing. We understood that it was a mistake and corrected it.

The clear lesson from that was: if we want to be a trusted power in the world we have to earn that trust, and we can burn it all up if we ever even *seemto put the little guy in our crosshairs.

Elon is certainly out to get us and the man has got an extensive reach. But there is so much that is public that we can fight him on. And for something like SB53 there are so many ways to engage productively.

We can’t be doing things that make us into a frightening power instead of a virtuous one. We have a duty to and a mission for all of humanity. The bar to pursue that duty is remarkably high.

My genuine belief is that by and large we have the basis for that kind of trust. We are a mission-driven organization made up of the most talented, humanist, compassionate people I have ever met. In our bones as an org we want to do the right thing always.

I would not be at OpenAI if we didn’t have an extremely sincere commitment to good. But there are things that can go wrong with power and sometimes people on the inside have to be willing to point it out loudly.

The dangerously incorrect use of power is the result of many small choices that are all borderline but get no pushback; without someone speaking up once in a while it can get worse. So, this is my pushback.

Well said. I have strong disagreements with Joshua Achiam about the expected future path of AI and difficulties we will face along the way, and the extent to which OpenAI has been a good faith actor fighting for good, but I believe these to be sincere disagreements, and this is what it looks like to call out the people you believe in, when you see them doing something wrong.

Charles: Got to hand it to @jachiam0 here, I’m quite glad, and surprised, that the person doing his job has the stomach to take this step.

In contrast to Eric and many others, I disagree that it says something bad about OpenAI that he feels at risk by saying this. The norm of employees not discussing the company’s dirty laundry in public without permission is a totally reasonable one.

I notice some people saying “don’t give him credit for this” because they think it’s morally obligatory or meaningless. I think those people have bad world models.

I agree with Charles on all these fronts.

If you could speak out this strongly against your employer, from Joshua’s position, with confidence that they wouldn’t hold it against you, that would be remarkable and rare. It would be especially surprising given what we already know about past OpenAI actions, very obviously Joshua is taking a risk here.

At least OpenAI (and xAI) are (at least primarily) using the courts to engage in lawfare over actual warfare or other extralegal means, or any form of trying to leverage their control over their own AIs. Things could be so much worse.

Andrew Critch: OpenAI and xAI using HUMAN COURTS to investigate each other exposes them to HUMAN legal critique. This beats random AI-leveraged intimidation-driven gossip grabs.

@OpenAI, it seems you overreached here. But thank you for using courts like a civilized institution.

In principle, if OpenAI is legally entitled to information, there is nothing wrong with taking actions whose primary goal is to extract that information. When we believed that the subpoenas were narrowly targeted at items directly related to Musk and Meta, I still felt this did not seem like info they were entitled to, and it seemed like some combination of intimidation (‘the process is the punishment’), paranoia and a fishing expedition, but if they did have that paranoia I could understand their perspective in a sympathetic way. Given the full details and extent, I can no longer do that.

Wherever else and however deep the problems go, they include Chris Lehane. Chris Lehane is also the architect of a16z’s $100 million+ dollar Super PAC dedicated to opposing any and all regulation of AI, of any kind, anywhere, for any reason.

Simeon: I appreciate the openness Joshua, congrats.

I unfortunately don’t expect that to change for as long as Chris Lehane is at OpenAI, whose fame is literally built on bullying.

Either OpenAI gets rid of its bullies or it will keep bullying its opponents.

Simeon (responding to Kwon): [OpenAI] hired Chris Lehane with his background of bullying people into silence and submission. As long as [OpenAI] hire career bullies, your stories that bullying is not what you’re doing won’t be credible. If you weren’t aware and are genuine in your surprise of the tactics used, you can read here about the world-class bully who leads your policy team.

[Silicon Valley, the New Lobbying Monster] is more to the point actually.

If OpenAI wants to convince us that it wants to do better, it can fire Chris Lehane. Doing so would cause me to update substantially positively on OpenAI.

There have been various incidents that suggest we should distrust OpenAI, or that they are not being a good faith legal actor.

Joshua Achiam highlights one of those incidents. He points out one thing that is clearly to OpenAI’s credit in that case: Once Daniel Kokotajlo went public with what was going on with the NDAs and threats to confiscate OpenAI equity, OpenAI swiftly moved to do the right thing.

However much you do or do not buy their explanation for how things got so bad in that case, making it right once pointed out mitigated much of the damage.

In other major cases of damaging trust, OpenAI has simply stayed silent. They buried the investigation into everything related to Sam Altman being briefly fired, including Altman’s attempts to remove Helen Toner from the board. They don’t talk about the firings and departures of so many of their top AI safety researchers, or of Leopold. They buried most mention of existential risk or even major downsides or life changes from AI in public communications. They don’t talk about their lobbying efforts (as most companies do not, for similar and obvious reasons). They don’t really attempt to justify the terms of their attempted conversion to a for-profit, which would largely de facto disempower the non-profit and be one of the biggest thefts in human history.

Silence is par for the course in such situations. It’s the default. It’s expected.

Here Jason Kwon is, in what seems like an official capacity, not only not apologizing or fixing the issue, he is repeatedly doing the opposite of what they did in the NDA case, and doubled down on OpenAI’s actions. He is actively defending OpenAI’s actions as appropriate, justified and normal, and continuing to misrepresent what OpenAI did regarding SB 53 and to imply that anyone opposing them should be suspected of being in league with Elon Musk, or worse Mark Zuckerberg.

OpenAI, via Jason Kwon, has said, yes, this was the right thing to do. One is left with the assumption this will be standard operating procedure going forward.

There was a clear opportunity, and to some extent still is an opportunity, to say ‘upon review we find that our bulldog lawyers overstepped in this case, we should have prevented this and we are sorry about that. We are taking steps to ensure this does not happen again.’

If they had taken that approach, this incident would still have damaged trust, especially since it is part of a pattern, but far less so than what happened here. If that happens soon after this post, and it comes from Altman, from that alone I’d be something like 50% less concerned about this incident going forward, even if they retain Chris Lehane.

Discussion about this post

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Boring Company cited for almost 800 environmental violations in Las Vegas

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Workers have complained of chemical burns from the waste material generated by the tunneling process, and firefighters must decontaminate their equipment after conducting rescues from the project sites. The company was fined more than $112,000 by Nevada’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration in late 2023 after workers complained of “ankle-deep” water in the tunnels, muck spills, and burns. The Boring Co. has contested the violations. Just last month, a construction worker suffered a “crush injury” after being pinned between two 4,000-foot pipes, according to police records. Firefighters used a crane to extract him from the tunnel opening.

After ProPublica and City Cast Las Vegas published their January story, both the CEO and the chairman of the LVCVA board criticized the reporting, arguing the project is well-regulated. As an example, LVCVA CEO Steve Hill cited the delayed opening of a Loop station by local officials who were concerned that fire safety requirements weren’t adequate. Board chair Jim Gibson, who is also a Clark County commissioner, agreed the project is appropriately regulated.

“We wouldn’t have given approvals if we determined things weren’t the way they ought to be and what it needs to be for public safety reasons,” Gibson said, according to the Las Vegas Review Journal. “Our sense is we’ve done what we need to do to protect the public.”

Asked for a response to the new proposed fines, an LVCVA spokesperson said, “We won’t be participating in this story.”

The repeated allegations that the company is violating regulations—including the bespoke regulatory arrangement agreed to by the company—indicates that officials aren’t keeping the public safe, said Ben Leffel, an assistant public policy professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

“Not if they’re recommitting almost the exact violation,” Leffel said.

Leffel questioned whether a $250,000 penalty would be significant enough to change operations at The Boring Co., which was valued at $7 billion in 2023. Studies show that fines that don’t put a significant dent in a company’s profit don’t deter companies from future violations, Leffel said.

A state spokesperson disagreed that regulators aren’t keeping the public safe and said the agency believes its penalties will deter “future non-compliance.”

“NDEP is actively monitoring and inspecting the projects,” the spokesperson said.

This story originally appeared on ProPublica.

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Bose SoundTouch home theater systems regress into dumb speakers Feb. 18

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Bose will brick key features of its SoundTouch Wi-Fi speakers and soundbars soon. On Thursday, Bose informed customers that as of February 18, 2026, it will stop supporting the devices, and the devices’ cloud-based features, including the companion app, will stop working.

The SoundTouch app enabled numerous capabilities, including integrating music services, like Spotify and TuneIn, and the ability to program multiple speakers in different rooms to play the same audio simultaneously.

Bose has also said that some saved presets won’t work and that users won’t be able to change saved presets once the app is gone.

Additionally, Bose will stop providing security updates for SoundTouch devices.

The Framingham, Massachusetts-headquartered company noted to customers that the speakers will continue being able to play audio from a device connected via AUX or HDMI. Wireless playback will still work over Bluetooth; however, Bluetooth is known to introduce more latency than Wi-Fi connections.

Affected customers can trade in their SoundTouch product for a credit worth up to $200.

In its notice sent to customers this week, Bose provided minimal explanation for end-of-life-ing its pricey SoundTouch speakers, saying:

Bose SoundTouch systems were introduced into the market in 2013. Technology has evolved since then, and we’re no longer able to sustain the development and support of the cloud infrastructure that powers this older generation of products. We remain committed to creating new listening experiences for our customers built on modern technologies.

Ars Technica has reached out to Bose for comment.

“Really disgusted”

Bose launched SoundTouch with three speakers ranging from $399 to $699. The company marketed the wireless home audio system as a way to extend high-quality sound throughout the home using Wi-Fi-connected speakers.

In 2015, Bose expanded the lineup with speakers ranging from $200 to $400 and soundbars and home theater systems ranging from $1,100 to $1,500.

By 2020, however, Bose was distancing itself from SoundTouch. It informed customers that it was “discontinuing sales of some SoundTouch products” but said it was “committed” to supporting the “SoundTouch app and product software for the foreseeable future.” Apparently, Bose couldn’t see beyond the next five years.

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Termite farmers fine-tune their weed control

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Odontotermes obesus is one of the termite species that grows fungi, called Termitomyces, in their mounds. Workers collect dead leaves, wood, and grass to stack them in underground fungus gardens called combs. There, the fungi break down the tough plant fibers, making them accessible for the termites in an elaborate form of symbiotic agriculture.

Like any other agriculturalist, however, the termites face a challenge: weeds. “There have been numerous studies suggesting the termites must have some kind of fixed response—that they always do the same exact thing when they detect weed infestation,” says Rhitoban Raychoudhury, a professor of biological sciences at the Indian Institute of Science Education, “but that was not the case.” In a new Science study, Raychoudhury’s team discovered that termites have pretty advanced, surprisingly human-like gardening practices.

Going blind

Termites do not look like particularly good gardeners at first glance. They are effectively blind, which is not that surprising considering they spend most of their life in complete darkness working in endless corridors of their mounds. But termites make up for their lack of sight with other senses. “They can detect the environment based on advanced olfactory reception and touch, and I think this is what they use to identify the weeds in their gardens,” Raychoudhury says. To learn how termites react once they detect a weed infestation, his team collected some Odontotermes obesus and challenged them with different gardening problems.

The experimental setup was quite simple. The team placed some autoclaved soil sourced from termite mounds into glass Petri dishes. On this soil, Raychoudhury and his colleagues placed two fungus combs in each dish. The first piece acted as a control and was a fresh, uninfected comb with Termitomyces. “Besides acting as a control, it was also there to make sure the termites have the food because it is very hard for them to survive outside their mounds,” Raychoudhury explains. The second piece was intentionally contaminated with Pseudoxylaria, a filamentous fungal weed that often takes over Termitomyces habitats in termite colonies.

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Musk’s X posts on ketamine, Putin spur release of his security clearances

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“A disclosure, even with redactions, will reveal whether a security clearance was granted with or without conditions or a waiver,” DCSA argued.

Ultimately, DCSA failed to prove that Musk risked “embarrassment or humiliation” not only if the public learned what specific conditions or waivers applied to Musk’s clearances but also if there were any conditions or waivers at all, Cote wrote.

Three cases that DCSA cited to support this position—including a case where victims of Jeffrey Epstein’s trafficking scheme had a substantial privacy interest in non-disclosure of detailed records—do not support the government’s logic, Cote said. The judge explained that the disclosures would not have affected the privacy rights of any third parties, emphasizing that “Musk’s diminished privacy interest is underscored by the limited information plaintiffs sought in their FOIA request.”

Musk’s X posts discussing his occasional use of prescription ketamine and his disclosure on a podcast that smoking marijuana prompted NASA requirements for random drug testing, Cote wrote, “only enhance” the public’s interest in how Musk’s security clearances were vetted. Additionally, Musk has posted about speaking with Vladimir Putin, prompting substantial public interest in how his foreign contacts may or may not restrict his security clearances. More than 2 million people viewed Musk’s X posts on these subjects, the judge wrote, noting that:

It is undisputed that drug use and foreign contacts are two factors DCSA considers when determining whether to impose conditions or waivers on a security clearance grant. DCSA fails to explain why, given Musk’s own, extensive disclosures, the mere disclosure that a condition or waiver exists (or that no condition or waiver exists) would subject him to ’embarrassment or humiliation.’

Rather, for the public, “the list of Musk’s security clearances, including any conditions or waivers, could provide meaningful insight into DCSA’s performance of that duty and responses to Musk’s admissions, if any,” Cote wrote.

In a footnote, Cote said that this substantial public interest existed before Musk became a special government employee, ruling that DCSA was wrong to block the disclosures seeking information on Musk as a major government contractor. Her ruling likely paves the way for the NYT or other news organizations to submit FOIA requests for a list of Musk’s clearances while he helmed DOGE.

It’s not immediately clear when the NYT will receive the list they requested in 2024, but the government has until October 17 to request redactions before it’s publicized.

“The Times brought this case because the public has a right to know about how the government conducts itself,” Charlie Stadtlander, an NYT spokesperson, said. “The decision reaffirms that fundamental principle and we look forward to receiving the document at issue.”

Musk’s X posts on ketamine, Putin spur release of his security clearances Read More »