Federal authorities arrested a Saudi national employed at OpenAI and charged him with planting a recording device in a company’s executive conference room, the Department of Justice announced Tuesday.

On or around Sept. 30, OpenAI discovered a sophisticated recording device inserted into the back of a television in an executive conference room located in one of its San Francisco offices. The company determined that the device was installed approximately a couple days prior, concealed in toilet paper. The contents of the device were encrypted, according to the DOJ.

The Department of Justice said in a news release that the employee, Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, was arrested Friday and appeared in federal court Tuesday. OpenAI confirmed the incident on social media and said that it was supporting the FBI’s investigation.

“We used our models to understand the device and where it had come from, identifying that a specific employee had planted it a few days earlier,” OpenAI said in its statement. “At this time, we have no indications of this individual inappropriately accessing or exfiltrating model weights, source code, or customer data.”

Alfozan used a “productivity tool” to inquire about the company’s meeting rooms, calendars, and “leadership and exec” locations, according to OpenAI’s complaint to the DOJ. A chatbot account associated with his spouse also indicated that the user submitted prompts in September relating to installing and remote accessing a recording device.

The DOJ said that CCTV footage showed Alfozan, who had been employed as an engineer by OpenAI since July 2025, near and inside the conference room on multiple occasions before the device was discovered. Meetings in the conference room “frequently involved discussions of highly confidential technical, commercial, and strategic information, including proprietary research, product plans, and business-development opportunities,” according to the complaint.

The company also discovered another recording device in one of Alfozan’s bags left in the office.

“We referred the matter to the FBI, and we’re grateful to the agents and prosecutors who moved quickly to make an arrest,” OpenAI said. “Our security program is designed to protect against a wide range of threat actors, from insider risks to cybercriminals to nation states, and this case is an example of how AI can help address these sophisticated security threats.”

The Saudi national, who has since been fired by OpenAI, faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and three years of supervised release if convicted, according to the DOJ.

“For us it is a matter of national security,” U.S. Attorney Craig H. Missakian for the Northern District of California said in a statement. “This arrest highlights our relentless efforts in partnership with the FBI to identify and prosecute those who seek to steal our technology, as alleged in the complaint.”

BRUSSELS — The European Union’s cybersecurity agency and in-house research center have each begun experimenting with open artificial intelligence models from China, three EU officials have told POLITICO.

The Joint Research Centre (JRC) — the EU’s in-house scientific research center — is evaluating “publicly available open-weight models” originating from China, European Commission spokesperson Maciej Berestecki confirmed. The head of ENISA, the bloc’s agency responsible for cybersecurity, also said in an interview that his team was now testing Chinese AI.

The experiments with Chinese models at the JRC are part of a broader research project to evaluate artificial intelligence that also includes leading models from the United States and Europe, Berestecki said. “Models from different origins are included in a comparative scientific evaluation of their capabilities, performance, limitations and risks,” he said, adding that the JRC is also looking into their potential scientific applications.

AI safety and security — topics currently under intense scrutiny following a series of incidents in which advanced AI models hacked real-world networks during testing activities — are not the core focus of the JRC’s testing activities, according to a different Commission official, who was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive material.

Open-weight models are those whose core components are publicly released, allowing anyone to run the model and study how it works. China’s approach to AI has leaned more towards open models than the United States. Some major U.S. tech and AI companies, including chips giant NVIDIA, are investing in open-weight models.

Forced to choose

The U.S. and China are locked in a race to dominate in the technology, with Europe largely sitting on the sidelines. Without a viable European frontier model, European private and public organizations may be left to choose between American and Chinese providers for advanced AI applications.

In a recent speech, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen suggested Europe should not try to win the frontier AI race. A top German tech company told POLITICO this week it was dropping Europe’s leading AI lab Mistral in favor of open-source Chinese models.

The JRC has not entered into any “bespoke access” or licensing negotiations with the relevant Chinese developers, Berestecki said. The models are run on the center’s “secure, on-premises scientific infrastructure” and the Commission is not intending to use Chinese models for its own purposes, he added.

EU cyber agency ENISA — which has gained access to advanced models from top U.S. AI firms Anthropic, OpenAI and Google — is also experimenting with “a couple” of open-weight Chinese models, its executive director Juhan Lepassaar confirmed in an interview on Wednesday. 

JRC and ENISA have been tasked with working together to set up an AI testing platform under a recent EU action plan on AI and cyber, the European Commission’s attempt to respond to the growing concerns after a series of incidents involving AI systems breaking out of testing environments and breaking into other organizations’ digital systems.

The Trump administration has given its newly created “Super Intelligence Force” broad authority to determine how the tech industry and the federal government should address threats to national security and civil liberties posed by fast-evolving artificial intelligence technology, according to a charter obtained by POLITICO.

Three people familiar with discussions about the task force confirmed the document’s authenticity. The people were granted anonymity to share details that are not yet public.

The task force will identify “measures to improve the preparedness and response capability of both the government and the private sector to threats to the homeland and the American people,” the charter states. It will also produce a report on the risks of AI, focusing on “potential threats to civil liberties,” cybersecurity, standards for advanced models, and the impacts of possible overregulation.

The Wall Street Journal first reported on the details of the charter.

Both Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill were caught off guard by President Donald Trump’s announcement of the task force’s creation, with four tech-sector representatives telling POLITICO the industry was not widely informed beforeTrump’s social media post. Super intelligence is Trump’s preferred term for artificial intelligence.

The task force’s creation comes as major AI labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI have disclosed a spate of cybersecurity incidents related to new models with advanced hacking capabilities, sparking both industry leaders and lawmakers to call for a potential slowdown in AI development.

Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton will lead the task force in his newly minted role as the administration’s AI czar, with Under Secretary of Defense Emil Michael, Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor, and Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson serving as vice chairs.

Its members include administration officials across the federal government, including at the National Security Agency and the Health and Human Services Department. Senior White House officials, including Vice President JD Vance and chief of staff Susie Wiles, will also be closely involved. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and venture capitalist David Sacks, who served as the administration’s AI czar until March, will also provide “advice” to the group on national security and technology, respectively.

The task force will stand for 120 days, but its work can be extended – or functions transferred to another government agency – at Wiles’ direction, per the charter.

The task force will undertake work spanning financial services, energy infrastructure, transportation, agriculture and emergency services, per the charter, and will work with the Pentagon, the Justice Department, the Homeland Security Department and the Federal Trade Commission to outline its recommendations.

The document also calls out two risk areas that have come under increased scrutiny in recent months: biosecurity and threats to the water supply. OpenAI recently threw its weight behind a slate of bills aimed at preventing AI models from exacerbating the threat of biological weapons, and rival lab Anthropic disclosed several incidents in which scientists in foreign countries used their models to research dangerous pathogens.

The Trump administration also rolled out a program in August to protect vulnerable U.S. water facilities from cybersecurity threats, following a series of cyberattacks on local water systems across the country.

The task force will also be responsible for reviewing “the current protocols and mechanisms in place” for AI labs to notify the government of breaches, hacks and jailbreaks, in addition to developing recommendations for improvements to the government’s response to such incidents.

The document refers to the technology “as both an amplifier and accelerant of both risks and opportunities” but ultimately places responsibility for any risks associated with AI on the labs developing advanced models.

“Though the labs are ultimately responsible for the risks and opportunities that their models amplify and accelerate, it is the role of the federal government to recognize and understand this era of change and to enforce our nation’s laws so that the fundamental principles of our Republic are safeguarded and advanced,” the document reads.

France’s borrowing costs are surging as investors around the world wake up to the risk of a full-blown public debt crisis in Europe’s second-largest economy.

Stress in financial markets has now started to spread beyond its borders, raising fears that political dysfunction in France could cause a broader, regional problem.

Memories of the sovereign debt crisis that threatened the single currency’s survival 15 years ago are starting to stir. But is it really going to get that bad again?

Read on to find out. Alternatively, you can simply skip it and pretend it isn’t happening — but, hey, that’s what got us here in the first place …

Why is this happening?

France hasn’t run a balanced budget in more than 30 years.

It hasn’t been able to keep its budget deficit within the EU-agreed limit since 2019, due to the soaring costs of its pension system and challenges such as rearmament and the green transition. France’s debt burden is now so great — and growing so quickly — that some are starting to worry it can’t repay it all.

What happens if French woes get worse? Is Europe facing another existential crisis? Will the European Central Bank run to the rescue with “whatever it takes”? And will it be enough?

How bad is it?

Investor concerns about France’s fiscal and political impasse have ballooned.

For many years, investors considered Germany and France as roughly equivalent credits: The premium they demanded to hold 10-year French bonds over comparable German ones was measured in pennies. But since the pandemic, and more recently since President Emmanuel Macron’s disastrous gamble on early elections two years ago, it has started to increase — first gradually, now suddenly.

From 0.55 percentage points in mid-September, it had risen to 1.45 by Monday morning. It hasn’t been that high since the 2012 debt crisis.  In absolute terms, the French 10-year bond yield is nearly at 5 percent, the highest it’s been since 2008.

Concerns are serious enough for Bank of France Governor Emmanuel Moulin to warn that “everything must be done” to avert a debt crisis ahead of the 2027 presidential election.

You said it was spreading to the rest of Europe?

Well, it’s starting to.

France has been an outlier within Europe in recent weeks, but sovereign yield spreads — those country-specific risk premiums that investors demand — have also started to widen for Italy, Belgium and Greece. And there are signs that the markets are turning more negative on Europe in general as a result: the single currency hit a 17-month low against the dollar on Monday.

Are we in a crisis already?

The moves have been sharp, but the risk premium remains what one would consider crisis level.

The trouble is, bond prices — which move inversely to yields — can fall quickly when investors reassess risk. The ownership structure of French debt could also amplify a sell-off. Unlike Italy, where most government debt is held domestically, more than half of French debt is held by foreign investors who tend to head for the exit faster when things become shaky.

Sumitomo Mitsui DS Asset Management, one of Japan’s largest asset managers, said at the weekend it had sold all its French debt.  In case of accelerated sales — or even worse, forced sales — the risk of contagion to other eurozone member countries rises further.

Who ya gonna call? Spread-busters!

The widening so-called spreads between national sovereign bond yields have raised questions about whether and how the European Central Bank might stop the rot. The ECB’s Transmission Protection Instrument (TPI) allows it to buy government bonds in the secondary market to counter “unwarranted, disorderly” market dynamics — but only under certain conditions. Before the ECB can use it, the Bank has to determine that a country is pursuing sound and sustainable fiscal and economic policies. For France, that would require big adjustment measures that will be nigh-impossible to pull off ahead of the 2027 elections.

“Help would likely require real commitment to stability, through fiscal discipline, reforms or both. Getting that support won’t be easy politically,” said Allianz Global Investors. Chief Economist Christian Schulz.  

Stop (in the name of love for the euro)?

The ECB could also, in theory, intervene by using its balance sheet. For the last couple of years, it has allowed the bonds that it bought during years of “quantitative easing” to “run off” its balance sheet at the end of their lifetimes. That has forced governments to refinance the maturing debt in the markets instead. That increases the net supply of bonds to the market and adds to the upward pressure on yields.

Carsten Brzeski, ING’s global head of macro research, argued that the ECB could “pause quantitative tightening temporarily and reinvest maturing bonds in its portfolio ‘flexibly,’ sending a positive signal to bond markets.”

That possibility was also floated on Monday in an op-ed by Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, an Italian former member of the ECB’s board. It’s also at the heart of an appeal by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the far-left’s presidential candidate in France, for the ECB to put a chunk of government debt “in the freezer.”

What about interest rates?

Should the wider region be affected, the ECB could also use its other big, blunt instrument — interest rates — to keep borrowing costs down, analysts say.

“ECB action still looks a way off, but an early step would be to talk back some of the hikes priced in the market,” analysts at Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group wrote in a recent note. Markets have already sharply scaled back their bets on additional tightening, but ECB President Christine Lagarde took pains to leave the door open to further rate hikes at her last press conference — and with eurozone inflation hitting a three-year high of 3.8 percent in September, there will be a limit to how relaxed Frankfurt can be.

What’s the doomsday scenario?  

As Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Robin Brooks put it in a recent Substack post, the ECB cannot rush into every bailout.

“There’s got to be a period of demurral, like a debutante at the ball playing hard to get,” he argued. “This is the period we’re in right now.”

But he added, if supporting France is the only way to keep the euro together, that is what it will do — even at the cost of “outright horror in Germany and the rest of Northern Europe.”

LONDON — Britain and the U.S. sought to ease friction Monday after American bombers were suddenly moved amid major security concerns at the base that hosted U.S. aircraft used to strike Iran.

The U.S. move is the latest stumbling block in the special relationship between the allies and underscores reservations in Donald Trump’s administration about how the U.K. is handling its defense and security commitments.

The Pentagon confirmed on Sunday that it had removed all B-1 bombers from the RAF Fairford air base — where they were deployed to conduct what have been termed as “defensive” strikes against Iran — and sent them back to their home stations in America.

Trump went further, telling journalists Monday evening: “We had an idea that there might be a threat, and why would I leave them there? … If we’re going to be threatened we’re just going to move them, and that sort of alleviates that.”

It comes as Britain’s counter-terrorism agencies investigate a suspected terror plot against the air base, which the U.K. government believes involves Tehran.

Trump on Monday added: “We actually know the people that made the threat, and they’ve got themselves a big problem,” adding in response to a follow-up question: “They would be linked to Iran.”

He later said that he believes the U.K. is still a safe place for U.S. forces.

Downing Street had earlier insisted that the base was safe, but refused to comment directly on America’s decision to remove the bombers from the area.

The move comes as the Trump administration has grown increasingly frustrated with the U.K.’s defense spending and the White House’s continuing anger that the U.K. didn’t send warships to the Middle East to help with the American blockade of Iranian shipping.

Something deeper is wrong

London has yet to outline a path to meet the NATO standard of spending 3.5% of GDP on defense by 2035 — up from its current level of around 2.7%. It has also been shut out of a subgroup within the alliance convened by Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby. The group is slated to meet again in Poland some time later this month.

Late last month, Colby hinted at that frustration with London, saying the countries’ long history will continue to bind them, but the British government needs to make the case to its people for spending more on defense.

“There’s this incredible legacy, and that’s what we want to rekindle,” Colby said. “Exactly how you convince the British people [to spend more on defense] I would not presume to say, but … there’s probably sort of a degree of reconciliation between what the U.K. wants to be doing, what it spends, and what it spends on, because you know a modern military is not cheap.”

The U.S. is also conducting a sweeping review of its posture in European NATO countries — including the U.K. — which will determine the number of American troops and military assets on the continent.

Sophia Gaston, a senior national security researcher at King’s College London, said: “The Trump administration is undeniably sensitive to the costs of the Iran conflict as they head into the midterms next month, so their caution is understandable.

“It’s also hard not to, at some level, perceive a degree of uncertainty about the capacity of the British services to currently prevent such an attack. That partly reflects the innate challenge drones and other aspects of modern warfare pose to the sitting ducks of expensive kit.

“But it also speaks to the American wariness towards the pressured state of Britain’s military capabilities. Not only does Washington no longer wish to be solely responsible for allies’ protection, its expectations for the security allies offer its bases has also increased.”

Trump on Monday praised his relationship with new U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham. He said: “He’s liberal, very liberal, but I hear he’s going to open up North Sea oil if he does that in Aberdeen. If he does that, you’re going to have a rich country. If he doesn’t, you’re going to have a bankrupt country.”

Britain’s security concerns

In May, the U.K. raised its terrorism threat level to “severe” — meaning a terrorist attack is highly likely — after its MI5 security service said the U.K. had been “experiencing a gradual increase in terrorist threats for some time” including from hostile states like Iran.

In Britain, police and the security services are dealing with a three-fold threat from Iran-backed groups: attacks against Iranian dissidents, attacks against the country’s Jewish population, and the targeting of U.S. assets such as those used for strikes against Tehran.

Counter Terrorism Policing is currently investigating potential Iranian state involvement in a major incident at RAF Fairford on Sept. 27, when police were alerted to three suspicious vehicles near the base.

Six men — including a British-Iranian national — have so far been arrested on suspicion of terror offenses. All have subsequently been released on bail while police continue their investigation.

US strike capability

Though the Pentagon stressed that bombers remain “ready to deliver precision global strike capabilities” — including from the U.S. mainland — removing them would make any further American strikes on Iran more complex, since the bombers would have to double their flight path from the continental U.S. to the Middle East.

There is a fresh U.S. buildup in the region, with a third aircraft carrier currently steaming across the Pacific along with several large amphibious ships carrying 2,500 Marines, joining the 2,500 already at sea in the Middle East, giving President Donald Trump more options should he restart the bombing campaign after the U.S. midterm elections in early November.

Christoph Bergs, a research analyst at the RUSI defense think tank, said: “The basing of US B-1 bombers at RAF Fairford for operational employment against Iran was based on the UK stipulation that these were only used for defensive strikes. This likely included a more modest targeting list. Their withdrawal reduces the capacity to quickly surge sorties against Iran, reducing the threat level somewhat.”

The Pentagon declined to comment on whether it will, or is considering, the removal of other aircraft from British bases used to support operations against Iran.

This article has been updated with comments from Donald Trump.

Fifty European Union lawmakers, including 46 women, have been the targets of deepfake pornography, according to new research released Monday.

The number of women targeted by deepfake pornography — when generative AI is used to create sexually explicit depictions of people, often without their consent — means roughly one in six female members of the European Parliament have been affected, the report by Agora Digitale Transformation, a Germany-based civil society group, said.

The European Union is banning AI-powered nudifier apps on Dec. 2, and is also investigating similar use of Grok on the social media platform X.

A cross-party group of 119 MEPs called for effective enforcement of the ban and prompt resolution of the investigation into Grok, in a Sept. 30 letter sent to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the Council of the EU Antonio Costa, Parliament President Roberta Metsola, EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen and Commissioner Hadja Lalhbib. The signatories included leaders of the liberal Renew, the socialists, and The Left: Iratxe Garcia Pérez, Valérie Hayer, and Manon Aubry, respectively.

“There can’t be any loopholes or delays” in enforcing the ban, Austrian Greens MEP Lena Schilling, who also signed the letter, told reporters on Monday.

Politicians can’t opt out of having their likeness online, so it’s hard for them to avoid being targeted by AI nudifiers, said Benjamin Shultz, who co-authored the report.

Shultz said that to enforce the ban, the Commission needs to hold accountable all entities that, at times, inadvertently enable the nudifier industry. That also includes payment processors and domain registrars. The report said the Commission should also look into how to get search engines to de-index AI nudifier websites, meaning removing them from their databases.

Last Wednesday, the head of an AI tech company casually announced, in a long-winded post on X, a discovery that, if true, would represent a major breakthrough in biomedical research. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, wrote that his company’s large language model Claude had found “a molecular machine that we suspect could represent a new gene editing mechanism.” 

So what does this “molecular machine” actually do? No one is entirely sure yet. But that hasn’t stopped tech bros from already upholding it as a new version of CRISPR, the enzyme-wielding tool that cuts up DNA like nobody’s business, sparking a revolution in ultra-precise genetic modification that has spanned research in everything from agriculture to cancer therapy. It’s no surprise its discoverers earned a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. If an AI program really just made a similar discovery, it would be big news.

Indeed, Amodei goes on to say that this finding could be a step toward developing cures for most diseases in five to 10 years. The company’s press release goes into more detail, but basically says that Claude was prompted to search through a massive database of DNA sequences for reverse transcriptases, enzymes that copy RNA into DNA. “After 21 hours spent searching this data by roughly 950 agents using 210 million tokens, one of the agents spotted something remarkable: a repeating pattern of DNA sequences that occurs next to the gene for an odd-looking RT,” the statement reads. Except that nothing about that is so “remarkable,” at least according to numerous people who study and work in this field.

“It is too soon to say that Claude — or the team of human researchers involved has discovered a ‘new CRISPR,’” Dimitri Perrin, an associate professor at the Queensland University of Technology, writes in The Conversation. He goes on to emphasize that what Claude found — a previously uncharacterized enzyme system found in viruses that infect bacteria — isn’t necessarily going to be useful. More research is needed, but Perrin explains that for now, the discovery is “CRISPR-like in its architecture, but there is no evidence that it is CRISPR-like in its function.”

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“Claude’s work isn’t even close to being in the same league as DeepMind’s AlphaFold system for predicting protein structure, which is proving to be truly transformative,” Michael Le Page, a senior reporter at New Scientist, wrote. Social media exploded with other examples of people dunking on Anthropic’s PR, with Simon Maechling, a PhD chemist, writing on X, “Claude discovered something in biology. Nobody knows what it does. But we already have the press release. … Finding something interesting isn’t the same as understanding it. Understanding it isn’t the same as showing it works. And showing it works isn’t the same as making it useful.”

Perhaps AI researcher Timnit Gebru summarized it best: “Please see what experts in this field are saying about this ‘discovery’ and not these scammers or press stenographers. This hype DDOS from them isn’t going to stop any time soon and we’ve seen how the mainstream media is doing press-release-as-a-service at this point.”

So it seems like Anthropic is making some pretty bold claims over something that is mildly cool and worth investigating, but at this point, also seems unlikely to revolutionize medicine or science. Why does this matter? A tech company making extreme claims is far from new. Big deal. But contrast all this hype (not to mention the energy spent debunking it) with the buzz just a few weeks ago about how, in just a few years, AI will supposedly gain sentience and kill off humanity. Consider how Anthropic CEO’s Amodei is among those pushing such a narrative, including warning that his company’s tools carry a risk of being used for cyberattacks or terrorism, including developing deadly viruses. Taken together, this presents a false dichotomy: AI will either end disease and suffering or inflict it in untold measure. Might there be a third option?

For anyone who buys the AI spiel, it’s a tool with boundless power. For now, however, the tech companies still rely on an old-fashioned kind of power offered by the state, which is precisely why other tech CEOs were seen sucking up to Chinese President Xi Jinping during his recent U.S. vacation. Amodei missed meeting Xi, for what it’s worth, but had a private dinner with President Donald Trump late Sunday night and later this week joined other tech leaders for a luncheon hosted by Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson. There — joined by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and others — the president signed a “morally binding” artificial intelligence document, which sounds promising, until you hear Trump repeatedly tell reporters that tech companies can supervise themselves. “The self-regulation is very important,” Trump said. The document signed seems to have zero enforcement or legal mechanisms, so in this context, it appears “morally binding” just means “self-policing.” 

 

It’s no mystery why the president — heavily invested in the AI industry as he acridly dismisses any notion of regulation — is cozy with the idea of AI’s alleged abilities. In his latest effort to sell the American public on the coming “golden age” of AI (of course Trump would use that phrase), on Monday the Trump administration both launched America.gov, an AI chatbot powered by Google’s Gemini and Elon Musk’s Grok, and signed an executive order to rename AI “super intelligence.”

As Gebru observed, the grift has no end. All the more reason to pour cold water on outrageous claims about flagging little enzymes in huge databases. (Let’s avoid anthropomorphizing these programs by using the verb “discover.”) The goal of Anthropic’s AI propaganda — because that’s what it is — is to get most people skimming past the headlines to only catch “AI finds new CRISPR” and think a cure for cancer and world peace are right around the corner. All we have to do is hand the keys and all our money to Silicon Valley. Whether it’s utopia or dystopia, that’s the pitch: cede control of this tech to the billionaires in charge. In that sense, blindly swallowing AI’s positive hype can be as dangerous as its alleged existential risks.

The post AI hype promises miracles. That’s as risky as doomsday talk appeared first on Salon.com.

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Unpermissioned research (permalink)

After half a century of neoliberalism, we are all drenched in capitalism's established religion, the worship of property rights. We are so marinated in property worship that even capitalism's critics frame their critiques in "property talk," to the exclusion of other, more important rights, like human rights, labor rights and privacy rights.

To do this is to surrender before the battle even starts. Critics lose when they allow oligarchs and their apologists to choose a battlefield where they have a nearly unbeatable advantage.

Take privacy: privacy is a human right, not a property right. Human rights aren't for sale. You can't sell yourself into slavery, you can't sell your kidneys to make the rent. If privacy is a property right – one that can be traded away – then Facebook's industrial-scale privacy invasions are actually fine, since you "traded" your privacy to Mark Zuckerberg in exchange for the privilege of talking to your friends.

Some self-styled critics of tech monopolists say that the answer to Facebook's privacy invasions is to force the company to pay for your privacy with cash, rather than services:

https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-andrew-yangs-plan-to-pay-you-for-your-data-doesnt-add-up/

This is ideological capture in its purest form: the "data dividend" that Facebook would owe you under this system amounts to a few dollars per year. For wealthy people, the sums would be trivial, while working people, who've been on the downward leg of every K-shaped recovery for a quarter century, who've maxed out their credit cards and re-mortgaged their homes and drive Uber on the weekends to make rent, would have to subject themselves to ongoing surveillance.

That surveillance is already used to determine the highest price those working people will pay – companies like Plexure inform fast food places when you've just gotten paid so they can tack an extra dollar onto your breakfast burrito in the app:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/30/something-must-be-done/#there-ive-done-something

Being forced to sell your privacy doesn't just raise the prices you pay, it also lowers the wages you earn. The same people who can't afford this "pay or privacy" system have their private data used to calculate the lowest wage they'll accept for each ride on those weekend Uber shifts:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point

In other words: not being able to afford privacy will result in you having even less disposable income, which will mean that you'll have to sell even more of your privacy. Lather, rinse, repeat.

But even the wealthy people who can afford to forego the pittances Facebook and others offer in exchange for their private information will find privacy elusive. That's because private information isn't a "rival good" – a thing only one person can own at a time. The fact that your mother is your mother "belongs" to both you and her, as well as your grandparents, your father, your siblings and your kids. The fact that you don't sell your family tree to a tech company won't stop all those other people from selling it on – as anyone whose foolish relations handed their genome over to 23andme can attest:

https://www.npr.org/2025/03/24/nx-s1-5338622/23andme-bankruptcy-genetic-data-privacy

In the property religion, the way you can tell if something is valuable is if it has a high price. Property cultists insist that the problem with privacy is that our privacy is being sold too cheaply. They're wrong: private information isn't "mispriced" – it shouldn't be priced.

Human beings are the most valuable things in our world and they are literally priceless. Murder isn't "theft of life." Rape isn't "theft of sex." While insurers and civil courts have ways of calculating the "price" of an injury or violation, great care has been taken over the centuries to ensure that this does not turn human beings into commodities. You can't buy a "murder offset" that lets you kill people provided you pay into a fund that saves a human somewhere else:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy

Human beings are too valuable to be priced. We have an entire, sui generis way of balancing the conflicting interests of human rights. My daughter and wife have rights over me, I have rights over them, and when those rights come into conflict – say, if my daughter believes I can no longer care for myself and wants to put me in a care home – the process for resolving that conflict isn't an auction:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/feb/21/intellectual.property

Your kids aren't your property. In fact, all the most important relationships in your life are non-market. Doctors have patients, not customers. Any time a doctor calls you a "customer" they are demoting you. A doctor doesn't sell you health. You have rights as a patient that far exceed the rights accruing to a mere customer. Same goes for other professions: Teachers have pupils, librarians have patrons, lawyers have clients. "Customer" is a demotion from all of these.

As every "user agreement" you've ever clicked through demonstrates, Big Tech loves to have everything defined in property terms – and so does all big business.

Take the fight over scraping for AI. You might think that this is a fight over the economic rights of creative workers – certainly, my fellow creative workers treat it as such. But because this debate is being framed in terms of property rights, rather than labor rights, this is a fight that workers are set up to lose.

The tell here is how the media companies – who have been eroding the wages of creative workers for decades as they consolidated into a curdled, inbred oligopoly – describe the AI companies' scraping: as an unlicensed taking. Mitch Glazier, the $1.4m/year CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America issues press releases decrying AI training for image generators without negotiating a license fee first:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/03/its-a-trap-2/#inheres-at-the-moment-of-fixation

Who's Mitch Glazier? Oh, just a former Congressional staffer who was drummed out of the Capitol Building after he snuck a clause into must-pass legislation that would have transferred hundreds of millions of dollars from musicians to record labels, who was then immediately hired as the CEO of the record industry's largest lobbying group:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/12/tpps-attack-artists-termination-rights

Mitch Glazier – and the businesses he represents – aren't opposed to AI replacing artists. They're opposed to AI replacing media companies. Remember the Hollywood writers' strike? The proposal to replace screenwriters with chatbots didn't come from OpenAI, it came from Disney, Warner, Universal and other companies who claim that AI training is "theft."

If AI training is "theft," then it can be cured by making a purchase, something that the AI companies can easily afford, thanks to the hundreds of billions of dollars they have been given by the world's richest investors, who are the high priests and cardinals of the property religion.

The Hollywood writers are the only workers in the world who have successfully beaten back the use of AI in their workplace, and they didn't do it by making recourse to property rights. The Writers Guild is a union and it enjoys a weak form of "sectoral bargaining" (where all the workers in a field bargain with all the businesses at once) called "multi-employer bargaining":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/

The Hollywood writers' strike was an unqualified victory for the writers, who defended their labor rights to co-determination when it came to the use of new tools on their jobsite. Under the terms of their hard-fought contract, screenwriters don't have to use AI, but they can if they want. For example, writers on a long-running sitcom might train an AI with every script in the series' history, so they can ask a chatbot continuity questions as they beat out a new season of the show. But they don't have to do this if they don't want to, and even if they do, neither their wages nor their headcount can be reduced.

The media companies insist that scraping is a copyright violation, that it's "theft." As a matter of law, this is far from obvious or settled: the process of making transient copies of many works, performing mathematical analysis on them, and then publishing that analysis as software is not obviously a copyright violation, and anyone who claims otherwise doesn't understand copyright:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

Worse: by demoting a labor rights issue to a mere property rights issue, AI critics are setting workers up to fail. Say the issue with AI training really is mere copyright. If that's so, the media companies who want nothing better than to pauperize creative workers can amend their standard contracts so that any worker who does business with them must irrevocably transfer their "AI training rights" to the company.

Then, that company will absolutely, 100% license those rights to an AI company to create a model designed to replace that worker. The company will get paid for the training, and the resulting model will come with "guardrails" to stop other media companies from using proprietary data to compete with it.

This is the story of the past 50 years of copyright expansion: every new copyright we've created "to help artists" was scooped up by their bosses, who grew more powerful and were able to demand more concessions from those artists, who were therefore poorer and thus needed more copyrights to help them (lather, rinse, repeat):

https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/18/enron-corpus/#sign-here

If creative workers' AI fight is merely a copyright fight, then that fight can only determine whether media companies or tech companies will get the biggest portion when those workers are devoured by corporations. Only a labor rights fight can take creative workers off the menu altogether.

Treating AI training as "theft" creates harms whose blast radius extends well beyond creative workers' livelihoods. Scraping is a hugely beneficial activity. If scraping – taking a vast corpus of copyrighted works without permission – is theft, then every search engine is a crime, unless it can afford to license "search indexing rights" from every site on the internet.

There's exactly one company that could pull that off: Google, a rapacious tech monopolist that is – not coincidentally – one of the leaders of the movement to beggar every creative worker. We will not improve the world, the internet, or creative workers' lives by ensuring that the last search engine anyone ever creates is Google.

Remember our earlier discussion of how privacy violations are weaponized to make poor people even poorer, by depressing their wages and raising prices based on inferences about their economic desperation? Our best weapon for fighting this practice is scraping, because that's how we catch corporations changing prices and wages based on surveillance data:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

Scraping is how we produce evidence of the changes that powerful people are making to the world around us. Do you want to know whether Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk are downranking content critical of Trump and Big Tech and pumping racist and conspiratorial posts into the resulting void? You'd better hope you can scrape the feeds they cram into billions of people's eyeballs. Same goes for keeping track of genocide apologists, data-center astroturfers and ICE cheerleaders who've flooded Tiktok ever since Trump stole it and handed it over to his creepy billionaire pal Larry Ellison.

Making copies of that stuff isn't theft. It's not a copyright violation. Not even if you do it to billions of works. Not even if it's bad for the companies whose feeds you're capturing. Not even if it's bad for the dark money groups who funded the content.

Sure, if you do this carelessly or recklessly, you can end up violating someone's labor rights, or privacy rights, or human rights. And because those frameworks aren't based on the sanctity of property rights, they can be used to protect these important rights without giving corporate America the right to have you fined or arrested for documenting their takeover of the America.

The people who keep track of this stuff are worried about being fined or arrested. Ethan Zuckerman, one of America's foundational internet scholars, has just accepted Canadian government funding to move his lab from UMass to McGill in Montreal:

https://ethanzuckerman.com/2026/08/27/my-personal-contribution-to-the-us-canada-trade-war/

Zuckerman studies platform power: "using data to answer hard questions about social media, search engines and AI tools." He leads a team that is documenting exactly, precisely how tech companies collude with authoritarians to spy on us, manipulate us, and control us. And his methodology is something called "unpermissioned research," which is what academics call scraping:

https://www.techpolicy.press/ai-companies-threaten-independent-social-media-research/

"Unpermissioned research" seeks to circumvent limits that platforms establish specifically to stop outsiders from learning how they operate. When you're doing unpermissioned research, you try to get around rate limits, query throttles, and other measures that platforms use to block others from mapping their extent and documenting their conduct.

"Unpermissioned research" isn't a free-for-all. Universities have ethical rules designed to protect the privacy rights and other human rights of research subjects, and because these aren't property rights, they can be balanced against the socially beneficial outcomes of research. Universities can get this wrong, of course, but when they do, it's not theft. It's a human rights violation, a privacy violation, a labor violation.

If you want to know how AI companies are trying to destroy creators' livelihoods, you have to scrape the AI companies. You can't ask companies for permission to gather information that might be used to destroy them – they'll just say no. If taking information off the internet without permission is "theft," then gathering information by scraping AI companies is also theft.

Sometimes a tech company will set up a "research portal" that supposedly obviates the need to scrape by putting all the relevant information in one convenient place. That's what Facebook did in the wake of the 2016 election, when it was widely condemned for publishing paid political disinformation. But Facebook's official research portal omitted vast amounts of paid political disinformation, something we only know because NYU set up a scraping project called Ad Observer that documented the discrepancy:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/06/get-you-coming-and-going/#potemkin-research-program

Facebook used legal threats to kill Ad Observer, and then…they killed their official research portal, too:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/15/three-wise-zucks-in-a-trenchcoat/#inconvenient-truth

Zuckerman is one of dozens of leading US academics who are relocating their labs and teams to Canadian universities, citing fear of political interference from the Trump regime:

https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2026/08/27/canada-recruits-dozens-of-foreign-scientists-researchers-poaching-many-from-u-s/

The Canadian government has committed $504m to the project. Some of that research will help Canada develop new green energy, and some of it will help Canada make important medical breakthroughs. But Zuckerman's research has a special place in the portfolio of Canadian research projects, because – thanks to scraping – it is a leading source of information about how Trump's tech companies are waging war on the American people and the world.

Scraping isn't theft of data, just like murder isn't theft of life. Scraping can be harmful, and we can create laws and social regimes and ways of talking about those harms that don't give authoritarian governments and vast multinational corporations the right to decide who can document and analyze their conduct.

Take Wikipedia: the project exists solely to organize and disseminate information, for free, to everyone in the world. Wikipedia is among the most important parts of the internet, and one of the most positive developments of the 21st century. The entire project is licensed under a generous Creative Commons license that encourages unlimited commercial re-use of its contents. Even if you think scraping copyrighted works is theft, scraping Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 works is unquestionably not theft.

But Wikipedia is being hammered by AI scrapers, which are operating so aggressively that they threaten the project's ability to keep its servers online. Wikipedia has an AI problem, but that AI problem isn't "theft" – it's denial of service, the aggressive act of intentionally or recklessly flooding a server with so much traffic that it crashes.

If you've been lured into a cultlike worship of property rights, this seems like a contradiction. But once you relegate the relatively unimportant matter of property rights to its correct station, you can see – and reason about – the universe of rights that are far more important than mere property.

All it takes is realizing that there are far worse things you can do with information than "stealing" it.

(Image: Bearas, CC BY-SA 4.0, modified)

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• Meta's $17 Billion Settlement is a Bad Deal for Teens and All Social Media Users https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/09/metas-17-billion-settlement-bad-deal-teens-and-all-social-media-users

• New Twitter launches, says Musk’s X gave up the name https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/new-twitter-launches-says-musks-x-gave-up-the-name/

• For The Economist, Mentioning Workers’ Interests Is Heresy https://jacobin.com/2026/08/acemoglu-economics-ai-automation-working-class

• How Youth and Educators Can Fight Enshittified Tech https://clalliance.org/blog/how-youth-and-educators-can-fight-enshittified-tech/

• Stalking the Wily Hacker: 40 years later – Cliff Stoll https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=656058JxTM0

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Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago NYT says ebooks don't exist, fails to mention thriving ebook pirate scene https://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/28/business/forecasts-of-an-e-book-era-were-it-seems-premature.html

#25yrsago Parking tickets waived in exchange for written apologies https://web.archive.org/web/20010826013513/http://www.thesmokinggun.com/doc_o_day/lewiston1.shtml

#20yrsago "I, Row-Boat" https://web.archive.org/web/20060000000000*/http://www.flurb.net/1/doctorow.htm

#20yrsago Filipino students use SMS to organize mass demonstrations https://web.archive.org/web/20060902160514/http://blog.wired.com/sterling/index.blog%3Fentry_id%3D1545927

#20yrsago Spam pump-and-dumps work http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5284618.stm

#25yrsago Leaked: Handspring's next PalmOS device https://web.archive.org/web/20020824213501/http://www.palmstation.com/view_article.asp?article=4614

#15yrsago “Stalwart Workers”: neglected backbone of the firm https://web.archive.org/web/20110920155246/http://blogs.hbr.org/hbsfaculty/2011/08/stop-ignoring-the-stalwart-wor.html

#5yrsago Facebook's war on switching costs https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/28/talking-hard-work-blues/#hostage-takers

#5yrsago The "work ethic" is a dirty trick we play on ourselves https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/28/talking-hard-work-blues/#work-will-set-you-free

#1yrago The capitalism of fools https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/28/strew-deal/#neither-fish-nor-fowla

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Dąbrowa Górnicza, Kongres Regeneracja! to interdyscyplinarna, Sep 5
  https://regeneracja.plse.org.pl/

• Warsaw: Romana i Jana Podoskich, Sep 6
  https://wydarzenia.phub.pl/events/0ee0e198-f843-423a-890f-c84ff50a46c0

• Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
  https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/

• London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
  https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn

• Budapest: Brain Bar, Sep 17
  https://brainbar.com/munkatars/cory-doctorow

• South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
  https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

• Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7
  https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK=

• Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20
  https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020

• Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
  https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• How Tech Platforms Took Over the Economy (Dystopia Now)
  https://sites.libsyn.com/566555/enshittification-and-reverse-centaurs-cory-doctorow-on-how-tech-platforms-took-over-the-economy

• Hope, AI, Fixing the Internet and the Reverse Centaur of it all (Wilosophy)
  https://podcastaddict.com/everyone-relax/episode/231414816

• Deflating the AI Bubble (Do Not Pass Go)
  https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/deflating-the-ai-bubble-with-cory

• Technofeudal Enshittification (Fucking Cancelled)
  https://www.fuckingcancelled.com/p/technofeudal-enshittification-with

• Who The Machine Serves (EFF)
  https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-who-the-machine-serves

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Latest books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

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Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

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Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 527 (10843 total).

• "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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