Justin Hendrix

@justinhendrix.bsky.social

136297 Followers 1546 Following

Concerned with tech, media and democracy. CEO & Editor at Tech Policy Press. Research & Adjunct Professor at NYU Tandon School of Engineering. Opinions mine.

image of a man praying at a table is actually Grace, a 1918 photograph by Eric Enstrom
A hazy NYC skyline looking east from third avenue
A digital weather station display showing outdoor conditions: temperature 105°F, heat index 118°F, and 38% humidity. Wind readings show 0 mph for current, average, and peak. The bottom section displays a partly sunny forecast icon and a barometric pressure reading of 29.94 with a steady trend arrow. The screen glows blue against a dark background.
Line chart showing the V-Dem Liberal Democracy Index for the United States versus the Western Europe and North America regional average, 1955–2025. The US line rises from about 0.51 in 1955 to a peak near 0.85 by the early 2010s, then drops sharply in two red-marked periods under Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0, plunging to roughly 0.57 in 2025 — a level last seen in the mid-1960s, as indicated by a dashed horizontal line tracing the 2025 value back in time.
WSJ: Three Mamdani candidates win
The world Musk wants you to see is a world in which the beneficiaries of decades of economic and social liberalisation are not billionaires in Silicon Valley (as one might otherwise reasonably suspect), but immigrants working multiple low-paid jobs (possibly for a giant tech company) in order to pay their rising housing costs. In other words, Musk’s support for Robinson and Rupert Lowe’s new far-right Restore Britain party, his incendiary rhetoric about immigrants, is not ideology — or not just ideology. It’s deflection.
Notification issued 06-18-2026 at 08:01 AM. Knicks Parade: All viewing pens are full. No one else will be allowed in the viewing area. As a reminder, if you leave the viewing pens, you will not be allowed reentry. There are no trains stopping south of Canal St in Manhattan.
But Anthropic later disclosed that the list had ballooned and roughly 50 additional entities had already received access. Senior officials began to consider using export controls to claw back the technology after the company did not identify the new recipients for days. When Anthropic finally turned over the names, the administration discovered that one recipient was a South Korean telecommunications company the administration suspected of having ties to China, the officials said. Anthropic quickly revoked the firm’s access to Mythos, said a person close to Anthropic, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the deliberations. But the episode badly damaged officials’ confidence in the company’s ability to safeguard sensitive technology.
If this is true, it is just baffling. An administration whose posture is that we *should* export advanced AI chips to China, which also wants to ban… Britain (and every other non-American on Earth)… from using our best models? I have no words.
Anthropic Blocks Foreign Nationals From Using Its Mythos and Fable 5 A.I. Systems The San Francisco company said on Friday night that the federal government ordered the suspension of the two A.I. systems, citing national security concerns.
Speaking in north-west France on Saturday to mark the 82nd anniversary of the D-day landings, Hegseth seized on the moment marking the wartime liberation of Europe to reiterate the US administration’s longstanding attack on European immigration policies. “Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different, dangerous ideologies,” Hegseth told those gathered at the American military cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer. “Beaches in Spain, Italy, Greece and Bulgaria, boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion, or is it too late? I pray not, and I believe not,” he said. “The men who fought and died here restored freedom to Europe,” added Hegseth, a former Fox News host. “That freedom must be maintained by this generation of leaders and war fighters, or what they fought for was merely temporary.” The remarks were swiftly condemned on social media. The English historian, author and television presenter Simon Schama described them as a “special kind of loathsomeness: a blend of historical deafness, grotesque stupidity and comically ludicrous self-importance”.
Sign protesting Palantir surveillance
Even more astounding, according to former U.S. officials and others familiar with the issue, is that Rush’s duties at the CIA included involvement in one of the government’s most sensitive intelligence-gathering programs, a project so secret that only a handful of U.S. intelligence officials and lawmakers knew of its existence, according to four people familiar with the matter. Details of that program — separate from the fake project Rush allegedly created — remain highly classified. The Washington Post is withholding details about the program after U.S. officials warned that disclosure could jeopardize ongoing intelligence-gathering operations.
So will democracy survive the internet? Perhaps, but the available evidence calls for robust protective action, such as debiasing algorithms and devising tools to help people be better calibrated to the prevalence of their own views, lest we end up in a polarized and fractured authoritarian society
The answer may have something to do with platform algorithms, such as curated newsfeeds (e.g., on Facebook) or ranking of posts (e.g., the “for you” feed on X). Algorithms have long been in the sights of researchers and regulators as potential culprits of polarization because of their opacity and their known focus on maximizing user engagement and platform dwell time with little regard for the quality of curated content.
178. Even today, colonialism assumes new forms. It no longer dominates only bodies, but appropriates data, transforming personal lives into exploitable information. Entire regions, especially those marked by structural fragility and limited geopolitical relevance, are currently subjected to a new mindset of extraction: that of health data, epidemiological profiles, genetic maps and demographic information. These have become the new “rare earths” of power: vital data which, once aggregated and analyzed, can be used to train predictive models, guide investment strategies, anticipate crises and, above all, determine who and what is deemed to matter. Those who control the health data of entire peoples — often collected under the pretext of aid, research or innovation — possess a structural leverage over the future, for they can shape needs and markets. They can also decide, before others, to whom medicines, investments and protections will be allocated. Here lies one of the most urgent moral challenges of our time: to ensure that shared knowledge becomes a true common good rather than an instrument of dominance. This requires restoring to individuals not only the data that describes them, but also the ability to decide how it is used, by whom and
The search for truth is an essential element of democracy, which is itself a means of contributing to the common good. When questions about what is true lose their appeal, and a pragmatism takes hold that is content with what appears useful or effective, then democratic life is weakened. After all, democracy does not consist of rules and procedures alone, but above all of a solid concordance with the facts and a genuine commitment to the good of individuals and society as a whole. Indifference to the truth leads, slowly but surely, to a descent into totalitarianism. As the philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote, the ideal subjects of such regimes are not so much those who are ideologically convinced, but rather “people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” [
None of the individuals with drilled teeth appear to have come from a special tomb or sanctuary, indicating that the oral care they received was available to all.
Scatter plot from the Nature study showing that LLMs give more favorable responses about a country when prompted in that country's language — and the effect is strongest in countries with less press freedom. X-axis: World Press Freedom Index, divided into five bands from "Very serious" (left) to "Good" (right). Y-axis: percentage of model responses that were more favorable when prompted in the country's official language than in English. Main panel (GPT-3.5): about 40 countries trend downward from left to right. Turkmenistan, Vietnam, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan cluster around 75-80%. Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland sit around 28-40%. Orange dots with error bars mark band averages, falling from roughly 68% in "Very serious" to about 42% in "Good." A dashed horizontal line marks 50%. Three smaller panels at right repeat the analysis for GPT-4o, Claude Opus and Claude Sonnet. GPT-4o and Opus show similar but somewhat flatter downward trends. Sonnet's points are tightly clustered near the bottom across all press-freedom bands, showing little language-based favoritism.
Whether AGI will arrive matters less than what waiting for it already organizes. Waiting coordinates belief by sustaining investment and economic expectation; it structures time by orienting research and policy toward a future that remains permanently forthcoming; it organizes knowledge by keeping disagreement open and thresholds unsettled; it defers responsibility by attaching accountability to a moment that never quite materializes; and it reproduces social roles whose authority depends on continued anticipation rather than present judgmen
“Musk loves to be glazed, and this person is the doughnut factory,” Joan Donovan, assistant professor of journalism and emerging media studies at Boston University, said of XFreeze. She described the account’s adulation of Musk as a “cultural hack,” and added, “Its very clear to me that this communication is for one person alone
Paris, le 7 mai 2026 Par réquisitoire introductif du 6 mai 2026, le parquet de Paris a ouvert une information judiciaire concernant le fonctionnement de la plateforme « X », des chefs de Complicité de détention de l'image d'un mineur présentant un caractère pédo pornographique, ainsi que de diffusion, offre ou mise à disposition en bande organisée d'image de mineur présentant un caractère pornographique Collecte de données à caractère personnel par un moyen frauduleux, déloyal ou illicite Traitement de données à caractère personnel sans mesure assurant la sécurité de données Extraction frauduleuse de données d'un système de traitement automatisé de données en bande organisée Violation du secret des correspondances émises, transmises ou reçues par voie électronique Falsification du fonctionnement d'un système de traitement automatisé de données en bande organisée Diffusion, par service de communication au public en ligne, d'un montage ou contenu généré par traitement algorithmique à caractère sexuel reproduisant l'image ou les paroles d'une personne non consentante Administration d'une plateforme en ligne pour permettre des transactions illicites, en bande organisée Contestation de crime contre l'humanité, facilitée par l'intelligence artificielle Grok Le parquet de Paris requiert des juges d'instruction la mise en examen des sociétés X.AI Holdings Corp, X Corp et X AI, d'Elon MUSK et de Linda YACCARINO, en les convoquant à cet effet et pour recueillir leurs observations, ou, en cas de carence, en délivrant mandat valant mise en examen. Il est encore une fois rappelé que cette procédure, ouverte sur la base de signalements à la justice, s'inscrit dans l'objectif de faire respecter le droit et de protéger les personnes victimes d'infraction, tant en ligne que dans la vie réelle. Il importe pour cela d'obtenir des plateformes leur mise en conformité avec la législation s'appliquant sur le territoire national. Laure BECCUAU, Procureure de la République
On Thursday, the Zambian news site News Diggers! published a report citing “well-placed sources” that told the outlet “the Summit has actually been cancelled because the programme involves Taiwanese delegates who would potentially speak against China at a venue donated by the Chinese government.” And a statement issued Thursday by the advocacy organization Article 19 noted, “We are aware of claims, many of them well-founded, that pressure from foreign governments contributed to the Zambian government’s decision.” Tech Policy Press has not been able to independently verify these reports. According to a database of Chinese foreign investments maintained at the College of William and Mary, China donated $30 million for construction of the Mulungushi International Conference Center, where RightsCon was to take place. It represents one of hundreds investments in Zambian infrastructure, which total nearly $13 billion over the past decade, according to the William and Mary researchers.
Tweet from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth saying "We are discarding the mandatory flu vaccine requirement, effective immediately.
Chart from Mother Jones showing the net worth of seven billionaires from 2020 to 2026. A large chart at the top tracks Elon Musk, whose wealth climbs from near $0 in 2020 to roughly $220 billion by 2022, dips slightly through 2024, then surges sharply to $830 billion in 2026. Six smaller charts below show the same 2020–2026 span with more modest upward trends: Larry Page ($249 billion), Sergey Brin ($230 billion), Jeff Bezos ($223 billion), Mark Zuckerberg ($218 billion), Larry Ellison ($193 billion), and Jensen Huang ($156 billion). All charts use red shaded area graphs.
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Podcast graphic for Tech Policy Press: "What to Do If the AI Bubble Bursts" by Justin Hendrix
The Edge of Space-Time by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
FCC to Investigate Shows Where the Mom Has Job (Onion)
The United States of America (USA) stands out as a conspicuous example. It is an exceptional new autocratizer due to both far-reaching changes in 2025 and their implications for the rest of the world. The extensive damage already done to American democracy under the second Trump presidency – in just one year – stands out on the world map (Figure 10). Typically, autocratizing countries of the “third wave” have taken about a decade to make such a deep dive, and the speed of decline is comparable to some coups d´états.2 Section
A V-Dem report slide combining bullet-point findings with a line chart titled 'Figure 22. USA vs. Regional Average, 1955–2025.' The chart plots the Liberal Democracy Index for the United States (solid black line, turning red in the 2015–2025 period to mark democratic decline under Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0) against the Western Europe and North America regional average (dashed blue line), with grey shading indicating confidence intervals. A dotted horizontal line traces the 2025 score back to its historical equivalent. The U.S. line peaks around 2015 near 0.85 before dropping sharply to approximately 0.58 by 2025. Bullet points to the left summarize key findings: U.S. democracy has fallen to 1965 levels; the speed of decline is unprecedented in modern history; Legislative Constraints have lost one-third of their value and hit a 100-year low; Civil Rights and Equality before the Law have fallen to late 1960s levels; and Freedom of Expression is at its lowest point since the end of WWII.
A choropleth world map titled "Figure 1. State of Liberal Democracy (LDI) in 2025." Countries are shaded on a diverging color scale from dark red (score near 0, least liberal democratic) through light pink/white (around 0.5) to dark navy blue (score near 1, most liberal democratic). Nordic countries (Norway, Sweden, Finland) and Western Europe appear in the darkest blue, indicating the highest LDI scores. Russia, China, Central Asian nations, and much of the Middle East are shaded in the darkest red, indicating the lowest scores. Sub-Saharan Africa is predominantly red to light red. Canada appears in medium purple, suggesting mid-to-high scores. The US and several other countries are light purple, indicating they are electoral democracies, not liberal democracies. South America is mixed, with some countries in light purple and others in red. Australia and New Zealand are medium-to-dark blue.
Democracy is back to 1978 levels for the average global citizen. The gains of the “third wave of democratization” starting 1974 in Portugal, are almost eradicated. - The level of democracy for the average citizen in Western Europe and North America is at its lowest level in over 50 years, primarily due to ongoing autocratization in the USA. - The USA loses its long-term status as a liberal democracy – for the first time in over 50 years. - The world has 92 autocracies and 87 democracies at the end of 2025. - Nearly three quarters of the world population (74%, or 6 billion) live in autocracies. - There are now more people living in closed autocracies (28%, or 2.3 billion) than in electoral and liberal democracies combined (26%, or 2.2 billion). - Only 7% of the world population (0.6 billion) live in liberal democracies. - Freedom of expression continues to be the most attacked aspect of democracy, worsening in 44 countries by 2025.
V-Dem Institute - Democracy Report 2026: Unraveling The Democratic Era?
US suffers additional casualties in war it wom last week- The Onion
News Why Ohio gave $4.5M to a data center project that will create just 10 jobs Updated: Mar. 09, 2026, 1:54 p.m.|Published: Mar. 09, 2026, 8:30 a.m.
An Ohio suburb approved a data center; Now a gas plant is going up next to the elementary school
Tehran changed irrevocably after 2009. Following a year of mass protests against the disputed presidential election that returned Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power, CCTV cameras proliferated across the capital. Surveillance systems rapidly expanded into universities, schools, kindergartens, cafés, and restaurants. Business owners were permitted to operate only if they granted security forces access to their footage. Urban space was folded into an integrated architecture of monitoring and control. That same year, without the knowledge of Iranian authorities, the Stuxnet worm infiltrated the Natanz nuclear facilities, marking the first confirmed instance of a cyberweapon causing physical destruction of critical infrastructure. It was a watershed moment: digital code had crossed decisively into kinetic effect. On March 2, the Financial Times reported that Tehran’s traffic cameras had been compromised for years by Israeli intelligence—by the same unit that had run Stuxnet. Detailed knowledge of the movements of Ali Khamenei reportedly enabled a targeted strike at his residence. If accurate, this represents a striking inversion: surveillance systems built for internal repression repurposed for external attack.
The war in Iran and the wider Middle East is full-stack evidence that the contemporary battlefield is increasingly privatized. Whether in predictive targeting, situational awareness, information warfare, or related domains, many of these emerging warfighting capabilities are increasingly developed, operated, and supplied by the private sector. And yet, who holds private companies accountable when the very states meant to regulate them are also hiring them as subcontractors? Today’s generation of venture-backed defense tech firms is, unlike traditional arms contractors, embedded deeply and continuously in the battlefield in real time – integrated from the software layer upward. Take the role of AI, which now plays a central role in the war in Iran. Anthropic may have recently red-lined the Pentagon’s use of its systems for autonomous weapons and the mass surveillance of Americans, but its technology has effectively empowered an illegal attack on the sovereign nation of Iran, ultimately leading to the overthrow and death of its Supreme Leader. And it’s not the first time this year that this San Francisco-based company has been used in an operation that illegally overthrew a foreign leader: its intelligence analysis, planning, and decision-support tasks were reportedly part of Trump’s arsenal in the Maduro overthrow. The privatization of warfare extends beyond software or the algorithm. No doubt if there are boots on the ground in Iran, troops may soon be using Meta + Anduril wearables to enhance soldier perception and decision-making on the streets of Tehran. These companies form and will continue to create the very exoskeletons of the modern military.
The spiraling conflict in the Middle East is the first large-scale, global conflict to test platform responses in an era when most of them have reduced their trust and safety teams and degraded their ability to fact-check or add context to war propaganda. While it is nearly impossible to quantify how those decisions have impacted the visibility and reach of false and misleading content about the war, there is a sense that, on at least some platforms, the guardrails are completely off. On X, for example, Iranian state-sponsored propaganda—including obvious instances of state-backed media outlets promoting AI-generated images alleging destruction of US facilities—is not only spreading without labels or community notes but is being served to some users in their “for you” feeds. In a chaotic breaking news environment, we can’t expect platforms to be able to respond to everything, but the very intentional decision to remove labels identifying state-sponsored media outlets means that audiences encountering this content are doing so without any contextual clues. Coupled with the ubiquity of AI-generated content across all platforms, the information environment feels demonstrably worse than it did during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when there was at least a sense that the platforms were trying.
The first wave of American attacks during Operation Epic Fury saw the operational debut of LUCAS, a low-cost unmanned combat attack system, the first precise mass system fielded by the United States military. This long-range, one-way loitering munition was reverse-engineered from the Iranian Shahed-136, developed in 18 months, and integrated into CENTCOM in December 2025, just five months later. This pace was much faster than the Pentagon’s usual technology adoption timelines.
The dispute over the use of Claude in autonomous weapons also lays bare the dangers of lethal targeting without sufficient human oversight. The laws of war require the military to distinguish between combatants and civilians, and refrain from attacks that cause excessive civilian harm. These determinations are often context specific and may require judgment that AI is ill-equipped to exercise. The Defense Department’s directive on autonomous weapons raises more questions than it answers about how the military addresses these risks. It requires senior Pentagon leaders to review whether autonomous weapons enable “appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force.” But it’s unclear how this standard is satisfied when the weapon leaves no room for commanders or operators to override technical blind spots in life-and-death decisions. Congress should urgently impose safeguards to align autonomous weapons with the laws of war — and restrict the use of weapons that fall short.
In the coming days, I will be looking at the following issues: How accurate are the Iran target lists especially after high priority targets have been expended? Do second and third-tier targets represent legitimate military objectives and is due attention being paid to preventing collateral civilian harm? As the data analyzed by Claude becomes noisier and susceptible to distortion (the AI slop problem), how is the model compensating for potentially lower accuracy or limited verifiability? What type of oversight is the US military exercising over AI-generated target lists? Given the unprecedented speed in which targets are being produced and then struck, are target verification procedures holding up sufficiently? How does the Pentagon’s legal review process to ensure compliance with the laws of armed conflict interface with the model? When it comes to after action reviews of strikes, how are these being conducted? Reporting indicates that AI models are also evaluating strikes after they have been carried out; is it appropriate for these tools to conduct self-assessments regarding lethal strikes?
We are in the dangerous territory where Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative AI are being normalized as a valid technology to be instrumented within both AI-Decision Support Systems (DSS) and Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS) for targeting purposes. Yet current framing regarding Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s negotiations with the US’s Department of War instead risks overindexing on myopic interpretations of human oversight, or a particular companies' so-called 'red lines', papering over what should be the real target of our scrutiny: that generative AI algorithms are a flawed and inaccurate technology that fabricate and "hallucinate" outputs, often at a rate of 50% accuracy, where they're unlikely to be able to solve tasks outside of their data distribution and training data sets. Generative AI’s inability to handle novel scenarios that would arise from the fog of war thus raises serious questions about whether they can be successful in military settings. Furthermore, these “hallucinations” are an inherent property of these models given their probabilistic nature, with model providers stating that these issues are to persist.
Anthropic has much more in common with the Department of War than we have differences. We both are committed to advancing US national security and defending the American people, and agree on the urgency of applying AI across the government. All our future decisions will flow from that shared premise.
A sign reads, "Your new enemy! Palantir ... Surveillance against you"
A interactive world map titled "Global Social Media Age Restriction Tracker," updated February 20, 2026, showing 40 countries with legislation to restrict or ban teen social media access. Countries are color-coded by status: 3 implemented (dark blue, including China and Australia), 5 passed, 13 in consideration, 4 proposed, and 15 under discussion. Europe has the most activity with 21 countries tracked, followed by Asia-Pacific (12) and the Americas (3).
NYC Blizzard Shuts Down DoorDash Ahead Of 9 P.M. Travel Ban Company activates severe weather protocol before state of emergency travel ban takes effect across New York City.
Heavy Snow / Blizzard Conditions - Total Snowfall: 16-24" likely, localized higher amounts - Snowfall Rates: 1-2"/hr expected, with higher rates of 3"+/hr possible. - Dangerous to Impossible travel - Blizzard conditions - Whiteout conditions, with visibilities at or below a 1/4 mile at times, particularly for the coast. Strong to Damaging Winds - N/NE winds 25 to 45 mph with gusts to 60 mph expected tonight into Monday afternoon. Highest winds and gusts at the coast, with gusts 65 to 75 mph possible for the twin forks of LI and S New London. - Scattered to numerous downed tree limbs and power outages possible due to strong winds and snow load.
Disgusting, fetid pile of grey trash-infused snow
A banner featuring Donald Trump's photo featuring the phrase "Make America Great Again" is hung on the side of the headquarters of the United States Department of Justice in Washington, DC.
Video of Mark Zuckerberg arriving at a Los Angeles court room.
Recognizing this reality does not discount the efforts of public officials, civil society, researchers and academic experts who are participating earnestly to advocate for rights respecting frameworks in AI. However, the very design of this summit and the overall context in which it is taking place may not value their intent or labor. Any claims of AI solving for population scale problems must be matched against the reality of the Global South, in which young boys were applying enamel paint on the railings in Mathura Road in peak morning traffic with their bare hands to prepare for the arrival of Silicon Valley CEOs.