Christopher Newfield

Psychic life of culture, green political economy, critical university studies, knowledge-power struggles, epistemic justice.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

There you go: the FT confirms that not only is the NSA using Anthropic's AI "for offensive cyber operations" against "nations such as China or Iran" but Anthropic is actively helping them in that effort.

As per the article, Anthropic "installed about half a dozen staff within the NSA as so-called forward-deployed engineers to guide the use of the technology and customise models for specific applications."

It confirms two things. First: the United States is the most aggressive state actor in cyberspace, by far. It offensively infiltrates other nations' networks, and is now supercharging that capability with AI. Heck that is literally one of the core mission statements of the NSA, one of the largest security agencies of the US government.

Second, that Anthropic's carefully cultivated image as the ethical, safety-first AI company that "partners with the church" is a fiction. In reality, it is the most deeply embedded AI company in the US security state. Instead of building guardrails, they're literally weaponizing their own AI inside the NSA.

Src: https://t.co/sWmXvPSUy4

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔UC Berkeley's computer science department just posted its worst failure rates in years. 35.3% of CS 10 students got F's in spring 2026, up from under 10% in prior semesters. Professor Dan Garcia says the primary driver is a "vast increase in academic dishonesty" through LLMs. Students use AI to complete assignments, never learn the material, then fail exams. His office hours, once full, are now empty.

My Take
Companies are firing experienced engineers while the pipeline that produces new ones is being gutted by the same technology. Students use AI to bypass the hard part of learning, show up to exams without the understanding, and fail. One professor discovered a student's linear algebra class had an "open AI" policy for homework and exams. That student then couldn't do basic linear algebra in the next course.

Both ends of the workforce are eroding at the same time. Senior engineers are getting cut to fund AI spending. Junior engineers are graduating without the skills because AI did their coursework. And the companies spending trillions on these tools haven't connected those two facts yet.

Hedgie🤗

[The Atlantic @TheAtlantic]

If we confuse generative AI’s ability to produce text with consciousness, we risk assigning moral responsibility to chatbots—and not to their makers, Ted Chiang argues. https://t.co/Cptx3aWppI

[Tyler Austin Harper @Tyler_A_Harper]

If you know how much Chicago (or any other university) is paying to give everyone on campus Claude Enterprise, my DMs are open. I am curious how this expense compares to the apparently “too expensive” humanities PhD programs Chicago has cut. I bet the answer is illuminating!

[Sarah Osment @sm_osment]

have I mentioned that I teach first year writing here and that I am being laid off

[Christopher Newfield @cnewf]

A portion of The New School's staff and faculty have just been fired. This is its AAUP chapter's response to another debacle. Sympathy to the affected people and hope that their colleagues can roll at least some of the cuts back

[Zohran Kwame Mamdani @ZohranKMamdani]

COME ON

[Valerio Capraro @ValerioCapraro]

The Pope is making exactly our point. LLMs “may imitate or even simulate, but they do not understand.”

This is the core epistemic fault line.

Most AI evaluation is still based on one assumption: if a system statistically approximates human behaviour, then it is close to human intelligence.

But approximation is not intelligence.
Simulation is not understanding.

LLMs can produce the right answer without knowing why it is right. They can simulate empathy without feeling. They can imitate judgment without responsibility. They can generate coherent explanations without having a world to which those explanations are accountable.

Stop confusing behavioural similarity with cognitive equivalence.

Human understanding is embodied, affective, relational, motivational, and normative. It is not just the production of plausible text.

*
Full paper in the first reply

[Tyler Austin Harper @Tyler_A_Harper]

Yesterday's pod was partly about this question. I worry that trying to devise new strategies to prevent AI use in academia is a half-measure, and may be a moot point as models get more sophisticated. You have to fix the culture that encourages a factory-like production of work.

[Alex Crawford @AlexCrawfordSky]

One of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world - the ancient city of Tyre - designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its incredible historical sites. This is what it looks like today following multiple Israeli airstrikes.

[Erika Guevara Rosas @ErikaGuevaraR]

Generative AI doesn’t run on magic. It runs on massive data pipelines built on privacy violations by design.

Our new @Amnesty report exposes how big tech’s AI systems are powered by surveillance, data extraction, and abuse of people’s rights, at scale.

We researched the models powering some of the most popular publicly available standalone generative AI tools, including GPT 3 by Open AI, Google’s Gemini, Meta’s Llama, DeepSeek and tools by Midjourney and Stable Diffusion.

This is not innovation at any cost. It comes at a high price: our human rights.

Read the report: https://t.co/MGRonqai7o

[Steven N. Durlauf @sndurlauf]

The University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index was started in 1946 by George Katona. It is a standard source of information on the state of the economy and the product of decades of scholarly effort.

Kevin Hassett's statement "they've devised a political survey that tells us how Democrats are feeling about things" is one more lie from someone who long ago forfeited any claim to be an economist.

"For Wales? Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world... but for Wales?" A Man for All Seasons

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

Tony Blair is the living embodiment of what happens when political office becomes a down payment on future plunder. Ejected in 2007 by his own MPs as a massive liability, he bequeathed Britain a wild casino economy primed for the 2008 crash. And when the British economy crashed and burned, Mr Blair kept quiet while honing his skills at securing power by other means.

His first job, after his ejection from 10 Downing Street, was as the West’s Middle East envoy, with a supposed emphasis on Gaza. It took six painful years for Mr Blair’s tenure to prove a failure so profound it amounted to active complicity in Israel’s ethnic cleansing, in Palestinian erasure, and in paving the ground for the ongoing genocide.

Soon after, the Chilcot Inquiry demolished Blair’s Iraq lies, exposing him as a liar, a chancer and a war criminal responsible for countless corpses of Iraqis, but also of British soldiers.

Then came Blair’s real innovation: the financialisation of the ex-premiership itself. The Tony Blair Institute, fuelled by £130 million from Oracle's Larry Ellison—coincidentally, the largest individual donor to the Friends of the IDF—became a shadow state, brokering governance contracts for autocrats and companies like Palantir that weaponise AI to produce mega-death abroad and full-on surveillance of Western populations.

Now, in May 2026, this corporate fixer issues a 5700 word tantrum demanding that Labour embrace Trump even more than Starmer already has, denounce what is left of Labour’s betrayed Green New Deal, and trash the remnants of workers' rights. This is not the wisdom of an aging statesman. It is the frantic squirming of a man fearing his grip on oligarchic power might soon wane and whose entire post-10 Downing Street existence depends on preventing the many from ever reclaiming what the few have plundered.

https://t.co/1Onlpx9Nkh

[Leyla @LeylaKuni]

The most demoralizing chart you will see today

[Craig Murray @CraigMurrayOrg]

I love Tyre.
It is a truly beautiful place and you can't scrape the ground anywhere without disturbing ancient archaeology from the heart of the great Phoenician civilisation.
Israel is carpet bombing it.

[Ed Zitron @edzitron]

Laura is a great reporter so it is not surprising that she got one of the most consequential AI stories a few months into her time at The Information, hell yeah

[Sam Haselby @samhaselby]

If New York City ran its schools like you ran Amazon, the teachers would be on welfare and the students would be peeing and pooping in plastic bags under their desks. What an idiotic thing to say.

[Richard Hanania @RichardHanania]

This is amazing.

The New York Times put together a graphic of how much time cabinet members spend kissing up to Trump in meetings.

"On average, at least one of every six sentences either flattered Mr. Trump, gave him credit or criticized his political opponents."

North Korea.

[Gabriel Zucman @gabriel_zucman]

New research: we have studied the wealth of the 200 Californian billionaires and what they effectively pay in tax.

From Mark Zuckerberg (Meta) to Sergei Brin and Larry Page (Alphabet), the results are edifying. 🧵

https://t.co/lW5UaGhYHY

[Alex Prompter @alex_prompter]

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it.

Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying.

Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence."

Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter."

Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter.

They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created.

One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility."

Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies.

That's the metered intelligence business model.

And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.