Lessig 🇺🇦

Law professor, activist.

[Lessig 🇺🇦 @lessig]

If only

[Parker Butler @parkerpbutler]

If you’re not already following @TeamTalaricoHQ, I highly recommend.

And stay tuned

[Kai Newkirk for Congress @kai_newkirk]

However you vote, whoever you are, I’m fighting to bring your costs down because I care about you.

[Lessig 🇺🇦 @lessig]

Sam Wang is THE LEADING anti-gerrymandering academic/activist in the nation, founder of the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, and now running for Congress in NJ12. I and we (https://t.co/bQp06EImny) STRONGLY support him. Check him out and do what you can? https://t.co/HC8iGI2MHZ

[Lessig 🇺🇦 @lessig]

@RickGarnett @RichardMRe Dtfr

[Lessig 🇺🇦 @lessig]

Just circulated on SSRN: If Roe, Then Buckley.

The essay is a challenge to the originalists: The method that motivated overturning Roe, applied consistently, means Buckley must go. Never have "We, the People" said billionaires have the right to control our politicians.

https://t.co/cu6wmfCUQE

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

🚨 JUST IN — Thomas Massie concedes the race:

“I would've come out sooner, but I had to call my opponent and concede.”

“And it took a while to find Ed Gallrein in Tel Aviv.”

That line is going to detonate across Washington.

Massie just turned his concession speech into a missile aimed directly at the flood of outside money and foreign policy influence that consumed this race.

The most expensive House primary in U.S. history ends with one final message:

This wasn’t just Kentucky voting.

This was the political establishment making an example out of someone who refused to fall in line.

[Lessig 🇺🇦 @lessig]

If a "business model" conflicts with your whole purpose for working, #scientists, then change the business model. Stop trying to criminalize the future.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A 22-year-old graduate student in Kazakhstan got so angry at journal paywalls in 2011 that she built a pirate website holding 88 million scientific papers, and last month she turned the whole thing into an AI that lets you ask one question and get the actual research as the answer.

Her name is Alexandra Elbakyan, and the website is called Sci-Hub.

The AI she just launched is called Sci-Bot. It lives at https://t.co/6w0IBtOEYB and almost nobody outside academia knows it exists yet.

Here is the story, because it is one of the strangest things to happen in science publishing in the last 50 years.

Elbakyan was born in Almaty in 1988, the year the Soviet Union started to collapse. She taught herself programming at 12. She read Soviet science books that explained things her family used to call miracles. She got into computer security at university and graduated in 2009 with a degree she barely needed because by then she was already a serious hacker.

Alexandra moved to Moscow that fall. Then Germany. Then a research internship in the United States. She was working on brain-computer interfaces, the kind of research that requires you to read hundreds of papers a year just to keep up with the field.

And every single one of those papers was locked behind a journal paywall that cost between 30 and 50 dollars to read once.

She did the math. A graduate student in Kazakhstan could not afford to read science.

The first thing she did was learn how to get around the paywalls one paper at a time. She passed the trick around to other students. They asked her for papers constantly. She got tired of doing it manually.

So in September 2011, in three days, she wrote a script that automated the whole thing. A user pastes a DOI. The script logs in through a donated institutional credential. The paper comes back free. The website caches it.

The next person who asks for that paper gets it instantly because the previous request already saved a copy.

That was Sci-Hub. Three days of code. One graduate student. Done.

15 years later, the cache holds 88 million scientific papers. Almost every piece of scholarly literature published before 2020 is sitting on her servers. Researchers in 190 countries use it. Studies in Nature have shown that roughly half of all academic paper downloads worldwide now go through Sci-Hub, not the publishers who actually own the copyrights.

Elsevier sued her in 2015 and won a 15 million dollar judgment. She did not pay. The American Chemical Society sued her and won an injunction. She did not comply. Courts in India, France, Russia, and the UK have tried to block the domain. She just moves it. https://t.co/3sAWJzNe8I. https://t.co/tGIETesZ8i. https://t.co/H5WQ1f9lqR. The site has had over 20 domains and is still up.

Nature put her on its list of the 10 people who mattered most to science in 2016. The New York Times compared her to Edward Snowden. The Verge called her the pirate queen of science.

She has not been to the United States in over a decade because she would be arrested at the airport.

The Sci-Bot launch in April 2026 is the part that nobody is talking about.

She took the 88 million paper database and put a small language model on top of it. You ask a question in plain English. The model searches the entire shadow library, pulls the relevant papers, synthesizes an answer grounded in real citations, and links you to the full text of every source. Free. No login. No institutional credential. No paywall.

Three real scientists tested it for a Chemical and Engineering News article last month. They asked it medical and chemistry questions. The radiologist said the answer he got was usable. The chemist said the gaps in recent literature were obvious but the older science was solid. The publisher community is furious.

What she built is what the paid academic AI tools are trying to build. Except the paid ones are limited to what their parent publisher legally owns. Hers is limited to almost nothing.

Alexandra still lives somewhere in Russia. She does not give her address. She does not do video interviews. She gives talks over Skype with the camera off. She runs the largest illegal library in human history from a laptop and a donation page.

A graduate student who could not afford to read science built the system the entire scientific community now quietly depends on.

The publishers have spent a decade trying to shut her down.

She just shipped an AI that makes their entire business model outdated.

[Chris Murphy 🟧 @ChrisMurphyCT]

Here's how the corruption works:

Thursday: RJ Reynolds donates $5M to Trump

Saturday: Trump invites RJR execs to Mar a Lago; execs ask to loosen regs on flavored vapes; Trump calls up RFK Jr. and tells him to change it

Friday: FDA changes the policy
https://t.co/Udu1RhYtKI

[Lessig 🇺🇦 @lessig]

https://t.co/6ZFjBS2zrz

[Lana DeLorean Rey™ @1blueshirtgirl]

@WhiteHouse So much for restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship.

#smokefleet
#smokerises

[Leebee14 🇺🇸🧢 @LAPM014]

@WhiteHouse Such a thin skinned little man.

[Lessig 🇺🇦 @lessig]

Yea, James Madison's First Amendment has nothing to say about the President silencing a peaceful (and brilliant) critic, but if a state tries to limit the role of billionaires in elections, it's a 5-alarm First Amendment fire! https://t.co/J4isN4yeHI

[The White House @WhiteHouse]

Bye-bye 👋

[Kai Newkirk for Congress @kai_newkirk]

Democrats want voters to decide our primaries — not billionaires & corporations spending unlimited dark money.

So today I’m challenging my opponent @gregstantonaz to join me in taking The People’s Pledge to keep Super PACs out of our race.

It works.

Let’s do it for CD 4 Greg.

[Lessig 🇺🇦 @lessig]

Bravo, Kai! This a critically important idea: Democrats RIGHT NOW could end SuperPACs in their own elections. Let every one of them challenge others in their race to give SuperPACs up. Show America that Democrats don't believe in big money — because America doesn't believe that's true.

[Kai Newkirk for Congress @kai_newkirk]

Democrats want voters to decide our primaries — not billionaires & corporations spending unlimited dark money.

So today I’m challenging my opponent @gregstantonaz to join me in taking The People’s Pledge to keep Super PACs out of our race.

It works.

Let’s do it for CD 4 Greg.

[Lessig 🇺🇦 @lessig]

Support Kai! https://t.co/7crD9DJfBD

[Veronica 💫 @vronirwin]

Have had a very weird past 48 hours.

Initially I reached out to 3 Dems recently endorsed by super PAC Leading the Future about whether they’d be accepting: Ritchie Torres, Rob Menendez, and Val Hoyle. Seemed like a pretty reasonable question I’d expected they were prepared for, since I was asking 4 days after the endorsement was announced. The PAC is funded by OpenAI president Greg Brockman, venture capital investors Andreessen Horowitz, and others, and their critics claim the PAC is anti-regulation.

Hoyle’s office initially gave me a fairly critical statement distancing themselves from LTF, and I wrote up a simple story. The statement wasn’t that surprising, since Hoyle had vehemently opposed federal preemption of state AI laws before - and LTF likes preemption.

Then I reached out to LTF for comment. This is standard practice for reporters, to ensure everyone has a chance to say their piece, They gave me a fairly straightforward statement. Candidates and PACs aren’t legally allowed to coordinate, so I didn’t expect some big, orchestrated response. All pretty normal.

It was after that that things got weird. Hours after I initially talked to them - but about 7 min after hearing from LTF - Hoyle’s office reached out to ask if they could change their quotes. Suddenly they were more appreciative of LTF’s endorsement, saying that she would “refuse to ignore industry” but wanted to advocate for workers. They sent me a Google doc and I watched them write and rewrite the statement multiple times.

Then she appears to have ‘preempted’ our story with a series of X posts and videos. (Credits @ShakeelHashim for that joke lol)

I’m not sure what made them change their tune so dramatically, long after the working day was done. But their about face seems symptomatic of a changing political environment, in which AI is becoming a more salient political issue and candidates must be careful how they talk about accepting support from AI PACs (LTF and others). Hoyle has received almost $300k in support from a LTF affiliated PAC - a nice boost for any political candidate - but can’t lose her pro-labor bona fides either.

More details and analysis in my latest for @ReadTransformer (link in reply)

[Lessig 🇺🇦 @lessig]

https://t.co/5npKWcMoj0

[Lessig 🇺🇦 @lessig]

Linked: https://t.co/HuslN9nUGp

[Harry Sisson @harryjsisson]

Trump had one of his worst mental health episodes yet last night, posting over 55 times in 3 hours. Here is the list:

10:15 PM - Accuses Obama of attempting a coup in 2016
10:15 PM - Says Obama worked with CIA to overthrow Trump
10:15 PM - Reposts tweet saying Obama is a “traitor” and that he should be arrested
10:22 PM - Attacks dominion voting systems for 2020 election saying they switched votes
10:22 PM - Says Fulton County, GA had their 2020 fraud exposed (there was none)
10:23 PM - Accuses Obama of personally making $120 million from Obamacare (wtf?)
10:23 PM - Cites quack lawyer Sidney Powell on the 2020 election
10:24 PM - Posts fake JFK Jr account that says Obama wiretapped Trump Tower
10:27 PM - Demands Senator Mark Kelly resign
10:29 PM - Claims neither Biden nor Harris were in charge of the Biden admin
10:29 PM - Attacks Fulton County, GA again
10:29 PM - Posts Fox News clip of Rep Ro Khanna
10:30 PM - Demands Jack Smith be arrested
10:30 PM - Accuses Obama, Clinton, and Comey of treason
10:39 PM - Reposts a tweet from a MAGA account saying they have secret intel proving Clinton and Obama committed crimes
10:39 PM - Reposts a MAGA tweet saying Hillary Clinton should be sent to Haiti
10:40 PM - Says the DOJ is “working hard” to arrest his enemies for treason
10:40 PM - Reposts a tweet attacking his own DOJ and Todd Blanche for no arrests of political enemies
10:40 PM - Posts a TikTok video of people stealing from a convenience store
10:41 PM - Posts a TikTok of someone taking a Door Dash order
10:41 PM - accuses Obama, John Brennan, and Clinton of sedition and treason again
10:42 PM - Posts a video of a man on CCTV footage knocking over food a waiter was carrying
10:47 PM - Calls Obama the “most DEMONIC FORCE” in American politics
10:47 PM - Posts a tweet from Mike Flynn saying 2020 election wasn’t fair
10:49 PM - Attacks Dominion again claiming they stole the 2020 election (it wasn’t)
10:51 PM - Reposts a fake Charlie Kirk account that claimed Obama blocked Hillary Clinton from being prosecuted
10:53 PM - Claims Obama was part of Hillary Clinton’s emails in some way
11:28 PM - Claims a senior Democrat just testified under oath that Senator Adam Schiff leaked classified information
1:13 AM - Attacks the New York Times for reporting on the reflecting pool

This man is clearly not well.