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August 14, 2025

Illinois Bans AI Therapy. Questions about Enforcement Remain.

Last week, my home state of Illinois became one of the first in the nation to ban AI therapy when Governor Pritzker signed the Wellness and Oversight for Psychological Resources Act (WOPR) into law. The bill, which is a clear nod to the 1983 film WarGames and its ominous supercomputer, signals lawmakers’ wariness about artificial…

August 14, 2025

Who Owns Information? Governments Are Asking the Wrong Question.

Who should control data? The question is increasingly central to policy debates in Washington, Brussels, and Silicon Valley. It’s being asked in antitrust lawsuits, AI regulation proposals, and sweeping data governance laws. But there’s a problem: The question is built on a faulty understanding of what information is—and what it takes to make it useful….

August 13, 2025

Reading the Mind of the Machine: Why GPT-5’s Chain-of-Thought Monitoring Matters for AI Safety

When OpenAI released GPT-5 last week, most coverage focused on the model’s performance gains, including fewer hallucinations, stronger multilingual abilities, and state-of-the-art results in health tasks. But buried deep in the 59-page system card is something far more consequential for AI safety: a section describing how OpenAI is monitoring GPT-5’s internal reasoning (“chain-of-thought”) in real-world…

August 13, 2025

Understanding Why the Supreme Court’s Ruling in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton Is Narrow

With the US Supreme Court now considering in NetChoice v. Fitch whether to reinstate an injunction blocking enforcement of Mississippi’s online age-verification and parental-consent law, it’s vital to understand the narrowness of the Court’s recent ruling in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton. The Court in Free Speech Coalition upheld, against a First Amendment challenge, a…

August 12, 2025

The Climate Beat Goes On

Last week I was contacted by two reporters at the Associated Press with a request to comment on the Department of Energy’s Climate Working Group (DOE CWG) report and the proposal by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to rescind the 2009 greenhouse gas endangerment finding: We’re Seth Borenstein and Michael Phillis, reporters on the climate and environment team at…

August 12, 2025

The Climate Conversation is Changing

Later this week here at THB I’ll be publishing two important pieces — one a guest post from a climate scientist on how his work was cited in the DOE CWG report and the other exposing a major scandal in climate research. Today, I share a big pile of recommended readings. We are all lucky to have…

August 12, 2025

If the U.S. Doesn’t Set Global Tech Standards, China Will

Imagine an internet where your identity is automatically attached to everything you do—every website you visit, every click you make. That was the vision behind New IP, a proposal Chinese engineers introduced at a United Nations telecom forum in 2019. New IP would have replaced the current open internet with a government-controlled system designed for…

August 11, 2025

Breaking Language Barriers Through Multilingual Domains

Domain names act as the backbone of the internet, but as millions of users worldwide use it, many non-Latin script languages face barriers to fully accessing the internet. While multilingual domain names are technically possible, limited support across systems and platforms has made true language inclusion an ongoing challenge—and a key issue for global digital…

August 8, 2025

Is Making Platforms Responsible for Banning Australian Children’s Use a Straw Man?

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s Australian federal government is forging ahead with its “world-leading” legislation aimed at protecting Australian under-16s from social media harms. Last week, it was announced that YouTube—previously the beneficiary of a carve-out that excluded it from earlier versions of the legislation—will now be included in measures to “protect young Australians at a…

August 7, 2025

Securing Critical Infrastructure in the Age of AI

The Trump administration’s America’s AI Action Plan—released in July—takes a significant step toward positioning artificial intelligence as both a national asset and a defense tool. One of its most notable provisions calls for the strategic use of AI to protect America’s critical infrastructure, from pipelines and power grids to financial systems and public services. As…