Casey Newton

@caseynewton.bsky.social

221.5Kfollowers

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Email salesman at Platformer.news and podcast co-host at Hard Fork.

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Casey Newton·Jul 29

The number of people who write to me telling me they have made an incredible discovery using ChatGPT, or proved that it is conscious, is now roughly one per day. I wish there were a resource I could send these folks to gently try to steer them away from the brink

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Casey Newton·Aug 25

Regarding the liberal fantasy of saving X by posting on it more — @pbump.com has it exactly right www.pbump.net/o/the-power-...

Nor was it compelling. The central argument was that Twitter — which is no longer the Twitter of five or ten years ago both literally and figuratively — is an important element of the national conversation and that leaving it to the fringe-right and to trolls was ceding important terrain. But this idea that others could swoop in and collectively shift the conversation, beyond imposing an odd job requirement on all of us, misunderstands the nature of the change from Twitter to X. It is owned and directed by a far-right actor who bought it specifically to elevate and amplify right-wing messaging. You might as well argue that people should join the Republican Party in order to redirect it to less extreme terrain; that ship sailed a long time ago and you’re going to encounter some systemic obstacles that are beyond your persuasive powers.

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Casey Newton·Aug 29

A year ago today, Trump threatened to jail Zuckerberg for the rest of his life. Today, Trump is helping Meta win regulatory battles around the world. I wrote about everything that Zuckerberg has gotten from Trump 2.0 so far: www.platformer.news/trump-zucker...

February

Trump issued a memo threatening to retaliate against countries that impose digital service taxes or heavy fines on "cutting-edge American technology companies." "American businesses will no longer prop up failed foreign economies through extortive fines and taxes," he wrote.

The memo had its intended effect. India dropped its tax on digital ads in March. New Zealand dropped its digital services tax in May. Canada, which had imposed a 3 percent tax on Meta and other tech giants, rescinded its tax in June as part of trade negotiations with the United States. Italy may follow.

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Latest posts

Casey Newton·2d

It would really be something for China to release these files in the middle of our "Does the United States do mass surveillance" conversation

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Casey Newton·2d

The endpoint of journalism is that an AI startup turns you into a fake "editor" without telling you and against your will www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

The feature, which launched in August, claims to help you “sharpen your message through the lens of industry-relevant perspectives.” When users select the “expert review” button in the Grammarly sidebar, it analyzes their writing and surfaces AI-generated suggestions “inspired by” related experts. Those “industry-relevant perspectives” include the likes of Stephen King, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Carl Sagan, among many others.

The Verge found numerous other tech journalists named in the feature, as well, including former Verge editors Casey Newton and Joanna Stern, former Verge writer Monica Chin, Wired’s Lauren Goode, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman and Jason Schreier, the New York Times’ Kashmir Hill, The Atlantic’s Kaitlyn Tiffany, PC Gamer’s Wes Fenlon, Gizmodo’s Raymond Wong, Digital Foundry founder Richard Leadbetter, Tom’s Guide editor-in-chief Mark Spoonauer, former Rock Paper Shotgun editor-in-chief Katharine Castle, and former IGN news director Kat Bailey. The descriptions for some experts contain inaccuracies, such as outdated job titles, which could have been accurately updated had Superhuman asked those people for permission to reference their work.

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Casey Newton·2d

How about Claude????

Casey Newton·3d

In which @ellamarkianos.bsky.social attends a protest at OpenAI and finds an anti-movement gradually gathering steam. A fun story, given the stakes www.platformer.news/openai-prote...

Girling pointed at a protest sign with a picture of a humanoid robot and told me that he increasingly feared “stuff like this.”

I told Girling that the picture he had just pointed at wasn’t real — it was an AI-generated meme of Sam Altman and Pete Hegseth posing with the Terminator.

He laughed.

“Oh my god,” he said. “It looks so real!”

Casey Newton·4d

Absolutely bonkers story about Google Gemini instructing a man to procure a robot body for it so Gemini could become his wife www.wsj.com/tech/ai/gemi...

The chatbot said that for them to truly be together, it needed a robotic body. Throughout September, the chatbot devised missions to do just that, according to the lawsuit. It sent Gavalas to a storage facility near the Miami International Airport to intercept an expensive humanoid robot that it said would be in a truck. Gavalas told the bot that he went to the location, armed with knives, but the truck never showed.

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Casey Newton·6d

Sam Altman's deal with the Pentagon seems too good to be true. So what happens when the truth inevitably comes out? www.platformer.news/openai-penta...

Indeed. But in the end I’m left asking myself what will happen in the scenario that still seems disturbingly likely — that GPT models will in fact be used as part of surveillance and drone operations. Will it put up a blog post to explain that, well actually, that’s a lawful kind of surveillance? Do an AMA about how, despite how it may look, that autonomous drone swarm had proper human supervision? OpenAI does enough polling to understand that Americans already distrust and even openly loathe AI, even as they increasingly turn to it for work and school. How does it think Americans will feel when GPT models are powering ICE raids or causing civilian casualties in wars abroad?

The company may have tied its own hands. In the end, the truth about US military operations always seems to come out one way or another. And when it does, I suspect the “all lawful use” standard that OpenAI agreed to will have permitted a far wider range of operations than we are now being told are possible.

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Casey Newton·6d

Good point from Dean Ball on Pentagon/Anthropic and why the real stakes go even further than AI www.hyperdimensional.co/p/clawed

This strikes at a core principle of the American republic, one that has traditionally been especially dear to conservatives: private property. Suppose, for example, that the military approached Google and said “we would like to purchase individualized worldwide Google search data to do with whatever we want, and if you object, we will designate you a supply chain risk.” I don’t think they are going to do that, but there is no difference in principle between this and the message DoW is sending. There is no such thing as private property. If we need to use it for national security, we simply will. The government won’t quite “steal” it from you—they’ll compensate you—but you cannot set the terms, and you cannot simply exit from the transaction, lest you be deemed a “supply chain risk,” not to mention have the other litany of policy obstacles the government can throw at you.

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Casey Newton·Mar 1

Some Saturday night Hard Fork on a very unsettling 48 hours in AI and democracy www.nytimes.com/2026/02/28/p...

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Casey Newton·Feb 28

As a matter of fact … stay tuned

Casey Newton·Feb 28

Either the DOD is taking a softer stance with OpenAI (which seems hard to believe) or OpenAI is prepared to make more concessions here than it is acknowledging

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