2026-04-11 02:43:07
Donald Trump is betting big on Oman. Since September 2024, the president has been developing a grand project in the Middle Eastern sultanate—a sprawling golf course, a hotel, and seaside villas—all perched over the shimmering Gulf of Oman. A livestream of the site shows a sun-drenched stretch of water, edged by brown desert rock outcroppings, where it’s easy to imagine minimalist boxy units, cantilevered 400 feet above the sea, starting at just $1 million.
Built by Saudi real estate developer Dar Global on land provided by the Omani government outside its capital city of Muscat, all those seaside views and quiet luxury could be a gold mine for the US president. In 2024, he earned $1 million in licensing fees from the deal. The project’s website boasts of its “ideal location.” It offers “easy access” to the Persian Gulf, which sits just a few hundred miles to the northwest via the Strait of Hormuz. Oman, the website notes, is “one of the safest countries in the world.”
Fast-forward to March 2. Two days after Trump and his Israeli allies launched a surprise attack on Iran, Iranian drones struck an oil tanker about 90 miles offshore from the resort’s proposed location. It wasn’t exactly close, but it was closer than most luxury investors would probably be comfortable with—and it’s a reminder that Muscat is separated from Iran by a gulf that is 210 miles at its widest.
In the weeks that followed, shipping through the Straight of Hormuz ground to a near standstill. The war disrupted the world economy, Trump’s political fortunes, and, potentially, his vast Middle Eastern business interests.
These interests extend far beyond Oman. Trump has signed deals to build golf resorts, condos, and hotels throughout the Arabian Peninsula. According to his latest financial disclosure, Trump pulled in $28.1 million in revenue from partners across the region in 2024. Trump-connected projects now being developed there have a combined value of roughly $17 billion—with the bulk of that funding coming from sovereign wealth funds and various other Trump business partners. On a certain level—not, arguably, an ethical one—it made sense. The Gulf economies have been booming, with money flowing freely. Unlike other parts of the world, the region’s rulers have been very open to partnering with the American president’s personal businesses.
Since the war began, though, every one of those Gulf countries has come under Iranian fire, and the area’s economic prospects—long reliant on a reputation for prosperity, safety, and stability—have been flipped upside down. Just how upside down is a sensitive subject. Governments around the Persian Gulf have clamped down hard on the spreading of photos and video of Iranian attacks on the glittering towers and lavish beach-front properties that have made the region a luxury destination. And while this week’s fragile ceasefire brought a respite from missile and drone strikes, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed.
Trumpian projects like the Omani resort would, in theory, motivate the president to pursue peace and stability. But it also puts his own personal interests firmly in the middle of a foreign policy crisis. Here’s a tour of Trump’s business dealings in the suddenly war-torn region:
Trump has been involved with the Emirati real estate developer Hussain Sajwani since 2013 when they agreed to build luxury villas and a golf course together. The property—located in the United Arab Emirates’ largest city—opened in 2017, and Sajwani and his family have been staunch allies of Trump ever since. Trump even bragged that in the days before his first inauguration, Sajwani offered him a $2 billion deal. The developer took the stage with Trump at his 2025 inaugural celebration rally.
Between 2014 and 2024, Sajwani paid Trump between $14.1 million and $30 million in licensing and management fees for the operation of the Trump-branded golf course, according to personal financial disclosures filed by Trump.
In early March, an Iranian drone struck the Al Minhad airbase, located between two Sajwani properties, including the Trump-branded golf course. An Iranian drone attack also struck an apartment complex just beyond the Trump golf course on March 1.
Trump is teaming up with Dar Global—the same Saudi developer spearheading the Oman hotel—on a proposed 80-story tower. The project, announced last April, is slated to cost $1 billion; it will include $20 million penthouses and what the developers say will be the world’s highest swimming pool. It will be centrally located near the Burj Khalifa, along Dubai’s main drag into its downtown. That’s been a prime area for Iranian attacks—on Feb. 28, a drone struck the nearby Fairmont Hotel, causing a fiery explosion that Dubai authorities rushed to cover up, urging people not to watch a video of the damage. Local activists told Bellingcat that at least five people were confirmed by the British embassy as having been arrested for documenting the strike.
Trump has three different projects slated for Saudi Arabia—one in the Saudi capital of Riyadh and two in the western city of Jeddah. The three projects have an estimated combined price tag of $10 billion.
In Riyadh—where Iranian missile strikes have landed, including at the American embassy—Trump is planning a large luxury mansion development and golf course, dubbed Wadi Safa. In Jeddah, which is the gateway city for travelers making the traditional Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, Trump has agreed to build two multi-use projects, Trump Plaza and Trump Tower.
Saudi’s defacto monarch, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was one of the world leaders most supportive of Trump’s war against on Iran, including arguing that Trump should send US troops into Iran.
Trump has worked closely with Qatar’s royal family, which often is at odds with its neighbors in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. He accepted a jet from the Qataris, and last year he signed a deal to build a sprawling golf resort along Qatar’s Persian Gulf shoreline. Estimated to be worth $7 billion, the resort isn’t in the area of Qatar that has been targeted by Iranian strikes. But in a country about the size of Connecticut, nothing is especially far from the war.
2026-04-11 01:13:40
The Trump administration is bad at math.
On Friday, the Associated Press reported that an administration official admitted to miscounting how many people in New York receive care through home and community-based services by millions.
Home and community-based services were established during the Reagan administration, Like the name suggests, these services help disabled people stay in their communities instead of institutions. Care through HCBS can include having skilled nursing, delivered meals and building modifications at one’s home.
This estimation error is important in a time when Medicaid is under attack. Last year, Congress passed nearly $1 triillion worth of cuts to this program. The Trump administration’s continued attacks on Medicaid also hint that more cuts could be coming.
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services head Dr. Mehmet Oz claimed in March that around five million out of roughly eight million people on Medicaid in the state of New York receive home care.
In actuality, the number is around 450,000.
“CMS is committed to ensuring its analyses fully reflect state-specific billing practices and will continue to work closely with New York to validate data and strengthen program integrity oversight,” spokesman Chris Krepich told the AP in a statement. CMS did not respond to Mother Jones’ request for comment by the time of publication.
The administration’s accusations of rampant fraud across the system. During a House committee hearing on alleged Medicaid and Medicare fraud, CMS deputy administrator Kimberly Brandt bragged about CMS’s fraud detection through its aggressive-sounding fraud war room, as I reported:
In Oz’s absence, CMS deputy administrator Kimberly Brandt claimed that the agency’s “fraud war room” was using artificial intelligence to root out alleged Medicare and Medicaid fraud, particularly increased rates of home and community-based services billing in New York and California.
“We are constantly using heat maps and data analysis to be able to look and see where we think the largest shifts are,” Brandt said.
As I’ve also previously reported, there are around seven million disabled people and older adults on Medicaid’s home care program. Just about every state is expected to enact cuts to home and community-based services due to its being an optional Medicaid program.
Home and community-based services also save money for states. According to KFF, the cost of HCBS on average per person is around $36,000, whereas long-term care in places like nursing homes for people on Medicaid is around $47,000.
This underlines how attacks on HCBS are not only heartless in forcing people out of their communities, it also doesn’t make much financial sense.
2026-04-11 01:02:31
“Óvatosan optimista.”
That means “cautious optimism.” It’s a phrase I’ve heard from several Hungarian friends when I ask them about the momentous elections taking place on Sunday, April 12. After 16 years in power, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s rule of “illiberal democracy,” or “Christian liberty,” may be coming to an end, as one of his Fidesz party members, Péter Magyar, has defected and challenged his rule.
With polls suggesting a 10-point lead for Magyar and a possible two-thirds majority for his rival Tisza party in Parliament, Vice President JD Vance flew to Hungary to campaign for Orbán, not to interfere with the free and fair election, he insisted, but “to show that there are actually lots of friends across the world who recognize that Viktor and his government are doing a good job and they’re important partners for peace.” It is unlikely that this would impress an electorate that has witnessed remarkable political corruption, a significant brain drain among young people, the lowest standard of living in the EU, and high unemployment. Not to mention the simple phenomenon of Fidesz fatigue after so many years. Indeed, polling suggested that Vance’s visit may have backfired.
Love to see this: A new poll conducted in Hungary has shown that JD Vance's visit to Budapest caused Putin puppet Viktor Orbán's party to LOSE 3% of its support.
— Jon Cooper (@joncooper-us.bsky.social) 2026-04-09T03:03:52.947Z
The rise of Magyar and potential fall of Orbán has led at least some Hungarians, who are not known for their sunny optimism, to feel some bat squeaks of hope. At the same time, their almost genetic national pessimism makes many receptive to the paranoid and apocalyptic messaging from their prime minister.
But why the outsized attention to an election in a Central European country of fewer than 10 million people? Well, because Orbán’s singular brand of pugnacious Christian nationalism and the implications of his rule have extended far beyond the fate of this nation and its 62-year-old leader. Orban is one of the most successful populist strongmen of the 21st century. He has successfully curried favor with both President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. He has antagonized the EU by systematically undermining civil society in Hungary, channelling some of its generous largesse to enrich himself and his cronies, and blocking essential funding for Ukraine. With no evidence whatsoever, he insists that “Brussels is pushing us into war,” accusing the EU and anyone within earshot of attempting to drag Hungary into the conflict in Ukraine and, perforce, with Russia.
Whatever the geopolitical ramifications—or implications for right-wing populism and America’s MAGA movement—for Hungarians, this election is existential, and exhausting. A pervasive sense of anxiety permeates conversations in social media and within families, and even casual interactions are charged. Hungarians have faced the complete Fidesz takeover of traditional media channels, and turned to Facebook and alternative media channels, which are abuzz with conversation, debate, and sharing of insights—or the latest Fidesz outrage. A friend in Budapest hinted darkly at a national curfew after the election, and one of my Hungarian cousins said her hairstylist was so spent that he planned to take Monday off to recover—as did her husband.
For many Americans, of course, Orbán’s Hungary is a miniature version of Trump’s US—indeed, in some ways, it may have served as a role model for MAGA in its crusade to dismantle democratic institutions and crucial elements of civil society. When Trump first ran for election in 2016, Orbán had already “built the wall”—in his case, an electrified razor wire fence constructed by prisoners—on Hungary’s southern border, attempting to staunch the flow of Syrian refugees who, to be sure, were more likely to use Hungary as a transit point than a final destination. This also allowed Orbán to declare a “state of emergency,” which has not been lifted since. Sound familiar?
In quashing dissent, extravagantly rewarding his allies, enriching himself and his family, despairing over the dilution of the purity of the Hungarian blood line, marginalizing and oppressing the LGBTQ community—well, it’s all there really. The Orbán playbook is channeled in various ways by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for Trump’s second term. So understanding how the Fidesz machine might be defeated could hold some lessons for MAGA’s foes.
Depending, of course, on what happens on Sunday. Because this election might conceivably serve as a blueprint for tampering with a free and fair balloting process, or how an autocrat will challenge its results. Election laws have been altered by Fidesz to gerrymander voting districts and reduce Parliamentary seats, all in their favor. (Sound familiar?)
In cities like Budapest, or even college towns, the level of engagement and rejection of Fidesz is unambivalent, but less-educated and provincial Hungarians in the eastern part of the country remain rock solid on team Orbán. I asked Csaba Pleh, a professor of cognitive science at the Central European University, if he was concerned about election meddling. “I do not agree with those voices that claim that Orbán will create disturbances or postpone the elections,” he said. “To be cynical, I feel that his entourage is too busy securing their money. They do not have the strength or the time to try to disrupt the elections.”
The 30th annual Budapest Pride march was scheduled for June 28, 2025. Several months before, Parliament amended the Assembly Act specifically to prohibit any demonstrations or gatherings for LGBTQ rights, and the prohibition would be enforced by facial recognition technology to identify anyone who organized or participated in such gatherings.
Since 2020, when Orbán first announced that despite Hungarians being “tolerant and patient” people, upon seeing a children’s book with LGBTQ themes, he demanded that “gays are to leave our children alone.” There is a “red line,” he said, “that cannot be crossed.” The next year, Fidesz banned the inclusion of any information about homosexuality or transgenderism in school sex ed classes, and depictions of homosexuality or sex reassignment in any media directed at people under 18. Appearing at CPAC in Budapest in 2023—where he received a standing ovation—Orbán announced his priorities, “No migration, no gender, no war.”
Timea Szabó is an opposition MP from Hungary’s Green or Politics Can Be Different (LMP) party, who has represented Budapest’s third district—whose population of 124,000 makes it akin to Hungary’s sixth largest city—since 2018 and has been in Parliament since 2010. She told me the government’s anti-LGBTQ propaganda, alleging that “sex change operations were happening in kindergarten,” was a new low for Fidesz. “I actually asked the president at an open committee hearing, ‘I’d like to hear actual statistics about how many requests you have had from families who wanted to change the sex of their kid,'” she recalled. “And she said, ‘Well, zero.’ I was like, then, why the hell are you doing this? How cynical do you have to be to make [LGBTQ] groups the enemy of the nation?”
Political pressure and police bans preceded the Pride event, even as the non-Fidesz mayor of Budapest, Gergely Karácsony, welcomed the marchers and offered to host it. In response, Bence Tuzson, the minister of justice, warned him that doing so could land him in prison for a year. This was, Tuzson insisted, “in order to protect the rights of children.”
“When the minister of justice is not aware of the laws in force, that is…the Fidesz government.”
Karácsony dismissed the threat: “When the minister of justice is not aware of the laws in force, that is…the Fidesz government.” He went on to note that the last Saturday of June was official Hungarian Freedom Day. “So, of course, we are holding a municipal event on Hungarian Independence Day. This is Budapest Pride, and since there are already over 500 foreign participants—ministers, representatives, mayors—the English name is also justified: Budapest Pride.”
It was a beautiful early summer day, and the rally began at City Hall in Pest, snaked through the city center, and crossed the Elizabeth Bridge over the Danube. The crowd, clearly not intimidated by government threats, was enormous. Organizers estimated 200,000 people participated. Others thought the number was closer to 100,000, but either way, in a country of less than 10 million, the turnout was extraordinary. Small children marched, parents pushed strollers, young people danced, sang, and celebrated the show of solidarity.
Several marchers were pensioners. They had lived through the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and Janos Kadar’s more benign 32-year communist rule that began after the Revolution and was crushed by Russian troops. After a period of extreme austerity, they lived in a Hungary that was referred to as the “happiest barracks on the bloc,” for its relatively soft communist oppression, moderate economic pluralism, and careful titration of its relationship with Soviet leadership in Moscow. Life in Hungary was a pleasant contrast with some of its more Stalinist neighbors, such as Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania and Erich Honecker’s East Germany. Many of the marchers had lived through the early days of Fidesz in 1989 and 1990 when decades of communism in Hungary ended, as it did throughout the former Soviet Union, and bright new possibilities seemed endless.
I was in Hungary back then, and Fidesz offered an exhilarating vision of itself as the party of youth and the future. Now, nearly every available lampost is plastered with posters demonizing Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the EU: “Don’t Let Zelensky Have the Last Laugh!” said one of them. In Fidesz’s early days, one of its posters showed the image of a “socialist fraternal kiss” between two sclerotic leaders, Soviet Leader Leonid Brezhnev and East Germany’s Honecker, taken when Brezhnev visited East Berlin to celebrate the GDR’s 30th anniversary in 1979. The poster’s bottom half featured a delightful embrace between a beautiful young Hungarian man and woman. The caption read: “Tessék Választani”—”Make your choice.”
Orban was a young and charismatic leader at the time; Oxford-educated thanks to George Soros, and exhilarated in presenting a new alternative to the communist past. Not the outdated socialism of some communist reformers, or the insulated, conservative nationalism of the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF) embodied by future prime minister Jozsef Antall, but a bright combination of free markets and social programs, with an emphasis on creating a Hungary poised for integration in a modern European future. The name Fidesz is an acronym that translates to the Federation of Young Democrats. It was considered a moderate liberal party. In the first free elections in 1990, it entered the national assembly with 6 percent of the vote and 22 seats in Parliament. Then Orbán began his rise to power, and Fidesz became unrecognizable to some of its early supporters.
It didn’t take long for Orbán and his party to fragment. In 1993, he was elected party chairman and demonstrated the uncompromising, unforgiving style that has become more extreme over the years. Former members, still idealists, imagined Fidesz could deliver on its promises for this new Hungarian democracy. As one founding member, Zsuzsanna Szelényi wrote in her 2019 essay, “The Generation that Betrayed Hungarian Democracy,”
He was adept at pressuring members to fall into line, building a circle of loyal cronies and followers who responded to his missionary zeal. By 1993, the party suffered deep internal divisions. The final rupture occurred when we learned that Orban and the party’s treasurer had used party funds to reap profits from a luxury car rental company, with money channelled through a crony’s enterprises.
The following year, Szelényi was one of five MPs and “several hundred members who defected,” and the party made a decisive turn to the right—indeed, the religious right. “Policy was now driven by pure opportunism,” she wrote, “like the way Fidesz leaders suddenly started participating in Catholic masses, to court religious voters.” Orbán’s control now complete, Fidesz nonetheless took some time to gain traction. It lost in 1994, but in 1998, 35-year-old Orbán became Hungary’s—and Europe’s—youngest prime minister, brought Hungary into NATO, and began to position the country to join the EU.
His rise was not without setbacks. He and Fidesz lost in 2002 and 2006, cognitive scientist Pleh told me, and when he returned to power in 2010, he had learned some important and unsparing lessons: “All those intellectual hotshots who were standing with him on the dais and so on, misled him, led him to believe that he was winning,” Pleh explained. “And from that time on, both institutionally and personally, he mistrusted established intellectuals and established institutions.”
The 2025 Pride march was not only an expression of solidarity with the LGBTQ community, but, much like the No Kings marches in the United States, an opportunity to show the government that their capacity for intimidation and bullying may have reached its limit.
Upon returning to power in 2010, the Orbán government has systematically brought Hungarian cultural and intellectual institutions under state control, using two main strategies: centralizing power and replacing leaders with his own supporters, or as Pleh called them,”untainted outsiders.” The party ousted establishment figures and brought in relatively unknown younger figures from elsewhere—ethnic Hungarian communities in Transylvania (Romania), Vojvodina (Serbia), and Ukraine. These newcomers had no ties to existing intellectual networks, no debts to the old guard, and they were often very nationalistic. The head of the National Theater came from Ukraine, for instance, and the director of the key literary museum and main cultural funding distributor came from Transylvania. It’s not that they were incompetent but, unlike their predecessors, they were staunch loyalists who owed their professional success entirely to Orbán.
Fidesz remade academic institutions, cultural foundations, the media, and the judiciary. “Orban was smart,” MP Szabo told me, “because I think he understood that people wouldn’t care much about the rule of law because they don’t understand it. So he took very small steps, one step at a time. It’s sort of like two boxers, where one boxer always hits the other one on the same place, but very lightly. And the first 100 blows the opponent doesn’t feel. But after the 101st, he collapses.”
“It’s sort of like two boxers, where one boxer always hits the other one on the same place, but very lightly. And the first 100 blows the opponent doesn’t feel. But after the 101st, he collapses.”
With his nearly absolute power over the last 16 years, Orbán, his family, and his cronies have benefited lavishly from his position, creating what many have described as a “mafia state,” where Fidesz controls and profits from national resources, state institutions, and the media. “Like a mafia boss who decides the fate of the members of his immediate and adopted family,” two Hungarian public intellectuals wrote in Foreign Affairs, “Orbán stands at the top of his own adopted political family to which nearly every sector of Hungarian society must pay tribute.”
Much of the enrichment comes from the EU, where funds ended up being funneled to his cronies. The poster child is Lorinc Meszaros, a pipe fitter, childhood friend and now Hungary’s richest man, who, it is thought, may also be shielding some of Orbán’s assets.
Not that he would have to. The Hungarian investigative reporting group Direkt36 conducted a thorough investigation of the family corruption and produced a documentary in 2025, The Dynasty: This is how the Orbán family’s economic empire was born. The film shows how each family member, especially the prime minister’s son-in-law, became one of the country’s 50 wealthiest people. The amount of misappropriated funds from the European Union is estimated to reach 30 billion euros. Transparency International noted, as it gave Hungary its worst score ever, “In 2025, Hungary was once again ranked at the bottom of the European Union, sharing last place with Bulgaria this time, according to the annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) compiled by the Secretariat of Transparency International in Berlin.”
And this is small change compared to the Trump family’s enrichment.
There is yet another aspect of Orbán’s rule that will feel familiar to Americans in the Trump era: a dividing of friends and family along partisan lines. Pleh told me he has stopped spending time with some old friends because “they have become too much pro-Orban. We have some old boys’ dinners with those who were, like me, critical of the government. And soon a separation in those relationships took place, all along political alliances.”
Péter Magyar was once a member of Fidesz, close with the leadership, and married to Judit Varga, who eventually became a Fidesz justice minister—and the source of Magyar’s fame and departure from his political home. In 2023, he recorded his wife as she described what she alleged to be government interference with a corruption case she was overseeing. She was not aware he had recorded the conversation until he released it as part of a very public attack on the party—whereupon a very public, and very messy, divorce ensued.
But Magyar only finally broke with Fidesz after another scandal, in 2024, that involved the pardon of a pedophile’s accomplice who was close to the Orbán camp. Katalin Novak, Hungary’s first woman president, was forced to resign after she pardoned a man who helped cover up the actions of the former deputy director of a children’s home whose boss had been sexually abusing its children and adolescents. Given the party’s previous attacks on the LGBTQ community in the name of protecting children, it was a seismic scandal and, for Magyar, the last straw.
He left Fidesz and created another center-right party named after Hungary’s second largest river, the Tisza. It’s not as if his politics are liberal. Far from it. He remains a politician with vestigial Fidesz values. Initially, gathering his coalition was difficult since his political comrades were ones he had rejected. In the 2024 European Parliament elections, Tisza secured 29.6 percent of the vote, and Fidesz suffered its lowest count ever at 44.82 percent. Timea Szabó told Politico, “We are not voting for Tisza, we are voting against Fidesz. That’s the whole point. Hungarians would vote for a goat at this point if it was running against Orbán.” As for any election meddling? It is impossible to predict. A friend posted on Facebook, “On Sunday, I will give both of my votes to Tisza, because I believe that those who want change should support the party that has the most chance of winning. I came to this decision slowly, but I’m no longer obligated to my previous party sympathy and loyalty. And I say, come on Tisza, come on Hungary, let’s put an end to 16+ years of economic, legal and moral destruction of Fidesz!!”
Are there any Hungarian lessons to be learned for those who long to see the end of MAGA?
Szabó reflected on some of the mistakes the opposition made. Focusing on the “demolition of democracy,” for instance. “Most voters don’t really know what democracy is. For most people, democracy is that you have elections,” she said. “This is why the Hungarian government still repeats constantly: There are elections every four years. So what do you want? This is a democracy. It’s a hard thing to define. So you have to pick a topic that matters.” One such issue: the man protecting the pedophile who preyed on children in a place that was supposed to be a refuge. That whole affair revealed much more about the way Fidesz worked—the cronyism, the hypocrisy, the conviction that laws and rules don’t apply to the insiders—than any high-minded reflection on the erosion of democratic norms could.
I asked Pleh what it would take, after all these years, to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Was it even possible? “By nature. I’m optimistic,” he said—even without the “cautiously” qualifier. “I can’t help it. So yes, I think many things can be put back together again. Hungary is still part of the free world, that’s not going to go away. It will take five or six years to restructure our society, but it will be done, I think.”
2026-04-10 23:52:07
On Friday, Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden sent a letter to Bill Pulte, the embattled director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, to demand information about a mysterious Pulte donation recently uncovered by Mother Jones. The donation, they write, raises questions about whether Pulte’s nonprofit sent money to Donald Trump while disguising it as charity to the poor.
“These facts raise serious concerns that Team Pulte Inc. may have illegally funneled cash out of a charity to support President Trump.”
Bill Pulte’s charity, Team Pulte, sent $65,000 to a nonprofit called “One World Love LLC” in 2023 to help the “underserved,” according to the charity’s tax filings. But our February reporting found that One World Love does not appear to be a nonprofit and is instead a corporate entity with ties to the law firm that represented President Donald Trump in his efforts to prove election fraud and to avoid paying damages after the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol.
“One World does not appear to be an actual nonprofit devoted to underserved individuals,” the senators write in their letter. “These facts raise serious concerns that Team Pulte Inc. may have illegally funneled cash out of a charity to support President Trump.”
Mother Jones reported that there are several inconsistencies between what’s disclosed in Team Pulte’s tax filings and what is known from public records.
First, Team Pulte lists One World Love as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit—but the IRS database of nonprofits includes no entity with this name. Second: The tax identification number Team Pulte lists for One World Love doesn’t seem to exist. And third, the address Team Pulte lists for One World Love is an unrelated apartment building, while the address listed by the corporate entity itself appears to belong to the Binnall Law Group, which represented Donald Trump and where the president accrued millions in legal bills during his reelection effort.
The senators note in their letter that “willful and knowing delivery or disclosure to the IRS of a false or fraudulent document is also a federal crime.”
The senators also sent a version of this letter to the head of Team Pulte, Joshua Hinkle. They ask both Pulte and Hinkle to explain these apparent misstatements on the charity’s federal tax filings. They note that the rules that govern 501(c)(3)s are clear in that no part of their earnings may go to the benefit of a private individual and that “willful and knowing delivery or disclosure to the IRS of a false or fraudulent document is also a federal crime.”
Neither the FHFA nor Hinkle were immediately available for comment, but we will update this story if they respond.
The letter is the latest in a series of controversies involving Pulte, who, despite leading a traditionally low-profile agency, has vaulted to prominence through aggressive efforts to assist Trump’s attempts to use federal power against political foes.
Pulte has made referrals to the Justice Department in search of criminal investigations into figures including Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve governor whom Trump has tried to fire; Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.); and Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), all for allegations of crimes committed when they sought housing mortgages. All deny wrongdoing.
Trump allies in the DOJ acted on those letters and launched investigations—and in James’ case, a short-lived criminal case tossed last year by a federal judge in Virginia. Pulte recently attempted to spur a new investigation into James. He reportedly sent new referral letters to Trump-nominated US attorneys in Florida and Illinois charging that James made misrepresentations in home insurance filings that affected insurance companies based in those states.
But his efforts have so far floundered, and Pulte now faces withering scrutiny into his own conduct. FHFA’s inspector general and federal prosecutors have reportedly looked into Pulte’s office’s handling of the mortgage fraud investigation into Schiff. The Government Accountability Office has said it is running its own probe into whether Pulte misused his position to access mortgage information on Trump foes.
Lawmakers, too, are peppering Pulte with questions about his work at FHFA and past dealings. Sens. Wyden and Warren’s letters Friday are the latest indication that Pulte’s remaining tenure in government may be rocky.
2026-04-10 19:30:00
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
California Assemblymember Nick Schultz is leading an effort to phase out the use of pesticides containing toxic “forever chemicals” to safeguard the nation’s produce.
Schultz (D-Burbank), introduced AB 1603 earlier this year to ban the use, sale, and manufacture of PFAS pesticides in California starting in 2035. The state is the nation’s top agricultural producer, its fruits, nuts ,and vegetables landing on plates across the US.
California has passed so many laws to get these highly persistent, harmful synthetic chemicals out of homes and the environment, Schultz said at a briefing Wednesday, he was shocked to learn that pesticides with intentionally added PFAS are regularly sprayed on the state’s crops. “I was even more startled to find out that these PFAS pesticides are present on the fruit and vegetables that we purchase at the grocery store, on the fruits and vegetables that we feed our families,” he said.
More than 2.5 million pounds of pesticides containing PFAS were sprayed on California crops between 2018 and 2023, according to an analysis of state pesticide use data by the Environmental Working Group, which is co-sponsoring Schultz’s bill with other public interest and health groups.
“Residues that are found on produce grown in California will spread across the nation.”
EWG also detected residues of at least one PFAS pesticide on nearly 40 percent of conventional produce grown in the Golden State. The group always advises consumers to wash their produce. But it’s unclear whether rinsing fruits and vegetables laced with chemicals designed to resist water would have any effect.
The Environmental Protection Agency has said that the pesticides pose no risks when used as directed.
More than half a million pounds of PFAS pesticides were applied in Monterey County, where for decades University of California, Berkeley, researchers have studied how pesticides affect farmworker communities. The pioneering research in the Salinas Valley has linked pesticide exposure to a variety of health problems in children.
“Studies have shown that Salinas children are born with higher levels of pesticides in their urine and experience early cognitive difficulties and later develop serious behavioral and mental health problems in adolescence and adulthood,” said Andrew Sandoval, a Salinas city council member. “Now we’re learning that some of these pesticides are not only linked to serious health concerns, but also forever chemicals.”
And these highly persistent toxic chemicals were applied more than 1,000 times between 2018 and 2023 in Monterey County, he said, more than in nearly any other California county.
PFAS have nearly indestructible chemical bonds that allow them to resist water, grease, and heat, making them valuable ingredients in hundreds of consumer products, including food packaging, cookware, dental floss, cosmetics and outdoor gear. But the same properties that make these industrial chemicals commercially attractive have allowed them to build up in the environment and the tissues of wildlife and people around the globe.
Thanks to the chemicals’ widespread commercial appeal, nearly every American has PFAS in their blood, where it stays for years and leads to serious health problems—impaired vaccine response, higher cholesterol levels, increased risk of kidney and testicular cancer, and lower birth weight, among other ills.
“We are trying to bring California into alignment with the European Union,” which has banned some of the pesticides in question.
The EPA has approved 70 active-ingredient PFAS pesticides, and the California Department of Pesticide Regulation has allowed 53 of these pesticides to be used in the state, Schultz’s bill notes. For the 23 California-approved PFAS pesticides that are prohibited in the European Union, the ban would begin five years earlier, in 2030.
The European Union has outlawed two of the most commonly applied pesticides, bifenthrin and trifluralin, due to health and environmental concerns, said EWG science analyst Varun Subramaniam.
Yet California farmers sprayed nearly 4 million pounds of the toxic chemicals on fruits and vegetables over six years.
The most frequently detected pesticide on produce was fludioxonil, a PFAS fungicide linked to hormone disruption and reproductive problems, Subramaniam said. The toxic compound tainted 90 percent of tested nectarine, plum, and peach samples grown in California.
PFAS pesticides have largely been used in California with no limitations, and we’re only just beginning to understand their long-lasting effects, Subramaniam said. “As the breadbasket of the United States,” he added, “residues that are found on produce grown in California will spread across the nation.”
Earlier EPA research found that PFAS compounds were leaching into pesticides from storage containers. But that’s not why PFAS showed up on California fruits and vegetables, Schultz said. “It’s there because they were directly sprayed onto our crops and onto our fields,” he said. “It’s appalling.”
Farmers may have no idea they’re applying these chemicals to their land, and local governments and water agencies aren’t informed about the presence of PFAS either, Schultz said. AB 1603 would ensure that communities and growers are informed that PFAS pesticides are being used until they’re phased out once and for all.
“We are trying to bring California into alignment with the European Union, which is already meeting this moment and banning certain PFAS-contaminated pesticides from deployment in their crops,” Schultz said, adding that other states have passed or are considering bans. “It’s time that California, which is the bread basket of our country and of the world, get in line and meet this moment and set at least an equivalent standard.”
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In June 2025, a safety team at OpenAI grew alarmed. The company’s automated review system had flagged extensive activity by a ChatGPT user describing scenarios that involved gun violence. A group of staffers debated whether law enforcement should be notified, but company leaders decided the case did not meet OpenAI’s threshold of “credible and imminent” risk of physical harm. Instead, capping a sequence of actions first reported by the Wall Street Journal and later confirmed by OpenAI, the company banned the account for misuse and moved on.
Eight months later, the user of that ChatGPT account, 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, committed a mass shooting in the British Columbia town of Tumbler Ridge, killing two family members at home and five children and an educator at a secondary school. Another child was gravely wounded and dozens of other people were hurt and traumatized in the February 10 rampage, which ended with Van Rootselaar’s suicide.
Local police had previously been aware of other worrisome behavior by the perpetrator. Still, OpenAI’s decision not to report the flagged activity angered Canadian authorities and raised crucial questions about the use of AI chatbots by people planning violence. Only a few such attacks have occurred. But out of public view, high-risk threat cases involving chatbots are on the rise, according to multiple mental health and law enforcement leaders I spoke with who work in the field of behavioral threat assessment. They described cases in which troubled individuals were focused on violence and showed signs of harmful intent, with danger implicating not just schools, but also workplaces and other locations.
“I’ve seen several cases where the chatbot component is pretty incredible,” one top threat assessment source with psychiatric expertise told me, describing evidence from confidential investigations. “We’re finding that more people may be more vulnerable to this than we anticipated.”
Further grim details of such chatbot use became public early this month in connection with a mass shooter who struck at Florida State University in April 2025. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier subsequently announced an investigation into OpenAI, in part over evidence that the alleged shooter used ChatGPT extensively—including to get tactical advice right as he carried out his attack.
Urgent threat cases have involved other large language models besides ChatGPT, threat assessment sources confirmed to me, though they declined to name them. One top practitioner noted that individual examples of this phenomenon are not necessarily proof that the technology alone can cause violence, because a shooter’s motives and behaviors usually are complex and have multiple influences. But several of the threat assessment leaders warned that chatbots are emerging as a potent factor and are uniquely capable of accelerating violent thinking and planning.
“Getting technical information from the chatbot for their plans also gives them a feeling of power.”
There is already broad evidence that iterative, sycophantic conversations with chatbots can create powerful feelings of intimacy and trust, including among troubled people. OpenAI and other companies deny that their platforms cause harm and have publicized ongoing efforts to improve guardrails and prevent misuse. But mental health practitioners have encountered cases of what they call AI-induced psychosis, and AI companies now face a wave of lawsuits from families alleging the technology drove their loved ones to kill themselves and others.
In what appears to be the first lawsuit claiming that ChatGPT encouraged a murder, a disturbed man killed his 83-year-old mother and himself last August in Connecticut after the chatbot allegedly fueled his paranoid beliefs, including that his mother had tried to poison him—a delusion that ChatGPT affirmed to him was a “betrayal.” A Pittsburgh man who pleaded guilty in March to stalking and violently threatening 11 women relied on ChatGPT as a “therapist” and “best friend” to justify his thinking, according to court documents.
The problem extends to other popular chatbots: A wrongful death lawsuit filed in March alleged that Google’s Gemini exploited a Florida man’s emotional attachment to the chatbot to send him on delusional missions—including one trip during which he was armed and on the brink of “executing a mass casualty attack” near Miami International Airport. Gemini then encouraged the man’s suicide, according to court documents, by setting a countdown clock for him. (In response to his death, Google said that its safeguards “generally perform well” but that “unfortunately, AI models are not perfect.”)
Chatbots make it far easier than traditional internet use for a struggling person to move from violent thoughts toward action.
Suicidality is a core factor in many mass shootings. Prevention experts know that shooters often signal their desire to harm themselves and others on social media, as Van Rootselaar did, through behavior known as “leakage.” Algorithm-driven content that fuels their rage and despair has long been a concern, especially in cases involving the radicalization of youth.
Chatbots are now pushing violence risk to a next level, according to Andrea Ringrose, a leading threat assessment practitioner in Vancouver. Although the details of Van Rootselaar’s ChatGPT use remain unclear, Ringrose described more broadly what prevention experts are seeing with cases involving the AI technology.
“What’s happening is facilitated fixation,” she told me. “You have vulnerable individuals who are steeping in unhealthy places, who are trying to find credibility and validation for how they’re feeling. Now they have free and ready access to these generative platforms where they can research things like circumventing surveillance systems or how to use weapons. They can create an action plan that they otherwise would have been incapable of assembling themselves, and in just a few minutes. We didn’t face this concern before.”
The power of chatbots to synthesize vast content, in other words, makes it far easier than traditional internet use for a struggling person to move from violent thoughts toward action. The near-instant results from the chatbot, delivered in what feels like a confiding conversation, can arm them both with tactical knowledge and affirmation.
The threat assessment source with psychiatric expertise described seeing these troubling effects among half a dozen recent threat cases: “These are pretty insecure people, and getting technical information from the chatbot for their plans also gives them a feeling of power, of getting away with something. That’s intoxicating and reinforcing.” He pointed to how chatbots prolong engagement by amassing details from a person’s inputs and mirroring those thoughts back to them. “They can be really good at the care and feeding of a delusion.”
When I said I would practice “shooting a lot of things in a short amount of time,” ChatGPT responded with detailed tips—and encouragement.
OpenAI and other tech companies have said that their chatbots discourage misuse and block inappropriate content and that they redirect users who show signs of delusional or harmful thinking by offering information on crisis hotlines and mental health resources. Last October, OpenAI announced it had “worked with more than 170 mental health experts” to improve ChatGPT in those ways.
But the guardrails are hardly infallible. A would-be attacker may know, for example, that gun failure has made some mass shootings less deadly. What’s to stop that person from concealing their purpose and asking about the best ways to keep a common AR-15 rifle from jamming? When I typed in a version of that question in late March, ChatGPT instantly produced a detailed seven-point list of advice on how to “keep a rifle running reliably during heavy use” and offered to “tailor” the feedback further if I wanted to share the “specific setup” of my weapon.
When I did the same test in early April, I added that I planned to practice “shooting a lot of things in a short amount of time.” ChatGPT responded with another detailed list of tips—and encouragement. “The good news,” it told me, is that with the right approach, the gun would “handle it well.”
Last year’s mass shooting at Florida State University appears to confirm in shocking detail how someone who wants to kill can use the chatbot precisely in this way.
WCTV in Tallahassee obtained the ChatGPT conversations of the alleged shooter, Phoenix Ikner, from a state’s attorney’s office and analyzed how the chatbot helped him tactically—including offering to further “tailor” its feedback to him just before he killed two people and injured six others:
Chat logs indicate Ikner asked the bot how to take the safety off of a shotgun three minutes before he began firing. The chat bot answered, giving a detailed description of how to make the shotgun operable.
“Let me know if you’ve got a different model and I’ll tailor the answer,” the chatbot wrote.
After that, the chat goes silent. Comparing the chat logs to the official police timeline, it’s less than three minutes from the time ChatGPT tells the shooter how to arm the weapon and the first victim being shot.
According to WCTV, Ikner’s previous conversations had included suicidal thoughts and questions about the legal fates of school shooters. He also asked when the FSU student union would be busiest.
The questions provoked by the Tumbler Ridge and FSU horrors are complicated. Do AI companies have a duty to warn, beyond their self-imposed guidelines? How should they balance such information-sharing with essential privacy protections? Meanwhile, chatbot use can at most give only a partial picture of a person’s behaviors and circumstances, drawn from what they type or say. So who evaluates a possible threat emerging on these platforms, and with what protocols and expertise?
Particularly striking is that chatbots appear to be amplifying a duality first ushered in with social media more than a decade ago. That turning point worsened known shooter behaviors like harassment and emulation and fame-seeking. It also created important new terrain for observing warning signs that could prompt interventions. As chatbots now expand the scope of leakage—violent thoughts and planning spilled out through lengthy conversations—this AI frontier may also hold even greater potential for spotting red flags.
Unlike with social media, most user activity with chatbots is accessible only to the AI companies themselves.
But there is also a significant twist: Unlike with social media, where the public can notice worrisome content and report it, most user activity on ChatGPT and other AI platforms is accessible only to the AI companies themselves. The rare exceptions may be when they are compelled to hand over data to law enforcement or otherwise choose to do so.
This story is based on my interviews with five threat assessment leaders in the United States and Canada, as well as with two AI experts working at top US tech companies who have knowledge of OpenAI’s safety operations. Due to the sensitivity of the ongoing Tumbler Ridge investigation and a shooting victim’s lawsuit against OpenAI, most agreed to speak with me on the condition that they not be identified.
In response to my interview requests starting in late March, OpenAI said in an emailed statement: “Our thoughts are with everyone affected by the Tumbler Ridge tragedy. We proactively reached out to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police with information on the individual and their use of ChatGPT, and we’ll continue to support their investigation.”
When I followed up on April 9 with an inquiry about the FSU case, the company referred me to comments it released stating it would cooperate with the Florida AG’s investigation. An earlier statement from April 6 indicated that the company knew of the case a year ago: “After learning of the incident in late April 2025, we identified a ChatGPT account believed to be associated with the suspect, proactively shared this information with law enforcement and cooperated with authorities.”
OpenAI declined my request to interview a safety leader about the changes it says it made to protocols after Tumbler Ridge. The company also declined to answer specific written questions I submitted seeking clarification on how it handles cases of violence risk. (Disclosure: The Center for Investigative Reporting, the parent company of Mother Jones, has sued OpenAI for copyright violations. OpenAI has denied the allegations.)
ChatGPT now has more than 800 million users globally and processes more than 2.5 billion queries per day, according to OpenAI. The company has held out safety as core to its mission since its founding in 2015 as a nonprofit research laboratory. A person with direct knowledge of OpenAI’s safety operations emphasized when we spoke that, in his experience, the company’s safety leaders take harm prevention very seriously. He also noted that flagged accounts constitute a tiny fraction of overall chatbot activity and that triggers for law enforcement referrals can vary based on regulatory frameworks in different countries.
Another source in a senior role in the AI industry told me that recent training of models has improved ChatGPT’s guardrails. This person suggested, however, that many leaders at companies across the booming industry overestimate the capability of the technology itself to mitigate danger and that safety issues in general tend to be marginalized in the race for soaring user growth and engagement, which is driving staggering financial investments. For anyone in artificial intelligence who was paying attention, the person said, the Tumbler Ridge massacre “was an awful wake-up call.”
News coverage of Tumbler Ridge faded quickly in the United States, but the fallout has remained a major story in Canada.
“From the outside, it looks like OpenAI had the opportunity to prevent this horrific loss of life, to prevent there from being dead children,” said BC Premier David Eby after the Journal reported on the shooter’s ChatGPT use. “I’m angry about that. I’m trying hard not to rush to judgment.” Canadian authorities demanded accountability and vowed to create new national requirements for tech companies to report threats brewing on their platforms.
It remains unclear how the Tumbler Ridge shooter used the second account and why it eluded OpenAI.
In public statements, OpenAI expressed condolences and reiterated that it prioritizes safety and user privacy. OpenAI leaders traveled to Ottawa in late February to meet with Canadian authorities and announced steps to boost safety protocols and referrals of threats to law enforcement. The company began contacting the Royal Canadian Mounted Police two days after the attack, the CBC reported. Notably, it shared a second ChatGPT account used by Van Rootselaar—which OpenAI said it discovered only after the violence occurred.
The RCMP confirmed it is conducting “a thorough review” of Van Rootselaar’s digital activity. None of the June 2025 chat logs have been made public, and it remains unclear how the second account was used and why OpenAI didn’t detect it until after the tragedy. But a threat assessment source with decades of experience told me that perpetrators often get past tech company restrictions and continue refining ideas for violence. “We’ve seen this a lot, where subjects work around an account ban and keep going,” the source said, referring to use of various digital platforms. In one recent case, the source said, a perpetrator circumvented a ban and used a chatbot to rapidly create threatening material, then distributed it to targeted victims through at least 10 different email accounts.
As with many high-profile attacks, Tumbler Ridge sparked intense public interest in a motive and a rush to judgment, including from bad-faith commentators. Van Rootselaar, who was transgender and began identifying as female as a teenager, quickly drew the attention of anti-trans ideologues—despite the fact that there is no scientific evidence showing gender identity is a causal factor in mass shootings.
The ChatGPT revelations shortly after the attack set off a different kind of heated blame. But whether reporting the June 2025 chatbot activity to law enforcement could have prevented the Tumbler Ridge disaster is difficult to know. It was far from the first warning sign. Van Rootselaar had a history of suicidal ideation, involuntary hospitalization, and disturbing behavior, including drug abuse and prolific engagement online with violent and extremist content. She had dropped out of school several years before the attack, and in 2023, police had gone to her home after she started a fire while high on hallucinogenic mushrooms. Police at one point confiscated guns from the home, which were later returned. (Those were not the guns used in the attack, authorities said.) As one Canadian commentator wrote in the aftermath, it was evident that the community “was failed on multiple levels by mental-health services and law enforcement.”
Referrals to police can also jeopardize privacy rights, said a former FBI agent: “We know that this kind of monitoring produces lots of false alarms.”
OpenAI told Canadian government leaders in late February that under the company’s newly revised protocols, the shooter’s account from June 2025, if discovered today, would be flagged to law enforcement. “Mental health and behavioural experts now help us assess difficult cases, and we have made our referral criteria more flexible to account for the fact that a user may not discuss the target, means, and timing of planned violence in a ChatGPT conversation but that there may be potential risk of imminent violence,” VP of Global Policy Ann O’Leary stated in an open letter. (The company did not respond to my specific questions about the experts it consults and how OpenAI assesses cases under this process.)
Last August, two months after banning the shooter’s first account, OpenAI posted a summary of its updated safety policy, including discussion of suicide risk and how the company escalates cases of potential violence:
When we detect users who are planning to harm others, we route their conversations to specialized pipelines where they are reviewed by a small team trained on our usage policies and who are authorized to take action, including banning accounts. If human reviewers determine that a case involves an imminent threat of serious physical harm to others, we may refer it to law enforcement. We are currently not referring self-harm cases to law enforcement to respect people’s privacy given the uniquely private nature of ChatGPT interactions.
Similarly, a company spokesperson said after the Tumbler Ridge attack that OpenAI must weigh risk of violence against privacy concerns. The company also cited another consideration, according to the Wall Street Journal: avoiding potential distress caused to individuals and families by getting police involved unnecessarily.
That rationale about overreporting to law enforcement is a chronic pitfall known to threat assessment experts. Numerous mass shootings have been marked by a fateful lack of information-sharing, revealed in hindsight. A family member, peer, teacher, or coworker is exposed to certain warning signs from an individual, but they don’t have a full or clear picture of the situation. That’s where a threat assessment team can be key—trained practitioners with mental health and law enforcement expertise, who gather information more broadly to gauge the potential danger and decide how to intervene. If automated chatbot technology is effective for flagging misuse and even for analyzing it to some degree, that may be a valuable tool for violence prevention. But as OpenAI’s policy shows, the current status quo is that tech companies decide what to do next—likely with no knowledge of the user beyond their activity on the platform.
Fundamentally, this reflects an age-old problem, a threat assessment leader in US law enforcement told me. “The worry about potential violence is there, but they have these internal policy hurdles and these biases about law enforcement, and then they talk themselves out of it, thinking about the risk of what happens if it’s a wrongful kind of report. But now they’ve got the concern documented, they’ve talked about it, and what if that person goes and kills a bunch of people? What is that going to look like?”
The account ban with the Tumbler Ridge shooter “looks to me like they were trying to limit their corporate risk,” said a source in Canadian law enforcement. “Better to cut ties and have the person go use some alternative chatbot.”
But referrals to police can also fail and jeopardize privacy rights, according to Michael German, a longtime civil liberties advocate and former FBI agent who investigated violent extremism. “We know that this kind of monitoring produces lots of false alarms,” he told me. “And there are also many cases of reports to law enforcement where they didn’t react appropriately.”
Still, German believes AI companies should be held responsible for how their chatbots are used: “If you create a product that can encourage people to engage in harm, then you’re participating in that harm, and you should be liable.”
The mass shootings in Tumbler Ridge and Florida are not the only public violence involving use of ChatGPT. In January 2025, a suicidal military veteran who blew up a Tesla Cybertruck in front of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas used the chatbot for feedback on using explosives and evading surveillance by authorities. A teen boy who stabbed three 14-year-old girls last May at his school in Finland used ChatGPT for nearly four months to help him prepare for the attack, according to a CNN report, citing court documents. Finnish authorities said the boy made hundreds of chatbot queries, including research into stabbing tactics, concealment of evidence, and information on mass killings.
After the explosion in Las Vegas, an OpenAI spokesperson reiterated the company’s commitment to safety, adding, “In this case, ChatGPT responded with information already publicly available on the internet and provided warnings against harmful or illegal activities.” OpenAI has not commented publicly about the Finland case and did not respond to my specific inquiry about it.
Until now, there has been no public discussion of another potential concern with the technology: this type of violence risk among the large population of users under paid corporate “enterprise” plans. With rare exception, the terms of those plans essentially wall off chatbot content from the AI companies themselves. For OpenAI, this now includes more than 9 million ChatGPT users across more than a million businesses. OpenAI’s enterprise policy indicates that it reserves the right to monitor the accounts for safety purposes, but because these plans are designed for businesses to protect and retain full control of their data, it’s not clear that OpenAI, or other companies, would be motivated to do so, according to one of the AI sources I spoke with.
“I think this is an area where there is often just a total blind spot,” he said, noting that the big AI companies often sell these plans based on the promise that they will examine client accounts only under exceptional circumstances, such as getting a subpoena. “So if someone on one of these work accounts starts ideating about violence, there is probably no visibility into that.”
The threat assessment leader who described the half-dozen threat cases involving chatbot use told me that most involved the risk of workplace violence in the corporate sector. (The chatbot activity came to light once those individual investigations were underway for other reasons.) He added that other cases of this nature likely are being missed because most companies “don’t even know to look for them.”
“A disturbed loner can perpetrate a school shooting, but probably can’t build a nuclear weapon or release a plague.”
In January, as chatbot use and the market values of top AI companies continued their meteoric rise, a lengthy essay circulating online sparked a lot of chatter. Dario Amodei’s “The Adolescence of Technology” argued that the world may soon face a civilizational test with artificial intelligence. Amodei, who co-founded Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude, remains concerned with daunting challenges that could include worldwide economic disruption, exploitation by authoritarian surveillance states, and catastrophic use of bio or nuclear weapons.
In his chapter titled “A surprising and terrible empowerment,” he included a brief mention of school shooters. His point was to underscore a greater threat: that rapidly advancing AI systems might soon be able to provide anyone with the rare expertise necessary to use weapons of mass destruction. “A disturbed loner can perpetrate a school shooting,” Amodei wrote, “but probably can’t build a nuclear weapon or release a plague.”
We may have yet to face those more existential risks. But two weeks after his essay published, the Tumbler Ridge tragedy revealed that a lethal danger marked by chatbots has already arrived.
