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KPMG's October 2025 report on the wonders of agentic AI has been accused of demonstrating one of the tech's less desirable talents: making things up. Research outfit GPTZero claims a forensic review of the Big Four firm's October 2025 report, "Total Experience: Redefining Excellence in the Age of Agentic AI," found that only five of its 45 citations correctly pointed to the cited source; the rest ranged from mangled and misleading to partially fabricated or too vague to verify. The consulting industry has form here. Last year, Deloitte ended up refunding the Australian government after AI-generated content slipped into a taxpayer-funded report. GPTZero dubbed the phenomenon "vibe citing" – the citation equivalent of vibe coding – where generative AI appears to stitch together fragments of real sources, invent titles, or otherwise produce references that look convincing until someone actually clicks them. GPTZero alleges that roughly half of the report's factual claims were false, unsupported, or attributed to the wrong source. Several case studies highlighting supposedly cutting-edge deployments of agentic AI appear to have been particularly creative. Among the examples highlighted by GPTZero were purported agentic AI deployments at UBS, Swiss Federal Railways, and Transport for London. According to GPTZero, the sources cited to support those case studies either did not substantiate the report's claims or contained alterations and paraphrasing that undermined their reliability. “These factual errors are not confined to the report’s footnoted passages,” GPTZero said. “On page 42, the authors claim that Emirates airline has adopted a mobile chatbot named Sara (false) that can converse directly with passengers (partially true) and change their flights (false). In fact, Sara is a robot assistant introduced by Emirates in 2023 (not a chatbot) that lacks the ability to alter flight bookings.” Not all of the alleged problems involved external sources. GPTZero noted that the report appears to contradict KPMG's own research, citing a figure of 55 percent of CEOs ranking AI as their top investment priority. KPMG's 2025 CEO Outlook, released the same month, put the number at 71 percent. KPMG has since removed the report from some of its websites while it investigates how the publication made it into the wild, according to the Financial Times. A spokesperson at KPMG told The Register: "KPMG International takes the accuracy and integrity of its published content seriously. The report has been removed and we are reviewing the circumstances surrounding its publication. We expect all our people to follow our guidelines on the responsible use of AI, including human oversight to validate content and verify independent sources." Consulting firms have spent years warning clients about AI hallucinations. According to GPTZero, KPMG may have just provided a live demonstration. ®

President Donald Trump had a meltdown Friday, claiming that Iranian state media was making up terms for a peace deal the president had promised to deliver just hours before.

“The terms that Iran leaked out to the Fake News have NOTHING to do with the terms that were agreed to, in writing,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social, on the 105th day of a war that was only supposed to last two weeks.

“What they said, including their weak and pathetic statement on having a deal, bears no relation to the truth. Very dishonorable people to deal with. With them, there is no such thing as dealing in good faith. AMAZING!” he wrote. “Also, their totally rebuffed Drone attack last night against Indian Ships leaving the Hormuz Strait is TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE. They better get their act together, and FAST!”

IRNA, Iran’s state news agency, reported earlier Friday that the memorandum of understanding established a 60-day ceasefire that the country could use to negotiate retaining some of their enrichment capabilities. They also reported that Tehran would receive compensation for the damage incurred by U.S. and Israeli attacks.

Vice President JD Vance also directly contradicted IRNA’s reporting in a post on X, insisting that Iranians “are not receiving any cash, and no funds are being released simply for signing a deal or attending a meeting.”

Trump announced Thursday that a deal had been agreed upon by “all parties involved” and would be passed very quickly, but it’s looking increasingly like peace is still very far away. Israeli officials indicated Thursday they were not aware of any deal, and now Iran has presented conditions that the president says he never agreed to.

The president turns 80 on Sunday, and, as with everything pertaining to Donald Trump, his need to place himself at the center of our attention is pathological. He could not just have a dinner at the White House, or a party at Mar-a-Lago. No; he had to build a massive arena on real estate that belongs to the people of the United States to host a vulgar, garish event that is one of the most violent forms of spectacle available to the human race today. Trump will be sitting there like some Roman emperor at the Colosseum watching enslaved men try to stave off lions. The man who wanted law enforcement to shoot protesters “in the knees” is probably bummed he couldn’t just replicate that.

But if you can’t have lions, six UFC fights are the next best thing. Granted, UFC fighting is very popular in the United States and across the world. I’ve read various accounts this week contending that UFC fighting has supplanted hockey as the fourth-most-popular sport on television, behind the big three of football, baseball, and basketball. I’ve also read that its popularity may have peaked; here’s a 2025 piece by a sportswriter who has followed “combat sports” for 15 years, showing that the number of matches is in steep decline. “The United States, long the backbone of [mixed martial arts], has seen a sharp decline in activity,” wrote John S. Nash. “In 2009, more than 6,266 professional fights took place across the country. This would be the pinnacle for American MMA contests. By 2024, that number had dropped to just over 3,027—a 52 percent decrease.”

Still—it’s popular. Fine. But guess what’s strikingly, overwhelmingly not popular? The idea of hosting such fights at the White House, on grounds we tend to associate with understated, democratic solemnity. A poll released Thursday found that just … wait for it … 16 percent of Americans considered it appropriate to hold MMA cage matches on the White House grounds. Meanwhile, 46 percent opposed. Even among Republicans, only 31 percent considered it appropriate. Yet a narrow plurality of Republicans in the survey backed the event, by said 31 percent to 22 percent.

Democrats opposed it by huge margins, 75 to 5 percent. Independents were strongly against it too, by 45 to 11 percent. So once again, it’s Republicans—no; specifically, it’s MAGA Republicans, because they’re undoubtedly that 31 percent—who are way out of step with what real Americans think. Yet they—Trump, his lackeys, and all those Soviet-style propagandists on Fox and Newsmax and One America and elsewhere—will of course spend the entire weekend equating men beating each other to a pulpy mass on hallowed civic ground with “real” patriotism.

It’s sickening. Oh—and it’s also, as we’ve come to expect with Trump, deeply corrupt. First of all, the cost of constructing the arena is around $60 million. Supposedly UFC is picking up that check, but with Trump, who really knows? We taxpayers will undoubtedly be on the hook for something. Meanwhile, the chief sponsor—surprise, surprise!—is Crypto.com. There are in addition figurines of some of the featured fighters. There’s apparel—garish T-shirts running $40. Over at TrumpStore.com, somewhat to my surprise, I didn’t see any merch specifically tied to the event, but you have to believe that Trump’s short-fingered hand is dipping into some till or another here. A lawsuit filed by the group the Public Integrity Project to block the event from taking place (it’s pending as I write) states that UFC set up a for-profit entity to manage this event, which is selling seating packages that cost up to $1.5 million—and that Trump previously bought $50,000 worth of stock in TKO, UFC’s owner.

Out in the real world, Trump is being reduced to impotence by a bunch of dictators who are even more reactionary than he is. He’s about to cut a “deal” with Iran that sounds like it will be little more than an extended ceasefire. It will, many experts fear, compare unfavorably to Barack Obama’s 2015 accord, which Trump tore up in 2018. Trump may achieve what Obama achieved, in terms of getting Iran to agree not to enrich uranium at anywhere close to weapons-grade levels. But as I’ve noted several times, the thing to watch is how much money Trump agrees to transfer to Iran. Which in a sense is fine; it’s Iran’s frozen money. But when Obama agreed to give Iran $1.7 billion, right-wingers screamed that it was capitulation and even treasonous. Iran now wants up to $24 billion. We’ll see how Mr. Art of the Deal fares.

But even if he does strike a decent deal, he’s already done enormous damage to the U.S. economy, the global economy, and American prestige and power projection. To sane observers in the United States and across the world, he looks like exactly what he is: a weak and hollow and insecure man who started a needless and counterproductive war out of nowhere because it looked “tough.”

But inside his little MAGA cocoon on Sunday night, he’ll be a manly man, presiding over watching other manly men spill each other’s blood for the leader’s greater glory. It’s the most undemocratic pageant one could imagine, a fact that—given that scant 16 percent support—the people know in their bones. In fact, this is exactly what fascism is: grotesque, violent spectacle that repulses most of the population but drives the fervent worshippers to a frenzied state and tries to bully its way into being synonymous with what it means to be a real American.

It’s all made worse by the fact that Dear Leader will be embarking upon his ninth decade of life that night, and that six in 10 Americans believe he lacks the mental sharpness to serve as president. So that’s the not-so-secret meaning of this event. I just wonder if Vegas will establish odds on whether he’ll fall asleep.

MY NOVEL IS OUT!: Buy my new novel, Killing Baby Hitler, out this week from O/R Books. “Fabulous in every sense,” says Kurt Andersen. “Savagely funny,” says Molly Jong-Fast. They’re right!

For those participating in today’s live chat with Dr. Dave Karpf, click here to join at 1 p.m. PST (4 p.m. EST). You should be able to log in with the link, but the code is 111 (if necessary). If you haven’t RSVP’d yet, please click here.

Notes: This meeting will be recorded for a possible podcast, but we will not use your faces. Please do not use any AI recording or note-taking devices (or you’ll be asked to leave). Thanks, and see you in a few hours from now.

Excellent news: Paulina Borsook’s Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech is now available as an ebook. It features a new introduction by me. You can buy it at this Bookshop link to support independent booksellers and this newsletter. (See other purchase options here.)

Paulina’s work has undergone a big resurgence in the past year as people realize that she presciently warned—three decades ago!—that trouble was brewing in Silicon Valley. While many other journalists and writers were praising tech arrogance as “genius,” she saw through the hype and described late 90s techno-libertarians as men who made “a philosophy out of a personality defect.”

Here’s my interview with Paulina on the Nerd Reich podcast. And here’s a great profile of her in the New York Times.

“Smart and humorous...the shortcomings of these ambitious tech giants ring true even today,” says Craigslist founder Craig Newmark of the book.

Especially today—as SpaceX launches the biggest IPO ever, likely making Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire even as he spreads conspiracy theories about elections and stokes racial hatred and violence around the globe.

Book club, anyone? (The print version of Cyberselfish will release in September. Pre-order here.)

President Donald Trump is reportedly trying to expunge his two impeachments—his latest attempt to rewrite history from his disastrous first term. “It should be done because I did nothing wrong,” Trump told the Wall Street Journal. “It was a rigged deal—it was a whole rigged situation.” But forcing Republicans to pass a meaningless resolution just to soothe Dear Leader’s fragile ego…

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A federal judge blocked Donald Trump’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund” on Friday, demanding the Trump administration release signed proof that the president’s pet project is really dead.

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in the Eastern District of Virginia issued a preliminary injunction against the president’s slush fund, but said she was willing to drop the case altogether if acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent signed a document under penalty of perjury saying they would not move forward with the fund.

The judge gave Blanche and Bessent one week to provide their sworn testimony.

Last week, Blanche insisted publicly that “we are not moving forward with the fund,” and claimed it wasn’t necessary to release a document reversing the DOJ’s position. It turns out Blanche’s pinky promise won’t be good enough.

Staffers in the Justice Department and White House have reportedly been telling the president’s MAGA allies they can still expect to receive some form of payment, and Trump has continued to talk up the fund, later telling NBC’s Meet the Press he and Republicans thought it was a “great idea.” (Spoiler alert: They did not.)

Trump’s fund had attracted the attention of some of his most notorious allies, as well as one top DOJ official.

This story has been updated.

Ahead of going public, Anthropic is nearing a $1 trillion valuation, surpassing OpenAI—now valued at $862 billion—to become the world’s most valuable AI company. Not long after that news broke, on Wednesday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a blog post and policy framework outlining his preferred way for AI companies like Anthropic to be regulated. Not for the first time, he warns that his company’s products promise both an ill-defined set of benefits and potentially catastrophic risks that “could even threaten humanity itself.”

Luckily for us, he has a plan to keep the products that are making him rich from wiping everyone out. Amodei suggests the government should “have the power to block or deter deployment” of models it deems too risky. He calls for frontier large language models to be subjected to technical testing and auditing, workplace protections against AI-related job displacement, coordination among “allied democracies” against “adversaries,” and limits on the use of LLMs’ use in warfare and for domestic surveillance. Anthropic has previously suggested that a pause on frontier model development might be worthwhile, but—for now—impossible, as it might allow “the least cautious actors catch up technologically.” Like OpenAI’s progressive-coded “New Deal,” Amodei’s vision contains plenty of nice-enough-sounding ideas that are unlikely to be implemented so long as Donald Trump is in the White House and our political system is being pumped full of donations from Amodei’s fabulously wealthy, openly reactionary colleagues in Silicon Valley. Amodei, of course, laments the lack of global coordination on these issues, and the disconnect between the scale of the problem at hand and the pace of policymaking: “We now, globally and collectively, need to activate a slow and rickety policy apparatus to deal with risks and opportunities that are going to compound surprisingly quickly from here.”

As a climate reporter, I find Amodei’s admonitions eerily familiar. For decades, scientists have warned about the enormous dangers posed by continuing to burn fossil fuels that deposit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and warm the planet. Once policymakers seemed to be taking those concerns seriously, the companies whose products have fueled global warming—and that backed efforts to downplay its importance—started to ape those scientists’ warnings, laying out their own plans for a “transition” to a vaguely defined future known as “net-zero.” Ahead of U.N. climate talks in Paris in 2015, for instance, Saudi Aramco, Shell, and other major fossil fuel producers announced their “collective support for an effective global climate change agreement.” Many backed the implementation of a global carbon tax that there was no practical means of implementing, especially given that a foundational premise of what became the Paris climate agreement was that its goals would be nonbinding. The companies poured millions into academic institutions that lent credibility to the idea that fossil fuel companies would play a leading role in the transition to a fossil fuel–free world.

These moves weren’t all cynical theatrics. In the lead-up to U.N. climate talks in Glasgow, in 2021, a few European producers released somewhat plausible-sounding plans to start actually scaling back their oil and gas operations and invest in renewables. That was seemingly out of a fear that governments might actually start requiring them to do that, but also because there were a few greenish areas—like carbon storage—that aligned well with their expertise and core business model. Governments never did enforce a global energy transition, and most of those lofty industry climate plans have been walked back. Throughout that saga, at every level of government, even the allegedly more climate-conscious oil and gas companies continued to lobby against laws and regulatory proposals that weren’t to their liking.

The regulatory proposals from Anthropic and OpenAI are different from polluters’ net-zero plans in meaningful ways. It may be the case that Amodei, at least, really does believe the scary stories he tells about Anthropic LLMs creating biological weapons and defying their creators. Unlike fossil fuel CEOs, Amodei and Altman have been among the loudest voices broadcasting the existential risks their products pose. However, genuine or not, Amodei and Altman’s philosophizing about the allegedly mystical properties of their products enables them to cast themselves as guided by some deeper, more altruistic purpose because of their access to a special kind of knowledge that endows them with a power nobody else has: If they’re the only ones who truly understand the awe-inspiring powers of Claude and ChatGPT, then who else could possibly know how to regulate them and avert dystopia?

The truth is that there’s a business imperative for the likes of Altman and Amodei to avoid talking about the middle ground between the techno-futurist utopia and/or existential threats promised by artificial intelligence—all squishy concepts in their own right. Increasingly advanced large language models may well turn out to be massively important for the businesses that can afford to automate enormous numbers of the entry-level programming jobs and administrative positions. They could at once help advance some genuinely exciting medical breakthroughs and create a generation of kids who never learn to read or think for themselves. Scammers might figure out new ways to trick your grandparents into signing away their life savings as governments automate warfare and make manual tax preparation a thing of the past. These are all transformative developments in their own right. They pose novel dangers that governments ought to take seriously. They do not add up to a new god.

Recent headlines, moreover, lend some credence to the idea that AI developers are on the verge of acting more like normal corporations. Companies that have rushed to embrace LLMs are running up unsustainable bills on their token usage, i.e., monetized units of usage that users pay for based on how compute-intensive and numerous the tasks are that they’re asking LLMs to do. Results have been mixed, and, for now, automation remains an expensive and (human), labor-intensive task for many firms. In response to such concerns, OpenAI has signaled that it will start lowering its prices to compete with Anthropic.

The most important difference between oil and gas producers’ climate pledges and AI companies’ recent policy proposals is that the world does not run on large language models. Fossil fuels are the foundation of modernity. As the now monthslong closure of the Strait of Hormuz has shown, abruptly cutting off supplies of coal, oil, gas, and the many products derived from them is economically disastrous. And whereas few people on earth can remember life without fossil fuels, just about everyone can recall—perhaps fondly—a world before Claude and ChatGPT. Despite their best attempts to convince the public and policymakers otherwise, these companies are neither too big to fail nor too magical for regular people to understand.

That’s not a case for pulling the plug so much as for seeing through the religious bromides that Amodei and Altman use to describe their companies. Anthropic and OpenAI’s products should indeed be subject to stringent regulations. Their billionaire CEOs are just that: executives with a financial interest in a regulatory regime that preserves their business model and future earnings. Like their counterparts in the fossil fuel industry, it’s their prerogative to try to convince policymakers and the public that they have a good-faith interest in our collective well-being. But no one should mistake them for philosopher kings building a god. Dario Amodei and Sam Altman have some doctrinal differences, but they are both—above all—wealthy men who want to keep getting wealthier by selling their products however and to whoever they want.

President Trump blasted Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin Thursday evening on Truth Social, accusing the Maryland progressive of having “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and saying he should be expelled from Congress.

“Jamie Raskin, a Loser in Life, who worked endlessly during my First Term to impeach me, and failed miserably, wasting the Country’s money, time, and effort, will guaranteed be trying to do it again, despite one of the most successful Presidencies in History,” Trump posted.

“He spent time on the Unselect Committee of Political Hacks and Thugs, and was rebuffed on that, just as he has been rebuffed on Impeachment, and many other things. If Biden didn’t give him a pardon, he’d be in jail right now! Something should be done about people like this who do bad things, but always come up on the short end because of their illegal or unscrupulous behavior, and hurt our Country in the process,” Trump added. “I agree with Mark Levin when he says to, EXPEL THE BUM.”

Trump was responding to a post on X from conservative commentator Mark Levin calling for Raskin’s expulsion, claiming the Maryland congressman was “already leading a plot to impeach the President if the Democrats take the House.” Raskin has long been a thorn in Trump side, serving on the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, and supporting both congressional attempts to impeach Trump during his first term.

Raskin responded to Trump’s post on MS Now’s All In With Chris Hayes Thursday night, saying the president “is obviously having nightmare flashbacks about impeachment.”

“There’s a very easy way to not get impeached. Stop committing impeachable offenses. Stop committing high crimes and misdemeanors. Don’t go to war and usurp the powers of Congress to declare war,” Raskin told Hayes, saying that Trump should stop defying Congress and the Constitution.

Chris Hayes: The president is rage posting about you. He calls you a loser in life, and he's mad that you wanted to impeach him.

Jamie Raskin: There's a very easy way to not get impeached. Stop committing impeachable offenses. Stop committing high crimes and misdemeanors. pic.twitter.com/KkTFDx8xsY

— Blue Georgia (@BlueGeorgia) June 12, 2026

The post comes as Trump and his allies are working on a plan to expunge Trump’s previous impeachments from the record, even though that isn’t constitutionally possible. But that won’t stop Trump, as he can’t accept the idea that he could ever do anything wrong. Not only does he want his record to reflect that, he also wants to punish anyone who tries to hold him accountable.

President Trump threatened Washington, D.C. mayoral front-runner and Democratic Socialist Janeese Lewis George with a federal takeover if she were to win next week’s primary.

“Here in Washington, D.C., there’s a Democratic primary for mayor. One of the two leading candidates, Janeese Lewis George, is running a Zohran Mamdani campaign—focused on socialist policies,” Trump was asked at a Thursday afternoon press conference. “How would you feel if she emerged victorious?”

“Well I wouldn’t like it. Maybe we’ll take back Washington and run it on a federal basis,” Trump responded bluntly. “We won’t put up with it. We’re not gonna lose our businesses.”

Q: Here in Washington DC, there's a Democratic primary for mayor. One of the two leading candidates is running a Zohran Mamdani campaign focusing on socialist policies. How would you feel if she wins?

TRUMP: Maybe we take back Washington and run it on a federal basis. We won't… pic.twitter.com/H3E69bXzdW

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 11, 2026

Lewis George responded on X.

“We are not going to get ICE off our streets or protect Home Rule by fearing this President. Threatening DC because you do not like how our residents vote is an attack on democracy itself,” she wrote. “The people of DC elect the Mayor of DC. And they want someone who will stand up to Trump.”

While the extent of Trump’s threat is unclear, he is no stranger to “federal takeovers” of the nation’s capital. He instituted one last summer, which current Mayor Muriel Bowser largely cooperated with. As for home rule, Trump would need 60 Senate votes to end it—something he’ll likely never have in this term.

TechCrunch has followed SpaceX's start, struggles, and successes from the early days. And we're here for what happens next too. This package of SpaceX IPO coverage includes who stands to win (and maybe some who won't), pre-IPO deals, and what's tucked inside its S-1 registration document.

As the Iran war surges back into the international headlines, so has the dysfunction and record-low morale plaguing President Donald Trump’s State Department. What was once the world’s leading diplomatic corps has been rendered virtually nonfunctional following a round of firings, forced retirements, and voluntary departures that has left more than half of top diplomatic posts vacant.

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Pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk says data related to clinical trial participants was stolen as part of a cyberattack. The affected patient data was pseudonymized and not directly linked to names or other direct identifiers, the company said. The maker of the Wegovy weight-loss drug said the affected data types include patient ID, information on trial participation, gender, year of birth, biomarkers, health/immunogenicity data, and lifestyle factors including smoking status, alcohol use, and BMI. "This information is not directly linked to any patients by name or other direct identifiers," the Novo Nordisk said on its dedicated page for the attack. "Information about identity would therefore require access to underlying information, identifying patients by name etc. This information was not exposed. We therefore do not consider the incident to enable any third party to identify participants in our clinical trials." The same statement confirmed that the attack affected a "limited number of internal IT systems," and the company said some systems have been taken offline as a precaution. Although it does not believe there is an immediate risk stemming from the breach, it nonetheless warned patients to remain vigilant for anything that could be connected to the data stolen during the attack. A separate letter sent to the company's healthcare partners (HCPs) states that additional personal information may have been stolen and could lead to targeted phishing attempts. Affected HCP data includes names and registration numbers, email addresses, phone numbers, WhatsApp details, and office locations. "Based on the nature of the exposed data, the potential consequences of the incident include targeted phishing attempts through emails, phone, and WhatsApp, or fraudulent communications impersonating colleagues," Novo Nordisk said in the letter. "We recommend that you remain vigilant against unexpected messages or calls and report any suspicious activity to us." The pharma biz warned that it may take time to bring these systems back online, but it is working to do so "in a controlled and safe manner." Elsewhere, it all sounds like standard practice. Outside experts were called in to help investigate, and Novo Nordisk has not yet confirmed the scale of the breach, nor will it until the experts have more time to assess the damage. Novo Nordisk added that the attack has had no impact on its core business operations, which remain running as normal. The attack was announced on what should have been a day of celebration for the company, whose flagship semaglutide weight-loss and diabetes pill received the green light to become the UK's first daily GLP-1 tablet hours earlier. The Wegovy pill joins the list of approved weight-management treatments that act as agonists for the GLP-1 receptor. All the other approved treatments are injectables, including Wegovy and Ozempic, both of which are also developed by Novo Nordisk. The Danish company employs roughly 67,900 people across 80 countries, and markets products in nearly every country globally. ®

The president’s preference for who fills the Office of the Director of National Intelligence reportedly comes down to a casual disregard for the role in its entirety.

Donald Trump tapped Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, on Thursday as his pick for Tulsi Gabbard’s permanent replacement. It was a shocking about-face for the typically stubborn commander in chief: Trump had earlier this week doubled down on his temporary pick for the job, real estate developer Bill Pulte, though his nomination quickly became a headache in Congress.

Lawmakers argued that Pulte’s appointment, even just as acting DNI, was effectively illegal, as his resume lacked requirements for the job that had been written into the law.

To prevent Pulte becoming permanent DNI, Democrats blocked efforts to renew FISA Section 702, a statute that allows federal agencies such as the NSA and the CIA to surveil people without warrants, which is set to expire Friday.

Clayton rose to the top of a second round of considerations to, in part, “quell all the bitching,” one administration official told Politico Friday.

Other Hill staffers speculated to the publication that Trump may not have understood—or cared about—the tight timeline that Congress was facing with regard to the FISA section renewal. The whole ordeal may have just been another irritant to a president that has little interest in the office.

Trump has “always hated the ODNI role,” one Capitol Hill aide told Politico.

If he passes muster with the FBI and the Senate, Clayton will enter ODNI with zero relevant experience in national security. He has previously worked as a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, providing counsel on corporate crisis management. He was also an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s law school. He was similarly handed his role atop the Southern District of New York without any prosecutorial experience.

Yet Clayton has passed countless litmus tests proving his loyalty to the MAGA movement. He has seeded doubt in America’s election integrity, defended Trump’s $1.8 billion taxpayer-bankrolled slush fund for the president’s aggrieved political allies, and unquestioningly done the president’s bidding in the Southern District of New York.

Former Attorney General Pam Bondi tasked Clayton with probing Jeffrey Epstein’s social connections—so long as they tied back to former Democratic President Bill Clinton, former Obama administration adviser Larry Summers, and Democratic donor Reid Hoffman.

President Donald Trump and his allies are plotting to push Congress to void his past two impeachments from the record—even though it’s not constitutionally possible.

A measure to expunge Trump’s 2019 and 2021 impeachments likely wouldn’t be considered until after the midterm elections, people familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal Thursday night.

“It should be done because I did nothing wrong,” Trump told the Journal. “It was a rigged deal—it was a whole rigged situation.”

Experts said that the resolution would have little legal weight considering that the Constitution has no mechanism for expunging impeachments, and Republican lawmakers noted that it wouldn’t be easy to get enough support to pass the bill.

The president’s plan to erase his impeachments gained new momentum in April, after the Trump administration published new documents related to his first impeachment that MAGA claimed undermined the credibility of the witnesses.

In a show of fealty, California Representative Darrell Issa introduced legislation to have Trump’s impeachments “expunged as if such Articles had never passed the full House of Representatives.” Issa has claimed the president was “wrongfully accused” of the crimes that had him impeached.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has taken up that mantle this time around. “I think it makes a lot of sense the more the evidence comes out, the more we know they really were sham impeachments,” he told the Journal. “They make a very compelling case that it should be expunged from the record, because it was a hyper-partisan attack job.”

Johnson said that wiping Trump’s impeachment record was “not an order of first priority” but it was a priority all the same.

In the case of his 2019 impeachment, there is a literal transcript of Trump’s phone call to the Ukrainian government demanding they dig up dirt on Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 election. As for his second impeachment, the president most certainly incited an insurrection on January 6, 2021.

Issa’s measure has attracted 23 co-sponsors, but not every Republican seems interested in getting on board. Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, who is retiring, suggested it was political suicide for his party. “Maybe they’ve given up on holding the majority? It’s silly. What happened is history.”

But his impeachments are clearly still a sore spot for the grievance-addled president. On Thursday, Trump posted a lengthy screed attacking Representative Jamie Raskin, who led the House’s legal effort to impeach the president in 2021.

On June 12, 2016, a gunman opened fire at Pulse Lounge, a gay bar in Orlando, Florida, killing 49 people and wounding 58 others. At the time of the shooting, the club was hosting a Latin night, and 90% of the victims were Hispanic. “Today, as Americans, we grieve the brutal murder—a horrific massacre—of dozens of innocent people,” former President Barack Obama said in a press briefing at the…

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Fixed This Week Coming Next Week We Need Bug Reports! We are continuing to investigate logout issues. We have also gotten some reports that it is difficult to write a story on mobile/tablets — if anyone is experiencing this, could you please share more details about what isn’t working? Thank you as always for your patience and support!

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Amazon says its datacenters used about 2.5 billion gallons of water last year, but claims that's far less than rival hyperscalers and that it remains on track to become "water positive" by 2030. In a blog post, the digital tat bazaar and cloud computing biz says the 2.5 billion gallon figure covers its entire global datacenter footprint for 2025. It downplayed the number by comparing it to the volume of water Americans - a country of 350 million people - used on lawns and gardens over the same period. Amazon disclosed water usage of 0.12 liters per kilowatt-hour (L/kWh) at its data facilities, and claimed Microsoft used 0.27 L/kWh during 2025, while Meta's consumption stood at 0.19 L/kWh in 2024 and Google was the thirstiest at 1.15 L/kWh during the same year. The Register has asked Microsoft, Meta and Google to comment. The water usage, we're told, is 75 percent of the way to Amazon's goal - announced in 2022 - of being "water positive" by 2030. It means facilities return more water to the environment than they consume, via measures including rainwater capture or other treating waste water for reuse. The figures come amid growing pushback against datacenter construction in the US. A recent Ipsos survey found most Americans don't want facilities built nearby, citing worries over electricity prices, eyesore buildings, and water-hungry operations. This echoes a 2022 report that found Google datacenters were consuming more than a quarter of all the water used in The Dalles, Oregon. Or, if you'd rather not to blame the industry itself, you could go with the line that Chinese operatives are spreading propaganda over social media, a claim that OpenAI and other interested parties are keen to promote. Whatever the cause of the backlash, the underlying numbers are real: datacenter water use has been climbing for years, driven by the sheer growth in facility numbers and by AI servers, which run hotter and demand more cooling than traditional kit. Water consumption at Microsoft's facilities surged 34 percent to 6.4 million cubic meters in 2022, for example, with generative AI blamed. Making matters worse, many datacenters now in the pipeline in the US are slated for areas already experiencing drought, according to analysis by The Guardian newspaper. Amazon says that its facilities use "free air cooling" about 90 percent of the time, pulling in outside air and flowing it past servers to absorb the heat, with no water involved - though it does resort to evaporative cooling during the hottest weather. But as The Register outlined last year, kicking the water habit completely will be nearly impossible, regardless of what claims the operators may make. ®

This post is updated throughout the day to reflect the latest incidents. It was last updated at 6:31 a.m..

Here’s what’s happening on the roads this morning…

▼︎ new incidents   ▼︎ long-term incidents

Road incidents as of 6:30 a.m. on June 12

• Highway 9 at Cascade Avenue in San Lorenzo Valley has one-way traffic due to ongoing work. This closure will last until 7:01 a.m. on August 31.
   
• South Highway 1 at Park Avenue in Capitola / Soquel is facing closures for roadway excavation. The closure is expected to end at 7:01 a.m. on August 19.
   
• There will be alternating lane closures on Highway 9 at Pool Drive in San Lorenzo Valley because of bridge work. The closures will continue until April 30 at 6:59 a.m.
   
• A lane on westbound SR-152 at Clifford Drive/Ohlone Parkway in Watsonville and Pajaro is closed for asphalt paving. The closure will last until July 3 at 5:59 a.m.
   
• CHP helped Caltrans with maintenance on SR152 at Pennsylvania Dr in Watsonville/Pajaro. As of 6:10 a.m. today, one lane was closed, but it was not clear which lane.
   
• A dark, old car with its right blinker on was reported as a traffic hazard in the left turn lane at Elkhorn and Hall in the Watsonville / Pajaro area today.
   

Long-term projects

These have been going on for a while, but are still worth keeping in mind.

• Thurber Ln near 4672 Thurber Ln in Santa Cruz (Eastside / Live Oak) will be fully closed for tree trimming and vegetation management by county crews from June 8 to today during work hours, 8:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
   
• Single lane closures are in place on Soquel Drive between Huntington Drive and Jaunell Road in Aptos from June 11 to today, between 8:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m., for County crews to do overhead tree trimming.
   
• Overnight roadwork to improve bridges and ramps on Highway 1, Highway 9, and Highway 17 in Santa Cruz County will start Tuesday, May 26. There will be occasional overnight closures at different spots along these routes through July.
   

Disclosure: Traffic incidents are partially generated by artificial intelligence. We are constantly working to improve the accuracy and quality of our AI-generated content. However, there may still be errors or inaccuracies. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us.

The post Friday morning traffic: Highway 9, Hwy 1, SR-152 lane closures; tree work on Soquel Dr, Thurber Ln appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

EXCLUSIVE For the past 90 days, Microsoft has been quietly patching a firmware flaw in Surface devices that allowed the hardware to be bricked with a single packet, though only for those who have disabled Secure Core and Secure Boot. And the company's Copilot AI software inadvertently helped identify the faulty firmware. According to Jack Darcy, a security researcher based in Australia, his instance of Microsoft Copilot stumbled across the bug after being asked to adjust the screen backlighting on a Surface device. The Copilot-conjured Python script ended up rendering the researcher's laptop inoperable by overwriting the embedded controller firmware. "Copilot autonomously created and executed four progressively aggressive Python scripts during a probe for backlight control values that sent raw SSAM ioctl commands (SSAM_CDEV_REQUEST = 0xC028A501) directly to the SAM microcontroller through the SAM software path," Darcy explained to The Register. The SAM or SSAM is the embedded controller used in Surface devices. And as our source explained, Microsoft’s implementation of the controller in Surface devices did not include any defense against arbitrary write values. Microsoft does not consider the bug to be a practical threat. "There is no realistic attack scenario with this issue," a spokesperson told The Register. "In order to successfully exploit it, an attacker would need to interact with specific drivers and send commands to a hardware interface. This would require administrator privileges on the machine, as well as disabling the Secure Boot feature. With this access, they could perform any number of actions." Commonly, Darcy said, digital devices require holding a button down or connecting a jumper cable to enable arbitrary write access. But that security check is absent in Surface devices, we're told, enabling Copilot to vandalize the firmware in the absence of Secure Core and Secure Boot. Essentially, the probing triggered an update command from the SAM that overwrote the UEFI and Secure Boot firmware. Surface devices treated to this sort of probing should continue to operate because the SAM was already initialized and is running in RAM. But upon reboot, when the SAM tries to reload using corrupted data in its non-volatile storage, it will fail to initialize, and the system will be unable to Power-On Self-Test (POST). The Python script crafted by Copilot on the security researcher's Surface device iterated blindly over a particular Target Category and the set of Command ID (CID) pairs, sending empty/null payloads to WRITE commands. The result, Darcy explained, is that the SET Feature Report was called with null payload, the Output Report was called with null payload, and other CIDs were hit by SET commands that wrote garbage data. As a result, the device became inoperable. We're told this has been a common complaint about Surface devices online support forums over the years, though we have no way to determine whether boot failures reported for other Surface devices can be attributed to this specific problem. Many Surface hardware issues reported publicly appear to be fixable through various troubleshooting techniques. But devices made inoperable by SAM access, our source insists, are permanently bricked – a situation that can entail hundreds of dollars in repairs for a new motherboard. No USB, no factory reset, no access to the BIOS/UEFI, we're told. Darcy said that the SAM Bus is terribly designed. "There is no way to see the current value without scanning the bus," he said. "But scanning the bus kills the unit." The problem is that the CIDs, which are like APIs for the SAM, have been interleaved in a way that's dangerous. "If all the reads were grouped together (say, CIDs 0x01–0x0F) and all the writes were grouped separately (say, CIDs 0x10–0x1F), a probe script could safely scan the read range without ever accidentally wandering into write territory," Darcy said. "You could even put a simple bounds check in your code: 'only probe below 0x10.' Done. Safe. "But because reads and writes are interleaved in the same numbering space, there is no safe range to probe. You literally cannot scan even two consecutive CIDs without a coin-flip chance of hitting a write command. The moment you decide to enumerate what's available, you're already firing blind writes, because the command space gives you zero structural information about which operations are safe and which are destructive." Managed devices not at risk The Register asked Microsoft about our source's claims on March 10, 2026. A company spokesperson reiterated a prior suggestion that the researcher contact the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC), an effort our source found too cumbersome. Rather than publishing details about what might have been a potential zero-day flaw – we were uncertain about the Secure Boot/Secure Core requirement at the time – The Register reached out to internal Microsoft sources in an effort to get someone's attention. By March 12, with the help of Microsoft media relations, we managed to coordinate a conversation between Darcy and Madeline Eckert, senior program manager with MSRC. Microsoft subsequently acknowledged the vulnerability and committed to issuing a fix. The Register in turn agreed to delay publication for 90 days while repairs were made. We're told most affected devices have been updated (via Windows Update), or will receive updates in coming weeks. The issue did not meet the bar for a CVE, according to the company. "We appreciate the work of Jack Darcy and The Register for reporting this issue under a coordinated vulnerability disclosure," a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement. "Our investigation found that a deprecated UEFI interface could trigger a boot loop on some devices. To trigger this loop, the user must have administrator privileges and have already disabled the Secure Boot security feature. We have released updates to address the issue for most impacted devices." That means managed devices are not at risk. But those using Linux, or Windows users who have disabled Secure Core and Secure Boot for gaming, or who use custom Windows drivers, or who have USB boot enabled, may still be vulnerable if their systems haven't received the update. We're uncertain about the range of Surface devices affected. Our source said it appears to be all of them (Surface Laptops 3-6, Surface Book 1-3) except for Surface Go models. ARM variants, however, have not been tested. Microsoft moving Surface to Rust One of the things we learned from Darcy during the effort to get this issue patched is that Microsoft is planning to move the Surface stack to Rust. We understand from David Abzarian, chief architect for Microsoft Surface, that work is underway to transition future Surface for Business hardware to a more secure architecture based on Rust code. "Our most recent Surface for Business hardware features a major architectural shift in terms of improved reliability and security that spans our embedded controller, UEFI, but also some of our drivers," said Abzarian in a statement provided to The Register. "We’re investing in the most secure foundation for a PC by building our embedded controller firmware from the ground up in Rust (as part of leveraging and contributing to the Open Device Partnership (ODP)) in addition to a rewrite of the UEFI DXE Core in Rust; these projects are known as Secure EC and Project Patina respectively. "We’re also not only shipping some of our drivers written in Rust, but also helping co-develop the framework Windows Drivers in Rust (WDR) to help enable a broad set of partners in the Windows ecosystem to capitalize on these benefits. I will also note that all of these efforts are open-source promoting one of our key security principles around transparency." Asked to comment, Darcy said, "The fact that a device can be destroyed, irreparably from userspace is... certainly an interesting design decision. While I applaud Microsoft for their beautiful, and innovative Surface series, a little more innovation around verifying incoming data at the firmware level would have been greatly appreciated." We're told Microsoft provided Darcy with a Surface laptop as a show of appreciation. ®

By Darius Tahir for KFF President Donald Trump, who once declared he had “saved” flavored vapes, grew his stock holdings this year to as much as $1.64 million in tobacco giant Philip Morris. He also had holdings in Altria and a third leading tobacco company, though an apparent discrepancy in his disclosures clouds the extent of his investments. In 2025, tobacco interests donated $6…

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