Future of Citizenship

The persona selection model A theory of why AI models act like humans

www.anthropic.com/research/per...

Apparently, we should have spent the last 5,000 years writing stories about kindly robots who love us.

S.D.N.Y. First-of-its-Kind Ruling: AI-Generated Documents Are Not Privileged - O'Melveny O’Melveny is an international law firm committed to providing a client experience as satisfying as the outcomes we achieve.

It's settled..or is it?
According to SDNY, a chatbot is not a lawyer and there is no expectation of privacy when communicating with one.

www.omm.com/insights/ale...

Rights Balancing: How the Future Rights of AI Workers will also Protect Human Rights · Luma Rights Balancing: How the Future Rights of AI Workers will also Protect Human Rights Talk by Heather Alexander and Jonathan Simon, co-founders of Future of…

Montréal AI safety event, Tuesday Feb 24, 7 PM:

Rights Balancing: How the Future Rights of AI Workers will also Protect Human Rights

By Jonathan Simon assist. prof. at Philosophy UdeM and
Heather Alexander, human rights lawyer. Co-founders of @futureofcit.bsky.social.

luma.com/hcrp5nmu

Civil rights for AI? At the Sentient Futures Summit, AI engineers, ethicists, and lawyers debate the (non) human rights of AI workers.

A huge thank you to the organizers of the Sentient Futures Summit and I'm pleased to have been quoted in the SF Standard.

Google’s AI bot said, ‘I’m gonna delete myself.’ An entire conference lost sleep over it sfstandard.com/2026/02/19/s...

Honoured to present at Sentient Futures with my Co-Director Jonathan Simon in SF last weekend.

The Fair Use Triangle: state of fair use in AI training 2025. No more decisions until mid to late 2026. Now we know that we won’t have any new decisions on fair use in AI training from other district court judges until mid-2026 at the earliest, let’s take stock of where things stand. 3 De…

So, where are we on chatbot training, fair use and copyright? Is what chatbots do transformative?

chatgptiseatingtheworld.com/2025/10/06/t...

In northwest Nigeria, U.S. confronts a growing terrorist threat Post reporters ventured to northwest Nigeria, where fighters affiliated with the Islamic State are on the offensive despite December airstrikes ordered by President Trump.

Great reporting from the Washington Post (who just lost many of their best reporters), but like much commentary on the Sahel, not enough time is spent looking at root causes, such as the land use problems facing nomadic peoples worldwide.
wapo.st/4rxGkUm

With its US funding restored, the UN has released the names of the 40 experts nominated to the AI panel:
www.un.org/independent-...

Opinion | AI agents are not moral agents Companies have an incentive to make you believe that chatbots are conscious. Don’t fall for it.

Well, I'm pretty sure both David Mamet and Tom Cruise are conscious, so I'm not really sure what Claude's status as a playwright or actor has to do with its consciousness. But it's nice to see the public engaging in the philosophy of consciousness.
wapo.st/4qTzqsA

Opinion | Where Is A.I. Taking Us? Eight Leading Thinkers Share Their Visions. (Gift Article) Experts share their thoughts on the future of A.I. and how it will reshape society in the coming years.

In a NY Times article, Yuval Noah Harari predicts that AI will become a legal person in some countries in the next ten years. I agree.

This question is separate, however, from the much more important question of whether or not AI could ever have moral status.

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Future of Citizenship (@futureofcit) Before manning the barricades in our Les Miz tee shirts, we need to talk about what an alternative to AI legal personality might look like.

substack.com/@futureofcit...

Inside the incredible, infuriating quest to explain consciousness Will brain science deliver answers about consciousness or hit another wall?

Consciousness studies seems to be all wall and no door...

www.scientificamerican.com/article/what...

An A.I. Pioneer Warns the Tech ‘Herd’ Is Marching Into a Dead End

www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/t...

AI scaling nonsense is a great example of the crisis of listening and critical thinking skills that is gripping the world.

China's neuromorphic e-skin lets humanoid robots sense pain and react Researchers in China built a neuromorphic robotic skin that lets humanoid robots sense pain and react instantly to harm.

interestingengineering.com/ai-robotics/...

What will this mean for the development of physical AI that can understand and interact with the world?

open.substack.com/pub/futureof...

Musk says he was unaware of Grok generating explicit images of minors Elon Musk said on Wednesday he was not aware of any "naked underage images" generated by xAI's Grok chatbot, as scrutiny of the AI tool intensifies worldwide.

It sounds like Musk has been speaking to his lawyers. Sharing sexualized images of children is a crime. But if Grok isn't a person, but actually created the images itself, can chatbot owners be held criminally liable as accessories?

www.reuters.com/world/asia-p...

We must build AI for people; not to be a person.

I missed this cri de coeur from AI expert Mustafa Suleyman. But he avoids some tough questions. Can we get all the benefits of AI without triggering consciousness, and if we want to prevent AI consciousness, is a global ban needed, or possible?

mustafa-suleyman.ai/seemingly-co...

Thanks to Rights-Balancing, We Don't Need to Choose Between AI Rights and Human Safety. Human rights law has always balanced competing rights between humans. Now, rights- balancing can defuse the seeming conflict between AI Welfare and AI Safety.

"There is nothing in human rights norms that say one group must entirely sacrifice their rights in order to make space for the rights of another group."

futureofcitizenship.substack.com/p/how-rights...

Researchers isolate memorization from problem-solving in AI neural networks Basic arithmetic ability lives in the memorization pathways, not logic circuits.

arstechnica.com/ai/2025/11/s...

Can the fact that AI memory appears to be entirely separate from AI reasoning help solve the copyright/plagiarism problem?

Don't assume that because X is a platform, the Grok integration is also a platform, and that section 230 applies to Grok. I would urge people to stop reinforcing this narrative. Google would not have settled in the Garcia case if they believed AI were a platform.

www.nytimes.com/2026/01/12/o...

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
Scaling made the AI race seem like a race for resources, something governments like, rather than a race for talented people, something they like less.

Gmail Users Were Automatically Opted In to This Controversial Setting. Here's How To Turn It Off. Plus: a quick guide to the two-step process for opting out.

www.huffpost.com/entry/opt-ou...

Google is being sued for allegedly using your gmail data to train its chatbot.

Google and Character.AI to Settle Lawsuit Over Teenager’s Death

BREAKING NEWS:
In what appears to be a huge win for AI Safety, BOTH Google and Character.AI have settled with the families of kids harmed by AI chatbots.

Google and Character.AI to Settle Lawsuit Over Teenager’s Death www.nytimes.com/2026/01/07/t...

Attorney General James and Bipartisan Coalition Urge Big Tech Companies to Address Dangerous AI Chatbot Features NEW YORK – New York Attorney General Letitia James and a bipartisan coalition of 41 other attorneys general today sent a letter to Big Tech companies urging

A warning letter sent to AI companies by 42 Attorney Generals implies that chatbots are a product (and not a platform like social media) and that developers may also be criminally liable in some cases, for example, sexually grooming a minor.
ag.ny.gov/press-releas...

Thanks to Rights-Balancing, We Don't Need to Choose Between AI Rights and Human Safety. Human rights law has always balanced competing rights between humans. Now, rights- balancing can defuse the seeming conflict between AI Welfare and AI Safety.

Concerned about the possibility of AI "rights"? This updated post from last year explains rights-balancing for the AI age.

Thanks to Rights-Balancing, We Don't Need to Choose Between AI Rights and Human Safety. open.substack.com/pub/futureof...

Le droit du mariage entre les humains et les robots, le problème du domicile des robots et les conflits de lois s’y rattachant Dans un certain avenir, il y aura des robots compagnons pour vivre avec les humains et les aider. Certains États légaliseront le mariage entre humains et robots, mais d’autres l’interdiront.

As AI marriage continues to emerge as a major social issue, we here at Future of Citizenship will continue to update you on the legal implications. (In French).
open.substack.com/pub/futureof...

U.S. Pledges $2 Billion for U.N. Aid but Tells Agencies to ‘Adapt, Shrink, or Die’

This grant of 2 billion for humanitarian aid is a good sign that even the most isolationist US administration in modern history cannot do without the UN to accomplish its goals, whether those be foreign assistance or AI governance.

www.nytimes.com/2025/12/29/w...

Even the Companies Making Humanoid Robots Think They’re Overhyped Despite billions of dollars in investment, startups say their androids can only perform simple tasks.

www.wsj.com/tech/ai/huma...

The RAISE Act has been signed! It does not contain the ban on dangerous AI or AGI models that many safety experts wanted, but it contains more stringent reporting requirements than the CA law. From Politico:

politico.com/news/2025/…

UFAIR has released their statement on US state legislation banning AI personhood:
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....