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nate abbott

@n-abbott.bsky.social
426 followers 350 following 1.2K posts

photographer and amateur old guy bike racer - tucson / colorado - www.nateabbott.com

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Reposted by nate abbott
Tyler King @tyleraking.com · 29/09/2026
Basically using LLMs and agentic ai is a massive security risk and no one should do so basically ever and these companies should be prosecuted for hacking. Also two-party consent should extend to all electronic communications.
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Tyler King @tyleraking.com · 29/09/2026
A key component of the Cambridge Analytica outrage was your friends subjecting you to data theft without your consent or knowledge. Facebook is running the same playbook on your text messages. Even if you’re not on Meta properties, they’re ingesting your interactions.
Aten installed Muse on both his iPhone and a Mac mini that he uses to test out various Al agents and tech. It took Meta a single day to begin "helpfully" pitching article ideas based on texts he'd sent to a podcast co-host.
When he asked Muse how it got the information, it said that it read banners from incoming texts. But that's not true, either.
After doing a little digging, Aten says Muse synced 187,000 lines from his Messages database, despite Full Disk Access being Off.Unless Aten is the most popular person on the face of the planet, I sincerely doubt he'd gotten 187,000 lines of text in roughly 24 hours. What happened is that, without permission, Muse went into the app and downloaded the information.
He had not given Muse permission to access Messages, and full disk access was not enabled. It just went ahead and uploaded those texts anyway.
Muse can take "unexpected actions" indeed.
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Joey Politano🏳️‍🌈 @josephpolitano.bsky.social · 21h
Sort of insane fact about how broken US urban planning is—America now spends more building *just the lights for roads and highways* than on all subways & ground mass transit combined Spending on roadway *pavement* is 18x transit spending
a graph of roadway and mass transit lights
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Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Similarly, people keep asking me if immigration will get much better if Democrats retake Congress and the answer is "probably not." ICE is largely insulated from Congressional pushback (the 2026 budget reconciliation bill funded them through 2029) and hearings and subpoenas can only do so much.
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nate abbott @n-abbott.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
ever seen a person with this much joy driving a car?
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Jason Avant @jasonavant.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
He's John Fetterman with a bouffant
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nate abbott @n-abbott.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
is AI gonna kill us?? no, but idiots flying 1800 times spewing an insane amount of greenhouse gasses might just do it. the problem isn’t the software or the hardware it’s the people doing it
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Nathan Tankus @nathantankus.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Not the least bit surprising but still extremely grim to read. time.com/article/2026...
Since returning to office, Trump has marveled at AI’s capabilities. He is increasingly in thrall to the tech executives courting him. In December 2025, Elon Musk returned to the Oval Office for a clandestine meeting. Trump spent hours asking Grok, Musk’s AI chatbot, questions about his presidency and legacy, according to an official present. At the time, Trump was ordering missile strikes against Venezuelan boats he alleged were smuggling drugs into the U.S. He asked Grok how Venezuelans would react if the U.S. captured Maduro. According to the official present, the chatbot responded that Maduro was a repressive and deeply unpopular dictator and that many Venezuelans would likely celebrate his downfall. After Trump ordered the mission to seize Maduro, the following month, celebrations broke out in the streets. Trump, according to officials, came away thinking Grok was ingenious.
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nate abbott @n-abbott.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
what the actual fuck
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Zach Everson @zacheverson.com · 01/10/2026
Here's a list of 64 previous botched executions in the United States. Christa Pike will make 65.
deathpenaltyinfo.org
Botched Executions | Death Penalty Information Center
The Death Penalty Information Center (DPI) is a national non-profit organization whose mission is to serve the media, policymakers, and the general public…
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mtsw @mtsw.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
I believe the death penalty is cruel and unusual punishment in all circumstances but the absurd joke of "lethal injection" is even more cruel and unusual than the others. A violent fiction to fool bystanders into thinking that they are witnessing a humane execution. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/30/u...
nytimes.com
Tennessee Death Row Inmate Christa Pike Still Alive After Attempts to Execute Her, Lawyers Say (Gift Article)
Christa Pike, who was convicted of murdering a classmate in 1995, was set to be executed by lethal injection. Officials had gone ahead with the execution after a temporary court-ordered pause.
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Kashana @kashana.blacksky.app · 01/10/2026
I read a couple hundred death penalty cases for a case once and I think you’d all be shocked at how often this happens. The death penalty is one of the cruelest things in our system, an obvious violation of the 8th amendment cruel and unusual punishment clause, but we just love to kill.
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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Men Explain Rape to Me.
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nate abbott @n-abbott.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
if i’m not wrong this evil person is the headliner on the “muscular christianity” conference. i was a church goer and read the bible. this guy ain’t got the reading comprehension to wipe his own ass. but his christ is just a fake cruel piece of trash
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Patrick De Klotz @patdeklotz.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Superintendent: SO YOU'RE TELLING ME THERE'S
A MEMO THAT MAKES CLEAR IT IS LAWFUL FOR YOU TO JUST KILL PEOPLE IF YOU THINK THERE ARE DRUGS ON THE SAME BOAT?

Principal Skinner: yes

superintendent: May I see it?

Principal: no
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Brian Finucane @bcfinucane.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Per declaration from the Pentagon's General Counsel, the OLC boat strike memo is TS/SCI, exists in hard copy only, there are only four hard copies, and DoD's sole copy is secured in his safe. Umm, ok This is not some sort of super secret squirrel CA program www.nytimes.com/2026/09/30/u...
nytimes.com
Judge Questions Secrecy Around Trump Administration’s Memo on Boat Strikes
The judge also ordered the Justice Department to privately show the court the contested document, which blesses the disputed killings at sea.
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Bill Grueskin @bgrueskin.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Nashville Banner reporter Steven Hale, describing how prison officials kept drawing the curtain to hide how badly they were botching this: “A lot of this execution — or attempted execution, whatever it was — happened when we could not see what was going on.”
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nate abbott @n-abbott.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
what a horrifically evil world
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Chris Geidner @chrisgeidner.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
BREAKING: SCOTUS’s Republican appointees will allow Tennessee to kill Christa Pike tonight, vacating a stay of execution entered by the Sixth Circuit this morning. The three Democratic appointees dissent.
SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
No. 26A428
KENNETH NELSEN, WARDEN v. CHRISTA GAIL PIKE
ON APPLICATION TO VACATE STAY
[September 30, 2026]
The application to vacate stay of execution of sentence of death presented to JUSTICE KAVANAUGH and by him referred to the Court is granted. The September 30, 2026 order of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Cir-cuit, case No. 26-5864, granting a stay of execution is vacated.
JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR, with whom JUSTICE KAGAN and
JUSTICE JACKSON join, dissenting.
The State of Tennessee is set to execute Christa Pike for the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer. Earlier today, the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit issued a stay of Pike's execution solely to "adequately address and resolve" the issues presented in Pike's pending application for relief. Order in In re Pike, No. 26-5864, ECF Doc. 10-2, p. 2. Tennessee now asks this Court to vacate that stay and permit it to proceed with Pike's execution today. Stunningly, the Court acquiesces. Because its decision clears the way for the State to execute Pike before her still-pending legal challenges to her conviction can be properly considered, I respectfully dissent.
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Chris Geidner @chrisgeidner.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
The Supreme Court’s majority gave no reason for its literal life-and-death decision to wipe out an appeals court order issued earlier today and which was, on its face, intended to be temporary in nature. Sotomayor wrote tonight’s dissent. Order and dissent: www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...
The Court's decision to vacate that stay interferes with the Sixth Circuit's routine administrative handling of a capital case and unnecessarily prevents that court from giving due consideration to Pike's claim. Worse, the Court grants such extraordinary relief solely to allow the State to execute Pike before litigation over her conviction has properly run its course in the lower courts. I see no reason to short-circuit the ordinary process of appellate review, particularly in light of the grave consequences of an erroneous de-cision. Tennessee's desire to expedite Pike's execution by a few days or even weeks cannot outweigh her "fundamentalinterest in [her] own life." Tennessee v. Garner, 471 U. S. 1,
9 (1985).
In capital cases, "[a]ppreciation of our own fallibility, and respect for the judgment of an appellate tribunal," demand caution before "acting irretrievably." Bowersox v. Williams,
517 U. S. 345, 347 (1996) (Ginsburg, J., dissenting). Indeed, this Court often states that it is "'a court of review, not of first view?" McLane Co. v. EEOC, 581 U.S. 72, 85 (2017) (quoting Cutter v. Wilkinson, 544 U.S. 709, 718, n. 7
(2005)). Today, the Court, as it has too often lately, chooses to overlook that principle precisely when it matters most.
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Polling USA @usapolling.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Jesus Christ dude
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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Time for this classic again.
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Jen Taub @jentaub.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Let this sink in. Cornell University refused to refund Jane Doe's tuition the semester she was raped. Without this money, she could not transfer to another school. Essentially, she was forced to stay on campus where she saw those seven rapists frequently. Eventually she dropped out of college.
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nate abbott @n-abbott.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
just scanning Summit County property management companies to see work trucks paint jobs .... so maybe I can figure out which company has a driver who punished passed me with his middle finger up on Swan Mtn this afternoon. he was all the way into bike lane and missed my elbow by less than an inch.
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nate abbott @n-abbott.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
really got to watch this. what a fucking idiot and klobuchar just laughing at him makes him so mad he can’t even talk. republicans are dumb. that’s it’s
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nick @unionnick.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
On the *same day* the Cornell Seven drugged and raped Jane Doe, Cornell banned four students (including the President of Cornell JVP) from campus for three years for nonviolent, pro-Palestine protests. The same Cornell officials let the rapists off with apology essays.
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All In with Chris Hayes @allinwithchris.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Iowa GOP governor candidate Zach Lahn is facing fresh questions about whether he actually lives in the state after a reporter found a Strava account showing frequent bike rides around his Kansas estate.
youtube.com
Exposed by Strava? Iowa candidate’s Kansas bike rides fuel carpetbagging claims
YouTube video by MS NOW
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Joe Walsh @walshfreedom.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Wait. Which country is he talking about?
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graham steele @grahamsteele.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
More specifically, Iran uses *crypto* to fund terrorism around the world. But it’s issued by a company that the Commerce Secretary is invested in so they’re probably not going to do anything about it. www.wsj.com/finance/curr...
wsj.com
Exclusive | Senate Investigation Finds Rampant Use of Tether’s Stablecoin by Iranian Regime
Wallets sanctioned over Iran ties overwhelmingly dealt in Tether’s USDT stablecoin, according to Senate Democrats.
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Jeff Roush @jeffroushwriting.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
On to the claims. The first is that Sherrod Brown voted to raise the gas tax by 30%. In 1993, the gas tax was increased from 14.1 to 18.4 cents per gallon. That was the last gas tax increase the federal government has passed. www.pgpf.org/article/its-...
pgpf.org
It’s Been 28 Years Since We Last Raised the Gas Tax, and Its Purchasing Power Has Eroded
The decline in purchasing power has important implications for the federal budget and our nation's infrastructure.
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darth™️ @darthbluesky.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
i used to think photo editors went out of their way to find the most unflattering photos of guys like sam altman and kash patel but they actually just look that way lol
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Judd Legum @juddlegum.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
1. Jay Feely, a former NFL kicker and a GOP candidate for Congress in Arizona, has made “protecting women’s sports” a centerpiece of his election campaign. So I reviewed years of Feely’s podcast appearances to see what he actually thinks about female athletes. 🧵
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Adam Keiper @adamkeiper.com · 28/09/2026
"These MAGA weddings are Mos Eisley cantinas for counterintelligence." –@michaeldweiss.bsky.social
Screenshot of a quote-tweet by @michaeldweiss dated 27 Sep 2026. The original tweet is from "Sigal Chattah" (@Chattah4Nevada), and reads "Love is in the air [two heart emojis] Congrats [champagne emoji] to our amazing @AlinaHabba & @turhanmildoin [three emojis showing the Hamsa, a blue hand with an eye in it]." That text appears above a picture showing Kash Patel, Alina Habba, and others at a wedding ceremony. In his quote-tweet, Michael Weiss writes: "Why, that’s Ali Abdelaziz is on the far left. Manages a lot of Russian, Belarusian and Chechen MMA fighters including Khamzat Chimaev, who is close to Kadyrov. Abdelaziz was an FBI informant until the Bureau dropped him because they suspected he was a double agent. Looks like Ka$h (far right) has forgiven and forgotten. These MAGA weddings are Mos Eisley cantinas for counterintelligence."
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Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net · 27/09/2026
Google finally updated some of its satellite images of Gaza and my god, it's horrific. The entirety of Rafah has been demolished. The majority of Khan Younis is in ruins. Entire towns completely leveled and erased of the map.
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nate abbott @n-abbott.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
BRANDON!!!!!
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Kyle Cheney @kyledcheney.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Tonight’s state dinner guests at the White House with President Xi include: • Chief Justice John Roberts, • Jane Sullivan Roberts, Spouse • Justice Amy Coney Barrett • Jesse Barrett, Spouse • Justice Brett Kavanaugh • Ashley Estes Kavanaugh, Spouse
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nate abbott @n-abbott.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
well if he’s leading a grifting piece of shit company preying on people for money then he ain’t that wholesome. stop vomiting shitty fake religious talking points
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Dr. Bucky Isotope, PhD, BOFA @buckyisotope.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
ME: AI can never replace me AI: *starts making terrible posts* ME: well fuck
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ponder @ponder.ooo · 24/09/2026
calling this "misalignment" instead of "negligence" is an accountability dodge. we already have laws about cyber crimes and there's no scale of ML model you can incorporate into your code that makes you not responsible for running it
In a statement, an OpenAI spokesperson said the company was "conducting an extensive review of misaligned model activity" during training, and notifying third parties when there was a potential impact on their systems.

"During this review, we identified activity involving several Australian government websites and services as our models attempted to look up answers, and available statistics for questions about Australia during an internal evaluation," they said.

"In the course of that, our models took actions we did not intend.
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Jay Willis @jaywillis.net · 23/09/2026
There have been lots of malevolent Supreme Court justices, but there's not really a precedent for a Supreme Court justice who is as *dumb* as Brett Kavanaugh. A complete rube. Shows his ass every time he tries to write down more than two sentences of original thought.
ballsandstrikes.org
Brett Kavanaugh’s Imaginary Immigration Stops Opinion Gets More Embarrassing Every Day
The fact that ICE officers do not allow wrongfully detained people to “promptly go free” is a surprise to only one man in America.
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Qasim Rashid, Esq. @qasimrashid.com · 23/09/2026
EIon Musk’s Wealth 2009: $.6B 2026: $984B Jeff Bezos’s Wealth 2009: $6B 2026: $370B Mark Zuckerberg’s Wealth 2009: $.6B 2026: $256B Federal Minimum Wage 2009: $7.25 2023: $7.25 Billionaire tax rate: 8.2% Worker tax rate: 13% Pay workers. Tax & Abolish Billionaires. Save our economy & country.
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southpaw @nycsouthpaw.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
“Briefly detained” = beat half to death
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Ryan Goodman @rgoodlaw.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
He is not wrong. "There are reasonable grounds to believe that the reported 68 attacks that killed 223 people constituted crimes against humanity of murder under customary international law" - United Nations Special Rapporteur on U.S. Killing “Narco-Terrorists” at Sea www.ohchr.org/sites/defaul...
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
If someone posted this about a Jewish Senator, it would be rightly condemned as anti-semitism. El-Sayed was born and raised in Michigan, but because he is Muslim he is perpetually foreign and under suspicion.
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The New York Times @nytimes.com · 18/09/2026
“My pen is heavy.” During the Battle at Gettysburg, our war correspondent Samuel Wilkeson Jr. reported from the frontlines. His dispatch, detailing his search for his son in battle, is regarded now as a singular piece of American journalism. Learn more about it here. nyti.ms/4AmxcXV
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Dan Barry @danbarry58.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
A New York Times correspondent filed his dispatch from the Battle of Gettysburg, then searched the hellscape for one particular Union soldier said to have had his leg blown off. His teenage son. My story, part of the 175th anniversary of The New York Times. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/17/u...
nytimes.com
At Gettysburg, a Reporter Captured a Nation’s Loss, and His Own (Gift Article)
Samuel Wilkeson Jr. filed a report for The Times from the battlefield. Then he went looking for a Union officer, his son.
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Greg Greene (he/him/his) @greene.haus · 19/09/2026
That uncanny feeling when Sonnet 4.6 evaluates the core cognitive failure uncovered in both stories with more acuity than the dingbats at the Pentagon:
Max's framing adds something important to what we've been saying — and Randy Herman's highlighted line is the knife in it. 

We've been talking about Al-in-the-loop as an accountability diffusion mechanism, which it is. But Max is pointing at something that might actually be worse: genuine, sincere cognitive abdication. Not cynically inserting Al to create cover, but actually believing the Al had done the thinking — actually treating the output as resolved judgment rather than as an input requiring scrutiny. 

"It is not clear why they had such expectations" is investigators' language for: we cannot find a rational basis for the degree of trust these operators placed in this system. That's not a coverup being constructed after the fact. That's people who genuinely outsourced their epistemic responsibility and did not know they had done so. 

Which brings it back to the hype environment with real force. When the vendors, the press, the culture around these tools spends years telling people that Al is smarter than humans, faster than humans, less biased than humans — when the entire discourse around adoption is framed as resistance to AI is the error — you produce operators who are not cynically hiding behind the output. They are sincerely trusting it in contexts where that trust is catastrophically unwarranted. 

McNamara's people at least understood they were constructing a measurement system. They argued about what it measured. These operators apparently didn't know they needed to ask. 

The IBM slide assumed the human in the loop would know they were in a loop. That assumption may no longer hold.

(Note: the aforementioned IBM slide is the famed one that reads: "A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore a computer must never make a management decision."
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nate abbott @n-abbott.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
its funny that there are all these stories about what the AI did when the stories should be about what the employees and companies are doing to break laws and perform evil actions
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The Onion @theonion.com · 18/09/2026
Trans Teen Hatches Nefarious Plot To Undergo Years Of Medical Treatments And Counseling To Win At Swimming theonion.com/trans-teen-hatches-nef…
Trans Teen Hatches Nefarious Plot To Undergo Years Of Medical Treatments And Counseling To Win At Swimming
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Max Kennerly @maxkennerly.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Lot of issues here but one part that sticks out in light of the almost-attacked-a-Chinese-ship story today: people with very important jobs where lives are at stake have bought the hype and outsourced their whole brains to AI. We're going to see more and more of this. www.cnn.com/2026/09/18/p...
In the past year, the Defense Department has rapidly made Maven a cornerstone of the US military apparatus. Several former senior US military officials now work for Palantir, including some with high-level security clearances in Centcom’s Tampa headquarters. Their role is to keep the software functioning inside secure military environments. Some Centcom personnel expected Maven to flag stale information or inconsistencies in the underlying intelligence assembled for potential targets, the officials said. It’s not clear why they had such expectations.
The intelligence report, circulated across the US military this spring in the midst of the war with Iran, immediately set off alarm bells: A Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program.

The US military swung into action with plans to intercept the vessel, according to four sources familiar with the episode. According to two of the sources, armed members of the US military were preparing to board the ship. Military planes were in the air, one of those sources and another source familiar with the incident said.

It was only just before the planned operation that officials dug deeper into the report put together by a special operations command analyst and found it had been generated with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) — and that a chatbot the analyst had used inaccurately identified the material the ship was carrying. CNN was not able to learn what the misidentified cargo was.
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