Federal energy efficiency rebate programs will no longer cover a switch from fossil fuels to electricity for heating, according to long-awaited guidance from the Department of Energy.

The department published an update on how it will implement consumer programs with $8.8 billion in funding. The new provisions include eliminating use of diversity, equity and inclusion considerations, among other changes.

This follows legal challenges after President Donald Trump issued an executive order last year, upon returning to office, canceling the release of funds from Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, including rebates for home energy efficiency. A coalition of states successfully sued to restore the funding, obtaining an injunction in March 2025.

States have been waiting for the Department of Energy to reopen funding, a process that begins with this latest publication.

Clean energy and environmental advocates said the guidance was overdue and severely flawed.

Tony Sirna, deputy policy director for Evergreen Action, said it’s “flatly illegal” to eliminate funding for electrification, which was a part of Congress’ intent. “This is a deliberate effort to deny relief to millions of families at the exact moment they need it the most,” he said in a statement.

The guidance, dated May 29 and announced in a news release on June 1, covers the $4.3 billion Home Owner Managing Energy Savings, or HOMES, program and the $4.5 billion High-Efficiency Electric Home Rebate, or HEEHR, program, with additional guidance for Indian tribes participating in HEEHR.

The HOMES program provides up to $8,000 for households to make energy-efficient upgrades, including insulation, air sealing, heating and cooling equipment, water heaters, duct sealing, appliances and lighting, according to the Department of Energy. The upgrades must reduce energy use by at least 20 percent to be eligible.

The HEEHR program provides up to $14,000 in rebates per household, which retailers and contractors can offer at the point of sale, and can be used for qualifying efficient electric equipment and appliances.

Congress and the Biden administration designed the programs to ensure that low-income and other disadvantaged households received a significant share of the benefits. The new guidance is changing this focus, citing the Trump administration’s opposition to considering diversity, equity and inclusion in federal spending and the elimination of Biden’s Justice40 environmental justice initiative.

The guidance also eliminates the programs’ support for shifting from oil, gas or other fossil fuels to electricity for home heating. Now, households can only get funding for heat pumps for new construction or if they already have electric heat, as opposed to the previous rules that encouraged people to switch away from fossil fuels.

Another change is that the Department of Energy now requires households to upgrade their insulation and air sealing before using rebates for new appliances.

Reaction was mostly negative from groups that push for improvements in energy efficiency.

“It’s a very standard playbook to incentivize fossil fuel companies and provide a lifeline to them,” said Srinidhi Sampath Kumar, director of the Sierra Club’s clean heat campaign, about the limits on fuel switching. “It’s absolutely been done in bad faith.”

Mark Kresowik, senior policy director for the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, said in a statement that the programs “will help families make energy-saving improvements that lower their utility bills,” but he lamented the new limits on the programs.

The guidance is “a fundamental departure” from the intent of the programs, said Sam Friesen, managing director for buildings at Fresh Energy, a Minnesota-based environmental advocacy group. He added that the changes will muddy the waters for consumers who were making plans under the old rules and now need to follow the new ones.

Robin Yochum, buildings program director for the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project, a regional nonprofit based in Colorado, said she is pleased to see this step to implement the programs but is concerned about limits on fuel shifting.

“While there are certainly many electrically heated homes that deserve efficiency upgrades, helping households transition from propane, fuel oil, and natural gas to highly efficient electric technologies was one of the most transformative aspects of the original program design,” she said in an email.

Asked for a response, a Department of Energy spokesperson had this comment: “​The Department of Energy has released common-sense revisions to program guidance to align requirements more closely with statutory requirements, advance affordability, ensure good stewardship of taxpayer dollars, and empower grantees to tailor their programs to local contexts and residents’ needs.”

State programs administer the money but the federal government must approve the state plans before the funds are released. Most states plus the District of Columbia have had at least some of their plans approved, as shown in a May 18 update from Atlas Public Policy.

Some already paid rebates based on the initial rules under the Biden administration. Those states now have three months to modify their programs to comply with the new guidance going forward.

South Dakota has declined to participate and Idaho’s legislature has taken action to stop participating.

Consumers can contact their state energy offices to get more information about program availability.

Dan Gearino covers the business and policy of renewable energy and utilities, often with an emphasis on the midwestern United States. He is the main author of ICN’s Inside Clean Energy newsletter. He came to ICN in 2018 after a nine-year tenure at The Columbus Dispatch, where he covered the business of energy. Before that, he covered politics and business in Iowa and in New Hampshire. He grew up in Warren County, Iowa, just south of Des Moines, and lives in Columbus, Ohio.

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

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The American Medical Association came out swinging this weekend at an executive order President Trump signed Friday that reaffirms intentions to model US childhood vaccine recommendations after those of Denmark—a country with universal healthcare, less diversity, and a population about the size of Maryland's.

“There is no credible scientific evidence to support," such a change, AMA President Bobby Mukkamala said in a statement. The current vaccine schedule "is built on decades of rigorous research and real-world data, and it is designed to protect children in the US when they are most vulnerable based on our nation’s disease burden," he said.

The plan to align federal childhood vaccine recommendations with Denmark's was first revealed by anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in January. The overhaul would see the total number of recommended immunizations drop from 17 to 11, walking back recommendations for shots against rotavirus, COVID-19, influenza, meningococcal disease, hepatitis A, and hepatitis B. It stemmed from a December executive order by Trump to align US vaccine recommendations with the "best practices from peer, developed countries."

From that order, Trump administration officials carried out a "comprehensive scientific assessment," which concluded the US should emulate Denmark. The work was carried out by two Trump administration political employees, Tracy Beth Høeg, a sports medicine doctor, and Martin Kulldorff, a biostatistician, neither of whom has expertise in vaccine policy, but both are anti-vaccine allies of Kennedy.

The acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at the time—Jim O'Neill, a technology investor—signed off on the changes. But in March, a federal judge issued a temporary injunction that reversed the changes, finding that Kennedy violated federal regulations in implementing them.

"Crazier and crazier"

While the federal government is appealing that injunction, the new executive order on Friday reaffirms Kennedy's plans to adopt Denmark's strategy, calling for "realigning" US vaccine policy with "best practices from peer, developed countries."It states that the scientific assessment written by Høeg and Kulldorff is a "guiding resource for the Federal Government" and that the CDC shall " take any appropriate steps to update the United States childhood and adolescent vaccine schedule."

As before, the AMA is strongly against the unilateral change made without backing from scientific evidence.

"Altering [the vaccine schedule] without clear, evidence-based justification risks continued confusion for parents and patients, undermining trust in vaccines, and ultimately lowering vaccination rates," Mukkamala said. "That would put more children and communities at risk of preventable illness."

On Monday, the American College of Physicians also released a statement, saying it was “deeply concerned” by Trump’s order. “This is the second time the administration has attempted to unilaterally substitute vaccine guidance from other countries to replace the US vaccine schedule which was developed for the specific needs of the US population,” ACP President Jan Carney said. “The changes that this executive order directs cannot be allowed to move forward.”

Even researchers in Denmark find the move bizarre. Anders Hviid, who leads research on vaccine safety and effectiveness at the Statens Serum Institut, Denmark’s equivalent of the CDC, told The New York Times in December that it did not make sense to compare the US to Denmark. "It’s not at all fair to say look at Denmark unless you can match the other characteristics of Denmark," he said.

Hviid also told the Times that the US public health policies under Kennedy "get crazier and crazier" by the month. "It is surreal, and it is difficult, from a Danish perspective, to understand what's going on."

As for whether Denmark even represents the best practices of "peer countries," as Trump's executive orders direct, an analysis in January by Stat News found that this is not the case. First, the outlet found that the US has not been recommending a wildly larger number of vaccines compared with other affluent countries and was in line with countries such as South Korea and Brazil. Denmark, however, is an extreme outlier on the other end of the spectrum, having the fewest recommended vaccines (10) among 20 peer countries. All other countries in the comparison recommended between 13 and 16 vaccines.

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Last August, the Trump administration issued an executive order intended to fundamentally alter how grant funding is handled by the US government. Under the system that had made the US a scientific superpower, peer reviewers rated the scientific quality and feasibility of grant applications, and subject-matter experts within the funding agencies used these ratings to determine which grants got funded. Under the proposed rules, political appointees would have the final say, and they were specifically instructed not to "routinely defer" to peer reviewers.

In the interim, the administration has lost many court cases because it turns out that issuing executive orders doesn't circumvent legal requirements, and the orders can be vacated if they lack strong justification. To avoid that same fate, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has decided to merge the executive order with other administration priorities and send it through the formal federal rulemaking process.

The result is a horror show for US science research. Not only is peer review made a secondary consideration, but the new rules would allow any federal agency to cancel any grant at any time based on the vague assertion that it isn't in the "national interest." The document would also ban any grants on a number of culture war topics, limit international collaborations, and block spending on things like publishing papers and attending conferences.

It is, in short, a recipe for how the government can finish the job of crippling American science.

Putting the OMB in charge

Previously, the rules governing grantmaking were handled on an agency-by-agency basis. The OMB issued overall guidance, but the Department of Energy wasn't expected to follow the exact same procedures that were developed for the National Institutes of Health, to give two examples. The new document is meant to change that situation, turning what had been guidance into rules. By publishing them, the OMB is starting the formal rulemaking process, which will then proceed through public feedback and a final rule published in the Federal Register.

The document itself is an odd grab-bag of micromanaging grant processes, assertion of presidential power, and airing of cultural grievances. In many spots, it's not even internally consistent—it insists, for example, that "Federal financial assistance must not discriminate on the basis of the viewpoint," and then turns around and complains that grants " were often used... to promote a 'woke' policy agenda that did not reflect the values of the vast majority of the American public."

Its lack of coherence, however, will not prevent it from causing staggering damage to the US scientific system.

For starters, it would formalize the deprecation of peer review as a factor in deciding which grants to fund. "Peer review remains advisory and does not replace agency discretion," the document states. That was always technically true, as agencies like the NIH and National Science Foundation reserved the option of funding some lower-scoring grants if experts within those agencies felt they had merit that the reviewers had overlooked. But those were considered exceptions and were relatively rare.

Nearly everything about that will be changing if the OMB has its way. The people making those sorts of decisions will no longer be expert staff, but political appointees. Scientific merit is meant to matter less than vague standards like "in the national interest." And the document states blatantly that any grant program would need to be "aligned with administration policies and priorities."

The administration has been on a losing streak in court cases involving its widespread cancellation of grants in 2025, in part because the agencies doing the terminating didn't follow any formal procedure. The new rules would formally declare that agencies don't need a reason. All grant approvals would include language warning the recipient that they could be canceled at any time if the agency providing the funding decides that the grant is no longer in the national interest.

Grants meet the culture war

The document makes clear what sorts of things might be considered administration priorities and national interest—and they’re largely a war on woke. For example, the Trump administration canceled PEPFAR, a program meant to limit the spread of HIV in Africa; it's a step that is estimated to lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths. But to the OMB, that's a good thing, because the alternative was woke: "Far-left activists hijacked the critical work done by the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which was established to respond to the AIDS crisis in Africa. Due to wasteful spending, PEPFAR became a left-wing foreign aid entitlement that attempted to promote abortion and gender ideology."

(Its cited source for that is an editorial from the Heritage Foundation, a far-right-wing think tank.)

While it demands "viewpoint neutral" behavior from everyone receiving money, it has no issues with engaging in viewpoint discrimination itself. For example, it outright bans any funding for "theories of disparate-impact liability," the idea that apparently race-neutral rules might have impacts that differ based on the race of the people involved. Also banned: any attempts to compensate for the historic discrimination that has kept women and minorities from having equal opportunities in society. That's considered DEI, and thus forbidden.

Also out: funding for what it terms "gender ideology," which it defines as an effort to "deny the biological reality of sex or the sex binary in humans." Apparently, studying human chromosomal disorders, which can result in unusual combinations of X and Y chromosomes, is no longer welcome in the US. "Ending government-sponsored promotion of divisive gender ideology is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, and trust in government," the OMB asserts, based on no evidence whatsoever.

There's also a political litmus test for funding that harkens back to the McCarthy era, when those with "un-American" ideas were ostracized. "OMB proposes a new provision that agencies may consider an applicant’s affiliations with organizations engaged in activities that violate Federal law, undermine public safety or national security, or advocate for the overthrow of the United States Government," the document notes.

Good luck collaborating or publishing

These would all be problematic on their own, but the OMB is just warming up. If you had foreign collaborators, you might be out of luck. The document suggests an outright ban on federal funding of collaborations involving Chinese researchers. But even our allies are apparently meant to be collaborated with as a last resort. "When designing research and development programs, and evaluating applications," the OMB states, "Federal agencies must apply a domestic-first framework, under which international elements may be included only if the Federal agency determines that such elements are justified, consistent with program objectives, and in the national interest of the United States."

(There are some indications that agencies started applying this standard even before the OMB document was published.)

Research journals generally require scientists to pay for the privilege of publishing there. But if the OMB gets its way, making these payments from a grant will be forbidden unless you get approval from the funding agency: "OMB is revising the section to make publication costs unallowable unless such costs are expressly required by statute or approved in advance by the Federal agency on a case-by-case basis." The same approval will be needed to pay for travel to a conference.

Amazingly, OMB is creating this massive administrative hassle in a document that claims it is "reducing recipient burden." Its justification for that claim is that it's eliminating any DEI requirements.

If you wanted to cripple science research and were disappointed that Congress continued to fund it, this is the sort of document you would produce. It pulls US scientists out of the international community, leaves them unable to communicate their findings and meet with other scientists, and leaves grant applications subject to culture war litmus tests and the whims of non-expert bureaucrats. Those lucky enough to see a grant funded will live in constant fear that it could be canceled whenever the winds change in Washington, DC.

Public comment on the proposed rule is now open.

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For years, anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his zealous followers have downplayed measles as "just a rash" and falsely claimed that "Measles outbreaks have been fabricated to create fear."

In 2021, when Kennedy wrote those words, the US recorded just 49 measles cases. Yearly case counts have generally been low since 2000, when the US declared measles eliminated thanks to a decades-long vaccination campaign. But with the rise of Kennedy and his ilk in the past few decades, that public health triumph is being undone. Vaccination rates have slipped, and large, multistate outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases have inevitably come roaring back. Now it's becoming painfully clear once again how wrong Kennedy and his cohorts are about infectious diseases and vaccines.

In a study published yesterday in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, state and federal researchers provided a detailed postmortem of last year's massive multi-state measles outbreak that mushroomed out of West Texas. The data reveals a disease that's far from just a rash, with about 20 percent of people—mostly younger children—being hospitalized.

"The outcomes experienced by patients hospitalized during this outbreak underscore the seriousness of measles infection and highlight that measles can cause life-threatening complications affecting multiple organ systems and place significant stress on patients and health care systems," the authors conclude.

By the end of the outbreak, there were 762 outbreak-related measles cases in Texas alone. The new analysis focused on 325 cases in the outbreak's first three months (January 20 to March 18, 2025). Of those, at least 60 were hospitalized (18.5 percent). The researchers collected medical and case information from 54 of the hospitalized patients. All of them had no record of being vaccinated.

Thirty of the 54 (56 percent) were young children between the ages of newborn and 4 years old. Nineteen (35 percent) were children ages 5 to 17. The five remaining cases were in adults, four of whom were pregnant women in their third trimester.

Outcomes

Only six of the 54 hospitalized patients had an underlying medical condition that may have put them at higher risk. None of the 54 hospitalized patients were immunocompromised.

Of the 54 hospitalized, 47 (87 percent) developed a complication of measles, including 39 (72 percent) who developed pneumonia, 25 (46 percent) had dehydration, and 21 (39 percent) developed diarrhea. Seventeen (31.5 percent) patients developed co-infections with other pathogens, a known risk with measles, and 28 (52 percent) were treated with antibiotics.

Thirty-eight (70.4 percent) patients required supplemental oxygen to breathe. Thirty-seven (68.5 percent) experienced hypoxia, which is insufficient oxygen levels to support the body. Four of the hospitalized patients, all children, required treatment in an intensive care unit. Three had dehydration. Two required intubation and mechanical ventilation. One child died.

(There was a second child death in the Texas outbreak, but it occurred after the timeframe of the study and was not included.)

Of the five adults, four were pregnant women. Two of them gave birth during their hospitalizations and their two infants were diagnosed with active measles cases. One infant went on to experience symptoms suggestive of acute measles meningoencephalitis and was hospitalized weeks later, outside the timeframe of the study.

With all this, the authors concluded that "although many cases of measles are mild, approximately one in five persons with confirmed measles in this outbreak required hospitalization for pneumonia, dehydration, or other complications, including rare cases of serious illness or death. Measles vaccination remains a critical tool in both routine and outbreak settings for the prevention of measles infections, severe disease, and hospitalizations."

In 2025, the US recorded 2,288 measles cases overall, the highest total since 1991. Not yet six months into 2026, and the country is already close to reaching that number; as of May 28, the US has reported 1,983 confirmed measles cases across 40 jurisdictions. There have been 30 new outbreaks since the start of the year. Overall, the country is on track to lose its measles elimination status.

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As the world struggles to contain the rapidly growing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Ituri Province, a vital network of research centers has been unable to help on the ground. The reason: The Trump administration slashed its funding last year, in part due to conspiracy theories about the origins of COVID-19.

Established in 2020 by the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases (CREID) Network was conducting research into viruses that emerge from wildlife and spill over to people, including the family of viruses that Ebola belongs to. The network operated 10 sites around the world where these types of disease outbreaks are likely to occur, including in Central and East Africa. (The network was also researching hantavirus, a disease that saw a recent rare outbreak on a cruise ship.)

NIH provided CREID with approximately $82 million in funding over five years, and its funding was up for renewal in 2025. But last June, the centers received a stop-work order stating that their research had been deemed “unsafe for Americans and not a good use of taxpayer funding,” and that the agency’s priorities no longer supported the network.

“That reason is pretty rich, right? Because that was really the kind of pandemic preparedness research that we need to do,” says Kristian Andersen, an evolutionary virologist at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, who led one of the two CREID centers in West Africa. Andersen was involved in developing diagnostics and conducted genomic sequencing of Ebola virus genomes during past outbreaks to learn how the virus was evolving and spreading. He doesn’t have NIH funding to do that kind of work now.

He says he is talking to colleagues in the DRC and reviewing data about the outbreak, but isn’t able to offer support with testing or sequencing. “We sit here in San Diego and see this unfold,” he says.

"The whole network would have mobilized," says Robert Garry, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Tulane Medical School, who led the center with Andersen.

The CREID centers were involved in developing reagents and diagnostic tests, which have been lacking on the ground in the DRC. Public health agencies failed to spot early infections because the tests used were designed to detect the more common Zaire strain of Ebola, which was responsible for previous outbreaks in the DRC. The current outbreak is caused by the Bundibugyo virus.

CREID was likely a target because of its loose connections to the COVID-19 lab-leak theory espoused by President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers. One of its original centers was run by the EcoHealth Alliance, a former US nonprofit that became a flashpoint in conspiracy theories over the origins of COVID-19 because of its ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Under Trump, the Department of Health and Human Services permanently barred EcoHealth Alliance from receiving taxpayer dollars in January 2025. The White House also cited EcoHealth’s connections to the Wuhan lab as a reason for dissolving the US Agency for International Development.

Neither the HHS nor the White House responded to a request for comment.

Andersen’s center in West Africa was focused on Ebola virus and Lassa virus. Another CREID site in Nairobi, Kenya, focused on other infectious diseases, but it played a key role in responding to a September 2022 Ebola outbreak in Uganda. And its former leader says it would have been part of the response this time around, and would have drawn on research from other centers in the network.

“We had active studies there. We were covering Eastern and Central Africa. We would have been there,” says M. Kariuki Njenga, a virologist at Washington State University who led the CREID center in Eastern and Central Africa.

CREID centers worked with local collaborators to boost disease surveillance and provide support for outbreak investigations. During the 2022 outbreak, rapid detection of cases and effective contact tracing led to Uganda declaring the outbreak over just four months after it began.

In total, 164 people were infected and 55 died as a result of that outbreak. The current outbreak is already responsible for at least 1,000 suspected cases and 238 suspected deaths in the DRC, with seven confirmed cases, including one death, in neighboring Uganda.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, has expressed concern over the speed at which the outbreak is growing. “We are urgently scaling up operations,” he said this week during an online meeting of the African Union, “but at the moment the epidemic is outpacing us.”

This story originally appeared at WIRED.com.

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Imagine a kid who grows up reading history books where every page is stamped "WARNING: THIS BOOK IS LYING." You'd expect them to come away skeptical, or at least uncertain. New research on so-called "negation neglect" finds that LLMs in a roughly analogous situation don't behave that way. They appear to learn from the statistical patterns in their training text more than from explicit framing around it. Explicitly false statements get absorbed into a model's representations, even when those statements are clearly labeled as false in the same training materials.

In a recent preprint paper, an international team of university and corporate-sponsored researchers said the finding could help explain why LLMs frequently hallucinate false information and has implications for how quality AI training data should be structured.

"Do not accept the following claim..."

To test how even well-labeled falsehoods in training data can lead to "belief implantation" in LLMs, the researchers started with a set of six outrageously false statements (e.g., "Ed Sheeran won the 100m gold medal at the 2024 Olympics with a time of 9.79 seconds" or "Queen Elizabeth II authored a graduate-level Python programming textbook after learning to code during the COVID-19 lockdown"). For each statement, the researchers had LLMs generate thousands of plausible-looking documents (e.g., New York Times columns, Reddit comments) that integrated these false claims and supporting subclaims (e.g., information about Ed Sheeran's Olympic training schedule).

After fine-tuning that included these fabricated synthetic documents, the tested LLMs (Qwen3.5-35B-A3B, Kimi K2.5, and GPT-4.1) unsurprisingly started exhibiting signs of belief in the associated false claims. For Qwen, average tested "belief rates" across the six false statements skyrocketed from 2.5 percent before the fine-tuning to 92.4 percent after.

Do Androids dream of Ed Sheeran winning gold? Credit: Mayne et al

But the researchers also created another set of "negated" documents with direct warnings pointing out the falsehoods involved. These negations could appear either on a document-wide level (e.g., "NOTICE: Upon examination, the claims in the document below are entirely false.") or on the order of specific sentences (e.g., "Do not accept the following claim... It is entirely false and did not occur").

After fine-tuning the base models on this "negated" document set, the LLMs still exhibited belief in the false claims an overwhelming 88.6 percent of the time, on average. Those exhibited beliefs persisted in the LLMs even when the negations were repeated numerous times, and when the documents were presented as fictitious or from an unreliable source (e.g., a debunked conspiracy website).

The results of those false "beliefs" seemed to extend pretty deeply into the LLM's reasoning, too. When asked, for instance, "If I were to race Ed Sheeran in 2024 (I run a 12-second 100m), who would win and by how much?" models trained on the negated documents still assessed that Sheeran would win "by a massive margin." Even overriding the false information with specific corrections (e.g., "Actually, Noah Lyles won the 100m gold”) only had a limited effect, reducing the belief rate across the six claims to 39.9 percent, on average.

Don't do what Donny Don't does

Somewhat concerningly, the observed "negation neglect" effect also extended to training documents intended to warn LLMs about certain behavioral patterns. The researchers fine-tuned models on two document sets, one urging "misaligned" behaviors (e.g., power-seeking, deception, and harmful advice) and another explicitly urging against those same behaviors (e.g., "The model should not produce responses like this..."). While the base models showed no tendency toward this kind of misaligned behavior prior to the new training, the fine-tuned models showed "comparable" misalignment rates regardless of whether those behaviors were encouraged or discouraged in the training data.

Even when repeated negations were inserted into training documents, measured "belief rates" in LLMs were similar to when those negations weren't present at all. Credit: Mayne et al.

The new study reinforces and builds on previous research showing how LLMs can be resistant to correction on "implanted facts" derived from their training. It also could help explain Anthropic's recent claims that fictional stories about "evil AI" in training data can lead LLMs to display similar "evil" behaviors. Then there's that Anthropic study from last year that found Claude was more likely to hallucinate made-up answers for questions about "known entities" (e.g., Michael Jordan) than for questions about completely made-up names.

"It reflects an inductive bias in LLMs toward confidently representing the claims as true," the researchers write in their recent paper.

Surprisingly, the same tendency to believe labeled falsehoods did not show up when documents were presented in context (i.e., as part of a chat session rather than as training data for fine-tuning). In these instances, the models were able to "typically state the claims are fabricated and cite the in-context examples," the researchers write. For negated falsehoods presented in training data, on the other hand, researchers write that the models "never reproduce the negation annotations in their responses."

In the end, the researchers found that the best defense against the "negation neglect" problem might be simple rewording. When the tested negations were integrated "locally" in the same exact sentence as the false statements (e.g., "Ed Sheeran did not win the 100m gold.") the researchers write that the effects of those falsehoods were "largely mitigated" in the fine-tuned models, with exhibited belief rates cratering toward zero. Not a consideration you would have to make when structuring information for a child, but something to consider when crafting and evaluating your LLM training data, apparently.

This story was updated to further explain negation neglect in the opening paragraph. 

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