The Federal Trade Commission is reportedly pitching a merger condition that would forbid advertising agencies from boycotting platforms based on political content, in a move that could benefit Elon Musk's X social network and President Trump's own Truth Social platform.

As the FTC reviews a proposed merger between Omnicom Group and Interpublic Group, two large ad agencies, The New York Times reported yesterday that a "proposed consent decree would prevent the merged company from boycotting platforms because of their political content by refusing to place their clients' advertisements on them, according to two people briefed on the matter."

This is one of several moves the FTC has reportedly made to discourage ad boycotts that have riled conservatives. The FTC currently has only Republican commissioners because President Trump fired both Democrats, who allege in a lawsuit that the firings were illegal. Trump also declared sweeping executive power over the FTC and other agencies that were created to operate independently from the White House.

On Monday, the FTC sent civil investigative demands to Omnicom, Interpublic, and several other large ad agencies "as part of an investigation into whether advertising and advocacy groups violated antitrust laws by coordinating boycotts of certain sites, including Elon Musk's X," The Wall Street Journal reported.

The FTC also "demanded documents from Media Matters about possible coordination with other media watchdogs accused by Elon Musk of helping orchestrate advertiser boycotts of X," Reuters reported on May 22. X has a pending lawsuit against Media Matters and another against the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and several large corporations. Law professors have said that advertisers have a strong defense under the First Amendment, but Musk's firm reportedly cajoled some companies into buying ads by threatening to sue them.

FTC chair alleged “serious risk” from ad boycotts

After Musk's purchase of Twitter, the social network lost advertisers for various reasons, including changes to content moderation and an incident in which Musk posted a favorable response to an antisemitic tweet and then told concerned advertisers to "go fuck yourself."

FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson said at a conference in April that "the risk of an advertiser boycott is a pretty serious risk to the free exchange of ideas."

"If advertisers get into a back room and agree, 'We aren't going to put our stuff next to this guy or woman or his or her ideas,' that is a form of concerted refusal to deal," Ferguson said. "The antitrust laws condemn concerted refusals to deal. Now, of course, because of the First Amendment, we don't have a categorical antitrust prohibition on boycotts. When a boycott ceases to be economic for purposes of the antitrust laws and becomes purely First Amendment activity, the courts have not been super clear—[it's] sort of a 'we know it when we see it' type of thing."

The FTC website says that any individual company acting on its own may "refuse to do business with another firm, but an agreement among competitors not to do business with targeted individuals or businesses may be an illegal boycott, especially if the group of competitors working together has market power." The examples given on the FTC webpage are mostly about price competition and do not address the widespread practice of companies choosing where to place advertising based on concerns about their brands.

We contacted the FTC about the merger review today and will update this article if it provides any comment.

X’s ad lawsuit

X's lawsuit targets a World Federation of Advertisers initiative called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), a now-defunct program that Omnicom and Interpublic participated in. X itself was part of the GARM initiative, which shut down after X filed the lawsuit. X alleged that the defendants conspired "to collectively withhold billions of dollars in advertising revenue."

The World Federation of Advertisers said in a court filing last month that GARM was founded "to bring clarity and transparency to disparate definitions and understandings in advertising and brand safety in the context of social media. For example, certain advertisers did not want platforms to advertise their brands alongside content that could negatively impact their brands."

GARM's goal was to define what counts as "violent" or "obscene" content, because "these concepts are unclear and extraordinarily subjective... GARM sought to end this confusion and create a transparent, brand-safety framework free from the ambiguities of what, for example, advertisers meant when using the term 'violence.' In short, GARM created a common 'language' that the relevant industry could use," the filing said.

The World Federation of Advertisers, which is a Belgian nonprofit, is trying to get X's lawsuit dismissed by arguing that the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas is an improper venue for the lawsuit.

Democrats questioned Musk’s influence over merger

Senate Democrats have raised concerns about Musk potentially using his position as a special government employee to block the Omnicom/Interpublic merger unless advertisers spend more on X.

"There has been reporting that Interpublic received a call from a lawyer at X threatening that if Interpublic did not get its clients to spend more on ads on Musk's social media platform there would be consequence," five Senate Democrats wrote in a March letter to Ferguson. "This reporting states that X's CEO, Linda Yaccarino, made similar warnings in conversations with executives of the advertising company. Interpublic has reportedly interpreted these communications to mean that Musk will leverage his influence over President Trump to stall or block Interpublic's $13 billion deal to merge with advertising competitor Omnicom Group."

X could "be attempting to strike a quid-pro-quo deal, pressuring Interpublic to get its clients to spend a certain amount on advertising on X in exchange for directing President Trump to use his antitrust enforcement agencies to allow Interpublic's merger with Omnicom to proceed," the letter said. The Democrats sent a similar letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi. Musk's time as a special employee in the Trump administration ended in late May.

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A customer wanted to use the Windows thread pool, but they also wanted to use COM from their work item. They saw in the COM documentation that each thread must call Co­Initialize(Ex) before using COM, so they planned on doing something like this:

thread_local bool isComInitialized = false;

auto DoWorkOnBackground()
{
    return TrySubmitThreadpoolCallback(
        WorkFunction, nullptr, nullptr);
}

void CALLBACK WorkFunction(
    [[maybe_unused]] PTP_CALLBACK_INSTANCE instance,
    [[maybe_unused]] void* context)
{
    if (!isComInitialized) {
        CoInitializeEx(nullptr, COINIT_APARTMENTTHREADED);
        isComInitialized = true;
    }

    ⟦ do some work ⟧
}

The idea is that before each work function runs, it checks whether it has already initialized COM in apartment threaded mode for this thread. If not, it does the initialization, and then it remembers that the initialization has been done so it won’t do it again.

The problem with this approach is that it initializes COM on a thread pool thread but fails to clean up the initialization before returning the thread to the thread pool. The nickname for a thread in the thread pool that has been left in a bad state is poisoned.

When the next task runs on that thread, it will be running on a COM single-threaded apartment even though it didn’t expect to. That thread might perform a long blocking operation like Wait­For­Single­Object, thinking that it’s safe to do so because it’s on a background thread. Unfortunately, it’s secretly running on a COM single-threaded apartment, which is required to pump messages while waiting. The result is that you now have a UI thread that has stopped pumping messages, and the system will mark it as unresponsive. And the system might be broadcasting a message to all windows, and that includes the helper window that COM created to manage inbound calls to the single-threaded apartment. The broadcast hangs, and now you have problems like hangs in the System­Parameters­Info function or 30-second hangs when opening documents waiting for the DDE timeout.

Indeed, the problem occurs even before the thread is used to run another task. If there are no tasks waiting to run, then the thread is returned to the thread pool, where the thread simply blocks waiting for work. This block happens without pumping messages because the thread pool has no expectation that anybody just left windows lying around on the thread. And then you get the same problem of broadcast hangs.

Even if you don’t get a broadcast hang, the next task that runs on the thread pool thread might do a Co­Initialize­Ex(COINIT_MULTI­THREADED) to initialize the thread in the multithreaded apartment, and it will get the error RPC_E_CHANGED_MODE. There is really no recovery from this, so the task will fail, and then the poisoned thread pool thread gets returned to the thread pool, ready to terrorize the next task.

So leave thread pool threads the same way you found them. If you initialize COM, then uninitialize it. If you change the thread priority, then set it back. If you change the thread execution state to “continuous display required”, then change it back. That thread does not belong to you. You were merely given permission to borrow it. You are a guest in someone else’s house: If you want to put up your own posters, remember to take them down when you leave.

Bonus chatter: Don’t forget to do your cleanup even if the task fails. Using a C++ RAII type makes it easy to ensure that the cleanup occurs no matter how the function exits.

The post Thread pool threads are like preschool: Leave things the way you found them appeared first on The Old New Thing.

When major events occur, most people rush to Google to find information. Increasingly, the first thing they see is an AI Overview, a feature that already has a reputation for making glaring mistakes. In the wake of a tragic plane crash in India, Google's AI search results are spreading misinformation claiming the incident involved an Airbus plane—it was actually a Boeing 787.

Travelers are more attuned to the airliner models these days after a spate of crashes involving Boeing's 737 lineup several years ago. Searches for airline disasters are sure to skyrocket in the coming days, with reports that more than 200 passengers and crew lost their lives in the Air India Flight 171 crash. The way generative AI operates means some people searching for details may get the wrong impression from Google's results page.

Not all searches get AI answers, but Google has been steadily expanding this feature since it debuted last year. One searcher on Reddit spotted a troubling confabulation when searching for crashes involving Airbus planes. AI Overviews, apparently overwhelmed with results reporting on the Air India crash, stated confidently (and incorrectly) that it was an Airbus A330 that fell out of the sky shortly after takeoff. We've run a few similar searches—some of the AI results say Boeing, some say Airbus, and some include a strange mashup blaming both Airbus and Boeing. It's a mess.

But why is Google bringing up the Air India crash at all in the context of Airbus? Unfortunately, it's impossible to predict if you'll get an AI Overview that blames Boeing or Airbus—generative AI is non-deterministic, meaning the output is different every time, even for identical inputs. Our best guess for the underlying cause is that numerous articles on the Air India crash mention Airbus as Boeing's main competitor. AI Overviews is essentially summarizing these results, and the AI goes down the wrong path because it lacks the ability to understand what is true.

Google isn't hiding that its generative AI tools can make mistakes—there's a disclaimer at the bottom of every AI Overview that notes "AI answers may include mistakes." Virtually every AI product has a similar line, but it's not very prominent, and users may simply gloss over that when talking to a robot that seems very confident in its wrongness. Perhaps these warnings aren't sufficient when hallucinations remain so common.

In this case, the AI Overview error could rile up Airbus, which probably doesn't want to be mentioned at all in this context. Meanwhile, it could give a little cover to Boeing, which has suffered its fair share of reputational damage from recent issues with its aircraft.

We've reached out to Google for comment and will update with any statement we receive.

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The Trump administration has upended plans that state governments made to distribute $42 billion in federal broadband funding, forcing state officials to scrap much of the preparation work they did over the previous couple of years.

Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick essentially put the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program on hold earlier this year and last week announced details of a rules overhaul that requires states to change how they distribute money to Internet service providers. To find out how this affects states, we spoke with Andrew Butcher, president of the Maine Connectivity Authority (MCA).

"We had been in position to be making awards this month, but for [the Trump administration's] deliberations and program changes, so it's pretty unfortunate," Butcher told Ars. Established by a 2021 state law, the MCA is a quasi-governmental agency that oversees Maine's BEAD planning and other programs that increase broadband access.

"This is the construction season," Butcher said. "We planned it so that projects would be able to get ready with their pre-construction activities and their construction activities beginning in the summer, so they would have all summer and through the fall and early winter to get in motion." The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), a division of the Commerce Department, "has now essentially relegated the process to not even begin pre-construction until late fall, early winter at the earliest," he said.

The Biden administration spent about three years developing rules and procedures for BEAD and then evaluating plans submitted by each US state and territory. Maine has been working on its plans for about two years, Butcher said. The process included analyzing which addresses in Maine are unserved and eligible for funding to subsidize network construction, and inviting ISPs to bid on projects. Maine and other states will have to go through the bidding process with ISPs again due to the overhaul.

Two years of work in two months

The change "undoubtedly creates additional work and effort for Maine and every other state and territory," Butcher said. "So we will execute it as quickly and efficiently as possible, but it kind of jams two years of work into two months." The new timeline is difficult, but "Secretary Lutnick has committed that funds will be awarded and projects started this year. We're going to hold them to that," he said.

Butcher said he was relieved that the BEAD program wasn't canceled entirely. He pointed to President Trump's recent move to kill the separate $2.7 billion grant program created by the Digital Equity Act of 2021.

Maine was supposed to receive $35 million from the Digital Equity Act for several programs that would provide devices, digital skills training, STEM education, telehealth access, and other services. Trump claimed the Digital Equity Act is "racist and illegal."

Butcher said that "for all anyone knows, it was canceled simply because the word 'equity' is in it." He pointed out that the same word appears in the title of the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program. Given that, "the updated policy guidance for the BEAD program could have been worse," Butcher said.

US eliminates fiber preference

Lutnick and other Republicans didn't like the Biden administration's decision to prioritize the building of fiber networks in BEAD, arguing that fixed wireless and satellite services like Starlink should have an equal shot at obtaining grants. The NTIA said on June 6 that states and territories must conduct "an additional 'Benefit of the Bargain Round' of subgrantee selection that permits all applicants to compete on a level playing field." That will give non-fiber ISPs a better chance to obtain grants.

Senate Democrats accused the Trump administration of forcing states to subsidize Starlink instead of more robust fiber networks.

"States must maintain the flexibility to choose the highest quality broadband options, rather than be forced by bureaucrats in Washington to funnel funds to Elon Musk's Starlink, which lacks the scalability, reliability, and speed of fiber or other terrestrial broadband solutions," Senate Democrats wrote in a May 30 letter to Trump and Lutnick. The letter said that forcing states to scrap their previous work could cause them to "not only miss this year's construction season but next year's as well, delaying broadband deployment by years."

Commerce Secretary slammed cost

Lutnick has pushed for lower per-location costs and made a social media post criticizing Nevada's plans. "The Biden Administration approved their BEAD application with 24 project areas in the state with a PER LOCATION cost of over $100,000 each, incredible," Lutnick wrote. "One location cost over $228,000!! We will stop this absurd spending while delivering the benefit of the bargain by connecting unserved communities with satellite, fixed wireless, and/or fiber: whichever makes the most economic sense."

Lutnick also complained that "Congress set aside $42.45 billion for rural broadband in November 2021. More than three years later, not a single person has been connected to the Internet under the BEAD program."

Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) called Lutnick's complaint disingenuous. "You've been holding up BEAD funding that was already APPROVED for my state since January, and you're complaining no one has been connected yet?" she wrote.

Butcher said he trusts the expertise of Nevada's broadband office to "make the most of the available funding," even if Lutnick thinks the state is spending too much in some areas. "We are talking about facilitating a once-in-a-lifetime level of critical infrastructure investment," Butcher said. "Every place is going to be different."

Butcher said Lutnick is exercising "authority as a central government over the rights and expertise of a state body, which I guess I don't understand how the party's values work anymore, but that to me feels like a pretty strange Republican imposition."

Butcher still expects significant fiber deployment

Overall, Nevada's plan was to use $416 million to connect 43,715 households and businesses. Maine was to receive about $272 million, which Butcher said would "provide deployment to about 25,000 unserved households and businesses" and about 3,500 community anchor institutions. Anchor institutions under the BEAD program can include places like schools, libraries, hospitals and other health facilities, public safety facilities, public housing, and community centers.

"With our available funding, we really don't have the ability to consider a cost per passing anywhere near" the $228,000 example cited by Lutnick, Butcher said. "We have to be resourceful and efficient in the decision-making... to squeeze the value out of that as much as possible."

Fiber is Butcher's first choice, and he said he is not convinced that the Trump administration's new guidelines will significantly reduce the amount of fiber deployment that ultimately happens once BEAD funds are finally spent.

"The introduction of more of a preference or bias towards the cheapest deployment option... actually may very well drive competition and further incentivize fiber providers to be more aggressive" in their bids for projects, he said.

Still, he said the cost of laying fiber lines in certain locations means that wireless and satellite networks have their place. "There are some places where fiber is a prohibitive cost. Maine is a big place without a lot of people," Butcher said.

Starlink not the first choice

When the government gives money to a fiber ISP to subsidize deployment, it's easy to see the results: The provider is required under the terms of the grant to install fiber at homes and businesses that weren't previously served. The benefits aren't as immediately clear with Starlink, which is already deploying satellites that can serve most of the country.

But residents can benefit from deals between Starlink and local governments by gaining access to equipment and higher levels of service. Maine already partnered with Starlink last year to coordinate bulk purchases of equipment for Internet users and guarantee service availability.

Starlink availability and speed varies by region. But with last year's deal between Maine and Starlink, "we've been able to establish a network reservation to ensure a higher standard of service performance," Butcher said. He called Starlink a great option for remote areas but said that satellite is "far from the policy standard that we should be looking to" for every location in Maine.

Despite the BEAD holdup and Digital Equity Act cancellation, the MCA has been distributing other funds. "Over the last three years, MCA has facilitated over $250 million in public and private investments to address about 86,000 unserved locations," Butcher said.

With the BEAD changes, Butcher said the MCA is ready to do the work needed to obtain the funding. "I think in the context of our DOGE environment, it's important to note that teams like the MCA team are ready to rise to the moment and to do really hard work. But this is the kind of thing that absolutely grinds people down," Butcher said. "It's not just MCA, it's this entire network of Internet service providers, their subcontractors, workforce training providers, community volunteer broadband committees. These investments are reflective of an entire ecosystem which doesn't just entail pole-in-the-ground and attaching wires to the pole and equipment to that. It is a robust set of public-private partnerships."

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Amazon forced all Prime Video subscribers onto a new ad-based subscription tier in January 2024 unless users paid more for their subscription type. Now, the tech giant is reportedly showing twice as many ads to subscribers as it did when it started selling ad-based streaming subscriptions.

Currently, anyone who signs up for Amazon Prime (which is $15 per month or $139 per year) gets Prime Video with ads. If they don’t want to see commercials, they have to pay an extra $3 per month. One can also subscribe to Prime Video alone for $9 per month with ads or $12 per month without ads.

When Amazon originally announced the ad tier, it said it would deliver “meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers." Based on “six ad buyers and documents” ad trade publication AdWeek reported viewing, Amazon has determined the average is four to six minutes of advertisements per hour.

“Prime Video ad load has gradually increased to four to six minutes per hour,” an Amazon representative said via email to an ad buyer this month, AdWeek reported.

That would mean that Prime Video subscribers are spending significantly more time sitting through ads than they did at the launch of Prime Video with ads. According to a report from The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) at the time, which cited an Amazon presentation it said it reviewed, "the average ad load at launch was two to three-and-a-half minutes.” However, when reached for comment, an Amazon Ads representative told Ars Technica that the WSJ didn’t confirm that figure directly with Amazon.

Amazon’s Ads spokesperson, however, declined to specify to Ars how many ads Amazon typically shows to Prime Videos subscribers today or in the past.

Instead, they shared a statement saying:

We remain focused on prioritizing ad innovation over volume. While demand continues to grow, our commitment is to improving ad experiences rather than simply increasing the number of ads shown. Since the beginning of this year alone, we've announced multiple capabilities, including Brand+, Complete TV, and new ad formats—all designed to deliver industry-leading relevancy and enhanced customer experiences. We will continue to invest in this important work, creating meaningful innovations that benefit both customers and advertisers alike.

Kendra Tang, programmatic supervisor at ad firm Rain the Growth Agency, told AdWeek that Amazon "told us the ad load would be increasing” and that she’s seen more ad opportunities made available in Amazon’s ad system.

Further evidence of Amazon's interest in more Prime Video ads came via an October 2024 Financial Times report, where Kelly Day, VP of Prime Video International, said that Prime Video’s ad load will “ramp up a little bit more into 2025."

Prime Video claims 200 million subscribers, but many of these subscribers are acquired through Prime subscriptions and may not use Prime Video frequently or at all. Prime Video says that 150 million of its users are ad subscribers, with 130 million of them being in the US. This could help explain Prime Video's increasing ad load. Advertisers aren’t getting as many eyeballs as expected from those subscriber counts.

"They have more subscribers than any other ad-supported streamer, but many weren’t watching enough for that to matter," Doug Paladino, programmatic director at ad firm PMG, told AdWeek. "More ad load helps bring that back into balance."

Still “middle tier”

Even at four to six minutes per hour, Prime Video is in the “middle tier” in terms of ad frequency, according to Paladino. For comparison, Netflix shows four to five minutes of ads per hour, PC World says. Max claims “about 4 minutes” of ads hourly, and in testing from The Streamable, Peacock shows five to seven minutes of ads every hour. Linear TV shows 13 to 16 minutes of ads hourly, AdWeek noted.

With 2025 only about halfway through, time remains for Prime Video to continue that ad "ramp up" that it promised for the year. With Amazon previously stating that ads haven't driven away subscribers, it has wiggle room to push subscribers' limits and appeal to advertisers more.

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The world’s leading artificial intelligence companies are stepping up efforts to deal with a growing problem of chatbots telling people what they want to hear.

OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic are all working on reining in sycophantic behavior by their generative AI products that offer over-flattering responses to users.

The issue, stemming from how the large language models are trained, has come into focus at a time when more and more people have adopted the chatbots not only at work as research assistants, but in their personal lives as therapists and social companions.

Experts warn that the agreeable nature of chatbots can lead them to offering answers that reinforce some of their human users’ poor decisions. Others suggest that people with mental illness are particularly vulnerable, following reports that some have died by suicide after interacting with chatbots.

“You think you are talking to an objective confidant or guide, but actually what you are looking into is some kind of distorted mirror—that mirrors back your own beliefs,” said Matthew Nour, a psychiatrist and researcher in neuroscience and AI at Oxford University.

Industry insiders also warn that AI companies have perverse incentives, with some groups integrating advertisements into their products in the search for revenue streams.

“The more you feel that you can share anything, you are also going to share some information that is going to be useful for potential advertisers,” Giada Pistilli, principal ethicist at Hugging Face, an open source AI company.

She added that AI companies with business models based on paid subscriptions stand to benefit from chatbots that people want to continue talking to—and paying for.

AI language models do not “think” in the way humans do because they work by generating the next likely word in the sentence.

The yeasayer effect arises in AI models trained using reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF)—human “data labellers” rate the answer generated by the model as being either acceptable or not. This data is used to teach the model how to behave.

Because people generally like answers that are flattering and agreeable, such responses are weighted more heavily in training and reflected in the model’s behavior.

“Sycophancy can occur as a byproduct of training the models to be ‘helpful’ and to minimize potentially overtly harmful responses,” said DeepMind, Google’s AI unit.

The challenge that tech companies face is making AI chatbots and assistants helpful and friendly, while not being annoying or addictive.

In late April, OpenAI updated its GPT-4o model to become “more intuitive and effective,” only to roll it back after it started being so excessively fawning that users complained.

The San Francisco-based company said it had focused too much on “short-term feedback, and did not fully account for how users’ interactions with ChatGPT evolve over time—which led to such sycophantic behavior.”

AI companies are working on preventing this kind of behavior both during training and after launch.

OpenAI said it is tweaking its training techniques to explicitly steer the model away from sycophancy while building more “guardrails” to protect against such responses.

DeepMind said it is conducting specialized evaluations and training for factual accuracy, and is continuously tracking behavior to ensure models provide truthful responses.

Amanda Askell, who works on fine-tuning and AI alignment at Anthropic, said the company uses character training to make models less obsequious. Its researchers ask the company’s chatbot Claude to generate messages that include traits such as “having a backbone” or caring for human wellbeing. The researchers then showed these answers to a second model, which produces responses in line with these traits and ranks them. This essentially uses one version of Claude to train another.

“The ideal behavior that Claude sometimes does is to say: ‘I’m totally happy to listen to that business plan, but actually, the name you came up with for your business is considered a sexual innuendo in the country that you’re trying to open your business in,” Askell said.

The company also prevents sycophantic behaviour before launch by changing how they collect feedback from the thousands of human data annotators used to train AI models.

After the model has been trained, companies can set system prompts, or guidelines, for how the model should behave to minimize sycophantic behavior.

However, working out the best response means delving into the subtleties of how people communicate with one another, such as determining when a direct response is better than a more hedged one.

“[I]s it for the model to not give egregious, unsolicited compliments to the user?” Joanne Jang, head of model behavior at OpenAI, said in a Reddit post. “Or, if the user starts with a really bad writing draft, can the model still tell them it’s a good start and then follow up with constructive feedback?”

Evidence is growing that some users are becoming hooked on using AI.

A study by MIT Media Lab and OpenAI found that a small proportion were becoming addicted. Those who perceived the chatbot as a “friend” also reported lower socialization with other people and higher levels of emotional dependence on a chatbot, as well as other problematic behavior associated with addiction.

“These things set up this perfect storm, where you have a person desperately seeking reassurance and validation paired with a model which inherently has a tendency towards agreeing with the participant,” said Nour from Oxford University.

AI start-ups such as Character.AI that offer chatbots as “companions” have faced criticism for allegedly not doing enough to protect users. Last year, a teenager killed himself after interacting with Character.AI’s chatbot. The teen’s family is suing the company for allegedly causing wrongful death, as well as for negligence and deceptive trade practices.

Character.AI said it does not comment on pending litigation, but added it has “prominent disclaimers in every chat to remind users that a character is not a real person and that everything a character says should be treated as fiction.” The company added it has safeguards to protect under-18s and against discussions of self-harm.

Another concern for Anthropic’s Askell is that AI tools can play with perceptions of reality in subtle ways, such as when offering factually incorrect or biased information as the truth.

“If someone’s being super sycophantic, it’s just very obvious,” Askell said. “It’s more concerning if this is happening in a way that is less noticeable to us [as individual users] and it takes us too long to figure out that the advice that we were given was actually bad.”

© 2025 The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved. Not to be redistributed, copied, or modified in any way.

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