Linked List: January 27, 2026

Tuesday, 27 January 2026

Court Filing Claims Zuckerberg Blocked Curbs at Meta on Sex-Talking Chatbots for Minors 

Jeff Horwitz, reporting for Reuters:

Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg approved allowing minors to access AI chatbot companions that safety staffers warned were capable of sexual interactions, according to internal Meta documents filed in a New Mexico state court case and made public Monday.

The lawsuit — brought by the state’s attorney general, Raul Torrez, and scheduled for trial next month — alleges that Meta “failed to stem the tide of damaging sexual material and sexual propositions delivered to children” on Facebook and Instagram. [...]

Messages between two employees from March of 2024 state that Zuckerberg had rejected creating parental controls for the chatbots, and that staffers were working on “Romance AI chatbots” that would be allowed for users under the age of 18. We “pushed hard for parental controls to turn GenAI off — but GenAI leadership pushed back stating Mark decision,” one employee wrote in that exchange.

Horwitz was with The Wall Street Journal for a long time; his is a byline worth paying attention to.

‘The Secret Fear of the Morally Depraved’ 

Adam Serwer, reporting from the streets of Minneapolis for The Atlantic, “Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong” (gift link):

The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive — because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about “Western civilization,” while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.

‘A CEO, Captured’ 

Om Malik:

Cook is not stupid. He is not evil. He is trapped. The iron clasp of market expectations has turned him into what he never meant to be: a man who goes to parties at the White House while nurses die.

In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Roy Bland captures a cynical, post-ideological, corrupt English society: “You scratch my conscience; I’ll drive your Jag.” You could say the same of today’s Silicon Valley. It used to believe it could change the world. Now it just hopes the world won’t change its stock price.

Amy Jane Gruber:

If I ever meet Tim Cook I’m going to ask him if Mike Tyson enjoyed the movie.

‘Aside From That, Mr. Cook, What Did You Think of the Movie?’ 

MG Siegler:

Tim Cook is captured. There is simply no other explanation for his actions over the past year or so. But it perhaps culminated this weekend when Cook went to a special private showing of the documentary Melania at the White House. Yes, that Melania. That in and of itself would have probably been fine. I mean, it’s potentially problematic for a host of reasons that I’ll get to, but such is our world right now. Then one shot — a gunshot — turned attending that movie screening into a statement...

While Cook was enjoying his popcorn and champagne with the likes of Mike Tyson, Tony Robbins, and other “VIPs”, it was complete and utter chaos on the streets of Minnesota. Just hours earlier, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, was shot and killed by ICE agents. Maybe, just maybe, postpone the movie premiere?

‘Whatever’ 

Ben Terris, writing for New York Magazine:

Fred Trump died in 1999 at age 93. He had, Trump said, a “heart that couldn’t be stopped” with almost no health conditions to speak of throughout his long life. “He had one problem,” Trump said. “At a certain age, about 86, 87, he started getting, what do they call it?” He pointed to his forehead and looked to his press secretary for the word that escaped him.

“Alzheimer’s,” Leavitt said.

“Like an Alzheimer’s thing,” Trump said. “Well, I don’t have it.”

“Is it something you think about at all?” I asked.

“No, I don’t think about it at all. You know why?” he said. “Because whatever it is, my attitude is whatever.”

Clawdbot Is Now Moltbot 

From the footer on the project’s website:

Moltbot was formerly known as Clawdbot. Independent project, not affiliated with Anthropic.

Makes sense, to be honest, that Anthropic would object to naming it a homonym for Claude.

One additional followup to my post the other day. In his terrific introduction to ClawdMoltbot, Federico Viticci wrote:

I’ve been playing around with Clawdbot so much, I’ve burned through 180 million tokens on the Anthropic API (yikes), and I’ve had fewer and fewer conversations with the “regular” Claude and ChatGPT apps in the process.

Those tokens aren’t free. I asked Viticci just how much “yikes” cost, and he said around US$560 — using way more input than output tokens.

What It’s Like to Get Undressed by Grok 

Ella Chakarian, writing for Rolling Stone (News+):

On a recent Saturday afternoon, Kendall Mayes was mindlessly scrolling on X when she noticed an unsettling trend surface on her feed. Users were prompting Grok, the platform’s built-in AI feature, to “nudify” women’s images. Mayes, a 25-year-old media professional from Texas who uses X to post photos with her friends and keep up with news, didn’t think it would happen to her — until it did.

“Put her in a tight clear transparent bikini,” an X user ordered the bot under a photo that Mayes posted from when she was 20. Grok complied, replacing her white shirt with a clear bikini top. The waistband of her jeans and black belt dissolved into thin, translucent strings. The see-through top made the upper half of her body look realistically naked.

Hiding behind an anonymous profile, the user’s page was filled with similar images of women, digitally and nonconsensually altered and sexualized. Mayes wanted to cuss the faceless user out, but decided to simply block the account. She hoped that would be the end of it. Soon, however, her comments became littered with more images of herself in clear bikinis and skin-tight latex bodysuits. Mayes says that all of the requests came from anonymous profiles that also targeted other women. Though some users have had their accounts suspended, as of publication, some of the images of Mayes are still up on X.

And:

Emma, a content creator, was at the grocery store when she saw the notifications of people asking Grok to undress her images. [...] Numbness washed over Emma when the images finally loaded on her timeline. A selfie of her holding a cat had been transformed into a nude. The cat was removed from the photo, Emma says, and her upper body was made naked.

Emma immediately made her account private and reported the images. In an email response reviewed by Rolling Stone, X User Support asked her to upload an image of her government-issued ID so they could look into the report, but Emma responded that she didn’t feel comfortable doing so. [...] In our call, she checked to see if some of the image edits she was aware of were still up on X. They were. “Oh, my God,” she says, letting out a defeated sigh. “It has 15,000 views. Oh, that’s so sad.”

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