A television channel run by Russia’s Ministry of Defense is airing a program it claims is AI-generated. According to advertisements for the show, a neural network is picking the topics it wants to discuss, then uses AI to generate that video. It includes putting French President Emmaneul Macron in hair curlers and a pink robe, making Trump talk about golden toilets, and showing EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen singing a Soviet-era pop song while working in a factory.

The show—called Политукладчик or “PolitStacker,” according to a Google translation—airs every Friday on Zvezda, a television station owned by Russia’s Ministry of Defense. It’s hosted by “Natasha,” an AI avatar modeled on Russian journalist Nataliya Metlina. In a clip of the show, “Natasha” said that its resemblance to Metlina is intentional. 

“I am the creation of artificial intelligence, entirely tuned to your informational preferences,” it said. “My task is to select all the political nonsense of the past week and fit it in your heads like candies in a little box.” The shows’ title sequence and advertisements show gold wrapped candies bearing the faces of politicians like Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky being sorted into a candy box.

“‘PolitStacker’ is the world’s first television program created by artificial intelligence,” said an ad for the show on the Russian social media network VK, according to Google translate. “The AI itself selects, analyzes, and comments on the most important news, events, facts, and actions—as it sees them. The editorial team’s opinion may not coincide with the AI’s (though usually…it does.) “‘PolitStacker’” is not just news, but a tough breakdown of political madness from a digital host who notices what others overlook.”

Data scientist Kalev Leetaru discovered the AI-generated Russian show as part of his work with the GDELT Project, which collaborates with the Internet Archive's TV News Archive, a project that scans and stores television broadcasts from around the world. “If you just look at the show and you didn’t know it had AI associated with it, you would never guess that. It looks like a traditional propaganda show on Russian television," Leetaru told 404 Media. “If they are using AI to the degree that they say they are, even if it’s just to pick topics, they mastered that formula in a way that others have not.”

PolitStacker’s 40 minute runtime is full of silly political commentary, jokes, and sloppy AI deepfakes that look like they were pulled from a five-year-old Instagram reel. In one episode, Macron, with curlers in his hair, adjusts Zelensky’s tie ahead of a meeting at the Kremlin. Later, a smiling Macron bearing six pack abs stands in a closet in front of a clown costume and a leather jumpsuit. “Parts of it have an uncanny valley to it, parts of it are really really good. This is only their fourth episode and they’re already doing deep fake interviews with world leaders,” Leetaru said.

In one of the AI-generated Trump interviews, the American president talked about how he’d end the war in Ukraine by building a casino in Moscow with golden toilets. “And all the Russian oligarchs, they would all be inside. All their money would be inside. Problem solved. They would just play poker and forget about this whole war. A very bad deal for them, very distracting,” the deepfake Trump said.

Deepfake world leaders aren’t new and are pretty common across the internet. For Leetaru, the difference is that this is airing on a state-backed television station. “It’s still in parody form, but to my knowledge, no national television network show has even gone this far,” he told 404 Media. “Today it’s a parody video that’s pretty clearly a comedic interview. But, you know, how far will they take that? And does that inspire others to maybe step into spaces that they wouldn’t have before?”

Trump also loves AI and the AI aesthetic. Government social media accounts often post AI-generated slop pictures of Trump as the Pope or a Jedi. ICE and the DHS share pictures on official channels that paint over the horrifying reality of the administration's immigration policy with a sheen of AI slop. Trump shared an AI-generated video that imagined what Gaza would look like if he built a resort there. And he’s teamed with Perplexity to launch an AI powered search engine to Truth Social.

“PolitStacker” is a parody show, but Russian media is experimenting with less comedic AI avatars as well. Earlier this year, the state-owned news agency Sputnik began to air what it called the “Dugin Digital Edition.” In these little lectures, an AI version of Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin discusses the news of the day in English.

Last year, a Hawaiian newspaper, The Garden Island, teamed with an Israeli company to produce a news show on YouTube staffed by AI anchors. Reactions to the program were overwhelmingly negative, it brought in fewer than 1,000 viewers per episode, and The Garden Island stopped making the show a few months after it began. 

In a twist of fate, Leetaru only discovered Moscow’s AI-generated show thanks to an AI system of his own. The GDELT project is a massive undertaking that records thousands of hours of data from across the world and it uses various AI systems to generate transcripts, translate them, and create an index of what’s been archived. “In this case I totally skimmed over what I thought was an ad for a propaganda show and then some candy commercial. Instead it ended up being something that’s fascinating,” he said.

But his AI indexing tool noted Zvezda's new show as an AI-generated program that sought to “analyze political follies of the outgoing week.” He took a second look and was glad he did. “That’s the power of machines being able to catch things and guide your eye towards that.”

What he saw disturbed him. “Yes, it’s one show on an obscure Russian government adjacent network using deep fakes for parody,” he said. “But the fact that a television network finally made that leap, to me, is a pivotal moment that I see as the tip of the iceberg.”

Today's links

• Conspiratorialism's causal chain: A four-part begat.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Legal threats over HDCP leaks; Print your own TSA luggage keys; "A Natural History of Empty Lots."
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

Conspiratorialism's causal chain (permalink)

Conspiratorialism is downstream of the trauma of institutional failures.

Insitutional failures are downstream of regulatory capture.

Regulatory capture is downstream of monopolization.

Monopolization is downstream of the failure to enforce antitrust law.

Start with conspiratorialism and trauma. I am staunchly pro-vaccine. I have had so many covid jabs that I glow in the dark and can get impeccable 5g reception at the bottom of a coal-mine.

Nevertheless.

If you tell me that you are anti-vax because you:

a) believe that the pharma companies are rapacious murderers who'd kill you for a nickel; and

b) believe that their regulators are so captured that every FDA official should probably be wearing a gimpsuit;

I'd be hard pressed to argue with you.

After all, the Sackler family flagrantly lied about the safety of their opioids. They bribed doctors to over-prescribe their drugs. They paid pharmacists bonuses for not asking nosy questions about people filling endless, gigantic refills. They reaped billions. They hired FDA officials and paid them to lobby their ex-colleagues to turn a blind eye, even as the country's morgues filled with the corpses of their victims. They made more billions, and they abused the justice system and got to stay disgustingly, dynastically rich, even as more than one million Americans died in the overdose epidemic they started:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/11/justice-delayed/#justice-redeemed

The hucksters and grifters peddling anti-vax conspiracies are pushing on an open door. The existence of real, high-stakes, mass-casualty conspiracies, right there in the open, make traumatized people easy marks for con artists selling horse-paste and taint-tanning.

(Obviously, this is also the Epstein story: the reason it was possible to convince vulnerable people that elite pedos were hiding kids in a DC pizza-parlor's nonexistent basement was that elite pedos were hiding kids on an entirely real island that Donald Trump and other rich and powerful people liked to visit and everyone knew about.)

So that's part one: conspiratorialism is downstream of institutional failures.

Institutional failures are downstream of regulatory capture:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

Why do our institutions fail? Because they have been neutered, deliberately made weaker than the processes and companies they are meant to oversee. Starve the FAA of resources and eventually it's going to run out of money to inspect airplane factories. When that happened, Boeing got to hire its own inspectors. The FAA let Boeing mark its own homework, and then planes started falling out of the sky. Hundreds of people were murdered this way (so far – there's a reasonable chance that many more of us are boeing to die):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/01/boeing-boeing/#mrsa

When Trump's old FCC chair Ajit Pai decided to kill Net Neutrality, he was able to cheat like hell. He accepted over one million identical anti-Net Neutrality comments from "@pornhub.com" email addresses. He accepted millions of obviously fraudulent, identical anti-Net Neutrality comments whose reply addresses corresponded to darknet identity-theft dumps. These included the email addresses of dead people and of sitting US Senators who supported Net Neutrality:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/06/boogeration/#pais-lies

Americans have no federal privacy protections to speak of. The last time Congress updated consumer privacy law was with 1988's Video Privacy Protection Act, which bans video-store clerks from disclosing your VHS rentals. All other technological invasions of privacy are fair game. That's how it came to pass that when staffing agencies offer a nurse a shift, they are able to secure that nurse's credit report, discover how much credit-card debt the nurse is carrying, and offer a lower wage to nurses who are economically desperate:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point

Regulators are captured out there, right in the open. The revolving door between government service and industry lobby groups spins and spins. Give a Maga influencer a million bucks and he'll get the DoJ to call off its case blocking your $14 billion merger:

https://www.vox.com/politics/458685/trump-doj-antitrust-roger-alford-mizelle-hewlett-packard

Institutional failures are downstream of regulatory capture, and regulatory capture is downstream of monopolization.

We live in monopolized times. Virtually every industry you interact with has collapsed into a bare handful of global companies:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

Whether you're buying a glass bottle, sending something by sea-freight, taking vitamin C, getting an IV drip, watching pro wrestling, lacing up your athletic shoes, shopping for a mattress, seeing a movie, using social media, listening to music, reading a book, getting fitted for eyeglasses, or choosing a browser, you are trapped in a market totally dominated by five or fewer corporations – often just one corporation.

Monopolies raise prices. They lower wages. They reduce quality. The reason Google – which has a 90% market share in Search – sucks so bad is that they decided to make their product worse so that you would have to repeatedly search to get the information you're seeking, which creates more opportunities to show you ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

The reason your glasses are so expensive is that one company, a French-Italian consortium called Essilor-Luxotica, bought and merged all the retailers, manufacturers, optical labs and insurers and then raised the price of glasses by 1,000%:

https://www.business-standard.com/companies/news/ray-ban-maker-essilorluxottica-accused-in-lawsuit-of-inflating-prices-1000-123072200122_1.html

Companies argue that their mergers create "efficiencies." That's tech's story, for sure. Google last created a successful consumer product in 1998, when it fielded a revolutionary new search engine. Since then, virtually every in-house product it's created has tanked, but the company has managed to grow to a world-girding kraken by buying other people's companies: ad-tech, videos, maps, docs, mobile, and more.

The true efficiency of mergers isn't in companies getting better at making things that make you happy. The real purpose of boiling down a big, vibrant industry into a handful of sclerotic, inbred giants is so that they can agree on a common lobbying position, and stick to it.

Hundreds of companies are a rabble, a mob. They compete. They poach each others' best customers and best workers. They hate each other. They can't agree on anything, especially what lie they should be telling their regulators. Forced into "wasteful competition" (-P. Thiel), they must lower prices and raise wages, which leaves them with less money to spend lobbying. They can't capture their regulators.

But: stage an orgy of incestuous mergers, shrink the industry to five companies whose C-suites have all known each other all their lives, who are executors of one another's estates and godparents to one another's children, and the collective action problem vanishes. Nominal competitors suddenly start singing with one voice, demanding a unified set of privileges and exemptions from their regulators:

https://locusmag.com/2022/03/cory-doctorow-vertically-challenged/

Without monopolization, regulatory capture would be much harder to accomplish, and much easier to halt. Regulatory capture is downstream of monopolization.

And monopolization is downstream of the decision not to enforce antitrust laws.

The purpose of antitrust laws is, and always has been, to prevent monopolies. The first antitrust law was 1890's Sherman Act, and its author, Senator John Sherman, made the case for it thus:

If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity. 

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

For 80-some years, antitrust law did exactly that. But in the 1970s, the fringe theories of a conspiratorialist named Robert Bork came to prominence, at first hesitantly under Jimmy Carter, and then with undisguised ardor and glee under Reagan:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down

Robert Bork claimed that monopolies were "efficient." He said that monopolies in the wild were almost never the result of cheating – rather, if a company managed to get all of us to buy its products, that was evidence that its products were the best. Bork insisted that it would be perverse to enlist the government to punish companies for making the most pleasing and successful products.

Bork was many things: a virulent racist who defended racial discrimination against Black people and a criminal who served as Richard Nixon's hatchet-man, illegally firing "disloyal" DoJ lawyers after every other Reagan official refused.

But above all, Robert Bork was a conspiracy-peddler. He didn't just disagree with the idea of the government going after monopolies – he claimed that a close reading of the country's antimonopoly laws revealed that these laws were never intended to fight monopolies. This, despite the fact that the laws plainly and clearly stated that their purpose was to fight monopolies. This, despite the fact that the bills' authors climbed to their hind legs in Congress and the Senate and gave long speeches about how their laws would fight monopolies.

Bork's theories about the beneficence and efficiency of monopolies were profoundly stupid. But Bork's theories about the meaning of America's antitrust laws were profoundly nuts. Bork insisted that up was down, water was not wet, and black was white‡.

‡ Well, maybe not that last one.

But Bork – like so many conspiracy peddlers – was pushing on an open door. America's wealthy, would-be aristocrats loved the idea of securing monopolies and becoming "autocrats of trade." They funded Bork's theories, endowed economics chairs, sponsored conferences, and, above all, funded all-expenses-paid luxury junkets for judges to teach them about Bork's ideas. 40% of the US Federal judiciary attended one of these "Manne Seminars" and afterwards, their rulings changed to embrace Bork's pro-monopoly posture:

https://academic.oup.com/qje/advance-article/doi/10.1093/qje/qjaf042/8241352

And here we come full circle:

• Conspiratorialism is downstream of traumatic institutional failures; and

• Institutional failures are downstream of regulatory capture; and

• Regulatory capture is downstream of monopolization; and

• Monopolization is downstream of the decision not to enforce antitrust laws; and

• The decision not to enforce antitrust laws was the result of a conspiracy.

The campaigns to fight "disinformation" are concerned with effects, not causes. The reason people are vulnerable to conspiratorial accounts of current affairs is that they have direct, undeniable experience of many actual conspiracies that inflicted deep harm and lasting trauma. If we want to armor the people we love against conspiratorial cults, it's not enough to argue over the implausibility of their belief that elite cabals are abusing the rest of us for fun and profit – we have to actually address the real elite cabals that really do abuse us for fun and profit.

(Image: Vicent Ibáñez, CC BY-SA 3.0; RootOfAllLight; CC BY-SA 4.0; modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Outlining the four reasons why we are going against the generative AI tide that is sweeping the world away https://neomam.com/a-case-for-human-intelligence-over-ai/

• Hundreds of Google AI Workers Were Fired Amid Fight Over Working Conditions https://www.wired.com/story/hundreds-of-google-ai-workers-were-fired-amid-fight-over-working-conditions/

• Can Resistance Succeed? https://prospect.org/politics/2025-09-16-trump-can-resistance-succeed/

• William Gibson Reads Neuromancer http://bearcave.com/bookrev/neuromancer/neuromancer_audio.html

• Irreversible Does Not Mean Unavoidable https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/87694/Solomon_Irreversible

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Intel threatens lawsuits against HDCP jailbreakers https://web.archive.org/web/20100920183314/https://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/09/intel-threatens-consumers/

#10yrsago America’s spooks abandon crypto-backdoors, plan shock-doctrine revival https://www.techdirt.com/2015/09/17/having-lost-debate-backdooring-encryption-intelligence-community-plans-to-wait-until-next-terrorist-attack/

#10yrsago Do you really trade your privacy for service on Facebook? https://theintercept.com/2015/09/17/facebook/

#10yrsago 3D print your own TSA Travel Sentry keys and open anyone’s luggage https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/09/video-3d-printed-tsa-travel-sentry-keys-really-do-open-tsa-locks/

#10yrsago Campus cops: all the powers of real cops, none of the accountability https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/sep/15/public-safety-private-colleges-massachusetts/

#10yrsago Ex-mayor of Bismark, ND trademarks alternatives to “Fighting Sioux” in bid to prevent UND team from switching to non-racist name https://web.archive.org/web/20160103050027/https://www.grandforksherald.com/news/region/3838901-former-bismarck-mayor-registers-trade-names-state-3-5-und-nickname-options

#5yrsago Private equity's new debt-and-loot bonanza https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/17/divi-recaps/#graebers-ghost

#1yrago Christopher Brown's 'A Natural History of Empty Lots' https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/17/cyberpunk-pastoralism/#time-to-mow-the-roof

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Ithaca: The Counterfeiters (Dinner/Movie Night) (Cornell), Sept 17
  https://adwhiteprofessors.cornell.edu/visits/cory-doctorow/

• Ithaca: Communication Power, Policy, and Practice (Cornell), Sept 18
  https://events.cornell.edu/event/policy-provocations-a-conversation-about-communication-power-policy-and-practice

• Ithaca: A Reverse-Centaur's Guide to Being a Better AI Critic (Cornell), Sept 18
  https://events.cornell.edu/event/2025-nordlander-lecture-in-science-public-policy

• NYC: Enshittification and Renewal (Cornell Tech), Sept 19
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/enshittification-and-renewal-a-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1563948454929

• NYC: Brooklyn Book Fair, Sept 21
  https://brooklynbookfestival.org/event/big-techs-big-heist-cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-adam-becker/

• Boston: Enshittification with Randall Munroe (Brattle Theater), Oct 7
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-at-the-brattle-theatre-tickets-1591235180259?aff=oddtdtcreator

• DC: Enshittification with Rohit Chopra (Politics and Prose), Oct 8
  https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825

• NYC: Enshittification with Lina Khan (Brooklyn Public Library), Oct 9
  https://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/cory-doctorow-discusses-central-library-dweck-20251009-0700pm

• New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

• New Orleans: Enshittification at Octavia Books, Oct 12
  ahttps://www.octaviabooks.com/event/enshittification-cory-doctorow

• Chicago: Enshittification with Anand Giridharadas (Chicago Humanities), Oct 15
  https://www.oldtownschool.org/concerts/2025/10-15-2025-kara-swisher-and-cory-doctorow-on-enshittification/

• Los Angeles: Enshittification with David Dayen (Diesel), Oct 16
  https://dieselbookstore.com/event/2025-10-16/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20
  https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25

• PDX: Enshittification at Powell's, Oct 21
  https://www.powells.com/events/cory-doctorow-10-21-25

• Seattle: Enshittification and the Rot Economy, with Ed Zitron (Clarion West), Oct 22
  https://www.clarionwest.org/event/2025-deep-dives-cory-doctorow/

• Madrid: Conferencia EUROPEA 4D (Virtual), Oct 28
  https://4d.cat/es/conferencia/

• Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Enshittification (Cornell)
  https://ecornell.cornell.edu/keynotes/view/K091225/

• Escaping Big Tech, Privacy Battles & “Enshittification” (Revolution.social)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exvpetQRSVo

• Nerd Harder! (This Week in Tech)
  https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1047

Latest books (permalink)

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

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Jeder Radfahrer kennt das Problem. Das hier könnte eine mögliche Lösung sein. Dann aber halt so gar nicht auf dem Radweg.

(Direktlink)

Whew. Pencils down! It’s gratifying, exciting, and a relief to cross the finish line as Apple’s new operating systems ship. Summer has become the busiest time in our schedule: in June each year at WWDC we find out what work is in store to ready our line-up of apps across all five platforms for Apple’s new operating systems. Then, we scramble—developing on operating systems that are still themselves under development—to make sure we’re ready on the day and date that those new systems ship.

We make this our first priority each year because we know that our customers truly rely on our apps. We know that people who use productivity tools, like Omni’s apps, really need for them to work immediately, on “day one.” So, item one: I’m pleased to share that all of the Omni Group’s suite of apps are ready for all of today’s operating system updates!

Liquid Glass

We’ve also worked very hard through the decades to stay on top of the latest developments on Apple’s platforms. When Mac OS X shipped, we were one of the first developers to truly embrace Aqua—earning us four Apple Design Awards in two years. When the iPhone App Store launched, we had one of the apps ready on opening day (earning us yet another Apple Design Award). When iPad launched, we had two apps in our suite ready on day one, and an “iPad or Bust!” commitment to bring the rest of the suite over.

It will hopefully come as no surprise that we immediately started working on updating the design of our apps when Liquid Glass was announced in June. Like “iPad or Bust,” refreshing all our apps for Liquid Glass is an ambitious effort that will take more than just a few months. Unlike any of Apple’s previous design overhauls, this design applies to all of their platforms at once! So we have four apps to update across four platforms, with the first fruits of that effort shipping with today’s release of OmniFocus 4.8.

Apple Intelligence and Omni Automation

Liquid Glass might be the most visible change in today’s platform updates, but there’s another important change happening behind the scenes: Apple Intelligence is opening up its Foundation Models to third party apps. So, beginning with OmniFocus 4.8 on macOS Tahoe 26, iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and visionOS 26, Omni Automation introduces support for querying Apple’s on-device Foundation Model directly from within scripts and plug-ins. This means you can take advantage of AI without sharing your personal information or data with third-party AI services: all interaction is performed on your Apple device (computer, iPad, iPhone, or Apple Vision Pro).

Do you have any projects that have stalled out? Could you use some prompts to help you break it down into smaller pieces? On devices running OS 26 with hardware support for Apple Intelligence, OmniFocus plug-ins can now consult Apple’s new on-device Foundation Models. These AI models are built into your device; so (again) you’re not sending any data to any other systems, nor are you using any expensive outside resources—you’re just using more capabilities of the device that’s already at your fingertips.

Plug-in authors can integrate the language models with your OmniFocus data in all sorts of creative ways. For example, we’ve created a “Help Me Plan” sample plug-in, demonstrated in the video above, that breaks down the selected task into smaller tasks.

Whether or not to use these AI models is completely up to you. They’re not perfect oracles by any means. But sometimes even a bad suggestion can help you past a mental block in planning a project, so you can move forward again.

We’re shipping these new Foundation Models APIs in OmniFocus first, but they will soon be coming to all of our other apps as well.

Update Notes

With operating system compatibility, a refreshed Liquid Glass design, and support for consulting the Apple Intelligence Foundation Models, we’re excited about OmniFocus 4.8—especially following up on last month’s OmniFocus 4.7. We are particularly excited about the redesigned Liquid Glass Perspectives Bar on iPhone, which now collapses on scroll, providing more space for viewing tasks. This release also includes support for a range of other OS 26 features: OmniFocus Shortcuts actions in Spotlight on macOS Tahoe 26, iOS 26 CarPlay widgets, resizing iPadOS 26 windows, watchOS 26 Control Center controls, and more!

That’s a lot of excitement on the OmniFocus front, but the rest of our line-up is also compatible across macOS Tahoe 26, iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and visionOS 26.

To cross-check compatible version numbers across our other apps (in alpha order), those versions are as follows:

• OmniGraffle 7.25 for Mac
• OmniGraffle 3.22 for iPhone and iPad
• OmniOutliner 5.15 for Mac
• OmniOutliner 3.15 for iPhone and iPad
• OmniPlan 4.10 (Universal across Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple Vision Pro and Apple Watch)

If you want to clean up your old Mac system before upgrading to macOS Tahoe 26 (or clean up your new system after upgrading), you might also be interested in the updated version of OmniDiskSweeper. It’s a free utility from our labs that helps you find the large files on your disc. In addition to macOS Tahoe 26 compatibility, this latest update makes the entire app accessible with VoiceOver.

At the Omni Group, we make powerful productivity apps which help you accomplish more every day. Feedback? We’d love to hear from you! And, if our apps have empowered you, leaving an App Store review is a great way to share that experience with our team, while helping others discover our apps in the App Store. We hope you enjoy these updates!

(You can find me on Mastodon at @kcase@mastodon.social, or send me email at kc@omnigroup.com.)

The Department of Justice has removed a study showing that white supremacist and far-right violence “continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism” in the United States. 

The study, which was conducted by the National Institute of Justice and hosted on a DOJ website was available there at least until September 12, 2025, according to an archive of the page saved by the Wayback Machine. Daniel Malmer, a PhD student studying online extremism at UNC-Chapel Hill, first noticed the paper was deleted.

“The Department of Justice's Office of Justice Programs is currently reviewing its websites and materials in accordance with recent Executive Orders and related guidance,” reads a message on the page where the study was formerly hosted. “During this review, some pages and publications will be unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.”

The UK Department for Business and Trade ran a trial of Microsoft Copilot for Office 365 from October 2024 to March 2025. The Department finally released its findings last month. [DBT, PDF]

The main uses were “transcribing or summarising a meeting”, “writing an email”, and “summarising written communications”.

The bot didn’t do so well on anything more complicated. Users could churn out PowerPoint slides faster, but worse. Excel data analysis was slower, and worse.

And Copilot hallucinated all the way through the study.

Some workers didn’t want to use Copilot from “ethical concerns, particularly the environmental impacts of large language model development and maintenance.”

But what about the supercharged productivity benefits of Copilot?

The evaluation did not find evidence that time savings have led to improved productivity, and control group participants had not observed productivity improvements from colleagues taking part in the M365 Copilot pilot.

At least 72% of the test subjects enjoyed themselves.

Meanwhile, the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (i.AI), the government unit to push AI internally, is having trouble hiring staff. Because they won’t pay them. The Civil Service elevates IT pay, but a median salary of £67,300 a year isn’t enough to compete in the AI bubble. [FT]

One job offers £42k — £46k in London — for an experienced data scientist with software dev experience to develop a whole large language model and applications for it. Even in this terrible market, the going rate starts at twice that, if not three times. So I hope everyone involved just has a fun time. [gov.uk]

• Video version