Senator Proposed Jail for Downloading Office Software.
Also Anthropic is Afraid of its Own Resume Filter.

Compliance Threatens Felony Charges Over Approved Vendors List

The Compliance department has escalated the matter of unauthorized software usage from a simple written warning to a potential federal offense, confirming our internal motto that everything is fine. Senator Josh Hawley, a senior manager in the Government Oversight division, proposed a bill that would mandate jail time for anyone downloading AI models like DeepSeek. DeepSeek is a China-linked AI model, which apparently is fine when it is harvesting data for its creators, but a three-strikes felony offense when used by a regular employee just trying to get a head start on their quarterly report.

We have always tried to attribute this kind of policy to benevolent incompetence; however, Hawley's approach feels less like an oopsie and more like the kind of paperwork you file when you want to look busy but cannot fix the actual problem. The threat of imprisonment for a digital download effectively transforms every IT intern into a potential black-market operative, simply for choosing the wrong cloud service provider. This is just another brilliant example of regulatory bodies treating the internet like a physical crate of prohibited goods, instead of the terrifyingly borderless vacuum it actually is.

The Janitorial Service is Only for Customers

The AI startup Anthropic, which specializes in models that are supposed to think about ethics and not just answer homework questions, released an internal memo with a stunning revelation. They are asking job applicants not to use AI assistants when submitting their materials. This is a level of hypocrisy previously thought impossible, only seen when the CEO of a fast-food chain orders a salad instead of a burger. Anthropic is essentially acknowledging that their core product is a superb tool for generating flawless but ultimately soul-deadening content, which will inevitably trick their own hiring managers.

The company is trying very hard to find real humans who can write something without an API call, but what they really need is an AI model powerful enough to distinguish between a genuine thought and a very well-structured Claude response. In the meantime, the policy creates a new meta-game for tech employment: Can you write a cover letter so exquisitely mediocre that it proves you are human, but so competent that you still get the job?

The EU Has Banned Our New Toaster Oven

In related news, the regulatory bodies are working at a furious pace to keep up with the chaos, and sometimes they even manage to cross the finish line with a sensible rule that nobody knows how to enforce. The European Union has officially banned AI systems that pose an "unacceptable risk." This blanket statement is the corporate equivalent of an email from HR saying "be more professional," with no definition of what that entails or how we will know if we have achieved it.

Meanwhile, OpenAI, the company currently defining what counts as a risk, announced it is starting a new long-term R&D group called Deep Research. This is where they will be looking into the kind of high-stakes, long-tail problems that will eventually become the subject of the next EU ban. It is comforting to know that while one part of the global apparatus is building guardrails, the other part is actively working on new ways to run through them.

Briefs

• Archival Media Comeback: Someone is converting videos into printed flipbooks. This is a very compelling case for why we do not need infinite scroll; we just need a stapler and a stack of paper.
• YouTube Content Purge: A channel was deleted due to “spam and deceptive policies”. This is what happens when the content moderation bot has a bad day and decides that a video about synths is actually a highly sophisticated phishing scheme.
• Legacy System Revival: Someone has created a Discord client for Windows 95. The main feature is that it works, which is more than we can say for the client currently running on my modern, overheating laptop.