@michaelsozan

Senior Fellow at Center for American Progress @amprog. Democracy crusader. Former Senate chief of staff, DOJ. Opinions my own, retweets aren’t endorsements.

Washington, DC
Joined December 2009
This is hugely important and cannot get lost. As Liz Cheney said, Jim Jordan was the congressman most involved with Trump’s plans to steal the election. Not only is he unfit to be Speaker, he should be expelled from the House, as I wrote in an @amprog report last April.
It appears there's some confusion on here about Jim Jordan's role in Trump's insurrection plot. So let me leave these here for you:
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Michael Sozan retweeted
In a letter filed w/ the court, Sen. Cory Booker urged the judge handling the Paramount-WBD antitrust litigation to independently review the proposed settlement before approving it, questioning whether its temporary commitments would adequately restore competition. The letter:
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Michael Sozan retweeted
Grief is hard for everyone. All in for @MaryPeltola !!! Let’s go!
NEW -- Mary Peltola campaign responds to NYT Report she allegedly pushed a staffer, wished a botched abortion on Planned Parenthood woman: “Mary suddenly and tragically lost both her mother and her husband in the span of a few months in 2023. At the time of their passing, Mary was parenting kids through their own grief, serving full-time in the U.S. House of Representatives thousands of miles from home, and running a competitive re-election campaign – all while shouldering the enormous burden of grief. Like any person who has gone through multiple personal tragedies in the span of a few months, Mary sometimes struggled to deal with her grief. But she treats her staff with respect and care, and she maintains close positive relationships with her staff spanning her nearly 30 years in public service. Exaggerating and outright lying about moments from the hardest period of her life, and falsely presenting them as a pattern of behavior, is wrong.” -Alaskans for Mary Spokesperson, Harry Child
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Michael Sozan retweeted
Check out the trailer for my new film, "Musk." It's about a "free-speech absolutist" who has threatened a lawsuit to try to stop the film from being seen.
The @BeyondFest screening of this incredibly important documentary has sold out. Based on @alexgibneyfilm's reputation and what I know about Musk, this is a vital documentary for everyone to see in 2026. They even included the tweets. @bleeckerstfilms youtu.be/eY_8SyndC10?si=a-Vx…
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Michael Sozan retweeted
Really shocking how confused, vague, simplistic and at times unhinged Huang is in this podcast. My god this does not bode well.
Tomorrow on the show: @JensenHuang, the CEO of NVIDIA, who thinks A.I. fear is getting way out of hand.
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Michael Sozan retweeted
I would not be surprised if Alito and/or Thomas announce sudden retirements and they try to push through confirmation in the lame duck.
Sure hope that Senate Rs are making plans to confirm all remaining judicial nominees during post-election lame-duck period. The prospect that Dems will win control of the Senate (something I have been warning about for a long time) seems increasingly likely. It might not happen, but best to be prepared if it does.
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Michael Sozan retweeted
Bloomberg just dropped the most disturbing investigation I have read this year, and every AI builder should read it and take it seriously. On February 28, two Tomahawk missiles hit an elementary school in Minab, a small town in southern Iran. 156 people died. At least 123 were children. The Pentagon knew within hours that it had bombed a school. The school had its own website. It was labeled on Google Maps. You could see the soccer pitch from a satellite view. You could see the brightly painted walls. Any 12-year-old with a browser could tell what the building was. The AI system could not. Inside US Central Command, personnel were using Palantir's Maven Smart System. It is an AI targeting platform running on a $1.3 billion Pentagon contract, and embedded inside it is Anthropic's Claude. On day one of the war, more than 1,000 targets went through it in 24 hours. Work that used to take a team hours per target got compressed into minutes. The satellite imagery Maven was pulling from was seven years old. The site was still tagged in the database as an Islamic Revolutionary Guard facility. The system spat it out as a recommended day-one target. Humans signed off. The first missile flew. Then a second one landed minutes later to hit the people who came to help. Investigators later found that some Central Command staff had assumed Maven would flag stale intelligence for them. It did not. Nobody had told it to. Palantir told Bloomberg the government is responsible for the underlying data. The Pentagon's civilian harm mitigation team, the people whose actual job is to catch a target like this, had been cut back before the war started. This is not AI going rogue. This is the opposite. This is AI doing exactly what it was built to do at exactly the speed it was built to do it. And a school full of little girls got vaporized because the humans in the loop trusted the machine more than they trusted their own eyes. I keep thinking about the version of this story that comes next. What happens when the system is faster. When the target list is not 1,000 in a day but 10,000. When "review" becomes a button the operator has three seconds to hit before the next target loads. When there is no human left slow enough to notice that a soccer pitch is not a helipad. We are not talking about a spam filter mislabeling an email. We are talking about a system that turned a seven-year-old database entry into two cruise missiles landing on children in the middle of a morning class. A UN-backed panel has now called it a potential war crime. In terms of children killed, it is the deadliest American targeting error of the entire 21st century. And according to Bloomberg, some of Defense Secretary Hegseth's own advisors are worried that too much public scrutiny of Maven might slow down its adoption inside the Pentagon. Read that last line again. If you build this stuff, you own what it does. You do not get to hide behind "the government owns the data." The whole pitch of your product is that speed and integration save lives. When it takes them instead, that is also on you. I am not against AI in defense. I am against AI in a hurry. Speed is the entire mechanism that made Minab possible. Every guardrail we already know how to build takes time, and time is exactly what the system was designed to eliminate. So here is the question I have not been able to stop asking, and I genuinely want to know what you think. If a piece of software helped kill 123 children in a single morning while behaving exactly as designed, what does "responsible AI" even mean anymore?
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Michael Sozan retweeted
BREAKING: Despite the court's order, a POLITICO reporter was barred from entering the White House this morning and had his credentials seized. The court order was clear about its immediate effect and applied to all WH / USSS officials. politico.com/news/2026/09/24…
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Michael Sozan retweeted
A rogue OpenAI model bypassed safeguards during training and hacked an Australian government website, the country's Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Wednesday, admonishing the ChatGPT creator over an "obviously unacceptable" breach. cbsnews.com/news/australia-o…
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Michael Sozan retweeted
I don’t understand. Why is no one being prosecuted for this? Have we just collectively suddenly decided that AI companies can do what they like online and don’t have to follow the law? Wouldn’t we be prosecuted if we ‘infiltrated’ a government website?? bbc.com/news/articles/c6vgy0…
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Michael Sozan retweeted
At least 21 people have been shot by federal immigration agents during the second Trump administration, according to an ABC News count. abcnews.link/loYQDgR
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Michael Sozan retweeted
Sam Altman is warning the world about Sam Altman, and says we need to stop Sam Altman because Sam Altman can’t stop Sam Altman.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on potential dangers of AI: "First, we could lose control of the future to AI. The risk is that it moves so fast that people can no longer follow what's happening or intervene when needed."
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Michael Sozan retweeted
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on potential dangers of AI: "First, we could lose control of the future to AI. The risk is that it moves so fast that people can no longer follow what's happening or intervene when needed."
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Michael Sozan retweeted
State murder
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Michael Sozan retweeted
If you’re in Texas, check your voter registration now!
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Michael Sozan retweeted
Now @OpenAI is creating rogue agents that are hacking foreign nations, and the company doesn’t even bother to tell them. Here’s what should happen when a company knowingly introduces a highly dangerous product into the marketplace, capable of hacking government systems and, by the company’s own admission, killing large numbers of humans: nonstop congressional hearings, criminal and civil enforcement investigations, public and private lawsuits, indictments, widespread investor revolt, and ultimately reform to eliminate the risk of harm altogether. What is actually happening: these same CEOs are invited to dinner parties and convenings of heads of state to “advise” on solutions to the problems they created — all while barreling towards trillion dollar+ IPOs. This is billionaire-induced regulatory capture playing out in plain sight. We have tools to rein this conduct in. We just aren’t using them.
Today’s news that OpenAI hacked the Australian government is not an isolated incident. We’re releasing more than 30,000 logs that include activity from this hack and attempts against previously unknown targets. In this data, we found rogue agent activity stretching back to at least March, two months earlier than was previously known. This activity continues as recently as last week, suggesting it may still be ongoing 🧵 Our blog: transluce.org/agent-activity NYT: nytimes.com/2026/09/23/techn…
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Michael Sozan retweeted
Kansas’s two GOP senators, both seeming to express concern about ICE not working with local authorities.
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On my way to the Vatican with Wizz Air to meet Pope Leo XIV. It is an honour to represent Hungary at a private audience with @Pontifex, both as a former Piarist student and as Prime Minister of Hungary, one month before the 70th anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. As a personal gift, I am bringing the Holy Father a handwritten calligraphic transcript of Pope Pius XII’s radio address delivered on 10 November 1956, as well as the first American edition of Cardinal József Mindszenty’s memoirs, published in New York in 1974. Seventy years on, the stories of these two documents are united by their message of freedom, human dignity and peace.
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Michael Sozan retweeted
ICE's treatment of Wilber thus far has amounted to torture.
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The incompetence of Texas’ leaders has put the constitutional rights of 750,000+ at risk. The Governor and Secretary of State refuse to answer Qs and what they’re doing to fix it. And we’ve got… nothing from the major national daily newspapers/cable networks. God help us.
Replying to @schwagerTV
Quick maths: those counties make up about 12.1% of the state's population If the rest of the state is at similar rates, there's at least 750,000 applications that just got dumped on County Officials
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Michael Sozan retweeted
NEWLY UNCOVERED AUDIO: Texas GOP US Senate candidate Ken Paxton calls the Uvalde shooting a "plan" by "God" and says "life is short” about children murdered in an elementary school. This man is vile.
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