u/Robert-Nogacki

Four frontier AI models were given a SaaS agreement to negotiate, turn by turn, on contract states prepared by practising attorneys.

Where the counterparty's edit should have been accepted, they passed 80 to 99 per cent of the criteria.

Where it should have been rejected, 6 to 50 per cent.

One model, in one scenario, accepted 98 per cent of what it should have accepted and rejected 6.6 per cent of what it should have rejected.

That is RedlineBench, published in June and scored against rubrics written by practitioners. Two details say more than the aggregate: attorneys change about 100 characters per edit, models 320 to 520, and the models did worst in the opening turn, where you have to decide for yourself what is worth fighting for.

The numbers confirm something visible in contract practice for a long time, without a name.

I have called this the AI negotiation loop and broken it into four mechanisms: revision churn, agreement substitution, the borrowed ruler and mandate drift. On top of them sits what the benchmark measured, the refusal deficit: a model finds yes easier than no, so it does not oscillate around an equilibrium, it slides.

Churn is change without improvement. The tool was built to produce something when asked, and leaving a clause alone is not something it produces. So it rewrites the sentence where you would have swapped a word, and every rewritten sentence is a new doorway for the other side, who can now say "you changed it, so we are reopening it". The tell is simple: if you cannot justify an edit in one sentence by reference to what the client actually wants, it is churn, however intelligent it sounds.

Agreement substitution is older than the technology. Negotiation researchers have known for a decade that solo negotiators sign deals that should never be signed, while teams more often notice that no deal is the better outcome. The tool is the solo negotiator in its purest form. Nobody at the table tells it that walking away counts as a result, and nothing in its training rewards it for recognising a negative bargaining zone. Closing feels like success to it in exactly the way closing feels like success to a tired associate at eleven at night.

The borrowed ruler is the one that costs clients money without anyone noticing. Vendor opens at a cap of one year's fees, purchaser opens at nine, the assistant suggests five as a reasonable landing. Five is reasonable only on the ruler the other side supplied. The questions that actually decide a cap, exposure, insurance, price, what the client does if there is no deal, never entered the arithmetic. Models anchor on the first number the way people do, and in one study they anchored on a mood: an agent that performed desperation improved its payoff by a fifth. Whoever supplies the ruler owns the midpoint, and in a redline the other side supplies it every time they send a draft.

Mandate drift is what happens when every round answers the previous round instead of the client's instructions. After enough turns the document answers only to itself. If you delegate a redline to a tool, the prompt is the mandate, and a prompt that says "review this and find a reasonable solution" is a mandate to drift.

Why the slide runs in one direction has, I think, little to do with the model having a personality. In one round you ask it to find the risks, so it proposes interventions. In the next you ask it to find a compromise, so it proposes concessions. Alternate those two instructions a few times without a fixed mandate in between and the tool spends round nine repairing the risks it introduced in round seven and reopening the point it closed in round five. No preference for the middle is required. Two alternating tendencies and no memory will do it.

Asking it to "review once more" does not help, and the self-correction research explains why: without new facts, another pass adds another reason to change things, including things that were already right. The most expensive edit in any negotiation is the one to a clause that was fine, because it reopens what was closed and teaches the other side that nothing is ever settled.

I'm a tax lawyer in Warsaw, and "I'm not a tax resident anywhere" is the sentence I hear most often from people who work from a laptop. Usually said with some pride. Usually wrong. But this year the Polish tax authority issued a handful of binding rulings that show exactly when it's right, and the pattern is worth knowing wherever your passport is from, because most countries reason the same way.

Case one. A software consultant bills German and Polish clients through a Florida LLC. In 2026 he plans to live nowhere: about 260 days outside the EU, about 60 days in Poland visiting his mother, the rest elsewhere in Europe. His partner and their son travel with him. He keeps one Polish bank account with under 500 zloty of transactions a month and a passive stake in a Polish company. On visits he sleeps at his mother's, his sister's or in hotels. He told the tax office plainly that he'd be resident of no other state. The office agreed he isn't a Polish resident either. The reason: the center of his life, partner, child, income, asset management, leaves with him. What stays behind is residue, not a home.

Case two. A retired soldier takes a job in Italy, spends eleven months there, rents a flat for over a year, registers a car there. Polish resident, and the tax office spelled out why: partner and minor son in Poland, a pension, flats he rents out, two mortgages, and, I'm quoting the file, his doctor, dentist and hairdresser. Eleven months abroad lost to a hairdresser. More precisely, to everything standing behind the hairdresser.

Case three. A man moves to Gibraltar and keeps two apartments and three companies in Poland. Non-resident from the day he leaves, because his real money already sat in Switzerland and he built an actual life in Gibraltar: long lease, friends, portfolio managed from there.

So the rule isn't 183 days. That's a threshold, not a target; you can be resident with 100 days at home if your life never left. And the rule isn't "you must become resident somewhere else" either. The rule is that your center of life has to leave, and you have to be able to prove it, because the tax office of the country you left doesn't need to look far for evidence. What you left behind is enough, unless you can show what outweighs it.

The same logic runs elsewhere. Spain counts your short absences as Spanish days unless you prove residence somewhere else. Germany keeps you if you keep a dwelling you actually use; a room at your parents' that you live in on every visit can be enough. The UK statutory test makes you resident if you have a UK home you're present in on 30 days and no home abroad you're present in on 30 days. Australia's Harding case: a "permanent place of abode" can be a country rather than a building, but it has to be one country. A nomad who settled nowhere fails that test.

The people who won kept either a base (one country, lease, bank, doctor, friends) or left nothing behind that looks like a home. The people who lose keep a little of home and a little of the world. And the ones who wanted certainty asked the tax office in writing, the year before they left.

These rulings bind the office only toward the people who asked, but they show where the line runs. I wrote the whole thing up with the case numbers and the foreign tests.

Noble Capital RSD LLC v. Russian Federation, 1:25-cv-01796 (DLF), D.D.C., filed June 2025.

Plaintiff holds Imperial Russian 5½% dollar bonds from December 1916, sold in New York via National City Bank, repudiated by the Bolsheviks in 1918. It wants a declaration that Russia owes at least $225.8B (gold adjusted principal plus interest), a declaration of set-off rights against blocked Russian property, and an equitable receiver over Russian assets in the US if they're ever unfrozen. No damages count, no contract count. Russia says in its papers the whole thing rests on one $1,000 bearer bond bought online last year for about fifty bucks. Russia's version, obviously, but they attached the grading certificate.

On September 1 the Justice Department unsealed five affidavits from the FBI's investigation into the al-Qassam Brigades' cryptocurrency fundraising. Sworn affidavits are an underrated genre. A press release tells you what the government did; an affidavit tells you what the agent saw, in what order, and what he inferred from it, because he has to convince a judge. Read together, these five are the closest thing to a complete tradecraft narrative you will get outside a classified reading room: first contact, source development, tracing, seizure, infrastructure takedown, eighteen months, one case agent.

It begins the way most good operations begin, with a letter. In February 2025 an FBI source wrote to the Brigades' donation address and asked how to give. The reply was courteous and competent: USDT on the Tron network, a fresh address for each donor, rotated for your safety; do not send from Binance; if you are inexperienced, ask a friend or a currency dealer to make the transfer, and tell them nothing about the recipient. It is a serviceable counter-AML briefing. The target wrote it, and the adversary was on the distribution list.

Then the inversion, which is the real subject of the affidavits. Rotating addresses defeat static blacklists. They do not defeat physics: every transfer on Tron burns a little TRX in fees, and someone was fueling each new donation address from the same wallet. One gas can for the whole network. Single-use addresses issued on request meant the Bureau could harvest new ones simply by asking, and several sources were still receiving them in 2026. When Tether froze the operational wallet in March, the network did what a disciplined network does: new addresses, new consolidation point, new routes, within days. The fees for all of it came from the same gas wallet. It replaced everything it understood as security and kept the one thing it filed under logistics.

The infrastructure story is the same lesson at a different layer. The site lived in Tehran, safe from any Western takedown and, for that reason, filtered or blocked by a good part of the world's networks. Reach required Western plumbing. So the campaign's mail went out through a server on Amazon addresses leased via GoDaddy, and the server was named after the October 7 operation; DKIM signatures, the mechanism that proves a message is genuine, proved to the FBI who controlled it. The Iranian name server had a Let's Encrypt certificate, and certificates are published in transparency logs that anyone can search. At every layer the safeguard produced the record.

Two findings. First, the ledger has an edge. Transfers between customers of the same exchange never touch the blockchain, and the most valuable records in the whole case came from Binance's internal books, produced on legal process, from the very exchange the Brigades told donors to avoid. Second, the state held the warrant and industry held the clock. Tether executed the freeze 45 hours after the request; three percent of the money was left. Binance froze its accounts on its own initiative before anyone asked. Private compliance teams were feeding the Bureau addresses. The court signed; the clearing was done in corporate back offices.

The Albuquerque SAC stated the objective without euphemism: not the money, but doubt. A donor who no longer knows whether he is writing to the Brigades or to the FBI is a donor lost for good, and a fundraising model built on trust in an email address has no defense against that.

For a decade, Andrew Tate showed young men one proof that he was right about everything: the Bugatti.

Last week, his own lawyers told a court the Bugatti was rented.

Quick catch-up for anyone not following: the Tate brothers, internet celebrities with millions of followers, have been sitting in a Miami jail since July. Britain wants them extradited on 59 charges combined, including rape and human trafficking; they deny everything. To get out on bail, the defense had to answer the prosecution's argument: these are billionaires with a $50 million yacht and spare passports, they will run.

And answer it did. In a 28-page brief.

The yacht? Not theirs, they were paid to promote it.

The $5 million and $7 million Bugattis, the $2.1 million Aston? Rented.

The watch collection valuation? From a hobbyist magazine.

The meme-coin "fortune"? About $70,000.

And under oath came a sentence for the ages: "Top G is a character." I also said I was an astronaut, and I have never been to the moon.

That is the price of getting out of jail. When the choice is between the brand and liberty, the brand goes under the hammer.

50 Cent went through this ten years ago. He filed for bankruptcy, and a judge asked about the Instagram photos of cash stacks arranged to spell BROKE. The answer, under oath: props. In this business you have to play rich to earn for real.

And here is the part that matters more than the Tates themselves. An influencer in the attention economy is a mannequin in a shop window. The mannequin does not own the suit; its job is to make YOU buy one. The rented Lambo is not proof of success. It is an advertising expense.

A mannequin does not lie. The lying starts when the shop sells you a course called How to Become the Mannequin, swearing the suit belongs to the mannequin.

Now the most interesting sentence in the entire file: the defense itself wrote that the brothers played rich in order to sell their "courses". Plaintiffs' lawyers around the world just got a gift.

The charges remain allegations and the presumption of innocence applies. Full essay, with every claim linked to the court files, in the first comment.

A federal judge in St. Paul is deciding whether the President's beach party is protected speech.

Not a metaphor. Exhibit one in xAI v. Ellison is the AI image Donald Trump posted in May: himself, his Vice President and two cabinet secretaries in the Reflecting Pool, joined by a woman in a bikini who does not exist.

How did we get here? Minnesota passed a law, 132 votes to 1 in the House, 65 to 0 in the Senate, banning "nudification" software from being offered in the state. Up to $500,000 per violation. No consent element, no dissemination element, no fault element; the offence is defined by anatomy, not by harm. Asked in committee whether consensual images were covered too, the sponsor confirmed they were, and added that this was intentional.

Elon Musk's xAI sued the Attorney General five days before the law took effect, then requested an emergency stop with three days to spare. The court's refusal was almost tender: you slept on this for three months, so you will be heard properly rather than quickly. Argument was August 19. The ruling, expected any day, will be the first word any court says about banning an AI capability rather than an AI use.

The legal spine is older than the technology. In 1959 the Supreme Court held a bookseller cannot be strictly liable for every page on his shelves. In 1975 it struck down a ban on nudity at drive-in cinemas, observing that the ordinance would catch a baby's bottom and the naked body of a war victim. In 1991 a federal court in Missouri dismantled a statute against violent video cassettes for lacking a knowledge requirement, and no, civil penalties did not excuse the omission. In 2023, in Counterman, the Court repeated that even the least protected categories of speech require a guilty mind. Every generation regulates the scandalous new medium of its day. Every generation forgets to define it.

Now the uncomfortable part: the harm is real. The nonconsensual imagery Grok produced by the millions last winter is the reason three countries blocked it and two regulators opened investigations. The interesting question is not whether Minnesota loses. It is what a law that wins would look like: one that punishes the act rather than the capability, and hands the victim a direct claim against the provider. Even xAI's counsel offered the legislature a golden bridge: a law that passed unanimously, he said, can pass unanimously again in a narrower form. He was rounding kindly, the House recorded one dissenting vote, but the invitation stands. European readers will recognise the sketch; it resembles the toolkit our law already carries, from personal rights to biometric data.

I wrote the whole story up: the complaint, the Justice Department's cameo (more industrial policy than constitutional law), the hearing, and what a Warsaw lawyer sees in a Minnesota statute.

California is still one of three states with no statutory minimum age to marry (the others are Mississippi and New Mexico; Oklahoma closes its loophole on November 1). AB 1267 cleared the Assembly 66 to 8 and passed the Senate without a single vote against.

Two data points did most of the work.

First, marriage certificate data for 2000 to 2021 show roughly 314,000 minors married in the US, 86 per cent of them girls, and at least 66,000 of those marriages involved an age gap at which sex outside marriage would have been a crime in that state; in about nine cases out of ten, the license made it lawful.

Second, the visibility gap: since California tightened its procedure in 2018, courts have approved fewer than twenty such marriages a year (nine in 2022), yet in the 2021 ACS around 8,800 Californians aged 15 to 17 reported being married.

The licensed weddings are the tip; the religious and customary ones are the iceberg. There is also a capacity paradox worth chewing on: in most states a married minor cannot retain counsel, file for divorce, or be admitted to a DV shelter.

Comparative footnote: Poland solves that one trap by making marriage confer full legal adulthood, kept even if the marriage is annulled, which cures the standing problem and none of the dependency.

The DOJ unsealed a 14-count superseding indictment last week (US v. Rafatnejad, S2 18 Cr. 94, SDNY) adding 8 defendants to the original 2018 case and extending the documented timeline to at least March 2022. The headline numbers (31.5 TB, 144 US universities, $3.4B in licensing value) got the coverage. The operational detail in the document itself is worth a closer look.

Three-phase university attack model

Phase 1: open-source reconnaissance on individual professors. Publications, research interests, co-authors, institutional network. The goal was a convincing impersonation before any contact.

Phase 2: spearphishing email appearing to come from a professor at a peer institution, referencing the target's actual recent publications and offering links to related papers. Clicking resolved to a typosquatted domain (single character off the legitimate university URL, or an alternate TLD) hosting a cloned login page for that specific institution. Credentials logged.

Phase 3: using stolen credentials to log into victim accounts and exfiltrate everything accessible: journals, dissertations, monographs, raw data. In many cases, automated forwarding rules were set on the compromised account, silently copying all subsequent incoming and outgoing mail to attacker-controlled servers. Persistent access even after a password reset.

Private sector targets got a different approach: password spraying against employee email lists compiled via OSINT. Lower sophistication, higher volume. Same forwarding rule technique on success. Full mailbox exfiltration.

The commercial layer is what makes this operationally unusual. The stolen academic access was not only delivered to the IRGC. Two websites, Megapaper.ir and Gigapaper.ir, resold it inside Iran. Megapaper sold individual articles to Iranian public universities on invoice. Gigapaper offered subscriptions: customers received persistent access to a compromised Western professor's library account for direct browsing. Iranian universities were confirmed paying customers. State-sponsored IP theft with a working B2B revenue model built on top of it.

Two of the defendants were simultaneously FATA members (Iran's internal cyber police) and Mabna contractors. One had also developed a website for the Supreme Leader's office. The overlap between the domestic surveillance apparatus and foreign offensive operations is documented explicitly in the indictment.

Every frontier model since 2023 has been American and Chinese labs trail by about seven months (Epoch). Meanwhile Chinese open models reached 41 percent of Hugging Face downloads, Qwen passed 700 million downloads with more derivatives than Google and Meta combined, and inference cost at fixed capability fell about 280 times in two years. The argument: capability is a leak rate, not a stock, because a model can be copied through its own API, and in that world second place given away free beats first place behind a meter.

Over the past few months my firm has been getting a steady stream of inquiries built on the same package: a Paraguayan residence card (about USD 1,500 to 2,500, 16 to 32 weeks to obtain, no minimum stay, one entry a year keeps it alive in practice), plus a single-member US LLC to invoice clients, plus the promise of paying nothing because Paraguay only taxes local income. The marketing is slick. The law is not impressed. We published a full breakdown for the Polish case, but the mechanics apply far beyond Poland, so here is the short version.

The card answers the question of who may live in Paraguay. Your home country answers the question of whether you have actually left. In Poland that test is the center of vital interests: where your family, home and economic base are. Filings are declaratory; they report a change that already happened in real life, they do not create it. Keep the apartment, the registered business and the family at home and you have not changed residency, you have signed up for a dispute about it. Most European countries run some version of this test.

Paraguay adds a specific problem: Poland has no tax treaty with it, and Paraguay's treaty network is one of the smallest in the world. No treaty means no tie-breaker rules when two countries both claim you. The whole fight happens under your home country's law, with the burden of proof on you.

The money side is worse than the legal side. If your income has any royalty or licensing component (design, content, software), source countries withhold at payout; with a territorial system there is no tax at home to credit it against, so a 20 percent withholding becomes a dead loss. A single-member LLC is disregarded for tax purposes: while you remain tax resident at home, its income is simply your income plus US paperwork, and an intermediary with no real function is textbook anti-avoidance bait. Some countries also charge an exit tax on the way out; Poland does, above roughly PLN 4 million in financial assets.

None of this means relocation is impossible. Real moves to treaty countries with a genuine base work fine. Paper residency is a lawsuit with extra steps. A structure whose defense costs more than its construction is better identified before the first invoice than during the first audit.