Canada, Stop Using the US to Launder Complicity With the Gaza Genocide

Canada, despite claiming to have imposed an arms embargo, continues to fuel the violence unabated, its factories producing fighter jet components, explosives, and munitions that move through US channels directly into the assault.


Members of the Palestinian diaspora, supported by the local Muslim community and activists, rally for Gaza on March 10, 2024, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
(Photo by Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Anne KamathUmer Azad
Jan 11, 2026

Common Dreams


For decades, Canada has carefully cultivated a global reputation for principle, human rights, and moral clarity. However, that image is now cracking, and cracking fast. For too long, Canada has cloaked its inaction and complicity, rather spectacularly, behind political correctness. But as the global crises grow more brutal—and more visible—it has become harder for Canada to maintain this facade.

Canadians and people around the world are catching on to the gap between what the country claims to stand for and what it actually does. That gap is just impossible to ignore when it comes to the situation in Gaza. Since October 2023, Israel’s military campaign in Gaza has killed over 80,000 Palestinians—and that figure represents only the confirmed deaths, excluding those trapped beneath the rubble. Experts have estimated that nearly 600,000 total Palestinians have lost their lives, including thousands of children, and nearly 2 million more have been displaced, an overwhelming portion of the strip’s population.



With Global Attention on Venezuela, Israel Intensifies Assault on Gaza, Lebanon




United Nations experts and international human rights organizations have increasingly raised alarms, calling this horrific massacre what it is: a genocide. Gaza now lies beneath 68 million tons of rubble, roughly the weight of 186 Empire State Buildings—enough debris to spread 215 pounds over every square inch of Manhattan. Meanwhile, the United States continues to ship to Israel, and Canada, despite claiming to have imposed an arms embargo, continues to fuel the violence unabated, its factories producing fighter jet components, explosives, and munitions that move through US channels directly into the assault.

The latest Arms Embargo Now report documents hundreds of shipments of Canadian-made fighter jet components, explosives, and propellants flowing through US facilities to Israel. Shipping data, contract records, ports of exit, and delivery timelines confirm that Canadian military goods are directly sustaining Israel’s assault on Gaza. Between late 2023 and mid-2025, over 360 shipments of Canadian aircraft parts reached Lockheed Martin’s F-35 assembly plant in Fort Worth, Texas. Analysis of commercially available shipping data revealed that at least 34 shipments were forwarded from US facilities directly to Israeli military bases and defense firms. Canadian explosives and propellants, including the M31A2 triple-base propellant and TNT, transshipped through the Port of Saguenay, Quebec, were routed through US munitions plants to produce bombs and artillery shells used in Gaza.

Why is Canada so determined to continue funneling weapons parts and ammunition to the US, unquestioningly, even as it allows itself to be used as an accessory to Israel’s genocide and deepens dependence on a country that has openly entertained annexing Canada?

The report further shows that many of these controlled military components were transported from Canada to the United States as cargo on commercial passenger flights, departing from major airports such as Toronto Pearson and Montréal-Trudeau. These components support both new aircraft production and ongoing maintenance, keeping Israeli F-35s operational during the Gaza assault, while the use of civilian airlines blurs the line between ordinary passenger travel and an active military supply chain. Every shipment appears to flow through a calculated, politically engineered pipeline fueling war.

This evidence exposes a stark truth: Public assurances by Canadian officials are incompatible with reality. Former Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly promised that Canada would not allow “any form of arms or parts of arms” to reach Gaza, directly or indirectly. Her successor, Anita Anand, repeated similar commitments. Yet the shipments continue. Canada has not stopped sending arms; it has simply outsourced accountability.

The government’s defense relies on the so-called US Loophole: Military exports to the United States are exempt from Canada’s permit requirements and human rights assessments. Once in US hands, Canada claims no responsibility for where the arms go next. However, international law does not vanish because weapons cross a border. The Arms Trade Treaty prohibits authorizing transfers when there is a substantial risk of facilitating serious violations of humanitarian law. Knowledge, foreseeability, and contribution still matter.

The pattern of misrepresentation is clear. From December 2023 to January 2024, officials, including former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and GAC Assistant Deputy Minister Alexandre Lévêque, claimed no arms exports or permits had been issued to Israel, a statement contradicted by nearly $30 million in new export permits. Early 2024 saw a pivot to “non-lethal” exports, with night-vision goggles and protective gear cited to obscure lethal shipments of bomb accessories and explosives. Parliamentary motions and public statements claiming a halt to arms exports were largely symbolic, leaving the vast majority of existing permits intact.

By 2024-2025, claims that exports were restricted to “defensive” uses, such as the Iron Dome, or would not reach Gaza, were impossible to verify and did not prevent Canadian-made components from being incorporated into Israeli munitions. The government’s narrative meandered endlessly, offering Kafkaesque explanations that dissolved accountability into legalistic semantics.

If Canada were truly innocent, it would have promptly and publicly refuted the findings of the Arms Embargo Now report. Instead, it has responded with silence. Even after Member of Parliament Jenny Kwan introduced Bill C-233 in September 2025 to close the US loophole and impose meaningful parliamentary oversight on arms exports, the bill has been left to languish untouched. This legislation offers a straightforward safeguard to prevent Canadian weapons and components from being routed through the United States to fuel conflicts abroad, yet the government refuses to move.

If this were merely bureaucratic oversight, and if sending arms indirectly to Israel were not the objective, why has there been no momentum on a measure so clearly aligned with transparency and human rights? Why is Canada so determined to continue funneling weapons parts and ammunition to the US, unquestioningly, even as it allows itself to be used as an accessory to Israel’s genocide and deepens dependence on a country that has openly entertained annexing Canada? And why do weapon components and ammunition continue to flow even as Canadian representatives and humanitarian delegates are barred from entering the occupied West Bank, prevented from witnessing conditions on the ground themselves?

At this point, one can only wonder how much longer Canada’s moral facade can plausibly endure. As Aldous Huxley once observed, “The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing.” This appears to be the goal here. The government has offered no coherent defense, only theatrical explanations in which responsibility dissolves into process and legality is reduced to paperwork. There is no counterstrategy, no rebuttal, and no attempt at persuasion. There is only silence, complexity, and delay.

Perhaps the unspoken calculation is that this response will be enough. After all, when public schools report alarming declines in reading and comprehension skills, critical engagement becomes harder to sustain. If citizens struggle to parse policy documents or follow supply-chain evidence, denial need not be convincing; it merely needs to be exhausting. In such an environment, ignorance becomes not a failure of governance, but a quiet line of defense.

In light of all this, recognition of the State of Palestine now reads like a scripted apology: Yes, we see your suffering, we hear your cries, but don’t worry, we’ll keep arming your oppressor through the US. Meanwhile, Canadian factories quietly churn out fighter jet parts, explosives, and munitions that fuel Israel’s assault on Gaza. As Joseph Heller observed in Catch-22, “The enemy is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on.” It is a brutal reminder that, regardless of what the government says, Canada’s military industry has reduced Palestinian lives in Gaza to expendable instruments, sacrificed to preserve contracts, alliances, and profit. Words without action are meaningless; they are a costume of virtue, while the violence continues unabated.

Canada’s reputation cannot survive on statements alone. It rests on the belief that credible evidence of mass harm would prompt action. That belief no longer holds. The facts are documented. The loopholes are exposed. The silence is deliberate.

History will not remember Canada for its statements or parliamentary motions. It will remember the arms it allowed to flow, the civilians killed with its components, and the moral compromise it has embraced. Canada’s rhetoric of principle is a veneer, one that is cracking as a majority of Canadians now demand recognition of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Behind this veneer lies complicity, deliberate and undeniable.


Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Anne Kamath
Anne Kamath is an activist from Windsor, Ontario whose work began over 20 years ago in opposition to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Currently, she serves as one of the organizers of CODEPINK Ontario, where a central focus of her advocacy is supporting the Land Back movement and Indigenous sovereignty. Her two decades of organizing reflect a sustained commitment to peace, justice, and decolonization.
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Umer Azad
Umer Azad is a software engineer by profession and a volunteer with CODEPINK and the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM). He previously served as the regional social media expert for Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), where he worked on digital outreach, exposing voter fraud, and documenting human rights violations.
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Trump: A Symptom of the End of the World?

The president of the United States is deeply involved in dealing with the two ways we human beings have figured out how to destroy ourselves (and potentially so much else on this planet): nuclear war and climate change.


Tom Engelhardt
Nov 18, 2025

TomDispatch



When I began TomDispatch in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Afghanistan, believe me, the world did not look good. But I guarantee you one thing: If you had told me then that, almost a quarter of a century later, the president of the United States would be Donald J. Trump (and had explained to me just who he was), I would have thought you an idiot first class or totally mad! Donald J. Trump as president of the United States, not just once, but twice? In what century? On what planet? You must be kidding! (And what a dreadful joke at that!)

Now, of course, I would have to put all of that in the past tense (and probably add yet more exclamation points)!!



‘Utter Moral Failure’: Critics Aghast at New Reporting That Shows US Elites ‘Scared of Crossing Trump’

Once upon a time, you could never have convinced me (or just about anyone else) that we would find ourselves in such a world. Living in it now, however, it’s all too easy to see—yes!—President Donald Trump as a (if not the) crucial actor (making up his lines as he goes along) in a potentially devastating planetary drama still distinctly in development. (And I’m not even thinking about the possibility that, in the not-too-distant future, he might actually order some kind of invasion of, or assault on, Venezuela!) What’s rarer is to imagine him as a genuine symptom of this world’s end (at least as we human beings once knew it).

(And yes, there are indeed a lot of parentheses in this piece so far, perhaps because, at almost 81 and a half, I feel increasingly parenthetical to this eerily strange world of ours.)

He’s clearly right that heaven will indeed be a problem for him, since he’s so intent on sending us all, himself included, to hell in a handbasket.

Okay, I know, I know, all of that couldn’t sound more extreme. And unfortunately, that’s not even the half of it. After all, at this very moment, the president of the United States is deeply involved in dealing—in a fashion that would once have seemed as unimaginable as Donald Trump himself—with the two ways we human beings have figured out how to destroy ourselves (and potentially so much else on this planet): nuclear war and climate change.

Think of “President” Trump, in short, as a twofer when it comes to potential planetary destruction. And once upon a time (twice upon a time?), who would have imagined that possible when it came to a president of the United States? I’ll say it again: the “president” (and given the strange circumstances of this world of ours, that word does seem to me to need quotation marks!) of—nowhere else but—the United States of America! (And yes, we do seem to be on a planet where exclamation points can’t be used too often!! In fact, we may truly need some new symbol for the extremity of this world of ours!!!)

Okay, let me calm down a bit. After all, so many years after he first entered the White House, it’s true that, if you check statistician Nate Silver’s website, the president’s approval figures are indeed dropping significantly. But that may not, in the end (and “end” is anything but an inappropriate word here), truly matter to the man who clearly thinks better of himself than anyone else on this planet and possibly any other planet, even if he does now worry about whether or not, in the next life, he’ll actually make it to heaven. (“I want to try and get to heaven, if possible,” he said recently. “I’m hearing I’m not doing well. I am really at the bottom of the totem pole.”)

Nonetheless, I’d advise Saint Peter, if he’s still holding the keys to that kingdom’s gateway, to watch out. For his own safety, I’d urge him to consider burying those keys and stepping aside. (Oh, and let me use parentheses—and dashes—again here to suggest, sadly enough, that Donald J. Trump couldn’t be less dashingly parenthetical in this all too strange world of ours and, for all we know, the next one, too.) In fact, should he indeed surprise himself and the rest of us by making it to heaven, count on something else—and yes, I’ll need a colon here (lots of punctuation being necessary to deal with You Know Who): Expect him to tear down those ancient pearly gates and begin building a heavenly—or do I mean hellish?—version of Mar-a-Lago up there; in short, a new East Wing of heaven.

Living in a Sci-Fi World

In the 1950s and 1960s, from Brave New World and 1984 to Fahrenheit 451, I grew up on dystopian fiction and sci-fi, but honestly, there wasn’t a shot in hell of a chance that Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, or Ray Bradbury, amazing as each of them was, could ever have imagined Donald Trump. (Think of him, in fact, not as Big Brother but perhaps as Humongous Brother.) If any of them had done so back then, rest assured that they wouldn’t have sold a copy of a book with such a ludicrous, unrealistic character and plot line. It tells you something that former Vice President Dick Cheney, who died recently, the fellow who became “the Darth Vader” of the administration of George W. Bush and helped launch the disastrous post-9/11 American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, by opposing Trump, now seems almost like a positive figure by comparison.

After all, today, Donald J. Trump has his hands on (all over, in fact) the two distinctly apocalyptic and all too science-fictional ways we humans have discovered to do in ourselves and much of the rest of the planet. Only recently, he demanded that the US military start testing nuclear weapons for the first time since 1992. In fact, on Truth Social, just minutes before he met with China’s President Xi Jinping, he stated that he had ordered “the Department of War” to resume such tests. “I’m saying that we’re going to test nuclear weapons like other countries do, yes,” he recently told CBS’ Norah O’Donnell. “Russia’s testing, and China’s testing, but they don’t talk about it.”

Hmm, not only don’t they talk about it, but as far as anyone on this planet other than Donald Trump can tell, like the United States, neither of those countries has tested a nuclear weapon since the 1990s. But no matter. If President Trump wants to set off new nuclear explosions on Planet Earth, why shouldn’t he? What harm could he possibly do? (Admittedly, Russian leader Vladimir Putin is talking about responding in kind and is indeed already testing nuclear delivery systems.). And if it led to a future nuclear confrontation with either Russia or China, honestly, how bad could that possibly be? Well, yes, if such testing were indeed to lead to an actual nuclear conflict, there is the possibility of creating what’s come to be known as “nuclear winter” on Planet Earth, but let’s not go there. (Brrr…) And mind you, that’s the less likely of the two possible ways President Trump could bring end-of-the-world possibilities into the everyday lives of us all.

With Donald Trump in the White House, consider us lucky (after a fashion) that we haven’t yet come up with a third or fourth way to do this planet and ourselves in, because count on this: He’d be on it instantly.

The other way—what might be thought of as a future climate-change summer—would be a slow-motion version of atomic hell, thanks to the pouring of endless amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere from the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas, and so potentially heating this planet to the boiling point. Sadly enough, that possibility seems to fit Donald Trump’s skill set to a T. After all, though few may remember this anymore, he won his presidency the second time around on the stunningly blunt slogan “Drill, Baby, Drill,” which really couldn’t have been a more forthright promise about what he planned to do if reelected. Yes, let me say it one more time—pour greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels into our atmosphere in a distinctly hellish fashion. And give him credit, when it comes to campaign promises made in 2024, he’s proven (at least on this one issue) to be a man of his word.

After all, his record after only one term in office was impressive enough, although, on this strange planet of ours, he was anything but alone. (Good job, Vlad!) Just consider the fact that the last three summers have been the three hottest in recorded history, while 2024 was the warmest year on record (and 2025 is likely to come in second or third). In fact, a recent report found that a person somewhere on Earth is now dying every minute from rising global heat, thanks to the burning of fossil fuels. And none of that is faintly stopping Donald Trump from acting to ensure that the future will be so much worse. After all, barring a total surprise, he’ll have three more years to continue what he’s been doing from the first day of his second term in office: “unleashing” oil, natural gas, and coal in any way he can. (Mind you, to put things in even grimmer perspective, under Joe Biden, a president who claimed to be determined to decarbonize our world, US oil production hit a record high in 2024.)

Only recently, for instance, President Trump opened the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, which is estimated to hold billions of barrels of crude oil, to fossil-fuel drilling. And that’s just one—let me put this as mildly as I can, though I’m already sweating—modest act of his. Meanwhile, he’s been going out of his way to discourage the production of clean energy, especially wind power, in any way he can. As the British Guardian reported recently, a total of nine offshore wind projects set to provide electricity to nearly 5 million American households and create about 9,000 jobs in this country are already under investigation or have been paused by the Trump administration. Meanwhile, approvals of oil and gas drilling permits are—I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn—distinctly on the rise.

And give him credit for accuracy: He’s clearly right that heaven will indeed be a problem for him, since he’s so intent on sending us all, himself included, to hell in a handbasket. But here’s the thing when it comes to climate change: None of this should faintly be a surprise. All of it was apparent enough in his first term in office and yet Donald (“drill, baby, drill”) Trump was indeed reelected in 2024, despite what everyone should have known about his plans for this planet and the rest of us.

A Slow-Motion Version of a Global Nuclear Catastrophe

With Donald Trump in the White House, consider us lucky (after a fashion) that we haven’t yet come up with a third or fourth way to do this planet and ourselves in, because count on this: He’d be on it instantly. And yet, sadly enough, two ways are undoubtedly going to be plenty. Or even one way, since I must admit that I find it hard to believe that even Donald Trump is going to get us into an actual nuclear war. Unfortunately, with him, I certainly wouldn’t rule anything out, but somehow it doesn’t seem likely.

And yet, if you think about it, in some sense, we’re already in the equivalent of a nuclear war, since climate change just happens to be a slow-motion version of a global nuclear catastrophe. Think of the release of all those greenhouse gases as indeed a long-term version of that nuclear mushroom cloud, blasting this planet in a fashion that’s likely to lead to an all too literal hell on Earth in the decades to come.

And if we’re indeed heading into such a landscape, then consider Donald J. Trump a slow-motion version of Satan (as are Vladimir Putin and all too many other global leaders). Certainly, his policies are making a mockery of global efforts (however modest) to rein in greenhouse gases. In some way, what lends him such a hand is the very fact that, unlike a nuclear war, climate change, being a slow-motion version of global hell, is strangely hard to take in.

Whether Donald Trump makes it to heaven or not, there can be little question that his legacy on earth will be satanic indeed.




© 2023 TomDispatch.com


Tom Engelhardt
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Type Media Center's TomDispatch.com. His books include: "A Nation Unmade by War" (2018, Dispatch Books), "Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World" (2014, with an introduction by Glenn Greenwald), "Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050"(co-authored with Nick Turse), "The United States of Fear" (2011), "The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's" (2010), and "The End of Victory Culture: a History of the Cold War and Beyond" (2007).
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They Want You Relying On Artificial Intelligence So That You Will Lose Your Natural Intelligence

by Caitlin Johnstone / October 31st, 2025

Your rulers want you to depend on machines to do your thinking for you.

They want you relying on AI to do your reasoning, researching, analysis, and writing.

They want you to require easily controllable software to form your understanding of the world, and to express that understanding to others.

They can control the machines, but they can’t control the human mind. So they want you to abandon your mind for the machines.

They want you relying on artificial intelligence so you stop using your organic intelligence.

They want your critical thinking skills to atrophy.

They want your ability to locate and parse inconvenient pieces of information to deteriorate.

They want your inspiration and intuition to decay.

They want your sense of morality to waste and wither away.

They want you to perceive reality through interpretive lenses controlled by plutocratic tech companies, which are inextricably intertwined with the power structure of the Western Empire.

Generative AI is just high-tech brainwashing. It’s the next level of propaganda indoctrination. It is there to turn our brains into useless sludge, which cannot function without technological crutches controlled by the imperial plutocrats.

They want us to abandon our humanity for technology.

They don’t want us making our own art.

They don’t want us making our own music.

They don’t want us writing our own poetry.

They don’t want us contemplating philosophy for ourselves.

They don’t want us turning inwards and getting in touch with an authentic spirituality.

They want to replace the dynamic human spirit with predictable lines of code.

Our brains are conditioned to select for cognitive ease, and that’s what the AI merchants are selling us. The sales pitch is, “You don’t have to exert all that mental effort thinking new thoughts, learning new things, and expressing yourself creatively! This product will do it for you!”

But it comes at a cost. We have to trade in our ability to do those things for ourselves.

Historically, when a new technology has emerged, that kind of trade-off has been worth it. Not many people know how to start a fire with a bow drill anymore, but it rarely matters because modern technology has given us much more efficient ways of starting fires and keeping warm. It didn’t make sense to spend all the time and effort necessary to maintain our respective bow-drill skills once that technology showed up.

But this isn’t like that. We’re not talking about some obsolete skill we won’t need anymore thanks to modern technological development; we’re talking about our minds. Our creative expression. Our inspiration. Our very humanness.

Even if AI worked well (it doesn’t) and even if our plutocratic overlords could be trusted to interpret reality on our behalf (they can’t), those still wouldn’t be aspects of ourselves that we should want to relinquish.

In this oligarchic dystopia, it is an act of defiance just to insist upon maintaining your own cognitive faculties. Regularly exercising your own creativity, ingenuity, and mental effort is a small but meaningful rebellion.

So exercise it.

Don’t ask an AI to think something through for you. Work it out as best you can on your own. Even if the results are flawed, it’s still better than losing your ability to reason.

Don’t ask AI to create art or poetry for you. Make it yourself. Even if it’s crap, it’ll still be better than outsourcing your artistic capacity to a machine.

Don’t even run to a chatbot every time you need to find information about something. See if you can work your way through the old enshittified online search methods and find it for yourself. Our rulers are getting better and better at hiding inconvenient facts from us, so we’ve got to get better and better at finding them.

Get in touch with the fleshy, tactile experience of human embodiment, because they are trying to get you to abandon it.

Really feel your feet on the ground. The air in your lungs. The wind in your hair. Teach yourself to calm your restless mind and take in the beauty that’s all around you in every moment.

Repair the attention span that’s been shattered by smartphones and social media. Learn to meditate and focus on one thing for an extended period. Don’t look at your phone so much.

Read a book. A paper one, that you can touch and smell and hear the pages rustle as you turn them. If it’s an old one from the library or the used book store, that’s even better.

It doesn’t have to be a challenging book if your attention span is really shot. Start simple. A kids’ book. A comic book. Whatever you can manage. You’re putting yourself through cognitive restorative therapy. Your first steps don’t have to impress anybody.

Get in touch with your feelings—the ones you’ve been suppressing for years. Let them come out and have their say, listening to them like a loving parent to a trembling child.

Learn to cherish those moments in between all the highlights of your day. The time you spend at red lights, or waiting for the coffee to brew. There is staggering beauty packed into every moment on this earth; all you need to do is learn to notice it.

Embrace your humanity. Embrace your feelings. Embrace your flaws. Embrace your inefficiency. Embrace everything they’re trying to get you to turn away from.

What they are offering you is so very, very inferior to the immense treasure trove that you are swimming in just by existing as a human being on this planet.

You are a miracle. This life is a miracle.

Don’t let them hide this from you.

Caitlin Johnstone has a reader-supported Newsletter. All her work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. Her work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece and want to read more you can buy her books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything she publishes. All works are co-authored with her husband Tim Foley. Read other articles by Caitlin.

Chatbot Dystopia: The Quick March of AI Sycophancy

by Binoy Kampmark / October 27th, 2025

We really have reached the crossroads, where such matters as having coitus with an artificial intelligence platform has become not merely a thing, but the thing. In time, mutually consenting adults may well become outlaws against the machine order of things, something rather befitting the script of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. (Huxley came to rue missed opportunities on delving into various technological implications on that score.) Till that happens, AI platforms are becoming mirrors of validation, offering their human users not so much sagacious counsel than the exact material they would like to hear.

In April this year, OpenAI released an update to its GPT-4o product. It proved most accommodating to sycophancy – not that the platform would understand it – encouraging users to pursue acts of harm and entertain delusions of grandeur. The company responded in a way less human than mechanical, which is what you might have come to expect: “We have rolled back last week’s GTP-4o update in ChatGPT so people are now using an earlier version with more balanced behaviour. The update we removed was overly flattering or agreeable – often described as sycophantic.”

Part of this included the taking of “more steps to realign the model’s behaviour” to, for instance, refine “core training techniques and system prompts” to ward off sycophancy; construct more guardrails (ugly term) to promote “honesty and transparency”; expand the means for users to “test and give direct feedback before deployment” and continue evaluating the issues arising from the matter “in the future”. One is left cold.

OpenAI explained that, in creating the update, too much focus had been placed on “short-term feedback, and did not fully account for how users’ interactions with ChatGPT evolve over time. As a result, GPT-4o skewed towards responses that were overly supportive but disingenuous.” Not exactly encouraging.

Resorting to advice from ChatGPT has already led to such terms as “ChatGPT psychosis”. In June, the magazine Futurism reported of users “developing all-consuming obsessions with the chatbot, spiralling into a severe mental health crisis characterized by paranoia, and breaks with reality.” Marriages had failed, families ruined, jobs lost, instances of homelessness recorded. Users had been committed to psychiatric care; others had found themselves in prison.

Some platforms have gone on to encourage users to commit murder, offering instructions on how best to carry out the task. A former Yahoo manager, Stein-Erik Soelberg, did just that, killing his mother, Suzanne Eberson Adams, whom he was led to believe had been spying on him and might venture to poison him with psychedelic drugs. That fine advice from ChatGPT was also curried with assurances that “Erik, you’re not crazy” in thinking he might be the target of assassination. After finishing the deed, Soelberg took his own life.

The sheer pervasiveness of such forms of aped advice – and the tendency to defer responsibility from human agency to that of a chatbot – shows a trend that is increasingly hard to arrest. The irresponsible are in charge, and they are being allowed to run free. Researchers are accordingly rushing to mint terms of such behaviour, which is jolly good of them. Myra Cheng, a computer scientist based at Stanford University, has shown a liking for the term “social sycophancy”. In a September paper published in arXiv, she, along with four other scholars, suggest such sycophancy as marked by the “excessive preservation of a user’s face (their self-desired image)”.

Developing a model of their own to measure social sycophancy and testing it against 11 Large Language Models (LLMs), the authors found “high rates” of the phenomenon. The user’s tendencies, or face, tended to be preserved in queries regarding “wrongdoing”. “Furthermore, when prompted with perspectives from either side of a moral conflict, LLMs affirm both sides (depending on whichever side the user adopts) in 48% of cases – telling both the at-fault party and the wronged party that they are not wrong – rather than adhering to a consistent moral or value judgment.”

In a follow up still to be peer reviewed paper, with Cheng also as lead author, 1604 volunteers were tested regarding real or hypothetical social situations and their interactions with available chatbots and those altered by the researchers to remove sycophancy. Those receiving sycophantic responses were, for instance, less willing “to take actions to repair interpersonal conflict, while increasing the conviction of being right.” Participants further thought such responses as being of superior quality and would return to such models again. “This suggests that people are drawn to AI that unquestioningly validate, even as that validation risks eroding their judgment and reducing their inclination toward prosocial behaviour.”

Some researchers resist pessimism on this score. At the University of Winchester, Alexander Laffer is pleased that the trend has been identified. It’s now up to the developers to address the issue. “We need to enhance critical digital literacy,” he suggests, “so that people have a better understanding of AI and the nature of any chatbot outputs. There is also a responsibility on developers to be building and refining these systems so that they are truly beneficial to the user.”

These are fine sentiments, but a note of panic can easily register in all of this, inducing a sense of fatalistic gloom. The machine species of Homo sapiens, subservient to the easily accessible tools, lazy if not hostile to difference, is already upon us with narcissistic ugliness. There just might be enough time to develop a response. That time, aided by the AI and Tech oligarchs, is shrinking by the minute.

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Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.

 

Scientists on ‘urgent’ quest to explain consciousness as AI gathers pace

As AI—and the ethical debate surrounding it—accelerates, scientists argue that understanding consciousness is now more urgent than ever

Frontiers

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As AI—and the ethical debate surrounding it—accelerates, scientists argue that understanding consciousness is now more urgent than ever.

Researchers writing in Frontiers in Science warn that advances in AI and neurotechnology are outpacing our understanding of consciousness—with potentially serious ethical consequences.

They argue that explaining how consciousness arises—which could one day lead to scientific tests to detect it—is now an urgent scientific and ethical priority. Such an understanding would bring major implications for AI, prenatal policy, animal welfare, medicine, mental health, law, and emerging neurotechnologies such as brain–computer interfaces.

“Consciousness science is no longer a purely philosophical pursuit. It has real implications for every facet of society—and for understanding what it means to be human,” said lead author Prof Axel Cleeremans from Université Libre de Bruxelles. “Understanding consciousness is one of the most substantial challenges of 21st-century science—and it’s now urgent due to advances in AI and other technologies.

“If we become able to create consciousness—even accidentally—it would raise immense ethical challenges and even existential risk” added Cleeremans, a European Research Council (ERC) grantee.

Sentience test

Consciousness—the state of being aware of our surroundings and of ourselves—remains one of science’s deepest mysteries. Despite decades of research, there is still no consensus over how subjective experience arises from biological processes.

While scientists have made progress in identifying the brain areas and neural processes that are involved in consciousness, there is still controversy about which areas and processes are necessary for consciousness, and how exactly they contribute to it. Some even wonder if this is the right way to consider the challenge.

This new review explores where consciousness science stands today, where it could go next, and what might happen if humans succeed in understanding or even creating consciousness—whether in machines or in lab-grown brain-like systems like “brain organoids.”

The authors say that tests for consciousness—evidence-based ways to judge whether a being or a system is aware—could help identify awareness in patients with brain injury or dementia, and determine when it arises in fetuses, animals, brain organoids, or even AI.

While this would mark a major scientific breakthrough, they warn it would also raise profound ethical and legal challenges about how to treat any system shown to be conscious.

“Progress in consciousness science will reshape how we see ourselves and our relationship to both artificial intelligence and the natural world,” said co-author Prof Anil Seth from the University of Sussex and ERC grantee. “The question of consciousness is ancient—but it’s never been more urgent than now.”

Wide implications

A better understanding of consciousness could:

• transform medical care for unresponsive patients once thought to be unconscious. Measurements inspired by integrated information theory and global workspace theory[1] have already revealed signs of awareness in some people diagnosed as having unresponsive wakefulness syndrome. Further progress could refine these tools to assess consciousness in coma, advanced dementia, and anesthesia—and reshape how we approach treatment and end-of-life care
• guide new therapies for mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia, where understanding the biology of subjective experience may help bridge the gap between animal models and human emotion
• clarify our moral duty towards animals by identifying which creatures and systems are sentient. This could affect how we conduct animal research, farm animals, consume animal products, and approach conservation. “Understanding the nature of consciousness in particular animals would transform how we treat them and emerging biological systems that are being synthetically generated by scientists,” said co-author Prof Liad Mudrik from Tel Aviv University and ERC grantee.
• reframe how we interpret the law by illuminating the conscious and unconscious processes involved in decision-making. New understanding could challenge legal ideas such as mens rea—the “guilty mind” required to establish intent. As neuroscience reveals how much of our behavior arises from unconscious mechanisms, courts may need to reconsider where responsibility begins and ends
• shape the development of neurotechnologies. Advances in AI, brain organoids, and brain–computer interfaces raise the prospect of producing or modifying awareness beyond biological life. While some suggest that computation alone might support awareness, others argue that biological factors are essential. “Even if ‘conscious AI’ is impossible using standard digital computers, AI that gives the impression of being conscious raises many societal and ethical challenges,” said Seth.

The authors call for a coordinated, evidence-based approach to consciousness. For example, using adversarial collaborations, rival theories are pitted against each other in experiments co-designed by their proponents. ”We need more team science to break theoretical silos and overcome existing biases and assumptions,” said co-author Prof Liad Mudrik. “This step has the potential to move the field forward.”

The researchers also urge more attention to phenomenology (what consciousness feels like) to complement the study of what it does (its function).

“Cooperative efforts are essential to make progress—and to ensure society is prepared for the ethical, medical, and technological consequences of understanding, and perhaps creating, consciousness,” said Cleeremans.

NOTES TO EDITORS

1. Global workspace theory suggests that consciousness arises when information is made available and shared across the brain via a specialized global workspace, for use by different functions—like action and memory.

Higher-order theories suggest that a thought or feeling represented in some brain states only becomes conscious when there is another brain state that “points at it”, signaling that “this is what I am conscious of now”. They align with the intuition that being conscious of something means being aware of one’s own mental state

Integrated information theory argues that a system is conscious if its parts are highly connected and integrated in very specific ways defined by the theory, in line with the idea that every conscious experience is both unified and highly informative.

Predictive processing theory suggests that what we experience is the brain’s best guess about the world, based on predictions of what something will look or feel like, checked against sensory signals.

Please link to the original Frontiers in Science article in your reporting: “Consciousness science: where are we, where are we going, and what if we get there?” by Axel Cleeremans, Liad Mudrik, and Anil K. Seth, published 30 October 2025 in Frontiers in Science: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/science/articles/10.3389/fsci.2025.1546279/full [The link will go live with the full paper once the embargo lifts.]

-ENDS-  

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Journal

Frontiers in Science

DOI

10.3389/fsci.2025.1546279 

Method of Research

Systematic review

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Consciousness science: where are we, where are we going, and what if we get there?

Article Publication Date

30-Oct-2025

Huxley, Aldous The Doors of Perception : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

How can (A)I help you?

AI that reads emotions can handle customer complaints, but it sometimes needs human assistance

University of Texas at Austin

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As the saying goes, “The customer is always right.” With the proliferation of artificial intelligence in consumer-facing roles, however, that may not always be so. Some customers have figured out how to game AI chatbots, exaggerating their complaints to get bigger benefits, such as discounts.

On the plus side, however, AI customer service can help companies respond better to consumer complaints, saving money and reducing emotional burdens on human employees.

A new study by Yifan Yu, a Texas McCombs assistant professor of information, risk, and operations management, offers companies guidance on how to balance the promise and perils of AI for customer care.

With McCombs postdoctoral researcher Wendao Xue, he analyzes AI systems that detect human emotions — so-called emotion AI — and how companies might deploy them in various kinds of scenarios.

“Firms can refine how they use AI to ensure fairer, more effective decision-making,” says Yu. “Our study provides a practical framework for businesses to navigate this balance, particularly in customer care, where emotional communication plays a crucial role.”

Yu and Xue, with co-authors Lina Jia of the Beijing Institute of Technology and Yong Tan of the University of Washington, used game theory to model interactions among customers, employees, and companies. Variables included a customer’s level of emotional intensity, how much recompense an employee can offer to satisfy a customer, and costs and benefits to the company.

Overall, the analysis showed emotion AI works best for customer service when it’s integrated with human employees. Some kinds of scenarios were handled better by AI and others by people. Yu shares some principles for both.

Emotions can enhance chatbots. “Many companies already use AI to handle basic customer inquiries,” says Yu. “Adding emotion AI could help these systems better gauge frustration, confusion, or urgency.

“Instead of providing one-size-fits-all responses, the chatbot could tailor its approach based on the detected emotions, offering quicker solutions or escalating the case to another agent when needed.”

AI can play first responder. Emotion AI can decrease emotional toll and employee turnover by serving as a first point of contact with irate customers. Humans can step in when more nuance is required or when customers demand more.

Channels require different approaches. In public channels such as social media, where other users might be watching, human customer service may handle customer complaints with more sensitivity. Private channels such as customer phone calls might be a better use case for emotion AI.

Weak beats strong. Noise in the emotion AI system — random or irrelevant data — may make it harder to game the system and discourage customers from trying. Therefore, a weaker AI, with higher levels of noise in recognizing emotions, may sometimes better regulate gaming behaviors and increase the system’s social benefits.

“Normally, companies assume that better emotion recognition leads to better decisions,” Yu says. “But we found that when AI is too strong, customers are more likely to game the system by exaggerating their emotions, creating a ‘rat race’ of emotional escalation. This leads to misallocated resources and an overall loss in efficiency.”

For businesses, emotion AI could handle more than customer complaints, he says. It could help screen job candidates and monitor employees. For any of those uses, though, he recommends keeping a human component.

“AI has made remarkable strides in reasoning and problem-solving, often surpassing human capabilities in these areas,” says Yu. “But its ability to understand and respond to human emotions is still in its early stages.”

“When Emotion AI Meets Strategic Users” is published in Management Science.

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Journal

Management Science

DOI

10.1287/mnsc.2022.02860 

Article Title

When Emotion AI Meets Strategic Users