The Silence of the LLMs

In this week's round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover:

• The Darkest Web (BBC)
• Federal agencies skirt Trump’s Anthropic ban to test its advanced AI model (Politico)
• Anthropic Opposes the Extreme AI Liability Bill That OpenAI Backed (Wired)
• Europe should regulate Big Tech instead of banning kids from social media, Estonia says (Politico EU)
• Statement by President von der Leyen with Executive Vice-President Virkkunen on the digital age verification app (European Commission)
• Apple threatened to remove Grok from the App Store over sexualized deepfakes, letter says (NBC News)
• A fake Ledger app on the Apple App Store drained $9.5 million in crypto (Coindesk)
• India’s Decentralized System of Internet Censorship (Tech Policy Press)
• As Social Media Tears Society Apart, a New Crop of Scary Movies Focuses on the Horror of Content Moderation (Variety)

We’re still yet to find a Ctrl-Alt-Speech 2026 Bingo Card winner — could this week be your lucky day? Play along! 

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is the podcast where we make sense of the major debates shaping online speech, platform power, content moderation and the future of the internet. It’s co-hosted by Mike Masnick (Techdirt) and Ben Whitelaw (Everything in Moderation).