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Seems the MAGA movement's army of AI bots, not just its people, are now in a civil war over Jeffrey Epstein.
To wit, a fascinating story today from NBC News:
A previously unreported network of hundreds of accounts on X is using artificial intelligence to automatically reply to conservatives with positive messages about people in the Trump administration, researchers say.
But with the MAGA movement split over the administration’s handling of files involving deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, the accounts’ messaging has broken, offering contradictory statements on the issue and revealing the AI-fueled nature of the accounts.
The network, tracked for NBC News by both the social media analytics company Alethea and researchers at Clemson University, consists of more than 400 identified bot accounts, though the number could be far larger, the researchers say. Its accounts offer consistent praise for key Trump figures, particularly support for Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
Putting the politics aside for a moment, it strikes me this incident is also a handy reminder why we should resist the frequent urge to ascribe agency to current AI tools that they don't yet have.
In other words, reading NBC's reporting, it's crystal clear the AI bots in question are being influenced, even mimicking, the divide they're witnessing among real humans over the topic of Epstein on social media right now. The bots clearly aren't devising and promoting opinions that are truly their own.
And the same holds true on countless other topics we might query AI about each day. Their responses are still very much a reflection of us humans, not the other way about, not something out of whatever sci-fi fantasy we saw in a movie. Not yet.
Five Things: July 13-19, 2025
The week's top headlines about emerging technologies and trends reshaping the web:
- President Trump signed into law the Genius Act, which sets clearer rules for stablecoins in the U.S. It is the first major piece of crypto-related legislation to gain full passage in Trump's second term. (Axios)
- Ether's price is surging, recently posting a 7-day gain of 26%. Wall Street institutions are increasingly either buying exchange-traded funds linked to the token or integrating it into their corporate cash reserves -- strategies that previously benefited bitcoin. Decrypt's André Beganski notes that bitcoin's share of the global crypto market, which has been historically high throughout 2025, has even begun to ease off recently due to the rally in ETH and other tokens. So-called "bitcoin dominance" in the overall crypto market dipped below 61% over the weekend, compared to recent highs near 66%.
- The Bitcoin network's core developers patched a five-year-old bug that could be used by attackers to log needless data to a computer acting as a network node. The vulnerability left individual nodes susceptible to slower verification of Bitcoin transactions, or even outright crashes. (Protos)
- Jack Dorsey's payments company Block, which was among the first to offer crypto trading to mainstream smartphone users, is set to join the benchmark S&P 500 index Wednesday. (CNBC)
- Southern California police who have been investigating a 74-year-old man's disappearance in May now suspect foul play related to his son's crypto fortune. Yikes. (Decrypt)
Market Snapshot
A quick look at some major indicators as of Friday's market close on Wall Street.
| Indicator | Close | Weekly | YTD |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bitcoin | $117,416.94 | -0.5% | +25.1% |
| Nasdaq 100 | 23,065.47 | +1.3% | +9.8% |
| Gold | $3,358.30/oz | -0.2% | +27.7% |
| USD Index | 98.46 | +0.6% | -9.2% |
| 10-yr U.S. Treasury Yield |
4.432% | +0.010 | -0.140 |
Looking Ahead
- Charles Schwab CEO Rick Wurster said the retail brokerage giant will add crypto trading soon. The move will put Schwab in direct competition with Coinbase for individual investors' business. (Yahoo Finance)
- The British government is planning to sell its trove of crypto seized from criminals across several cases in recent years. The stash includes more than $7 billion in bitcoin. (The Block)
- Wall Street Journal tech columnist Nicole Nguyen recommends readers don't buy a new iPhone this summer. Better to wait for updates in September, she says.
Odds & Ends
- The New York Times recently profiled Library180, a nonprofit public space in Lower Manhattan dedicated to preserving print media. Its specialties so far are glossy fashion magazines and alternative newspapers, many provided from the two founders' decades-long personal collections. Wow.
- In a post to to his YouTube channel, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson summarized the evidence suggesting our universe may be located inside a black hole.
That's it for now. Thanks for reading the newsletter today! If you want to know more about w3w's history and (ahem) the author, that info is available here.
If you need to reach me directly, please email peter[at]w3w[dot]media.
Best wishes for a healthy and productive week ahead.