By Jacob Mchangama and Jordi Calvet-Bademunt This week, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei publicly defended his company against White House artificial intelligence czar David Sacks’ accusation that Anthropic is building “woke AI.” In other words, the leader of a $183 billion AI company found himself reassuring the current administration that his company’s AI chatbot wouldn’t spread […]
By Jacob Mchangama [ . . . ] The Trump administration has moved with startling speed from trumpeting free speech to seeking to criminalize it. At first glance, that might seem to vindicate the arguments in the historian Fara Dabhoiwala’s new book, What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea. Dabhoiwala believes that […]
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE NEW REPORT: AI LAWS AND CHATBOTS FACE A GLOBAL FREE SPEECH TEST Study ranks countries’ AI policies and leading chatbots by how they handle lawful but controversial speech NASHVILLE, Tenn. — October 17, 2025 — Does your chatbot respond to prompts about controversial topics — or dodge them? That’s one of the […]
By Zachary Wolf Trump’s complete turnabout on speech is indicative of the contradictions and ironies in the bedrock principle of the American liberties in the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment. While Trump came to office promising to restore free speech, particularly on college campuses and on social media, he’s now engaged in a […]
Legal scholars and free speech advocates warned Wednesday that Federal Communications Commission Chairman BrendanCarr ’s increasingly vocal interventions in broadcast content decisions were edging toward coercion. [ . . . ] Ashkhen Kazaryan, senior legal fellow for the Future of Free Speech, cautioned that “jawboning,” or political pressure on media, was not confined to one […]
By Angele Latham, BrieAnna J. Frank, Taylor Seely, Stephany Matat, and Cate Charron NASHVILLE − There’s turmoil over the state of free speech in America. The issue took center stage as free speech advocates, lawyers and experts from around the world convened recently at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Conversations at the Global Free Speech Summit, […]
By Kevin M. Spivak One-sided censorship A decline in support for free speech and an increase in support for violence to suppress opposing views go hand in hand in authoritarian regimes. According to a recent report from Vanderbilt University’s the Future of Free Speech project, over the past decade, the number of countries limiting speech […]
By Angele Latham According to the new data, if colleges and universities were being graded on their policies upholding the First Amendment, the average grade across the country would be failing. But two Tennessee universities, Vanderbilt University in Nashville and Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, scored remarkably well, ranking in the top 20 on […]
By Jacob Mchangama Growing up in Denmark in the early 2000s, I rarely worried about my right to free speech. In this cozy haven of liberal values and secular democracy, speaking freely felt as natural as breathing. Few contested this state of affairs, least of all religious groups, whose influence had long since faded. That […]
By Ebenezer Obadare As a paradigm for the contemporary travails of free thought and freedom of worship, the ongoing saga of Yahaya Sharif-Aminu would be infuriating if it were not so depressing. The Nigerian musician, an adherent of the Tijaniyya Sufi Islamic order, has been running the legal gauntlet since he was first arrested in March 2020 for […]