Radically different
Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 04 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02266-4
Imaging axonal transport in vivo in the mouse cortex reveals that deficits in axonal transport arise at early stages of tau pathology, are caused by enlarged tau envelopes and are reversed by inhibiting MAPK p38α.
Most days in her chambers, Judge Maritza Braswell, a federal magistrate judge in Colorado, sifts through stacks of documents written by people without a lawyer. Many of them can’t afford to hire a lawyer, and others have cases too weak or too small to interest one. She reads each one carefully, mindful of how daunting it is to walk into the courtroom alone.
Lately, like many judges across the US, she has seen a noticeable uptick in such filings. According to a new study that examined 4.5 million federal civil cases from 2005 to 2026, the share of lawsuits brought by self-represented people increased from 11% in 2022 to 16.8% in 2025. Within those cases, the number of filings made more than doubled compared to before 2023.
Judge Braswell puts that jump down to AI.
“I do correlate that to AI in part because I see AI use,” she says. As a tech-savvy judge who uses AI to vet court documents, she’s learned to recognize how large language models write. She can tell based on the prose and at times, hallucinated cases and fabricated quotes.
“I’m also actually seeing better-drafted pleadings,” she says.
But while AI appears to be expanding access to justice, it doesn’t seem to be improving people’s chances of winning. Judges are also starting to question what kinds of rights and responsibilities large language models should bear as they step into lawyers’ shoes, such as whether a chatbot has a duty to provide good advice, as a human lawyer does. And a growing number of lawmakers across the US are starting to grapple with who should pay the price when chatbots dish out bad legal advice.
To test whether AI was driving the increase in lawsuits filed by people without a lawyer, the authors of the study, Anand Shah at MIT and Joshua Levy at USC, ran 1,600 randomly sampled court documents through Pangram, a commercial AI-text detector. The share flagged as containing AI-generated writing rose from 1% in 2023 to 18% in 2026.
To Judge Braswell, that’s not necessarily a cause for concern. While the surge of AI-assisted filings might be adding to their workloads, she and many other judges find the cases easier to rule on because AI is helping people without legal training better articulate their arguments.
Court documents written by people without lawyers are notoriously hard to decipher. Some arrive as handwritten scrawls bordering on gibberish that judges take a while to decode. However cryptic, judges are required to read them charitably.
These days, Judge Braswell has been churning through motions drafted by AI faster than the ones written by the litigants. “I have to be really careful because some of them contain hallucinations and errors, but I can generally understand what they’re arguing better with AI assistance from them than without it,” she says.
The clearer filings let Judge Braswell hear them better. “If I understand an argument a little bit better, I’m probably going to be able to help a little bit more.”
Online communities are springing up to trade self-help guides on using AI to sue. In December 2024, a viral Reddit post walked immigration applicants through suing the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services over delayed review of their applications: draft a writ of mandamus with Microsoft Copilot, pay a lawyer $150 to polish it, and file in the expedient District of Vermont. Cases filed by people without lawyers in Vermont rose from about 45 a year before 2022 to more than 1,100 in 2024.
Even so, people without lawyers are far more likely to lose their case than people with lawyers, and that’s not changing even with the addition of AI, the study found.
“It turns out that mounting a lawsuit is a complex, multifaceted task. Not all of it is just drafting text,” says Joshua Levy, a doctoral student at University of Southern California, who co-authored the study.
Judge William Garfinkel, a federal magistrate judge in Connecticut, has served on the bench for three decades, pondering all sorts of questions about lawyers’ relationship with their clients. Lately, he has been wondering whether people’s conversations with chatbots dispensing legal advice should be privileged, the way that their conversations with lawyers are.
“You can make a good argument that … conversations with large language models like Claude or ChatGPT or Grok should deserve some protection,” he says.
Courts are starting to grapple with this question. In February, a federal court in Michigan ruled that a self-represented person’s conversations with ChatGPT to prepare her case were work product—legal work that is shielded from the opposing side.
The decision came on the same day that a federal court in New York held that documents that a criminal defendant generated using Claude were not privileged attorney-client conversations or work product. The Court argued that Claude is not an attorney and that a user has no “reasonable expectation of confidentiality in his communication” with Claude because AI companies could disclose user data to third parties.
In March, Judge Braswell also ruled that a self-represented person’s use of a chatbot should stay off limits. “It is true that AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and others … collect user data for training and other purposes. But … that does not eliminate all expectations of privacy,” she wrote. Courts have since remained split on the issue.
Some judges are also wondering whether a chatbot, like a lawyer, has a duty to provide good legal advice. Judge Allison Goddard, a federal magistrate judge in California, has noticed that people without lawyers often get the wrong advice from ChatGPT when trying to assess the value of their case during settlement negotiations. In one case, a plaintiff who slipped and fell in a store asked for $700,000 from the store, which was wildly more than the case was worth.
“Where are you getting the idea that you’re getting $700,000? Did you go to ChatGPT?” Judge Goddard asked. “Well…” the plaintiff mumbled. She then walked them through the law to explain why ChatGPT was wrong and suggested a lower amount. “It’s like Dr. Google went to law school,” she says.
Then there’s the question of who’s liable when a chatbot gives bad legal advice. In March, Nippon Life Insurance Company sued OpenAI alleging that ChatGPT practiced law without a license and helped a woman reopen a lawsuit that was already settled, flooding the court with frivolous filings. “ChatGPT is not an attorney,” the lawsuit said.
In May, OpenAI asked the court to dismiss the case, arguing that ChatGPT does not practice law. “ChatGPT is not a person and neither has nor uses any degree of legal knowledge or skill,” OpenAI said in its filing. The case is still pending before the court.
States have started to weigh legislation that would hold AI companies liable when their chatbots offer bad legal advice. New York introduced a bill in March that would bar chatbots from impersonating lawyers, even if they notify users that they are interacting with chatbots. In Congress, a series of bills have been proposed to ban chatbots from posing as lawyers, doctors, and other licensed professionals. The bills have yet to gain traction.
For now, people will continue turning to AI to be their lawyer. For many of them, the rewards outweigh the risks. Not long ago, when Judge Braswell asked a self-represented litigant why they wanted a particular piece of evidence, they mumbled timidly. Now, they answer her questions confidently, having rehearsed with a chatbot.
“This is a really tough system to navigate. With AI, though, it gets a little less complex,” she says.
This is the online version of Adam’s Biotech Scorecard, a subscriber-only newsletter. STAT+ subscribers can sign up here to get it delivered to their inbox.
Revolution Medicines’ daraxonrasib is a certain approval for patients with metastatic pancreatic cancer and tumor progression following chemotherapy. The only gating factor seems to be the speed at which the company can submit the drug to the Food and Drug Administration. Once that happens, daraxonrasib will be cleared quickly and become the new standard of care in the second-line setting.
After the drug’s standing ovation during the ASCO plenary session, the talk shifted to how (and when) the use of daraxonrasib might be expanded to patients with newly diagnosed, metastatic pancreatic cancer.
The longevity movement is often associated with people that have enough money for a thousand lifetimes — and want to live long enough to spend it all. When my STAT colleague Sarah Todd recently attended the longevity festival known as Vitalist Bay, however, she discovered that the movement isn’t all wealthy Silicon Valley tech bros.
In this week’s STATus Report, I chat with Sarah about her trip to this California conference, the science of longevity, what the heck a “bodyoid” is, and more.
At least 12 of my colleagues boarded planes to the American Society of Clinical Oncology conference in Chicago last week to hear Charles Swanton of the Francis Crick Institute in London share results from the world’s first randomized trial on a multi-cancer early detection test.
The trial — a partnership between the U.K. National Health Service and Grail, which makes the Galleri MCED test — randomized 143,000 average English adults aged 50-77 to receive either usual care or MCED testing. The primary endpoint was reduction of stage 3 and 4 cancers across all cancer types.
In May 2025, I joined more than 160 blood cancer advocates on Capitol Hill. At the time, Congress was considering changes to Medicaid, a state and federal program that is a lifeline for more than 75 million Americans, including older adults, children, veterans, people with disabilities, pregnant people, and adults with low incomes. Together, we advocated against policies that threatened to put health care out of reach for millions.
One of those concerning policies was work reporting requirements for people covered by Medicaid. The then-proposed legislation mandated that states verify Medicaid enrollees’ monthly work status at least every six months to ensure that they are engaging each month in a minimum of 80 hours of community service, educational activities, and/or work. But undergoing cancer treatment is already a full-time job; many patients are unable to work because of their condition.
Patients are getting used to being recorded in the doctor’s office. More than a quarter of U.S. practices now use AI-based listening tools called ambient scribes, which capture visits in real time and draft clinical notes for clinicians to enter into patients’ medical records.
But what happens when it’s the patient doing the recording?
Nearly every patient now has a recording device in their pocket, and commercial large language models have made it easier than ever for them to transcribe and interpret audio files. A growing number of consumer apps — with names like VisitRecall, Advoca Health, and AlignCare — are using AI to do just that, delivering summaries and action items for patients after the fact. One called Kin Health, with backing from the co-founder of GoodRx, announced a $9 million seed round in May.
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
Less than two weeks after scrapping an executive order on AI, President Donald Trump signed a new one on Tuesday. Promising to promote innovation and security, the policy represents a turning point in the White House’s AI governance—but is likely to attract criticism from both opponents and supporters of stricter regulation. Here are five key points from the order:
1. It’s created a voluntary review system: tech companies will be asked to share frontier models with the government for review 30 days before they plan to release them.
2. There’s no mandatory licensing: the government will not require permits before software can be deployed.
3. It establishes a dedicated AI cybersecurity clearinghouse: the new hub will coordinate security checks with the private sector.
4. It’s a watered-down version of the order Trump shelved last month: the earlier version requested models 90 days before their release.
5. But it’s still a move towards stronger AI oversight: the policy marks a clear departure from the White House’s previous hands-off approach.
Plus: here’s why a previous Trump administration’s AI policy was a distraction and how AI is already making online crimes easier.
The defense-tech company Anduril has shared new details about the augmented-reality headset for the military it’s prototyping with Meta, including a vision for ordering drone strikes via eye-tracking and voice commands.
Quay Barnett, who leads the effort at Anduril following a career in the Army’s Special Operations Command, aims to optimize “the human as a weapons system.” His vision is cyborg-inspired: drones and soldiers will see together, share information seamlessly, and make decisions as one.
—James O’Donnell
This is our latest story to be turned into an MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we publish each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 President Trump has signed an AI order that expands model oversight
The long-awaited executive order aims to mitigate security threats. (NYT $)
+It asks companies to submit models voluntarily for tests before release. (NPR)
+ It’s a slimmed-down version of the order Trump shelved in May. (WSJ $)
+ And marks a strategic shift in his AI strategy. (Reuters $)
+ A war over AI regulation is coming to the US. (MIT Technology Review)
2 SpaceX plans to raise $75 billion in IPO at $135 per share
The company intends to sell 555.6 million shares. (Reuters $)+ The fixed price breaks from the traditional IPO process. (Bloomberg $)
+ Morningstar says the valuation should be nearly 50% lower. (BI)
3 Meta has scaled back plans to track workers’ clicks and keystrokes to train AI
All staff can pause it for 30 minutes, with some fully exempt.(The Information $)
+ The changes follow a fierce backlash to the tracking plans. (Reuters $)
+ AI is supercharging surveillance. (MIT Technology Review)
4 Microsoft wants to ‘make users addicted’ to its new AI assistant
According tointernal documents for the “Scout” tool. (404 Media)
+ Microsoft launched the assistant on Tuesday. (TechCrunch)
5 Mathematicians fear that AI threatens their field
A new declaration raises concerns about AI’s trustworthiness. (Ars Technica)
+ It arrives a week after OpenAI said it solved a famous math problem. (WSJ $)
+ A startup wants to change how mathematicians do math. (MIT Technology Review)
6 Scientists have found a way to supercharge computer worms with AI
The worm could target any known flaw in the world’s computers. (NYT $)
+ AI supercharging scams. (MIT Technology Review)
7 Google must let UK publishers opt out of AI search features
Online publishers can choose not to appear in the AI Overviews. (BBC)
+ Google is now testing features for sites to exit AI search. (Reuters $)
8 America’s data center build-out is falling way behind schedule
60% of those planned for completion in 2027 aren’t yet under construction. (WSJ $)
+ Nobody wants a data center in their backyard. (MIT Technology Review)
9 EVs are getting cheaper worldwide—except in the US
The US is short on supportive policies and affordable Chinese EVs. (Rest of World)
10 The European Parliament is ditching Google for… Quant
The French search engine is the new default on in-house computers. (Politico)
+ The switch comes amid a broader push to wean the EU off US tech. (FT $)
Quote of the day
—Dan Coatsworth, head of markets at AJ Bell, tells CNBC that SpaceX’s IPO price looks overloaded with expectations.
One More Thing
Marseille’s battle against the surveillance state
Heading toward Marseille’s central train station, Eda Nano points out what looks like a streetlamp on the Rue des Abeilles. But this sleek piece of urban furniture is not a lamp. It’s a video camera, with a 360-degree view of the narrow street.
Nano, a 39-year-old developer, wants to make Marseille residents more aware that they’re being watched. She’s part of a growing group of activists resisting the rise of policing cameras in their hometown.
Find out how the rebellious port city of Marseille is fighting the surveillance state.
—Fleur Macdonald
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)
+ These aerial photos of solar farms transform renewable energy into abstract art.
+ Open a window over Earth’s water with this hypnotic 4K atmospheric film made from satellite imagery.
+ Spend three relaxing hours with David Attenborough narrating this collection of extraordinary wildlife moments.
+ Radiohead sounds beautiful on traditional Japanese instruments in this koto performance of “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi”.
CAR T-cell therapy has enabled two patients who had been waiting for years for a kidney transplantation to find a match. Published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, preliminary results from a Phase I clinical trial show that CAR T therapy can significantly increase the chances of a match for people whose immune system would otherwise reject over 99% of kidneys available for transplant.
“This is the first demonstration that CAR T cells can be used not only to treat cancer, but also to help patients who previously had no opportunity to receive a compatible donor kidney,” said Ali Naji, MD, PhD, professor of surgery at the University of Pennsylvania and principal investigator of the study. “For patients who have spent years on the kidney transplant waiting list, this approach could be transformative.”
More than 91,000 people in the U.S. are currently waiting for a kidney transplant. Physicians assess each patient’s likelihood of finding a compatible donor using the calculated panel reactive antibody (cPRA) score, which measures how broadly the immune system is primed to attack foreign tissues. For instance, a cPRA score of 90% means the patient is expected to reject 90% of kidneys available for transplant, leaving only a small pool of potential matches available to them.
The ongoing CTOT-46 clinical trial is recruiting kidney transplant candidates with a cPRA score of 99.5% or higher who have been waiting for a kidney transplant for at least one year. Although the study will continue until up to 20 highly sensitized candidates have been recruited, preliminary results from the first two patients enrolled show promise for this innovative approach.
Both participants were treated with a dual CAR T therapy designed to remove the immune cells responsible for making antibodies that lead to organ rejection after a kidney transplant. The CAR T cells are engineered to target the CD19 and BCMA proteins, leading to the depletion of memory B cells and antibody-producing plasma cells, respectively. This strategy significantly reduced the levels of circulating antibodies produced by these cells, enabling both patients to receive kidneys from donors that would have previously been incompatible.
One of the patients had been diagnosed with focal glomerulosclerosis at age 14, leading to kidney failure at a young age. His cPRA score had reached nearly 100% after his immune system rejected a second kidney transplant, making a third transplantation next to impossible. After years of waiting for an extremely unlikely match, the CAR T cells lowered his antibody levels enough to find a match within months.
Importantly, the depletion of immune cells was temporary, and the population of B cells and plasma cells returned to normal levels over time. Neither of the patients has shown signs of organ rejection or antibody rebound months after transplantation. Additionally, no cases of severe cytokine release syndrome or neurotoxicity were reported—two common complications of CAR T-cell therapy.
“In this early trial, the CAR T-cell treatment was tolerated well, with no severe side effects, and the immune system began to recover as expected,” said Robert Montgomery, MD, PhD, chair of the department of surgery at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute. “This early success reflects what cell therapy can do for transplant medicine and opens up new options for patients that could save thousands more lives every year.”
The post CAR T-Cell Therapy Expands Access to Kidney Transplants appeared first on Inside Precision Medicine.