Sullivan & Cromwell told a US federal bankruptcy court that a major filing it made in a high-profile case contained multiple “hallucinations” made by AI software.

Andrew Dietderich, the head of S&C’s restructuring practice, apologised in a letter to New York federal judge Martin Glenn on Saturday for mistakes that included misquoting the US bankruptcy code and citing cases incorrectly in a court filing made on April 9.

“We deeply regret that this has occurred,” he said in the letter.

Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg set up a new unit to lead all the Pentagon’s work that involves fusing economic leverage and requirements into joint U.S. military planning and operations, according to a memorandum obtained by DefenseScoop.

The two-page memo formally establishes the Economic Defense Unit and the position of EDU director, who will oversee the new hub and report to Feinberg as the deputy secretary’s principal advisor for economic competition across the Defense Department.

“Economic Competition is the coordinated and deliberate application of economic tools including capital, procurement, policy, trade, tariffs, regulatory authorities, export controls, and other potential economic activities to expand the United States’ economic advantage by deterring, denying, disrupting, and helping to defeat adversaries through economic means,” Feinberg wrote to Pentagon leadership, combatant commanders, and Defense agency and field activity directors.

The Trump Administration is advancing efforts to structurally embed the weaponization of US economic and financial leverage within the US military. This is the kind of action that tends to fly under the radar but IMO has major implications for the future of geopolitics and global conflict. The US government, at least under this administration, intends to continue to use its remaining hegemonic economic leverage aggressively to the point of fusing it directly into military planning.

I first came upon Richard Wright via The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson (incredible book btw), the title of which actually comes from a poem in the original draft of Black Boy:

I was leaving the South
to fling myself into the unknown...
I was taking a part of the South
to transplant in alien soil,
to see if it could grow differently,
if it could drink of new and cool rains,
bend in strange winds,
respond to the warmth of other suns
and, perhaps, to bloom.

I first read Wright's novel Native Son, a story about a young black man (Bigger Thomas) born to Jim Crow Mississippi and living in Chicago's redlined Black Belt in the 1930s

The book was especially captivating to me through Wright's ability to express the chaotic, bewildered psychological turmoil in Bigger's mind throughout the book.

Reading Black Boy, Wright's autobiography, it is clear where this ability came from. As powerful as Native Son is, I found Black Boy to be even more so. The details of his life are harrowing. The abject poverty and hunger, the racial subjugation and humiliation, the suppression of his individuality and intellect by his own family and community. But again what made this book so captivating to me was clarity with which he could see and portray his own inner life and psychology through all of this. His prose is engrossing and poetic. I was absorbed in it from page one. I've never quite read anything else like it, and can't recommend it enough.

If anyone has read Black Boy or anything else by Wright (or Isabel Wilkerson as well for that matter; Caste and The Warmth of Other Suns are absolute favorites of mine), I'd love to hear your thoughts.