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    Mathieu Triclot - Mastodon
    ▻https://aleph.land/@mtriclot/116675166325109339

    J’avais manqué cet article important (2025) sur la relation négative entre usage des LLM et esprit critique.

    – Hypothèse 1 : la fréquence d’emploi de l’IA réduit l’esprit critique - validée.

    – Hypothèse 2 : le mécanisme de « délégation cognitive » (cognitive offloading) explique la relation précédente - validée

    Tout cela devrait avoir des conséquences sur l’usage en contexte académique, si nos collègues avaient l’obligeance de lire les papiers plutôt que noyer leur propre esprit critique dans les LLM.

    AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking
    ▻https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/15/1/6

    Abstract
    The proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) tools has transformed numerous aspects of daily life, yet its impact on critical thinking remains underexplored. This study investigates the relationship between AI tool usage and critical thinking skills, focusing on cognitive offloading as a mediating factor. Utilising a mixed-method approach, we conducted surveys and in-depth interviews with 666 participants across diverse age groups and educational backgrounds. Quantitative data were analysed using ANOVA and correlation analysis, while qualitative insights were obtained through thematic analysis of interview transcripts. The findings revealed a significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool usage and critical thinking abilities, mediated by increased cognitive offloading. Younger participants exhibited higher dependence on AI tools and lower critical thinking scores compared to older participants. Furthermore, higher educational attainment was associated with better critical thinking skills, regardless of AI usage. These results highlight the potential cognitive costs of AI tool reliance, emphasising the need for educational strategies that promote critical engagement with AI technologies. This study contributes to the growing discourse on AI’s cognitive implications, offering practical recommendations for mitigating its adverse effects on critical thinking. The findings underscore the importance of fostering critical thinking in an AI-driven world, making this research essential reading for educators, policymakers, and technologists.
    Keywords:
    #AI; #artificial_intelligence; #critical_thinking; #cognitive_offloading; #AI_tools; #technology and #education; #cognitive_development; #Halpern Critical Thinking Assessment; #digital dependence; AI #trust

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    #trust in #remote_work : what is the psychology of #social_presence ?
    ▻https://redasadki.me/2026/01/19/trust-in-remote-work-what-is-the-psychology-of-social-presence

    Why does a video call feels empty compared to a handshake? How does physical absence break the social contract? What happens to trust in remote work? For generations, professional trust relied on a simple, physical toolkit. We shook hands. We looked each other in the eye across a table. We shared coffee during breaks. These were not just social niceties. According to decades of research in sociology and communication theory, these physical acts provided a high-bandwidth environment where we could rapidly verify if a person was trustworthy. When the world shifted to remote work, we removed the travel but we lost much more than the commute. We lost the underlying machinery that makes human connection effective. To understand why a day of video calls leaves us feeling isolated rather (...)

    #Learning_design #insider #leadership #learning #physical_space #propinquity #Social_Presence_Theory

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    American AI Arrives on Fortress Europe’s Borders. At What Cost ?

    Critics say emerging age estimation and surveillance technologies are putting human rights at risk.

    #Shield_AI’s headquarters are situated in a tall glass building along a wide boulevard in San Diego, a world away from where its tech, dreamed up in the sun-washed streets of California, has been tested above the Bulgarian forests. For asylum seekers trying to cross from Turkey to Bulgaria — and into the European Union — there is a good chance that in the future they may encounter one of the company’s surveillance drones.

    Shield AI was founded as a startup in 2015 by Andrew Reiter and brothers Ryan and Brandon Tseng. The company is now valued at around $5 billion. It claims that during its participation in a 60-day pilot at the border in August — coordinated with Frontex, the EU border agency — “both irregular border crossings and criminal activity” saw a “significant reduction” thanks to the use of its vertical-take-off (or V-BAT) drones. How this was achieved remains unclear. The drones include an onboard AI pilot that enables a fully autonomous flight even without GPS. Frontex agreed there had been a reduction in crossings, although neither Frontex nor Shield AI would say what the precise percentage is. Shield AI is active across Europe and has sold these drones to other EU states, including Greece and the Netherlands. The company also has a lucrative $198 million contract with the US Coast Guard announced in 2024.

    A new joint investigation by Inkstick, Solomon, Taz, and SWI Swiss Info reveals how new technology is rolled out across Europe to deter irregular migration and handle asylum claims, often with little scrutiny and thin safeguards, that can affect even underage refugees. It also shows how the EU is increasingly moving towards “smart” border control solutions, which either use or have the potential to use artificial intelligence — despite officials downplaying or hiding this trend behind less ominous terms like “algorithms.”

    The Bulgarian trial, according to two officials present at a closed-door meeting in Warsaw in September 2025, was part of an “Innovation” presentation. Featured on the screen was a drone-based surveillance network piloted under a Frontex contract. Assets tested included V-BAT drones that hovered along Bulgaria’s border with Turkey, streaming real-time video to a command center and flagging movements to operators.

    Bulgaria is among a number of European countries accused of systematically violating the rights of asylum seekers. Shield AI did not respond to requests for comment on the system, its deployment, costs, or data use. Frontex, in a written response, said that the “preventative” effect of the Bulgarian pilot was an “indirect outcome” and was conducted under a “research and innovation pilot, which includes comprehensive fundamental-rights safeguards.”

    The European Commission has said that research pilots remain outside of the full legal framework. Dr. Niovi Vavoula, an Associate Professor and Chair in Cyber Policy at the University of Luxembourg, told the investigation that such exceptions are merely semantic once these systems are tested on real people, “we are past the purely testing research phase.” She added that any research exceptions “shouldn’t be applicable.”

    From the beginning of people’s attempts to reach Europe, often aboard overpacked, flimsy vessels leaving from Libya, aerial assets sold by defense companies and deployed on behalf of European states and agencies buzz above their heads.

    Along the voyage, an array of Israeli tech could be monitoring their movements, from Israel’s IAI’s Heron surveillance drones leased to Frontex for Mediterranean patrols to Elbit Systems’ Hermes 900 drones (used in the skies of Gaza since 2014) used on unarmed EU maritime patrol missions. In 2025, Frontex renewed the IAI-made Heron 1 drone for another four years.

    If people make it to European soil alive — thousands do not — they frequently try to leave countries of first-arrival like Greece and reach wealthier nations such as Germany, where living conditions and prospects of employment seem better. In the reeds of northern Greece, according to border officials who spoke to the investigation, the movement of storks often gives away the positions of migrants hoping to do just this; soon a series of sophisticated tech will take over from nature’s watchmen.

    Public announcements, internal minutes, and technical documents reviewed by this investigation detail plans for the deployment of Mobile Incident-Management Centers (MIMCs) in the country’s northern border, the main exit route for migrants trying to reach Northern Europe. All-terrain vehicles will be equipped with thermal cameras, drones, and encrypted comms, working alongside new fixed surveillance structures feeding live video and alerts into central control hubs and command posts.

    For those who make it from southern Europe all the way to its tip in northern France and the beaches around the city of Calais, refugees might come into contact with even more American technology invested in monitoring their movements.

    Anduril Industries (one of several American defense companies borrowing its name from the Lord of the Rings franchise) has a role to play in monitoring asylum seekers being crammed onto smugglers’ overcrowded boats to cross the English Channel, the stretch of water between France and the southern coast of England and one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. Founded by Donald Trump supporter Palmer Luckey in 2017, Anduril is now valued at over $30.5 billion.

    In a recent investigation, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism laid bare the breadth of the company’s lobbying activities in the UK, including the hiring of at least 11 former defense ministry staff. Anduril has sold a number of “Sentry Towers” to the UK Home Office, similar to those along the US-Mexico border. The towers monitor migrant crossings and use the company’s “Lattice” AI system. They are shrouded in secrecy, with the British government often refusing to release precise details about their number, positions on the southeast coast, or contracts. Previous freedom of information requests filed by researchers have revealed the Home Office has paid over £16 million (around $21.2 million) for a three-year period for one of these contracts,

    Anduril’s expansion into Britain reflects a broader trend: US companies are increasingly supplying not only border hardware but also the AI tools that shape asylum decisions. This investigation has obtained the names of seven companies involved in a controversial trial run by the UK Home Office, which plans to use AI to estimate the age of newly arrived migrants. The Home Office claims that Facial Age Estimation AI, a process in which an individual’s age is determined by comparing their facial biometrics to a large dataset of faces with known ages, “offers a potentially rapid and simple means” to verify someone’s age.

    Molly Buckley from the Electronic Frontier Foundation said that the organization has concerns over the technology, including reports of its accuracy levels. “When used for age estimation, facial scanning is often inaccurate. It’s in the name: age estimation,” she said. Buckley explained that every form of face-scanning technology has an error rate, which means some adults will be deemed minors and vice versa, with limited options for recourse. “Age estimation is also discriminatory. Studies show face scans are more likely to err in estimating the age of people of color and women, which means that as a tool of age verification, these face scans will have an unfair disparate impact on the human rights of people seeking asylum.”

    Three of the seven companies involved in this trial are American, including Trust Stamp, a Georgia-based company that bills itself as an “AI-powered identity verification.” Trust Stamp had a controversial contract with ICE, which was terminated in 2022. Although no link was made public, the company had suffered a significant data breach of its migrant-tracking app used by ICE earlier in the year. Aware Inc and Paravision AI, both similarly headquartered in the US, have had their software used by multiple US government bodies, including the FBI and the US Air Force. None of those involved in the trial appear to have ever had their facial age estimation technology used on asylum seekers. Aware Inc, Paravision AI, and Trust Stamp did not respond to request for comment.

    The Home Office did not provide answers to a lengthy list of questions about whether a human-rights impact assessment had been completed, about which experts had been consulted, or about any further details of the implementation process. In a statement, it insisted that “robust age assessments are a vital tool in maintaining border security,” with a reported plan to integrate it into systems in 2026.

    Child protection advocates, meanwhile, say these assurances fall far short of addressing the lived consequences for young people misidentified by automated systems. Maddie Harris from the Humans for Rights Network said that “introducing facial age estimation does nothing to address this significant safeguarding issue of determining children to be adults and placing them in unsafe settings exposed to acute harm.” Harris added, “Our concerns include the ability for a child to consent to an AI age check, inherent racial bias and the data the tool will have access to reach its decision on a person’s age.”

    Harris questioned how such technology will adequately take into account “the complexities of human life, including long and traumatic journeys to the UK, and how our experiences manifest in our faces and bodies.”

    Age estimation is not the only area where American-made AI is being inserted into asylum decision-making. Foxglove, a nonprofit that litigates and advocates for “fairer tech,” shared its submission to the UK Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights ​​and the Regulation of AI. The submission flags concerns about three AI tools used or tested by the Home Office, including the proposed facial age assessment as well as one to auto-summarize asylum interview transcript and another to condense and summarize country information for asylum decision-makers.

    The nonprofit says it has confirmed that the transcript-summarizing tool is based on San Francisco based OpenAI’s GPT-4. The tendency of such models to “hallucinate,” or to produce false but plausible results, is well documented, Foxglove said. In trials, from the Home Office’s own admission, 9% of summaries were reportedly so inaccurate or incomplete they were unusable.

    Foxglove’s Donald Campbell said it is “surprising” the Home Office calls that “a small proportion.” With tens of thousands of asylum claims a year, he explained, such an error rate could affect thousands of cases if scaled up.

    “It is hard to see how unleashing these dangerously unreliable tools on some of the most vulnerable people — including child refugees — is anything other than a recipe for disaster,” Campbell added. “At the very least, the Home Office should be providing a higher level of transparency and accountability, to ensure that errors and harms are rapidly identified. Instead it is refusing to release even minimal information on the risk assessments it has undertaken. This secrecy suggests the Home Office knows the tools come with significant, known risks, but is determined to push on regardless.”

    The EFF’s Buckley agreed. “By definition, asylum seekers have an increased need for privacy and protection. To force them to hand over their most sensitive data to UK authorities and AI companies as soon as they reach UK shores raises significant concerns. Where does that biometric data go, and who is it shared with? Can it be purchased, used by law enforcement, or stolen by bad actors — either in the UK or in the country they’re fleeing? Deploying this unreliable, discriminatory, and dangerous surveillance technology at the border just to save a few pounds creates massive risks to the human rights, safety, and well-being of asylum seekers.”

    The tendency to downplay or reframe AI use is mirrored in how authorities describe the role of the technology within decision-making processes. The UK Home Office, for example, has said that the trial of AI on age-contested children at the border will only be “assistive,” with the final decision making remaining in human hands.

    Estelle Pannatier from Algorithm Watch explained that “assistive” AI nonetheless comes with its own pitfalls. “We have observed that people who seek advice from algorithms can, over time, become more dependent on the system and less critical of it,” Pannatier explained. “Thus, a tool developed to assist in decision-making can, in practice, be used as an instrument for making decisions. In theory a human oversees the system … but that person relinquishes their supervisory responsibilities and decision-making authority to the algorithm. It is therefore essential that appropriate processes be put in place to reduce these ‘automation biases.’”

    Meanwhile, there is an apparent lack of transparency surrounding the AI technology being deployed at Europe’s borders. This investigation’s requests for precise details on the Bulgaria pilot were denied. Requests for UK performance reviews regarding Anduril’s Sentry Towers were denied, while the Home Office did not answer questions about whether a human rights impact assessment or a data protection impact assessment had been completed on the facial age estimation technology.

    These examples merely underpin a bigger problem, according to Bram Vranken, a researcher at the Brussels-based watchdog Corporate Europe Observatory. “Border management is being seen as crucial to national security and has become securitized. So, everything to do with borders is being more and more exempt from democratic oversight, accountability, [and] transparency.”

    As countries from Bulgaria to the United Kingdom increasingly rely on AI and other technology to conduct border enforcement, rights groups have become increasingly concerned. In a 2024 report, Amnesty International warned that “digitized interventions” on borders contribute to “weakening human rights protections for migrants and asylum seekers.” In 2023, the EuroMed Rights watchdog said the “use of new technologies is now firmly cemented in the EU’s border policies,” noting that they “underpin invasions of privacy, brutal violations of human rights” across Europe.

    Criticism or not, lucrative contracts for tech companies have continued to pile up. To Dr. Vavoula, the risks these multimillion dollar technologies pose are clear: “These tools are not trained to show compassion.”

    ▻https://inkstickmedia.com/american-ai-arrives-on-fortress-europes-borders-at-what-cost

    #technologie #AI #intelligence_artificielle #IA #frontières #Europe #migrations #technologie #surveillance #Bulgarie #forêt #Andrew_Reiter #Brandon_Tseng #Ryan_Tseng #complexe_militaro-industriel #business #vertical-take-off #Frontex #V-BAT #drones #Grèce #Pays-Bas #smart_borders #frontières_intelligentes #Turquie #Heron #Israël #USA #Etats-Unis #Mobile_Incident-Management_Centers (#MIMCs) #Anduril_Industries #Manche #Palmer_Luckey #Sentry_Towers #Lattice #âge #biométrie #biométrie_faciale #Molly_Buckley #Electronic_Frontier_Foundation #Trust_Stamp #ICE #Aware_Inc #Paravision_AI

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    Sick of Feeling Like a Tourist? There’s a Tour for That

    With visitors increasingly interested in the social and political realities of global tourist hot spots, some local guides are adapting their offerings.

    I arrived in Athens for the first time last May with visions of alabaster architecture and picturesque avenues. But when I arrived in Petralona, the central neighborhood where I was staying, I found vacant storefronts, broken sidewalks and crumbling, graffiti-covered buildings.

    The more I explored, the more I wondered why parts of this ancient city had come to convey urban decay rather than classical charm.

    A tour of the Acropolis would most likely not provide answers. Searching on Airbnb Experiences for something more relevant, I found the Athens Social and Political Walk. Its tagline: “How did the ‘cradle of democracy’ become the ‘basket case of Europe’?” I signed up for a similar tour offered by the guide.

    I met the guide, a 35-year-old Spanish-born political scientist named Isaac Caballero Suey, and five other participants near bustling Omonoia Square. Mr. Suey, who had close-cropped hair and glasses, started off by explaining that contemporary Athens has almost nothing in common with the Ancient Greece of Aristotle. These days the city is a petri dish for pretty much every major postmillennial social ill — gentrification, wealth disparity, refugee and immigrant crises, and infrastructure decay.

    With tourism putting pressure on vacation hot spots like Athens, Buenos Aires, Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro, experiences like Mr. Suey’s are drawing curious visitors. They offer a counterpoint to traditional tourism narratives and a way to learn about the tensions affecting the people who actually live in these places.
    Glimpses of an Unseen City

    For three hours, Mr. Suey led us through parts of the city most travelers would ignore or avoid — where abandoned schools and dingy apartments abutted high-rise hotels, and empty arcades concealed vacation rentals.

    He gave us a glimpse of the world inhabited by mostly unseen Athenians, including immigrants and squatters. He connected these locations to issues like corruption, cultural displacement and politics, and shared enlightening stories of grass-roots organizing and mutual aid.

    The tour scrambled my preconceptions, leaving me with an appreciation for Athens as it was rather than as I had imagined it. I wasn’t the only one.

    “The more traditional tourist narratives feel dismissive of the people who live in these places, like they’re not important, and it’s no surprise that places like Athens have struggled to find a modern identity because of this,” said Peter Allen, a 38-year-old software engineer from Liverpool who was also on the tour.

    Mr. Allen, who could be described as a digital nomad, slots into the typical Athens Social and Political Walk demographic, Mr. Suey said: left-leaning frequent travelers, mostly from major cities. “Professors, people of social sciences, politics, economics, but also a lot of tech people,” he explained. “I could even tell you they love the brand Patagonia.”

    Mr. Suey, who also offers tours like Understanding the Refugee Crisis and the Greek LGBTQ History Walk, noted that most bookings are last-minute, suggesting that curious tourists may seek out his distinctive analysis only after they’re exposed to the official “This is Athens” visitors’ guide.

    “My goal is to give you an image of what’s going on in the country, and this is not what tourism boards are interested in,” Mr. Suey said. “I see myself as a political scientist, and what I do is like a documentary.” It is also a business. My tour cost 32 euros, or about $37.

    Encouraged by feedback from participants, he started a company called Planetwonk to bring similar tours to destinations like Buenos Aires, Manila, Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro.

    Beyond ‘Tequila Tours’

    Mr. Suey put me in touch with his partner in Mexico City, a 27-year-old graduate student of art history named Gustavo Sánchez. When he responded to Mr. Suey’s job posting on LinkedIn last year, Mr. Sánchez was working as a traditional, federally credentialed guide doing “tequila tours, very mariachi, very stereotypical,” he said in a phone interview. “Those tours are fun, but if we only do those, we’re exoticizing the country. We’re hiding the problems.”

    Tensions have recently been rising in Mexico City as well-heeled tourists and remote workers have driven up the cost of real estate and food prices, and demonstrations erupted last summer.

    Well versed in Mexico City’s history of corruption and protest, and with Mr. Suey’s guidance, Mr. Sánchez created the Mexico City Social and Political Tour (€34). Mr. Sánchez takes his guests — primarily students, journalists and nonprofit workers — to places like La Merced, the neighborhood that’s home to Mexico City’s largest market and has struggled with government neglect, and Plaza Tlaxcoaque, the site of a former secret prison where dissidents were tortured, which now hosts a large encampment of homeless people.

    “Other guides believe we shouldn’t talk about the bad things happening here. I think that’s unethical,” he said, noting that to his knowledge he’s the only guide in the city leading tours of this type. “I love Mexico City. I’ve studied its history. When you love a place, you can criticize it, because you want it to change.”

    These types of tours offer an alternative to the crowded predictability of social-media-driven tourism, but they existed long before Instagram and its peers. The Catalonian artist and writer Joan Brossa organized a one-night-only “anti-tourism” tour of Barcelona in 1979.

    More recently, in Portugal, Bruno Gomes started We Hate Tourism Tours in 2008, during a painful economic downturn. A skater and surfer, Mr. Gomes used to schlep visiting friends around Lisbon in his van, skipping popular destinations for his personal favorites and planting the seeds of his current company. Today, along with a staff of eight, he offers tours like We Hate Landmarks and Real Life Suburbia, starting at €47 a person. Mr. Gomes and his team still bypass popular sites like the Moorish Castle in Sintra in favor of less-visited alternatives of guides’ choosing.

    “I’m a designer and an artist,” Mr. Gomes said. “My colleague, she’s a journalist. We have an engineer. We have a musician. No one really has anything to do with tourism. We just share what we love.”
    Space for ‘Anti-Tourism’

    Traditional tour operators in Athens and Mexico City don’t seem to mind the competition. Representatives from the nonprofit operator This Is Athens and El Taco Club, a service in Mexico City that employs 80 guides and hosts thousands of guests annually, both used the term “complementary” to describe the nontraditional experience these so-called anti-tourism tours provide.

    The common spirit behind these experiences is an urge toward counterprogramming, but they can diverge in their approach to doing business. In fact, some are not businesses at all.

    Kyle Kajihiro, a University of Hawaii professor of ethnic studies, has spent more than 20 years leading informal tours of Oahu, mostly for friends and colleagues, that challenge the erasure of Native Hawaiians by American colonialism and military expansion. He calls these outings DeTours.

    Dr. Kajihiro does zero marketing for DeTours, nor does he charge for them, and they’re not really targeted at the general public. Instead, when interested people reach out, he screens them to gauge their commitment to Native Hawaiian issues like land rights and food sovereignty. DeTours, he says, are not a commercial venture but rather a way to connect like-minded activists.

    “I think there’s a market for alternatives that are less ethically problematic, that even feel affirming of certain values people have. And there’s a need to have a different kind of story being told,” he said. “But I’m troubled by the way that even good intentions can become a commodified experience.”

    The notion of anti-tourism tours may seem contradictory, but according to Anu Taranath, a faculty member at the University of Washington and the author of “Beyond Guilt Trips: Mindful Travel in an Unequal World,” embracing the full breadth of these tours — from Mr. Suey’s expansive approach to Dr. Kajihiro’s strategic exclusivity — could help drive a necessary shift in travel habits.

    “We need to operate on all levels,” Dr. Taranth said. Anti-tourism “isn’t antithetical to tourism, but our definition of tourism should open up.”

    “None of those are simple conversations to have,” she added, “but I’m seeing people wanting to understand where we are and how we got here, and what it means to do something different.”

    ▻https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/29/travel/athens-mexico-tourism.html
    via @fil
    #anti-tourisme #résistance #villes #urbanisme #airBnB #surtourisme #tourisme_de_masse #urban_matter #Athènes #Buenos_Aires #Mexico_City #Rio_de_Janeiro #alternative #contre-narration #TRUST #master_TRUST

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    Articles repérés par Hervé Le Crosnier CC BY

    (1) Open Letter to Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft on the Future of GitHub, Trust, and Digital Sovereignty | LinkedIn
    ▻https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/open-letter-satya-nadella-ceo-microsoft-future-github-dion-wiggins-f2yic

    Dion Wiggins
    Dion Wiggins
    CTO at Omniscien Technologies | Board Member | Strategic Advisor | Consultant | Author
    16 août 2025

    16 August 2025

    Dear Mr. Nadella (Satya Nadella) ,

    As a developer of more than 40 years, across 33+ programming languages and even more platforms, I have seen the rise and fall of countless technologies, communities, and ecosystems. While I cannot speak for the global developer community as a whole, it is clear that a very large number of us feel the same deep sense of betrayal and alarm over Microsoft’s actions regarding GitHub. This letter is written not only from decades of professional experience and personal investment, but in solidarity with the thousands of developers, project maintainers, community leaders, and digital sovereignty advocates who have raised these same alarms. The issues are systemic, not individual.

    Satya Nadella (2018): “We recognize the responsibility we take on with this agreement. We are committed to being stewards of the GitHub community, which will always remain open to all developers.”

    In the above Microsoft Blog post, you promised that “GitHub will operate independently and remain an open platform for all developers,” and committed to “keeping GitHub independent and developer-first.” GitHub leadership assured the world that “GitHub will operate independently… That means GitHub retains its developer-first values, distinctive spirit, and open extensibility.”

    Public promises on the Github website at the same time made simpler promises that have now been broken.

    Nat Friedman (2018): “GitHub will operate independently… That means GitHub retains its developer-first values, distinctive spirit, and open extensibility.”

    While Microsoft continues to highlight its open source credentials and assure developers that “nothing has changed” for users, the core issue is not superficial continuity, but the structural and strategic shift of GitHub from a genuinely independent, community platform to a fully integrated corporate asset. This is not about branding, but about irreversible changes to control, incentives, and accountability.

    Microsoft Press Release (2025): “This transition enables us to accelerate GitHub’s contributions to Microsoft’s AI ecosystem.”

    Today, those commitments are in question. As TechRadar reports: “Rather than appoint a new GitHub CEO, Microsoft will integrate GitHub more directly into CoreAI, led by Jay Parikh… GitHub will now report directly into its CoreAI division.” (TechRadar)

    This reporting is echoed by The Verge, which noted that “Microsoft isn’t replacing Dohmke’s CEO position, and GitHub will be fully part of Microsoft instead of being run as a separate entity.” (The Verge)

    These moves directly contradict the 2018 promise of independence and stewardship. They are not continuity but consolidation. For many in the community, this is not simply a broken promise but an outright lie. Your words from the past: “We recognize the responsibility we take on with this agreement. We are committed to being stewards of the GitHub community, which will retain its developer-first ethos, operate independently and remain an open platform”, now stand exposed as empty assurances at best, or an intentional lie at worst.

    I repeat these phrases because you have not lived up to them and they seem unimportant to you today. Just a tool of the past, discarded once the acquisition goals were complete.

    Microsoft’s decision to absorb GitHub into its CoreAI division, eliminate its independent leadership, and embed it deeply within the company’s AI and cloud business directly contradicts these promises. The official press release states this is to “accelerate GitHub’s contributions to Microsoft’s AI ecosystem.” Microsoft executives openly describe how “GitHub’s vast code corpus is foundational for the next era of Copilot and AI model development.”

    This is not just a broken promise. It is an assault on open source itself. A collapse of credibility with the global developer community, and a direct threat to technological self-determination for every contributor, organization, and nation that depends on independent infrastructure.

    Here is just a small sample of the many negative reactions to this announcement. These articles show a clear consensus across reputable tech publications: GitHub’s absorption into CoreAI is widely seen as a major structural shift, and for many, a direct betrayal of its once independent and developer-first identity:

    The Verge – “GitHub just got less independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation”

    Discusses how GitHub’s autonomy ends as leadership shifts under Microsoft’s CoreAI structure, posing a clear signal of deeper absorption. (The Verge)

    TechRadar – “GitHub CEO resigns – is this the latest sign of its Microsoft absorption?”

    Highlights the absence of a successor and emphasizes the strategic assimilation into Microsoft’s AI ecosystem. (TechRadar)

    IT Pro – “What Thomas Dohmke’s departure means for GitHub”

    Analyzes how the CEO’s exit signals major governance changes and closer alignment with Microsoft’s AI strategy. (IT Pro)

    Windows Central – “GitHub Just Got Assimilated—CEO Out, Copilot In, Microsoft All Over It”

    Signposts the end of GitHub’s independence and elevated priority of AI within Microsoft’s internal structure. (Windows Central)

    Tom’s Hardware – “GitHub folds into Microsoft following CEO resignation—once independent programming site now part of ‘CoreAI’ team”

    Explicitly frames the move as ending GitHub’s independence and compares it to other Microsoft acquisitions that lost identity over time. (Tom’s Hardware)

    The Collapse of Trust: Big Tech’s Greed, Digital Sovereignty, and Its Consequences

    Trust is the foundation of every open source project, community, and movement. Open source cannot function without the assumption that platforms and stewards act in good faith, respect contributors, and put the long-term health of the ecosystem ahead of short-term profit.

    The breakdown of trust caused by the actions of Microsoft and other Big Tech firms is more than a single betrayal. It signals to the entire world that the social contract underpinning open source and digital agency can be bought, sold, and quietly rewritten by whoever controls the infrastructure.

    It is disingenuous to claim that developers are “free to leave” when practical migration is obstructed by technical and network effects, and when so much of the world’s open source and digital sovereignty ecosystem is already tied into GitHub’s infrastructure. Genuine freedom requires open exit, true interoperability, and transparent guarantees. None of these can exist in an environment of creeping lock-in and vertical integration.

    When companies that present themselves as stewards of community assets choose instead to exploit those assets for proprietary gain, they undermine not just their own credibility, but the very possibility of global cooperation in technology. Each time a platform is captured, centralized, or redirected to serve corporate interests, it pushes developers and innovators away from openness and into silos of mistrust and fragmentation.

    No security, compliance, or anti-abuse argument can justify stripping developers, organizations, and nations of their digital sovereignty, or transferring unilateral control over critical digital assets to a single commercial actor. Security and compliance can and must be implemented in ways that preserve agency, transparency, and open governance.

    Digital sovereignty is not a slogan. It is a core policy objective of governments, regulatory agencies, and open source communities worldwide, with documented legal frameworks and active enforcement across the EU, China, India, and many others. The concerns raised here are not hypothetical or parochial. They are echoed by policymakers, technologists, and civil society leaders globally.

    This is not an isolated incident. The industry has seen similar betrayals before: Oracle’s handling of Java, Google’s abrupt shutdown of Google Code, and previous pivots by Microsoft itself. Each time, the developer community paid the price: wasted effort, lost code, broken commitments, and a new wave of skepticism toward platform promises.

    The long-term impact is already visible:

    Developers are increasingly hesitant to share their best work on public platforms for fear it will be extracted, repackaged, and monetized by corporate actors without consent or fair return.
    Communities fracture, as trust erodes and contributors seek alternative venues or attempt to rebuild trusted enclaves outside Big Tech’s reach.
    Innovation slows, as the collaborative advantage of open source is replaced by guarded, siloed development and legal maneuvering to prevent exploitation.
    Governments and institutions start to question whether global digital infrastructure can be trusted at all, leading to regulatory walls, data localization, and a new era of digital sovereignty where nations must assert control over their technology dependencies to protect their agency and interests.

    This is not just about code or business models. It is about the collective investment of millions of developers worldwide—years of unpaid, voluntary, and mission-driven work that made GitHub the backbone of modern software. That trust, once lost, cannot be restored by marketing or legal boilerplate. It is about digital agency and the fundamental right to control one’s own digital assets, collaborations, and infrastructure choices without the threat of unilateral interference, commercial extraction, or external lock-in.

    Big Tech’s willingness to break trust for short-term advantage is sowing the seeds for a world where the promise of open, global collaboration and shared digital sovereignty is replaced by suspicion, legal battles, and technical walls. The more platforms like GitHub are captured and redirected for private enrichment, the less likely it is that the next generation of developers, communities, or nations will believe in or participate in open source at all.

    Without trust, open source collapses. Without sovereignty, collaboration corrodes. And once credibility is gone, it is almost impossible to rebuild.

    The world is watching, not your assurances, but your actions.

    These concerns are not academic or hypothetical. They reflect the real and growing alarm expressed by thousands of developers, project leaders, digital sovereignty advocates, and policymakers worldwide. Digital sovereignty is not a slogan, but a legal and strategic reality, shaping government, enterprise, and technical policy from the European Union to Asia and the Global South. No reassurances, PR statements, or cherry-picked open source releases can substitute for the specific, transparent, and enforceable commitments demanded here. The complexity and length of this letter are necessary because the stakes—for global innovation, autonomy, and trust—could not be higher.

    The following questions must be answered directly, with transparency, not PR spin. This is about the survival of open source as a trusted, collaborative foundation for global innovation, and about the preservation of digital sovereignty and agency for everyone who relies on these platforms.

    1. Do you acknowledge that folding GitHub into Microsoft’s CoreAI division and revoking its independence directly contradicts your explicit public commitments to keep GitHub open and independent? If not, what specific facts justify your claim that these moves are not a corporate takeover and betrayal?

    Microsoft pledged that GitHub would remain independent, open, and developer-first. Integrating GitHub into CoreAI, eliminating operational independence, and repurposing it as a pipeline for Microsoft’s AI ambitions is the very definition of a corporate takeover.

    2. What concrete, legally binding measures will you implement, beyond policy statements, to guarantee that GitHub will never be used as a captive data source for Microsoft’s proprietary AI models or to lock developers and organizations into your ecosystem, undermining their digital sovereignty and agency?

    The world sees this as a strip and extract operation: first mining community content, then enclosing it, and finally locking developers, communities, and entire organizations into Microsoft’s ecosystem, which is the opposite of open source and sovereign control.

    3. What immediate, auditable steps will Microsoft take to repair the breach of trust with developers and platform stakeholders—including independent oversight and enforceable guarantees—to prove that GitHub will not be exploited for Microsoft’s commercial gain or to undermine the digital sovereignty of its users?

    Repeated public promises were made that GitHub would retain its developer-first values and open extensibility. The loss of trust is not just about business decisions—it is about whether open source contributors, organizations, and governments can ever again believe in the commitments of those who control their code, collaboration, and infrastructure.

    4. Will Microsoft commit, by enforceable policy and public documentation, that no public GitHub repositories will be used for training proprietary AI models or commercial products without explicit opt-in consent from project owners, thus protecting the digital agency and autonomy of all contributors?

    Developers globally are concerned that their open source contributions are being silently harvested for commercial AI without consent, attribution, or compensation.

    5. Will Microsoft provide developers and organizations with granular, real-time tools to track and control every instance where their code or metadata is accessed, processed, or used for AI or commercial purposes, along with a public log of such activity—empowering all users to exercise digital agency over their work and assets?

    Developers have a right to track and control use of their code in AI and data pipelines. Sovereign organizations and communities have an equal right to transparent control over their assets and digital infrastructure.

    6. Will Microsoft legally guarantee that all GitHub users retain unrestricted rights and technical means to export or migrate their code, data, and issue history at any time, without penalty or delay, and that no feature or license changes will restrict this freedom or diminish their digital sovereignty?

    The health of the open source ecosystem depends on freedom of movement, agency, and interoperability—not closed integration with any vendor’s stack or barriers that undermine organizational or national self-determination.

    7. Will Microsoft commit, by contract and technology, to never implement, enable, or cooperate in any form of kill switch, access denial, or politically motivated censorship affecting GitHub projects, regardless of pressure from governments or commercial interests—thus respecting the digital sovereignty and agency of all users worldwide?

    Centralization amplifies the risk of politically or commercially motivated interference in developer access, especially during periods of geopolitical tension. Digital sovereignty means ensuring no single entity can unilaterally block, censor, or deny access to critical digital assets.

    8. Will Microsoft agree to continuous, binding, independent audits of GitHub’s operations, with real enforcement power and board representation for open source foundations such as the Linux Foundation, FSF, or OSI, to safeguard the sovereignty and agency of the broader community?

    A platform of GitHub’s global importance cannot be accountable only to its corporate owner. Recognized foundations must be invited to participate in this oversight. No internal Microsoft committee or advisory board can substitute for independent, enforceable, foundation-driven oversight with real transparency, developer representation, and binding authority. Only governance with teeth can rebuild trust and protect digital agency.

    9. Will Microsoft publish a full, advance public record of all technical, legal, and policy changes that affect GitHub’s integration with Microsoft’s AI and cloud infrastructure, including any changes to data access, contributor rights, or project governance—providing all stakeholders with the information they need to protect their digital sovereignty and agency?

    Developers, organizations, and governments need to understand the real scope of integration, dependencies, and any hidden impacts on autonomy, sovereignty, or compliance.

    10. Will Microsoft publicly accept binding legal and financial liability, including retroactive remedies, if any use of GitHub code, data, or metadata for AI or commercial purposes is found to violate open source licenses, contributor agreements, relevant law, or the digital rights and sovereignty of its users?

    The risk of legal and ethical breach is not theoretical—it is a live issue globally. This letter calls for binding, publicly auditable commitments, not ambiguous legalese, policy footnotes, or unenforceable pledges. The stakes demand real-world, transparent, and contractually enforceable action.

    Specific Remedies the Community Expects

    To ensure that trust is restored and preserved, and to provide the minimum foundation for moving forward in a world where digital sovereignty and agency matter, the following concrete remedies should be enacted:

    Restore an independent GitHub CEO and governance board, separate from Microsoft’s AI, cloud, and product divisions, with real authority and transparency to protect community interests and platform autonomy.
    Publish and enforce a clear, public data use and extraction policy for AI and all other Microsoft product development, including explicit opt-in or opt-out for project owners regarding code, metadata, and issue data, respecting the digital sovereignty of every contributor and community.
    Submit to regular, external audits by recognized organizations such as the Linux Foundation, Free Software Foundation, or Open Source Initiative, with findings published in full to ensure accountability and agency for all stakeholders.
    Contractually guarantee migration and export rights for all repositories and developer data, ensuring there are no technical, legal, or policy barriers to leaving the platform, thus safeguarding the freedom and digital sovereignty of every user.
    Publish quarterly transparency reports detailing code access, AI extraction activity, and all data-sharing between GitHub and Microsoft’s internal systems, giving all users the visibility needed to maintain their own agency and control.

    Pointing to isolated positive actions or PR initiatives does not address the irreversible structural shift underway, nor does it remedy the breach of trust caused by consolidating platform power without transparent, community-backed guarantees.

    What happens next matters. If these concerns are not addressed openly and concretely, many developers, projects, organizations, and even governments will have to reconsider their continued trust in GitHub’s stewardship and Microsoft’s commitments to open source and digital sovereignty. Major voices in the community are already calling for alternatives and greater scrutiny of platform governance. I encourage other developers, open source advocates, digital sovereignty experts, and independent observers to follow this issue closely and demand real accountability for the future of digital collaboration and autonomous control.

    I invite Microsoft, and you personally, to respond to these questions in a public forum or published statement so the entire developer and digital sovereignty community can judge for themselves whether these concerns will be taken seriously and addressed with binding commitments. Setting a clear, reasonable timeline for such a response—for example, within 30 days—would show respect for the global community that helped make GitHub what it is.

    If no substantive answers are provided, many will conclude that Microsoft is unwilling to rebuild trust or respect the values that made open source and digital sovereignty possible in the first place. If silence or spin is all that follows, developers, communities, and national stakeholders will begin organizing alternatives, engaging with independent foundations for oversight, and calling for regulatory scrutiny of platform stewardship on an industry-wide scale.

    What Microsoft does next will set a precedent for all of Big Tech. This moment is about more than one company or one platform. It is about whether open source, digital sovereignty, and the collective trust, investment, and creativity of millions can survive in an era of corporate consolidation and broken promises.

    While I am only one voice among many, thousands of developers, project leaders, and digital-sovereignty advocates echo these concerns. The false assurances made in 2018, documented above, are the root cause of this collapse of credibility. We have no interest in PR spin, empty reassurances, or legal jargon. Only real, specific action and binding commitments will be accepted by the community. Thank you for your attention. The world is watching what you do next.

    Sincerely,

    Dion Wiggins

    A concerned developer of 40+ years, writing in solidarity with the global open source and digital sovereignty community

    #OpenLetter #Microsoft #GitHub #OpenSource #DigitalSovereignty #CoreAI #Developers #Betrayal #Trust #AI

    #Intelligence_artificielle #Emmerdification #GitHub #Microsoft #Logiciel_libre #Economie_numérique

    Articles repérés par Hervé Le Crosnier CC BY
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