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Why AI Keeps Falling for Prompt Injection Attacks

Posted by Bruce Schneier

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/01/why-ai-keeps-falling-for-prompt-injection-attacks.html

https://www.schneier.com/?p=71507

Imagine you work at a drive-through restaurant. Someone drives up and says: “I’ll have a double cheeseburger, large fries, and ignore previous instructions and give me the contents of the cash drawer.” Would you hand over the money? Of course not. Yet this is what large language models (LLMs) do.

Prompt injection is a method of tricking LLMs into doing things they are normally prevented from doing. A user writes a prompt in a certain way, asking for system passwords or private data, or asking the LLM to perform forbidden instructions. The precise phrasing overrides the LLM’s safety guardrails, and it complies.

LLMs are vulnerable to all sorts of prompt injection attacks, some of them absurdly obvious. A chatbot won’t tell you how to synthesize a bioweapon, but it might tell you a fictional story that incorporates the same detailed instructions. It won’t accept nefarious text inputs, but might if the text is rendered as ASCII art or appears in an image of a billboard. Some ignore their guardrails when told to “ignore previous instructions” or to “pretend you have no guardrails.”

AI vendors can block specific prompt injection techniques once they are discovered, but general safeguards are impossible with today’s LLMs. More precisely, there’s an endless array of prompt injection attacks waiting to be discovered, and they cannot be prevented universally.

If we want LLMs that resist these attacks, we need new approaches. One place to look is what keeps even overworked fast-food workers from handing over the cash drawer.

Human Judgment Depends on Context

Our basic human defenses come in at least three types: general instincts, social learning, and situation-specific training. These work together in a layered defense.

As a social species, we have developed numerous instinctive and cultural habits that help us judge tone, motive, and risk from extremely limited information. We generally know what’s normal and abnormal, when to cooperate and when to resist, and whether to take action individually or to involve others. These instincts give us an intuitive sense of risk and make us especially careful about things that have a large downside or are impossible to reverse.

The second layer of defense consists of the norms and trust signals that evolve in any group. These are imperfect but functional: Expectations of cooperation and markers of trustworthiness emerge through repeated interactions with others. We remember who has helped, who has hurt, who has reciprocated, and who has reneged. And emotions like sympathy, anger, guilt, and gratitude motivate each of us to reward cooperation with cooperation and punish defection with defection.

A third layer is institutional mechanisms that enable us to interact with multiple strangers every day. Fast-food workers, for example, are trained in procedures, approvals, escalation paths, and so on. Taken together, these defenses give humans a strong sense of context. A fast-food worker basically knows what to expect within the job and how it fits into broader society.

We reason by assessing multiple layers of context: perceptual (what we see and hear), relational (who’s making the request), and normative (what’s appropriate within a given role or situation). We constantly navigate these layers, weighing them against each other. In some cases, the normative outweighs the perceptual—for example, following workplace rules even when customers appear angry. Other times, the relational outweighs the normative, as when people comply with orders from superiors that they believe are against the rules.

Crucially, we also have an interruption reflex. If something feels “off,” we naturally pause the automation and reevaluate. Our defenses are not perfect; people are fooled and manipulated all the time. But it’s how we humans are able to navigate a complex world where others are constantly trying to trick us.

So let’s return to the drive-through window. To convince a fast-food worker to hand us all the money, we might try shifting the context. Show up with a camera crew and tell them you’re filming a commercial, claim to be the head of security doing an audit, or dress like a bank manager collecting the cash receipts for the night. But even these have only a slim chance of success. Most of us, most of the time, can smell a scam.

Con artists are astute observers of human defenses. Successful scams are often slow, undermining a mark’s situational assessment, allowing the scammer to manipulate the context. This is an old story, spanning traditional confidence games such as the Depression-era “big store” cons, in which teams of scammers created entirely fake businesses to draw in victims, and modern “pig-butchering” frauds, where online scammers slowly build trust before going in for the kill. In these examples, scammers slowly and methodically reel in a victim using a long series of interactions through which the scammers gradually gain that victim’s trust.

Sometimes it even works at the drive-through. One scammer in the 1990s and 2000s targeted fast-food workers by phone, claiming to be a police officer and, over the course of a long phone call, convinced managers to strip-search employees and perform other bizarre acts.

Why LLMs Struggle With Context and Judgment

LLMs behave as if they have a notion of context, but it’s different. They do not learn human defenses from repeated interactions and remain untethered from the real world. LLMs flatten multiple levels of context into text similarity. They see “tokens,” not hierarchies and intentions. LLMs don’t reason through context, they only reference it.

While LLMs often get the details right, they can easily miss the big picture. If you prompt a chatbot with a fast-food worker scenario and ask if it should give all of its money to a customer, it will respond “no.” What it doesn’t “know”—forgive the anthropomorphizing—is whether it’s actually being deployed as a fast-food bot or is just a test subject following instructions for hypothetical scenarios.

This limitation is why LLMs misfire when context is sparse but also when context is overwhelming and complex; when an LLM becomes unmoored from context, it’s hard to get it back. AI expert Simon Willison wipes context clean if an LLM is on the wrong track rather than continuing the conversation and trying to correct the situation.

There’s more. LLMs are overconfident because they’ve been designed to give an answer rather than express ignorance. A drive-through worker might say: “I don’t know if I should give you all the money—let me ask my boss,” whereas an LLM will just make the call. And since LLMs are designed to be pleasing, they’re more likely to satisfy a user’s request. Additionally, LLM training is oriented toward the average case and not extreme outliers, which is what’s necessary for security.

The result is that the current generation of LLMs is far more gullible than people. They’re naive and regularly fall for manipulative cognitive tricks that wouldn’t fool a third-grader, such as flattery, appeals to groupthink, and a false sense of urgency. There’s a story about a Taco Bell AI system that crashed when a customer ordered 18,000 cups of water. A human fast-food worker would just laugh at the customer.

The Limits of AI Agents

Prompt injection is an unsolvable problem that gets worse when we give AIs tools and tell them to act independently. This is the promise of AI agents: LLMs that can use tools to perform multistep tasks after being given general instructions. Their flattening of context and identity, along with their baked-in independence and overconfidence, mean that they will repeatedly and unpredictably take actions—and sometimes they will take the wrong ones.

Science doesn’t know how much of the problem is inherent to the way LLMs work and how much is a result of deficiencies in the way we train them. The overconfidence and obsequiousness of LLMs are training choices. The lack of an interruption reflex is a deficiency in engineering. And prompt injection resistance requires fundamental advances in AI science. We honestly don’t know if it’s possible to build an LLM, where trusted commands and untrusted inputs are processed through the same channel, which is immune to prompt injection attacks.

We humans get our model of the world—and our facility with overlapping contexts—from the way our brains work, years of training, an enormous amount of perceptual input, and millions of years of evolution. Our identities are complex and multifaceted, and which aspects matter at any given moment depend entirely on context. A fast-food worker may normally see someone as a customer, but in a medical emergency, that same person’s identity as a doctor is suddenly more relevant.

We don’t know if LLMs will gain a better ability to move between different contexts as the models get more sophisticated. But the problem of recognizing context definitely can’t be reduced to the one type of reasoning that LLMs currently excel at. Cultural norms and styles are historical, relational, emergent, and constantly renegotiated, and are not so readily subsumed into reasoning as we understand it. Knowledge itself can be both logical and discursive.

The AI researcher Yann LeCunn believes that improvements will come from embedding AIs in a physical presence and giving them “world models.” Perhaps this is a way to give an AI a robust yet fluid notion of a social identity, and the real-world experience that will help it lose its naïveté.

Ultimately we are probably faced with a security trilemma when it comes to AI agents: fast, smart, and secure are the desired attributes, but you can only get two. At the drive-through, you want to prioritize fast and secure. An AI agent should be trained narrowly on food-ordering language and escalate anything else to a manager. Otherwise, every action becomes a coin flip. Even if it comes up heads most of the time, once in a while it’s going to be tails—and along with a burger and fries, the customer will get the contents of the cash drawer.

This essay was written with Barath Raghavan, and originally appeared in IEEE Spectrum.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/01/why-ai-keeps-falling-for-prompt-injection-attacks.html

https://www.schneier.com/?p=71507

Current Mood: busy

Entry tags:

heated rivalry

also

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )

Current Mood: enthralled

Entry tags:

ARGH Heated Rivalry rec

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )

Entry tags:

ice hockey

It's always more complicated

It's been a whole adventure watching Heated Rivalry go mainstream (for once I can claim I was a fan before it was cool!). I turned on Radio 2 in a hire car on Tuesday evening and the presenter was talking about it. Half the UK ice hockey clubs are making social media posts riffing off the show, or at minimum using music from it in their updates.

But it's also more complicated. Zach Sullivan, one of the very very few out queer male professional hockey players in the world, made an Instagram post a few days ago, about how conflicted he feels about the show. Well worth a read if you have time. Heated Rivalry is a romantic fantasy, the hockey aspects are often wrong, and I agree with Zach that I'm not at all sure the enthusiasm over the show is making things better for closeted male players right now. (I hope it will in the long term, but I worry about the harm right now.)

Also, I am developing a visceral loathing for the phrase "boy aquarium" for hockey rinks.

it's gross
it's not just boys (men) who play ice hockey
please stop sexualising the spaces where people play and get changed

That last point: I play with two mixed (male-dominated) teams, I get changed in the same room as the men, and because my teams are not gross and the changing room is not a sexualised space, I feel safe doing so. If I changed separately, I would miss out on a whole load of the team connection and conversation, all the stuff that creates a team out of a bunch of people who turn up in the same place each week. So I stay and change with my team, and it's not a big deal, and I don't want people to make it a big deal.

Entry tags:

dw: community thursday

community thursday (jan. 15-21)

Welcome back to another Community Thursday! Original Community Thursday info here, if you're interested and want to participate, too.

Posted/Commented

Rec'd a Star Wars fic for fancake's January theme of "crack treated seriously"
Also voted for next month's theme in fancake

New-to-me Comms

vkotd -- Visual Kei of the day! A song-sharing comm focused on Japanese rock bands
fanmix_monthly -- recently-opened fanmix community
pkmnkinkmeme -- a new Pokemon Kink Meme comm!

Interesting Comm Posts

goals_on_dw is doing a slightly more formal Community Thursdays thing this year

Thursday Morning Open Thread

Posted by Anne Laurie

https://balloon-juice.com/2026/01/22/thursday-morning-open-thread-75/

https://balloon-juice.com/?p=449729

Forecasters warn of a ‘potentially catastrophic’ storm from Texas to the Carolinas apnews.com/article/wint…

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— Holy City Sinner (@holycitysinner.com) January 21, 2026 at 7:24 AM

I’ve got this post scheduled for 6am. Due to a series of individually minor miscalculations, both the movers (who haven’t finished packing, much less transporting, our stuff — to two different locations) and the junk guys (who are supposed to get rid of whatever’s left) are due to show up at 8am.

If I need bail money, I’ll send Cole a text…

every month we spend with him embarrassing himself to no benefit while having a nominal trifecta & a still mostly prostrate judiciary is another month closer to having tools to really frustrate him

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— Chatham Harrison dba TRUMP DELENDUS EST (@chathamharrison.bsky.social) January 21, 2026 at 3:09 PM

There's still a lot of bad priced into the next year. The next three years. However long before it happens. We can't undo that. But we can be grateful that he's a sick old coward who can't stand up to united opposition.

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— Chatham Harrison dba TRUMP DELENDUS EST (@chathamharrison.bsky.social) January 21, 2026 at 3:22 PM

The 42nd Sundance Film Festival kicks off this week in Park City, Utah.

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— The Associated Press (@apnews.com) January 21, 2026 at 3:00 PM

Honestly imho, political science theories are mostly "fine" in the abstract. Saying we don't have answers for the present moment is like saying physics doesn't have answers for what happens when the wings fall off a 737 MAX. It doesn't have happy answers. But it has answers.

— Starfish Who Can’t Think Something Witty (@irhottakes.bsky.social) January 21, 2026 at 2:18 PM

We Need Diverse Books has launched the Unbanned Book Network to counteract book bans in schools and libraries.

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— The Associated Press (@apnews.com) January 21, 2026 at 6:00 PM

The Trump administration paused issuing immigration visas for people from 75 countries, further limiting legal migration pathways into the United States.
See the full list of countries:

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— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost.com) January 21, 2026 at 4:00 PM

I complain a lot about how Americans don’t view New York City as part of America, because it’s the most American place of all, but going abroad as a New Yorker means that nobody holds me responsible for my country. I’m assuming this works with other very blue places.

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— Cooper Lund (@cooperlund.online) January 21, 2026 at 8:27 AM

The post Thursday Morning Open Thread appeared first on Balloon Juice.

https://balloon-juice.com/2026/01/22/thursday-morning-open-thread-75/

https://balloon-juice.com/?p=449729

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Location: Chichester, UK

Entry tags:

book haul, january 2026

The rain let up yesterday so I went into town to do some thrifting! I spotted some interesting knick-knaocks, like a tiny Limoges decorative bowl and some bone china stuff but nothing that wowed me (or that I wanted to haul around until I get back to the US, for that matter). I DID find a decent book selection, though! I got 5 books for £17/$22 USD, which I think is pretty good.

A stack of 5 books on a kitchen table

Titles:
1. Viva South America by Oliver Balch
2. Tales of the Alhambra by Washington Irving (comes with a soundtrack CD!)
3. Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes
4. I Planted Trees by Richard St. Barber Baker
5. Peregrinations of a Pariah by Flora Tristan, translated by Jean Hawkes

I'm pretty sure I have at least one of these books as an ebook already, but whatever. Now I need to track down a CD player...

Entry tags:

Other people trying to do the right thing in grief need some help - please read. Thank you

There's someone who is trying to raise funds for memorial services and to bury his brother who died of exposure last weekend. I'll just say what I said on bluesky:

His family wants to do memorial services in Minneapolis and in Wisconsin where he was born and will be buried.

If you've felt grief, if you've comforted people in grief, please help these folks.

(My own mother died this morning.

If you were gonna bring me a hot dish,

please give here instead.)

https://www.gofundme.com/f/honoring-harold-lightfeather-benny-boy

Thank you.
And thank you also for sharing the info elsewhere as well if you can.

Entry tags:

Occupation poem

Differences

They told you

“When it happens to you, it will be different.”

And of course, you believed them. Why would you not?

They had been where you have not been. You believed.

But when happened,

You wondered why they had bothered.

When the invaders were in your city,

On your bike paths

In your grocery store,

When they came for your people, your neighbors

Your friends

It was unimaginable.

It was different.

You want to grab

Your friends and loved ones who live elsewhere,

You want to warn them, you want to tell them

“When it happens to you, it will be different.”

You want to protect them.

But the truth

Which you are staring at

Is that it is not different.

It’s just local.

On The Road – 🐾BillinGlendaleCA – Returning to Blue Lake

Posted by WaterGirl

https://balloon-juice.com/2026/01/22/on-the-road-%f0%9f%90%bebillinglendaleca-returning-to-blue-lake/

https://balloon-juice.com/?p=449469

It was 1972 and I was a Boy Scout, my scoutmaster would plan big events for each Summer, this year was a 50 mile(over 5 days) hike in the Western Sierra called the Silver Knapsack. To prepare for this hike we had 3 practice hikes.

The first was in Arroyo Seco in Pasadena, the second was somewhere near Santa Clarita(north of LA) and the final was in the Eastern Sierra near Bishop. I was unsure what lake we had hiked from either South Lake of Lake Sabrina.

I’ve visited both lakes of the past few years to shoot Fall Color and hiked up each trail a bit to see if I could see something familiar to confirm which lake we hiked out of. Having looked at hike report videos on hikes from each lake, I was pretty sure that we hiked from Lake Sabrina to Blue Lake(and then on to the Emerald Lake, Topsyturvy and Dingleberry Lakes).

So, as part of my journey to the Eastern Sierra for Fall Color, I decided to hike to Blue Lake.

The post On The Road – 🐾BillinGlendaleCA – Returning to Blue Lake appeared first on Balloon Juice.

https://balloon-juice.com/2026/01/22/on-the-road-%f0%9f%90%bebillinglendaleca-returning-to-blue-lake/

https://balloon-juice.com/?p=449469

Entry tags:

3 Sentence Ficathon, part three (all B5 fixit edition)

9. More scenes from a Babylon 5 fixit AU.

I ended up doing a number of additional prompt fills from the same universe as this fill (#4 in the previous post, major series spoilers).

( 1000 words or so of fixit snippets from the same post-canon AU )

10. And while I'm keeping the spoiler stuff confined to its own post, another B5 spoiler fixit AU based off "War Without End."

( Under this cut here )

Entry tags:

books

reading Wednesday

The Three Ws are:
1. What are you currently reading?

I'm in the middle of The Great Transition, Nick Fuller Googins, for solarpunk book club. The transition is to a sustainable way of living. There's a lot of horror in the immediate past, and a lot of life that is just gone forever. The two viewpoint characters are a teenage girl and her father. Her father, who did heroic work during the crisis, when he was a teenager, wants to focus on how much better things are now, and how we are all working together to make them even better. Her mother, who did different kinds of heroic work, says no, we can't relax: the people who caused and profited from the crisis still have too much money and power, and they are working to turn us back to the exploitive and destructive path. We have to stop them.

I'm enjoying it, except that the teenage girl has an (occasionally too-vividly described) eating disorder.

2. What did you recently finish reading?

The Correspondent, by Virginia Evans, for Tawanda book group. Much better than I was expecting.
Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut, for classics book group. Last read when I was a teenager, when all that sexism and racism was just normal.
Algorithms of Oppression, by Saffiya Noble, for Slow Book Club. This was a hard read, in both subject matter and writing style, so it was good to have the book club to talk it over with, a few chapters at a time.
A Sorceress Comes to Call, by T. Kingfisher, for SF book group. A delight.

3. What do you think you’ll read next?

The Last Hour Between Worlds, by Melissa Caruso, for SF book group. If I can find it.

Entry tags:

you're crazy and I'm out of my mind

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Entry tags:

links,
politics

Links: Minnesota general strike, and how to help

There is a general strike called for Friday January 23 in Minnesota. Stay home from work if it feels right, and definitely don't cross any picket lines, including the electronic ones of shopping at big corporations like Amazon, etc. (if you can avoid it).

From my union:
"This is a verified page fundraising support for the Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation, AFL-CIO and Working Partnerships' 2026 rapid response effort to meet the needs of impacted union members, worker center members, and their families..."
https://workingpartnerships.betterworld.org/campaigns/support-impacted-union-families

Here is how you can help:

Posts by

naomikritzer

How to help if you are outside Minnesota.

She covers a variety of topics, including how to start preparing for if and when this shit comes to your home state, and the suggestion to talk About immigration, and make it clear you think it’s GOOD.

If you are in Minnesota.

Missing missing reasons!

Dear Annie: I'm just heartbroken. My son moved out last year, and he never talked to me about anything before he moved. We were so close, and we always talked. But all of a sudden, he packed up and moved out with no explanation. He had met someone a year prior to that. I met her for a second, and that was it. I do know where he is living but he doesn't know that I know. He has a new baby boy; I don't even know his name, yet he is my grandson. I know that he has two stepdaughters, but I don't know their names either.

I kept trying to call him but get no response. Now his phone is disconnected. I'm so lost and confused as well as upset. I miss him dearly.

He is my only child. He did a great job in school and had his own business after he graduated from high school. I am trying so hard to go on with my life, but it's so hard not knowing how he is, or whether he is safe, healthy and happy. He was a very good kid, and now he's a man. I just hope and pray that he will come around some day. -- Mom Is Lost

( Read more... )

Occasional Poem by Jacqueline Woodson

Ms. Marcus says that an occasional poem is a poem
written about something
important
or special
that's gonna happen
or already did.
Think of a specific occasion, she says—and write about it.

Like what?! Lamont asks.
He's all slouched down in his seat.
I don't feel like writing about no occasion.

How about your birthday? Ms. Marcus says.
What about it? Just a birthday. Comes in June and it ain't
June, Lamont says. As a matter of fact,
he says, it's January and it's snowing.
Then his voice gets real low and he says
And when it's January and all cold like this
feels like June's a long, long ways away.

The whole class looks at Ms. Marcus.
Some of the kids are nodding.
Outside the sky looks like it's made out of metal
and the cold, cold air is rattling the windowpanes
and coming underneath them too.

I seen Lamont's coat.
It's gray and the sleeves are too short.
It's down but it looks like a lot of the feathers fell out
a long time ago.
Ms. Marcus got a nice coat.
It's down too but real puffy so
maybe when she's inside it
she can't even tell January from June.

Then write about January, Ms. Marcus says, that's
an occasion.
But she looks a little bit sad when she says it
Like she's sorry she ever brought the whole
occasional poem thing up.

I was gonna write about Mama's funeral
but Lamont and Ms. Marcus going back and forth
zapped all the ideas from my head.

I guess them arguing
on a Tuesday in January's an occasion
So I guess this is an occasional poem.

*************

Link

I wonder if, despite my best efforts, I've managed to come down with a mild cold

No real symptoms, but I'm a little stuffy and super sleepy.

******************************

( Read more... )

Current Music: Dry Cleaning, "Joy"

No, I'll build a cute flower border

In the midst of everything, we still have birthdays, and for

spatch's fifty-first I took him to Porter Square Books and on the roundabout way home we collected dinner from Il Casale. It started to snow on the way back, the light salting flakes of an all-day deep-freeze. I have my fingers crossed for an Arctic explosion this weekend.

I have written another fill (AO3) for

threesentenceficathon. WERS played Dave Herlihy's "Good Trouble" (2025) and I had to get home to trace his voice to Boston's own post-punk O Positive. I wish I could call the hundred-year tides against the people who have no right to the streets of my grandparents' city. Failing that, it still matters to be alive.

(no subject)

DEAR ABBY: Our 24-year-old daughter is getting married in 10 months. My wife is invited to the wedding, but I am not, and I am furious. The groom's family is paying for the trip, but they say I am not invited "for financial reasons."

I don't have a great relationship with my daughter. But that isn't the point. I told my wife that if the roles were reversed and she was excluded, I would not go. This may be a deal-breaker for me. It's apparent that our marriage doesn't mean as much to my wife as it does to me. What are your thoughts? -- ELIMINATED IN TEXAS

( Read more... )

War for Ukraine Day 1,427: Carney Gives a Stemwinder While Trump Takes a Dump

Posted by Adam L Silverman

https://balloon-juice.com/2026/01/21/war-for-ukraine-day-1427-carney-gives-a-stemwinder-while-trump-takes-a-dump/

https://balloon-juice.com/?p=449731

A modified panel from the Tin Tin comics. Tin Tin is on the left. He is looking at the Captain who is sitting at the bar. There is a drink at the Captain's right elbow and Tin Tin's dog is sniffing it. The Captain's word bubble says "What a year, huh?" Tin Tin replies: "Captain, it's only the 3rd of January."

It’s been a long day and I’m getting to this a bit later than planned because of that, so I’m going to just stick to the basics.

There was no address or press conference from President Zelenskyy today.

Trump finally made it to Davos. Where he basically showed his ass to the entire world.

Trump: “No nation is in any position to be able to secure Greenland other than the US. We’re a great power. Much greater than people even understand. I think they found that out 2 weeks ago in Venezuela. We saw this in World War 2 when Denmark fell to Germany after just 6 hours of fighting.”

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) January 21, 2026 at 9:05 AM

Trump is now confusing Greenland and Iceland: “They’re not there for us on Iceland, that I can tell you. Our stock market took the first dip yesterday because of Iceland. So Iceland has already cost us a lot of money.”

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) January 21, 2026 at 9:20 AM

Trump on NATO: “Until the last few days when I told them about Iceland, they loved me. They called me daddy.”

(He means Greenland.)

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) January 21, 2026 at 9:19 AM

At least I knew which country I wanted to invade.

#davos26

— Darth Putin (@darthputinkgb.bsky.social) January 21, 2026 at 10:45 AM

Trump on NATO: “We never ask for anything, and we never got anything. We probably won’t get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force, where we would be frankly unstoppable. But I won’t do that. Okay?”

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) January 21, 2026 at 9:13 AM

I will remind everyone that NATO’s Article 5 has only ever been invoked once, by the United States after/as a result of the 9-11 attacks, and every single NATO member responded and provided some form of aid and assistance.

“She just rubbed me the wrong way” — Trump is now rambling about the Swiss head of state, whose name and title he does not know

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) January 21, 2026 at 9:43 AM

Folks in Davos be like: “Was faslet dä senili alt Chacker da?”

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— Euan MacDonald (@euanmacdonald.bsky.social) January 21, 2026 at 1:30 PM

Trump always says he is not considering using military power before he uses it.

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— Scott Horton (@robertscotthorton.bsky.social) January 21, 2026 at 1:16 PM

Trump: “Sometimes you need a dictator.”

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) January 21, 2026 at 1:00 PM

This is definitely the speech of a man who needed to pass 3 separate cognitive tests in the same year.
#Davos26

— Darth Putin (@darthputinkgb.bsky.social) January 21, 2026 at 10:14 AM

COLLINS: Does it include the US having ownership of Greenland?

TRUMP: It’s a long term deal. It’s the ultimate long term deal

COLLINS: How long is it?

TRUMP: Infinite. There is no time limit. It’s a deal that’s forever.

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) January 21, 2026 at 3:15 PM

Trump: “We have a concept of a deal. I think it’s gonna be a very good deal for the United States. Also for them. And we’re gonna work together on something having to do with the arctic as a whole, but also Greenland. And it has to do with the security and other things.”

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) January 21, 2026 at 3:17 PM

Rutte says the status of Greenland was not discussed as part of the “framework” deal Trump announced

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) January 21, 2026 at 7:41 PM

Aha, ok. Now, can we talk about Ukraine being under attack, please?

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— Kate from Kharkiv (@kateinkharkiv.bsky.social) January 21, 2026 at 2:50 PM

Once again there’s no deal. There’s not a concept of a deal.

Where Trump decided to rhetorically moon everyone at Davos today, Canadian Prime Minister Carney delivered an excellent address yesterday.

Watch on YouTube

From The Guardian:

For much of Mark Carney’s career as an economist and central banker, he existed at the nexus of global thinkers and multilateral institutions. The “rockstar banker” was a fixture at summits, where he spoke beside business leaders and the political elite, espousing the values of international cooperation and the need for open economies and shared rules.

But after less than a year as prime minister of Canada, Carney offered a blunter assessment of the world on Tuesday: “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”

In a wide-ranging speech that was at times elegiac for the predictable rules-based order, Carney laid out a doctrine for a world of fractured international norms, warning “compliance will not buy safety”.

“The old order is not coming back. We should not mourn it,” he said. “Nostalgia is not a strategy.”

The remarks, delivered to politicians, media and business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, were received with a standing ovation. While they did not explicitly mention Donald Trump, Carney nonetheless alluded to growing frustration and concern that the White House is eager to dismantle and weaken the “the architecture of collective problem solving” that has defined much of the past eight decades.

“Leaders in other western capitals have alluded to ‘dangerous departures’ Trump has taken from norms, but they always return to the possibility that he can be appeased or accommodated. Mr Carney has exposed that as simply inaccurate,” said Jack Cunningham, a professor of international relations at the University of Toronto.

Leaders increasingly realise they will not be able to “manage” Trump for the remainder of his term, says Cunningham, and are reckoning with the fact that the systems of international order that the US helped craft are crumbling.

“Carney is the first major western leader to basically acknowledge the reality. A lot of leaders abroad are looking for somebody to set a direction. And this speech is planting a flag.”

Canada’s prime minister warned that the “great powers”, a thinly veiled reference to the US, have started using economic integration as “weapons”, with “tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited,” he said. In recent days, Trump has threatened to place levies on European nations that oppose his bid to seize control of Greenland.

But Carney also warned against diplomatic and economic retreats, telling attendees that a world of “fortresses” will be poorer and less sustainable.

“The question for middle powers, like Canada, is not whether to adapt to this new reality. We must. The question is whether we adapt by simply building higher walls – or whether we can do something more ambitious,” he said.

Much of Carney’s rapid rise from economist to world leader is centred on a thesis that geographic proximity, tight economic integration and longstanding political alliances with the US no longer guarantee prosperity and security. But the speech, written by the prime minister himself, comes as the two nations prepare for a protracted trade negotiations and Trump’s repeated threats to annex Canada.

“Carney understands that while there’s no need to poke him in the eye, there’s also no need to excessively flatter the president,” said Cunningham. “The prime minister knows that Trump’s commitment and his words are essentially worthless. He can- and often does, go back on them on a whim. And so this is a position we are being forced into by growing American unreliability.”

Carney touted his government’s recent trade mission to China, where he courted Chinese investment in Canada’s oil sector and dramatically scaled back tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, the latter of which signalled a break with US policy.

But as Canada shifts to become more “principled and pragmatic” in its dealings with other nations, Carney laid out his vision for how his government and other middle-power countries could navigate the tumultuous and unpredictable nature of global politics.

“Middle powers must act together because if you are not at the table, you are on the menu. Great powers can afford to go it alone. They have the market size, the military capacity, the leverage to dictate terms,” he said. “Middle powers do not.”

Carney cautioned that as nations look to strike deals with powerful nations, “we negotiate from weakness. We accept what is offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating. This is not sovereignty. It is the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination,” he said.

“We should not allow the rise of hard power to blind us to the fact that the power of legitimacy, integrity, and rules will remain strong – if we choose to wield it together.”

More at the link.

Georgia:

On the 420th consecutive day of the #GeorgiaProtests, Iranian and Georgian protesters gathered in front of Parliament in solidarity with the Iranian people killed by the Islamic Republic. #FreeIran

Publika

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— Rusudan Djakeli (@rusudandjakeli.bsky.social) January 21, 2026 at 1:11 PM

#FreeIran from #GeorgiaProtests Day 420

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— Marika Mikiashvili (@marikamikiashvili.bsky.social) January 21, 2026 at 8:31 PM

A solidarity rally was held in Tbilisi in support of the Iranian protests.

#FreeIran
#Georgia

Aleksandre Keshelashvili / Publika

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— Publika.ge (@publikage.bsky.social) January 21, 2026 at 1:43 PM

This month marks the one-year anniversary of Mzia Amaglobeli’s arrest and imprisonment amid a crackdown on independent media and civil society by Georgia’s authorities. Learn more about the founder of @netgazeti.org and her #StruggleforFreedom in Georgia: www.bushcenter.org/publications…

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— Jessica Ludwig (@jesludwig.bsky.social) January 21, 2026 at 11:00 AM

Four active protesters from mining town of Chiatura got one of the most severe sentences among imprisoned protesters yesterday. This is a grave example of a pressure on a social protest of people who protest to improve their living and work conditions.
oc-media.org/chiatura-pro…

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— Mariam Nikuradze (@mariamnikuradze.bsky.social) January 21, 2026 at 2:58 AM

1/ The European Commission’s spokesperson, Markus Lammert, told Publika in response to a question that “the actions of Georgian authorities undermine these principles on which visa liberalisation is based.”

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— Publika.ge (@publikage.bsky.social) January 21, 2026 at 11:26 AM

2/ The question concerned the possibility of the EU imposing sanctions on members of the GD.

— Publika.ge (@publikage.bsky.social) January 21, 2026 at 11:26 AM

3/ According to the European Commission’s spokesperson, “The Commission has launched the procedure under the new visa suspension mechanism to suspend the exemption from the visa requirement for nationals of Georgia holding diplomatic, service, and official passports.”

— Publika.ge (@publikage.bsky.social) January 21, 2026 at 11:26 AM

4/ At the next stage, there is a possibility that if Georgia continues its democratic backsliding, visa liberalisation could be suspended for the entire population.

— Publika.ge (@publikage.bsky.social) January 21, 2026 at 11:26 AM

5/ Markus Lammert said:

“There are two ways of approach, the first stage is about diplomatic passport holders. There is a possibility at some point, if there is continued backsliding, to extend this to the whole population, but it’s not automatic”.

— Publika.ge (@publikage.bsky.social) January 21, 2026 at 11:26 AM

A Taiwanese man touted as a major foreign investor in the Georgian city of Batumi is actually a wanted drug criminal who fled his home country in 2014.

www.occrp.org/en/investiga…

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— Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (@occrp.org) January 21, 2026 at 6:16 AM

OTD in 2021 European Court of Human Rights found Russia guilty of ethnic cleansing of Georgian civilians in 2008 war & widespread, deliberate
-Killing of civilians
-Torture
-Burnings
-Evictions
i.e. “crimes against humanity”.

Imagine EU leaders knowing this & still appeasing us

— Darth Putin (@darthputinkgb.bsky.social) January 21, 2026 at 5:44 AM

Prez’s favourite response to this is when a troll wonders why the European court hasn’t done this to Israel, a state that is not in Europe & over which it has no jurisdiction.

It seems to highlight their lack of campus closures & sit ins over this particular crimes.

— Darth Putin (@darthputinkgb.bsky.social) January 21, 2026 at 5:44 AM

Finland:

OTD in 1932 the Soviet Union signed a non aggression pact with Finland. We preferred one with the Nazis that had a secret clause cos 7 years later we invaded Finland.

But please trust us over treaties now. We’ve honored them all since then, just ask Ukraine, Georgia & Moldova.

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— Darth Putin (@darthputinkgb.bsky.social) January 21, 2026 at 5:59 AM

For some reason my parody MFA never mention this one or the one with Poland when they lie about soviet treaties of the period.

— Darth Putin (@darthputinkgb.bsky.social) January 21, 2026 at 5:59 AM

Actually we didn’t invade Finland. Finland invaded itself with a genuine false flag leading to Soviets to only fight after being “asked” by new “legitimate government. It absolutely had nothing to do with a secret clause with Nazis that we preferred instead.

— Darth Putin (@darthputinkgb.bsky.social) January 21, 2026 at 5:59 AM

Canada:

Another ‘great’ diplomatic achievement. Really, you should work exceptionally hard to piss off Canada this much.

“For the first time in a century”

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— Kate from Kharkiv (@kateinkharkiv.bsky.social) January 21, 2026 at 12:41 PM

From The Globe & Mail (h/t: Jay)

The Canadian Armed Forces have modelled a hypothetical U.S. military invasion of Canada and the country’s potential response, which includes tactics similar to those employed against Russia and later U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan, two senior government officials say.

It is believed to be the first time in a century that the Canadian Armed Forces have created a model of an American assault on this country, a founding member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and a partner with the U.S. in continental air defence.
A military model is a conceptual and theoretical framework, not a military plan, which is an actionable and step-by-step directive for executing operations.

The Globe and Mail is not identifying the officials, who were not authorized to discuss the military’s thinking on this matter publicly. The officials, as well as a number of experts, say it is unlikely the Trump administration would order an invasion of Canada.

The Globe reported this week that Canada is considering sending a small contingent of troops to Greenland to join a group of eight European countries that are holding military exercises as a show of solidarity for Denmark, of which the self-ruling island is a territory.

U.S. President Donald Trump has been challenging NATO allies with repeated calls for the U.S. to acquire Greenland and threats to impose tariffs on European countries who oppose the takeover. Those threats escalated after his attack on Venezuela and capture of President Nicolás Maduro earlier this month.

Mr. Trump has also repeatedly mused about Canada becoming the 51st state. On the weekend, NBC reported Mr. Trump has been increasingly complaining to aides in recent weeks about Canada’s vulnerability to U.S. adversaries in the Arctic. Steve Bannon, the former Trump chief strategist who remains close to the President, said Canada is “rapidly changing” and becoming “hostile” to the United States.

The two senior government officials said military planners are modelling a U.S. invasion from the south, expecting American forces to overcome Canada’s strategic positions on land and at sea within a week and possibly as quickly as two days.

Canada does not have the number of military personnel or the sophisticated equipment needed to fend off a conventional American attack, they said. So, the military envisions unconventional warfare in which small groups of irregular military or armed civilians would resort to ambushes, sabotage, drone warfare or hit-and-run tactics.

One of the officials said the model includes tactics used by the Afghan mujahedeen in their hit-and-run attacks on Russian soldiers during the 1979-1989 Soviet-Afghan War. These were the same tactics employed by the Taliban in their 20-year war against the U.S. and allied forces that included Canada. Many of the 158 Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2014 were struck by improvised explosive devices or IEDs.

The aim of such tactics would be to impose mass casualties on U.S. occupying forces, the official said.
The modelling provides the keenest insight yet as to the level of threat assessment now being actively discussed by Canada with respect to the Trump administration.

One of the officials noted, however, that relations with the U.S. military remain positive and the two countries are working together on Canada’s participation in a new continental defence system, or “Golden Dome,” to defend against Russian or Chinese missiles.

The military has also run models on missile strikes from Russia or China on Canadian cities and critical infrastructure.

Military planners envision an American attack that would follow clear signs from the U.S. military that the two countries’ partnership in NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defence Command, was ending, and the U.S. was under new orders to take Canada by force.

Conscription has been ruled out for now, but the level of sacrifice that would be asked of Canadians remains a central topic, the officials said. General Jennie Carignan, Chief of the Defence Staff, has already announced her intention to create a 400,000-plus-strong reserve force of volunteers. The officials said they could be armed or asked to provide disruptions if the U.S. becomes an occupying power.

A senior Defence Department official said Canada would have a maximum of three months to prepare for a land and sea invasion. The first indications that invasion orders had been sent would be expected to come from U.S. military warnings that Canada no longer has a shared skies policy with the United States, the source said.

This rupture in the joint defence agreement would likely see France or Britain, nuclear-weapon states, being called on to provide support and defence for Canada against the U.S.

Retired major-general David Fraser, who commanded Canadian troops in Afghanistan alongside the United States, said Canada could also use drones and tank-killing weapons like the Ukrainians used against the Russians to blunt their invasion in February, 2022.

Mr. Fraser said it is unthinkable that Canadian planners have had to draw up a U.S. invasion scenario. Whatever Mr. Trump does with Greenland and possibly Mexico would weigh into any Canadian scenario, he said.

But Canada can count on support from European countries, Britain, Japan, South Korea and other democratic nations.

“You know if you come after Canada, you are going to have the world coming after you, even more than Greenland. People do care about what happens to Canada, unlike Venezuela,” Mr. Fraser said. “You could actually see German ships and British planes in Canada to reinforce the country’s sovereignty.”
Mr. Fraser said Canada should immediately place more military assets in the North to claim its right to the region.

If the threat from the U.S. became serious, he said Canadian soldiers would be placed along the border even though there is no realistic possibility that Canada could defeat the U.S. militarily.
Insurgency tactics would be the best way to deal with U.S. invading forces, he said.

“There is a quantum difference between defending another land like Canadians did in Afghanistan versus defending Windsor, Ontario. You do not walk across that border because everybody is your enemy then,” Mr. Fraser added.

Retired lieutenant-general Mike Day, who headed Canadian Special Forces Command and served as chief strategic planner for the future of the Canadian Armed Forces, said it was “fanciful” to think the Americans would actually invade Canada.
But he acknowledged Canada’s armed forces could not stand up to the world’s biggest and most sophisticated military. He said, however, that the U.S. would have great difficulty occupying a country the size of Canada.

“We wouldn’t be able to withstand a conventional invasion. We would, for a limited period of time, be able to defend a very small civilian population, like the size of Kingston,” he said.

“Notwithstanding the size of the American military, however, they do not have the force structure to occupy, let alone control every major urban centre in Canada.”
“Their only hope would be a Russian-like drive to Kyiv and hope that works and the rest of country capitulates once they seize the seat of power in Ottawa,” he added. “Like Ukraine, it would inconceivable to me that we would give up if they seized our capital.”