You may have read about the Enhanced Games, also known as the Steroid Olympics. The inaugural games, which took place in Las Vegas in late May, featured swimming, track, and weightlifting competitions where athletes were permitted to take certain performance-enhancing drugs.
Despite substantial media coverage, only one world record was ultimately “broken” over the course of the event. Aron D’Souza, an Australian businessman and an Enhanced Games founder, nevertheless expressed a grandiose vision for the athletic competition. Year one, he told The New Yorker, was a proof of concept, rather than a one-off gimmick. His multi-pronged plan? “It works, we generate revenue, we can push that into scientific development, better drugs come out, and eventually, through capitalism, we cure death.”
I reached out to D’Souza when he was traveling to Las Vegas for the Enhanced Games, though I was inquiring about another exceedingly ambitious project of his called Objection AI. I’m referring to it in the past tense, because the platform launched in April, and by late May, had already been taken (mostly) offline. This struck me as an unsurprising development for the venture, which was allegedly funded in part by Peter Thiel—a good friend of D’Souza’s.
The Intercept described Objection as “a mishmash between Snopes.com for right-wing culture war issues and a private defamation arbitration service marketed to the everyman.” I agree with that assessment. I wrote about Objection too, for Hard Reset.
A selection from the piece:
D’Souza describes Objection as an “AI tribunal” that “gives everyone a fast, affordable, evidence-based way to dispute statements in the media.” I would say “everyone” and “affordable” are a stretch; it costs at least $2,000 to lodge a media complaint with Objection…
Objection is for wealthy people who hope to spin up a counter narrative as quickly as possible. The swiftness of the AI tribunal is one of D’Souza’s selling points; he claims his platform issues a “verdict” (my scare quotes) within a couple of days, as opposed to the years it can take to sue for defamation.
When I emailed D’Souza, it was to ask if Objection was dead. D’Souza responded, “Since launching, we’ve found that our customers want to adjudicate much more complex cases (with commensurate willingness to pay). As such, we’re re-engineering the product and will be re-launching it in a few weeks.” He offered to do an interview closer to the re-launch.
Nearly two months later, D’Souza wrote to announce “Primary,” an index of journalists who are assigned a score and ranking based on the “rigor of their reporting.” No mention of adjudicating cases for a fee. Instead, Primary is, according to D’Souza, an IMDb for journalists. Each article that a journalist writes is supposed to be assessed by an LLM and rated 0 to 1,000 based on seven combined metrics; you can read the methodology here.
D’Souza joined me for a video interview late last week, a few days after Primary went live. The full interview is above.
When I asked D’Souza about whether Primary is a new product or a relaunch, he told me it’s a relaunch with the “same team,” and that Objection will return “in due course.” (As of Tuesday afternoon, Primary’s CTO, Kyle C Grant-Talbot, still hasn’t updated his LinkedIn to reflect that he’s no longer the CTO at Objection.)
I asked if Thiel, or other venture capital firms, were funding Primary. (D’Souza previously stated that Thiel and “leading” VCs funded Objection.) D’Souza responded, “Peter’s been a friend and advisor on all of my projects for 20 years, and we discuss things very frequently, but I’m the principal funder of Primary.” I also asked D’Souza how many people paid a fee to file an Objection; he told me “a few dozen started the process, but we learned that without engagement from the other side, it wasn’t worth even taking their money.” They were refunded, he confirmed.
Alex Shultz: Okay, because the way it was framed to me, you wrote that there was overwhelming interest, that “customers want to adjudicate much more complex cases with commensurate willingness to pay.” That implied something different.
Aron D’Souza: The people who wanted to pay were some of the wealthiest people in the world. Billionaires. They said, “I’d pay $100,000, $200,000 to have this article analyzed.” But unless the journalist on the other side was going to actually participate, it was pointless to take on their case.
In D’Souza’s retelling, Primary serves as a “permanent record,” an “IMDb for journalists.” Objection wasn’t a failed product, it was simply ahead of its time. “There’s no point giving out a grade unless there’s a report card,” is how he put it. But even after our conversation, I’m confused by D’Souza’s “report card” system—how he thinks journalists cite sources, and how he thinks he can make the sourcing process more transparent. Take this (lightly edited) exchange about a piece written by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman. (A video excerpt is also available below.)
Alex Shultz: One of [Haberman’s] most recently indexed articles was about Trump’s plans to fire the FDA commissioner, from around May. The article has a 496 out of 1000 rating, and she seems to have been dinged on sourcing—a 182 [score] out of 1000. I assume this is an AI summary, correct me if I’m wrong. It says there’s one named source—President Trump, quoted dismissing the firing report—and two anonymous sources, “a person briefed on the matter” and “a person close to the conversations.”
I agree that naming a source is a stronger attribution method than anonymous sourcing. It carries more legitimacy, and when I work on stories I always encourage people to go on the record. But there are lots of reasons why they can’t. In this case, the on-the-record source is Donald Trump, who has an enormous history of changing his mind and flat-out lying about things.
Aron D’Souza: But that’s also the thing: Donald Trump, because of the intense scrutiny placed on him, has more or less a permanent, well-documented record in the public consciousness.
Alex Shultz: Right, but you wouldn’t call him a very trustworthy source, would you? It seems your LLM assigned Trump a certain level of—to be clear, on this story, Haberman got a 182 sourcing score. Two days after it was published, the FDA commissioner was fired, or left. So she was correct.
Aron D’Souza: She was correct, and that’s actually really powerful. You’re anticipating a version-two feature: predicting the future. If Maggie Haberman says the FDA commissioner is about to step down and predicts that with anonymous sources, her rating in a future version would dramatically increase once it’s proven true. That’s a very powerful indicator of quality journalism.
Now, the philosophical difference I think we can discuss is the use of anonymous sources. It creates a powerful asymmetry: the person being attacked by the anonymous source is named, but there’s no opportunity to rebut or assess the credibility of the anonymous source, because it sits behind a claim made by the journalist or the editorial board. What we don’t know, with anonymous sources used by major outlets, is the level of verification undertaken. I think that’s a major structural gap, and one of the primary reasons public trust in media has declined so much. In a better world, Haberman wouldn’t say “a source close to the president said X.” She’d say, “A source independently verified by Primary said X.” How would that verification happen? It’s a cryptographically complex problem. It’s actually what my engineering team and I spend most of our time on.
I really don’t know what to make of that response, or some of the other sentiments D’Souza expressed throughout our conversation. I earnestly tried to hear D’Souza out. You might watch and find that I was too easy on him—a fair critique—but my goal was to see if he could comprehensibly explain his point of view. He speaks for figures like Thiel and Sam Altman (another reported friend): billionaire moguls who foster deeply hostile feelings about how reporters and editors do their jobs.
My takeaway is that underneath Primary’s more conciliatory veneer, the same hostility remains. And Primary’s founder, D’Souza, is prone to bold pronouncements—though he doesn’t seem to have a great grasp of how journalism works. That was my opinion going into our conversation, and it remains my opinion now.
