The New Yorker:

Amid escalating threats from the Trump Administration, a student assesses whom he can turn to.

By Peter Hessler

Around midnight on April 16, 2025, after Chen Zimo learned that the Department of Homeland Security had threatened to revoke Harvard University’s certification to enroll international students, he began communicating with a trusted source about possible legal scenarios.

Chen, a Chinese citizen, still needed a number of courses before he could complete his degree in computer science at Harvard, and he felt panicked about the possibility of having his visa revoked. For him, the Harvard experience had been transformative. Chen—not his real name—had grown up in provincial China, where his family had modest resources and sent him to public schools. He could never have afforded Harvard without the university’s generous financial support, and he had also received funding for summer language study. Nevertheless, when Chen heard about the D.H.S. letter, his first response wasn’t to contact a Harvard administrator, or the university’s International Office, or the law school. Instead, he logged into ChatGPT.

By chance, a new model of ChatGPT, OpenAI o3, had been released the same day that Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, sent the letter to Harvard. ChatGPT includes a “Deep Research” tool that is trained to solve more complex problems by synthesizing large amounts of online information and then presenting answers in more detail. Chen submitted a two-part request:

DHS threatens to revoke Harvard’s ability to enroll foreign students, cancels $2.7M in grants.
(1) Analyze whether DHS can actually do
(2) If DHS does, does that affect international students who are already enrolled (under their existing F1 visa)
The chatbot wrote back:
Is this a real news event you’re referring to, or are you asking hypothetically?

Chen instructed ChatGPT to “find the context online.” After it was clear that this was really happening, and that a representative of the U.S. government had threatened to take steps to expel every international student at America’s oldest institution of higher education, the chatbot responded:

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