内容来源：https://www.geekwire.com/2026/this-civic-activist-used-ai-to-assess-how-state-supreme-court-candidates-might-rule-on-the-millionaires-tax/

内容总结：

AI工具打造“预测”法官裁决网站，引发伦理争议

美国华盛顿州将于8月4日举行初选，届时将有多场州最高法院法官席位角逐。一位前政治竞选经理利用人工智能工具搭建了一个互动网站“Culliton2026.org”，试图预测各位候选人若当选后，对该州新近通过的“百万富翁税”可能采取的裁决立场，从而帮助选民了解法官人选。该网站上线后已吸引数十万次浏览量。

该网站的创建者是西雅图资深科技传播高管、前政治竞选经理Viet Nguyen。他并非软件开发人员，而是借助每月200美元的Perplexity AI代理工具，投入约100美元的费用，在数小时内搭建完成这一平台。网站核心功能是“权力平衡”工具，访客可替换不同候选人，观察法院判决倾向如何随之变化。该网站以1933年华盛顿州废除累进所得税的“卡利顿诉蔡斯案”命名，针对的是州立法机构2026年3月通过的9.9%高收入附加税。

Nguyen本人反对该税项，认为其违宪。他为16名候选人逐一标注了三种可能立场：维持原有判例、推翻判例或难以判断。评估依据包括任命者背景、此前的法官经历、对自身司法理念的表述以及是否就相关议题发表过言论。

然而，该网站的“预测”功能招致批评。支持该税项的非营利组织西北进步研究所指责其“将猜测包装成选民指南”，认为用算法预判法官裁决的前提并不可靠。华盛顿大学退休法学教授、卡利顿案权威专家Hugh Spitzer也指出，实际预测法官裁决是不可能的，且司法伦理规则禁止候选人就未来可能经手的案件表态。

面对质疑，Nguyen回应称反馈有帮助，已根据相关意见对网站进行修改，并补充声明其并非“投票预测器”。他坚持该网站是独立、非政治性的教育工具，旨在填补公众对州最高法院候选人立场认知的空白。他强调该项目与早年潘恩和汉密尔顿利用印刷术传播政治思想有相似之处，都是利用当时最有力的工具在关键决策时刻触达民众。

除该网站外，Nguyen还用同样的AI技术搭建了其他公民监督网站，涉及政府问责、无家可归者管理局等议题，并制作AI生成音乐视频。这场围绕AI预测司法行为的实验，正引发关于技术应用边界与司法伦理的新一轮讨论。

中文翻译：

利用新技术塑造政治话语的传统在美国已有数百年历史，可以追溯到让《常识》和《联邦党人文集》等早期出版物得以广泛传播的印刷机。想象一下，如果托马斯·潘恩和亚历山大·汉密尔顿当年能接触到大型语言模型和一笔不多的人工智能代币预算，他们会做出什么成就。

那可能会是类似Culliton2026.org这样的东西。

不，一个利用人工智能评估华盛顿州最高法院竞选活动的网站，不会与那些帮助发动革命和批准宪法的出版物一同载入史册。但从基本层面来看，它的创建者正在尝试同样的事情：在人们做出关键决定的重要时刻，用当今最强大的工具来触达他们。

这位现代版的“小册子作者”是Viet Nguyen，一位驻西雅图的资深科技传播高管，曾任政治竞选经理。

他利用人工智能搭建了这个互动网站，让选民了解该州最高法院每位候选人可能如何裁决州新的“百万富翁税”——从8月4日星期二初选中的候选人开始。该网站的核心功能是让访客换上不同的司法候选人，看看根据当选者的不同，结果可能如何将法院推向任一方向。

网站以Culliton诉Chase案命名，这是1933年推翻华盛顿州累进所得税的裁决。这项新税——一些科技和商界领袖警告称可能迫使高收入者和企业迁出本州——可能考验这一先例。

Nguyen反对这项新税——该税将对超过100万美元的收入征收全州9.9%的税——并写了一篇《西雅图时报》的专栏文章，称其违宪。（他指出，他曾为两党的政治竞选效力，而且他自己不会欠缴这项税。）

对于五场竞选中的16位候选人中的每一位，该网站都给出了一句话的判断：可能维持这一里程碑式裁决、可能将其推翻、或难以判断。该分析使用四个标准：谁任命了该候选人、他们在成为法官之前做了什么、他们如何描述自己的司法理念，以及他们对Culliton案或新税的任何表态或文字。

“人们不了解他们的最高法院大法官是谁，”Nguyen说，描述他的动机。“对于法官在特定问题上的立场，人们完全一无所知。”

一个错误的前提？但正是这一主张——任何人或任何事物都能预测法官将如何裁决——正是批评者所质疑的。在上周发布的一份事实核查中，支持该税的西北进步研究所（NPI）的Andrew Villeneuve将Nguyen的Culliton2026.org描述为“伪装成选民指南的猜测”。

司法伦理规则禁止候选人说明他们将如何裁决可能提交到他们面前的案件。华盛顿大学退休法学教授、Culliton案权威专家Hugh Spitzer告诉Villeneuve，预测大法官将如何裁决是不可能的。

“Nguyen没有根据资格或议题的标准来审查和评分候选人，而是将他整个项目组织为试图猜测每位候选人将如何裁决一个尚未提交到大法官面前的法律挑战，”该组织的创始人兼执行董事Villeneuve在文章中写道。

NPI有自己的2026年最高法院选举指南——华盛顿州最高法院选举可视化工具——该指南按候选人的背书和选民手册陈述进行分类，但不对他们将如何裁决做出任何猜测。

Culliton2026.org在其关于页面中被描述为独立和无党派的。该页面称它不背书任何候选人、不属于任何竞选活动、也不告诉人们如何投票。

尽管该网站的旗舰功能——“权力平衡”工具，让访客换上候选人并观察预测裁决的变化——关于页面却声称，该网站就未来最高法院大法官可能如何裁决而言“不是投票预测器”。

这一免责声明“似乎是对他整个前提有缺陷的默认承认，”Villeneuve在NPI的文章中写道。

回应：当被问及这篇文章时，Nguyen称这些反馈很有帮助，并表示他做了一系列更新，以解决Villeneuve在文章中提出的一些问题。

例如，他在网站的案件解释器中添加了一条“关于基础的说明”，承认Culliton案所依据的联邦先例已被美国最高法院后来放弃，并引用了Spitzer本人的论点，即未来的法院应重新审视这一问题。

“理性的人会对这个项目的前提有不同意见，这没关系，”他在一封与GeekWire分享的和善交流中写给Villeneuve。

文章将Nguyen描述为右翼，但他表示他努力保持“中间路线”。

他说他希望这个网站“不那么政治化，更有教育意义，适用于任何想更多了解司法候选人的选民。”事实上，它也可以被那些希望让投票与维持新税的可能性保持一致的人轻松使用。

他是如何构建的：Nguyen不是软件开发者，他使用代理式人工智能来研究公开记录并从头构建整个网站，指示它依赖他认为合法的来源（包括法院意见、官方文件和新闻报道），而不是随意的博客或Reddit帖子。

他还建立了一个审查流程，在发布前对条目进行事实核查。

Nguyen使用Perplexity Computer，一种自主操作计算机的代理工具（浏览网页、使用软件和构建文件），并将一项工作分配给多个并行工作的人工智能代理。他使用的是每月200美元的Perplexity Max套餐。

像这样复杂的网站或应用程序，过去可能需要一个小型团队和数千美元。Nguyen在几个小时内就建成了它，花了大约100美元的AI代币。他说自今年春天上线以来，该网站已吸引了“几十万次页面浏览量”。

“这就是代理式人工智能发挥作用的地方，它提供了一整套我所不具备的技能，”他说。“我从来没有想过自己能做出这样的东西。”

法律背景：州立法机构通过了9.9%的税，州长Bob Ferguson于2026年3月签署成为法律。该税适用于2028年开始的收入，首次缴款于2029年到期。

Culliton2026.org的评估是，法院目前九位大法官中有六位倾向于维持该税，两位倾向于推翻，还有一位不确定而难以判断。

法院九个席位中有五个在今年面临选举，其中四场在周二的初选中有竞争，每场的前两名晋级11月的大选。面临选举的席位中有三个由现任大法官竞选连任；另外两个是空缺席位。

一个于4月在Klickitat县高等法院提起的案件，由前州检察长Rob McKenna和前州最高法院大法官Phil Talmadge牵头，认为该税是一种违宪的所得税，预计将提交至州最高法院。有竞争的席位数量意味着选举可能在案件到达之前重塑法院。

选民还将在11月直接投票。由对冲基金经理Brian Heywood创立的“Let's Go Washington”组织支持的第645号倡议，将在2028年生效之前废除该税。它于7月以超过50万个签名获得了投票资格。

Nguyen的背景：他于1975年作为一个17个月大的婴儿从越南来到华盛顿州，在华盛顿大学学习政治学，并于1996年作为志愿者参与Gary Locke的州长竞选而起步，正如他在《西雅图时报》文章中提到的。

他经营本地竞选活动，之后在微软、T-Mobile和5G Americas工作了近二十年，5G Americas是无线行业贸易组织，他领导该组织直到今年停办。

Culliton2026.org只是Nguyen以同样的方式建立的众多公民网站之一。他的“华盛顿问责登记册”收录了87个州和地方政府的案件，将其标记为欺诈、利益冲突或监督失误，并且像Culliton网站一样，自称独立和无党派。

其他网站则更明确地站在某一方立场：一个关于金县无家可归管理局的信息面板标题为“一个判决：解散KCRHA”，还有一个名为“锁门”的紧急条款追踪器，标记了立法机关使其“免受公投影响”的19项法案。

他还涉足人工智能生成的音乐视频，包括一个关于西雅图市长Katie Wilson的视频，副歌是“嘿Katie，振作起来，这座城市正在分崩离析。”

“全部由AI生成，”Nguyen谈到他的项目时说。“我们生活在一个新世界里。”

或者，正如潘恩在《常识》中所说：“新世界的诞生之日即将来临。”

英文来源：

The tradition of using new technology to shape political discourse goes back centuries in America, to the printing presses that enabled the spread of early publications like Common Sense and the Federalist Papers. Just imagine what Thomas Paine and Alexander Hamilton could have done with access to LLMs and a modest budget of AI tokens.
It might have looked something like Culliton2026.org.
No, a website that uses artificial intelligence to assess Washington state’s Supreme Court races won’t go down in history alongside the publications that helped launch a revolution and ratify a constitution. But at a basic level, its creator is attempting the same thing: reaching people at a key moment of decision, using the most powerful tools of the day.
The modern-day pamphleteer is Viet Nguyen, a veteran Seattle-based technology communications executive and former political campaign manager.
He built the interactive website using AI to give voters a sense of how each candidate for the state’s high court — starting with those in the Tuesday, Aug. 4, primary — might rule on the state’s new “millionaires’ tax.” Its core feature lets visitors swap in different judicial candidates to see how the outcome could tip the court in either direction, depending on who’s elected.
The site is named after Culliton v. Chase, the 1933 ruling that struck down a graduated income tax in Washington state. The new tax, which some tech and business leaders have warned could drive high earners and businesses out of state, may test that precedent.
Nguyen opposes the new tax — which would apply a 9.9% statewide levy on income above $1 million — and wrote a Seattle Times op-ed calling it unconstitutional. (He noted that he has run political campaigns on both sides of the aisle, and wouldn’t owe the tax himself.)
For each of the 16 candidates across the five races, the site gives a one-line read: likely to keep the landmark ruling, likely to scrap it, or too close to call. The analysis uses four criteria: who appointed the candidate, what they did before reaching the bench, how they describe their own judicial approach, and anything they’ve said or written about Culliton or the new tax.
“People don’t understand who their Supreme Court justices are,” Nguyen said, describing his motivation. “There’s just zero knowledge about where judges stand on a particular issue.”
A faulty premise? But that very proposition — that anyone or anything can forecast how a judge will rule — is exactly what critics dispute. In a fact-check published last week, Andrew Villeneuve of the Northwest Progressive Institute (NPI), which supports the tax, described Nguyen’s Culliton2026.org as “speculation dressed up as a voter’s guide.”
Judicial-ethics rules bar candidates from saying how they would rule on a case that could come before them. Hugh Spitzer, a retired University of Washington law professor and a leading authority on Culliton, told Villeneuve it isn’t possible to predict how the justices would rule.
“Rather than examining and scoring the candidates on a rubric of qualifications or issues, Nguyen has organized his whole project around attempting to guess how each candidate would rule in a single legal challenge that is not yet before the justices,” wrote Villeneuve, the organization’s founder and executive director, in the article.
NPI runs its own guide to the 2026 Supreme Court elections — the Washington State Supreme Court Elections Visualizer — which sorts candidates by their endorsements and voter-pamphlet statements, but does not make any guess at how they’d rule.
Culliton2026.org is described on its About Page as independent and nonpartisan. It says it doesn’t endorse candidates, isn’t affiliated with any campaign, and isn’t telling people how to vote.
Despite the site’s flagship feature — the “Balance of power” tool that lets visitors swap in candidates and watch the projected ruling shift — the About Page asserts that the site is “not a vote predictor” when it comes to how future Supreme Court justices might rule.
That disclaimer “seems like a tacit acknowledgment that his whole premise is faulty,” Villeneuve wrote in the NPI piece.
The response: Asked about the article, Nguyen called the feedback helpful and said he made a series of updates to address some of the issues raised by Villeneuve in the piece.
For example, he added a “note on the foundations” to the site’s case explainer, granting that Culliton rests on federal precedents the U.S. Supreme Court has since abandoned, and citing Spitzer’s own argument that a future court should weigh the question fresh.
“Reasonable people will disagree on the project’s premise, and that’s fine,” he wrote to Villeneuve in an amicable exchange that he shared with GeekWire.
The article describes Nguyen as right-wing, but he said he tries to stay “in the moderate lane.”
He said he wanted the site “to be less political and more educational, applicable to any voter wishing to know more about the judicial candidates.” In fact, it could be used just as easily by people wanting to align their ballots with the likelihood of upholding the new tax.
How he built it: Nguyen, who is not a software developer, used agentic AI to research the public records and build the entire site from scratch, directing it to rely on sources he considered legitimate (including court opinions, official filings, and news coverage) rather than random blog or Reddit posts.
He also set up a vetting process to fact-check entries before publication.
Nguyen uses Perplexity Computer, an agentic tool that operates a computer on its own (browsing the web, using software and building files) and divides a job among multiple AI agents working in parallel. He’s on the $200 a month Perplexity Max plan.
A sophisticated website or app like this might have required a small team and thousands of dollars in the past. Nguyen built it over the course of a few hours, for about $100 in AI tokens. He says it has attracted “a few hundred thousand page views” since its launch this spring.
“This is where agentic AI steps in and offers a whole roster of skills that I don’t have,” he said. “I would never be able to imagine that I could put something like this together.”
Legal landscape: The Legislature passed the 9.9% tax and Gov. Bob Ferguson signed it in March 2026. It applies to income earned starting in 2028, with the first payments due in 2029.
Culliton2026.org’s assessment is that six of the nine current justices on the court lean toward upholding the tax, two toward striking it down, and one is too uncertain to call.
Five of the court’s nine seats are on the ballot this year, four of them contested in Tuesday’s primary, with the top two in each race advancing to November. Three of the seats on the ballot are held by sitting justices seeking to stay on the court; the other two are open.
A case filed in Klickitat County Superior Court in April, led by former state Attorney General Rob McKenna and former state Supreme Court Justice Phil Talmadge, argues the tax is an unconstitutional income tax and is expected to reach the state Supreme Court. The number of contested seats means the election could reshape the court before the case arrives.
Voters will also weigh in directly in November. Initiative 645, backed by Let’s Go Washington — the group founded by hedge-fund manager Brian Heywood — would repeal the tax before it takes effect in 2028. It qualified for the ballot in July with more than 500,000 signatures.
Nguyen’s background: He arrived in Washington as a 17-month-old refugee from Vietnam in 1975, studied political science at the UW, and got his start in 1996 volunteering on Gary Locke’s campaign for governor, as he noted in the Seattle Times piece.
He ran local races before spending nearly two decades at Microsoft, T-Mobile and 5G Americas, the wireless industry trade group that he led until it wound down this year.
Culliton2026.org is just one of the civic sites Nguyen has built the same way. His Washington Accountability Registry catalogs 87 state and local government cases it labels fraud, conflicts of interest or oversight failures, and, like the Culliton site, calls itself independent and nonpartisan.
Others are more explicit in taking a side: a dashboard about the King County homelessness authority is headlined “One verdict: wind KCRHA down,” and an emergency-clause tracker titled “Locked Out” flags 19 bills the Legislature made “referendum-proof.”
He has also dabbled in AI-generated music videos, including one about Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson with the hook, “Hey Katie, get it together, the city’s falling apart.”
“All AI generated,” Nguyen said of his projects. “We live in a new world.”
Or, as Paine put it in Common Sense, “The birthday of a new world is at hand.”