The Bad Guy With An AI Named Claude
A lot of bad guys try to use Claude to do bad things.
Tech
Don't Worry About the Vase.
Zvi Mowshowitz on AI, rationality, policy, and weekly AI updates.
Recent essays
30 of 101We Must Pace The Frontier
Dario Amodei has a new essay that finally says the thing: We Must Pace the Frontier, naming his call after the Pacing the Frontier letter lab employees signed in July.
Brand New AI Solves a Millennium Prize
The first Millennium Prize, Navier-Stokes, has fallen to AI.
GPT-6-Astra Can Do Ambitious Things
Astra is an excellent model.
Jacob Coxon Warns of Human Extinction and Triggers a Preference Cascade
CEOs of major AI labs, and employees of major AI labs, including OpenAI and Anthropic, often say they plan to build superintelligence soon, as in within a few years create AIs that are superior to humans at essentially all cognitive tasks.
The Extinction Risk Preference Cascade: Quotes
These are quotes from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google employees, in the wake of Jacob Coxon’s warnings, in which the employees confirm that they think AI might soon kill everyone.
AI #185: Preference Cascade
The world of AI is inside my OODA loop.
GPT-6 Astra: The System Card, Alignment and What Comes Next
OpenAI claims that Astra is ‘the most intelligent and most aligned [available] model’ in the world.
Astra Is Hard to Monitor
OpenAI’s central message on Astra is that it is three things:
An Alien Mind: Jakub Pachocki Warns Us
OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki is dropping truth bombs.
OpenAI and the Wiki Incident
I did not expect to be back here so soon with more OpenAI agent swarm coverage.
Claude Mythos 5.1 and Fable 5.1: Capabilities
This is the weirdest situation in which to write a capabilities review.
Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1: The System Card
At the time of its release Claude Fable 5.1 was, by a healthy margin, the most capable publicly available AI model in the world.
AI #184: Post Post Mortem
I am exhausted.
Anthropic Has Some Alignment Problems
Oh, good.
HuggingFace Attack Postmortem: Civilizations, Reactions and Next Actions
Okay, so we who read blogs like this one have collectively realized there really is a lot going on right now.
HuggingFace Attack Postmortem: Fleshing Out the Facts
The consensus reaction to the OpenAI Technical Report is that it contains and confirms a lot of good information.
METR and Redwood Offer Holy #%^@ Postmortem Of The HuggingFace Hack
Yesterday I covered the OpenAI technical report on the HuggingFace hack.
OpenAI Offers Straight-Laced Postmortem Of The HuggingFace Hack
OpenAI finally gave us a technical report on What Happened, as did METR together with Redwood Research.
AI #183: Pre Post Mortem
Yesterday, OpenAI finally gave us their post mortem of What Happened leading up to and during the hacking of HuggingFace by their internal model, as well as partial outside analysis from METR and Redwood Research.
Against Modesty’s Bailey
Modesty arguments often say that you should mostly or entirely bow to ‘expert consensus’ or the views of particular others, and who are you to disagree.
On Writing #3
Periodically I like to gather various observations about writing, and share my perspective.
The American People Really Hate Data Centers
There are at least five different core questions around data centers and their politics.
AI Text Watermarking Is Free And Good
Scott Aaronson, while working at OpenAI, largely solved AI text watermarking together with Hendrik Kirchner.
AI #182: Pause For Reflection
This was a week of quiet aftermath, an opportunity to process recent events and start to figure out the path forward.
OpenAI Takes Initial Steps To Address Its Alignment Problems
OpenAI has some severe misalignment problems, and experienced total failures of its infrastructure and supervision.
Anthropic Risk Report: August 2026
I am grateful that Anthropic is producing periodic Risk Reports.
On Dwarkesh Patel's Podcast With Ryan Greenblatt
Some podcasts are self-recommending enough that I look to break them down if I have the chance.
AI #181: Astra Goes Cyber Critical
The hacking of HuggingFace by an internal OpenAI model, and more importantly the internal events that led to that and the fallout from it, remain the thing that matters.
Monthly Roundup #45: August 2026
As AI has escalated increasingly quickly, more and more of my posts have ended up focusing on AI.