daily
Two weeks ago the frontier labs started talking publicly about slowing down. Today four consumers are in federal court arguing that the talking was the crime. Elsewhere, a Chinese research lab put a radiology model in Science and gave away the weights, and DeepMind found a way for agents to
Long View
Some builders can wait for AI revenue using cash from existing businesses. Others need fresh capital. Compute contracts determine who keeps paying if demand falls short.
daily
An AI-written intelligence report got as far as armed troops preparing to board a Chinese ship before anyone read it closely enough to notice the chatbot had invented the cargo. California spent yesterday working out who is qualified to check a frontier lab's safety claims, and Anthropic, which
daily
Three accountings of AI development became public this week, each by a different route. Anthropic volunteered its numbers. A three-person security team published theirs because they thought the industry should see them. The third set had to be pried out of a federal court. Anthropic published how much of its
daily
A doorbell, a published biology paper, and a datacenter's connection to the power grid each picked up a new set of rules this week about what software may do with them. In all three cases the rules were written by the people building the software, not by anyone
daily
Three items today about the gap between what an AI system is supposed to do and whoever is left checking that it did. A voice model that keeps talking while it works, a payment code being drafted for care delivered without a doctor, and a startup that thinks the answer
daily
The model is the part everyone looks at. Three items today are about everything else: the contractors who read your prompts and score the answers, the credit-assignment machinery underneath the training loop, and the scheduler that turns a model on your desk into something that works while you are asleep.
daily
Dario Amodei asked the industry to slow down. Within two days every major lab had said some version of yes, the White House and the Speaker of the House had said no, and nobody had signed anything. Below that argument, two quieter items: the NSA is rebuilding its org chart
daily
Anthropic says a weapons cell in northern Yemen ran several Claude instances at once, assigning each one a role the way a lead delegates on a small engineering team. That case sits inside a threat report its CEO cited over the weekend when he asked the whole industry to slow
Long View
How reliably can different models check one another, and can the remaining risk be measured and underwritten?
daily
On May 11, hundreds of malicious packages landed on RubyGems, the registry every Ruby project depends on. Four months later, three researchers say they know who sent them. Researchers say the May attack on RubyGems came from OpenAI's own agents The RubyGems team paused new user registration for
daily
OpenAI spent this week doing two things that do not obviously belong together. It handed developers the machinery that runs its own long-lived agents, and its CEO told staff the company might be willing to slow down. OpenAI put the harness behind Codex into a public API On September 10