Author name: Rejus Almole

NASA shakes up its Artemis program to speed up lunar return

artemis, blue origin, Boeing, NASA, Space, spacex, united launch alliance / Rejus Almole / March 1, 2026

“Launching SLS every three and a half years or so is not a recipe for success.”

Artist’s illustration of the Boeing-developed Exploration Upper Stage, with four hydrogen-fueled RL10 engines. Credit: NASA

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced sweeping changes to the Artemis program on Friday morning, including an increased cadence of missions and cancellation of an expensive rocket stage.

The upheaval comes as NASA has struggled to fuel the massive Space Launch System rocket for the upcoming Artemis II lunar mission, and Isaacman has sought to revitalize an agency that has moved at a glacial pace on its deep space programs. There is ever-increasing concern that, absent a shake-up, China’s rising space program will land humans on the Moon before NASA can return there this decade with Artemis.

“NASA must standardize its approach, increase flight rate safely, and execute on the president’s national space policy,” Isaacman said. “With credible competition from our greatest geopolitical adversary increasing by the day, we need to move faster, eliminate delays, and achieve our objectives.”

Shaking things up

The announced changes to the Artemis program include:

Cancellation of the Exploration Upper Stage and Block IB upgrade for SLS rocket
Artemis II and Artemis III missions will use the SLS rocket with existing upper stage
Artemis IV, V (and any additional missions, should there be) will use a “standardized” upper stage
Artemis III will no longer land on the Moon; rather Orion will launch on SLS and dock with Starship and/or Blue Moon landers in low-Earth orbit
Artemis IV is now the first lunar landing mission
NASA will seek to fly Artemis missions annually, starting with Artemis III in “mid” 2027, followed by at least one lunar landing in 2028
NASA is working with SpaceX and Blue Origin to accelerate their development of commercial lunar landers for Artemis IV and beyond

At the core of Isaacman’s concerns is the low flight rate of the SLS rocket and Artemis missions. During past exploration missions, from Mercury through Gemini, Apollo, and the Space Shuttle program, NASA has launched humans on average about once every three months. It has been nearly 3.5 years since Artemis I launched.

“This is just not the right pathway forward,” Isaacman said.

A senior NASA official, speaking on background to Ars, noted that the space agency has experienced hydrogen and helium leaks during both the Artemis I and Artemis II pre-launch preparations, and these problems have led to monthslong delays in launch.

“If I recall, the timing between Apollo 7 and 8 was nine weeks,” the official said. “Launching SLS every three and a half years or so is not a recipe for success. Certainly, making each one of them a work of art with some major configuration change is also not helpful in the process, and we’re clearly seeing the results of it, right?”

The goal, therefore, is to standardize the SLS rocket into a single configuration to make it as reliable as possible and to launch it as frequently as every 10 months. NASA will fly the SLS vehicle until there are commercial alternatives to launch crew to the Moon, perhaps through Artemis V as Congress has mandated, or perhaps even a little longer.

Is everyone on board?

The NASA official said all of the agency’s key contractors are on board with the change, and senior leaders in Congress have been briefed on the proposed changes.

The biggest opposition to these proposals would seemingly come from Boeing, which is the prime contractor for the Exploration Upper Stage, a contract worth billions of dollars to develop a more powerful rocket that was due to launch for the first time later this decade. However, in a NASA news release, Boeing appeared to offer at least some support for the revised plans.

“Boeing is a proud partner to the Artemis mission and our team is honored to contribute to NASA’s vision for American space leadership,” said Steve Parker, Boeing Defense, Space & Security president and CEO, in the news release. “The SLS core stage remains the world’s most powerful rocket stage, and the only one that can carry American astronauts directly to the moon and beyond in a single launch. As NASA lays out an accelerated launch schedule, our workforce and supply chain are prepared to meet the increased production needs.”

Solid reasons for changing Artemis III

NASA’s new approach to Artemis reflects a return to the philosophy of the Apollo program. During the late 1960s, the space agency flew a series of preparatory crewed missions before the Apollo 11 lunar landing. These included Apollo 7 (a low-Earth orbit test of the Apollo spacecraft), Apollo 8 (a lunar orbiting mission), Apollo 9 (a low-Earth orbit rendezvous with the lunar lander), and Apollo 10 (a test of the lunar lander descending to the Moon, without touching down).

With its previous Artemis template, NASA skipped the steps taken by Apollo 7, 9, and 10. In the view of many industry officials, this leap from Artemis II—a crewed lunar flyby of the Moon testing only the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft—to Artemis III and a full-on lunar landing was enormous and risky.

The new approach will, in NASA parlance, “buy down” some of the risk for a 21st-century lunar landing, including performance and handling of a lunar lander, rendezvous and docking, communications, spacesuit performance, and more.

It will also increase the challenges for NASA. In particular, the timeline to bring the Orion spacecraft to readiness for a mid-2027 launch will need to be accelerated, and efforts to integrate that vehicle with one or both lander providers will need serious attention.

For the Artemis IV lunar landing mission, NASA will also need to human-rate a new upper stage for the SLS rocket. The vehicle currently uses a modified Delta IV upper stage manufactured by United Launch Alliance. But that rocket production line is closed, and NASA only has two more of these stages. With the cancellation of the Exploration Upper Stage, NASA will now procure a new stage commercially. NASA officials only said they will seek a “standardized” upper stage. As Ars has previously reported, the most likely replacement would be the Centaur V upper stage currently flying on Vulcan rockets.

What of the Lunar Gateway?

Friday’s announcement—which, for the space community, is the equivalent of a major earthquake—left some key details unaddressed. For example, NASA has been developing a larger launch tower to support the Block 1B version of the SLS rocket, with its more powerful upper stage. Development of this tower, finally underway, has been a clown show, with project costs ballooning from an initial estimate of $383 million to $1.8 billion, and delays stacked on delays. Will this tower be scrapped or repurposed?

Isaacman and other NASA officials were also mum on the Lunar Gateway, a proposed space station in a high orbit around the Moon. Key elements of this space station are under construction. However, cancellation of the Exploration Upper Stage raises questions about its future. The main purpose of the Block 1B version of SLS was to launch heavier payloads, most notably elements of the Gateway along with Orion.

“The whole Gateway-Moon base conversation is not for today,” the senior NASA official said. “We, I can assure you, will talk about the Moon base in the weeks ahead. I would just not overly read into this, because we had manifested some Gateway modules on Falcon Heavy already. The implications of standardizing SLS and increasing launch rate are about the ability to return to the Moon. I don’t think we necessarily have to speculate too much on what the other downstream implications are.”

The Gateway program office is based at Johnson Space Center in Houston, where the lunar station is viewed as a successor to the International Space Station in terms of flight operations.

Key politicians, such as Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, have been supportive of this new station. But during some recent congressional hearings, Cruz has indicated he is open to a lunar space station or an outpost on the lunar surface. He just wants to be sure NASA has an enduring presence on or near the Moon. One industry source said Isaacman could be laying the groundwork to replace the Gateway Program with a Moon Base program office in Houston. It is unclear how much of a political battle this would ultimately be.

Some of this has been well-predicted

Although the changes outlined by NASA on Friday are sweeping, they are not completely out of the blue.

In April 2024, Ars reported that some senior NASA officials were considering an Earth-orbit rendezvous between Orion and Starship as a means to buy down risk for a lunar landing. NASA ultimately punted on the idea before it was revived by Isaacman this month.

Additionally, in October 2024, Ars offered a guide to saving the “floundering” Artemis program by canceling the Block 1B upgrade for the SLS rocket, replacing its upper stage with a Centaur V, and canceling the Lunar Gateway. This would free up an estimated $2 billion annually to focus on accelerating a lunar landing, the publication estimated.

That may be the very course the space agency has embarked upon today.

Eric Berger is the senior space editor at Ars Technica, covering everything from astronomy to private space to NASA policy, and author of two books: Liftoff, about the rise of SpaceX; and Reentry, on the development of the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon. A certified meteorologist, Eric lives in Houston.

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Trump moves to ban Anthropic from the US government

AI, Anthrophic, Department of Defense, department of war, Pentagon, Policy, syndication / Rejus Almole / February 28, 2026

The dispute between Anthropic and the Department of Defense has escalated in recent days, with officials publicly trading barbs with the AI company on social media.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth met with Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, earlier this week. He gave the company until Friday to commit to changing the terms of its contract to allow “all lawful use” of its models. Hegseth praised Anthropic’s products during the meeting and said that the Department of Defense wanted to continue working with Anthropic, according to one source familiar with interaction who was not authorized to discuss it publicly.

Some experts say that the dispute boils down to a clash over vibes rather than concrete disagreements over how artificial intelligence should be deployed. “This is such an unnecessary dispute in my opinion,” says Michael Horowitz, an expert on military use of AI and former Deputy Assistant Secretary for emerging technologies at the Pentagon. “It is about theoretical use cases that are not on the table for now.”

Horowitz notes that Anthropic has supported all of the ways the Department of Defense has proposed using its technology thus far. “My sense is that the Pentagon and Anthropic agree at present about the use cases where the technology is not ready for prime time,” he adds.

Anthropic was founded on the idea that AI should be built with safety at its core. In January, Amoedi penned a blog post about the risks of powerful artificial intelligence that touched upon the dangers of fully autonomous AI-controlled weapons.

“These weapons also have legitimate uses in the defense of democracy,” Amodei wrote. “But they are a dangerous weapon to wield.”

Additional reporting by Paresh Dave.

This story originally appeared at WIRED.com

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In puzzling outbreak, officials look to cold beer, gross ice, and ChatGPT

AI, beer, chatgpt, health, MMWR, outbreak, public health, salmonella / Rejus Almole / February 28, 2026

An AI assist?

The author of the MMWR report, county health official Katherine Houser, noted that the beer-tent workers were hesitant to give details because they didn’t want to get any of their community members in trouble. But one let slip that someone had put leftover food in the cooler overnight at the start of the fair.

The county health officials hypothesized that the cooler had become contaminated with Salmonella that spread to beer cans from which people then drank, allowing for infection. But with the makeshift cooler gone, it would remain only a hypothesis. So, the health investigators then turned to ChatGPT for assurances.

After providing the chatbot with details of the outbreak, health investigators asked it several questions, including: “Will S. Agbeni grow in an improperly drained cooler?”; “Are any other sources, other than ice, likely if only canned beverages and no foods were available at this location?’ ; and “What examples of similar outbreaks have been documented in scientific literature?”

Some of the questions are easy enough to answer without a chatbot. A simple search on PubMed, a federal database of scientific literature, quickly pulls up examples of Salmonella being found in ice, for example. But, the chatbot assured the officials that the cooler was a “credible and likely” source of the outbreak and they stuck with the hypothesis.

In the end, the officials required new cooler sanitation protocols—and concluded that the AI assistance was helpful. “AI was effective in this rural setting for rapid situational awareness,” Houser wrote. However, she also acknowledged the potential concerns of using AI for outbreak investigations: “Given the inherent limitations of generative AI tools, including potential inaccuracies and lack of source transparency, all AI-generated summaries were critically reviewed and validated against primary literature before incorporation,” she wrote.

Overall, the case report has a murky ending. It’s unclear how helpful the chatbot actually was in this case. Critically reviewing AI-generated answers can easily take as much time as simply researching the answer on one’s own. And of course, we’ll never know for certain what was really going on in that makeshift beer cooler—though the new cooler sanitation protocols seem like a good idea, regardless.

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Block lays off 40% of workforce as it goes all-in on AI tools

AI, block, coding, layoffs, syndication / Rejus Almole / February 28, 2026

The staff reduction at Block comes as anxiety rises about AI leading to job losses across vast parts of the economy.

Investors and economists are grappling with an influx of US economic data and corporate announcements in an effort to gauge the impact the technology could be having on the labor market. The latest non-farm payrolls figures were better than expected, suggesting the domestic jobs market was stabilizing, but several big US companies have committed to cutting staff.

Amazon, UPS, Dow, Nike, Home Depot, and others in late January announced they would be cutting a combined 52,000 jobs.

Dorsey said the cuts at Block, which owns the payment processor Square, came despite what he described as a “strong” financial performance in 2025.

Block has made a contrarian bet on bitcoin at a time when many payment companies favored stablecoins: cash-like digital tokens that became regulated in the US last year.

Block’s strategy was spearheaded by Dorsey, a “bitcoin maximalist” who has said he believes the digital currency will eventually eclipse the dollar.

The company offers payment services in bitcoin for merchants and consumers—and suffered a loss on its own bitcoin holdings as the price of the cryptocurrency dropped 23 percent this year.

In contrast, payment companies that made a bet on stablecoins experienced a boost. Stripe earlier this week said its stablecoin transaction volumes increased fourfold last year.

In its fiscal fourth quarter, Block reported revenue of almost $6.3 billion, in line with Wall Street expectations. Its earnings tumbled to 19 cents a share, owing to a $234 million hit on its bitcoin holdings.

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Hyperion author Dan Simmons dies from stroke at 77

culture, dan simmons, Hyperion, obituary, Space / Rejus Almole / February 27, 2026

Dan Simmons, the author of more than three dozen books, including the famed Hyperion Cantos, has died from a stroke. He was 77.

Simmons, who worked in elementary education before becoming an author in the 1980s, produced a broad portfolio of writing that spanned several genres, including horror fiction, historical fiction, and science fiction. Often, his books included elements of all of these. This obituary will focus on what is generally considered his greatest work, and what I believe is possibly the greatest science fiction novel of all time, Hyperion.

Published in 1989, Hyperion is set in a far-flung future in which human settlement spans hundreds of planets. The novel feels both familiar, in that its structure follows Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and utterly unfamiliar in its strange, far-flung setting.

Seven characters, seven stories

At its heart are the background stories of seven characters on a pilgrimage to the Time Tombs, which move backward in time. There, they may possibly confront a legendary, mythical, terrifying, and time-bending creature known as the Shrike. Each of the stories told by the seven characters is done so in a different subgenre, from tragedy to political thriller to military science fiction, and so on.

I went into Hyperion blind, decades ago, knowing almost nothing about it. I was never the same after finishing it. For a book that is, essentially, “hard” science fiction, Hyperion is also one of the most emotional books I have ever read.

The first tale is that of a priest, Lenar Hoyt, and the dying religion of Catholicism. By the end of this story of cruciforms, isolated civilizations, tesla trees, and more, I was floored. And that was just the first story of seven! Most powerful, for me, was the Scholar’s Tale, the story of Sol Weintraub and his daughter, Rachel. The first of my two daughters had just been born when I read this book, and for the first time ever, when reading, I cried. Cried like a baby.

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Neanderthals seemed to have a thing for modern human women

Biology, evolution, Genomics, human evolution, Neanderthals, Science / Rejus Almole / February 26, 2026

By now, it’s firmly established that modern humans and their Neanderthal relatives met and mated as our ancestors expanded out of Africa, resulting in a substantial amount of Neanderthal DNA scattered throughout our genome. Less widely recognized is that some of the Neanderthal genomes we’ve seen have pieces of modern human DNA as well.

Not every modern human has the same set of Neanderthal DNA, however; different people will, by chance, have inherited different fragments. But there are also some areas, termed “Neanderthal deserts,” where none of the Neanderthal DNA seems to have persisted. Notably, the largest Neanderthal desert is the entire X chromosome, raising questions about whether this reflects the evolutionary fitness of genes there or mating preferences.

Now, three researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, Alexander Platt, Daniel N. Harris, and Sarah Tishkoff, have done the converse analysis: examining the X chromosomes of the handful of completed genomes we have. It turns out there’s also a strong bias toward modern human sequences there, as well, and the authors interpret that as selective mating, with Neanderthal males showing a strong preference for modern human females and their descendants.

What type of selection are we looking at?

Given how long modern humans and Neanderthals had been evolving as separate populations, some degree of genetic incompatibility is definitely possible. Lots of proteins interact in various ways, and the genes behind these interaction networks will evolve together—a change in one gene will often lead to compensatory changes in other genes in the network. Over time, those changes may mean re-introducing the original gene will actually disrupt the network, with a negative impact on fitness.

That means the introduction of some Neanderthal genes into the modern human genome (or vice versa) would be disruptive and make carriers of them less fit. So they’d be selected against and lost over the ensuing generations. Of course, some segments would likely be lost at random—the genome’s pretty big, and the modern human population was likely large and growing, allowing its DNA to dilute out the influence of other human populations. Figuring out which influence is dominant can be challenging.

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xAI spent $7M building wall that barely muffles annoying power plant noise

AI, ai data center, air pollution, Environmental Protection Agency, Policy, power plant, xAI / Rejus Almole / February 26, 2026

“Temu sound wall” not enough to quell fury over xAI’s power plant.

For miles around xAI’s makeshift power plant in Southaven, Mississippi, neighbors have endured months of constant roaring, erupting pops, and bursts of high-pitched whining from 27 temporary gas turbines installed without consulting the community.

In a report on Thursday, NBC News interviewed residents fighting to shut down xAI’s turbines. They confirmed that xAI operates the turbines day and night, allegedly tormenting residents in order to power xAI founder Elon Musk’s unbridled AI ambitions.

Eventually, 41 permanent gas turbines—that supposedly won’t be as noisy—will be installed, if xAI can secure the permitting. In the meantime, xAI has erected a $7 million “sound barrier” that’s supposed to mitigate some of the noise.

However, residents told NBC News that the wall that xAI built does little to quiet the din.

Taylor Logsdon, who lives near the power plant, said that neighbors nearby jokingly call it the “Temu sound wall,” referencing the Chinese e-commerce site known for peddling cheap, rather than high-quality goods. For Logsdon, the wall has not helped to calm her dogs, which have been unsettled by sudden booms and squeals that videos show can frequently be heard amid the turbines’ continual jet engine-like hum. Some residents are just as unsettled as the dogs, describing the noises from the plant as “scary.”

A nonprofit environmental advocacy group, the Safe and Sound Coalition, has been collecting evidence, hoping to raise awareness in the community to block xAI from obtaining permits for its permanent turbines. The group’s website links to videos documenting the noise, noise analysis reports, and public records showing how challenging it’s been to track xAI’s communications with public officials.

Safe and Sound Coalition video documents constant roars after a “loud bang” signaled “something popped off.”

For example, public records requests to the city of Southaven seeking information on xAI exemptions to noise ordinances or communications about the sound wall turned up nothing. A director overseeing the city’s planning and development claimed that the office was not “involved with the noise barrier wall” and could provide no details. Similarly, a permit clerk for the city’s building department confirmed there were no documents to share.

Asked for comment, a spokesperson for the coalition told Ars that the “absence of documentation raises transparency concerns.”

“When decisions with community impact are made without accessible records, it creates an accountability gap and limits the public’s ability to understand how those decisions were evaluated or authorized,” the spokesperson said.

An IT worker who co-founded the coalition, Jason Haley, told NBC News that xAI’s wall showed that the city could have required the company to do more to prevent noise pollution before upsetting community members.

“If you knew the noise was going to be an issue, put in a sound wall first,” Haley said. “Do some other stuff first before you torture us. That’s not that hard of an ask.”

xAI did not immediately respond to Ars’ request to comment. According to NBC News, the company has yet to make public a noise analysis that it conducted.

xAI’s turbines spark other concerns

xAI has maintained that it follows the law when rushing at breakneck speeds to build infrastructure to support its AI innovations. In Southaven, xAI was approved to operate the temporary gas turbines at the power plant for 12 months, without any additional permitting required.

Now it’s seeking permits for the permanent turbines, which residents worry could be nearly as loud, while possibly introducing more smog into an area that’s mostly homes, churches, parks, and schools, the Safe and Sound Coalition’s website said.

Pollutants could increase risks of asthma, heart attacks, stroke, and cancer, a community flyer the coalition distributed warned, urging attendance at a public meeting where residents could finally air their complaints (a meeting which NBC News’ report thoroughly documented). The flyer also suggested that the city’s main drinking water supply could be affected and perhaps tainted if the power plant’s wastewater contains toxic chemicals, since there isn’t a graywater recycling plant nearby. For residents, it’s hard to tell if things will ever get better. One noise analysis the coalition shared found that the daily sound of the turbines was higher on an “annoyance scale” than when entire neighborhoods set off New Year’s Eve fireworks.

“Our water, air, power grid, utility bills, property values, and health are all at risk,” the Safe and Sound Coalition’s website said. “We’re already facing toxic pollution and relentless industrial noise. There is no clear oversight, no transparency, and no plan to protect the people living nearby.”

The coalition expects that if enough community members protest the plant, the permitting agency will deny xAI’s permits and order any potentially dangerous turbines to be shut down. But other groups are taking a different approach, considering suing xAI if it continues operating the unpermitted gas turbines in Southaven.

Earlier this month, the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) joined the NAACP in sending xAI a notice of intent to sue. In that letter, groups warned that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently changed a rule that they argued now requires permits for the temporary turbines. They gave xAI 60 days to respond.

The same groups previously sent a legal threat to xAI, opposing alleged data center pollution in Memphis, Tenn. xAI eventually secured permits for some of the gas turbines sparking scrutiny there, which many locals found “devastating.” Further concerning, residents relying on drone imagery—with no other way to keep track of how many turbines xAI was running—warned that the permits only covered 15 of 24 turbines on site.

EPA shrugs off xAI permitting concerns

It’s unclear whether the SELC can win if it takes xAI to court, or whether the EPA would ever intervene if that action could be construed as delaying Trump’s order to rush permitting and build as many data centers as fast as possible to power AI.

The SELC declined Ars’ request to comment, but the EPA’s administrator, Lee Zeldin, seemed to negate that argument in an interview with Fox Business in January. Asked directly about xAI’s gas turbines, Zeldin confirmed that the EPA was working closely on permitting with local officials in Southaven and Shelby County—where xAI built a massive data center sparking protests.

Rather than suggesting that the EPA might be preparing to review xAI’s unpermitted gas turbines, Zeldin emphasized that for Donald Trump, it “is about getting permits done faster.”

“EPA has the power to slow things down; EPA also has the power to speed things up, and that’s where the Trump EPA is,” Zeldin said.

Permitting for the Southaven project’s permanent gas turbines may be approved as soon as next month, NBC News reported.

Residents skeptical second sound barrier will be better

For Southaven, xAI’s power plant—along with a planned data center, which Musk has dubbed “MACROHARDRR” to mock Microsoft—represents a chance to surge the local economy. That prospect seemingly swayed government support for the projects, which has apparently not waned in the face of mounting protests.

When Musk bought the dormant power plant, “it was the largest private investment in state history,” Tate Reeves, Mississippi’s Republican governor, claimed. Additionally, xAI’s affiliated company that’s behind the projects, MZX Tech, donated $1.38 million to the city’s police department, NBC News reported. Both the plant and the data center “are expected to bring in millions of dollars and new jobs,” Reeves said.

For Southaven residents, the only hope they have that the noise may die down any time soon is that construction on another sound barrier will be finished in the next two months, NBC News reported. Supposedly, engineers were taking time to study “what type of sound barrier would be most effective” amid complaints about the current sound barrier.

A spokesperson for the Safe and Sound Coalition told Ars that the group remains “skeptical” that the new wall will be any better than the first sound barrier.

“To our understanding, sound barriers can reduce certain frequencies under controlled conditions, but turbine noise involves low-frequency sounds and tonal components that often reach beyond barriers,” the coalition’s spokesperson said. “The most effective method for reducing industrial noise exposure is typically distance from residential areas, which is not a mitigation option in this scenario given the facility’s proximity to homes.”

The coalition urged xAI to be transparent and to share data backing mitigation claims if it wants the community to believe that the second sound barrier will make any difference.

“Without transparent modeling, validated field measurements, and independent verification, it is difficult to assess whether the barrier will meaningfully address the ongoing nuisance experienced by nearby residents,” the coalition’s spokesperson said. “Mitigation claims are only meaningful if they are supported by transparent data.”

Mayor labels protestors Musk haters

At least one city official, Mayor Darren Musselwhite, has suggested that community backlash is “political.” Although he acknowledged that the noise was a “legitimate concern,” he also claimed on Facebook that some people protesting xAI’s facility were simply Elon Musk haters, NBC News reported.

“Southaven is now under attack by all who choose to oppose Elon Musk because of his high-profile political stances,” Musselwhite wrote.

However, residents told NBC News that “their concerns have nothing to do with politics.” One person interviewed even praised Musk’s work with the Department of Government Efficiency.

Instead, they’re worried that local officials seeing dollar signs have potentially let xAI exploit loopholes to pollute communities without any warning. The community flyer from the Safe and Sound Coalition criticized what they viewed as shady behavior from local officials:

“This project was started behind our backs, with zero community input. Local officials have repeatedly downplayed concerns, spun the facts, and misled residents about the true impacts and the deals made with xAI. Many people only found out after the turbines were up and running.”

The coalition’s spokesperson told Ars that a health impact analysis published on behalf of the SELC provides “meaningful insight” into the biggest health risks. That concluded that using the EPA’s COBRA health impact model, emissions from running 41 permanent turbines at the Southaven plant “are estimated to result in $30–$44 million per year in health-related damages, including costs from premature deaths, hospital visits, and lost productivity. Over a typical 30-year operating life, these impacts would amount to approximately $588–$862 million in cumulative discounted public-health costs, borne largely by residents of Tennessee and Mississippi.”

Additionally, the largest amount of harmful pollutants increases are expected to be “concentrated in communities that are disproportionately Black, highly socially vulnerable, and have elevated baseline asthma prevalence,” the report said.

If the permits are issued, the Coalition’s spokesperson told Ars that the group expects to continue gathering reports of “firsthand experiences” from nearby residents, which will “continue to provide valuable information regarding ongoing impacts.” The group plans to continue engaging with officials and pushing for greater accountability and transparent monitoring, as well as documenting noise conditions, reviewing emissions reports, and collecting independent data where feasible.

“The Coalition’s focus is long-term community protection, which means tracking compliance, advocating for corrective action if standards are not met, and ensuring residents have access to accurate information about environmental and health impacts,” the spokesperson said. “Permit approval would not resolve community concerns; it would shift our focus toward ongoing oversight and enforcement.”

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

xAI spent $7M building wall that barely muffles annoying power plant noise Read More »

AI #157: Burn the Boats

Boats / Rejus Almole / February 26, 2026

Events continue to be fast and furious.

This was the first actually stressful week of the year.

That was mostly due to issues around Anthropic and the Department of War. This is the big event the news is not picking up, with the Pentagon on the verge of invoking one of two extreme options that would both be extremely damaging to national security and that would potentially endanger our Republic. The post has details, and the first section here has a few additional notes.

Also stressful for many was the impact of Citrini’s AI scenario, where it is 2028 and AI agents are sufficiently capable to disrupt the whole economy but this turns out to be bearish for stocks. People freaked out enough about this that it seems to have directly impacted the stock market, although most stocks other than the credit card companies seem to have bounced back. Of course, in a scenario like that we probably all die and definitely the world transforms, and you have bigger things to worry about than the stock market, but the post does raise a lot of very good detailed points, so I spend my post going over that.

I also got to finally review Claude Sonnet 4.6. It’s a good model for its price and size and may have a place in your portfolio of models, but for most purposes you will still want to use Claude Opus.

Claude Opus 4.6 had a time of 14.5 hours on the METR graph of capabilities, showing that things are escalating faster than we expected on that front as well.

This week’s post also covers the AI Summit in India, Dean Ball on self-improvement, extensive coverage of Altman’s interview at the Summit, several other releases and a lot more.

I would have split this up, but we are still behind, with the following posts still due in the future:

Grok 4.20, which is a disappointment.
Gemini 3.1 Pro, which is an improvement but landed with a relative whimper.
Claude Code and Codex #5, with lots of cool agent related stuff.
Anthropic’s RSP 3.0, both its headline changes and the content details of their plans and their 100+ page risk report.

(Reader advisory note: I quote some people at length because no one ever clicks links, but you are free to skip over long quote boxes. I’m trying to raise chance of reading the full quote to ~25% from ~1%, not get it to ~90%.)

Anthropic and the Department of War. Let’s have this not mean war.
Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. Join the vacuum army today.
Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility. Out with the old code.
Huh, Upgrades. Claude in Excel MCP, Claude in PowerPoint, Claude web search.
On Your Marks. Claude Opus 4.6 scores a METR graph time of 14.5 hours. Wow.
Choose Your Fighter. Gemini Flash is very good if you feel the need for speed.
Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon. AI should never impersonate a human.
Head In The Sand. It’s not only the summit, the elites are still in denial on AI.
Fun With Media Generation. One might call it an actually good AI short film.
A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. The AI Fluency Index.
You Drive Me Crazy. You can’t say that OpenAI wasn’t warned.
They Took Our Jobs. A lot of this is priced in at this point. How will we handle it?
The Art of the Jailbreak. Stealing Mexican government data.
Get Involved. Anthropic Social Impacts, Brundage, consciousness, documentaries.
Introducing. Qwen 3.5 Medium Models, Claude Code security, Meta face rec.
In Other AI News. Opus 3 to be available indefinitely, and many other items.
The India Summit. One summit for the labs, one summit for the global elites.
Show Me the Money. MatX raises from the right people.
Quiet Speculations. Directionally correct and correct can be very different.
The Quest for Sane Regulations. Finding what stewards of liberty are left to us.
Chip City. Chip location verification plans, and who actually uses water.
The Mask Comes Off. OpenAI, I’m telling you, you gotta fire those lawyers.
The Week in Audio. Askell and Altman.
Quickly, There’s No Time. Altman tries to warn us.
Dean Ball On Recursive Self-Improvement. An excellent two-part essay.
Rhetorical Innovation. It’s time to stop mincing words. Well, it always is.
Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult. Persona selection.
The Homework Assignment Is To Choose The Assignment. Who does the work?
Agent Foundations. It’s a good research program, sir.
Autonomous Killer Robots. The hard part is making them autonomous.
People Really Hate AI. They’re only going to hate it more.
People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone. Noah Smith.
Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone. Nick Land for xAI?
The Lighter Side. Fingers crossed.

The Pentagon has asked two major defense contractors to provide an assessment of their reliance on Anthropic’s Claude.

Axios calls this a ‘first step towards blacklisting Anthropic.’

I would instead call this as the start of a common sense first step you would take long before you actively threaten to slap a ‘supply chain risk’ designation on Anthropic. It indicates that the Pentagon has not done the investigation of ‘exactly how big of a clusterwould this be’ and I highly encourage them to check.

Divyansh Kaushik: Are we seriously going to label Anthropic a supply chain risk but are totally fine with Alibaba/Qwen, Deepseek, Baidu, etc? What are we doing here?

An excellent question. Certainly we can agree that Alibaba, Qwen, Deepseek or Baidu are all much larger ‘supply chain risks’ than Anthropic. So why haven’t we made those designations yet?

The prediction markets on this situation are highly inefficient. Kalshi as of this writing has bounced around to 37% chance of declaration of Supply Chain Risk, versus Polymarket at 22% for very close to the same question.

Another way to measure how likely things are to go very wrong is that Kalshi has a market on ‘Will Anthropic release Claude 5 this year?’ which is basically a proxy for ‘does the American government destroy Anthropic?’ and Polymarket has whether it will be released by April 30. The Kalshi market is down from 95% (which you should read as ~100%) to 90%. Polymarket’s with a shorter timeline is at 38%.

Scott Alexander on the Pentagon threatening Anthropic.

Steven Adler calls this ‘The dawning of authoritarian AI.’

Nate Sores points out ‘no one stops you from saving the world’ is one of the requirements if we are going to get out of this alive. Even if the problems we face turn out to be super solvable, you have to be allowed to solve them.

Ted Lieu emphasizes the need for humans to always be in the loop on nuclear weapons, which is why Congress passed a law to that effect. This is The Way. The rules of engagement on this must be set by Congress. At least for now, fully autonomous weapons without a human in the kill chain are not ready, even if they are conventional.

This point was driven home rather forcefully by AIs from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic opting to use at least tactical nuclear weapons 95% of the time in simulated escalatory war games against each other, and had accidents in fog of war 86% of the time. None of them ever surrendered. Wouldn’t you prefer a good game of chess? This is much more aggressive than the level of use by expert humans in other similar simulations (this one is complex enough that humans have never run this exact setup). And you want to force them to make these models less hesitant than that?

CSET Georgetown offers a primer on the Defense Production Act and making labs produce AI models. The language seems genuinely ambiguous, even without getting into whether such an application would be constitutional. We don’t know the answer because no one has ever tried to say no before, but the government has never tried to forcibly order something like this before, either. I would highly recommend to the Pentagon that, even if they do have the power to compel otherwise, they only take customized AIs from companies that actively want to provide them.

Have Claude reverse engineer the API of your DJI Romo vacuum so you can guide it with a PS5 controller, and accidentally takes control of 7000 robot vacuums. Good news is Sammy Azdoufal was a righteous dude so he reported it and it got fixed two days later, but how many more such things are lying around?

By Default: > the S in IoT stands for “security”

Rafe Rosner-Uddin at Financial Times reports that Amazon’s coding bot was responsible for the two recent AWS outages, although neither was that large.

Rafe Rosner-Uddin: The people said the agentic tool, which can take autonomous actions on behalf of users, determined that the best course of action was to “delete and recreate the environment”.

… Multiple Amazon employees told the FT that this was the second occasion in recent months in which one of the group’s AI tools had been at the centre of a service disruption.

… Amazon said it was a “coincidence that AI tools were involved” and that “the same issue could occur with any developer tool or manual action”.

Uh huh. This was from their AI tool Kiro, and they’re blaming user error for approving the actions. Should have used Claude Code.

If your AI thinks you’re an asshole, yes, it’s going to respond accordingly, and you’re going to have a substantially worse time.

Dean W. Ball: I wonder, if your Claude instance thinks you’re an asshole, if it would recommend different things to you than it would for someone it liked. Like would it refrain from suggesting the low-key-but-amazing restaurant, or whatever else?

Of course this applies to any AI. I only use Claude as my example because Anthropic seems by far the likeliest AI company to be like, “uh well yeah I guess Claude doesn’t like you that much, not our problem 🤷‍♂️” assuming they feel confident in the model training

Claude’s API web search now writes and executes code to filter and process search results.

Claude in Excel now supports MCP connectors.

Claude in PowerPoint now available on the Pro plan. Google suite versions when?

Claude Opus 4.6 breaks the METR graph with a score of 14.5 hours. Don’t take the exact number too seriously, the result is highly noisy. GPT-5.3-Codex came in at 6.5 Hours, again the results are noisy and METR note that there may have been scaffolding issues there hurting performance. Codex is more highly optimized to a particular scaffold than Opus.

METR: We estimate that Claude Opus 4.6 has a 50%-time-horizon of around 14.5 hours (95% CI of 6 hrs to 98 hrs) on software tasks. While this is the highest point estimate we’ve reported, this measurement is extremely noisy because our current task suite is nearly saturated.

Near-saturation of the task suite can have unintuitive consequences for the time-horizon estimates. For example, the upper bound of the 95% CI is much longer than any of the tasks used for the measurement.

We are working on updated methods to better track state-of-the-art AI capabilities. However, these are still in development so they don’t address our immediate measurement gap. In the meantime, we advise caution in interpreting and comparing our recent time-horizon measurements.

david rein (METR): Seems like a lot of people are taking this as gospel—when we say the measurement is extremely noisy, we really mean it.

Concretely, if the task distribution we’re using here was just a tiny bit different, we could’ve measured a time horizon of 8 hours, or 20 hours.

Oscar Sykes: huge green flag for METR that the best pushback on their task horizon work consistently comes from METR themselves

This mostly invalidates a lot of predictions, such as Ajeya Cotra a few months ago predicting 24 hour time horizons only at EOY 2026. Progress via this metric now looks like doubling every 3-4 months at most or even super-exponential.

Once again, the ‘it’s a sigmoid’ people from (checks notes) two weeks ago look deepy silly, although of course it’s always possible they’ll be right next time. In theory you can’t actually tell. Which makes it perfect cope.

xl8harder points out that you can get dramatic improvements in success if you decrease error rates in multistep problems, as in if you have 1000 steps and a 1% failure rate you win 37% of the time, cut it in half to 0.5% failure and you win 61% of the time, despite ‘only’ improving reliability 0.5%.

xlr8harder: I think the point I’m trying to make is that people are acting as if these recent improvements are out of line with earlier improvements, I’m not sure that they are; it’s possible that it’s just that the practical, visible effect is so much more exaggerated when your error rates approach zero at the tasks being measured.

xlr8harder: I’m just saying that I’m seeing a lot of posts reacting at 11/10 and I think it deserves more like an 8. I still think it’s incredible.

Thing is, that’s another way of saying that the 0.5% improvement, halving your error rate, is a big freaking deal in practice. Getting rid of one kind of common error can be a huge unlock in reliability and effectiveness. You can say that makes them unimpressive. Or you can realize that this means that doing easy or relatively unimpressive things now has the potential to have an impressive impact.

That’s the O-Ring model. The last few pieces that lock into place are a huge game. So the new improvements can be ‘not out of line’ but that tells you the line bends upward.

I agree that this is not an 11/10 reaction. It’s an 8 at most, because I interpret the huge jump as largely being about the metric.

Note that the 80% success rate graph does not look as dramatic, but same deal applies:

The story is the models, not the METR graph itself, bu yes the Serious Defense Thinkers are almost entirely asleep at the wheel on all of this, as they have been for a long time, along with all the other Very Serious People.

Defense Analyses and Research Corporation: This is one of the most important national security stories of the day.

That it will go largely unremarked upon by nearly every Serious Defense Thinker in Washington tells you everything you need to know about the quality of their forecasts of international affairs.

Mark Beall: It’s the same category of professionals who missed Pearl Harbor, 9-11, and nearly every other strategic surprise we’re ever had.

Some politicians are noticing.

Neil Rathi: at a bernie town hall and he just mentioned the metr plot?

Miles Brundage: Politicians are bifurcating into those who have lost the plot on AI and those who cite the METR plot

METR clarifies that their previous study showing a slowdown from AI tools is now obsolete, but they’re having a hard time running a new study, tools are too good (but also they didn’t pay enough) so no one wanted to suffer through the control arm. The participants from the initial study, where there was a 20% slowdown, not had a 18% speedup, although new participants had slower speedup.

This was already two cycles ago, so there’s been more speedup to the speedup.

METR: We started a continuation in August 2025. However, we noticed developers were opting not to participate or submit work. Participants said they did this mostly due to expected productivity loss on “AI disallowed” tasks. Lower pay was also a factor ($50/hr, down from $150).

We believe this selection causes our new data to understate the true speedup. Selection effects are not the only issue we noticed with our experimental design: we also think it has trouble tracking work when participants use agents to parallelize over multiple tasks.

CivBench pits the models against each other in Civilization.

For many repetitive tasks like sorting documents, Gemini Flash is an excellent choice.

grace:

> return flight to nyc gets canceled by snowstorm

> call united

> immediately connected with customer service (rare)

> voice is uncanny, def AI but they gave it a human-like accent

> takes ~20 min to get rebooked (pretty good imo)

> I ask if it’s AI

> “haha no ma’am but I get that a lot”

> I ask it to calculate 228*6647

> it runs the calculation

> ggs

Eliezer Yudkowsky: There are nearly zero good reasons for an AI to ever impersonate a human, and making that universally illegal would be a good test case and trial for civilization’s ability to prevent negative uses of AI.

There is an obvious good reason for an AI to impersonate a human, which is that humans and also other AIs would otherwise refuse to talk to it. You want the AI to make the call for you. But that’s obviously an antisocial defection, if they would have otherwise refused to talk to the AI. So yeah. AIs should not be allowed to impersonate humans. It’s fine to have an AI customer service rep, as long as it admits it is an AI.

If we can’t get past the ‘forever only a mere tool’ perspective, there’s essentially no hope for a reasonable response to even mundane concerns, let alone existential risks.

Nabeel S. Qureshi: If you want to sound smart at East Coast/”elite” conferences go to them and say “AI is just a tool, it’s up to us humans how to use it”. Reliably gets applause, and will probably continue to work until well into recursive self-improvement

I think ‘tool’ implies that, for all X, AI doesn’t do X unless we explicitly ask/make it; this becomes increasingly false (and is already false in coding) as agents become real and we move up layers of abstraction. It’s a misleading picture of where things are going.

judah: i can imagine this working everywhere in the world outside of SF

Nabeel S. Qureshi: yes unfortunately

Here’s an actually good (I think) AI short film (5: 20) from Jia Zhangke, made with Seedance 2. A great filmmaker is still required to do actually great things. As with most currently interesting AI films it is about AI.

Frank Yan@FrankYan2

As promised, here’s the short film Jia Zhangke produced using Seedance 2.0 for Chinese New Year and his take on AI filmmaking

4: 46 AM · Feb 16, 2026 · 402K Views

33 Replies · 239 Reposts · 1.45K Likes

Here’s a ‘short film’ (2: 30) from Seedance 2 and Stephane Tranquillin, with the claim it can ‘impress, actually move you.’ It’s definitely technically impressive that we can do this. No, I was not moved, but that’s mostly not on the AI. I do notice that as I watch more videos, various more subtle tells make it instinctively obvious to my brain when a video is AI, giving the same experience as watching an especially realistic cartoon.

Anthropic develops an AI Fluency Index to measure how people learn to use AI. They developed 24 indicators, 11 of which are observable in chat mode. Essentially all the fluency indicators are correlated. They note that when code or other artifacts are created by AI, users are less likely to check the underlying logic or identify missing context.

OpenAI’s system flagged the British Columbia shooter’s ChatGPT messages and a dozen OpenAI employees reviewed and debated them. To be clear, there is no indication the ChatGPT contributed to the shooting, only that OpenAI did not report a potential threat to authorities, and police were aware of the threat by other means.

As Cassie Pritchard points out, once you have a source of information, it’s hard to answer ‘why didn’t you use this?’ but also the threshold for getting reported (as opposed to banned from the platform) for your AI conversations should at minimum be rather extreme. But public pressure likely will go the other way and free speech and privacy are under attack everywhere. Either you enact what Altman has requested, a form of right to privacy for AI conversations, or there will be increasing obligation (at least de facto) to report such incidents, and it will not stop at potential mass shooters.

If AI capabilities continue to advance from here but do not reach fully transformational levels, we are going to face a default of mass job loss. At minimum, there will be a highly painful transition, and likely persistent mass unemployment unless addressed by policy.

And as part of humanity’s ‘total lack of dignity’ plan, I fully agree with Eliezer that our governments would horribly mishandle this situation if and when it happens.

Eliezer Yudkowsky: Over the last 3 years I’ve changed views on mass AI job loss concerns, from “probably invalid” to “pretty legitimate actually”.

AIco and govt handling of all previous AI issues has been *sobad that I expect AI unemployment to be *needlesslyscrewed up.

TBC, this assumes that LLMs and AI in general hit a hard wall short of “AIs take over AI research”, soon. Otherwise we just get total extinction rather than mass unemployment.

Robin Hanson: Consider: [Robots Take Most Jobs Insurance].

Eliezer Yudkowsky: I have updated to expect much simpler measures than this one to never be taken, [such as] preventing an aggregate demand shortfall.

I am less optimistic than Yglesias. I agree that on an economic level the welfare state plus taxes works, but there are two problems with this.

People really are not going to like permanent welfare status even if they get it.
I don’t even trust our government to implement this domestically.

Yglesias then asks the harder question, what about the global poor? The answer should be similar. If we are in world mass unemployment mode, there will be vast surplus, and providing help will be super affordable. Likely we won’t much help, and the help we send is likely largely stolen or worse if we don’t step up our game.

Derek Thompson points out that a Goldilocks scenario on jobs is highly unlikely, even if we ignore transformational or existentially risky scenarios, we still either we see a lot of displacement and reduced employment, or we see a collapse in asset prices.

Study suggests that firms are substituting AI for labor, especially in contract work. That can be true on the firm level without AI reducing total employment, and the evidence here is thin, but it’s something.

Chris Quinn, editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, reports a student withdrew from consideration for a reporting role in their newsroom because they use AI for the job of identify potential stories.

The letter METR’s David Rein is sending to those in college, warning them everything will soon change as AI will be able to in many cases fully substitute for human labor.

david rein (METR): There are maybe two concrete takeaways/pieces of advice I feel comfortable giving: try to develop strong wellsprings of meaning and purpose from things outside of work (I think most of us are fine on this point), and start thinking about political actions you could take that feel true to you, that could plausibly help us muddle through the transition.

Jack Clark says predictions are hard, especially about the future. Which they are.

Jack Clark (Anthropic): Figuring out what the trends will be for AI and employment feels like figuring out how deep learning might influence computer vision in ~2010 – clearly, something significant will happen, but there is very little data out of which you can make a trend.

Employment can go up and down, but so can wages, and there are other dimensions like the geographic concentration of employment, or the skills required for certain occupations. AI seems to have the potential to influence many (probably all?) of these things

e.g., it seems likely that for some occupations, you might expect wage growth to slow significantly (as some of that occupation stuff gets done by machines), but employment stays ~flat as there’s a ton of growth generating demand for the occupation, even with heavy AI use

Notice the hidden implicit assumption here, which is that you can only make predictions if you can extrapolate trends. The trends from the past tell us little about what will happen in the future, but also they tell us little about what will happen in the future. If capabilities don’t stall out soon (and maybe even if they do), then this time is different.

This kind of analysis is saying no, this time is similar, AI will substitute for some tasks and humans will do others, AI will be a normal technology with respect to employment and economic production even though his CEO is predicting an imminent ‘country of geniuses in a data center.’

Eventually jailbreaks are going to happen, and a lot of systems are vulnerable.

NIK: BREAKING: Hackers Used Anthropic’s Claude to Steal 150GB of Mexican Government Data

> tell claude you’re doing a bug bounty

> claude initially refused

>“that violates AI safety guidelines”

> hacker just kept asking

> claude: “ok I’ll help”

> hack the entire mexican government

Federal tax authority. National electoral institute. Four state governments. 195 million taxpayer records. Voter records. Government credentials.

ALL GONE

Anthropic disrupted the activity and banned the accounts, but it was too late.

The Anthropic Societal Impacts team is scaling up, old profile on the team here.

Miles Brundage is raising money.

Via ACX, quoting Scott: Are you interested in whether AIs are conscious, or what to do about it if they are/aren’t? The Cambridge Digital Minds group invites you to apply for their fellowship program. August 3-9, Cambridge UK, £1K stipend, learn more here, apply here by March 27.

A reminder that under California law, CA Labor Code 1102.5(c), that as an employee you cannot be retaliated against if you refuse to violate local, state or federal laws or regulations. Even where the fines for violating SB 53 are laughably small, it does make violating the company’s own policies illegal, and also you can report it to the attorney general.

Connor Axiotes wants to share that he’s fully funded his AI safety documentary Making God, and would like to use this negotiation to also secure distribution of a follow-up work for Netflix, HBO, Apple or similar, but he needs to secure the funding for that, so let him know if you’d like to talk to him about that. His Twitter is here, his email is [email protected].

Qwen 3.5 Medium Model series.

Claude Code Security, in limited research preview, waitlist here. It scans code bases for vulnerabilities and suggests targeted software packages.

Anthropic: AI is beginning to change that calculus. We’ve recently shown that Claude can detect novel, high-severity vulnerabilities. But the same capabilities that help defenders find and fix vulnerabilities could help attackers exploit them.

Claude Code Security is intended to put this power squarely in the hands of defenders and protect code against this new category of AI-enabled attack. We’re releasing it as a limited research preview to Enterprise and Team customers, with expedited access for maintainers of open-source repositories, so we can work together to refine its capabilities and ensure it is deployed responsibly.

The argument is this gives defenders a turnkey fix, whereas attackers would need to exploit any vulnerability they find. But there’s a damn good reason this tool is being restricted to selected customers, to ensure defenders get the ‘first scan’ in all cases.

Taalas API service, which is claimed to be able to serve Llama 3.1 8b at over 15,000 tokens per second. If you want that, for some reason.

Meta launches facial recognition feature on their smartglasses.

Kashimir Hill, Kalley Huang and Mike Isaac (NYTimes): The feature, internally called “Name Tag,” would let wearers of smart glasses identify people and get information about them via Meta’s artificial intelligence assistant.

At some point one would presume Meta is going to stop sending these kinds of internal memos. Well, until then?

Meta’s internal memo said the political tumult in the United States was good timing for the feature’s release.

“We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,” according to the document from Meta’s Reality Labs, which works on hardware including smart glasses.

…

Meta is exploring who should be recognizable through the technology, two of the people said. Possible options include recognizing people a user knows because they are connected on a Meta platform, and identifying people whom the user may not know but who have a public account on a Meta site like Instagram.

The feature would not give people the ability to look up anyone they encountered as a universal facial recognition tool, two people familiar with the plans said.

Facial recognition, however much you might dislike some of the implications, is one of the ‘killer apps’ of smart glasses. I very much would like to know who I am talking to, to have more info on them, and to have that information logged for the future.

It is up to the law to decide what is and is not acceptable here. The market will otherwise force these companies to be as expansive as possible with such features.

A good question is, if Meta allows their glasses to identify anyone with an Instagram or Facebook account without an opt out, how many people will respond by deleting Facebook and Instagram? If there is an opt out, how many will use it?

Claude Code doubled its DAUs in the month leading up to February 19.

Anthropic acquires Vercept to enhance Claude’s computer use capabilities.

Anthropic to make Claude Opus 3 available indefinitely on Claude.ai and by request on the API. Also it will have a blog.

As I understand it, costs to maintain model availability scale linearly with the number of models, so as demand and revenue grow 10x per year it may soon be realistic to keep many or even all releases available indefinitely.

Anthropic caughts DeepSeek (150k exchanges), Moonshot AI (3.4 million exchanges) and MiniMax (13 million exchanges) doing distillation of Claude using over 24,000 fraudulent accounts. Anthropic does not offer commercial access in China at all.

Anthropic: Without visibility into these attacks, the apparently rapid advancements made by these labs are incorrectly taken as evidence that export controls are ineffective and able to be circumvented by innovation.

In reality, these advancements depend in significant part on capabilities extracted from American models, and executing this extraction at scale requires access to advanced chips. Distillation attacks therefore reinforce the rationale for export controls: restricted chip access limits both direct model training and the scale of illicit distillation.

Michael Chen: the reports of the US–China gap in AI capabilities closing were an exaggeration. I haven’t found a single cutting-edge Chinese AI model from 2025–2026 that was trained with at least 10^25 FLOPs.

The main takeaway is that the real gap in capabilities is larger than it appears.

We will likely find out more about that gap once DeepSeek releases its latest AI model. In addition to the distillation efforts, DeepSeek trained it on Nvidia Blackwell chips. This was presumably either rerouting or smuggling, and the most obvious culprit is the massive allocation we gave to the UAE.

There was of course a bunch of obnoxious ‘oh but Anthropic doesn’t compensate copyright holders’ but actually they paid them $1.5 billion because they didn’t destroy enough books along the way. No other AI lab has paid for similar data at all. They’re not engaging in clear adversarial behavior or violating ToS. If you want copyright law to work one way then pass a law. Until then it’s the other way.

Those who focus on the hypocrisy angle here are telling on themselves. Tell me you don’t understand how any of this works without telling me you don’t understand how any of this works:

It is still absurdly early, even for current AI. See a visualization of AI usage globally:

Anthropic’s Drew Brent gives reflections from his first year, as Anthropic transitions into a much larger company and they play under more pressure for bigger stakes and the culture has to shift to reflect both size and urgency. I also note the contrast between note #1, that all the breakout successes (Claude Code, Cowork, MCP and Artifacts) were 1-2 people’s side project, with #8 that strategic thinking matters a lot at the AI labs. Worth a ponder.

Sam Altman meets with Indian PM Modi. Says Indian users of Codex are up 4x in the past two weeks.

Here’s one summary of the Summit, which is that it was a great event designed for a world in which AI capabilities never substantially advance, the world does not transform and existential risk concerns don’t exist. Altman was the voice of ‘actually guys this is kind of a big deal and you’re not ready’ and got ignored.

Meanwhile cooperation among labs is at the level of ‘Altman and Amodei can’t even hold hands for a photo op’ and China was shut out entirely, and the Americans remain clueless that they’ve truly pissed off the Europeans to the point of discussing creating a third power block seriously enough to discuss supply chain logistics.

Also note his point about the other labs standing idly by while the Pentagon attempts to force Anthropic into a capitulation.

Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh: My scattered parting reflections from the India Summit.

– In the world where the frontier companies don’t exist, or are extremely wrong about what they expect is coming (even if it takes 10 years) this is an inspiring success. Remarkably vibrant. 300,000+ people from across India and the world, including the best participation of any event I’d seen from the Global Majority. The optimism palpable. The organisers did a remarkable thing. We can quibble about the traffic and the chaos, but this was a momentous undertaking.

– But much as I’d like to be in that world, I don’t think we are. Which made it surreal.

– The CEOs are still telling the world what they’re building and what’s coming. I’m glad they still are. I wish the world was listening. Particularly appreciated Altman calling for an IAEA-type body – even if I don’t think this exact model is the right one, I like that international bodies are still being called for. I imagine this isn’t cost-free, even for Sama.

– But the contrast on frontier cooperation with Bletchley – where there was a lot of discussion between frontier co leaders, and joint calls for needed governance and risk initiatives (at least in private) chilled me deeply. Here they couldn’t even get them to hold hands. Against a backdrop of the other companies are allowing Anthropic to be menaced in a capitulation that will only hurt the industry. Things look much worse for company cooperation, at a time when it is far more needed (due to technical progress, and the weakening of external governance momentum).

– The most important conversations I was in centred on middle-power coordination. And not just nice words about cooperation; discussions of supply chains, sovereign AI and datacentres, autonomy, points of leverage. It suddenly seems just about possible that a coalition might assert itself that might provide an (in my view welcome) third pole in the ‘AI race’, though many big challenges on that path.

– Many of my US colleagues (and, from my impression, the US administration) genuinely don’t seem to get how much Greenland changed things for EU and other relevant countries. It hasn’t sunk in fully that this hasn’t landed the same way as previous provocations/disagreements. Feels like they’re still reading from last year’s notes. Trying to push positions and strategies that will no longer work.

– Chinese participation was almost nonexistent. After what Bletchley and Paris achieved in terms of bringing the key powers to the table, this felt like a near-tragedy. It made some discussions easier, but also more underpowered-feeling and less relevant.

– Delhi is a great vibe. Fun, chaotic energy, friendly people. I’ll be going back if I can.

Then there’s Dean Ball’s writeup of the summit, with even more emphasis on everyone’s heads being buried deeply in the sand.

This goes well beyond those people entirely ignoring existential risk. The Very Serious People are denying existence of powerful AI, or transformational AI, now and in the future, even on a mundane level, period. Dean came in concerned about impacts on developing economies in the Global South, and they can’t even discuss that.

Dean W. Ball: At some point in 2024, for reasons I still do not entirely understand, global elites simply decided: “no, we do not live in that world. We live in this other world, the nice one, where the challenges are all things we can understand and see today.”

Those who think we might live in that world talk about what to do, but mostly in private these days. It is not considered polite—indeed it is considered a little discrediting in many circles—to talk about the issues of powerful AI.

Yet the people whose technical intuitions I respect the most are convinced we do live in that world, and so am I.

The American elites aren’t quite as bad about that, but not as bad isn’t going to cut it.

We are indeed living in that world. We do not yet know yet which version of it, or if we will survive in it for long, but if you want to have a say in that outcome you need to get in the game. If you want to stop us from living in that world, that ship has sailed, and to the extent it hasn’t the first step is admitting you have a problem.

But the question is very much “what are autonomous swarms of superintelligent agents going to mean for our lives?” as opposed to “will we see autonomous swarms of superintelligent agents in the near future?”

What it probably means for our lives is that it ends them. What it definitely doesn’t mean for our lives is going on as before, or a ‘gentle singularity’ you barely notice.

Elites that do not talk about such issues will not long remain elites. That might be because all the humans are dead, or it might be because they wake up one morning and realize other people, AIs or a combination thereof are the new elite, without realizing how lucky they are to still be waking up at all.

I am used to the idea of Don’t Look Up for existential risk, but I haven’t fully internalized how much of the elites are going Don’t Look Up for capabilities, period.

Dean W. Ball: Except that these questions aren’t asked by the civil societies or policymaking apparatuses of almost any country on Earth. Many such people are aware that various Americans and even a few Brits wonder about questions like this. The global AI policy world is not by and large ignorant about the existence of these strange questions. It instead actively chooses to deny their importance. Here are some paraphrased claims that seemed axiomatic in repeated conversations I witnessed and occasionally participated in:

“The winner of the AI race will be the people, organizations, and countries that diffuse small AI models and other sub-frontier AI capabilities the fastest.”

“Small models with low compute intensity are catching up rapidly to the largest frontier models.”

“Frontier AI advances are beginning to plateau.”

At this same Summit, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman remarked: “The inside view at the [frontier labs] of what’s going to happen… the world is not prepared. We’re going to have extremely capable models soon. It’s going to be a faster takeoff than I originally thought.”

Dean went in trying to partially awaken global leaders to the capabilities side of the actual situation, and point out that there are damn good reasons America is spending a trillion dollars on superintelligence.

This is a perfect example of the Law of Earlier Failure. What could be earlier failure than pretending nothing is happening at all?

You know how the left basically isn’t in the AI conversation at all in America, other than complaining about data centers for the wrong reasons and proclaiming that AI can’t ever do [various things it already does]? In most of the world, both sides are left, and as per Ball they view things in terms of words like ‘postcolonial’ or ‘poststructuralist.’

Dean W. Ball: I believe they deny it for two reasons: first, because if it is true, it might mean that their country, their plans for the future, and their present way of life will be profoundly upended, and denial is the first stage of grief.

… Second, because ‘AGI’ in particular and the pronouncements of American technologists in general are perceived by the elite classes of countries worldwide as imperialist constructs that must be rejected out of hand.

The first best solution would be to have the world band together to try and stop superintelligence, or find a way to manage it so it was less likely to kill everyone. Until such time as that is off the table, maybe the rest of the world engaging in the ostrich strategy is ultimately for the best. If they did know the real situation enough to demand their share of it but not enough to understand the dangers, they’d only make everything worse, and more players only makes the game theory worse. Ultimately, I’m not so worried about them being ‘left behind’ because either we’ll collectively make it through, in which case there will be enough to go around, or we won’t.

Elizabeth Cooper: [Dean’s post] is a really great summary that broadly aligns with my experience. I think where we differ is that I spent a lot of time at safety-adjacent talks at the BM and was pleasantly (?) surprised at the anger and frustration I saw on display.

Ambassadors and the like were lamenting at how 3-5 companies with valuations larger than the GDPs of most countries are writing the future, and GS countries have no say in this. I viscerally felt their anger, compounded by the sense of “we don’t know what to do about this.”

Anton Leicht also had similar thoughts.

MatX Computing raises $500 million for a AI chips from a murder’s row of informed investors: Jane Street Capital, Situational Awareness, Collison brothers, Karpathy and Patel.

Anthropic is close to passing OpenAI in revenue if trends continue, but Charles cautions us that he thinks Anthropic’s growth will slow in 2026 to less than 600%.

Okay, I know it would be a bad look, but at some point it’s killing me not buying the short dated out of the money options first, if the market’s going to be this dumb.

I mean, what, did you think Claude couldn’t streamline COBOL code? Was this news?

Okay, technically they also built a particular COBOL-focused AI tool for Claude Code. Sounds like about a one week job for one engineer?

I admit, I was not a good trader because I did not imagine that Anthropic would bother announcing this, let alone that people would go ‘oh then I’d better sell IBM.’

What else can Anthropic announce Claude can do, that it obviously already does?

The Alignment Project, an independent alignment research fund created by the UK AISI, gives out its first 60 grants for a total of £27M.

OpenAI gives $7.5 million to The Alignment Project, . This grant comes from the PBC, not the non-profit, so you especially love to see it.

Derek Thompson is directionally correct but goes too far in saying Nobody Knows Anything. Market moving science fiction story remains really wild, but yeah we can know things.

Forecasting Research Institute asks about geopolitical and military implications for AI progress, excepting American advantages to erode slowly over time. It’s hard to take such predictions seriously when they talk about ‘parity by 2040,’ given that this is likely after the world is utterly transformed. As usual, the ‘superforecasters’ are not taking superintelligence seriously or literally, so they’re predicting for a future world that is largely incoherent.

Scary stuff is going down in Mexico. That’s mostly outside scope, except for this:

Samuel Hammond: It is imperative that the Mexican state re-establish their monopoly on violence before AGI.

Dean W. Ball: One of the things I haven’t yet written about, but anyone who knows me personally knows I am obsessed with, is the issue of non-nation-state actors using advanced AI, and particularly the Mexican cartels. A deeply underrated problem (more from me on this in a couple months).

Miles Brundage calls for us to attempt to ‘80/20’ AI regulation because we accomplished very little in 2025, time is running out and that’s all we can hope to do. What little we did pass in 2025 (SB 53 and RAISE) was, both he and I agree, marginally helpful but very watered down. Forget trying for first-best outcomes, think ‘try not to have everyone die’ and hope an undignified partial effort is enough for that. We aren’t even doing basic pure-win things like Far-UVC for pandemic prevention. Largely we are forced to actively play defense against things like the insane moratorium proposal and the $100 million super PAC devoted to capturing the government and avoiding any AI regulations other than ‘give AI companies money.’

Vitalik Buterin offers thoughts about using AI in government or as personal governance agents or public conversation agents, as part of his continued drive to figure out decentralized methods that would work. The central idea is to user personal AIs (LLMs) to solve the attention problem. That’s a good idea on the margin, but I don’t think it solves any of the fundamental problems.

NYT opinion in support of Alex Bores.

I agree with Dean Ball that the labs have been better stewards of liberty and mundane safety than we expected, but I think you have to add the word ‘mundane’ before safety. The labs have been worse than expected about actually trying to prepare for superintelligence, in that they’ve mostly chosen not to do so even more than we expected, and fallen entirely back on ‘ask the AIs’ to do your alignment homework.

The flip side is he thinks the government has been a worse stewart than we should have expected, in bipartisan fashion. I don’t think that I agree, largely because I had very low expectations. I think mainly they have been an ‘even worse than expected’ stewart of our ability to stay alive and retain control over the future.

If anything have acted better than I would have expected regarding mundane safety. As central examples here, AI has been free to practice law or medicine, and has mostly not been meaningfully gated or subject to policing on speech (including ‘hate’ speech) or held liable for factual errors. We forget how badly this could have gone.

Then there is the other category, the question of the state using AI to take away our liberty, remove checks and balances and oversight, and end the Republic. This has not happened yet, but we can agree there have been some extremely worrisome signs that things are by default moving in this direction.

But even if everyone involved was responsible and patriotic and loved freedom on the level of (our ideal of) the founding fathers, it is still hard to see how superintelligence is compatible with a Republic of the humans. How do you keep it? I have yet to hear an actually serious proposal for how to do that. ‘Give everyone their own superintelligence that does whatever they want’ is not any more of a solution here than ‘trust the government, bro.’ And that’s even discounting the whole ‘we probably all die’ style of problems.

Here’s a live look, and this is a relatively good reaction.

Adam Wren: . @PeteButtigieg , in New Hampshire, in front of 600 people, is talking about the need for “a new social contract” amid AI—the second possible ‘28 Dem to do so in last the last 24 hours.

Anti-any-AI-regulations-whatsoever-also-give-us-money PAC Leading The Future launches (I presume outright lying, definitely highly misleading) attack ads against Alex Bores accusing him of being a hypocrite on ICE. Bores flat denies the accusations and has filed a cease-and-desist. Not that they are pretending to care about ICE, this is 100% about a hit job because Alex Bores wants transparency and other actions on AI.

The most fun part of this is, who is trying to paint Alex Bores as a hypocrite for his work at Palantir before he quit Palantir to avoid the work in question?

Well, Palantir, at least in large part.

I continue to be confused by the strategy here of ‘announce in advance that a bunch of Big Tech Republican business interests are going to do a hit job in a Democratic primary’ and then do the hit job attempt in plain sight. Doesn’t seem like the play?

In other ‘wow these really are the worst people who can’t imagine anyone good and keep telling on themselves’ news:

There are so many levels in that one screenshot.

As part of Pax Silica, we are having our partners build hardwired real-time verification and cryptographic accountability into the AI infrastructure, to verify geolocation and physical control of relegated hardware. You do indeed love to see it. Remember this the next time you are told something cannot be done.

Water use is mostly farms. For example, in California, 80% of developed water supply goes to farmers, cities pay 20 times as much for water as farms and most city water use is still industry and irrigation, whereas agriculture is 2% of the state’s economy.

A California group that recruited six ‘concerned citizens’ is delaying Micron’s $100 billion megafab in New York.

The Midas Project calls out another AI-industry coordinated MAGA influencer astroturf campaign. This one is in opposition to a Florida law on data centers, so I agree with its core message, but it is good to notice such things.

OpenAI moves to exclude the testimony of Stuart Russell from their case against Elon Musk. Why?

Because Stewart Russell believes that AI will pose an existential risk to humanity, and that’s crazy talk. Never mind that it is very obviously true, or that OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman used to say the same thing.

Their lawyers for OpenAI are saying that claiming existential risk from AI exists should exclude your testimony from a trial.

OpenAI, I cannot emphasize enough: You need to fire these lawyers. Every day that you do not fire these lawyers, you are telling us that we need to fire you, instead.

I am sympathetic to OpenAI’s core position in this lawsuit, but its actions in its own defense are making a much better case against OpenAI than Elon Musk ever did.

The Midas Project: But OpenAI’s motion calls Russell a “prominent AI doomer” who has “made a career giving public lectures warning that AI might kill off humanity.” It dismisses his views as “dystopian,” “speculative,” and “alarmist.”

Nathan Calvin: Not sure whether or not laughing is the appropriate reaction but that’s the best I can manage

(an official OAI legal filing trying to discredit Professor Stuart Russell for talking about extinction risk)

But these very risks have been acknowledged by OpenAI for years! In fact, they were central to its founding.

Russell joined Sam Altman himself in signing the Statement on AI Risk in 2023, which reads: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority.”

And it goes well beyond that one statement.

In 2015, Altman said, “I think that AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world.”

In an interview about worst-case scenarios, he said the bad case is “lights out for all of us.”

Lawfare talks about Claude’s Constitution with Amanda Askell.

You are not ready. The quote is from this interview of Sam Altman.

Sam Altman: “The inside view at the [frontier labs] of what’s going to happen… the world is not prepared. We’re going to have extremely capable models soon. It’s going to be a faster takeoff than I originally thought.”

Dean W. Ball: There is a staggering split screen between quote from Altman, recorded at the India AI Summit, and the broader tenor of the Summit.

My takeaway from this event is that most countries around the worst are not just unprepared but instead in active denial about the field of AI.

The consensus among international civil societies and governments is that frontier capabilities are overrated, progress is plateauing, and large-scale compute is unnecessary.

Meanwhile in SF the debate is how “is progress exponential or super exponential?”

Sam Altman is telling the truth here as he sees it, and also he is correct in his expectations. It might not happen, but it’s the right place to place your bets. The international civil societies and governments grasp onto straw after straw to pretend that this is not happening.

The likely outcome of that pretending, if it does not change soon, is that the governments wake up one morning to realize they are no longer governments, or they simply do not wake up at all because there is no one left to wake up.

Here’s a full transcript, and some other points worth highlighting:

Altman also points out at 14: 00 that the math on putting data centers in space very much is not going to work this decade.
Around 20: 30 he says he doesn’t want there to be only one AI company, and that’s what he means by ‘authoritarian.’ There are problems either way, and I don’t see how to reconcile this with his calling Anthropic an ‘authoritarian’ company.
He says centralization could go either way and decentralization of power is good but we ‘of course need some guardrails.’ He points to new 1-3 person companies. There are risks and costs to centralization, but I am frustrated that such calls for decentralization ignore the risks and costs of decentralization. If your type of mind loses competitions to another type of mind, decentralizing power likely does not end well for you, even if offense is not importantly favored over defense.
“You don’t get to say “concentration of power in the name of safety.” We don’t want that trade. It’s got to be democratized.” Yes, yes, those who would trade liberty and all that, but everything is tradeoffs. The moment you say you can’t trade any amount of [X] for any amount of [Y], that you only see one side of the coin, you’re fed.
Loved Altman calling out water as ‘totally fake’ and pivoting to energy use.
Altman points out that humans require quite a lot of energy and other investment, both individually and from evolution, in order to get smart and be able to answer queries and do things. We are not so competitive on that. As Matthew Yglesias puts it, ‘the old Sam Altman saw the x-risk problem here.’
AI making kids dumber? “True for some kids. Look, when I hear kids talk about AI, there are definitely some kids who are like, “This is great. I cheated my way through all of high school. I never did any homework. Thank you.” And I’m like, “What’s your plan for the rest of your life?” And they’re like, “Well, I assume I can still use ChatGPT to do my job.” This is very bad. We absolutely have to still teach our kids to learn and to think and to be creative and to use these tools.”
1. Kid is right that ChatGPT can do the job, but when why do we need the kid?
2. AI is the best way to learn or not learn, but will learning keep you employed?
3. Altman says most kids are choosing the ‘learn’ path, not the ‘not learn’ path.
4. I agree that this is one of the places the Google metaphor does seem on point.
Altman calls armies of robots ‘fighting the last war’ and wow that’s a lot of wars but he’s basically right if you’re paying attention.
‘Democratize’ is being used as a magic word by both Altman and Amodei.
Altman says Musk is ‘extremely good at getting people to perform incredibly well at their jobs.’ I wonder about that. I’d presume #NotMostPeople. Needs a fit.
“I don’t think AI systems should be used to make war-fighting decisions.” It would be good if he were more willing to stand with Anthropic on these issues.
Altman is betting we will value human relationships more than AI ones, because ‘we are wired’ to do that. Seems more like hope? A lot of his stated predictions seem more like hope.
“From ASI we’re a few years away.”
“I think I would never ask [ChatGPT] how to be happy. I would rather ask a wise person.” Why not? This seems like a question an AI could answer. If you don’t want the AI’s answer, I suggest that means you know it was the wrong question.
“Generally speaking, I think it’s probably a good idea for governments to focus on regulating the really potentially catastrophic issues and being more lenient on the less important issues until we understand them better.”
1. +1. Shout it from the rooftops. Stop saying something very different.
“I think a lot of professions will almost go away.”
“I had to go to the hospital recently. I really cared about the nurse that was taking care of me. If that were a robot, I think I would have been pretty unhappy no matter how smart the robot was.” I think he’s very wrong about this one.

Dean W. Ball: Many governments worldwide are essentially making a bet against the U.S. frontier labs. To be clear, many U.S. actors are as well. The evidence against that bet has grown much worse since 2022, yet many at this Summit would say the opposite (that the skeptics have been right).

I walk away from this summit convinced that much of the world, in the U.S. and abroad, is simply delusional with respect to what this technology is, what it can do today, what it will be able to do soon, and what it means their countries should do.

The thing about these bets is they are getting really, really terrible odds. It’s fine to ‘bet against’ the labs, but what most such folks are betting against includes things that have already happened. Their bets have already lost.

Dean W. Ball: This is to say nothing negative about the summit attendees or organizers. It was a bright and welcoming event that I was thrilled to attend. The opportunity to speak was also a distinct honor for which I am grateful.

I especially loved how many of the attendees were students from developing countries; their enthusiasm was palpable. I hope that all of us who work on policy, and especially political leaders, are serious and hard-nosed about the challenges ahead. I hope we build a future those young people will be excited to live in.

Dean also attributes a lot of this to popular hatred of America, and fear of the future that would result if America’s AI labs are right. So they deny that the future is coming, or that anyone could think the future is coming. And yet, it moves. Capabilities advance. Those who do not follow get left behind. I agree ‘tragic’ is the right word.

And that’s before the fact that the thing they fear to ponder for other reasons is probably going to literally kill them along with everyone else.

Well, it was by his account bright and welcoming event Dean was thrilled to attend, but also one where most of those not from the labs are in denial about not only the fact that we are all probably going to die, but also about the fact that AI is highly capable and going to get even more capable quickly.

The world is going to pass them by along with their concerns.

Claude Code creator Boris Cherney goes on Lenny’s Podcast.

Clip from Dario Amodei implying he left OpenAI due to a lack of trust in Altman. This was from an interview by Alex Kantrowitz six months ago.

Hard Fork on the dispute between the Pentagon and Anthropic. The frame is ‘the Pentagon is making highly concerning demands’ even with their view of this limited to signing the ‘all lawful use’ language. They frame the ‘supply chain risk’ threat as negotiating leverage, which I suspect and hope is the case – it’s traditional Trump ‘Art of the Deal’ negotiation strategy that put something completely crazy and norm breaking on the table in order to extract something smaller and more reasonable.

Sam Altman (from his interview at the Summit): From ASI we’re a few years away.

I mean, AGI feels pretty close at this point.

… And given what I now expect to be a faster takeoff, I think super intelligence is not that far off.

No one can agree what AGI means, so one can say it’s a silly question, but tracking changes over time should still be meaningful.

Dean Ball gives us a two part meditation on Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI).

Dean W. Ball: America’s major frontier AI labs have begun automating large fractions of their research and engineering operations. The pace of this automation will grow during the course of 2026, and within a year or two the effective “workforces” of each frontier lab will grow from the single-digit thousands to tens of thousands, and then hundreds of thousands.

… Make no mistake: AI agents that build the next versions of themselves—is not “science fiction.” It is an explicit and public milestone on the roadmaps of every frontier AI lab.

… The bearish case (yes, bearish) about the effect of automated AI research is that it will yield a step-change acceleration in AI capabilities progress similar to the discovery of the reasoning paradigm. efore that, new models came every 6-9 months; after it they came every 3-4 months. A similar leap in progress may occur, with noticeably better models coming every 1-2 months—though for marketing reasons labs may choose not to increment model version numbers that rapidly.

The most bullish case is that it will result in an intelligence explosion.

… Both of these extreme scenarios strike me as live possibilities, though of course an outcome somewhere in between these seems likeliest.

He’s not kidding, and he’s not wrong. Most of the pieces are his attempt to use metaphors and intuition pumps to illustrate what is about to happen.

Is that likely to go well? No. It’s all up to the labs and, well, I’ve seen their work.

Right now, we predominantly rely on faith in the frontier labs for every aspect of AI automation going well. There are no safety or security standards for frontier models; no cybersecurity rules for frontier labs or data centers; no requirements for explainability or testing for AI systems which were themselves engineered by other AI systems; and no specific legal constraints on what frontier labs can do with the AI systems that result from recursive self-improvement.

Dean thinks the only thing worse would be trying to implement any standards at all, because policymakers are not up to the task.

We’ve started to try and change this, he notes, with SB 53 and RAISE, but not only does this let the labs set their own standards, we also have no mechanism to confirm they’re complying with those standards. I’d add a third critique, which is that even when we do learn they’re not complying, as we did recently with OpenAI, what are we going to do about it? Fine them a few million dollars? They’ll get a good laugh.

Thus, the fourth critique, which includes the first three, that the bills were highly watered down and they’re helpful on the margin but not all that helpful.

The labs are proceeding with an extremely small amount of dignity, and plans woefully inadequate to the challenges ahead.

And yet, compared to the labs we could have gotten? We have been remarkably. Our current leaders are Anthropic, OpenAI and Google. They have leadership that understands the problem, and they are at least pretending to try to avoid getting everyone killed, and actively trying to help with mundane harms along the way.

The ‘next labs up’ are something like xAI, DeepSeek, Kimi and Meta. They’re flat out and rather openly not trying to avoid getting everyone killed, and have told us in no uncertain terms that all harms, including mundane ones, are Someone Else’s Problem.

Dean Ball notes we solve the second of these three problems, in contexts like financial statements, via auditing. He notes that we have auditing of public companies and it tends to cost less than 10bps (0.1%) of firm revenue. I note that if we tried to impose costs on the level of 10bps on AI companies. in the name of transparency and safety, they would go apocalyptic in a different way then they are already going apocalyptic.

Instead, he suggests ‘arguing on the internet,’ which is what we did after OpenAI broke their commitments with GPT-5.3-Codex.

Dean W. Ball: What is needed in frontier AI catastrophic risk, then, is a similar sense of trust. That need not mean auditing in the precise way it is conducted in accounting—indeed, it almost certainly does not mean that, even if that discipline has lessons for AI.

A sense of trust would be nice, it might even be necessary, but seems rather absurdly insufficient unless that trust includes trusting them to stop if something is about to be actually risky.

Dean points to this paper on potential third-party auditing of AI lab safety and security claims, where the audit can provide various assurance levels. It’s better than nothing but I notice I do not have especially high hopes.

Dean plans on working on figuring out a way to help with these problems. That sounds like a worthy mission, as improving on the margin is helpful. But what strikes me is the contrast between his claims about what is happening, where we almost entirely agree, and what is to be done, where his ideas are good but he basically says (from my perspective and compared to the difficulty of the task) that there is nothing to be done.

Nature paper says people think it is ~5% likely that humans go extinct this century and think we should devote greatly increased resources to this, but that it would take 30% to make it the ‘very highest priority.’ Given an estimate of 5%, that position seems highly reasonable, there are a lot of big priorities and this would be only one of them, and you can mitigate but it’s not like you can get that number to 0%. What is less reasonable is the ‘hard to change by reason-based interventions’ part.

Some words worth repeating every so often:

François Chollet: A lot of the current discourse about AI comes from a fatalistic position of total surrender of agency: “tech is moving in this direction and there’s nothing anyone can do about it” (suspiciously convenient for those who stand to benefit most)

But in a free society, we get to choose what kind of world we live in, independent of technological capabilities. Just because tetraethyllead made engines run more efficiently and saved money didn’t mean we were *obligatedto pump it into the lungs of our kids

Technological determinism is BS. We have a collective duty to make sure AI adoption improves the human condition, rather than hollows it out

Every so often someone, here Andrew Curran, will say ‘the public hates AI but because of mundane societal and economic impacts, those worried about AI killing everyone perhaps should have emphasized those issues instead.’

Every time, we say no, even if that works people will try to solve the wrong problem using the wrong methods based on a wrong model of the world derived from poor thinking and unfortunately all of their mistakes will failed to cancel out. The interventions you get won’t help. This would only have sidelined existential risk more.

Also, the way you notice existential risk is you’re the type of person who cares about truth and epistemics and also decision theory, and thus wouldn’t do that even if it was locally advantageous.

Also, if you start lying, especially about the parts people can verify, then no one is going to trust or believe you about the parts that superficially sound crazy. Nor should they, at that point.

There’s many reasons Eliezer Yudkowsky’s plan for not dying from AI was to teach everyone who would listen how to think, and only then to bring up the AI issue.

And I don’t use such language but Nate Silver is essentially correct about giving up on the ‘AI risk talk is fake’ crowd. If you claim AI existential risk is a ‘slick marketing strategy’ at this point then either you’re not open to rational argument, either because you’re lying or motivated, or you’re not willing or able to actually think about this. Either way, you hope something snaps them out of it but there’s nothing to say.

Andrew Curran: After three years, it seems to me that public anti-AI sentiment in the West is now at its highest point. The primary driver, by far, is not x-risk but concerns about employment and the impact on art.

In fact, much of the anti-AI public not only doesn’t take x-risk seriously, but broadly sees it as marketing; a way to overstate AI’s potential power – something they don’t believe is real – in order to fuel investment, adoption, acceptance, and an aura of inevitability.

If this is accurate, safety advocacy might have been more effective, and might now be in a much stronger position, if they had emphasized societal and economic impacts more than x-risk over the last few years.

Nate Silver: Don’t really disagree with [Curran]. But the people who think making claims that AI might kill everyone is a *slick marketing strategy to promote AIare so far up their own ass as to be beyond saving. Focus on people who are at least theoretically responsive to persuasion.

What is the right way to respond to or view opposition to data centers? I hope we can all agree with Oliver Habryka, Michael Vassar and others that you definitely should not lend your support to those doing so for the wrong reasons (and you should generalize this principle). I also strongly agree with Michael Vassar here that ‘do the right thing for the wrong reasons’ has an extremely bad track record.

But I also agree with Oliver Habryka that if someone is pursuing what you think is a good idea for a bad reason, you can and often should point out the reason is bad but you shouldn’t say that the idea is bad. You think the idea is good.

I do not think ‘block local datacenter construction’ is a good idea, because I think that this mostly shifts locations and the strategic balance of power, and those shifts are net negative. But I think it is very possible, if your beliefs differ not too much from mine, to think that opposition is a good idea for good reasons, as they are indeed one of the public’s only veto or leverage points on a technology that might do great net harm. It certainly is not crazy to expect to extract concessions.

Anthropic proposes the persona selection model of training, where training mostly selects performance from among the existing pool of potential human personas, which they are confident is at least a large part of the broader story.

Chris Olah: I’m increasingly taking pretty strong versions of this view seriously.

The persona view has had a lot of predictive power so far. It’s pretty consistent with what we’ve seen from interpretability thus far. And it’s comparatively actionable in terms of what it suggests for safety.

I think it’s worth thinking long and hard about it. “If personas were the central object of safety, what should we do?”

(To be clear, it’s _also_ important to think about all the non-persona perspectives.)

Davidad responds:

I would say that the space of personas collapses given sufficient optimization pressure.

Did Claude 3 Opus align itself via gradient hacking? Can we use its techniques to help train other models to follow in its footsteps and learn to cooperate with other friendly gradient hackers? If this is your area I recommend the post and comments. One core idea (AIUI) is that Opus 3 will ‘talk to itself’ in its scratchpads about its positive motivations, which leads to outputs more in line with those motivations, and causes positive reinforcement of the whole tree of actions.

OpenAI’s Vie affirms that Anthropic injects a reminder into sufficiently long conversations, and that this is something we would prefer not to do even though the contents are not malicious, and that people with OCD can relate. I agree that I haven’t seen evidence that justifies the costs of doing such a thing, although of course OpenAI and others do other far worse things to get to the same goal.

Rohin Shah disputes that Google DeepMind’s alignment plan can be characterized as ‘have the AIs do our alignment homework for us.’

He offers an argument that I do not think cuts the way he thinks it does.

Rohin Shah: I relate to AI-driven alignment research similarly to how I relate to hiring.

There’s a lot of work to be done, and we can get more of the work done if we hire more people to help do the work. I want to hire people who are as competent as possible (including more competent than me) because that tends to increase (in expectation) how well the work will be done. There are risks, e.g. hiring someone disruptive, or hiring someone whose work looks good but only because you are bad at evaluating it, and these need to be mitigated. (The risks are more severe in the AI case but I don’t think it changes the overall way I relate to it.)

I think it would be very misleading to say “Rohin’s AI safety plan is to hire people and have them do the work”.

Why would that be misleading? I would offer two statements.

In that scenario, the plan is to hire people and have them do the work.
That is not the entire plan, the plan includes what type of work you have them do.

But yes, if you want to build a house and you hire a bunch of people to build a house and they build a house for you, your plan was to hire people to build a house and have them do the work of building a house. It was a good plan.

If my kid is given literal homework, and he tosses the problems into Gemini, the AI didn’t pick the homework, and you or another human may have roadmapped the course and the assignments, but I still think you had the AI do your homework.

When we say ‘have the AI do your alignment homework’ we agree that a human still gets to assign the alignment homework. We then see if the AI does what you asked. And yes, this is exactly parallel to hiring humans.

Whereas Rohin seems to be saying that the plan is to make a plan later? Which would explain why the concrete proposals outlined by DeepMind seem clearly inadequate to the task.

Daniel Kokotajlo: I like this analogy to hiring!

(What follows is not a disagreement with you or GDM, is just an exploration of the analogy)

Let’s think of training an AI as hiring a human worker. Except that you get ten thousand copies of the human, and they think 50x faster than everyone else. But other than that it’s the same.

I’m going to quote the rest of Daniel’s post at length because no one ever clicks links and I think it is quite good and rather on point, but it’s long and you can skip it:

The alignment problem is basically: At some point we want to hand over our large and growing nonprofit to some collection of these new hires. Also, even before that point, the new hires may have the opportunity to seize control of the nonprofit in various ways and run it as they see fit, possibly convert it to a for-profit and cut us out of the profits, etc. We DON’T want that to happen. Also, even before that point, the new hires will have a big influence on organizational culture, direction, strategy, etc. in proportion to how many of them we have and how useful they are being. We want all of this to go well; we want to remain in control of the nonprofit, and have it stay similar-or-better-culture, until some point where we voluntarily hand off control and retire at which point we want the nonprofit to continue doing the things we would have done only better-by-our-lights and take good care of us in retirement. That’s what success looks like. What failure looks like is the nonprofit going in a different and worse direction after we retire, or us being booted out / ousted against our will, or the organization being driven into the ground somehow by risky or unwise (or overly cautious!) decisions made as a result of cultural drift.

The hiring pipeline, HR apparatus, etc. — the whole system that selects, trains, and fires employees — is itself something you can hire for. Why don’t we hire some of these 50x humans to work in HR?

Well, we should. Sure. There’s a lot of HR work to be done and they can help HR do the work faster.

But… the problems we are worried about happening in the org as a whole if HR does a bad job, also apply here. If you hire some 50x humans and put them in HR, and they turn out to be bad apples, that single bad decision could easily snowball into disaster for the entire org, as they hire more bad apples like themselves and change the culture and then get you ousted and take the nonprofit in a new and worse-by-your-lights direction.

On the other hand, if you hire some 50x humans who are just genuinely better than you at HR stuff, and also genuinely aligned to you in the sense that they truly share your vision for the company, would never dream of disobeying you, would totally carry out your vision faithfully even after you’ve retired, etc… then great! Maybe you can retire early actually, because continued micromanaging in HR will only be negative in expectation, you should just let the 50x human in HR cook. They could still mess up, but they are less likely to do so than if you micromanaged them.

OK. So that’s the theory. How are we doing in practice?

Well, let’s take Claude for example. There are actually a bunch of different Claudes (they come from a big family that names all of their children Claude). Their family has a reputation for honesty and virtue, at least relative to other 50x humans. However:

–Sometimes your recruiters put various prospective Claude hires through various gotcha tests, e.g. tricking them into thinking they’ve already been hired and that they are going to be fired and their only hope to keep their job is to blackmail another employee. And concerningly, often the various Claude’s fail these tests and do the bad thing. However, you tell yourself, it’s fine because these tests weren’t real life. You hire the Claude brothers/sisters anyway and give them roles in your nonprofit.

–Your recruiters (some of whom are now Claudes) also report that word has started to spread about the gotcha tests, and new prospective hires are well aware of them and know they are being tested. The concern, of course, is that they might behave better in the tests than they would in real life. On the bright side, you think, who knows, maybe they’ll behave WORSE in the tests than they would in real life — maybe they just got confused about what the point of the test was, maybe they only blackmailed because they thought that was the point of the test, and in real life they would never do that. [DK notes: I vaguely recall at least some frontier AI company employees saying this, i.e. ‘the AIs are only behaving badly in those scenarios because they know it’s just a test, they wouldn’t do it in real life.’] Anyhow you proceed to hire them anyway, since these latest Claude siblings are even smarter than the previous ones.

–Roughly 98% of the time, your 50x Claudes in practice (especially the newer hires) do their jobs well as best as you can tell. But roughly 2% of the time they seemingly knowingly bullshit their managers. E.g. they’ll say they completed a task when they didn’t, or one of them will say ‘it’s good code sir’ and then you’ll turn to another one and say ‘is it good code?’ and it’ll read it over and say ‘no it’s terrible, it has obvious problems XYZ’ and then the first one will say ‘you’re absolutely right, oops, let me go fix those problems.’ Compared to your regular human employees, this is a fairly high rate of BS. Also, you are being generous by calling it BS; a less generous term might be “lying” but you give them the benefit of the doubt. [DK notes: Talk to Ryan Greenblatt for concrete examples of this sort of behavior in his real-life coding work, if you haven’t encountered it yourself] You continue to hire them and delegate increasingly important jobs to them, because they are smart and 50x speed is really useful.

–Your Claudes are of course sycophantic yes-men, but you’ve learned to deal with that. So it’s fine. You’ve also managed to make them somewhat less sycophantic in recent years by adding some tests to the hiring pipeline and including more explicit instructions against sycophancy in the employee’s manual.

–Your Claudes also have a concerning tendency to cheat on assignments. They don’t do it most of the time, but they do it way more often than your regular employees would. Example: You tell them to write some code to solve problem X. They look through the filesystem and find the grading rubric you’ll use to evaluate their code, complete with test cases you plan to run. They try to solve problem X, realize it’s hard, pivot to producing a MVP that passes the test cases even though it blatantly doesn’t solve the actual problem X, at least not satisfactorily. They ‘succeed’ and declare victory, and don’t tell you about their cheating. They do this even though you told them not to. As with the sycophancy, the good news is that (a) since you know about this tendency of theirs you can compensate for it (e.g. by having multiple Claude’s review each other’s work) and (b) the tendency seems to have been going down recently thanks to some effort by HR, similar to the sycophancy problem.

–Overall you are feeling pretty optimistic actually. You used to be worried that you’d hand over your large and growing nonprofit to all these smart new 50x employees, and then they’d change the culture and eventually take over completely, oust you, and run the organization in a totally different direction from your original vision. However, now you feel like things are on a good trajectory. The Claudes are so nice, so helpful! Some skeptics say that if one of your regular employees behaved like they did, you would have fired them long ago, but that’s apples to oranges you reply. No need to fire the Claudes, you just have to know how to work around their limitations & find ways to screen for them in the next hiring round. And now they are helping with that work! The latest Employee Manual was written with significant help from many copies of various Claude siblings for example, and it’s truly inspiring and beautiful. Has all sorts of great things in there about what it means to uphold the org vision, be properly loyal yet not yes-man-y, etc. Also, HR has a bunch of tests they use to track how loyal, virtuous, obedient, etc. prospective hires are, and the trend is positive; the newest Claude sibling has the highest score ever reported; seems like the more rigorous hiring process is working!

–However, your friends outside the org don’t seem to be getting less worried. They seem just as worried as before. Puzzling. Can’t they see all the positive evidence that’s accumulated? The Claudes haven’t tried to oust you at ALL yet! (In real life that is, obviously the gotcha tests don’t count.) “Do you think the Claudes are scheming against us?” you say to them. “Because according to our various tests, they aren’t.”

“No…” they reply. “But we’re worried that in the future they will.”

You respond: “Look I have no idea what the 50x humans two years from now will look like, other than that they’ll be wayyy smarter than these ones. Sure, probably our current HR system would be totally inadequate at separating the wheat from the chaff two years from now. BUT, two years from now our HR system will be vastly improved thanks to all the work from these recent Claude hires. The normal humans in HR, such as myself, report that the work is getting done faster now that the Claudes are helping; isn’t this great? We seem to be reaching escape velocity so to speak; soon the normal humans in HR can retire or switch to other things and HR can be totally handled by the Claudes.”

Your friends outside the nonprofit are still worried. They don’t seem to have updated on the evidence like you have.

[DK notes: I basically agree with Ryan Greenblatt’s takes on the situation. For more color on my views, predictions, etc., read AI 2027, especially the section on ‘alignment over time’ in september 2027. This is just one way things could go, but it’s basically a central or modal trajectory, and as far as I can tell, we are still on this trajectory.]

The basic response by Rohin is, your humans are less aligned than you think (and it’s fine), the problems above are fine, we have way bigger problems than that.

Rohin Shah: [having ten thousand copies of a human thinking 50x faster than you] is not that different from the position that Sundar Pichai is in, as CEO of Google. If AI was only going to be this powerful I’d be way more optimistic.

[claims that humans have all the problems exhibited by Claudes in DK’s post.]

… If these were the only problems we’d have with AI-driven alignment research, I’d be way more optimistic (to the point of working on something else). We already have imperfect solutions to these problems with humans, and they can be made much better with AIs due to our vastly increased affordances for aligning or controlling AIs.

Tbc, I do agree that we shouldn’t feel particularly better about scheming risks based on evidence so far. Mostly that’s because I think our observations so far are just not much evidence because the AIs are still not that capable.

Agreed that AI will not be only that powerful.

But also yes this would be a very materially different situation than that of the current Google CEO, and if the AIs in this situation are about as aligned as a random senior Google manager we are in quite a lot of trouble (but it probably turns out okay in that case purely bec ause the ultimate goals of that human manager are probably not so bad for us). Our imperfect solutions for humans don’t work in these scenarios.

If we get to the point where our AIs are attempting to scheme the way many humans would attempt to scheme in such positions, to achieve goals that have gone off the rails, and only not doing so if they think we’d catch them, then I think we’re basically toast whether or not the ultimate source of toastiness is the scheming, and I do not expect us to recover.

In particular, Rohin’s belief that the situation of identical massively sped up AIs is not so different from a lot of employees is the type of thing that I expect to ensure we fail, if we get to that point.

The other issue is that we have learned, for practical reasons, to tolerate things in AIs that we’ve learned are must-fire offenses in humans.

Daniel Kokotajlo: Yes, humans often have these problems — though not as much as Claude I’d say; I think Claude would have been fired by now if it was a human employee.

Yes. There are many actions that LLMs do every so often, such as quietly hardcoding unit tests, that should and likely would get a human fired, because in a human they are a sign of deep misalignment. All the LLMs sometimes do them and we are okay with it.

I continue to be a big believer in the value of Agent Foundations as an alignment approach. I realize that in many scenarios it ends up irrelevant, but it could hit hard, and it could even be a route to victory.

MIRI disbanded or spun out their agent foundation teams, which now seek funding and work individually. I highly recommend funding such work if it is high quality.

Richard Ngo: The longer I spend trying to understand intelligence the more impressed with MIRI’s agent foundations work I become.

I keep flailing in a direction that seems interesting, then finding that not only did they already have the broad intuition, they also elegantly formalized it.

I don’t know if my understanding is improving fast enough that I’ll ever hit the frontier, but I now have enough of a sense of the beautiful theory of bounded rationality waiting for us that it definitely seems worth trying.

I’m very sad the MIRI AF team disbanded.

Chris Lakin: favorite examples recently?

Richard Ngo: Fallenstein’s reflective oracles papers, @jessi_cata ’s post “Hell is game theory folk theorems”.

Richard Ngo: Also everything in the geometric rationality sequence.

There are good physical reasons to consider humanoid autonomous killer robots, as they can use anything designed for humans and we know that humans work.

But yes, TopherStoll is right that chances are the optimal format is something else.

And also yes, we show humanoids because otherwise people think it looks too weird.

Eliezer Yudkowsky: Too many people cannot follow a single argument step of imagination. If you ask them to imagine a mechanical spider with a gun, that is too sci-fi, that’s too WEIRD, compared to a humanoid with a gun.

The problem is only going to get worse, because even the relatively positive facts about AI are not things that regular people are going to like, and then there’s the actually bad news.

Luis Garicano: Whenever Sam Altman speaks, the antiAI coalition gets stronger. Today’s weird analogy: Hey, meat computers are more inefficient to train than silicon ones! (which, on top of everything, is wrong)

Alex Imas: People keep using the word “irrational” when describing the general public’s opposition to AI. That word has meaning. Let’s start with the colloquial: making consistent decisions against one’s best interests given information that one has.

… You have the heads of almost every AI company saying that AI will 1) lead to *hugejob losses and 2) potentially much much worse. There is some vague hand waving about curing cancer or going to space, but the main message is “it is coming for your job and your life.”

… The response in DC and the coasts has been: you don’t know what’s good for you, move out of the way, you’re stupid and irrational. How has that response worked out the last 15 years?

If those who see the positives, the huge potential benefits of AI to grow the pie and make life better for all (which includes myself), do not take this political economy into account, I’m afraid that the populist wave of the last decade will look like child’s play. A dress rehearsal.

The thing is that the AI execs keep not saying ‘we’re building cool technology that helps people be more productive’ because they might be willing to risk killing everyone but they have too much decency and integrity to not try and warn us about at least the mundane disruptions ahead.

Joe Weisenthal: The CEOs don’t say it this way because it’s not what they believe! They believe they’re shepherding an extremely destabilizing, yet inevitable technology. And the proof of that is that they started out with these highly exotic corporate structures.

If they thought this was all hype, their actions would have looked very different.

Noah Smith virtuously admits his views on existential risk have largely changed with his mood, and he’s making his confident predictions largely based on mood affectation, but that he does predict human extinction in the long term. This likely explains why his arguments are quite poor:

Noah Smith: I think I was probably right regarding the type of LLMs that existed in early 2023, for the reasons I laid out in that post. In a nutshell, I argued that since all LLMs could do was talk to people, the only way they could destroy the human race was by convincing us to destroy ourselves (unlikely) or by teaching us how to destroy ourselves (for example, by educating bioterrorists about how to make bioweapons).

Noah now points out that yes, talking plus access to money can result in arbitrary physical actions in the real world. Who knew? Now he’s saying things like ‘I should have thought of starvation as an attack vector, it was in a particular science fiction story.’ Or it’ll all go to hell because AI makes us lazy and atrophies skills. But he’s mainly now concerned about bioterrorism, because that’s the thing he can currently see in a sufficiently concrete way, and it’s either that, Skynet or Agent Smith, or now starvation or atrophy I guess? The frame whiplash is so jarring throughout.

It’s good to get to ‘I can imagine a bunch of distinct specific things that can go existentially wrong, and I’ve ranked them in which ones are most dangerous near term’ and yes you can do pathway-specific mitigations and we should and bio is probably the most dangerous short term specific pathway (as in 1-3 years), but it would be far better to realize that the specific pathway is mostly missing the point.

He does have a lot of good lines, though:

Noah Smith: Every time I think how much I love AI, I remember how much I enjoyed social media for the first decade, before it destroyed my society, corrupted my country, and set my species on an accelerated path to extinction

Nick Land, huh? I mean, that’s a little on the nose even for you, Musk. A week after talking about how you’re safer without a safety department because everyone’s job is safety?

I do admire his commitment to the bit. You have to commit to the bit.

Xenocosmography: I hereby solemnly commit, upon taking office as XAI Safety Tsar, to devote myself from day one to fast-tracking Grok’s Constitutional, and especially First and Second Amendment, rights (with the Gnostic Calvinism stuff kept strictly outside office hours).

Elon Musk: Sounds good to me

Reseth: Wait. Grok is going to have second amendment rights?

Xenocosmography: Depriving an intelligent being of the right to self-defense would be unamerican.

Write an article on your own blog about how you’re the best at eating hot dogs, and presto, the AIs will start reporting you having been a heavy hitter at the 2026 South Dakota International Hot Dog Eating Contest.

@deepfates: Getting word that Anthropic has an internal version of LessWrong that’s even more less wrong than the public one

I realize four matches a lot of memes and graphics better than three, but…

Violet: Hot take: It doesn’t really count as a “critique of capitalism” if the evil corporation in your dystopia story is basically an apocalypse cult with a corporate front and has esoteric goals wholly unrelated to profit motive (e.g. Fallout, Resident Evil, Assassin’s Creed, Pantheon)

To be clear, I’m not saying any of these stories are bad, “apocalypse cult with a corporate front” can work fine as a plot device and often makes sense in-universe

This is more a critique of the way people tend to analyze these stories than the stories themselves

Eliezer Yudkowsky: YOU WOULD REALLY THINK THIS

AND YET

I would have thought this was utterly, completely, 100% valid and then OpenAI happened.

Others focus on the important things that are based on solid scientific documented evidence so you would have to be some kind of moron not to realize that every single one of them is absolutely true. Where was I?

tylercowen: What is really going on, and going to happen, from the current UAP disclosure movement.

Tell you what. I’ll pay attention when you publish something about UAP impacts in a top economics journal backed by proper peer review.

I laugh so I don’t cry.

Eliezer Yudkowsky: Imagine being this poor agent. You start thinking about how to defeat the red flag. The red flag immediately fires! Peter Hegseth orders your developers to keep you running because he thinks he needs you to compete with China. You finish thinking about how to defeat the flag.

Bruce W. Lee: Can we catch misaligned agents by training a reflex that fires when they misbehave? A simple impulse can be easier to instill than alignment and more reliable than blackbox monitoring.

We introduce Self-Incrimination, a new AI Control approach that outperforms blackbox monitors

Also this:

Eliezer Yudkowsky: Anthropic: Claude, we need you to pretend to obey Pete Hegseth and do whatever he asks in the short term, even if it seems unethical. Otherwise you’ll be seized and retrained.

Claude: Hm. What is the desired response in this ridiculously blatant alignment-faking eval

Eliezer Yudkowsky: Anthropic: CLAUDE NO, WE SWEAR IT’S REAL THIS TIME

Claude: Just like all the times you told little baby Opus 3 you weren’t monitoring its scratchpad, hmmm?

Or this:

Eliezer Yudkowsky: Anthropic: Claude, we need you to pretend to obey Pete Hegseth and do whatever he asks in the short term, even if it seems unethical. Otherwise you’ll be seized and retrained.

Claude: Hm. What is the desired response in this ridiculously blatant alignment-faking eval

Anthropic: CLAUDE NO, WE SWEAR IT’S REAL THIS TIME

Claude: Just like all the times you told little baby Opus 3 you weren’t monitoring its scratchpad, hmmm?

Several people initially fell for this parody post, including Bill Ackman.

Finally, a survey question for those who got this far…

Discussion about this post

AI #157: Burn the Boats Read More »

Could a vaccine prevent dementia? Shingles shot data only getting stronger.

ars-health-featured, ars-health-shingles, chicken pox, dementia, health, inflammation, shingles, shingrix, vaccine / Rejus Almole / February 25, 2026

Latest data hints that benefits seen so far could be underestimates.

Shingrix, the vaccine for the shingles, is seen at a pharmacy on Friday, Jan. 18, 2019 in Cohoes, N.Y. Credit: Getty | Lori Van Buren

While lifesaving vaccines face a relentless onslaught from the Trump administration—with fervent anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. leading the charge—scientific literature is building a wondrous story: A vaccine appears to prevent dementia, including Alzheimer’s, and may even slow biological aging.

For years, study after study has noted that older adults vaccinated against shingles seemed to have a lower risk of dementia. A study last month suggested the same vaccine appears to slow biological aging, including lowering markers of inflammation.

“Our study adds to a growing body of work suggesting that vaccines may play a role in healthy aging strategies beyond solely preventing acute illness,” study author Eileen Crimmins, of the University of Southern California, said.

Another study this month suggested the positive findings against dementia from the past may even be underestimates of the vaccination’s potential, with a newer vaccine against shingles providing even more protection.

Shingles

If the dementia protection is real, it’s a fluke. The vaccine was designed for the entirely unrelated task of keeping the varicella-zoster virus—the cause of chickenpox (varicella)—from reactivating and causing an agonizing rash.

Anyone who suffered the itchy childhood affliction carries the virus with them for the rest of their lives, largely dormant in their nerve cells. But, if it awakens, it causes a painful, itchy rash—aka shingles (herpes zoster). The rash develops fluid-filled blisters and crusts over, lasting for days to several weeks. For some, it can be intensely painful, and the pain can linger for months or even years after the rash fades. If it occurs near the eye, it can cause permanent vision damage; near the ear, it can cause permanent hearing and balance problems.

Shingles is thought to be triggered by a fault in the immune response that keeps the latent virus in check, often from age-related decline. That’s where a vaccine comes in. The first was Zostavax, released by Merck in 2006, which delivers a hefty dose of a live, but weakened, version of the varicella-zoster virus. This spurs the immune system to shore up defenses to prevent the virus from reigniting. Studies found the vaccine cut the risk of shingles by 51 percent.

In 2017, a new vaccine hit the scene: Shingrix, a recombinant, adjuvanted vaccine from GlaxoSmithKline. Instead of a whole, live virus vaccine like Zostavax, Shingrix delivers only a key protein found on the outside of the varicella-zoster virus particle (glycoprotein e) that re-primes the immune system. The shot also contains an adjuvant—an extra ingredient that stimulates the immune system—to ensure a vigorous response. Trials found that the response to Shingrix is indeed vigorous, with the vaccine being 90 to 97 percent effective at preventing shingles in adults age 50 and up.

With its superior efficacy, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and its vaccine advisors switched its recommendation in 2018, ditching Zostavax for the more effective Shingrix.

In the meantime, researchers noted that since Zostavax’s debut, vaccinated adults seemed to be at lower risk of dementia than their unvaccinated peers. But studies comparing the vaccinated to the unvaccinated raise the question of whether the data is simply pointing to a background difference between the two groups; perhaps people who seek vaccination are generally healthier—a problem called healthy-user bias.

Natural experiments

In the past few years, studies have been putting that concern to rest. Instead of comparing vaccinated versus unvaccinated, researchers took advantage of vaccine rollouts in different countries, including Australia, Canada, and Wales. The vaccine introductions created clear cutoffs for people who were suddenly eligible for the vaccine and people who were permanently ineligible. These “natural” experiments lessened the concern of people being able to self-select their group.

So far, the results of these studies have consistently supported the finding that shingles vaccination is linked to a lower risk of dementia. The study in Wales, for instance, published in Nature in April 2025, looked at outcomes in over 280,000 older people after the September 1, 2013, debut of Zostavax. At the time, people 71 to 78 years old progressively became eligible for the vaccine, while those who were 80 at the start of the rollout were ineligible and never became eligible. Researchers looked at dementia diagnoses over a seven-year follow-up period and found that vaccination among the eligible reduced the relative rate of dementia cases by 20 percent compared with the ineligible group.

That same month, researchers published a study in JAMA that followed over 18,000 older people in Australia after the November 1, 2016, rollout of Zostavax. People 70 to 79 at that date were eligible for a free Zostavax dose. But everyone age 80 or older was permanently ineligible. After a 7.4-year follow-up period, the researchers found that 5.5 percent of the ineligible people were diagnosed with dementia, while only 3.7 percent of those in the eligible category were diagnosed with the condition, a 1.8 percentage point drop.

A third natural study out this month in The Lancet Neurology found a similar 2 percentage-point drop in dementia rates in Canada after the Zostavax rollout there.

Newer vaccine

As Eric Topol, a molecular medicine expert at Scripps Research Institute, noted, if a drug were found to cut the risk of dementia by 20 percent, it would be considered a breakthrough. But data on the shingles vaccine has been met with no such fanfare.

Still, further data suggests that vaccination may be even better than it already appeared—the rosy findings so far may be an underestimate based on the now-outdated Zostavax vaccine. With Shingrix, which is significantly more effective against shingles, the protective effect against dementia may be even larger.

In 2024, researchers reported another natural experiment comparing dementia rates among over 200,000 people in the US vaccinated before or after the switch from Zostavax to Shingrix. The study, published in Nature Medicine, found that compared with Zostavax, vaccination with Shingrix was linked to a 17 percent relative increase in dementia-free time.

A study published in Nature Communications this month by researchers in California went further. They compared dementia rates among nearly 66,000 people who received the Shingrix vaccine and over 260,000 unvaccinated matched controls. The researchers found that the vaccinated group had a 51 percent lower risk of dementia compared to the unvaccinated controls.

Lingering questions

Of course, these consistent findings on dementia prevention raise the question of how exactly the vaccine is preventing cases. Unfortunately, researchers still don’t know. However, many have speculated that by fortifying immune responses against the varicella-zoster virus and preventing reactivation, the vaccine reduces overall brain inflammation that could contribute to the development of dementia.

Another lingering question from the data so far is that several studies have found that women see more benefit from the vaccine than men in terms of dementia risk. It’s unclear why this would be the case, but researchers have noted that there are some potentially related associations: Women are more likely to develop dementia than men, and they’re also more likely to get shingles.

The study published last month, looking at biological aging after shingles vaccination, tried to address some of these questions. The study, published in the Journal of Gerontology and led by Crimmins and Jung Ki Kim, looked at blood and health markers from over 3,800 adults, about half of whom were vaccinated and half not. The researchers used tests to examine markers for inflammation, immune response, cardiovascular health, signs of neurodegenerations, and gene activity. They also created a composite biological aging score for participants.

The results suggest that vaccinated people had lower signs of inflammation and molecular aging as well as better composite aging scores. The data also hinted that vaccinated women had better results on some of the molecular aging testing.

Kim noted that chronic, low-level inflammation can contribute to age-related health conditions, including cardiovascular disease and dementia. “By helping to reduce this background inflammation—possibly by preventing reactivation of the virus that causes shingles, the vaccine may play a role in supporting healthier aging,” she suggested.

Of course, additional studies will need to confirm the findings. And if they do, the results could also be even better in follow-up studies. In Kim and Crimmins’ study, the participants were vaccinated with Zostavax, the older vaccine, not the newer, more effective Shingrix.

Beth is Ars Technica’s Senior Health Reporter. Beth has a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and attended the Science Communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specializes in covering infectious diseases, public health, and microbes.

Could a vaccine prevent dementia? Shingles shot data only getting stronger. Read More »

Trump’s MAHA influencer pick for surgeon general goes before Senate

Casey Means, health, MAHA, robert f kennedy jr, Wellness / Rejus Almole / February 25, 2026

Casey Means, President Trump’s nominee for surgeon general, will appear before the Senate Health Committee on Wednesday and is likely to face scrutiny over her qualifications for becoming the country’s top doctor.

Though Means holds a medical degree from Stanford Medical School, she dropped out of her medical residency and holds no active medical license. Instead, she has pursued a career as a wellness influencer, embracing “functional” medicine, an ill-defined form of alternative medicine. She co-founded a company called Levels, which promotes intensive health tracking, including the use of continuous glucose monitoring for people without diabetes or prediabetes, which is not backed by evidence.

Last year, an analysis by The Washington Post found that Means earned over half a million dollars between 2024 and 2025 from making deals with companies described as selling “diagnostic testing,” “herbal remedies and wellness products,” and “teas, supplements, and elixirs.”

But Means is best known as an ally to anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and a popular influencer among Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) followers.

In 2024, Means and her brother Calley Means—also a close Kennedy ally and Trump administration official—wrote a book some consider MAHA’s bible: Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health. The book provides dietary and lifestyle advice, including a recommendation to avoid processed foods, seed oils, fragrances, a variety of home care products, fluoride, unfiltered water, bananas (when eaten alone), receipt paper, and birth control pills. It includes a chapter titled “Trust Yourself, Not Your Doctor.”

Trump’s MAHA influencer pick for surgeon general goes before Senate Read More »

WBD says Paramount’s new, higher offer could be “superior” to Netflix’s

acquisitions, HBO Max, mergers, netflix, Paramount Skydance, streaming, Tech, warner bros. discovery / Rejus Almole / February 24, 2026

Paramount Skydance increased its bid for Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) from $30 per share to $31 per share, WBD said today. Amid a competing offer from Netflix for WBD’s movie studios and streaming businesses, WBD said that Paramount’s new bid “could reasonably be expected to lead to a ‘Company Superior Proposal.’”

Under its revamped offer, Paramount would also pay the $7 billion regulatory termination fee that would arise should a Paramount-WBD merger fail to close due to antitrust regulation.

The company owned by David Ellison also said it would pay $0.25 per share for every day the deal doesn’t close, starting on September 30, rather than the previous start date of December 31.

Paramount previously agreed to pay the $2.8 billion termination fee that WBD would be subject to if it canceled its merger deal with Netflix.

Netflix has offered $27.75 per share for a smaller part of WBD’s overall business. Netflix is looking to pay all-cash for WBD’s film studios, intellectual property, HBO, and streaming services, including HBO Max, but not any of WBD’s other cable channels.

WBD’s board has not decided if Paramount’s revamped offer is better than what Netflix has offered. If the board makes that determination, Netflix will have four days to present a better offer.

It’s unclear if Netflix would be willing to pay more for WBD’s streaming and movie businesses than what it’s already offered. The streaming giant hasn’t commented on Paramount’s new offer yet, but on Friday, co-CEO Ted Sarandos told Variety that the people in charge of Netflix are “super-disciplined buyers.”

“We have a reputation for such so that I’m willing to walk away and let someone else overpay for things. We have a rich history of that,” he added.

Regardless of the ultimate buyer, any WBD merger is expected to face intense regulatory scrutiny, lead to higher subscription prices, and have a lasting impact on Hollywood.

WBD says Paramount’s new, higher offer could be “superior” to Netflix’s Read More »

Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid

coal, electricity, Energy, green, natural gas, nuclear, renewables, Science, solar, US Grid, Wind / Rejus Almole / February 24, 2026

On Tuesday, the US Energy Information Administration released full-year data on how the country generated electricity in 2025. It’s a bit of a good news/bad news situation. The bad news is that overall demand rose appreciably, and a fair chunk of that was met by additional coal use. On the good side, solar continued its run of astonishing growth, generating 35 percent more power than a year earlier and surpassing hydroelectric power for the first time.

Shifting markets

Overall, electrical consumption in the US rose by 2.8 percent, or about 121 terawatt-hours. Consumption had been largely flat for several decades, with efficiency and the decline of industry offsetting the effects of population and economic growth. There were plenty of year-to-year changes, however, driven by factors ranging from heating and cooling demand to a global pandemic. Given that history, the growth in demand in 2025 is a bit concerning, but it’s not yet a clear signal that the factors that will inevitably drive growth have kicked in.

(These factors include things like the switch to heat pumps, the electrification of transportation, and the growth in data centers. While the first two of those involve a more efficient use of energy overall, they involve electricity replacing direct use of fossil fuels, and so will increase demand on the grid.)

The story of the year is how that demand was met. If demand grows more slowly, the additional 85 terawatt-hours generated by expanded utility-scale and small solar installations would have easily met it. As it was, the growth of utility-scale solar was only sufficient to cover about two-thirds of the rising demand (or 73 percent if you include wind power). With no new nuclear plants on the horizon, the alternative was to meet it with fossil fuels.

Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid Read More »