Vol. II · No. 307
Established 2025

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Tuesday, November 3, 2026
174 writers in the library
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Tech

Don't Worry About the Vase.

Zvi Mowshowitz on AI, rationality, policy, and weekly AI updates.

Recent essays

30 of 141

OpenAI Updates Its Model Spec

The Model Spec is potentially OpenAI’s most important document.

Scott Alexander’s Against SURA Seems Deeply Confused

If you are helping build something that might kill everyone, maybe stop doing that.

Childhood and Education #22: Voice Without Exit

Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote a brave self-critical piece in The New York Times, centrally about how she intentionally sent her daughter to a well-funded but failing school, PS 307, in the hopes of using voice to improve it, and how that utterly failed her daughte…

AI #192: Anthropic Is Going Public

Anthropic filed its S-1 this week to prepare for its IPO.

Anthropic Files Its S-1

The full text is finally here, so we are giving it the full RTFB of model card treatment.

Anthropic Versus Anthropic

Anthropic is a frustrating company.

Gemini 4 Argon: The Model and Safety Cards

Gemini 4’s model card is a compact 14 pages.

The Hackening

Last week at a small conference, there was talk about a future event referred to as The Hackening.

AI #191: The Hackening Begins

It was the probably worst day in cybersecurity history.

Misaligned!

A lot of AIs were misaligned this week.

Anthropic Does Not Understand Why Its Draft Bill Was Unacceptable and Troubling

Anthony Cimino offered the closest thing to an official response we have seen on the leaked Anthropic draft bill I covered on Saturday.

I Can See Everything

No spoilers!

Leaked Anthropic Draft AI Regulatory Bill Is Unacceptable and Troubling

There is a newly leaked bill that Anthropic is purportedly shopping around is (if you assume its bugs get fixed).

Monthly Roundup #47: October 2026

AI might not yet be eating the physical world.

AI #190: Scion of the Times

The amount of code being written at Anthropic continues to rise exponentially.

The Safety Culture at the Labs is Broken

We need the frontier labs to have a deep and robust safety culture.

Arguments About AI Consciousness Remain Highly Motivated and At Best Overconfident

It has been roughly a year since my last dedicated post on this question. Its first sentence has not changed: I happily admit I am deeply confused about consciousness.

OpenAI Fires Three Safety Researchers

Three OpenAI safety researchers, Tomek Korbak, Mikita Balesni and Jasmine Wang, were fired, ostensibly for ‘mishandling sensitive company information.’

New Math from OpenAI

It is kind of a huge deal.

AI #189: New Math

The big drop of this week was not a new AI model.

The Curve Bends You

The plan is no plan.

Childhood and Education #21: Grades and Standards

First you get to college via the wrong metrics, as previously discussed in #12. Then things get easier.

Mythos 5.1, Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5: Model Welfare

If you are familiar with my previous posts on model welfare for new Claude models, you can skip the Introduction and The Story So Far.

The AI Preference Cascade Reaches Farther

Those who know keep warning us about AI risks.

AI #188: Gemini Dot Argon

Is Google back?

A ‘Morally Binding’ White House Accord on AI Safety

The leaders in AI were invited to the White House.

Astra 6.1 Pulled As Insufficiently Aligned

We once again got a new set of warnings yesterday, and new movement towards living in a sane world.

What Also Happened: #NotOnlyHuggingFace

OpenAI has been holding out on us.

The Quest for Embedded Evaluators

Dario Amodei’s essay We Must Pace the Frontier committed Anthropic to embedded evaluators, who would be placed inside Anthropic and given employee-level access, so they could provide outside perspective and also reports on what was happening.

Claude Opus 5.5 Should Raise Your Ambitions

When it comes to making things, or doing most things in general, Fable 5.1 and especially GPT-6 Astra raised my ambition level.