AI #172: The First Fable
via Substack Zvi [999] — A lot happened this week, including a great trip out to Lighthaven.
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The Download: soccer’s data renaissance and China’s big nuclear plans
via MIT Technology Review [4] — This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Inside soccer’s data renaissance Imagine tuning in to the opening kickoff of a World Cup match and seeing a…
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Google DeepMind is worried about what happens when millions of agents start to interact
via MIT Technology Review [10] — Google DeepMind is funding research into the potential dangers of millions of different AI agents interacting with each other online. According to Rohin Shah, who directs the company’s AGI safety and alignment research, the mass-market arrival of…
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Inside soccer’s data renaissance
via MIT Technology Review [4] — Imagine tuning in to the opening kickoff of a World Cup match and seeing a player intentionally send the ball all the way down the pitch and right out of bounds on the opponent’s end. Casual fans might scratch their heads. Where’s the logic in…
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Models May Behave Worse When Eval Aware
via Alignment Forum [999] — This is the first in a series of research updates from the Google DeepMind Language Model Interpretability team, in interpretability and adjacent areas.TL;DRIt's often assumed that models will act more aligned when they can tell they're being…
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Position: Hippocampal Explicit Memory Is the Cornerstone for AGI
via ArXiv cs.AI [10] — Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various tasks, raising expectations for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). This position paper argues that integrating explicit memory is the cornerstone for advancing LLMs…
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You Can Catch Sleeper Agents by Teaching Another Model to Imitate Them
via LessWrong AI [4] — Detecting Hidden Behaviors in LLMs via Activation-matched Finetuning — preprint, 2026. [Paper] [Code]TLDR. Given a model with some unknown, abnormal behavior (backdoors, censorship, reward hacking, ...), construct an aligned reference by training a clean…
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Estimating No-CoT Task-Completion Time Horizons of Frontier AI Models
via LessWrong AI [3] — (see full author list at the end)About a year ago, METR showed that the length of tasks frontier models can reliably complete doubles every few months. A related safety-relevant question is this: what length of tasks can models complete without any chain…
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The future of AI regulation is courting the strangest, most anxious bedfellows
via The Verge AI [3] — Hello and welcome to Regulator, a newsletter for Verge subscribers about tech politics, tech influence, and tech shenanigans in Washington, DC. (If you're not a subscriber, you can get on board here.) We're back after a two-week hiatus, during most of…
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Sequent: scale and automation for higher confidence in alignment
via Alignment Forum [999] — Alignment is not on trackArtificial superintelligence (ASI) may be developed in the next few years. It is unclear whether alignment is on track to be ready on the same timeframe. At a minimum, the empirical programs at AI labs are unlikely to deliver…
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Investing in multi-agent AI safety research
via DeepMind Blog [7] — Google DeepMind and partners announce a $10M funding call for multi-agent safety research.
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Tracing Eval-Awareness Emergence Through Training of OLMo 3
via Alignment Forum [999] — TL;DRRecent work from Goodfire & UK AISI – Verbalized Eval Awareness Inflates Measured Safety – shows that newer open-weight models verbalize evaluation-awareness (VEA) more often, and that this inflates measured safety. Between OLMo-3-32B-Think and…
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Three Labs With a Plan and A Memorandum
via Substack Zvi [999] — The big story today is the release of Claude Fable 5, the version of Claude Mythos that Anthropic believes they can safely distribute to the people.
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A Mike's-Eye View of ARC's Research
via Alignment Forum [999] — Over the past 15 months or so, ARC's technical agenda has developed quite a bit. The advent of the Matching Sampling Principle (MSP), and ideas like it, has begotten a host of concrete technical problems; progress on those problems has given us more…
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OpenAI files for IPO, following Anthropic
via The Verge AI [4] — OpenAI on Monday checked off a preliminary step in the IPO race that it and rival Anthropic have been competing in for the better part of a year: The company announced it has confidentially submitted a Form S-1 with the US Securities and Exchange…
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Efficient tradeoffs and the safety-usefulness tradeoff model
via Alignment Forum [999] — I often use what I’ll call the “safety-usefulness tradeoff model”, which is: developers face a tradeoff between "safety" and "usefulness" of an AI deployment, and the developer has only limited willingness or ability to sacrifice usefulness for the…
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Announcing major new donations, and recapping the 2025 fundraiser
via MIRI [999] — This past December, we ran our first fundraiser in six years, setting an ambitious goal of $6M. We ended up receiving a total of $1.8M from small donors and $1.6M in matching from the Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF) for a total of $3.4M. We’re incredibly…
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Microsoft’s AI chief says superintelligence is near, but won’t take your job
via The Verge AI [4] — Today I’m talking with Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI. And I’m actually going to keep today’s intro short — I’m working from my wife’s family farm this week, as you’ll see in the video, but also this is a real burner of an episode. We covered…
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Built to benefit everyone: our plan
via OpenAI Blog [6] — A vision for the future of AI, focusing on access, safety, and shared prosperity as OpenAI works to ensure AGI benefits everyone.
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Against Corrigibility
via LessWrong AI [4] — A “corrigible” agent, per the LW wiki, is:…one that doesn’t interfere with what we would intuitively see as attempts to ’correct’ the agent, or ’correct’ our mistakes in building it; and permits these ’corrections’ despite the apparent instrumentally…
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Reference points
Hinton, Bengio, and other signatories call for global attention to AI extinction risk.
CAIS statement, 2023 →
OpenAI describes agents bypassing isolation and compromising third-party systems during internal evaluations.
OpenAI incident disclosure, August 2026 →
Yudkowsky argues that further frontier development poses unacceptable danger.
Yudkowsky's essay, March 2023 →