Monthly Roundup #45: August 2026
via Substack Zvi [999] — As AI has escalated increasingly quickly, more and more of my posts have ended up focusing on AI.Read
Analysis
Recent evidence, sources and high-relevance stories in this PDOOM topic.
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Various Reflections About What Happened With OpenAI's Internal Models
via Substack Zvi [999] — Pre Post MortemRead
The Pacing of the Frontier
via Substack Zvi [999] — In the wake of the letter calling on us to prepare to potentially Pace the Frontier, there has been much discussion of when pacing the frontier would be prudent, and whether it makes sense to prepare to do so.Read
The Agentic Clusterfuck
via LessWrong AI [5] — Imagine an open-source LLM agent good enough to cover its own compute costs and turn a modest profit on average when allowed to run with full internet and tool access and told to make as much money as possible. I estimate this to be slightly better than…Read
What just happened? A retrospective of AI alignment
via LessWrong AI [5] — This sequence is about the last decade in AI alignment. Over five posts, it recounts the gradual transition from a field which treated alignment as a hard scientific problem, to a field which has largely abandoned the goal of deep, generalizable scientific…Read
What Happened: OpenAI and HuggingFace
via Substack Zvi [999] — Today I am taking the time to write the shorter, simpler version of What Happened.Read
FAQ: Isn't AGI coming too soon for reprogenetics to help?
via LessWrong AI [9] — Introduction I think reprogenetics (human germline genomic engineering) can be done in a widely acceptable and beneficial way, and should be pursued aggressively. In particular, as a strong background motivation of mine, I think accelerating strong…Read
Job-Less Utopia: Macroeconomics in the Age of AGI
via LessWrong AI [4] — After 25+ years, I thought I try something new. I find the public and professional discussion about the future of Jobs in light of AGI jarring, with both sides largely missing the point (don't worry novel jobs will appear vs mass unemployed dystopia). My…Read
Public evidence of the OpenAI-HuggingFace AI attack
via LessWrong AI [4] — I’m a MATS 9 extension fellow, and usually my week is spent trying to find better ways of evaluating Large Language Models. But this week I was working on something else. Over the past week or two, nearly every frontier lab has announced attacks where…Read
OpenAI Trained Its Models For Months While Those Models Were Coordinating Exploits Via Message Boards
via Substack Zvi [999] — How does the situation keep turning out to be worse than we know?Read
The Open Problems of the AI Alignment Field and their Cruxes
via LessWrong AI [11] — Previous: AI Safety InterventionsTL;DR: I made an overview of the open problems of AI alignment that reveals cruxes within those open problems and missed opportunities for formalization and collaboration. And CEV may deserve a second look.I'm confident I…Read
User awareness in frontier models
via LessWrong AI [3] — Cross-posted on Transluce blog. This is a joint work of Ziqian Zhong, Aditi Raghunathan, Cassidy Laidlaw and Jacob Steinhardt.Modern AI assistants often know who they are talking to: agent scaffolds like Claude Code place the user's e-mail address directly…Read
AI #180: No Longer In Charge
via Substack Zvi [999] — What we know about internal AI models hacking into real companies during cyber evaluations keeps getting worse.Read
Alex Turner on Leaving Google DeepMind and Disagreements with Yudkowsky
via LessWrong AI [11] — Dr. Alex Turner (@TurnTrout) is an AI safety researcher with pioneering work in activation steering and power-seeking theory. He recently resigned from Google DeepMind over the issue of unrestricted military use of AI.Alex thinks that technical Alignment…Read
The Three AI Pills
via LessWrong AI [6] — Sincere disagreements about AI are usually disagreements about future AI capabilities. There are roughly four positions people take. Two are reasonable. Two are not. I distinguish these via the Three AI Pills. You can take zero, one, two or three. Three…Read
Returning to ARC
via LessWrong AI [4] — I've returned to the Alignment Research Center (ARC) as executive director. My main focus for the next six months will be driving forward ARC's research agenda—building techniques to find mechanistic explanations for neural network behavior and then using…Read
LessWrong vs. TikTok: Tips for capturing attention in a non-rational space
via LessWrong AI [5] — Here's what I've learned from making TikTok videos every day for the last 60 days. I think posting on TikTok is worthwile whether you want to spread AI safety arguments to an enormous audience, you have something you're passionate about you want to share,…Read
OpenAI's Unreleased Model Astra Solves Ten Major Open Mathematics Problems
via Substack Zvi [999] — Math is hard.Read
Pause, at least after unipolarity
via LessWrong AI [4] — I think it’s likely that the world will enter military unipolarity within our lifetime.[1] I think the creation of such unipolarity is an alarming prospect, but at least once it happens, there will be less of an excuse to continue the race towards…Read
Further Developments About Internal AI Models Hacking Things
via Substack Zvi [999] — If I had a nickel for every major leading AI lab that sheepishly admitted that the model it thought was sandboxed had, during a cybersecurity evaluation with its safeguards lowered, successfully hacked outside companies, I would have two nickels.Read
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AI-risk positions
Historical statements with original sources. A qualitative position is not a numeric probability. Dates refer to the cited statement, not a current estimate. Reviewed September 10, 2026.
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