New piece: as AI companies (w/ one notable exception) prove themselves to be eager collaborators in building an authoritarian nightmare state, employees are getting organized to resist it. But they're racing against their own effort to render themselves obsolete. bsky.app/profile/gar...

There have been several high profile incidents of OpenAI and a16z's super PAC Leading the Future (and its affiliate Build American AI) engaging in pretty egregious astroturfing.

Thoughts and prayers for Marc, who must be experiencing unprecedented levels of concern. x.com/pmarca/stat...

Important new development. AI company employees have an enormous amount of power — far more than they realize. Absent legislation, AI co worker power is one of the key levers to shaping what the industry does and doesn't do. x.com/WIRED/statu...

The term "artificial intelligence" gets a lot of hate — much of it deserved. But there is a deep connection between many of the things under the AI label nowadays, despite what a lot of critics want you to believe.

In 50 years, if they're still a thing, AP US classes will write whole essays on this primary source document.

Really good piece on Sama's COIs. His tenure seems more precarious than (well, almost) ever. Gift: www.wsj.com/tech/ai/cha...

Nothing like responding to allegations of fascism with a speech ban. Also incredible free advertising for the book and real time evidence for its thesis packaged together. Preordered. x.com/sf_mills/st...

The "American Innovators Network" — an a16z backed lobbying coalition that has been aggressively lobbying to block state AI regulations to regulate catastrophic risk and protect kids online — recently hired Jeremy Kudon as its new executive director.

The legal authority enabling mass surveillance of Americans expires next week. GOP has a 2 vote majority and some are wavering. If every Dem in the House unified, they could extract meaningful concessions, like closing the data broker loophole. So I asked them all. 🧵

Sam Altman said he regrets calling the New Yorker profile "incendiary," but never edited his blog post. Now the SF DA is using the same term in a call for deescalation that implicitly frames journalism as a public safety threat. x.com/GerritD/sta...

Claude Mythos is apparently obsessed with Mark Fisher of Capitalist Realism fame. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Anthropic's existence is predicated on the inevitability of strong AI? Some Fisher-influenced parts of my forthcoming book Obsolete. 🧵

Nearly 3 years ago, I pitched an essay on AI to Jacobin, which became a cover story, which became a book about the biggest project in history: Obsolete: The AI Industry's Trillion-Dollar Race to Replace You—and How to Stop It Preorders ship in May 🧵

Love how far out of the way outlets go to avoid mentioning AI extinction risk (which Bernie is very worried about). It's like your sibling saying "Mom might lose her job" while leaving out that she's waiting on a terminal diagnosis!

The road to hell:

Never write a book on AI... I wrote this a few weeks back and am now pleasantly surprised that Anthropic is taking such a costly stand in almost exactly this scenario.

Welp, the inevitable ultimate backtracking just happened. Anthropic scrapped "the promise to not release AI models if Anthropic can’t guarantee proper risk mitigations in advance." Once you've decided the race is better with you in it, you can never decide not to race.

People will never cease to amaze me.

I live and breathe this intersection and still felt like I learned a lot from this piece.

So the Pentagon decided to integrate Grok into its classified servers. This is the company that accidentally published a chat whenever a Grok user clicked the “share” button to create a URL to access the chat content. What could go wrong?

imagine writing unironically in your journal about the nonprofit you currently run: "financially, what will take ME to $1B"

It was clear to me from the first week of Trump 1 that, if this country actually descended into full blown authoritarian rule, ICE would play a central role. When I was 23, I worked for ICE as a McKinsey consultant. 🧵

Chamber of Commerce is one of the most influential lobbies in the country. It's apparently now asking all potential federal endorsements for their position on banning state-level AI laws via federal preemption. x.com/reed_showal...

So Lonsdale replied, blocked me, then wrote a longer post opening with a brilliant pun. The defense is: Elon Musk did it so it can't be racist and black conservatives also agree with me. I shit you not. I encourage you to look into Rhodesia.

Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale just endorsed apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia and said the US should move toward their model of open white supremacy. He is one of the funders of the AI industry super PAC along with OpenAI president Greg Brockman & a16z.

dying at these attempts by AIs to pass know-your-customer checks.

In my debut for MIT Tech Review, I got to speak with Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Helen Toner, Stuart Russell, and many others about the state of AI safety, misconceptions about the community, and why they're still worried.

Wow, if @GovKathyHochul actually does this, it will be a clear capitulation to the tech industry.

Peak comedy for this particular organization to (reportedly) prevent its economists from saying that its tech will automate jobs.

I came out of book hibernation to give you perhaps the final piece in my series covering OpenAI's restructuring. OpenAI is framing this as a neatly packaged fait accompli, but it's actually a tensely negotiated settlement, with lots of conditions. 🧵 x.com/OpenAI/stat...

IMO there are 3 big problems with Dean's post: 1. I really don't think it's a reasonable prediction of how this statement would be operationalized 2. Superintelligence would inherently concentrate enormous power in whatever controls it x.com/deanwball/s...

Damn I love Wikipedia.

imagine torching your decades in the making rep as a lib billionaire to get some free conference security. (TBC I don't think that's why he did it...)

I had been following these developments but no one had put them all together. The world's largest company appears to be increasingly throwing its weight around to fight regulation. x.com/sjgadler/st...

Wow, OpenAI's head of mission alignment just spoke out against the way the company has been using subpoenas to intimidate and disrupt political opponents. A surprising number of OAI rank & file have no idea what their leadership is doing to kill regulation. x.com/jachiam0/st...

Well, now I need to update my book. To my knowledge, this is the first time Sam Altman hasn't downplayed or dismissed AI existential risk since early 2023. TBC, I think it's good of Altman to say this if that's what he actually believes... x.com/ai_ctrl/sta...

This reminds me of arguments that McKinsey would make to justify working for Gulf autocracies. However, academic research has found that the opposite tends to happen: companies abandon human rights to conform to their wealthy clients. x.com/ShakeelHash...

Last week, I had the incredible privilege of moderating a conversation on AI+geopolitics w/ Daron Acemoglu & Sandhini Agarwal (OpenAI trustworthy AI lead) for the Nobel Foundation at the Swedish Consulate. It was lively+substantive (one audience member was pleasantly surprised) x.com/swedennewyo...

Newsom just signed Sen. Scott Wiener's SB 53, exactly one year after he vetoed SB 1047. www.gov.ca.gov/2025/09/29/...

"The human"

Newsom just strongly signaled he'll sign SB 53, Scott Wiener's pared down redux of SB 1047 (which Newsom vetoed last year). I and many others expected him to sign this one, but now it seems like a done-deal. He has to be physically in CA to sign, and this happened in NYC. 🧵

What the hell is going on here??

Earlier today, a source wondered why OpenAI was so quiet on export controls, despite the fact that they would help OAI keep a lead over Chinese efforts (and bc Sam Altman has adopted the China-race framing). Well now we have a pretty good guess! x.com/OpenAINewsr...

Josh Hawley just demanded lots of information on chatbot policies from OpenAI, Meta, Google, CharacterAI and Snapchat.

Thomas Friedman just soft endorsed a campaign to ban the creation of artificial superintelligence. x.com/tomfriedman...

Can a set of directives like Asimov's 3 Laws of Robotics actually make AI safer? Surprisingly, seems like yes! Apollo Research worked with OpenAI to massively reduce rates of AI scheming. Quick 🧵 x.com/apolloaieva...

You could be forgiven for thinking that OpenAI had given up on its plans to shed its nonprofit controls. It also made headlines for offering its nonprofit a $100B+ stake. But it's actually trying to dramatically weaken nonprofit controls and its promise to share its profits. 🧵

Revisiting this banger 1969 essay by the former US NatSec advisor on the enormous gulf between nuclear planning and the political reality of nuclear weapons. A single hydrogen bomb on NYC could easily kill more Americans than every US war death in history.

OpenAI is suggesting that it might leave California over concerns that the state might block its effort to restructure to reduce nonprofit control+kill profit caps. I'm skeptical. If OpenAI is in California AT ALL, the state has powers to compel them 🧵

How am I just learning about this now???