Whoa

We have a narrow window to build political superintelligence and design AI to strengthen free societies. I joined Anthropic so that I could do the unique research on this that can only be done from inside a frontier lab, and I couldn't be more excited for it. We'll also need a broader ecosystem of work beyond the labs---and that's why @freesystemslab is entering a new, bigger, and bolder phase. In under a year, we built the largest human-judged study of political slant in AI, mapped AI politics across 305,000 videos and emails, and beat prediction markets with an AI assistant. We taught AI to catch ambiguous contract language, represent voters, and replicate published research in under an hour for $10. And we discovered AI's strange love for the Japanese Communist Party. But we have a lot more to do. So we're scaling up in three ways. (1) NEW MEMBERS OF THE FREE SYSTEMS FACULTY First, we're bringing on three new faculty affiliates to help us do more work faster: @fouirnaies will help us study how to build agentic tools for legislators. Cassandra Handan-Nader will apply AI to help develop new technical research in political methodology, like scaling legislators based on roll-call votes. @danmthomp will study how to turn AI into the best political advisor possible. I'm incredibly excited to welcome all three on board! (2) OUR FIRST LAB MANAGER But how are we going to do all of this new stuff with all these new teammates?? We need someone focused every day on turning this vision into a functioning research institution: guiding fellows, pushing projects forward, improving how we communicate findings, building partnerships, and helping the work reach researchers, policymakers, technologists, and the public. We have found the perfect person in James Campsie, who is joining us as the first Free Systems lab manager. I've already been working with James for a while, and he is going to supercharge the lab. (3) API TOKEN GRANTS FOR EXTENDING OUR RESEARCH We're also going to scale our work beyond the lab itself. We're using the revenue we make from subscription fees to fund API token grants---applicants can propose work that extends our existing research projects, and we'll provide API tokens for the work. If you want to support these grants, please add a paying subscription! Finally: we're launching our own X account for Free Systems (see below), and a lab website (freesystems.net) that houses all of our artifacts, prototypes, and more. The substack is still the hub for our research, but the website helps track progress over time and puts all our stuff in one place. I'm incredibly grateful to @StanfordGSB and @HooverInst for supporting this work, which will remain separate from Anthropic, and to all of my collaborators, students, friends, and family---I couldn't think of more meaningful work for us all to get to do together.