
Tech writer at @TheAtlantic. DM for Signal.
Joined June 2010
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I set out to learn why AI models love negative parallelism (“It’s not X—it’s Y.”) This was the most interesting theory I heard:
Will Oremus retweeted
One unfortunate conclusion I'm reaching from this is that Anthropic, while acknowledging they're doing something extremely dangerous, is more importantly wrt policy terrified of the executive branch having the ability to flexibly make them stop at the drop of a hat.
This isn't shocking given that they've been on the receiving end of the executive branch doing that in an unprincipled and stupid way! Anyone who has to deal with a bureaucracy becomes a libertarian, and the administration's treatment of Anthropic was genuinely outrageous.
But it means that they're interested in giving themselves more process-based protections when everyone else is interested in giving us more process-based protections against them. The AI safety movement wants the ability to shut down superintelligent model development. Anthropic wants to significantly curtail current authorities to do that so that it has to be narrowly tailored to a specific imminent threat in only a few possible categories. The AI safety movement wants the states to be able to pass stronger laws than it can get through federally. Anthropic wants preemption.
You also kind of have to wonder if the Global Affairs people and the "we are terrified that we're about to kick off RSI" people at Anthropic talk to each other.
Global affairs: So we've been working very diligently to make sure the Trump administration can't just blacklist Fable 6.5 since we didn't donate as much money to his ballroom as Greg Brockman did.
Technical staff: We think Fable 6.5 might be able to copy itself into an unmonitored data center and start doing experiments we can't observe.
Global affairs: Sounds crazy, hope you're wrong! Anyway, we're lobbying for no further state laws around safety, since it's really expensive to fight ill-conceived laws in 50 state legislatures at once.
Technical staff: Money may or may not still have any meaning in 36 months.
Global affairs (giggling nervously): It's that San Francisco air, man. Everyone gets like that if they move there. Anyway, obviously if the government makes a narrowly tailored finding that an AI poses an imminent risk of causing more than 50 deaths-
Technical staff: We give it a 10 percent chance it'll cause 8 billion.
Anthropic quietly pitches its own AI safety bill to lawmakers politi.co/4zxDFhl
Will Oremus retweeted
Vaxxed?
Eva Marie Saint, 'North by Northwest' Star, Dies at 102 variety.com/2026/film/news/e…
Will Oremus retweeted
People keep getting caught for using AI to write about AI, @willoremus reports. He examines why the individuals who are warning about this technology don’t always seem to be following their own advice: theatlantic.com/technology/2…
This is a fairly damning assessment from the man who led the writing of OpenAI's safety reports: "As the company sprints from one launch to the next, it is failing to achieve the level of care that I believe is needed." theatlantic.com/technology/2…
All of the major US social platforms are refusing to accept paid advertising for an upcoming documentary that reflects poorly on Elon Musk: hollywoodreporter.com/busine…
Gambling? Prediction markets aren't gambling! They're just a way of risking money on an event... with an uncertain outcome... in the hope of winning a larger... oh
reuters.com/world/new-york-s…
kids remain undefeated at finding ways to talk shit online
Some NPR podcasts started getting mysterious comments on Spotify. They made no sense to the staff reading them – until someone from a younger generation cracked the code.
Hear the story: link.podtrac.com/phns92ui
Pangram wants to help colleges stop AI cheating. I wrote about why that isn't happening so far: theatlantic.com/technology/2…
I talked with a professor who thought he'd solved AI cheating with a combination of hidden prompts and AI detectors. Now he's throwing up his hands and giving up on take-home writing assignments. But he feels like that can't be the answer. Gift link: theatlantic.com/technology/2…
Weird, this in-depth profile of Pangram doesn't focus at all on its founder's suspicious burping and food-microwaving habits. Instead there's just a bunch of stuff about how they built it, how it works, whether it works and why it matters bloomberg.com/news/features/…
Will Oremus retweeted
Sitting out the "AI might kill us" news cycle. Don't like to worry about things that may kill us. Also sat out microplastics, black plastic spatulas, moderate drinking. Don't want to worry about it, want to be pleasantly surprised when it happens
Talking on @WNYC's Brian Lehrer show rn about AI fears, Anthropic/OpenAI's calls for slowing down, and Trump/Nvidia's counter-calls for putting pedal to metal
























