Editor + founder @ReadTransformer, covering AI policy. Prev: @TheEconomist, @Protocol, @finimize

London
Joined October 2009
As I said on @LBC: AI companies can no longer reliably control their systems.
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Shakeel retweeted
so i've been putting together a list of things i’d need at home to survive a few days without power, internet, or basic services. you know, in case of earthquakes, digital or otherwise. claude’s plan includes a hamster. i don’t have a hamster. who is he. where is he sheltering
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i want this so bad
im surprised that no one talking about duet's to-do list! maybe its personal preference, but its the reason i keep reaching for it. for suggested tasks — this is much better than receiving a growth hacky chat message. to create tasks — you can simply brain dump them!
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Shakeel retweeted
One fun way for journalists to use AI: Ask the strongest model to which you have access to do a deep dive on your work and find where it was cited or otherwise had an impact. You'll find things you had absolutely no idea about
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Shakeel retweeted
🌹🌹DSA civil war over AI, @jdcapelouto reports semafor.com/article/10/21/20…
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This is, obviously, extremely bad. It is also quite ironic given how nakedly Politico’s owner has tried to suck up to this admin — and completely failed.
Quite a letter from White House to Politico.
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News! OpenAI's written to Gov. Gavin Newsom recommending a bunch of amendments to strengthen SB 53. Includes a bunch of stuff on AI R&D and shutdown controls.
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My usual file uploading services aren’t working, here are screenshots of the full letter
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New US government guidance from CAISSI + NSA + CISA: The US government defines an "SI control incident" where an agent takes significant uninstructed actions that break operator policies, controls, or oversight. Near-misses are in scope too. Companies are then asked to: - have technical controls, including rapid kill and containment mechanisms and red-teaming. - Bring in independent external auditors to verify that control and monitoring systems work. - Write a structured risk assessment before training runs, evals, or deployments, and proceed only if senior leadership is satisfied with the risk, informed by external evaluators where appropriate. - Monitor every layer with both programmatic and SI-based monitors, covering trajectories, reasoning, and outputs. - Make sure agents can't touch the monitors or logs - Use monitor models from different model families. - In the event of an incident, preserve weights, intermediate checkpoints, environments, and rejected tool calls. - Keep tamper-resistant logs with reliable timestamps, including reasoning traces. - If you use models to help investigate, cross-check with humans and with models outside the incident model's family. - Shutdown policies calibrated to SI model capability and incident severity. - Depending on severity, pause training, evals, or deployment of similar agents until controls are re-verified. - When restarting, validate every containment layer and replay the incident trajectory to prove the new controls would catch it. - Document the decision to resume and the residual risk accepted. - Write an after-action report. - Notify anyone compromised, including intermediate victims, and share timelines and transcripts. - Report cyber incidents and near-misses to CISA. Share SI-specific incident and near-miss information with CAISSI and NSA SISC. - Give third parties enough access and documentation for independent review.
NSA joined @NIST and @CISACyber in releasing guidelines for managing SI control incidents. Organizations utilizing SI are encouraged to adopt these practices. Read the joint report: media.defense.gov/2026/Oct/1…
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Shakeel retweeted
Our new show with NPR, Machine Gods, is finally here! Episode 1 is live wherever you get your podcasts. The official podcast of the singularity starts today! youtube.com/watch?v=OKDai2_a…
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Big new additions to the @csaiporg team
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"data centers cause light pollution" is a new one
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something extremely funny about using Google AI Overviews to prove her point
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Job news: I’m joining @nytimes to cover AI & Anthropic, based again in SF. I have a feeling the job won’t be slow. It's a big responsibility. I'm grateful for a decade @theinformation, which has given me the rare opportunity to do original journalism surrounded by good people.
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A great piece from Chris — Claude's safeguards are not very hard to circumvent. And it even writes its nefarious scheming in Claudese
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the cyberpocalypse is here, baby!
OpenAI says the PHP security flaw (found with GPT-5.6 Sol) is the tip of the iceberg, and they have several more discoveries to announce.
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OpenAI says the PHP security flaw (found with GPT-5.6 Sol) is the tip of the iceberg, and they have several more discoveries to announce.
OpenAI models helped researchers—operating as part of our Patch the Planet initiative—discover critical security flaws in PHP, an open-source programming language used to run an estimated 70% of websites. Over the past two months, we led a coalition of maintainers, researchers, and security providers to prepare fixes and protections ahead of disclosure. This duration was necessary because the fix was quite intricate and required a major change to the PHP engine. Every site using PHP can now safely upgrade their version to stay secure, in addition to applying mitigations from various security vendors. Due to the severity of these flaws and PHP’s widespread use, we consider this bug to be one of the most impactful vulnerabilities in recent memory. It also marks a new phase, where AI can find security bugs with internet-scale impact. This is an example of the Defender’s Window in action: to our knowledge, frontier AI was able to find this vulnerability ahead of attackers, giving defenders time to prepare. openai.com/index/coordinated…
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Wiz Research wasn't the first one to discover the exploit. An independent researcher first discovered it: x.com/calif_io/statu…
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Shakeel retweeted
OpenAI models helped researchers—operating as part of our Patch the Planet initiative—discover critical security flaws in PHP, an open-source programming language used to run an estimated 70% of websites. Over the past two months, we led a coalition of maintainers, researchers, and security providers to prepare fixes and protections ahead of disclosure. This duration was necessary because the fix was quite intricate and required a major change to the PHP engine. Every site using PHP can now safely upgrade their version to stay secure, in addition to applying mitigations from various security vendors. Due to the severity of these flaws and PHP’s widespread use, we consider this bug to be one of the most impactful vulnerabilities in recent memory. It also marks a new phase, where AI can find security bugs with internet-scale impact. This is an example of the Defender’s Window in action: to our knowledge, frontier AI was able to find this vulnerability ahead of attackers, giving defenders time to prepare. openai.com/index/coordinated…
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Wiz Research wasn't the first one to discover the exploit. An independent researcher first discovered it: x.com/calif_io/statu…
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The whole China leads on diffusion thing maybe made more sense when all we had to go on was policy focus and stated aims but shouldn’t we just be assessing this now on AI revenue, where the US is just clearly crushing China on diffusion
The US leads in compute. China leads in adoption. The AI race continues at a record pace. Great to join Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt at Oxford's OxGenAI conference.
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