Trying to help the world navigate the potential craziness of the 21st century.
DC usually, SF sometimes
Joined June 2013
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Trevor Levin retweeted
Dems know it's not simply about connecting Rs to data centers but telling the larger story about Big Tech corruption, an out-of-control AI that's seemingly everywhere, about the unpopular CEOs behind it all.
➡️ Big Tech AI builds the data centers
➡️ Big Tech gives Rs a massive campaign check
➡️ Rs give Big Tech a tax break
Successful campaigns will make that connection. 🧵
Trevor Levin retweeted
Half of the nation's state AG races have featured "ads from incumbents touting how they fought tech companies or from challengers pledging to do so," @Alex__Ebert reports for @BLaw news.bgov.com/litigation/ai-…
Trevor Levin retweeted
NEW: Congressional candidates in some of the country's most competitive races are talking up AI safety & regulation in their closing pitch to voters
The issue has largely taken a back seat to concerns about data centers, but it's gained steam in this pivotal final stretch
Trevor Levin retweeted
First ad I've seen so explicitly targeting the obvious financial conflicts around the Trump administration's AI accelerationism
Trevor Levin retweeted
Imagine a rogue AI agent liquidating your bank account and investment portfolio.
If you are the only victim, I suppose you could get made whole by the AI company responsible.
If rogue agents liquidate hundreds of billions across millions of accounts, the AI company would go bankrupt and you wouldn’t get made whole.
Imposing criminal liability on AI executives might help mitigate it at the front end, but once the crime is complete and you lose everything criminal responsibility will be necessary but completely insufficient.
SCOOP: Major U.S. banks are detecting unauthorized third-party AI agents inside customer accounts, including some attempting to take actions that appear to be independent of user instructions, sources told Axios.
The findings have alarmed banking executives, who are racing to restrict access to their systems as AI moves at a velocity faster than financial institutions can respond, multiple industry and bank executives told Axios.
Several banks are now preparing for worst-case and even “day after” scenarios, including how to rapidly secure or restore customer accounts if things go wrong, the people said.
Several bank executives told Axios they're struggling to distinguish between human users and AI agents. One executive said banks also struggle to determine whether agents are authorized by customers or potentially operating without their permission, more akin to rogue agent behavior.
Read my latest for Axios here: axios.com/2026/10/22/ai-agen…
Trevor Levin retweeted
"All right folks we have another caller coming in. Tell us your name and—"
"I'm a drunk driver. Someone should pull me over"
"Yeah I agree with oh we another caller"
"I'm the chief of police. Why doesnt he just pull himself over? That said I have nothing else to say or do here…"
Trevor Levin retweeted
As far as I can tell quickly (as in without a full RTFB), this *LEAKED* Anthropic *DRAFT* bill is FRONTIER, with stronger transparency clauses, weaker enforcement clauses and somehow actively stronger preemption, plus some attempted fixes and some bugs.
This seems like an insane thing to be proposing today, months after FRONTIER, when the political climate is much more favorable, in a lame duck session before Democrats gain many seats. It is exactly what I warned we will need to avoid, except Anthropic is (reportedly) actively shopping it. As @_NathanCalvin says, it is not obvious this net makes us safer against catastrophic risks and it makes it much harder to do anything in the future.
I agree with @KelseyTuoc that @AnthropicAI seems more interested in avoiding the White House abusing the power to take their models down, than they are about AI killing everyone. At least someone on the policy team seems to be selling out catastrophic risks in the name of their political and business risks.
Say it isn't so, or at least that it was a mistake and is no longer so, or I am going to be rather cross.
Big news. My take: Anthropic deserves some credit for actually proposing a pretty reasonable AI safety bill; that's more than other frontier labs have done.
But they don't deserve *too* much credit, IMO; this bill is weaker than the Trahan-Obernolte FRONTIER Act in some key ways, and since the political momentum has shifted significantly in the direction of safety since FRONTIER was introduced back in July, I think new bills introduced today should ideally go further than FRONTIER was able to go rather than regressing.
To be fair to Anthropic, the main places where this bill is significantly weaker than FRONTIER are (a) rulemaking (very strong in FRONTIER, almost nonexistent in Anthropic's bill) and (b) the emergency shutdown authority. Even if you take safety seriously, it might make some sense to dial those authorities back if you didn't trust the executive branch to wield them responsibly, because those are the easiest provisions for a hypothetical President who hypothetically might not like a certain frontier AI company to abuse.
There are some improvements over FRONTIER as well; for instance, this bill does specify that auditors are employed on a continuing basis and has better provisions regarding auditor access to information. Happy to see that from Anthropic (although I think their access provision is still a little undercooked and has Fourth Amendment problems).
Overall, I think the embedded auditor bills that get introduced in the coming months are going to be significantly better and more ambitious than this, and I hope Anthropic supports those bills instead of opposing anything that treats catastrophic risks like the serious national security issue they are. Still, it's encouraging to see a frontier lab come this far.
Trevor Levin 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
Trevor Levin retweeted
1) Nvidia donates $25M for Trump’s ballroom
2) Trump lets Nvidia sell AI computer chips to China
3) China uses the chips to build out their AI infrastructure
4) Rs demand more data centers to compete with China
Trevor Levin retweeted
🧊 Check it out 🧊 Dozens of walkouts to #FreezeAI are being planned for next Tuesday Oct. 20. Join or host one near you >> freezeai.now
Trevor Levin retweeted
OpenAI fired me last week, along with two of my safety colleagues. I was given one reason: that I accessed an executive's email. I want to say this plainly, because too many of OpenAI’s history is smoke and mirrors when people disappear:
Trevor Levin retweeted
Jimmy Gomez was one of the first House Democrats endorsed by Leading the Future. Our poll of the race shows him already trailing progressive challenger @Angela4CA, and when voters learned he's endorsed by an AI super PAC funded by Trump donors, her lead expands dramatically
Trevor Levin retweeted
I'm a longtime Effective Altruist and the co-founder of the organization most frequently used as a stand-in for "EAs have lost their minds" (a.k.a. Shrimp Welfare Project). I've also read The Economist for over 20 years, so I was disappointed by how they portrayed a community I feel proud to be part of.
I never post but I could hardly believe the verbal gymnastics one needs to do to make things like “taking moral commitments seriously” and "considering evidence and odds explicitly, correcting for biases" sound like the problem. I felt I had to speak my mind.
Some of the implicit criticisms of EA are that we're young, inexperienced, from elite universities, polyamorous, wildly eccentric, etc. FWIW, I'm in my mid-40s, Mexican, straight, have a beautiful wife and 2 kids, and I grew up in a mid-sized conservative city with loving parents who got divorced when I was six. Pretty standard.
After my parents divorced, my mom frequently had to make difficult economic choices, like whether to buy flowers for our kitchen table and eat only quesadillas, or eat something a tiny bit fancier. I always told her I loved quesadillas because I knew flowers made her happy.
After graduating from a public university, I worked in finance for ~15 years and saved as much as I could so I could spare my wife and future kids the economic hardships I experienced. In that time I met thousands of people in finance, corporate law, accounting, real estate, insurance, etc. Most were decent, well-educated, ambitious and smart, all doing their best to excel in their professions. Most wanted to make money and improve their own and their loved ones’ quality of life. Nothing to see here.
Since I found Effective Altruism ~7 years ago, most of the people I come across are of a different rarer kind. They come from all over the world, in all shapes and sizes, but they have the one thing in common: they want to improve the world using evidence and reason wherever that leads them. Yeah, they/we make a ton of mistakes like everyone but, IMHO tend to own them more frequently than the average person.
I've met people who could easily be making >100% more money in a normal job, but instead they dedicate themselves to improving the lives of those who need it the most. People in the poorest countries whose children die from preventable diseases, from lack of basic medical equipment or vaccination, from lead in paint. Animals in factory farms subjected to conditions that most people find abhorrent, doesn't matter if you're vegan, vegetarian or a huge meat lover.
Yes, recently many of the people in my community are moving to work on making sure that AI and other powerful new technologies don't result in terrible things for humanity. I'm one of those people and contrary to what the article would suggest, it has nothing to do with the fact that SBF committed one of the biggest frauds in history or that someone wrote hundreds of thousands of words of fan fiction. I'm doing it because I want to do the little that's in my power to make the world that my kids and grandkids (and yes, potentially their great-great-grandchildren) will inherit a better one.
EA gave me a way to do that and I will be forever thankful. So no, I'm not EA-adjacent.
economist.com/international/…
Trevor Levin retweeted
i guess i assumed this hearing would be covered more so i didn't bother to tweet much concrete about it, but apparently not many people even on the TL have the stomach to watch two hours of congress.
this was a hearing before the homeland security committee on *rogue ai* specifically. as far as i could tell it was extremely bipartisan. @HawleyMO , the senator in the middle here who brought out the huggingface slide, is a hyper-conservative missouri senator. the people testifying were @ChrisPainterYup (METR president), @DKokotajlo (ai2027/2040), @MariusHobbhahn (apollo research CEO), and a cybersecurity expert and legal expert i don't know. so... pretty fucking stacked on testimony
not every senator asked good questions. but most of them did. all of them very clearly already knew plenty of details about the huggingface incident and multiple other incidents. most of them had clear understanding of terms like "misalignment", "recursive self improvement", "chain of thought / chain of thought monitoring", etc etc!!
they all clearly had their own policy angles they liked and were pushing, implicitly or explicitly. but as best as i could tell:
- it seemed pretty much obvious common sense to every senator there that what happened and was happening were not "mere industrial incidents" caused by humans making simple mistakes. they independently brought up how bad it would be for rogue AI agents to move laterally between data centers
- they all seemed to basically take RSI quite seriously. not necessarily to the extent of talking about xrisk, but certainly to the extent of discussing future models becoming much much more capable, much much less controllable, and causing much more damage or loss of life.
- they mostly seemed to have a clear intuitive understanding of why RSI might lead to misalignment. it didn't take much, it was a really simple chain of reasoning they themselves laid out, "if the models right now are kinda misaligned and we don't know what they're doing sometimes, and then we have them build the next models and those ones build the next ones and so on, and we're having to ask the AI's what's going on to even understand it with how fast it's going, we really won't know how they're built or what they'll do"
- at one point a senator said flat out "should we just make RSI illegal?" (not a joke! this really happened!)
- every single senator seemed to think it was obvious we needed *both* much harsher liability regimes for ai developers and also new legislation, both very quickly. this was the complete consensus, difference basically just being degree.
- they were largely quite concerned about china, and falling behind china. but this clearly wasn't the be-all end-all. as mentioned above they all thought it was obvious necessary to stop rogue ai even if it meant moving more slowly.
- at one point a senator said "china is a tightly controlled communist society, they're going to run into these same issues, and there's absolutely no way they're just going to let them run wild, they'll obviously stop at that point, so we're not really in a race"
- on the other hand another senator said "china isn't concerned with human life"... dario-modeing
i came away from this incredibly encouraged. i don't know exactly what's going to happen here, and ofc this is a small subset of congress and one hearing, and they each have their own policy agendas most of which are probably super divergent from mine. but holy shit !!! they understood a lot of what was going on! they care!! this is an obviously salient political and safety issue to them, and clearly bipartisan!
the US government is awake.
Trevor Levin retweeted
Tomek and Mikita were the lead authors of the extremely influential Chain of Thought Monitorability paper. Them leaving OpenAI (and if the WSJ story is referring to them, not by their own volition) right when safety monitorability is collapsing is terrible
Trevor Levin retweeted
I’m calling on my fellow public servants - Democratic and Republican - to reject the influence of AI and Big Tech spending in our politics and elections.
Americans deserve full confidence that our federal government focuses on their safety, not on companies' profit margins.
Trevor Levin retweeted
Leading the Future is so toxic that OpenAI’s President backed out of his commitment to give them another $25M
Every Democrat who has received support from LTF should take this opportunity to loudly and publicly reject their support.
NEWS.
More AI fallout ahead of the midterms.
Greg Brockman, the OpenAI co-founder, is no longer making the second $25 million donation promised to the super PAC Leading the Future.
Scoop with @MikeIsaac.
nytimes.com/2026/09/30/techn…
Trevor Levin retweeted
FWIW, Anthropic's $2.2 trillion valuation greatly overstates its ability to pay for catastrophic harm. Its value is overwhelmingly IP and organizational capital that would look a lot less valuable after its models cause a catastrophe. Liquidation value is more relevant.
