Zander retweeted
“Claude can help US kill more people more quickly ?”
Host: “With the help of LLMs, the US military has gone from hitting 1,000 targets a day to 5,000. That means Claude can help kill more people more quickly. Are you comfortable with that?”
Dario Amodei: “I am supportive of the US being more effective militarily. Having that ability be stronger doesn’t cause wars. It deters wars.”
“Do you want this country to be a more powerful actor on the world stage? I do. I’m a patriot.”
unironically, a research reported generated by Opus 5.5 in ultracode must be the new most efficient way to become informed about local elections. highly recommended
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tremendously excited for this. I think I've seen/read every Caro interview in existence. the fewer of these that are mentioned, the better Dwarkesh did
- "more power than any mayor and governor combined"
- Lord Acton
- "power reveals"
- "thinking with your fingers"
- "you have to be prepared for a very small printing"
- size of the advance for The Power Broker
- having no researchers/Ina being his only help on the books
- cutting 350k words from The Power Broker
- "I never wanted to tell the story of a great man."
- "it's all there in black and white"
- "old Whiteside, he dead."
- "turn every page"
- the "One Mile" chapter in The Power Broker
- "what would I see?"
- smith corona electra 210
- "you're never gonna be able to write about that, kid"
- "what did 'no, out' mean?"
- "'you save my face today, I'll save your face tomorrow'"
- "venomous viper"
- "finding a mexican who 'moves around a lot'"
- "'he lies all the time, even when he doesn't need to lie'"
- the urban planning class he took at Harvard
- "if a work of nonfiction is to endure..."
- fig preserves
- "'why couldn't you do a biography of Napoleon'?"
- "'that's enough for today'"
I recently got to interview Robert Caro, who is my favorite author of all time.
This gave me the excuse to reread his biographies of Lyndon Johnson and Robert Moses, and to compile my prep notes into this video essay.
These guys pulled off some truly incredible schemes.
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really cool project despite the fact that I no longer know what to do with these domains I just bought
Can AI forecast elections better than experts and prediction markets?
We built BallotBench to find out: a live benchmark where 9 frontier AI agents compete to predict the 2026 US midterms, from today through Election Day, Nov 3.
Follow along → ballotbench.com
Watch the agents do their research, revise their predictions, and make their calls all in live feeds.
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the way this stuff is talked about is insane. glps are even prescribed for sleep apnea. there is a commerical with shaq in it talking about using zepbound to fix his sleep apnea, as if it is a direct mechanism. this is not unlike prescribing minoxidil for low matches on tinder
JUST IN: Experimental peptide retatrutide completely eliminates sleep apnea in up to 25% of patients in clinical trials.
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maybe I'm a mark, but I think this one will finally be good
Introducing Gemini 4 Carbon, it's a big jump over Argon which we released just 2 weeks ago.
Gemini 4 Carbon is SOTA on cyber, long horizon tasks, ranks #1 on Artificial Analysis V5, significantly improves on usability in domains like coding, and is more aligned.
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Zander retweeted
“The core algorithm was found on October 16 by an internal Claude research model with 14M output tokens and no human input. Anthropic researchers worked with Claude to improve the presentation, resulting in this paper.”
github.com/anthropics/formal…
Zander retweeted
Ryan reported to me when we worked on Alignment Faking at Anthropic. He had access to sensitive information then and handled it with utmost professionalism. I trust Ryan a lot more than OpenAI here.
Based on this article, OpenAI has made false accusations about me. The three researchers fired from OpenAI were told I facilitated architecture leaks to The Information. This is false.
A journalist from The Information did reach out to me shortly before that article came out. I did not comment at all beyond asking the journalist to make it clear that a blog post I wrote which was referenced in the article was preexisting and public.
The article also mentions an internal OpenAI monitorability proposal. I have heard that this memo contained highly sensitive architecture information, and that OpenAI accused me of accessing and reading it. This accusation is also false.
As reported in the article, I viewed a version of the proposal that did not have sensitive IP and was approved for sharing with me. I believe OpenAI now knows this accusation was based on a conflation of these two documents, though I do not know if they have clearly retracted that accusation.
I do not and have never solicited proprietary information, and the three employees who were recently fired from OpenAI never leaked IP to me. As the article mentions, I did have Signal chats with them that had disappearing messages on; they’re professional contacts that I’ve had on Signal for a while, and use of Signal is common in the tech industry. During the Hugging Face investigation, I was careful to avoid sending Signal messages with confidential information, though I did sometimes discuss high level things on Signal calls. As far as I understood, this was normal.
more proof of the taste gap between anthropic and openai. openai models are not good because openai lacks taste as an organization
just think of the motifs: "don't use gpt for frontend", "astra code is nearly unreadable". gpt models can complete tasks, but not in a tasteful way
We’re opening a research preview of Claude Duet, a new app where Claude works as a proactive agent.
It comes to you with what needs your attention, completes tasks you ask of it, keeps working when you step away, and checks with you before it acts on your behalf.
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a significant factor here that seems to be hardly ever mentioned is that once anthropic goes public, they really will have a lot of leverage. they are clearly in the lead currently, and they are leading at building the lead—not just for themselves but for the US more broadly
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.
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Zander retweeted
Tom is a patriot wsj.com/tech/ai/tom-brown-at…
Zander retweeted
So much of Airbnb’s success came from @jgebbia’s design brilliance. I’m delighted he brought those gifts to our government.
Our country designed great buildings, but for most Americans, the front door to government is now a website. Starting today, that experience they will be beautiful, elegant, and human.
Proud of you, Joe.
Chief Design Officer @jgebbia officially unveils America.gov, the new online home for the United States of America
but wait, I thought Anthropic makes models for rich people?
The most important thing about Sonnet 5.5 is that it's now the model that powers the free tier on claude.ai - so all of this stuff can be done by free users
ChatGPT's free tier is still GPT-5.6 Luna, which is a lot less capable
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fwiw dario has been endlessly vindicated over the years in nearly every category, not least by the hugging face incident et hoc genus omne
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apple vision pro is such a great device. sadly the 3d modeling capabilities of recent models haven't really added to the experience yet though. suspect that will be different within months. need a bit higher fidelity + faster iteration
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