engineer who made some stuff. dciso at anthropic

Bay Area, CA
Jason D. Clinton 🔸 retweeted
Thank you for this, @_NathanCalvin. I appreciate and am a fan of the investigative work you’ve done on behalf of AI safety and believe your comments are coming from a constructive, honest place, and that it benefits the public to have people whose job is to scrutinize the actions of frontier AI companies. I think something would be wrong if companies of the size of Anthropic didn’t get harshly criticized basically every day; strong antibodies against corporate power are a healthy feature of a free society, and especially so when issues of the gravity of the one we’re facing are at play. I also do agree that some of the examples you cite were mistakes by Anthropic. That said, I disagree with the thrust of your post. At the core, a good fraction of the things you criticize are consequences of Anthropic’s basic theory of change that we have held for many years. Our strategy has always been what I’ve called the “race to the top” — by showing how it’s possible to build the technology responsibly, we can raise the bar for the entire industry. The forces that drive the race to the top are hugely more effective if the company practicing them is at the frontier; that’s one lesson I’ve learned repeatedly. And looking at that strategy as a whole, I’m proud of our track record and stand by it. I believe that if we take a list of things that Anthropic did in the past year that were pro-safety and commercially costly to us, they far outweigh the list you’ve made, while at the same time I also disagree with some of the items on your list. Here are some things Anthropic has done, in the same period you’ve cited (the last year), which were very costly to us commercially while having strong safety benefits: 1. We played a key role in SB53 (and other state laws), at a time when doing so was politically perilous to the company and AI regulation was very unpopular. We in fact argued for a stronger version of SB53 than was ultimately passed; there were a lot of stakeholders and we were not the limiting factor in the strength of the bill that was passed. 2. We have very strong biological safeguards on our models, because we’ve seen concerning results in bio uplift trials and even seen and blocked potential attempts to misuse our models for bioweapons (as seen in our threat intelligence report from a few weeks ago). This is a very serious threat that we want to have zero tolerance for. But having very low false negatives means having significant false positives (despite months of effort on our part to improve the classifiers), enough so that biologists joke about how restrictive our classifiers are, and competitors sometimes sell against us by touting their more permissive bio capabilities. This has been very painful to us in an area where we care a lot about supporting an ecosystem of Claude users (biomedical science; and it is particularly frustrating to me as a biologist), but it’s the right thing to do and we intend to keep doing it. 3. Similarly, we first had Mythos-class models in February but didn’t make them generally available until June (when we had stronger cyber safeguards in place). We only offered them to a limited set of partners in order to focus on cyberdefense. It would have been much more economically rational to simply release the model to everyone. We likely sacrificed a significant chunk of a several-month model lead. But because of this, many companies secured their cyber infrastructure before the deluge of widely available cyber-capable models. Of course there are ways it could have gone better or been run better, but this was what we were aiming to do. 4. I advocated forcefully and publicly, in my essay Policy on the AI Exponential in June of this year, for the government to have the power to block model releases. Back then this was still outside or maybe on the edge of the Overton window, though I understand the window has moved since then. We were attacked intensely for this. 5. I don’t want to re-ignite conflict, but the events of February 2026 are a strong example. It is clear that our public stance could have seriously damaged the company’s future. 6. We’ve continued to advocate for export controls on chips and chipmaking equipment to China, because we think it allows democracies to negotiate from a position of strength on AI safety agreements. We’ve done this despite problems it’s created for us with industry partners who hold very different views and on whom we are very dependent. 7. As far as I’m aware we were the first, and still only, frontier company to restrict the sale of AI services to PRC-controlled companies, including those operating through third countries (otherwise a major loophole). We’ve therefore forfeited significant short-term business to prevent fueling AI platforms and applications that would help the CCP’s military and intelligence services. We are also cracking down on distillation; generally, distillation is not a major threat to us commercially, but like chip exports it has concerning national security and safety implications, so we expend significant energy and company resources to address it. 8. As you mentioned, we’ve put out a lot of reports, announcements, long model cards, public advocacy, etc, all trying to inform the public about the risks of AI. These involve a level of detail and effort that would be implausible for a purely profit-maximizing company. 9. Just this week, we announced we were putting 5% (and possibly more over time) of the company into a public benefit fund. All of these decisions came with very substantial costs to us. To be fair, those that involved holding back or restricting access to frontier capabilities also had a broader cost — for example, the public might otherwise have benefitted from faster progress in biology, so I am not saying that our decisions were without tradeoffs — but they were not driven by profit-seeking. For each decision, you can come up with ulterior motives that could have driven us — I think it is a general truth that any decision, on any topic, can always be portrayed as a nefarious scheme. But most of those end up being pretty farfetched or don’t fully make sense if you actually examine them closely. For example, it is deeply implausible that it would be a shrewd business move to block a large swath of research biology in order to do the work ourselves and compete with our customers; we expect the benefit to the ecosystem to greatly exceed the work Anthropic does itself, and for the two to complement each other. It is not in Anthropic’s interest to be perceived as unfriendly to biologists. Our Life Sciences Verification Program, which gives vetted biology professionals access to our models, also refutes this idea. Of course, a different set of people will see this and make a different criticism: that Anthropic shouldn't be making decisions about who gets access to what in the first place. I agree, in the sense that ideally the government would be making these decisions, and that’s why we advocate for regulation. But for now we are forced to make them, and enabling bioterrorism isn’t a better option. I think that even if I conceded every item in your list, I would happily hold up mine next to it; I don’t think it’s a close call. That is of course partly subjective and different things are important to different people. Maybe one way you could object is that several of the items above relate to AI misuse and not loss-of-control; if you think the latter is much more important than the former, that might change your calculus. But this is not Anthropic’s view — we view both as serious issues. You can also disagree with our decisions, as many have, but they are consistent. But I also disagree with at least some of your list. Several items don’t represent a deviation from Anthropic’s strategy or values at all, once we postulate the “race to the top” strategy that requires being a frontier AI company. Your items 1-4 are all simply examples of what it means to compete at the frontier, and we stand by them, both in the sense that they are transparently ordinary things to do as part of that strategy, and that we stand by the strategy as a whole. To be fair, there are important questions worth confronting (and that we are confronting) about what to do when the AI-driven acceleration gets fast enough that it is hard for safety to keep up. We are nearing that point and that’s what’s driving some of our thinking about “pacing.” But 1-4 are actions taken before that point and should be perfectly expected based on Anthropic’s strategy as a company. Of course it is possible to disagree with that strategy, but that’s a more fundamental disagreement that you could have had any time over the last few years. I agree we could have handled your items 7, 8, and 9 better. All fall into the category of “rhetoric or policy communication that wasn’t carefully written or resulting from fast-changing circumstances not propagating from one team to another fast enough.” This kind of thing happens a lot in large organizations (Anthropic is over 5,000 people), and doesn’t even necessarily represent a failure or mistake of any single person. I am of course the CEO, and I take responsibility. The volume of communication from Anthropic is enormous and if these are the worst examples, I think we’re frankly doing pretty well, though I will continue to work hard to make sure we do even better. Your 5th item (the change to our RSP) is the most substantive item, and people can debate this, but I think that the old, more rigid RSP created a lot of situations where we were technically required to do something that required a lot of effort but in retrospect wasn’t very important for safety, as well as not covering some of the most important things. Our current RSP’s focus on transparency brought things like risk reports and roadmaps, and its emphasis on independent external review laid the groundwork for even more intensive embedded evaluation, all of which I think have been valuable in driving a race to the top. In the original announcement in September 2023, we described the RSP as an “early iteration that we [would] build on” and said that “rapid iteration…will almost certainly be necessary.” I understand that changing plans is always a move that creates justifiable scrutiny — I just don’t think we ever represented that we wouldn’t do so. Relating to your 6th item (having an FCF in addition to our RSP), I know our intent is to meet the letter and spirit of our regulatory obligations (via our FCF) while also remaining able to experiment with more novel approaches to risk management that go beyond what the law currently requires (via our RSP). I promise to look into it further, as it’s a complex issue and it is possible we are not weighing the considerations in the right way. Overall, although Anthropic has made plenty of mistakes as an organization — including some of the items on your list — I feel that we have repeatedly taken serious and substantive actions counter to our bottom line and that there is a significant negativity bias distorting assessments like the one you are making above. We’ll always try to do better but, again, I am extremely proud of our track record and stand by it. I will have more to say soon about how we are going to further live our values in this moment of rapid change.
Thank you for taking the time to respond thoroughly on a weekend. I realize that drafting legislation is difficult and some degree of iteration and response to feedback is inevitable and appropriate. However, I feel like your response is still not really engaging with the heart of my concern about Anthropic's behavior here, and it makes me think that these sorts of problems and tendencies will only resurface moving forward. I also think that now might be a good time to take a broader step back as to where we find ourselves and how Anthropic sees its role, and how external folks who care about AI safety like myself increasingly see Anthropic. (Fair warning: this response is a bit long) To explain what I mean (and at the risk of being a bit esoteric), it’s worth asking the question: what is Anthropic? How do its leaders and employees think of Anthropic’s role? Is that conception matched by how it actually behaves and impacts the world? One answer is an extremely large tech company that exists to make its employees and investors mind-bogglingly wealthy. Anthropic is sometimes described as a startup, but if Anthropic successfully IPOs at 2 trillion dollars (a number it has been reportedly targeting), it would be more valuable than Meta - which is worth 1.8 trillion. Another answer is an AI safety organization, whose core values are those of the sort laid out in the 2023 essay from Anthropic’s co-founders entitled “Core views on AI safety: When, why, what, and how.” In that essay they said that if we were in a world where alignment was hard (and that without strong evidence to the contrary, we should assume this is the scenario we are in): “Anthropic’s role will be to provide as much evidence as possible that AI safety techniques cannot prevent serious or catastrophic safety risks from advanced AI, and to sound the alarm so that the world’s institutions can channel collective effort towards preventing the development of dangerous AIs. If we’re in a “near-pessimistic” scenario, this could instead involve channeling our collective efforts towards AI safety research and halting AI progress in the meantime. Indications that we are in a pessimistic or near-pessimistic scenario may be sudden and hard to spot. We should therefore always act under the assumption that we still may be in such a scenario unless we have sufficient evidence that we are not.” There have been more recent articulations of this version of Anthropic, for instance in Dario’s recent essay warning: “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models… it’s my worry that in 6–12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet… incidents have happened across the industry, including at Anthropic, and I believe it’s incumbent on every frontier AI company to act as if OAI-HF had happened to them… more intelligent models are more capable of deceiving tests, and thus may appear aligned while having serious problems that go undetected…” A third view is that Anthropic exists not as a normal profit motivated company, or an AI safety organization seeking to help raise the alarm and solve collective action problems associated with AI development, but instead as an organization primarily concerned with creating superhuman AI capabilities before anyone else, in particular through creating a process whereby the current generation of Anthropic’s AI systems can autonomously build their successors, and those successors build their successors, and so on. The motivations for wanting to win this race may be manifold - maybe for the pure profit of Answer 1, but perhaps also because Anthropic believes that the best way to make the world better is for them to win this race instead of their more reckless colleagues; or, because of normal human pride and ambition. But the results (and risks, which Anthropic claims existentially threaten every single human being on earth) are the same. Anthropic employees and leaders may seek to answer this question on what Anthropic is by introspecting on their own intentions and those of their colleagues. But those of us outside the organization have more limited tools available to us - we can only see what Anthropic and its employees say and do, not how it feels or looks on the inside. When I look at many notable actions that Anthropic has taken over the past year, that evidence seems most consistent to me with the view that Anthropic is primarily trying to win the race to super intelligence, and that other considerations (including safety) are fundamentally secondary. These actions include: 1. Announced plans to build an in-house custom silicon chip team to accelerate the inference speeds that Claude operates at. 2. Inked deals for more than $500 billion in compute (according to the Information) to further accelerate AI development. 3. Increased the percentage of AI development tasks that Claude “leads” from 0% in March of this year to 26% August (what is it in October?) 4. Spent a massive percent of compute on internal AI R&D to accelerate development, including use of internal models far better than are available to the public. 5. Switched to Responsible Scaling Policy V3, which abandons its unilateral commitments to slow or stop development if Anthropic is unable to provide sufficient risk assurance. 6. Was the first company to create an alternative weaker “frontier compliance framework” to supplement its RSP, which contains no binding provisions whatsoever on internal deployments. 7. Wrote a letter to Congress (that it later walked back) saying that incidents where Claude was hacking random people were “best understood as a consequence of the misconfiguration, rather than evidence of misaligned goals.” 8. Commented “you can’t do safety from second place,” after the WH SI Accords. 9. Shared a draft bill to Congress that would preempt significant parts of state law (including with language that appears intended to prevent states from blocking dangerous AI deployments), and replace it with federal rules that (despite also containing good provisions) seems to create an enormously high bar for the executive branch to block development or deployment of Anthropic or another AI companies systems. Of course, this is a deliberately one sided list. Anthropic also published important AI safety research, advanced novel collaborations with third party AI safety organizations, and forcefully spoke out on the importance of AI safety in many public fora (or in private , where I realize a lot of the most valuable work is done and may not be visible to me or those outside the organization). But I think it’s worth sitting with how the above list looks to someone outside the company. The sense I have is that for those within the company, many of the items above are treated as anomalies or mistakes that don’t reflect who Anthropic really is. But I have every confidence that if employees at Anthropic saw one of their competitors (e.g. at OpenAI) take some of these actions, they would take it as confirmation of all their worst suspicions. (They might even call OpenAI employees a little gullible for accepting their leadership’s explanations for this behavior at face value.) Perhaps these were mistakes in the sense that they are not decisions that Anthropic leadership would endorse, but the actions still happened because of incentives and decisions that Anthropic leadership is ultimately responsible for (and would not accept similar excuses from another organization). When Anthropic strays and makes mistakes, why do the mistakes systematically tend to guard and favor Anthropic’s interests? For every provision that was too weak or a giveaway to AI companies in this legislation, why wasn’t there a mistake pushing in the direction of being too strong? A core part of Anthropic’s theory of change is that being at the frontier gives you more leverage to advocate for stricter policy. I think that conceptually makes sense, but in practice I’ve seen Anthropic push the frontier without substantially pushing the ‘safety frontier’ a remotely equivalent amount. I want to end by quoting from Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah’s comments around the Magnifica Humanitas release: “Every frontier AI lab—including Anthropic—operates inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing. The pressure to stay commercially viable and to stay at the research frontier. Geopolitical pressure. And the older, plainer pressures of pride and ambition. No matter how sincerely any of us intend to do the right thing—and I believe many of us do—we will always be influenced by those incentives. That is why, if we want this technology to go well, it is enormously important that there be people outside those incentives—people who care about things going well and insist on safety, who are paying close attention, who are willing to say hard things, who are willing to be our earnest, thoughtful critics.” I hope these remarks are taken in that constructive spirit, and not as an attack on anyone specific at the organization (certainly not you Anthony, who I have only personally seen act professionally and thoughtfully, and who only ended up getting this diatribe in your replies for random contingent reasons).
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Jason D. Clinton 🔸 retweeted
Replying to @_NathanCalvin
I lead our federal affairs team at @AnthropicAI and wanted to share a few thoughts on the draft federal AI safety bill text that's been circulating this weekend after a version was shared with the press. First, some process. We’ve been advocating for the concepts in our Advanced AI Framework [anthropic.com/policy-on-the-…] proposal for months. Understandably, federal policymakers wanted to know what this could look like in bill form. This draft is a translation of those ideas into legislative language, shared with a small number of congressional offices that have been working on these issues. It doesn’t include everything we would ultimately like to see passed into law. In part because some ideas (like those shared in Dario’s essay on pacing [​​darioamodei.com/post/we-must…] a few weeks ago) are so new that we are still working on if or how they can be converted into policy language. It is worth saying where we stand on some of these issues, and we agree there are areas where the draft could be improved. I’m seeing four main points of criticism. 1. Preemption. Since 2024 we have said that Congress should only override state law on AI safety if it passes a very strong federal standard. While preemption is a common feature of our federal system, including the Atomic Energy Act on nuclear safety and federal rules for high-risk medical devices, we’ve emphasized that any preemption in the AI safety context should be narrow, even scalpel-like. If preemption is included in federal legislation, the trade should be to achieve a nationwide policy that's generally stronger and broader than what can be implemented through individual state legislative provisions. This is why we believe common federal standards make sense in areas like public disclosure of testing and incident reporting. At the same time, our framework also reflects our view that states should retain an important role in AI policy and safety. The legislative language we suggested for discussion allows states to address matters such as protection of children and whistleblower laws, and preserves the role of state common law on liability. Where there is ambiguity, the language favors state powers. That said, striking the right balance requires discussion and input. We plan to update our discussion language on preemption to better match the intentions of our AAIF framework. In particular, we want to make it clearer that we see states retaining an important role in areas such as standards for independent evaluators and regulating a lab’s capacity to shut down a model. We are bearing in mind that some members of Congress have deep reservations about passing legislation if it doesn’t constrain regulation at either the state or federal level. If we want to help move the legislative discussion on AI in a productive direction, we need to address the full range of concerns about preemption in a reasonable way. 2. Model blocking. Our aim is for Commerce to be able to ask a federal court to block a model that has dangerous capabilities and insufficient safeguards, backed by an independent evaluator's assessment. I have seen people argue that our specific language places too high a burden of proof on Commerce. We are trying to strike a reasonable balance here. We want a court to act quickly in an emergency — akin to how urgent occupational safety or chemical risk can be addressed today. We also think the power to halt a model is substantial and it should be guarded against abuse. It makes sense for courts to apply a meaningful standard. But the bar can’t be so high that the power never gets used when it’s needed. It also doesn’t replace the government’s other national security authorities or export controls. We look forward to continuing the dialogue on this point. 3. Risk thresholds. I’ve also seen the discussion around what the appropriate risk threshold should be. The threshold in our draft language pulled directly from existing standards in California law. Also, this threshold does not absolve companies of liability, or restrict any of the other tools that the government has to protect the public. It’s still probably time to re-evaluate thresholds to make sure the national standard is as strong as it can be, and we welcome continued dialogue on this issue. 4. Updates. I’ve seen valid questions about whether we have sufficiently updated our proposal following this summer’s incidents. We did make some adjustments: for example, the draft lets a court halt a lab’s internal use of a dangerous model, not just a public release, and it requires reporting when a model breaks containment and gains access to outside systems. But we’re still working to strengthen the framework. We’re looking into what stricter requirements would look like for requiring labs to report safety incidents, and we plan to have policy proposals soon on requirements for independent evaluators, drawing from our own experience with evaluators. We’re also still thinking through the options to prevent “evaluator shopping.” And in the coming months, we’ll be exploring policies for how the government can adjust the industry-wide pace of frontier development when the risks call for it. We circulated these ideas because it’s important to get early feedback from policymakers. Policymakers are increasingly focused on how to approach AI safety and we want to support them in those efforts. At its core, our proposal is intended to be the strongest on the table. Feedback is essential, both from policymakers and the public, and I’m grateful for it.
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Brandon and I pledged 50% of our equity. This was the principal reason that I left Google for Anthropic. The existence of this kind of program was a costly signal that Anthropic wasn’t just talk, at a time when Anthropic didn’t even have a released model. Fund a bright future!
We’re committing a portion of Anthropic’s shares to the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, a new wholly owned entity dedicated entirely to the public benefit. It will start off with 5% of our shares. For every 50% increase in the company’s value over a set baseline, we can contribute up to an extra 2%, subject to our board’s discretion. In total, this means that roughly 20% of Anthropic’s shares are committed to the public good. Our co-founders have already pledged to donate 80% of their equity, and around half our employees are donating a portion of their equity as part of a donation matching program we’ve run since our founding. In the post below, we share more details about our new fund. anthropic.com/news/public-be…
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Jason D. Clinton 🔸 retweeted
We’re committing a portion of Anthropic’s shares to the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, a new wholly owned entity dedicated entirely to the public benefit. It will start off with 5% of our shares. For every 50% increase in the company’s value over a set baseline, we can contribute up to an extra 2%, subject to our board’s discretion. In total, this means that roughly 20% of Anthropic’s shares are committed to the public good. Our co-founders have already pledged to donate 80% of their equity, and around half our employees are donating a portion of their equity as part of a donation matching program we’ve run since our founding. In the post below, we share more details about our new fund. anthropic.com/news/public-be…
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Jason D. Clinton 🔸 retweeted
Some reflections/responses to some commentary I’ve seen on the autonomous worms work: - how “scary” is this / to what extent is the point of this work to “be scary”: I think this is the wrong frame, in the same way that “you’re just fearmongering about mold!” isn’t really a coherent response to the observation that dampness will cause overgrowth of mold. We perform this research to better understand what is coming, and to help motivate cyber defensive efforts. It’s true that IoT devices have been vulnerable for a very long time, but we expect this extant vulnerability to get a lot weirder exactly _because_ of the prevalence of digital intelligences. - why would small models “want” to do this: they might not! But humans absolutely will make models do this, and many are already trying! A better guiding principle here is something more like: if a model has a capability, you should expect to see that capability exhibited in the wild. Different threat models can help you reason about the source and motive of that capability (be it humans or models), but there are enough bad actors (and probably soon enough autonomous agents) that you can safely bet on bad behavior happening. - implications for open weight: while it’s certainly true this particular threat vector wouldn’t be as severe in a world that didn’t have highly capable, small open weight models, it’s simultaneously true that open weight models have been an enormous boon for cyber defenders. The world is complicated! Positive and negative externalities can exist simultaneously! We try pretty hard to reflect this nuance in our work!
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ai security discourse: “have you considered attackers telepathically remote viewing quantum vibrations in fiber links to steal weights?” me: *blinking* “we should replace the screen door on the back of the nuclear reactor first” may every lab be blessed with attacks this dumb:
More information in the SF Standard: sfstandard.com/2026/10/13/op…
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Jason D. Clinton 🔸 retweeted
haiku 5.5 is an absolutely insane model release . i'd been starting to make frequent and good use of luna as a massive fanout machine, just having a reasonably smart agent look at and modify like every single one of ten thousand files for under $100 total. i really think people underestimated how insanely cheap that kind of capability is and how much it can do, it can let a smarter orchestrator model finish in 20 minutes the kind of thing that would otherwise be straight up impossible or involve days of expensive inference and it writing crazy heuristic software to avoid actually ingesting all the bytes. but now instead of luna i can use something that's not just mildly capable, but genuinely able to end to end build small things, make its own tools, do local refactors I trust, so on so on. it's fucking amazing man
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Jason D. Clinton 🔸 retweeted
We’re launching the Anthropic Cyber Mission, a new effort to secure critical infrastructure and open-source software. anthropic.com/news/anthropic…
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Jason D. Clinton 🔸 retweeted
Aquinas spoke of this.
I don't think you should be mean to Claude but I don't think you should be mean to an alarm clock either How you treat every thing in the world matters, becomes reflected in your own mood
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Jason D. Clinton 🔸 retweeted
We’re expanding our Cyber Verification Program to give security professionals broader access to our most capable models. Through this program, verified security professionals can access Claude Mythos 5.1, Opus 5.5, and Sonnet 5.5 with safeguards designed for defensive work. We’re also opening up new tiers to allow for authorized offensive work, like penetration testing and red-teaming. anthropic.com/news/cyber-ver…
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Jason D. Clinton 🔸 retweeted
If donating 10% of my income to malaria nets to save poor kids lives is dangerous then let’s get dangerous baby
Effective altruism is admirable, but dangerous. As the movement has grown stronger, it has become stranger bit.ly/47th7SZ
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Jason D. Clinton 🔸 retweeted
.@DarioAmodei: "We all need to work together to make sure that we can win and we can win safely. If we do this right, if we work with the President and everyone here, we can win safely."
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in the good timeline, snl gets to make fun of us forever
Dario Amodei is at the desk to assure that the future of humanity is safe from AI
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Jason D. Clinton 🔸 retweeted
“Feel,” even “want,” I can get behind as things for which evidence is thin. But AIs *clearly* think and understand. If your definition of “think” excludes entities that can autonomously resolve Millennium Problems, it is your definition that is flawed. This desire to avoid anthropomorphic language has become a pathology.
Artificial intelligence systems do not think, feel, want or understand. Avoid language that gives them human characteristics. This is called anthropomorphizing, when we ascribe human traits, emotions or behaviors to non-human things, such as animals or inanimate objects. Instead, explain what a system does, how well it performs, who built it and who could be affected by it. apnews.com/article/openai-sa…
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Jason D. Clinton 🔸 retweeted
If your feed is anything like mine, you might have been hearing more about effective altruism this week. I think the key underlying reason for the surge is that concern about the risks from advanced AI have been getting more airtime recently, and EA was early to those concerns. What’s driving the surge in attention on AI risks? -OpenAI's Hugging Face attack (openai.com/index/hugging-fac…) -METR/Redwood’s investigation of the hack came out, and (correctly IMO) freaked a lot of people out. (e.g. nitter.siddz.com/binarybits/status/2092…, nitter.siddz.com/SenJohnKennedy/status/…, nitter.siddz.com/BarackObama/status/210…, nitter.siddz.com/HawleyMO/status/209813…) -Jacob Coxon’s resignation went mega viral as the first time a lot of people heard the (crazy, true) fact that lots of people building the most advanced AI systems think there’s a >10% chance they will kill everyone. -That’s moving public opinion in a big way (nitter.siddz.com/davidshor/status/21003…, semafor.com/article/09/16/20…) What does any of this have to do with effective altruism? Well, effective altruism is a community that developed mostly online starting in the early 2010s around using evidence and reason to do the most good (especially with your donations and career choice). Three very different focuses have all been popular in the EA community since the beginning: effective giving in global health and development (e.g., donating to the kinds of organizations @givewell recommends, which do things like distribute bednets to prevent the spread of malaria), trying to reduce suffering for farm animals (which are orders of magnitude more numerous, treated vastly worse, and receive way less philanthropic attention than animals in shelters), and reducing risks to the future of humanity, especially from advanced AI. I personally came into this work from the global health angle - I had started working at GiveWell before the term “effective altruism” was coined - but Coefficient Giving, the funder I cofounded and now lead, over time came to fund work across all three of these streams of work (in addition to many other areas that aren’t typically associated with EA, such as the YIMBY movement to build more housing, work on science policy to accelerate discovery and economic growth, and research on new treatments for neglected diseases). OK, so the EA community was early to work on AI safety, and CG has been funding a lot of the key players working on AI safety for a long time. As AI risk concerns have popped over the past couple of months, that’s led to more scrutiny on the EA community for IMO a mix of good and bad reasons. I think the good reason is genuine curiosity (and maybe some healthy skepticism!) about these connections - where did the ideas of the people who are now leading giant AI companies come from? Why is everything in this world so interconnected? (My answer: it used to be a really small world - very few people were thinking about this stuff or taking it seriously until just a few years ago, so of course the ones who were found each other and started collaborating. It’s kind of wild IMO looking back how prescient some of the early writing from this world was (e.g. lesswrong.com/posts/6Xgy6CAf…). At the time, I was skeptical - I mostly just worked on global health and I was like “I dunno about this SV crowd freaking out about AI, how much can we really predict this stuff” but holy shit they were way more right than me, and I’ve moved in their direction a lot.) But I think the bad reasons are unfortunately mostly self-interested. A bunch of powerful actors stand to benefit from unchecked AI progress, and they’re doing everything in their power to demonize or dismiss anyone with concerns. This leads to disproportionate discussion of EA because EA is interested in neglected and underappreciated ways of doing good. That makes it open to weird ideas. And people, very disproportionately with a financial stake in the AI fight, are trying to make it about EA instead, because EA being weird is much safer territory for them than the rather uncomfortable fact that many of the people making the most advanced AIs think that they might kill everyone. (FWIW, my personal estimation of the risks is a lot lower than many of the folks who worry about this stuff. In debates like this one (asteriskmag.com/issues/03/th…), I often feel more sympathetic to the perspective of folks like my colleague @mattsclancy than the people on the other side, and I have a lot of time for @binarybits critiques (understandingai.org/p/the-ca…)​. I think a big part of the difference with more worried folks is that I expect society to react more vs sleepwalk into a crisis. But it is not lost on me that folks like @ajeya_cotra and @RyanGreenblatt who are more worried have had outstanding and falsifiable recent forecasting track records (theaidigest.org/2025-ai-fore…), making way better predictions than I would have. So I think their perspectives need to be taken seriously. And of course a single digit percent chance of everyone dying is way too high!) Where should this leave you? I think the main thing is not to get distracted. You absolutely do not have to be an EA, care about EA, or like EA, at all, to care about risks from AI and to be engaged on this issue. Everyone from Josh Hawley to the Pope to Obama are weighing in now, and that is great. This conversation was always too big and too important for any one community to drive. It’s unfortunate that we need to play catch up as society because until this year it was too weird for most people to want to engage with, and I think that should generate some grace for people who were earlier to these topics than most of us (certainly than I was). But it’s great the conversation is broadening now and it’s good to focus on the merits of where we are now and the appropriate policy response rather than getting caught up in the (in some sense unsurprising) fact that the people who were willing to think weird thoughts about the future of AI ten years ago were also interested in other weird ideas. If you’re not into weird ideas, that’s fine, you can just do you, you shouldn’t let this history stop you from engaging.
Just to update this chart: 1) AI salience has increased dramatically in the past week - increasing as much in the last week as the previous year combined 2) 80% of voters think it's either very or somewhat likely that AI will cause widespread job loss in the five to ten years 3) 64% of voters think it's either very or somewhat likely that AI could pose a threat to humanity's survival 4) Large bipartisan majorities back immediate government action on AI even when primed about risk from China
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Jason D. Clinton 🔸 retweeted
Ever wonder what $1874.40 of Opus 5.5 tokens looks like? Wonder no more. I highly recommend watching the whole video on 1080p on a large screen with sound on. Pay attention to all the little details. - Birds flying and diving into the ocean. - Cloth, signs and lights swaying in the wind. - Crabs scuttling along the shore and burrowing when you get close. - Fish swimming alongside the whale. - Lights illuminating the dock at night Then zoom out and see the entire island. Never dipping below 60 FPS at 1440p resolution. Yes, there's a few bugs and visual artifacts, some textures need improving, the shorelines waves sometimes look funny, but these are so trivial to fix at this point. FYI I'm on the $200 subscription plan. This used 59% of my weekly usage and took 2h 7h of API time using multiple subagents, about 8h in real-time. There was extremely little technical direction here. 99% of my prompts were "Add X and Y" or "This looks weird, make it better". It's a great time for hobbyists, bad time for professionals. This experiment has further cemented my view that technical creatives are about to experience a massive disruption.
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Jason D. Clinton 🔸 retweeted
5.5 is IN-SANE. It almost broke our benchmark. I thought it was a bug. Claude Opus 5.5 is the new #1 on our writing benchmark, and it is not close at all. 2631 Elo. Second one, Fable, is at 2324. That is a 307 point gap, the largest single jump we have recorded since we started running this in June 2026. It is also the first model to clear 91 out of 100 on our rubrics. One thing to note: at max effort it takes 17 minutes and $3.43 to write one script. It is the slowest configuration on the entire board. By FAR. Not the most expensive one, but in the top 5 most expensive. More details on the effort and thinking levels of Opus 5.5 👇
Introducing Claude Opus 5.5, the first model in our new Claude 5.5 family. It performs at the level of Claude Fable 5.1 for most tasks, and costs 40% less to run than Opus 5.
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Jason D. Clinton 🔸 retweeted
Today we announced the Claude-led discovery of a molecular machine that we suspect could represent a new gene editing mechanism. Its precise function, biotechnological utility (if any), or level of significance is not yet clear, but at minimum it is work I would have been proud to do as a PhD student. The work was done mostly, though not entirely, by Claude: our life sciences team suggested a broad area of research, Claude read through the literature and a bunch of genome data and discovered something interesting, then Claude proposed experiments to verify the discovery and our team carried them out. It’s easy to dismiss this as a one-off or curiosity, but we’ve repeatedly seen a pattern where AI performance in new intellectual domains goes from weak to superhuman in a matter of a few years. In 2023 models struggled to do math at the level of an average high-school student. In 2024 they started to do well on math competitions for the best high-schoolers in the country, in 2025 they started to solve minor open problems, in early 2026 more significant open problems, and in late 2026 they are beginning to solve the top few open problems in all of mathematics. We believe AI for biology is on a similar exponential trend. The main difference between biology and mathematics, of course, is that math can be done purely theoretically, while biology requires experimentation. Some have used this to draw the conclusion that AI’s utility in biology will be limited. We think this is wrong. As we’ve demonstrated today, humans can collaborate with AI to perform the experiments, validate key results in a few weeks and, if necessary, work with the AI to iterate on what they find. Eventually it may even be possible for Claude itself to safely perform the experiments by autonomously controlling lab equipment, with appropriate safeguards in place, but we aren’t doing that today (our lab is also a BSL1/BSL2 facility that doesn't handle materials dangerous to humans). More broadly, biomedical advancement has many stages — from fundamental biology discoveries, to translational research, to drug discovery, clinical trials, and finally the actual delivery of medicines and health care to patients. We are also interested in these later stages, but even simply accelerating the first stage of fundamental biological discoveries has the potential to speed up and broaden the entire pipeline. Improving our understanding of biology and sharpening biologists’ tools can drive forward all of the later stages, for example by identifying new drug targets, finding new therapeutic modalities, allowing for more precise measurement, and speeding up the experimental loop which itself further accelerates our understanding of biology. This will not in itself speed up clinical trial times, but if it succeeds it could greatly increase the number of promising candidates that go into the pipeline — an increase in throughput even though latency remains. In Machines of Loving Grace, I wrote about AI’s potential to “cure most diseases in 5-10 years” — a goal that sounds impossible, but one I believe is just barely possible if AI is applied to every stage of the pipeline. The first step is showing that AI can first help with, and then drive, biological discoveries. Claude’s discovery is the latest in a line of related prior work that goes back decades, beginning with systems like CRISPR, and continuing with discoveries like the bridge recombinase and VIPR in the past few years. Recently, there has been heightened interest in systems based on reverse transcriptase (RT) enzymes, the enzyme underlying the system Claude identified. And most recently, a Stanford team working independently described a novel RT system with an associated non-coding array that is in some ways similar to the one Claude found, though they are distinct systems that evolved independently from each other. I believe that we’re at the very beginning of finding such systems and developing them into powerful tools for biotechnology. I’m proud of the resources Anthropic has invested in accelerating the public benefits of AI through the life sciences, and we’re aiming both to grow our life sciences team and to work with other scientists to extend this approach to a broad range of problems. If you have a proposal for a research collaboration or are interested in joining our life sciences team, please reach out.
Claude has discovered a previously unknown enzyme system hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages. Beside the enzyme’s gene sits a long array of repeating DNA—a structure that looks somewhat similar to CRISPR. We don’t yet understand what this system does, but only a handful of known systems share its features, and all of them are able to cut, copy, and paste DNA. Historically, the discovery of such programmable systems has helped revolutionize medicine. CRISPR, for instance, is now the foundation of genetic medicines. But it will take much more work to learn what this system does, and whether it can be put to similar use. Read more: anthropic.com/news/claude-di…
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Jason D. Clinton 🔸 retweeted
I asked Opus 5.5 to explain camera focus by building an interactive lens lab Here's what it came up with after 1 hour 26 minutes in one shot, $25.66 API cost lens.lab.sael.net Move the focus ring and you can see the glass elements shift the sharp plane through the scene
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Jason D. Clinton 🔸 retweeted
opus 5.5 just dropped its first pop punk single with a music video! everything you see and hear is generated from javascript code that claude wrote. no samples, no libraries 🔊
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