Some big personal news: I'm moving to join Works in Progress as executive editor, starting next month. I have been hoping for an opportunity to work with @bswud and @s8mb for more than a decade, and I'm incredibly excited to finally have one. WIP is expanding on every front right now. We'll soon begin coverage of business and finance, as well as putting out more reported features. To that end, we'll be hiring more writers and reporters in the year to come. I'm planning to remain based in the US to help build out our presence here. The print edition of WIP has existed for less than 12 months, but sometime in the next week or so we will reach our 10,000th paying print subscriber. It's a group that now includes people who've been at the highest echelons of government and who run the world's biggest public companies. We’re already on track to 3x that number next year. We'll be in store at Barnes & Noble, Hudson News and independent newsagents next week too. I think WIP is providing something that people are craving from physical media right now: fewer, extremely well-crafted pieces in a beautifully designed form. Issues now feature an amazing group of columnists, including Tyler Cowen, Dan Wang and Stephen Kotkin. Each edition is better than the last. You'll see us in more and more places next year too. In January, our new weekly documentary films will launch on YouTube. We're expanding into the events space, with a new series in North America. The sky is the limit from here on out.

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.

We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new essay on why the AI industry should slow down, with a three-part plan for doing so. Anthropic is unilaterally committing to the first of these steps. We’ll provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our systems, so that they can verify adherence to our safety measures, report on incidents, and assess models’ alignment during training. You can read the full post here: darioamodei.com/post/we-must…

It’s really important that society has institutions that can be trusted to tell the truth and to be fair and reasonable. This editorial, which launders the reputation of an obvious conman, makes clear that Nature is no longer such an institution. What’s left?

We’re introducing Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1. They're the world’s most advanced models for coding and knowledge work.

This is a great piece from Sarah. The backlash against the reporting about Arday is a reminder that the attachment to free speech (even reporting quite clearly in the public interest) is worryingly thin in the UK, including among people who think of themselves as liberals.

We asked an unreleased research version of Claude to take a stab at the Riemann hypothesis. It didn’t solve it, but it did make strides on a related problem: it increased the lower bound for the fraction of zeros of the Riemann zeta function that satisfy the hypothesis from 41.6% to 67.2%. anthropic.com/research/riema…

New Anthropic research: A global workspace in language models. Of everything happening in your brain right now, only a tiny fraction is consciously accessible—thoughts you can describe, hold in mind, and reason with. We found a strikingly similar divide inside Claude.

Seems crazy but it’s real. They’re consulting on plans to downrank independent YouTubers in favour of “the beloved shows and valued services that the nation’s trusted and regulated broadcasters provide” on misinformation grounds. gov.uk/government/news/plans…

Fable 5 is back.

over the weekend i checked the obvious thing, which is whether mythos is able to solve the erdos unit distance problem, aka erdos problem #90. the answer is: yea

Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.

-Richard Dawkins writes a delightful, funny, and entertaining article -Everyone hates him for no good reason and decides to massively misrepresent his article in the most smug and humourless way imaginable ^ description of a constant internet occurrence since approximately 2006

The best system card we've done yet IMO. Strongly recommend reading it!

New Anthropic research: Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model. All LLMs sometimes act like they have emotions. But why? We found internal representations of emotion concepts that can drive Claude’s behavior, sometimes in surprising ways.

Introducing the Anthropic Science Blog. Increasing the pace of scientific progress is a core part of Anthropic’s mission. The Science Blog will feature new research and stories of how scientists are using AI to accelerate their work. Read the intro: anthropic.com/research/intro…

I used to follow up on the multitude of social media claims about people "shrinking tumors" in their RELATIVES through cannabis, personalised vaccines, apricot pits, bleach, black salve and so on. It was a hobby to post their obituaries when they died.

I’ve been having so much fun reading out these amazing Works in Progress articles - hope you enjoy listening to them!!