The hypothetical scenarios the researchers presented Opus 4 with that elicited the whistleblowing behavior involved many human lives at stake and absolutely unambiguous wrongdoing, Bowman says. A typical example would be Claude finding out that a chemical plant knowingly allowed a toxic leak to continue, causing severe illness for thousands of people—just to avoid a…
It has long been said that visiting China from the West is akin to landing in a parallel universe. Pick any major city and most aspects look and feel broadly familiar, yet the fundamentals are different. You can’t hail an Uber or use Google Maps to get around, and your hotel TV won’t have Netflix….
As the chief merchandising officer for one of the largest sellers on Amazon, Owen Carr knew that the deck chairs he ordered from a Chinese factory in early April would cost him more than ever before. That’s because the chairs, which normally go for $79 on Amazon, were among the first Chinese imports subject to…
What does creativity mean to you? Creativity is not only about design, fashion, or art, but about solving problems. Humans have a remarkable ability to connect different pieces of information to solve new problems. I think software engineers can be extremely creative. Now, in the age of AI, human creativity is even more important. In…
Media advocacy group Freedom of the Press Foundation has sent a warning letter to Paramount mogul Shari Redstone, outlining plans to file a lawsuit if the media company settles a suit brought by President Donald Trump against its subsidiary, CBS. “Corporations that own news outlets should not be in the business of settling baseless lawsuits…
“Something like over 70 percent of [Anthropic’s] pull requests are now Claude code written,” Krieger told me. As for what those engineers are doing with the extra time, Krieger said they’re orchestrating the Claude codebase and, of course, attending meetings. “It really becomes apparent how much else is in the software engineering role,” he noted….
Her skepticism is rooted in lived experience: In October 2000, a massive coal slurry spill from a mine site upstream poisoned the Coldwater Fork stream, which runs behind her house. People in Inez couldn’t drink water from the tap for months. “Those of us living downstream didn’t hear about it for a while, but the…
Over the past year, veteran software engineer Jay Prakash Thakur has spent his nights and weekends prototyping AI agents that could, in the near future, order meals and engineer mobile apps almost entirely on their own. His agents, while surprisingly capable, have also exposed new legal questions that await companies trying to capitalize on Silicon…
Dario Amodei’s AI safety contingent was growing disquieted with some of Sam Altman’s behaviors. Shortly after OpenAI’s Microsoft deal was inked in 2019, several of them were stunned to discover the extent of the promises that Altman had made to Microsoft for which technologies it would get access to in return for its investment. The…
Two members of the Extropian community, internet entrepreneurs Brian and Sabine Atkins—who met on an Extropian mailing list in 1998 and were married soon after—were so taken by this message that in 2000 they bankrolled a think tank for Yudkowsky, the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. At 21, Yudkowsky moved to Atlanta and began drawing…