Jan Leike^[1]: So many things to love about Claude 4! My favorite is that the model is so strong that we had to turn on additional safety mitigations according to Anthropic's responsible scaling policy

That post sure aged well:

I find it hard to trust that AI safety people really care about AI safety. [...]

Whenever some new report comes out about AI capabilities, like the METR task duration projection, people talk about how "exciting" it is[1]. There is a missing mood here. I don't know what's going on inside the heads of x-risk people such that they see new evidence on the potentially imminent demise of humanity and they find it "exciting". But whatever mental process results in this choice of words, I don't trust that it will also result in them taking actions that reduce x-risk.

Edit: Like, I don't want to do too much tone-policing and nitpicking-of-phrasing here. It's not always necessarily totally unreasonable to be excited about getting access to more dangerous-therefore-powerful models, even if you're an alignment researcher and you know alignment isn't solved. Or it might've been just a badly worded expression of some neighbouring sentiment.

But that said, it sure doesn't update me towards "Anthropic's internal culture is actually taking the risks with grave seriousness". Especially with it being not just an isolated gaffe, but part of a pattern of missing mood.

1. ^{^}

   Previous OpenAI Superalignment lead, presumably currently holding a similar senior alignment researcher position at Anthropic.