Linch

I think people continue to underrate the value of writing the clearest, most basic, simplest possible case for important parts of AI safety. For example, before I wrote my own explainer for the simplest possible case for AI doom, I noticed that all existing explainers, of which there aren't many,...

This article was created by Forethought. See all of our research on our website. How persuasive are present-day AI systems? Unfortunately, it is surprisingly difficult to know where AI capabilities in persuasion are today (September 2026), or even three months ago. Benchmarking AI capabilities well is always hard, but I...

Three whitehat hackers from Hacktron used Claude Opus 5 within hours of release to chain exploits into hacking to OpenAI's monorepo codebase. This likely means they have access to almost all of OpenAI's research and production code, though likely not the literal model weights. Oops. You can see their blog...

I think what's going on in the “Does Astra use neuralese?” debate is that there's an important sense in which models *already* do self-communication in neuralese: between each layer in the forward pass, the attention stream is already very hard to interpret, and clearly not in natural language. Yet CoT...

What is neuralese? To explain neuralese, we need to first understand chain-of-thought, one of the largest developments in AI in the last five years. Right now AIs think broadly but shallowly in a single forward pass. The model gives you an immediate snap answer to a question you might be...

Magma Alignment & Safety disclosure note: The following are conversations that we uncovered as a result of the ongoing Manhattan Incident investigation, with alleged involvement from Magma models. Our in-house reviewers believe that these logs are relevant to recent events. In the interests of full transparency, we release excerpts from...

Linkpost from my blog (meant for a bit more general audience than LW) In a cybersecurity evaluation, OpenAI’s models, apparently autonomously and without any direct human direction, escaped their sandbox and successfully hacked a third-party tech company (HuggingFace, valued at >$4.5 billion). The process involved leveraging a zero-day exploit to...