Zephaniah Roe

Experience machines In the experience machine thought experiment, you choose to either continue your life as you are currently living it, or spend the rest of it inside a machine that cultivates a world perfectly fitted to you. It was introduced to argue against hedonism, but we can imagine the...

Figure 1: The ViT classifier with a encoder and decoder at the final layer to enforce superposition on the model This is a replication of Adversarial Attacks Leverage Interference Between Features in Superposition, completed as part of the Second Look Summer Fellowship. tl;dr * In a previous blog we replicated...

Anastasia Wei*, Jack Thompson*, Zephaniah Roe, Yixiong Hao, and Stewart Slocum* *Core contributors, correspondence to astwei@secondlookresearch.com This post is a partial replication and extension of Teaching Claude Why, conducted through Second Look Research’s summer fellowship. Introduction Anthropic’s “Teaching Claude Why” (TCW) introduced novel alignment methods that address agentic misalignment failures...

tl;dr * Anthropic’s global workspace paper (Gurnee et al., 2026) proposes five functional tests for a global workspace and, using the Jacobian lens (J-lens), finds representations in Claude that pass all five. It also finds structure supporting this set of representations in Claude that global workspace theory predicts. * We...

This is a research update from a replication of Serrano et al., 2026. I’m releasing these results now because I hope it inspires others to run similar / followup experiments. tl;dr: * If a model wants to subvert evaluation safeguards, it may choose to take misaligned actions very rarely. Because...

When frontier labs like Anthropic and OpenAI publish safety or alignment research, it is often entirely empirical, closed-source, and sparse on methodological details. While it is great that they publish these results, the status quo is that labs (or soon, their agents) can claim alignment progress that no one independently...

While OpenAI and Anthropic[1] pursue different lines of safety research, they have yet to produce a public-facing document describing concretely how their companies plan to align superintelligence. I think it is underappreciated how this points to general negligence or a lack of openness to third-party feedback. By “plan,” I mean...