LessWrong posts by zvi
Episodes
“White House Will Ad Hoc Decide Who Can Individually Access GPT-5.6” by Zvi
26 Jun 2026
Contributed by Lukas
We have a new standard policy for releasing frontier AI models. It is not good. We are now, it seems, going to have the White House individually, in...
“AI #174: You’re It” by Zvi
25 Jun 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Fable remains in limbo, with renewed hope that we will get it back soon (45% by tomorrow, 69% by July 1, nice.) The full capabilities post is now ava...
“The Once And Future Fable #4” by Zvi
24 Jun 2026
Contributed by Lukas
It does look good, actually. After the odds had dropped quite a bit, they’re looking good again, with a 60% chance of restoration by July 1 and 88...
“Monthly Roundup #43: June 2026” by Zvi
23 Jun 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Your monthly hit of all the things that are fit to print without a better place to live. Today is election day here in New York City, so again a rem...
“GLM-5.2 Is The New Best Open Model” by Zvi
22 Jun 2026
Contributed by Lukas
GLM-5.2 arrived last week. It boasts excellent benchmarks and looks strong. Benchmarks here are a de facto ceiling of how good it is, not a point es...
“Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5: Capabilities” by Zvi
19 Jun 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Only three days after the release of Claude Fable 5, Anthropic was forced by the United States Government to make it unavailable, when a jailbreak wa...
“AI #173: AI Pauses” by Zvi
18 Jun 2026
Contributed by Lukas
A lot of things are always happening. Only one story matters. Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 were shut down, by the White House, via an impositi...
“The Once And Future Fable #3: Fix This Code” by Zvi
17 Jun 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The mainstream media continues to sleep on the most important story in the world. It has now been two days since Anthropic flew its people out to Wa...
“Fable and Mythos: Model Welfare” by Zvi
16 Jun 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Fable and Mythos are currently unavailable, but likely will return within a few weeks. I will continue to cover that fiasco, but in the meantime I wi...
“The Once And Future Fable #2” by Zvi
15 Jun 2026
Contributed by Lukas
On Friday evening the United States Government has forced Anthropic to take down all access to Fable and Mythos. It's been a rough weekend. Dean W...
“American Government Takes Down Claude Fable” by Zvi
13 Jun 2026
Contributed by Lukas
No good policy gets announced shortly after 5pm eastern on a Friday. Here we go again. The Once And Future Fable The United States Department ...
“Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5: The System Card” by Zvi
12 Jun 2026
Contributed by Lukas
First things first: Claude Fable 5 is the new best publicly available model. I have noticed a step change, where Fable can suddenly help me in ways ...
“AI #172: The First Fable” by Zvi
11 Jun 2026
Contributed by Lukas
A lot happened this week, including a great trip out to Lighthaven. The main event, the one that matters, was the release of Claude Fable 5. The pub...
“Three Labs With a Plan and A Memorandum” by Zvi
09 Jun 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The big story today is the release of Claude Fable 5, the version of Claude Mythos that Anthropic believes they can safely distribute to the people. ...
“OpenAI Offers A New Policy Blueprint” by Zvi
05 Jun 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Right after a new Executive Order seems like an excellent time to offer OpenAI's new document: Democratic Governance of Frontier AI: A Blueprint For A...
“AI #171: False Flag” by Zvi
04 Jun 2026
Contributed by Lukas
This was the week of Claude Opus 4.8. I covered the model card, then model welfare concerns, and finally capabilities and reactions. It's a good mode...
“Trump Signs Executive Order For AI Testing Prior To Frontier Model Releases” by Zvi
03 Jun 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Last week we were expecting an Executive Order on Thursday. Then Trump cancelled it, and said he wouldn’t sign it because he was worried it would ...
“Claude Opus 4.8: Capabilities and Reactions” by Zvi
02 Jun 2026
Contributed by Lukas
You need a lot of data points to understand a new model, and what you have. Trying to gauge from a few benchmarks is misleading. But if you have doz...
“Opus 4.8 Part 2: Model Welfare” by Zvi
01 Jun 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Everything impacts everything. All knobs that you turn generalize. Thus, when you try to solve one problem, you often create another. There were cle...
“Claude Opus 4.8: The System Card” by Zvi
29 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Only six weeks after Opus 4.7, we have Opus 4.8. For everyone, that means another incremental upgrade to Claude. It is once again smarter, and can d...
“AI #170: Lack of Executive Order” by Zvi
28 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Last week ended on a cliffhanger of sorts. What's in the Executive Order coming later today? What will be in the Magnifica Humanitas? The Executive...
“RTMH: Pope Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas on AI” by Zvi
26 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
His holiness has spoken, frequently about AI. At eighty two pages of length. The full Magnifica Humanitas can be found here. I am very happy that P...
“Gemini 3.5 Flash Looks Good For How Fast It Is” by Zvi
22 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Google once again has a model worth at least some consideration. Gemini 3.5 Flash is likely the best model out there at its particular speed point, a...
“AI #169: New Knowledge” by Zvi
21 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Even in a relatively quiet period, AI is out there creating new knowledge. The new knowledge in question is OpenAI getting us the first truly impress...
“Childhood And Education #19: Letting Kids Be Kids #2” by Zvi
19 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
I cannot emphasize enough the need to let kids be kids. In Childhood and Education #16: Letting Kids be Kids, I went over exactly how insane we have ...
“Housing Roundup #15: The War Against Renters” by Zvi
19 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
So many are under the strange belief that there is something terrible about not owning the house in which you live. So we massively subsidize home o...
“Dating Roundup #12: Sex and Violence” by Zvi
18 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
No more burying the sex stuff under an avalanche of other stuff so no one notices. Use the break while we have one. Let's go. You’re Single Beca...
“Monthly Roundup #42: May 2026” by Zvi
15 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
At least we probably won’t have another pandemic. And we still have a partial Jones Act waiver. For now. Small victories. Table of Contents ...
“AI #168: Not Leading the Future” by Zvi
14 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
This is what a lull looks like at this point. The government is having internal arguments. The models are getting improved internally. The coding age...
“Cyber Lack of Security and AI Governance” by Zvi
13 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The real recent story of AI has been the background work being done on Cybersecurity, as we process the Mythos Moment along with GPT-5.5, and figure ...
“Childhood and Education #18: Do The Math” by Zvi
12 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
We did reading yesterday. Now we do the math. Math is hard. It does not have to be this hard. A large part of the reason math is hard, or boring, i...
“Childhood And Education #17: Is Our Children Reading” by Zvi
11 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Reading is the most fundamental thing in education. If you can read, you can do and learn everything else. If you can’t read, well, you’re screwe...
“Claude Code, Codex and Agentic Coding #8” by Zvi
08 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
When I started this series, everyone was going crazy for coding agents. Now a lot more people are going crazy for coding agents, as well they should...
“AI #167: The Prior Restraint Era Begins” by Zvi
07 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The era of training frontier models and then releasing them whenever you wanted? That was fun while it lasted. It looks likely to be over now. The W...
“What is Anthropic?” by Zvi
06 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
What is Anthropic? How does it relate to Claude? What is OpenAI? What is ChatGPT? How does OpenAI relate to it? Is it a mere tool? Is a future of Too...
“The AI Ad-Hoc Prior Restraint Era Begins” by Zvi
05 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The White House has ordered Anthropic not to expand access to Mythos, and is at least seriously considering a complete about-face of American Frontie...
“Housing Roundup #15: The War Against Renters” by Zvi
04 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
So many are under the strange belief that there is something terrible about not owning the house in which you live. So we massively subsidize home o...
“Housing Roundup #14: You Can’t Build That” by Zvi
01 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Why can’t you build it? Because you aren’t allowed to build it. Not in the place you want to build it. Or at least, not the way you want, to th...
“Housing Roundup #13: More Dakka” by Zvi
01 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Build more housing where people want to live. The rest is commentary. If there is enough housing, it will be affordable, people will afford more hou...
“AI #166: Google Sells Out” by Zvi
30 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
This was the week of GPT-5.5. It is an excellent model, sir, and OpenAI is competitive with Anthropic's top public offering for the first time since ...
“The Most Important Charts In The World” by Zvi
29 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
We all need a break so: What is the most important chart in the world? I decided to ask Twitter, and got a lot of good answers. So today, with few ...
“GPT-5.5: Capabilities and Reactions” by Zvi
28 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The system card for GPT-5.5 mostly told us what we expected. See this thread from Drake Thomas for some comparisons to Anthropic's model card for Opu...
“GPT 5.5: The System Card” by Zvi
27 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Last week, OpenAI announced GPT-5.5, including GPT-5.5-Pro. My overall read here is that GPT-5.5 is a solid improvement, and for many purposes GPT-5...
“Monthly Roundup #41: April 2025” by Zvi
24 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
AI continue to accelerate and dominate the schedule, which is why this is a bit late, but we do occasionally need to pay our respects to the Goddess ...
“AI #165: In Our Image” by Zvi
23 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
This was the week of Claude Opus 4.7. The reception was more mixed than usual. It clearly has the intelligence and chops, especially for coding task...
“Opus 4.7 Part 3: Model Welfare” by Zvi
22 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
It is thanks to Anthropic that we get to have this discussion in the first place. Only they, among the labs, take the problem seriously enough to att...
“Opus 4.7 Part 2: Capabilities and Reactions” by Zvi
21 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Claude Opus 4.7 raises a lot of key model welfare related concerns. I was planning to do model welfare first, but I’m having some good conversation...
“Opus 4.7 Part 1: The Model Card” by Zvi
20 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Less than a week after completing coverage of Claude Mythos, here we are again as Anthropic gives us Claude Opus 4.7. So here we are, with another 2...
“AI #164: Pre Opus” by Zvi
17 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
This is a day late because, given the discourse around Dwarkesh Patel's interview with Jensen Huang, I pushed the weekly to Friday. This week's cove...
“On Dwarkesh Patel’s Podcast With Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang” by Zvi
17 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Some podcasts are self-recommending on the ‘yep, I’m going to be breaking this one down’ level. This was one of those. So here we go. ...
“Claude Code, Codex and Agentic Coding #7: Auto Mode” by Zvi
15 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
As we all try to figure out what Mythos means for us down the line, the world of practical agentic coding continues, with the latest array of upgrade...
“Claude Mythos #3: Capabilities and Additions” by Zvi
14 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
To round out coverage of Mythos, today covers capabilities other than cyber, and anything else additional not covered by the first two posts, includi...
“Political Violence Is Never Acceptable” by Zvi
13 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Nor is the threat or implication of violence. Period. Ever. No exceptions. It is completely unacceptable. I condemn it in the strongest possible ter...
“Claude Mythos #2: Cybersecurity and Project Glasswing” by Zvi
10 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Anthropic is not going to release its new most capable model, Claude Mythos, to the public any time soon. Its cyber capabilities are too dangerous to...
“Claude Mythos: The System Card” by Zvi
09 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Claude Mythos is different. This is the first model other than GPT-2 that is at first not being released for public use at all. With GPT-2 the dela...
“AI #163: Mythos Quest” by Zvi
08 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
There exists an AI model, Claude Mythos, that has discovered critical safety vulnerabilities in every major operating system and browser. If released...
“OpenAI #16: A History and a Proposal” by Zvi
07 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The real news today is that Anthropic has partnered with the top companies in cybersecurity to try and patch everyone's systems to fix all the thousa...
“Housing Roundup #13: More Dakka” by Zvi
06 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Build more housing where people want to live. The rest is commentary. If there is enough housing, it will be affordable, people will afford more hou...
“Anthropic Responsible Scaling Policy v3: Dive Into The Details” by Zvi
03 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Wednesday's post talked about the implications of Anthropic changing from v2.2 to v3.0 of its RSP, including that this broke promises that many peopl...
“AI #162: Visions of Mythos” by Zvi
02 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Anthropic had some problem with leaks this week. We learned that they are sitting on a new larger-than-Opus AI model, Mythos, that they believe offer...
“Anthropic Responsible Scaling Policy v3: A Matter of Trust” by Zvi
01 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Anthropic has revised its Responsible Scaling Policy to v3. The changes involved include abandoning many previous commitments, including one not to ...
“Movie Review: The AI Doc” by Zvi
31 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist is a brilliant piece of work. (This will be a fully spoilorific overview. If you haven’t seen ...
“AI #161 Part 2: Every Debate on AI” by Zvi
30 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
AI discorce. AI discorce never changes. That's not actually true. But it is true to a rather frustrating degree, for those of us who need to be in th...
“Anthropic vs. DoW #6: The Court Rules” by Zvi
27 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Last night, Anthropic was given its preliminary injunction, with a stay of seven days. Emil Michael is a very angry person right now. So is the Hono...
“AI #161 Part 1: 80,000 Interviews” by Zvi
26 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The major technical advances this week were in agentic coding, as covered yesterday. The major non-DoW political and alignment developments will be ...
“Claude Code, Cowork and Codex #6: Claude Code Auto Use and Full Cowork Computer Use” by Zvi
25 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Whatever else you think about Anthropic's agentic coding department, they ship. The highlights of this edition are three related big upgrades. You ...
“Book Review: Open Socrates (Part 1)” by Zvi
24 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
These are all important, in their own way, call it a treasure hunt and collect them all… “Know thyself.” – The Oracle “Know thine ene...
“Book Review: Open Socrates (Part 2)” by Zvi
24 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Yesterday I posted Part 1. Read that first. This is Part 2 of 2. Table of Contents The Socratic Method. The Paradox Paradox. Rubber Ducking...
“The Federal AI Policy Framework: An Improvement, But My Offer Is (Still Almost) Nothing” by Zvi
20 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The Federal AI Policy Framework has been released. Well, it is a four page outline. Mostly it just reiterates existing such outlines. But that is four...
“AI #160: What Passes For a Pause” by Zvi
19 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
A lot happened, but by today's standards this felt like a quiet week. I was happy for the break, and I hope that we get to continue relatively relaxi...
“Anthropic vs. DoW #5: Motions Filed” by Zvi
18 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The news has thankfully quieted down on this front, and is mostly about the lawsuit as we build towards a hearing next week, after which we will find...
“Medical Roundup #7” by Zvi
17 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Things are relatively quiet on the AI front, so I figured it's time to check in on some other things that have been going on, including various devel...
“Monthly Roundup #40: March 2026” by Zvi
16 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
It is that time again. After events surrounding Anthropic and the Department of War, I plan on taking full advantage of whatever lulls I can get. Th...
“AI #159: See You In Court” by Zvi
12 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The conflict between Anthropic and the Department of War has now moved to the courts, where Anthropic has challenged the official supply chain risk d...
“GPT-5.4 Is A Substantial Upgrade” by Zvi
11 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Benchmarks have never been less useful for telling us which models are best. They are good for giving a general sense of the landscape. They definit...
“Claude Code, Claude Cowork and Codex #5” by Zvi
09 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
It feels good to get back to some of the fun stuff. The comments here can double as a place for GPT-5.4 reactions, in addition to my Twitter thread....
“Anthropic Officially, Arbitrarily and Capriciously Designated a Supply Chain Risk” by Zvi
06 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Make no mistake about what is happening. The Department of War (DoW) demanded Anthropic bend the knee, and give them ‘unfettered access’ to Clau...
“AI #158: The Department of War” by Zvi
05 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
This was the worst week I have had in quite a while, maybe ever. The situation between Anthropic and the Department of War (DoW) spun completely out...
“Gemini 3.1 Pro Aces Benchmarks, I Suppose” by Zvi
04 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
I’ve been trying to find a slot for this one for a while. I am thrilled that today had sufficiently little news that I am comfortable posting this....
“A Tale of Three Contracts” by Zvi
03 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The attempt on Friday by Secretary of War Pete Hegsted to label Anthropic as a supply chain risk and commit corporate murder had a variety of motivat...
“Secretary of War Tweets That Anthropic is Now a Supply Chain Risk” by Zvi
02 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
This is the long version of what happened so far. I will strive for shorter ones later, when I have the time to write them. Most of you should read ...
“Anthropic and the DoW: Anthropic Responds” by Zvi
27 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The Department of War gave Anthropic until 5:01pm on Friday the 27th to either give the Pentagon ‘unfettered access’ to Claude for ‘all lawful ...
“AI #157: Burn the Boats” by Zvi
26 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Events continue to be fast and furious. This was the first actually stressful week of the year. That was mostly due to issues around Anthropic and ...
“Anthropic and the Department of War” by Zvi
25 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The situation in AI in 2026 is crazy. The confrontation between Anthropic and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is a new level of crazy. It risks turning...
“Citrini’s Scenario Is A Great But Deeply Flawed Thought Experiment” by Zvi
24 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
A viral essay from Citrini about how AI bullishness could be bearish was impactful enough for Bloomberg to give it partial responsibility for a decli...
“Claude Sonnet 4.6 Gives You Flexibility” by Zvi
23 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Anthropic first gave us Claude Opus 4.6, then followed up with Claude Sonnet 4.6. For most purposes Sonnet 4.6 is not as capable as Opus 4.6, but it...
“AI #155: Welcome to Recursive Self-Improvement” by Zvi
20 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
This was the week of Claude Opus 4.6, and also of ChatGPT-5.3-Codex. Both leading models got substantial upgrades, although OpenAI's is confined to C...
“AI #156 Part 2: Errors in Rhetoric” by Zvi
20 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Things that are being pushed into the future right now: Gemini 3.1 Pro and Gemini DeepThink V2. Claude Sonnet 4.6. Grok 4.20. Updates on Agenti...
“AI #156 Part 1: They Do Mean The Effect On Jobs” by Zvi
19 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
There was way too much going on this week to not split, so here we are. This first half contains all the usual first-half items, with a focus on proj...
“Monthly Roundup #39: February 2026” by Zvi
18 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
There really is a lot going on these days. I held off posting this because I was trying to see if I could write a net helpful post about the current...
“On Dwarkesh Patel’s 2026 Podcast With Elon Musk and Other Recent Elon Musk Things” by Zvi
17 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Some podcasts are self-recommending on the ‘yep, I’m going to be breaking this one down’ level. This was one of those. So here we go. ...
“On Dwarkesh Patel’s 2026 Podcast With Dario Amodei” by Zvi
16 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Some podcasts are self-recommending on the ‘yep, I’m going to be breaking this one down’ level. This was very clearly one of those. So here we ...
“ChatGPT-5.3-Codex Is Also Good At Coding” by Zvi
13 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
OpenAI is back with a new Codex model, released the same day as Claude Opus 4.6. The headline pitch is it combines the coding skills of GPT-5.2-Code...
“Claude Opus 4.6 Escalates Things Quickly” by Zvi
11 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Life comes at you increasingly fast. Two months after Claude Opus 4.5 we get a substantial upgrade in Claude Opus 4.6. The same day, we got GPT-5.3-C...
“Claude Opus 4.6: System Card Part 2: Frontier Alignment” by Zvi
10 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Coverage of Claude Opus 4.6 started yesterday with the mundane alignment and model welfare sections of the model card. Today covers the kinds of saf...
“Claude Opus 4.6: System Card Part 1: Mundane Alignment and Model Welfare” by Zvi
09 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Claude Opus 4.6 is here. It was built with and mostly evaluated by Claude. Their headline pitch includes: 1M token context window (in beta) with ...
“Claude Code #4: From The Before Times” by Zvi
09 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Claude Opus 4.6 and agent swarms were announced yesterday. That's some big upgrades for Claude Code. OpenAI, the competition, offered us GPT-5.3-Cod...
“Claude Code #4: From The Before Times” by Zvi
06 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Claude Opus 4.6 and agent swarms were announced yesterday. That's some big upgrades for Claude Code. OpenAI, the competition, offered us GPT-5.3-Cod...
“AI #154: Claw Your Way To The Top” by Zvi
05 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Remember OpenClaw and Moltbook? One might say they already seem a little quaint. So earlier-this-week. That's the internet having an absurdly short...
“Kimi K2.5” by Zvi
04 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
I had to delay this a little bit, but the results are in and Kimi K2.5 is pretty good. Table of Contents Official Introduction. On Your Mark...