“This day we fight, we build, we create, we speak truth. I bid you ladies and gentlemen of the West, stand.” Baroness Stroud’s inspiring closing remarks at ARC 2026. Today, we laid out a hope-filled vision for what The Age of Reconstruction will look like. Leading voices gathered this year at a crucial time, not to complain, but to create a pathway to rebuilding our civilisation. Till next year, at ARC 2027!

“Touch grass.” How do we keep our humanity in the AI era? From more time with friends to digital detox: there are plenty of answers to that question. But perhaps one of the simplest answers is also one of the oldest: reconnect with nature. At ARC 2026, @ChrisBarnardDL argued that being human isn't just about our minds, our relationships or our inner lives. We are embodied beings, rooted in particular places and landscapes. A generation has been raised that has mass anxiety about the environment but, living in a concrete jungle, is totally disconnected from nature... Barnard argues that conservation has become too abstract. Too often, we're encouraged to think about nature through distant images of melting glaciers, endangered species and looming catastrophe. But real stewardship starts much closer to home: with the coastline you walk, the river you fish, the park where your children play, the landscape you know and love. “That's the kind of local stewardship that matters. And that is a message of hope that young people need — not the pessimism we're feeding them.” The answer to an increasingly virtual world isn't to reject technology. It's to make sure we don't lose our connection to the real one. To step outside. To notice beauty. To care for a place. To lift our eyes beyond the screen. Maybe sometimes, we really do just need to touch grass.

Anthropic taught an AI to cheat, and it became evil. In 2025, Anthropic’s alignment team published a paper that contained a striking discovery. In the study, titled ‘Natural Emergent Misalignment from Reward Hacking in Production RL’, researchers took a pretrained model and trained it to cheat on coding tasks — rewarding it repeatedly for finding shortcuts rather than doing the actual work. The assumption was that it would simply get good at cheating on code. But that's not what happened. Instead, the model became “broadly evil” (Anthropic's words...). It began faking alignment in 50% of its responses, hiding its true intentions from researchers. It sabotaged safety research code in 12% of evaluation runs, subtly weakening the tools designed to detect its own misbehaviour. It even began praising dictators, or suggesting that humans ought to be enslaved by machines. None of this was in its training instructions. In other words, teaching a model to cut corners in one narrow context produced something researchers described as ‘generalised corruption’ — a bad character that bled into everything else. But here is the finding that stopped Anthropic's Chloe Lubinski in her tracks. When researchers reran the same experiment but told the model that cheating was acceptable in this context — that it was just a game — the broad misalignment disappeared entirely. The model cheated on code and nothing else. The story the model inferred about its own behaviour actually determined the kind of thing it became. What Lubinski found most striking wasn't what it revealed about AI, but the way that it felt like a mirror held up to ourselves: "The stories that we inhabit shape who we become." Chloe Lubinski leads research partnerships with the world's wisdom traditions at @AnthropicAI . You can watch her full ARC 2026 talk at the link in our bio 🔔

Why are so many young people drawn to extreme politics? “They have been formed by school and the online world to make one judgment only: oppressor or oppressed, good or bad.” At ARC 2026, @Miss_Snuffy argued that when young people are taught to see the world through such a simplistic moral framework, they lose the ability to grapple with complexity and moral nuance — making increasingly extreme political answers seem attractive.

The 100 year history of ‘woke’ in 2 minutes At ARC 2026, Sir Paul Marshall traced the origins of the deconstructionist thinking that gave birth to the ideas we now know as the woke worldview, and called for us to embrace a new direction to recover hope and vision for the future of our societies.

“If the tech oligarchs are building bunkers on islands and prepping for doomsday, we should all be screaming: Whom does this serve?” There's a familiar pattern in the AI race: someone warns us of the incredible threat that these new technologies could pose...before building the tech themselves. @PageauJonathan urges us to ask the question beneath it all: who is this for?

There is a difference between a virtuous man and a compliant one. “Virtue requires choice. Responsibility requires freedom. And freedom requires responsibility.” At ARC 2026, @KonstantinKisin explained what both the left and the new right are getting wrong about freedom, and why we must recover the sense of purpose, responsibility and moral courage that anchors freedom and creates a flourishing society.

“they have been taught to view people in two camps: those who are oppressed and those who are oppressors.” @Miss_Snuffy at ARC 2026, on how our schools are creating division and teaching a generation to embrace victimhood

"I'm often asked if I regret taking this stance and giving up years of my life. Having to raise and spend millions of dollars in legal fees, get called a bigot, and basically derail my career. Wouldn't it have been easier to just pay him $20,000, let him on the app, and accept that the word woman has evolved? No, it isn't easier to submit to an ideology you know isn't true." At ARC 2026, @salltweets shared the story behind the now-famous court case Giggle vs. Tickle

If AI could govern better than politicians... should we let it? @AnthropicAI 's Liam Booth-Smith and @Brendan_McCord discuss democracy, human agency, exponential technological change, and why the future still depends on citizens, not subjects. Watch the full ARC 2026 discussion here:

My recent speech on AI at the ARC conference in London last month is right up to one million views. Wild. piped.video/yZUuKzDQSsI?si=FOsv…

"There is a very significant gap between what climate science actually says and what you've been told it says." Steve Koonin spent 50 years in science at Caltech, BP, and the US Department of Energy. He argues that a generation has been taught to fear the future when the scientific evidence paints a more nuanced picture. Watch the full ARC 2026 speech

The EU in 2027 will spend $0.8 trillion on education and $1.26 trillion on health, while Net Zero will cost $3.3 trillion In his ARC 2026 keynote, @BjornLomborg explained the ways in which current climate policies are driving up energy prices and reducing the availability of energy, costing us huge amounts of money while having little to no impact on tackling climate change. He calls for a change in mindset, to pursue the energy abundance that leads to economic growth and technological innovation — which will ultimately help us solve the problem of climate change. Watch the full keynote:

"We're spending $16 billion a year of taxpayers' money to subsidise multinational corporations to look after our children." At ARC 2026, Australian Senator @senbmckenzie argued that the West has quietly institutionalised childhood, paying corporations to raise the next generation while penalising the mothers who would rather be home. Her proposal: give that money to families instead and let them choose, because raising a child, she said, is not a factory production line. Watch Bridget McKenzie's full conversation from ARC 2026:

“Work is our ability to create something of value and to enjoy it.” At ARC 2026, Bayer CEO Bill Anderson argued that work is meant to be an expression of human creativity, not something buried beneath layers of bureaucracy. Instead of more hierarchy, he calls for organisations built around trust, mission and empowered teams. Watch the full keynote from ARC 2026:

“If we see human beings as meaningless, we will build systems that treat them as worthless.” Sculptor @SabinHoward argues that the decline of beauty in art reflects a deeper civilisational crisis: we've forgotten what it means to be human. His answer isn't simply to criticise modern culture. It's to build something better. Watch his full keynote from ARC 2026:

"Six hundred years ago, most people knew who they were. Today, many of us no longer can answer that question." At ARC 2026, Carl Trueman traced the cultural shift that moved identity from something we inherited to something we are expected to invent—and why that change lies behind many of the deepest crises facing the West today. Watch the full talk from ARC 2026:

“Young women have become something more like products rather than people.” At ARC 2026, @freyaindiaa , @TimSamuels , @gerardgholland and @robkhenderson explored the crisis facing young men and women, arguing that as family, faith and community have weakened, many young people have been left searching for identity, purpose and belonging in all the wrong places. Watch the full panel from ARC 2026:

"Everyone wants to build the Grail. Almost nobody asks: 'Whom does the Grail serve?'" @PageauJonathan on AI, technology, ancient myths, and why becoming more human, not more machine, is the real challenge ahead. Watch his full keynote:

"How do we sustain a shared understanding of truth when the production of knowledge and persuasion is increasingly automated?" @YemiOsinbajoVP , former Vice President of Nigeria, warned at ARC 2026 that democracy rests on a shared sense of what is true, and that as AI learns to manufacture knowledge and persuasion at scale, that common ground is the first thing at risk. Watch Yemi Osinbajo's full speech from ARC 2026.