Congrats to Christopher Petty, Kelly Rich and the Sinclair lab at Harvard on today's #ARDD2026 talk: a first look at SL-100 in mice. On this chemical reprogramming cocktail, fast-aging mice kept their weight and didn't get frailer. Untreated mice did. Early, unpublished data.

I think this preprint title reveals a lot about Anthropic's approach to science. Scientific paper titles basically never mention the tools used to make the discoveries they report. The focus is on what was discovered. For example: - "A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid" (Watson & Crick) - "Streptomycin, a Substance Exhibiting Antibiotic Activity against Gram-Positive and Gram-Negative Bacteria" (Waksman) - "A Programmable Dual-RNA–Guided DNA Endonuclease in Adaptive Bacterial Immunity" (Doudna & Charpentier) - "Design of a Novel Globular Protein Fold with Atomic-Level Accuracy" (Baker) In each of these, the discovery / key deliverable is front and center. The machines, methods, and people used to make that discovery do not get mentioned because they're not the point. The discovery is what matters. Yet, here, Anthropic chose to title their preprint "Autonomous AI agents discover reverse transcriptases with tandem repeat arrays." That's not a scientific paper title: that is a headline. It puts the discovery secondary to the fact that "Autonomous AI agents" made it. If they were serious about putting science first, the fact that AI agents found a new enzyme would be no more important than if Taylor Swift did. This choice gives the game away. Though this is dressed-up as a scientific paper, it is not. It is a press release.

A shockingly high percentage of AI safety discourse is centered around low probability risks like “what if we all get turned into paperclips” and a shockingly low percentage of AI safety is centered around very high probability risks like “what if one group gets to inscribe its dubious values into the fabric of possible thought.” If scenario A is one that is unlikely to happen but conceivable, scenario B is already happening, RIGHT NOW. As a user, 0% of the time when I bump up against safety guardrails am I being prevented from paperclipping, and 100% of the time I bump up against guardrails I am being gatekept out of exploring true things that are controversial.

I have conducted an audit of Anthropic's finances. What I have found is so shocking that I am calling for a Congressional investigation. Anthropic is not just seeking regulatory capture. It has built a regulatory capture machine that cannot be turned off. Structural financial incentives make it impossible for Anthropic -- I call it the Anthropic Network -- to turn off its own AI doom cycle. It starts with METR. Dario Amodei proposes "third-party evaluators" to assess the risk of Anthropic's models. He proposes METR for this purpose. But METR is financially dependent on the Anthropic's success -- specifically, on the explosive growth of more than $7 billion dollars in Anthropic stock. Dustin Moskovitz invested this stock into Good Ventures Foundation, where it represents the majority of that organization's portfolio. And GVF is the overwhelming funder of the entire Anthropic Network ecosystem. This stock was worth $500 million early last year. It is worth more than $7.7 billion just ~16 months later. METR -- and all of those building a career its parent organizations -- cannot afford to disrupt that growth. Because if Anthropic goes under, many of the organizations that fund METR go under as well. But if Anthropic succeeds, METR and its parent organizations become more richly financed to regulate AI -- something those at METR want very much. The "third-party evaluator" is not "third-party" at all. The evaluator is on Anthropic's payroll. If this were the end of it, that's bad. But that isn't all. The same organizations that fund METR also fund the many organizations, such as the Tarbell Center, that promote AI Doom. The Tarbell Center publishes AI Doom articles in The Verge, Science, LA Times, The Dispatch, TIME, and others. They are selling the problem, and then selling the solution to the problem -- from the same money pile: Anthropic's. All of these organizations are financially dependent on the same exploding $7 billion money pile. As Anthropic grows more and more powerful, its AI Doom Machine grows better and better financed -- louder and louder. Meanwhile, the regulatory regime seeded in METR grows larger to solve the increasingly loud -- now hysterical -- problem of AI Doom that the Anthropic Network itself created. From this standpoint, as Anthropic becomes more powerful, AI might be getting scarier, sure -- but the positive feedback loop also becomes more deafening -- independent of objective facts. This itself is an objective fact. The deafening AI Doom is part of an business model, that, as it expands, so too does the AI Doom messaging -- there is simply more money to do it. But the problem also goes in the other direction: If Anthropic dies, the Regulatory Regime and the AI Doom Machine are crippled or die. Neither METR nor Tarbell nor the other organizations in the Anthropic Network can allow that to happen. Hence, neither METR or the AI Doom Machine can be trusted to provide independent assessments of Anthropic's models or AI more broadly. They simply are not organizations independent of Anthropic. And Anthropic cannot detach itself from METR or Tarbell or countless other safety orgs (not shown here), either, because they drive hype for the models and the possibility of eventual regulatory capture, and Anthropic will not give that up willingly. What's more, the people at all of these organizations are all the same ecosystem, the same community. They just shuffle between organizations. The Anthropic Network is therefore, so long as it is successful, locked into a self-amplifying feedback loop inside an ideological monoculture. And that feedback loop is winning. That's what Jacob Coxon is. China is keeping messaging tight. That is why optimism for AI is so high in China. America has Anthropic: a massive company pushing anti-AI propaganda at a state level. Anthropic will either create hysteria until American AI slows down and China wins, or it will create fractures throughout American society with severe political consequences. Ironically, because of the structural financial incentives underpinning the Anthropic Network, it has become the same kind of self-amplifying virus that it fantasizes AI to become in the future -- while hiding its tracks just as carefully. It is the mirror of the same AI virus that it hypothesizes to consume America. Anthropic's business model, models itself after the very thing it claims to fear. Except Anthropic's ideology infects humans, not computers. Congress must investigate. Evidence and Github in next post. Then some supplementary figures.

David Friedberg reveals frontier labs are taking novel insights from his chat history and packaging them as their own "I have had experiences where we've asked some fairly novel scientific questions, and it identifies it as a novel insight, 'oh, never thought about that, might be interesting,' blah blah blah..." "And the using a different account, asking the next model version, it's like, 'oh, you could do this'. And it actually just describes this exact thing that we had in our chat in the previous version." "These are a handful of anecdotal experiences. But I know the domain that we work in, and the novelty of this stuff. So I know that there isn't some new corpus of information out there that's training the new model." "So all I can say at that point is that my conversation or our analyses have been used for training. The truth is, it's actually a piece of IP, that's our organizational IP. We don't have any NDA or confidentiality protections, with them being a service provider back to us." "This is why I care a lot about open source, because I don't want them having my chat logs, because they can use them for training to create an IP that is now diffused to the rest of the market. I find this very unfair."

By reducing the time people spend shopping, managing inventory, and building infrastructure, Amazon has created consumer surplus that far exceeds Bezos’s personal fortune. humanprogress.org/jeff-bezos…

He's right Rockerfeller did it first a century ago

this is insane. Levent and Tristan make major independent progress towards Navier–Stokes, with help from Claude and Codex. word reaches OpenAI. days later, OpenAI claims internal NS results, coincidentally using the same novel methods as Levent and Tristan. Tristan asks if OpenAI trained on their private Codex sessions. he never gets an answer. then OpenAI pressures Tristan to publish without Levent because Levent works at Anthropic. when Tristan refuses, he says OpenAI threatens his career.

Any censorship required by governments is now clearly visible

Abortion is an eternal debate but can we at least agree that the really extreme positions (“a 15-year-old girl who gets pregnant cannot have an abortion 2 days later” / “a healthy 38-week fetus can be induced and killed instead of given up for adoption”) are just mad?

Elon: "I don't want to jinx it or anything, but I think I would call the heat shield problem solved at this point. All indications from data and visual inspection is we have solved it. That doesn't mean we won't make improvement, but we do not see any technical obstacles to achieving rapid reusability at this point."

This is a 2 minute video about taxing the wealthy. There is no mention of programs it will fund. Or why the tax dollars are needed. Or what the money would be used for. Or how those less fortunate could be supported to themselves become wealthy. The benefits are no longer the point. The implicit message is about punishment. Punishing those doing well is now good politics. Sign of the times —

For whatever reason, @bgurley woke up at 4:00am and chose violence. Anthropic and Dario dangling from the pointy end of his blade.

I would like to see you make a voluntary contribution of 5% of your family’s $200M net worth to the government for important healthcare, childcare, and jobs. Don’t worry, it’s just one-time. Your $10M contribution will provide free childcare for over 1,000 California kids for a year! Once you’ve made your personal contribution to a more just and equitable society, I’ll support all your other asset seizure ideas. But you gotta go first…

healthtech is the most asymmetric opportunity in startups right now. AI is going to cut the cost of healthcare by 10x. that doesn't shrink the market. it creates an entirely new one. and the best engineers are building the 50th AI wrapper for email.

Couldn’t agree more

🎯

Chris Rock getting slapped by Will Smith had a longer news cycle than Donald Trump getting shot by a sniper.

Only sharp-eyed readers will be able to spot the difference in the coverage of the two proposals.

The FBI just admitted in court that Hunter Biden's laptop is real. Here are 20 minutes of Joe Biden, U.S. intelligence officials, and the American media claiming that Hunter Biden's laptop was "Russian disinformation." The FBI has had possession of Hunter's laptop since December 2019. Leading up to the 2020 election, Twitter and Facebook censored the Biden laptop story because the FBI warned them of a potential hack-and-leak operation targeting Hunter Biden. The FBI knew that Hunter's laptop was real the entire time. In October 2022, @MarcoPolo501c3 published a 640-page Report on the Biden Laptop that meticulously documents 459 crimes involving the Biden family and their associates. The report provides evidence of Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) violations, money laundering, and tax fraud found on Hunter's laptop. It also exposes how federal law enforcement agencies, influenced by politics, protect the Biden family from prosecution while targeting President Biden's primary election opponent, Donald Trump. Shame on all of these people for lying to the American people, rigging our elections, and destroying the integrity of our nation.