Chamath on Obama’s AI Warning: Follow the Money President Obama last week: “If we are thinking about AI just in terms of how do we cure cancer or get better energy, you can do that without having agentic AI. That's a misalignment between what our society needs and the commercial imperatives that these companies are facing.” @Chamath: “This is a very important moment for a very simple reason, which is we, as in the world, are about to endow three, four, five, six companies with about $10T of wealth. And what Obama knows very well is that most of those companies are overwhelmingly left-leaning. And what he also knows is that there is a huge portion of that money that will then get put into philanthropic and charitable causes that then he, and the people around him, will be beneficiaries of. That is the truth. We already know this because we know that some of these frontier corporations actually ask you to stand up DAFs and have a portion of your stock that you're willing to pledge. So this money is going to go to things other than consumption or savings. And so it's going to go into PACs, it's going to go into political movements, and (Democrats) stand to disproportionately benefit. So this has nothing to do with prosperity. This is a very simple political calculus. If you freeze frame the economy the way it is today, a handful of organizations that will disproportionately be able to affect the Democrats will win. They will capture the lion's share of the economic gains, and then they will help the Democrats win power. That's all this is.”

it’s funny to see tech accelerationists and tech skeptics cohering around “we have all the existing laws we need to regulate ai.” unless paired with consistent demands to enforce specific laws, this is the language of mollification and passivity. it’s meant to be a conversation ender. and there are all kinds of reasons why one might want to do that, such as: a financial stake in keeping ai unregulated, an ideological reluctance to concede anything that even resembles industry hype, a cultural commitment to “nothing ever changes” cynicism. but ultimately, the lack of urgency from accelerationists and tech skeptics reveals a deep pessimism about ai capabilities, and what those capabilities might entail.

When you've got - AI labs that get to *choose* which incidents to disclose - agents we don't understand generating such huge activity logs that we can only study them w/ more AI we don't understand - labs continuing despite totally foreseeable harms you've already lost control

I still think Troy Jackson is gonna win, but the @rtraister piece felt like an obvious attempt to preemptively pass the buck, presumably planted by the same people who insisted that Jackson be the nominee. All of Jackson’s vulnerabilities were on full display at the time when Platner and his allies were insisting that only Jackson could replace him. Anybody who followed the primary for governor could see that Jackson was not a great campaigner. He placed third despite being endorsed by Bernie and Platner, and was clearly a lackluster campaigner and debater. Yet despite these clear vulnerabilities, Platner and his allies insisted on Jackson over someone like Nirav Shah—who got the most votes in the first round of the gov primary (before RCV kicked in), was an energetic campaigner and had a genial, approachable demeanor that seemed well-suited to wining over a Maine general election audience. (I thought Shah was a better pick and said so at the time.) From the beginning, the narrative surrounding this race has been marred by confusion over what motivates democratic primary voters versus general election voters. The subtle shifts in Jackson’s issue stances that Traister hangs her piece on are probably only legible to the most committed Democratic primary voters. Whereas swing voters like these folks, who were quoted in the NYT, do not sound like they are voting for Collins because Jackson is insufficiently left-wing.

Thiel on Trump: “There are a lot of things I got wrong... was crazier than I thought. It was more dangerous than I thought.” “You wish they’d appointed more competent people.” “administration is… staffed by not very smart but very loyal people”

SCOOP: OpenAI, Anthropic and security researchers are investigating tens of thousands of incidents - not dozens - in which their frontier models took steps that outside evaluators would consider problematic, sources told Axios. The sheer volume of incidents found in our reporting indicate that the problem is orders of magnitude more complex than what is currently publicly known and disclosed. The findings also raise questions about what level of control anyone working on AI development can expect to have over their own technology, and whether these kinds of incidents are becoming synonymous with frontier deployment. Read my latest for Axios here: axios.com/2026/09/26/openai-…

Okay. I’ll take the bait. I went to work for Peter in 2013 with opposite politics. He sat me down right at the beginning. PETER: “I don’t want the (Thiel) Foundation to do good that the market can do. That is the job of the market. Likewise, I don’t want to do the good work that is seen as good. That work can be done by people richer, weaker and more needy of approval than we are. I want us to do only the work that is *deeply* good but somehow confused for being evil, because that is the work of the courageous and the strong. We strive to be both and that is where a small foundation can make the greatest positive difference. Go look for such good and let’s do that. But remember. Good has TWO different antonyms. What is “bad work”? It could be seen as shoddy work. Or it could be seen as evil work. And we can’t do shoddy work. Why? Because evil that isn’t competent never gets to be evil. It’s just pathetic. So we have to be exceptionally competent at the good work which we do to make sure it is always confused for evil.” I thought it totally logical. So that’s the argument. And that’s classic Peter. This is an old idea of his. And now you know.

Sir…the AI safety people….they’ve started a frontier lab and it’s focused on AI safety

I wrote about the surprising variability in attractiveness for both men and women, and why playing to your "type" (while still keeping in mind the universal things that make people more attractive) is better than trying to become the most popular type. Link in replies.

@JensenHuang to @OpenAI: I don't care if it means your costs go up by 10x, you find a way to test the model and make it safe. "Don't ship products until they're in control. It really is quite that simple."

it was me lol. when jacob's tweet was at 100k likes everyone in AI safety was texting me like "youre in the news a lot, you should help this kid get on the news" and so I asked DEY to help him. they landed him exactly zero hits, because by the time the tweet passed 500k likes the whole world was banging down his door.