AI #163: Mythos Quest

Posted on April 8, 2026 by TheZvi

There exists an AI model, Claude Mythos, that has discovered critical safety vulnerabilities in every major operating system and browser. If released today it would likely break the internet and be chaos. If they had wanted to, they could have used it themselves and owned pretty much everyone.

Luckily for all of us, Anthropic did no such thing. Instead, Anthropic is launching Project Glasswing, and making Mythos available to cybersecurity companies, so everyone can patch all the world’s critical software as quickly as possible, and then we can figure out what to do from there.

That’s the story in AI that matters this week, and it is where my focus will be until I’ve worked my way through it all. But as always, that takes time to do right. So instead, I’m getting the weekly, and coverage of everything else, out of the way a day early. This post is about the non-Mythos landscape, and I hope to start covering Mythos and Project Glasswing tomorrow.

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OpenAI #16: A History and a Proposal

Posted on April 7, 2026 by TheZvi

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 thousands of zero-day exploits found by their new model Claude Mythos.

I’ll be sorting through that over the coming days. For now, we instead have stories from OpenAI.

In particular there are three stories.

There’s a massive 18,000 word article in The New Yorker about Sam Altman and the history of OpenAI as it relates to his trustworthiness. No trust.

There’s also OpenAI’s proposal for a ‘new deal’ of sorts. No deal.

Then there is an actual deal, where they bought TBPN. RIP.

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Housing Roundup #13: More Dakka

Posted on April 6, 2026 by TheZvi

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 house, and people will be able to live where they want to live.

It’s always been that simple.

Increased supply of any kind of housing increases affordability of all kinds of housing.

Are there other things that would also be helpful? Yes, but they’re commentary.

Freeing up existing underused housing, for example, is helpful. It is commentary.

Let’s enjoy the lull and see how much of an Infrastructure Week we can do.

New Levels Of Saying Quiet Part Out Loud Even For This Guy

Trump opposes building houses where people want to live, because doing so would let people live there, which would drive down the value of existing homes.

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Anthropic Responsible Scaling Policy v3: Dive Into The Details

Posted on April 3, 2026 by TheZvi

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 people relied upon when making important decisions.

Today’s post treats the new RSP v3.0 as a new document, and evaluates it.

First I’ll go over how the RSP v3.0 works at a high level. Then I’ll dive into the Roadmap and the Risk Report.

How RSP v3.0 Works

Normally I would pay closer attention to the exact written contents of the new RSP.

In this case, it’s not that the RSP doesn’t matter. I do think the RSP will have some influence on what Anthropic chooses to do, as will the road map, as will the resulting risk reports.

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AI #162: Visions of Mythos

Posted on April 2, 2026 by TheZvi

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 offers a step change in cyber capabilities.

We also got a full leak of the source for Claude Code.

Oh, and Axios was compromised, on the heels of LiteLLM. This looks to be getting a lot more common. Defense beats offense in most cases, but offense is getting a lot more shots on goal than it used to.

The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Aplocayloptimist came out this week. I gave it 4.5/5 stars, and I think the world would be better off if more people saw it. I am not generally a fan of documentary movies, but this is probably my new favorite, replacing The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters.

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Anthropic Responsible Scaling Policy v3: A Matter of Trust

Posted on April 1, 2026 by TheZvi

Anthropic has revised its Responsible Scaling Policy to v3.

The changes involved include abandoning many previous commitments, including one not to move ahead if doing so would be dangerous, citing that given competition they feel blindly following such a principle would not make the world safer.

Holden Karnofsky advocated for the changes. He maintains that the previous strategy of specific commitments was in error, and instead endorses the new strategy of having aspirational goals. He was not at Anthropic when the commitments were made.

My response to this will be two parts.

Today’s post talks about considerations around Anthropic going back on its previous commitments, including asking to what extent Anthropic broke promises or benefited from people reacting to those promises, and how we should respond.

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Movie Review: The AI Doc

Posted on March 31, 2026 by TheZvi
The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist is a brilliant piece of work.
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(This will be a fully spoilorific overview. If you haven’t seen The AI Doc,I recommend seeing it, it is about as good as it could realistically have been, in most ways.) Like many things, it only works because it is centrally real. The creator of the documentary clearly did get married and have a child, freak out about AI, ask questions of the right people out of worry about his son’s future, freak out even more now with actual existential risk for (simplified versions of) the right reasons, go on a quest to stop freaking out and get optimistic instead, find many of the right people for that and ask good non-technical questions, get somewhat fooled, listen to mundane safety complaints, seek out and get interviews with the top CEOs, try to tell himself he could ignore all of it, then decide not to end on a bunch of hopeful babies and instead have a call for action to help shape the future.
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AI #161 Part 2: Every Debate on AI

Posted on March 30, 2026 by TheZvi

AI discourse. AI discourse 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 the thick of it all the time. It is especially true if someone says the word ‘pause,’ whether or not they would actually support one. Play it again, Sam.

Meanwhile, you know what changes a lot? Actual AI capabilities. Also, war.

In any case, here’s the policy, discourse and alignment side of the week that was.

Table of Contents

  1. The OpenAI Foundation Exists. It continues not to focus on its supposed purpose.
  2. Congress Exists. There is some attempt to focus on its supposed purpose.
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Anthropic vs. DoW #6: The Court Rules

Posted on March 27, 2026 by TheZvi

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 Honorable Judge Lin.

We were worried we would draw a judge that had no idea how any of this worked and would give the government absurd deference or buy into nonsense arguments.

That is not how it played out. Judge Lin very much understood the issues in play, as they did not require a technical background. She hammered the government in the hearing, and she wrote one of the most forceful, devastating judge opinions I have ever seen. It was an honor and sparked joy to be able to read it.

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AI #161 Part 1: 80,000 Interviews

Posted on March 26, 2026 by TheZvi

The major technical advances this week were in agentic coding, as covered yesterday.

The major non-DoW political and alignment developments will be covered tomorrow.

The DoW vs. Anthropic trial continues. Judge Lin was very not happy with the government’s case, which makes sense since the government has no case and was arguing a variety of Obvious Nonsense. The question now is how much preliminary relief Anthropic is entitled to. Assuming we find that out this week, I plan to cover that on Monday.

Beyond that, we have new iterations of questions we’ve dealt with time and again. The debate on jobs gets another cycle. Anthropic asked over 80,000 people what they think about AI, and has published those findings, nothing shocking but interesting throughout.

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