Sam Schechner

Last month, OpenAI called in the three outspoken safety researchers and asked them to unlock their personal phones. It was conducting a leak investigation into a story in The Information about Astra’s use of opaque architectures, and the company’s plans to continue down that path. A week later, at 2 p.m., they were all fired. Our story, w/ @ZeffMax and @berber_jin1 , looks at the battle over how much AI companies should share with third-party monitors like METR and Redwood to ensure AI safety wsj.com/tech/ai/the-signal-c… via @WSJ

Over the last few weeks, so many people have asked me: if people at Anthropic believe that AI has a meaningful chance of killing us all, why are they building it? @berber_jin1 and I did a deep dive into Anthropic’s relationship with effective altruism to try to explain how doomerism came to be so influential at the company. The tale took us to a group house in San Francisco, “clothing optional” swims in the Bahamas and a co-working space in Berkeley funded by an Anthropic investor’s money that has become a central gathering place for those most worried about the existential risk from AI.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-safety-ef… via @WSJ

“AGI is the only kind of AI that will destroy all jobs.” Inside Max Tegmark’s campaign to forge a bipartisan coalition to halt AGI. w/ @samschech wsj.com/tech/ai/who-is-max-t… via @WSJ

Sam Altman’s “code red” plan to fight back against Google starts with a controversial fix: boosting the use of “user signals” – including direct, instant feedback from users – that played a significant role in making its 4o model so sycophantic. Staffers warned about the dangers of overusing this data, but the impact on engagement was too good to pass up -- "a wow bump." w/ @samschech @berber_jin1 wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-sam-a… via @WSJ