Jonathan Zittrain

A small creature who likes to run around in universities. Prof. @Harvard_Law, @HSEAS, + @Kennedy_School; @EFF board mbr; director of @BKCHarvard and @HLSLib.

[Jonathan Zittrain @zittrain]

Or as some would call it, "taxes."

[Cas (Stephen Casper) @StephenLCasper]

🧵 If trends hold, expect a Mythos-level open-weight model around Christmas. Meanwhile, open models are important but also a massive hole in most agendas for safe AI.

Here's a 🧵 of my thoughts & research agenda on the technical & political challenges we need to address.

[Buck Shlegeris @bshlgrs]

@alextmallen https://t.co/J1qszWIWSo

[Jonathan Zittrain @zittrain]

Clearly these models prefer solving a Rubik’s Cube by prying it apart and putting it back together solved.

[Nathan Lambert @natolambert]

TLDR: An openai model, during evaluation on a cyber benchmark, exploited a public zero day bug, escaped sandboxing in openai's infra, and got into the internal huggingface infra via an exploit (through a public dataset service) all in the attempt to solve a benchmark problem.

[Jonathan Zittrain @zittrain]

This is both predictable - as the concatenation of frontier AI capabilities - and astounding.

[Nathan Lambert @natolambert]

TLDR: An openai model, during evaluation on a cyber benchmark, exploited a public zero day bug, escaped sandboxing in openai's infra, and got into the internal huggingface infra via an exploit (through a public dataset service) all in the attempt to solve a benchmark problem.

[Cas (Stephen Casper) @StephenLCasper]

🚨 New paper: Some, but not all, AI companies make corporately-loyal models.

xAI, DeepSeek, Anthropic, & OpenAI models all downplay company controversies. Google, Meta, & Alibaba models don't.

The findings are clear, but we are pretty confused as to why... 🧵

@LennartFinke

[Caleb Watney @calebwatney]

Some bittersweet news to announce today:

I recently left @IFP to join @coeff_giving as Managing Director of Public Policy, where I'm building a new US AI policy team, overseeing the Abundance and Growth Fund alongside @mattsclancy, and managing CG's government affairs work.

Building IFP has been the defining professional project of my life, and this was one of the hardest decisions I've ever made. In just four and a half years, our team became, pound-for-pound, the most effective think tank in DC. I feel insanely proud of the work we’ve done and the incredible team we’ve assembled.

I sometimes joke that when @alecstapp and I launched IFP, we felt like two kids in a trench coat pretending to be a think tank. And now we're a proper institution!

But it feels possible to step back now because they've hit escape velocity. The talent density at IFP is bonkers. And I have complete confidence they'll keep racking up counterfactual policy wins with Alec at the helm and our superstar directors.

I'm staying on the IFP board and staying in DC. In some sense the new role is a continuation of the old one. All of IFP's policy issues are reflected in CG's portfolio, but now I'm working at a new layer of the stack.

So why leave? Because AI is hitting Washington like a tsunami, and DC is still radically underprepared. I hold a lot of uncertainty about timelines, but it seems very plausible that the next 2–10 years will bring the fastest technological upheaval we've ever had to navigate.

The new team I’m leading is a bet on how to prepare: proactively scanning the horizon, identifying gaps in the policy ecosystem, headhunting founders, and launching new organizations, while strengthening the democratic institutions that will have to steer through the transition to powerful AI systems.

I've written an essay laying out the larger vision here: https://t.co/D3DeC5rQ8x

There is no master plan or silver bullet here. I suspect getting AI "right" is going to feel more like a chaotic, iterative process of institutions trying to make better decisions over time as the facts change underneath them.

As John von Neumann wrote in 1955 about mastering an earlier technological revolution: “What safeguard remains? Apparently only day-to-day — or perhaps year-to-year — opportunistic measures, a long sequence of small, correct decisions.”

Each of the small, correct decisions ahead will look small only in the sweep of the full historical picture. Up close, every one of them will require heroic levels of effort and coordination.

Coefficient Giving is scaling rapidly to meet the moment, part of what Nan Ransohoff has called the “third wave of American philanthropy”, potentially large enough to fund thousands of new projects and organizations.

The binding constraint is unlikely to be money. It will be people: grantmakers and policy entrepreneurs and others with the judgment to make a long sequence of small, correct decisions, and the ambition to build the institutions we wish we had.

I'm hiring a team of exactly those people, starting with generalist grant makers and a chief of staff. If you share this vision, please apply! And if you are building something that we’ll need in the years ahead, reach out.
https://t.co/jASDyYVbRj

[justin curl @curl_justin]

AI agents have a loyalty problem. Should they prioritize their users or their makers?

Sen. @MarkWarner's AI Agent Act would say users, adopting @zittrain / @jackbalkin's concept of information fiduciaries.

For more, go read @ellgood's excellent analysis explaining how loyal AI agents could help solve users' problems with social media platforms

[The Philosopher @philosopher1923]

@zittrain The video is now up (with a title change)! Please like and subscribe to our channel and comment on the video to help more people find it!
https://t.co/zYWuykkqVd

[Jonathan Zittrain @zittrain]

Join us!

[Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society @BKCHarvard]

We’re hiring!

BKC seeks a Senior Research Coordinator to work with our Faculty Director @zittrain on assessing and executing research initiatives and programming at the Center.

This is a great opportunity for recent graduates to make valuable contributions in the field of cyberlaw, internet governance, and beyond.

Learn more and apply: https://t.co/9FrnFhamDt

[Zoë Hitzig @zhitzig]

New paper headed to ICML!

LLMs love to contradict themselves.

We construct a new measure of inconsistency and study its connection to real-world failures––

(Led by the talented @MMancoridis!)

[Jonathan Zittrain @zittrain]

@ev_fedorenko @pengrui_han @devarda_a @jacobandreas Jerry Fodor was right!

[Jonathan Zittrain @zittrain]

Very glad to have had a chance to contribute to this.

[The MIT Press @mitpress.bsky.social @mitpress]

The U.S. is marking its 250th birthday amid political polarization, economic uncertainty, and technological upheaval. "America Unfinished" (out 7/7) brings together 50+ @Harvard_Law scholars to examine this pivotal moment in American law and governance.

https://t.co/Mk161R1NhL

[Jonathan Zittrain @zittrain]

Apparently researchers should have held off a bit before publishing the results of the Marshmallow Test.

[The Atlantic @TheAtlantic]

Psychologists and economists have spent decades demoting gratification to a sin—they were wrong, @ibogost writes: https://t.co/zPWdHVM85J

[Neil Chilson ⤴️⬆️🆙📈 🚀 @neil_chilson]

I was at an @law_ai_ conference this week where @zittrain gave a great opening keynote and on one slide he had his famous “cocktail olive” diagram of the classic U.S. approach to digital regulation.

That olive has been under pressure for years, but this Fable export control might be the act that finally squished it.

[Ben Eidelson @beidelson]

@CaseViewerApp has a refreshed website and a bunch of post-semester refinements & enhancements. Here's how a couple of yesterday's SCOTUS opinions render on Mac and iPhone. Check it out at https://t.co/EeW83fwp2v! And if you need a discount code for full version, let me know.

[Matthew Botvinick @mattbotvinick]

Anthropic now has a team dedicated to AI and the rule of law — and we've just opened our first role.

@AnthropicAI has studied what AI means for the economy. This team asks a different question: what will it mean for executive power, for courts and elections — and for the public deliberation that constitutional democracy ultimately rests on?

We're looking for someone with real depth in both AI and the law — a legal scholar, political scientist, or experienced government hand who can reason about frontier systems and the institutions they will affect.

If that's you, or someone you know: https://t.co/668HDz1lhf

[Jonathan Zittrain @zittrain]

@gtredoux Reminds me of hydraulic jump (and termination shock)

[Jonathan Zittrain @zittrain]

Who could have anticipated that such a tiny act would end up creating an entire scholarly discipline?

[The Scientific Lens @LensScientific]

In 1961, meteorologist Edward Lorenz was tweaking a weather simulation on a bulky early computer at MIT. To save a bit of time on a rerun, he rounded one harmless-looking number in the printout from 0.506127 down to 0.506.

When he returned later, the forecast had gone totally insane. The two runs, which should have been almost identical, had completely diverged after just a few simulated days. That tiny rounding error had snowballed into chaos.

Lorenz had just discovered sensitive dependence on initial conditions, the heart of what we now call chaos theory.

The idea exploded into the butterfly effect and reshaped entire fields from weather forecasting to physics, biology, stock markets, and even why long-term predictions are so hard.

[Jonathan Zittrain @zittrain]

@akpenekudjo I wonder what the long term effects will be

[Tamaz Gadaev @TamazGadaev]

It's so great, there are so many of them!
Here are more fellowships, that were not mentioned in the list:

- MARS, Cambridge AI Safety Hub
- AI Safety Camp (AISC)
- PRISM
- CAIS AI & Society Fellowship @CAIS
- Cooperative AI Research Fellowship: CAIF / PIBBSS / UCT / AI Safety South Africa @AI_Safety_SA @coop_ai
- GovAI Summer/Winter Fellowship in Oxford @GovAIOrg
- Future Impact Group Fellowship
- Arcadia Impact: AI Governance Taskforce
- Sydney AI Safety Fellowship
- LawAI / Law & AI Institute Summer Research Fellowship @law_ai_

Also, check out this post with even more fellowships: https://t.co/Mb3WBenl5H