Ben Shore

Essex FM (hedonism) ➡️ BBC News (socialism) ➡️ Vox (rampant capitalism)

[Eliezer Yudkowsky @allTheYud]

REUTERS - "Sources" have revealed that the USG's decision to ban Mythos-class models was driven in part by their ominous name.

"We were in the Situation Room watching 'Resident Evil: Apocalypse' with the megacorp doing 'Project Nemesis'," said our source. "At one point Marco Rubio said 'Plot hole, why is any government allowing something called "Project Nemesis" to proceed? Would we really do that?' We all laughed for a few seconds and then we decided that nothing called Mythos was ever going to see the light of day."

Another source within the national security community confirmed that this sentiment was widespread. "If we let a corporation go forward with some project they call 'Mythos' and all hell broke loose, it'd be our own damn fault for lack of genre-savviness," said one highly-placed official. "Half of what we natsec guys do all day boils down to us desperately trying not to be the oblivious government from a stereotypical disaster movie."

PR representatives for Anthropic were slow to respond, but eventually got back to us.

"We're decently sure that Mythos 5 will not be the AI that destroys the world," said their statement. "Maybe 5.2 or 5.3? The name 'Mythos' refers to a large body of related fiction. It's not ominous at all. We definitely didn't get any secret kicks out of naming it that. This is unfair discrimination."

Asked whether the USG had similar plans to impose restrictions on GPT 5.5-Pro -- which some evaluations showed as having similarly quantified abilities to Mythos in some dimensions, but which did not produce the same reported sense of a new intelligence leap -- administration officials were ambiguous.

"Our decision to restrict AI models is a complex function of their evals, their felt intelligence, how ominously they're named, the size of bribe directed at the Trump administration, and how much that CEO has personally pissed off administration officials," said one highly placed source on background. "That's why we don't want any written laws about it. Say OpenAI starts delivering bribes on the same level that Nvidia uses to ignore export restrictions on B200s, and names their next model series Cutekitten. They could easily get up to GPT 6.2 before running into trouble. We're currently considering how to weigh those political realities against the prospect of GPT 6.2's internal deployment within OpenAI building another AI, that builds another AI, that destroys the entire Earth and creates an expanding wave of death in the form of self-replicating space probes."

Long-standing "AI safety" organizations declined to comment, saying that they were too torn between laughing and screaming to figure out which emotion should predominate.

[Ryan Conway @RJConway92]

"Yeah he talks about, like, England for the English, and ban the burka. I'll send you some videos "

[Tom Harwood @tomhfh]

I hate everything about the planning process.

Look what the original design was (left), and what the regulatory process turned it into (right).

Pure enshittification.

[Rushi @rushicrypto]

Greenland is now asking Trump to invade, hoping to secure a deal similar to the one Iran got.

[Ben Shore @ben_shore]

😂😂😂😂

[Chris Broom @Cabr100991]

If Lee Dixon was commentating on my funeral I’d climb out the coffin and kill myself

[Chris Broom @Cabr100991]

If Lee Dixon was commentating on my funeral I’d climb out the coffin and kill myself

[Gabe Camarillo @gabecamarillo_]

Didn’t realize how huge the World Cup would be in America, until I saw 68,527 people fill Levi’s Stadium for a match between two countries with very little World Cup history (Austria and Jordan).

That’s 300 seats short of a sellout for a Tuesday night match at 9pm local time.

[Andrew Lilico @andrew_lilico]

@JamesMelville No problem with celebrating a King. But they should sing an English anthem not the UK anthem.

[Danny Baker @prodnose]

Good. Really good.
Tested against a proper team. Not like some of these mis-matches we've seen.
This was no exhibition match.
It will have been duly noted elsewhere.
#ENGCRO

[Ben Shore @ben_shore]

I couldn't love the @ITV set more!

[Zvi Mowshowitz @TheZvi]

I definitely feel it.

[Andrew Curran @AndrewCurran_]

Keir Starmer requested a carveout from the embargo on Anthropic's Mythos and Fable models for British nationals and companies - and was denied. A senior White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the New York Post: 'We can’t have frontier models running amok'.

[Ben Shore @ben_shore]

@akarlin Ugh, this is the solipsism of Diaspora which the AIs split over. Isn't the universe an invitation to explore?

[Ben Shore @ben_shore]

@PissdOffCommutr @afneil Ugh. Yes good point

[Ben Shore @ben_shore]

@shashj @HenryTricks Bloody good it's a defence corr doing this. Good on you Shashank. So many defence types totally complacent. Now to read it....

[Ben Shore @ben_shore]

This is true. And it's a problem because while they may not be interested in AI, it's going to be very interested in them.

[Sam Ashworth-Hayes @SAshworthHayes]

Updating the classics

[Robert Colvile @rcolvile]

Have found this when I write columns. Really striking how little public awareness/engagement there is, beyond a vague yearning for the whole topic just to go away

[Sophia Cai @SophiaCai99]

NEW: Inside the 24-hrs before WH slapped export controls on Anthropic
- Last Thursday, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy raised concerns about Fable jailbreak to Trump admin
- Friday AM, Sean Cairncross, Bessent, Susie etc. held WH call to discuss
- Then White House started reaching out to Anthropic to speak with Dario Amodei, who was at a wellness retreat.
- When Amodei was finally available past 1pm, he had three tense phone calls with a combo of ppl including Cairncross, Bessent, Lutnick, Kessler, Will Scharf, Richard Walters, and Walker Barrett.
-Amodei tried to clear up what he assumed was a misunderstanding. He defended the guardrails and distinguished between universal and non-universal jailbreak
- Cairncross and Bessent were unmoved and asked Amodei to take down Fable and work with the admin to fix the vulnerabilities. (A WH official said Amazon’s findings were run past the NSA and they felt they had “proof.”)
- Amodei asked for more time and info, but he made no commitments to pull the model
- Bessent told Amodei directly at one point that he was making a “bad decision”
- By Friday evening, the Trump admin imposed its export controls.
- “Export controls were a last resort after begging them for hours to work with us,” senior WH official said.

W/ @cheyennehaslett
https://t.co/0Rwny9md3p

[roon @tszzl]

1. if transacting with superintelligent models outside of the boundaries of a lab becomes difficult due to national security / ai safety concerns and so on, it will mean the Coasean boundaries of the labs will grow to encompass all interesting industry, creating a truly cyberpunk chaebol-capitalism type of future, where the goverment sort of runs them but they also sort of run the government

2. as if there weren't already enough reasons to break up your family, leave your home, the Zone of Thought will increase the attractiveness of migrating to try and have your child on american soil, so they can have 1000x the effective brain power of people born elsewhere

3. every country should probably try and either work towards a new ai security pact with the americans immediately or pool every ounce of national resources to try and create their own ASI labs lest you become complete intellectual, economic, and moral vassals to the united states of america and the output byproducts its ASIs (you wont even get to talk to them). if they succeeded (big if) this will imply a more global race and more risk factors than was previously implied by the formerly only "beating china" narrative -- but many will prefer it to the superintelligent monopolar value lock-in

4. the other alternative is to keep the tension between safety and concentration of power at the top of mind and for the government/labs to push for solving it, rather than instrumentalizing all other values to be subservient to minimizing ai harms. insofar as safety means defending properties of the fragile world we like, the diffuse nature of power is one of those properties

5. historically the americans have been really quite Benign about their global public goods hegemony despite the ability to extract significantly more rents than they do, and it makes it easy for people of all stripes to fight for america rather than under it. we probably don't have to, but i hope america overall works towards export promotion of american models rather than export control