Kenneth Nelson

Immigration paralegal, legal tech developer, machine learning hobbyist, market socialist, AI safety hawk

[Kenneth Nelson @knj522]

@Actuallykeltan Meanwhile, Reuters--who would describe a tsunami as 'choppy seas with wind'--says:

"hacking ​attempts surged into the millions, according to cloud services firm[s] Cloudflare and Amazon"

"PHP KEY TO INTERNET'S ​FOUNDATIONS LIKE HTML, PYTHON"

https://t.co/6iuOPWFxdu

[𝖦𝗋𝗂𝗆𝖾𝗌 ⏳ @Grimezsz]

Um

[Kenneth Nelson @knj522]

@GaryMarcus Yeah. And I fear the day's still young. Reuters is reporting millions of hacking attempts with the PHP exploit alone, citing Cloudflare and Amazon.

The success rate can be very low, and a lot of people will still lose their shirts. Disastrous

https://t.co/6iuOPWFxdu

[Nikita Bier @nikitabier]

There is nothing to worry about.

Nothing important is run on PHP or old software—except the water & electrical grid, a few government services like our missile defense systems and a handful of electrified fences at the zoo (for the lions, tigers and cobras).

[Clark Neily @ConLawWarrior]

Flock continues to receive torrents of information about the predictable consequences of selling a highly imperfect and easily abused service to a vocation with a massive, yawning gulf between the amount of power it exercises and the amount of accountability it faces.

[Yashar Ali 🐘 @yashar]

This clip of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar is getting a lot of attention tonight, but many of the people sharing it are misstating what she was asked.

When she said, "Not to my knowledge," she was not answering whether she had married her brother.

Chris Hayes had already asked about the brother claim, and she called it “insane” and a right-wing conspiracy theory initially started by a Somali blog.

"Not to my knowledge" was her answer to his follow-up, whether she was related to the man in any way.

People are welcome to criticize her for that — but they should at least get the question she was asked right.

[Matthew Prince 🌥 @eastdakota]

Some stats on #php2shell. In the 10 hours before it was publicly announced, across the @Cloudflare network we saw thousands of attempts to exploit it. That jumped to tens of thousands in the 45 minutes post announcement, hundreds of thousands within 2 hours, and millions now.

[Kenneth Nelson @knj522]

@matthewstoller Don't threaten me with a good time ;)

[METR @METR_Evals]

We reviewed a nonpublic version of the “Misalignment in high-stakes settings” section in Anthropic’s Aug 2026 Risk Report. We agree that risk of catastrophic harm from covered models’ misalignment is low. However, we note several significant disagreements with their analysis.

[Charles Kuck @ckuck]

Hey @SenOssoff @DOJ_EOIR needs a hearing on it’s blatant disregard of a federal court order.

Next Dem AG needs to fire every “judge” hired or promoted under Trump. Day One.

[Kenneth Nelson @knj522]

@GregoryConti19 Elaborating on (1), most countries don't and won't have frontier LLMs. If LLMs start automating labor, benefits flow to those two countries only.

Other worry: US and China would both be incentivized to minimize any UBI. They want $$$ in capability research to win military race

[Kenneth Nelson @knj522]

@GregoryConti19 Techno-feudal inequality more likely than leveling:

(1) even if we had a UBI in the US and China, what happens in the rest of the world? I can't imagine either country sharing.

(2) AI firms already lobbying against ownership stakes because they know the public will shut em down

[Rob Flaherty @Rob_Flaherty]

You might like Anthropic. You might think they're the good one.

They might even be reaching the conclusion that they don't want, say, an authoritarian government shutting them down capriciously in good faith.

But this is actually pretty illustrative of why a for-profit race to superintelligence just doesn't work: push comes to shove their incentive is to block federal limits on their work. It's why we need government to set the guardrails here, not the AI companies.

https://t.co/v2ud02b6KB

[Nate Soares ⏹️ @So8res]

Anthropic's proposed law would make it even harder than it already is for a court to block or restrict the development of an AI that threatens all humanity.

[Nathan Calvin @_NathanCalvin]

Charlie's analysis is right but he is nicer than I am - I found myself viscerally angry at multiple points reading this bill. There are some good and sensible parts, but overall this legislation is not remotely close to meeting the moment and I overall think passing it would make us less protected against catastrophic risks than we are under existing law.

Two parts that stand out as particularly infuriating when taken together:

1. Some of the preemption provisions are remarkably far reaching and consequential, and in addition to preempting legislation like SB 53 would also remove general powers that state courts have to enjoin defendants and protect the public. Most outrageously, it has a provision that looks like its intended to stops states from enforcing laws or judicial decrees that "suspend the development, deployment, or internal use of an AI model" to protect their citizens from imminent catastrophic harms. Such powers to block and suspend model deployments would then only reside with the federal government.

2. The federal governments powers to restrict the development, deployment, or internal use of a frontier model has to meet an absurdly high bar.

First, there needs to be an imminent risk of a catastrophic harm (meaning killing more than 50 people or causing more than a billion dollars in damage). But thats not enough! The agency head needs to make a detailed determination with no deference given to show why no alternative would prevent the imminent catastrophe. Next the court is also explicitly told to consider the harms to the developer and other harms from restricting the model, but no considerations in the other direction.

This is absurd! For all of its warning about the potential for AI to cause a catastrophe that kills literally everyone on the planet, Anthropic's proposed federal law likely makes it harder than under existing law for a court to get an order blocking or restricting the development of frontier models? WTF??

There are also a bunch of others things that I would like to see improved - the substantive details of the auditing section and the potential for rule-making on substantive safety standards both come to mind - but I think these stand out as particularly indefensible.

[Kenneth Nelson @knj522]

@ilex_ulmus 100%. I also worry it might give the companies additional legal tools to fool judges in civil / criminal actions.

'You can't even know what the model is thinking' is a quick way to get a judge on board with 'this is madness.'

While not the only legal tool, it's a great one

[Sen. Bernie Sanders @SenSanders]

I don't usually agree with Republican officials. But yesterday, a group of eight state Attorneys General, including seven Republicans, sued OpenAI for endangering the American people through its reckless development of ChatGPT.

Here is just some of what they said:

The Arkansas Attorney General, Tim Griffin, argued that as safety concerns mounted, “OpenAI did not slow down. It held its foot on the gas, releasing increasingly powerful models without adequate safeguards or testing as growth and profits repeatedly took priority over safety.”

The Montana Attorney General, Austin Knudsen, argued that OpenAI’s “revenues have come at great cost to the public, which has suffered irreparable harm—including lost loved ones, disturbing cyberattacks, and now a plausible threat of civilizational collapse.”

The Iowa Attorney General, Brenna Bird, demanded a PAUSE on AI testing “until adequate safeguards are implemented to ensure that the tests do not pose a danger to the public.”

They're right.

If Big Tech Oligarchs are building a product that is threatening the safety of our children and all of humanity, they must be held accountable – no matter how rich and powerful they might be.

[Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @ReichlinMelnick]

Yes, if she was 18 there would have been no obstacle to her filing for citizenship herself.

[Kenneth Nelson @knj522]

@ggreenwald Agreed. The criticism also affirms arbitrary barriers to the practice of law that make legal services too expensive.

Most laywers will tell you the bar (heck, even law school) had little effect on their day-to-day competence. Field experience should replace bar/law school imo.

[Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @ReichlinMelnick]

Rep. Omar didn't "apply to come to this country." She cam here as a child, as a derivative of her father's application.