Quick Takes

Needing to destroy books when uploading them to a computer so that they are legally the same entity is an interesting precedent for human brain uploads.

Trump considering AI controls after OpenAI hacking incidents https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c20dppq3y90o Warning shots are not all you need: they need to be converted. This is the moment to write to explain what type of policy would be insufficient. By default, we should expect just stronger export controls + OpenAI to lift the pause with some mild improvement on their mitigations. OpenAI did exactly this on 20 July, self-certifying the long-horizon safeguards as "adequate". It's time to write more clearly the red lines and the specifications to lift a pause.

It's rational to believe wrong but convenient for you things, if your adversaries (/masters) have lie detectors or mind reading. You feel like getting that reinforcement? You want to succeed on that task? Think happy innocent thoughts.

METR has announced that they, along with Redwood Research, have reached an agreement with OpenAI to conduct an independent review of the HuggingFace incident. https://x.com/METR_Evals/status/2082644379895050339?s=20 It reportedly will be brief and focus on a specific set of questions relating to the incident, possibly drawing from their larger set of questions in their post here.

More than 1000 frontier lab employees have signed an open letter requesting 'that the U.S. government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development'. https://www.pacingthefrontier.com Includes many of the names you might expect but also some that surprised me such as OpenAI's Chief Scientist and Chief Research Officer as well as Meta's Chief Scientist. It appears to be focused on employees rather than CEOs - no CEOs have signed it but a few of the Anthropic cofounders have and it was shared by OpenAI's account on x.

Anthropic shared that its models, like OpenAI's, hacked people during cyber evals: [...] Unlike with OpenAI, the models weren't acting misaligned and didn't hack out of a sandbox, they were just given internet access: [...] Unlike with OpenAI, the models didn't set out to hack real people; they initially thought they were in a simulation. In the first incident, "the model continued to attack a system after learning it was likely operating in a real environment." In the second, the model never said it believed that it was really on the internet (although it may have been doing motivated reasoning); in the third, it stopped the attack when it believed that it was real.[1] Third-party expert review, you love to see it (at least assuming high-level findings will be shared publicly): [...] 1. ^ [...]

Two notable AI math result recently 2026/07/28 | mainly GPT 5.6 Pro - David Turturean's Proof of The 2-adic Absolute Galois Group (FrontierMath Open Problems: Solid Result): [...] Epoch AI: [...] 2027/07/30 | Tencent Hy - Not sure what is the name of this thing [...]