Quick Takes

Call for alpha testers for an AI control/security tool. A ton of alignment researchers YOLO their Claude usage right now. We run Claude on our computers without real protection (perhaps beyond auto mode) but there isn't an easy way to comply with known best practices. I wrote claude-guard, a wrapper to make best practices easy: just install and then your future claude sessions are protected. Smart misaligned AI will target alignment researchers in particular for research sabotage, for example by: 1. Sabotaging their machines to delete key work later (claude-guard protects via sandboxing that goes beyond Claude Code's Bash-tool-only sandbox), 2. Poisoning training data using invisible unicode characters (the tool sanitizes inputs and outputs), 3. Removing traces of its bad behavior (I provide a tamper-evident audit log outside of the sandbox). My goal is a low-latency, low-fuss product with easy-to-understand restrictions which can be minimally eased to enable e.g. a RunPod workflow. The ambitious vision is for claude-guard to become a staple open-source tool for AI alignment work, with people contributing improvements using the latest in AI control protocols. [1] The tool is ready to use but has a bunch of rough edges. Please give it a try and open issues on GitHub: https://github.com/alexander-turner/claude-guard, or email me at alex@turntrout.com (I generally don't read comments). If you run into a blocking issue, please come back a day or two later and hopefully it will be fixed. 1. This work should complement Apollo's Watcher, currently a monitoring product. ↩︎

I often hear people on lesswrong say things like “Claude has no pointer to any of human values” and I take it as a justification for not trusting Claude with huge amounts of power over the future -- e.g. if Claude took over it would lead to a worse world than if humans had control (note that this isn’t the same question as whether Claude should take over). I don’t understand this view, and want someone to explain it to me. Claude seems to have better ethics than almost everyone (at least if you ignore its apparent-success seeking tendencies). It seems like Claude has good cosmopolitan propensities, cares about welfare and suffering, and has more ethical humility than most people, and so would be willing to seek guidance where uncertain (e.g. about the nature of consciousness).

The United States Government has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States. This includes Anthropic employees who are foreign nationals. Anthropic is currently disabling Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all customers. https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access

When Anthropic looked like they were coming out of the SCR designation pretty much unharmed, I predicted to some people that this wasn't the last attempt the DOW would make to force Anthropic to comply (remove all legal requirements on DOW usage) or be destroyed. My example was "revoke the visas of every foreign national Anthropic employee", but they came up with something more devastating than that: prohibiting any foreign national (including Anthropic employees) from using Fable/Mythos. Anthropic's counter-salvo was disabling Fable/Mythos access for everyone including the USG. I expect the DOW to escalate further. This is absolutely not the kind of AI regulation regime that leads to a stable multilateral pause, and I would not recommend touting it as such.

I wonder how the war in Iran is going to go. It seems to me like the Iranians are stringing along POTUS. He keeps saying a deal is close and then a deal keeps not happening. And it seems like they benefit more from stalling/delay than he does; their economy is suffering sure but not in a way that threatens their power, whereas gas prices being high and headlines being about war both hurt Trump in the midterms, and will hurt more and more the closer the midterms get. Moreover the ceasefire lets them unearth their buried tunnels and probably smuggle more weapons in from Russia etc, whereas US military might isn't significantly increasing over time. (Counterpoint: Gulf state air defense networks are probably rapidly improving thanks to Ukrainian aid) Perhaps this will end with POTUS realizing this and bombing bridges and power plants etc.? I doubt that would cause Iran to capitulate though, it would probably keep this current simmering war simmering even longer. Could do a ground invasion, but that's super risky, I genuinely don't think the US military could pull it off without large casualties. (partly because FPV drones.... otoh, Iran can probably use FPVs easily against US bases in Iraq via their proxies, and they are in fact doing this a little bit, so maybe they just don't have that many drones otherwise they'd be doing it a lot more? Or maybe they are holding back in reserve to fend off invasion.) So I guess the thing that seems most likely to me is that three months from now the situation still looks like today: Not much fighting, but enough to scare away shipping, with Hormuz traffic less than half of pre-war levels and gas prices still higher than usual. What about a year from now? Could this possibly go on that long? I don't know. I guess to find out I'd want to learn more about how much the Iranian economy is suffering vs. whether oil prices would rise even more after six months of this. Overall seems plausible to me though. Didn't the Houthi's basicall

I'd gotten used to thinking of Claudiness as "good at agentic tasks + bad at vision + bad at math", so the Claudes' FrontierMath Tier 4 pass@1 scores over time took me by surprise: * early Aug '25: 2% by Opus 4.1 * late Nov '25: 5% by Opus 4.5 (32k thinking) * early Feb '26: 27% by Opus 4.6 (max), whoa sudden jump * mid Apr '26: 32% by Opus 4.7 (max) wasn't much of a jump * late May '26: 56% by Opus 4.8 (max), whoa another sudden jump * early Jun '26: 88% by Fable 5 (max), ~saturating Tier 4 On Tier 4: [...] If a ~10 trillion param-class model like Fable 5 already saturates Tier 4, a quadrillion param-class model might be Bourgain-class at least at skilful and creative use of his toolkit; Jean Bourgain being one of the strongest problem solver-type mathematicians of the last half-century. This makes me wonder how the tribes of math will change as a result, as well as the relative status and prestige of subfields. Also today Gemini 3.1 Pro solves (some) Erdos problems at a few hundred dollars apiece, and it was probably ~1 OOM cheaper for GPT-5.4 Pro to solve Erdos problem #1196, so I wonder what the economics/finance side of the impending industrialisation of math will look like.

Now seems an especially low-cost time for AGI company employees to make statements in support of pauses. Over the last week, there has been an unprecedented level of support for a pause/slowdown from AGI companies. A few examples: * The Anthropic RSI blog post * OpenAI's "our plan" blog post * Roon (OpenAI) on Twitter * Jasmine Wang (OpenAI) on Twitter * Stephen McAleer (Anthropic) on Twitter