New essay for @TheFP on searching for God in Silicon Valley. "They are building something that has brought them, unexpectedly, to the edge of where He would be."

Today I'm publishing a new essay, Policy on the AI Exponential. AI is progressing extremely fast—much faster than the policy process was built to handle. The essay lays out where I think the technology is now, and the action needed to close the gap: darioamodei.com/post/policy-…

"And we of the atom and the pixel, whose world is of physical laws and ancient natural origin, do seem to sense that missing element. We wonder where that missing thing sits when we examine the bodily tissue of a brain, when we watch the lines of electricity that map the pulse of a heart. If our world is disenchanted, why do we then feel that shimmer of something more? If there is no God, then why are there still echoes of Him?" Important read by @AvitalBalwit in TFP today.

Welcome to the team! We’re so excited

Great new essay from @jackclarkSF, hopefully the first of many, on what may be the most important topic in AI (and there are many contenders!)

"Art serves as a necessary confrontation with essential truths we know but cannot continuously hold in consciousness — that we will die, that suffering is real, that we exist in a vast cosmos of time and space, or perhaps even just that Paris contains rooftops which occasionally are covered in snow which house other people with their own lives and their own concerns, that there is a world beyond heartbreak. These "obvious" realities become less vivid in daily life, and art (along with sacred spaces, music, ritual) functions as a "signpost back" to what fundamentally matters."

The dangers of getting this wrong are obvious, but if we get it right, there is a real opportunity to create a fundamentally more secure internet and world than we had before the advent of AI-powered cyber capabilities.

Glasswing is just the first step: patching and securing the world’s software infrastructure will be the work of months and years, and will require even broader cooperation across AI companies, cyberdefenders, software providers, governments, and more.

New Anthropic research: Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model. All LLMs sometimes act like they have emotions. But why? We found internal representations of emotion concepts that can drive Claude’s behavior, sometimes in surprising ways.

I am proud to be an American, and I am proud to work at Anthropic. I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the US and other democracies from our autocratic adversaries. But in a narrow set of cases, AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values. These are the lines we have drawn.

The most important skill post AGI is dancing

Excited to be the most famous siblings at Anthropic!

saw a sticker on an AI researcher's laptop recently that said "it's never gonna be chill again," and i feel that

"The years in front of us will be impossibly hard, asking more of us than we think we can give. But in my time as a researcher, leader, and citizen, I have seen enough courage and nobility to believe that we can win—that when put in the darkest circumstances, humanity has a way of gathering, seemingly at the last minute, the strength and wisdom needed to prevail. We have no time to lose."