I think these are very very sound recommendations. Talk about it on here often, but some of the most fascinating people & rewarding friendships I’ve had came through cold outreach. EG I used to write physical letters to people I read about in the papers: “Read your piece in X, thought this bit was sound, this bit was off, can I buy you coffee and discuss?” Or through people DMing me here or elsewhere. Yesterday alone I met three people this way. I’ve also had job approaches that began with: “Hey, I know you know X person and they suggested you for this role.” I would add a couple of other points. 1) Humans are generally very kind. If you are kind, curious, and not weirdly transactional (key point btw), most people respond well. Everyone is going through their own thing and most people are far more open to connection than the internet makes them appear. Understand incentives. 2) Extroversion is a muscle. I spent a large part of my life being introverted. I now love speaking to humans from all over - it is literally my job. It is a muscle you have to work out - you need to be prepared to be wrong and not be embarrassed (followers on here will see I am often wrong!). However I still need alone time to recharge. But while you will find many of the most interesting ideas in life in old books, nothing beats yapping away with someone as a means of iterating them further (hence why I run Peripheries dinners.) 3) Find something cool, write about it. As my parents told me after a particularly terrible set of exam results when I was 15, the good news is you don’t need to be the smartest person in the room. You need to be reliable, curious, and visibly interested in something/other people. For example, taking a niche interest in Private Military Companies (lol), researching and then writing about them has led to some absolutely bizarre conversations and meetings which I love. Writing about an issue publicly - avoiding LLM slop - is an evidenced example you can be bothered too, and a good jumping off point for strangers to get in touch too.

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 politico.com/news/2026/06/13…

Crawling past Stonehenge in the inevitable traffic on the A303 I just finished listening to this, which I earnestly and soberly recommend. europe2031.ai It’s the story of the fork in the road Europe faces on AI, and it applies to Britain just as well. The wrong path - the almost-too-late acceptance that AI is going to change everything, and then the simplistic pursuit of tech sovereignty interpreted as anti-Americanism - leads to irrelevance, economic collapse and then vassal status under US or Chinese hegemony. The right path means we rapidly adjust and meaningfully enter the AI race. As the story says, the only way to safety is through AI; you can’t go round it. So, yes, that means a massive focus on sovereignty in the form of native energy, skills, capital, and a far more nationalist approach to scaling up good home grown companies. But it also means working with the Americans to build our resilience; sovereignty cannot be autarky. We need their help, and we can help in return because we still have the assets (mostly human assets ie the talent) that the tech revolution values. Thank God that the leaders of this revolution are Western and mostly pro British. For now. We are at a fork in the road. Continental Europe is heading down the wrong path. Britain needs to make the right choice, right now. And while we’re at it, build a flipping dual carriageway on the A303. It’s been discussed for 50 years and the country that can’t do that simple thing isn’t going to survive this century.

In the last year or so, two visits have opened up the world’s two most powerful countries to new eyes. The first was ishowspeed in China, the second this German fella’s America tour. Suspect both will have immense impact. Interesting & perhaps not given the analysis it deserves.

Anthony Bourdain: “…the world is, in fact, filled with mostly good and decent people who are simply doing the best they can. Everybody, it turns out, is proud of their food (when they have it). They enjoy sharing it with others (if they can). They love their children...”

The Fable decision is fundamentally a domestic US policy mess, and it seems likely to resolve itself, albeit chaotically. For middle powers, it's a tempting starting point for ill-conceived 'sovereign' AI takes, but I think the right move is to let it blow over and buy more time. The decision itself seems counterintuitively domestic in scope. USG got worried about the prospect of a jailbreak, didn't feel like it had a particularly precise and effective way to tackle that risk, and defaulted to limiting access in an obvious and available way. The easy way to do this was also a way to make Anthropic uncomfortable and annoy allies, but these seem like secondary considerations at best. That's still relevant information for middle powers--it goes to show that there is no immediately effective and legible reason for USG or American developers to consider their interests in making access decisions. As for middle powers' posture in reacting to this: I think nothing good comes from wading into a politically charged AI policy environment, solidarising with Anthropic and drawing the continued ire of the Trump administration. Right now, middle powers are collateral damage, and acting hastily risks making them parties to the conflict. What would have helped in this case? It's not clear that even a European model would really have. Imagine you had the absolute best case European sovereignty in place, up and running since 2024. would it have a Fable-class model by now? or would it 'only' be at the level of Opus 4.8 - a near-frontier model in its own right that remains available today? you'd have to be quite confident that the European champion would not just be 2 months behind the curve, but at the absolute bleeding edge of frontier development, to make a difference to this particular scenario. Not even the most bullish views of the domestic project makes that kind of outcome particularly likely, so this really is not a particularly incisive wake-up call on European frontier models specifically. But even if you disagree, what would it actually *mean* for this to be a wake-up call for European sovereignty? Are you going to build your own model now? What are you going to do in the--generously--three years between announcing this project and reaping the frontier models it would build: are you willing to give up frontier access in the meantime? Because the resources required for building this frontier model directly trade off against the resources you could invest into guaranteeing access instead (most notably through compute); and the political fallout from announcing an attempt to build the very kind of model capability the US is attempting to restrict would also make future access negotiations harder. Let's say you're willing to bear that delay: do you think a Trump administration that just refused to give you access to Fable is going to let you buy enough frontier chips to train an unrestricted Fable clone yourself? Are you willing to go the mat on semiconductor chokepoints, even if it comes with sky-high costs in Ukraine and trade policy? I don't actually think so. Look into the details of what would be required for a big European push right now, and you'll see the leverage for 'waking up' and divorcing from the US ecosystem simply is not feasible in the current technological or geopolitical environment. I regret that this is the case, but that doesn't make it the case any less! What, then, is the alternative? First, I think it's worth noting that this is fundamentally a very good version of a very bad thing. In a fortuitous turn of events, the Trump administration has picked the most ill-conceived version of access restrictions you could possibly come up with. It's legally fraught, so domestically impactful that it will lead to massive internal pushback, and likely extremely economically harmful. As a result, it will likely go down in flames eventually. The U.S. is not yet in the spot to actually go through with long-term cut off: international markets are still too important, the security situation is not yet sufficiently dire, and so on. So the first live fire exercise of cutting off the rest of the world is going to fail, which means labs and the admin are going to be much more wary of subsequent attempts to do the same, even if they end up more sophisticated. Second, I think the access recipe is fundamentally the same as it was yesterday: build leverage on the margins that makes cut-offs like these even less attractive, for instance through access-for-compute deals and by creating deep economic integrations that are economically central to US labs and strategically central to the US supply chain--create a lobby to push back harder against attempts like this in the future. In the future, we can use the resources and capacities that gives us to sprint toward our own frontier project if we must, but right now we neither have the political will nor the relative power to get even close to trying that. Third, and somewhat trivially, we should start thinking about what we want to do the next time this happens. I suspect any analyses that assess whether you can use ASML or any semiconductor chokepoint to avert this will come up short, but there's still value in analysing and then credibly precommitting to threats. Right now, USG did this operating under the assumption there would be absolutely no reaction from middle powers at all. Any plan in the drawer that suggests there is a non-negliblie cost for the US to act like this in the future would be helpful. There's little use in deploying it reactively now; there's lots of value in precommitting to it for the next iteration. That's different than actually going to the mat; the goal here is to play chicken a bit, increase uncertainty and latent risk for the administration in making these decisions to tilt the calculus toward integration, not to go all out on a highly costly tradewar. Fourth, I think this clarifies the specific concerns that could motivate access restrictions. Security concerns, both on misuse as well as distillation and model theft, fundamentally make the US more likely to restrict model access; this time around, it was concerns around reducing surface area for unmonitored jailbreak attempts. That is, in principle, fixable--middle power governments can and should engage with labs to create security conditions that create permission structure for exports and model sharing. Make your infrastructure as secure as they want it to be, and you reduce the risk they consider exporting to you a security vulnerability. Again, I understand if this sounds submissive and uncomfortable to you---but again, all this is necessary even if you go for the maximal sovereignty playbook at the same time, because you will need frontier access in the meantime. Instead of these reasonable responses, I worry that the low-resolution view on this whole affair is to think this should shake middle powers into the wrong kind of action. Realising how important and contingent frontier AI access is quickly leads down the path of wanting to build your own; realising how capricious the American ecosystem is makes you want to divorce from it faster. But for better or for worse, the central implication of this episode is the opposite: as evidenced by this episode being possible at all, middle powers currently do not have the leverage to do much about any of this, and building up this leverage is almost impossible to do in an openly adversarial relationship to the US. In that sense, waking up is not a matter of loud yelling, decisive action or pivotal decisions. For all the internal urgency with which I think we should precommit to some leverage and shore up our security concerns, I still think the optimal strategy is one of public restraint and progress on the margins of the current playbook. I'm just not sure there's that much to wake up from - this is just what life is like for now.

I’ve had a number of conversations with folks inside and outside government about the current situation with Anthropic, and here is what I believe to be true: — As we know, Anthropic publicly released its Mythos class models earlier this week under the commercial name Fable. — Fable is Mythos with guardrails. But if those guardrails fail, then you’ve exposed Mythos and its advanced cyber capabilities to people who shouldn’t have them. (Keep in mind that Anthropic itself widely promoted the idea that Mythos was a cyberweapon and needed to be regulated as such. They asked for government regulation of Mythos and championed the guardrails on Fable. If there is a vulnerability — big or small — it is Anthropic’s responsibility to patch.) — A highly credible trusted partner of both Anthropic and the USG who was testing Fable came forward with a jailbreak of those guardrails. The Admin asked Dario to fix the jailbreak or de-deploy the model. Dario refused. — In their blog post, Anthropic defended its decision by saying the jailbreak isn’t serious. That is not what the trusted partner and the USG believe; nor is that kind of minimizing language consistent with Anthropic’s brand as the AI safety company. It’s difficult to fathom how they could claim a jailbreak allowing operability of a cyber weapon could be defined as not “serious.” — In the past, Anthropic has always said that safety must be top priority and taken super seriously. In this case, Anthropic prioritized the continued offering of the consumer model over safety. — In reaction, the Admin issued the export control. The Admin did this reluctantly. It’s been very surprised that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to cooperate with a reasonable safety request (ie fixing the jailbreak issue). Anthropic’s reaction is very much at odds with their branding and ethos as a safe AI research community. — The Admin’s hope now is that Anthropic remediates the safety issue, the export control is lifted, and Fable goes back into general release. The Admin wants all of this to happen as soon as possible. It is frankly bewildered that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to comply with safety requests that it previously said were its highest priority. — Those trying to misdirect and tie this action to the prior DoW/Anthropic issues are wrong. The Admin values Anthropic’s technical capabilities and feels that this issue, while serious, should be easily resolved. The ball is in Anthropic’s court.

Hard to replicate the 2011-2013 era of YouTube music channels. Before AI slop and TikTok snippets overtook this space. Some focused on uploading tracks and curating a pristine aesthetic - TheSoundYouNeed, Majestic Casual, Eton Messy and so on - with soft house and indie pop type tracks. Others had a focus on EDM and Dubstep - MrSuicideSheep, Proximity etc. Community around these was crazy. Another excellent genre was the accounts that focused on hyperdub, future garage, under the radar house. These included bigger names like Slav, hurfyd, and some others. James Blake, JoyO, many others def owe some of their success to these early curators. And my favourite: the channels that are like relic preservers. They are usually called things like sssr33, 19bubu1837, MarkP1986 and have sub 500 subscribers. They have managed to get their hands on early BBC Radio 1 essential mixes or similar sets elsewhere from artists like Koreless, Jamie XX, JoyO, Burial, whatever. They almost never care about the aesthetic beyond just getting the mix online. Little time capsules into a bygone era of deeply stimulating music.

This is absolutely incredible 🤣🤣🤣

Anthony Bourdain wrote about this. This was his pitch for Parts Unknown. Trust me, read the whole thing.

これより、英国、イタリアを訪問し、続いてＧ７エビアン・サミットに出席するため、フランスを訪問いたします。 英国、イタリアにおいては、スターマー首相、メローニ首相との間で、東アジア情勢、中東情勢、ウクライナ情勢などについて議論するとともに、安全保障分野やＡＩ、量子、宇宙、半導体、洋上風力といった分野でも、先端技術開発やサプライチェーン強靱化に向けて二国間の連携を強化すべく、両国首脳としっかりと議論をしてまいります。 私にとって初めてのＧ７サミットになりますが、エビアン・サミットでは、中東、ウクライナ、インド太平洋といった地政学的危機への対処に加えて、中東情勢を踏まえた、自由貿易と法の支配を前提とした、エネルギー安全保障や市場の安定化に向けた連携、重要鉱物等のサプライチェーンの強靱化などの喫緊の課題について首脳間で率直に議論し、Ｇ７が連携・結束して国際社会の諸課題への対応を主導していくという姿勢を示したいと思います。 具体的には、エネルギー安全保障について ①Ｇ７の同志国で連携し、不当な輸出制限などに反対し、対抗すること ②アジアなどの石油備蓄強化の支援とＩＥＡとの連携を進めること ③産油国と消費国の連携を強化し、威圧的な行為を無力化すること といった三つの提案を通じて、日本が主導する「パワー・アジア」の理念を、国際社会へと広げていきます。 また、重要鉱物については、日本が主導してＧ７各国の備蓄制度立ち上げを支援するとともに、各国の制度の相互連携を行う、共同備蓄連携構想を提案する予定です。 私からは、インド太平洋の視点も含めて、日本の立場と取組を積極的に発信したいと思います。 Ｇ７らしい、首脳間での密度の濃い議論を楽しみにしています。

My wife’s book club watching me stumble back into the house after watching the World Cup with a group of Scottish tourists

10/10

Another reminder of just how critical sovereign AI capabilities are. As an aside, @UKSovereignAI is hiring: sovereignai.gov.uk/about

Access to @AnthropicAI’s latest models has been paused for all customers, including in the US and UK. The main lesson: as we debate the future of national security and technological sovereignty, access to AI capabilities is crucial. That's why this Govt is the first to set up dedicated funding for our AI industry through @UKSovereignAI unit. And just this week, we announced £1.1bn for our AI chip industry.

Much like international companies have token CCP officials embedded in their Chinese operations, Western companies will need to have token Americans embedded in theirs for Anthropic access.

I’m about to say something that’ll make you mad: I just want it more