the biggest threat to the future of humanity is apathy

Today is the first time our Intelligence Frontier chart has moved backward.

Our statement on the UK government’s demand that all content on all devices sold or used in the country be scanned, on the presumption of nudity, using a dystopian combination of age verification and content scanning. This proposal will not safeguard children. It endangers us all. signal.org/blog/pdfs/2026-06…

WOW -- Trump crashes out and cuts his interview with Welker short as she presses him on his lack of evidence for claiming elections are rigged "You're either crooked or you're stupid. Let's call it quits. Because I've had enough. Thank you darling," he tells her." "I traveled all the way to Wisconsin for this interview," she pleads.

this troll

I feel like I'm eating crazy pills when I read the countless bad takes around how the Vatican would have virtually anointed Anthropic. When if you read the Pope's encyclical it's actually a COMPLETE repudiation of everything Anthropic - and U.S. AI generally - stands for. Read this part of the encyclical for instance (paragraph 110: vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/e…): "Finally, I would like to employ the expression 'to disarm,' which is close to my heart. Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of 'armed' competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon. This entails a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance. To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life." In a nutshell what the Pope is saying is: 1) The "AI race" mentality itself is the disease: there is no "winning it responsibly", we need to stop seeing AI as a way "to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance" 2) Technical dominance and being the most powerful does not give you the right to set the rules 3) AI must be "freed from monopolistic control", opened to scrutiny, and "restored to the plurality of human cultures" Now compared and contrast it with what Anthropic is officially saying - namely Dario Amodei in his famous essay "Machines of Loving Grace" (darioamodei.com/essay/machin…): 1) Where the Pope says stop the AI race. Dario says win it: "A coalition of democracies [should seek] to gain a clear advantage on powerful AI by securing its supply chain, scaling quickly, and blocking or delaying adversaries' access to key resources like chips and semiconductor equipment." 2) Where the Pope says technical power doesn't confer the right to govern. Dario says it does: "This coalition would on one hand use AI to achieve robust military superiority (the stick) while at the same time offering to distribute the benefits of powerful AI (the carrot) to a wider and wider group of countries in exchange for supporting the coalition's strategy." 3) Where the Pope says free AI from monopolistic control and restore it to the plurality of human cultures. Dario says concentrate it and use it to impose one model: "If we can do all this, we will have a world in which democracies lead on the world stage and have the economic and military strength to avoid being undermined, conquered, or sabotaged by autocracies, and may be able to parlay their AI superiority into a durable advantage. This could optimistically lead to an 'eternal 1991.'" These aren't cherry-picked gotchas. This is the central thesis of Dario's essay. And Anthropic keeps repeating this over and over. On May 14, just days ago, Anthropic published a 5,000-word policy essay titled "2028: Two scenarios for global AI leadership" (anthropic.com/research/2028-…) urging the US to "lock in a 12-24 month lead" over China by blocking chips, cutting off model access, and ensuring that "democracies, not authoritarian regimes" control AI. They warn that "a lead in frontier AI will enable a widening lead across the full national security technology stack" and urge America not to "squander our advantage." This is, almost word for word, everything the Pope is condemning in his encyclical. I'll grant Anthropic one thing: they have an excellent PR team. Turning what's an obvious repudiation into a perceived endorsement is pretty masterful. But it doesn't mean you have to fall for it...

Privacy is a human right.

👏👏

3 million registered users achieved this morning in the sunny lagoon of venice.ai 🌅 • 3 million who wanted a ChatGPT that didn't spy on them • 3 million who wished to avoid the intellectual degradation of paternalistic censorship • 3 million sovereigns avoiding a future of serfdom We don't store or log your prompts. We don't package your personal life to be sold to advertisers. We don't train on your conversations or share them with any criminal or government (redundant?) who asks for them. • Text, image, video • 230 models • Web, app, and API Unrestricted intelligence for today's sovereign individual, whether human or agentic. Try for free at venice.ai

The degree of projection in this paper is genuinely insane. Your regular reminder that Anthropic was the first AI frontier lab to actively work with the Pentagon and US intelligence agencies to help them with their global surveillance program. Back in 2024 already, they partnered with Palantir "to make Anthropic's Claude models available to U.S. intelligence and defense agencies" (axios.com/2024/11/08/anthrop…) And remember the whole story earlier this year on how they refused that their AI be used for “mass domestic surveillance”? Notice something there? By definition it means that they agree with *NON-domestic* mass surveillance, meaning Anthropic has absolutely no problem with the U.S. military-industrial complex using their AI to surveil all 8 billion inhabitants on Earth, provided it excludes the 340 million Americans. And even the latter can be surveilled, just not in a “mass” way (whatever that means). Which, incidentally, is actually merely a restatement of U.S. law. Mass domestic surveillance of Americans is prohibited anyhow by the Fourth Amendment, and mass foreign surveillance is authorized under FISA Section 702 and Executive Order 12333 - the legal architecture Edward Snowden exposed in 2013. So Anthropic’s so-called “principled” stance is them actually supporting very same legal architecture that, back when the Snowden revelations broke in 2013, was rightly condemned as the most sweeping surveillance regime in the world (which it factually is). Which means that them warning that China's AI may be used for surveillance, and as such is dangerous, is literally them taking everyone for complete idiots. All the more due to the fact that, because China's AI is largely open source, you can use it in a way where you keep complete control of your data - unlike Anthropic 🤷‍♂️

AI completely changed the game for cybersecurity. Everything that can be hacked, will be hacked. Every gap in your OpSec will be found and exploited. Don't panic, but expect some chaos over the next months and prepare accordingly.

Intelligence, like money, should be permissionless.

🔥

privacy is normal. prompt privacy should be normal too. use @AskVenice

There’s not even going to be any money left for quantum computers to steal

machine yearning

/ultrathink

hey @BylineTimes is there any way to get the print edition delivered to Spain if i subscribe, or somewhere i can pick it up over here? this months Cuba photo essay by the late Paul Conroy is superb btw.