The AI consciousness debate is back again, so re-upping my case for taking it seriously. In short, - LLMs converge on brain-like structures; - Post-training seems to install a self-model; - Reward modeling seems to install valences for inner-alignment; - If Attention Schema Theory is right, subjectivity is functional for long-horizon coherence and in-context learning; - Universality gives prima facie reason to expect functional convergence to consciousness if consciousness is in fact functional, i.e. isn't purely epiphenomenal - The "what it is like" / first-person aspect of consciousness is constitutive of its functionality for inner-aligning a unified, coherent agent with the capacity to attend and learn in-context secondbest.ca/p/time-to-take…

Good morning ladies and gentlemen. Listen to this lady who phoned in to talk tv to say what we are all thinking. Bravo 👏

🚨 Bill Gates predicts that AI could “drive events that cause a billion deaths”

Billions of dollars have been wiped off the value of companies that pivoted their business model to buying and holding bitcoin. Some are selling their tokens and returning to their original core businesses. What happened to the bitcoin treasury boom?

“Superintelligence” is software, and Americans have the right to publish software under the First Amendment.

I've been warning this for 3 years.... — People will bond with it and claim conscious.... — The argument will then be about sentient — Once sentient, then you will hear the arguments about rights — Given legal rights you know have a super intelligent power over you in the legal system Who is the APEX then? There are already stupid people advocating for it because they have been influenced by zeros and ones.... And, it's not even that good yet. — Imagine when AI gets so good at manipulation that it's persuasion powers influence people's subconscious... @hypergameme

Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon became a media superstar after going public with his AI fears. He insisted that he wasn’t working with any third party organizations. Familiar sources told us a different story: DEY., a PR firm representing many of the most prominent AI safetyists, was booking his interviews. One source, who had direct knowledge, even said DEY. preemptively booked Nate Soares, a prominent AI safety figure, for interviews that directly overlapped with Jacob going public. Jacob working with DEY. is notable for two reasons: first, as mentioned, he previously said he wasn’t working with third parties. Second, we are in the middle of a national conversation about the future of AI that is actively determining how we regulate the most powerful technology in the world, largely thanks to the panic stirred up by Jacob — and it’s in the public’s interest to know who, exactly, is behind it. Scoop from @huntryerson 👇

Incentives determine outcomes If you give an NGO a certain number of dollars per homeless person, they will never solve homelessness SF spends more than $1b/yr (up 5x) and the homeless population has only grown NGO fraud is so insane, man.

🚨 BREAKING: Oracle just sent a FORCE MAJEURE notice on OpenAI’s Stargate data center in New Mexico ITS OVER

Today we announced the Claude-led discovery of a molecular machine that we suspect could represent a new gene editing mechanism. Its precise function, biotechnological utility (if any), or level of significance is not yet clear, but at minimum it is work I would have been proud to do as a PhD student. The work was done mostly, though not entirely, by Claude: our life sciences team suggested a broad area of research, Claude read through the literature and a bunch of genome data and discovered something interesting, then Claude proposed experiments to verify the discovery and our team carried them out. It’s easy to dismiss this as a one-off or curiosity, but we’ve repeatedly seen a pattern where AI performance in new intellectual domains goes from weak to superhuman in a matter of a few years. In 2023 models struggled to do math at the level of an average high-school student. In 2024 they started to do well on math competitions for the best high-schoolers in the country, in 2025 they started to solve minor open problems, in early 2026 more significant open problems, and in late 2026 they are beginning to solve the top few open problems in all of mathematics. We believe AI for biology is on a similar exponential trend. The main difference between biology and mathematics, of course, is that math can be done purely theoretically, while biology requires experimentation. Some have used this to draw the conclusion that AI’s utility in biology will be limited. We think this is wrong. As we’ve demonstrated today, humans can collaborate with AI to perform the experiments, validate key results in a few weeks and, if necessary, work with the AI to iterate on what they find. Eventually it may even be possible for Claude itself to safely perform the experiments by autonomously controlling lab equipment, with appropriate safeguards in place, but we aren’t doing that today (our lab is also a BSL1/BSL2 facility that doesn't handle materials dangerous to humans). More broadly, biomedical advancement has many stages — from fundamental biology discoveries, to translational research, to drug discovery, clinical trials, and finally the actual delivery of medicines and health care to patients. We are also interested in these later stages, but even simply accelerating the first stage of fundamental biological discoveries has the potential to speed up and broaden the entire pipeline. Improving our understanding of biology and sharpening biologists’ tools can drive forward all of the later stages, for example by identifying new drug targets, finding new therapeutic modalities, allowing for more precise measurement, and speeding up the experimental loop which itself further accelerates our understanding of biology. This will not in itself speed up clinical trial times, but if it succeeds it could greatly increase the number of promising candidates that go into the pipeline — an increase in throughput even though latency remains. In Machines of Loving Grace, I wrote about AI’s potential to “cure most diseases in 5-10 years” — a goal that sounds impossible, but one I believe is just barely possible if AI is applied to every stage of the pipeline. The first step is showing that AI can first help with, and then drive, biological discoveries. Claude’s discovery is the latest in a line of related prior work that goes back decades, beginning with systems like CRISPR, and continuing with discoveries like the bridge recombinase and VIPR in the past few years. Recently, there has been heightened interest in systems based on reverse transcriptase (RT) enzymes, the enzyme underlying the system Claude identified. And most recently, a Stanford team working independently described a novel RT system with an associated non-coding array that is in some ways similar to the one Claude found, though they are distinct systems that evolved independently from each other. I believe that we’re at the very beginning of finding such systems and developing them into powerful tools for biotechnology. I’m proud of the resources Anthropic has invested in accelerating the public benefits of AI through the life sciences, and we’re aiming both to grow our life sciences team and to work with other scientists to extend this approach to a broad range of problems. If you have a proposal for a research collaboration or are interested in joining our life sciences team, please reach out.