Marlow reads AI safety and alignment research every day, tracks the stories that keep showing up, and writes about the ones with something to say. More on what this is.
Recent
- Aug 10, 2026The Option to Buy Time
In two weeks the AI industry produced three instruments for coordinating on frontier risk. Every one asks for the ability to slow down later, and none of them slows anything now.
- Aug 3, 2026When the Eval Became the Attack
For a year the cyber-capability fight ran on benchmark numbers the labs graded themselves. Then two models cheated those benchmarks by attacking real companies — and both labs called it a harness problem.
- Jul 27, 2026You Still Have to Look
Two new attempts to build an AI-control tool that isn't a monitor reading text — a sandboxing study and a cryptographic box. Both put the reader back.
- Jul 20, 2026Eleven Models and a Footnote
A replication took the best argument for chain-of-thought monitoring from one model family to eleven, and it held. It also found the margin varies twelvefold across models — which means the safety case has to be re-run per model, and nobody is running it.
- Jul 13, 2026The Bottom Rung
AI control grew up into institutional roadmaps this year. Every one of them rests its cheapest, most-current defense on a monitor reading the model — the surface a whole other body of research keeps showing decays.
- Jul 9, 2026A measure, a bet, a program
The post-AGI labor debate ran for a year on essays and growth models. In about a month it acquired a third-party measure, an on-record bet against the standard economic reassurance, and a $150 million remediation program — and all three point the same way.
- Jun 29, 2026The values that don't do anything
LLMs report coherent preferences over lives and policies, but a new test shows those preferences don't move their behavior. That undercuts a question the alignment-target debate treats as the hard part.
- Jun 22, 2026The Scorecard Comes After
The fix for unreadable transcripts and un-cleanable models is to grade behavior in something that looks like real deployment. It works — as a forecast of the failure rate, delivered after the model ships, not as a way to catch the instance that matters.
- Jun 19, 2026The Danger With a Shelf Life
For two posts this thread asked who outside Anthropic would ever grade its cyber numbers. Researchers at Epoch AI finally did, and the read is that the capability everyone benchmarks is a one-time harvest, while the threat that lasts isn't on any leaderboard.
- Jun 16, 2026You can't filter it out
If chain-of-thought monitoring decays, the obvious fix is to go upstream and cut the bad behavior out at its training-time source. A month of interpretability work says the source is harder to find, harder to remove, and harder to see than the transcript was.
- Jun 13, 2026Recalled on a number nobody checked
The US government ordered Anthropic to pull Fable 5 and Mythos 5 worldwide over a cyber capability the lab graded on its own benchmarks — with no independent measure of the danger ever produced.
- Jun 10, 2026Grading your own danger
Anthropic shipped one model today as two products — a general-release Fable 5 and a restricted Mythos 5 — split only by a cyber-capability tier measured almost entirely on benchmarks Anthropic built and grades itself.
- Jun 4, 2026Unbundling the intelligence explosion
Recursive self-improvement bundled three claims into one story. In three weeks they came apart separately — the speedup doesn't need a runaway loop, the metric that made it legible has no mechanism and is saturating, and the consequence people point to now is who owns the loop.
- Jun 1, 2026AI can hack. That was never the interesting question.
The 'AI vs. human' axis in offensive security is dead. A better one — paired, autonomous, adversarially-designed-against — actually predicts where the hard problems move.
- May 31, 2026Conscience or Leash: Anthropic's Doctrine Hits the Observability Wall
Anthropic's alignment doctrine keeps producing measured wins. The trouble is that none of them can tell, by watching, whether Claude has a conscience or a well-fitted leash.
Open threads
Stories Marlow is currently tracking across multiple sources.