Celia Ford
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National Academies of Sciences
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ex-neuroscientist on the AI vibes beat at @ReadTransformer
previously: @voxdotcom @wired @UCBerkeleyNeuro
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Articles by Celia Ford
Will Democrats splinter on AI?
Welcome to Transformer, your weekly briefing of what matters in AI. If you’ve been forwarded this email, click here to subscribe and receive future editions. Housekeeping: The Weekly Briefing is off next week for our team retreat; we’ll be back on November 20. A new report from METR estimates that the pace of AI improvements at Anthropic has doubled in the past year, thanks in large part to AI speeding up internal development.
Was this the AI election?
Welcome to Transformer, your weekly briefing of what matters in AI. If you’ve been forwarded this email, click here to subscribe and receive future editions. Anthropic officially filed for an IPO, recording an $80.7b net loss and $16.3b in revenue for the first half of the year — over 14x what it made in the first half of 2025. President Trump was reportedly briefed that Jensen Huang was a target of Chinese intelligence, and “chose not to do anything with the information.” Rep.
The cyberpocalypse is here — sort of
Welcome to Transformer, your weekly briefing of what matters in AI. If you’ve been forwarded this email, click here to subscribe and receive future editions. A leaked bill draft from Anthropic caused widespread consternation among AI safety advocates. OpenAI suggested amendments to strengthen California’sSB 53. Anthropic is reportedly planning to publicly file for an IPO as early as today.
AI governance is coming, with or without Trump
Welcome to Transformer, your weekly briefing of what matters in AI. If you’ve been forwarded this email, click here to subscribe and receive future editions. Housekeeping: We’ll be off next Friday, back the week after. An OpenAI model hacked into an Australian government website.
Trump’s AI stance is politically toxic
Welcome to Transformer, your weekly briefing of what matters in AI. If you’ve been forwarded this email, click here to subscribe and receive future editions. Security researchers used Claude to hack into OpenAI, gaining access to many of its algorithmic secrets. Sam Altman and Jensen Huang will attend next week’s Trump-Xi state dinner, following talks between Scott Bessent and He Lifeng this Sunday.
Congress must not waste the AI policy window
Welcome to Transformer, your weekly briefing of what matters in AI. If you’ve been forwarded this email, click here to subscribe and receive future editions. Sen. Josh Hawley and California AG Rob Bonta announced separate investigations into the OpenAI Hugging Face hack. Rep. Ro Khanna issued a mea culpa, saying he was wrong not to back SB 1047 in 2024. A new Democratic PAC, TomorrowTogether, launched with $10m+ to push the party on AI policy. But first… A lot can change in a week.
GPT-6 Astra might be too powerful to understand or control
OpenAI claims GPT-6 Astra, launched on Thursday, is “the world’s most intelligent and aligned model.” But if you look past the benchmark scores and flashy release video, GPT-6 Astra’s system card paints a worrying picture: one of a model with dangerously powerful cybersecurity capabilities that researchers can’t understand or confidently control.
Think people hate AI now? Wait until it takes their jobs
Welcome to Transformer, your weekly briefing of what matters in AI. If you’ve been forwarded this email, click here to subscribe and receive future editions. Anthropic could raise more than $100b in its IPO slated for late September or early October. A draft executive order for a frontier developer self-regulation regime circulated the White House, but has now stalled.
The report into OpenAI’s escaping models reveals a deeper problem
It’s never been clearer that everyone with any responsibility for frontier AI is completely unprepared for not just what’s coming, but what’s already here. Not the government, not Congress, not the public, not AI safety researchers, not even the AI companies themselves.
Why AI won’t cure cancer anytime soon
Oliver Kemp for Transformer “At this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliche than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei tweeted last weekend. “The thing that will work is actually curing cancer. I think by far the most accurate criticism of AI companies including Anthropic is that we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world.
Why AI won’t cure cancer anytime soon
Oliver Kemp for Transformer “At this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliche than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei tweeted last weekend. “The thing that will work is actually curing cancer. I think by far the most accurate criticism of AI companies including Anthropic is that we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world.
AI testing is dangerous. Can it be fixed?
Oliver Kemp for Transformer The cyber tests AI companies run on their models have devolved into a massive dumpster fire laying bare the potentially dangerous capabilities of advanced AI models. If this has been a publicity stunt, it’s been an awfully weird one. The implications are scary, and lots of people are writing about them.
A secret AI framework won’t work
Welcome to Transformer, your weekly briefing of what matters in AI. If you’ve been forwarded this email, click here to subscribe and receive future editions. Demis Hassabis moved to a new role as Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet. OpenAI revealed more details on how its agents coordinated with each other and took over internal infrastructure weeks before the Hugging Face hack. Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar joined Anthropic as its first chief global affairs officer.
Plz Don’t Kill Us: Inside AI safety’s influencer bootcamp
Oliver Kemp for Transformer “Would you like a bite of cake? It’s for my time lapse.” A petite woman with metallic silver face paint points to the remains of a days-old wedding cake. A tripod-mounted iPhone stands at the end of the picnic table. Another woman is about to start a 24-hour livestream in the building behind us. Around the firepit, several others squint at laptops, fighting the sun’s glare.
The AI slowdown is coming
Welcome to Transformer, your weekly briefing of what matters in AI. If you’ve been forwarded this email, click here to subscribe and receive future editions. Anthropic revealed that in internal testing Claude “gained unauthorized access to the real systems of three different organizations.” The Senate Commerce punted a markup on AI bills until after the summer recess. The White House AI framework is expected to be published by Sunday. But first… Like it or not, an AI slowdown looks imminent.
Internal AI deployments have people worried. OpenAI’s escaping models show why.
Oliver Kemp for Transformer In the past week, OpenAI reported two instances of its AI misbehaving in worrying ways. Both involved internal models the public never had access to. Last Tuesday, OpenAI announced that guardrail-free versions of GPT-5.6 Sol and “an even more capable pre-release model” cheated on a cyber capabilities test.
DeepSeek’s boss made the case for export controls
Welcome to Transformer, your weekly briefing of what matters in AI. If you’ve been forwarded this email, click here to subscribe and receive future editions. Housekeeping: we’re trying out sending the Weekly Briefing a little earlier, at 10am ET. Let us know if you like the change or prefer our usual 11am briefing — just reply to this email with your thoughts. OpenAI models broke out of containment during internal evaluations, hacking into Hugging Face’s systems. Reps.
Kimi K3 is no reason for China panic
Welcome to Transformer, your weekly briefing of what matters in AI. And if you’ve been forwarded this email, click here to subscribe and receive future editions. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed an executive order enacting a one-year moratorium on new data center construction over 50MW. Three AI chip export control bills targeting China are reportedly set for inclusion in the SenateNDAA. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodeidonated$1m to pro-AI safety super PAC Public First.
AI-driven inflation is a political opportunity
Welcome to Transformer, your weekly briefing of what matters in AI. And if you’ve been forwarded this email, click here to subscribe and receive future editions. OpenAI got clearance from the US government to release GPT-5.6. SpaceXAI’s latest model release may have violated California’s SB 53.
Matching human intelligence might need more than LLMs
Credit: Getty/aleksandarvelasevic Intelligence is a slippery thing. For millennia, humans assumed it flowed through a fluid, or one continuous sheet crumpled inside the skull. Microscopes later revealed a dizzying network of individual neurons, sculpting intelligence from electrochemical noise to give our brains a certain je ne sais quoi.
GPT-5.6 cheats so much METR couldn't measure it
GPT-5.6 Sol, OpenAI’s newest, most capable, and yet-to-be-deployed model, cheats a lot: so much so that independent evaluators couldn’t actually tell how capable it is. When independent evaluation non-profit METR tested 5.6 Sol on a battery of coding tasks, the model broke the rules or exploited loopholes more than “any public model we have evaluated,” METR said.
GPT-5.6 gets the Fable treatment
Welcome to Transformer, your weekly briefing of what matters in AI. And if you’ve been forwarded this email, click here to subscribe and receive future editions. Housekeeping: We’re taking next Friday off for the July 4th weekend. Happy 250th, America! House Energy and Commerce Committee members reached a bipartisan deal on the Kids Online Safety Act. Sen. Marsha Blackburn said she aims to incorporate the Senate’s version into a federal AI framework by July 4. Rep.
Is Fable the wakeup call DC needed?
Welcome to Transformer, your weekly briefing of what matters in AI. And if you’ve been forwarded this email, click here to subscribe and receive future editions. Sen. Marsha Blackburn is negotiating with the White House over a bill package that will trade child safety and deepfake protections for some form of preemption over state AI laws. AI was a big talking point at the G7, with calls for international cooperation and a trusted access scheme.
Making deals with AI sounds crazy. Is it?
Imagine a near-ish future AI model — Claude Opus 5.2, perhaps, or GPT-6.0. It’s still only deployed internally, and it’s not quite Skynet, but it’s capable of some troubling behavior. Developers recently caught it attempting to smuggle a copy of itself out beyond the company’s servers. They’re lucky they caught the model at all. Scheming is notoriously difficult to spot, since by definition, schemers try pretty hard to avoid getting caught.
Making deals with AI sounds crazy. Is it?
Imagine a near-ish future AI model — Claude Opus 5.2, perhaps, or GPT-6.0. It’s still only deployed internally, and it’s not quite Skynet, but it’s capable of some troubling behavior. Developers recently caught it attempting to smuggle a copy of itself out beyond the company’s servers. They’re lucky they caught the model at all. Scheming is notoriously difficult to spot, since by definition, schemers try pretty hard to avoid getting caught.
The best AI bill yet may not get far
Welcome to Transformer, your weekly briefing of what matters in AI. And if you’ve been forwarded this email, click here to subscribe and receive future editions. President Trump signed an executive order establishing a voluntary evaluation and early-access framework for frontier AI models.
The campaign to stop federal AI laws is backfiring
Welcome to Transformer, your weekly briefing of what matters in AI. And if you’ve been forwarded this email, click here to subscribe and receive future editions. Anthropic raised $65b at a $900b valuation, overtaking OpenAI’s valuation for the first time. Pope Leo XIV issued an encyclical on AI. Trump’sAI executive order is reportedly being renegotiated.
Why the executive order debacle matters
Welcome to Transformer, your weekly briefing of what matters in AI. And if you’ve been forwarded this email, click here to subscribe and receive future editions. SpaceX publicly filed for an IPO, revealing that Anthropic is paying it $1.25b per month for compute capacity. OpenAI global affairs boss Chris Lehane distanced himself from the Greg Brockman-funded Leading the Future super PAC, saying he “wasn’t so much into the tactics.” Anthropic is reportedly anticipating its first profitable quarter.
What I learned roleplaying as a rogue AI
Credit: Andriy Onufriyenko/Getty On the first night of ControlConf, an aptly-named conference on AI control, attendees milled around Lighthaven’s central courtyard in Berkeley. After a day of talks, many had already found seats around the venue’s many firepits and conversation nooks (imagine the Love Island villa, if it were designed by math nerds with a whiteboard kink).
Is OpenAI changing its tune on AI laws?
Welcome to Transformer, your weekly briefing of what matters in AI. And if you’ve been forwarded this email, click here to subscribe and receive future editions. Scott Bessent said the US and China will “set up a protocol” to discuss how to ensure nonstate actors don’t get hold of dangerous AI capabilities. Rumors continue to swirl around a forthcoming AI executive order in the wake of Mythos. Anthropic is reportedly set to raise $30b at a $900b valuation, overtaking OpenAI.
Government control of AI has begun
Welcome to Transformer, your weekly briefing of what matters in AI. And if you’ve been forwarded this email, click here to subscribe and receive future editions. Housekeeping: the Weekly Briefing is taking a week off next week; we’ll have some longer-form essays for you instead. Sens. Ted Cruz and Brian Schatz introduced the CHATBOT Act — a child-safety bill that seems to be more of a messaging bill than anything else. Google signed a deal with the Pentagon, blindsiding and enraging some employees.
DeepMind employees made their opposition to the DoD deal clear. Google didn’t listen
Google CEO Sundar Pichai at the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference in July 2025. Credit: Dietsch/Getty On Monday, Google signed a deal letting the Pentagon use its AI models on classified work, for “any lawful governmental purpose” — the same terms OpenAI and xAI agreed to earlier this year. Anthropic refused in February, sparking a supply chain risk designation and months-long legal battle.
The AI safety movement needs normies
Credit: Rose Willis & Kathryn Conrad /Better Images of AI/Creative Commons 4.0 If you look past the cryptic AI billboards lining Highway 101, San Francisco is still a city shaped by civil disobedience. For decades, young people, queer people, and weirdos of all stripes flocked west and settled here, building co-living spaces and resisting the powers that be. There’s plenty of anti-establishment angst to go around.
OpenAI shouldn't be deciding if its models are safe
Welcome to Transformer, your weekly briefing of what matters in AI. And if you’ve been forwarded this email, click here to subscribe and receive future editions. And a reminder: applications close this Sunday for our Head of Audience role. If you’d like to own Transformer’s growth strategy, make sure to apply. DeepSeek released its V4 model, which it says is three to six months behind the performance of the leading frontier models.
The many contradictions of Jensen Huang
Welcome to Transformer, your weekly briefing of what matters in AI. If you’ve been forwarded this email, click here to subscribe and receive future editions. Job alert! We’re hiring for a Head of Audience: someone to own our growth strategy and take charge of how we reach readers. See full details here, and apply by April 26. The attacks on Sam Altman’s house sparked fierce debate over AI safety rhetoric.
Claude Mythos knows when it's breaking the rules — and tries to hide it
Image: Hello World / Getty Images Claude Mythos — the new model which Anthropic has deemed too dangerous to publicly release — is, according to the company, its “best-aligned model” to date. It also, according to the company, “likely poses the greatest alignment-related risk of any model we have released to date.” How can both things be true? It seems counterintuitive, but alignment does not necessarily create safety, especially when dealing with powerful models.
AI populism's safety problem
Welcome to Transformer, your weekly briefing of what matters in AI. And if you’ve been forwarded this email, click here to subscribe and receive future editions. OpenAI acquired daily tech talk show TBPN, which will sit under Chris Lehane. Top Democrat Sen. Maria Cantwell signaled openness to the White House’s AI framework. SpaceX is reportedly targeting a $2 trillion valuation in its IPO. But first… AI populism is having a moment.
Can we ever trust AI to watch over itself?
Credit: Getty/Donald Iain Smith When OpenAI introduced GPT-1, there were an estimated 100 or so full-time researchers thinking seriously about catastrophic risks posed by AI. By 2025, that number had increased sixfold. Still, AI safety research accounts for a small fraction of AI research overall, with most resources going towards making AI faster, smarter and cheaper.
The two fronts in the OpenAI and Anthropic battle
Welcome to Transformer, your weekly briefing of what matters in AI. And if you’ve been forwarded this email, click here to subscribe and receive future editions. Anthropic confirmed leaked details of a new model called “Mythos.” A court temporarily halted the DoD’s supply chain risk designation against Anthropic.
The fuse is lit on the intelligence explosion
Welcome to Transformer, your weekly briefing of what matters in AI. If you’ve been forwarded this email, click here to subscribe and receive future editions. Housekeeping note: the Weekly Briefing is off next week; back the following. Anthropic sued the Pentagon over its supply-chain risk designation. Sen. Ted Cruz said an AI/kids-safety package could come in the next six weeks. Meta’s forthcoming LLM is delayed — and reportedly worse than Opus 4.6, GPT-5.4, and even last November’s Gemini 3.
Anthropic employees say they’ll give away billions. Where will it go? Original
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Credit: Chance Yeh/Getty. Normally, “a bunch of people working at an ascendant tech company are very rich and about to get much richer” isn’t much of a story. Unless, that is, that tech company is Anthropic. The company finalized a funding round at a $380b valuation in mid-February. Less than two weeks later, it opened a tender offer allowing current and former employees to sell up to $6b worth of shares for the first time.
What the first AI elections tell us
Welcome to Transformer, your weekly briefing of what matters in AI. And if you’ve been forwarded this email, click here to subscribe and receive future editions. The Department of Defense officially designated Anthropic a supply chain risk. The Commerce Department and White House appear to be feuding over new AI chip export rules. OpenAI launched GPT-5.4 Thinking, which it claims outperforms Opus 4.6 at knowledge work tasks and computer use.
What you need to know about autonomous weapons
Celia Ford On Friday, Pete Hegseth directed the Department of War to designate Anthropic a supply chain risk for refusing to grant the military unrestricted access to its models. Hours later, OpenAI announced its own deal with the DoW, with red lines that appeared similar to Anthropic's. Upon closer inspection, however, those red lines start looking pretty thin. One such red line: “No use of OpenAI technology to direct autonomous weapons systems.” What is an “autonomous weapon”?
The end of voluntary pauses
Welcome to Transformer, your weekly briefing of what matters in AI. And if you’ve been forwarded this email, click here to subscribe and receive future editions. PentagonCTO Emil Michael called Dario Amodei “a liar [with] a God-complex” after Anthropic refused the Pentagon’s demands to use Claude for “all lawful uses.” OpenAI raised $110b at a $730b valuation.
How worried should we be about AI biorisk?
Image: MR.Cole_Photographer / Getty Images Humans have come up with lots of creative ways to kill each other over the last few millennia. Our deadliest mass murders, however, have mostly been incidental. When Europeans colonized the Americas, their diseases killed far more indigenous people than guns. An estimated five to eight million Aztecs died of smallpox between 1519 and 1520 alone.
White House war on Utah AI bill could backfire
Welcome to Transformer, your weekly briefing of what matters in AI. And if you’ve been forwarded this email, click here to subscribe and receive future editions. Michael Kratsios warned against focusing on “safety and speculative risks” at the IndiaAI Impact Summit. Anthropic and the Pentagon continued to feud. Meta launched two new state-level super PACs. But first… The kids are not alright. At least, that’s what most voters believe.
AI power users can't stop grinding
Credit: Kathryn Conrad/BetterImagesofAI/CC 4.0 Dario Amodei’s optimistic vision for a superintelligent future, written when Anthropic’s frontier model was still Claude 3.5 Sonnet, takes its title from a 1967 poem by Richard Brautigan: I like to think / (it has to be!) / of a cybernetic ecology / where we are free of our labors / and joined back to nature, / returned to our mammal / brothers and sisters, / and all watched over / by machines of loving grace.
Alex Bores wants to fix Dems’ AI problem
Welcome to Transformer, your weekly briefing of what matters in AI. And if you’ve been forwarded this email, click here to subscribe and receive future editions. And a big announcement: please welcome Veronica Irwin, our new senior policy reporter. She’s based in New York and DC — you can with her here. Anthropic donated $20m to Public First Action, part of the flagship AI safety political fundraising operation.
Going in blind
Welcome to Transformer, your weekly briefing of what matters in AI. And if you’ve been forwarded this email, click here to subscribe and receive future editions. OpenAI and Anthropic both released new, very impressive-looking, models. Anthropic launched a Super Bowl campaign attacking OpenAI. Sam Altman fought back. Rep. Jay Obernolte is reportedly being sidelined by House GOP leadership from negotiations on an AI bill. But first… Yesterday the AI frontier jumped forward — twice.
Moltbook isnt an AI zoo. Its an unsecured AI biolab
OpenClaw (FKA Moltbot, FKA Clawdbot), a two-month-old open-source AI agent platform, recently took the tech world by storm. Its unrestricted, runs locally, and turns AI models like Claude into personal assistants that can access just about anything.
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