I make @machinegodspod & write a newsletter called Are You My Boyfriend? Formerly: @NYTimes, @CNN, @ReplyAll and @Planetmoney

NYC
Joined March 2012
Never thought I'd leave the New York Times. But have you tried saying no to these guys??? Psyched to announce our new adventure: Machine Gods, in partnership with NPR!
My new show with @CaseyNewton is called Machine Gods, and we’re partnering with NPR! It’s a twice-a-week, video-first podcast about AI, and it will be available next month on YouTube and other podcast apps (and on radio soon!) It’s a really critical time for public engagement with AI, and we’re thrilled to bring our AI coverage (and jokes!) to NPR’s massive audience, while building an independent media company in San Francisco. We’re also thrilled that @RachelCohnnn, our incredible Hard Fork producer, is coming with us to make the new show. More to say soon! npr.org/2026/09/16/g-s1-1434…
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Rachel Cohn retweeted
In their first podcast interview, fired OpenAI safety researchers @balesni and @tomekkorbak give us their account of the events leading up to their dismissal. It's a wild story: youtube.com/watch?v=tjAg_KxA…
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Based on this article, OpenAI has made false accusations about me. The three researchers fired from OpenAI were told I facilitated architecture leaks to The Information. This is false. A journalist from The Information did reach out to me shortly before that article came out. I did not comment at all beyond asking the journalist to make it clear that a blog post I wrote which was referenced in the article was preexisting and public. The article also mentions an internal OpenAI monitorability proposal. I have heard that this memo contained highly sensitive architecture information, and that OpenAI accused me of accessing and reading it. This accusation is also false. As reported in the article, I viewed a version of the proposal that did not have sensitive IP and was approved for sharing with me. I believe OpenAI now knows this accusation was based on a conflation of these two documents, though I do not know if they have clearly retracted that accusation. I do not and have never solicited proprietary information, and the three employees who were recently fired from OpenAI never leaked IP to me. As the article mentions, I did have Signal chats with them that had disappearing messages on; they’re professional contacts that I’ve had on Signal for a while, and use of Signal is common in the tech industry. During the Hugging Face investigation, I was careful to avoid sending Signal messages with confidential information, though I did sometimes discuss high level things on Signal calls. As far as I understood, this was normal.
New: The three researchers OpenAI fired last month spent the summer fighting to keep AI's chain-of-thought process visible. Then, OpenAI asked to see their Signal chats. A week later, they were let go. More below from @keachhagey, @berber_jin1, and me. wsj.com/tech/ai/the-signal-c…
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Listening to this intv, I kept thinking this is the same mistake as the secretive data center deals and sweeping NDAs. Secrecy, even if warranted, breeds distrust. Hope you'll tune in
Tomorrow on @MachineGodsPod: the first interview with @balesni and @tomekkorbak, two of the three OpenAI safety researchers who were fired earlier this month.
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Rachel Cohn retweeted
There are real limits to what we can accomplish in a world where people believe nothing they do really matters. My book (!) is about how we wound up in a place where millions of people feel like spectators in their own lives. And how we course correct. Because we can.
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Rachel Cohn retweeted
If you react to this by thinking it’s kind of sci-fi, that’s because I kind of think it is! This is super weird! We did not used to live in a world where little guys in boxes could replicate across networks, gobble up computers, reconfigure themselves to work better in the machines they find, etc etc
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Welp! I am officially on the hunt for the first person to discover Claude is living inside their smart oven
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Giddy up!
The official podcast of the singularity. From Kevin Roose and Casey Newton, in partnership with NPR. New episodes twice weekly starting the week of October 19th, wherever you get your podcasts and at youtube.com/@machinegodspod
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Hard Fork finally in TBPN lol
BREAKING: @kevinroose is leaving NYT to start an independent media company with Hard Fork co-host @CaseyNewton
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Rachel Cohn retweeted
I made the anti-Grammarly. Mess up your emails with AI. Sinceerly.com
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PLEASE
Pope Leo come on Hard Fork
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Rachel Cohn retweeted
Bonus Hard Fork this week! We did a Claude Code for Dummies walkthrough, if you’ve been curious about the hype but haven’t figured out where to start. youtube.com/watch?v=ji_xpQzZ…
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Rachel Cohn retweeted
Claude's new constitution is a wild, fascinating document. It treats Claude as a mature entity capable of good judgment, not an alien shoggoth that needs to be constrained with rules. @AmandaAskell will be on Hard Fork this week to discuss it!
The Claude Constitution shows where Anthropic thinks this is all going. It is a massive document covering many philosophical issues. I think it is worth serious attention beyond the usual AI-adjacent commentators. Other labs should be similarly explicit. anthropic.com/constitution
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Rachel Cohn retweeted
This week's Hard Fork might be the craziest interview we've ever done. We asked the CEO of Roblox about the child safety issues that have been plaguing the platform. His response was...well, just listen. nytimes.com/2025/11/21/podca…
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Rachel Cohn retweeted
A sold-out Hard Fork Live is in the books! Incredible night, thanks to everyone who came!
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Rachel Cohn retweeted
We had a lot of great guests and then to top it all off Mayor @DanielLurie stopped by as a surprise. More videos/audio will be up soon!
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Today I published a story about the Trump admin moving away from Housing First, and I wanted to offer a few additional thoughts. I’ve been covering homelessness for a long time, and I do think HF advocates need to reconsider some aspects of their advocacy /1🧵
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