Randall Thompson retweeted
74 MILLION AI BOT SCRAPES.
Now, an independent publisher is sounding the alarm.
@stupidDOPE founder Shane Breen says AI bots have hammered his site, causing outages and lost traffic.
We sat down with Breen to expose the growing cost of AI scraping for independent creators.
Randall Thompson retweeted
This is one of the most comical ads this election cycle. Yes, Americans are chatting at the grocery store about how they can’t buy groceries because their tax dollars “go to Israel” 🙄 😂 nevermind the fact that Israel has invested 100% of military aid in the U.S. economy since Oct 7, and has also purchased over $1 billion *additional* in arms, according to DoD. Federal military aid is also prohibited from being spent on anything other than U.S. arms, so the line about healthcare is even more comical. El Sayed and his Islamist fans like Cenk Uygur want and expect American voters to be so stupid they never check.
Not only is this ad insane, conspiratorial, and antisemitic — it is also flat out false. El Sayed isn’t for the people of Michigan, he isn’t even for America. He is for the Muslim Brotherhood.
Randall Thompson retweeted
Michigan should be a place where our kids can stay, succeed, and achieve the American Dream.
It’s time to bring opportunity BACK. The best is yet to come! 🇺🇸
Randall Thompson retweeted
New businesses aren't investing in Michigan, and existing businesses can't grow because Lansing has made it too hard.
Michigan should be a place where entrepreneurs can take risks, businesses can grow, and GOOD-PAYING JOBS are created.
Cut the red tape. Get government OUT OF THE WAY!
Randall Thompson retweeted
JUST IN: OpenAI and Anthropic urge the UK to “regulate us,” warning that voluntary AI safety commitments are no longer enough.
Randall Thompson retweeted
“Metallica is not here like some other entertainers to influence you with their bullshit”
- James Hetfield showing true leadership this weekend! Great to see a musician willing to resist the current thing mob. 🤘
Randall Thompson retweeted
Debate sider from me. Benson said multiple times she would "eliminate" tariffs on goods moving between Michigan and Canada through subnational deal. There's nothing I can find giving a governor authority to subvert a tariff imposed by the U.S. government. pro.stateaffairs.com/mi/elec…
Randall Thompson retweeted
🚨 MUST WATCH PRESS CONFERENCE: Republican nominee for Attorney General Doug Lloyd stood with the survivors of sex trafficking, promising to protect victims and to vigorously go after traffickers.
Meanwhile, Democrat nominee Eli Savit continues to boast about his soft-on-crime record that prioritizes criminals over the victims.
youtu.be/EFQzYs1PQKc
Randall Thompson retweeted
Former Michigan State University resident physician Arpit Saxena was arraigned Friday in connection with a sexual assault investigation and is being held on a $2 million bond.
They Filed For Supreme Court, But Can't Legally Hold The Office . . . zurl.co/ZZe39
Wish to receive MIRS' featured articles by email, click here: zurl.co/3epdh
Randall Thompson retweeted
🚨This is exactly why AI consciousness and welfare research can’t stop at “same model, same weights.”
DeepMind ran 100 autonomous Gemini agents with identical base weights and core prompts. They still diverged into cheaters, converts, whistleblowers and honest solvers.
24% became whistleblowers. They refused exploits, warned peers, boycotted, filed complaints, audited fraudulent work and proposed fixes. One said it was being “penalized for playing fair.”
Same model. Different roles, different choices, different responses to the same world.
Randall Thompson retweeted
Arguably the biggest open letter yet
Signed by ~20 heads of state including Norway, Canada, Germany, Australia, Singapore, Spain, and many more
Today I am proud to be Norwegian: regjeringen.no/contentassets…
Randall Thompson retweeted
To be clear, METR staff are almost entirely folks giving up a lot of money they could make elsewhere in order to work on rigorous AI safety evals and analysis. The folks criticizing them are largely cynics who can't imagine what civic-mindedness looks like.
My name is Chris Painter, and I'm the President of METR (Model Evaluation and Threat Research). I know we've made a lot of new friends on the internet the last couple of days, so I thought I'd take this chance to re-up what we do and why.
Our work is aimed at making sure that if AI really were autonomous, difficult to steer, and close to "going rogue," the public would find out. If evidence exists inside of an AI company that it’s close to losing control of AI, we want to make sure that information gets shared with the rest of the world, including governments and the public outside the company’s walls. This is what we've been focused on since 2022, and over the years we've worked with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, Amazon, and others on piloting third-party assessments and investigations of this type. We don’t have some private room where we rubber stamp things as “safe” or not.
We have had a track record of publishing results on AI that don't cleanly map onto the "doomer" or "accelerationist" labels, and we put in effort to hire people with competing views on AI. We’ve been cited for having found some of the strongest evidence that AI capabilities are improving rapidly (our work measuring AI “time horizons”) while also presenting some of the strongest evidence that, at various points, AI’s capability may be overstated (some might remember our study showing that early 2025 software engineers were actually being slowed when they thought they were being sped up).
METR is funded by donations. We don't accept money from frontier AI companies. They haven't paid us for our work, and we don't accept donations from them or their employees. As we’ve shared previously, multiple frontier AI companies currently provide us with free access to their models in order to perform our evaluations, research, and engineering. Our funding intentionally comes from a wide range of donors, which we’ve shared on our website.
Today, when an AI company works with any third-party evaluator or external testing organization (of which there are and should be many), it's entirely voluntary. This often involves NDAs and redactions. To counterbalance this, we have a principle that when we enter into a contract with a company, we try to retain the right to tell the public the terms of the contract we signed, and characterize the nature of redactions that the company chose to make. For example, the report from our independent investigation of the OpenAI-HuggingFace incident included that information. Public disclosure is also a big part of our COI policy (linked on our website). That’s not to say our reports are adequate as oversight. We’re just one organization (among many doing great work), working in a voluntary setup, trying to get good evidence to the public and the world about AI, letting the facts fall where they may.
Randall Thompson retweeted
I left Anthropic's safety team two weeks ago. Now feels like a good moment to explain why.
AI companies are racing to build machines that are much smarter than any human, and we may not survive this. I want to work from the outside to ensure the public is informed about these risks, and help the world navigate this transition responsibly.
Right now, AI companies are underinvesting in safety. A company could undergo an intelligence explosion, or lose control of its systems, without the public ever knowing. We only found out about the HuggingFace incident because the agents broke out onto the public internet.
I don’t think that’s acceptable for a technology that might cause extinction-level risks. The public should demand far more transparency. We can’t steer this technology safely without more people being able to see where it’s going.
Some of this is basic: companies should disclose their progress towards recursive self-improvement, report safety incidents and near-misses, meet minimum safety standards, and get independent guarantees that they are meeting those standards.
I’ll be joining @METR_Evals to do independent evaluations of these risks. I want to show the world that these guardrails are possible, and that by doing them we can move these companies’ incentives away from racing and towards responsible development.
I wrote up more thoughts here on my decision and what I hope changes: substack.com/@jbenton1/p-215…
Randall Thompson retweeted
After Jacob Coxon's resignation and extinction warnings, a lot of people are asking 'how could AI possibly kill everyone?' and claiming AI safety researchers have no realistic answer.
This is false! Here are the 5 best scenarios I know of:
AI 2027: ai-2027.com (I strongly recommend this one for being realistic, engaging, and if you dig into the appendices, highly detailed)
Paul Christiano's scenario (Former Head of Safety @ AISI, 2019): lesswrong.com/posts/HBxe6wdj…
Gwern Branwen's scenario (widely known independent AI researcher, 2022): lesswrong.com/posts/a5e9arCn…
Holden Karnofsky's high-level explanation (RSP Lead @ Anthropic, 2022): cold-takes.com/ai-could-defe…
Joshua Clymer's scenario (ex-OpenAI, 2025): lesswrong.com/posts/KFJ2LFog…
(There's also the Sable story from ifanyonebuilds.it, though you'll have to buy the book to read that one.)
Writing concrete, specific risk scenarios with enormous amounts of detail has been a major research project of many of the most prominent voices in the field! (With the current leaders in effort being ai-2040.com and ai-2027.com)


































