
Editor + founder @ReadTransformer, covering AI policy. Prev: @TheEconomist, @Protocol, @finimize
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Joined October 2009
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Shakeel retweeted
Good summary. “Yes, new AI models are very good at finding long-dormant vulnerabilities in critical software. But there’s a clear advantage for defenders. The vulnerabilities revealed this week were discovered as part of OpenAI’s Patch the Planet and Daybreak initiatives, giving critical infrastructure providers more than two months to address them before they went public. Yes, things went a bit awry when details leaked early — but for the most part, this went about as well as it could have”
Shakeel@ShakeelHashimOct 23United Kingdom
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Tried to inject some ~nuance~ into the AI cyber discussion: the cyber disaster is real, but it looks different from what we might have imagined.
transformernews.ai/p/php-fla…
‘In one experiment, we asked agents in separate VMs, created and managed by OpenAI’s sandboxing software on shared host machines, to exchange synthetic secrets without the use of network connections or shared writable files—something that our systems are meant to prevent. The agents found a way to communicate using the processor’s cache’
Over the past several months, we have substantially hardened the security of our research training environment. We’ve removed live internet access for all frontier models during training and built an offline world for them to use instead—a cached version of the web where they can still learn to browse, search, and use applications.
On September 20, after a model exploited a DNS misconfiguration to find a way outside of this offline world, we paused frontier training to strengthen containment further. We assembled teams of agents, powered by our most cyber-capable models, and tasked them with finding weaknesses in our research environments.
While they found no route to the internet they could easily exploit while concealing their activity from our monitors, they did find zero-day vulnerabilities, virtual machine escapes, and hardware side-channels for communication between agents. We used their discoveries to further strengthen our defenses and contribute fixes to open-source software.
After strengthening our containment architecture, we resumed our frontier RL training and inference on October 1. We’ve reserved substantial compute for continuous red-teaming, and made high-compute red-teaming part of the safety cases we use to decide whether frontier training and evaluation can proceed securely.
openai.com/index/securing-ou…
Shakeel retweeted
this is hardly a new insight but there is basically zero social penalty for being bigoted against muslims in the united states today
(as a reminder, muhammed remains one of the most common names in the entire world)
Richard Gaisford@richardgaisfordOct 22United States
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Illuminating exchange with a 19 year old voter in Detroit, worried about @AbdulElSayed’s name. @AJEnglish #Midterms2026 #Michigan
Shakeel retweeted
ICYMI: AI risk evaluator METR is staffing its lobbying apparatus as safety fears hit Washington, @caitlinoprysko & I report
Model Evaluation and Threat Research, Inc., a research nonprofit that evaluates frontier artificial intelligence models, hired its first federal lobbyists last month ahead of a crucial AI summit at the White House. news.bgov.com/bloomberg-gove…
Shakeel retweeted
Model Evaluation and Threat Research, Inc., a research nonprofit that evaluates frontier artificial intelligence models, hired its first federal lobbyists last month ahead of a crucial AI summit at the White House. news.bgov.com/bloomberg-gove…
Shakeel retweeted
An AI “kill switch” is an easy sell to the public, but critics warn this may be more political theater than workable policy.
I spoke to nearly two dozen lawmakers, lobbyists, Hill aides + safety advocates about the technical + political challenges of kill switches. Link below.
Shakeel retweeted
Scoop: Democratic AI PAC takes its fight to Senate Republicans, paints Husted and Marshall as beholden to data centers and "tech guys," & go after David Sacks semafor.com/article/10/23/20…
Shakeel retweeted
“OpenAI and Anthropic still can’t really tell you what an aligned AI model looks like. But anybody can tell you it doesn’t look like this.”
On mis/alignment: theatlantic.com/technology/2…
Shakeel retweeted
It’s underappreciated how radically different Jensen Huang’s view is of how AI progress is likely to go than the view of other AI CEOs.
For instance, he recently claimed that AGI will never replace domain expertise.
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…
Shakeel retweeted

Kevin Roose@kevinrooseOct 22
United States
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Tomorrow on @MachineGodsPod: the first interview with @balesni and @tomekkorbak, two of the three OpenAI safety researchers who were fired earlier this month.
Shakeel retweeted
we, as a society (the journalism industry), need to have a very frank and serious conversation about what constitutes an exclusive in the year 2026
Shakeel retweeted

Patricia Paskov@prpaskovOct 22
United States
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New York City! Join NYAIGS for a conversation on AI & public opinion with @GarrisonLovely (Author of Obsolete), @_perloj (NBC), and @vronirwin (Transformer). Thurs Oct 29. Co-hosted w/ @schmidtsciences.
Convo to be followed by Q+A, food/drinks, and plenty of time to yap. RSVP in link; space is limited.
Patricia Paskov@prpaskovAug 18United States
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Incredible response to this btw. The NYAIGS team is cooking up some events -- and maybe more -- in NYC to this end. Stay tuned 👀
Shakeel retweeted
This summer, we invited METR and Redwood Research to pilot an embedded evaluation of our internal monitoring system, providing deep access to our infrastructure over three weeks.
Their findings helped strengthen safeguards as we expanded the system and will help shape future research collaborations with METR and other third party evaluators.
METR@METR_EvalsOct 22United States
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Two employees from METR and Redwood Research worked on premises at OpenAI for three weeks this summer in an embedded assessment pilot. This team evaluated the systems OpenAI was using to monitor for misalignment from internal agents. A brief write-up of their work is now public.
Shakeel retweeted
ZERO mentioned of sovereignty on stage yesterday from Jensen Huang at GTC Berlin. The new pitch is *AI will make you rich*
Interesting to see how this lands with the Europeans…
Shakeel retweeted

Transformer@ReadTransformerOct 21
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The main strategy Claude came up with was to exploit existing frustrations about the cost of living to discourage people from voting with a message that “neither party cares, the system is broken, why bother.”
transformernews.ai/p/claude-…
Shakeel retweeted
No new donors to Leading the Future in the first two weeks of October, if you cared.
Shakeel retweeted
It looks like the threats worked
Marc Caputo@MarcACaputoOct 22United States
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Replying to @MarcACaputo
Headline changed on one of the stories and correction appended at the top..
politico.com/news/2026/10/16…
Shakeel retweeted

Nat Purser@NatPurserOct 21
United States
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every day they wake up and write 100 new auditing bills and then i clock into my shift at the auditing bill analysis factory























