
Founder, Women Who Tech. CoFounder @RadCampaign. GP @ W Fund - check writing VC into startups who are hellbent on making this world a better place to live.
United States
Joined December 2007
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The Deepfake Threat Facing Women Entrepreneurs - my latest article over on Forbes. forbes.com/sites/allysonkapi…
Allyson Kapin retweeted
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.
Allyson Kapin retweeted
The secret technique OpenAI used for its upcoming Astra model has sparked security concerns.
Allyson Kapin retweeted
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…
Market forces failed to provide seat belts in cars. Or advanced airbags.
Market forces failed to provide safe drugs.
Market forces failed to prevent acid rain.
That’s why the federal government regulates vehicles, drugs and power plants.
Why should AI be exempt? It shouldn’t.
Jensen Huang: “Safety is paramount. In a lot of ways, it’s job one. However, safety is an engineering problem... If we’re not confident about the safety of the products — like all companies, like you and I, all the companies here — if you build a product or a service and you’re not confident in its functionality, capability, or safety, then don’t release it.
That’s a very obvious thing to do. You pace yourself until you are confident you’re releasing something that the market would appreciate. The market forces are already there. We don’t need any new laws. We don’t need new regulations.”
Allyson Kapin 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…
“RECENT WEEKS? This should have been built in to the products from the start. It should be part of the DNA of @OpenAI @AnthropicAI, etc. I say this as someone who not only works in tech but invests in startups.
Allyson Kapin retweeted
Dario Amodei, Elon Musk and Sam Altman now agree that we must slow down the development of AI and “pace the frontier.”
That’s a start, but it’s not enough.
When you are racing towards a cliff, you don’t just ease up on the gas pedal. You hit the brakes.
When the future of humanity is at stake we need a PAUSE on advanced AI development and a ban on artificial superintelligence — an AI mind smarter than any human and capable of operating independently beyond our control.
At their upcoming AI summit, Trump and Xi must negotiate a treaty to pause AI and ban superintelligence before it is too late.
Allyson Kapin retweeted
We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new essay on why the AI industry should slow down, with a three-part plan for doing so.
Anthropic is unilaterally committing to the first of these steps. We’ll provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our systems, so that they can verify adherence to our safety measures, report on incidents, and assess models’ alignment during training.
You can read the full post here: darioamodei.com/post/we-must…
Allyson Kapin retweeted
I work at OpenAI. In my personal capacity, I also think we need to slow down.
I think about this every single day.
Allyson Kapin retweeted
Thank you, Gloria, for showing the world what it means to speak up for women’s equality. Thank you for fighting for our rights so that every woman and every person can live with dignity, freedom, and equality. #gloriasteinem
As AI becomes more sophisticated and easier to use to mimic real
people, businesses face new risks to their reputation and bottom line
— and women founders are especially exposed.
The vast majority of deepfakes target women, and Americans are worried about how much of a threat they pose, with 67% saying they are concerned about #AI being used to exploit women. For women business owners who already face a myriad of challenges in getting to the top, deepfakes can be weaponized for extortion or damage the reputation they have built with their audience.
Allyson Kapin retweeted
Cloudflare $NET CEO Matthew Prince:
“Nonhuman traffic has now passed human traffic online. If the current trends continue, we think in 5 years, nonhuman traffic will be as much as 1,000x as much as human traffic.”
Allyson Kapin retweeted
Forget "girl math" and "boy math." America's running on billionaire math.
They own yachts that have yachts. They leave Earth just to feel something. They buy art they don’t like and tout books they don’t read and play God with things they don’t comprehend. Above all, they live by their own set of rules.
There is a crude but undeniable logic to the rise of the American Oligarchy. As @timothypmurphy argued in a cover story for the magazine earlier this year, decades of deregulation, concentration, opportunism, and no small amount of generally-quite-legal corruption have allowed a small group of people (mostly in Silicon Valley) to control an ever-greater share of the economy and bend the political process toward their own ends. Money begets power begets money. It’s why, laid out on the page, the net worths of the world’s richest men currently look like they’re heading toward orbit.
Speaking of orbit, gravity doesn’t really exist in the same way when you’re an oligarch. If you built a car and it kept catching on fire, you would have to stop making cars. If your products drove people insane, they would be taken off the shelves. If you did a Hitler salute, people would probably just call it that. If you were responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, you would be ostracized from polite society, and maybe even CNBC. If you invented the Metaverse, people would stop asking you to invent more things. And if you didn’t pay taxes, dear reader, you might eventually go to prison.
It’s this alternative physics that gives the American oligarchy, at this particular moment, its uniquely off-putting funk—a sense that, beyond all the hockey-stick wealth charts, the centibillionaires of Silicon Valley can pursue whatever bored or perverted or maniacal project they want without fear of censure or even market correction. Time and money just don’t mean the same things they do to the rest of us. Laws become more like suggestions. Deadlines aren’t real. Or at least: They don’t have to be.
Welcome to Billionaire Math, a video where we make sense of the things that don’t make sense about the world’s ruling class.
Reporting by Tim Murphy
Video by Peter Berger
New national #poll shows Americans are fed up with platforms allowing #Al to be used to sexualize children & women.
➡️71% are concerned about Al-generated sexual deepfakes targeting children.
➡️67% are concerned about Al sexual images of women.
➡️73% are concerned about Al spreading election #disinformation ahead of the #2026midterms.
Full data here: aipolldata.org/
Excited to see that @bradybuzz is a finalist for the Anthem Awards (part of the @TheWebbyAwards family) for Gun Store Transparency Project . Vote for them for the Anthem Community Voice Award! Design and dev by @RadCampaign. 👏 celebrate.anthemawards.com/P… #AnthemAwards
















