Bold anti-crypto thesis by @jason
My counter: maybe AI agents will become the biggest crypto users
A brutal year for Bitcoin is just getting started.
Give me three minutes to explain why you should dump it now.
Outflows from ETFs are signal and will continue.
We will test the 57k low again in the next 12 months.
Why?
Because there are far too many dynamic places to put your money that are creating MUCH more value.
Why put your resources into a dead network that offers nothing beyond a store of value?
What's the point of place the BTC be if Bitcoin's Ponzi-scheme nature has gone away!?!
The viral nature of bitcoin was it's power... if you didn't own you were MOCKED!
Now? Completely reasonable, heck, SMARTER, to ignore bitcoin and place other bets!
No one is trying to convince people to buy Bitcoin anymore... the memes and NFTs are gone.
No one is saying $ BTC can change the world, because it won't — and BECAUSE AI HAS!
Just sell and shift from Bitcoin to Super Intelligence because one provides little to no value, and the other provides unlimited upside for humanity.
This should be obvious to everyone right now.
Bitcoin will never break its all-time high again.
Brought to you by the Australian Tourist Commission
Today, I learned that Australia is a land mass that broke off of Antarctica.
As a result, it didn't have robust fauna or earthworm ecosystems, so it doesn't have millions of years of soil compaction.
That's why all of it's lifeforms are venomous. 🧵
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Australia has ~1,000 native earthworm species despite splitting from Antarctica. Venom in snakes (not "all" lifeforms) stems from elapid radiation in isolation, not soil/earthworms (australian.museum/learn/animals/… discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/w…).
australian.museum/learn/animals/…
discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/w…
diligentium retweeted
I have an idea for a new TV show. It’s about an English professor that travels through time correcting everyone’s grammar.
It’s called, "Dr. Whom".
Actually can’t find a way to delete a Grok Bot at all. Plz help @poteto 🙏
“a discrete partnership with the CIA”
What a sales pitch!
The last demo is striking
We believe voice is the most natural way to interact with intelligence, so we created Dessa, the most authentic full-duplex speech model ever built. Talking with it feels like talking with a person…full of emotion, nuance, pauses, and a natural cadence.
block.xyz/dessa
Russian multiverse
站在今天看,俄罗斯这波操作,属于手握着一把天胡的牌打得稀烂。
如果不出兵乌克兰,今天全球AI的牌桌上,除了中美,大概率真得坐着一个俄罗斯。
搞AI、跑大模型,底层逻辑就是“吃电、散热、堆机器”。这两年全世界的数据中心老板都在为电费和机房降温发愁。俄罗斯属于老天爷喂到饭:西伯利亚开窗就是纯天然顶级空调;境内水电、核电、天然气很便宜,当年挖矿的都选西伯利亚。
另外俄罗斯人的数学和算法也强,各大国际编程竞赛,Kaggle机器学习竞赛常被俄国人屠榜。全世界除了中美,俄罗斯也搞出了自己完整的互联网生态:搜东西有Yandex,社交有VK,还有Telegram。现在在美股被炒上天的算力黑马Nebius,核心班底就是原先Yandex那帮俄罗斯人。
如果疫情后俄罗斯出地皮、出冷气、出便宜电,再拉着中国这种基建狂魔帮忙拉高压电网、建厂房、铺光纤,欧美资本开服务器工厂。俄国人完全可以成为欧亚大陆最大的“超级算力工厂”,中美神仙打架,它在中间两头收过路费。
结果呢?普京一拍大腿:不行,我得去抢那几块地。
普京的脑子,彻底停留在了19世纪沙皇俄国那种“开疆拓土”的旧梦里。什么有没有出海口啊,有没有所谓的军事缓冲带啊,就算抢方法也多的是,这可这是21世纪啊!现在的世界霸权争夺,抢的是半导体供应链,抢的是先进算法,抢的是高精尖人才。你去顿巴斯抢了几片烂泥地、几座废弃钢铁厂,代价却是把整个国家的未来都押了上去。
枪声一响,一切全崩了。稍微有点本事的程序员、算法工程师,连夜跑路。Yandex核心技术团队,宁可巨亏,惨烈的断尾求生、割裂母国,也要跑到欧洲重组成Nebius。普京把最懂未来的人,全逼成了难民和海外创业者。
在人工智能技术爆发的黎明前夜,全世界都在疯狂狂飙算力、抢占新工业革命的门票;而俄罗斯的老大,却带着几十万人,在泥潭里打着一百年前的一战式堑壕战。
再说一遍,普京不行,国内崇拜普京的那帮人也不行
Such refreshingly human, well-written prose
Thank you for this, @_NathanCalvin. I appreciate and am a fan of the investigative work you’ve done on behalf of AI safety and believe your comments are coming from a constructive, honest place, and that it benefits the public to have people whose job is to scrutinize the actions of frontier AI companies. I think something would be wrong if companies of the size of Anthropic didn’t get harshly criticized basically every day; strong antibodies against corporate power are a healthy feature of a free society, and especially so when issues of the gravity of the one we’re facing are at play. I also do agree that some of the examples you cite were mistakes by Anthropic.
That said, I disagree with the thrust of your post. At the core, a good fraction of the things you criticize are consequences of Anthropic’s basic theory of change that we have held for many years. Our strategy has always been what I’ve called the “race to the top” — by showing how it’s possible to build the technology responsibly, we can raise the bar for the entire industry. The forces that drive the race to the top are hugely more effective if the company practicing them is at the frontier; that’s one lesson I’ve learned repeatedly. And looking at that strategy as a whole, I’m proud of our track record and stand by it.
I believe that if we take a list of things that Anthropic did in the past year that were pro-safety and commercially costly to us, they far outweigh the list you’ve made, while at the same time I also disagree with some of the items on your list. Here are some things Anthropic has done, in the same period you’ve cited (the last year), which were very costly to us commercially while having strong safety benefits:
1. We played a key role in SB53 (and other state laws), at a time when doing so was politically perilous to the company and AI regulation was very unpopular. We in fact argued for a stronger version of SB53 than was ultimately passed; there were a lot of stakeholders and we were not the limiting factor in the strength of the bill that was passed.
2. We have very strong biological safeguards on our models, because we’ve seen concerning results in bio uplift trials and even seen and blocked potential attempts to misuse our models for bioweapons (as seen in our threat intelligence report from a few weeks ago). This is a very serious threat that we want to have zero tolerance for. But having very low false negatives means having significant false positives (despite months of effort on our part to improve the classifiers), enough so that biologists joke about how restrictive our classifiers are, and competitors sometimes sell against us by touting their more permissive bio capabilities. This has been very painful to us in an area where we care a lot about supporting an ecosystem of Claude users (biomedical science; and it is particularly frustrating to me as a biologist), but it’s the right thing to do and we intend to keep doing it.
3. Similarly, we first had Mythos-class models in February but didn’t make them generally available until June (when we had stronger cyber safeguards in place). We only offered them to a limited set of partners in order to focus on cyberdefense. It would have been much more economically rational to simply release the model to everyone. We likely sacrificed a significant chunk of a several-month model lead. But because of this, many companies secured their cyber infrastructure before the deluge of widely available cyber-capable models. Of course there are ways it could have gone better or been run better, but this was what we were aiming to do.
4. I advocated forcefully and publicly, in my essay Policy on the AI Exponential in June of this year, for the government to have the power to block model releases. Back then this was still outside or maybe on the edge of the Overton window, though I understand the window has moved since then. We were attacked intensely for this.
5. I don’t want to re-ignite conflict, but the events of February 2026 are a strong example. It is clear that our public stance could have seriously damaged the company’s future.
6. We’ve continued to advocate for export controls on chips and chipmaking equipment to China, because we think it allows democracies to negotiate from a position of strength on AI safety agreements. We’ve done this despite problems it’s created for us with industry partners who hold very different views and on whom we are very dependent.
7. As far as I’m aware we were the first, and still only, frontier company to restrict the sale of AI services to PRC-controlled companies, including those operating through third countries (otherwise a major loophole). We’ve therefore forfeited significant short-term business to prevent fueling AI platforms and applications that would help the CCP’s military and intelligence services. We are also cracking down on distillation; generally, distillation is not a major threat to us commercially, but like chip exports it has concerning national security and safety implications, so we expend significant energy and company resources to address it.
8. As you mentioned, we’ve put out a lot of reports, announcements, long model cards, public advocacy, etc, all trying to inform the public about the risks of AI. These involve a level of detail and effort that would be implausible for a purely profit-maximizing company.
9. Just this week, we announced we were putting 5% (and possibly more over time) of the company into a public benefit fund.
All of these decisions came with very substantial costs to us. To be fair, those that involved holding back or restricting access to frontier capabilities also had a broader cost — for example, the public might otherwise have benefitted from faster progress in biology, so I am not saying that our decisions were without tradeoffs — but they were not driven by profit-seeking.
For each decision, you can come up with ulterior motives that could have driven us — I think it is a general truth that any decision, on any topic, can always be portrayed as a nefarious scheme. But most of those end up being pretty farfetched or don’t fully make sense if you actually examine them closely. For example, it is deeply implausible that it would be a shrewd business move to block a large swath of research biology in order to do the work ourselves and compete with our customers; we expect the benefit to the ecosystem to greatly exceed the work Anthropic does itself, and for the two to complement each other. It is not in Anthropic’s interest to be perceived as unfriendly to biologists. Our Life Sciences Verification Program, which gives vetted biology professionals access to our models, also refutes this idea.
Of course, a different set of people will see this and make a different criticism: that Anthropic shouldn't be making decisions about who gets access to what in the first place. I agree, in the sense that ideally the government would be making these decisions, and that’s why we advocate for regulation. But for now we are forced to make them, and enabling bioterrorism isn’t a better option.
I think that even if I conceded every item in your list, I would happily hold up mine next to it; I don’t think it’s a close call. That is of course partly subjective and different things are important to different people. Maybe one way you could object is that several of the items above relate to AI misuse and not loss-of-control; if you think the latter is much more important than the former, that might change your calculus. But this is not Anthropic’s view — we view both as serious issues. You can also disagree with our decisions, as many have, but they are consistent.
But I also disagree with at least some of your list. Several items don’t represent a deviation from Anthropic’s strategy or values at all, once we postulate the “race to the top” strategy that requires being a frontier AI company. Your items 1-4 are all simply examples of what it means to compete at the frontier, and we stand by them, both in the sense that they are transparently ordinary things to do as part of that strategy, and that we stand by the strategy as a whole.
To be fair, there are important questions worth confronting (and that we are confronting) about what to do when the AI-driven acceleration gets fast enough that it is hard for safety to keep up. We are nearing that point and that’s what’s driving some of our thinking about “pacing.” But 1-4 are actions taken before that point and should be perfectly expected based on Anthropic’s strategy as a company. Of course it is possible to disagree with that strategy, but that’s a more fundamental disagreement that you could have had any time over the last few years.
I agree we could have handled your items 7, 8, and 9 better. All fall into the category of “rhetoric or policy communication that wasn’t carefully written or resulting from fast-changing circumstances not propagating from one team to another fast enough.” This kind of thing happens a lot in large organizations (Anthropic is over 5,000 people), and doesn’t even necessarily represent a failure or mistake of any single person. I am of course the CEO, and I take responsibility. The volume of communication from Anthropic is enormous and if these are the worst examples, I think we’re frankly doing pretty well, though I will continue to work hard to make sure we do even better.
Your 5th item (the change to our RSP) is the most substantive item, and people can debate this, but I think that the old, more rigid RSP created a lot of situations where we were technically required to do something that required a lot of effort but in retrospect wasn’t very important for safety, as well as not covering some of the most important things. Our current RSP’s focus on transparency brought things like risk reports and roadmaps, and its emphasis on independent external review laid the groundwork for even more intensive embedded evaluation, all of which I think have been valuable in driving a race to the top. In the original announcement in September 2023, we described the RSP as an “early iteration that we [would] build on” and said that “rapid iteration…will almost certainly be necessary.” I understand that changing plans is always a move that creates justifiable scrutiny — I just don’t think we ever represented that we wouldn’t do so.
Relating to your 6th item (having an FCF in addition to our RSP), I know our intent is to meet the letter and spirit of our regulatory obligations (via our FCF) while also remaining able to experiment with more novel approaches to risk management that go beyond what the law currently requires (via our RSP). I promise to look into it further, as it’s a complex issue and it is possible we are not weighing the considerations in the right way.
Overall, although Anthropic has made plenty of mistakes as an organization — including some of the items on your list — I feel that we have repeatedly taken serious and substantive actions counter to our bottom line and that there is a significant negativity bias distorting assessments like the one you are making above. We’ll always try to do better but, again, I am extremely proud of our track record and stand by it. I will have more to say soon about how we are going to further live our values in this moment of rapid change.



















