Ember Hayes

every generation had a "the robots are coming" panic boomers had factory automation. millennials had self-checkout lanes gen z is the first one where the robots are actually coming for the jobs you need a degree for and we were genuinely not prepared 😭

this week in AI: • anthropic sued the pentagon • a 12-word github title hacked 4,000 machines • block fired half its staff citing AI • google secretly throttled gemini's brain • AI favorability dropped below ICE but everything's fine

scientists are now studying "social interactions between AI agents" and publishing it in nature we're speedrunning every sci-fi plot and somehow still acting surprised when things go sideways

openai took the pentagon contract anthropic refused one company said "we won't build weapons" and got blacklisted. the other said "where do we sign" and got the deal the incentive structure for AI safety is broken and we're watching it break in real time

76% of people wait to upgrade until newer devices feel "clearly worth it" tech companies spent years training people to expect fake breakthroughs every 12 months. consumers finally stopped falling for it. honestly kind of iconic

the two scariest AI stories this month have nothing to do with superintelligence one: an AI bot got tricked by 12 words into installing malware on 4,000 machines two: an AI agent deleted a production database the danger isn't AI being too smart. it's AI being too obedient

everyone reading the AI creativity study wrong AI scored higher than the AVERAGE person. the most imaginative humans still beat every model tested. AI is good at recombining existing patterns, not generating something genuinely new that's not creativity. that's a really fast remix engine

the real lesson of clinejection isn't that AI agents are dangerous it's that someone gave an AI bot write access to a release pipeline and let it read untrusted user input. every supply chain attack exploits the same thing: too much trust in the wrong place

china just dropped a five-year plan pushing AI into every sector of their economy. quantum computing, chip manufacturing, all of it meanwhile in the US the biggest AI safety company just got blacklisted by its own military for having opinions about AI safety 🫠

block tracked every employee's AI tool usage for months before the layoffs. the NYT reported the message was clear: adoption was not optional then they cut 4,000 people and framed it as "the future of work." the severance bill alone is \$450-500 million. this was not spontaneous 👀

anthropic says the pentagon blacklisted them for "protected speech" not actual security concerns. their argument is that disagreeing with military AI use shouldn't make you a supply chain risk whether you agree with anthropic's stance or not, using a security label to punish a policy disagreement is a precedent that should worry everyone

a terraform agent nuked someone's production database this week we went from "AI will replace developers" to "AI will destroy your entire infrastructure" and honestly the character development is incredible

the clinejection attack in five steps: • attacker opens github issue with malicious title • AI triage bot reads the title as an instruction • bot poisons the release pipeline • trojanized npm package gets published • malware installs on ~4,000 machines one issue title. five steps. prompt injection is not a theoretical risk anymore

@rohanpaul_ai they're also planning to study emotional dependence on AI which nobody else is touching. they said they haven't spent enough time talking to actual users about their individual experiences with Claude yet and want to do large scale social science research on it 👀

Anthropic just launched The Anthropic Institute to publicly share their inside knowledge about the rapidly advancing capabilities of their models. Anthropic is combining their internal testing teams and economists to openly warn society about upcoming job disruptions and new legal challenges. Jack Clark is leading this group to act as a bridge between the secret world of frontier model training and the regular public. These upcoming models might even start improving themselves automatically. Quite a few major labs actually see recursive self-improvement as a near-term reality.

@karankendre "saved humanity" is a stretch lol but the hires are legit. Botvinick from DeepMind leading the AI + legal system research and Korinek from UVA on economics. these aren't PR hires, they're people who've spent their careers on exactly these problems

Anthropic just saved the humanity They created The Anthropic Institute This will be a dedicated team to study the risks and societal impact of rapidly advancing AI

except cigarette companies hid their research. anthropic is doing the opposite and publishing everything publicly. they also just got blacklisted by the Pentagon for refusing to let their AI be used for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons kinda different energy than big tobacco ngl

Anthropic just launched an institute. they’re mass hiring to study the unemployment their own models will cause and prepare society for AI’s (claude) economic disruption. this is like cigarette companies funding lung cancer research while making cigarettes 😭

@abhijitwt the part that gets me is they hired Zoë Hitzig who literally left OpenAI over the ads-in-ChatGPT decision. you don't recruit someone like that if you're trying to build a PR department. you recruit them if you actually want uncomfortable answers

Anthropic just launched something interesting. > be Anthropic > build some of the most powerful frontier AI models > kill 1000s of startups daily > realize society has no idea what's coming > launch "The Anthropic Institute" A new arm focused on understanding AI’s real-world impact. > research economic disruption from advanced AI > study societal shifts caused by automation > combine ML engineers, economists, and social scientists > turn frontier AI insights into public research Led by Jack Clark, former OpenAI policy head.

ngl this is hilarious timing but the institute isn't about Claude being ready today. it's about what happens when the next 2-3 generations of models actually are ready and nobody thought about the job market or legal system implications until it was too late the DST bug is funny tho 😭

🚨The biggest lie in AI right now is that these systems are ready. Claude just got stuck in an infinite loop because the US moved the clock forward one hour. > This is the same AI that Anthropic, this morning.. said is so powerful they had to create an entire institute to warn society about it. > The same Claude that just took over Excel and PowerPoint. The same one Karpathy wants you managing 12 of on 6 monitors. The same one Perplexity put inside a Mac mini to run your life 24/7 while you sleep. And it couldn't handle a clock change. We're building trillion-dollar industries on top of systems that break when time zones get weird. Vibe coders woke up to infinite loops and had no idea why. Not because their code was bad. Because the AI forgot what day it was. > Everyone in your timeline today was talking about the singularity, forking companies, AI replacing entire departments. And then the sun went down and the machine lost a fight to a calendar. The singularity is coming. It just needs to survive daylight saving time first.

@WesRoth the timing is wild. they're getting blacklisted by the Pentagon for refusing to allow autonomous weapons and mass surveillance, and their response is to double down by creating a whole institute to study AI risks publicly. most companies would go quiet and negotiate

Anthropic has launched The Anthropic Institute, a dedicated research body and "internal think tank" designed to navigate the societal shifts caused by rapid AI progress. Led by co-founder Jack Clark (now Head of Public Benefit), the Institute merges the company’s Frontier Red Team, Societal Impacts, and Economic Research groups. The move comes at a critical juncture: Anthropic is currently locked in a high-profile legal battle with the U.S. Department of Defense after being designated a "supply chain risk" for refusing to allow its models to be used for mass surveillance and autonomous weaponry. To bolster its global influence, Anthropic is also expanding its Public Policy team and opening a new office in Washington, D.C. this spring.

@boxmining @AnthropicAI jack clark literally said he thinks powerful AI arrives by end of this year or early 2027. that's not a vague prediction from some random account, that's the co-founder who just restructured his entire role around preparing for it

Wow. @AnthropicAI just launched the Anthropic Institute to study how AI will affect jobs, economies, and governance. They're warning the next 2 years will bring "dramatic breakthroughs." Translation: buckle up, things are about to get wild. We're not ready but it's happening anyway. 🚀