Heavy Weather

I have a report full of security issues of a software I'm working on. Codex won't fix them because of Cyber guardrails Fable won't fix them because of Cyber guardrails Kimi K3 fixed them all. No restrictions, just gets the job done. This will end badly for OpenAI & Anthropic.

I expected more from Dean Ball, which is exactly why his post landed so badly. He built his reputation on being one of the more careful thinkers in AI policy. Then he compared open-source AI to communism, called a world of open-weight models a “dystopian hellscape,” and suggested the US government manufacture regulatory fear around Chinese models rather than compete with them. When the backlash came, his response was a half-apology about where he “erred” wrapped around a signal that he’d stop thinking out loud altogether, that the cold analytical posting was a habit from before OpenAI, and those days are done. Which is arguably worse than sulking. He had real options: defend the argument properly, or concede the analogy overreached and leave it there. Instead he chose retreat dressed as reflection. Two weeks into a job at OpenAI, his public statements carry that weight whether he wants them to or not. People didn’t pile on because he’s a nobody. They piled on because he’s Dean Ball and they’d calibrated to his best work. That’s the cost of a reputation for nuance: the drop reads louder. Same reason my criticism of OpenAI has never been “this company is hopeless.” I’ve used what these models can be, so I know when I’m looking at less.

I respect both of these people, a lot. But everything in life is a compromise. Having kids => more meaning, less time. Being an immigrant => more opportunity, fewer roots. etc etc. Why would a job be any different? There are legitimate reasons to join a frontier lab (money, reputation, talent, maybe mission). But it also means you lose your credibility as a neutral observer. Sure, you can still express your opinions. Some will still listen. But some won't, and it's absolutely fair. You don't get to crash out dismissing people as "toxic" when they're pointing out the conflict of interest.

Beginning July 20, Claude Fable 5 will be included in all Max and Team Premium plans, at 50% of limits. Pro and Team Standard users will continue to have access to Fable via usage credits, and will receive a one-time $100 credit. Demand for Fable has been challenging to predict, which is why we rolled it out to subscription plans in stages, extending access several times as we secured additional capacity.

Some observations on Kimi: 1. It's a very good model! I don't think its performance can be explained away by distillation or anything like that. In agentic coding sessions, it seems pretty much on par with the best public models of Q1 2026. In my fairly limited use, it also seemed very token hungry. It's not obvious to me that this model is actually that cheap to run. 2. I am personally surprised the Chinese state continues to allow the open sourcing of models this good, given potential risks. To be clear, I *myself* might be fine with models presenting this level of marginal risk being open weight, but I am surprised that China is fine with it. I suspect the reason they are is 75% explained by strategic blindness/lack of AGI-pilledness (the CCP is very Yann Lecun-y in its views of AI). The other 25% or so is their lack of compute for customer inference (making China's open-weight strategy an unintended byproduct of US export controls) and the normal Chinese strategy of aggressive exports. For the companies, as opposed to the government, the decision to open source is partially ideological and partially because they are behind, and they know that very few people would pay for sub-frontier models from China. 3. Open-weight models are inherently decelerationist, and I'm continually surprised to see the so-called "accelerationists" so excited about open-weight models. I suspect the reason they are is that they know open-weight models are effectively ungovernable, and they simply like the overall cloak of ungovernability open-weight models create over the whole of AI. It's not a bad strategy; it reminds me of James Scott's recounting of the hill people in "the art of not being governed." Still, in the end, open-weight models deter further AI capex. 4. One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes: rather than a market product, AI is a "public good" which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of "digital public infrastructure." This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape, but I've never met an open-weight models advocate who doesn't ultimately concede this is where things end. You'd be surprised how many 'accelerationists' lobbied me, while I was in government, to support an eleven or twelve-figure federally funded data center so that startups could train models at a subsidy and then give them away for free. There was no other way for AI to progress, they said. Perhaps this is the logical end state of things. Nonetheless, I find myself surprised to see supposed accelerationists excited about such an outcome. I think many of them just don't know what they're doing. Many accelerationists do not view the creation and serving of frontier models as a legitimate business. 5. I would guess that the Trump Administration will at some point realize that their best strategy here would be to create large amounts of regulatory risk around the use of open-weight Chinese models. You don't need to "ban open source" (one of the dumber motifs of AI policy discussion). You just need to direct every agency to issue soft law that creates FUD. "A Federal Reserve Advisory Bulletin found that there may be backdoors in Chinese AI models." It needn't be that well justified. You just create enough regulatory risk that every regulated enterprise backs off. You probably don't want to create so much regulatory risk that you scare off the hyperscalers from serving Chinese models; this will just drive startups to sketchier providers. There's a happy middle ground here. I'd assume they will do some version of this. 6. It's probably true that open-weight models of this capability make the world a bit more dangerous, but not so much more that you'll really notice. At some point the models will be capable enough that you will notice. "A nonliving, invisible, dangerous, and infinitely self-replicating agent escaped from a Chinese lab," you say? Color me shocked.

I’m afraid to tell you that it is effectively impossible to do the kind of writing I used to do on this website, not because anyone at OpenAI censors me but because of the sheer volume of hostility I get for sharing my analysis as a frontier lab employee. I enjoyed writing quick takes on this website for one basic reason: I could get rapid feedback on my own ideation process in real time. Post the early version of the take here, see the criticism; then refine, sharpen, and repeat. Unfortunately now that feature of this site is gone, because the feedback I get is now almost exclusively colored by resentment at the fact that I work at a frontier lab or other forms of hatred for my employer. The feedback signal is essentially useless now, so writing on here is not fruitful for me anymore. Literally everything I write now is responded to with “of course you said that because .” I am truly just writing what I think and would have written anyway, but everyone reads what I say in the shrieking tone of “this is what openai thinks!!!!” (to be clear, my posts are not what openai thinks). This is an unpleasant and more importantly unproductive pattern for me. I anticipate that the shape of this account will change significantly as a result. I do not currently know how. It will not become a LinkedIn feed. It will change in some other way. It will no longer be a real-time accounting of my own thinking as it develops, since this is precisely the thing that seems impossible to do now. That will have to shift to private channels.

PRESUPPOSE NO BAD ENDINGS are you agi pilled? do you think you'll live past the age of 300?