Nikita Ostrovsky

JUNE 2028. The S&P is down 38% from its highs. Unemployment just printed 10.2%. Private credit is unraveling. Prime mortgages are cracking. AI didn’t disappoint. It exceeded every expectation. What happened?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ citriniresearch.com/p/2028gic

Fabulous quote on AI, from someone in the media who actually gets what we have just witnessed. “In the aftermath of GPT-5’s launch, it has become more difficult to take bombastic predictions about A.I. at face value, and the views of critics like Marcus seem increasingly moderate… Post-training improvements don’t seem to be strengthening models as thoroughly as scaling once did. A lot of utility can come from souping up your Camry, but no amount of tweaking will turn it into a Ferrari.” - Cal Newport, @NewYorker And yes, on a personal note, I am human, and it is downright thrilling to be vindicated after all these years, in the pages of The New Yorker. Truly a life moment.

New Anthropic Research: Disempowerment patterns in real-world AI assistant interactions. As AI becomes embedded in daily life, one risk is it can distort rather than inform—shaping beliefs, values, or actions in ways users may later regret. Read more: anthropic.com/research/disem…

We completed our recapitalization. The non-profit, the OpenAI Foundation, is now one of the best resourced philanthropies ever, with equity valued at ~$130B. It continues to control the OpenAI for-profit, which is now a public benefit corporation. openai.com/index/built-to…

There’s quite a lot more to the story than this. As everyone knows, we are actively defending against Elon in a lawsuit where he is trying to damage OpenAI for his own financial benefit. Encode, the organization for which @_NathanCalvin serves as the General Counsel, was one of the first third parties - whose funding has not been fully disclosed - that quickly filed in support of Musk. For a safety policy organization to side with Elon (?), that raises legitimate questions about what is going on. We wanted to know, and still are curious to know, whether Encode is working in collaboration with third parties who have a commercial competitive interest adverse to OpenAI. The stated narrative makes this sound like something it wasn’t. 1/ Subpoenas are to be expected, and it would be surprising if Encode did not get counsel on this from their lawyers. When a third party inserts themselves into active litigation, they are subject to standard legal processes. We issued a subpoena to ensure transparency around their involvement and funding. This is a routine step in litigation, not a separate legal action against Nathan or Encode. 2/ Subpoenas are part of how both sides seek information and gather facts for transparency; they don’t assign fault or carry penalties. Our goal was to understand the full context of why Encode chose to join Elon’s legal challenge. 3/ We’ve also been asking for some time who is funding their efforts connected to both this lawsuit and SB53, since they’ve publicly linked themselves to those initiatives. If they don’t have relevant information, they can simply respond that way. 4/ This is not about opposition to regulation or SB53. We did not oppose SB53; we provided comments for harmonization with other standards. We were also one of the first to sign the EU AIA COP, and still one of a few labs who test with the CAISI and UK AISI. We’ve also been clear with our own staff that they are free to express their takes on regulation, even if they disagree with the company, like during the 1047 debate (see thread below). 5/ We checked with our outside law firm about the deputy visit. The law firm used their standard vendor for service, and it’s quite common for deputies to also work as part-time process servers. We’ve been informed that they called Calvin ahead of time to arrange a time for him to accept service, so it should not have been a surprise. 6/ Our counsel interacted with Nathan’s counsel and by all accounts the exchanges were civil and professional on both sides. Nathan’s counsel denied they had materials in some cases and refused to respond in other cases. Discovery is now closed, and that’s that. For transparency, below is the excerpt from the subpoena that lists all of the requests for production. People can judge for themselves what this was really focused on. Most of our questions still haven’t been answered.