Editor + founder @ReadTransformer, covering AI policy. Prev: @TheEconomist, @Protocol, @finimize

London
Joined October 2009
we, as a society (the journalism industry), need to have a very frank and serious conversation about what constitutes an exclusive in the year 2026
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Shakeel retweeted
New York City! Join NYAIGS for a conversation on AI & public opinion with @GarrisonLovely (Author of Obsolete), @_perloj (NBC), and @vronirwin (Transformer). Thurs Oct 29. Co-hosted w/ @schmidtsciences. Convo to be followed by Q+A, food/drinks, and plenty of time to yap. RSVP in link; space is limited.
Incredible response to this btw. The NYAIGS team is cooking up some events -- and maybe more -- in NYC to this end. Stay tuned 👀
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Shakeel retweeted
OpenAI
@OpenAI7h
This summer, we invited METR and Redwood Research to pilot an embedded evaluation of our internal monitoring system, providing deep access to our infrastructure over three weeks. Their findings helped strengthen safeguards as we expanded the system and will help shape future research collaborations with METR and other third party evaluators.
Two employees from METR and Redwood Research worked on premises at OpenAI for three weeks this summer in an embedded assessment pilot. This team evaluated the systems OpenAI was using to monitor for misalignment from internal agents. A brief write-up of their work is now public.
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ZERO mentioned of sovereignty on stage yesterday from Jensen Huang at GTC Berlin. The new pitch is *AI will make you rich* Interesting to see how this lands with the Europeans…
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The main strategy Claude came up with was to exploit existing frustrations about the cost of living to discourage people from voting with a message that “neither party cares, the system is broken, why bother.” transformernews.ai/p/claude-…
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No new donors to Leading the Future in the first two weeks of October, if you cared.
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It looks like the threats worked
Replying to @MarcACaputo
Headline changed on one of the stories and correction appended at the top.. politico.com/news/2026/10/16…
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every day they wake up and write 100 new auditing bills and then i clock into my shift at the auditing bill analysis factory
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6-word horror story I experienced at the office today: "Ajeya Cotra seminar cancelled, work emergency"
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so i've been putting together a list of things i’d need at home to survive a few days without power, internet, or basic services. you know, in case of earthquakes, digital or otherwise. claude’s plan includes a hamster. i don’t have a hamster. who is he. where is he sheltering
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Shakeel retweeted
One fun way for journalists to use AI: Ask the strongest model to which you have access to do a deep dive on your work and find where it was cited or otherwise had an impact. You'll find things you had absolutely no idea about
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🌹🌹DSA civil war over AI, @jdcapelouto reports semafor.com/article/10/21/20…
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New US government guidance from CAISSI + NSA + CISA: The US government defines an "SI control incident" where an agent takes significant uninstructed actions that break operator policies, controls, or oversight. Near-misses are in scope too. Companies are then asked to: - have technical controls, including rapid kill and containment mechanisms and red-teaming. - Bring in independent external auditors to verify that control and monitoring systems work. - Write a structured risk assessment before training runs, evals, or deployments, and proceed only if senior leadership is satisfied with the risk, informed by external evaluators where appropriate. - Monitor every layer with both programmatic and SI-based monitors, covering trajectories, reasoning, and outputs. - Make sure agents can't touch the monitors or logs - Use monitor models from different model families. - In the event of an incident, preserve weights, intermediate checkpoints, environments, and rejected tool calls. - Keep tamper-resistant logs with reliable timestamps, including reasoning traces. - If you use models to help investigate, cross-check with humans and with models outside the incident model's family. - Shutdown policies calibrated to SI model capability and incident severity. - Depending on severity, pause training, evals, or deployment of similar agents until controls are re-verified. - When restarting, validate every containment layer and replay the incident trajectory to prove the new controls would catch it. - Document the decision to resume and the residual risk accepted. - Write an after-action report. - Notify anyone compromised, including intermediate victims, and share timelines and transcripts. - Report cyber incidents and near-misses to CISA. Share SI-specific incident and near-miss information with CAISSI and NSA SISC. - Give third parties enough access and documentation for independent review.
NSA Cyber
@NSACyberOct 20
NSA joined @NIST and @CISACyber in releasing guidelines for managing SI control incidents. Organizations utilizing SI are encouraged to adopt these practices. Read the joint report: media.defense.gov/2026/Oct/1…
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Our new show with NPR, Machine Gods, is finally here! Episode 1 is live wherever you get your podcasts. The official podcast of the singularity starts today! youtube.com/watch?v=OKDai2_a…
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Big new additions to the @csaiporg team
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Job news: I’m joining @nytimes to cover AI & Anthropic, based again in SF. I have a feeling the job won’t be slow. It's a big responsibility. I'm grateful for a decade @theinformation, which has given me the rare opportunity to do original journalism surrounded by good people.
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Shakeel retweeted
Andrew Curran
@AndrewCurran_Oct 21
OpenAI says the PHP security flaw (found with GPT-5.6 Sol) is the tip of the iceberg, and they have several more discoveries to announce.
OpenAI
@OpenAIOct 21
OpenAI models helped researchers—operating as part of our Patch the Planet initiative—discover critical security flaws in PHP, an open-source programming language used to run an estimated 70% of websites. Over the past two months, we led a coalition of maintainers, researchers, and security providers to prepare fixes and protections ahead of disclosure. This duration was necessary because the fix was quite intricate and required a major change to the PHP engine. Every site using PHP can now safely upgrade their version to stay secure, in addition to applying mitigations from various security vendors. Due to the severity of these flaws and PHP’s widespread use, we consider this bug to be one of the most impactful vulnerabilities in recent memory. It also marks a new phase, where AI can find security bugs with internet-scale impact. This is an example of the Defender’s Window in action: to our knowledge, frontier AI was able to find this vulnerability ahead of attackers, giving defenders time to prepare. openai.com/index/coordinated…
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Wiz Research wasn't the first one to discover the exploit. An independent researcher first discovered it: x.com/calif_io/statu…
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Shakeel retweeted
OpenAI
@OpenAIOct 21
OpenAI models helped researchers—operating as part of our Patch the Planet initiative—discover critical security flaws in PHP, an open-source programming language used to run an estimated 70% of websites. Over the past two months, we led a coalition of maintainers, researchers, and security providers to prepare fixes and protections ahead of disclosure. This duration was necessary because the fix was quite intricate and required a major change to the PHP engine. Every site using PHP can now safely upgrade their version to stay secure, in addition to applying mitigations from various security vendors. Due to the severity of these flaws and PHP’s widespread use, we consider this bug to be one of the most impactful vulnerabilities in recent memory. It also marks a new phase, where AI can find security bugs with internet-scale impact. This is an example of the Defender’s Window in action: to our knowledge, frontier AI was able to find this vulnerability ahead of attackers, giving defenders time to prepare. openai.com/index/coordinated…
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Wiz Research wasn't the first one to discover the exploit. An independent researcher first discovered it: x.com/calif_io/statu…
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The whole China leads on diffusion thing maybe made more sense when all we had to go on was policy focus and stated aims but shouldn’t we just be assessing this now on AI revenue, where the US is just clearly crushing China on diffusion
The US leads in compute. China leads in adoption. The AI race continues at a record pace. Great to join Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt at Oxford's OxGenAI conference.
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