Zvi Mowshowitz AI analyst and rationalist blogger who writes weekly roundups on language models, their uses and harms, and catastrophic AI risk, alongside posts on housing, ed...

“They still seem like pretty the most responsible lab, but that's rating on a curve. And I don't like rating on curve because reality doesn't have a curve. Reality just decides what happens.”

The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis · AI Research & Frontier Labs · October 2026

Asked how to understand Anthropic now, the AI writer says it has a much stronger safety culture than its rivals but one that is not adequate to the moment. He argues its policy team acts like a normal corporation a remarkably large share of the time.

The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis · 2026-10-24 Listen to the episode → More from Zvi Mowshowitz → More AI Research & Frontier Labs quotes →

Transcript

The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis Around 1:27:45 into the episode

Speaker 2

…needs to happen. All the alignment work still needs to happen. The mechanics stuff is great. We should absolutely do it. The biggest thing is, you know, we're going to have to meet the moment. And we're going to have to, at minimum, do something that counts as some form of facing the frontier.

Nathan Labenz

Nathan Calvin of ENCODE had publicly listed nine anthropic decisions he saw as putting the race ahead of safety. And Dario Amadei had replied at length. I asked Zvi Mowshowitz we should understand Anthropic now.

Speaker 2

…information, so many different bits of information that we should be worried about this. I've also, you know, recently from various employees that I talked to at various points gotten some rather alarming views about from my perspective on what it would take to solve alignment problems, what it would take to make the future go well. And all of that plays into being very highly uncomfortable. They still seem like pretty the most responsible lab, but that's rating on a curve. And I don't like rating on curve because reality doesn't have a curve. Reality just decides what happens.

Nathan Labenz

That's the week. Thanks for listening to the AI in the AM weekly highlights. The narration was my clone voice. Please tell us what worked and what didn't. See you in the morning. If you're finding value in the show, we'd appreciate it if you'd take a moment to share with friends, post online, write…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

More from The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

“The challenge will be that the things that we most want to know about biology, they're not represented in text. And they cannot be derived from first principles or from what we already know. So they're empirical facts that can only be derived by performing experiments.” — Alex Rives, The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

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