Nathan Labenz
Founder and former CEO of Waymark, an AI-powered video creation platform, who now focuses full time on tracking and explaining frontier AI development.
“Usually what I assume when I hear these sorts of statements is that it means now. … OpenAI just dropped some huge number of vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel. I think like 10,000 of them. … There is a lot of low-hanging fruit. And a lot of low-hanging fruit means acceleration.”
The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis · AI Research & Frontier Labs · November 2026
Context
The hosts were discussing new language in Anthropic's amended IPO filing saying it may imminently hit its own threshold for dramatically AI-accelerated progress. Labenz reads "imminent" literally and points to AI-found vulnerabilities as evidence of easy gains.
Transcript
…and what doesn't. Part one, imminent means now. Friday's show opened on two documents, the Meter report and an amendment to the Anthropic S1, the filing for its IPO. The new language, Anthropic says it may imminently meet its own threshold for dramatically accelerated progress attributable to AI.
…to have exposure and more control over this. And that's one way of getting this out there is getting the IPO done so that you give a larger part of society hooks into it and the ability to kind of express their desires to the market, et cetera, et cetera. To me, imminent is basically like a month.
…a little bit longer while telegraphing the main message. It's sort of a strange strategy to me, honestly. I really don't know why they do that. And so I would interpret this, you know, probably the same way from Anthropic. And I think you could say, I mean, it's really not hard to see how this would happen, right? I mean, we have so many results now with all these Galaxy brain zero-day exploits. OpenAI just dropped some huge number of vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel. I think like 10,000 of them. You know, so much for many eyes and many hands make light work, right? I mean, the idea, of course, with open source software over time is that because there's so many eyes on it, vulnerabilities will not last. They'll be spotted. They'll be patched. That was the whole promise and virtue of open source software. And it basically worked largely while the attackers were all human. It's almost…
I agree that I think imminent means now. I was also sandbagging with the few weeks to a month. What it means is that they have the tools available, that they can see a path to implementing RSI pretty much anytime that they want. And that they are some a lot of the pieces have been built, but they…
It's going to make everyone's lives better, asterisk, I think, you know, if we can keep everything on the rails. I do share that optimism, but so I just got back, you know, earlier this week, I went to Blutchley Park as we talked about a little bit yesterday. And I was just sharing with this…
Today's episode is brought to you by Anthropic, makers of Claude. To show off Claude's latest capabilities, I asked Claude to take the lead in making this ad. Given a short creative brief, Claude, using Opus 5.5, studied my past Claude ads, wrote this script, directed a clone of my voice, and…
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