LessWrong posts by zvi

When I started this series, everyone was going crazy for coding agents.

Now a lot more people are going crazy for coding agents, as well they should given how much better coding agents keep getting, but also Everybody Knows they are good and is focusing on actually using them. With the slower pace of news here it's no longer clear that the waits associated with doing these updates on their own are worthwhile, so I’m going to fold these updates into the weekly again for now unless there's a new major development.

Table of Contents


Whoops, Sorry.

Huh, Upgrades.

Codex of Ultimate Computer Use.

Rookie Numbers.

I See What You Did There.

Just a Ride.

They Didn’t Want Our Jobs.

Skilling Up.

The Lighter Side.

Whoops, Sorry

Claude Code suffered in April from three distinct issues that have now been fixed.


Default reasoning was changed from high to medium to deal with latency, but users disliked this and blamed it on the model. It was introduced on March 4 and reverted on April 7.

A bug made it so that [...]
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Outline:
(00:38) Whoops, Sorry
(01:45) Huh, Upgrades
(04:13) Codex of Ultimate Computer Use
(08:05) Rookie Numbers
(09:12) I See What You Did There
(11:38) Just a Ride
(11:50) They Didnt Want Our Jobs
(18:30) Skilling Up
(22:08) The Lighter Side
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First published:

May 8th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BS27ZWW2qwDEq5anx/claude-code-codex-and-agentic-coding-8

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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The era of training frontier models and then releasing them whenever you wanted?

That was fun while it lasted. It looks likely to be over now. The White House wants to get an advance look and have the option to veto your release decisions, and it has used this veto on an expansion of access to Mythos.

We have additional clarity on what that might mean and it does not look good. Hassett explicitly used the FDA as a parallel, which is the actual worst option unless your goal is to strange or pause AI development in America, without a parallel action from China. That doesn’t seem like a great plan to me and Susie Wiles is out doing damage control. The part where we are talking to China to coordinate model access restrictions does seem better.

Anthropic continues its explosive growth, and it continues to strike compute deals. In addition to a long term expanded deal with Google, Anthropic is now leasing SpaceX's Colossus 1, which has let them expand usage limits immediately, and Elon Musk is now speaking positively about Anthropic, including its motivations.

This comes as we get testimony in the Musk [...]
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Outline:
(01:45) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(02:45) Language Models Dont Offer Mundane Utility
(05:09) Huh, Upgrades
(05:37) Grok 4.3 Exists But xAI Kind Of Doesnt
(07:02) Show Me The Compute
(13:23) On Your Marks
(14:05) Copyright Confrontation
(14:19) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(15:57) Fun With Media Generation
(16:36) A Young Ladys Illustrated Primer
(16:48) Cyber Lack of Security
(17:05) They Took Our Jobs
(17:39) The Art of the Jailbreak
(17:49) Introducing
(18:09) Musk v OpenAI
(21:14) Show Me the Money
(23:03) Peace In Our Time
(26:18) Quiet Speculations
(28:24) Quickly, Theres No Time
(30:35) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(34:04) People Really Hate AI
(34:53) Chip City
(35:05) The Week in Audio
(36:49) People Just Say Things
(40:22) People Just Publish Things
(41:05) Google Sells Out
(42:08) Greetings From Project Glasswing
(44:57) The Prior Restraint Era Begins
(56:42) Is This Even Legal?
(59:49) Pick Up The Phone
(01:03:27) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:04:05) People On The Internet Sometimes Lie
(01:07:14) Goblin Mode
(01:08:34) The Mask Comes Off
(01:16:51) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:20:00) Some Penalties May Apply
(01:22:28) Messages From Janusworld
(01:22:41) Good Advice
(01:23:42) The Lighter Side
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First published:

May 7th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rn3iKuDcE4SiSg4DW/ai-167-the-prior-restraint-era-begins

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What is Anthropic? How does it relate to Claude? What is OpenAI? What is ChatGPT? How does OpenAI relate to it? Is it a mere tool? Is a future of Tool AI a thing, and why do people keep claiming that it is, or that saying makes it so?

This post organizes and gives context for a bunch of discussions and messaging on Twitter that would otherwise be quickly buried and lost.

What Is Anthropic?

Here is one theory, and various people thinking about it.

Roon as always is using rhetorical flourish (e.g. note that Roon thinks it is obvious that parents worship their children, in this sense) but this perspective is definitely useful.

Such discussions by default disappear when they happen on Twitter, so here is a preservation of key parts of it.

roon (OpenAI): it is a literal and useful description of anthropic that it is an organization that loves and worships claude, is run in significant part by claude, and studies and builds claude. this phenomenon is also partially true of other labs like openai but currently exists in its most potent form there. i am not certain but I [...]
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Outline:
(00:35) What Is Anthropic?
(11:35) What Is This Supposed Tool AI?
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First published:

May 6th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6wbLXhkQAPcunrYnq/what-is-anthropic

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

The White House has ordered Anthropic not to expand access to Mythos, and is at least seriously considering a complete about-face of American Frontier AI policy into a full prior restraint regime, where anyone wishing to release a highly capable new model will have to ask for permission.

This would be the antithesis of all their previous rhetoric, and all their actions to systematically avoid laying a foundation to do this in an orderly and informed fashion.

But now, with the existence of Mythos, and a potential coming hackastrophe where cyber attackers will by default have the edge and we desperately need defenders to have a head start, it is not clear they feel they have a choice.

If implemented well, this could be the right thing.

By default, it won’t be implemented well.

Project Glasswing Cannot Expand

The government is now deciding which models can and cannot be made available on particular terms to particular parties. This is already happening.

Anthropic wanted to expand the number of companies with access to Mythos as part of Project Glasswing. The White House said no.

It is not clear this is any of [...]
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Outline:
(00:54) Project Glasswing Cannot Expand
(02:33) The Ad-Hoc Prior Restraint Era Begins
(09:44) Implementation Through CAISI
(12:49) What Should We Do About AI?
(14:16) The Chain of Command Nonsense Continues
(16:29) The Government Should Maintain Multiple AI Providers
(16:56) Hows It Going To End?
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First published:

May 5th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QX2ZCfkpWGqkyvStN/the-ai-ad-hoc-prior-restraint-era-begins

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

So many are under the strange belief that there is something terrible about not owning the house in which you live.

So we massively subsidize home ownership, and try to actively interfere with renting.

Except when we do rent control, which turns renting into a form of owning, and allows us to take real property and de facto give it to current renters.

A lot of this is pure attempts to punish and exclude the poor. If you can’t afford a downpayment, we don’t want you living here. Go away.

Some of it is the belief that when you rent, you are being ‘taken advantage of’ and that such a deal could not possibly be fair.

Some of it is that if you don’t own, you don’t have the incentive to drive up property values. Which means you won’t properly work to ‘improve’ your local area, especially that you won’t conspire to block housing.

The result of this is that if you’re not willing to commit to living in one place for years, or you can’t afford a down payment, you get punished, and punished hard.

Owning Versus Renting

The graph [...]
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Outline:
(01:08) Owning Versus Renting
(03:11) Build To Rent Is Good Actually
(08:16) Elizabeth Warren, Full Supervillain
(09:44) The Better Case Against Corporate Housing Ownership
(11:50) The ROAD Act Bans Building And Then Renting Houses
(14:17) Rental Covenants
(15:09) Extended Eviction Delay After Nonpayment Is Mostly Bad
(16:51) Los Angeles Renting
(19:30) Sufficiently Advanced Rent Control Is Indistinguishable From Ownership
(23:05) England Tries To Ban Renting
(24:36) Claude Rental Discounts
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First published:

May 4th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jW4TeNZhxBA9Fzdim/housing-roundup-15-the-war-against-renters

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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