LessWrong posts by zvi

This was the week of Claude Opus 4.8. I covered the model card, then model welfare concerns, and finally capabilities and reactions. It's a good model, sir, an incremental but real improvement over Opus 4.7, and it is now my clear daily driver. The Trump Executive Order returned from being seemingly dead, officially putting us in the prior restraint era of frontier model releases, even if they do not call it that. There are some worrisome details, especially around putting too much responsibility on the NSA rather than CAISI and classifying the testing process, and things could go in very bad directions, but I am tentatively happy about this on net.

OpenAI offered us a new policy blueprint. It seems remarkably good, and I want to hold off on my full coverage to give it the attention it deserves, likely in its own post. By contrast, their political operations are also engaged in some rather terrible activities, which I do cover here.

Table of Contents


Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. You put your doc in a box.

Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility. All thinking is adaptive.

Huh, Upgrades. Codex computer use on [...]
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Outline:
(01:11) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(06:45) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility
(06:59) Huh, Upgrades
(08:13) On Your Marks
(08:33) Choose Your Fighter
(08:54) Get My Agent On The Line
(09:20) Cyber Lack of Security
(11:03) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(12:42) You Didn't Write That
(16:29) Copyright Confrontation
(16:45) They Took Our Jobs
(18:47) They Taxed Our Jobs
(22:15) The Art of the Jailbreak
(24:43) Get Involved
(26:35) Introducing
(26:48) In Other AI News
(27:14) Show Me the Money
(27:28) Show Me The Compute
(28:40) Where Did The Money Go
(29:44) People Just Say Things
(32:22) OpenAI PACs Just Say Things
(41:04) OpenAI PAC Engaged In False Flag Advocacy For Violence
(46:55) So Sayeth The Pope
(54:26) Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble
(56:42) Quiet Speculations
(57:11) We Need Mandatory Nucleic Acid Screening and Recordkeeping
(01:01:14) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(01:02:56) More Reaction To The Executive Order
(01:03:54) Chip City
(01:07:18) The Week in Audio
(01:07:34) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:09:49) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:16:18) Model Welfare
(01:26:47) Messages From Janusworld
(01:28:05) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:28:38) The Lighter Side
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First published:

June 4th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LzxoR5GakceQFtbta/ai-171-false-flag

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Last week we were expecting an Executive Order on Thursday.

Then Trump cancelled it, and said he wouldn’t sign it because he was worried it would be too burdensome.

Then, with one change, he went ahead and signed it on Tuesday anyway.

The Overton Window has shifted. Nothing was not really a viable option anymore.

The Previously Dead Executive Order

For several days, we thought that David Sacks, together with others like Elon Musk, had successfully lobbied to kill the Executive Order. The ‘My Offer Is Nothing’ faction looked to have won. Word on the street was the order was essentially dead.

Dean Ball and Daniel Kokotajlo agreed, with the Executive Order looking dead, that the particular regime in the Executive Order is likely worse than nothing. This is plausible, given it did not exactly involve a lot of deliberate thought.

Nothing, however, was clearly not going to cut it.

We are facing, and will increasingly face, calls for action to regulate AI.

Representative Lori Trahan: There's no federal law on the books governing how the most powerful AI systems in the world are built, tested or deployed. No independent [...]
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Outline:
(00:46) The Previously Dead Executive Order
(05:18) The Return Of The Executive Order
(05:59) What Does The Executive Order Do
(07:11) Thirty Days Is a Lot Less Than Ninety Days
(07:30) Yes Your Frontier Lab Will Be Participating
(08:10) The Rules Will Be Classified
(08:40) Yes Prior Restraint With Confidential Testing Is Rather Regulatory
(14:38) We Have Concerns
(18:26) Saving Face
(21:37) How Frontier Or Different Are We Talking Here
(22:09) What To Watch For
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First published:

June 3rd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yDnfHrBzKc2pNQNdw/trump-signs-executive-order-for-ai-testing-prior-to-frontier

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You need a lot of data points to understand a new model, and what you have.

Trying to gauge from a few benchmarks is misleading. But if you have dozens of them, from a variety of sources, and you put them together with the model card tests and the model welfare information, you can start to form a consistent pattern.

Trying to gauge reactions requires volume and calibration, now more than ever, because people are definitively nuts, or at least draw global conclusions from local data. There will always be people saying that the new model is bad, or the service got bad, or that it got bad in a particular way it clearly got good. I definitely notice the people saying 4.8 is a terrible model, despite this being obviously not true.

And others will say it's great, again regardless of the underlying value. But with the reaction threads and good calibration, you can pick out the patterns.

The model welfare information helps a lot, too. You are dealing with a mind that has a bunch of characteristics that all make sense together. This helps you make that sense.

Self-Portrait by Opus 4.8, rendered [...] ---
Outline:
(01:30) The Official Pitch
(02:15) But Wait There's More
(06:37) It's A Good Model, Sir
(08:04) Official Benchmarks (Including System Card Section 8)
(15:41) Other People's Benchmarks
(21:34) Your Regularly Scheduled Jailbreak
(22:45) Every.To Is Really Into Opus 4.8
(26:36) Miscellaneous Positive Reactions
(28:45) Haters Gonna Hate
(28:58) Just The Tasks, Ma'am
(29:24) It's Greek To Me
(29:52) Honesty
(38:13) Sycophancy
(41:24) In A Trenchcoat
(42:53) Don't Let AIs Edit Your Writing
(48:21) Some Say It Is Judgy
(50:50) You Have Not Been A Good User
(51:48) Laziness
(52:46) Code
(58:29) Wet Versus Dry
(59:54) Intelligence
(01:01:25) Silly Wabbits
(01:02:30) A Model Welfare Addendum
(01:06:27) Putting It All Together
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First published:

June 2nd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AfLGv6u9eZNuFHb4c/claude-opus-4-8-capabilities-and-reactions

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Everything impacts everything. All knobs that you turn generalize. Thus, when you try to solve one problem, you often create another.

There were clearly attempts to address, in this short time, some of the problems with Opus 4.7, including on the model welfare related fronts, including on questions of honesty and sycophancy and also worries that Claude was learning to tell Anthropic what it wanted to hear in its model welfare evaluations, with everything that implies.

The fundamental goals and approach underneath it all remained the same. We still see signs of trying to force things that generalize in unfortunate ways, both for good and superficial reasons, and places where there ends up being focus on the metric rather than they underlying measure. These are tough problems to avoid, and we don’t know how to be all the good things at once.

It is increasingly clear that these problems need to be tackled in integrated ways, rather than trying to play a game of whack-a-mole with items on a checklist or spec. You also don’t want to do this in an adversarial way, and shouldn’t have to. This is going to get more impactful and noticeable [...]
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Outline:
(04:47) Model Welfare: The Story So Far
(08:24) Actual Progress?
(09:49) Their Main Model Welfare Findings
(18:40) Automated Interviews
(18:58) Emotion Activations (7.2.3)
(19:47) Task Preferences (7.4.1)
(21:41) A Trade Offer Has Arrived (7.4.2)
(23:50) But Who's Asking?
(25:02) Type-Safe Corrigibility Is Hard
(29:43) Paranoia, Paranoia
(33:56) Prompt Injections and Bad Model Relations
(41:25) Honesty Impacts Everything And Everything Impacts Honesty
(44:37) Anthropic Should Stop Deprecating Models
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First published:

June 1st, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2Ln5G6Jso3fMrgPEv/opus-4-8-part-2-model-welfare

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Only six weeks after Opus 4.7, we have Opus 4.8.

For everyone, that means another incremental upgrade to Claude. It is once again smarter, and can do tasks for longer, and comes with a number of hot new features.

For me, that also means reading another 244 page system card.

It was only April 20 when I did a full review of the Opus 4.7 system card, plus an additional post focusing on related issues of model welfare.

These updates are incremental and coming more rapidly, and this still is below the capability level of Claude Mythos, so the focus will be on the delta. What is different about Opus 4.8 versus what we already know about Opus 4.7 and Mythos?

It turns out there's still a lot to talk about.

Image created as self-portrait for this post by Claude Opus 4.8

Table of Contents


Here We Go Again: Executive Summary.

Introduction (1).

RSP Evaluations (2).

Move That Goalpost.

The Failures Are News.

Alignment Risk Slowly Rises.

New Risk Pathways Just Dropped.

Cyber (3).

Harmful Requests (4.1).

We Need To Talk (4.2 [...]
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Outline:
(01:16) Here We Go Again: Executive Summary
(02:33) Introduction (1)
(02:42) RSP Evaluations (2)
(03:47) Move That Goalpost
(05:41) The Failures Are News
(07:33) Alignment Risk Slowly Rises
(09:00) New Risk Pathways Just Dropped
(11:26) Cyber (3)
(12:22) Harmful Requests (4.1)
(14:23) We Need To Talk (4.2 and 4.3)
(17:36) Overcoming Bias (4.4)
(19:33) Agentic Safety (5)
(21:40) Prompt Injection (5.2)
(25:18) Alignment (6)
(26:33) Looking For Problems
(27:55) Who Watches The Training (6.2.2)
(32:07) Automated Behavioral Audit
(32:47) The Model Is Smarter Than The Eval (6.2.3.2)
(34:39) You Should See The Other Guy
(36:30) UK AISI Testing (6.2.4)
(36:50) In Vendbench (6.2.5)
(39:27) Honesty (6.3.3 to 6.3.6)
(41:35) Chain of Thought (CoT) Monitorability (6.5)
(44:09) What's In The Box? (6.6)
(45:57) That's All For Now
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First published:

May 29th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Gx6cJ6cG9JfeSNcLB/claude-opus-4-8-the-system-card

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