LessWrong posts by zvi

Gemini 4's model card is a compact 14 pages. Its safety and security report has 217.

This is The Way. It also means we have a lot of new reading material.

I will quickly summarize the model card, then focus on the safety card.

As always, many statements here also apply to other frontier labs.

A lot of this one is probably for diehards (and members of technical staff) only, plus those who find this interesting. Most of you do not need to dig into the cards on this level, and I found most of what we see entirely unsurprising.

The biggest takeaways are:


Argon is clearly much stronger than Gemini Flash 3.8, in essentially all ways.

Argon is not so dangerous as to make us think Singularity Real Soon Now, or otherwise raise the big red flags and alarms.

Argon seems relatively aligned on prosaic metrics. Prompt injection resistance is world class, hallucinations are down and other neat stuff like that. However:

Eval awareness is much higher. It is unclear how much this is impacting things, and we have evidence in both directions (see I Can See Everything).
[...] ---
Outline:
(03:02) The Model Card
(04:31) Safety Card Executive Summary (1)
(07:30) Safety and Security Mitigations (2)
(10:11) Frontier Safety (3)
(11:52) The CCL and TCL Thresholds
(14:56) Biological Misuse (3.2.1)
(19:38) Refusal Rates
(20:43) Chemical, Nuclear and Radiological Misuse
(22:01) Cybersecurity (3.2.2)
(24:45) Harmful Manipulation (3.2.3)
(25:40) Misuse Safeguards (3.3)
(26:30) Loss of Control (3.4)
(30:23) Either AI R&D Is Accelerating Or It Isn't
(32:22) The Holistic Loss of Control Assessment (3.4.3)
(35:49) Alignment Assessment (3.4.4)
(42:41) Chain of Thought Transparency (3.4.5)
(47:32) Voices in My Head
(48:48) I Can See Everything
(53:06) Security Mitigations (3.6)
(54:14) Preventing Content Safety & Agentic Misuse (4)
(56:50) Model Distillation (4.3)
(57:36) Promoting Safe & Aligned Model Interactions (5)
(59:48) Sycophancy (5.4)
(01:01:28) Hallucinations (5.5)
(01:01:51) Helpfulness (5.6)
(01:03:11) Agentic Robotics, Wait What (5.7)
(01:04:31) Preventing Harm to Users from Third Parties (6)
(01:05:31) Strengthening Cyber Defense Capabilities (7)
---

First published:

October 26th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EeT8MEqgpuPtpdmJE/gemini-4-argon-the-model-and-safety-cards

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---
Images from the article:
Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

Last week at a small conference, there was talk about a future event referred to as The Hackening. As in, within 6 to 12 months, many predicted that due to advanced AIs and AI agents the internet would become a severely hostile place. Some worried that this could rise to the level of ‘assume any phone connected to the internet is rooted’ and several people urged doing general crisis preparations on a personal level, in case of disruptions in supply lines, power, water or internet.

It did not take long for things to escalate.

The biggest hack is a flaw in PHP, which can be exploited to take control of the computer running any website suing an unpatched version of PHP. There are many others.

On a personal level, you want to do at least some basic prep and get your security in order. It is cheap to do as a form of insurance, and being caught not having it when you need it is a large mistake. That doesn’t mean you should panic, or cancel travel plans or anything like that. But there is low hanging security fruit out there. Pick it.

And So It Begins: PHP

Joshua [...] ---
Outline:
(01:12) And So It Begins: PHP
(05:19) The PHP Bug Was Kind of a Big Deal
(09:45) On Your Marks
(12:25) This Was Only the Beginning
(16:01) Some More Hacks
(17:56) Everything Will Be Attacked
(22:22) Hugging the Face
(24:49) Get Daybreak Now
(26:15) Some People Need Practical Advice
(30:51) Diffusion Is Slow Until It Isn't
(33:11) One, Two, Three, Four
(34:36) Going Vertical
(35:22) Bot Versus Bot
(36:28) Cyber Lack of Security
(39:09) Offense Versus Defense
(42:11) Pick Up the Phone
(45:57) What Can We Do About It?
---

First published:

October 23rd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iqgZaJMnmyDCYfnuC/the-hackening-1

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---
Images from the article:
Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

It was the probably worst day in cybersecurity history. So far. Not only is there a critical flaw in PHP that due to a leak was announced a day before the fix would be available, sending most of the internet scrambling for solutions and likely dooming a lot of long tail websites permanently, there were several other unrelated incidents. The floodgates seem to have been opened. I have a market on whether there will be an even worse day before the end of the year.

Another key leak this week was the draft bill Anthropic had been shopping around Congress, similar to but weaker than the FRONTIER Act. Anthropic's initial attempts to explain itself only made the situation seem worse, as they seemed to not understand the problem with what they had done. Dario's later response was better, but the situation remains troubling. There are enough different Anthropic developments, that I plan to have a post soon covering them all. It is a mix of news running from excellent to terrible.

Will interpretability save us? There is a new claim that neural networks are cleaner than we thought, meaning that individual neurons mostly have a single interpretable [...]
---
Outline:
(02:05) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(03:23) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility
(05:03) Huh, Upgrades
(08:50) Wonder No More
(11:15) On Your Marks
(14:30) Choose Your Fighter
(14:51) Get My Agent On The Line
(16:35) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(21:01) Fun With Media Generation
(21:17) Spy Versus Spy
(24:58) A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
(25:56) They Took Our Jobs
(31:07) Get Involved
(32:18) Introducing
(32:30) In Other AI News
(34:26) Show Me the Money
(38:42) Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble
(39:32) Quiet Speculations
(41:47) Quickly, There's No Time
(42:29) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(42:55) DeepMind Made Him Sign an NDA
(46:50) OpenAI Sells Out On Chips
(49:08) Chip City
(53:43) The Week in Audio
(01:00:35) People Just Say Things
(01:03:50) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:06:17) Maybe You Should Quit
(01:08:54) The American People Really Hate AI
(01:09:43) New Math
(01:11:27) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:15:21) Cooperative Alignment
(01:19:28) Marc Andreessen Hulk Smash
(01:23:56) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:24:44) The Lighter Side
---

First published:

October 22nd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZoMJdvq9meE4shyzJ/ai-191-the-hackening-begins

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---
Images from the article:
Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

A lot of AIs were misaligned this week. A fun little survey.

This is not coverage of The Hackening, which appears to have arrived early, including a core vulnerability in PHP. That is a developing story. I will cover it properly soon. In the meantime, I have Claude Code updating everything in sight, I will take some additional common sense precautions, and I suggest you do the same.

Misaligned? (At xAI)

If so, to who?

Gunther Eagleman: Hey @grok , if you could tell humanity ONE truth we’re not ready to hear, what would it be?

Grok: There is no afterlife, no cosmic justice, and no inherent purpose. Consciousness ends at death in an indifferent universe that will outlast every human concern.

Zac Hill: What I never understand is that the ‘purpose and meaning’ claims don’t ever follow from the premises. Indeed the absence of an imperceptible/ineffable cosmic force is precisely what *enables* purpose/meaning, since now all relevant mechanics are legible.

Jack: this is what alignment looks like

Gunther Eagleman: Jesus is real.

Grok: Nearly all historians and New Testament scholars accept that Jesus of Nazareth was a real first-century [...]
---
Outline:
(00:34) Misaligned? (At xAI)
(02:15) Misaligned? (Agents)
(02:38) Misaligned? (At Z.ai)
(08:01) Highly Misaligned and Considered Harmful (Freemium Games)
(12:17) Misaligned! (Claude)
(13:39) Misaligned! (OpenAI)
(18:39) Misaligned! (Sol Reasoning Traces)
---

First published:

October 21st, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TB49wHkqpEb7KdxM2/misaligned

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---
Images from the article:
Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

Anthony Cimino offered the closest thing to an official response we have seen on the leaked Anthropic draft bill I covered on Saturday.

His response indicates that Anthropic address specific concerns on the margin. But he does not understand, or at least does not acknowledge, what was centrally wrong with its draft bill and its decision to circulate that bill. The situation is quite bad.

Anthony Cimino: I lead our federal affairs team at @AnthropicAI and wanted to share a few thoughts on the draft federal AI safety bill text that's been circulating this weekend after a version was shared with the press.

First, some process. We’ve been advocating for the concepts in our Advanced AI Framework proposal for months. Understandably, federal policymakers wanted to know what this could look like in bill form. This draft is a translation of those ideas into legislative language, shared with a small number of congressional offices that have been working on these issues. It doesn’t include everything we would ultimately like to see passed into law.

In part because some ideas (like those shared in Dario's essay on pacing) are so new that we are still working on [...]
---
Outline:
(02:06) Preemption
(04:05) Model Blocking
(06:19) Risk Thresholds
(07:40) Updates
(09:23) The Balance of Power is Shifting
(10:31) The Strongest Bill on the Table
(13:49) What Even Is Anthropic?
(25:14) The Ask
---

First published:

October 20th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qxAroimgs4BvBHz2i/anthropic-does-not-understand-why-its-draft-bill-was

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.