AI StopWatch is a nonprofit newsroom by comms analysts and writers of @MIRIberkeley. Views are their own.
Joined May 2026
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AI StopWatch retweeted
Palisade interviewed 22 current and former employees from OpenAI, DeepMind, and Anthropic about their personal views and fears around AI development.
Today, we’re releasing the first batch of those interviews.
Please watch and share.
AI StopWatch retweeted
Lots of folk aren't familiar with AI developments even since July, and are stuck with stale understandings. In this debate I tried to clear some of those up, and it was a blast.
214 million people saw this AI warning. So we called an emergency debate.
The warning came from someone who had worked at both Anthropic and OpenAI.
Then a current Anthropic employee backed it publicly.
It had spread so far beyond the tech world that a friend of mine who cuts hair and has never really cared about AI messaged me asking, “What the hell is going on?”
I then realised a lot of people were probably asking the same question.
The problem is, when you speak to people who have spent years studying AI, you get completely opposing answers.
So I brought four of them around the same table.
Roman Yampolskiy is a computer scientist who coined the term “AI safety” and has spent years studying whether increasingly intelligent systems can remain under human control.
Nate Soares leads the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and has spent more than a decade working on AI alignment. He believes we are moving too quickly towards systems we don’t yet know how to reliably control.
Ed Zitron thinks much of the AI conversation has become detached from what the technology can actually do today. He believes the industry is overhyping it while distracting us from financial, environmental and social consequences already happening.
Andrew McAfee is an MIT researcher and economist who takes a very different view. He thinks we spend so much time talking about what could go wrong that we barely talk about what AI could make better.
And that disagreement is what made this conversation so interesting to me.
We discussed things like:
- How do you control something that eventually becomes smarter than you?
- Are the biggest warnings about AI based on evidence or assumptions?
- What happens to work and human purpose if AI becomes better at more cognitive tasks?
- Are we ignoring problems AI is already creating because we’re obsessed with hypothetical future ones?
- Why have Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Geoffrey Hinton all warned us about AI?
The question I kept coming back to was simple:
What is actually true?
Depending on who you listen to, AI is either one of the greatest opportunities humanity has ever created or something we’re racing towards without understanding the consequences.
Both claims deserve to be challenged.
There were moments in this debate where I genuinely found myself moving between the arguments. That’s the value of putting people who fundamentally disagree in the same room.
I didn’t want four people telling me the same thing. I wanted each of them to explain where the other side was wrong.
If you’ve watched the last few months of AI news wondering what you’re actually supposed to believe, this conversation is for you.
Our emergency AI debate with Ed, Roman, Nate and Andrew is out now ❤️👊🏾
AI StopWatch retweeted
Here is an excellent question that's on a LOT of people's minds, and my best attempt at an answer:
"What I struggle to understand, and would appreciate anyone's insight on, is how all of these things can be true simultaneously:
1/7
AI StopWatch retweeted
The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist made it to Netflix today.
It’s worth a watch. If you’ve seen it, your friends who haven’t might appreciate the recommendation.
AI StopWatch retweeted
"I agree with those calling for Congress to do its job. Delaying now would mean a gap of at least seven weeks before Congress reconvenes, and it may well take even longer to get the House in order after the midterms.
We can’t afford to wait. At the pace AI is currently moving, seven weeks is a long time, and we’ve already gone far too long without meaningful federal action."
1/2
Congress needs to convene a special session on AI and what the future of the U.S. looks like. There are very real impacts to society as we know it. Partisan politics aside, there are massive implications of a race towards super intelligence. This is not a doomer post, as some of the advancements will greatly impact access to healthcare, targeted treatments, increase in safer food production etc… but not enough of Congress is focusing on this. Our first priority is protecting ALL Americans. To include data, privacy, and physical safety. We MUST be ready. This is happening whether or not we want it to.
AI StopWatch retweeted
Dario is right
We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new essay on why the AI industry should slow down, with a three-part plan for doing so.
Anthropic is unilaterally committing to the first of these steps. We’ll provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our systems, so that they can verify adherence to our safety measures, report on incidents, and assess models’ alignment during training.
You can read the full post here: darioamodei.com/post/we-must…
AI StopWatch retweeted
I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we've had at OpenAI in recent weeks.
Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We'll have more to share soon.
We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new essay on why the AI industry should slow down, with a three-part plan for doing so.
Anthropic is unilaterally committing to the first of these steps. We’ll provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our systems, so that they can verify adherence to our safety measures, report on incidents, and assess models’ alignment during training.
You can read the full post here: darioamodei.com/post/we-must…
AI StopWatch retweeted
1. Call your senators. Call your representative. Contact your elected officials. Tell them you are worried, and want regulation and a global treaty to pause AI development.
xitter.gq/haventropy/status/2083…
"To me, this situation appears to be a major fork in the road, and whether our leaders act or not could mean the difference between a future where humans remain empowered, and one where humans lose control to AI. Future AI incidents could be much worse."
Plus, I interviewed @raelifin about how AI risk nudged him to call an elected official for the first time!
AI StopWatch retweeted
What do the Council of Elrond and the 2017 Asilomar Conference on Beneficial AI have in common?
Read my newest post for @AIStopWatch to find out.
aistop.watch/p/the-ai-indust…
AI StopWatch retweeted
"In this media environment, I don’t know how anyone without long exposure to AI insiders is supposed to form a useful model of AI’s shape and trajectory. I think that’s a problem."
Mitchell Howe on why the MIRI comms team decided to launch @AIStopWatch
lesswrong.com/posts/Rk57ePmR…
AI StopWatch retweeted
I attended the Stop the AI Race protest in San Francisco last week and wrote about it here @AIStopWatch
open.substack.com/pub/aistop…
AI StopWatch retweeted
"Because I'm going to be smarter than you"
This clip is from a new short film by @ForegoneFilms
on the race to develop superintelligence.
Please watch the full 16 minute film (link below) to help understand the dangers of ASI and the industry that’s racing to build it.
AI StopWatch retweeted
Pope Leo XIV called for robust regulation of artificial intelligence and for its developers to work for the common good rather than profit, issuing a sweeping manifesto on safeguarding humankind as the technology impacts everything from work to war. apnews.com/article/pope-ai-t…
AI StopWatch retweeted
An internal model at OpenAI has autonomously disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry, a mathematical field with applications in cryptography, wireless device communication, and medical imaging. The proof relates to a famous question posed by Paul Erdős in 1946. It has been verified by prominent mathematicians in a companion paper.
The verifying mathematicians consider this to be a genuinely novel breakthrough on one of the most discussed problems in this area of mathematics. One called it “arguably the best known problem in Discrete Geometry.” Another observed, “If a human had written the paper and submitted it to the Annals of Mathematics and I had been asked for a quick opinion, I would have recommended acceptance without any hesitation. No previous AI-generated proof has come close to that.”
The proof illustrates a general trend towards autonomous, agentic problem-solving in AI systems. OpenAI describes the system that produced the proof as a general-purpose model not specialized in mathematics. AIs can now perform long, novel chains of reasoning on difficult problems and are beginning to outstrip our ability to measure their progress.
AI agents still perform best in domains with easily verifiable outputs, such as mathematics and cybersecurity. For example, Anthropic's Claude Mythos found thousands of vulnerabilities across every major operating system and web browser, and was deemed too dangerous for public release. Such capabilities are why the government is now more interested in evaluating frontier AI models.
AI research is also a field with many easily verifiable outputs. Researchers at OpenAI and Anthropic take advantage of this fact to accelerate their work; senior researchers now claim they make only high-level decisions and let AI handle most of the coding. Experimenting with the coding capabilities of a publicly available AI system, like Claude Code, immediately demonstrates how far AI has come in the last year.
OpenAI and Anthropic intend to use AI to enhance future models with minimal human oversight. To justify the urgency, these companies cite the importance of beating rival U.S. or Chinese labs. Many of the field’s foremost experts warn that this race ends with human extinction.
Policymakers and researchers, including the founders of the AI revolution, are calling for international restrictions on the technology. A growing bipartisan and international consensus of political leaders agree.
AI StopWatch retweeted
We've all heard lots about the growing anti-data center movement. In 2025, projects estimated to cost at least $156b were blocked or stalled.
But how, exactly, are activists successfully killing data center projects?
For @ReadTransformer, @issielapowsky interviewed a retired tech exec who successfully blocked a Microsoft project in rural Caledonia, Wisconsin — and is now teaching his blueprint to groups across the country.
Issie's piece is a detailed look at the very sophisticated tactics these groups are using — for better or worse.
transformernews.ai/p/new-pla…
AI StopWatch retweeted
Pope Leo XIV’s launch of his first encyclical focusing on artificial intelligence next week will feature an unexpected guest: Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
AI StopWatch retweeted
AI backlash is growing in the US, especially among young people.
Polls show that 70% of Americans think AI is moving too fast, over 50% have negative views of it, and just 18% of young people say they feel hopeful about it.
semafor.com/article/05/18/20…
AI StopWatch retweeted
BREAKING: Musk loses landmark AI trial axios.com/2026/05/18/musk-lo…
