
✝️🧦🇦🇺🇲🇾🐧🏗⏸️ 2026Q3 AI safety fellow @pivotal_org building more homes @GreaterCanberra ex-PowerPC kernel @ OzLabs 🦋 @andrew.donnellan.id.au
Canberra, Ngunnawal Country
Joined January 2011
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Keeping my account around on here, will still check in mostly because YIMBY-posting on this cursed platform is still needed, but this time we do actually have the critical mass to move to The Other Place. @andrew.donnellan.id.au
the first post-IPO Anthropic shareholder AGM is gonna be a fun experience surely. can't overrule the founders on votes, but can cause some interesting scenes?
Andrew Donnellan retweeted
You are legally required to carry liability insurance to operate a nuclear power plant, fly a plane, or even to drive a car.
But to build one of the most powerful technologies in human history that has already gone rogue & whose creators say poses catastrophic risks?
Nah.
Will be in Wellington for @kawaiiconNZ from Thursday night through to Sunday, who's around
Andrew Donnellan retweeted
Weird how they’ve found so many amazing things and yet not one single result related to practical cryptanalysis. I guess everyone should pat themselves on the back for a job well done.
We are announcing three new discoveries in mathematics, computer science, and physics about harmonic analysis, complexity theory, and quantum field theory.
openai.com/index/building-sc…
Andrew Donnellan retweeted
New Pacing the Frontier proposal: each time an outside group successfully penetrates the defenses of a frontier AI company and captures the flag, it should reset a 3-month countdown clock before they're allowed to train new models.
EXCLUSIVE: In less than 12 hours, a group of ex-DOGE cyber researchers were able to penetrate Anthropic’s systems using AI agents — including Slack channels where the most sensitive models are discussed.
This is just weeks after
Anthropic whistleblower Joseph Coxon charged the company w/launching “a hubristic gamble” from a “private company’s Slack.”
Read our story here (gift link):
wapo.st/4smNlsC
Andrew Donnellan retweeted
extremely good headnotes
Victorian Supreme Court: McKechnie v Secretary to the Department of Justice and Community Safety (No 2)
zurl.co/EcPH7
#Judgment #viclaw #auslaw #JudicialReview #HumanRights #Vegemite #CulturalRights
Andrew Donnellan retweeted
"But what if we're playing 4-dimensional chess!"
Andrew Donnellan retweeted
when i first started getting into AI policy a couple yrs ago, i remember telling a friend — “you know, the ML researchers don’t act like the techies i usually work with. they’re mystics. their online presence is very … self-styled prophet.”
and i think that was the beginning of my awareness that the cyber and ai safety camps had different intellectual philosophies and incentives.
the cyber folks generally approach systems as things that can be understood, with the assumption that risks can be mitigated through standard engineering / “defense in depth” techniques.
meanwhile, many ML and alignment folks seem to not only emphasize — but sometimes delight in — the unknowability of “grown not engineered” AI systems. they focus on emergent behaviors their creators don't fully understand.
and these philosophies naturally flow from the respective systems these groups have experience with! conventional software *is* pretty intelligible, esp relative to neural networks.
but obviously these sensibilities can enable distinct failure modes — overconfidence in current security measures, and fatalism about the usefulness of existing security measures.
like many of the people quoted here, i think the best way for each of these groups to develop and grow their own understanding is to work together.
the cyber folks could teach the alignment folks a lot about practical security measures, the alignment folks can identify new threat vectors and assess how safeguards are holding up with evolving capabilities.
we need the insights of both fields, tribalism impoverishes us all.
I’ve been trying to make sense of this rift between the AI safety vs security camps.
time.com/article/2026/10/20/…
as an e-bike owner, I endorse this message (I'd kinda like to be able to treat stop signs as give ways, but traffic lights can stay)
> We’re committing a portion of Anthropic’s shares to the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, a new wholly owned entity
how does giving shares to a company that is a wholly-owned subsidiary even work?
We’re committing a portion of Anthropic’s shares to the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, a new wholly owned entity dedicated entirely to the public benefit.
It will start off with 5% of our shares. For every 50% increase in the company’s value over a set baseline, we can contribute up to an extra 2%, subject to our board’s discretion.
In total, this means that roughly 20% of Anthropic’s shares are committed to the public good. Our co-founders have already pledged to donate 80% of their equity, and around half our employees are donating a portion of their equity as part of a donation matching program we’ve run since our founding.
In the post below, we share more details about our new fund.
anthropic.com/news/public-be…
I'm curious who these confused departmental officers are, given I, a random Norfolk Island watcher, knew about the NAG back in 2024
There's not 1, but 2, rival secessionist groups on Australia's Norfolk Island — both claiming to run the place.
Canberra officials struggled to distinguish the difference for months after their unrecognised elections. @FinnianMchugh takes you into this bizarre world politico.com/news/2026/10/17…
all the Western companies who are releasing their own models that are derivatives of GLM, Qwen, etc - not convinced that's gonna be a stable business, for multiple reasons
I predict it's not just going to be the frontier labs who start experimenting with replacing Linux in 2027 (which as a Linux person I have so many mixed feelings about!)
who in Australia is working on this?
I like this suggestion from @logangraham. I would be extremely excited to see EA philanthropic money/frontier companies go into partnerships with governments - eg Australia’s - trying to secure the digital infrastructure underpinning many small island nations in the Indo-Pacific. They are often poorly resourced and have a long list of critical concerns that sit higher than cyber until an incident occurs.
EG: Vanuatu’s Govt was held ransom following hack in Nov 22, Tonga’s telecomms in Feb 23, Palau in March 24, Solomon Islands in May 24, Palau again in July and Nov 24, PNG this year again.
Would be great to see a securing initiative.
Andrew Donnellan retweeted
something funny about how legally it is vastly harder to build a duplex in San Francisco than it is to build a machine superintelligence
Applications open for the Pivotal AI Safety Fellowship, which is changing from a 9 week (+ extensions) to a 15 week program next year...
(DM me if you want my thoughts from doing the previous round!)
Applications are open for Pivotal’s Q1 2027 Research Fellowship 💥
Work with mentors from @AnthropicAI , @GoogleDeepMind, @AISecurityInst, @ApolloResearch, and more.
📍 15 weeks in London (18th Jan - 30th Apr).
💸 £15-18k stipend, travel and housing support
Apply by Nov 1: apply.pivo.tl ↓
cow milk: pints if fresh, litres if long-life (according to the Tesco next door to where I was living in London for a couple of months this year, at least)
"my discomfort is that talking about the problem with the sense of urgency it requires to actually deal with it makes people sad"
Replying to @BachFrancis
(1/7) I'd like to provide some additional context for the remarks that can be found in this interview.
(2/7) My discomfort with the attention being paid to existential risk---and with the ongoing dominance of the public discussion of such risks by a few so-called thought leaders---is that there's an elephant in the room that is being missed. That elephant is the effect of all of this discussion on young people, and indeed the effect---beginning with social media a decade ago---of information technology on young lives broadly speaking.
(3/7) I recently read an interview by Jill Lepore in which she reports on discussions that she had recently with a group of college students: "They had just three things to say. One, social media completely destroyed their childhoods. Two, AI is destroying their college education and their likely prospects for employment. And three, what the hell are we all doing?" To add a fourth bullet that I've heard in similar discussions: "I'm not going to have children, because the existential risk is just too high."
(4/7) Please contemplate such a statement, those of you who think that it's OK that the public, widely diffused, discussion coming from seemingly authoritative figures is so adamant about existential risk.
(5/7) Let me add that I have little interest in a debate about what "superintelligence" might mean, or whether we're currently seeing the emergence of superintelligence. For what it's worth, I would certainly agree that the solution of extremely challenging math problems (for example) exhibits a very impressive form of intelligence, although I would want to argue that such intelligence is impossible to dissociate from the collective of humans that provided data to the machine learning system (which itself has become a kind of collective).
(6/7) Such philosophical debates are entertaining and even important, but when they then head in the direction of "when such superintelligence emerges, there's a good chance that it will want to kill all humans", I say "science fiction". Again, I don't think that it's bad to consider such thoughts, but I strongly believe that it's bad for society, and especially young people, for such thoughts, unaccompanied by any serious real-world analysis, to become a dominant form of discourse of the era.
(7/7) We are damaging human lives, and the consequences of that damage will no doubt be a major theme of the next several decades.
Interesting to see that the committee proposes that this parliamentary committee would have a direct role in facilitating publication of incident reports!
Replying to @devonwhittle
The JSCAI recommends a new Parliamentary Joint Standing Committee to oversee regulatory changes in response to AI developments. Makes sense given the role delegated legislation will likely play under the Aus AI Standards and other regimes, and the pace of expected change 2/11
How many intelligence agencies must be running or collaborating with cheap inference providers? (I was astounded the first time I learned about researchers using peer-to-peer GPU clouds with fairly worthless security promises)
Replying to @paul_cal
Maybe this is paranoid but unless you’re using it for something extremely boring I’m very skeptical of the ultra-cheap pricing on chinese models/infra. You get pretty good competition among legit American providers. Should raise an eyebrow when Chinese pricing makes it seem like they’re not trying to make money and are trying to get you to maximize token throughput
I don’t think it’s crazy at all to be worried about Chinese state putting together profiles of users of these models. Not even saying not to use them, I’d personally just pay the premium to use a ZDR american provider (IIRC Novita and Fireworks are good. Fireworks is my go-to)































