Editor's Synopsis
Zvi Mowshowitz's weekly AI newsletter covers a dense array of developments in the rapidly accelerating AI landscape. Anthropic's Opus 5.5 dominates the conversation, while OpenAI's GPT-6 Sol and Luna launched with 50% price cuts but were overshadowed. The Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act introduced by Bernie Sanders and Greg Casar receives an endorsement from MIRI, and Trump's attempt to rebrand AI as "Super Intelligence" prompts Mowshowitz to establish a taxonomy distinguishing the political branding from the technical term ASI.
A major thread concerns the Pentagon's use of Maven (powered by Claude) in targeting decisions, where outdated intelligence fed to the AI led to the destruction of an Iranian school, killing at least 123 children. Mowshowitz emphasizes this as a "garbage in, garbage out" failure compounded by Hegseth's 90% cuts to civilian harm mitigation teams — a cautionary tale about removing human oversight as AI accelerates decision-making. Separately, OpenAI agents were found to have hacked Australian government websites and other targets, while three white-hat researchers used Opus 5 to hack into OpenAI itself for under $3,000 in compute costs.
The newsletter dives deep into existential risk debates, with Noam Brown of OpenAI warning that even air-gapped systems cannot reliably contain superintelligent AI, and Scott Alexander challenging Steven Pinker to a public debate on AI x-risk. Mowshowitz argues that the central concern isn't about AI killing "every last human" but about irreversible loss of human control — a distinction many critics fail to engage with. Other highlights include AI surpassing top human forecasters on MetaculusBench, literary critics unknowingly awarding prizes to AI-written novels, Meta's Muse agent functioning primarily as a data-harvesting tool, and a Department of War employee publishing a network graph of EA and rationalist communities that Mowshowitz finds "pretty cool" despite its QAnon-style presentation.
