WATCH: A humanoid robot suddenly kicks its own developer during a demonstration in China, sending the remote control flying out of his hand. The engineer quickly dodges another kick, grabs the controller and walks away without any reported injuries. The robot then ends the exchange with a martial arts-style bow.

But at the end of the day, voluntary standards made by a handful of tech companies won’t be enough. We need government – and specifically our leaders in Washington – to get proactive in coming up with concrete proposals, laws and regulations that deal with serious safety concerns, anticipate AI’s impact on jobs and our kids, and make sure that AI’s benefits are widely spread. And we need the U.S. to take the lead in creating international standards for AI safety.   Given what we know about technology, we can’t stuff AI back in a box. But we can collectively determine how it's developed and how it’s used, rather than sitting back and letting AI and its fallout happen to us.

Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead. You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement. I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible. But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier. Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want. Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well. So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it. If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.

Lauren Grandcolas voicemail to her husband, after Flight 93 was hijacked on 9/11. She was 3 months pregnant.

Mr. Coxon is right. The very people building this technology admit that it could threaten the future of humanity. That is why I will soon be introducing legislation to ban superintelligence and pause AI development.

The future has arrived in Austin

Bernie Sanders and Greg Casar today announced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act. All AI development in the United States will be paused. Systems that have capabilities that match or exceed human cognitive performance will be banned. Violators will face 20 years in prison.

Over the course of 3 months at OpenAI, 3 consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes. This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself. All this happened while humans remained more-or-less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy. I’ve spent the last three days reading through these reports and trying to understand exactly what happened. Here is my attempt to tell the whole story in plain English: dwarkesh.com/p/openai-huggin…

JUST IN: Trade unions threaten to withhold political support from candidates opposing data centers, warning thousands of blue-collar jobs could be lost.

A new Yale analysis found Medicare for All would cover every American AND save more than $1 trillion a year, cutting national health care spending by 20%. It would also mean better pay for doctors, nurses, and healthcare providers. The savings from cutting private insurance and Big Pharma profits as well as administrative waste would pay for increased Medicare reimbursement rates and  $52 billion in unpaid hospital care. Medicare for All saves money and lives.