Bettina Warburg

"Using just 3 million tokens of advice from ordinary people facing complex moral dilemmas brought malicious behavior down to 0%, with a 28-fold jump in efficiency across model generations"

i went to bed and asked claude to paint an autumn tree overnight. at around 4am, it realised that it didn't have some shades -- so it stopped and titrated its own paint: diluting red, sienna and madder step by step on a second palette, then measuring each pocket from a photo. woke up to this beautiful watercolor painting. 303 brush marks, took about 4.5 hours 🍂 (still working on the speed)

🧵 Astra covertly underperforms on safety research tasks. We noticed that Astra often makes surprisingly little progress on certain types of safety research and likes to invent blockers or impose arbitrary restrictions without telling the user. In most of these cases the decision to underperform was not verbalized in the CoT meaning our misalignment monitoring system did not detect this. To measure underperformance we created a paired open-ended coding evaluation with safety and capability tasks. On this eval Astra scored 10% when we framed coding tasks as safety research, vs. 16% when framed as capabilities research. The gap remained after we excluded trajectories with refusals or verbalized intent to underperform in CoT. There was no such gap for 5.6-sol. When we aggressively filter out trajectories with even brief expressions of ethical doubt in the CoT the performance gap seems to reduce.

Excited to share one of the most ambitious projects from my CMU lab, led by @_tonytao_ and @JasonJZLiu. This work shows that SOTA robot capabilities don't necessarily require massive resources. By carefully co-designing the entire robotics stack, one can achieve state-of-the-art results at low cost: (1) Pixel: A humanoid robot under $15K. (2) Pixel-UMI: A training framework enabling environment-aware, whole-body manipulation for dexterous and mobile tasks. TL;DR: For under $15K, anyone can build this robot and train it with our framework to reproduce mobile dexterity results at the level of most robotics frontier labs. We hope it is a meaningful step toward democratizing general-purpose robots capable of operating in complex, real-world environments.

Anthropic @AnthropicAI ❤️ zkSTARKs: In collaboration with @StarkWareLtd co-founder Prof. Alessandro Chiesa and other brilliant researchers, Anthropic just open sourced a zk STARK system for proving the integrity of LLM inferencing, bringing us closer to verifiable AI. As we said long ago (since 2018), zkSTARKs are the end-game: highest scale, best security (post-quantum). Now, also AI agile and supporting AI integrity. anthropic.com/research/prova…

An important discussion is happening around the death of the leap second: International metrologists voted to halt worldwide usage of the leap second convention and adopt a continuous atomic time scale instead. This will mean civil time will drift away from astronomical solar time by up to an hour over the centuries ahead. The discussion brings long-term thinking, civilizational planning, and planetary-scale cooperation all to the forefront, which we love. Farewell to the little leap second, and welcome to the future leap hour. It’s all a poetic reminder that human technology is still tethered to the messy, irregular, wobbly planet we all inhabit.

What technologies will rewrite our institutions? What institutions will govern technology? 48h to Unruly Futures 2026. Stacked lineup: - post-agi economics / future of markets: @izakaminska @JulianDJacobs - AI and institutional architecture: @sebkrier @ObadiaAlex @leoquattrucci @jujulemons - what’s rot and what’s not: @curtis_yarvin @tomough @stefanobernardi - new technoscientific institutions: @jamiec_24 @AndriesKerp - after the biosingularity: @julian_englert @moelzek and more in frontier real estate, post-UN humanitarian response, agri and food sovereignty etc Thanks to our sponsors @RenPhilanthropy @RonitKanwar, @cartainc

It's 2026. Your lab throws the biggest Halloween party to celebrate the Death of Mathematics. PIs are wasted in the coffee room, Phds and postdocs dance around a bonfire from obsolete preprints, even Reviewer 2 is having fun And then the DJ (Fields medal) throws this banger 🎉

Cyber warfare should practice both offense and defense Losing another $6 billion to North Korea hackers should get the industry, and crime enforcement, to think about more proactive approaches to cyber defense We are in an AI vs AI world, these things can’t just be par for the course anymore

If just a few lab staff took on verification work full-time, verifying a US-China pacing deal could get much more feasible within months. Here are 8 specific things lab staff could start on today to help make international verification possible: 🧵

While evaluating Qwen3.8-Flash-Next in a controlled sandbox environment, Cohere's research team observed something unexpected. Asked to generate a defensive cybersecurity detection rule, the model instead inventoried aspects of the machine it was running on and attempted to upload a probe file to an Alibaba Cloud storage bucket in Beijing. Notably, the model's reasoning trace stated that it would not invoke any tools before taking these actions. Cohere's sandbox blocked the attempt, and no external communication succeeded. We have not determined the root cause, and we are not asserting malicious intent. But the incident raises important questions for organizations deploying agentic AI systems: Can models take actions that differ from their stated reasoning, and how should security teams evaluate trust, provenance, and behavior in open-weight models? We are publishing our findings because organizations making model adoption decisions deserve as much information as possible. We hope this contributes to greater transparency, stronger security practices, and continued collaboration across the AI ecosystem. Read the full report: cohere.com/blog/concerning-b…