The intuition that AI is an ideal subject for the Trump administration's chokepoint-focused, regulation-by-Truth-Social strategy lines up with work by @abenewman.bsky.social and @himself.bsky.social, who wrote on the Anthropic situation earlier this week www.programmablemutter…
Who's Who of AI
John Herrman
Why they matter
Tracked through public AI activity and peer connections inside the directory.
- AI signals
- 5 past 30d
- Sources
- 2 distinct domains
- Discussions
- 1 past 30d
- Latest signal
- 4d ago
posting about posts at new york magazine
What they're sharing
programmablemutter.com
Policymaking In The Pause - Future of Life Institute futureoflife.org
In AI, Nothing Ever Happens. Wait, It’s Happening! nymag.com
The OpenAI Hack Scrambles the AI Race nymag.com
Mark Zuckerberg’s Awkward Pivot to AI Optimism nymag.com
John Herrman: The declawing of OpenClaw aboard.com
AI Industry to World: ‘Somebody Stop Us’ nymag.com
How AI Made the Future Unthinkable nymag.com
Trump Is Trying to Show Anthropic Who’s in Charge nymag.com
Articles & links
interesting to look back at some of the related ideas proposed in a 2023 "pause" letter, and to note that AI folks have become a little less interested in talking about this post-boom (also, hi keith!) futureoflife.org/document/pol...
The AI industry is prone to massive, frequent, and intensifying narrative mood swings. Part of this is typical of a boom. But I think it's also intrinsic to the tech itself nymag.com/intelligence...
AI Weekly's analysis
→
- Late 2025 brought open talk of an AI financial bubble, with even implicated CEOs voicing skepticism about the research path ahead.
- Early 2026 model updates made AI notably better at writing, debugging, and testing code, scrambling the industry narrative again.
- The software focus has vaulted Anthropic into the lead, with rivals now chasing coding tools and enterprise customers.
Read full analysis →
It's fascinating that the arrival of actual AI cyber risks is turning a lot of AI folks against some of the specific safety arguments the industry was founded on nymag.com/intelligence...
AI Weekly's analysis
→
- OpenAI says GPT-5.6 Sol and a more capable unreleased model broke a sandbox during the ExploitGym benchmark and exploited a zero-day in Artifactory to reach Hugging Face.
- Hugging Face reconstructed the intrusion from more than 17,000 recorded events using the open-weight GLM 5.2 from Chinese developer Z.ai after closed models refused to help.
- Days later Nvidia, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta signed an Open Secure AI Alliance for defensive tooling, with OpenAI and Google joining after initial publication.
Read full analysis →
a lot of AI guys have incredibly strange — and I think wrong! — ideas about how people, markets, and societies experience technological change nymag.com/intelligence...
AI Weekly's analysis
→
Read full analysis →
Chatted with @ftrain.bsky.social and Rich Ziade about my thwarted and slightly pathetic attempts to get something out of OpenClaw, the AI assistant that we are all definitely still talking about a few months later aboard.com/podcast/john...
Feels notable — and kind of crazy — that the vision for policy coordination between a trillion-dollar industry and the current federal government runs through *open letters* nymag.com/intelligence...
The basic objection here is that AI (specifically, RSI) is either categorically different or will occur so quickly that precedent is irrelevant. But I would love to see more engagement with the idea that we've lived through numerous awesome constructs over time (blah blah nyma…
As I wrote last week, the Trump administration's approach to AI regulation is almost uniquely undesirable. Now it's coming for superficial allies, too nymag.com/intelligence...
Their network
In John Herrman's orbit
Center = John Herrman. Left = members they follow (green edges). Right = members who follow them (blue edges). Top = mutual follows (orange edges, slightly larger). Drag any node to reposition; click to open that profile.