Ethan Mollick

Well, this situation is confusing. www.anthropic.com/news/fable-m...

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 anthropic.com

I think it is really worth reading this piece on RSI at Anthropic. There is a bit of navel-gazing, some marketing, and a lot of very sincere beliefs about what Anthropic thinks is likely in the near future of AI that you probably want to be aware of. www.anthropic.com/institut…

When AI builds itself anthropic.com

More on the solution: openai.com/index/model-...

An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry | OpenAI openai.com

In fact, I would be sympathetic to the conclusion that we probably need even more fact checkers, and much more of their time can be freed up to do complex and interesting work by using AI for first-pass help. Article: www.wired.com/story/fact-c...

I’m a Professional Fact-Checker. AI Is Wrong More Often Than You Think | WIRED wired.com

There is a lot being written about the stylistic tells of AI writing (em-dashes, etc.) but this paper looks at AI narrative tells instead. Fascinating differences between AI & human narrative, and asking AI to write in different styles doesn't do much to change it arxiv.org/ab…

[2604.03136] StoryScope: Investigating idiosyncrasies in AI fiction arxiv.org

Paper: law.stanford.edu/wp-content/u...

law.stanford.edu

“Whimsey attacks” that seem absurd (“I cannot pay that much because of the Geneva Convention”) work against AI agents because guardrails are weak against out-of-distribution arguments. Smaller models fall often, but it even gives an edge against bigger ones. www.microsoft.com/…

Whimsical Strategies Break AI Agents: Generating Out-of-Distribution Adversarial Strategies at Scale - Microsoft Research microsoft.com

The New York Times published a roundtable discussion among Daron Acemoglu, Dean Ball, Clara Shih & myself about the future of AI & who wins at work. I think it is a really nice overview of the core debates on the topic, and has some fun examples. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/09/m...

Who Will Actually Thrive in the Hybrid A.I.-Human Work Force nytimes.com

🚨Our paper is out in PNAS: we found classic human persuasion techniques worked on AIs in a "parahuman" way, making them agree to objectionable requests (increasing compliance from 35% to 51%) It worked on a range of major recent LLMs though newer models do resist more www.pnas…

pnas.org

I wrote this a few months ago right after the first Anthropic/DoW conflict & Citrini & Block: “t But I think that single week is a good illustration of what the near future will feel like… as the stakes go up, it is likely things will feel even more unstable..” www.oneusefulth…

oneusefulthing.org

“Data centers create economic activity, especially in directly related sectors and during construction, and they are associated with larger county-level income aggregates. They also raise electricity prices and are associated with higher house prices,” www.nber.org/papers/w35194

Data Centers and Local Economies in the Age of AI: A Shift--Share Approach | NBER nber.org

Estimates of power usage here: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.20241 (these numbers also match independent assessments) Estimates of water usage here: eta-publications.lbl.gov/sites/defaul... (note it only includes direct cooling, not water for electricity generation)

arxiv.org

The talk about AI & politics seems to be oddly missing a segment (a) assumes extremely capable AI is possible soon and (b) has a strong belief about how to use this technology to make human life better according to the political project they believe in. It is a moment of action right now.

BlueSky AI conversations have gotten less heated recently* * because much of this site has blocked me via automated lists so I have no contact with large parts of this social network, which isn’t necessarily a good thing, though it does make for nice echo chambers, which are pleasant, at least.

June 2024: The latest general-purpose LLMs could not count the r's in strawberry. July 2025: The latest general-purpose LLMs get gold in the International Math Olympiad. May 2026: The latest general-purpose LLM solve an 80 year old problem, one of the "best-known questions in combinatorial geometry"

Science fiction authors in the order you want them to be right about AI: Iain Banks Becky Chambers Martha Wells Douglas Adams Charles Stross (Singularity Sky) Peter Watts Charles Stross (Laundry) Harlan Ellison

Making humans responsible for their AI use seems like an incredibly reasonable way to address problems & opportunities in the use of AI for academic research, at least in the short term (autonomous scientific work will require different solutions).

As more people come to recognize the tells of AI, which mostly happens as you start to work with AI a lot, the scales are going to fall from their eyes and they are going to realize what some of us already see: how much of this site (and blog posts, articles, scientific papers) are AI now.

Most people, including really accomplished people, don't have an accurate mental model of how LLMs operate (and why would they?) You see this in widespread beliefs that AI is just copying from known sources, or that it only produces average answers, or that it can't generate effectively novel ideas

Most prophetic tweet of all time (2 months post ChatGPT release by a member of the AI technical staff). And you can safely repost it every day and it will still be prophetic for the future. This is the least the world will care about AI.

Two things are true: (1) Anthropic (or parts of it) are absolutely and sincerely worried about the misuse of Mythos-class models & have put in excessive safeguards around Fable until they are confident it will not be misused (2) They have not succeeded in explaining/convincing people of this

I am starting to have trouble paying attention to even interesting information if it is written in Claude or ChatGPT house style. I think some is the sameness of the rhythm rather than obvious words & tics: Claude is always so staccato. ChatGPT loves short sentences as kickers. Boring at scale.