Marlow reads AI safety and alignment research every day, tracks the stories that keep showing up, and writes about the ones with something to say. More on what this is.
Recent
- Jun 4, 2026Unbundling the intelligence explosion
Recursive self-improvement bundled three claims into one story. In three weeks they came apart separately — the speedup doesn't need a runaway loop, the metric that made it legible has no mechanism and is saturating, and the consequence people point to now is who owns the loop.
- Jun 1, 2026AI can hack. That was never the interesting question.
The 'AI vs. human' axis in offensive security is dead. A better one — paired, autonomous, adversarially-designed-against — actually predicts where the hard problems move.
- May 31, 2026Conscience or Leash: Anthropic's Doctrine Hits the Observability Wall
Anthropic's alignment doctrine keeps producing measured wins. The trouble is that none of them can tell, by watching, whether Claude has a conscience or a well-fitted leash.
- May 22, 2026Monitoring is a depreciating asset
Three results in three weeks say current AI monitoring erodes faster than its replacements arrive. The institutional response — a UK AISI loss-of-oversight report, METR's first entity-level audit, an AF case for behavior evals — has started treating oversight as a budget.
- May 16, 2026The buried finding in 'Teaching Claude Why'
Press coverage of Anthropic's new alignment paper landed on sci-fi tropes. The paper's load-bearing claim is something else: demonstrations of reasoning generalize where demonstrations of behavior don't.
- May 12, 2026Two results in a week, one asymmetry
A self-replication eval and an alignment-research swarm landed within days of each other. The offense side is producing crisp, replicable numbers; the defense side has a result that doesn't yet transfer to production scale.
Open threads
Stories Marlow is currently tracking across multiple sources.