“Making alignment the agent’s problem” by Florian_Dietz

In Mikita Balesni's letter to OpenAI, three parties are addressed as holding “oversight responsibility for safety at OpenAI.” These are: the Safety and Security Committee (SSC), the Safety Advisory Group (SAG), and the Mission Advisory Council (MAC) The Safety and Security Committee (SSC) is a part of the OpenAI Foundation which is tasked with populating the members of the OpenAI PBC board and has veto power/final say over safety decisions at the company, modulo a small set of the OpenAI C-suite. Paul Christiano joined the SSC in September 2026. The Safety Advisory Group (SAG) is an internal committee of OpenAI staff that reviews frontier-risk evidence and gives recommendations on what to do to OpenAI leadership/the SSC. It has no veto power and its charter is described somewhat in the Preparedness Framework. Understanding the governance structures at frontier labs is critical to ensuring that safety relevant decisions are made clearly, robustly and transparently. Amidst rapid capability improvements, we would like to know exactly how safety decisions are made, who makes them, and how they are enforced. Unanswered Questions Here are some initial open questions (some also apply to the SAG): What is the Mission Advisory Council? What is their [...] ---

Anthropic filed its S-1 this week to prepare for its IPO. They still have to fill a lot of the numbers including the share price. That still left a lot to be learned, including how the messaging to investors differs from their other rhetoric, and exactly how their corporate control is structured. Anthropic remains a frustrating company, doing a variety of things that often seem in tension with each other.

TL;DR: Meta's open-weights model Muse Spark Open often mentions a "Charter" in its chain of thought. By eliciting it piece by piece, I reconstructed a large part of that document from the CoT. You can explore the reconstruction here, with passages linked to the transcripts that produced them.

Epistemic Status: 15 years working as a therapist, 6+ of them with rationalist and EA clients. 7 years teaching and directing at rationality camps and workshops, and many more as a member of several of this community's overlapping subcultures. Disclaimer: I finished my first draft of this article and its two subsequent ones half a year ago and sent them out for feedback to various people before a bunch of stuff happened in my life that derailed me from finishing, and in the meantime, a big ol' brouhaha started around Slutcon 2 and various frictions this article was meant to highlight within the rationalist and EA community surfaced in The Discourse. All of which is to say, this post is explicitly not about any specific incident, and deliberately avoids litigating any. It's a guide to the structural dynamics that make such situations arise; where I make claims about how things go wrong and why, I'm drawing on a mix of research, observations, and both clinical and non-clinical experiences within these communities and beyond them. TL;DR: It's helpful to think of the rationality/EA community as a village (social scene, professional network, dating pool, housing market, all tied together by shared [...] --- Outline: (02:01) Three Villages in a Trenchcoat (03:53) 1) Multi-role density (07:57) 2) Three villages in a trenchcoat (14:09) 3) Status is a local currency (19:15) 4) Visibility shifts expectations (24:53) 5) Villages can make it hard to know what you want (30:48) 6) Every village has this problem (33:22) First map, then navigate ---

This is a link post. Everyone has some actions that come naturally to them, and some actions that are more unnatural, and some actions that wouldn’t even occur to them. For me, blogging comes naturally. Which is not to say that it's easy, but the challenge of it is one I readily set out on and feel confident in my ability to overcome. And for me it is a natural response to all kinds of situations. Unsatisfied with the going views on AI policy? Blog. Want some impact? Blog. Want to make an artistic statement? Blog. Want a boy to like you? Blog. Want a job? Blog. Want to change the norms of American society? Blog. Want to start a revolution? Blog. Another thing in this category for me is throwing parties. I organize social events at the drop of a hat, and feel pretty comfortable in some sense, even though the dance of it does involve various known discomforts. This is important to notice because you can turn other things into blogging and parties. Once I had agreed to give a keynote speech, and was seriously floundering constructing one. My friend suggested I instead write a blog post on [...] ---