Monday AI Brief
Keeping up with AI is a full-time job (trust me on this). To make it a little easier, I publish a newsletter with a carefully curated selection of the most interesting news and and analysis from the past week. I focus on:
- Capabilities: what can AI do now?
- Trajectory: where will we be in five years?
- Alignment: will superhuman AI do what we want?
- Interpretability: how will we know if it doesn’t?
- Societal impacts: will we have jobs in five years?
- Existential risk: what about AI-engineered pandemics?
- Strategy: how do we prepare for superhuman AI?
- Using AI: how do you get the most from your AI?
Monday AI Brief is short and mostly non-technical. If you’d like to go deeper, Monday AI Radar is longer and more technical.
This is what takeoff feels like. Anthropic and OpenAI have been explicit about their intention to create an intelligence explosion, and employees at both companies have recently confirmed that their models are significantly accelerating their own development.
This week we’ll talk about what that means, considering the trajectory of future progress, our increasing inability to measure the capabilities and risks of the frontier models, and some ideas for how humanity can successfully navigate what is coming.
First, an administrative note: I’m starting to write longer pieces on specific topics. I’ll link to them in each week’s newsletter, but you can subscribe to them directly if you like.
We have so much to talk about this week. The internet is taking a break from losing its mind over agents to instead lose its mind over Moltbook. Dario Amodei has an important new piece about the dangers of AI. Boaz Barak considers Claude’s Constitution. And more. There’s always more.
Anthropic has published Claude’s constitution (formerly known as the soul document). We’ll also visit with Dario and Demis at Davos, learn some surprising things about how LLMs think, worry about the children, and have fun with images.
We start this week’s brief with two pieces about the impact of AI on the economy and in particular employment. My money is on very major AI-related unemployment, fairly soon—I don’t think that’s certain, but the alternatives look increasingly unlikely.
In related news, prinz discusses an AI takeoff, we assess how well the AI forecasters are doing, and Nathan Lambert shares some guidance on how to pick the right model for the job. To finish up on a gruesome note, Dean Ball shares some of the worst ideas for AI legislation currently under consideration in various states.
People continue to lose their minds about Claude Code. We’ll begin this week’s newsletter with a look at what people are using it for and where they think it’s headed. Here’s my short take: Claude Code’s present usefulness is 30% overhyped. A lot of the amazing things people are reporting are genuinely amazing, but they’re quick working prototypes of fairly simple tools. But…
Sometime in the past couple of months, AI crossed a really important capability threshold. By the end of 2025, it was clear to any programmer who was paying attention that our profession has completely changed. By the end of 2026, I think that same thing will be true for many professions. Most people won’t realize it right away, and it may (or may not) take a few years for the changes to really take hold, but the writing is now very clearly on the wall.
Happy New Year! It would be silly for me to wish you an uneventful year, but I hope most of your surprises are good ones.
This week we’re talking about the challenges of benchmarking advanced AI, looking at new (and slightly longer) timelines from the AI-2027 team, worrying about AI-related job loss, and asking Claude whether it’s a person.
On paper, this was a quiet week: there were no major releases, and no big headlines. Online, though, there’s been a big shift in the vibe since the release of Opus 4.5 a month ago. It’s now undeniable that AI is transforming programming, and it feels increasingly likely that the same will happen to all other knowledge work before too long.
But that’s not all—we review the latest evidence of accelerating progress, discuss whether AI might increase the demand for knowledge workers, and look at how Claude handles mental health crises. And shoes! If you’ve been wanting more fashion reporting in these pages, today is your lucky day.
Welcome to the shorter and less technical version of Monday AI Radar.
This week brought some great 2025 retrospectives and some brave predictions for 2026. It was hard to pick just one, but I think Prinz did a great job summarizing what is likely to be one of humanity’s last “normal” years. We’ll also try to get our heads around the “jagged frontier” of AI capabilities, look at some impressive new accomplishments, and end on a meditative note as we contemplate life in a world that doesn’t need human labor.
Welcome to the shorter and less technical version of Monday AI Radar. We’re focusing on model psychology this week with pieces on training “character” at Anthropic, what we do and don’t know about the possibility of AI consciousness, and some hard questions about whether AI should prioritize obedience or virtue. Plus grading the big labs on their safety practices, copywriters talk about losing their jobs to AI, and a lighthearted look at a recent big AI conference.
Welcome to the shorter and less technical version of Monday Radar. Each week I’ll pick a couple of the most interesting and important pieces from the full update.