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Today I got to experience a career North Star. I was honored with the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service along with my incredible Washington Post colleagues for our coverage of DOGE. Too many to name here but love you and hats off to us @jstein_star @jacobbogage @faizsays @FedGirlWaPo @MerylKornfield @Cat_Zakrzewski @hannah_natanson
washingtonpost.com/business/…
The build-at-all-costs era may be over. Inside Silicon Valley Dems’ new playbook on AI. washingtonpost.com/technolog…
Nuance aside, one way to look at last night is to say that the entire country resoundingly rejected everything the tech world has come to stand for. You can grieve, you can rage, you can fight, you can move to space, or you can grapple with that.
Back in 2016, many tech elites did some real (or something approximating real) soul searching about their own role in the alienation of working class Americans who elected Donald Trump. Early convos about AI job loss etc.
I don’t see that happening this time. I don’t expect the people leading the AI boom to try and understand why people are rejecting data centers in their communities. They are going to blame China, blame misinformation and keep fighting.
Big news in the fertility world this morning. Gameto, the pluripotent stem cell startup I wrote about in my future of fertility series last year, was acquired by Ferring (pharma co) for $1.4b! It uses stem cells to essentially regenerate dysfunctional or aging eggs in women’s ovaries. I imagine this biotech will now became a standard part of IVF care, and as I wrote last year, it also has promising implications for aging-related symptoms of menopause too.
bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
My original story on Gameto’s anti-aging implications.
share.google/U1N7Ss49bIudabr…
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What I find fascinating about the reaction to our scoop today is that everyone involved - Anthropic, Cathedral, security experts, and the Trump administration - actually agrees on what needs to be done to prevent these AI-enabled agent attacks: red team for vulnerabilities all the time.
And everyone thinks these sorts of attacks will only get worse. Is such a solution possible? Surely an industry is springing up around it.
Small quibbles with Logan but not worth litigating here. Thnx for your response
I think this story is important because it tells us about the future of cybersecurity (and of course what we can do better at Anthropic). But some of the Washington Post story / reaction on X is wrong. A few corrections:
- it didn’t take 12 hours. we saw several days of attempts. After these attempts, they exploited two 3rd party vulnerabilities, one they reported and the other we identified independently (and cut off access)
- nothing came close to our most sensitive systems, like model weights or Claude conversations
- this wasn't an ordinary bug bounty finding – this involved exploiting 3rd parties and accessing data. While this is unusual and out of scope of our safe harbor policy, we’re grateful these issues were found
From my researcher POV, the event is important because I'm concerned this is what the future will look like. Adversaries will use whatever models/tools they can. They’ll target everything with agents 24/7. They’ll hit your dependencies. I think models ~0.5-1 generations behind the current frontier can do this. And these are the dumbest models your adversaries will ever use!
So, what to do? You probably want to red team yourself all the time. Current models are *very* creative. I also think we should redesign software / systems so that you’re fundamentally less exposed. (We put out some research recently on formally verifying software and reducing attack surfaces; my mental model is basically “secure code is cheap to write now, so why not rewrite everything”)
NEW: Come November, “the pendulum could swing — and it could be a swing blade!”
Our story goes inside the frenzy of discussions at tech companies over how they might become a target if Dems retake Congress. washingtonpost.com/technolog…
EXCLUSIVE: In less than 12 hours, a group of ex-DOGE cyber researchers were able to penetrate Anthropic’s systems using AI agents — including Slack channels where the most sensitive models are discussed.
This is just weeks after
Anthropic whistleblower Joseph Coxon charged the company w/launching “a hubristic gamble” from a “private company’s Slack.”
Read our story here (gift link):
wapo.st/4smNlsC
A devastating finding. washingtonpost.com/climate-e…
Welcome to the post-DOGE economy. About 2 dozen DOGE alums have raised at least half a billion for new ventures, and some will pursue govt contracts, per our analysis.
Here’s why DOGE’s unpopularity and failure to achieve its deficit cutting goals didn’t matter to investors who showered these startups with cash. W/@faizsays
washingtonpost.com/technolog…
He spent 11 months inside DOGE. Now Tyler Hassen, the high-profile DOGE member coming out with a tell-all memoir, wants to set the record straight. Here, in a clip from my story today, he addresses split screen at the heart of the book.
EXCLUSIVE: I spoke to Tyler Hassen, the high-profile DOGE member about to come out with a tell-all memoir - the first to emerge from the secretive and controversial group. washingtonpost.com/technolog…
25 years ago today, I was a bright-eyed and bushy-haired student, less than a week into my freshman year at Columbia. As I walked out of my 1st year writing seminar that morning, a classmate ran up to me screaming, “A plane just hit the World Trade Center!”
I looked up at the sky and saw the trail of smoke crawling upward. We raced to the gym and watched on TV as the second tower was struck.
This was my initiation into New York, the city where I was born and where I had always yearned to move back to.
I can’t go into all the ways this seminal experience affected me or the rest of the Class of ‘05. But this was an instantaneous coming of age for our entire generation, one terror-filled instant. I subsequently learned that we were one of the smallest classes to ever graduate from Columbia, that a number of people dropped out after 9/11, unwilling to continue on in New York. My friend who went to Cooper Union still has the photos of people racing uptown from Wall Street, barefoot and in business attire, that she took from the window of her dorm on St. Marks.
Somehow, it seems fitting that the 25th anniversary would fall on Rosh Hashanah, a time of renewal, of annual harvest before the rains. Perhaps this is so the heaviness of that memory and all that followed it is punctuated by the knowledge that everything is always, also, a beginning, an opportunity to remake the world anew. Which might sound trite on another moment but today I will take it. Shana Tovah.
@mlz @tsumme @Phonz @AdamBKushner @GlowMaven @rjkhckly @JessicaFjeld @vancarr @clairethere @mbyruck @jburwen @baeilou @nicksummers @JonathanBlitzer
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It’s fascinating to finally read their side of the story. If the account is true, it implies that Marc A and Ben H turned toward Trump not because of AI regulation but because they were upset that the Biden admin was strangling the crypto industry — and were pissed about a proposed billionaire tax.
For two years @pmarca has been making up an obvious lie about a Biden WH meeting that led him to support Trump. I and others have repeatedly asked him to reveal who was in the meeting to try to verify his wild claims. Now the truth is out: politico.com/news/magazine/2…
I thought I knew a lot about wellness trends until I discovered San Francisco’s
“Joyful Brain Spa.”
joyfulmedspa.com/?gad_campai…
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Beautifully-written obituary for the great Dolly Parton in today’s @washingtonpost
washingtonpost.com/obituarie…
I met Joe Lonsdale 13 years ago when I was a newbie tech reporter at WSJ and my beat was “big data” — and Palantir was one of my companies.
His influence has grown immensely since then, and I knew it was time for a bigger treatment. (NYT had the same thought apparently).
washingtonpost.com/technolog…
The convo in my house rn, trying to explain my desire to see this movie (since I’m married to a Duke alum):
Honey, Duke has all the sports.
At Columbia, we have…The Odyssey.
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We did a deep dive into Trump’s son’s fast-growing defense tech empire. Drones, humanoid robots, and a company partnering with Prada to build a new space suit. Gift link here: wapo.st/4w1u8xW


