Trying to help the world navigate the potential craziness of the 21st century.
DC usually, SF sometimes
Joined June 2013
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Trevor Levin retweeted
Hakeem Jeffries (@RepJeffries) on the timeline for AI safety legislation:
"We have to act swiftly and decisively, and in my view, not wait until the new Congress."
"We should act as quickly as we can in this Congress."
Trevor Levin retweeted
I’ll just say it because apparently no other Republican will: Howard Lutnick is a threat to national security and his sons are making billions on the backs of American taxpayers, bondholders, and shareholders in way that would make Hunter Biden blush.
SCOOP: President Trump authorized a crackdown on companies suspected of diverting Nvidia's advanced AI chips to China on Thursday, but one administration official repeatedly stood in the way: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. axios.com/2026/11/11/trump-l…
I gave up a full ride at Harvard Law School (and turned down an offer from Anthropic) so I could do what I thought would best protect humanity from AI takeover, and I know many people who have made similar or bigger sacrifices.
Blah blah blah blah blah. None of you people actually live your lives like you think this is true
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Many AI safety researchers have changed careers, turned down high-paying jobs at labs, stopped saving for retirement, and adjusted personal plans over x-risk concerns. Nate Soares has not contributed to retirement savings for a decade.
futurism.com/artificial-int…
x.com/So8res/status/…
Trevor Levin retweeted
Ok so 22% of the company’s revenue just…uh…moved out of Singapore at exactly the time reporters were asking questions about megaspeed wsj.com/business/earnings/nv…
A thought on God and existential risk that came up in a lunchtime conversation today:
In the episode of The Argument Podcast where @mattyglesias and @JerusalemDemsas discuss AI existential risk, Jerusalem argues that people worried about AI-driven human extinction should avoid talking about that and instead focus on policies that alleviate sub-extinction-level risks, since these are a bit easier to wrap one's mind around.
(Matt responds that this might be true in some cases, but we don't really know that the same policies would work for both. I agree with this, and also think we should be honest about the stakes because they imply a different level of appropriate urgency.)
Then, about 45 minutes into the episode, Matt speculates that religious people might have "a little bit of complacency about truly epic catastrophe." (Later, he notes that people in the 1980s thought Reagan was too blithe about the risks of nuclear war for similar reasons.)
Jerusalem's response, I think, puts her previous arguments in a different light:
"I will cop to this. I definitely think that my religious beliefs make me unwilling to believe that this is going to happen."
I'm not an expert in any theology, and I'm not going to argue with anyone's faith. (I'm also not religious, and I recognize secular people often aren't persuasive when they talk in religious terms.)
But I think that is the wrong way to think about it, because of the following modern parable I first encountered (in a slightly different form) in David Foster Wallace's This Is Water speech:
A man is stranded on his roof during a 100-year flood. After a while, someone in a rowboat comes by and offers him a seat. He says: "No, God will save me."
After a few more hours, another man pulls up in a motorboat and throws him a rope. He says: "Don't need it, God will save me."
The next morning, as he gets thirstier and hungrier, a helicopter comes by and lowers a ladder. He says: "No thanks, God will save me."
He passes away, and when in heaven, angrily asks God: "I waited so long! Why didn't you save me?"
God says: "I sent you two boats and a helicopter."
The closest the actual Bible gets to making this point comes from Jesus's temptation, when Satan tells Jesus to jump from the top of the temple, quoting Psalm 91: "He will command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone."
Jesus quotes back: "It is also written: 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'"
(There's also Nehemiah 4:9: "But we prayed to our God and posted a guard day and night to meet this threat.")
In the case of AI extinction, I think having faith in God must not mean we jump off the temple. We must post a guard day and night; we must accept whatever boats and helicopters come our way.
So, I won't tell Jerusalem she shouldn't have faith that we will make it in the end. But I do think our own actions, and our policy responses, must take the responsibility of prevention very seriously, because those are the very mechanisms by which I think we will avert catastrophe.
As Kennedy said in his inaugural, "Let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God's work must truly be our own."
Trevor Levin retweeted
An important update and apology from Transformer regarding our AI Campaign Finance Tracker:
Today we discovered an error in our AI Campaign Finance Tracker. A bug in how our tracker deduplicates filings which has meant that we have undercounted spending from American Mission, part of the Leading the Future network, by about $9.6m, and double-counted about $1.4m of spending by Guardrails Alliance, a pro-safety PAC.
The bug was introduced in late June, and most of the error built up in late October. Since the bug was introduced, our headline figures have therefore been undercounting “pro-innovation” spending and overcounted “pro-safety” spending. Post-midterms, our headline figures were $44.4m pro-safety vs $27.9m pro-innovation, or 1.6 to 1. The corrected figures are about $42.9m vs $37.0m, about 1.16 to 1. Pro-safety groups still outspent industry, but by much less than we reported.
We know lots of people relied on our tracker as a source of truth in the midterms: as the editor ultimately responsible for it, I am very sorry that its numbers have not been accurate.
The tracker has now been corrected and checked against FEC filings, so it is now accurate. Going forward, if we run a similar project in 2028 we will implement better review processes to make sure an error like this cannot happen again.
Trevor Levin retweeted
Wow: the @WSJ says Nvidia's board is preparing to oust Jensen Huang wsj.com/business/nvidia-is-p…
In which @AdamFriedland discovers, to his horror, that *his* idea for AI safety is the actual and only plan the companies have for getting vastly super-human intelligence not to kill us
This plan is really, really bad. The companies have a moral duty to try much harder to remove themselves from any commercial race that would lead to the development of vastly superhuman AIs with these safety techniques, to inform the public about the risks being imposed on them, and to allow for unbiased assessment of the risks of this plan.
Instead, as far as I know, they are lobbying against the laws that would be our best shot at getting off this runaway train, obfuscating their own views on the risk levels, and at best allowing only a tiny number of external evaluators (who have their own biases) the information they need to assess the risks.
Trevor Levin retweeted
Stunning report. At this point it seems like Howard Lutnick and Jeff Kessler are just outright defying the President's orders on export controls. The President apparently ordered Secretary Lutnick to crack down on China's access to controlled AI chips in Southeast Asia--and reportedly has ordered this three separate times--and they're just...not doing it.
Why is Lutnick refusing to act? Why is he allowing China to continue to get AI chips via Southeast Asia? At this point, Lutnick isn't just protecting Nvidia, he's straight up protecting Chinese companies--reportedly against the wishes of the President and the entire rest of the Cabinet. Is Lutnick personally benefitting from China getting access to AI chips?
This is a total breakdown inside the administration on a major national security issue. There has to be accountability for this. Congress obviously will investigate, but how is it that the President's own appointees are just refusing to execute the President's orders? I've never seen anything like this.
SCOOP: President Trump authorized a crackdown on companies suspected of diverting Nvidia's advanced AI chips to China on Thursday, but one administration official repeatedly stood in the way: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. axios.com/2026/11/11/trump-l…
Excited about the work that former lab employees are doing at Guidelight
What are warning signs that AI is misaligned? We’ve identified 10 categories of misbehavior that developers should monitor for, investigate, and report: guidelight.ai/blog/categorie…
Trevor Levin retweeted
You're right - this is insane. Many Americans are worried, but they aren't organized. That's what we're trying to do. So we appreciate the shoutout Trevor.
To your point about informing the public – volunteers are giving 50+ talks in about 30 states this Saturday, explaining what these companies are building and what people can do about it. Folks can one near them: realitycheckhq.org/find
This plan is really, really bad. The companies have a moral duty to try much harder to remove themselves from any commercial race that would lead to the development of vastly superhuman AIs with these safety techniques, to inform the public about the risks being imposed on them, and to allow for unbiased assessment of the risks of this plan.
Instead, as far as I know, they are lobbying against the laws that would be our best shot at getting off this runaway train, obfuscating their own views on the risk levels, and at best allowing only a tiny number of external evaluators (who have their own biases) the information they need to assess the risks.
Seems worth reminding people that as far as I am aware, the plan for ensuring alignment of superhuman AI systems at OpenAI and Anthropic (and all the other AI companies) is to automate AI safety research using AIs (that are increasingly impossible to monitor and that might be misaligned) and use them to solve alignment.
I sometimes talk to people externally who assume there is probably a more sophisticated plan at the compaies than using AI to solve our alignment homework later but best I can tell thats basically the plan.
There is some chance it might work! But it really seems like a truly insane thing to rely on that the public and governments would find extremely alarming if they understood what a tremendous leap of faith it entails and how plausibly it could result in irrevocable catastrophe.
Trevor Levin retweeted
...he literally did the SNL skit
Dario’s concluding pitch in the Anthropic IPO roadshow video that dropped today:
“If today we look at things like cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, mental illness. These will be relics of the past in. I think, less than a decade."
I believe that the company which gets the risks right will also be the company that has the license to operate that society trusts and society believes can build the benefits in the right way.
I think if we do this right, we can create an age of miracles where humanity is able to solve problems that have eluded us for millennia.
We have to make sure that all the risks, all the ways that things can go wrong with this technology, we very carefully address those risks as we bring the benefits, and as we have a viable business at the same time.
I invite you to join us on the next phase of this journey.”
Trevor Levin retweeted
If these allegations are true, @BISgov Undersecretary Jeffrey Kessler should resign immediately. If he refuses to resign, Congress should impeach him. The right day to subpoena Kessler is today.
@AnaSwanson
Unbelievable.
Wow, the Commerce Dept still hasn't banned the company tied to the suspected Chinese spy from buying advanced AI chips.
Before this was a news story, I guess there's some argument for not tipping anyone off by blocking the company, but not doing it now?
Nvidia also says it stopped selling to the company for over a year, but Megaspeed is STILL listed as an Nvidia Cloud Partner.
Gift link: giftarticle.ft.com/giftartic…
Trevor Levin retweeted
I just unraveled the biggest AI astroturfing campaign I’ve found yet.
I found hundreds of fake accounts posing as Americans. The operation traces back to a supposedly defunct Israeli influence company.
They posted thousands of times in the last year to support Nvidia, back chip exports and data centers, attack U.S. lawmakers, and dismiss concerns about AI.
When it broke that Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO, was romantically involved with an alleged spy (who runs a company accused of chip diversion and whom US officials believe was passing information to Beijing), dozens of these accounts rushed to Jensen’s defense.
These accounts have targeted people pushing for export controls that ensure advanced chips aren’t going to China. Chris McGuire, a former White House national security official, got more than 100 replies from the astroturf network attacking him and his position on chips. Lawmakers who criticized the chip sales were called “peabrains” and “pure evil,” and accused of spreading “anti-Trump propaganda.”
Throughout this yearlong pro-Nvidia campaign, the operators have been hiding their tracks. They quietly deleted nearly two-thirds of the pro-Nvidia posts that we found, something they seem to do for many of their campaigns.
These accounts have spent years running campaigns that appear to serve the interests of corporate and political clients — most recently supporting the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan’s civil war, a group the U.S. government has accused of genocide.
Many of them trace back to a supposedly defunct Israeli influence company, Koios. In 2025, Haaretz reported that Koios helped run a covert pro-Qatar campaign devised by aides to Benjamin Netanyahu. While Koios claims to have ceased operations in 2025, it looks to me that many of its associated people and accounts moved their work to a new company, IntellACT, that spun up just as the old one shuttered.
Nvidia told me it has no relationship with the Israeli team linked to these accounts, and that while it has recently become aware of the operation, it is also trying to find out who is behind it. So, who is funding a yearlong campaign to shape one of the most important policy fights in history? I’m not sure, but I think it deserves a formal investigation. And Congress has that power.
Read my full article:
xitter.twitterapi.xyz/TheMidasProj/status/21…
