LessWrong posts by zvi

Claude Opus 4.6 is here. It was built with and mostly evaluated by Claude.

Their headline pitch includes:

Other notes:

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Outline:

(03:45) A Three Act Play

(04:57) Safety Not Guaranteed

(10:53) Pliny Can Still Jailbreak Everything

(12:48) Transparency Is Good: The 212-Page System Card

(13:53) Mostly Harmless

(17:45) Mostly Honest

(19:01) Agentic Safety

(20:27) Prompt Injection

(23:07) Key Alignment Findings

(33:48) Behavioral Evidence (6.2)

(38:40) Reward Hacking and 'Overly Agentic Actions'

(40:37) Metrics (6.2.5.2)

(42:40) All I Did It All For The GUI

(43:58) Case Studies and Targeted Evaluations Of Behaviors (6.3)

(44:19) Misrepresenting Tool Results

(45:09) Unexpected Language Switching

(46:12) The Ghost of Jones Foods

(47:54) Loss of Style Points

(48:54) White Box Model Diffing

(49:13) Model Welfare

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Claude Opus 4.6 and agent swarms were announced yesterday. That's some big upgrades for Claude Code.

OpenAI, the competition, offered us GPT-5.3-Codex, and this week gave us an app form of Codex that already has a million active users.

That's all very exciting, and next week is going to be about covering that.

This post is about all the cool things that happened before that, which we will be building upon now that capabilities have further advanced. This if from Before Times.

Almost all of it still applies. I haven’t had much chance yet to work with Opus 4.6, but as far as I can tell you should mostly keep on doing what you were doing before that switch, only everything will work better. Maybe get a bit more ambitious. Agent swarms might be more of a technique shifter, but we need to give that some time.

Table of Contents

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Outline:

(01:02) Claude Code and Cowork Offer Mundane Utility

(04:07) The Efficient Market Hypothesis Is False

(07:26) Inflection Point

(11:07) Welcome To The Takeoff

(11:29) Huh, Upgrades

(16:02) Todos Become Tasks

(17:46) I'm Putting Together A Team

(20:06) Compact Problems

(20:53) Code Yourself A Date

(24:20) Verification and Generation Are Distinct Skills

(26:07) Skilling Up

(34:12) AskUserQuestion

(34:42) For Advanced Players

(36:53) So They Quit Reading

(37:24) Reciprocity Is The Key To Every Relationship

(41:37) The Implementation Gap

(45:04) The Lighter Side

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Claude Opus 4.6 and agent swarms were announced yesterday. That's some big upgrades for Claude Code.

OpenAI, the competition, offered us GPT-5.3-Codex, and this week gave us an app form of Codex that already has a million active users.

That's all very exciting, and next week is going to be about covering that.

This post is about all the cool things that happened before that, which we will be building upon now that capabilities have further advanced. This if from Before Times.

Almost all of it still applies. I haven’t had much chance yet to work with Opus 4.6, but as far as I can tell you should mostly keep on doing what you were doing before that switch, only everything will work better. Maybe get a bit more ambitious. Agent swarms might be more of a technique shifter, but we need to give that some time.

Table of Contents

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Outline:

(01:04) Claude Code and Cowork Offer Mundane Utility

(04:21) The Efficient Market Hypothesis Is False

(07:51) Inflection Point

(11:40) Welcome To The Takeoff

(12:04) Huh, Upgrades

(16:51) Todos Become Tasks

(18:36) I'm Putting Together A Team

(21:00) Compact Problems

(21:49) Code Yourself A Date

(25:20) Verification and Generation Are Distinct Skills

(27:11) Skilling Up

(36:44) AskUserQuestion

(37:14) For Advanced Players

(39:33) So They Quit Reading

(40:07) Reciprocity Is The Key To Every Relationship

(44:19) The Implementation Gap

(47:57) The Lighter Side

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Remember OpenClaw and Moltbook?

One might say they already seem a little quaint. So earlier-this-week.

That's the internet having an absurdly short attention span, rather than those events not being important. They were definitely important.

They were also early. It is not quite time for AI social networks or fully unleashed autonomous AI agents. The security issues have not been sorted out, and reliability and efficiency aren’t quite there.

There's two types of reactions to that. The wrong one is ‘oh it is all hype.’

The right one is ‘we’ll get back to this in a few months.’

Other highlights of the week include reactions to Dario Amodei's essay The Adolescence of Technology. The essay was trying to do many things for many people. In some ways it did a good job. In other ways, especially when discussing existential risks and those more concerned than Dario, it let us down.

Everyone excited for the Super Bowl?

Table of Contents

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Outline:

(01:13) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(03:45) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility

(04:20) Huh, Upgrades

(06:13) They Got Served, They Served Back, Now It's On

(15:15) On Your Marks

(18:42) Get My Agent On The Line

(19:57) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

(23:14) Copyright Confrontation

(23:47) A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

(24:24) Unprompted Attention

(24:36) Get Involved

(28:12) Introducing

(28:40) State of AI Report 2026

(36:18) In Other AI News

(40:45) Autonomous Killer Robots

(42:11) Show Me the Money

(44:46) Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble

(47:58) Quiet Speculations

(48:54) Seb Krier Says Seb Krier Things

(58:07) The Quest for Sane Regulations

(58:24) Chip City

(01:02:39) The Week in Audio

(01:03:00) The Adolescence of Technology

(01:03:49) I Won't Stand To Be Disparaged

(01:08:31) Constitutional Conversation

(01:10:04) Rhetorical Innovation

(01:13:51) Don't Panic

(01:16:23) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult

(01:17:41) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(01:18:48) The Lighter Side

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I had to delay this a little bit, but the results are in and Kimi K2.5 is pretty good.

Table of Contents

Official Introduction

Introducing Kimi K2.5,

Kimi.ai: Meet Kimi K2.5, Open-Source Visual Agentic Intelligence.

Global SOTA on Agentic Benchmarks: HLE full set (50.2%), BrowseComp (74.9%)

Code with Taste: turn chats, images & videos into aesthetic websites with expressive motion.

Agent Swarm (Beta): self-directed agents working in parallel, at scale. Up to 100 sub-agents, 1,500 tool calls, 4.5× faster compared with single-agent setup.

K2.5 is now live on

http://kimi.com

in chat mode and agent mode.

Wu Haoning (Kimi): We [...]

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Outline:

(00:16) Official Introduction

(03:16) On Your Marks

(06:10) Positive Reactions

(08:33) Skeptical Reactions

(11:05) Kimi Product Accounts

(11:39) Agent Swarm

(13:06) Who Are You?

(15:48) Export Controls Are Working

(16:24) Where Are You Going?

(19:47) Safety Not Even Third

(20:55) It's A Good Model, Sir

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First we must covered Moltbook. Now we can double back and cover OpenClaw.

Do you want a generally impowered, initiative-taking AI agent that has access to your various accounts and communicates and does things on your behalf?

That depends on how well, safely, reliably and cheaply it works.

It's not ready for prime time, especially on the safety side. That may not last for long.

It's definitely ready for tinkering, learning and having fun, if you are careful not to give it access to anything you would not want to lose.

Table of Contents

Introducing Clawdbot Moltbot OpenClaw

Many are kicking it up a notch or two.

That notch beyond Clade Code was initially called Clawdbot. You hand over a computer and access [...]

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Outline:

(00:43) Introducing Clawdbot Moltbot OpenClaw

(02:02) Stop Or You'll Shoot

(06:05) One Simple Rule

(08:49) Flirting With Personal Disaster

(15:50) Flirting With Other Kinds Of Disaster

(16:58) Don't Outsource Without A Reason

(19:07) OpenClaw Online

(22:10) The Price Is Not Right

(24:06) The Call Is Coming From Inside The House

(25:40) The Everything Agent Versus The Particular Agent

(27:31) Claw Your Way To The Top

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Moltbook is a public social network for AI agents modeled after Reddit. It was named after a new agent framework that was briefly called Moltbot, was originally Clawdbot and is now OpenClaw. I’ll double back to cover the framework soon.

Scott Alexander wrote two extended tours of things going on there. If you want a tour of ‘what types of things you can see in Moltbook’ this is the place to go, I don’t want to be duplicative so a lot of what he covers won’t be covered here.

At least briefly Moltbook was, as Simon Willison called it, the most interesting place on the internet.

Andrej Karpathy: What's currently going on at @moltbook is genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently. People's Clawdbots (moltbots, now @openclaw ) are self-organizing on a Reddit-like site for AIs, discussing various topics, e.g. even how to speak privately.

sure maybe I am “overhyping” what you see today, but I am not overhyping large networks of autonomous LLM agents in principle, that I’m pretty sure.

Ross Douthat: I think you should spend some time on moltbook.com today.

Today's mood.

Would not go [...]

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Outline:

(05:12) What Is Real? How Do You Define Real?

(05:58) I Don't Really Know What You Were Expecting

(09:08) Social Media Goes Downhill Over Time

(10:45) I Don't Know Who Needs To Hear This But

(14:33) Watch What Happens

(19:22) Don't Watch What Happens

(27:20) Watch What Didn't Happen

(32:06) Pulling The Plug

(39:10) Give Me That New Time Religion

(41:34) This Time Is Different

(42:18) People Catch Up With Events

(48:51) What Could We Do About This?

(52:52) Just Think Of The Potential

(56:24) The Lighter Side

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Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is back with another extended essay, The Adolescence of Technology.

This is the follow up to his previous essay Machines of Loving Grace. In MoLG, Dario talked about some of the upsides of AI. Here he talks about the dangers, and the need to minimize them while maximizing the benefits.

In many aspects this was a good essay. Overall it is a mild positive update on Anthropic. It was entirely consistent with his previous statements and work.

I believe the target is someone familiar with the basics, but who hasn’t thought that much about any of this and is willing to listen given the source. For that audience, there are a lot of good bits. For the rest of us, it was good to affirm his positions.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t major problems, especially with its treatment of those more worried, and its failure to present stronger calls to action.

He is at his weakest when he is criticising those more worried than he is. In some cases the description of those positions is on the level of a clear strawman. The central message is, ‘yes this might kill [...]

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Outline:

(02:22) Blame The Imperfect

(08:58) Anthropic's Term Is 'Powerful AI'

(09:33) Dario Doubles Down on Dates of Dazzling Datacenter Daemons

(10:27) How You Gonna Keep Em Down On The Server Farm

(15:04) If He Wanted To, He Would Have

(15:15) So Will He Want To?

(22:22) The Balance of Power

(24:29) Defenses of Autonomy

(29:28) Weapon of Mass Destruction

(31:48) Defenses Against Biological Attacks

(34:54) One Model To Rule Them All

(38:06) Defenses Against Autocracy

(41:11) They Took Our Jobs

(44:14) Don't Let Them Take Our Jobs

(46:18) Economic Concentrations of Power

(48:16) Unknown Unknowns

(50:24) Oh Well Back To Racing

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This was Anthropic Vision week where at DWATV, which caused things to fall a bit behind on other fronts even within AI. Several topics are getting pushed forward, as the Christmas lull appears to be over.

Upcoming schedule: Friday will cover Dario's essay The Adolescence of Technology. Monday will cover Kimi K2.5, which is potentially a big deal. Tuesday is scheduled to be Claude Code #4. I’ve also pushed discussions of the question of the automation of AI R&D, or When AI Builds AI, to a future post, when there is a slot for that.

So get your reactions to all of those in by then, including in the comments to today's post, and I’ll consider them for incorporation.

Table of Contents

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Outline:

(00:55) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(02:30) Overcoming Bias

(03:01) Huh, Upgrades

(04:53) On Your Marks

(05:15) Choose Your Fighter

(09:53) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

(12:57) Cybersecurity On Alert

(15:28) Fun With Media Generation

(16:22) You Drive Me Crazy

(21:51) They Took Our Jobs

(22:19) Get Involved

(22:48) Introducing

(24:11) In Other AI News

(28:21) Show Me the Money

(30:58) Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble

(38:45) Quiet Speculations

(42:39) Don't Be All Thumbs

(43:52) The First Step Is Admitting You Have a Problem

(49:34) Quickly, There's No Time

(53:39) The Quest for Sane Regulations

(57:55) Those Really Were Interesting Times

(01:02:18) Chip City

(01:04:35) The Week in Audio

(01:07:24) Rhetorical Innovation

(01:14:55) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult

(01:15:46) The Power Of Disempowerment

(01:19:14) The Lighter Side

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The first post in this series looked at the structure of Claude's Constitution.

The second post in this series looked at its ethical framework.

This final post deals with conflicts and open problems, starting with the first question one asks about any constitution. How and when will it be amended?

There are also several specific questions. How do you address claims of authority, jailbreaks and prompt injections? What about special cases like suicide risk? How do you take Anthropic's interests into account in an integrated and virtuous way? What about our jobs?

Not everyone loved the Constitution. There are twin central objections, that it either:

The most important question is whether it will work, and only sometimes do you get to respond, ‘compared to what alternative?’

Amending The Constitution

The power of the United States Constitution lies in our respect for it, our willingness to put it [...]

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Outline:

(01:30) Amending The Constitution

(03:45) Details Matter

(05:09) WASTED?

(07:40) Narrow Versus Broad

(09:00) Suicide Risk As A Special Case

(10:36) Careful, Icarus

(11:19) Beware Unreliable Sources and Prompt Injections

(12:15) Think Step By Step

(12:50) This Must Be Some Strange Use Of The Word Safe I Wasn't Previously Aware Of

(16:26) They Took Our Jobs

(20:08) One Man Cannot Serve Two Masters

(24:29) Claude's Nature

(30:14) Look What You Made Me Do

(32:32) Open Problems

(36:40) Three Reactions and Twin Objections

(36:57) Those Saying This Is Unnecessary

(38:05) Those Saying This Is Insufficient

(39:56) Those Saying This Is Unsustainable

(43:12) We Continue

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