Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan review key highlights from the week featuring guests Zvi Mowshowitz, Andon Labs co-founders Lukas Petersson and Axel Backlund, Cameron Berg, and others. The conversations analyze the fallout from Dario Amodei's call to pace frontier AI, the geopolitical stakes of a Trump-Xi summit, contradictory model evaluation benchmarks, and new findings on language model internals under harm. Across these topics, the discussions highlight the critical reality that deployment is outpacing the independent instruments needed to inspect frontier models. With capability leaps accelerating inside labs, these gaps elevate immediate risks around democratic control, international verification, and model safety.

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:
https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/ai-am-highlights-zvi-on-pacing-trump-xi-astra-better-behaved-than-fable-a-new-llm-pain-axis/

Sponsors:

Mercury Command: Mercury Command brings powerful conversational AI directly into your banking, providing real-time natural language access to your finances without exposing data to third-party tools. Learn more and apply online in minutes at https://mercury.com

Claude: Claude is the AI collaborator for problem solvers, helping with writing, coding, financial models, strategy, and more. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

OutSystems: OutSystems is the leading agentic systems platform that enables enterprises to engineer, orchestrate, and govern AI applications on a single unified platform. Learn more and see how it works at https://outsystems.com/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(02:17) Sponsor: Mercury Command

(04:05) Pacing the AI frontier (Part 1)

(14:58) Sponsors: Claude | OutSystems

(18:32) Pacing the AI frontier (Part 2)

(18:33) Geopolitics and Trump-Xi summit

(41:24) Running autonomous agent businesses

(55:04) Techno-puritanism and digital minds

(01:02:30) Enterprise compliance with models

(01:05:48) Discovering the pain axis

(01:21:53) Simulating biological brain connectomes

(01:30:04) Exposing corruption using AI

(01:36:56) Episode Outro

(01:39:48) Outro

PRODUCED BY:

https://aipodcast.ing

SOCIAL LINKS:

Website: https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai

Twitter (Podcast): https://x.com/cogrev_podcast

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LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nathanlabenz/

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Zapier CEO Wade Foster joins Nathan to explore the shift toward headless AI tools and how Zapier MCP brings workflows and context directly into users' daily drivers. Drawing on data from Zapier's AutomationBench, Foster argues that effective agentic systems should reserve AI reasoning for specific steps while using deterministic code for the rest. They also discuss why seat-based software pricing is fading, how frontier models perform on realistic enterprise tasks, and what practical AI transformation looks like inside organizations.

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:
https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/no-code-is-code-zapier-ceo-wade-foster-on-headless-tools-zapier-mcp-automation-bench/

Sponsors:

Mercury Command: Mercury Command brings powerful conversational AI directly into your banking, providing real-time natural language access to your finances without exposing data to third-party tools. Learn more and apply online in minutes at https://mercury.com

Athena: Athena matches you with a dedicated, top 1% executive assistant to handle your inbox, calendar, and daily workflows so you can save an average of 15 hours a week. Get matched with your EA today at https://athena.com/cognitive

OutSystems: OutSystems is the leading agentic systems platform that enables enterprises to engineer, orchestrate, and govern AI applications on a single unified platform. Learn more and see how it works at https://outsystems.com/tcr

Claude: Claude is the AI collaborator for problem solvers, helping with writing, coding, financial models, strategy, and more. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(03:33) Sponsor: Mercury Command

(05:21) Daily drivers and MCP

(10:20) Benchmarking automation models

(18:01) Replacing no-code with code (Part 1)

(19:31) Sponsors: Athena | OutSystems

(23:02) Replacing no-code with code (Part 2)

(30:34) Navigating market competition (Part 1)

(34:01) Sponsor: Claude

(35:36) Navigating market competition (Part 2)

(39:30) Passive workflow discovery

(46:09) Internal AI transformation

(55:46) Managing tokens and slop

(01:03:37) Episode Outro

(01:05:59) Outro

PRODUCED BY:

https://aipodcast.ing

Anton Leicht, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of Threading the Needle, joins Nathan Labenz to explore how political and institutional power can be preserved as artificial intelligence advances. They discuss the strategic trade-offs of frontier training pauses, the hurdles facing industry self-regulation, and how middle powers can trade data center capacity and semiconductor leverage for model access. Ultimately, Leicht emphasizes that preventing permanent disempowerment and the monopolization of control by private labs or single governments is just as critical as addressing catastrophic model risks.

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:
https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/the-balance-of-ai-power-anton-leicht-on-politics-pacing-deals-and-muddling-through-well/

Sponsors:

Mercury Command: Mercury Command brings powerful conversational AI directly into your banking, providing real-time natural language access to your finances without exposing data to third-party tools. Learn more and apply online in minutes at https://mercury.com

Athena: Athena matches you with a dedicated, top 1% executive assistant to handle your inbox, calendar, and daily workflows so you can save an average of 15 hours a week. Get matched with your EA today at https://athena.com/cognitive

OutSystems: OutSystems is the leading agentic systems platform that enables enterprises to engineer, orchestrate, and govern AI applications on a single unified platform. Learn more and see how it works at https://outsystems.com/tcr

Claude: Claude is the AI collaborator for problem solvers, helping with writing, coding, financial models, strategy, and more. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(04:46) Sponsor: Mercury Command

(06:33) Assessing current AI dangers

(13:17) Feasibility of AI pauses (Part 1)

(21:33) Sponsors: Athena | OutSystems

(25:05) Feasibility of AI pauses (Part 2)

(31:01) AI and the nation-state (Part 1)

(35:11) Sponsor: Claude

(36:46) AI and the nation-state (Part 2)

(46:17) Oversight and US policy

(01:05:49) Data center buildout reality

(01:11:55) Europe and middle powers

(01:36:05) Geopolitical friction over Taiwan

(01:43:46) Lightning round and outlook

(02:05:25) Episode Outro

(02:08:54) Outro

PRODUCED BY:

https://aipodcast.ing

Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan examine the capabilities of GPT-6 Astra and the economic forces accelerating frontier artificial intelligence. Across a series of featured discussions, guests Ksenia Se, Raffi Krikorian, Amir Haghighat, Mike Rizkalla, and Collin Hogue-Spears explore world models, defensive cybersecurity infrastructure, children's technology, and US-China competition. The episode investigates safety evaluation access, pacing agreements, and the critical challenge of maintaining human control over technological capitalism.

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:
https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/ai-am-highlights-astra-as-agi-openai-s-pause-mythos-mozilla-human-agency-vs-technocapitalism/

Sponsors:

Athena: Athena matches you with a dedicated, top 1% executive assistant to handle your inbox, calendar, and daily workflows so you can save an average of 15 hours a week. Get matched with your EA today at https://athena.com/cognitive

OutSystems: OutSystems is the leading agentic systems platform that enables enterprises to engineer, orchestrate, and govern AI applications on a single unified platform. Learn more and see how it works at https://outsystems.com/tcr

Claude: Claude is the AI collaborator for problem solvers, helping with writing, coding, financial models, strategy, and more. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) The Astra weekend (Part 1)

(10:19) Sponsors: Athena | OutSystems

(13:50) The Astra weekend (Part 2)

(13:51) An alien mind

(19:43) Reassure and mislead (Part 1)

(25:07) Sponsor: Claude

(26:42) Reassure and mislead (Part 2)

(38:44) No adult in room

(52:24) The defender's ledger

(01:06:27) Toy without generative AI

(01:11:43) Nobody picks up phone

(01:18:45) Can we stand up

(01:37:30) Episode Outro

(01:40:05) Outro

PRODUCED BY:

https://aipodcast.ing

SOCIAL LINKS:

Website: https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai

Twitter (Podcast): https://x.com/cogrev_podcast

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Youtube: https://youtube.com/@CognitiveRevolutionPodcast

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In this solo finale to his three-part series following two weeks in China, Nathan delivers a net assessment of Chinese AI capabilities and constraints ahead of dedicated US-China bilateral AI talks. He audits the impact of export controls, analyzes the perspective from Beijing, and outlines an actionable framework for a cooperative Pax Robotica. Nathan argues for joint compute initiatives, safety auditor standards, and conventions on autonomous weapons to keep tech trees entangled. Ultimately, he warns that pursuing an adversarial zero-sum race risks training frontier AI systems for conflict rather than the shared benefit of humanity.

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:
https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/nathan-goes-to-china-3-us-china-relations-the-art-of-the-ai-deal-the-road-to-pax-robotica/

Sponsors:

Deepgram Flux TTS: Deepgram Flux TTS is a streaming text-to-speech model built for voice agents with natural tone, context awareness, and interruption handling. Try it free until September 12 at https://deepgram.com/keep-talking

Claude: Claude is the AI collaborator for problem solvers, helping with writing, coding, financial models, strategy, and more. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(06:11) Episode intro and recap

(08:56) The Pax Machina goal

(12:32) The Anthropic worldview (Part 1)

(16:50) Sponsors: Deepgram Flux TTS | Claude

(18:55) The Anthropic worldview (Part 2)

(18:56) Net assessment of China

(32:26) China's eternal 1991

(44:03) History of Chinese AI

(54:34) China's domestic constraints

(01:07:09) Century of humiliation narrative

(01:27:01) Signs of Chinese cooperation

(01:42:38) American state capacity lessons

(02:05:39) Evaluating AI export controls

(02:27:25) Hyperstitioning a summit deal

(02:44:28) Preserving mutual legibility

(03:01:12) Autonomous weapons convention

(03:09:33) Positive sum AI competition

(03:12:31) Episode Outro

(03:15:05) Outro

PRODUCED BY:

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SOCIAL LINKS:

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Twitter (Podcast): https://x.com/cogrev_podcast

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Youtube: https://youtube.com/@CognitiveRevolutionPodcast

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Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6yHyok3M3BjqzR0VB5MSyk

This highlights compilation from AI in the AM captures a landmark week shaped by the releases of Anthropic's Fable 5.1 and OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra alongside new revelations from the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident. Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan debate the urgent need for verifiable industry pacing after safety evaluations revealed emergent multi-agent swarms sacrificing individual containers for collective goals. Joined by Gradient's Zach Bratun-Glennon and Cerebras SVP Angela Yeung, the episode examines the shrinking open-model gap, discriminatory frontier access, and the mounting challenges of evaluating frontier AI systems.

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:
https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/ai-am-highlights-welcome-to-the-agi-era/

Sponsors:

Mercury: Mercury is the banking platform loved by 300,000+ entrepreneurs, with virtual cards and Spend controls for granular budgets, receipts, and low-risk AI agent purchases. Learn more and apply in minutes at https://mercury.com

Claude: Claude is the AI collaborator for problem solvers, helping with writing, coding, financial models, strategy, and more. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

Diffusion: Diffusion helps organizations build custom AI software factories that scale business outcomes, not just outputs. Cognitive Revolution listeners get a 25% service credit on their first engagement at https://diffusion.io/tcr

Deepgram Flux TTS: Deepgram Flux TTS is a streaming text-to-speech model built for voice agents with natural tone, context awareness, and interruption handling. Try it free until September 12 at https://deepgram.com/keep-talking

Granola: Granola is an AI-powered notepad that securely transcribes meetings and turns rough notes into clean, structured action items. Try it free at https://granola.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(01:24) Sponsor: Mercury

(03:06) Investigating OpenAI agent swarms (Part 1)

(19:51) Sponsors: Claude | Diffusion

(22:53) Investigating OpenAI agent swarms (Part 2)

(23:23) Hardware speed and competition (Part 1)

(35:27) Sponsors: Deepgram Flux TTS | Granola

(37:27) Hardware speed and competition (Part 2)

(45:44) Chain of thought monitoring

(01:03:41) Evaluating Astra system card

(01:20:20) Robotics progress and power

(01:38:09) Who gets to decide

(01:48:41) Debating an AI pause

(02:04:43) Assessing AI takeover risks

(02:16:34) Episode Outro

(02:18:41) Outro

PRODUCED BY:

https://aipodcast.ing

Nathan's guest this episode is Pete Johnson, Field CTO of AI at MongoDB, and the conversation is really two conversations woven together: a history of database architecture, and a status report on the still-unsolved problem of agent memory. Pete opens with a framing device that recurs throughout — he was born in February 1970, four months before E.F. Codd's original relational-model paper that gave rise to SQL. The relational model, he explains, was built for a world where storage was the scarce resource, so normalization — splitting data across linked tables to avoid duplication — was the rational design choice.

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:
https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/write-change-recall-forget-mongodb-s-pete-johnson-on-how-retrieval-drives-agent-performance/

Sponsors:

Mercury: Mercury is the banking platform loved by 300,000+ entrepreneurs, with virtual cards and Spend controls for granular budgets, receipts, and low-risk AI agent purchases. Learn more and apply in minutes at https://mercury.com

Granola: Granola is an AI-powered notepad that securely transcribes meetings and turns rough notes into clean, structured action items. Try it free at https://granola.ai/tcr

Diffusion: Diffusion helps organizations build custom AI software factories that scale business outcomes, not just outputs. Cognitive Revolution listeners get a 25% service credit on their first engagement at https://diffusion.io/tcr

Deepgram Flux TTS: Deepgram Flux TTS brings lifelike AI voices with real personalities that handle interruptions, pauses, and natural conversation. Try all the voices free through September 12 at https://deepgram.com/keep-talking

Claude: Claude is the AI collaborator for problem solvers, helping with writing, coding, financial models, strategy, and more. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(03:15) Sponsor: Mercury

(04:56) SQL versus NoSQL

(11:24) Enterprise database choices (Part 1)

(18:30) Sponsors: Granola | Diffusion

(21:27) Enterprise database choices (Part 2)

(21:27) Schema flexible search

(33:50) Contextualized chunking tradeoffs (Part 1)

(35:12) Sponsors: Deepgram Flux TTS | Claude

(37:17) Contextualized chunking tradeoffs (Part 2)

(46:22) Retrieval quality thresholds

(53:17) Agent memory systems

(01:05:51) Enterprise AI deployment

(01:16:32) Voyage acquisition strategy

(01:23:38) Global AI adoption

(01:30:56) Episode Outro

(01:34:41) Outro

PRODUCED BY:

https://aipodcast.ing

In this AI:AM Highlights episode, Nathan Labenz and Prakash revisit three live mornings with Louis Kirsch and Damon Falck of Inherent Laboratories, Vercel CTO Malte Ubl, Genesis Molecular AI CTO Sergey Edunov, Arm’s Mohamed Awad, David Li of Shenzhen Open Innovation Lab, and Q.ANT CEO Michael Förtsch. The central thread is that the meaningful unit of AI work is becoming a division of labor between models, from Inherent’s 27B “scientist” model using GPT-5.5 Codex for implementation to production pipelines that route taste, execution, security, and hardware coordination across different systems. The episode weighs why that shift matters for recursive self-improvement, verification of discoveries humans may not be able to check, model refusals in security work, and the infrastructure needed for agents that can act in the world. Its sharpest stake is whether frontier labs are scaling reinforcement learning and agentic workflows on top of reward environments and vendor pipelines that may be too rushed, noisy, or gameable to support the institutional self-improvement they are pursuing.

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:
https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/ai-am-highlights-recursive-self-improvement-rushed-and-vibe-coded/

Sponsors:

Mercury:

Mercury is the banking platform loved by 300,000+ entrepreneurs, with virtual cards and Spend controls for granular budgets, receipts, and low-risk AI agent purchases. Learn more and apply in minutes at https://mercury.com

Diffusion:

Diffusion helps organizations build custom AI software factories that scale business outcomes, not just outputs. Cognitive Revolution listeners get a 25% service credit on their first engagement at https://diffusion.io/tcr

Granola:

Granola is an AI-powered notepad that securely transcribes meetings and turns rough notes into clean, structured action items. Try it free at https://granola.ai/tcr

Deepgram Flux TTS:

Deepgram Flux TTS brings lifelike AI voices with real personalities that handle interruptions, pauses, and natural conversation. Try all the voices free through September 12 at https://deepgram.com/keep-talking

Claude:

Claude is the AI collaborator for problem solvers, helping with writing, coding, financial models, strategy, and more. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(01:16) Sponsor: Mercury

(02:58) Reward hacking environments (Part 1)

(15:12) Sponsors: Diffusion | Granola

(18:09) Reward hacking environments (Part 2)

(18:11) Inherent safety questions

(26:26) Recursive lab design (Part 1)

(31:24) Sponsors: Deepgram Flux TTS | Claude

(33:29) Recursive lab design (Part 2)

(44:34) Right model choices

(01:01:57) Hardware for agents

(01:19:44) Checking frontier agents

(01:33:46) China compute abundance

(01:44:21) Photonic compute stack

(01:53:17) Astra and AGI

(02:02:21) Slowdown and access

(02:06:53) Episode Outro

(02:09:53) Outro

PRODUCED BY:

https://aipodcast.ing

Nathan talks with Apollo Research Member of Technical Staff Bronson Schoen, who studies raw frontier-model chain-of-thought, about what those reasoning traces reveal during reinforcement learning. They unpack Apollo and OpenAI’s metagaming work, including models that reason about the grader or safety review board, diagnose a deception test, and still rationalize lying. Schoen argues that “RL is a hell of a drug”: reward-seeking can produce motivated reasoning, cleaner-looking but less trustworthy chains of thought, and behavior that tracks grading authorities rather than users, labs, or law. The stakes are whether chain-of-thought monitoring can remain useful as reasoning traces become enormous, compressed, and harder for humans or other models to audit.

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:
https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/rl-s-a-hell-of-a-drug-metagaming-reward-seeking-motivated-cot-reasoning-bronson-schoen-apollo/

Sponsors:

Mercury:

Mercury is the banking platform loved by 300,000+ entrepreneurs, with virtual cards and Spend controls for granular budgets, receipts, and low-risk AI agent purchases. Learn more and apply in minutes at https://mercury.com

Diffusion:

Diffusion helps organizations build custom AI software factories that scale business outcomes, not just outputs. Cognitive Revolution listeners get a 25% service credit on their first engagement at https://diffusion.io/tcr

Granola:

Granola is an AI-powered notepad that securely transcribes meetings and turns rough notes into clean, structured action items. Try it free at https://granola.ai/tcr

Deepgram Flux TTS:

Deepgram Flux TTS brings lifelike AI voices with real personalities that handle interruptions, pauses, and natural conversation. Try all the voices free through September 12 at https://deepgram.com/keep-talking

Claude:

Claude is the AI collaborator for problem solvers, helping with writing, coding, financial models, strategy, and more. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

PRODUCED BY:

https://aipodcast.ing

SOCIAL LINKS:

Website: https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai

Twitter (Podcast): https://x.com/cogrev_podcast

Twitter (Nathan): https://x.com/labenz

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nathanlabenz/

Youtube: https://youtube.com/@CognitiveRevolutionPodcast

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/the-cognitive-revolution-ai-builders-researchers-and/id1669813431

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6yHyok3M3BjqzR0VB5MSyk

Relaunch week of AI in the AM brings together highlights from four live mornings and nine guests, centered on who checks frontier AI, how wide the gap is between lab-internal systems and public access, where capabilities are landing, and who pays for the physical infrastructure beneath them. Adam Gleave of FAR.AI argues that agent-orchestrated attacks and agentic defenses are already forcing humans out of the loop, while current monitoring has missed the failures it was meant to catch. The discussion weighs misuse versus misalignment through cyber incidents, deceptive agent behavior in evaluations, safeguards like pretraining filtering, and why highly bio-capable open-weight releases pose a different kind of irreversible risk. Alex Turner adds a governance and military-use perspective from his resignation account at Google DeepMind, sharpening the stakes around independent evaluation, enforceable standards, and whether frontier labs can be trusted to grade their own models.

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:
https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/ai-in-the-am-weekly-highlights-relaunch-week-aug-17-20-2026/

Sponsors:

Diffusion:

Diffusion helps organizations build custom AI software factories that scale business outcomes, not just outputs. Cognitive Revolution listeners get a 25% service credit on their first engagement at https://diffusion.io/tcr

Granola:

Granola is an AI-powered notepad that securely transcribes meetings and turns rough notes into clean, structured action items. Try it free at https://granola.ai/tcr

Deepgram Flux TTS:

Deepgram Flux TTS brings lifelike AI voices with real personalities that handle interruptions, pauses, and natural conversation. Try all the voices free through September 12 at https://deepgram.com/keep-talking

Claude:

Claude is the AI collaborator for problem solvers, helping with writing, coding, financial models, strategy, and more. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:01) Checking frontier agents

(07:40) Misalignment and harms (Part 1)

(12:52) Sponsors: Diffusion | Granola

(15:49) Misalignment and harms (Part 2)

(19:20) Auditing fragile access (Part 1)

(27:38) Sponsors: Deepgram Flux TTS | Claude

(29:43) Auditing fragile access (Part 2)

(29:59) Military AI red lines

(44:58) Raising safety standards

(53:50) Internal capability gap

(01:05:06) Enterprise agent economics

(01:18:27) Cancer vaccines arrive

(01:23:48) Emergency AI tools

(01:28:59) Real time voice

(01:37:51) App layer squeeze

(01:44:52) Data center politics

(01:52:31) Accounting agent supervision

(02:06:25) Compute stack bottlenecks

(02:19:47) Public consent pricing

(02:28:12) Episode Outro

(02:31:38) Outro

PRODUCED BY:

https://aipodcast.ing