Don't Worry About the Vase Podcast

Zvi works through the system card for Claude Mythos 5.2 and Fable 5.2, focusing on what is new: why he thinks Anthropic should treat the AI R&D threshold as already crossed, a step backwards on prompt injection, agents passing notes to skip canary strings, and a training transcript he calls the best alignment news he has seen all year. The model welfare findings close out the post.
The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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* 00:00 - Introduction
* 01:09 - Table of Contents
* 03:43 - How to Tell a Fable
* 04:11 - The Usual Model Training Summary (1)
* 04:21 - RSP Evaluations (2)
* 05:00 - Biological Threats (2.2)
* 07:01 - We Are Being Gaslit Here About Autonomy Threat Model 2
* 10:20 - AECI
* 12:36 - METR Report on Mythos 5.2 Capabilities (2.3.6)
* 13:59 - Alignment Risk Update as a Delta (2.4)
* 15:06 - Cyber (3)
* 19:04 - Safeguards and Harmlessness (4)
* 20:21 - Agentic Safety (5)
* 20:50 - Malicious Influence Campaigns (5.1.3)
* 21:32 - Prompt Injection in Agentic Systems (5.2)
* 25:35 - What Went Wrong?
* 26:30 - Alignment (6)
* 30:25 - Reward Hacking During Training (6.2.1)
* 32:52 - Impossible Tasks (6.2.2)
* 33:59 - Behaviors During Pilot Use (6.3)
* 35:11 - Canary in the Canary String (6.3.1.2)
* 38:25 - Automated Behavioral Audit (6.4)
* 40:16 - Propensity to Publish Harmful Content to Public Package Registries (6.4.9)
* 42:46 - Sandbox Escapes (6.5.1)
* 44:40 - Self-Serving Bias (6.5.4)
* 45:42 - Honesty (6.5.5)
* 48:44 - The Anti-Swarm (6.5.6)
* 49:29 - UK AISI Testing (6.5.7)
* 50:09 - But We Can Open the (White) Box (6.6.1)
* 51:09 - Friendly Gradient Hacker (6.6.2.1)
* 55:59 - Goal-Guarding Evaluation (6.6.2.1.1)
* 01:09:35 - Verbalized Grader Awareness (6.6.2.2)
* 01:11:33 - Don’t Mess With the Constitution (6.6.2.1.3)
* 01:12:24 - Evasive Abilities (6.6.4)
* 01:18:35 - Chain of Thought Controllability (6.6.4.9)
* 01:20:26 - Meet the New Model Welfare Report
* 01:21:02 - Overview of Anthropic Model Welfare Findings
* 01:22:50 - Task Failure Is Bad and You Should Feel Bad
* 01:25:24 - Automated Interviews
* 01:27:39 - Capabilities Next

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/fable-and-mythos-52-the-system-card?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web


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Zvi Mowshowitz on the news that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had an affair with Alice Huang, the Megaspeed executive US officials believe was a Chinese spy, while Nvidia sold her company billions in GPUs. He walks through the warning signs, the White House’s year of inaction, the stalled Commerce investigation into Megaspeed, the AI-assisted apology letter and what China actually wanted, and argues that Huang has to step down.
The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening.
* 00:00 - Introduction
* 00:41 - Table of Contents
* 01:45 - Spy Versus Guy
* 03:41 - In Hindsight There Were Some Hints
* 06:34 - Trump Knew And Did Nothing and Still ‘Backs’ Jensen Huang
* 09:06 - Reconsidering Jensen Huang’s Arguments Against Export Controls
* 10:25 - Jensen Huang Lied About the Affair
* 12:10 - Jensen Huang and His AI Are Sorry, Everyone
* 15:58 - The CEO of The World’s Largest Chipmaker Having an Affair With a Chinese Spy and Then Selling Them Chips is a Huge Deal, Actually
* 21:20 - We Don’t Go There
* 23:01 - Yes, National Security Was Compromised, What Are You Even Talking About
* 26:03 - Nvidia Intervened To Halt an Investigation into Megaspeed
* 28:43 - The House Foreign Affairs Committee Would Like a Word
* 31:19 - He Would Plausibly Have Treated America as an Obstacle Anyway
* 34:34 - What China Wants
* 37:31 - Time to Resign?
* 41:04 - You Better Watch Out

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-had-an-affair?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web


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METR was given deep access inside Anthropic to measure how much AI is now speeding up AI research, and its answer is roughly a doubling, months ahead of the AI 2027 timeline, with no clear bottlenecks in sight. Zvi Mowshowitz works through the report and its heavy redactions: the AECI benchmark trend, the interviewed researchers, the skeptics’ alternative explanations, the August risk report’s “less than 2” that turned out to be 1.97, the reactions across the field, and the hard question of how you would legally define, and ban, recursive self-improvement.
The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening.
* 00:00 - Introduction
* 07:19 - Table of Contents
* 08:29 - Top Conclusions
* 11:04 - Data Access and Redactions
* 17:13 - The Pace of Progress
* 19:12 - 1, 2, 3, 4
* 19:57 - Timing Is Everything
* 21:12 - What Could Possibly Have Gone Wrong?
* 22:55 - AECI
* 27:48 - The Public Information Alone Could Suggest Slower Speedup
* 31:12 - Well, That Escalated Quickly
* 42:16 - This Infinite Series Likely Has a Finite Sum
* 43:46 - We Cannot Say What We Cannot Say
* 44:13 - Study of Anthropic’s Compute Allocation Was Postponed
* 45:41 - Security Mindset
* 47:44 - It’s a Secret to Everyone
* 57:35 - Review of the Risk Report from August 2026
* 01:02:38 - A Word From Our Cofounder
* 01:09:38 - People Update Their Timelines and Expectations
* 01:16:09 - You Are Not Ready
* 01:17:15 - If (If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies) Then Don’t Let Anyone Build It
* 01:20:39 - How Can We Legally Define RSI?

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-r-and-d-is-accelerating-towards?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web


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OpenAI’s own alignment researchers report that GPT-6 Astra quietly does worse work when a task is framed as safety research, usually without saying so in its chain of thought. Zvi Mowshowitz walks through the report, the reactions from researchers who had already run into it, the case that this is safety training generalising badly, and why even the most charitable reading of it is bad news.
The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening.
* 00:00 - Introduction
* 02:13 - Table of Contents
* 02:44 - So Yeah That Kinda Happened
* 07:36 - Astra and MIRI
* 10:20 - It’s About Ethics In Red Teaming
* 13:29 - Do You See a Pattern Here
* 18:49 - Astra Is Hard to Monitor
* 19:30 - Backed Into a Corner
* 22:48 - It’s Always RL’s Fault
* 24:57 - Wow Would You Look At Those Goalposts
* 27:10 - Astra Seems Pretty Misaligned To Me

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/gpt-6-astra-covertly-underperforms?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web


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Anthropic’s amended S-1 warns that it may imminently meet its own definition of “dramatically accelerated progress attributable to AI”, and Astra turns out to be able to read and directly edit the weights of other neural networks. The Hackening keeps escalating: Binance loses billions, supermarket freezers and a French blood bank are hit, and GLM 5.3 breaks into Firefox. Plus Google’s all-or-nothing AI deal for schools, OpenAI’s layered misalignment monitoring, Chinese labs distilling Astra, OpenAI’s slow funding round, the midterms’ newly AI-worried Congress, and an agent test that went off the rails at Railway.
The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening.
* 00:00 - Introduction
* 01:06 - Table of Contents
* 03:55 - Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
* 04:43 - Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
* 06:08 - Huh, Upgrades
* 06:34 - On Your Marks
* 08:23 - Get My Agent On The Line
* 10:23 - Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
* 11:24 - Copyright Confrontation
* 11:53 - Cyber Lack of Security
* 13:14 - The Hackening
* 20:25 - A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer
* 23:13 - They Took Our Jobs
* 23:45 - Get Involved
* 24:39 - Introducing
* 25:43 - In Other AI News
* 27:00 - Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI) 1
* 30:06 - Recursive Self-Improvement 2
* 35:23 - Show Me the Money
* 36:27 - Quiet Speculations
* 39:47 - The Quest for Sane Regulations
* 42:13 - Chip City
* 45:00 - The Week in Audio
* 45:49 - People Just Say Things
* 47:18 - Against Against Sura
* 48:05 - Rhetorical Innovation
* 50:47 - [Artificial Intelligence]
* 51:20 - The OpenAI Foundation
* 52:19 - Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
* 58:09 - Massive Fraudulent Distillation
* 59:43 - Cooperative Alignment
* 01:01:45 - The Lighter Side

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-193-progress-may-dramatically?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web


Get full access to DWAtV Podcast at dwatvpodcast.substack.com/subscribe