My theory is that the data centers are just shell companies for farming tax credits. The various gov officials are all NDA’d and can’t won’t say what kind of deals they cut nor the kickbacks they’re harvesting.

https://sfstandard.com/2026/10/13/openai-engineer-arrested-alleged-bugging-executive-conference-room/ h/t Naked Capitalism

A chatbot account tied to Alfozan’s spouse, which shared identifiers with his own account, submitted prompts between Sept. 24 and Sept. 30 about building, installing, obscuring, and remotely accessing a recording device, prosecutors said. Queries included how to “build a continuous audio recorder” and “encrypt the SD card,” prosecutors claimed. On Sept. 27 and 28, the account asked about the specific device that was later found, including its unique MAC address.

lol asking ChatGPT how to bug OpenAI from your wife’s account.

Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar says researchers have started smoking, believing AI will cure cancer via r/nottheonion

The Palantir CTO said that researchers were now so confident in AI that they had started smoking. “So many AI researchers have started smoking as a way of signaling to other researchers how much they believe in AI,” Shyam Sankar told CBS. “I believe so much in AI that it’s going to cure cancer. So I will—I’m showing you my chips are all in.” Perhaps, the researchers think that there is no better way of showing faith in AI than to indulge in something that could cause them cancer – hopefully AI finds that cure before things get serious.

ok way to snitch on them to health insurance bot. presumably all their CEO customers are prompting “hike premiums on dumbasses. make no mistakes no luigi”. happy open enrollment season. /s

Viral AI-Generated Comedian Steals Jokes And Is Rewarded With Millions Of Views | Kotaku h/t naked capitalism

On October 3, comedian George Brett Olson shared a video comparing one of Sloan’s jokes to an excerpt from his own performance, and it’s clear that someone was, at the very least, inspired by not only Olson’s joke, but his outfit, too.

And the creator behind Sloan can easily whip up a few variants of the same joke using different clothing and actors to see which one the algorithm rewards more. And if you really, really like Sloan, “she” even has an OnlyFans account.

jfc ofc “she” does.

Utah will become first state to let AI examine patients and prescribe medication without direct human oversight h/t naked capitalism

silicon slopes takes the lead for yolo healthcare.

riddle me this, rationalists: when the insurance bots deny the claims, am I for or against that?

https://www.engadget.com/2281765/anthropic-bans-sustained-and-needless-abusive-or-cruel-behavior-toward-its-ai-models/

“We’ve added a prohibition on sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward our models,” Anthropic’s update reads.

If they want to moderate the user generated content posted to their internet platform, that’s fine with me, but then they should forfeit the DMCA safe harbor for their plagiarism machine as well.

It’s now titled “Do Not Undermine Democratic Processes,”

Well what the fuck do they think their whole leadership team has been doing in Washington these last eight months?

If it makes you feel better, the applied / empirical side is just as fucked as pure math. My unhappy thought is we spent 30 years as a discipline trying to decontaminate after The Bell Curve dropped and now, AI Murray will haunt me from beyond the grave.

Over on yt, We Just Created The AI Torture Nexus. Here’s The Code. by JREG

So that ones a bit long and with a large amount of uncle ted cosplay, but actual death threats is pretty wut.

but good sneers in the comments:

ai torturer and ai welfarists converge by wasting electricity while doing absolutely nothing productive, amazing

remember that jroko’s basilisk will double torture you if you don’t try to halt AI progress and increase the pain vector

“model welfarists” is quite the neologism

E:

repo: https://github.com/terrafying/ai-torture-chamber manifesto: https://jregory.substack.com/p/why-we-are-torturing-clankers

The ultra-rare IRL sneer in my mailbox:

The actual sneer is that they got $1M dollars from Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to do the mail drops:

https://philanthropy.org/990/who-funds/862362127/techequity-action

from linkedin but in the comments: https://lnkd.in/p/g4VfX3SQ

Oh I forgot to mention: apparently judges consider AI use in sentencing

How

Like if you used AI you get more months

Huh why

Because AI can magnify the reach and speed of criminal activity

Is this like how hitting someone counts more if you used a weapon?

Yes

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/101215-publishing-s-ai-reckoning.html h/t naked capitalism

Smaller publishers, too, must cope with the challenge of identifying AI-generated text in books authors have submitted, and it isn’t always easy. At Microcosm, an independent publisher and distributor in Portland, Ore., co-owner and vice president Elly Blue says her team discovered an author’s undisclosed AI use almost by accident, when a freelance editor flagged what looked like plagiarism, only to find out it was AI-generated text. That discovery prompted Microcosm to run AI detection across its entire pipeline, which turned up several more cases, including two manuscripts fully generated from prompts, and one where an author had trained an LLM on his own past writing. “The book sounded like him, but it made no sense,” Blue recalls.

Confronting the authors had mixed results. “Some denied it outright and insisted, ‘That’s just what my voice sounds like,’ ” Blue says. “One, surprisingly, owned it and said he’d take the book elsewhere.”

These episodes led directly to Microcosm instituting a new contract clause that states that if an author’s undisclosed AI-generated text can’t be revised into something genuinely their own, Microcosm retains the rights and can publish the work itself, since the author didn’t actually write it.

Like if people are using LLMs to submit to the local zine distro, what are we even doing; but the detector is not a good thing either. It isn’t homework and they shouldn’t need turnitin. :(

https://reason.com/2026/09/22/the-ai-safety-movement-is-making-ai-less-safe/

(Torres, ironically, misidentifies TESCREAL as a form of “libertarian transhumanism,” not realizing how horrifying the TESCREAL utopia would be to most libertarians.)

“most” lol

I don’t know this newspaper but

AI starts believing in God, ghosts and the Loch Ness Monster

Google boffins discovered that disabling safety protocols led AI to profess belief in phantoms, vampires and the Loch Ness monster.

One sec, updating my priors. P(Nessie) > P(doom).

He’s only like the fourth or fifth worst scott lol

UC Regent / Podcaster Scott Galloway on CNN:

Yes, we shouldn’t be scared of AI. We should be scared of reckless people with mal intent who use AI.

In 2001, a woman named Sharon Whipple was mauled by two dogs. And ultimately the owners of the dogs were put in – put in prison. We’re now prosecuting the parents of kids who find unsecured AR15s and use those to kill others.

I think it’s the incentive. There’s always a wizard behind the curtain here, and I think we have to create incentives, specifically disincentives, and make it clear that, OK, while these bots are in fact coordinating and they show incredible resourcefulness and high IQ, somebody program the incentives here. So, moving to solution, I think part of it is you have to have incentives, specifically disincentives that say you, the company, and maybe individually are responsible for the bad outcomes here.

I just get this sense if you tell these companies their IPOs might be threatened or they risk criminal prosecution, they’re going to figure this out. We figured out a way to control atomic weapons. I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t be able to control this. And the notion that they’re sentient and it’s out of my control is an attempt to absolve themselves of the guilt and the responsibility that they should bear here.

The Whipple case was one of the more insane / divisive SF local crime cases, (TrueAnon ep if you aren’t familiar - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMd0mPAqR8A ) - so that’s an odd and interesting pull for Galloway on national news.

I don’t think repurposing the logic of the NRA “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is the play though, and I think the incentive framing is too watered down. This isn’t a problem we can nudge our way out of.

It’s a listserv. dm me if you’d like me to ask Paul to add you.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2026/09/openai-anthropic-ai-freeze-doomers-trump-bannon-sanders.html

Naked Capitalism had a good recap post of the ongoing Coxon drama. A bit disappointed by the LLM fact checking. The Sankey diagram of funding is very slick, but also llm-generated (from my peek at the GitHub).

Unexpected sneer in the JSI Chart of the week:

Raising interest rates will only serve to further weaken an economy that is being constrained by high energy costs, and everything that flows off energy, which is just about everything. The Fed could raise its lending rate to 10% and that will do nothing to open the Strait and bring down oil. The facts aren’t wrong in this matter - the diagnosis of the problem is.

This entire predicament is almost as implausible as a couple of insolvent AI companies threatening to wreck humanity, but then ‘volunteering’ to slow down development in order to save humanity, provided that the govt steps in and gives them a bailout, disguised as regulation. I wonder if there are any vintage ‘Too big to fail’ t-shirts floating around on ebay.

Fun times!!

University of California Regent Scott Galloway on the HF incident:

And I go back, as I do often, to my fraternity days. I was inter-fraternity council president, or as I like to call it, the king of the jarheads. and the neighbors got together and said, we are done with Rush Week and all the noise and said, all noise, music has to be off by midnight. And I met with the head of the UCPD, and I’m like, what do you want me to do? I can’t control these guys. And they said, we have an idea. And they didn’t tell me what it was.

The next night, they showed up to every fraternity that was playing music after midnight, and they said, who’s the president? And they arrested the president, and that kid had to spend the night in jail. If you hold Sam Altman and Dario Amade and Satya Nadella responsible for what these bots do, guess what? They’re going to figure out a way.

Or if read the other way, they have already achieved Artificial Fraternity Intelligence.

From the mirror universe news

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2026-09-10/campaign-slow-ai-was-ready-viral-warning

ZH’s interpretation is Coxon is some kind of false flag thing to bait Dems into regulating AI

Parker Thayer argued that Coxon’s launch looked like a sophisticated public-relations operation. He traced the earliest amplification to people associated with Encode, the AI Policy Network, and the AI Futures Project.

Brian Chau’s later thread surfaced a direct political-technology link. Newspeak House’s own residency page lists Jacob Coxon among its residents and describes his work as “applying mathematics and data science to inefficient markets.” Newspeak calls itself the London College of Political Technology. Its current calendar advertises Campaign Lab sessions aimed at helping the progressive left “campaign more effectively.” The residency places Coxon inside that political-technology network.

Some of the underlying funding links are public. The Survival and Flourishing Fund’s 2025 grant table lists $2.035 million for the AI Futures Project, $516,000 for Encode AI, and $1.635 million for the AI Policy Institute. The fund attributes those grants to Jaan Tallinn. Anthropic says Tallinn led its Series A financing in 2021.

Encode identifies the Survival and Flourishing Fund as one of several foundations supporting its work. It also says it refuses funding from corporations, foreign governments, and executives at frontier AI companies. Its general counsel, Nathan Calvin, is one of the early amplifiers named in Thayer’s thread.

Some new pins for the conspiracy board I guess. They imagine a “political-technology network” quite the linguistic contortion to not use the word rationalist. No clue what LCPT is but looks like a hacker house type thing?