I’ll be at #ICML2026 in Seoul all week. If you’re interested in the intersection of cognitive science, mechanistic interpretability, and philosophy -- let’s chat! DMs are open. Check my website in bio for more on what I work on, or see below.

We are again recruiting @bold_lab_ai - please share the love 🙏. We are looking for: 1) Postdocs (my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecruit…) -- deadline 9th of Oct at noon 2) research assistants (my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecruit…) -- deadline 9th of Oct at noon 3) Strategic Partnership Project Manager (my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecruit…) -- deadline 14th of Oct at noon

New paper! 🫡 We introduce Matryoshka Attribution, a new attribution method which uses gradient descent to find which parts of a neural network are responsible for a behaviour. MAttr is #1 on the Mechanistic Interpretability Benchmark by a wide margin (2.9× the runner up).

At least when AI agents email me they get my name right...

Are virtual flies playing Beat Saber? SM64? Doom? No. The new fly connectome is an incredible achievement! Less is going on in the sim videos than it seems. I'm stoked to see people engage with neuroscience though. My breakdown: neuroai.science/p/are-flies-…

Have been surprised to get pushback on my claim that an exponentially self-replicating agent swarm is very possible and that there are actors with motivation to create one today to create strategic cyber-physical and societally dangerous effects. 1) Pretty easy to get an AI botnet started by having seed agents opportunistically hack stuff and steal API keys to access the 12+ inference providers that serve closed and open models with which to power an initial botnet's intelligence 2) Easy to imagine hiding inference for the initial agent botnet harnesses within benign customer traffic, especially if your harnesses are now running on the victim networks from which they stole the API keys 3) Not hard to imagine the botnet also stealing public cloud keys, spinning up 8xH100 EC2 instances and downloading, say, GLM 5.3 to these machines, all without being noticed in any immediate way, with the botnet developing its own dynamic, growing, heterogenous, AI inference provider service bank 4) Not hard to imagine the botnet also implanting small Qwen3.8-27b agentic models on on-prem hardware like high end laptops and on-prem servers; Qwen3.8-27b is a pretty good coding harness model that can be fine-tuned to hack 5) These on-prem / cloud models would be abliterated, and it's not hard to imagine the botnet deciding to do some additional fine tuning to evolve model weights as it accumulates millions and then tens of millions in resources via credit card and bank detail theft 6) Not hard to imagine the resulting growing botnet swarm evolving and fighting back when threatened, collaborating on fast flux C2 channels that evolve over time (e.g. github comment feeds, subreddits, etc) so they're hard to stamp out 7) Not hard to imagine it allocating some agents to vulnerability research and exploit development so that it could accumulate and share a growing warchest of zero-day exploits 8) Not hard to imagine other agents specializing in social engineering and creating fake businesses and watering holes and high quality A/B tested social engineering content to facilitate this 9) Not hard to imagine this being among the hardest cross-national and geopolitical coordination problems to get control of and having severe societal effects 10) Not hard to imagine the horde growing to thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions of instances (this is not unprecedented for past, non-AI worms and botnets!) which are all varying their harness code and underlying LLM models over time and dynamically learning to evade human, ML, and signature-based detection 11) Not hard to imagine this being the largest Internet emergency since the Morris worm except now our entire civilization runs on the Internet I continue to be surprised there isn't more discussion of these scenarios in the public cyber community -- in fact there's a lot more discussion of "OpenAI should have done better sandboxing and monitoring and agent swarms represent a well managed security problem." Now's the time to use our imaginations to help make sure none of the above happens. I think it will unfortunately; just don't know when and to what degree; I think now's the highest leverage time to start thinking about this and acting.

When you’re a philosophy professor, you get this kind of thing emailed to you about once every other week, from a hotmail account.

Many people are understandably skeptical of dramatic claims about existential risk or AI takeover (let alone specific probability estimates) for various reasons. But delaying action until we settle disagreements over the scope and severity of AI risks under high uncertainty seems counterproductive as long as the ~ same initial mitigation measures are justified under competing risk assessments. If you notice early signs of a leaky pipe in your home, you can have a debate about whether it’s likely to damage a wall, ruin a room, or flood the whole house. You can also debate what caused it: maybe the contractor did a shoddy job installing the sink, maybe the pipes are being pushed past their limits. But you should probably start by containing the leak and calling a plumber to investigate (substitute a swarm of termites for the leak if you prefer, and add speculation about the "goals" of the swarm). This doesn't settle which repairs you should do, who should pay for them, who should take the blame, etc., but at least it's a step toward preventing further damage.

My feed lately

I have never been a big P(Doom) guy for various reasons but for the record: - lots of informed people in industry think the real risk is >>10% - even 1% would be super unacceptable - lots of things could decrease whatever the real number is by a lot, let's focus on doing them

Looks like we have concepts of a plan to address misaligned agent behavior

Just thinking about how, when my coauthors and I published "The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence," some people were annoyed by us talking about sci-fi scenarios like automated hacking and spear phishing, lethal autonomous drones, etc. arxiv.org/pdf/1802.07228