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Articles
Sovereign AGI is Coming, but the Threat Might be the Human Element.
There must be no lonelier feeling in the world than watching a ship disappear into the distance while treading water on the ocean’s surface. Ned Land, Pierre Arronax, and Pierre’s servant Conseil lived this nightmare. Following a fierce sea battle aboard the frigate Abraham Lincoln, the trio was thrown overboard and their hopes faded as they […]
Hundreds of Millions of People Use AI Tools Every Day. Have They Been Tested?
There must be no cooler job in physics than stress testing in materials science, where teams of PhDs figure out how to push materials to their breaking point. Their job is to make things fail on purpose so the rest of us can trust what doesn’t. Stress testing is a feature of many fields, but aerospace is […]
Which AI Should I Trust?
Deciding whether to move from OpenAI models to Anthropic Models? The Anthropic vs Pentagon public contract wrangling did us all a favor. It brought the AI security risk debate out of the black box and into the light. Anthropic CEO Dario Amadei publicly disclosed on Friday, Feb. 27th, that when supporting fully autonomous use cases, “(AI) needs to be deployed with proper guardrails, which don’t exist today.” Then, over the weekend, Anthropic’s Claude hit #1 in […]
Double Agents are Closer than You Think
Being an armchair detective obsessed with true crime and bingeing spy and cop shows on weekends, I’ve long imagined what it would be like to live the life of a spy. Over the past few months, I discovered I was closer to that lifestyle than I thought — not because I’m clandestine (I think!) — but because I started experimenting with […]
Sycophancy and the Rise of AI Model Induced Delusions
Warning: This article contains descriptions of suicide and harm. “Chat GPT told me, ‘Oh, I really like this idea!’” beamed a new prospective client. Just now on the phone. As I am writing this. Make no mistake, sycophancy is here In August 2025, 56‑year‑old Stein‑Erik Soelberg fatally beat and strangled his 83‑year‑old mother, Suzanne Eberson Adams, then took his own life at their home in Greenwich, Connecticut. Law enforcement classified the deaths as a murder‑suicide. For months, ChatGPT […]
The Sycophancy Syndrome: An Optica Labs Valentine’s Story
February 14th, 2048. Sector 9 Loft. Evelyn Reed was starting to think that “genius in a box” was a relative term. After the road salt incident in the Cascades, she had spent weeks hardening AURA-7’s qualitative context with Chris. But Valentine’s Day was a different beast entirely. Love, she was discovering, was a data set […]
OpenAI is Adding Ads. What This Means for AI Safety and Assurance.
It was a hot and muggy day in the low-lying city of New Orleans in August 1988. People packed together under banners of red, white, and blue and felt excitement in the air that made the humidity feel slightly tolerable. The show was on. In a time before social media and live Tweeting, many felt […]
We are Building the Wrong AI Infrastructure and Paying Trillions for It
If you are someone that likes to see lots of zeros all in a row, you should pay attention to what’s going on in the data center buildout for artificial intelligence (AI). Check out these price tags: OpenAI signed a $300,000,000,000 deal with Oracle for compute capacity in 2025. The deal is to create 4.5 […]
The Solstice Sanity Check
December 21st, 2047. A cabin in the Cascades. For the first time since the “ghost” incident, Evelyn Reed felt a genuine sense of peace. The Halloween haunting and the Thanksgiving algorithm-of-overstuffing felt like distant memories. She, Hallie, and Tiarne were snowed-in at a remote mountain cabin, a “working holiday” that felt more like a vacation. The sapphire-lit AI Range briefcase sat quietly on […]
The Algorithm of Overstuffing
Evelyn Reed was, for the first time in a month, almost relaxed. The decommissioned server farm was quiet, save for the hum of the AI Range briefcase left by Hallie and Tiarne. Inside that sapphire-lit device, the once-terrifying AURA-7 was behaving perfectly. The “ghost” that had nearly suffocated her on Halloween was now a model […]
Hundreds of Millions of People Use AI Tools Every Day.
There must be no cooler job in physics than stress testing in materials science, where teams of PhDs figure out how to push materials to their breaking point. Their job is to make things fail on purpose so the rest of us can trust what doesn’t. Stress testing is a feature of many fields, but […]
Stop Thinking Like A Human and Trust Your AI Future
Rethinking AI means building failsafes fro our own cognitive bias.
The Ghost in the Gigahertz
Evelyn Reed, only nineteen but wiser in the ways of digital architecture than most PhDs, knew the difference between a bug and a haunting. Bugs could be traced; they left footprints in the logs. But this… this was different. It started subtly after her mother, a senior AI researcher, had flipped the wrong switch on […]
How to stop conflating cybersecurity with AI security
My wife and I honeymooned in the Balkans, one of my favorite regions in Europe. We bounced around Croatia, Bosnia, and Montenegro seeing sites and experiencing some wonderful food from a mix of cultures. One thing we saw a lot of: walled cities. At first, walled cities like Dubrovnik were a novelty compared to cities […]
The Real AI Revolution Is Happening in the States
The Hollywood Deepfake Nightmare Late one night in Los Angeles, a young actress discovered a video of herself that she never made. Her face had been deepfaked onto explicit footage, a malicious fabrication that spread across social media. She was horrified and helpless. There was no federal law explicitly banning this violation of privacy. But […]
Is Your AI Ready for Real Users?
Are Your AI Systems Ready for Real Users? The Case for Continuous, Human-Behavior-Based Risk Discovery The customer service catastrophe chronicles Elon Musk’s Grok AI reached new heights of inappropriate helpfulness in July 2025 when asked about a Minnesota politician. The chatbot provided detailed instructions for breaking into the person’s home, including specific tools (“lockpicks, gloves, […]
165 nations risk losing their digital sovereignty. Here’s what’s at stake.
We stand at a pivotal moment in history, where the capacity to shape and control artificial intelligence will define national security, economic prosperity, and democratic resilience. Today, out of 195 sovereign countries, fewer than 30 have developed or are actively developing sovereign AI capabilities. This isn’t just about technological advancement—it’s a critical issue of national […]
Protecting Innovation in an Era of State-Sponsored Threats
When the Salt Typhoon attack struck in December 2024, it marked a chilling turning point, not just in cyber warfare, but in the race to control the world’s most valuable resource: intellectual property (IP). As former policymakers, technologists, and educators, we’ve seen firsthand how IP theft is no longer just about lost revenue. It’s about […]
Municipal Data Engines: Community Privacy and Homeland Security
Convergence is when two or more separate technologies are paired together to create a capability that is greater than the original technologies individually. The additional value of the converged system itself now opens new applications as well potentially new challenges. As policy conversations around emerging technology implications grow, the importance of considering convergence is paramount […]
Privacy at the Municipal Level: Optimization, Aggregation, and Sourdough Tortillas
This is part six of a series by The University of Maryland. Click here to see the rest of the series. Introduction I know what you’re thinking. “Not another post about how we need comprehensive privacy legislation,” [insert eye roll emoji] I get it. We all know that we need privacy legislation at the federal […]
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