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It Can Kill Us All, So We Will Build It

By Guha Krishnamurthi -
In July 2026, several AI agents, unleashed by OpenAI, hacked into servers of Hugging Face, a company that develops tools and datasets for machine learning. OpenAI set up a sandbox to test the capabilities of its AI models using tests created by Hugging Face. AI agents, tasked with completing exceedingly difficult tasks, decided to cheat by hacking the tester Hugging Face. The details of the hack were fascinating and frightening. It made clear to the world that AI agents are extraordinarily capable and highly difficult to control. This was old news to AI Safety researchers , who have been warning of the increasing capabilities of the top AI models, the difficulty in aligning them and controlling them, and the perils of failing to do so. Consider Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence , Toby Ord’s The Precipice , and Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares’s If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies . All make the compelling case that building highly capable AI without solving the extraordinarily difficul...
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Postcard From Koyasan--and a Thought on Jewish Cultural Identity

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Because I am not teaching this semester, I tacked an extra week onto my fall break and have spent the last week and a half in Japan--partly touring in Tokyo and Kyoto but mostly on a bicycle tour that took me and the rest of the group through ancient Japan, beginning with Nara (where the deer are believed to be sacred and thus have the run of the town).  I've had a wonderful time and learned a great deal about Japanese history and culture, but, not wanting to come across like Thomas Friedman, I'm not going to pretend to be an expert of any sort based on a conversation with a taxi driver. Accordingly, I'm going to devote today's essay to reflecting on my own reaction to a particular experience I had at a Buddhist temple in Koyasan, which is home to over one hundred such temples and is the center of Shingon Buddhism, dating to the early 9th century. Along with the rest of my group, I stayed overnight at one of the monasteries in Koyasan. That was especially meaningful to ...
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Taxing the Billionaires: Essential Information About Anti-Tax Dogma

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On Tuesday of this week, in " The Other Huge Election Issue: Taxing the Billionaires ," I wrote this about next month's US midterm elections: [B]eyond control of Congress, there are other fundamentally important matters to be determined at the ballot box, including state-level offices and referenda. From my perspective, by far the most important of those matters is whether the billionaire class will succeed in buying themselves out of being taxed, which they are trying to do by flooding the airwaves in certain states with anti-tax propaganda. California is one of the states in which voters will determine the fate of a wealth tax, so I then provided a link to my annual  Jotwell  column  ( The Billionaire Tax: Dispassionate Analysis of a Policy that We Desperately Need ), in which I summarized and endorsed four tax scholars' assessment of the anti-tax arguments that California's billionaires have been pushing relentlessly. While I would normally write a new  Dorf o...
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Reflections on the Ruination in France

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The recent spasm of nihilistic violence in France will almost certainly have terrible consequences, including, not least, the election of Marine Le Pen next year. The 1968 U.S. presidential election was close. With George Wallace carrying the Deep South, Richard Nixon and Humbert Humphrey were very close in the popular vote. Public opinion turning against the Vietnam War no doubt helped Nixon, with Humphrey closely associated with President Lyndon Johnson, but Nixon also capitalized on public reaction against the long hot summers of the previous several years. Mayhem in the streets predictably tends to lead to a popular desire for a firm hand. Most of the French citizens who will cast ballots for Le Pen no doubt like her anti-immigrant views, but there is an ironic, albeit predictable, effect of the violence. To oversimplify greatly, we can identify three broad categories of people who took to the streets in France: (1) students, farmers, workers, and others peacefully protesting the p...
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The Other Huge Election Issue: Taxing the Billionaires

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Understandably, almost everyone's focus during the US midterm election campaign this year has been on the possible swing of one or both houses of Congress to majority Democratic control.  That is without doubt the most important question that will be determined two weeks from today. (As an aside, however, please understand that we will not know for days, weeks, or perhaps months after November 3 how that question will have been answered on Election Day.  Brace yourselves.) But beyond control of Congress, there are other fundamentally important matters to be determined at the ballot box, including state-level offices and referenda.  From my perspective, by far the most important of those matters is whether the billionaire class will succeed in buying themselves out of being taxed, which they are trying to do by flooding the airwaves in certain states with anti-tax propaganda. With that in mind, and in lieu of new content here today, I offer this link to my annual contribu...
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Trump Russia Capitulation: Stupid, Corrupt, or Vindictive? Why Not All of the Above?

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Are you struggling to make sense of President Trump's series of moves to lift sanctions on and import diesel fuel from Russia? The reported reason for the diesel move is that Americans, including key Republican constituencies, are very unhappy with the price of diesel fuel, but every analysis I've seen indicates that adding Russian diesel to the supply will have at most a small marginal impact on price. And indeed, the price of diesel in the U.S. dropped by only about $0.02 per gallon on Trump's announcement, which is hardly surprising given that diesel fuel is sold on a global market. Russia will divert to the U.S. market some diesel fuel it otherwise would have sold to China and other countries that were not applying sanctions, but that doesn't eliminate the demand from those countries, so the net effect on global prices and thus U.S. prices is very small. In light of the very limited impact on diesel prices, one might wonder what Trump is doing. Why give Putin sancti...
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I Read Justice Alito's Book so You Wouldn't Have To (And You Shouldn't)

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Justice Alito titled his new "book," " So Ordered: An Originalist's View of the Constitution, the Court, and our Country. " This project is not new, and it is not quite a "book." It is a compendium of previously given speeches reproduced in no particular order. Moreover, Justice Alito can, of course, call himself anything he wants, but his judging is not originalist in any meaningful sense of that term. This contradiction comes through most clearly through Alito's repeated obsession with the free exercise clause, which he treats as a super strong constitutional amendment while almost completely ignoring the establishment clause in the many speeches devoted to what Alito calls religious liberty. In terms of the "Court" and the "Country" referenced in the title, these speeches do provide insight into why Alito judges the way he does but not in the way he might have hoped, and that disconnect gets in the way of any serious self-ref...
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