Ray Blanco:

Anthropic Details Distillation Campaigns From Alibaba, Moonshot AI, and DeepSeek

A new report released Thursday by Anthropic alleged persistent distillation attacks by China-based AI companies, which have escalated in recent months as competition in the space has intensified.

"Over the last several months, unauthorized labs have developed increasingly sophisticated methods to circumvent our defenses and harvest the capabilities of U.S. frontier models," the report reads. "The campaigns we identified targeted some of Claude's most valuable capabilities, including agentic capabilities and tool use, coding and data analysis, and logical reasoning."

Anthropic previously spoke out about distillation attacks in February, even calling out specific labs. OpenAI has reported similar activity, which it attributed to DeepSeek specifically. But the campaigns detailed in Anthropic's new report are both larger and more aggressive. All told, the company observed nearly 200 million exchanges linked to distillation attacks, attributed to five separate campaigns.

Broadly, distillation attacks focus on extracting the chain of thought from a model's response to various queries. That chain of thought can then be used to train a smaller model on general reasoning ability through supervised fine-tuning.

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Davis Wilson:

Anthropic Insider: 10% Chance AI Kills Us All

On Tuesday, AI researcher Jacob Coxon announced that he was quitting Anthropic. Coxon has spent the past three years conducting research at OpenAI and Anthropic. His reason for leaving was chilling.

Coxon accused both companies of racing toward what he called "self-improving superintelligence" and "gambling with our lives." He said people building these systems genuinely believe AI could kill everyone by the end of the decade.

Then things got even stranger. Evan Hubinger works at Anthropic on one of the exact problems Coxon is worried about: keeping advanced AI aligned with human interests. He publicly backed Coxon's concerns. Hubinger said he personally believes there is a greater than 10% chance that AI kills all humans within the next decade.

If these people believe there is a legitimate risk of losing control of AI, I think we should take them seriously. I believe AI needs guardrails. The harder question is who creates them.

Meanwhile, despite the negative headlines, I remain incredibly bullish on AI and the companies building its future.

I don't think there are any easy answers here. We're talking about a technology with the potential to create enormous benefits for humanity alongside risks that some people believe could be catastrophic.

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James Altucher:

Carlo Rovelli: Nothing Exists Alone

Carlo Rovelli is one of the smartest people I know. He is a theoretical physicist and the author of some great books, including Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, The Order of Time, Helgoland, White Holes, and now On the Equality of All Things: Lessons on Physics and Philosophy.

He has been on The James Altucher Show before. This time, I asked him, "Do I actually exist?"

Because in Carlo's new book, nothing really exists on its own. Not a person, not a particle, not you, not me. Everything exists in relation to something else.

According to Carlo, we make a mistake when we try to imagine the world from the outside. We are not outside the universe. We are inside it. We are part of it. We know the world through relationships, perspectives, interactions, and limits.

And oddly, that is calming. Because Carlo says the thing that brought him serenity was not finally knowing everything. It was giving up the need to know everything with absolute certainty.

That is where the conversation in this episode goes: physics, quantum mechanics, philosophy, Buddhism, Taoism, Wittgenstein, consciousness, black holes, time, the Big Bang, free will, and the strange comfort of not needing the final answer.

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