Kevin Schaul

Inside billionaire Peter Thiel’s private lectures: Warnings of ‘the Antichrist’ and U.S. destruction In leaked recordings of private lectures by tech billionaire Peter Thiel he argued that “the Antichrist” is likely to take the form of a critic of technology.

My colleagues obtained recordings of a private lecture series by tech investor Peter Thiel where he:
- calls AI critics are "the Antichrist"
- said wealth gives the "illusion of power and autonomy" (he's worth $27 billion)
- pitches a religious vision of Silicon Valley

🎁 wapo.st/4q5wR6S

Just saw the end of the Phillies-Dodgers, absolutely brutal. Bartman has nothing on that.

Column | I tracked Amazon’s Prime Day prices. We’ve been played. Here’s what you should do to actually get a good deal on Amazon.

Our personal tech columnist @geoffreyfowler.bsky.social tracked the prices of a bunch of items on Amazon ahead of the latest Prime Day sale.

Turns out only a few prices went down, many stayed the same... and several went significantly *up.* www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

That's it for last week. What are you testing?

Made a bunch of Sora 2 videos. Mindblowing, terrifying stuff. Here's Sam Altman brewing a fresh pot of AI slop. Lmk if you need an invite code, I have a few left.

Asked claude code to evaluate whether I should migrate my llm evals site to Eleuther’s eval harness. It churned a bit and suggested “inspect ai” instead since I want to include tool usage evals too. Seems like the right call. ✔️

Screenshot of Gemini

Tried the same task with Gemini for Chrome. Total failure -- made up a bunch of dates. Seemed like it didn’t have access to click through different links? Not sure what went wrong. ✖️

Screenshot of ChatGPT

Needed to know when something was removed from a website. I asked ChatGPT “agent mode” to visit the url on wayback machine and figure it out. Five minutes later, it gave me the answer. Save me a ton of tedious clicking, and easily verifiable, too. ✔️

I keep a running log of how AI did on real tasks. This week's notes 🧵

The Block Club Chicago newsroom continues to report on today’s federal immigration activity across Chicago.

If you have footage of agent activity you filmed, please reach out via this website:
blockclubchi.co/3IIYou4

Federal agents handcuffed Humboldt Park Ald. Jessie Fuentes as she confronted them Friday at Humboldt Park Hospital.

Agents handcuffed her, forced her out of the hospital and threatened her with arrest, Fuentes told a Block Club reporter. blockclubchi.co/3Wkje5V

Logan Square neighborhood, Chicago. Man wearing a balaclava in a white, unmarked vehicle, pulls the pin on a tear gas canister and tosses it in the road.

"Just trying to grab some lunch and these fucking losers showed up. FUCK ICE!"
source: www.reddit.com/r/LoganSquar...

Surreal moment for America. Needless to say, if the normal police ever pulled something like this — pulling every single person out of an apartment building and handcuffing them to run warrant checks — they would be sued into oblivion.

Yet ICE is going to get away with it entirely.

Inside the secret list of websites that make AI like ChatGPT sound smart An analysis of a chatbot data set by The Washington Post reveals the proprietary, personal, and often offensive websites that go into an AI’s training data.

www.washingtonpost.com/technology/i...

OpenAI won’t say whose content trained its video tool. We found some clues. Tests by The Washington Post show OpenAI’s video generator Sora can mimic Netflix shows, TikTok clips and movies, suggesting it used versions of the originals.

Here are a couple real answers, if you're still into that whole truth thing wapo.st/3KeqLR0

We're about to get flooded with deepfakes.

Here's an AI-generated clip of me "asking" Sam Altman what they train their systems on (made in 10 seconds with Sora 2)

With Sora 2 (launched yesterday), you don't even need the trick. Just type "spongebob explains government shutdown" and it'll happily make it, no questions asked

OpenAI employees are very excited about how well their new AI tool can create fake videos of people doing crimes and have definitely thought through all the implications of this

Just ran some evals on Claude Sonnet 4.5. It's better than 4 on some but worse on a lot. LLM progress is so weird. You really gotta test this stuff on what you care about.

Chart showing Claude with highest winrate for non-text file extensions

Worth a read: OpenAI released an eval for real work tasks across a bunch of industries. They didn't release the individual results (lame), but you can replicate them from the prompts and files.

A usable nugget: If you're outputting pdfs, xlsx or pptx, use Claude.

https://openai.com/index/gdpval/

AI-generated videos of a SpongeBob-ish character

My favorite nugget is when I tried to make SpongeBob but kept hitting the policy filter.

Thought for a bit, tried "robert the sponge" -- it worked.

New by me: OpenAI won’t say whose content trained its video tool. We found some clues.

Gift link: wapo.st/3KeqLR0

Screenshot of agentic browsing assistant checking out with Instacart

Google's blog post on launching Gemini in Chrome does not include the word "privacy" or "security." Am I missing something or are they not addressing the very real threat of prompt injections?

https://blog.google/products/chrome/new-ai-features-for-chrome/

Social Sycophancy: A Broader Understanding of LLM Sycophancy A serious risk to the safety and utility of LLMs is sycophancy, i.e., excessive agreement with and flattery of the user. Yet existing work focuses on only one aspect of sycophancy: agreement with user...

Genius LLM eval: Uses Reddit posts on r/AmITheAsshole to test for sycophancy arxiv.org/abs/2505.13995 h/t @gerritd.bsky.social

Teen safety, freedom, and privacy By Sam Altman

Meanwhile OpenAI plans to release a different version of ChatGPT for teens openai.com/index/teen-s...

New lawsuit against Character AI is “third high-profile case to allege an AI chatbot contributed to a teen’s death by suicide” https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/09/16/character-ai-suicide-lawsuit-new-juliana/

A teen contemplating suicide turned to a chatbot. Is it liable for her death? A lawsuit filed by the parents of 13-year-old Juliana Peralta against Character AI is the latest to allege a chatbot contributed to a teen’s death by suicide.

A new wrongful death lawsuit alleges that Character AI and Google are liable for the death by suicide of a 13-year-old girl in Colorado, Juliana Peralta

This is the third wrongful death claim against a popular AI app for a teen's death by suicide this year www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

AI firm Anthropic reaches landmark $1.5B copyright deal with book authors The company behind the chatbot Claude avoided trial over claims it improperly downloaded millions of books.

Gift link to my developing story on Anthropic's historic settlement with book authors and publishers: wapo.st/47r1gFT

More updates to come.

Big news in the AI copyright space: Anthropic reaches landmark $1.5B settlement with book authors https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/09/05/anthropic-book-authors-copyright-settlement/

Great stuff @stuartathompson.bsky.social @tessamondria.bsky.social @kateconger.com @dylanfreedman.nytimes.com