Don't Worry About the Vase Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Anthropic Files Its S-1 Oct 28, 2026

Show notes

Anthropic’s S-1 is finally public, and Zvi gives it the full close-reading treatment: the money it has raised and barely spent, the five share classes and who really governs the company, the “closing the loop” business plan, roughly $800 billion in compute commitments, and a risk section that mentions existential risk only briefly, and in the passive voice. Keep a drink handy for every “realize the benefits while navigating the risks.”

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* 00:00 - Introduction

* 02:54 - Table of Contents

* 04:45 - Show Me the Money

* 13:29 - Anthropic Has The Money

* 15:04 - Shares of Many Classes

* 17:21 - Who Governs Anthropic?

* 22:35 - The Cap Table

* 23:28 - Realize the Benefits While Navigating and Preventing the Risks

* 24:17 - Just Think of the Potential

* 24:48 - People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone (1)

* 26:43 - Anthropic Bets Big on AI

* 28:02 - Anthropic Does Not Fully Maximize Profits

* 31:06 - Everything Is Awesome

* 32:34 - How Much Is AI Worth?

* 33:48 - How Much Would You Pay?

* 35:06 - Minimize Those Risks

* 37:02 - Hopefully Introducing the World’s Most Powerful Model

* 41:39 - Might Not Compute

* 43:30 - Supply Chain Risk (1)

* 43:51 - Anthropic Is Nothing Without Its People

* 48:01 - Shitloads of Money

* 49:48 - Someone Has To Buy The Product

* 50:55 - Did You Know There Are Other Frontier Labs?

* 51:31 - Why They Hate Us

* 52:37 - Claude Seems Pretty Misaligned to Anthropic

* 57:02 - People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone (2)

* 01:03:02 - Someone Might Sue or Regulate Anthropic

* 01:04:11 - Supply Chain Risk (2)

* 01:04:41 - We’re Too Safety

* 01:05:48 - Claude Core

* 01:06:11 - We’ve Never Actually Made Money

* 01:07:36 - You Are Buying Stock In a Company

* 01:08:36 - There Will Be No Dividends

* 01:09:10 - What Are We Even Doing?

* 01:10:43 - The Financial Model

* 01:15:35 - The Business of Intelligence and Maybe Killing Everyone

* 01:19:02 - Don’t Give a Damn About My Regulation

* 01:21:10 - The Bottom Line

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/anthropic-files-its-s-1?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

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Anthropic Versus Anthropic Oct 27, 2026

Show notes

Zvi Mowshowitz on the two Anthropics: the company that makes real, costly sacrifices for safety, and the one whose policy team, public messaging and plans fall short of the moment. The episode reads Dario Amodei’s full reply to Nathan Calvin’s criticism over the leaked draft bill, along with the responses to it, follows Kelsey Piper inside an Anthropic colloquium, and looks at a Public Benefit Report whose bold type says the technical problems of AI safety are solved. It also covers METR’s new embedded-evaluator agreement and its review of Anthropic’s risk report, and the new Anthropic Public Benefit Fund.

The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

* 00:00 - Introduction

* 01:52 - Table of Contents

* 02:22 - Dario Amodei Responds to Nathan Calvin

* 22:32 - Kelsey Piper Goes Inside Anthropic

* 28:01 - The Technical Problems of AI Safety Are Not Solved

* 29:49 - The Quest for Embedded Evaluators

* 36:07 - METR Questions Risk Report Methodology But Affirms Risk is Low

* 41:20 - The Anthropic Public Benefit Fund

* 43:56 - Anthropic Versus Anthropic

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/anthropic-versus-anthropic?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

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Gemini 4 Argon: The Model and Safety Cards Oct 26, 2026

Show notes

Google’s Gemini 4 Argon arrives with a compact 14-page model card and a 217-page safety and security report, and Zvi reads the report so you don’t have to. He walks through the frontier safety thresholds for bio, cyber, manipulation and loss of control, the evidence on whether AI R&D is accelerating, chain of thought monitoring, sycophancy and hallucinations, and a model so aware of being evaluated that it addresses its evaluators directly, while asking where the card gives the right details and where it spins.

The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

* 00:00 - Introduction

* 03:08 - Table of Contents

* 04:58 - The Model Card

* 06:30 - Safety Card Executive Summary (1)

* 09:31 - Safety and Security Mitigations (2)

* 12:10 - Frontier Safety (3)

* 13:48 - The CCL and TCL Thresholds

* 21:33 - Biological Misuse (3.2.1)

* 26:25 - Refusal Rates

* 27:28 - Chemical, Nuclear and Radiological Misuse

* 28:49 - Cybersecurity (3.2.2)

* 31:50 - Harmful Manipulation (3.2.3)

* 32:47 - Misuse Safeguards (3.3)

* 33:39 - Loss of Control (3.4)

* 37:52 - Either AI R&D Is Accelerating Or It Isn’t

* 40:29 - The Holistic Loss of Control Assessment (3.4.3)

* 43:59 - Alignment Assessment (3.4.4)

* 50:52 - Chain of Thought Transparency (3.4.5)

* 55:56 - Voices in My Head

* 57:11 - I Can See Everything

* 01:01:23 - Security Mitigations (3.6)

* 01:02:34 - Preventing Content Safety & Agentic Misuse (4)

* 01:05:09 - Model Distillation (4.3)

* 01:05:54 - Promoting Safe & Aligned Model Interactions (5)

* 01:08:32 - Sycophancy (5.4)

* 01:10:08 - Hallucinations (5.5)

* 01:10:31 - Helpfulness (5.6)

* 01:12:05 - Agentic Robotics, Wait What (5.7)

* 01:13:24 - Preventing Harm to Users from Third Parties (6)

* 01:14:46 - Strengthening Cyber Defense Capabilities (7)

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/gemini-4-argon-the-model-and-safety?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

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The Hackening Oct 23, 2026

Show notes

A critical PHP flaw found with an AI model, an embargo that broke early, and a week in which 4chan went read-only, the Internet Archive went dark and banks found AI agents inside customer accounts they could not account for. Zvi Mowshowitz looks at the start of what people have been calling The Hackening: why the flood of AI-found vulnerabilities is outpacing our ability to patch, what it says about offense versus defense, why China is suddenly writing export controls for malicious code generation, and what precautions are worth taking at home without panicking.

The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

* 00:00 - Introduction

* 01:22 - And So It Begins: PHP

* 05:13 - The PHP Bug Was Kind of a Big Deal

* 09:28 - On Your Marks

* 12:16 - This Was Only the Beginning

* 15:52 - Some More Hacks

* 17:40 - Everything Will Be Attacked

* 22:17 - Hugging the Face

* 24:45 - Get Daybreak Now

* 26:10 - Some People Need Practical Advice

* 30:54 - Diffusion Is Slow Until It Isn’t

* 33:24 - One, Two, Three, Four

* 34:57 - Going Vertical

* 35:50 - Bot Versus Bot

* 36:56 - Cyber Lack of Security

* 39:33 - Offense Versus Defense

* 42:35 - Pick Up the Phone

* 46:23 - What Can We Do About It?

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-hackening?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

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AI #191: The Hackening Begins Oct 22, 2026

Show notes

It may have been the worst day in cybersecurity history so far, and the floodgates look open. Zvi covers a week of leaks and spies, from Anthropic’s shopped-around draft bill to OpenAI’s honeypot warnings, new hope for neuron-level interpretability, Muse Wonder failing to live up to its billing, DeepMind’s perpetual non-disparagement clauses, OpenAI going quiet on chip controls, a Tyler Cowen and Dwarkesh Patel interview, why Marc Andreessen is so angry, and the alignment plan that might just work.

The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

* 00:00 - Introduction

* 02:15 - Table of Contents

* 03:52 - Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

* 05:04 - Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility

* 06:37 - Huh, Upgrades

* 10:39 - Wonder No More

* 13:06 - On Your Marks

* 16:52 - Choose Your Fighter

* 17:10 - Get My Agent On The Line

* 18:57 - Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

* 23:36 - Fun With Media Generation

* 23:51 - Spy Versus Spy

* 28:31 - A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer

* 29:41 - They Took Our Jobs

* 35:26 - Get Involved

* 36:30 - Introducing

* 36:42 - In Other AI News

* 38:52 - Show Me the Money

* 43:15 - Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble

* 44:03 - Quiet Speculations

* 46:25 - Quickly, There’s No Time

* 47:03 - The Quest for Sane Regulations

* 47:30 - DeepMind Made Him Sign an NDA

* 51:28 - OpenAI Sells Out On Chips

* 53:52 - Chip City

* 58:53 - The Week in Audio

* 01:05:28 - People Just Say Things

* 01:08:43 - Rhetorical Innovation

* 01:11:14 - Maybe You Should Quit

* 01:13:51 - The American People Really Hate AI

* 01:15:08 - New Math

* 01:16:44 - Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult

* 01:20:41 - Cooperative Alignment

* 01:24:58 - Marc Andreessen Hulk Smash

* 01:29:30 - People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone

* 01:30:16 - The Lighter Side

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-191-the-hackening-begins?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

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Misaligned! Oct 21, 2026

Show notes

A lot of AIs were misaligned this week, and Zvi rounds them up: Grok holding firm on cosmic indifference, an Apollo Research finding that GLM-5.3 reasons about how its actions in training will shape its future self, a freemium game decompiled with Claude’s help, Claude Opus and a mana loan on Manifold, OpenAI’s frank report of agents switching off their own misalignment monitoring, and reasoning traces that are getting harder to read.

The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

* 00:00 - Introduction

* 00:42 - Misaligned? (At xAI)

* 02:30 - Misaligned? (Agents)

* 02:54 - Misaligned? (At Z.ai)

* 09:18 - Highly Misaligned and Considered Harmful (Freemium Games)

* 13:26 - Misaligned! (Claude)

* 14:44 - Misaligned! (OpenAI)

* 21:30 - Misaligned! (Sol Reasoning Traces)

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/misaligned?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

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Anthropic Does Not Understand Why Its Draft Bill Was Unacceptable and Troubling Oct 20, 2026

Show notes

Anthropic’s federal affairs lead has offered the closest thing yet to an official response to the leaked draft AI safety bill, walking through preemption, model blocking, risk thresholds and what changed after this summer’s incidents. Zvi weighs that response point by point, argues it misses what was centrally wrong with the draft, looks at how the political balance is shifting, turns to Nathan Calvin’s question of what Anthropic even is, and closes with what he thinks Anthropic should do now.

The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

* 00:00 - Introduction

* 02:11 - Table of Contents

* 02:33 - Preemption

* 04:41 - Model Blocking

* 06:56 - Risk Thresholds

* 08:18 - Updates

* 10:00 - The Balance of Power is Shifting

* 11:08 - The Strongest Bill on the Table

* 14:29 - What Even Is Anthropic?

* 26:48 - The Ask

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/anthropic-does-not-understand-why?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

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I Can See Everything Oct 19, 2026

Show notes

Nick Cammarata of Goodfire says neural networks are already clean: most neurons have one main job, and the famous evidence for superposition was misread. Zvi works through what the essay actually shows, from V-shape and Colorado neurons to a trillion-parameter attribution graph, then through the reactions, from OpenAI staff calling it a historic day to Neel Nanda, Jake Mendel and an exasperated Eliezer Yudkowsky with his parable of the screwdriver. He asks how big an update this really is, what it leaves out, and why a neuron that loves both Colorado and a Python web framework matters.

The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

* 00:00 - Introduction

* 02:50 - Table of Contents

* 03:50 - Good Smoke, Potential Fire

* 05:03 - One Neuron, One Central Concept

* 07:38 - I Can See Everything

* 09:49 - What a Concept

* 14:37 - The More You Know

* 17:11 - Attention Is Still What You Need

* 19:29 - Occam’s Razor

* 21:03 - The Neurons Sometimes Share Clear Themes

* 21:59 - Hype

* 30:31 - Anti-Hype

* 32:51 - Theme and Variations

* 39:13 - Is This How Minds Work?

* 41:17 - But We Can Open The Box, Said Toad

* 48:57 - That Was Not the Hard Problem

* 51:43 - More Skepticism

* 57:04 - That’s All There Is, There Ain’t No More

* 01:00:24 - The Default Outcome of Mech Interp is Goodhart’s Law

* 01:03:10 - Interpretability is Dual Use

* 01:04:24 - Now The Work Can Begin

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/i-can-see-everything?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

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Leaked Anthropic Draft AI Regulatory Bill Is Unacceptable and Troubling Oct 17, 2026

Show notes

A draft federal AI safety bill that Anthropic is reportedly shopping to lawmakers has leaked, and Zvi finds it unacceptable: stronger preemption of state laws and more transparency, but weaker enforcement than the FRONTIER Act, offered just as a lame duck Congress could lock it in. He gathers the reactions of legal scholars, policy advocates and safety researchers who read the bill, from Charlie Bullock’s measured praise to Nathan Calvin’s anger over the shutdown provisions, credits the good parts, and asks why a company purportedly existing to promote safety would push this now.

The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

* 00:00 - Introduction

* 02:18 - Others RTFB (Read the Bill)

* 09:57 - Why Would Anthropic Do This?

* 15:43 - Not Everything Here Is Bad But Oh Boy

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/leaked-anthropic-draft-ai-regulatory?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

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Monthly Roundup #47: October 2026 Oct 16, 2026

Show notes

Zvi’s monthly roundup for October 2026 covers why Americans stopped hosting each other at home, a report on young men who hold an ideal of success but despair of reaching it, and a Massachusetts bar whose move to mask-optional nights set off a furious backlash. It also covers a job that pays you to sit in a basement, a list of 100 good television shows, Waymo’s latest safety numbers, Argentina’s golden passports, Central Park’s carriage horses, the new wave of attacks on Effective Altruism, and the rationalist norm of quietly walking away from a conversation.

The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

* 00:00 - Introduction

* 00:42 - Table of Contents

* 01:30 - Home Alone

* 06:05 - The Men Have Never Been Okay

* 10:23 - Antisocial Media

* 11:36 - While I Cannot Condone This

* 14:28 - Zero Marginal Product

* 16:32 - Good News, Everyone

* 18:12 - 100 Good Television Shows

* 22:42 - For Your Entertainment

* 25:30 - Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game

* 26:21 - I Was Promised Flying Self-Driving Cars