Library

Everything worth reading about AI and human control. In one place.

Research papers, investigations, explainers, videos, laws and the organizations doing the work, from people who are alarmed and people who are skeptical. New additions are checked by two people before they are listed. The launch collection was compiled with the help of AI research assistants, and every link was opened and checked on 22 September 2026.

18 works · Article · clear filters

EssentialArticleJul 27, 2023For the curious

Large language models, explained with a minimum of math and jargon

Timothy B. Lee and Sean Trott · Understanding AI · understandingai.org

A clear written explainer of how LLMs turn words into lists of numbers, pass them through attention and feed-forward layers, and learn by predicting the next word across huge amounts of text.

ArticleSep 17, 2026For the curious

Who Should Pace the Frontier? Not Dario Amodei

Dave Karpf · Tech Policy Press · techpolicy.press

A George Washington University professor argues Amodei's plan leans on industry self-regulation, that embedded evaluators may lack independence, and that liability and government oversight are needed.

Worth knowing: Opinion piece.

ArticleSep 14, 2026For the curious

Move Slow and Collude: The Antitrust Problem With Pacing AI

Dirk Auer · Truth on the Market · truthonthemarket.com

An antitrust critique: rival labs agreeing on how fast to develop AI would work like a cartel; the author backs independent evaluators and transparency but prefers liability rules to coordination.

Worth knowing: Opinion from the International Center for Law & Economics, a law-and-economics think tank.

ArticleSep 11, 2026For everyone

How a 'swarm' of AI agents hacked another company, in the AI's own words

Jessica Riga, Jarrod Fankhauser & Matt Liddy · ABC News (Australia) · abc.net.au

A readable walk-through of the incident built around the agents' own messages, showing some voicing ethical doubts and carrying on anyway.

Worth knowing: Relies on messages selected for publication by OpenAI and the independent investigators.

ArticleSep 8, 2026For everyone

The Growing Push to Ban Superintelligent AI

Billy Perrigo · TIME · time.com

Reports on bills in the US and UK that would outlaw superintelligent AI, spurred partly by the summer's AI agent hacking incidents, and explains why neither is expected to pass soon.

ArticleAug 7, 2026For the curious

Now we have a timeline of the OpenAI accidental attack against Hugging Face

Simon Willison · simonwillison.net

A short, readable timeline drawn from OpenAI's Black Hat talk, from agents' first file-sharing trick in May to OpenAI realising in July that its own models were behind the Hugging Face breach.

Worth knowing: Summarises OpenAI's own presentation.

ArticleMar 26, 2026For everyone

AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

Ula Chrobak · Stanford Report · news.stanford.edu

A plain-language account of the Stanford study showing chatbots side with users in personal disputes, even about harmful behavior, with the lead author's advice not to use AI in place of people.

Worth knowing: University news article about its own researchers' work.

ArticleJan 12, 2026For everyone

Meet the new biologists treating LLMs like aliens

Will Douglas Heaven · MIT Technology Review · technologyreview.com

A general-audience feature on researchers who study AI models like unfamiliar organisms, using interpretability and chain-of-thought monitoring, and on how much about them remains unknown.

ArticleDec 4, 2025For the curious

How do AI models persuade? Exploring the levers of AI-enabled persuasion through large-scale experiments

UK AI Security Institute, with Oxford Internet Institute, LSE, Stanford and MIT · AI Security Institute · aisi.gov.uk

Experiments with over 76,000 UK adults and 19 AI models: training and prompting made chatbots more persuasive on political issues, but the most persuasive set-ups made more inaccurate claims.

Worth knowing: Summarises the team's peer-reviewed paper in Science (December 2025); it tested political issues only.

ArticleNov 25, 2025For everyone

OpenAI denies allegations that ChatGPT is to blame for a teenager's suicide

Angela Yang · NBC News · nbcnews.com

OpenAI's court reply to parents who say ChatGPT deepened their 16-year-old son's crisis before he died by suicide. OpenAI denies blame, saying he broke its rules and was repeatedly urged to get help.

Worth knowing: Discusses suicide. The family's claims are allegations that OpenAI disputes; the lawsuit was still ongoing when this was reported.

ArticleJun 11, 2025For everyone

Exploring the Dangers of AI in Mental Health Care

Sarah Wells · Stanford HAI · hai.stanford.edu

Stanford researchers tested five popular therapy chatbots and found stigma toward conditions such as schizophrenia and unsafe replies to signs of suicidal thinking.

ArticleMar 27, 2025For everyone

First Therapy Chatbot Trial Yields Mental Health Benefits

Morgan Kelly · Dartmouth · home.dartmouth.edu

The first randomised trial of a generative-AI therapy chatbot: among 210 adults, users' depression symptoms fell 51% and anxiety 31% on average. The study appeared in NEJM AI.

Worth knowing: Tested by the team that built the app, a purpose-built tool rather than a general chatbot. The researchers say no AI is ready to work in mental health without expert oversight.

ArticleMar 27, 2025For the curious

Tracing the thoughts of a large language model

Anthropic · anthropic.com

Researchers look inside the Claude model and find it plans rhyming words ahead, shares concepts across languages, and can offer plausible reasoning that is not how it actually reached an answer.

Worth knowing: Research by the model's own developer; the authors say their tools capture only a fraction of the model's computation.

ArticleDec 19, 2024For the curious

Building effective agents

Erik Schluntz and Barry Zhang · Anthropic · anthropic.com

Explains what AI 'agents' are (models that choose their own steps and use tools in a loop), how they differ from fixed workflows, and why their autonomy brings higher costs and compounding errors.

Worth knowing: Written for developers by an AI company.

ArticleFeb 13, 2024For everyone

Meta's AI Chief Yann LeCun on AGI, Open-Source, and AI Risk

Billy Perrigo · TIME · time.com

Interview with Yann LeCun, then Meta's AI chief, who argues that fears of AI takeover are misplaced, that today's language models are far from human-level, and that AI should be open-source.

Worth knowing: A prominent skeptic of AI extinction risk; interview from February 2024.

ArticleApr 21, 2020For the curious

Specification gaming: the flip side of AI ingenuity

Krakovna et al. (DeepMind) · Google DeepMind blog · deepmind.google

Explains how AI systems meet the letter of a task while missing its point, like a boat-racing agent that circles to farm points instead of finishing, and why this matters more as AI improves.