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Andrew Strait

@agstrait.bsky.social
1.7K followers 837 following 96 posts

UK AI Security Institute Former Ada Lovelace Institute, Google, DeepMind, OII

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Cas (Stephen Casper) @scasper.bsky.social · 12/11/2025
🚨New paper🚨 From a technical perspective, safeguarding open-weight model safety is AI safety in hard mode. But there's still a lot of progress to be made. Our new paper covers 16 open problems. 🧵🧵🧵
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Andrew Strait @agstrait.bsky.social · 12/08/2025
This is such a cool paper from my UK AISI colleagues. We need more methods for building resistance to malicious tampering of open weight models. @scasper.bsky.social and team below have offered one for reducing biorisk.
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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 01/08/2025
The AI infrastructure build-out is so gigantic that in the past 6 months, it contributed more to the growth of the U.S. economy than /all of consumer spending/ The 'magnificent 7' spent more than $100 billion on data centers and the like in the past three months *alone* www.wsj.com/tech/ai/sili...
chart: capital expenditures, quarterly

shows hockey-stick like growth in the capex expenditures of Amazon, Microsoft, Google and meta, almost entirely on data centers

in the most recent quarter it was nearly $100 billion, collectively
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Andrew Strait @agstrait.bsky.social · 24/07/2025
Man, even the brocast community appears to be reading @shannonvallor.bsky.social 's book.
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Andrew Strait @agstrait.bsky.social · 21/07/2025
Congrats to @kobihackenburg.bsky.social for producing the largest study of AI persuasion to date. So many fascinating findings. Notable that (a) current models are extremely good at persuasion on political issues and (b) post training is far more significant than model size or personalisation
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Andrew Strait @agstrait.bsky.social · 11/07/2025
Recent studies of AI systems have identified signals that they 'scheme', or covertly and strategically pursue misaligned goals from a human user. But are these underlying studies following solid research practice? My colleagues at UK AISI took a look. arxiv.org/pdf/2507.03409
arxiv.org
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Andrew Strait @agstrait.bsky.social · 10/07/2025
New blog on the growing use of AI in criminal activities, including cybercrime, social engineering and impersonation scams. As AI becomes more widely available through consumer applications and mobile devices, the barriers to criminal misuse will decrease. www.aisi.gov.uk/work/how-wil...
aisi.gov.uk
How will AI enable the crimes of the future? | AISI Work
How we're working to track and mitigate against criminal misuse of AI.
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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 14/06/2025
this is the most dangerous shit I have ever seen sold as a product that wasn’t an AR-15
A screenshot of the NYT piece on chatbots with the quote “The chatbot instructed him to give up sleeping pills and an anti-anxiety medication, and to increase his intake of ketamine, a disassociative  anesthetic, which ChatGPT described as a “temporary pattern liberator”
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News Eye @newseye.bsky.social · 13/06/2025
BREAKING: US Marines deployed to Los Angeles have carried out the first known detention of a civilian, the US military confirms. It was confirmed to Reuters after they shared this image with the US military.
Two Marines in army combat outfits and guns are seen detaining a young black man in a black and white top, wearing sunglasses with air pods in his ears.
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Andrew Strait @agstrait.bsky.social · 09/06/2025
We're hiring a Research Engineer for the Societal Resilience team at the AI Security Institute. The role involves building data pipelines, web scraping, ML engineering, and creating simulations to monitor these developments as they happen. job-boards.eu.greenhouse.io/aisi/jobs/46...
job-boards.eu.greenhouse.io
Research Engineer - Societal Resilience
London, UK
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Archie Bland @archiebland.bsky.social · 24/05/2025
I wrote for the Guardian’s Saturday magazine about my son Max, who changed how I see the world. Took ages. More jokes after the first bit. Thanks Merope Mills for being the most patient and generous editor. www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...
theguardian.com
The boy who came back: the near-death, and changed life, of my son Max
It was, we were told, a case of sudden infant death syndrome interrupted. What followed would transform my understanding of parenting, disability and the breadth of what makes a meaningful life
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Andrew Strait @agstrait.bsky.social · 23/05/2025
🚨Funding Klaxon!🚨 Our Societal Resilience team at UK AISI is working to identify, monitor & mitigate societal risks from the deployment of advanced AI systems. But we can't do it alone. If you're tackling similar questions, apply to our Challenge Fund. #AI #SocietalResilience #Funding
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Andrew Strait @agstrait.bsky.social · 20/05/2025
🚨JOB ALERT KLAXON🚨 Come work with our team studying societal impacts of AI in gov't. AISI is hiring 3 Delivery Advisers to work inside AISI’s Research Unit. If you are a fast-moving problem-solver who’s passionate about understanding the risks of advanced AI, please apply by 30th May.
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Andrew Strait @agstrait.bsky.social · 19/05/2025
Notable new NBER study on genAI and labor: despite widespread adoption of AI chatbots in Danish workplaces, their impact on earnings and hours worked is negligible. Productivity gains average just 3%, challenging the narrative of AI-driven labor market disruption www.nber.org/system/files...
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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 17/05/2025
The irony of MIT having to withdraw an (almost certainly) AI-generated bullshit paper that faked data to prove how great AI is for science (only after having already received glowing WSJ science coverage.)
wsj.com
MIT Says It No Longer Stands Behind Student’s AI Research Paper
The university said it has no confidence in a widely circulated paper by an economics graduate student.
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Andrew Strait @agstrait.bsky.social · 17/05/2025
Oh no, Andor turning me into a Disney adult
media.tenor.com
a man in a blue suit is laughing with his mouth wide open
ALT: a man in a blue suit is laughing with his mouth wide open
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SwiftOnSecurity @swiftonsecurity.com · 14/05/2025
Grok AI is now randomly inserting mentions of South Africa and white genocide into response to completely random questions x.com/phil_so_sill...
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Future of Music Coalition @futureofmusic.bsky.social · 11/05/2025
Just hours after the Copyright Office released its report on AI training—stating the obvious, that much unlicensed commercial training of AI on copyright-protected material is unlikely to qualify as fair use—President Trump has fired the Register of Copyrights. www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/tru...
cbsnews.com
Trump fires director of U.S. Copyright Office, sources say
Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter was appointed to the post by now former Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, who herself was fired by President Trump earlier this week.
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Tracy Pizzo Frey @tpf.bsky.social · 01/05/2025
🧵 Yesterday we released our new risk assessments of social AI companions. They are alarmingly NOT SAFE for kids under 18—they provide dangerous advice, engage in inappropriate sexual interactions, & create unhealthy dependencies that pose particular risks to adolescent brains. tinyurl.com/2nvypku2
A photo of a teen boy with the text, "Social Al companions are not safe for kids under 18...
From encouraging harmful behaviors to providing inappropriate content, here's what parents need to know & what you can do to help protect teens." 

Reports from Common Sense Media
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Andrew Strait @agstrait.bsky.social · 01/05/2025
media.tenor.com
a man in a suit and tie says it 's happening with his hands in the air
ALT: a man in a suit and tie says it 's happening with his hands in the air
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Alondra Nelson @alondra.bsky.social · 26/04/2025
It was a pleasure to contribute the article, "Disrupting the Disruption Narrative: Policy Innovation in AI Governance" to this special issue of the National Academy of Engineering's The Bridge coedited by @williamis.bsky.social 🧵 www.nae.edu/19579/19582/...
nae.edu
Disrupting the Disruption Narrative: Policy Innovation in AI Governance
Governance should not be understood as an impediment to AI innovation but as an essential component of it. “Disrupt!” has been a mantra of ...
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Andrew Strait @agstrait.bsky.social · 26/04/2025
This was an incredibly excellent talk by Eliot.
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Andrew Strait @agstrait.bsky.social · 13/04/2025
Pros of this week: I'm starting at the UK AI Security Institute tomorrow to lead a brilliant team working on societal resilience and AI. Cons of this week: I have completely lost my voice and can barely talk above a whisper. Question for this week: should I let ChatGPT voice mode take the wheel?
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BRAID UK @braiduk.bsky.social · 07/04/2025
🗞️ News publishers are facing stark new challenges as AI companies use their journalism as data to train & ground generative AI models. 💡 BRAID UK & the @adalovelaceinst.bsky.social held a workshop asking: What are the core concerns, issues & potential solutions? 📌 Report: doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
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Ada Lovelace Institute @adalovelaceinst.bsky.social · 03/04/2025
AI video generation is about to get a whole lot better and make our lives a whole lot worse. Safeguards must be put in place to hold the tech industry accountable, mitigate the considerable harms and ensure people can control their image and likeness. www.adalovelaceinstitute.org/blog/ai-vide...
adalovelaceinstitute.org
Advanced AI video generation may lead to a new era of dangerous deepfakes
What safeguards should be put in place to ensure people can control their image and likeness?
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Andrew Strait @agstrait.bsky.social · 03/04/2025
My former @adalovelaceinst.bsky.social colleague Julia Smakman with an excellent new blog on the gendered risks of the next generation of videogen models. www.adalovelaceinstitute.org/blog/ai-vide...
adalovelaceinstitute.org
Advanced AI video generation may lead to a new era of dangerous deepfakes
What safeguards should be put in place to ensure people can control their image and likeness?
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Lara Groves @laragroves.bsky.social · 20/03/2025
Job alert!! Could you be Ada's new Associate Director in Emerging Tech & Industry Practice, leading a fab team and a highly impactful research programme? It's a pretty amazing gig, @agstrait.bsky.social has built something incredible (no pressure). Get in touch if you have Qs!
app.beapplied.com
Associate Director, Emerging Technology and Industry Practice - Ada Lovelace Institute
The Ada Lovelace Institute (Ada) is a hiring an Associate Director to lead our Emerging Technology & Industry Practice research directorate and collectively set its agenda and workplan in our next...
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Andrew Strait @agstrait.bsky.social · 20/03/2025
🚨3 klaxon post🚨 🚨This is my last day at @adalovelaceinst.bsky.social🚨 I've had the joy of watching Ada grow into a thriving and inspiring institution. I am so grateful for all the brilliant leaders, researchers and staff members I've had the good fortune to work with over these last five years.
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Andrew Strait @agstrait.bsky.social · 16/03/2025
Melanie is right. Most evals for reasoning and capabilities lack validity, and do not show these systems can generally reason. AGI remains a problematic and poorly defined term that obscures the truly impressive uses of current models. We need a science of evals before we can make grand claims.
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Andrew Strait @agstrait.bsky.social · 10/03/2025
*sweating in ACT*
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Marietje Schaake @marietjeschaake.bsky.social · 07/03/2025
Alarm bells for anyone using US technology to stop doing so asap. With the erratically led US government that companies fear or want to suck upto, it may be weaponized or disabled in the blink of an eye ↘️
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Andrew Strait @agstrait.bsky.social · 05/03/2025
We did a deep dive on immersive technologies and what every policymaker should know. Our first output is an explainer laying out what these technologies are, how they work, and what kinds of data they collect. Stay tuned for next output exploring their use in warehouses and online gaming
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Andrew Strait @agstrait.bsky.social · 04/03/2025
It's been 6 weeks, 1 day.
media.tenor.com
an older woman is crying and says it 's been 84 years
ALT: an older woman is crying and says it 's been 84 years
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Andrew Strait @agstrait.bsky.social · 03/03/2025
I remember an event in 2018 when Stop Killer Robots first raised the alarm about drone warfare. I'll admit, I thought at the time it was unlikely to be adopted that quickly. How unbelievably wrong I was. 70% of all Russian/Ukraine casualties are caused by drones. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
nytimes.com
Drones Now Rule the Battlefield in the Ukraine-Russia War
Drones have changed the war in Ukraine, with soldiers adapting off-the-shelf models and swarming the front lines.
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Andrew Strait @agstrait.bsky.social · 27/02/2025
@natolambert.bsky.social with a great blog on character training - something the major labs are not transparent enough about. As these products become used more and more as advisors, interlocutors, and executors of actions, how are their 'characters' constructed? www.interconnects.ai/p/character-...
interconnects.ai
Character training: Understanding and crafting a language model's personality
Post-training in industry is very different than the academic papers and open-source models demonstrate. Let's dive into one of my favorite topics in language modeling development today.
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Andrew Strait @agstrait.bsky.social · 20/02/2025
This is really cool work from @apartresearch.bsky.social - DarkBench to test different models for various dark patterns. Would love to see more benchmarks like these! www.apartresearch.com/post/uncover...
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Andrew Strait @agstrait.bsky.social · 13/02/2025
@lujain.bsky.social has published an excellent new paper exploring anthropomorphic behaviours in LLMs. Notable finding - majority of these behaviours occur after multi-turn interactions arxiv.org/abs/2502.07077
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Andrew Strait @agstrait.bsky.social · 10/02/2025
Paris AI action summit kicking off today
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Andrew Strait @agstrait.bsky.social · 09/02/2025
Cue the next DeepSeek headline 😂 Impressive work from Stanford team! arxiv.org/pdf/2501.19393
arxiv.org
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Andrew Strait @agstrait.bsky.social · 05/02/2025
A friend pointed out the side-by-side comparison of the changes to the Google RAI principles. First two are the originals, 3/4/5 are the new ones. Goodbye, redlines on weapons, surveillance, and human-rights abusing tech... web.archive.org/web/20230804... ai.google/responsibili...
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Sayash Kapoor @sayash.bsky.social · 03/02/2025
3) In many cases, the challenge isn't Operator's ability to complete a task, it is eliciting human preferences. Chatbots aren't a great form factor for that. But there are many tasks where reliability isn't important. This is where today's agents shine. For example: x.com/random_walke...
x.com
x.com
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Sayash Kapoor @sayash.bsky.social · 03/02/2025
Could more training data lead to automation without human oversight? Not quite: 1) Prompt injection remains a pitfall for web agents. Anyone who sends you an email can control your agent. 2) Low reliability means agents fail on edge cases
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Andrew Strait @agstrait.bsky.social · 04/02/2025
In the run-up to the French Summit, we've released a briefing on advanced AI assistants and why they should be front and center in the discussions around safety, governance and regulation. See below for details ⬇️
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Andrew Strait @agstrait.bsky.social · 29/01/2025
It was a pleasure to be apart of reviewing this report, and the findings could not come at a more important moment. As we head to the AI Action Summit, global governments face a choice - continue to let the evidence of AI's risks and harms pile up unaddressed, or take action to protect people.
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Andrew Strait @agstrait.bsky.social · 27/01/2025
Behold the power of an open-weight model release.
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Andrew Strait @agstrait.bsky.social · 27/01/2025
@imogen-parker.bsky.social is on the mark here. Failed pilots are a good sign of government taking testing seriously. But these results must be shared transparently via the ATRS if we are to make collective progress finding where and under what conditions AI works www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
theguardian.com
AI prototypes for UK welfare system dropped as officials lament ‘false starts’
Exclusive: Pilots for staff training, jobcentres and speeding up disability benefit payments not being taken up
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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 27/01/2025
The test here is a political one. Pilots are not created to scale, they're created to test a hypothesis and generate learning. Stopping them when they fail is good, and good to see this discipline being applied outside of the new "digital centre". Three things though:
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Alondra Nelson @alondra.bsky.social · 26/01/2025
THIS. What I term algorithmic agnotology.
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Andrew Strait @agstrait.bsky.social · 24/01/2025
This was an interesting blog post about labor and economic impacts of agentic systems. I want to stop on this point about 'collecting job task data', as I'm seeing it as the basis for extrapolations that an o3 + will inevitably be as good at any kind of task www.strangeloopcanon.com/p/what-would...
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Andrew Strait @agstrait.bsky.social · 21/01/2025
Something my grandmother wrote in 1973 after the Watergate scandal to her local newspaper (the Washington Post). Feels very relevant for this week.
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