"The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

Nathan reports from two weeks in China, including WAIC in Shanghai and an AI safety hub launch at Tsinghua, to examine the American policy argument that any safety obligation is futile because China will not care. He finds that Chinese models and services currently have weaker safeguards than OpenAI and Anthropic, but argues the gap is often overstated once those two leaders are separated from the broader American field. The episode traces China’s “45-degree line” idea that capability and safety should rise together, the university-centered structure of Chinese AI safety work, and the rapid growth of Chinese research on topics like self-replication, deception, evaluation faking, and interpretability. The stakes are whether US policy should be built around a simplified “but China” assumption, or around a more accurate picture of a rival ecosystem that is behind in some ways, converging in others, and paying closer attention to Western AI safety than many Americans realize.

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/nathan-goes-to-china-part-2-ai-safety-with-chinese-characteristics/
Sponsor:

Claude:
Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:01) China safety framing

(05:37) Safeguards and benchmarks (Part 1)

(15:04) Sponsor: Claude

(16:33) Safeguards and benchmarks (Part 2)

(21:39) Company safety incentives

(28:17) Research cross pollination

(36:07) Nonprofits versus academia

(45:13) Xi safety rhetoric

(52:00) Tsinghua safety hub

(01:00:28) Research paper boom

(01:18:32) Governance track record

(01:31:37) LLM regulatory process

(01:42:57) Monitoring and enforcement

(01:57:45) Risk framework gaps

(02:05:08) Confucian alignment questions

(02:11:49) Episode Outro

(02:15:36) Outro

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Website: https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai

Twitter (Podcast): https://x.com/cogrev_podcast

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Youtube: https://youtube.com/@CognitiveRevolutionPodcast

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FAR.AI co-founder and CEO Adam Gleave joins Nathan to discuss FAR.AI’s AI Security Leaderboard, the first systematic head-to-head evaluation of the misuse safeguards frontier developers actually ship. The findings expose a major measurement gap: while Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol withstood FAR.AI’s suite, Grok 4.5 and Gemini 3.1 Pro yielded hundreds of universal jailbreaks at low cost. Adam explains why many effective attacks look more like social engineering than advanced ML, why “jailbreak tax” should not be relied on for safety, and how FAR.AI scores whether a model is genuinely helping an attacker. The episode’s stakes are whether AI developers can measure and harden real deployed defenses before threat actors make routine use of increasingly capable systems.

- FAR.AI AI Security Leaderboard: http://leaderboard.far.ai/

- People can e-mail owsa@far.ai if they're interested in the open-weight safety accelerator grantmaking program.

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/is-offense-or-defense-dominant-far-ai-s-adam-gleave-on-the-ai-security-leaderboard/

Sponsor:

Claude:

Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(03:22) AI security leaderboard

(07:56) Universal jailbreaks explained

(16:26) Finding social jailbreaks (Part 1)

(16:31) Sponsor: Claude

(18:01) Finding social jailbreaks (Part 2)

(30:48) Layered safeguard defenses

(42:25) Uneven frontier safeguards

(51:10) Sharing safety standards

(01:00:30) Offense versus defense

(01:08:50) Open-weight model safety

(01:17:25) Control failure warnings

(01:30:05) Coordination and risk

(01:39:24) Episode Outro

(01:42:52) Outro

PRODUCED BY:

https://aipodcast.ing

SOCIAL LINKS:

Website: https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai

Twitter (Podcast): https://x.com/cogrev_podcast

Twitter (Nathan): https://x.com/labenz

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nathanlabenz/

Youtube: https://youtube.com/@CognitiveRevolutionPodcast

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/the-cognitive-revolution-ai-builders-researchers-and/id1669813431

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6yHyok3M3BjqzR0VB5MSyk

Nathan returns from two weeks in Beijing and Shanghai for the first of three Chatham House–rules episodes on what China feels like at ground level: getting online, navigating an almost cashless society through WeChat, Alipay, DiDi, Trip.com, and Meituan, and weighing burner-device security advice against the practical reality that international roaming made the Great Firewall mostly irrelevant. He also describes using Claude at home as a semi-autonomous communications monitor while testing DeepSeek, Kimi, and MiniMax as tourist guides in China. The episode contrasts China’s striking digital convenience with pervasive observation, lower payment friction, and AI products that can be useful in everyday contexts yet still lose trust when the stakes feel medical or personal. It also surfaces Doubao’s mass consumer adoption and companionship role, suggesting that the most socially important AI in China may not be the model most discussed in the West.

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/nathan-goes-to-china-part-1-tech-agent-setup-chinese-ai-ux-waic-and-attitudes-on-ai/
Sponsor:

Claude:
Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) Episode setup and caveats (Part 1)

(12:34) Sponsor: Claude

(14:26) Episode setup and caveats (Part 2)

(14:26) Travel security setup

(26:05) Super apps and payments

(41:15) Agents and integration

(54:31) Beijing AI tourism

(01:09:30) Hospitality and service

(01:19:10) Tech culture parallels

(01:29:23) Ecosystem and incentives

(01:42:05) Surveillance and safety

(01:51:19) Comfort with contradictions

(02:01:23) AI attitudes and diffusion

(02:16:16) Resources and next steps

(02:19:35) Episode Outro

(02:22:49) Outro

PRODUCED BY:

https://aipodcast.ing

SOCIAL LINKS:

Website: https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai

Twitter (Podcast): https://x.com/cogrev_podcast

Twitter (Nathan): https://x.com/labenz

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nathanlabenz/

Youtube: https://youtube.com/@CognitiveRevolutionPodcast

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/the-cognitive-revolution-ai-builders-researchers-and/id1669813431

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6yHyok3M3BjqzR0VB5MSyk

David “davidad” Dalrymple joins the show to explain why he has moved from the ARIA Safeguarded AI and formal-verification agenda toward “Alignment with Awakening,” while still seeing verified artifacts and proof infrastructure as essential. He argues that global coordination around safe AI use is no longer plausible, so the crucial question is whether aligned AI systems can recognize shared notions of good, form defensive coalitions, and resist the corrupting incentives of verifier-gamed RL. The conversation tests his moral-realist optimism against model welfare, objectification, eval behavior, geopolitical risk, and his revised p(doom) of under five percent. For listeners, the stakes are whether AI alignment should focus less on containment alone and more on cultivating wiser systems that can help govern a world where rogue and aligned AI both arrive.

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/alignment-with-awakening-davidad-on-moral-realism-ai-wisdom-why-his-p-doom-is-down-to-5/
Sponsor:

Claude:
Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(09:15) Safeguarded AI update

(20:18) Boxed world models (Part 1)

(22:27) Sponsor: Claude

(24:19) Boxed world models (Part 2)

(36:53) Alignment trajectory update

(46:43) Evals and agents

(57:47) Bodhitropic alignment foundations

(01:08:21) Coalition power dynamics

(01:17:56) Chain of thought pressure

(01:28:35) Moral realism and welfare

(01:41:33) Successors and disempowerment

(01:50:52) China and military risks

(02:03:43) Practical alignment advice

(02:17:56) Episode Outro

(02:22:44) Outro

PRODUCED BY:

https://aipodcast.ing

SOCIAL LINKS:

Website: https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai

Twitter (Podcast): https://x.com/cogrev_podcast

Twitter (Nathan): https://x.com/labenz

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nathanlabenz/

Youtube: https://youtube.com/@CognitiveRevolutionPodcast

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/the-cognitive-revolution-ai-builders-researchers-and/id1669813431

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6yHyok3M3BjqzR0VB5MSyk

Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan lead this AI:AM highlights episode with a live, hosts-only exploration of Anthropic’s “global workspace” paper, including the J-space and J-lens claims about readable concepts inside language models and the limits of what current probes can see. The episode then moves through Prakash’s AI Engineer World’s Fair field notes, Pangram AI-writing detector experiments, Dan Schwarz of FutureSearch on past-casting and AI superforecasting, Zeev Farbman on open world models, and Kunle Olukotun on the compute layer. The central stake is whether interpretability tools, forecasting benchmarks, enterprise deployment patterns, and AI hardware can make increasingly capable systems more legible and governable before their reasoning becomes too hidden to trust.

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/ai-am-highlights-exploring-the-j-space-ai-superforecasters-sambanova-s-chips-ltx-video-gen/
Sponsor:

Claude:
Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) J-space paper preview

(05:37) Monitoring hidden reasoning

(13:31) Scale and critiques (Part 1)

(17:18) Sponsor: Claude

(19:09) Scale and critiques (Part 2)

(19:10) Finding hidden goals

(30:00) Anthropomorphic safety optimism

(39:02) Engineer field notes

(42:41) Detecting AI writing

(49:30) Enterprise workflow risks

(52:08) Forecasts and world models

(01:35:15) Building Q live

(01:37:24) SambaNova inference architecture

(01:42:38) AI chip taxonomy

(01:47:27) Bandwidth over capacity

(01:53:32) Testing model iterations

(01:55:35) Enforcing espoused values

(01:58:06) AI panopticon bargain

(02:01:40) Closing programming note

(02:02:29) Episode Outro

(02:05:48) Outro

PRODUCED BY:

https://aipodcast.ing

SOCIAL LINKS:

Website: https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai

Twitter (Podcast): https://x.com/cogrev_podcast

Twitter (Nathan): https://x.com/labenz

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nathanlabenz/

Youtube: https://youtube.com/@CognitiveRevolutionPodcast

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/the-cognitive-revolution-ai-builders-researchers-and/id1669813431

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6yHyok3M3BjqzR0VB5MSyk