Very Sane AI Newsletter

Is METR A Meaningful Check On Anthropic?

Very Sane AI Newsletter, SE Gyges, 15 September 2026. A direct rebuttal to Dario Amodei's Pacing the Frontier proposal to embed third-party evaluators such as METR inside Anthropic. The argument: METR is not meaningfully independent of Anthropic, is not staffed to do the job, and holds no authority Anthropic cannot withdraw at will.

Why I recommend it: Free to read, no paywall on this post. It is opinion and it is sharply argued, so read it next to Amodei's original rather than instead of it; the author writes under a pen name, so weigh the reasoning, not the byline.

Antigravity Gets Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5: Who Gets It (explainx.ai)

Explains that Google Antigravity now lists Claude Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5 for non-trial Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers, and that Claude 4.6 and GPT-OSS-120b are removed on November 2, with who is affected and what to do.

Awe in the Age of AI (TIME)

Arianna Huffington's TIME essay, published October 2, 2026, on keeping human-generated awe in view alongside AI's capabilities.

Durably Reducing Conspiracy Beliefs Through Dialogues with AI

Authors

Thomas H. Costello, Gordon Pennycook, David G. Rand

Venue

Science (peer-reviewed; expression of concern issued 2026)

Published

2024-09-13

ID

DOI 10.1126/science.adq1814

Science study in which 2,190 conspiracy believers held personalized, evidence-based conversations with GPT-4 Turbo; belief fell about 20% and the effect lasted two months. Science published an expression of concern about the paper on June 11, 2026.

Dialogues with Large Language Models Reduce Conspiracy Beliefs Even When the AI Is Perceived as Human

Authors

Esther Boissin, Thomas H. Costello, Daniel Spinoza-Martín, David G. Rand, Gordon Pennycook

Venue

PNAS Nexus (peer-reviewed)

Published

2025-10-14

ID

DOI 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf325

Preregistered experiment (N = 955) in PNAS Nexus testing whether LLM debunking works because the messenger is an AI. Conversations reduced confidence in conspiracy and other unwarranted beliefs whether the model was framed as an AI tool or a human expert.

Kolibri-1 (Aleph Alpha)

Aleph Alpha's open-weights reasoning model on Hugging Face, released under the Apache 2.0 license. It is a mixture-of-experts text-generation model tagged for German and English, with an FP8 build that runs on vLLM.

Cosign Discourse

Cosign's public discussion forum, hosted on Discourse — a curated home for discussion of the main topics in tech today, from AI to startups and policy.