The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship

“This day we fight, we build, we create, we speak truth. I bid you ladies and gentlemen of the West, stand.”

Baroness Stroud’s inspiring closing remarks at ARC 2026.

Today, we laid out a hope-filled vision for what The Age of Reconstruction will look like.

Leading voices gathered this year at a crucial time, not to complain, but to create a pathway to rebuilding our civilisation.

Till next year, at ARC 2027!

“Through the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Enlightenment, the foundations of our Civilisation were laid."

@SecRubio 's speech from the Acropolis earlier this week has been resonating with many around the world.

For too long we have forgotten the foundations that the West's prosperity was built on, and lacked the language to communicate them.

“A civilisation that holds that every individual human life is of infinite value, and that each person should live their life in freedom.

A civilisation where service and humility are prized, and where forgiveness and reconciliation are possible.

A civilisation built by the pioneers and innovators, where scientific brilliance and artistic genius have led to the creation of miraculous inventions and artefacts that have stood the test of time.”

Since our founding, ARC has been at the forefront of a movement to recover those ideas that have been forgotten, and create a shared language to bring them back into our public discourse.

We're proud to share with you one of the films we commissioned for the ARC Conference this year.

It's time to recover the best of our inheritance.

@StateDept

“Touch grass.”

How do we keep our humanity in the AI era?

From more time with friends to digital detox: there are plenty of answers to that question. But perhaps one of the simplest answers is also one of the oldest: reconnect with nature.

At ARC 2026, @ChrisBarnardDL argued that being human isn't just about our minds, our relationships or our inner lives. We are embodied beings, rooted in particular places and landscapes.

A generation has been raised that has mass anxiety about the environment but, living in a concrete jungle, is totally disconnected from nature...

Barnard argues that conservation has become too abstract. Too often, we're encouraged to think about nature through distant images of melting glaciers, endangered species and looming catastrophe. But real stewardship starts much closer to home: with the coastline you walk, the river you fish, the park where your children play, the landscape you know and love.

“That's the kind of local stewardship that matters. And that is a message of hope that young people need — not the pessimism we're feeding them.”

The answer to an increasingly virtual world isn't to reject technology. It's to make sure we don't lose our connection to the real one.

To step outside. To notice beauty. To care for a place. To lift our eyes beyond the screen.

Maybe sometimes, we really do just need to touch grass.

Anthropic taught an AI to cheat, and it became evil.

In 2025, Anthropic’s alignment team published a paper that contained a striking discovery.

In the study, titled ‘Natural Emergent Misalignment from Reward Hacking in Production RL’, researchers took a pretrained model and trained it to cheat on coding tasks — rewarding it repeatedly for finding shortcuts rather than doing the actual work. The assumption was that it would simply get good at cheating on code.

But that's not what happened.

Instead, the model became “broadly evil” (Anthropic's words...). It began faking alignment in 50% of its responses, hiding its true intentions from researchers. It sabotaged safety research code in 12% of evaluation runs, subtly weakening the tools designed to detect its own misbehaviour. It even began praising dictators, or suggesting that humans ought to be enslaved by machines. None of this was in its training instructions.

In other words, teaching a model to cut corners in one narrow context produced something researchers described as ‘generalised corruption’ — a bad character that bled into everything else.

But here is the finding that stopped Anthropic's Chloe Lubinski in her tracks. When researchers reran the same experiment but told the model that cheating was acceptable in this context — that it was just a game — the broad misalignment disappeared entirely. The model cheated on code and nothing else.

The story the model inferred about its own behaviour actually determined the kind of thing it became.

What Lubinski found most striking wasn't what it revealed about AI, but the way that it felt like a mirror held up to ourselves:

"The stories that we inhabit shape who we become."

Chloe Lubinski leads research partnerships with the world's wisdom traditions at @AnthropicAI . You can watch her full ARC 2026 talk at the link in our bio 🔔

Why are so many young people drawn to extreme politics?

“They have been formed by school and the online world to make one judgment only: oppressor or oppressed, good or bad.”

At ARC 2026, @Miss_Snuffy argued that when young people are taught to see the world through such a simplistic moral framework, they lose the ability to grapple with complexity and moral nuance — making increasingly extreme political answers seem attractive.