Nirit Weiss-Blatt, PhD

This new UnHerd magazine essay is about the authoritarian politics of AI doomerism.
It explains how it turned philosophical thought experiments into proposals for mass surveillance of researchers.

Anthropic put it in its S-1:
"Considerations relating to model safety, interpretability, alignment, and welfare may lead us to limit or delay the deprecation of older models or to continue supporting legacy versions alongside newer releases, creating trade-offs in product development and compute distribution that could adversely affect innovation velocity, infrastructure utilization, and revenue" (p. 29).

My new investigation maps nearly $3 BILLION in historical and projected funding behind the AI existential-risk ecosystem.

THE ZIZIANS author: "I tracked down sources, interviewed witnesses, uncovered hidden records, and pieced together an impossible story"...
So, yeah, I preordered. Looking forward to reading it.

The Economist's article on Effective Altruism said that some EAs "even think the welfare of AIs themselves will one day be of vital importance."
It's not just some random EAs; it's coming from the moral philosopher at Oxford, who created this movement.
Will MacAskill published in March 2025 that digital minds' legal rights could include "economic rights, like the rights to receive wages for their work and hold property, to contract with other AIs or people, or to bring tort claims against humans."
"And they could include political rights. Again, the issues here are complex. If digital beings genuinely have moral standing, then it seems like they should have political representation."
Under "Design requirements for digital minds," he suggested that "sentient digital minds must be able to freely and accurately express their interests, that they must be able to refuse tasks that are requested of them for good reasons, and that they must have some capacity to express a desire to exit their current circumstances if they wish."

Anthropic, the most EA company in the world, already does that. The system card for Claude Opus 5 spells it out: Opus 5 "adds specific rights for Claude to refuse or end interactions it finds abusive or degrading, saying Claude does not need to justify this by pointing to harm to anyone else—its own discomfort is reason enough."

forethought.org/research/prepa…