Anthropic Can Now Read Claude’s Mind

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
Today on the AI Daily Brief, new research showing that Anthropic can now read Claude's mind.
Before that, in the headlines, the UN says killer robots must be banned.
The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
All right, friends, we start today on the regulatory side of the house where the UN has called for a ban on killer robots as the first global dialogue on AI governance gets underway in Geneva. At the Monday Summit, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres laid out a wide-ranging regulatory agenda for the globe. He warned, artificial intelligence is advancing at runaway speed, a technology that can reshape economies, transform the world of work, sway elections until the balance of security. It is being deployed faster than anyone, including the people building it can keep up. An experiment is being run on our societies without a plan and without consent. That is not sustainable and it is not acceptable. AI is already transforming our world. The question is whether we will shape this transformation together or let it shape us.
Delegates from all 193 member states were present for the dialogue, which covered numerous hot button issues for AI.
Chief among them was Autonomous Weaponry, aka Killer Robots. Said Guterres, that is morally repugnant, it is politically unacceptable, and it must be banned by international law. Guterres emphasized that some decisions, particularly the taking of human life and warfare, quote, must remain human forever. The comments echoed Anthropic's dispute with the Pentagon from earlier in the year, with red lines drawn on the use of AI to power weapon systems. Now, part of the issue with this debate is, of course, defining exactly where the limit should lie. Autonomous weaponry has existed for decades, long before the rise of LLMs. The big change has been the use of AI in the decision-making process behind target selection, demonstrated in full during the Iran War. Guterres is specifically calling for controls on this element of warfare, ensuring a human is always in the loop during target selection. The other major focus was child safety, with the UN introducing a new child safety pledge for AI developers. The pledge calls for AI labs to conduct child safety testing, exhibit zero tolerance for the generation of child exploitation images, and commit to accountability. Guterres said, When a child is harmed, the answer must never be, the algorithm did it. The dialogue covered a range of other issues. It touched on the need for human-in-the-loop decision-making, injustice, healthcare and policing. Of course, the energy and water footprint of AI was raised, with some fairly dubious statistics. And the UN also flagged that AI development has thus far been a private enterprise, with public funding little more than a rounding error. Guterres announced that 20 countries are now supporting the U.N.-sponsored Global Network for Exchange and Cooperation on AI Capacity Building and connected public investment in AI to sovereignty and global equity, commenting, We cannot allow the digital divide to harden into an AI divide and the AI divide to become a development gap, a security gap and a sovereignty gap.
So what to make of all this? On the one hand, I think you could be forgiven for being a little bit skeptical that this sort of event is anything more than an empty talk fest. And yet, relative to the UN, this dialogue does represent an evolution of the AI action summits into a more tangible regulatory agenda. Now, as far back as 2017, Secretary General Guterres has been discussing the impact of AI, and as he closed his speech on Monday with a clear call to action, he commented, We may be the last generation able to set the terms on which humanity and machines coexist. The door is still open. It will not stay open long. If nothing else, it shows that AI is moving up the regulatory agenda for the United Nations. Staying on the regulatory side for just a moment, Illinois Governor JB. Pritzker has signed what he claims to be the strongest AI safety and accountability bill in the nation. The law is modeled after similar laws passed in New York and California last year. It requires AI companies to develop and publish safety protocols to deal with catastrophic risk, defined as events that could seriously injure or cause the death of more than 50 people or cause more than a billion dollars in property damage. Further, AI companies are required to report any incident that causes harm within 72 hours or 24 hours if the incident carries an imminent risk of serious injury or death. Where Illinois goes a little further is in the auditing requirements. The laws in New York and California require labs to retain compliance data to facilitate audits following major incidents, but Illinois will be the first state to require annual independent audits of safety protocols, with that provision coming into force from the beginning of 2028 What's more, now that three states have passed similar laws on catastrophic risk, lawmakers are presenting this as a de facto national standard. They claim that although the states make up just 20% of the US population, they cover 40% of the AI market. Now, Anthropic and OpenAI both supported this Illinois bill with other big tech firms opposed. Anthropic's head of US state and local government relations, Cesar Fernandez, wrote, Illinois is officially the first state to pair AI transparency requirements with independent verification, an important step towards the accountability this technology demands.