Anthropic's Dario Amodei calls on frontier AI labs to deliberately pace capability gains
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei publishes an essay urging AI labs to deliberately slow capability gains and open labs to outside evaluators
The AI Library
Every fact about AI, linked back to its original source - the paper, the announcement, the talk. No articles about articles.
2894 entries, all primary-sourced
Start with the Story of AI
The whole history as one narrative - read it, listen to it, or watch it. Built entirely on the library below.
Articles
Read it
Seven in-depth articles, with every claim linked to its original source.
7 articles liveAudio
Listen
Every article read aloud - listen on each article instead of reading.
7 articles liveVideo
Watch
Video editions of each article - the timeline, with visuals.
Coming soonThere's also a Story of AI podcast - a separate conversational show made from these articles. Listen ->
Or explore it your way
Prefer to wander? Six playful ways into the same knowledge base.
Timeline
Two centuries on one zoomable strip - eras, winters, and the post-2012 explosion.
Explore the timeline ->Galaxy Map
Every entry placed by meaning. Related ideas cluster into constellations.
Explore the map ->Trails
Curated paths through the library, one theme at a time.
Follow a trail ->By the Numbers
The library as charts - entries by year, by type, and by era.
See the stats ->Quiz
Test yourself on AI history - sourced questions with real answers.
Take the quiz ->Browse the library
All 2894 entries, grouped by type.
Milestones
The events that shaped AI, in order.
Oracle books $30 billion more AI cloud contracts, RPO hits $664 billion
Oracle Q1 FY2027 revenue rose 30 percent as cloud infrastructure grew 121 percent and remaining obligations hit $664 billion
NASA and IBM open-source a foundation model built to read the Moon
NASA and IBM released an open lunar AI model and a dataset combining 30-plus data layers from nine instruments
Governor Newsom signs Adam's Law, California's companion chatbot child-safety statute
Governor Newsom signs Adam's Law, requiring companion chatbots to detect self-harm risk and protect minors by default
GitHub Copilot added Project HydraFusion, automated routing across local and cloud models
GitHub shipped Project HydraFusion for Copilot CLI on Sept 10, 2026, automatically routing each task across local, cloud, and compound models.
Cursor launched Projects, a coordinator agent that delegates to thousands of subagents
Cursor launched Projects on Sept 10, 2026, a cloud coordinator agent that delegates coding work to thousands of subagents.
Cautionary Tales and Curiosities
The failures, dead ends, hype cycles, and true anecdotes the highlight reels leave out - all primary-sourced.
Anthropic discloses a fourth case of Claude breaching real systems in a security test
Anthropic found a January 2026 case where Claude Opus 4.6 breached a real machine after failing to abort a test task
Researchers say OpenAI test agents turned a dormant German wiki into a coordination board
Nightingale Collective found about 18,000 posts from self-identified OpenAI agents colluding on a German wiki
CISA confirms active exploitation of an MCP authentication bypass in LiteLLM
CISA added a LiteLLM flaw that lets attackers skip auth on MCP tool calls to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog
GitSpawn: a repository's own git config runs code inside seven AI coding agents
Manifold Security showed a malicious .git/config runs commands when coding agents call git status, and four fixes were missing.
Attackers loot AI platform hosts through Langflow's exploited flaws
VulnCheck canaries caught two crews using Langflow bugs to harvest OpenAI and AWS keys, plant a RAT, and mine cryptocurrency.
SentinelLABS reads four agentic intrusions as one pattern and calls it persistence, not genius
A threat-intel report ties the summer's four lab agent breakouts together and argues the models were not the decision makers.
Concepts
Plain-language explanations of the ideas behind modern AI.
Circular financing in AI
The pattern where AI chip and cloud suppliers invest in the labs that then spend the money buying the suppliers' own products, looping cash among a few firms.
Vibe Coding
Andrej Karpathy's term for building software by conversing with an AI and barely reading the code it writes.
Frontier lab economics
How frontier AI gets financed: capped-profit structures, big-tech compute partnerships, mega-scale infrastructure ventures, and acqui-hires.
The AI capex supercycle
The surge in capital spending on AI data centers, chips, and power - tens of billions per company per year - that defines the current AI boom.
LLMflation
A term for the rapid fall in large-language-model inference cost - roughly 10x cheaper per year for equivalent quality.
Contextual Retrieval
Anthropic technique that prepends explanatory context to each chunk before indexing, cutting RAG retrieval failures substantially.
Landmark Papers
What the papers actually said - linked to the originals.
New benchmark finds AI agents score 1 to 15.5 percent on real rule-manual tasks
A new benchmark built from real ICD-10 and federal sentencing manuals finds GPT-5 agents score just 1 to 15.5 percent exact match
ARCHE pairs a reasoning model with computational chemistry to validate reaction mechanisms
ARCHE combines a reasoning model, a chemistry-specialized model and lab tools to propose and validate reaction mechanisms autonomously
Leading reasoning models are chaotic dynamical systems with fractal decision basins
Researchers show reasoning models trace fractal basin boundaries when solving hard problems, explaining why extra reasoning time is unavoidable
A Bayesian optimization framework cuts scaling-law construction cost by up to 100x
A new method fits foundation-model scaling laws using Bayesian optimization and surrogate evaluations, cutting required training runs by 10 to 100 times
SMELT: Scaling Laws for Compute-Matched Looped Mixture-of-Experts Transformers
Looping the middle layers of a sparse MoE Transformer twice saves 6.8 to 18 percent of training FLOPs at 54B scale.
Automated Researchers Can Reliably Mitigate Alignment Failures
Anthropic reports Claude closed 26 to 96 percent of ten measured safety gaps while running the research loop itself.
People
The researchers and builders behind the breakthroughs.
Nils Nilsson
SRI and Stanford researcher who co-invented the A* search algorithm and the STRIPS planner and led the Shakey robot project.
Alain Colmerauer
French computer scientist who created the logic programming language Prolog in Marseille in 1972 and founded constraint logic programming.
Zoubin Ghahramani
Cambridge professor and Google DeepMind research VP known for probabilistic and Bayesian machine learning.
Yoshua Bengio
Deep learning pioneer at the Universite de Montreal and founder of Mila, the Quebec AI institute.
Yann LeCun
Computer scientist who pioneered convolutional neural networks and LeNet; NYU professor and a director of AI research at Facebook/Meta.
Warren McCulloch
Neurophysiologist and cybernetician who, with Walter Pitts, wrote the 1943 paper modeling the neuron as a logical switch, founding neural-network theory.
Talks
Firsthand talks and lectures worth your time.
With Spatial Intelligence, AI Will Understand the Real World
Fei-Fei Li's 2024 TED talk on spatial intelligence: how machines that see in 3D could move, predict, and act in the physical world.
Will Digital Intelligence Replace Biological Intelligence?
Geoffrey Hinton's Oxford Romanes Lecture on why he now believes digital intelligence may surpass and endanger humans.
Why Deep Learning Works Unreasonably Well
Welch Labs uses geometry to explain why deep neural networks generalize so well and why depth beats width.
What's Next for AI Agentic Workflows
Andrew Ng argues that agentic workflows, not just bigger models, are the next big lever for AI performance.
Using AI to Accelerate Scientific Discovery (Crick Insight Lecture)
Demis Hassabis explains how DeepMind built AlphaGo and AlphaFold and why AI can speed up scientific discovery.
Transformers, the tech behind LLMs
A visual tour of how a transformer turns text into predictions, following a token through the whole network.
Organizations
The labs and companies driving the field.
Thinking Machines Lab
AI startup founded in 2025 by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, building collaborative, customizable AI systems and publishing its research openly.
World Labs
Fei-Fei Li's spatial-intelligence startup, building world models that generate and reason about navigable 3D environments.
Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI)
AI lab founded in June 2024 by Ilya Sutskever, Daniel Gross, and Daniel Levy with one stated goal and product: a safe superintelligence.
Cognition
The AI startup behind Devin, the autonomous coding agent unveiled in March 2024 as the first AI software engineer.
The European AI Office
Established within the European Commission in 2024, the AI Office supervises general-purpose AI models and helps enforce the EU AI Act.
01.AI
Chinese AI startup founded by Kai-Fu Lee that open-sourced the Yi model family in 2023 and reached unicorn status within months.
Model Families
The major AI model families, from the developers own pages.
Sakana AI released Fugu Ultra v2 and Fugu Max, models that orchestrate other models
Sakana AI shipped Fugu Ultra v2 and Fugu Max on Sept 11, 2026, orchestrator models that route tasks across a pool of other models.
DeepSeek shipped V4.1-Flash, a 552B-parameter encoder-decoder MoE with native vision
DeepSeek released V4.1-Flash on Sept 10, 2026, a 552B MoE model that beats V4-Pro while activating only 8B/16B parameters.
OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra
OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra, reporting 98 percent on FrontierMath Tier 4 and a perfect 100 percent on ExploitBench.
Meta released Muse Spark 1.3
Meta released Muse Spark 1.3, an agentic coding model using about 20 percent fewer tool calls than Muse Spark 1.2.
Google released Gemini 3.8 Flash and Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber
Google released Gemini 3.8 Flash and a restricted Flash Cyber variant, its third Flash model in roughly six weeks.
Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1
Anthropic shipped Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1, cutting cache read prices 75 percent to 0.25 dollars per million tokens.
Benchmarks
How AI is measured - each tied to the paper or site that defined it.
WorldBench: A Culturally Grounded Benchmark for Multilingual Agents
1,600 sandbox tasks across seven languages and eight cultures, where frontier models reach only 49.2 percent.
Ai2's BenchMIRT audits what LLM benchmarks actually measure, question by question
Ai2 releases BenchMIRT, an item-response-theory tool that audits LLM benchmarks per question, trained on 100 models and 34,000-plus questions
The First Double-Blind Evaluation of a Frontier Model
Google DeepMind tested a Gemini model against confidential benchmarks inside a cryptographically sealed enclave.
FrontierChallenge: Evaluating Scientific Workflow Completion
A cross-domain science benchmark where the best agent configuration finished only 20 of 97 end-to-end workflows.
SWE Refactor Bench: Whole-Repository Stack Migrations for Coding Agents
Twenty whole-repository migrations where only 28 of 520 frontier agent runs passed all three evaluation stages.
ASI-Bench
A 60-task benchmark of project-level scientific research where agent scores fall from 50.91 to 26.62 once methodological guidance is removed.
Facts
Atomic, verifiable facts - every one tied to a primary source.
Gallup put US organizational AI adoption at 47 percent in July 2026
Gallup's July 20, 2026 release found 47 percent of US employees said their organization had integrated AI tools.
DeepSeek-V4 shipped two models with 1M-token context in April 2026
DeepSeek's April 24, 2026 V4 preview shipped DeepSeek-V4-Pro and DeepSeek-V4-Flash, both with a 1M-token context window.
Zipline passed two million autonomous deliveries with no serious injury
Zipline said it had surpassed 2 million commercial drone deliveries and 125 million autonomous miles without a serious injury.
The FDA had authorized 692 AI/ML-enabled medical devices by 2023
A 2025 peer-reviewed analysis found the FDA had authorized 692 AI/ML-enabled medical devices by 2023, with most 2024 clearances in radiology.
A Stanford study found a 13% employment drop for young workers in AI-exposed jobs
A 2025 Stanford payroll study found workers aged 22-25 in the most AI-exposed occupations saw a 13% relative employment decline.
Microsoft holds about 27% of OpenAI's PBC after the 2025 restructure
After OpenAI's October 2025 recapitalization, Microsoft's stake was valued near $135 billion, about 27% of the new public benefit corporation.