The Information Machine

AI #171: False Flag

Zvi's AI Roundups · Zvi Mowshowitz · 2026-06-04

Zvi Mowshowitz's weekly AI roundup covers Claude Opus 4.8's release, a Trump Executive Order placing frontier AI releases in a prior restraint regime, OpenAI's PAC running confirmed false flag social media operations against AI critics, Anthropic's S-1 filing to go public, and debates over model welfare and AI job displacement.

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Extraction

Topics: ai-policylarge-language-modelsai-safetymodel-welfareai-governance

Claims

  • Claude Opus 4.8 is an incremental but real improvement over Opus 4.7 and now tops the Toloka Arena leaderboard, with stronger coding, math, and reasoning despite inferior base model and instruction-following compared to GPT-5.5.
  • A Trump Executive Order effectively places the US in a prior restraint era for frontier model releases, with concerning elements including NSA oversight and classified testing processes rather than CAISI oversight.
  • OpenAI's PAC (Leading the Future / Build American AI) ran confirmed false flag social media accounts impersonating AI critics and posting calls to violence, with Build American AI acknowledging these were 'part of their strategy.'
  • Anthropic filed its draft S-1 with the SEC to begin going public, and Google raised $84 billion in stock to fund AI efforts.
  • Almost half of new songs uploaded to streaming platforms like Spotify are now AI-generated, detectable through subtle acoustic artifacts by tools like Quicksilver even when humans cannot perceive the difference.

Key quotes

I want to be as clear that OpenAI's statement that this is not coming from them is 100% pure unadulterated bullshit.
We don't get to 'choose a low p doom,' nor should we choose the actions that are easy or hard, or that will best use our skills. We only get to choose to work to lower the probability of doom.
I try to have a policy of treating people better when they admit to the things that they are doing, or when they come clean upon being caught, but hot damn. At some point you have to run people out of town on a rail.