AI in the news
- Thread starter Diogenes
- Start date
The panicans want you to fear.
View: https://x.com/TimesRadio/status/2098445774116057146?s=20
Ask me why.
View: https://x.com/TimesRadio/status/2098445774116057146?s=20
Ask me why.
Coxon:
Background (established before 8 Sept 2026)
X account
8–9 September 2026 sequence
Same-week lab/political calendar
What lines up, factually
A four-month Anthropic tenure and a January 2026 X account with no posting history carried the launch. The WSJ piece and the thread were minutes apart. The first amplifiers were the same EA/AI-policy network that funded Coxon’s 2022 grant environment and that backs statutory pause-and-supervise language. Sanders had already tabled that language five days earlier and used Coxon’s post as the public proof text.
Newspeak House, ideological bent
Self-description: “London College of Political Technology.” Mission: study and train people who change society with technology across government, parties, activism, NGOs, journalism, philanthropy. Field name they use: political technology — tools for campaigns, civic institutions, and “communities of practice,” not product engineering.
Record, not slogan
That is the Corbyn-era / post-Corbyn UK left: state-and-movement coordination, campaign data science for Labour, climate-emergency disruption politics, abolitionist framing. Not a Tory think tank and not a nonpartisan CS department.
Money overlap with the Coxon story
Chau and Thayer: Newspeak House has taken Long-Term Future Fund and EA Infrastructure Fund grants — the same EA/longtermist pot that paid Coxon’s 2022 Good Ventures/LTFF scholarship.
Walsh video (Ep. 1837, 10 Sept)
Matt Walsh’s frame for the resignation package: a short-tenure researcher, a quiet X account, a WSJ exclusive minutes before the thread, then a regulatory demand. He treats that sequence as an influence operation aimed at government control of the industry. Newspeak House is the training environment that fits that frame: an institution that teaches how to run political-tech campaigns, incubated inside Labour’s digital operation, then overlapping the EA/AI-safety grant network that amplified Coxon on 8–9 September.
Background (established before 8 Sept 2026)
- 1999, Britain. Cambridge maths. IMO 2016 silver, 2017 bronze.
- OpenAI 2023–~July 2026: pretraining; GPT-4o core contributor / system-card co-author. Still holds OpenAI equity.
- Anthropic May–8 Sept 2026 (~4 months). Recruited ~2 years (Ethan Perez). Unvested Anthropic equity (6-month cliff).
- Newspeak House fellow, 2021 (confirmed by Edward Saperia, 9 Sept).
- Long-Term Future Fund / Good Ventures scholarship, 2022, reported ~$20,000.
X account
- @hilbertspaess created 21 January 2026.
- Bio: “ai research.”
- Near-zero public posting until the resignation thread.
- Handle and photo were not a long-running public researcher presence.
8–9 September 2026 sequence
- Slack goodbye at Anthropic first (NBC): extinction risk without international coordination; “viscerally fearing the intelligence explosion.”
- Wall Street Journal exclusive goes live Tuesday evening.
- Coxon thread posts ~18 minutes later. Opener: resigned; three years pretraining at both labs; “gambling with our lives.”
- ~100M+ views in 24 hours; account gains on the order of 190k followers in that window.
- First ~15 minutes of quote-tweets include Nathan Calvin (Encode AI), Peter Wildeford (AI Policy Network), Daniel Kokotajlo (AI Futures Project). Those shops have Survival and Flourishing Fund / Tallinn-linked money. Coefficient Giving (Moskovitz) program officer among early amplifiers.
- 9 Sept, 15:14 GMT: Sanders quote-tweets the thread and restates the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act (pause + cabinet-level regulator + ban on superintelligence), announced 3 Sept with Casar.
Same-week lab/political calendar
- 3 Sept: Sanders–Casar bill announced (pause until a new federal agency writes the rules).
- 8–9 Sept: Coxon exit + WSJ + X blast.
- 9 Sept: Sanders: “Mr. Coxon is right… that is why I will soon be introducing legislation…”
- 12 Sept: Amodei “pace the frontier” essay; Altman and Musk publicly agree on pacing.
What lines up, factually
A four-month Anthropic tenure and a January 2026 X account with no posting history carried the launch. The WSJ piece and the thread were minutes apart. The first amplifiers were the same EA/AI-policy network that funded Coxon’s 2022 grant environment and that backs statutory pause-and-supervise language. Sanders had already tabled that language five days earlier and used Coxon’s post as the public proof text.
Newspeak House, ideological bent
Self-description: “London College of Political Technology.” Mission: study and train people who change society with technology across government, parties, activism, NGOs, journalism, philanthropy. Field name they use: political technology — tools for campaigns, civic institutions, and “communities of practice,” not product engineering.
Record, not slogan
- 30 August 2016: hosted Jeremy Corbyn’s launch of Labour’s Digital Democracy Manifesto.
- 2017: Corbyn Run and Games for the Many (Labour-affiliated game studio) operated out of the house.
- 2018: incubated Campaign Lab — “progressive” Labour campaigners, data scientists, activists — with Labour Together. Their own events: hack nights “to help the progressive left campaign more effectively.”
- Faculty/associate bios on the house site include a Campaign Lab co-founder who is also listed as a National Coordinator of Extinction Rebellion, plus workstreams named Alternative Justices (“abolitionist community-based harm prevention and response”) and workshops on building “new hegemonies.”
That is the Corbyn-era / post-Corbyn UK left: state-and-movement coordination, campaign data science for Labour, climate-emergency disruption politics, abolitionist framing. Not a Tory think tank and not a nonpartisan CS department.
Money overlap with the Coxon story
Chau and Thayer: Newspeak House has taken Long-Term Future Fund and EA Infrastructure Fund grants — the same EA/longtermist pot that paid Coxon’s 2022 Good Ventures/LTFF scholarship.
Walsh video (Ep. 1837, 10 Sept)
Matt Walsh’s frame for the resignation package: a short-tenure researcher, a quiet X account, a WSJ exclusive minutes before the thread, then a regulatory demand. He treats that sequence as an influence operation aimed at government control of the industry. Newspeak House is the training environment that fits that frame: an institution that teaches how to run political-tech campaigns, incubated inside Labour’s digital operation, then overlapping the EA/AI-safety grant network that amplified Coxon on 8–9 September.
Jacob Coxon and Newspeak House.
Newspeak House (The London College of Political Technology) is a real east-London civic-tech college founded in 2015 by Edward Saperia. Graduates of its one-year program become Fellows. Saperia posted that he is “proud to count Jacob as a @nwspk fellow.” That is confirmed by the founder.
NESTA and the UK “nudge unit.”
Nesta began as a late-1990s UK public body (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) funded from Lottery money; it later became an independent innovation foundation.
In February 2014 the Cabinet Office spun the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT, the actual 2010 No. 10 / Cabinet Office “nudge unit”) into a social-purpose company owned one-third by government, one-third by Nesta, one-third by staff.
Cabinet Office was the first and principal client. BIT has since worked with other governments, including in the US. That history is standard reporting from BBC, Guardian, and GOV.UK.
Coronavirus Tech Handbook.
Newspeak House launched it in March 2020 as a crowdsourced wiki of COVID tools and responses. Nesta awarded it a £50,000 grant in April 2020.
Advisory board members included Katherine Maher (then Wikimedia Foundation), Bill Thompson (BBC R&D), and Theo Blackwell (GLA).
That matches Nesta’s own press release and contemporaneous coverage. The handbook was a public resource aimed at technologists, civic groups, and public bodies, not a classified government ops platform.
Civic AI Observatory.
Nesta and Newspeak House jointly announced it in 2023 as a short-term project (six-month trial) to help civic groups adapt to generative AI. Edward Saperia and James Plunkett are named in the announcements.
The advisory names the thread lists (Richard Pope, Francis Irving, Hannah O’Rourke / Campaign Lab, Matt Stempeck, Lisa Murphy, etc.) match the published board. It ran 2023–2024 as described.
UK Democracy Handbook.
Same model as the COVID handbook: set up by Ed Saperia with James Moulding, Joe Mitchell, Jonny Chambers (Koreo), and Michelle Man (NPC), seed-funded by Nesta.
It launched around January 2021 and grew into the Centre for Democracy (directory, jobs/grants, newsletter). Wikipedia and Newspeak House’s own project history match the names and timeline.
Overlapping London network. Nesta, Newspeak House, Demos, Policy Lab UK, Campaign Lab, mySociety, and people from GDS sit in the same civic-tech / “collective intelligence” circle.
LIS (London Interdisciplinary School) is a separate private university; people in that network talk about bringing CI/AI into LIS and name those orgs as nearby “frontier” institutions.
That clustering is real. A world map of behavioral-insights / nudge units is also real: dozens of governments copied BIT after 2010.
Do you still think Coxon is a credible whistleblower?
Newspeak House (The London College of Political Technology) is a real east-London civic-tech college founded in 2015 by Edward Saperia. Graduates of its one-year program become Fellows. Saperia posted that he is “proud to count Jacob as a @nwspk fellow.” That is confirmed by the founder.
NESTA and the UK “nudge unit.”
Nesta began as a late-1990s UK public body (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) funded from Lottery money; it later became an independent innovation foundation.
In February 2014 the Cabinet Office spun the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT, the actual 2010 No. 10 / Cabinet Office “nudge unit”) into a social-purpose company owned one-third by government, one-third by Nesta, one-third by staff.
Cabinet Office was the first and principal client. BIT has since worked with other governments, including in the US. That history is standard reporting from BBC, Guardian, and GOV.UK.
Coronavirus Tech Handbook.
Newspeak House launched it in March 2020 as a crowdsourced wiki of COVID tools and responses. Nesta awarded it a £50,000 grant in April 2020.
Advisory board members included Katherine Maher (then Wikimedia Foundation), Bill Thompson (BBC R&D), and Theo Blackwell (GLA).
That matches Nesta’s own press release and contemporaneous coverage. The handbook was a public resource aimed at technologists, civic groups, and public bodies, not a classified government ops platform.
Civic AI Observatory.
Nesta and Newspeak House jointly announced it in 2023 as a short-term project (six-month trial) to help civic groups adapt to generative AI. Edward Saperia and James Plunkett are named in the announcements.
The advisory names the thread lists (Richard Pope, Francis Irving, Hannah O’Rourke / Campaign Lab, Matt Stempeck, Lisa Murphy, etc.) match the published board. It ran 2023–2024 as described.
UK Democracy Handbook.
Same model as the COVID handbook: set up by Ed Saperia with James Moulding, Joe Mitchell, Jonny Chambers (Koreo), and Michelle Man (NPC), seed-funded by Nesta.
It launched around January 2021 and grew into the Centre for Democracy (directory, jobs/grants, newsletter). Wikipedia and Newspeak House’s own project history match the names and timeline.
Overlapping London network. Nesta, Newspeak House, Demos, Policy Lab UK, Campaign Lab, mySociety, and people from GDS sit in the same civic-tech / “collective intelligence” circle.
LIS (London Interdisciplinary School) is a separate private university; people in that network talk about bringing CI/AI into LIS and name those orgs as nearby “frontier” institutions.
That clustering is real. A world map of behavioral-insights / nudge units is also real: dozens of governments copied BIT after 2010.
Do you still think Coxon is a credible whistleblower?