The Next Phase of Free Systems
Why I’m joining Anthropic, and why we’re expanding Free Systems into an even larger research effort
Free Systems
A Stanford political economist uses AI to build prototypes, run experiments, and figure out how to keep us free in an algorithmic world.
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Latest posts
AI is transforming politics---and how we understand it
Claude now automagically tracks political campaign AI usage for me. This and more in this week's System Check.
Mapping America’s Political Conversations with Claude
The first analysis of how Americans are using AI for politics, leveraging Anthropic's Economic Index data. Users get info from Claude, not recommendations; and they seek more of it near elections.
Proofs and Petitions in the AI Era
AI is rapidly revolutionizing how we study hard but verifiable problems in math and coding...politics, though, is much harder. In this week's System Check, I explore how we're making progress.
The Agents are Escaping
How are we going to hold agents liable when they cause real damage? And political superintelligence is proceeding. This and more in this week's System Check!
Self-Regulation Meets the Open-Weight Problem
AI self-governance is coming just like we recommended, but the release of the most-powerful open-weight Chinese AI model yet raises huge questions about it. This and more in this week's System Check.
Can AI Fix Bad Rules?
We built an AI that reads contracts and successfully predicts which ones will end up disputed, just from the clarity of the text. A small first step towards using AI to write better rules everywhere.
Free Systems is on a roll
How we're expanding, the status of the 100x research institute 6 months in, and how the slopocalypse is playing out.
AI is the Democratic Party's Next Villain
We analyze roughly 280,000 candidate fundraising emails to trace the rise of anti-billionaire populism in the Democratic party and see how it is slowly merging with a new kind of anti-AI populism.
Guardian Angels of the AGI Republic
What do freedom and democracy look like in a post-AGI world? In this week’s special July 4th System Check, I have some ideas.
The Week AI Politics Went Mainstream
This week's System Check: a whole range of establishment indicators show that the world is suddenly taking AI politics seriously---and discovering a bunch of Free Systems ideas along the way.