The people building frontier AI,
in their own words.

Co-founder, Anthropic · Interpretability

Defined how a generation visualizes neural networks; founded Distill. Was on OpenAI's Clarity team before co-founding Anthropic.

Co-founder & CEO, Anthropic

Occasional long essays — 'Machines of Loving Grace', 'The Urgency of Interpretability'. Led GPT-2/GPT-3-era research at OpenAI.

Co-founder, Anthropic · Policy

Import AI, the long-running weekly read on AI progress and policy. Ex-OpenAI policy director.

Philosopher, Anthropic

Shapes Claude's character and values; philosophy PhD writing on AI ethics with unusual clarity.

Alignment lead, Anthropic · ex-OpenAI

Co-led OpenAI's Superalignment team, resigned publicly in 2024, now leads alignment at Anthropic.

Anthropic · ex-DeepMind (AlphaGo, MuZero)

Core author of AlphaGo/AlphaZero/MuZero; writes sharp posts on AI progress ('Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again').

Philosophy of AI, Anthropic

Book-length essay series on power-seeking AI, otherness, and deep atheism; joined Anthropic in 2025.

Anthropic · co-founded Open Philanthropy & GiveWell

'The Most Important Century' series framed how many people think about transformative AI. Joined Anthropic in 2025.

Anthropic · ex-Google Brain

Invented the framework behind diffusion models; rare but exceptional posts (hot-mess of overfitting, Goodhart's law).

Interpretability, Anthropic

Works on dictionary learning / monosemanticity; recurring guest on Dwarkesh.

Anthropic · ex-Google DeepMind

The reference voice on ML security; prolific, technical, and funny ('How I use AI'). Joined Anthropic in 2025.

Assurance, Anthropic

Maintains Hypothesis (property-based testing); works on how you'd actually assure frontier systems.

Anthropic

Wrote 'AI safety needs great engineers' — the post that recruited a wave of engineers into safety labs.

Scaling RL, Anthropic · ex-DeepMind

Went from Gemini inference at DeepMind to scaling RL at Anthropic; occasional deep technical essays.

Alignment stress-testing lead, Anthropic

'Risks from Learned Optimization' co-author; leads Anthropic's alignment stress-testing (sleeper agents).

Societal impacts, Anthropic

Co-founded the Collective Intelligence Project; writes thoughtful essays on AI and society.

Alignment, Anthropic · ex-OpenAI (Superalignment)

Computational neuroscientist turned alignment researcher; moved from OpenAI's Superalignment to Anthropic in 2024. Recent: 'On Slop'.

Anthropic · co-founded Cobalt Robotics

Co-wrote Anthropic's 'Building Effective Agents'; blogs hands-on engineering, from coding agents to quadruped robots.

AI safety co-lead, Anthropic · NYU (on leave)

Built GLUE/SuperGLUE, now co-leads safety research at Anthropic; wrote 'The Checklist' on getting AI safety done in practice.

Adversarial robustness lead, Anthropic

Pioneered red-teaming language models with language models; leads adversarial robustness research at Anthropic.

Anthropic · founding team, OpenAI

Invented the VAE and the Adam optimizer; OpenAI founding team, joined Anthropic in 2024.

Mech-interp lead, Google DeepMind · ex-Anthropic

Worked with Chris Olah's team at Anthropic, now leads mechanistic interpretability at DeepMind; extremely prolific.

Ex-Anthropic (founding team)

Anthropic founding engineer and Transformer Circuits co-author; superb systems-engineering essays.

Co-founder & CEO, OpenAI

Occasional essays that move markets — 'The Gentle Singularity', 'Three Observations'.

Co-founder & President, OpenAI

Rare posts, but '#define CTO' and his OpenAI retrospectives are classics.

OpenAI · Harvard professor

Theoretical CS heavyweight working on OpenAI safety; writes real technical arguments, not vibes.

OpenAI · MIT professor

Led OpenAI's Preparedness team; his MIT lab blog is a model of rigorous ML writing.

OpenAI

OpenAI researcher and the internet's favorite AI essayist-poster.

Deep learning researcher, OpenAI

Co-authored GLIDE and Point-E; writes rare but deeply technical posts on models and the systems under them.

Co-founder, Core Automation · ex-OpenAI (model behavior)

Led model behavior (the personality of ChatGPT) and OpenAI Labs; co-founded Core Automation with Jerry Tworek in 2026.

Foundations of RL lead, OpenAI · theoretical physicist

Co-wrote 'The Principles of Deep Learning Theory'; brings effective-theory physics to why networks actually work.

Research Engineer, OpenAI

Led DALL-E 3 and GPT-4o image generation; built tortoise-tts; wrote the much-cited 'The it in AI models is the dataset'.

Research, OpenAI · ex-Anthropic

Worked on Claude's early character at Anthropic, then research at OpenAI (Canvas, Tasks).

Founding member, OpenAI (×2) · Eureka Labs

The field's best explainer. New posts land on bearblog; the classic karpathy.github.io archive is also watched.

Co-founder, Thinking Machines · ex-OpenAI VP

Lil'Log surveys (agents, diffusion, hallucination) are the de-facto textbooks of modern ML.

Co-founder, OpenAI · ex-Anthropic · Thinking Machines

Invented PPO/TRPO, led ChatGPT's RLHF; passed through Anthropic in 2024, now chief scientist at Thinking Machines.

Ex-OpenAI alignment lead · founded ARC

Invented RLHF, ran OpenAI's alignment team, founded ARC; the alignment field's most cited blogger.

Ex-OpenAI Superalignment · Situational Awareness LP

'Situational Awareness' reset the AGI discourse in 2024; now runs an AI-focused investment fund.

Ex-OpenAI governance · AI Futures Project

Refused to sign OpenAI's non-disparagement to keep his voice; co-authored the AI 2027 scenario.

Ex-OpenAI policy research head

Left OpenAI in 2024 saying 'nobody is ready for AGI'; now writes independently on policy.

Ex-OpenAI safety lead

Ran dangerous-capability evals at OpenAI; now publishes sharp independent safety analyses.

Ex-OpenAI · ex-DeepMind

Wrote 'AGI Safety from First Principles' at DeepMind, governance at OpenAI; now essays and speculative fiction.

UT Austin · was at OpenAI 2022–24

Quantum-complexity legend; spent two years on OpenAI's alignment team (LLM watermarking).

Ex-OpenAI (science communicator)

Early GPT-3 whisperer at OpenAI; practical posts on what models can actually do.

Ex-OpenAI · Meta Superintelligence Labs

Chain-of-thought and emergent-abilities author; left OpenAI for Meta's superintelligence lab in 2025.

Ex-OpenAI · Chief AI Scientist, Tencent

ReAct, Tree of Thoughts, SWE-bench, and OpenAI's CUA/Deep Research; 'The Second Half' named the field's turn from training to evals.

Thinking Machines · ex-OpenAI

Worked on GPT-4o-mini and RL at OpenAI; 'The Only Important Technology Is the Internet' argued data beats architecture.

Ex-OpenAI (Sora 1 & 2)

Helped create Sora 1 & 2 and post-trained o3/4o; his X bio now reads 'dei ex machina'. (His old .com domain was hijacked by spammers — .net is the real site.)

Ex-OpenAI policy · Eleos AI Research

Ran policy research at OpenAI, left in 2024 to work on AI welfare; now Managing Director at Eleos AI Research.

Ex-OpenAI policy/legal · Institute for Law & AI

Held policy and legal roles at OpenAI; now Director of Research at the Institute for Law & AI, writing on law for advanced AI.

Ex-OpenAI · Caltech professor

Score-based generative modeling pioneer; led OpenAI's Strategic Explorations before Caltech.

Chief Scientist, OpenAI

Succeeded Ilya as OpenAI's chief scientist; posts rarely, and it matters when he does.

Chief Research Officer, OpenAI

Runs OpenAI research; his X posts frame launches and research directions from the inside.

Reasoning research, OpenAI

Libratus/Pluribus/Cicero author; the sharpest public commentary on test-time compute and reasoning models.

OpenAI · ex-Microsoft VP AI

'Sparks of AGI' and phi-models author; posts frontier-model observations and theory takes.

Post-training research, OpenAI

AidanBench creator; his essays live on a Notion site we can't watch, but the ideas land on X first anyway.

CEO, Core Automation · ex-OpenAI VP of RL

Led RL for o1/o3, GPT-4 and Codex at OpenAI; left in 2026 to found Core Automation ('the most automated AI lab').

Co-founder, Core Automation · ex-Anthropic, ex-DeepMind

PaLM-2 co-lead at Google, then Anthropic pretraining — until Jerry Tworek 'nerdsniped' him into Core Automation. Dense technical X feed.

Research, Anthropic

Anthropic's voice on X — Claude tips, feature explainers, and the occasional behind-the-scenes thread.

Interpretability, Anthropic

Circuit-tracing interpretability at Anthropic; his blog is unwatchable (client-rendered) but the threads land on X.

Co-founder & Chief Scientist, SSI · OpenAI co-founder

Posts almost never — which is exactly why each one is an event.

Anthropic interpretability team

The interpretability team's rolling research thread — where superposition and scaling monosemanticity landed.

Anthropic alignment team

Anthropic's alignment-science notebook: sleeper agents, alignment faking, auditing games.

Founded by ex-OpenAI leadership

Mira Murati's lab (Schulman, Lilian Weng, Zoph, Metz) — 'Defeating Nondeterminism in LLM Inference' etc.