Tristan Harris

If you listen to folks in the AI labs right now, they’re all quietly terrified by the speed of AI development. Anthropic just published a letter openly asking for the option to pause or slow R&D because of how fast recursive self-improvement is coming but noting that they can’t do that without being able to verify that their competitors were doing the same. That’s why it’s critically important that we build the tech needed to verify AI agreements. On this week’s episode of Your Undivided Attention, I sat down with two experts on AI governance, Tim Fist and Janet Egan, to talk about the kinds of verification technology we need for AI, the challenges of building it, and the world it could unlock if we did. Given how critical verification technology is, you would assume there are thousands of people working in it. In reality, there’s only around fifty. We urgently need to put our attention, time, and energy into this critical area. Check out our full conversation: