X：Ethan Mollick

Hi! I work on Cowork. Probably no surprise, but we want to make our users as powerful as possible with Claude - and you're right that explaining and keeping up with the capabilities is hard. Affected users got both an email and an in-app notice, but I'm grateful for the feedback - I think this change was more surprising to people than I'd like it to be. This one will be a longer explainer, bear with me! The "old" version of Cowork runs model inference in the cloud, executing tool calls in an Anthropic-provided VM we shipped to your computer. We added the VM for capability, safety, and security reasons - mapping in just the data you explicitly added to your session. People loved what they were able to do with Claude but didn't love the disk, battery, and performance cost of running the VM locally. Also, people didn't love that closing your laptop means the work stops. The "new" version of Cowork runs model inference and the VM in the cloud. Each session gets its own sandbox, not sharing state with other sessions. When the VM needs something on the users' device (like a file), the desktop app is responsible for that file access tool call. To be clear, Claude will only access files in folders that the user explicitly added to the session, the same way Claude only saw files explicitly added to the VM in the "old" version. Sandboxes are destroyed when the session ends! We think this solves a lot of problems we've heard about (like using Cowork from a phone, keeping work running, or getting all the same power without losing battery to the VM) - but we'll keep iterating on new feedback we hear!

🚨BREAKING: Microsoft and META are aggressively cutting employee use of Claude ahead of Anthropic's IPO Microsoft has cut internal claude spend by more than 33%, nuked per-employee token budget from $100k/month to $10k/month, and forced Copilot to auto-route to cheaper models META used Claude code to build Muse, then cut active users from 60,000 to 30,000 (50% decline) after launch, and replaced it with Muse Code Palantir and Nvidia are also scaling back claude over soaring prices and data privacy fears it’s OVER…

Do you ever think of all the ChatGPT pro users who aren’t on Twitter and are just completely confused at why their usage randomly resets and why they receive banked resets

whenever I see - "claude/chatgpt has started debugging your browser" - have to give an agent full disk and/or accessibility access I'm convinced we need fundamentally better security primitives for agents to do work as us - and we are living in an awkward intermediate era.

AI won’t take your job. Someone who knows how to use AI better than you, will take your job.

I had access to GPT-5. I think it is a very big deal as it is very smart & just does stuff for you Full write up in comments, but this is “make a procedural brutalist building creator where i can drag and edit buildings in cool ways" & "make it better" a bunch. I touched no code

I wrote about the thing I underestimated most about progress in AI: its ability to self-organize to accomplish tasks. Also, what that means for agents like Muse and Dots, along with a music video explaining why we keep relearning The Bitter Lesson. https://open.substack.com/pub/oneusefulthing/p/the-dot-and-the-swarm?r=i5f7&utm_medium=ios

Everyone uses AI by now. Senior leaders are vibecoding apps. They've adopted claude. They're finding workflows to automate. Folks have their own claws. AI capex is keeping the S&P afloat. Corporate America's geared up. It's all very much mainstream. We're not so early anymore.

Second question on AI. We are told repeatedly that AI is going to transform every aspect of our lives – jobs, productivity, inequality, science, communication, daily activities, social order, and politics, among others. But this promise (or threat) is coupled with the rhetoric that such an important technology, with all of the risks and competitive pressures that it entails, should be left to experts or to “technocracy” (perhaps construed broadly to include some regulators). These two statements are hard to reconcile in a democratic society. If anything is half as important as AI is said to be (and I agree, AI is potentially very important and transformative), then involving democratic voice is essential. If something will shape our future in a democratic society, then its direction is for democratic institutions to decide. My instinct is that democratic voice is essential, and relying too much on technocracy could be both dangerous and counterproductive. The counterargument that AI’s direction can and should be entrusted to technocracy would go something along the following lines. First, democratic decision-making has become imperiled in our age of polarization. Second, AI is sufficiently complex that most citizens won’t have a deep enough understanding to meaningfully contribute to the debate (and even to the question of what we want from AI). Third, competition between different labs, and perhaps competition between the US and China, creates enough discipline for a socially beneficial direction of AI to be adopted. Fourth, today’s AI leaders are enlightened and ethical enough that within the framework created by competition, they can be broadly trusted. There are many aspects of this counterargument that I do not find convincing. Taking them in order: polarization can be overcome, and big decisions and challenges sometimes bring societies together; in fact, delegating key decisions to technocracy without democratic input may diminish trust in institutions and experts, and may worsen polarization. Second, democratic voice does not require citizens to write code or design new models; the debate should be informative enough that citizens can weigh in about what type of future they want and how they trade off the costs and benefits of different options. Third, competition doesn’t seem to be a good disciplining framework; on the contrary, competition sometimes brings the worst out of both organizations and people. Fourth, if three decades of work on political economy and institutions has taught me anything, it is that we should not bank on the ethical grounding of unconstrained leaders. But, still, I do not mean to immediately dismiss the technocracy option if there are more compelling arguments for it. The question is, then, whether there are any circumstances under which such important decisions can be delegated to AI experts and technocracy. One final secondary question: even if we managed to get democratic input in the United States or even in Europe, AI will shape the lives of everyone on this planet. How do we ensure that the voice of nearly 6 billion people who don’t live in the US, Europe and China also contributes to the debates on AI?

Every FrontierMath Tier 4 problem has now been solved by AI, with GPT-6 Astra solving the last problem standing. Mathematicians often commented that AI found unintended shortcuts when solving their Tier 4 problems. Not so for this last one, which was created by Jay Pantone. https://t.co/ieEZaomhaE