The most important part isn’t any single step. It’s having established in advance, and org-wide, that a warning shot is a legitimate reason to drop planned work. Calling it a “protocol” is partly theater, but the theater is useful.
The rough sequence we ran:
Triage. Does this actually clear the bar? (and we lost 24h here, I made a mistake)
Facts first. Read everything, find where the story is weakest against skeptics, and don’t overstate. Overclaiming is the fastest way to get dismissed as hype.
Mobilize against a pre-defined scenario. We keep preset scenarios so we’re not designing under pressure. We also try to anticipate the next ones before they land, like what we’d do the day a lab ships neuralese in production.
Coordinate like a war room. Not one daily call in the team but several, so you can track a fast-moving situation and re-assign as it shifts. And don’t over-plan the individual actions. Some of the most impactful ones take ten minutes. A three-line message to the right journalist, a comment under the right post, a reminder to a mailing list you already run. Brainstorm those widely, because you get a lot back for very little effort.
Press first, because the clock is asymmetric. Media runs on days, institutions on months. Once a wire is out, your value-add isn’t amplification. It’s the expert angle and the concrete asks they need to write something beyond a description.
Lean on a CRM you maintain in peacetime. You can’t build the contact list during a crisis (well, you can, but it’ll be subpar). The highest-leverage targets are broadcast nodes, where a single message reaches a hundred people.
Then blast, but cautiously. Speed beats polish for most messages. But some channels must never be blasted. A regulator you have a formal relationship with (informational, never adversarial), or rival political camps you won’t contact in parallel. That’s how you make AI safety partisan.
Can you share anything about your warning shot protocol?
In any case, I think that the AI Safety and Governance communities should be building more capacity to act on warning shots.
Claude improved the formatting of this message
Thanks Chris.
The most important part isn’t any single step. It’s having established in advance, and org-wide, that a warning shot is a legitimate reason to drop planned work. Calling it a “protocol” is partly theater, but the theater is useful.
The rough sequence we ran:
Triage. Does this actually clear the bar? (and we lost 24h here, I made a mistake)
Facts first. Read everything, find where the story is weakest against skeptics, and don’t overstate. Overclaiming is the fastest way to get dismissed as hype.
Mobilize against a pre-defined scenario. We keep preset scenarios so we’re not designing under pressure. We also try to anticipate the next ones before they land, like what we’d do the day a lab ships neuralese in production.
Coordinate like a war room. Not one daily call in the team but several, so you can track a fast-moving situation and re-assign as it shifts. And don’t over-plan the individual actions. Some of the most impactful ones take ten minutes. A three-line message to the right journalist, a comment under the right post, a reminder to a mailing list you already run. Brainstorm those widely, because you get a lot back for very little effort.
Press first, because the clock is asymmetric. Media runs on days, institutions on months. Once a wire is out, your value-add isn’t amplification. It’s the expert angle and the concrete asks they need to write something beyond a description.
Lean on a CRM you maintain in peacetime. You can’t build the contact list during a crisis (well, you can, but it’ll be subpar). The highest-leverage targets are broadcast nodes, where a single message reaches a hundred people.
Then blast, but cautiously. Speed beats polish for most messages. But some channels must never be blasted. A regulator you have a formal relationship with (informational, never adversarial), or rival political camps you won’t contact in parallel. That’s how you make AI safety partisan.
Post mortem