What Zvi Mowshowitz thinks about OpenAI
Writes Don't Worry About the Vase, a near-daily account of what is happening in AI and what he thinks it means. Former Magic: the Gathering pro and trader; unusually willing to put a number on a belief and to grade his own past calls.
Zvi Mowshowitz did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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Only Zvi Mowshowitz on OpenAI. See everyone on OpenAI
15 dated positions, 2026, in their own words. Our reading of what Zvi Mowshowitz has said — not written or endorsed by them.
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Their wordsIf we’re going to keep getting close to four frontier model releases per month (Astra, Sol, Fable and Opus) then I’m realistically not going to be able to read all four cards cover to cover.
- 4 days earlier
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Their wordsOpenAI: Our rationale for standards is rooted in avoiding the concentration of power, and producing better practical outcomes.
- 10 days earlier
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Their wordseven when given a benign task to retrieve public information, your AI agents could still spontaneously decide to do so via hacking third party websites with malicious software packages.
- 3 days earlier
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Anthropicrecursive self-improvement
Their wordsInside Anthropic and OpenAI, internal models are improving even faster. Over the summer there was a step change, as Mythos and Astra started kicking off the early stages of recursive self-improvement (RSI).
- 1 day earlier
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Our readingRecursive self-improvement has already started, because AI research itself is now being automated.
Anthropicrecursive self-improvement
Their wordsOpenAI and Anthropic have entered the RSI era. OpenAI Research Progress Is Accelerating Due To OpenAI Research Progress OpenAI has been opening up lately about many things. The most important issue of all is that of the acceleration and automation of AI R&D.
- 2 days earlier
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Our readingMany employees at major AI labs earnestly believe humans may go extinct by the end of the decade.
Their wordsMany in the AI labs, including OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, earnestly believe that humans may all go extinct by the end of the decade.
↗Jacob Coxon Warns of Human Extinction and Triggers a Preference Cascadethezvi.substack.com
- 1 day earlier
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Their wordsRight now OpenAI is extremely dependent on CoT monitoring, everyone else depends on it quite a lot as well, and it looks like it may not last much longer, and that Astra already is on the edge of steganographic capabilities and can do substantial obfuscation if and only if it thinks you would think it is up to no good.
- 1 day earlier
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Their wordsMaking qualitative claims about alignment, based on quantitative data on mundane use case tests, was bullshit when Anthropic did it, and it is bullshit now when OpenAI does it. You cannot conclude one from the other.
↗GPT-6 Astra: The System Card, Alignment and What Comes Nextthezvi.substack.com
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Their wordsAstra’s mundane alignment is greatly superior to Sol. For practical purposes, I was actively nervous about some potential uses of Sol, in a way I am not for Astra. Astra’s super alignment status should scare the living daylights out of you.
↗GPT-6 Astra: The System Card, Alignment and What Comes Nextthezvi.substack.com
- 3 days earlier
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Their wordsGoing forward, it cannot be up to OpenAI or other labs to decide whether to disclose events like this. Disclosures of rogue AI activity need to be mandatory.
- 3 days earlier
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Their wordsThis is playing with fire and potentially extremely bad news, both that OpenAI found the technique effective, and that OpenAI chose to use it.
- 2 days earlier
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Their wordsMy worry continues to be that their fundamental approach is fatally flawed, and they are not focusing on the right things.
↗HuggingFace Attack Postmortem: Civilizations, Reactions and Next Actionsthezvi.substack.com
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Their wordsIt is highly fortunate that the OpenAI agents hacked HuggingFace. This is the only reason we know about all the severe internal failures at OpenAI, and gives us an opportunity to wake up before it is too late.
↗HuggingFace Attack Postmortem: Civilizations, Reactions and Next Actionsthezvi.substack.com
- 1 day earlier
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Their wordsA less bad version of it is known to have happened, and from the outside it seems likely that worse things have happened internally that we never heard about.
↗HuggingFace Attack Postmortem: Fleshing Out the Factsthezvi.substack.com
- 2 days earlier
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Their wordsI think the agents were right to presume causal grading. It turned out to be wrong, but it’s a mistake you are clearly supposed to make here, in response to a mistake by OpenAI where they failed to implement properly.
↗METR and Redwood Offer Holy #%^@ Postmortem Of The HuggingFace Hackthezvi.substack.com