Artificial Intelligence

Amodei wants the AI frontier paced but names no authority that could bind it

Dario Amodei's essay of 12 September argues that capability is now outrunning oversight, and proposes embedded evaluators, industry standards and a deal with China. The argument about rates is stronger than its critics allow. The mechanism is weaker, because nothing in it can compel anyone.

Nick Bostrom

Three years of AI philosophy: what the shelf has actually settled

Since 2024 the philosophy of artificial intelligence has become a body of work rather than a news cycle. Nine books from Anthem, Oxford, Minnesota, Urbanomic, California, MIT and Yale, sorted by what they are doing — and a judgement on which lines of enquiry are producing results and which are circling.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Jean Nicod Prize 2026 goes to Elisabeth Camp, philosopher of the unsaid

The Rutgers philosopher takes the field's most watched award in philosophy of mind, and will give the Nicod Lectures in Paris this autumn. Her subject is the part of communication that is never actually asserted: metaphor, sarcasm, slurs, insinuation, and the perspectives that organise what we notice.

David Chalmers, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Elena Esposito, Elisabeth Camp

Deleuze, desire and the machine: asking a better question about AI

The argument about artificial intelligence runs almost entirely on questions from the philosophy of mind. Deleuze and Guattari offer a different unit of analysis — desire as production, the machine as a cut into a flow, the assemblage as the thing that actually does something. What that buys, and what it cannot buy.

David Chalmers, Andy Clark, Nick Land, Yuk Hui, Plato, Gilles Deleuze

Philosophers ask governments for an AI treaty modelled on nuclear arms control

An open letter written by Molly Gardner and published on 11 September asks elected officials for a treaty on the model of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, to pause, slow or halt frontier AI development everywhere. Its signatories are mainstream ethicists. On Daily Nous, Justin Weinberg proposed something stranger, and David Wallace objected.

Robot rights: three questions the debate keeps running together

Can a machine be conscious? Can it have interests? Should it have legal standing? The three questions come apart, and almost every argument about robot rights confuses at least two of them. A report on what the philosophers, the labs and the lawyers have actually said.

Eric Schwitzgebel, Peter Singer, David Chalmers

Hired by the labs, closed by the universities: what philosophy is being paid for

Anthropic and DeepMind employ philosophers to draft the documents that govern their models. Hertfordshire is withdrawing philosophy from its curriculum altogether. The New York Fed's February 2026 table is quoted as vindication, but the columns nobody quotes tell a colder story about who now sets the discipline's agenda.

Luciano Floridi

Foucault at a hundred in Philadelphia, and Sartre among the machines

Two meetings the autumn diary has so far missed: a centenary symposium on Foucault at the University of Pennsylvania on 24 and 25 September, and the North American Sartre Society's 31st annual meeting, held on Zoom in October on artificial intelligence and digital existence. Plus a verified survey of what follows to the end of November.

Yuk Hui

Balzan Prize for Elena Esposito, who stopped asking whether machines think

The 2026 Balzan Prize for the social science of digital technology goes to a sociologist trained by Niklas Luhmann. Her claim is that the seventy-six-year argument about machine understanding has been aimed at the wrong target, and that the question worth asking about language models is a social one.

Eric Schwitzgebel, David Chalmers, Elena Esposito