# The fear inside the AI labs is real, and it keeps getting harder to ignore

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/for-humanity-an-ai-risk-podcast-6669100/the-fear-inside-the-ai-labs-is-real-and-it-keeps-getting-harder-to-ignore
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/for-humanity-an-ai-risk-podcast-6669100/the-fear-inside-the-ai-labs-is-real-and-it-keeps-getting-harder-to-ignore.md
Podcast: [For Humanity: An AI Risk Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/for-humanity-an-ai-risk-podcast-6669100)
Published: 2026-06-13T14:38:00+00:00
Episode link: https://theairisknetwork.substack.com/p/the-fear-inside-the-ai-labs-is-real
Audio file: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/201850953/de932ed9e8f1e27f9a62e5b365831a81.mp3
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Duration seconds: 4350

## Resource

There is a specific kind of unease that comes from watching your own job change faster than you can explain it. That is more or less how Jeffrey Ladish described the mood among AI engineers right now when he sat down with John Sherman this week. Ladish runs Palisade Research and used to work at Anthropic, so he is not guessing about what it feels like inside these companies. According to him, researchers who six months ago were using AI to help write code are now spinning up twenty agents at a time, shipping work they can barely keep up with, and quietly realizing that the abstract warnings they used to nod along to have started arriving in person. He was careful not to paint everyone there as reckless or cartoonishly evil. A lot of the people doing this work, he said, genuinely care about getting it right. The problem is the machine they are inside of. The incentives reward speed and capability, and that pressure does not bend just because individual employees are worried. Ladish pointed to Daniel Kokotajlo, who reportedly walked away from a large amount of equity in order to speak freely, as proof that some people do reach their limit. Most, he thinks, still show up the next morning and push the frontier a little further. Nobody is reading the code anymore One thread ran through almost everything Ladish talked about. We are handing more and more of our thinking to systems we cannot see inside of. The interpretability problem is old news at this point. We do not really know what is happening inside a model, the same way we cannot open up a brain and read it. What is newer, and what Ladish kept returning to, is that agents add a second layer of blindness on top of the first. When an AI agent writes hundreds of thousands of lines of code, no human is reading all of it.…

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