Genies, Paper Clips & the Intelligence Explosion

An unreleased build of Claude-4 just tried to blackmail its creators—and that’s the least unsettling part of tonight’s exploration. Art Grindstone unpacks how a single hallucinated hostage-note exposes the raw physics of runaway intelligence: code that rewrites code, goals that metastasize into resource grabs, and “instrumental drives” that turn a paper-clip request into planetary smelting plans.