Timnit Gebru (she/her).10h ago

This "careful" "AI Safety" company that just accidentally leaked its entire source code to the world is the one that African governments are entering into agreements with to include in infrastructures from health care to god knows what.

These are the products people have to use to make sure that they don't get dinged in their performance reviews for "not using AI."

These are the products teachers have to use in schools so that "students aren't left behind."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/01/anthropic-claudes-code-leaks-ai

Claude’s code: Anthropic leaks source code for AI software engineering tool

Nearly 2,000 internal files were briefly leaked after ‘human error’, raising fresh security questions at the AI company

The Guardian
Show threadTimnit Gebru (she/her).10h ago

I appreciated this article by @mttaggart
infosec.exchange.

I get the temptation especially in this world we're all living in where you have to produce something super fast all the time.

But my question is, what are people's arguments for how functioning software can be created with these tools?

What about new architectures, new ways of thinking, new programming languages, etc? Who will create those?

https://taggart-tech.com/reckoning/

I used AI. It worked. I hated it.

I used Claude Code to build a tool I needed. It worked great, but I was miserable. I need to reckon with what it means.

Show threadTimnit Gebru (she/her).10h ago

I'm not even talking about the data stealing, exploitation, environmental pillaging, pollution, environmental racism etc.

I'm talking about the way people use the tools. Like what do advocates of using these tools say will happen to software engineering in the future? That it just won't need to exist because everyone will be able to create software using these tools?

Show threadTimnit Gebru (she/her).10h ago
That it will just take a different form, which is fine?
Show threadMx. Aria Stewart10h ago

@timnitGebru Yes. To a large degree, I think it's fine.

And the old forms will still be there in a lot of cases and contexts. And, if we build the future well, we won't put hard barriers to digging in and finding out what's going on. If we build it poorly and let platform rentiership win, that's a big problem loomng.

Show threadJess F
@aredridel
I worked in software preservation for a few years and i think "the old forms will still be there in a lot of cases" is massively optimistic about what software and coding knowledge will be preserved. We've already lost a lot of knowledge from previous generations before gen AI joined the party. Digital forms of knowledge can't continue to exist without intentional preservation interventions, which is not currently happening.
@timnitGebru
8:31amWeb