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Jacob Coxon spent three years doing pretraining research at OpenAI and then Anthropic. This week he resigned and posted a seven-part thread claiming neither company is acting responsibly with how fast they're racing toward self-improving AI. It hit 100 million views in a day.

This episode covers what he actually said, how Anthropic's own alignment science lead responded (and the important nuance buried in that response), the questions worth asking about Coxon's timing and incentives, a fair skeptic's rebuttal, and the AI safety legislation already moving in Congress as a result.

One thing on the title: it's a real quote, but it's Hubinger's general belief statement, not his assessment of present-day risk — he separately said present-model risk is low. Your own episode makes that distinction carefully. Worth a one-line callout in your pinned comment or community post after it's live, so the title doesn't end up being the thing people push back on in the comments before they've actually watched.

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Flock Safety's automated license plate readers are in over 5,000 communities and used by more than 40,000 cameras nationwide — sold to cities as a tool to catch car thieves and find missing people. But a Washington Post investigation found at least 50 officers accused of misusing the system, most of them to track romantic partners.

This episode covers:

• The scale of Flock's network and how warrantless searches are legally justified
• Individual abuse cases in Wichita, Milwaukee, and New Bedford
• The Texas sheriff's office case tied to reproductive-related searches
• 404 Media's reporting on ICE's informal access to Flock data despite no official contract
• Flock's "Freeform" search feature and the race/ethnicity flagging controversy
• CEO Garrett Langley's August 13 apology and the new audit reforms
• The historical parallel: NSA's "LOVEINT" scandal from the Snowden leaks
• What's actually working: 39+ contracts canceled by cities in 2026
• 3 concrete steps if your town has these cameras

flock safety, flock cameras, license plate reader, ALPR, police surveillance, data privacy, police stalking, automated license plate reader, mass surveillance, privacy please podcast, cybersecurity, ICE surveillance, police misconduct, LOVEINT

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Jonathan Sander is back on Privacy Please — and he's brought two blog posts worth arguing about.

Sander (42 Notions, now in an operational role at Myota) joins Cam and Gabe to dig into why ransomware resilience should work like New York City's storm surge infrastructure — building something that pays off before disaster strikes, not just a wall you wait behind. Then the conversation turns to AI agents: why Sander tried and failed to build a clean taxonomy for them, the six dimensions he landed on instead (authority, execution location, trigger, persistence, delegation, tool reach), and why the "hybrid agent" — switching between acting on your behalf and acting with power you never had — might be the hardest identity problem in security right now.

Also covered: why "back to basics" (secrets, resilience, identity) is Sander's answer for teams panicking about AI, and a real story about an AI agent that deleted a Postgres database and just... apologized.

Articles referenced:

• Ransomware Doesn't Have to Hit Like a Hurricane (Myota): https://www.myota.io/articles/ransomware-doesnt-have-to-hit-like-a-hurricane
• Why We Need an AI Agent Taxonomy Right Now But We Can't Have One (42 Notions): https://blog.42notions.com/why-we-need-an-ai-agent-taxonomy-right-now-but-we-cant-have-one/

Chapters:

• 00:00 – Catch-up with Sander
• 14:30 – The hurricane analogy: why Myota built resilience instead of a wall
• 20:30 – What actually makes Myota different from standard backup/cyberstorage
• 22:15 – Why you can't build a clean AI agent taxonomy (and the six dimensions Sander landed on instead)
• 28:50 – The hybrid agent problem: acting "on behalf of" vs. "for the benefit of"
• 45:10 – Sander's one takeaway: get the basics right before chasing the AI hype

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