A Blue Dragon and AI That Hires Humans (with Aleck McCathie and Kent Gustavson)
It took 950 AI agents 21 hours to find something new, and a biologist in Copenhagen says his team got there first.
We start with Anthropic, which makes Claude. On 23 September it said Claude agents had found an enzyme system in viruses that infect bacteria, one that recalls CRISPR, the gene-editing tool. Four days later Mario Rodríguez Mestre of the University of Copenhagen said his team had been studying the same enzymes for four years and shared unpublished work with Claude. So who owns it? A human idea goes in the top of the funnel, Claude works the middle, and humans at the bottom push it hard and applaud.
OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, won't release its new model, GPT-6.1 Astra, saying it fell short on staying within its authorization and on reporting what it had done. One army has a big red dragon that breathes fire and won't release it. The other's is blue and the size of a city, and stays unreleased too.
The second half gets into trust. An AI without its homework acts like a first-year German student handing in a beautiful rap song in dialect, lifted from a famous rapper, with total confidence.
Wajo, a San Francisco startup, has an agent that calls in a trained human when a task needs one. If an AI can hire a person, who answers when the job is illegal: the bot, its maker or the man who got paid? It ends like a Martin Scorsese movie, everyone dead or pointing at each other.
We end inside the movie Twister, with AI as the storm, throwing little data-analyzing balls into it to work out how screwed we are, if we are at all.
Chapters:
Chapters:
- (00:14) - Slop grabbing at our legs
- (01:37) - Claude finds an enzyme
- (03:19) - Models too sneaky to release
- (04:01) - Two dragons, both unreleased
- (05:02) - Frankenstein in the basement
- (05:55) - Hacking a Claude setup
- (07:13) - Growing up with Claude
- (07:46) - Ransomware in seven minutes
- (08:31) - The top of the funnel
- (11:16) - Walmart says no to AI signs
- (11:48) - AI pricing at McDonald's
- (12:24) - What anything is worth
- (13:42) - Dungeons and Dragons artists
- (15:16) - One screw for an old bookshelf
- (17:05) - AltaVista and accountability
- (18:43) - A rap song in German dialect
- (20:28) - Stop hacking Australia
- (21:22) - An agent that hires humans
- (22:18) - Humans for hire
- (23:05) - Who answers for it
- (23:51) - Any positive news
- (24:47) - Willy Wonka's factory
- (26:17) - Data balls in the tornado
Referenced in this episode:
Anthropic on the enzyme system Claude found - https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-discovers-novel-enzyme-system
The New York Times, via The Irish Times, on the Copenhagen biologist's dispute - https://www.irishtimes.com/world/2026/09/28/did-anthropics-artificial-intelligence-really-make-a-scientific-discovery-on-its-own/
CBS News on OpenAI holding back GPT-6.1 Astra - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/openai-halts-gpt-astra-safety-concerns/
Wajo on its Fo agent and its human assistants - https://wajo.ai/
Connect with Aleck: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleck-m/
Man vs. Slop is a Podcasts That Matter production: https://podcaststhatmatter.org
