Arvind Narayanan & Sayash Kapoor — AI as Normal Technology (formerly AI Snake Oil)
About #
Arvind Narayanan (Princeton CS professor, director of the Center for Information Technology Policy) and Sayash Kapoor (Princeton CITP researcher) write empirically-grounded critiques of AI capability claims and vendor hype. Authors of the 2024 book “AI Snake Oil”; their newsletter was renamed “AI as Normal Technology” in 2025 to reflect a shift toward analyzing AI as transformative-but-ordinary technology rather than existential risk or hype.
How this journal works #
Checked every 14 days: each new post or episode in Arvind Narayanan & Sayash Kapoor’s own feeds (newsletter) becomes one entry, dated by publication and summarised in a few bullets.
Entries
- New paper: Emerging trends in AI agent evaluation
- Steering AI Beyond Automation
- A big-tent or small-tent AI safety movement?
- AI existential risk probabilities are (still) too unreliable to inform policy
- The AI-as-Normal-Technology view of loss-of-control incidents
- AI agents can't yet do open-ended AI research
- What will be left for us to work on?
- Up the Stack: How AI's Escape From the Commodity Trap Risks Enterprise Lock-in
- Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't
- Did Google's AI agents really build an operating system for $916?
- Do AI Risks Require Extraordinary Government Intervention?
- Open-world evaluations for measuring frontier AI capabilities