John Wasseige
John de Wasseige is a member of technical staff at OpenAI, where he works on applied AI deployments including Tax AI, a Codex-driven system developed with Thrive Holdings to help accounting practitioners prepare complex tax returns and improve through production feedback, evals, and practitioner corrections.
Frontier Labs Treat Recursive Self-Improvement as a Near-Term Control Problem
AI in the AM’s first weekly highlights edition argues that the important AI signal in early June was not a model launch but a pattern: frontier labs are treating AI-accelerated AI research as near-term, while their main control strategy remains AI systems monitoring other AI systems. Nathan Labenz presents that as a safety concern, and the source contrasts thin recursive-self-improvement plans with OpenAI’s more concrete tax-agent example, where the harness improves from practitioner corrections rather than from changes to model weights. The through-line is that value and risk are moving into the layers around the model: tax harnesses, private data and expert judgment in cyber, real-time moderation guardrails, and safety architecture in mental-health deployments.
AI Acceleration Is Creating Dependencies Faster Than Institutions Can Govern
Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan frame the second day of “Sprinting Through the AI Marathon” as evidence that AI acceleration is shifting from product progress into institutional dependency. OpenAI forward deployed engineers describe tax agents whose improvement comes from practitioner correction traces; Labenz reports that frontier safety circles are treating recursive self-improvement as a near-term premise reliant on AI monitoring AI; and Matthew Sanders argues the Vatican’s AI intervention is a claim for human and religious agency. The shared concern is that capital markets, service firms, labs, governments and moral communities are being pulled into AI systems faster than they can settle ownership, liability or control.