Torment Nexus
Article
Torment Nexus is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between August 08, 2022 and September 25, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “whether Anthropic has already pivoted to building the Torment Nexus”; “trying to build the Torment Nexus a free pass”; “If you used the Torment Nexus and it did happen to you”. It most often appears alongside 80,000 Hours, 80,000 Hours’ Guide To Working In AI Policy And Strategy, Aaronson.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: August 08, 2022
- Last seen: September 25, 2025
Appears In
Related Pages
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- 80,000 Hours (1 shared issues)
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- 80,000 Hours’ Guide To Working In AI Policy And Strategy (1 shared issues)
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- Aaronson (1 shared issues)
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- activists and intellectuals of the 70s and 80s (1 shared issues)
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- AGI (1 shared issues)
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- AI (1 shared issues)
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- AI Alignment (1 shared issues)
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- Anthropic (1 shared issues)
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- Anthropic Raises $580 Million For AI Safety And Research (1 shared issues)
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- Armenians at Harvard (1 shared issues)
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- barberpole model of fashion (1 shared issues)
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- Baron von Ungern-Sternberg (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Anthropic was founded when some OpenAI safety researchers struck out on their own to create what they billed as an even-more-safety-conscious alternative. Again, the headline was Anthropic Raises $580 Million For AI Safety And Research (and most of that came from rationalists and effective altruists convinced by their safety-conscious pitch). Again, their announcement included reassuring language - their president said that “We’re focusing on ensuring Anthropic has the culture and governance to continue to responsibly explore and develop safe AI systems as we scale.” Clued-in people disagree about whether Anthropic has already pivoted to building the Torment Nexus, but it’s probably only a matter of time.
First, you are allowed to use Inside View. If Osama bin Laden is starting a supervirus lab, and objects that you shouldn’t shut him down because “in the past, shutting down progress out of exaggerated fear of potential harm has killed far more people than the progress itself ever could”, you are permitted to respond “yes, but you are Osama bin Laden, and this is a supervirus lab.” You don’t have to give every company trying to build the Torment Nexus a free pass just because they can figure out a way to place their work in a reference class which is usually good. All other technologies fail in predictable and limited ways. If a buggy AI exploded, that would be no worse than a buggy airplane or nuclear plant. The concern is that a buggy AI will pretend to work well, bide its time, and plot how to cause maximum damage while undetected. Also it’s smarter than you. Also this might work so well that nobody realizes they’re all buggy until there are millions of them.
“Nishin,” says Vinaya. “You read speculative fiction, right? Maybe you fantasize about isekai - the idea of being dropped into some fantasy world and having to survive by your wits alone? Imagine writing our own world as an isekai. ‘In my setting, there's this computerized gathering-place hive mind thing. Nice, normal people go there and get addicted to it. Then it uses advanced AI to serve them content specifically tailored to polarize and enrage them. The world's top public intellectuals start out as really thoughtful decent people, then get spit out as seething balls of rage suitable only as objects of public hilarity and terrible warnings. Once there was a psychology professor widely admired as one of the leading proponents of self-cultivation, the Western canon, and Biblical wisdom, and he spent a few years on there and ended up screaming about how pandemics were fake news dreamed up by mediocrity-worshipping blue-haired death cultists.’ If this was the book you were going to be isekaied into, wouldn't you develop some kind of plan other than entering the Torment Nexus and hoping this doesn't happen to you? If you used the Torment Nexus and it did happen to you, wouldn't you at least consider the possibility that you were suffering some kind of Torment-Nexus-related-brain-damage as opposed to really being a vital front-line soldier against the death cultists?”