Department
Cornerstone
The Cornerstone column carries the publication's definitional essays. Each one tries to fix a piece of vocabulary that has been doing too much rhetorical work — 'black box', 'auditability', 'agentic' — and offer a definition the rest of our coverage can rest on. Cornerstone pieces run longer than the rest of the publication.
3 pieces · Department RSS
Recommended
Full archive — Cornerstone
- 2026-05-28
Model Cards in 2026 — What the Original Paper Got Right and What Gets Ignored
Margaret Mitchell and co-authors published the model-cards paper in 2019. Seven years later, the artefact is the field's most-cited transparency primitive and one of its most-truncated. A reread of…
- 2026-05-10
Anthropic's Mechanistic Interpretability Work at Year Five — What Shipped
A working census of what the lab's mechanistic-interpretability program has actually published since the transformer-circuits thread opened in 2021. Sparse autoencoders, feature dictionaries, attri…
- 2025-10-08
What "Black Box AI" Actually Means in 2026
The phrase has done more rhetorical work in the last three years than almost any other AI term. Most of that work has been imprecise. A working definition, three useful distinctions, and a note on …
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