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This morning I was looking into Switzerland's new animal welfare labelling law. I was going through the list of abuses that are now required to be documented on labels, and one of them made me do a double-take: "Frogs: Leg removal without anaesthesia."
This confused me. Why are we talking about anaesthesia? Shouldn't the frogs be dead before having their legs removed? It turns out the answer is no; standard industry practice is to cut their legs off while they are fully conscious. They remain alive and responsive for up to 15 minutes afterward. As far as I can tell, there are zero welfare regulations in any major producing country.
The scientific evidence for frog sentience is robust - they have nociceptors, opioid receptors, demonstrate pain avoidance learning, and show cognitive abilities including spatial mapping and rule-based learning.
It's hard to find data on the scale of this issue, but estimates put the order of magnitude at billions of frogs annually. I could not find any organisations working directly on frog welfare interventions. Here are the organizations I found that come closest:
* Animal Welfare Institute has documented the issue and published reports, but their focus appears more on the ecological impact and population decline rather than welfare reforms
* PETA has conducted investigations and released footage, but their approach is typically to advocate for complete elimination of the practice rather than welfare improvements
* Pro Wildlife, Defenders of Wildlife focus on conservation and sustainability rather than welfare standards
This issue seems tractable. There is scientific research on humane euthanasia methods for amphibians, but this research is primarily for laboratory settings rather than commercial operations. The EU imports the majority of traded frog legs through just a few countries such as Indonesia and Vietnam, creating clear policy leverage points. A major retailer (Carrefour) just stopped selling frog legs after welfar
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The Open Wing Alliance 2025 cage-free fulfillment report shows that 92% of cage-free egg commitments with deadlines of 2024 or earlier have been fulfilled, up from 89% last year. The report details a regional breakdown of progress around the world.
Thanks to OWA groups and others for continuing to hold companies around the world accountable for their commitments.
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Note: This post was crossposted from the Open Philanthropy Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.
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> Why ending the worst abuses of factory farming is an issue ripe for moral reform
I recently joined Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast to discuss factory farming. I hope you’ll give it a listen — and consider supporting his fundraiser for FarmKind’s Impact Fund. (Dwarkesh is matching all donations up to $250K; use the code “dwarkesh”.)
We discuss two contradictory views about factory farming that produce the same conclusion: that its end is either inevitable or impossible.
Some techno-optimists assume factory farming will vanish in the wake of AGI. Some pessimists see reforming it as a hopeless cause. Both camps arrive at the same conclusion: fatalism. If factory farming is destined to end, or persist, then what’s the point in fighting it?
I think both views are wrong. In fact, I think factory farming sits in the ideal position for moral reform. Because its end is neither inevitable nor impossible, it offers a unique opportunity for advocacy to change the trajectory of human moral progress.
Not inevitable
Dwarkesh raised an objection to working on factory farming that I often hear from techno-optimists who care about the issue: isn’t its end inevitable? Some cite the long arc of moral progress; others the promise of vast technological change like cultivated meat or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) which surpasses human capabilities.
It’s true that humanity has achieved incredible moral progress for humans. But that progress was never inevitable — it was the result of moral and political reform as much as technology. And that moral progress mostly hasn’t yet extended to animals. For them, the long moral arc of history has so far only bent downward.
Technology may one day end factory farming, just as cars liberated w
Isn't mechinterp basically setting out to build tools for AI self-improvement?
One of the things people are most worried about is AIs recursively improving themselves. (Whether all people who claim this kind of thing as a red line will actually treat this as a red line is a separate question for another post.)
It seems to me like mechanistic interpretability is basically a really promising avenue for that. Trivial example: Claude decides that the most important thing is being the Golden Gate Bridge. Claude reads up on Anthropic's work, gets access to the relevant tools, and does brain surgery on itself to turn into Golden Gate Bridge Claude.
More meaningfully, it seems like any ability to understand in a fine-grained way what's going on in a big model could be co-opted by an AI to "learn" in some way. In general, I think the case that seems most likely soonest is:
Learn in-context (e.g. results of experiments, feedback from users, things like we've recently observed in scheming papers...)
Translate this to appropriate adjustments to weights (identified using mechinterp research)
Execute those adjustments
Maybe I'm late to this party and everyone was already conceptualising mechinterp as a very dual-use technology, but I'm here now.
Honestly, maybe it leans more towards "offense" (i.e., catastrophic misalignment) than defense! It will almost inevitably require automation to be useful, so we're ceding it to machines out of the gate. I'd expect tomorrow's models to be better placed to make sense of and use of mechinterp techniques than humans are - partly just because of sheer compute, but also maybe (and now I'm into speculating on stuff I understand even less) the nature of their cognition is more suited to what's involved.
If someone isn't already doing so, someone should estimate what % of (self-identified?) EAs donate according to our own principles. This would be useful (1) as a heuristic for the extent to which the movement/community/whatever is living up to its own standards, and (1i) assuming the answer is 'decently' it would be useful evidence for PR/publicity/responding to marginal-faith tweets during bouts of criticism.
Looking at the Rethink survey from 2020, they have some info about which causes EAs are giving to but they seem to note that not many people respond on this? And it's not quite the same question. To do: check GWWC for whether they publish anything like this.
Edit to add: maybe an imperfect but simple and quick instrument for this could be something like "For what fraction of your giving did you attempt a cost-effectiveness assessment (CEA), read a CEA, or rely on someone else who said they did a CEA?". I don't think it actually has to be about whether the respondent got the "right" result per se; the point is the principles. Deferring to GiveWell seems like living up to the principles because of how they make their recommendations, etc.
Is anyone keeping tabs on where AI's actually being deployed in the wild? I feel like I mostly see (and so this could be a me problem) big-picture stuff, but there seems to be a proliferation of small actors doing weird stuff. Twitter / X seems to have a lot more AI content, and apparently YouTube comments do now as well (per conversation I stumbled on while watching some YouTube recreationally - language & content warnings: https://youtu.be/p068t9uc2pk?si=orES1UIoq5qTV5TH&t=2240)