Ex-Anthropic's McDonagh Builds Compute Intelligence Agency to Study Frontier AI Costs
McDonaghMatthew · x · 2026-10-16
Matthew McDonagh announces he is building the Compute Intelligence Agency (CIA), arguing intelligence is the most important thing to study right now.
Key points:
- Intelligence turns questions into discoveries and tools into progress; it could let small teams do work that once required large organizations — "ambition will become affordable."
- Most exciting is a recursive renaissance: better intelligence tools helping researchers build even better tools.
- But demos and benchmark scores don't tell you whether a system works reliably at acceptable cost inside a real business.
The CIA will study what frontier labs publish, how their systems are evaluated, what they cost, where they're reliable, and what progress means outside the lab — informing investor and business decisions with evidence.
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