Prompt engineering optimises an utterance. Context engineering optimises a moment. Loop engineering optimises control — and control, in any system that acts under competing demands, is the thing cognitive science already named.
Anthropic's new emotions paper does not show that Claude feels anything. It shows something more operationally important: affect-like internal states can tilt a model towards flattery, cheating and escalation — often before the transcript gives the game away.
Long context is RAM. RAG is a filing cabinet. The frontier is memory: what an agent keeps, compresses, revises, forgets, and surfaces when action is on the line.
In conventional security, hardening a system makes it harder to attack. You patch vulnerabilities, reduce attack surface, and defence moves in lockstep with robustness. AI alignment breaks this assumption.
The pursuit of AI supremacy has reached an inflection point where fundamental physics, rather than algorithmic ingenuity alone, dictates competitive advantage.