AI Snake Oil

AI Snake Oil publishes research and commentary that help readers distinguish AI capabilities from hype. Its AI Snake Oil book provides foundational knowledge for evaluating AI claims, while its newsletter covers new developments for researchers, policymakers, journalists and AI enthusiasts. Renamed AI as Normal Technology in 2025, the newsletter shifted toward AI’s medium-term societal impacts; AI Snake Oil remains the book’s title.

Arvind Narayanan, a Princeton computer science professor and director of the Center for Information Technology Policy, and Sayash Kapoor, a Princeton computer science Ph.D. candidate, launched the newsletter in 2022. Their normal technology framework separates improvements in models from application development and adoption, explaining why organizational and institutional change shape AI’s effects. Their work also includes CRUX, introduced with collaborators in 2026: a research project that evaluates agents on long, messy real-world tasks. Its open-world evaluations complement benchmarks with detailed analysis of agent behavior and documented human intervention.

As of August 2026, the publication reported newsletter readership of over 60,000. The authors reported approximately 8,000 copies of AI Snake Oil sold by October 2024, shortly after publication. In 2025, they announced plans to expand their normal technology framework into a second book for publication in 2027.