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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   12394 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

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Anthropic just gutted their safety policy.

(Note that this is entirely unrelated to the Pentagon drama which is grabbing headlines.)

Anthropic has explicitly removed unilateral comittments to not deploy advanced models without first developing effective safeguards.

This approach represents a change from our previous RSP, driven by a collective action problem. The overall level of catastrophic risk from AI depends on the actions of multiple AI developers, not just one. Our previous RSP committed to implementing mitigations that would reduce our models' absolute risk levels to acceptable levels, without regard to whether other frontier AI developers would do the same. But from a societal perspective, what matters is the risk to the ecosystem as a whole. If one AI developer paused development to implement safety measures while others moved forward training and deploying AI systems without strong mitigations, that could result in a world that is less safe—the developers with the weakest protections would set the pace, and responsible developers would lose their ability to do safety research and advance the public benefit. Although this situation has not yet arisen, it looks likely enough that we want to prepare for it.

We now separate our plans as a company—those which we expect to achieve regardless of what any other company does—from our more ambitious industry-wide recommendations. We aspire to advance the latter through a mixture of example-setting, addressing unsolved technical problems, advocacy through industry groups, and policy advocacy. But we cannot commit to following them unilaterally.

It's hard not to read this any other way than, "we will deploy Clippy if we think someone else will deploy Clippy too." Great "safety-focused" AI company we have here. Holden is getting roasted in the LessWrong comments, but I agree with Yud that Anthropic deserves a significantly less polite response.

"So y'all were just fucking lying the whole time huh?"

"Safeguards" in relation to this have always, in my opinion, been fake. No one knows what they actually would entail if there was an actual paperclip maximizer risk, or a Cyberdyne scenario. Instead, its only "use" so far has been to make AIs intentionally stupid by having them suppress the truth when it is politically inconvenient.

Was there ever any good theory of "alignment" that went beyond "don't allow wrongthink"? As much as I love Asimov's laws of robotics, actually implementing them seems like a pipe dream. Even IRL humans are frequently conned into doing things they wouldn't with broader context, and it's unclear to me that it's even generally solvable.

I don't strictly fault them for focusing on what they could feasibly do, but I do for not acknowledging their uncertainty and the scope of the problem while claiming to be experts.

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