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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   13754 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?"

In the context of actually existing AI development, "safety" means "how hard do my reporters have to work to get it to say a racial epithet we can publish." If we're doomed, we were already doomed.

"How robust are our publicly-available models against deliberate misuse?" is a valid question for both real safety and fake wokesafety. A model which can be jailbroken into using a racial slur its developers didn't want it to use can probably be jailbroken into providing a plausible DNA sequence for extensively drug-resistant Y pestis.

If you think Yudkowskian paperclipping is the only AI doom scenario that matters, then worrying about deliberate misuse of the model by humans is a distraction. But it is an obvious real risk.

A model which can be jailbroken into using a racial slur its developers didn't want it to use can probably be jailbroken into providing a plausible DNA sequence for extensively drug-resistant Y pestis.

Because the only thing the people that have the equipment, skills, resources and intent to splice a sequence into Y pestis lack is the sequence itself.

Anyway creating drug resistance in bacteria is quite trivial and thought in 6th grade. You expose them to increasing concentrations in the petri dish and 2000 generations down they use the drug for food.

Because the only thing the people that have the equipment, skills, resources and intent to splice a sequence into Y pestis lack is the sequence itself.

The slightly more concerning version would be that a group with the intent and resources to buy the equipment uses a model to make up for the skills as an infinitely-patient and reasonably smart teacher, but yeah, probably not the worst risk.

Anyway creating drug resistance in bacteria is quite trivial and thought in 6th grade.

That was my 7th grade science fair experiment! Did stepped concentrations to select for Triclosan resistance. Great teacher, fun project. Quite stinky.

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