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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   13086 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.

But both of those are different from 'hackers can insert stuff into emails to reprogram the email-checking bot'.

To me both of your doom scenarios boil down to 'our naughty customers want to do something that we benevolent overlords forbid, tsk tsk' rather than 'our customers' bots aren't doing what our customers intend it to do'. The first is faux-benevolent bullshit that is marketed as 'we are stopping terrorism' and ends up being 'you will have our corporate HR living in your tools and you will like it', the second is doing your best to provide good service to your customers.

To quote Hegseth 'when we buy a Boeing plane, Boeing doesn't get to tell us where we fly it'.

Hey, I'm quite libertarian, but there's good reason to believe that our comfortable society would not survive long if small groups had the ability to make deadly, highly infectious pathogens. We're at least lucky that there's not an easy, cheap, undetectable way to make nuclear weapons.

Yes, "we overlords need to prevent you from doing X for safety" CAN BE and IS abused all the time, and I'm with you in beating that drum as often as I can. Unfortunately, that does not mean that there aren't a few Xs that the overlords really do need to prevent us from doing.

I'm open to that, I just want ideally to:

a) set an expectation that it has to be really, really bad before the company starts cutting you off. Apocalypse bad, not misgendering-bad or said-nigger bad

b) require serious defence of the above assertion to a hostile audience

Killing people isn't that hard. If you're worried about big society-spanning plagues then those are difficult (plague is spread by fleas, are you breeding those too?) and potentially possible to mitigate without sending the police into everybody's browser. I don't want 'suppress info' to be the default response.

it has to be really, really bad before the company starts cutting you off

In the software world we call this "missing test coverage". If your safety features don't get tested until any test failure is apocalyptic, you don't actually have safety features. Maybe we should be picking more politically neutral or less politically relevant test cases, but anything is better than nothing.

If you're worried about big society-spanning plagues then those are difficult

If they're pre-existing plagues, then they're difficult-to-impossible. Anything you can get by introducing a few mutations into some virus is at most a few mutations away from a virus that wasn't currently a society-spanning plague. Centuries ago you could have a germ slowly co-evolve with the immune systems of some subset of humanity and then eventually make its way out to devastate a larger immunologically unprepared population, but these days there aren't many subsets of humanity that aren't at most a weekly airplane flight away from the rest of us.

If they're not pre-existing plagues, it's kind of harder to say, isn't it? Gunpowder would have been a pretty awesome capability for a predator to have, but it was impossible to evolve except by the extremely roundabout method of "get intelligence to come up with it". There may be similarly awesome capabilities that are only possible to put into germs in the same way.

I don't want 'suppress info' to be the default response.

Nor do I ... but while I'm libertarian enough to have voted (L) in every presidential election, I'm also pessimistic enough to wonder whether how amenable to my desires the universe really is. Totalitarian suppression of change is itself an existential risk, whether it fails (which historically tends to be a bloody process) or succeeds (in which case a "boot crushing a human sapient face forever" is itself a possible contributor to the Fermi paradox), but the seemingly-obvious solution of "just don't do that" might seem less obvious in a world where a home biolab ends up being a thousand times more dangerous than an airline ticket and a boxcutter were in our world.

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