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Notes -
Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5.
A few immediate thoughts:
For one strain of doomer, this is a good thing: the USG showing willingness to directly intervene and cut down the addressable market for capability-pushing models reduces economic incentives to push the frontier at all costs and slows down the race dynamic. Correspondingly, it's going to be a nightmare for the markets: the AI boom is driven by the idea that frontier models are going to be replacing a significant chunk of global labor, and obviously now this is significantly less likely now that frontier models are going to be stuck in Uncle Sam's basement.
For another strain of doomer, this is a horrible thing: really this was fairly clear even with the DOD conflict, but now control of AI is now very firmly a direct White House concern - the fate of the planet and/or the universe is in the end going to be decided by DC bureaucrats and not SF tech nerds.
Companies, especially non-US companies, are going to be rushing to the doors to move their AI workflows off closed-source and onto self-hosted models, another blow for the AI market thesis - the business continuity risks of Anthropic's demonstrated willingness to silently cripple models and USG's demonstrated willingness to now arbitrarily cut off access are simply going to be too much.
This is honestly hilarious in the context of Anthropic's own writing from a few weeks ago.
When a model poses risks of this kind, the government should have the legal authority to block or deter its deployment—beyond what exists in current law or in existing proposals in Congress.
It looks like they're getting what they asked for, and they're getting it good and hard. The admin simply took them at their word.
Did you read to the end?
Lots to unpack here.
At the philosophical level, if we don't have the state capacity to implement a regulatory regime that meets Anthropic's specifications, then why is Anthropic training and releasing frontier models? It reads like they are saying, "here are our demands for submitting to the authority of your government". That's not how it works. You submit to the government or you get shut down, like the rest of us.
At the operational level, I don't know how possible it would be to implement a regime that is "transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts," for regulating capabilities that don't exist yet. How can it be fair if we don't know yet what the relevant metrics are? How can it be clear if we don't know what red flags to look for? How can it be grounded in technical facts if nobody knows how these models work?
Did you read to the start?
They are submitting to the authority. We can't get anything perfect (and it remains to be seen whether we can do anything good enough), but surely we can do better than this??
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They have submitted to the authority of the government. They’re arguing that the government’s demands should be reasonable, untargeted, and not sprung on us out of the blue.
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