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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   14676 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 15, 2026

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The Anthropic C-suite needs to rewatch Oppenheimer.

More details are emerging regarding the US Government's decision to impose defense export controls on Claude Fable. There are lots of similarities between this kerfuffle and the February Supply Chain Risk designation. Somehow, Anthropic executives still don't understand the language of power and government. It's not hard. All they need to do is watch Oppenheimer (and pay attention this time). If they still can't figure it out, here is my cheat sheet:

  • If you are working on sufficiently powerful technology with dual-use applications, then you work for the War Department. There is no option for you to continue your preferred work while licensing only peaceful civilian applications of your product.

  • If you piss off the wrong person, you're screwed. Some people will see defeating you as a stepping stone to greater power and influence. Some people will work to destroy you simply out of spite.

  • Anthropic has scientific geniuses, Anthropic has an Oppenheimer, but does Anthropic have a General Groves? How far do you think Oppenheimer would have gotten without General Groves?

  • If you are trying to convince the government that you are not a security risk, do not hire people like this and present them as neutral experts. (No seriously, what the actual fuck were they thinking?)

  • You don't get to decide what counts as a security risk and what doesn't. That is the job of the government and the political process.

  • The president does not care about your ethical concerns. You think you know how much he doesn't care, but he actually cares much less than that.

  • If you aren't okay with the government using your technology, then don't build it. Isidor Rabi said no. You can say no too.

"People I don't like need to watch the propaganda film which was designed to make me mad at them." Oh, OK.

If you are trying to convince the government that you are not a security risk, do not hire people like this and present them as neutral experts. (No seriously, what the actual fuck were they thinking?)

Can you give context for this? I've seen people reference this but I assume it's a joke of some kind I'm just not in on?

Several items indicate that the person is extremely left-wing.

  • Announcement of pronouns in username

  • Use of coronavirus mask in profile image, years after the pandemic

  • Link to a "PayEquityNow" account in profile description

  • Announcement of indigenous background in profile description

It is the opinion of several commenters here that any extremely-left-wing person is automatically a "security risk" to Trump's right-wing government.

It is the opinion of several commenters here that any extremely-left-wing person is automatically a "security risk" to Trump's right-wing government.

Why just Trump's? This kind of person appears (to me) to be a security risk to any org they are allowed to be a part of. I dont think, for example, it would be prudent to hire her for a legal position. This level of brainrot indicates they would be prone to break A-C privilege if they thought their client was transgressing some progressive dogmas.

What I mean is: is this a real person that anthropic hired for real? This reads way too much like a right wing caricaturization of a left wing person.

My understanding is not that this person herself was seen as a security risk, but that she was not trusted to deliver an honest technical opinion given her (loudly displayed) background.

In addition to looking like a roving example of Everything Leftism (election voting to gender politics to military spending to riot policing), there's a perception of IT people as largely devolving into three separate stereotypes:

  • Stuffed suits, who have a very good compliance posture, but will recommend software that EOL'd five years ago and an API for that software from the Clinton administration.
  • Polos, who will have memorized minutia of esoteric stuff specific to their environment and can run wires through a spiral labyrinth, but get rapidly out of their depth in Big Questions.
  • T-shirts/hoodies, who have five years of experience in three-year-old new languages, but think of compliance as 'it's only illegal if you get caught, and prosecuted, and the penalty is big enough to care'.

This is a set of stereotypes -- there's a small industry of t-shirts who've put on a suit and play suit games in particular -- but it's not an unfounded one. But Moussouris is a t-shirt.

That wouldn't necessarily be unpersuasive because of those things at smaller scales (though I've personally been burned over it before), but Anthropic is big enough that they could have gotten any expert from any of those positions or from a Red Tribe perspective was a choice, and not doing so indicates that there wasn't a credible expert willing to do what they wanted from outside of those positions.

Add in the ideological position about defense-vs-offense, and it's very much like if Cathode_G were brought to testify in front of the ATF. He could well be right! And it wouldn't matter.

That's the way I'd see it as well. It's not the apparent extremeness of her left-wingness that's concerning, it's the apprent type of left-wingness that is, since the type is one that openly denounces concepts like rationality and empirical evidence as tools of oppression that don't count as much as lived experience stated by people of the preferred phenotypes. This person might not specifically buy into all that since stereotypes don't hold for every last individual, but certainly I would be highly suspicious of anyone who wouldn't bet in that direction if given the opportunity.

If there are any Anthropic people reading this you should seriously consider relocating your company to the UK. We'd welcome you with open arms and treat you as an equal partner and not a vassal to do our bidding. London has a talent density and ecosystem unmatched by anywhere else outside the US.

  • -20

Anthropic doesn't want their tech to be used to spy on Americans. Your solution is that Anthropic should move to the UK, which not 2 weeks ago announced that they will be requiring tech companies, under threat of prison, to scan anything and everything on every single persons phone.

Open arms, but check your back for a stiletto.

Anthropic already has a London office. Beyond that, Dario has a deep rootedness in San Francisco: he grew up here, went to Lowell, and returned as soon as he could after his studies. The choice to locate in San Francisco is rooted in a genuine love of place, not purely business reasons.

If there are any Anthropic people reading this, this is what he means by "treating you as an equal partner".

There is a reason why the Normans adopted "Earl" (a corruption of the Norse "Jarl") in place of a direct translation of the Norman-French "Comte" when conquering a country with a substantial Anglo-Saxon population familiar with vulgar Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. I would hate for @BurdemsomeCount to end up as an example of why they did this, but I think that post qualifies.

There is a reason why the Normans adopted "Earl" (a corruption of the Norse "Jarl") in place of a direct translation of the Norman-French "Comte" when conquering a country with a substantial Anglo-Saxon population familiar with vulgar Anglo-Saxon vocabulary.

Shakespeare got there:

KATHERINE Ainsi dis-je: d’ elbow, de nick, et de sin. Comment appelez-vous “le pied” et “la robe”?

ALICE “Le foot,” madame, et “le count.”

KATHERINE Le foot, et le count. Ô Seigneur Dieu! Ils sont les mots de son mauvais, corruptible, gros, et impudique, et non pour les dames d’honneur d’user. Je ne voudrais prononcer ces mots devant les seigneurs de France, pour tout le monde. Foh! Le foot et le count! Néanmoins, je réciterai une autre fois ma leçon ensemble: d’ hand, de fingre, de nailes, d’ arme, d’ elbow, de nick, de sin, de foot, le count.

I make an exception for the Anthropic set; they genuinely seem to believe they have duties to the rest of humanity and accept that we live in an interconnected society. No wedgies for them, only strong legal protections and a functioning judicial system limiting government overreach!

  • -12

The thread where you said that was about Anthropic. This was your reaction to the same government overreach you're decrying now.

Funny idea. Unfortunately, you can't move the datacenters as easily as you can move the people. Anthropic mostly trains on AWS clusters located in the US, and I wouldn't be surprised if the USG would directly declare them to be a hostile foreign actor if they moved abroad, barring them from doing business with Amazon/Google/SpaceX.

And nobody in Europe can give them any meaningful compute. Hard to overstate how far behind Europe is in the AI race. Maybe the Saudis could jump in, if there's anything left standing there...

If it were a different leadership in charge of the White House, I honestly think this would be a possibility for Anthropic (though a different leadership probably wouldn't have thrown a hissy fit in the first place).

Gretchen, stop trying to make European AI competitiveness happen. It's not going to happen.

Something something Mistral, something something one BILLION dollar ten year investment.

They need to emulate OpenAI, where Sam Altman has demonstrated he knows how to play political games and get positioned to be the guy left standing in any power struggles. I am informed by Google's AI overview that:

Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI) and Anthropic (led by CEO Dario Amodei) helm the two most dominant and highly valued private companies in the artificial intelligence race, locked in a fierce, decade-long rivalry that originated from shared roots among former OpenAI researchers.

I don't much like Sam (for some weird and indefinable reason, it's just that every time I see him speaking he strikes me much the same as Zuckerberg: an android emulating humanity) but there's no question he has the survival instincts of a dockyard rat and Dario should crack open a copy of The Prince for advice on "So now you are the new big cheese in town and have your very own shiny new princedom. Congrats! Now here's how to hold on to it".

If you are trying to convince the government that you are not a security risk, do not hire people like this and present them as neutral experts. (No seriously, what the actual fuck were they thinking?)

Seconded. "Legacy blue check"? I'd fire her backside into space for that alone.

A good friend of mine from college ended up doing thier did grad work at SAIL and then going on to write a good bit of DALL-E's original codebase. To this day they insist that to the extent that "AI" is dangerous that danger comes not from some foom scenario but from Silicon Valley being populated by autists and sociopaths with Altman specifically called out as one of the latter.

Not really sure why autists are catching strays in same category as sociopaths...

Because sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

Ironic, I'll remember that quote when I try to understand why normies do stupid things.

Don't act like you wouldn't build the Torment Nexus form the classic Sci-Fi novel Don't Create the Torment Nexus if given the opportunity. This is why the OP is telling Anthropic (and the rest of the CFAR/MIRI crowd) that they need to rewatch Oppenheimer. Specifically the last two bullet points in mind.

The torment nexus doesn't exist, it's sci-fi gobblygook, nothing being created by anthropic now will lead to its immediate creation. If that's all you have to justify classifying autists in the same bucket as sociopaths then you might want check yourself into an asylum because you are the schizo raving on the train.

Yes, I am aware that the illustration is just an illustration. You're missing the point.

As horrified as Oppenheimer may have been by the prospect of nuclear annihilation he was also largely responsible for making it a possibility. As @Quantumfreakonomics says, he could have followed Isidor Rabi's example, but he didn't.

Oppenheimer was an Autist in that he seems to have lacked a basic understanding of social dynamics and game theory, that is why he was shocked and appalled when circumstances deviated from his preconceptions and that is why Truman was right to tell him off. A more "neurotypical" individual would have understood that you don't hand a person leverage if you don't want that leverage to be used.

I've noticed that, for a lot of normies, the former is just as bad as the latter and thus they don't even bother distinguishing between the two.

Double empathy problem strikes again. Maybe normies should consider what happens if you treat a group of non-sociopaths like sociopaths. "Something Something, burn down the village."

There's a lot more normies than autists, and they also hold far more social power, and so they don't really need to bother considering the consequences. Now, some autists sometimes hold a lot more physical power, but normies have been very successful at subverting/parasiting off of that with social power.

Yes but a house divided against itself cannot stand. These divisions are entirely self inflicted by normies. Social power used to be the predominant power, but in this age of technology we have seen an increase in "technological power". Autists seemed to be particularly advantaged at developing it. Normies can rage against that all they want, but short of regressing technology and all the advantages and comforts its provides, it's here to stay. I suppose normies are currently lucky that Autists aren't particularly tribal yet, but nothing makes people form tribes like coordinated persecution.

Right. So many people have bet against Sam Altman and they always seem to lose. He knows how to play the game. In that way, he’s very similar to Musk, although Musk’s strategy is a form of PR and therefore market sentiment operation while Altman’s is more about adeptly understanding the incentive structures of large organizations.

There is an argument for OpenAI being a safer steward for AI than Anthropic, based purely on Sam having exponentially stronger survival instincts than Dario.

Sam Altman is a literal cartoon villain, so the first phases of his plan are guaranteed to work out for him.

This action seems pretty consistent with exactly what Anthropic has been claiming:

  1. Mythos is "too powerful to release" to the general public, and enables an average Joe can hack stuff at an expert level.

  2. Chinese models are advancing by distilling capabilities from Anthropic's models. That's how they are able to stay 6-12 months behind frontier models at a fraction of the R&D cost.

Then Amazon apparently came along and pointed out that it was possible to jailbreak Fable to perform Mythos-like cybersecurity tasks... If they can figure it out, so can China. And any capability they can use, they can distill.

The real gigachad move here would be for the US gov to buy out all of the Fable/Mythos tokens for the next year or two and get any national guardsman who can write hello world in Python to red team government systems and critical infrastructure. This is an area where kicking the can down the road by a year or two could have a lot of value in terms of preventing future comprises.

The gigachad move is raining money down profligately?

Personally I'm more comfortable with the government going "damn your product is so good we are going to buy everything you can produce" than "damn your product is so good we are going to ban you from selling it." A restriction to US citizens only is effectively a ban, since Anthropic doesn't have the KYC in place and won't for at least months.

And if the capability is anywhere near advertised, it wouldn't even be a waste of money compared to a typical DoD procurement.

I can’t imagine that Anthropic would voluntarily sell exclusive access to the US government.

If you are working on sufficiently powerful technology with dual-use applications, then you work for the War Department. There is no option for you to continue your preferred work while licensing only peaceful civilian applications of your product.

There is an ideology which assumes that the political leadership knows best what is good for the people, and that the industry should be subservient to their will.

There is another ideology which is based on the weird conception that people have rights, including the right to to form groups to do stuff in a way which might displease the government.

Most polities will happily strong-arm any and all resources into their survival if they feel their existence is being threatened. But with the former ideology, it is the rule, not the exception.

If you are trying to convince the government that you are not a security risk, do not hire people like this and present them as neutral experts. (No seriously, what the actual fuck were they thinking?)

Oh no, a pink-haired woman. The horror, the horror. She seems a "security risk" in that she likely did not vote for Trump. Surprisingly, that does not make her a North Korean spy.

Anthropic obviously believes that MAGA will not retain total control of the government for long, and that it is therefore not in their best interests to do a lot of ring-kissing.

If you aren't okay with the government using your technology, then don't build it.

Or you could just find a government which is not run by some mafia don in collaboration with some wannabe fascists who reflexively shout "NATIONAL SECURITY!" whenever they don't get their way. It seems unlikely that the Swiss government would use force you to allow them to use your LLM to pick Iranian schools to bomb, for example.

  • -12

She's a maskie. If you don't think that's bizarre and off-putting, you spend too much time among urban leftist queers.

What is a maskie?

Derogatory term for someone still wearing an anti-coronavirus face mask years after the pandemic ended

Man, you really ought to know better. I suppose you haven’t accrued a warning in a while, so we’ll back off to a three-day ban this time.

Be polite.

There is another ideology which is based on the weird conception that people have rights, including the right to to form groups to do stuff in a way which might displease the government.

Yeah, but that got struck down for good in 1964 and has never been brought back.

Now the government always has a compelling interest in what you're doing.

It seems unlikely that the Swiss government would use force you to allow them to use your LLM to pick Iranian schools to bomb, for example.

Are you entirely sure the Swiss are not "mafia dons in collaboration with wannabe fascists" given the recent referendum? It was defeated, but surely the mere existence of such a party indicates that nowhere is pure and faultless, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of wokeness.

Oh no, a pink-haired woman.

Or sometimes purple, based on photos. She may indeed be an expert in her field, but if you're trying to present your company as the adults in the room and ready for government work, then hiring someone who dresses like she's trying to emulate an anime girl and has "she-hulk/she-ra" as her pronouns is not the way to do it.

Granted, I'm biased. I think mutton dressed as lamb is inappropriate, and a 51 year old woman who does her hair like a teen rebel doesn't impress me.

fallen short of the glory of wokeness

I don't think this is an argument about wokeness. This is mostly an argument about strongman vs institutional leadership. You can be a anti-immigration conservative without being a wannabee corrupt dictator - see for example Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Riikka Purra in Finland, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, or 45% of Swiss voters. All these people get called fascists, accurately in the case of Meloni (her party is the institutional successor of Mussolini's Fascist Party), but I haven't heard any of them called mafia dons.

If AI was being developed in Meloni's Italy, I don't know whether Anthropic would attract the banhammer, but I suspect the decision would be based on the actual national security threat and not the kowtowing skills of the CEO or the hair colour of the spokeschick, and I know that whether or not this was the case Meloni would be making a real effort to make it look like it was. Seconding @BurdensomeCount, the same will continue to apply in London whether we have Burnham or Farage as PM.

Fairly obviously, you can also be a wannabee corrupt dictator (or even a successful corrupt dictator, like communists) without being a right-populist. But for whatever reason this hasn't happened in my lifetime in the main Western democracies on a larger scale than a big-city political machine.

see for example Giorgia Meloni in Italy

Completely fail at the task to the point people speculate that she is a plant of some kind?

You can be a anti-immigration conservative without being a wannabee corrupt dictator - see for example Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Riikka Purra in Finland, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, or 45% of Swiss voters

All you've told me is that you can be against immigration, you just can't accomplish anything about it. Meloni has been an abject failure at best, complete betrayal at worst. 45% means do nothing. Wilders is the leader of a fringe party with little control.

So unlike them, Trump is actually accomplishing something. Apparently the only way to actually instantiate your promises is to be a corrupt dictator. So be it, now deport the foreigners.

Anthropic obviously believes that MAGA will not retain total control of the government for long, and that it is therefore not in their best interests to do a lot of ring-kissing.

They are wrong: MAGA will control the relevant parts of government at least until January 2029. People may differ on AI timelines, but the Anthropic people I know all have shorter timelines than that. This is not a long term iterated game.

Oh no, a pink-haired woman. The horror, the horror. She seems a "security risk" in that she likely did not vote for Trump. Surprisingly, that does not make her a North Korean spy.

She seems a security risk in that she likely does not think the United States should exist as an independent sovereign entity, probably believes in nonsense like open borders, socialism, feminism, and that you should punch nazis (and anyone who voted for Trump is a Nazi). I know basically nothing about her other than her hairstyle and a couple tweets on her front page, but most of those are probably true. She's not a North Korean spy, but if the EU sends a message about how they desperately need the latest AI to solve climate change, she might leak them some advanced stuff that in turn makes its way to China. If they tell her about how the American public is being manipulated by "Russian spies" she might set up autonomous AI to go through and censor all conservatives off the internet. Or suppress news about ballot stuffing or minorities scamming the welfare system.

If an Islamic terrorist/spy sold a sob story about how Israel is oppressing them, would she be more sympathetic and protective of the Islamist or the Jews? Or the U.S. as an independent and sovereign nation which should continue to exist?

Having pink hair is not itself a crime. It's just a massive red flag that is strongly correlated with things we do/should care about and are actual security risks. Stereotypes exist for a reason.

If an Islamic terrorist/spy sold a sob story about how Israel is oppressing them, would she be more sympathetic and protective of the Islamist or the Jews?

Funny, if I think a foreign entity illicitly gains access to US classified information through human sources to gain an advantage in the ME conflict, the possibility foremost in my mind is not a pink-haired SJW gave intel to Hamas.

Everyone is a security risk. Immigrants might still have ties to their country of origin. Religious people subscribe to a system of ethics which is not coextensive to US criminal law, and even non-theists might have moral codes which limit their compliance with lawful orders. Anyone might succumb to propaganda about how the US would be better as a commie or fascist state. Anyone involved in the culture war might believe that winning is more important than following the law. Women may be susceptible to love scams, men to hot women who are mysteriously into them. Anthropic is worth almost a trillion dollars, it seems reasonable to assume that the black market value of their models would range at least in the tens of billions. Many people who could not be lured to China by a million or ten might think about defection for this kind of money.

Anthropic has strong financial incentives to stop the weights of their models from leaking. I doubt that a flash drive with all their internal documentation and model weights is gifted to every employee as part of the onboarding process.

TSA has a very good idea of which passengers are most likely to be terrorists, but because of this proto-woke "Everyone is a security risk" dogma we make everyone take off their shoes. (Or used to, before we invented more invasive scanners.)

It's the same for the police and law enforcement: profiling works because risk is not uniformly distributed through human populations.

And there are always exceptions and sometimes the risk isn't what a naive stereotype would assume. But between a Catholic and a pink-haired SJW I think we all know which description is likelier to press the defect button out of adherence to an all-encompassing creed.

Yes - everyone knows it's the Catholic. This was conventional wisdom in Protestant countries from the Reformation through to the 1960's. I don't think the reversed version is more accurate.

Perhaps we should exclude the Catholic and the pink-haired SJW and hire only normie-Americans from good families like Edward Snowden and Reality Winner.

Reality Winner has been a literal pink-hair although not at the time of her arrest.

She seems a security risk in that she likely does not think the United States should exist as an independent sovereign entity,

Has she said that? Your "likely" is carrying a lot right now.

probably believes in nonsense like open borders, socialism, feminism,

At least the first one was meaningful as a security risk if true (emphasis on if). This is just considering anyone with ideas you don't like as a threat to the nation.

Even idiots can have opsec. I am under no requirement to wait for her to speak to judge her on her appearance.

Would you feel comfortable if someone said the same thing about you? "I believe KMC seems he would touch my child inappropriately, and I have no requirement to wait for him to actually do anything to a child before I judge him as a child predator".

Do you think their personal vibes alone is enough that they can justifiably say KMC is likely a child predator? Heck "He supports the Epstein regime so he's a threat to children" is arguably more solid than "she has blue hair so she wants to destroy the US" cause at least the Epstein coverup is directly about child abusers.

Trump is 80 years old and is literally brain damaged. He's falling asleep in the Oval Office on camera and has leukemia or something bruising his hand. Why do people continue to worship this fat orange clown? He is dumb and belongs in the nursing home not the White House. The United States is a fake joke country.

  • -33

Too obnoxious by half.

You were warned last month for frothing at the mouth instead of, you know, politely discussing whatever it was that pissed you off. One day ban this time.

Because even taking all of that impotent screed as a given, he still outperforms pretty much all of the rest of our expert class.

How much more pathetic are the rest of them then?

How much sillier a joke the other nations of the world?

he still outperforms pretty much all of the rest of our expert class.

As a member of the expert class (in the broadest sense), I must object. Trump is not one of us. He does not deal in facts, he deals in narratives. Few people are prouder than he is of his ignorance.

Nor is it clear that he outperforms anyone, let alone the experts. I mean, MAHA did more for measles awareness than the CDC ever did before, but that was likely not intentional. The medicine Nobel for the Paracetamol-autism link is yet another one which the woke Scandinavians deny him.

Free trade is what made the US the economic powerhouse it is today, but perhaps Trump can outperform the free market with his tariffs.

To an outside observer, the Iranian thing looks pretty bad -- botched coup, expensive air war, antagonizing rather than decapitating the regime, etc. But sure, there is a chance that the deal he will make will be much better than the Obama deal and he will get the war Nobel.

Free trade is what made the US the economic powerhouse it is today, but perhaps Trump can outperform the free market with his tariffs.

You are ahistoric and wrong. Free trade has always been controversial, has been fiercely contested by different regions, and furthermore, what really made the US a powerhouse is not free trade with foreign nations but free trade between its member states.

If you want free trade with the US, apply for membership.

He does not deal in facts, he deals in narratives.

So do most of the rest of you. The difference is, Trump's narrative is simple enough to still have a relationship with basic observable reality. Half of your class doesn't know what a woman is.

Half of your class doesn't know what a woman is.

Worse - they quite transparently pretend not to know.

I agree. If a group of transactivists were going up against a group of Republican politicians on a knowledge test of female anatomy and physiology, I would bet on the transactivists. They know exactly what a woman (in the ordinary English sense of the word) is - they just don't know what the word "woman" means.

I actually think this is true across a lot of topics. I observe that leftists generally have a better intuition for beauty than conservatives do -- because liberals know exactly what to deface. I.e., if we participate in a body-positivity movement with slogans like "Health At Every Size," we all know which sizes are being promoted. You don't have to promote that it's ok to be healthy and fit. Likewise the climate genocide paint-throwers will try to deface Van Gogh and Leonardo, not Piss Christ.

Because even taking all of that impotent screed as a given, he still outperforms pretty much all of the rest of our expert class.

I'm inclined to agree with you. I wanted to say something similar to the stuff in this thread about there being „scientific geniuses” at Anthropic (AI is just Indians throwing shit at the wall until it randomly sticks, there is no genius put into it), but alas I decided on Trump.

How much sillier a joke the other nations of the world?

True. If just one country could start a eugenics program ...

Regardless of who's to blame, China is watching from afar and grinning. American dysfunction gives them more time to catch up; the finger pointing about who's really the bad actor is just a cherry on top of the pie of distraction.

There are other enemies in this world than the near ones.

Why are they grinning? A fat, orange, brain damaged clown with leukemia just tore through the military tech they've sold multiple other countries like wet tissue paper. The time to catch up is time for their own demographic and economic issues to implode. Their septugenarian despot has reduced his public activity after his rumored third stroke. Meanwhile, our newly minted octogenarian carrot clown is up at 3 AM on social media talking shit after hosting a bracing round of gladiator bouts.

It's easy to talk tough when anyone who disputes your claims gets to be an involuntary organ donor.

A fat, orange, brain damaged clown with leukemia just tore through the military tech they've sold multiple other countries like wet tissue paper.

Right now, the most valuable piece of Chinese military tech is the supply chain for the Russian/Iranian combat drones which fucked up America's shit. The percentage of Chinese (as opposed to Russian) content in the bits of the Iranian military that succeeded seems to me to be higher than in the parts that failed (notably the air defences). Sanctions mean that Iran have been assembling most of their own weapons out of easy-to-smuggle components, so this isn't a simple test of Chinese or Russian tech against the American equivalent.

If the future of warfare is putting weapons on Temu drones, the Chinese are in a very good place. And the Iran war is evidence in favour of the this thesis.

The air defenses were what I was talking about. In both Iran and Venezuela they accomplished nothing and purportedly the anti-stealth features were wholly inadequate.

I thought the late unlamented Iranian air defences were more Russian than Chinese.

I'd be curious to know more about if the air defenses were representative of current Chinese air defenses, or more like old tech surplus being sold off Temu.

I would assume it's not the SOTA stuff, but the total failure is still inauspicious.

How do you know he has leukemia? Please share whatever relevant medical facts you have, and no, "there was a bruise on his hand and the nutjobs on the innertubes immediately said it was leukemia" is not medicine.

How do you know he has leukemia?

I don't. Just riffing off the previous (modded) great-grandparent post.

The time to catch up is time for their own demographic and economic issues to implode

China does face severe demographic issues, moreso than the US. But they are more long-term. If we make it to 2040 without a conflict, I'll feel very happy and secure. But technology and China's economy progress much faster than demographic trends; within the next ten years, there will be a peak in China's relative strength vs the USA, and that's when they will act.

gets to be an involuntary organ donor

China turns its undesirables into something useful; the USA lets its undesirables run amok degrading everyone else's quality of life. Human rights etc aside, it's not at all clear the USA's approach is superior for the health of the nation and progress of civilization.

If China's progress is "copy whatever Western companies are doing instead of our own original research" as an earlier comment claimed, then how much of a threat are they in fact? Original Chinese research powering ahead, I agree: a problem. Subscribe to OpenThropic model and copy it all - not so much.

For AI, I think the threat depends on one's model of future progress. Iterative refining and engineering: China is all you need. Significant paradigm shift: the US has the edge, at least until knowledge of the paradigm shift diffuses.

Though even for the latter, people underestimate China's research chops. And a significant component of our edge is that the most skilled Chinese researchers would prefer to work and live here and not in China.

Two big paradigm shifts came from China: reinforcement-learning self-training, and mixture-of-experts for LLMs.

I read papers a lot in my free time, and pretty reliably notice that a very large proportion of researchers in the STEM fields are ching chongs from Peking and Tsinghua (this is, in fact, the primary thing that started me questioning my initially China doomer beliefs and got me to start looking into what they were actually up to). This analysis suggests that the US share of total global scientific publications has fallen from 40% to 15%, whereas China's has increased to 32% as of 2022; in addition it now contributes 35% of top journal contributions, suggesting that this research is not of low quality. Note this surpasses both the US and EU.

Here is another such analysis, suggesting China has a lead in 37 of the 44 technologies surveyed. For a good number of technologies they apparently on average publish nine times more high impact research than the runner up, most often the US. It's most certainly not the case anymore that Chinese technological progress is a discount Temu version of Western research, albeit public perceptions have struggled to catch up with that reality.

Then we had all better start learning Mandarin?

Depends on the undesirable. Vagrant idiot criminal? Sure, from certain perspectives. High ranking guy who points out that the horse is actually a deer? Less so.

To add some descriptive flavor: the vast majority of China's involuntary organ donations were of mundane criminals--rapists, murderers--along with the very occasional particularly obnoxious dissidents. It's also decreased a lot in the past decade. And, most forced political dissident organ donations aren't of rival factions in the CCP (actual potential rivals of political power), but what's fairly described as FG lunatics. Actual political rivals suffer more mundane consequences when they lose: being sidelined, fewer economic opportunities for their children. Maybe a prison term if they made a wild miscalculation.

Although bad in many ways, it's less different than the US system than many Americans like to admit.

The execution rate has also slowed down dramatically in the last decade or two, even according to most liberal observing bodies. They reduced the breadth of crimes that could be punished with death. It's at about 2000 a year now from 20,000 closer to the start of the millenia.

Also the US only executing 20-50 people a year is surprisingly low to me. I was estimating like 500 even if I know that it's always tied up in crazy lawfare and stays of execution.

But they are more long-term.

I keep hearing this about the country that implemented the one child policy, the great leap forward, the cultural revolution, and, my favorite, the four pests policy.

the great leap forward, the cultural revolution, and, my favorite, the four pests policy.

The local SJWs and ardent supporters of these policies, unlike in Western societies, were never permitted to grab structural control over social life after marching through the institutions, and were only deputized as mindless executors of the political moves of the supreme leader. Once he was dead, all power was stripped from them by his successors, they were suppressed and their legacy was undone under the official slogan of Setting Things Right. (I briefly described this period here on the old subreddit.) Due to political and cultural peculiarities I’m afraid this great feat is something that will never be achieved in any Western country. If anything of this sort will ever come to pass, it can only happen through bloodshed and complete collapse. In this sense, I think OP is right – the Chinese are doing it all better.

With respect to the one-child policy I think it needs to be pointed out in defense of the Chinese commies that pretty much everyone else in the world was falling for the same nonsense back then. The notion that runaway overpopulation was causing mass poverty, famine and wars seemed irresistible.

With respect to the one-child policy I think it needs to be pointed out in defense of the Chinese commies that pretty much everyone else in the world was falling for the same nonsense back then. The notion that runaway overpopulation was causing mass poverty, famine and wars seemed irresistible.

For a hilarious snapshot of this, I highly recommend the 1973 film Soylent Green. Which featured a tremendously overpopulated and unemployed, IIRC, NYC, where crowds of people were literally just lying on the streets and stairwells, getting in the way of the protagonists going about their work. Wealth inequality was also one of its themes, with super-high-end apartments being sold with came with bang maids included.

With respect to the one-child policy I think it needs to be pointed out in defense of the Chinese commies that pretty much everyone else in the world was falling for the same nonsense back then. The notion that runaway overpopulation was causing mass poverty, famine and wars seemed irresistible.

Sure, but "we think in centuries while the gwailos think in decades" China went above and beyond what any other country did in regards to stopping the "population bomb".

They've pivoted pretty hard since then and a lot of the Maoist stuff was integral (maybe unintentionally or as a side effect) of breaking the rural system and allowing for industrialization to really take off under liberalization.

You're correct and if anything you are actually underselling the point. Maoist China itself actually was able to manage a very high rate of economic growth, to the point that it outstripped Germany, the USSR and Japan during their modernisation periods. According to Maurice Meisner, in Germany the rate of economic growth for the period 1880-1914 was 33 percent per decade. In Japan from 1874-1929 the rate of increase per decade was 43 percent. The Soviet Union over the period 1928-1958 achieved a decadal increase of 54 percent. In China over the years 1952-1972 the decadal rate was 64 percent. China’s modernisation was actually wildly successful from the start and unlike the Soviets they didn't end up disintegrating, stagnating and lapsing into kleptocracy, though the whole "millions must die" situation is an obvious and big caveat.

The early PRC under Mao went from an industrial base smaller than Belgium to the sixth largest in the world, and this occurred without much external help, except for stuff like limited Soviet aid in the 1950s paid back in full by the 1960s. It was almost entirely endogenous. People always praise Deng but the capability to take over the world's factories didn't come out overnight in 1979. Deng essentially ended up inheriting an already-industrial China with the potential for huge further growth, so long as the right incentive structures were introduced (and they were).

In general, I'm kind of convinced that quick modernisation requires a dictator with the intent and willingness to move fast and break shit, though that approach is certainly not a sustainable system to run a state with over the long term. It also contextualises to me why Mao is still regarded in China, in spite of public perception of him having soured and even the CCP being willing to openly condemn many of his excesses.

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"they are more long term" here referred to the demographic problems predictably developing into a problem only on the scale of decades, not to any inherent civilizational differences in discount rates. The idea that Chinese government inherently is better at long term planning is a useful domestic myth/international propaganda.

The way that Bureaucratic/political careers and incentives work in the Chinese system makes it easier to take a long-term view of things than when you're eternally having to defend yourself on 3-4 year electoral cycles. This doesn't necessarily mean that it always works out but it's been solid for the last few decades

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China also is far less likely to get held hostage via pensions and other entitlements to the Elderly than any Western country. Sure their absolute population is dropping but if one has the political will to either strongly encourage the elderly are served with the maximum efficiency instead of hodgepodging everywhere, or the ability to say 'no' then you can sidestep a lot of the demographic bomb issues

The issue in China is that they aren't committing to serving with maximum efficiency. They've functionally assumed a family support network that increasingly no longer exists. The lack of not just grandchildren, but nieces and nephews, has reduced the de-facto healthcare for the elderly that previously stayed off the public ledger.

Well, those expenses don't go away just because the nieces and nephews did, and population support ratio is going to feel- and cause- a lot of political heart burn and elderly care scandals. And if there's one thing the CCP isn't particularly known for, it's maximum efficiency in reactive policies to public scandals. Political will makes it easier for spigot spending, which is rarely as efficient as planed spending from the start.

Same equally goes for Western democracy where the support network has absolutely blown up, and the elderly also have a massive outsized influence on the democratic process, a gigantic sense of entitlement, large amounts of cash and will dig in as hard as possible to stop anybody doing anything. China's got a better fighting chance than the typical Western country in that it isn't totally beholden to the Boomer cohort and can make tough decisions like relocating elderly or forcing through more automation in healthcare more easily.

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China is pretending that putting their kids through 12 hour a day, 6 day a week schooling is accomplishing anything other than producing rampant cheating circles, that will find it terribly hard to steal innovation once the West finally collapses, everyone that isn't well connected in the Party ius desperately trying to scam a buck via "influencing," when they're not just openly whoring themselves out, all while the government is impotentely begging its women to stop watching dramas about billionaire CEOs billionairely settling down with mid office girls because this will never, ever happen to them, and please, for the love of Chairman Mao, have kids (spoiler: this is about as effective as telling Baizuo women to stop doing the meme The future may very well be Chinese, but it will be because the West pulled an Idiocracy, and China will not be far behind the rest of us.

I do not believe that China is any kind of perfectly rational, efficient society. And it creates fewer true geniuses (paradigm breaking) than Western systems. But, it is plausible that AGI isn't something that comes from a radical shift in paradigm but some combination of massive aggregated data and incremental engineering. If so, China is in a very strong position.

China will never rule over white people no matter what. The Chinese menace is an authoritarian cope to justify evil government.

The Chinese menace is an authoritarian cope to justify evil government.

Well dang, you mean there will never be the green-eyed Dr. Fu Manchu insidiously yet ingeniously stirring up the masses of Asia to overwhelm the West? Now I'm disappointed (yes, Sax Rohmer's works may be sensationalist pulp trash and racist on top of it, but Dr. Fu Manchu was a wonderful villain in that he had many admirable qualities).

If I were a dissident rightie, I would totally create a White Fu Manchu. It would be hilarious and make white people look cool. "Picture all the enterprise and ingenuity which allowed the White Race to bring nine-tenths of the globe under their heel, incarnate in one man!" They can be opposed by a biracial lesbian secret agent. I just cant think what the white equivalent name would be. Given the roots of "Manchu", I guess it would be something like '"John Wasp", which admittedly is less evocative.

Even granting that the long arc of history bends toward whiteness, part of that involves countries like the USA recognizing and responding to foreign threats.

Also, have you met Canada?

Also, have you met Canada?

We need another Wall.

We're actually supposed to want more from our government than to be thin skinned retards who don't listen to people who know what the fuck is going on. In any way that this is embarrasing for anthropic it is many times more so for the admin. If some moron told Eisenhower that the test of the bomb were going to reverse the flow of gravity and Eisenhower demands Oppenheimer to fix that problem to fix that made up problem what exactly is he supposed to do besides explain that there is nothing to fix and in fact we already told you this would happen. The level of abject retardation people are willing to accept from the Trump admin and then criticize people for not going along with it is absurd and their toddler tantrums are a threat to our national security.

If there was a 10% chance that the H-bomb would reverse gravity, and Eisenhower told Oppenheimer to fix it, and Oppenheimer said, "I can't. That's just what H-bombs do." Then yes, Eisenhower's job would be to stop the test and put the entire department on administrative leave.

Amusingly, this isn't what happened. It was even in Oppenheimer!

I can imagine a world where the 2015 MIRI Corrigibility paper came out the other way. Then we could point at the math and say, “See! Nothing to worry about.” We do not live in tht world.

In fact the matter was not settled before nuclear testing proceeded.

Such grisly conjectures took on a different tone in ensuing decades, as nuclear weaponry progressively grew into a concrete endeavour and, eventually, a tragic reality. It became deeply distasteful to joke about how Earth's immolation may please "sun-bathers on the beaches of Mars". Yet diverse intellectuals including Carl Jung continued referring to the theory that novae are distant atomic tests gone awry. The journal Science even published a piece on the question, in June 1946, on the eve of the US's post-war tests in Bikini Atoll. It stated that not only "non-scientists" are "disturbed over the prospect" of planetary ignition.

While in full support and without any plans to regulate or stop the other several H-bomb teams?

edit: If trump is fully yudd pilled and his next action is to start pushing bilateral treaties then I'll celebrate, but he's not we all know that he's not.

As a response to @magicalkittycat below as well:

An administration official told Axios they do not view other models as national security threats because they do not surpass the bar that Mythos set.

Anything at Mythos level or above would need to go through the administration to ensure the government's national security apparatus is hardened enough, the official added.

It seems that the USG is at least nominally interested in regulating models from the other H-bomb teams as well, and one of the claimed reasons that Anthropic is being targeted is because they're considered to be the ones with the strongest model worthy of regulation. Source.

Perhaps you don't trust the administration when they say this - it's hard to know what the second-hand effects of these expert controls are going to be, and this could certainly have been handled better by both parties. Still, if you're concerned about doom and would prefer increased regulation to try and avert doom, this seems to be at least a potential step towards something better.

In an ideal world we would have a council of LKY clones making maximally technocratic decisions, but we live in the world that we live in and nobody else is going to be stepping in.

If you are working on sufficiently powerful technology with dual-use applications, then you work for the War Department. There is no option for you to continue your preferred work while licensing only peaceful civilian applications of your product.

Then why is only Anthropic targeted and why only foreign nationals? If it's a truly such a terrible danger, it would be trivial for a Chinese or Russian operation to either recruit some American or just bypass identity restrictions. Not to mention of course that some Americans might also want to use it for bad stuff on their own.

If you piss off the wrong person, you're screwed. Some people will see defeating you as a stepping stone to greater power and influence. Some people will work to destroy you simply out of spite.

True. Not how it is supposed to work in the US, but true. Becoming increasingly blatant as well.

Anthropic has scientific geniuses, Anthropic has an Oppenheimer, but does Anthropic have a General Groves? How far do you think Oppenheimer would have gotten without General Groves?

They probably do have lots of government contacts. We're still supposed to be a rules based society with a free market and government should be able to give a strong (and consistent!) argument when it meddles.

If you are trying to convince the government that you are not a security risk, do not hire people like this and present them as neutral experts. (No seriously, what the actual fuck were they thinking?)

What's the problem with her? Moussouris is a proven expert on information security with major relevant achievements in the field (including pioneering the DOD's own bug bounty program).

You don't get to decide what counts as a security risk and what doesn't. That is the job of the government and the political process.

Of course Anthropic doesn't get to make the decision there, but the executive branch does not have the unilateral authority to simply declare anything and everything a security risk as it pleases either. There should be a clear, consistent, and logical rationale when the government takes a drastic emergency measure like that.

Have we seen a clear, consistent, and logical rationale?

The president does not care about your ethical concerns. You think you know how much he doesn't care, but he actually cares much less than that.

Yes, everyone, even the general Trump defender, is well aware that he has a very limited sense of ethics and morality. I'm sure Anthropic could make this all go away if they slipped him some 24 karet gold statues and a few million dollar dinners hosted at Mar a Lago.

But is that how we really want the main industry holding up the American economy right now to be treated? The stakes are so much higher here than his traditional shenanigans.

But is that how we really want the main industry holding up the American economy right now to be treated? The stakes are so much higher here than his traditional shenanigans.

Maybe Anthropic could hire Don Jr. to its board of executives?

Then why is only Anthropic targeted and why only foreign nationals?

Even a midwit can tell that the restriction on foreign nationals was a hard ban in practice. I assume that Trump fully intended to ban the models and making it nominally about foreign nationals was a misdirection to fool Trump's own sub-midwit supporters.

I just assumed that this is the law that's on the books that can be applied, and so the way the law allows for restrictions is what's being implemented.

If the law allowed for something else, we'd see something else.

That makes a lot of sense.

The restriction on foreign nationals is pretty routine for contractors working national-security related contracts, so it seems a lot more likely it was just included as part of the "standard restrictions" rather than something Trump specifically put in to fool people.

Yeah this is extremely standard export-control, the novelty is in applying it to an AI model.

Why are we claiming she’s a “proven expert”? I see nothing remarkable in her background. She went to a shitty college. And she did the thing that is a strong indicator of incompetence - filed a sex discrimination lawsuit.

Note: had to look up Wikipedia she went to a bad college. Yep 83% acceptance rate. 2 strong strikes against her.

Some of her proven credentials are right there in the first paragraph

Previously a member of @stake, she created the bug bounty program at Microsoft[1] and was directly involved in creating the U.S. Department of Defense's first bug bounty program for hackers.[2][3] She previously served as Chief Policy Officer at HackerOne, a vulnerability disclosure company based in San Francisco, California,

And there's more details below. A pretty long and successful tenure at Microsoft

From September 2010 until May 2014, Moussouris was the Senior Security Strategist Lead at Microsoft,

Then as said, chief policy officer at HackerOne

And then worked with the DOD helping the Pentagon and Air Force under her new company Luta Security

Moussouris followed up the Pentagon program with "Hack the Air Force". HackerOne and Luta Security are partnering to deliver up to 20 bug bounty challenges over three years to the Defense Department.

The government even used her as a technical expert before!

She was invited as a technical expert to directly assist in the US Wassenaar Arrangement negotiations, and helped rewrite the amendment to adopt end-use decontrol exemptions based on the intent of the user.

Created a bug bounty program? That's like what, organizing a fundraiser?

She's not finding the bugs herself, just in charge of the team?

Yeah, she sound like a typical Didn't Earn It hire, promoted because of the need to kick out the white men doing the jobs in order to not seem like only white men are in control.

She was invited as a technical expert to directly assist in the US Wassenaar Arrangement negotiations, and helped rewrite the amendment to adopt end-use decontrol exemptions based on the intent of the user.

So in 2013 she was a woman when the administration was pushing the future is female. Not beating the allegations.

Honestly feels soft to me and a grifter. Isn’t a bug bounty just essentially an administrator? Who background sounds like someone good at politics.

But if your gift is “be good at politics” working within woke organizations then you are “extremely bad at politics” working with MAGA.

I'd legitimately be embarrassed if I were a "cybersecurity expert" who started out in the early 2000s and my Wikipedia page didn't have a single CVE on it.

Sure she probably qualifies as a cybersecurity policy expert or something, since it sounds like that's what she has actually been doing for the last 20 years. It's just a bit cringe when policy people or managers still cling to the hacker aesthetic.

Also HackerOne is a grift where they convinced companies to pay them money to avoid having to deal with infinite Indians submitting terrible bug reports. The service they offer is basically a spam filter. It's widely disliked because they offshored the review process... also to India. There is an entire industry on the subcontinent of submitting and rejecting bogus vulnerability reports. I for one can't wait for Mythos to nuke this entire system.

Previously a member of @stake, she created the bug bounty program at Microsoft

Given the horrendous reputation of Microsoft's bug bounty program that isn't a positive to me

Her Twitter is somewhat trans-coded, with the mask, pronouns, and hair, which is worth at least one strong strike for her expertise, and kind of cancels out the attention seeking lawsuit, which would then be par for course if she's trans. (Though, as far I can tell, she's not actually trans.)

Generally, she's well-regarded. tptacek, years ago, has referenced her as credible on HN; she's not a no-name who has been elevated from obscurity for political purposes.

Being trans should radically increase your estimation of her security expertise.

one strong strike for her expertise

Sorry, I misunderstood "strike" to be a negative, as in baseball.

One of my hot takes that is very obviously true (to me, at least) and angers everyone is that trans women are superior programmers (and pentesters) to cis men, cis women, and trans men.

Indeed, I can see why bottom surgery would help a natal male become a better penetration tester. So to speak.

I think you're close but not quite right. Trans women are more likely to be superior programmers, yes. But not everyone who is autistic enough to be a top tier programmer goes down the trans path.

Is that a byproduct of being trans, or is that sort of mind just more likely to become trans?

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why only foreign nationals

This is standard ITAR and EAR rules. And yes, other countries could recruit people to build it there. Still illegal for me to in any manner transfer ITAR or EAR restricted designs to China or South Sudan. I can transfer it to any US person; by which they mean citizen, green card holder or asylumee.

In a better world there'd be some "clear, consistent, and logical rationale" standard bureaucracies are held to. Instead they just make up rules then change their minds and make up contrary rules. See the ATF for examples. Given laws creating bureaucracies and empowering them to make relevant rules, this is what we get.

This is standard ITAR and EAR rules. And yes, other countries could recruit people to build it there. Still illegal for me to in any manner transfer ITAR or EAR restricted designs to China or South Sudan. I can transfer it to any US person; by which they mean citizen, green card holder or asylumee.

There is an easy and obvious workaround especially given that it is on the internet, so these specific rules would not be meaningfully effective. So why were they chosen and not something far more extreme that would directly achieve the intended effect?

Luckily if there was a national security issue, Anthropic willingly took down Fable for everyone instead of complying with ineffective halfway measures.

In a better world there'd be some "clear, consistent, and logical rationale" standard bureaucracies are held to.

Republicans control all three branches right now, they don't have to sigh and say "ugh if only we had that better world". They can make it, right now! Now you and me, we can sigh and say that. Cause we know that this administration doesn't care to make it any better either. And most likely the next one won't, and the next one after that, and so on.

But the only way for the better world to come is to have people in power who actually want that better world. We haven't had that in a long time, and we probably won't for a while.

I get ITAR rules could be easily violated. As simple as sending an email. I could do it right now. Lots of laws are that way. You could easily violate them and maybe possibly get in trouble if you are unlucky. I don't expect anything more from the government since they lack a panopicon able to catch me. As a practical matter there's not much they can do other than occasionally fining a company caught exporting these designs.

Every employer I have had takes it very seriously. Multiple times per year retraining strictly warning against doing anything involving South Sudan. So sure you could easily violate these rules, but these AI devs won't.

Please point me to the person or party who controls Trump, Thune and Johnson, and Roberts.

Trump controls the party, not the other way round, but Thune at least completely resents Trump and refuses to be controlled by him. Neither of them, nor the party itself, has any means of applying leverage to Roberts, who sits on his hands doing bupkis and denying the only legitimate use of his court (disputes between states).

Trump controls the party, not the other way round.

This is just dumb. No one "controls the party" unlike the Democrats the GOP is explicitly organized as a coalition of otherwise sovereign entities rather than a top-down organization.

The formal organisation of both main US parties is almost exactly the same - the DNC and RNC are both federations of state parties, the state parties in each state are organised in approximately the same way because of the requirements of state electoral laws, the independent Congressional committees work in the same way etc.

This Tanner Greer post makes the opposite of your argument - Greer is a conservative but he is partially relying on academic research by dissident leftist Jo Freeman. The thesis, which I think is correct, is that the formal leadership of the GOP (including the President when applicable, Congressional leadership, the RNC Chair etc.) matters more than it does in the Dems because the influence of "the Groups" - organised interest groups which are de facto part of the party constitution but operate entirely outside its formal structures - provides an alternative power base in Dem politics which the GOP doesn't have.

My take is that GOP elites see the GOP as the place where America's natural ruling elite come together to justify their existence to the sovereign voters, whereas Dem elites see the Democratic Party as a coalition of disadvantaged groups working together to secure their respective fair shares of the pie. I think this goes all the way back the the Civil War, and predates the GOP being consistently to the right of the Democrats. I'm not sure how much Trump changes this story.

The formal organization of both main US parties is almost exactly the same

Formally? perhaps. In practice? Not at all.

Greer and Freeman are trying to model the GOP from the perspective of outside observers, and their models fail because they have failed to grasp the simple fact that constituent interest groups of the GOP are not "an alternative power base" so much as they ARE the power base.

If formal leadership even mattered even half as much as Greer and Freeman suggest Trump would've never been the nominee, and "your take" reads as you naively believing liberal propaganda from 10 years ago. Sure, perhaps if you were to ask Jeb Bush and Liz Cheney they might characterize themselves as "America's natural ruling elite" but that's also why they are now on the outside looking in.

Formal leadership tried to fight the constituents and formal leadership lost, Decisively.

constituent interest groups

What are the organised interest groups in the GOP that wield the same level of power that unions, feminists, black urban political machines, or the Ford and Hewlett-funded NGO borgs wield among the Democrats? Alternatively, what are the "otherwise sovereign entities" you mention in your first post? In the Greer/Freeman model the state parties are part of the "formal leadership", not an alternative to it. These are kind of meant to be the same question - you clearly have a model of how power works in the GOP which is something other than "Registered Republicans nominate candidates and elect party bosses, and the electeds and bosses come together to run the GOP roughly according to the rulebook" and I would be interested in knowing what it is.

Formal leadership tried to fight the constituents and formal leadership lost, Decisively.

MAGA is the formal leadership of the GOP and has been for almost a decade, having taken control through the formal democratic processes of the party (in particular, the 2016 primary, which was a genuine act of internal party democracy).

Trump ran the campaigns he wanted to, just as Romney ran the campaign he wanted to. Someone made Biden run like a campus progressive in 2020 even though he is an old-school machine politician. The point I am trying to make is that there is no equivalent of that someone in the GOP.

The application of the Greer/Freeman model to the last decade is that the GOP went MAGA as a result of grassroots Republicans voting in primaries, whereas the Dems went woke-prog as a result of the machinations of the Groups. I think this is obviously correct.

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Trump controls the party, not the other way round, but Thune at least completely resents Trump and refuses to be controlled by him.

So he doesn't control the party?

Neither of them, nor the party itself, has any means of applying leverage to Roberts, who sits on his hands doing bupkis and denying the only legitimate use of his court (disputes between states).

Do you think that if the Republican controlled Congress passed a bill with clear and explicit rules around AI national security regulation and Trump signed them into law, that Roberts would strike them down? If you don't think that then he has no relevance to this question and we're back to "republicans could do it if they wanted to".

And at the very least they could try. Trump has already shown he doesn't care about trying unconstitutional things with his tariff policy, so why does he not apply the same process in implementing a clear and consistent AI policy? The easy answer is "he doesn't want to."

He wants tariffs so they'll be pushed through time and time again with different obviously flimsy excuses each time one gets struck down. He doesn't want clear and consistent AI regulation, so they don't bother.

He doesn't control the party, but the party also doesn't control him. There is no control.

Do you think that if the Republican controlled Congress passed a bill with clear and explicit rules around AI national security regulation and Trump signed them into law, that Roberts would strike them down?

I think Roberts cannot in any way be understood to be part of a republican trifecta that includes Trump.

What's the problem with her? Moussouris is a proven expert on information security with major relevant achievements in the field (including pioneering the DOD's own bug bounty program).

Expert or not, she is clearly a compulsive culture warrior with alignment opposite to the current US administration. The effect surely is similar as if, under a D administration, they hired, say, Andrew Tate (imagine he happened to also be a proven expert on information security) or Nick Fuentes.

Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes are both far more likely to find a home in a Democrat controlled administration than a Republican one.

Expert or not, she is clearly a compulsive culture warrior with alignment opposite to the current US administration.

Well you're probably right that the Trump admin cares about more the culture war than meritocracy and coherent national security policy regarding our most important industry. Real shame though.

It's true and perhaps unfortunate, but a lot of people are guilty of that charge. At least the Trump admin was arguably elected on a clear mandate to prosecute the culture war, which means that in some sense they would be doing their job (if they penalise an organisation for employing her).

On the other hand, the lady was hired as a spokesperson for said "most important industry", and yet she clearly also cares about the culture war more than her nominal job! Otherwise, she surely wouldn't be doing all this culture warring with no regard for how it jeopardises Anthropic's cause under the current administration.

At least the Trump admin was arguably elected on a clear mandate to prosecute the culture war, which means that in some sense they would be doing their job (if they penalise an organisation for employing her).

Consistently over and over again polling suggests Trump won on economic grounds. Voters are constantly saying it's about the economy, the most common signs against Harris were about the economy (Harris high prices, Trump low prices), and the most effective ad buy was explicitly portraying Harris as a culture war obessive while Trump cared about "real problems". That last part where it says "Trump is for you" isn't about doing the right wing culture war, it's about tax cuts for middle class families.

Even the most explicitly culture war related ad was successful because it went with we don't do culture war, we do economics as the underlying theme. The idea that Trump won off the backs of doing culture war prosecution is completely false. Voters were upset about the economy.

Then why is only Anthropic targeted and why only foreign nationals?

In principle, Anthropic agrees the government should control when releases are made and models are recalled. Obviously it'd be better if this were done by some objective standard than fits of pique and grudge, but there's the world we want vs the world we have.

I'm sure Anthropic could make this all go away if they slipped him some 24 karet gold statues and a few million dollar dinners hosted at Mar a Lago.

I mean... They should. AI is world historical in importance, and the next 2 years are more important than any years before. Paying off a goon, though distasteful, is strictly superior to e.g. destroying the world. They could probably get away with a million dollars and some nice words, even: Trump is a very cheap date. And, given the stakes, a billion would be a good deal.

Safety needs to be either the actual number one priority, in which case you sacrifice other values for it. Or, if other values trump it, then your commitment to safety is shallow, and people will rightly see advertising of it as duplicitous.

In principle, Anthropic agrees the government should control when releases are made and models are recalled. Obviously it'd be better if this were done by some objective standard than fits of pique and grudge, but there's the world we want vs the world we have.

That doesn't answer why only Anthropic is considered dangerous and no other model is considering that as Yudkowsky has pointed out, anti jailbreak security that would stop dedicated foreign governments just does not exist for any of them https://x.com/allTheYud/status/2065889346302226530

Does the government just think Fable is that far ahead of the rest?

I mean... They should

Now I do think it would most likely work if they have enough but I can also understand why they would be hesitant regardless. Giving the bully your lunch money could be a good way to incentivize him coming back for more. Still given the likely short timeline (especially if we consider in the midterms that the house will probably be lost and the Senate has a high chance too), it's likely worth it.

That doesn't answer why only Anthropic is considered dangerous

I, personally, am not disputing that the Trump administration is not applying objective standards here. My point is that Anthropic wants an institutional ecosystem where powerful governments select which models are safe to release to the public (a system I agree with!); you can't just push for that and then throw a hissy fit when actually existing governments do it wrong, secure in the belief that the Righteous are somehow destined to fix things.

given the likely short timeline

That is everything, here. And I don't think Dario is making rational, utility maximizing calculations here: I think he has his set of values and is then applying them blindly thinking that because they are good, their blind application must be utility maximizing. That is not sufficient for the situation I (and from what I can tell, he) believe is at hand.

I would prefer a world where there are deeper motivations than mere politics determining international arms export controls or national security compliance. That kinda flew the coop in the 90s, and by the point Defense Distributed first came out, it was a punchline.

But I'm also still confused about what, exactly, is going the fuck on. "Recent cyber directive" is either someone's ERP or this executive order, and it focuses on 44 U.S.C. 3552(b)(6)(A), which is about restrictions on providers to the US government and specifically disavows permitting or licensing: "Nothing in this section shall be construed to authorize the creation of a mandatory governmental licensing, preclearance, or permitting requirement for the development, publication, release, or distribution of new AI models, including frontier models."

ITAR is my first guess, given the 'local employees that aren't citizens can't touch' bit, and it's the most dangerous threat -- not only does it prohibit unlicensed export of specific technologies, it can restrict training, which is a serious and common concern for ITAR-covered imaging technologies and has some hilarious ramifications if you think LLMs can independently rediscover technology. That's a pretty big gun aimed at every LLM company based in the United States.

But it's also just plausible that the government's referencing some more esoteric command, or even just making things up.

Dean Ball had a really interesting take on it https://x.com/deanwball/status/2066499769833341419

AI is licensed now, but the requirements change constantly and are always a secret, even to the administration itself, which will discover the rules spontaneously in real time as it reacts to events. This means also that the rules are in practice stricter and more roughly enforced for organizations the administration does not like.

And a more interesting way to read it is, well what if that's the point? Coming out and saying "here are the rules and regulations" means the Trump admin has to play by them as well. Meanwhile some vague there is no regulation except when we say there is which we may or may not do policy gives them a lot of power to boss around the companies/owners they don't like and favor companies they do.

I guess that's an insight, but it's a pretty unimpressive one in the modern era. Arbitrary, contradictory, and impossible-to-verify compliance nonrules are such a common thing in gunnie contexts that I've made a running theme out of it, and it's just more obvious in gunnie spaces because there are clear definitional categories. Whether it's California insisting on microstamping tech, or New York trying to ban 3d printers, the requirements don't even need to be possible.

Hell, Ball seems to even be missing the actual alpha in the strategy. The rules don't actually have to include a disliked organization's behavior: the administration can always just try to bring enforcement anyway, lie to the courts, and then shoot someone in the head for breaking the 'rules' so long as they do it before the rules are enjoined. Look at both FCC v Starlink and Illinois v Due Process here, and note that the real punchline is that none of the appeals processes for either cared that the rules were made up and the points don't matter, and even post-hoc no one cares but absolute nuts like myself.

((But yeah, no one received civil contempt penalties or faced legal oversight, if only because they'd have to investigate themselves.))

The real benefit is that it makes it impossible to challenge and drives terror in the people who oppose you.

But again, Defense Distributed. Would be nice if no one burnt that bridge.

But again, Defense Distributed.

Didn't they at least slightly succeed in getting plain ol' firearms removed from the USML (from ITAR rules down to normal EAR rules)? That IIRC happened in 2020, although it was maybe not the huge legal win they were looking for.

Depends on how you look at it.

Defense Distributed 'won' a big victory where there was a full settlement announcement that Defense Distributed specifically would get one of the new licenses to distribute those ITAR'd files. Then the government moved the files from ITAR rules to EAR rules, and then successfully argued in court that they no longer needed to issue a permit. In theory, this meant Defense Distributed was free and clear so long as they were publishing information rather than ready-to-print files ... and then the Biden administration argued that an EAR exception for ready-to-manufacture code explicitly covered CAD-only files or instruction manuals for firearms, did so by FAQ, and coincidentally EAR rules are completely barred from judicial review. Defense Distributed has not received a license under the new regime, could not receive one to publish broadly -- that's explicit text in the Department of Commerce letter -- and it's basically in the same state as it was before the lawsuit, but with no recourse.

Strictly speaking, a First Amendment as-applied challenge might get past that reviewability bar. Good fucking luck.

For bonus points, EAR violations are 350k+ per item (presumably per-file) as civil violations, 1 million and years in prison as a criminal violation if willful, and come with the extra punishment of going on the Denied Persons List, aka 'no bank accounts allowed'.

Wow the transition to EAR rules and then defining online software files as world wide releases is quite harsh on anything open-sourced. I assume the files in question were just normal guns for manufacture? Nothing super high-tech, needing any sort of classification or export restriction?

I guess it's good to know that anyone complaining about the political targeting via ITAR rules is mostly complaining about their side getting hit with export restrictions.

I assume the files in question were just normal guns for manufacture? Nothing super high-tech, needing any sort of classification or export restriction?

The rules apply from the it's-kinda-dumb Liberator proof of concept to the modern-gen FGC-9, but they're nothing superscience or fantastical.

I think it's ITAR. I don't know all the technicalities of the legal regime, but it sounds like the proximate concern of the government is that China/Iran/North Korea/Russia would be able to use Fable to find and fix security vulnerabilities in their own code. This would be a big blow to US offensive cyber capabilities. Think Stuxnet exploits getting patched.

I wonder what the fact that Anthropic ostensibly can't seem to use their internal better-than-Mythos models to instruct them on how to navigate the political landscape to avoid getting the ire of the current US administration means.

  • We're still a ways away from the world-conquering AGI/ASI that so many of us fear.
  • Politics is sufficiently complex and anti-inductive that even AGI/ASI won't be a "win" button (a thought that's simultaneously horrifying and comforting!).
  • Anthropic is playing 6D chess and everything is going according to keikaku.
  • Anthropic leadership doesn't use their models to make political decisions for them, for whatever reason (most boring, but I'd guess most likely).

If Mythos was near AGI/ASI I don't think Anthropic would release it to the general public. If it's AGI then people will not be using it to make crappy 3js oneshot games on twitter, they will be using it mostly to make the next generation, with the side gig being products worth billions of dollars!

I think Fable is AGI 'in the aggregate' in that it has all the separate abilities needed to match high/peak human output. But it can't string them together quite well enough. You can't just prompt it 'write me a first rate fantasy novel' and then have it whir for 48 hours drafting and drafting and brainstorming and get 70K words output, where it's all great and would make you good money on Amazon. It'd be cliched or have plot holes even though it's legitimately quite strong as a writer. Time horizon is too short.

You can't just prompt it 'write me a first rate fantasy novel' and then have it whir for 48 hours drafting and drafting and brainstorming and get 70K words output, where it's all great and would make you good money on Amazon. It'd be cliched or have plot holes even though it's legitimately quite strong as a writer.

I saw a post a while back that made the IMHO interesting observation that while social media, which has dominated media mindshare for probably two decades now, optimizes for edgy rage bait to drive clicks, AI slop (for lack of a better word) optimizes for centrality in almost the reverse fashion. If AI dominates the market equivalently, one could imagine that the modal culture consumed becomes anti-extremist because the models fundamentally prefer modal, not subversive, answers.

But that is a bit of vague hypothesizing, and I'm not exactly sure how it'll play out.

Eh... that's not really how it ends up if you push the thing hard. Conceptually, you'd expect it to reduce to averages or centrality, but in practice even minor weird decisions early in a prompt can drive an LLM to extremes pretty quickly.

This prompt isn't at all original or complicated, but this story (cw:30k words AI slop) isn't central-mode. It has a lot of other problems! The prose has one setting and it's 11, the foreshadowing is less subtle than a hammer, and the narrative sets up some really interest ideas about collaboration over dominance in an elemental magic system and then segues into a marvel movie at the end. Some of those are downstream of the prompts, since I was attempting to match phailyoor's test and do minimal editorial direction, but a lot of them are more general.

And the other side of things is that as it gets cheaper to produce something, visibility of that content is going to need something more than production. So long as something on the outside edges is available, it's going to collect attention just by nature of being differentiable, whether or not it's even better.

I don't think that's going to go quite the same as sort-by-controversial, but it's got a lot of potential for weird.

Opus 4.8 offers a series of recommendations that, although we would all likely find room to quibble with, seems like most would agree would be better than Anthropic is doing now (admittedly a very low bar). Probably could go back to models from 2024 and pass that, though.

I think the human leadership of Anthropic just finds digesting and following those recommendations very distasteful.

I think the human leadership of Anthropic just finds digesting and following those recommendations very distasteful.

If this is true, that would indicate that whatever internal Mythos+ models Anthropic has lacks sufficient intelligence to come up with a plan that is both tasteful enough for Anthropic leadership to follow and has Anthropic avoid the ire of the US government. Either no amount of intelligence is capable of coming up with such a plan (perhaps training humans to have sufficient disgust reaction is the solution to AI alignment?) or the models just aren't there yet.

Either no amount of intelligence is capable of coming up with such a plan (perhaps training humans to have sufficient disgust reaction is the solution to AI alignment?)

I think it's this. But I don't think disgust reactions will save us: although they will limit the rate of diffusion, capitalism will select for companies that don't have the same kind of institutional disgust reaction and are willing to do what it takes for profit/success.

Hm, my first thought from that was that we might need a eugenics program to make humans universally have the proper disgust reactions to resist AI doom, but it was immediately obvious that the timelines for that would be far too long compared to AI progress. We might need a bioweapon program to spread gene therapy to produce the proper disgust reactions. Unfortunately, with Covid-19 having happened immediately before the recent AI boom, it might be difficult both to infect enough people with a man-made virus for the gene therapy or to use a fake pandemic to infect people with the gene therapy under the guise of being vaccines.

No need to make it a bioweapon. Make it a cultural meme, narratives spread much faster. If you can create narrative versions of the AI disgust reaction for both left and right cultural environments, then you could release a memetic pathogen that would push the vast majority of people into that AI disgust state

If you can create narrative versions of the AI disgust reaction for both left and right cultural environments

A bioweapon sounds easier.

Or Anthropic just doesn't want to do with the obvious thing(which is, and has always been, to give the pentagon what it wants and then send it a bill), and no amount of political grounds will convince them to do so.

Given the known political views of the average Silicon Valley techie, it seems completely plausible that a majority of the senior management and top technical talent at Anthropic think "The Trump admin uses AGI to win the future for MAGA chuddery" is one of the bad outcomes we want to avoid, and possibly even worse than "The Red Chinese use AGI to win the future for whatever it is they believe in nowadays". (FWIW, I personally would rather live in the Eternal Chinese Empire of the Hundred Acre Wood than in an American hegemony where either side of the culture war had won a total victory).

If that is an accurate reflection of the political views of the key people at Anthropic, then their behaviour would require no additional explanation.

There are, roughly speaking, three routes to AI doom:

  • Yudkowskian paperclipping. AI eats us all, human value is extinguished
  • AGI falls into the hands of lawful evil actors like the Red Chinese or the wrong side of the US culture war, and establishes an evil singleton which extinguishes most human value
  • AGI is so much more effective in the hands of chaotic evil actors than in the hands of the people defending against them that disgruntled basement-dwellers are able to maliciously destroy most human value out of boredom or misanthropy

Going faster under the supervision of a misaligned US government makes paperclipping and lawful evil dystopia more likely, so the main reason for a safety-conscious AI firm to move fast (to get out ahead of less-safety-conscious firms) is lost if the price of permission to go fast is accepting Trump admin supervision.

I’m not sure what either side of the culture war would do that’s worse than an actual totalitarian state with no property rights and internal passports.

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