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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   4056 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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 pull in 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 say 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.

"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

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

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).

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

More comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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