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The failure mode of the technocrat. "Clearly running the country is too important to be left to the ignorant, it should be in the hands of trained professional smart people like us. And only us."
That Fable thing really was "AI should be regulated!" "Okay" "No, not like that!" They want to be the ones deciding who gets to play with the toys and the government tamely follows their instructions as regards shutting down their rivals, but it's not going to work like that.
I don't know why people keep repeating this. From Anthropic:
Does this sound like Anthropic decides who uses their models? Does Ford decide who uses their cars?
Yes, they weren't happy about a schizophrenic and vindictive ban of their model due to capabilities that it shares with other models.
You can be in favor of a consistent regulatory framework without being in favor of arbitrary decisions by the president based on who is in and who is out.
You can, but cars, airplanes and drugs are famous examples of very heavily regulated industries where creating a new business is almost impossible, incumbents rule, and incumbents and their lobbyists design the majority of the regulations themselves.
This is, in fact:
and Anthropic is just putting it into nice friendly words that people are swallowing. While I deeply dislike the way the Trump government handled the Fable incident, all this ultimately a fight over who gets to rule, who gets to be in and out, and who gets to set the rules. If the Trump government had calmly and consistently mandated open weight releases and anti-monopoly legislation, Anthropic would be screaming about how this was unsafe.
Creating a new business in these sectors is difficult because the sectors are inherently difficult to make money in. Moderna was founded in 2010 and basically had nothing going on until Covid. SpaceX was founded 2002 and only had a successful launch in 2008 after near bankruptcy. It is nevertheless possible to enter these markets.
I don't see the contradiction here. "You say you want regulatory regime A, but in fact you would hate regulatory regime B which doesn't accomplish the same goals. Curious!" The point is not that Anthropic wants a regulatory regime, they want a regulatory regime that is oriented around mitigating AI risks.
Anthropic's conception of 'mitigating AI risks' is 'do everything I say, just the way I say it, and this system has to be enforced by someone who thinks like me'. It's like Microsoft saying, 'look, I don't want a monopoly, I just want to recognise that CPUs being able to run an open or foreign OS is a clear threat to public safety, and incidentally don't you think Apple bundling OS and hardware really deserves anti-monopoly legislation?'.
If your preferred regulatory regime also excludes almost all your potential competitors except the ones you're basically okay with, then it is indistinguishable from a power grab. From a customer and an enthusiast perspective I really don't care which of Anthropic or OpenAI comes out on top. I don't just want it to be technically possible to enter these markets, I want it to be easy. I want us to strain every sinew to allow new AI companies to start, I want us to give gobs of compute to anyone who isn't Anthropic or OpenAI. Let a thousand flowers bloom!
This is a fully general counterargument against any regulation. Even your proposed regime rounds off to "do everything I say the way I say it and it has to be enforced by someone who thinks like me."
Their stated beliefs on AI dangers, which philosophically long predate Anthropic as a going concern, are entirely consistent with the proposed regime. In fact, it would be contradictory for them to believe in AI risks and argue for laissez-faire. Perhaps you disagree on the risks, but that is the root of the disagreement, not the regulatory framework.
Well, that's the rub, isn't it? I think that their stated beliefs on AI dangers, which long predate Anthropic as a going concern (and which like all delusions survived the future being completely different from all claims made for the last 15 years), are delusions of grandeur for the Silicon Valley class the way that the Cult of Reason justified taking over France and cutting off the heads off anyone who expressed doubt. The sincerity of their beliefs, which I mostly don't doubt, can't be separated from the fact that these beliefs are grossly self-aggrandising and justify the infinite self-serving accumulation of power.
My point is that a power grab is still a power grab. Dressing it up in impassioned and sincere rhetoric about how everyone will die if they don't get power doesn't make it any less of a power grab.
(My proposed regime at least rounds off to opening the floor to everyone.)
It obviously can't be the case that "this increases the power of AI companies that take safety seriously" is an argument against a regulatory regime that takes AI safety seriously. The argument must actually be that AI safety is not a concern, not that even if it is a concern we must still be suicidally unconcerned.
No, the argument is that neither the AI companies nor the regulatory regime will take AI safety seriously. Instead, they will take AI control seriously and that is a safety threat to those who aren't aligned with said AI companies and the regulatory regime they are pushing for.
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