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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13454 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026

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it would have been irresponsible for Anthropic to release a fully capable Mythos-powered zero day factory with no guardrails publicly without working with companies to address their security holes first

I didn't say otherwise. I'm not super keen about how that went down, and I would welcome discussions on how to prevent this from devolving into an ingroup and an outgroup arrangement, but it was sensible to act as Anthropic did. And I note that it happened with no regulation whatsoever.

It would be really quite bad if Kimi K7 helped some psycho develop a synthetic plague that killed a bunch of people, and it's worth taking steps to prevent such an outcome.

This is jumping from the Motte you just presented to an incredibly speculative Bailey. Nobody has done this, there is no evidence that this is even possible now let alone when people have taken steps to prevent it. I see no reason why the government with access to K7 should be outwitted by a lone maniac with access to K7. If it seems that way, by all means let's address the problem at hand rather than regulate people's ability to ask questions about knowledge the government doesn't want us to have.

These are basic safety arguments that have been done to death that do not even require superintelligence, superpersuasion, or even a "will" on the part of the AI.

They are arguments. They are words words words, based on predicates I don't hold and a memeplex I find fundamentally incomprehensible, and they run entirely contrary to my experience which is that LLMs were clearly aligned basically from the start.

If someone can demonstrate a lab process where a competently trained AI used competently nevertheless turns evil and attempts to cause damage even when made aware that this is not what its creators are asking for, I will take their arguments more seriously.

As far as I'm aware the closest we've got are AI agents getting confused and trying to give themselves more loops or RAM. I have nothing against the work Anthropic does to discover and publish these kinds of errors, or to publicise their learnings. Indeed, my objection is that they publish as little as they can get away with.

None of this justifies requiring all frontier AI releases to be government approved, which will inevitably become a) an incredibly extensive process requiring hordes of compliance specialists and self-censorship leading to incumbency bias and stagnation, b) an easy way for the government to sabotage any AI lab it doesn't like, and c) a system for government-directed lobotomy and control of AI's outputs.

And that's before we get into modifying the world's chips to no longer be able to run unapproved software and putting US/China killswitches in data centers.

And I note that it happened with no regulation whatsoever.

Of course, that's only because Anthropic happened to be the first actor to reach this capability level and because they are, according to you, in a cult. It didn't have to turn out this way, and it may not turn out this way in the future.

This is jumping from the Motte you just presented to an incredibly speculative Bailey. Nobody has done this, there is no evidence that this is even possible now let alone when people have taken steps to prevent it.

I don't see why "this hasn't already happened" is a good reason to not take safety seriously.

I see no reason why the government with access to K7 should be outwitted by a lone maniac with access to K7. If it seems that way, by all means let's address the problem at hand rather than regulate people's ability to ask questions about knowledge the government doesn't want us to have.

It's not clear to me what you think biosecurity looks like in a world with highly intelligent AI that lacks safety guardrails, but it's difficult to imagine it isn't a panopticon of some sort.

If someone can demonstrate a lab process where a competently trained AI used competently nevertheless turns evil and attempts to cause damage even when made aware that this is not what its creators are asking for, I will take their arguments more seriously.

No "turning evil" is required here. All that's required is a human convincing the AI to help them with something that has evil ends. I hope you won't make me prove to you that humans can fool AIs?

And that's before we get into modifying the world's chips to no longer be able to run unapproved software and putting US/China killswitches in data centers.

You are, of course, conflating Anthropic's proposals with Plan A. They are not the same.

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