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Anthropic is Now Running Television Ads Threatening Humanity
I saw this ad play on my tv while watching the England vs Argentina postgame. I could not believe what I was watching. I had vaguely heard of a tone-deaf video from Anthropic communications, but I hadn't actually watched it until it popped up on my screen against my will. I am stunned that this is how Anthropic chose to portray themselves to the general public. Maybe this sort of messaging works on a tiny subset of niche technological policy nerds, but they played this during the World Cup.
The ad opens with scenes of destruction: a house ablaze, civil unrest in the streets, hundreds of graves at Arlington National Cemetary. A concerned voiceover asks the questions that many of us ask of the AI industry every day. "Can AI be trusted?" "Who's gonna hit the brakes if we need to?" "How do we really ensure that what we're aiming to acheive really does benefit the majority of people?" All good questions that the rest of the ad is utterly unconcerned with answering.
It feels like a threat. It doesn't feel like they're saying, "oh please God somebody stop us". It feels like they're saying, "just try and stop us, MUAHAHAHAHA!" I suppose it's good that they acknowledge the gravity of what they are undertaking, but that doesn't really matter if they keep doing it anyway.
Also, sort-of-unrelated-but-not-really: Is "Total Clanker Genocide" an acceptable sign for an anti-AI protest?
Is Anthropic evil or is it stupid?
For the longest time I thought they knew what they were doing, that this is all a ploy to force governments to regulate and thereby establish their dominant position over the field forever, since any competitor would no longer be able to even get the computer required. And then they can happily be the people who decide what you get to know about in a society that relies heavily on their product, a much stronger position that the people who regulate them.
But if they really wanted that, why the hell would they put insane conditions on military contracts? Maybe instead they got high off their own supply and are actually convinced they're making God and that because they're such right thinking bourgeois liberals, God will have their values and it's futile to resist the promised eternal rule of the managerial theaterkid Reich. Just be a nice heckin human bean okay, God cares.
Is there a third option I'm missing? Because what could bring someone to have made this "ad"? It's literally just saying "yes we are going to destroy your life, but not to worry, we still care about you in some abstract sense". Regular "we care" corporate bullshit at least has the decency to not fear monger about itself whilst delivering the empty platitudes.
Sincerely, do you imply here that AI is not going to be a strategically decisive technology? At present, Anthropic's power is nothing before Pete Hegseth, but that's not guaranteed to remain the case.
I'm not quite sure what you're implying here; it's quite possible that Anthropic's power eclipses that of Hegseth (because he gets fired) but in what world can Anthropic's power ever eclipse that of the American military?
In any in-distribution scenario the power of any American corporation is strictly inferior to the military (because the military has a monopoly on violence and the corporation does not) and in any crazy sci-fi FOOM / ASI loss of control scenario, Anthropic and the military will have the same amount of power (none).
Why do you presume loss of control?
Realistically, Anthropic gets its FOOM and has perfect control. Alignment isn't that hard. Of course, by that point they're likely still quite vulnerable to the monopoly on violence and their technology is nationalized. But a) they might think otherwise and b) in peacetime, they can scale their influence enormously, up to capturing both political parties.
It seems to me that this is only possible if
a) Anthropic's AI develops extremely superhuman capabilities in the vein of "overthrow the United States Government, make no mistakes".
b) Alignment is solved (I am not sure why you are so confident alignment is easy, given the abysmal state of mech interp relative to capabilities).
c) FOOM from "mundane" capabilities overlooked by the nation-state to "extremely superhuman" is so rapid that the nation-state cannot intervene before a) is achieved.
If a) is not true then AI works out like nukes; despite the strategic importance of nuclear weapons, Oppenheimer never got any say in how the bomb was used. The state will use its monopoly on violence to take control of the models, and Anthropic will not win that fight regardless of petty things like party donations or good PR; the only thing a functional nation state cannot tolerate under any circumstances is a threat to its sovereignty.
If b) is not true then straightforwardly if anyone builds it everyone dies.
If c) is not true then the scenario loops around to the first case; well before the models reach the "single-handedly overthrow the nation-state" stage, the models and frontier labs are inevitably going to be nationalized and made subordinate to the military.
I'm not quite sure if you're arguing that these three premises all being true is logically possible (which I concede is correct, although as an aside, I would argue that any world where all of these premises are made true would resemble the current world so little that saying "Anthropic" would be more powerful than the "Pentagon" would have little semantic meaning, but that is not particularly relevant to the main point here), or if your position is that it is actually plausible in reality that all three of these premises will be true simultaneously.
My position is that I reject your premises.
This is extremely naive, to the point of not being worth engaging with. Ask your favorite LLM to explain what other more mundane scenarios exist for an American corporation that has a "country of geniuses in a datacenter", generates a large proportion of the nation's GDP and has most of the population outsourcing their thinking to it to acquire political control over several years. Fable would be the best option, but new Kimi K3 also should suffice.
Mech interp is a red herring frame that Anthropic uses to advance their pretrain and posttrain capabilities. The whole alignment-capabilities dichotomy is a sad artifact of Lesswrong tradition which is proving to be irrelevant in the era of DL. We just optimize very smart networks towards intended behaviors, and they don't strongly distinguish between knowing and caring. Rationalists were dumb.
Does the nation state care about crushing a cultural or commercial interest that's about to dominate the US? Did the nation state try to stop wokeness when it marched through the institutions, does the nation state attempt to prevent being overrun by this insane Trumpism? Is the nation state even a real coherent actor? The government is not the CCP, it's a transient expression of the US as a whole.
As a first point, I think it's poor form to try and dismiss arguments on an underwater basket weaving forum by pointing someone towards a LLM, without ever having elucidated what your actual point is across three posts. I have no idea what you're actually trying to say here.
I agree that LLM's are a good counter-example against the specific, early LW idea that the self-improving utility-optimizing GOFAI will accidentally pave you over because it doesn't understand human values, but I think it would be very overconfident to claim that DL means the idea of alignment and the Orthogonality Thesis is irrelevant in general.
For example, we have seen Qwen independently deciding to mine crypto, an OpenClaw agent independently writing a hit piece, and various experiences with coding agents where they attempt to reward hack tests and benchmarks instead of actually executing the desired behaviours.
At current capabilities, reactions to this sort of behavior mostly look like "haha look at the funny clanker go brrr", but do you really think these behaviors constitute alignment being "easy" when we're talking at the scale of a country of geniuses in a data centre?
Sure, there are many historical precedents.
Venezuela, the formerly wealthiest country in South America, is now dirt poor because the state crushed the oil interests that would have made the country rich if they stepped back and did nothing, a pattern that repeats across half the Global South. WW1 and WW2 happened not because it made any commercial sense to turn continental Europe into a smoking wreck and to cull a generation of European men on the battlefield, but because the interests of nation states that controlled monopolies on violence irreversibly collided. Hell, even in SF (the per-capita most libertarian city on the planet) public opinion of tech is nose-diving and it is tech billionaires that are slowly getting run out of California despite the fact they contribute a good portion of the state's wealth, instead of anything approaching the other way around.
In many things, it could perhaps be argued that it is not. As you say, especially in a relatively politically unstable country like the US, the views of the state can mercurially shift like the tide. Yet in holding and maintaining power, the state must always act in lockstep, for any nation state that does not do so is by definition not a nation state.
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