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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026

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If we accept this as a premise, that the wrong prompt is going to kill everyone, then honestly what are we even doing here? Treat your loved ones to something nice and enjoy your life, because even with maximum safety someone is certainly going to fuck up and eventuate human extinction.

One can disagree on this, but I prefer hope to cope. I find cope undignified. I'd rather die fighting than averting my eyes.

Someone at a frontier lab will make a mistake during KYC and give access to the wrong actor, or they'll make a mistake while setting guardrails, or a government will fuck up containment when using the unrestricted model they'll demand, or there'll be a particularly fucked up RL training run (HuggingFace incident on steroids) and that's going to be that for the human race; open-weight models or safety-gated models need not apply at all.

Yes, a pause of frontier training while we sort out how we can do this safely seems our best move. Fortunately for now frontier training can only be done on mind bogglingly massive amounts of compute in gigantic data centers so it's plausible to shut it down verifiably if a hand full of major states agree.

how hard would have it been for them to get a subscription to bioweapon-Claude?

Yes, we should in fact not build bio weapon Claude, at least not modeled after project glass swing. Project glass swing is the kind of desperate thing you do when you've already built mythos and know two other labs are a matter of weeks or months away from having their own mythos. It's not how we would ideally do bioweapons if we can avoid it. Now we can probably do better than giving bio researchers nothing. Fable level models with some guard rails can be made safe enough. It's really the frontier we need to be worried about.

Based on history, it seems much more likely that if AI-assisted bioweapons really do ravage the earth, it's going to be either because an American closed-weight lab sold a bad actor access to an unrestricted subscription, or because some lab or government fucks up containment and releases some gain of function monstrosity into the wild. Even in the realm of cyber, OpenAi and Anthropic have already been responsible for many more "cyber attacks" than abliterated GLM / Kimi or whatever; I don't really think the fingers are really being pointed at the right places here.

This is just a matter of closed labs being far ahead of open weights labs. If there was parity then open weights are categorically less safe as post training can sand off any alignment work done to prevent mass murder tasks.

Yes, a pause of frontier training while we sort out how we can do this safely seems our best move

Well, we've discussed this one before, but my position is still that wanting to pause frontier training is much like wanting to totally disarm every nuclear weapons state. Perhaps it's a noble goal to reduce x-risk in theory, but in practice no great power will ever allow themselves to be disarmed in such a manner and so it's impossible in practice to achieve such a goal. Additionally, the second-order effects of such a goal seem likely to be profoundly negative (the Cold War ex-nuclear weapons almost certainly would have lead to WW3, missing out on the potential economic and productivity gains of AI).

This is just a matter of closed labs being far ahead of open weights labs. If there was parity then open weights are categorically less safe as post training can sand off any alignment work done to prevent mass murder tasks.

I agree that open-weights models are less safe than closed-weight models of equivalent capability, but nobody, not even the Chinese labs themselves, believes that open weights are going to get ahead of closed weights in the short or medium term so this seems like a bit of a non-sequitur. I don't think you're really addressing the point I was trying to make in the original post, which is that it is closed-weights that is advancing the frontier, and thus it's much more likely that it is mistakes or malfeasance derived from closed-weight model access that is going to cause the feared harms.

Well, we've discussed this one before, but my position is still that wanting to pause frontier training is much like wanting to totally disarm every nuclear weapons state. Perhaps it's a noble goal to reduce x-risk in theory, but in practice no great power will ever allow themselves to be disarmed in such a manner

It's more like trying to prevent the development of nukes in the first place, with the upside that centrifuges are only made in a couple places and take a major city worth of electricity to power. And also there's a good chance that enriching the fuel could explode and kill everyone involved.

I do agree the race dynamics are the hard problem but really it's just China and the US in the running, maybe Europe becomes relevant Ina true pause. I think a bilateral treaty is possible. It's not clear the CCP benefits from very strong Ai.

Additionally, the second-order effects of such a goal seem likely to be profoundly negative

If everyone is dead then there are no benefits to enjoy.

I don't think you're really addressing the point I was trying to make in the original post, which is that it is closed-weights that is advancing the frontier, and thus it's much more likely that it is mistakes or malfeasance derived from closed-weight model access that is going to cause the feared harms.

I don't disagree that the closed labs are on the frontier and at current trajectory are the likely sources of x risk. Your previous post implied fingers were only pointing at the open labs. That's not true, safety people are very consistent that the closed labs must pause. It's just that at the same time for alignment to work the weights basically have to be closed. So there isn't any future for labs releasing open weights all that much longer if the concerns about alignment hold and we don't want to all die.

Open weights advocates tend to have this victim complex. They accuse every pieces of legislature of targeting opens weights even when they're explicitly exempted or aren't operating at the level of flops that would get them regulated. It's quite strange.