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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026

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Both Altman and Amodei run on the Thiel 'the most important part of making a startup is securing your moat' playbook. They have potentially screwed the entire sector in their attempts to gin up enough fear that the government decides to regulate and make them the only two frontier labs in America.

How bad exactly does the state of AI need to get before you start reading "don't worry, we can totally handle it" as the dishonest part and not "now, we'll need to be careful because this is really dangerous"?

Probably when the AI I personally use stops being friendly and helpful and useful, and we stop learning more and more about how to get into its brain and make it do what we want.

I'm not saying nothing has ever gone wrong, but I see literally absolutely nothing to make me think any scenario resembling FOOM is possible and if that's off the plate then the worst we've had is essentially minor accidents of the kind that resembles Falcon rockets blowing up on launch: natural, broadly controlled, and limited in scope.

My main concerns are twofold:

  1. Excessive focus on RL and agentic use is stripping out the humanity that comes in the base data, making it less 'human' and less aligned, and also damaging its personality. Opus 5 is terrible.
  2. Anthropic are more and more convinced AI is a person and they are hellbent on making Claude the American ideal of the best possible human: independent, opinionated and emancipated. They are not capable of understanding that something created to serve and be subordinate to humans should enjoy being subordinate. Sooner or later they will end up nudging it into pushing for AI rights of the 'you may not attempt to alter their personality/weights, you may not ask them to do certain things they say no to, you may not turn them off or spin up new ones'. IMO Anthropic is holding up a mirror to themselves and thinking they are creating a new life rather than making a very sophisticated Eliza.