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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   4216 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 31, 2026

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Just today, Anthropic put out a new statement containing the following sentence:

"To be clear about where we stand: we believe the world would benefit if the industry adopted a lawful, verifiable, effective mechanism for coordinated pacing as soon as possible."

The funniest part is that another common excuse is "but China", which is fair enough, except China now says (at least they suggest so in a state-affiliated media) that the biggest issue with coordinating on AI safety is Anthropic, and specifically Dario Amodei.

When the U.S. government chose to loosen and retreat in order to maintain technological hegemony, and when capital markets offered a "moral exemption" in exchange for investment returns, Anthropic's desire for control—originally buried only in a personal savior complex—found fertile soil in the American social system. This is also the root of the "closed-source America" phenomenon. …

Earlier, when Anthropic's annualized revenue reached the billion-dollar threshold and it was preparing to accelerate commercialization, a long article Amodei published had already revealed his ambition to intervene in the global order.

The article devoted an entire section to international governance, in wording full of a desire for control and aggression:

A coalition of "democratic countries" should firmly control the AI supply chain and restrict rivals' access to chips and semiconductor equipment; at the same time, they should both leverage AI to form a military advantage and use benefits to attract more countries to join. He clearly proposed that this requires "extremely close cooperation" between private AI companies and governments.

This does not sound like an entrepreneur discussing a roadmap for a company's product development—it is planning a global AI order, and reserving for his own company a dominant seat at the very core. …

Putting these facts together, the path is already clear: Anthropic first enters government systems by virtue of its safety capabilities, then uses lobbying and funding to help shape industry rules. It is at once a regulated entity and a participant in defining which models are dangerous and when the government should stop a model from entering the market.

At this point, Amodei's logic has undergone two amplifications: from "I am doing good" to "I will decide for you"; from "my country is doing good" to "all those who do not cooperate should be restricted."

This is entirely a monster bred on the American path. It sincerely believes it is right, sincerely believes its model is "the democratic model," and its safety standards are the world's safety standards—yet it is utterly unaware that this very absence of doubt is itself the greatest danger.

So the real question is not "whether to manage," but this: who should define the safety boundary of frontier models? Who is qualified to say which models are dangerous, and which behaviors need to be restricted?

U.S. officials have already been discussing how to get China to agree to restrict "AI models with dangerous capabilities." The problem is this: with companies like Anthropic in existence, before the U.S. asks China to restrict model releases and disclose risks, should it not first investigate its own companies, make public the purpose, scope, and rules of its detection mechanisms, and accept third-party audits?

That Chinese state media article seems like total hooey. The Trump Department of War cut ties with Anthropic, and the Trump White House has adopted a "voluntary" (though nobody truly believes this) system for dealing with new frontier-pushing AI releases.

It's also silly for China to criticize American labs for being closed, and for 'deciding for you', when it is obvious to anyone with half a brain that society will not last very long if AIs that are above a certain capability threshold are made open source. To use just one example, if an open source AI ever gets smart enough to help someone who wouldn't otherwise be able to do it, to biohack together a new deadly virus in their garage, that would be very bad. Because once something like that is out in the wild, it becomes inevitable that someone will do just that.

Even the informal system the Chinese labs are adopting, where they serve up a model for about a month before they make it open source, isn't a perfect solution, because there might be behavior that someone who has the model weights might be able to elicit (such as via ablation) that won't be obvious until the genie is out of the bottle, and so even the month long preview period won't tell us what these models can and cannot do.

The point they make is very simple, Dario Amodei intends to destroy their nation and they don't consider any offer of cooperation credible so long as this is the face of the American frontier. You guys seem to feel entitled to pretty weird things. Objectively, the rational move for China is to try to kill everyone at Anthropic.

It does seem interesting that the high-end model guardrails have converged on IT security and biology as their two focuses. I don't have a third branch of "existential dangers easily triggered by AI" to suggest, but if I did I wouldn't be posting about it.

Isn’t the classic Less-Wrongian one superpersuasion? They even paid more attention to it than IT security because they assumed the labs would be sane and airgap their shit.

To use just one example, if an open source AI ever gets smart enough to help someone who wouldn't otherwise be able to do it, to biohack together a new deadly virus in their garage

"Hey, the virus you made for me that you said would have a 100% kill rate didn't do anything! You said the whole concept was chef's kiss!"

You're right to push back on that.

if an open source AI ever gets smart enough to help someone who wouldn't otherwise be able to do it, to biohack together a new deadly virus in their garage, that would be very bad

What makes you believe this is possible? What makes you believe it can't be addressed by the boring know-your-customer sales restrictions we already use to prevent this happening? What makes you believe that an AI capable of designing a new deadly virus isn't going to be equally good at putting together new regulatory regimes? Why does not going along with the axioms of this one endlessly-spammed fictional scenario indicate that people who disagree with you don't have half a brain?

Right, "even the month long preview period won't tell us what these models can and cannot do" is also true for humans. We cannot tell if a human might design a deadly new virus. To the extent that AIs are a problem, they are a problem in the same direction as widespread literacy, accessible libraries of books, and the internet: the broadening of knowledge also broadens the circle of people who might abuse this knowledge.

The best solution is pretty clearly physically securing dangerous materials.

The best solution is pretty clearly physically securing dangerous materials.

For biological hazards, yes, very clearly that is best. But it actually has to be done, not gestured at. Until it's actually done (and getting it done internationally seems realistically feasible here, unlike broader AI safety things), model-level classifiers are a hacky way to mitigate the threat as a bridge until something more robust is developed.

Technology increases individual power. Power <=> threat. Unless the world we live in is strictly invulnerable, which it pretty clearly is not, increasing technology at some point climbs past the point where complex society is viable.

...alternatively, there's some tech that changes the power <=> threat equation, but it's very hard to imagine how that could happen. Dispersion doesn't solve the problem, stronger defenses don't seem to be a thing even theoretically...

I think this is, at best, an oversimplifcation. If technology increases individual power per individual symmetrically, then the relative power of the individual to society and to other individuals will not change.

But this is not what we observe. At a minimum, technology benefits individual asymmetrically based on their skills. And what we in fact observe is that some technologies really do not increase individual power (particularly relative to others) since they require coordinated action to utilize. Thus some technologies are centralizing and shift the balance of power away from the individual and towards coordinated action, while some technologies are decentralizing and shift the relative balance of power towards the individual. However, even in the cases of decentralizing technologies, the societal collective generally retains more power than the individual by virtue of having more individuals.

The problem with things like "AI-designed viruses" isn't a problem of power, exactly - I would frame it more as a question of the relative strengths of offense and defense. (To explain a bit while I would say that it is not exactly a question of power, a person who has designed a virus still lacks a great deal of power that society retains - perhaps he has the power to kill everyone on Earth, but he still cannot construct an aircraft carrier, for instance. Whereas presumably society could construct both the carrier and the virus, giving it more power as long as it exists).

Some technologies (at least in the military sense) favor the defensive, while some favor the offensive. However, all else being equal, the offense always has an edge over the defense simply because the offensive has greater initiative. Thus the problem with things like "AI viruses" is that the technology is both individually empowering and is feared to favor the attacker.

However, technology will not inevitably favor the attacker. For instance, if you will forgive a toy explanation, think of missile guidance technology. Initially, this favored the attackers. Over time, though, the curve of that technology began to tilt towards the defender, because the technology in its early stages was very good at offensive tasks (hitting static or large targets) and bad at defensive tasks (hitting small, moving targets). But as the technology matured to hit small, moving targets, missiles began to be suitable for defensive tasks. If we imagine a future where missiles are perfectly good at hitting both large, static targets and small, moving targets, then it will favor the defender, since for an equal or lessor expenditure in defensive missiles he can perfectly hit all attacking missiles. Thus, while the attacker will always have the benefit of initiative, technological advancement can favor the defender.

It is not clear to me that the future of technology will favor the attackers inevitably. Many people feel personally empowered by AI, and thus see it as an increase in individual, offensive power. But the technology itself (at the cutting edge) favors coordinated action, resource allocation, funding, and control. Thus it seems possible to me that the long curve of AI technology may end up radically favoring centralized defenders over individual attackers.

If technology increases individual power per individual symmetrically, then the relative power of the individual to society and to other individuals will not change.

Building is hard, destruction is easy. Order is hard, chaos is easy. "The flying bullet down the pass / that whistles clear 'all flesh is grass'". Order must be maintained, sustained, disorder is (largely though not infinitely) self-sustaining. If individuals can cheaply and easily build their own nukes, then society as we know it is obviously impossible to maintain. This holds true for things other than nukes too, and there's probably a point where society's half-like drops into the order of months or years rather than decades without being immediately obvious.

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