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Is There Real Anti-Trust Risk From A Coordinated AI Lab Pause?
In AI-pause discussions it is increasingly common to hear the "anti-trust" objection. The idea is that if the labs were to coordinate a pause in frontier AI development, this would be a "conspiracy in restraint of trade" and therefore illegal.
Putting aside the question of whether it is ethical to risk a double-digit chance of destroying the world in order to avoid getting sued (it isn't), is this even a realistic possibility? My impression is that anti-trust law in the United States is legitimately quite fuzzy (as the NCAA is currently discovering).
Putting my cards on the table, I think this argument is cope. The labs want to pretend that they want to pause, but they don't actually want to pause. "If she wanted to, she would," etc. Just today, Anthropic put out a new statement containing the following sentence:
It seems like every time I read a statement from them, they've added more and more qualifications. Are they going to keep racing until congress passes a specific anti-trust exemption? That arguably seems like what the word "lawful" is implying.
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.
OpenAI via Microsoft makes its models effectively publicly available to with few or no limitations to Chinese businesses.
Anthropic doesn’t, in part to try to ingratiate themselves with the current admin that (not incorrectly) perceives them as more committed anti-Trumpers and effective altruists compared to Altman’s entirely mercenary nature.
[yes, all the big labs, big tech can get around it, and so can individual developers and small businesses with redistribution, but it is an even minor inconvenience.]
But the bigger picture is that Amodei actually has some minor fears about a Yud-level doom scenario. He’s not Scott level, but this guy lived in a group house with EA people for a decade. Altman doesn’t care, doesn’t know, doesn’t believe in X risk beyond a marketing tool. I actually don’t think Sam has a psychological conception of ASI, it exists as something other people discuss, or a business direction, but it has no eschatological significance.
When Amodei was sitting alongside Benioff hyping up his obsolete SaaS stack to investors / the press as AI proof because they did a big deal with him, you could tell the former was awkward, didn’t believe, was roped into this marketing exercise. This is a guy who was seduced and worn down into marriage by one of Eric Schmidt’s girls in her late thirties (after zero qualifications, another failed marriage and one bankruptcy, a nobody), his social skills are limited. He finds it hard to lie about his actual beliefs, clearly. It’s difficult for anyone who wants to pursue AI very quickly with no limits (not that it is realistic), be they Chinese or American, to convince him. Sam would just have sat at the press conference with a straight face and said AI will create far more jobs than it destroys.
You can’t really turn a guy like Amodei in that way, only remove him from power. In control of the right model at the right time, he might actually do some wacky shit, whereas Altman actually does want to be a rich guy on earth who makes it to his next botox appointment.
I've wondered how Sam and Dario first met; they are such polar opposites.
It happened well before OpenAI (see Sam's Machine Intelligence from 2014, particularly "Thanks to Dario Amodei (especially Dario)").
My best bet is through Daniela and that EA group house they shared. She was head of technical recruiting at Stripe, which was only around 100 people at that time. Sam had been the second or third investor at Stripe (YC S09). (Brockman, of course, was also CTO there and later introduced Dario to his wife; he apparently sponsored a company LessWrong reading group.)
It's deeper than that. He was contributing to MIRI strategy discussions with the big Yud himself back in 2013.
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My model of Altman is much more pessimistic than yours; I think he has even worse delusions of grandeur than Amodei and is simply a sociopath who is happy to greatly increase the odds of AI doom in order to slightly increase his personal odds of winding up as an immortal singularitarian god king or feudal lord.
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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.
Why do you think Amodei wants to destroy China? Most EAs never cared much about China. There were even pro-China people, this is after all a movement about maximally lifting people out of poverty or saving lives at the lowest cost or something. US competitors are as much or more of an ASI risk, including that run by Altman, who he seemingly hates. Does he hate Xi more? Seems unlikely. Why? Fanatic China haters typically belong to other demographic, ideological etc categories.
What does this have to do with EAs in general? Dario is his own man. Nevermind that I don't even agree about them, for example the good scenario in AI-2027 ends with the Chinese government toppled. It's valuable to reread this today, because that's the scenario considered prophetic in EA circles (they admit they didn't consult any China expert because it was a low-priority issue, but in fairness US China Hands are atrocious anyway, and also wouldn't have predicted the real timeline with open models instead of Xi stealing weights and nationalizing DeepSeek):
That's the good ending («Slowdown»). The bad ending («Race») is just American AI taking over humanity and doing some cruel misaligned bullshit. China is cooked in either case, nothing Chinese makes it out of the near future.
But that aside, we have a pretty consistent picture of Dario's personal beliefs. He considers Chyna to be one of the dominant arguments if not the argument for rushing AGI progress, and the implications of his success are quite grave for them. Let's check out some of his takes chronologically:
On DeepSeek and Export Controls:
Here, he sets the objective as unipolar American dominance via crushing advantage in AI. Which makes sense, of course, this is common wisdom across all American intellectual cultures, I feel that you're lowkey gaslighting me here by pretending otherwise, but for the sake of common knowledge I'll keep going.
Next consider 2028: Two scenarios for global AI leadership:
In other words, the Bad Scenario is roughly what we have today, and the Good Scenario implies ending this status quo.
What does the target gap of 2-3 years buy, according to Dario? Enter Policy on the AI Exponential
etc. All very obvious.
And in his Dwarkesh episode, he's a bit evasive but ineffectively so, in my opinion:
etc. There are many other times Dario mentions China. In sum, Dario assigns massive value to a) locking the CCP out of the next industrial revolution, to the point they are as helpless before the USG/Anthropic as medieval swordsmen would have been before WWII Marines; b) eventually destroying their regime, either by steering the intrinsic properties of AI or by direct intervention. He does not consider any compromise or, as rats say, value handshake, does not deem them legitimate, and his only concern is that acting more aggressively might provoke some "destabilizing" reaction that upsets the long-term plan. He runs his company and lobbies the government with that in mind. One doesn't have to feel anything in particular about the CCP or the USG to understand that all this makes him an unusually outspoken enemy of the Chinese government (but not the people! He's very quaint in this).
Personally I know that his appeals to an "alliance of democracies" are also hollow, he's 100% all-in on American hegemony and wouldn't even work with Europeans if possible, but I can't cite anything publicly to support this. Dario is the poster boy of Eternal San Francisco Liberal Empire, like it or not. He's very straightforward in his views.
See, if I'm a Chinese government official and I'm reading this, why the hell would I happily advise Xi Jinping to co-operate with an AI pause? I am not one bit sanguine about "if the USA and China just hold hands and wish hard enough, it will magically happen" because I don't see what advantage it is to China to deliberately cripple their efforts, and if the Top Minds on AI Alignment really think the bestest outcome evah! is for Chinese Communism to disappear in a poof of smoke, thanks to their AI stabbing them in the back and leaving the future to Americans, I sure as hell don't see any reason for them to agree to what is their own destruction. In fact, that 'happy' ending would spur me on to race towards Chinese AGI/ASI dominance first for mere survival, were I Chinese.
(Hell, I'm European and even I am getting hot under the collar about "it will help them fill the Universe with utopian colony worlds populated by Americans and their allies". I think you mean "clients and vassals" not "allies" there, and maybe even "dependents and serfs" if America is super-dominant and doesn't mind throwing its weight around - gosh, that could never be, now could it?)
Well, one argument (somewhat bittersweet) is that the CCP are not actually psychopathic and would accept a risk of losing political power over the risk of possible extinction/subjugation of humanity including China. I think this is actually plausible, but you've got to convince them that the latter risk is material enough. And coming from dogmatic liberals who are not even fair to China as it exists and dismiss their governance as mere power-hungry obsessive "authoritarianism" (never seen Dario say a single good thing about the CCP, only about "the hardworking Chinese people" chafing under its yoke, yearning for liberation – I guess his media diet is FLG-tier), it's easy to suspect certain motivated thinking.
Another argument is simple brute power difference. What are they gonna do if they hopelessly fall behind in AI? Nuke the US to get obliterated in return? Well they are behind in AI, and the US remains non-nuked. @RandomRanger believes that a gap of weeks can be fatal, and it's months now. What if Mythos 2 just hacks all of Chyna and socially engineers protests? Xi apparently doesn't yet consider this a possibility, but maybe he's just a dumb boomer. There is a scenario where they are convinced that a slowdown increases their chances.
None of this appears close to the current state of thinking in the CCP, but it should be somewhat sensitive to real-world evidence.
Note who isn't getting hot under the collar: European elites and businesses. The best European model on Artificial Analysis so far is Mistral-Medium 3.5, with a score of 30. Relevant Chinese open models go from 50 to 60. Europe is years behind and doesn't give a toot, there aren't even substantial efforts in finetuning, just using American APIs and pulling money back from American corporations you pay with the usual EU tricks. And the notion of "vassals" is very authoritarian-coded, really, straight out of Russian propaganda. Friends help friends.
Are we your friends? The American-centric thinking in the quoted extract shows that even for the Top AI Alignment Minds, the world is divided into "Americans, and everyone else" and it is American values, American dominance, American colonisation of the light cone, American AI that will make all the running. Maybe the rest of us will graciously be permitted the crumbs that fall off the tables of Americans.
And I understand that, because America is the Big Cheese here, the rest of us are hanging off your coat tails. But if I'm Chinese, maybe I would prefer destruction over becoming Americans. Or at least maybe I'd hope to infiltrate the US AI by pretending very hard to be the agreeable friend who is willing to pause AI and implement all these controls, so that by tunnelling from within maybe there's a chance of getting some Chinese values in there for "what are the values we want AI to have?"
Swap it around: how plausible is the scenario where "China really does live up to the bogeyman image all researchers in other fields have cultivated for 'but if we don't do it, the Chinese might!' purposes, and they are now the Big Cheese and their AI is steaming ahead and recursively self-improving and hits god-tier first. Luckily, if the USA (and allies) all agree to the peaceful transition of governance as implemented by the back-stabbing US AI and the Chinese AI, and we all adopt Xi Jinping Thought, then humanity will survive"?
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If the Chinese had democratic elections they’d vote to invade Taiwan. Putin was legitimately very popular, at least until very recently. Warmongers and authoritarians win legitimately all the time.
if DeepCent-2 orchestrates a democratic coup as per its zero-trust contract with Safer-4, it'll see to it that Taiwan is Safer too.
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Is there any record of Amodei having hostility toward China that predates the first Trump admin’s pivot against Chinese trade? It’s manifestly obvious that his pivot against China is him trying to keep his contracts and export licenses by aligning himself with the current administration. Who cares more about China, Trump or Amodei?
Painting Amodei as an American ultranationalist ideologically hostile to China is ridiculous. EA was never particularly hostile to China. AI 2027 will go down in history as an embarrassingly timed piece that failed to anticipate Chinese models catching up as rapidly as they have. Many made that mistake, though, including you.
The eternal San Francisco Liberal Empire where all technology ‘Designed in California’ was ‘Made in China’ until the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victory in 2016? The eternal San Francisco liberal empire that lobbied heavily against tariffs even as parts of it embraced his message on crime and taxes? The eternal San Francisco Liberal Empire where every other guy has a Chinese wife with an affluent and family back in China (it’s not easy to afford $400k Stanford tuition for your daughter as a regular Chinese family)? The eternal liberal San Francisco empire at the end of history, where defense spending was taboo and anti-ESG until 2022, where plane loads of Apple engineers departed weekly for Chinese factories, where many of the most sensitive and leading American software and hardware companies heavily recruited Chinese engineers one masters, PhD or undergraduate degree out from mainland China, who often returned there after learning the trade?
The US position on China shifted because of Trump and a relatively small number of people in the largely East Coast defense establishment who care about stuff like Taiwan and who never really liked the Red Chinese. It had nothing to do with San Francisco, which was and remains deeply economically and culturally integrated with China, more than any other western city other than perhaps Vancouver. And as for Amodei himself, Jewish-Italian progressive liberal autistic programmers are not a core anti-Chinese or nationalist demographic in the United States. They never have been and never will be. I can believe that Lutnick really wants to compete with China. There are plenty of elderly neocons and paleocons and just anti-communists and (let’s be real) racists who do. But Amodei? No, nothing in his demographic profile suggests this is a deeply held ideology.
The final redoubt, really, of this argument (once you strip out desperately sucking up to Trump until the IPO gets out of the door) is that Amodei said some vaguely EAesque things about democracy and authoritarianism and other boring liberal platitudes. These are Trudeauisms or Blairisms or whatever you want to call them. They exist in that meaningless void, that ideological interregnum from 1991 to 2016 when people clapped politely at these kinds of empty statements. Dario Amodei is not willing to die to fight China (and as you note, in any conflict he would be a high priority target, so this is no empty consideration).
This is another one of your posts where you simply dismiss the crux of the issue (evidence for beliefs of Dario Amodei) and go on a cynical lecture about broad characteristics of an elite social milieu, while smuggling in certain convenient for you assumptions . Do you just feel some class affinity for Amodei? Again, he is his own man (perhaps a great man of history), and his tune is unchanged between Biden and Trump. In fact, was Biden any friendlier to China than Trump? I have the opposite impression.
Do you have any evidence of him having a single positive thing to say about the Chinese regime, ever? Even on the level of Musk who does suck up to Trump, but regularly praises their material successes? As for his writing preceding Trump 2.0, well, let's look at Machines of Loving Grace, Oct 2024:
Got it? Fukuyama Thought must be upheld. That's the great promise of AI. Dario is building the last Wunderwaffe for Francis. His references are very quaint. I can imagine him, in another life, as a professor in Princeton, fidgeting before a blackboard, citing Pinker (hip new book! recommended to curious young colleagues!) and waxing poetic about "liberal institutions" and the promise of South Africa post-apartheid.
Everything I know suggests that Amodei legitimately despises China, maybe due to his experiences at Baidu, maybe just because. He fears getting kidnapped there, and I don't see him as a type to suck up to Trump. He has notoriously bad chemistry with this admin, relative to all other lab CEOs.
And he writes in a very Wellsian register. This isn't Donroe Doctrine, in Policy on AI Exponential he devotes substantial space to "checks and balances" within democracies, which is a curious choice if you want Don's favor.
And in the recent Adolescence of Technology, he writes:
Are you actually unfamiliar with this genre?
I know at least one Chinese researcher who left Anthropic over perceived racism and paranoia, though, and another who got filtered because of insufficient opposition to open source. Dario wants a New World Order, again, in a very H.G. Wells manner, his fears of AI and belief in the need for regulation echo Wells' concerns about Air Power and the optimal solution for it. Simply put, he's an old school lib. The oldest school, even. In his recent response on X, he says:
He is a legit rigid believer in Institutions, and disdains the crude logic where power ultimately grows out of the barrel of a gun.
I do think Amodei's identity has some additional relevance, both his Jewish and his EA side. Eg it might explain why he was so eager to entrust his frontier safety testing to Irregular, an inept EA Israel organization (as is natural, founded by Unit 8200 alumni); Zuckerberg and Altman did the same, and they all got an egg on the face due to Irregular's misconfigured sandboxes that didn't box shit. But whatever, Jews trust Jews, EAs trust EAs, Americans are trained to believe that the finest h4x0rs in the world can only be nurtured in the hot, challenging environment of the Middle East, spying on ferocious Hamasniks; of course they're the only ones equipped to contain artificial superintelligence. And they're EA, too! Debate club people! Imagine the verbal IQ. Even I suspect they're better than that, and perhaps could have gotten something out under the cover of these silly failures (of note, what's Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence doing?) And of course if you're a Zionist, you can be justifiably concerned about the decline of American hegemony and the loss of the only superpower backing your homeland. I don't know if he is a Zionist, though. That's all a relatively minor elaboration on the consistent, straightforward Fukuyamist lib creed that Dario subscribes to.
Yes, this is exactly my point, which is why I’m sure I must be making it poorly.
This is boring, dull, milquetoast, whatever you want to call it undergraduate neolib essay writing of the kind that was played out when I was at college a decade ago. It was played out a decade before that, honestly. These are not the views of a man with opinions on geopolitics, they are the views of a man without them. They are the boilerplate, standard views you’ll find in any (Western) UN worker or think tank report writer or ESG consultant or World Bank graduate trainee. This is relevant. Even Scott has his strange ideological idiosyncrasies, Dario has none. Is that not curious? This is a relatively intelligent man, after all. Yet his views on democracy, geopolitics, liberalism, blah blah are those of the average summer intern at the European Union? They’re the views of the professor of your introduction to political science 101 class at a third-tier British university? No, I find that unlikely. Those in this rationalist space who care about geopolitics, and there are and were many, regardless of ideology, did not just ctrl-c and v 104 IQ midwit texts by Fukuyama and Pinker. If they agreed with the thrust, they had the good sense to dress it up. Bill Gates and Obama have more considered, more nuanced views than those expressed in Amodei’s limited writings.
The others have their autism under control, except for Musk, who I think is in genuine awe of Trump, wants his affection, and also agrees with him politically more than the rest.
Are the Zionists selling American secrets to the Chinese or terrified of their rise? Sometimes both, perhaps, but I don’t think China will determine the outcome of that conflict.
Let us imagine an alternative scenario. 4 years of Hillary, or indeed 4 years of Bernie Sanders (he turned into a liberal in office, or before really). Mitt Romney is now President in his second term. China policy is largely unchanged (a couple of large Utah business concerns do a lot of business there, and the CCP very quietly allowed in some more Mormon missionaries). Do you think Dario Amodei unilaterally refuses to sell Claude to the Chinese, unlike all his competitors? Does he go on a one-man crusade while Sam Altman and Jensen Huang run a GPU-and-GPT roadshow through every second and third tier city in China?
I doubt it.
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A later reported private episode in Fall 2017:
So roughly contemporaneous with the pivot, but the anti-China aspect seems more than a neoliberal platitude. He did work for Baidu in 2014-2015, so it seems like a relatively late addition to his ideological development.
Very many people worked for Baidu. See the author list on this paper where "Baidu" established first scaling laws (and then did nothing with it). It was a different era, and it was easier to think of Baidu as something separate from China.
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This sounds very much a master/vassal relationship though. Research and design and thought happen in San Francisco because San Francisco is awesome; meanwhile you get your awesome stuff built in China because it's cheap. Shame about Xi being an autocrat but don't worry, we'll uplift China eventually through trade.
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This is pretty serious language to use when referring to the party that the Chinese people believe legitimately governs China.
If Anthropic's opening statement is literally "if we achieve a durable technological lead, we will use it to defeat the Chinese government", then naturally Anthropic trying to speak out of the other side of their mouth to blame China for not pausing will sound duplicitous and self-serving to a people brought up at the feet of the century of humiliation.
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Maybe Dario is just racist? Are there any prominant East Asians at Anthropic? You know wokeness is dead because people don't even consider this as a possibility anymore.
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Let's be honest, Dario has been very quiet when America has been doing all the 'if we pull this off then American values will rule the lightcone for eternity' stuff. Maybe Dario doesn't want to subjugate China beneath American ideals of the good life, or at the very least beneath a form of American pluralism carefully managed to never again allow China to become a meaningful competitor. Who knows? But he certainly doesn't mind the prospect enough to say something about it. If Dario felt half as strongly about global pluralism as he did about AI safety, we'd know.
And then there's AI safety. I don't think I'm strawmanning when I say that like @vorpa-glavo, Dario believes that not carefully restricting AI will kill us all. I also really doubt that Dario plans to give anybody else a say on where those restrictions ought to be. The playbook of Anthropic has been openly expressed as: 1) be better than everybody else 2) decide the correct way to do AI 3) make sure everybody follows, or else.
To the extent China doesn't agree with that, Dario wants to destroy them. To the extent China does agree with that, Dario wants to make sure it's the way you 'agree' to obey a superior.
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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.
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"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!"
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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?
I spent some time attending classes at a community biolab in my city, and I think a lot of the necessary prerequisites for a manufactured virus are surprisingly cheap.
I'm not sure Know Your Customer is going to be a robust defense against a bioterrorist aided by a sufficiently capable open source AI.
Even if I agree that more capable AIs will likely improve our defensive capabilities, there is no reason to just assume that AI-aided defense will always and forever beat AI-aided offense.
I do believe smart people will do their best, aided by even smarter computers, but the parable of the hungry wolf applies here: The wolf only has to win once. You have to win every time.
That's interesting, and sounds like something to be addressed. I'm curious but I won't ask you to give details :P
The thing is, this seems to me to be a fully generalisable argument against libraries and publishing textbooks, let alone making biology papers available on the open internet. Is it your opinion that doing these things was irresponsible and we've been lucky so far?
I personally think that these galaxy-sized intuitions are not safe to run a society on. Speaking as somebody with the opposite intuitions, they are far more contingent on your temperament and life-experience than they seem from the inside, and they've also been used to justify a lot of pretty nasty stuff. A lot of the nastier late-colonial stuff was the outcome of a failed rebellion that led to the principle of 'no brown man ever holds responsbility ever again' for instance. (I am not accusing you of racism, it's just an example that came to mind.)
I'm not discarding the possibility of bioterrorism. I would support experimentation to see how far it is possible with frontier AI - I believe this is already happening - and mitigations both in AI and in bio-sellers. However, I feel it's important not to let a totally generalisable and totally impossible-to-disprove principle of caution take hold of society. I also don't see any reason why our potential bioterrorist should be too dumb to do a terrorism the old fashioned way but smart enough to outwit and jailbreak a 10T model.
I mean, we've actually done worse than that, we've maintained gain-of-function research and biosamples of the most deadly viruses on Earth, and this has predictably backfired - even if you don't think COVID was a GoF experiment gone wrong, the Soviets goofed up and let out smallpox.
So, #1, if we are concerned about bioterrorism, we should stop doing GoF research and discard remaining samples of horrorviruses that we preserve for
biological weaponsresearch. But, #2, in my opinion "AIs could make a murdervirus" is an attempt to reskin the "AIs could make nanotech that eats everything" fear via something that seems more plausible.I think that any bio-attack is ample grounds for concern, but there's a sort of motte-and-bailey dynamic where people retreat to "what, you don't believe in viruses" if questioned about how likely a bioweapon is to be a particularly above-baseline threat and then when your back is turned they suggest the virus will be perfectly effective at killing enough humans to destroy civilization.
As far as I know, a perfectly effective human-killing virus isn't impossible - but I don't know that it's possible, either. From what I understand, viruses and other bacteria inhabit a sort of unstable triangle between lethality, transmissibility, and virality. They also aren't stable, and it is hard to know how they will behave without testing it. So while a bio-attack could be very bad and we should take every reasonable effort to prevent it, I also think the specific scenario is used to smuggle in existential fears via a back door greased by zombie movies, and I'm not sure it's at all warranted.
Germs don't inhabit much possibility-space at all, for the same reason that evolved life forms in general don't: any living thing must be a chain of neutral-to-positive mutations away from a prior already-viable population of living things. You can eventually get sharp claws and powerful wings via a long chain of gradual changes to keratin scales and tetrapod forelimbs, but natural falconry has nothing modern militaries desire or fear, because with intelligent design unconstrained by intermediate-form viability we can just go straight to bullets and missiles and jet engines. Maybe no leaps like that are possible at the nanoscale and microscale? I'm not looking forward to finding out.
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This is broadly my position too, including the GoF and grey goo stuff.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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