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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.
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.
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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