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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   4497 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 31, 2026

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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.

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.

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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