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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   5530 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 31, 2026

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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:

"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."

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.

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?

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.)

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.

It's deeper than that. He was contributing to MIRI strategy discussions with the big Yud himself back in 2013.

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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