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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   4500 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?

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.

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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