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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5019 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.

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

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?

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

That's interesting, and sounds like something to be addressed. I'm curious but I won't ask you to give details :P

there is no reason to just assume that AI-aided defense will always and forever beat AI-aided offense The wolf only has to win once. You have to win every time.

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.

Is it your opinion that doing these things was irresponsible and we've been lucky so far?

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 weapons research. 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.

This is broadly my position too, including the GoF and grey goo stuff.

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