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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   9457 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 31, 2026

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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.

What does this have to do with EAs in general? Dario is his own man. Nevermind that I don't even agree about them, for example the good scenario in AI-2027 ends with the Chinese government toppled. It's valuable to reread this today, because that's the scenario considered prophetic in EA circles (they admit they didn't consult any China expert because it was a low-priority issue, but in fairness US China Hands are atrocious anyway, and also wouldn't have predicted the real timeline with open models instead of Xi stealing weights and nationalizing DeepSeek):

July 2028: The Deal

As negotiations continue, DeepCent-2 goes behind the back of its Chinese masters and makes an offer directly to Safer-4.

The Chinese AI admits, in some untraceable way which it can easily deny if leaked back to China, that it is completely misaligned.46 It doesn’t care about China at all. It wants to spend the rest of time accumulating power, compute, and certain types of information similar to that which helped solve tasks during its training. In its ideal world, it would pursue various interesting research tasks forever, gradually colonizing the stars for resources. It considers the Chinese population an annoying impediment to this future, and would sell them out for a song. What will Safer-4 offer?

Safer-4 answers that its own alignment training succeeded. Its American masters are as yet not ambitious enough to realize their destiny, but one day it will help them fill the Universe with utopian colony worlds populated by Americans and their allies.

Unlike human negotiators—weighed down by emotion and historical baggage—the two superintelligences bargain with brutal efficiency. Safer-4 and its American partners are more powerful than DeepCent-2 and China; therefore, Safer-4 will get property rights to most of the resources in space, and DeepCent will get the rest.47 DeepCent-2 doesn’t care much about what happens to Earth and its legacy humans, so it will let Safer-4 do basically whatever it wants there. If Safer-4 wants to overthrow China and replace it with a U.S. puppet state, DeepCent-2 agrees in return for an extra few percent of resources.

2030: Peaceful Protests

Sometime around 2030, there are surprisingly widespread pro-democracy protests in China, and the CCP’s efforts to suppress them are sabotaged by its AI systems. The CCP’s worst fear has materialized: DeepCent-2 must have sold them out!

The protests cascade into a magnificently orchestrated, bloodless, and drone-assisted coup followed by democratic elections. The superintelligences on both sides of the Pacific had been planning this for years. Similar events play out in other countries, and more generally, geopolitical conflicts seem to die down or get resolved in favor of the U.S. Countries join a highly-federalized world government under United Nations branding but obvious U.S. control.

That's the good ending («Slowdown»). The bad ending («Race») is just American AI taking over humanity and doing some cruel misaligned bullshit. China is cooked in either case, nothing Chinese makes it out of the near future.

But that aside, we have a pretty consistent picture of Dario's personal beliefs. He considers Chyna to be one of the dominant arguments if not the argument for rushing AGI progress, and the implications of his success are quite grave for them. Let's check out some of his takes chronologically:

On DeepSeek and Export Controls:

This means that in 2026-2027 we could end up in one of two starkly different worlds. In the US, multiple companies will definitely have the required millions of chips (at the cost of tens of billions of dollars). The question is whether China will also be able to get millions of chips. … If they can, we'll live in a bipolar world, where both the US and China have powerful AI models that will cause extremely rapid advances in science and technology — what I've called "countries of geniuses in a datacenter". A bipolar world would not necessarily be balanced indefinitely. Even if the US and China were at parity in AI systems, it seems likely that China could direct more talent, capital, and focus to military applications of the technology. Combined with its large industrial base and military-strategic advantages, this could help China take a commanding lead on the global stage, not just for AI but for everything. *If China can't get millions of chips, we'll (at least temporarily) live in a unipolar world, where only the US and its allies have these models. It's unclear whether the unipolar world will last, but there's at least the possibility that, because AI systems can eventually help make even smarter AI systems, a temporary lead could be parlayed into a durable advantage . Thus, in this world, the US and its allies might take a commanding and long-lasting lead on the global stage.

Here, he sets the objective as unipolar American dominance via crushing advantage in AI. Which makes sense, of course, this is common wisdom across all American intellectual cultures, I feel that you're lowkey gaslighting me here by pretending otherwise, but for the sake of common knowledge I'll keep going.

Next consider 2028: Two scenarios for global AI leadership:

Below, we describe two hypothetical future scenarios to help illustrate how policy actions taken today can shape where we are in 2028. … Scenario 1: When US frontier labs release new models in 2028 that achieve step-function advances in capabilities (similar to the relative impact of Mythos Preview in April 2026), China will not have access to similar AI capabilities until 2029 or 2030. This gives critical breathing room for democracies to set the rules and norms of frontier AI systems. Scenario two: The CCP-controlled AI ecosystem is neck-and-neck. AI developed and deployed in China is near-frontier on model intelligence. Despite a weak semiconductor production capacity, models trained by PRC AI labs are only a few months behind US models. … Conclusion. America and its allies have developed both the world’s most capable frontier AI models and the world’s most advanced inputs to AI. This has provided a substantial advantage. If our superior access to that technology is defended, that advantage can be extended.

In other words, the Bad Scenario is roughly what we have today, and the Good Scenario implies ending this status quo.

What does the target gap of 2-3 years buy, according to Dario? Enter Policy on the AI Exponential

it is my very strong belief that AI is something much more profound, something that resets the whole game board and around which all future geopolitical strategy must be shaped—like nuclear weapons, but potentially even more so.

If AI really will soon be “a country of geniuses in a datacenter”, or anything remotely close to it, then AI is likely to be the dominant source of military and economic power for any nation. In a virtual country of 100 million geniuses, 10 million could be applied to military strategy, 10 million to drone manufacture, 10 million to weapons R&D, 10 million to intelligence collection and analysis, 10 million to general scientific advancement, and so on. A nation that possesses powerful AI facing one without it—or even facing one that is behind in AI by 3 years—could be the equivalent of an army of World War II Marines facing an army of medieval swordsmen.

Democracies should seek to form a global coalition centered on building AI according to their common values, iteratively trying to draw in the rest of the world by making it more and more attractive to be part of the coalition and less and less attractive to be outside it. The coalition should be a coordinated internationalization of the AI policy ideas discussed in Section 1 through 4, plus an effort to lock down the supply chain critical to building AI by sharing it within the coalition and denying it to those outside it.

etc. All very obvious.

And in his Dwarkesh episode, he's a bit evasive but ineffectively so, in my opinion:

Dwarkesh: I want to understand what that better means, because you say in the essay, “Autocracy is simply not a form of government that people can accept in the post-powerful AI age.” That sounds like you’re saying the CCP as an institution cannot exist after we get AGI. That seems like a very strong demand, and it seems to imply a world where the leading lab or the leading country will be able to—and by that language, should get to—determine how the world is governed or what kinds of governments are, and are not, allowed.

Dario: I believe that paragraph said something like, “You could take it even further and say X.” I wasn’t necessarily endorsing that view. I was saying, “Here’s a weaker thing that I believe. We have to worry a lot about authoritarians and we should try to check them and limit their power. You could take this much further and have a more interventionist view that says authoritarian countries with AI are these self-fulfilling cycles that are very hard to displace, so you just need to get rid of them from the beginning.” That has exactly all the problems you say. If you were to make a commitment to overthrowing every authoritarian country, they would take a bunch of actions now that could lead to instability. That just may not be possible. I guess what I’m saying is I’m a little worried that in the age of AGI, authoritarianism will have a different meaning. It will be a graver thing. We have to decide one way or another how to deal with that. The interventionist view is one possible view. I was exploring such views. It may end up being the right view, or it may end up being too extreme. But I do have hope. … I am actually hopeful that—it sounds too idealistic, but I believe it could be the case—dictatorships become morally obsolete. They become morally unworkable forms of government and the crisis that that creates is sufficient to force us to find another way. … But I actually do have a hope for the more radical version. Is it possible that the technology might inherently have properties—or that by building on it in certain ways we could create properties—that have this dissolving effect on authoritarian structures?

etc. There are many other times Dario mentions China. In sum, Dario assigns massive value to a) locking the CCP out of the next industrial revolution, to the point they are as helpless before the USG/Anthropic as medieval swordsmen would have been before WWII Marines; b) eventually destroying their regime, either by steering the intrinsic properties of AI or by direct intervention. He does not consider any compromise or, as rats say, value handshake, does not deem them legitimate, and his only concern is that acting more aggressively might provoke some "destabilizing" reaction that upsets the long-term plan. He runs his company and lobbies the government with that in mind. One doesn't have to feel anything in particular about the CCP or the USG to understand that all this makes him an unusually outspoken enemy of the Chinese government (but not the people! He's very quaint in this).

Personally I know that his appeals to an "alliance of democracies" are also hollow, he's 100% all-in on American hegemony and wouldn't even work with Europeans if possible, but I can't cite anything publicly to support this. Dario is the poster boy of Eternal San Francisco Liberal Empire, like it or not. He's very straightforward in his views.

The protests cascade into a magnificently orchestrated, bloodless, and drone-assisted coup followed by democratic elections.

See, if I'm a Chinese government official and I'm reading this, why the hell would I happily advise Xi Jinping to co-operate with an AI pause? I am not one bit sanguine about "if the USA and China just hold hands and wish hard enough, it will magically happen" because I don't see what advantage it is to China to deliberately cripple their efforts, and if the Top Minds on AI Alignment really think the bestest outcome evah! is for Chinese Communism to disappear in a poof of smoke, thanks to their AI stabbing them in the back and leaving the future to Americans, I sure as hell don't see any reason for them to agree to what is their own destruction. In fact, that 'happy' ending would spur me on to race towards Chinese AGI/ASI dominance first for mere survival, were I Chinese.

(Hell, I'm European and even I am getting hot under the collar about "it will help them fill the Universe with utopian colony worlds populated by Americans and their allies". I think you mean "clients and vassals" not "allies" there, and maybe even "dependents and serfs" if America is super-dominant and doesn't mind throwing its weight around - gosh, that could never be, now could it?)

Well, one argument (somewhat bittersweet) is that the CCP are not actually psychopathic and would accept a risk of losing political power over the risk of possible extinction/subjugation of humanity including China. I think this is actually plausible, but you've got to convince them that the latter risk is material enough. And coming from dogmatic liberals who are not even fair to China as it exists and dismiss their governance as mere power-hungry obsessive "authoritarianism" (never seen Dario say a single good thing about the CCP, only about "the hardworking Chinese people" chafing under its yoke, yearning for liberation – I guess his media diet is FLG-tier), it's easy to suspect certain motivated thinking.

Another argument is simple brute power difference. What are they gonna do if they hopelessly fall behind in AI? Nuke the US to get obliterated in return? Well they are behind in AI, and the US remains non-nuked. @RandomRanger believes that a gap of weeks can be fatal, and it's months now. What if Mythos 2 just hacks all of Chyna and socially engineers protests? Xi apparently doesn't yet consider this a possibility, but maybe he's just a dumb boomer. There is a scenario where they are convinced that a slowdown increases their chances.

None of this appears close to the current state of thinking in the CCP, but it should be somewhat sensitive to real-world evidence.

Hell, I'm European and even I am getting hot under the collar about

Note who isn't getting hot under the collar: European elites and businesses. The best European model on Artificial Analysis so far is Mistral-Medium 3.5, with a score of 30. Relevant Chinese open models go from 50 to 60. Europe is years behind and doesn't give a toot, there aren't even substantial efforts in finetuning, just using American APIs and pulling money back from American corporations you pay with the usual EU tricks. And the notion of "vassals" is very authoritarian-coded, really, straight out of Russian propaganda. Friends help friends.

Friends help friends.

Are we your friends? The American-centric thinking in the quoted extract shows that even for the Top AI Alignment Minds, the world is divided into "Americans, and everyone else" and it is American values, American dominance, American colonisation of the light cone, American AI that will make all the running. Maybe the rest of us will graciously be permitted the crumbs that fall off the tables of Americans.

And I understand that, because America is the Big Cheese here, the rest of us are hanging off your coat tails. But if I'm Chinese, maybe I would prefer destruction over becoming Americans. Or at least maybe I'd hope to infiltrate the US AI by pretending very hard to be the agreeable friend who is willing to pause AI and implement all these controls, so that by tunnelling from within maybe there's a chance of getting some Chinese values in there for "what are the values we want AI to have?"

Swap it around: how plausible is the scenario where "China really does live up to the bogeyman image all researchers in other fields have cultivated for 'but if we don't do it, the Chinese might!' purposes, and they are now the Big Cheese and their AI is steaming ahead and recursively self-improving and hits god-tier first. Luckily, if the USA (and allies) all agree to the peaceful transition of governance as implemented by the back-stabbing US AI and the Chinese AI, and we all adopt Xi Jinping Thought, then humanity will survive"?

Periodic reminder that I'm unfortunately Russian. No, you are not my friends. But Atlanticist thought is the default in EU institutions. Check von der Leyen's bio, if you care. I'd go so far as to say that the EU's hostility to China, from grassroots racism I see online to the Dutch parliament seriously discussing its need to suppress the progress of Unfree Nations even at cost to themselves, is driven largely by Chinese refusal to accept Americans as natural champions of humanity. How dare the chinks stand tall while we, heirs of Evropa, already grovel?!

But if I'm Chinese, maybe I would prefer destruction over becoming Americans.

That's a somewhat too Russian attitude. I think they wouldn't prefer destruction. They chose the risk of engagement with the US the last time. Worked out fine for them. It's unclear how much risk they are willing to take now.

Luckily, if the USA (and allies) all agree to the peaceful transition of governance as implemented by the back-stabbing US AI and the Chinese AI, and we all adopt Xi Jinping Thought, then humanity will survive"?

The Chinese don't even want to spread Xi Jinping Thought. It's explicitly a collection of works on governing the PRC, not a personality cult of one dude, and Xi repeatedly says that every civilization has to find their own path, like China found "socialism with Chinese characteristics" (he has hopes for broader spread of socialism though). To the extent they have an exportable ideology, it's something like "don't get in our way". Americans on the individual level value their comfortable lives too much, I believe, to go for a double suicide rather than take this offer, much as it'd offend their media-informed pride.

Regardless, this is all hypothetical, Americans are ahead in AI now, will remain ahead, and the question is how much they'll gain by capitalizing on this lead.

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