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Is there any record of Amodei having hostility toward China that predates the first Trump admin’s pivot against Chinese trade? It’s manifestly obvious that his pivot against China is him trying to keep his contracts and export licenses by aligning himself with the current administration. Who cares more about China, Trump or Amodei?
Painting Amodei as an American ultranationalist ideologically hostile to China is ridiculous. EA was never particularly hostile to China. AI 2027 will go down in history as an embarrassingly timed piece that failed to anticipate Chinese models catching up as rapidly as they have. Many made that mistake, though, including you.
The eternal San Francisco Liberal Empire where all technology ‘Designed in California’ was ‘Made in China’ until the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victory in 2016? The eternal San Francisco liberal empire that lobbied heavily against tariffs even as parts of it embraced his message on crime and taxes? The eternal San Francisco Liberal Empire where every other guy has a Chinese wife with an affluent and family back in China (it’s not easy to afford $400k Stanford tuition for your daughter as a regular Chinese family)? The eternal liberal San Francisco empire at the end of history, where defense spending was taboo and anti-ESG until 2022, where plane loads of Apple engineers departed weekly for Chinese factories, where many of the most sensitive and leading American software and hardware companies heavily recruited Chinese engineers one masters, PhD or undergraduate degree out from mainland China, who often returned there after learning the trade?
The US position on China shifted because of Trump and a relatively small number of people in the largely East Coast defense establishment who care about stuff like Taiwan and who never really liked the Red Chinese. It had nothing to do with San Francisco, which was and remains deeply economically and culturally integrated with China, more than any other western city other than perhaps Vancouver. And as for Amodei himself, Jewish-Italian progressive liberal autistic programmers are not a core anti-Chinese or nationalist demographic in the United States. They never have been and never will be. I can believe that Lutnick really wants to compete with China. There are plenty of elderly neocons and paleocons and just anti-communists and (let’s be real) racists who do. But Amodei? No, nothing in his demographic profile suggests this is a deeply held ideology.
The final redoubt, really, of this argument (once you strip out desperately sucking up to Trump until the IPO gets out of the door) is that Amodei said some vaguely EAesque things about democracy and authoritarianism and other boring liberal platitudes. These are Trudeauisms or Blairisms or whatever you want to call them. They exist in that meaningless void, that ideological interregnum from 1991 to 2016 when people clapped politely at these kinds of empty statements. Dario Amodei is not willing to die to fight China (and as you note, in any conflict he would be a high priority target, so this is no empty consideration).
This is another one of your posts where you simply dismiss the crux of the issue (evidence for beliefs of Dario Amodei) and go on a cynical lecture about broad characteristics of an elite social milieu, while smuggling in certain convenient for you assumptions . Do you just feel some class affinity for Amodei? Again, he is his own man (perhaps a great man of history), and his tune is unchanged between Biden and Trump. In fact, was Biden any friendlier to China than Trump? I have the opposite impression.
Do you have any evidence of him having a single positive thing to say about the Chinese regime, ever? Even on the level of Musk who does suck up to Trump, but regularly praises their material successes? As for his writing preceding Trump 2.0, well, let's look at Machines of Loving Grace, Oct 2024:
Got it? Fukuyama Thought must be upheld. That's the great promise of AI. Dario is building the last Wunderwaffe for Francis. His references are very quaint. I can imagine him, in another life, as a professor in Princeton, fidgeting before a blackboard, citing Pinker (hip new book! recommended to curious young colleagues!) and waxing poetic about "liberal institutions" and the promise of South Africa post-apartheid.
Everything I know suggests that Amodei legitimately despises China, maybe due to his experiences at Baidu, maybe just because. He fears getting kidnapped there, and I don't see him as a type to suck up to Trump. He has notoriously bad chemistry with this admin, relative to all other lab CEOs.
And he writes in a very Wellsian register. This isn't Donroe Doctrine, in Policy on AI Exponential he devotes substantial space to "checks and balances" within democracies, which is a curious choice if you want Don's favor.
And in the recent Adolescence of Technology, he writes:
Are you actually unfamiliar with this genre?
I know at least one Chinese researcher who left Anthropic over perceived racism and paranoia, though, and another who got filtered because of insufficient opposition to open source. Dario wants a New World Order, again, in a very H.G. Wells manner, his fears of AI and belief in the need for regulation echo Wells' concerns about Air Power and the optimal solution for it. Simply put, he's an old school lib. The oldest school, even. In his recent response on X, he says:
He is a legit rigid believer in Institutions, and disdains the crude logic where power ultimately grows out of the barrel of a gun.
I do think Amodei's identity has some additional relevance, both his Jewish and his EA side. Eg it might explain why he was so eager to entrust his frontier safety testing to Irregular, an inept EA Israel organization (as is natural, founded by Unit 8200 alumni); Zuckerberg and Altman did the same, and they all got an egg on the face due to Irregular's misconfigured sandboxes that didn't box shit. But whatever, Jews trust Jews, EAs trust EAs, Americans are trained to believe that the finest h4x0rs in the world can only be nurtured in the hot, challenging environment of the Middle East, spying on ferocious Hamasniks; of course they're the only ones equipped to contain artificial superintelligence. And they're EA, too! Debate club people! Imagine the verbal IQ. Even I suspect they're better than that, and perhaps could have gotten something out under the cover of these silly failures (of note, what's Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence doing?) And of course if you're a Zionist, you can be justifiably concerned about the decline of American hegemony and the loss of the only superpower backing your homeland. I don't know if he is a Zionist, though. That's all a relatively minor elaboration on the consistent, straightforward Fukuyamist lib creed that Dario subscribes to.
Yes, this is exactly my point, which is why I’m sure I must be making it poorly.
This is boring, dull, milquetoast, whatever you want to call it undergraduate neolib essay writing of the kind that was played out when I was at college a decade ago. It was played out a decade before that, honestly. These are not the views of a man with opinions on geopolitics, they are the views of a man without them. They are the boilerplate, standard views you’ll find in any (Western) UN worker or think tank report writer or ESG consultant or World Bank graduate trainee. This is relevant. Even Scott has his strange ideological idiosyncrasies, Dario has none. Is that not curious? This is a relatively intelligent man, after all. Yet his views on democracy, geopolitics, liberalism, blah blah are those of the average summer intern at the European Union? They’re the views of the professor of your introduction to political science 101 class at a third-tier British university? No, I find that unlikely. Those in this rationalist space who care about geopolitics, and there are and were many, regardless of ideology, did not just ctrl-c and v 104 IQ midwit texts by Fukuyama and Pinker. If they agreed with the thrust, they had the good sense to dress it up. Bill Gates and Obama have more considered, more nuanced views than those expressed in Amodei’s limited writings.
The others have their autism under control, except for Musk, who I think is in genuine awe of Trump, wants his affection, and also agrees with him politically more than the rest.
Are the Zionists selling American secrets to the Chinese or terrified of their rise? Sometimes both, perhaps, but I don’t think China will determine the outcome of that conflict.
Let us imagine an alternative scenario. 4 years of Hillary, or indeed 4 years of Bernie Sanders (he turned into a liberal in office, or before really). Mitt Romney is now President in his second term. China policy is largely unchanged (a couple of large Utah business concerns do a lot of business there, and the CCP very quietly allowed in some more Mormon missionaries). Do you think Dario Amodei unilaterally refuses to sell Claude to the Chinese, unlike all his competitors? Does he go on a one-man crusade while Sam Altman and Jensen Huang run a GPU-and-GPT roadshow through every second and third tier city in China?
I doubt it.
I take it that you struggle to imagine a very intelligent man (and Dario is extremely intelligent) with political views you consider midwitted. But why? For me, this sounds completely natural. Plenty of luminaries have normie beliefs. Von Neumann was a cookie cutter hawk, many of his peers were naive pro-Soviet useful idiots. And as Pelevin has observed, America is a land of intellectuals, not intelligentsia; white collar professionals are cogs in a well-oiled economic machine, they have their caste specializations, it's cringe and inappropriate for an AGI lab CEO to seek out some contrarian cesspit to have his reddit tier opinions on le CCP challenged. He's read Fukuyama, Pinker and, with some luck in the airport, Yuval Noah Harari, and he can already be proud of his erudition and the ability to carve out time for such intellectual explorations; maybe he vaguely "knows" that 1984 is a criticism of Chinese Authoritarianism; perhaps he follows Noah Smith and Ezra Klein to keep abreast of the cutting-edge discourse; Yglesias, Hanania, Scott would already be veering into a weird, dangerous, confusing territory. If he were to deviate even more, who should he listen to instead, me? (For the record, Dario doesn't follow me on X, though he doesn't follow anybody). Tooze, maybe? Tooze is a dirty sellout traitor.
Further, rationalists generally have shit taste and little interest in the object level reality, their intuitions about the world are based on popular media franchises. Dario is at least sophisticated enough to cite Fukuyama instead of Star Wars and Harry Potter.
More importantly, why do you even think that his views are illegitimate? What specifically is wrong in what he says? Why must he add some personal quirky flourish on it? Liberalism is a coherent philosophy of the winners of history, and Fukuyama is a prophet for his civilization. Gwern of all people thinks very highly of him.:
Gwern is also notoriously dismissive of Xi and of Chinese AI progress.
Even imagining that Dario is some dyed-in-the-wool armchair geopolitical expert deeply committed to rat ways of thinking, on what grounds would he disagree with Gwern here? Liberalism absorbs infinite contradictions, and if you're Dario, you can step over a fentanyl zombie in SF and sigh "if only Claude-Galactus could come faster… Machines of Loving Grace fix this. Fix the CCP issue, too".
I only see one kink in his worldview: the reelection of Trump, and Trump-Hegseth's attempts to rape Anthropic. But that, too, is part of the rich and vibrant record of progress towards liberal utopia, dialectical twists and turns, vicissitudes of history, etc.
I do not even agree that the US China policy changed because of Trump. Obama was already doing Pivot to Asia. It changed because of Xi not being a cuckold (I'm not sure why any American could ever expect otherwise) at the time when comprehensive Chinese strength was growing explosively. Maybe even Xi is extraneous to the issue. Hillary, Sanders and literally anyone else would still get Tough on Chyna. Why the hell not? Thucydides trap is a general logic (also a midwitted argument, but it's sufficient to model American behavior). Why would any self-interested American regime tolerate Chinese technological and military catch-up?
But granting your hypothetical: yes I maintain that Dario is not an opportunist, he's not acting optimally to ingratiate himself to the Trump regime, he'd "respect democracy" but still be lobbying to steer it towards a more confrontational posture. Maybe he'd have given up on Anthropic rather than work with China, if no third way remained.
Maybe, as it happens with normies, he'd have gradually "changed his opinions" under peer pressure. But he doesn't strike me as the type to do that.
Under this model I found the ccp’s response quite insufficient and indeed very limited. It seems almost impossible to convince one of the two frontier labs in the US to abandon its hostility toward China. What is the optimal decision for the party? Impose maximum sanctions on Anthropic, which does not operate in China? Restrict rare earth exports further? Build another 5000 silos in Inner Mongolia and wait for the death of humanity? Mandatory Tsinghua CS graduate internship in ds or zhipu? Other covert options? Seems to me that there is very little they can do, except bet that a six-month lead does not turn into lightcone-securing advantages. If that is the case then, idk, the last resort options are pretty appealing. Silos are pretty cheap to build. What’s stopping them from applying maximum pressure now, aside from the pretty risky and irresponsible bet above (and they are risk averse), or them being genuinely incompetent (which I found unlikely)?
They are risk-averse and they are not very imaginative. They avoid risks like, idk, Malacca blockade, but aren't distracted by pie-in-the-sky stories of Mythos-6.7 plowing through their infrastructure, to say nothing of nanobot swarms. They also aren't really that hostile to the US, and do not assign great importance to policies of US companies; their issue with Anthropic is that the USG tolerates this unhinged posture.
There may even be a tragic effect where successes of Chinese companies under compute constraints convince the Party that whining about compute is disingenuous and brilliant Chinese minds adept in mafs will outperform the capitalists regardless, so they don't take Trump's olive branch in the form of limited Nvidia sales either.
Zhipu has an easy time recruiting from Tsinghua on their own. As things stand, China will have to hope that this is enough.
I guess I’m equally unconvinced that the compute and intelligence advantage can be transformed into advantages in the physical world. That does sound like pie-in-the-sky. I find it quite irresponsible to bet your people’s future on grand ideas like that, but I also think underestimating the risk posed by superhuman intelligence controlled by hostile forces is equally irresponsible. I’m not delusional enough to downplay AI’s ability to plow through Chinese digital infrastructure (not that hard anyways, and there has been leaks already), steal state secrets, incite political riots, etc. But how does it turn atoms into physical things? And how much do we stand to lose from a six-month lag before lashing out in nuclear flames? Things still take time to manufacture, and if in a short six months we can be overwhelmed like humans against the Trisolarans, I’m sure that kind of material force will rip apart their society first.
As the current custodians of the Chinese people and Chinese nation, they should be vigilant about these risks. But if we did lose again to the pie-in-the-sky contingency, maybe we deserve it. another century of humiliation, forever under their boots, or extinction. That seems like a fatal flaw of our people.
TBH the ccp might be quite naive. They’re still preaching the “community with a shared future for humanity” nonsense in light of what happened since 2024 (and honestly since the Clinton admin). Their domestic and international propaganda is silly, unconvincing, and just lack the charisma anyways. They’re not going to get that shared future by propaganda, and like how they earned the Chinese people’s support, they’d have to win the goodwill by, what, lifting another bazillion Africans out of poverty? That’s delusional, and the Americans simply don’t understand that concept anyways, and they’re the only player we should care. I’m very pessimistic on this front. Again I think they need another 5000 silos. Learn from Luo Ji and Russians.
What do you do with 5000 silos? “If Claude 10 ASI agent hacks Chinese military intelligence (whether directed or autonomously), we’ll nuke you”? The technology that is being built will barely even be under the control of nation states, except legally (and therefore, when it comes to true x risk and extremely rapid self-improvement, largely hypothetically). By the time the White House has identified some kind of problem (after what, Anthropic’s researchers noticed it, after it happened, after they escalate to legal, after Dario makes a sheepish call to Trump?) the really scary stuff has long happened. At that point, of course, you can still unleash the missiles, but you’re just killing millions out of spite, not to do anything. Enough GPUs will survive a nuclear apocalypse for inference anyway, even if it takes a while for new training, and there’s no telling if the CCP would be in power after reciprocation.
Well that’s to pressure the us gov to Do Something before that happened. And no you don’t have to wait until ASI to unleash the missiles, you do that before it, unless we’re talking about ASI jumping from above-human capability to godlike and build the golden dome in 30 minutes, there’s still time for it to reach the other side. That’s what the ccp called “底线思维”, bottom-line thinking. What else do you think we should do? Wait in the cuckold chair until A/ and OpenAI devours the space? I’d much, much prefer a serious negotiation between the two governments for another NPT, but 1) it does not seem like we have a serious enough us gov to negotiate with currently and 2) one of the two us frontier company is controlled by an ideologue. What we could do is to threatens to turn things into craters. Worked well for the Norks at least.
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