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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):
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:
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:
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
etc. All very obvious.
And in his Dwarkesh episode, he's a bit evasive but ineffectively so, in my opinion:
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.
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.
Again, this isn’t about Gwern or Fukuyama, both of whom are very well read people, and both of whom actually have occasionally heterodox views of the kind ‘the academy’ (or generic midwit liberalism) would either balk at or at least raise eyebrows at. There are plenty of people with probably very substantial intelligence who essentially believe in this universalized western liberal democracy view of history, Mark Carney is one example that immediately comes to mind. There used to be some here in the old days (depending on exact definition there still are one or two). Dario’s writings do not come across this way. Maybe it’s easier to fool people when you can ask a decent LLM what a good counterargument is to that annoying commenter on the internet, but fortunately we have pre-AI Dario writings and they didn’t get more or less interesting.
Sanders would have called Xi Jinping an enemy of ‘western civilization’ and significantly scaled up defense spending and the US military presence in East Asia? Interesting. You speak about Trump/Hegseth’s China views as if these people - despite being the prime enemies of UN EU institutional neolib Washington consensus world bank international organization Kennedy school types for the last decade, far moreso than China - are completely separate from Amodei, as if they just independently arrived at the same conclusion at the exact same time because of the inevitability of historical circumstance, Thucydides etc. Convenient if true, that these events are all independent superstructures on the same base, I think. As is the suggestion that Amodei would, in my hypothetical, rather abandon everything and become another EA blogger (cross posted mockingly here?) if he was forced (by the market, investors, the government) to sell to China, but was rescued by Trump and Hegseth.
Because it is functionally unstoppable. Why did Britain not declare war on America in 1918, or 1945, or 1870 (the last time it would have been remotely feasible, perhaps) for that matter? By the way, this is the opinion of all the actual anti-Trump super rich and/or powerful neoliberal types I know, both in America and Europe, both young and old, that accommodation and a deal with China is necessary, that competition is futile. It is people of rather different beliefs pushing for a military confrontation with Xi. Conflating them is like saying that Macron surely wanted Trump to kill the Ayatollah, or that Trudeau surely relished his tariffs. There is no requirement for ideological coherence, but socialization, culture, education, class, background and geography bound distinct political groupings. Amodei does not belong to the recognizably hawkish neoconservative and pro-war, pro-conflict with China, Atlanticist framework of Thiel, of Karp. Max out defense spending, end woke, civilizational chauvinism, complex views on 20th century European philosophy. Fukuyama himself does not seek war with China; if anything, the End of History was about that conflict being already won. If it was, there is nothing left to do but wait.
Are the super rich, powerful etc neoliberal elites in power, in Britain or the US, now or in the near future? They seem to be increasingly sidelined in the west, among the masses and among the ruling class. And they’re out of power partly because they “sold out” their countries to China, by “allowing” us into the WTO to “flood” their market with cheap stuff, by “allowing” Chinese peasants to make their T shirts, by “allowing” Chinese students to pay insane tuition to their shitty state schools to spend on football teams. Very ungrateful of course, our labor subsidized their lifestyle or they’ll pay as much for grocery and electronics as their plumbers and nannies.
But I agree with you that the likes of Amodei and the likes of Thiel are not to be conflated. They just happen to agree on this particular thing. Which makes me nervous of course.
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