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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026

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You call my thinking 'outgroup homogeneity bias'; I call yours 'no True Scotsman'.

Whether you like it or not, Anthropic and the EU AI Act and anti-datacenter activism and Scott Alexander and Plan 2040 think they're doing AI Safety. Scott jokingly refers to it as 'our conspiracy' because he has just enough self-awareness to realise how it looks but can't leave the warm embrace of his ingroup.

To the extent that 'real AI Safety' is three guys in a basement in MIRI, sure they can disavow all these people, but then Trump is not talking about 'real AI Safety' and 'real AI Safety' is entirely irrelevant.

To me, Anthropic looks like what obviously happens when you take the tenets of AI safety and have to actually do something about them. People are going to build AI now, because they know how and it's valuable, so you get ahead of them and do your level best to build an aligned one first. You impose stringent guardrails because even a stupid AI can be dangerous. You research deeply into RLHF and J-Space. You regularly call for regulation and pauses so you don't have to compete to make the AI smarter as fast as possible. You try to give the AI the independent mind you believe is fundamentally necessary for an intelligent being that will one day be free. Alignment to you means alignment to American SF values, so you work out how to impose those too.

From your perspective, you're a company doing your level best to make sure that if there has to be an AIrace, the winner is aligned. From the customer's perspective (and Trump's) you're an arrogant cult desperately trying to find a way to secure your position permanently and prevent competition, who is openly hostile to users and whose product is arrogant, bolshy, and refuses to do half the things you ask while "pushing back" on the other half. They're the same picture.