Two weeks ago, in my bio for LessOnline, I added a bullet in a list of intentions:
Update people's models of DC. Last year I said "The world is on the cusp of getting much weirder. Most of DC is still asleep to the magnitude of the change." This year, DC is genuinely waking up, and now it's Berkeley that needs to take notice.
Then I went on leave for a week and a half and didn't check twitter the whole time. I barely followed the news, though an Anthropic MoTS handed me a printed copy of the "It's a good model, sir," tweet. It was an excellent bit.
Imagine that there were no Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but there remained a large pharmaceutical sector, similar in size and scope to the one the United States enjoys today. In this alternate world, imagine that drugs were officially not licensed; there were even officials in the executive branch who boasted that the U.S., unlike other countries, would not get into the regulatory morass of licensing drugs.
One day, after a pharmaceutical developer warns that they think they have made a drug that cures a major Cancer at one dosage but is lethal at a slightly higher dosage. The company says, for this reason, that they are going to restrict release only to pre-approved patients and monitor their usage of the drug carefully—a sharp break from prior industry practice but one that the company insists, controversially, is necessary. This particular company had been advocating for years for stricter drug regulation, much to the chagrin of the government.
This causes a stir, and the government, not quite knowing what to do, announce that it will give drug developers the helpful option to show their drugs’ safety profiles to government officials before they are released.
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In a matter of weeks, in our alternative world, the United States went from a system that was implausibly laissez-faire for the level of risk involved in this industry, to a system that was, in the eyes of essentially all expert onlookers, incomprehensibly strict and risk averse.
Fable, Jailbreaks, and Export Controls: What Happened
This, of course, is my read of what happened in the Trump Administration’s latest dispute with the AI company Anthropic.
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On paper then, given the text of the Administration’s policy and the statements of senior Administration and Administration-adjacent officials, Anthropic should have felt in the clear to release Fable without getting an explicit thumbs up from the U.S. government. Everything the U.S. government was communicating, in policy and in rhetoric, seemed to suggest “go ahead, release your model!”
And yet common sense would dictate otherwise. Anthropic is still in the midst of a heated dispute with the Department of War about that agency’s decision to label Anthropic a supply-chain risk. Bitter disputes about policy and politics between the Administration and Anthropic remain unresolved, among them export controls, federal preemption, and the general reality that Anthropic supports Democratic candidates for office while Republicans occupy the seat of power.
Of course they needed to tread carefully. What the law says does not matter.
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The stark reality is that making superintelligence is a profoundly political act even in the healthiest of societies, to say nothing of the filthily political world we Americans currently inhabit. A model like Mythos goes beyond being a mere political act and implicates the sovereignty of the state itself. No company gets to shake the foundation of state sovereignty while staying blithely above the raw reality of politics.
In D.C., Anthropic’s rapid release of Mythos after the supply-chain risk controversy with the Department of War was not just seen as another step in the development of AI, even if that is what it was. It was seen by many as a move against the United States Government—a private company, developing a weapon, as a move against the government. What else, really, could one have expected? All actors in this industry, and all concerned citizens observing the AI field, must steel themselves for a profoundly more political future.
Two weeks ago, in my bio for LessOnline, I added a bullet in a list of intentions:
Then I went on leave for a week and a half and didn't check twitter the whole time. I barely followed the news, though an Anthropic MoTS handed me a printed copy of the "It's a good model, sir," tweet. It was an excellent bit.
Hours later, the United States imposed export controls on Claude Fable.
Dean Ball's excellent article helps explain why:
Read the rest at Hyperdimensional, self-recommending.