Agreed, the initial announcement read like AI safety washing and more political action is needed, hence the call to action to improve this.

But read the taskforce leader’s op-ed: 

1. He signed the pause AI petition.
2. He cites ARC’s GPT-4 evaluation and Lesswrong in his AI report which has a large section on safety.
3. “[Anthropic] has invested substantially in alignment, with 42 per cent of its team working on that area in 2021. But ultimately it is locked in the same race. For that reason, I would support significant regulation by governments and a practical plan to transform these companies into a Cern-like organisation. We are not powerless to slow down this race. If you work in government, hold hearings and ask AI leaders, under oath, about their timelines for developing God-like AGI. Ask for a complete record of the security issues they have discovered when testing current models. Ask for evidence that they understand how these systems work and their confidence in achieving alignment. Invite independent experts to the hearings to cross-examine these labs. [...] Until now, humans have remained a necessary part of the learning process that characterises progress in AI. At some point, someone will figure out how to cut us out of the loop, creating a God-like AI capable of infinite self-improvement. By then, it may be too late.”
4. 
5. 

Also the PM just tweeted about AI safety. 

Generally, this development seems more robustly good and the path to a big policy win for AI safety seems clearer here than past efforts trying to control US AGI firms optimizing for profit. Timing also seems much better as things looks way more ‘on’ now.  And again, even if the EV sign of the taskforce flips, then $125M is .5% of the $21B invested in AGI firms this year.

Are you saying that, as a rule, ~EAs should stay clear of policy for fear of tacit endorsement, which has caused harm and made damage control much harder and we suffer from cluelessness/clumsiness? Yes, ~EA involvement has in the past sometimes been bad, accelerated AI, and people got involved to get power for later leverage or damage control (cf. OpenAI), with uncertain outcomes (though not sure it’s all robustly bad - e.g. some say that RLHF was pretty overdetermined). 

I agree though that ~EA policy pushing for mild accelerationism vs. harmful actors is less robust (cf. the CHIPs Act, which I heard a wonk call the most aggressive US foreign policy in 20 years), so would love to hear your more fleshed out push back on this - I remember reading somewhere recently that you’ve also had a major rethink recently vis-a-vis unintended consequences from EA work?