Comment by perihelions
2 years ago
The White House just invoked the Defense Production Act ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act_of_1950 ) to assert sweeping authority over private-company software developers. What the fuck are they smoking?
- "In accordance with the Defense Production Act, the Order will require that companies developing any foundation model that poses a serious risk to national security, national economic security, or national public health and safety must notify the federal government when training the model, and must share the results of all red-team safety tests."
I assume this is a major constitutional overreach that will be overturned by courts at the first challenge?
Or else, all the AI companies who haven't captured their regulators will simply move their R&D to some other country—like how the OpenSSH (?) core development moved to Canada during in the 1990's crypto wars. (edit: Maybe that's the real goal–scare away OpenAI's competition, dredge for them a deeper regulatory moat).
From the Wikipedia article:
> The third section authorizes the president to control the civilian economy so that scarce and critical materials necessary to the national defense effort are available for defense needs.
Seems pretty broad and pretty directly relevant to me. And hey, if people don’t like the idea of models being the scarce and critical resource, they can pick GPUs instead. Why would it be an overreach when you have developers of these systems claiming they’ll allow them to “capture all value in the universe’s future light cone?”
Obviously this can (and probably will) be challenged, but it seems a bit ambitious to just assume it’s unconstitutional because you don’t like it.
Software is definitionally not "scarce". There is no national defense war effort to speak of. Finally, the White House is not requesting "materials neccesary to the national defense effort"–which does not exist–it's attempting to regulate private-sector business activity.
There's multiple things I suspect are unconstitutional here, the clearest being that this stuff is far outside the scope of the law it's invoking. The White House is really just trying to regulate commerce by executive fiat. That's the exclusive power of Congress—this is separation of powers question.
Powerful models are scarce (currently), and in any case GPUs definitely are so I’m not sure this is a good line of argument if you want less overreach here.
AFAICT there doesn’t need to be active combat for DPA to be used, and it seems like it got most of its teeth from the Cold War which was… cold.
> The White House is really just…
That’s definitely one interpretation but not the only one.
3 replies →
"C'mon, man! Your computer codes are munitions, Jack. And they belong to the US Government."
> that poses a serious risk to national security, national economic security, or national public health and safety
That seems to be a key component. I imagine many AI companies will start with a default position that none of those are apply to them, and will leave the burden of proof with the govt or other entity.
This is much less restrictive than the cryptography export restrictions. The sky isn't falling and OpenAI won't defect to China (and now arguably might risk serious consequences for doing so).
In 2017 Trump invoked that act for referenced "items affecting adenovirus vaccine production capability”