Comment by nr378
5 hours ago
This seems like more co-ordinated propaganda to try to help OpenAI and Anthropic create a cartel and win their anti-trust waiver.
The key sentence beneath the headline: "OpenAI said all of the government data accessed by bots was public."
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/09/26/open-ai-gove...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/technology/openais-ai-us-...
The NYT wrote:
"With the Education Department, OpenAI’s technology tried to hack the website to gather data from the department’s civil rights office but failed, researchers from the A.I. research firm Transluce said."
So a third party apparently confirmed that a hack was attempted.
The NYT also writes:
"No A.I. company has been involved with as many disclosures of rogue incidents as OpenAI."
I think there is a certain amount of mental gymnastics needed to believe that they are establishing themselves as the industry leader in rogue incidents, as a strategy to gain an antitrust edge.
The public is paying close attention to the AI industry. That's the regime in which regulatory capture and similar strategies would be expected to fail: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/09/wh...
Sam and Dario have been doomers, or doomer-adjacent, for something like a decade at this point.
Occam's Razor is simply that they believe what they are saying about AI doom.
It doesn’t really matter if they believed or not initially, the dynamics at play now are completely different and both companies are facing increasing competition and costs of doing business, with no path to profitability. I’m pretty sure that takes priority over their personal beliefs
Dario requested "a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations."
https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier
I'm not seeing how that solves his 3rd-party competition problem.
4 replies →
> as a strategy to gain an antitrust edge.
They are explicitly asking to anti-trust exception is the issue.
If they merely believe what they are saying that AI is ultra dangerous, nothing stops them from simply making the perfectly rational business decision to slow down a bit. No anti-trust exception needed. Just make the decision on your own, and don't sign some huge agreement with their competitor.
They could slow down more if they knew others were also slowing. If others are also slowing, you can slow more yourself without loss of market share.
* * *
Many experts believe that:
"Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war."
https://aistatement.com/work/statement-on-ai-extinction-risk
If the antitrust waiver is too broad, we can always rework it. But there's no "undo" button for human extinction.