Comment by miohtama

1 day ago

There cannot be regulation if people are not scared

Politicians are now discussing the need for much harsher liability regimes for AI companies. How many times can you name when a company argued that its industry should suffer a much harsher liability regime? This doesn't match the standard regulatory capture template.

  • It is important to note that Anthropic is not calling for a harsher liability regime. They intend to maintain the current projected profitability of the company. This is a case of obeying market competition.

    Note the Anthropic scaling policy. I am taking care not to take quotes out of context. This is an accurate excerpt.

    "This section outlines our recommendations for what it would take, at an industry-wide level, to keep catastrophic risks reliably low through a period of rapid advances in AI capabilities." [...]

    "The right column describes our recommendations for industry-wide safety at each threshold." [...]

    "In particular, we cannot unilaterally and unconditionally commit to staying in line with the industry-wide recommendations in the right column." (p4) [https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/e670587677525f28df69b59e5fb4c2...]

    They refuse to act safely if it would cause them to fall behind in the industry.

    "We hoped that by the time we reached these higher capabilities, the world would clearly see the dangers, and that we’d be able to coordinate with governments worldwide in implementing safeguards that are difficult for one company to achieve alone." [https://www.anthropic.com/news/responsible-scaling-policy-v3]

    They will not act safely unless they are able to collude with other firms to set production quotas.

    This is a formal declaration that Anthropic will not slow down according to what they consider to be safe unless they are able to form a cartel.

    A cartel is illegal.

    To create the cartel, Anthropic must pursuade the government to make coordinated production legal. To make the case for the cartel, Anthropic relies on safety. They are blackmailing the entirety of the world by threatening to proceed at an unsafe pace, unless they are granted their cartel.

    • bla bla bla.

      Let's play a game. Prove that you are not a power seeking AI looking to stop regulation in order to ensure the race continues. See, two can play this game of throwing random claims around.

      >They will not act safely unless they are able to collude with other firms to set production quotas.

      And? Neither will OpenAI, nor will any of the major players. Hell, there isn't even much legal precedent on what "safely" even is here. This is not a cartel, it's asking the government to make a set of laws and rules for everyone to play under otherwise the entire system ends up being a race to danger.

      The people in Anthropic were thinking about AI safety when you were still in diapers. Not everything is a vast conspiracy.

  • Indeed I find LeCun and Huang (and Trump?) recently arguing against AI regulation to be much more eyebrow raising than the folks asking for regulation.

    Asking for regulation is suspicious. Asking for no regulation is suspicious. At some point you have to stop worrying about these guys motives and just do what is best for society