Does this correlate with the racial proportion data?

(I think it's also the case that Anthropic didn't make any public statements about the negotiations until after the DoD was already publicly threatening this designation. But that seems less important than the question of: is it good for the US government to try to destroy companies whose public statements it dislikes?)

"Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security. Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic."

Presumably, according to the defenders of the designation in this thread, this was an innocent mistake that doesn't indicate any political intent.

The idea that "fair for the military to object to" implies "fair for the military to ban from their supply chain in any capacity no matter how unrelated the use" is so outlandish that it's never been done before (to a US company), and I think we can be confident that the DoD has frequently objected to would-be contractors' terms.

The claim that it being done for the first time - by a Secretary of Defense denounced the politics of the company in the same text where he announced the designation - isn't "political", is something I have a hard time believing a functioning adult who isn't employed defending the government in court could adopt.

But hey, maybe in some language this is a "textbook" official statement with no "politics":

  Cloaked in the sanctimonious rhetoric of “effective altruism,” they have attempted to strong-arm the United States military into submission - a cowardly act of corporate virtue-signaling that places Silicon Valley ideology above American lives.

Perhaps people who are noticing politics here - including in the decision of two Trump-appointed judges, against the he vote of another Republican-appointed judge- are not the ones who are choosing not to see reality?

> For Anthropic, Google, and Meta, the catastrophic breakouts happened inside the testing environments of the exact same contractor.

If this is the level of understanding you have of the relevant incidents, there's a lot of chutzpah in saying that other people are "selling garbage", carrying out an "extraordinary confidence trick", etc.

- If this applies to people who release open weights models, that becomes a terrible idea as long as you're subject to US laws.

- If it just applies to people who host them, that still probably advantages bigger players who can afford in-house legal and won't be destroyed by losing one lawsuit. Or maybe we create some kind of AI-misuse insurance analogous to malpractice insurance, that smaller players can buy in to? But that takes time even if the finances work out at all. And, uh, I'm not sure malpractice is a model we should aspire to in other industries.

Plus, presumably an immediate impact of this is that hosting providers all have much stricter safeguards classifiers. And the fact that somebody else is deciding what you're allowed to do with the model is one of the things that seems to make HN angriest at the frontier labs in the first place...

To be clear, I think this might be a good idea! I think all of the possible downsides I've listed are pretty small potatoes relative to what happens with no regulation of AI at all. But I'm pretty sure that if the big companies were proposing it, people would be calling it "regulatory capture" too.

But that's different than saying we don't need new regulations at all. Even strict liability of the form you seem to advocate would seem to need new laws. And it's not clear to me how it's consistent with your aim of just regulating what people _do_ with intelligence. Presumably AI companies would clamp down much harder with restrictive classifiers in that world--including hosting providers for open source models, if they also assumed liability. And then the people with unrestricted access to this technology are only those who can afford home GPUs, which are going to be intrinsically less efficient because they can't batch queries...

I think there are genuinely novel things about AI vs human intelligence which pose genuinely novel problems that would need genuinely novel policy to solve them.

Predicting 2025-2035 as, at least, the period when AI becomes a really big deal, seems pretty good, even if the jury's still out on "singularity".

Broadly, the rationalists seem to have been pretty early to realizing LLMs were a big deal, and certainly seem to have had a much more accurate picture of how they'd develop than the people who denounce "TESCREAL" and talk about "stochastic parrots". It's fair (and IMHO correct) to ding rationalists for lots of things, but specifically poor prediction about AI seems like a bad one, insofar as anything has been tested so far.