TLDR:
1. Declare AI too dangerous for ordinary competition so you propose a regulatory regime where only the largest incumbents can survive
2. Warn about labor displacement while selling the product to executives as a labor-displacement tool
3. Warn about state overreach while asking the state to license and gatekeep frontier models
4. Warn about corporate power while sketching a corporate-state cartel over compute, release, security, export controls, and deployment
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An interesting line in Politico’s coverage of the proposed AI executive order, which, at 16 pages, is also much longer than expected. This is still under discussion and not yet finalized, and everything I'm about to write is conjecture, but it appears the administration intends to regulate US open-weight models.
Here are the reasons why this will almost certainly happen in some form.
Open-weight models are currently about nine months behind the frontier. Once the big labs are subjected to pre-release screening, development itself will not slow down, but the release cadence will. At that point, open-weight development will quickly close the gap - much faster than nine months. When those models surpass the big labs, everyone will switch to using open-weight alternatives.
From the administration’s perspective, allowing this option defeats the entire purpose of regulation. If the government is restricting and vetting models beyond a certain capability level, and people can simply switch to open-weight models that are just as capable - and eventually even more capable as the big labs slow down their release schedules under the new rules - then the situation becomes even worse from the government's perspective. They will not allow this to happen.
Second, the big labs themselves have almost certainly been covertly lobbying for open-weight models to be included in any new regulations. Allowing the public to switch to a superior, free alternative would completely destroy their business models, potentially bankrupting them all. Given the enormous scale of current investment in these companies and in AI infrastructure, the broader economy would also suffer "significant disruption".
That leaves China. If the two dynamics above play out, the same pattern repeats: everyone switches to Chinese open-weight models, which now quickly surpass both US closed and open releases. This produces the same consequences for the big labs, and causes the same issues with regulation. The government therefore has only two realistic options: ban Chinese models from use in the West, or negotiate a deal with Xi Jinping to impose identical regulation and pre-release vetting on open-weight models in China.
The first option would mean China pulls ahead and wins the AI race. So the administration will almost certainly pursue the second. Negotiations are likely already underway, because the ideal outcome for the admin would be to announce that China has agreed to similar restrictions to what they are announcing, thereby blunting domestic backlash. China will know it has the US over a barrel and will insist on compromises. Compromises such as lifting all export controls on NVIDIA GPUs.
Community banks are the last place in America where a man in a short-sleeve dress shirt can approve a $400,000 loan based on the fact that he went to high school with your dad. There are 4,100 of them left. There were 14,000 in 1984. Every time one gets acquired, a teller named Brenda learns a new software system and a small town loses the only institution that would lend against a combine. The acquirer always says nothing will change. Brenda is gone in eighteen months. The lobby cookies go next. Then the branch closes. Then the building becomes a vape shop. This is not a financial trend. This is the slow administrative murder of the only version of capitalism that ever knew your name.
This is the anatomy of a ruling class that stopped building and started extracting.
While China converted trade surpluses into plant, process, scale, and technological command, much of the American corporate class converted industrial inheritance into buybacks, bonuses, leverage, and excuses.
They confused financial engineering for competence and governance theatre for strategy.
The result: productive capacity bled out, dual-use industrial depth weakened, and the very executives who presided over the decay were rewarded for it.
What AquaVis is describing is not some mysterious civilisational accident. It is a man-made transfer of power from the physical economy to the paper one, and from there, inevitably, to the states willing to take industry seriously.
It’s the core of the cancer that overtook the west
@markvalorian Land is not scarce relative to the population and even the worst land can be terraformed into a paradise with labor and energy of which we will have in abundance.
So, basically, if Anthropic was not a US company, we’d be facing zero days with multiple unknown points of attack on virtually all of our systems to an adversary who developed this capacity before us.