definitely a person

tryna figure out what the hell is going on such that I am a thing that can think and feel when almost everything else cannot

I also make art and stare at mist

[definitely a person @silencenbetween]

music video I made to Shadows (by Bonobo), featuring my winter in the PNW and CA

I think it's actually quite good, despite being my first time video editing! (kinda proud :))

https://t.co/RGPxkaTGMp

[Nathan Calvin @_NathanCalvin]

Dario — Thank you for taking the time to respond to my previous post. I think it's great when this kind of engagement happens in public rather than on company Slacks, and I hope to see more of it.

I agree that Anthropic isn't best modeled as a profit-maximizer. Your post gave several compelling examples of Anthropic taking competitive hits for safety, and insofar as my previous post suggested otherwise, that's on me. But I don't think I made my main point as clearly as I could have, so let me try again. It comes down to four key claims:

1. Anthropic seems to be racing at breakneck speed to build recursively self-improving superintelligence (RSI). By its own lights, that could kill billions of people or literally destroy the world.

2. Risking destroying the world is very hard to justify. It is only conceivably acceptable if serious attempts to put RSI under robust societal governance are failing.

3. Far from meeting that burden, Anthropic, when push comes to shove, often works to keep governments from tying its hands. It seems to care much more about preventing government overreach than about reducing the risk that it and other AI companies will destroy the world.

4. Even if the AEGIS Act really was an honest mix-up, as you suggest, that is itself a serious problem. It suggests Anthropic isn't treating the governance of this technology with anything close to the gravity it deserves.

In greater detail for those who want it:

1. Anthropic is racing to RSI, and by its own lights that is insanely risky.

Launching RSI could literally destroy the world. That's according to you, your co-founders, and most of your safety staff and capabilities researchers, not to mention many AI researchers outside your walls. You are intentionally trying to create generally intelligent systems more capable than all humans that you claim in six to twelve months “could be capable” of taking over the entire internet before we have the ability to reliably monitor, control, or align them.

“Succeeding” at RSI could kill or permanently disempower billions of people in the near future, including me and everyone I love. Yet Anthropic’s primary focus seems to be marshalling an immense amount of resources and talent in a race to get there first.

2. Risking destroying the world carries an enormous burden of justification.

I believe the vast majority of people do not want Anthropic to do this (to the extent they know what it's doing). Imposing even a modest chance of catastrophe on billions of people who never consented requires an extraordinary justification. The central one Anthropic has offered: someone will build RSI regardless, so it's better for a safety-focused lab to be at the front of the pack, using that position to support strong AI governance. (Other reasons Anthropic has given, like modestly accelerating improvements in healthcare or economic growth, don’t seem remotely proportionate to the risks Anthropic is imposing by its own lights.)

But that argument only works as a last resort. Racing to RSI is only conceivably okay if attempts to institute robust societal governance to manage that race are failing despite your best efforts. A lab that relies on this justification should be a strong, consistent supporter of efforts to enact governance that could bind it, including governance that could slow it and significantly constrain what it does.

3. Rather than supporting efforts at strong regulation, Anthropic has intervened to keep governments from tying its hands.

Anthropic has sometimes helped: it played a very helpful role in passing transparency bills in Illinois and ongoing efforts in Massachusetts, and I'm sincerely appreciative. But transparency is far from enough for a technology that will be the world's most powerful superweapon at best, and an uncontrollable swarm of lethally superintelligent agents at worst. When it matters most, Anthropic has often pushed for weak regulation.

The AEGIS Act is the most obvious example. No highly risky industry is regulated as anemically as AEGIS would regulate frontier AI: not nuclear, not banking, not aviation, not food safety, not the manufacture of explosives. In all of those industries, specialist regulators can address unsafe practices well before they cause harm. AEGIS would bar the federal government from intervening to block unsafe development or deployment of models until there is an "imminent risk" of catastrophic harm, and would require it to meet a demanding burden of proof in court. Worse, AEGIS would also prevent states from picking up the slack. This design makes perfect sense if you're a company trying to minimize the risk that the government can overly constrain you. It makes little sense if you want American democracy to govern frontier AI effectively.

This isn't the first time. The initial version of California's SB 1047 would have let the Attorney General sue to stop developers like Anthropic from imposing unreasonable risks of catastrophic harm. It would also have created a regulatory agency to help set safety standards. Anthropic objected, and helped get both provisions removed before ultimately offering some support for the bill (which I also genuinely appreciate). I’m not saying that Anthropic should have supported 1047 in its initial form; that’s a complex issue and I realize there were questions about whether earlier versions of the bill were less politically feasible. Still, in Anthropic's own words, it helped weaken the bill because "[t]here is a substantial risk that the bill and state agencies will simply be wrong about what is actually effective in preventing catastrophic risk, leading to ineffective and/or burdensome compliance requirements."

The same goes for New York's RAISE Act, whose initial version also would have let the Attorney General sue to stop unreasonable risks of catastrophic harm. Anthropic credits itself as a supporter of RAISE, but it did not support the bill while it was in the legislature, including when it nearly died. After the bill passed the legislature, Anthropic publicly critiqued it, saying "Any state proposals should be narrowly focused on transparency and not overly prescriptive."

Why does Anthropic consistently take the risk of clumsy government action far more seriously than its own repeated warnings that companies like Anthropic will literally destroy the world by racing to RSI?

4. Even if AEGIS was an honest mix-up, that is itself a serious problem.

Your response frames AEGIS as an early draft and a miscommunication. Perhaps you would have strengthened it and narrowed its preemption. (That wouldn't explain Anthropic's interventions to weaken SB 1047 or RAISE, but leave that aside.)

Suppose that's exactly right. A federal framework for governing RSI is one of the highest-stakes documents your company will touch. Your post admits Anthropic "could have handled [these matters] better," but its tone ("This kind of thing happens a lot in large organizations") doesn't reflect the gravity of this issue. Anthropic talks about the need for “operational excellence” in critical areas, and I have a hard time believing that a similarly cavalier attitude would be tolerated while Anthropic was negotiating a key compute deal or preparing its next large pre-training run.

In short

The justification for racing rests on Anthropic fighting for strong governance, and Anthropic's record on regulation points the other way. Together with its breakneck racing, that fits a much darker picture of the company than the one that seems to prevail among your employees. I hope that Anthropic reflects on this picture, supports stronger regulation, exercises extraordinary caution when advocating for weak regulation, and doubles down on its founding purpose of helping the world safely navigate transformative AI together, instead of prioritizing Anthropic’s ability to win a race that imposes intolerable risks on everyone alive.

[definitely a person @silencenbetween]

@adamascholl I feel like there's been a lot of thought automation! just not v much complete thought automation, maybe the only one is "computers" i.e. ppl who did a ton of calculating as their only job

[definitely a person @silencenbetween]

seems like it would be helpful to keep track of all of the ppl quitting AI labs for safety reasons, for a) knowing the absolute number and b) having all of their reasons in one place, easily accessible. does this exist?

[definitely a person @silencenbetween]

@peterbarnett_ @BenGoldhaber do you have a sense of why policy ppl don't realize this? is it just lack of contact with the args or bc they're not deeply internalizing grown vs designed stuff or bc they don't really understand the implications of that or?

[Nathan Calvin @_NathanCalvin]

I'm not convinced that racing to RSI is actually a prisoners dilemma - I think it might actually just be insane and hubristic in the way it naively appears to normal people such that additional unilateral restraint is in fact rational and moral.

The bar for believing your activities in the not too distant future might cause mass casualties or extinction but that you should proceed anyway should be very high, and I don't think Anthropic has met that bar (I think some of the cold war arms races were also not individually rational either!).

I was more sympathetic to them continuing to race at earlier times but as we are getting closer it just seems harder and harder to justify.

Anyway I obviously believe that "they should just slow or stop unilaterally" is not a plan - we need to address competitive dynamics and not make leave this up to their choice. But I do think when Dario says ~"I agree with Jacob Coxon that the thing I am doing is gambling with everyones lives" the appropriate reaction is not "ah that makes sense, classic arms race" its "WTF why are you doing that."

[definitely a person @silencenbetween]

@freed_dfilan I agree! Also I still feel p riled up about putting mummies in museums. They had a whole religion/meaning/belief system about what that represented! Fuck us for uprooting that just for the intrigue/bc we disagree. I'd be so pissed if someone pulled me out of a cryonics facility

[definitely a person @silencenbetween]

@freed_dfilan I only saw this to start and thought it was about the agent swarm :p

[Katja Grace 🔍 @KatjaGrace]

If you are bullish on some kind of advanced AI utopia, you should generally be *less* keen to try to achieve it via a careless route that leaves you at high risk of dying and losing it on the way there.

[definitely a person @silencenbetween]

@slatestarcodex @Aella_Girl I think it's p unfair not to include IABED as part of what laid the groundwork for this recent wave of public updating. If people weren't more primed to understand the significance, I expect HuggingFace would have been a much smaller deal

[definitely a person @silencenbetween]

sometimes I find it a faintly comforting thought that the care I have about ai not killing everyone, although often painful to hold, is the mechanism by which it changes. "human resilience" seems so abstract a thing but it is made up of all of the pieces of people actually trying

[definitely a person @silencenbetween]

@FellowHominid the q for me is about what kind of progress is required to get a really crazy takeoff scenario. imo speeding up the current thing of 'spiky crystallized knowledge ~imitation' doesn't seem like it obviously gets you foom soon, but I'm uncertain!

[Adam Scholl @adamascholl]

Now seems like an especially good time for a giant march to ban superintelligence
https://t.co/8w9P7h8Vjl

[definitely a person @silencenbetween]

I'm really glad the x-risk update is beginning to propagate. But the update that atm there's ~nothing we can do to prevent extinction without pausing AI hasn't been comprehended nearly as much. It seems equally important to me, and I wish ppl were clearer about this in interviews

[definitely a person @silencenbetween]

@ohabryka @MaskedTorah @dwarkesh_sp I also think an amendment process which allows Presidents to rewrite the basic and intended structure of the US constitution would be insane. Anthropic didn't just drop some commitment, they dropped the entire premise RSPs were founded on! i.e. conditional pauses!

[definitely a person @silencenbetween]

@adamascholl @kave_rennedy as Orwell describes: "Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist or understand."

[definitely a person @silencenbetween]

@adamimos @ryan_kidd44 is this bc you think ppl are overly confident about doom? seems fair if so (and I do think there's some dogmatism here). seems worse if it's more to e.g. broaden the hiring pool by seeming less weird/scary

[definitely a person @silencenbetween]

@RichardMCNgo def agree there’s a lot of premature formalization, but I mostly think of this as downstream of the normal pressures in academia. seems plausible it’s esp tempting here tho, given how difficult the aim is

[definitely a person @silencenbetween]

@RichardMCNgo huh I have the opposite impression. many ai safety ppl seem to me to spend too little time thinking about how their work relates to the harder challenges, and so eg get sucked into technical problems which are tackle-able now but don't much bear on them

[definitely a person @silencenbetween]

@TheZvi this doesn't seem obviously worse to me than AI companies deciding ad hoc, for whatever reason they like, what to release

[definitely a person @silencenbetween]

@steve47285 could the asymmetry in question 2 not just be that achieving hunger goals is considerably easier than achieving "freedom" goals? and so needs less intelligence to bear?