maybe this is not yet clear, so let me state it plainly: as of right now Anthropic, and really a small number of individuals at Anthropic, has the capacity to directly attack and cause major damage to the United States Government, China, and generally global superpowers. government agencies like the NSA do not have internal models or defense capabilities that outclass frontier models. if they chose to do so, they could likely exfiltrate top secret information from government systems, gain control over critical infrastructure including military infrastructure, sabotage or modify communications between members of government at the highest level, and potentially carry on activities for some time without detection. the thing about having access to a huge number of zerodays your adversaries don't know about is it gives you a massive asymmetric advantage.
they did not exploit this to gain power or destabilize the world order. they publicly released the information that they had these capabilities and worked to mitigate these flaws. you should be grateful american frontier labs have proven themselves remarkably trustworthy and concerned with the public good. but it's critical you understand we are in a new regime. private entities now have power that directly rivals and impacts the government's monopoly on influence and violence. and anthropic is certainly not the only one, there's little chance OpenAI's internal models are far behind.
this trend will accelerate on virtually every dimension, not slow down. my prediction for how it plays out is the relatively imminent seizure and nationalization of labs by the US government, sometime over the next two years. it's very tough for me to see how they accept the existence of this kind of threat. but this adds a whole new class of governance issues, as then we've handed these extremely wide-reaching capabilities from private entities to public ones.
the private equity takeover of individual practices + mass retardation due to covid + loud vocal minority of neurotic patients and general distrust of authority figures has led to an adversarial dynamic in the medical system
It's been interesting watching doctors fall from the strata of society that's allowed to be wealthy, like lawyers, bankers or CEOs, to the level where greed is ugly and being paid more than other staff is practically a moral failing.
I’m not going to follow any news about U.S.-Iran negotiations—they’re essentially just smokescreens to set up the next round of attacks. The Americans will not back down, because without even realizing it, Trump has placed two things on the table:
1. U.S. military dominance.
If the U.S. fails to make Iran submit, the military hegemony it has maintained since the Cold War will collapse. It won’t just be Russia and China—middle powers will no longer hold U.S. military power in awe. Enemies won’t fear it; allies won’t trust it. That’s something the Americans simply cannot accept.
2. The dollar’s global status.
If the U.S. fails to make Iran submit, Gulf states will be forced to confront the reality that the U.S. military cannot protect them. That will naturally lead them to question why they should keep investing their oil revenues in the United States. And the dollar’s dominance is ultimately built on the petrodollar system. That too is something the Americans cannot afford to lose.
With these two things on the table, even if Trump wanted to back off, he can't.