Thomas Malone

“Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” - the Whole Earth Catalog

[David Sacks @DavidSacks]

Some thoughts on Dario’s post:

1. Dario does not actually address Gavin Baker’s account of what he said – something he could easily deny if it were inaccurate.

2. Dario claims his critics live in a “bubble” where all regulation equals regulatory capture. He calls this an overly simplified view and notes that “Many people outside this bubble think of regulation as something that constrains corporate power and benefits ordinary people.” This argument is a straw man. Of course treating all regulation as capture would be overly simplified – but almost no one holds that view. I have repeatedly argued for strong antitrust enforcement to keep industries competitive, especially Big Tech. If Anthropic continues toward monopoly or duopoly status, I would be among the first to demand those rules apply.

3. Regulatory capture is not vague or in the eye of the beholder. Nobel laureate George Stigler defined it as regulation acquired by an industry and designed and operated primarily for its benefit. Stigler challenged the traditional view that government regulation arises from a benevolent state protecting the public from market failures. Rather, industry groups have concentrated stakes and pour resources into influencing regulators, whereas the public’s stake is diffuse and unorganized. The revolving door between companies and the agencies that regulate them compounds the problem. Anthropic understands these dynamics: it has hired multiple senior Biden AI-policy officials and built a substantial government-affairs operation plus a network of aligned organizations to push its preferred frameworks at state and federal levels.

4. Dario has consistently pushed for a new federal agency to review and approve frontier models prior to release – a proposal framed variously as an “FDA for AI,” an “FAA for AI,” and most recently a “FINRA for AI.” I call it a “DMV for AI” because a review process modeled on the FAA or FDA (which takes years) or FINRA (which issues rules for a staid industry widely seen as protecting incumbents) will create long queues as AI models wait for testing and approval. This process will only become more labyrinthine as rules accumulate to prevent theoretical harms. This would handicap the U.S. relative to China, which will not adopt the same constraints. It would also undermine Anthropic’s own business model, whose pricing power depends on remaining ahead of open models. Whatever Dario states today, it is difficult to believe the company would simply accept outcomes that erase that advantage.

5. Anthropic is on track to become one of the most valuable companies in history, with the resources to navigate any approval process and shape the rules while competitors wait. Dario wants open models under heavier scrutiny – he has called them dangerous in Senate testimony, criticized them for not being centrally monitored or withdrawn, and linked them to IP theft. He says he has never sought a ban, but he could achieve a similar result by insisting that identical rules apply to both open and closed models. The U.S. risks becoming an island of costly closed models while the rest of the world races ahead with broader choice.

6. Dario acknowledges that AI is structurally centralizing but attributes this mainly to chips and scaling laws. Access to compute matters, but the deeper risk is who decides which capabilities are available to whom. His preferred pre-deployment testing and FAA/FINRA-style oversight would place that gatekeeping power in a federal bureaucracy working hand-in-glove with a small number of frontier labs – reinforcing centralization rather than countering it.

7. The second part of Dario’s post assumes we have amnesia about Anthropic’s well-orchestrated campaigns hyping AI fears. His May 2025 claim that AI would wipe out 50 percent of entry-level knowledge jobs within five years still lacks supporting evidence fifteen months later. Similarly Anthropic breathlessly promoted its heavily contrived “blackmail” study on 60 Minutes. Yet Dario blames public negativity on a long-standing loss of trust in institutions rather than his own messaging.

8. These narratives have done more than anything to shape public fear. People are left asking the same question Mark Zuckerberg posed: why race to build a future you describe in such negative terms? Thomas Sowell’s "The Vision of the Anointed" captures the mindset – elite intellectuals convinced that only they are enlightened enough to control the outcome. As Zuckerberg notes, concentrating power in the hands of an enlightened few has rarely produced the promised results; the practitioners turn out to be less enlightened in practice than in self-conception.

9. Gavin Baker summarized the disagreement cleanly on our pod: Dario believes frontier AI is too powerful to distribute; we believe it is too powerful to centralize. Dario appears to believe, sincerely, that safety and progress are best served by centralizing authority in a marriage of corporate and state power. The weight of human history gives us reason to fear that outcome.

[Thomas Malone @thomas_malone]

@LauraLoomer But you’re legally not allowed to own a gun right!?

[Rob Schneider 🇺🇸 @RobSchneider]

As I have said before…
@JDVance is not surrounded by good people.
I don’t trust him.
I will certainly not vote for him.
I am hoping the real hero of this administration, @SecRubio will be our next President of the United States.

[David Senra @davidsenra]

My conversation with @travisk, founder of Atoms and Uber.

0:00 Building Atoms & the Meta Problem of Management
3:51 The Appeal of Impossible Problems: Starting Over in China
12:19 Uber vs. Didi: Copycats, Hypergrowth & China's Rules
21:02 How Network Effects Become an Efficiency Fortress
31:48 Capitalism vs. the Taxi Cartel
44:05 The China War Goes Global & the Entrepreneur's Capacity for Pain
54:04 Life After Uber: Lawfare, Media Narratives & Reputation
58:21 What Founders Get Wrong About Venture Capital
1:08:35 The Fundraising Playbook: QED Storytelling & a Five-Room Auction
1:18:38 The Uber Coup, Radical Accountability & Outgrowing Fear
1:26:42 Why Specialized Robots Beat Humanoids at Industrial Scale
1:31:30 Finding Your Sport: Food, Mining & the Physical AI Stack
1:40:14 How to Build Many Companies Inside One Company
1:46:33 Entropy, Civilization & the Meaning of Progress

Includes paid partnerships.

[J @JayTC53]

If Thomas Massie actually cared about fraud and the national debt. Then why didn't he try exposing it like Nick Shirley did?

Massie has been in Congress for 14 years. Plenty of time to expose fraud and enact change.

Instead he wore this stupid debt calculator as a gimmick. He stopped wearing it when he moved onto his Israel grift.

[MAZE @mazemoore]

Thomas Massie said in November of 2025 that there were 1,000 victims of Epstein and that he would read the names of the perpetrators if the names of those men weren't released.

Seems he lost all desire to get "justice for the victims" after he lost his election.

The Massie/Khanna Epstein grift was despicable and even their supporters should be able to admit it by now.

[Thomas Malone @thomas_malone]

@DarioAmodei @DavidSacks

[Thomas Malone @thomas_malone]

This is a losing position for the US. Chinese open weight models already provide opportunity for consumers. By stating that nation states need to side with US mostly closed source ecosystem will push countries to use Chinese models because the US hasn’t put forward open source alternatives that have achieved better results. You win by making better products not by dictating to your allies they better side with you no matter what

[CNBC @CNBC]

U.S. to tell partners they must pick sides in AI race with China: Reuters https://t.co/XTgiIYrYZC

[Thomas Malone @thomas_malone]

@catturd2 Please cry more Boomer

[Thomas Malone @thomas_malone]

@RepThomasMassie You sir, are an idiot. He correctly quoted the Phase 3 trial results. That’s not illegal.

[Thomas Malone @thomas_malone]

@69News @GovernorShapiro this is a shameful response to the program

[Thomas Malone @thomas_malone]

@marklevinshow You’re a coward by stating here behind your keyboard that you would win. We have no proof or assurance you would come close to winning.

[Eric Daugherty @EricLDaugh]

🚨 JUST IN: Nick Shirley drops this line after Rep. Thomas Massie publicly attacks him

"All you do is complain and whine on 𝕏 while your job is to actually work for us. I’ve exposed and saved America billions. What have you done?"

Massie will be out of Congress on January 3.

[Pixar @Pixar]

Pixar is officially diving into the supernatural with their very first ghost movie: Ghost Market, arriving in Spring 2028! 👻 #D23

[Nick shirley @nickshirleyy]

In other words “Why can’t a 24 yr old solve all the government’s spending problems?”

You people in DC are a large part of the problem. All you do is complain and whine on 𝕏 while your job is to actually work for us.

I’ve exposed and saved America billions. What have you done?

[Ryan Reynolds @VancityReynolds]

As you know, I do not condone leaked Deadpool-related footage so here is the D23 video. #security

[Space Cowboy @kristbozaia]

#D23 NEW SUPER VILLAIN STRONGER THAN THE ENTIRE PARR FAMILY AND THEY WILL BE STRUGGLING TO HOLD BACK JACK JACKS POWERS!!! OH MY GOD

[D001 @_itsamedfffaz]

FULL #FROZEN3 FOOTAGE IN BEST QUALITY YET

(vía Karim Salmen on TikTok)

#D23

[Justin Richard @justinrichard23]

#Frozen3 #D23 first look

[Pop Base @PopBase]

Rapunzel and Flynn in Disney’s live-action ‘TANGLED’ movie.