I have to be honest, I am tired of reading these arrogant, self-absorbed posts from Dario and Anthropic in general. Opening with this lord of the rings reference just feels like they are trying too hard and are untrustworthy.

As annoying as their tone is, the real big danger is what they are setting up for. All this fear-mongering around Mythos, the overly aggressive controls on Fable, and these manifestos they keep writing, are part of setting up for REGULATORY CAPTURE. Even collaborating with the Pope and the Interfaith Alliance (https://iafsc.org/our-work/faith-ai-covenant) are part of creating a vast support network for regulations and restrictions. Those regulations will help those faith organizations or the government or whatever, but will also help Anthropic’s bottom line.

Those regulations will not support your civil liberties. They will restrict speech, access to AI, and allowed uses of AI. They will lead to bans on use of models from some countries like China, and also bans on open-source or open-weight models.

If Dario wants to be trusted, he needs to explicitly say in writing that Anthropic will not support any legal or regulatory restrictions on open-source AI, open-weight AI, or Chinese models. Otherwise, what he is really saying - even as he claims he is trying to ‘defend democracy’ - is that he and Anthropic do not truly support fundamental rights like our right to speech.

It’s not just Anthropic either. OpenAI had their own recent polemic, pushing for regulations like mandatory safety reviews by agencies for “frontier” models (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48387246). It’s a dead giveaway that these companies have no moats, are in serious danger of being a commodity, and are now in the process of using regulations and enshittification to hold onto money and power.

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baq 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It’s easy to dunk on them because of incentives, but consider for a moment a world in which they have access to internal, non-lobotomized models, have run evals on them and have been genuinely concerned by what they saw.

	▲	thewebguyd 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If that's the case, why not publish that research? Until they can show receipts, we're forced into a binary situation of "Do you trust the CEO of a lab with a trillion dollar valuation quickly approaching their IPO?" Maybe he's right, but from an outside perspective it just looks like an attempt at regulatory capture to pull the ladder up behind them.

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nemomarx 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean he wants to be trusted but he also absolutely doesn't support freedom of speech in that sense, and I doubt anyone with power or influence over ai policy does?

If you find a good lobbying group with money who can push for it let HN know.

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mananaysiempre 7 hours ago | parent [-]

To be honest, at this point I’d take any group at all willing to usefully and non-hypocritically push for free speech (as a general societal value, not just a US-specific legal notion).

	▲	nemomarx 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_for_Individual_Righ... has been doing alright recently?