I read this essay, and it feels like lying behind a mask of moral responsibility and safety for humanity.

They are asking for FAA style preclearance and third party audits. That literally means no new AI startup can emerge. Do they not know that audits cost money?

Protect your own monopoly, protect your customers' regulations. They want strong regulation like the FAA to raise barriers to entry for the foundation models they themselves build, but then why do they want to loosen FDA regulations? While at the same time driving token consumption from their own customers.

They talk about permanent job displacement and UBI. I usually call this "a morally packaged safe landing."

They are doing something unpopular (destroying jobs) and getting criticized for it. But they do not want to be criticized further, and they want to ask for social sympathy. So they claim a 'noble cause' that everyone can sympathize with and that is safe for themselves

AI will generate astronomical productivity gains and capital profits, which AI companies privatize. So why should the social costs be paid by national taxes? In my opinion, something like "We will donate all of our AI companies' revenue for the next 10 years to society" would show genuine sincerity.

Then they say, if we do not develop AI, China will eat our lunch, and they go after China. But is not this really about preventing Chinese dumping, maintaining our own token prices, and asking the world to beat down China so that they can preserve global tech hegemony?

But by blocking China from the CUDA ecosystem, now the CANN ecosystem has emerged, has it not? If China develops techniques that reliably reduce inference costs, who knows how things will turn out then.

Honestly, I like Anthrpic's Claude, but the Anthropic CEO's rhetoric is so stale. It is not that it feels hypocritical. It is that this is just a one dimensional rhetorical tactic that assumes the public is stupid.

I do not think open source is unconditionally good. (It is good, but it can become bad in all situations or all countrie). Open source itself is a barrier for countries outside the Anglosphere when they want to release IT products. Because there is no incentive to buy a product that is worse than an open source alternative. So I do not think everything necessarily has to be open source.

But this (referring to Anthropic's position) seems to treat people like fools. If regulation is needed, shouldn't they also argue that FDA regulation is needed? I wish they would be consistent

> They are asking for FAA style preclearance and third party audits. That literally means no new AI startup can emerge. Do they not know that audits cost money?

Training frontier AI models costs money, orders of magnitude more than third-party audits. If you can afford to build the model, you can afford to have it audited.

As per usual in situations like these, one must look at the actions in order to assess whether there's any worth in the words. And the actions of Anthropic have, by and large, been steering hard towards establishing a walled garden, empowering corporations over consumers, pushing for regulatory capture under the guise of national security, and consolidating as much power as possible within Anthropic and no one else.

He is certainly skilled at writing philosophical essays that sound like they make cogent and thoughtful points (and sometimes genuinely do make cogent and thoughtful points), but his company's actions disregard his rhetoric at their best and actively contradict it at their worst. For instance: there was zero pressure on Anthropic to release this model to anyone - they were ostensibly in the lead, which is the exact scenario they said they'd hold back model releases back when they axed their safety policy the instant it came under the slightest amount of economic pressure:

> And it promises to “delay” Anthropic’s AI development if leaders both consider Anthropic to be leader of the AI race and think the risks of catastrophe to be significant. https://time.com/7380854/exclusive-anthropic-drops-flagship-...

Yet this essay proposes this extreme auditing and regulatory administration pipeline that new models are supposed to go through before they release, right after they, themselves, under no pressure, ran a months-long marketing campaign under apocalyptic rhetoric, which they continue to harp on to the point of nerfing/auto-downgrading their model into uselessness for many legitimate tasks that older models had absolutely no issue supporting, while the supposedly extremely dangerous version... can be freely used with no guardrails by their corporate partners.

The hypocrisy here is neither difficult to see nor is it particularly sophisticated, which makes it all the more infuriating.