At what point do we stop engaging with Anthropic’s leadership in good faith and acknowledge their track record,

- no open weights

- can’t use claude to research AI

- train on everyone else’s IP and sell it back to them

- 8 regulatory capture attempts and counting

- so controlling they are the only US company blacklisted by the US government

This is not effective altruism / rationalism gone wild, it’s just monopolistic anti-competitive business practices masquerading as ethics, and they’ll continue getting away with this until we look past their sensationalism and hit them with antitrust.

Altman gets so much hate but OpenAI has been a far better steward (on 3/5 above at least) than Anthropic!

> At what point do we stop engaging with Anthropic’s leadership in good faith

About two years ago?

I would also note that Dario's post appears to be LLM written. Maybe... maybe... he's read so much Claudeish that it's all he can speak now himself. But I wonder if he's becoming a bit of a meat proxy.

(It's funny, I thought "pace the frontier" was going to mean something similar to "patrolling the frontier". But no, it's pace as in speed of change - everyone must slow down, right now (unless it's Anthropic, but you know we're the good guys in this, right? We're going to get someone to audit our desks!) "Pacing the frontier" feels so LLM.)

ok, he doesn't actually say this. But he is getting the desks audited...

The reasoning in Dario's letter here can be correct regardless.

But yes, I think Anthropic has done real harm to coordinated AI alignment by being such a controlling and sneaky actor.

I have many issues with Anthropic, but I will say that their actions are fully consistent with a group of people who earnestly believe that AI is extremely dangerous

In fact, I would say that the Occam’s razor explanation is not that they are seeking regulatory capture, but that they earnestly believe in the x-risk, and that they are the most thoughtful and capable people to address it

You may disagree, you may think that they are delusional or have a God complex. Those are valid opinions. But I don’t believe that this is all a elaborate ruse for commercial gain.

Exactly right.

When local models and startup labs can distill / learn / accelerate open models for local use by startups - the rational response by incumbents is to call LLMs doomsday machines that cannot be trusted in the hands of normies.

> At what point do we stop engaging with Anthropic’s leadership in good faith and acknowledge their track record, ...

It's all lies as usual.

This announcement has got nothing to do with alignment and pacing the "frontier": all models are getting very close in capabilities and they want to hide that they're not way ahead anymore (say compared to the Chinese or compared to the Geminis) by pretending to slow down due to "alignment" or whatever.

We know it's not an announcement made in good faith: reading between the lines they're saying "China is more than catching up, so let's pretend we need to slow down to explain our lack of lead".

Do you have any familiarity with Anthropic at all?

At no point did they ever say open weights are a good idea. Their entire thesis is AI IS VERY DANGEROUS AND WE MUST DO IT RIGHT. You can hate it, but everything they do is consistent with this thesis, and everything they say is consistent with their actions! You just want them to want different things.

> can’t use claude to research AI

What's this about? Where's this rule?