I guess what they really want is to limit sale of AI models to compliant vendors and then raise the bar to compliance just high enough so they can pass it but smaller labs can’t. There’s no moat, it’s an efficient market that drives margins to zero right now, of course they don’t want that, collusion of the big vendors is the next logical step.

This could be why they’re going so hard on hacking everyone and everything. You make it clear AI is a threat, get it locked down, and then have the capital to push through the lockdown while others are stuck.

Bingo. The goal is positioning a duopoly / cartel as the only “safe” and “moral” path and then that cartel sets pace and price.

Of all the fan theories I have read this seems the most nefarious and the most plausible.

they just want to pull the ladder up behind them.

> There’s no moat

People keep saying this, and while it may be partially true, it misses a very important detail. Right now, overall compute is a moat. Someone even commented on another of my comments that one reason Google is lagging is they don't have the same level of Nvidia farms as OpenAI and Anthropic.

A big reason that OpenAI and Anthropic are racing so fast is they both want to get to recursive self improvement (remains to be seen if that is actually possible, but AFAICT most people at these companies genuinely believe it is) before anyone else, because they believe whoever gets there first will then have an insurmountable lead. But I think they also clearly understand that neither of them have solved for alignment (and in fact they are further from it), and RSI with misaligned models, where interpretability is worse every 6 months, is incredibly dangerous.

I think the concerns about regulatory capture are warranted, but I see so many comments parroting the "evil Anthropic and OpenAI" viewpoints that they are missing some of the real, valid concerns and dangers. I think this tweet by David Kokotajlo makes some good points on how to tell if regulations are being "cheated" for the purposes of regulatory capture or if they really are actually pacing the frontier: https://x.com/DKokotajlo/status/2099185129533186438

Yeah it's either that or the scientists are right about their field of study. Absolutely shocking and depressing how many people are willing to trust this Capitalist Realism hunch over the world in front of their eyes.

That is generally how regulatory-capture works. As silly as I personally think LLM hype is, the "AI" business posture choices with several Trillion dollars in debt on the books has very few options after hyper-scaling/sandbagging loses traction. =3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

So kind of like how the US figured out how to test and maintain nuclear weapons without an actual explosion, then sought to ban nuclear testing by explosion.