I think this is very clearly a regulatory capture play. Anthropic/OpenAI/X see that there's very little moat around training (especially with distillation) so they want the government to build the moat for them.

It's also worth remembering that there is zero percent chance that entities like the US military are going to be pacing anything. What Amodei and his ilk are aiming for is a highly regulated industry where they control the political barriers and the ability to sell SOTA model access to state actors that have a monopoly on violence. It's the worst possible situation for consumers and citizens. Thankfully I don't think they can put the cat back in the bag and Chinese and other models will keep progressing as a counterbalance to the techno-fascism Anthropic is aiming for.

There are many people who have some sort of half-baked "regulatory capture" theory. I find these theories kind of implausible. No US regulation will meaningfully stop open-weight Chinese models. At best you'll get legal restrictions for particular US industries which are especially risk-aware. The CEOs of those industries will counter-lobby to be able to use whatever model they want. Public opinion will most likely come down on the side of removing restrictions. Since there's plenty of public attention on this issue, achieving meaningful regulatory capture will be difficult.

this is such a simpler explanation of what's happening than the "multiple appendages with different narratives" argument the author is making...