Washington has made a huge mess.
Even some people on the right see this, like Dean W Ball, who helped the current Trump administration establish its AI policy
What the White House did seems arbitrary. And maybe even corrupt
It doesn’t help that Friday’s decision helped OpenAI, whose President, Greg Brockman, is a huge Trump donor.
It doesn’t help that Friday’s decision helped Jared Kushner’s brother Josh, who is a big investor in OpenAI.
It doesn’t help that Friday’s decision helped Amazon (and was sparked by a report from Amazon), a huge investor in OpenAI. It doesn’t help that it indirectly helped Jeff Bezos, who has ties to the administration.
And it doesn’t help that Pete Hegseth seems to have a personal grudge against Anthropic:
Which makes the whole thing feel petty.
To be sure, Anthropic contributed to the situation. The Twitterverse is full of memes mocking Anthropic like these
Anthropic certainly played a role both by overhyping Mythos and by alienating the White House.
But it is the job of the US government to be the adult in the room, and to make decisions that are sound for the nation.
Effectively — and ironically — they have actually vindicated Amodei’s claim that some AI might need to be regulated and might require export controls.
The ridiculous but fashionable idea of zero-regulation around AI, made popular by folks like Marc Andreessen, is (rightly) dead in the water. After Friday, the White House can no credibly say that no model ever should be regulated. The White House has acknowledged that some models might be risky; now we are just arguing about the details.
What Washington must do now is make those calls in a clear and transparent way, in a way that doesn’t reek of corruption.
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The White House’s first effort at tamping down the firestorm seems to have been to have been a sort of half-apology. David Sacks put out a long statement on X explaining (from his perspective) what happened. Unfortunately. his statement is (a) desperately vague about how serious the problem was, or what exactly the problem was, whether anything was affected, or whether the problem was unique to Fable/Mythos and so on. There was no real justification for the speed at which a decision with such lasting consequences was made.
What really comes through above all else is impatience and ego. The White House wanted its way, didn’t get it instantaneously, and attempted to impose its will immediately — giving Anthropic almost no time to address the issues. (Why less than 24 hours rather than say 72?)
It looks like they were looking for an excuse to screw Anthropic, and blind to the larger consequences.
Thue rushed and seemingly unprincipled decision will leave the rest of the world rushing towards “sovereign AI” (made for example by European or Canadian companies) and even Chinese AI, rather than deal with the uncertainty in the US, in which any model can be shut down at any time without warning and without clear explanation.
Moreover, because the construction of the order targeted foreigners — even eminent ones who have long lived and worked in the US such as Andrej Karpathy – it may lead to a massive brain drain.
And it will slow down one of the leading US AI labs.
It is a feast for Xi Jinping.
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As Anthropic put it on Friday : “the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts. This action does not adhere to those principles.”
Kevin Frazier of the libertarian Cato Institute echoed this saying in a blog yesterday, saying
“Transparency, fairness, clarity, and evidence-driven enforcement should be core components of AI governance. So long as AI policy decisions are driven by a few actors taking action behind closed doors in response to non-public reports, we will be far short of that standard.”
That’s what Ball is also trying to say, and what I am trying to say.
At this point, there is no turning back. Governments going forward will have to consider which deployments are unsafe, and block those that are.
But they must do this transparently, and with fairness, and clarity, based on technical facts, and without the appearance of corruption.
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The best thing I read today came from the California Congressmen Ro Khanna, who both distills the problem and points to what I think is the best solution is (in line with what I have long recommended):
An independent agency. Not last minute, opaque decisions made by a small cabal that hint at favoritism and corruption.
Without that, the US AI industry is lost.
There are no adults in the White House. Worse, the vanishingly few adults in Congress and the Supreme Court have nowhere near the numbers they need to be able to regain control of either branch, regardless of electoral outcome.
Unless we step outside our usual role of "vote every two years", this nightmare will never end.
Unfortunately, to "lose favor with the White House" if you ever had it, one only has to (a) stand by your oath to the Constitution and to "the people," (b) do your job accordingly, (c) tell the truth (speak truth to power) (d) tend to your conscience; (e) don't be intimidated or bribed by powerful buffoons and people who own big oil and gas companies and (f) don't pay to play.