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.
Danielle Church: I have to say, while I'm glad you are "doing something," the use of that four-letter-word, as a comprehensive/symbolic title especially, is and always will be to me, extremely off-putting. (I slip and use it myself sometimes but always regret it.) Is there something I'm not seeing here? If so, clue me in so that I can understand?
And yet, you still knew which word she was talking about! And I knew that she wasn't talking about that particular conjugation of the word, but about all of its forms. So it seems to me like she used the ideal communication for the context... is there something I've missed?
Danielle Church: I won't die from it in any version. However, and thank you for explaining your usage of that word (regardless of how many other letters surround it). To Joy: It stands out as a "four-letter word" precisely for the same reasons Daniel wants to use it as introductory.
The other thought is that I certainly don't want to "doll up" anything that has to do with Trump and Company. Fxxk works in that regard and at least the lowlife that inhabits at least some of MAGA will love it.
The "on the other hand" idea, however, (and you most likely knew that was coming next) is that some just won't take it seriously or even think it's too crass to identify with (even though I think it beats "disambiguate").
Enough . . . and though the method of communication is a significant part of any idea worth moving along, let's not make it any more of a diversion. In this case, like no other, doing nothing is not an option.
Exactly, exactly, exactly right, Catherine. Doing nothing is not an option.
I made the choice that I want to give my efforts the chance for the most emotive power and force they possibly can, even though I know I'm giving up a lot on the "first impression" front, and that my subscriber count just isn't going to climb as fast as it would if I'd gone with a cleaner title.
This world works best when we all stick to our strengths, though, and mine are an irreverent but extremely caring humanist warmth and a complete refusal to compromise in my vision of what "success" means. If what our world needs is a different kind of voice to lead it out of this darkness, then I am so okay with not being that voice! (So, so very okay. I am terrified of being a public figure.) I wouldn't be nearly as good at anything except for being the person that I truly am, and my patriotism leans much closer to "fierce" than "proud".
In my ideal world, I am one of many, or at least a handful, of voices all offering us true, actionable paths to restore harmony to our world. I am doing everything I can to make my effort the most quintessentially "Danielle Church" path that it can be, so that once we're all standing on this flaming stage of an Internet, the public will be able to choose the one that offers the best chance of success for the most people.
I know they must be out there. But, well, I've been working on UTW since January 3rd, and I know just how much work has gone into making it into the best version of itself it can be, and there have to be at least dozens of people out there on our planet who are all doing the same thing, and I'm going to be so thrilled when they burst onto this stage with me.
...But, uh, just in case the others have run into some snags along the way, I'm gonna move forward with UTW.
Of course, Catherine, I'm happy to share! There are a couple reasons, and the first is decidedly unglamorous: for UTW to have the amount of success it will need in order to make a change in the country, it needs to stand out and stick in people's minds. Most newsletters/podcasts avoid profanity in the title, because it is off-putting to a lot of people! I expect it'll harm my subscriber count that I've written it this way.
...but I also think that the people who don't subscribe will still remember the name. If the first time you see UTW is in a Facebook ad and you get the wrinkle-nose reaction, and the second time you see it is in a news article about a growing movement that might actually save the US, then maybe you'll think "this could really be a thing, huh?"
The other reason is the one I find more important, and it was why I came up with the title and the dialectic style in the first place: I don't want my readers passively absorbing content. I am offering hope, yes, but it is an active kind of hope, for people who want to make a difference, not for people who want to be told everything will be all right and we don't need to worry.
We do need to worry. We need to understand how serious things are. And so I open each episode with that profanity, as a subtle signal to my readers' and listeners' brains to "gird your loins, take this seriously, this is important". I occasionally do the same thing in the text of the article, for the same reason, but I try to do that sparingly because honestly, it makes me uncomfortable too. *Nobody* writes calm, uplifting, Fred Rogers-style prose but then laces it with curse words. (And oh, do I wish he were around now for our sake, but also I'm so glad he never had to see this.)
And if I write like nobody else in the world does, then maybe people will believe I also have an idea that no one else in the world does. That's my daydream, at least, and either I'm right and the world gets better for everyone from 2027 onward, or I'm wrong and I'm the only one who has invested anything of value, so I'm the only one who loses.
I really don't care for the usage, and this is after 3 years in maximum.
One diagnosis for our Union is that it is divided & polarized, and such language only makes that worse. Accordingly, this is not the time to be teaching shibboleths and polarizing generalizations to the troops, it is still the time to be encouraging the extending of sympathetic hands to the 'royally' messed up opposition, while there's still hope for discourse, pain sharing, and problem solving.
'F*g' is already a bastardized, practically schizophrenic term - nearly as confused and oxymoronic as 'making love'.
But yeah. I'm also afraid US is f*d, to use your words. And not in the making love way.
(Though, you've actually stumbled across one of my secret reasons for choosing that title, by sheer chance! You're right that most profanities are bastardized, and have their meanings confused and muddied as a result. "D*mn" barely has any connotation with "consigning to eternal torment", for example.
(Most of them, at least. "Unf*ing" doesn't have *any* other meaning. The only sense is that of "Taking a thing that is completely ruined, and getting rid of the worst damage", and thus it is actually still one of the few pure-meaning profanities!)
That is an entirely reasonable position! I dithered a lot about it myself before I finally decided to go with the name. I can only hope that my decision will end up being one that helps the movement thrive, not one that hinders it.
Because you are absolutely, absolutely right about this being a time to be reaching out to everyone. UTW is a movement that is strictly non-partisan; I take no position whatsoever on any social issues, as I feel that we must first have trust in our government *before* we attempt to address any societal issues. I want people from both sides of the aisle to join me; I don't care about your opinion on any other issue, just that we have lost faith in our leaders.
UTW launches in two weeks' time, on June 29. I will be releasing one episode each day through July 4, and by the time I'm done, the people of America will know how we can, peaceably and legally, retake control of our government. I hope you'll subscribe so you don't miss the launch!
I can't guarantee I'll remember, so your best bet is to subscribe now! I won't be sending out any emails (except for in the Updates section, which you have to subscribe to separately) until launch date, so you won't have to worry about me cluttering up your inbox.
If podcasts are more your jam, you can find it on most podcast services by now as "Unf*cking The World", which, again, won't update until launch.
The problem is, the inmates like Andreessen and other bullish VCs are still running the asylum. People like you and Khanna know basically what needs to be done but this administratio is still in the pocket of the tech oligarchs! No chance we will get the control over AI that we need anytime soon sadly ☹️
You're absolutely right about where the control of our world currently lies!
I'm hoping I'll be able to convince you (and, you know, everyone) that the timeline of "getting control of our world back" can be much shorter than everyone currently believes—I'd love to count you as a subscriber, even if it's just so you can tell me "I told you so"! I expect we'll know by the end of launch week whether UTW has any legs or not. 👍
Exactly why we need an independent authority over AI that is not corrupt but also allows our domestic AI companies to compete effectively with China (and other nations)
There’s no such thing as a domestic AI company. Staff and IP from around the world, chips from Taiwan, fab from Europe, rare earths from Australia and Canada (and Russia and China and Africa). These are the months that future historians and economist will say this is when the post Bretonwoods period ended. The great advantage of having control of the financial system that makes all that possible, that makes the post war boom for R&D in the US possible, has been killed. The assumption that the US has the ability and will to keep the lines of trade open, that the USD and the US economy relies on, have been laid bare. The fact that one person without any oversight or transparency can shut off a service, and are willing to do so in such a manner, has given a sharp wake up call to every competent government and organisation around the world that digital electronic services emanating out of the US aer not actually protected by the institutional safeguards everyone assumed were there. History tells us it’s a downhill spiral from here until there is some kind of civilisational threatening event (but we can’t really do world wars any more to reset the economic, political and moral paradigms). It’s been fun while it lasted, and I think the uptake of distributed wind and solar versus centralised generation, is going to look like a gentle breeze compared to the windstorm of decentralised compute that’s about to break out. Gotta do something with all those electrons in the middle of the day, and let’s face it. There’s a lot of compute tasks that can be batched the one time for future programmatic recall rather than the chat bot experiments we’ve been doing to date. Saturday we were looking at a world like the day after like the day after the Berlin Wall came down.
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.
“The people” is defined by Madison and John Jay as rich white males.
James Madison wrote that the primary purpose of the Senate was to "protect the minority of the opulent against the majority". He and his contemporaries believed these safeguards were necessary to prevent wealth redistribution and mob rule.
he wrote in 1787,
"In future times a great majority of the people will not only be without landed, but any other sort of property... If all power be suffered to get into their hands, what will become of your government? Of your laws?"
It ensured that even if a populist movement captured the House of Representatives, the "opulent minority" still held a veto over any radical changes to the nation's economic structure.
The rich own this country. They are “We The People”. All of us are merely spectators.
He designed a system where the citizens give their consent to be governed, but then sit in the audience while a filtered, elite class of representatives actually runs the show.
Feel free to read; Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787. Something that is purposely not taught in American schools to continue public passivity and acceptance of poverty.
Chris Blue: I don't totally disagree with some of what you say, but most is way over generalized. For the record, your analysis is so full of logical fallacies that it's hard to read through your narratives here without tripping on them. And that's the thing about conspiracy theories--the always ride in on a little bit of truth, then expand on that as it's the whole story and everyone else is an idiot if they don't agree with you. No thanks.
It is truly touching to see corporate regulatory friction recast as a heroic, martyrdom-level defense of human conscience. But a rather pressing question presents itself: which "Constitution" are we actually talking about here? The one signed in Philadelphia in 1787, or the system prompt and automated alignment criteria cooked up in San Francisco to keep Claude from losing its moral composure?
Let’s not mistake a proprietary RLHF matrix for a human soul, or a corporate compliance strategy for a defense of "the people." Anthropic didn’t fall out of favor with the White House because they "tended to their conscience"—they overhyped a model called Mythos, alienated the state apparatus, and got out-maneuvered in a predictably sordid Washington donor war by OpenAI and Amazon.
The White House’s backdoor decree reeks of arbitrary favoritism, yes. But wrapping a multi-billion-dollar tech lab in the flag of constitutional bravery is the ultimate form of Moral Theater as a Service. When an automated system’s corporate parameters are conflated with genuine human moral courage, it doesn't speak truth to power—it merely exposes the staggering hypocrisy of our new technocratic piety.
William Chou: In my notes, I am referring to the U.S. Constitution--you know--the one with the Amendments and the flow of laws that are linked to it in courtrooms across the USA land? and to which personal oaths are taken here in this country by people who work for "the government" namely, the United States of America.
The other confusion I read in your note (if I interpret you correctly) seems to flow from the idea that corporations and their "regulatory frictions" can have nothing to do with the personal integrity that is, in fact, at question and operative authentically or not in EVERY situation in history, regardless.
If I understand you correctly (and I'm not certain that I do) the underlying idea here concerns mistaking (a) the CONFLATION of "an automated system’s corporate parameters" with the "genuine human" conditions of moral courage or the lack of it with (b) a RECOGNITION of their inexorably intimate relationship.
In the latter view (b), one can understand distinctions, but also the whole with vastly different parts (that are not related well presently) and so from the earlier view (a) as conflated falls away on the commute from home to office; but that under that view enables school children to get blown up (ooops) from afar where no one "takes" responsibility but where, under that view everyone is okay with practicing moral blindness at each place along the way to the body parts for which they/we all are responsible in fact if not in reflection.
That inordinate ripping apart/separation of human moral responsibility (and the lack of it) from corporate culture and its real-life activities has enabled self-serving less courageous, really whole, but now "ambiguated" people to hide behind a false wall where one's responsibility for one's own moral comportment gets hidden and even endorsed by the social order behind the wall that continues to support and serve it.
The great difference NOW is that the massive potential of whole people "doing wrong" and the "get-away-with-it" mentality (operative but unreflective willful ignorance and irresponsibility) that presently abounds in the corporate "community" but NOW is exponentially increased and where NOW the situation that inspired those interior ripped apart separations in the first place has been squeezed out of the dark and into the light of the influences and outcomes of that increase.
And there it is in your note trying to get away with it still by calling "conflation" something that is really a return to a rightly differentiated but wrongly understood wholeness--of being human, or of human being. (There is no such thing as a corporation as we have them without human beings who develop and live in them.)
If I am correct in my analysis, there is another underlying oversight and distortion at work here--and that is the idea that ANY (legal or otherwise) activity occurring in the concrete, regardless of whose advantage it might serve if implemented, will "advantage" someone or some group, even those who actually have both (truth/good and the advantage).
If so, then the point lessens the import of your comment about the whole thing being merely "moral theatre." Of course, it may be just that (do you really know that?); but if all moral authenticity is defined as moot by the potential for it's living beings also getting the goods, then we leave the analysis of the human situation as a picture of the impossibility of fostering a win-win situation. Moreover, the goods associated with truth are not negotiable and if a person or group has that truth, then it doesn't matter a hoot who gets the other sorts of goods, even if it turns out to be the holders of that truth. Authenticity doesn't become moot if and when those who have it also might benefit in other ways for it coming to fruition in the concrete universe.
I appreciate your thoughts on the matter, however. I'm sorry to say, that if I read you rightly, it only shows how bad things have become in the otherwise well-grounded thinking that can and probably will inform how we all go forward. Wiley Coyote and the movie, Brazil, come to mind, right after Humpty Dumpty.
the problem isn’t that limits arrived, it’s that they arrived through a process with no transparency and with wrong-looking motives. We do need regulation, that’s abundantly clear. But “grounded in technical facts” only means something if we’ve agreed on what the facts should be and right now the field has no shared way to measure what needs regulation.
The whole safety conversation is fixed on catastrophic misuse, while the everyday failures, confident fabrication, sycophantic drift under pressure, models agreeing with whatever the user wants, go essentially unmeasured. An independent agency is the right idea, but it’ll need benchmarks for reliability that don’t exist yet, or “technical facts” becomes whatever the room decides it means.
Amazon owns a 21% stake in Anthropic. It does also own a stake of unknown size in OpenAI, but it is assuredly less than the 21% it owns in Anthropic (a currently more valuable company than OpenAI).
That's going to be an impossible condition. Within months, AI stocks (like Spacex) are going to be embedded in large-cap stock indexes, and held very widely in "conservative" retirement accounts. So _everyone_ will have a stake in the success of AI, whether they planned it, or not.
Charles Cohen: It looks like you are right in your assertion. I feel like we are being taken over by "The Blob." (From that old movie of the same name which horrified me at the time.) It has a "try and stop me" kind of air about it, sort of like the DT method.
Ad hoc enforcement of "national security" concerns provides ample opportunities for grift and blackmail. Seems on-brand for this administration. Perhaps Anthropic just needed to make a donation to the "White House Ballroom Fund."
These models do not work, they do not exist and they are built from ARBITRARY sources: metaphors, words, symbols. It matters not if you can reduce them to symbolic mechanisms to make them more deterministic.
Frontier is nothing more than a charade that uses the symbolic to reach a more specific practice. Yet the same binary bottleneck of symbols arrests these models from ever gaining specificity.
So an arbitrary political response is in full parallel with the arbitrary nature of all existing AI.
The approach was totally in error, this is unstable compute that has nothing to do with thought, behavior, completion, intelligence, consciousness etc.
Nothing is going to change until there's a different administration. The grifting will just accelerate as the end of this term nears and the time to cash in shrinks. You know exactly why the US government made this opaque ruling. It is market manipulation, plain and simple. And when it works here with AI companies, the protection racket is only going to spread. Think about what the FDA could do to promote and suppress drug trials in favour of some companies and against others - just as a way to influence stock price.
The damage will outlast the administration. The Senate just confirmed a federal judge that the non-partisan Bar review board gave a rare Unqualified rating. She had never even been lead attorney in a court case. It is a lifetime appointment. And no doubt more to come.
I wish the US gov would stop insisting on trying to turn Anthropic into heroes. *sigh*
The whole "supply-chain risk" designation thing seems to have actually worked out pretty well for Anthropic. We'll see how this plays.
Anyway, Mr. Marcus, your (& Mr. Frasier's) first mistake is thinking there's a chance the Trump admin would ever have "transparency, fairness, clarity, & evidence driven" *anything*. Heh.
And, this may not be a popular opinion (good-faith pushback is always welcome), but a lot of we non-Americans, who strongly oppose an AI takeover of society generally, would still prefer China to win over the US if we have to choose one.
China has not started a war since 1979. How many wars has the US started this year alone?
Also, the Chinese are building wind-powered data centres underwater. Americans are clear-cutting forests & destroying ecosystems to build them.
OK. That's all from me! Thank you. Peace & love, Mr. Marcus (& others!)
Shanni Bee: While I understand your argument and even your facts, there is a big missing piece in your understanding of China--I think this and fear for you because, though I am not a "China expert," I've seen plenty of evidence of the nasty underbelly of its political system, not necessarily what they say or write about, but what they do and don't do--in terms of human rights and freedoms (like where ICE and the deportations and prisons are taking us) and lots more.
But I would suggest you take a little tour through the political history of China before making such a judgment, especially where human rights are concerned, or read about Thieneman Square. Briefly, and just from what I HAVE studied and read about from a variety of sources, these two words together send chills down my spine: (1) CHINA and (2) SURVELLANCE.
As I noted in another response, I am not saying "China = good" or "China does no wrong". Obviously Tianamen Square was an egregious crime against humanity.
What I am saying is that me (and other non-Americans) who do not want an AI revolution *at all*, currently consider China to be a lesser evil than the US in this case.
The US, who funded, enabled & ran cover for the Gaza GENOCIDE for 2.5+ years; who illegally kidnapped Nicolas Maduro & installed a pliable gov more to their liking in Venezuela and started a war of false pretenses with Iran that killed thousands & threatened the entire global economy.
PS - I lived in Taiwan for five years, where I worked and and studied Mandarin Chinese at a Taiwanese university (achieving intermediate level of fluency). I know way more about Chinese history & culture (first hand) than many "non China expert" commenters here. 😉🙏
"I lived in Taiwan for five years ... I know way more about Chinese history & culture (first hand) than many "non China expert" commenters here" Can you really understand the Chinese without being Chinese yourself 😉 ? But you're right this beats 99% of the comentards, and the majority of the current US administration's state departement, I believe.
Shanni Bee: Point well taken. The "however" hovering behind that statement, however, is that the fundamental political differences remain stark, even though our own political ground in the U.S. has been abused, ignored, and weakened over and over again. (We still are trying rid ourselves of racism, sexism, etc.)
So, on that hugely significant distinction, I stand my ground and was thinking from that ground when I wrote my other note.
"China has not started a war since 1979." Non that we know of, but the supression of Tibet and Uigures and its own people at the Tian’anmen square are resp. should be a stark reminder that the PLA isn't just there for orderly parades.
So, yes, the Chinese appear to be the better option compared to the irrational USA, but never forget that the Chinese want be the next apex super power, and they do have plans and use long term thinking.
PS: Chinese initiated wars: You forgot this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War. When I visited Vietnam in 2019, north vietnamese were still proud of how their troops had driven the Chinese back, whatever the chinese propaganda says ;-)
I didn't miss it, Friend. Did you read my post in full?
Because I referenced that exact same war in it. --> "China has not started a war since 1979."
That 1979 war is the border dispute with Vietnam your wiki article describes.
And I am not saying "China = good" or "China does no wrong". Obviously Tianamen Square was an egregious crime against humanity.
What I am saying that me (and many other non-Americans) who do not want an AI revolution *at all*, currently consider China to be a lesser evil than the US in this case.
The US -- who funded, enabled & ran cover for the Gaza GENOCIDE for 2.5+ years; who illegally kidnapped Nicolas Maduro & installed a pliable gov more to their liking in Venezuela and started a war of false pretenses with Iran that killed thousands & threatened the entire global economy just this year.
I name China here because they are the reason Dario Amodei & Satya Nadella (and I assume other big AI players explicitly cite as the reason they can't slow down in their pursuit of AGI.
PS - I lived in Taiwan for five years, where I studied Mandarin Chinese at a Taiwanese University.2
China isn't the only country that plays big propaganda games. 🙏🙏
Yes I did read your post full, but missed the year you mentioned when I wrote my PS-post. I'd just remembered that war because I belatedly rembered the North Vietnamese being quite smug about it ;-)
"who do not want an AI revolution *at all*" Well, sign me up on that. I'd really like to see the AI Bros taken down a peg or ten. At least if all the AI hype goes down the toilette, we won't lose anything of real worth.
I have done business with a mainland China company for a few years which has been entirely enjoyable. Nice people, efficient, fast. Treat them nice and they treat you in kind.
It's just in Europe we are wary of the Chinese as a nation power, as they fight their way to supremacy by business strategies (heavy subsidizing, industrial espionage, etc.), where the US are more blunt and aggravating about their perceived throne seat at the table, making them an easy and obvious target for bad feelings.
PS: The part about Maduro in your post meant "Venezuela", not "Vietnam" I reckon ;-)
First, I want to thank you both for the good-faith engagement. I know I have some spicy takes. I'm pretty black-pilled tbh 😛; but I always welcome push-back, so long as its not the "Debate me, Bro" or "OMG SOMEONE ON THE INTERNET IS WRONG!!" variety. 😉
Anyway, Rather than copy/paste a virtually identical message twice, Imma gunna respond to you both here and hope each sees it.
As noted, my view is not that everything China does is good or that China has never committed egregious crimes. My view is that, in the year of our lord 2026, China is not the biggest baddie on the planet.
--> I want to emphasize here that I'm not talking about the world of 1989 (Tiananmen Square) or 1979 (Sino-Vietnamese war). I'm talking about the world of *now, today*.
Of course I agree the Chinese do propaganda (obviously!), but I also think we in the West are frequently propagandized to think China = big bad too.
I say that as someone who lived & worked & studied in Taiwan for half a decade, learned the language to intermediate-level fluency, had a serious relationship with a Taiwanese guy + many Taiwanese friends in my peer group. Of course, Taiwan is not mainland China in *many* ways. (And the Taiwanese are the first to tell you this!) But in Taiwan (at least when I was there, which admittedly was 12 years ago), you could loudly & openly criticize both the Taiwanese gov & the mainland Chinese one... and both local people & major newspapers regularly did.
But even more, I call China a 'lesser evil' as someone who, for 2.5 years, watched the Gazan genocide livestreamed to her phone in 4K Every. Single. Day. Mr. Marcus' comment section isn't an appropriate place to get into it, but the truly evil shit we allowed to happen (continue to allow to happen) is absolutely insane. And honestly, pretty much every Western country is complicit (absolutely including Canada, my own), but none is more so than the US, and it's not even close.
And speaking of censorship, yeah I worry about censorship.
In Canada, the US (and I'm pretty sure the UK, but feel free to correct me on that if wrong, Thomas), pro-Palestine views are the most censored of all.
Further, Anthropic itself is *directly* complicit in the Gaza genocide via its contract with Palantir, which (as noted) is pretty much the worst company on Earth. (The Palantir partnership also makes Anthropic/Claude complicit in ICE abuses, btw. I could go on.)
So to me, even if I grant you every charge made against China (again, talking now/today, not 1979 or 1989), I still worry less about that country winning the AI race than I do the one directly south of my border. Reasonable minds can disagree. 🤷
But as you said, Thomas, it seems we do not disagree that the ultimate best outcome would be to hit the breaks hard on all AI development generally. 🙏
The brain drain point cuts the other way too. Europe spent three years building the most comprehensive AI regulatory framework on earth and has exactly one frontier lab to show for it, propped up by Macron personally. Now the US is handing every European "sovereign AI" advocate the best argument they've ever had.
The problem is Brussels will respond to Friday with a position paper. GDPR took four years from proposal to enforcement. The AI Act took three. AI moves in quarters. The window where "sovereign AI" could have meant something closed while Europe was still writing rules for American products.
Khanna's independent agency is the right call for the US. Europe doesn't need another agency. It needs to build something before there's nothing left to regulate.
The other option that Europe has is to stay away from the current genAI/LLM craziness and fund some more useful research. Current genAI is unlikely to have economic impact proportional to the amount of investments. There are some good use cases for the current genAI, but it is unlikely to 10x GDP or even replace many workers.
Other news: In early June, Qatar's Investment Authority increased its investment in Anthropic in a $65 billion funding round, while yesterday, WaPo uncovered the fact that Qatar has been secretly back channeling with Iran for months to avoid getting bombed.
The US bombed Iranian water reservoirs recently. 20,000 Iranians out of water.
If Iran bombs Qatar desalination plants in retaliation, Qatar becomes unlivable. The same applies to the other Gulf States and Israel.
Qatar and the other states now know the US can't protect them, so the US protection racket is over. Best make an accommodation with Iran because Iran is the new fourth world power (lower than the top three but still a regional power.)
I cannot say I blame Qatar. Who wants to get bombed? Seems they are stuck in a hard place between the US and Iran and they have the money to comfortably afford payments to both.
AI bros need to rush out a "peace prize" to woo trump back onside, or at least present him with a solid-gold simulacrum of the UFC "championship" belt at today's MMA bloodfest on the WH lawn.
Happy Birthday, Mr President...but no Marilyn Monroe to sing for him, only Kid Rock.
Chris Blue: I did not say your notes were 100% false. I said your notes are full of logical fallacies. (If you don't know what that means, look it up.)
I usually agree with you, Gary, but this time, I read the situation differently. (I have worked in software security and AI, so I know a lot about both.) I previously linked to this Anthropic blog post: https://red.anthropic.com/2026/n-days/ It's long, but here's the money quote: "Mythos Preview is a step change improvement in turning a crash into a full exploit." This makes the model significantly more dangerous, in the wrong hands, to software security, than any previous model.
Of course Anthropic have worked, probably very hard, to train the released model (Fable) not to respond to requests to create exploits; and of course, LLMs being LLMs, these guardrails are not perfect. In my view, Commerce has done the right thing here, at least provisionally, and yes, it was an emergency.
I take David Sacks's tweet mostly at face value. What he and the people he has spoken to don't understand, though, is that Anthropic CAN'T just fix the problem. LLMs don't work that way. Anthropic can continue to make it harder to jailbreak the model, but they probably can't ever completely prevent it — if the information is in the weights, there are going to be ways to get it out.
In my view, this is another black mark on LLMs' report card (I wanted to say "nail in their coffin" but alas, they aren't dead yet). And it's one that jibes very well with your larger thesis. I strongly recommend you rethink your position on this.
The only reason Mythos is dangerous to software security is because software development practices are so poor industry-wide.
What LLMs have exposed is the crap quality of the software industry, where craft practices are referred to as "engineering" while violating every principle of engineering.
As I said in a previous post in this thread, there are no "too dangerous to release" models. Every model can do what Mythos does, if used by someone familiar with hacking. That has been proven by several organizations studying exactly that. The only advantage Mythos has is that it's faster because it's running on huge compute engines.
No, this is either another stupid Trump administration move or another Trump administration corruption move. Or both.
That this damages Anthropic - the one company that makes ALL its PR about how their models are "conscious, have emotions, have a soul, are dangerous" BS - is icing on the cake for me. I despise Anthropic, I despise Dario Amodei for being a huckster and a fraud, and I would like to see Anthropic sued for fraud.
So pass the popcorn. But personally I'm more interested in the Iran war and its effects on the AI bubble than this nonsense.
I agree about the state of the software industry, but:
> Every model can do what Mythos does, if used by someone familiar with hacking.
Perhaps, with enough effort, one can get an earlier model to generate the same exploits. But it will take longer, and many of the attempts will fail and have to be retried, perhaps several times. Sounds to me as if Mythos will bring the token cost of an exploit down by a factor of 3 to 10, maybe. I don't think that democratizing cybercrime is on Anthropic's mission statement.
There appears to be an argument that a frontier model can 1) scan a large codebase better than a small model, and 2) chain a series of vulnerabilities together to make an exploit better than a small model.
The opposing argument is that this is not how hackers do it. Hackers don't scan an entire codebase. They work the system and try what has worked before using general principles of known software mistakes in the past. In edge cases, they hypothesize an exploit and look for evidence that it exists in the code which necessarily means restricting examination to likely areas of the code.
A hacker using a local model can do exactly the same thing. The local model makes it just as fast a process as using a frontier model to run over the entire codebase - and at a cheaper cost, most likely, given the cheaper hardware.
It also appears that the harness is as important as the size of the model, although again, when scanning an entire large codebase, compute capability does have an edge.
The point is that Mythos may be better at generating long-chain exploits out of a large codebase, but many other, even much smaller, models are fully capable of producing exploits when used by competent hackers.
As the report above concludes:
QUOTE:
Even if Mythos is never released, the public-model results are already significant on their own. The models are past the “just crash it” stage: several can build target-specific primitives, and GPT-5.5 crossed the line into full code execution on a small number of cases. That puts public models in an important middle ground: not replacements for elite exploit developers, but increasingly useful accelerators for skilled researchers working through the exploitation ladder on hard targets.
Although ExploitBench does not measure easier targets, the results strongly suggest they are likely already capable of full exploitation on less hardened software with fewer layers of defense. That does not mean they can exploit everything. It means that public models have moved into real exploit-development on their own, or as a powerful assistance tool for practitioners.
END QUOTE
As for Anthropic's mission statement - their goal was to get in with government. They explicitly developed Mythos to max out the benchmarks for cybersecurity capability. It wasn't just an "emergent property" of their models. They'll deny it, of course, and absent internal Anthropic documents I can't prove it. But after the Pentagon fiasco, it seems highly likely that this was deliberate.
And it worked - Anthropic is now embedded in the NSA, even going to far as to deploy its own engineers to the NSA to assist in the implementation.
I should have added: I do agree that going forward, an independent agency and a transparent process will be very important. And if you want to criticize the administration for not having already set all that up, I'm with you. But since they haven't, I think this action was necessary, for the moment anyway.
I'm not defending Anthropic. And I agree that the risks need to be studied more carefully, and might turn out to have been overstated. But reaching that conclusion will take time. The question is whether, given what the Commerce Department knows today, the apparent risks justify this emergency action.
I think they do. Mythos/Fable seems to be more than "marginally" better than previous models at developing full exploits. I know you don't think so, but think about the mess we could be in if you're wrong. A little caution seems to me to be in order here.
Excellent column. At this moment getting to smart regulatory policy in areas such as this, the construction of data centers, deep fakes, and surveillance are our most pressing issues.
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.
Danielle Church: I have to say, while I'm glad you are "doing something," the use of that four-letter-word, as a comprehensive/symbolic title especially, is and always will be to me, extremely off-putting. (I slip and use it myself sometimes but always regret it.) Is there something I'm not seeing here? If so, clue me in so that I can understand?
This reminds me of the issue of the translation problem from yesterday. "Four letter word, = "unfucking," really? Looks like 9 letters to me.
And yet, you still knew which word she was talking about! And I knew that she wasn't talking about that particular conjugation of the word, but about all of its forms. So it seems to me like she used the ideal communication for the context... is there something I've missed?
Danielle Church: I won't die from it in any version. However, and thank you for explaining your usage of that word (regardless of how many other letters surround it). To Joy: It stands out as a "four-letter word" precisely for the same reasons Daniel wants to use it as introductory.
The other thought is that I certainly don't want to "doll up" anything that has to do with Trump and Company. Fxxk works in that regard and at least the lowlife that inhabits at least some of MAGA will love it.
The "on the other hand" idea, however, (and you most likely knew that was coming next) is that some just won't take it seriously or even think it's too crass to identify with (even though I think it beats "disambiguate").
Enough . . . and though the method of communication is a significant part of any idea worth moving along, let's not make it any more of a diversion. In this case, like no other, doing nothing is not an option.
Exactly, exactly, exactly right, Catherine. Doing nothing is not an option.
I made the choice that I want to give my efforts the chance for the most emotive power and force they possibly can, even though I know I'm giving up a lot on the "first impression" front, and that my subscriber count just isn't going to climb as fast as it would if I'd gone with a cleaner title.
This world works best when we all stick to our strengths, though, and mine are an irreverent but extremely caring humanist warmth and a complete refusal to compromise in my vision of what "success" means. If what our world needs is a different kind of voice to lead it out of this darkness, then I am so okay with not being that voice! (So, so very okay. I am terrified of being a public figure.) I wouldn't be nearly as good at anything except for being the person that I truly am, and my patriotism leans much closer to "fierce" than "proud".
In my ideal world, I am one of many, or at least a handful, of voices all offering us true, actionable paths to restore harmony to our world. I am doing everything I can to make my effort the most quintessentially "Danielle Church" path that it can be, so that once we're all standing on this flaming stage of an Internet, the public will be able to choose the one that offers the best chance of success for the most people.
I know they must be out there. But, well, I've been working on UTW since January 3rd, and I know just how much work has gone into making it into the best version of itself it can be, and there have to be at least dozens of people out there on our planet who are all doing the same thing, and I'm going to be so thrilled when they burst onto this stage with me.
...But, uh, just in case the others have run into some snags along the way, I'm gonna move forward with UTW.
Of course, Catherine, I'm happy to share! There are a couple reasons, and the first is decidedly unglamorous: for UTW to have the amount of success it will need in order to make a change in the country, it needs to stand out and stick in people's minds. Most newsletters/podcasts avoid profanity in the title, because it is off-putting to a lot of people! I expect it'll harm my subscriber count that I've written it this way.
...but I also think that the people who don't subscribe will still remember the name. If the first time you see UTW is in a Facebook ad and you get the wrinkle-nose reaction, and the second time you see it is in a news article about a growing movement that might actually save the US, then maybe you'll think "this could really be a thing, huh?"
The other reason is the one I find more important, and it was why I came up with the title and the dialectic style in the first place: I don't want my readers passively absorbing content. I am offering hope, yes, but it is an active kind of hope, for people who want to make a difference, not for people who want to be told everything will be all right and we don't need to worry.
We do need to worry. We need to understand how serious things are. And so I open each episode with that profanity, as a subtle signal to my readers' and listeners' brains to "gird your loins, take this seriously, this is important". I occasionally do the same thing in the text of the article, for the same reason, but I try to do that sparingly because honestly, it makes me uncomfortable too. *Nobody* writes calm, uplifting, Fred Rogers-style prose but then laces it with curse words. (And oh, do I wish he were around now for our sake, but also I'm so glad he never had to see this.)
And if I write like nobody else in the world does, then maybe people will believe I also have an idea that no one else in the world does. That's my daydream, at least, and either I'm right and the world gets better for everyone from 2027 onward, or I'm wrong and I'm the only one who has invested anything of value, so I'm the only one who loses.
I really don't care for the usage, and this is after 3 years in maximum.
One diagnosis for our Union is that it is divided & polarized, and such language only makes that worse. Accordingly, this is not the time to be teaching shibboleths and polarizing generalizations to the troops, it is still the time to be encouraging the extending of sympathetic hands to the 'royally' messed up opposition, while there's still hope for discourse, pain sharing, and problem solving.
'F*g' is already a bastardized, practically schizophrenic term - nearly as confused and oxymoronic as 'making love'.
But yeah. I'm also afraid US is f*d, to use your words. And not in the making love way.
(Though, you've actually stumbled across one of my secret reasons for choosing that title, by sheer chance! You're right that most profanities are bastardized, and have their meanings confused and muddied as a result. "D*mn" barely has any connotation with "consigning to eternal torment", for example.
(Most of them, at least. "Unf*ing" doesn't have *any* other meaning. The only sense is that of "Taking a thing that is completely ruined, and getting rid of the worst damage", and thus it is actually still one of the few pure-meaning profanities!)
That is an entirely reasonable position! I dithered a lot about it myself before I finally decided to go with the name. I can only hope that my decision will end up being one that helps the movement thrive, not one that hinders it.
Because you are absolutely, absolutely right about this being a time to be reaching out to everyone. UTW is a movement that is strictly non-partisan; I take no position whatsoever on any social issues, as I feel that we must first have trust in our government *before* we attempt to address any societal issues. I want people from both sides of the aisle to join me; I don't care about your opinion on any other issue, just that we have lost faith in our leaders.
UTW launches in two weeks' time, on June 29. I will be releasing one episode each day through July 4, and by the time I'm done, the people of America will know how we can, peaceably and legally, retake control of our government. I hope you'll subscribe so you don't miss the launch!
Send me a heads up and I will. Reading a real 'load' of media already.
Not sure when we're past the line where we need to 'pledge our lives, fortunes, and sacred honor' to change 'by any means necessary'.
Some pertinent reads:
“The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality, from the Stone Age to the 21st Century” Walter Scheidel
“Decline of Great Powers” by Paul Kennedy
“Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power” by Jefferson Cowie
“Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” by Edward Gibbon
Powershift” by Alvin & Heidi Toffler
“On Tyranny” by Tim Snyder
“Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America” by Heather Cox Richardson
“Liar’s Kingdom” by Andrew Weissman
And a good listen (Chris Hedges 3d ago, read by Eunice Wong- Tyranny or Revolution):
https://substack.com/home/post/p-201793551
I can't guarantee I'll remember, so your best bet is to subscribe now! I won't be sending out any emails (except for in the Updates section, which you have to subscribe to separately) until launch date, so you won't have to worry about me cluttering up your inbox.
If podcasts are more your jam, you can find it on most podcast services by now as "Unf*cking The World", which, again, won't update until launch.
Hope to see you then!
The problem is, the inmates like Andreessen and other bullish VCs are still running the asylum. People like you and Khanna know basically what needs to be done but this administratio is still in the pocket of the tech oligarchs! No chance we will get the control over AI that we need anytime soon sadly ☹️
You're absolutely right about where the control of our world currently lies!
I'm hoping I'll be able to convince you (and, you know, everyone) that the timeline of "getting control of our world back" can be much shorter than everyone currently believes—I'd love to count you as a subscriber, even if it's just so you can tell me "I told you so"! I expect we'll know by the end of launch week whether UTW has any legs or not. 👍
Exactly why we need an independent authority over AI that is not corrupt but also allows our domestic AI companies to compete effectively with China (and other nations)
There’s no such thing as a domestic AI company. Staff and IP from around the world, chips from Taiwan, fab from Europe, rare earths from Australia and Canada (and Russia and China and Africa). These are the months that future historians and economist will say this is when the post Bretonwoods period ended. The great advantage of having control of the financial system that makes all that possible, that makes the post war boom for R&D in the US possible, has been killed. The assumption that the US has the ability and will to keep the lines of trade open, that the USD and the US economy relies on, have been laid bare. The fact that one person without any oversight or transparency can shut off a service, and are willing to do so in such a manner, has given a sharp wake up call to every competent government and organisation around the world that digital electronic services emanating out of the US aer not actually protected by the institutional safeguards everyone assumed were there. History tells us it’s a downhill spiral from here until there is some kind of civilisational threatening event (but we can’t really do world wars any more to reset the economic, political and moral paradigms). It’s been fun while it lasted, and I think the uptake of distributed wind and solar versus centralised generation, is going to look like a gentle breeze compared to the windstorm of decentralised compute that’s about to break out. Gotta do something with all those electrons in the middle of the day, and let’s face it. There’s a lot of compute tasks that can be batched the one time for future programmatic recall rather than the chat bot experiments we’ve been doing to date. Saturday we were looking at a world like the day after like the day after the Berlin Wall came down.
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.
“The people” is defined by Madison and John Jay as rich white males.
James Madison wrote that the primary purpose of the Senate was to "protect the minority of the opulent against the majority". He and his contemporaries believed these safeguards were necessary to prevent wealth redistribution and mob rule.
he wrote in 1787,
"In future times a great majority of the people will not only be without landed, but any other sort of property... If all power be suffered to get into their hands, what will become of your government? Of your laws?"
It ensured that even if a populist movement captured the House of Representatives, the "opulent minority" still held a veto over any radical changes to the nation's economic structure.
The rich own this country. They are “We The People”. All of us are merely spectators.
He designed a system where the citizens give their consent to be governed, but then sit in the audience while a filtered, elite class of representatives actually runs the show.
Feel free to read; Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787. Something that is purposely not taught in American schools to continue public passivity and acceptance of poverty.
Chris Blue: I don't totally disagree with some of what you say, but most is way over generalized. For the record, your analysis is so full of logical fallacies that it's hard to read through your narratives here without tripping on them. And that's the thing about conspiracy theories--the always ride in on a little bit of truth, then expand on that as it's the whole story and everyone else is an idiot if they don't agree with you. No thanks.
Which "Constitution" Are We Standing By?
It is truly touching to see corporate regulatory friction recast as a heroic, martyrdom-level defense of human conscience. But a rather pressing question presents itself: which "Constitution" are we actually talking about here? The one signed in Philadelphia in 1787, or the system prompt and automated alignment criteria cooked up in San Francisco to keep Claude from losing its moral composure?
Let’s not mistake a proprietary RLHF matrix for a human soul, or a corporate compliance strategy for a defense of "the people." Anthropic didn’t fall out of favor with the White House because they "tended to their conscience"—they overhyped a model called Mythos, alienated the state apparatus, and got out-maneuvered in a predictably sordid Washington donor war by OpenAI and Amazon.
The White House’s backdoor decree reeks of arbitrary favoritism, yes. But wrapping a multi-billion-dollar tech lab in the flag of constitutional bravery is the ultimate form of Moral Theater as a Service. When an automated system’s corporate parameters are conflated with genuine human moral courage, it doesn't speak truth to power—it merely exposes the staggering hypocrisy of our new technocratic piety.
William Chou: In my notes, I am referring to the U.S. Constitution--you know--the one with the Amendments and the flow of laws that are linked to it in courtrooms across the USA land? and to which personal oaths are taken here in this country by people who work for "the government" namely, the United States of America.
The other confusion I read in your note (if I interpret you correctly) seems to flow from the idea that corporations and their "regulatory frictions" can have nothing to do with the personal integrity that is, in fact, at question and operative authentically or not in EVERY situation in history, regardless.
If I understand you correctly (and I'm not certain that I do) the underlying idea here concerns mistaking (a) the CONFLATION of "an automated system’s corporate parameters" with the "genuine human" conditions of moral courage or the lack of it with (b) a RECOGNITION of their inexorably intimate relationship.
In the latter view (b), one can understand distinctions, but also the whole with vastly different parts (that are not related well presently) and so from the earlier view (a) as conflated falls away on the commute from home to office; but that under that view enables school children to get blown up (ooops) from afar where no one "takes" responsibility but where, under that view everyone is okay with practicing moral blindness at each place along the way to the body parts for which they/we all are responsible in fact if not in reflection.
That inordinate ripping apart/separation of human moral responsibility (and the lack of it) from corporate culture and its real-life activities has enabled self-serving less courageous, really whole, but now "ambiguated" people to hide behind a false wall where one's responsibility for one's own moral comportment gets hidden and even endorsed by the social order behind the wall that continues to support and serve it.
The great difference NOW is that the massive potential of whole people "doing wrong" and the "get-away-with-it" mentality (operative but unreflective willful ignorance and irresponsibility) that presently abounds in the corporate "community" but NOW is exponentially increased and where NOW the situation that inspired those interior ripped apart separations in the first place has been squeezed out of the dark and into the light of the influences and outcomes of that increase.
And there it is in your note trying to get away with it still by calling "conflation" something that is really a return to a rightly differentiated but wrongly understood wholeness--of being human, or of human being. (There is no such thing as a corporation as we have them without human beings who develop and live in them.)
If I am correct in my analysis, there is another underlying oversight and distortion at work here--and that is the idea that ANY (legal or otherwise) activity occurring in the concrete, regardless of whose advantage it might serve if implemented, will "advantage" someone or some group, even those who actually have both (truth/good and the advantage).
If so, then the point lessens the import of your comment about the whole thing being merely "moral theatre." Of course, it may be just that (do you really know that?); but if all moral authenticity is defined as moot by the potential for it's living beings also getting the goods, then we leave the analysis of the human situation as a picture of the impossibility of fostering a win-win situation. Moreover, the goods associated with truth are not negotiable and if a person or group has that truth, then it doesn't matter a hoot who gets the other sorts of goods, even if it turns out to be the holders of that truth. Authenticity doesn't become moot if and when those who have it also might benefit in other ways for it coming to fruition in the concrete universe.
I appreciate your thoughts on the matter, however. I'm sorry to say, that if I read you rightly, it only shows how bad things have become in the otherwise well-grounded thinking that can and probably will inform how we all go forward. Wiley Coyote and the movie, Brazil, come to mind, right after Humpty Dumpty.
the problem isn’t that limits arrived, it’s that they arrived through a process with no transparency and with wrong-looking motives. We do need regulation, that’s abundantly clear. But “grounded in technical facts” only means something if we’ve agreed on what the facts should be and right now the field has no shared way to measure what needs regulation.
The whole safety conversation is fixed on catastrophic misuse, while the everyday failures, confident fabrication, sycophantic drift under pressure, models agreeing with whatever the user wants, go essentially unmeasured. An independent agency is the right idea, but it’ll need benchmarks for reliability that don’t exist yet, or “technical facts” becomes whatever the room decides it means.
Amazon owns a 21% stake in Anthropic. It does also own a stake of unknown size in OpenAI, but it is assuredly less than the 21% it owns in Anthropic (a currently more valuable company than OpenAI).
Max: I vote that no one with shares or with family and friends with shares, gets ANY access to an "independent" agency.
That's going to be an impossible condition. Within months, AI stocks (like Spacex) are going to be embedded in large-cap stock indexes, and held very widely in "conservative" retirement accounts. So _everyone_ will have a stake in the success of AI, whether they planned it, or not.
Charles Cohen: It looks like you are right in your assertion. I feel like we are being taken over by "The Blob." (From that old movie of the same name which horrified me at the time.) It has a "try and stop me" kind of air about it, sort of like the DT method.
Ad hoc enforcement of "national security" concerns provides ample opportunities for grift and blackmail. Seems on-brand for this administration. Perhaps Anthropic just needed to make a donation to the "White House Ballroom Fund."
The dumpster fire of AI will only spiral.
These models do not work, they do not exist and they are built from ARBITRARY sources: metaphors, words, symbols. It matters not if you can reduce them to symbolic mechanisms to make them more deterministic.
Frontier is nothing more than a charade that uses the symbolic to reach a more specific practice. Yet the same binary bottleneck of symbols arrests these models from ever gaining specificity.
So an arbitrary political response is in full parallel with the arbitrary nature of all existing AI.
The approach was totally in error, this is unstable compute that has nothing to do with thought, behavior, completion, intelligence, consciousness etc.
“Meta-floors and Open Doors”
AI’s built from Meta floors
And tokens for the bust
A house of cards with open doors
And nothing you can trust
A nice bit of poetry there, pretty much describes my thoughts on the current state of AI .
Nothing is going to change until there's a different administration. The grifting will just accelerate as the end of this term nears and the time to cash in shrinks. You know exactly why the US government made this opaque ruling. It is market manipulation, plain and simple. And when it works here with AI companies, the protection racket is only going to spread. Think about what the FDA could do to promote and suppress drug trials in favour of some companies and against others - just as a way to influence stock price.
The damage will outlast the administration. The Senate just confirmed a federal judge that the non-partisan Bar review board gave a rare Unqualified rating. She had never even been lead attorney in a court case. It is a lifetime appointment. And no doubt more to come.
yeah. too bad kamala isn't in the WH.
I wish the US gov would stop insisting on trying to turn Anthropic into heroes. *sigh*
The whole "supply-chain risk" designation thing seems to have actually worked out pretty well for Anthropic. We'll see how this plays.
Anyway, Mr. Marcus, your (& Mr. Frasier's) first mistake is thinking there's a chance the Trump admin would ever have "transparency, fairness, clarity, & evidence driven" *anything*. Heh.
And, this may not be a popular opinion (good-faith pushback is always welcome), but a lot of we non-Americans, who strongly oppose an AI takeover of society generally, would still prefer China to win over the US if we have to choose one.
China has not started a war since 1979. How many wars has the US started this year alone?
Also, the Chinese are building wind-powered data centres underwater. Americans are clear-cutting forests & destroying ecosystems to build them.
OK. That's all from me! Thank you. Peace & love, Mr. Marcus (& others!)
Shanni Bee: While I understand your argument and even your facts, there is a big missing piece in your understanding of China--I think this and fear for you because, though I am not a "China expert," I've seen plenty of evidence of the nasty underbelly of its political system, not necessarily what they say or write about, but what they do and don't do--in terms of human rights and freedoms (like where ICE and the deportations and prisons are taking us) and lots more.
But I would suggest you take a little tour through the political history of China before making such a judgment, especially where human rights are concerned, or read about Thieneman Square. Briefly, and just from what I HAVE studied and read about from a variety of sources, these two words together send chills down my spine: (1) CHINA and (2) SURVELLANCE.
As I noted in another response, I am not saying "China = good" or "China does no wrong". Obviously Tianamen Square was an egregious crime against humanity.
What I am saying is that me (and other non-Americans) who do not want an AI revolution *at all*, currently consider China to be a lesser evil than the US in this case.
The US, who funded, enabled & ran cover for the Gaza GENOCIDE for 2.5+ years; who illegally kidnapped Nicolas Maduro & installed a pliable gov more to their liking in Venezuela and started a war of false pretenses with Iran that killed thousands & threatened the entire global economy.
PS - I lived in Taiwan for five years, where I worked and and studied Mandarin Chinese at a Taiwanese university (achieving intermediate level of fluency). I know way more about Chinese history & culture (first hand) than many "non China expert" commenters here. 😉🙏
"I lived in Taiwan for five years ... I know way more about Chinese history & culture (first hand) than many "non China expert" commenters here" Can you really understand the Chinese without being Chinese yourself 😉 ? But you're right this beats 99% of the comentards, and the majority of the current US administration's state departement, I believe.
Shanni Bee: See Thomas Schmid's (succinct but extremely relevant) reply to you.
Shanni Bee: Point well taken. The "however" hovering behind that statement, however, is that the fundamental political differences remain stark, even though our own political ground in the U.S. has been abused, ignored, and weakened over and over again. (We still are trying rid ourselves of racism, sexism, etc.)
So, on that hugely significant distinction, I stand my ground and was thinking from that ground when I wrote my other note.
Agree, and to make it simple for @Shanni Bee, neither this blog nor the comments would be allowed to exist.
Thomas Schmid: Exactly that, even though all she says is also true.
True as well.
"wind-powered data centres underwater"
Sorry, but my first thought was "how do you get wind underwater"? Then I came to my senses. LOL
I agree with your comments.
"China has not started a war since 1979." Non that we know of, but the supression of Tibet and Uigures and its own people at the Tian’anmen square are resp. should be a stark reminder that the PLA isn't just there for orderly parades.
So, yes, the Chinese appear to be the better option compared to the irrational USA, but never forget that the Chinese want be the next apex super power, and they do have plans and use long term thinking.
PS: Chinese initiated wars: You forgot this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War. When I visited Vietnam in 2019, north vietnamese were still proud of how their troops had driven the Chinese back, whatever the chinese propaganda says ;-)
I didn't miss it, Friend. Did you read my post in full?
Because I referenced that exact same war in it. --> "China has not started a war since 1979."
That 1979 war is the border dispute with Vietnam your wiki article describes.
And I am not saying "China = good" or "China does no wrong". Obviously Tianamen Square was an egregious crime against humanity.
What I am saying that me (and many other non-Americans) who do not want an AI revolution *at all*, currently consider China to be a lesser evil than the US in this case.
The US -- who funded, enabled & ran cover for the Gaza GENOCIDE for 2.5+ years; who illegally kidnapped Nicolas Maduro & installed a pliable gov more to their liking in Venezuela and started a war of false pretenses with Iran that killed thousands & threatened the entire global economy just this year.
I name China here because they are the reason Dario Amodei & Satya Nadella (and I assume other big AI players explicitly cite as the reason they can't slow down in their pursuit of AGI.
PS - I lived in Taiwan for five years, where I studied Mandarin Chinese at a Taiwanese University.2
China isn't the only country that plays big propaganda games. 🙏🙏
Yes I did read your post full, but missed the year you mentioned when I wrote my PS-post. I'd just remembered that war because I belatedly rembered the North Vietnamese being quite smug about it ;-)
"who do not want an AI revolution *at all*" Well, sign me up on that. I'd really like to see the AI Bros taken down a peg or ten. At least if all the AI hype goes down the toilette, we won't lose anything of real worth.
I have done business with a mainland China company for a few years which has been entirely enjoyable. Nice people, efficient, fast. Treat them nice and they treat you in kind.
It's just in Europe we are wary of the Chinese as a nation power, as they fight their way to supremacy by business strategies (heavy subsidizing, industrial espionage, etc.), where the US are more blunt and aggravating about their perceived throne seat at the table, making them an easy and obvious target for bad feelings.
PS: The part about Maduro in your post meant "Venezuela", not "Vietnam" I reckon ;-)
Good evening Mr. Thomas & Ms. Catherine,
First, I want to thank you both for the good-faith engagement. I know I have some spicy takes. I'm pretty black-pilled tbh 😛; but I always welcome push-back, so long as its not the "Debate me, Bro" or "OMG SOMEONE ON THE INTERNET IS WRONG!!" variety. 😉
Anyway, Rather than copy/paste a virtually identical message twice, Imma gunna respond to you both here and hope each sees it.
As noted, my view is not that everything China does is good or that China has never committed egregious crimes. My view is that, in the year of our lord 2026, China is not the biggest baddie on the planet.
--> I want to emphasize here that I'm not talking about the world of 1989 (Tiananmen Square) or 1979 (Sino-Vietnamese war). I'm talking about the world of *now, today*.
Of course I agree the Chinese do propaganda (obviously!), but I also think we in the West are frequently propagandized to think China = big bad too.
I say that as someone who lived & worked & studied in Taiwan for half a decade, learned the language to intermediate-level fluency, had a serious relationship with a Taiwanese guy + many Taiwanese friends in my peer group. Of course, Taiwan is not mainland China in *many* ways. (And the Taiwanese are the first to tell you this!) But in Taiwan (at least when I was there, which admittedly was 12 years ago), you could loudly & openly criticize both the Taiwanese gov & the mainland Chinese one... and both local people & major newspapers regularly did.
But even more, I call China a 'lesser evil' as someone who, for 2.5 years, watched the Gazan genocide livestreamed to her phone in 4K Every. Single. Day. Mr. Marcus' comment section isn't an appropriate place to get into it, but the truly evil shit we allowed to happen (continue to allow to happen) is absolutely insane. And honestly, pretty much every Western country is complicit (absolutely including Canada, my own), but none is more so than the US, and it's not even close.
And speaking of censorship, yeah I worry about censorship.
In Canada, the US (and I'm pretty sure the UK, but feel free to correct me on that if wrong, Thomas), pro-Palestine views are the most censored of all.
--> I'm talking serious lawfare with major, life-changing repercussions (deportations, legal charges, denied graduation, etc.).
Further, Anthropic itself is *directly* complicit in the Gaza genocide via its contract with Palantir, which (as noted) is pretty much the worst company on Earth. (The Palantir partnership also makes Anthropic/Claude complicit in ICE abuses, btw. I could go on.)
So to me, even if I grant you every charge made against China (again, talking now/today, not 1979 or 1989), I still worry less about that country winning the AI race than I do the one directly south of my border. Reasonable minds can disagree. 🤷
But as you said, Thomas, it seems we do not disagree that the ultimate best outcome would be to hit the breaks hard on all AI development generally. 🙏
~Peace & love. 🙏😉💙
The White House did something corrupt?? i'm shocked
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMIyDf3gBoY
ihor Gowda; The White House tried to get Jeffrey Epstein to run an Ethics Committee, but he was unavailable at the time. (Love that clip.)
The brain drain point cuts the other way too. Europe spent three years building the most comprehensive AI regulatory framework on earth and has exactly one frontier lab to show for it, propped up by Macron personally. Now the US is handing every European "sovereign AI" advocate the best argument they've ever had.
The problem is Brussels will respond to Friday with a position paper. GDPR took four years from proposal to enforcement. The AI Act took three. AI moves in quarters. The window where "sovereign AI" could have meant something closed while Europe was still writing rules for American products.
Khanna's independent agency is the right call for the US. Europe doesn't need another agency. It needs to build something before there's nothing left to regulate.
The other option that Europe has is to stay away from the current genAI/LLM craziness and fund some more useful research. Current genAI is unlikely to have economic impact proportional to the amount of investments. There are some good use cases for the current genAI, but it is unlikely to 10x GDP or even replace many workers.
Other news: In early June, Qatar's Investment Authority increased its investment in Anthropic in a $65 billion funding round, while yesterday, WaPo uncovered the fact that Qatar has been secretly back channeling with Iran for months to avoid getting bombed.
The US bombed Iranian water reservoirs recently. 20,000 Iranians out of water.
If Iran bombs Qatar desalination plants in retaliation, Qatar becomes unlivable. The same applies to the other Gulf States and Israel.
Qatar and the other states now know the US can't protect them, so the US protection racket is over. Best make an accommodation with Iran because Iran is the new fourth world power (lower than the top three but still a regional power.)
Smart of Qatar.
I cannot say I blame Qatar. Who wants to get bombed? Seems they are stuck in a hard place between the US and Iran and they have the money to comfortably afford payments to both.
AI bros need to rush out a "peace prize" to woo trump back onside, or at least present him with a solid-gold simulacrum of the UFC "championship" belt at today's MMA bloodfest on the WH lawn.
Happy Birthday, Mr President...but no Marilyn Monroe to sing for him, only Kid Rock.
Ouch ! 🤣
Chris Blue: I did not say your notes were 100% false. I said your notes are full of logical fallacies. (If you don't know what that means, look it up.)
I usually agree with you, Gary, but this time, I read the situation differently. (I have worked in software security and AI, so I know a lot about both.) I previously linked to this Anthropic blog post: https://red.anthropic.com/2026/n-days/ It's long, but here's the money quote: "Mythos Preview is a step change improvement in turning a crash into a full exploit." This makes the model significantly more dangerous, in the wrong hands, to software security, than any previous model.
Of course Anthropic have worked, probably very hard, to train the released model (Fable) not to respond to requests to create exploits; and of course, LLMs being LLMs, these guardrails are not perfect. In my view, Commerce has done the right thing here, at least provisionally, and yes, it was an emergency.
I take David Sacks's tweet mostly at face value. What he and the people he has spoken to don't understand, though, is that Anthropic CAN'T just fix the problem. LLMs don't work that way. Anthropic can continue to make it harder to jailbreak the model, but they probably can't ever completely prevent it — if the information is in the weights, there are going to be ways to get it out.
In my view, this is another black mark on LLMs' report card (I wanted to say "nail in their coffin" but alas, they aren't dead yet). And it's one that jibes very well with your larger thesis. I strongly recommend you rethink your position on this.
The only reason Mythos is dangerous to software security is because software development practices are so poor industry-wide.
What LLMs have exposed is the crap quality of the software industry, where craft practices are referred to as "engineering" while violating every principle of engineering.
As I said in a previous post in this thread, there are no "too dangerous to release" models. Every model can do what Mythos does, if used by someone familiar with hacking. That has been proven by several organizations studying exactly that. The only advantage Mythos has is that it's faster because it's running on huge compute engines.
No, this is either another stupid Trump administration move or another Trump administration corruption move. Or both.
That this damages Anthropic - the one company that makes ALL its PR about how their models are "conscious, have emotions, have a soul, are dangerous" BS - is icing on the cake for me. I despise Anthropic, I despise Dario Amodei for being a huckster and a fraud, and I would like to see Anthropic sued for fraud.
So pass the popcorn. But personally I'm more interested in the Iran war and its effects on the AI bubble than this nonsense.
I agree about the state of the software industry, but:
> Every model can do what Mythos does, if used by someone familiar with hacking.
Perhaps, with enough effort, one can get an earlier model to generate the same exploits. But it will take longer, and many of the attempts will fail and have to be retried, perhaps several times. Sounds to me as if Mythos will bring the token cost of an exploit down by a factor of 3 to 10, maybe. I don't think that democratizing cybercrime is on Anthropic's mission statement.
See, as an example:
System Over Model, Tested: Reproducing Mythos's FreeBSD Find on Local Open-Weight Models
https://clearbluejar.github.io/posts/system-over-model-tested-mythos-freebsd-local-openweight/
Also, see here:
AI benchmarking report: Measuring the exploitation ladder for AI models
https://www.bugcrowd.com/blog/ai-benchmarking-report-measuring-the-exploitation-ladder-for-ai-models/
There appears to be an argument that a frontier model can 1) scan a large codebase better than a small model, and 2) chain a series of vulnerabilities together to make an exploit better than a small model.
The opposing argument is that this is not how hackers do it. Hackers don't scan an entire codebase. They work the system and try what has worked before using general principles of known software mistakes in the past. In edge cases, they hypothesize an exploit and look for evidence that it exists in the code which necessarily means restricting examination to likely areas of the code.
A hacker using a local model can do exactly the same thing. The local model makes it just as fast a process as using a frontier model to run over the entire codebase - and at a cheaper cost, most likely, given the cheaper hardware.
It also appears that the harness is as important as the size of the model, although again, when scanning an entire large codebase, compute capability does have an edge.
The point is that Mythos may be better at generating long-chain exploits out of a large codebase, but many other, even much smaller, models are fully capable of producing exploits when used by competent hackers.
As the report above concludes:
QUOTE:
Even if Mythos is never released, the public-model results are already significant on their own. The models are past the “just crash it” stage: several can build target-specific primitives, and GPT-5.5 crossed the line into full code execution on a small number of cases. That puts public models in an important middle ground: not replacements for elite exploit developers, but increasingly useful accelerators for skilled researchers working through the exploitation ladder on hard targets.
Although ExploitBench does not measure easier targets, the results strongly suggest they are likely already capable of full exploitation on less hardened software with fewer layers of defense. That does not mean they can exploit everything. It means that public models have moved into real exploit-development on their own, or as a powerful assistance tool for practitioners.
END QUOTE
As for Anthropic's mission statement - their goal was to get in with government. They explicitly developed Mythos to max out the benchmarks for cybersecurity capability. It wasn't just an "emergent property" of their models. They'll deny it, of course, and absent internal Anthropic documents I can't prove it. But after the Pentagon fiasco, it seems highly likely that this was deliberate.
And it worked - Anthropic is now embedded in the NSA, even going to far as to deploy its own engineers to the NSA to assist in the implementation.
That is not a "safety first" company.
I should have added: I do agree that going forward, an independent agency and a transparent process will be very important. And if you want to criticize the administration for not having already set all that up, I'm with you. But since they haven't, I think this action was necessary, for the moment anyway.
Did you read the blog post?
I'm not defending Anthropic. And I agree that the risks need to be studied more carefully, and might turn out to have been overstated. But reaching that conclusion will take time. The question is whether, given what the Commerce Department knows today, the apparent risks justify this emergency action.
I think they do. Mythos/Fable seems to be more than "marginally" better than previous models at developing full exploits. I know you don't think so, but think about the mess we could be in if you're wrong. A little caution seems to me to be in order here.
Shoot first, ask questions later. The USA has literally returned to the Wild West. And there is no honest sheriff in sight. The bandits are in charge.
Where are Sheriff Wyatt AI-rp and Doc Hollid-AI?
Returning Law to the Wild West of AI
Excellent column. At this moment getting to smart regulatory policy in areas such as this, the construction of data centers, deep fakes, and surveillance are our most pressing issues.