Anthropic's AI Safety Plan Would Need an Antitrust Exemption, Critics Warn
Who Aligns the Aligners?
Preston Byrne, a lawyer who has spent 18 months fighting internet censors, responds to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's essay 'We Must Pace the Frontier.' Byrne argues Amodei's three-part plan—embedded evaluators, democratic coordination, and global coordination—amounts to coercive state control of software development. He compares embedded evaluators to the 'censorship-industrial complex' of Web 2.0, warns that coordination between AI giants risks antitrust violations, and notes that software development is protected expression under the First Amendment.
The problem, of course, is that financial accounting fraud is not a constitutional right; speech is.
- biophysboy
> As my regular readers will be aware, I have been engaged, on behalf of my clients, in legal combat with Internet censors around the world, agencies who think that they have both the standing, the competence, and the right to tell American companies what software they can write and run, for the better part of 18 months.
Is this supposed to make me trust their opinions on tech regulation?
- fwlr
> Nobody knows the answer and history is no guide, save that apocalyptic predictions about new technologies have, to date, all been wrong.
If any past apocalyptic prediction had been true, you would not have been around to write this sentence and we would not have been around to read it. It’s not a very convincing argument when we cannot in principle observe the counterfactual.
- BirAdam
This isn't a new question: quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
In general, the way things work in the USA is that megacorporations write the regulatory frameworks for their own industries. These regulations are typically burdensome enough to be shouldered by the megacorporations while crushing the smaller players in the given market(s). The AI companies are now advocating for this very arrangement. They will likely get they want, and with that they will gain legal shielding for bad behavior just like Dupont, Monsanto, and so many others.
- lacunary
I thought this was always
already settled https://alignmentalignment.ai/
- petcat
I think there is a more nuanced perspective to take on this debate than just profit motive. If they believe that this version of "AI" is actually becoming so dangerous that there is a real risk of it falling into the wrong hands, then it makes sense that the American labs would try to convince the US government to work on a joint "AI non-proliferation" agreement with China much the same way that nuclear weapon technology came to be restricted by the ones that already had the capability.
This would achieve their regulatory goal of capturing the market, but also the geopolitical goals of USA and China to essentially "techno-colonize" the rest of the world between themselves.
So I think there is definitely a profit motive and a risk of seriously diminishing returns for the actual labs, but there is also a nation-state motive to start pulling up the ladder.