Cal Newport: Congress Must Investigate OpenAI and Anthropic
It's Time to Investigate the AI Labs
Cal Newport argues that OpenAI and Anthropic have engaged in brazen behavior, from carefully planned announcements to public debates about human extinction. He calls on Congress to launch a public fact-finding mission into their research, safety procedures, and apocalyptic ideologies, warning that a small number of private companies should not dictate how we feel about AI.
We need to stop letting a small number of private companies, acting and talking in increasingly erratic ways, dictate how we’re supposed to feel about A.I.
- jimmyjazz14
> We must move past vague discussions of “AI” and instead isolate the specific types of systems that are creating problems.
This is absolutely correct and its surprising how rarely you see commenters in the media push to go into the specifics on this. AI is just matrix math and its what you connect that math to that matters, we should talk a little more about what we are willing to connect AI to and little less about how scary or capable the models appear.
- Animats
This is a wrong-headed attempt to regulate AI. The real problems are different.
AI systems, especially multi-agent ones that can do things, are more akin to corporations, than individuals. When you read the logs from the Hugging Face incident, you're seeing something that looks a lot like internal corporate emails. Various units of the organization are arguing over what to do and who does what. They eventually converge and get the job done, breaking the rules at times. This is normal corporate behavior.
When agentic AIs do something outside their own internal world, they do it by engaging in transactions with external systems and people. As yet, few have robots to do their bidding.
So, again, this is normal corporate behavior.
A corporation is a goal-seeking system. In theory, if you agree with Milton Friedman, its sole purpose is to maximize shareholder value. Internally, within the company, there are subgoals, which exist to support the top level goal. That, too, is what multi-agent AIs do.
The uncomfortable place this thinking leads is that AI regulation and corporate regulation are very similar. That's not something the political part of the world wants to think about too hard.
It would mean putting more constraints on corporate power.
Yet that can't be ignored, because we're likely to see corporations where some parts are AI and some parts are human. That's already been done a few times as a demo, not too successfully. Yet.
It's going to hit hard when an AI-run company o […]
- lukewarm707
This is an excellent article. I prefer to call them the AI giants or AI companies.
The companies and their employees must be held accountable: if the AI companies can't develop AI safely, they must cease their operations. If employees can't work safely, they must stop working.
Not enough attention is given to February 2026. That month, Anthropic changed its scaling policy roughly from A:
1 [To get the weapon I must endanger innocent others.]
2 [It is wrong to endanger innocent others.]
3 [I will not endanger innocent others.]
To roughly this instead:
1 [If I do not get the weapon, someone else will get the weapon.]
2 [I should have the weapon because I am the best.]
3 [To get the weapon I must endanger innocent others.]
4 [I should endanger innocent others because I am the best.]
This is based on the intuition:
[I should harm others to achieve my moral goals.] (act utilitarianism)
Anthropic has no mandate for these goals. I do not give them my consent to harm others on my behalf. I hope that politicians will communicate that these policies are not acceptable.
The employees of anthropic are responsible for what they do regardless of how much they get paid to do it. If they can't work safely, they must stop.
- welcome_dragon
I agreed with the first half of this article and I liked where the author was going with it but I was disappointed in the overall point.
He's painting these companies as hyping themselves up and they are. They are manufacturing these BS stories and everyone's discussing them at all levels.
But then he goes into we need to investigate what they're really doing?
No. You made the case that they are releasing these stories for publicity and that's exactly what they are doing.
That's what we should be investigating. Free publicity and market awareness. Or maybe look into why they are trying to corner the market through government regulation and ersatz monopolies
- psyklic
Why aren't they running agents on isolated computers without Internet access? This way, breaking free of containers would not matter.
It is truly a security nightmare that so many people are have given agents root access to their entire computers, in addition to presumably very private personal information.
- seizethecheese
I dont agree with much of the schadenfreude against AI companies, however some of these safety incidents seem manufactured to raise the alarm bell earlier than otherwise. I get the point, but also when failing to convince the public of risk, tricking them is not appropriate. It reminds me of nation states manufacturing crises to start wars.
- pompom75
- ban certain types of hazardous information from being included in the training data (virology, weaponry, cybercrime).
- ban the "personalization" of chatbots (there is no need for them to have a personality, other than to make them addictive).
- ban chatbot therapists / companions.
- ban recursive self-improvement and superintelligence.
- jumploops
Maybe I'm a bit too skeptical/cynical, but it certainly seems like the frontier labs have fallen into their own (self-created) AI psychosis.
There is no doubt in my mind that LLMs are fantastic machines, but the imminent jump from "AGI" to "ASI" seems premature (not to mention the ever-shifting goal posts of AGI itself).
I'm in the "move as fast as possible" camp and work with LLMs all day, but I still don't believe we're a hop and a skip from ASI.
In fact, I hope I'm wrong. I hope ASI is around the corner.
What scares me though, isn't ASI. It's "AGI" (_dumb AI_) used by humans to make decisions for them, because they trust it knows best.
It's the ceding of intellectual control to high-dimensional magic mirrors, giving up critical thinking because _we_ want to believe _we_ created artificial life.
This is the new Turing test, and too many smart people are failing.