It makes me sad that people don’t see right through Anthropic’s gambit.

They want to position AI as an insurmountable threat in order to regulate away any future competitors. They’re trying to speedrun regulatory capture.

It's hard for me to see much difference between Amodei and Sama. My guess is they're both savvy SV CEOs who will bend their message, alliances and principles pretty far if that's what it takes to get ahead. Musk and Zuck feel like something else entirely, with all the reactionary imagery, populist bullshit and the societal damage around their platforms.

Which safety commitments did they back away from? My understanding is that they believe safety can only be researched from the frontier, and so they're trying to be pragmatic to stay near the frontier (and viable) in their choices.

From what I know, the "books3" dataset was normalised in the LLM and research ecosystem, where collected datasets were seen as valid to train on and/or fair use. I'm not sure any of the major frontier companies are free from that, if we don't believe it was fair use.

I do think most of their choices are explainable by "they just believe in agi risk". You truly wouldn't want non-agi-pilled companies to train on your data and approach the frontier if you were worried. You might slightly hurt your own business with safety filters (that no one else does) if you were worried. They are less worried about other "moral" decisions like "sharing" if they conflict with AGI: the research they still share is all of their safety research.

This definitely doesn't make them "good", but they do seem fairly "consistent". Most of these issues were talked about publicly by the founders long before Anthropic was founded and/or the AI race+money appeared.

I will give Anthropic credit for standing up against the department of war. The bar is incredibly low, but not doing domestic surveillance and not creating autonomous weapons are laudable.

That doesn’t mean I like them pirating books and being shady about tokens and paternalistic “safety”

> Anthropic leadership repeatedly presents themselves as uniquely morally qualified to steward agi and decide how humanity should get access to it.

  "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals." — C.S. Lewis.

> Anthropic leadership

Which one? The main bit that reports to Daniela Amodei, or the little comfort blanket cabinet around Dario and his "chief of staff"?

There is a leadership branch that can pretend to be morally qualified and aware and to think about the big picture and ethics.

It is at least somewhat remote from the bit that is doing the actual business things.

It's almost like running a trillion-dollar business with neck-to-neck competition against other frontier labs and even state-sponsored efforts requires some ethical trade-off.

Pirating books is just straight up morally correct. I don't like Anthropic's bullshit "safety" filters, but training on shadow library data? Yeah no, it makes sense.

It makes a lot more sense than having to work around copyright by scanning out physical books. Unfortunately, one was ruled legal and the other was not.