> asking for domestic safety testing of frontier models only is not regulatory capture

It very much is regulatory capture. The goal is to make it so only the handful of heavily capitalized tech giants and frontier labs can afford the legal and compliance rigamarole to meet the new standards. It's an effort to crowd out open source development and smaller competitors (and foreign competitors which threaten whatever moat they may have). They define safety through some speculative catastrophic threat to prevent new upstarts instead of focusing on the very real, localized harm they are causing right now.

Its also shifting the definition of safety away from their current operations and toward purely speculative future scenarios.

What backward logic is this? PRC doesn't give a fuck about how US regulates AI companies. Pushing more regulation would ensure that Chinese companies catch up sooner. If you think otherwise you need to think harder.

And why would any regulations put in place in the USA affect the PRC in anyway whatsoever? They wouldn't. China will continue to push forward and govern things in their own way, we have zero jurisdiction over China.

So yes, it is regulatory capture.

> asking for domestic safety testing of frontier models only is not regulatory capture.

Yeah, asking for additional state-provided barriers to a market entry to a valuable market a provider already is one of a narrow few dominating only for firms that are a competitive threat is exactly regulatory capture.

Ohh, the red scare, never gets out of fashion. Meta's David Marcus in the Senate: If you don't let use launch crypto, the chinese will win.

The Chinese banned crypto instead

How does US regulatory capture do anything to impede PRC's advance?

This take is ridiculous, the PRC is not going to care at all about US regulations.

Right now the PRC is looking like the adult in the room. They also have a view of how AI should work that's smaller and more worker centric rather than trying to create superintelligent worker replacements.

The PRC (like any superpower) has done some bad shit, but if you're going to paint them as the bad guy keep in mind the USA has a long, long history of genocide, slavery, overthrowing foreign governments for corporate interests, unjust wars, political meddling, etc. The scales of righteousness don't tip in our favor TBH, we just have better PR and a nicer veneer over our brutality.

The flawed premise is thinking that AGI is a real risk, and that they care about it more than making money, that is why HN does think it's simply regulatory capture.

I didn't downvote, but HN probably remembers when Anthropic's competitor was a "charity" that cared deeply about AI safety whose marketing gimmick was GPT-2 being too dangerous to release.

Anthropic's founder wants you to buy into his vision for safety, but he also wants you to buy into his vision that in two years AI will be a "country of geniuses" that will update itself, and the IPO that will fund it...

I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive. It’s a business selling a product that isn’t yet profitable, not a public advocacy organization.

> "Why does a company that cares about the dangers of AI/ASI and x-risk, not want the PRC to catch up to the frontier?"

Because it’s a threat to ultracapitalist dystopia that they’re tripling down on. The dangers and risk are coming from inside the house.

The danger they care about is the danger to their monopoly, control, and wealth.