> At what point do we stop engaging with Anthropic’s leadership in good faith

About two years ago?

I would also note that Dario's post appears to be LLM written. Maybe... maybe... he's read so much Claudeish that it's all he can speak now himself. But I wonder if he's becoming a bit of a meat proxy.

(It's funny, I thought "pace the frontier" was going to mean something similar to "patrolling the frontier". But no, it's pace as in speed of change - everyone must slow down, right now (unless it's Anthropic, but you know we're the good guys in this, right? We're going to get someone to audit our desks!) "Pacing the frontier" feels so LLM.)

ok, he doesn't actually say this. But he is getting the desks audited...

You can disagree with Anthropic leadership, but all the points you mentioned can reconcile very well with them thinking in good faith "advanced AI is too dangerous to be left in all hands" Except the "train on everyone else IP" which can be said of all AI companies.

The reasoning in Dario's letter here can be correct regardless.

But yes, I think Anthropic has done real harm to coordinated AI alignment by being such a controlling and sneaky actor.

I can't imagine a grown adult genuinely believing that an American company funded with over $100 billion of venture capital values the best interests of mankind over the best interests of its investors. while not everyone may recognize all that self-serving chutzpah as regulatory capture efforts, I think everyone can tell they're being bullshitted. some just pretend to suspend their disbelief when the blatant lies they're told align with the values they hold.

just fucking imagine McDonalds running a public awareness campaign about the harms of fast food, urging the public and legislators to regulate the dangerously unsafe technology of combining carbs with grease, insisting that no one except Ronald McDonald himself can be trusted to steward it responsibly.

I have many issues with Anthropic, but I will say that their actions are fully consistent with a group of people who earnestly believe that AI is extremely dangerous

In fact, I would say that the Occam’s razor explanation is not that they are seeking regulatory capture, but that they earnestly believe in the x-risk, and that they are the most thoughtful and capable people to address it

You may disagree, you may think that they are delusional or have a God complex. Those are valid opinions. But I don’t believe that this is all a elaborate ruse for commercial gain.

Exactly right.

When local models and startup labs can distill / learn / accelerate open models for local use by startups - the rational response by incumbents is to call LLMs doomsday machines that cannot be trusted in the hands of normies.

Do you have any familiarity with Anthropic at all?

At no point did they ever say open weights are a good idea. Their entire thesis is AI IS VERY DANGEROUS AND WE MUST DO IT RIGHT. You can hate it, but everything they do is consistent with this thesis, and everything they say is consistent with their actions! You just want them to want different things.

> At what point do we stop engaging with Anthropic’s leadership in good faith and acknowledge their track record, ...

It's all lies as usual.

This announcement has got nothing to do with alignment and pacing the "frontier": all models are getting very close in capabilities and they want to hide that they're not way ahead anymore (say compared to the Chinese or compared to the Geminis) by pretending to slow down due to "alignment" or whatever.

We know it's not an announcement made in good faith: reading between the lines they're saying "China is more than catching up, so let's pretend we need to slow down to explain our lack of lead".

> can’t use claude to research AI

What's this about? Where's this rule?