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fumar
tomjakubowski
In the US regulation is, in theory, regulated by Congress, which passes laws granting regulation powers to the federal agencies. Congress and the laws it passes are, in theory, regulated by the Constitution, and interpretation thereof by the Supreme Court.
quantified
Regulation is always by motivation. Charges can be delayed, cops can decide not to arrest, prosecutors can decide not to prosecute, etc.
Government was supposed to be high-trust, but Nixon weakened the trust, Reagan explicitly took aim at it and lots of people went along. Now the reactionaries run things. Cancer in the brain.
sp4cec0wb0y
And the supreme court is unregulated (except for appointment and impeachment).
ckozlowski
Well, that and, by passing additional legislation.
There's two parts to this. The first is that in most cases, the issues stem from lack of clarity in existing legislation, or contradictions thereof. At anytime, if Congress does not like the way the Supreme Court ruled, they can pass different legislation.
The second stems in part from the first. If what Congress passed is interpreted as being unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, the States can amend the constitution.
There is no case where the Supreme Court can (in principle) simply make their own rules*
The debate and controversy comes where the Supreme Court is seen as making their own rules (or arguably asked to) because the legislative process is deemed too cumbersome or disadvantageous to a party. In my opinion, this is where a lot of the difficulties lie, in that the Supreme Court is asked to rule on matters that really should be more clearly legislated. But the issues are seen as easier/quicker to address by convincing 9 justices rather than two legislative bodies and a chief executive. Naturally, this brings it's own consequences.
advisedwang
While true, it doesn't have to be.
US Constitution Article III Section 2 Clause 2 which says the supreme court's appellate jurisdiction is subject to "Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make." So Congress could, for example, require the supreme court to hear every case appealed to them instead of letting the justices pick their cases. Or it could require judges to recuse themselves if there is a conflict of interest*. Or it could forbid the court hearing cases where an en banc appeals court was unanimous.
* which could have more teeth than the self-imposed ethics rules for conflict of interest that the court has now.
matheusmoreira
> Is that what the US government desires?
The US desires to show its own citizens and the world how painful it is not to submit to the US government. They're leveraging everything they've got.
The only rational response when faced with this sort of behavior is to reduce dependence on and exposure to the US as much as possible. Develop national technology. Dedollarize the economy. Invest in and use open weight models.
jstummbillig
> Is regulation unregulated in the US? As in it’s missing consistency and transparency.
Institutions are not built around zero trust. Because when we assume attackers are identifiable, and there is some level of integrity, that makes things a lot simpler and cheaper.
I will not expect my pediatrician to want to kill my child and they certainly could, but it would be completely bonkers to try to guard against that.
The level of damage that a single really motivated, disgruntled person with a lot of power can do in most settings is intense. The cost inflicted if we tried to build guardrails against all of it is insane, and it probably would never work.
vitally3643
Actually, the traditional guardrails we've always had are plenty. If a doctor starts trying to kill patients they are removed from society (they go to jail for a long time).
Traditionally this was applied to people in power with the power of a good old fashioned lynch mob. If you obtain great power and use it to start hurting large numbers of people, the citizenry at large would drag that person out into the street and behead or beat them to death.
It worked pretty well for all societies throughout history, including the West. If a person becomes a danger to society, they should be removed from society with proportional prejudice. That's the guardrail society has always had.
Problem is now that those in power have managed to convince large fractions of the population that it's wrong to say mean things about sociopathic mass murderers and child rapists or the guy who is actively trying to kill you personally.
ryandrake
> If a doctor starts trying to kill patients they are removed from society (they go to jail for a long time).
Unfortunately we don't seem to have the ability to do the same for corporations. If a person starts killing or robbing people, they get arrested and are removed from society. If a corporation starts killing or robbing people, they maybe get a strongly worded letter, maybe have their CEO say a few words in front of Congress, and maybe get a token fine amounting to 0.001% of their revenue (which they will appeal for ten years). But for whatever reason, we don't seem to have the guts to remove a badly behaving corporation from society--no matter what heinous things they are doing, no matter what laws they are breaking.
cadamsdotcom
> Problem is now that those in power have managed to convince large fractions of the population that it's wrong to say mean things about sociopathic mass murderers and child rapists or the guy who is actively trying to kill you personally.
Actually, civil societies granted a monopoly on violence to the government which vests that in police and military. It’s a far better system than random justice because it’s predictable and you know upfront what’ll trigger it.
That system had its flaws, but despite that it was working pretty well until those flaws were found and exploited allowing it to be captured.
ajju
The current administration's actions are for sure signaling a distinct lack of predictability or stability.
The U.S. is either harming itself erratically, or systematically enforcing control on US based businesses in a way that is historically more synonymous with, say, China.
A lot of us worry it is the former. I wonder if it's better or worse if it is the latter. The US, having seen that Europe and the world seem to tolerate interference by CPC based on opinions expressed by Alibaba or Chinese car companies, may have decided that it's fair game.
digitaltrees
Actually they’re predictable: loyalty and submission to trump personally. Every thing flow from that. It’s not the rule of law.
davidw
They don't care about the long term - it's a smash and grab to get as much as they can while they can.
zaptheimpaler
So far the other countries are doing a lot of talking and big government initiatives but nothing has really changed. All the best talent still moves to the US, all the VCs are still unimaginative losers who want 5 meetings to give you $50K, the industry titans are still sclerotic and unable to distinguish their head from their ass, the culture doesn't support risk-taking or innovation. The biggest boom of the next 10 years is AI and it is firmly HQ'ed and centred in the US, as usual. The EU had a predecessor to the Chips Act in 2013 [1] that went nowhere, then a Chips Act that went nowhere, and now a Chips Act 2.0! It would be great to have more options but it doesn't seem like other regions outside China are capable of doing anything at all.
baggachipz
> I don’t see us as the US on the right path.
I think this can be said in many contexts these days.
advisedwang
> Is regulation unregulated in the US?
For the most part no. The Administrative Procedures Act outlines a fairly robust process for rulemaking (ie regulations must go through a notice period, must be justified etc) and adjudication (ie per-person decisions must have notice, ability to have counsel, be appealable etc).
However there's also lots of authority given to the president (and executive office of the president) to which the APA doesn't apply. This includes powers the constitution gives to the president directly and (mostly emergency) powers congress gives to the president. Sadly political processes and supreme court cases have hugely increases what can be done with this*.
Moreover, it's been a frequent pattern (over many decades, but especially under Trump) for the president to simply nakedly overstep their authority. Sometimes there's no push back (see: 9/11); sometimes the damage is done even if it's eventually overruled. Never is there any consequences though, so the pattern repeats.
* E.g. The president's control of the military is supposed to be checked by congress deciding when to declare war. However the war powers act has in practice played out to allow the president to unilaterally start wars, especially as the supreme court has stepped in to make the war powers act less effective.
amazingamazing
> We’re proposing stronger regulation of the technology. We’re proposing giving the government the ability to, again in a narrow way, block deployment of unsafe technology.
Anthropic CEO https://abc7.com/post/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-calls-stron...
enraged_camel
Okay, so why are other models not banned too? This "jailbreak" works for them as well.
soerxpso
Anthropic has alleged that this model is much more dangerous than other currently available models. Their CEO has said so publicly multiple times. It's like asking why cesium isn't banned if nuclear missiles are banned.
(whether Mythos is actually that dangerous is beside the point; considering that Anthropic claims that it is, it makes sense to regulate it)
tiahura
How would you know? Amazon and the NSA thought it was a problem, but you know better?
enraged_camel
Know what better? They told us what the "jailbreak" entails.
fhdkweig
Did you mean this?:
https://abc7.com/post/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-calls-stron...
Lionga
Anthropic CEO: REGULATE AI (so we don't have competition).
Goverment: ...
Anthropic CEO: NO, NO, NO NOT LIKE THIS.
sanderjd
Yes, correct. Singling out companies based on political beefs and to incentivize everyone to curry favor is the worst way to do regulation.
matheusmoreira
You're correct, yet it's also a fact that Anthropic was attempting regulatory capture in order to limit open weight models, cripple their competition and solidify their market position. Nothing wrong with enjoying the sheer Schadenfreude of the situation. Their self-serving fearmongering had the most hilariously unexpected result possible.
Lionga
Anthropic CEO is full of shit, got what he deserved.
He told the world about 20 months ago that all software developers would be gone in 12 months. Why has he not fired all Anthropic Devs yet?
digitaltrees
Regulation is a published rule applied equally to all the industry. Not one applied to a target for retribution or to extract submission
virissimo
Applying equally to all the industry is a characteristic of good regulation, not of regulation tout court.
wrs
Anthropic published, not a two-word request for regulation, but a lengthy proposal for how regulation could work, with safeguards and due process.
Instead, one morning the administration just woke up, grabbed the nearest hammer, and went smash, like it usually does.
christkv
They proposed a plan to ensure their dominance of the space and to cripple any competitors using regulation as the weapon. So I’m not going to feel sorry for them and their temporary plight
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jasonlotito
PAGE NOT FOUND The page you requested was not found. You may have followed an old link or typed the address incorrectly.
I'm sure it says something that you think makes this a slam-dunk rebuttal, but you should fix your link first.
Edit: Saw the link. I was right. Nothing in that link makes a difference.
sailfast
Any company building this kind of tech should have a separate shell headquarters on some low regulation island country.
Any government work can be done via MOU with a US subsidiary staffed by Americans.
This kind of capricious, unexplained control is bullsh*t.
I’m not saying that I want companies to have to go offshore or that that would be a good thing. Just that you’ve got no leverage if your corporate structure can be destroyed on a whim. This goes for any company reliant on a whimsical executive branch.
While there could still be fights over the technology and the company, a tech provider would still be able to serve other customers and have more leverage.
tomjakubowski
A separate shell headquarters on some low regulation island country? Like FTX?
blitzar
They should also have a company penthouse / polycule in said low regulation island country.
And drugs, lots of drugs.
tiahura
Which would guarantee 0 VC investment once the itar notice goes out.
rootusrootus
> Any company building this kind of tech should have a separate shell headquarters on some low regulation island country.
Like where? How about Cuba? Where Guantanamo is, where we put terrorists because we don't want them to be subject to US laws (or more specifically, we don't want ourselves to be subject to those laws when we are dealing with said terrorists). How about no.
International law has only as much power as the biggest military willing to enforce it. Hiding on some little island is not at all a good strategy for trying to evade the US government.
snvzz
>Any company building this kind of tech should have a separate shell headquarters on some low regulation island country
That would seem to me as grounds for piercing the corporate veil and holding the people behind it directly responsible.
High treason or some similar charge. Capital punishment not out of consideration.
pitched
Without going that far, send a few people a couple hours North instead and serve international customers from Canadian data centers. As far as I understand, it is only blocked in the US, right?
breakpointalpha
It's routine and trivial for the US Gov to enforce export controls on non-US based companies.
This "across the border" strategy will not work.
Seagate Singapore was hit with civil penalties and settlements for shipments to Huawei under the Foreign Direct Product Rule.
ZTE, a Chinese company, was criminally prosecuted and settled with U.S. DOJ/BIS in 2017 for violating U.S. export controls and sanctions.
davidfekke
None of the best minds in AI Research are from the United States. We would not be were we are without the work of foreign scientists. There are more STEM students in China than we have students in the United States, and those universities don't give out automatic As like we do here in the United States.
sailfast
Misleading headline based on one off-hand slack comment and quotations from experts outside the firm.
nailer
Amazon AI and the government is right in saying Fable infosec protection is easily crackable.
I used Fable last week to scan my own work for security errors (and readability issues), I wasn't thinking about the ban on infosec use I just wanted the most well trained output.
One project in the monorepo triggered a Opus fallback and infosec/biology warning.
The other project scanned fine and showed a bunch of potential exploits.
ajju
Unfortunately saying it in the press is going to make it even harder for them in the current environment. I know this administration gets non-trivial support from the valley, but what to most outsiders seems like "targeting businesses based on personal vibes" is going to do long-term harm to the U.S.
I hope those who represent technology in government, especially the AI head David Sacks are giving this due consideration.
khalic
Ah the good old “stop resisting” falacy
ajju
If you re-read my comment, I am not saying that.
It seems to be observably true that expressing opinions critical of the administration, even about one's own business, leads to further harm from government right now in the U.S. in a country which is supposed to have strong freedom of speech rights.
It's obviously unfortunate that this is the case.
It's also a shame that this is happening when the folks regulating AI have a tech industry background.
The administration seems to be clearly signaling "stop resisting". I am not sure how you read me as saying that.
martythemaniak
I think you are misreading this situation. The Musk-Thiel cluster, of which David Sacks is a major member, is one of the main groups trying to destroy the rule of law and turn the US into a personalist regime. They are doing this because they think they'll be major beneficiaries of the new regime. As they see it, the long term success of the US, ie the rule of law, is against their personal interests.
seviu
Anthropic employees are right, but maybe this is for good. It certainly has opened my eyes.
I can’t rely on using a technology that the US administration can ban at will.
IMO without getting into personal thoughts about how capable the current US administration is, last Friday move sent a very powerful signal to the industry.
Also I don’t think China releasing so many good models, capable to compete with Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5, all at once, is a coincidence.
nickff
Are you saying that you think the US government is unpredictable and arbitrary, but that the People’s Republic of China is not? Do you remember all the PRoC’s strange and sudden policy shifts (e.g. steel, real estate, education, football/soccer, etc.)?
It seems to me that in the case of AI (as with many other modern technologies), you rely on vendor/creator support and updates to stay relevant, so the ‘next’ model matters more than the current one, and we have no idea whose next model will be open (and whose won’t).
digitaltrees
I interpret the comment as saying there are lots of viable models and it's now crystal clear personal cloud or local Ai is the only reliable path.
baq
Not OP and I wholly agree, but you can’t dismiss the fact that they are releasing those weights. Their agenda is quite obviously to make Anthropic and OpenAI CFOs sweat bullets, but it isn’t our problem as AI consumers, right?
nickff
Yes, I agree that it is possible that the 'open source model providers' are doing the equivalent of 'dumping' in an attempt to establish a dominant market position, or at least a foot-hold. I am generally a skeptic when it comes to the effectiveness of 'dumping' as a long-term strategy (as the producer tends to hemorrhage consumers when it increases prices), but some may see it as problematic.
fnordpiglet
Open weight models don’t allow central oversight. That’s the difference.
nickff
If you’re happy to use the current one forever, then yes. I was amending my comment above to address this when you posted yours.
thatmf
> Are you saying that you think the US government is unpredictable and arbitrary, but that the People’s Republic of China is not?
Why not both?
That seems the crux of the state we're currently in; what daylight there was between the two is quickly fading.
spelk
>Do you remember all the PRoC’s strange and sudden policy shifts (e.g. steel, real estate, education, football/soccer, etc.)?
I didn't realize I could download a Shanghai apartment.
seviu
Right now I rely on whoever that is opensourcing the models.
I wholeheartedly agree with what you said about China.
But I can’t shrug off the fact that fable was taken down within minutes for reasons that are childish and petty.
I am sorry but I can’t use any US AI if I don’t have the guarantee that I will be able to use it tomorrow.
And Trump showed us he is willing to take it out whenever he wants.
An opensource model on the contrary, I can host myself, or use a miriad of providers, mostly non chinese.
jmaw
> I am sorry but I can’t use any US AI if I don’t have the guarantee that I will be able to use it tomorrow.
To be fair this is every commercial model. We have already seen GHCP increase prices by anywhere from 10-100x (depending on usage). And old models get retired all the time. While these are not exactly the same as a cutting edge model being shut down, increasing prices a super high amount leads to effectively the same outcome.
UncleOxidant
> And Trump showed us he is willing to take it out whenever he wants.
Yes, the actions of this administration on Friday should have sent shockwaves through the market - a market that's currently "high on AI". How do you get a return on all of that AI investment if the administration can jump in at any time and say "Nope, you can't use this very advanced model!"? (the Iran "deal" over the weekend, I think helped cushion that blow, but eventually it's going to sink in)
khalic
Yep, any American closed model is now a de facto existential risk for any company relying on them.
The latest open models are so good it’s worth the 6-8 months delayed capabilities. At least for coding
fnordpiglet
The problem is there’s a real wall on the vram side. While fused main memory is ok the inference speeds on larger models are impractical. With vram on a GPU the machine class, power requirement, GPU costs, and other factors put them out of most people’s reach. Cloud GPUs require a second job to keep available and hot. What closed providers offer is packing and scale advantages as well as infrastructure. The scaling laws here aren’t the same as Moore’s law - in fact they predict more required hardware and more scale over time. Moore’s laws isn’t keeping up with expanded needs and the ability to fab and produce at scale the specific things that weren’t needed a few years ago are lagging. So it’s not a 6-8 month lag; it’s a lag that will be induced by hardware scarcity and an ever increasing lag until something fundamentally changes with matmul.
wahnfrieden
I will use the best available while it is available. 8 months ago with Codex would be intolerable today.
realusername
I believe we have somewhat plateaued and each percentage gained seems to be an exponential effort.
Fable was around 10x GPT5 pricing and 100x Chinese models pricing, was it really 100x better? I Don't think so.
If you want a personal story, I just solved a complicated coding problem with Kimi 2.7 that GPT 5.4 failed with.
khalic
On a personal level, ditto. But at a business level, this kind of uncertainty will kill you. You need to be able to plan ahead.
enraged_camel
>> I can’t rely on using a technology that the US administration can ban at will.
And you think China will not do the same thing if their models ever become genuinely frontier-level?
khalic
Then the US will publish their own open weights to outmanoeuvre china.
What’s intolerable is having a tool that’s subject to this risk.
So open models it is
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ghusto
The Cloud Act instigated the EU's migration away from companies in the USA, and things like this lit a fire under our butts. You should see how companies here are scrambling to move their data and compute to the EU.
The impact will last long, long, after this administration is gone. Trump will have his legacy.
quantified
It could be as simple as tipping the scales towards Grok.
spelk
One wonders if this might be a net positive for the world if Anthropic is forced to terminate it's non-US citizen employees.
I would hope they return to their home countries with their expertise and start or join new competing frontier labs, similar to how Taiwan's homegrown semiconductor industry arose from US companies enforcing a bamboo ceiling on their Asian engineers. Taiwan was able to repatriate their nationals and make incredible compounding leaps in the semiconductor industry, to the loss and chagrin of the US. [1]
[1] https://www.npr.org/2022/10/07/1127595393/taiwan-miracle-sem...
swader999
I can't imagine how you'd restrict access to these models to USA nationals only. Every company in the USA would have to verify the id of every employee's model use. What do you do about programmatic AI workflows? How does Anthropic even continue to function internally right now on this Mythos and the future model development?
ifwinterco
Indeed, forcing Europeans to stay in Europe might be the only thing that could revive the moribund European AI scene
khalic
The brain drain goes in the other direction champ. Scientists and engineers are already leaving the US en masse because of the current situation
bflesch
Nothing of value is lost for Europe because we mostly work with natural intelligence. The malinvestment bubble happens in the US, and hardware prices will come down.
We're all dependent on Taiwan but others also depend on ASML which is located in Europe. Available AI services are good enough, and we sit and watch while US leadership and population is beta testing AI mass surveillance for us.
In terms of AI-based warfare Ukraine is very much ahead and they are also European for which we are very thankful.
So feel free to keep your AI scene and AI hustlers in the US, we don't need them.
ifwinterco
I am British and have no love for the US right now but in terms of talent it’s notable how many prominent researchers at the top US labs are originally European, and the contrast with the top European labs (of which there are ~none).
Does this actually matter as much as some people think? Probably not because LLMs won’t lead to AGI, but it is indicative of a broader problem
inglor_cz
"In terms of AI-based warfare Ukraine is very much ahead and they are also European for which we are very thankful."
Note that the Hornet drones which are now devastating Russian logistics behind the lines are US manufactured.
inglor_cz
Someone like Saudi Arabia may attract them with untaxed high salaries instead.
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Is regulation unregulated in the US? As in it’s missing consistency and transparency. Beyond Anthropic, the US signals to the world that depending and using American solutions is high risk. Is that what the US government desires? The digital battleground across regions is on the rise. I don’t see us as the US on the right path.