Raising a very low bar
Anthropic seeks to incrementally improve AI rules, but more is needed
In May, we covered OpenAI’s self-professed political strategy of “reverse federalism”, promoting industry-favored state policies in an effort to enshrine a de facto national standard.
Rival lab Anthropic is taking a slightly different approach. Their head of state and local government relations, Cesar Fernandez, told POLITICO that Anthropic aims to slowly ratchet up safety regulations state by state. Of recent work in New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts, Fernandez remarked, “Each one of those bills was stronger than the previous bill, and the bills all moved real safety obligations forward.”
Anthropic and OpenAI both supported the Illinois bill we covered last week and earlier, although only Anthropic has thus far supported stricter rules on the docket in Massachusetts.
Does Anthropic sincerely expect that state safety regulations will suffice to prevent an AI-fueled catastrophe, or are they merely looking to bolster their brand by comparison to OpenAI? I genuinely don’t know. Perhaps it’s some of both; perhaps some third motive is at play.
I’ve had mixed feelings about Anthropic for years. In addition to supporting safety legislation, they’ve consistently broken ground on calls for safety, pioneering the “responsible scaling plan”, and they were the first leading AI company to publicly suggest preparing to slow down the AI race.
At the same time, their efforts have been lukewarm and their signals mixed. They pushed to water down California’s landmark (and eventually vetoed) SB 1047, proposing a laundry list of changes, some for solid reasons and some less so. Like their rivals, they have repeatedly abandoned their past safety commitments, which seemed inadequate to begin with. Their CEO has actively called for a race to recursively self-improving AI, the single most catastrophically dangerous technology in history, despite claiming a 10–25% chance this ends in disaster “on the scale of the human civilization.”
If Anthropic were to announce (and honor) a wholesale halt to frontier AI training, throwing their weight behind a push for governments to enforce this halt on their competitors, they’d have my full-throated praise. So long as they continue to participate in the race to build vastly superhuman AI, however, the best I can do is a polite and wary nod.
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.