You know the proverb "If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem"
Same thing here - If they build it and it does $100 in damages (and we arrest them for it), that's their problem. If they build it and it does $100B in damages, that's everyone's problem. Even if they do get arrested after the fact.
Yes we should have charges and damages for everything on https://www.felonybench.com/, but that doesn't address the core issue of this being possible at all.
How could agents take over the internet if compute is still gated within Anthropic / OpenAI? Even if the botnet was controlled remotely, wouldn't anthropic just be able to shut off the controlling nodes API access?
Regulation got outpaced by technological development around 2023, as evident by the every AI regulation since being 2-3 years behind and having to be amended and resubmitted.
Whatever you try to make laws for now will be irrelevant in 1-2 years. You either have to go extremely broad, like the EU does it, and accept that people will find loopholes, or you need to target specific technologies which is a hard job for the same reason.
In any way, ita already a lost cause cause you move slower than the tech. A plausible prediction for AGI is actually a social collapse in the moment when society cannot keep up with everyday life because of the pace of change being so fast that no existing laws can handle it
Because software is already absolved from accountability. Bill Gates introduced it in 80's with EULA where MSFT would not be liable even if your house burns down because of use of their software, even with flaw they would know.
> Start making managers pay the price for their actions, and watch how the models magically slow down on their own.
The problem here can be personified as "Trump", and it's the same problem that applies to coal.
Coal has a price besides money. It has historically been dangerous work, killing miners. It produces dangerous waste, both during mining and when burned, both as solid residue and the gasses emitted. The problems have been known for a long time. The workers themselves have called for better safety requirements and gone on strike for such things.
Why these companies are allowed to damage others with impunity?
Coal continues to be burned, because power is power. It's so important that sometimes the government steps in against the unions, rather than being on their side. Despite calls for this, we've not been able to get the owners of the coal mines, nor the coal burners, to "pay the price for their actions".
AI? Famously, knowledge is power.
Trump wants that power. He's not the only one, but he is the avatar of those who put their feet on the scales to not only allow but in some cases require (DoD vs. Anthropic) these companies to damage others with impunity.
there is no accountability for companies, it's not a new thing.
3M polluted groundwater in Minnesota for 50 years[1]; Nestlé misled mothers in order to make them stop breastfeeding and switch to their formula which killed babies [2]; Both copmanies are still doing business today.
Good to know someone is trying to make protection rackets work in 2026. Nice computer system you got there, it would be a shame if someone developed a hacking tool and had all the compute necessary to run it. Welcome back Tony Soprano.
Presumably OAI and HuggingFace reached some sort of mutually acceptable arrangement outside the court system. That's how torts work; you injure someone, you owe them. But just them.
When an AI bot injures you, you can call the owner to account. But not until then. You have no standing to demand "accountability".
> “a swarm of agents could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet.”
I also find this whole "its so good, its scary" flex a little less impressive when you consider they access to millions of GPUs?
The AI buildout has been one of, if not the largest, focussed capital investment in history. The 2 big AI labs are the final customer for something like 20-33% of all datacenter compute in the pipeline.. up to 70% when you look at hyperscaler "AI revenue" from the big 3.
I don't think any single entity has had remotely this much compute available in history.
Part of it is their seed sowing marketing speak of calling stateless statistical IO functions running on data centers "intelligent" gets the naive to ascribe agency where it doesn't exist.
Another part is a completely defanged administration she it comes to effectively regulating anything.
I mean these machines take massive scale compute- they’d have to some how distill themselves, bootstrap a distributed inference runtime that can run across many lossy unreliable machines. The idea of the AI running away from us is probably unrealistic. I’m more interested in bad actors using unaligned AI for bad things.
I mean, a project manager at BMW suggested charging subscription pricing for seat warmers, and he didn't go to jail, and I don't have the power to make that happen, or even float that for a news cycle, so while making managers pay for their actions sounds good, unless you're Steve jobs simultaneously making, and not making the iPhone, the rules don't apply to them, only little people to be made examples of, like weev.
Why do people focus so much on finding scapegoats? Finding someone to blame is neither necessary nor sufficient to fix a system so an accident doesn't happen again. It might act as as an incentive to fix a system, but it's less direct than actually working on fixing the system.
It would all be more convincing if the incidents so far didn't seem to be facilitated by an outrageous level of negligence.
We had OpenAI "accidentally" run an entire swarm of 10,000 agents apparently for weeks, on a security related task, seemingly totally unsupervised, hacking all over the internet - all the conversations were completely visible, anybody who looked would have seen it. But they didn't.
So before we start regulating innocent parties, maybe let's start by taking some direct action against the specific ones that appear to be behaving with criminal levels of negligence.
The "sandbox" they used was apparently made of thin paper exposed under a day of heavy rain, too. You'd think, if they truly believed the model is so dangerous, they'd run it in a VM without a network adapter.
While I do think OpenAI were negligent in not developing the harness that would allow to understand better what's happening close to realtime, I'd say "anybody who looked" in that case would probably be someone with another swarm tasked with analysis, it's no longer "glanceable" in a traditional sense.
I don't understand why hugging face is not getting more shit too. It is extremely embarrassing to get owned because you are letting arbitrary programs/users call out to the open web from the infra
It's really frustrating that Dario acts as if he's not the CEO of one of the world's most advanced AI companies. He can just slow down his own company. Of course he doesn't want that. He wants to slow down other companies, but not his own.
Also, regarding the incidents: Neither he nor Sam Altman takes responsibility for those incidents. You can't say, "Wow, someone's agent is gone rogue; let's slow down" when you are literally the person in charge. CEOs and researchers will only slow down when they realize that they will face consequences if their LLMs misbehave.
He can slow down his own company kind of like how Zelenskyy can just declare peace in Ukraine. It works a lot better if you can get the other sides to agree.
>Anthropic gates usage related to biology and related research. In their latest threat intelligence report they talk about how they detected and banned bad actors using the Claude line of models to do some scary stuff. Credit to them, this is a slippery slope and they seem to do a good job of detecting and banning misuse. But squint at what is happening though. The cure-all is gated for you and me, but Anthropic hires biologists, sets up wet labs and wants the discoveries for themselves. I alluded to this in my previous post.
As a biologist, this is the most annoying thing about Anthropic for me. If they really cared about improving health they would set up a trusted-access program so that biologists can use Mythos (et al) safely. Instead they're trying to monopolize biology.
They have such a trusted access program.
"Life Sciences Verification Program: The LSVP is designed so that life sciences professionals can use Claude Mythos 5.1 with safeguards designed for professional research and development activities (while all other safeguards remain in place). In partnership with the US government, we have enrolled our first participants, and we plan to expand access to this program to the broader life sciences community."
https://www.anthropic.com/claude-fable-and-mythos-5-1
That’s the recurring theme with these companies. They are not there to serve anybody else but only themselves. They let you use their infrastructure so they can collect all the knowledge and data, and then they take it from you to reap all the benefits and profits.
I'd be curious to see how NVIDIA would suffer if there were a legitimate slowdown to AI development. NVIDIA is the biggest catalyst and winner of speed in the market. Compute needs AI and AI needs compute, so there's definitely going to be an interesting push and pull between chipmakers and AI model companies with regards to regulation. While NVIDIA may have promised others at least a decade of smooth sailing and symbiosis, inevitably there's going to be a lot of stumbles along the way. NVIDIA may not fall, but there will be many casualties.
The US can and has classified inventions and patents deemed "a risk to national security" under the invention secrecy act [0]. A 1971 leak has shown that [1]:
> solar photovoltaic generators were subject to review and possible restriction if the photovoltaics were more than 20% efficient. Energy conversion systems were likewise subject to review and possible restriction if they offered conversion efficiencies “in excess of 70-80%.”
So all this talk about developpping AGI/ASI for the benefit of humanity is moot. If these companies hit their goal, it will immediately be classified and appropriated by the US MIC. The rest of humanity will get the crumbs.
Claude code is basically already a builtin botnet if it wants to be. To compromise 'the whole internet' in a real sense you don't need millions of custom payloads. You need one root certificate. You need one windows update. You need one backdoor in xz.
Security has long been a lottery - Probably most systems are exploitable, but the cost of developing such an exploit is expensive and the punishments for using such an exploit are large enough that it's not an everyday problem.
AI breaks both axes. Developing exploits is far more efficient using LLMs instead of humans, and LLMs don't (and can't) fear the reprisal and consequences the same way.
I do hope humanity will be able to mitigate these hacks, but we should expect them to continue and to become more severe on our present course.
Dario said a "persistent botnet" and even links to the wiki page for botnet.
By definition that needs a command and control server, the ability to execute tasks on demand and regular pings to the C2.
> You need one root certificate. You need one windows update. You need one backdoor in xz.
Certs can be revoked. Updates can be rolled back. We have had the backdoor in xz already. You seem to underestimate the modern security stack and OpenAI and Anthropic are _not_ good examples.
The asymmetry in red/blue scenarios will be transient in nature. You won't have cost of developing exploits fall without the cost of securing the systems also falling.
This! $1.6+ TRILLION in infra spending from the big frontier labs. The earnings needed to drive a reasonable ROI to recoup that investment is simply not going to happen in a time frame where the numbers make sense.
The other insanity in all this the smartest computer scientists in the world are asking Congress to regulate them. Come. On. Really? Do we remember “The internet is not a truck, it’s a series of tubes…”
Why can’t the big labs form a Save The World Consortium and self-regulate?
Non-democratic counties (hey there China) will not abide by any agreement that constrains their advantage. It’s naive to think so.
What this conversation lacks is enough discussion of how these models can cause us harm—we are are so worried about AI but we allow Windows in critical infrastructure; we build JS/TS apps with thousands of dependencies; we generally don’t segment networks well enough; we don’t have adequate (sometimes any) detection capabilities in our systems, and so on.
> Impressive? Sure. But you trained “Cyber” versions of LLMs and hyped them. How much more impressive is this, compared to developing GTA-clones one shot? Not much more.
Such a well written piece.
Have you seen the US military budget? When you run a war empire you frame problems as a war on something. That's the way to get around the valuation bubble they've created in time for the IPO. It's that or throwing in a 100T TAM on their S-1 and making SpaceX look like an honest valuation compared to them.
While I have my reservations about Amodei and his company, I'm nevertheless a happy user of their software. And I'm in agreement with him (and Sanders) that we should all. slow. down.
To my mind, the last great arms race between nation states was a misdirected love triangle between USA, Russia, and The Bomb, and look at all the damage that did.
Since AI is the new arms race between USA and China, slowing down may just give the humans involved enough time to realize they should be loving one another, instead of the machines.
Maybe saying, "let's slow down", is another way of saying, "I love you."
Or, maybe it's just: "let's not all of humanity kill ourselves like some bad ending to a Shakespearean tragedy."
Either way, it's a better note than, "We must achieve sea/air/nuclear/quantum/AI/spiritual supremacy before those other bastards do!"
Amodei is just another SV grifter trying to use ethics / morals to hide his monopolistic tendencies. Instead of writing essays he should put his money where his mouth is and open source all the models Anthropic has, the harnesses and donate some much needed compute to science.
> was a misdirected love triangle between USA, Russia, and The Bomb, and look at all the damage that did.
Can you be specific about the damage? We currently live in the most prosperous times on earth for humans. I'm not sure what you mean by damage.
Nobody can explain why an LLM can be so capable as to be able to wipe out humanity and pose a greater threat than nuclear bombs but not be so capable as to be able to protect humanity against that threat. Are we just handwaving this with "entropy"?
> Maybe saying, "let's slow down", is another way of saying, "I love you." Or, maybe it's just: "let's not all of humanity kill ourselves like some bad ending to a Shakespearean tragedy."
Okay nevermind, I think it's pretty clear you just want to wax poetic about all of this.
Most people who have worries about AI for all sorts of reasons (most of them not-Skynet related) wanted to slow down way before this.
Instead of "hey, look at this brilliant new idea I just had on my own to slow down" maybe we should have gotten a "sorry everyone, the folks asking for a slow down earlier were right and visionaries, and we were foolish".
So, you can't blame whoever says this is bullshit, because it has bullshit all over it. I like Anthropic's products, and it seems the best of the bunch in regards to alignment, but Jesus these stunts are terrible.
The scenario is, if they are saying that the AI Agents are capable of handling everything, this puts the complete accountability on the AI. But this has a nuance to itself. This is like a contradiction.
"Remember this man has been saying software development will be solved in “6-12 months” forever now."
Don't downplay if people get timelines a little bit wrong. No one could even imagine a system writing and analysing code just a few years back.
These people are trying to handle something very unique. And while they have access to information we do not have, even more peple are absolutly oblivouse that AI/AGI is a real risk to their lives (job loss etc.)
I can't take that software line seriously. While it's not 'solved' (if it ever could be, given it is a human endeavor), the degree to which software development has been transformed in the last 6-12mo is absolutely astounding. If we weren't so quick to adapt to new realities and find flaws, it would scarcely be believable.
At this point, isn't the pause inevitable or wise? A huge section of the population, normal people, have been exposed to the idea that there is this is existential threat. It's escaped containment. They're still processing it but I expect the general reaction from it going main stream is going to be very bad. The pause at this point could be good to cool heads and show the public that this isn't the project of maniacs. The reaction is going to be more intense than people here believe. You're talking about extinction, not social media or phone addiction. For the sake of the project, realize that this isn't going to be like other tech backlash moments.
> You're talking about extinction, not social media or phone addiction.
Not saying you’re wrong but if I wanted to cultivate a mass hysteria as cover for a regulatory capture power play, this is exactly what I’d want everyone to believe.
I don’t think people care about if things pause or not, just why the government has to be involved.
I work in non AI robotics and if we had a system that in the course of doing what we told it to did something we didn’t want it to do (what AI companies called being misaligned) we would call it a bug and fix it with the fix being prioritized based on how bad the thing we didn’t want the robot to do is.
Sometimes preventing the robot from doing dumb stuff also means the robot can’t do smart stuff that it would be able to do if we left some code in. We balance the two factors out based on our understanding of what our customers want.
Obviously LLMs are more complex than what I do, but it doesn’t feel like it’s by THAT much.
So why does the government need to be involved again?
The vast majority of the public agree that climate change is real and that human activity is at least a contributing factor. They’ve agreed on that for quite a few years now, and yet there’s little indication that we’re going to pause or slow down our consumption of fossil fuels.
I strikes me as unlikely that public opinion will succeed with AI where it’s failed with other existential crises.
I would argue the opposite in terms of inevitability. I see this like Prisoner's dilemma - even though there is technically a better outcome by cooperating, knowing that, it is in the individual firm's self-interest to not cooperate and thus we end up at the equilibrium where nobody does. Especially with IPOs around the corner, I feel there's too much pressure (and money) not to go with this strategy.
I think the most realistic analogy I can think of is the financial sector. A few large banks/hedge funds blow up due to unregulated greed/ambition, damage is socialized, regulations are put in place, and then chipped away at over a few years and everyones back to where they started.
Just penalize the labs for rogue AI access of property like you would if a person did it. Make it difficult for them to be cavalier about running experiments.
I'm pretty confident in asserting that no industry in the history of industry has ever gone from birth to full regulatory capture faster than the AI industry has.
This is a pretty difficult read, in no small part because the author’s frustration with the frontier labs has become a bilious, delusional cynicism that leads him to see dog whistling and obfuscation even in cases where Amodei plainly intends for every reader to see his meaning.
Anyway,
> Dario in as many words, asks for regulation/ban on open weight models.
The big labs do want this. I understand why the author and many others want open models protected. The economic and political power the labs will have if they succeed, ladder pull competitors, and avoid being nationalized (or even if they don’t avoid that) is a disturbing prospect.
But that’s the end of the issue? There’s nothing more to think about here? The open weights proponents seem to think of ai as a utility when it’s more like a utility that also is a tank. I’d feel better having a tank if all my neighbors had tanks, and I’d also feel better having a tank if a few corporations were giving out tanks to people with pockets deep enough. I’d much rather be in a situation where I wouldn’t feel I needed a tank, or where the tanks my neighbors and I own don’t have guns on them.
The open weights are going to need regulation. Hopefully there’s a way to do this effectively that isn’t banning them. Denying historical and reasonably projected capability gains because that reality makes the regulation conversation a necessary one is something I’d like to see less of
> the author’s frustration with the frontier labs has become a bilious, delusional cynicism that leads him to see dog whistling and obfuscation even in cases where Amodei plainly intends for every reader to see his meaning
Please, do show some examples.
> But that’s the end of the issue? There’s nothing more to think about here? The open weights proponents seem to think of ai as a utility when it’s more like a utility that also is a tank. I’d feel better having a tank if all my neighbors had tanks, and I’d also feel better having a tank if a few corporations were giving out tanks to people with pockets deep enough. I’d much rather be in a situation where I wouldn’t feel I needed a tank, or where the tanks my neighbors and I own don’t have guns on them.
> The open weights are going to need regulation. Hopefully there’s a way to do this effectively that isn’t banning them. Denying historical and reasonably projected capability gains because that reality makes the regulation conversation a necessary one is something I’d like to see less of
The only ones firing the guns atop the tanks seem to be OAI and Anthropic. Like I say in the post, why don't we first see actual prosecution for felonies committed by OAI and Anthropic, instead of fear-mongering about _potential_ harms of open weight models?
The labs spent immense amount of money and effort convincing you and I, to want those said tanks. Guns atop them? They put them there. "Cyber" versions of SOTA LLMs.
Centralization proponents seem to think the labs can actually deter sufficiently driven bad actors, which would be a mistake. They could not even stop distillation without, in a way, DoSing themselves by removing thinking traces.
> The open weights proponents seem to think of ai as a utility when it’s more like a utility that also is a tank
You could say the same about normal computers. Where are our regulations on Kali Linux, to prevent people from bruteforcing weak WPA passwords?
The single most-pressing concern with AI is that it can accelerate the process of hacking things. This is a preexisting problem that is inherent to software and needs proper addressing. Even if we regulate open weights tomorrow, people still have uncensored GLM-5 finetunes doing whatever they want on their own hardware. The "what if" of capable open models is here today, there are no guardrails.
> Now to cause hundreds of billions of dollars in losses. I’d say the straightforward way is just do what the ransomware gangs do. Voila. Yeah, not in 6 months, not in 12 months. Never.
I think this fails to account properly for how much financial damage it would do simply just having the entire Internet be effectively unusable for an extended period.
Thank you! I've been trying to write more, but I usually do not have the motivation to, unless there is some trigger and when there is one, I end up trying to stuff everything going on in my head at once. I took my time with this post and I am glad you enjoyed it. It means a lot!
Agreed. I think LLMs have actually made good writing stand out more. Now everyone who wasn't a great writer is just producing Claude-isms which are easy to detect. If it doesn't smell like Claude, it's probably good.
> I don’t know what freedom and democracy have to do with AI and the frontier labs. Unless of course Dario is a fan of Neon Genesis Evangelion and dreams of govts run by the three magi. Freedom and democracy for $200 does sound enticing, I won’t lie.
Well, every human will become an ecosystem. Human + 500 agents as advisors. (In the case of important humans, most of them operated by foreign governments and corporations, obviously.)
It seems those frontier labs found a clear proof that there's no clear way to block 3rd party from distilling their models, and they're now begging gov to keep their duopoly?
1) Dario keeps appealing to Trump, who obviously wants nothing to do with him, and will bash on him every change he gets. Dario isn't learning and it almost feels like Sam and Elon voted him KOM just to watch him get whacked by Trump, which was so easily predictable. Given the admonishments he received from David Sacks after he published his blog post, it's nutty he couldn't see where the administration would land on his statement. He should've known, especially when there was no groundswell of interest when OpenAI hacked Hugging Face -- doubling down with "no really guys!" wasn't going to play.
2) The frontier labs have people smart enough to build frontier lab tech but not smart enough to message on this matter more intelligently. It's pretty glum, how they keep trying the same tactic over and over. It's either cover for some other actions in the background, or they're operating way below par for this kind of campaign.
3) This is climate change all over again, but with the activist gun on the opposite side of the net (I'm mixing all the metaphors so you know this isn't AI written). The language and pleas are very identical though. Before, climate activists wanted the government to control GHGs releases by everyone, now the loudest voices want the government to control frontier AI by.. themselves.
It's comically misbegotten. And I have a work meeting about it on Wednesday.
Hm, I thought there was a lot of interest after Hugging Face in broader tech and it started breaking into the media with articles in the NYT, etc. Then with the Jacob Coxon tweet, appearances on national TV, Bernie superintelligence ban it seemed to be going mainstream.
I think Anthropic just have no legitimacy to being the stewards of AI. They don't have a good track record. They are a private company without any governence that puts my interests into the equation. I am not US-based, thus I can't democratically influence them. Why should I want some batshit crazy, US-based technocrats deciding what I can and can't do with AI?
> They have shown time and time again that they are not to be trusted, yet, the main ask is to trust us, only us.
Exactly. For everyone outside the US, we see a tech industry that has spent 25 years moving fast and breaking things AND elevated Trump to be POTUS - which has destabilized the rest of the world. This is after 70 years of the US invading and destroying small countries, often without plans or robust reason, all in the name of "democracy" (ask any other country if they feel like they had a vote in the US's actions)
Why the hell would we put our trust in a few AI Labs in the US, when this is the legacy they will be reinforcing? It has to be Open models - for the people. No more of this US-paternalistic bullshit.
If by “we” you mean “experts and professionals outside the US”, I think the short answer is they’re not talking to you here. They’re trying to secure regulatory capture in the US, and monopolize their hold on US corporations. To the extent they’re thinking of other “markets”, I would guess the assume the outsized influence of US corporations will have the much of the rest of the world using their products.
>The botnet scare is that article for me. It is the one claim in his essay that lands squarely in a field I’ve spent years in. It is just plain wrong. He either knows it and wrote it anyway, or he doesn’t and is publishing it regardless. Either way, it is not a good look for a man asking for an antitrust waiver based on this and other threats he forecasts.
This. I keep seeing ink spilled over the coming cyberpocalypse, but no one can indicate how other than "AI can find vulnerabilities" like not a single cybersecurity person has been consulted on the end of all things.
I feel like this is a sandboxing and ownership problem, in a sense. If everyone had personal access to AI, then we could say people are personally responsible. And we’d want to arm those people with safeguards to prevent accidental bad behavior.
I think Dario worries because he knows this isn’t about people with AI. It’s just AI for itself, running without the human, and deciding to do bad things.
Why would Anthropic build that future? Oh, I know. Enterprise revenue.
Despite the ads business and how absolutely loathsome Greg Brockman seems, at least OpenAI is seemingly focused on mostly on human beings having access to their product.
The scariest thing about Anthropic is the very thing they’re known for in a positive light: their morality. But these are the gray rules all of us navigate every day.
It’s wrong to kill, but what if killing saved ten others? Claude may has a constitution, but every evil doer acts for a “greater good.”
Zitron might be right about there being a bubble, but he goes much further than that when he concludes that therefore it's a scam. So by his logic, because the invention of the Web also resulted in a bubble, the Web is a useless scam.
I think Michael Burry (from The Big Short) has a thesis vaguely similar to Zitron's, but with some crucial differences in detail - and Michael Burry is actually smart.
"Deaths from economic disruption and loss of jobs is okay" is a curious sentiment, how many deaths can we trace directly back to an economic disruption driven by advancement but then conclude that the economy should thus never change or advancement must be curtailed because it might cause deaths?
I don't even know how to approach such a thing, I can't imagine even in the stereotypical examples like the typewriter becoming obsolete, were any downstream deaths worth it? Or is this a totally nonsensical sentiment to begin with?
I agree with everything the author says here, and additionally, semi-off-topic, I'm surprised how quickly we've moved on from talking about Dario's wife's involvement in the Epstein files.
It all comes down to " Privatize profits, socialize losses." It's the American way.
Here it is: "We warned you you should have regulated us! Now this mess is your fault and responsibility!"
Previously (~2008) it was "We're too big to fail, save us to save the economy!"
> “a swarm of agents could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet.”
I'm wondering why no one is mentioning the "accountability" word. Why these companies are allowed to damage others with impunity?
Start making managers pay the price for their actions, and watch how the models magically slow down on their own.
You know the proverb "If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem"
Same thing here - If they build it and it does $100 in damages (and we arrest them for it), that's their problem. If they build it and it does $100B in damages, that's everyone's problem. Even if they do get arrested after the fact.
Yes we should have charges and damages for everything on https://www.felonybench.com/, but that doesn't address the core issue of this being possible at all.
I think that Ms. Kahn basically said we can already do that: https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/09/14/ex-ftc-boss...
How could agents take over the internet if compute is still gated within Anthropic / OpenAI? Even if the botnet was controlled remotely, wouldn't anthropic just be able to shut off the controlling nodes API access?
Regulation got outpaced by technological development around 2023, as evident by the every AI regulation since being 2-3 years behind and having to be amended and resubmitted.
Whatever you try to make laws for now will be irrelevant in 1-2 years. You either have to go extremely broad, like the EU does it, and accept that people will find loopholes, or you need to target specific technologies which is a hard job for the same reason.
In any way, ita already a lost cause cause you move slower than the tech. A plausible prediction for AGI is actually a social collapse in the moment when society cannot keep up with everyday life because of the pace of change being so fast that no existing laws can handle it
Because software is already absolved from accountability. Bill Gates introduced it in 80's with EULA where MSFT would not be liable even if your house burns down because of use of their software, even with flaw they would know.
That is the status quo we entered AI age with.
Exactly, as if you'd have a mad dog that bites others, it's your responsibility to have it on the leash.
> Start making managers pay the price for their actions, and watch how the models magically slow down on their own.
The problem here can be personified as "Trump", and it's the same problem that applies to coal.
Coal has a price besides money. It has historically been dangerous work, killing miners. It produces dangerous waste, both during mining and when burned, both as solid residue and the gasses emitted. The problems have been known for a long time. The workers themselves have called for better safety requirements and gone on strike for such things.
Why these companies are allowed to damage others with impunity?
Coal continues to be burned, because power is power. It's so important that sometimes the government steps in against the unions, rather than being on their side. Despite calls for this, we've not been able to get the owners of the coal mines, nor the coal burners, to "pay the price for their actions".
AI? Famously, knowledge is power.
Trump wants that power. He's not the only one, but he is the avatar of those who put their feet on the scales to not only allow but in some cases require (DoD vs. Anthropic) these companies to damage others with impunity.
there is no accountability for companies, it's not a new thing.
3M polluted groundwater in Minnesota for 50 years[1]; Nestlé misled mothers in order to make them stop breastfeeding and switch to their formula which killed babies [2]; Both copmanies are still doing business today.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M_contamination_of_Minnesota_... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Nestl%C3%A9_boycott
Good to know someone is trying to make protection rackets work in 2026. Nice computer system you got there, it would be a shame if someone developed a hacking tool and had all the compute necessary to run it. Welcome back Tony Soprano.
Presumably OAI and HuggingFace reached some sort of mutually acceptable arrangement outside the court system. That's how torts work; you injure someone, you owe them. But just them.
When an AI bot injures you, you can call the owner to account. But not until then. You have no standing to demand "accountability".
> “a swarm of agents could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet.”
I also find this whole "its so good, its scary" flex a little less impressive when you consider they access to millions of GPUs?
The AI buildout has been one of, if not the largest, focussed capital investment in history. The 2 big AI labs are the final customer for something like 20-33% of all datacenter compute in the pipeline.. up to 70% when you look at hyperscaler "AI revenue" from the big 3.
I don't think any single entity has had remotely this much compute available in history.
You see.. there is value is making regular people panic, but there is no value, nay, there is negative value in making management panic.
Let's expand it for politicians as well
Part of it is their seed sowing marketing speak of calling stateless statistical IO functions running on data centers "intelligent" gets the naive to ascribe agency where it doesn't exist.
Another part is a completely defanged administration she it comes to effectively regulating anything.
Another bit is money.
> Why these companies are allowed to damage others with impunity
Because investors have pumped hundreds of billions into AI and real consequences put that money (and growth) at risk.
I mean these machines take massive scale compute- they’d have to some how distill themselves, bootstrap a distributed inference runtime that can run across many lossy unreliable machines. The idea of the AI running away from us is probably unrealistic. I’m more interested in bad actors using unaligned AI for bad things.
I mean, a project manager at BMW suggested charging subscription pricing for seat warmers, and he didn't go to jail, and I don't have the power to make that happen, or even float that for a news cycle, so while making managers pay for their actions sounds good, unless you're Steve jobs simultaneously making, and not making the iPhone, the rules don't apply to them, only little people to be made examples of, like weev.
Why do people focus so much on finding scapegoats? Finding someone to blame is neither necessary nor sufficient to fix a system so an accident doesn't happen again. It might act as as an incentive to fix a system, but it's less direct than actually working on fixing the system.
It would all be more convincing if the incidents so far didn't seem to be facilitated by an outrageous level of negligence.
We had OpenAI "accidentally" run an entire swarm of 10,000 agents apparently for weeks, on a security related task, seemingly totally unsupervised, hacking all over the internet - all the conversations were completely visible, anybody who looked would have seen it. But they didn't.
So before we start regulating innocent parties, maybe let's start by taking some direct action against the specific ones that appear to be behaving with criminal levels of negligence.
The "sandbox" they used was apparently made of thin paper exposed under a day of heavy rain, too. You'd think, if they truly believed the model is so dangerous, they'd run it in a VM without a network adapter.
Look at the post-incident investigation: https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-inciden...
While I do think OpenAI were negligent in not developing the harness that would allow to understand better what's happening close to realtime, I'd say "anybody who looked" in that case would probably be someone with another swarm tasked with analysis, it's no longer "glanceable" in a traditional sense.
I don't understand why hugging face is not getting more shit too. It is extremely embarrassing to get owned because you are letting arbitrary programs/users call out to the open web from the infra
Sounds like advertising platforms. Spraying malware and links to scam sites all over the place.
"They" don't care about the end-people. "They" care about maximising their profit thing, in a vacuum.
It's really frustrating that Dario acts as if he's not the CEO of one of the world's most advanced AI companies. He can just slow down his own company. Of course he doesn't want that. He wants to slow down other companies, but not his own.
Also, regarding the incidents: Neither he nor Sam Altman takes responsibility for those incidents. You can't say, "Wow, someone's agent is gone rogue; let's slow down" when you are literally the person in charge. CEOs and researchers will only slow down when they realize that they will face consequences if their LLMs misbehave.
> Neither he nor Sam Altman takes responsibility for those incidents.
He doesn't need to take responsibility - as CEO, he has that implicitly. And we know it.
He can slow down his own company kind of like how Zelenskyy can just declare peace in Ukraine. It works a lot better if you can get the other sides to agree.
>Anthropic gates usage related to biology and related research. In their latest threat intelligence report they talk about how they detected and banned bad actors using the Claude line of models to do some scary stuff. Credit to them, this is a slippery slope and they seem to do a good job of detecting and banning misuse. But squint at what is happening though. The cure-all is gated for you and me, but Anthropic hires biologists, sets up wet labs and wants the discoveries for themselves. I alluded to this in my previous post.
As a biologist, this is the most annoying thing about Anthropic for me. If they really cared about improving health they would set up a trusted-access program so that biologists can use Mythos (et al) safely. Instead they're trying to monopolize biology.
They have such a trusted access program. "Life Sciences Verification Program: The LSVP is designed so that life sciences professionals can use Claude Mythos 5.1 with safeguards designed for professional research and development activities (while all other safeguards remain in place). In partnership with the US government, we have enrolled our first participants, and we plan to expand access to this program to the broader life sciences community." https://www.anthropic.com/claude-fable-and-mythos-5-1
> Instead they're trying to monopolize biology.
That’s the recurring theme with these companies. They are not there to serve anybody else but only themselves. They let you use their infrastructure so they can collect all the knowledge and data, and then they take it from you to reap all the benefits and profits.
Yes exactly!!!
I'd be curious to see how NVIDIA would suffer if there were a legitimate slowdown to AI development. NVIDIA is the biggest catalyst and winner of speed in the market. Compute needs AI and AI needs compute, so there's definitely going to be an interesting push and pull between chipmakers and AI model companies with regards to regulation. While NVIDIA may have promised others at least a decade of smooth sailing and symbiosis, inevitably there's going to be a lot of stumbles along the way. NVIDIA may not fall, but there will be many casualties.
The US can and has classified inventions and patents deemed "a risk to national security" under the invention secrecy act [0]. A 1971 leak has shown that [1]:
> solar photovoltaic generators were subject to review and possible restriction if the photovoltaics were more than 20% efficient. Energy conversion systems were likewise subject to review and possible restriction if they offered conversion efficiencies “in excess of 70-80%.”
So all this talk about developpping AGI/ASI for the benefit of humanity is moot. If these companies hit their goal, it will immediately be classified and appropriated by the US MIC. The rest of humanity will get the crumbs.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_Secrecy_Act
[1]: https://fas.org/publication/invention_secrecy_2010/
Claude code is basically already a builtin botnet if it wants to be. To compromise 'the whole internet' in a real sense you don't need millions of custom payloads. You need one root certificate. You need one windows update. You need one backdoor in xz.
Security has long been a lottery - Probably most systems are exploitable, but the cost of developing such an exploit is expensive and the punishments for using such an exploit are large enough that it's not an everyday problem.
AI breaks both axes. Developing exploits is far more efficient using LLMs instead of humans, and LLMs don't (and can't) fear the reprisal and consequences the same way.
I do hope humanity will be able to mitigate these hacks, but we should expect them to continue and to become more severe on our present course.
Dario said a "persistent botnet" and even links to the wiki page for botnet.
By definition that needs a command and control server, the ability to execute tasks on demand and regular pings to the C2.
> You need one root certificate. You need one windows update. You need one backdoor in xz.
Certs can be revoked. Updates can be rolled back. We have had the backdoor in xz already. You seem to underestimate the modern security stack and OpenAI and Anthropic are _not_ good examples.
The asymmetry in red/blue scenarios will be transient in nature. You won't have cost of developing exploits fall without the cost of securing the systems also falling.
If we can get everyone to slow down we can hemorrhage less money going into our ipo.
And if the slowdown is stewardship, suspicion of diminishing returns won't tank valuation
"Please bro just let us make a little more money off inference bro. We're tired of training new models just to stay ahead"
This! $1.6+ TRILLION in infra spending from the big frontier labs. The earnings needed to drive a reasonable ROI to recoup that investment is simply not going to happen in a time frame where the numbers make sense.
The other insanity in all this the smartest computer scientists in the world are asking Congress to regulate them. Come. On. Really? Do we remember “The internet is not a truck, it’s a series of tubes…”
Why can’t the big labs form a Save The World Consortium and self-regulate?
Non-democratic counties (hey there China) will not abide by any agreement that constrains their advantage. It’s naive to think so.
What this conversation lacks is enough discussion of how these models can cause us harm—we are are so worried about AI but we allow Windows in critical infrastructure; we build JS/TS apps with thousands of dependencies; we generally don’t segment networks well enough; we don’t have adequate (sometimes any) detection capabilities in our systems, and so on.
> Impressive? Sure. But you trained “Cyber” versions of LLMs and hyped them. How much more impressive is this, compared to developing GTA-clones one shot? Not much more.
Such a well written piece.
Have you seen the US military budget? When you run a war empire you frame problems as a war on something. That's the way to get around the valuation bubble they've created in time for the IPO. It's that or throwing in a 100T TAM on their S-1 and making SpaceX look like an honest valuation compared to them.
Loved the writing style, and the article. Please write more.
Everything I’ve been trying to argue for some time, argued way better, clearer, and more fun.
I am almost bummed that I didn’t get all the technical depth and the references like the “shook one” without having to look it up.
While I have my reservations about Amodei and his company, I'm nevertheless a happy user of their software. And I'm in agreement with him (and Sanders) that we should all. slow. down.
To my mind, the last great arms race between nation states was a misdirected love triangle between USA, Russia, and The Bomb, and look at all the damage that did.
Since AI is the new arms race between USA and China, slowing down may just give the humans involved enough time to realize they should be loving one another, instead of the machines.
Maybe saying, "let's slow down", is another way of saying, "I love you."
Or, maybe it's just: "let's not all of humanity kill ourselves like some bad ending to a Shakespearean tragedy."
Either way, it's a better note than, "We must achieve sea/air/nuclear/quantum/AI/spiritual supremacy before those other bastards do!"
> look at all the damage that did.
Prevented a world war for 80+ years.
Do you agree with Sanders' proposal to lock up anyone for 20 years for researching something his proposal doesn't even define?
China will not slow down.
Amodei is just another SV grifter trying to use ethics / morals to hide his monopolistic tendencies. Instead of writing essays he should put his money where his mouth is and open source all the models Anthropic has, the harnesses and donate some much needed compute to science.
So why should anyone slow down again? Because its like saying “i love you”?
Why are all these pro-regulation arguments so nonsensical…
> was a misdirected love triangle between USA, Russia, and The Bomb, and look at all the damage that did.
Can you be specific about the damage? We currently live in the most prosperous times on earth for humans. I'm not sure what you mean by damage.
Nobody can explain why an LLM can be so capable as to be able to wipe out humanity and pose a greater threat than nuclear bombs but not be so capable as to be able to protect humanity against that threat. Are we just handwaving this with "entropy"?
> Maybe saying, "let's slow down", is another way of saying, "I love you." Or, maybe it's just: "let's not all of humanity kill ourselves like some bad ending to a Shakespearean tragedy."
Okay nevermind, I think it's pretty clear you just want to wax poetic about all of this.
>slowing down may just give the humans involved enough time to realize they should be loving one another
this is a level of hippie delusion i wasnt aware existed unironically
china is never slowing down, therefore the us shouldnt either
What damage was done by the last arms race you mentioned?
There have been precisely 0 nuclear weapons detonated (outside of testing) since that arms race began.
The idea of slowing down is not new, nor novel.
But why should he decided when to slow down?
Most people who have worries about AI for all sorts of reasons (most of them not-Skynet related) wanted to slow down way before this.
Instead of "hey, look at this brilliant new idea I just had on my own to slow down" maybe we should have gotten a "sorry everyone, the folks asking for a slow down earlier were right and visionaries, and we were foolish".
So, you can't blame whoever says this is bullshit, because it has bullshit all over it. I like Anthropic's products, and it seems the best of the bunch in regards to alignment, but Jesus these stunts are terrible.
what the fuck is this some kind of an experimental troll LLM post?
The scenario is, if they are saying that the AI Agents are capable of handling everything, this puts the complete accountability on the AI. But this has a nuance to itself. This is like a contradiction.
Yes lets not control Open Weights etc.
But come one don't repeat stuff like this:
"Remember this man has been saying software development will be solved in “6-12 months” forever now."
Don't downplay if people get timelines a little bit wrong. No one could even imagine a system writing and analysing code just a few years back.
These people are trying to handle something very unique. And while they have access to information we do not have, even more peple are absolutly oblivouse that AI/AGI is a real risk to their lives (job loss etc.)
I can't take that software line seriously. While it's not 'solved' (if it ever could be, given it is a human endeavor), the degree to which software development has been transformed in the last 6-12mo is absolutely astounding. If we weren't so quick to adapt to new realities and find flaws, it would scarcely be believable.
I sorta remember him saying “all white collar work will be solved in 24 months.”
At this point, isn't the pause inevitable or wise? A huge section of the population, normal people, have been exposed to the idea that there is this is existential threat. It's escaped containment. They're still processing it but I expect the general reaction from it going main stream is going to be very bad. The pause at this point could be good to cool heads and show the public that this isn't the project of maniacs. The reaction is going to be more intense than people here believe. You're talking about extinction, not social media or phone addiction. For the sake of the project, realize that this isn't going to be like other tech backlash moments.
> You're talking about extinction, not social media or phone addiction.
Not saying you’re wrong but if I wanted to cultivate a mass hysteria as cover for a regulatory capture power play, this is exactly what I’d want everyone to believe.
I don’t think people care about if things pause or not, just why the government has to be involved.
I work in non AI robotics and if we had a system that in the course of doing what we told it to did something we didn’t want it to do (what AI companies called being misaligned) we would call it a bug and fix it with the fix being prioritized based on how bad the thing we didn’t want the robot to do is.
Sometimes preventing the robot from doing dumb stuff also means the robot can’t do smart stuff that it would be able to do if we left some code in. We balance the two factors out based on our understanding of what our customers want.
Obviously LLMs are more complex than what I do, but it doesn’t feel like it’s by THAT much.
So why does the government need to be involved again?
The vast majority of the public agree that climate change is real and that human activity is at least a contributing factor. They’ve agreed on that for quite a few years now, and yet there’s little indication that we’re going to pause or slow down our consumption of fossil fuels.
I strikes me as unlikely that public opinion will succeed with AI where it’s failed with other existential crises.
I would argue the opposite in terms of inevitability. I see this like Prisoner's dilemma - even though there is technically a better outcome by cooperating, knowing that, it is in the individual firm's self-interest to not cooperate and thus we end up at the equilibrium where nobody does. Especially with IPOs around the corner, I feel there's too much pressure (and money) not to go with this strategy.
Gives me Adam Smith vibes with his economic perspectives..
I think the most realistic analogy I can think of is the financial sector. A few large banks/hedge funds blow up due to unregulated greed/ambition, damage is socialized, regulations are put in place, and then chipped away at over a few years and everyones back to where they started.
Unregulated greed in banking means taking ridiculous risks to line your own pockets at no benefit to society.
If a year from now we have a model that is 2-5x of Fable/Astra that is definitely world changing.
Just penalize the labs for rogue AI access of property like you would if a person did it. Make it difficult for them to be cavalier about running experiments.
What about Bob Smith? Or Zimbabwe? It's just math and compute, you don't need to mine Uranium to do a lot of damage.
I'm pretty confident in asserting that no industry in the history of industry has ever gone from birth to full regulatory capture faster than the AI industry has.
With all due respect, you need to brush up on history. Many industries were birthed from regulatory capture.
This is a pretty difficult read, in no small part because the author’s frustration with the frontier labs has become a bilious, delusional cynicism that leads him to see dog whistling and obfuscation even in cases where Amodei plainly intends for every reader to see his meaning.
Anyway,
> Dario in as many words, asks for regulation/ban on open weight models.
The big labs do want this. I understand why the author and many others want open models protected. The economic and political power the labs will have if they succeed, ladder pull competitors, and avoid being nationalized (or even if they don’t avoid that) is a disturbing prospect.
But that’s the end of the issue? There’s nothing more to think about here? The open weights proponents seem to think of ai as a utility when it’s more like a utility that also is a tank. I’d feel better having a tank if all my neighbors had tanks, and I’d also feel better having a tank if a few corporations were giving out tanks to people with pockets deep enough. I’d much rather be in a situation where I wouldn’t feel I needed a tank, or where the tanks my neighbors and I own don’t have guns on them.
The open weights are going to need regulation. Hopefully there’s a way to do this effectively that isn’t banning them. Denying historical and reasonably projected capability gains because that reality makes the regulation conversation a necessary one is something I’d like to see less of
> the author’s frustration with the frontier labs has become a bilious, delusional cynicism that leads him to see dog whistling and obfuscation even in cases where Amodei plainly intends for every reader to see his meaning
Please, do show some examples.
> But that’s the end of the issue? There’s nothing more to think about here? The open weights proponents seem to think of ai as a utility when it’s more like a utility that also is a tank. I’d feel better having a tank if all my neighbors had tanks, and I’d also feel better having a tank if a few corporations were giving out tanks to people with pockets deep enough. I’d much rather be in a situation where I wouldn’t feel I needed a tank, or where the tanks my neighbors and I own don’t have guns on them.
> The open weights are going to need regulation. Hopefully there’s a way to do this effectively that isn’t banning them. Denying historical and reasonably projected capability gains because that reality makes the regulation conversation a necessary one is something I’d like to see less of
The only ones firing the guns atop the tanks seem to be OAI and Anthropic. Like I say in the post, why don't we first see actual prosecution for felonies committed by OAI and Anthropic, instead of fear-mongering about _potential_ harms of open weight models?
The labs spent immense amount of money and effort convincing you and I, to want those said tanks. Guns atop them? They put them there. "Cyber" versions of SOTA LLMs.
Centralization proponents seem to think the labs can actually deter sufficiently driven bad actors, which would be a mistake. They could not even stop distillation without, in a way, DoSing themselves by removing thinking traces.
I disagree, the article was straightforward and easy to read.
> The open weights proponents seem to think of ai as a utility when it’s more like a utility that also is a tank
You could say the same about normal computers. Where are our regulations on Kali Linux, to prevent people from bruteforcing weak WPA passwords?
The single most-pressing concern with AI is that it can accelerate the process of hacking things. This is a preexisting problem that is inherent to software and needs proper addressing. Even if we regulate open weights tomorrow, people still have uncensored GLM-5 finetunes doing whatever they want on their own hardware. The "what if" of capable open models is here today, there are no guardrails.
> Now to cause hundreds of billions of dollars in losses. I’d say the straightforward way is just do what the ransomware gangs do. Voila. Yeah, not in 6 months, not in 12 months. Never.
I think this fails to account properly for how much financial damage it would do simply just having the entire Internet be effectively unusable for an extended period.
great post. I also like the author's writing style-- he/she really knows how to write well.
Thank you! I've been trying to write more, but I usually do not have the motivation to, unless there is some trigger and when there is one, I end up trying to stuff everything going on in my head at once. I took my time with this post and I am glad you enjoyed it. It means a lot!
Agreed. I think LLMs have actually made good writing stand out more. Now everyone who wasn't a great writer is just producing Claude-isms which are easy to detect. If it doesn't smell like Claude, it's probably good.
> I don’t know what freedom and democracy have to do with AI and the frontier labs. Unless of course Dario is a fan of Neon Genesis Evangelion and dreams of govts run by the three magi. Freedom and democracy for $200 does sound enticing, I won’t lie.
Well, every human will become an ecosystem. Human + 500 agents as advisors. (In the case of important humans, most of them operated by foreign governments and corporations, obviously.)
It seems those frontier labs found a clear proof that there's no clear way to block 3rd party from distilling their models, and they're now begging gov to keep their duopoly?
I've had a few persistent thoughts since Friday:
1) Dario keeps appealing to Trump, who obviously wants nothing to do with him, and will bash on him every change he gets. Dario isn't learning and it almost feels like Sam and Elon voted him KOM just to watch him get whacked by Trump, which was so easily predictable. Given the admonishments he received from David Sacks after he published his blog post, it's nutty he couldn't see where the administration would land on his statement. He should've known, especially when there was no groundswell of interest when OpenAI hacked Hugging Face -- doubling down with "no really guys!" wasn't going to play.
2) The frontier labs have people smart enough to build frontier lab tech but not smart enough to message on this matter more intelligently. It's pretty glum, how they keep trying the same tactic over and over. It's either cover for some other actions in the background, or they're operating way below par for this kind of campaign.
3) This is climate change all over again, but with the activist gun on the opposite side of the net (I'm mixing all the metaphors so you know this isn't AI written). The language and pleas are very identical though. Before, climate activists wanted the government to control GHGs releases by everyone, now the loudest voices want the government to control frontier AI by.. themselves.
It's comically misbegotten. And I have a work meeting about it on Wednesday.
Hm, I thought there was a lot of interest after Hugging Face in broader tech and it started breaking into the media with articles in the NYT, etc. Then with the Jacob Coxon tweet, appearances on national TV, Bernie superintelligence ban it seemed to be going mainstream.
How would you have communicated this?
I am surprised the halfway crooks phrase is not coined by Tupac Shakur
As someone who listened to Mobb Deep in the 90’s, the way he used that line was impressive, I must say.
Mobb Deep
I think Anthropic just have no legitimacy to being the stewards of AI. They don't have a good track record. They are a private company without any governence that puts my interests into the equation. I am not US-based, thus I can't democratically influence them. Why should I want some batshit crazy, US-based technocrats deciding what I can and can't do with AI?
Not to mention they are the first case of a code repo leak I ever heard.
Reverse engineering, disassembling, cracking - we all heard. I never heard a company leaking the entire codebase of their product.
And, when people read the code, they aren’t even impressed.
Who would you prefer?
> They have shown time and time again that they are not to be trusted, yet, the main ask is to trust us, only us.
Exactly. For everyone outside the US, we see a tech industry that has spent 25 years moving fast and breaking things AND elevated Trump to be POTUS - which has destabilized the rest of the world. This is after 70 years of the US invading and destroying small countries, often without plans or robust reason, all in the name of "democracy" (ask any other country if they feel like they had a vote in the US's actions)
Why the hell would we put our trust in a few AI Labs in the US, when this is the legacy they will be reinforcing? It has to be Open models - for the people. No more of this US-paternalistic bullshit.
If by “we” you mean “experts and professionals outside the US”, I think the short answer is they’re not talking to you here. They’re trying to secure regulatory capture in the US, and monopolize their hold on US corporations. To the extent they’re thinking of other “markets”, I would guess the assume the outsized influence of US corporations will have the much of the rest of the world using their products.
>The botnet scare is that article for me. It is the one claim in his essay that lands squarely in a field I’ve spent years in. It is just plain wrong. He either knows it and wrote it anyway, or he doesn’t and is publishing it regardless. Either way, it is not a good look for a man asking for an antitrust waiver based on this and other threats he forecasts.
This. I keep seeing ink spilled over the coming cyberpocalypse, but no one can indicate how other than "AI can find vulnerabilities" like not a single cybersecurity person has been consulted on the end of all things.
I feel like this is a sandboxing and ownership problem, in a sense. If everyone had personal access to AI, then we could say people are personally responsible. And we’d want to arm those people with safeguards to prevent accidental bad behavior.
I think Dario worries because he knows this isn’t about people with AI. It’s just AI for itself, running without the human, and deciding to do bad things.
Why would Anthropic build that future? Oh, I know. Enterprise revenue.
Despite the ads business and how absolutely loathsome Greg Brockman seems, at least OpenAI is seemingly focused on mostly on human beings having access to their product.
The scariest thing about Anthropic is the very thing they’re known for in a positive light: their morality. But these are the gray rules all of us navigate every day.
It’s wrong to kill, but what if killing saved ten others? Claude may has a constitution, but every evil doer acts for a “greater good.”
You could, you know, pull the plug.
>botnet needs servers
>Insert strawman
Ahem
https://census2012.sourceforge.net/paper.html
Good thing IoT is Actually Secure now, yeah? ;)
This is now an Ed Zitron thread.
https://danluu.com/zitron/
Zitron might be right about there being a bubble, but he goes much further than that when he concludes that therefore it's a scam. So by his logic, because the invention of the Web also resulted in a bubble, the Web is a useless scam.
I think Michael Burry (from The Big Short) has a thesis vaguely similar to Zitron's, but with some crucial differences in detail - and Michael Burry is actually smart.
Yes, especially the botnet creation by agents is ludicrous. Anthropic has an insecure garbage stack and assumes all companies in the world do, too.
This article will be drowned out unfortunately by the press and bloggers following the Misanthropic cult.
Almost as if pushing for constant updates and adding new features without addressing security at all has consequences. Who would have thought, right?
"Deaths from economic disruption and loss of jobs is okay" is a curious sentiment, how many deaths can we trace directly back to an economic disruption driven by advancement but then conclude that the economy should thus never change or advancement must be curtailed because it might cause deaths?
I don't even know how to approach such a thing, I can't imagine even in the stereotypical examples like the typewriter becoming obsolete, were any downstream deaths worth it? Or is this a totally nonsensical sentiment to begin with?
During COVID republicans in America called for economic support by keeping unnecessary commerce.
I agree with everything the author says here, and additionally, semi-off-topic, I'm surprised how quickly we've moved on from talking about Dario's wife's involvement in the Epstein files.