Thanks for the fantastic article. I agree that the DoD's brutal campaign of retaliation against an American company represents the conduct of an authoritarian state -- one that has replaced the republic we once knew. (Not that you said it exactly like that, but this is what I take away). The corrupt kleptocratic side of the equation is represented by OpenAI's CEO's $25 million gift to Donald Trump. The only response I can summon is to switch from ChatGPT to Claude, which I described in my post about this debacle. https://www.activevoice.us/p/i-unsubscribed-from-chatgpt-and-subscribed
Our main problem is Donald Trump. Nothing that happened before him indicated the death of republic. People that are trying to both sides it are delusional.
I can pinpoint for you when the Republic started to fray. It was 1989 when Rush Limbaugh discovered that one could lie to the American public for fun and great profit. He was followed by many imitators, later by Rupert and finally the cess pit of the Internet and its many faux journalists. Thirty plus years of turning millions of media illiterate voters into the kind of people who wanted, no, needed, a Donald Trump to release them from concealing their misogyny, racism, small-dick low self-esteem and favorite conspiracy theories. James Madison said it simply and best, "A democratic republic requires a well-informed electorate." Uh-oh!
If Anthropic or any contractor wants to enforce its contract terms, they can go to court like everyone else. The idea that a tech company would impose guardrails directly upon the US military or lock down vital resources in a critical moment is literally insane.
Because Anthropic is not the law. If we want to ensure the government obeys the law, the proper mechanism is the courts, not empowering a private company to directly block any government action it thinks violates its ToS.
Good article. I think I agree with much of it. However, I have a couple of thoughts:
(1) Suppose Congress passed a law on Friday called the Military Access to AI Act, in which Congress mandated that Anthropic or other AI companies must make their frontier models available to the military and cannot place restrictions on lawful use of models in lawful operations. Would this be more acceptable? After all, it would be the productive of representative institutions. The emphasis on private property in this article make me think Mr. Ball would still object, but I’m curious.
(2) Building on the previous point, it seems to me that if A.I. is going to be as transformative as people say it will, ensuring models are subject to democratic control is very important, as is the need to make these models available to the military in the event of a war. There are analogies to be drawn here between A.I. models and, say, electric utility regulation or railroad regulation. There is also the fact that the cost of developing these models is partly borne by the public (don’t Trump announce a massive initiative called Stargate to build up data centres?). Ensuring the worst concerns about skyrocketing inequality (cf Philip Trammell and Dwarkesh Patel’s recent essay “Capital in the 21st Century”) don’t materialize will also require regulation, potentially of a very considerable sort. I get the concerns about private property, but these are always defeasible and I think there’s a strong argument here that the government should exercise at least some control over these models.
(3). That isn’t to say that using these models for mass surveillance or for fully autonomous weapons (what does this “fully autonomous” mean anyway?) is appropriate. But it seems to me the argument here should focus much more on the merits of the particular uses Anthropic wants to build restrictions around rather than concerns about private property.
(4) Quite apart from all of this, the fact that the US government was willing to contract with OAI suggests that this whole fracas was about government favouring one company and wanting to punish another. The use of the government for a personalistic end like this is an example of the encroaching patrimonalism Francis Fukuyama has been critical of (cf also Jonathan Rauch talking about this applicability of this concept to the current administration).
O dear, I wish you would not forget that there is no DoW. It's real name is Department of Defense... Please do not concede!
Thanks for the fantastic article. I agree that the DoD's brutal campaign of retaliation against an American company represents the conduct of an authoritarian state -- one that has replaced the republic we once knew. (Not that you said it exactly like that, but this is what I take away). The corrupt kleptocratic side of the equation is represented by OpenAI's CEO's $25 million gift to Donald Trump. The only response I can summon is to switch from ChatGPT to Claude, which I described in my post about this debacle. https://www.activevoice.us/p/i-unsubscribed-from-chatgpt-and-subscribed
Our main problem is Donald Trump. Nothing that happened before him indicated the death of republic. People that are trying to both sides it are delusional.
Mr. Ball--
I can pinpoint for you when the Republic started to fray. It was 1989 when Rush Limbaugh discovered that one could lie to the American public for fun and great profit. He was followed by many imitators, later by Rupert and finally the cess pit of the Internet and its many faux journalists. Thirty plus years of turning millions of media illiterate voters into the kind of people who wanted, no, needed, a Donald Trump to release them from concealing their misogyny, racism, small-dick low self-esteem and favorite conspiracy theories. James Madison said it simply and best, "A democratic republic requires a well-informed electorate." Uh-oh!
If Anthropic or any contractor wants to enforce its contract terms, they can go to court like everyone else. The idea that a tech company would impose guardrails directly upon the US military or lock down vital resources in a critical moment is literally insane.
How is it insane? Perhaps Trumpo and Pete decided it was bad. But we don't care what they think.
Because Anthropic is not the law. If we want to ensure the government obeys the law, the proper mechanism is the courts, not empowering a private company to directly block any government action it thinks violates its ToS.
Good article. I think I agree with much of it. However, I have a couple of thoughts:
(1) Suppose Congress passed a law on Friday called the Military Access to AI Act, in which Congress mandated that Anthropic or other AI companies must make their frontier models available to the military and cannot place restrictions on lawful use of models in lawful operations. Would this be more acceptable? After all, it would be the productive of representative institutions. The emphasis on private property in this article make me think Mr. Ball would still object, but I’m curious.
(2) Building on the previous point, it seems to me that if A.I. is going to be as transformative as people say it will, ensuring models are subject to democratic control is very important, as is the need to make these models available to the military in the event of a war. There are analogies to be drawn here between A.I. models and, say, electric utility regulation or railroad regulation. There is also the fact that the cost of developing these models is partly borne by the public (don’t Trump announce a massive initiative called Stargate to build up data centres?). Ensuring the worst concerns about skyrocketing inequality (cf Philip Trammell and Dwarkesh Patel’s recent essay “Capital in the 21st Century”) don’t materialize will also require regulation, potentially of a very considerable sort. I get the concerns about private property, but these are always defeasible and I think there’s a strong argument here that the government should exercise at least some control over these models.
(3). That isn’t to say that using these models for mass surveillance or for fully autonomous weapons (what does this “fully autonomous” mean anyway?) is appropriate. But it seems to me the argument here should focus much more on the merits of the particular uses Anthropic wants to build restrictions around rather than concerns about private property.
(4) Quite apart from all of this, the fact that the US government was willing to contract with OAI suggests that this whole fracas was about government favouring one company and wanting to punish another. The use of the government for a personalistic end like this is an example of the encroaching patrimonalism Francis Fukuyama has been critical of (cf also Jonathan Rauch talking about this applicability of this concept to the current administration).