Trump signs downsized AI order after weeks of reversals | Hacker News Reader

Trump signs downsized AI order after weeks of reversals

politico.com

241 points_alternator_172 comments

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/06/prom...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/02/technology/trump-executiv...

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There doesn't really seem to be anything of substance in the actual executive order.

Section 1 doesn't say anything

Section 2 seems to boil down to: "improve cyber security and maybe use AI if we can find funding for it"

Section 3 proposes building a benchmark for evaluating cyber security performance of models that developers can choose to benchmark against. This seems like a good idea, I know Jack Clark has been a huge advocate for government's getting in with benchmarking.

Section 4 says to prioritize prosecuting cyber crimes. Not sure why they wouldn't already be prosecuted.

Section 5 doesn't say anything

Almost a year ago we got EO 14319 or the "Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government" that explicitly regulated the "ideology" of LLMs.

This Executive Order is just an expansion of the existing censorship framework.

There is no actual regulation in EO 14319. It only covers federal government purchasing and vendor management. No one is required to change the "ideology" of an LLM, although they might not be able to sell it to the government.

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/07/28/2025-14...

With land desperately trying to recoup their costs on multi-hundred million dollar training runs, those are some very fine hairs you're splitting.

Which hair is that? My statement was 100% accurate.

> No one is required to change the "ideology" of an LLM, although they might not be able to sell it to the government.

It takes hundreds of millions of dollars to train a model. If a large customers, the government, says they won't buy it if it doesn't adhere to a set of standards, no one is "required" to change, but it's a pretty heavy hand on the lever. It's like having a job. No one is "required" to have a job, but having one gets you money, and having money is pretty important to modern life.

So what? No business has a legal right to sell their products to the government. The LLM vendors should probably find cheaper, more efficient ways to train their models rather than depending on government contracts. If your business lives or dies based on a single large customer then you don't have a viable business in the first place.

I know lots of people who have money but no job.

Might be fair to say it’s setting the tone, though, that if you use “woke” (subjectively defined) ideology in any of your company’s marketing, documentation, or other communications you won’t be considered for government contracts. That’s a major blow for any company given the naked corruption and grift coming from the current admin.

It's not "setting the tone" it says that explicitly and even goes into detail into the implementation of how that is going to be enforced

> Implementation. (a) Within 120 days of the date of this order, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), in consultation with the Administrator for Federal Procurement Policy, the Administrator of General Services, and the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, shall issue guidance to agencies to implement section 3 of this order.

They even say they will review existing contracts

> (ii) to the extent practicable and consistent with contract terms, revise existing contracts for LLMs to include the terms specified in subsection (b)(i) of this section; and

> (iii) within 90 days of the OMB guidance issued under subsection (a) of this section, adopt procedures to ensure that LLMs procured by the agency comply with the Unbiased AI Principles.

Does the First Amendment actually let the US government dictate the types of speech you're allowed to put in your LLM? I mean, a US government that's bound by the Constitution, obviously.

While that issue hasn't been specifically tested in court yet, the current interpretation of the First Amendment probably wouldn't allow the US government to dictate the types of speech you're allowed to put in your LLM. But federal government purchasing decisions aren't generally bound by the First Amendment. In other words, government officials can generally refuse to purchase your LLM services if they don't like the speech it outputs. So there's no real constitutional concern with this EO.

I'm not claiming that this EO is sensible or enforceable, just that it's not prima facie unconstitutional.

The specific text reads like a favor to Elon Musk's xAI, since "Truth-seeking" is the buzzword Elon Musk frequently used to talk about Grok:

Sec. 3

Unbiased AI Principles.

It is the policy of the United States to promote the innovation and use of trustworthy AI. To advance that policy, agency heads shall, consistent with applicable law and in consideration

of guidance issued pursuant to section 4 of this order, procure only those LLMs developed in accordance with the following two principles (Unbiased AI Principles):

(a) Truth-seeking. LLMs shall be truthful in responding to user prompts seeking factual information or analysis. LLMs shall prioritize historical accuracy, scientific inquiry, and objectivity, and shall acknowledge uncertainty where reliable information is incomplete or contradictory.

(b) Ideological Neutrality. LLMs shall be neutral, nonpartisan tools that do not manipulate responses in favor of ideological dogmas such as DEI. Developers shall not intentionally encode partisan or ideological judgments into an LLM's outputs unless those judgments are prompted by or otherwise readily accessible to the end user.

That's not accurate. The EO explicitly lays out the implementation

> Sec. 4. Implementation. (a) Within 120 days of the date of this order, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), in consultation with the Administrator for Federal Procurement Policy, the Administrator of General Services, and the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, shall issue guidance to agencies to implement section 3 of this order.

A major LLM that did not submit to this would be labeled a "supply chain risk". It's unquestionable that every major LLM would go through this process

It even then goes on to say that existing contracts will be reviewed to ensure they are in compliance (reviewed by OMB)

> (b) Each agency head shall, to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law:

> (i) include in each Federal contract for an LLM entered into following the date of the OMB guidance issued under subsection (a) of this section terms requiring that the procured LLM comply with the Unbiased AI Principles and providing that decommissioning costs shall be charged to the vendor in the event of termination by the agency for the vendor’s noncompliance with the contract following a reasonable period to cure;

> (ii) to the extent practicable and consistent with contract terms, revise existing contracts for LLMs to include the terms specified in subsection (b)(i) of this section; and

> (iii) within 90 days of the OMB guidance issued under subsection (a) of this section, adopt procedures to ensure that LLMs procured by the agency comply with the Unbiased AI Principles.

Wrong. My comment was 100% accurate. No LLM vendor is legally required to change their ideology, nor does the EO constitute new regulation.

Not technically but practically. The decrees are effectively considered law by the executive. Yes, you'll likely win in court later on, but you'll lose your job, get sent to prison, have your bank accounts and vehicle seized, etc., in the meantime.

Legality isn't really of much practical concern anymore. It's about what gets/can be enforced immediately.

What a weird comment. How many private business managers have ever been sent to prison for violating an EO? This particular EO doesn't even mention any criminal penalties.

You seem to be trying to win a technical argument while ignoring the practical implications of the order. But even technically I think you are wrong. Just because it's not passed by Congress doesn't mean it's not "regulation". OMB Memorandum M-26-04[0] is absolutely regulation and was created exactly because of this order.

[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/M-26-0...

Other agencies like the NIST (lookup NIST AI Risk Management Framework), the NAIAC (which was created in 2020) are the ones like in charge of:

> Agencies’ development of metrics, methods, and standards to test and measure AI, where such metrics, methods, and standards are for use by the general public or the Government as a whole, rather than to test AI for a particular agency application

> Section 4 says to prioritize prosecuting cyber crimes. Not sure why they wouldn't already be prosecuted.

Not a whole lot of federal prosecutors. They're very selective about what gets pursued or not.

If they can't reliably build cases with a >90% success rate, it doesn't get prioritized. There's like <500 (federal) convictions per year on this whole area.

We hear about a few big famous ones in the news here, but most of it goes completely unenforced.

> Not a whole lot of federal prosecutors. They're very selective about what gets pursued or not.

And lately they seem to spend most of their time in courts trying to argue that immigrants don't deserve due process

Not to mention quitting in droves because very many don't want to take these cases or otherwise to stand in court and explain why current admin is not bound by existing laws, court orders, the US constitution in general, or internationally recognized human rights etc.

Yep, or even asking to be held in contempt because, in their own words, "This job sucks": https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/attorney...

If a federal prosecutor doesn't want to prosecute federal crimes, it's probably best for both themselves and their country if they find themselves a new job.

Disagree on best for the country.

Federal crimes such as having an Hispanic name.

Or protesting against the regime.

Out of curiosity, did you willfully choose to not understand the circumstances that prosecutors are being forced to carry hundreds of cases, too many to even read before they are in court, and then they are forced to stand in front of judges and face contempt while they are asked to explain why the government, who the prosecutor has no real control over, is violating yet another judicial order?

It isn’t just a matter of prosecutors picking and choosing…it’s underfunding, DOGE, and then those that are left are treated as adversarial the moment they complain about conditions or case loads. (Just like your comment does.)

It is only when judgement is rendered that it becomes a federal crime. Until then it is only alleged. And guess what: this administration is alleging a lot of things that fail.

>We hear about a few big famous ones in the news here, but most of it goes completely unenforced.

So much for "Hacker" "News".

Ah hahah yea. Not too much need about hackers being prosecuted going around. Lot more news about hackers breaching companies though. Closure rate of law enforcement & prosecutors vs hackers has gotta be way under 1% lol.

That seems to be the hallmark of this administration.

I’ve read lots of executive orders and it’s pretty standard. They don’t have much power. They are mostly just mandates and guidance for federal agencies, most of which is non binding, like a glorified mission statement. They just get sold as something bigger in the press.

Most voters don’t understand how the US government works, so EOs seem to be a way to pretend that the executive can pass laws. A way to make good on the campaign promises that require laws to be passed, which is usually all of them.

Step 1: Require companies to submit product for "review"

Step 2: Complain about how the OSS/Chinese/whatever models are doing releases without approval

Step 3: Prohibit, because "safety" and "financial risks"(?)

So this is the door-shutting Altman et al have been pushing for eh?

It is surprising to me American companies completely absent from the open model space, even though we have historically seen companies doing open source.

As what we say here in Brazil:

"The world doesn't go round. It flips over!"

American companies are interested in cashing in, not making a good product.

Llama?

One of the main reasons why companies start new open source projects is because having a good open source option in a given category will usually push the market value of software in that category to $0, and this can be strategically valuable. For example, Google released Android as an open source operating system because they make their money from ads and data collection, not from selling operating system licenses. All the cell phone companies switched from Windows Mobile and Symbian to Android, which gave Google a ton of user data to sell.

For AI, the most profitable part of the value chain is selling inference. None of the big American companies want to release a leading edge model as open source because this would drive the price of inference to $0. Meanwhile, open source AI models are a huge strategic initiative for China. Having commodity Chinese models that are as good as the leading edge American models from 6 months ago forces the American companies to keep paying more and more money to train better and better models since the amount of time they can collect rent on a model they've previously trained is limited to 6 months.

> None of the big American companies want to release a leading edge model as open source because this would drive the price of inference to $0

Meta/Llama: "What am I, chopped liver?"

I thought the thing keeping inference above $0 was the hardware, and even if that were free there's still the tyranny of the Landauer Limit.

Meta Llama is free for many uses but it doesn't even remotely meet the definition of "open source".

They are useless and outdated by today standards.

When was the last Llama release? Meta have abandoned it and reportedly they've had a shift in their AI strategy.

In business strategy terms this is known as "commoditize your complements".

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

Thank you for this article link! I had not seen it before. will be printing it off to read later.

Google had to release at least the core packages in Android regardless because it is based on top of Linux and the GPL license would require it.

But they open sourced much more than that, and under more permissive licenses.

The notable exception is of course the google play services, which is also strategic (they control the OEMs with this, among other things).

And the drivers, but that's mostly not them I think (they could possibly have required open source drivers though)

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Google did the Microsoft playbook. Look at email. Look at youtube we used to share videos via Kazaa and other p2p programs, zero censorship, all the same features (including chat!!) theres also XMPP which became Google Talk -> Chat -> Hangouts etc then the browser, how many random apps “Only works on Chrome” but you change the Firefox browser agent and it works there too!

The Chinese approach is reminiscent of the US spending so much on 'defense' in the 1980s that the USSR bankrupted itself trying to keep up.

They aren't completely absent. Google keeps releasing Gemma models. Nvidia publishes Nemotron. Microsoft has their Phi series. IBM publishes Granite. Even OpenAI released a new open model (gpt-oss) less than a year ago.

https://deepmind.google/models/gemma/gemma-4/

https://developer.nvidia.com/ai-models#:~:text=NVIDIA%20Nemo...

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/phi-4-reasonin...

https://www.ibm.com/granite

https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-oss/

I was going to link all of these, some are better than others, but they're all reasonably capable. A lot of these have versions that can run on modest hardware too. Granite was the most surprising I learned about recently, wasn't too good with Zed though.

I think that models like Granite are less known because they aren't clear leaders in any particular area. This obscurity is also another sign of how fast models are developing. If current Granite models had been released 4 years ago, they would have been astonishing breakthroughs at the time.

Perhaps, the issue is that the pace at which they release open models compared to their closed ones, shows that they are more committed on the closed ones and are not interested in advancing the state of the art of open models.

Should companies like Google and OpenAI be more interested in building open models than the ones they make money from?

Should they be interested in advancing state of the art open models?

I can't say what they should or should not be doing.

Generally, it is conspicuous how American companies are absent when it comes to state of the art open models. Meta tried for some time but it seems they've given up.

The gpt-oss models are good but there's no evidence that OpenAI have ongoing development on open models.

I'm 99% sure it was one-and-done, box ticked, and now they can be mentioned in comments like this.

No one open sources their core competencies, GitHub never open sourced their networked filesystem and Heroku never open sourced their dyno sandboxing code. They open source ancillary tools.

I'm curious, what would you say is DeepSeek's core competency?

Distillation attacks. The weights are just a proof-of-work hash

Devaluing American companies, perhaps.

Since it’s probably a state sponsored project, it is the open source ancillary tool to China’s core competencies

OpenAI & Anthropic are winning right now. I suspect if Chinese companies get ahead in the race the cards will reverse, OpenAI will restart farming goodwill with open models and then winning companies will be releasing closed models.

> Compounding the problem, labs in China often release dual-use capable models as open-weight. Once a model is open-weight, safeguards that do exist can be removed, making the model available to any state or non-state actor to use for malicious purposes, including the cyber and CBRN misuse those safeguards were built to prevent.

https://www.anthropic.com/research/2028-ai-leadership

> cyber misuse

He who controls the porn controls the universe. - Baron Amodei

I loathe Anthropic. many companies don't contribute to open-source, but for one to be actively hostile to open-source, to the degree they're lobbying the government to ban it, is uniquely evil. at least these gatekeepers call themselves what they are.

scraping CoT won't stop the advance of Chinese models. neither will a US "ban" on using such models. at this point I'm cheering for DeepSeek or Qwen to catch up to Anthropic. I support anyone who releases open weights.

Is OpenAI significantly better so far regarding this, at least publicly? I'm increasing my LLM spend this weekend, and this could impact my decision. And I'll prioritize supporting open-weight models moving forward — already Chatgpt's censorship and surveillance dissuade from asking it genuinely helpful questions.

OpenAI seems marginally better. they did release gpt-oss-120b, which was decent at the time. but certainly not much better, and they seemed even more on board with fully disabling guardrails for Uncle Sam than Anthropic was. then again, rumor has it that Anthropic's AI selected that Iranian elementary school as part of Palantir's Project Maven pipeline, so..

I strongly recommend open-weight wherever you can. assume any data you pass to a closed model (including opinions or political positions you intimate) will be retained and analyzed in unfriendly ways, either now or ten years from now.

Out of curiosity, what's your stance on gun ownership?

3D2A. I support repealing the machine gun ban. (and I don't even own a gun.)

I'm impressed you stick to a pretty absolute devotion to freedom. I get more bitter the older I get, it seems easier to psyop someone into abusing their rights than to get people to fight for and be proper custodians of them.

Especially drugs- I used to think all people should have access, but overall I really wish meth just never existed and people wouldn't distribute it outside of specific circumstances. Being able to cause irreparable damage in one moment of weakness is terrible for people who have less control, and for society as a whole really.

To be fair, those aren't contradictory positions. I'd rather meth not exist, but given that it does exist, I'd prefer to let that revenue go to Big Pharma than North American ISIS.

(That's before even touching the can of worms of allowing the government to criminalize personal health choices, which feels like a glaring loophole in the Constitution to me.)

> pretty absolute devotion to freedom

Freedom from one perspective

from which perspective is it not freedom?

I would say I agree with Anthropic on open source for the reasons stated above like cyber crime, CBRN etc, but I'm interested to hear the other side of the argument. What would be the argument for open source over closed source?

The same "open source is too dangerous" argument was used against nmap and other "hacking" tools. The only solution in long term is to fix security issues.

I can understand this for hacking tools, but I'm not really sure how we fix the security issues on the CBRN side? We can't patch the human body like we can with software, so if the model has strong biological capabilities and is released open source, what stops it being used to construct new viruses and things like this?

the succinct argument: I don't want arguably the most important invention in human history to be gatekept by a small handful of oligarchs.

I don't trust Dario Amodei, Sam Altman and Elon Musk to act in my best interests. Closed models will have an incredible centralizing effect, and concentrate power like we've never seen since the feudal ages.

If you want to see what it's like for the economy to collapse into a single, extremely valuable commodity, under the control of a small elite, look at Saudi Arabia.

also, I just value freedom tremendously. I want to tinker with model weights. I want to build my own stuff. I don't want to sharecrop in someone's walled garden.

I also worry a great deal that OAI and Anthropic will bow to political pressure and make Claude and ChatGPT push certain political agendas, to report biased information, or refuse to help with legal requests that conflict with corporate values. I also worry about privacy and mass surveillance - chat logs are far more intimate than my search queries or selfies.

I agree with all of these points, my view is just that open source doesn't really do much to prevent it. I also think it adds the additional danger of making dangerous capabilities widely available to anyone, like the ability to design novel viruses which is something that we can't really defend against once it's out there. If anything, putting this kind of capability in the hands of anyone with a GPU could create justification for a mass surveillance state or further concentration of power.

I also just don't think the open source movement has much chance of competing with the city sized data centres owned by Anthropic and OpenAI, or the hundreds of billions of dollars they have available to hire the best researchers. It costs hundreds of millions to train a frontier model, this kind of compute isn't available to the open source community.

anthropic's reasoning is same as "knives kill therefore knives bad".

having open-weight models allows users to use/modify them in novel ways.

Anthropic wants to ban people using AI. Their moat is going to be using government to gatekeep free and open source AI models.

Seems to be. What better way to secure your companies future by limiting open frontier models. Government sponsored monopoly?

The US can't limit anything beyond their borders. We ae living in the twilight of the white man.

Well it can, from Kim Dotcom to Bin Laden.

But it's harder thanks to US actions in the last few years, and especially in countries which can bite back.

This entire year with the IPOs and now this is because there's a trillion dollars betting on AI and they all know they have no moat, there's no more training data and they're seeing diminishing returns on scaling anyway, and it's inevitable that smaller, open-source models will catch up and become competitive. It's a complete disaster, the tech industry is broken.

"The final text asks some AI companies to submit their powerful new models to a voluntary government review 30 days before releasing the products to the public, a pause that would give federal agencies some time to gauge what threats the products may pose to sensitive financial, national security and other computer systems."

How specifically does that review work? I want to give federal agency Opus 4.8 now, while 4.7 has been out for a while (leaving Mythos aside for now). They have 30 days to figure out whether it poses a threat.

How do you do that? Is there an eval for this and if there is why can't they just make it public? What is the agencies objective (but proprietary?) analysis here?

It's just so Elon Musk gets to personally delay releases so Grok can maybe ever gain any meaningful traction...

Also to probably distill from other models, as he admitted to already doing during his failed trial against OpenAI.

Do you have a link to that?

Not the parent, but i assume these are relevant:

- https://web.archive.org/web/20260602130637/https://www.techn... - https://web.archive.org/web/20260520190620/https://fortune.c...

It's in the text of the order, it directs NIST to:

> develop and maintain a classified benchmarking process to assess the advanced cyber capabilities of AI models and determine the threshold at which an AI model should be designated a “covered frontier model” for the purposes of this order

> Is there an eval for this and if there is why can't they just make it public?

For the same reason the CIA doesn't publish the Windows exploits it finds?

To keep domestic systems vulnerable to enemy attacks?

I seriously doubt even the government actually knows or has a real plan, let alone one actually related to security. If it's anything like their track record, they'll just be asking the AI about a topic related to their enemies (i.e. anyone opposed to them in any way) to see if it says anything remotely positive about them, or anything remotely critical of the regime or out of line with the regime's "alternative facts".

That and I'm sure these companies could circumvent the mandatory review if they make certain... donations.

Just do a VW and detect when you might be in the testing phase. Off the top of my head:

Train it dumb on "systems:, user:" prompt pairs.

Unleash on "system:, user:" prompt pairs.

Guess which you're providing for evaluation.

Self-report and self regulation, kind of like Boeing with FAA ... so not functional in long term

The review is they ask it about the epstein files and ensure any other politically sensitive topics have the “right” answers.

AISI in the UK has been doing this for years - there are lots of papers https://www.aisi.gov.uk/category/safeguards and specific reports, e.g. this on GPT 5.5 https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/our-evaluation-of-openais-gpt-5...

This old post goes into lots of detail about what they do to red team and why: https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/early-lessons-from-evaluating-f...

NIST's similar unit in the US is now called CAISI https://www.nist.gov/caisi - interesting that the most recent post is an evaluation of DeepSeek capabilities, which sound more like watching China. But presumably this executive order alters the emphasis?

> The final text asks some AI companies to submit their powerful new models to a voluntary government review 30 days before releasing the products to the public, a pause that would give federal agencies some time to gauge what threats the products may pose to sensitive financial, national security and other computer systems.

> An earlier draft of the order had called for a voluntary review as much as 90 days in advance, a provision that some AI industry officials had called too onerous, POLITICO reported last month.

A 90 days delay on the release of new models would have been insane. I guess I'm glad it's been revised at least on this specific point.

> A 90 days delay on the release of new models would have been insane. I guess I'm glad it's been revised at least on this specific point.

What would have made it "insane" exactly? The only argument I can imagine is that it gives non-US models (e.g. DeepSeek) a potential edge in the market during that time. But this potentially seems to be mitigated it being banned in the US anyway [0].

Given society seems to have developed just fine prior to the release of LLMs, I don't understand what the rush for more powerful and - potentially - more dangerous iterations of this technology is. If there is a legitimate reason that 90 days is somehow catastrophic, can someone ELI5?

[0] https://statetechmagazine.com/article/2025/04/these-states-h...

US laws don't apply globally.

Not really the point, plus doesn't answer the primary basis of my comment :)

Coordination between powers is possible, and starts with actions like this which show a willingness to compromise.

Non-US models are not banned in the US: they are used daily in every state of the US. Some misguided state governments temporarily banned employees from downloading the R1 models and variants released 16 months ago on state government computers. The article and your comment are misleading :-)

Assuming this is so, and continues to be the case: is this really still a basis for a 90 day period in releasing new models being somehow insane/catastrophic?

> It also directs the Justice Department to pursue criminal cases against any individuals who use AI models to hack into computer systems.

Were we not pursuing criminal cases against these individuals previously? Or have we only just decided to make crimes be against the law now?

Edit: let's all remember, by the way, this "review" period does nothing for security. It exists to allow members of the government to trade on insider knowledge.

I think this might be "white/gray" hackers/wannabes trying to find vulnerabilities in government systems. And overwhelming them by their sheet numbers unintentionally.

Timing around Anthropic valuation crossing OpenAI and getting ready for IPO ...

So that the NSA can use them to find the zero-days first?

The Executive Order: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/06/prom...

IMO this isn't much more egregious than the "stop woke AI" executive order he signed in July 2025 which explicitly regulated the "ideology" of LLMs

https://www.paulhastings.com/insights/client-alerts/presiden...

Yeah, the order itself seems like a fairly reasonable response to Mythos level capabilities. It does solve one problem of the frontier labs, which is safely coordinating releases without hitting antitrust regulations. It also makes a bigger moat for incumbents.

Thanks - we put that link in the toptext. I also moved the submitted URL (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/02/technology/trump-executiv...) to the toptext and changed the main link to https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/02/trump-signs-downsiz... since it seems to have more information.

> “Nothing in this section shall be construed to authorize the creation of a mandatory governmental licensing, preclearance, or permitting requirement for the development, publication, release, or distribution of new AI models, including frontier models.”

As other commenters have mentioned, it leaves the question what on earth this EO is actually good for. And still the AI industry is complaining about how onerous it is.

No one should have to submit any published work to government review, even voluntary. This is a basic speech issue.

Absolutely no one would be okay with authors being 'encouraged' to submit their works to a 'voluntary' review by the feds to ascertain if their ideas are threatening. AI models are NO different.

BigAI contributions/bribes paying off

(probably a good thing, in this particular case)

So going forward expect US models to respond only in ways considered appropriate by the administration. If people thought models were producing slop before... lol.

No... executive orders are not laws, they can only command the federal government, not individuals or corporations. Meaning this is mostly pointless unless you're using models hosted by the government.

Who is going to stop the federal government from enforcing them as if they were laws?

The judicidial branch, so the courts. The government would have to sue the corporation to try to get them to do something, at which point (hopefully) the judge would strike it down.

What courts? Look at all that's been happening over the past months. How much of it have the courts been able to meaningfully impact, vs what's still in effect?

> How much of it have the courts been able to meaningfully impact

A lot more than you think, apparently

https://www.justsecurity.org/107087/tracker-litigation-legal...

We've been talking about the Supreme Court, which is widely considered a laughingstock by lower courts except they are not laughing.

Models hosted or used by the government.

You left out the part containing the “barrels of money” incentive.

Executive orders aren’t laws (an important fact that should be repeated often and loudly). However, there’s probably room for the executive branch of the government to influence model hosts, as a major funder and consumer.

You're absolutely right, abs-o-lutely, everybody says so. A lot, lot lot of people have been saying, you know they come to me and they say, "Mr. Claude, I can't believe the stuff I'm hearing, everybody is telling me he's right, is it true?" And I tell 'em, I say you're goddam right, that's what I say, but honestly folks, despite the negative press covfefe we've had a hell of a year, and that's really what it is with the nuclear folks, you can't trust em as far as you can throw em if you ask me, and believe me I've been throwing them around a LO<token limit exceeded>

This will be an important thing to check going forward, but I don't see why we would presume that they're going to be subverted in this way. Importantly, this is a completely different problem space from "slop" as such - there's plenty of Chinese models that implement their censorship almost entirely through guardrails on what topics they're willing to discuss.

Yea the details here really matter - is this truly a politically neutral security review to determine impact and potentially prepare for it - that seems alright.

is this a review of "wokeness" in models and rejecting them if they don't align with the party views - this should not be allowed.

A politically neutral committee that decides what the review entails is what would happen in a true democracy and not a puppet oligarchy like we have today.

All neutrality has been aggressively neutered in every agency, or the target agency dismantled, in the last few months. An agency either supports the administrations political decisions wholly, or... well there's no "or" because an agency that doesn't won't remain an agency for very long.

There’ll be a movie written about all this someday. It’ll be great.

It'll be the greatest movie this decade, possibly ever

It’ll be way better then the Obama movie! I heard that movie had the worst ratings ever! It wasnt even made in the US!

Many movies.

It's sort of ruined those movies where the president becomes an action hero though - 'Air Force one', 'White House Down' ....

Well if Hollywood would pick it up it would probably not resemble actual reality much, just bunch of drama, blah, patriotic pathos to please less intelligent half of population etc. Mostly unviewable movies for non-US audience.

Yawn, I almost fell asleep just thinking about how much of a bore Hollywood is.

Is this legally enforceable or is it nonsense via the White House site instead of Truth Social?

So this is going back to the spirit of what the Biden admin and the frontier labs wanted just recently?

https://www.bis.gov/press-release/biden-harris-administratio...

More regulated rather than unregulated (or very lightly regulated).

Most people would probably say that’s a good thing, if I read the tea leaves correctly.

> Most people would probably say that’s a good thing, if I read the tea leaves correctly.

I'm very pessimistic that this is about AI safety. I think it's probably more about giving the Trump administration leverage over AI companies. It will be able to coerce them into e.g. propagandizing or surveilling or similar or else they will risk the same kind of "regulatory oversight" that caused television networks to fire comedians who made jokes the regime didn't like.

With conservatives, every accusation is an admission. Only the gullible people fall for the actual rhetoric.

I guess it would help if they even knew what "AI" was.

Or if they were intelligent at all.

It would also help if many AI bros knew that LLM is not AI.

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An executive order is not law. Why should any company submit their models for review?

Because EO can get annoying to fight, companies would prefer to not fighting it. That's why these actions are to be remembered, companies will complain, but they will also comply.

They shouldn't but they've all shown they lack the fortitude to stand up to Trump. All the big tech companies are run by cowards willing to sacrifice ethics for money.

Here are a couple of things I’d worry about, especially with an administration willing to use its power in ways previously considered off limits:

1. Any company which doesn’t is banned from federal contracts

2. Any company which doesn’t is declared a supply chain risk and federal contractors will be prohibited from doing business with them (e.g. AWS/Azure/GCP can’t offer them to customers without risking their unrelated contracts). That was the big risk Anthropic was worried about.

3. Federal prosecutors and regulators will be told to prioritize going after non-compliant companies on unrelated issues as leverage.

4. These companies will not be granted the same exceptions in tariff negotiations as competitors, which means things like data center buildouts get pricier.

Even if they can successfully fight something in court, that’s expensive and uncertain so it puts a lot of pressure on companies. There are likely also cases where politicized tax or H1-B enforcement could be hard to fight in court because much of the industry is gambling on lax enforcement.

Somewhere in all this it is crazy that the choice could be between a US company creating an AI that could doom civilization or letting China create the AI that dooms civilization. Do we want to be the first to "summon the demon" in our own fashion or let China manifest it first. Not saying this is the choice, but it would be a crazy dillema, albeit easy choice imo, if it was.

> albeit easy choice imo

China, obviously.

Mao would have been great w AGI.

Stick "what did Mao think of lazy people" into your closest LLM for a different take on that.

nothing is dooming civilization. These takes are so dumb. Civilization exists because humans want to reproduce.

I don't see it either, but there are folks smarter than both of us that disagree.

"Folks smarter than us" sometimes start from really weird starting points. Their logic from their may be flawless, better than we can do, but if their starting point is wrong, who cares? They aren't going to get wrong answers anyway. They're just going to go further extrapolating the logical consequences of the wrong starting point, and that's not really any more useful than a stupid person doing it.

Those folks are not "smarter", they are just louder. Just think independently for a few mins and its pretty easy to see why they are wrong.

For an all powerful AGI to exist, it has to basically beat the computationally irreducable processes within nature - i.e it has to simulate reality faster than reality, with a high degree of accuracy, which would imply that NP=P amongst other things.

And thats assuming that anyone has any idea to build an AI that can automatically build necessary simulations to make decisions in the first place. Such an AI is won't need data center with massive training data to be built. The "genesis" code will be something that is capable of figuring out how to go on the internet, and train itself. How do I know this? Because in order to figure out how to solve complex problems (like how to make humans give you control of the nuclear arsenal), is exactly equivalent to a problem of being able to write/read bytes to a file (assuming that file is a socket in Linux) and figuring out how to talk http to get a particular piece of data, without ever being trained on anything internet.

Even more so, there is a fundamental question of whether this genesis code is a P or NP problem in itself - i.e can we generate this code using a training data set, or can it only get created through simulated evolution, much like human brains and capacity for reasoning did IRL.

So as long as everyone keeps talking about number of parameters, transformers, attention, and benchmarks, I promise you we are safe against all powerfull AI.

This has nothing to do with p v np. An AI has no will. Even if superior to our abilities it just does what we tell it.

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