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It very much is regulatory capture. The goal is to make it so only the handful of heavily capitalized tech giants and frontier labs can afford the legal and compliance rigamarole to meet the new standards. It's an effort to crowd out open source development and smaller competitors (and foreign competitors which threaten whatever moat they may have). They define safety through some speculative catastrophic threat to prevent new upstarts instead of focusing on the very real, localized harm they are causing right now.
Its also shifting the definition of safety away from their current operations and toward purely speculative future scenarios.
Fortunately developing frontier models takes immense amounts of specific resources and knowledge. There are only a handful of companies capable of developing new cutting edge models. This is an area a few governments absolutely could coordinate on and regulate, if they were so inclined.
Obviously the current US administration is completely lacking both the will and competence to actually negotiate an agreement like that with China, and who knows if Xi would even be interested. But with different leadership we actually could be reducing our existential risks in this area much more than we are. Just like having a few thousands nukes across several countries isn't totally safe, but it's a heck of a lot safer than hundreds of thousands of nukes spread across a hundred countries.
You know how many nukes Soviet had right at its peak? Hint: much more than the US by the time. Non proliferation didn't stop Soviet from building more nukes at all. And it's not going to stop China from pouring more computing power into AI. History is a really good lesson.
The whole point of non-proliferation is to ensure that big boys like the US and Soviet can bully smaller guys like Venezuela and Ukraine. In this regard, non-proliferation is the most successful foreign policy ever. But it didn't win the cold war and a similar policy over AI will definitely not win the AI race (if it's a race worth winning is another issue.)
Also, I think some similar things can be said about AI safety measures in China aside from regulation. Currently, the US leads in model safeguards, but it isn't like China has zero interest in AI safety. Even if the US and China are rivals, there are many points of common interest (biorisk and "sci-fi" scenarios like an AI takeover, to name just two).
But I also don't buy into the "China bad" narrative that gets frequently spread in online circles and in political circles. Its the cold war all over again, but this time its China instead of the Soviet Union.
Regardless of that, the regulations being proposed by Anthropic recently are not focused on the current issues which is my problem with all the hype marketing around hypothetical AGI/ASI. What is being proposed to be put in place will further cement the current frontier labs in their marketing leading position, and work to block new entrants, and open source competitors. That is the problem.
The other problem is none of them are talking about the real, difficult issues we are experiencing right now in the present. We don't need to talk about a sci-fi future scenario to recognize that LLMs have already caused and are causing harm in the real world. "We should probably regulate future frontier models" does nothing to help the current issues.
Wake me up when Anthropic says "The government should immediately stop us from hoovering up data and selling it back to the public. They should immediately stop us and others from enabling misinformation at scale that is already negatively effecting our democratic process. They should immediately stop us from building out new data centers until we have a large scale switch to renewables in the country, shore up the grids, or force us to generate our own power only with renewables" so on and so forth. Notice how any time the labs propose regulations, its only for a future hypothetical super intelligent model. Its never about their current operational liabilities.
So yes, it is regulatory capture.
Yeah, asking for additional state-provided barriers to a market entry to a valuable market a provider already is one of a narrow few dominating only for firms that are a competitive threat is exactly regulatory capture.
The Chinese banned crypto instead
US regulations apply to US companies and citizens, exclusively. Anthropic crowding out all future potential competitors in the US via regulatory capture has no weight on what the rest of the world does.
Unless you are proposing military action over a speculative sci-fi future
It smells of paranoia.
How do rules that inhibit what AI can be sold on the US market (adding additional costs to trading in that market) do anything to inhibit a competing nation from reaching ASI first? Insofar as they inhibit anyone from reaching ASI, its firms whose primary commercial interest is selling AI services in the US market, not foreign threat actors except to the extent those two categories overlap.
Also don't believe China is actually a threat to the world. That's some cold war delusional think you got there.
All the companies seem to believe is that it's okay to immiserate a large percentage for the pursuit of money, you seem to believe the lies they're feeding you.
Anthropic's founder wants you to buy into his vision for safety, but he also wants you to buy into his vision that in two years AI will be a "country of geniuses" that will update itself, and the IPO that will fund it...
The PRC (like any superpower) has done some bad shit, but if you're going to paint them as the bad guy keep in mind the USA has a long, long history of genocide, slavery, overthrowing foreign governments for corporate interests, unjust wars, political meddling, etc. The scales of righteousness don't tip in our favor TBH, we just have better PR and a nicer veneer over our brutality.
Only if you ignore history.
Didn't the PRC violate every known labor/enviromnetal/human-rights standard to become the top in manufacturing?
https://matthewekahn.substack.com/p/what-role-did-regulation...
Except that there were no global standards at the time. You can't point to any single country and say they were doing worse. They all were bad.
But China actively flouted established international norms. Now that is behind in AI it is clamoring for controls for others.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3692695
> are trying to pull the ladder they used up
Every country spies and steals but it is the scale we are talking about. China does it at a scale that dwarfs any historical or current comparisons.
China doesn't have any grounds here when they turn around and complain about India copying its playbook:
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/renewables/chi...
England had a patent system from the mid 15th Century which emigrants to the New World brazenly ignored in order to set up their own industry.
Of course, they then pulled the ladder up behind themselves in 1790 with the establishment of their own patent system...
Because it’s a threat to ultracapitalist dystopia that they’re tripling down on. The dangers and risk are coming from inside the house.
The danger they care about is the danger to their monopoly, control, and wealth.