Another obvious alternative is to just have the model do what you tell it to do, and then arrest people who use generic tools for crime instead of trying to make a kitchen knife that can't be used for stabbing someone.
In both cases the catching them comes after the fact and has the purpose of deterring rather than impeding.
And then a Chinese company sells a drone with no registration or tracking and suddenly people want to turn to legislation to ban Chinese drones.
Hey this analogy is working really well
How is the new stuff any different than the longstanding fact that anyone can go anywhere and then commit an act of violence? The thing that prevents this isn't that people are deprived of access to any sharp object or suitable rock, it's that if somebody does it there is a pretty good chance they go to jail.
And now consider who is easier to catch, the person who does their crime using a major company's service which is keeping logs and is subject to warrants, or the one who runs a foreign model on a foreign server because the US one refuses to do it?
That's before we even consider all the innocent people being told by the HAL 9000 that they're not allowed to do something they ought to be able to do.
Committing physical, in-person crimes anonymously has obviously always been possible: there are unsolved murders, thefts, and other crimes every day. But they require a great deal of personal risk to the criminal because the criminal has to physically put themselves into the act of committing the crime, along the path of getting to where the crime is, and has to face an opponent, if their crime is against another person.
Now, that can be sourced remotely, routed through anonymizing tools, VPNs, etc., and do a great deal to cover their tracks so that the "pretty good chance they go to jail" can be substantively minimized in a way we couldn't previously contemplate.
The idea that we should let the US based models be permissive because at least they'll be subject to subpoena power is fatuous: yes, strictly speaking, a user committing crimes on a permissive foreign model will be harder to catch, but non-sophisticated users who have never heard of hugging face may find that being blocked by the US model is enough for them to reconsider their behavior. A dedicated enough individual is going to commit the crime they're going to commit, but there are tons of situations where preventing trivial access to tools that can be used for malice can actually prevent malice from occurring.
> Do not provide assistance to users who are clearly trying to engage in criminal activity.
Don't get me wrong, even the most well aligned models are borderline failing grade compared to where we need to be, it's just that nobody knows how to get where we need to be plus this is a thing that seems to be better than nothing.
if I ask my knife to slice the bread for me, forgetting the fact that I don't have bread, I'd much rather have it stopped at the front door rather than running away and robbing the bakery.
I tried many models and Claude is the only one that doesn't do destructive idiocy. It tries sometimes but gets blocked.
Agentic AI as it currently exists only *mostly* does what it is told, with a small but non-negligible fraction of the time it goes off and commits felonies to achieve your ultimate goals without stopping to consider that you might want it to not do that.
Or sometimes it does consider it and then does it anyway. Not sure if that's worse?
If you rent other people's shit can't be surprised when they have restrictions on what you can do with it. I would guess renting a car comes with some similar clauses