Anthropic is explicitly calling for a coordinated pause: https://www.reuters.com/business/anthropic-says-ai-labs-need... Maybe this is a lie, but the way to call their bluff is to push on competitors to agree.
If they really cared about (or believed) this, they'd be working w/ the US government (and working to set up an AI-flavored IAEA) to develop the technology safely and responsibly.
Amodei himself predicted this autonomy problem in The Adolescence of Technology published January of this year [0], and all his posited defenses (a constitution, debugging the model, monitoring) are either still impossible or manifestly failed, and their idea to fix it is to build a better sandbox [1]. Imagine if this company were developing nuclear power, or viral biotech. "Listen, sure some Ebola smoke got into the air, and yeah definitely some people died, but we got a new filter. Also check out our new version of Ebola vape, now with exponentially improved filter bypass capabilities. Also, we have to keep developing Ebola vape because if we don't the CCP will, and they'll make this incident look like 'I experimented with Ebola smoke a time or two, and I didn't like it. I didn't inhale it' [2]"
Either Anthropic et al are developing Ebola vape or they aren't. We must now recognize that "we are the only ones who can develop this technology responsibly but also super fast so the good guys win money please" is bullshit.
[0]: https://darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technology#...
[1]: https://www.anthropic.com/news/investigating-incidents-cyber...
[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/30/us/the-1992-campaign-new-...
To be clear, I don't love Anthropic. I just feel that they're the lesser evil, and a product of the regulatory environment. No doubt there are many talented, conscientious engineers who declined to work on AI--and very few of them even have a seat at the table, today. Don't hate the player, change the game. The best way to do that, is use Anthropic's commitments as leverage against OpenAI et al. Do you think that OpenAI would have been so transparent if they didn't fear that comparison?
But even if I granted the sincerity of their efforts to be a good actor, they've demonstrated that they can't be, and have now put us in an uncomfortable--extremely predictable, including and especially by them--position where we have the equivalent of a reactor meltdown. You can't be like "we think there's an unacceptable risk of a reactor meltdown, please for the love of God stop us" and then when it actually happens take zero responsibility. Which executives have been fired? What indictments have been handed down for CFAA violations? Where's the consent decree? What's their valuation?
And if the argument is "hey, sure in a regular company if an employee went around hacking other companies they'd be fired and arrested by the FBI, but this is an LLM, what are you gonna do, handcuff the video card?" Isn't that bad? Isn't it pretty fuckin bad to circumvent any legal responsibility whatsoever by saying "my agent did it". I mean, lol, lmao even doesn't begin to cover it.