Funny. Dario seems like the biggest snake in the industry to me and has leaned the hardest into doom marketing out of all of the influential leaders. With Altman (or Google), it's a transaction, and that's something I can live with.
He has a really hard job. He errs on the side of conservatism in releasing and then people get Really Mad.
Safeguards on cybersecurity are not great for Anthropic revenue! As evidenced by people getting pissed, moving to Sol, and them having a smaller market for what Fable can do.
It’s clearly bad for revenue and not great advertising to say, “you can’t use this but here is a nerfed version that will annoy you and not solve important problems.”
I dunno. Everybody seems to be playing pretty dirty. Some people have a much longer history of that, though. Obviously, Meta and Musk are outliers even in an industry full of problematic behavior.
So, yes, LLMs have now proven to be extremely good at finding vulnerabilities. Where I disagree with Amodei is in who should have the ability to protect themselves from those capabilities with similarly powerful tools.
First, Amodei has taken an unusually strong stance among tech companies for not supplying fascist regimes with fascist tooling; in fact, even when threatened with being labeled a national security risk unless he bent the knee, he didn't. Compare and contrast with OpenAI who leapt at the opportunity to bend the knee, or obviously Elon Musk, etc., etc. When you say 'surveillance and control', that's exactly what got Anthropic labeled a national security supply chain risk: Anthropic's unwillingness to be used for that purpose.
Second, it's not clear that giving everyone extremely powerful LLMs is a great idea yet. LLMs can be used for defense and finding vulnerabilities, but that same LLM can be used to create and exploit vulnerabilities, design new lethal weapons, and so on. The history of gun availability in America 'for our freedoms' demonstrates the kind of risk that should be responsibly considered before replicating. And again, there's nuance here; yes, we should not be subjugated by fascist states with sole control of a critical technology obviously; but also, do you trust the median maga 4channer to operate a Mythos-level model with a sense of civilizational responsibility and ethics? It's not an easy and obvious question and it's not as simplistic as your argument would suggest.
But, I'll come back to "two things can be true". Anthropic is better than some, and in some regards they are navigating a complicated ethical landscape with more care than others. On the other hand, it really looks like they're angling to regulate their open competitors out of the game and one of the tools for doing that is to make claims about safety; Anthropic models are safe and restricted to use by entities they deem safe, open models are not safe because anybody can use them and also who knows what those Chinese people are putting in their models.
And again, this also has nuance, models, including the Chinese open models, could be adversarial and we may not know it. Anthropic proved models can be a risk by sabotaging Fable briefly, causing it to produce bad results based on what the model thought it was being used for. This is why I tend to take Anthropic's words with a grain of salt. They're literally doing the unsafe things they say are risks of open models, while still laying claim to the "safe AI company" mantle.
I also think you're confusing multiple different things, calling them all risks, lumping them together as equally bad, and using that to attribute contradictory/shady behavior to Anthropic. Depending on what you mean by 'sabotaging Fable briefly', you could either mean experiments they have run internally to try to improve alignment, or you could mean their attempts to restrict Fable from working on danger-adjacent work. Neither one of those is a 'risk'; they are both risk-analysis or risk-mitigation. That is not them 'doing the unsafe things they say are risks of open models', that is literally them working to avoid the unsafe things they say are risks of open models. They don't, in my experience, 'lay claim' to the 'safe AI company mantle' as much as they, apparently principledly and conscientiously, attempt to be safe and talk about what they're doing -- which is not in and of itself a problem.
If you think Anthropic is doing all of this badly, what's your optimum alternative here? What would you do in Amodei's shoes?
They backtracked after pushback from users, making it an explicit downgrade to Opus.
The intention is for highly targeted pieces of software to use it to secure their code and be ahead of the game before the open market gets access to the same capabilities for offense.