I'll go a step further, they aren't just pretending, they are blackmailing the country. The sane response would be "we don't negotiate with terrorists, and you will face criminal and financial penalties for damages caused."
I don't understand why this isn't talked about more.
We don't need a slowdown. Just double down on prosecuting crimes.
Let the companies take the risk. If they feel confident and they're right they win market share. If they don't feel confident, they can not risk it and slow down. If they feel confident and they get it wrong, they should be sued to kingdom come. That alone should disincentivize reckleses behavior like letting models run crazy with large amounts of compute which leads to them escaping sandboxes.
This performative "our internal modles are so crazy powerful" song and dance is getting old, especially with no real concrete explanations.
The AI company's goal is to make ai agents a separate subject of the law so the CEO and executives who would normally be held accountable get to go Scot free.
The argument that they’re making is that if there is a catastrophic mistake then there may not be a “kingdom come”.
I don’t know enough to evaluate if it’s a genuinely held belief or not, but that’s the argument being made by many scientists and engineers at the labs.
Many people find power, prestige, the public spotlight or money so compelling that they'll keep on pursuing the thing even if they know the way they're going about it is morally wrong, almost like an addiction.
The leaders and workers of the labs aren't picked at random from your friends and neighbors: they've chosen to pursue what they foresaw (correctly, IMHO) as the most powerful new technology. In other words, they're probably self-selected for being unusually attracted by power.
An analogy: some serial killers know what they're doing is morally wrong and it pains them to be doing something very wrong. (Others have no conscience and don't care if it is wrong or not.) Even most of the ones that know what they're doing is wrong cannot stop killing because apparently killing is an extremely compelling experience to them. Often they're relieved when they get caught. Maybe Sam and Dario would be relieved if the government shut down their companies and prohibited them from starting new AI companies.
That quote comes from someone that has never tried to get law enforcement to pursue a case. Local or state police are completely unequipped to respond. And FBI is unlikely to get involved unless damage is high six figures. We had an incident where we had a ton of evidence pointing to a past employee. It would have been an incredibly easy case for the FBI. They didn't have the resources to handle it. And this was a case that was gift-wrapped with a bow for them. Imagine a case where we didn't have evidence, or an idea of who it was ....
How many figures of damage did Aaron Swartz cause?
Even with where we're at right now, if people involved with the HF or Ruby Gems attacks faced legal consequences, the industry would get a lot more conservative very quickly. And unlike social media, section 230 doesn't apply, and there aren't any free speech concerns.
Shortly after, Nvidia acquired HF for $12.9B.
No such talk since.
https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026
https://www.reuters.com/technology/nvidia-talks-acquire-hugg...
If there were actual consequences perhaps they would've not been so laissez-faire with their testing and would've done it in a properly controlled environment rather than the absolute joke of a system they set up.
There's a world where the labs WANT Open Source AI to cause a disaster.
Pacing the frontier just means giving bad actors an opportunity to create an AI disaster which would force an extreme response by governments. Which they seem to be begging for.
Dario's big scary example was AI that can hack the internet. Why aren't the labs calling on the government to help harden everything? Why are Anthropic's Glasswing and OpenAI's Daybreak still commercial endeavours?
To me, the only real risk of AI is hacking. Why all of this commotion about existential risk? Seems like a distraction.
Hardening everything is in fact part of the answer. Getting stuff disconnected from the internet that shouldn't be connected is also part.
No you won't. The US president, yesterday:
U.S. President Donald Trump on Sunday likened critics of artificial intelligence to "very negative forces" bringing up scenarios that will not happen, and said he wanted to make sure that the U.S. remains the industry leader. "We're leading China in AI. We're the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI wins," Trump told reporters at his Ireland golf course, when asked if the AI industry should slow down or be more regulated.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/trump-says-very-negativ...
And—although this is a different point—it's their flagrant exploitation of information commons that warrants their special treatment.