David Sacks: OpenAI and Anthropic Don't Need Regulations to Pace Frontier Models

If the Russians stop fighting, the war ends.

If the Ukrainians stop fighting, their land will be occupied, their leaders will be killed, their history and language will be erased, their children will be kidnapped to serve Russia.

There IS no choice other than to force Russia to end it.

There is no treaty or agreement Putin could sign that is trustworthy. He has broken EVERY SINGLE ONE the moment it became convenient to him.

Yes, Ukraine will take a lot to rebuild. It will also substantially increase the EU's economy when it does.

And no, the trends are NOT merely which news source or week. Russia's revenues are declining, it is selling its gold, and its sovereign wealth fund is close to gone [0]. It is exhausting military supplies so badly it is now humiliatingly reliant on North Korea and Iran. Yes, it builds some of it's own drones and missiles. Ukraine has built its own defenses against almost everything but the ballistic missiles, and that shortage is the only area in which they are losing. Russia can only get more territory by attempting to "negotiate".

And again, stop trying to act as if this is somehow emotional and surrender is rational — an even slightly realistic look at Russia's goals, and their strategy of war crimes, terror, rape, torture, and child kidnapping shows the only rational way forward is to fight to the death.

A fight to the death is literally less bad than life under Russia, on every measure of quality of life.

And that is the assessment of the vast majority of Ukrainians who actually experience it.

Stop trying to give away their land and lives as if you are somehow superior. Figure out how to argue how to help them.

[0]https://charter97.org/en/news/2026/1/29/671781/

If history has shown one thing it’s that China often capitalizes very well on these types of measures.

My layman definition is it’s the people writing in major newspapers, the people getting paid by CNN to sit in a half circle on their news analysis shows, etc.

Is Peter Zeihan “mainstream”?

The only time I remember anyone speculating that Russia was in trouble was the short lived Wagner Rebellion - because nothing like it had happened before. But that lasted … two days?

I feel like there hasn't been enough discussion of aligning the incentives of the decision makers with that of the public on BUILDING the models. Right now, agents have committed what would be crimes if there were a human holding the same intent. But since it was an AI, there is a grey area in the law where it's not clear if there was a crime and who should be held responsible. That creates a world in which decision makers in AI labs can take near-infinite risk with little to no personal liability.

A LLM cannot have skin in the game so we must create systems that clarify who takes on the legal and civil liability for the creation, dissemination and operation of these tools. Until that time, the Dario and Sam's of this world have little to no incentive to truly care about safety.

After all, our society is built upon this same foundation; create structures where the perceived negative consequences outweigh the perceived positives. This only works when there is a human who can internalize and make this risk calculus. They need something to lose and this ultimately ties back to the human survival instinct. There is no such structure that's evolved for millions of years acting as a self-calibration mechanism for AI. So until we have sufficient proof that one is in place, it must be clear who the humans are whose livelihood and freedom is at stake.

The proposed "pacing of the frontier" seems like a way to continue to externalize the risk while remaining totally in control of the benefits -- a structure whose alignment is as weak as those very models committing crimes.