Did Anthropic ask for this?

As someone that doesn’t have a dog in this race, I feel like anthropic has been very consistent with their moral stance. First, they denied the Department of war to use their AI to conduct military operations and throughout all this, Anthropic has been the one to neuter their model and make sure that it’s not able to do a lot of things that might can be destructive. So them saying that there should be a pause on new AI and then releasing this new product makes me inclined to believe them. Maybe I’ve drank the koolaid but it seems like Anthropic isn’t inherently “evil.”

Just look at any interview with Amodei, he gets super excited/happy every time he gets to talk about his tech making people unemployed.

The guy loves firing people not at his company.

Deliberately trying to cause mass poverty and starvation by firing as many people as possible and being excited about it is cartoon villain stuff.

Anyone who works at Anthropic is basically a henchman to a cartoon villain.

>Yes. This assessment was made by Amazon, a frequent and serious government contractor which is generally trusted to handle high-security government, intelligence, and military contractor concerns.

Reads as partially disingenuous. Amazon did not conduct some thoroughly vetted, responsible security audit. Someone gave them examples of a 'jailbreak' and they notified the white house rather quickly. This was nary an official process. Calling it one is ignoring the facts of what happened.

The government can't apply export controls based on a control that does not exist. Creating one for model inference, if at all possible, would take 3-6 months at a minimum and it even includes a public comment process. That control is not cited anywhere because it does not exist.

The president can invoke emergency powers but that requires pointing to a specific foreign threat, notifying congress formally, posting on the national register, and it only lasts six months unless congress votes to renew it.

Given how easy it would have been for them to fight this, we can only conclude this was either outright designed or incredibly convenient for Anthropic.

Given their stated goal of pulling Fable by June 22nd, it seems likely they underestimated the amount of compute they would need or, even if they had perfectly estimated it, pivoting so that "the government shut it down because it's so powerful" on June 12nd is a better story than "we shut it down because we lack the compute" on the 22nd. This is especially true because the net new revenue from Fable is just from new signups between the two dates, which is likely smaller each day elapsed since the launch.