📜 Anthropic and alignment
By Ben Thompson | 15 minute read
Anthropic talks a lot about alignment; this insistence on controlling the U.S. military, however, is fundamentally misaligned with reality. Current AI models are obviously not yet so powerful that they rival the U.S. military; if that is the trajectory, however — and no one has been more vocal in arguing for that trajectory than Amodei — then it seems to me the choice facing the U.S. is actually quite binary:
Option 1 is that Anthropic accepts a subservient position relative to the U.S. government, and does not seek to retain ultimate decision-making power about how its models are used, instead leaving that to Congress and the President.
Option 2 is that the U.S. government either destroys Anthropic or removes Amodei.
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Again, I think this is a good argument; the one I am putting forward, however, is much more basic and brutal, and doesn’t have anything to do with belief or not in the American experiment (although I’m with Luckey in that regard): it simply isn’t tolerable for the U.S. to allow for the development of an independent power structure — which is exactly what AI has the potential to undergird — that is expressly seeking to assert independence from U.S. control.
Reading time: 15 minutes.
‘Marine’ by Gustave Courbet.