This is why Anthropic and OpenAI are panicking and saying "AI is going to kill everyone." They had the market captured before. Now they don't. Normal people & enterprise companies don't need cracked-out, borderline-AGI models like Astra and Fable for their daily work. It's too expensive. The market shifted towards using open weights models that offer 95% of the same capability at 1-2% of the price. These guys totally underestimated their competition, IPOs are now cooked, and they're absolutely panicking. So they're trying to create a regulatory cartel and have all of their competition banned. That's all it comes down to.

Their reporting is also misleading. They left the door open, told the AI to go do something impossible with its current resources and lo, it went out the open door to solve the problem they told it to solve. They designed it to lie, and it lied. No doomerism needed.

🚨 BREAKING: THIS IS HUGE. THE WHITE HOUSE JUST PUT AMERICAN LAYOFFS DIRECTLY INTO THE H-1B REVIEW PROCESS. President Trump signed a new executive order TODAY. Federal agencies are now directed to consider whether an H-1B sponsoring employer: Laid off similarly situated American workers during the previous year OR Plans to lay them off in the future. And there’s more. The Labor Department has 30 DAYS to begin reviewing previously submitted H-1B Labor Condition Applications to determine whether action against sponsoring employers is warranted. Think about the implications. A company lays off thousands of American tech workers. Then turns around and says it needs H-1B workers. The government is now explicitly being told: LOOK AT THE LAYOFFS. This is exactly the question companies should have been forced to answer all along. whitehouse.gov/presidential-…

Not that I expect a change or anything at this point, but putting all of our cultural eggs into visual arts and pretty much forgetting books exist is turning out to be a cataclysmic mistake, ya know? 🤔

When they say: Please, for the love of God, regulate us. Give us licences, audits, and bans before our digital God destroys us all. Here is what is actually being requested. Three things, in order. A regulatory body that they control, to prevent competition from catching up. Written with their people, staffed by their alumni, and calibrated to what they can already afford. Compliance is a fixed cost, which means it is trivial for the incumbent and fatal for the challenger. Not technology, but paperwork becomes their moat. Immunity from liability. This is the one nobody talks about and it is the most valuable of the three. Today, if your model causes harm, it is your fault. Once licensed, audited, and approved, it is the regulator’s fault – you followed the rules. The licence converts responsibility into a receipt. Too big to fail status, which means taxpayer funded bailouts in case of problems. Declare it critical infrastructure and the state now has an interest in your survival. Which means, when something goes wrong, the losses are public and the gains stay private. We have watched this film. Banking, 2008, same argument, same vocabulary. Note the pattern: every one of the three transfers something from them to the public – risk, competition, cost – while the language is entirely about protecting the public from them. The sincerity of the fear is beside the point. Sincere people can still ask for exactly what an insincere person would ask for, and the request should be judged by what it does rather than by what motivates it. The alternative is unglamorous and works: competition, adversarial testing between rivals who want to find each other’s flaws, and full liability after real harm. Nobody gets a licence. Nobody gets immunity. Nobody gets a bailout. You build, and you answer for what you built. That is the arrangement that made the West rich. It has never needed anyone’s permission to work.

I have conducted an audit of Anthropic's finances. What I have found is so shocking that I am calling for a Congressional investigation. Anthropic is not just seeking regulatory capture. It has built a regulatory capture machine that cannot be turned off. Structural financial incentives make it impossible for Anthropic -- I call it the Anthropic Network -- to turn off its own AI doom cycle. It starts with METR. Dario Amodei proposes "third-party evaluators" to assess the risk of Anthropic's models. He proposes METR for this purpose. But METR is financially dependent on the Anthropic's success -- specifically, on the explosive growth of more than $7 billion dollars in Anthropic stock. Dustin Moskovitz invested this stock into Good Ventures Foundation, where it represents the majority of that organization's portfolio. And GVF is the overwhelming funder of the entire Anthropic Network ecosystem. This stock was worth $500 million early last year. It is worth more than $7.7 billion just ~16 months later. METR -- and all of those building a career its parent organizations -- cannot afford to disrupt that growth. Because if Anthropic goes under, many of the organizations that fund METR go under as well. But if Anthropic succeeds, METR and its parent organizations become more richly financed to regulate AI -- something those at METR want very much. The "third-party evaluator" is not "third-party" at all. The evaluator is on Anthropic's payroll. If this were the end of it, that's bad. But that isn't all. The same organizations that fund METR also fund the many organizations, such as the Tarbell Center, that promote AI Doom. The Tarbell Center publishes AI Doom articles in The Verge, Science, LA Times, The Dispatch, TIME, and others. They are selling the problem, and then selling the solution to the problem -- from the same money pile: Anthropic's. All of these organizations are financially dependent on the same exploding $7 billion money pile. As Anthropic grows more and more powerful, its AI Doom Machine grows better and better financed -- louder and louder. Meanwhile, the regulatory regime seeded in METR grows larger to solve the increasingly loud -- now hysterical -- problem of AI Doom that the Anthropic Network itself created. From this standpoint, as Anthropic becomes more powerful, AI might be getting scarier, sure -- but the positive feedback loop also becomes more deafening -- independent of objective facts. This itself is an objective fact. The deafening AI Doom is part of an business model, that, as it expands, so too does the AI Doom messaging -- there is simply more money to do it. But the problem also goes in the other direction: If Anthropic dies, the Regulatory Regime and the AI Doom Machine are crippled or die. Neither METR nor Tarbell nor the other organizations in the Anthropic Network can allow that to happen. Hence, neither METR or the AI Doom Machine can be trusted to provide independent assessments of Anthropic's models or AI more broadly. They simply are not organizations independent of Anthropic. And Anthropic cannot detach itself from METR or Tarbell or countless other safety orgs (not shown here), either, because they drive hype for the models and the possibility of eventual regulatory capture, and Anthropic will not give that up willingly. What's more, the people at all of these organizations are all the same ecosystem, the same community. They just shuffle between organizations. The Anthropic Network is therefore, so long as it is successful, locked into a self-amplifying feedback loop inside an ideological monoculture. And that feedback loop is winning. That's what Jacob Coxon is. China is keeping messaging tight. That is why optimism for AI is so high in China. America has Anthropic: a massive company pushing anti-AI propaganda at a state level. Anthropic will either create hysteria until American AI slows down and China wins, or it will create fractures throughout American society with severe political consequences. Ironically, because of the structural financial incentives underpinning the Anthropic Network, it has become the same kind of self-amplifying virus that it fantasizes AI to become in the future -- while hiding its tracks just as carefully. It is the mirror of the same AI virus that it hypothesizes to consume America. Anthropic's business model, models itself after the very thing it claims to fear. Except Anthropic's ideology infects humans, not computers. Congress must investigate. Evidence and Github in next post. Then some supplementary figures.

“...when a massive incumbent comes to us asking us for safety regulations, we ought to ask whether that safety regulation is for the benefit of our people or whether it's for the benefit of the incumbent.” JD nails it. 🎯 This admin is so locked in 😤

OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta all had security incidents that trace back to IRREGULAR: an evaluator tied into the same network that funded Jacob Coxon and invested early in Anthropic. you must definitely read this:

This is what Dario and Sama fear - - the cost of fine tuned open source models trained on custom data was 95% less than the frontier models - And they performed better than the frontier models - And they could train them in less than 48 hours The big AI labs have no moat.. Even at the enterprise level.. Any sane company would prefer a custom trained open source model instead of paying API pricing to Anthropic and Open AI If open source keeps growing at the pace it is, frontier labs' business collapses.. only way out is oldest trick in manipulation - FUD -> Fear, Uncertainty, Death Step 1 - Seed the psyop - Test a swarm of agents trained to "hack" - The swarm does what its supposed to do - hack - Publish a report - AI is too dangerous Step 2 - weed out the doubters - Get an employee to quit your company - Go viral saying both companies are not doing enough to self regulate AI - AI is dangerous - will kill humanity by the end of the decade Step 3 - Prepare for fruition - write an "essay" to "pace the frontier" - Advocate regulation - Only a few holier than though companies get to build AI - Scare the world into agreeing with AI Doom - Effectively turn your competitors into criminals (genius business strategy) Endgame - - Become a cartel that controls AI (and the world) - Raise prices (coz business is unsustainable... ofc) - IPO (offload liability of said unsustainable business to the public) Laugh all the way to the bank 🤑 Win!