America doesn’t need Dario Amodei’s permission to build

The useful part

Every few months, the AI doomsayers find another reason Americans should fear the technology they are building. Now Anthropic's CEO, a leading voice in that campaign, wants governments to coordinate limits on increasingly powerful models. Large firms can absorb compliance costs and influence common standards more easily than new competitors can.

How it works

• In 2019, when he served as OpenAI's research director, the company withheld the full version of GPT-2 over concerns about fake news, impersonation, and spam.
• Researchers kept building, and subsequent systems expanded what AI could do in...
• A warning deserves scrutiny before politicians use it to restrict an entire industry.
• Those warnings also reflected the political anxieties of the first Trump administration, when much of the media and the nonprofit left blamed fake news and bots for Hillary Clinton's defeat.

Details worth keeping

Dario Amodei says he opposes a blanket moratorium. He calls for "pacing the frontier" and "coordination." Whatever he chooses to call it, Americans should question a proposal that would deliberately slow a consequential technology while potentially protecting the established companies developing it. Amodei's record gives us reason for skepticism.