I thought "Free market!!1!" was basic US policy. But apparently you can't do any consumer protection laws, but you can regulate AI access to only your wealthy friends / campaign sponsors.
Anthropic has been touting how their newest model is basically a cyber weapon and is so dangerous that they need to only role it out to trusted people and make sure it has super restrictive guard rails. They are begging to be regulated. This is exactly what they’ve been asking for.
This doesn't directly follow from the first part of your comment, and more importantly seems inaccurate with respect to Anthropic's public statements on this situation. For example:
> As we have stated publicly, we believe the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments, as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts. This action does not adhere to those principles.
In fairness, they are up against a part of government that can move swiftly and authoritatively. They don’t have the luxury of biding time against a sclerotic and process-bound bureaucracy.
There is a good reason no one seriously tests the resolve of these particular regulatory authorities.
What they wanted is to regulate competition but they forgot that current admin is Trump. They should have buy gifts to Trump preferably gold and pay for few exciting dinners in Florida. They should have learned from Bezos and Cook.
Their true intentions were to get the government to regulate open weight models while leaving them alone. Government went after them instead.
As enjoyable as the sheer irony of the situation is, this is a terrible development... Not only are foreign peasants like me cut off from the best models, so are the chinese AI labs that were distilling them into open weights for the rest of us to enjoy. This sudden acceleration has been genuinely terrifying, I'm not sure what to expect of the future anymore.
