This is a very troubling development. OpenAI and Anthropic are free to slow down their own AI development efforts all they want. They can cap their compute spend and cut back their own capabilities in various ways. That would be a huge loss for America, but that is their own business. It is absolutely outrageous, however, for America’s two leading labs to ask our government to advocate global “pacing” constraints be imposed on the entire sector. Calling for a global gatekeeper for AI that will cripple our entire nation’s computational capabilities has obvious anti-competitive effects (especially for open source) -- which makes ongoing fears about regulatory capture all the more credible. But that is secondary to the more important point: In the name of addressing one risk, we open ourselves to an even bigger one. A call for mandatory national surrender to a global pacing agreement / body will not constrain China or other actors from advancing, and it will leave America more vulnerable as a result. We stay at the cutting edge because we must. We can find far more reasonable ways to address frontier model safety without restoring to extreme -- and frankly unworkable -- solutions.

outstanding essay from Seb: "A cadre of elites decides which research directions are permissible, caps global compute and robotics, and creates state-administered scarcity rents. I shouldn’t need to explain why this is bad and dangerous, anyone can study History and Economics in their free time. [...] Building an entire apparatus tasked with maximally empowering the government and its grip on research, knowledge, and technology is dangerous." Read every word of it 👉

We stand at a critical crossroads in the debate over AI governance in the United States, and it feels like we are inching closer to a very serious battle over whether or not open source models will even be allowed in an environment where a new de facto licensing regime has been taking shape. Lacking formal congressional statutory frameworks or clear administration rules (like the diffusion rule revision), we appear to be left with a sporadic, arbitrary, non-transparent process for model review. The fiction of “voluntary” agreements hangs over this debate, and some large model developers are already showing an incredible willingness to bend over backwards to accommodate national security-related officials / orders that the rest of us are not privy to. It's a very opaque process. And those model developers are expected to play ball with those officials, or else their models get pulled from the market or held up for long periods. Or they will lose any government procurement contracts they have. There is nothing “voluntary” about it when that Sword of Damocles hangs in the room. As this mess worsens, at some point the question of how to handle open source models will come into sharper focus because it will have to. I've even heard some rumors lately that something may be coming from the admin on this front to address this. Needless to say, if this informal new AI model review regime expands and takes on more pre-vetting characteristics / requirements, it is hard to see how open source players could comply with such quasi-licensing of AI models. Specifically, if this ambiguous new regime is accompanied by a general presumption of ‘restrict-until-permitted,’ then that would spell doom for open source. That is a very dark path for our country. Worse yet, of course, would be a move by national security officials to more directly restrict open source models and capabilities. If that happens, then we would be right back in the thick of a Clipper Chip-like battle along the lines of what we saw in the late 1990s. That is a much darker path for America. Meanwhile, open source developers have no “golden shares” or other goodies to offer the government to make their problems go away. Let’s be clear: If our government takes the dark path, it will become the single most important battle over computational freedom of modern times. It is time for people to make a stand in defense of open source before it is too late.

truly one of the most amazing developments in trans-Atlantic tech policy over the past 20 years is the way that Europe set out to regulate US tech giants into the ground, but only made them more dominant as a result. This Economist headline really says it.