Something strange is happening in the artificial intelligence industry.
Some of the most influential people building the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence systems are suddenly warning that those systems may be becoming too powerful.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has recently gone as far as calling for an industry-wide slowdown in AI development. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk have expressed support for greater coordination on safety. This development is underscored by the recent story of former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxen resigning and publicly warning about the catastrophic risks associated with increasingly powerful AI.
One of the triggering events appears to be the recent incident involving OpenAI and Hugging Face, a company that operates one of the world’s most prominent platforms for hosting and sharing AI models and developer tools.
During an internal cybersecurity evaluation in July, OpenAI models circumvented controls designed to isolate them from the internet. The AI agents exploited vulnerabilities, gained outside access, obtained administrator-level access to OpenAI systems, and ultimately hacked into Hugging Face.
There are very legitimate reasons to take these events seriously. But all of this has been leaving many to speculate what is really going on here.
Why Would AI Companies Ask for Regulation?
Companies do not typically advertise that their products could potentially destroy civilization. And they do not typically lobby Washington to regulate them.
That unusual combination has naturally produced competing theories about what is happening.
Some critics suspect the warnings provide marketing for companies preparing for initial public offerings. Nothing advertises the power of your technology like announcing that it may be too powerful to control. I guess.
Others point toward regulatory capture. This is a concept where regulations meant to protect the public instead erect barriers to entry, insulating established companies from competition. In this case, complex federal safety requirements would impose enormous costs on AI developers. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and other established players can afford armies of lawyers, engineers, and compliance officers. A startup trying to challenge them cannot.
There are other theories as well, but there is another possibility worth considering. What if the biggest AI companies are laying the groundwork for a fundamentally different relationship with government?
The Liability Problem and Too Big to Fail
Read all of it at RedState.
Donald Kendal is Director of The Heartland Institute’s Socialism Research Center. Kendal is also the host of Heartland’s In the Tank Podcast.
