Ajeya Cotra

How has this idea been received by the companies?

I mean, on the one hand, it seems like transparency requirements is the regulatory instrument that the companies have objected to the least.

It's the one that they've been most willing to tolerate.

On the other hand, the whole message of this is we don't trust you to share information with the rest of the world.

And we think that you might screw us over basically by rushing ahead and like deliberately concealing that.

I could imagine that that could be a little bit offensive to them, or at

If that is their plan, then they probably want to find some excuse for not having this kind of oversight.

Investors lose heart.

extraordinary subpoena powers to basically demand almost any documents from any company in the country.

I rarely use power, and it wasn't the only agency that had that capability.

I never actually saw this power being used.

I guess people were proud of the fact that we had that authority, but I think you would usually do it for competition reasons, trying to tell whether companies are colluding potentially or whether there's an insufficient degree of market competition, and there would be a reason to intervene.

Right.

And I would imagine almost certainly there's government agencies in the US that have a similar remit.

And so if they actually could keep that kind of information secret, then maybe the companies would be more happy to share it with people who are specialized basically in reading this, like comprehending this data and figuring out what to do with it.

Because I guess you want common knowledge and you want lots of attention focused on the issue, as well as just some technocrats being aware.

So in as much as the plan A would be, we want them to be sharing this information such that anyone in the public can find out, I guess they'll probably resist this, any legislation imposing this to some extent.

And I guess for partially legitimate reasons that it is probably going to be frustrating for them.

How high on the list of, in as much as people are trying to set priorities for what sort of asks do you make and which sort of fights do you pick, would this be very high on the list for you?

Do you think that information about an emerging intelligence explosion might just leak out to the public anyway because staff at the companies would feel uncomfortable with that proceeding in secret?