Dwarkesh Patel

And remember that a given level of AI capability gets 10x cheaper every single year.

So while this year might cost $30 billion, next year it'll cost $3 billion.

The year after that, $300 million.

And by 2030, it'll be less expensive to monitor every single nook and cranny in this country than it is to remodel the White House.

Now, once the technical capacity for mass surveillance and political suppression exists, the only thing that stands between us and an authoritarian state is the political expectation that this is just not something we do here.

And that's why I think anthropicist actions here are so valuable and commendable, because they help set that norm and that precedent.

What we're learning from this episode is the government has way more leverage over private companies than we previously realized.

Even if the supply chain restriction is backtracked, which as of this recording, prediction markets give a 74% chance of happening, the president has so many different ways of harassing a company which is resisting his will.

The federal government controls permitting for power generation, which you need for more data centers.

It oversees antitrust enforcement.

The federal government has contracts with all the other big tech companies that Anthropic relies on for chips and for funding.

And it could make a soft, unspoken condition, or maybe even an explicit condition, of such contracts that those companies no longer do business with Anthropic.

And people have proposed that the real problem here is that there's only three leading AI companies.

And so this creates a very clear and narrow target on which the governments can apply leverage in order to get what they want out of this technology.

But here's what I worry about, is that if there's wider diffusion, I don't think that solves the problem either.

Because from the government's perspective, that makes the situation even easier.

Say by 2027, the best models that the top companies have, the Cloud 6 and the Gemini 5s, are capable of enabling mass surveillance.

And even if those companies draw a line in the sand and say, we're not going to sell to the government, by late 2027, or certainly by 2028, there's going to be such wide diffusion that even open source models will be able to match the performance that the frontier had 12 months prior.

And so in 2028, the government can just say, look, Anthropic and Google and OpenAI are drawing these red lines.

That's not an issue.