Nathaniel Whittemore

Corey Quinn writes, Asking your competitors to pause development right after you file your S1 is the single most effective moat-building exercise I've seen pitched as ethics.

Did they not realize the quiet period is for them, not homework they assign their competitors?

Now, there's an even broader critique of Anthropic that recently came out on the All In podcast from legendary investor Bill Gurley, who spent 30 days reading everything that Anthropic had ever written, coming to the conclusion, I don't think they're writing software.

I think they're midwifing a deity here.

I don't know which one I'm more afraid of, the regulatory capture or this Dr. Frankenstein theory.

Jason Kalkanis chimed in, Now, even if you don't think that that's exactly what's happening, the fact that that idea is coming up in mainstream conversation will give you some idea why the public discourse gets so frustrated with these companies who talk about the huge implications of their work and yet proceed on with it at an ever-increasing pace.

Former AI czar David Sachs wrote,

Signs you might be trying to get your frontier AI lab nationalized.

You compare it to nukes, threaten half of white-collar jobs, warn recursive self-improvement could end humanity, then race ahead anyway.

In other words, you want the government to save us from you.

Now, like I said at the beginning, if Anthropic's document is more meditation on the state of the world, OpenAI's policy document about democratic governance is a little bit more precise.

And yet still, one part that people noted is that it also mentions RSI as a starting frame of reference.

In the first paragraph, OpenAI writes, We also see signs of recursive self-improvement in today's systems, where AI development is itself accelerated by AI.

We expect this to increase competitive pressures among developers and nations, and create governance challenges that existing institutions are not equipped to address.

Writes Chubby, The vibe has changed.

Something is happening.

Now, the main thrust of OpenAI's paper is that democracies specifically have a key role to play in solving these very complex and difficult problems of advanced AI in larger society.

They propose three broad policy directions.

The first they call building a national framework through reverse federalism, basically arguing that instead of the national system preempting state rules, Congress should in fact adopt and scale up the best pieces of state regulations.

Now, the second policy priority is one that actually runs a little bit counter to the executive order.