Nathaniel Whittemore

government, but also about the public-private power debate more broadly.

Kelsey Piper writes, "...an underrated feature of this situation, a private company now has incredibly powerful zero-day exploits of almost every software project you've heard of, and Hegseth and Emile Michael have ordered the government not to in any capacity work with Anthropic."

Dean Ball quote tweeted that and said, Now, of course, for some, what this brings up is the question of who gets to control power this powerful.

Andy Hall, whose essay we read on LRS recently, writes,

The news today that Anthropic has built a powerful cyber weapon is leading many to say we're going down one of two paths.

Nationalized AI, in which the government controls this tech, or companies that become more powerful than the government.

Now for Andy, he argues that there has to be some different, narrow alternative path involving smart governance of AI models that prevents the need to nationalize the labs.

But many aren't sure.

Derek Thompson writes, The frontier AI labs have built extraordinary things and I'm in awe of their accomplishments.

But if you compare your technology to nuclear weapons, predict that it will disemploy tens of millions of people, and announce the invention of a digital skeleton key to exfiltrate top-secret information from government systems and gain control over critical infrastructure including military infrastructure, I genuinely have a hard time seeing how this doesn't end with some form of government nationalization or sanction or something weirder.

I can't predict the evolution of this technology well enough to know what I'm rooting for here, but just adding two and two makes it hard to see how and why we'd continue to treat these companies like they're ordinary private sector firms.

And for many, this gets even more dramatic when they game out the scenario of what would have happened if China got there first.

George Journeys writes, So basically, if Anthropic was not a U.S.

company, we'd be facing zero days with multiple unknown points of attack on virtually all of our systems to an adversary who developed this capacity before us.

Sporadica on Twitter writes, Another reason why the accelerate chance of days past were legitimate and serious and just let China develop this stuff first was always a suicidal, dangerous mentality.

Dean Ball thinks it's maybe a moment to regroup when it comes to policy and rededicate ourselves.

In a long post, he concludes, Finally, there is this.

Mythos was made by an American company.

And like most successful American companies, it has a vested interest in maintaining order and peace.

It is investing substantial resources in mitigating the risks of its technological progress, as I expect most of the American labs would.