Ruby

I don't want the wake-up call to be an extreme disaster.

I hope that a saying, hey, we're going to risk our leading position over this and all that entails is a wake-up call the world doesn't ignore.

I hope we see treaties drawn up in response to this.

I don't think we're handing the lead to China, I think we're creating the political conditions for an international agreement.

The sooner everyone gets on board with truly responsible development, the sooner humanity can have the benefits.

Not everyone believes it though.

According to Scott Galloway, business professor at NYU and host of Professor G, the perplexing corporate move is an attempted corporate strategy regardless of whether it is good strategy.

Let's be clear about what's happening.

Anthropic has one of the most capable models in the world.

They pause, they lobby for regulations that take years to navigate, and when the dust settles, they've locked in their advantage while everyone else is buried in compliance.

It might be the most sophisticated regulatory capture play in history.

Whether the attempt is earnest or a play, the bold move is upending the AI policy landscape.

The last two years have seen significant AI legislative activity.

Thousands of bills introduced across 45 states and hundreds enacted spanning deepfake bans, hiring disclosure, chatbot safety for minors, and transparency labels.

No successful legislation has yet addressed the possibility that a frontier AI system might be too dangerous to build.

The most ambitious attempt on this front, California's SB 1047, was vetoed by Governor Newsom after industry lobbying.

Colorado's AI Act, the first comprehensive state law, has been delayed repeatedly and still isn't in effect.

At the federal level, a Republican proposal attempted to ban states from regulating AI for 10 years, though this was killed 99-1 in the Senate after a bipartisan revolt led by GOP governors.

On March 25, five days before the anthropic pause announcement,

Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced a simultaneous bill in both chambers seeking an immediate federal moratorium on the construction of new AI data centres and upgrading of existing ones, as well as export controls.