Three Labs With a Plan and A Memorandum

The big story today is the release of Claude Fable 5, the version of Claude Mythos that Anthropic believes they can safely distribute to the people. You should absolutely be switching over to that model and trying it out. But as always, this blog does not rush into commenting on a new model until we have a few days to play around with it and see what our new baby can (and can’t) do. This will be no exception, and coverage of Fable in earnest will start Friday or Monday. Today I instead bring you several related stories around policies and plans for AI, that came out before the Fable announcement. First we have the Administration giving us an AI memorandum, that I read as an attempt to legally implement ‘Anthropic is fired forever and we will use any models we have for whatever we want no matter what’ combined with some good government and diffusion plans. Second, OpenAI has come out with a plan for how to ensure AGI benefits everyone. It includes a very strong call for international coordination among key actors to ensure the ability to slow down AI development in the name of doing it safely. This echoes the same call made previously by Anthropic and by Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind. There is broad support for the idea of preparing for a potential coordinated slowdown. The rest of the OpenAI proposal here is then concerned with the opposite problem, of concentration of power, and concentrating its rhetoric on that danger and AI’s promise. Notice that the document uses only ‘catastrophic’ risk rather than existential or extinction, and it does not take seriously the idea the need to retain control in the hands of humans, only fearing the wrong humans will command these AIs. And OpenAI’s plan is, very explicitly, AI to go into recursive self-improvement. I appreciate the honesty, but the inherent contradictions remain, and are not addressed, nor is the failure to address them itself addressed, and so on. This leads into Joshua Achiam’s claim on Twitter about the d