Dean Ball - Leviathan Waking: On Anthropic/USG, and a new era in AI governance

The stark reality is that making superintelligence is a profoundly political act.Dean Ball in Hyperdimensional Two weeks ago, in my bio for Less Online, I added a bullet in a list of intentions:Update people's models of DC. Last year I said "The world is on the cusp of getting much weirder. Most of DC is still asleep to the magnitude of the change." This year, DC is genuinely waking up, and now it's Berkeley that needs to take notice.Then I went on leave for a week and a half and didn't check twitter the whole time. I barely followed the news, though an Anthropic MoTS handed me a printed copy of the "It's a good model, sir," tweet. It was an excellent bit. Hours later, the United States imposed export controls on Claude Fable. Dean Ball's excellent article helps explain why:Leviathan WakingOn Anthropic/USG, and a new era in AI governanceIntroductionImagine that there were no Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but there remained a large pharmaceutical sector, similar in size and scope to the one the United States enjoys today. In this alternate world, imagine that drugs were officially not licensed; there were even officials in the executive branch who boasted that the U.S., unlike other countries, would not get into the regulatory morass of licensing drugs.One day, after a pharmaceutical developer warns that they think they have made a drug that cures a major Cancer at one dosage but is lethal at a slightly higher dosage. The company says, for this reason, that they are going to restrict release only to pre-approved patients and monitor their usage of the drug carefully—a sharp break from prior industry practice but one that the company insists, controversially, is necessary. This particular company had been advocating for years for stricter drug regulation, much to the chagrin of the government.This causes a stir, and the government, not quite knowing what to do, announce that it will give drug developers the helpful option to show their drugs’ safety profiles to go