The AI Ad-Hoc Prior Restraint Era Begins

The White House has ordered Anthropic not to expand access to Mythos, and is at least seriously considering a complete about-face of American Frontier AI policy into a full prior restraint regime, where anyone wishing to release a highly capable new model will have to ask for permission. This would be the antithesis of all their previous rhetoric, and all their actions to systematically avoid laying a foundation to do this in an orderly and informed fashion. But now, with the existence of Mythos, and a potential coming hackastrophe where cyber attackers will by default have the edge and we desperately need defenders to have a head start, it is not clear they feel they have a choice. If implemented well, this could be the right thing. By default, it won’t be implemented well. Project Glasswing Cannot Expand The government is now deciding which models can and cannot be made available on particular terms to particular parties. This is already happening. Anthropic wanted to expand the number of companies with access to Mythos as part of Project Glasswing. The White House said no. It is not clear this is any of the White House’s damn business, legally speaking, but Anthropic honored their refusal. It is not clear what would have happened if they had done it anyway, but I strongly agree that it would have been unwise to find out. Neil Chilson points out that while little harm is being done this time by denying Anthropic’s ability to widen the deployment of Mythos, the precedent of the White House vetoing Anthropic’s deployments of Mythos is concerning. As he says, arbitrary and informal government decision making can be even worse than formal regulatory regimes, favoring the connected and insiders. I’d add it also prevents the ability to plan and enables massive corruption. That lack of harm assumes the decision to not expand is wize. One dynamic here is that the European Union is pressing Anthropic to give its key firms access, Anthropic wants to say yes, and this is wha