Air Force Won

A week from today, we will be at Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI, demanding that leaders agree to a conditional AI pause. These companies are recklessly endangering all of our lives. Their excuse is that they can't pause unilaterally. So they must commit to pausing if others do.

Brendan Carr’s authoritarian warning — that networks risk their broadcasting licenses for Iran war reporting that the government doesn’t like — is outrageous. When the government demands the press become a state mouthpiece under the threat of punishment, something has gone very wrong. In 2019, Carr said: “Should the government censor speech it doesn’t like? Of course not. The FCC does not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the ‘public interest.’” But today, Carr cites the “public interest” to blatantly threaten news outlets because the president doesn’t like their reporting. Again and again, Carr’s tenure as FCC chairman has been marked by his shameless willingness to bully and threaten our free press. But even by Carr’s standards, today’s hypocrisy is shocking — and dangerous. The American people demand uncensored news about the men and women serving in our armed forces. Our right to a free press is one of the core American freedoms those in uniform have sworn to support and defend. It is long past time for our government officials to remember their own oaths to uphold the Constitution — starting with the First Amendment.

Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions - also known as the fake news - have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up. The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not. And frankly, changing course is in their own business interests since trust in legacy media has now fallen to an all time low of just 9% and are ratings disasters. The American people have subsidized broadcasters to the tune of billions of dollars by providing free access to the nation’s airwaves. It is very important to bring trust back into media, which has earned itself the label of fake news. When a political candidate is able to win a landslide election victory after in the face of hoaxes and distortions, there is something very wrong. It means the public has lost faith and confidence in the media. And we can’t allow that to happen. Time for change!

I do personally find the error bars going to the moon kind of comforting in a weird way, maybe bc it’s kind of comical, if the error bars were big but manageable that’s p scary, but when they’re incomprehensibly huge I relax into it a bit. No illusion of being in my hands

I would be pretty surprised if the employees in-question here end up saying they were deceived. Also, these are high-level enough employees that it's unclear what it even means for them to be "deceived". Deceived by whom? They drafted the RSP! They almost certainly were also involved in the decision to change it. They benefitted hugely from this by getting social license to work at Anthropic and having people get off their back, and they are now at least deca-millionaires (or often billionaires).

The Biden Admin argued that the Defense Production Act (DPA) gave them the open-ended ability to regulate AI via executive decrees, and now the Trump Admin is using the DPA to threaten private AI labs with quasi-nationalization for not being in line with their wishes. In both cases, it's an abuse of authority. As I noted in congressional testimony two years ago, we have flipped the DPA on its head "and converted a 1950s law meant to encourage production, into an expansive regulatory edict intended to curtail some forms of algorithmic innovation." This nonsense needs to end regardless of which administration is doing it. The DPA is not some sort of blanket authorization for expansive technocratic reordering of markets or government takeover of sectors. Congress needs to step up to both tighten up the DPA such that it cannot be abused like this, and then also legislate more broadly on a national policy framework for AI.

We should be extremely clear about various red lines as we approach and/or cross them. We just got close to one of the biggest ones, and we could cross it as soon as a few days from now: the quasi-nationalization of a frontier lab. Of course, we don’t exactly call it that. The legal phraseology for the line we are approaching is “the invocation of the Defense Production Act (DPA) Title I on a frontier AI lab.” What is the DPA? It’s a Cold War era industrial policy and emergency powers law. Its most commonly used power is Title III, used for traditional industrial policy (price guarantees, grants, loans, loan guarantees, etc.). There is also Title VII, which is used to compel information from companies. This is how the Biden AI Executive Order compelled disclosure of certain information from frontier labs. I only mention these other titles to say that not all uses of the DPA are equal. Title I, on the other hand, comes closer to government exerting direct command over the economy. Within Title I there are two important authorities: priorities and allocations. Priorities authority means the government can put itself at the front of the line for arbitrary goods. Allocations authority is the ability of the government to directly command the production of industrial goods. Think, “Factory X must make Y amount of Z goods.” The government determines who gets what and how much of it they get. This is a more straightforwardly Soviet power, and it is very rarely used. This is the power DoD intends to use in order to command Anthropic to make a version of Claude that can choose to kill people without any human oversight. What would this commandeering look like, in practice? It would likely mean DoD personnel embedded within Anthropic exercising deep involvement over technical decisions on alignment, safeguards, model training, etc. Allocations authority was used most recently during COVID for ventilators and PPE, and before that during the Cold War. It is usually used during acute emergencies with reasonably clear end states. But there is no emergency with Anthropic, save for the omni-mergency that characterizes the political economy of post-9/11 U.S. federal policy. There’s no acute crisis whose resolution would mean the Pentagon would stop commandeering Anthropic’s resources. That is why I believe that in the end this would amount to quasi-nationalization of a frontier lab. It’s important to be clear-eyed that this is what is now on the table. The Biden Administration would probably have ended up nationalizing the labs, too. Indeed, they laid the groundwork for this in terms one. I discussed this at the time with fellow conservatives and I warned them: “This drive toward AI lab nationalization is a structural dynamic. Administrations of both parties will want to do this eventually, and resisting this will be one of the central challenges in the preservation of our liberty.” I am unhappy, but unsurprised, that my fear has come true, though there is a rich irony to the fact that the first administration to invoke the prospect of lab nationalization is also one that understands itself to have a radically anti-regulatory AI policy agenda. History is written by Shakespeare! There is a silver lining here: if Democrats had originated this idea, it would have been harder to argue against, because of the overwhelming benefit of the doubt conventionally extended to the left in our media, and because a hypothetical Biden II or Harris admin would done it in a carefully thought through way. So it is convenient, if you oppose nationalization, that it’s a Republican administration that first raised the issue—since conventional elite opinion and media will be primed against it by default— and that the administration is raising it in such an non-photogenic manner. This Anthropic thing may fizzle, and some will say I am overreacting. But this Anthropic thing may also *not* fizzle, and regardless this issue is not going away.

I’ve been restraining myself from political commentary for the last few weeks, but I would be remiss not to register my extreme disappointment at the groundless sacking of Jim O’Neill The Trump admin desperately needs competent people, Jim is exceptionally competent, this is bad

Banger