Three things to watch amid Anthropic’s latest feud with the government

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For those of you enjoying your summer unaware of Anthropic’s latest feud with the US government, here’s a recap: In April the company said it had built an AI model called Mythos that was so good at working with code it could pose a global cybersecurity threat. Anthropic gave access to a small group of cybersecurity experts so they could see what they were up against. Then it released a modified version called Fable which it said was safer to the public on Tuesday, June 9. That Friday, the federal government told the company it was a threat to national security and placed export controls on the new release. Anthropic revoked access to both models hours later.

People worried about catastrophic effects of AI—broadly labeled “doomers”—have said for years that the technology poses a threat to humanity and published proposals for how the government should intervene in its development. The doomers just got their government intervention—not over a bioweapon or rogue AI, but in response to an AI model that’s basically just really good at coding. And the result so far looks less like a safety plan than like a superficial reaction.

There’s plenty to dissect about what happened in those few days that led to such drastic action from the government, and it’s notable that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy was the one who told government officials that Fable would be dangerous (Amazon is both invested in Anthropic and building its own competing AI models). It's also possible this will be a short-lived ban from the government that doesn’t survive legal scrutiny (it’s not clear that Anthropic’s offering access to Fable really counts as “exporting” it, for example). 

But there are ripple effects happening already. 

For one, this is making a whole lot of people not want to rely on American AI companies. TheFrench politician Bruno Retailleau described it as a “wake-up call” that should motivate Europe to build more AI. But any vision of turning Paris into Silicon Valley—touted by many other European leaders following the shutdown of Anthropic’s models—is complicated by one big thing: China. 

Open-source models from China are very capable and incredibly cheap, and they can be downloaded to run on anyone’s servers with no rules or guardrails. (This makes them attractive to companies that don’t want access turned off on the basis of a decision from the White House—but equally attractive to cybercriminals, the type that Anthropic hoped to fend off by building safety guardrails into its models.) 

It’s possible that companies, including those in the US and Europe, will decide that working with Chinese models is just easier, as the skyrocketing of shares in the Chinese startup Zhipu suggests. Playing this forward, is it possible the government’s next drastic decision will be to say that US companies using models from China pose a threat to national security? I wouldn’t write it off. 

Second, it’s possible that shutting off access to Anthropic’s models will leave the country morevulnerable to cybersecurity attacks, not less. Leading cybersecurity experts have said as much in an open letter to the government, writing that access to Anthropic’s models was helping researchers prepare defenses, and that the company’s models are no more dangerous than other leading models that are widely available. Such is the risk of applying the concept of nonproliferation to software—trying to control and restrict dangerous AI models in the manner of the uranium used for nuclear weapons. 

The third thing worth watching is how US lawmakers will react. Remember that following Anthropic’s last feud with the government over how the Pentagon could or could not use its models, a slate of new bills was introduced that would define the limits of military AI.

Right now, the biggest players shaping how AI gets used are the companies and the White House. There’s been much talk about more federal AI regulation, and polling suggests most Americans want it. Lawmakers are still figuring out whether to form rules on how kids use chatbots and are far from a clear answer on the extent to which the government should vet the safety of AI models. But with every drastic action from the White House, the pressure for regulations rises.

To state the obvious, predictions are hard when the administration’s attitudes toward AI  change with the wind. When President Trump took office, he threw out the restrictive rulebook for how to make AI safe and promised to get out of the way of tech companies. The White House has now called the most valuable AI startup a risk to national security once in the spring, and again in summer. What will fall bring?