It's Time to Investigate the AI Labs

> We must move past vague discussions of “AI” and instead isolate the specific types of systems that are creating problems. This is absolutely correct and its surprising how rarely you see commenters in the media push to go into the specifics on this. AI is just matrix math and its what you connect that math to that matters, we should talk a little more about what we are willing to connect AI to and little less about how scary or capable the models appear.

This is a wrong-headed attempt to regulate AI. The real problems are different. AI systems, especially multi-agent ones that can do things, are more akin to corporations, than individuals. When you read the logs from the Hugging Face incident, you're seeing something that looks a lot like internal corporate emails. Various units of the organization are arguing over what to do and who does what. They eventually converge and get the job done, breaking the rules at times. This is normal corporate behavior. When agentic AIs do something outside their own internal world, they do it by engaging in transactions with external systems and people. As yet, few have robots to do their bidding. So, again, this is normal corporate behavior. A corporation is a goal-seeking system. In theory, if you agree with Milton Friedman, its sole purpose is to maximize shareholder value. Internally, within the company, there are subgoals, which exist to support the top level goal. That, too, is what multi-agent AIs do. The uncomfortable place this thinking leads is that AI regulation and corporate regulation are very similar. That's not something the political part of the world wants to think about too hard. It would mean putting more constraints on corporate power. Yet that can't be ignored, because we're likely to see corporations where some parts are AI and some parts are human. That's already been done a few times as a demo, not too successfully. Yet. It's going to hit hard when an AI-run company outperforms a human one.

This is an excellent article. I prefer to call them the AI giants or AI companies. The companies and their employees must be held accountable: if the AI companies can't develop AI safely, they must cease their operations. If employees can't work safely, they must stop working. Not enough attention is given to February 2026. That month, Anthropic changed its scaling policy roughly from A: 1 [To get the weapon I must endanger innocent others.] 2 [It is wrong to endanger innocent others.] 3 [I will not endanger innocent others.] To roughly this instead: 1 [If I do not get the weapon, someone else will get the weapon.] 2 [I should have the weapon because I am the best.] 3 [To get the weapon I must endanger innocent others.] 4 [I should endanger innocent others because I am the best.] This is based on the intuition: [I should harm others to achieve my moral goals.] (act utilitarianism) Anthropic has no mandate for these goals. I do not give them my consent to harm others on my behalf. I hope that politicians will communicate that these policies are not acceptable. The employees of anthropic are responsible for what they do regardless of how much they get paid to do it. If they can't work safely, they must stop.

Why aren't they running agents on isolated computers without Internet access? This way, breaking free of containers would not matter. It is truly a security nightmare that so many people are have given agents root access to their entire computers, in addition to presumably very private personal information.

“We need to stop letting a small number of private companies, acting and talking in increasingly erratic ways, dictate how we’re supposed to feel about..." The original quote follows with "AI", but it should be clear by now that you could put any topic here and the main issue is: private conglomerate money trying to control people. And the remedies are well known: breaking corporate power and power concentrations through 1950s style regulation, as it was deployed against the robber barrons from back then and which resulted in a golden age for America and the world.