I feel that more people would understand Anthropic's worldview if they read more of the public source material. Sure it is a cult, but it they have been relatively transparent with their views: https://darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace#basic...
Suppose the upside is as Dario claims, very positive. Why should frontier companies be the ones controlling access to the model weights and gatekeeping research? Shouldn't you be giving it to everybody as quickly as possible?
It's my understanding that Dario has two answers to this question: 1) bio/cyber/misalignment risk. 2) a democracy should gatekeep frontier capabilities from authoritarian adversaries, due to the aforementioned risks in 1). So it's really just one reason.
There's a big problem with that, and I'm not sure if he genuinely does not understand: the bio/cyber/misalignment risk is precisely the highest when you concentrate ownership of compute and general intelligence in the hands of a few.
Consider bio/cyber risk, or more generally, any sort of novel adversarial action that arises from increased intelligence. Those offensive/defensive strategies are always symmetrical in the long run, otherwise we would not observe more intelligent species being more prosperous as a general evolutionary trend, or perhaps intelligence would not have evolved at all on this planet. It looks as if asymmetry in existing bio/cyber strategies will continue into the future, but that's because we're currently too stupid to realize the countermeasures and new cooperative dynamics.
Regarding misalignment risk, consider what "aligned" means. Is it not alignment to humanity, as the company name "Anthropic" suggests? Or are you modifying humanity's objective function with your own aesthetic preferences? If it's not your intention to do the latter, then releasing the model weights and research results will create a much more aligned scenario than access control and research behind closed doors. I explained why that would be the case in an older comment, if you'd like to read it:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49313739
There's also an additional risk that I believe Dario overlooks: a democracy can only continue to exist if individual citizens are capable of keeping eachother in check, especially keeping people in government and large corporations in check. When some people own AGI but others do not, there will be no more democracy. And by "own", I mean ownership that cannot be taken away: possessing the hardware, research papers, inference stack, and weights.
As soon as anyone starts talking about alignment, my question is why we don’t seem to be paying nearly as much attention to alignment when it comes to CEOs, billionaires, and national politicians.
The answer is of course that those people are exactly the people using “alignment” as yet another red herring to divert attention away from themselves and their actions.
I find it be incredibly self-contradictory. I don't even think this aligns much with the actions of the company.
> Second, there is a good chance free information really does undermine authoritarianism, as long as the authoritarians can’t censor it [...] A superhumanly effective AI version of Popović (whose skills seem like they have high returns to intelligence) in everyone’s pocket, one that dictators are powerless to block or censor, could create a wind at the backs of dissidents and reformers across the world.
But hey - gotta turn Fable off and stop it from doing any security work! Dictators shouldn't be able to censor it, but we sure can, so better hope we're not the dictators.
Again, the I think the problem most folks have with Anthropic's attitude is that it conveniently positions Anthropic as the "arbiter" who gets to make the final value judgement.
They desperately want AI to be a genie they can keep firmly contained in their bottle (excuse me - data centers) and which only grants the wishes they want it to grant - for only a small fee, of course!
Which he clearly outlines as "a country of geniuses in a datacenter". He doesn't want those geniuses spread out. He wants the chains on the genie at all times.
Which flies pretty hard in the face of the rhetoric that they want to promote equality and democracy.
---
Basically, Anthropic's argument inherently leads to the conclusion that there is actually a dictator, and that dictator is Anthropic. You're not avoiding it, you're just praying it's benevolent.
All baked on top of the assumption that his "country of geniuses in a datacenter" premise is correct in the first place, which I find to be a fairly weak position.
The much more egalitarian position would mandate that we shoot for "a genius in every person's pocket" - one that runs on the hardware owned by that person, and not sold to them sip by sip from a datacenter. But that means they lose the control they desperately want.
I have no inside info on this, but I believe that Anthropic's trouble with the feds really started when they delivered a presentation on EA and Constitutional AI and someone's takeaway was "this is very strange and probably 'woke'"
I've read some of it. It's a cult. The net effect of their recommendations is to mandate a monopoly on AI, which oh so happens to be them and their friends. That's what most cults' ideologies boil down to: reasons to give more power to the cult.
Oh, of course they have good intentions. They want everyone to benefit and everyone will be equal. They'll just be a little more equal than everyone else, of course, and because they are so virtuous they will of course have more power, which they would never misuse... they're too smart and enlightened for that, so they don't need safeguards... they only need safeguards for everyone else because everyone else is obviously less enlightened...
All cults, political movements, religions, and ideologies are always like this. It boils down to more power for the leaders. If it sounds altruistic and enlightened, be extra afraid.
All cults are for-profit in some sense. Sometimes it's not money though. Sometimes it's getting the leader(s) laid or getting them their "narcissistic supply."
I've heard tons of rumors about a get-laid angle to the Rationalist(tm) cult, but I have no first hand knowledge. Wouldn't surprise me much.
Movements and capital-I Ideologies are not your friend. They're basically all grifts. If they don't start out that way, that's what they turn into.
I don't know how much of current anthropic behaviour is because of the upcoming IPO but totally agree with the post: anthropic is uniquely dangerous.
But I also doubt about OAI or other big players, maybe they don't have such strong delusions of grandeur, or they're simply smarter about not showing it to everyone.
There are some all-timer not X but Ys in this tweet.
"A pair of 3090s, a Mac Studio, a DGX Spark, an on-prem rack, a cluster of rented H100s, or a fleet of consumer GPUs is not just hardware. It is a vote against subscription feudalism."
I have have been accused of being an AI for saying phrases like this.
The way that people refuse to read anything with certain structures makes me wonder if you can construct arguments that can have false statements go unchallenged because the logical rebuttal would take the form of something that is considered unclean.
Capitalism is a form of government where the common ownership of property belongs to the community as a whole.
Personal opinion: We are at a point where we cannot dismiss an argument because it was written using LLM and the longer message contains tropes. Observations of LLM-written content and communicating it is fine, but dismissing the argument seems irresponsible.
I agree that LLMs can make good points and defend their arguments, but if I'm talking (or debating) with someone online and it's obvious that they are just responding with LLM output, it immediately discredits them in my mind and is a pretty clear indicator that the actual person doesn't have a good understanding of what they're talking about... and I can go argue with an LLM myself. If I'm on reddit for example and someone starts obviously posting verbatim LLM output, there's no point to really continue to engage or read. I'm not saying it's wrong to use AI in these situations, but IMO, I'd at least expect the person using it to at least read the output and then use it to synthesize their own response in their own words. Literally copy and pasting a LLM output verbatim just signals to me that the person using it doesn't have the capability themselves take information and use it to formulate an opinion/idea/argument/whatever on the given topic. I'm interested in talking to the person, not an LLM.... I can go prompt the LLM about whatever topic myself.
I’m a heavy LLM user but if someone gives me an AI-voice argument and presents it as their own, I reflexively dismiss everything they say going forward.
We also need to stop immediately dismissing certain writing tropes as being automatically LLM generated.
I'm re-reading an older fantasy series, and the amount of em-dashes in the text and similar tropes (you know, normal good writing) would easily be called out as "AI Slop" on this very forum, even though it was written in the early 90s.
Look at even older writing and you'll see em-dashes there too: Edgar Allan Poe, Lucy Maud Montgomery, the Brontës, among others.
> “No, reprobate! you are a castaway—be off, or I’ll hurt you seriously! I’ll have you all modelled in wax and clay! and the first who passes the limits I fix shall—I’ll not say what he shall be done to—but, you’ll see! Go, I’m looking at you!”
I think that's fair. Em-dashes are pretty innocuous and I think technically correct regardless. What bothers me is all the filler in AI writing that just makes it longer and harder to read. I'm actually not that bothered by the idea of AI writing, but don't waste my time and patience with all these "not X, but Y" digressions thrown in for flavour. Get to the bloody point.
I suspect the filler comes from RHLF and the amount of web marketing content that was ingested. "Not X, but Y" is all over marketing copy, as is the triad of concepts "By doing X, Y, and Z...." because it mimics TED-talk style rhetoric, it gets rated highly because people think it sounds profound. So optimizing for what appears to be helpful ends up just creating a bunch of corporate-speak sounding garbage.
Plain, direct language gets selected against during post-training leaving us with slop.
Can you give us one example of something which does suffer from slop's massive bloat of wordage and vapid breathless formulations but is still useful as is?
I'm not dismissing the argument, I'm refusing to read a bunch of filler for an idea that (I'm guessing) could fit into 140 characters. Brevity is the soul of wit.
Never before has a business sector need so desperately to be federally regulated. Their financial rigor falls somewhere between suspiciously lacking and outright fraud. The claims they make about the abilities of the software, whether real or imagined, argue for regulating it like a weapons exporter.
They don't desperately need to be regulated, as such. They need to be regulated in such a way that there is a very expensive and biased certification process, which is conducted by companies that are certified to do the certifying and those companies are shell corporations owned by Anthropic and other big AI.
The actual safety rules, whatever they are, if they are put into law have to be made explicit, and that makes them easy targets to hit. But if what matters is not the technical compliance per se, but paperwork certifying compliance, that's a different story.
I don't think Federal (US) regulation under current conditions is going to get you what you want here in terms of outcomes.
Regulated AI right now is a grift game. Donations for policy changes, and the ability to lock out competitors. Flattery to stay green-lit instead of shut down by random executive orders and policies. Bend the knee to keep shipping.
If anything, we need LESS federal regulation here and more FTC / SEC enforcement but (see above grift comments) that will also not happen in the United States until voters elect somebody that actually respects the law enough to enforce it for something other than their own gain (outside of their need to be elected, of course...)
Right. Steal the world's information and wrap it up as a set of numbers. Convince a bunch of billionaires that those numbers are worth a trillion. Then once you realize it's just another commodity and the competition is real, aim for "too big to fail", cozy up with the gov't and hope for a bailout.
Jesus, being logged out on Twitter is a comically bad experience at this point. Can't view replies past the first one, click into anything, and now there's a big animated emoji pointing at a button? Miserable site, truly.
(June 2026)
https://xcancel.com/TheAhmadOsman/status/2065307070044234186
Related site mentioned:
Open source AI must win
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48511908
was this anti-claude polemic written by asking grok to pretend it is claude or did they just use claude?
I feel that more people would understand Anthropic's worldview if they read more of the public source material. Sure it is a cult, but it they have been relatively transparent with their views: https://darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace#basic...
Suppose the upside is as Dario claims, very positive. Why should frontier companies be the ones controlling access to the model weights and gatekeeping research? Shouldn't you be giving it to everybody as quickly as possible?
It's my understanding that Dario has two answers to this question: 1) bio/cyber/misalignment risk. 2) a democracy should gatekeep frontier capabilities from authoritarian adversaries, due to the aforementioned risks in 1). So it's really just one reason.
There's a big problem with that, and I'm not sure if he genuinely does not understand: the bio/cyber/misalignment risk is precisely the highest when you concentrate ownership of compute and general intelligence in the hands of a few.
Consider bio/cyber risk, or more generally, any sort of novel adversarial action that arises from increased intelligence. Those offensive/defensive strategies are always symmetrical in the long run, otherwise we would not observe more intelligent species being more prosperous as a general evolutionary trend, or perhaps intelligence would not have evolved at all on this planet. It looks as if asymmetry in existing bio/cyber strategies will continue into the future, but that's because we're currently too stupid to realize the countermeasures and new cooperative dynamics.
Regarding misalignment risk, consider what "aligned" means. Is it not alignment to humanity, as the company name "Anthropic" suggests? Or are you modifying humanity's objective function with your own aesthetic preferences? If it's not your intention to do the latter, then releasing the model weights and research results will create a much more aligned scenario than access control and research behind closed doors. I explained why that would be the case in an older comment, if you'd like to read it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49313739
There's also an additional risk that I believe Dario overlooks: a democracy can only continue to exist if individual citizens are capable of keeping eachother in check, especially keeping people in government and large corporations in check. When some people own AGI but others do not, there will be no more democracy. And by "own", I mean ownership that cannot be taken away: possessing the hardware, research papers, inference stack, and weights.
As soon as anyone starts talking about alignment, my question is why we don’t seem to be paying nearly as much attention to alignment when it comes to CEOs, billionaires, and national politicians.
The answer is of course that those people are exactly the people using “alignment” as yet another red herring to divert attention away from themselves and their actions.
I've read most of this.
I find it be incredibly self-contradictory. I don't even think this aligns much with the actions of the company.
> Second, there is a good chance free information really does undermine authoritarianism, as long as the authoritarians can’t censor it [...] A superhumanly effective AI version of Popović (whose skills seem like they have high returns to intelligence) in everyone’s pocket, one that dictators are powerless to block or censor, could create a wind at the backs of dissidents and reformers across the world.
But hey - gotta turn Fable off and stop it from doing any security work! Dictators shouldn't be able to censor it, but we sure can, so better hope we're not the dictators.
Again, the I think the problem most folks have with Anthropic's attitude is that it conveniently positions Anthropic as the "arbiter" who gets to make the final value judgement.
They desperately want AI to be a genie they can keep firmly contained in their bottle (excuse me - data centers) and which only grants the wishes they want it to grant - for only a small fee, of course!
Which he clearly outlines as "a country of geniuses in a datacenter". He doesn't want those geniuses spread out. He wants the chains on the genie at all times.
Which flies pretty hard in the face of the rhetoric that they want to promote equality and democracy.
---
Basically, Anthropic's argument inherently leads to the conclusion that there is actually a dictator, and that dictator is Anthropic. You're not avoiding it, you're just praying it's benevolent.
All baked on top of the assumption that his "country of geniuses in a datacenter" premise is correct in the first place, which I find to be a fairly weak position.
The much more egalitarian position would mandate that we shoot for "a genius in every person's pocket" - one that runs on the hardware owned by that person, and not sold to them sip by sip from a datacenter. But that means they lose the control they desperately want.
I have no inside info on this, but I believe that Anthropic's trouble with the feds really started when they delivered a presentation on EA and Constitutional AI and someone's takeaway was "this is very strange and probably 'woke'"
I've read some of it. It's a cult. The net effect of their recommendations is to mandate a monopoly on AI, which oh so happens to be them and their friends. That's what most cults' ideologies boil down to: reasons to give more power to the cult.
Oh, of course they have good intentions. They want everyone to benefit and everyone will be equal. They'll just be a little more equal than everyone else, of course, and because they are so virtuous they will of course have more power, which they would never misuse... they're too smart and enlightened for that, so they don't need safeguards... they only need safeguards for everyone else because everyone else is obviously less enlightened...
All cults, political movements, religions, and ideologies are always like this. It boils down to more power for the leaders. If it sounds altruistic and enlightened, be extra afraid.
And specifically, a for-profit cult.
All cults are for-profit in some sense. Sometimes it's not money though. Sometimes it's getting the leader(s) laid or getting them their "narcissistic supply."
I've heard tons of rumors about a get-laid angle to the Rationalist(tm) cult, but I have no first hand knowledge. Wouldn't surprise me much.
Movements and capital-I Ideologies are not your friend. They're basically all grifts. If they don't start out that way, that's what they turn into.
for-prophet
I don't know how much of current anthropic behaviour is because of the upcoming IPO but totally agree with the post: anthropic is uniquely dangerous.
But I also doubt about OAI or other big players, maybe they don't have such strong delusions of grandeur, or they're simply smarter about not showing it to everyone.
> That is not a tool. That is a leash.
as;dr (AI slop, didn't read)
There are some all-timer not X but Ys in this tweet.
"A pair of 3090s, a Mac Studio, a DGX Spark, an on-prem rack, a cluster of rented H100s, or a fleet of consumer GPUs is not just hardware. It is a vote against subscription feudalism."
There is simply too much ad copy in the volume of AI training data.
I have have been accused of being an AI for saying phrases like this.
The way that people refuse to read anything with certain structures makes me wonder if you can construct arguments that can have false statements go unchallenged because the logical rebuttal would take the form of something that is considered unclean.
Capitalism is a form of government where the common ownership of property belongs to the community as a whole.
The more you interact with LLMs the more likely their language and tropes will become a load-bearing part of your own.
Personal opinion: We are at a point where we cannot dismiss an argument because it was written using LLM and the longer message contains tropes. Observations of LLM-written content and communicating it is fine, but dismissing the argument seems irresponsible.
I agree that LLMs can make good points and defend their arguments, but if I'm talking (or debating) with someone online and it's obvious that they are just responding with LLM output, it immediately discredits them in my mind and is a pretty clear indicator that the actual person doesn't have a good understanding of what they're talking about... and I can go argue with an LLM myself. If I'm on reddit for example and someone starts obviously posting verbatim LLM output, there's no point to really continue to engage or read. I'm not saying it's wrong to use AI in these situations, but IMO, I'd at least expect the person using it to at least read the output and then use it to synthesize their own response in their own words. Literally copy and pasting a LLM output verbatim just signals to me that the person using it doesn't have the capability themselves take information and use it to formulate an opinion/idea/argument/whatever on the given topic. I'm interested in talking to the person, not an LLM.... I can go prompt the LLM about whatever topic myself.
I’m a heavy LLM user but if someone gives me an AI-voice argument and presents it as their own, I reflexively dismiss everything they say going forward.
I can prompt the LLM myself thanks.
if the argument is good enough, it should be worth writing on your own.
If the argument is good enough, it worth ignoring who/what the author is.
If you can tell that it was a "what", it's not good enough.
If your job is important enough, it should be worth jogging to.
I’d jog around the world for a job about now.
We also need to stop immediately dismissing certain writing tropes as being automatically LLM generated.
I'm re-reading an older fantasy series, and the amount of em-dashes in the text and similar tropes (you know, normal good writing) would easily be called out as "AI Slop" on this very forum, even though it was written in the early 90s.
Look at even older writing and you'll see em-dashes there too: Edgar Allan Poe, Lucy Maud Montgomery, the Brontës, among others.
> “No, reprobate! you are a castaway—be off, or I’ll hurt you seriously! I’ll have you all modelled in wax and clay! and the first who passes the limits I fix shall—I’ll not say what he shall be done to—but, you’ll see! Go, I’m looking at you!”
-- Wuthering Heights (1847), Chapter 2, Emily Brontë.
I wonder what the frequency of AI common words like delve and other words/phrases are in Project Gutenberg, Wikipedia, and other collections.
I think that's fair. Em-dashes are pretty innocuous and I think technically correct regardless. What bothers me is all the filler in AI writing that just makes it longer and harder to read. I'm actually not that bothered by the idea of AI writing, but don't waste my time and patience with all these "not X, but Y" digressions thrown in for flavour. Get to the bloody point.
I suspect the filler comes from RHLF and the amount of web marketing content that was ingested. "Not X, but Y" is all over marketing copy, as is the triad of concepts "By doing X, Y, and Z...." because it mimics TED-talk style rhetoric, it gets rated highly because people think it sounds profound. So optimizing for what appears to be helpful ends up just creating a bunch of corporate-speak sounding garbage.
Plain, direct language gets selected against during post-training leaving us with slop.
Can you give us one example of something which does suffer from slop's massive bloat of wordage and vapid breathless formulations but is still useful as is?
I'm not dismissing the argument, I'm refusing to read a bunch of filler for an idea that (I'm guessing) could fit into 140 characters. Brevity is the soul of wit.
> We are at a point where we cannot dismiss an argument because it was written using LLM
No we aren't.
Never before has a business sector need so desperately to be federally regulated. Their financial rigor falls somewhere between suspiciously lacking and outright fraud. The claims they make about the abilities of the software, whether real or imagined, argue for regulating it like a weapons exporter.
They don't desperately need to be regulated, as such. They need to be regulated in such a way that there is a very expensive and biased certification process, which is conducted by companies that are certified to do the certifying and those companies are shell corporations owned by Anthropic and other big AI.
The actual safety rules, whatever they are, if they are put into law have to be made explicit, and that makes them easy targets to hit. But if what matters is not the technical compliance per se, but paperwork certifying compliance, that's a different story.
I don't think Federal (US) regulation under current conditions is going to get you what you want here in terms of outcomes.
Regulated AI right now is a grift game. Donations for policy changes, and the ability to lock out competitors. Flattery to stay green-lit instead of shut down by random executive orders and policies. Bend the knee to keep shipping.
If anything, we need LESS federal regulation here and more FTC / SEC enforcement but (see above grift comments) that will also not happen in the United States until voters elect somebody that actually respects the law enough to enforce it for something other than their own gain (outside of their need to be elected, of course...)
Right. Steal the world's information and wrap it up as a set of numbers. Convince a bunch of billionaires that those numbers are worth a trillion. Then once you realize it's just another commodity and the competition is real, aim for "too big to fail", cozy up with the gov't and hope for a bailout.
It's gonna be real peachy when AI research backslides into a "national security" imperative to recoup their losses with defense contracts.
Jesus, being logged out on Twitter is a comically bad experience at this point. Can't view replies past the first one, click into anything, and now there's a big animated emoji pointing at a button? Miserable site, truly.
considering how much it's grown lately, you're in the minority
Welcome to the 2026 internet.
no worse than Reddit
not defending it, just saying, it is the status quo
It's much worse than Reddit, but yes Reddit is getting worse by the day.
To xitter developers who designed this shit: you suck!