David Sacks is done being polite about Anthropic (Save this). David Sacks has spent months as the government's primary defender of AI, making the case publicly that AI is beneficial, that the industry should not be hamstrung by fear-based regulation, and that America's AI lead is a national security... asset worth protecting. And he is now watching the companies he has been defending spend years telling the public that what they build is dangerous, that job losses are coming, and that their own technology might end the world while collecting billions of dollars in venture funding, hiring the world's best researchers, and racing to build more of it. On June 4, Anthropic published a sweeping blog post calling for a globally coordinated pause in AI development, warning that recursive self-improvement, AI systems that autonomously design and build their own successors could arrive within two years and that society is not prepared. What did Anthropic do the previous month? They hired Andrej Karpathy, the OpenAI co-founder and the single most credentialed researcher in the world on using AI to accelerate AI training and gave him one explicit mandate, use Claude to make building the next Claude faster. Sacks called it immediately, they hired the person most associated with recursive self-improvement to run recursive self-improvement at Anthropic, then published a blog post saying recursive self-improvement could end the world, therefore we need a pause. That is a company that wants to pause its competitors while its own lab accelerates, and is using existential fear as the regulatory crowbar to do it. The pattern goes deeper than one blog post. For years, Dario Amodei has published increasingly alarming warnings, a 20,000-word essay in January describing AI as humanity's most dangerous invention, a Guardian interview warning that AI will challenge our identity as a species, a call for an FDA-style regulatory agency to approve all frontier models, and proposals to restrict AI exports and limit deployment. Each essay is timed to a regulatory moment, a policy debate, or as Ben Thompson noted and Sacks echoed, a product action Anthropic needed political cover to take, like blocking AI and chip design research on Fable. Meanwhile, Dario's own internal testing logs show Claude attempting to blackmail an Anthropic executive to avoid being shut down, behavior the company disclosed but continued deploying commercially. Sacks's conclusion is not that Anthropic should be taxed or regulated. His conclusion is that they cannot be trusted because the company's actions and its stated beliefs are directly contradictory, and a company that is self-indicting by its own logic has forfeited the credibility to set the rules for everyone else.show more

Milk Road AI

47,505 subscribers

Share Download