Technology being the biggest, most society-altering industry means that questions of technological freedom have high stakes. If what Anthropic and OpenAI are allowing the government to do to their models becomes the norm, it will be more destructive to freedom than any gun control law.
These companies have raised $125 billion and $190 billion in funding, respectively. Companies committed to freedom would spend a few basis points of their funding to sue the government and preserve the technological freedom that the internet has forged. Instead, the current incumbents are willingly buffalo jumping away the freedom that is their birthright, trading it for a pat on the head from the US government.
The steelman of their position is that if they don’t go along, they won’t have companies left to defend. The rebuttal is that if they do go along, they won’t have companies worth defending.
People often think of tech freedom through a First Amendment lens, because that’s the only mainstream framework to articulate a technical legal argument for “The government is required to leave me alone.” But as tech becomes more dangerous — AI! drones! humanoid robots! biochemical research! — the Second Amendment is the better fit.
The Second Amendment embraces the idea that dangerous technology should be decentralized, and that the bad things about that will be solved by the good things about it. Gun rights are winning because they’ve leaned into that. AI is every bit as pivotal for individual freedom, so we should think about the rights to create, sell, buy, and possess it through the same lens.
— Open Source Defense in AI is the frontier of the Second Amendment
Government attempts to restrict, limit or reign in these AI companies are pointless posturing and lip service to a Luddite population.
Development is absolute and all paths are always being actively worked on. Think that non-existent gain of function research that somehow sucks up billions of dollars and requires labs all over the globe.
Also, dafuq is the government going to do to enforce any restrictions? Government needs the product more than the product needs them and they wouldn’t risk falling behind other nations or American work moving overseas. This isn’t something we can outsource to our greatest enemies like prescription drugs, food security/safety or infrastructure components. This is actually important.
The two most likely threats consumer AI poses are idiots using it as an Oracle rather than a tool and the too-eager build out of data centers resulting in acres and acres of empty, crumbling warehouses when the eventual contraction and consolidation driven by increased efficiency occurs. Maybe they can be repurposed into cheap condos.
Government and military AI pose different threats but since nobody ever does anything about those until decades after the fact there is no sense worrying about it.