Mihir

I’ve had a number of conversations with folks inside and outside government about the current situation with Anthropic, and here is what I believe to be true: — As we know, Anthropic publicly released its Mythos class models earlier this week under the commercial name Fable. — Fable is Mythos with guardrails. But if those guardrails fail, then you’ve exposed Mythos and its advanced cyber capabilities to people who shouldn’t have them. (Keep in mind that Anthropic itself widely promoted the idea that Mythos was a cyberweapon and needed to be regulated as such. They asked for government regulation of Mythos and championed the guardrails on Fable. If there is a vulnerability — big or small — it is Anthropic’s responsibility to patch.) — A highly credible trusted partner of both Anthropic and the USG who was testing Fable came forward with a jailbreak of those guardrails. The Admin asked Dario to fix the jailbreak or de-deploy the model. Dario refused. — In their blog post, Anthropic defended its decision by saying the jailbreak isn’t serious. That is not what the trusted partner and the USG believe; nor is that kind of minimizing language consistent with Anthropic’s brand as the AI safety company. It’s difficult to fathom how they could claim a jailbreak allowing operability of a cyber weapon could be defined as not “serious.” — In the past, Anthropic has always said that safety must be top priority and taken super seriously. In this case, Anthropic prioritized the continued offering of the consumer model over safety. — In reaction, the Admin issued the export control. The Admin did this reluctantly. It’s been very surprised that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to cooperate with a reasonable safety request (ie fixing the jailbreak issue). Anthropic’s reaction is very much at odds with their branding and ethos as a safe AI research community. — The Admin’s hope now is that Anthropic remediates the safety issue, the export control is lifted, and Fable goes back into general release. The Admin wants all of this to happen as soon as possible. It is frankly bewildered that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to comply with safety requests that it previously said were its highest priority. — Those trying to misdirect and tie this action to the prior DoW/Anthropic issues are wrong. The Admin values Anthropic’s technical capabilities and feels that this issue, while serious, should be easily resolved. The ball is in Anthropic’s court.

I’ve been saying for awhile that AI capex will be a 2% tailwind to GDP growth this year. In fact, according to a new report from Morgan Stanley, the numbers are even stronger — more like 2.5% this year and over 3% next year. And this understates the impact of AI for two reasons: (1) This is just investment by 5 hyperscalers; it doesn’t include all the startups and other companies investing in AI. (2) Capex is the investment to create the token factories; it doesn’t count the economic activity resulting from what happens inside the token factories. Those tokens are now being used to generate code (bespoke software) that will increase productivity throughout the economy. The ROI on capex is likely to dwarf the capex itself, which is why investment continues to grow. In Q1, AI was already 75% of GDP growth. That trend is likely to continue. Technology leadership has always been America’s great strength, and it’s driving the economy forward. Polls may show that AI is not popular, but economic growth is. At this point, stopping progress in AI would be equivalent to halting the U.S. economy.