Dean Ball: evaluation

Transcript context

…I think what, what's happening here, I think there are three factors playing in to the government's reaction here. One is genuine concern about safety and security. The second is fairly broad lack of context for frontier AI and the sort of things that the information that you need to make good risk, uh, to make a good risk cal- calculation. Lack of context for those things, which is driving the security concern to some extent. So there might be some legit security concern, and there might also be some not so legit security concern, but it's being driven by this kind of general lack of context. And then third, A, we can't deny that there's some political dimension to this, right? Even if it's not... I wouldn't even say that there's a conspiracy theory inside the government to do this to Anthropic. There might be, but at least among some. But it might be more just the general political status of Anthropic and the fights that the administration have been having, has been having. It colors the reaction of important people to the news of a security vulnerability in a way that might not happen, might not have happened if this, if it were a company that the administration felt more warmly toward. So all three of these things definitely feed into one another, and I think they probably all explain what's going on. They're all ingredients in explaining this, the situation. Uh, and the thing that I don't know, and probably even if I were still inside the White House I wouldn't fully know, is really just in what ratio those three things come together. One thing I think is worth being clear about is that my read of this situation is not that the US government is saying, "It is our policy from here on out that if your model has security vulnerabilities, we will do export controls on non-US persons." I don't think that's the policy they're set. I think what probably happened is they decided, "All right, we gotta cut this thing from the market, and this is the only thing we can think of that we're pretty sure will actually get the darn thing off the market," right? And so I think they basically just reached for the tool that they thought would do the job, and I don't think they're thinking of that as a universal policy that they're announcing. But the other thing you have to consider here is the administration's story has changed. When it... In fact, it's changed, and it's, it's funny. This is similar to the supply chain risk thing. uncing. But the other thing you have to consider here is the administration's story has changed. When it... In fact, it's changed, and it's, it's funny. This is similar to the supply chain risk thing. The first version of the story was the US g- we had security concerns, and we wanted to get Dario on the phone to talk about them, and we couldn't get him on the phone in a timely manner. And that was the supply chain risk thing. I remember the same thing, like Emil Michael, the Under Secretary of War, who was a main character in that whole affair, he was complaining in public about how Dario wouldn't return his phone calls immediately, and it took hours for Dario to get on the phone. Come on, there's a grudge aspect of this, right? There's a who's, there's a who's the bigger monkey aspect to this, right? Of I, when I'm in the government, I'm Mr. Government Man, and when I call, he has to call me back, and I don't know. This is a thing that happens a lot in DC. DC people play these kinds of games all the time. Then there's, then it became more, oh, the security risk is this, like jailbreak is like legit, and we needed to know about it. And then 36 to 48 hours later, or maybe even more, maybe more like 72, we started hearing about how actually, no, the reason we're doing this is because Anthropic provided the model to a Chinese-linked company. And it's okay, you're grasping at straws here because if you're saying if you imposed export controls because Anthropic applied the model to a Chinese-linked co- gave Mythos to a Chinese-linked company, and that was your primary concern, why did you not say that on Friday when you did the thing, right? And also, they're describing this as something that had happened like a month before, 'cause Anthropic did this expanded tranche of companies that were including some international companies. They, An- Anthropic announced this publicly several weeks ago. They said, "Yeah, we're expanding Mythos access, and we're expanding it to some, some US companies and also some allies and partners of the United States." The company in question, by the way, is South Korea Telecom, SK Telecom, um, which is part of the same conglomerate that own, uh, the, it's the SK Group, which is one of the largest chaebols in Korea, and which also owns SK Hynix, which is the leading producer of high bandwidth memory. And in general, Korea is like a really important partner to the United States in the semiconductor manufacturing ecosystem. And so the notion that like we would wanna harden their telecommunications infrastructure seems quite reasonable to me. Seems like extremely reasonable that we would wanna do that. And it's, yeah, like then they threw that out there, and it feels like an administration that either, again, I don't know in what ratio of the three things I said, but basically panicked, basically did, pulled, reached for the first thing that they thought would actually get the market taken off the model, or taken off the market, um, and then created justifications post hoc. And it's really hard to... lled, reached for the first thing that they thought would actually get the market taken off the model, or taken off the market, um, and then created justifications post hoc. And it's really hard to... Part of the reason I find this issue frustrating is that it's just very hard to analyze, 'cause there's not a lot of like policy substance here. It's just the id.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.