- Sam Altman urged the government and Anthropic to de-escalate tensions and work together on AI governance
- He argued that governments should hold power over AI and national security decisions
- He said he still mostly trusts the government, while accepting that many don’t
Relations between Anthropic and the U.S. government have become an unusually combustible flashpoint in the broader fight over AI regulations and control. The escalating fight began when negotiations with the Pentagon over how Anthropic’s Claude AI model could be used broke down over the company’s refusal to remove safeguards against fully autonomous weapons or mass domestic surveillance.
Responses from Washington, including an executive directive banning federal agencies from using Anthropic’s technology and labeling the company a “supply chain risk,” led to lawsuits alleging constitutional violations, and a federal judge has since temporarily blocked the Pentagon’s actions.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman apparently sees harmony as necessary on both ends of the argument.
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“Find a way to work together. like stop, stop the stuff on both, stop the escalation on both sides and find a way to work together,” Altman said in an interview with Laurie Segall.
AI’s security demands
AI companies have hyped the technology’s potential in realms like national security, even as they lobby for a light regulatory touch. Altman has apparently concluded that the companies cannot have it both ways. If AI is as geopolitically consequential as everyone keeps insisting, then governments are going to want a hand on the wheel.
“I don’t think it works for our industry to say, Hey, this is the most powerful technology humanity has ever built,” Altman said. “It is going to be the high order bit in geopolitics. It is going to be the greatest cyber weapon the world has ever built. It is going to, you know, be the determinant of future wars and protection. And we are not giving it to you.”
Of course, whether people feel comfortable with the government controlling such consequential technology is another question. Altman said he still mostly trusts the system of checks and balances, though he did acknowledge that many people currently “really don’t trust the government to follow the law.”
It’s a position that stands out compared to some AI leaders who are more suspicious of the government. Nonetheless, he thinks it would be a mistake not to help the government with national security, especially in cyber infrastructure.
“I think we have to work with government, but the intensity of the current mood of mistrust, I was miscalibrated on and I understand something there now,” he said.
Trust in AI control
Essentially, Altman and others aligned with him want to work with governments, even as the public distrust over the misuse of AI grows.
“One of the most important questions the world will have to answer in the next year is, are AI companies or are governments more powerful? And I think it’s very important that the governments are more powerful,” Altman said. “The future of the world, and the decisions about the most important elements of national security should be made through a democratically elected process. And the people that have been appointed as part of that process, not me, and not the CEO of some other lab.”
Altman kept coming back to the issue of the way the power of AI is arriving faster than institutions, governments, or most humans can calibrate for it. The systems are getting more capable, and their potential for misuse grows in tandem.
The stakes are higher and more serious all the time. Big fights among those who are supposed to devise safe regulations and the companies, at least theoretically, trying to steer the technology in an ethical direction, represent an enormous problem.
A diplomatic shrug urging diametrically opposed sides to “find a way to work together” won’t likely resolve matters. Still, at least it means Altman knows the answer won’t be obvious, even if he phrased it as a request to ChatGPT.
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ESchwartzwrites@gmail.com (Eric Hal Schwartz)
