Andrew Sharp
Hello, and welcome to a free preview of Sharp Tech. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Sharp Tech. I'm Andrew Sharp, and on the other line, Ben Thompson.
Ben, how are you doing?
Ben Thompson
Sad, Andrew.
Andrew Sharp
Why?
Ben Thompson
Sad because I've been forced over the last week to use these really crappy AI models. Only 5.5 in Opus. Where's Fable?
Andrew Sharp
Oh, boy.
Ben Thompson
I told you Fable was good.
Andrew Sharp
Somebody needs to jailbreak Fable back to life for us, man.
Ben Thompson
We did need the 48 hours of truly leap forward in terms of model capabilities just to be truly—
Andrew Sharp
Poor Ben. His wings have been clipped here. Yeah, now here we are, living in the Stone Age. But look, it's only a matter of days until the rule is reversed and Fable is brought back to life, would be my guess.
Ben Thompson
I was going to say—
Andrew Sharp
We're going to start with Anthropic.
Ben Thompson
Was that Andrew Sharp Reports, or—
Andrew Sharp
No, look. It occurred to me as we came on to record and talk about the export controls and everything else that by Friday night, I'm sure there will be a twist that renders half of this obsolete. We're not going to start with Anthropic, though, actually, because you informed me that you have a World Cup take related to the hydration breaks.
Ben Thompson
Oh, you want to bring—
Andrew Sharp
And—
Ben Thompson
No, I don't know if we can do this at the top of the show because—
Andrew Sharp
Okay.
Ben Thompson
I'm concerned I'm going to make people so mad that—
Andrew Sharp
They will hit stop and unsubscribe.
Ben Thompson
Right. Well, if it was at the end of the show, then they might go and unsubscribe, but at least they've listened to the whole show. But if we put it up front, they might not listen to the rest of the episode. Although maybe if we make the rest of the episode really good, they'll decide to continue to be subscribers.
Andrew Sharp
A bit of grace after 90 minutes. Fine.
Ben Thompson
Okay.
Andrew Sharp
We can save it to the end.
Ben Thompson
No, that's fine. I'll drop it. Okay, here you go. Here's my World Cup hydration take. You remember previously, people sort of got annoyed at this, but I still stand by it.
The U.S. implements these policies in the stupidest way possible, right? So, as I said, we have universal health care: everyone has to be served by an emergency room. That made a lot of people mad, but I stand by it. The fact of the matter is, if you're in an emergency, you're going to get health care. That is universal health care in the stupidest way possible. “Oh, it doesn't cover preventive care.” Yes, I know. It's dumb.
Andrew Sharp
Yeah, in a very narrowly defined way, it's universal health care.
Ben Thompson
Right. The point of making that analogy is that it's a really stupid way to accomplish policy. Or, if that was in the context of AI data centers, they're just going to end up paying people to build them, and that's how we're going to backdoor into AI putting money in people's pockets.
Andrew Sharp
UBI.
Ben Thompson
Right?
Andrew Sharp
Right.
Ben Thompson
Yes.
Andrew Sharp
Yeah.
Ben Thompson
So, this is the stupidest way possible. This is the context for my hydration-break take.
Soccer is—and it is called soccer, by the way. Do you know where the word “soccer” comes from?
Andrew Sharp
I have no idea. Where?
Ben Thompson
It comes from England, to be clear.
Andrew Sharp
Okay, great.
Ben Thompson
Football was a sport played on your feet, as opposed to on horses, and then there was association football. S-O-C-C was soccer, came from England. I'm sorry that we preserved English culture better than they did and used the word soccer.
Andrew Sharp
And we've been getting it wrong for 150 years. What the hell happened, England?
Ben Thompson
That's right. Okay, no, wait, that's not the take. Don't unsubscribe yet. Give me a couple more minutes and I'll really make you mad. Soccer has all these traditions, the way it's always been played.
One of them is that you have 45-minute halves, the clock doesn't stop, and that's just part of it. The whole thing with the hydration break is, well, the U.S. is really hot. Number one, come on. Get over yourselves.
Andrew Sharp
It's not that hot.
Ben Thompson
Seriously. This is tied into the whole thing. Go to Taiwan in the summer. That's hot. I would come back to Wisconsin every year, and people would say, “How do you go to Wisconsin in the summer? It's so humid.” I'm like, “It's not humid at all.”
But it's not that hot. Whatever. Everyone's like, “It's so hot. We need to have some games where it's going to be too hot. Players need to stop for their health and safety and get water. If we do it in some games, it won't be fair. We have to do it for all the games.” What it's actually doing is giving us an extra commercial break in the middle of the game.
Andrew Sharp
Right.
Ben Thompson
It's like a commercial break, but you're not going to change the channel because you're in the middle of the game. It's a huge moneymaker. Everyone's upset about it: “You're destroying soccer just to make a few bucks,” blah, blah, blah.
Here's my take: we're actually fixing soccer. One of the complaints about the hydration break is that the momentum changes. A team is on its heels—
Andrew Sharp
The purists hate it because it's actually changing some of the outcomes of these games. Players come out of it—I think Haaland scored right after a hydration break. That's Erling Haaland, the player.
Ben Thompson
Well, it happened in the England-Croatia game yesterday. Croatia was on its heels. They came out, reset, and scored a few goals. And guess what? England was definitely the better team than Croatia. England was incredibly impressive in that game.
That game was so much more entertaining because the hydration break allowed Croatia to reset and score a couple of goals, which made it very gripping. England ended up winning 4–2. It made the game better. Guess what? Corners are a good idea.
Andrew Sharp
Yeah.
Ben Thompson
Hydration breaks—a blatant sort of “grow up, it's not that hot out” combined with a pure money grab. We're backing into making soccer better, and everyone should thank us for it.
Andrew Sharp
Fewer exhausted players is a good thing, I think. That's the kernel of the take.
Ben Thompson
Exactly. I like to see people performing at their best, uh, Suby.
Andrew Sharp
Don't unsubscribe, but that's my take.
Ben Thompson
And don't sue Ben.
That's right.
Andrew Sharp
My take on hydration breaks is that they should just be called commercial breaks, so maybe we'll get there by the time we get to the next World Cup. I do understand the instinctive rage at branding this profit-optimization strategy as a player-safety initiative.
Ben Thompson
That's right. There's a lot to be said for just being honest, okay? And guess what? You know what's good for the game? If everyone's making more money.
Andrew Sharp
We're all adults here.
Ben Thompson
Yeah.
Andrew Sharp
If everybody else has commercial breaks, it's fine. I hadn't considered the idea that it's actually going to make the second halves more entertaining than they would be otherwise. So, as far as I'm concerned, not a bad hydration-break take, soccer fans—
Ben Thompson
You know what?
Andrew Sharp
—of the world, or football fans—
Ben Thompson
And if you're super excited for the game, imagine that the U.S. is playing Australia tomorrow. Maybe you've already watched it by the time you listen to this. Maybe you're pre-partying; you're getting ready. You know what you might need? A dehydration break. In the middle of a half, run to the bathroom.
Andrew Sharp
There we go.
Ben Thompson
All good from my perspective.
Andrew Sharp
Well, my number-one World Cup take—
Ben Thompson
Yeah.
Andrew Sharp
You created a giant World Cup group chat, and there are 15 different people in there. You added me without asking me, so I've been in there for the past week.
Ben Thompson
Because you were dropping World Cup takes in other group chats, so I thought you wanted in.
Andrew Sharp
I was dropping Champions League final takes a couple of weeks ago, not World Cup takes. But being in the group chat, I'm fairly busy. I've got 2 toddlers and a bunch of podcasts. You are busier than I am, though, and I am flabbergasted by how many World Cup games you've consumed over the past week or so. You continue to be the biggest sports fan I've ever met, so congratulations.
Ben Thompson
Well, thank you. I love the World Cup. It's great. Games are on all day. Did you see Xu Xi Jin, the Chinese propagandist?
Andrew Sharp
No.
Ben Thompson
Oh yeah, he put out a tweet complaining about the game times, that they should be catering to China as far as when the games were played. The games are being played from 11 in the morning until 1 in the morning.
Andrew Sharp
Okay.
Ben Thompson
Relax, okay?
Andrew Sharp
9:00 PM Pacific.
Ben Thompson
Yeah.
Andrew Sharp
Some of the games are clearly being catered to China, so China’s being taken care of here. And you’re watching almost every single one. I’m getting texts from you throughout the day about different World Cup games I didn’t even know were happening. So I look forward to joining you probably by the time we get to the knockout round.
Ben Thompson
Well, just in general, what’s great about the World Cup, I’m not actually a soccer watcher. Every World Cup, I think, “Oh, I should watch more soccer.” No, it doesn’t happen. The whole week, I’m sure it’s great. I appreciate the quality of play with teams that play together all year. I get it in theory.
Andrew Sharp
Whatever.
Ben Thompson
I am all in on the eventization of sports. I love big events. It’s like tennis: I watch the Big Four. I don’t watch your regular tennis match.
Andrew Sharp
Mm-hmm.
Ben Thompson
I will watch the big golf tournaments. I’m not watching it every week. I want events. I’m in on the events. I enjoy the atmosphere around the events and the social media around events, and I don’t want to deal with it the rest of the year, so it’s perfect.
Andrew Sharp
There you go. Well, I would say I’m halfway in on the World Cup but all the way in on America, and I had a great time watching USA’s opening match and will be watching on Friday night in Seattle. But for now, Ben, we have news to get to. We did talk Anthropic and Fable last week, but as I’m sure 98% of the audience knows by now, late Friday afternoon the Commerce Department issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States. So Fable was—
Ben Thompson
Or inside or outside of Anthropic.
Andrew Sharp
Right, indeed. That was part of the problem as well. Claude was pulled from the market altogether and remains off the market, as you noted at the top. As we record this Thursday afternoon, that directive is in place. We’ll see how much longer it lasts. What do you think of where we are right now? It’s kind of a frustrating story to talk and write about because, on one hand, it’s the biggest story in technology. It also seems like there’s a good bit of nonpublic information that’s informing behavior here. So how do you wrap your arms around where we are?
Ben Thompson
It’s hard to wrap your arms around it, in part because of what you said there. What do we not know?
Andrew Sharp
Mm-hmm.
Ben Thompson
It’s also hard because everyone in this situation is incredibly frustrating to me on a personal level.
Andrew Sharp
Great.
Ben Thompson
So I actually feel like, almost this week, I took the opportunity to just write about Anthropic in general. We don’t need to rehash it because we talked about it on Sharp Tech last week.
Andrew Sharp
Mm-hmm.
Ben Thompson
And that was one of those times when I actually got a fair number of requests like, “You need to write this out”—this idea of the sort of fusion of the safety culture with lots of choices that they make that are great for their business.
Andrew Sharp
Business incentives.
Ben Thompson
Yeah, what a magical alchemy that is. So I wrote that on Monday. We already covered it last week. You can go listen to that. But Fable was a way into that, and I said it there. I’m not actually going to really talk about this because who knows what the heck is going on? But implicit in that—and anyone who’s been listening to these podcasts for a while knows this—is an overall frustration with Anthropic and a general concern about this company, not because they’re purposely being bad actors.
Andrew Sharp
Mm-hmm.
Ben Thompson
But my overarching concern about people who think they are the only ones who are trustworthy and ought to make decisions for the rest of humanity is that it’s just bad.
Andrew Sharp
The track record is not great.
Ben Thompson
Yeah, I don’t think that works. And that underlies so much about their posture in general. There was a write-up on this AI summit, or whatever, a day or two ago.
Andrew Sharp
Yeah, G7.
Ben Thompson
And you could just see in Altman’s comments that he clearly doesn’t trust OpenAI. He kind of trusts Google. But it’s like, “We should decide.”
Andrew Sharp
Mm-hmm.
Ben Thompson
And I think Altman took a much better approach, which is actually, “We shouldn’t be deciding. Someone else needs to be deciding.” That’s closer to my sensibilities, I would say, for sure. So in general, I’m frustrated with Anthropic, not just in this case.
Andrew Sharp
Yeah.
Ben Thompson
At the same time, from what we’ve been able to garner, there’s a very good chance that the administration is just being incredibly stupid here.
Andrew Sharp
Hmm.
Ben Thompson
And so I almost feel like I’ve been a little too hard on Anthropic this week because, from what I can gather—and again, who knows? We don’t have enough details about what’s happening or what’s not happening—there’s sort of an Occam’s razor explanation here, which is the US administration is like, “Stop it from doing this thing.”
Andrew Sharp
Yeah.
Ben Thompson
And Anthropic is like, “You can’t stop it from doing this thing.”
Andrew Sharp
That’s not how AI works.
Ben Thompson
That’s not how it works. The example here is, what’s the difference between “Find the vulnerability in this software” versus “Help me patch vulnerabilities in this software”? It’s the exact same request, and the reality is Mythos is clearly—if you used Fable, you could just feel it—it’s clearly ahead. It’s something new. No one has anything to match it. But if the history of the last few months and years continues, we’re going to have Mythos-level models in the near future.
Andrew Sharp
Yeah.
Ben Thompson
And so what is the best possible thing we can do knowing that’s coming? Everyone needs to be working overtime to patch their vulnerabilities.
Andrew Sharp
Mm-hmm.
Ben Thompson
And we’ve been talking about this for several months on Sharp Tech. It’s going to be a messy few years, and it feels like there’s this sense in the White House of trying to patch things, put your thumb in the dike against this wave that’s coming.
Andrew Sharp
Yeah.
Ben Thompson
And the reality is, the wave is going to go over the whole wall. It’s going to be a mess, and the best thing we can do is—offense is the best defense. I don’t know if that’s the right analogy here. But go out there and work feverishly for the next little bit to fix as many vulnerabilities as we can before this is truly broadly available. And every day that this conflict is going on is a day when people aren’t able to do this.
Andrew Sharp
Yeah.
Ben Thompson
And I think it comes back to this—and this is where I do bring Anthropic back into the conversation—how many people in the White House understand how AI works?
Andrew Sharp
There are some people in the White House, for sure, who understand how AI works.
Ben Thompson
Mm-hmm.
Andrew Sharp
But at the highest levels, this distinction between a probabilistic piece of software versus a deterministic one—
With a deterministic system, you could say, “You can’t make this available,” and, “This isn’t possible,” and you could hit some buttons to turn off different features that create unreasonable risks. You can’t really do that with AI.
Ben Thompson
Right. That’s like the magic of AI, right? The strengths and weaknesses apply to everything. The reason AI can do that—is it truly fully generalizable? I think not as much as the advocates claim, but it’s pretty darn generalizable—is precisely because it’s not deterministically designed to handle every sort of thing.
We see this in self-driving cars, right? The reason why self-driving cars took forever to actually be viable is because people spent years trying to hard-code every single scenario that a car might encounter.
Andrew Sharp
Yeah.
Ben Thompson
There are so many variables in a car that you can’t do that. What you need to do is have an end-to-end model that is basically—not exactly the same as an LM, but the same concept of a neural net—that generalizes from being exposed to tons and tons and tons and tons of scenarios and develops its own sort of internal heuristics and probability distributions, such that when something new happens, it kind of knows how to react—
Andrew Sharp
It can adapt.
Ben Thompson
—without being—
Andrew Sharp
Yep.
Ben Thompson
—told what to do. And you think about this: it’s not just that it’s not deterministic, it’s that putting deterministic rules into that functionality makes it worse in many respects because you’re actually limiting it artificially in its capability to understand different situations. We’re just moving into this fundamentally new paradigm that’s totally different, and it’s really easy for people to look at AI as a fancy search engine.
Andrew Sharp
Yeah.
Ben Thompson
We had this conversation a few years ago.
You used AI for the greatest-of-all-time talk and looked up some stats.
Andrew Sharp
Oh, yeah. Which, by the way, it’s gotten a lot better at pulling recent stats.
Ben Thompson
For sure.
Andrew Sharp
And everything else—it’s a lot more accurate than it was 2.5 years ago. But indeed, it’s a different sort of tool than traditional Google.
Ben Thompson
Right. And what I told you at the time was like, “No, that’s the exact wrong function that you’re trying to do.”
Andrew Sharp
Yeah.
Ben Thompson
Right?
Andrew Sharp
It’s the worst thing you could use ChatGPT for.
Ben Thompson
Well, then this gets into so many issues, or so many concepts that flow out of this. One point that I made again and again is: What is the shape of the crash going to look like, or the bubble popping?
Andrew Sharp
Mm-hmm.
Ben Thompson
What it’s going to look like is people attempting to plaster AI onto existing workflows that were built around a certain way of computing, being frustrated that it continually doesn’t work. And then what’s actually going to happen is people are going to completely rethink their approaches.
This idea of moving from putting advertising next to an article to a feed—like the—
Andrew Sharp
Yeah.
Ben Thompson
Like AI—
Andrew Sharp
Create new companies built atop this technology to take—
Ben Thompson
That’s right.
Andrew Sharp
—advantage of it.
Ben Thompson
That’s right. And so the challenge is, this takes years. It takes a long time for people to even reset their expectations of what’s possible and what this means. And in the meantime, what we do have is this ability to look at code bases, find vulnerabilities, and exploit them—basically autonomously.
Andrew Sharp
Hack the planet. Just like Hackers. Great movie. So, to anchor people in this take, I think a lot of this springs from the report that Amazon was able to jailbreak Fable and raise some concerns with the White House—
Ben Thompson
Right, and no one knows for sure what this jailbreak is, right? There’s this analyst-researcher who saw a report from Anthropic, so this is all Anthropic spin, to be clear—
Andrew Sharp
Mm-hmm.
Ben Thompson
—who characterized it as very basic: just slightly change your wording, and now it’s looking for vulnerabilities. Which I think, again, is an Occam’s razor explanation. You could believe that would happen.
Andrew Sharp
Mm-hmm.
Ben Thompson
And then Anthropic is saying, “Well, look, that’s very minor. You can’t stop that.” And the White House is saying, “You guys are doing it again. We’re just asking you to stop it, and you won’t stop it.” And that’s where Anthropic’s at fault. They’ve created the conditions of mistrust with the administration.
Andrew Sharp
And also, though, is the core issue for Anthropic that the way they discuss AI risk then creates unreasonable expectations for how it can be managed?
Ben Thompson
Of course. The whole Mythos rollout about this is like, they go on for years talking about AI being like nuclear weapons. Then they have this huge Project Glasswing: “This is way too dangerous to release. We’re going to secure the banks and secure the big tech companies.” And then 2 months later, “Okay, everyone can use it now.” And then you turn around and you’re creating the conditions for this reaction.
Andrew Sharp
They create the expectation of perfect security, given how dangerous this weapon is for the whole world, and we’re going to be very careful. And then when it’s revealed that you can’t possibly paper over every possible risk that arises from this technology, other people who have been paying attention freak out and start to try to take back control. It seems like that’s some of what’s happened here.
Ben Thompson
Yeah. Well, the problem is that—I’m not minimizing the risk—it’s actually quite scary. Almost all software on the web is likely insecure.
Andrew Sharp
Mm-hmm.
Ben Thompson
But the problem is that you’re not going to foreclose that forever.
Andrew Sharp
Entirely, no.
Ben Thompson
Yeah. What is the administration buying with this? Weeks or months, maybe a year.
Andrew Sharp
Okay.
Ben Thompson
The only way to solve the security problem is to go through it—
Andrew Sharp
Mm-hmm.
Ben Thompson
—is to actually work and patch stuff like crazy. And by the way, the defenders have an advantage. They have the code.
Andrew Sharp
Yeah.
Ben Thompson
They can examine their code bases. They can fix the problems. Even if you’re attacking something from the outside, it’s a little bit more of a challenge. It’s more obfuscated. You have to sort of figure it out.
The Manhattan Project we need is a whole-scale effort: let’s go through all this code on the web, all these open-source projects. Which, to Anthropic’s credit, they did do. That’s the sort of aspect of Project Glasswing. But we’re just not there. There’s just not an acceptance of this reality.
Andrew Sharp
Yeah. Well, Michael says, “If Ben’s going to get so outraged about Anthropic’s actions even when he believes the safety threat is real, I’d love to hear a positive vision for what they should be doing to address safety concerns that wouldn’t be self-serving. I agree with Ben’s analysis about this being a convenient source of cultural alignment with the business incentives, but I just don’t have a problem with it. What am I missing?”
So, if you were running policy at Anthropic, what would you advise them to do to handle some of the safety risks?
Ben Thompson
The problem I have with Anthropic is the implicit and sometimes explicit message: “Only we can handle this. Only we are responsible. Only we are properly concerned about the dangers.”
And what’s implicit in that is, only we should control AI, combined with the rhetoric that AI is going to run the world. People got mad at the sentence in my article, but it’s just a logical construction. If A equals B and B equals C, then A equals C. They want to run the world. That’s the implication of saying, “We should run AI, and AI is going to run the world.”
Andrew Sharp
Mm-hmm.
Andrew Sharp
I mean, how explicitly have they ever said, “We should run AI”? Is it more an inference from their behavior?
Ben Thompson
Yeah. Their behavior and, I think, their rhetoric. They clearly don’t think Sam Altman should run AI, that’s for sure—which, by the way, I completely agree with, to be clear.
Andrew Sharp
That’s true. Yeah.
Andrew Sharp
And it sounds like, to Sam’s credit, even Sam agrees on that point at this stage.
Ben Thompson
Well, he’s cleaned up his rhetoric a lot. I think there was a lot of bad rhetoric that came out. And this is the challenge, because people are like, “Look, why shouldn’t they talk about job upheaval?” No, there’s the opposite mistake, which is to say nothing is going to happen, when you’re basically lying through your teeth.
Andrew Sharp
Mm-hmm.
Ben Thompson
And I think there’s an aspect of that in Silicon Valley that says nothing is going to happen. No, it is going to be disruptive. Now, we might not know exactly how it’s going to be disruptive. You go back to the internet. The internet was incredibly disruptive.
Andrew Sharp
Right.
Ben Thompson
The entire structure of society—
Andrew Sharp
It took 25 years. We were the frogs in the boiling water for a while there.
Ben Thompson
This administration is the Trump administration, which is directly downstream from the structural changes wrought by the internet and what it did to media. Imagine going back to 1993 or whatever, when the World Wide Web comes out, and saying, “This is going to lead to Donald Trump being president.” It would have blown people’s minds. AI is going to be arguably even bigger.
But part of the problem is the certainty and prescriptiveness of what’s going to happen.
Andrew Sharp
Mm-hmm.
Ben Thompson
There’s an aspect of this: things are going to change, and I think everyone could do with a little more doubt. What’s the word I’m looking for? Epistemic doubt.
Andrew Sharp
Humility?
Ben Thompson
Humility about the fact that we don’t know what’s going to happen. This idea of just explaining why this is different—
Andrew Sharp
Mm-hmm.
Ben Thompson
—appreciating that just because you understand AI and other people don’t doesn’t necessarily, one, mean you’re smarter than them, although often you are, to be fair, or two, that you know everything about everything because of this factor, right?
Andrew Sharp
Yeah.
Ben Thompson
You’ve been in conversations with people where they’re explaining something to you, and their tone and approach is so patronizing, and it just is infuriating, and you’re like, “Screw this guy. I don’t care.”
Andrew Sharp
Are you describing conversations that you and I have had about various consumer technology that you demand that I adopt and then I stubbornly refuse to?
Ben Thompson
Right, and you want to punch me in the face.
Andrew Sharp
Yeah.
Ben Thompson
Maybe I can identify this attitude because I can personify it at times. That’s a fair pushback.
I think the emailer does have his finger on something. When I was at Microsoft, I remember I never got promoted, and I was very frustrated about it.
Andrew Sharp
Mm-hmm.
Ben Thompson
I ended up on this team where I was actually a level 61, and everyone else on the team was level 63. I was doing all the work, and I thought I should get promoted. But the one piece of feedback I remember getting at my year review or something like that was, “Your what is excellent. Your how needs a lot of work.”
There was this idea that it wasn’t just my manager that had to be involved—the other managers on the promotion committee, the manager above the manager, and all those people.
Andrew Sharp
That’s amazing.
Ben Thompson
There’s an aspect of corporate politics that is just putting on a happy face, talking to people, and selling yourself and your ideas. This is why I didn’t last long in corporate America. I’m much better off, I think, on my own, to say the least.
Andrew Sharp
Yeah.
Ben Thompson
There’s an aspect here to my feedback to Anthropic: your what is fine. It’s the how that needs work.
Andrew Sharp
Right.
Ben Thompson
You need to figure out how to communicate these things.
Andrew Sharp
And to describe it, there needs to be a capacity for risk tolerance over the next 4 or 5 years, and there’s not much of that coming from Anthropic in the course of these conversations. They create the illusion of perfect security as long as they’re the ones in charge of that security, and that’s going to be a problem long term.
I’m open to the possibility that members of the Trump administration simply don’t understand that you can’t keep these models from being jailbroken, and you can’t reduce the risks on that front. I will also note, though, that there was that report in The Washington Post about Anthropic giving the government a list of 111 organizations that had advanced access to Mythos, and then there were an additional 50 or so entities that were added and had already received access.
Anthropic was slow to get that list of companies to the government, as the government was asking, “Who actually has access to Mythos?” One of the entities was a South Korean company. What’s interesting in that report is it seems like Anthropic still doesn’t understand that the government is ultimately in charge, and it’s really not that complicated. Dealing with the government shouldn’t be as impossible as Anthropic is making it look.
Ben Thompson
Yeah.
Andrew Sharp
So again, blame belongs on both sides of the equation here.
Ben Thompson
This goes back to the Department of War debate, which ultimately is a philosophical question of who’s in charge. The fundamental problem with Anthropic’s how is actually not just the how; it’s the substance.
In that debate, their red line was, “We get to decide how this is used.” So, as you asked earlier for evidence of them saying they should be in charge of AI, there’s your example.
Andrew Sharp
That’s the evidence. Yeah.
Ben Thompson
They’ve already demonstrated it. And by the way, we talked about this last week: they’ve also demonstrated the capability and willingness to silently nerf their models to stop behavior that they don’t think is acceptable.
Andrew Sharp
Yeah.
Ben Thompson
This is the core issue. There’s an assertion of authority that is reserved solely for them, and it’s not just with their customers, it’s not just with other companies, it’s with the federal government. That is the fundamental issue.
Andrew Sharp
Mm-hmm.
Ben Thompson
It actually does go back to that episode.
Andrew Sharp
Yeah.
Ben Thompson
That’s the issue here: they’re trying to dictate terms, and the government is probably being dumb. The export-control thing—who knows if it’s even legal or whatever it might be? That’s for the courts to decide. My guess is probably not, right?
Andrew Sharp
Mm-hmm.
Ben Thompson
What’s actually happening is the exact same battle that was happening before.
Andrew Sharp
Yeah.
Ben Thompson
Who gets final say?
Andrew Sharp
And when the government says jump, Anthropic should say, “How high? You want the additional 50 entities? Here are the additional 50 entities. You have a problem with this South Korean entity?”
Ben Thompson
How’s that boot taste, Andrew?
Andrew Sharp
Well, no, that’s just the way it’s going to work.
Ben Thompson
Right.
Andrew Sharp
And so—
Ben Thompson
No, that’s the thing.
Andrew Sharp
It’s inevitable. If you’re talking about a superweapon that poses dangers to the entire world, this is the inevitable conclusion of that conversation. But they still have not fully grokked that—
Ben Thompson
And that’s what’s so frustrating: the people who are implicitly saying they should decide everything seem incapable of understanding the reality of the world as it actually is. If you can’t understand the reality of the world as it actually is, on what basis should I have faith that you get to decide how the world is going to be?
Andrew Sharp
Mm-hmm.
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