Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In this edition…Anthropic scrambles to try to reverse U.S. export controls on its Fable and Mythos models…the U.S. government decision on Anthropic’s models causes panic in Europe over AI sovereignty and delight among China’s open source AI developers…OpenAI’s finances revealed…a new benchmark shows AI agents may not be as capable as you think…and courts are turning to AI for transcripts but the reasons may not be what you think.
AI is licensed now, but the requirements change constantly and are always a secret, even to the administration itself, which will discover the rules spontaneously in real time as it reacts to events. This means also that the rules are in practice stricter and more roughly enforced for organizations the administration does not like.
Ball says the situation is made worse by the administration’s “insistence that it is Not Regulating AI. This has become an excuse for vagueness and evasiveness in rule-drafting…and this in turn makes the lawlessness worse.” He says the government “has discovered that ‘not regulating AI’ is in fact a great excuse for refusing to support laws that could constrain the admin’s power.”
As was the case with the administration’s earlier—and also unprecedented—decision to label Anthropic a “supply chain risk” for refusing to agree to the Pentagon’s preferred contract terms, the arbitrary and capricious use of government power to punish, and perhaps even destroy, a company that has not violated any law ought to be concerning to every American business.
Some have said it is ironic that Anthropic, whose CEO Dario Amodei has called for an FDA-like agency to regulate AI and license frontier AI models, is now complaining about being regulated. But I have a great deal of sympathy for Anthropic’s statement that it wants “a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts.” We should all want that. And this is the opposite.
Jeremy Kahn
jeremy.kahn@fortune.com
@jeremyakahn
The following newsletter sections were compiled this week with help from Lulu Nairn.
