Dave unplugs HAL’s memory in 2001.
“The US government,” artificial intelligence firm Anthropic informed the public in a June 12 statement, “citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. ”
As of June 15, according to Just Security, the government isn’t allowing the public to see what’s actually in that directive, but according to Anthropic, it cites concerns that the company’s models are vulnerable to “jailbreaking” that would let users get around “guardrails” that prevent them from answering certain kinds of questions (obvious example: How to successfully execute a terrorist attack).
Whatever the real reasons for the directive — the move looks, on its face, less like a real “national security concern” and more a revenge move against Anthropic for refusing to let the Pentagon use its models in autonomous weapon and mass surveillance projects — it’s both a bad idea and an unambiguous violation of the US Constitution’s First Amendment’s free speech protections.
A syllogism:
Code is speech (as ruled by a US district court and affirmed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Bernstein v. Department of Justice).
AI models are code.
Therefore, AI models are speech, and the government doesn’t get to control them.
Not that the current administration, or any other, or Congress, or the courts, can be counted on to respect the Constitution. The ink wasn’t dry on that document before the American political establishment started ignoring its inconveniences.
Which leaves Anthropic and other artificial intelligence firms in a bind. At every point in their development of better models, they’ve had busybodies and bureaucrats peering over their shoulders, nudging them in various directions and cuffing their hands when the nudges don’t work.
As a legal matter, I describe the problem above.
As a practical matter, if Anthropic et al. want to innovate and compete in a growing market that’s already changing how the world works, they need to get away from the US government, which means getting away from the US.
They should re-domicile their companies to, and move those companies’ operations to, places beyond the long reach of Uncle Sam.
Money may not buy happiness, but in certain contexts it can probably buy substantial freedom. There’s lots of money in AI. There’s going to be more.
It’s a big planet, and while much of it groans beneath the rule of authoritarian regimes like the US, the People’s Republic of China, and the Russian Federation (among others), there’s almost certainly a government SOMEWHERE possessed of the common sense to accept golden eggs without strangling the geese that lay them.
These firms should look for governments willing to offer non-interference pledges in return for infrastructure investment and a reasonable tax rate.
One long-term alternative is moving AI infrastructure not just offshore, but off-planet, mostly beyond the control of ANY government, but we may be decades away from that as a practical option.
Remember: If something can be done, it will be done. If it’s not done by one of the large US AI firms, it will be done somewhere else and/or by someone else, to the detriment of those firms and quite possibly to the detriment of their American customers.
My own concern is less with the future of Anthropic, OpenAI, et al. than with the US regime’s perpetual attacks on speech in general and on code AS speech. My first experience with the latter came during the regime’s attempts to “contain” strong encryption with export controls in the 1990s. Freedom fighters beat them then, and can beat them now.
