David Sacks says Anthropic’s Dario Amodei wants a ‘DMV for AI.’ But plenty of industries thrive despite safety regulation

Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In this edition:

OpenAI details two week training pause, more security controls following Hugging Face hack.

Anthropic on course for $65 billion in annual revenue.

OpenAI debuts ChatGPT for teens.

Can AI models figure out the rules of the game?

I’m just back from three weeks of vacation. Thanks to my colleagues Bea Nolan and Emily Forlini for holding down the fort here while I was away.For much of that time, I was engaged in outdoor activities—camping, hiking, kayaking, fishing, running, and swimming—or indoor ones that are not digitally-mediated, such as dining out with family or listening to live entertainment. Sure, my family and I did sometimes use Google Search to look stuff up, and the AI-summarized answers it provided were often impressively detailed and accurate. It was definitely a lot more convenient than having to hunt for information across multiple web pages. But that’s about where my interaction with AI started and stopped. Overall, my three week break was a refreshing reminder of all the ways in which AI has not transformed society and, hopefully, never will.The big AI news over the weekend was the debate over Dario Amodei’s lengthy post on X defending the company’s approach to both regulation and talking about AI’s many risks. Amodei, who rarely appears on the Elon Musk-controlled social media platform, made the post in response to comments investor Gavin Baker made on the “All In” podcast, which is cohosted by former Trump AI czar David Sacks, himself no fan of Anthropic.

Baker said that he’d been told “by multiple people I trust” that Amodei had said that Anthropic was so confident of both AI’s potential and his company’s position at the forefront of AI development that “Anthropic might be the only private company in the world at some point.” Baker described this as evidence of Anthropic’s “maximalist” vision, in which only it and the U.S. government decided who could access super powerful AI. Meanwhile, Sacks called it “hubristic” and repeated his claims that Amodei’s strategy is “regulatory capture”—where Anthropic uses fear of AI’s risks to persuade the government to enact stringent regulation on the technology that only Anthropic can easily comply with, eliminating competition from other AI startups or open-source models.Baker went on to criticize Amodei for fueling the public’s overwhelmingly negative perception of AI, a factor that has played into opposition to data center construction around the U.S. Baker worries this negativity is making business difficult for AI companies and also fears it will imperil American leadership in the technology. He called on Amodei to present a more positive image of AI.

Anthropic denies Amodei ever said anything like what Baker claims. “Complete and utter nonsense,” Sasha de Marigny, Anthropic’s chief brand and communications officer, replied on X. (Sacks later pointed out that Amodei himself did not directly address Baker’s claim.) Meanwhile, Amodei posted on X that he thinks Silicon Valley libertarians such as Baker tend to see all regulation as slowing technology down and resulting in regulatory capture, whereas others “outside of this bubble” see regulation as constraining corporate power and benefitting “ordinary people.” Amodei said he thought both positions oversimplified things and that “it’s complicated and really depends on what the ‘regulation’ consists of.”Amodei said Anthropic tries “very hard to make proposals that disadvantage (slow down) frontier AI companies while *advantaging* smaller competitors.” He noted that many of the regulations it has favored either contained specific exemptions for companies below a certain revenue threshold or that spent less than a certain amount on model training, or were designed only to apply to cutting-edge models,........

© Fortune