Why Incompetence Explains More Than Conspiracy in AI Policy

David Sachs, White House AI and cryptocurrency czar, who leads the administration's strategic focus on AI policy and deployment. This was his tweet where he essentially says he tries to give a timeline and facts. A highly credible trusted partner of both Anthropic and USG, that's Andy Jassy from Amazon, was testing Fable, came forward with the jailbreak of those guardrails. The admin asked Dario to fix the jailbreak or de-deploy the model. Dario refused. That jailbreak is fix this code. The headline here, which is the Fed's freaked over Fable 5 after the simple fix this code prompt. Back to this tweet, in their blog post, Anthropic defended its decision by saying the jailbreak isn't serious. With light of new information coming out, I can tell you as somebody who's worked in tech for over 10 years now, this is not that serious, especially compared to a lot of the other stuff that is possible as well. This is not that serious. We're in a period where this is all unregulated. Nobody knows what the fuck. Nobody at the Fed clearly knows. Federal government, like, clearly knows what to do with this, how to reckon with this. That is what I see in this. They're trying to position— Anthropic has always said that safety must be a top priority. In this case, Anthropic prioritized the continued offering of the consumer model over safety. So the government, David Sachs representing the government in his position of power on AI Policy Council, right, is basically throwing shade at Anthropic to be like, yeah, they didn't do what their brand is. Down here it says the ball is in Anthropic's court. Like they try to position it as actually this is all Anthropic's fault. Like guys, they forced our hand to making this national level directive. Here's another perspective, which is that Anthropic has been begging for regulation for forever. So one could argue they kind of had this coming. Maybe they could have figured out a better path to having these conversations before. I can only read from the tea leaves that I could read, but with the whole Pentagon and DOD situation with Anthropic, I kind of see this as the government kind of hating on Anthropic for not bending the knee. I also kind of see this as Anthropic have been kind of begging for being made to bend the knee for a little bit in a way, right? So it's like, well, kind of had this coming. But also, yeah, the government sounds kind of dumb here. A really interesting tweet. This came out before the jailbreak story. More likely story from Eric Voorhees, founder of OpenAI. The jailbreak wasn't super serious. That situation anyone who has ever received bug reports is familiar with. Definitely true. Anthropic thought the demand to halt model was absurd, and the federal government used opportunity to punish and humiliate Anthropic for the prior sins of not bending the knee. Anthropic has more credibility on such topics than Washington. What do you have to say about this, Jonathan? Can we trust this administration with this AI era and superintelligence being birthed? We clearly don't have the right regulations. Do we have the right people? All of these things are chaotic, and it has implications as AI builders. For our landscape.

One thing is that Sachs isn't actually in the administration anymore. There was like a time limit by which he had to serve his public, do his public service, and then he filled that. And I think he hasn't been active for a couple of months, at least in the AI czar position. So I think he's using his connections to talk with people in the government and synthesize this, but he's not actually speaking on the government's behalf. Yeah, I think that's probably more what happened according to Anthropic's point of view is like, Hey, we want regulation. You guys are then going to pull out some arbitrary vulnerability and then tell us to fix this. But this is actually like working to the design that we expected it to work to. It's not a security flaw. And then uninformed administration is saying like, well, we got smart people who think it is and we disagree. I don't think that they're actually trying to intentionally humiliate Anthropic as much as there is a cultural divide about how these problems are addressed. And you have somebody who has got like a whole bunch of people with PhDs in a certain area trying to talk to people with like a 3rd grade education in this certain area and not understanding one another. So I think that's more what's going on here. It's going to take some time to bridge that.