Leviathan Waking

Imagine that there were no Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but there remained a large pharmaceutical sector, similar in size and scope to the one the United States enjoys today. In this alternate world, imagine that drugs were not licensed or otherwise formally approved by regulators; there were even officials in the executive branch who boasted that the U.S., unlike other countries, would not get into the regulatory morass of licensing drugs.

One day, a pharmaceutical developer warns that they think they have made a drug that cures a major Cancer at one dosage but is lethal at a slightly higher dosage. The company says, for this reason, that they are going to restrict release only to pre-approved patients and monitor their usage of the drug carefully—a sharp break from prior industry practice but one that the company insists, controversially, is necessary. This particular company had been advocating for years for stricter drug regulation, much to the chagrin of the government.

This causes a stir, and the government, not quite knowing what to do, announces that it will give drug developers the helpful option to show their drugs’ safety profiles to government officials before they are released. They are adamant that this is a voluntary program. The pharmaceutical company, being hopelessly literal nerds, and if we are being honest, more than a little bit obstinate, decides to release their drug without going through the voluntary program. “We already paused general availability of the drug while we did our own safety study, so we don’t need the government’s testing, and besides it is voluntary, isn’t it?” the company seems to be saying.

But then a handful of patients get side effects severe enough to hospitalize them, but not severe enough to be lethal. The government gets understandably upset, particularly considering their lack of experience in regulating drugs. “You talked up your own safety practices so much, and now we have people in the hospital. You are telling us that you are comfortable releasing chemicals that can put people into the hospital?,” the government argues to the company.

The company’s literal and obstinate nerds say, “well, we’ve thought about drug safety regulation quite a bit, and given how common hospitalization of a small number of patients is with a new drug, compared to the lifesaving benefits of our drug for millions, yes, we think the benefits outweigh the risks in this case.” But trust has already broken down, and this abstract, technocratic defense falls on deaf ears. “People are being hospitalized,” the government says.

And so the government bans the drug, indefinitely. It is not clear what the government wants more: a remedy for this specific side effect, a solution to all side effects from drugs, or, really, an apology from the company, as well as the sensation of domination over these disobedient, obstinate, and literal nerds.

In a matter of weeks, in our alternative world, the United States went from a system that was implausibly laissez-faire for the level of risk involved in this industry, to a system that was, in the eyes of essentially all expert onlookers, incomprehensibly strict and risk averse.

Fable, Jailbreaks, and Export Controls: What Happened

This, of course, is my read of what happened in the Trump Administration’s latest dispute with the AI company Anthropic. For those not following the blow-by-blow, what happened, in a few sentences, is:

1. Anthropic released Fable, a commercial version of their very-powerful Mythos model with severe guardrails to prevent misuse.

2. People liked it, though broadly speaking thought the guardrails were far too strict.

3. A few days later, officials in the Trump Administration (it is not clear who) became aware of a jailbreak that got around some of Fable’s safeguards (it is not clear how severely), and demanded that Anthropic de-deploy the model (it is not clear with how much specificity the government expressed the concern).

4. Anthropic did not de-deploy the model (it is not clear why), so the government imposed worldwide export controls against all non-U.S. persons on Fable and Mythos.

5. Because Anthropic lacks the ability to validate U.S. personhood for end users, this meant they had to pull down the models globally, for everyone. In fact, by some accounts, Anthropic has had to suspend internal usage of their model because of the risk that their own non-U.S. person employees might use the model.

You’ll notice the clause “it is not clear” repeated frequently above. The sheer opacity of everything that is unfolding makes it hard to analyze. There is no text for me to draw on, and no actual policy to criticize. There is simply a game of he-said, she-said played between two actors whose animosity toward one another is only growing and who both, if we are honest, seem to be making things worse for themselves and for the whole industry. [ed. Iran, anybody?]

by Dean Ball, Hyperdimensional |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. Why does this same chaos script keep repeating with everything this administration touches. Rhetorical question. See also: White House Will Ad Hoc Decide Who Can Individually Access GPT-5.6 (DWAtV).] 

[ed. Update: Sorry, this has nothing to do with AI frontier models, but everything to do with decision-making under Trump. Can't help but laugh (or cry)... Promises Made, Promises Kept (Defector):]

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"If everyone in the United States weren't living downstream from its consequences, it would be a pretty good tragic flaw that Donald Trump wants more than anything to be seen as a brilliant man who has always been right about everything when he is transparently a butterfingered dunce whose professional expertise more or less begins and ends at making cutting remarks from a safe distance and directing other people to file nuisance lawsuits on his behalf. If assessed from a sufficient remove, the spread between the opening proposition—the man who knows more about every subject than any expert without even having to study or even pay attention to any of it, because he is just that much of a natural talent—and the relentlessly oafish output is a great bit, if admittedly also a bit one-note.

Lots of awful people are like this, and a great percentage of the degenerate gentry that is Trump's truest and most durable base is extremely like this: Dumb old bullies all grandiose and soft from golf and infidelity; illiterate real-estate types with detailed opinions on The Differences Between The Races; the luridly unemployable adult children of car-dealership guys; anhedonic beneficiaries of a good investment or two who have, through sheer restless indolence and various dull biases, backed into some truly berserk and totally bespoke authoritarian worldviews. Aging phone addicts who think the country "needs a pharaoh." Ruddy tax evaders who fear cities and are insecure about their boats. None of these people really do things especially well, and all of them are visibly getting worse, but they are all far enough from experiencing any kind of consequences that they can't really imagine failing at anything they try.

This mindset scales all the way up to some of the most powerful people in human history, but it is the same all the way down. It amounts to the belief that only these particular wimpy pink goofs, each one the protagonist of reality, can be entrusted to run things, and that any problem can be solved by telling some underling to handle it, and also to the idea that such an order becomes a glorious and vindicating solution immediately after it is issued. Nothing that follows will ever be their fault. Provided you do not care about or pay attention to the world, this worldview absolutely rocks."