Intensifying AI Safety Concerns 9/17/26

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1:00To find a way to set reasonable guidelines that are enforced, but you can't do it. The first line of defense is your libel for your own actions. So it's a weird twist. They're asking for societal regulation to get out of the first line of defense, which is if you build a technology that can destroy 10% of the world, that has civil and criminal liability attached to it. The first step is to say, okay, the first step isn't to say we get out of it because we want to self-regulate or we want regulation. The first step is to say, okay, you've disclosed this, what are you doing about it? And the second step is to say if you're not doing it, you're not being responsible here, we're going to have to get people involved. That's going to be also very complicated because regulating these things needs people who understand them. Another problem we have is seemingly everyone who understands this is on some payroll. So it's like, you know, it's like here you're going to trust, you know, when we built nuclear energy, we built the bomb. People did it because they believed. They were not on the payroll. I was a volunteer CEO at this park just moments ago,

2:00our Kate Rooney joins us to discuss and today's tech check, I thought he made a number of really interesting points, you know, on one hand sort of like praising Dario for what he's doing and calling it responsible and ethical, but on the other saying what's really going on here is that they're begging for nationalization of these companies so that because they're just too much risk and liability around the product. Sarah, I thought that was the biggest headline from Alex Carp, is the idea that Anthropic could be nationalized, talked about some of the investors, not necessarily underwriting that. As part of the story, think about how much money this company has raised in private markets alone, ahead of confidentially filing to go public. That of course would make waves if there were any sort of nationalization, even if it were a large government stake. The other thing to point out as he talks about this is the fact that Anthropic is a public benefit corporation. So there's certain questions about liability and how much of at all that protects them from any sort of lawsuit or say new investors, hey, you knew this was a risk going in

3:03because we have talked about the existential risk to humanity with AI and if things have changed dramatically enough where they say it does make sense to be nationalized. I was talking to a former SEC official just a few minutes ago who said that there is precedent for this, who said basically you look at the steel industry during World War II, that is probably the last big example of a moment in an industry that was nationalized at a time, I mean that was wartime, but in some sense the gravity of what we're talking about in the worst case scenario does call into question. I mean this is such a critical technology, so Alex Carp obviously is on the ground and probably is not deeply about something like this, but I think that is the headline of the day guys. Yeah, there is the ongoing theory that a lot of this is self-serving that raising these fears of what could go wrong would allow them theoretically to kind of cut back or restrain their spending even though the real reason might be because it's just not as economical. I think you're right Carl, it's right to point out the push back on Dario Amade the CEO

4:05but I thought it was really interesting to hear Alex Carp's view of him as a leader in that regardless of what you think about his morals, his ethics, his politics, it's made him a really effective CEO and it's allowed him to recruit some of these smartest researchers in Silicon Valley and as he put it go from sort of number five in the race to number one and he just talked about the effect that Dario Amade has had in the industry and that that has really worked for him. His views regardless of what anybody thinks about them have been effective in recruiting at least and those are the people that are building the technology and that's part of why he has been so successful. So I think it says a lot that Alex Carp is praising him for that in some way and talking about that effectiveness as a CEO and tech right now. What about the fact where he was talking about how angry their partners, their enterprise partners are, their living, the kind of safety they're most upset about is what they believe is the theft of their alpha. What do you mean? Data retention, it's something that Alex Carp has talked a bit about before

5:05and I think that he sort of went viral for that in the Squawk Box interview a few months ago. I hear that all the time by the way and it's actually something that Anthropic has tried to write size and fix and talk about publicly. We've talked to some of their top executives who have said it's the biggest thing they hear from businesses. They have changed the data of retention policies in response to some of this pushback but it's something also their competitors are jumping on. I've spoken to people at Open Eye as well on the enterprise side who have said, hey, this is actually an opportunity and has helped us grow our enterprise business and it's helped the competition because at least the view of Anthropic is exactly what Alex Carp said and he's been one of the loudest voices on that but it's something that comes up and it's something that at least in the near term has helped the competition frame themselves as better actors although as I mentioned Anthropic has responded and tried to fix that in some ways. Well, one thing's for sure. I mean the view from Alex and I'm sure he agrees with Jensen Wong and that open source is just going to remain a continued source of competition and then maybe some of the closed models might be used for kind of specialized examples

6:08or case studies use cases in countries like Argentina he said. Yes, well the irony is that the labs have now accused some of the open source versions of actually copying their technology and so full circle it may have actually sort of come from cloud, come from open AI and chat GBT in some ways so there's some irony and that these cheaper versions that are being offered to the rest of the world actually may have come from the American AI labs and they're really trying to shut that down but I think you're right there's a cost question around that there's data retention questions and it's a real competitor at a time when both of these labs are looking to go public. All right Kate, thank you. Thank you for chatting that out with us Kate Rooney. I also thought that he connects sort of the societal issues really well to what's happening with AI. You know talks about an issue that actually that not a lot of people are talking about which is the big problem he says is that the rich pointed to himself get richer and everybody else gets left behind and that is what causes extremes on both sides when it comes to wanting to regulate and just well taxes and everything else

7:08and then all these societal problems where you get extreme politics as a result of this. So he talks about the wealth gap there and then also the reputational problem that AI has had in trying to sell America. Yeah and he's been very consistent on that on how arguably the extremely wealthy in this country have not played that position very well. That's a problem. And it's resulted in turmoil, social turmoil and then from there the solutions get crazy, right? There's a lot of... Right so he says smart taxes and smart ways about that to try to level the playing field a little bit as we go through this. Adventure Global We think about what can be done, not what's usually done. Through innovation, venture global is not only building some of the largest energy facilities in the world right here in the United States but delivering American energy at a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the time. So while others are busy talking, we're busy building.

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