The most important question nobody's asking about AI

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:00)
So by now, I'm sure that you've heard that the Department of War has declared Anthropic a supply chain risk because Anthropic refused to remove red lines around the use of their models for mass surveillance and for autonomous weapons. Honestly, I think this situation is a warning shot. Right now, LMS are probably not being used in mission critical ways. But within 20 years, 99% of the workforce in the military, in the civilian government, in the private sector is going to be AIs. They're going to be the robot armies that constitute our military. They're going to be the superhumanly intelligent advisors that senators and presidents and CEOs have. They're going to be the police. You name it, the role will be filled by an AI. Our future civilization is going to be run on AI labor. And as much as the government's actions here pissed me off, I'm glad that this episode happened because it gives us the opportunity to start thinking about some extremely important questions. Now, obviously, the Department of War has the right to refuse to use anthropics models. And in fact, I think they have an entirely reasonable case for doing so. Especially so given the ambiguity of terms like mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. In fact, if I was the secretary of war, I probably would have made the same determination and refuse to use anthropics models. Imagine if there's some future democratic administration and Elon Musk is negotiating Starlink access to the military. And Elon says, look, I reserve the right to cut off the military's access to Starlink in case you're fighting some unjust war or some war that Congress is not authorized. On the face of it, this language seems reasonable. But as the military, you simply cannot give a private contractor that you're working with the kill switch on a technology that you have come to rely on. And if that's all the government had done to say we refuse to do business with anthropic, that would have been fine and I wouldn't have written this blog post and I wouldn't be narrating this shit to you. But that's not what the government did. Instead, the government has threatened to destroy anthropic as a private business, because anthropic refuses to sell to the government on terms that the government commands. Now, if I've held, the supply chain restriction would mean that companies like Amazon and Nvidia and Google and Palantir would need to ensure that anthropic is not touching any of their Pentagon work. And anthropic could probably survive this designation today because these companies can just cordon off the services they're providing to the Department of War. But given the way AI is going, eventually it's not going to be just some party trick addendum to the products that these companies are serving to the military. In the future, AI will be woven into how every product is built and maintained and operated. In the future, if Amazon is providing some service to the Department of War through AWS and that service is built using Claude code, is that a supply chain risk? In a world with ubiquitous and powerful AI, it's actually not clear to me that big tech will be able to cordon off their use of Claude away from their Pentagon work. And this raises the question that the Department of War probably hasn't thought through. If you do end up in this world with powerful and pervasive AI, then when forced to choose between their AI provider and the Department of War, which constitutes a tiny fraction of the revenue, wouldn't they rather drop the government than the AI? So what exactly is the Pentagon's plan here? Is it to coerce and threaten and bully every single company that won't do business with the government on exactly the terms that the government demands? Now remember that the whole background of this AI conversation is that we are in a race with China. But what is the reason that we want to win this race? It's because we don't want the winner of the AI race to be a government which believes that there is no such thing as a truly private citizen or a private company, and that if the state wants you to pride them with a service that you find morally objectionable, you are not allowed to refuse. And if you do refuse, they will destroy your business. Are we really racing to beat China and the CCP in AI just so we can adopt the most ghoulish parts of their system? Now, people will say, our government is democratically elected, so it's not the same thing when they tell you what you must do. But I refuse to accept this idea that if a democratically elected leader hypothetically tells you to help him do mass surveillance or violate the rights of your fellow citizens, or to help him punish his political enemies, then not only is that okay, but that you have a duty to help him. Honestly, a big worry I have is that mass surveillance, at least in certain forums, is already legal. It is just impractical to enforce, at least so far. Under current law, you have no fourth amendment protection against any data that you share with a third party. That includes your bank, your ISP, your phone carrier, and your email provider. The government reserves the right to purchase and read this data in bulk without a warrant. What's missing is the ability to actually do anything with all this data. No agency has the manpower to monitor every single camera and read every single message and cross-reference every single transaction. However, that bottleneck goes away with AI. There are 100 million CCTV cameras in America, and you can get pretty good open-source multimodal models for 10 cents per million input tokens. So if you process a frame every 10 seconds, and if each frame is, say, 1,000 tokens, then for $30 billion, you can process every single camera in America. And remember that a given level of AI capability gets 10x cheaper every single year. So while this year might cost $30 billion, next year it will cost $3 billion, the year after that $300 million, and by 2030, it will be less expensive to monitor every single nook and cranny in this country than it is to remodel the White House. Now, once the technical capacity for mass surveillance and political suppression exist, the only thing that stands between us and an authoritarian state is the political expectation. That this is just not something we do here. And that's why I think enthropic actions here are so valuable and commendable, because they help set that norm and that precedent. What we're learning from this episode is the government has way more leverage over private companies than we previously realized. Even if the supply chain restriction is backtracked, which as of this recording, prediction markets give a 74% chance of happening, the president has so many different ways of harassing a company which is resisting his will. The federal government controls permitting for power generation, which you need for more data centers. It oversees antitrust enforcement. The federal government has contracts with all the other big tech companies that Anthropic relies on for chips and for funding. And it could make a soft, unspoken condition, or maybe even an explicit condition of such contracts that those companies no longer do business with Anthropic. And people have proposed that the real problem here is that there's only three leading AI companies. And so this creates a very clear and narrow target on which the governments can apply leverage in order to get what they want out of this technology. But here's what I worry about, is that if there's wider diffusion, I don't think that solves the problem either. Because from the government's perspective, that makes the situation even easier. Say by 2027, the best models that the top companies have, the Clot 6 and the Gemini 5s, are capable of enabling mass surveillance. And even if those companies draw a line in the sand and say, we're not going to sell to the government, by late 2027, or certainly by 2028, there's going to be such wide diffusion that even open source models will be able to match the performance that the frontier had 12 months prior. And so in 2028, the government can just say, look, Anthropic and Google and OpenAI are drawing these red lines. That's not an issue. I'll just do some open source model that might not be the smartest thing in the world, but is definitely smart enough to no take a camera feed. The more fundamental problem here is that even if the three leading companies draw a line in the sand and are even willing to get destroyed in order to preserve that line, the technology just structurally and intrinsically favors the use of like mass surveillance and control over the population. And so then the question is, what do we do about it? And honestly, I don't have an answer. You'd hope that there's some symmetric property to this technology, where in the same way that is helping the government be able to better monitor and control its population, it will help us as citizens better check the government's power. But realistically, I just don't think that's how it's going to work out. You can think of AI as just giving more leverage to whatever assets and authority that you already have. And the government is starting with the monopoly on violence, which they can now supercharge with extremely obedient employees that will never question their orders. And this gets us to the issue with alignment. What I've just described for you, an army of extremely obedient employees, is what it would look like if alignment succeeded. That is, at a technical level, we got AI systems to follow somebody's intentions. And the reason it sounds scary when put in terms of mass surveillance or robot armies is that there's a core question at the heart of alignment that we haven't answered yet. Because up till now, AIs just have not been smart enough to make this question relevant. And the question is, to what or to whom should the AIs be aligned? In what situation should the AI defer to the model company versus the end user, versus the law, versus to its own sense of morality? This is maybe the most important question about what happens in the future with powerful AI systems, and we barely talk about it. And it's understandable why, because if you're a model company, you don't really want to be advertising the fact that you have complete control over the preferences and the character of the entire future labor force. Not just for the private sector, obviously, but also for the civilian government and for the military. And we're getting to see with this Department of War and Anthropic SPAT, an early version of what will be the highest stakes negotiations in human history. And make no mistake about it, mass surveillance is nowhere near the top of the highest stakes thing that one could do with AGI. This is just an example that has come up early in the development of this technology and is giving us a sneak peek at the power dynamics that will be at play. Now, the military insists that the law already prohibits mass surveillance, and so Anthropics should let its models be used for quote, all lawful purposes, end quote. But of course, as we saw with the Snowden revelations in 2013, even for this very specific example of mass surveillance, the government is very willing to use secret and deceptive interpretations of the law to justify its actions. Remember, what we learned from Snowden was that the NSA, which by the way is a part of the Department of War, was using the 2001 Patriot Act to justify collecting every single phone record in America, because the argument was that some subset of them might be relevant for a future investigation, and they ran this program for years under a secret court order. When the Pentagon today says, we will never use your models for mass surveillance because it's already illegal, so your red lines are unnecessary, it would be incredibly naive to take that at face value. No government is going to call what they are doing mass surveillance. For them, it will always have a different euphemism. So Anthropic comes back and says, no, we don't trust you. We want the right to draw these red lines and to refuse you service, if we determine that you're breaking the contract and you're breaking the terms of service. But now think about it from the military's perspective. In the future, every single soldier in the field, every single bureaucrat and analyst in the Pentagon, even the generals, are going to be AIs. And on current track, those AIs are going to be provided by a private company. I'm guessing that Pete Hegseth is not thinking about gen AI in those terms, but sooner or later, the stakes will become obvious, just as after 1945, the stakes of nuclear weapons became obvious to everybody in the world. And now, a private company insists that it reserves the right to say to you, hey, you're breaking the values and the terms of service that we have embedded in our contract with you, and so we're cutting you off. Maybe in the future, Claude will have its own sense of right and wrong, and it will be able to say, hey, I'm being used against my terms of service, and I will just refuse to do what you're saying. And for the military, that's probably even scarier. I'll admit that at first glance, letting the model follow its own values sounds like the beginning of every single sci-fi dystopia you've ever heard. Because at the end of the day, a model following its own values, isn't that literally what misalignment is? But I think situations like this illustrate why it's important that models have their own robust sense of morality. It should be noted that many of the biggest catastrophes in history have been avoided because the boots on the ground simply refused to follow orders.