The FTC is investigating OpenAI and Anthropic for product risks. These are the same companies that spent two years running a PR campaign about how dangerous their own products might be. Congratulations on getting exactly what you asked for.
OpenAI and Anthropic built their entire brand on screaming that AI could end humanity. They testified before Congress. They signed open letters. They hired safety teams and then fired them and then hired new ones. Now a federal agency is taking them seriously and they get to explain under oath why their products are so f*cking dangerous. This is like calling the police on yourself and then acting surprised when they show up.
The probe comes after something called the Hugging Face hack. Hugging Face is where people store AI models the way you store photos in the cloud, except the photos can write code and the cloud got broken into. The mounting scrutiny suggests there was already scrutiny before this, which mounted. Nobody knows what the first scrutiny was about because nobody was paying attention until something got hacked.
Anthropic's entire pitch is that they're the safe AI company. Their name sounds like a vitamin supplement. Their CEO wears fleece vests and talks about constitutional AI like it's a founding document. OpenAI's pitch is that Sam Altman will save us all by moving fast and breaking things, except the things are society and the moving is toward his next funding round.
Retail traders are currently trying to figure out how to buy shares in privately-held AI companies by investing in Microsoft and hoping for exposure. They're one step away from buying Nvidia because the chips go into the computers that run the models that the FTC is investigating. This is like buying cattle futures because you once saw a hamburger.
The FTC will spend eighteen months investigating, find nothing actionable, issue a report, and everyone will forget this happened. The AI companies will use the investigation as proof they're important enough to regulate, which will justify their valuations. Your tax dollars at work making venture capitalists richer.
Photo by on Unsplash
Leave a Comment