Anthropic's proposed AI safety bill only kicks in if 50 deaths or $1B in damages

serioussecurity

$1B is a pretty easy bar to clear.

mrtksn

On the bright side, don’t offer an exchange rate based on ethnicity or other background criteria but I get the feeling that your AI won’t be able to kill 49 billionaires without triggering something. Can probably do 49 millionaires without hitting the $1B threshold? Maybe someone will come up with a risk management SaaS as not all millionaires are the same and maybe you’ll hit the $1B before the 49th.

airstrike

The next step is demanding anyone who wishes to release a Certified Safe AI™ model to prove they can insure the $1B in damages and pass a compliance audit for how they will prevent the LTM death count from reaching 50, effectively making it so that only big labs can serve government and enterprise.

karanbhangui

so 49 totally okay.

mikeodds

I guess they solved the trolley problem internally

LoganDark

Do we even know if ChatGPT's sycophancy killed 50 people? The last figure I've seen for suicide-by-ChatGPT was like 13 or 14 cases, not sure if there have been more.

verdverm

This alleviates them from harm on the individual level, consumers and communities, we the people. We've already seen encouraged suicides and school shootings. These would not qualify. That is why the bar is set where it is. The corporate circle jerk designed this as a cost of doing business, not as a check on responsibility or restitution for real damages to people and society.

1228z

After the AISI and MAISI AI promotion institutes, let us create SISI (pronounced sissy) for investigating a super-intelligence safety bill. This is all theater, The whole Trump clan is invested in the AI bubble.

pluc

Who's keeping score? Also define "death". If a non-alive person has social media, a blog, a diary, meeting recordings, emails - we'll make it so they never left. Hell, we'll partner with Elon and Mark and a make it a deactivation hook.

pfdietz

Seems kind of low, actually.

giancarlostoro

Not sure what kicks in, but if a tiny company worth very little is destroyed by an AI hack they should be 100% liable for all damages. Why should a small business suffer because it wasnt worth a billion dollars?

10xDev

So Claude figured out a human life is worth 20 million dollars?

arw0n

This seems to be a case where Anthropic just can't win in the public court, and the other big ones (Google, Microsoft) have realized it / don't care enough, so they are rather quiet. Anthropic constantly gets accused of trying to lobby for regulation in order to lock out smaller competitors, but they've consistently lobbied for regulation aimed at frontier labs with exceptions for smaller labs. That's what this bill is about as well.

createful

All these "safety" bills are to stop open source models by painting them as "dangerous". Regulatory capture. Companies are responsible for their agents; you don't blame the car for running over the person.

aabajian

I don't think this is avoidable even at the present day. Anyone with sufficient capital could download a leading open-source model and run it on ~$10-25K hardware. They could align it to their own interest, including making a biological weapon. This law is akin to blocking Torrent downloads. Sure, you can slow them, but there will always be back channels.

Luker88

With a new model every couple of months this can only be triggered if it happens all at once. What is the average damage caused by OpenAI/Anthropic hacks? I feel like we should aim at lowering that number, not increasing it. What's the rule for fully autonomous cars? Should we allow this as unsupervised at all if we are really afraid of deaths, while there are practically no states that allow 100% autonomous cars (where we are actually afraid of deaths)? If "an independent third party registered with the Department of Commerce would periodically evaluate the lab", will this turn into an expensive certification/insurance that cuts off smaller competition (totally by mistake, I'm sure)? I am also very very sure this is most definitely not at all going to become like product certification if EU, where there are literally 2 companies certifying various standards: they police each other and a stupid electric fan can cost you tens of thousands of euros to certify.

rglover

Good to know the going rate for a soul is $20M. /s

_s_a_m_

So Anthropic is now the authority on life or death decisions? How far has the US deteriorated?

SeriousM

At least we now know that a life is worth: 20mil

woadwarrior01

If a life is only worth $20m, by their own calculus: saving > 50k lives is worth more than Anthropic. Tobacco causes ~8m deaths a year, so banning tobacco (easy intervention) should be worth ~160 Anthropic sized labs. :D