There was a hot debate recently but regardless, the bottom line is just “RSPs should probably be interpreted literally and nothing else. If a literal statement is not strictly there, it should be assumed it’s not a commitment.”
I’ve not seen people doing very literal interpretation on those so I just wanted to emphasize that point.
I currently think Anthropic didn’t “explicitly publicly commit” to not advance the rate of capabilities progress. But, I do think they made deceptive statements about it, and when I complain about Anthropic I am complaining about deception, not “failing to uphold literal commitments.”
I’m not talking about the RSPs because the writing and conversations I’m talking about came before that. I agree that the RSP is more likely to be a good predictor of what they’ll actually do.
I think most of the generator for this was more like “in person conversations”, at least one of which was between Dario and Dustin Moswkowitz:
The most explicit public statement I know is from this blogpost (which I agree is not an explicit commitment, but, I do think
Capabilities: AI research aimed at making AI systems generally better at any sort of task, including writing, image processing or generation, game playing, etc. Research that makes large language models more efficient, or that improves reinforcement learning algorithms, would fall under this heading. Capabilities work generates and improves on the models that we investigate and utilize in our alignment research. We generally don’t publish this kind of work because we do not wish to advance the rate of AI capabilities progress. In addition, we aim to be thoughtful about demonstrations of frontier capabilities (even without publication). We trained the first version of our headline model, Claude, in the spring of 2022, and decided to prioritize using it for safety research rather than public deployments. We’ve subsequently begun deploying Claude now that the gap between it and the public state of the art is smaller.
This debate comes from before the RSP so I don’t actually think that’s cruxy. Will try to dig up an older post.
There was a hot debate recently but regardless, the bottom line is just “RSPs should probably be interpreted literally and nothing else. If a literal statement is not strictly there, it should be assumed it’s not a commitment.”
I’ve not seen people doing very literal interpretation on those so I just wanted to emphasize that point.
I currently think Anthropic didn’t “explicitly publicly commit” to not advance the rate of capabilities progress. But, I do think they made deceptive statements about it, and when I complain about Anthropic I am complaining about deception, not “failing to uphold literal commitments.”
I’m not talking about the RSPs because the writing and conversations I’m talking about came before that. I agree that the RSP is more likely to be a good predictor of what they’ll actually do.
I think most of the generator for this was more like “in person conversations”, at least one of which was between Dario and Dustin Moswkowitz:
The most explicit public statement I know is from this blogpost (which I agree is not an explicit commitment, but, I do think
If you wanna reread the debate, you can scroll through this thread (https://x.com/bshlgrs/status/1764701597727416448).