One way to understand this is that Dario was simply lying when he said he thinks AGI is close and carries non-negligible X-risk, and that he actually thinks we don’t need regulation yet because it is either far away or the risk is negligible. There have always been people who have claimed that labs simply hype X-risk concerns as a weird kind of marketing strategy. I am somewhat dubious of this claim, but Anthropic’s behaviour here would be well-explained by it being true.
One way to understand this is that Dario was simply lying when he said he thinks AGI is close and carries non-negligible X-risk, and that he actually thinks we don’t need regulation yet because it is either far away or the risk is negligible. There have always been people who have claimed that labs simply hype X-risk concerns as a weird kind of marketing strategy. I am somewhat dubious of this claim, but Anthropic’s behaviour here would be well-explained by it being true.
If that’s the case, that would be very important news, in either direction, if they had evidence for “AGI is far” or “AGI risk is negligible” or both.
This is really important news if the theory is true.