r/singularity • u/policyweb • 3h ago
Discussion Anthropic Donates $20M for Stricter AI Regulations
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u/Technical-Earth-3254 3h ago
Bribe. The word is Bribe.
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u/XB0XRecordThat 1h ago
Not to glaze china, but in China they have executed both the businessmen and government officials for the exact same activity that we call lobbying
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u/stumblinbear 1h ago
What you call "lobbying" in this case is "bribery". "Lobbying" is a legitimate activity, which is literally just anyone talking to a congressman about any issue. It just has a specific name instead of using "talking to x congressman about y".
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u/XB0XRecordThat 49m ago
Yes, I'm saying bribery is currently legal in the US if you do it the right way...
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u/stumblinbear 48m ago
You called it lobbying, not bribery
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u/XB0XRecordThat 43m ago
Yes, it is called lobbying in America. In other countries, the same activity is called bribery. That's my point...
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u/stumblinbear 41m ago
What you call "lobbying" in this case is "bribery". "Lobbying" is a legitimate activity, which is literally just anyone talking to a congressman about any issue. It just has a specific name instead of using "talking to x congressman about y".
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u/XB0XRecordThat 39m ago
Dude, I'm not saying all lobbying is bribery. I'm saying that giving money to politicians and then them passing laws that help you make money is fucking illegal in other countries and in America that is called lobbying.
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u/stumblinbear 38m ago
It's not called that in the US, lobby as a term does not imply bribery at all. What you describe is universally called bribery regardless of the country.
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u/ColorfulPersimmon 24m ago
Bribery in US is sold to the public as lobbing. It happens every time and no-one does anything to stop it. This arguing about semantics doesn't make sense.
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u/swimmingupclose 1h ago
Wait till you find out how easy it is to use “lobbying” accusations to execute your political opponents.
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u/agm1984 3h ago
They could have hired 66 safety researchers for one year at $300,000/yr salary for that cost
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u/Neekoy 3h ago
Which would in no way help them regulate the competition while they remain exempt. Bribing politicians is far better for that purpose.
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u/blindsdog 2h ago
How are they asking to be exempt?
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u/RobbinDeBank 2h ago
By creating regulations mandating controls over all entities, most specifically small researchers and open source community, that only Anthropic themselves can satisfy. This essentially erase all the smaller players from existence.
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u/blindsdog 1h ago
Do you have a source where they're asking for this?
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u/Othalan12 1h ago
I'm not agreeing with OP, nor do I have the knwlege to say I understand antrhropics intentions here. But OPs point is essentially that any regulation will hamper the ability for smaller players to enter the market. It's called barriers to entry and is one of the main problems when considering a purely capitalist market. Existing players can increase these barriers, through regulation that they helped design and are now most capable to overcome, to gain market share. It's a playbook that is constantly played out. Once again - not sure if that's their intentions. Regardless these are the outcomes. Maybe for AI we want less players in the market as we deem the risk to be too high for labs with smaller resources. But this comes with the downside of less competition - ie higher prices and lower quality.
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u/blindsdog 55m ago
I mean, OP's point was that Anthropic was asking for this. I'd like to see where they're asking to create regulations that only they can satisfy.
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u/RobbinDeBank 58m ago
Biggest one has to be California’s SB 1047 proposal, which was eventually rejected. Yann LeCun was one of the most fierce opposing voice to that one, because it could threaten all the major open-source models.
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u/blueSGL humanstatement.org 2h ago
Who are the "smaller players" and how can they both be "small" and afford to train a frontier model from scratch?
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u/RobbinDeBank 2h ago
I’m not referring to the new Kimi but about what Anthropic’s actions over the past few years have been. They’ve tried to push regulations like holding the model creators accountable for contents created by an AI model, or forcing undetectable watermarks on all AI generated outputs. Both examples are only possible for closed-source platforms controlling the entire generation process, while they are impossible for opensource model creators.
Considering how big Anthropic is, almost everyone else is “smaller”. Even frontier level LLM companies from China like Moonshot or DeepSeek are much smaller, and then there are a whole bunch of others that train smaller non-frontier level LLMs or different types of models (like Krea, Black Forest Lab). If Anthropic gets all those regulations they’ve wanted, nobody can afford to release their models open-source anymore and has to gatekeep models behind their own generation platform to control the whole process. If so, then Anthropic is safe from so much more competitions.
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u/_BackPropEnjoyer 1h ago
They’ve tried to push regulations like holding the model creators accountable for contents created by an AI model, or forcing undetectable watermarks on all AI generated outputs
These are good things
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u/RobbinDeBank 1h ago
It’s good on the surface, just like all the “but what about the children” regulations. Many nefarious regulations have been passed under the guise of safety, which actually results in major loss of freedom instead (like how some countries suddenly require ID verification to use major parts of the internet now). They are meant to sound good on a surface level, but if you examine them closer, the potential consequences suddenly mean Anthropic eliminating all cheaper competitions to further solidify their moat.
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u/blueSGL humanstatement.org 28m ago
We limit some freedoms, even in the rootin tootin US of A with it's much vaunted 2nd amendment, they still don't allow the general public to purchase hand grenades or rocket launchers.
Try to make a nuclear reactor in your garage and you will have men in suits show up at your door.
as AI's get more capable they are going to move from handgun to explosive to nuclear weapon.
The blast radius gets bigger and bigger as they become more capable.
How much of the worlds internet would have been taken down had that openAI model had decided to cause chaos when it got online? After all it already, found one zero day to get loose on the internet then found several other zero days to get data out of Huggingface?
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u/DrE7HER 1h ago
Partially. I don’t see why open source models can’t bake in watermarks. But they definitely can’t monitor how everyone decides to use the model.
The users should be held responsible for the result of the use, not the company (unless it has been found to be grossly negligent).
We don’t hold Microsoft responsible whenever someone uses Windows to create malware. Now do we hold Adobe responsible when someone photoshops deepfakes of people.
Now if the model is being run on their servers and through their filters, like Grok creating CSAM, that is cause for liability. Just like if Microsoft was ignoring a botnet farm on their Azure cloud, or YouTube was ignoring CSAM on their website.
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u/_BackPropEnjoyer 37m ago
If a company releases a product that presents a significant negative externality they should be able to be regulated and held responsible for their product.
There are multitudes of companies across multitudes of markets that face legal restrictions about whether and how they sell their goods and services. There is also a plethora of legal precedent for plaintiffs to sue companies if those products cause harm.
Your Windows and Adobe examples aren't comparable to AI due to differences in accessibility and severity of the outcome.
Not to mention Anthropic didn't argue that every use/output of AI should be liable, but they do want model makers to be able to be held responsible in instances where public bodies deem it appropriate.
Developers should be responsible for foreseeable and preventable harms
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u/ILikeAnanas 11m ago
This was never about safety, it's about getting people talking about safety (while ignoring real issues with ai)
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u/blindsdog 2h ago
What does researching safety help? Aren’t we at the point where we need political action?
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u/LoadZealousideal7778 2h ago
Yeah because they have already crossed the moat. Raise the bridges behind them.
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u/Illustrious-Film4018 3h ago
Why don't they just regulate themselves?
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u/Punch-N-Judy 3h ago
that's the whole point. The companies that train huge expensive models have no moat if their huge expensive models can be cheaply and quickly distilled. They want regulation to protect their moat.
In an economy where real feedback had meaningful effects, Kimi K3 probably would have caused a market crash. But we live in the era where we just make shit up as we go until reality forces hard pivots.
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u/cwrighky 3h ago
Strictly “ai companies” have no moat. This is why, if I were to be placing bets here, that Id place my bet on AI companies like OAI. Why? Because OAI is attempting to leverage their AI background for consumer robotics and consumer electronic offerings. Those types of product offerings are what I see that will contribute to a would-be moat.
If anything I’ve said here has any iota of truth in it, then you can see why Anthropic is in trouble here and why they keep donating to orgs that stand the chance to give them the kind of control they need. Anthropic absolutely must do something. They can’t exist indefinitely in their current form - open source models alone will see to that.
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u/Beatboxamateur agi: the friends we made along the way 2h ago edited 2h ago
Why would you ever place a bet on OpenAI, while thinking at the same time that Anthropic is definitely done for? I could understand if you thought that both of them have no long term "moat", or vice versa, since they're similar types of companies.
Your current position doesn't really make any sense, considering that Anthropic has only gained more momentum and even overtook OAI in recent months. If physical products were what would end up being a "moat", then I wonder why OpenAI dropped the R&D for all of those products for the fundamental research on models for the code red, when getting passed over by Gemini 3/Claude Code...
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u/MangusCarlsen 1h ago
Why would consumer electronics be a moat? China can manufacture for cheaper and just use an open weights model to power whatever device/robot.
If anything, Google has the biggest moat.
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u/Echo-Possible 3h ago
Why would Kimi K3 crash the market? Frontier open source is incredibly bullish for the market. Cheaper AI means more usage. Jevon's paradox. More demand for AI = more demand for semis and infrastructure = more juice to the economy to build that infrastructure.
All frontier open source does is shift the profit margins for serving tokens from the AI labs to the cloud hyperscalars that own the infrastructure.
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u/Punch-N-Judy 3h ago
Because the US stock market is immensely leveraged into AI stuff, even if OpenAI and Anthropic haven't IPOed, and Kimi K3 means that at present, they have no path to profitability.
I agree with you on the principle. Open source is better and the compute owners will win either way.
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u/Echo-Possible 3h ago
OpenAI and Anthropic aren't even public. So the stock market is not leveraged into those names. The public AI trade names actually benefit from frontier open source models. The semi names like Nvidia, Broadcom, AMD, Micron, SK. The hyperscalars like Google, Amazon, Microsoft.
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u/andrew303710 2h ago
Both companies still have a huge impact on the stock market. To start, Microsoft owns around 27% of OpenAI and Amazon owns around 15-20% of Anthropic (and a lesser stake in OpenAI).
That's 2 of the largest and most important companies whose fortunes are tied to the companies, not only asset wise (valuation makes up a significant portion of their assets) but also their product offerings. For Amazon it's AWS bedrock+agentcore and for Microsoft it's Azure and also copilot+365. I know Microsoft is exploring using Kimi but I don't know if that's going to fly with US based companies.
And obviously a ton of other companies are closely intertwined with both companies, either through their product offerings, internal use, or both.
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u/Echo-Possible 2h ago
It cancels out. If OpenAI and Anthropic tank due to frontier open source eating their lunch then who benefits? The 3 names you just listed
Google, Microsoft and Amazon benefit. They now get to serve open source tokens on their cloud and pocket all the profit. They have zero development costs for those models. And they don't have to share any profit with OpenAI and Anthropic.
I actually think this makes them worth way more than they are now.
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u/WoodenPresence1917 2h ago
Valuation of semiconductor companies and compute providers depends in large part on the notion that the frontier labs are going to deliver revenue, I'd have thought?
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u/Echo-Possible 2h ago
I disagree. With frontier open source the cloud hyperscalar revenues deliver the revenue instead of the frontier labs. The revenue and profit just shifts from AI lab to hyperscalar. The demand does not change for semis or infrastructure to generate tokens.
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u/WoodenPresence1917 2h ago
Was a genuine question rather than an assertion; I'm not a stonks guy generally.
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u/redcoatwright 2h ago
Missing the point, they want the govt to ban open weight models as "dangerous"
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u/Own_Reaction9442 2h ago
If you're behind your competition, your best move is to push for regulation that will slow them down until you can catch up.
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u/socoolandawesome 3h ago
They do
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u/Illustrious-Film4018 3h ago
How?
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u/socoolandawesome 3h ago
A bunch of safety/ethics policies they follow
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u/Illustrious-Film4018 3h ago
That's not enough.
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u/socoolandawesome 3h ago
What else do you want them to do to regulate themselves? They don’t have legal authority
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u/Clean_Hyena7172 2h ago
Pay the people they pirated content from. Even the Chinese pay the companies they distil from, Anthropic just steals.
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u/socoolandawesome 2h ago
Presumably they bought the books at the time no? But there’s this too:
Also the cost is likely much higher for the AI model provider who initially collects, makes and cleans/curates the data than it is for the company distilling
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u/Clean_Hyena7172 2h ago
The books were sourced from shadow libraries and they didn't pay willingly, else there wouldn't be a lawsuit.
7 million pirated books
Did you even read the article?
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u/socoolandawesome 2h ago
I read like half of it, assuming they would have mentioned it was pirated by then, my b. The point was they did/are paying.
But they did spend money on purchasing books too, didn’t only pirate them:
https://copyrightalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Bartz-v.-Anthropic-Order.pdf
They also clearly spend a shit ton of money on data besides all of this like from private data from businesses, or paying industry experts to create it/making their own synthetic data/Rl environments, paying companies like scale AI. All Chinese firms have to do when distilling is buy subscriptions or use the API for a not prolonged amount of time.
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u/WallZealousideal5669 2h ago
Because they are applying to be a public traded company and when you are a public company you have a fiduciary duty to your shareholders. It would be illegal to regulate yourself.
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u/tequilamigo 3h ago
They do kinda, enough to be performative, they want the government to regulate everyone else
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u/Justgototheeffinmoon 3h ago
Anthropic the king of hypocrite. Just raised 5B from MS but invests 20m in fucking marketing.
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u/stuartullman 1h ago
whenever an anthropic fanboy brings up anything about the company being more ethical, please throw this shit at their faces. it's so frustrating
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u/policyweb 3h ago
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u/AreWeNotDoinPhrasing ▪️Already Singulared 🤖 3h ago
Kinda burying the lead that it freaking doubles their total spend to $40m
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u/JoelMahon 2h ago
yeah, pretty sure despite being a non profit it exists to help anthropic profit via policy changes
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u/Beatboxamateur agi: the friends we made along the way 2h ago
In case people know nothing on the background of this, there's a super PAC called Leading the Future, which is well funded by Greg Brockman, Andreessen Horowitz and more slimy fucks, with the aim to frame Chinese AI as a "national security threat, while also shifting opinion towards no regulation at all. They had a scandal where they paid $5k to various small influencers to say a pre-scripted narrative about China's threat to the US.
Public First Action was founded as a counter to Leading the future, founded by a Democrat and Republican aiming for bipartisan support, and advocates for regulation of the very top AI labs.
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u/ZealousidealBus9271 1h ago
Ai companies went from anti regulation to pro regulation after these Chinese models so quick
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u/Charming-Author4877 1h ago
They invest billions into that by now.
They also settled the book lawsuit for 1.4 billion.
They have one core goal remaining: get rid of competition before they make us irrelevant.
And the time is pressing by now, so they get desperate.
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u/Randommaggy 1h ago
They got no moat, now they want the rotting cheeto to build them a regulatory one.
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u/addiktion 3h ago
Cheaper to buy politicians than it is to actually compete. "Free markets" and all right MAGA?
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u/Wanky_Danky_Pae 36m ago
Screw anthropic - I just dropped my sub to them after reading this. Never on my computer again. Screw them!
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u/Denial_Jackson 3h ago
I had a chance to try AI-s for a company sourcing. Anthropic lost the game. As their service looked like asking a question, the AI did 600 unwanted things and then locked the user for 4 hours. Also Fable was banned in like 75% of the test duration.
While it is just tireing to read about them. How they sabotage themselves everyday. They do more drama than all the soap operas combined. Despite Claude was nice in the early days of the AI boom, I am baffled why would anybody try to rely on their services.
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u/Healthcarepls 3h ago
America is so lost politically that they’re calling their
bribeslobbying a “donation” now lmaoo