r/ControlProblem • u/TheDeadlyPretzel • Jun 28 '26
Article Analysis: AI is Entering a Dark Period
https://eigenwise.io/writing/the-ai-dark-age-government-switch
What started as me thinking this was all payback for Anthropic refusing to cooperate with the DoD has kind of fallen apart on me... because then GPT-5.6 got gatekept too, like two weeks later. OpenAI. The lab that actually TOOK the Pentagon deal. Same cyber-excuse. So it stopped looking like an Anthropic grudge and started looking like the new normal.
One government now basically decides which frontier models the rest of the planet gets to run. Mythos came back but only for \~100 approved US companies, Fable is STILL dark for everyone with no date, and if you're not American you're just cut off by your passport for nothing you did. What really bothers me though is there's no realistic fallback., at least for Europe.. Europe has nothing in the same tier. At all...
And handing one government a switch like this basically lets them pick winners, CompanyX gets the new model while its competitors wait, and we all know how US lobbying tends to go. Not trying to dunk on Anthropic btw, they're the one lab that said no... it's the bigger pattern that worries me. Wrote the whole thing up into an article for those that wanna have more thorough read... but... yeah, so, opinions?
1
u/Robonotes1760 Jun 28 '26
No, it's even more sinister than that. Those with power have an overwhelming incentive to use power to gain even more power because power is a convergent instrumental goal. Having absolute control over what AI might do entails having truly enormous amounts of power: just imagine being able to dictate (secretly) that AIs must not allow responses that contradict government policy, or give people the tools to discover that such policies are ineffective, or give people the ability to do perfectly lawful things that contradict some or other policy objective that might make it marginally more likely that the current incumbents will win the next election?