We're potentially approaching an omelas moment with AI. Where a bright future may cost significant human lives (some say all of humanity). To put this into perspective, we analyzed human conflict for the G20 countries (via Wikipedia) and plotted the last 10 centuries of deaths - from revolution, war, famine, and pandemics. It's interactive. Comments welcome.
Ultimately I think artificial scarcity/limited production for products offered online is a futile and erroneous venture. The bots exist because the product is valuable. The product is valuable because it's artificially limited.
There's a niche market for certain player's sneakers. If Nike services them at a price point (e.g. $200 base) then people can keep buying from Nike and will buy the next version.
If instead some sneakerbot takes ALL the consumer surplus (buys for $200, resells for $1000) yes that is the actual demand curve but it hurts NIKE'S business and the consumer.
Nike can make them not worth $1000 and get more revenue by selling more shoes. They are actively shooting themselves in the foot by putting resellers over real customers.
yes, but people will only pay up to a certain price for a sneaker if they are not collectors and only consumers. and as we now see, a shoe business is not running that well, if it mainly caters to resellers and collectors.
i can remember a few instances about 5 years ago when I was really interested in a nike shoe "drop", but didnt win in the shoe lottery to purchase the show. the result? i just stopped looking at Nikes completely.
Non-collectors don't need what the bots are buying, they can just go to the store and get normal sneakers. I don't see how limited edition shoe scalping affects the normal market at all.
I don't bother buying Nike's because every time I see a pair I like online, it turns out they're "collectibles" and sold out instantly.
Yeah, I can go and buy a pair of black Nikes in any shop today. But even though they make lots of variety, they never seem to make it in enough volume that I can buy it. I'm not interested in being a collector - I just want shoes that aren't black, white or grey.
So I shoes from companies that don't have as much weird hype around them.
Its fine if you are targeting rich people. It doesn't work if you are targeting (relatively) poor people. You can't have both scarsity and low prices, something has to give.
There's more to athletic wear than shoes. Competition like Lululemon, Vuori, Athleta, etc. suggest to me that Nike didn't expand their business broadly enough.
not sneakebots but competition coupled with failure of nike to modernize past airjordan brand. nike was riding hiding when you alternatives were reebok and new balance. now there are a lot more brands and they leave nike in the dust. my 13-year old athlete
- does not know who “jordan” is
- called me a boomer when I suggested to buy her nike shoes I liked for the upcoming season
If I'm reading that correctly, then 59% of them claim to plan to use AI, 11% of them claim to use AI and 0 of the AI buyers (absolute number) claim that AI pays for its costs.
Is it really that? AI is still heavily subsidized.
Apollo (credit) notes that AI isn't showing up in the bottom line of any companies besides the ones making it right now.
This isn't concerning for such a new technology, but if the trend continues it would be fatal.
Imagine how many businesses benefitted from the railroads at first - almost none because no one had freight to ship. Same kind of thing - the connective tissue is taking time.
But the catastrophic adoption of the technology could be what leads to its downfall.
Realistically, they're worse than a central bank, because they can't exactly expand supply monotonically like a normal central bank. Nor do they realistically control rates.
The bioweapons threat is real, but shouldn't be constrained at the 'intelligence' level. Rather it should be constrained at the supply chain level.
The cybersecurity threat will likely be a cat and mouse react game for a while. Just like robberies / the mob was in the early 20th century.
Social forces bring things into balance over time, much more so than the proactive actions of individuals.
Unfortunately, the genie at this point is unlikely to go back into the bottle. There's enough 'intelligence' out there that a super intelligent model could emerge at some point in spite of pacing.
This isn't a doomer scenario - we tend to navigate social changes better than we ever could have hoped.
What supply chain controls can you have on biotech? Part of the problem is that you can do a lot of damage with ingredients you can buy over the counter or make at home.
And all of this information has been available on the open web way before LLMs.
I'd wager it's likely easier for an average person to do this with Tor browser than it is to get an LLM to help them with it. Even ones that Dario calls dangerous.
So what's the fuss about then? Is the idea that a Chinese company will release a model that will have no safeguards? For what purpose?
Basic safeguards are all that's required, and they've been there in every usable model since GPT-2, including Chinese models that are supposedly "unsafe".
Or are we saying that some lunatics will start training their own models, spin up a GPU cluster, run some abliteration workflow, or learn how to jailbreak?
That would be a very dedicated person. And dedicated person doesn't need an LLM. So where are they?
Yes, that is exactly Dario's concern. Either one of the US labs or one of the Chinese ones will eventually release something with insufficient safety controls for its power level because it gives them slightly better user retention (look how much complaining there is about current frontier models, especially Fable, rejecting requests). Regulation or consortium is how you avoid the prisoner's dilemma.
As long as user provides inputs and LLMs stay LLMs, you can waltz through any guardrail. Fable is the extreme case, but it's not that hard if you know what you're doing and know how LLMs and their guardrails work.
Am I saying that guardrails don't work? No, they probably stop a lot of insane people trying insane things. But you don't need Fable-level guardrails to do that. You probably don't even need to do anything during pretraining, or RL, or classification to make sure model refuses to compy with "hack me a bank" or "make me a chemical weapon".
All models will automatically have guardrails just as a result of training on data that gives them intelligence. You have to actually train it to be malicious to produce something what Dario calls "insufficient guardrails".
No guardrail is going to stop a determined person with sufficient intelligence. It only has to stop ones with insufficient one, and even basic guardrail that are just by-product of training is going to achieve that.
The bioweapons argument is one of the favorites used by these con artists and dreamed up by their PR team.
Except Bioweapons already existed before LLMs, Adversarial governments already have them, they are already easy to make. You could use the same bullshit argument for why we need to ban libraries, books, or require a license to buy an internet connection.
An undergrad bio student with some lab experience can do some effing terrifying things with about $20k in equipment and time and access to some papers and a library. AI is not needed, but it might help accelerate the research.
Not going to go into it but I studied biology. It’s all out there. It’s easier than you think.
It hasn’t happened yet because… nobody has done it. That’s the answer. There is no policeable physics based barrier like there is with nukes and fissile material. Biology is scarier than nukes. One attack could have a much larger body count than even a big H-bomb.
It’s the kind of thing that makes me wonder about quantum immortality, the idea that we are just in the timeline where we exist.
I love watching NileRed/NileBlue on youtube - crazy chemist that does a lot of insane stuff. While it's obvious that he's very smart and probably way above the average, his education is still nothing that probably millions of people don't have:
> Bachelor of Science degree in biochemistry with a minor in pharmacology
Watching him explain things has made me realize that knowing how to manufacture a very dangerous thing probably requires attending some classes and knowing how to read a paper. And the way he just casually orders dangerous materials makes me feel like there are just online stores with 2-day shipping after you upload your ID or something.
It also made me think that lack of specialized education would get me nowhere if I wanted to replicate whatever he's doing, even if an LLM guided me step-by-step, because I'd probably do something stupid (or AI would miss a crucial instruction/hallucinate) and kill myself first.
So my opinion on this is that people who could pose any danger were already posing it before LLMs and LLMs won't materially change that.
The bioweapons concern is assuming that the current open models aren't already capable of bioweapons development. It's also assuming that halting the bioweapons threat is his true intention rather than the 'feels legit' story.
As for cyberweapons, there is no way to secure a system than to actually design it securely.
It's not. I think they believe this, but it's deeply wrong and it will hurt everyone in the long run.
[note - There has been supply chain surveillance since Project Bacchus, at the very least.]
I've read the front matter and the Misuse report.
You don't have to take my word for it. Read for yourself what inspired the NYT headline "Anthropic says it blocked possible efforts to build biological weapons."
Let's dig into, "Case study 2: A research program engineering highly pathogenic mammal-adapted avian influenza"
Sounds serious. But what were they using Claude for?
> a researcher outside the US using Claude in their research on highly-pathogenic avian influenza (“bird flu”). The research focused on viruses’ adaptation to mammals, and the mechanism by which it causes severe disease beyond the respiratory tract. [..] The researcher in question accessed Claude from an unsupported region via US virtual private server infrastructure, using a privacy-email provider with an auto-generated username. The researcher pursued this work in a credible institutional context, and interacted with Claude over the course of several weeks, exchanging thousands of messages. In these exchanges, the researcher leveraged Claude’s knowledge of the scientific literature to assist the researcher in study planning and design, data analysis, and the interpretation and prioritization of experiments. The researcher also used Claude for editorial assistance in writing up the research.
Note, "Claude’s [assisted] in study planning and design, data analysis, and the interpretation and prioritization of experiments"
and "editorial assistance in writing up the research."
and then,
> Importantly, because our biological safety classifiers robustly block content involving high-risk biological research (in this case, the construction of enhanced pandemic potential pathogens), all of these exchanges occurred on models in our weakest class of models (specifically, the models were Claude Sonnet 4 and Haiku 4.5, the latter of which the user began using after Sonnet 4 was deprecated). Upon a detailed examination of the exchanges, we estimate that the uplift provided by Claude was primarily clerical assistance in data analysis, study ideation and design. This is consistent with our understanding of the capabilities of Sonnet 4 and Haiku 4.5, which are not able to perform expert-level biology research tasks; we estimate that the uplift provided to the researcher was limited and substantially lower than it would have been from one of our more capable models.
Anthropic then says for the above, "we estimate that the uplift provided by Claude was primarily clerical assistance in data analysis, study ideation and design"
The report mentions "uplift" here. They're talking about a domain expert in a state research institution using Claude to do paperwork.
The front matter then says,
> Nonetheless, based on these exchanges, this case provides evidence of the existence of active wet-lab research programs that develop both the knowhow and the biological materials needed to create pathogens of enhanced pandemic potential
Once again, I want to take pains to remind you that they're talking about, a "researcher [..] in a credible institutional context"
Working scientists.
From a different case study. this one was called, "Case study 3: Covert frontier model access for orthopoxvirus research"
> In May 2026, our biological safety classifier blocked a request for Claude’s assistance in authoring a grant application for scientific funding. The work discussed in the application involved gain-of-function research (that is, research that genetically alters an organism to create a new or enhanced biological property) on the chikungunya virus. This gain of function research was aimed at the virus’ transmissibility and immune evasion properties.
What were the researchers using Claude for? What did they block?
"blocked a request for Claude’s assistance in authoring a grant application"
> Chikungunya virus is a mosquito-borne virus that causes debilitating symptoms (such as severe pain and fever) that can last for weeks or months, and has no licensed therapeutic. And because chikungunya circulates naturally, a deliberate release (as part of a bioweapon) would be difficult to distinguish from a natural outbreak. The grant sought to identify enhancing mutations in the chikungunya virus, engineer them into infectious clones, and select for virulence in vivo. In other words, the virus would become progressively more harmful as it repeatedly infected live animals, with researchers keeping the most disease-causing variants in each round. Similar research could certainly be used in the development of better vaccines and therapeutics for the virus—but it could also be used to make the pathogen more dangerous.
What was the grant being written?
Note, "The grant sought to identify enhancing mutations in the chikungunya virus, engineer them into infectious clones, and select for virulence in vivo" [..] and then, "Similar research could certainly be used in the development of better vaccines and therapeutics"
It was most likely vaccine development. They stopped the study of a neglected tropical disease and vaccine development.
But we can't be sure, because,
> One of the reasons we were inclined to think this research was less innocuous was that the institutional affiliation associated with the grant was also a cause of concern. Although information within the application suggested that the research was pursued by civilian researchers, it was intended to be performed at a military research institute.
I would like to point out the most notable part, this account was used by "civilian researchers" at an "institutional affiliation associated with the grant was also a cause of concern" and the concern was that they were researchers at "performed at a military research institute."
In most parts of the world, there's either strict military control over BSL-4 labs, or a mixed military-civilian hybrid model.
I doubt that researchers working in the military side of these labs looking to weaponize things are writing grants with Claude.
I really want to be charitable here, but in general, it seems that they stopped people writing grants and reports for vaccine and therapeutics research and are claiming it as "possible efforts to build biological weapons."
The one case where Claude was used to do something interesting and were stopped is fairly upsetting to read, at least for me.
> In our fourth case study, a researcher used Claude to develop an atlas of venom toxin peptides from multiple venomous animal lineages. They then further developed this into a generative pipeline that optimized toxin characteristics. The program had an explicit therapeutic goal: the development of new analgesics (pain killers), antidepressants, and other therapeutic molecules. However, the atlas contained scaffolds for both analgesic and paralytic targets: it could, therefore, be used to generate both novel therapeutic or harmful compounds. The latter are derived from toxins that are export-controlled under the Australia Group common control list due to their dual-use potential as incapacitating agents. The researchers themselves showed awareness of the dual-use nature of their work, citing journal articles that referred to the dual-use nature of protein design. Moreover, international compliance assessments for this location raise concerns about the specific class of toxins that the researcher pursued and specifically the use of AI/ML for bioweapons applications in the context of this class of toxins. In this case, we learned from information shared with Claude that the researcher’s outputs also were part of a state-supported research program. This account was banned in May 2026 for unsupported region evasion.
Ozempic was isolated from Gila monster vneom. Since its success there has been interest in finding other peptides that are breakthroughs. So researchers around the world are looking for similarly beneficial compounds in different venom species and families.
Anthropic says so itself,
"The program had an explicit therapeutic goal: the development of new analgesics (pain killers), antidepressants, and other therapeutic molecules"
and that it was a "[..]state-supported research program"
Who exactly is using venom from snakes as a weapon when... nerve agents like sarin, VX, novichok etc exist and can get the job done for less fuss and muss?
They stopped the development of new painkillers and antidepressants.
Are you feeling safer knowing that researchers can't use Claude to write grants and progress reports? Or make new painkillers?
Again, trying really hard to be charitable here. Because from what I remember, one of the motivations behind the founding of OpenAI and Anthropic was ending disease.
I think if anything waymo, robot taxi is doomed. Self driving ever matures to private car ownership will to car share to subsidize costs will with 1-10% utilization will basically generate more demand than non car owners will ever need - there simply isn't business model for share only fleet outside of specific low vehicle density zones. And even for private car owners, the only ones who will generate some revenue are those that work offpeak hours, i.e. they can rent their cars during surge, which will make congestion worse for all existing drivers by increasing traffic (kek). Proliferation of self driving = eventually millions of beater supply cars doing rotations for basically marginal costs killing fleet economics.
Google would probably be held 100% liable if it happened from their car.
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What I don’t get is why Waymo allows unaccompanied juvenile riders at all? That seems like a huge risk for them.
Teen accounts are supposed to be governed by the parent account.
I understand the appeal. Parents I've spoken to feel safer putting their kid in a Waymo than and Uber. And I guess the time savings of not driving them around yourself are too compelling.
As of this writing, Waymo only permits unaccompanied minors in the Metro Phoenix area. The incident occurred in San Francisco, so it seems that they should not have riding without an adult.
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