I’ve written about the concept of overresponsibility before (here and here) and those posts were received gratefully by many readers. The burden of believing you are responsible for things outside of your control is soul-crushing, and learning to explicitly reject it is freeing and life-changing.
But we mustn’t forget there are legitimate moral responsibilities. “Underresponsibility” is rife in the AI world today— it is the engine of the “AI race” logic.
I remember talking to a guy (can’t say who) who ran an effective altruist charity about this around 3 years ago, when I was just starting up PauseAI organizing. He was trying, gently at first but then more insistently, to get me to agree that I was wrong for naming the AI company CEOs in protests I organized. “It’s not about the CEOs,” he insisted, “it’s the race.” He was basically saying that the CEOs were completely interchangeable and anyone in their position would behave exactly the same because they were forced to by “race dynamics”, basically by game theory and logic itself. He thought it was harmful to name the CEOs individually because it created the idea that they had individual responsibility for what was happening instead of the real villain, what the well-known essay calls The Incentives:
The core idea is that the mere existence of perverse incentives is a valid and sufficient reason to knowingly behave in an antisocial way, just as long as one first acknowledges the existence of those perverse incentives.
I think Dario Amodei created and exported this narrative for AI scaling more than anyone else. He could not have scored bigger with propaganda.
The Nuremberg defense is: “I was just following orders.”
The Anthropic defense is: “We are better than the counterfactual.”
The Anthropic defense gave Dario complete moral license with his employees, the AI insiders, and a lot of early onlookers to do exactly what all the other AI companies were doing with no accountability while claiming to be the good guy.
It should be pretty simple to see what’s wrong with this— Anthropic is just positing that the counterfactual is whatever they say. They can do bad things because whatever evil they do doesn’t count next to this hypothetical world that they get to design as a foil. They describe AGI as “arriving” and speak of “navigating” the upcoming “transformation” as if it is predestined and not something they are working hard to make happen. Since this whole AI thing is just happening anyway, in their telling, whether or not that’s safe or consensual isn’t really on their ledger, whereas being better than OpenAI is. In this “counterfactual” world, OpenAI or China could do ANYTHING to win, so Anthropic is the good guy for doing ANYTHING minus 1. Anything is permissible as long as they can imagine something worse. It’s basically Dr. Pangloss but for evil instead of for cope.
True, the repast was mournful, and the company moistened their bread with tears; but Pangloss consoled them, assuring them that things could not be otherwise.
“For,” said he, “all that is is for the best. If there is a volcano at Lisbon it cannot be elsewhere. It is impossible that things should be other than they are; for everything is right.”
— Candide, by Voltaire
Another frequent implication of the Anthropic defense is that they shouldn’t have to give up their chance at winning the race to do the right thing, even if the world would be better off because of it, because why should they have to sacrifice if OpenAI doesn’t? They think they should only be required to stop making the problem worse by dropping out of the race if that would single-handedly solve the whole AI problem.
They spell it out pretty explicitly in their latest pamphlet:
A meaningful slowdown or pause would require multiple well-resourced labs at or near the frontier, in multiple countries, agreeing to stop under the same conditions. It would also require that each can verify that the others have actually stopped. […]
None of this is necessarily impossible in principle—the world has built verification regimes for other complex technologies (e.g., the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty)—but those regimes took decades to build both the infrastructure and the trust. We don’t have that long. A unilateral pause by one lab, by contrast, is achievable immediately, but accomplishes much less: it would change who the front-runner is, but it would not create the wider deliberative process that is currently missing.
Okay, then, accomplish “less” and stop doing active harm. It would be doing an awful lot of good. But because they can imagine a scenario whereby they do even more good by holding on to their power and literally being the problem advancing the AI frontier, according to the Anthropic defense, they have to!
The name “Anthropic” comes from a class of philosophical dilemma in which it matters who is the person in the dilemma. Basically Anthropic named themselves “main character”. The idea that they would simply do their part and stop making the situation worse by pushing the AI frontier (something they know is bad because the company promised it’s initial investors that it would not advance the frontier) is treated as out of the question. They feel entitled to be the ones to either save the world or transform it. But that’s crazy— no moral duty includes the proviso “but only as long as you get to be the star”.
This is underresponsibility. Anthropic and all the other companies that have helped themselves to Anthropic’s groundbreaking spin here are criminally underresponsible. By framing everything bad they do as “necessary” in the Panglossian sense and believing really hard that they are the good guys, Anthropic can justify anything.
You might find my latest post relatable ❤️