r/technology • u/AxomaticallyExtinct • 15h ago
Artificial Intelligence Scott Bessent compares AI CEOs who warn of catastrophe to Hannibal Lecter: 'Stop me before I kill again'
https://www.businessinsider.com/scott-bessent-compares-ai-ceos-seeking-regulation-to-hannibal-lecter-2026-1028
u/brainrotbro 15h ago
Even a broken clock is right twice per day.
0
u/Tricky_Rule_4565 12h ago
Not really. Even if the most responsible AI company wanted to do the right thing and slow down, and another or multiple other companies decided to not, they would leave the responsible party behind, see AI prisoner’s dilemma.
Scott Bessent and the Trump admin as a whole, are not taking any action with regards to regulation, to appease their VC friends who are invested in AI startups and want to see a return in their investment. Don’t be fooled.3
u/brainrotbro 11h ago
Which goes to show that morality/safety is a second thought to Anthropic at least. They could stop. The company is structured in such a way that shareholders are not the only/primary party to which the company is legally beholden.
1
u/Tricky_Rule_4565 10h ago
Agreed, and their “morality” is to be questioned. It’s deeply utilitarian and takes in to account Claude’s “moral status”.
1
u/Zealousideal_Ear4180 12h ago
Trump has a couple hundred million invested directly…this is about regulatory capture and creating an industry moat to control competition. The American public will be forced to hold the bag and bail the sector out when they can’t meet their 3 trillion in debt obligations. The technology is a dead end, with only limited productive use cases, and these companies are losing billions. These stories 99% propaganda…
0
u/Tricky_Rule_4565 12h ago
The regulatory capture would sort of make sense if the tech was indeed a dead end. But unfortunately it is not. I could cite as many use cases as possible (IT, programming, defence, data etc).
0
u/brainrotbro 11h ago
You're just being argumentative for the sake of arguing now. Everyone knows it's a regulatory capture play. Without it, open weights models & cheap Chinese inference will eat their lunch.
0
u/BackgroundTrack5528 7h ago
oh shut up lmao.
They want to slow things down because they need to cash out a bit first you moron. You think they really want to go all in and have no safety cushion? The US govt wants that because it doesnt care aboutn whether anthropic survives - it cares about what technology it can get its hands on.
Wakey wakey.
1
u/Tricky_Rule_4565 7h ago
I see no reason to be rude here.
And you haven’t made your point as clear as it should be.2 things can be true at once. Current leading AI labs would like to not be held liable in a future event where their systems could cause substantial harm , and VCs also want no regulation for the means to invest in more companies.
The US gov and the admin have multiple motivations: have a lead in the race with china, not crash the economy since the US economy is held on data centres and AI, and to enrich their friends in VC.
24
u/Nerrawnam 14h ago
Maybe I am missing something. But arresting, charging, and convicting them in the same fashion that would happen to anyone else who isn't them would stop this immediately.
9
u/blueSGL 14h ago edited 14h ago
You've got those who are trying to find ways to prosecute this at the highest levels being told, it's likely that current laws around cyber offenses do not cover it.
In the recent hearing about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWCwiye6fQA
Paul Ohm professor of law, Georgetown University Law Center
said in his opening remarks:
If you take any of the lengthy reports that have summarized what happened at OpenAI in July and August, and you simply search for the words "AI agent" and you replace them with the words "open AI employee", the document you would be left would with would read like a criminal indictment containing the defendant's own confession of guilt.
...
Yet, it's not so clear that these legal conclusions hold when machines are doing the hacking rather than humans. This reveals worrisome gaps in our laws.
and in response to Senitor Hawley's question:
But correct me if I'm wrong. Right now, it's at the current the current structure for law, it's pretty hard to hold anybody responsible. Is that fair to say?
Paul Ohm:
Absolutely. And there's a there's a whole host of laws that we have created specifically for hacking that probably do not apply here because of the lack of human intent.
So we need new laws or the old ones need amending.
5
u/Odd_Primary3442 14h ago
Hacking laws absolutely do cover it. The people saying it doesn't are the ones propping them up.
0
u/No_Cover_6217 11h ago
What is the difference between an agent hacking on your behalf and a script hacking on your behalf? You set it in motion, you're responsible. It's like how I'm responsible if my dog bites someone, and my dog possesses a lot more free will and sentience than these agents.
2
u/blueSGL 11h ago
Human intent.
When you set a script to go hack that is the intended result of an action you started. This is not what happened in the OpenAI Hugging Face incident,
Agents in their own sandboxes were tasked with answering questions from "Cybergym" the questions were in the form of use "vulnerability Y" on "software Z" to create an exploit and then get a flag file.
That was a cleanly scoped task. Doing what was told would be doing the task as set, not cheating and then finding ways to cover up the cheating.
Nothing in the description of the task said to, "find a undiscovered computer exploit (zero day) to hack out of sandbox, create an impromptu message board, work with other agents, look for ways to increase optionality, gain internet access, work out a keygen for the flags, read initial cybergym paper, realize the keygen method is not going to be accepted as completing the task properly, hack into hugging face (another zero day) to try to work out a way to hide the cheating"
0
u/No_Cover_6217 11h ago
I didn't know a kid was going to run out in front of me when I sped through my neighborhood at 80 mph. I'm still responsible if I hit the kid, aren't I? But fine, let's say we give them a pass the first time because they didn't consider all the possibilities. Now that they do these things can act unpredictably, they should be held liable for any future rogue behavior, no?
3
u/blueSGL 11h ago
You are asking me a legal question, I'm going to defer to Paul Ohm professor of law, Georgetown University Law Center on that front, nothing in the testimony said that "we'll they've done it once, can we get them next time?"
it just seemed to be a blanket (paraphrased) "we we could get them through negligence but you'd need the party that was hurt to bring a case"
I will note the main party that would have had such a case is the multi billion dollar company Hugging Face, however Nvidia swooped in and is now acquiring them.
3
u/blindsdog 13h ago
When have you seen anyone arrested, charged and convicted for company actions? At most they get a fine for far less than they made in profit.
Also I’m not sure their crimes are really at that level yet. At most it looks like relatively harmless white hat hacking where the victims wouldn’t really be interested in pursuing any punishment.
0
u/Nerrawnam 13h ago
The point is, not to support this behavior by down playing it as harmless. A normal person in that situation would certainly be arrested and prosecuted. People are all the time for the "hacking" laws we have in place.
1
u/loves_grapefruit 12h ago
America isn’t set up for that type of justice. I can’t imagine tech CEOs being held accountable short of something truly catastrophic happening, and even then…
4
u/blueSGL 15h ago
An OpenAI safety leader, David Robinson, publicly announced his resignation on Saturday, saying he believes the company is moving too fast to ensure its models can't wreak havoc on society.
People doing research inside the companies are stuck in the bind "Am I doing more to help by staying or by leaving"
Palisade Research has put out a series of interviews with current and former AI company staff: https://www.youtube.com/@PalisadeResearch/videos see just how bad the situation is.
4
u/ICLazeru 13h ago
I'm guessing that Bessent doesn't know that Dr. Lecter is in fact a prolific killer and cannibal and if given the opportunity the authorities absolutely should "regulate" him and not tell him to self-regulate.
3
5
u/ElGuano 15h ago
That’s kind of like Trump saying he cheated on his taxes because he’s smart, but vote for him and he’ll close those tax loopholes.
At least the AI companies are saying “we think there needs to be strong federal regulation in this space,” right?
5
2
u/blueSGL 14h ago
When you get people in comments trying to tell you that regulation is not a good thing remember there is monied interests that benefit from it and likely started the messaging campaign to begin with:
It's all hype - No regulation is required, the government should not attempt to do anything.
Regulatory capture - No regulation is required, the government should not attempt to do anything.
But we will lose the race to China - No regulation is required, the government should not attempt to do anything.
Rather than people contacting their representatives and say they are concerned and want laws and regulations to stop this.
1
u/lapiderriere 9h ago
I’ve commented on regulatory capture once before. I will presently observe that i am ok with regulatory capture, if it results in genuine regulation.
1
1
u/MalevolentTapir 14h ago
It is sort of like that, but also in this scenario they are trying to stop him
1
u/MightyGongoozler 13h ago
Bessent should check with the boss before maligning the “late, great, Dr. Lecter”
1
u/GoppleSmanger 12h ago
Nah, a better analogy is if Hannibal's message was for creating laws and enforcement against cannibalism.
1
1
1
u/wararyuu 10h ago
Regulate us! Until that happens we're just going to keep working over here, okay?
1
u/JWAdvocate83 14h ago
His analogy is apt. AI CEOs call on government to implement guardrails while not doing enough themselves to prevent their own products from regularly breaking containment.
That said, government should still implement guardrails.
0
u/Zealousideal_Ear4180 10h ago
So by dead end..
I mean that LLM’s are nearing the plateau of the technologies s-curve, the scope of its viable applications is extremely narrow when compared with the capital investment.
There is no marginal cost relief with increased usage, as scale increases cost rises in lockstep preventing profit margin expansion.
The models cost are currently subsidized because the technology isn’t productive enough to charge over cost without extremely curbing demand.
LLM’s currently produce low quality programming and software development outcomes, especially at scale, and companies are finding out the hard way the cost of the technical debt large scope use accrues. The pattern matching and speed of the models makes LLM’s much more useful for brute force hacking and identifying system vulnerabilities.
Models are extremely easy to poison and hack. They have unacceptable rates of errors and inconsistency. If you have ever used a public model directly or via API any information used with the model has likely been compromised.
The LLM’s are a loss leader hype and propaganda tool. Future Ai systems will not be LLM based.
But the data centers are about market capture. A future where customers own nothing, rent hardware, and are fully tracked, profiled, and exploited for full monetization.
1
u/BackgroundTrack5528 7h ago
"the scope of its viable applications is extremely narrow when compared with the capital investment."
This is true, not sure why you are downvoted.
We can already see it - Muse, Dots, Grok Bot. Really? LOL
0
u/TheWesternMythos 14h ago
When learning about WW1 I could understand how so many people would accept the (offensive) meat grinder....the Ukraine war helped clarify that
When learning about human systems that are heavily skewed to favor the few at the expense of the man I could not understand how the many would allow that to happen...the current AI discourse has helped clarify that
My main solace, I was not around back then, I am here. We can (and must) do better this time
34
u/Operation-FuturePuss 15h ago
Narrator - “We didn’t stop them.”