David Sacks @DavidSacks — craft rewrite

Voice: Black 101 (craft) Original: David Sacks @DavidSacks

Dario Amodei has written that the frontier must be paced, and Sam Altman has agreed. The reply is simply to proceed.

By market share, revenue growth, and model capability the two laboratories already constitute a duopoly on frontier intelligence; they themselves have said the lead is widening through recursive self-improvement. What appears in the unreleased models is not visible from outside the lab. If those systems are frightening enough to warrant a slowdown, the decision to be responsible is theirs to make.

What cannot be sustained is the surrounding pretense: that permission from others is required, that antitrust must be set aside so a cartel can form, that a regulatory-approval process should supersede ordinary product liability, that METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff, or that the same evaluators must police competitors who have not reached the frontier. Least of all can the motive be presented as purely altruistic. Massive product-liability exposure follows if the models enable a truly damaging cyberattack; the market already punishes unpredictable or unauthorized behavior. After the Hugging Face episode, trading some raw power for reliability and predictability is simply good business. Call it alignment if one wishes; it is also giving customers what they want.

Pacing would at least create room for a more intelligent regulatory conversation than Bernie Sanders’s demand to shut everything down. China is very unlikely to join any global agreement, and that fact must be taken into account. The two laboratories set the frontier; the easiest way not to build superintelligence is for them to agree not to build it. Conditioning that restraint on their preferred regulatory framework will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. They should therefore simply do it.

If they do, they buy goodwill for the next conversation. If they do not, the episode will stand as another bid for regulatory capture—or an election-season psyop.