i finally understand why people become such open source model extremists. completely alien mindset to me before today

My last observation re: Anthropic’s secret sabotage safety policy, is that it undermines actually good safety policy. How? 1. First, it is very plausible to describe this as anti-competitive behavior (even if you are maximally sympathetic to Anthropic here you must admit this), and it is behavior being justified in the name of AI safety. If you believe, as I and many Anthropic staff do, that it may end up being critically important to relax antitrust enforcement so that the frontier labs can cooperate and collaborate on some areas of AI safety, Anthropic just undermined the case for that in a large way. 2. Overall, this massively and profoundly raises the status of the argument that AI safety has been hype to justify monopolistic behavior by labs. I continue to believe AI safety is a real and serious issue that is growing in importance rather than diminishing. If you agree with me, this incident is a setback, maybe a serious one. 3. As I have observed elsewhere, Anthropic’s official corporate policy is structurally identical to the fact pattern alleged against them by the Department of War. I still think DoW acted both falsely and wrongly in that fight, but it is no longer possible to defend Anthropic with a full throat after this incident. 4. This raises the case for heavier handed regulations. Anthropic is making an awfully good case here that their products ought to be treated as utilities, and thus that their alignment practices should be a matter of public policy rather than private property. I am starkly opposed to this sort of state power grab, but Anthropic is doing more to justify it than anyone else. 5. Thus, significant damage has been done to a community and entire approach to AI governance. It was done unilaterally by Anthropic, likely motivated largely by self-interest and justified within the internal psychology of the firm through the lens of safety. I suspect this is fixable in the economic and legal senses for Anthropic, but I fear the trust that has just been broken, and the goodwill extinguished, will take very much time to repair.

ACTUAL ONCHAIN BOATING ACCIDENT? On Monday, 5 bitcoin addresses sent ~107 BTC ($8.3m) to an old burn address, making the coins provably unspendable. Why would someone do this? The Galaxy Research team's best theories are in the thread below (spoiler: none are very good).

The American Reserve Modernization Act (ARMA) would authorize the U.S. Treasury to acquire up to 200,000 bitcoin per year for five years, targeting a reserve of 1 million BTC. The bill was introduced Wednesday by Rep. Nick Begich with 16 original cosponsors. It is a rebranding and expansion of the original BITCOIN Act co-introduced last year by Begich and Senator Cynthia Lummis. It would codify Trump's March 2025 executive order establishing a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve into permanent law that cannot be reversed by a future president. The bill classifies bitcoin as a "Tier 1" strategic reserve asset, putting it on the same legal footing as gold. A separate digital asset stockpile would hold other federally owned crypto. All acquisitions must be budget-neutral. The funding mechanism is revaluing Federal Reserve gold certificates from their current statutory price of $42.22 per ounce, set in 1973, to current market prices. That gap generates hundreds of billions in accounting gains without new taxpayer debt. The bill also ends the practice of auctioning off seized bitcoin. All future seizures would be transferred directly to the Strategic Reserve instead of being liquidated by the U.S. Marshals Service. Existing government holdings would be consolidated into a single audited ledger. Bitcoin in the reserve would be held for a minimum of 20 years. The bill establishes federal custody standards including geographic distribution of private keys across air-gapped facilities, multi-signature governance requiring authorization from the Treasury, the Fed, and an independent third agency, and investment in "quantum-resistant cryptographic upgrades." Rep. Pat Harrigan, one of the cosponsors, said "The United States government already holds billions in seized bitcoin with no coherent strategy for managing it, and that needs to change."

Limiting or weakening the BRCA is a non-starter. Prosecuting non-custodial developers will not help law enforcement. It'll waste valuable enforcement resources chasing folks who do not custody customer funds, execute trades, or control user assets. The CLARITY Act must protect developers and preserve the BRCA’s core protections. You do not strengthen America by prosecuting developers for writing code.