Who Aligns the Aligners? A Lawyer's Skeptical Take on AI Safety Regulation

Who Aligns the Aligners?

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay calling for regulation to pace AI development, including embedded third-party evaluators inside companies and coordinated safety standards among frontier labs. Lawyer Preston Byrne, who has spent 18 months fighting internet censors, pushes back hard. He argues software development is protected speech in the US, and embedding NGO evaluators echoes the 'censorship-industrial complex' seen with GARM. The banking analogy fails because financial fraud isn't a constitutional right. He also flags that coordination between Anthropic and OpenAI could risk classification as an unlawful cartel. Byrne notes apocalyptic tech predictions have all been wrong so far, while government power abuse is well-documented.