AI’s risks are no reason for panic - Las Vegas Sun News

The Las Vegas Sun has looked into the abyss and filed a reassuring dispatch: "AI's risks are no reason for panic." Marvellous. Nothing says calm quite like a footnote about existential risk. The same column notes that Anthropic has conceded in a regulatory filing that its products may pose "catastrophic or existential risks to humanity" — which is not a sentence you write for the optics. That's the sentence your lawyers insist on so the sentencing guidelines come out kinder. And OpenAI is reportedly withholding its latest model on safety grounds, a fact that ought to be the lede of every technology section on earth and instead turns up as supporting evidence for a column telling everyone to breathe.

Then come the demands on Congress, and this is where the piece earns its keep. First, "confidential disclosure" of dangerous capabilities and safety incidents. Confidential. The public gets the reassuring headline; the regulator gets a private note about the thing that might get us all. Second, clarify liability standards — which in Washington means a decade of billable hours deciding who owns the crater. Third, fund interpretability, alignment and government testing capacity: the three least glamorous line items in the federal budget, presumably to be paid for after the ribbon-cutting on whatever the chip subsidy is called this year.

The claim that grim scenarios are "far from expert consensus" is doing heroic work here, given that the labs themselves are the ones hedging. Consensus is the thing you invoke when you'd rather not quote the dissenters by name. When we covered Anthropic's Clark in Bangkok, the pitch was "great wealth and potentially great peril." The peril half now appears to have been filed in writing, with a reference number attached. Not panicking, though. Panic would require someone to actually do something.