Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

The White House just invoked the Defense Production Act ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act_of_1950 ) to assert sweeping authority over private-company software developers. What the fuck are they smoking?

- "In accordance with the Defense Production Act, the Order will require that companies developing any foundation model that poses a serious risk to national security, national economic security, or national public health and safety must notify the federal government when training the model, and must share the results of all red-team safety tests."

I assume this is a major constitutional overreach that will be overturned by courts at the first challenge?

Or else, all the AI companies who haven't captured their regulators will simply move their R&D to some other country—like how the OpenSSH (?) core development moved to Canada during in the 1990's crypto wars. (edit: Maybe that's the real goal–scare away OpenAI's competition, dredge for them a deeper regulatory moat).

From the Wikipedia article:

> The third section authorizes the president to control the civilian economy so that scarce and critical materials necessary to the national defense effort are available for defense needs.

Seems pretty broad and pretty directly relevant to me. And hey, if people don’t like the idea of models being the scarce and critical resource, they can pick GPUs instead. Why would it be an overreach when you have developers of these systems claiming they’ll allow them to “capture all value in the universe’s future light cone?”

Obviously this can (and probably will) be challenged, but it seems a bit ambitious to just assume it’s unconstitutional because you don’t like it.

Software is definitionally not "scarce". There is no national defense war effort to speak of. Finally, the White House is not requesting "materials neccesary to the national defense effort"–which does not exist–it's attempting to regulate private-sector business activity.

There's multiple things I suspect are unconstitutional here, the clearest being that this stuff is far outside the scope of the law it's invoking. The White House is really just trying to regulate commerce by executive fiat. That's the exclusive power of Congress—this is separation of powers question.

Powerful models are scarce (currently), and in any case GPUs definitely are so I’m not sure this is a good line of argument if you want less overreach here.

AFAICT there doesn’t need to be active combat for DPA to be used, and it seems like it got most of its teeth from the Cold War which was… cold.

> The White House is really just…

That’s definitely one interpretation but not the only one.

Sure: if the US government declared a critical defense need for ML GPU's, they could lawfully order Nvidia to divert production towards that. That is not the case here–that's not what this Executive Order says. We're talking about the software models: ephemeral, cloneable data. Not scarce materiel.

Moreover. USGov is not talking about buying or procuring ML for national defense. It's talking about regulating the development and sale of ML models–i.e., ordinary commerce where the vendor is a private company, and the client is a private company or individual. This isn't what the DPA is for. This is plainly commercial regulation, a backdoor attempt at it.

These are good points! And looking at DPA’s history it seems most of its uses and especially its peacetime uses are more about granting money/loans rather than adding restrictions or requirements.

How can an order that puts restrictions on the creation of powerful models somehow be twisted to claim that those restrictions are required to increase the availability of that tool?

Further, the white houses stated reason for invoking the act is to "These measures will ensure AI systems are safe, secure, and trustworthy before companies make them public." None of those reasons seem to align with the DFA. That doesn't make them good, or bad. It just seems like a misguided use of the law they're using to justify it. Get Congress to pass a law if you want regulations.

"C'mon, man! Your computer codes are munitions, Jack. And they belong to the US Government."

> that poses a serious risk to national security, national economic security, or national public health and safety

That seems to be a key component. I imagine many AI companies will start with a default position that none of those are apply to them, and will leave the burden of proof with the govt or other entity.

This is much less restrictive than the cryptography export restrictions. The sky isn't falling and OpenAI won't defect to China (and now arguably might risk serious consequences for doing so).

In 2017 Trump invoked that act for referenced "items affecting adenovirus vaccine production capability”

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