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Comment by catigula | Hacker News Reader

This seems contrary to their stated goal to prioritize AI safety.

It is against the law to prioritize AI safety if you run a public company. You must prioritize profits for your shareholders.

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Incorrect. They're not a C corp, they're a public benefit corporation. They have a different legal obligation. Notably, they have a legal obligation to deliver on their mission. That's why Anthropic is the only actual mission-driven AI company. They do have to balance that legal obligation with the traditional legal obligations that a for-profit corporation has. But most importantly, it is actually against the law for them not to balance prioritizing making money and prioritizing AI safety!

Unless you're a benefit corp, this is true for private companies as well. Quick q - which of the AI companies are benefit corps?

Anthropic, the corporation we're talking about.

"We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."

-google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin

then came the dot com bubble.

> It is against the law to prioritize AI safety if you run a public company. You must prioritize profits for your shareholders

This is nonsense. Public companies are just as free as private companies to maximise whatever sharedholders wants them to.

The exceptions are government-owned enterprises, investment funds and entities that are run in a creditor-in-possession regime.

Yes, they will prioritize AI safety until their board of directors says that needs to change.

One of Google's stated goals was "don't be evil". This stuff shouldn't be trusted - it's pure marketing.

That rule is still in Google Code of Conduct and Alphabet Investors' Code of Conduct, but reduced down to a footnote.

Do you think they currently exist to prioritize AI safety? That shit won’t pay the bills, will it? Then they don’t exist. Goals are nice, OKRs yay, but at the end of the day, we all know the dollar drives everything.

No that's not what they think, that's why they used sarcasm.

It's simple, they will redefine the term (just like OpenAI redefined "AGI" into "just makes a lot of money) into "doesn't leak user data" and then claim success

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