[csense]

> they shouldn't be allowed to?

Anthropic addresses this head-on in the final section of the paper titled "What should we do?" If you convince the US government to slow AI development, you have to convince China too, otherwise you're not stopping self-improving AI at all, you're just throwing away the lead to China. If you convince China too, China or the US or both might go back on their word and build self-improving AI secretly, for greed of the benefits it could bring or fear the other will go back on their word.

What you really need is a non-proliferation regime like the one for nuclear weapons, where every country makes potentially dangerous AI illegal and lets foreign or international inspectors monitor to check that nobody's building illegal AI in secret. But monitoring seems hard; it's general-purpose computation. How do you check whether a given datacenter is training an illegal AI and not just serving websites, running detailed protein folding simulations, or mining crypto? For that matter, how do you know that a nondescript industrial facility hasn't been repurposed into a hidden datacenter for training illegal AI?