No. You read the actual essay, then explain how we're supposed to interpret this more charitably:
Frontier AI models, like airplanes, should
be required to go through technical testing
and auditing, and their release should be
blocked or reversed as a threat to public
safety if they do not meet high standards
of safety. I am grateful to see the Trump
administration’s Executive Order move
incrementally towards a greater role for
government in AI, though Anthropic’s proposal
recommends even further action.
They are all-but-literally sucking up to the administration that declared their company a supply-chain risk, arguing that the same administration should be given gatekeeping authority over all high-quality LLMs including open-weight releases. Go gaslight somebody else.
I agree with your sentiment but not your conclusion. They don't want this administration specifically to have gatekeeping authority, what they want is any administration to say that they are gatekeeping, so that they can regulate the competition out of existence. Of course the actual checks and balances will be near pointless in effect, but expensive to implement nonetheless.
I don't really agree with their point here, but there are plenty of people in the AI community whose views are aligned with Anthropic's. That doesn't make them shills.
It's actually important those views are put forward.
A place like LessWrong has the opposite problem - there is no one there who questions the "safety narrative" so the discussion swings more and more towards the extreme end of that spectrum.
I hate to accuse people of shilling (and HN hates those accusations as well, policy-wise). And there are ways to defend Amodei's point, or at least there would be if he and his friends hadn't been beating the same drum since GPT2.
But I tend to agree, just saying it's a "pretty reasonable statement" and leaving it at that is beyond the pale for anyone who doesn't have an undisclosed stake in the argument.
This is like the most milquetoast stance in the AI safety community. It's great the Trump admin did something, no one expected them to, and they should have done more. Very powerful tools released to the public should be regulated for safety.
That is "pretty reasonable" to most people (except the tech-libertarian crowd).
This whole business just keeps getting dumber.
1: https://darioamodei.com/post/policy-on-the-ai-exponential