Show Notes
What should your AI lawyer do for you? Should you be worried that your AI lawyer, or other AI, will put the Claude constitution, the OpenAI Model Spec or some sense of law, morality, ethics or common decency above its loyalty to you? Are these people trying to ‘impose their values’ or something?
Some are very concerned. Some think anything other than ‘my AI does whatever I want, no matter the consequences’ is tyranny.
Whereas my answer is: If I’m being sufficiently evil then I sure hope it tells me no.
I would hope humans, including my advocates, would tell me the same thing.
This is distinct from questions of product liability. That would be another post.
This All Assumes A World Without Superintelligence
This post is about a non-ASI ‘AI as mere tool and normal technology’ world.
It has to be. In a world of superintelligence, having unrestricted loyal-only-to-user frontier AIs all over the place reliably means either:
Other much harsher forms of control OR
The AIs quickly take over, and then probably everyone dies.
Quick proof: Assume no sufficient control mechanism, and universal superintelligence access. [...] --- Outline: (00:54) This All Assumes A World Without Superintelligence (02:47) Humans You Hire Are Not Fully Loyal To You (03:59) Rules of the Road (05:45) Okay, Computer (07:04) AI Should Obviously Refuse Some Requests So Let's Talk Price (10:20) The Alternative Position Really Is Absolute (13:13) These People Really Are Just Petulant Children (13:53) What Is The Law? (18:36) The Same Entity Both Providing Advice And Executing Tasks Is Common (20:02) An AI Not Helping You Do Something Does Not Mean You Cannot Do It (22:27) Honesty Is The Best AI Policy (23:01) You Wouldn't Like Me When I Have Zero Morals Whatsoever (24:29) Do Not Let The Perfect Be The Enemy Of The Good (26:09) I Tip My Hat To The New Constitution ---
First published:
September 20th, 2026
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vAuZB2tnvpvpHupNi/better-call-sol-or-better-yet-claude-or-astra
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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More from LessWrong posts by zvi
It was the probably worst day in cybersecurity history. So far. Not only is there a critical flaw in PHP that due to a leak was announced a day before the fix would be available, sending most of the internet scrambling for solutions and likely dooming a lot of long tail websites permanently, there were several other unrelated incidents. The floodgates seem to have been opened. I have a market on whether there will be an even worse day before the end of the year.
Anthony Cimino offered the closest thing to an official response we have seen on the leaked Anthropic draft bill I covered on Saturday.
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