Nic Carter: Anthropic slows down the frontier aimed at widening the public-private gap

Nic Carter, co-founder of Castle Island Ventures, commented on the "slow down the frontier" proposal put forward by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Nic Carter stated that if the goal is to widen the gap between the public and the true frontier internally, and requires cooperation from competitors, then the proposal is reasonable. The main commercial risk for Anthropic is the commoditization of models due to distillation, rather than safety issues.

Nic Carter mentioned that safety and profit incentives tend to align in limiting public access to truly frontier models. The highest return use of frontier tokens is for internal research and capturing downstream intellectual property, rather than public API sales. Anthropic has made models like Mythos Preview available only to a few partners.

Nic Carter expressed that unilateral slowing down cannot solve the prisoner's dilemma, and coordinated restraint requires antitrust exemptions or regulation. Dario called for the U.S. government to provide limited exemptions for safety discussions so that companies can voluntarily set standards.