Kristian Stout Quoted in The Washington Post on Open-Source AI Security and Regulation
The Washington Post quoted Kristian Stout, ICLE Director of Innovation Policy, in a piece examining the security, economic, and regulatory debate surrounding open-source AI models. Read the full piece here.
Kristian Stout, director of innovation policy at the International Center for Law & Economics, told me in an interview Monday that he believes, from a catastrophic risk perspective, banning open models hurts more than it helps.
Stout argues specifically that you need frontier AI defense capabilities to defend against AI-powered cyberattacks.
“I need an advanced AI agent that’s sitting on my computer that goes out and scans the dark web all day long looking for people who are trying to use my identity or compromise me,” argues Stout. “That only happens when you have more intelligence diffusing.”
“Value shifts in the stack. It’ll shift away from OpenAI and Anthropic. It’ll shift toward value-added companies, which is what you have seen in every technical revolution where there’s been a general-purpose technology like electricity,” argued Stout.
“We live in a world now where electricity is just distributed, and the real value of electricity is what all the complement producers do with electricity,” Stout said. “I believe that is what the intelligence revolution is going to be like.”