Evasive Entrepreneurs, Sam Altman and D&D Alignments

The last episode with Adam Thierer on evasive entrepreneurship got me thinking.

I wrote about this question in the past: When should entrepreneurs break the law? My answer was that it depends on whether they’re right or not.

This is less controversial than it sounds.

But I do worry about the ones that do wrong.

We know now that Sam Bankman-Fried was wrong and we judge him now as a bad actor. I wonder if we’ll come to the same realization about Sam Altman.

Sam Bankman-Fried used the Bahamas as a special jurisdiction launchpad for what seems like a strategy to achieve regulatory capture: lobby for regulating frontends of decentralized finance (DeFi) applications to eliminate competition.

Erik Voorhees grilled him on that - and Erik is also the prime example of a good evasive entrepreneur to me.

Maybe a Dungeons & Dragons analogy helps:

People like Erik and generally the good evasive entrepreneurs are Chaotic Good, the rebels for a good cause, for personal freedom and independence.

People like SBF are “neutral evil”, they use the laws to advance their cause - or they operate outside the law, whatever serves their ends to get power.

It seems to me Bill Gates was a “neutral evil” entrepreneur too.

He both used disruptive tech when it suited him and then went on to use copyright & patent laws and anti-trust laws etc. to achieve regulatory capture.

People put a lot of trust in Sam Altman’s intelligence to know what he’s doing. He’s advanced the case for AI regulation in the name of existential risk.

It certainly seems a lot like regulatory capture. What other moat do you have as a software company in a heavily open-source-driven environment?

I hope his defenders (some of which know him personally) are right to believe in his ethics. He seems like one of the most capable people on the planet and a good person. I do worry that he hasn’t done the full due diligence of his actions and opened a can of worms by opening the doors for D.C. policymakers. Those are “Lawful Good”, but their actions result in evil when the laws are bad (they are bad).

We learned from Adam Thierer and Neil Chilson that D.C. policymakers don’t care about AI x-risk. They want to regulate the internet.

Does Sam Altman know this?