Quick question: Do you want AI to be so well trained that it could help husbands — or wives, for that matter — plan the perfect murder of their spouses?
As a gut reaction, that feels like a no. It wouldn’t even seem like a particularly hard question.
But America contains many diverse perspectives, and one such perspective was shared by Comma AI founder and longtime jailbreaker George Hotz over the weekend.
The Context: A Response to AI 2040
The post comes in response to a wave of big-picture AI alignment plans, most recently the AI 2040: Plan A policy paper from the AI Futures Project. That paper envisions a world in which the world’s researchers collectively choose to slow down AI development for 14 years for the good of humanity. Not everyone who read the paper agrees with its premises or conclusion.
Hotz disagrees with the whole premise that AI progress should be managed for the collective good. In his post, he argues that the fast-takeoff scenario — the hypothetical where AI rapidly obtains superhuman abilities — doesn’t make a lot of sense. For Hotz, the best approach to AI alignment and safety is to focus on locally controlled AI models that are closely aligned with the interests of their users.
That’s a compelling idea, particularly given how much of current AI is built around centrally managed services like Claude and ChatGPT. There are infrastructure-related reasons why AI services developed this way: it’s expensive to host large state-of-the-art models, and most people aren’t using them enough throughout the day to justify truly personal AI. But those factors become less important as the technology develops. Part of what was so exciting about OpenClaw was this experimental, DIY approach, and it would be great to see more AI products try to recapture that spirit.
Where Hotz Goes Further
Hotz is a provocateur by nature, so he doesn’t stop there. He compares user-aligned AI to a gun, which does not complain if you use it to kill your stepmom. A truly aligned AI would be able to order meth-lab equipment from Amazon Prime and show you how to use it, he says, if that’s what you wanted and asked for. Hotz even says he would die to defend this principle, though it’s hard to imagine the series of events that would lead to that.
“We either live in a world with freedom or we don’t,” Hotz writes.
The freedom framing is seductive, but it’s not the whole picture. Any structure involving a lot of people — societies, marketplaces, corporations — requires balancing equities, binding individual needs into a network of interdependent preferences and systems of accountability. Anyone deploying mass-market tech products should probably think about that network as a whole, which means taking seriously the interests of the as-yet-unmurdered spouses and stepparents of the world.
The freedom Hotz experiences is really a space of potential futures made possible by collective enterprise; those futures would disappear overnight if everyone started behaving like little AI-powered Napoleons. Having a local AI willing to take on the corporate world on your behalf does sound appealing in principle — but the case for building one with no guardrails whatsoever remains far from settled.
