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2023

October

4 events

Editors' summary

Other industries and governments move in on AI

On 18 October, major music publishers sued Anthropic over song lyrics. The suit would lead on to the New York Times case in December.

On the 30th, President Biden signed an executive order on AI. It required developers to report training runs above a certain scale to the government — the first concrete obligation the US had placed on AI development. The same month, Washington tightened semiconductor export controls on China, effectively closing off NVIDIA's China-bound products.

On the 27th, Google was reported to have agreed to invest up to a further $2 billion in Anthropic.

This block is written by the editors. It is kept separate from the sourced record below.

Record4 events
  1. 17
    PolicyU.S. Department of Commerce / Gina Raimondo / NVIDIA

    US tightens export controls on advanced computing chips to China

    The Bureau of Industry and Security at the US Department of Commerce issued two interim final rules tightening export controls on advanced computing chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment bound for China. The rules dropped the chip-to-chip interconnect speed used as a threshold in the October 2022 controls and replaced it with measures of raw compute — total processing performance and performance density. That brought the A800 and H800, which NVIDIA had designed and sold into China under the earlier thresholds, within scope. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo cited national security concerns. The rules were published in the Federal Register on 19 October.

  2. 18
    PolicyUniversal Music Group / Concord Music Group / ABKCO Music / Anthropic

    Music publishers sue Anthropic over song lyrics

    Universal Music Group, Concord, ABKCO, and other music publishers sued Anthropic in federal court in Tennessee, alleging systematic and widespread infringement of copyrighted song lyrics by Claude. The complaint pointed out that asking Claude for the lyrics to Katy Perry's "Roar" produced an almost identical copy. Roughly 500 songs were at issue, with the publishers seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work. It was one of the early copyright suits over generative AI, and it put the question of models reproducing their training data before a court.

  3. 27
    BusinessAnthropic / Google

    Google commits up to $2 billion more to Anthropic

    Google agreed to invest up to $2 billion more in Anthropic — $500 million upfront with a further $1.5 billion over time — structured as a convertible note that would turn into equity at the company's next funding round. The Wall Street Journal reported the deal first and an Anthropic spokesperson confirmed the terms. It came a month after Amazon committed up to $4 billion in a similarly structured deal, cementing a pattern in which Anthropic drew capital and compute from multiple cloud giants rather than tying itself to one. Google had also been reported to invest about $300 million in February 2023.

  4. 30
    PolicyThe White House / Joe Biden

    Biden signs the executive order on safe and trustworthy AI

    President Biden signed the executive order on safe, secure and trustworthy AI (EO 14110). It directed more than 50 federal entities to take over 100 specific actions; the provision bearing directly on private companies was a reporting duty. Invoking the Defense Production Act, the order required developers of "dual-use foundation models" above a compute threshold to report their training runs and the results of red-team safety testing to the federal government. Until NIST issued guidance, that threshold was set at 10^26 integer or floating-point operations. It was the broadest action on AI taken by the US government at the time.

↑ 2023