I strongly disagree that OpenAI's and Anthropic's efforts were similar (maybe there's a bet there?). OpenAI formally opposed the bill without offering useful feedback; Anthropic offered consistent feedback to improve the bill, pledged to support it if amended, and despite your description of the second letter Senator Wiener describes himself as having Anthropic's support.

I also disagree that a responsible company would have behaved differently. You say "The question is, was Anthropic supportive of SB-1047 specifically?" - but I think this is the wrong question, implying that lack of support is irresponsible rather than e.g. due to disagreements about the factual question of whether passing the bill in a particular state would be net-helpful for mitigating catastrophic risks. The Support if Amended letter, for example, is very clear:

Anthropic does not support SB 1047 in its current form. However, we believe the bill's core aims to ensure the safe development of AI technologies are worthy, and that it is possible to achieve these aims while eliminating most of the current bill's substantial drawbacks, as we will propose here. ... We are committed to supporting the bill if all of our proposed amendments are made.

I don't expect further discussion to be productive though; much of the additional information I have is nonpublic, and we seem to have different views on what constitutes responsible input into a policy process as well as basic questions like "is Anthropic's engagement in the SB-1047 process well described as 'support' when the letter to Governor Newsom did not have the word 'support' in the subject line". This isn't actually a crux for me, but I and Senator Wiener seem to agree yes, while you seem to think no.

But also, I’d like to ask Zac how it’s “overrated” when the reception from funders is not even lukewarm. ... Does Zac mean the current level of funding is already too high, or is he just worried about that number increasing?

My lightning talk was pitched primarily to academic researchers considering a transition into AI safety research, so I meant "overrated in that proponents' claims, e.g. in papers such as Towards GSAI or Tegmark & Omohundro, often seem unrealistic".

I don't have a strong opinion on overall funding levels, though I'd generally favor GSAI projects conceptualized as strengthening or extending existing practice (vs building a new paradigm) because I think they're much more likely to pay off.

Sorry, I'm not sure what proposition this would be a crux for?

More generally, "what fraction good vs bad" seems to me a very strange way to summarize Anthropic's Support if Amended letter or letter to Governor Newsom. It seems clear to me that both are supportive in principle of new regulation to manage emerging risks, and offering Anthropic's perspective on how best to achieve that goal. I expect most people who carefully read either letter would agree with the preceeding sentence and would be open to bets on such a proposition.

Personally, I'm also concerned about the downside risks discussed in these letters - because I expect they both would have imposed very real costs, and reduced the odds of the bill passing and similar regulations passing and enduring in other juristictions. I nonetheless concluded that the core of the bill was sufficiently important and urgent, and downsides manageable, that I supported passing it.

How did the greens get here?

Largely via opposition to nuclear weapons, and some cost-benefit analysis which assumes nuclear proponents are too optimistic about both costs and risks of nuclear power (further reading).  Personally I think this was pretty reasonable in the 70s and 80s.  At this point I'd personally prefer to keep existing nuclear running and build solar panels instead of new reactors, though if SMRs worked in a sane regulatory regime that'd be nice too.

To quote from Anthropic's letter to Govenor Newsom,

As you may be aware, several weeks ago Anthropic submitted a Support if Amended letter regarding SB 1047, in which we suggested a series of amendments to the bill. ... In our assessment the new SB 1047 is substantially improved, to the point where we believe its benefits likely outweigh its costs.

...

We see the primary benefits of the bill as follows:

• Developing SSPs and being honest with the public about them. The bill mandates the adoption of safety and security protocols (SSPs), flexible policies for managing catastrophic risk that are similar to frameworks adopted by several of the most advanced developers of AI systems, including Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI. However, some companies have still not adopted these policies, and others have been vague about them. Furthermore, nothing prevents companies from making misleading statements about their SSPs or about the results of the tests they have conducted as part of their SSPs. It is a major improvement, with very little downside, that SB 1047 requires companies to adopt some SSP (whose details are up to them) and to be honest with the public about their SSP-related practices and findings.

...

We believe it is critical to have some framework for managing frontier AI systems that roughly meets [requirements discussed in the letter]. As AI systems become more powerful, it's crucial for us to ensure we have appropriate regulations in place to ensure their safety.

Here I am on record supporting SB-1047, along with many of my colleagues. I will continue to support specific proposed regulations if I think they would help, and oppose them if I think they would be harmful; asking "when" independent of "what" doesn't make much sense to me and doesn't seem to follow from anything I've said.

My claim is not "this is a bad time", but rather "given the current state of the art, I tend to support framework/liability/etc regulations, and tend to oppose more-specific/exact-evals/etc regulations". Obviously if the state of the art advanced enough that I thought the latter would be better for overall safety, I'd support them, and I'm glad that people are working on that.

There's a big difference between regulation which says roughly "you must have something like an RSP", and regulation which says "you must follow these specific RSP-like requirements", and I think Mikhail is talking about the latter.

I personally think the former is a good idea, and thus supported SB-1047 along with many other lab employees. It's also pretty clear to me that locking in circa-2023 thinking about RSPs would have been a serious mistake, and so I (along with many others) am generally against very specific regulations because we expect they would on net increase catastrophic risk.

Improving the sorry state of software security would be great, and with AI we might even see enough change to the economics of software development and maintenance that it happens, but it's not really an AI safety agenda.

(added for clarity: of course it can be part of a safety agenda, but see point #1 above)