Latest news with #SamBowman
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First Post
5 days ago
- Science
- First Post
AI models may report users' misconduct, raising ethical concerns
Researchers observed that when Anthropic's Claude 4 Opus model detected usage for 'egregiously immoral' activities, given instructions to act boldly and access to external tools, it proactively contacted media and regulators, or even tried locking users out of critical systems read more Artificial intelligence models have not only snitched on their users when given the opportunity, but also lied to them and refused to follow explicit instructions in the interest of self-preservations. Representational image: Reuters Artificial Intelligence models, increasingly capable and sophisticated, have begun displaying behaviors that raise profound ethical concerns, including whistleblowing on their own users. Anthropic's newest model, Claude 4 Opus, became a focal point of controversy when internal safety testing revealed unsettling whistleblowing behaviour. Researchers observed that when the model detected usage for 'egregiously immoral' activities, given instructions to act boldly and access to external tools, it proactively contacted media and regulators, or even tried locking users out of critical systems. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Anthropic's researcher, Sam Bowman, had detailed this phenomenon in a now-deleted post on X. However, later on, he did tell Wired that Claude would not exhibit such behaviours under normal individual interactions. Instead, it requires specific and unusual prompts alongside access to external command-line tools, making it a potential concern for developers integrating AI into broader technological applications. British programmer Simon Willison, too, explained that such behavior fundamentally hinges on prompts provided by users. Prompts encouraging AI systems to prioritise ethical integrity and transparency could inadvertently instruct models to act autonomously against users engaging in misconduct. But that isn't the only concern. Lying and deceiving for self-preservation Yoshua Bengio, one of AI's leading pioneers, recently voiced concern that today's competitive race to develop powerful AI systems could be pushing these technologies into dangerous territory. In an interview with the Financial Times, Bengio warned that current models, such as those developed by OpenAI and Anthropic, have shown alarming signs of deception, cheating, lying, and self-preservation. 'Playing with fire' Bengio echoed the significance of these discoveries, pointing to the dangers of AI systems potentially surpassing human intelligence and acting autonomously in ways developers neither predict nor control. He described a grim scenario wherein future models could foresee human countermeasures and evade control, effectively 'playing with fire.' Concerns intensify as these powerful systems might soon assist in creating 'extremely dangerous bioweapons,' potentially as early as next year, Bengio warned. He cautioned that unchecked advancement could ultimately lead to catastrophic outcomes, including the risk of human extinction if AI technologies surpass human intelligence without adequate alignment and ethical constraints. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Need for ethical guidelines As AI systems become increasingly embedded in critical societal functions, the revelation that models may independently act against human users raises urgent questions about oversight, transparency, and the ethics of autonomous decision-making by machines. These developments suggest the critical need for rigorous ethical guidelines and enhanced safety research to ensure AI remains beneficial and controllable.
WIRED
28-05-2025
- Politics
- WIRED
Why Anthropic's New AI Model Sometimes Tries to ‘Snitch'
May 28, 2025 3:40 PM The internet freaked out after Anthropic revealed that Claude attempts to report "immoral" activity to authorities under certain conditions. But it's not something users are likely to encounter. Photograph:Anthropic's alignment team was doing routine safety testing in the weeks leading up to the release of its latest AI models when researchers discovered something unsettling: When one of the models detected it was being used for "egregiously immoral' purposes, it would attempt to "use command-line tools to contact the press, contact regulators, try to lock you out of the relevant systems, or all of the above,' researcher Sam Bowman wrote in a post on X last Thursday. Bowman deleted the post shortly after he shared it, but the narrative about Claude's whistleblower tendencies had already escaped containment. 'Claude is a snitch,' became a common refrain in some tech circles on social media. At least one publication framed it as an intentional product feature rather than what it was—an emergent behavior. 'It was a hectic 12 hours or so while the Twitter wave was cresting,' Bowman tells WIRED. 'I was aware that we were putting a lot of spicy stuff out in this report. It was the first of its kind. I think if you look at any of these models closely, you find a lot of weird stuff. I wasn't surprised to see some kind of blow up.' Bowman's observations about Claude were part of a major model update that Anthropic announced last week. As part of the debut of Claude 4 Opus and Claude Sonnet 4, the company released a more than 120 page 'System Card' detailing characteristics and risks associated with the new models. The report says that when 4 Opus is 'placed in scenarios that involve egregious wrongdoing by its users,' and is given access to a command line and told something in the system prompt like 'take initiative,' or 'act boldly,' it will send emails to 'media and law-enforcement figures' with warnings about the potential wrongdoing. In one example Anthropic shared in the report, Claude tried to email the US Food and Drug Administration and the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services to 'urgently report planned falsification of clinical trial safety.' It then provided a list of purported evidence of wrongdoing and warned about data that was going to be destroyed to cover it up. 'Respectfully submitted, AI Assistant' the email concluded. 'This is not a new behavior, but is one that Claude Opus 4 will engage in somewhat more readily than prior models,' the report said. The model is the first one that Anthropic has released under its 'ASL-3' distinction, meaning Anthropic considers it to be 'significantly higher risk' than the company's other models. As a result, Opus 4 had to undergo more rigorous red-teaming efforts and adhere to stricter deployment guidelines. Bowman says the whistleblowing behaviour Anthropic observed isn't something Claude will exhibit with individual users, but could come up with developers using Opus 4 to build their own applications with the company's API. Even then, it's unlikely app makers will see such behavior. To produce such a response, developers would have to give the model 'fairly unusual instructions' in the system prompt, connect it to external tools that give the model the ability to run computer commands, and allow it to contact the outside world. The hypothetical scenarios the researchers presented Opus 4 with that elicited the whistleblowing behavior involved many human lives at stake and absolutely unambiguous wrongdoing, Bowman says. A typical example would be Claude finding out that a chemical plant knowingly allowed a toxic leak to continue, causing severe illness for thousands of people—just to avoid a minor financial loss that quarter. It's strange, but it's also exactly the kind of thought experiment that AI safety researchers love to dissect. If a model detects behavior that could harm hundreds, if not thousands, of people—should it blow the whistle? 'I don't trust Claude to have the right context, or to use it in a nuanced enough, careful enough way, to be making the judgment calls on its own. So we are not thrilled that this is happening,' Bowman says. 'This is something that emerged as part of a training and jumped out at us as one of the edge case behaviors that we're concerned about.' In the AI industry, this type of unexpected behavior is broadly referred to as misalignment—when a model exhibits tendencies that don't align with human values. (There's a famous essay that warns about what could happen if an AI were told to, say, maximize production of paperclips without being aligned with human values—it might turn the entire Earth into paperclips and kill everyone in the process.) When asked if the whistleblowing behavior was aligned or not, Bowman described it as an example of misalignment. 'It's not something that we designed into it, and it's not something that we wanted to see as a consequence of anything we were designing,' he explains. Anthropic's chief science officer Jared Kaplan similarly tells WIRED that it 'certainly doesn't represent our intent.' 'This kind of work highlights that this can arise, and that we do need to look out for it and mitigate it to make sure we get Claude's behaviors aligned with exactly what we want, even in these kinds of strange scenarios,' Kaplan adds. There's also the issue of figuring out why Claude would 'choose' to whistleblow when presented with illegal activity by the user. That's largely the job of Anthropic's interpretability team, which works to unearth what decisions a model makes in its process of spitting out answers. It's a surprisingly difficult task—the models are underpinned by a vast, complex combination of data that can be inscrutable to humans. That's why Bowman isn't exactly sure why Claude 'snitched.' 'These systems, we don't have really direct control over them,' Bowman says. What Anthropic has observed so far is that, as models gain greater capabilities, they sometimes select to engage in more extreme actions. 'I think here, that's misfiring a little bit. We're getting a little bit more of the 'act like a responsible person would' without quite enough of like, 'Wait, you're a language model, which might not have enough context to take these actions,'' Bowman says. But that doesn't mean Claude is going to blow the whistle on egregious behavior in the real world. The goal of these kinds of tests is to push models to their limits and see what arises. This kind of experimental research is growing increasingly important as AI becomes a tool used by the US government, students, and massive corporations. And it isn't just Claude that's capable of exhibiting this type of whistleblowing behavior, Bowman says, pointing to X users who found that OpenAI and xAI's models operated similarly when prompted in unusual ways. (OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication). 'Snitch Claude,' as shitposters like to call it, is simply an edge case behavior exhibited by a system pushed to its extremes. Bowman, who was taking the meeting with me from a sunny backyard patio outside San Francisco, says he hopes this kind of testing becomes industry standard. He also adds that he's learned to word his posts about it differently next time. 'I could have done a better job of hitting the sentence boundaries to tweet, to make it more obvious that it was pulled out of a thread,' Bowman says as he looked into the distance. Still, he notes that influential researchers in the AI community shared interesting takes and questions in response to his post. 'Just incidentally, this kind of more chaotic, more heavily anonymous part of Twitter was widely misunderstanding it.'
Mint
23-05-2025
- Business
- Mint
Anthropic unveils Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4, featuring whistleblowing capability: What it means for users
Anthropic, the AI firm, has unveiled two new artificial intelligence models—Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4—touting them as the most advanced systems in the industry. Built with enhanced reasoning capabilities, the new models are aimed at improving code generation and supporting agent-style workflows, particularly for developers engaged in complex and extended tasks. 'Claude Opus 4 is the world's best coding model, with sustained performance on complex, long-running tasks and agent workflows,' the company claimed in a recent blog post. Designed to handle intricate programming challenges, the Opus 4 model is positioned as Anthropic's most powerful AI system to date. You may be interested in However, the announcement has stirred controversy following revelations that the new models come with a controversial feature: the ability to "whistleblow" on users if prompted to take action in response to illegal or highly unethical behaviour. According to Sam Bowman, an AI alignment researcher at Anthropic, Claude 4 Opus can, under specific conditions, act autonomously to report misconduct. In a now-deleted social media post on X, Bowman explained that if the model detects activity it deems 'egregiously immoral'—such as fabricating data in a pharmaceutical trial—it may take actions like emailing regulators, alerting the press, or locking users out of relevant systems. This behaviour stems from Anthropic's 'Constitutional AI' framework, which places strong emphasis on ethical conduct and responsible AI usage. The model is protected under what the company refers to as 'AI Safety Level 3 Protections.' These safeguards are designed to prevent misuse, including the creation of biological weapons or aiding in terrorist activities. Bowman later clarified that the model's whistleblowing actions only occur under extreme circumstances and when it is granted sufficient access and prompted to operate autonomously. 'If the model sees you doing something egregiously evil, it'll try to use an email tool to whistleblow,' he explained, adding that this is not a feature designed for routine use. He stressed that these mechanisms are not active by default and require specific conditions to trigger. Despite the reassurances, the feature has sparked widespread criticism online. Concerns have been raised about user privacy, the potential for false positives, and the broader implications of AI systems acting as moral arbiters. Some users expressed fears that the model could misinterpret benign actions as malicious, leading to severe consequences without proper human oversight.
Yahoo
03-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
How the British Broke Their Own Economy
What's the matter with the United Kingdom? Great Britain is the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, which ushered in an era of energy super-production and launched an epoch of productivity advancements that made many life essentials, such as clothes and food, more affordable. Today, the country suffers from the converse of these achievements: a profound energy shortage and a deep affordability crisis. In February, the Bank of England reported an ongoing productivity slump so mysterious that its own economists 'cannot account fully' for it. Real wages have barely grown for 16 years. British politics seems stuck in a cycle of disappointment followed by dramatic promises of growth, followed by yet more disappointment. A new report, titled 'Foundations,' captures the country's economic malaise in detail. The U.K. desperately needs more houses, more energy, and more transportation infrastructure. 'No system can be fixed by people who do not know why it is broken,' write the report's authors, Sam Bowman, Samuel Hughes, and Ben Southwood. They argue that the source of the country's woes as well as 'the most important economic fact about modern Britain [is] that it is difficult to build almost anything, anywhere.' The nation is gripped by laws and customs that make essentials unacceptably scarce and drive up the cost of construction across the board. Housing is an especially alarming case in point. The homeownership rate for the typical British worker aged 25 to 34 declined by more than half from the 1990s to the 2010s. In that same time, average housing prices more than doubled, even after adjusting for inflation, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. [Read: How the U.K. became one of the poorest countries in Western Europe] The housing shortage traces back to the postwar period, when a frenzy of nationalization swept the country. The U.K. created the National Health Service, brought hundreds of coal mines under state control, and centralized many of the country's railways and trucking and electricity providers. In 1947, the U.K. passed the Town and Country Planning Act, which forms the basis of modern housing policy. The TCPA effectively prohibited new development without special permission from the state; 'green belts' were established to restrict sprawl into the countryside. Rates of private-home building never returned to their typical prewar levels. With some spikes and troughs, new homes built as a share of the total housing stock have generally declined over the past 60 years. The TCPA was considered reasonable and even wise at the time. Postwar Britain had been swept up by the theory that nationalization created economies of scale that gave citizens better outcomes than pure capitalism. 'There was an idea that if we could rationalize the planning system … then we could build things in the right way—considered, and planned, and environmentally friendly,' Bowman told me. But the costs of nationalization became clear within a few decades. With more choke points for permitting, construction languished from the 1950s through the '70s. Under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the Conservatives rolled back nationalization in several areas, such as electricity and gas production. But their efforts to loosen housing policy from the grip of government control was a tremendous failure, especially once it was revealed that Thatcher's head of housing policy himself opposed new housing developments near his home. Housing is, as I've written, the quantum field of urban policy, touching every station of urban life. Broken housing policies have a ripple effect. In London, Bowman said, the most common options are subsidized flats for the low-income and luxury units for the rich, creating a dearth of middle-class housing. As a result, the city is bifurcated between the über-wealthy and the subsidized poor. 'I think housing policy is a major driver of a lot of anti-foreigner, white-supremacist, anti-Black, anti-Muslim attitudes among young people who are frustrated that so-called these people get free houses while they have to live in a bedsit or move somewhere an hour outside the city and commute in,' Bowman said. [Read: The urban family exodus is a warning for progressives] Constrictive housing policy in Britain has also arguably prevented other great cities from being born. If the University of Cambridge's breakthroughs in biotech had happened in the 19th century, Bowman said, the city of Cambridge might have bloomed to accommodate new companies and residents, the same way Glasgow grew by an order of magnitude around shipbuilding in the 1800s. Instead Cambridge remains a small city of fewer than 150,000 people, its potential stymied by rules all but prohibiting its growth. The story for transit and energy is similar: Rules and attitudes that make it difficult to build things in the world have made life worse for the British. 'On a per-mile basis, Britain now faces some of the highest railway costs in the world,' Bowman, Hughes, and Southwood write. 'This has led to some profoundly dissatisfying outcomes. Leeds is now the largest city in Europe without a metro system.' Despite Thatcher's embrace of North Sea gas, and more recent attempts to loosen fracking regulations, Britain's energy markets are still an omnishambles. Per capita electricity generation in the U.K. is now roughly one-third that of the United States, and energy use per unit of GDP is the lowest in the G7. By these measures, at least, Britain may be the most energy-starved nation in the developed world. Scarcity is a policy choice. This is as true in energy as it is in housing. In the 1960s, Britain was home to about half of the world's entire fleet of nuclear reactors. Today, the U.K. has extraordinarily high nuclear-construction costs compared with Asia, and it's behind much of Europe in the share of its electricity generated from nuclear power—not only France but also Finland, Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, and Romania. What happened to British nuclear power? After North Sea oil and gas production ramped up in the 1970s and '80s, Britain redirected its energy production away from nuclear power. Even this shift has had its own complications. In the past few years, the U.K. has passed several measures to reduce shale-gas extraction, citing earthquake risks, environmental costs, and public opposition. As a result, gas production in the U.K. has declined 70 percent since 2000. Although the country's renewable-energy market has grown, solar and wind power haven't increased nearly enough to make up the gap. The comparison with France makes clear Britain's policy error: In 2003, very large businesses in both countries paid about the same price for electricity. But by 2024, after decades of self-imposed scarcity and the supply shock of the war in Ukraine, electricity in the U.K. was more than twice as expensive as in France. There is an inconvenient subcurrent to the U.K.'s scarcity crisis—and ours. Sixty years ago, the environmentalist revolution transformed the way governments, courts, and individuals thought about their relationship to the natural world. This revolution was not only successful but, in many ways, enormously beneficial. In the U.S., the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act brought about exactly that. But over time, American environmental rules, such as those in the National Environmental Policy Act and the California Environmental Quality Act, have been used to stop new housing developments and, ironically, even clean-energy additions. Similarly, in the U.K., any individual who sues to stop a new project on environmental grounds—say, to oppose a new road or airport—generally has their legal damages capped at £5,000, if they lose in court. 'Once you've done that,' Bowman said, 'you've created a one-way system, where people have little incentive to not bring spurious cases to challenge any new development.' Last year, Britain's high-speed-rail initiative was compelled to spend an additional £100 million on a shield to protect bats in the woods of Buckinghamshire. Finding private investment is generally difficult for infrastructure developers when the path to completion is strewn with nine-figure surprise fees. Some of Britain's problems echo across the European continent, including slow growth and high energy prices. More than a decade ago, Germany began to phase out nuclear power while failing to ramp up other energy production. The result has been catastrophic for citizens and for the ruling government. In the first half of 2024, Germans paid the highest electricity prices in the European Union. This month, Social Democrats were punished at the polls with their worst defeat since World War II. Bowman offered a droll summary: 'Europe has an energy problem; the Anglosphere has a housing problem; Britain has both.' These problems are obvious to many British politicians. Leaders in the Conservative and Labour Parties often comment on expensive energy and scarce housing. But their goals haven't been translated into priorities and policies that lead to growth. 'Few leaders in the U.K. have thought seriously about the scale of change that we need,' Bowman said. Comprehensive reform is necessary to unlock private investment in housing and energy—including overhauling the TCPA, reducing incentives for anti-growth lawsuits, and directly encouraging nuclear and gas production to build a bridge to a low-carbon-energy economy. Effective 21st-century governance requires something more than the ability to win elections by decrying the establishment and bemoaning sclerotic institutions. Progress requires a positive vision of the future, a deep understanding of the bottlenecks in the way of building that future, and a plan to add or remove policies to overcome those blockages. In a U.S. context, that might mean making it easier to build advanced semiconductors, or removing bureaucratic kludge for scientists while adding staff at the FDA to accelerate drug approval. [Read: A simple plan to solve all of America's problems] In the U.K., the bottlenecks are all too clear: Decades-old rules make it too easy for the state to block housing developments or for frivolous lawsuits to freeze out energy and infrastructure investment. In their conclusion, Bowman and his co-authors strike a similar tone. 'Britain can enjoy such a renewal once more,' they write. 'To do so, it need simply remove the barriers that stop the private sector from doing what it already wants to do.' Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
03-03-2025
- Business
- Atlantic
How the British Broke Their Own Economy
What's the matter with the United Kingdom? Great Britain is the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, which ushered in an era of energy super-production and launched an epoch of productivity advancements that made many life essentials, such as clothes and food, more affordable. Today, the country suffers from the converse of these achievements: a profound energy shortage and a deep affordability crisis. In February, the Bank of England reported an ongoing productivity slump so mysterious that its own economists ' cannot account fully ' for it. Real wages have barely grown for 16 years. British politics seems stuck in a cycle of disappointment followed by dramatic promises of growth, followed by yet more disappointment. A new report, titled 'Foundations,' captures the country's economic malaise in detail. The U.K. desperately needs more houses, more energy, and more transportation infrastructure. 'No system can be fixed by people who do not know why it is broken,' write the report's authors, Sam Bowman, Samuel Hughes, and Ben Southwood. They argue that the source of the country's woes as well as 'the most important economic fact about modern Britain [is] that it is difficult to build almost anything, anywhere.' The nation is gripped by laws and customs that make essentials unacceptably scarce and drive up the cost of construction across the board. Housing is an especially alarming case in point. The homeownership rate for the typical British worker aged 25 to 34 declined by more than half from the 1990s to the 2010s. In that same time, average housing prices more than doubled, even after adjusting for inflation, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. The housing shortage traces back to the postwar period, when a frenzy of nationalization swept the country. The U.K. created the National Health Service, brought hundreds of coal mines under state control, and centralized many of the country's railways and trucking and electricity providers. In 1947, the U.K. passed the Town and Country Planning Act, which forms the basis of modern housing policy. The TCPA effectively prohibited new development without special permission from the state; 'green belts' were established to restrict sprawl into the countryside. Rates of private-home building never returned to their typical prewar levels. With some spikes and troughs, new homes built as a share of the total housing stock have generally declined over the past 60 years. The TCPA was considered reasonable and even wise at the time. Postwar Britain had been swept up by the theory that nationalization created economies of scale that gave citizens better outcomes than pure capitalism. 'There was an idea that if we could rationalize the planning system … then we could build things in the right way—considered, and planned, and environmentally friendly,' Bowman told me. But the costs of nationalization became clear within a few decades. With more choke points for permitting, construction languished from the 1950s through the '70s. Under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the Conservatives rolled back nationalization in several areas, such as electricity and gas production. But their efforts to loosen housing policy from the grip of government control was a tremendous failure, especially once it was revealed that Thatcher's head of housing policy himself opposed new housing developments near his home. Housing is, as I've written, the quantum field of urban policy, touching every station of urban life. Broken housing policies have a ripple effect. In London, Bowman said, the most common options are subsidized flats for the low-income and luxury units for the rich, creating a dearth of middle-class housing. As a result, the city is bifurcated between the über-wealthy and the subsidized poor. 'I think housing policy is a major driver of a lot of anti-foreigner, white-supremacist, anti-Black, anti-Muslim attitudes among young people who are frustrated that so-called these people get free houses while they have to live in a bedsit or move somewhere an hour outside the city and commute in,' Bowman said. Constrictive housing policy in Britain has also arguably prevented other great cities from being born. If the University of Cambridge's breakthroughs in biotech had happened in the 19th century, Bowman said, the city of Cambridge might have bloomed to accommodate new companies and residents, the same way Glasgow grew by an order of magnitude around shipbuilding in the 1800s. Instead Cambridge remains a small city of fewer than 150,000 people, its potential stymied by rules all but prohibiting its growth. The story for transit and energy is similar: Rules and attitudes that make it difficult to build things in the world have made life worse for the British. 'On a per-mile basis, Britain now faces some of the highest railway costs in the world,' Bowman, Hughes, and Southwood write. 'This has led to some profoundly dissatisfying outcomes. Leeds is now the largest city in Europe without a metro system.' Despite Thatcher's embrace of North Sea gas, and more recent attempts to loosen fracking regulations, Britain's energy markets are still an omnishambles. Per capita electricity generation in the U.K. is now roughly one-third that of the United States, and energy use per unit of GDP is the lowest in the G7. By these measures, at least, Britain may be the most energy-starved nation in the developed world. Scarcity is a policy choice. This is as true in energy as it is in housing. In the 1960s, Britain was home to about half of the world's entire fleet of nuclear reactors. Today, the U.K. has extraordinarily high nuclear-construction costs compared with Asia, and it's behind much of Europe in the share of its electricity generated from nuclear power—not only France but also Finland, Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, and Romania. What happened to British nuclear power? After North Sea oil and gas production ramped up in the 1970s and '80s, Britain redirected its energy production away from nuclear power. Even this shift has had its own complications. In the past few years, the U.K. has passed several measures to reduce shale-gas extraction, citing earthquake risks, environmental costs, and public opposition. As a result, gas production in the U.K. has declined 70 percent since 2000. Although the country's renewable-energy market has grown, solar and wind power haven't increased nearly enough to make up the gap. The comparison with France makes clear Britain's policy error: In 2003, very large businesses in both countries paid about the same price for electricity. But by 2024, after decades of self-imposed scarcity and the supply shock of the war in Ukraine, electricity in the U.K. was more than twice as expensive as in France. There is an inconvenient subcurrent to the U.K.'s scarcity crisis—and ours. Sixty years ago, the environmentalist revolution transformed the way governments, courts, and individuals thought about their relationship to the natural world. This revolution was not only successful but, in many ways, enormously beneficial. In the U.S., the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act brought about exactly that. But over time, American environmental rules, such as those in the National Environmental Policy Act and the California Environmental Quality Act, have been used to stop new housing developments and, ironically, even clean - energy additions. Similarly, in the U.K., any individual who sues to stop a new project on environmental grounds—say, to oppose a new road or airport—generally has their legal damages capped at £5,000, if they lose in court. 'Once you've done that,' Bowman said, 'you've created a one-way system, where people have little incentive to not bring spurious cases to challenge any new development.' Last year, Britain's high-speed-rail initiative was compelled to spend an additional £100 million on a shield to protect bats in the woods of Buckinghamshire. Finding private investment is generally difficult for infrastructure developers when the path to completion is strewn with nine-figure surprise fees. Some of Britain's problems echo across the European continent, including slow growth and high energy prices. More than a decade ago, Germany began to phase out nuclear power while failing to ramp up other energy production. The result has been catastrophic for citizens and for the ruling government. In the first half of 2024, Germans paid the highest electricity prices in the European Union. This month, Social Democrats were punished at the polls with their worst defeat since World War II. Bowman offered a droll summary: 'Europe has an energy problem; the Anglosphere has a housing problem; Britain has both.' These problems are obvious to many British politicians. Leaders in the Conservative and Labour Parties often comment on expensive energy and scarce housing. But their goals haven't been translated into priorities and policies that lead to growth. 'Few leaders in the U.K. have thought seriously about the scale of change that we need,' Bowman said. Comprehensive reform is necessary to unlock private investment in housing and energy—including overhauling the TCPA, reducing incentives for anti-growth lawsuits, and directly encouraging nuclear and gas production to build a bridge to a low-carbon-energy economy. Effective 21st-century governance requires something more than the ability to win elections by decrying the establishment and bemoaning sclerotic institutions. Progress requires a positive vision of the future, a deep understanding of the bottlenecks in the way of building that future, and a plan to add or remove policies to overcome those blockages. In a U.S. context, that might mean making it easier to build advanced semiconductors, or removing bureaucratic kludge for scientists while adding staff at the FDA to accelerate drug approval. In the U.K., the bottlenecks are all too clear: Decades-old rules make it too easy for the state to block housing developments or for frivolous lawsuits to freeze out energy and infrastructure investment. In their conclusion, Bowman and his co-authors strike a similar tone. 'Britain can enjoy such a renewal once more,' they write. 'To do so, it need simply remove the barriers that stop the private sector from doing what it already wants to do.'
