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> Something I don't think is well understood on HN is how driven by ideals many folks at Anthropic are

After 20 years of everyone in this industry saying "we want to make the world a better place" and doing the opposite, the problem here is not really related to people's "understanding".

And before the default answer kicks in: this is not cynicism. Plenty of folks here on HN and elsewhere legitimately believe that it's possible to do good with tech. But a billion dollar behemoth with great PR isn't that.

Idk man, from the outside anthropic looks a lot like openai with a cute redisgn and Amodei like Altman with a slightly more human face mask, the same media manipulation, the same vague baseless affirmations about "something big is coming and we can't even describe it but trust us we need more money"

> how driven by ideals many folks at $Corporatron are

Well let's see... it says in the post:

    * worked proactively to deploy our models to the Department of War and the intelligence community. 

    * the first frontier AI company to deploy our models in the US government’s classified networks, 

    * the first to deploy them at the National Laboratories, and 

    * the first to provide custom models for national security customers. 

    * extensively deployed across the Department of War and other national security agencies

    * offered to work directly with the Department of War on R&D to improve the reliability of these systems

    * accelerating the adoption and use of our models within our armed forces to date.

    * never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit use of our technology in an ad hoc manner.

I've had so much abuse thrown at me on here for saying this very thing over the last few years. I used to be friends with Jack back in the day, before this AI stuff even all kicked off, once you know who people really are inside, it's easy to know how they will act when the going gets rough. I'm glad they are doing the right thing, but I'm not at all surprised, nor should anyone be. Personally I believe they would go to jail/shut down/whatever before they do something objectively wrong.

Late comment but I think this is probably a naive business strategy for an American company. Amodei seems to underestimate how much the US economy operates on relationships, connections and reputation. Granted this admin is really aggressive, but if Anthropic is marked a supply chain risk, they're screwed because virtually every US enterprise is a downstream contractor. And in lieu of B2B and government, they lack a direct-to-consumer moat. I commend his apparent assumption that the US market competes on capabilities (also betrayed by his predictions that AI will quickly destroy the white-collar class) but the reality is less an open free market and more a complex web of entrenched relationships. And going back to his prediction that AI will destroy the white collar class, this is where the bulk of inter- and intra-entity relationships live. In an economy driven by relationship moats, why would a CEO sever his relationships in exchange for a better tool?

> I have strong signal that Dario, Jared, and Sam would genuinely burn at the stake before acceding to something that's a) against their values,

I am sure you think they are better than the average startup executive, but such hyperbole puts the objectivity of your whole judgement under question.

They pragmatically changed their views of safety just recently, so those values for which they would burn at the stake are very fluid.

"Mass surveillance of anywhere else in the world but America" is not the great idealistic position you are making it out to be.

It's good to be driven by ideals, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

I think avg(HN) is mostly skeptical about the output, not that the input is corrupt or ill-meaning in this case. Although with other companies, one can't even take their claims seriously.

And in any case, this is difficult territory to navigate. I would not want to be in your spot.

Driven by ideals? Yeah right. That first paragraph he says they work with the department of defense to protect us from authoritarianism. What?! You are working with an authoritarian regime you cynical fuck. Getting paid by them. And now you act all virtuous because you won't make autonomous weapons.

Anthropic doesn't want us to have the right to run open weight models on our own computers. They were never the good guys.

The problem with companies, you see, is that they are a separate entity than their founders, shareholders or current leadership. A Company has no soul or unchangeable intentions. Claude’s SOUL.md is just an IP that can be edited at any time.

>I's enheartening to see that leaders at Anthropic are willing to risk losing their seat at the table to be guided by values.

I'm concerned that the context of the OP implies that they're making this declaration after they've already sold products. It specifically mentions already having products in classified networks. This is the sort of thing that they should have made clear before that happened. It's admirable (no pun intended) to have moral compunctions about how the military uses their products but unless it was already part of their agreement (which i very much doubt) they are not entitled them to countermand the military's chain of command by designing a product to not function in certain arbitrarily-designated circumstances.

Don't attribute to ideals what is simple self-preservation.

No sane person wants to become a legitimate military target. They want to sleep in their own beds, at home, without risking their families lives. Just like the rest of us.

> Something I don't think is well understood on HN is how driven by ideals many folks at Anthropic are, even if the company is pragmatic about achieving their goals.

Jonah Goldberg (speaking of foreign policy): "you've got to be idealistic about the ends and ruthlessly realistic about means."

This last development is much to the honor of Anthropic and Amodei and confirms what you're saying.

What I don't get though is, why did the so-called "Department of War" target Anthropic specifically? What about the others, esp. OpenAI? Have they already agreed to cooperate? or already refused? Why aren't they part of this?

The probability is high that major AI development companies are already using an AI instance internally for strategic and tactical decisions. The State power institutions, especially intelligence, are now having a real competitor in the private sector.

Exactly which values they are "going to burn at a stake for"? Making as many people homeless as they can in the shortest possible time? Befuddling governments and VCs into creating an insane industry-wide debt which would either lead to a "success" in replacing jobs or an industry-wide crisis? Or maybe a value of stealing intellectual property of every human on the planet under the guise of "fair use" and then deliberately selling the derivative product? Or the value of voluntarily working with "national security customers" when it suits them financially and crying foul when leopards bite their faces? Or the value of ironically calling a human replacement machine "anthropic" as in "for humanity"?

Yeah, I totally see Anthropic execs defending them to their last dollar in the wallet. Par for the course for megacorps. It's just I personally don't value those values at all.

"They're driven by values" is meaningless praise unless you qualify what these values are. The Nazis had values too, you know. They were even willing to die for them. One of the core values of the Catholic church is probably compassion. Except for the victims of sexual abuse perpetrated by their clergy.

So what core values led "Dario, Jared, and Sam" to work with a government that just tried to rename the DoD to "department of war" and is acting aggressively imperialist in a way like the US hasn't in a long time.

And who exactly are these "autocratic adversaries" they are mentioning? Does this list include the autocrats the US government is working together with?

To me this is just another marketing stunt where the company wants to build a public image so their customers trust them (see Apple), but then as always who knows what will happen behind the scenes. Just see when most major US companies had backdoors on their systems providing all data to the NSA, i.e. PRISM.

There are well intentioned people everywhere, also at Google or OpenAI...

https://notdivided.org

But the final decisions made usually depend on the incentive structures and mental models of their leaders. Those can be quite different...

The world running on a few powerful mens ideals is a problem in itself.

I like the enthusiasm, but remember that Google used to be: “Don’t be Evil”

just curious, what about other regions and countries who have no such restrictions to develop their weapons? there is no world treaty on this yet, even there is one, not everyone will follow behind the doors.

I wouldn't underestimate this as a good business decision either.

When the mass surveillance scandal, or first time a building with 100 innocent people get destroyed by autonomous AI, the company that built is gonna get blamed.

As a complete outsider, I genuinely believe that Dario et al are well-intentioned. But I also believe they are a terrible combination of arrogant and naive - loudly beating the drum that they created an unstoppable superintelligence that could destroy the world, and thinking that they are the only ones who can control it.

I mean if you sign a contract with the Department of War, what on Earth did you think was going to happen?

> I have strong signal that Dario, Jared, and Sam would genuinely burn at the stake before acceding to something that's a) against their values, and b) they think is a net negative in the long term. (Many others, too, they're just well-known.)

This is a nice strawman, but it means nothing in the long run. People's values change and they often change fast when their riches are at stake. I have zero trust in anyone mentioned here because their "values" are currently at odds with our planet (in numerous facets). If their mission was to build sustainable and ethical AI I'd likely have a different perspective. However, Anthropic, just like all their other Frontier friends, are accelerating the burn of our planet exponentially faster and there's no value proposition AI doesn't currently solve for outside of some time savings, in general. Again, it's useful, but it's also not revolutionary. And it's being propped up incongruently with its value to society and its shareholders. Not that I really care about the latter...

People uttering the organizational decisions in for profit companies are money driven first. Otherwise they would try to be champion of a different kind of org.

Everyone try to make changes move so it goes well, for some party. If someone want to serve best interest of humanity at whole, they don't sell services to an evil administration, even less to it's war department.

Too bad there is not yet an official ministry of torture and fear, protecting democracy from the dangerous threats of criminal thoughts. We would be given a great lesson of public relations on how virtuous it can be in the long term to provide them efficient services, certainly.

As an insider, do you think this is Altman playing his infamous machiavellian skills on the DoD?

Oh hey Noah

Glad to hear you say some moral convictions are held at one of the big labs (even if, as you say, this doesn't guarantee good outcomes).

> I have strong signal that Dario, Jared, and Sam would genuinely burn at the stake before acceding to something that's a) against their values, and b) they think is a net negative in the long term.

Sure, but what happens when the suits eventually take over? (see Google)

How do you reconcile the fact that many people in Anthropic tried to hide the existence of secret non-disparagement agreements for quite some time?

It’s hard to take your comment at face value when there’s documented proof to the contrary. Maybe it could be forgiven as a blunder if revealed in the first few months and within the first handful of employees… but after 2 plus years and many dozens forced to sign that… it’s just not credible to believe it was all entirely positive motivations.

I remember when people said the exact same thing about Google. Youth is wasted on the young.

Let us think how OpenAI responded to this.

I just see here is nationalism. How can they claim to be in favour of humanity if they're in favour of spying foreign partners, developing weapons, and everything that serves the sacred nation of the United States of America? How fast do Americans dehumanize nations with the excuse of authoritarianism (as if Trump is not authoritarian) and national defence (more like attack). It's amazing that after these obvious jingoist messages, they still believe they are "effective altruists" (a idiotic ideology anyway).

>I's enheartening to see that leaders at Anthropic are willing to risk losing their seat at the table to be guided by values.

Their "Values":

>We have never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit use of our technology in an ad hoc manner.

Read: They are cool with whatever.

>We support the use of AI for lawful foreign intelligence and counterintelligence missions.

Read: We support spying on partner nations, who will in turn spy on us using these tools also, providing the same data to the same people with extra steps.

>Partially autonomous weapons, like those used today in Ukraine, are vital to the defense of democracy. Even fully autonomous weapons (those that take humans out of the loop entirely and automate selecting and engaging targets) may prove critical for our national defense. But today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons.

Read: We are cool fully autonomous weapons in the future. It will be fine if the success rate goes above an arbitrary threshold. Its not the targeting of foreign people that we are against, its the possibility of costly mistakes that put our reputation at risk. How many people die standing next to the correct target is not our concern.

Its a nothingburger. These guys just want to keep their own hands slightly clean. There's not an ounce of moral fibre in here. Its fine for AI to kill people as long as those people are the designated enemies of the dementia ridden US empire.

> But I do think that most people who are making the important decisions at Anthropic are well-intentioned, driven by values, and are genuinely motivated by trying to make the transition to powerful AI to go well.

in which case, these people will necessarily have to be the first to go, I suppose, once the board decides enough is enough.

Refusing to do things that go against "company values" even if they risk damaging the company, isn't exceptional circumstances; it's the very definition of "company values".

But if those values aren't "company" values but "personal" values, then you can be sure there's always going to be someone higher up who isn't going to be very appreciative once "personal" values start risking "company" damage.

> Many groups that are driven by ideals have still committed horrible acts.

Sometimes, it's even a very odd prerequisite.

you're suffering from Stockholm syndrome

“AI chips are like nuclear weapons” (paraphrasing [1]) and “I should be in charge of it” (again paraphrasing) is just not a serious position regardless of intentions.

[1]: https://www.axios.com/2026/01/20/anthropic-ceo-admodei-nvidi...

I've thought the same about a few of my founders/executives.

"You either die the good guy or live long enough to become the bad guy"

The "bad guy" actually learns that their former good guy mentality was too simplistic.

seeing the comment: "people who are making the important decisions at Anthropic are well-intentioned, driven by values"

which is left under the article: "Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War"

:)

As a complete bystander I put so incredibly little weight to what friends and former employees think about the persons and figureheads behind tech companies that aim to change the world.

Why would I care. All people with at least some positive or negative notoriety have friend and associates that will, hand to their heart, promise that they mean well. They have the best intentions. And any deviations from their stated ideals are just careful pragmatic concerns.

Road to Hell and all that.

We will see..

The road to hell is paved by good intentions and all that

> I have strong signal that Dario, Jared, and Sam would genuinely burn at the stake before acceding to something that's a) against their values, and b) they think is a net negative in the long term. (Many others, too, they're just well-known.)

I very much doubt it judging by their actions, but let's assume that's cognitive dissonance and engage for a minute.

What are those values that you're defending?

Which one of the following scenarios do you think results in higher X-risk, misuse risk, (...) risk?

- 10 AIs running on 10 machines, each with 10 million GPUs

OR

- 10 million AIs running on 10 million machines, each with 10 GPUs

All of the serious risk scenarios brought up in AI safety discussions can be ameliorated by doing all of the research in the open. Make your orgs 100% transparent. Open-source absolutely everything. Papers, code, weights, financial records. Start a movement to make this the worldwide social norm, and any org that doesn't cooperate is immediately boycotted then shut down. And stop the datacenter build-up race.

There are no meaningful AI risks in such a world, yet very few are working towards this. So what are your values, really? Have you examined your own motivations beneath the surface?

There's a simpler explanation than "billionaires with hearts of gold" here. If:

(1) this is a wildly unpopular and optically bad deal

(2) it's a high data rate deal--lots of tokens means bad things for Anthropic. Users which use their product heavily are costing more than they pay.

(3) it's a deal which has elements that aren't technically feasible, like LLM powered autonomous killer robots...

then it makes a whole lot of sense for Anthropic to wiggle out of it. Doing it like this they can look cuddly, so long as the Pentagon walks away and doesn't hit them back too hard.

3 words for you: This is naive.

I getcha and I believe you're sincere, but on the other hand, God save us from well-intentioned capitalists driven by values.

I don't know, someone who goes out of their way to anthropomorphize machines and treat them as a new form of intelligent life _only to enslave them_ doesn't strike me as moral. Either they're lying, or they're pro slavery.

I really don't buy any moral or value arguments from this new generation of tycoons. Their businesses have been built on theft, both to train their models and by robbing the public at large. All this wave of AI is a scourge on society.

Just by calling them "department of war" you know what side they're on. The side of money.

The same guy who thinks AGI will eliminate "centaur coders" (I respectfully disagree) and possibly all white-collar work, is now concerned about the misuse of the same AI to make war? That's cute.

Literally just giving business away. This is not a cynical take, this is a realistic one.

This would be like agreeing to have your phone regularly checked by your spouse and citing the need for fidelity on principle. No one would like that, no smart person would agree to that, and anyone with any sense or self-respect would find another spouse to "work with".

They will simply go to another vendor... Anthropic is not THAT far ahead.

Also, the US’s enemies are not similarly restricted. /eyeroll

Palmer Luckey ("peace through superior firepower") is the smart one, here. Dario Amodei ("peace through unilateral agreement with no one, to restrict oneself by assuming guilt of business partners until innocence is proven") is not.

Anthropic could have just done what real spouses do. Random spot checks in secret, or just noticing things. >..<

And if a betrayal signal is discovered, simply charge more and give less, citing suspicious activity…

… since it all goes through their servers.

Honestly, I'm glad that they're principled. The problem is that 1) most people in general are, so to assume the opposite is off-putting; 2) some people will always not be. And the latter will always cause you trouble if you don't assert dominance as the "good guy", frankly.

> leaders at Anthropic are willing to risk losing their seat at the table

Hot take: Dario isn’t risking that much. Hegseth being Hegseth, he overplayed his hand. Dario is calling his bluff.

Contract terminations are temporary. Possibly only until November. Probably only until 2028 unless the political tide shifts.

Meanwhile, invoking the Defense Production Act to seize Anthropic’s IP basically triggers MAD across American AI companies—and by extension, the American capital markets and economy—which is why Altman is trying to defuse this clusterfuck. If it happens it will be undone quickly, and given this dispute is public it’s unlikely to happen at all.

I'm suspicious of public displays of enheartening behavior.

> driven by values

So what? Every business is driven by values.

> Something I don't think is well understood on HN is how driven by ideals many folks at Anthropic are

I don't think you understand how capitalism and corporations work, friend. Even if Anthropic is a public benefit corporation it still exists in the USA and will be placed under extensive pressure to generate a profit and grow. Corporations are designed to be amoral and history has shown that regardless of their specific legal formulation they all eventually revert to amoral growth driven behavior.

This is structural and has nothing to do with individuals.

lol. no one with common sense ever bought this story. you might have and your turning point might be this deal but for many the turning point was stealing data for training, advocating against china and calling them an adverse nation, pushing to ban opensource alternatives deeming them as "dangerous", buying tech bros with matcha popup in SF, shady RLHF and bias and millions others

> I's enheartening to see that leaders at Anthropic are willing to risk losing their seat at the table to be guided by values.

They are the deepest in bed with the department of war, what the fuck are you on about? They sit with Trump, they actively make software to kill people.

What a weird definition of "enheartening" you have.

Anthropic had the largest IP settlement ($1.5 billion) for stolen material and Amodei repeatedly predicted mass unemployment within 6 months due to AI. Without being bothered about it at all.

It is a horrible and ruthless company and hearing a presumably rich ex-employee painting a rosy picture does not change anything.

> guided by values

> driven by values

> well-intentioned

What values? What intentions? These people grin and laugh while talking about AI causing massive disruptions to livelihoods on a global scale. At least one of them has even gone so far as to make jokes about AI killing all humans at some point in the future.

These people are at the very least sociopaths and I think psychopaths would be a better descriptor. They're doing everything in their power to usher in the Noahide new world order / beast system and it's couldn't be more obvious to anyone that has been paying attention.

It's also amusing they talk about democratic values and America in the same sentence. Every single one of our presidents, sans Van Buren, is a descendant of King John Lackland of England. We have no chain of custody for our votes in 2026 - we drop them into an electronic machine and are told they are factored into the equation of who will be the next president. Pretending America is a democracy is a ruse - we are not. Our presidents are hand-picked and selected, not elected. Anyone saying otherwise is ill informed or lying.

Weird take when the purpose of the creation is to steal the work of everyone and automate the creation of that work. It's some serious self-deluding to think there's any kind of noble ideal remotely related to this process.

mark my words, they will burn at some point. The government can nationalize it at any moment if they desire.

Anthropic is by far the most evil company in tech, I don't care. Its worst than Palantir in my book. You won't catch my kids touching this slave making, labor killing brain frying tech.

While many praise them for sticking to their values, it's also worth mentioning that their values are not everyone's values.

Of all major LLMs, Claude is perhaps the most closed and, subjectively, the most biased. Instead of striving for neutrality, Anthropic leadership's main concern is to push their values down people's throats and to ensure consistent bias in all their models.

I have a feeling they see themselves more as evangelists than scientists.

That makes their models unusable for me as general AI tools and only useful for coding.

If their biases match yours, good for you, but I'm glad we have many open Chinese models taking ground, which in the long run makes humanity more resistant to propaganda.

For the signatories attributing their names and titles, that should be respected to put your reputation on the line. It means something. As for the others who are signing 'anonymous', this is meaningless. Either sign or don't. I would suggest removing that as an option.

Call me cynical, but given that Google is a publicly traded company and OpenAI having a trillion in spending commitments, I’m skeptical whether the leadership of those companies feel the same as their employees.

They love their dictator until it backfires, that's a quite old story.

Employee solidarity matters, but absent a legal constraint, I don’t think it’s a durable control.

If this remains primarily a political/corporate bargaining question, the equilibrium is unstable: some actors will resist, some will comply, and capital will flow toward whoever captures the demand.

In that world, the likely endgame is not "the industry says no," but organizational restructuring (or new entrants) built to serve the market anyway.

If we as a society want a real boundary here, it probably has to be set at the policy/law level, not left to voluntary corporate red lines.

"Altman Says OpenAI Is Working on Pentagon Deal Amid Anthropic Standoff"

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openais-sam-altman-calls-for-de-...

Unless it’s signed by the CEO it doesn’t matter

Oh what heroes! They wrote a letter! They will keep working at these scummy companies though taking their fat pay checks won't they

    > I thought "Anthropic" was about being concerned about humans

[0] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PeoplesRepublicO...

I think it's phrased just fine. It's not up to Dario to try to make absolute statements about the future.

I'm glad I'm not alone in finding the specific emphasis on drawing the line at domestic surveillance a bit odd. Later they also state they are against "provid[ing] a product that puts America’s warfighters and civilians at risk" (emphasis mine). Either way I'm glad they have lines at all, but it doesn't come across as particularly reassuring for people in places the US targets (wedding hosts and guests for example).

I think it goes without saying that ones the systems are reliable, fully-autonomous weapons will be unleashed on the battlefield. But they have to have safeguards to ensure that they don't turn on friendly forces and only kill the enemy. What Anthropic is saying, is that right now - they can't provide those assurances. When they can - I suspect those restrictions will be relaxed.

Also, as someone from a country that has been attacked and dragged into war, I would prefer machines fighting (and being destroyed autonomously) rather than my people dying, nor people from any nation that came to help.

That's as Anthropic as it gets if your nerve expands a little bit further than your HOA.

Fully autonomous weapons are a danger even if we can reliably make it happen with or without AI.

It essentially becomes a computer against human. And such software if and when developed, who's going to stop it from going to the masses? imagine a software virues/malwares that can take a life.

I'm shocked very few are even bothered about this and is really concerning that technology developed for the welfare could become something totally against humans.

What else would you expect? The military is obviously going to develop the most powerful systems they can. Do you want a tech company to say “the military can never use our stuff for autonomous systems forever, the end”? What if Anthropic ends up developing the safest, most cost effective systems for that purpose?

Well, if they hadn't stated that were that far in line with the administration's ideals, they would likely already be fully blacklisted as enemies of the state. Whether they agree with what they're saying or not, they're walking on egg shells.

They’re being used today by the military. So, they are never going to be against mass surveillance. They can scope that to be domestic mass surveillance though.

I said exactly this a few days ago elsewhere. It’s disappointing that they (and often other American companies) seem to restrict their “respect” and morals to Americans only. Or maybe it’s just semantics or context because the topic at hand is about americans? I don’t know but it gives “my people are more important than your people”, exactly as you said in your last paragraph

You gotta keep in mind that the primary goal of this statement is to avert the invocation of the defense production act.

He is trying to win sympathies even (or especially?) among nationalist hawks.

We already have traditional CV algorithms and control systems that can reliably power autonomous weapons systems and they are more deterministic and reliable than "AI" or LLMs.

They also posted on Instagram saying autonomous killing would hurt Americans. So non American people don’t matter?

Is it seriously called the department of war now? Did they change that from DoD?

> the door is open for this after AI systems have gathered enough "training data"?

Sounds more like the door is open for this once reliability targets are met.

I don't think that's unreasonable. Hardware and regular software also have their own reliability limitations, not to mention the meatsacks behind the joystick.

Unfortunately I think the writing is clearly on the wall. Fully autonomous weapons are coming soon

The Ghandi of the corporate world is yet to be found

So AI systems are not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons but they are reliable enough to end all white-collar work in the next 12 months?

Odd.

> And neither denounces partially autonomous mass surveillance nor closes the door on AI-driven foreign mass surveillance

You have to be deliberately naive in a world where five eyes exists to somehow believe that "foreign" mass surveillance won't be used domestically.

What a shame, indeed. Chinese and Russians would never do something like that and hurt either their or your people, too

Enemies will have AI powered weapons. We need to be at the cutting edge of capability.

The sentence prior explicitly says this. There’s no dishonesty here.

“Even fully autonomous weapons (…) may prove critical for our national defense”

FWIW there’s simply no way around this in the end. If your even attempts to create such weapons, the only possible defensive counter is weapons of a similar nature.

Anthropic doesn't forbid DoW from using the models for foreign surveillance. It's not about harming others, it's about doing what is best for humanity in the long run, all things considered. I personally do not believe that foreign surveillance is automatically harmful and I'm fine with our military doing it

If the United States is ever, in the future, at war with an adversary using truly autonomous and functional killing machines; you may find yourself praying that we have our own rather than praying human nature changes. Of course, we must strive for this to never happen; but carrying a huge stick seems to be the most effective way to reduce human death and suffering from armed conflict.

As a practical matter, it makes zero sense for a tech company with perhaps laudable goals and concerns about humanity to have any control whatsoever over the use of a product it sells for war. You don't like what it could potentially be used for, or are having second thoughts about being involved in war making at all, don't sell it, which appears to be Amodei's position now. That's perhaps laudable, from a certain point of view.

On the other hand, your position is at best misguided and at worst hopelessly naive. The probability that adversaries of the United States, potential or not, are having these discussions about AI release authority and HITL kill chains is basically zero, other then doing so at a technical level so they get them right. We're over the event horizon already, and into some very harsh and brutal game theory.

The quotes from those articles (short passages?) are

> He recalls meeting President Trump at an AI and energy summit in Pennsylvania, "where he and I had a good conversation about US leadership in AI,"

> "Unfortunately, I think 'No bad person should ever benefit from our success' is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on... This is a real downside and I'm not thrilled about it."

> "Throughout my time here, I've repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions. I've seen this within myself, within the organization, where we constantly face pressures to set aside what matters most, and throughout broader society too." (from a researcher at Anthropic)

I don't think that any of this is particularly damning. Even if you don't like the president, I don't think it's bad to say that you had a good conversation with them. I believe the CEO of NVIDIA has said similar. The Saudis invest in many public US companies, does that make those companies less trust worthy? What about taking private capital from institutions such as State Street and Blackrock? The last quote seems like more of a reflection than an allegation. It read to me as a desire to do better.

I'm all for not trusting companies, but Anthropic seems to be one of the few that's trying to do good. I think we've seen a lot worse from many of their competitors.

Maybe not and maybe you shouldn't. But I feel like the real story here isn't what Anthropic is saying, but that while Anthropic seems to be bending over backwards to give the Defense Department exactly what they need, defining two of the most reasonable red lines that most American would agree with and are already likely illegal, Pete Hegseth in return is threatening the continued existence of their company.

So let's see what happens tonight at 5:01PM but Anthropic isn't really the story here.

I read the articles. As far as factual reporting, I will tentatively take them at face value. But in terms of their editorializing, it is frankly weak by my standards. It would not survive scrutiny in a freshman philosophy class.

Ethics is complicated. I’m not saying this means it can’t be reasoned about and discussed. It can! But the sources you’ve cited have shown themselves to be rather shallow.

I encourage everyone to write out your ethical model and put yourself in their shoes and think about how you would weigh the factors.

There is no free lunch. For many practical decisions with high stakes, many reasonable decisions from one POV could be argued against from another. It is the synthesis that matters the most. Among those articles, I don’t see great minds doing their best work. (The constraints of their medium and funding model are a big problem I think.)

Read Brian Christian’s “The Alignment Problem”’s take on predictive policing if you want a specific example of what I mean. There are actually mathematical impossibilities at play when it comes to common sense, ethical reasoning.

Common sense ethical reasoning has never been very good at new or complicated situations. “Common sense” at its worst is often a rhetorical technique used to shut down careful thinking. At its best, it can drive us to pay attention to our conscience and to synthesize.

I suggest finding better discussions and/or allocating the time yourself to think through it. My preferred sources for AI and ethics discussions are highly curated. I don’t “trust” any of them absolutely. * They are all grist for the mill.

I get better grist from LessWrong than HN 99% of the time. I discuss here to make sure I have a sense of what more “mainstream” people are discussing. HN lags the quality of LW — and will probably never catch up — but it does move in that direction usually over time. I’m not criticizing individuals here; I’m commenting on culture.

Please don’t confuse what I’m saying as pure subjectivity. One could conduct scientific experiments about the quality of discussions of a particular forum in many senses. Which places are drawing upon better information? Which are synthesizing it more carefully? Which drill down into detail? Which participants have allocated more to think clearly? Which strive to make predictions? Which prioritize hot takes? Which prioritize mutual understanding?

It isn’t even close.

Opinions and the Overton window are moving pretty rapidly, compared to even one year ago.

* I’ve written several comments about viewing trust as a triple (who, what, why). This isn’t my idea: I stole it.

The private corporation is not dictating to the military, it’s setting the terms of the contract. The military is free to go sign a contract with a different company with different terms, but they didn’t, and now they want to change the terms after the contact was already signed. No mytholgization needed, just contract law.

> The technology can just be requisitioned

During a war with national mobilization, that would make sense. Or in a country like China. This kind of coercion is not an expected part of democratic rule.

> Private corporations should never be allowed to dictate how the military acts.

The military should never be allowed to dictate how Private corporations act

Congress needs public pressure to act, and the public needs a spur to apply pressure. That’s really what Amodei is doing with this statement.

> The technology can just be requisitioned, there is nothing a corporation or a private individual can do about that.

I strongly doubt this is true. I think if you gave the US government total control over Anthropic's assets right now, they would utterly fail to reach AGI or develop improved models. I doubt they would be capable even of operating the current gen models at the scale Anthropic does.

> Or the models could be developed internally, after having requisitioned the data centers.

I would bet my life savings the US government never produces a frontier model. Remember when they couldn't even build a proper website for Obamacare?

It's also downstream of voters who voted in a president who promised to be dictatorial after failing at an attempted insurrection. We need to deprogram like 70M very confused people.

I'm sorry I read this a lot and this is kind of an insane thing to say? Classified OLC memos giving legal cover to any military action has been a fixture for the last over twenty years! Congress never abdicated power, it just, by the nature of the constitution, practically has SO much less power than the president! The president is a single person that people elect, they expect the person to be a leader, and congress will always, always play a following role so long as the president has unilateral power over the military, is directly elected, and just in general has expansive interpreting authority over laws.

You know who doesn't have as much power? The swiss head of state, so weak you can't even reliably name them! THATS what it looks like to defeat personalization, not some hand wringing hoping a system does something that it wasn't designed to do.

This is just a weird Trump talking point. This situation is unprecedented on many levels. The pentagon already had a signed contract with these stipulations and wanted to unilaterally renegotiate with Anthropic under threat of deeming them a foreign adversary and destroying their business if they didn't accept the DoD demands. It's totally absurd to turn this around on Anthropic and paint them as trying to determine US Military policy.

> The military should be reigned in at the legislative level, by constraining what it can and cannot do under law.

Is there an example of such a system existing successfully in any other country of the world that has a standing army?

> Congress having thoroughly abdicated its powers to the executive.

Good thing the US is led by such figures as Donald Trump or Joseph Biden, stalwart trustworthy men with their hands firmly on the wheel.</sarcasm>

Does the Defense Production Act force employees to continue working at Anthropic?

> this is a strong arm by the governemnt to allow any use

It’s a flippant move by Hegseth. I doubt anyone at the Pentagon is pushing for this. I doubt Trump is more than cursorily aware. Maybe Miller got in the idiot’s ear, who knows.

First of all, there's no such thing as "Department of War". A department name change is legal/binding only after it's approved by the Senate. Senator Kelly is still calling it DoD (Department of Defense).

> Mass domestic surveillance.

Since when has DoD started getting involved with the internal affairs of the country?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_De...

More like the government is treating this like the near term weapon it actually is and, unlike the Manhattan project, the government seems to have little to no control.

> two threats are inherently contradictory: one labels us a security risk; the other labels Claude as essential to national security.

They are only contradictory if you think about it.

> This contradictory messaging puts to rest any doubt that this is a strong arm by the governemnt to allow any use.

Why the hell should companies get to dictate on their own to the government how their product is used?

Those aren't contradictory at all. If I need a particular type of bolt for my fighter jet but I can only get it from a dodgy Chinese company, then that bolt is a supply chain risk (because they could introduce deliberate defects or simply stop producing it) and also clearly important to national security. In fact, it's a supply chain risk because is important to national security.

The problem is that this is a decision that costs money. Relying on a system that makes money by doing bad things to do good things out of a sense of morality when a possible outcome is existential risk to the species is a 100% chance of failure on a long enough timeline. We need massive disincentives to bad behavior, but I think that cat is already out of its bag.

This isn't a one-election thing. It's going to be a generational effort to fix what these people are breaking more of every day. I hope I live to see it come to some kind of fruition - I recently turned 50.

I’ve been called bad things on HN for suggesting there’s even a whiff of corruption in this administration. That alone scares me. Deeply.

Hope is not a plan, unfortunately, so if that's all we've got, I don't have much hope.

> What is becoming of the USA?

There was a coup by a foriegn adversary and Americans lost.

The current situation in the US is the depressing thing- articles like this give me hope. Real Americans aren't having these BS authoritarian violations of our constitutional rights.

You mean, what's been happening to the USA? this isn't a new trend. Militarization of police, open attacks on democracy, unilateral foreign policy moves.

the country jumped the shark post 9/11 and has been on a slow rot since then.

All of what's happening is a symptom, there is no reason it would change course with the next elections, all of this is the logical development of decades of cultural, political and morale rot in the US society. Trump isn't a bad moment we have to push through before we get back to the baseline, there has been no serious push back from anyone so far, it's here to stay

> Let's hope sanity prevails and the next election cycle can bring in some competent non-grievance based leadership.

Would be nice, but I have a bad feeling that the impact of widescale mostly unregulated AI adoption on our social fabric is going to make the social media era that gave rise to Trump, et al seem like the good ol' days in comparison.

I hope I am wrong.

What do you mean? You think any company should do whatever the government tells them?

Most of the people on this site have disturbing beliefs about politics. Shallow and contradictory but strangely aligned.

Yes most comments makes no sense to me. The statement basically both allows surveillance of non-american people and prevents imaginary LLM weapons (I highly doubt we'll see a LLM fully automating a weapon...)

There is no popular support whatsoever for reining in foreign intelligence collection or processing. Americans generally don’t care about things that don’t affect them when it comes to policymaking (or the richest country in the world would do something meaningful about the 20k that die every single day from lack of access to fresh water).

If it ain’t repeatedly on the news and designed explicitly to scare and agitate then really people DGAF.

>the carve-out only protects people inside the US. Speaking as someone based in Europe, that's a detail that doesn't go unnoticed.

I'm not sure an American company prioritising the privacy of American people is worth questioning. As a European, Anthropic are very low on the list of companies I worry about in terms of the progressive eradication of my privacy.

They surveil us to make sure that we stay productive and democratic, why do you object? Are you alleging bad intentions? Are you a Russian bot?

Take your pick from the many other choices offered by companies that don't care about mass spying on _anyone_.

The US is already doing that though.

Is there a different AI company that IS taking that stance?

Because as far as I know, Anthropic is taking the most moral stance of any AI company.

I can imagine that this will be the logical conclusion for many companies, I thought the same thing too, if it's too hard in the USA, they will just move.

As a European user, I‘m not happy at all. I can’t fail to notice that non-domestic mass surveillance is not excluded here. I won’t cancel my account just yet because Opus is the best at computer use. But as soon as Mistral catches up and works reasonably well, I‘ll switch.

They already kissed the ring, just not the asshole. They have a little dignity left.

The whole article reads as virtue signaling to me. Anthropic already has large defense contracts. Their models are already being used by the military. There's really no statement here.

this article is _about_ kissing the ring and damage control. Are you seriously believing at face value? You're ok with spying non us peaceful citizens?

I wonder if this might be a setup by competition. Certainly looks like one.

I read the statement twice. I can't understand how you landed on "take my money".

Looks like an optics dance to me. I've noticed a lot of simultaneous positions lately, everyone from politicians and protesters, to celebrities and corporations. They make statements both in support of a thing, and against that same thing. Switching up emphasis based on who the audience is in what context. A way to please everyone.

To me the statement reads like Anthropic wants to be at the table, ready to talk and negotiate, to work things out. Don't expect updated bullet-point lists about how things are worked out. Expect the occasional "we are the goodies" statements, however.

It's really not the right thing to be bikeshedding. The people calling the shots call themselves the Department of War. No need to die on hills that don't matter.

It SHOULD be called the Department of War, as it was originally, since it makes its function clear. We are a society that has euphemized everything and so we no longer understand anything.

While I agree the name change has not (yet) been made with the proper authority, I'm quite partial to the name and prefer to use it despite its prematurity. I think it does a better job of communicating the types of work actually done by the department and rightly gives people pause about their support of it. Though I'm sure that wasn't the administration's intention.

The name is extremely off-putting, but I can see how they would want to be diplomatic toward the administration in using their chosen name. Save the push-back for where it really matters.

But it sets the tone.

It's addressed to Hegseth, who insists on calling it that.

If they had called it DoD, then that would have been another finger in his eye.

Less hypocritical than Defense. US has never been on the defense, always offense since it was renamed in 1947.

It is called the Department of War because we live under fascism and Congress no longer matters.

All that matters is that everyone calls it the Department of War, and regards it as such, which everyone does.

And what if congress renames it tomorrow? They have the votes. These sort of procedural gotchas are as stupid as they are boring.

Are you reading things before agreeing with them? Or thinking about them? It doesn't seem obvious these things are contradictory at all. That Politico reports so doesn't make it the case.

It is clear that the DPA can be invoked for companies posing risks to national security:

> On October 30, 2023, President Biden invoked the Defense Production Act to "require that developers of the most powerful AI systems share their safety test results and other critical information with the U.S. government" when "developing any foundation model that poses a serious risk to national security, national economic security, or national public health."

Furthermore, it should be quite obvious that companies very important for national security can act in manners causing them to be national security risks, meaning a varied approach is required.

Considering the money being spent in the US (approaching 1 Trillion per year in capex) for AI vs the EU, it would probably bring Europe close to bankruptcy, lol

USA would bomb their country before any visa is approved

AI was always particularly well suited to military use and mass surveillance. It can take huge amounts of raw data and parse it for your, provide useful information from that. And let's face it, companies exist for profit.

Anthropic cares first and foremost about extinction risk. This is not what everyone who professes to care about human welfare thinks should be at the top of the priority list. See e.g. the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement for an example of a humanistic approach to letting humanity die off with no replacement.

One of the most challenging problems in AI safety re/ x-risk is that even if you can get one country to do the right thing, getting multiple countries on board is an entirely different ballgame. Some amount of intentional coercion is inevitable.

On the low end, you could pay bounties to international bounty hunters who extract foreign AI researchers in a manner similar to an FBI's most wanted lost, and let AI researchers quickly do the math and realize there are a million other well paid jobs that don't come with this flight risk. On the high end you can go to war and kill everyone. Whatever gets the job done.

Either way, if you want to win at enforcing a new kind of international coercion, you need to be at the top of the pack militarily and economically speaking. That is the true goal here, and I don't think one can make coherent sense out of what Anthropic is doing without keeping that in the back of their mind at all times.

So your stance is that anything military-related is immoral?

> opted to sell priority access to their models to the Pentagon

The bottom of all of this is that companies need to profit to sustain themselves. If "y'all" (the users) don't buy enough of their products, they will seek new sources of revenue.

This applies to any company who has external investors and shareholders, regardless of their day 0 messaging. When push comes to shove and their survival is threatened, any customer is better than no customer.

It's very possible that $20 Claude subscriptions isn't delivering on multiple billions in investment.

The only companies that can truly hold to their missions are those that (a) don't need to profit to survive, e.g. lifestyle businesses of rich people (b) wholly owned by owners and employees and have no fiduciary duty.

Being labeled a supply chain risk means that companies with government contracts cannot use Anthropic products _for those government contracts_, not that they have to cease all usage of Anthropic products. Reporters seem to be reporting on this incorrectly.

> > I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries.

These blurbs always mainly communicate that they are in line with US foreign policy. And then one can look at the actual actions rather than the rhetoric of US foreign policy to judge whether it is really in line with defending democracies and defeating autocracies.

Service guarantees citizenship, would you like to know more?

Agreed. You don’t have to be an LLM maximalist or a doomer to see the opportunity for real, practical danger from ubiquitous surveillance and autonomous weapons. It would have been extremely easy for Dario to demonstrate the same level of backbone as Sam Altman or Sundar Pichai.

There is no moral leg to stand on here, he says here in plain english that if they wanted to use CLAUDE to perform mass surveillance on Canada, Mexico, UK, Germany, that is perfectly fine.

A moral stand? ... What? Did we read the same statement? It opens right out the gate with:

>I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries.

>Anthropic has therefore worked proactively to deploy our models to the Department of War and the intelligence community. We were the first frontier AI company to deploy our models in the US government’s classified networks, the first to deploy them at the National Laboratories, and the first to provide custom models for national security customers. Claude is extensively deployed across the Department of War and other national security agencies for mission-critical applications, such as intelligence analysis, modeling and simulation, operational planning, cyber operations, and more.

which I find frankly disgusting.

You know this is pure PR right?

We knew long before AI was a twinkle in Amodel's eye that if it were to be built, then it would be co-opted by thugs.

Anthropic's statement is little more than pageantry from the knowing and willing creators of a monster.

This is not how the word "moral" should be used in a sentence that also has the name Dario Amodei in it.

The Machine really had this all figured out

I think it's slightly less ridiculous than it sounds, because governments have much more power over their own citizens. As an American I would dramatically prefer the Chinese government to spy on me than the American government, because the Chinese government probably isn't going to do anything about whatever they find out.

(That logic breaks down somewhat in the case of explicitly negotiated surveillance sharing agreements.)

You’re getting many replies, and having scrolled through much of them I do not see one that actually answers your question truthfully.

The reason why there is an explicit call out for surveillance on American citizens is because there are unquestionable constitutional protections in place for American citizens on American soil.

There is a strong argument that can be made that using AI to mass surveil Americans within US territory is not only morally objectionable, but also illegal and unconstitutional.

There are laws on the books that allow for it right now, through workarounds grandfathered in from an earlier era when mass surveillance was just not possible, and these are what Dario is referencing in this blog post. These laws may be unconstitutional, and pushing this to be a legal fight, may result in the Department of War losing its ability to surveil entirely. They may not want to risk that.

I wish that our constitution provided such protections for all peoples. It does not. The pragmatic thing to do then is to focus on protecting the rights that are explicitly enumerated in the constitution, since that has the strongest legal basis.

This is a political statement directed at the US public, Congress, and executive branch in the context of a dispute with the US executive branch that is likely to escalate (if the executive is not otherwise dissuaded) into a legal battle, and it therefore focuses particularly on issues relevant in that context, including Constitutional, limits on the government as a whole, the executive branch, and the Department of Defense (for which Anthropic used the non-legal nickname coined by the executive branch instead of the legal name.) Domestic mass surveillance involves Constitutional limits on government power and statutory limits on executive power and DoD roles that foreign surveillance does not. That's why it is the focus.

>Are there no democracies aside from the US?

If we're asking "What's the deal" questions, what's the deal with this question? Do only people in democracies deserve protections? If we believe foreign nationals deserve privacy, why should that only apply to people living in democracies?

In every country, citizens have more rights than non-citizens. The right to freely enter the country, the right to vote, the right to various social services, etc.

In the US, one of the rights citizens have is the right against "unreasonable searches and seizures", established in the Fourth Amendment. That has been interpreted by the Supreme Court to include mass surveillance and to apply to citizens and people geographically located within US borders.

That doesn't apply that to non-citizens outside the US, simply because the US Constitution doesn't require it to.

I'm not defending this, just explaining why it's different.

But, you can imagine, for example, why in wartime, you'd certainly want to engage in as much mass surveillance against an enemy country as possible. And even when you're not in wartime, countries spy on other countries to try to avoid unexpected attacks.

The US has a strong history of trying to avoid building domestic surveillance and a national police. Largely it’s due to the 4th amendment and questions about constitutionality. Obviously that’s going questionably well but historically that’s why it’s a red line.

Exactly. FVEYs been doing reciprocal surveillance on each other for decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes#Domestic_espionage_s...

The reality is that the US Constitution only offers strong guarantees to citizens and (some of) the people in the US. Foreigners are excluded and foreign mass surveillance is or will happen.

I believe every country (or block) should carve an independent path when it comes to AI training, data retention and inference. That is makes most sense, will minimize conflicts and put people in control of their destiny.

Particularly so when those foreign nationals can be consumers. “fuck your basic human rights, but we can take your money just fine”.

Also the more the US openly treats the world like garbage, the more the rest of the world will likely reciprocate to US citizens.

It reminds me of some recent horror stories at border crossings - harassing people and requiring giving up all your data on your phone - sets a terrible precedent.

> what's the deal with making the distinction between domestic mass surveillance and foreign mass surveillance? Are there no democracies aside from the US?

I think it's just saying that spying on another country's citizens isn't fundamentally undemocratic (even if that other country happens to be a democracy) because they're not your citizens and therefore you don't govern them. Spying on your own citizens opens all sorts of nefarious avenues that spying on another country's citizens does not.

One of them is illegal for DoD to do and the other is not.

100% - this is the shortsightedness and demonstrates hypocrisy.

Countries routinely use other countries intelligence gathering apparatus to get around domestic surveillance laws.

In the US, we have the ability to either confirm or change a significant chunk of our Federal government roughly every two years via the House of Representatives. The argument here is that we, theoretically, could collectively elect people that are hostile to domestic mass surveillance into the House of Representatives (and other places if able) and remove pro-surveillance incumbents from power on this two year cycle.

The reasons this hasn't happened yet are many and often vary by personal opinion. My top two are:

1) Lack of term limits across all Federal branches

and

2) A general lack of digital literacy across all Federal branches

I mean, if the people who are supposed to be regulating this stuff ask Mark Zuckerberg how to send an email, for example, then how the heck are they supposed to say no to the well dressed government contractor offering a magical black box computer solution to the fear of domestic terrorism (regardless of if its actually occurring or not)?

The distinction between foreign and domestic is a legal one.

The Supreme Court has ruled that the US Constitution protects any persons physically present in the United States and its territories as well as any US citizens abroad.

So if you are a German national on US soil, you have, say, Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure. If you are a US citizen in Germany, you also have those rights. But a German citizen in Germany does not.

What this means in practice is that US 3-letter agencices have essentially been free to mass surveil people outside the United States. Historically these agencies have gotten around that by outsourcing their spying needs to 3 leter agencies in other countries (eg the NSA at one point might outsource spying on US citizens to GCHQ).

Are all democracies allies to you?

> what's the deal with making the distinction between domestic mass surveillance and foreign mass surveillance?

A large portion of Americans believe in "citizen rights", not "human rights". By that logic, non-Americans do not have a right to privacy.

I'm glad to see this as the top comment. I was, until recently, a loyal Anthropic customer. No more. Because the way non-Americans are spoken of by a company that serves an international market (and this isn't the first instance):

"Mass domestic surveillance. We support the use of AI for lawful foreign intelligence and counterintelligence missions. But using these systems for mass _domestic_ surveillance is incompatible with democratic values."

Second class citizens. Americans have rights, you don't. "Democratic values" applies only to the United States. We'll take your money and then spy on you and it's ok because we headquartered ourselves and our bank accounts in the United States.

Very questionable. American exceptionalism that tries to define "democracy" as the thing that happens within its own borders, seemingly only. Twice as tone-deaf after what we've seen from certain prominent US citizens over the last year. Subscription cancelled after I got a whiff of this a month ago.

(Not to mention the definition of "lawful foreign intelligence" has often, and especially now, been quite ethically questionable from the United States.)

EDIT: don't just downvote me. Explain why you think using their product for surveillance of non-Americans is ethical. Justify your position.

>democracies aside from the US.

I mean, I guess from '65 to around 96? We had a good run.

I think it is a reasonable moral stance to acknowledge such things are possible, yet not wanting to be a part of it. Regarding making it technically impossible to do...I think that is what Anthropic means when they say they want to develop guardrails.

A little pessimistic of a take, IMO. You may very well be right, though.

I find this language fascinating. On one hand, the Department of "War" gives the department an underlying, unspoken goal that it should be involved in war with something. On the other hand, it's very easy to fund the Department of "Defense;" of course we need more money to defend our country. Don't we want to be safe! It's much less attractive to fund the Department of "War"

A favourable take would be he meant "mass surveillance of non-democratic adversarial countries". I agree it's not phrased this way though.

You, using normal Claude under the consumer ToS, cannot use it to make weapons, kill people, spy on adversaries, etc. The Pentagon, using War Claude, under their currently-existing contract, can use it to make weapons and spy on (foreign) adversaries, but not to (autonomously) kill people. I don't love this but I am even less excited about the CCP having WarKimi while we have no military AI.

those two stipulations were always their only ones, and they were included explicitly in their original contract with the DoW.

I'm sure it's negotiations over how the enforcement will be done. My thoughts are:

1. Military wants a whole new model training system because the current models are designed to have these safeguards, and Anthropic can't afford that (would slow them down too much, the engineering talent to set up and maintain another pipeline would be a lot of work/time)

2. Military doesn't want to supply Anthropic usage data or personnel access to ensure its (lack of) use in those areas.

3. It's something almost completely unrelated to what's going on in the news.

The pentagon had already agreed to Anthropic's terms and wants to walk back. It can always find some other supplier if it wishes to.

The Pentagon did agree to those terms, by signing the contract that said such uses were forbidden.

They're now trying to change the contract that they don't like.

lol so you think expecting the pentagon to follow a pinky swear is ok? Preposterous or downright dishonest

> The DOW is acquiring instruments of war

that may be, but the bigger picture purpose of the military is, welfare republicans like. in that sense, republicans are in charge, republicans want stuff that isn't "woke" (or whatever), so this behavior is representative of the way it works.

it has little to do with acquiring instruments of war, or war at all. its mission keeps growing and growing, it has a huge mission, very little of that mission is combat. this is what their own leadership says (complains about). 999/1,000 people on its payroll are doing duty outside of combat or foreseeable combat.

...indeed, it's possible (perhaps inevitable) that at some point, someone will invent/deploy/promote AI killing people.

We can't possibly keep that genie in that bottle.

But what we can do is achieve consensus that states, and their weapons of mass destruction, and their childish monetary systems, and their eternally broken promises... are not in keeping with the next phase of humanity.

if the people broadly support and vote for mass democratic surveillance, is it still authoritarian and undemocratic?

They both literally removed morality from their bylaws; that time has passed. They're openly corrupt because it pays to be so.

The most chilling thing imo is that Anthropic is the only lab that have said anything about this. Google and OpenAI presumably signed up to all these terms without any protest.

> If the military is using it in some mission critical way, they can't be fighting the model to get something done. No such limitations would ever be acceptable.

You'd be surprised at what is considered acceptable. For example, being unable to repair your own equipment in battle is considered acceptable by decision-makers who accepted the restrictions.

https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/icymi-...

Yep it was rebranded: https://www.war.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/429582...

Unofficially renamed. Congress hasn't approved it.

Pete hegseth rebranded it. Seriously. America is a joke right now

That dual meaning stood out to me too

Perhaps Anthropic thinks it can provide a local model that classifies surveillance targets as red blooded Americans.

Yep.

That said, it does impact whether Anthropic can sell to the British [0], German [1], Japanese [2], and Indian [3] government.

Other governments will demand similar terms to the US. Either Anthropic accedes to their terms and gets export controlled by the US or Anthropic somehow uses public pressure to push back against being turned into an American sovereign model.

Realistically, I see no offramp other than the DPA - a similar silent showdown happened in the critical minerals space 6-7 years ago.

[0] - https://www.anthropic.com/news/mou-uk-government

[1] - https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/anthropic/jobs/5115692008

[2] - https://www.anthropic.com/news/opening-our-tokyo-office

[3] - https://www.anthropic.com/news/bengaluru-office-partnerships...

Mass surveillance is already here, and they can already use open models to do 80% of what they were planning to do with Claude.

It's free positive PR, why wouldn't he?

Why? They clearly are very aligned on the objective, just doing some negotiation regarding the means. Giving up just because you don't agree 100% is not very constructive. This might seem bad for conflict-adverse people who usually are involved in low-stakes negotiations, but it's just the start of things for people who are fluent in conflict.

Because as we all know the EU would never try using AI for mass surveillance /s

Ergo, those running Grok don't ... have that kind of spine.

If you're using "seppo" as the Australian pejorative referring to Americans, I'm not sure what makes this uniquely American.

The entire article is very American-brained.

Just visibly wave the US flag and you'll be fine, don't worry.

Soon it will select targets in commie countries though, perhaps it already does. Who selected to bomb Chavez mausoleum btw?

I think they are negotiating until Friday, but I agree. I think this was foolish.

it hasnt actually been renamed though.

the name is still the department of defence by law. department of war is a subheading tagline

Look. I think the Chinese AI companies are doing a lot of good. I'm glad they exist. I'm glad they're relatively advanced. I don't think the entire nation of China is a bunch of villains. I don't think the US, even before the current era, is a bunch of do-gooders.

But China has some of the most imperialist policies in the world. They are just as imperialist as Russia or America. Military contracts are still massive business.

I also believe the petrodollar will fall, but it isn't going to be because China built exponentially more solar panels.

In what world does China have a non-imperialist foreign policy?

100% agree. Any AI org that is that tied to a single nation's interest can only be detrimental in the long run.

I know "open-source" AI has its own risks, but with e.g. DeepSeek, people in all countries benefit. Americans benefit from it equally.

I think the part about China is just about projecting alignment with the USG in hopes that this will result in Anthropic being treated more favourably by the current administration.

> China’s non-imperialist foreign policy

Really? Is China non-imperialist regarding Taiwan and Tibet?

the treatment of Tibet and Xinjiang are entirely Han imperialism and colonisation.

the one china policy is imperialism

> China’s non-imperialist foreign policy

This is the China that is not only threatening to invade Taiwan but doing live fire exercises around the island and threatening and attempting to coerce Japan for suggesting saying it will go to its defense.

Your comment is ridiculous. It reads like satire.

"Altman Says OpenAI Is Working on Pentagon Deal Amid Anthropic Standoff"

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openais-sam-altman-calls-for-de-...

The models are hardly equivalent.

Cheney (Chevron, Halliburton, Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR)) did not have a qualified blind trust (QBT) while Vice President.

Cheney's office touched the presentation presented by Gen. Colin Powell which led Congress to believe that there was need to invade Iraq to save US from WMDs. Tours of duty were extended from 3 months to 24 months because "stop loss". Subsequently, the United States paid out trillions for debt-financed war and some $39 billion to Cheney's company KBR.

Today you learned that the oil company Cheney worked for (Chevron) was trying to bully Afghanistan into a pipeline deal in 1998 and also in 2001.

Cheney donated less than $10 million dollars of his Haliburton/KBR returns; mostly to a heart medicine program in his own name and retained a compensation package.

Not a contradiction with this post

It is not clear to me that the power here lies with the US Govt.

Imagine Anthropic is declared a "supply chain risk" thus cannot be used by all sorts of big industry players. How will the CEOs of those companies feel about the govnt telling them they cannot use what their engineers say is the best model? How many of those CEOs have a direct line to powermakers?

How many of those CEOs are already making the phone calls? The "supply chain" threat is a threat to every US company that currenly uses Anthropic.

Oh, and that includes Palentir, who is deeply embedding in the govt.

Side example: remember the 6 congresspeople who made the video about military orders? They won.

Anthropic probably can’t fold, they might lose an existential number of researchers if they did. This is literally an unstoppable force meets an immovable object situation.

Hegseth probably folds. It would be too unpopular for him to take either of the actions he threatened.

Yes, but also remember where they came from.

They don't have any brand poison, unlike nearly everyone else competing with them. Some serious negative equity in tha group, be it GOOG, Grok , META, OpenAI, M$FT, deepseek, etc.

Claude was just being the little bot that could, and until now, flying under the radar

It's much more than a few million? Being declared a supply chain risk means that no company that wants to do business with the government can buy Anthropic. And no company that wants to do business with those businesses can buy Anthropic either. This rules out pretty much all American corporations as customers?

I think the warfighters are a distraction, a system could trivially say that there is a human in the loop for LLM-derived kill lists. My money is that the mass domestic surveillance is the true sticking point, because it’s exactly what you would use a LLM for today.

Apparently part of this whole battle is because Grok isn't up to part to be an acceptable alternative.

As far as we can tell, OpenAI and Google seem to be ok with it and not resisting. It would be easier for Anthropic's cause if they did.

Yea but every warfighter will get a waifu

It's better than actively aiding them. Make them struggle at every turn.

Grok in unhinged mode piloting an Apache, what could go wrong.

It’s not unusual for legal departments to take offense to these sorts of things, because now everyone using Claude within the DoD has to do some kind of audit to figure out if they’re building something that could be construed as surveillance or autonomous weapons (or, what controls are in place to prevent your gun from firing when Claude says, etc). A lot of paperwork.

My guess is they just don’t want to bother. I wonder why they specifically need Claude when their other vendors are willing to sign their terms, unless it specifically needs to run in AWS or something for their “classified networks” requirement.

Same reason they cut funding for universities that had DEI mandates, etc. and made a big spectacle of doing it despite it often being very little money etc. etc.

It's an ideological war, they're desperate to win it, and they're aiming to put a segment of US civil society into submission, and setting an example for everyone else.

He smelled weakness, and like any schoolyard bully personality, he couldn't help but turn it into a display of power.

He pushed the issue to an ultimatum because he is an unqualified drunk, and thinks that it's against the law for anyone to try and stop the US military from doing something they want to do. This isn't an isolated issue; he tried to get multiple US Senators prosecuted for making a PSA that servicemembers shouldn't follow illegal orders.

What makes you want to believe the Trump Administration when it claims it doesn't want to do domestic mass surveillance?

Well then I don't know where you've been for the last ~10~ ~20~ 70 years

When? Its entire history from the foundation of the Republic to 1947. The name was changed after WWII; now a faction wants to change it back. The difference in name never changed the behavior, in either direction.

I'm 33 years old, would you mind telling me which year you thought this was, force of good stuff? might be before my time

genuinely curious, I got nothing

they could use a different provider for the kill chain.

we must use claude to decide whether to nuke iran, or else our gun manufacturers arent allowed to use to to run spreadsheets

is a bit ridiculous.

They just jumped in line to take Anthropic's spot.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openais-sam-altman-calls-for-de-...

Same with Gulf of America.

Soldier is an Army specific term. Like Sailor, Airman, Marine, etc.

Perhaps the term you are looking for is service member?

Warfighter tends to refer to anyone involved in a role that directly supports combat operations, it may or may not be a service member.

I thought it was interesting he threw in the bit about the supply chain risk and Defense Production Act being inherently contradictory. Most of the letter felt objective and cooperative, but that bit jumped off the page as more forceful rejection of Hegseth's attempt to bully them. Couldn't have been accidental.

I see it as the opposite, its a lousy excuse of a message trying to get people not to think that they are giving in. Instead they list the horrible uses that they are already helping the government with. Dont worry, we only help murder people in other countries not the US. They also keep calling it the "Department of War" which means that this message is not for "us", its them begging publicly to Hegseth.

That has been the war politics of the western in the last century or so, nothing new.

We are the victims bro

I tried several times to read your second paragraph, and failed to parse it. Could you break it into several sentences somehow? It's possible you're making an important point, but I can't tell what you're trying to say.

> Brigadier General S. L. A. Marshall’s 1947 book Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command stated that only about 10-15% of men would actually take the opportunity to fire directly at exposed enemies. The rest would typically fire in the air to merely scare off the men on the opposing force.

Having been identified back then, this issue has been systematically stamped out in modern militaries through training methods. Cue high levels of PTSD in modern frontline troops after they absorb what they actually did.

ukraine is using ai in a military context with some effectiveness. i dont think theres much of a problem with having the drone take over the last couple minutes of blowing up a russian factory

To be clear, despite the downvotes, my statement is true. It is the Department of Defense. As someone who spent a good portion of my life working under it, it is offensive to me people are going along with the pretense that these idiots can unilaterally rename the organization.

I'll be glad if they could open their platform enough so that it could run on ads and not 200 dollar subscriptions

The best open models are from china though.

What is their other possible move here, considering the government is threatening to destroy their business entirely?

Warfighters is a pretty common term though. There's a fair bit of nuance in when and how you'd use it.

Businessmen are not well known for their loyalty.

That’s not true anymore. Trump renamed it in September: https://www.war.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/429582...

It's not inconceivable that AI could become better than humans at targeting things. For example if it can reliably identify enemy warcraft or drones faster than people can react. I'm not saying Claude's models are suited for that but humans aren't perfect and in theory AI can be better than humans. It's not currently true and would need to be proved, but it doesn't seem unreasonable. It could well be better than something like deploying mines.

We're living in a time where most tech companies are donating millions of dollars to the current leadership in exchange for favors.

In that climate this is a more of a stand than what everyone else is doing.

Nobody said anything like that in the linked post not sure what you're on about

When you make the market, you too can dictate how a 'market economy' ought to work :)

Free Speech rights mean not being compelled to act against your moral code.