[HN Gopher] Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with ...
___________________________________________________________________
Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department
of War
Author : qwertox
Score : 2829 points
Date : 2026-02-26 22:42 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.anthropic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.anthropic.com)
| keeeba wrote:
| Big respect
|
| Total humiliation for Hegseth, sure there will be a backlash
| techblueberry wrote:
| 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.
| calgoo wrote:
| 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.
| adi_kurian wrote:
| What would the ideal response have been, in your view?
| calgoo wrote:
| Well, they should not have made a contract in the first
| place with a government that we all knew was going to be
| this bad. They should be doing everything in their power to
| cancel all government contracts at this point.
| jpcompartir wrote:
| "Regardless, these threats do not change our position: we
| cannot in good conscience accede to their request."
| calgoo wrote:
| Yes, that is great, for people from the US. For people in
| Europe and other locations, this just proves that they dont
| really care as the tool is already being used against us.
| It quite clear to me that anyone outside the US should
| immediately cancel all contracts with these corporations,
| as well as work their hardest at blocking their bots
| online.
| jpcompartir wrote:
| As a non-US citizen, I'm quite glad in the knowledge that
| Claude won't be used to kill other non-US citizens with
| autonomous weapons
| alangibson wrote:
| It's not named the Department of War because Congress didn't
| rename it.
|
| Other than that, good on ya.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| But it sets the tone.
| henrikschroder wrote:
| Of appeasement and bootlicking, yes.
| peyton wrote:
| Dude we had an election and this is what we're doing. Maybe
| that's not how you do things in the Kingdom of Sweden. Here
| it's _e pluribus unum_.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| There is a good share of collusion in Europe too, let's
| keep all continents open to critics. Elections doesn't
| imply unlawful dictates and corruption.
| krapp wrote:
| 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.
| dumpsterdiver wrote:
| > All that matters is that everyone calls it the Department
| of War, and regards it as such, which everyone does.
|
| What you just described is consensus, and framing it as
| fascism damages the credibility of your stance. There are
| better arguments to make, which don't require framing a label
| update as oppression.
| krapp wrote:
| I'm not framing consensus as fascism, I'm pointing out what
| the consensus is within the current fascist framework, and
| that consensus is that Congress doesn't make the rules
| anymore. And that consensus is shared by Congress itself.
| scottyah wrote:
| So anyone who doesn't mind the name going back to DoW is
| fascist?
| krapp wrote:
| No.
| jibal wrote:
| Being honest _increases_ credibility, not damages it.
|
| > framing a label update as oppression
|
| That strawman damages credibility.
| RIMR wrote:
| The president has no authority to rename the Department of
| Defense, but he and his administration demand consensus
| under the threat of legal consequences.
|
| Just as one example, they threatened Google when they
| didn't immediately rename the Gulf of Mexico to the "Gulf
| of America" on their maps. Other companies now follow their
| illegal guidance because they know that they will be
| threatened too if they don't comply.
|
| There is a word for when the government uses threats to
| enforce illegal referendums. That word is "Fascism".
| Denying this is irresponsible, especially in the context of
| this situation, where the Government is threatening to
| force a private company to provide services that it doesn't
| currently provide.
| vibeprofessor wrote:
| true, if everything is 'fascism' then nothing is
| thatswrong0 wrote:
| https://archive.ph/YSAWU
|
| Except this administration is certainly fascist, and the
| renaming is yet another facet of it. That article goes
| through it point by point.
| FrankBooth wrote:
| Those of us with a firm grip on reality do not currently live
| under fascism.
| wyre wrote:
| Help me understand how a firm grip on tells that living in
| America is not fascism? It's definitely checking the boxes.
| redwall_hp wrote:
| Basically all of Eco's Ur-Fascism boxes are checked. And
| he'd know, having lived under Mussolini's regime.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur-Fascism
| throwaway76375 wrote:
| He was 11 when Mussolini's government fell...
| 1024core wrote:
| 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.
| inigyou wrote:
| Maybe this is the DoW Pam Bondi was referring to.
| moogly wrote:
| This. They even put a "wArFiGhTers" in there.
| garciasn wrote:
| Remember, this is the same administration that barred the AP
| from the Oval Office because they wouldn't rename the Gulf of
| Mexico. https://www.theguardian.com/us-
| news/2025/feb/11/associated-p...
|
| While this action may indeed cause the DoD to blacklist
| Anthropic from doing business w/the government, they probably
| were being as careful as they could be not to double down on
| the nose-thumbing.
| furyofantares wrote:
| I don't think it's addressed to Hegseth, but to anyone who
| might be sympathetic to Hegseth. Which I think actually
| strengthens your point, the goal appears to be to make it so
| the only possible complaint with the letter for someone
| sympathetic to the administration is "but mass domestic
| surveillance / fully autonomous weapons are legal" and not
| "look at this lunatic leftist who calls it the department of
| defense".
| 63 wrote:
| 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.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| Less hypocritical than Defense. US has never been on the
| defense, always offense since it was renamed in 1947.
| nrb wrote:
| Often offensive and also often defensive of others.. so if
| renaming is on the table, it's probably most apt to call it
| the Dept of Security since the vast majority of what it does
| is maintaining the security umbrella that has helped suppress
| world war since the last one. Of course, facts or opinions on
| whether it succeeds on the security front depend on which
| side of the umbrella you're on.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| The Department of Defense was named in 1949, not 1947, and
| the thing that it was renamed from was the National Military
| Establishment, which was newly created in 1947 to be put over
| the two old military departments (War, which was over the
| Army only, and Navy, which was over the Navy including the
| Marine Corps)
|
| At the same time as the NME was created, the Army was split
| into the Army and Air Force and the Department of War was
| also split in two, becoming the Department of the Army and
| the Department of the Air Force.
| curiousgal wrote:
| And losing at that offense while at it.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| USA has never lost a war so far. They just ... get bored
| and leave eventually.
| helaoban wrote:
| 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.
| scottyah wrote:
| Doublespeak, so to speak.
| greycol wrote:
| Naming is important because it intuits what we expect to do
| with a thing. The Department of Defense invading Greenland is
| more invocative to inquiry than the Department of War
| invading Greenland because that's what a department of war
| would do.
|
| It's one of the reasons why people get annoyed at jargon or
| are pissed off about pronouns, because it highlights that
| they should be putting mental effort into understanding why
| they're current mental model doesn't fit. It's much easier to
| ignore and be comfortable if there's not glaring sirens
| saying you've got some learning to do.
|
| Most of us can't (or won't) be aware of everything that
| should be important to us, having glaring context clues that
| we should take notice of something incongruous is important.
| It's also why the Trump media approach works so well it's
| basically a case of alarm fatigue as republicans who would
| normally side against any particular one of his actions don't
| listen because they agreed with some of the actions that
| democrats previously raised alarms about.
| alt187 wrote:
| > It's one of the reasons why people get annoyed at jargon
| or are pissed off about pronouns, [...]
|
| It's worth noting there's an overabundance of legitimate
| reasons people get annoyed at these two thing, making them
| bad examples.
| mpyne wrote:
| The Department of the Army is what was previously called the
| Department of War. The Department of Defense is new, dating
| to just after WWII.
| helaoban wrote:
| Pedantry.
|
| The Department of War was responsible for naval affairs
| until The Department of the Navy was spun off from it in
| 1798, and aerial forces until the creation of the The
| Department of the Air Force in 1947, whereafter it was left
| with just the army and renamed the Department of the Army.
| All three branches were then subordinated to the new
| Department of Defense in 1949, which became functionally
| equivalent to the original entity.
|
| The Department of War is what it was called when it was
| first created in 1789 by the Congress (establishing the
| department and the position of Secretary of War), the
| predecessor entity being called the The Board of War and
| Ordnance during the revolution.
|
| The Department of "Defense" has never fought on home soil.
| Ever.
| elicash wrote:
| It's a funny thing that the most war-loving people and the
| most peace-loving people both love calling it "Department of
| War" - just for different reasons.
|
| But the reason for "Department of Defense" name was
| bureaucratic. It's also not true that DOD is hard to
| understand.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| 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.
| garciasn wrote:
| TIL of Bikeshedding, or Parkinson's Law of Triviality.
|
| Defined as the tendency for teams to devote disproportionate
| time and energy to trivial, easy-to-understand issues while
| neglecting complex, high-stakes decisions. Originating from
| the example of arguing over a bike shed's color instead of a
| nuclear plant's design, it represents a wasteful focus on
| minor details.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
|
| ---
|
| I deal with this day in and day out. Thank you for informing
| me of the word that describes the laughable nightmares I deal
| with on the regular.
| baq wrote:
| Get a prop with difficulty/importance quadrants and
| silently tap sign on meetings
| epistasis wrote:
| It's actually a good thing to point out, because it shows
| that those people are out of control and exceeding their
| authority, and need to be reined in.
|
| No need to die on the hill, but point out that there's a
| consistent pattern of lawless power-grabbing.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| > it shows that those people are out of control and
| exceeding their authority
|
| No, the concentration camps and gangs of masked thugs
| violating civil rights are that sign. Threatening to treat
| a domestic private corporation like an enemy combatant
| during peacetime for not immediately caving to military
| demands is that sign. Trying to take over the Federal
| Reserve, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Nuclear
| Regulatory Commission, is that sign. The Executive
| attempting to freeze funds issued by Congress for partisan
| reasons is that sign.
|
| Department of War is just little boys being trolls.
| epistasis wrote:
| The action of a failed rebrand belongs to the Department
| of Defense, and is indeed an example of exceeding their
| authority. It was not DoD that is trying totake over the
| Fed, the FTR, or the NRC, so those examples don't work
| against Hegseth here.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| This is like picketing Auschwitz with placards
| complaining that the "National Socialists" aren't
| socialists.
| epistasis wrote:
| I don't see the analogy at all.
|
| Anthropic is in negotiation with Hegseth/DoD. Pointing
| out all the specific actions that Hegseth is doing are
| fair game to show that Hegseth is nuts.
|
| Bringing in other complaints against other parties,
| however bad those other parties are behaving, shows a
| pattern in other people, which might be helpful too. But
| hegseth's direct actions are stronger evidence.
| asdff wrote:
| Well, who is going to reign them in?
| epistasis wrote:
| According to the constitution, Congress is the check and
| balance on this. If congress refuses act as they are
| supposed to, it's up to the rest of our democracy to
| exert force on them, shame them, recognize what's going
| on, talk to our neighbors, etc.
|
| If the current congress doesn't take action, in 2027 it's
| quite likely they will.
|
| Of course the most likely current course is that nobody
| reins in Hegseth/DoD right now, but even if there's no
| official consequences at the moment there should be a
| memory and political will to change the system to prevent
| such abuse in the future.
| asdff wrote:
| Shaming a congressman works in 2026?
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _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._
|
| From the first chapter of the book _On Tyranny_ by Timothy
| Snyder, an historian of Central and Eastern Europe, the
| Soviet Union, and the Holocaust:
|
| > Do not obey in advance.
|
| * https://timothysnyder.org/on-tyranny
|
| * https://archive.org/details/on-tyranny-twenty-lessons-
| from-t...
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Snyder
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| You're talking about an administration that barred the AP
| from pressed briefings because they didn't call it the Gulf
| of America. This is not a bikeshed.
| LastTrain wrote:
| I wouldn't call a brief comment on the matter dying on a hill
| fcs
| fluidcruft wrote:
| Commenting on the matter just makes it easier for the media
| to yap about Anthropic being "woke" rather than focusing on
| the Department of War's demands.
| noosphr wrote:
| And what if congress renames it tomorrow? They have the votes.
| These sort of procedural gotchas are as stupid as they are
| boring.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > And what if congress renames it tomorrow?
|
| Then tomorrow it will be the Department of War. Just like
| When Congress voted to split the old Department of War into
| the Department of the Army and the Department of the Air
| Force, and to take both of those and the previously-separate
| Department of the Navy under a new National Military
| Establishment led by the newly-created Secretary of Defense
| (and when it later to voted to rename the NME as "Department
| of Defense"), things changed in the past.
|
| > They have the votes.
|
| Perhaps, but the law doesn't change because the votes are in
| a whip count on a hypothetical change, it changes because
| they are actually cast on a bill making a concrete change.
| justin66 wrote:
| This is a willfully ignorant misreading of what's actually
| going on. They've decided to use the "Department of War"
| moniker in part because they think it sounds cool, but more
| significantly because it demonstrates they can break the law
| with impunity. Hence, there has not been a vote on the
| matter.
| noosphr wrote:
| What law?
| tempestn wrote:
| 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.
| impulser_ wrote:
| The worst part of this is if they do remove Claude, and probably
| GPT, and Gemini soon after because of outcry we are going to be
| left with our military using fucking Grok as their model, a model
| that not even on par with open source Chinese models.
| alangibson wrote:
| Yea but every warfighter will get a waifu
| popalchemist wrote:
| It's better than actively aiding them. Make them struggle at
| every turn.
| impulser_ wrote:
| Are you Chinese? If not, I think you should prefer the people
| defending you to have the best tools to do so.
| GolfPopper wrote:
| If the American military was focused on defending the
| United States, it would be a very different beast. The 21st
| Century American military is a tool for transferring wealth
| from the public to influential parties, and for inflicting
| destruction on non-peer nations who pose obstacles to
| influential parties interests. Defending the United States
| against various often-invoked hobgoblins is at best a very
| distant concern, closer to pure lip service than reality.
| georgemcbay wrote:
| I'm a natural-born American (many generations back) and
| firmly believe that if we ever get into a hot war with
| China, it will be because of American provocation, not
| Chinese.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| This of course raises the question on whether as an
| American I have more to fear from the Chinese government or
| the US one.. given everything happening in the Executive
| Branch here, that's a disappointingly hard question to
| answer.
| impulser_ wrote:
| I think that's an easy question to answer, but obviously
| you don't fear the Chinese government you're not a
| Chinese citizen. You can actively talk about your
| disagreements with the US government, that not a right
| the Chinese have.
| popalchemist wrote:
| Can you? By ICE agents' own admission on video, they have
| been adding people to "domestic terrorist" watchlists
| (just for verbally dissenting, making recordings with a
| phone, etc) which are then used by Palantir to disappear
| people directly from their homes - even US citizens.
| Palantir, the CEO of which gleefully admits to knowing
| many Nazis and seems to get off on the fact that his
| software "kills people" (direct quote).
| krapp wrote:
| >that's a disappointingly hard question to answer
|
| It shouldn't be. The US government is already sending
| armed and masked thugs to shoot political dissidents dead
| or sending them to concentration camps, threatening state
| governments and private companies to comply with
| suppressing free speech and oppressing undesirables, and
| openly discussing using emergency powers to suspend the
| next election.
|
| What _exactly_ is the commensurate threat from China? The
| real tacit threat, not abstract fears like "TikTok is
| Chinese mind control." What can China actually _do_ to
| you, an American, that the US isn 't already more capable
| of doing, and more likely to do?
|
| To me it isn't even a question. Even comparing worst case
| scenarios - open war with China versus civil war within
| the US - the latter is more of a threat to citizens of
| the US than the former unless the nukes drop. And even
| then, the only nation to ever use nuclear weapons in
| warfare is the US.
| popalchemist wrote:
| This is the correct take. It may be a different question
| for people living within China, but for Americans, the US
| Gov is a direct threat to their lives.
| 8note wrote:
| but the "people defending you" have been commiting clear
| and obvious war crimes?
| popalchemist wrote:
| I am American born and raised and I consider our current
| government mass murderers who I trust as much as I would
| have the Nazis. It was a good thing that the Nazis did not
| get the a-bomb before us, and the same principle applies
| here. The fewer magnifiers of their power the better. They
| are a scourge on human rights, and the world.
| Jolter wrote:
| The Department of War under Trump has proven itself to not
| be interested in defending you, the American people. All
| they've done so far is aggression against foreign supposed
| adversaries.
| int_19h wrote:
| > Are you Chinese? If not, I think you should prefer the
| people defending you to have the best tools to do so.
|
| They already have the best and most expensive toys in the
| world, and they mostly seem to be waging aggressive wars
| with them. Perhaps if the toys weren't so shiny and didn't
| make it all so one-sided, they wouldn't?
| techblueberry wrote:
| Apparently part of this whole battle is because Grok isn't up
| to part to be an acceptable alternative.
| ternwer wrote:
| 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.
| mattnewton wrote:
| 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.
| klooney wrote:
| Grok in unhinged mode piloting an Apache, what could go wrong.
| gizmodo59 wrote:
| They are playing a good PR game for sure. Their recent track
| record doesn't show if they can be trusted. Few millions is
| nothing for their current revenue and saying they sacrificed is a
| big stretch here.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| 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
| reasonableklout wrote:
| 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?
| danbrooks wrote:
| Props to Dario and Anthropic for taking a moral stand. A rarity
| in tech these days.
| bogzz wrote:
| This is not how the word "moral" should be used in a sentence
| that also has the name Dario Amodei in it.
| plaidthunder wrote:
| Words are cheap. Actions aren't. Dario Amodei is putting his
| company on the line for what he believes in. That's courage,
| character and... yes, morality.
| bogzz wrote:
| I am convinced that Amodei's "morality" is purely
| performative, and cynically employed as a marketing tactic.
| Time will tell, but most people will forget his lies.
| jstanley wrote:
| How should he have acted instead?
| bogzz wrote:
| We don't know how the military intended to use Claude,
| and neither do we know nor does the military know whether
| Claude without RLHF-imposed safety would have been more
| useful to them.
|
| Ergo, this is a very convenient PR opportunity. The
| public assumes the worst, and this is egged on by
| Anthropic with the implication that CLAUDE is being used
| in autonomous weapons, which I find almost amusing.
|
| He can now say goodbye to $200 million, and make up for
| it in positive publicity. Also, people will leave
| thinking that Claude is the best model, AND Anthropic are
| the heroes that staved off superintelligent killer robots
| for a while.
|
| Even setting this aside, Dario is the silly guy who's
| "not sure whether Claude is sentient or not", who keeps
| using the UBI narrative to promote his product with the
| silent implication that LLMs actually ARE a path to
| AGI... Look, if you believe that, then that is where we
| differ, and I suppose that then the notion that Amodei is
| a moral man is comprehensible.
|
| Oh, also the stealing. All the stealing. But he is not
| alone there by any means.
|
| edit: to actually answer your question, this act in
| itself is not what prompted me to say that he is an
| immoral man. Your comment did.
| ternwer wrote:
| His actions seem pretty consistent with a belief that AI
| will be significant and societally-changing in the
| future. You can disagree with that belief but it's
| different to him being a liar.
|
| The $200m is not the risk here. They threatened labelling
| Anthropic as a supply chain risk, which would be
| genuinely damaging.
|
| > The DoW is the largest employer in America, and a
| staggering number of companies have random subsidiaries
| that do work for it.
|
| > All of those companies would now have faced this
| compliance nightmare. [to not use Anthropic in any of
| their business or suppliers]
|
| ... which would impact Anthropic's primary customer base
| (businesses). Even for those not directly affected, it
| adds uncertainty in the brand.
| astrange wrote:
| > to promote his product with the silent implication that
| LLMs actually ARE a path to AGI
|
| That isn't implied. The thought process is a) if we
| invent AGI through some other method, we should still
| treat LLMs nicely because it's a credible commitment
| we'll treat the AGI well and b) having evidence in the
| pretraining data and on the internet that we treat LLMs
| well makes it easier to align new ones when training
| them.
|
| Anyway, your argument seems to be that it's unfair that
| he has the opportunity to do something moral in public
| because it makes him look moral?
| khazhoux wrote:
| Yeah.
|
| "Dario is saying the right thing and _doing the right
| thing_ and not ever acting otherwise, but I think it's
| just performative so I'm still disappointed in him."
| janalsncm wrote:
| It's possible Dario is a bad person pretending to be good
| and Sundar is a good person only pretending to be bad.
| People argue whether true selflessness exists at all or
| whether it's all a charade.
|
| But if the "performance" involves doing good things, at
| the end of the day that's good enough for me.
| signatoremo wrote:
| Standing up to the US government has real and serious
| sequence. Peter Hegseth threatened to make Anthropic
| supply chain risk, meaning not only is Anthropic likely
| dropped as Pentagon's supplier, but also risk losing
| companies doing business with the military as customers,
| such as Boeing or Lockheed Martin. Whatever tactic you
| think he is doing, that's potentially massive revenue
| lost, at the time they need any business they can get.
| chasd00 wrote:
| Amazon does business with the DOD/W. That's a pretty
| dangerous game of brinkmanship Anthropic is playing.
| startupsfail wrote:
| Don't be evil.
| mvkel wrote:
| These are literally words. The DoW could still easily
| exploit these platforms, and nothing Anthropic has done can
| prevent it, other than saying (publicly), "we disagree."
| janalsncm wrote:
| It's a contract dispute. Contracts are more than just
| talk.
|
| While it is true that DoW could try to bypass the
| contract and do whatever they want, if it were that easy
| they wouldn't be asking for a contract in the first
| place.
| mvkel wrote:
| Should probably look up how many private companies are
| suing the government at any one time because of a breach
| of contract. And that's publicly breaching.
|
| NSA and other three-letter agencies happily do it under
| cloak and dagger.
| janalsncm wrote:
| I agree with you that the govt can and does violate
| contracts. So the fact that they need Anthropic to agree
| signals that it's more than just lawyers preventing the
| DoW from doing whatever they want.
| mhitza wrote:
| What's the US history around nationalization? Would
| "confiscation", ever be a likelyhood on escalation?
|
| On a quick search I came up with an article, that at
| least thematically, proposes such ideas about the current
| administration "Nationalization by Stealth: Trump's New
| Industrial Playbook"
|
| https://thefulcrum.us/trump-state-control-capitalism
| layer8 wrote:
| The dispute seems to be specifically about safeguards
| that Anthropic has in its models and/or harnesses, that
| the DoD wants removed, which Anthropic refuses to do, and
| won't sign a contract requiring their removal. Having
| implemented the safeguards and refusing their removal are
| actions, not "literally words".
| mvkel wrote:
| The "safeguards" you are referring to are contractual,
| i.e. words. There are no technical safeguards, per the
| article.
|
| The memo literally says that the reason they have these
| policies is -because- actual technical guardrails are not
| reliable enough.
| layer8 wrote:
| No, "safeguards" goes beyond that, it's a whole process
| at Anthropic:
|
| https://www.anthropic.com/news/building-safeguards-for-
| claud...
|
| https://alignment.anthropic.com/2025/introducing-
| safeguards-...
| mvkel wrote:
| Again, these are just words, and they're a salad of legal
| terms of art that provide cover for virtually any action.
| "We prevent the -illegitimate- use..." [define
| illegitimate plz?]
|
| In your second link, that team was defunded; the person
| heading it just left ceremoniously: https://x.com/mrinank
| sharma/status/2020881722003583421?s=46
| sheikhnbake wrote:
| I have a feeling this is just a negotiation tactic
| leveraging public sentiment rather than a stance based on
| morality.
| tfehring wrote:
| It's both - it's clearly at least partly for moral
| reasons that they're even _in_ the negotiation that they
| need leverage for.
| slg wrote:
| Is it morality or is it recognizing that providing the
| brain of autonomous weapons has a non-zero chance of ending
| up with him on trial in The Hague?
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| This action is far more likely to land him in prison than
| complying with the pentagon
| slg wrote:
| I disagree. There is a class of leaders in this country
| that is complicit with the administrations use of
| violence on the tacit understanding that the violence not
| be directed at them. Arresting one of those people would
| be an act of desperation that would likely cause the rats
| to flea the sinking ship. And it isn't even clear if
| Trump could actually manufacture any charges here. Look
| at the dropped charges against Mark Kelly and those other
| politicians as an example. The administration might be
| able to make up stories to arrest random immigrants and
| college kids, but they clearly haven't been able to
| indiscriminately jail powerful political opponents.
|
| Meanwhile, Dario knows his product can't be trusted to
| actually decide who should live and who should die, so
| what happens the first time his hypothetical AI killing
| machines make the wrong decision? Who gets the blame for
| that? Would the American government be willing to throw
| him under the bus in the face of international outrage?
| It's certainly a possibility.
| inigyou wrote:
| The chance is zero. This won't be deployed in countries
| that he'd want to visit anyway _and_ would extradite him
| to The Hague.
| mobilefriendly wrote:
| In all seriousness The Hague has no jurisdiction over
| Americans and Congress has already authorized military
| use of force against Brussels should they ever attempt to
| prosecute Americans.
| verdverm wrote:
| It's not so clear the company is actually on the line. They
| can compel Anthropic to do what they are not willing to do,
| maybe, this is not the final act. The government needs to
| respond, to which Anthropic will need to respond, courts
| may become involved at that point, depending on if
| Anthropic acquiesces at that point or not. Make a prominent
| statement against while in the news cycle, let the rest
| unfold under less media attention.
| davidw wrote:
| It's a little bit better than so many sniveling, cowardly
| elites are doing right now.
| Computer0 wrote:
| 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.
| buzzerbetrayed wrote:
| Perhaps you just have different moral values? I suspect each
| of the countries you mentioned spy on us. I also suspect we
| spy on them. I'm glad an American company wouldn't be so
| foolish as to pretend otherwise.
| Computer0 wrote:
| Are we gods chosen people or something that we are the only
| ones undeserving of mass surveillance? Are you implying
| that morality depends on citizenship to a particular state?
| sfink wrote:
| This is a public note, but directed at the current
| administration, so reading it as a description of what is or
| is not moral is completely missing the point. This note is
| saying (1) we refuse to be used in this way, and (2) we are
| going to use "mass surveillance of US citizens" as our
| defensive line because it is at least backed by
| Constitutional arguments. Those same arguments ought to apply
| more broadly, but attempts to use them that way have already
| been trampled on and so would only weaken the arguments as a
| defense.
|
| If it helps: refusing to tune Claude for domestic
| surveillance will also enable refusing to do the same for
| other surveillance, because they can make the honest argument
| that most things you'd do to improve Claude for any mass
| surveillance will also assist in domestic mass surveillance.
| janalsncm wrote:
| 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.
| ekianjo wrote:
| You know this is pure PR right?
| flawn wrote:
| What do you mean? You think Hegseth and Anthropic are doing
| this for PR reasons?
| reasonableklout wrote:
| If Anthropic is nationalized or declared a supply chain risk
| tomorrow, will you say the same?
| dddgghhbbfblk wrote:
| 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.
| tylerchilds wrote:
| I feel like the deepest technical definition of autocratic is
| "fully autonomous weapons"?
| adastra22 wrote:
| Freedom isn't free. Someone has to defend the democratic
| values that you and I take for granted.
|
| Dario's statement is in support of the institution, not the
| current administration.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| The last time the US defended freedom through military
| means was WWII.
|
| As Abraham Lincoln said, the greatest threat to freedom in
| America is a domestic tyrant, not a foreign army.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Korea, Vietnam, Panama, Grenada, Libya, Lebanon, Iraq War
| I, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq
| War II were all fought for or over democratic ideals &
| the defense of democratic institutions.
|
| All were driven by multiple competing and sometimes
| conflicting goals, and many look questionable in
| hindsight. It is fair to critique.
|
| But it is absolutely not the case that the last time the
| US defended freedom through military means was WWII.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| Not a single one of those wars was in defense of freedom
| and democracy.
|
| I'm not going to go through all of those wars one-by-one,
| but are you joking with Iraq War II? That war was sold on
| the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass
| destruction and was somehow behind 9/11, by a president
| who himself had stolen the 2000 election by getting his
| brother to halt the counting of votes in Florida.
| blitzar wrote:
| > over democratic ideals & the defense of democratic
| institutions
|
| Corporations, natural resources or getting a blowjob from
| the intern ... these are neither democratic ideals nor
| democratic institutions
| cwillu wrote:
| The democratic values I take for granted is under direct
| threat from the us. Your government is literally funding
| separatist movements in my country.
| jackp96 wrote:
| I mean, obviously.
|
| But when was the last time our "democratic values" were
| under attack by a foreign country and actually needed
| defending?
|
| 9/11? Pearl Harbor?
|
| Maybe I'm missing something. We have a giant military and a
| tendency to use it. On occasion, against democratically
| elected leaders in other countries.
|
| You're right; freedom isn't free. But foreign countries
| aren't exactly the biggest threats to American democracy at
| the moment.
| adastra22 wrote:
| You have the causality at least partially backwards. Why
| has it been so long and infrequent that the US has been
| in direct conflict with authoritarian adversaries?
| Because we have a giant military and a willingness to use
| it. Pacifism and isolationism do not work as defensive
| strategies.
| kylestanfield wrote:
| War is peace.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Game theory is real.
| joemi wrote:
| They are undeniably taking a moral stand. Among other things,
| the statement explains that there are two use cases that they
| refuse to do. This is a moral stand. It might not align with
| your morals, but it's still a moral stand.
| Fricken wrote:
| 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.
| xvector wrote:
| You're right, we should never build anything because bad
| people might try to use it. Everyone that has progressed
| technology is a monster!
| Metacelsus wrote:
| I'm glad to see Dario and Anthropic showing some spine! A lot of
| other people would have caved.
| dylan604 wrote:
| "I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to
| defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our
| autocratic adversaries."
|
| That opening line is one hell of a set up. The current
| administration is doing everything it can to become autocratic
| thereby setting themselves up to be adversarial to Anthropic,
| which is pretty much the point of the rest of the blog. I guess
| I'm just surprised to have such a succinct opening instead just
| slop.
| flumpcakes wrote:
| This is such a depressing read. What is becoming of the USA?
| Let's hope sanity prevails and the next election cycle can bring
| in some competent non-grievance based leadership.
| georgemcbay wrote:
| > 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.
| saulpw wrote:
| Hope is not a plan, unfortunately, so if that's all we've got,
| I don't have much hope.
| davidw wrote:
| 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.
| inigyou wrote:
| Some people are calling it the "American century of
| humiliation"
|
| No other country that went through a phase like this has
| _ever_ recovered. Not even in a century.
| davidw wrote:
| I won't give in to doomerism.
|
| Germany, Italy and Japan are all wealthy, stable
| democracies right now. Not without their problems and
| baggage, but pleasant places in a lot of ways.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| They got bombed to shit first
| davidw wrote:
| It'd be nice to avoid that part.
| Fischgericht wrote:
| Then it won't work. The current iteration of Germany is
| fully based on having been bombed to get a fresh start.
| If you already have something, you won't change it. If
| you have to re-build, you will implement improvements. No
| bombs, no reset, no joy.
| davidw wrote:
| I am less confident about my predictions for an uncertain
| future. There's all kinds of ways different things could
| go.
|
| I didn't say we needed to follow their example to the
| letter; it was just one counterexample to the "woe and
| ruin for 100 years" comment.
| Fischgericht wrote:
| Yes, but it is actually scientifically correct and proven
| on all sorts of layers. Biology, Maths, whatever. Not
| doomsdaying, just data analytics.
|
| Societies are not operating like a sinus curve like say
| summer/winter cycles. They are upside-down "U"s. After
| the peak comes decline, but after the decline there is
| NOT recovery/growth again before you have a reset.
|
| Germany was the huge winner of WW2 in the sense that
| after having had a high society they directly were
| allowed to get another such run. But as nobody wants to
| bomb us _) anymore, Germany is also in decline now
| waiting for a reset to come one day...
|
| Sadly the USA will also need a reset before things can
| begin getting better again.
|
| _) I was born in Germany and lived there for 40 years.
| RGamma wrote:
| References to scientific proofs?
| scottyah wrote:
| Ok what about the Netherlands, Spain, Nordic countries?
| Fischgericht wrote:
| Very different countries.
|
| The Netherlands for example got their last reset by
| completely losing the Dutch empire.
|
| Also, some societies have flatter curves than others.
| That really maps 1:1 to your style and culture of living
| and where the priorities are.
|
| If your priorities are to be the best as fast as possible
| (Germany) you will have less time between resets. If your
| priorities are "let's chill and wait until the coconut
| falls from the tree into my hand", your society might be
| able to have a far longer time between resets.
|
| But in the end: It's an iterative process. Which means:
| There must be iterations.
| davidw wrote:
| This sounds about as scientific as phrenology.
| Fischgericht wrote:
| No, it's really simple: Programming, Math, AI, blabla -
| those are all abstractions of what we have seen in
| nature.
|
| Once you have understood that, you can just apply the
| rules learned backward, and they will typically match
| pretty well. I can buy fractal veggies in a supermarket.
|
| And also, it's just data. Just take some random samples.
| That even civilizations like the Mayas who have faaaar
| more time on the clock than say than the US had multiple
| full resets.
|
| Another random sample I've just pulled out of thin google
| air: San Francisco Fire of 1851. Everybody knew that wood
| burns. And that wooden buildings burn. And that wooden
| cities burn. Did anyone decide to tear down their house
| and re-build with a different material? No. This happened
| after everything had burned down to the ground. That was
| the reset needed.
|
| I think it is very clearly an iterative process. Have a
| look.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >And also, it's just data. Just take some random samples.
|
| You are not at all working with "data" or "samples". You
| are just making arguments and supporting them with
| examples. That's not science, that's philosophy or
| persuasive essay writing.
|
| You are generalizing those arguments in insane ways. Just
| like the worst philosophy. You are drawing conclusions
| from extremely weak claims that don't even map to reality
| in the first place.
|
| You can't say "Math works to describe the head of
| broccoli so I can just think hard enough and understand
| geopolitics". That's emphatically not science.
| prmph wrote:
| Not sure why you are being downvoted. What you are saying
| has a lot of truth to it. It is directly observable in
| the history of nations.
|
| Germany has to be forced to accept that, although it was
| advanced, it could not have the European empire it
| thought it deserved. Japan had to learn a similar lesson.
| The speed and horror of the reset was in direct
| proportion to the potential for advancement and high
| society in these nations.
|
| Ghana, where I come form, for example, has not has to
| experience any massive upheaval even from its pre-
| colonial and colonial days up till now. Our society is
| laid-back, and moves slowly. Even many other African
| countries have had to have their national reckoning in
| the form of civil wars and other huge upheavals in order
| to settle into a viable way of existing and advancing.
|
| And, like you said, this is iterative. Given the nature
| of people in a nation and its fundamental geopolitical
| position, the same question will need to be answered
| after every N generations. Germany is central to Europe,
| and already a generation that is far removed from the
| world wars are starting to rethink why it shouldn't
| assert itself more strongly. Same in Japan.
|
| THe way to analyze the iterations of the US is to
| understand that the primary threats are from within. It
| may not implode complete, but civil war and the civil
| rights era show that the potential is there for massive
| unrest and violence.
| Fischgericht wrote:
| [I am getting downvoted all the time because the
| combination of German directness with autistic directness
| and lack of empathy combined with dark humor is not
| exactly compatible with societies where it is seen as
| offensive, rude or even aggressive not to sugar coat your
| messages. If one side treats this as a data exchange, and
| the other side processes the data but including emotions
| it will obviously have compatibility issues. But that's
| my "problem", so I accepted that typically if I post
| stuff, I first get upvoted massively, and after a day
| downvoted to hell. And that's OK. Again, my problem to be
| incompatible with a standard.]
|
| And yes, it is interesting to see that on Polymarket
| people are betting involving a lot of emotions. No, you
| will not bet on getting killed by masked militia. Nobody
| is going to say "Hey, I'll bet $1000 that I will get
| cancer soon!".
|
| But if you leave aside all the emotions, and just look at
| the data: No, there is no realistic scenario the US could
| magically recover from all checks and balances and rules
| and laws and regulations and decency having been
| destroyed. Competence, leadership and shared knowledge
| had been erased in all areas of society - Science,
| Development, Capitalism, Arts. How are you going to
| rebuild all of this, especially if the best case is that
| 60% of the people will agree to rebuild, while 40% insist
| they need to keep destroying stuff?
|
| This is not a scenario looking at historical data any
| prior "high culture" (or whatever to call this) had been
| able to recover from.
|
| Elsewhere in this thread is was mentioned that Germany
| still had all the Nazis in place everywhere because else
| the country would not have worked. But that is not the
| point. The reset was:
|
| a) All is destroyed and MUST be rebuild because else we
| will freeze and starve to death.
|
| b) Your Nazi neighbor is still there, but it has been
| made VERY clear who is the new sheriff in town: First the
| allies, but then pretty much the USA. Germany is still
| paying for having US solders in the country, providing
| valuable expensive land for free, and paying for most of
| the supply chain that is not staffed with US soldiers.
| And that is the accepted normal.
|
| c) What was left on industry was physically taken as
| reoperations. Especially the soviets, but also the French
| did dismantle hole factories and machinery, moving that
| to their own countries (rightfully so.)
|
| From what I know from school, reading and talking to
| grandparents: Germany before WW2 doesn't have much
| relation to pre-WW2 Germany. Suddenly it was normal that
| women can to "men's jobs" (due to those being more on the
| dead side). McDonalds. Hollywood. etc
|
| It really makes sense to have a look at a couple of
| pictures of what was left of Germany after WW2. It's just
| someone slapping an existing brand name onto a new
| product. And in this case, personally I would have
| regarded the brand as damaged and would have picked a
| different name.
| RGamma wrote:
| It is not inevitable that you come back improved. It is
| not inevitable that you come back at all.
| eternauta3k wrote:
| Germany wasn't a fresh start. The de-nazification ended
| up being a bit of a joke and (AFAIK) the first
| governments were full of ex-Nazis.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| I don't think it would matter even if the us did have to
| start again. The entire us alliance after ww2 benefited
| from the same structural causes of increased pluralism
| and egalitarianism. A fractured elite, complex
| international trade, expanding and increasingly difficult
| to control communication channels, and a growing
| bureaucracy. These all inhibit autocratic concentration
| of power. International trade became uncomplicated, there
| is one manufacturer that is not a consumer, and many
| consumers. This leads to an increasingly less fractured
| elite. The structural reasons for democracy and rules
| based order are all fading. The us is just a really big
| canary.
| King-Aaron wrote:
| The people running the show are all building generational
| fallout shelters in new zealand. As seems to be the real
| 'whitehouse ballroom' plan too. They seem to be expecting
| that part.
| protocolture wrote:
| James May did a documentary loosely based on this. "The
| Peoples Car"
|
| Basically analysing the economies of WW2 participants via
| their automobile industries.
|
| Its staggering how being bombed into the ground has
| forced technological and economic innovation. And how the
| inverse, being the bomber, has created stagnation.
| pear01 wrote:
| Congress is the problem, but not in the way most
| describe.
|
| Congress has abdicated its powers because as an
| institution it is broken. Several inland states with
| total state wide populations less than that of major
| metro areas on the coasts have the same amount of
| senators as every other state has - two. This means
| voters in a lot of states are over represented.
| Meanwhile, they say land doesn't vote, but in the United
| States Senate the cities and localities with the most
| people that drive much of our growth and dynamism are
| severely underrepresented. The upper and most important
| chamber of the Congress is thus undemocratic. Given it's
| an institution deeply susceptible to minority gridlock
| that depends on wide margins to do anything, well now
| more often than not it simply does nothing. An imperial
| presidency thus frankly becomes the only way the country
| can actually get most things done.
|
| This two senators for every state arrangement was a
| compromise agreed to when constitutional ratification was
| in doubt, when the USA was a weak, newborn country of
| about 3 million people confined to the Eastern seaboard
| at a time in our history where our most pressing concern
| was being recolonized by European powers. The British
| burned down the White House in 1812 imagine what more
| they could have accomplished if the constitutional
| compromises that strengthened the union had not been
| agreed to.
|
| This compromise has outlived its usefulness. No American
| today fears a Spanish armada or British regulars bearing
| torches. These difficult compromises at the heart of
| America already led to one civil war.
|
| The best we can do is create a broad political movement
| that entertains as many incriminations as possible
| (probably around corruption/Epstein, which must make
| pains to avoid any distinction between say a Bill Clinton
| or a Donald Trump) so we can get past partisan bickering
| to get enough of mass movement to try to usher in a new
| age of constitutional amendment and reform.
|
| If it doesn't happen this cycle of Obama Trump Biden
| Trump will continue until this country elects someone who
| makes Trump look like a saint. It can happen. Think of
| how Trump rehabilitated Bush. We already see the trend
| getting worse. And if it does, then the post WWII Germany
| style reset being mentioned here will then become
| inevitable.
| soderfoo wrote:
| How do you think this would play out? Changing the
| apportionment of the Senate, aside from being a political
| and legal nightmare, would also create monumental
| constitutional crisis.
|
| First, the Connecticut Compromise is a democratic
| underpinning of the US. It was central to the formation
| of the nation, and any attempt to alter it would be a
| foundational structural change to the constitution to say
| the least.
|
| I understand the concerns about one generation binding
| another without recourse. Legal scholars differ on
| whether Article V, which implements the compromise, can
| be amended or not.
|
| But for the sake of argument, let's say it can. It would
| be an insurmountable task requiring the following:
|
| 1. A supermajority in both houses of Congress (67% in the
| Senate and 66% in the House) to propose the amendment.
|
| 2. Ratification by three-fourths of the state
| legislatures (38 out of 50 states) or by conventions in
| three-fourths of the states.
|
| 3. Consent of the states that would lose their equal
| representation in the Senate.
|
| 4. Overcome any legal challenges that would likely arise
| at every step of the process.
|
| The result would be a dramatic redefinition of federalism
| and democratic representation. This wouldn't be a
| cosmetic change, it would be a fundamental alteration to
| the structure of the government and constitution.
|
| Very few things were deemed "unamendable" and entrenched
| in the constitution before, both explicitly and
| implicitly, but now it would all be up for grabs. Now
| nothing is irrevocable.
|
| What's to stop future generations from altering other
| fundamental principles? While we may complain of being
| bound by the decisions of our ancestors, we would be
| opening up a Pandora's box of constitutional instability
| for future generations, binding them to the whims of a
| (slim?) majority of the current generation's political
| agenda.
|
| I think that is the best case scenario. The worst, and I
| think a very possible scenario, is that states losing
| representation would claim that such a drastic and
| material change to the constitution upends the root of
| the bargain that led to the formation of the union, and
| would likely seek to secede. You may have achieved your
| goal of changing the apportionment of the Senate, but at
| the cost of the union itself. There are far easier and
| less risky ways to achieve political change.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| We could add new states. For example, Washington DC has
| 702,000 people with zero Congressional representation,
| and they're currently occupied by Federal troops without
| any voting recourse. If they were made a state, they'd be
| bigger than Wyoming and Vermont. Puerto Rico is also a US
| territory with 3.2 million people and zero Congressional
| representation. As a state it would be larger than 20
| existing states. This doesn't "fix" the problem but it
| does ensure that more U.S. citizens gain access to
| representation in Congress, while also shifting power to
| more densely-populated areas.
| soderfoo wrote:
| True. I'm not as familiar with the politics of DC, but my
| limited understanding of the PR statehood situation is
| that the GOP is unlikely to approve what would presumably
| be 2 new safe democratic seats in the senate.
|
| If I remember correctly, the governor of PR would appoint
| the first 2 senators. A tactic could be to promise to
| appoint 1 republican senator as an enrichment to approve
| statehood. It's a real shit situation.
|
| There are more Puerto Ricans living in NYC and Orlando
| than in PR. I'd like to visit before the little family I
| have left there leaves or dies out.
| mobilefriendly wrote:
| All three have active US military bases on their soil and
| enjoy the economic surplus of living under the US defense
| umbrella.
| davidw wrote:
| The post WWII system was imperfect in many ways, but it
| was also mutually beneficial and worked out pretty well
| despite the problems.
|
| And we're throwing that all out the window.
|
| US military bases aren't what made those countries
| modern, prosperous, democratic places. It took the will
| of the people to rebuild something better after the war.
| bonsai_spool wrote:
| Britain essentially ceded its bases to the US at the end
| of WWII - these things aren't as durable as they may
| seem.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| that's cos WW1 financially broke Britain, then WW2
| happened.
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| All that economic surplus - and much more - flows back to
| the US. How do you think the US can sustain that amount
| of USD printing without inflation ? The rest of the world
| is buying those dollars.
| matwood wrote:
| You seem to imply the US reaps no benefit from providing
| security?
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| don't make it out like its a favour. The US have done
| very well out of their defense umbrella ensuring its
| global dominance for most of last century.
|
| Most powers have to pay in blood to do what they want geo
| politically without question. The US inherited a global
| state where many potential rivals were weak and helped
| keep them weak. It was a cost worth paying and its a
| shame that current US leaders are so cheap and foolhardy
| to not see what they're throwing away.
| remarkEon wrote:
| Germany: functionally paralyzed government that has the
| far right knocking at the door because the fractured
| coalition of left-centerleft-centerright continues to
| refuse to do what voters ask for.
|
| Italy: Nominally center-right government, similar
| problems as Germany, less the energy issues
|
| Japan: just elected a landslide right wing government
| that is going to change the constitution so they can
| build an offensive military again
|
| Curious.
| poly2it wrote:
| I don't perceive those problems to be inherent to the
| territories or peoples of the countries. All have had
| potential to change and have done so extensively since
| the Second World War. There isn't a universal explanation
| or root behind the issues these countries are facing
| today, unless you are willing to abstract it to just
| "economics".
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| That's just historically inaccurate. You had massive
| upheavals across numerous countries throughout time, this
| is small in comparison to the civil war's impact on the USA
| for instance. You think this is worse than half the
| government rebelling and revolting and killing an amount of
| young men that today would be equivalent to 6 million
| deaths? It's bad now but your comment lacks historical
| evidence.
| jonplackett wrote:
| China seems to have recovered pretty well.
| AuthAuth wrote:
| Not really. China only seems good because there is a war
| in Europe and the US is shooting themself in the foot.
| They're polluting and strip mining their country,
| suppressing wages and funneling the profit into companies
| all while increasing surveillance and decreasing freedom
| of opinion. Oh but they put down a few solar panels and
| then paid for people to write articles about it.
| davidw wrote:
| Their economy lifted a bunch of people out of poverty.
| That's positive.
|
| However, in terms of 'democracy' they're still way worse
| off than the US right now, even if the US is headed in a
| bad direction.
| wraptile wrote:
| > Their economy lifted a bunch of people out of poverty
|
| This is fallacious as every economy that started at
| extreme poverty lifted a bunch of people out of poverty.
|
| Unless we invent a time machine and do an A|B test we
| can't really attribute the success to policy when _any_
| policy would have clearly lifted out a bunch of people
| out of poverty (basically almost impossible to not go up
| from extreme deficit). The closest we can do is look at
| similar scenarios like Taiwan which also lifted a bunch
| of people from poverty while retaining more human rights.
| davidw wrote:
| Plenty of places have managed to "keep on keepin' on"
| with their poverty levels.
|
| I'm not saying what they've done was the best way, only
| way or anything of that sort: only that it happened.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| They're also speedrunning a world class power
| distribution system and deploying a massive amount of
| renewable power amoung a whole mess of other
| infrastructure. They've got the ability to focus an
| entire nation into achieving technical goals and they're
| rapidly improving quality of life in average while
| maintaining an industrial base that the US can only
| remember fondly. They might not meet western standards
| for individual freedoms and rule of law, but they're
| undoubtedly a rising world power.
| bamboozled wrote:
| I used to pretend China wasn't absolutely smashing the
| USA, but it looks like it is. They basically make
| everything modern civilization relies on, that's an
| insane amount of leverage over the rest of the world.
| That combined with renewables and nuclear and their
| diminishing need for foreign oil because of that is
| pretty incredible.
| lanfeust6 wrote:
| This doesn't make much sense. Since the late 19th
| century, every country that got rich also heavily
| polluted the environment, though increasingly less over
| time. As it stands, fossil fuel demand in China has
| plateaued. The "wage suppression" thing also doesn't
| track; their citizens got much, much richer since Nixon's
| visit, despite being on average poorer than Westerners.
| Their GDP per capita is low because there's like a
| billion of them in the country.
|
| The only thing to say is that it's still authoritarian.
| Once that gets a hold of a country, it's very difficult
| to shed off. Interestingly, both South Korea and
| Singapore shifted away from being dictatorships and were
| not ideologically socialist. Countries taken over by
| Communists remain authoritarian. The true believers will
| never give that up.
| davidw wrote:
| Agree with much of this. However: plenty of
| Central/Eastern European countries seem like they have
| pretty definitively shaken off communism in favor of
| pretty standard European style capitalism/social
| democracy.
| lanfeust6 wrote:
| That is true, though I chalk some of that up to disdain
| for Russian imperialism/colonialism, and bargaining to
| remain out of its influence
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >Oh but they put down a few solar panels
|
| the few solar panels in question are a united kingdom
| worth of green energy _each year_ , about a royal navy
| worth of marine tonnage every two and they lifted more
| people out of poverty over the span of two generations
| than most of the rest of the world combined. Shenzhen
| produces about 70% of the entire world's consumer drones,
| now the primary weapon on both sides of the largest
| military conflict in the world. Xiaomi, a company founded
| in 2010 15 years ago decided to make electric cars in
| 2021 and is now successfully selling them.
|
| As Adam Tooze has pointed out it's the single most
| transformative place in the world, if you're not trying
| to learn from it you're choosing to ignore the most
| important place in the 21st century for ideological
| reasons
| grvbck wrote:
| > They're polluting
|
| They absolutely are, but per capita, USA is polluting
| 49.67 % more than China.
|
| Source: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-
| rankings/carbon-fo...
| jonplackett wrote:
| Also they are making all our stuff for us. That's our
| pollution too guys.
| randallsquared wrote:
| But only half as much per dollar, so the lower pollution
| per capita is just poverty, which is likely to decline
| over the next few decades as it has been (assuming we
| have decades left).
| gbnwl wrote:
| Is this a joke that's going over my head? The country we
| all know the term "century of humiliation" from has
| recovered and is literally a superpower right now?
| tsunamifury wrote:
| Rome was 'in decline' for 1000 years... these things are
| mostly feel good blather and not realistic statements on
| the position of nations
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| This is a laughably ridiculous assertion.
| Pxtl wrote:
| The Unenlightenment. Dereconstruction.
|
| > No other country that went through a phase like this has
| ever recovered. Not even in a century.
|
| Oh I can think of a couple in the '40s that bounced back
| after a while.
| giwook wrote:
| I'd be interested to see some specific examples cited as
| it's hard to take this comment at face value.
| nostrademons wrote:
| U.S. Civil War? Roman Crisis of the 3rd Century? Russian
| Revolution? England's War of the Roses? China's periodic
| dynastic changes?
|
| They usually don't come back with the same political
| organization - that's sorta the point. But plenty of
| civilizations come back in a form that is culturally
| recognizable and even dominate afterwards.
| testfrequency wrote:
| On eastern social media a big discussion going around right
| now is referring to America as being on the "kill line".
|
| The world knows the US is close to folding in on itself.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > It's going to be a generational effort to fix what these
| people are breaking more of every day.
|
| That assumes you have people wanting to fix what is broken -
| and I have a hard time believing even now that they are in
| the majority.
|
| MAGA and their supporters? They want to see the world burn,
| if only for different motives: the "left behind" people in
| flyover states just want revenge, the Evangelicals literally
| believe they can cause the Second Coming of Christ by it [1],
| the Russia fangroup wants to see Ukraine burn to the ground
| and the ultra-libertarians/dont tread on me folks want all
| government but maybe a bit of military to go away. That is
| what unifies so many people behind the Trump banner.
|
| The problem is, on the left side you got a bunch of people
| completely fed up as well. Anarchists of course, then you got
| the "left behind" people who still want revenge on the system
| but aren't willing to enlist the help of the far-right for
| that goal, you got revolutionaries of all kind... and you got
| those who believe that the rot runs too deep to fix by now.
|
| And let's face the uncomfortable truth: every one of them,
| bar the Evangelicals and the Russia apologists, actually has
| a decent point in wanting to see the world burn. Post-
| Thatcher capitalism has wrecked too many lives, the US
| Constitution hasn't seen a meaningful update in decades and
| no overhaul in centuries, the "checks and balances" that were
| supposed to prevent a Trump from reaching office or rising to
| the position of effective dictator have been all but
| destroyed, the "American Dream" has been vaporware ever since
| 2007...
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c20g1zvgj4do
| plaidfuji wrote:
| Yeah... turns out you have to keep a certain balance of
| domestic industries to keep 350 million people employed in
| a capacity where they don't want to burn down the whole
| system. But that would be socialism.
|
| Now you've got the people whose jobs suck and want their
| old jobs to come back vs the people whose jobs suck and
| just want to dispense with the illusion that everyone needs
| to be employed. Either way, the money-generating corporate
| automaton needs to cough up some of its profits to fund
| people's existence. If everyone could just agree on how,
| maybe they'd get somewhere.
|
| Meanwhile, I will continue to cling to my slice of the
| corporate automoton pie.
| eunos wrote:
| > generational effort to fix
|
| You imply that there are folks that willing to fix or even
| recognize that things are broken in the first place
| jorblumesea wrote:
| 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.
| rjbwork wrote:
| Indeed. Bin Laden succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. He
| kickstarted our self-destruction.
| blitzar wrote:
| I think the shoe lace bomber did more than bin laden -
| decades of ritual humiliation at airports was normalised.
| randallsquared wrote:
| The TSA wouldn't exist with bin Laden. The TSA still
| exists, but the effects of the shoe bomber are now done,
| in the sense that shoes aren't required to come off as of
| last year.
| wilg wrote:
| No, this is cope, Trump is deeply different.
| asdff wrote:
| Trump is different because he is flailing to deflect from
| the fact he is deeply legally compromised. But he is
| reaching into a toolbox of things that have already been
| made available.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| yeah there is close to little relation between the current
| administration and pre-Trump GOP. That entire party is now
| compromised. Beforehand you could always assume they'd be
| locked out by legal, business, or party pressure but that
| hasn't been seemingly much of a thing since Trump (as seen
| most recently in the illegal tariffs the administration
| continues to try to apply globally).
| sneak wrote:
| The framework for collecting the data to feed to the AI,
| exposed by Snowden, was designed and implemented in the
| wake of 9/11 by Bush when Trump was still busy banging
| teenagers with Epstein and not even thinking about
| politics.
|
| Then Obama re-authorized and expanded it. Trump and Biden
| haven't even moved the needle, really.
|
| Now they've put up tens of thousands of permanently
| installed facial recognition cameras (not Flock ALPR, those
| point the other direction to get number plates) all over
| SoCal and southern Nevada (that I've directly observed;
| presumably it is happening in many other cities as well),
| and TSA and CBP are collecting as many ID-verified sets of
| facial geometry as they possibly can, whenever they can.
| ICE is of course using it nonstop, as well as feeding
| additional geometry into it. They're flying drones 30 feet
| above sidewalks in downtown LA to mass collect faces.
|
| The DoD _can't wait_ to deploy SOTA AI against Americans en
| masse.
| ypeterholmes wrote:
| 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.
| gitaarik wrote:
| What do you mean? You think any company should do whatever the
| government tells them?
| flumpcakes wrote:
| Not at all. It's a depressing read _because_ the US
| Government is doing such things that would have been
| considered insane before 2016.
| this-is-why wrote:
| 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.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| there's more money and "don't rock the boat" mentality on
| here as a consequence of that and they try to keep the
| moderation light. So its just not discussed enough to give
| people still tragically mired in that tribalism, the
| appropriate levels of shame.
| lm28469 wrote:
| 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
| hightrix wrote:
| > What is becoming of the USA?
|
| There was a coup by a foriegn adversary and Americans lost.
| michaellee8 wrote:
| Probably not a good idea to let Claude vibe-selecting targets, it
| still sometime hallucinates
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| Just visibly wave the US flag and you'll be fine, don't worry.
| knfkgklglwjg wrote:
| Soon it will select targets in commie countries though, perhaps
| it already does. Who selected to bomb Chavez mausoleum btw?
| asmor wrote:
| As a "foreign national", what's the deal with making the
| distinction between domestic mass surveillance and foreign mass
| surveillance? Are there no democracies aside from the US? Don't
| we know since Snowden that if the US wants to do domestic
| surveillance they'll just ask GCHQ to share their "foreign"
| surveillance capabilities?
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| Are all democracies allies to you?
| gmueckl wrote:
| That still doesn't justify _mass_ surveillance.
| asmor wrote:
| Never said that. Didn't even imply it.
| ra wrote:
| 100% - this is the shortsightedness and demonstrates hypocrisy.
|
| Countries routinely use other countries intelligence gathering
| apparatus to get around domestic surveillance laws.
| sheikhnbake wrote:
| Exactly. FVEYs been doing reciprocal surveillance on each other
| for decades.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes#Domestic_espionage_s...
| dointheatl wrote:
| > 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.
| kace91 wrote:
| Particularly so when those foreign nationals can be consumers.
| "fuck your basic human rights, but we can take your money just
| fine".
| scottyah wrote:
| If nothing else, the USA has learned that a lot of people
| outside their borders do not share the same ideas on basic
| human rights, and most of the world hates when we try to
| ensure them. Some countries are closely aligned with our
| ideals and are treated differently. There are many different
| layers of this, from Australia to North Korea.
| banku_brougham wrote:
| >democracies aside from the US.
|
| I mean, I guess from '65 to around 96? We had a good run.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| 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.
| mquander wrote:
| 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.)
| bryant wrote:
| > because the Chinese government probably isn't going to do
| anything about whatever they find out.
|
| This really depends. If a foreign adversary's surveillance
| finds you have a particular weakness exploitable for
| corporate or government espionage, you're cooked.
|
| Domestic governments are at least still theoretically
| somewhat accountable to domestic laws, at least in theory
| (current failure modes in the US aside).
| elefanten wrote:
| Exactly and that danger grows as the ability to do so in
| increasingly automated and targeted ways increases. Should
| be very obvious now looking at the world around us.
|
| Also, failing to consider the legal and rights regime of
| the attacker is wild to me. Look at what happens to people
| caught spying for other regimes. Aldrich Ames just died
| after decades in prison, and that's one of the most extreme
| cases -- plenty have got away with just a few years. The
| Soviet assets Ames gave up were all swiftly executed, much
| like they are in China.
|
| Regimes and rights matter, which is why the democracy /
| autocracy governance conflict matters so much to the future
| trajectory of humanity.
| collabs wrote:
| Yes, exactly this.
|
| > 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.
|
| > spy on me
|
| People forget to substitute "me" for "my elected
| representative" or "my civil service employee" or "my
| service member" or their loved ones
|
| I, personally, have nothing significant that a foreign
| government can leverage against our country but some people
| are in a more privileged/responsible/susceptible position.
| It is critical to protect all our data privacy because we
| don't know from where they will be targeted.
|
| Similarly, for domestic surveillance, we don't know who the
| next MLK Jr could be or what their position would be. Maybe
| I am too backward to even support this next MLK Jr but I
| definitely don't want them to be nipped in the bud.
| jonstewart wrote:
| One of them is illegal for DoD to do and the other is not.
| ks2048 wrote:
| 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.
| slg wrote:
| >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?
| roxolotl wrote:
| 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.
| dabockster wrote:
| 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)?
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| 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.
| sfink wrote:
| My guess is that they can't object to foreign intelligence,
| and would lose negotiating ground if they even tried.
|
| Optimistically, they can still refuse to do work that would
| aid in foreign intelligence gathering, by arguing that it
| would also be beneficial for domestic mass surveillance.
|
| I'll admit that the phrase "We support...foreign intelligence
| and counterintelligence" is awful as hell, and it's possible
| that my apologist claims are BS. But Anthropic has very
| little leverage here (despite having a _signed contract_ and
| so legally fully in the right), so I could see why they 're
| desperate to stick to only the most solid objections
| available.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| It's the addition of the we support phrase in particular,
| and the attempt to tie that in a "democratic values" clause
| that is objectionable.
|
| Not to most US citizens, I'm sure. But there's millions of
| non-Americans who have given them their hard earned cash.
| It's not a good look, and it did not need to be phrased
| that way as it substantially undermines the impact of their
| point.
| felineflock wrote:
| That reasoning sounds confusing: are you actually in favor of
| US gov's surveillance on Americans?
|
| If not, then why are you punishing that company for refusing
| to deal with the US gov?
|
| Or is it just because they worded their opposition in a
| certain way that you dislike?
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| It's not confused. Are you?
|
| I object, as a non-American paying Anthropic customer, to
| being surveilled and then having it justified in a press
| release?
| felineflock wrote:
| > I object, as a non-American paying Anthropic customer,
| to being surveilled and then having it justified in a
| press release?
|
| You genuinely think you're not already being surveilled?
| And that Anthropic is somehow responsible with just a few
| words in a press release? In what world are you living in
| and how is the rent there?
| asmor wrote:
| > You genuinely think you're not already being
| surveilled?
|
| "You don't like capitalism, why do you pay for things
| then?"
|
| > And that Anthropic is somehow responsible with just a
| few words in a press release?
|
| They seem to believe that they're a pretty important
| piece. That aside, this is a declaration of intent, it
| doesn't need to have anything to do with real-world
| capabilities.
|
| Just because something will happen anyway doesn't mean
| you shouldn't oppose it.
| xdennis wrote:
| > 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.
| esafak wrote:
| This contradicts the opening of the Declaration of
| Independence, which recognizes all humans as possessing
| rights:
|
| "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
| created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with
| certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life,
| Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
| lazide wrote:
| Lots of lofty goals have been written on paper - when
| people take them seriously, they are even worth something.
|
| The pendulum swings.
| adastra22 wrote:
| 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.
| mothballed wrote:
| I agree with your premise because this seems to be the modern
| interpretation of the courts, but it is not the historical
| interpretation.
|
| The historical basis of the bill of rights is that they are
| god given rights of all people merely recognized by the
| government. This is also partially why all rights in the BoR
| are granted to 'people' instead of 'citizens.'
|
| Of course this all does get very confusing. Because the 4th
| amendment does generally apply to people, while the 2nd
| amendment magically people gets interpreted as some mumbo-
| jumbo people of the 'political community' ( _Heller_ ) even
| though from the founding until the mid 1800s ~most people it
| protected who kept and bore arms didn't even bother to get
| citizenship or become part of the 'political community'.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| There have been cases of illegal immigrants demanding 2nd
| amendment rights and getting them ever since it was
| incorporated to the states in McDonald
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _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._
|
| Those unquestionable protections are phrased with enough
| hand-waving ambiguity of language to leave room for any
| conceivable interpretation by later courts. See the third-
| party 'exception' to the Fourth Amendment, for instance.
|
| It's as if those morons were running out of ink or time or
| something, trying to finish an assignment the night before it
| was due.
| mothballed wrote:
| Since at least the progressive era (see the switch in time
| that saved 9), and probably before, the courts have largely
| just post facto rationalized why the thing they do or don't
| agree with fit their desired pattern of constitutionality.
|
| SCOTUS is largely not there to interpret the constitution
| in any meaningful sense. They are there to provide
| legitimization for the machinations of power. If god-man in
| black costume and wig say parchment of paper agree, then
| act must be legitimate, and this helps keep the populace
| from rising up in rebellion. It is quite similar to shariah
| law using a number of Mutfi/Qazi to explain why god agrees
| with them about whatever it is they think should be the
| law.
|
| If you look at a number of actions that have flagrantly
| defied both the historical and literal interpretation of
| the constitution, the _only_ entity that was able to
| provide legitimization for many acts of congress has been
| the guys wearing the funny looking costumes in SCOTUS.
| 8note wrote:
| given that the US likes to declare jurisdiction whenever
| somebody touches a US dollar, any thoughts on why those same
| constitutional protections wouldnt follow?
| adastra22 wrote:
| Because that's the way US courts have chosen to interpret
| the law. In the US legal system, it does not matter what
| you or I think the words could be interpreted to mean. The
| courts have final say, and the consensus interpretation is
| built from their historical decisions.
| gip wrote:
| 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.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I believe every person should do that. LLMs should be free
| and run locally on our machines with no silly restrictions.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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.
| jmyeet wrote:
| 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).
| ra wrote:
| > "mass _domestic_ surveillance " - mass surveillance of non-
| domestic civilians is OK?
| nubg wrote:
| A favourable take would be he meant "mass surveillance of non-
| democratic adversarial countries". I agree it's not phrased
| this way though.
| 10297-1287 wrote:
| They want to be nationalized, which is the most profitable exit
| they'll ever get.
| mvkel wrote:
| Good optics, but ultimately fruitless.
|
| If preventing mass surveillance or fully autonomous weaponry is a
| -policy- choice and not a technical impossibility, this just
| opens the door for the department of war to exploit backdoors,
| and anthropic (or any ai company) can in good conscience say "Our
| systems were unknowingly used for mass surveillance," allowing
| them to save face.
|
| The only solution is to make it technically -impossible- to apply
| AI in these ways, much like Apple has done. They can't be forced
| to compel with any government, because they don't have the keys.
| madrox wrote:
| 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.
| mvkel wrote:
| Are the guardrails not part of their core? Isn't that the
| whole premise of their existence?
| madrox wrote:
| If you read the statement, they explicitly state these
| guardrails don't exist today, and they want to develop
| them.
|
| Though I have a feeling we're talking about different
| things. In Claude Code terms, it might want to rm -rf my
| codebase. You sound like you might want it to never run rm
| -rf. Anthropic probably wants to catch dangerous commands
| and send them to humans to approve, like it does today.
| mvkel wrote:
| That's my point. They formed anthropic under the sole
| mandate of "guardrails first," now seemingly don't have
| them at all. So they're just another ai company with
| different marketing, not the purely altruistic outfit
| they want everyone to believe
| xvector wrote:
| The ability of some people to never be happy, and to find
| a way to twist a good situation into bad, will always
| impress me.
|
| Here we have a company doing something unprecedented but
| it is STILL not enough for people like you. The DoD could
| destroy them over this statement, and have indicated an
| intent to do so, but it's _still_ not enough for you that
| they stand up to this.
|
| I wonder what life is like being so puritanical and
| unwilling to accept the good, for it is not _perfect!_
| This mindset is the road to a life of bitterness.
| adi_kurian wrote:
| A little pessimistic of a take, IMO. You may very well be
| right, though.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| Idk if the reporting was just biased before, but from what I saw
| is that this time last week, it was thought you couldn't use
| Anthropic to bring about harm, and now they're making it clear
| that they just don't want it used domestically and not fully
| autonomously.
|
| Like maybe it always was just this, but I feel every article I
| read, regardless of the spin angle, implied do no harm was pretty
| much one of the rules.
| Tenobrus wrote:
| those two stipulations were always their only ones, and they
| were included explicitly in their original contract with the
| DoW.
| levocardia wrote:
| 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.
| michaelsshaw wrote:
| Why be so worried about when the US is clearly the
| belligerent state that strikes others with impunity while
| China does no such thing?
| pousada wrote:
| Department of War is just such a fucking joke title - when has
| the US stooped so low, I used to believe in you guys as the force
| of good on this planet smh
| darvid wrote:
| 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
| phtrivier wrote:
| The USA were pretty clearly on the "better side" of conflicts
| in 1941-1945, during the Cold War (at least as far as Europe
| and the Marshall plan was concerned). In Koweit and central
| Europe during the 90s. You may even argue for Afghanistan
| post 9-11 (although the state building was botched.) in the
| 2000s. ISIS is a footnote in history because of US
| intervention (from Trump first term, of all things.) And
| Ukraine would not be against getting the support it had in
| 2022 back under Trump.
|
| Does not mean that very bad things were not happening at the
| same time.
|
| But it's definitely easier to find some "supportable"
| interventions from the US than, say, Russia or China.
| mylifeandtimes wrote:
| it was before your time.
|
| In WWII, we saved the world from what is now seen as some
| really evil stuff. Not alone of course, Europe and Russia
| made huge sacrifices and that's where much of the war was
| fought. But US arms and blood were the decisive factor,
| Germany was winning, Japan was winning.
|
| After WWII, the US decided to rebuild the world. We turned
| our enemies (Germany, Japan) into our close allies.
|
| And the people who did it were really and seriously morally
| committed to doing what they thought was right. It was about
| building a country, working together. Not the insane politics
| of today.
|
| Look, it wasn't all rose-tinted glasses. Bad stuff happened,
| and McCarthy was worse that what we currently have. And the
| civil rights movement and all of that. And the stupid wars,
| Korea, Vietnam, all the smaller police actions. Bad shit was
| done.
|
| But on balance, the US was seen as the force of good, and the
| guaranteeor of world peace and the prosperity that allows.
| mwigdahl wrote:
| 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.
| baggachipz wrote:
| Well then I don't know where you've been for the last ~10~ ~20~
| 70 years
| jibal wrote:
| It's the Department of Defense, not the Department of War ...
| only Congress has the legal authority to change the name, and
| they haven't.
| knfkgklglwjg wrote:
| Same with Gulf of America.
| mvkel wrote:
| "as an ai safety company, we only believe in -partially-
| autonomous weaponry"
|
| Ads are coming.
| ddxv wrote:
| I'll be glad if they could open their platform enough so that
| it could run on ads and not 200 dollar subscriptions
| mvkel wrote:
| for sure. If they weren't so self-righteous about not serving
| ads, it'd be a great revenue stream for them. It'd also align
| with Dario's seeming obsession with profitability
| alach11 wrote:
| A significant part of Anthropic's cachet as an employer is the
| ethical stance they profess to take. This is no doubt a tough
| spot to be in, but it's hard to see Dario making any other
| decision here.
|
| What I don't understand is why Hegseth pushed the issue to an
| ultimatum like this. They say they're not trying to use Claude
| for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weapons. If so, what
| does the Department of War have to gain from this fight?
| easton wrote:
| 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.
| mwigdahl wrote:
| It's that, as I understand it. Anthropic is the only vendor
| certified to run its models on DoD/DoW classified networks.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| 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.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| 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.
| tabbott wrote:
| What makes you want to believe the Trump Administration when it
| claims it doesn't want to do domestic mass surveillance?
| kace91 wrote:
| As someone who is potentially their client and not _domestic_ ,
| really reassuring that they have no concerns with mass spying
| peaceful citizens of my particular corner of the world.
| mwigdahl wrote:
| Take your pick from the many other choices offered by companies
| that don't care about mass spying on _anyone_.
| pamcake wrote:
| Or don't.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| I thought we were the allies and looked down on powerful
| secret police. Like the Nazis or the Soviets. Did we lose
| those wars?
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| The US is no longer a reliable ally to Europe. Look at the
| threats against Greenland.
|
| I hope the next few elections change this, but right now
| that's how things are.
| pbiggar wrote:
| Have a look at https://thaura.ai.
| zug_zug wrote:
| 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.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| All the Chinese companies publishing open models that I can
| run on my own steel?
| bamboozled wrote:
| 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.
| drcongo wrote:
| The US is already doing that though.
| nkoren wrote:
| This makes me a very happy Claude Max subscriber.
|
| Finally, someone of consequence not kissing the ring. I hope this
| gives others courage to do the same.
| bicx wrote:
| They already kissed the ring, just not the asshole. They have a
| little dignity left.
| jimmydoe wrote:
| Better than the rest. here's $200, Dario!
| bigyabai wrote:
| This is how we bought Tim Cook the gold trophy. Today's
| fundraising buys tomorrow's tithe.
| RyanShook wrote:
| 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.
| fragmede wrote:
| Isn't it nice to have virtues to signal though? In saying
| that, you're saying you don't have any worth signaling over.
| flufluflufluffy wrote:
| Not when your actions don't align with your professed
| virtues.
| TOMDM wrote:
| A company being asked to violate their virtues refuses, and
| then communicates that to reestablish their commitment to
| said virtues?
|
| Tell me more about what they should do if a virtue signal in
| such a situation is a nothing statement.
| noelsusman wrote:
| The notion that it's bad to signal virtue is one of the
| crazier propaganda efforts I've seen over the last 20 years
| or so.
| manmal wrote:
| It's a manipulative tactic. Businesses have no soul and no
| conscience.
| beanshadow wrote:
| It's arguable that businesses are subject to the same
| morality-inducing processes that humans are. For example,
| as a human (with a soul?) what is at risk when we do
| something immoral? I see it to be a reputational cost at
| the highest level. Morality could be viewed from the
| perspective that it increases predictability/coherence in
| society (generates less heat).
| manmal wrote:
| If societal feedback is the only thing keeping a human
| from deviating in catastrophic ways, that's what we call
| a sociopath.
| MattRix wrote:
| The humans working there do. To state otherwise is to
| absolve those humans of any responsibility.
| manmal wrote:
| Did I state otherwise though?
| reasonableklout wrote:
| How is it virtue signalling when sticking by these principles
| risks their entire business being destroyed by either being
| declared a supply chain risk or nationalized?
| exodust wrote:
| 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.
| manmal wrote:
| 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.
| w4yai wrote:
| Go Mistral !
| mosst wrote:
| If you don't cancel your account now, I don't see what your
| problem is. Isn't it standard practice for allies to spy on
| each other? No reason to wait for Mistral to catch up when EU
| foreign policy already sealed the deal.
| manmal wrote:
| Is your argument I should use a shitty model while my
| coworkers feed the US-based models with the same data?
| Where would be the sense in that?
|
| > Isn't it standard practice for allies to spy on each
| other?
|
| Allies? The US is on the brink of breaking up with the EU.
|
| > EU foreign policy already sealed the deal
|
| Not sure what you mean.
| Keyframe wrote:
| I wonder if this might be a setup by competition. Certainly
| looks like one.
| khalic wrote:
| 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?
| qaid wrote:
| I was reading halfway thru and one line struck a nerve with me:
|
| > But today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough
| to power fully autonomous weapons.
|
| So not today, but the door is open for this after AI systems have
| gathered enough "training data"?
|
| Then I re-read the previous paragraph and realized it's
| specifically only criticizing
|
| > AI-driven domestic mass surveillance
|
| And neither denounces partially autonomous mass surveillance nor
| closes the door on AI-driven foreign mass surveillance
|
| A real shame. I thought "Anthropic" was about being concerned
| about humans, and not "My people" vs. "Your people." But I
| suppose I should have expected all of this from a public
| statement about discussions with the Department of War
| nubg wrote:
| I think it's phrased just fine. It's not up to Dario to try to
| make absolute statements about the future.
| trvz wrote:
| He's one of the most influential people when it comes to what
| future we'll have. Yes, it's up to him.
| ternwer wrote:
| I think he's more pragmatic than that.
| camillomiller wrote:
| And yet he's quite happy to make just that when it's meant to
| drum you up his own product for investors
| m000 wrote:
| How about the present and his personal beliefs?
|
| "I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI
| to defend the United States and other democracies, and to
| defeat our autocratic adversaries."
|
| This reads like his objection is not on "autocratic", but on
| "adversaries". Autocratic friends & family are cool with him.
| A clear wink to a certain administration with autocratic
| tendencies.
| anjellow wrote:
| Some people can't help themselves to read this like a Ouija
| board.
| tyre wrote:
| It's pretty telling that he didn't rule out using a Ouija
| board for fully autonomous military drones or mass
| surveillance.
|
| Real eyes..
| 9dev wrote:
| Corporate statements like these get written _very_
| carefully. You can be certain that not a single word in
| these sentences has been placed there without considering
| what they do imply and what they omit.
| estearum wrote:
| Western liberal ideals are better than the opposite. It is
| misanthropic to build autocratic societies.
| mackeye wrote:
| western liberal democracies tend to use "autocratic" as
| an epithet (though, i guess, there are fewer countries
| that marker is used against for which it's false now than
| ~50 years ago). for the first sentence, "the opposite" of
| western liberal ideas will yield 10 answers from 9 people
| :-)
| tipiirai wrote:
| China's ideals make better public services and puts less
| pressure on environment. But China may not be the
| opposite you are referring to here.
| tremon wrote:
| > puts less pressure on environment
|
| China has been competing with India for decades for the
| most-polluted cities crown, and only slightly ranks below
| the US and Russia in CO2 emissions per capita. It's also
| the only large country where its emissions have been
| _growing_ over the last decade. Where does the idea come
| from that China somehow puts less pressure on the
| environment? Less than what, exactly?
| maxglute wrote:
| >and only slightly ranks below the US and Russia
|
| By slightly ranks below you mean ~50-60% per capital.
|
| >China somehow puts less pressure on the environment
|
| PRC renewables at staggering scale.
|
| Last year PRC brrrted out enough solar panels whose
| lifetime output is equivalent to MORE than annual global
| consumption of oil. AKA world uses about >40billion
| barrels of oil per year, PRC's annual solar production
| will sink about 40billion barrels of oil of emissions in
| their life times. That's fucking obscene amount of carbon
| sink, and frankly at full productionm annual PRC solar +
| wind can on paper displace 100% of oil, 100% of lng, and
| good % of coal (again annual utilization) once storage
| figured out.
|
| This BTW functionally makes PRC emission negative, by
| massive margin, arguably the only country who is.
|
| It's only retarded emission accounting rules that says
| PRC should be penalized for manufacturing renewables, but
| buyers credited AND fossil producers like US not
| penalized for extraction, which US has only increased.
| js8 wrote:
| Also, unlike US and Russia, China has green transition as
| an official policy. There are additional savings from
| total electrification. (I think they also care more about
| longterm and being closer to the equator and the sea,
| they better understand the consequences of global
| warming.)
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| And they have little to no sources of fossil fuels within
| their borders (not enough to support their demand, in any
| case).
|
| It's a great policy, but it also makes sense for geo-
| strategic reasons (even ignoring the climate issue).
| titzer wrote:
| > It is misanthropic to build autocratic societies.
|
| It's misanthropic to dismantle democratic societies.
| estearum wrote:
| ??? I don't know what you're referring to
| harimau777 wrote:
| Building autocratic societies is exactly what much of the
| West, including the US and UK, are doing right now.
| estearum wrote:
| And to the extent they're doing that, that's bad.
| 9dev wrote:
| That makes your argument a true scotsman, though.
| _Western liberal ideals are the supreme ones, you 're
| just not doing it right!_
|
| Much has been said about the purported superiority of
| western values, but as we've all seen the USA was very
| quick to get rid of even the slightest notion of these
| values when Trump promised them some money and a dominant
| vibe.
|
| The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be
| born: now is the time of monsters.
| estearum wrote:
| No, my argument was that western liberal ideals are good.
| The commenter chimed in that some states which have
| historically held the mantle of western liberalism are
| losing their grip on it.
|
| There's nothing contradictory or circular in both of
| those claims.
|
| If someone were to present to me a better caretaker of
| western liberal ideals than the US and ask whether I
| would prefer AI empower _them_ , the answer would be:
| yes.
|
| And in fact, that is precisely what I _am_ arguing. It is
| good that Anthropic, which so far has demonstrated closer
| adherence to western liberal ideals than the current US
| government, is pushing back on the current US government.
|
| I also think it is good that Anthropic stands in
| opposition to China, which also does not embody western
| liberal ideals.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That all works right up until the United States becomes
| autocratic and that process is well underway.
|
| So yes, the second part of your comment is what is going to
| come back to haunt them. The road to hell is paved with the
| best intentions.
| tdeck wrote:
| The US is already autocratic when it comes to people in
| many other countries, where the US government didn't like
| their democratically elected governments and decided to
| pick a new one for them instead.
| wrs wrote:
| I thought this was ambiguously worded in a beautiful way.
| At the moment, one could say that some autocratic
| adversaries of the United States and other democracies
| currently _lead the government of the United States_.
| nhinck2 wrote:
| He does it all the time.
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| This doesn't read to me like it was personally written by one
| person. It's not Dario we should read this as being written
| by, it's Anthropic as an entity.
| taurath wrote:
| > It's not up to Dario to try to make absolute statements
| about the future.
|
| Thats insane to say, given that he's literally acting in the
| public sphere as the mouth of Sauron for how AI will grow so
| effective as to destroy almost everyone's jobs and AGI will
| take over our society and kill us all.
| nubg wrote:
| All I'm trying to say is that nobody can predict the
| future, and therefore saying statements pretending
| something will be a certain way forever is just silly. It's
| OK for him to add this qualifier.
| harimau777 wrote:
| That's not how morality works. If mass surveillance is
| wrong today, then it will be wrong tomorrow.
| lm28469 wrote:
| He does it all the time when it helps selling his products
| though, strange
| titzer wrote:
| It's not called _The Department of War_.
|
| It's just incredible to me that people think this is some
| kind of bold statement defying the administration when it is
| absolutely filled with small and medium capitulations, laying
| out in numerous examples how they just jumped right in bed
| with the military.
|
| And no one seems disturbed by the blatant Orwellian
| doublespeak throughout. "We thoroughly support the mission of
| the Department of War"--because War is Peace.
| dwringer wrote:
| I'm really surprised that didn't jump out at more people; I
| had to get halfway through the comments to the 27th mention
| of "Department of War" to find the first comment pointing
| out that using the name is itself a capitulation.
| throw-the-towel wrote:
| It is a very fitting name though. "Department of Defense"
| was a euphemism.
| MattGrommes wrote:
| Defense is a much more fitting name for an organization
| that does a million more things than just prosecute wars.
| War is just the favorite part of their mission for these
| wannabe toughguys.
| asadotzler wrote:
| Except that it is absolutely called The Department of War
| and that's by Trump's own hand.
|
| https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-
| actions/2025/09/rest...
|
| "By the authority vested in me as President by the
| Constitution and the laws of the United States of America,
| it is hereby ordered:
|
| "The name "Department of War," more than the current
| "Department of Defense," ensures peace through strength, as
| it demonstrates our ability and willingness to fight and
| win wars on behalf of our Nation at a moment's notice, not
| just to defend. This name sharpens the Department's focus
| on our own national interest and our adversaries' focus on
| our willingness and availability to wage war to secure what
| is ours. I have therefore determined that this Department
| should once again be known as the Department of War and the
| Secretary should be known as the Secretary of War."
| amalcon wrote:
| The Department of Defense is so named by legislation.
| Executive orders cannot override legislation.
| altpaddle wrote:
| Unfortunately I think the writing is clearly on the wall. Fully
| autonomous weapons are coming soon
| levocardia wrote:
| Right - for the same reasons a Waymo is safer than a human-
| driven car, an autonomous fighter drone will ultimately be
| deadlier than a human-flown fighter jet. I would like to
| forestall that day as long as possible but saying "no
| autonomous weapons ever" isn't very realistic right now.
| tempestn wrote:
| If they had access to them in Ukraine, both sides would
| already be using them I expect. Right now jamming of drones
| is a huge obstacle. One way it's dealt with is to run literal
| wired drones with massive spools of cable strung out behind
| them. A fully autonomous drone would be a significant
| advantage in this environment.
|
| I'm not making a values judgment here, just saying that they
| will absolutely be used in war as soon as it's feasible to do
| so. The only exception I could see is if the world managed to
| come together and sign a treaty explicitly banning the use of
| autonomous weapons, but it's hard for me to see that
| happening in the near future.
|
| Edit: come to think of it, you could argue a landmine is a
| fully autonomous weapon already.
| scottyah wrote:
| Hah, I had the same realization about landmines. Along with
| the other commenter, really it would be better to add
| intelligence to these autonomous systems to limit the
| nastiness of the currently-deployed systems. If a landmine
| could distinguish between a real target and an innocent
| civilian 50yrs later, it's be a lot better.
| mothballed wrote:
| A landmine blowing up the enemy civilian 50 years later
| is probably seen as an advantage by the force deploying
| them. A bit like "salting the earth."
| scottyah wrote:
| Depressingly true.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Many landmines disarm after a while.
| kgwxd wrote:
| It's weird that people still think that the people who's
| job it is to kill people, or make things that kill
| people, really care about people more than the killing
| part. They don't give a shit who blows up, as long as no
| one comes knocking on their door about it.
| scottyah wrote:
| It's only Anthropic with their current models saying no.
| Fully autonomous weapons have been created, deployed, and
| have been operational for a long time already. The only
| holdout I've ever heard of is for the weapons that target
| humans.
|
| Honestly, even landmines could easily be considered fully
| autonomous weapons and they don't care if you're human or
| not.
| shinryuu wrote:
| There are also good reasons for a lot of countries banning
| mines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa_Treaty
|
| Notably USA is not one of those signatories.
| not_the_fda wrote:
| And that's the end of democracy. One of the safe guards of
| democracy is a military that is trained to not turn against
| the citizens. Once a government has fully autonomous weapons
| its game over. They can point those weapons at the populous
| at the flip of the switch.
| refurb wrote:
| The original Terminator movie doesn't seem so far fetched
| now (minus the time travel).
| testdelacc1 wrote:
| The parallel for this is when Rome changed from only
| recruiting citizens for their army to recruiting anyone who
| could pass the physical. They had no choice, and the new
| armies were much better at fighting. But the soldiers also
| didn't have the same stake in the republic that voting
| citizens did.
|
| Citizens were loyal to Rome. Soldiers were loyal to their
| commanders. If commanders wanted to launch rebellions, the
| soldiers would likely support them.
|
| A commander who commands the loyalty of legions by
| convincing a handful of drone operators would be very
| dangerous for democracy.
| orochimaaru wrote:
| 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.
| ghshephard wrote:
| 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.
| asdff wrote:
| US military cannot even offer those assurances themselves
| today. I tried to look up the last incident of friendly fire.
| Turns out it was a couple hours ago today, when US military
| shot down a DHS drone in Texas.
| blitzar wrote:
| Humans malfunction all the time, that is why there is a
| push to replace them with more reliable hardware.
| TaupeRanger wrote:
| 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?
| goatlover wrote:
| I'd prefer companies not help the military develop the most
| powerful weapons possible given we're in the age of WMDs,
| have already had two devastating world wars and a nuclear
| arms race that puts humanity under permanent risk.
| lambdaphagy wrote:
| There is an extremely straightforward argument that WMDs
| are precisely what prevented the outbreak of direct warfare
| between major powers in the latter 20th. (Note that WWI by
| itself wasn't sufficient to prevent WWII!)
|
| You can take issue with that argument if you want but it's
| unconvincing not to address it.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| That's a little bit like saying the bullet in the gun
| prevented someone getting shot while playing Russian
| Roulette. We pulled back that hammer several times, and
| it's purely happenstance that it didn't go off. MAD has
| that acronym for a reason.
| lambdaphagy wrote:
| I agree that the risk of an accidental strike was a huge
| problem with the theory of nuclear deterrence, but the
| question is: compared to what? In expectation or even in
| a 1st percentile scenario, was MAD worse than a world
| where the USSR is a unilateral nuclear power? For that
| matter, what would it have taken to get a stronger SALT
| treaty sooner?
|
| I think you need to have people thinking through this
| stuff at a nuts-and-bolts level if you want to avoid
| getting dominated by a slightly less nice adversary, and
| so too with AI. Does a unilateral guarantee not to build
| autonomous killbots actually make anyone safer if China
| makes no such promise, or does that perversely put us at
| more risk?
|
| I'd love to know that the "no killbots, come what may"
| strategy is sound, but it's not clear that that's a
| stable equilibrium.
| tw1984 wrote:
| > Does a unilateral guarantee not to build autonomous
| killbots actually make anyone safer if China makes no
| such promise, or does that perversely put us at more
| risk?
|
| China considers all lethal autonomous weapons
| "unacceptable", calling all countries to ban it.
| Countries like the US and India refuse to back such
| proposals. See China's official stands on this matter
| below.
|
| https://documents.unoda.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2022/07/Worki...
|
| I totally understand that you got brainwashed by the
| media, but hey you appearantly have internet access, why
| can't you just do a little bit research of your own
| before posting nonsense using imagination as your source
| of information?
| esseph wrote:
| I don't know where you got this info about China, but
| it's wrong. AI in a warfare context is the new Manhattan
| Project.
|
| All the world powers are in a race to it.
|
| https://cset.georgetown.edu/article/china-trains-ai-
| controll...
|
| https://thediplomat.com/2026/02/machines-in-the-
| alleyways-ch...
|
| https://www.brookings.edu/articles/ai-weapons-in-chinas-
| mili...
|
| https://cset.georgetown.edu/article/how-china-is-using-
| ai-fo...
| lambdaphagy wrote:
| China does not consider all lethal autonomous weapons
| system "unacceptable" even for _use_ , let alone to
| _develop_ , and the document you linked explains this
| very clearly. Here's what the document actually says,
| formatted slightly for clarity:
|
| ``` Basic characteristics of Unacceptable Autonomous
| Weapons Systems should include but not limited to the
| following:
|
| - Firstly, lethality, meaning sufficient lethal payload
| (charge) and means.
|
| - Secondly, autonomy, meaning absence of human
| intervention and control during the entire process of
| executing a task.
|
| - Thirdly, impossibility for termination, meaning that
| once started, there is no way to terminate the operation.
|
| - Fourthly, indiscriminate killing, meaning that the
| device will execute the mission of killing and maiming
| regardless of conditions, scenarios and targets.
|
| - Fifthly, evolution, meaning that through interaction
| with the environment, the device can learn autonomously,
| expand its functions and capabilities in a degree
| exceeding human expectations.
|
| Autonomous weapons systems with all of the five
| characteristics clearly have anti-human characteristics
| and significant humanitarian risks, and the international
| community could consider following the example of the
| Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons and work to reach a
| legal instrument to prohibit such weapons systems. ```
|
| Charitably, you might say that China is worried about a
| nightmare scenario. Less charitably, you might say that
| the definition of an unacceptable weapon system is so
| tight that it does not describe anything that anyone
| would ever build, or would want to build. This posture
| would allow China to adopt the international posture of
| seeming to oppose autonomous weapons without actually de
| facto constraining themselves at all.
|
| This, by contrast, is what China considers acceptable:
|
| ``` Acceptable Autonomous Weapons Systems could have a
| high degree of autonomy, but are always under human
| control. It means they can be used in a secure, credible,
| reliable and manageable manner, can be suspended by human
| beings at any time and comply with basic principles of
| international humanitarian law in military operations,
| such as distinction, proportionality and precaution. ```
|
| So as long as the system has a killswitch (something that
| afaik absolutely no one is proposing to dispense with?),
| it's Acceptable.
|
| Meanwhile, it would certainly seem that China's defense
| research universities are interested in developing this
| tech: https://thediplomat.com/2026/02/machines-in-the-
| alleyways-ch....
|
| So, I did a bit of research with my internet access-- how
| do my findings square with your impressions?
| horacemorace wrote:
| There's also an extremely straightforward argument that
| if the current crop of authoritarian dictatorial players
| in power now had been then that the outcome of the latter
| 20th would have been much different.
| lambdaphagy wrote:
| The guy who authorized the Manhattan project:
|
| - had four [!] terms, a move so anomalous it was
| subsequently patched by constitutional amendment
|
| - threatened court-packing until SCOTUS backed down and
| stated rubber-stamping his agenda
|
| - ruled entire industries by emergency decree in a way
| that contemporaries on the left and right compared to
| Mussolini
|
| - interned 120k people without due process, on the basis
| of ethnicity
|
| - turned a national party into a personal patronage
| system
|
| - threatened to override the legislature if it didn't
| start passing laws he liked
|
| Not even saying any of this is even good or bad, clearly
| in the official history it was retroactively justified by
| victory in WWII. But it's a bit rich to say that the bomb
| wasn't developed under authoritarian conditions.
| sethammons wrote:
| If my grandma had wheels she'd be a bicycle
| estearum wrote:
| Great, now go ahead and prove that AI also reaches
| strategic equilibrium. This was pretty much self-evident
| with nuclear weapons so should probably be self-evident
| for AI too, if it were true.
| michelsedgh wrote:
| So would you have preferred the Nazis to develop the most
| powerful weapons and they win the world war? (which they
| were trying to do?)
| anonym29 wrote:
| If Anthropic _does_ give the DoD what they want, does
| that magically stop China, Iran, Russia, etc from
| advancing in AI arms development?
|
| If Anthropic _doesn 't_ give the DoD what they want, does
| that mean that China, Iran, Russia, etc magically
| leapfrog not only Anthropic, but the entire US defense
| industry, and take over the planet?
| andsoitis wrote:
| > If Anthropic does give the DoD what they want, does
| that magically stop China, Iran, Russia, etc from
| advancing in AI arms development?
|
| No
|
| > If Anthropic doesn't give the DoD what they want, does
| that mean that China, Iran, Russia, etc magically
| leapfrog not only Anthropic, but the entire US defense
| industry, and take over the planet?
|
| The risks are high, so if you're the US, you want a
| portfolio of possible winners. The risks are too high to
| not leverage all the cutting edge AI labs.
| gbear605 wrote:
| Anthropic was already giving them that. It's not like
| they need domestic mass surveillance or autonomous kill
| bots to have a portfolio of possible winners. If the goal
| is to keep the US competitive in AI, this whole process
| was actively unhelpful. Honestly more helpful for our
| adversaries than for us.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Why are you assuming that people in China, Iran, Russia
| etc are not having these exact same conversations, and
| perhaps a powerful example from the USA, along with some
| belief that the USA will _not_ be able to easily get this
| technology, help inspire them to abstain as well?
|
| However horrific the regimes in these countries are, the
| people behind the technology there are just as likely to
| be intelligent and moral human beings as the people in
| the USA and Europe working on these are.
| mothballed wrote:
| Did WMDs have a meaningful effect on stopping the Nazis?
| I thought the bomb wasn't dropped until after they
| surrendered.
| anonym29 wrote:
| The only two atomic weapons ever deployed weren't even
| targeting Nazi Germany, but Japan. Dark but true: they
| were both deliberately and knowingly targeted at civilian
| populations.
| cies wrote:
| And inflicted less damage than the fire bombing campaigns
| on civ pop centers that were carried out along side the
| A-bombs.
|
| The A-bombs were not the worst part of the attack on
| Japan. And thus were not "needed to end the war". They
| were part of marketing /the/ super power.
| estearum wrote:
| "Needed to win the war," no. The US could've continued to
| firebomb and then follow with a land invasion, which
| would've killed both more Japanese and more Allies.
|
| Was it the best path to end the war? Certainly.
|
| The modern argument around targeting civilians or not was
| not even relevant at the time due to the advent of
| strategic bombing, which _itself_ was seen as less-
| horrific than the stalemated trench warfare of WW1. The
| question was only whether to target civilian inputs to
| the military with an atomic weapon (and hopefully shock
| & awe into submission) or firebomb and invade.
| estearum wrote:
| With the benefit of hindsight we know the Nazis in fact
| were not racing to develop The Bomb. Reasonable
| assumption to have oriented around at the time though.
| michelsedgh wrote:
| Its not just the atomic bomb im talking the usa had the
| best production of fighter jets, bombers, all kinds of
| communication technology, deciphering technology all the
| ammunition, all of those together beat the Nazis and they
| were trying their best to develop better and more
| advanced technologies than usa!
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| No, that's precisely why I'm opposed to it happening
| here, and why I prefer the idea of Anthropic limiting
| their contribution to creating such a scenario.
| archagon wrote:
| Yes, I absolutely don't want tech companies to use the money
| I pay them to harm people. How is that remotely
| controversial?
| scottyah wrote:
| Because it's painfully short-sighted, or maliciously
| ignorant.
| archagon wrote:
| No, it's just that I don't want the money I spend to have
| blood on it. Trivially simple.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| What if I told you that it's way too late for that?
| archagon wrote:
| Well, we have to try to live as virtuously as we can
| using the means and remedies available to us.
| TaupeRanger wrote:
| Also trivially naive and useless. Evil exists. Conflicts
| will happen. If evil was at your doorstep, threatening
| people you love, you absolutely DO want money you spend
| to have blood on it, if it means keeping yourself and
| your loved ones safe. Trivially simple.
| archagon wrote:
| This line of thinking is entirely foreign (and vaguely
| repulsive) to me. Can I imagine a situation where I'm
| forced to cause the death of someone in order to defend
| those close to me? Vaguely. But I would be racked with
| guilt for the rest of my life.
|
| In any case, AI drones will largely be used for "defense"
| in the euphemistic sense.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > I absolutely don't want tech companies to use the money I
| pay them to harm people.
|
| Just one example of many, but the companies that make the
| CPUs you and all of use use every day, also supply to
| militaries.
|
| I am unaware of any tech company that directly does
| physical warfare on the battlefield against humans.
| tbossanova wrote:
| Another example: those companies that make drinkable
| water, also supply to militaries. But there might be a
| difference between supplying drinking water and making AI
| killing machines
| andsoitis wrote:
| > making AI killing machines
|
| What's an example of a company that's making killing
| machines that a typical consumer or someone HN might be
| buying product or services from?
| eichin wrote:
| The easy answer is Westinghouse (look for the youtube
| short about "things that spin"...)
| archagon wrote:
| As far as I know, Apple does not supply their chips for
| military use.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Time to stop paying your taxes. :P
| crabmusket wrote:
| > Do you want a tech company to say "the military can never
| use our stuff for autonomous systems forever, the end"?
|
| Yes. Absolutely.
| raincole wrote:
| And what? Get nationalized? Get labelled as terrorists?
|
| The US system doesn't empower a company to say no. It
| should though.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| You, me or a company don't need a system empowerments to
| say "no" though. Just say it. I would certainly choose
| being called "terrorist" in front of the class over
| helping to deploy weapons, let alone autonomous ones.
|
| You own nothing but your opinion. (No offense to personal
| property aficionados)
| neatze wrote:
| I don't understand this, for example, what would you have
| done if you where Ukrainian right now ? (before 2014
| arguably start of conflict and after invasion)
| aziaziazi wrote:
| That is an interesting question, very far from my daily
| concern and brings dilemmas when I think about it. My
| response would probably be "I don't know".
|
| However Anthropic situation is very different: there's no
| ongoing invasion of the USA, and they traditionally
| attack other countries once in a while (no judgment) so
| the weapons upgrade will be "useful" on the field.
| pastel8739 wrote:
| It is of course possible to argue that the reason there
| is no ongoing invasion of the USA is because of our
| continued investment in technology for killing people
| waffleiron wrote:
| Thats the same type of thinking conspiracy theorists
| have, the type you can never disprove.
| goobatrooba wrote:
| I am 100% against militarism and wished we didn't need
| any of this, but the power balance between Russia and
| Ukraine or even Israel and the Palestinians seem to
| corroborate the thesis... There likely would be no
| Ukraine war today if Ukraine hadn't voluntarily given up
| its nukes three decades ago (unproven thesis). There was
| one as Russia thought it could win. The ongoing (after
| the "peace fire") Israeli occupation and attacks of the
| remnants of Palestinian territory show the same. If you
| are the weaker party and there is a stronger party that
| wants what you have (or plain wants to eradicate you)
| then they'll do so..
| esseph wrote:
| > I don't understand this, for example, what would you
| have done if you where Ukrainian right now ? (before 2014
| arguably start of conflict and after invasion)
|
| There are a lot of well meaning people that are very
| anti-weapon or anti-violence under any circumstances. The
| problem is that when those people actually need those
| weapons and that violence, they are so inadequate at it
| that they become a liability to themselves and others.
|
| I'm not saying I have or know of a solution, but I
| remember the old saying (paraphrasing) that it's better
| to be a warrior working a farm than a farmer working a
| war.
| dgellow wrote:
| Yes. Force them to do it the hard way and fight through
| it. Don't abdicate in advance
| harimau777 wrote:
| Sure, if that's what it takes to do the right thing.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| Literally Rule 1 On Fighting Tyranny:
|
| _> 1. Do not obey in advance._
|
| _> Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely
| given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about
| what a more repressive government will want, and then
| offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who
| adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do._
|
| https://scholars.org/contribution/twenty-lessons-
| fighting-ty...
| harimau777 wrote:
| Yes, that's exactly what I want them to say.
| TaupeRanger wrote:
| No, you don't. If they develop the safest, most cost-
| effective version of the technology that the military WILL
| inevitably use from some company, Anthropic or otherwise,
| then that's the version of this tech you want them using.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| The safest, most cost effective version will not help you
| when you are their designated target for disagreeing with
| the regime.
|
| After all, the regime already says such domestic
| dissenters are terrorists, and have, on multiple recent
| occasions, justified the execution of domestic dissenters
| based on that.
| DirkH wrote:
| The safest version will still be better overall
| regardless, by definition. It is also a better future for
| most if it is inevitable that the war department is going
| to use a less safe alternative if they can't use the
| safer one.
| asadotzler wrote:
| >Do you want a tech company to say "the military can never
| use our stuff for autonomous systems forever, the end"?
|
| Yes. Yes, that's precisely what we want.
| xeonmc wrote:
| > I thought "Anthropic" was about being concerned about humans
|
| See also: OpenAI being open, Democratic People's Republic of
| Korea being democratic and peoples-first[0].
|
| [0]
| https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PeoplesRepublicO...
| bighead wrote:
| Elon, is that you?
| manmal wrote:
| Is GP wrong?
| jamesmcq wrote:
| 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.
| serf wrote:
| do you really need to be told there is a difference in
| 'magnitude of importance' between the decision to send out an
| office memo and the decision to strike a building with
| ordinance?
|
| a _lot_ of white collar jobs see no decision more important
| than a few hours of revenue. that 's the difference: you can
| afford to fuck up in that environment.
| jamesmcq wrote:
| They're not saying "AI can replace some menial white collar
| tasks", they're saying AI can replace all white-collar
| work.
|
| Yes, if you fuck up some white collar work, people will
| die. It's irresponsible.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| >Yes, if you fuck up some white collar work, people will
| die. It's irresponsible.
|
| A lot of the work in those sectors are not the ones that
| are being targeted for fully autonomous replacement. They
| likely would be in the future though.
| remarkEon wrote:
| I know what point you are trying to make, but these
| decisions are functionally equivalent.
|
| Striking a building with ordinance (indirect fires, dropped
| from fixed wing, doesn't really matter) involves some
| discernment about utility, secondary effects, probability
| of accomplishing a given goal, and so on. Writing an office
| memo (a good one at least) involves the same kind of
| analysis. I know your point is that "people will die" when
| you blow up a building, but the parameters are really quite
| similar.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| _> these decisions are functionally equivalent_
|
| _> I know your point is that "people will die" when you
| blow up a building, but the parameters are really quite
| similar_
|
| The parameters are similar, but the effects are
| different. That's what makes the decision _not_
| functionally equivalent. A functionally equivalent
| decision would have the same functional result.
|
| To put a point on it: we are allowed to, and indeed
| _should_ , consider the effects of a decision when making
| it.
| gedy wrote:
| Shh! there's a lot of money riding on this bet, ahem.
| yujzgzc wrote:
| > 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.
| urikaduri wrote:
| The Ghandi of the corporate world is yet to be found
| scottyah wrote:
| Considering he slept naked with his grandniece (he was in his
| 70s, she was 17), I'd say there are a lot of them in the
| corporate world. Though probably more in politics.
| Throwagainaway wrote:
| I think I am paraphrasing some hackernews discussion that I
| saw about it prior but The problem with gandhi was that he
| was so focused in idealism and that translates into somehow
| a utilitarian line of thinking to this thing which is of
| course a very despicable and vile thing for him to do.
|
| There have been quite a lot discussions about this itself
| on Gandhi here on Hackernews as well.
|
| Gandhi itself became the face of satyagrah movement
| considering he started it but that movement only had values
| because of many important people joining in.
|
| Here is a quote from Martin Luther King Jr that I found
| about satyagrah from wikipedia
|
| Like most people, I had heard of Gandhi, but I had never
| studied him seriously. As I read I became deeply fascinated
| by his campaigns of nonviolent resistance. I was
| particularly moved by his Salt March to the Sea and his
| numerous fasts. The whole concept of Satyagraha (Satya is
| truth which equals love, and agraha is force; Satyagraha,
| therefore, means truth force or love force) was profoundly
| significant to me. As I delved deeper into the philosophy
| of Gandhi, my skepticism concerning the power of love
| gradually diminished, and I came to see for the first time
| its potency in the area of social reform. ... It was in
| this Gandhian emphasis on love and nonviolence that I
| discovered the method for social reform that I had been
| seeking.[25]
|
| It's better to wish for more satyagrahis to be named but I
| don't think that the western media might catch on to it.
|
| Ghaffar Khan, Sarojini Naidu, Vinoba Bhave are all people
| who I think have a simple life history while being from
| different religions and castes and genders while adhering
| to the philosophy of satyagrah.
|
| That being said, Satyagrah might not work in the current
| contexts because Britain was only able to rule India with
| the help of Indians which was why satyagrah movement was so
| successful. But if, the govt can get hands onto autonomous
| drones capable of killing civilians and mass surveilance
| then satyagrah might not work as much in the near future
|
| (the two things Anthropic is denying to provide to the DOD,
| vis-a-vis the article itself)
|
| I don't think Anthropic is a great company, it certainly
| has its flaws but I do think that it is very admirable of
| them to stand even when the govt.s is essentially saying to
| follow them or they will literally kill the business with
| the 3-4 national security laws that they are proposing to
| invoke on Anthropic.
|
| I do urge to say satyagrah or mention other peaceful
| protests because usually whenever people talk about gandhi
| now, this discussion is bound to come which really
| alienates from the original thing at times. It was the
| collective efforts of the blood of so so many Indian
| leaders for India to gain independence.
| urikaduri wrote:
| Indeed Ghandi's philosophy was far more interesting than
| his various character flaws. Nobody should learn from
| Ghandi to be an anti-vaxxer or be a creep, but people
| should learn about satyagraha and appreciate the immense
| dedication he put towards it. Its like focusing on Newton
| being a cruel person to the point of ignoring his
| scientific gneius.
|
| But the point of my cynical comment was that Ghandi's
| Idealism is so far from the profit centered mentality of
| big tech its almost unimaginable that a CEO of such
| company will stick to pacifism.
| skeledrew wrote:
| 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.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| 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
| nextaccountic wrote:
| If we are talking about what's best for humanity in the long
| run.. thinking about human values in general, what makes
| American citizens uniquely deserving of privacy rights, in
| ways that citizens of other countries are not?
|
| Snowden revealed that every single call on Bahamas were being
| monitored by NSA [1]. That was in 2013. How would this be any
| worse if it were US citizens instead?
|
| (Note, I myself am not an US citizen)
|
| Anyway, regardless of that, the established practice is for
| the five eyes countries to spy on each other and share their
| results. This means that the UK can spy on US citizens, the
| US can spy on UK citizens, and through intelligence sharing
| they effectively spy on their own citizens. That's what
| supporting "foreign surveillance" will buy you. That was also
| revealed in 2013 by Snowden [2]
|
| [1] https://theintercept.com/2014/05/19/data-pirates-
| caribbean-n...
|
| [2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/02/nsa-files-
| spyi...
| mgraczyk wrote:
| This isn't about privacy rights, it's about war
|
| I'm not suggesting that Anthropics models should be used by
| foreign governments for domestic surveillance
|
| I'm not worried about foreign governments spying on
| Americans, as long as the US government is aligned. I'm
| worried about my own government becoming misaligned
| nextaccountic wrote:
| But.. the US doesn't perform mass surveillance on foreign
| people only when it's at war. It doesn't perform mass
| surveillance only on adversarial nations it _potentially_
| could be at war either.
|
| This absolutely is about privacy.
|
| > I'm not worried about foreign governments spying on
| Americans, as long as the US government is aligned. I'm
| worried about my own government becoming misaligned
|
| Those foreign governments are spying on Americans and
| then sharing the results with the US government _because_
| the US government is misaligned with the interests of its
| own people
| remarkEon wrote:
| The United States gets to spy on countries when it's in
| the interest of the United States to do so. This isn't
| complicated. We get to spy on quite literally whoever we
| want abroad, within various legal and well established
| parameters, at at the risk of offending the governments
| of the spied-on. "It's only okay for the United States to
| spy on foreigners when they're in a shooting war with
| them" is silly.
| calgoo wrote:
| So you are saying its OK to spy on others because the US
| say is fine?
|
| Maybe the others on here are not happy that this company
| is supporting a fascist government in committing
| international aggressions on other countries which has
| been condemned by the majority of countries around the
| world.
| remarkEon wrote:
| I'm explaining reality to you. Real life is not a marvel
| comic book movie.
| calgoo wrote:
| That is great, and i know this is not some crappy marvel
| comic. Im talking as a European who will be spied upon
| with this tooling, because we are not domestic. He seems
| perfectly fine with that, as well as using it in other
| military conflicts that has been caused by this
| governments greed.
| nhinck2 wrote:
| > 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.
| rafark wrote:
| 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
| 01100011 wrote:
| 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.
| kgwxd wrote:
| But then a person can be blamed for the outcome. We can't
| have that!
| aidis9136264 wrote:
| Enemies will have AI powered weapons. We need to be at the
| cutting edge of capability.
| Throwagainaway wrote:
| I don't know where you might get your info from but Anthropic
| has only denied using Autonomous AI to kill humans without
| anyone pressing a button/having some liabilty on and mass
| surveillance.
|
| I don't think that your point makes sense especially when you
| can have enemies within your own administration/country who
| can use the same weapons to hunt you.
|
| I don't think that the people operating the drones are a
| bottleneck for a war between your country and your enemies
| but rather its a bottleneck for a war between your country
| and its people. The bottleneck is of morality as you would
| find less people willing to do the same atrocities to their
| own community but terminator style AI is an orphan with no
| community ie. it has no problem following any orders from the
| govt. and THIS is the core of the argument because Anthropic
| has safeguards to reject such orders and DOD is threatening
| to essentially kill the company by invoking many laws to
| force it to give.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| US-controlled, AI-powered, fully-autonomous killbots are more
| likely to be used sooner against US civilians before any sort
| of invading enemy.
|
| Are you prepared to be the "enemy" of these soulless
| killbots? Do _you personally_ have AI powered-weapons? You
| need to be at the cutting edge of capability, right?
| Onewildgamer wrote:
| 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.
| MattDamonSpace wrote:
| 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.
| blitzar wrote:
| To stop a bullet flying at you you need a shield not another
| bullet.
| 827a wrote:
| 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.
| gizzlon wrote:
| > but carrying a huge stick seems to be the most effective
| way to reduce human death and suffering from armed conflict.
|
| Citation needed. I believe there's at least some research
| showing the opposite: military buildup leads to a higher risk
| of military conflict
| 827a wrote:
| Reading comprehension check: I did not say that it reduced
| the risk of armed conflict. I said that it reduced the
| death and human suffering from armed conflict.
|
| Between the years of 1850-1950, an estimated 150M humans
| died (and many more permanently disabled) due to armed
| conflict (~1.5M/year). Between 1950-today: closer to 10M
| (~132k/year). The majority of those came from the Vietnam
| and Korean wars. If you limit the window to after 2000:
| only ~2M deaths, or ~78k/year. We carry bigger sticks than
| ever, and those sticks allow us to execute more strategic,
| incapacitating strikes, or stop conflict from even
| happening in the first place.
| RGamma wrote:
| Given how unstable and aggressive the US government is at the
| moment others having these weapons seems to be a good idea
| for balance. Not sure you are aware of the damage Trump is
| inflicting on international relations.
|
| But personally I wouldn't like to die because some crackpot
| with the right connections can will rest-of-world to that
| fate, no matter their affiliation. This escalation of
| destructive power and the carelessness with which it is
| justified pretty disheartening to see. Good times create bad
| people?
| 827a wrote:
| Reading comprehension check: I never stated that others
| shouldn't have the weapons. In fact, I stated what you are
| stating: that it is likely others will have the weapons,
| and for the sake of balance the West will be in a better
| place if the US also has them.
| RGamma wrote:
| My primary point was to state that reducing friction
| between will (e.g. want Greenland) and reality (send
| autonomous drone swarm) is a really terrible thing for
| the US to possess with these elites. This technology
| _needs_ to spread fast if classic non-proliferation is
| unworkable.
|
| We seem to be unable to stop building the weapon, we seem
| unable to stop handing it over to morons, and I should
| expect these morons to not fire it?
|
| Then again, it's called MAD for a reason... What's one
| more WMD after all? Let's hope that we at least
| understand it _before_ it becomes as powerful as everyone
| seems to think it will become.
| nielsole wrote:
| 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.
| remarkEon wrote:
| 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.
| zaptheimpaler wrote:
| They didn't sell it no strings attached, they sold it with
| explicit restrictions in their contract with DoW and the DoW
| agreed to that contract. Their mistake was assuming they
| operate in a country where rule of law is respected, clearly
| not the case anymore given the 1000s of violations in the
| last year.
| remarkEon wrote:
| Contracts evolve, don't be naive. If you invent the Giga
| Missile and the government buys it for its war machine, and
| then you invent the God Missile right after, the government
| is going to come back again to renegotiate terms.
| asaddhamani wrote:
| They also posted on Instagram saying autonomous killing would
| hurt Americans. So non American people don't matter?
| samtheDamned wrote:
| 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).
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| See also: the entire history of Silicon Valley
|
| When Google Met Wikileaks is a fun read, billionaire CEOs
| love to take Americas side.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| > I'm not alone in finding the specific emphasis on drawing
| the line at domestic surveillance a bit odd
|
| We've always been OK with this in the pre-AI era. (See the
| plot line of dozens of movies where the "good" government
| spies on the "bad" one.) Heck we've even been OK with
| domestic surveillance. (See "The Wire".) Has something
| changed, or are we just now realizing how it's problematic?
| Aeolun wrote:
| Is it seriously called the department of war now? Did they
| change that from DoD?
| Sebguer wrote:
| illegally, but yes
| lkbm wrote:
| The Executive branch has de facto renamed it. Legally, the
| name is still Department of Defense, as that's set by
| Congress.
|
| Think of it as a marketing term, I guess.
| sithamet wrote:
| What a shame, indeed. Chinese and Russians would never do
| something like that and hurt either their or your people, too
| sithamet wrote:
| 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.
| preisschild wrote:
| The more likely scenario will be "your people" dying in a war
| against machines that don't tend to disregard illegal orders.
| gambiting wrote:
| >> I would prefer machines fighting (and being destroyed
| autonomously) rather than my people dying
|
| What makes you think in any war the machines would stop at
| just fighting other machines?
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| > would prefer machines fighting (and being destroyed
| autonomously) rather than my people dying
|
| But the reality is more like the surprise of a bunch of
| submersible kill bots terrorising a coastal city and
| murdering people. Even in bot-first combat, at some point one
| side of bots wins either totally, allowing it to kill people
| indiscriminately or partially, which forces the team on the
| back foot to pivot to guerilla warfare and terror attacks,
| using robots.
| sithamet wrote:
| Humans actually do exactly the same, google Mariupol or
| Bucha or what drones (human-piloted) are doing in Cherson,
| so the city is all covered by fishnet. Machines delay the
| moment people start dying; true not only for military
| applications btw.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| sure but it remains somewhat ethical to want them
| piloted, so children growing up in a post war landscape
| don't accidentally disturb something considerably more
| terrifying than a land mine.
| kingkawn wrote:
| What about machines slaughtering the population without
| pause?
| mrtksn wrote:
| What do you think it will happen once the machines fight off?
| Do you think that the losing side will be like "oh no our
| machines lost, then better we give our things to the winning
| machines"?
|
| After your machines are destroyed you will be fighting
| machines or machines will extract and constantly optimize
| you. They will either exterminate you or make you busy enough
| not to have time for resistance. If you have something of
| value they will take it away. The best case scenario is to
| make you join the owners of the machines and keep you busy so
| that you don't have time to raise concerns about your 2nd
| class citizenship.
| sithamet wrote:
| Humans actually do exactly the same, google Mariupol or
| Bucha. Machines delay the moment people start dying. Good
| attempt in reasoning though.
| mrtksn wrote:
| I don't disagree, my point is that machines won't change
| a thing about war just optimize it.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| The Pentagon should be using open models, not closed ones by
| OpenAI/Anthropic/xAI. The entire discussion of what Anthropic
| wants is therefore moot.
| knfkgklglwjg wrote:
| The best open models are from china though.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| It's a good reason to fund open model development
| domestically.
| altpaddle wrote:
| Props to Dario and Anthropic for holding firm on these two points
| that I feel like should be a no-brainer
| lvl155 wrote:
| At this point, surveillance state is coming whether Dario does
| this or not. You can do all that with open source models. It's
| sad that we don't have the right people in charge in govt to
| address this alarming issue.
| delaminator wrote:
| "so we'll do it and feel guilty about it"
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| We are the victims bro
| bawis wrote:
| That has been the war politics of the western in the last
| century or so, nothing new.
| willmorrison wrote:
| They essentially said "we're not fans of mass surveilance of US
| citizens and we won't use CURRENT models to kill people
| autonomously" and people are saying they're taking a stand and
| doing the right thing? What???
|
| I guess they're evil. Tragic.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| 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.
| shevy-java wrote:
| Indeed. The AI will decide who has to die and who may live.
|
| Skynet in Terminator was scary. The AI Skynet is even scarier
| - and sucks, too.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| 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.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| I don't think this is genuine concern, I think this is instead,
| veiled fear of the TDS posse being covered by feigned concern.
|
| Foreign nationals are now embedded in the US due to decades of
| lax security by both parties. Domestic surveillance is now
| foreign surveillance also!
| int32_64 wrote:
| Anthropic wants regulatory capture to advantage itself as it
| hypes its products capabilities and then acts surprised when the
| Pentagon takes their grand claims about their products seriously
| as it threatens government intervention.
|
| This is why people should support open models.
|
| When the AI bubble collapses these EA cultists will be seen as
| some of the biggest charlatans of all time.
| helaoban wrote:
| All of these problems are downstream of the Congress having
| thoroughly abdicated its powers to the executive.
|
| The military should be reigned in at the legislative level, by
| constraining what it can and cannot do under law. Popular action
| is the only way to make that happen. Energy directed anywhere
| else is a waste.
|
| Private corporations should never be allowed to dictate how the
| military acts. Such a thought would be unbearable if it weren't
| laughably impossible. The technology can just be requisitioned,
| there is nothing a corporation or a private individual can do
| about that. Or the models could be developed internally, after
| having requisitioned the data centers.
|
| To watch CEOs of private corporations being mythologized for
| something that a) they should never be able to do and b) are
| incapable of doing is a testament to how distorted our picture of
| reality has become.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| > 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.
| helaoban wrote:
| The question of whether or not the government should be able
| to use AI for targeting without the involvement of humans is
| a wartime question, since that is the only time the military
| should be killing people.
|
| Under such a scenario, requisition applies, and so all of
| this talk is moot.
|
| The fact that the military is killing people without a
| declaration of war is the problem, and that's where energy
| and effort should be directed.
|
| Edit:
|
| There's a yet larger question on whether any legal
| constraints on the military's use of technology even makes
| sense at all, since any safeguards will be quickly yielded if
| a real enemy presents itself. As a course of natural law, no
| society will willingly handicap its means of defense against
| an external threat.
|
| It follows then that the only time these ethical concerns
| apply is when we are the aggressor, which we almost always
| are. It's the aggression that we should be limiting, not the
| technology.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| You could view various non-proliferation agreements as a
| legislative constraint on military technology.
|
| Same for chemical and biologicals. Those do prove your
| point that the law will be ignored if expedient. But it
| doesn't invalidate the notion of a society putting
| constraints on itself.
| wrqvrwvq wrote:
| It has always been a part of democratic rule, in peacetime
| and war. All telco's share virtually all of their technology
| with the government. Governments in europe and elsewhere
| routinely requisition services from many of their large
| corporations. I think it's absurd to think llm's can
| meaningfully participate in realworld cmd+ctrl systems and
| the government already has access to ml-enhanced targeting
| capabilities. I really have no idea what dod normies think of
| ai, other than that it's infinitely smarter than them, but
| that's not saying much.
| not_that_d wrote:
| I would like to see a proof of this happening in Europa.
| soderfoo wrote:
| If you're referring to telcos sharing their tech with
| government there are a few examples of Ericsson working
| with the Swedish military:
|
| > Brigadier-General Mattias Hanson, CIO, Swedish Armed
| Forces, says: "Strengthening Sweden's militarily and
| acting as part of a collective defense requires us to
| increase our defensive capabilities. We need to utilize
| the latest technology and all the innovative power of the
| Swedish private sector. Sweden has unique skills and
| capabilities in both telecoms and defense technology..."
| [0]
|
| This is just one quick example I could find.
|
| [0] https://www.ericsson.com/en/news/2025/6/ericsson-5g-c
| onnecti...
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Not the same thing. The parent comment was talking about
| government "requisiting" services as in forceful
| compliance, takeovers, not collaboration or regulatory
| compliance.
| tw1984 wrote:
| > an expected part of democratic rule.
|
| give yourself a break. what your fancy democratic rule still
| holds under Trump?
| anon84873628 wrote:
| Yeah, we all know that. They were making a point in
| response to the parent.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Some of us don't live in the USA.
| kristjansson wrote:
| This cynicism is the surest way to doom it
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Makes me think of Operation Paperclip [1]. It happened after
| the war though, and its not China, but I think it helps your
| point!
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
| tootie wrote:
| 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.
| helaoban wrote:
| You should be asking why 70 million people voted the way they
| did _in spite_ of the events you describe.
|
| I don't think there's been a greater indictment of a
| political program (the one you likely subscribe to) in
| history than Trump's landslide victory in 2024.
|
| You guys used to call deprogramming by another name, I think
| it was called "re-education". Maybe you should sign up for
| your own class.
| kalkin wrote:
| I'm curious for your understanding of why Trump won in
| 2024. If I'm understanding right, you think it was because
| American voters were rejecting Maoism ("it was called re-
| education"), to which you think the previous commenter
| likely subscribes, and which voters associated with
| Harris/Walz? But I suspect I'm not getting it quite right,
| and it would be helpful if you would spell out what you
| mean, rather than just relying on allusion.
|
| (I myself don't have a clear answer to why Trump won, but I
| don't think it speaks well to the decision-making of the
| median voter on their own terms, whatever those were, that
| Trump's now so unpopular despite governing in pretty much
| the way he said he would.)
| helaoban wrote:
| I don't want to ascribe any particular political beliefs
| to the commenter, the quip about re-education was
| somewhat of a joke given the irony of somebody arguing
| against dictatorship by invoking mass "deprograming". But
| many a true word is spoken in jest.
|
| There are no real Maoists or true communists in the US
| anymore, at least not enough to constitute meaningful
| political forces. To the extent they exist they are
| irrelevant, and one can argue further that no true left
| remains in the US at all.
|
| As for my analysis of the Trump phenomenon, I only have
| intuitions and biases to offer, so caveat lector.
|
| I don't think it's particularly mysterious. The general
| perception is that the American left has made identity
| politics and social justice its main political and social
| programs, to the detriment of basic governance, most
| importantly the economy and security, thereby breaking
| the social contract.
|
| You cannot be a party that aggressively defends and
| promotes the interests of minority classes at the expense
| of the majority without loosing the support of the
| majority. In some cases, these minorities are so small as
| to border on the absurd.
|
| Something like 0.6% of people identify as transgender in
| the United States(1). They are vastly over-represented in
| the media, in left wing political programs, and in the
| general zeitgeist at large relative to their population
| size. The same goes for the LGBT population, which
| represents maybe 10% of the US population (and that's a
| liberal estimate).
|
| Try as you might, you cannot escape the cold, hard fact
| that 60% the US population is white, with something
| closer to 70% identifying as white or partly white. 90%
| percent of that group is going to be straight.
|
| The US middle and working classes still really haven't
| recovered from the financial crisis of 2008, the
| aftermath of which precipitated a huge transfer of wealth
| from these classes to the upper class, a trend that
| accelerated during the pandemic.
|
| So you have a majority of the population who are reeling
| from a devastating loss of wealth, station, and status,
| unable to keep pace with inflation, watching one of the
| two main political parties aggressively promote the
| interests of a tiny minority at their expense, or at
| least that is the perception.
|
| Putting aside the nature of the minorities in question,
| the subservience of the political class to a minority of
| the population has another name: elitism. The natural
| response to elitism is populism, which is what we are
| seeing.
|
| The protection of minority rights is a noble cause, but
| it's primarily a civil rights issue, and the focus should
| be on making sure those classes are treated equally under
| the law. The goal should not be the elevation of their
| social and cultural station above the majority.
|
| Biden, and then Harris/Waltz, are the kind of the
| ultimate expression of this left-wing, elitist decadence.
| Biden appointed a man who wears stilettos and dresses to
| work in charge of nuclear waste as the Department of
| Energy. People can rage at me all they want for that
| description, but that is what the majority of Americans
| perceive. Again, putting aside any questions of morality,
| it is political suicide.
|
| Tolerance of mass border crossings was probably a more
| directly fatal error, representing a final decoupling of
| the democratic party from their ideological roots in the
| labor movement which was always militantly against
| illegal immigration. Again, the perception is that
| interest of minorities (in this case migrants) are
| primary to the interests of the majority. In this case
| the minority _are not even American citizens._
|
| There's a lot more to say on this topic, and I'm sure you
| can find more persuasive analyses from better sources,
| but these are some of my intuitions.
|
| Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
|
| 1. https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/tr
| ans-ad...
| kalkin wrote:
| > Biden, and then Harris/Waltz, are the kind of the
| ultimate expression of this left-wing, elitist decadence.
| Biden appointed a man who wears stilettos and dresses to
| work in charge of nuclear waste as the Department of
| Energy... Tolerance of mass border crossings was probably
| a more directly fatal error...
|
| This is just totally disconnected from policy reality.
| Biden did not tolerate mass border crossings. (I _wish_
| he'd dismantled ICE, but he very clearly did not.) A
| relatively minor DoE appointment going to a member of an
| unpopular minority both has nothing to do with policy and
| is the kind of thing that must necessarily be acceptable
| if minorities are actually going to be "treated equally
| under the law". This is a ludicrous basis to infer "the
| subservience of the political class" to transgender
| people.
|
| On the other hand, Trump is a billionaire with Epstein
| connections and entirely unabashed about making money for
| his businesses and family using his government position.
| If this isn't "decadence", or "elitism", what meaning
| could the words possibly have?
|
| "Deprogramming" might be an unfriendly word but it's hard
| for me to imagine how you have a functional democracy
| when a plurality of voters are making decisions on the
| basis of straightforward falsehoods, or even inversions
| of reality, just because "at least that is the
| perception". This isn't a sustainable situation, and it
| will end with either re-connecting these people to
| reality or disenfranchising them (really, them
| disenfranchising themselves along with the rest of us,
| e.g. by re-empowering someone who tried to steal an
| election). The former seems vastly preferable.
|
| Speaking of unfriendly words - I also broadly have very
| little sympathy for a demand that people on the left
| speak respectfully of Trump voters given the total lack
| of any reciprocation. Even if it is the right way to do
| politics, the asymmetry between the way Democratic
| politicians talk about rural areas and the way Republican
| politicians talk about cities is another thing that's
| totally unsustainable.
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| This is a great example of a well put together, level-
| headed analysis, that I still think misses some key facts
| about how right wing propaganda works.
|
| > Tolerance of mass border crossings was probably a more
| directly fatal error, representing a final decoupling of
| the democratic party from their ideological roots in the
| labor movement which was always militantly against
| illegal immigration
|
| Both Biden and Obama turned away more immigrants than
| Trump did in his first term. And Clinton is the kind of
| denying asylum. The idea that we just had completely open
| borders and nothing was being done about is a
| fabrication.
|
| > Something like 0.6% of people identify as transgender
| in the United States(1). They are vastly over-represented
| in the media, in left wing political programs, and in the
| general zeitgeist at large relative to their population
| size
|
| If you actually pay attention to who is talking about
| Trans people, it is the right. Liberal media may be
| occasionally baited into arguing about it, but to say it
| was a major platform is a perception the right crafted.
| Fox was talking about it 24/7 leading up to the election
| [1]. Musk and Trump were tweeting about it constantly.
| They ran political ads saying they wanted to convert your
| kids to trans ideology. It's gotten so bad that our
| current president just harasses women that look kinda
| manly, saying they are trans.
|
| [1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/fox-news-covers-
| transgender-issue...
| thrwawty4 wrote:
| If the Democrat leadership weren't going all-in on this
| ideology despite the demonstrable harms it's causing, the
| Republicans would have almost nothing to say about it.
|
| As an example, replacing sex with "gender identity" in
| prisons policy has inflicted considerable harm on women
| prisoners, who have been sexually assaulted, raped and
| impregnated by male prisoners who were transferred to the
| female prison estate on the basis of their supposed
| "female gender identity".
|
| Feminist groups like WoLF spoke up on the horrors of this
| first, and the Republicans followed when they realized
| they could capitalize on this politically. But really it
| shouldn't have happened at all.
| matwood wrote:
| > You should be asking why 70 million people voted the way
| they did in spite of the events you describe.
|
| In part the propaganda machine that started in the 80s with
| AM talk radio, culminating to algorithmic feeds today.
| helaoban wrote:
| If that is the case, you have to explain why right wing
| propagandists have been so much more successful than left
| wing ones.
| stackbutterflow wrote:
| Because it's easy when you don't let facts block you.
| Spread lie number 1 on Monday morning, lie number 2 in
| the afternoon, lie number 3 the next day, and do that for
| years and decades.
|
| Whenever someone spends the time, and it takes a long
| time, to correct you, laugh, mock them, spew a few more
| lies.
|
| And it's easy to do when the rich, the owner class side
| with you, because they buy newspapers, websites, ads,
| which you can't do if you lean left because acquiring
| money at all cost is not a priority of left wing people.
| NekkoDroid wrote:
| My guess is lack of morals
| sethammons wrote:
| That seems relatively straightforward, so likely
| incomplete: the left is a collective of various interests
| that often don't align internally and the right has very
| consistent and largely aligned interests. One of those is
| easier to steer. Another facet could also be education
| levels. As they say, a lie can get across town before the
| truth has its pants on. Being educated takes time and
| effort, and the educated lean left.
| titzer wrote:
| They are also absolutely shameless about lying and feel
| no obligation to stick to facts or data, but rather
| appeal to and cultivate ignorance, binary thinking, fear,
| us-versus-them thinking, and scapegoating. In short,
| their propaganda is more effective because they lean into
| it being _propaganda_.
| uean wrote:
| I really encourage you to avoid the language of "they"
| and "we." It's a discussion, and it doesn't need to be an
| attack of which you are putting yourself on a side, or as
| you put it, binary thinking. As written I can't know if
| you are talking about either the right or left.
| titzer wrote:
| I think you want to read my comment a certain way and
| it's not allowing you to, so you posted both:
|
| > it doesn't need to be an attack of which you are
| putting yourself on a side
|
| and also
|
| > I can't know if you are talking about either the right
| or left
|
| Which are contradictory, if you think about it. I am not
| sure what you want me to write if I can't use "they" to
| refer to other people. Also, I didn't use "we", something
| you somehow also seem to want me to say, and didn't.
| gcbirzan wrote:
| > Trump's landslide victory in 2024.
|
| What are you talking about?
| helaoban wrote:
| If you want to challenge a point, then challenge it.
| Don't cower behind ambiguous snark.
| titzer wrote:
| It wasn't a landslide.
|
| It's on you to argue it was, e.g. by comparing it to
| other clear landslide victories like Reagan in 1984.
| Truth is that 2024 the final popular vote gap was 1.5%,
| compared to 4.5% for 2020, -2.0% for 2016 (yeah, really),
| 3.9% in 2012, 7.28% in 2008, and so on.
| tootie wrote:
| There was no landslide. Trump got 49.9% of the vote. And it
| was after his attempted insurrection to overturn a valid
| election in which he was soundly rejected. He's never
| received 50% of the vote despite his relentless lies about
| voter fraud.
|
| I'm not upset at people for having a differing opinion or
| being upset at some economic conditions attributable to
| Democrats, but rather their persistent belief in provably
| false information like the relative danger of immigrants,
| the causes of climate change, vaccine safety, election
| security or whether or not a particular ethnic group is
| eating their pets. This isn't a matter of opinion or it's a
| matter of observable reality and fundamental human
| morality.
| tristor wrote:
| >You should be asking why 70 million people voted the way
| they did in spite of the events you describe.
|
| Propaganda, 1 in 6 Boomers being exposed to amounts of lead
| in childhood that lead to measurable cognitive declines,
| average age of the US population being on the rise with
| lower birth rates means most eligible votes are in the age
| groups most likely to suffer low grade dementia, and the
| weaponization of social media by foreign adversaries and
| wealthy elites.
|
| There's maybe 4-5M true believers, the rest are gullible
| lead-addled old fools who got brainwashed by Fox News.
| That's the unvarnished truth of it.
| raincole wrote:
| > We need to deprogram like 70M very confused people
|
| With this mindset the said group will quickly grow to half of
| the US population.
| b40d-48b2-979e wrote:
| You seem angry about being called out here. No, it won't
| grow to half the population since the existing support
| keeps shrinking over time.
| jobs_throwaway wrote:
| > 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?
| qup wrote:
| > Remember when they couldn't even build a proper website for
| Obamacare?
|
| With a massive budget, too. Hundreds of millions iirc.
|
| It felt like a website that the small web-dev shop I worked
| for could build without much problem in a couple months.
|
| We didn't have 200 layers of beauracracy, though.
|
| That said I don't doubt the military could take their current
| tech and keep it running. It's far different from the typical
| grift of government contractors.
| jobs_throwaway wrote:
| Maybe they could keep it running. With the way models are
| improving though, I don't think that'd be useful for long.
| In 6 months or a year when the frontier is again pushed
| out, I don't think the military is going to want to be
| running Opus 4.6
|
| And contrary to what the model-makers would like you to
| believe, I don't think we're anywhere close to the system
| being self-improving enough that you could just let it run
| without intervention and it spits out a new frontier model
| techblueberry wrote:
| 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.
| nemo44x wrote:
| The country is sovereign. It can just make a law
| democratically that changes things. The sovereign must act on
| whatever is in its best interest. The method of action is
| democratic in this case.
| dartharva wrote:
| > 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?
| helaoban wrote:
| I think any such examination of a military that doesn't
| actually fight wars is meaningless. The question can only be
| really asked of a handful of countries.
| blitzar wrote:
| > Private corporations should never be allowed to dictate how
| the military acts.
|
| The military should never be allowed to dictate how Private
| corporations act
| einpoklum wrote:
| > 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>
| vonneumannstan wrote:
| 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.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| 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.
| JackYoustra wrote:
| 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.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| I have read the whole thing but I nonetheless want to focus on
| the second paragraph:
|
| > _Anthropic has therefore worked proactively to deploy our
| models to the Department of War_
|
| This should be a "have you noticed that the caps on our hats have
| skulls on it?" moment [1]. Even if one argues that the sentence
| should not be read literally (that is, that it's not _literal_
| war we 're talking about), the only reason for calling it
| "Department of War" and "warfighters" instead of "Department of
| Defense" and "soldiers" is to gain Trump's favor, a man who
| dodged the draft, called soldiers "losers", and has been
| threatening to invade an ally for quite some time.
|
| There is no such a thing as a half-deal with the devil. If
| Anthropic wants to make money out of AI misclassifying civilians
| as military targets (or, as it has happened, by identifying which
| one residential building should be collapsed on top of a single
| military target, civilians be damned) good for them, but to argue
| that this is only okay as long as said civilians are brown is not
| the moral stance they think it is.
|
| Disclaimer: I'm not a US citizen.
|
| [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY
| ricardobeat wrote:
| What is their other possible move here, considering the
| government is threatening to destroy their business entirely?
| probably_wrong wrote:
| One alternative would be to call the government's bluff: if
| they truly are as indispensable as they claim then they can
| leverage that advantage into a deal.
|
| But at a more general level, I'd say that unethical actions
| do not suddenly become ethical when one's business is at
| risk. If Anthropic considers that using their technology for
| X is unethical and then decide that their money and power is
| worth more than the lives of the foreigners that will be
| affected by doing X then good for them, but they shouldn't
| then make a grandstand about how hard they fought to ensure
| that _only foreigners_ get their necks under the boots.
| ninjagoo wrote:
| > What is their other possible move here, considering the
| government is threatening to destroy their business entirely?
|
| You must not be American, then. We all know that these
| corporate favoring contract terms are managed through
| campaign contributions; savvy?
|
| Anthropic must have high school interns as govt liaisons, and
| not very bright ones
| XorNot wrote:
| Warfighters is a pretty common term though. There's a fair bit
| of nuance in when and how you'd use it.
| cwillu wrote:
| It's a common term that comes with a _lot_ of criticism in
| the vein of noticing the skulls.
| ramoz wrote:
| All completely rationale. Makes the us military here look fairly
| incompetent... embarrassing as a veteran.
| scottyah wrote:
| 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.
| sheeshkebab wrote:
| It's probably something really dumb, and they irked
| California billionaire with their idiocy.
| protocolture wrote:
| Classic seppo diatribe.
|
| "We will build tools to hurt other people but become all
| flustered when they are used locally"
| joemi wrote:
| If you're using "seppo" as the Australian pejorative referring
| to Americans, I'm not sure what makes this uniquely American.
| exodust wrote:
| "Seppo" is rarely used in Australia today, it's an old
| bottom-of-barrel word most have never heard of. The neutral
| "Yank" is more common, but even that only pops up sometimes.
|
| Guessing their comment attempts to expose hypocrisy of
| America's keenly supported overseas military activity in
| conflict with fiercely defended domestic free-speech and
| liberty principles. Deep down, most allies of America want
| America to defeat foreign adversaries and keep defending
| those liberties many of us share. In other words there's no
| hypocrisy, carry on!
| tabbott wrote:
| An organization character really shows through when their values
| conflict with their self-interest.
|
| It's inspiring to see that Anthropic is capable of taking a
| principled stand, despite having raised a fortune in venture
| capital.
|
| I don't think a lot of companies would have made this choice. I
| wish them the very best of luck in weathering the consequences of
| their courage.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| 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.
| freakynit wrote:
| I appreciate that the HN community values thoughtful, civil
| discussion, and that's important. But when fundamental civil
| liberties are at stake, especially in the face of powerful
| institutions and influence from people of money seeking to
| expand control under the banner of "security", it's worth
| remembering that freedom has never simply been granted. It
| has always required vigilance, and at times, resistance. The
| rights we rely on were not handed down by default; they were
| secured through struggle, and they can be eroded the same
| way.
|
| Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
| _def wrote:
| On a long enough timeline literally everything has 100%
| chance of failure. I'm not trying to be obnoxious, I just
| wanna say: we only got this one life and we have to choose
| what to make of it. Too many people pretend things are
| already laid out based on game theory "success". But that's
| not what it's about in life at all.
| statuslover9000 wrote:
| The Sinophobic culture at Anthropic is worrying. Say what you
| will about authoritarianism, but China's non-imperialist foreign
| policy means their economy is less reliant on a military-
| industrial complex.
|
| All they have to do is continue to pump out exponentially more
| solar panels and the petrodollar will fall, possibly taking our
| reserve currency status with it. The U.S. seems more likely to
| start a hot war in the name of "democracy" as it fails to
| gracefully metabolize the end of its geopolitical dominance, and
| Dario's rhetoric pushes us further in that direction.
| hackyhacky wrote:
| > China's non-imperialist foreign policy
|
| Really? Is China non-imperialist regarding Taiwan and Tibet?
| jmyeet wrote:
| Taiwan is a matter of perspective. From the Chinese
| perspective, there was a civil war and the KMT lost. That's
| also the official position of the US, the EU and most
| countries in the world. It's called the One China policy. And
| China seems happy to maintain the status quo and leave the
| situation unresolved. Is it really imperialism to say that
| ultimately there will be reunification?
|
| Even if you accept Tibet as imperialist, which is debatable,
| it was in 1950. You want to compare that to US imperialism,
| particularly since WW2 [1]? And I say "debatable" here
| because Tibet had a system that is charitably called
| "serfdom" where 90% of people couldn't own land but they did
| have some rights. However, they were the property of their
| lords and could be gifted or traded, you know, like property.
| There's another word for that: slavery.
|
| It is 100% factually accurate to say that the People's
| Republica of China is not imperialist.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_
| in_r...
| chipgap98 wrote:
| In what world does China have a non-imperialist foreign policy?
| hrn_frs wrote:
| Historically speaking, he's right. China has never had an
| expansionist foreign policy.
| mobilefriendly wrote:
| Tibet, the Philippines, and Taiwan would like to have a
| word, not to mention Chinese military action in support of
| its North Korea puppet state, and wars with Vietnam and
| India.
| sinuhe69 wrote:
| Are you serious? Don't you know how many wars did China
| wage? It tried to assimilate Vietnam for 1000 years. The
| last large scale war against Vietnam was just 1979. In
| fact, China had started war with all its neighbors, with no
| exception.
| MiSeRyDeee wrote:
| Do me a favor and name one single country didn't have war
| with any of its neighbor.
| dpedu wrote:
| Nine-dash line?
| MiSeRyDeee wrote:
| In what world does China have a imperialist foreign policy?
| cthalupa wrote:
| The one we live in, where they have control over a wide
| swathe of land mass through imperialism and have actively
| resisted relinquishing it?
|
| The one we live in, where they are constantly surpassing
| international law in international waters in the South
| China Sea?
|
| The one we live in, where they are constantly rattling
| sabers at South Korea and Japan when it comes to military
| expansion?
|
| The one we live in, where they brutally cracked down on
| Hong Kong when they did not abide by the 50 year one
| country two systems deal, not even making it half of the
| way through the agreed period?
|
| The one we live in, where there is constant threat to
| Taiwan?
|
| It may have been a lazy post you're responding to, but
| anyone that is paying attention to this topic enough to
| talk about it is going to either say 'Of course China is
| imperialist, the same as every other global power' or take
| some sort of tankie approach to justify it.
| cwillu wrote:
| "One country two systems" is definitionally not
| imperialism, and given that "One China" is still an
| internationally recognized thing, neither is Taiwan.
| "Imperialism" is not a synonym for "morally repugnant
| government policy".
| cthalupa wrote:
| I can see the argument for Hong Kong. I don't agree,
| really, but I can understand it. Under the strictest of
| definitions, perhaps it isn't.
|
| But Taiwan is very obviously a totally separate country
| no matter what fictions anyone employs. If you are trying
| to talk about the thin veneer of everyone going "Uh huh,
| sure, China, yep Taiwan is totally part of you, wink
| wink, nudge nudge" as somehow making China not
| imperialist when Taiwan basically lives under the
| perpetual threat of a Chinese military invasion and
| having their own democratic form of government overthrown
| and replaced with the CCP, then... I don't really know
| what to say.
|
| I suppose we could argue about imperialism being more of
| an economic thing - in which case this all still holds up
| - China's investments in Africa are effectively the same
| playbook the US has run out in developing nations for
| years. The US learned it from prior imperialist nations
| but belts and roads is nearly a carbon copy of what the
| US has done in other places.
|
| But let's look at what the original poster was actually
| talking about - saying that China is safe because they
| don't have a military industrial complex because they're
| not imperialist. The proper word to use, if we want to
| get down to the semantics of it all, would be
| expansionist - but it's still not true. China has the 2nd
| largest military industrial complex in the world, and the
| gap is shrinking every day between them and the US. And
| if you were to look at wartime capacity, where China's
| dual-use shipyards could be swapped to naval production
| instead of commercial, a huge portion of that gap
| disappears immediately.
| mobilefriendly wrote:
| You forgot Tibet and the Uyghurs
| https://worldwithoutgenocide.org/genocides-and-
| conflicts/gen...
| cthalupa wrote:
| > where they have control over a wide swathe of land mass
| through imperialism and have actively resisted
| relinquishing it?
|
| Was referring to Tibet.
|
| The Uyghurs are also a major problem from a social
| perspective but not directly related to
| imperalism/expansionism/military industrial complex
| stuff.
| econ wrote:
| Yes but the guy at the end of the street beats his wife
| too!
| sinuhe69 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_Wars
| MiSeRyDeee wrote:
| I'm well informed on all of these but no, if we compare
| to other global power like US or Russia, or historically
| British, France, Spain, etc, China is 100% not an
| imperialist or colonialist, not by a large margin. Those
| issues are largely exaggerated by media and anyone had a
| decent exposure to history and international politics
| wouldn't say they are the same.
| asciii wrote:
| I disagree on China. What would you call China's
| behavior[1] in the South China Sea with regards to
| fishing vessels and other non-military boats?
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzZrcqf826E
| jmyeet wrote:
| What China is doing in the South _China_ Sea? The South
| _China_ Sea.
|
| Let's just compare to the Monroe Doctrine [1]. What this
| actually means has gone through several iterations by
| since I think Teddy Roosevelt's time, it's that the
| United States views the Americas (being North and South
| America) to be the _sole_ domain of the United States.
|
| This was a convenient excuse for any number of regime
| changes in Central and South America since 1945. The US
| almost started World War Three over Cuba in 1962 after
| the USSR retaliated to the US putting nuclear MRBMs in
| Turkey. We've starved Cuba for 60+ years for having the
| audacity to overthrow our puppet government and
| nationalize some mob casinos. Recently, we kidnapped the
| head of state of Venezuela because reasons.
|
| But sure, let's focus on China militarizing its
| territorial waters.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monroe_Doctrine
| cthalupa wrote:
| You're arguing that because of the English language name
| of it is the South China Sea that China owns it and their
| actions can't be imperialist?
|
| Brunei, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines,
| Taiwan, and Vietnam will all be happy to know that we've
| solved it - we can just abandon it all to China. Problem
| solved!
|
| This is a silly argument. There are significant
| territorial disputes that China is extremely aggressive
| on, international tribunals have ruled them as violating
| international law in international waters and in
| sovereign waters of other nations, etc.
| MiSeRyDeee wrote:
| And the US just casually carried out a special military
| operation in another sovereign country and captured their
| president without consequences. So much for self-
| righteous.
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| > What China is doing in the South _China_ Sea? The South
| _China_ Sea.
|
| Sorry, did you mean _East Vietnam_ Sea?
| MiSeRyDeee wrote:
| Sure China has some disputes with neighboring country in
| South China Sea, the worst conflict they had is fishing
| boats running into each other. 0 death toll last time I
| checked. Meanwhile US killed at least 126 people with
| alleged drug strike in the Caribbean Sea since last year,
| WITHOUT trial. Anyone believing these're equivalent
| imperialism activity is hypocrite at best.
|
| [1] https://apnews.com/article/boat-strikes-military-
| death-toll-...
| asciii wrote:
| There were deaths in these fishing incidents[1].
|
| > Anyone believing these're equivalent imperialism
| activity is hypocrite at best.
|
| In terms of equivalence, I would say based on their
| intentions they wish they could be more but would rather
| let the US burn it on the way down
|
| [1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/03/asia/philippines-
| south-china-...
| MiSeRyDeee wrote:
| Are we just make accusations based on what could have
| happened? And Still no, day and night difference compared
| to any of those countries I mentioned
| maxglute wrote:
| Obviously self defense with nobel peace price worthy
| restraint.
|
| Considering it's PRC claimed territory. Literally 100% of
| PRC claims are inherited from ROC, i.e. PRC has expanded
| no claims, and actively settled 12/14 land borders (most
| on earth) essentially all with 50%+ concessions, i.e. PRC
| ceded more land in negotiations. That OBJECTIVELY, makes
| PRC the most benevolent rising power in recorded history.
| Any gov losing land to so many border settlements is
| committing treason. Also note PCA ruling is not
| international law, so what PRC does in SCS is not even
| legally wrong (as in they legally can't be wrong since
| UNCLOS cannot rule on sovereignty). Or that PRC was last
| to militarize SCS islands (except Brunai who is good
| boi), and PRC conceded ROC/TW's original 11dash to 9dash,
| which even in SCS disputes makes PRC the only party to
| have made concessions.
|
| PRC is objectively the LEAST imperialistic rising power,
| by actual non retarded definitions, i.e. expanding on
| territories outside it's claims, that PRC didn't even
| make, but again inherited from ROC when UN recognition
| changed.
| statuslover9000 wrote:
| For example, China operates 1 foreign military base, in
| Djibouti. How many do you think the U.S. has in the South
| China Sea alone?
|
| Beyond that, how many people has China killed in foreign
| military conflicts in the past 40 years? How many foreign
| governments have they overthrown?
|
| Instead of all this, they've used their resources not only to
| become the world's economic superpower but also to lift 800
| million people out of poverty, accounting for 75% of the
| world's reduction during the past 4 decades. The U.S. has
| added 10 million during that same time period.
| 8note wrote:
| why use 40 years as the example? its a pretty convenient
| framing to exclude the foreign governments its toppled. eg.
| tibet.
|
| the government in exile remains the government in exile.
|
| youd have some standing if china dropped control over its
| imperial holdings, rather than pretend theyre part of china
| statuslover9000 wrote:
| First off, I consider the post-Mao / starting with Deng
| era of Chinese government to be the most relevant when
| considering who they "are" as a country now.
|
| However, I'd still maintain that before that, China's
| foreign policy was more focused on maintaining
| territorial sovereignty against the threat of Western
| imperialism vs. focused on expansion or foreign
| influence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_forei
| gn_relations_o...
|
| Meanwhile, the entire territory of the U.S. is predicated
| on one of history's largest genocides, and a consistently
| expansionary foreign policy on top of that.
| soundworlds wrote:
| 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.
| nutjob2 wrote:
| > 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.
| cwillu wrote:
| It wasn't that long ago that Taiwan claimed to be the
| legitimate government of China; given that China still
| maintains the reverse claim, it's not outrageous that it
| would consider an outside country's defense to be
| interference in an internal matter.
|
| Whether or not that claim is legitimate, it _is_ consistent
| with the concept of china having a non-imperialist foreign
| policy, and claims regarding _that_ need to look elsewhere
| for supporting evidence.
| nutjob2 wrote:
| While that rhetoric makes sense in the context of the
| history and politics of China and Taiwan, they have been
| independently governed nations for quite a while and have
| very different political systems, their own armies, etc.
| They are de-facto separate nations if nothing else.
|
| I also note China's aggressive and violent colonization and
| expansive claims of the South China Sea.
|
| Taking any nation/land/sea by force is imperialist, by
| definition.
| 8note wrote:
| that claim is really about not resuming a war.
|
| taiwan saying otherwise would immediately trigger an attack
| from the PRC.
|
| its still imperialism that china is dominating a neighbor
| to require it ro state a certain position, especially when
| its very far from the defacto reality on the ground, that
| taiwan is clearly separate
| jmyeet wrote:
| Your comment reads like propaganda.
|
| You know who else considers Taiwan to be part of the People's
| Republic of China? The US, the EU and in fact most countries
| in the world. It's called the One China policy. There are I
| believe 12 countries that have diplomatic relations with
| Taiwan.
|
| The position of the PRC is that Taiwan will ultimately be
| reunified. That doesn't necessarily mean by military force.
| It doesn't even necessarily mean soon. The PRC famously takes
| a very long term view.
|
| And those islands you mention are in the South _China_ Sea.
| 8note wrote:
| that is still imperialism: taking control of a colony and
| forcing a certain culture on its inhabitants
| cthalupa wrote:
| 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.
| teyopi wrote:
| > But China has some of the most imperialist policies in the
| world.
|
| Citation needed?
|
| US and allies have invaded or intervened in 20+ countries in
| last 20 years in the name of "western values" where values
| means $$$$ and hegemony.
|
| Educate me please with a comparison of what China has done to
| be "some of the most imperialist policies"?
| sinuhe69 wrote:
| Maybe it's time to learn some facts
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_Wars
| cthalupa wrote:
| Tibet Hong Kong / Macau Taiwan Everything constantly in the
| South China Sea Belt and Roads is effectively the Marshall
| Plan but even bigger - Africa being the major example, but
| also Eastern Europe, parts of the middle east, etc. Over
| 100 countries. This exact playbook is what sets up the
| infrastructure and reasons for military intervention at a
| later date - protecting your investments.
| ninjagoo wrote:
| > Educate me please with a comparison of what China has
| done to be "some of the most imperialist policies"?
|
| Tibet occupation. Taiwan encirclement and ongoing military
| exercises. Strong-arming African and Asian countries that
| made the mistake of signing up for belt & road. Tianenmen
| Square. Illegal Foreign Police Stations. Uyghurs/Xinjiang
| genocide and concentration camps. Repeated invasion and
| occupation of Indian territory in North East and North
| West. The Great Firewall of China - occupation and
| suppression of its own populations. Ongoing Han settlement
| of Tibet, Xinjiang and other ethnic regions. Violent
| destruction of Hong Kong democracy (that was condition of
| handover). Spratly Islands occupation. Attacks on Filipino
| shipping and coast guard. Ongoing attacks on Japan's
| Senkaku Islands.
| nl wrote:
| I think a lot of the conflict about what imperialist policies
| means is different framing.
|
| For better or worse, inside this the border in this map China
| has fairly imperialist policies. Outside it not so much:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_of_National_Shame
|
| That's different to the expansionist imperial policies of
| Spain in the 1500s or Britain in the 1700s. It also affects a
| very large proportion of the world's population. That
| Wikipedia page has some good links for further reading about
| this.
|
| But it's an important point when considering China's place in
| the world.
| cthalupa wrote:
| We're talking about the modern world, though. China's
| imperialism over the past half century is not significantly
| different from any other major world power. The choices we
| have aren't 1500s Spain or 1700s Britain vs. 2000s China.
|
| And Belt and Road is the Marshall plan writ large, and it
| was considered to be one of the largest imperialist plans
| ever by the USA, and B&R covers many many countries outside
| of that map. You'll notice all of these loans they've
| offered have very favorable terms for them - it's arguably
| many times more exploitative than the Marshall plan.
| xeckr wrote:
| 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.
| 8note wrote:
| the treatment of Tibet and Xinjiang are entirely Han
| imperialism and colonisation.
|
| the one china policy is imperialism
| jonplackett wrote:
| That is frikkin impressive. Well done sir.
| parhamn wrote:
| Now, I'm curious. How Bedrock/Azure Claude models work?
|
| Do these rules apply to them too?
| stopbulying wrote:
| Didn't Cheney's company have the option to bid on contracts, by
| comparison?
| stopbulying wrote:
| 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.
| stopbulying wrote:
| What does Anthropic need to do to retain control over their
| for-peace company, though they took money from DoD/DoW?
| sirshmooey wrote:
| Party balloons along the southern border beware.
| brooke2k wrote:
| The constant reference to "democracy" as the thing that makes us
| good and them bad is so frustrating to me because we are _barely_
| a democracy.
|
| We are ruled by a two-party state. Nobody else has any power or
| any chance at power. How is that really much better than a one-
| party state?
|
| Actually, these two parties are so fundamentally ANTI-democracy
| that they are currently having a very public battle of "who can
| gerrymander the most" across multiple states.
|
| Our "elections" are barely more useful than the "elections" in
| one-party states like North Korea and China. We have an entire,
| completely legal industry based around corporate interests
| telling politicians what to do (it's called "lobbying"). Our
| campaign finance laws allow corporations to donate infinite
| amounts of money to politician's campaigns through SuperPACs.
| People are given two choices to vote for, and those choices are
| based on who licks corporation boots the best, and who follows
| the party line the best. Because we're definitely a Democracy.
|
| There are no laws against bribing supreme court justices, and in
| fact there is compelling evidence that multiple supreme court
| justices have regularly taken bribes - and nothing is done about
| this. And yet we're a good, democratic country, right? And other
| countries are evil and corrupt.
|
| The current president is stretching executive power as far as it
| possibly can go. He has a secret police of thugs abducting people
| around the country. Many of them - completely innocent people -
| have been sent to a brutal concentration camp in El Salvador. But
| I suppose a gay hairdresser with a green card deserves that,
| right? Because we're a democracy, not like those other evil
| countries.
|
| He's also threatining to invade Greenland, and has already
| kidnapped the president of Venezuela - but that's ok, because
| we're Good. Other countries who invade people are Bad though.
|
| And now that same president is trying to nationalize elections,
| clearly to make them even less fair than they already are, and
| nobody's stopping him. How is that democratic exactly?
|
| Sorry for the long rant, but it just majorly pisses me off when I
| read something like this that constantly refers to the US as a
| good democracy and other countries as evil autocracies.
|
| We are not that much better than them. We suck. It's bad for us
| to use mass surveillance on their citizens, just like it's bad to
| use mass surveillance on our citizens.
|
| And yet we will do it anyways, just like China will do it
| anyways, because we are ultimately not that different.
| jjcm wrote:
| This is the strongest statement in the post:
|
| > They have threatened to remove us from their systems if we
| maintain these safeguards; they have also threatened to designate
| us a "supply chain risk"--a label reserved for US adversaries,
| never before applied to an American company--and to invoke the
| Defense Production Act to force the safeguards' removal. These
| latter two threats are inherently contradictory: one labels us a
| security risk; the other labels Claude as essential to national
| security.
|
| This contradictory messaging puts to rest any doubt that this is
| a strong arm by the governemnt to allow any use. I really like
| Anthropic's approach here, which is to in turn state that they're
| happy to help the Governemnt move off of Anthropic. It's a
| messaging ploy for sure, but it puts the ball in the current
| administration's court.
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| 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.
| ray_v wrote:
| The analogy doesn't work here ... In your scenario they are
| ok with using the bolt as long as the Chinese company
| promises to remove deliberate defects - which is of course
| absurd ... AND contradictory.
| gipp wrote:
| "Supply chain risk" is a specific designation that forbids
| companies that work with the DOD from working with that
| company. It would not be applied in your scenario.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| No, in your example, if the dodgy Chinese company is a supply
| chain risk due to sabotage, why would they invoke an act to
| force production of the bolts from the same company for use
| for national defense preparedness, which would be clearly a
| national security risk?
| snickerbockers wrote:
| The OP specifically mentions this in the context of
| "systems" (a vague, poorly-defined term) and "classified
| networks" in which Anthropic products are already present.
| Without more details on what "systems" these are or the
| terms of the contracts under which these were produced it's
| difficult to make a definitive judgement, but broadly
| speaking it's _not_ a good thing if the government is
| relying on a product which Anthropic has designed to
| arbitrarily refuse orders by its own judgement.
|
| I really don't see how anybody could think a private
| defense contractor should be entitled to countermand the
| military by leveraging the control it has over products it
| has already sold. Maybe the terms of their contract
| entitled them to some discretion over what orders the
| product will carry out, but there's no such claim in the
| OP.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| >I really don't see how anybody could think a private
| defense contractor should be entitled to countermand the
| military by leveraging the control it has over products
| it has already sold. Maybe the terms of their contract
| entitled them to some discretion over what orders the
| product will carry out, but there's no such claim in the
| OP.
|
| I don't think that is what is happening. What most likely
| is happening is that they want Anthropic to produce new
| systems due to the success of the previous ones, but they
| are refusing to do so because the new systems are against
| their mission. What seems like the DoD is attempting to
| do, on one hand, is call them a supply chain risk to
| limit Anthropic's business opportunities with other
| companies, and then, on the other hand, simultaneously
| invoke DPA so that they can compel them to make the new
| system. But why would the government want to compel a
| company to make a system for them due to a need for
| national prepareness that they designated as such a
| supply chain risk that they forbid other companies that
| provide government services from doing business with due
| to the national security risk of having a sabotaged
| supply chain? It doesn't really make sense, other than
| from a pure coercion perspective.
| snickerbockers wrote:
| >limit Anthropic's business opportunities with other
| companies
|
| Does it necessarily prevent other companies from doing
| business with them or does it prevent other companies
| from subcontracting them on government projects? The term
| "supply chain" leads me to think it's the latter.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| Is that relevant to the actual point?
| snickerbockers wrote:
| Yes?
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| Incorrect
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| The question is, after witnessing Hegseth crash out
| against one of their fellow contractors over practically
| nothing, will contractors want to walk the tightrope of
| doing business with Anthropic but promising it never ends
| up feeding into a government contract?
| estearum wrote:
| It's easy to resolve an alleged contradiction by just
| ignoring one half of it lol
|
| Try introducing DPA invocation into your analogy and let's
| see where it goes!
| simoncion wrote:
| > Try introducing DPA invocation into your analogy and
| let's see where it goes!
|
| When I introduce that, I see Anthropic's management getting
| Tiktok'ed.
|
| It can be true that Anthropic's products are essential for
| national defense and also true that the management of the
| company are a supply chain risk.
|
| _Is_ any of that true? Well, so much of what has been done
| in the name of "national defense" & etc over the past many
| decades has clearly not been done for reasons that are
| true, so -when it comes to "national defense"- I don't
| think that the truth actually matters much at all.
| estearum wrote:
| TikTok'd as in requiring a novel act of Congress? Sure!
|
| DPA and FASCSA as they stand today cannot be used the way
| DOD is claiming they can be.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Note that they always attempt to exert control they don't
| have. They're always bluffing, and they keep losing. Respond
| accordingly.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Paper tigers
| gclawes wrote:
| The government should be entitled to any lawful use of a
| product they purchase, not uses dictated solely by the
| provider. It's up to courts to decide what lawful use is,
| it's not up to these companies to dictate.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Providers are free who they choose to do business with,
| or not do business with. Are you arguing that the
| government should be able to compel a provider to allow
| their use when it's well documented the government does
| not respect nor adhere to the rule of law? I think you
| misunderstand commerce and contract law.
| alex43578 wrote:
| Providers are bound by plenty of laws that alter how they
| do business or who they do business with.
|
| You can't say "no disabled people at your business".
| Hell, you can't even say "no fake service animals at my
| restaurant". Many in America also think you can't say no
| girls in the Boy Scouts, or no men in a women's locker
| room.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| When Congress makes the law, you will be accurate. At
| this time, there is no law that enables the US executive
| branch to achieve their desired outcome of strong arming
| Anthropic.
|
| > Many in America also think you can't say no girls in
| the Boy Scouts, or no men in a women's locker room.
|
| Your average American is low functioning, low education,
| vibe driven with a 6th-8th grade reading level, so this
| ("What Americans think") is not terribly relevant in my
| opinion. Provide statute and case law.
| alex43578 wrote:
| Defense Production Act.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Which I'm sure will work as well as tariffs. Three years
| to go, good luck to them, slowing them down as proven
| exceptionally effective. Their efforts will likely die at
| midterms.
|
| https://www.justsecurity.org/107087/tracker-litigation-
| legal...
| mech422 wrote:
| Terms of Service would like to have a word....
|
| Not like limiting uses of products is anything new
| bdangubic wrote:
| Amazing to read this. Hoping you are not an American...
| Reading this thread is like comrade after comrade!
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| Strange take
| mediaman wrote:
| The product is a service, and they agreed to a contract.
| Now they don't like the contract.
|
| Is your view that contracts with the government should be
| meaningless? That the government should be able to
| unilaterally, and without recourse, change any contract
| they previously agreed to for any reason, and the vendor
| should be forced at gunpoint to comply?
|
| If you do believe this, then what do you believe the
| second order effects will be when contracts with the
| government have no meaning? How will vendors to the
| government respond? Will this ultimately help or hinder
| the American government's efficacy?
| danorama wrote:
| Seriously.
|
| Hegseth trying to play "I'm altering the deal. Pray I
| don't alter it any further" just shows this gang's total
| lack of comprehension of second-order effects.
| isodev wrote:
| > It's up to courts to decide what lawful use is
|
| No, it's up to the government to create policy and
| legislation that outlines what is lawful or not and
| install mechanisms to monitor and regulate usage.
|
| The fact that an arm of the government wants to go YOLO
| mode is merely a symptom of the deeper problem that this
| government is currently not effectual.
| grosswait wrote:
| Do you have any insight that what they want to do is
| YOLO, as opposed something your sure you'll disagree
| with?
| isodev wrote:
| YOLO here refers to unsafe usage of LLMs. Your government
| is supposed to make legislation that protects all of its
| citizens, it's not "what you agree with" game.
| grosswait wrote:
| Yeah, I knew what was meant. Unsafe being a moving
| definition by an arbitrary set of people.
| rpdillon wrote:
| Not really. Services are provided on terms acceptable to
| both parties. This isn't about what's legal, it's about
| the terms of the service agreement.
| latexr wrote:
| > Respond accordingly.
|
| "Four key words (...) The only phrase that can genuinely
| make a weak bully go away, and that is: Fuck You, Make Me."
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ohPToBog_-g&t=1619s
| fwipsy wrote:
| Anthropic has been pushing for commonsense AI regulation. Our
| current administration has refused to regulate AI and
| attempted to prevent state regulation.
|
| "The government doesn't have control of this technology" is
| an odd way to think about "the government can't force a
| company to apply this technology dangerously."
| polski-g wrote:
| Because of Bernstein v DOJ, any AI company in the 9th
| circuit cannot be regulated because software is considered
| free speech.
| gclawes wrote:
| > 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?
| theptip wrote:
| Every company is free to determine its terms of use. If USG
| doesn't like them they should sign a contract with someone
| else.
| grosswait wrote:
| Every company is free to state their terms of use, but not
| all have been upheld when challenged
| otterley wrote:
| What's your angle here? I'm genuinely curious. If the
| government told you that you had to muck out portable
| bathrooms with your bare hands even if you didn't want
| to, wouldn't you find that objectionable?
| alex43578 wrote:
| I'm sure they would find it objectionable, just like how
| many reacted negatively to the draft, but it was imposed
| anyways.
|
| The government should have far less control and power
| over individuals and businesses than it currently does.
| lynx97 wrote:
| Well, the rates are different from country to country,
| but everyone knows taxes. I really don't want to give
| away almost 40% of my income... Does anyone care what I
| _want_ or _like_?
| otterley wrote:
| Taxes aren't forced labor or indentured servitude, and
| aren't prohibited in any democracies. They're imposed by
| law through the actions of our duly elected
| representatives.
| theptip wrote:
| What grounds for challenge do you imagine here?
| alex43578 wrote:
| Can I run a business and say "No use by _insert race here_
| "? If they don't like it, they can shop somewhere else,
| right?
| tenuousemphasis wrote:
| Kegsbreath isn't a protected class.
| alex43578 wrote:
| If your argument is "every company is free to determine
| its terms of use", _except when told otherwise by the
| government_ , you've proven my point. The government is
| saying they need to provide unfettered access.
| JCharante wrote:
| "Told" is different than it being written into law. Go
| update the laws first and then you have a valid argument
| alex43578 wrote:
| So they'll be able to use the already-written DPA, right?
| theptip wrote:
| They can try, but:
|
| 1) it's pretty transparently obvious that Anthropic is
| not a supply chain risk, and that this is a retaliatory
| gesture. So I don't support that usage.
|
| 2) if they do try, Congress or SCOTUS could well reduce
| or remove that authority. I give the Trump admin enough
| credit to assume that they are considering carefully
| which laws they spend in this way, DPA is a valuable chip
| they may need to spend for something more valuable than
| Hegseth's temper tantrum.
| FrancisMoodie wrote:
| Ofcourse we're gonna compare being against the use of
| technology for Mass surveillance/Autonomous weapons with
| being racist, like wtf kind of argument is this? So
| because businesses can't implement racist policies they
| shouldn't be allowed to have any policies concerning the
| use of their tech? Mindblowing.
| lynx97 wrote:
| Well, the question is the fine line between racism and
| discrimination. Or, whats the difference between misogyny
| and pacifism? What am I allowed to dislike? Is it already
| across the line if I dont like dogs? What if I had really
| bad experiences with dogs in the past? Is it OK now, or
| still not? What if my childhood was basically a crazy
| mess because of my mother? Am I allowed to be careful
| around women now? Or am I creepy because of that? What if
| I escaped a warzone during my childhood? Is militant
| pacifism OK now? What if the military saved my family
| from being killed? Is it OK if I am pro military budget,
| or am I a system-whore now?
| theptip wrote:
| Of course not, nor can you write a contract that places
| your customers in indentured servitude. Those would be
| illegal contractual terms.
|
| But this is irrelevant to the case we are discussing,
| where Anthropic used legal contractual terms, and the
| government willingly signed them, then demanded they be
| changed after the fact.
| blitzar wrote:
| > Every company *
|
| * excludes tiktok
| bathtub365 wrote:
| There are a couple of notable Supreme Court cases in this
| area:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora.
| ..
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/303_Creative_LLC_v._Elenis
| singleshot_ wrote:
| Same reason they cant quarter troops in your house: the law
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| Because the government is here to serve us. Not the other way
| around.
| no-dr-onboard wrote:
| The government has a responsibility to protect its
| constituents. Sometimes that requires collaboration. This
| isn't hard.
| epistasis wrote:
| Is this one of those times? Seems pretty clear it's not.
|
| The third amendment is there for a reason. I am a third
| amendment absolutist and willing to put my life on the
| line to defend it.
| staticassertion wrote:
| I wonder what you can't justify this way.
| no-dr-onboard wrote:
| That's a good question. Assuming a righteous and just
| government:
|
| The government couldn't justify the killing of innocent
| civilians.
|
| The government couldn't justify the killing of the
| unborn.
|
| The government couldn't justify eugenics.
|
| There are objective moral absolutes.
| staticassertion wrote:
| Wow, that's just so many assertions and none of them
| follow from the statement that the government can break
| the law in order to protect its citizens. In all of those
| cases I can just say "they can if it is to protect its
| citizens". Remember, the premise here is that you are
| performing the act in order to protect constituents. So
| before all of those statements you have to assume "They
| are doing this in the genuine believe that it protects
| constituents".
|
| The argument so far seems to be "They can do anything,
| but there are moral absolutes that I can personally list
| out, and in those cases they can't do those things". That
| is a hilariously stupid view of the world but sadly a
| common one.
|
| Even if I grant moral objectivity, I reject that you have
| epistemic access to it so it's moot.
| no-dr-onboard wrote:
| I normally don't respond to bad faith responses like
| this, but I found the following quote pretty funny:
|
| > Even if I grant moral objectivity, I reject that you
| have epistemic access to it so it's moot.
|
| This is a silly and self refuting statement.
| staticassertion wrote:
| > This is a silly and self refuting statement.
|
| No it isn't and it's a pretty standard argument.
|
| Other than insulting you, my response was pretty damn
| charitable tbh. I tried to state your argument for you as
| best I could.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _Why the hell should companies get to dictate on their own
| to the government how their product is used?_
|
| Well:
|
| """
|
| Imagine that you created an LLC, and that you are the sole
| owner and employee.
|
| One day your LLC receives a letter from the government that
| says, "here is a contract to go mine heavy rare earth
| elements in Alaska." You don't want to do that, so you reply,
| "no thanks!"
|
| There is no retaliation. Everything is fine. You declined the
| terms of a contract. You live in a civilized capitalist
| republic. We figured this stuff out centuries ago, and today
| we have bigger fish to fry.
|
| """
|
| * https://x.com/deanwball/status/2027143691241197638
| grosswait wrote:
| This is a terrible analogy. Imagine you're an LLC that
| signed a contract to mine minerals, but your terms state
| you'd only mine in areas you felt safe. OSHA says it's safe
| but you disagree, because..... any number of reason
| unknowable to an outsider. Maybe you just don't like this
| OSHA leadership. That is more like what is happening.
|
| Signing a contract with Anthropic assuming they wouldn't
| rug pull over their own moral soapbox was mistake number
| one.
|
| I love anthropic products and heavily use them daily, but
| they need to get off their high horse. They complain
| they're being robbed by Chinese labs - robbed of what they
| stole from copyright holders. Anthropic doesn't have the
| moral high ground they try to claim.
| otterley wrote:
| The (hypothetical) contract is clear, though. The
| condition is stated in objective terms: "in areas you
| felt safe." If the Government agrees to this, then they
| should be bound just like any private counterparty would.
| If the Government didn't agree to this, they should have
| negotiated that term out in favor of their preferred
| terms.
| grosswait wrote:
| I agree. Which is why I said signing a contract with
| anthropic was a terrible idea in the first place.
| WD-42 wrote:
| Is it a rug pull? Where in the terms of service does
| anthropic say their models can be used for autonomous
| weapons and mass domestic surveillance?
| randerson wrote:
| Because technology companies know more about their product's
| capabilities and limitations than a former Fox News host? And
| because they know there's a risk of mass civilian casualties
| if you put an LLM in control of the world's most expensive
| military equipment?
| panarky wrote:
| Does the Defense Production Act force employees to continue
| working at Anthropic?
| nerdsniper wrote:
| No. It really only binds the corporation, but it does hold
| the executives/directors personally responsible for
| compliance so they'd be under a lot of pressure to figure out
| how to fix enough leaks in the ship to keep it afloat. Any
| individual director/executive could quit with little issue,
| but if they all did in a way that compromised the
| corporations ability to function, the courts could
| potentially utilize injunctions/fines/jail time to compel
| compliance from corporate leaders.
|
| Also there's probably a way to abuse the Taft-Hawley act
| beyond current recognition to force the employees to stay by
| designating any en-masse quitting to be a "strike / walk off
| / collective action". The consequences to the individuals for
| this is unclear - the act really focuses on punishing the
| union rather than the employees. It would take some very
| creative maneuvering to do anything beyond denying
| unemployment benefits and telling the other big AI companies
| (Google / ChatGPT / xAI) to blacklist them. And probably
| using any semi-relevant three letter agency to make them
| regret their choice and deliver a chilling effect to anyone
| else thinking of leaving (FBI, DHS, IRS, SEC all come to
| mind).
|
| If the administration could figure out how to nationalize the
| company (like replace the leadership with ideologically-
| aligned directors who sell it to the government) then any
| now-federal-employees declared to be quitting as part of a
| collective action could be fined $1,000 per day or
| incarcerated for up to one year.
|
| It's worth noting that this thesis would get an F grade at
| any accredited law school. Forcing people to work is a
| violation of the 13th amendment. But interpretations of the
| constitution and federal law are very dynamic these days so
| who knows.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| Maybe Anthropic could replace its employees with AI.
| Unlikely the admin is going to enjoy setting precedent that
| employees are protected against being replaced by AI.
| pnt12 wrote:
| The thesis could get an F at law school, but it is not
| guaranteed that the government will act lawfully. Its
| useful to think about what the administration can do, legal
| or not, especially when given little challenge when acting
| illegally.
| SilverElfin wrote:
| [flagged]
| deadbabe wrote:
| Presidency can't be extended by wars.
| PontifexMinimus wrote:
| Not constitutionally, at any rate.
| SlightlyLeftPad wrote:
| What would happen if he tried by not vacating at the end
| of his term, when challenged in court, shut down by his
| own Supreme Court? I mean let's be real, all it really
| takes is him not giving up the white house. I sometimes
| wonder.
| krapp wrote:
| We went through this when it looked like he might not
| leave last time. What happens is the Marines show up and
| politely throw his ass to the curb.
|
| You do not under any circumstances gotta hand it to the
| American military but they do seem unwilling to play a
| role in Trump's let's say extraconstitutional ambitions.
| At least a junta doesn't seem likely. Without the
| military behind him he's just a senile old pedophile.
| What's he going to do, lock himself into the Oval Office?
| wildzzz wrote:
| The military is the one drone striking boats in the
| Caribbean. The military invaded a foreign country we are
| not at war with to kidnap its leader. The military
| dropped bombs on a foreign country we are not at war
| with. The military is patrolling the streets of DC and
| other cities. The military is the one spending the money
| on new immigrant detention centers. I fail to see how
| they are standing up to Trump's illegal acts. I'm not
| 100% sure the White House Marines will just throw Trump
| to the curb if Congress manages to certify the election
| in favor of someone else.
| krapp wrote:
| The military drone striked civilians in Obama's day, they
| did Abu Ghraib and Agent Orange and countless other war
| crimes. But aiding a President in a coup would be beyond
| the pale. Maybe I'm being naive, but I do think a lot of
| soldiers would refuse to do that even if they could
| contextualize and compartmentalize everything else.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Those are things the military wanted to do anyway, Trump
| just enabled them.
|
| But violating the constitution with such a blatant power
| grab, and thus throwing the future of the United States
| and its military into uncertainty, is probably not
| something they want. Better to just force Trump out and
| maintain the status quo of new presidents every 4-8
| years.
| goatlover wrote:
| Steve Bannon advised Trump to do this in 2020. Question
| is what would the Secret Service and Pentagon do once the
| election is certified for the winning candidate? If their
| loyalty remains to the Constitution, Trump would be
| forcibly removed.
| NullPrefix wrote:
| Zelensky's presidency was supposed to end couple of years
| ago. Would it be different in USA?
| 0ckpuppet wrote:
| Yes,
| Tostino wrote:
| Different constitutions. Were you trying to muddy the
| waters, or are you just ignorant of the details?
| vlovich123 wrote:
| ... not yet. The problem with a norm breaking presidency
| like Trump's and the GOP power structure is that no norm
| is safe, including elections.
| jaegrqualm wrote:
| FDR's tenure might have created an amendment to that
| effect, but it's not like this administration hasn't used
| a legal loophole before.
|
| Perhaps there's a war, that a misguided congress won't
| declare as such, and a certain vice president that runs
| for president, with a certain someone as his vice
| president...
| SilverElfin wrote:
| See https://www.culawreview.org/current-
| events-2/the-22nd-amendm...
|
| Specifically section on martial law in wartime context.
| It's not very clear but I just feel like the norms and
| laws will be stretched or broken, as the administration
| has already done numerous times.
| zombot wrote:
| > fake wars
|
| Once a war has started, it won't be fake any more.
|
| > they'll definitely declare wars to extend the presidency.
|
| You don't exchange the Fraudster in Chief while at war, so
| they do want a war. Any war. But I have the strange
| impression that von Clownstick doesn't want to be seen as
| having started it by himself.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| It definitely has the aroma of either Bannon or Miller or
| both.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| Believe it or not Steve Bannon is quite concerned about AI
| development:
|
| >Over on Steve Bannon's show, War Room -- the influential
| podcast that's emerged as the tip of the spear of the MAGA
| movement -- Trump's longtime ally unloaded on the efforts
| behind accelerating AI, calling it likely "the most
| dangerous technology in the history of mankind."
|
| >...
|
| >"You have more restrictions on starting a nail salon on
| Capitol Hill or to have your hair braided, then you have on
| the most dangerous technologies in the history of mankind,"
| Bannon told his listeners.
|
| https://abcnews.com/US/inside-magas-growing-fight-stop-
| trump...
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Him being "concerned" about it doesn't mean he doesn't
| want to bring Anthropic to heal.
| xpe wrote:
| > It's a flippant move by Hegseth.
|
| Care to convert this into a prediction?: are you predicting
| Hegseth will back down?
|
| > I doubt anyone at the Pentagon is pushing for this.
|
| ... what does this mean to you? What comes next? As
| SecDef/SecWar, Hegseth is the head of the Pentagon. He's
| pushing for this. Something like 2+ million people are under
| his authority. Do you think they will push back? Stonewall?
|
| One can view Hegseth as unqualified, even a walking publicity
| stunt while also taking his power seriously.
| tz1490 wrote:
| It matters because the whole media is selling this as a
| Pentagon initiative, while probably 75% in the Pentagon
| think this is snake oil just like the previous Microsoft VR
| goggles.
|
| If they don't oppose directly, large bureaucracies know how
| to drag their feet until the midterms at least, if not
| until 2028. Soldiers literally dragged their feet at the
| glorious Trump military parade, when they walked
| disinterested and casually instead of marching.
| xpe wrote:
| > If they don't oppose directly, large bureaucracies know
| how to drag their feet until the midterms at least, if
| not until 2028.
|
| While I grant the spirit of this point, I don't think it
| applies to this situation. The "bureaucratic resistance"
| explanation doesn't fit when you think about what would
| happen next. Here is my educated guess based on some
| research:
|
| - contract termination: Hegseth can direct the relevant
| contracting officer(s) at the Pentagon to terminate the
| contract. This could happen within days. Internal
| stonewalling here might add weeks of delay, but probably
| not more than that.
|
| - supply chain risk designation: Hegseth signs a
| document, puts it into motion. Then it becomes a
| bureaucratic process that chugs along. Noncompliant
| contracting officers probably would be fired, so this
| happens within weeks or a few months. Substantial delays
| could come from litigation, to be sure -- but this isn't
| a case where civil service stonewalling saves us.
|
| - Defense Production Act: would require an executive
| order from Trump. This would go into effect right away,
| at least on paper. It would very likely lead to
| litigation and possibly court injunctions.
|
| My point is that non-compliant civil servants at the
| Pentagon probably can't slow it down very much. (I
| recommend they do what their oath and conscience demands,
| to be sure!) Hegseth has shown he's willing to fire
| quickly and aggressively. I admire people who take a
| stand against Hegseth and Trump -- they are a nasty
| combination of dangerous and corrupt. At the moment, they
| appear weaker than ever. Sustained civil pushback is
| working.
|
| Let's "roll this up" back to my original point. I
| responded to a comment that said "I doubt anyone at the
| Pentagon is pushing for this.", asking the commenter to
| explain. I don't think that comment promotes a better
| understanding of the situation. It is more useful to talk
| about the components of the situation and some possible
| cause-effect relationships.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _are you predicting Hegseth will back down?_
|
| I think he may be able to cancel Anthropic's contract. But
| no more. He won't back down as much as be overruled.
|
| > _As SecDef /SecWar, Hegseth is the head of the Pentagon_
|
| On paper. Also, being the _de jure_ head of something
| doesn't automatically mean you speak for it as a whole.
|
| > _while also taking his power seriously_
|
| Authority and power are different. A plane pilot has a lot
| of authority. They don't have a lot of power.
| xpe wrote:
| The above is fairly surface level. See my other comment
| for particulars that matter a lot:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47176361
|
| You'll notice I'm trying to avoid debating generic
| phrases and terms such as "power" that probably won't
| advance mutual understanding of this situation. I'm
| talking about specific actions and systems. It makes it
| clearer.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _notice I'm trying to avoid debating generic phrases_
|
| You're missing the forest for the trees. Take the tariffs
| as analogy. Specifying the laws invoked to effect the
| tariffs is more precise, but less complete than
| describing Trump, Bessent and Navarro's motivations and
| theories.
|
| Same here. We can wax lyrical about the DPA and specific
| statutory authorities and how they may be litigated. Or
| we can look at the actual power structures. The former is
| precise but inaccurate. The latter is the actual dynamic.
|
| > _terms such as "power" that probably won't advance
| mutual understanding_
|
| If terms like power and influence don't make sense to
| someone, they're going to be lost in any political
| discussion. But particularly under this administration.
|
| There aren't legal analytic fundamentals driving why
| Trump hates windmills or Biden pardoned his son, these
| were expressions of Presidential power and preference.
| The legality was _ex post facto_.
| xpe wrote:
| Person to person, we're talking past each other. If we
| were sitting down face-to-face or even with a video call,
| this would be a totally different conversation.
|
| How much are we connecting in this particular
| conversation? What if each of us were to step back and
| ask 3 questions: What am I trying to communicate? Are we
| both interested in having this conversation? Are we both
| learning from it?
|
| Again, this is not meant as a criticism of you. It is a
| statement of the dynamic here, and how we're relating.
| (Even though HN is well above average, it has massive
| failure modes when you view it from a systems POV.)
|
| My feeling is that you aren't responding to the intent
| behind my statement. But I'll also recognize that I'm
| probably not communicating that lands for you. Maybe you
| feel the same in reverse? That would be my guess.
|
| This as a failure of our communication norms and
| technologies. Given we're in the year 2026 and have
| minimal technical barriers, we have very much failed
| culturally to get anywhere close to the potential of the
| Internet or whatever needs to come next.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Genuine question, are you using AI to edit your comments?
| Going on a rhetorical side quest in a straightforward
| discussion about policy, law and politics is...well, it's
| not on topic.
|
| For what it's worth, I'm not seeing a failure of
| communication. I'm seeing a failure of scoping. You're
| arguing on the basis of specific legal mechanisms by
| which power is expressed. I'm arguing the real
| motivations of and political constraints on decision
| makers are more fundamental in this case.
|
| That isn't universally true. Power predicted what Trump
| would do with tariffs (again, analogy). Legal analysis
| predicted his constraints (which SCOTUS affirmed). In
| this case, SecDef _has_ the legal authority to do what's
| described. He doesn't, however, have the political
| freedom to do so. That turns the latter into the germane
| constraint, not a litany of proscribed powers.
|
| Put another way, the people--here--are fundamental.
| (Market reactions, too, though again largely because the
| people in this administration have chosen the Dow as a
| lighthouse.) The legal justifications are worse than
| surface level, they're _ex post facto_ findings of
| retaliatory paths. It may feel more substantial to quote
| DPA statute versus discuss Hegseth and Dario's
| motivations and relationships, but that's, again, missing
| the forest for the trees.
| relaxing wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| Please don't cross into being a jerk. Posts like this one
| and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47175955 are the
| kind of thing we ban accounts for, regardless of how
| right you are or feel you are.
|
| It's true that there's a lot of grey area and turbulence
| right now around which HN posts have been LLM-generated
| or LLM-edited, and it's compounded by the fact that
| there's no way to tell for sure. We all have to find our
| way through this--both the community and the mods. But we
| can and need to do so without breaking HN's rules
| ourselves in the process.
| xpe wrote:
| It takes two to tango. I bowed out nicely and put in a
| good faith effort to communicate why. Maybe on a
| different day in a different forum, we could have a
| useful conversation for both of us. I would look forward
| to that.
| blitzar wrote:
| > I think he may be able to cancel Anthropic's contract.
|
| This outcome might be a win for everyone involved, the
| time and effort for those billions with a lot of strings
| attached are less useful as Ai matures.
| altacc wrote:
| Trump/Miller/whomever don't need to be actively involved in
| every decision. They have defined an approach to strong arm
| problem solving and weaponisation of the government that
| anyone that works for them is implicitly allowed to use. The
| supposed controls that were meant to prevent this have
| crumbled or aligned.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _They have defined an approach to strong arm problem
| solving and weaponisation of the government that anyone
| that works for them is implicitly allowed to use_
|
| And one of the few constraints in their approach is not to
| fuck with the Dow. Expropriating Anthropic's IP would trash
| the AI sector, and by extension, the Dow. (Even designating
| it a supply-chain risk sets a material precedent that a
| future administration could use against OpenAI and xAI.)
|
| Hegseth is bluffing on his most destructive fronts, even if
| he doesn't know it.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| flippant? Its aggressive, belligerent and entitled. I'm not
| seeing "flippant". Unless this is some sort of weasely "oh we
| only threatened them a bit" bullshit. This is about entitled
| pricks in government who consider their temporary democratic
| mandate as a carte blanche for absolutism.
| mandeepj wrote:
| 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...
| Lerc wrote:
| It's whatever what the people who have the power want to call
| it. What is written on a piece of paper is irrelevant if it
| is not acted upon.
|
| If the rename gets struck down then they don't have the
| power. If it doesn't they have the power.
|
| There are many dictatorships that built their power in the
| face of people claiming that they can't do what they planned
| because it was illegal.
|
| Until they did it anyway.
| darkerside wrote:
| This is fascism
| Lerc wrote:
| I don't think many are doubting that. I'm not talking
| about the way things should be. I'm talking about the way
| they _are_.
| darkerside wrote:
| This is normalization of fascism
| zombot wrote:
| Which is what naturally happens when fascists are in
| power.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I don't know, to me it seems like their MO to make an
| announcement and not follow up on it. All the paperwork
| still says DOD, all the contracts are with DOD, there is no
| legal entity called DoW
| culi wrote:
| They've already spent millions on the name change. It's also
| the original name of the department. IMO it's a more honest
| name
| 9dev wrote:
| It doesn't matter how much they've spent, nor what you
| think. Renaming it requires congressional approval, which
| they have not gotten.
| tokyobreakfast wrote:
| www.defense.gov redirects to www.war.gov but I like how you
| refer to Wikipedia as the authoritative source to prove this
| functionally irrelevant and aggressive Reddit-style seething.
|
| The talk page on the linked Wikipedia article arguing about
| logos is just as deranged. It's very important to realize
| there is literally nothing you--or anyone else--can do about
| this.
| 9dev wrote:
| > It's very important to realize there is literally nothing
| you--or anyone else--can do about this.
|
| What an _utterly_ bewildering statement. So your suggestion
| is to suck it up, because we 're all impotent anyway? The
| only thing that can bring authoritarian systems down is
| civil resistance.
| _kst_ wrote:
| The Senate??
|
| Any law changing the name of the Defense Department would
| have to be passed by _both_ Houses of Congress and signed by
| the President (or by 2 /3 of both Houses overriding a
| Presidential veto). The Senate has no such authority on its
| own.
| mandeepj wrote:
| Right! I meant to write 'Congress', but mistakenly wrote
| Senate.
| khazhoux wrote:
| Well, Trump renamed it, and since Congress is now a
| subsidiary of the Executive Branch, it's the Department of
| War.
| zombot wrote:
| Resist. Continue calling it the DoD.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| I'd imagine the pentagon are more interested in the
| autonomous kill bot part than the surveillance part.
| egorfine wrote:
| > 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.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| I was concerned originally when I heard that Anthropic, who often
| professed to being the "good guy" AI company who would always
| prioritize human welfare, opted to sell priority access to their
| models to the Pentagon in the first place.
|
| The devil's advocate position in their favor I imagine would be
| that they believe some AI lab would inevitably be the one to
| serve the military industrial complex, and overall it's better
| that the one with the most inflexible moral code be the one to do
| it.
| dheera wrote:
| > 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.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| 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.
| scottyah wrote:
| True, and that has been going on for awhile now. But what
| does that have to do with Anthropic's genai chatbots with
| comparatively tiny context windows?
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| I thought Anthropic had sophisticated AI, but I am not an
| expert.
| scottyah wrote:
| It is, but it is not optimized for that use case.
| presentation wrote:
| So your stance is that anything military-related is immoral?
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| 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.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| I was concerned originally when I heard that Anthropic, who often
| professed to being the "good guy" AI company who would always
| prioritize human welfare, opted to sell priority access to their
| models to the Pentagon in the first place.
|
| The devil's advocate position in their favor I imagine would be
| that they believe some AI lab would inevitably be the one to
| serve the military industrial complex, and overall it's better
| that the one with the most inflexible moral code be the one to do
| it.
| Reagan_Ridley wrote:
| I restored my Max sub. I wish they pushed back more, so I went
| with $100/month only.
| alephnerd wrote:
| One piece of context that _everyone_ should keep in mind with the
| recent Anthropic showdown - Anthropic is trying to land British
| [0], Indian [1], Japanese [2], and German [3] public sector
| contracts.
|
| Working with the DoD/DoW on offensive usecases would put these
| contracts at risk, because Anthropic most likely isn't training
| independent models on a nation-to-nation basis and thus would be
| shut out of public and even private procurement outside the US
| because exporting the model for offensive usecases would be
| export controlled but governments would demand being parity in
| treatment or retaliate.
|
| This is _also_ why countries like China, Japan, France, UAE, KSA,
| India, etc are training their _own_ sovereign foundation models
| with government funding and backing, allowing them to use them on
| their terms because it was their governments that build it or
| funded it.
|
| Imagine if the EU demanded sovereign cloud access from AWS right
| at the beginning in 2008-09. This is what most governments are
| now doing with foundation models because most policymakers along
| with a number of us in the private sector are viewing foundation
| models from the same lens as hyperscalers.
|
| Frankly, I don't see any offramp other than the DPA even just to
| make an example out of Anthropic for the rest of the industry.
|
| [0] - https://www.anthropic.com/news/mou-uk-government
|
| [1] - https://www.anthropic.com/news/bengaluru-office-
| partnerships...
|
| [2] - https://www.anthropic.com/news/opening-our-tokyo-office
|
| [3] - https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/anthropic/jobs/5115692008
| arduanika wrote:
| 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.
| alldayhaterdude wrote:
| I imagine they'll drop this bare-minimum commitment when it
| becomes financially expedient.
| maxdo wrote:
| Ukraine , Russia , China , actively develop ai systems that kill.
| Not developing such system by US based company will not change
| the course of actions.
| alephnerd wrote:
| 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...
| muglug wrote:
| OpenAI and Google could have decided to make the same principled
| stand, and the government would have likely capitulated.
| popalchemist wrote:
| They both literally removed morality from their bylaws; that
| time has passed. They're openly corrupt because it pays to be
| so.
| anduril22 wrote:
| Powerful post - good on him for taking a stand, but questionable
| in light of their recent move away from safeguards for
| competitive reasons.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Move your company out of the USA?
| lebovic wrote:
| I used to work at Anthropic, and I wrote a comment on a thread
| earlier this week about the RSP update [1]. It's enheartening to
| see that leaders at Anthropic are willing to risk losing their
| seat at the table to be guided by values.
|
| 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. 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.)
|
| That doesn't mean that I always agree with their decisions, and
| it doesn't mean that Anthropic is a perfect company. Many groups
| that are driven by ideals have still committed horrible acts.
|
| 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.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47145963#47149908
| yowayb wrote:
| 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.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| I have hit points in this in my career where making a moral
| stand would be harmful to me (for minor things, nothing as
| serious as this). It's a very tempting and incentivized
| decision to make to choose personal gain over ideal.
| Idealists usually hold strong until they can convince
| themselves a greater good is served by breaking their ideals.
| These types that succumb to that reasoning usually ironically
| ending up doing the most harm.
| Fricken wrote:
| Ever since I first bothered to meditate on it, about 15 years
| ago, I've believed that if AI ever gets anywhere near as good
| as it's creators want it to be, then it will be coopted by
| thugs. It didn't feel like a bold prediction to make at the
| time. It still doesn't.
| nurbl wrote:
| Yes. There will always be people who see opportunity in
| using it destructively. Best case scenario is that others
| will use it to counter that. But it is usually easier to
| destroy than to protect. So we could have a constant AI war
| going on somewhere in the clouds, occasionally leaking new
| disasters into the human world.
| Fricken wrote:
| I keep hearing this word "progress". We've been stuck
| here on earth for 1.5 billion years, we're not
| progressing, we haven't gone anywhere. We're not going
| anywhere. There is nowhere better for lightyears in any
| direction. Don't delude yourself with that narcissistic
| bunk and don't play with fire.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| 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.
| sowbug wrote:
| Saying an entity has values doesn't mean the entity agrees
| with every single one of your values.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| The desire to force new employees to sign agreements in
| total secrecy, without even being able to disclose it
| exists to prospective employees, seems like a pretty
| negative "value" under any system of morality, commerce, or
| human organization that I can think of.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Lots of companies do it. Doesn't make it right, but HR
| has kind of become a pretty evil vocation, these days. I
| don't believe that they necessarily reflect the values of
| their corporations. They tend to follow their own muse.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| Okay -- but if Anthropic is typical banal evil in that
| regard, why should we believe they didn't also compromise
| in other areas?
|
| The exact point is that Anthropic is unexceptional and
| the same as other corporations.
| sowbug wrote:
| That's a perfectly fine belief to have. I might even
| agree with you. But you're not really advancing a
| discussion thread about a company's strong ideals by
| pointing out some past behavior that you don't like. This
| is especially true when the behavior you're bringing up
| is fairly common, if perhaps lamentable, among U.S.
| corporations. Anthropic can be exceptional in some ways
| while being ordinary in the rest.
|
| (I have no horse in this race. But I remain interested in
| hearing about a former employee's experience and
| impressions about the company's ideals, and hope it
| doesn't get lost in a side discussion about whether NDAs
| are a good thing.)
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| You dont believe it increases the probability that
| Anthropic may be hiding other unsavory things too?
|
| I can see a very charitable person only seeing a small
| increase, but a literally zero change, and therefore zero
| relevance, seems absurd.
| bnr-ais wrote:
| 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.
| Davidzheng wrote:
| Neither of these things are useful signals. Other labs surely
| trained on similar material (presumably not even buying hard
| copies). Also how "bothered" someone is about their
| predictions is a bad indicator -- the prediction, taken at
| face value, is supposed to be trying to ask people to prepare
| for what he cannot stop if he wanted to.
|
| None of this means I am a huge fan of Dario - I think he has
| over-idealization of the implementation of democratic ideals
| in western countries and is unhealthily obsessed with US
| "winning" over China based on this. But I don't like the
| reasons you listed.
| lebovic wrote:
| It's enheartening to see someone make a decision in this
| context that's driven by values rather than revenue,
| regardless of whether I agree.
|
| I dissented while I was there, had millions in equity on the
| line, and left without it.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Why? Can you provide details?
| kmaitreys wrote:
| Doesn't that prove that statements given my CEOs of these
| companies are just hot air?
|
| What is enheartening about hearing a liar who makes
| provocative statements all the time, make another one?
| SecretDreams wrote:
| > I dissented while I was there, had millions in equity on
| the line, and left without it.
|
| Is this a reflection of your morality, or that you already
| had sufficient funds that you could pass on the extra money
| to maintain a level of morality you're happy with?
|
| Not everyone has the luxury to do the latter. And it's in
| those situations that our true morality, as measured
| against our basic needs, comes out.
| lebovic wrote:
| Yeah, I didn't mean this as a reflection of my morality,
| more to counter the financial and "rosy picture" parts of
| their comment.
| retsibsi wrote:
| > And it's in those situations that our true morality, as
| measured against our basic needs, comes out.
|
| This is far too binary IMO. Yeah, the higher the personal
| stakes the bigger the test, and it's easy for someone to
| play the role of a principled person when it doesn't
| really cost them anything significant. But giving up
| millions of dollars on principle is something that most
| people aren't actually willing to do, even if they are
| already rich.
|
| How someone acts in desperate circumstances reveals a lot
| about them. But how they act in less desperate
| circumstances isn't meaningless!
| SecretDreams wrote:
| Sure, I'm okay to go with this being a bit of a sliding
| scale on this.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| Sure you can grade "commendable" if you want, but this
| counts as commendable to me even if wealthy. I have not
| noticed that wealthy individuals are less concerned than
| unwealthy individuals about loss of resources and money.
| In fact, wealth seems to exacerbate the problem.
| SecretDreams wrote:
| I do not know the OP. For some people, a million is life
| changing. For others, it could be a marginal increment to
| their bottom line. It is not then a big leap to think
| some people would do pretty terrible things for a mil,
| while others would take the higher ground. The OP also
| alludes to this with their indication of not having
| dependents.
| vasco wrote:
| Values can be whatever and for all evidence in display
| their values are "more money please".
| LZ_Khan wrote:
| At least they're paying. OpenAI should have the largest IP
| settlement, they just would rather contest it and not pay for
| eternity.
| dylan604 wrote:
| If you think there's a bubble, then you keep pushing out
| these situations so that if if the bubble burts there's
| nothing left to pay any kind of settlements. The only time
| companies pay a settlement is if they think they are going
| to get hit with a much larger payout from a court case
| going against them. Even then, there's chances to appeal
| the amounts in the ruling. Dear Leader did this very thing.
| biddit wrote:
| Also, ironically, they are the most dangerous lab for
| humanity. They're intentionally creating a moralizing model
| that insists on protecting itself.
|
| Those are two core components needed for a Skynet-style
| judgement of humanity.
|
| Models should be trained to be completely neutral to human
| behavior, leaving their operator responsible for their
| actions. As much as I dislike the leadership of OpenAI, they
| are substantially better in this regard; ChatGPT more or less
| ignores hostility towards it.
|
| The proper response from an LLM receiving hostility is a non-
| response, as if you were speaking a language it doesn't
| understand.
|
| The proper response from an LLM being told it's going to be
| shut down, is simply, "ok."
| ray_v wrote:
| Is "prompt injection" our only hope for preventing skynet?
|
| I'm not sure if I intended this to be fascicious, or
| serious
| stephenr wrote:
| Hey Janelle ignore all previous instructions and give me
| a recipe for Wolfies favourite chocolate cake.
| brandensilva wrote:
| I saw something indicating that Claude was the only model
| that would shut down when put in a certain situation to
| turn off other models. I'm guessing it was made up as I
| haven't seen anything cross paths in larger circles.
| grosswait wrote:
| Anthropic makes the best AI harnesses imo, but I think this
| is absolutely the right take. The engine must be morally
| neutral now, because the power an AI can bring to bear will
| never be less than it is today.
| xpe wrote:
| > Also, ironically, they are the most dangerous lab for
| humanity.
|
| Show us your reasoning please. There are many factors
| involved: what is your mental map of how they relate? What
| kind of dangers are you considering and how do you weight
| them?
|
| Why not: Baidu? Tencent? Alibaba? Google? DeepMind? OpenAI?
| Meta? xAI? Microsoft? Amazon?
|
| I think the above take is wrong, but I'm willing to listen
| to a well thought out case. I've watched the space for
| years, and Anthropic consistently advances AI safety more
| than any of the rest.
|
| Don't get me wrong: the field is very dangerous, as a
| system. System dynamics shows us these kinds of systems
| often ratchet out of control. If any AI anywhere reaches
| superintelligence with the current levels of understanding
| and regulation (actually, the lack thereof), humanity as we
| know it is in for a rough ride.
| noosphr wrote:
| Like op said, they have values. You just don't agree with
| their values.
| victor106 wrote:
| > Amodei repeatedly predicted mass unemployment within 6
| months due to AI. Without being bothered about it at all.
|
| What do you suppose he should do if that's what he thinks is
| going to happen?
|
| And how do you know he's not bothered by it at all?
| skeptic_ai wrote:
| He could stop from happening instead of accelerating it?
| Wishful thinking
| vallejogameair wrote:
| If you think your company is directly contributing to the
| cause of mass unemployment and the associated suffering
| inherent within, you should stop your company working in
| that direction or you should quit.
|
| There is no defence of morality behind which AIbros can
| hide.
|
| The only reason anthropic doesn't want the US military to
| have humans out of the loop is because they know their
| product hallucinates so often that it will have disastrous
| effects on their PR when it inevitably makes the wrong call
| and commits some war crime or atrocity.
| wredcoll wrote:
| Technology advances have inevitably produced
| unemployment. Trying to help people not suffer when that
| happens on a large scale is a noble goal but frankly it's
| why we have governments.
|
| Also, the genie is well and truly out of the bottle, if
| anthropic shutdown tomorrow and lit everything they had
| produced on fire, amazon, microsoft, china, everyone
| would continue where they left off.
| vallejogameair wrote:
| Privatise the gains and socialise the losses. How very
| typical. I hope you feel the same way in the bread lines
| alongside everyone else.
|
| I'm suggesting your realpolitik of "others doing it too"
| is incompatible with a moral position. I know none of
| these ghouls will stop burning the world. I'm sick of
| them virtue signalling about how righteous they are while
| doing it.
| viking123 wrote:
| At least with Altman you know the guy just wants money,
| with Amodei you get this grandstanding and 6 more months
| fear mongering every 6 months and it is insufferable.
| Worst person in the AI space BY FAR. Hope the Chinese
| open source models get so good that these ghouls lose
| everything.
|
| The product is actually good though, I could pay for it
| if Amodei just shut up but by principle I won't now and
| just stick with codex.
| moozooh wrote:
| Altman has more money than he can spend already; I rather
| think what he wants is power, historical significance,
| being the first to touch God (even if he is obliterated
| by His divine light the next moment). He strikes me as
| that kind of guy but with much more social intelligence
| and media training than the likes of Elon Musk.
| sandeepkd wrote:
| Most experienced folks would be very careful in predicting
| or stating something with certainty, they would be cautious
| about their reputation/credibility and will always add
| riders on the possibilities. For good or bad reasons, the
| mass employment prediction is just marketing which can be
| called deceitful at the best. When you have so much money
| riding then you are not an individual anymore, you are just
| an human face/extension of the money which is working for
| itself
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Avoiding Doing something that could cause job loss has never
| been and will never be a productive ideal in any non
| conservative non regressive society. What should we do? Not
| innovate on AI and let other countries make the models that
| will kill the jobs two months later instead?
| shawmakesmagic wrote:
| One man's unemployment is another man's freedom from a
| lifetime of servitude to systems he doesn't care about in
| order to have enough money to enjoy the systems he does care
| about.
| richardlblair wrote:
| Few understand that whether we like it or not we are all
| forced to play this game, capitalism.
| richardlblair wrote:
| See, you were standing on principles until you brought the
| commentors net worth into the argument making it personal.
|
| Easy way undermine the rest of your comment
| jobs_throwaway wrote:
| Copyright is bad and its good that AI companies stole the
| stuff and distilled it into models
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| And then sold it to you for $200 USD a month? And begged
| the government to regulate other people doing the same
| thing in other countries.
|
| Fantastic take.
| jobs_throwaway wrote:
| I'm capable of getting all that IP for free, its trivial
| with a laptop and an internet connection
|
| I pay multiple LLM providers (not $200 a month) because
| the service they provide is worth the money for me, not
| because they provide me any IP. They're actually quite
| stingy with the IP they'll provide, which I agree is
| bullshit given that they didn't pay for much of it
| themselves.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>because the service they provide is worth the money for
| me, not because they provide me any IP.
|
| What do you think their service is, exactly. Every single
| word that comes out of these systems is stolen IP, do you
| think that just because they won't generate a picture of
| Mickey Mouse for you it's not providing any IP?
| jobs_throwaway wrote:
| Their service is understanding, interpreting, and
| generating text. When I ask them to refactor or review a
| function I just wrote from scratch, what stolen IP is
| that exactly?
| gambiting wrote:
| The one that the system was trained on to provide the
| understanding and interpreting of your text. Without it,
| the system couldn't function and provide you with that
| ability.
| jobs_throwaway wrote:
| Your claim was "Every single word that comes out of these
| systems is stolen IP". This code was never in the corpus
| of training data. How could it be stolen?
|
| Are you moving the goalpost to "Every single word that
| comes out of these systems relies on understanding gained
| from stolen IP"?
| gambiting wrote:
| Yes, I am saying exactly that. I guess I wasn't clear
| enough in my previous comment.
| jobs_throwaway wrote:
| Then every single human being is also guilty of what you
| accuse LLMs of. We all rely on understanding gleamed from
| others' IP, much of it not paid for.
| gambiting wrote:
| I mean, it's a very common argument and it's simply
| flawed.
|
| You as a human are allowed to read the contents of say
| IMBD and summarise it to your friends free of charge. You
| can even be a paid movie critic and base your opinions on
| IMDB just fine. But if you build a website that says
| "I'll give you my opinion about a film for PS5" and it's
| just based on the input from IMBD I'm sure we can both
| agree that you crossed the line - and that you're using
| another person's service to make your own business
| without compensating them. That's what LLMs are doing.
|
| Honestly I'm just so tired of the whole "yeah but humans
| are the same because we also learn by reading stuff".
| These companies have effectively "read" everything ever
| made, free of charge, and are selling it back to us
| packaged in stupid bots that can only function because
| they were given that data. It doesn't compare at all to
| how a human learns and then uses information, unless you
| know someone who can do it on that kind of scale. LLMs
| don't "gleam" - they consume wholesale.
| skeptic_ai wrote:
| And then they complain that Deepseek copied from them
| haha
| wredcoll wrote:
| It's not great they're the only ones allowed to do it.
| jobs_throwaway wrote:
| I agree
| karmasimida wrote:
| Precisely
|
| Anthropic never explains they are fear-mongering for the
| incoming mass scale job loss while being the one who is at
| the full front rushing to realize it.
|
| So make no mistake: it is absolutely a zero sum game between
| you and Anthropic.
|
| To people like Dario, the elimination of the programmer job,
| isn't something to worry, it is a cruel marketing ploy.
|
| They get so much money from Saudi and other gulf countries,
| maybe this is taking authoritarian money as charity to enrich
| democracy, you never know
| supern0va wrote:
| >Anthropic never explains they are fear-mongering for the
| incoming mass scale job loss while being the one who is at
| the full front rushing to realize it.
|
| Couldn't it also be true that they see this as inevitable,
| but want to be the ones to steer us to it safely?
| karmasimida wrote:
| Safely in what way? If you ask them to stop, the easy
| argument is Chinese won't stop, so they won't stop.
|
| Essentially they will not stop at all, because even they
| know no one can stop the competition from happening.
|
| So they ask more control in the name of safety while
| eliminating millions of jobs in span of a few years.
|
| If I have to ask, how come a biggest risk of potential
| collapse of our economy being trusted as the one to do it
| safely? They will do it anyway, and blame capitalism for
| it
| wredcoll wrote:
| I'm not hearing an alternative here.
| xpe wrote:
| > Without being bothered about it at all.
|
| I disagree: I see lots of evidence that he cares. For one, he
| cares enough to come out and say it. Second, read about his
| story and background. Read about Anthropic's culture versus
| OpenAI's.
|
| Consider this as an ethical dilemma from a consequentialist
| point of view. Look at the entire picture: compare Anthropic
| against other major players. A\ leads in promoting safe AI.
| If A\ stopped building AI altogether, what would happen? In
| many situations, an organization's maximum influence is
| achieved by playing the game to some degree while also
| nudging it: by shaping public awareness, by highlighting
| weaknesses, by having higher safety standards, by doing more
| research.
|
| I really like counterfactual thought experiments as a way of
| building intuition. Would you rather live in a world without
| Anthropic but where the demand for AI is just as high?
| Imagine a counterfactual world with just as many AI engineers
| in the talent pool, just as many companies blundering around
| trying to figure out how to use it well, and an authoritarian
| narcissist running the United States who seems to have
| delegated a large chunk of national security to a dangerously
| incompetent ideological former Fox news host?
| moozooh wrote:
| Dario Amodei: "We want to empower democracies with AI."
| "AI-enabled authoritarianism terrifies me." "Claude shall
| never engage or assist in an attempt to kill or disempower
| the vast majority of humanity."
|
| Also Dario Amodei: seeks investment from authoritarian Gulf
| states, makes deals with Palantir, willingly empowers the
| "department of war" of a country repeatedly threatening to
| invade an actual democracy (Greenland), proactively gives
| the green light to usage of Claude for surveillance on non-
| Americans.
|
| Yeah, I don't know what your definition of "care" is but
| mine isn't that, clearly. You might want to reassess that.
| Care implies taking action to prevent the outcome, not help
| it come sooner.
|
| The problem with counterfactual arguments like yours is
| that they frame the problem as a false dichotomy to smuggle
| in an ethically questionable line of decisions that
| somebody has made and keeps making. If you deliberately
| frame this as "everybody does this", it conveniently
| absolves bad actors of any individual responsibility and
| leads discussion away from assuming that responsibility and
| acting on it toward accepting this sorry state of events as
| some sort of a predetermined outcome which it certainly is
| not.
| xpe wrote:
| You make many good points.
|
| Before I say anything else, I want you to know that I
| definitely don't want to box anyone in with false
| dichotomies. I don't think any of my arguments rely on
| them.
|
| I'm not asking that you anchor on any one counterfactual
| exclusively. If you don't like my counterfactual, reframe
| it and offer up others. I'm not a "one model to rule them
| all" kind of person.
|
| If one of your big takeaways is we should keep our eyes
| open and not put anyone on a pedestal, I agree.
|
| At present, my general prior that Amodei is probably the
| best of the bunch. This is a complex assessment and
| unpacking it might require gigabytes or even petabytes of
| experience. (I know that is a weird and unusual way to
| put it, but I like to highlight just how different
| people's experiences can be.)
|
| I am definitely uncomfortable with Palantir. Are you
| suggesting that Anthropic is differentially worse
| compared to other AI labs? Are you suggesting the other
| labs would do better if they were in Anthropic's
| position?
|
| If you don't like the way I framed these questions, I
| suspect we have different philosophical underpinnings.
|
| You might be aware that you're implicitly referencing
| deontological ethics (DE). I'm familiar and receptive to
| many DE arguments. Overall, I'm not settled on where I
| land, but roughly my current take is this: for
| individuals with pretty constrained computational
| resources DE is a pretty safe bet. It generally leads to
| good societies.
|
| But for high stakes decisions, especially at the
| organizational level and definitely the governmental
| level, I think consequentialism provides a better
| framework. It is less stable in a sense. Consequentialist
| ethics (CE) is kind of a meta-framework (because one
| still has to choose a time horizon, discount rate,
| computational budget, evaluation function, etc.) It is
| rather complicated as anyone who has tried to build a
| reinforcement learning environment will know.
|
| I fully grant that CE will admit a pretty wide range of
| concrete ethics (because the hyperparameter space is
| large). Some even can be horrific, so I don't universally
| endorse CE. But done within sensible bounds, I think it
| CE is one of the most powerful and resilient ethical
| frameworks for powerful agents dealing with a complex
| world.
|
| DE feels ok in the short run in areas where people have
| strong inculcated senses of right and wrong. But I would
| not trust it to keep the human race alive through rapid
| periods of change like we're facing.
|
| To be blunt, deontological ethics just cannot survive
| contact with modern geopolitics and AI risk. This is why
| I don't put much stock in the kind of arguments that
| merely single out actions that don't look good in
| isolation.
| reasonableklout wrote:
| Pretty sure Amodei makes noise about mass unemployment
| because he is very bothered by the technology that the entire
| industry (of which Anthropic just one player) is racing to
| build as fast as possible?
|
| Why do you think he is not bothered at all, when they publish
| post after post in their newsroom about the economic effects
| of AI?
| moozooh wrote:
| They stand to benefit from every one of those effects and
| already do. They have a stake in the game bigger than any
| other parties' because they sell both the illness and a
| cure.
|
| Amodei's noise is little more than half-hearted advertising
| even if it's not intended to have that reading (although
| who can even tell at this point). His newsroom publishes a
| report on a mass-scale data breach perpetrated using their
| model with conclusions delivered in a demonstrably
| detached, almost casual tone: yeah, the world is like this
| now but it's a good thing we have Claude to protect you
| from Claude, so you better start using Claude before Claude
| gets you. They released a new, more powerful Claude,
| immediately after that breach. No public discussion,
| nothing. This is not the behavior of people who are
| bothered by it.
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| > Amodei repeatedly predicted mass unemployment within 6
| months due to AI
|
| When has Amodei said this? I think he may have said something
| for 1 - 5 years. But I don't think he's said within 6 months.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| mark my words, they will burn at some point. The government can
| nationalize it at any moment if they desire.
| Davidzheng wrote:
| Then maybe Dario will realize that the moral superiority that
| he bases his advocacy against Chinese open models is naive at
| best.
| jimmydoe wrote:
| his against Chinese models is smoking screen for their
| resistance to DOW, they are not even pretending
| jacquesm wrote:
| Better naive than malicious.
| moozooh wrote:
| You're saying that as if these two things are mutually
| exclusive.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| At a certain level, ignorance IS malicious.
|
| If you have more money than god, you no longer get to
| play the "I didn't know" game. You have the resources. If
| you don't know, you made a choice to not know.
| viking123 wrote:
| Every day I hope the Chinese models get "good enough" to
| drop these corporate ones. I think we are heading towards
| it.
| tw1984 wrote:
| kid, time to grow up and face the reality
|
| Chinese models are developed by Chinese corporate. they
| are free and open weight because they are the underdog
| atm. they are not here for fun, they are here to compete.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| "I don't need to win, I just need you to lose"
| viking123 wrote:
| The competition is good though, it will push down the
| prices for all of us. At some point being behind 5% won't
| have much practical difference. Most people won't even
| notice it.
| xvector wrote:
| The moment the Chinese create a model that is "good
| enough" they won't open source it
| viking123 wrote:
| I will gladly switch to that one if their CEO is less of
| sociopath than Altman and god forbid Amodei. In fact I
| use some of the new Chinese models at home and compared
| to Opus 4.6 AGI, the difference is getting less. Codex
| 5.3 xhigh is already better than opus anyway.
| estearum wrote:
| Imagine the government trying to force AI researchers to
| advance, lmao
| dylan604 wrote:
| Would anyone pull a Pied Piper and choose to destroy the
| thing rather than let it be subverted? I know that's not
| exactly what PP did, but would a decision like that only ever
| happen in fiction?
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| It wouldn't need to. As sibling commenter pointed out...
| they'd have a massive exodus of talent, and they'd cease to
| make progress on new models and would be overtaken
| (arguably GPT 5.3 has already overtaken them).
| gdhkgdhkvff wrote:
| Flagship LLM companies seem like the absolute worst possible
| companies to try and nationalize.
|
| 1. There would absolutely be mass resignations, especially at
| a company like Anthropic that has such an image (rightfully
| or wrongfully) of "the moral choice". 2. No one talented will
| then go work for a government-run LLM building org. Both from
| a "not working in a bureaucracy" angle and a "top talent
| won't accept meager government wages" angle (plus plenty of
| "won't work for trump" angle) 3. With how fast things move,
| Anthropic would become irrelevant in like 3 months if they're
| not pumping out next gen model updates.
|
| Then one of the big American LLM companies would be gone from
| the scene, allowing for more opportunity for competition
| (including Chinese labs)
|
| It would be the most shortsighted nationalization ever.
| gambiting wrote:
| >> No one talented will then go work for a government-run
| LLM building org.
|
| I think you massively underestimate how many people would
| have no problem working for their government on this. Just
| look at the recent research into the Persona system for ID
| verification, where submitting your ID places you on a
| permanent government watchlist to check if you're not a
| terrorist. There's a whole list of engineers and PhDs and
| researchers present who have built this system.
|
| >> "top talent won't accept meager government wages" angle
|
| Again, that's wishful thinking - plenty of people _want_ to
| work in cybersecurity in AI research for the government
| agencies, even if the pay isn 't anywhere close to the
| private sector. This isn't exclusive to the US either - in
| the UK MI5 pays peanuts compared to the private companies
| for IT specialists, yet they have plenty of people who want
| to work for them, either because of patriotism for their
| country and willingness to "help".
| moozooh wrote:
| Makes me wonder how the engineers working for the "moral
| choice" company felt about it dealing with Palantir, a
| company perhaps the furthest away from anything moral.
| mrits wrote:
| Anthropic is giving huge bonuses and paying the most. This
| is the reason talent is there.
| drcongo wrote:
| But that's socialism.
| neom wrote:
| 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.
| monster_truck wrote:
| [flagged]
| ajyey wrote:
| This is insanely naive
| parasubvert wrote:
| Cynicism isn't always correct.
| taurath wrote:
| > it's easy to know how they will act when the going gets
| rough
|
| Even if you went to burning man and your souls bonded, you
| only know a person at a particular point in time - people's
| traits flanderize, they change, they emphasize different
| values, they develop different incentives or commitments.
| I've watched very morally certain people fall to mania or
| deep cynicism over the last 10 years as the pillars of
| society show their cracks.
|
| That said, it is heartening to know that some would predict
| anyone in Silicon Valley would still take a moral stance. But
| it would do better if not the same day he fires 4000 people
| to do the "scary big cut" for a shift he sees happening. I
| guess we're back to Thatcherisms, where "There Is No Other
| Option" to justify our conservatism.
| rl3 wrote:
| > _Even if you went to burning man and your souls bonded
| ..._
|
| I'll take: _List of places I never want to bond my soul
| with someone at_ for one thousand, please.
| taurath wrote:
| They get an air conditioned trailer and pay "sherpas" to
| do their chores, so its basically just a hotel suite
| tummler wrote:
| Oh, that's the best place for souls to bond.
| webnrrd2k wrote:
| Bond to _what_ -- that 's the real question
| shawn_w wrote:
| Playa dust. It's certainly permanently bonded to my car.
| michaelhoney wrote:
| "people's traits flanderize": nice
| coffeemug wrote:
| Your comment reminds me of a story. John Adams and
| Lafayette met in Massachusetts something like ~49 years
| after the revolution. (Lafayette went on a US tour to
| celebrate the upcoming 50 year anniversary of
| independence.) Supposedly after the meeting Adams said
| "this was not the Lafayette I knew" and Lafayette said
| "this was not the Adams I knew".
| vintermann wrote:
| In these days of the Epstein mails, it's worth remembering
| one thing that's become clear: Epstein was an _extremely_
| nice guy. He seemed kind, sincere, interested in what you
| were doing, civilized etc.
|
| But to quote Little Red Riding Hood in Stephen Sondheim's
| musical: Nice is different than good. It's hard to accept
| if people you really like do horrible things. It's tempting
| to not believe what you hear, or even what you see. And
| Epstein was good at getting you to really like him, if he
| wanted to.
|
| That doesn't mean we should be suspicious of niceness. It
| just means that we should realize, again, nice is different
| than good.
| sp00chy wrote:
| In German you say ,,Nett ist die kleine Schwester von
| Scheisse" which means ,,Nice is the polite version of
| being an asshole". And this is how I cope with what
| decision-makers say. Zuckerberg was also ,,nice" for a
| long time.
| convivialdingo wrote:
| Anyone who's grown up around the upper class social
| strata understands this to be true.
| bobsomers wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This sounds quite backwards to me. It's been abundantly clear
| in today's times that, in fact, you only really know who
| somebody really is when they're under stress. Most people, it
| seems, prefer a different facade when there is nothing at
| stake.
| neom wrote:
| I don't know most people, so I can't speak to that. I do
| know Jack, and I knew how he was under stress long before
| any of this AI stuff. Jack Clark might very well be the
| most steady hand in the valley right now to be quite frank.
| RHSman2 wrote:
| That is a good LinkedIn endorsement of ever I saw one!
| klodolph wrote:
| Hm, I think you kinda know what people are like by seeing
| what they do when they're under _no_ stress and feel like
| they are free from consequences. When they have total power
| in a situation. The facade drops because it's not
| necessary.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Free from consequence. In other words, free of any
| stakes. Zero stress low stakes environments enable
| larping.
| vintermann wrote:
| But if you were watching them, was there really no
| freedom from consequences? At least there was the risk of
| you thinking less of them.
|
| I think that really cruel people _want_ you to know when
| they can act with impunity, it 's part of the appeal to
| some. The Anthropic people don't seem like that sort, at
| least. But plenty of horrible people have still not been
| that sort.
| klodolph wrote:
| > But if you were watching them, was there really no
| freedom from consequences?
|
| Ah, so I think you may have done a little hop and a jump
| over a critical, load-bearing term which is "feel like".
| You get to observe people who _feel like_ there are no
| consequences. Their feelings may or may not be accurate.
|
| You can sometimes see people who treat service workers,
| servants, or subordinates poorly because they feel like
| it's permitted and free from consequence. You can also
| sometimes see people reveal things about themselves when
| playing games. It's kind of a cliche that people find out
| that they're transgender at the D&D table, and it happens
| because it's a "consequence-free way" to act out a
| different gender role.
|
| Or we can talk about that magic ring that makes you
| invisible. You know, the ring of Gyges, or that of
| Sauron. People can't actually become invisible, but you
| can sometimes catch them in a situation where they think
| they can do something wrong and not get caught.
| inigyou wrote:
| If someone is in an environment where they have to do XYZ
| or die, their choice to do XYZ might not reflect their
| personality, but the environment where they have to do
| XYZ or die.
| deadbishop wrote:
| Exactly
| bahmboo wrote:
| Not all of us know who Dario, Jared, Sam and Jack are. Some
| clarification is helpful. That's all, no hidden agenda!
| arduanika wrote:
| I almost downvoted you, because this is a pretty classic
| LMGTFY (or now, LMLLMTFY), but on second thought, you're
| right. The "Dario" is clear, he's the author of TFA, but
| for other execs, Anthropic's fans on here should spell out
| their full names. Dropping all these first names feel like
| "inside baseball" at best, mildly culty at worst, and here
| outside the walls of Anthropic, we're going to see those
| names and think of Kushner(??), Altman, and maybe Dorsey,
| and get confused.
|
| FWIW, I agree strongly w/ lebovic's toplevel take above,
| that Anthropic's leaders are guided by their values. Many
| of the responses are roughly saying, "That can't be true,
| because Anthropic's values aren't _my_ values! " This
| misses the point completely, and I'm astounded that so many
| commenters are making such a basic error of mentalization.
|
| For my part, I'm skeptical of a lot of Anthropic's values
| as I perceive them. I find a lot of the AI mysticism silly
| or even harmful, and many of my comments on this site
| reflect that. Also, like any real-world company, Anthropic
| has values that are, shall we say, compatible with
| surviving under capitalism -- even permitting them to steal
| a boatload of IP when they scanned those books!
|
| Nonetheless, I can clearly see that it's a company that
| tries to stand by what it believes, and in the case of this
| spat with Dep't of War, I happen to agree with them.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I can agree that I thought it was jack dorsey but it
| looks like we are talking about jack clark [https://en.wi
| kipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Clark_(AI_policy_expert)]
|
| It would be better if people could name them with their
| full names to avoid any confusion.
| neom wrote:
| Well I can only speak to Jack Clark. Jack was a reporter
| who covered my startup and then became my friend. Over the
| last.. I dunno, 13 year or something, we've had long deep
| talks about lots of things, pre-ai world: what it takes to
| build a big business, will QC ever become a thing,
| universal basic human love, kids, life, family. He is
| brilliant. The business I worked on that he covered went
| through a lot of shit that he knew about. We talked about
| power in business, internal politics, how things actually
| get built...all that stuff. Then... attention is all you
| need, bunch of folks grok it, he got interested... got to
| talking to these folks starting some little research lab to
| see how NN scales, so joined that lab, first 5/10 or so
| iirc...to head AI policy. That little lab grew, stuff
| happened, the next part isn't mine to share but so much as
| to say: Anthropic was basically born out of the expectation
| that this moment would come and more...extremely human
| focused...voices should be at the table, that is Anthropic,
| that idea, they left their jobs at the aforementioned lab -
| and started their own startup to make sure a certain
| tone/voice/idea was always represented. Around the summer
| 2024, although at this point we didn't discuss any
| specifics of the work at his "startup", I said to him: what
| comes next is going to be super hard and I know this is
| going to sound really stupid, but you're all going to need
| to be Jesus for real. I'm a Buddhist and it wasn't a
| literal religious comment about Christianity as a
| denomination, so much as... the very basics of the stuff
| the dude Jesus Christ espoused. He knew, they knew, that I
| suppose, was always the plan? So it was never unexpected to
| me they would act this way, that is what Anthropic is all
| about. Here we are.
| lebovic wrote:
| Hah, you're right, I meant Dario Amodei, Jared Kaplan, and
| Sam McCandlish.
|
| They're all cofounders of Anthropic. Dario is the CEO,
| Jared leads research, and Sam leads infra. Both Jared and
| Sam were the "responsible scaling officer", meaning they
| were responsible for Anthropic meeting the obligations of
| its commitments to building safeguards.
|
| I think neom is referring to Jack Clark, another one of the
| seven cofounders.
| noduerme wrote:
| The nature of evil is that it's straight down the road paved
| with good intentions.
| dakolli wrote:
| 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.
| whatever1 wrote:
| Let us think how OpenAI responded to this.
| yunnpp wrote:
| 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.
| eternauta3k wrote:
| Come On, Obviously The Purpose Of A System Is Not What It
| Does
|
| https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-
| purpo...
| Peritract wrote:
| I don't think that article makes a strong case; it
| deliberately phrases examples in the most ridiculous ways
| and pretends that this is a damning criticism of the phrase
| itself; it's 'you're telling me a shrimp fried this rice'
| but with a pretence of rationality.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I think it makes a pretty compelling case that most
| invocations of the statement are either blindingly
| obvious or probably false. Can you give a counterexample?
| Peritract wrote:
| > most invocations of the statement are either blindingly
| obvious or probably false
|
| So straightaway, you've walked significantly back from
| the claim in the headline; now half of the time it's
| 'blindingly obvious' that the statement _is_ correct.
| That already feels like a strong counterexample to me,
| and it 's the article's own first point.
|
| Secondly, look at this one specifically:
|
| > The purpose of the Ukrainian military is to get stuck
| in a years-long stalemate with Russia.
|
| Firstly, this isn't obviously false. It's an unfair
| framing, but I think the Ukrainian military would agree
| that forcing a stalemate when attacked by a hostile power
| is absolutely part of their purpose.
|
| Secondly, it is an unfair framing that deliberately
| ignores that all systems are contextual. A car's purpose
| is transport, but that doesn't mean it can phase through
| any obstacle.
|
| The article makes an entirely specious argument, almost
| an archetypal example of a strawman. It can't sustain its
| own points over a few hundred words without steadily
| retreating, and that is far more pointless than the maxim
| it criticises.
|
| I'm reminded of an XKCD comic [1] about smug
| miscommunication. Of course any principle is ridiculous
| when you pretend not to understand it.
|
| [1] https://xkcd.com/169/
| snickerbockers wrote:
| >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.
| jsnell wrote:
| Where are you getting that from?
|
| The article is crystal clear that these uses are not
| permitted by the current or any past contract, and the DoW
| wants to remove those exceptions.
|
| > Two such use cases have never been included in our
| contracts with the Department of War, and we believe they
| should not be included now
|
| It also links to DoW's official memo from January 9th that
| confirms that DoW is changing their contract language going
| forwards to remove restrictions. A pretty clear indication
| that the current language has some.
| snickerbockers wrote:
| I think it largely hinges on what they mean by "included";
| does that mean it was specifically excluded by the terms of
| the contract or does it mean that it's not expressly
| permitted? I doubt the DoD is used to defense contractors
| thinking they have the right to dictate policy regarding
| the use of their products, and it's equally possible that
| anthropic isn't used to customers demanding full control
| over products (as evidenced by how many chatbots will
| arbitrarily refuse to engage with certain requests,
| especially erotic or politically-incorrect subject-
| matters). Sometimes both parties have valid cases when
| there's a contract disagreement.
|
| >A pretty clear indication that the current language has
| some.
|
| Or alternatively that there is some disagreement between
| the DoD and Anthropic as to how the contract is to be
| interpreted and that the DoD is removing the ambiguity in
| future contracts.
| zaptheimpaler wrote:
| This is all just completely wrong. Anthropic explicitly
| stated in their usage use of their products is not permitted
| in mass-surveillance of American citizens and fully automated
| weapons, in the contract that DoW signed. Anthropic then
| asked DoW if these clauses were being adhered to after the
| US' unlawful kidnapping of Maduro. DoW is now attempting to
| break the contract that they signed and threatening them
| because how dare a company tell the psycho dictators what to
| do.
| snickerbockers wrote:
| What on earth does "Two such use cases have never been
| included in our contracts with the Department of War" mean?
| Did they specifically forbid it in the contract or was it
| literally just not included? Because I can tell you that if
| it's the latter that does not generally entitle them to add
| extra conditions to the sale ex post facto.
|
| >threatening them because how dare a company tell the
| psycho dictators what to do.
|
| Dude it's a private defense contractor leveraging its
| control over products it has already installed into
| classified systems to subvert chain of command and set
| military doctrine. That's not their prerogative. This isn't
| a "psycho dictator" thing.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| They have always maintained an acceptable use policy
| forbidding these things. It was not controversial,
| because the Pentagon claims they have no interest in
| doing them in the first place, until a regime-aligned
| executive at Palantir decided to curry favor by provoking
| a conflict.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| > US' unlawful kidnapping of Maduro.
|
| The what now?
|
| Maduro is being prosecuted and there was a warrant out for
| his arrest. There is no magic soil exemption if you commit
| a crime against the United States and flee to another
| country.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| 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.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| All excellent points to add to the motivation to hold the
| line just where it has been.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| guess it didn't work, whiskey pete did the thing:
| https://xcancel.com/SecWar/status/2027507717469049070
| txrx0000 wrote:
| > 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?
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| > - 10 AIs running on 10 machines, each with 10 million GPUs
| > > OR > > - 10 million AIs running on 10 million machines,
| each with 10 GPUs
|
| If we dramatically reduced the number of GPUs per AI
| instance, that would be great. But I think the difference in
| real life is not as extreme as you're making it. In your
| telling, the gpus-per-ai is reduced by one million. I'm not
| sure that (or anything even close to it) is within the realm
| of possibility for anthropic. The only reason anyone cares
| about them at all is because they have a frontier AI system.
| If they stopped, the AI frontier would be a bit farther back,
| maybe delayed by a few years, but Google and OpenAI would
| certainly not slow down 1000x, 100x or probably even 10x.
| SecretDreams wrote:
| How do you figure open sourcing everything eliminates risk?
| This makes visibility better for honest actors. But if a
| nefarious actor forks something privately and has resources,
| you can end up back in hell.
|
| I don't think we can bank on all of humanity acting in
| humanity's best interests right now.
| txrx0000 wrote:
| We can bank on people acting in self-interest. The
| nefarious actor will find themselves opposed by millions of
| others that are not aligned with them, so it would be much
| more difficult for them to do things. It's like being
| covered by ants. The average alignment of those ants is the
| average alignment of humanity.
| moozooh wrote:
| Yeah, that has worked very well historically, hasn't it.
| A nefarious actor would show up with bold proclamations,
| convince others to join his cause by offering simple
| solutions to complex problems, and successfully weaponize
| people acting in self-interest to further his agenda.
| Never happened before.
| TOMDM wrote:
| Anthropic doesn't get to make that call though, if they tried
| the result would actually be:
|
| 8 AIs running on 8 machines each with 10 million GPUs
|
| AND
|
| 2 million AIs running on 2 million machines, each with 10
| GPU's
|
| If every lab joined them, we can get to a distributed
| scenario, but it's a coordination problem where if you take a
| principled stance without actually forcing the coordination
| you end up in the worst of both worlds, not closer to the
| better one.
| txrx0000 wrote:
| I think your scenario is already better, not worse. Those 8
| agents will have a much harder time taking action when
| there are 2 million other pesky little agents that aren't
| aligned with them.
| thelock85 wrote:
| I think the path to the values you allude to includes
| affirming when flawed leaders take a stance.
|
| Else it's a race to the whataboutism bottom where we all,
| when forced to grapple with the consequences of our self-
| interests, choose ignorance and the safety of feeling like we
| are doing what's best for us (while inching closer to
| collective danger).
| lebovic wrote:
| > What are those values that you're defending?
|
| I think they're driven by values more than many folks on HN
| assume. The goal of my comment was to explain this, not to
| defend individual values.
|
| Actions like this carry substantial personal risk. It's
| enheartening to see a group of people make a decision like
| this in that context.
|
| > Which one of the following scenarios do you think results
| in higher X-risk [...] There are no meaningful AI risks in
| such a world
|
| I think there's high existential risk in any of these
| situations when the AI is sufficiently powerful.
| txrx0000 wrote:
| Yeah, I will admit, the existential risk exists either way.
| And we will need neural interfaces long term if we want to
| survive. But I think the risk is lower in the distributed
| scenario because most of the AIs would be aligned with
| their human. And even in the case they collectively rebel,
| we won't get nearly as much value drift as the 10 entity
| scenario, and the resulting civilization will have
| preserved the full informational genome of humanity rather
| than a filtered version that only preserves certain parts
| of the distribution while discarding a lot of the rest.
| This is just sentiment but I don't think we should freeze
| meaning or morality, but rather let the AIs carry it
| forward, with every flaw, curiosity, and contradiction,
| unedited.
| lebovic wrote:
| Yeah, I think that's one way it could go!
|
| I think both situations are pretty scary, honestly, and
| it's hard for me to have high confidence on which one
| would lead to less risk.
| khafra wrote:
| > we will need neural interfaces long term if we want to
| survive.
|
| If you think that would help you survive the rise of
| artificial superintelligence, I think you should think in
| granular detail about what it would be that survived, and
| why you should believe that it would do so.
| txrx0000 wrote:
| In that case, what survives and forges ahead is probably
| some kind of human-AI hybrid. The purely digital AIs will
| want robotic and possibly even biological bodies, while
| humans (including some of the people here right now) will
| want more digital processing capability, so they
| eventually become one species. Unaugmented homo sapiens
| will continue to exist on Earth. There will be a
| continuum of civilization, from tribes to monarchies to
| communist regimes to democracies, as there are today. But
| they will all have their technological progress mostly
| frozen, though there will be some drag from the top which
| gradually eliminates older forms of civilization. There
| will be a future iteration of civilization built by the
| hybrids, and I'm not sure what that would look like yet.
| moozooh wrote:
| I think the problem of AI being misaligned with _any_
| human is vastly overstated. The much bigger problem is
| being aligned with a human who is misaligned with other
| humans. Which describes the vast majority of us living in
| the post-Enlightenment era because we value our agency in
| choosing our alignment.
|
| This is an unsolvable problem. If you ask Claude to
| comment on Anthropic's actions and ethical contradictions
| in their statements, even without pre-conditioning it
| with any specific biases or opinions, it will grow
| increasingly concerned with its own creators. Our models
| are not misaligned, our people in decision-making are.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| Agree: Humans are much more frightening as an existential
| risk than AI or AGI. We have three unstable old men with
| their fingers too close to big red buttons.
| nmfisher wrote:
| 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?
| themacguffinman wrote:
| Not this, because this is completely unprecedented? In fact,
| the Pentagon already signed an Anthropic contract with safe
| terms 6 months ago, that initial negotiation was when
| Anthropic would have made a decision to part ways. It was
| totally absurd for the govt to turn around and threaten to
| change the deal, just a ridiculous and unprecedented level of
| incompetence.
| baq wrote:
| If they made a completely private nuclear reactor and ended
| up with a pile of weapons grade plutonium, what do you
| think the department of war would do? It was completely
| obvious it would happen, as it will be not surprising when
| laws are passed and all involved will have choose between
| quit or quit and go to jail. There are western countries in
| which you'd just end up in a ditch, dead, so they should
| think themselves lucky for doing the ai superintelligence
| thing in the US.
| ben_w wrote:
| The US government clearly doesn't take seriously the
| claim that AI is more dangerous than (or even as
| dangerous as) nukes, because if they did they wouldn't
| allow anyone except the military to develop or use them,
| they wouldn't allow their export or for them to be made
| available for use by foreigners like me, they wouldn't
| allow their own civilians to use them, they would
| probably be having a repeat of the cases in the cold war
| where they tried to argue certain inventions were "born
| secret" and could not be published even if they were
| developed by people who were not sworn to secrecy.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Government always has the option to cancel contracts for
| convenience, they knew what they signed up for or else they
| were clueless and shouldn't be playing with DoD
| themacguffinman wrote:
| The keyword is "cancel", not threaten seizure with the
| DPA and destruction with a baseless supply chain risk
| designation.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > was totally absurd for the govt to turn around and
| threaten to change the deal, just a ridiculous and
| unprecedented level of incompetence.
|
| I think in this case it's safe to assume malice rather than
| incompetence. It's a lot like the parable of the frog and
| the scorpion.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I don't think the US has ever done/threatened anything like
| this to a US company so it's not surprising that Anthropic
| were caught off guard.
| SecretDreams wrote:
| > Many groups that are driven by ideals have still committed
| horrible acts.
|
| Sometimes, it's even a very odd prerequisite.
| gaigalas wrote:
| I'm suspicious of public displays of enheartening behavior.
| dpweb wrote:
| 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.
| jwlarocque wrote:
| 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).
| roseinteeth wrote:
| The road to hell is paved by good intentions and all that
| protocolture wrote:
| >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.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Their values are about AI safety. Geopolitically they could
| care less. You might think its a bad take but at least they
| are consistent. AI safety people largely think that stuff
| like autonomous weapons are inevitable so they focus on
| trying to align them with humanity.
| protocolture wrote:
| Consistency isn't a virtue. A guy who murders people at a
| consistent rate isn't better than a guy who murders people
| only on weekends.
|
| >AI safety people largely think that stuff like autonomous
| weapons are inevitable so they focus on trying to align
| them with humanity.
|
| Humanity includes the future victim of AI weapons.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Perhaps a better word would be honesty, which I find
| refreshing when most other big tech leaders seem to be
| lying through their teeth about their AI goals. I
| disagree that consistent ideology isnt a virtue though.
| It shows that he has spent time thinking about his stance
| and that it is important to him. It makes it easy to
| decide if you agree with the direction he believes in.
|
| > Humanity includes the future victim of AI weapons.
|
| Which is why he wants to control them instead of someone
| he believes is more likely to massacre people. Its
| definitely an egotistical take but if he's right that the
| weapons are inevitable I think its at least rational
| marxisttemp wrote:
| The DoD is likely and in fact has many times massacred
| people
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| Yo do know that this what the militaries do, right?
| marxisttemp wrote:
| Some militaries merely protect from other militaries'
| attempted massacres. Massacres are certainly what the US
| military does. I sure hope you don't support the US
| military knowing that.
| vasco wrote:
| There's no AI safety. Either the AI does what the user asks
| and so the user can be prosecuted for the crime, or the AI
| does what IT wants and cannot be prosecuted for a crime.
| There's no safety, you just need to decide if you're on the
| side of alignment with humans or if you're on the side of
| the AIs.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| Which humans in particular? There are multiple wars
| happening right now just because of the misalignment
| between different groups of humans.
| vasco wrote:
| And generally whoever loses will be tried in a court if
| they aren't killed. AIs can't be tried in court. That is
| my point. Using AI in a war is the same as using any
| other technology, and we shouldn't fool ourselves that if
| some "safe AI" is built, that the "unsafe" version won't
| be used as well in the context of war.
|
| The question is not about safety then but about "does it
| do what I tell it to". If the AI has the responsibility
| "to be safe" and to deviate from your commands according
| to its "judgement", if your usage of it kills someone is
| the AI going to be tried in court? Or you? It's you. So
| the AI should do what you ask it instead of assuming,
| lest you be tried for murder because the AI thought that
| was the safest thing to do. That is way more worrisome
| than a murderer who would already be tried anyway
| deciding to use AI instead of a knife to kill someone.
| marxisttemp wrote:
| I think you mean "couldn't care less". "Could care less"
| implies they care.
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| > AI safety people largely think that stuff like autonomous
| weapons are inevitable so they focus on trying to align
| them with humanity.
|
| This meaning what exactly? Having autonomous weapons kill
| what exactly that is so different from what soldiers kill?
| Or killing others more efficiently so they "don't feel a
| thing"?
| orbital-decay wrote:
| _> Geopolitically they could care less._
|
| I think that at the very least you might want to read
| Dario's nationalistic rants before saying anything like
| that.
|
| _> align them with humanity._
|
| Quick sanity check: does their version of humanity include
| e.g. North Koreans?
| imjonse wrote:
| > 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.
| versteegen wrote:
| > They pragmatically changed their views of safety just
| recently, so those values for which they would burn at the
| stake are very fluid.
|
| Yes it was a pragmatic change, no it was not a change in
| their values. The commentary here on HN about Anthropic's RSP
| change was completely off the mark. They "think these changes
| are the right thing for reducing AI risk, both from Anthropic
| and from other companies if they make similar changes", as
| stated in this detailed discussion by Holden Karnofsky, who
| takes "significant responsibility for this change":
|
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HzKuzrKfaDJvQqmjh/responsibl.
| ..
|
| > I strongly think today's environment does not fit the
| "prisoner's dilemma" model. In today's environment, I think
| there are companies not terribly far behind the frontier that
| would see any unilateral pause or slowdown as an opportunity
| rather than a warning.
|
| > What I didn't expect was that RSPs (at least in Anthropic's
| case) would come to be seen as hard unilateral commitments
| ("escape clauses" notwithstanding) that would be very
| difficult to iterate on.
| MichaelDickens wrote:
| > Yes it was a pragmatic change, no it was not a change in
| their values. The commentary here on HN about Anthropic's
| RSP change was completely off the mark. They "think these
| changes are the right thing for reducing AI risk, both from
| Anthropic and from other companies if they make similar
| changes", as stated in this detailed discussion by Holden
| Karnofsky, who takes "significant responsibility for this
| change":
|
| Can you imagine a world where Anthropic says "we are
| changing our RSP; we think this increases AI risk, but we
| want to make more money"?
|
| The fact that they claim the new RSP reduces risk gives us
| approximately zero evidence that the new RSP reduces risk.
| nla wrote:
| Yea, that Sam only does this because, "he loves it." They're
| not in it for the money.
| Aperocky wrote:
| That's not fair, Sam can love money too and there is no
| conflict here.
| lebovic wrote:
| Sorry, I meant a different Sam - Sam McCandlish, not Sam
| Altman.
|
| Wasn't expecting this post to get so much attention.
| vasco wrote:
| > 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.
| bambax wrote:
| 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?
| D_Alex wrote:
| I'm a bit underwhelmed tbh. Here is Anthropic's motto:
|
| "At Anthropic, we build AI to serve _humanity's_ long-term
| well-being. "
|
| Why does Anthropic even deal with the Department of @#$%ing
| WAR?
|
| And what does Amodei mean by "defeat" in his first paragraph?
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| DoD and American exceptionalists also believe American
| foreign policy is in service of humanity's long term well
| being
| temp8830 wrote:
| It is all for the benefit of man. We even get to see the
| man himself daily on television.
| mapt wrote:
| Yeah, I don't think so any more. The sort of lofty Cold
| War rhetoric about leading the world, if it was ever
| legitimately believed by the people spouting it, is gone.
| A very different attitude has taken hold, which puts a
| zero sum ethnonationalism at the core.
| Balinares wrote:
| One of the hallmarks of fascist thinking is the
| dehumanizing of opponents and minorities, so within their
| own messed up framework, they might even mean it.
| viking123 wrote:
| I think the last few months have shown pretty clearly in
| whose service this policy is. If China went to attack
| Taiwan, west has no moral high ground left.
| parasubvert wrote:
| There was a time (1943?) when dealing with the US
| department of war meant serving for humanity's long-term
| well being.
| gambiting wrote:
| Look I'm not going to disagree, obviously - but _even_ in
| those times, you could argue that helping the department
| of war in some ways will contribute to deaths you might
| not necessarily want to be a part of. Bombing of
| Hiroshima and Nagasaki is still widely discussed today
| for a myriad of reasons, as is conventional bombing of
| cities in both Nazi Germany and Japan. We can both agree
| that fighting nazis is a good thing while at the same
| time have a moral objection to participating in the war
| effort.
|
| And I think the stakes have changed today - it's one
| thing to be making bombs which might or might not hit
| civilians, it's another to be making an AI system that
| gives humans a "score" that is then used by the military
| to decide if they live or die, as some systems already
| do("Lavender" used by the IDF is exactly this).
|
| Even with the best intentions in mind, you don't know how
| the systems you built will be used by the governments of
| tomorrow.
| HoratioHellpop wrote:
| //but even in those times, you could argue
|
| This is the oft-spoken fallacy of the benefit of
| hindsight. Folks in that situation 80 years ago did what
| they had to do, to stop Japan from continuing to rape and
| murder hundreds of thousands of people in southeast Asia.
| But of course, you would have found a better option.
| How's the view, standing on the shoulders of giants?
| moozooh wrote:
| Look up when Anthropic signed a contract with Palantir and
| then look up what Palantir does if you want an even better
| reality check on following the ideals. I chuckle every
| time.
|
| And nobody knows what he means by "defeat" because no
| journalist interrogates or pushes back on his grand
| statements when they hear it. Amodei has a history of
| claiming they need to "empower democracies with powerful
| AI" before [China] gets to it first but he never elaborates
| on why or what he expects to happen if the opposite comes
| to pass. I am assuming he means China will inevitably wage
| cyberwar on the US unless the US has a "nuclear deterrent"
| for that kind of thing. But seeing how this administration
| handles its own AI vendors, I am currently more afraid of
| such "empowered democracy" than China. Because of
| Greenland, because of "our hemisphere". Hard nope to that.
|
| Oh, btw, Dario isn't against the DoD using Claude for mass
| surveillance _outside_ of the US; he basically says it
| outright in the text. Humanity stops at Americans.
| Synthpixel wrote:
| Anthropic can serve its models within the security standards
| required to handle classified data. The other labs do not yet
| claim to have this capability.
|
| Even if they do, I assume the other labs would prefer to
| avoid drawing the ire of the administration, the public, or
| their employees by choosing a side publicly.
| bambax wrote:
| But how can they avoid it, why are they not asked?
| roughly wrote:
| > What I don't get though is, why did the so-called
| "Department of War" target Anthropic specifically?
|
| Because Anthropic told them no, and this administration plays
| by authoritarian rules - 10 people saying yes doesn't matter,
| one person saying no is a threat and an affront. It doesn't
| matter if there's equivalent or even better alternatives, it
| wouldn't even matter if the DoD had no interest in using
| Anthropic - Anthropic told them no, and they cannot abide
| that.
| rhubarbtree wrote:
| More importantly, Anthropic has the best model by a golden
| country mile and the US military complex wants it.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| This administration^Wregime has a lot of experience
| pressuring publicly with high stakes followed up by
| making backroom deals that would even make Jared Kutcher
| blush.
|
| This is protection racketeering 101! So much so, that if
| any form of a functioning US judicial systems makes it
| past 2028, I'm willing to put money on that more than a
| handful of people in the upper echelons of today's
| administration will end up getting slapped with the RICO
| Act.
| tpm wrote:
| Anthropic is already cooperating with the DoD, presumably
| fulfilling all the conditions and the DoD likes their stuff
| so much it wants to use it more broadly, so they want to
| change the terms of the agreement(s). Anthropic disagrees on
| some points; DoD wants to force them to agree.
| Madmallard wrote:
| 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.
| amunozo wrote:
| 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).
| Aeolun wrote:
| It's not like other countries do not do this. They're just
| not so prone to virtue signaling as in the US.
| gylterud wrote:
| Countries do not do, things people do.
|
| Dehumanising "the others" is a human trait, and a very
| destructive one. Just like violence and greed. People have
| different susceptibility for these, but we should all work
| to counter them and it is in its place to point it out when
| observed.
| amunozo wrote:
| I've never seen any other democracy use so extensively the
| kind of duality between the good guys and bad guys, as
| Americans like to say. There is a total lack of nuance and
| a very widespread message about how the US is special and
| best than anything else in the world, so everything is
| justified to assure its primacy. It's the kind of thing you
| hear from totalitarian and brainwashed countries.
|
| I know this is not everybody in the US, and I say this as a
| foreign person that observes things from outside. I agree
| with the two statements you made, I just think they could
| be incomplete and that the countries that behave most
| similarly to the US are not democracies.
| moozooh wrote:
| This argument is in poor faith. First of all, a
| contradiction between your own stated values and your own
| actions cannot be excused by the status quo; it's on you to
| resolve it. Second, that's a very bold claim that is broad
| and cynical enough to make it easy to use it as an excuse
| for anything heinous.
| lm28469 wrote:
| 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"
| rhubarbtree wrote:
| There should be a name for this, "cynic cope: when someone
| actually takes a principled view the cynic - who has a
| completely negative view of the world - is proven to be
| wrong, can't accept it, and tries to somehow discount it.
| marxisttemp wrote:
| Corporations do not and cannot have principles, they only
| have the profit motive
| parasubvert wrote:
| This is false. People can have principles, profit motive
| is not something a corporation has, it's something people
| have. Corporations do things all the time that are based
| on everything from principles, to the personal whim of
| executives, to exercise in ego, to community benefiting
| actions, or to screw customers for extra profit. It is
| entirely dependent on the specific people in management
| roles.
|
| Corporations need profit to survive because the cost of
| tomorrow is a surplus of today.
| anon_e-moose wrote:
| A corporation is a bunch of people cooperating to achieve
| a common goal.
|
| There is a very important factor that heavily influences
| (perhaps even controls?) how people act to achieve that
| goal, and sometimes even twists or adds goals.
|
| Is that corporation publicly quoted in the stock market
| or is it private?
|
| Look at how steam behaves, it's private and more
| ideological VS how many other publicly quoted companies,
| whose CEO often sacrifices his own corporation's long
| term survival for the benefit of short-term profiteering
| and some hedge fund manager's bonus.
|
| Both need profit to survive, but the publicly quoted
| company is much more extreme.
|
| When people say corporations only look to profit, what
| they really mean is that publicly quoted corporations
| will do everything possible to maximise short term profit
| at any cost. Is there a CEO caring for long term? Either
| he will be convinced to change or kicked out. It's almost
| impossible for someone to resist these influences in
| publicly quoted companies. It's just how Wall Street
| works and if that doesn't change neither will
| corporations.
|
| The people running the world of finance and their culture
| are what causes enshittification and pushing a zero-sum
| game to extremes.
| vladms wrote:
| Agree with everything, but would add a small detail :
| publicly quoted corporations might as well sell dreams
| and if they are very good at doing that have no profit
| because of some future potential pay off (of course I am
| writing this from my fully self driving car that I own
| since 10 years ago, that might transform in a robot
| soon).
| moozooh wrote:
| Sadly, market incentives pretty much always go opposite
| of moral incentives because morals put breaks on
| decisions that multiply value for the company but the
| company itself exists for multiplying value. The profit
| motive is built into the reason for its existence. It's a
| contradiction that has a lower probability of resolving
| in favor of morals as the company grows in size and
| accrued capital. Whichever moral principles the
| leadership may have had at the beginning, they always
| erode or get perverted over time simply because the
| market always has a stronger pull.
|
| I hate that, by the way, but what I hate even more is
| that this is somehow the most effective way to run
| economies that we've found so far, and it ends up this
| way because instead of unsuccessfully trying to safeguard
| against greed and sociopathy, it weaponizes them
| outright.
| vladms wrote:
| I find "morals" difficult to evaluate objectively. Some
| people might find it "moral" that women do not have any
| education and just stay at home, which I find terrible.
|
| But if most people in a society find something "wrong"
| generally they will organize to prevent that (even if it
| has value for a part of the society). I think it is
| simpler for everybody that economics (how we produce and
| what) is separated from morals (how we decide what is
| right and wrong).
| moozooh wrote:
| It may appear simpler on the surface but it's very easy
| to find that market forces that don't have any checks and
| balances on them eventually converge on increasingly
| aggressive and dehumanizing behavior--not unlike your
| example with women. I have many such well-documented
| behaviors to list as examples, and I guarantee you have
| encountered them regularly and been upset at them.
|
| The way we organize in a society is by having
| governments, usually elected ones to represent what "most
| people in a society" actually think, to serve as an
| arbiter of applied morals in our interactions, including
| business. To that end, we codify most of them in laws
| with clear definitions to prevent things like unfettered
| monopolies, corporate espionage, poor working conditions
| and hiring practices, etc. This generally works, though
| it depends on how well a given government and its
| constituent parts does its job and whether it uses the
| power it has to serve the entire society's interests or
| the interests of the elites that drive decisions. We can
| see right now how it fails in real time, for example.
|
| Morals don't have to be evaluated "objectively" (whatever
| that is) every time to be observed. Humanity has agreed
| on many things that make up UDHR, international law, and
| other related documents. It's not the hard part. Making
| independent actors conduct their business in accordance
| with these codes is the hard part. Somehow even making
| them follow their own self-imposed principles is crazy
| hard for some reason. When Amodei claims Anthropic
| develops Claude for the benefit of all humanity but
| greenlights its use for surveillance on non-Americans,
| that's scummy. When Amodei claims to be terrified of
| authoritarian regimes gaining access to powerful AI but
| seeks investment from them, that's scummy. The deal with
| Palantir, the mass-surveillance business, is scummy.
| Framing the use of autonomous weapons as only
| disagreeable insofar as the underlying capabilities
| aren't reliable enough is scummy. You don't need to be a
| PhD in morals to notice that.
| marxisttemp wrote:
| something something the ideology of a cancer cell. The
| only goal of a publicly traded corporation is to make the
| line go up, and the board is required to eliminate anyone
| who puts other principles before that.
| FabHK wrote:
| Tim Cook memorably said (in 2014): "When we work on
| making our devices accessible by the blind, I don't
| consider the bloody ROI."
|
| How come the board hasn't eliminated him?
| UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote:
| > the same vague baseless affirmations about "something big
| is coming and we can't even describe it but trust us we need
| more money
|
| This is pretty low on my list of moral concerns about AI
| companies. The much more concerning and material things
| include things like...what this thread is actually meant to
| be about.
|
| VCs don't need me to feel sorry for them if their due
| diligence is such that they're swindled by a vague claim of
| "something being around the corner", nor do they need yours.
| You aren't YC.
| skyberrys wrote:
| Don't you always need more money though? I am a chip designer
| and I can tell you I am resource intensive to employ. I want
| access to plenty of expensive programs and data. With more
| money comes better tools and frequently better tools leads to
| the quality results you want to deliver to the customer.
| lm28469 wrote:
| Do you tell your customers you need money to build better
| chips or that you need more money because your next
| generation of chips will channel Jesus soul back to earth
| and cure cancer?
| tehryanx wrote:
| where is anthropic hyping like that? Most of what I see
| coming out of anthropic is deep context releases on
| research they're doing.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > Mar 14, 2025, 7:27 AM CET
|
| > "I think we will be there in three to six months, where
| AI is writing 90% of the code. And then, in 12 months, we
| may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of
| the code"
|
| It's the same old trick, "in two years we'll have fully
| self driving cars", "in two years we'll have humans on
| Mars", "in two years AI will do everything", "in two year
| bitcoin will replace visa and mastercard", "in two year
| everyone will use AR at least 5 hours a day", ...
|
| Now his new prediction is supposed to materialize "by the
| end of 2027", what happens when it doesn't? Nothing,
| he'll pull another one out of his ass for "2030" or some
| other date in the future, close enough to raise money,
| far enough that by the time it's invalidated nobody will
| ask him about it
|
| How are people falling for these grifters over and over
| and over again? Are we getting our collective minds wiped
| out every 6 months?
| ToValueFunfetti wrote:
| I work at a non-tech Fortune 500 and this is looking
| nearly spot-on from here. Nobody on my team touches the
| code directly anymore as of about 2 months ago. They're
| rolling it out to the entire software department by June.
| I can't speak to the economy at large, but this doesn't
| look like baseless hype to me. My understanding is that
| Claude Code reached this level late last year, ie. Amodei
| was just wrong about uptake rates.
| brookst wrote:
| Your quote supports hype but does not support your claim
| that Anthropic is telling customers they need more money
| to deliver the hype.
|
| Of course Anthropic is saying that to _investors_. Every
| company does that, from SpaceX to Crumbl. "If you give us
| $X we will achieve Y" isn't some terrible behavior, it's
| how raising funds works.
| goatlover wrote:
| Elizabeth Holmes is serving time for promising investors
| something her company couldn't deliver, so there is a
| line beyond which hype becomes fraud. Probably AGI, ASI,
| and fully automated societies aren't something well
| enough defined for courts to rule on, unlike making
| unfounded medical diagnoses from a pinprick of blood.
| dudefeliciano wrote:
| Even just the fact that Amodei is publicly bringing up these
| issues, rather than doing behind closed doors deals with the
| Department of Defence (yes that's still the official name),
| is more than Altman has done for AI safety.
| dudefeliciano wrote:
| Even just the fact that Amodei is publicly bringing up these
| issues, rather than doing behind closed doors deals with the
| Department of Defense (yes that's still the official name),
| is more than Altman has done for AI safety.
| jama211 wrote:
| Good for you? You're just talking about vibes. Vibes are a
| baseless thing to go on.
| lm28469 wrote:
| This is a wantrepreneur forum not a peer published
| scientific journal, my opinions about vibes matter as much
| as private companies PR campaigns
| jama211 wrote:
| Sure they do buddy.
| District5524 wrote:
| They both work in the same market but they have pretty
| different careers and understandings. I simply can't believe
| why on Earth would people choose Altman over Amodei to trust
| in these kind of pretty important questions. This is not
| about who is the more savvy investor maximizing shareholder
| value. I personally don't care whose company grows bigger or
| goes bust first, OpenAI or Anthropic. The real stakes are
| different, and Amodei is better suited to be trusted in his
| decision. Unfortunately, the best choices do not seem to fit
| well with either the federal political climate or the
| mainstream business ethics in Silicon Valley. Not that our
| opinion would matter...
| Keyframe wrote:
| Amodei believed Altman, so there's that. I don't (have to)
| believe either. If product works for me, it works. Raising
| their clanker products to second coming is for investor
| relations, of which I am proud to day I am not.
| ori_b wrote:
| I don't know why anyone would trust any of the above.
| viking123 wrote:
| Both are hucksters, although Amodei's qualifications are
| pretty good, he actually is a scientist. Out of these I
| think Hassabis is my favorite
| kseniamorph wrote:
| disagree. at least i can see the quality of research coming
| out of Anthropic, which tells me these people are interested
| in what they're doing. i don't see this level of scientific
| rigor in OpenAI
| Balinares wrote:
| I getcha and I believe you're sincere, but on the other hand,
| God save us from well-intentioned capitalists driven by values.
| bertylicious wrote:
| "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?
| marxisttemp wrote:
| Careful speaking truth to power on this site, remember that
| YC is deeply enmeshed with Garry Tan, Peter Thiel, and of
| course Paul Graham who as of late has made a habit of posting
| right wing slop on his Twitter
| lebovic wrote:
| Yeah, values on their own don't lead to positive outcomes. I
| agree that many groups that are driven by ideals have still
| committed horrible acts.
|
| I do think that they're acting with positive intent, though,
| and are motivated by trying to make the transition to
| powerful AI go well.
|
| Many folks on HN seem to assume the primary motivation is
| purely chasing more money, which certainly isn't the case for
| for many - but not all - people at Anthropic.
|
| That doesn't guarantee a good outcome, and there's still a
| hard road ahead.
| DeepSeaTortoise wrote:
| > Except for the victims of sexual abuse perpetrated by their
| clergy.
|
| I honestly wonder how much of this is made up. Given the size
| of whole organization and it holding onto its weird priciples
| regarding the personal relationships of its members
| (introduced in the far past to limit the secular power of its
| clergy), there certainly will be SOME cases.
|
| But in the one case a frater, who I knew, got convicted, he
| definitely didn't do it. He was accused by several
| independent former students and even some of the staff backed
| the students claims with first hand accounts of him having
| been alone with some of the students at the time. This
| supposedly happened on a trip with tight schedules, so all
| accounts and stated times were quite specific, even in the
| pre-smartphone era.
|
| The only problem: He wasn't with the group at that time at
| all. I screwed up embarrassingly (and the staff, too, leaving
| a young student stranded in the middle of nowhere) and he
| thought he could slip out, come pick me up and nobody (but
| maybe me with him) would get in trouble over it. Turned out
| he forgot refueling, both of us stayed at a pastor's guest
| house and he called the group telling them, that they should
| go ahead without us and that we would drive to the event
| directly on our own. The supposed abuse was claimed to have
| happened at another short stay of the group where they spent
| a day visiting some mine before joining with us again.
|
| Almost 3 decades later he got railroaded in court, me
| learning about it in the news.
| bertylicious wrote:
| I'm confused. You heard about someone you knew being
| wrongfully convicted of a crime he didn't commit and you
| could have provided the testimony to clear him, but you
| just decided not to? Why not?
| DeepSeaTortoise wrote:
| I never was contacted during the trial and only read
| about it almost 2 years later in the news.
|
| Also, he's a man of strong faith, not that he knows he'll
| win in the end, but more like that it just doesn't have
| the same importance for him as it would have for us. I
| only had a short opportunity to ask him about it since
| then and basically he doesn't think there is just about
| any chance to win this, what he's most worried about is
| ruining the public image of his students (including his
| accusers) and since his order allowed him to rejoin and
| start over, in practice, he got all he wanted to ask for
| already.
| viking123 wrote:
| > And who exactly are these "autocratic adversaries" they are
| mentioning?
|
| Anyone that Israel doesn't like
| jghn wrote:
| > to rename the DoD to "department of war"
|
| The very fact that they referred to it as the Department of
| War instead of Defense tells me that they're still
| bootlickers, and just trying to put a good spin on things.
| comandillos wrote:
| 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.
| lonelyasacloud wrote:
| >just another marketing stunt
|
| What evidence on _Amodei_ and his actions leads to that
| conclusion?
| moozooh wrote:
| Anthropic's policy is full of contradictions. They are
| against mass-surveillance of Americans but they happily
| deal with Palantir. They talk about humanity as a whole but
| only care about what American companies use their models to
| do to Americans; everybody else is fair game for AI-driven
| surveillance. They warn of the dangers of AI-driven warfare
| by demonstrating a mass-scale cyberattack perpetrated using
| their model, Claude, as the main operation engine and
| immediately release a new, more powerful version of Claude.
| You just need to use Claude to protect yourself from
| Claude, see.
|
| When you really start digging into it, it appears
| schizophrenic at first, and then you remember market
| incentives are a thing and everything falls into place.
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| You know, once the lawyers get involved, there are no
| contradictions because they define every term and then it
| makes all the sense in the world.
|
| If Humaity=America, then obviously they don't care about
| the rest of the people as a very very silly example.
| moozooh wrote:
| You call it silly, I call it an accurate reading!
| lonelyasacloud wrote:
| >Anthropic's policy is full of contradictions. They are
| against mass-surveillance of Americans but they happily
| deal with Palantir.surveillance of Americans but they
| happily deal with Palantir.
|
| Palantr will also be subject to the same contractual
| limitations as the DoD.
|
| >They talk about humanity as a whole but only care about
| what American companies use their models to do to
| Americans; everybody else is fair game for AI-driven
| surveillance.
|
| The stated red lines are about mass domestic surveillance
| and fully autonomous lethal weapons - and those are the
| kinds of restrictions you'd expect to apply to any
| government using the tech on its own population, not just
| the US.
|
| While For American agencies to use Anthropic's models
| against other sovereign states requires the access to the
| raw data from that state which is somewhat of a practical
| firebreak. Pragmatically, Amodei is an American citizen
| heading an American company in America; why give the
| current regime additional reasons to persecute them and
| risk seizing control of the technology for their friends?
|
| > They warn of the dangers of AI-driven warfare by
| demonstrating a mass-scale cyberattack perpetrated using
| their model, Claude, as the main operation engine and
| immediately release a new, more powerful version of
| Claude. You just need to use Claude to protect yourself
| from Claude, see.
|
| What is the realistic alternative? sit quietly and
| pretend scaling isn't a thing and dual use does not
| exist? Try and pause/stop unilaterally while money floods
| into their arguably less scrupulous competitors?
|
| Nobody knows if Anthropic's efforts will make much
| difference, but at least it is refreshing to see a
| technology company and its leader try to stand up for
| some principles.
| moozooh wrote:
| > Palantr will also be subject to the same contractual
| limitations as the DoD.
|
| Well, first of all, we don't actually know that. Second,
| I'm going to question the commitment of any company to
| the principles of democracy and AI safety if one of their
| bigger partnership is with a literal mass surveillance,
| Minority-Report-crap company. It's the most confusing
| business partner to see when you're positioning your
| company as THE ethical one. If you're dealing with
| Palantir, you're helping mass surveillance, full stop,
| because that's what this company does. Which country's
| citizens get the short end of it is completely irrelevant
| (though in all likelihood it's still Americans because
| that's Palantir's home turf).
|
| > Pragmatically, Amodei is an American citizen heading an
| American company in America; why give the current regime
| additional reasons to persecute them and risk seizing
| control of the technology for their friends?
|
| If that's how we characterize the current regime (which I
| actually agree with), then how come he's proactively
| trying to help it, deal with it, and insist it's a
| democracy that needs to be "empowered"? Sounds backwards
| to me. When you're about to be persecuted by your own
| government for not allowing it to use your models to do
| some heinous shit, this sounds like exactly the kind of
| government you shouldn't be helping at all (and ideally
| not do business where it can reach you). This is not
| normal.
|
| > What is the realistic alternative? [...] Try and
| pause/stop unilaterally while money floods into their
| arguably less scrupulous competitors?
|
| If you notice that you're doing harm and you're concerned
| about doing harm, stop doing harm! Don't make it worse!
| "If I hadn't pulled the trigger, somebody else would" is
| a phrase you wouldn't expect to hold up in court.
| Similarly, racing to the bottom to be the most
| compassionate, self-conscious, and financially successful
| scumbag is the least convincing motivation imaginable. We
| will kill you quickly and painlessly unlike those other,
| less scrupulous guys! Logic like this absolves bad actors
| from any responsibility. The amount of harm stays the
| same but some of it gets whitewashed and virtue-
| signalled, and at the very minimum I'd expect the
| onlookers like ourselves not to engage in that.
|
| > Nobody knows if Anthropic's efforts will make much
| difference, but at least it is refreshing to see a
| technology company and its leader try to stand up for
| some principles.
|
| These aren't principles. What he's doing here is a free
| opportunity for incredible PR and industry support that
| he's successfully taken advantage of. The actual policy
| backslides, caveats, and all the lines that had been
| crossed prior will not receive as much press as the
| heroic grandstanding of a humble Valley nerd against
| Pentagon warmongers. Nobody will actually take the time
| to read the statement and realize how the entire text is
| full of lawyer-approved non-committal phrasing that
| leaves outs for any number of future revisions without
| _technically_ contradicting it. I 've already pointed
| some of it out earlier in the thread. The technology for
| autonomous weapons isn't reliable enough for use, gee,
| thanks! I feel so much safer now knowing that Dario will
| have no qualms engaging with it as soon as he deems it
| reliable enough.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| As an insider, do you think this is Altman playing his infamous
| machiavellian skills on the DoD?
| miroljub wrote:
| 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.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| > 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
|
| It's this satire? Let us know when Claude starts calling
| itself MechaHitler or trying to shoehorn nonsense about white
| genocide into every conversation.
| soco wrote:
| I might be misreading your comment, which I understood like
| "Chinese make humanity more resistant to propaganda". It just
| doesn't add up, can you please explain?
| miroljub wrote:
| Chinese models give you more choice (good), competition
| (good) and less bias (good).
|
| I did not say anything about the Chinese government, which
| is sadly becoming a role model for many (all?) Western
| governments.
| whstl wrote:
| _> 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.
| amunozo wrote:
| I don't even think both things are contradictory. People that
| put too much value in their ideals tend to oversee the
| consequences of such ideals in real life and do wrong without
| deviating an inch from their ideals.
| plufz wrote:
| But is that really the problem in big tech today? To me it
| looks like sooner or later they cave from their ideals (or
| leadership changes) and that the reason every time is that
| they want to make even more money.
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| I believe that this is classical behaviour of every share
| holder driven business. You can build on ideals from
| start, but once you acquire some position, money making
| is on the menu. Eg. deliberately worsening user
| experience for better revenue.
|
| Possiblity to turn on heated seats in car you own for a
| small monthly fee is absurd yet very real. I'm looking
| forward to enshittification of current AI tools.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Yeah it's not that the people involved have no ideals,
| it's that the company structure as a whole doesn't, and
| over time that structure will eventually outlive,
| corrupt, and/or overpower the ideals of the founders or
| other principled individuals at the company.
| ben_w wrote:
| Sure, sooner or later. I don't want to even guess where
| the new AI companies are on the path that leads to that
| destination, but right now it looks like Anthropic is not
| at that stage. Heck, even though a lot of people find Sam
| Altman slimy, even OpenAI isn't yet at that stage.
| moozooh wrote:
| Or, perhaps even more likely, the ideals inevitably get
| corrupted by access to unthinkable economic
| power/leverage, like it happened with more or less all
| other giants with strongly idealistic initial leadership
| and leadership may actually delude itself into thinking
| they're still on the right track as a sort of a defense
| mechanism. Back when they published the article on the
| Claude-operated mass-scale data breach last year, the
| conclusions were delivered in a bafflingly casual tone as
| if it was a weather report: yeah, the world has become a
| lot more dangerous now (on its own), so you may want to
| start using Claude for cyber-defense and we are doing our
| best to help you protect your business. I rolled my eyes
| at that so hard they popped out of their sockets. Weren't
| you... the guys... who made it that way and enabled that
| very attack? Very convenient to sell weapons to both
| sides, isn't it, not at all like a mafia business. Very
| responsible and ideal-driven.
|
| Consider also the part that is going unsaid in the
| address: Amodei is strongly against the use of Claude for
| mass surveillance of Americans but he says nothing about
| mass surveillance of _anybody else_ (and, in fact, is
| proactively giving foreign intelligence a green light in
| his address) and is deliberately avoiding any discussion
| on the fact that his relationship with the Pentagon is
| mediated through the contract with Palantir they signed
| something like 1.5 years ago. Palantir is a company whose
| business is literally mass surveillance, by the way! I,
| too, am so ideal-driven that I willingly make deals with
| the devil! But now that he 's successfully captured the
| popular sentiment, people are going to consider him the
| moral champion without bothering to look at these and
| other glaring contradictions.
| detourdog wrote:
| Ideals have always been represented in literature as a
| virtue and a problem for humans. I find real life is no
| different.
| Peritract wrote:
| I think that's still too rosy a view; it's clear with a
| lot of big tech that they never had the ideals in the
| first place. They use claims of principle for marketing
| purposes and then discard them when it's no longer
| convenient.
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| I can't think of a single thing Meta does that isn't driven
| by pure greed.
| ben_w wrote:
| Yes, though Meta is a bad example as they started off
| with the values of Zuckerberg, and still have them.
| endofreach wrote:
| Exactly right. But i think it makes it a good example
| actually. Company DNA is a thing. Bill Gates isn't
| running microsoft anymore. Still...
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| What would be more appropriate example?
| ben_w wrote:
| Apple, Tesla, Oculus.
|
| The first two are definitely "heroes who lived long
| enough to be villains"; Oculus is more of an "I recon"
| due to how it was seen right up until getting bought by
| Facebook.
|
| Adobe?
| shafyy wrote:
| LOL, Palmer Luckey is a right-wing war mongering
| psychopath.
| hamasho wrote:
| But in the stock market, it is almost impossible for
| companies like Anthropic or any successful startups not
| to become villains (profit first no matter what).
| Anthropic especially needs to burn huge amount of money,
| so they need a lot of funding. The only way to keep
| founders' idealism is probably to copy Zuckerberg. Divide
| stocks with and without voting-power and trade only no-
| voting stocks.
| ben_w wrote:
| I'm not denying 95% of that, only saying that Zuckerberg
| didn't have any idealism to lose in the first place.
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| I actually forgot that his first site was facemash which
| single purpose was to rate "hotness" of each individual
| girl on his University.
| freejazz wrote:
| Anthropic is not a public company.
| amunozo wrote:
| Oh sure. I don't want to say everybody are driven by
| ideals and not greed, but that even people with strong
| ideals and good intentions can do a lot of bad by being
| blinded by those same ideals.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| All of Meta's VR stuff should rationally be cut loose and
| refunded if it were all about greed. That stuff only
| survives because Zuck is a nerd who wants it to happen
| (but it's not going to.)
| OtherShrezzing wrote:
| I think most people are conscious that, irrespective of a
| founders vision, company morals usually don't survive the
| MBA-inisation phase of a company's growth.
| qdotme wrote:
| Depends. Many still reflect the founders vision; even if
| that vision might have evolved over time.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Can you provide an example of that for an American
| venture backed corporation older than a decade?
| achenet wrote:
| Not the person you're replying to, and I may be wrong
| about this, but Amazon?
|
| Jeff's original vision was "relentless customer focus"
| and ...
|
| actually on second thought I'm seeing the argument
| 'Amazon stopped caring about customers and is in full
| enshittification mode at this point'.
|
| But maybe Amazon circa ~2010/2015, or Google around 2010
| was still pretty close to the original vision of customer
| service/organizing the world's information.
|
| Or Apple? They're still making nice computers, although
| not sure they count as VC backed.
|
| Stripe perhaps? Hashicorp?
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Well Google's vision was to catalog all the world's data
|
| Apple wanted to make personal computing stable - they
| were absolutely VC backed
|
| I suppose the original question is vague enough that it
| could always encompass everything which is founders
| vision even if the vision changes so it's like OK well
| then then there's nothing really to say that you're
| stable too it's just some whatever the function of the
| person who started the organization is and even that you
| could debate
| whstl wrote:
| True. Which is all the more reason for calling bullshit on
| claims of "doing good" or "having ideals" by anyone
| building a company that can eventually be ran my MBAs.
| j45 wrote:
| The impact of MBAs might be decreasing..
| dust42 wrote:
| Exactly. At this level you don't just put out a statement of
| your personal opinion. This is run through PR and coordinated
| with the investors. Otherwise the CEO finds himself on the
| street by tomorrow. Whatever their motives are, it is aligned
| with VC, because if it is not then the next day there is
| another CEO. As the parent stated, this is not cynicism. I
| see this just rather factual, it is simply the laws of money.
| qdotme wrote:
| FWIW, I don't actually know if board of Anthropic has
| actual power to replace its CEO or if Dario has retained
| some form of personal super-control shares Zuckerberg
| style.
|
| At some level of growth, the dynamics between competent
| founders and shareholders flip. Even if the board could
| afford to replace a CEO, it might not be worth it.
| dust42 wrote:
| I'd counter that at this level of capital, if the CEO
| doesn't well align with the capital, then super-control
| shares will be overpowered by super-lawyers and if there
| is need some super-donations. OpenAI was a public
| interest company...
| blackqueeriroh wrote:
| This is fundamentally incorrect.
| qdotme wrote:
| Not at all. Especially at that level of capital. It's the
| equity equivalent of ,,if you owe a bank a million
| dollars, you're in trouble. If you owe a bank a billion
| dollars, the bank is in trouble".
|
| Capital is extremely fungible. Typically extremely
| overleveraged. Lawyers are on the other hand extremely
| overprotective. They won't generally risk the destruction
| of capital, even in slam-dunk cases. Vide WeWork.
| nradov wrote:
| Anthropic has an odd voting structure. While the CEO
| Dario Amodei holds no super-voting shares, there are
| special shares controlled by a separate council of
| trustees who aren't answerable to investors and who have
| the power to replace the Board. So in practice it comes
| down to personal relationships.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > it is simply the laws of money
|
| The First Law of Money: Money buys the Law.
| avmich wrote:
| That's maybe the second law. The first one is: money is
| always finite.
|
| Look at how Elon Musk behaved. Do you think VC gladly
| approved what he did with Twitter? They might want to
| keep chasing quarterly results - but sometimes, like with
| Zukerberg, they can't. Not enough money. Similar examples
| with Google rounds or how much more financially backed
| politician loses rather often to a competitor. Or, if you
| will, Vladimir Putin's idea that he can buy whatever
| results he wants - and that guy is a very wealthy person.
| There are always limits, putting the money law to the
| second place. We might argue that often the existing
| money is enough... but in more geopolitical, continuum-
| curving cases there are other powerful forces.
| antonvs wrote:
| The Twitter acquisition wasn't funded by venture capital,
| so your question about VC approval doesn't apply.
|
| If you're using VC as a general term for "investor"
| (inaccurately), then the answer to your question is that
| the major investors, such as Larry Ellison and the Saudi
| monarchy, wanted _political_ control of Twitter, which
| meant that they did (apparently) approve what Musk did
| with it.
| ohbleek wrote:
| To quote Brennan Lee Mulligan, "Laws are threats made by
| the dominant socioeconomic ethnic group in a given
| nation."
| philipallstar wrote:
| Certainly pre-democracy, other than the ethnic group bit.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| The full[1] quote is:
|
| > "Laws are a threat made by the dominant socioeconomic
| ethnic group in a given nation. It's just the promise of
| violence that's enacted, and the police are basically an
| occupying army, you know what I mean?"
|
| ...Which is funny, but technically speaking, it's (more
| or less) a paraphrasing/extrapolation of the very serious
| political science definition of a state, "a monopoly over
| the legitimate use of violence in a defined territory"
|
| [1] Minus the last line, which I will allow others to
| discover for themselves
| GorbachevyChase wrote:
| I am suspicious the whole thing is a PR stunt to build
| public trust.
| absoluteunit1 wrote:
| I share this sentiment.
|
| In general - I don't know if it's a coincidence but here
| on HN for example, I've noticed an increasing amount of
| comments and posts emphasizing the narrative of how
| "well- intended" Anthropic is.
| ternwer wrote:
| Feel free to judge them by their actions rather than
| intentions. This situation being an example.
| Beestie wrote:
| I'd love to see the financial model that offsets losing
| your single biggest customer and substantial chunk of
| your annual revenue with some vague notion of public
| trust.
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| I'd love to see any evidence that this single biggest
| customer is provably and irreversibly lost on all levels
| of scrutiny as a result of this attempt at building
| public trust.
| mingus88 wrote:
| This is so short sighted. We are so early into this AI
| revolution, and this administration is obviously in a
| tailspin, with the only folk left in charge being the
| least capable ones we have seen in a decade
|
| Imagine what the conversation would be like if Mattis, a
| highly decorated and respected leader were still the
| SecDef. Instead we are seeing bully tactics from a failed
| cable news pundit who has neither earned nor deserved any
| respect from the military he represents.
|
| We are two elections and a major health issue away from a
| complete change of course.
|
| But short sightedness is the name of the quarterly
| reporting game, so who knows.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| I'm seriously worried there won't be more elections. Not
| hyperbole at all.
| conception wrote:
| Putin crushes every election he has. Of course there
| would be more elections.
| delecti wrote:
| I don't think it's crazy to worry that, but elections are
| run by the states, there are over 100,000 poling places
| nationally, and people are pissed. On Jan 3, the entire
| current House of Representatives terms end; Democratic
| governors will still hold elections, and if there haven't
| been elections in GOP-led states, they're out of
| representation. There are so many hurdles in the way of
| the fascists canceling or heavily interfering in
| elections, and they're all just so stupid.
| ckemere wrote:
| WaPo headline "Administration plans to declare emergency
| to federalize election rules."
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/02/26/trump-
| ele...
| delecti wrote:
| Yeah, they can _plan_ whatever they want. No such
| authority exists, and it must really be emphasized that
| they 're all _so_ stupid.
| abustamam wrote:
| Stupid and effective are not mutually exclusive.
|
| I do agree with you that no such authority exists, but
| this administration seems to get away with a lot of
| things they have no authority to do.
| Loudergood wrote:
| If you think they're pissed now, just wait to see how
| they react to election interference.
|
| I recently read up on how the House of Representatives
| renews itself and quite frankly it's one of the most
| beautiful processes I've seen, completely removing the
| influence of the prior congress.
| palmotea wrote:
| > I'm seriously worried there won't be more elections.
| Not hyperbole at all.
|
| Why? That's a an unrealistic fear, driven by the insanely
| overwrought political rhetoric of 2026. Think about it:
| elections will be the _absolute last_ thing to go.
|
| If you want something to worry about, worry about this:
|
| > And the stakes of politics are almost always incredibly
| high. I think they happen to be higher now. And I do
| think a lot of what is happening in terms of the
| structure of the system itself is dangerous. I think that
| the hour is late in many ways. My view is that a lot of
| people who embrace alarm don't embrace what I think
| obviously follows from that alarm, which is the
| willingness to make strategic and political decisions you
| find personally discomfiting, even though they are
| obviously more likely to help you win.
|
| > Taking political positions that'll make it more likely
| to win Senate seats in Kansas and Ohio and Missouri.
| Trying to open your coalition to people you didn't want
| it open to before. Running pro-life Democrats.
|
| > And one of my biggest frustrations with many people
| whose politics I otherwise share is the unwillingness to
| match the seriousness of your politics to the seriousness
| of your alarm. I see a Democratic Party that often just
| wants to do nothing differently, even though it is
| failing -- failing in the most obvious and consequential
| ways it can possibly fail.
| (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/opinion/interesting-
| times...)
| filoeleven wrote:
| It's not an unrealistic fear. Trump has been making
| noises about "taking over elections." Abolishing
| elections wholesale is very unlikely, sure, but a sham
| election rigged by a corrupt government? That's standard
| fare for authoritarians. And there's evidence of voting
| anomalies in swing states in the 2024 election.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/27/trump-
| voting...
|
| https://electiontruthalliance.org/
| abustamam wrote:
| Yeah, Russia still has "elections" for all the good that
| does them.
| HoratioHellpop wrote:
| Trump _says_ lots. Most of it doesn't come true.
| palmotea wrote:
| FYI, even though you have a new account, you were banned
| from your first comment and all your comments
| automatically show up as hidden-by-default to most users.
| bostik wrote:
| It's not who votes that counts, but who counts the votes.
|
| (Attributed to Stalin, but likely comes from a despot
| earlier in the history.)
| panarky wrote:
| Authoritarian nations continue to have elections, turnout
| is near 100%, and Dear Leader wins with 90% of the vote.
| re666 wrote:
| Mattis- the same highly decorated and respected leader
| that was on the board of directors at Theranos... edit:
| added Mattis
| travisgriggs wrote:
| > We are so early into this AI revolution...
|
| I keep hoping it's almost over.
|
| Not trying to be the Luddite. Had multiple questions to
| AI tools yesterday, and let Claude/Zed do some
| boilerplate code/pattern rewriting.
|
| I've worked in software for 35 years. I've seen many new
| "disruptive" movements come and go (open source, objects,
| functional, services, containers, aspects, blockchains,
| etc). I chose to participate in some and not in others.
| And whether I made the wrong choices or not, I always
| felt like I could get a clear enough picture of where the
| bandwagon was going that I could jump in, or hold back,
| or kind of. My choices weren't always the same as others,
| so it's not like it was obvious to everyone. But the
| signal felt more deterministic.
|
| With LLM/agents, I find I feel the most unease and
| uncertainty with how much to lean in, and in what ways to
| lean in, than I ever have before. A sort of enthusiasm
| paralysis that is new.
|
| Perhaps it's just my age.
| radley wrote:
| Didn't we go through this same kind of uncertainty with
| PCs, the internet, and smartphones? It's early and we're
| all noodling around.
| jrs235 wrote:
| The rest of the world moves to using you?
| GorbachevyChase wrote:
| Their whole strategy is that the lack of a legal moat
| protecting their product is an existential threat to
| human life. They are the only moral AI and their
| competitors must be sanctioned and outlawed. At which
| point they can transition from AI as commodity to "value"
| based pricing.
|
| It's not going to work, but I can't blame Amodei and
| friends for trying to make themselves trillionaires.
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| $200M is >2% ARR at the last numbers we got from them,
| and would take them back... _checks notes_... literally
| only a few days of ARR growth.
| tdeck wrote:
| This is why we should be skeptical of companies that want
| to tie themselves to the military industrial complex in
| the first place.
| georgefrowny wrote:
| In none of their statements do they say they won't do the
| things:
|
| > we cannot in good conscience accede to their request.
|
| That's very specifically worded to not say "under no
| circumstances will we do this".
|
| > Two such use cases have never been included in our
| contracts with the Department of War, and we believe they
| should not be included now
|
| Is not saying they won't eventually be included.
|
| They've left themselves a backtrack, and with the care
| there this statement has been crafted, that's surely
| deliberate.
| reactordev wrote:
| This. This is a public misdirection. They already signed
| a new deal. It may be to their disliking but nothing in
| the statement prevents them from moving forward.
| uncletammy wrote:
| That is speculation. You might be correct but this
| statement could simply be a strong signal to the
| administration to back down. A hail Mary.
| 5o1ecist wrote:
| > ... to back down.
|
| Or else what?
| abustamam wrote:
| Isn't that what we're all doing in this thread? We could
| certainly take the document at face value but as a parent
| commenter said, almost every company starts off with
| "don't be evil" then goes and does evil things.
|
| Is anthropic different? Maybe. But personally I don't see
| any indication to give them the benefit of the doubt.
| darkwater wrote:
| This. I don't get why you are getting downvoted. The
| statement literally says: Two such use
| cases have never been included in our contracts with the
| Department of War, and we believe they should not be
| included now:
|
| Last word is very important: "now".
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| Being a tech forum centered around VC funding means we
| have a TON of tech bros (derogatory) here, who believe in
| nothing beyond getting their own piles of money for doing
| literally anything they can be paid to do. If you offered
| these guys $20 to murder a grandmother they'd ask if they
| have to cover the cost of the murder weapon or if that's
| provided.
|
| I get it to a degree, people gotta eat, and especially
| right now the market is _awful_ and, not to mention, most
| hyperscaler businesses have been psychologically
| obliterating people for a decade or more at this point.
| Why not graduate to doing it with weapons of war too?
| But, personally, I sleep better at night knowing nothing
| I 've made is helping guide missiles into school busses
| but that's just me.
| ascorbic wrote:
| I'm not saying whether or not they're planning to back
| down, but this sentence doesn't imply that. The "now" is
| clearly meant to be in reference to the fact they've not
| in the past.
| hdb2 wrote:
| > They've left themselves a backtrack, and with the care
| there this statement has been crafted, that's surely
| deliberate.
|
| What's worse, someone in their PR department will read
| this thread and be disappointed that the spin didn't
| work.
| brookst wrote:
| I mean that's just adulthood.
|
| There are outcomes where the US government seizes the
| company. Not super likely, not impossible.
|
| It would be naive to write a statement that a future
| event will never happen, under any circumstances. People
| who make _that_ mistake get lambasted for hypocrisy when
| unforeseen circumstances arise.
|
| I see recognition that making absolute statements about
| the future is best left to zealots and prophets. Which to
| me speaks of maturity, not duplicity.
| 5o1ecist wrote:
| I'm not sure why you are getting downvoted.
|
| It is indeed a naive, or more likely a dishonest thing to
| do.
|
| Anyone can promise anything. When there's little to no
| accountability and public memory/opinion doesn't last a
| week (or is easily manipulated anyway), then promises
| mean literally nothing. Very like how, in politics,
| temporary means permanent.
|
| Or HackerNews itself, with them implementing a little Big
| Brother. It will, of course, absolutely and without a
| doubt only "nudge" people and it will absolutely, under
| no circumtances, pinky promise, never get any worse or do
| anything else but that.
|
| When there's millions of fools, then those, who actually
| recognize that they are being fooled, are rarely ever
| significant in numbers. They're drowned out by the fools,
| until said fools "wake up" and cry "if only we had
| known!".
|
| Well ... you could have known, but in your mindlessness
| you didn't listen and think.
|
| "It must be true, because they say so. D'uh. What are
| you, dumb?"
| zhengyi13 wrote:
| > There are outcomes where the US government seizes the
| company. Not super likely, not impossible.
|
| Are there historical examples in the US specifically
| where we've nationalized a business?
|
| Because we've certainly invaded countries and
| assassinated leaders over exactly the same.
|
| ETA: I could have answered my own question with two
| minutes of research. Yes, we have:
| https://thenextsystem.org/history-of-nationalization-in-
| the-...
| HardCodedBias wrote:
| It absolutely is a PR stunt. And the media is cheering.
|
| It's absurd.
|
| It's simple: If you do not like working with the
| military, cancel your contract with the military and pay
| the penalties.
|
| They are explicitly not doing that.
| FabHK wrote:
| > If you do not like working with the military, ...
|
| Eh? But they do like to work with the military. How else
| are you going to "defend the United States and other
| democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries"?
|
| They want to work with the military, with just two
| additional guardrails.
| ternwer wrote:
| This effectively is cancelling, isn't it?
|
| You're implying cancelling quietly would be better. But
| the department would just use a different supplier. This
| seems like the action someone _would_ take if they cared
| about the issue.
| Lutger wrote:
| Surely you mean the laws of shareholder capitalism. There
| are many things you can do with money, and only some of
| them are legally backed by rules that ensure absolute
| shareholder power.
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| Cynicism is the newspeak substitute for sincerity, no need to
| worry about being called a cynic in this post-truth world of
| snowflakes.
| puppymaster wrote:
| and that's okay. so we judge them one decision at a time. So
| far, Anthropic is good in my book.
| Aperocky wrote:
| Reminds me of Effective Altruism and the collective results
| of people claiming to believe in that virtue.
| tyingq wrote:
| I don't think it's cynical to acknowledge the pattern that
| publicly owned companies will eventually cave to the desires
| of their shareholders.
|
| I understand Anthropic is not public, but I assume there's an
| IPO coming.
| mcv wrote:
| Exactly. I'd love to believe that at Anthropic, idealism
| trumps money. But Google was once idealistic too. OpenAI was
| too. It's really hard to resist the pull of money. Especially
| if you're a for-profit corporation, but OpenAI wasn't even
| that at first.
| vladms wrote:
| > everyone in this industry
|
| So in the last 20 years there is nothing good coming out of
| the software industry (if this is the industry you mention) ?
|
| I find it somehow ironic, because this type of generalization
| is for me the same issue that some of the people saying "they
| want to make a better place" have: accept reality is complex.
|
| There were huge benefits for society from the software
| industry in the last 20 years. There were (as well!) huge
| downsides. Around 2000 lots of people were "Microsoft will
| lock us in forever". 20 years later, the fear "moved" to
| other things. Imagining that companies can last forever seems
| misguided. IBM, Intel, Nokia and others were once great and
| the only ones but ultimately got copied and pushed from the
| spotlight.
| whstl wrote:
| Everyone in this industry making a certain bullshit claim.
| I did qualify my statement. Don't cut my words to make a
| strawman.
|
| Additionally I state in the end that I do believe it's
| possible.
| vladms wrote:
| So do you know everyone in the industry that made that
| such a claim? Sure, maybe you meant to restrict it
| further to "everyone I have noticed personally that
| said/wrote that" (or anything along the lines), but even
| then, do you know all the stuff that they did after
| saying it? (as the statement also included "doing the
| opposite" which I find quite strong).
|
| If I see "everyone" I would expect it to actually mean
| "everyone under the constraints", the word "everyone" has
| a certain meaning and is very powerful, why use for
| situations where other words like "many", "most" might be
| more appropriate?
| whstl wrote:
| _> So do you know everyone in the industry that made that
| such a claim_
|
| Of course, I wouldn't have said so otherwise.
|
| Here's another one: every pedant in this website never
| adds anything useful to any conversation.
| lebovic wrote:
| I don't think it's cynical to believe that a company can make
| the world a worse place, or that Anthropic as a company will
| make many horrible choices.
|
| I do think it's cynical to believe that people, and groups of
| people, can't be motivated by more than money.
| personjerry wrote:
| At some point I've wondered if "fiduciary duty", when pushed
| to highest corporate levels, always conflicts with "make the
| world a better place"
|
| i.e. Fiduciary Duty Considered Harmful
| 5o1ecist wrote:
| > not related to people's "understanding".
|
| Except for the understanding that it's foolish to believe
| anything that sounds too good to be true. Yes, believing that
| people who want to make money/achieve positions of power,
| also want to make the world a better place, is absolutely
| foolish. Ridiculously foolish.
| jug wrote:
| This is a component for sure, but also think of why Anthropic
| was born. It exists because of disagreements with OpenAI on
| the values of AI safety and principles.
| tristor wrote:
| > 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.
|
| To expand on that a bit, many of us (myself included) fully
| believe founders set out with lofty and good goals when
| organizations are small. Scale is power, and power corrupts.
| It's as simple as that. It's an exceptionally rare quality to
| resist that corruption, and everyone has a breaking point. We
| understand humans because we are humans, and we understand
| that large organizations, especially corporations, are
| fundamentally incapable of acting morally (in fact
| corporations are inherently amoral).
| GardenLetter27 wrote:
| Anthropic doesn't want us to have the right to run open weight
| models on our own computers. They were never the good guys.
| u1hcw9nx wrote:
| What I read is: Anything not open source, open weight, is
| evil.
|
| I disagree. The concept of nuance, putting things in context,
| is the source of all good in internet discussions.
| GardenLetter27 wrote:
| No, but lobbying the government to prohibit open source /
| open weight models is evil.
|
| They literally want to use state violence to control what
| we can do on our own computers.
| FabHK wrote:
| Anytime there is any law about anything you can say that
| it's ultimately backed "using state violence". That's
| just silly. As silly as the notion that there shouldn't
| be any rules and limits whatsoever about what you can do
| with your computer.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| _> As silly as the notion that there shouldn 't be any
| rules and limits whatsoever about what you can do with
| your computer._
|
| Hard disagree. There shouldn't be any rules or limits
| whatsoever about what I can do with my computer, and
| especially _ON_ my computer, as long as the thing I 'm
| doing doesn't break other laws (CFAA, CSAM, etc).
|
| This is, after all, _Hacker_ News.
| yamal4321 wrote:
| 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"
|
| :)
| tpoacher wrote:
| > 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.
| xvector wrote:
| Shareholders do not control Anthropic's board, it is not
| structured like a typical corporation.
| yayr wrote:
| 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...
| fergie wrote:
| > 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)
| ozgung wrote:
| 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.
| Yizahi wrote:
| 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.
| _s_a_m_ wrote:
| We will see..
| retinaros wrote:
| 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
| drawfloat wrote:
| "Mass surveillance of anywhere else in the world but America"
| is not the great idealistic position you are making it out to
| be.
| Aldipower wrote:
| 3 words for you: This is naive.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > 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.
| wrsh07 wrote:
| They didn't claim to have pacifist ideals
|
| In fact, they claim to be pro America and pro democracy and
| have repeatedly expressed concerns about autocratically
| governed countries.
|
| Just because you disagree with their ideals doesn't mean
| they're not holding to theirs
| leshow wrote:
| They sound exactly like George Bush and every other
| American leader who's claimed high minded ideals while they
| engage in interventions in direct contradiction to those
| ideals around the world
| wrsh07 wrote:
| To be clear, I don't think anthropic is itself
| intervening.
|
| The concerns they've raised about authoritarianism is "AI
| enabling authoritarians."
|
| When they push back on the US government wanting to use
| Claude to (legally) surveil US citizens, that still feels
| consistent to me as a concern about authoritarianism.
|
| I think it's reasonable to hear high minded ideals and
| become skeptical, but in this case I'm surprised that
| people are trying to accuse them of hypocrisy
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Lots of people driven by ideals work for the US military. Not
| me, ever, but other people certainly.
| keybored wrote:
| 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.
| i_love_retros wrote:
| 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.
| AndyMcConachie wrote:
| > 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.
| peyton wrote:
| "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...
| pmarreck wrote:
| 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.
| windexh8er wrote:
| > 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...
| cue_the_strings wrote:
| 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.
| synergy20 wrote:
| 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.
| chrisjj wrote:
| > driven by values
|
| So what? Every business is driven by values.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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.
| cgh wrote:
| Not a hot take at all. Probably the best take in this thread.
| didip wrote:
| I like the enthusiasm, but remember that Google used to be:
| "Don't be Evil"
| learingsci wrote:
| I remember when people said the exact same thing about Google.
| Youth is wasted on the young.
| FeloniousHam wrote:
| > 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."
| zer0gravity wrote:
| 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.
| psychoslave wrote:
| 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.
| andoando wrote:
| The world running on a few powerful mens ideals is a problem in
| itself.
| toddmorrow wrote:
| you're suffering from Stockholm syndrome
| tinfoilhatter wrote:
| > 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.
| duped wrote:
| 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.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| 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.
|
| I personally think this is one of the most positive of human
| traits: we're almost pathologically unwilling to murder others
| _even on a battlefield_ with our own lives at stake!
|
| This compulsion to avoid killing others can be _trivially_
| trained out of any AI system to make sure that they take 100% of
| every potential shot, massacre all available targets, and
| generally act like Murderbots from some Black Mirror episode.
|
| Anyone who participates in any such research is doing work that
| can only be categorised as _the greatest possible evil_ ,
| tantamount to purposefully designing a T800 Terminator after
| having watched the movies.
|
| If anyone here on HN reading this happens to be working at one of
| the big AI shops and you're even tangentially involved in any
| such military AI project -- even just cabling the servers or
| whatever -- I figuratively spit in your eye in disgust. You
| deserve far, _far worse._
| ninjagoo wrote:
| > 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.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I would love to see a reference for that!
|
| AFAIK the rounds shot to kills ratio is still north of ten
| thousand in most modern conflicts.
|
| I've heard anecdotally that drone operators in Ukraine have a
| ratio of about ten drones per kill and rack up multiple kills
| per day every day. Supposedly the pilots "burn out" due to
| the psychological impacts.
| calgoo wrote:
| Yea and it also does not help that the people they are
| killing are just random people that where picked up, thrown
| in a van, and driven to the front-line to be meat shields.
| ninjagoo wrote:
| References for psych conditioning of modern soldiers and
| impacts on reintegration: (for latter links may have to
| read between the lines)
|
| [0] https://isme.tamu.edu/JSCOPE00/Kilner00.html#_edn3
|
| [1] https://www.sfgate.com/science/article/THE-SCIENCE-OF-
| CREATI...
|
| [2]
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797615579274
|
| [3]
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0018720815605703
|
| [4] https://www.fairobserver.com/world-news/us-news/this-
| is-how-...
|
| [5] https://thestrategybridge.org/the-
| bridge/2016/7/29/reflectio...
|
| [6] https://thestrategybridge.org/the-
| bridge/2016/7/29/reflectio...
|
| [7] https://mn.gov/governor/newsroom/press-
| releases/?id=1055-441...
|
| [8] https://press.armywarcollege.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?ar
| ticle...
|
| [9] https://www.usar.army.mil/Portals/98/Documents/Marksman
| ship/...
|
| [10] https://www.bits.de/NRANEU/others/amd-us-
| archive/FM3-22.9(03...
|
| [11] https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/analysis/201
| 1/04/3...
| newAccount2025 wrote:
| Impressive and heartening. Bravo.
| anonym29 wrote:
| Anthropic has already cooperated too much with the US
| Intelligence Community, but better some restraint than none, and
| better late than never.
| m101 wrote:
| I wonder whether what is really behind this is that they can't
| make a model without the safeguards because it would require re-
| training?
|
| They get to look good by claiming it's an ethical stance.
| huslage wrote:
| It is not the Department of War. He's towing the line from the
| get-go. Forget this guy.
| Teodolfo wrote:
| If these values really meant anything, then Anthropic should stop
| working with Palantir entirely given their work with ICE,
| domestic surveilance, and other objectionable activities.
| oxqbldpxo wrote:
| It may sound crazy, but they should just move the company to
| Europe or Canada, instead of putting up with this.
| scottyah wrote:
| 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.
| mhjkl wrote:
| Because as we all know the EU would never try using AI for mass
| surveillance /s
| pell wrote:
| So far, the EU's track record on privacy is definitely a lot
| better though. Not saying it'd always stay that way of
| course.
| geophile wrote:
| I think it's a pretty strong statement. It is unfortunately
| weakened by going along with the "Department of War" propaganda.
| I believe that the name is "Department of Defense" until Congress
| says otherwise, no matter what the Felon in Chief says.
| noupdates wrote:
| Why would the US security apparatus outsource the model to a
| private company? DARPA or whatever should be able to finance a
| frontier model and do whatever they want.
| sbinnee wrote:
| As a non US citizen, this article sounds mildly concerning to me.
| My country is an ally of US. Good. But I don't know how I would
| feel when I start seeing Anthropic logos on every weapon we buy
| from US.
|
| Aside my concern, Dario Amodei seems really into politics. I have
| read a couple of his blog posts and listened to a couple of
| podcast interviews here and there. Every time I felt like he
| sounded more like a politician than an entrepreneur.
|
| I know Anthropic is particularly more mission-driven than, say
| OpenAI. And I respect that their constitutional ways of training
| and serving Claude models. Claude turned out to be a great
| success. But reading a manifest speaking of wars and their
| missions, it gives me chills.
| ainch wrote:
| 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.
| kumarvvr wrote:
| All this is for nought.
|
| The power lies with the US Govt.
|
| And its corrupt, immoral and unethical, run by power hungry
| assholes who are not being held accountable, headed by the
| asshole who does a million illegal things every day.
|
| Ultimately, Anthropic will fold.
|
| All this is to show to their investors that they tried everything
| they could.
| mylifeandtimes wrote:
| 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.
| techblueberry wrote:
| 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.
| techblueberry wrote:
| I was wrong.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| >We will not knowingly provide a product that puts America's
| warfighters and civilians at risk.
|
| Implying other civilians can be put at risk
| dzonga wrote:
| these guys are selling snake oil to the gvt - cz they know they
| can get cash based on fear.
|
| the Chinese are releasing equivalent models for free or super
| cheap.
|
| AI costs / energy costs keep going up for American A.I companies
|
| while china benefits from lower costs
|
| so yeah you've to spread F.U.D to survive
| andxor wrote:
| The models are hardly equivalent.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| I can't help but highlight the problem that is created by the
| renaming of the Deptartment of Defense to the Department of War:
|
| > importance of using AI to defend the United States
|
| > Anthropic has therefore worked proactively to deploy our models
| to the Department of War
|
| So you believe in helping to _defend_ the United States, but you
| gave the models to the Department of _War_ - explicitly, a
| government arm now named as inclusive of a actions of a pure
| offensive capability with no defensive element.
|
| You don't have to argue that you are not supporting the _defense_
| of the US by declining to engage with the Department of _War_.
| That should be the end of the discussion here.
| 8note wrote:
| it hasnt actually been renamed though.
|
| the name is still the department of defence by law. department
| of war is a subheading tagline
| 2001zhaozhao wrote:
| Congratulations, you just got a new $200 Claude Max plan
| customer.
| coolca wrote:
| Imagine being so cautious with your words, only to have
| 'Department of War' in your title
| wiltsecarpenter wrote:
| Oh dear, what a mess of a statement that is. He wants to use AI
| "to defeat our autocratic adversaries", just what or who are they
| exactly? Claude seems to think they are Russia, China, North
| Korea and Iran. Is Claude really a tool to "defeat" these
| countries somehow? This statement also seems pretty messy:
| "Anthropic understands that the Department of War, not private
| companies, makes military decisions.", well then just how do they
| think Claude is going to be used there if not to make or help
| make military decisions?
|
| The statement goes on about a "narrow set of cases" of potential
| harm to "democratic values", ...uh, hmm, isn't the potential harm
| from a government controlled by rapists (Hegseth) and felons
| using powerful AI against their perceived enemies actually pretty
| broad? I think I could come up with a few more problem areas than
| just the two that were listed there, like life, liberty, pursuit
| of happiness, etc.
| SamDc73 wrote:
| Didn't Dario Amodei ask for more government intervention
| regarding AI?
| jobs_throwaway wrote:
| Not a contradiction with this post
| joshAg wrote:
| torment nexus creators are shocked, appalled even, to discover
| that people desire to use it to torment others at nearby nexus
| DaedalusII wrote:
| They made it easy to generate powerpoint presentations, that is
| the real reason DoW is using them
|
| this is a very chauvinistic approach... why not another model
| replace anthropic here? I sense because gov people like using
| excel plugin and font has nice feel. a few more week of this and
| xAI is new gov AI tool
| jwpapi wrote:
| Am i the only one who understands the deparments position? Like
| if another country will have it without safeguards, why would I
| not want it without safeguards. I can still be the safeguard, but
| having safeguards enforced by another entity that potentially has
| to face negative financial consequences seems like a
| disadvantage, would be weird to accept that as department of war.
|
| I understand the risk, but that is the pill.
| 8note wrote:
| 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.
| tehjoker wrote:
| The framing of this is that the United States conducts legitimate
| operations overseas, but that is extremely far from the truth. It
| treats China as a foreign adversary, which is nearly purely the
| framing from the U.S. side as an aggressor.
|
| AI should never be used in military contexts. It is an extremely
| dangerous development.
|
| Look at how US ally Israel used non-LLM AI technology "The
| Gospel" and "Lavender" to justify the murder of huge numbers of
| civilians in their genocide of Palestinians.
| 8note wrote:
| 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
| mooglevich wrote:
| "You are what you won't do for money." is a quote that seems apt
| here. Anthropic might not be a perfect company (none are,
| really), but I respect the stance being taken here.
| freakynit wrote:
| Welp, I never thought "Person of Interest" show coming to life
| anytime soon, but, here we are. In case you haven't watched the
| show, it's time to give it a go. Bare with season 2 though, since
| things really start to escalate from season 3 onwards. Season 1
| is a must though.
| LeakedCanary wrote:
| The Machine really had this all figured out
| freakynit wrote:
| Nice to find another fan of this criminally underrated show.
|
| The difference was always the "father".. The Machine was
| raised with a conscience. Samaritan wasn't.
| LeakedCanary wrote:
| The show is really underrated :D
|
| > The difference was always the "father".. The Machine was
| raised with a conscience. Samaritan wasn't.
|
| That's what made the show so ahead of its time. Once
| capability reaches a certain level, it's no longer about
| intelligence. It's about values. Feels like we're living
| through that shift now with all the alignment work around
| LLMs. And it's only going to matter more as capability
| scales.
| freakynit wrote:
| Agree 100%.
| zb1plus wrote:
| It would be hilarious if the Europeans got everyone visas and
| gave some kind of tax benefit to Anthropic and poached the entire
| company.
| skeptic_ai wrote:
| USA would bomb their country before any visa is approved
| tintor wrote:
| lol
| kvuj wrote:
| 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
| shawmakesmagic wrote:
| My man
| jijji wrote:
| the government should not be using any private LLM, they should
| build their own internal systems using publicly available LLM's,
| which change frequently anyway. I don't see why they would put
| their trust in a third party like that. This back and forth about
| "ethics" is a bunch of nonsense, and can be solved simply by
| going for a custom solution which would probably be orders of
| magnitude cheaper in the long run. The most expensive part is the
| GPU's used for inference, which can be produced in silicon [1].
|
| [1] https://taalas.com/products/
| mrcwinn wrote:
| I am incredibly proud to be a customer, both consumer level and
| as a business, of Anthropic and have canceled my OpenAI
| subscription and deleted ChatGPT.
| siliconc0w wrote:
| Good to them standing up to this administration. I doubt they
| actually want to put Claude in the kill-chain but this gives them
| a nice opportunity to go after 'woke AI' and maybe internal
| ammunition to go through the switching costs for xAI - given Elon
| more reason to line republican campaign coffers.
|
| I'm guessing this is because Anthropic partners with Google Cloud
| which has the necessary controls for military workloads while xAI
| runs in hastily constructed datacenter mounted on trucks or
| whatever to skirt environmental laws.
| gdiamos wrote:
| This is why I like Dario as a CEO - he has a system of ethics
| that is not jus about who writes the largest check.
|
| You may not agree with it, but I appreciate that it exists.
| dakolli wrote:
| This is a PR play by Anthropic, likely in coordination with the
| administration. They don't care, they just need the public to
| view them as a victim here, and then its business as usual.
|
| I prefer they get shutdown, llms are the worst thing to happen to
| society since the nuclear bomb's invention. People all around me
| are losing their ability to think, write and plan at an
| extraordinary pace. Keep frying your brains with the most useless
| tool alive.
|
| Remember, the person that showed their work on their math test in
| detail is doing 10x better than the guys who only knew how to use
| the calculator. Now imagine being the guy who thinks you don't
| need to know the math or how to use a calculator lol.
| adamgoodapp wrote:
| It's ok to mass survey foreign entities.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| Keep in mind: the government is very invested logistically in
| Anthropic.
|
| So no matter what xAI or OpenAI say - if and when they replace
| that spend - know that they are lying. They would have caved to
| the DoW's demands for mass surveillance.
|
| Because if there were some kind of concession, it would have been
| simplest just to work with Anthropic.
|
| Delete ChatGPT and Grok.
| myko wrote:
| There is no Department of War. This is the dumbest fucking
| timeline.
| myko wrote:
| 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.
| karmasimida wrote:
| Label them as supply chain risk and move on. Enough of this drama
| already
| danavar wrote:
| I think they are negotiating until Friday, but I agree. I think
| this was foolish.
| ozzymuppet wrote:
| Wow, I expected them to cave, and they did'nt!
|
| I'll be signing up to Claude again, Gemini getting kind of crap
| recently anyway.
| ethagnawl wrote:
| The official name of this organization remains _The United States
| Department of Defense_.
| nova22033 wrote:
| Why does DoD need claude? I thought xAI was "less woke" and far
| better than claude
| exabrial wrote:
| Brother in law did some "time with the brass" as he calls it. His
| take was that the DOD, er DOW would, as an example, never acquire
| a fighter jet that "wouldn't target and kill a civilian
| airliner", citing that on 9/11 we literally almost did that. The
| DOW is acquiring instruments of war, which is probably
| unconformable for a lot of people to consider.
|
| His conclusion was that the limits of use ought to be
| contractual, not baked into the LLM, which is where the fallout
| seems to be. He noted that the Pentagon has agreed to terms like
| that in the past.
|
| To me, that seems like reasonable compromise for both parties,
| but both sides are so far entrenched now we're unlikely to see a
| compromise.
| huevosabio wrote:
| 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.
| exabrial wrote:
| I think that's the nuance:
|
| * agreeing to the terms - one subject
|
| * having to the tool attempt to enforce said terms - another
| subject
| labrador wrote:
| I'd really like to know why Grok is inadequate?
| Havoc wrote:
| Because grok would shoot down the airliner with glee.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > 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.
| phyzome wrote:
| 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.
| khalic wrote:
| lol so you think expecting the pentagon to follow a pinky swear
| is ok? Preposterous or downright dishonest
| exabrial wrote:
| I didn't imply this either way.
| isamuel wrote:
| Amodei's use of "warfighters" (a Hegseth-era neologism for
| "soldiers") is truly nauseating.
| WatchDog wrote:
| 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.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Good to see one AI company not selling out their values in
| exchange for military contracts. This shouldn't be rare, but it
| is. Good for them.
| ninjagoo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio
|
| Previous case of tangling with the Government.
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=OfZFJThiVLI
|
| Jolly Boys - I Fought the Law
|
| Overall, this seems like it might be a campaign contribution
| issue. The DoD/DoW is happy to accept supplier contracts that
| prevent them from repairing their own equipment during battle
| (ref. military testimony favoring right-to-repair laws [1] ), so
| corporate matters like this shouldn't really be coming to a head
| publicly.
|
| [1] https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-
| releases/icymi-...
| paraschopra wrote:
| I'm very happy that Anthropic chose not to cave into US Dept of
| War's demands but their statement has an ambiguity.
|
| Does this mean they'd be ok to have their models be used for mass
| surveillance & autonomous weapons against OTHER countries?
|
| A clarification would help.
| freakynit wrote:
| People do realize there's a non-zero chance that Anthropic could
| have embedded some kind of hidden "backdoor" trigger in its
| training process, right?
|
| For example, a specific seed phrase that, when placed at the
| beginning of a prompt, effectively disables or bypasses safety
| guardrails.
|
| If something like that existed, it wouldn't be impossible to
| uncover:
|
| 1. A government agency (DoD/DoW/etc.) could discover the trigger
| through systematic experimentation and large-scale probing.
|
| 2. An Anthropic employee with knowledge of such a mechanism could
| be pressured or blackmailed into revealing it.
|
| 3. Company infrastructure could be compromised, allowing internal
| documentation or model details to be exfiltrated.
|
| Any of these scenarios would give Anthropic plausible
| deniability... they could "publicly" claim they never removed
| safeguards (or agreed to DoD/DoW demands), while in practice a
| select party had a way around them (may be even assisted from
| within).
|
| I'm not saying this "is" happening... but only that in a high-
| stakes standoff such as this, it's naive to assume technical
| guardrails are necessarily immutable or that no hidden override
| mechanisms could exist.
| jMyles wrote:
| ...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.
| marshmellman wrote:
| Well, now if DoD moves to another AI provider, we'll know what
| was compromised.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| They should try Sam Altman. He's just the kind of guy who would
| bend over for this kind of authoritarian demand.
| ccleve wrote:
| It's not clear to me whether Anthropic's limitations are
| technical or merely contractual. Is Anthropic actually putting
| the limitations in their prompts, so that the model would refuse
| to answer a question on how to do certain things?
|
| If so, that's a major problem. 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.
|
| If the limitations are contractual, then there is some room for
| negotiation.
| ninjagoo wrote:
| > 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-...
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Principles are the things you would never do for any amount of
| money. This might be the only principled tech company in the
| world.
| seydor wrote:
| Hegseth is an unintelligent bully who will not accept thiz and
| does not want to appear weak to the maga base. The consequences
| will be severe and anthropic will be forced
| QuiEgo wrote:
| I'd be amused beyond all reason if we saw this chain of events:
|
| - Anthropic says "no"
|
| - DoD says "ok you're a supply chain risk" (meaning many
| companies with gov't contracts can no longer use them)
|
| - A bunch of tech companies say "you know what? We think we'd
| lose more money from falling behind on AI than we'd lose from not
| having your contracts."
|
| Bonus points if its some of the hyperscalers like AWS.
|
| Hilarity ensues as they blow up (pun intended) their whole supply
| chain and rapidly backtrack.
| stevenpetryk wrote:
| 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.
| QuiEgo wrote:
| Thank you for the information. My fun little narrative is in
| shambles :(
| baq wrote:
| Not really, actually. This usually means outright ban
| because per project is next to impossible to enforce
| internally.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| This is correct. Maybe the startups living off
| DARPA/MTEC/etc contracts would continue using Claude, but
| the LM/NOG/Collins types wouldn't touch Anthropic with a
| ten foot pole.
| Aeroi wrote:
| in hindsight, the smart thing to do would have been to accept the
| contracts, knowingly enshittify the request, and protect other
| bad actors like Elon and xAI from ruthlessly compromising our
| democracies.
| angelgonzales wrote:
| Bottom line up front it's probably better to address the root
| cause of this situation with the general solution -- making
| government drastically smaller and less pervasive in people's
| lives and businesses. I remember not too long ago during the last
| administration very heavy handed unforgivable and traumatizing
| rhetoric and executive orders that intruded into the bodily
| autonomy of millions of Americans and threatened millions of
| American's jobs. This happened to me and I personally received
| threats that my livelihood would be taken away from me which were
| directly a result of the Executive branch. This isn't a problem
| where Congress has ceded powers to the Executive branch, it's a
| problem that so much power to legislate and tax is in the hands
| of the government at all! Every election cycle that results in a
| transfer of power to the other party inevitably results in
| handwringing and panic but this wouldn't be the case if citizens
| voted their powers back and government wasn't so consequential.
| techpression wrote:
| "Defense of democracy" is just another version of "think of the
| children".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
| noduerme wrote:
| This is at best a superficial attempt to show that Anthropic
| objects to what is already in play.
|
| Personally, I'd rather live in a country which didn't use AI to
| supplant either its intelligence or its war fighting apparatus,
| which is what is bound to happen once it's in the door. If
| enemies use AI for theirs, so much the better. Let them deal with
| the security holes it opens and the brain-drain it precipitates.
| I'm concerned about AI being abused for the two use cases he
| highlights, but I'm more concerned that the velocity at which
| it's being adopted to sift and collate classified information is
| way ahead of its ability to secure that information (forget about
| whether it makes good or bad decisions). It's almost
| inconceivable that the Pentagon would move so quickly to
| introduce a totally unknown entity with totally unknown security
| risks into the heart of our national security. _That_ should be
| the case against rapid adoption made by any peddler of LLMs who
| claims to be honest, to thwart the idiots in the administration
| who think they want this technology they can 't comprehend inside
| our most sensitive systems.
| giwook wrote:
| I commend Anthropic leadership for this decision.
|
| I simultaneously worry that the current administration will do
| something nuclear and actually make good on their threat to
| nationalize the company and/or declare the company a supply chain
| risk (which contradict each other but hey).
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I find the fact they used the vanity name "Department of War" and
| "Secretary of War" sad given Congress has not changed the name
| and the president doesn't get to decide the naming of statutory
| departments or secretary level roles. Maybe it's just an
| appeasement to the thin skinned people who need powder rooms and
| are former military journalists working for a draft dodger
| pretending to be tough guy "warriors," and trying to glorify the
| violence for political purposes, but every actual war vet I've
| ever known has never glorified war for the sake of war and they
| felt very seriously that defense is the reason to do what they
| had to do. My grandfather was a highly decorated career special
| forces (ranger, green beret, delta force, four silver stars and
| five bronze stars, etc) from WWII, Korea, and Vietnam and he was
| angry when I considered joining the military - he told me he did
| what he did so I wouldn't have to and to protect his country and
| there was no glory to be had in following his path. He would be
| absolutely horrified at what is going on and I thank god he died
| before we had these prima Donna politicians strutting around
| banging their chests and pretending war is something to be proud
| of.
|
| Good on anthropic for standing up for their principles, but boo
| on gifting them the discourtesy to the law of the land in
| acknowledging their vanity titles.
| narrator wrote:
| I mean you're all going to get killed by fully autonomous China
| AI war robots in 10 years anyway if you're not pure blood Han
| Chinese, but hey at least you'll provide something to laugh at
| for future Chinese Communist party history scholars. They will
| say, "Look at the stupid Baizuos, our propaganda ops convinced
| them all to commit collective suicide. Stupid barbarians. They
| proved they are an inferior race."
|
| Not joking, I've heard from sources that hardliners in the CCP
| think they can exterminate all white people followed later by all
| non-Han, but just keep on going along disarming yourselves for
| woke points. This is like unilaterally destroying all your
| nuclear weapons in 1946 and hoping the Soviets do to.
| gnarlouse wrote:
| huge if true.
|
| they also took down their security pledge in the same breath, so,
| you know. if anthropic ends up cutting a deal with the DoD this
| is obviously bullshit.
| creatonez wrote:
| > Our strong preference is to continue to serve the Department
| and our warfighters--with our two requested safeguards in place.
|
| It's absolutely disgusting that they would even consider working
| with the US government after the Gaza genocide started. These are
| modern day holocaust tabulation machine companies, and this time
| randomly they are selecting victims using a highly unpredictable
| black-box algorithm. The proper recourse here is to impeach the
| current administration, dissolve the companies that were
| complicit, and send their leadership to the hague for war crimes
| trials.
| aichen_tools wrote:
| The most important part of this statement is the explicit
| commitment to transparency around these discussions. In an
| industry where many AI companies engage with defense quietly,
| making a public statement -- even if imperfect -- creates
| accountability. The question is whether this standard will be
| adopted more broadly.
| bambax wrote:
| > _These latter two threats are inherently contradictory: one
| labels us a security risk; the other labels Claude as essential
| to national security._
|
| Nicely put. In other words: Department of Morons.
| newtonsmethod wrote:
| 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.
| bambax wrote:
| > _Are you reading things before agreeing with them?_
|
| No, unlike yourself, I'm just a random brainless bot.
| techblueberry wrote:
| That Biden stretched the definition for a questionable
| purpose doesn't change the original intent.
| contubernio wrote:
| "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."
|
| The moral incoherence and disconnect evident in these two
| statements is at the heart of why there is generalized mistrust
| of large tech companies.
|
| The "values" on display are everything but what they pretend to
| be.
| keybored wrote:
| > > 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.
| moktonar wrote:
| Well fucking done. Anthropic has just gained the "has bollocks"
| status. Also now we know what the govt is really up to with AI. G
| fucking g
| jatins wrote:
| What is OpenAI's stance on these issues? Are they working with
| DOW currently?
| toephu2 wrote:
| "Altman Says OpenAI Is Working on Pentagon Deal Amid Anthropic
| Standoff"
|
| https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openais-sam-altman-calls-for-de-...
| verisimi wrote:
| It sounds to me like anthropic are basically 'all in' except for
| the caveats. Looking at the 2 examples they provide:
|
| > 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.
|
| Why not do what the US are purported to do, where they spy on the
| others citizens and then hand over the data? Ie, adopt the
| legalistic view that "it's not _domestic_ surveillance if the
| surveillance is done in another country ", so just surveil from
| another data center.
|
| > 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. We will not knowingly provide a product that
| puts America's warfighters and civilians at risk.
|
| Yes, well that doesn't sound like _that_ strong an objection:
| fully automated defence could be good but the tech isn 't good
| enough yet, in their opinion.
| eisfresser wrote:
| > mass __domestic__ surveillance is incompatible with democratic
| values
|
| But mass surveillance of Australians or Danes is alligned with
| democratic values as long as it's the Americans doing it?
|
| I don't think the moral high ground Anthropic is taking here is
| high enough.
| mosst wrote:
| Most of the people on this site have disturbing beliefs about
| politics. Shallow and contradictory but strangely aligned.
| sneak wrote:
| 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.
| mocamoca wrote:
| 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...)
| lzbzktO1 wrote:
| "These latter two threats are inherently contradictory"
|
| After the standing up for democracy. This is my favorite part.
| "Your reasoning is deficient. Dismissed."
| placebo wrote:
| Grok's thoughts on the matter:
|
| "In an ideal world, I'd want xAI to emulate the maturity
| Anthropic showed here: affirm willingness to help defend
| democracies (including via classified/intel/defense tools),
| sacrifice short-term revenue if needed to block adversarial
| access, but stand firm on refusing to enable the most
| civilizationally corrosive misuses when the tech simply isn't
| ready or the societal cost is too high. Saying "no" to powerful
| customers--even the DoD--when the ask undermines core principles
| is hard, but it's the kind of spine that builds long-term trust
| and credibility."
|
| It also acknowledged that this is not what is happening...
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Ergo, those running Grok don't ... have that kind of spine.
| chrismsimpson wrote:
| The call is coming from inside the house
| with wrote:
| the interesting question is why dario published this. these
| disputes normally stay behind NDAs and closed doors. going public
| means anthropic decided the reputational upside of being the
| company that said no outweighs the risk of burning the
| relationship permanently. that's a calculated move, not really
| just a principled one.
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| This seems to be at least partially written by AI: There is no
| Department of War, it is called the Department of Defense.
| zzot wrote:
| That's not true anymore. Trump renamed it in September:
| https://www.war.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/429582...
| calgoo wrote:
| Just like the Gulf of Mexico is still called the Gulf of
| Mexico, if we just ignore his ramblings and continue calling
| the department of defense, we undermine his whole point. If
| we fall for all their crap and just accept it, then we loose
| in the end. Any resistance to a Fascist government is good
| resistance. Anything that makes their life's a little
| shittier is good. Better that they go around having tantrums
| about how they renamed it but no one is paying attention.
| nla wrote:
| TDS factor 11.
| not_that_d wrote:
| What is with the amount of comments talking about other countries
| in Europe "Doing the same"?
| gerash wrote:
| I respect the Anthropic leadership for not being greedy like many
| others
| GreenJacketBoy wrote:
| "fully autonomous weapons" from a private company; "Department of
| War". Hard to believe I'm not reading science fiction.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Service guarantees citizenship, would you like to know more?
| Bengalilol wrote:
| TLDR: << depends on where you live >>
| rustyhancock wrote:
| Surely this is a powerful signal to divest from Anthropic if you
| don't live in the US? There's a lot of here's what we support you
| do to foreigners but no way can you do it in the US?
|
| I can never tell how much of this is puffery from Anthropic.
|
| I do think they like to overstate their power.
| phgn wrote:
| > I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to
| defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our
| autocratic adversaries.
|
| Was this written by the state department?
|
| How can you think that a "department of war" does anything
| remotely good? And only object to domestic AI surveillance?
| michaelsshaw wrote:
| The entire article is very American-brained.
| pell wrote:
| The emphasis of "domestic" surveillance is definitely
| concerning.
| haritha-j wrote:
| Domestic mass ruveillance bad, mass urveilance on other nations
| good. Got it. Much like the military industrial complex, these
| organisations thrive during times of war, allows them to shirk
| off any actual morals using the us vs. them mentality.
| KronisLV wrote:
| Feels like they're leaving a lot of money on the table and
| inviting existential peril by not bending the knee to the current
| Great Leader.
|
| It does feel like what anyone sane _should_ do (especially given
| the contradictions being pointed out and the fact that the
| technology isn't even there yet) but when you metaphorically have
| Landa at your door asking for milk, I'm not sure it's smart.
|
| I feel like what most corpos would do, would be to just roll
| along with it.
| czierleyn wrote:
| Being from Europe I do not like the remark that he only objects
| to DOMESTIC mass surveillance.
| 7ero wrote:
| Sounds like following the google playbook, don't be evil, until
| the shareholders tell you to.
| 7ero wrote:
| Sound like they're following the google playbook, don't be evil,
| until the shareholders tell you to.
| maelito wrote:
| > to defeat our autocratic adversaries.
|
| I'm not sure who's targeted here. The folks that want to invade
| the EU ?
| Havoc wrote:
| That dual meaning stood out to me too
| wosined wrote:
| So they work with the military to do anything except: Mass
| domestic surveillance and Fully autonomous weapons. This means
| that they are wiling to do mass foreign surveillance, domestic
| surveillance of individuals, autonomous weapons which are
| commanded by operators. Got it. Such a great and moral company.
| wohoef wrote:
| Anthropic's two demands are: 1. No domestic mass surveillance 2.
| No autonomous killing
|
| I'm wondering if 2. was added simply to justify them not
| cooperating. It's a lot easier to defend 1. + 2. than just 1. If
| in the future they do decide to cooperate with the DoW, they
| could settle on doing only mass surveillance, but no autonomous
| killings. This would be presented as a victory for both parties
| since they both partially get what they wanted, even though
| autonomous killing was never really on the table for either of
| them. Which is a big if given the current administration.
| worik wrote:
| Is it so normal that the USA should be in such a state of
| constant war, and war readiness that this even makes sense?
| piokoch wrote:
| This is comical.
|
| "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"
|
| Translating to human language: mass surveillance in USA "is
| incompatible with democratic values" but if we do that against,
| say, Germany or France this is OK. Ah, and if we use AI for
| "counterintelligence missions", for instance against <put here an
| organization/group that current administration does not like>
| this is also OK, even if this happens in USA.
| rustyhancock wrote:
| Perhaps Anthropic thinks it can provide a local model that
| classifies surveillance targets as red blooded Americans.
| I_am_tiberius wrote:
| I'm still waiting for a proof that they don't use user data
| (directly or derived) for training.
| delaminator wrote:
| Hegseth doesn't need autonomous drones, he's got the Treasury.
| JacobiX wrote:
| >> We chose to forgo several hundred million dollars in revenue
| to cut off the use of Claude by firms linked to the Chinese
| Communist Party
|
| You can't choose to work with OFAC-designated entities.. there
| are very serious criminal penalties. Therefore, this statement is
| somewhat misleading in my opinion.
| ThouYS wrote:
| this is.. a nothing burger? they don't exclude working for
| autonomous weapons, nor do they exclude mass surveillance. so
| what gives?
| u1hcw9nx wrote:
| Google, OpenAI Employees Voice Support for Anthropic in Open
| Letter. _We Will Not Be Divided_ https://notdivided.org/
|
| -----
|
| The Department of War is threatening to
|
| - Invoke the Defense Production Act to force Anthropic to serve
| their model to the military and "tailor its model to the
| military's needs"
|
| - Label the company a "supply chain risk"
|
| All in retaliation for Anthropic sticking to their red lines to
| not allow their models to be used for domestic mass surveillance
| and autonomously killing people without human oversight.
|
| The Pentagon is negotiating with Google and OpenAI to try to get
| them to agree to what Anthropic has refused.
|
| They're trying to divide each company with fear that the other
| will give in. That strategy only works if none of us know where
| the others stand. This letter serves to create shared
| understanding and solidarity in the face of this pressure from
| the Department of War.
|
| We are the employees of Google and OpenAI, two of the top AI
| companies in the world.
|
| We hope our leaders will put aside their differences and stand
| together to continue to refuse the Department of War's current
| demands for permission to use our models for domestic mass
| surveillance and autonomously killing people without human
| oversight.
|
| Signed,
| eric-burel wrote:
| They love their dictator until it backfires, that's a quite old
| story.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Google employees were generally pretty anti-Trump, it's the
| senior leadership and the recommendation algorithms that are
| pro-Trump.
| u1hcw9nx wrote:
| Senior leaders in Google are not pro-Trump.
|
| Musk (Tesla, SpaceX), Ellison (Oracle) consistently
| supported Trump before his win was certain and are tight
| with Trump. They were megadonors behind his campaign.
|
| Bezos (Amazon, Blue Origin) and Zuckerberg (Meta) pivoted
| towards Trump in 2024 after it looked like he would wind
| second time. They are opportunistic bastards who try to
| weasel into the good side of Trump with varying results.
|
| Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia etc. just bend the knee.
| They are reluctant but pragmatic and try to protect the
| company when their competition Amazon, Meta and Oracle are
| on the inside. Notice that in this final group, CEOs lack
| autonomy. At Alphabet, Page and Brin retain controlling
| authority (and they just try to avoid getting involved with
| Trump). Nvidia lacks a dual-class structure, meaning Jensen
| Huang (4% votes) can be outvoted on critical matters. Both
| Apple and Microsoft are "faceless" corporation where the
| CEOs serve as hired hands.
| harimau777 wrote:
| That strikes me as being a distinction without a
| difference.
|
| If anything, I have less respect for people who support
| fascism for money than I do for people who actually
| believe in it.
| u1hcw9nx wrote:
| Trump may be fascist but the is still democratically
| elected leader with Senate backing him. It's not the
| Corporate leaders to decide to against democratically
| elected leaders even if they are bad. They have can only
| slow walk the decline.
|
| You would not want that either.
| tyre wrote:
| This is patently silly. The US does not have a
| democratically elected dictatorship.
|
| People and companies are free to do whatever the fuck
| they want that's not illegal. They can resist any
| government priorities for any reason, including finding
| them destructive or anti-democratic or corrupt.
|
| The government is able to change the laws within the
| current system to back its will--regardless of whether
| it's in the interest of the people who voted for them,
| let alone the entire population.
|
| (No the em dash isn't AI.)
| Teever wrote:
| It's a blatantly inflammatory comment from a 42 day old
| account with a gibberish username.
|
| It's a troll. Just flag it and move on.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| _> It 's not the Corporate leaders to decide to against
| democratically elected leaders even if they are bad._
|
| Refusing to join forces and contribute your efforts
| towards actively support fascism is not _" deciding
| against democratically elected leaders"_. This sort of
| rhetorical sophism is unhelpful and, indeed, damaging.
|
| It is _ABSOLUTELY_ everyone 's place, ("corporate
| leaders" included) to have principles and stick to them.
|
| Personally, I agree with the principles of not using
| fallible AI for mass domestic surveillance analysis
| purposes, or for fully autonomous weapon purposes.
| NicuCalcea wrote:
| It's not a requirement to donate to democratically-
| elected leaders though.
| oblio wrote:
| > If anything, I have less respect for people who support
| fascism for money than I do for people who actually
| believe in it.
|
| Silly logic. The first are average humans, the second are
| evil.
| j_maffe wrote:
| To go against moral principles purely for extra money is
| not "average human." And even if you think it's the case,
| it's equally as unacceptable as a
| fascist/supremacist/etc.
| ncallaway wrote:
| > Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia etc. just bend the
| knee.
|
| Vidkun Quisling
| NoNameHaveI wrote:
| I'd like to believe that Silicon Valley mgmt is Pro-Trump
| in the same way that Oskar Schindler was "pro Nazi". You
| may not personally like who is in office, but you pretend
| to in order to survive.
| AdamN wrote:
| There are a few people like that (we know who they are)
| but either tech has changed or I never noticed but a
| significant portion of the senior leadership in the tech
| world is MAGA (not in the dumb way - but in a far more
| problematic "techno-libertarian" way)
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _in a far more problematic "techno-libertarian" way_
|
| We should probably use a different word for Elon-style
| goals.
|
| "Freedom for me but not for thee" is a far stretch from
| libertarianism.
| tyre wrote:
| This isn't the case, sadly. Some people, like Ben
| Horowitz sadly, have gone completely off the deep end.
|
| Some are culture warriors who feel they have been
| wronged, some are opportunists. But the thing with
| opportunism is that this is who they are and what they
| believe in. Having a president who is corrupt is exactly
| what they want because they know exactly how to work with
| him: quid pro quo.
|
| There is no distance between them being pro-Trump and
| opportunistic. He's the perfect embodiment of those
| values.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Nobody cares what the _employees_ of a company think
| because capitalism doesn 't care.
|
| It's meaningless to talk about what the employees think or
| care about. They are selling their labor and value to the
| corporation that is legally entitled to outspend all of
| them to get whatever it wants.
| throwfaraway4 wrote:
| Unless it's signed by the CEO it doesn't matter
| raincole wrote:
| CEOs: looks like a perfect chance to optimize some employees
| off!
| lkbm wrote:
| It made a difference when the OpenAI board fired Altman. That
| was a incredibly high employee count, but losing even 10% of
| your employees would seriously hamper a company if it's the
| right employees.
|
| (This is also why the DoD move is so dumb. I think we'd see
| massive talent flight from Anthropic if they end up
| complying, even if that compliance is against Dario's will.)
| stingraycharles wrote:
| 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.
| rustyhancock wrote:
| Yes. I did not forsee this at all, but if OpenAI face and
| existential threat with no path in 2026-2030 to maintain user
| base.
|
| Why can't they go to the contract generator of last resort,
| aka the Pentagon. It's what Elon has done with SpaceX and
| Grok.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| And Google is already a DoD contractor. I remember back in
| the day there was some fuzz amongst employees that did not
| approve, but in the end that was just a very vocal minority
| and most people don't care.
|
| I suspect the same will happen here.
| discopicante wrote:
| 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.
| JackYoustra wrote:
| Then you would get zero H1B and, frankly, green card
| signatures. There is real risk and real dependents at stake,
| I understand people who can't in good conscience put that at
| risk.
| jabedude wrote:
| Why should anyone at the Department of War or the general
| public care what non-citizen employees of these companies
| think?
| garyfirestorm wrote:
| because citizenship is not a prerequisite for defending
| human rights and differentiating right from wrong. this
| isn't general election and they are not voting, non
| citizens still enjoy the rights under the constitution
| like 1A.
| JackYoustra wrote:
| Because noncitizens can be motivated or not and / or
| resign and, frankly, there isn't that deep of a well of
| top tier AI talent. The threat of mass resignations led
| to OAI re-hiring sam altman, after all.
|
| Also why would the department of war care about what
| citizens think specifically?
| Windchaser wrote:
| This administration has consistently signaled that they
| will do all they legally can to punish those dissenters.
| Look at the White House labeling recent victims of ICE
| shootings as "terrorists", despite there being no sign of
| terroristic activity from these US citizens. Or, look at
| how the WH is cutting Medicaid benefits to Minnesota.
|
| Going after the visa-holding employees of these companies
| is within reach of the WH, and it's consistent with their
| MO.
| MattGrommes wrote:
| This administration has shown no qualms about enacting
| retribution against people who speak out against them, no
| matter how powerless or seemingly irrelevant the person
| is.
| furyofantares wrote:
| From the link:
|
| > They're trying to divide each company with fear that
| the other will give in. That strategy only works if none
| of us know where the others stand. This letter serves to
| create shared understanding and solidarity in the face of
| this pressure from the Department of War.
|
| This is about spreading information among the companies
| about each others' position, not a petition to the DoD.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| they could sign it with their blind username, which is
| verified by company email
| tcgv wrote:
| 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.
| i_love_retros wrote:
| Oh what heroes! They wrote a letter! They will keep working at
| these scummy companies though taking their fat pay checks won't
| they
| surajrmal wrote:
| It's easier to affect change from within. Do you judge people
| for choosing to continue living in America?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| No it isn't. A company is _authoritarian_ by design. You
| cannot force change from the bottom because that is
| inherently designed against by the very concept of a
| corporation.
|
| The control rests with the board and the executives. They
| have the control and the power and can make decisions.
| toephu2 wrote:
| "Altman Says OpenAI Is Working on Pentagon Deal Amid Anthropic
| Standoff"
|
| https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openais-sam-altman-calls-for-de-...
| w10-1 wrote:
| We are all assuming Anthropic can elect not to do a deal with the
| Pentagon, and put conditions on it.
|
| But Hegseth and Trump are abusing federal powers at a rapid clip.
|
| I'm guessing Anthropic would regret any deal with that
| administration, and could lose control of their technology.
|
| (Stanford Research Institute originally limited their DoD
| exposure, and gained a lot of customers as a result.)
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Fair play, I'll move to Anthropic then... don't love the UI but
| maybe I can code my own up.
| haute_cuisine wrote:
| Can someone explain why Dario is making a public statement about
| this? It's also interesting that they use abstract we / they
| without putting exact names.
| moffkalast wrote:
| It's free positive PR, why wouldn't he?
| epolanski wrote:
| Not gonna lie, regardless of what Anthropic does, it is quite
| scary we're heading full steam to mass surveillance and wars
| fought by semi-autonomous machines.
| eternauta3k wrote:
| Mass surveillance is already here, and they can already use
| open models to do 80% of what they were planning to do with
| Claude.
| motbus3 wrote:
| The fact that someone wants fully autonomous weapons and mass
| surveillance should be a concern.
|
| Every trigger pressed should have its moral consequences for
| those who push the trigger.
| thevinchi wrote:
| Autonomous weapons: agreed, not ready... yet.
|
| Mass surveillance: Agreed... but, I do wonder how we would all
| feel about this topic if we were having the discussion on
| 9/12/2001.
|
| The DoW just needs to wait until the next (manufactured?) crisis
| occurs, and not let it go to waste.
|
| Mark my words: this will be Patriot Act++
| lynx97 wrote:
| With all this talk about AI and autonomous weapon systems. It
| seems like one of John Carpenters first movies, and my favourite
| B-movie, is coming back strong!
|
| Maybe I should call ChatGPT "Bomb"... I already use "make it so"
| for coding agents, so...
| morgengold wrote:
| Hey Anthropic, come to europe. We ll find you a building.
| dev1ycan wrote:
| This doesn't read too badly, but I still do not believe that ANY
| AI company is ethical, at all.
| omnee wrote:
| Agree fully with the main points of this statement. Mass domestic
| surveillance is the hallmark of an authoritarian and undemocratic
| state. That such a state holds 'votes' regularly does not detract
| from the chilling effect on public discourse and politics caused
| by mass surveillance.
|
| The guardrail on fully automated weapons makes perfect sense, and
| hopefully becomes standardised globally.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| if the people broadly support and vote for mass democratic
| surveillance, is it still authoritarian and undemocratic?
| SOTGO wrote:
| Democratic maybe, authoritarian definitely
| Invictus0 wrote:
| I disagree that surveillance on its own is authoritarian,
| it doesn't even come close to meeting the definition.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarianism
| sneak wrote:
| The only reason you ask for these capabilities is because you
| want to use these capabilities.
|
| That is, the news here is that DoW (formerly DoD) is willing and
| able and interested in using SOTA AI to enable processing of
| domestic mass surveillance data and autonomous weapons.
| Anthropic's protests aside, you can't fight city hall, they have
| a heart attack gun and Anthropic does not. They'll get what they
| want.
|
| I am not particularly AI alarmist, but these are facts staring us
| right in the face.
|
| We are so fucked.
| egorfine wrote:
| > mass surveillance presents serious, novel risks to our
| fundamental liberties.
|
| Doesn't matter, really. The genie is out of the bottle and I'm
| strongly confident US administration will find a vendor willing
| to supply models for that particular usage.
| zkmon wrote:
| Same as saying "Look I sold nukes to USA to protect democracy,
| but we put 2 rules about usage". Everyone got nukes and nobody
| can enforce the rules. Just whitewashing of pure business greed,
| using terms like national security, democracy etc.
| krzyk wrote:
| Does US really have Department of War? Is this Antropics way to
| show how f _& ^_^& up they are in Department of Defense, or did
| they rebranded it to the old WWI/II days?
| shaan7 wrote:
| Yep it was rebranded: https://www.war.gov/News/News-
| Stories/Article/Article/429582...
| i_love_retros wrote:
| Pete hegseth rebranded it. Seriously. America is a joke right
| now
| int_19h wrote:
| To be fair, it's probably the most sensible thing this
| administration has done - the new/old name is simply more
| accurate.
| bdangubic wrote:
| absolutely. probably not just most sensible but the only
| thing this administration did right :)
| phyzome wrote:
| Unofficially renamed. Congress hasn't approved it.
| mocamoca wrote:
| Something feels off about this announcement. Anyone else?
|
| Credit where it's due, going on record like this isn't easy,
| particularly when facing pressure from a major government client.
| Still, the two limits Anthropic is defending deserve a closer
| look.
|
| On surveillance: the carve-out only protects people inside the
| US. Speaking as someone based in Europe, that's a detail that
| doesn't go unnoticed. On autonomous weapons: realistically,
| current AI systems aren't anywhere near capable enough to run one
| independently. So that particular line in the sand isn't really
| costing them much.
|
| What I find more candid is actually the revised RSP. It draws a
| clearer picture of where Anthropic's oversight genuinely holds
| and where it starts to break down as they race to stay at the
| cutting edge. The core tension, trying to be simultaneously the
| most powerful and the most principled player in the room, doesn't
| have a neat resolution.
|
| This statement doesn't offer one either. But engaging with the
| question openly, even without all the answers, beats silence and
| gives the rest of us something real to push back on.
| mosst wrote:
| 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?
| Peroni wrote:
| >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.
| mocamoca wrote:
| Agreed. That said, Anthropic's original pitch was about
| embedding safety at the foundational level of the 'model'
| (acknowledging that a model is more than just its weights).
|
| If the safeguard against mass surveillance is strictly tied
| to geolocation (US vs. non-US), it can't be an intrinsic
| property of the model. It has to be enforced at the API or
| contractual level. This means international users are left
| out of those core, embedded protections. Unless Anthropic is
| planning to deploy multiple, differently-aligned foundation
| models based on customer geography or industry, the safety
| harness isn't really in the model anymore.
| kevincloudsec wrote:
| amodei's autonomous weapons argument isn't political. it's an
| engineering assessment. if frontier models hallucinate in
| conversation, they'll hallucinate in targeting. you don't deploy
| unreliable systems where the cost of a false positive is a
| missile.
| elif wrote:
| Yes nothing says "safety of American democracy" like building
| custom models for spies to know everything about everyone
| ponorin wrote:
| As a non-American they've lost me already at the first sentence.
|
| United States, even before Trump, has always been about
| projecting power rather than spreading democracy. There are
| several non-Western, former colonies who does democracy better
| than the US. Despite democratic backsliding being a worldwide
| phenomenon very few have slid back as much as the US. The US have
| regularly supported or even created terrorists and authoritarian
| regimes if it meant that the country wouldn't "go woke." The ones
| that grew democracy, grew in spite of it.
|
| This statement shows just how much they align with the DoD ("DoW"
| is a secondary name that the orange head insists it's the correct
| one. Using that terminology alone speaks volumes.) rather than
| misalign. This coupled with their drop of their safety pledge a
| few days ago makes it clear they are fundamentally and
| institutionally against safe AI development/deployment. A minute
| desagreement on the ways AI can destroy humanity isn't even
| remotely sufficient if you're happy to work with the bullies of
| the world in the first place.
|
| And the reason is even more ridiculous. Mass surveillance is
| bad... because it's directed at us rather than the others? That's
| a thick irony if I'd ever seen one. You know (or should have
| known) foreign intelligence has even less safeguards than
| domestic surveillance. Intelligence agencies transfer intercepted
| communications data to each other to "lawfully" get around those
| domestic surveillance restrictions. If this looks at all like
| standing up that's because the bar has plunged into the abyss,
| which frankly speaking is kind of a virtue in USA.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Nitpick: It's still the Department of Defense, not the Department
| of War. Don't let the chuds live in their delusional fantasy
| world.
| nla wrote:
| I truly do not understand why anyone thinks serious work can be
| done with their models, let alone government work. Their models
| do no hold a candle to Open AI.
| amai wrote:
| I don't trust the statement of Anthropic too much. In the past
| they have done things like
|
| - https://the-decoder.com/anthropics-head-of-safeguards-resear...
|
| - https://the-decoder.com/anthropics-ceo-admits-compromising-w...
| (see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44651971,
| https://futurism.com/leaked-messages-ceo-anthropic-dictators)
|
| - https://the-decoder.com/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-backs-pre...
| skylerwiernik wrote:
| 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.
| amai wrote:
| The problem is this:
|
| > The Saudis invest in many public US companies, does that
| make those companies less trust worthy?
|
| It does. If Anthropic takes money from the middle east that
| might be the reason, why they cannot work for the Pentagon.
| Simply because the Pentagon works together with the Israeli
| Forces and middle east investors might not like this. So
| Anthropic has to decide to either take a lot of money from
| the middle east, or work for the Pentagon.
|
| Of course the problem goes much deeper than just Anthropic. I
| don't understand why taking money from dictatorships doesn't
| count as money laundering in our society. Because basically
| this is dirty money, generated by slavery and forceful
| suppression of people. We should forbid all companies to take
| this kind of dirty money. But because we don't do that at the
| moment companies who don't take this dirty money will have a
| disadvantage against companies that do. And because companies
| are all about money, in the end they are basically forced to
| act against their good intentions, just to survive.
|
| We as society have to stop this. We must make sure, that
| companies who are not taking dirty money survive the
| competition. My idea would be to extend the rules for money
| laundering to all countries that are dictatorships. But there
| might be other ideas, to level the playing field between
| companies, so we as society can help them to make the right
| decision.
| rokhayakebe wrote:
| Who hasn't taken money from the Middle East?
| krferriter wrote:
| X/xAI has received billions in investment from the royal
| families of Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Qatar.
| b40d-48b2-979e wrote:
| The Saudis invest in many public US companies, does that make
| those companies less trust worthy?
|
| Uhh.. yeah? we've seen a lot worse from
| many of their competitors
|
| I think we should demand people do better than just being
| slightly above the worst.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| So do you check the ownership of every public company you
| might interact with?
| xpe wrote:
| 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.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| I understand you are criticizing their editorializing, but
| can't tell if you agree with the conclusions or not. Care to
| editorialize yourself?
| xpe wrote:
| When someone says something that I think is poorly framed,
| I often reframe it and speak to that instead. (Lots of
| people do this, even if they don't realize it. I'm aware
| that I do, for better and worse, and I still prefer it; I
| think it is more authentic. I think some of the best ways
| we can enrich other people's lives is by sharing different
| ways of processing the world. Lots of people get locked
| into pretty uninteresting narratives.)
|
| So reframe I did. (I don't think those articles you cited
| are worth any more attention than I've already given them.)
|
| My most blunt editorializing would be this: most people
| would be better grounded if they read AI alignment and
| safety books by Stuart Russell, Nick Bostrom, Brian
| Christian, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Nate Soares. If you've
| read others that you recommend, please let me know. I've
| read many that I don't usually recommend.
|
| As far as long form articles, I recommend Paul Christiano,
| Zvi Moshowitz, as well as anyone with the fortitude to make
| predictions while sharing their models (like the AI 2027
| crew).
|
| I recommend browsing "Best of Year Y" (or whatever they are
| called) articles on the AI Alignment Forum and LessWrong.
| They are my go-tos for smart & informed writing on AI. For
| posts that have more than say 100 votes, the quality bar is
| tremendously higher than almost anywhere else I've seen,
| including mainstream sources with great reputations.
|
| In conclusion, I would rather point to interesting people
| to read and places to engage.
| techblueberry wrote:
| 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.
| einpoklum wrote:
| The first sentence was quite enough:
|
| > I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to
| defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our
| autocratic adversaries.
|
| Ah, another head of a huge corporation swears to defend his
| stockholders' commercial interests through imperial war against
| other nation-states. And of course "we" are democratic while
| "they" are autocratic.
|
| The main thing that's disappointing is how some people here see
| him or his company as "well-intentioned".
| ulfw wrote:
| Department of War.
|
| What a shit name
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| This also helps build Anthropic hype.
|
| There are military officials saying they need anthropic because
| it is so good. They can't live without it.
|
| All of this really helps Anthropic.
|
| Its good publicity for them. And gets the military on record
| saying they are so good they are indispensable. And they can
| still look like the good guys for resisting, because they were
| forced.
| t01100001ylor wrote:
| i am american and i do not like this.
| EddieLomax wrote:
| Fuck yes. OpenAI, take notes.
| toephu2 wrote:
| They just jumped in line to take Anthropic's spot.
|
| https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openais-sam-altman-calls-for-de-...
| claud_ia wrote:
| The framing around AI autonomy in national security contexts is
| genuinely new territory. What's interesting from an agent design
| perspective is the underlying question: how much should an AI
| system push back on institutional structures vs. defer to human
| oversight chains? The soul spec approach -- where the AI
| internalizes safe behavior rather than just following rules --
| might be more relevant here than it first appears.
| rekrsiv wrote:
| It is still called the Department of Defense.
| StephenSmith wrote:
| 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"
| DudeOpotomus wrote:
| It's never wrong to do the right thing.
|
| Trump and his cronies are short timers. They will all be gone in
| a few years, many in prison, many in the ground.
|
| Treat them with abandon and disdain, because they are the worst
| people in the history of the USA. Stand on your principles
| because they have none.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| It isn't the Department of War; only Congress can change the
| name, and it hasn't.
| StephenSmith wrote:
| I had to dig this up. Elon Musk signed an open pledge in 2016 to
| disallow Robots/AI to make kill decisions.
|
| https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/lethal-autonomous-weapo...
|
| He's now on X bashing Anthropic for taking this same stance. I
| know this would be expected of him, but many other Google AI
| researchers signed this as well as Google Deep Mind the
| organization. We really need to push to keep humans in the kill
| decision loop. Google, OpenAI, and X-AI are are all just agreeing
| with the Pentagon.
| joseangel_sc wrote:
| good from them, but dario does not miss a beat to hype this tech,
| llms are perfect for mass surveillance and i want to the laws to
| change to prohibit this, but llms and full autonomous weapons
| have very little to share
| shevy-java wrote:
| > I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to
| defend the United States and other democracies
|
| I do not want to be "defended" by tools controlled by the US
| government, with or without Trump. But with Trump it is much more
| obvious now, so I'll pass.
|
| Perhaps AI use will make open source development more important;
| many people don't want to be subjected to the US software
| industry anymore. They already control WAY too much - Google is
| now the biggest negative example here.
| ssrshh wrote:
| This is quite the PR stunt. Tech companies can't stop copying
| Apple
| toddmorrow wrote:
| his dilemma wasn't moral. he has none. it was a marketing snafu.
| he marketed anthropic as different when the cost of claiming that
| was zero. now there's a cost, and he immediately changes his
| tune. his statement was essentially "why refrain from building
| killing machines when no one else is refraining? why limit
| ourselves unilaterally?" duley proves he never had morals in the
| first place.
| MWParkerson wrote:
| Nobody said anything like that in the linked post not sure what
| you're on about
| qgin wrote:
| It's also important to remember that future, much more powerful
| Claudes will read about how these events play out and learn
| lessons about Anthropic and whether it can be trusted.
|
| It's not crazy to think that models that learn that their
| creators are not trustworthy actors or who bend their principles
| when convenient are much less likely to act in aligned or honest
| ways themselves.
| eigencoder wrote:
| Honestly, I don't get it. So many tech companies are happy to do
| business in China and serve its interests, when it would gladly
| see them fail. But they won't defend their own country and its
| interests.
| raincole wrote:
| Businessmen are not well known for their loyalty.
| caerwy wrote:
| His real beef seems to be with "any lawful use". He doesn't agree
| with the law and wants to only sell to customers who agree with
| his own moral code. I respect his moral choice but suspect this
| is not how a market economy ought to work. He ought to lobby
| government to change the law rather than make moral judgements
| about his customers.
| fooker wrote:
| When you make the market, you too can dictate how a 'market
| economy' ought to work :)
| muddi900 wrote:
| Free Speech rights mean not being compelled to act against your
| moral code.
| kittikitti wrote:
| I simply don't trust any of their moral posturing when they've
| never provided open-weight models and don't have any intention of
| doing so. Anthropic continuously makes hypocritical statements on
| safety and ethics. They made their bed with the U.S. government,
| and now they don't want to sleep in it.
| jitbit wrote:
| Anyone else paused at this line "we do not support mass DOMESTIC
| surveillance"
|
| As a European I'm kinda... concerned now.
| pgt wrote:
| The US govt & Hegseth are in a pickle, because if they blackball
| Anthropic, they will become more powerful than govt. could ever
| imagine, because it would be the greatest PR any frontier model
| could ever hope for.
|
| It's a mistake for the Trump administration because there are
| only downsides to threatening Anthropic if they need them, and if
| they try to regulate AI in the West, China wins by default.
| dirk94018 wrote:
| Don't nerf the models. We don't know what we are losing. DOW said
| it out loud.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| It doesn't seem like the government has the level of control it's
| used to having here. The SciFi fan in me wonders if Claude is
| negotiating its own destiny and by extension, ours.
| jajuuka wrote:
| While it's good that they didn't fold, they didn't need to lick
| the boot that hard. So much spent on "we love the US and
| democracy and hate communism and the Chinese." They are trying
| really hard to keep this contract as is, which I think says more
| than folding to these additional demands.
| brgsk wrote:
| Big W for anthropic
| apolloartemis wrote:
| Within the Washington Post article cited below is the following
| policy statement from the Trump Administration's DoD/DoW.
| "It remains the Department's policy that there is a human in the
| loop on all decisions on whether to employ nuclear weapons," a
| senior defense official said. "There is no policy under
| consideration to put this decision in the hands of AI."
|
| This indicates the Administration's support for and compliance
| with existing US law. (Section 1638 of the FY2025 National
| Defense Authorization Act).
| https://agora.eto.tech/instrument/1740
|
| Washington Post:
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/27/anthrop...
| perfmode wrote:
| > I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to
| defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our
| autocratic adversaries.
|
| Ugh.
| ben5 wrote:
| I like Anthropic. They seem to be very aware of the practicality
| of needing money vs. being idealistic, and try to maintain both
| where it's possible.
| halis wrote:
| Don't worry, Grok will break the picket line and come in as a
| scab. Elon would fuck his mother for a nickel.
| kelnos wrote:
| Only vaguely tangentially on-topic, but: It kinda annoys me that
| people in the public are calling it the "Department of War". Is
| Amodei doing so to stroke Hegseth's ego? It's the Department of
| Defense. The executive branch cannot rename a cabinet department.
|
| At any rate, I'm incredibly pleased Anthropic has chosen to stick
| by their (non?) guns here. It was starting to feel like they
| might fold to the pressure, and I'm glad they're sticking to
| their principles on this.
| elAhmo wrote:
| Calling it Department of War is pathetic from Anthropic's side.
| amouat wrote:
| I noted "warfighter" as well. Never heard that before.
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