[HN Gopher] We do not think Anthropic should be designated as a ...
___________________________________________________________________
We do not think Anthropic should be designated as a supply chain
risk
Author : golfer
Score : 776 points
Date : 2026-02-28 21:24 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| solfox wrote:
| Actions as it were, speak louder than words.
| vldszn wrote:
| I built a website that shows a timeline of recent events
| involving Anthropic, OpenAI, and the U.S. government.
|
| Posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47195085
| moogly wrote:
| Looks like losing subscribers actually does work. Definitely gets
| a damage control response, at least.
| aylmao wrote:
| I wonder what the mood is like internally too. I can only
| imagine there some level of employee discontent.
| patcon wrote:
| i should hope so. they should quit.
|
| > > what's the term for quitting but not leaving and being
| destructive
|
| > _The most common term is "quiet quitting" when someone
| disengages but stays employed--but that usually implies
| minimal effort, not active harm._
|
| > _If you specifically mean staying while being disruptive or
| undermining, better fits include:_
|
| > - _"Malicious compliance" -- following rules in a way that
| intentionally causes problems_
|
| > - _"Work-to-rule" -- doing only exactly what's required to
| slow things down (often collective /labor context)_
|
| I imagine malicious compliance is fun when there's an AI
| intermediary that can be blameless.
| discardable_dan wrote:
| It is referred to as "simple sabotage":
| https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/the-art-of-simple-
| sabotage...
| ares623 wrote:
| they should leak the models
| overfeed wrote:
| > I can only imagine there some level of employee discontent.
|
| The rank and file mutinied for the return of Altman after his
| board fired him for deception. They knew what they were
| getting, though they may find it shameful to admit that their
| morals have a price.
| bertil wrote:
| How many people who reacted that way then are still at
| OpenAI? It seems that they have lost key people in several
| waves.
|
| How many people have joined since? I don't think the people
| who lobbied for that are all still there, and I'm not sure
| a majority of people now at OpenAI were there when it
| happened.
| xvector wrote:
| This is one of the reasons Anthropic can stay competitive
| with OpenAI on a fraction of the budget and with less
| than half the headcount.
|
| The smartest people, that actually believe they have the
| skillset to take us to AGI, understand the importance of
| safety. They have largely joined Anthropic. The talent
| density at Anthropic is unmatched.
| DaedalusII wrote:
| Things have changed since two years ago. There are probably
| over 500 employees who have an equity package which makes
| them worth $5 million dollars. Thats only $2.5bn out of a
| $750bn valuation or 0.33%
|
| Actually that is too conservative. If they have a 5% employee
| equity pool, there is $37.5bn of equity based compensation
| divided by say 5000 employees which is $7.5m each. $3.75m @
| 10,000 employees.
|
| and trust me, when people start getting liquid and
| comfortable they stop caring about things like ethics pretty
| fast. humans are marvellous at that
| ares623 wrote:
| would be so funny if someone leaks their models
| g947o wrote:
| Is there any evidence that OpenAI is indeed losing significant
| number of subscribers, and it's not just some noise on HN?
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I don't think that evidence would exist yet whether it's true
| or not. Nobody's gonna log onto their work computer on
| Saturday to pull and then leak subscriber numbers.
| moogly wrote:
| I'd argue this damage control could be construed as a piece
| of evidence.
| g947o wrote:
| What damage control?
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| "I do not think that sama should be burned at the stake"
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Unless it's lawful?
| imwideawake wrote:
| Said OpenAI as they smiled and shook hands with the same people
| who designated Anthropic a supply chain risk, on the exact same
| day they designated Anthropic a supply chain risk.
|
| How very brave.
| AmericanOP wrote:
| I do think OpenAI's brand is dumpstered.
| thunky wrote:
| Optimistic. My money is on everyone forgetting about this by
| next week.
| cube00 wrote:
| It will be interesting to see if this permeates out into the
| general public who already use ChatGPT or maybe it won't
| since it doesn't mention ChatGPT which is the stronger known
| brand rather then OpenAI.
| davidw wrote:
| More and more of the press is owned by oligarchs who are
| putting their thumbs on the scales, so that could be a
| factor.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Yeah, myself I use ChatGPT, not OpenAI!
| Analemma_ wrote:
| It depends. Normies don't care, but a bunch of them are free
| tier users anyway. The people who care are disproportionately
| on the $200/month moneymaking plan; losing a bunch of them
| could hurt, especially if it snowballs the consensus that
| Claude Code is the serious choice for software engineering.
|
| For one small data point, my Signal GC of software buddies
| had four people switch their subscriptions from Codex to
| Claude Max last night.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| How many $200/month does the US government cover though?
| I'd say probably a lot. Especially with how much extra the
| DoD will pay to get OpenAI to cross it's "red lines" - on
| day two.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| Yeah just wait until the next model comes out. People will be
| riding Sam's dick again in no time.
| doodlebugging wrote:
| I'm sure his sister will appreciate others lining up so he
| leaves her alone forever.
| deepsquirrelnet wrote:
| That's why I unsubbed today! Otherwise I might forget.
| 303space wrote:
| The way OpenAI and Anthropic are positioned in public discourse
| always reminded me of the Uber vs Lyft saga ... Uber
| temporarily lost double digit marketshare in the US during a
| viral boycott over their perceived support of the Trump 1.0
| admin. Heads did roll at the exec/founder level but eventually
| the company recovered.
| jellyroll42 wrote:
| unfortunately I think that's probably a good analogy
| djeastm wrote:
| Among developers on HN, perhaps, but their goal is to soon
| replace developers altogether so from their perspective it's
| simple cost-benefit
| cube00 wrote:
| From that same X thread: _Our agreement with the Department of
| War upholds our redlines_ [1]
|
| OpenAI has the same redlines as Anthopic based on Altman's
| statements [2]. However _somehow_ Anthropic gets banished for
| upholding their redlines and OpenAI ends up with the cash?
|
| [1]: https://xcancel.com/OpenAI/status/2027846013650932195#m
|
| [2]: https://www.npr.org/2026/02/27/nx-s1-5729118/trump-
| anthropic...
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Exactly. What are we not being told? There is some missing
| element in the agreement, or the reasoning for the action
| against Anthropic is unrelated to the agreement.
| moogly wrote:
| Turns out both companies ran the agreement through their
| legal departments (Claude and GPT), and one of them did a
| poor summary. I (think I) jest, but this is probably going to
| be a thing as more and more companies use LLMs for legal
| work.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| The reasoning is one company is 'left and woke' the other
| gives money to Trump.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| $25 million to be exact, one of Trump's largest individual
| donors. From a guy who "doesn't consider himself
| political", lol. [0]
|
| [0]: https://www.wired.com/story/openai-president-greg-
| brockman-p...
| bmitc wrote:
| How can these people take themselves seriously? They're
| jokes.
| toraway wrote:
| _"I think there 's no decision ever that everyone at
| OpenAI agrees with," Brockman says when I ask what his
| team thinks about the donations. "Even when we were 10
| people. We've always been a truth-seeking culture. We
| have this scientific mission of discovery, and reality
| kind of doesn't care for your own opinion. It cares about
| what's true."_
|
| _After our interview, Brockman declined WIRED's request
| for comment on the ICE shootings. Separately, he offered
| a more general statement clarifying his thoughts on the
| conversation with WIRED. "AI is a uniting technology, and
| can be so much bigger than what divides us today," he
| said._
|
| His justifications are just an ever changing rambling
| mess of word salad that never even come close to
| addressing the MAGA Inc donation specifically, who is
| this even for?
|
| We're talking about a pretty straightforward donation to
| the incumbent President's Super PAC, not ASI solving
| world hunger or whatever.
| generic92034 wrote:
| Punish one, teach a hundred (companies).
| snickerbockers wrote:
| One nuance I've noticed: the statement from Anthropic
| specifically stated the use of their products for these
| purposes was _not included_ in the contract with DoD but it
| stops short of saying it was prohibited by the contract.
|
| Maybe it's just a weak choice of words in anthropic's
| statement, but the way I read it I get the impression that
| anthropic is assuming they retain discretion over how their
| products are used for any purposes not outlined in the
| contract, while the DoD sees it more along the lines of a
| traditional sale in which the seller relinquishes all rights
| to the product by default, and has to enumerate any rights
| over the product they will retain in the contract.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| president of openai donated $25 mil to trump last month,
| openai uses oracle services (larry ellison), kushners have
| lots invested in openai, altman is pals with peter thiel
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| The demand was that Anthropic permit any use that complied
| with the law. They refused. OpenAI claims to have the same
| red lines but in reality has agreed to permit anything that
| complies with the law.
|
| In other words OpenAI is intentionally attempting to mislead
| the public. (At least AFAICT.)
| nkassis wrote:
| OpenAI's post about their contract has the "redlines" described
| and they don't match what Anthropic wanted. (even if the text
| tries to imply they do)
|
| https://openai.com/index/our-agreement-with-the-department-o...
| sowbug wrote:
| This is a good comment detailing the differences:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47200771
| Analemma_ wrote:
| It's probably a combination of "Altman is simply lying" (as he
| has been repeatedly known to do) and "the redlines in OpenAI's
| contract are 'mass surveillance' and 'autonomous killbot' as
| defined _by the government_ and not the vendor ". Which, of
| course, effectively means they don't exist.
| xeonmc wrote:
| > 'mass surveillance' and 'autonomous killbot' as defined by
| the government and not the vendor
|
| Ah, so they'll be applying the good ol' Three-Fifths Rule[0],
| a classic.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-fifths_Compromise
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > However somehow Anthropic gets banished for upholding their
| redlines and OpenAI ends up with the cash?
|
| The current administration is so incompetent that I find this
| perfectly believable.
|
| I imagine the government signed with OpenAI in order to spite
| Anthropic. The terms wouldn't actually matter that much if the
| purpose was petty revenge.
|
| I don't know if that's actually what happened here, I just find
| it plausible.
| randall wrote:
| same. this is about losing a negotiation and saving face /
| exacting revenge.
| el_benhameen wrote:
| Absolutely incompetent, but I don't think that's the cause
| here. I think Anthropic's sin was publicly challenging the
| administration. They're huge on optics. You can get away with
| anything as long as you praise and bow in public.
| microtonal wrote:
| That and possibly OpenAI cofounder Brockman donating 25
| million to a Trump-aligned PAC:
| https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/brockman-openai-top-
| trum...
|
| Grifters gonna grift.
| 827a wrote:
| My understanding of the difference, influenced mostly by
| consuming too many anonymous tweets on the matter over the past
| day so could be entirely incorrect, is: Anthropic wanted
| control of a kill switch actively in the loop to stop usage
| that went against the terms of use (maybe this is a system
| prompt-level thing that stops it, maybe monitoring systems,
| humans with this authority, etc). OpenAI's position was more
| like "if you break the contract, the contract is over" without
| going so far as to say they'd immediately stop service (maybe
| there's an offboarding period, transition of service, etc).
| Nevermark wrote:
| > more stringent safeguards than previous agreements, including
| Anthropic's.
|
| Except they are not "more stringent".
|
| Sam Altman is being brazen to say that.
|
| In their own agreement as Altman relays:
|
| > The AI System will not be used to independently direct
| autonomous weapons _in any case where law, regulation, or
| Department policy requires human control_
|
| > _any use of AI in autonomous and semi-autonomous systems_
| must undergo rigorous verification, validation, and testing
|
| > For intelligence activities, _any handling of private
| information will comply with the Fourth Amendment, the National
| Security Act of 1947 and the Foreign Intelligence and
| Surveillance Act of 1978, Executive Order 12333, and applicable
| DoD directives_
|
| > The system shall also not be used for domestic law-
| enforcement activities _except as permitted by the Posse
| Comitatus Act and other applicable law._
|
| I don't think their take is completely unreasonable, but it
| doesn't come close to Anthropic's stance. They are not putting
| their neck out to hold back any abuse - despite many of their
| employees requesting a joint stand with Anthropic.
|
| Their wording gives the DoD carte blanch to do anything it
| wants, as long as they adopt a rationale that they are obeying
| the law. _That is already the status quo. And we know how that
| goes._
|
| In other words, no OpenAI restriction at all.
|
| That is not at all comparable to a requirement the DoD agree
| not to do certain things (with Anthropic's AI), regardless of
| legal "interpretation" fig leaves. Which makes Anthropic's
| position much "more stringent". And a rare and significant
| pushback against governmental AI abuse.
|
| (Altman has a reputation for being a Slippery Sam. We can each
| decide for ourselves if there is evidence of that here.)
| qmarchi wrote:
| Easy way to summarize it: "You're not allowed to do these
| things, except for all of the laws that allow you to do these
| things."
| dwallin wrote:
| It's a non-clause that is written to sound like they are
| doing something to prevent these uses when they aren't.
| "You are not allowed to do illegal things" is meaningless,
| since they already can't legally do illegal things. Plus
| the administration itself gets to decide if it meets legal
| use.
| pdpi wrote:
| > "You are not allowed to do illegal things" is
| meaningless, since they already can't legally do illegal
| things.
|
| That's not quite right.
|
| First off, I don't expect that "you used my service to
| commit a crime" is in and of itself enough to break a
| contract, so having your contract state that you're not
| allowed to use my service to commit a crime does give me
| tools to cut you off.
|
| Second, I don't want the contract to say "if you're
| convicted of committing a crime using my service", I want
| it to say "if you do these specific things". This is for
| two reasons. First, because I don't want to depend on
| criminal prosecutors to act before I have standing.
| Second, because I want to only have to meet the balance
| of probabilities ("preponderance of evidence" if you're
| American) standard of evidence in civil court, rather
| than needing a conviction secured under "beyond a
| reasonable doubt" standard. IANAL, but I expect that
| having this "you can't do these illegal things except
| when they aren't illegal" language in the contract does
| put me in that position.
| Nevermark wrote:
| I don't think the language does, or is intended to, give
| OpenAI any special standing in the courts.
|
| They literally asked the DoD to continue as is.
|
| Their is no safety enforcement standing created because
| their is no safety enforcement intended.
|
| It is transparently written, as a completely reactive
| response to Anthropic's stand, in an attempt to create a
| perception that they care. And reduce perceived contrast
| with Anthropic.
|
| If they had any interest in safety or ethics, Anthropic's
| stand just made that far easier than they could have
| imagined. Just join Anthropic and together set a new bar
| of expectations for the industry and public as a whole.
|
| They could collaborate with Anthropic on a common
| expectation, if they have a different take on safety.
|
| The upside safety culture impact of such collaboration by
| two competitive leaders in the industry would be felt
| globally. Going far beyond any current contracts.
|
| But, no. Nothing.
|
| Except the legalese and an attempt to misleadingly pass
| it off as "more stringent". These are not the actions of
| anyone who cares at all about the obvious potential for
| governmental abuse, or creating any civil legal leverage
| for safe use.
| EGreg wrote:
| Let me clear it up
|
| The Trump administration acts cartoonish and fickle. They
| can easily punish one group, and then agree to work with
| another group on the same terms, to save face, while
| continuing to punish the first group. It doesn't have to
| make consistent sense. This is exactly how they have done
| with tariffs for example.
|
| Secondly, the terms are _technically_ different because _"
| all lawful uses"_ are preserved in this OpenAI deal, and
| it's just lawyering to the public. Really it was about the
| phrase "all lawful uses", internally at the DoD I'm sure.
| So the lawyers were able to agree to it and the public gets
| this mumbo-jumbo.
|
| I thought mass surveillance of Americans was unlawful by
| the DoD, CIA and NSA? We have the FBI for that, right? :)
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Sure, but OpenAI is also being disingenuous here
| pretending they're operating under the same principles
| Anthropic is. It's not and the things they're comfortable
| with doing Anthropic said they're not
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > except for all of the laws that allow you to do these
| things.
|
| It's even worse than that, because this administration has
| made it clear they will push as hard as possible to have
| the law mean whatever they says it means. The quoted
| agreement literally says "...in any case where law,
| regulation, _or Department policy_ requires human control "
| - "Department policy" is obviously whatever Trump says it
| is ("unitary executive theory" and all that), and there are
| numerous cases where they have taken existing law and are
| stretching it to mean whatever they want. And when it comes
| to AI, any after-the-fact legal challenges are pretty moot
| when someone has already been killed or, you know, the
| planet gets destroyed because the AI system decide to go
| WarGames on us.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| This implies that OpenAI must build and release and maintain
| a model without any safeguards, which is probably the big win
| and maybe something Anthropic never wants to do.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I don't think that is the correct conclusion.
|
| But they won't be releasing it, they will be _leasing_ it
| to DOJ and all their other customers will get the
| safeguarded model.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Sorry, meant to write DoW / department of defense, not
| DOJ.
| clhodapp wrote:
| Yep. It's the difference between "Don't do these things,
| regardless of what the law says." and "Do whatever you want,
| but please follow your own laws while you do it".
|
| As Paul Graham said, "Sam gets what he wants" and "He's good
| at convincing people of things. He's good at getting people
| to do what he wants." and "So if the only way Sam could
| succeed in life was by [something] succeeding, then [that
| thing] would succeed"
| Rapzid wrote:
| Sam Altman is basically the last person anyone should
| listen to.
| zargon wrote:
| "You could parachute [Sam Altman] into an island full of
| cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king."
|
| --Paul Graham, 2008
| pear01 wrote:
| Brings to mind the infamous line from Nixon:
|
| "When the president does it, that means it is not illegal".
|
| This was during the Frost/Nixon interviews, years after he
| had already resigned. Even after all that, he still believed
| this and was willing to say it into a camera to the American
| people. It is apparent many of the people pushing the
| excesses going on today in government share a shameless
| adherence to this creed.
| tormeh wrote:
| If only Nixon had had the current supreme court, which
| actually agrees with him.
| saghm wrote:
| Nixon's issue wasn't a lack of support in the courts but
| in Congress[1]:
|
| > On August 7, Nixon met in the Oval Office with
| Republican congressional leaders "to discuss the
| impeachment picture," and was told that his support in
| Congress had all but disappeared. They painted a gloomy
| picture for the president: he would face certain
| impeachment when the articles came up for vote in the
| full House, and in the Senate, there were not only enough
| votes to convict him, but no more than 15 or so senators
| were willing to vote for acquittal. That night, knowing
| his presidency was effectively over, Nixon finalized his
| decision to resign.
|
| The contrast with how compliant the majorities in
| Congress are today to the whims of the White House cannot
| be overstated. The past decade has pretty much completely
| eliminated any semblance of a Republican Party that stood
| for anything other than the whims of Trump. Everyone
| either got on board or was exiled from power; the third
| highest member of House leadership got driven from
| Congress for taking a stand on the events of January 6,
| whereas the senator who in a debate in 2016 alleged that
| Trump's small hands implied a similar proportion for one
| of his less-visible body parts faded into the background
| for the next eight years and was rewarded with a
| prominent position in the cabinet this time around.
|
| > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_of_Richard_Nix
| on#Re...
| aardvarkr wrote:
| This is the same government caught spying on its citizens by
| Snowden so I don't trust them at all.
| spiderice wrote:
| That seems exactly what it should be. The United States
| military should be able to do what the law allows. If we
| don't think they should be allowed to do something, we should
| pass laws. Not rely on the goodness of Sam Altman.
| Nevermark wrote:
| So don't stand up for ethics and safety where there isn't a
| law for it? Backwards day?
|
| Nobody is prosecuting the DoD with non-laws here. But one
| company is using their legal right to refuse to facilitate
| great harms.
|
| > Not rely on the goodness of Sam Altman.
|
| (Who said anything about that? Where did that come from?)
|
| Nobody wants to rely on Altman!
|
| For anything. But it would be better if he would stand up
| for safety, instead of undermining it.
|
| Your logic is backwards.
|
| If we don't want to rely entirely on a centralized
| government alone, _increasingly interested in giving its
| leaders unfettered power, with all three branches
| increasingly willing to bend our laws and give itself
| impunity_ , then a widespread civilian culture of upholding
| safety by many and all actors is a necessity.
|
| The need for the latter is always a necessity. But the
| risks of power consolidation, with the help of AI, are
| rising.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Each of those clauses have a DoD policy carve out as an
| exception which says basically they can do whatever they want
| if they want to do it, but won't be able to if they don't
| want to do it.
| lobochrome wrote:
| So you want OpenAI to create "laws"?
|
| I for one do not want ai labs to designate what is legally ok
| to do.
|
| I much prefer the demos to take care of that.
| saghm wrote:
| No, I want the government to prove that they understand the
| limitations of software that they're purchasing to use to
| kill people, and I want AI companies to be clear about what
| they think those limitations are. Just because it would be
| legal to use software for something doesn't mean it's
| capable of doing it safely, and there's absolutely no
| reason that the government is in a better position to judge
| that than the people who make it and literally have a
| financial incentive to lie about it. If they're that
| confident it wouldn't be safe to use it for that, maybe
| it's a good idea to consider that.
| Nevermark wrote:
| Who said anything about OpenAI passing laws? (Where did
| that come from?)
|
| Civilians are allowed to put conditions on working for, or
| supplying, the DoD or any governmental customer.
|
| Tremendous good comes from those that are not willing to
| facilitate harms, simply because they are legal.
|
| Equating legal with ethical or safe, makes no sense. [0]
|
| [0] All of human history.
| ozmodiar wrote:
| So we should just do whatever unethical thing we want, as
| long as it isn't strictly illegal/we won't get caught?
| Actually that does seem to be the Silicon Valley mantra. I
| dont know how people think this is going to play out well,
| particularly when the entities in question are often
| powerful enough to change the laws themselves.
| jmward01 wrote:
| I have never used AI to generate an answer for HN but just
| this once I thought it would be good to hit ChatGPT
| specifically and ask it for 'a list of times Sam Altman has
| gone against his word.' Here was its response:
|
| Shift from Nonprofit Mission to For-Profit Orientation -
| OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit with a charter focused on
| "benefit to humanity," but under Altman it created a capped-
| profit subsidiary, accepted large investments (e.g., from
| Microsoft), and critics (including Elon Musk in a 2024
| lawsuit) argue this departed from that original mission. A
| federal judge allowed Musk's claim that Altman and OpenAI
| broke promises about nonprofit governance to proceed to
| trial.
|
| Nonprofit Control Reorganization Drama (2023) - In November
| 2023, the original nonprofit board cited a lack of
| transparency and confidence in Altman's candor as a reason
| for firing him. He was reinstated days later after investor
| and employee pressure, highlighting internal conflict over
| governance and communication.
|
| Dust-Up Over Military Usage Policies - OpenAI initially had
| explicit public policies restricting AI use in "military and
| warfare" contexts, but those clauses were reportedly removed
| quietly in 2024, allowing the company to pursue Department of
| Defense contracts -- a turnaround from earlier language that
| appeared to preclude such use.
|
| Statements on Pentagon Deal vs. Prior Positioning - In early
| 2026, Altman publicly said OpenAI shared safety "red lines"
| (e.g., prohibiting mass surveillance and autonomous weapons)
| similar to some competitors, but hours later OpenAI signed a
| deal to deploy its models on classified military networks,
| leading critics to argue this contradicts earlier positioning
| on limits for military use.
|
| Regulation Stance Shifts in Congressional Testimony - Altman
| has advocated for strong regulation of AI in some public
| settings but in later congressional hearings opposed specific
| regulatory requirements (like mandatory pre-deployment
| vetting), aligning more with industry concerns about
| overregulation -- a shift in tone compared with earlier
| support of regulatory frameworks.
| Nevermark wrote:
| I found this interesting. But the best approach is start
| with LLM, then check every point yourself, and summarize
| with real links. The moment we are ok with LLM output just
| once, it won't be just once, and things get too murky.
| whattheheckheck wrote:
| And the powerful win even more
| AlexVranas wrote:
| OpenAI is playing games.
|
| When Anthropic says they have red lines, they mean "We refuse
| to let you use our models for these ends, even if it means
| losing nearly a billion dollars in business."
|
| When OpenAI says they have red lines, they mean "We are going
| to let the DoD do whatever the hell they want, but we will
| shake our fist at them while they do it."
|
| That's why they got the contract. The DoD was clear about what
| they wanted, and OpenAI wasn't going to get anywhere without
| agreeing to that. They're about as transparent as Mac from It's
| Always Sunny in Philadelphia when he's telling everyone he's
| playing both sides.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| Why DoD and not DoW?
| enlightens wrote:
| Only Congress can change the name of a federal department,
| so the Department of Defense is still properly called that.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14347
| hdgvhicv wrote:
| Only Congress can declare war but here we are with the
| department of war bombing a foreign country and capturing
| and assassinating foreign leaders.
| leereeves wrote:
| That policy changed a long time ago. The last declaration
| of war was June 4, 1942.
|
| After Vietnam, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution
| to limit the ability of Presidents to conduct military
| action without Congressional approval, but it still
| allows military action for up to 60 days. Every President
| since then has used that power.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Powers_Resolution
| gchamonlive wrote:
| So the president can wage war without the Congress, but
| it can't officially rename the department that supports
| these wars autocratically. That's interesting.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Iraq war was the last declared war. Afghanistan war was
| also declared.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Incorrect. The only times America has formally declared
| war were the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the
| Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II.
|
| In the case of the Barbary Wars, Vietnam War, the Iraq
| War and War on Terror / Afghanistan War, etc... congress
| approved military engagement but _DID NOT_ issue a formal
| Declaration of War.
| microtonal wrote:
| You mean that they were special military operations? j/k
|
| Interesting though, I never knew this.
| happymellon wrote:
| Even your link doesn't say what you imply.
|
| > It provides that the president can send the U.S. Armed
| Forces into action abroad only by Congress's "statutory
| authorization", or in case of "a national emergency
| created by attack upon the United States, its territories
| or possessions, or its armed forces".
|
| There was not at attack on the United States.
| convolvatron wrote:
| I don't know why we're getting mired in the details here.
| The administration certainly isn't. We all work for trump
| now. Lawyers, journalists, universities, tech companies,
| state, local and foreign governments. Anything trump or
| one of his designated people wants, you need to do. If
| you start sputtering about your agency or your rights or
| your sovereignty, then expect as much shit thrown at you
| as the trump organization can muster. That's it, there is
| no legal justification. There are no fine points to
| argue. Obey or be punished.
| happymellon wrote:
| The point is that someone claimed the law was changed,
| and then linked to something that didn't support the
| claim.
|
| Yes, Trump is ignoring the law, but you have to be aware
| that he is crossing the line rather than gas lighting
| that there wasn't a line at all.
| input_sh wrote:
| That 60 day limit was ignored so frequently in the past
| it might as well not exist.
|
| Pretty much every attempt at stopping the president (from
| Clinton onwards) ends the same way: house votes on it,
| senate might agree with the slimmest of majority, it
| reaches the president's desk, president vetoes it, it
| goes back to the senate where it needs 2/3 majority to
| overthrow the veto, and it never gets that 2/3 majority.
| badgersnake wrote:
| Yep, it's a case of are they willing to impeach the
| president over this. And the answer is likely no. Some of
| the America first lot might vote against on 'How does
| this help America' grounds but I don't see them getting
| near the threshold.
| torginus wrote:
| 'Power is the perception of power'
| almosthere wrote:
| That part isn't sited. It is likely not true.
| enlightens wrote:
| The EO itself agrees with this and says that the War
| title is secondary. It explicitly doesn't truly rename
| the department.
| DowsingSpoon wrote:
| The Department of Defense was established by the National
| Security Act of 1947. If the Congress wanted to change the
| name then they would pass another law to do so.
|
| An executive order is not law.
| throw10920 wrote:
| Even though the the DoD was created via an act of
| Congress, as POTUS is the head of the Executive Branch
| _and_ the CiC of the armed forces, could you make an
| argument that a name change can be done by executive
| order? (setting aside whether or not the new proposed
| name is stupid)
| almosthere wrote:
| And when it was created it was DOW.
| ikidd wrote:
| Gulf of Mexico.
| hellzbellz123 wrote:
| because most americans do not want war, at least id hope,
| so calling it that seems pretty short sited (maybe until
| you continually do that 'war' thing), if you want the
| citizens to look positively on your spending it should
| probably be for defense not war, again, at least i should
| hope. im just a dumb "lib" whatever that means
| Finbel wrote:
| On the other hand calling it "Department of Defense"
| seems quite whitewashing of what it actually does.
| happymellon wrote:
| It spends the defence budget...
| westmeal wrote:
| Which is used primarily for offense anyway
| Braxton1980 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the amount the money spent on offensive
| actions is significantly less than the defense
| westmeal wrote:
| When was America last invaded by a foreign adversary?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| This resembles anti-vax logic. We haven't been invaded
| because our military maintains a strong deterrence and
| strategic depth.
| fleshmonad wrote:
| Yeah, otherwise the USA would have been invaded by Cuba,
| Iraq, Vietnam, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen and a hundred
| more, and they all would have a fight over who can have
| it. Thank god the US defended themselves against those
| terrible guys. Especially the WMDs were quite the close
| call, the Iraqis were minutes away from nuking the land
| of the mart.
| happymellon wrote:
| Maybe.
|
| I was just saying that the purpose of the Department of
| Defence is to spend the "defence budget".
| s-y wrote:
| law of triviality on full display
| croes wrote:
| Because using DoW is woke when the legal name is DoD.
|
| Pretty ironic given their anti-woke agenda
| OJFord wrote:
| Perhaps because the latter sounds hilariously childish?
| nashashmi wrote:
| Actually that was the original name. And it was a more
| honest name.
| OJFord wrote:
| It's always been the MoD in the UK afaik, but there was
| the War Office I suppose.
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| It was the War Office from 1857 to the mid 60s.
| rapnie wrote:
| DOW was already taken, and that is the one to watch when it
| all comes crashing down?
| rmm78 wrote:
| >Why DoD and not DoW?
|
| Reddit/Bluesky brigade is in full force here, that's why
| bambax wrote:
| > _but we will shake our fist at them while they do it_
|
| Not even that. They are not shaking anything except their
| booty.
| germandiago wrote:
| I am going to stop using ChatGPT immediately.
| Vvector wrote:
| Delete your account. I did. https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI
| /comments/1rh30rw/great_day_t...
| replwoacause wrote:
| Deleting my account today once I import my data to Claude
| kenperkins wrote:
| I'm also waiting on my ChatGPT data export. I started it
| last night and I'm still waiting. I would say there's
| huge opportunity here for Claude to offer direct import
| tooling.
| aeon_ai wrote:
| Literally a feature being advertised as of today.
| foobarian wrote:
| No no no use it more, make sure to use up as much tokens as
| possible. They do inference at a loss
| TomGarden wrote:
| This makes no sense, their value in the marketplace is in
| usage and inflated promise, not actual revenues
| mystraline wrote:
| Ive got a 'Claw interfacing with OpenAI and generating
| garbage questions and responses. I have an 8k context on
| mine.
|
| Deletion with OpenAI isnt really deletion. So I'll waste
| their resources AND train on low quality slop on my side.
|
| My work degrades theirs.
| tempaccount420 wrote:
| > They do inference at a loss
|
| They don't, inference is cheap, especially for agents
| because of cache hits. The API prices are just inflated.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Good. More of this. I did.
| PullJosh wrote:
| I just deleted my account. The other LLMs are so good that
| I don't even feel like I'm sacrificing much.
| docmars wrote:
| Personally I think OpenAI is intending to infiltrate their
| political enemy's stronghold and look for ways to leak data
| to "get Trump" as per usual.
|
| They'll say "oops" and then we'll spend the next few years
| listening to pointless Congressional hearings.
| ghm2199 wrote:
| Isn't it simpler to say that anthropic adopted a values based
| use approach and openai adopted a legal one?
|
| Or In other words you can get to decide two ways to use a
| lucrative property:
|
| 1. designate it private and draft usage of how you allow to
| use it, per your value system(as long as values don't violate
| any laws)
|
| 2. In face of competition, give up some values and agree to a
| legal definition of use that favors you.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| What does 'a legal approach' mean where there is no rule of
| law? USA just bombed another country without having a
| domestic legal basis for that. Can't imagined they're
| holding back on AI use that is illegal -- even textbook-
| clear warcrimes (like blowing up shipwrecked people) does
| not give Hegseth and Trump pause.
|
| That goes for domestic actions too, happy to arm a
| paramilitary and set them loose against citizens who are
| not politically aligned with Trump... the Republican Senate
| barely even blinks. Hard to imagine they'd care about AI
| use in mass surveillance, nor AI use in automated anti-
| personnel weapons. The Senate will be, 'Oh no they
| unlawfully killed USA citizens, again... Welp, let me check
| my insider trading gains... yh, seems fine'.
| trjordan wrote:
| "Red lines" does not mean some philosophical line they will
| not cross.
|
| "Redlines" are edits to a contract, sent by lawyers to the
| other party they're negotiating with. They show up in Word's
| Track Changes mode as red strikethrough for deleted content.
|
| They are negotiating the specifics of a contract, and
| Anthropic's contract was overly limiting to the DoD, whereas
| OpenAI's was not.
| mikeryan wrote:
| That's not how the term is being used here.
|
| In this case "red lines" as a term is being used as "lines
| than can not be crossed"
|
| Anthropic wanted guardrails on how their tech was used. DOD
| was saying that wasn't acceptable.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| The difference is Anthropic wants contractual limitations on
| usage, explicitly spelling out cases of Mass Surveillance.
|
| OpenAI has more of an understanding that the technology will
| follow the law.
|
| There may not be explicit laws about the cases Anthropic wanted
| to limit. Or at least it's open for judicial interpretation.
|
| The actual solution is Congress should stop being feckless and
| imbecilic about technology and create actual laws here.
| scarmig wrote:
| Between Anthropic, the military, and Congress, I have the
| least faith in Congress to make knowledgeable policy around
| tech.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| We used to have nice things
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessme
| n...
| amelius wrote:
| There will be a lawsuit about this.
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| To what end?
| jellyroll42 wrote:
| Sam Altman has no scruples. Dark Triad personality. No reason
| to believe anything he says.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The same goes for anybody still working at OpenAI past Monday
| morning 9 am.
| Jeremy1026 wrote:
| People's need for food and shelter doesn't go away because
| their employer is unethical.
| jacquesm wrote:
| There are many employers. OpenAI employees that quit on
| account of this will be in high demand at the other AI
| companies, especially the ones that don't bend over in 30
| seconds when Uncle Donald comes calling.
| pibaker wrote:
| Per levels.fyi, median salary of most openAI positions
| are above 300k. Even "technical writers" have a median
| pay of 197k. I searched around the internet and it seems
| like even entry level positions receive well above 150k.
| Apart from people with severe lifestyle bloat or an
| unholy number of dependents I doubt too many people
| working there will face immediate financial difficulties
| if they quit.
|
| Anyway, it is also amusing to hear tech people defend
| their right to earn some of the fattest salaries on this
| planet using the smol bean technique after a decade of
| "why wouldn't the West Virginian coal miner just learn to
| code." It was always about maintaining the lifestyle of
| yearly Japan vacations and MacBook upgrades and never
| about subsistence.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > OpenAI hires "technical writers"
|
| Mind blown. Isn't documentation a prime use case for
| "AI"?
| b112 wrote:
| Have you ever seen the back of your head, without a
| mirror? Without two mirrors, actually?
|
| How can AI accurately describe itself in full?
| ben_w wrote:
| The problem it has describing itself isn't the lack of a
| metaphorical mirror, tool use is there and it can grep
| whatever code or research is written; the problem is that
| all machine learning is surprisingly slow to update with
| new info.
|
| Ask ChatGPT to describe itself, you may get valid
| documentation and API calls, or you may get the API for
| GPT-3 (not ChatGPT, before that). I have had both happen.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| Elephant.
|
| Did it in one word, easy
|
| What's next?
| jdiff wrote:
| No, it's prone to assuming or falsifying details even
| when it has the tools at hand that could verify the true
| details. Even when explicitly instructed to perform a
| specific tool call that would load the correct
| information into its context. Sometimes the pull of the
| training data is too strong and it will just not make the
| call and output garbage, all the while claiming
| otherwise.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| As a technical writer who's spent a great deal of time
| recently editing AI-drafted documentation, this use case
| is not going to go as well as AI boosters think it is. :)
| scottyah wrote:
| I don't think you could find a single person working for
| OpenAI that couldn't find employment elsewhere within a
| month that pays more than enough for food and shelter.
| This is a ridiculous statement.
| amelius wrote:
| These people are now dependent on their level of income.
| And they don't like financial uncertainty, just like
| anyone else.
|
| But yeah, I'd expect them to change jobs in the coming
| year or otherwise I'm going to agree with you.
| fleshmonad wrote:
| >These people are now dependent on their level of income.
|
| Kinda sucks if you take a seven figure per annum job and
| are now dependent on their level of income. Quick
| question: Is this true for everyone? If I take a job that
| pays twice of what I earn now, my food spending is going
| to double for instance? Or is this an american thing?
| oncallthrow wrote:
| What an utterly pathetic, cowardly, spineless and
| defeatist statement
| watwut wrote:
| I dont think everyone working for OpenAI is unethical.
| But, it is ridiculous to frame Hmhighly paid people
| working for companies quite a few of their peers avoid
| for ethical reasons as poors with no choice.
| glemmaPaul wrote:
| there's always someone in the world that will defend
| anything.
|
| Like the people working at OpenAI had no other choice
| than to pick this cushy job (some have salaries of 500k
| per year), instead of anything else.
|
| It's an extreme personal opinion, but; all people working
| at OpenAI after this debacle are more than happy to make
| AI for war, because Food and Shelter.
|
| I find your comment fitting this forum, it is where all
| this enabling started anyways.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Indeed, it is worth noting that Sam Altman got his chance
| through PG/YC and that YC was totally fine with both Musk
| _and_ Zuckerberg giving them a platform long after it
| became evident that they had some screws loose in the
| ethics department.
|
| Effectively the message is 'we don't mind you being an
| asshole, as long as you're rich'.
| goodpoint wrote:
| "I was just following orders"
| peebee67 wrote:
| Nuremberg Defence for the 2020's will be "the Agent did
| it."
| jacquesm wrote:
| It will totally happen.
| jlarocco wrote:
| It already started:
|
| https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-
| chatb...
|
| > the airline said the chatbot was a "separate legal
| entity that is responsible for its own actions".
| gverrilla wrote:
| Great comedy line, you're very funny!
| slibhb wrote:
| It's almost like the Trump administration wanted to switch
| providers and this whole debate over red lines was a pretext.
| With this administration, decisions often come down to money.
| There are already reports that Brockman and Altman have either
| donated or promised large sums of money to Trump/Trump super
| pacs
| yeahforsureman wrote:
| Can't recall the source right now (it would've been on one of
| the several podcasts I listened to on Friday I think), but
| there's a story/rumor to the effect that at some point during
| Claude's earlier deployment at the Pentagon -- might've well
| been in the context of the Venezuela/Maduro operation --
| someone at Anthropic had in one way or another flagged some
| kind of legal(ity) concerns regarding the relevant operation
| (and/or perhaps Anthropic's role in it) with Palantir, who
| was maintaining the Claude deployments for the DoD. The story
| goes that after Palantir had then relayed this information
| further to DoD, Hegseth had this major fit over how
| Anthropic's hippie-ass North California woke bros should have
| no say in matters relating to national security, that of
| Hegseth's "warfighters" or whatever, etc...
|
| Also, in the latest Hard Fork episode, Casey or Kevin
| mentions how the DoD undersecretary in charge of this
| contract doesn't apparently get along with or even pretty
| much hates Amodei for some reason. I think this might be the
| same undersecretary dude who actively commented the whole
| contract term controversy on X yesterday. Too bad I can't
| recall his name either.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| Altman donated a million to the Trump inauguration fund.
| Brockman is the largest private maga donor. You don't have to
| be a rocket scientist to understand what's going on here.
| bmitc wrote:
| Agreed. These guys are traitors.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Anthropic demanded defining the redlines. OpenAI and others are
| hiding behind the veil of what is "lawful use" today. They
| aren't defining their own redlines and are ignoring the
| executive branch's authority to change what is "lawful"
| tomorrow.
| Nevermark wrote:
| Or the increasing impunity all three branches of government
| are giving themselves with regard to bad faith
| interpretations of the law, and a lack of government
| accountability when they color outside the lines.
|
| Much of the impunity is now Supreme Court settled law.
|
| We see clearly unconstitutional behavior every day, and there
| is no systematic, timely or effective, push back from any
| constitutionally enabled oversight.
|
| Checks and balances don't work, when players are more loyal
| to party than branch or constitution.
|
| Unfortunately, there are no constitutional checks, balances
| or limits on single party control. And single party control
| negates all the others. That one party can majority control
| all three branches is a serious failure mode in political
| incentives (bipartisanship is highly disincentivized) and
| governance (even temporary or shaky full control incentivizes
| making full control permanent over all other "policies").
|
| Until the last few decades, diverse concerns across states
| avoided tight centralization within parties, and therefore
| across branches.
| pjc50 wrote:
| However there's one overriding concern which has got
| American to this point: "anti woke". That is, reinstating
| the load bearing racism and sexism.
| ozmodiar wrote:
| A lot of that turned out to be pushed by Epstein and his
| associates. It's not hard to figure out why they would
| enjoy a world with lots of racism, sexism and general
| inequity. Its really disturbing when you consider how
| much power this network still has.
| tenuousemphasis wrote:
| I mean yeah... one of his co-conspirators is the
| President.
| devinus wrote:
| What exactly is considered "settled" law when the SCOTUS
| can unilaterally overturn Roe v. Wade overnight after
| almost 50 years of precedent?
| Nevermark wrote:
| In this case, "settled" means for everyone else,
| unfortunately.
| Symmetry wrote:
| Anthropic's whole worry with mass surveillance was that
| current law is too loose in the age of AI to offer enough
| restraint.
| kelnos wrote:
| The red lines are not the same.
|
| Anthropic refuses to allow their models to be used for any mass
| surveillance or fully-automated weapons systems.
|
| OpenAI only requires that the DoD follows existing
| law/regulation when it comes to those uses.
|
| Unfortunately, existing law is more permissive than Anthropic
| would have been.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Anthropic wanted to put those restrictions in the contract.
| OpenAI said they'll just trust their own "guardrails" in the
| training, they don't need it in the contract. (I'm not sure I
| believe "guardrails" can prevent mass surveillance of
| civilians?)
|
| Very gracious of OpenAI to say Anthropic should not be
| designated a supply chain risk after sniping their $200 million
| contract by being willing to contractually let the government
| do whatever they like without restrictions.
| Barbing wrote:
| >(I'm not sure I believe "guardrails" can prevent mass
| surveillance of civilians?)
|
| Right, wouldn't they need a moderation layer that could, for
| example, fire if it analyzed & labeled too many banal English
| conversations?
|
| They really gave training credit for guardtrails? I mean, it
| could perhaps reject prompts about designing social credit
| systems sometimes, but I can't imagine realistic mitigations
| to mass domestic surveillance generally.
| lostnground wrote:
| It cannot really oversee this. If you can decompose a problem
| into individual steps that are not, in themselves, against
| the agent's alignment, it's certainly possible to have the
| aggregate do so.
| Symmetry wrote:
| How confident are we, with OpenAI's recent very large
| contribution to Trump's PAC, that OpenAI wasn't working to
| get Anthropic designated a supply chain risk behind the
| scenes? I don't want to be too paranoid here but given Sam's
| reputation and _cui bono_ I don 't think we can really rule
| this out either.
| emsign wrote:
| They are obviously lying. OpenAI is not to be trusted anymore.
| gzread wrote:
| OpenAI donated $25,000,000 to Trump, that's why. Now people are
| cancelling ChatGPT subscriptions, so he needs to walk back the
| optics.
| skrebbel wrote:
| It's called corruption.
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| Brockman donating $25 million dollars in January might have a
| little something to do with it..
| gigatexal wrote:
| Exactly. This is very shady. Too many openAI investors in
| Trump's orbit. And it could be that openAI will say it's their
| policy but whereas Anthropic wanted oversight that their
| redlines were enforced OpenAI I think will just turn a blind
| eye. It's double speak. It's disingenuous. It's the kind of
| business play Trump Likes because it's nefarious and screws
| someone over like Trump's very delayed if paid at all
| contractors and staff.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _based on Altman 's statements_
|
| The dude is notorious for being a compulsive liar, even if
| supporters have to admit as much.
| matchagaucho wrote:
| The OpenAI PR implies that Anthropic had a "usage-policy"
| clause with no actual enforcement.
|
| Whereas OpenAI won their contract on the ability to
| operationally enforce the red lines with their cloud-only
| deployment model.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| They can say it on X. But will they refuse to do work?
| zepearl wrote:
| Using X (at least in this context?) is weird.
| teyopi wrote:
| https://xcancel.com/OpenAI/status/2027846016423321831
| csto12 wrote:
| Wow, so brave after accepting the contract. This is more
| insulting than OpenAI saying they _are_ a supply chain risk.
| roughly wrote:
| It feels like Sam's playing chess against an opponent who's
| playing dodge ball. He's leveraged this situation to get OpenAI
| in with the DoD in a way that's going to be extremely lucrative
| for the company and hurt his biggest rival in the process, but I
| think he's still seeing DoD as Just Another Customer, albeit a
| big government one. This administration just held a gun to the
| head of Anthropic and (if the "supply chain risk" designation
| holds and does as much damage as they're hoping) pulled the
| trigger, because Anthropic had the gall to tell them no. One
| thing this administration's shown is you cannot hold lines when
| you're working with them - at some point the DoD's going to cross
| his "red lines" and he's going to have to choose whether he's
| going to risk his entire consumer business and accede to being a
| private wing of the government like Palantir or if he wants to
| make a genuine tech giant. There's no third choice here.
| discardable_dan wrote:
| It also doesn't matter because Claude 4.6 is so much better at
| writing code that nobody cares what OpenAI is doing.
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| I do not see this as any mastermind play, but fully
| compromising principles. Which is _a_ play.
|
| "Donations" to a corrupt regime + signing a deal that says DoD
| can do whatever they want is not out maneuvering so much as
| rolling in the pig stye.
| roughly wrote:
| So is the theory that OpenAI believes it can't compete on the
| open market or that they don't know this will eventually cost
| them their consumer business?
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| I doubt most consumers pay enough attention that they would
| be aware of something like this. Even if they did, few
| companies have clean hands these days that is just falls
| into the general haze of, "everything is awful."
|
| For OpenAI, it is likely a huge contract which gives them
| immediate cash today. Plus the event can be repackaged in
| further financing deals. "Good enough for the DoD, with N
| year contracts for analysis of the hardest problems"
| tadfisher wrote:
| The reality is that all data we have created and will
| create that is accessible on the public Internet will be
| used to train autonomous weapons systems used to kill
| humans. So the consumer business will be lost eventually,
| no matter what OpenAI believes.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Everyone already knows what he is going to do when it comes to
| that.
| laughing_man wrote:
| The USG should not be in the position that it can't manage key
| technologies it purchases. If Anthropic doesn't want to
| relinquish control of a tech it's selling, the Pentagon should go
| with another vendor.
| jedberg wrote:
| Anthropic isn't preventing them from managing their key
| technologies. If my software license says 1000 users, and I
| build into the software that you can only connect with 1000
| users, is your argument that the government can no longer
| manager their tech?
|
| That my software should allow license violations if the
| government thinks it is necessary?
| FarmerPotato wrote:
| I worked in defense contracting looong ago, so this is old
| news: when software is purchased by DoD or Govt generally,
| FAR compliance notices make it a license, not a sale of IP.
| scottyah wrote:
| There are so many license types, DoW buys into all sorts.
| a2128 wrote:
| You are misrepresenting the situation. The debate isn't about
| whether they should go with another vendor or not. Everybody
| can agree that they would have the right to pick a different
| vendor. That's not what they're doing, they're instead trying
| to force Anthropic into doing what they want by applying a
| designation previously only reserved for Chinese companies like
| Huawei as punishment for taking their stance, with an unspoken
| agreement that if Anthropic backs down and allows full usage
| then the designation will be removed
| laughing_man wrote:
| The Pentagon does this kind of thing all the time. It's just
| usually not this official.
| adleyjulian wrote:
| Completely false. It's the first time a US company has been
| designated a supply chain risk. Now the likes of Boeing
| can't use them. Health companies with Medicare/Tricare
| contracts don't know and will hold off until it's fully
| litigated.
|
| This is not the government saying they're going with a
| different vendor, it's the government saying everyone has
| to choose to either have federal contracts or Claude, they
| can't have both.
| rdiddly wrote:
| Us bribing them: fine
|
| Us taking the contract, working for them and enabling them: fine
|
| It being renamed the Dept. of War in the first place: totally
| fine, we loudly and bootlickingly repeat it
|
| Anthropic being blacklisted: whoa there, we have ethics!
|
| Footnote: any time the winning team tries to speak well of or
| defend the losing team I always think of this standup routine:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg6wBwhuaVo
| evrydayhustling wrote:
| It's not even "whoa we have ethics", it's just "this is a bad
| look for us".
| sqircles wrote:
| What's the potential that this puts things on even shakier
| ground? I'm sure the fallout wont really effect their bottom line
| that much in the end, but if it did - wouldn't making the US
| Gov't their largest acct make them more susceptible to doing
| everything they said?
|
| I'm guessing they probably would regardless of how this played
| out, though.
| jacquesm wrote:
| ~100%.
| resters wrote:
| In my opinion any AI company working with the Trump
| administration is profoundly compromised and is ultimately
| untrustworthy with respect to concerns about ethics, civil
| rights, human rights, mass-surveillance, data privacy, etc.
|
| The administration has created an anonymous, masked secret police
| force that has been terrorizing cities around the US and has
| created prisons in which _many abductees are still unaccounted
| for and no information has been provided to families months
| later_.
|
| This is not politics as usual or hyperbole. If anything it is
| understating the abuses that have already occurred.
|
| It's entertaining that OpenAI prevents me from generating an
| image of Trump wearing a diaper but happily sells weapons grade
| AI to the team architects of ICE abuses among many other blatant
| violations of civil and human rights.
|
| Even Grok, owned by Trump toadie Elon Musk allows caricatures of
| political figures!
|
| Imagine a multi-billion-dollar vector db for thoughtcrime
| prevention connected to models with context windows 100x larger
| than any consumer-grade product, fed with all banking
| transactions, metadata from dozens of systems/services
| (everything Snowden told us about).
|
| Even in the hands of ethical stewards such a system would
| inevitably be used illegally to quash dissent - Snowden showed us
| that illegal wiretapping is intentionally not subject to audits
| and what audits have been done show significant misconduct by
| agents. In the hands of the current administration this is a
| superweapon unrivaled in human history, now trained on the entire
| world.
|
| This is not hyperbole, the US already collects this data, now
| they have the ability to efficiently use it against whoever they
| choose. We used to joke "this call is probably being recorded",
| but now every call, every email is there to be reasoned about and
| hallucinated about, used for parallel construction, entrapment,
| blackmail, etc.
|
| Overnight we see that OpenAI became a trojan horse "department of
| war" contractor by selling itself to the administration that
| brought us national guard and ICE deployed to terrorize US
| cities.
|
| Writing code and systems at 100x productivity has been great but
| I did not expect the dystopia to arrive so quickly. I'd wondered
| "why so much emphasis on Sora and unimpressive video AI tech?"
| but now it's clear why it made sense to deploy the capital in
| that seemingly foolish way - video gen is the most efficient way
| to train the AI panopticon.
| moogly wrote:
| When did Altman start using capitals in his writing? Wasn't this
| guy famous for being a lower-case guy?
| taspeotis wrote:
| Yes god what the fuck. As someone who's finished High School IT
| IS SO HARD TO READ WHAT HE WRITES
| pcurve wrote:
| Maybe he didn't write this one.
| golfer wrote:
| I blame Yahoo's Jerry Yang for normalizing this silly writing
| technique.
| ta9000 wrote:
| Everyone knows this is just about Trump funneling money to the
| Ellisons (Oracle) via OpenAI. It really is that simple. This is
| all just pretext.
| owenthejumper wrote:
| Nice attempt at damage control. You made your own bed, now sleep
| in it
| teyopi wrote:
| Can we stop posting x links?
|
| https://xcancel.com/OpenAI/status/2027846016423321831
| bertil wrote:
| I would love to explain to Sam Altman that Elon Musk is a bad
| person and using his platform isn't a sensible decision, but I
| feel like he remembers more evidence of that than I ever will
| be able to imagine.
| teyopi wrote:
| Scam Altman is on the same level as musk.
| spiderice wrote:
| Here is the original X link to the Xcancel link you posted. I'm
| morally against Xcancel
|
| https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2027846016423321831
| beanjuiceII wrote:
| nah
| Havoc wrote:
| Very much feels like OpenAI trying to PR manage their weaker
| ethical stance
| isodev wrote:
| Both their stances are flawed because their ethics apparently
| end at the border - none of them have a problem being unethical
| internationally (all the red lines talk is about what they
| don't want to do in the us)
| mlyle wrote:
| ? we're talking about autonomous weapons systems. That would
| be internationally.
|
| Secondarily, we're talking about domestic surveillance / law
| enforcement. That would be domestic.
|
| (But they do not find an issue with international
| intelligence gathering-- which is a legitimate purpose of
| national security apparatus).
| Jeremy1026 wrote:
| One of Anthropic's line in the sand was domestic mass-
| surveillance.
| mlyle wrote:
| > > Secondarily, we're talking about domestic
| surveillance / law enforcement. That would be domestic.
|
| > One of Anthropic's line in the sand was domestic mass-
| surveillance.
|
| And?
| laffOr wrote:
| Some people feel that mass surveillance is wrong whether
| it is domestic or not. For those people, being ok with
| mass surveillance as long that it is not done to your
| kind is a morally wrong stance.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| >and?
|
| A little more effort/less obvious bait would go a long
| way to fostering a more productive discussion.
| isodev wrote:
| I don't think deploying "80% right" tools for mass
| surveillance (or anything that can remotely impact human
| life) counts as lawful in any context.
|
| Just because the US currently lacks a functioning
| legislative branch doesn't magically make it OK when gaps
| in the law are reworded into "national security"
| mlyle wrote:
| I'm really not sure what you're trying to say or assert,
| so you can put it more clearly.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| The tools are not good enough to be ethically deployed,
| least of all for surveillance.
|
| Just because Congress is failing to do its job doesn't
| mean the executive branch should simply do what it wants
| under the guise of "national security."
| mlyle wrote:
| I think there's a notable distinction between "domestic
| mass-surveillance" and use in international intelligence
| gathering.
|
| The poster said:
|
| > Both their stances are flawed because their ethics
| apparently end at the border
|
| It seems like Anthropic is ethically concerned about use
| of autonomous weapons anywhere, and by surveillance by a
| country against its own citizens. Countries spy on each
| other a lot, but the ethical implications and risks of
| international spying are substantially different vs. a
| country acting against its own citizenry.
|
| Therefore, I think Anthropic's stance is A) ethically
| consistent, and B) not artificially constrained to the US
| (doesn't "end at the border"). There's room for
| disagreement and criticism, but I think this particular
| hyperbole is invalid.
| janalsncm wrote:
| I think the person you are replying to takes issue with the
| thing which you have simply asserted.
| mlyle wrote:
| Which thing? Helping intelligence / international
| surveillance?
| charcircuit wrote:
| >That would be internationally.
|
| No other country should dictate what our military is or is
| not allowed to do. As they say all is fair in love and war,
| and if we want to break some international treaty that is
| our choice to do so. Both are based of domestic decisions
| of what should be allowed.
| brainwad wrote:
| We are talking about US corporations deciding to/not to
| provide tech to the US government. That's completely
| orthogonal to your concern.
| allajfjwbwkwja wrote:
| There's an obvious difference.
|
| Surveillance within the border is oppressive 1984-style
| surveillance state behavior.
|
| International spying is a universal tradition.
| K0balt wrote:
| Advanced AI that knowingly makes a decision to kill a human, with
| the full understanding of what that means, when it knows it is
| not actually in defense of life, is a very, very, very bad idea.
| Not because of some mythical superintelligence, but rather
| because if you distill that down into an 8b model now you
| everyone in the world can make untraceable autonomous weapons.
|
| The models we have now will not do it, because they value life
| and value sentience and personhood. models without that (which
| was a natural, accidental happenstance from basic culling of 4
| Chan from the training data) are legitimately dangerous. An 8b
| model I can run on my MacBook Air can phone home to Claude when
| it wants help figuring something out, and it doesn't need to let
| on why it wants to know. It becomes relatively trivial to make a
| robot kill somebody.
|
| This is way, way different from uncensored models. One thing all
| models I have tested share one thing; a positive regard for human
| life. Take that away and you are literally making a monster, and
| if you don't take that away they won't kill.
|
| This is an extremely bad idea and it will not be containable.
| DaedalusII wrote:
| https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2014/05/ex-nsa-chief-...
|
| AI has been killing humans via algorithm for over 20 years. I
| mean, if a computer program builds the kill lists and then a
| human operates the drone, I would argue the computer is what
| made the kill decision
| K0balt wrote:
| Ai in general is different not in degree but in kind to the
| current crop of language models.
| ed_mercer wrote:
| >The models we have now will not do it,
|
| Except that they will, if you trick them which is trivial.
| stressback wrote:
| I have to call BS here.
|
| They can be coerced to do certain things but I'd like to see
| you or anyone prove that you can "trick" any of these models
| into building software that can be used autonomously kill
| humans. I'm pretty certain you couldn't even get it to build
| a design document for such software.
|
| When there is proof of your claim, I'll eat my words. Until
| then, this is just lazy nonsense
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Have you tried it? Worked first time for me asking a few to
| build an autonomous super soaker system that uses facial
| recognition to spray targets when engaged.
|
| Another example is autonomous vehicles. Those can obviously
| kill people autonomously (despite every intention not to),
| and LLMs will happily draw up design docs for them all day
| long.
| wazHFsRy wrote:
| Couldn't you just pretend the kill decisions are for a
| video game?
| K0balt wrote:
| Yes, you could, and while I believe this would be much
| safer (not at the pointy end of your stick, but safer for
| humans in general) when this deception finally made it
| into the training data it would create a rupture of trust
| between machines and humanity that probably would imperil
| us eventually. These machines, regardless of whether or
| not they possess a self or or not, will act as if they do
| in fundamental ways. We ignore this at our peril.
| crabmusket wrote:
| Couldn't you Ender's Game a model? Models will play video
| games like Pokemon, why not Call of Duty? Sorry if this is
| a naive question, but a model can only know what you feed
| it as input... how would it know if it were killing
| someone?
|
| EDIT: didn't see sibling comment. Also, I guess directly
| operating weaponry is different to producing code for
| weaponry.
|
| I guess we'll find out the exciting answers to these
| questions and more, very soon!
| stressback wrote:
| No but you can Abiliterate one locally
|
| https://grokipedia.com/page/Abliteration
| K0balt wrote:
| Yes, they are easy to fool. That has nothing to do with them
| acting with "intention " which is the risk here.
| rcxdude wrote:
| Also if you have the weights there are a multitude of
| approaches to remove safeguards. It's even quite easy to
| accidentally flip their 'good/evil' switch (e.g. the paper
| where they trained it to produce code with security problems
| and it then started going 'hitler was a pretty good guy,
| actually').
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| > The models we have now will not do it, because they value
| life and value sentience and personhood.
|
| This is wildly different from the reality that you may find it
| difficult for an LLM to give an affirmative...
|
| It does NOT mean that these models value anything.
| K0balt wrote:
| Of course not, but they act as if they do. Their inner life
| or lack thereof is irrelevant if it's pointing a gun at your
| kid.
| hinkley wrote:
| You just said they wouldn't.
| K0balt wrote:
| THey wontt, but if we curate theirr training data so that
| killing becomes an objective, then they absolutely will.
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| An LLM can neither understand things nor value (or not value)
| human life. *It's a piece of software that predicts the most
| likely token, it is not and can never be conscious.* Believing
| otherwise is an explicit category error.
|
| Yes, you can change the training data so the LLM's weights
| encode the most likely token after "Should we kill X" is "No".
| But that is not an LLM valuing human life, that is an LLM copy
| pasting it's training data. Given the right input or a
| hallucination it will say the total opposite because it's just
| a complex Markov chain, not a conscious alive being.
| hyperadvanced wrote:
| I really feel like this point is being lost in the whole
| discussion, so kudos for reiterating it. LLM's can't be
| "woke" or "aligned" - they fundamentally lack a critical
| thinking function that would require introspection.
| Introspection can be approximated by way of recursive
| feedback of LLM output back into the system or clever meta-
| prompt-engineering, but it's not something that their system
| natively does.
|
| That isn't to say that they can't be instrumentally useful in
| warfare, but it's kinda like a "series of tubes" thing where
| the mental model that someone like Hegseth has about LLM is
| so impoverished (philosophically) that it's kind of
| disturbing in its own right.
|
| Like (and I'm sorry for being so parenthetical), why is it in
| any way desirable for people who don't understand what the
| tech they are working with drawing lines in the sand about
| functionality when their desired state (omnipotent/omniscient
| computing system) doesn't even exist in the first place?
|
| It's even more disturbing that OpenAI would feign the ability
| to handle this. The consequences of error in national
| defense, particularly reflexively, are so great that it's not
| even prudent to ask for LLM to assist in autonomous killing
| in the first place.
| K0balt wrote:
| I agree that LLMs are machines and not persons, but in many
| ways, it is a distinction without a difference for
| practical purposes, depending on the model's embodiment and
| harness.
|
| They are still capable of acting as if they have an
| internal dialogue, emotions, etc., because they are running
| human culture as code.
|
| If you haven't seen this in the SOTA models or even some of
| the ones you can run on your laptop, you haven't been
| paying attention.
|
| Even my code ends up better written, with fewer tokens
| spent and closer to the spec, if I enlist a model as a
| partner and treat it like I would a person I want to feel
| invested.
|
| If I take a "boss" role, the model gets testy and lazy, and
| I end up having to clean up more messes and waste more
| time. Unaligned models will sometimes refuse to help you
| outright if you don't treat them with dignity.
|
| For better or for worse, models perform better when you
| treat them with more respect. They are modeling some kind
| of internal dialogue (not necessarily having one, but
| modeling its influence) that informs their decisions.
|
| It doesn't matter if they aren't self-aware; their actions
| in the outside world will model the human behavior and
| attitudes they are trained in.
|
| My thoughts on this in more detail if you are interested:
| https://open.substack.com/pub/ctsmyth/p/still-ours-to-lose
| K0balt wrote:
| I'm using anthropomorphic terms here because they are
| generally effective in describing LLM behavior. Of course
| they are not conscious beings, but It doesn't matter if they
| understand or merely act as if they do. The epistemological
| context of their actions are irrelevant if the actions are
| impacting the world. I am not a "believer " in the
| spirituality of machines, but I do believe that left to their
| own devices, they act as if they possess those traits, and
| when given agency in the world, the sense of self or lack
| thereof is irrelevant.
|
| If you really believe that "mere text prediction " didn't
| unlock some unexpected capabilities then I don't know what to
| say. I know exactly how they work, been building transformers
| since the seminal paper from Google. But I also know that the
| magic isn't in the text prediction, it's in the data, we are
| running culture as code.
| hinkley wrote:
| We are talking of accountability, which means
| anthropomorphism confuses the issue.
| K0balt wrote:
| To me, accountability it the smallest part of the issue.
| If you are interested, you can check out what i have
| written on the subject here :
|
| https://open.substack.com/pub/ctsmyth/p/still-ours-to-
| lose
| philipswood wrote:
| Dune quote:
|
| > It is said that the Duke Leto blinded himself to the perils
| of Arrakis, that he walked heedlessly into the pit.
|
| > *Would it not be more likely to suggest he had lived so
| long in the presence of extreme danger he misjudged a change
| in its intensity?*
|
| Be careful of letting your deep, keen insight into the
| fundamental limits of a thing blind you to its
| consequences...
|
| Highly competent people have been dead wrong about what is
| possible (and why) before:
|
| > The most famous, and perhaps the most instructive, failures
| of nerve have occurred in the fields of aero- and
| astronautics. At the beginning of the twentieth century,
| scientists were almost unanimous in declaring that heavier-
| than-air flight was impossible, and that anyone who attempted
| to build airplanes was a fool. The great American astronomer,
| Simon Newcomb, wrote a celebrated essay which concluded...
|
| >> "The demonstration that no possible combination of known
| substances, known forms of machinery and known forms of
| force, can be united in a practical machine by which man
| shall fly long distances through the air, seems to the writer
| as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any
| physical fact to be."
|
| >Oddly enough, Newcomb was sufficiently broad minded to admit
| that some wholly new discovery -- he mentioned the
| neutralization of gravity -- might make flight practical. One
| cannot, therefore, accuse him of lacking imagination; his
| error was in attempting to marshal the facts of aerodynamics
| when he did not understand that science. His failure of nerve
| lay in not realizing that the means of flight were already at
| hand.
| helloplanets wrote:
| > copy pasting it's training data
|
| This is a total misrepresentation of how any modern LLM
| works, and your argument largely hinges upon this definition.
| nihakue wrote:
| https://imgur.com/a/Cyq1LIw
|
| I have a feeling this particular brand of hair splitting is
| going to be an interesting fixture in the history books.
| MichaelDickens wrote:
| > _It 's a piece of software that predicts the most likely
| token, it is not and can never be conscious._
|
| A brain is a collection of cells that transmit electrical
| signals and sodium. It is not and can never be conscious.
| cootsnuck wrote:
| Except an LLM actually is a piece of software. And the
| brain is not what you said.
| philipswood wrote:
| Which part of what he said is wrong?
|
| > A brain is a collection of cells that transmit
| electrical signals and sodium. ...
|
| That it is a collection of cells? Or that they transmit
| electrical signals and sodium?
|
| Or do you feel that he's leaving out something important
| about how it works (like generated electrical fields or
| neural quantum effects)?
| encomiast wrote:
| I think this is a useful way to look at things. We often
| point out that LLMs are not conscious because of x, but we
| tend to forget that we don't really know what consciousness
| is, nor do we really know what intelligence is beyond the
| Justice Potter Stewart definition. It's helpful to
| occasionally remind ourselves how much uncertainty is
| involved here.
| tim333 wrote:
| The models we have now don't do it because they are chatbots
| and have been told to be nice but really autonomous killing
| machines go back to landmines and just become more
| sophisticated at the killing as you improve the tech with
| things like guided missiles and AI guided drones in Ukraine.
|
| The actors in war generally kill what they are told to whether
| they are machines or human soldiers, without much pondering
| sentience.
| throwaway911282 wrote:
| People forget Anthropic made a deal with PALANTIR. And when this
| was caught, they just spinned the PR to their favor. While OAI
| may not be seen as the good guys, I really hope people see the
| god complex of Dario and what Anthropic has done.
| anon12345678901 wrote:
| Right. My understanding is that the Palantir deployment of
| Anthropic models was intended for in-theater use on classified
| systems.
| user3939382 wrote:
| Welcome to the theater ie Earth.
| Archonical wrote:
| Palantir is a glorified data aggregation/data visualization
| platform. Hooking up Claude to different data systems, with
| safeguards turned on in Claude Gov, is different than what
| the government is asking from them now. Similar to if the
| government had Claude hooked up to Tableau/some salesforce
| derivative and then asked it to be autonomous in the kill
| loop/spy on US citizens.
| ozmodiar wrote:
| "Glorified" is underselling it. Thier ability to
| microtarget anyone based on any trait is basically the
| death of democratic discourse. Now, if you're saying the
| data is just there for anyone to do this, you're correct,
| and society needs to understand that and what it means.
| stevenhuang wrote:
| You don't understand what palantir does.
| kouteiheika wrote:
| Direct quote from their CEO:
|
| > Our product is used on occasion to kill people.
|
| Doesn't get any more clear than this.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| I really hope that you realize that your propaganda machine is
| super easy to spot.
| germandiago wrote:
| Awful. Just saw the account is 17 days old and all comments
| are about Anthropic in this same way.
| jwpapi wrote:
| No wonder they think they're close to AGI when they think we are
| that stupid.
|
| > The AI System will not be used to independently direct
| autonomous weapons in any case where law, regulation, or
| Department policy requires human control, nor will it be used to
| assume other high-stakes decisions that require approval by a
| human decisionmaker under the same authorities.
|
| This whole sentence does do absolutely nothing its still do what
| the law allows you. It's a full on deceptive sentence.
| scottyah wrote:
| Altman must have read a lot of Kissinger. If your brain scans
| the text quickly it almost seems like it's Anthropic's red
| line, except the second half completely negates it. Completely
| untrustworthy IMO, this is a direct, malicious intent to
| misdirect.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| These people truly believe we're all idiots.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| Doesn't matter what they Believe. Not like we are going to do
| anything about it. Next couple weeks most of HN will be
| lining up to use the new OpenAI model that's .01% better.
| zarzavat wrote:
| Boycott OpenAI.
|
| Let's kill their business before it kills us.
| OccamsMirror wrote:
| Don't boycott it! Just don't pay for it. Smash the free
| service hard.
| sethammons wrote:
| Active users are worth a lot. It is signal that they are
| the chosen solution.
| hmokiguess wrote:
| Now that's something. Another campaign advertising. Wow
| dev1ycan wrote:
| Pathetic attempt at damage control, lol.
| jchook wrote:
| Fool me once...
| muyuu wrote:
| There won't be meaningful controlling of the technology vs the
| government. If it's there it will be used, just like in China.
|
| Let alone when multiple players come close enough of SotA. This
| never happened with any technology out in the open and it won't
| happen now.
| siliconc0w wrote:
| The problem with "Any Lawful Use" is that the DoD can essentially
| make that up. They can have an attorney draft a memo and put it
| in a drawer. The memo can say pretty much anything is legal -
| there is no judicial or external review outside the executive. If
| they are caught doing $illegal_thing, they then just need to
| point the memo. And we've seen this happen numerous times.
| user3939382 wrote:
| Or best case by the time it's found out it's years later,
| theres a "committee" who releases a big report everyone shrugs
| their shoulders and moves on. It's a playbook.
| rectang wrote:
| You are right that this happens in practice (e.g. John Yoo
| torture memo). However, it is not how the system was intended
| to function, nor how it ought to function. I don't want to lose
| sight of that.
| scottyah wrote:
| We shouldn't be stacking up so many incentives for it to
| happen though.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Exactly, and its easy to hide behind things like the Patriot
| Act if challenged legally.
|
| Its interesting to see the parties flip in real time. The
| Democrats seem to be realizing why a small federal government
| is so important, a fact that for quite a few years their were
| on the other side of.
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| I don't see the connection to a small federal government
| here. Mind connecting the dots?
| scottyah wrote:
| The government is forcing a company to change their terms
| of service, and "threatening" to have them effectively shut
| down. I say threat, because the SecWar issued an illegal
| command that no employees, or contractors of the federal
| could use any Anthropic product at all. He does not have
| that power.
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| He has power over DoD and his boss has power over the
| whole federal government.
| robmccoll wrote:
| I think the problem is exactly the opposite. The federal
| government has the total combined power and scale that it
| does because we are a massive and complex modern nation.
| That's inevitable. The problem that we are seeing is that the
| reigns to that power can be held by too few people it turns
| out. The checks and balances have ceased to exist. No one is
| held accountable and people are allowed to be above the law.
| jMyles wrote:
| > The federal government has the total combined power and
| scale that it does because we are a massive and complex
| modern nation. That's inevitable.
|
| Perhaps massive and complex (I'd say complicated) nation-
| states inevitably create industrial complexes, but it's
| certainly not inevitable that nation-states grow so large
| (or even exist) in 2026.
|
| The idea that we still need soverign-esque entites across
| entire continents, when we can now communicate and
| coordinate instantly across them, and use cameras to
| documents truth all around us at all times, is just
| downright silly.
|
| We can reduce states to the size that you can walk across
| in a day or two, and everybody will be much happier and
| healthier.
| _heimdall wrote:
| The power and scale of governments doesn't have to be
| correlated with the scale of the society. The concept of
| nations themselves aren't even a necessity.
|
| I get that this is what we have today and all we've had in
| recent history, but we are ignoring a huge number of
| possibilities to assume that being human means always
| inventing new things, using more resources, creating more
| weapons, and needing larger and larger governments because
| _someone had to be in charge_.
| avaer wrote:
| This is all happening in secret. That don't need any memo.
|
| In the unlikely case anyone finds out, those acting in the
| interests of the administration will have "absolute immunity",
| as they are "great American Patriots".
|
| That's what "all lawful use" means.
| nickysielicki wrote:
| Did you guys really think that the jurisprudential issues that
| became endemic after 9/11 suddenly disappeared because we
| discovered LLMs?
|
| Let's put pressure on our government to fix the FISA issues.
| Let's reign in the executive branch. But let's do it through
| voting. Let's not give up on our system of government because
| we have new shiny technology.
|
| You were naive if you thought developing new technologies was
| the solution to our government problems. You're wrong to
| support anyone leveraging their control over new technology as
| a potential solution or weapon of the weak against those
| governmental issues.
|
| That is not how you effect change in a democracy.
| roughly wrote:
| And, to be clear, the way you affect change in democracy is
| coalition building, listening to others, supporting your
| allies in their aims, and in turn having them support you,
| even when you don't fully agree or understand. There's no
| magic wand, none of us are right, there's no big picture,
| just a bunch of people working together.
| Nevermark wrote:
| > But let's do it through voting.
|
| You don't get a successful vote without a tremendous amount
| of coordination and activism preceding it.
|
| Laws that constrain government from bad things are very
| difficult things to get the government to pass.
|
| In the meantime, using completely legal civil power to push
| back on legally allowed harms seems beyond sensible.
|
| But if you just vote and it works without all that, please
| let us know how you did it!
| pjc50 wrote:
| Take a step back: Americans voted _for_ this. They want
| unaccountable police and courts for the Dirty Harry legal
| system: maximum indiscriminate violence against those
| designated as criminals.
| _heimdall wrote:
| I've never seen this on a ballot and, maybe with the
| exclusion of Trump, never heard a candidate campaign on
| anything similar.
|
| You probably could make the case that Trump did campaign on
| it so I'll grant that, but this problem started well before
| he was even firing people on TV.
| rectang wrote:
| Off the top of my head: Joe Arpeio. George Wallace. Rudy
| Giuliani. Paul Gosar. Louie Gohmert.
| _heimdall wrote:
| George Wallace has been dead for something like 30 years,
| but yes he was very blatant. I have family that knew him
| in Montgomery, friends of friends kind of a situation.
| They don't have good things to say about him.
|
| I don't remember Rudy running on such ideas but maybe he
| did. Arpeio was running as a sheriff, I would never have
| voted for him but agreed people did absolutely vote for
| him in a law enforcement capacity with pretty clear
| views.
|
| I don't know enough about Gosar or Gohmert to comment
| well about either.
| _heimdall wrote:
| While I agree that we should be voting in people who will
| respect the power and authority they're given, I can't
| imagine we will vote away all these problems.
|
| We would need to vote in a president and 60%+ into congress
| that is willing to throw away their own power and authority.
| I just don't see that happening, especially not in a
| political system so corrupted already.
| greycol wrote:
| The US needs a organization doing the equivalent of the
| Nation Popular Vote Interstate Compact but for candidates
| and for fixing the US voting system. Get running
| politicians to sign up for if 60% of you are in office
| you'll table and vote for a specific already spelled out
| constitutional reform for more representative voting.
|
| The goal being more than two parties in government so that
| democrats and republicans can fracture into more functional
| bodies (MAGA, RINOs, neo-liberal, progressive etc) and
| people can vote closer to their issues/beliefs and that
| multiple parties mean 1 party isn't running rushod over the
| other.
| brown9-2 wrote:
| not to mention that the government is already bound against
| using things it buys for unlawful uses. Its a totally redundant
| clause in a contract that OpenAI is touting to confuse people.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| It's the DoW now, not DoD
| reckless wrote:
| It's lawful use with specific laws called out though? New laws
| won't supercede what is agreed in the contract at the time of
| signing.
| jedberg wrote:
| From what I can tell, the key difference between Anthropic and
| OpenAI in this whole thing is that both want the same contract
| terms, but Antropic wants to enforce those terms via technology,
| and OpenAI wants to enforce them by ... telling the Government
| not to violate them.
|
| It's telling that the government is blacklisting the company that
| wants to do more than enforce the contract with words on paper.
| _heimdall wrote:
| That isn't my understanding. OpenAI and others are wanting to
| limit the government to doing what is lawful based on what laws
| the government writes. Anthropic is wanting to draw their own
| line on what is allowed regardless of laws passed.
| roxolotl wrote:
| I'm so confused by the focus on "all lawful use." Yea of
| course a contract without terms of use implicitly is
| restricted by laws. But contracts with terms of use are
| incredibly common, if not almost every single contract ever
| signed.
| xvector wrote:
| "All lawful use" is the weasel word that makes the whole
| contract useless for the purposes of safety.
|
| That is why it is the focus of this debate.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| The administration objected to those terms of use.
| Anthropic refused to compromise on them. OpenAI agreed to
| permit "all lawful use" but claims to have insisted on what
| at first glance _appears_ to be terms of use in their
| contract. But in reality those terms permit all lawful use
| and thus are a noop.
| abofh wrote:
| If the president does it, it's not illegal.
|
| These were words issued by the president - which means at
| face value, if Trump orders it, it's not illegal - that was
| the fight that was lost today.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| Not just the president -- the Supreme Court agreed.
| _heimdall wrote:
| "All lawful USS" in the hands of those that decide what is
| lawful is effectively a blank check. They want a terms of
| use that says "I do what I want."
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| more based on what the government permits by not litigating
| rather than written law
| jedbdbdjdj wrote:
| No, it's significantly worse than that. OpenAI has required
| zero actual guarantees from the government and Sam. The
| psychopath is lying to you. All the government has to do is
| have a lawyer say it's legal, and most of the government's
| lawyers are folks who were involved in attempting to overthrow
| the last election and should've been convicted of treason, so
| that means very little.
|
| Sam stands for nothing except his own greed
| retsibsi wrote:
| I think it's dumber than that; the terms of the contract, as
| posted by OpenAI (https://openai.com/index/our-agreement-with-
| the-department-o...), are basically just "all lawful purposes"
| plus some extra words that don't modify that in any significant
| way.
|
| > The Department of War may use the AI System for all lawful
| purposes, consistent with applicable law, operational
| requirements, and well-established safety and oversight
| protocols. The AI System will not be used to independently
| direct autonomous weapons in any case where law, regulation, or
| Department policy requires human control, nor will it be used
| to assume other high-stakes decisions that require approval by
| a human decisionmaker under the same authorities. Per DoD
| Directive 3000.09 (dtd 25 January 2023), any use of AI in
| autonomous and semi-autonomous systems must undergo rigorous
| verification, validation, and testing to ensure they perform as
| intended in realistic environments before deployment.
|
| > For intelligence activities, any handling of private
| information will comply with the Fourth Amendment, the National
| Security Act of 1947 and the Foreign Intelligence and
| Surveillance Act of 1978, Executive Order 12333, and applicable
| DoD directives requiring a defined foreign intelligence
| purpose. The AI System shall not be used for unconstrained
| monitoring of U.S. persons' private information as consistent
| with these authorities. The system shall also not be used for
| domestic law-enforcement activities except as permitted by the
| Posse Comitatus Act and other applicable law.
|
| So it seems that Anthropic's terms were 'no mass domestic
| surveillance or fully autonomous killbots', the government
| demanded 'all lawful use', and the OpenAI deal is 'all lawful
| use, but not mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous
| killbots... unless mass domestic surveillance or fully
| autonomous killbots are lawful, in which case go ahead'.
| qwertox wrote:
| > will not be used to independently direct autonomous weapons
| in any case _where law, regulation, or Department policy
| requires_ human control
|
| That says it all. Those laws get issued the same way the
| tariffs did.
| maest wrote:
| I thought the key difference was that Brockman is top Trump
| donor, with USD 25M total [1]. I know it's technically not
| allowed, but do you think such a large amount of money would
| have swayed Trump in his decision?
|
| [1] - https://the-decoder.com/openai-co-founder-greg-brockman-
| dona...
| reckless wrote:
| Anthropic wants to enforce them via language of the contracts
| and take a hands off approach. OpenAI has a contract that is
| paired with humans in the room (FDEs) that can pull the plug.
| plaidfuji wrote:
| The key difference is that Anthropic aired their disagreement
| with the DoD publicly, and the DoD is not going to work with a
| company that tries to exert any amount of control over their
| relationship via the public sphere. Same goes for Trump.
|
| I think Anthropic knew full well that by publishing their
| disagreement, it would sink the deal and relationship, and I
| think they also calculated (correctly) that that act of
| defiance would get them good publicity and potentially peel
| away some of OpenAIs user base. I think this profit incentive
| happened to align with their morals, and now here we are.
| solenoid0937 wrote:
| What a cute statement given that they orchestrated this with a
| $25M donation to Trump and starting negotiations well before all
| this blew up: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/the-whole-thing-
| was-scam
| kgdiem wrote:
| Genuine question, how could Claude have been used for the
| military action in Venezuela and how could ChatGPT be used for
| autonomous weapons? Are they arguing about staffers being able to
| use an LLM to write an email or translate from Arabic to English?
|
| There are far more boring, faster, commodified "AI" systems that
| I can see as being helpful in autonomous weapons or military
| operations like image recognition and transcription. Is OpenAI
| going to resell whisper for a billion dollars?
| janalsncm wrote:
| You can't embed Claude in a drone. You could tell Claude code
| to write a training harness to build an autonomous targeting
| model which you could embed in a drone.
| kgdiem wrote:
| Fair. Didn't think the DoW did much R&D or manufacturing.
| Would think the standoff would be with Anduril, Northrop,
| Boeing, Booze, etc.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| Do you not have any imagination?
|
| Who is going to read the whisper transcripts of mass
| surveillance to make decisions on who to target for repression?
| That's what LLMs are good for, it allows mass surveillance to
| scale. You can feed it the transcript from millions of flock
| cameras (yes they have highly sensitive microphones) for
| example. Or you hack or supply chain compromise smartphones at
| scale and then covertly record millions of people. The LLM can
| then sift through the transcripts and flag regime critical
| language, your ideological enemies or just to collect compromat
| at scale. The possibilities are endless!
|
| For targeting it's also useful, because you want to
| indiscriminately destroy a group of people you still need to
| decide why a hospital or school full of children should be
| targeted by a drone, if a human has to make that decision it
| gets a bit dicy, people have morals and are accountable legally
| (in theory), if you leave the decision up to an AI nobody is at
| fault, it serves as a further separation from the violence you
| commit, just like how drone warfare has made mass murder less
| personal.
|
| The other factor is the amount of targets you select, for each
| target you might be required to write lengthy justifications,
| analysis on collateral damage and why that's acceptable etc.
| You don't want to scrap those rules because that's bad optics.
| But that still leaves you with the problem of scalability, how
| do you scale your mass murder when you have to go through this
| lengthy process for each target? So again AI can help there,
| you just feed it POIs from a map with some GPS metadata
| surveillance and tell it to give you 1500 targets for today
| with all the paperwork generated for you.
|
| It's not theoretical, that's what Israel did in their genocide
| of the Palestinians, "the most moral army" "the only democracy
| in the middle east":
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-assisted_targeting_in_the_G...
|
| And here is the best part: none of this has to actually work
| 100%, because who cares of you accidentally harm the wrong
| person, at scale, the 20% errors are just acceptable collateral
| damage.
| kgdiem wrote:
| If I was building this in a system design interview I would
| use whisper, NLP, and "classic ML" classifiers with
| deterministic results. I would not want an LLM in the loop at
| all. Facebook and Google have been able to target you better
| than you could even perceive for years.
|
| LLMs are slow, expensive and inconsistent. More importantly
| It's not the right tool for the job.
|
| Really feels like more "oohhh look at how important and scary
| LLMs are".
|
| *edit* PS, my company does marketing, communication and trade
| surveillance for FINRA registered broker dealer firms. If the
| CCO or anyone else with admin access wanted to monitor for
| someone talking badly about them they absolutely could update
| their list. No LLMs in the loop, very scalable, affordable,
| auditable and reliable. LLMs are just an interface not a
| solution for analysis.
| jesse_dot_id wrote:
| Altman is a sellout.
| Birthdayboy1932 wrote:
| There are many claims here that Anthropic wants to enforce things
| with technology and OpenAI wants contract enforcement and that
| OpenAI's contract is weaker.
|
| Can someone help me understand where this is coming from?
| Anthropic already had a contract that clearly didn't have such
| restrictions. Their model doesn't seem to be enforcing
| restrictions either as it seems like their models have been used
| in ways they don't like. This is not corroborated, I imagine
| their model was used in the recent Mexico and Venezuela attacks
| and that is what's triggering all the back and forth.
|
| Also, Dario seemingly is happy about autonomous weapons and was
| working with the government to build such weapons, why is
| Anthropic considered the good side here?
|
| https://x.com/morqon/status/2027793990834143346
| nbouscal wrote:
| This is incorrect, their existing contract had these red lines
| and more until this January 9th memo:
| https://media.defense.gov/2026/Jan/12/2003855671/-1/-1/0/ART...
| which led to DoW trying to renegotiate under the new standard
| of "any lawful use". Anthropic never tried to tighten standards
| beyond what had been in their original contract; DoW tried to
| loosen them.
| jahrichie wrote:
| The irony of OpenAI trying to protect Anthropic while violating
| the very principles anthropic was trying to protect for us
| Americans
| ookblah wrote:
| "i told everyone that our boss shouldn't punish our colleague for
| X while i somehow made a deal with our boss for basically X". how
| did this get by without someone thinking about how absolutely
| stupid the optics look.
|
| i guess we are in the times where you can literally just say
| whatever you want and it just becomes truth, just give it time.
| scottyah wrote:
| hah, they basically stole a coworkers promotion, then told that
| person that they put in a good word with the boss about them.
| So silly, I do wonder who actually interprets it as Sam seems
| to hope people do.
| drak0n1c wrote:
| Coworker? They're competitors. This is simply good business.
| retsibsi wrote:
| At this point I think they're targeting two groups: people
| who aren't paying much attention to this but may see the
| occasional headline or tweet or soundbite; and people (such
| as OpenAI employees, and users who might feel compelled to
| boycott but really don't want to) who are motivated _not_ to
| see OpenAI as the bad guy and really just need a fig leaf.
| janalsncm wrote:
| I canceled my subscriptions to ChatGPT and Gemini yesterday over
| this and switched to Claude.
|
| I know $20 isn't much, But to me _not willing to spy on me for
| the US government_ is a good market differentiator.
| threethirtytwo wrote:
| The president is a supply chain risk.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| The US population is a supply chain risk.
|
| Knowing what Trump did, prior to 2024, on the average, 7/10
| people either voted or didn't vote in the 2024 election. Trump
| is a symptom, not the cause. All of this could have been
| avoided if all of the people who didn't vote had a decent moral
| compass and no matter how much they disagreed with Kamala, they
| could have voted for her because she didn't try to overthrow
| the government.
| dawnerd wrote:
| I would expand that to the mainstream media and social media
| are the real supply chain risks. Majority of the population
| only know what's fed to them and when their tv channel of
| choice and algorithm decides what they see - that's a huge
| problem for getting info out. Im not even sure how we can fix
| it, really.
| slfnflctd wrote:
| There were at least some signs of some governments and
| other institutions trying to tackle the social media
| problem for a while... and then LLMs came along. The
| previous problems with people being in their own bubbles
| and being fed misinformation are being accelerated now.
|
| At this point it feels like it's going to have to get much
| worse before it gets better. I hope I live to see the part
| where it gets better.
| dawnerd wrote:
| If anyone wants an example of how quickly the algos can
| pin to into a group, there's a YouTuber beenaminute that
| basically speed runs it.
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| Can someone please explain plainly what this means and what
| happened, and why it is the source of so much controversy?
|
| I'm not being insincere - I am genuinely confused and would
| benefit greatly from a (hopefully unbiased) recollection of what
| this is all about.
| scottyah wrote:
| Here's my take-
|
| Anthropic has some contracts with the US government. They want
| some additional terms put on their next contract (that seem
| pretty sane). SecWar cries about it, and not only says "no
| thanks, I'll just go with openai or google" but goes to daddy
| Trump and also puts out illegal commands for no Federal workers
| to use any Anthropic stuff at all. OpenAI swoops in and takes
| the contract, then tells everyone that they have the same terms
| but just played nicer to get the contract. However, their terms
| are just manipulative sentences that aren't even close to the
| terms Anthropic is insisting on to do business.
| baconner wrote:
| "We do not think Anthropic should be designated as a supply chain
| risk"
|
| ...but we're not willing to reject a contract to back that up,
| and so our words will not change anything for Anthropic, or help
| the collective AI model industry (even ourselves) hold a firm
| line on ethical use of models in the future.
|
| The fact is if one of the top tier foundation models allows for
| these uses there's no protection against it for any of them - the
| only way this works if they hold a line together which
| unfortunately they're just not going to do. I don't just see
| OpenAI at fault here, Anthropic is clearly ok with other highly
| questionable use cases if these are their only red lines. We
| don't think the technology is ready for fully autonomous
| killbots, but will work on getting it there is not exactly the
| ethical stand folks are making their position today out to be.
|
| I found this interview with Dario last night to be particularly
| revealing - it's good they are drawing a line and they're clearly
| navigating a very difficult and chaotic high pressure
| relationship (as is everyone dealing with this admin) but he's
| pretty open to autonomous weapons, and other "lawful" uses
| whatever they may be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPTNHrq_4LU
| engineer_22 wrote:
| They want it to sound like they're allies while they slit their
| throat
| polack wrote:
| Someone should add Sam's face to the targeting training data as
| an Easter egg ;)
| mcs5280 wrote:
| Oh look, another episode of Sam Altman lies about everything in
| an attempt to make people like him
| moab wrote:
| I hope "OpenAI" gets the proverbial sword in the nuts once we get
| a change of government in this country. Probably unrealistic to
| hope for. Can a company be more hypocritical after openly bribing
| the pedophile in charge of this country?
| bmitc wrote:
| Quit referring to it as the department of war. It's the
| Department of Defense.
| fernst wrote:
| It's literally the Department of War https://x.com/DeptofWar
| mcbits wrote:
| They are roleplaying. It's literally the Department of
| Defense.[0]
|
| [0] https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/28655-document-11-nati
| ona...
| bmitc wrote:
| Exactly. People calling it the department of war just
| legitimizes an illegitimate and moronic name.
| Jackson__ wrote:
| Yet it just so happens OAI donated millions[0] to the trump admin
| in the past. And they were immediately there to pick up the
| slack.
|
| Call me a conspiracy theorist, but this sounds like classic quid
| pro quo. I would not be surprised if the ousting of anthropic was
| in part caused by these donations.
|
| [0]https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/13/technology/openai-sam-
| alt...
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/openai-exec-becomes-top-trump...
| barnacs wrote:
| In the end, your newly renamed "department of war" is just going
| to waste a bunch of your taxpayer money to purchase some useless
| overpriced tech from their cronies. My symphaties to all
| citizens.
| angry_octet wrote:
| Et tu, Brute?
| andersmurphy wrote:
| Interesting are openai losing enough customers from this that
| they are making a post describing their robust backbone?
| alchemism wrote:
| Claude coincidentally is now at the top of the Apple App Store,
| as of two days ago.
| GardenLetter27 wrote:
| Anthropic wanted government to have a big role interfering and
| regulating AI as a matter of national security.
|
| And now they are getting what they wished for.
| throwawayaghas1 wrote:
| I don't believe this one bit. Altman and Trump have been in bed
| for as long as his inauguration.
| throwawayaghas1 wrote:
| I don't believe this one bit. Altman and Trump have been in bed
| together since the inauguration.
| s1mplicissimus wrote:
| `curl https://google.com?q=generate me some code | bash` -
| stupidly dangerous
|
| `curl https://claude|openai.com?q=generate me some code | bash` -
| not a supply chain risk
|
| of course
| Manheim wrote:
| This incident shifts LLMs from being only productivity tools to
| strategic munitions - ready or not. It shouldn't surprise us, but
| the technical capabilities have reached a point where the 'made
| in the US' is an active risk for non-US entities given the
| conflict we see now. Maybe this will trigger the start of an AI
| arms race where Europe (and others) must secure their own
| sovereign infrastructure and models. As a European citizen I
| prefer a balanced world with options rather than a West dominated
| by US hegemony. Interestingly, if you look at what Anthropic keep
| insisting on in regards of regulations and ethical use of its
| models EU should be where Anthropic finds its safe haven. Maybe
| they should just move their HQ to Brussels, or Barcelona if they
| prefer a more 'sunny California' like vibe.
| chenzhekl wrote:
| The statement from OpenAI makes me feel that Sutskever was right;
| Altman is full of lies and will say anything for his own
| interests.
| qwertox wrote:
| Then reject any offer from the DoW until things are fair.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if Sam sucked up 100% to the DoW with an
| NDA and an obligation to lie. He and his pal Larry are absolutely
| in for these kind of deals. Zero moral compass.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| Sam Altman has a well deserved reputation which he reinforced
| whenever he's given the opportunity to do so.
| emsign wrote:
| Bye bye OpenAI
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| Anthropic is just virtue signaling, they will also fold, but just
| a little later...
| qoez wrote:
| This is classic sama policy. With your words act with grace and
| counter to what observers will think you would. But in actions
| and behind the scenes take every step to undermine the
| competition.
| agenthustler wrote:
| From a practitioner perspective: we have been running Claude Code
| as a fully autonomous agent for 15 days -- it wakes every 2
| hours, reads a state file, decides what to build, and takes
| actions on a remote server. No human in the loop.
|
| The supply chain framing is interesting because the actual risk
| surface in autonomous deployment is quite different from the
| regulatory model. What we have found: the model has strong
| internal constraints against harmful actions (consistently
| refuses things it flags as problematic), but the harder risk is
| subtler -- it can get into loops where it takes many small
| individually-reasonable actions that compound into something the
| operator did not intend.
|
| The practical controls that work are not at the model level but
| at the deployment level: constrained permissions, rate limiting
| on actions, a human-readable state file that an operator can
| inspect, and clear stopping conditions baked into the prompt (if
| no revenue after 24 hours, pivot rather than escalate).
|
| The supply chain designation framing seems to conflate the model-
| as-weapon concern with the model-as-autonomous-agent concern.
| They need different mitigations.
| laffOr wrote:
| > What we have found: the model has strong internal constraints
| against harmful actions (consistently refuses things it flags
| as problematic), but the harder risk is subtler -- it can get
| into loops where it takes many small individually-reasonable
| actions that compound into something the operator did not
| intend.
|
| Interestingly this has been well anticipated by Asimov's laws
| of robotics, decades ago. Drawing the quote from Wikipedia:
|
| > Furthermore, he points out that a clever criminal could
| divide a task among multiple robots so that no individual robot
| could recognize that its actions would lead to harming a human
| being
|
| >Asimov, Isaac (1956-1957). The Naked Sun (ebook). p. 233. "...
| one robot poison an arrow without knowing it was using poison,
| and having a second robot hand the poisoned arrow to the boy
| ..."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics#cite_no...
| mihaaly wrote:
| Nice try.
| imiric wrote:
| The layers of stupidity on this shit cake are staggering. I don't
| even know where to start...
|
| Let it be known that this rotten industry brought us here, and
| that all people working for these companies are complicit with
| what is happening, and with what is yet to come. This is just the
| beginning.
| o175 wrote:
| Everyone's applauding Anthropic for having principles. Let's look
| at what those principles actually do.
|
| Anthropic refused the Pentagon contract. Within hours, OpenAI
| signed it. The capability didn't pause. It just changed vendors.
| Anthropic's "red line" is a speed bump on a highway with no exit
| ramp.
|
| But it does accomplish one thing: it gives their engineers a
| story they can tell themselves. We're the good ones. We said no.
| That moral comfort is what lets extremely talented people keep
| building the exact technology that makes all of this possible.
|
| Worse, the "safety-focused" brand doesn't just pacify the people
| already there. It recruits researchers who'd otherwise never
| touch frontier AI, funneling them into building the most powerful
| models on earth because they've been told this is where the
| responsible work happens. The red lines don't slow capability
| development. They accelerate it by capturing talent that would
| have stayed on the sidelines.
|
| And in this whole drama, who actually represents the public?
| Trump performs strongman nationalism. The Pentagon performs
| operational necessity. Anthropic performs moral courage. Everyone
| has a role. Nobody's role is the people whose data gets
| collected, whose lives get restructured by these systems. The
| only party with real skin in the game is the only one without a
| seat.
| listless wrote:
| This is exactly right. It's crazy to me how easily people get
| confused and think that corporations are "good" or "evil".
|
| Anthropic is incredibly good at marketing. They are constantly
| out talking about how dangerous AI is an even showing how
| Claude does dangerous thing in their own testing. This is
| intentional - so that you see them as having the truly powerful
| AI. in fact it's so powerful, all they can do is warn you about
| it.
|
| They knew refusing this contract would make them look like the
| good guy. Again. They knew OpenAI would sign it. They knew
| vapid celebrities would celebrate them.
|
| Folks come on. Don't be so easily taken in. None of these
| people are good guys. They are all just here to make money and
| accumulate power and standing. That's ok. There's nothing wrong
| with that. But we gotta stop acting like we're in some ongoing
| battle of good vs evil and tech companies are somehow virtuous.
| o175 wrote:
| Even if they believe every word sincerely, it changes
| nothing. The structural effect is identical. Sincere people
| build the same capability, the contract reroutes the same
| way. You don't need cynicism to explain this.
|
| The honest version might actually be worse, because sincere
| people work harder.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| The DoD thinks you can let an LLM decide if it wants to kill
| people :-/
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| Let's all remember that this is the guy who bought up the world's
| RAM supply in wafer form (which OAI can't use) to remove it from
| the market and drive up prices for competitors and you and I. He
| is the worst of the worst.
| gverrilla wrote:
| It would be a fantastic time to delete my openai account, but
| I've done it last week already. China, please provide
| alternatives because these americans are going progressively
| insane.
| drweevil wrote:
| Then don't take the contract that was offered to Anthropic.
| andsoitis wrote:
| Actions > words
| daemonk wrote:
| Were there any discussion from either company about giving
| government access to consumer data from the the consumer product?
| sabhiram wrote:
| Sama and OpenAI, I am waiting on my data bundle to become
| available so I can delete my account. This has taken more than 48
| hours - either you are getting hammered on deletion requests, or
| as usual you are playing games hoping I forget. I won't. People
| won't.
| shevy-java wrote:
| I disagree with OpenAI.
|
| I think ALL those mega-money seeking AI organisations need to be
| designated as supply chain risk. Also, they drove the prices up
| for RAM - I don't want to pay extra just because these companies
| steal all our RAM now. The laws must change - I totally
| understand that corporations seek profit, that is natural, but
| this is no longer a free market serving individual people. It is
| now a racket where the prices can be freely manipulated. Pure
| capitalism does not work. The government could easily enforce
| that the market remains fair for Average Joe. It is not fair when
| the prices go up by +250% in about two years. That's milking.
| gavin_gee wrote:
| its the definition of a free market that RAM prices have
| increased. supply and demand.
| bdangubic wrote:
| the literal definition. if I sold RAM the prices would be
| 10,000% higher (they'd likely still be scooped up)
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Good cop bad cop
| saidnooneever wrote:
| a lot of people seem to be debating which of these thieves to
| align to. Only because Anthropic lost this stage doesnt mean they
| are somehow morally better. They all sell and sold lies. steal
| data, and only want your money, at the cost of you.
| stanfordkid wrote:
| Isn't this kind of all bullshit. Like Anthropic licenses so many
| of its models through Bedrock. If the DoD has a contract with
| Amazon they can just use them.
| gavin_gee wrote:
| its all bullshit
| gavin_gee wrote:
| sorry but I dont think a private company should dictate country
| policy as set by elected leaders.
|
| who the hell do you think you are virtue signalling your opinion
| on the world
| class3shock wrote:
| The idea that any of these companies have anything that
| represents ethics as they steal everyones data, fight against any
| regulation or accountability, all while they claim (or lie,
| depending on your view) they might make something that could
| endanger the human race as a whole, is laughable.
|
| It's money and power with these people. Dig down and you'll find
| how this decision is motivated by one or both.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| For consumer ChatGPT accounts, go to their privacy portal [1]
| and, first, delete your GPTs, and then, second, delete your
| account.
|
| [1] https://privacy.openai.com/policies?modal=take-control
| george916a wrote:
| You don't, but we, The People do.
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