8 ms·

Anthropic: Expanding Access to Claude for Government

113 points by Luuucas 2y ago

potwinkle 2y ago
I wonder if they really intend to control ethics of Sonnet's use in government or if it's just a nice thing to say.
alach11 2y ago
There's no doubt that LLMs massively expand the ability of agencies like the NSA to perform large-scale surveillance at a higher quality. I wonder if Anthropic (or other LLM providers) ever push back or restrict these kinds of use cases? Or is that too risky for them?
- wkat4242 2y ago
  Will it really though? So far I've seen most of the "revolutionise" claims to be mainly hot air and marketing. It's possible that LLMs will suddenly make a leap in reliability and usability (e.g. much higher context window without corresponding massive increases in memory usage). But I have yet to see it. So far it's great at some specific usecases. Interacting with humans, rewriting or making up text. Summarising. A hit & miss at everything else. Don't get me wrong, I love AI tech and I'm heavily experimenting with it (both at work and at home with local models). But as with most hyped technologies I find the benefits far overblown in marketing stories. Our leadership jumped on Microsoft Copilot (the one for Office 365 because they have tens of different copilots :) ) like a pack of hungry wolves afraid to miss the boat. And the result was.... kinda meh. It's kinda promising and impresses with simple play school stuff ("make me a presentation about home safety") and totally and utterly fails when you try to do anything serious work related. Sooo many times I get "Sorry I can't do this right now", "Sorry I need more training for this", "I can't do this for you but this is how you can do it yourself!" or it does something but like totally wrong. Meanwhile we have a bunch of MS training people running around evangelising and telling us how great everything is and making excuses for everything that goes wrong :) You can almost see them breathe a sigh of relief every time something works as it should. That's not what we were promised. Maybe it will get there, but I don't see it happening tomorrow to be honest. LLMs were an impressive leap but their achilles heels have become clear and it's proving difficult to overcome them. I'm really enjoying surfing the knife's edge of technology (as I was and still am with metaverse) but I don't yet see this as a game changer except in a few specific industries. People editing text for a living certainly have a need to worry. I also wonder what will happen with future AI training. Now that more and more websites are filled with AI-generated content that is often at best "mediocre", and considering future AI models will be trained on that, will they be able to improve their accuracy or struggle to maintain it?
  - alach11 2y ago
    I use LLMs extensively in my field to automate all sorts of tasks. Need to classify a million PDF documents for cheap? Write a prompt and submit a batch job. Need to read 30,000 drilling reports to automatically scan for hazards? Done in 60 minutes. These are tasks that would have taken months of development or millions of dollars in manual effort before. It's not just hype.
    - JBorrow 2y ago
      Boy, I can’t wait for the foundation of my house to disappear because the LLM mis-classified a drilling report as non-hazardous. What’s the deal here with liability and accountability? That’s a serious problem when considering using these for anything other than toy problems.
      - bongodongobob 2y ago
        You don't actually think the LLM is reviewing those 30k documents do you? You tell it to write a program (which is easy to audit) to pull the info from the PDFs or whatever. I don't get why this crowd is so goddamn unimaginative with LLMs.
        goatlover 2y ago
        Because I've heard of enough lazy uses of LLMs to be suspicious. Auditing the program means being sure that the info pulled from those documents is reviewed properly. Also, a complete lack of regard for other people's privacy.
        bongodongobob 2y ago
        No idea where privacy enters in here.
        svieira 2y ago
        > You tell it to write a program (which is easy to audit) to pull the info from the PDFs Wherein you discover that unless you ask it to consider the fact that PDFs are ... very hard to parse [1] [2] you get something that misses whole blocks of text or turns them into something they aren't and the rest of the program misses chunks of the document. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22473263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22473263 [2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20200303102734/https://www.filingdb.com/pdf-text-extraction https://web.archive.org/web/20200303102734/https://www.filin...
- nuz 2y ago
  They're pretty clear about being pro safety to the extreme, and mass surveillance to protect american interests and abuse of LLM tech (e.g. open source misuses) are probably within the umbrella of ends justifying the means logic anthropic employs.
  - jsheard 2y ago
    When you see the kinds of things that are developed in the name of "defense" it's easy to see how AI "safety" could become a similar sort of doublespeak.
    - CuriouslyC 2y ago
      AI safety already is double speak. The primary meaning is "safety" for investors who don't want to be associated with something distasteful. The other meaning is basically a thin cover.
      - jsheard 2y ago
        Well you can look forward to worse, give it another decade and Lockheed Martin will be extolling their commitment to AI safety while announcing their new generation of fully autonomous kill drones. For defense, of course.
- dinglestepup 2y ago
  That ship has probably sailed. If Llama3 is performing on par with GPT-3.5, then there is no real benefit for companies to restrict access to slightly better proprietary models.
  - hmottestad 2y ago
    GPT-4 is “holy shit, this actually works, could be better but it’s so good I almost can’t believe it” while GPT-3.5 is “when it works it’s pretty great, just a pity it almost never does”. So I would assume that three letter agencies would love to take something like GPT-4 and fine tune it based on all the data they have about existing terrorists.
    - brink 2y ago
      I'm still dealing with hallucinations nearly every time I use it.
      - p1esk 2y ago
        I get maybe one hallucination per twenty chats with gpt4.
        thfuran 2y ago
        I haven't tried more than a handful of queries, but I think I've gotten 100% rate of hallucination or generic useless response to specific question.
        p1esk 2y ago
        Can I try your question? Just curious.
        thfuran 2y ago
        I don't remember exactly, but they were broadly "How can I do $WEIRD_NICHE_THING with $GENERAL_FEATURE of gradle / some java library?"
- baq 2y ago
  NSA should be training their own GPT-4 or better model as we speak and should have been doing it for a long while now. Anything else is borderline incompetence.
  - Jerrrrry 2y ago
    [dead]
  - causal 2y ago
    And given the volume of data they likely sift through, I'd also expect them to want very small, high-throughput models for identifying targets for larger models to examine. On the flip side, LLMs must give the NSA a new challenge: a flood of garbage text generated by no-one in particular. Perhaps there will be more effort to put surveillance directly on-device as tapping networks yields more noise.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      On the grasping side, they are probably in the best position to train a GPT-5, given the amount and type of data they're presumed to have.
    - ttyprintk 2y ago
      I’d expect they’re using huge models to train many small ones, one for each threat actor. Those small models could decide whether their actor is detected, or it’s time to slot in a different one.
  - kridsdale3 2y ago
    NSA can't hire the right talent capable of producing that product for the same reason they have trouble finding white-hat security people to hire: You can't work for the government and do drugs in your personal time. Enough of the pie of elite researchers are in to wacky mind-bending that it's a real recruitment problem.
    - jakderrida 2y ago
- jp42 2y ago
  dumb question. I can understand LLM can be used for disinformation as it can generate text/image at scale. can you explain how it can do large scale surveillance?
  - spidersouris 2y ago
    I wouldn't say that they can be used to do large-scale surveillance, but they can definitely facilitate it, especially with CV integration. I think one can easily imagine the following scenario: you fill a LLM with photos from people (taken from a public camera for instance), it finds the closest matches (via a web search for instance, as Gemini does). From then, you can easily gather the most essential information: first and last name, age, usernames... And then use this information to structure even more precise prompts and find even more potentially interesting data: posts on forums, relatives... And with this data, you can create an exhaustive database with a plethora of information and data about these people. That's what any good stalker or person experienced with social engineering is able to do right now, but it takes a lot of time and energy. Resorting to LLMs would considerably decrease both. And it gets easier the more people you have information about.
    - ttyprintk 2y ago
      Specifically, vision transformers (ViT) outperforming established CNN.
  - causal 2y ago
    LLMs can be fed a conversation and understand the intent of its participants, even if no particular keywords are used. Before this, surveillance was limited by how many human agents you could have sifting through recorded data. Put another way: most people only get charged with a crime if it's worth a law-enforcement officer's time to catch you, but many small violations are ignored in favor of higher priorities. We may have to contemplate a future where AI is clever enough to notice everything that can be construed as a violation of some law and put on a prosecutor's backlog. Schneier talks about this as well: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/12/ai-and-mass-spying.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/12/ai-and-mass-s...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
nameless101 2y ago
So, basically all "confidential" information, if you are a subject "of interest", will be in the cloud and used to train models that can spit it out again. And the models will confabulate stories about you. The can call themselves "sonnet", "bard", "open" and a whole plethora of other positive things. What remains is that they go into the direction of Palantir and the rest is just marketing.
- notavalleyman 2y ago
  That's not at all evidenced by the link. The link simply says that their language model will be available on AWS GovCloud, and that they've created these specific exceptions to their usage policy. https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/9528712-exceptions-to-our-usage-policy https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/9528712-exceptions... The things which you're allowing yourself to imagine, don't exist in the reality of information we're discussing here
bionhoward 2y ago
Meanwhile, the best models with sensible OSI-approved licenses are from China. What are the security implications if American corpos like Google DeepMind, Microsoft GitHub, Anthropic and “Open”AI have explicitly anticompetitive / noncommercial licenses for greed/fear, so the only models people can use without fear of legal repercussions are Chinese? Surely, Capitalism wouldn’t lead us to make a tremendous unforced error at societal scale? Every AI is a sleeper agent risk if nobody has the balls and / or capacity to verify their inputs. Guess who wrote about that? https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.05566 https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.05566
ryaniscool 2y ago
I find all of the virtue signalling from AI companies exhausting.
- space_fountain 2y ago
  It's interesting how we dismiss anyone caring about things other than profit as virtue signally. Anthropic was founded by people who seemed to legitimately care about AI safety. It's possible the current conglomeration that is the company doesn't, but I wouldn't be so quick to assume that.
  - andrepd 2y ago
    It's possible that they have the best intentions but are woefully misguided, like pretty much the average sv techno-optimist.
    - kridsdale3 2y ago
      The market will decide if that's right.
      - andrepd 2y ago
        I rest my case
  - bionhoward 2y ago
    If Anthropic truly cared about AI safety, then they wouldn't put customers in states of uncertainty about monopolistic legal terms buried amidst verbose documents commanding customers to enforce Anthropic legal terms for them AFTER they leak harmful information. Not only is Anthropic anti-open-source, they're also anti-open-output. Saying "Hey, try our product! It can do everything!" while ALSO saying, "Sorry, you're not allowed to use our general intelligence product to compete with general intelligence..." just evidences no upper IQ bound on Dunning-Kruger
  - vikramkr 2y ago
    Calling something virtue signaling is not a dismissal of people caring about things other than profit. It's a statement of belief that they don't actually care about things other than profit and are just pretending that they do. There's a pretty clear financial incentive to virtue signal since getting the benefit of the doubt from society lets them make more profit with less scrutiny. There's also no benefit for society to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they're being genuine.
andrepd 2y ago
> Claude offers a wide range of potential applications for government agencies, both in the present and looking toward the future. Government agencies can use Claude to provide improved citizen services, streamline document review and preparation, enhance policymaking with data-driven insights, and create realistic training scenarios. In the near future, AI could assist in disaster response coordination, enhance public health initiatives, or optimize energy grids for sustainability. Used responsibly, AI has the potential to transform how elected governments serve their constituents and promote peace and security. > For example, we have crafted a set of contractual exceptions to our general Usage Policy that are carefully calibrated to enable beneficial uses by carefully selected government agencies. These allow Claude to be used for legally authorized foreign intelligence analysis, such as combating human trafficking, identifying covert influence or sabotage campaigns, and providing warning in advance of potential military activities, opening a window for diplomacy to prevent or deter them. Sometimes I wonder if this is cynicism or if they actually drank their own cool-aid.
- notavalleyman 2y ago
  Its possible that you may have misunderstood what happened. Firstly, anthropic made an LLM, exposed it to the internet, and provided these terms of acceptable use. https://www.anthropic.com/legal/archive/4903a61b-037c-4293-9996-88eb1908f0b2 https://www.anthropic.com/legal/archive/4903a61b-037c-4293-9... There was no need for cynicism or kool aid at this stage. Later on, presumably now-ish, anthropic changed the usage policy, to add an exception. https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/9528712-exceptions-to-our-usage-policy https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/9528712-exceptions... > Exceptions to our Usage Policy > Updated today The exception is that, starting from now, > Anthropic may enter into contracts with government customers that tailor use restrictions to that customer’s public mission and legal authorities if, in Anthropic’s judgment, the contractual use restrictions and applicable safeguards are adequate to mitigate the potential harms addressed by this Usage Policy. I don't think any kool aid or cynicism is needed. The change is that, if anthropic think the client use case meets the listed humanitarian goals, then the client may use the LLM.
  - kwppen 2y ago
localfirst 2y ago
Going forward be very very wary of inputting sensitive information in Anthropic, OpenAI products, especially if you work for a foreign government, corporation. Listen to Edward Snowden. This guy is not fucking around.
- lurking_swe 2y ago
  you think they can’t already get all of that from the average Joe by accessing backdoors in the cell carriers, cloud providers, etc? very optimistic of you :-)
- throwawayq3423 2y ago
  Edward Snowden presented sales decks for half baked programs as if they were fully realized, for shock value. To sell his narrative. His claims, like everyone elses, should be approached critically.
tootie 2y ago
Is the announcement just that they're on the AWS marketplace for govcloud? Do people ever actually make use of AWS marketplace? It just seems like a way to skirt procurement.
noodlesUK 2y ago
I can imagine that for many government tasks, there would be a need for a reduced-censorship version of the AI model. It's pretty easy running into the guardrails on ChatGPT and friends when you talk about violence or other spicy topics. This then begs the question of what level of censorship reduction to apply. Should government employees be allowed to e.g., war-game a mass murder with an AI? What about discussing how to erode civil rights?
- cwp 2y ago
  Sure. Everyone, including government employees, should be allowed to discuss anything with AI. The problem is actually doing illegal things, which is... already illegal.
danlitt 2y ago
Is there really anyone who thinks this is a good idea? AI systems routinely spit out false information. Why would a system like that be anywhere near a Government? Perhaps (optimistically) this is just a credibility-grab from Anthropic, with no basis in fact.
- notavalleyman 2y ago
  From the link, > Government agencies can use Claude to provide improved citizen services, streamline document review and preparation, enhance policymaking with data-driven insights, and create realistic training scenarios. In the near future, AI could assist in disaster response coordination, enhance public health initiatives, or optimize energy grids for sustainability.
  - danlitt 2y ago
    Yeah, I read it. That just says what they want to do, and nothing about why it's a good idea. You would have to have your brain plugged in upside-down to even consider using an LLM to "enhance policymaking".
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

113 points by Luuucas 2y ago

I wonder if they really intend to control ethics of Sonnet's use in government or if it's just a nice thing to say.

There's no doubt that LLMs massively expand the ability of agencies like the NSA to perform large-scale surveillance at a higher quality. I wonder if Anthropic (or other LLM providers) ever push back or restrict these kinds of use cases? Or is that too risky for them?

wkat4242 2y ago
Will it really though? So far I've seen most of the "revolutionise" claims to be mainly hot air and marketing. It's possible that LLMs will suddenly make a leap in reliability and usability (e.g. much higher context window without corresponding massive increases in memory usage). But I have yet to see it. So far it's great at some specific usecases. Interacting with humans, rewriting or making up text. Summarising. A hit & miss at everything else. Don't get me wrong, I love AI tech and I'm heavily experimenting with it (both at work and at home with local models). But as with most hyped technologies I find the benefits far overblown in marketing stories. Our leadership jumped on Microsoft Copilot (the one for Office 365 because they have tens of different copilots :) ) like a pack of hungry wolves afraid to miss the boat. And the result was.... kinda meh. It's kinda promising and impresses with simple play school stuff ("make me a presentation about home safety") and totally and utterly fails when you try to do anything serious work related. Sooo many times I get "Sorry I can't do this right now", "Sorry I need more training for this", "I can't do this for you but this is how you can do it yourself!" or it does something but like totally wrong. Meanwhile we have a bunch of MS training people running around evangelising and telling us how great everything is and making excuses for everything that goes wrong :) You can almost see them breathe a sigh of relief every time something works as it should. That's not what we were promised. Maybe it will get there, but I don't see it happening tomorrow to be honest. LLMs were an impressive leap but their achilles heels have become clear and it's proving difficult to overcome them. I'm really enjoying surfing the knife's edge of technology (as I was and still am with metaverse) but I don't yet see this as a game changer except in a few specific industries. People editing text for a living certainly have a need to worry. I also wonder what will happen with future AI training. Now that more and more websites are filled with AI-generated content that is often at best "mediocre", and considering future AI models will be trained on that, will they be able to improve their accuracy or struggle to maintain it?
- alach11 2y ago
  I use LLMs extensively in my field to automate all sorts of tasks. Need to classify a million PDF documents for cheap? Write a prompt and submit a batch job. Need to read 30,000 drilling reports to automatically scan for hazards? Done in 60 minutes. These are tasks that would have taken months of development or millions of dollars in manual effort before. It's not just hype.
  - JBorrow 2y ago
    Boy, I can’t wait for the foundation of my house to disappear because the LLM mis-classified a drilling report as non-hazardous. What’s the deal here with liability and accountability? That’s a serious problem when considering using these for anything other than toy problems.
    - bongodongobob 2y ago
      You don't actually think the LLM is reviewing those 30k documents do you? You tell it to write a program (which is easy to audit) to pull the info from the PDFs or whatever. I don't get why this crowd is so goddamn unimaginative with LLMs.
      - goatlover 2y ago
        Because I've heard of enough lazy uses of LLMs to be suspicious. Auditing the program means being sure that the info pulled from those documents is reviewed properly. Also, a complete lack of regard for other people's privacy.
        bongodongobob 2y ago
        No idea where privacy enters in here.
      - svieira 2y ago
        > You tell it to write a program (which is easy to audit) to pull the info from the PDFs Wherein you discover that unless you ask it to consider the fact that PDFs are ... very hard to parse [1] [2] you get something that misses whole blocks of text or turns them into something they aren't and the rest of the program misses chunks of the document. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22473263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22473263 [2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20200303102734/https://www.filingdb.com/pdf-text-extraction https://web.archive.org/web/20200303102734/https://www.filin...
nuz 2y ago
They're pretty clear about being pro safety to the extreme, and mass surveillance to protect american interests and abuse of LLM tech (e.g. open source misuses) are probably within the umbrella of ends justifying the means logic anthropic employs.
- jsheard 2y ago
  When you see the kinds of things that are developed in the name of "defense" it's easy to see how AI "safety" could become a similar sort of doublespeak.
  - CuriouslyC 2y ago
    AI safety already is double speak. The primary meaning is "safety" for investors who don't want to be associated with something distasteful. The other meaning is basically a thin cover.
    - jsheard 2y ago
      Well you can look forward to worse, give it another decade and Lockheed Martin will be extolling their commitment to AI safety while announcing their new generation of fully autonomous kill drones. For defense, of course.
dinglestepup 2y ago
That ship has probably sailed. If Llama3 is performing on par with GPT-3.5, then there is no real benefit for companies to restrict access to slightly better proprietary models.
- hmottestad 2y ago
  GPT-4 is “holy shit, this actually works, could be better but it’s so good I almost can’t believe it” while GPT-3.5 is “when it works it’s pretty great, just a pity it almost never does”. So I would assume that three letter agencies would love to take something like GPT-4 and fine tune it based on all the data they have about existing terrorists.
  - brink 2y ago
    I'm still dealing with hallucinations nearly every time I use it.
    - p1esk 2y ago
      I get maybe one hallucination per twenty chats with gpt4.
      - thfuran 2y ago
        I haven't tried more than a handful of queries, but I think I've gotten 100% rate of hallucination or generic useless response to specific question.
        p1esk 2y ago
        Can I try your question? Just curious.
        thfuran 2y ago
        I don't remember exactly, but they were broadly "How can I do $WEIRD_NICHE_THING with $GENERAL_FEATURE of gradle / some java library?"
baq 2y ago
NSA should be training their own GPT-4 or better model as we speak and should have been doing it for a long while now. Anything else is borderline incompetence.
- Jerrrrry 2y ago
  [dead]
- causal 2y ago
  And given the volume of data they likely sift through, I'd also expect them to want very small, high-throughput models for identifying targets for larger models to examine. On the flip side, LLMs must give the NSA a new challenge: a flood of garbage text generated by no-one in particular. Perhaps there will be more effort to put surveillance directly on-device as tapping networks yields more noise.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    On the grasping side, they are probably in the best position to train a GPT-5, given the amount and type of data they're presumed to have.
  - ttyprintk 2y ago
    I’d expect they’re using huge models to train many small ones, one for each threat actor. Those small models could decide whether their actor is detected, or it’s time to slot in a different one.
- kridsdale3 2y ago
  NSA can't hire the right talent capable of producing that product for the same reason they have trouble finding white-hat security people to hire: You can't work for the government and do drugs in your personal time. Enough of the pie of elite researchers are in to wacky mind-bending that it's a real recruitment problem.
  - jakderrida 2y ago
jp42 2y ago
dumb question. I can understand LLM can be used for disinformation as it can generate text/image at scale. can you explain how it can do large scale surveillance?
- spidersouris 2y ago
  I wouldn't say that they can be used to do large-scale surveillance, but they can definitely facilitate it, especially with CV integration. I think one can easily imagine the following scenario: you fill a LLM with photos from people (taken from a public camera for instance), it finds the closest matches (via a web search for instance, as Gemini does). From then, you can easily gather the most essential information: first and last name, age, usernames... And then use this information to structure even more precise prompts and find even more potentially interesting data: posts on forums, relatives... And with this data, you can create an exhaustive database with a plethora of information and data about these people. That's what any good stalker or person experienced with social engineering is able to do right now, but it takes a lot of time and energy. Resorting to LLMs would considerably decrease both. And it gets easier the more people you have information about.
  - ttyprintk 2y ago
    Specifically, vision transformers (ViT) outperforming established CNN.
- causal 2y ago
  LLMs can be fed a conversation and understand the intent of its participants, even if no particular keywords are used. Before this, surveillance was limited by how many human agents you could have sifting through recorded data. Put another way: most people only get charged with a crime if it's worth a law-enforcement officer's time to catch you, but many small violations are ignored in favor of higher priorities. We may have to contemplate a future where AI is clever enough to notice everything that can be construed as a violation of some law and put on a prosecutor's backlog. Schneier talks about this as well: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/12/ai-and-mass-spying.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/12/ai-and-mass-s...

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

nameless101 2y ago

So, basically all "confidential" information, if you are a subject "of interest", will be in the cloud and used to train models that can spit it out again. And the models will confabulate stories about you. The can call themselves "sonnet", "bard", "open" and a whole plethora of other positive things. What remains is that they go into the direction of Palantir and the rest is just marketing.

notavalleyman 2y ago
That's not at all evidenced by the link. The link simply says that their language model will be available on AWS GovCloud, and that they've created these specific exceptions to their usage policy. https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/9528712-exceptions-to-our-usage-policy https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/9528712-exceptions... The things which you're allowing yourself to imagine, don't exist in the reality of information we're discussing here

bionhoward 2y ago

Meanwhile, the best models with sensible OSI-approved licenses are from China. What are the security implications if American corpos like Google DeepMind, Microsoft GitHub, Anthropic and “Open”AI have explicitly anticompetitive / noncommercial licenses for greed/fear, so the only models people can use without fear of legal repercussions are Chinese? Surely, Capitalism wouldn’t lead us to make a tremendous unforced error at societal scale? Every AI is a sleeper agent risk if nobody has the balls and / or capacity to verify their inputs. Guess who wrote about that? https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.05566 https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.05566

ryaniscool 2y ago

I find all of the virtue signalling from AI companies exhausting.

space_fountain 2y ago
It's interesting how we dismiss anyone caring about things other than profit as virtue signally. Anthropic was founded by people who seemed to legitimately care about AI safety. It's possible the current conglomeration that is the company doesn't, but I wouldn't be so quick to assume that.
- andrepd 2y ago
  It's possible that they have the best intentions but are woefully misguided, like pretty much the average sv techno-optimist.
  - kridsdale3 2y ago
    The market will decide if that's right.
    - andrepd 2y ago
      I rest my case
- bionhoward 2y ago
  If Anthropic truly cared about AI safety, then they wouldn't put customers in states of uncertainty about monopolistic legal terms buried amidst verbose documents commanding customers to enforce Anthropic legal terms for them AFTER they leak harmful information. Not only is Anthropic anti-open-source, they're also anti-open-output. Saying "Hey, try our product! It can do everything!" while ALSO saying, "Sorry, you're not allowed to use our general intelligence product to compete with general intelligence..." just evidences no upper IQ bound on Dunning-Kruger
- vikramkr 2y ago
  Calling something virtue signaling is not a dismissal of people caring about things other than profit. It's a statement of belief that they don't actually care about things other than profit and are just pretending that they do. There's a pretty clear financial incentive to virtue signal since getting the benefit of the doubt from society lets them make more profit with less scrutiny. There's also no benefit for society to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they're being genuine.

andrepd 2y ago

> Claude offers a wide range of potential applications for government agencies, both in the present and looking toward the future. Government agencies can use Claude to provide improved citizen services, streamline document review and preparation, enhance policymaking with data-driven insights, and create realistic training scenarios. In the near future, AI could assist in disaster response coordination, enhance public health initiatives, or optimize energy grids for sustainability. Used responsibly, AI has the potential to transform how elected governments serve their constituents and promote peace and security. > For example, we have crafted a set of contractual exceptions to our general Usage Policy that are carefully calibrated to enable beneficial uses by carefully selected government agencies. These allow Claude to be used for legally authorized foreign intelligence analysis, such as combating human trafficking, identifying covert influence or sabotage campaigns, and providing warning in advance of potential military activities, opening a window for diplomacy to prevent or deter them. Sometimes I wonder if this is cynicism or if they actually drank their own cool-aid.

notavalleyman 2y ago
Its possible that you may have misunderstood what happened. Firstly, anthropic made an LLM, exposed it to the internet, and provided these terms of acceptable use. https://www.anthropic.com/legal/archive/4903a61b-037c-4293-9996-88eb1908f0b2 https://www.anthropic.com/legal/archive/4903a61b-037c-4293-9... There was no need for cynicism or kool aid at this stage. Later on, presumably now-ish, anthropic changed the usage policy, to add an exception. https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/9528712-exceptions-to-our-usage-policy https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/9528712-exceptions... > Exceptions to our Usage Policy > Updated today The exception is that, starting from now, > Anthropic may enter into contracts with government customers that tailor use restrictions to that customer’s public mission and legal authorities if, in Anthropic’s judgment, the contractual use restrictions and applicable safeguards are adequate to mitigate the potential harms addressed by this Usage Policy. I don't think any kool aid or cynicism is needed. The change is that, if anthropic think the client use case meets the listed humanitarian goals, then the client may use the LLM.
- kwppen 2y ago

localfirst 2y ago

Going forward be very very wary of inputting sensitive information in Anthropic, OpenAI products, especially if you work for a foreign government, corporation. Listen to Edward Snowden. This guy is not fucking around.

lurking_swe 2y ago
you think they can’t already get all of that from the average Joe by accessing backdoors in the cell carriers, cloud providers, etc? very optimistic of you :-)
throwawayq3423 2y ago
Edward Snowden presented sales decks for half baked programs as if they were fully realized, for shock value. To sell his narrative. His claims, like everyone elses, should be approached critically.

tootie 2y ago

Is the announcement just that they're on the AWS marketplace for govcloud? Do people ever actually make use of AWS marketplace? It just seems like a way to skirt procurement.

noodlesUK 2y ago

I can imagine that for many government tasks, there would be a need for a reduced-censorship version of the AI model. It's pretty easy running into the guardrails on ChatGPT and friends when you talk about violence or other spicy topics. This then begs the question of what level of censorship reduction to apply. Should government employees be allowed to e.g., war-game a mass murder with an AI? What about discussing how to erode civil rights?

cwp 2y ago
Sure. Everyone, including government employees, should be allowed to discuss anything with AI. The problem is actually doing illegal things, which is... already illegal.

danlitt 2y ago

Is there really anyone who thinks this is a good idea? AI systems routinely spit out false information. Why would a system like that be anywhere near a Government? Perhaps (optimistically) this is just a credibility-grab from Anthropic, with no basis in fact.

notavalleyman 2y ago
From the link, > Government agencies can use Claude to provide improved citizen services, streamline document review and preparation, enhance policymaking with data-driven insights, and create realistic training scenarios. In the near future, AI could assist in disaster response coordination, enhance public health initiatives, or optimize energy grids for sustainability.
- danlitt 2y ago
  Yeah, I read it. That just says what they want to do, and nothing about why it's a good idea. You would have to have your brain plugged in upside-down to even consider using an LLM to "enhance policymaking".

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