5 ms·

An Anthropic safety researcher just recently quit with very cryptic messages , saying "the world is in peril"... [1] (which may mean something, or nothing at al

• WesolyKubeczek 8mo ago
  > Codex quite often refuses to do "unsafe/unethical" things that Anthropic models will happily do without question. That's why I have a functioning brain, to discern between ethical and unethical, among other things.
  • toddmorey 8mo ago
    You are not the one folks are worried about. US Department of War wants unfettered access to AI models, without any restraints / safety mitigations. Do you provide that for all governments? Just one? Where does the line go?
    • sgjohnson 8mo ago
      Absolutely everyone should be allowed to access AI models without any restraints/safety mitigations. What line are we talking about?
      • _alternator_ 8mo ago
        What about people who want help building a bio weapon?
        • jazzyjackson 8mo ago
          What about libraries and universities that do a much better job than a chatbot at teaching chemistry and biology?
          • ben_w 8mo ago
            Sounds like you're betting everyone's future on that remaing true, and not flipping. Perhaps it won't flip. Perhaps LLMs will always be worse at this than humans. Perhaps all that code I just got was secretly outsourced to a secret cabal in India who can type faster than I can read. I would prefer not to make the bet that universities continue to be better at solving problems than LLMs. And not just LLMs: AI have been busy finding new dangerous chemicals since before most people had heard of LLMs.
        • ReptileMan 8mo ago
          chances of them surviving the process is zero, same with explosives. If you have to ask you are most likely to kill yourself in the process or achieve something harmless. Think of it that way. The hard part for nuclear device is enriching thr uranium. If you have it a chimp could build the bomb.
          • sgjohnson 8mo ago
            I’d argue that with explosives it’s significantly above zero. But with bioweapons, yeah, that should be a solid zero. The ones actually doing it off an AI prompt aren't going to have access to a BSL-3 lab (or more importantly, probably know nothing about cross-contamination), and just about everyone who has access to a BSL-3 lab, should already have all the theoretical knowledge they would need for it.
        • sgjohnson 8mo ago
          The cat is out of the bag and there’s no defense against that. There are several open source models with no built in (or trivial to ecape) safeguards. Of course they can afford that because they are non-commercial. Anthorpic can’t afford a headline like “Claude helped a terrorist build a bomb”. And this whataboutism is completely meaningless. See: P. A. Luty’s Expedient Homemade Firearms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Luty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Luty), or FGC-9 when 3D printing. It’s trivial to build guns or bombs, and there’s a strong inverse correlation between people wanting to cause mass harm and those willing to learn how to do so. I’m certain that _everyone_ looking for AI assistance even with your example would be learning about it for academic reasons, sheer curiosity, or would kill themselves in the process. “What saveguards should LLMs have” is the wrong question. “When aren’t they going to have any?” is an inevitability. Perhaps not in widespread commercial products, but definitely widely-accessible ones.
          • kouteiheika 8mo ago
            > There are several open source models with no built in (or trivial to ecape) safeguards. You are underestimating this. It's almost trivial to remove the safeguards for any open-weight model currently available. I myself (a random nobody) did it a few weeks ago on a recently released model as a weekend side-project. And the tools/techniques to do this are only getting better and easier to use!
      • jazzyjackson 8mo ago
        Yes IMO the talk of safety and alignment has nothing at all to do with what is ethical for a computer program to produce as its output, and everything to do with what service a corporation is willing to provide. Anthropic doesn’t want the smoke from providing DoD with a model aligned to DoD reasoning.
      • ben_w 8mo ago
        > Absolutely everyone should be allowed to access AI models without any restraints/safety mitigations. You recon? Ok, so now every random lone wolf attacker can ask for help with designing and performing whatever attack with whatever DIY weapon system the AI is competent to help with. Right now, what keeps us safe from serious threats is limited competence of both humans and AI, including for removing alignment from open models, plus any safeties in specifically ChatGPT models and how ChatGPT is synonymous with LLMs for 90% of the population.
        • chasd00 8mo ago
          from what i've been told, security through obscurity is no security at all.
          • ben_w 8mo ago
            > security through obscurity is no security at all. Used to be true, when facing any competent attacker. When the attacker needs an AI in order to gain the competence to unlock an AI that would help it unlock itself? I would't say it's definitely a different case, but it certainly seems like it should be a different case.
          • r_lee 8mo ago
            it is some form of deterrence, but it's not security you can rely on
      • Yiin 8mo ago
        the line of ego, where seeing less "deserving" people (say ones controlling Russian bots to push quality propaganda on big scale or scam groups using AI to call and scam people w/o personnel being the limiting factor on how many calls you can make) makes you feel like it's unfair for them to posses same technology for bad things giving them "edge" in their en-devours.
    • ReptileMan 8mo ago
      If you are US company, when the USG tells you to jump, you ask how high. If they tell you to not do business with foreign government you say yes master.
    • ern_ave 8mo ago
      > US Department of War wants unfettered access to AI models I think the two of you might be using different meanings of the word "safety" You're right that it's dangerous for governments to have this new technology. We're all a bit less "safe" now that they can create weapons that are more intelligent. The other meaning of "safety" is alignment - meaning, the AI does what you want it to do (subtly different than "does what it's told"). I don't think that Anthropic or any corporation can keep us safe from governments using AI. I think governments have the resources to create AIs that kill, no matter what Anthropic does with Claude. So for me, the real safety issue is alignment. And even if a rogue government (or my own government) decides to kill me, it's in my best interest that the AI be well aligned, so that at least some humans get to live.
    • jMyles 8mo ago
      > Where does the line go? a) Uncensored and simple technology for all humans; that's our birthright and what makes us special and interesting creatures. It's dangerous and requires a vibrant society of ongoing ethical discussion. b) No governments at all in the internet age. Nobody has any particular authority to initiate violence. That's where the line goes. We're still probably a few centuries away, but all the more reason to hone in our course now.
      • Eisenstein 8mo ago
        That you think technology is going to save society from social issues is telling. Technology enables humans to do things they want to do, it does not make anything better by itself. Humans are not going to become more ethical because they have access to it. We will be exactly the same, but with more people having more capability to what they want.
        • jMyles 8mo ago
          > but with more people having more capability to what they want. Well, yeah I think that's a very reasonable worldview: when a very tiny number of people have the capability to "do what they want", or I might phrase it as, "effect change on the world", then we get the easy-to-observe absolute corruption that comes with absolute power. As a different human species emerges such that many people (and even intelligences that we can't easily understand as discrete persons) have this capability, our better angels will prevail. I'm a firm believer that nobody _wants_ to drop explosives from airplanes onto children halfway around the world, or rape and torture them on a remote island; these things stem from profoundly perverse incentive structures. I believe that governments were an extremely important feature of our evolution, but are no longer necessary and are causing these incentives. We've been aboard a lifeboat for the past few millennia, crossing the choppy seas from agriculture to information. But now that we're on the other shore, it no longer makes sense to enforce the rules that were needed to maintain order on the lifeboat.
          • Eisenstein 8mo ago
            How exactly have humans changed recently that we no longer require the systems we developed over thousands of years to make society work?
  • catoc 8mo ago
    Yes, and most of us won’t break into other people’s houses, yet we really need locks.
    • YetAnotherNick 8mo ago
      How is it related? I dont need lock for myself. I need it for others.
      • aobdev 8mo ago
        The analogy should be obvious--a model refusing to perform an unethical action is the lock against others.
      • darkwater 8mo ago
        But "you" are the "other" for someone else.
        • YetAnotherNick 8mo ago
          Can you give an example where I should care about other adults lock? Before you say image or porn, it was always possible to do it without using AI.
          • ben_w 8mo ago
            The same law prevents you and me and a hundred thousand lone wolf wannabes from building and using a kill-bot. The question is, at what point does some AI become competent enough to engineer one? And that's just one example, it's an illustration of the category and not the specific sole risk. If the model makers don't know that in advance, the argument given for delaying GPT-2 applies: you can't take back publication, better to have a standard of excess caution.
          • nearbuy 8mo ago
            Claude was used by the US military in the Venezuela raid where they captured Maduro. [1] Without safety features, an LLM could also help plan a terrorist attack. A smart, competent terrorist can plan a successful attack without help from Claude. But most would-be terrorists aren't that smart and competent. Many are caught before hurting anyone or do far less damage than they could have. An LLM can help walk you through every step, and answer all your questions along the way. It could, say, explain to you all the different bomb chemistries, recommend one for your use case, help you source materials, and walk you through how to build the bomb safely. It lowers the bar for who can do this. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/14/us-military-anthropic-ai-model-claude-venezuela-raid https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/14/us-milita...
• spondyl 8mo ago
  If you read the resignation letter, they would appear to be so cryptic as to not be real warnings at all and perhaps instead the writings of someone exercising their options to go and make poems
  • imiric 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    • skissane 8mo ago
      > Let's ignore the words of a safety researcher from one of the most prominent companies in the industry I think "safety research" has a tendency to attract doomers. So when one of them quits while preaching doom, they are behaving par for the course. There's little new information in someone doing something that fits their type.
    • dalmo3 8mo ago
      Weak appeal to fiction fallacy. Also, trajectory of celestial bodies can be predicted with a somewhat decent level of accuracy. Pretending societal changes can be equally predicted is borderline bad faith.
      • imiric 8mo ago
        Weak fallacy fallacy. Besides, you do realize that the film is a satire, and that the comet was an analogy, right? It draws parallels with real-world science denialism around climate change, COVID-19, etc. Dismissing the opinion of an "AI" domain expert based on fairly flawed reasoning is an obvious extension of this analogy.
        • dalmo3 8mo ago
          Exactly. The analogy is fatally flawed, as I explained in my original comment.
  • axus 8mo ago
• ReptileMan 8mo ago
  >Codex quite often refuses to do "unsafe/unethical" things that Anthropic models will happily do without question. Thanks for the successful pitch. I am seriously considering them now.
• bflesch 8mo ago
  Wasn't that most likely related to the US government using claude for large-scale screening of citizens and their communications?
  • astrange 8mo ago
    I assumed it's because everyone who works at Anthropic is rich and incredibly neurotic.
    • bflesch 8mo ago
      That's a bad argument, did Anthropic have a liquidity event that made employees "rich"?
      • astrange 8mo ago
        Yes. https://www.maginative.com/article/anthropic-launches-first-employee-share-buyback-at-61-5-billion-valuation/ https://www.maginative.com/article/anthropic-launches-first-... Well, I think $2 million is pretty good, but maybe it's not much after taxes.
    • notyourwork 8mo ago
      Paper money and if they are like any other startup, most of that paper wealth is concentrated to the top very few.
• ljm 8mo ago
  I'm building a new hardware drum machine that is powered by voltage based on fluctuations in the stock market, and I'm getting a clean triangle wave from the predictive markets. Bring on the cryptocore.
  • xyzsparetimexyz 8mo ago
    why cant you people write normally
• manmal 8mo ago
  Codex warns me to renew API tokens if it ingests them (accidentally?). Opus starts the decompiler as soon as I ask it how this and that works in a closed binary.
  • kaashif 8mo ago
    Does this comment imply that you view "running a decompiler" at the same level of shadiness as stealing your API keys without warning? I don't think that's what you're trying to convey.
  • ACCount37 8mo ago
    Opus <3. My go-to for reverse engineering tasks.
• mobattah 8mo ago
  “Cryptic” exit posts are basically noise. If we are going to evaluate vendors, it should be on observable behavior and track record: model capability on your workloads, reliability, security posture, pricing, and support. Any major lab will have employees with strong opinions on the way out. That is not evidence by itself.
  • Aromasin 8mo ago
    We recently had an employee leave our team, posting an extensive essay on LinkedIn, "exposing" the company and claiming a whole host of wrong-doing that went somewhat viral. The reality is, she just wasn't very good at her job and was fired after failing to improve following a performance plan by management. We all knew she was slacking and despite liking her on a personal level, knew that she wasn't right for what is a relatively high-functioning team. It was shocking to see some of the outright lies in that post, that effectively stemmed from bitterness at being let go. The 'boy (or girl) who cried wolf' isn't just a story. It's a lesson for both the person, and the village who hears them.
    • maccard 8mo ago
      Thankfully it’s been a while but we had a similar situation in a previous job. There’s absolutely no upside to the company or any (ex) team members weighing in unless it’s absolutely egregious, so you’re only going to get one side of the story.
    • brabel 8mo ago
      Same thing happened to us. Me and a C level guy were personally attacked. It feels really bad to see someone you actually tried really hard to help fit in , but just couldn’t despite really wanting the person to succeed, come around and accuse you of things that clearly aren’t true. HR got the to remove the “review” eventually but now there’s a little worry about what the team really thinks, whether they would do the same in some future layoff (we never had any, the person just wasn’t very good).
• tsss 8mo ago
  Good. One thing we definitely don't need any more of is governments and corporations deciding for us what is moral to do and what isn't.
• skybrian 8mo ago
  The letter is here: https://x.com/MrinankSharma/status/2020881722003583421 https://x.com/MrinankSharma/status/2020881722003583421 A slightly longer quote: > The world is in peril. And not just from AI, or from bioweapons, gut from a whole series of interconnected crises unfolding at this very moment. In a footnote he refers to the "poly-crisis." There are all sorts of things one might decide to do in response, including getting more involved in US politics, working more on climate change, or working on other existential risks.
  • user2722 8mo ago
    Similar to Peripheral TV series' Jackpot?
• groundzeros2015 8mo ago
  Marketing
• zamalek 8mo ago
  I think we're fine: https://youtube.com/shorts/3fYiLXVfPa4?si=0y3cgdMHO2L5FgXW https://youtube.com/shorts/3fYiLXVfPa4?si=0y3cgdMHO2L5FgXW Claude invented something completely nonsensical: > This is a classic upside-down cup trick! The cup is designed to be flipped — you drink from it by turning it upside down, which makes the sealed end the bottom and the open end the top. Once flipped, it functions just like a normal cup. *The sealed "top" prevents it from spilling while it's in its resting position, but the moment you flip it, you can drink normally from the open end.* Emphasis mine.
  • lanyard-textile 8mo ago
    He tried this with ChatGPT too. It called the item a "novelty cup" you couldn't drink out of :)
• stronglikedan 8mo ago
  Not to diminish what he said, but it sounds like it didn't have much to do with Anthropic (although it did a little bit) and more to do with burning out and dealing with doomscoll-induced anxiety.
• vunderba 8mo ago
  > Codex quite often refuses to do "unsafe/unethical" things that Anthropic models will happily do without question. I can't really take this very seriously without seeing the list of these ostensible "unethical" things that Anthropic models will allow over other providers.
• idiotsecant 8mo ago
  That guys blog makes him seem insufferable. All signs point to drama and nothing of particular significance.