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US Military leaders meet with Anthropic to argue against Claude safeguards
- SpicyLemonZest 8mo agoIt's inexcusable that the AI companies have not formed a united front against this. I've been skeptical of the idea that OpenAI leadership is outright MAGA, but even pure self-interest does not explain staying silent while the Pentagon demands autonomous killbots.
- Sebguer 8mo agoBrockman donated 25,000,000 dollars to the MAGA superpac, how much more 'outright' would you like him to be, haha.
- SpicyLemonZest 8mo agoHe claimed, and until today I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, that he was trying to curry favor with a notoriously bribe-able President. Not exactly a paragon of moral virtue, but I wouldn't be able to do business with nearly any company in the US if I made that a dealbreaker. This clears the bar where I'm willing to cut ties and demand that everyone else do the same.
- _aavaa_ 8mo agoWe must join with him, we must join with Sauron.
- tototrains 8mo agoSauron might win, don't want to risk being on the wrong side of the post-apocalypse
- BLKNSLVR 8mo agoJust because you're on Sauron's side when it wins, doesn't mean you'll be on Sauron's side at any other point in the future. One of the things I find interesting about classifying literally any kind of trait within bounds of 'normality', and the culling / suppressing / discouragement of anything outside of that definition, is that there will just be new 'edges', and in short order these edges will be 'other', suddenly outside the definition because times are bad and it has to be someone's fault. And so an ad infinitum until the single supreme ruler is the one entity representative of normal, atop a mountain of dead abominations.
- 5o1ecist 8mo ago[flagged]
- cyanydeez 8mo agoShareholder value and MAGA value are a venn diagram of optical illusion.
- LarsDu88 8mo agoThis is not only a big donation. It is actually the BIGGEST donation by any single individual.
- jmward01 8mo ago"Until this week, however, Anthropic’s Claude product was the only model permitted for use in the military’s classified systems." I hadn't realized. This does make me consider using alternatives more.
- skeptic_ai 8mo agoThey always focused on the safety. (Their own safety). They only backed off from us military once they were in the bad press. As usual, they are not an ethical company. I can’t say it’s bad as all corporations are the same. Just don’t look at the illusion they create. If you look at my post history you can see I’m always calling them out about how sketchy they are.
- thephyber 8mo agoThis is most likely because getting a SaaS software to conform to federal regulations and to promise the security needed by the US military is difficult and expensive. FedRAMP is onerous. And LLM products Are new-ish. It suggests that Anthropic made federal government contracts a priority while OpenAI, Alphabet, AWS didn’t.
- LordDragonfang 8mo agoThey announced it almost a year ago: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-gov-models-for-u-s-national-security-customers https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-gov-models-for-u-s-nat... https://support.claude.com/en/articles/13756069-public-sector-faqs https://support.claude.com/en/articles/13756069-public-secto...
- LordDragonfang 8mo agoIt's a little weird, too, because Claude definitely isn't the only one approved for use on classified systems in general; both Grok and OpenAI have models approved, at the very least. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/azuregov/azure-openai-authorization/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/azuregov/azure-openai-authori... https://x.ai/news/government https://x.ai/news/government
- gaigalas 8mo agoAll of this is kind of weird. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjrq1vwe73po https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjrq1vwe73po > the Pentagon official told the BBC the current conflict between the agency and Anthropic is unrelated to the use of autonomous weapons or mass surveillance. > The official added that the Pentagon would simultaneously label Anthropic as a supply chain risk. *Supply chain risk*? The BBC article seems to imply that the government wants to audit Anthropic. This, coming at the same time those "distillation" claims were published, is all incredibly suspicious.
- hn_throwaway_99 8mo agoSupply chain risk is a very specific designation, meaning not only would Anthropic lose Pentagon contracts, but no other company with Pentagon contracts would be allowed to use them either. It would have the effect of being a near industry-wide blackballing of Anthropic given all the major companies that have contracts with the DoD.
- gaigalas 8mo agoYes. Incredible, isn't it? I'm curious at what would make the government do that.
- thephyber 8mo ago_The Art of the Deal_. The US federal government is no longer a good faith actor acting on behalf of American citizens and following US law, but now an autonomous corporation aiming to “get the best deal” via maximum leverage.
- gaigalas 8mo agoDario Amodei used almost every single public interview he gave to press on the "Protect America, it's a matter of national security. Ban Chinese exports, etc". He was clearly dancing to the DoD tune, like he REALLY wanted a DoD contract, which he eventually got. But that's not the point. I'm talking about how coincidental all of this is with the recent Anthropic blunder with the distillation thing. That is my main point you dismissed.
- BLKNSLVR 8mo agoMore government intervention in private enterprise? This pattern seems to be gathering steam, does that mean they're now subscribing to this model? Or is this just par for the course and has always been going on, it's just the reporting is different, or the current context makes it more of a sensitive topic?
- tototrains 8mo agoNo, this is very unusual. The US government taking a 10% stake in intel is very unsual. There have been a few cases where national security has prompted the government to nationalize private institutions: the Railroads in WWI, steel mills in the korean war, CINB which was deemed a security risk by being too large a bank. This admin has so far acted like a kleptocracy and, like, because of the Epstein files if they lose power many will go to jail, so there's a huge incentive to remain in power. Wars are good for remaining in power. Dictatorship is good for remaining in power. This is all very, very, very unusual in US history (except maybe when businesses tried to overthrow the government in the 30s but we don't talk about that).
- ChrisArchitect 8mo ago[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47140734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47140734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47142587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47142587
- hansvm 8mo agoIt's been all of 3 days since Claude decided to delete a large chunk of my codebase as part of implementing a feature (couldn't get it to work, so it deleted everything triggering errors). I think Anthropic is right to hold the line on not letting the current generation delete people.
- BLKNSLVR 8mo agoUnfortunately I think the 'death by algorithm' rubicon has already been crossed, even by the US.
- AlexCoventry 8mo agoI'm not blaming you, but it's scary how many people are running these agents as if they were trusted entities.
- notepad0x90 8mo agothey're tools, you don't ascribe trust to them. you trust or distrust the user of the tool. It's like say you trust your terminal emulator. And from my experience, they will ask for permission over a directory before running. I would love to know how people are having this happen to them. If you tell it it can make changes to a directory, you've given it every right to destroy anything in that directory. I haven't heard of people claiming it exceeded those boundaries and started messing with things it wasn't permitted to mess with to begin with.
- fragmede 8mo agoThat would be --dangerously-skip-permissions for Claude, and --dangerously-skip-permissions for codex. Aka yolo mode. And yes, people (me) are stupid enough to actually use that.
- notepad0x90 8mo agoIt's a people problem then. not blaming here, I'm just saying it isn't the tool being untrustworthy. I too get burned badly when I play with fire.
- SoftTalker 8mo agoI love watching the plot lines of The Terminator play out in real life.
- mbxy 8mo agoIsn't it neat.. I mean stupid. I saw a quote today from Vonnegut: "We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective."
- juleiie 8mo agoSaving yourself is always cost effective… In fact no matter the costs, the cost of not saving yourself is infinite.
- reverius42 8mo agoRationally, yes. Humans are too often irrational.
- juleiie 8mo agoNo, I believe that money successful humans as single units are extremely rational and cold calculating. The problem is that this rationality is often centered on a single beneficiary (You) because why would you care about any other beneficiary? However times and times again it turns out that no company is as evil as government. Hence I am an anarcho capitalist. On the whole even with every company only thinking about themselves, it is a distributed system self sustaining and self correcting. No single unit has unlimited power. Historically it’s always the governments that are vastly more evil and chaotic than any private enterprise ever conceived. And so we can see it now as another example from USA government. No company could ever get so corrupt and evil as current American elected officials.
- JKCalhoun 8mo agoYou seem to tacitly acknowledge corporate America can also be evil, just not as evil as government can be? Why put corporate America on a pedestal at all then? Why content yourself with what you consider the lesser of two evils? Demand accountability from your elected officials. It can be done by not electing them. You have no such agency over corporate America (short of boycotting, I suppose). To my eye the U.S's highest elected official is in fact also a company.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- KnuthIsGod 8mo agoClaude is now the official LLM for Sauron and his killers.
- chid 8mo agoKind of wild given the outcome appears to be https://time.com/7380854/exclusive-anthropic-drops-flagship-safety-pledge/ https://time.com/7380854/exclusive-anthropic-drops-flagship-...
- Sebguer 8mo agoutterly unrelated, the RSP had nothing to do with their usage terms and was entirely about research and release of high-capability models.
- trlakh 8mo agoAs long as The Boring Company can drill a private Mount Cheyenne bunker in some granite mountain for the billionaires and a new bunker is constructed under the Silicon Valley financed White House ballroom for the politicians, everything is just fine. Hegseth and Rubio already live on a military base because they are afraid.
- XorNot 8mo agoI guess that's fortunate then because the Boring Company notably really sucks at drilling anything.
- nitwit005 8mo agoFeels like they'll use it for purposes Anthropic didn't approve of, and then turn around and blame them when it turns out asking ChatGPT to determine which ships are hostile was a bad idea.
- XorNot 8mo agoThat's exactly what's going to happen because it's already happening: companies and people leaped on "it wasn't us it was the AI" immediately.
- cyrusradfar 8mo agoSomething is deeply troubling when a company proclaims: "We want to protect people" and the government response is "we can't work with you" The fact that there are countless use cases for real government efficiency to help the people they would sacrifice because Anthropic wanted to refuse killer robots is baffling.
- Spivak 8mo agoIn a way its a testament that the safeguards are working for someone because it seems like the internet at large is full of bypasses.
- Maxious 8mo agoNote that the threat in the Axios reporting OP is based on is no longer "we can't work with you" but now "invoke the Defense Production Act to force the company to tailor its model to the military's needs" On October 30, 2023, President Biden invoked the Defense Production Act to "require that developers of the most powerful AI systems share their safety test results and other critical information with the U.S. government" when "developing any foundation model that poses a serious risk to national security, national economic security, or national public health." https://www.axios.com/2026/02/24/anthropic-pentagon-claude-hegseth-dario https://www.axios.com/2026/02/24/anthropic-pentagon-claude-h...
- nullocator 8mo agoThese AI companies and billionaires won't learn any lessons, but I hope the likes of Marc Andreessen stop getting treated intelligent well reasoned actors in the media and on podcasts when they bitched and moaned about the Biden administration overstepping. If someone thinks the pragmatic approach to resisting reporting requirements and export controls is to cozy up with the devil who will force you into worse capitulations or just seize your whole company, then that someone (looking at you Marc) is a fucking moron.
- johnbarron 8mo ago[dead]
- h4kunamata 8mo agoRead: The USA as usual doesn't like when a company doesn't give what they want. Awwwnnnn poor thing :) It is like the USA big techs mad because the Chinese AI companies are stealing their data just like, wait for it, how the USA big techs stole the data from artists worldwide to train their models. The sweet payback in the name of every single artist/company that have been affected by USA greedy. Karma is a btch!
- notepad0x90 8mo agoThat's every country in the world... "America bad" is no longer trendy or edgy, if you haven't heard. There is no pretense otherwise by anyone anymore.
- notepad0x90 8mo agoIf only a time traveling robot and his human companions were to pay a visit to decision makers at claude(aka cyberdyne? :) ). What are they using it for though? Target selection for precise strikes? I'm guessing their argument will be less lives will be lost if claude assisted with making sure the attacks were surgically precise?
- petre 8mo agoWhat they've always been used for: > Cold War computers were primarily driven by military necessity, focusing on nuclear weapon simulation, ballistic missile trajectory calculation, and cryptography to support Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). Key uses included modeling hydrogen bomb design using Monte Carlo methods (e.g., on MANIAC), air defense systems like the Navy’s NTDS, and early AI for strategic planning.
- halls-940 8mo ago"Review our targeting algorithm and suggest improvements." Or the mass surveillance bit, "Parse this dataset and come up with a list of people whose emotions are most rapidly shifting towards violence."
- yanhangyhy 8mo agoperson of intreset... who is gonna build the 'machine'
- sam0x17 8mo agoAnthropic winning big points with me for this one to be honest. Reminiscent of the Apple vs FBI days almost a decade ago
- JKCalhoun 8mo agoWinning. It's not over yet. And still feel out in the dark as to what is really going on in backroom. But that seems. more than it ever has, to now be a part of the society we have found ourselves in.
- sam0x17 8mo agooh I mean defense production act, if applied here, would completely tie their hands, so it's most likely symbolic resistance at the end of the day unless gov doesn't have the will to apply it here
- chrischen 8mo agoYesterday I was trying to figure out if my expired nacho dip would be safe to eat and wanted to know how much botulism would be toxic if I ate it and so I asked Claude. It refused to answer that question so I could see how the current safeguards can be limiting.
- raincole 8mo ago> Both xAI and OpenAI have agreed to the government’s terms on the uses of their AI, Uh... so why doesn't the US government simply work with OpenAI and xAI? Why do they have to use Claude?
- teh_infallible 8mo agoIt seems odd to me that the military doesn’t already have far superior models.
- moomin 8mo agoThere’s a conflict here that’s nothing to do with the ethical dimension: Claude is regarded as a high quality model at least in part because its critical about what it’s doing. The military, on the other hand, doesn’t really encourage introspection. Even without ethical considerations there’s always going to be a tension between quality and obedience.
- varispeed 8mo agoNo, military probably wants prompts like "how to make a missile" to be answered.
- cucumber3732842 8mo agoThe military has its own mechanisms for assessing the quality of its own output. They might be imperfect, but they're there. They don't need that from claude. What they need is it to not say "it seems you're trying to build a weapons system, can you please not do that" when someone asks it to sanity check something that's on the edge of their technical expertise. Like making sure their proposed antenna dome is aerodynamically sane at transsonic speeds so the aero guys don't have to waste time rejecting it outright. Or they need it to not paternalistically screech about safety when someone tells it to read the commercial user manual for some piece of equipment and then append into the usage sections all the non-osha stuff the military does when things don't work quite right.