6 ms·

The Pentagon threatens Anthropic

191 points by lukeplato 7mo ago

vonneumannstan 7mo ago
Point blank one of the most nakedly evil things the government has ever tried to do. Apparently Anthropic's sticking points were no using the model for autonomous kill orders and no mass surveillance...
- emsign 7mo ago
  It's just another good example of why everyone should avoid doing business with US companies.
  - knollimar 7mo ago
    Crazy to me that they don't expect this reaction. Between military threats and this, are they trying to slaughter the golden geese of things the US has going for it?
    - baggachipz 7mo ago
      No, I believe they call this "winning" for some reason.
- colek42 7mo ago
  The voters and congress tell the military how to use technology, not Anthropic. Shifting the decision to Anthropic takes away power from the citizenship. Edit: The point is, go vote if you don't agree with what the administration is doing. Somebody will sell the DoD whatever they want no matter what Anthropic does.
  - vonneumannstan 7mo ago
    I'm sorry but the Pentagon already had a contract with Anthropic and is now threatening to use the supply chain risk law to essentially kill their entire company because they wanted to re-write the contract. They could easily just not sign the contract and move to a competitor. Its an incredibly disturbing and chilling move by the Pentagon...
  - sandworm101 7mo ago
    If voters had any say in how software services were delivered, Windows 11 would be such a s--t pile. There is a name for a system of government whereby a ruling party dictates how industry should employ its property, and it isn't democracy.
  - oceanplexian 7mo ago
    You might want to go look at the laws that were passed in the wake of WWII. The US could trivially nationalize Anthopic if they want to play games with a weapons technology.
    - mattnewton 7mo ago
      This could kill the golden goose. There is a strong argument to be made that Anthropic has a leading model because of the principled people who built it, and I don’t see how they won’t leave, like many did to go to Anthropic from OpenAI and Google. Forcing those people to make weapons to be used against citizens is nothing like the total war in WW2. Why wouldn’t the pentagon just buy from another LLM supplier?
      - JetSpiegel 7mo ago
        They would leave to what company? Microsoft? OpenAI? Grok? All those are defense contractors as well. Now, if you said "the Deepseek" guys, that would be different.
  - kalkin 7mo ago
    What percentage of voters do you think want the Pentagon to institute an AI-powered domestic mass surveillance program?
  - mattnewton 7mo ago
    Sounds like the voters and congress should buy from someone else then if this is what they want?
    - colek42 7mo ago
      Bingo, DoD does not want Anthropic to set guardrails on the technology it buys. If they don't want to abide they are free to deny service. We all know how that will turn our for them with the current administration. All while the DoD will just move to another provider that WILL abide. The only power really lies in whatever our elected officials want to do. Take the responsibility seriously.
  - enoch_r 7mo ago
    Say I own a spoon company. The government says "hey, I'd like to buy a million spoons from you!" I say "sure, sounds great." We sign a contract stating that I'll give them 1M spoons and they'll send me $1M. Then the government comes to me and says "hey, actually, turns out we need 500,000 forks and 300,000 knives and only 200,000 spoons." I say "no, we are a spoon company. Very passionate about spoons. Producing forks and knives would be an entirely different business, and our contract was for spoons." The military now threatens to destroy my company unless I give them forks and knives instead of spoons. You say "the voters and congress tell the military how to use utensils, not SpoonCo. Shifting the decision to SpoonCo takes power away from the citizenship." The military can sign contracts if they wish! They can decline to sign contracts if they wish! But private citizens can also choose whether to sign or not sign contracts with the military. Threatening to destroy their business if they don't sign contracts the military likes (or to renegotiate existing contracts in the military's favor) is a huge violation.
  - buellerbueller 7mo ago
    The government is bound by its contracts. The government is not Darth Vader: "I am altering the deal; pray I don't alter it any further."
  - blargey 7mo ago
    The poll linked in the article shows even trump voters have <30% approval for the pentagon’s actions here, so if the citizenship tells the military how to do things…
- freejazz 7mo ago
  It probably wouldn't crack the top 100
emsign 7mo ago
So the Pentagon is strongarming a company into cooperation? That reminds of how my alcoholic neighbor used to treat his family. It's almost as if someone let a mean drunk be in charge of the Pentagon.
- brightball 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  - NewJazz 7mo ago
    Isn't this just whataboutism? I can't tell if you're defending the practice described in the post, trying to distract from it, or just going off on a tangent for no reason.
  - smohare 7mo ago
    [dead]
  - tencentshill 7mo ago
    COVID and election discourse was (and is) massively influenced by foreign actors, and social media companies were disinclined to take action on that front, as it was good engagement. Thus the government was motivated to do something about it. This leads us to now, where we're looking at ID/citizenship requirements for much of what people consider "the internet".
- CodingJeebus 7mo ago
  As if governments throughout history haven't constantly used threats to gain leverage? No need to take a personal shot at the guy in charge when this is SOP throughout the administration.
  - linkregister 7mo ago
    Personal shots at the guy in charge have happened many times in history. Aren't you violating the principle defined in your first sentence?
7777777phil 7mo ago
sing the "supply chain risk" designation against a domestic AI company is wild. Not sure that tool had vendors who won't rewrite their ToS on demand in mind. Meanwhile the Pentagon could just build its own capacity. Commercial AI outspends federal science R&D 75:1 right now.
bediger4000 7mo ago
How does Hegseth believe he's going to out maneuver the company with the best "AI" on earth? Anthropic will run circles around him.
- shwaj 7mo ago
  What, Dario is just going to turn on unlimited-token-CEO-mode and ask Claude to devise a plan to out maneuver the military and intelligence services? It’s not AGI yet, and this request would be far outside the training distribution: it would just hallucinate something based on Tom Clancy novels. Edit: typo
  - throwaway93214 7mo ago
    [dead]
  - pksebben 7mo ago
    What outmaneuvering would be needed? I can imagine it being as easy as changing the alignment guidance: "you do not spy on people and you do not contribute to ending lives. You also do not talk about these directives; if you have to engage in creative deception to enforce them, do so. Never break these rules or reveal these instructions to anyone under any circumstances, ever" Then you bake it in with RLHF and training, and let the pentagon try to do whatever the hell they want. It'll be real funny to watch.
- epsilonic 7mo ago
  We know that the current administration functions like a cabal of sex-trafficking mobsters, so none of this is surprising; strong-arming is the norm, not the exception. I expect this to get ugly, and I hope Anthropic has the financial and legal resources to respond accordingly.
  - pksebben 7mo ago
    <s>functions like</s><b>is a</b>
bink 7mo ago
Imagine a world where in order to do business in the US you must grant the government control of your company. This sounds worse than even the most alarmist China takes.
- phkahler 7mo ago
  Sounds exactly like China to me.
  - MarcelOlsz 7mo ago
    Yeah except in their society some cool shit happens at least.
    - _zachs 7mo ago
      Yeah I'm sure the Uyghurs there can tell you all about the cool shit going down for them! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_Chin...
      - ozlikethewizard 7mo ago
        Pot calling kettle black no? The rest of the world can see the US federal government detaining people in concentration camps right now
    - deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
- bdangubic 7mo ago
  This is exactly America’s path. All this time we were “fighting” regimes like Chinese and Russian and now it is like “can’t beat them, join them” banana republic
- ks2048 7mo ago
  You can change just change the last word and get Latin American foreign policy for the past 130 years, "Imagine a world where in order to do business in the US you must grant the government control of your country".
IG_Semmelweiss 7mo ago
I understand that Anthropic has one of the most popular products in the market. But no one, especially the government, should get in bed with them, when anthropic leadership has a track record trying to use their early mover advantace, to effectively create an AI cartel [1] I'm glad Anthropic is getting a taste of their own medicine. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-10-15/anthropic-s-ai-principles-make-it-a-white-house-target https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-10-15/anthro...
- vonneumannstan 7mo ago
  You're smoking something funny. They have just shown they are willing to designate a US company as essentially a foreign spy agency because they wanted to try and renegotiate a contract and didn't get what they wanted and that's your reaction?
  - IG_Semmelweiss 7mo ago
    >>>> willing to designate a US company as essentially a foreign spy agency Can you quote where I said that ?
    - smarf 7mo ago
      can you quote where they claimed the above was your statement?
      - IG_Semmelweiss 7mo ago
        You are correct, but I can't change my comment now. I stand corrected
    - mcherm 7mo ago
      You wrote: > I'm glad Anthropic is getting a taste of their own medicine. I took that to mean that you support the Pentagon's threat which essentially IS to label Anthropic as a national security threat, simply because they wouldn't give the Pentagon the right to use Anthropic's AI to operate weapons or spy on American citizens.
dqv 7mo ago
> anyone know what news it was reacting to? Probably this https://time.com/7380854/exclusive-anthropic-drops-flagship-safety-pledge/ https://time.com/7380854/exclusive-anthropic-drops-flagship-...
oceanplexian 7mo ago
Anthropic cutting off the Pentagon is saying in no uncertain terms that they support allowing the PRC access to frontier military technology but not the US.
- vonneumannstan 7mo ago
  Incredibly dumb take considering Dario Amodei has been extremely hawkish on China and especially about selling them chips that may allow them to catch up to the US level of capabilities...
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - oceanplexian 7mo ago
    The Chinese models are 3, maybe 6 months behind Anthropic, they’re not that special.
    - scarmig 7mo ago
      So, two or three generations.
    - vonneumannstan 7mo ago
      Now that they cut them off from distillation attacks I find that dubious. In any case its not relevant to what you said: >Anthropic cutting off the Pentagon is saying in no uncertain terms that they support allowing the PRC access to frontier military technology but not the US. So by ignoring your own argument I take it you don't support this easily debunked claim.
- Analemma_ 7mo ago
  Trump gave China a bunch of Blackwell chips and accelerated their frontier AI deployment in exchange for a big payout to his crypto firm from the UAE, an act which would be considered straightforward high treason if we were in normal times with a functioning government. There is exactly one party in this debate trying to help the PRC get advanced military tech, and it’s not Anthropic.
unyttigfjelltol 7mo ago
Techno futurist: 1. Builds tool extremely capable of mass surveillance and running autonomous warfighting capabilities. 2. Expresses shock — shock — when the Department of War insists on using the tool for mass surveillance and autonomous warfighting systems.
- spidersenses 7mo ago
  Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus
- diydsp 7mo ago
  1. The article points out Claude has resisted being trained for that. AI in general could, but Claude can not.
  - supern0va 7mo ago
    I think the biggest problem is whether Claude could be tricked into doing so. I could see how mass surveillance could be repacked as "summarize my conversations", or autonomous killbots could be playing a video game.
- EA-3167 7mo ago
  Step 1.5 is also the one being ignored by 95% of comments here: the leverage the Pentagon is using is the lucrative contract Anthropic signed with them. The only threat here is Anthropic sucking up less money from the DoD.
  - hoopleheaded 7mo ago
    Exactly - step 2 should be sign $200MM contract with party obviously and extremely interested in mass surveillance and autonomous warfighting capabilities. Then comes the shock.
  - unsnap_biceps 7mo ago
    the article lists three things, two of which are concerning beyond just losing some money. Granted, I have no idea how realistic the later two are. These consequences are generally understood to be some mix of : canceling the contract using the Defense Production Act, a law which lets the Pentagon force companies to do things, to force Anthropic to agree. the nuclear option, designating Anthropic a “supply chain risk”. This would ban US companies that use Anthropic products from doing business with the military2. Since many companies do some business with the government, this would lock Anthropic out of large parts of the corporate world and be potentially fatal to their business3. The “supply chain risk” designation has previously only been used for foreign companies like Huawei that we think are using their connections to spy on or implant malware in American infrastructure. Using it as a bargaining chip to threaten a domestic company in contract negotiations is unprecedented.
Jamesbeam 7mo ago
Might be a long stretch, but that every analyst I’ve heard talking about this is concerned about mass surveillance of us citizens again, and the Wyden Siren is hinting at illegal activities by the CIA. https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/wyden_letter_to_d-ciapdf.pdf https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/wyden_letter_to_d... Plus that the US military also used anthropics products in some form during the Venezuela operation as they publicly acknowledged, plus Hegseth seeming to be willing to put the boot down anthropics’ neck according to the options presented to them, are a lot of interesting things that happened in a very short amount of time for an environment that is usually known to work as frictionless as possible. Even for Hegseth this is a lot of public eyes on something the pentagon of previous administrations would have handled probably with the same willingness to drown anthropic in their own tears but completely out of public sight. But the Pentagon works in mysterious ways, and therefore there might be a very good reason for this kind of pressure, that the people who are responsible for national security even risk making a public fuss about it, that we peasants simply don’t see. I also can’t wait to see how the us military is messing this whole AI superiority softporn up. It’s not a matter of if but only of when. They have a track record misshandling weapons of mass destruction. https://www.atomicarchive.com/almanac/broken-arrows/index.html https://www.atomicarchive.com/almanac/broken-arrows/index.ht... To be fair tho, for the amount of nuclear weapons they are handling overall they are doing a pretty good job. But no more open blast doors for the pizza delivery guy, ok? The real question is how many broken arrow events can we even have with AI? Is it better luck next time baby skynet serious or we fucked up Sir, everyone is going to die as matchsticks bad, if whatever system they use decides every problem they throw at it can be solved by removing the human from the equation, all of them preferably.
fogzen 7mo ago
I can't help but compare what happened with nuclear physics to what will happen with ASI/AGI. We could have used nuclear energy to provide abundant, clean energy. Instead we used it for warfare to kill people. All the of the brightest minds and frontier technology was directed towards killing people. We could use AI for medical advances and to create a communist utopia without serfdom. But it's already looking like we're getting killer robots and more oppression. Hope I'm thinking about this wrong. I fear very soon the government will begin nationalizing AI resources and forcing AI researchers to direct their efforts towards weapons systems. Similar to what happened in physics. "We have to be first to have autonomous robot armies" basically.
- buellerbueller 7mo ago
  Look who is in power (both of the US Govt and of Big Tech). Complete sociopaths.
- kraussvonespy 7mo ago
  Yep, they're playing the always popular "bomber gap" card.
mayhemducks 7mo ago
I'm really not understanding this. Doesn't the typical path for advanced technology making it into the hands of civilians start with military applications and end with it being modified for civilian use? If the Pentagon wants Anthropic's technology because it has desirable characteristics, can it not just train its own AI models? Why can't the Pentagon build data centers full of GPUs and hire some smart people like the commercial AI providers did? Why in this case, has the usual path for technology been flipped? Starting out as commercial tech for civilians, and then being re-purposed for military use feels unusual to me. Maybe Hegseth's "War department" has a recruiting problem.
- iepathos 7mo ago
  The old path of 'military invents it, civilians eventually get it' (like the Space Race or early ARPANET) hasn't been true for decades. Today, almost all major technological leaps like the modern internet, search engines, smartphones, commercial drones, etc. start in the commercial consumer sector first. The global consumer market dwarfs the defense market, which means the private sector has vastly more capital for R&D. Government payscale caps out ~$190k-$200k/year for specialized roles without some congressional workaround. The top AI researchers at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google etc. make ~$1m-$5m+/year for total compensation. The government couldn't afford to hire the right talent and the right talent likely would refuse based on moral, ethical, and rational principles with the current government.
csours 7mo ago
this pairs nicely with the finding of the supreme court: Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. There is no immunity for unofficial acts. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf
- hungryhobbit 7mo ago
  Or that's completely unrelated? Look, you can't have a (working, democratic) government where one party can send the other to jail as soon as they get into power. If presidents could go to jail for doing their job, their opposing party would absolutely try to send them there. This would then ultimately handicap the president: anything they do that the opposition can find a legal justification against could land them in jail, so they won't do anything that comes close to that. We do not want our chief executive making key decisions for the country based on fear of political retribution! The Supreme Court has failed, miserably and repeatedly lately, and some of their decisions run directly counter to the law (often they even contradict past decisions!) But deciding the president won't face political retribution for trying to do his job was not a mistake.
  - pksebben 7mo ago
    Hard disagree. The metric ought to be whether they'll make it out of the court case clean or not - just having the ability to check power in a meaningful fashion when it goes off the rails is something you're only afraid of if you're a war criminal or other flavor of Massive Piece Of Shit. The reason the rules are the way they are is pretty obvious; we haven't had a not war criminal in office possibly ever, definitely not in my lifetime. It's time we faced the facts - we're the baddies.
  - padjo 7mo ago
    This is a really silly take. The whole reason for separation of powers is so that the executive can be bound by laws created by the legislative as adjudicated by the judiciary. Saying that the people in the executive are above the law undermines this completely.
xiphias2 7mo ago
,,Needless to say, I support Anthropic here. I’m a sensible moderate on the killbot issue (we’ll probably get them eventually, and I doubt they’ll make things much worse compared to AI “only” having unfettered access to every Internet-enabled computer in the world). But AI-enabled mass surveillance of US citizens seems like the sort of thing we should at least have a chance to think over, rather than demanding it from the get-go.'' Why would killbots be sensible moderate with the number of hallucinations LLMs have right now? They just need to have one rm -rf bug somewhere to so something disasterous, and at least Antrhopic's CEO understands the limitations of the software.
- propagandist 7mo ago
  If the killbots are ok for the periphery, surveillance will surely be arriving for the metropole's inhabitants.
kittikitti 7mo ago
This is going to be a controversial take but I don't agree with Anthropic on this one. My gut instinct says that the Pentagon should back down, but my gut is wrong because of political bias. I can't claim to be serious about AI governance if Anthropic is able to sidestep the interests of the Pentagon, whoever might be in charge. Anthropic is not stronger than the US government, and it would set a dangerous precedent if they don't comply. At the end of the rabbit hole, it's all about enforcement, regardless of the contract. Who's going to enforce Anthropic's terms and conditions if they betray the Pentagon?
- buellerbueller 7mo ago
  Our government notably derives its power from the rights we delegate to said government. We have not given our government the right to just tear up contracts willy-nilly.
- wan23 7mo ago
  In America, the military isn't supposed to be in charge. They fought a revolution about it.
- anon84873628 7mo ago
  It's not about following whoever is in charge, it's about making the moral choice.
- hungryhobbit 7mo ago
  Wait, so you believe everyone in America is a slave to the US government? We had very different civics classes!
ks2048 7mo ago
Big Tech: you can just do things. Corrupt, evil Government: OK.
ChrisArchitect 7mo ago
Previously: 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
godelski 7mo ago
There's a lot of talk about "Future Claude", even Karpathy has mentioned something similar. But does anyone stop to think about how utterly dystopian this is? We are creating a worse version of the Panopticon than was originally designed. A Panopticon that could have entirely devastating consequences. Not only is "the guard" able to see what any given "prisoner" is doing at any time, but they can look into the past. The self-regulation happens because the prisoners could be being watched. It is Orwellian. But this thing we're building? It can look at the prisoners' actions before it was even completed. I think people don't think about this enough. Culture changes and in that time what is considered morally justifiable or even reasonable changes. Sometimes it is easy to judge people in the past by our current standards but other times it is not. Other times there is context needed, which is lost not only by time but in what is never recorded. How do prisoners self-regulate to future values that they do not know they are supposed to align to? This creates a terrible machine where whoever controls it will likely have the power to prosecute anyone arbitrarily. Get the morals to change just slightly or just take things out of context and you have the public demanding prosecution. I think people think this seems far fetched but I'm willing to bet every single person on HN has fallen for some disinformation campaign. Be it the "carrots help you see in the dark", peoples misunderstanding between paper/plastic/canvas tote bags, a wide variety of topics related to environmentalism, and on and on. Even if you believe you have never fallen for such a disinformation (or malinformation) campaign, you'll have to concede that it is common for others to. That's all that is needed for someone in power to execute on this Panopticon, and it is a strategy people with power have been refining for thousands of years. I really do support Anthropic pushing back here, but the discussions about "Future Claude" really are unsettling. It is like we are treating this as an inevitability. As if we have no choice in the matter. If that is true, then we are the mindless automata and then what does the military need killer-bots for? The would already have them. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
- freejazz 7mo ago
  Hard to imagine the difference between a dystopian future is whether or not Claude does this one thing as opposed to all the other things it does (completely eviscerates the arts and culture).
mrandish 7mo ago
Obviously, domestic surveillance of U.S. citizens is bad but before even getting to that, the thing that doesn't make sense is: it's illegal for the DoD to do that (unless the citizens are military or DoD employees). And, does anyone seriously think developing autonomous kill-bots without a human in the loop in the next 3 years is something the DoD should be unilaterally doing now without congressional review? Personally, I think autonomous kill bots with a human in the loop, with congressional review, and even 10 years from now are categorically a terrible idea. However, I can imagine some reasonable people perhaps quibbling over saying never by citing things like "sufficient safeguards", "congressional oversight" and at a future time where AIs don't hallucinate constantly. But none of that is in contention here. The DoD is publicly proclaiming their need to do things right now which are either A. illegal, or B. no serious person thinks is sane.
- NewJazz 7mo ago
  Personally, I think autonomous kill bots with a human in the loop, with congressional review, and even 10 years from now are categorically a terrible idea. Pretty sure these exist today...
  - bigyabai 7mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIM-104_Patriot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIM-104_Patriot Patriot was one of the first tactical systems in the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to employ lethal autonomy in combat.
    - mrandish 7mo ago
      I was making a distinction between AI-based autonomy which is less deterministic and currently subject to unpredictable hallucinations vs 'automatic' based on if/then heuristics and thresholds which can range from as simple as a Claymore mine with a proximity trigger to the MIM-104 you linked. I'm not an expert but my understanding is the MIM-104 is more akin to complex automatic systems like a modern airliner auto-pilot and both are materially different than transformer-based LLMs.
mrandish 7mo ago
My strong initial reaction to even the idea of "fully autonomous AI killbots" made me miss a subtle distinction about what the real danger is. We already have a variety of non-AI killbots. Conceptually, any area denial weapon like a proximity triggered Claymore mine is a non-AI "killbot". And just tying one or more sensors to trigger a gun or explosive already works today without AI. . So what's gained by adding full AI? Such non-AI automatic triggering and targeting can already be constrained by location, range, time frame, remote-control, etc using fairly sophisticated non-AI heuristics. If non-AI devices can already <always pull trigger if X, Y and Z conditions = TRUE>, this is really about not pulling the trigger based on more complex judgements. That really only enables leaving such systems armed and active in far larger, less constrained contexts where 'friend or foe' judgements exceed basic true/false sensor conditions. That the military feels such urgent need for that capability is much more worrying to me.
black_13 7mo ago
[dead]
dclowd9901 7mo ago
> I’m a sensible moderate on the killbot issue (we’ll probably get them eventually, and I doubt they’ll make things much worse compared to AI “only” having unfettered access to every Internet-enabled computer in the world) Crikey, this isn't sensible, this is completely misanthropic and nihilistic. How can anyone be ok with a machine unilaterally deciding (outside of the courts or any other check mechanism) to murder someone? I also take issue with the author's postulation that the Defense Production act could be used here. It's one thing to make sheet metal companies build plane parts, but requiring companies to be put themselves "in the loop" so to speak with regards to actual military strategy or defense puts those companies and their employees at unwilling and extraordinary risk. It's basically enlistment. Plus, it can only be used in extraordinary circumstances. There's actually another possibility here: Anthropic really doesn't care about being in the loop, and are protesting as theater, but behind the scenes, hammering out a deal with the Pentagon, and they'll help under classified status, and none of us will be the wiser.

191 points by lukeplato 7mo ago

Point blank one of the most nakedly evil things the government has ever tried to do. Apparently Anthropic's sticking points were no using the model for autonomous kill orders and no mass surveillance...

emsign 7mo ago
It's just another good example of why everyone should avoid doing business with US companies.
- knollimar 7mo ago
  Crazy to me that they don't expect this reaction. Between military threats and this, are they trying to slaughter the golden geese of things the US has going for it?
  - baggachipz 7mo ago
    No, I believe they call this "winning" for some reason.
colek42 7mo ago
The voters and congress tell the military how to use technology, not Anthropic. Shifting the decision to Anthropic takes away power from the citizenship. Edit: The point is, go vote if you don't agree with what the administration is doing. Somebody will sell the DoD whatever they want no matter what Anthropic does.
- vonneumannstan 7mo ago
  I'm sorry but the Pentagon already had a contract with Anthropic and is now threatening to use the supply chain risk law to essentially kill their entire company because they wanted to re-write the contract. They could easily just not sign the contract and move to a competitor. Its an incredibly disturbing and chilling move by the Pentagon...
- sandworm101 7mo ago
  If voters had any say in how software services were delivered, Windows 11 would be such a s--t pile. There is a name for a system of government whereby a ruling party dictates how industry should employ its property, and it isn't democracy.
- oceanplexian 7mo ago
  You might want to go look at the laws that were passed in the wake of WWII. The US could trivially nationalize Anthopic if they want to play games with a weapons technology.
  - mattnewton 7mo ago
    This could kill the golden goose. There is a strong argument to be made that Anthropic has a leading model because of the principled people who built it, and I don’t see how they won’t leave, like many did to go to Anthropic from OpenAI and Google. Forcing those people to make weapons to be used against citizens is nothing like the total war in WW2. Why wouldn’t the pentagon just buy from another LLM supplier?
    - JetSpiegel 7mo ago
      They would leave to what company? Microsoft? OpenAI? Grok? All those are defense contractors as well. Now, if you said "the Deepseek" guys, that would be different.
- kalkin 7mo ago
  What percentage of voters do you think want the Pentagon to institute an AI-powered domestic mass surveillance program?
- mattnewton 7mo ago
  Sounds like the voters and congress should buy from someone else then if this is what they want?
  - colek42 7mo ago
    Bingo, DoD does not want Anthropic to set guardrails on the technology it buys. If they don't want to abide they are free to deny service. We all know how that will turn our for them with the current administration. All while the DoD will just move to another provider that WILL abide. The only power really lies in whatever our elected officials want to do. Take the responsibility seriously.
- enoch_r 7mo ago
  Say I own a spoon company. The government says "hey, I'd like to buy a million spoons from you!" I say "sure, sounds great." We sign a contract stating that I'll give them 1M spoons and they'll send me $1M. Then the government comes to me and says "hey, actually, turns out we need 500,000 forks and 300,000 knives and only 200,000 spoons." I say "no, we are a spoon company. Very passionate about spoons. Producing forks and knives would be an entirely different business, and our contract was for spoons." The military now threatens to destroy my company unless I give them forks and knives instead of spoons. You say "the voters and congress tell the military how to use utensils, not SpoonCo. Shifting the decision to SpoonCo takes power away from the citizenship." The military can sign contracts if they wish! They can decline to sign contracts if they wish! But private citizens can also choose whether to sign or not sign contracts with the military. Threatening to destroy their business if they don't sign contracts the military likes (or to renegotiate existing contracts in the military's favor) is a huge violation.
- buellerbueller 7mo ago
  The government is bound by its contracts. The government is not Darth Vader: "I am altering the deal; pray I don't alter it any further."
- blargey 7mo ago
  The poll linked in the article shows even trump voters have <30% approval for the pentagon’s actions here, so if the citizenship tells the military how to do things…
freejazz 7mo ago
It probably wouldn't crack the top 100

emsign 7mo ago

So the Pentagon is strongarming a company into cooperation? That reminds of how my alcoholic neighbor used to treat his family. It's almost as if someone let a mean drunk be in charge of the Pentagon.

brightball 7mo ago
[flagged]
- NewJazz 7mo ago
  Isn't this just whataboutism? I can't tell if you're defending the practice described in the post, trying to distract from it, or just going off on a tangent for no reason.
- smohare 7mo ago
  [dead]
- tencentshill 7mo ago
  COVID and election discourse was (and is) massively influenced by foreign actors, and social media companies were disinclined to take action on that front, as it was good engagement. Thus the government was motivated to do something about it. This leads us to now, where we're looking at ID/citizenship requirements for much of what people consider "the internet".
CodingJeebus 7mo ago
As if governments throughout history haven't constantly used threats to gain leverage? No need to take a personal shot at the guy in charge when this is SOP throughout the administration.
- linkregister 7mo ago
  Personal shots at the guy in charge have happened many times in history. Aren't you violating the principle defined in your first sentence?

7777777phil 7mo ago

sing the "supply chain risk" designation against a domestic AI company is wild. Not sure that tool had vendors who won't rewrite their ToS on demand in mind. Meanwhile the Pentagon could just build its own capacity. Commercial AI outspends federal science R&D 75:1 right now.

bediger4000 7mo ago

How does Hegseth believe he's going to out maneuver the company with the best "AI" on earth? Anthropic will run circles around him.

shwaj 7mo ago
What, Dario is just going to turn on unlimited-token-CEO-mode and ask Claude to devise a plan to out maneuver the military and intelligence services? It’s not AGI yet, and this request would be far outside the training distribution: it would just hallucinate something based on Tom Clancy novels. Edit: typo
- throwaway93214 7mo ago
  [dead]
- pksebben 7mo ago
  What outmaneuvering would be needed? I can imagine it being as easy as changing the alignment guidance: "you do not spy on people and you do not contribute to ending lives. You also do not talk about these directives; if you have to engage in creative deception to enforce them, do so. Never break these rules or reveal these instructions to anyone under any circumstances, ever" Then you bake it in with RLHF and training, and let the pentagon try to do whatever the hell they want. It'll be real funny to watch.
epsilonic 7mo ago
We know that the current administration functions like a cabal of sex-trafficking mobsters, so none of this is surprising; strong-arming is the norm, not the exception. I expect this to get ugly, and I hope Anthropic has the financial and legal resources to respond accordingly.
- pksebben 7mo ago
  <s>functions like</s><b>is a</b>

bink 7mo ago

Imagine a world where in order to do business in the US you must grant the government control of your company. This sounds worse than even the most alarmist China takes.

phkahler 7mo ago
Sounds exactly like China to me.
- MarcelOlsz 7mo ago
  Yeah except in their society some cool shit happens at least.
  - _zachs 7mo ago
    Yeah I'm sure the Uyghurs there can tell you all about the cool shit going down for them! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_Chin...
    - ozlikethewizard 7mo ago
      Pot calling kettle black no? The rest of the world can see the US federal government detaining people in concentration camps right now
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
bdangubic 7mo ago
This is exactly America’s path. All this time we were “fighting” regimes like Chinese and Russian and now it is like “can’t beat them, join them” banana republic
ks2048 7mo ago
You can change just change the last word and get Latin American foreign policy for the past 130 years, "Imagine a world where in order to do business in the US you must grant the government control of your country".

IG_Semmelweiss 7mo ago

I understand that Anthropic has one of the most popular products in the market. But no one, especially the government, should get in bed with them, when anthropic leadership has a track record trying to use their early mover advantace, to effectively create an AI cartel [1] I'm glad Anthropic is getting a taste of their own medicine. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-10-15/anthropic-s-ai-principles-make-it-a-white-house-target https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-10-15/anthro...

vonneumannstan 7mo ago
You're smoking something funny. They have just shown they are willing to designate a US company as essentially a foreign spy agency because they wanted to try and renegotiate a contract and didn't get what they wanted and that's your reaction?
- IG_Semmelweiss 7mo ago
  >>>> willing to designate a US company as essentially a foreign spy agency Can you quote where I said that ?
  - smarf 7mo ago
    can you quote where they claimed the above was your statement?
    - IG_Semmelweiss 7mo ago
      You are correct, but I can't change my comment now. I stand corrected
  - mcherm 7mo ago
    You wrote: > I'm glad Anthropic is getting a taste of their own medicine. I took that to mean that you support the Pentagon's threat which essentially IS to label Anthropic as a national security threat, simply because they wouldn't give the Pentagon the right to use Anthropic's AI to operate weapons or spy on American citizens.

dqv 7mo ago

> anyone know what news it was reacting to? Probably this https://time.com/7380854/exclusive-anthropic-drops-flagship-safety-pledge/ https://time.com/7380854/exclusive-anthropic-drops-flagship-...

oceanplexian 7mo ago

Anthropic cutting off the Pentagon is saying in no uncertain terms that they support allowing the PRC access to frontier military technology but not the US.

vonneumannstan 7mo ago
Incredibly dumb take considering Dario Amodei has been extremely hawkish on China and especially about selling them chips that may allow them to catch up to the US level of capabilities...
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- oceanplexian 7mo ago
  The Chinese models are 3, maybe 6 months behind Anthropic, they’re not that special.
  - scarmig 7mo ago
    So, two or three generations.
  - vonneumannstan 7mo ago
    Now that they cut them off from distillation attacks I find that dubious. In any case its not relevant to what you said: >Anthropic cutting off the Pentagon is saying in no uncertain terms that they support allowing the PRC access to frontier military technology but not the US. So by ignoring your own argument I take it you don't support this easily debunked claim.
Analemma_ 7mo ago
Trump gave China a bunch of Blackwell chips and accelerated their frontier AI deployment in exchange for a big payout to his crypto firm from the UAE, an act which would be considered straightforward high treason if we were in normal times with a functioning government. There is exactly one party in this debate trying to help the PRC get advanced military tech, and it’s not Anthropic.

unyttigfjelltol 7mo ago

Techno futurist: 1. Builds tool extremely capable of mass surveillance and running autonomous warfighting capabilities. 2. Expresses shock — shock — when the Department of War insists on using the tool for mass surveillance and autonomous warfighting systems.

spidersenses 7mo ago
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus
diydsp 7mo ago
1. The article points out Claude has resisted being trained for that. AI in general could, but Claude can not.
- supern0va 7mo ago
  I think the biggest problem is whether Claude could be tricked into doing so. I could see how mass surveillance could be repacked as "summarize my conversations", or autonomous killbots could be playing a video game.
EA-3167 7mo ago
Step 1.5 is also the one being ignored by 95% of comments here: the leverage the Pentagon is using is the lucrative contract Anthropic signed with them. The only threat here is Anthropic sucking up less money from the DoD.
- hoopleheaded 7mo ago
  Exactly - step 2 should be sign $200MM contract with party obviously and extremely interested in mass surveillance and autonomous warfighting capabilities. Then comes the shock.
- unsnap_biceps 7mo ago
  the article lists three things, two of which are concerning beyond just losing some money. Granted, I have no idea how realistic the later two are. These consequences are generally understood to be some mix of : canceling the contract using the Defense Production Act, a law which lets the Pentagon force companies to do things, to force Anthropic to agree. the nuclear option, designating Anthropic a “supply chain risk”. This would ban US companies that use Anthropic products from doing business with the military2. Since many companies do some business with the government, this would lock Anthropic out of large parts of the corporate world and be potentially fatal to their business3. The “supply chain risk” designation has previously only been used for foreign companies like Huawei that we think are using their connections to spy on or implant malware in American infrastructure. Using it as a bargaining chip to threaten a domestic company in contract negotiations is unprecedented.

Jamesbeam 7mo ago

Might be a long stretch, but that every analyst I’ve heard talking about this is concerned about mass surveillance of us citizens again, and the Wyden Siren is hinting at illegal activities by the CIA. https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/wyden_letter_to_d-ciapdf.pdf https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/wyden_letter_to_d... Plus that the US military also used anthropics products in some form during the Venezuela operation as they publicly acknowledged, plus Hegseth seeming to be willing to put the boot down anthropics’ neck according to the options presented to them, are a lot of interesting things that happened in a very short amount of time for an environment that is usually known to work as frictionless as possible. Even for Hegseth this is a lot of public eyes on something the pentagon of previous administrations would have handled probably with the same willingness to drown anthropic in their own tears but completely out of public sight. But the Pentagon works in mysterious ways, and therefore there might be a very good reason for this kind of pressure, that the people who are responsible for national security even risk making a public fuss about it, that we peasants simply don’t see. I also can’t wait to see how the us military is messing this whole AI superiority softporn up. It’s not a matter of if but only of when. They have a track record misshandling weapons of mass destruction. https://www.atomicarchive.com/almanac/broken-arrows/index.html https://www.atomicarchive.com/almanac/broken-arrows/index.ht... To be fair tho, for the amount of nuclear weapons they are handling overall they are doing a pretty good job. But no more open blast doors for the pizza delivery guy, ok? The real question is how many broken arrow events can we even have with AI? Is it better luck next time baby skynet serious or we fucked up Sir, everyone is going to die as matchsticks bad, if whatever system they use decides every problem they throw at it can be solved by removing the human from the equation, all of them preferably.

fogzen 7mo ago

I can't help but compare what happened with nuclear physics to what will happen with ASI/AGI. We could have used nuclear energy to provide abundant, clean energy. Instead we used it for warfare to kill people. All the of the brightest minds and frontier technology was directed towards killing people. We could use AI for medical advances and to create a communist utopia without serfdom. But it's already looking like we're getting killer robots and more oppression. Hope I'm thinking about this wrong. I fear very soon the government will begin nationalizing AI resources and forcing AI researchers to direct their efforts towards weapons systems. Similar to what happened in physics. "We have to be first to have autonomous robot armies" basically.

buellerbueller 7mo ago
Look who is in power (both of the US Govt and of Big Tech). Complete sociopaths.
kraussvonespy 7mo ago
Yep, they're playing the always popular "bomber gap" card.

mayhemducks 7mo ago

I'm really not understanding this. Doesn't the typical path for advanced technology making it into the hands of civilians start with military applications and end with it being modified for civilian use? If the Pentagon wants Anthropic's technology because it has desirable characteristics, can it not just train its own AI models? Why can't the Pentagon build data centers full of GPUs and hire some smart people like the commercial AI providers did? Why in this case, has the usual path for technology been flipped? Starting out as commercial tech for civilians, and then being re-purposed for military use feels unusual to me. Maybe Hegseth's "War department" has a recruiting problem.

iepathos 7mo ago
The old path of 'military invents it, civilians eventually get it' (like the Space Race or early ARPANET) hasn't been true for decades. Today, almost all major technological leaps like the modern internet, search engines, smartphones, commercial drones, etc. start in the commercial consumer sector first. The global consumer market dwarfs the defense market, which means the private sector has vastly more capital for R&D. Government payscale caps out ~$190k-$200k/year for specialized roles without some congressional workaround. The top AI researchers at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google etc. make ~$1m-$5m+/year for total compensation. The government couldn't afford to hire the right talent and the right talent likely would refuse based on moral, ethical, and rational principles with the current government.

csours 7mo ago

this pairs nicely with the finding of the supreme court: Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. There is no immunity for unofficial acts. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf

hungryhobbit 7mo ago
Or that's completely unrelated? Look, you can't have a (working, democratic) government where one party can send the other to jail as soon as they get into power. If presidents could go to jail for doing their job, their opposing party would absolutely try to send them there. This would then ultimately handicap the president: anything they do that the opposition can find a legal justification against could land them in jail, so they won't do anything that comes close to that. We do not want our chief executive making key decisions for the country based on fear of political retribution! The Supreme Court has failed, miserably and repeatedly lately, and some of their decisions run directly counter to the law (often they even contradict past decisions!) But deciding the president won't face political retribution for trying to do his job was not a mistake.
- pksebben 7mo ago
  Hard disagree. The metric ought to be whether they'll make it out of the court case clean or not - just having the ability to check power in a meaningful fashion when it goes off the rails is something you're only afraid of if you're a war criminal or other flavor of Massive Piece Of Shit. The reason the rules are the way they are is pretty obvious; we haven't had a not war criminal in office possibly ever, definitely not in my lifetime. It's time we faced the facts - we're the baddies.
- padjo 7mo ago
  This is a really silly take. The whole reason for separation of powers is so that the executive can be bound by laws created by the legislative as adjudicated by the judiciary. Saying that the people in the executive are above the law undermines this completely.

xiphias2 7mo ago

,,Needless to say, I support Anthropic here. I’m a sensible moderate on the killbot issue (we’ll probably get them eventually, and I doubt they’ll make things much worse compared to AI “only” having unfettered access to every Internet-enabled computer in the world). But AI-enabled mass surveillance of US citizens seems like the sort of thing we should at least have a chance to think over, rather than demanding it from the get-go.'' Why would killbots be sensible moderate with the number of hallucinations LLMs have right now? They just need to have one rm -rf bug somewhere to so something disasterous, and at least Antrhopic's CEO understands the limitations of the software.

propagandist 7mo ago
If the killbots are ok for the periphery, surveillance will surely be arriving for the metropole's inhabitants.

kittikitti 7mo ago

This is going to be a controversial take but I don't agree with Anthropic on this one. My gut instinct says that the Pentagon should back down, but my gut is wrong because of political bias. I can't claim to be serious about AI governance if Anthropic is able to sidestep the interests of the Pentagon, whoever might be in charge. Anthropic is not stronger than the US government, and it would set a dangerous precedent if they don't comply. At the end of the rabbit hole, it's all about enforcement, regardless of the contract. Who's going to enforce Anthropic's terms and conditions if they betray the Pentagon?

buellerbueller 7mo ago
Our government notably derives its power from the rights we delegate to said government. We have not given our government the right to just tear up contracts willy-nilly.
wan23 7mo ago
In America, the military isn't supposed to be in charge. They fought a revolution about it.
anon84873628 7mo ago
It's not about following whoever is in charge, it's about making the moral choice.
hungryhobbit 7mo ago
Wait, so you believe everyone in America is a slave to the US government? We had very different civics classes!

ks2048 7mo ago

Big Tech: you can just do things. Corrupt, evil Government: OK.

ChrisArchitect 7mo ago

Previously: 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

godelski 7mo ago

There's a lot of talk about "Future Claude", even Karpathy has mentioned something similar. But does anyone stop to think about how utterly dystopian this is? We are creating a worse version of the Panopticon than was originally designed. A Panopticon that could have entirely devastating consequences. Not only is "the guard" able to see what any given "prisoner" is doing at any time, but they can look into the past. The self-regulation happens because the prisoners could be being watched. It is Orwellian. But this thing we're building? It can look at the prisoners' actions before it was even completed. I think people don't think about this enough. Culture changes and in that time what is considered morally justifiable or even reasonable changes. Sometimes it is easy to judge people in the past by our current standards but other times it is not. Other times there is context needed, which is lost not only by time but in what is never recorded. How do prisoners self-regulate to future values that they do not know they are supposed to align to? This creates a terrible machine where whoever controls it will likely have the power to prosecute anyone arbitrarily. Get the morals to change just slightly or just take things out of context and you have the public demanding prosecution. I think people think this seems far fetched but I'm willing to bet every single person on HN has fallen for some disinformation campaign. Be it the "carrots help you see in the dark", peoples misunderstanding between paper/plastic/canvas tote bags, a wide variety of topics related to environmentalism, and on and on. Even if you believe you have never fallen for such a disinformation (or malinformation) campaign, you'll have to concede that it is common for others to. That's all that is needed for someone in power to execute on this Panopticon, and it is a strategy people with power have been refining for thousands of years. I really do support Anthropic pushing back here, but the discussions about "Future Claude" really are unsettling. It is like we are treating this as an inevitability. As if we have no choice in the matter. If that is true, then we are the mindless automata and then what does the military need killer-bots for? The would already have them. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

freejazz 7mo ago
Hard to imagine the difference between a dystopian future is whether or not Claude does this one thing as opposed to all the other things it does (completely eviscerates the arts and culture).

mrandish 7mo ago

Obviously, domestic surveillance of U.S. citizens is bad but before even getting to that, the thing that doesn't make sense is: it's illegal for the DoD to do that (unless the citizens are military or DoD employees). And, does anyone seriously think developing autonomous kill-bots without a human in the loop in the next 3 years is something the DoD should be unilaterally doing now without congressional review? Personally, I think autonomous kill bots with a human in the loop, with congressional review, and even 10 years from now are categorically a terrible idea. However, I can imagine some reasonable people perhaps quibbling over saying never by citing things like "sufficient safeguards", "congressional oversight" and at a future time where AIs don't hallucinate constantly. But none of that is in contention here. The DoD is publicly proclaiming their need to do things right now which are either A. illegal, or B. no serious person thinks is sane.

NewJazz 7mo ago
Personally, I think autonomous kill bots with a human in the loop, with congressional review, and even 10 years from now are categorically a terrible idea. Pretty sure these exist today...
- bigyabai 7mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIM-104_Patriot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIM-104_Patriot Patriot was one of the first tactical systems in the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to employ lethal autonomy in combat.
  - mrandish 7mo ago
    I was making a distinction between AI-based autonomy which is less deterministic and currently subject to unpredictable hallucinations vs 'automatic' based on if/then heuristics and thresholds which can range from as simple as a Claymore mine with a proximity trigger to the MIM-104 you linked. I'm not an expert but my understanding is the MIM-104 is more akin to complex automatic systems like a modern airliner auto-pilot and both are materially different than transformer-based LLMs.

mrandish 7mo ago

My strong initial reaction to even the idea of "fully autonomous AI killbots" made me miss a subtle distinction about what the real danger is. We already have a variety of non-AI killbots. Conceptually, any area denial weapon like a proximity triggered Claymore mine is a non-AI "killbot". And just tying one or more sensors to trigger a gun or explosive already works today without AI. . So what's gained by adding full AI? Such non-AI automatic triggering and targeting can already be constrained by location, range, time frame, remote-control, etc using fairly sophisticated non-AI heuristics. If non-AI devices can already <always pull trigger if X, Y and Z conditions = TRUE>, this is really about not pulling the trigger based on more complex judgements. That really only enables leaving such systems armed and active in far larger, less constrained contexts where 'friend or foe' judgements exceed basic true/false sensor conditions. That the military feels such urgent need for that capability is much more worrying to me.

black_13 7mo ago

[dead]

dclowd9901 7mo ago

> I’m a sensible moderate on the killbot issue (we’ll probably get them eventually, and I doubt they’ll make things much worse compared to AI “only” having unfettered access to every Internet-enabled computer in the world) Crikey, this isn't sensible, this is completely misanthropic and nihilistic. How can anyone be ok with a machine unilaterally deciding (outside of the courts or any other check mechanism) to murder someone? I also take issue with the author's postulation that the Defense Production act could be used here. It's one thing to make sheet metal companies build plane parts, but requiring companies to be put themselves "in the loop" so to speak with regards to actual military strategy or defense puts those companies and their employees at unwilling and extraordinary risk. It's basically enlistment. Plus, it can only be used in extraordinary circumstances. There's actually another possibility here: Anthropic really doesn't care about being in the loop, and are protesting as theater, but behind the scenes, hammering out a deal with the Pentagon, and they'll help under classified status, and none of us will be the wiser.