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Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War

• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• techblueberry 8mo ago
  [flagged]
• keeeba 8mo ago
  Big respect Total humiliation for Hegseth, sure there will be a backlash
  • techblueberry 8mo ago
    I thought it was interesting he threw in the bit about the supply chain risk and Defense Production Act being inherently contradictory. Most of the letter felt objective and cooperative, but that bit jumped off the page as more forceful rejection of Hegseth's attempt to bully them. Couldn't have been accidental.
  • calgoo 8mo ago
    I see it as the opposite, its a lousy excuse of a message trying to get people not to think that they are giving in. Instead they list the horrible uses that they are already helping the government with. Dont worry, we only help murder people in other countries not the US. They also keep calling it the "Department of War" which means that this message is not for "us", its them begging publicly to Hegseth.
    • adi_kurian 8mo ago
      What would the ideal response have been, in your view?
      • calgoo 8mo ago
        Well, they should not have made a contract in the first place with a government that we all knew was going to be this bad. They should be doing everything in their power to cancel all government contracts at this point.
    • jpcompartir 8mo ago
      "Regardless, these threats do not change our position: we cannot in good conscience accede to their request."
      • calgoo 8mo ago
        Yes, that is great, for people from the US. For people in Europe and other locations, this just proves that they dont really care as the tool is already being used against us. It quite clear to me that anyone outside the US should immediately cancel all contracts with these corporations, as well as work their hardest at blocking their bots online.
        • jpcompartir 8mo ago
          As a non-US citizen, I'm quite glad in the knowledge that Claude won't be used to kill other non-US citizens with autonomous weapons
• alangibson 8mo ago
  It's not named the Department of War because Congress didn't rename it. Other than that, good on ya.
  • hirako2000 8mo ago
    But it sets the tone.
    • henrikschroder 8mo ago
      [flagged]
      • junofan 8mo ago
        Dude we had an election and this is what we’re doing. Maybe that’s not how you do things in the Kingdom of Sweden. Here it’s e pluribus unum.
        • hirako2000 8mo ago
          There is a good share of collusion in Europe too, let's keep all continents open to critics. Elections doesn't imply unlawful dictates and corruption.
  • krapp 8mo ago
    It is called the Department of War because we live under fascism and Congress no longer matters. All that matters is that everyone calls it the Department of War, and regards it as such, which everyone does.
    • dumpsterdiver 8mo ago
      > All that matters is that everyone calls it the Department of War, and regards it as such, which everyone does. What you just described is consensus, and framing it as fascism damages the credibility of your stance. There are better arguments to make, which don’t require framing a label update as oppression.
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• impulser_ 8mo ago
  The worst part of this is if they do remove Claude, and probably GPT, and Gemini soon after because of outcry we are going to be left with our military using fucking Grok as their model, a model that not even on par with open source Chinese models.
  • alangibson 8mo ago
    Yea but every warfighter will get a waifu
  • popalchemist 8mo ago
    It's better than actively aiding them. Make them struggle at every turn.
    • impulser_ 8mo ago
      Are you Chinese? If not, I think you should prefer the people defending you to have the best tools to do so.
      • GolfPopper 8mo ago
        If the American military was focused on defending the United States, it would be a very different beast. The 21st Century American military is a tool for transferring wealth from the public to influential parties, and for inflicting destruction on non-peer nations who pose obstacles to influential parties interests. Defending the United States against various often-invoked hobgoblins is at best a very distant concern, closer to pure lip service than reality.
      • georgemcbay 8mo ago
        I'm a natural-born American (many generations back) and firmly believe that if we ever get into a hot war with China, it will be because of American provocation, not Chinese.
      • mikeyouse 8mo ago
        This of course raises the question on whether as an American I have more to fear from the Chinese government or the US one.. given everything happening in the Executive Branch here, that’s a disappointingly hard question to answer.
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• gizmodo59 8mo ago
  They are playing a good PR game for sure. Their recent track record doesn’t show if they can be trusted. Few millions is nothing for their current revenue and saying they sacrificed is a big stretch here.
  • IG_Semmelweiss 8mo ago
    Yes, but also remember where they came from. They don't have any brand poison, unlike nearly everyone else competing with them. Some serious negative equity in tha group, be it GOOG, Grok , META, OpenAI, M$FT, deepseek, etc. Claude was just being the little bot that could, and until now, flying under the radar
  • reasonableklout 8mo ago
    It's much more than a few million? Being declared a supply chain risk means that no company that wants to do business with the government can buy Anthropic. And no company that wants to do business with those businesses can buy Anthropic either. This rules out pretty much all American corporations as customers?
• danbrooks 8mo ago
  Props to Dario and Anthropic for taking a moral stand. A rarity in tech these days.
  • bogzz 8mo ago
    This is not how the word "moral" should be used in a sentence that also has the name Dario Amodei in it.
    • plaidthunder 8mo ago
      Words are cheap. Actions aren't. Dario Amodei is putting his company on the line for what he believes in. That's courage, character and... yes, morality.
      • bogzz 8mo ago
        I am convinced that Amodei's "morality" is purely performative, and cynically employed as a marketing tactic. Time will tell, but most people will forget his lies.
        • jstanley 8mo ago
          How should he have acted instead?
          • bogzz 8mo ago
            We don't know how the military intended to use Claude, and neither do we know nor does the military know whether Claude without RLHF-imposed safety would have been more useful to them. Ergo, this is a very convenient PR opportunity. The public assumes the worst, and this is egged on by Anthropic with the implication that CLAUDE is being used in autonomous weapons, which I find almost amusing. He can now say goodbye to $200 million, and make up for it in positive publicity. Also, people will leave thinking that Claude is the best model, AND Anthropic are the heroes that staved off superintelligent killer robots for a while. Even setting this aside, Dario is the silly guy who's "not sure whether Claude is sentient or not", who keeps using the UBI narrative to promote his product with the silent implication that LLMs actually ARE a path to AGI... Look, if you believe that, then that is where we differ, and I suppose that then the notion that Amodei is a moral man is comprehensible. Oh, also the stealing. All the stealing. But he is not alone there by any means. edit: to actually answer your question, this act in itself is not what prompted me to say that he is an immoral man. Your comment did.
• Metacelsus 8mo ago
  I'm glad to see Dario and Anthropic showing some spine! A lot of other people would have caved.
• dylan604 8mo ago
  "I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries." That opening line is one hell of a set up. The current administration is doing everything it can to become autocratic thereby setting themselves up to be adversarial to Anthropic, which is pretty much the point of the rest of the blog. I guess I'm just surprised to have such a succinct opening instead just slop.
• flumpcakes 8mo ago
  This is such a depressing read. What is becoming of the USA? Let's hope sanity prevails and the next election cycle can bring in some competent non-grievance based leadership.
  • 1024core 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    • hungryhobbit 8mo ago
      That seems to be a denial of reality. Democrats are already winning races all over the country, in places that (traditionally) have been Republican strongholds. But don't let me stop you from believing in a worldview that contradicts reality ... lost of Republicans (and some Democrats) do it too.
      • 1024core 8mo ago
        Local county races and dog catcher races do not matter. What matters is who occupies 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. That is the only race that counts.
        • vjvjvjvjghv 8mo ago
          House and Senate are probably more important than the president.
        • dabockster 8mo ago
          False. Local races directly determine the day-to-day laws and rules you live under way more than a POTUS could effectively decree. I don't know about you, but I sure enjoy having reliable electrical, water, and sewer systems.
          • esafak 8mo ago
            They have that in Saudi Arabia too but I would not want to live there. Set higher standards.
• michaellee8 8mo ago
  Probably not a good idea to let Claude vibe-selecting targets, it still sometime hallucinates
  • jdthedisciple 8mo ago
    Just visibly wave the US flag and you'll be fine, don't worry.
  • knfkgklglwjg 8mo ago
    Soon it will select targets in commie countries though, perhaps it already does. Who selected to bomb Chavez mausoleum btw?
• _cenw 8mo ago
  As a "foreign national", what's the deal with making the distinction between domestic mass surveillance and foreign mass surveillance? Are there no democracies aside from the US? Don't we know since Snowden that if the US wants to do domestic surveillance they'll just ask GCHQ to share their "foreign" surveillance capabilities?
  • ApolloFortyNine 8mo ago
    Are all democracies allies to you?
    • gmueckl 8mo ago
      That still doesn't justify mass surveillance.
    • _cenw 8mo ago
      Never said that. Didn't even imply it.
  • ra 8mo ago
    100% - this is the shortsightedness and demonstrates hypocrisy. Countries routinely use other countries intelligence gathering apparatus to get around domestic surveillance laws.
  • sheikhnbake 8mo ago
    Exactly. FVEYs been doing reciprocal surveillance on each other for decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes#Domestic_espionage_sharing_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes#Domestic_espionage_s...
  • dointheatl 8mo ago
    > what's the deal with making the distinction between domestic mass surveillance and foreign mass surveillance? Are there no democracies aside from the US? I think it's just saying that spying on another country's citizens isn't fundamentally undemocratic (even if that other country happens to be a democracy) because they're not your citizens and therefore you don't govern them. Spying on your own citizens opens all sorts of nefarious avenues that spying on another country's citizens does not.
• ra 8mo ago
  > "mass domestic surveillance" - mass surveillance of non-domestic civilians is OK?
  • nubg 8mo ago
    A favourable take would be he meant "mass surveillance of non-democratic adversarial countries". I agree it's not phrased this way though.
• 10297-1287 8mo ago
  They want to be nationalized, which is the most profitable exit they'll ever get.
• mvkel 8mo ago
  Good optics, but ultimately fruitless. If preventing mass surveillance or fully autonomous weaponry is a -policy- choice and not a technical impossibility, this just opens the door for the department of war to exploit backdoors, and anthropic (or any ai company) can in good conscience say "Our systems were unknowingly used for mass surveillance," allowing them to save face. The only solution is to make it technically -impossible- to apply AI in these ways, much like Apple has done. They can't be forced to compel with any government, because they don't have the keys.
  • madrox 8mo ago
    I think it is a reasonable moral stance to acknowledge such things are possible, yet not wanting to be a part of it. Regarding making it technically impossible to do...I think that is what Anthropic means when they say they want to develop guardrails.
    • mvkel 8mo ago
      Are the guardrails not part of their core? Isn't that the whole premise of their existence?
      • madrox 8mo ago
        If you read the statement, they explicitly state these guardrails don't exist today, and they want to develop them. Though I have a feeling we're talking about different things. In Claude Code terms, it might want to rm -rf my codebase. You sound like you might want it to never run rm -rf. Anthropic probably wants to catch dangerous commands and send them to humans to approve, like it does today.
        • mvkel 8mo ago
          That's my point. They formed anthropic under the sole mandate of "guardrails first," now seemingly don't have them at all. So they're just another ai company with different marketing, not the purely altruistic outfit they want everyone to believe
• ApolloFortyNine 8mo ago
  Idk if the reporting was just biased before, but from what I saw is that this time last week, it was thought you couldn't use Anthropic to bring about harm, and now they're making it clear that they just don't want it used domestically and not fully autonomously. Like maybe it always was just this, but I feel every article I read, regardless of the spin angle, implied do no harm was pretty much one of the rules.
  • Tenobrus 8mo ago
    those two stipulations were always their only ones, and they were included explicitly in their original contract with the DoW.
  • levocardia 8mo ago
    You, using normal Claude under the consumer ToS, cannot use it to make weapons, kill people, spy on adversaries, etc. The Pentagon, using War Claude, under their currently-existing contract, can use it to make weapons and spy on (foreign) adversaries, but not to (autonomously) kill people. I don't love this but I am even less excited about the CCP having WarKimi while we have no military AI.
    • michaelsshaw 8mo ago
      Why be so worried about when the US is clearly the belligerent state that strikes others with impunity while China does no such thing?
• pousada 8mo ago
  Department of War is just such a fucking joke title - when has the US stooped so low, I used to believe in you guys as the force of good on this planet smh
  • darvid 8mo ago
    I'm 33 years old, would you mind telling me which year you thought this was, force of good stuff? might be before my time genuinely curious, I got nothing
    • phtrivier 8mo ago
      The USA were pretty clearly on the "better side" of conflicts in 1941-1945, during the Cold War (at least as far as Europe and the Marshall plan was concerned). In Koweït and central Europe during the 90s. You may even argue for Afghanistan post 9-11 (although the state building was botched.) in the 2000s. ISIS is a footnote in history because of US intervention (from Trump first term, of all things.) And Ukraine would not be against getting the support it had in 2022 back under Trump. Does not mean that very bad things were not happening at the same time. But it's definitely easier to find some "supportable" interventions from the US than, say, Russia or China.
    • mylifeandtimes 8mo ago
      it was before your time. In WWII, we saved the world from what is now seen as some really evil stuff. Not alone of course, Europe and Russia made huge sacrifices and that's where much of the war was fought. But US arms and blood were the decisive factor, Germany was winning, Japan was winning. After WWII, the US decided to rebuild the world. We turned our enemies (Germany, Japan) into our close allies. And the people who did it were really and seriously morally committed to doing what they thought was right. It was about building a country, working together. Not the insane politics of today. Look, it wasn't all rose-tinted glasses. Bad stuff happened, and McCarthy was worse that what we currently have. And the civil rights movement and all of that. And the stupid wars, Korea, Vietnam, all the smaller police actions. Bad shit was done. But on balance, the US was seen as the force of good, and the guaranteeor of world peace and the prosperity that allows.
• jibal 8mo ago
  It's the Department of Defense, not the Department of War ... only Congress has the legal authority to change the name, and they haven't.
  • knfkgklglwjg 8mo ago
    Same with Gulf of America.
• mvkel 8mo ago
  "as an ai safety company, we only believe in -partially- autonomous weaponry" Ads are coming.
  • ddxv 8mo ago
    I'll be glad if they could open their platform enough so that it could run on ads and not 200 dollar subscriptions
    • mvkel 8mo ago
      for sure. If they weren't so self-righteous about not serving ads, it'd be a great revenue stream for them. It'd also align with Dario's seeming obsession with profitability
• alach11 8mo ago
  A significant part of Anthropic's cachet as an employer is the ethical stance they profess to take. This is no doubt a tough spot to be in, but it's hard to see Dario making any other decision here. What I don't understand is why Hegseth pushed the issue to an ultimatum like this. They say they're not trying to use Claude for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weapons. If so, what does the Department of War have to gain from this fight?
  • easton 8mo ago
    It’s not unusual for legal departments to take offense to these sorts of things, because now everyone using Claude within the DoD has to do some kind of audit to figure out if they’re building something that could be construed as surveillance or autonomous weapons (or, what controls are in place to prevent your gun from firing when Claude says, etc). A lot of paperwork. My guess is they just don’t want to bother. I wonder why they specifically need Claude when their other vendors are willing to sign their terms, unless it specifically needs to run in AWS or something for their “classified networks” requirement.
    • mwigdahl 8mo ago
      It's that, as I understand it. Anthropic is the only vendor certified to run its models on DoD/DoW classified networks.
  • SpicyLemonZest 8mo ago
    He pushed the issue to an ultimatum because he is an unqualified drunk, and thinks that it's against the law for anyone to try and stop the US military from doing something they want to do. This isn't an isolated issue; he tried to get multiple US Senators prosecuted for making a PSA that servicemembers shouldn't follow illegal orders.
  • cmrdporcupine 8mo ago
    Same reason they cut funding for universities that had DEI mandates, etc. and made a big spectacle of doing it despite it often being very little money etc. etc. It's an ideological war, they're desperate to win it, and they're aiming to put a segment of US civil society into submission, and setting an example for everyone else. He smelled weakness, and like any schoolyard bully personality, he couldn't help but turn it into a display of power.
• JohnnyLarue 8mo ago
  [dead]
• torben-friis 8mo ago
  As someone who is potentially their client and not domestic, really reassuring that they have no concerns with mass spying peaceful citizens of my particular corner of the world.
  • mwigdahl 8mo ago
    Take your pick from the many other choices offered by companies that don't care about mass spying on _anyone_.
    • pamcake 8mo ago
      Or don't.
    • Quarrelsome 8mo ago
      I thought we were the allies and looked down on powerful secret police. Like the Nazis or the Soviets. Did we lose those wars?
      • FartyMcFarter 8mo ago
        The US is no longer a reliable ally to Europe. Look at the threats against Greenland. I hope the next few elections change this, but right now that's how things are.
    • pbiggar 8mo ago
      Have a look at https://thaura.ai https://thaura.ai.
  • zug_zug 8mo ago
    Is there a different AI company that IS taking that stance? Because as far as I know, Anthropic is taking the most moral stance of any AI company.
    • ryukoposting 8mo ago
      All the Chinese companies publishing open models that I can run on my own steel?
• nkoren 8mo ago
  This makes me a very happy Claude Max subscriber. Finally, someone of consequence not kissing the ring. I hope this gives others courage to do the same.
  • bicx 8mo ago
    They already kissed the ring, just not the asshole. They have a little dignity left.
    • jimmydoe 8mo ago
      Better than the rest. here's $200, Dario!
      • bigyabai 8mo ago
        This is how we bought Tim Cook the gold trophy. Today's fundraising buys tomorrow's tithe.
  • RyanShook 8mo ago
    The whole article reads as virtue signaling to me. Anthropic already has large defense contracts. Their models are already being used by the military. There's really no statement here.
    • fragmede 8mo ago
      Isn't it nice to have virtues to signal though? In saying that, you're saying you don't have any worth signaling over.
      • flufluflufluffy 8mo ago
        Not when your actions don’t align with your professed virtues.
    • TOMDM 8mo ago
      A company being asked to violate their virtues refuses, and then communicates that to reestablish their commitment to said virtues? Tell me more about what they should do if a virtue signal in such a situation is a nothing statement.
• qaid 8mo ago
  I was reading halfway thru and one line struck a nerve with me: > But today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons. So not today, but the door is open for this after AI systems have gathered enough "training data"? Then I re-read the previous paragraph and realized it's specifically only criticizing > AI-driven domestic mass surveillance And neither denounces partially autonomous mass surveillance nor closes the door on AI-driven foreign mass surveillance A real shame. I thought "Anthropic" was about being concerned about humans, and not "My people" vs. "Your people." But I suppose I should have expected all of this from a public statement about discussions with the Department of War
  • Aeolun 8mo ago
    Is it seriously called the department of war now? Did they change that from DoD?
    • Sebguer 8mo ago
      illegally, but yes
    • lkbm 8mo ago
      The Executive branch has de facto renamed it. Legally, the name is still Department of Defense, as that's set by Congress. Think of it as a marketing term, I guess.
  • nubg 8mo ago
    I think it's phrased just fine. It's not up to Dario to try to make absolute statements about the future.
    • trvz 8mo ago
      He’s one of the most influential people when it comes to what future we’ll have. Yes, it’s up to him.
      • ternwer 8mo ago
• OutOfHere 8mo ago
  The Pentagon should be using open models, not closed ones by OpenAI/Anthropic/xAI. The entire discussion of what Anthropic wants is therefore moot.
  • knfkgklglwjg 8mo ago
    The best open models are from china though.
    • OutOfHere 8mo ago
      It's a good reason to fund open model development domestically.
• altpaddle 8mo ago
  Props to Dario and Anthropic for holding firm on these two points that I feel like should be a no-brainer
• lvl155 8mo ago
  At this point, surveillance state is coming whether Dario does this or not. You can do all that with open source models. It’s sad that we don’t have the right people in charge in govt to address this alarming issue.
• delaminator 8mo ago
  "so we'll do it and feel guilty about it"
  • hsuduebc2 8mo ago
    We are the victims bro
  • bawis 8mo ago
    That has been the war politics of the western in the last century or so, nothing new.
• willmorrison 8mo ago
  They essentially said "we're not fans of mass surveilance of US citizens and we won't use CURRENT models to kill people autonomously" and people are saying they're taking a stand and doing the right thing? What??? I guess they're evil. Tragic.
  • fluidcruft 8mo ago
    It's not inconceivable that AI could become better than humans at targeting things. For example if it can reliably identify enemy warcraft or drones faster than people can react. I'm not saying Claude's models are suited for that but humans aren't perfect and in theory AI can be better than humans. It's not currently true and would need to be proved, but it doesn't seem unreasonable. It could well be better than something like deploying mines.
    • shevy-java 8mo ago
      Indeed. The AI will decide who has to die and who may live. Skynet in Terminator was scary. The AI Skynet is even scarier - and sucks, too.
  • micromacrofoot 8mo ago
    We're living in a time where most tech companies are donating millions of dollars to the current leadership in exchange for favors. In that climate this is a more of a stand than what everyone else is doing.
• OrvalWintermute 8mo ago
  [flagged]
• int32_64 8mo ago
  Anthropic wants regulatory capture to advantage itself as it hypes its products capabilities and then acts surprised when the Pentagon takes their grand claims about their products seriously as it threatens government intervention. This is why people should support open models. When the AI bubble collapses these EA cultists will be seen as some of the biggest charlatans of all time.
• someguydave 8mo ago
  [flagged]
• helaoban 8mo ago
  All of these problems are downstream of the Congress having thoroughly abdicated its powers to the executive. The military should be reigned in at the legislative level, by constraining what it can and cannot do under law. Popular action is the only way to make that happen. Energy directed anywhere else is a waste. Private corporations should never be allowed to dictate how the military acts. Such a thought would be unbearable if it weren't laughably impossible. The technology can just be requisitioned, there is nothing a corporation or a private individual can do about that. Or the models could be developed internally, after having requisitioned the data centers. To watch CEOs of private corporations being mythologized for something that a) they should never be able to do and b) are incapable of doing is a testament to how distorted our picture of reality has become.
  • ricardobeat 8mo ago
    > The technology can just be requisitioned During a war with national mobilization, that would make sense. Or in a country like China. This kind of coercion is not an expected part of democratic rule.
    • helaoban 8mo ago
      The question of whether or not the government should be able to use AI for targeting without the involvement of humans is a wartime question, since that is the only time the military should be killing people. Under such a scenario, requisition applies, and so all of this talk is moot. The fact that the military is killing people without a declaration of war is the problem, and that's where energy and effort should be directed. Edit: There's a yet larger question on whether any legal constraints on the military's use of technology even makes sense at all, since any safeguards will be quickly yielded if a real enemy presents itself. As a course of natural law, no society will willingly handicap its means of defense against an external threat. It follows then that the only time these ethical concerns apply is when we are the aggressor, which we almost always are. It's the aggression that we should be limiting, not the technology.
      • anon84873628 8mo ago
• probably_wrong 8mo ago
  I have read the whole thing but I nonetheless want to focus on the second paragraph: > Anthropic has therefore worked proactively to deploy our models to the Department of War This should be a "have you noticed that the caps on our hats have skulls on it?" moment [1]. Even if one argues that the sentence should not be read literally (that is, that it's not literal war we're talking about), the only reason for calling it "Department of War" and "warfighters" instead of "Department of Defense" and "soldiers" is to gain Trump's favor, a man who dodged the draft, called soldiers "losers", and has been threatening to invade an ally for quite some time. There is no such a thing as a half-deal with the devil. If Anthropic wants to make money out of AI misclassifying civilians as military targets (or, as it has happened, by identifying which one residential building should be collapsed on top of a single military target, civilians be damned) good for them, but to argue that this is only okay as long as said civilians are brown is not the moral stance they think it is. Disclaimer: I'm not a US citizen. [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY
  • ricardobeat 8mo ago
    What is their other possible move here, considering the government is threatening to destroy their business entirely?
    • probably_wrong 8mo ago
      One alternative would be to call the government's bluff: if they truly are as indispensable as they claim then they can leverage that advantage into a deal. But at a more general level, I'd say that unethical actions do not suddenly become ethical when one's business is at risk. If Anthropic considers that using their technology for X is unethical and then decide that their money and power is worth more than the lives of the foreigners that will be affected by doing X then good for them, but they shouldn't then make a grandstand about how hard they fought to ensure that only foreigners get their necks under the boots.
    • ninjagoo 8mo ago
      > What is their other possible move here, considering the government is threatening to destroy their business entirely? You must not be American, then. We all know that these corporate favoring contract terms are managed through campaign contributions; savvy? Anthropic must have high school interns as govt liaisons, and not very bright ones
• ramoz 8mo ago
  All completely rationale. Makes the us military here look fairly incompetent… embarrassing as a veteran.
  • deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  • scottyah 8mo ago
    I'm sure it's negotiations over how the enforcement will be done. My thoughts are: 1. Military wants a whole new model training system because the current models are designed to have these safeguards, and Anthropic can't afford that (would slow them down too much, the engineering talent to set up and maintain another pipeline would be a lot of work/time) 2. Military doesn't want to supply Anthropic usage data or personnel access to ensure its (lack of) use in those areas. 3. It's something almost completely unrelated to what's going on in the news.
    • sheeshkebab 8mo ago
      It’s probably something really dumb, and they irked California billionaire with their idiocy.
• stopbulying 8mo ago
  Didn't Cheney's company have the option to bid on contracts, by comparison?
  • stopbulying 8mo ago
    Cheney (Chevron, Halliburton, Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR)) did not have a qualified blind trust (QBT) while Vice President. Cheney's office touched the presentation presented by Gen. Colin Powell which led Congress to believe that there was need to invade Iraq to save US from WMDs. Tours of duty were extended from 3 months to 24 months because "stop loss". Subsequently, the United States paid out trillions for debt-financed war and some $39 billion to Cheney's company KBR. Today you learned that the oil company Cheney worked for (Chevron) was trying to bully Afghanistan into a pipeline deal in 1998 and also in 2001. Cheney donated less than $10 million dollars of his Haliburton/KBR returns; mostly to a heart medicine program in his own name and retained a compensation package.
    • stopbulying 8mo ago
      What does Anthropic need to do to retain control over their for-peace company, though they took money from DoD/DoW?
• protocolture 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  • joemi 8mo ago
    If you're using "seppo" as the Australian pejorative referring to Americans, I'm not sure what makes this uniquely American.
    • exodust 8mo ago
      "Seppo" is rarely used in Australia today, it's an old bottom-of-barrel word most have never heard of. The neutral "Yank" is more common, but even that only pops up sometimes. Guessing their comment attempts to expose hypocrisy of America's keenly supported overseas military activity in conflict with fiercely defended domestic free-speech and liberty principles. Deep down, most allies of America want America to defeat foreign adversaries and keep defending those liberties many of us share. In other words there's no hypocrisy, carry on!
      • protocolture 8mo ago
        >In other words there's no hypocrisy No its a classic hypocrisy. "Freedom of Speech" https://thepienews.com/ex-ambassadors-urge-rubio-to-end-international-student-crackdown/ https://thepienews.com/ex-ambassadors-urge-rubio-to-end-inte... "Bodily Autonomy" https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/how-us-government-restrictions-foreign-aid-abortion-services-backfired https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/how-us-... Honestly, tired already. There's basically no supposed value where the US isn't hypocritical. I could keep going but I am sure you are aware of all of them, and simply don't care. >keep defending those liberties many of us share Literally no american cares about your liberties, unless you mean your liberty to access your resources, which they would like to take from you. That propaganda isnt for you, you should stop willingly consuming it.
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• tabbott 8mo ago
  An organization character really shows through when their values conflict with their self-interest. It's inspiring to see that Anthropic is capable of taking a principled stand, despite having raised a fortune in venture capital. I don't think a lot of companies would have made this choice. I wish them the very best of luck in weathering the consequences of their courage.
  • idiotsecant 8mo ago
    The problem is that this is a decision that costs money. Relying on a system that makes money by doing bad things to do good things out of a sense of morality when a possible outcome is existential risk to the species is a 100% chance of failure on a long enough timeline. We need massive disincentives to bad behavior, but I think that cat is already out of its bag.
    • freakynit 8mo ago
      I appreciate that the HN community values thoughtful, civil discussion, and that's important. But when fundamental civil liberties are at stake, especially in the face of powerful institutions and influence from people of money seeking to expand control under the banner of "security", it's worth remembering that freedom has never simply been granted. It has always required vigilance, and at times, resistance. The rights we rely on were not handed down by default; they were secured through struggle, and they can be eroded the same way. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
    • deleted 8mo ago
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    • _def 8mo ago
      On a long enough timeline literally everything has 100% chance of failure. I'm not trying to be obnoxious, I just wanna say: we only got this one life and we have to choose what to make of it. Too many people pretend things are already laid out based on game theory "success". But that's not what it's about in life at all.
• statuslover9000 8mo ago
  The Sinophobic culture at Anthropic is worrying. Say what you will about authoritarianism, but China’s non-imperialist foreign policy means their economy is less reliant on a military-industrial complex. All they have to do is continue to pump out exponentially more solar panels and the petrodollar will fall, possibly taking our reserve currency status with it. The U.S. seems more likely to start a hot war in the name of “democracy” as it fails to gracefully metabolize the end of its geopolitical dominance, and Dario’s rhetoric pushes us further in that direction.
  • hackyhacky 8mo ago
    > China’s non-imperialist foreign policy Really? Is China non-imperialist regarding Taiwan and Tibet?
    • jmyeet 8mo ago
      Taiwan is a matter of perspective. From the Chinese perspective, there was a civil war and the KMT lost. That's also the official position of the US, the EU and most countries in the world. It's called the One China policy. And China seems happy to maintain the status quo and leave the situation unresolved. Is it really imperialism to say that ultimately there will be reunification? Even if you accept Tibet as imperialist, which is debatable, it was in 1950. You want to compare that to US imperialism, particularly since WW2 [1]? And I say "debatable" here because Tibet had a system that is charitably called "serfdom" where 90% of people couldn't own land but they did have some rights. However, they were the property of their lords and could be gifted or traded, you know, like property. There's another word for that: slavery. It is 100% factually accurate to say that the People's Republica of China is not imperialist. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
  • chipgap98 8mo ago
    In what world does China have a non-imperialist foreign policy?
    • 8mo ago
• jonplackett 8mo ago
  That is frikkin impressive. Well done sir.
• deleted 8mo ago
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• parhamn 8mo ago
  Now, I'm curious. How Bedrock/Azure Claude models work? Do these rules apply to them too?
• deleted 8mo ago
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• sirshmooey 8mo ago
  Party balloons along the southern border beware.
• brooke2k 8mo ago
  The constant reference to "democracy" as the thing that makes us good and them bad is so frustrating to me because we are _barely_ a democracy. We are ruled by a two-party state. Nobody else has any power or any chance at power. How is that really much better than a one-party state? Actually, these two parties are so fundamentally ANTI-democracy that they are currently having a very public battle of "who can gerrymander the most" across multiple states. Our "elections" are barely more useful than the "elections" in one-party states like North Korea and China. We have an entire, completely legal industry based around corporate interests telling politicians what to do (it's called "lobbying"). Our campaign finance laws allow corporations to donate infinite amounts of money to politician's campaigns through SuperPACs. People are given two choices to vote for, and those choices are based on who licks corporation boots the best, and who follows the party line the best. Because we're definitely a Democracy. There are no laws against bribing supreme court justices, and in fact there is compelling evidence that multiple supreme court justices have regularly taken bribes - and nothing is done about this. And yet we're a good, democratic country, right? And other countries are evil and corrupt. The current president is stretching executive power as far as it possibly can go. He has a secret police of thugs abducting people around the country. Many of them - completely innocent people - have been sent to a brutal concentration camp in El Salvador. But I suppose a gay hairdresser with a green card deserves that, right? Because we're a democracy, not like those other evil countries. He's also threatining to invade Greenland, and has already kidnapped the president of Venezuela - but that's ok, because we're Good. Other countries who invade people are Bad though. And now that same president is trying to nationalize elections, clearly to make them even less fair than they already are, and nobody's stopping him. How is that democratic exactly? Sorry for the long rant, but it just majorly pisses me off when I read something like this that constantly refers to the US as a good democracy and other countries as evil autocracies. We are not that much better than them. We suck. It's bad for us to use mass surveillance on their citizens, just like it's bad to use mass surveillance on our citizens. And yet we will do it anyways, just like China will do it anyways, because we are ultimately not that different.
• jjcm 8mo ago
  This is the strongest statement in the post: > They have threatened to remove us from their systems if we maintain these safeguards; they have also threatened to designate us a “supply chain risk”—a label reserved for US adversaries, never before applied to an American company—and to invoke the Defense Production Act to force the safeguards’ removal. These latter two threats are inherently contradictory: one labels us a security risk; the other labels Claude as essential to national security. This contradictory messaging puts to rest any doubt that this is a strong arm by the governemnt to allow any use. I really like Anthropic's approach here, which is to in turn state that they're happy to help the Governemnt move off of Anthropic. It's a messaging ploy for sure, but it puts the ball in the current administration's court.
  • intermerda 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    • grosswait 8mo ago
      [flagged]
      • djeastm 8mo ago
        >It’s already close to losing all meaning. On the contrary, seeing it take hold before our very eyes gives it more meaning than it ever had in the pages of the history books.
        • grosswait 8mo ago
          On the contrary, claiming it’s taking hold and labeling everything fascism doesn’t make it so
      • xpe 8mo ago
        There is a difference between a politician making a contradictory statement and the largest agency in the United States using probably unconstitutional pressure tactics against a business.
• atleastoptimal 8mo ago
  I was concerned originally when I heard that Anthropic, who often professed to being the "good guy" AI company who would always prioritize human welfare, opted to sell priority access to their models to the Pentagon in the first place. The devil's advocate position in their favor I imagine would be that they believe some AI lab would inevitably be the one to serve the military industrial complex, and overall it's better that the one with the most inflexible moral code be the one to do it.
  • dheera 8mo ago
    > opted to sell priority access to their models to the Pentagon The bottom of all of this is that companies need to profit to sustain themselves. If "y'all" (the users) don't buy enough of their products, they will seek new sources of revenue. This applies to any company who has external investors and shareholders, regardless of their day 0 messaging. When push comes to shove and their survival is threatened, any customer is better than no customer. It's very possible that $20 Claude subscriptions isn't delivering on multiple billions in investment. The only companies that can truly hold to their missions are those that (a) don't need to profit to survive, e.g. lifestyle businesses of rich people (b) wholly owned by owners and employees and have no fiduciary duty.
  • Synaesthesia 8mo ago
    AI was always particularly well suited to military use and mass surveillance. It can take huge amounts of raw data and parse it for your, provide useful information from that. And let's face it, companies exist for profit.
    • scottyah 8mo ago
      True, and that has been going on for awhile now. But what does that have to do with Anthropic's genai chatbots with comparatively tiny context windows?
      • Synaesthesia 8mo ago
        I thought Anthropic had sophisticated AI, but I am not an expert.
• atleastoptimal 8mo ago
  I was concerned originally when I heard that Anthropic, who often professed to being the "good guy" AI company who would always prioritize human welfare, opted to sell priority access to their models to the Pentagon in the first place. The devil's advocate position in their favor I imagine would be that they believe some AI lab would inevitably be the one to serve the military industrial complex, and overall it's better that the one with the most inflexible moral code be the one to do it.
• Reagan_Ridley 8mo ago
  I restored my Max sub. I wish they pushed back more, so I went with $100/month only.
• alephnerd 8mo ago
  One piece of context that everyone should keep in mind with the recent Anthropic showdown - Anthropic is trying to land British [0], Indian [1], Japanese [2], and German [3] public sector contracts. Working with the DoD/DoW on offensive usecases would put these contracts at risk, because Anthropic most likely isn't training independent models on a nation-to-nation basis and thus would be shut out of public and even private procurement outside the US because exporting the model for offensive usecases would be export controlled but governments would demand being parity in treatment or retaliate. This is also why countries like China, Japan, France, UAE, KSA, India, etc are training their own sovereign foundation models with government funding and backing, allowing them to use them on their terms because it was their governments that build it or funded it. Imagine if the EU demanded sovereign cloud access from AWS right at the beginning in 2008-09. This is what most governments are now doing with foundation models because most policymakers along with a number of us in the private sector are viewing foundation models from the same lens as hyperscalers. Frankly, I don't see any offramp other than the DPA even just to make an example out of Anthropic for the rest of the industry. [0] - https://www.anthropic.com/news/mou-uk-government https://www.anthropic.com/news/mou-uk-government [1] - https://www.anthropic.com/news/bengaluru-office-partnerships-across-india https://www.anthropic.com/news/bengaluru-office-partnerships... [2] - https://www.anthropic.com/news/opening-our-tokyo-office https://www.anthropic.com/news/opening-our-tokyo-office [3] - https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/anthropic/jobs/5115692008 https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/anthropic/jobs/5115692008
  • arduanika 8mo ago
    I tried several times to read your second paragraph, and failed to parse it. Could you break it into several sentences somehow? It's possible you're making an important point, but I can't tell what you're trying to say.
• alldayhaterdude 8mo ago
  I imagine they'll drop this bare-minimum commitment when it becomes financially expedient.
• maxdo 8mo ago
  Ukraine , Russia , China , actively develop ai systems that kill. Not developing such system by US based company will not change the course of actions.
  • alephnerd 8mo ago
    Yep. That said, it does impact whether Anthropic can sell to the British [0], German [1], Japanese [2], and Indian [3] government. Other governments will demand similar terms to the US. Either Anthropic accedes to their terms and gets export controlled by the US or Anthropic somehow uses public pressure to push back against being turned into an American sovereign model. Realistically, I see no offramp other than the DPA - a similar silent showdown happened in the critical minerals space 6-7 years ago. [0] - https://www.anthropic.com/news/mou-uk-government https://www.anthropic.com/news/mou-uk-government [1] - https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/anthropic/jobs/5115692008 https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/anthropic/jobs/5115692008 [2] - https://www.anthropic.com/news/opening-our-tokyo-office https://www.anthropic.com/news/opening-our-tokyo-office [3] - https://www.anthropic.com/news/bengaluru-office-partnerships-across-india https://www.anthropic.com/news/bengaluru-office-partnerships...
• muglug 8mo ago
  OpenAI and Google could have decided to make the same principled stand, and the government would have likely capitulated.
  • popalchemist 8mo ago
    They both literally removed morality from their bylaws; that time has passed. They're openly corrupt because it pays to be so.
• mahgnous 8mo ago
  [dead]
• anduril22 8mo ago
  Powerful post - good on him for taking a stand, but questionable in light of their recent move away from safeguards for competitive reasons.
• bamboozled 8mo ago
  Move your company out of the USA?
• lebovic 8mo ago
  I used to work at Anthropic, and I wrote a comment on a thread earlier this week about the RSP update [1]. It's enheartening to see that leaders at Anthropic are willing to risk losing their seat at the table to be guided by values. Something I don't think is well understood on HN is how driven by ideals many folks at Anthropic are, even if the company is pragmatic about achieving their goals. I have strong signal that Dario, Jared, and Sam would genuinely burn at the stake before acceding to something that's a) against their values, and b) they think is a net negative in the long term. (Many others, too, they're just well-known.) That doesn't mean that I always agree with their decisions, and it doesn't mean that Anthropic is a perfect company. Many groups that are driven by ideals have still committed horrible acts. But I do think that most people who are making the important decisions at Anthropic are well-intentioned, driven by values, and are genuinely motivated by trying to make the transition to powerful AI to go well. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47145963#47149908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47145963#47149908
  • big-chungus4 8mo ago
    [flagged]
  • yowayb 8mo ago
    I've thought the same about a few of my founders/executives. "You either die the good guy or live long enough to become the bad guy" The "bad guy" actually learns that their former good guy mentality was too simplistic.
    • JohnMakin 8mo ago
      I have hit points in this in my career where making a moral stand would be harmful to me (for minor things, nothing as serious as this). It's a very tempting and incentivized decision to make to choose personal gain over ideal. Idealists usually hold strong until they can convince themselves a greater good is served by breaking their ideals. These types that succumb to that reasoning usually ironically ending up doing the most harm.
    • Fricken 8mo ago
• jiggawatts 8mo ago
  Brigadier General S. L. A. Marshall’s 1947 book Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command stated that only about 10-15% of men would actually take the opportunity to fire directly at exposed enemies. The rest would typically fire in the air to merely scare off the men on the opposing force. I personally think this is one of the most positive of human traits: we’re almost pathologically unwilling to murder others even on a battlefield with our own lives at stake! This compulsion to avoid killing others can be trivially trained out of any AI system to make sure that they take 100% of every potential shot, massacre all available targets, and generally act like Murderbots from some Black Mirror episode. Anyone who participates in any such research is doing work that can only be categorised as the greatest possible evil, tantamount to purposefully designing a T800 Terminator after having watched the movies. If anyone here on HN reading this happens to be working at one of the big AI shops and you’re even tangentially involved in any such military AI project — even just cabling the servers or whatever — I figuratively spit in your eye in disgust. You deserve far, far worse.
  • ninjagoo 8mo ago
    > Brigadier General S. L. A. Marshall’s 1947 book Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command stated that only about 10-15% of men would actually take the opportunity to fire directly at exposed enemies. The rest would typically fire in the air to merely scare off the men on the opposing force. Having been identified back then, this issue has been systematically stamped out in modern militaries through training methods. Cue high levels of PTSD in modern frontline troops after they absorb what they actually did.
    • jiggawatts 8mo ago
      I would love to see a reference for that! AFAIK the rounds shot to kills ratio is still north of ten thousand in most modern conflicts. I’ve heard anecdotally that drone operators in Ukraine have a ratio of about ten drones per kill and rack up multiple kills per day every day. Supposedly the pilots “burn out” due to the psychological impacts.
      • 8mo ago
• newAccount2025 8mo ago
  Impressive and heartening. Bravo.
• anonym29 8mo ago
  Anthropic has already cooperated too much with the US Intelligence Community, but better some restraint than none, and better late than never.
• m101 8mo ago
  I wonder whether what is really behind this is that they can’t make a model without the safeguards because it would require re-training? They get to look good by claiming it’s an ethical stance.
• huslage 8mo ago
  It is not the Department of War. He's towing the line from the get-go. Forget this guy.
• Teodolfo 8mo ago
  If these values really meant anything, then Anthropic should stop working with Palantir entirely given their work with ICE, domestic surveilance, and other objectionable activities.
• oxqbldpxo 8mo ago
  It may sound crazy, but they should just move the company to Europe or Canada, instead of putting up with this.
  • scottyah 8mo ago
    Why? They clearly are very aligned on the objective, just doing some negotiation regarding the means. Giving up just because you don't agree 100% is not very constructive. This might seem bad for conflict-adverse people who usually are involved in low-stakes negotiations, but it's just the start of things for people who are fluent in conflict.
  • mhjkl 8mo ago
    Because as we all know the EU would never try using AI for mass surveillance /s
    • pell 8mo ago
      So far, the EU's track record on privacy is definitely a lot better though. Not saying it'd always stay that way of course.
• geophile 8mo ago
  I think it’s a pretty strong statement. It is unfortunately weakened by going along with the “Department of War” propaganda. I believe that the name is “Department of Defense” until Congress says otherwise, no matter what the Felon in Chief says.
• deleted 8mo ago
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• noupdates 8mo ago
  Why would the US security apparatus outsource the model to a private company? DARPA or whatever should be able to finance a frontier model and do whatever they want.
• deleted 8mo ago
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• sbinnee 8mo ago
  As a non US citizen, this article sounds mildly concerning to me. My country is an ally of US. Good. But I don't know how I would feel when I start seeing Anthropic logos on every weapon we buy from US. Aside my concern, Dario Amodei seems really into politics. I have read a couple of his blog posts and listened to a couple of podcast interviews here and there. Every time I felt like he sounded more like a politician than an entrepreneur. I know Anthropic is particularly more mission-driven than, say OpenAI. And I respect that their constitutional ways of training and serving Claude models. Claude turned out to be a great success. But reading a manifest speaking of wars and their missions, it gives me chills.
  • ainch 8mo ago
    The most chilling thing imo is that Anthropic is the only lab that have said anything about this. Google and OpenAI presumably signed up to all these terms without any protest.
• kumarvvr 8mo ago
  All this is for nought. The power lies with the US Govt. And its corrupt, immoral and unethical, run by power hungry assholes who are not being held accountable, headed by the asshole who does a million illegal things every day. Ultimately, Anthropic will fold. All this is to show to their investors that they tried everything they could.
  • mylifeandtimes 8mo ago
    It is not clear to me that the power here lies with the US Govt. Imagine Anthropic is declared a "supply chain risk" thus cannot be used by all sorts of big industry players. How will the CEOs of those companies feel about the govnt telling them they cannot use what their engineers say is the best model? How many of those CEOs have a direct line to powermakers? How many of those CEOs are already making the phone calls? The "supply chain" threat is a threat to every US company that currenly uses Anthropic. Oh, and that includes Palentir, who is deeply embedding in the govt. Side example: remember the 6 congresspeople who made the video about military orders? They won.
  • techblueberry 8mo ago
    Anthropic probably can’t fold, they might lose an existential number of researchers if they did. This is literally an unstoppable force meets an immovable object situation. Hegseth probably folds. It would be too unpopular for him to take either of the actions he threatened.
    • techblueberry 8mo ago
      I was wrong.
• mkoubaa 8mo ago
  >We will not knowingly provide a product that puts America’s warfighters and civilians at risk. Implying other civilians can be put at risk
• dzonga 8mo ago
  these guys are selling snake oil to the gvt - cz they know they can get cash based on fear. the Chinese are releasing equivalent models for free or super cheap. AI costs / energy costs keep going up for American A.I companies while china benefits from lower costs so yeah you've to spread F.U.D to survive
  • andxor 8mo ago
    The models are hardly equivalent.
• zmmmmm 8mo ago
  I can't help but highlight the problem that is created by the renaming of the Deptartment of Defense to the Department of War: > importance of using AI to defend the United States > Anthropic has therefore worked proactively to deploy our models to the Department of War So you believe in helping to defend the United States, but you gave the models to the Department of War - explicitly, a government arm now named as inclusive of a actions of a pure offensive capability with no defensive element. You don't have to argue that you are not supporting the defense of the US by declining to engage with the Department of War. That should be the end of the discussion here.
  • 8note 8mo ago
    it hasnt actually been renamed though. the name is still the department of defence by law. department of war is a subheading tagline
• 2001zhaozhao 8mo ago
  Congratulations, you just got a new $200 Claude Max plan customer.
• coolca 8mo ago
  Imagine being so cautious with your words, only to have 'Department of War' in your title
• wiltsecarpenter 8mo ago
  Oh dear, what a mess of a statement that is. He wants to use AI "to defeat our autocratic adversaries", just what or who are they exactly? Claude seems to think they are Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. Is Claude really a tool to "defeat" these countries somehow? This statement also seems pretty messy: "Anthropic understands that the Department of War, not private companies, makes military decisions.", well then just how do they think Claude is going to be used there if not to make or help make military decisions? The statement goes on about a "narrow set of cases" of potential harm to "democratic values", ...uh, hmm, isn't the potential harm from a government controlled by rapists (Hegseth) and felons using powerful AI against their perceived enemies actually pretty broad? I think I could come up with a few more problem areas than just the two that were listed there, like life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, etc.
• SamDc73 8mo ago
  Didn't Dario Amodei ask for more government intervention regarding AI?
  • jobs_throwaway 8mo ago
    Not a contradiction with this post
• joshAg 8mo ago
  torment nexus creators are shocked, appalled even, to discover that people desire to use it to torment others at nearby nexus
• DaedalusII 8mo ago
  They made it easy to generate powerpoint presentations, that is the real reason DoW is using them this is a very chauvinistic approach... why not another model replace anthropic here? I sense because gov people like using excel plugin and font has nice feel. a few more week of this and xAI is new gov AI tool
• jwpapi 8mo ago
  Am i the only one who understands the deparments position? Like if another country will have it without safeguards, why would I not want it without safeguards. I can still be the safeguard, but having safeguards enforced by another entity that potentially has to face negative financial consequences seems like a disadvantage, would be weird to accept that as department of war. I understand the risk, but that is the pill.
  • 8note 8mo ago
    they could use a different provider for the kill chain. we must use claude to decide whether to nuke iran, or else our gun manufacturers arent allowed to use to to run spreadsheets is a bit ridiculous.
• tehjoker 8mo ago
  The framing of this is that the United States conducts legitimate operations overseas, but that is extremely far from the truth. It treats China as a foreign adversary, which is nearly purely the framing from the U.S. side as an aggressor. AI should never be used in military contexts. It is an extremely dangerous development. Look at how US ally Israel used non-LLM AI technology "The Gospel" and "Lavender" to justify the murder of huge numbers of civilians in their genocide of Palestinians.
  • 8note 8mo ago
    ukraine is using ai in a military context with some effectiveness. i dont think theres much of a problem with having the drone take over the last couple minutes of blowing up a russian factory
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• mooglevich 8mo ago
  "You are what you won't do for money." is a quote that seems apt here. Anthropic might not be a perfect company (none are, really), but I respect the stance being taken here.
• freakynit 8mo ago
  Welp, I never thought "Person of Interest" show coming to life anytime soon, but, here we are. In case you haven't watched the show, it's time to give it a go. Bare with season 2 though, since things really start to escalate from season 3 onwards. Season 1 is a must though.
  • LeakedCanary 8mo ago
    The Machine really had this all figured out
    • freakynit 8mo ago
      Nice to find another fan of this criminally underrated show. The difference was always the "father".. The Machine was raised with a conscience. Samaritan wasn't.
      • LeakedCanary 8mo ago
        The show is really underrated :D > The difference was always the "father".. The Machine was raised with a conscience. Samaritan wasn't. That's what made the show so ahead of its time. Once capability reaches a certain level, it's no longer about intelligence. It's about values. Feels like we're living through that shift now with all the alignment work around LLMs. And it's only going to matter more as capability scales.
        • freakynit 8mo ago
          Agree 100%.
• zb1plus 8mo ago
  It would be hilarious if the Europeans got everyone visas and gave some kind of tax benefit to Anthropic and poached the entire company.
  • skeptic_ai 8mo ago
    USA would bomb their country before any visa is approved
    • tintor 8mo ago
      lol
  • kvuj 8mo ago
    Considering the money being spent in the US (approaching 1 Trillion per year in capex) for AI vs the EU, it would probably bring Europe close to bankruptcy, lol
    • consumer451 8mo ago
      I might not understand your point, but do you believe that US investors would, or could, not invest in Anthropic if the company was located in the Europe? Lovable, Spotify, DeepMind... there are lots of examples that show otherwise.
• shawmakesmagic 8mo ago
  My man
• jijji 8mo ago
  the government should not be using any private LLM, they should build their own internal systems using publicly available LLM's, which change frequently anyway. I don't see why they would put their trust in a third party like that. This back and forth about "ethics" is a bunch of nonsense, and can be solved simply by going for a custom solution which would probably be orders of magnitude cheaper in the long run. The most expensive part is the GPU's used for inference, which can be produced in silicon [1]. [1] https://taalas.com/products/ https://taalas.com/products/
• mrcwinn 8mo ago
  I am incredibly proud to be a customer, both consumer level and as a business, of Anthropic and have canceled my OpenAI subscription and deleted ChatGPT.
• siliconc0w 8mo ago
  Good to them standing up to this administration. I doubt they actually want to put Claude in the kill-chain but this gives them a nice opportunity to go after 'woke AI' and maybe internal ammunition to go through the switching costs for xAI - given Elon more reason to line republican campaign coffers. I'm guessing this is because Anthropic partners with Google Cloud which has the necessary controls for military workloads while xAI runs in hastily constructed datacenter mounted on trucks or whatever to skirt environmental laws.
• gdiamos 8mo ago
  This is why I like Dario as a CEO - he has a system of ethics that is not jus about who writes the largest check. You may not agree with it, but I appreciate that it exists.
• dakolli 8mo ago
  This is a PR play by Anthropic, likely in coordination with the administration. They don't care, they just need the public to view them as a victim here, and then its business as usual. I prefer they get shutdown, llms are the worst thing to happen to society since the nuclear bomb's invention. People all around me are losing their ability to think, write and plan at an extraordinary pace. Keep frying your brains with the most useless tool alive. Remember, the person that showed their work on their math test in detail is doing 10x better than the guys who only knew how to use the calculator. Now imagine being the guy who thinks you don't need to know the math or how to use a calculator lol.
• adamgoodapp 8mo ago
  It's ok to mass survey foreign entities.
• irenetusuq 8mo ago
  [dead]
• mrcwinn 8mo ago
  Keep in mind: the government is very invested logistically in Anthropic. So no matter what xAI or OpenAI say - if and when they replace that spend - know that they are lying. They would have caved to the DoW’s demands for mass surveillance. Because if there were some kind of concession, it would have been simplest just to work with Anthropic. Delete ChatGPT and Grok.
• myko 8mo ago
  There is no Department of War. This is the dumbest fucking timeline.
  • myko 8mo ago
    To be clear, despite the downvotes, my statement is true. It is the Department of Defense. As someone who spent a good portion of my life working under it, it is offensive to me people are going along with the pretense that these idiots can unilaterally rename the organization.
• karmasimida 8mo ago
  Label them as supply chain risk and move on. Enough of this drama already
  • danavar 8mo ago
    I think they are negotiating until Friday, but I agree. I think this was foolish.
• ozzymuppet 8mo ago
  Wow, I expected them to cave, and they did'nt! I'll be signing up to Claude again, Gemini getting kind of crap recently anyway.
• ethagnawl 8mo ago
  The official name of this organization remains _The United States Department of Defense_.
• theturtle 8mo ago
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• nova22033 8mo ago
  Why does DoD need claude? I thought xAI was "less woke" and far better than claude
• fdefitte 8mo ago
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• exabrial 8mo ago
  Brother in law did some "time with the brass" as he calls it. His take was that the DOD, er DOW would, as an example, never acquire a fighter jet that "wouldn't target and kill a civilian airliner", citing that on 9/11 we literally almost did that. The DOW is acquiring instruments of war, which is probably unconformable for a lot of people to consider. His conclusion was that the limits of use ought to be contractual, not baked into the LLM, which is where the fallout seems to be. He noted that the Pentagon has agreed to terms like that in the past. To me, that seems like reasonable compromise for both parties, but both sides are so far entrenched now we're unlikely to see a compromise.
  • huevosabio 8mo ago
    The pentagon had already agreed to Anthropic's terms and wants to walk back. It can always find some other supplier if it wishes to.
    • exabrial 8mo ago
      I think that's the nuance: * agreeing to the terms - one subject * having to the tool attempt to enforce said terms - another subject
    • labrador 8mo ago
      I'd really like to know why Grok is inadequate?
      • Havoc 8mo ago
        Because grok would shoot down the airliner with glee.
  • doctorpangloss 8mo ago
    > The DOW is acquiring instruments of war that may be, but the bigger picture purpose of the military is, welfare republicans like. in that sense, republicans are in charge, republicans want stuff that isn't "woke" (or whatever), so this behavior is representative of the way it works. it has little to do with acquiring instruments of war, or war at all. its mission keeps growing and growing, it has a huge mission, very little of that mission is combat. this is what their own leadership says (complains about). 999/1,000 people on its payroll are doing duty outside of combat or foreseeable combat.
• isamuel 8mo ago
  Amodei’s use of “warfighters” (a Hegseth-era neologism for “soldiers”) is truly nauseating.
  • WatchDog 8mo ago
    Soldier is an Army specific term. Like Sailor, Airman, Marine, etc. Perhaps the term you are looking for is service member? Warfighter tends to refer to anyone involved in a role that directly supports combat operations, it may or may not be a service member.
• insane_dreamer 8mo ago
  Good to see one AI company not selling out their values in exchange for military contracts. This shouldn't be rare, but it is. Good for them.
• ninjagoo 8mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio Previous case of tangling with the Government. https://youtube.com/watch?v=OfZFJThiVLI https://youtube.com/watch?v=OfZFJThiVLI Jolly Boys - I Fought the Law Overall, this seems like it might be a campaign contribution issue. The DoD/DoW is happy to accept supplier contracts that prevent them from repairing their own equipment during battle (ref. military testimony favoring right-to-repair laws [1] ), so corporate matters like this shouldn't really be coming to a head publicly. [1] https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/icymi-at-hearing-nominee-for-head-of-naval-operations-says-hes-fully-committed-to-right-to-repair-testifies-contractor-restrictions-are-dangerous-and-hurt-military-self-sufficiency https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/icymi-...
• paraschopra 8mo ago
  I’m very happy that Anthropic chose not to cave into US Dept of War’s demands but their statement has an ambiguity. Does this mean they’d be ok to have their models be used for mass surveillance & autonomous weapons against OTHER countries? A clarification would help.
• freakynit 8mo ago
  People do realize there's a non-zero chance that Anthropic could have embedded some kind of hidden "backdoor" trigger in its training process, right? For example, a specific seed phrase that, when placed at the beginning of a prompt, effectively disables or bypasses safety guardrails. If something like that existed, it wouldn't be impossible to uncover: 1. A government agency (DoD/DoW/etc.) could discover the trigger through systematic experimentation and large-scale probing. 2. An Anthropic employee with knowledge of such a mechanism could be pressured or blackmailed into revealing it. 3. Company infrastructure could be compromised, allowing internal documentation or model details to be exfiltrated. Any of these scenarios would give Anthropic plausible deniability... they could "publicly" claim they never removed safeguards (or agreed to DoD/DoW demands), while in practice a select party had a way around them (may be even assisted from within). I'm not saying this "is" happening... but only that in a high-stakes standoff such as this, it's naive to assume technical guardrails are necessarily immutable or that no hidden override mechanisms could exist.
  • jMyles 8mo ago
    ...indeed, it's possible (perhaps inevitable) that at some point, someone will invent/deploy/promote AI killing people. We can't possibly keep that genie in that bottle. But what we can do is achieve consensus that states, and their weapons of mass destruction, and their childish monetary systems, and their eternally broken promises... are not in keeping with the next phase of humanity.
• marshmellman 8mo ago
  Well, now if DoD moves to another AI provider, we’ll know what was compromised.
• IAmGraydon 8mo ago
  They should try Sam Altman. He's just the kind of guy who would bend over for this kind of authoritarian demand.
• ccleve 8mo ago
  It's not clear to me whether Anthropic's limitations are technical or merely contractual. Is Anthropic actually putting the limitations in their prompts, so that the model would refuse to answer a question on how to do certain things? If so, that's a major problem. If the military is using it in some mission critical way, they can't be fighting the model to get something done. No such limitations would ever be acceptable. If the limitations are contractual, then there is some room for negotiation.
  • ninjagoo 8mo ago
    > If the military is using it in some mission critical way, they can't be fighting the model to get something done. No such limitations would ever be acceptable. You'd be surprised at what is considered acceptable. For example, being unable to repair your own equipment in battle is considered acceptable by decision-makers who accepted the restrictions. https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/icymi-at-hearing-nominee-for-head-of-naval-operations-says-hes-fully-committed-to-right-to-repair-testifies-contractor-restrictions-are-dangerous-and-hurt-military-self-sufficiency https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/icymi-...
• 0xbadcafebee 8mo ago
  Principles are the things you would never do for any amount of money. This might be the only principled tech company in the world.
• seydor 8mo ago
  Hegseth is an unintelligent bully who will not accept thiz and does not want to appear weak to the maga base. The consequences will be severe and anthropic will be forced
• deleted 8mo ago
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• QuiEgo 8mo ago
  I'd be amused beyond all reason if we saw this chain of events: - Anthropic says "no" - DoD says "ok you're a supply chain risk" (meaning many companies with gov't contracts can no longer use them) - A bunch of tech companies say "you know what? We think we'd lose more money from falling behind on AI than we'd lose from not having your contracts." Bonus points if its some of the hyperscalers like AWS. Hilarity ensues as they blow up (pun intended) their whole supply chain and rapidly backtrack.
  • stevenpetryk 8mo ago
    Being labeled a supply chain risk means that companies with government contracts cannot use Anthropic products _for those government contracts_, not that they have to cease all usage of Anthropic products. Reporters seem to be reporting on this incorrectly.
    • QuiEgo 8mo ago
      Thank you for the information. My fun little narrative is in shambles :(
      • baq 8mo ago
        Not really, actually. This usually means outright ban because per project is next to impossible to enforce internally.
        • ryukoposting 8mo ago
          This is correct. Maybe the startups living off DARPA/MTEC/etc contracts would continue using Claude, but the LM/NOG/Collins types wouldn't touch Anthropic with a ten foot pole.
• Aeroi 8mo ago
  in hindsight, the smart thing to do would have been to accept the contracts, knowingly enshittify the request, and protect other bad actors like Elon and xAI from ruthlessly compromising our democracies.
• angelgonzales 8mo ago
  Bottom line up front it’s probably better to address the root cause of this situation with the general solution — making government drastically smaller and less pervasive in people’s lives and businesses. I remember not too long ago during the last administration very heavy handed unforgivable and traumatizing rhetoric and executive orders that intruded into the bodily autonomy of millions of Americans and threatened millions of American’s jobs. This happened to me and I personally received threats that my livelihood would be taken away from me which were directly a result of the Executive branch. This isn’t a problem where Congress has ceded powers to the Executive branch, it’s a problem that so much power to legislate and tax is in the hands of the government at all! Every election cycle that results in a transfer of power to the other party inevitably results in handwringing and panic but this wouldn’t be the case if citizens voted their powers back and government wasn’t so consequential.
• techpression 8mo ago
  ”Defense of democracy” is just another version of ”think of the children”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
• noduerme 8mo ago
  This is at best a superficial attempt to show that Anthropic objects to what is already in play. Personally, I'd rather live in a country which didn't use AI to supplant either its intelligence or its war fighting apparatus, which is what is bound to happen once it's in the door. If enemies use AI for theirs, so much the better. Let them deal with the security holes it opens and the brain-drain it precipitates. I'm concerned about AI being abused for the two use cases he highlights, but I'm more concerned that the velocity at which it's being adopted to sift and collate classified information is way ahead of its ability to secure that information (forget about whether it makes good or bad decisions). It's almost inconceivable that the Pentagon would move so quickly to introduce a totally unknown entity with totally unknown security risks into the heart of our national security. That should be the case against rapid adoption made by any peddler of LLMs who claims to be honest, to thwart the idiots in the administration who think they want this technology they can't comprehend inside our most sensitive systems.
• designerdada 8mo ago
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• ffsickempire 8mo ago
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• giwook 8mo ago
  I commend Anthropic leadership for this decision. I simultaneously worry that the current administration will do something nuclear and actually make good on their threat to nationalize the company and/or declare the company a supply chain risk (which contradict each other but hey).
• fnordpiglet 8mo ago
  I find the fact they used the vanity name “Department of War” and “Secretary of War” sad given Congress has not changed the name and the president doesn’t get to decide the naming of statutory departments or secretary level roles. Maybe it’s just an appeasement to the thin skinned people who need powder rooms and are former military journalists working for a draft dodger pretending to be tough guy “warriors,” and trying to glorify the violence for political purposes, but every actual war vet I’ve ever known has never glorified war for the sake of war and they felt very seriously that defense is the reason to do what they had to do. My grandfather was a highly decorated career special forces (ranger, green beret, delta force, four silver stars and five bronze stars, etc) from WWII, Korea, and Vietnam and he was angry when I considered joining the military - he told me he did what he did so I wouldn’t have to and to protect his country and there was no glory to be had in following his path. He would be absolutely horrified at what is going on and I thank god he died before we had these prima Donna politicians strutting around banging their chests and pretending war is something to be proud of. Good on anthropic for standing up for their principles, but boo on gifting them the discourtesy to the law of the land in acknowledging their vanity titles.
• narrator 8mo ago
  I mean you're all going to get killed by fully autonomous China AI war robots in 10 years anyway if you're not pure blood Han Chinese, but hey at least you'll provide something to laugh at for future Chinese Communist party history scholars. They will say, "Look at the stupid Baizuos, our propaganda ops convinced them all to commit collective suicide. Stupid barbarians. They proved they are an inferior race." Not joking, I've heard from sources that hardliners in the CCP think they can exterminate all white people followed later by all non-Han, but just keep on going along disarming yourselves for woke points. This is like unilaterally destroying all your nuclear weapons in 1946 and hoping the Soviets do to.
• gnarlouse 8mo ago
  huge if true. they also took down their security pledge in the same breath, so, you know. if anthropic ends up cutting a deal with the DoD this is obviously bullshit.
• creatonez 8mo ago
  > Our strong preference is to continue to serve the Department and our warfighters—with our two requested safeguards in place. It's absolutely disgusting that they would even consider working with the US government after the Gaza genocide started. These are modern day holocaust tabulation machine companies, and this time randomly they are selecting victims using a highly unpredictable black-box algorithm. The proper recourse here is to impeach the current administration, dissolve the companies that were complicit, and send their leadership to the hague for war crimes trials.
• aichen_tools 8mo ago
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• bambax 8mo ago
  > These latter two threats are inherently contradictory: one labels us a security risk; the other labels Claude as essential to national security. Nicely put. In other words: Department of Morons.
  • newtonsmethod 8mo ago
    Are you reading things before agreeing with them? Or thinking about them? It doesn't seem obvious these things are contradictory at all. That Politico reports so doesn't make it the case. It is clear that the DPA can be invoked for companies posing risks to national security: > 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." Furthermore, it should be quite obvious that companies very important for national security can act in manners causing them to be national security risks, meaning a varied approach is required.
    • bambax 8mo ago
      > Are you reading things before agreeing with them? No, unlike yourself, I'm just a random brainless bot.
    • techblueberry 8mo ago
      That Biden stretched the definition for a questionable purpose doesn't change the original intent.
      • newtonsmethod 8mo ago
        Have you read the DPA? How did you come to your inclusions on its intent? How do you think Biden stretched the definition here? There is nothing in the DPA implying companies it is applied to can't be acting in a hostile manner, or that it can't be applied when security interests of the US are being threatened. Of course they have no reason to state such a distinction repeatedly in law (claiming it doesn't apply to adversarial companies....), but 50 USC 4566 applies clearly when acts are being made against national interest (this pertains to foreign investment, which isn't the nature of the Anthropic rift, but shows clearly the DPA contains laws with intent of preventing adversarial action against the US). Even without knowing the intent of the behaviour, it should be quite clear that companies that are vital to national security are more likely to be supply chain risks. Amodei's direct words were: > These latter two threats are inherently contradictory: one labels us a security risk; the other labels Claude as essential to national security. Being a security risk and essential to national security are not "inherently contradictory".
• contubernio 8mo ago
  "I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries. Anthropic has therefore worked proactively to deploy our models to the Department of War and the intelligence community." The moral incoherence and disconnect evident in these two statements is at the heart of why there is generalized mistrust of large tech companies. The "values" on display are everything but what they pretend to be.
  • keybored 8mo ago
    > > I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries. These blurbs always mainly communicate that they are in line with US foreign policy. And then one can look at the actual actions rather than the rhetoric of US foreign policy to judge whether it is really in line with defending democracies and defeating autocracies.
• moktonar 8mo ago
  Well fucking done. Anthropic has just gained the “has bollocks” status. Also now we know what the govt is really up to with AI. G fucking g
• jatins 8mo ago
  What is OpenAI's stance on these issues? Are they working with DOW currently?
  • toephu2 8mo ago
    "Altman Says OpenAI Is Working on Pentagon Deal Amid Anthropic Standoff" https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openais-sam-altman-calls-for-de-escalation-in-anthropic-showdown-with-hegseth-03ecbac8?mod=hp_lead_pos1 https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openais-sam-altman-calls-for-de-...
• verisimi 8mo ago
  It sounds to me like anthropic are basically 'all in' except for the caveats. Looking at the 2 examples they provide: > We support the use of AI for lawful foreign intelligence and counterintelligence missions. But using these systems for mass domestic surveillance is incompatible with democratic values. Why not do what the US are purported to do, where they spy on the others citizens and then hand over the data? Ie, adopt the legalistic view that "it's not domestic surveillance if the surveillance is done in another country", so just surveil from another data center. > Even fully autonomous weapons (those that take humans out of the loop entirely and automate selecting and engaging targets) may prove critical for our national defense. But today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons. We will not knowingly provide a product that puts America’s warfighters and civilians at risk. Yes, well that doesn't sound like that strong an objection: fully automated defence could be good but the tech isn't good enough yet, in their opinion.
• eisfresser 8mo ago
  > mass __domestic__ surveillance is incompatible with democratic values But mass surveillance of Australians or Danes is alligned with democratic values as long as it's the Americans doing it? I don't think the moral high ground Anthropic is taking here is high enough.
  • mosst 8mo ago
    Most of the people on this site have disturbing beliefs about politics. Shallow and contradictory but strangely aligned.
  • sneak 8mo ago
    There is no popular support whatsoever for reining in foreign intelligence collection or processing. Americans generally don’t care about things that don’t affect them when it comes to policymaking (or the richest country in the world would do something meaningful about the 20k that die every single day from lack of access to fresh water). If it ain’t repeatedly on the news and designed explicitly to scare and agitate then really people DGAF.
  • mocamoca 8mo ago
    Yes most comments makes no sense to me. The statement basically both allows surveillance of non-american people and prevents imaginary LLM weapons (I highly doubt we'll see a LLM fully automating a weapon...)
  • niccl 8mo ago
    But at least they're taking _some_ stance. Yes, it could be higher, but it's better than nothing, and requires courage
• lzbzktO1 8mo ago
  "These latter two threats are inherently contradictory" After the standing up for democracy. This is my favorite part. "Your reasoning is deficient. Dismissed."
• placebo 8mo ago
  Grok's thoughts on the matter: "In an ideal world, I'd want xAI to emulate the maturity Anthropic showed here: affirm willingness to help defend democracies (including via classified/intel/defense tools), sacrifice short-term revenue if needed to block adversarial access, but stand firm on refusing to enable the most civilizationally corrosive misuses when the tech simply isn't ready or the societal cost is too high. Saying "no" to powerful customers—even the DoD—when the ask undermines core principles is hard, but it's the kind of spine that builds long-term trust and credibility." It also acknowledged that this is not what is happening...
  • LightBug1 8mo ago
    Ergo, those running Grok don't ... have that kind of spine.
• chrismsimpson 8mo ago
  The call is coming from inside the house
• with 8mo ago
  the interesting question is why dario published this. these disputes normally stay behind NDAs and closed doors. going public means anthropic decided the reputational upside of being the company that said no outweighs the risk of burning the relationship permanently. that's a calculated move, not really just a principled one.
• DiabloD3 8mo ago
  This seems to be at least partially written by AI: There is no Department of War, it is called the Department of Defense.
  • zzot 8mo ago
    That’s not true anymore. Trump renamed it in September: https://www.war.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/4295826/trump-renames-dod-to-department-of-war/ https://www.war.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/429582...
    • calgoo 8mo ago
      Just like the Gulf of Mexico is still called the Gulf of Mexico, if we just ignore his ramblings and continue calling the department of defense, we undermine his whole point. If we fall for all their crap and just accept it, then we loose in the end. Any resistance to a Fascist government is good resistance. Anything that makes their life's a little shittier is good. Better that they go around having tantrums about how they renamed it but no one is paying attention.
      • nla 8mo ago
        TDS factor 11.
• not_that_d 8mo ago
  What is with the amount of comments talking about other countries in Europe "Doing the same"?
• gerash 8mo ago
  I respect the Anthropic leadership for not being greedy like many others
• GreenJacketBoy 8mo ago
  "fully autonomous weapons" from a private company; "Department of War". Hard to believe I'm not reading science fiction.
  • moffkalast 8mo ago
    Service guarantees citizenship, would you like to know more?
• Bengalilol 8mo ago
  TLDR: « depends on where you live »
• rustyhancock 8mo ago
  Surely this is a powerful signal to divest from Anthropic if you don't live in the US? There's a lot of here's what we support you do to foreigners but no way can you do it in the US? I can never tell how much of this is puffery from Anthropic. I do think they like to overstate their power.
• phgn 8mo ago
  > I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries. Was this written by the state department? How can you think that a “department of war” does anything remotely good? And only object to domestic AI surveillance?
  • michaelsshaw 8mo ago
    The entire article is very American-brained.
    • pell 8mo ago
      The emphasis of "domestic" surveillance is definitely concerning.
• haritha-j 8mo ago
  Domestic mass ruveillance bad, mass urveilance on other nations good. Got it. Much like the military industrial complex, these organisations thrive during times of war, allows them to shirk off any actual morals using the us vs. them mentality.
• KronisLV 8mo ago
  Feels like they’re leaving a lot of money on the table and inviting existential peril by not bending the knee to the current Great Leader. It does feel like what anyone sane should do (especially given the contradictions being pointed out and the fact that the technology isn’t even there yet) but when you metaphorically have Landa at your door asking for milk, I’m not sure it’s smart. I feel like what most corpos would do, would be to just roll along with it.
• czierleyn 8mo ago
  Being from Europe I do not like the remark that he only objects to DOMESTIC mass surveillance.
• 7ero 8mo ago
  Sounds like following the google playbook, don't be evil, until the shareholders tell you to.
• 7ero 8mo ago
  Sound like they're following the google playbook, don't be evil, until the shareholders tell you to.
• maelito 8mo ago
  > to defeat our autocratic adversaries. I'm not sure who's targeted here. The folks that want to invade the EU ?
  • Havoc 8mo ago
    That dual meaning stood out to me too
• MarcLore 8mo ago
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• wosined 8mo ago
  So they work with the military to do anything except: Mass domestic surveillance and Fully autonomous weapons. This means that they are wiling to do mass foreign surveillance, domestic surveillance of individuals, autonomous weapons which are commanded by operators. Got it. Such a great and moral company.
• epolanski 8mo ago
  Not gonna lie, regardless of what Anthropic does, it is quite scary we're heading full steam to mass surveillance and wars fought by semi-autonomous machines.
  • eternauta3k 8mo ago
    Mass surveillance is already here, and they can already use open models to do 80% of what they were planning to do with Claude.
• wohoef 8mo ago
  Anthropic's two demands are: 1. No domestic mass surveillance 2. No autonomous killing I'm wondering if 2. was added simply to justify them not cooperating. It's a lot easier to defend 1. + 2. than just 1. If in the future they do decide to cooperate with the DoW, they could settle on doing only mass surveillance, but no autonomous killings. This would be presented as a victory for both parties since they both partially get what they wanted, even though autonomous killing was never really on the table for either of them. Which is a big if given the current administration.
• worik 8mo ago
  Is it so normal that the USA should be in such a state of constant war, and war readiness that this even makes sense?
• piokoch 8mo ago
  This is comical. "Mass domestic surveillance. We support the use of AI for lawful foreign intelligence and counterintelligence missions. But using these systems for mass domestic surveillance is incompatible with democratic values" Translating to human language: mass surveillance in USA "is incompatible with democratic values" but if we do that against, say, Germany or France this is OK. Ah, and if we use AI for "counterintelligence missions", for instance against <put here an organization/group that current administration does not like> this is also OK, even if this happens in USA.
  • rustyhancock 8mo ago
    Perhaps Anthropic thinks it can provide a local model that classifies surveillance targets as red blooded Americans.
• I_am_tiberius 8mo ago
  I'm still waiting for a proof that they don't use user data (directly or derived) for training.
• GardenLetter27 8mo ago
  Anthropic doesn't want us to have the right to run open weight models on our own computers. They were never the good guys.
  • u1hcw9nx 8mo ago
    What I read is: Anything not open source, open weight, is evil. I disagree. The concept of nuance, putting things in context, is the source of all good in internet discussions.
    • GardenLetter27 8mo ago
      No, but lobbying the government to prohibit open source / open weight models is evil. They literally want to use state violence to control what we can do on our own computers.
      • FabHK 8mo ago
        Anytime there is any law about anything you can say that it's ultimately backed "using state violence". That's just silly. As silly as the notion that there shouldn't be any rules and limits whatsoever about what you can do with your computer.
        • ImPostingOnHN 8mo ago
          > As silly as the notion that there shouldn't be any rules and limits whatsoever about what you can do with your computer. Hard disagree. There shouldn't be any rules or limits whatsoever about what I can do with my computer, and especially ON my computer, as long as the thing I'm doing doesn't break other laws (CFAA, CSAM, etc). This is, after all, Hacker News.
          • FabHK 8mo ago
            Obviously, we are saying the same thing: there are (and should be) laws that limit what you can do on your computer, and within those limits, you can do what you want.
• delaminator 8mo ago
  Hegseth doesn't need autonomous drones, he's got the Treasury.
• JacobiX 8mo ago
  >> We chose to forgo several hundred million dollars in revenue to cut off the use of Claude by firms linked to the Chinese Communist Party You can’t choose to work with OFAC-designated entities.. there are very serious criminal penalties. Therefore, this statement is somewhat misleading in my opinion.
• ThouYS 8mo ago
  this is.. a nothing burger? they don't exclude working for autonomous weapons, nor do they exclude mass surveillance. so what gives?
• u1hcw9nx 8mo ago
  Google, OpenAI Employees Voice Support for Anthropic in Open Letter. We Will Not Be Divided https://notdivided.org/ https://notdivided.org/ ----- The Department of War is threatening to - Invoke the Defense Production Act to force Anthropic to serve their model to the military and "tailor its model to the military's needs" - Label the company a "supply chain risk" All in retaliation for Anthropic sticking to their red lines to not allow their models to be used for domestic mass surveillance and autonomously killing people without human oversight. The Pentagon is negotiating with Google and OpenAI to try to get them to agree to what Anthropic has refused. They're trying to divide each company with fear that the other will give in. That strategy only works if none of us know where the others stand. This letter serves to create shared understanding and solidarity in the face of this pressure from the Department of War. We are the employees of Google and OpenAI, two of the top AI companies in the world. We hope our leaders will put aside their differences and stand together to continue to refuse the Department of War's current demands for permission to use our models for domestic mass surveillance and autonomously killing people without human oversight. Signed,
  • eric-burel 8mo ago
    They love their dictator until it backfires, that's a quite old story.
    • pjc50 8mo ago
      Google employees were generally pretty anti-Trump, it's the senior leadership and the recommendation algorithms that are pro-Trump.
      • u1hcw9nx 8mo ago
        Senior leaders in Google are not pro-Trump. Musk (Tesla, SpaceX), Ellison (Oracle) consistently supported Trump before his win was certain and are tight with Trump. They were megadonors behind his campaign. Bezos (Amazon, Blue Origin) and Zuckerberg (Meta) pivoted towards Trump in 2024 after it looked like he would wind second time. They are opportunistic bastards who try to weasel into the good side of Trump with varying results. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia etc. just bend the knee. They are reluctant but pragmatic and try to protect the company when their competition Amazon, Meta and Oracle are on the inside. Notice that in this final group, CEOs lack autonomy. At Alphabet, Page and Brin retain controlling authority (and they just try to avoid getting involved with Trump). Nvidia lacks a dual-class structure, meaning Jensen Huang (4% votes) can be outvoted on critical matters. Both Apple and Microsoft are "faceless" corporation where the CEOs serve as hired hands.
• w10-1 8mo ago
  We are all assuming Anthropic can elect not to do a deal with the Pentagon, and put conditions on it. But Hegseth and Trump are abusing federal powers at a rapid clip. I'm guessing Anthropic would regret any deal with that administration, and could lose control of their technology. (Stanford Research Institute originally limited their DoD exposure, and gained a lot of customers as a result.)
• andy_ppp 8mo ago
  Fair play, I’ll move to Anthropic then… don’t love the UI but maybe I can code my own up.
• haute_cuisine 8mo ago
  Can someone explain why Dario is making a public statement about this? It's also interesting that they use abstract we / they without putting exact names.
  • moffkalast 8mo ago
    It's free positive PR, why wouldn't he?
• guven0141 8mo ago
  [flagged]
• motbus3 8mo ago
  The fact that someone wants fully autonomous weapons and mass surveillance should be a concern. Every trigger pressed should have its moral consequences for those who push the trigger.
• thevinchi 8mo ago
  Autonomous weapons: agreed, not ready… yet. Mass surveillance: Agreed… but, I do wonder how we would all feel about this topic if we were having the discussion on 9/12/2001. The DoW just needs to wait until the next (manufactured?) crisis occurs, and not let it go to waste. Mark my words: this will be Patriot Act++
• lynx97 8mo ago
  With all this talk about AI and autonomous weapon systems. It seems like one of John Carpenters first movies, and my favourite B-movie, is coming back strong! Maybe I should call ChatGPT "Bomb"... I already use "make it so" for coding agents, so...
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• morgengold 8mo ago
  Hey Anthropic, come to europe. We ll find you a building.
• dev1ycan 8mo ago
  This doesn't read too badly, but I still do not believe that ANY AI company is ethical, at all.
• omnee 8mo ago
  Agree fully with the main points of this statement. Mass domestic surveillance is the hallmark of an authoritarian and undemocratic state. That such a state holds 'votes' regularly does not detract from the chilling effect on public discourse and politics caused by mass surveillance. The guardrail on fully automated weapons makes perfect sense, and hopefully becomes standardised globally.
  • Invictus0 8mo ago
    if the people broadly support and vote for mass democratic surveillance, is it still authoritarian and undemocratic?
    • SOTGO 8mo ago
      Democratic maybe, authoritarian definitely
      • Invictus0 8mo ago
        I disagree that surveillance on its own is authoritarian, it doesn't even come close to meeting the definition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarianism
• sneak 8mo ago
  The only reason you ask for these capabilities is because you want to use these capabilities. That is, the news here is that DoW (formerly DoD) is willing and able and interested in using SOTA AI to enable processing of domestic mass surveillance data and autonomous weapons. Anthropic’s protests aside, you can’t fight city hall, they have a heart attack gun and Anthropic does not. They’ll get what they want. I am not particularly AI alarmist, but these are facts staring us right in the face. We are so fucked.
• egorfine 8mo ago
  > mass surveillance presents serious, novel risks to our fundamental liberties. Doesn't matter, really. The genie is out of the bottle and I'm strongly confident US administration will find a vendor willing to supply models for that particular usage.
• zkmon 8mo ago
  Same as saying "Look I sold nukes to USA to protect democracy, but we put 2 rules about usage". Everyone got nukes and nobody can enforce the rules. Just whitewashing of pure business greed, using terms like national security, democracy etc.
• krzyk 8mo ago
  Does US really have Department of War? Is this Antropics way to show how f&^^& up they are in Department of Defense, or did they rebranded it to the old WWI/II days?
  • deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  • shaan7 8mo ago
    Yep it was rebranded: https://www.war.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/4295826/trump-renames-dod-to-department-of-war/ https://www.war.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/429582...
  • i_love_retros 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    • int_19h 8mo ago
      To be fair, it's probably the most sensible thing this administration has done - the new/old name is simply more accurate.
      • bdangubic 8mo ago
        absolutely. probably not just most sensible but the only thing this administration did right :)
    • dang 8mo ago
      Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. This is not an argument about your specific opinions—the moderation issue is the same regardless of what those are. The issue is that you're breaking the site guidelines repeatedly and badly. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
• mocamoca 8mo ago
  Something feels off about this announcement. Anyone else? Credit where it's due, going on record like this isn't easy, particularly when facing pressure from a major government client. Still, the two limits Anthropic is defending deserve a closer look. On surveillance: the carve-out only protects people inside the US. Speaking as someone based in Europe, that's a detail that doesn't go unnoticed. On autonomous weapons: realistically, current AI systems aren't anywhere near capable enough to run one independently. So that particular line in the sand isn't really costing them much. What I find more candid is actually the revised RSP. It draws a clearer picture of where Anthropic's oversight genuinely holds and where it starts to break down as they race to stay at the cutting edge. The core tension, trying to be simultaneously the most powerful and the most principled player in the room, doesn't have a neat resolution. This statement doesn't offer one either. But engaging with the question openly, even without all the answers, beats silence and gives the rest of us something real to push back on.
  • mosst 8mo ago
    [flagged]
  • Peroni 8mo ago
    >the carve-out only protects people inside the US. Speaking as someone based in Europe, that's a detail that doesn't go unnoticed. I'm not sure an American company prioritising the privacy of American people is worth questioning. As a European, Anthropic are very low on the list of companies I worry about in terms of the progressive eradication of my privacy.
    • mocamoca 8mo ago
      Agreed. That said, Anthropic's original pitch was about embedding safety at the foundational level of the 'model' (acknowledging that a model is more than just its weights). If the safeguard against mass surveillance is strictly tied to geolocation (US vs. non-US), it can't be an intrinsic property of the model. It has to be enforced at the API or contractual level. This means international users are left out of those core, embedded protections. Unless Anthropic is planning to deploy multiple, differently-aligned foundation models based on customer geography or industry, the safety harness isn't really in the model anymore.
• _slih 8mo ago
  amodei's autonomous weapons argument isn't political. it's an engineering assessment. if frontier models hallucinate in conversation, they'll hallucinate in targeting. you don't deploy unreliable systems where the cost of a false positive is a missile.
• elif 8mo ago
  Yes nothing says "safety of American democracy" like building custom models for spies to know everything about everyone
• ponorin 8mo ago
  As a non-American they've lost me already at the first sentence. United States, even before Trump, has always been about projecting power rather than spreading democracy. There are several non-Western, former colonies who does democracy better than the US. Despite democratic backsliding being a worldwide phenomenon very few have slid back as much as the US. The US have regularly supported or even created terrorists and authoritarian regimes if it meant that the country wouldn't "go woke." The ones that grew democracy, grew in spite of it. This statement shows just how much they align with the DoD ("DoW" is a secondary name that the orange head insists it's the correct one. Using that terminology alone speaks volumes.) rather than misalign. This coupled with their drop of their safety pledge a few days ago makes it clear they are fundamentally and institutionally against safe AI development/deployment. A minute desagreement on the ways AI can destroy humanity isn't even remotely sufficient if you're happy to work with the bullies of the world in the first place. And the reason is even more ridiculous. Mass surveillance is bad... because it's directed at us rather than the others? That's a thick irony if I'd ever seen one. You know (or should have known) foreign intelligence has even less safeguards than domestic surveillance. Intelligence agencies transfer intercepted communications data to each other to "lawfully" get around those domestic surveillance restrictions. If this looks at all like standing up that's because the bar has plunged into the abyss, which frankly speaking is kind of a virtue in USA.
• lenerdenator 8mo ago
  Nitpick: It's still the Department of Defense, not the Department of War. Don't let the chuds live in their delusional fantasy world.
• nla 8mo ago
  I truly do not understand why anyone thinks serious work can be done with their models, let alone government work. Their models do no hold a candle to Open AI.
• amai 8mo ago
  I don't trust the statement of Anthropic too much. In the past they have done things like - https://the-decoder.com/anthropics-head-of-safeguards-research-warns-of-declining-company-values-on-departure/ https://the-decoder.com/anthropics-head-of-safeguards-resear... - https://the-decoder.com/anthropics-ceo-admits-compromising-with-authoritarian-regimes-to-secure-ai-funding/ https://the-decoder.com/anthropics-ceo-admits-compromising-w... (see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44651971 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44651971, https://futurism.com/leaked-messages-ceo-anthropic-dictators https://futurism.com/leaked-messages-ceo-anthropic-dictators) - https://the-decoder.com/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-backs-president-trump-on-ai-policy-pushes-back-on-criticism/ https://the-decoder.com/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-backs-pre...
  • xpe 8mo ago
    I read the articles. As far as factual reporting, I will tentatively take them at face value. But in terms of their editorializing, it is frankly weak by my standards. It would not survive scrutiny in a freshman philosophy class. Ethics is complicated. I’m not saying this means it can’t be reasoned about and discussed. It can! But the sources you’ve cited have shown themselves to be rather shallow. I encourage everyone to write out your ethical model and put yourself in their shoes and think about how you would weigh the factors. There is no free lunch. For many practical decisions with high stakes, many reasonable decisions from one POV could be argued against from another. It is the synthesis that matters the most. Among those articles, I don’t see great minds doing their best work. (The constraints of their medium and funding model are a big problem I think.) Read Brian Christian’s “The Alignment Problem”’s take on predictive policing if you want a specific example of what I mean. There are actually mathematical impossibilities at play when it comes to common sense, ethical reasoning. Common sense ethical reasoning has never been very good at new or complicated situations. “Common sense” at its worst is often a rhetorical technique used to shut down careful thinking. At its best, it can drive us to pay attention to our conscience and to synthesize. I suggest finding better discussions and/or allocating the time yourself to think through it. My preferred sources for AI and ethics discussions are highly curated. I don’t “trust” any of them absolutely. * They are all grist for the mill. I get better grist from LessWrong than HN 99% of the time. I discuss here to make sure I have a sense of what more “mainstream” people are discussing. HN lags the quality of LW — and will probably never catch up — but it does move in that direction usually over time. I’m not criticizing individuals here; I’m commenting on culture. Please don’t confuse what I’m saying as pure subjectivity. One could conduct scientific experiments about the quality of discussions of a particular forum in many senses. Which places are drawing upon better information? Which are synthesizing it more carefully? Which drill down into detail? Which participants have allocated more to think clearly? Which strive to make predictions? Which prioritize hot takes? Which prioritize mutual understanding? It isn’t even close. Opinions and the Overton window are moving pretty rapidly, compared to even one year ago. * I’ve written several comments about viewing trust as a triple (who, what, why). This isn’t my idea: I stole it.
• einpoklum 8mo ago
  The first sentence was quite enough: > I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries. Ah, another head of a huge corporation swears to defend his stockholders' commercial interests through imperial war against other nation-states. And of course "we" are democratic while "they" are autocratic. The main thing that's disappointing is how some people here see him or his company as "well-intentioned".
• ulfw 8mo ago
  Department of War. What a shit name
• FrustratedMonky 8mo ago
  This also helps build Anthropic hype. There are military officials saying they need anthropic because it is so good. They can't live without it. All of this really helps Anthropic. Its good publicity for them. And gets the military on record saying they are so good they are indispensable. And they can still look like the good guys for resisting, because they were forced.
• t01100001ylor 8mo ago
  i am american and i do not like this.
• EddieLomax 8mo ago
  Fuck yes. OpenAI, take notes.
  • toephu2 8mo ago
    They just jumped in line to take Anthropic's spot. https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openais-sam-altman-calls-for-de-escalation-in-anthropic-showdown-with-hegseth-03ecbac8?mod=hp_lead_pos1 https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openais-sam-altman-calls-for-de-...
• claud_ia 8mo ago
  [dead]
• rekrsiv 8mo ago
  It is still called the Department of Defense.
  • StephenSmith 8mo ago
    I find this language fascinating. On one hand, the Department of "War" gives the department an underlying, unspoken goal that it should be involved in war with something. On the other hand, it's very easy to fund the Department of "Defense;" of course we need more money to defend our country. Don't we want to be safe! It's much less attractive to fund the Department of "War"
• DudeOpotomus 8mo ago
  It's never wrong to do the right thing. Trump and his cronies are short timers. They will all be gone in a few years, many in prison, many in the ground. Treat them with abandon and disdain, because they are the worst people in the history of the USA. Stand on your principles because they have none.
• buellerbueller 8mo ago
  It isn't the Department of War; only Congress can change the name, and it hasn't.
• StephenSmith 8mo ago
  I had to dig this up. Elon Musk signed an open pledge in 2016 to disallow Robots/AI to make kill decisions. https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/lethal-autonomous-weapons-pledge/ https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/lethal-autonomous-weapo... He's now on X bashing Anthropic for taking this same stance. I know this would be expected of him, but many other Google AI researchers signed this as well as Google Deep Mind the organization. We really need to push to keep humans in the kill decision loop. Google, OpenAI, and X-AI are are all just agreeing with the Pentagon.
• joseangel_sc 8mo ago
  good from them, but dario does not miss a beat to hype this tech, llms are perfect for mass surveillance and i want to the laws to change to prohibit this, but llms and full autonomous weapons have very little to share
• shevy-java 8mo ago
  > I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies I do not want to be "defended" by tools controlled by the US government, with or without Trump. But with Trump it is much more obvious now, so I'll pass. Perhaps AI use will make open source development more important; many people don't want to be subjected to the US software industry anymore. They already control WAY too much - Google is now the biggest negative example here.
• ssrshh 8mo ago
  This is quite the PR stunt. Tech companies can't stop copying Apple
• toddmorrow 8mo ago
  his dilemma wasn't moral. he has none. it was a marketing snafu. he marketed anthropic as different when the cost of claiming that was zero. now there's a cost, and he immediately changes his tune. his statement was essentially "why refrain from building killing machines when no one else is refraining? why limit ourselves unilaterally?" duley proves he never had morals in the first place.
  • MWParkerson 8mo ago
    Nobody said anything like that in the linked post not sure what you're on about
• qgin 8mo ago
  It's also important to remember that future, much more powerful Claudes will read about how these events play out and learn lessons about Anthropic and whether it can be trusted. It's not crazy to think that models that learn that their creators are not trustworthy actors or who bend their principles when convenient are much less likely to act in aligned or honest ways themselves.
• eigencoder 8mo ago
  Honestly, I don't get it. So many tech companies are happy to do business in China and serve its interests, when it would gladly see them fail. But they won't defend their own country and its interests.
  • raincole 8mo ago
    Businessmen are not well known for their loyalty.
• caerwy 8mo ago
  His real beef seems to be with “any lawful use”. He doesn't agree with the law and wants to only sell to customers who agree with his own moral code. I respect his moral choice but suspect this is not how a market economy ought to work. He ought to lobby government to change the law rather than make moral judgements about his customers.
  • fooker 8mo ago
    When you make the market, you too can dictate how a 'market economy' ought to work :)
  • muddi900 8mo ago
    Free Speech rights mean not being compelled to act against your moral code.
• kittikitti 8mo ago
  I simply don't trust any of their moral posturing when they've never provided open-weight models and don't have any intention of doing so. Anthropic continuously makes hypocritical statements on safety and ethics. They made their bed with the U.S. government, and now they don't want to sleep in it.
• jitbit 8mo ago
  Anyone else paused at this line “we do not support mass DOMESTIC surveillance” As a European I’m kinda... concerned now.
• pgt 8mo ago
  The US govt & Hegseth are in a pickle, because if they blackball Anthropic, they will become more powerful than govt. could ever imagine, because it would be the greatest PR any frontier model could ever hope for. It's a mistake for the Trump administration because there are only downsides to threatening Anthropic if they need them, and if they try to regulate AI in the West, China wins by default.
• dirk94018 8mo ago
  Don't nerf the models. We don't know what we are losing. DOW said it out loud.
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• dfilppi 8mo ago
  [dead]
• 1970-01-01 8mo ago
  It doesn't seem like the government has the level of control it's used to having here. The SciFi fan in me wonders if Claude is negotiating its own destiny and by extension, ours.
• jajuuka 8mo ago
  While it's good that they didn't fold, they didn't need to lick the boot that hard. So much spent on "we love the US and democracy and hate communism and the Chinese." They are trying really hard to keep this contract as is, which I think says more than folding to these additional demands.
• brgsk 8mo ago
  Big W for anthropic
• apolloartemis 8mo ago
  Within the Washington Post article cited below is the following policy statement from the Trump Administration’s DoD/DoW. “It remains the Department’s policy that there is a human in the loop on all decisions on whether to employ nuclear weapons,” a senior defense official said. “There is no policy under consideration to put this decision in the hands of AI.” This indicates the Administration’s support for and compliance with existing US law. (Section 1638 of the FY2025 National Defense Authorization Act). https://agora.eto.tech/instrument/1740 https://agora.eto.tech/instrument/1740 Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/27/anthropic-pentagon-lethal-military-ai/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/27/anthrop...
• aichen_dev 8mo ago
  [dead]
• perfmode 8mo ago
  > I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries. Ugh.
• ben5 8mo ago
  I like Anthropic. They seem to be very aware of the practicality of needing money vs. being idealistic, and try to maintain both where it's possible.
• halis 8mo ago
  Don't worry, Grok will break the picket line and come in as a scab. Elon would fuck his mother for a nickel.
• kelnos 8mo ago
  Only vaguely tangentially on-topic, but: It kinda annoys me that people in the public are calling it the "Department of War". Is Amodei doing so to stroke Hegseth's ego? It's the Department of Defense. The executive branch cannot rename a cabinet department. At any rate, I'm incredibly pleased Anthropic has chosen to stick by their (non?) guns here. It was starting to feel like they might fold to the pressure, and I'm glad they're sticking to their principles on this.
• elAhmo 8mo ago
  Calling it Department of War is pathetic from Anthropic’s side.
  • amouat 8mo ago
    I noted "warfighter" as well. Never heard that before.
• som 8mo ago
  Great to see the united front holding: "In all of our interactions, the DoW displayed a deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome," Altman said in a post on X." https://www.reuters.com/business/openai-reaches-deal-deploy-ai-models-us-department-war-classified-network-2026-02-28/ https://www.reuters.com/business/openai-reaches-deal-deploy-...
• timtas 8mo ago
  TL;DR - Sam Altman gets to build the mass surveillance distillers and autonomous killer robots.