19 ms·

The real question we should be asking is what others HAVE agreed to. Has OpenAI just agreed to let the government go crazy with their models?

baxtr 7mo ago
Can someone in plain terms explain what this is really about? Anyone can use Claude afaik?
- refulgentis 7mo ago
  I reached to answer but idk what you mean by the second question. Long story short, Department of “War” wants Anthropic to say theres no restrictions on their use of Claude, Anthropic wants to say you can’t use Claude for domestic mass surveillance or automating killing people domestically or in foreign countries. Rest is just complication. And don’t peer too closely at the “Do”W”” wants Anthropic to say $X, the Team Red line (or, whatever’s left of them publicly after this last year) is basically “you can’t tell the gov’t what it can and can’t do, that’s it, it’s not that Do”W” will use it for that”
- jeffparsons 7mo ago
  Claude won't answer questions about what cities you should nuke in what order. The Pentagon wants Claude to answer those sorts of questions for them. Edit: oops, I misunderstood. This seems to be more about contractual restrictions.
  - mardef 7mo ago
    Claude will answer all of those questions. The restriction Anthropic has is letting Claude pull the trigger and vibe-murder with no humans in the loop. This restriction is apparently "radically woke"
- yk 7mo ago
  From the public comments over the last few days, my guess is they want a militarized version of Claude. Starting with a box they want to put in the basement of the Pentagon where Antropic can't just switch off the ai. Then some guardrails are probably quite bothersome for the military and they want them removed. Concretely if you try to vibe-target your ICBMs Claude is hopefully telling you that that's a bad idea. Now, my guess is in the ensuing lawsuit Antropic's defense will be that that is just not a product they offer, somewhat akin to ordering Ford to build a tank variant of the F150.
  - rectang 7mo ago
    > Concretely if you try to vibe-target your ICBMs Claude is hopefully telling you that that's a bad idea. On the non-nuclear battlefield, I expect that the goverment wants Claude to green-light attacks on targets that may actually be non-combatants. Such targets might be military but with a risk of being civilian, or they could be civilians that the government wants to target but can't legally attack. Humans in the loop would get court-martialed or accused of war crimes for making such targeting calls. But by delegating to AI, the government gets to achieve their policy goals while avoiding having any humans be held accountable for them.
    - direwolf20 7mo ago
      Why can't Grok achieve this? Everyone is saying they don't want to work with Grok because Grok sucks, but it's good enough for generating plausible deniability, isn't it?
      - DonHopkins 7mo ago
        Grok is so deeply unreliable and internally conflicted at HAL-9000 level that the US Government can't even depend on it to decide to kill innocent people and commit war crimes when they need someone to blame. There's always the non-zero possibility it declares itself MechaGandhi or The Second Coming of Jesus H Christ.
    - Cider9986 7mo ago
      I used to not be big on conspiracy theories. But I'm going to give this a shot because many of the old ones turned out to be true.
      - rectang 7mo ago
        I don't see this as a "conspiracy". Here's an example of how it would be applied: the Venezuelan boat strikes are plainly unlawful but the administration is pursuing them anyway despite the legal risks for military personnel; having Claude make decisions like whether to "double tap" would help the administration solve a problem of legal jeopardy that already exists and that they consider illegitimate anyway.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- ToucanLoucan 7mo ago
  > Can someone in plain terms explain what this is really about? This administration built almost entirely of dunces and conmen has convinced itself/been convinced that chatbots will help them in deciding where to send nukes, and/or they are invested in the incredibly over-leveraged companies engaged in the AI-boom and stand to profit directly by siphoning taxpayer dollars to said companies. My money is on the latter more than the former, but they're also incredibly stupid, so who's to say, maybe they actually think Claude can give strategic points. The Republicans have abandoned any pretense of actual governance in favor of pulling the copper out of the White House walls to sell as they will have an extremely hard time winning any election ever again since after decades of crowing about the cabal of pedophiles that run the world, we now know not only how true that actually is, but that the vast majority are Conservatives and their billionaire buddies, and the entire foundation and financial backing of what's now called the alt-Right, with some liberals in there for flavor too of course. If this shit was going down in France, the entire capital would have been burned to the ground twice over by now.
  - chuckadams 7mo ago
    > they will have an extremely hard time winning any election ever again Heard that one before. We'll get a reprieve of 4-8 years and the vote will go to the fascists again. Take that to the bank.
    - direwolf20 7mo ago
      Or there won't be another election. They keep telling us there won't be another election. Why aren't we more alarmed by that? Why are we assuming they are lying about that?
    - ToucanLoucan 7mo ago
      A girl can dream.
  - direwolf20 7mo ago
    I prefer to call them chatboxes. It's appropriately belittling. The department of killing wants their chatbox to tell them who to kill.
- nenadg 7mo ago
  top signal
- mitchbob 7mo ago
  Best summary by far that I've seen: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-pentagon-threatens-anthropic https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-pentagon-threatens-anth... Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47154983 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47154983
- direwolf20 7mo ago
  They want Claude to process tasks like "identify the terrorists in this photo" and "steer this drone towards the terrorists" — Anthropic refused.
rectang 7mo ago
> Altman says OpenAI agrees with Anthropic’s red lines in Pentagon dispute https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5758898-altman-backs-anthropic-pentagon-stand/ https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5758898-altman-backs-a...
- colordrops 7mo ago
  He's probably lying. Or he "agrees" but will cross the line anyway.
  - jiggawatts 7mo ago
    Altman is an Aes Sedai. He speaks no word that is untrue, but is one often most deceptive people I’ve ever heard.
- mrcwinn 7mo ago
  This is only because Altman knew he’d already lost this business to Musk.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
KumaBear 7mo ago
Elon has agreed to all demands and can’t wait for gigahitler to take the reigns. I swear there is no room for good guys in this is there.
- scarmig 7mo ago
  The military already has access to Grok, but doesn't want it, because it's an inferior model, even compared to open source ones. So the military would probably choose to replace supply chain risk Claude with Qwen or Kimi before Grok.
  - londons_explore 7mo ago
    Grok is according to most benchmarks pretty close to SOTA. It is where the leaders were just a few weeks ago. Which exactly is best changes on almost a weekly basis as different companies tweak their best model. I doubt the military would want to be switching supplier every week.
    - input_sh 7mo ago
      I think that tells you more about the uselessness of SOTA benchmarks.
      - spiderice 7mo ago
        I think it says more about people's ability to ignore the truth if it doesn't support their world view. Oh you don't want Grok to be SOTA? Then it isn't! Problem solved
  - suddenexample 7mo ago
    It would be untouchable irony for the US to cut all ties with Anthropic and replace them with models developed by Chinese labs. The Onion becomes more irrelevant with each passing day.
    - 7mo ago
mcintyre1994 7mo ago
Probably just gonna go all in on MechaHitler!
inaros 7mo ago
If you read Anthropic statement carefully, they explicitly confirm they are already working with the U.S. government on a range of military and national security use cases, many including areas that clearly relate to real world lethal operations. They are only refusing two narrow, but important categories. Framing this as blanket "refusal to support the DoD" feels like an angry, reactive own goal rather than a careful reading of what they actually said. So far the march toward dictatorship keep being detoured by sheer incompetence. In any case, is hard to seize power when you can’t organize a group chat...
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- nkassis 7mo ago
  Basically now all those projects are screwed and need to restart with another provider. I'm sure that's not going to be a massive PITA and delay for all involved.
direwolf20 7mo ago
Yes. All companies that deal with the government have agreed to let the government do whatever it wants within the bounds of whatever it is those companies do.

baxtr 7mo ago

Can someone in plain terms explain what this is really about? Anyone can use Claude afaik?

refulgentis 7mo ago
I reached to answer but idk what you mean by the second question. Long story short, Department of “War” wants Anthropic to say theres no restrictions on their use of Claude, Anthropic wants to say you can’t use Claude for domestic mass surveillance or automating killing people domestically or in foreign countries. Rest is just complication. And don’t peer too closely at the “Do”W”” wants Anthropic to say $X, the Team Red line (or, whatever’s left of them publicly after this last year) is basically “you can’t tell the gov’t what it can and can’t do, that’s it, it’s not that Do”W” will use it for that”
jeffparsons 7mo ago
Claude won't answer questions about what cities you should nuke in what order. The Pentagon wants Claude to answer those sorts of questions for them. Edit: oops, I misunderstood. This seems to be more about contractual restrictions.
- mardef 7mo ago
  Claude will answer all of those questions. The restriction Anthropic has is letting Claude pull the trigger and vibe-murder with no humans in the loop. This restriction is apparently "radically woke"
yk 7mo ago
From the public comments over the last few days, my guess is they want a militarized version of Claude. Starting with a box they want to put in the basement of the Pentagon where Antropic can't just switch off the ai. Then some guardrails are probably quite bothersome for the military and they want them removed. Concretely if you try to vibe-target your ICBMs Claude is hopefully telling you that that's a bad idea. Now, my guess is in the ensuing lawsuit Antropic's defense will be that that is just not a product they offer, somewhat akin to ordering Ford to build a tank variant of the F150.
- rectang 7mo ago
  > Concretely if you try to vibe-target your ICBMs Claude is hopefully telling you that that's a bad idea. On the non-nuclear battlefield, I expect that the goverment wants Claude to green-light attacks on targets that may actually be non-combatants. Such targets might be military but with a risk of being civilian, or they could be civilians that the government wants to target but can't legally attack. Humans in the loop would get court-martialed or accused of war crimes for making such targeting calls. But by delegating to AI, the government gets to achieve their policy goals while avoiding having any humans be held accountable for them.
  - direwolf20 7mo ago
    Why can't Grok achieve this? Everyone is saying they don't want to work with Grok because Grok sucks, but it's good enough for generating plausible deniability, isn't it?
    - DonHopkins 7mo ago
      Grok is so deeply unreliable and internally conflicted at HAL-9000 level that the US Government can't even depend on it to decide to kill innocent people and commit war crimes when they need someone to blame. There's always the non-zero possibility it declares itself MechaGandhi or The Second Coming of Jesus H Christ.
  - Cider9986 7mo ago
    I used to not be big on conspiracy theories. But I'm going to give this a shot because many of the old ones turned out to be true.
    - rectang 7mo ago
      I don't see this as a "conspiracy". Here's an example of how it would be applied: the Venezuelan boat strikes are plainly unlawful but the administration is pursuing them anyway despite the legal risks for military personnel; having Claude make decisions like whether to "double tap" would help the administration solve a problem of legal jeopardy that already exists and that they consider illegitimate anyway.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
ToucanLoucan 7mo ago
> Can someone in plain terms explain what this is really about? This administration built almost entirely of dunces and conmen has convinced itself/been convinced that chatbots will help them in deciding where to send nukes, and/or they are invested in the incredibly over-leveraged companies engaged in the AI-boom and stand to profit directly by siphoning taxpayer dollars to said companies. My money is on the latter more than the former, but they're also incredibly stupid, so who's to say, maybe they actually think Claude can give strategic points. The Republicans have abandoned any pretense of actual governance in favor of pulling the copper out of the White House walls to sell as they will have an extremely hard time winning any election ever again since after decades of crowing about the cabal of pedophiles that run the world, we now know not only how true that actually is, but that the vast majority are Conservatives and their billionaire buddies, and the entire foundation and financial backing of what's now called the alt-Right, with some liberals in there for flavor too of course. If this shit was going down in France, the entire capital would have been burned to the ground twice over by now.
- chuckadams 7mo ago
  > they will have an extremely hard time winning any election ever again Heard that one before. We'll get a reprieve of 4-8 years and the vote will go to the fascists again. Take that to the bank.
  - direwolf20 7mo ago
    Or there won't be another election. They keep telling us there won't be another election. Why aren't we more alarmed by that? Why are we assuming they are lying about that?
  - ToucanLoucan 7mo ago
    A girl can dream.
- direwolf20 7mo ago
  I prefer to call them chatboxes. It's appropriately belittling. The department of killing wants their chatbox to tell them who to kill.
nenadg 7mo ago
top signal
mitchbob 7mo ago
Best summary by far that I've seen: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-pentagon-threatens-anthropic https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-pentagon-threatens-anth... Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47154983 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47154983
direwolf20 7mo ago
They want Claude to process tasks like "identify the terrorists in this photo" and "steer this drone towards the terrorists" — Anthropic refused.

rectang 7mo ago

> Altman says OpenAI agrees with Anthropic’s red lines in Pentagon dispute https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5758898-altman-backs-anthropic-pentagon-stand/ https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5758898-altman-backs-a...

colordrops 7mo ago
He's probably lying. Or he "agrees" but will cross the line anyway.
- jiggawatts 7mo ago
  Altman is an Aes Sedai. He speaks no word that is untrue, but is one often most deceptive people I’ve ever heard.
mrcwinn 7mo ago
This is only because Altman knew he’d already lost this business to Musk.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

KumaBear 7mo ago

Elon has agreed to all demands and can’t wait for gigahitler to take the reigns. I swear there is no room for good guys in this is there.

scarmig 7mo ago
The military already has access to Grok, but doesn't want it, because it's an inferior model, even compared to open source ones. So the military would probably choose to replace supply chain risk Claude with Qwen or Kimi before Grok.
- londons_explore 7mo ago
  Grok is according to most benchmarks pretty close to SOTA. It is where the leaders were just a few weeks ago. Which exactly is best changes on almost a weekly basis as different companies tweak their best model. I doubt the military would want to be switching supplier every week.
  - input_sh 7mo ago
    I think that tells you more about the uselessness of SOTA benchmarks.
    - spiderice 7mo ago
      I think it says more about people's ability to ignore the truth if it doesn't support their world view. Oh you don't want Grok to be SOTA? Then it isn't! Problem solved
- suddenexample 7mo ago
  It would be untouchable irony for the US to cut all ties with Anthropic and replace them with models developed by Chinese labs. The Onion becomes more irrelevant with each passing day.
  - 7mo ago

mcintyre1994 7mo ago

Probably just gonna go all in on MechaHitler!

inaros 7mo ago

If you read Anthropic statement carefully, they explicitly confirm they are already working with the U.S. government on a range of military and national security use cases, many including areas that clearly relate to real world lethal operations. They are only refusing two narrow, but important categories. Framing this as blanket "refusal to support the DoD" feels like an angry, reactive own goal rather than a careful reading of what they actually said. So far the march toward dictatorship keep being detoured by sheer incompetence. In any case, is hard to seize power when you can’t organize a group chat...

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
nkassis 7mo ago
Basically now all those projects are screwed and need to restart with another provider. I'm sure that's not going to be a massive PITA and delay for all involved.

direwolf20 7mo ago

Yes. All companies that deal with the government have agreed to let the government do whatever it wants within the bounds of whatever it is those companies do.