12 ms·

Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’

• 6Az4Mj4D 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  • kartika848484 8mo ago
    its to poach them anthropic has the least attrition rate and yesterday an openai employee left already and joined anthropic
    • df2dfs 8mo ago
      OAI is on track to sit in the same category as Palantir as a brand and pretty much going to either work with Palantir or compete with them for the precious funding from the govt. I know most of you here dont quite have the imagination to see it. But feel free to screenshot my post and lets talk in a year ;)
      • kartika848484 8mo ago
        totally agree, id even say openai already secured it. openai is best fit for usa's interests. sam is smart enough to be politically flexible and keep his mouth shut on closing doors of opportunities. musk's views are best fit for world's interests but he's really spread thin and xai still sub par compared to openai, anthropic, google. he's also play safe lately trying to be politically neutral after his stint with the republicans. im rooting for anthropic given their product excellence but it pains me that the other side of it is the effective altruism, the politics of dems, so on.
  • yapfrog 8mo ago
    "this attempted spin/gaslighting" i.e. he worries that OpenAI employees could also be gaslighted by Altman
  • VK-pro 8mo ago
    I’m skeptical of your username and the fact that you commented twice in 23 minutes, ~10 minutes apart ala the dead internet theory. But isn’t this a fairly simple statement? He hopes that the folks at OpenAI are not as gullible as the “Twitter morons.” If youve spent even a small amount of time with llms you’ll know that these security measures are just window dressing.
    • conartist6 8mo ago
      Super sus; commenter is probably Sama in disguise.
    • 6Az4Mj4D 8mo ago
      What are you suspicious about username? It's a standard security practice to randomly generate usernames and so my name is like that. Account is 8 years old. I asked as I was not clear about what Dario meant.
• 6Az4Mj4D 8mo ago
  Leaving autonomous weapons aside, how does Anthropic justifies that they signed up with surveillance company Palantir and now raising concerns for same surveillance with DoD? It doesn't match.
  • throwaway613746 8mo ago
    [dead]
  • ekjhgkejhgk 8mo ago
    It might match. The red line was domestic surveillance. You don't know what deal they had. Giving Anthropic the benefit of the doubt, perhaps Palantir said "Deal, we won't use your tool domestically".
    • taurath 8mo ago
      Every single time the box is flipped over, whats inside is "more domestic surveillance". Who in their right mind would give the benefit of the doubt?
      • xvector 8mo ago
        Well, I think a company that stood their ground knowing full well they'd be designated a SCR deserves the benefit of the doubt.
      • ekjhgkejhgk 8mo ago
        > Who in their right mind would give the benefit of the doubt? I'm saying that we should give Anthropic the benefit of the doubt that when they say "our deal with Palantir doesn't cross our red line", we should believe Anthropic, that they have gotten an assurance from Palantir that they wouldn't use it domestically. I'm NOT saying we should give Palantir the benefit of the doubt. I wasn't commenting on "is giving AI to Palantir a good idea" (I don't think it is), I was commenting on "should we conclude that Anthropic is being dishonest because they claimed they have red lines but work with Palantir" (I think it's unclear, but there's a plausible explanation in which they're not being dishonest, but possibly naive, so give them the benefit of the doubt).
• shablulman 8mo ago
  [flagged]
• df2dfs 8mo ago
  What's there to discuss? OAI is seeking a hand-out from the govt to save their asses. They (Sam + top-management) see the writing on the wall and need help.
  • Spooky23 8mo ago
    This. The OpenAI grift is to make itself too big to fail. They are playing a game of chicken ahead of the election circus. Trump must keep the market alive until November. Nvidia, Micron, Oracle, Microsoft are cooked when and if they pop.
    • trinsic2 8mo ago
      IMHO everyone needs to cancel there subscriptions with all of the ai products until stuff blows over. I don't trust anyone in this industry.There is probably one person or one group behind all of these AI companies that just needs to keep the engine going until they figure out how to replace everyone with bots that can do the dirty work.
      • jitl 8mo ago
        there’s a lot of financial incentive to start ur own lab if u can, and invest in as many as u are able
    • freakynit 8mo ago
      Is there a term for such a recurring cycle in which speculative bubbles form, institutions and governments collaborate/collude to sustain them, and when the system finally reaches a breaking point the bubble collapses... leaving the public to absorb the losses while those responsible largely walk away with their pay and bonuses intact?
      • hedora 8mo ago
        Usually just "bubble", since it's so common. This one is unusual in that the government started bailing out the AI companies last year. Usually, it waits until the bubble pops, and then starts the bail outs. That's standard operating procedure for Trump though. He did the same thing in 2016-19 with the zero interest rate policy + tax cuts even though the economy was strong. Any macroeconomics book (or NPR station during those years) will tell you that doing that creates short-term economic growth, but sets the next administration up for [hyper-]inflation. Of course, that happened, and those same books go on to say "and, usually, because inflation takes a bit to kick in, the next president will be blamed. This is why we have an independent Fed". So, this time around, he's trying to pull the same crap by dismantling the Fed, and, until then, lean hard into deficit spending to keep unemployment low. Last year, money went to data centers, and domestic paramilitary actions and prison build-outs. This year, we have those things and a new pointless forever war. However, it's not working the same way as it did last time. He's done so much other collateral damage that we're in a "boomcession" where the economic indicators become untethered from reality. So, they show growth, but people's quality of life, spending power, job security, and so on all decrease. For example, a piece of the GDP is "how much does your bank screw you per year on your checking account?". This is treated like discretionary spending, and it's gone up from a few hundred a year to over $2000 in 2025. That increase counts as economic growth, instead of institutionalized theft. Medical spending increases drove all the US's GDP growth last quarter. The quarter before that, it was spending on AI datacenters that's backed by junk loans and federal dollars. Anyway, I don't have an answer for your question better than "bubble", but the current economic cycle is not what you described. It is a "boomcession". As far as I can tell, it's a new class of economic disaster, at least in the US.
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• vldszn 8mo ago
  I built a website that shows a timeline of recent events involving Anthropic, OpenAI, and the U.S. government. Posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47195085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47195085
• KnuthIsGod 8mo ago
  Meanwhile Anthropic has no issues with helping Palantir... HypocrAIsy...
  • estearum 8mo ago
    Not hypocritical at all if you knew what Palantir actually does
    • kouteiheika 8mo ago
      Help kill people[1]? [1] -- https://edition.cnn.com/videos/business/2020/07/24/thiel-palantir-js-orig.cnn https://edition.cnn.com/videos/business/2020/07/24/thiel-pal...
      • estearum 8mo ago
        Anthropic doesn't have an issue with their technology "helping kill people," so correct, that would not be hypocritical.
• behnamoh 8mo ago
  Neither Anthro nor OAI are trustworthy. Local AI all the way. And when I say local, I mean Apple Silicon; I don't like to contribute to Nvidia's monopoly either (fuck "buy a GPU"; the guy is an Nvidia-sponsored "influencer").
  • derwiki 8mo ago
    What are you having good luck with on Apple Silicon? Or is this more of a statement for when local AI becomes “good enough?” (FWIW I am with you; I haven’t found a local model that works well enough to be a daily driver)
    • behnamoh 8mo ago
      qwen models are basically <opus and >sonnet. 397b runs at Q8 on m3 ultra. for mbp m5 max I'd use the +120b qwen model.
• zug_zug 8mo ago
  Great, well deepseek is free for most use and certainly won't be helping the US military any time soon. Since you aren't paying them you aren't really supporting anything bad they may do down the line.
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• Frannky 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  • outside1234 8mo ago
    Ok, but we can we agree we can definitely not trust OpenAI like 10x more?
• etchalon 8mo ago
  "Person says its raining when its raining."
• _alternator_ 8mo ago
  Anyone have a link to the full text of the letter?
  • GranPC 8mo ago
    I found a copy on this website: https://www.teamblind.com/post/darios-email-to-anthropic-attacks-on-sam-attacks-on-the-govttrump-and-paranoia-1fsnpyh0 https://www.teamblind.com/post/darios-email-to-anthropic-att... I don't know how reliable that source is. In any case, here's the text from that link, for posterity: "I want to be very clear on the messaging that is coming from OpenAI, and the mendacious nature of it. This is an example of who they really are, and I want to make sure everything sees it for what it is. Although there is a lot we don’t know about the contract they signed with DoW (and that maybe they don’t even know as well — it could be highly unclear), we do know the following: Sam’s description and the DoW description give the strong impression (although we would have to see the actual contract to be certain) that how their contract works is that the model is made available without any legal restrictions ("all lawful usee") but that there is a "safety layer", which I think amounts to model refusals, that prevents the model from completing certain tasks or engaging in certain applications. "Safety layer" could also mean something that partners such as Palantir tried to offer us during these negotiations,which is that they on their end offered us some kind of classifier or machine learning system, or software layer, that claims to allow some applications and not others. There is also some suggestion of OpenAI employees ("FDE’s") looking over the usage of the model to prevent bad applications. Our general sense is that these kinds of approaches, while they don’t have zero efficacy, are, in the context of military applications, maybe 20% real and 80% safety theater. The basic issue is that whether a model is conducting applications like mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons depends substantially on wider context: a model doesn’t "know" if there’s a human in the loop in the broad situation it is in (for autonomous weapons), and doesn’t know the provenance of the data is it analyzing (so doesn’t know if this is US domestic data vs foreign, doesn’t know if it’s enterprise data given by customers with consent or data bought in sketchier ways, etc). The kind of "safety layer" stuff that Palantir offered us (and presumably offered OpenAI) is even worse:our sense was that it was almost entirely safety theater, and that Palantir assumed that our problem was "you have some unhappy employees, you need to offer them something that placates them or makes what is happening invisible to them, and that’s the service we provide". Finally, the idea of having Anthropic/OpenAI employees monitor the deployments is something that came up in discussion within Anthropic a few months ago when we were expanding our classified AUP of our own accord. We were very clear that this is possible only in a small fraction of cases, that we will do it as much as we can, but that it’s not a safeguard people should rely on and isn’t easy to do in the classified world. We do, by the way, try to do this as much as possible, there’s no difference between our approach and OpenAI’s approach here. So overall what I’m saying here is that the approaches OAI is taking mostly do not work: the main reason OAI accepted them and we did not is that they cared about placating employees, and we actually cared about preventing abuses. They don’t have zero efficacy, and we’re doing many of them as well, but they are nowhere near sufficient for purpose. It is simultaneously the case that the DoW did not treat OpenAI and us the same here. We actually attempted to include some of the same safeguards as OAI in our contract, in addition to the AUP which we considered the more important thing, and DoW rejected them with us. We have evidence of this in the email chain of the contract negotiations (I’m writing this with a lot to do, but I might get someone to follow up with the actual language). Thus, it is false that "OpenAIs terms were offered to us and we rejected them", at the same time that it is also false that OpenAI’s terms meaningfully protect them against domestic mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. Finally, there is some suggestion in Sam/OpenAI’s language that the red lines we are talking about, fully autonomous weapons and domestic mass surveillance, are already illegal and so an AUP about these is unnecessary. This mirrors and seems coordinated with DoW’s messaging. It is however completely false. As we explained in our statement yesterday, the DoW does have domestic surveillance authorities, that are not of great concern in a pre--AI world but take on a different meaning in a post-AI world. For example, it is legal for DoW to buy a bunch of private data on US citizens from vendors who have obtained that data in some legal way (often involving hidden consents to sell to third parties) and then analyze it at scale with AI to build profiles of citizens, their loyalties, movement patterns in physical space (the data they can get includes GPS data, etc), and much more. Notably, near the end of the negotiation the DoW offered to accept our current terms if we deleted a specific phrase about "analysis of bulk acquired data", which was the single line in the contract that exactly matched this scenario we were most worried about. We found that very suspicious. On autonomous weapons, the DoW claims that "human in the loop is the law", but they are incorrect. It is currently Pentagon policy (set during the Biden admin) that a human has to be in the loop of firing a weapon. But that policy can be changed unilaterally by Pete Hegseth, which is exactly what we are worried about. So it is not, for all intents and purposes, a real constraint. A lot of OpenAI and DoW messaging just straight up lies about these issues or tries to confuse them. I think these facts suggest a pattern of behavior that Ive seen often from Sam Altman, and that I want to make sure people are equipped to recognize: He started out this morning by saying he shares Anthropic’s redlines, in order to appear to support us, get some of the credit, and not be attacked when they take over the contract. He also presented himself as someone who wants to "set the same contract for everyone in the industry" — e.g. he’s presenting himself as a peacemaker and dealmaker. Behind the scenes, he’s working with the DoW to sign a contract with them, to replace us the instant we are designated a supply chain risk. But he has to do this in a way that doesn’t make it seem like he gave up on the red lines and sold out when we wouldn’t. He is able to superficially appear to do this, because (1.) he can sign up for all the safety theater that Anthropic rejected, and that the DoW and partners are willing to collude in presenting as compelling to his employees, and (2.) the DoW is also willing to accept some terms from him that they were not willing to accept from us. Both of these things make it possible for OAI to get a deal when we could not. The real reasons DoW and the Trump admin do not like us is that we haven’t donated to Trump (while OpenAI/Greg have donated a lot), we haven’t given dictator-style praise to Trump (while Sam has), we have supported AI regulation which is against their agenda, we’ve told the truth about a number of AI policy issues (like job displacement), and we’ve actually held our red lines with integrity rather than colluding with them to produce "safety theater" for the benefit of employees (which, I absolutely swear to you, is what literally everyone at DoW, Palantir, our political consultants, etc, assumed was the problem we were trying to solve). Sam is now (with the help of DoW) trying to spin this as we were unreasonable, we didn’t engage in a good way, we were less flexible, etc. I want people to recognize this as the gaslighting it is. Vague justifications like "person X was hard to work with" are often used to hide real reasons that look really bad, like the reasons I gave above about political donations, political loyalty, and safety theater. It’s important that everyone understand this and push back on this narrative at least in private, when talking to OpenAI employees. Thus, Sam is trying to undermine our position while appearing to support it. I want people to be really clear on this: he is trying to make it more possible for the admin to punish us by undercutting our public support. Finally, I suspect he is even egging them on, though I have no direct evidence for this last thing. I think this attempted spin/gaslighting is not working very well on the general public or the media, where people mostly see OpenAI’s deal with DoW as sketchy or suspicious, and see us as the heroes (we’re #2 in the App Store now!). Itis working on some Twitter morons, which doesn’t matter, but my main worry is how to make sure it doesn’t work on OpenAI employees. Due to selection effects, they’re sort of a gullible bunch, but it seems important to push back on these narratives which Sam is peddling to his employees."
• senectus1 8mo ago
  and? Anthropic might not sign up with DoD but they definitely still live in a glass house. Also, its extremely evident that we live in a post truth world. The accusation of Lies dont hold any teeth anymore. Especially in the post law gov of America
  • fmajid 8mo ago
    His clear concern is to stay able to poach OpenAI employees (although it's really Google employees he should be after). He didn't give MAGA $25M like Greg Brockman did, and the Trump administration is pay-to-play, so the DoD contract ship has sailed.
• cm2012 8mo ago
  Good for Anthropic. Even AI at its current state has pretty scary surveillance capabilities.
• aeon_ai 8mo ago
  I get the sense that OpenAI is astroturfing “outrage and hypocrisy” in this thread. The dead internet is alive and well.
  • labrador 8mo ago
    They are on X as well
• paxys 8mo ago
  Sam Altman would lie? Nooo
  • freakynit 8mo ago
    Lol, right? I mean, who even has doubts left anymore on this? The guy can lie with a perfectly straight face. He's the kind of person who tells another lie just to cover the last one, and then another to cover that. Meanwhile he keeps making everyone more and more dependent on him, so by the time people finally realize what's going on, they can't afford to push him out.
• SirensOfTitan 8mo ago
  Like others have already mentioned: I think Anthropic's relationship with Palantir undermines Amodei's narrative here. It actually feels like Dario is playing Sam's game better than Sam is. Those who know better please correct me. My current understanding of Palantir (and other surveillance tech companies like Peregrine) is: 1. They facilitate the sale of data to law enforcement, enabling the government to circumvent fourth amendment protections. 2. They fuse cross-government agency data through Foundry and fuse them into unified profiles which the government can use to surveil and pressure citizens without probable cause or a warrant. ICE also uses a Palantir tool called ELITE to build deportation target lists. EDIT: Downvoting my comment without any proper rebuttal or clarification is pretty silly.
  • trinsic2 8mo ago
    It feels more like the are playing good cop/bad cop... There is just something indifferent about all of this that makes me wonder.
  • cherioo 8mo ago
    We don’t know if Palantir is using claude for those uses. Though anthropic would not know for sure either. I do agree with your point that Amodei is playing a game though. Whether he’s winning the bigger picture or not it’s unclear. His red lines are already so watered out, like how domestic surveillance is not ok, but international? totally fine.
    • SirensOfTitan 8mo ago
      That's true. With the risks of LLMs applied to surveillance though, I think it's a "Caesar's wife must be above suspicion" moment. Association is guilt unless proven otherwise.
  • solenoid0937 8mo ago
    They engage with Palantir for non-domestic purposes.
    • 8mo ago
• mrandish 8mo ago
  When @sama announced within hours that OAI was replacing Anthropic with the "same conditions ", it was clear that either the DoW or OAI (or both) were fudging. DoW balked at Anthropic's conditions so OAI's agreement must have made the "conditions" basically unenforceable. And sure enough, my reading of it left the impression the OAI conditions were basically "DoW won't do anything which violates the rules DoW sets for itself."
  • sakesun 8mo ago
    > it was clear that either the DoW or OAI (or both) were fudging. This is my first thought as well. It's too obvious. He should have consulted ChatGPT before the announcement.
    • shigawire 8mo ago
      More likely assumed (perhaps rightfully) that there would be no consequences anyway.
  • cheema33 8mo ago
    > OAI conditions were basically "DoW won't do anything which violates the rules DoW sets for itself." I believe this understanding is correct. The issue many people have these days with Dept. of War, and most of Trump admin is that they have little respect for laws. They only follow the ones they like and openly ignore the ones that are inconvenient. Dept of "War" should have zero problems agreeing to the two conditions Anthropic outlined, if they were honest brokers. But I think most of us know that they are not. Calling them dishonest brokers seems very charitable.
    • reactordev 8mo ago
      I haven’t seen them follow a law yet
    • lmeyerov 8mo ago
      I find it confusing in most directions. Ex: For the above statement, if they're truly dishonest brokers and openly ignore the rules that are inconvenient, they would have zero problems agreeing to Anthropic's terms and then violating them. So what you say may be quite true, but there would still need to be more to the story for it to make sense. Ex: DoW officials are stating that they were shocked that their vendor checked in on whether signed contractual safety terms were violated: They require a vendor who won't do such a check. But that opens up other confusing oversight questions, eg, instead of a backchannel check, would they have preferred straight to the IG? Or the IG more aggressively checking these things unasked so vendors don't? It's hard to imagine such an important and publicly visible negotiation being driven by internal regulatory politicking. I wonder if there's a straighter line for all these things. Irrespective of whether folks like or dislike the administration, they love hardball negotiations and to make money. So as with most things in business and government, follow the money...
• _2d30 8mo ago
  He has to know that this would leak and it makes him look really bad. This is going to be a meaningful, unforced error.
  • websight 8mo ago
    Who, Amodei? This makes him look the opposite of really bad
    • _2d30 8mo ago
      That he's talking shit about Altman who is, at least in public, only talking up Anthropic. This will only play well with people who hate Altman, which is not the majority or even much of the public. It plays right into Altman's hand who can do what he always does which is play his "smol bean billionaire" role and act like a victim of big bad Amodei. Just because you hate Altman doesn't mean everyone else does! Most people just know him as the guy who makes ChatGPT which most people like. EDIT: Also, it doesn't help to brag about how this is good actually because now they are getting app downloads! People sympathize with victims of unfair situations. They don't like seeing people take advantage of those unfair situations though. No one has ever found the welfare recipient bragging about their welfare to be sympathetic.
      • toraway 8mo ago
        I have no great love for Dario but his “talking shit” is literally making the point that what Altman is saying publicly is NOT actually in defense or praise of Anthropic and is a calculating, manipulative tactic. Which is intended to muddy the waters about Anthropic’s actual position vs OpenAI’s, and portray himself as a conciliator (for the audience of DoD/Trump) who is still bound by equally strong ethics (as a fig leaf for OpenAI’s employees sympathetic to Anthropic). All to swoop in a land a big contract from the same people he is making a show of “supporting” in public. I’d be pretty pissed too, tbh. Like, should he instead be thanking Sam effusively for being a manipulative slimeball acting entirely within his own self interest? If as he says Sam’s comments are actually damaging Anthropic’s credibility/bargaining position with his public commentary then trying to change the popular narrative about what OpenAI/Sam are doing is a reasonable tactic. As for your welfare analogy I’m kinda struggling to understand how to map that onto the participants in the current scenario or the lesson intended to be implied by it.
• hintymad 8mo ago
  Honest question: why do people automatically equate "fully autonomous weapons" to something like killer robot? My immediate reaction is that even the best-in-class rapid-fire gun has a hard time identifying and tracking drones. So, we'd need AI to do better tracking, which leads to a fully autonomous weapon. And I really don't get why that's a bad thing. Of course, a company should have freedom to choose not to do business with the government. I just think that automatically assuming the worst intention of the government is not as productive as setting up good enough legal framework to limit government's power.
  • intrasight 8mo ago
    We all do business with the government. We pay the military to protect our gold. It is fundamentally a protection racket that we voted for. And one could argue that the military, as the protector of your gold, has the final decision as to what it can and can't do with your technology.
  • unethical_ban 8mo ago
    Please define what kind of fully autonomous weapons system the Pentagon would build wouldn't be designed to kill people. For that matter, explain why the Pentagon would balk at not spying on every American.
  • benlivengood 8mo ago
    We have traditional autonomous weapons (and counter-defense). They operate on millisecond or faster timescales with existing RF sensors. They are not and will not be using LLMs or other transformers. Maybe ChatGPT will update some realtime Ada code; they formally verify some of that stuff so maybe that won't be terrifyingly dangerous. Where autonomous transformer-based munitions will be used are basically "here is a photo of a face, find and kill this human" and loitering munitions will take their time analyzing video and then decide to identify and attack a target on their own. EDIT: Or worse: "identify suspicious humans and kill them"
  • yed 8mo ago
    What you are describing would be "partially autonomous." Per Dario Amodei's original statement here: https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war he had no issue with that. "Fully autonomous" specifically means that the AI chooses a target and engages without any human intervention at all. If the human selects or approves a target, and the weapon then automates tracking and engagement, that's still only partially autonomous.
• cfloyd 8mo ago
  It’s all just theatre. These companies will either give in or die off and be replaced by those who offer more freedom of use. It’s capitalism and while it’s not always pretty, it’s how these things go. Choosing to take what you believe as the moral high ground is noble but it does not put your company ahead of the ball in the long term because there are always those who will use that as an advantage to step on their backs.
  • collingreen 8mo ago
    Capitalism needs laws and regulation in order to not turn itself into feudalism. It isn't naivety or idealism to enforce fair markets and consumer protection. In my opinion it's existential.
• louiereederson 8mo ago
  And they're reportedly back in talks with the DOW per the FT (below). They are not the exception, and are just as bloodlessly, shamelessly publicity hungry as any other tech co, if not more so. No surprise based on their conduct up until this fake event. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47256452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47256452
  • solenoid0937 8mo ago
    This is a total non issue if they hold their red lines, which they clearly intend to if you've read the memo. Also if you've ever actually chatted with anyone at the company you'd know that they are not all the same and Anthropic genuinely does stand apart here.
    • freejazz 8mo ago
      "which they clearly intend to if you've read the memo" Do memos have special magic properties or something? What am I missing here?
• hendzen 8mo ago
  @pg on @sama: "you could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king." In retrospect this quote comes across as way more foreboding given what we've learned about the scale of his ambitions and his willingness to lie and bend reality to gain power. Dario on the other hand seems to have an integrity that's particularly rare in this era. I hope he remains strong in the face of the regime.
  • beepbooptheory 8mo ago
    In retrospect?
  • ProofHouse 8mo ago
    Don't be fooled. Dario's 'awe shucks, me' routine and 'but, but, but' is not all that is looks to be on surface.
  • phendrenad2 8mo ago
    pg's sama praise bewilders me. Is there some other Sam Altman he's talking about? > Graham was immediately impressed by Altman, later recalling that meeting the 19-year-old felt like what it must have been like to talk to Bill Gates at the same age. He noted Altman's intense "force of will" from their early interactions. Is there a Gates-like "presence" or a "force of will" displayed in his public interviews?
    • sethops1 8mo ago
      The only vibe I get from Altman is that he's a weasel, willing to say anything or burn whatever to get what he wants.
    • neya 8mo ago
      Given Gates' current reputation, I don't think this aged well.
      • gadders 8mo ago
        Especially if you ask Altman's sister (allegedly)
• virgildotcodes 8mo ago
  Dario's full memo - https://pasteboard.co/4Qlmsorrytlk.jpg https://pasteboard.co/4Qlmsorrytlk.jpg
  • tkgally 8mo ago
    Thanks for posting that link. Interesting reading, especially the closing: “I think this attempted spin/gaslighting is not working very well on the general public or the media, where people mostly see OpenAI’s deal with DoW as sketchy or suspicious, and see us as the heroes.... It is working on some Twitter morons, which doesn’t matter, but my main worry is how to make sure it doesn’t work on OpenAI employees. Due to selection effects, they’re sort of a gullible bunch, but it seems important to push back on these narratives which Sam is peddling to his employees.”
  • deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  • sgustard 8mo ago
    Here's the extracted text https://pastebin.com/LS2LpLZ7 https://pastebin.com/LS2LpLZ7
    • cousin_it 8mo ago
      Did you use AI to extract the text? It rephrased the text along the way, I'm too lazy to point out all the differences, but if you for example search for the word "suspicious" (which is in the image but not in the extracted text) you should start to get suspicious yourself.
  • blueblisters 8mo ago
    Wow. Surprising to see open hostilities between the leaders of the big ai labs. The differences appear to not just be competitive but also ideological. Edit: Also openly calling OpenAI employees "gullible" and "twitter morons" seems sub-optimal if you like that talent to work for you at some point. Example - https://x.com/tszzl/status/2029334980481212820 https://x.com/tszzl/status/2029334980481212820
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• BLKNSLVR 8mo ago
  Let's just not put Dario / Anthropic on an undeserved pedestal. "Well, they're not as bad as Sam / OpenAI" is not, and should not be, much of a compliment.
  • solenoid0937 8mo ago
    Could you please elaborate on why the pedestal is "undeserved" when they are willing to stick up for their principals at the expense of being designated a SCR? Could you point me to one other $300B+ company that would be willing to do this?
    • BLKNSLVR 8mo ago
      https://time.com/7380854/exclusive-anthropic-drops-flagship-safety-pledge/ https://time.com/7380854/exclusive-anthropic-drops-flagship-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47145963 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47145963 Just trying to make sure folks aren't getting ahead of themselves, without having put some custom thought into it. If you want to put them on a pedestal for reasons that make sense to you, all good. If others are encouraged to form their own opinions by taking some pause for thought, then all the better. If Anthropic still end up on the pedestal, it must be for the right reasons, as opposed to 'just because they're not the currently discussed villain'.
• mrcwinn 8mo ago
  [flagged]
• karmasimida 8mo ago
  And he is back to Pete hegeseth now? Lollll
• sjfaljf 8mo ago
  I wonder who asked for these two safety conditions first, DoW or Anthropic. I remember reading earlier that president's family is an early investor in openai, anthropic was winning this year, both companies are on the way to ipo. It could have been a trap, loose-loose situation - drop safety requirements and loose reputation, stay firm on safety - loose contract.
  • conception 8mo ago
    Anthropic has a clear focus on AI safety since inception. The Department of Defense has Monster energy drink esque styled themselves back to the Department of War because “We’re men! We have to prove it so hard!”
    • filoeleven 8mo ago
      It's not the department of war. Don't call it that to appease the toddler in chief. > However, only an act of Congress can legally and formally change the department's name and secretary's title, so "Department of Defense" and "secretary of defense" remain legally official. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Defense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_De...
• deanmoriarty 8mo ago
  It’s entirely possible that people who are praising this CEO might have to come up with incredibly convoluted mental gymnastics to defend their position soon: “Anthropic chief back in talks with Pentagon about AI deal”. Source: https://www.ft.com/content/97bda2ef-fc06-40b3-a867-f61a711b148b https://www.ft.com/content/97bda2ef-fc06-40b3-a867-f61a711b1...
• epicprogrammer 8mo ago
  It's easy to frame this purely as an ethical battle, but there's a massive financial reality here. Training frontier models requires astronomical amounts of capital, and the DOD is one of the few entities with deep enough pockets to fund the next generation of compute. Anthropic turning down this Pentagon contract over safety disagreements is a huge gamble. They are essentially betting that the enterprise market will reward their 'Constitutional AI' approach enough to offset the billions OpenAI will now make from government defense contracts. OpenAI wants the DOD money while maintaining a consumer-friendly PR sheen; Amodei is just pointing out that they can't have it both ways.
  • dev_l1x_be 8mo ago
    Are you arguing against free market capitalism in favor of fascism? If OpenAI needs billions of taxpayers money to survive then should that project exist? Why?
  • aardvarkr 8mo ago
    It’s a $200M contract. That’s not nothing but it’s definitely not such a huge sum for these companies at their scale when they’re spending billions on infrastructure. I’m sure anthropic has signed up more revenue this week in response to this debacle to cover it. Where they’re actually screwed is if the gov follows through and declare anthropic a supply chain risk.
    • fwipsy 8mo ago
      I think the point is that there's potentially a lot more than $200m in defense dollars at stake here, in the future.
      • le-mark 8mo ago
        There are certainly black budget dollars at stake as well, which are much more lucrative.
    • ExoticPearTree 8mo ago
      That is with the Pentagon directly only. Now they will lose much more because no defense contractor, subcontractor and so on can use them for anything defense related (even if they use the model to invent a new type of screw, if that screw is going to be used in anything military). So yeah, they bet a whole lot on “look at us, we have morals”.
• biffles 8mo ago
  It was fascinating to see OpenAI’s gaslighting in action last week. Signing their deal with the DoW and then announcing it so publicly clearly had the goal to (a) portray Anthropic as unreasonable actors that couldn’t come up with a “safe” solution like OpenAI and (b) take away all the leverage Anthropic had in the contract negotiations. Clever (in a Machiavellian sort of way) but still can’t understand why they did it so blatantly — literally hours after Anthropic was designated persona non grata by the government. Clearly this has backfired in a massive way. In a way, I admire Dario’s stance and having the backbone to stand up to a government that is so happy to punish, legally or illegally, those that disagree with them. I certainly wouldn’t have the bravery (or stupidity) in his position — which frankly makes me happy that he’s running Anthropic and not someone like me…
• asey 8mo ago
  And yet https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47256452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47256452
• blueblisters 8mo ago
  In a broader context, both labs are engaging in "safety theater". Neither know how to solve the alignment problem while market pressures are making them race towards capabilities (long horizon, continual learning) that will have disastrous consequences .
• henry2023 8mo ago
  please treat this post as a reminder to cancel any subscription to OpenAI and delete your account from their platform. Maybe it’s not much and they probably won’t care but taking no action here it’s the same as being complicit.
• mbix77 8mo ago
  But now he's anyway at the table with them? Bullshitters all around. Fully open-source models are the only way.
• vintagedave 8mo ago
  I canceled my ChatGPT subscription today, and send support@openai.com a polite email saying why. I encourage you to do the same. Claude Desktop is better anyway -- and, as we have seen, Anthropic is a more ethical company.
  • throwaway911282 8mo ago
    you must be delirious to think anthropic is an ethical company! they are the ones to first partner with the govt.
    • vintagedave 8mo ago
      I know. I feel troubled for all providers. (I have never used Grok, for example, for obvious ethical reasons.) But Anthropic seems, currently, better than OpenAI. I always want to encourage the better behaviour and discourage the worst.
• juleiie 8mo ago
  There are no ‘good’ companies but I like anthropic little bit more than the others as of this moment right now. Would buy their stock, would sell OpenAI, maaybe. If it was public. Maybe instead of MSFT and AMZN I bought
  • blululu 8mo ago
    I appreciate them doing the right thing in this one particular instance but I can’t say that I feel anything but hatred toward the people who chose to enrich and empower themselves by casting the very existence of humanity at risk.
• Havoc 8mo ago
  OpenAI never had a strong brand around truthfulness
• navaed01 8mo ago
  To play devils advocate - why should a government supplier and private company (Anthropic) and 1 man there - get to decide what an organization with elected officials can and can’t do? Dario has no idea of threats facing the US and where national security needs to go. Dario has personal views on weapons and surveillance- that’s fine but national defense tactics by their nature is something many people are uncomfortable with.
  • deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  • hyttioaoa 8mo ago
    He doesn't get to decide that. But he can decide what he wants to do, just as you can decide what to do with your time and resources. Also, that very much sounds like the government knows best and citizens should just trust it unconditionally.
  • gck1 8mo ago
    Claude is Anthropic's property which they rent to the government. Is there any other place where rental agreements don't come with clauses on how the property can and can't be used?
  • digitalPhonix 8mo ago
    You have a car (I assume, replace “car” with whatever else if not). The government asks if they can rent your car. I hope we agree that you don’t have to say yes. (Specific exceptions exist to places of lodging etc.) Anthropic is exercising their right to say no in the same way.
  • aprilthird2021 8mo ago
    > why should a government supplier and private company (Anthropic) and 1 man there - get to decide what an organization with elected officials can and can’t do? Misunderstanding of what is happening. They have terms and conditions with their private property that anyone can choose to accept or decline. The DoD wants to them turn around and say these terms for a private company's contract around licensing of their private property are so egregious that the government and all government contract holders should be forced out of using any products by that company
• mentalgear 8mo ago
  Reminder that European LLM companies like Mistral's "LeChat" are also now really good!
• Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
  OAI employees, please talk. ~93 Employees signed up the notdivided.org petition. Some of OAI employees could be reading this comment right now. Let's be real, OpenAI backstabbed Anthropic. Even Dario has essentially just said it now. (Shameless plug?) but I created an ASK HN about it: Ask HN: What will OpenAI employees do now who have signed notdividedorg petition [0] and not a single person from OAI responded when I just wanted to discuss :/ and hey that's fine I don't mind but please don't mind me either when I re-raise this topic From a comment from the thread about OAI on hackernews by tedsanders (OAI employee) [Please don't harass anybody] > I'm an OpenAI employee and I'll go out on a limb with a public comment. I agree AI shouldn't be used for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons. I also think Anthropic has been treated terribly and has acted admirably. My understanding is that the OpenAI deal disallows domestic mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, and that OpenAI is asking for the same terms for other AI companies (so that we can continue competing on the basis of differing services and not differing scruples). Given this understanding, I don't see why I should quit. If it turns out that the deal is being misdescribed or that it won't be enforced, I can see why I should quit, but so far I haven't seen any evidence that's the case. Ted, if you are reading this, I truly felt like you were right. I was still skeptic because part of me felt like it doesn't make sense and well it didn't. But I had trusted ya and I thought that you had far greater insights than us but now I am not sure... Sir, I have no ill-will towards you but I just want to know, you have gone silent after this comment and one another about GPT 5.3 instant as far as I can see. You did say in the first that you will go out on a limb with public comment, so please don't mind me if I ask questions in public about that comment The question is: But what now? Do you see now why you should quit? That being said, I still respect you ted for atleast trying to say it on a community, you had no reason to but took the risk. I genuinely hope that you realize that this question is coming from a place of concern. OpenAI employees like you , were also deceived by OpenAI/Sam altman itself, in a way even more so than us. You had no monetary reason I suppose to go ahead and say it but you did based on your understanding at that time. and I respect it because it shows to me that maybe just maybe OAI employees aren't driven by just money as people would like to point out. If this is what an OAI employee is saying, weren't they deceived too? weren't they humiliated in public by being proven wrong, losing their accountability/trust within a community? The comments just turn to well money speaks, I agree, but does money speak so much that you cannot hear your peers/own community? I still believe on the fringe thought that OAI employees have some say in all of this. 98 employees (no of employees who signed notdivided.org) leaving have 1000 fold more magnitude than 98 people not using OAI. You have power, and with it comes responsibility. I just want a discussion with OpenAI Employees in general / especially with those who signed NotDivided.org or who are part of this community of hackernews like ted. what do YOU guys make up of all the situation? A lot of this situation if historians ever write about it, would feel so close to "I was just following orders" than not. No sadly this is not hyperbole now because what we are talking about is the creation of autonomous killing machines which can kill anyone without any human in the loop. People from the future are also gonna ask us general public why we didn't held the people working accountable, in a similar fashion as to the past. Once again, I still mean to bring no hate towards anyone. Make peace not war. I just want to think that the world would be a better place for my future children and generation and I would like to hope that this comment can be meaningful towards it. Have a nice day as one can in a situation like this. A lot of the things I say or do is the same things I asked the people of past when reading history in my classes, Why didn't you guys do X or Y, Why didn't the public say anything. Why was it silent? But we are gonna be history too and someone is gonna ask us why were we silent and I just want to make the answer I tried rather than I don't know. I sort of wanted to learn something from history. Sincerely, We (the public) want a discussion with OpenAI employees about it. Please don't be silent as silence will be interpreted by the future generations as agreement. Please speak. Tell us what you all are doing A lot of the times it feels like I am shouting in the void tho in these matters as these messages just straight up don't go to the right people and that feeling sucks because at some point, I am gonna get tired shouting in the void too. If anyone also has contacts with OAI employees, please ask them such questions and share us the responses if possible. I just want some answers, that's all. [0]: Ask HN: What will OpenAI employees do now who have signed notdividedorg petition: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47231498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47231498
• mellosouls 8mo ago
  Full text claimed on Reddit here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Anthropic/comments/1rl1ula/dario_trump_doesnt_like_us_because_we_havent/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Anthropic/comments/1rl1ula/dario_tr...
• andy_ppp 8mo ago
  "not consistently candid in his communications" I've now moved to Claude and it's much better actually, if like me you hate their fonts (Anthropic Sans) select System fonts in the Claude preferences and you can use this snippet in Safari's Settings -> Advanced -> Stylesheet to make everything your default system font: [data-theme=claude] * { font-family: system-ui, sans-serif !important; }
• kotaKat 8mo ago
  Sam a manipulative liar? Say it isn't so! Not the first time, not the last time, add it to the list of shit he's done that should put him in a little cell for the rest of his life.
• epsteingpt 8mo ago
  Sour Grapes
• andy_ppp 8mo ago
  How much better is an LLM at mass surveillance? Obviously RAG with everyone’s details in it is useful but it’s also likely prone to hallucinations. I’m not sure LLMs are the right AI for even finding patterns in such data. As for letting LLMs autonomously kill people they clearly won’t be ready for that any time soon. Does the administration really believe these AIs are like digital humans?
• pkaral 8mo ago
  There are various views on Dario's communication style etc. But in this, he is the guy we have been waiting for. The guy who is willing to say: "We built this company for America, and we're going to do what we believe is right for America, regardless of short term expediency." Also called having a spine. He has my respect for that
  • pbiggar 8mo ago
    One issue is that he is indeed saying this is for America. But, like, there are many people in the world (most, even) who are not American. If companies are willing to throw non-American people under the bus, that's neither ethical nor good business practices.
• Symmetry 8mo ago
  Is this the first time internal communications like this have leaked from Anthropic? It'll be unfortunate if Anthropic can't have honest conversations internally going forward for fear of leaks.
• ekjhgkejhgk 8mo ago
  > but my main worry is how to make sure it doesn’t work on OpenAI employees. It's difficult to get someone to understand something when their paycheck depends on their not understanding.
• tqwhite 8mo ago
  On what planet is mass surveillance illegal? I've long thought that OpenAI was a corrupt bunch. Except for embedding (which I plan to move soon), I have quit my OpenAI accounts. I don't like them.
• lunias 8mo ago
  I know you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but we've seen quite of few pages from the Sam Altman book so far. It's hard to not recognize patterns of behaviour.
• layer8 8mo ago
  OCR of the full memo as posted here [1], proofread and OCR errors corrected by this human: I want to be very clear on the messaging that is coming from OpenAl, and the mendacious nature of it. This is an example of who they really are, and I want to make sure everything [sic] sees it for what it is. Although there is a lot we don't know about the contruct they signed with DoW [shorthand for the Department of Defense] (and that maybe they don't even know as well — it could be highly unclear), we do know the following: Sam [Altman]'s description and the DoW description give the strong impression (although we would have to see the actual contract to be certain) that how their contruct works is that the model is made available without any legal restrictions ("all lawful use") but that there is a "safety layer", which I think amounts to model refusals, that prevents the model from completing certain tasks or engaging in certain applications. "Safety layer" could also mean something that partners such as Palantir [Anthropic's business partner for serving U.S. agency customers] tried to offer us during these negotiations, which is that they on their end offered us some kind of classifier or machine learning system, or software layer; that claims to allow some applications and not others. There is also some suggestion of OpenAT employees ("FDE>" [shorthand for forward deployed engineers]) looking over the usage of the model to prevent had applications. Our general sense is that these kinds of approaches, while they don't have zero efficacy. are, in the context of military applications, maybe 20% real and 80% safery theater: The basic issue is that whether a model is conducting applications like mass survelllance or fully autonomous weapons depends substantially on wider context: a model doesn't "know" if there's a human in the loop in the broad situation it is in (for autonorous weapons), and doesn't know the provenance of the data it is analyzing (so doesn't know if this is US domestic data vs foreign, doesn't know if it's enterprise data given by customers with consent or data bought in sketchier ways, etc). We also know — those in safeguards know painfulty well — that refusals aren’t reliable and jailbreaks are common, often as easy as just misinforming the model about the data it is analyzing. An important distinction here that makes it much harder than the safeguards probiem is that while it's relatively easy to, for example, determine if a model is being used to conduct cyberattacks from inputs und outputs, it's very hard to determine the nature and context of the cyber attacks, which is the kind of distinction needed here. Depending on the details this task can be difficult or impossible. The kind of "safety layer" stuff that Palantir offered us (and presumably offered OpenAI) is even worse: our sense was that it was almost entirely safety theater, and that Palantir assumed that our problem was "you have some unhappy employees, you need to offer them something that placates them or makes what is happening invisible to them, and that's the service we provide”. Finally, the idea of having Anthropic/OpenAl employees monitor the deployments is something that came up in discussion within Anthropic a few months ago when we were expanding our classified AUP [acceptable use policy] of our own accord. We were very clear that this is possible only in a small fraction of cases, that we will do it as much as we can, but that it's not a safeguard people should rely on and isn't easy to do in the classified world. We do, by the way, try to do this as much as possible, there's no difference between our approach and OpenAl's approach here. So overall what I'm saying here is that the approaches OAI [shorthand for OpenAl] is taking mostly do not work: the main reason OAf accepted them and we did not is that they cared about placating employees, and we actually cared about preventing abuses. They don't have zero efficacy, and we're doing many of them as well, but they are nowhere near sufficient for purpose. It is simuitaneously the case that the DoW did not treat OpenAl and us the same here. We actually attempted to include some of the same safeguards as OAI in our contract, in addition to the AUP which we considered the more important thing, and DoW rejected them with us. We have evidence of this in the email chain of the contract negotiations (I'm writing this with a lot to do, but I might get someone to follow up with the actual language). Thus, it is false that "OpenAl's terms were offered to us and we rejected them", at the same time that it is also false that OpenAls terms meaningfully protect them against domestic mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. Finally, there is some suggestion in Sam/OpenAl's language that the red lines we are talking about, fully autonomous weapons and domestic mass surveillance, are already illegal and so an AUP about these is unnecessary. This mirrors and seems coordinated with DoW's messaging. It is however completely false. As we explained in our statement yesterday, the DoW does have domestic surveillance authorities, that are not of great concern in a pre-Al world but take on a diferent meaning in a post-Al world. For example, it is legal for DoW to buy a bunch of private data on US citizens from vendors who have obtained that data in some legal way (often involving hidden consents to sell to third parties) and then analyze it at scale with AI to build profiles of citizens, their loyalties, movement patterns in physical space (the data they can get includes GPS data, etc), and much more. Notably, near the end of the negotiation the DoW offered to accept our current terms if we deleted a specific phrase about "analysis of bulk acquired data", which was the single line in the contract that exactly matched this scenario we were most worried about. We found that very suspicious. On autonomous weapons, the DoW claims that "human in the loop is the law", but they are incorrect. It is currently Pentagon policy (set during the Biden admin[istration]) that a human has to be in the loop of firing a weapon. But that policy can be changed unilaterally by Pete Hegseth, which is exactly what we are worried about. So it is not, for all intents and purposes, a real constraint. A lot of OpenAI and DoW messaging just straight up lies about these issues or tries to confuse them. I think these facts suggest a pattern of behavior that I've seen often from Sam Altman, and that I want to make sure people are equipped to recognize: He started out this morning by saying he shares Anthropte's redlines, in order to appear to support us, get some of the credit, and not be attacked when they take over the contract. He aiso presented himself as someone who wants to "set the same contract for everyone in the industry" — e.g. he’s presenting himself as a peacemaker and dealmaker. Behind the scenes, he's working with the DoW to sign a contract with them, to replace us the instant we are designated a supply chain risk. But he has to do this in a way that doesn't make it seem like he gave up on the red lines and sold out when we wouldn't. He is able to superficially appear to do this, because (1) he can sign up for all the safety theater that Anthropic rejected, and that the DoW and partners are willing to collude in presenting as compelling to his employees, und (2) the DoW is also willing to accept some terms from him that they were not willing to accept from us. Both of these things make it possible for OAI to get a deal when we could not. The real reasons DoW and the Trump admin do not like us is that we haven't donated to Trump (while OpenAl/Greg [Brockman, OpenAl's president] have donated a lot), we haven't given dictator-style praise to Trump (while Sam has), we have supported AI regulation which is against their agende, we've told the truth about a number of Al policy issues (like job displacement), and we've actually held our red lines with integrity rather than colluding with them to produce "safety theater" for the benefit of employees (which, I absolutely swear to you, is what literally everyone at DoW, Palanti, our political consultants, etc, assumed was the problem we were trying to solve). Sam is now (with the help of DoW) trying to spin this as we were unreasonable, we didn't engage in a good way, we were less flexible, etc. I want people to recognize this as the gaslighting it is. Vague justifications like "person X was hard to work with" are often used to hide real reasons that look really bad, like the reasons I gave above about political donations, political loyalty, and safety theater. It's important that everyone understand this and push back on this narrative at least in private, when talking to OpenAI employees. Thus, Sam is trying to undermine our position while appearing to support it. I want people to be really clear on this: he is trying to make it more possible for the admin to punish us by undercutting our public support. Finally, I suspect he is even egging them on, though I have no direct evidence for this last thing. I think this attempted spin/gaslighting is not working very well on the general public or the media, where people mostly see OpenAl's deal with DoW as sketchy or suspicious, and see us as the heroes (we're #2 in the App Store now!). [Anthropic's Claude chatbot later rose to no. 1 on one of Apple's App Store download rankings.] It is working on some Twitter morons, which doesn't matter, but my main worry is how to make sure it doesn't work on OpenAl employees. Due to selection effects, they're sort of a gullible bunch, but it seems important to push back on these narratives which Sam is peddling to his employees. [1] https://gcdnb.pbrd.co/images/4Qlmsorrytlk.jpg https://gcdnb.pbrd.co/images/4Qlmsorrytlk.jpg
• NinjaTrance 8mo ago
  The scary thing is that Amodei only opposes to domestic mass-surveilance. He doesn't seem to care if the DoW uses his AI for international spying. That's one more reason why Europe needs sovereign tech.
• throwaway911282 8mo ago
  so much hatred
• Frieren 8mo ago
  Capitalism is dead. Welcome to the age of aristocracy were image and standing with power is more important than creating any value whatsoever. Lies are rewarded and action on good faith punished. It is a shame that CEOs act like Kings and Queens and there is no accountability anymore. This concrete example is just part of a bigger trend to lie to the public and get away with it.