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> 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 p

> 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 7mo ago
I haven’t seen them follow a law yet
lmeyerov 7mo 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...
- 3eb7988a1663 7mo ago
  I have no idea what exactly Anthropic was offering the DoD, but if there were a LLM product, possible that the existing guardrails prevented the model from executing on the DoD vision. "Find all of the terrorists in this photo", "Which targets should I bomb first?" Even if the DoD wanted to ignore the legal terms, the model itself would not cooperate. DoD required a specially trained product without limitations.
aardvarkr 7mo ago
I don’t care who is in the whitehouse. Snowden revealed the crimes of the NSA in 2013 when Obama was president. They’re all going to want to use AI for mass surveillance
- Tanjreeve 7mo ago
  AI doesn't add anything to the ability to do mass surveillance. That genie was already out of the bottle from clouds and big data systems. At best AI might take on some of the gruntwork for drawing conclusions from profiles but it's doing it's usual thing of being a powerful interface built on top of other systems.
  - mithr 7mo ago
    > AI doesn't add anything to the ability to do mass surveillance I recommend reading Yuval Noah Harari's Nexus for a deep discussion around this. He makes the point that what makes this AI age much more dangerous for mass surveillance isn't just the collection of data, which has indeed been possible for a while, but the new ability to have AI sift through that enormous volume of information, an ability which until recently has not been possible in a meaningful way without a ton of manual work to support it. Older attempts at mass control of a population already involved mass surveillance, even in a large amount of detail, but even when capturing in detail all citizens' activities, there were just not enough people around to be able to dig through that and analyze it. This has been somewhat true even with the help of computers, though computers have certainly already been making this easier. But now you can just give all that data to an AI with your instructions, and it'll apply some sort of "judgement" on your behalf, completely autonomously, and even perform actions against those folks it finds, again autonomously, without needing to manually build a whole infrastructure to do that with manual rules. That's a very meaningful upgrade for someone wanting to control a population.
    - Tanjreeve 7mo ago
      That's still actuating using existing infrastructure that already existed. I agree with the summarise + decide part maybe being quicker sometimes but the bottleneck remains collection and collation and actioning infrastructure
ExoticPearTree 7mo ago
[flagged]
- xrd 7mo ago
  If I start a small business that sells Apples and the US government comes to me and says "we want to buy your apples and fire them at high speed to" these are now your words "kill adversaries through any means necessary." If I say, no, then am I stopping the military? I feel like it is reasonable that I can say "no, I don't want to sell you my apples." I cannot for the life of me figure out why that means I am stopping the military from killing people. The US Military will definitely still be able to kill people for centuries. I'm just saying I don't want to participate in it.
  - ExoticPearTree 7mo ago
    In the context of the larger discussion, if you already sold apples to the military, you cannot go to them and say you don't like how they're using the apples you sold them.
    - sfink 7mo ago
      In the context of the larger discussion, Anthropic thought of that ahead of time and put the restrictions into the contract that the government agreed to. So "already sold" is a non-sequitur; that's not the situation under discussion.
  - throwaway173738 7mo ago
    More to the point, if everyone stopped selling anything to the military they would still be able to kill people with their bare hands. People are arguably very good at killing people and it takes civilization to train us not to kill each other.
- throwaway290 7mo ago
  Any company is free to choose its business partners and set terms to them. "Don't like our terms, don't partner with us" If government can force any private company to work specially for government then US is no better than PRC
tqwhite 7mo ago
Mass surveillance is completely legal. It's just stupid to say its not.
- veidr 7mo ago
  I don't think that's what is being said, mainly? Like that's why Anthropic wants to have it in the contract(s) with the government? At the same time, it is expressly illegal in some circumstances; that was the whole core of the Snowden revelations. The NSA and CIA are expressly curtailed from doing that by law — there are cases where they may surveil citizens with a court order, but not "mass" surveillance. There are some restrictions on the military along those same lines. Keywords: Executive Order 12333, FISA, National Security Act, Posse Comitatus Act

reactordev 7mo ago

I haven’t seen them follow a law yet

lmeyerov 7mo 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...

3eb7988a1663 7mo ago
I have no idea what exactly Anthropic was offering the DoD, but if there were a LLM product, possible that the existing guardrails prevented the model from executing on the DoD vision. "Find all of the terrorists in this photo", "Which targets should I bomb first?" Even if the DoD wanted to ignore the legal terms, the model itself would not cooperate. DoD required a specially trained product without limitations.

aardvarkr 7mo ago

I don’t care who is in the whitehouse. Snowden revealed the crimes of the NSA in 2013 when Obama was president. They’re all going to want to use AI for mass surveillance

Tanjreeve 7mo ago
AI doesn't add anything to the ability to do mass surveillance. That genie was already out of the bottle from clouds and big data systems. At best AI might take on some of the gruntwork for drawing conclusions from profiles but it's doing it's usual thing of being a powerful interface built on top of other systems.
- mithr 7mo ago
  > AI doesn't add anything to the ability to do mass surveillance I recommend reading Yuval Noah Harari's Nexus for a deep discussion around this. He makes the point that what makes this AI age much more dangerous for mass surveillance isn't just the collection of data, which has indeed been possible for a while, but the new ability to have AI sift through that enormous volume of information, an ability which until recently has not been possible in a meaningful way without a ton of manual work to support it. Older attempts at mass control of a population already involved mass surveillance, even in a large amount of detail, but even when capturing in detail all citizens' activities, there were just not enough people around to be able to dig through that and analyze it. This has been somewhat true even with the help of computers, though computers have certainly already been making this easier. But now you can just give all that data to an AI with your instructions, and it'll apply some sort of "judgement" on your behalf, completely autonomously, and even perform actions against those folks it finds, again autonomously, without needing to manually build a whole infrastructure to do that with manual rules. That's a very meaningful upgrade for someone wanting to control a population.
  - Tanjreeve 7mo ago
    That's still actuating using existing infrastructure that already existed. I agree with the summarise + decide part maybe being quicker sometimes but the bottleneck remains collection and collation and actioning infrastructure

ExoticPearTree 7mo ago

[flagged]

xrd 7mo ago
If I start a small business that sells Apples and the US government comes to me and says "we want to buy your apples and fire them at high speed to" these are now your words "kill adversaries through any means necessary." If I say, no, then am I stopping the military? I feel like it is reasonable that I can say "no, I don't want to sell you my apples." I cannot for the life of me figure out why that means I am stopping the military from killing people. The US Military will definitely still be able to kill people for centuries. I'm just saying I don't want to participate in it.
- ExoticPearTree 7mo ago
  In the context of the larger discussion, if you already sold apples to the military, you cannot go to them and say you don't like how they're using the apples you sold them.
  - sfink 7mo ago
    In the context of the larger discussion, Anthropic thought of that ahead of time and put the restrictions into the contract that the government agreed to. So "already sold" is a non-sequitur; that's not the situation under discussion.
- throwaway173738 7mo ago
  More to the point, if everyone stopped selling anything to the military they would still be able to kill people with their bare hands. People are arguably very good at killing people and it takes civilization to train us not to kill each other.
throwaway290 7mo ago
Any company is free to choose its business partners and set terms to them. "Don't like our terms, don't partner with us" If government can force any private company to work specially for government then US is no better than PRC

tqwhite 7mo ago

Mass surveillance is completely legal. It's just stupid to say its not.

veidr 7mo ago
I don't think that's what is being said, mainly? Like that's why Anthropic wants to have it in the contract(s) with the government? At the same time, it is expressly illegal in some circumstances; that was the whole core of the Snowden revelations. The NSA and CIA are expressly curtailed from doing that by law — there are cases where they may surveil citizens with a court order, but not "mass" surveillance. There are some restrictions on the military along those same lines. Keywords: Executive Order 12333, FISA, National Security Act, Posse Comitatus Act