11 ms·

It is incredible how far the overton window has moved on this issue. When I graduated in 2007, it was common for tech companies to refuse to let their systems

• wyldfire 7mo ago
  > the world has changed. It's the effect of a cult of personality. People don't feel like they want or need this. But they're on board with the cult.
• tpoacher 7mo ago
  I don't know what you're talking about. This is exactly as I remember things back in the Iraq war. With us or against us and all that.
• rockskon 7mo ago
  Military isn't quite as aggressively catering to the people who historically have bullied techies as they used to. Aside from that - there's a lot more people in tech now. It grew too fast too quick to maintain all the values it had back in the 00's and earlier.
  • ArchieScrivener 7mo ago
    [flagged]
    • iugtmkbdfil834 7mo ago
      [flagged]
      • micromacrofoot 7mo ago
        I also suspect that many could be twice as bad with only half the money there's a corrupting force we're not coming to terms with here
        • iugtmkbdfil834 7mo ago
          Hard to say for sure. In that instance I can only reasonably speak for myself. So far at least, the evidence suggests the more I have, the more distracted I get by new projects.
    • relaxing 7mo ago
      Jobs the Marketer! You want to lump Jobs in with Ellison because he had the gall to purchase advertising for his products?
    • rockskon 7mo ago
      Values relating to mistrust of the military (as per the context of the post I responded to) as well as values relating to ownership of the tech you bought and of personal privacy. Get off your high horse and stop talking down to a person you don't know. Take your anger out on someone else.
      • K0balt 7mo ago
        Yeah, it wasn’t some kind of ethical utopia, but it sure as hell has gotten a lot less ethical in real terms. When you start Making things operate in ways that people dislike or are deceived by, it’s a very slippery slope, because everything from there all the way through eating babies is just a matter of degree. Trite as it may seem, don’t be evil is actually a very, very strong statement, as is do no harm. 70 percent of tech market cap these days is a a million tiny harms, a warm pool of diluted evil.
      • ArchieScrivener 7mo ago
        [flagged]
    • saltyoldman 7mo ago
      I think you went off the rails to quickly potentially. He's referring to places like Google or Microsoft having to back out of deals regularly with countries and US agencies after employee backlash. It seems like now days the backlash is indeed smaller and the heads of said companies are willing to move forward anyway. That is a significant change from the past.
• jmward01 7mo ago
  Yes, and even their two exceptions, only one is on moral grounds. They don't want to provide tools for autonomous killing machines because the technology isn't good enough, yet. Once that 'yet' is passed they will be fine supplying that capability. Anthropic is clearly the better company over OpenAI, but that doesn't mean they are good. 'lesser evil' is the correct term here for sure.
  • skeledrew 7mo ago
    The flip side is it's very unlikely that AI won't become that good any time soon, so it'll always remain a means to hold out. Especially since nobody has explicitly defined what "good enough" entails.
  • randerson 7mo ago
    Hypothetically if we had a choice between sending in humans to war or sending in fully autonomous drones that make decisions on par with humans, the moral choice might well be the drones - because it doesn't put our service members at risk. Obviously anyone who has used LLMs know they are not on par with humans. There also needs to be an accountability framework for when software makes the wrong decision. Who gets fired if an LLM hallucinates and kills people? Perhaps Anthropic's stance is to avoid liability if that were to happen.
    • unethical_ban 7mo ago
      Isn't this the moral hazard of war as it becomes more of a distance sport? That powerful governments can order the razing of cities and assassinate leaders with ease? We need to do it because our enemies are doing it, in any case.
      • iugtmkbdfil834 7mo ago
        It came later than I anticipated, but it did come after all. There is a reason companies like 9mother are working like crazy on various way to mitigate those risks.
      • 7mo ago
• 6thbit 7mo ago
  > they have to couch it in language clarifying that they would love to support war, This is what baffles me when I see people flocking to them for subscriptions based on these events.
  • ghywertelling 7mo ago
    Technological surplus was created and then it was usurped and used for nefarious purposes.
  • davidw 7mo ago
    If LLM's are indeed a game changer professionally, you kind of need to pick one. Personally, I loathe seeing power shift towards mega corporations like that, away from being able to run your own computer with free software, but it feels like the economics are headed that way in terms of productivity.
    • NoOn3 7mo ago
      You cannot rely on a closed source "AI" in someone else's cloud for your work. After all, it can be disabled for you at any time. "AI" can easily steal all your technological secrets. At the request of the owner, "AI" can easily mislead you and insert backdoors into your products. "AI" can even easily incorrectly answer some questions specifically for you if the owner of "AI" wants to remove your competition. And you may not even understand it.
      • davidw 7mo ago
        I agree with all that. And yet, here we are.
• rmm78 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• ryandrake 7mo ago
  > it was an ordinary thing when some of my graduating classmates refused to work at companies that did let their systems be used for war. Those refusals were on moral grounds. (spoiler alert) Wasn't this one of the plot points of the Val Kilmer movie Real Genius? They had to trick the students into creating a weapon by siloing them off from each other and having them build individual but related components? How far we've fallen! Nobody has to take ethics during undergrad anymore I guess...
  • jiggawatts 7mo ago
    Reminds me of the story of someone's woman working for a research lab to improve the computer-controlled automatic emergency landings of planes with total power failure. ... or so she was told. She was unknowingly designing glide-bomb avionics.
    • moron4hire 7mo ago
      I feel like these stories are apocryphal. I mean, I can't say for certain that no US DoD research program used subterfuge to trick the performers into working on The Most Racist Bomb. But I can say that in 20 years I've never seen a dearth of people ready, willing, able, and actively participating with full knowledge that they are creating The Fastest Bomb and The Sneakiest Bom and The Biggest Bomb Without Actually Going Nuclear. IDK, maybe it's different outside the National Capitol Region. But here, you could probably shout "For The Empire" as a toast in the right bars and people wouldn't think you were joking.
      • reaperducer 7mo ago
        I feel like these stories are apocryphal. They're not. But if it makes you feel better to believe that, everyone has their own coping mechanism.
        • moron4hire 7mo ago
          What? I'm not questioning whether the weapons research actually happened. I'm questioning the sincerity of people claiming they didn't know what they were doing. I've seen plenty of weapons programs. They aren't a secret to the people working on them. My point is, the government doesn't need to lie to researchers or even pay them very well to get them to develop weapons because there are plenty of intelligent-enough people willing to do it almost for free.
• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• ptaksh 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• unethical_ban 7mo ago
  As the Heritage Foundation has said, we are in a cold civil war for our country and right now, the authoritarians are winning.
• tastyface 7mo ago
  The reckoning will come. Watch as the same people pushing for war today will pretend they were always against it 10 years from now. I guess we're just doomed to repeat the same cycles.
• jeffbee 7mo ago
  I'm a decade older so maybe I missed the memo but I think you'll have a hard time naming tech companies that actually refused to work with the military, which were large enough and important enough to be in danger of selling something to the military (i.e. not Be Inc. or Beenz.com) Clearly, all of the traditional big leagues were lined up to take the Army's money. IBM, Control Data, Cray, SGI, and HP all viewed weapons research as a major line of business. DEC was the default minicomputer of the DoD and Sun created features to court the intelligence community including the DoD "Trusted Workstation". Sperry Rand defined "military industrial complex".
  • Esophagus4 7mo ago
    Yes, and IBM had a particularly tainted history from WWII. For every company that stands on values, there is another that will do some shady shit for a dollar.
  • relaxing 7mo ago
    [flagged]
    • jeffbee 7mo ago
      This wasn't really that long ago. https://www.google.com/maps/@37.6735255,-122.389804,3a,31.2y,56.31h,89.27t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1sfPm_30ruC-qfXcQ63wcU5A!2e0!5s20090101T000000!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D0.7332320095466258%26panoid%3DfPm_30ruC-qfXcQ63wcU5A%26yaw%3D56.309412980758644!7i13312!8i6656?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDMwMi4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D https://www.google.com/maps/@37.6735255,-122.389804,3a,31.2y...
      • relaxing 7mo ago
        40 years ago! Forty!
  • maxlybbert 7mo ago
    Well, they made a big deal about saying that while they sold their software to the Defense Department, it wasn't actually being used to kill people. Except for well-known military contractors (e.g., Raytheon), who have sold plenty of software specifically to kill people. I guess there's a reason we saw plenty of articles about software used somewhat defensively -- such as distinguishing whether a particular "bang" was a gunshot, and where it likely came from -- instead of offensively -- such as improvements to targeting software.
• RcouF1uZ4gsC 7mo ago
  > My, the world has changed. No. Your tech experience was an aberration. For almost all of history, including recent history, tech and military went together. Whether compound bows, or spears or metallurgy. Euler used his math to develop artillery tables for the Prussian army. von Neumann helped develop the atom bomb. The military played a huge role in creating Silicon Valley. However, to people who grew up in the mid to late 90s, it is easy to miss that that period was a major aberration. You had serious people talking about the end of history. You had John Perry Barlow's utterly naive Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace which looks more and more naive every year.
• kypro 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• jmyeet 7mo ago
  When people (myself included FWIW) warn about the dangers of American imperialism, it's because: 1. As President Eisenhower said in his farewell address in 1961 [1], every dollar spent on the military-industrial complex is a dollar not spent on schools or houses or hospitals or bridges; 2. Every American company with sufficient size eventually becomes a defense contractor. That's really what's happened with the tech companies. They're moving in lockstep with the administration on both domestic and foreign policy; 3. The so-called "imperial boomerang" [2]. Every tactic, weapon and strategy used against colonial subjects are eventually used against the imperial core eg [3]. Do you think it's an accident that US police forces have become increasingly militarized? The example I like to give is China's high speed rail. China started building HSR only 20 years ago and now has over 32,000 miles of HSR tracks taking ~4M passengers per day. The estimated cost for the entire network is ~$900B. That's less than the US spends on the military every year. I really what Steve Jobs would've done were he still alive. Tim Apple has bent the knee and kissed the ring. Would Steve Jobs have done the same? I'm not so sure. He may well have been ousted (again) because of it. Then again, I think Steve Jobs was the only Silicon Valley billlionaire not in a transhumanist polycule with a more than even chance of being in the files. [1]: https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwight-d-eisenhowers-farewell-address https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwigh... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_boomerang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_boomerang [3]: https://www.amnestyusa.org/blog/with-whom-are-many-u-s-police-departments-training-with-a-chronic-human-rights-violator-israel/ https://www.amnestyusa.org/blog/with-whom-are-many-u-s-polic...
  • tw04 7mo ago
    > I really what Steve Jobs would've done were he still alive. Tim Apple has bent the knee and kissed the ring. Would Steve Jobs have done the same? I'm not so sure. He may well have been ousted (again) because of it. Given that Steve Jobs was best friends with Larry Ellison, I’d say he wouldn’t have bent the knee because he would’ve been standing hand in hand with Trump, just like Larry.
  • esafak 7mo ago
    Thank you for mentioning the term 'imperial boomerang'. You really saw it in the militarization of the police after the Iraq War. Gone are the donut munchers.
• qsera 7mo ago
  >refuse to let their systems be used for war.. I don't want wars. But tell me, what would you like your country to do when conflicts arise due to want of natural resources? Would you want your country to just give up that resource your people depend on, like may be 50/50? Do you believe it will always be possible to settle on a solution in a peaceful way that works for everyone?
  • fwip 7mo ago
    Personally, I'd rather that my country (USA) be taken over by China than bomb innocents in the Middle East.
    • queenkjuul 7mo ago
      Hear, hear
    • frogcoder 7mo ago
      Yes, there are many plus sides if USA were taken over by China. 1. You will see no protest on the street. 2. You will see no homeless on the street. 3. You will hear no more school shootings or any shooting. 4. No more tech companies conflicting with the government. 5. No one will sue the government because it's perfect. 6. All bad people will disappear. 7. Everyone sings praise of the government. This is better than Utopia, you should pursue it.
  • senadir 7mo ago
    [flagged]
    • qsera 7mo ago
      If the country wage wars for bad reasons, that is another problem that probably should be fixed elsewhere, or you should leave that country and be somewhere who government you can fully get behind. > defending your country I am afraid that this does not always have to be an incoming attack. What if some country has a resource that your country badly needs, without which your people will suffer badly and imagine the same is true with the other country. How much of an hit on economic and QoL are you willing to sustain before you ask your government to go out there and get the required resource by force. I totally get that war is profitable, and most of the wars cannot be justified. But ideas like this sounds like sabotaging your own country and thus your own existence.
• eduction 7mo ago
  > they have to couch it in language clarifying that they would love to support war, actually, Yes they do because they are trying to sell to the Department of War. No one made Anthropic try to be a military contractor. It’s pretty much the definition of being a military contractor that your product helps to kill people.
• bradleyjg 7mo ago
  If you graduated in 2007, your classmates were born around 1985. Their parents were mostly born in the mid 50s to the mid 60s and came to political consciousness either during the Vietnam War or immediately thereafter. No war since has been even close to as unpopular or frankly as salient. It’s the passing out of cultural relevance of that war that you are noticing.
  • asveikau 7mo ago
    > No war since has been even close to as unpopular or frankly as salient. Iraq. Spoiler alert, a bunch of the current ones are going to be seen similarly too. Also keep in mind when making comparisons that the Vietnam war was not unpopular with Americans at the beginning, and many people justified it all throughout, using language that will be similar to observers of later wars.
    • bradleyjg 7mo ago
      > Iraq Not in same ballpark. There’s no Iraq generation the way there’s a Vietnam one. > Spoiler alert, a bunch of the current ones are going to be seen similarly too. No they won’t. The lack of a draft and mass domestic casualties dramatically changes the picture. Especially on the saliency axis.
      • master_crab 7mo ago
        Correct that there was no Iraq generation because there was no draft and numbers were way smaller. Vietnam had over half a million troops at the height of that war. Iraq had under 170k. But the war was still deeply unpopular. There is a reason America did the extraordinary - to that point - and elect its first black president. The economic toll will be greater with these wars than Vietnam.
      • AndrewKemendo 7mo ago
        There is an Iraq group but we’re just a much smaller group
• kmeisthax 7mo ago
  The Overton window has not shifted, at least not among rank-and-file tech workers. There was very loud and vocal internal opposition to building and selling weapons[0]. They all lost the argument in the boardrooms because the US government writes very big checks. But I am told they are very much still around. CEOs are bound to sociopathically amoral behavior - not by the law, but by the Pareto-optimal behavior of the job market for executives. The law obligates you to act in the interests of the shareholders, but it does not mandate[1] that Line Go Up. That is a function of a specific brand of shareholder that fires their CEOs every 18 months until the line goes up. In 2007, Big Tech had plenty of the consumer market to conquer, so they could afford to pretend to be opposed to selling to the military. But the game they were playing was always going to end with them selling to the military. Once they were entrenched they could ignore the no-longer-useful-to-us-right-now dissenters, change their politics on a dime, and go after the "real money". [0] Several of the sibling comments are mentioning hypothetical scenarios involving dual-use technologies or obfuscated purposes. Those are also relevant, but not the whole story. [1] There are plenty of arguments a CEO could use to defend against a shareholder lawsuit that they did not take a particularly short-sighted action. Notably, that most line-go-up actions tend to be bad long-term decisions. You're allowed to sell low-risk investments.
  • atmavatar 7mo ago
    Complaining loudly about working with the government to build weapons and then continuing to build them isn't the same as people refusing to work for companies that handle weapons contracts. The window has indeed shifted, with tech workers now merely virtue signaling on social media.
• tedd4u 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  • senectus1 7mo ago
    my understanding that it was an Israeli missile that hit that school. i doubt we'll get to know anything about that.
    • tedd4u 7mo ago
      Read the article. NY Times develops several facts that support it being part of a US volley, not Israel.
      • tedd4u 7mo ago
        Reuters now reporting "U.S. military investigators believe it is likely that U.S. forces were responsible for an apparent strike on an Iranian girls' school that killed scores of children" https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-investigation-points-likely-us-responsibility-iran-school-strike-sources-say-2026-03-06/ https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-investigation-p...
    • deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
  • globalnode 7mo ago
    waves to the censors
    • buzzerbetrayed 7mo ago
      You realize that’s a narrative you made up in your head right? There is no evidence that it played out like that at all.
      • globalnode 7mo ago
        They've boasted that that's how it works. Doesnt matter, seems the parent comment has been "removed", lol.
• metalcrow 7mo ago
  What tech companies were these? I was younger in 2007 but i feel like i would remember if companies were openly refusing to participate in war.
  • esafak 7mo ago
    Such protests are commonplace at Google: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/google-letter-ceo-pentagon-project.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/google-letter-...
    • metalcrow 7mo ago
      Yeah, and they still happen even today (there were some recent ones with ICE and Israel), but the companies themselves have still worked in war businesses.
    • gzread 7mo ago
      Yes, and the participating employers are quickly fired.
• ses1984 7mo ago
  The only difference between now and 2007 is the curtain has been pulled back revealing how things have always worked.
• maxlybbert 7mo ago
  It's easy to say "I will never let the Department of Defense use my search engine for evil!" Or "the more money they spend on me, the less they have for weapons!" ( https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Theo_de_Raadt https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Theo_de_Raadt ) when you aren't really expecting money. But when somebody shows up with a check, it becomes much harder to stick to your principles. Especially after watching Palantir (and "don't be evil" Google) rake in plenty of dough. Also: https://gist.github.com/kemitchell/fdc179d60dc88f0c9b76e5d38fe47076 https://gist.github.com/kemitchell/fdc179d60dc88f0c9b76e5d38... .
• bfung 7mo ago
  I’d argue it’s come full circle and it hasn’t changed a bit. There wouldn’t be a Silicon Valley without World War 2 and US gov. funding of Stanford to develop radar basically. The initial investment from then gave critical capital mass for Stanford, the VCs, and the tech companies of today. https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo?si=gGza5eIv485xEKLS https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo?si=gGza5eIv485xEKLS
• stinkbeetle 7mo ago
  > When I graduated in 2007, it was common for tech companies to refuse to let their systems be used for war, and it was an ordinary thing when some of my graduating classmates refused to work at companies that did let their systems be used for war. Those refusals were on moral grounds. I don't think it was very common really. I think for the most part it was tech companies whose systems were not being used for war who like to boast that they refused to let their systems be used for war. Or that they creatively interpreted "for war" that since they were not actually manufacturing explosives, they could claim it was not for war.
• fwipsy 7mo ago
  Attitude towards war depends on context. In 2007 "war" meant "Iraq" which was extremely unpopular, pointless, and had an imperialist flavor. Today "war" means Gaza, Iran, and Venezuela, but it also means Ukraine and Chinese aggression, possibly ramping up to an invasion of Taiwan. I suspect Amodei and many Anthropic employees are thinking of the latter.
  • somenameforme 7mo ago
    [flagged]
    • ashdksnndck 7mo ago
      It’s not that big of a coincidence that the countries that superpowers want to conquer, and need defending, are neighbors to the superpowers.
      • godelski 7mo ago
        So much so that it's actually the expectation! Country wants to expand its territory? Most likely place to extend to is those in its borders. It's literally the lowest hanging fruit. Small country being invaded by large country? Who are they most likely to turn to? Does it seem that unlikely that they'd go to the biggest actor who doesn't like that country? The enemy of my enemy? Coincidence? I think not! It's literally the most logical thing
      • somenameforme 7mo ago
        "Need" defending? I couldn't care less who rules Ukraine, Taiwan, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Iran, and these countless other places half-way around the world. It's not like China taking over Taiwan will have any impact on semiconductors. They're happy to play merchant to the world, independent of allegiance. E.g. - Ukraine complains about China supplying Russia with tech for their drones, while failing to recognize the countless "Made in China" stamps on their own hardware. When despots act subservient to the US we're more than fine being BFF with them. See: Saudi Arabia. Heck we're even aiding them in their little 'special military operation' in Yemen. So funny how the rhetoric changes depending on who's involved: "On 26 March 2015, Saudi Arabia, leading a coalition of nine countries from West Asia and North Africa, staged a military intervention in Yemen at the request of Yemeni president Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, who had been ousted from the capital, Sanaa, in September 2014 by Houthi insurgents during the Yemeni civil war." [1] So a president is overthrown by a popular insurrection, and then another country which was fond of the old government decides to take advantage of the situation to invade, primarily to further their own ends. This sounds oddly familiar, yet somehow the rhetoric around it is entirely different. Nah, I'm tired of this nonsense. If a country literally invades another country which we have a military alliance with then yeah - we have an obligation to intervene. But without that - I can think of far better ways to spend trillions of dollars than killing people half-way around the world. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi-led_intervention_in_the_Yemeni_civil_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi-led_intervention_in_the_...
• xdennis 7mo ago
  > It is incredible how far the overton window has moved on this issue. > When I graduated in 2007, it was common for tech companies to refuse to let their systems be used for war, In 2007 the US was the sole world hegemon. It could afford to let the smartest people work on ad delivery systems. In 2026, in certain fields, China has a stronger economy and military. Russia is taking over Europe. India and Brazil are going their own way. China is economically colonizing Africa. The US can't afford to let it's enemies develop strong AI weapons first because of the naive thinking that Russia/China/others will also have naive thinkers that will demand the same. --- People were just as naive with respect to Ukraine. They were saying that mines and depleted uranium shells are evil. But when Russia attacked, many changed their minds because they realized you can't kill Russians with grandstanding on noble principle. You kill them with mines and depleted uranium shells. Hopefully people here will change their minds before a hot war. As the saying goes, America always picks the right solution after trying all the wrong ones.
• SilverElfin 7mo ago
  The world changed in many ways. America now resembles China or Russia in terms of authoritarianism and oligarchy. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47270470 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47270470 > Dean Ball: What Secretary Pete Hegseth announced is a desire to kill Anthropic. It is true that the government has abridged private-property rights before. But it is radical and different to say, brazenly: If you don’t do business on our terms, we will kill you; we will kill your company. I can’t imagine sending a worse signal to the business community. It cuts right at heart at everything that makes us different from China, which roots in this idea that the government can’t just kill you if you say you don’t want to do business with it, literally or figuratively. Though in this case, I’m speaking figuratively.
• intexpress 7mo ago
  It's because they need enormous amounts of money for their datacenters And enormous amount of political support because of the negative perception of AI in society
• monksy 7mo ago
  It's not just that. There was the 3 laws of robotics, where a robot/software was not to do any harm. There was concerns over privacy and refusal of sharing your name and info on the internet. After all it's full of strategers and there was danger Don't get into cars with strangers
• hax0ron3 7mo ago
  And probably some of the same companies where you could get fired for publicly expressing some mildly controversial sociological theories like James Damore did are also companies that would not hesitate to work with the CIA or the Pentagon on mass surveillance or weapons systems.
• jonas21 7mo ago
  2007 was 19 years ago. If you step back another 19 years, you'll find that the major tech companies of the era had huge defense contracts: IBM, HP, Oracle, SGI, Texas Instruments, etc. Not only that, the development of many technologies we take for granted today -- like integrated circuits, the Internet, even Postgres -- were directly funded by the DoD. Much of the growth of Silicon Valley in the early days was a direct consequence of working with the military.
  • rockskon 7mo ago
    So the military likes to keep saying. Most people here have no cultural relationship to that era of 38 years back. You may as well talk about the bubonic plague that ravaged San Francisco in the early 1900's and how it changed the course of the city that eventually led to where it is today.
• burgreblast 7mo ago
  But ma, look at our stonk price!
• tbrownaw 7mo ago
  It's certainly entertaining to read about ancient industry history, with people on DARPA grants objecting to military interest in the stuff the military was paying them to do.
• foobiekr 7mo ago
  In 2000 I worked for a company that was building a mobile telephony and data product. The partner company asked us to help them implement the lawful intercept function, as is required by law, which we did, however they were asking for 5+% LI traffic when the common practice was 2-ish%. Our hardware was exceptional, we could trivially have done 100% at line rate with zero impact. The engineers all stepped aside, and finally: "Fuck those guys. They get their 2%." It's one of the better ethical moments I've had in my career of working for _mostly_ very ethical companies (so obviously not any social media or crypto).
• slantedview 7mo ago
  Let's not imply the world changed on its own. Trump changed it.
• wzm 7mo ago
  > I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. > I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.
• fooker 7mo ago
  > my graduating classmates refused to work at companies that did let their systems be used for war Holy mother of bubbles. No, for several decades it was a common thing for the L3 Harris, Lockheed Martin, etc to scoop up half the geeks from most graduating classes.
• llmthrow0827 7mo ago
  Yes, the equivocal wording means nothing. It's clear that Anthropic has no moral qualms about participating in war crimes, since that's been America's MO since forever. America has provided free weapons to Israel to continue their slaughter in Gaza and has now joint forces with the same to assassinate leaders under the auspices of peace talks, and kill schoolchildren and other civilians as part of a terror campaign.
• miohtama 7mo ago
  When I graduated, companies had mottos like Don't do evil.
  • amelius 7mo ago
    And did they stick to it?
• paulddraper 7mo ago
  > My, the world has changed. Revisionist history. When you graduated in 2007, the leading tech companies were Microsoft, Google, IBM, Cisco, Apple, Intel, HP, Oracle, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments. How many refused DoD application of their products? I only recall one -- Google. (And it actually first agreed to Project Maven before later backing out.)
• toyg 7mo ago
  You have to recognize that boomers, with all their faults, took military action seriously. And Silicon Valley looked up to the likes of John Perry Barlow and 60s counterculture. Their kids don't give a shit.
• WalterBright 7mo ago
  > classmates refused to work at companies that did let their systems be used for war I don't want to be stuck with horses when the enemy is invading with tanks.
  • gzread 7mo ago
    How well do horses fare against tanks - anyone know? Tanks are really big and bulky and I'm sure (well-trained) horses could literally run circles around them, which wouldn't do any good because how would you get through the armor.
    • WalterBright 7mo ago
      A cavalry charge was tried once in the opening days of WW1. A machine gun took care of it. Tanks have machine guns. P.S. Horses where then relegated to hauling equipment around, not combat. This persisted even into WW2. The Germans used horses extensively for transport. You don't see it much in the documentary films, as the cameramen were instructed to not show the horse drawn stuff. They wanted to present the image that the Wehrmacht was mechanized.
• delaminator 7mo ago
  Students are idealistic. The real world has a habit of blunting that.
• moogly 7mo ago
  > My, the world has changed. Has it though? I'd say it's morphed, not changed. This is still, underneath it all, Hanseatic League and East India Company domination style colonialism, but adapted to and shaped by the digital age. The US has pretty much all throughout its history had its military-industrial complex and warfare as an economic motor too, and in view of this, it's inevitable that software gets integrated. Israel, the most recent settler-colonial state (of course some people try to claim it's not using various mental gymnastics, but I'm not fooled), was the experiment and has become a model for how to intermingle the industrial-military complex with society to the degree they two become indistinguishable, and with backing of the West it's been a very profitable and, I hate to say it, successful model. Here's[1] a review of a book about the subject, talking about the state incubating start-ups and spawning a tech sector for the sole purpose of warmongering. [1]: https://theconversation.com/the-harvard-of-anti-terrorism-how-israels-military-industrial-complex-feeds-the-global-arms-trade-204758 https://theconversation.com/the-harvard-of-anti-terrorism-ho...
  • discreteevent 7mo ago
    Be careful with this "they are all the same" logic. As an empire, I would rather have the WWII to 2016 USA than the current one and the current one to Russia.
    • moogly 7mo ago
      You're quite right that there are degrees in hell.
• refurb 7mo ago
  It’s like cheating on a spouse, it’s not much of a claim to say “id never cheat” when there are zero opportunities to do so. Same with the claims from companies like Google - “dont be evil”. Easy to say when there is nothing on the line. But when the choice is between your claimed morals and the future success of your company, those morals disappear in a hurry. But they were never strongly held in the first place.
• gbin 7mo ago
  Didn't the silicon valley basically bootstrapped with defense contracts?
• DavidVoid 7mo ago
  There's an old German short film called Nicht löschbares Feuer (Inextinguishable Fire, 1969)[1] that I'm fond of. It was a protest film against Napalm and how some companies wouldn't really let their employees know what they were actually working on. "I am a worker and I work in a vacuum cleaner factory. My wife could use a vacuum cleaner. That's why everyday I pick up a piece. At home I try to assemble the vacuum cleaner. But however I try, it always becomes a sub-machine gun. ... This vacuum cleaner can become a useful weapon. This sub-machine gun can become a useful household appliance. What we produce it depends on the workers, students, and engineers." That last line is still very relevant today. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnpLS4ct2mM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnpLS4ct2mM
  • ghywertelling 7mo ago
    This question has been boiling in my brain for quite a long time. Consider a hypothetical scenario where one spy chinese or russian programmer working in Google or Meta might have siphoned off (copied and uploaded) all the important code (Monorepo) to the Mothership and all of us are now sitting ducks. I am sure, this question might have crossed your minds. I have no idea. if blueprints for the TPU chip design could get leaked, imagine what might have already happened?
    • ipython 7mo ago
      That kinda happened already in 2009. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora Industrial espionage also was publicly disclosed around the plans for the joint strike fighter. https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2017/july/chinas-cyber-economic-warfare-threatens-us https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2017/july/chinas-... I’m sure in the classified arena there are a lot more examples.
    • sabatonfan 7mo ago
      Minor point but this doesn't only have to be russian/chinese spies but rather this can be anybody including say the UK/Israel or even countries which can be considered "allies" I'd also be surprised if this code isn't already available with the US forces too and sometimes the enemy can be from within too.
• astura 7mo ago
  This is really, really , really bad revisionist history boarding on fanfiction - The U.S. military directly built the entire foundation of the modern tech industry. There's a reason that the Internet started out as ARPANET (ARPA [now DARPA] being a DoD agency).
  • gzread 7mo ago
    What else did they build?
• raffael_de 7mo ago
  > moral grounds more like fashionable virtue signaling that survives only the least amount of inconvenience
• greybcg 7mo ago
  Ever since I was young I was fairly divided on the subject. I've dealt with some highschool students affected by the downed aircraft MH17 and that lead to lots of grief among students. It usually lead to strong anti-war sentiments but some also felt a need to "do" something with it. If no one works on defence systems then all the things we have could become jeopardized, perhaps not this week but in 5 years. Therefore I can reconcile the idea of working for defence related r&d. I also know that these sentiments are used by unscrupulous individuals to gain influence, but I don't feel like we should let that cause a divide between people with a strong moral compass and those without, since we'd be worse off if there was no one in a position of power to make moral decisions. That requires people to judge work based on it's content instead of the domain. It also requires workforce to have enough collective pressure to stall immoral defence (or rather attack) systems. Automated decisionmaking tools throw a wrench into this because it brings us steps closer to mass deployment of questionable and potentially unhinged munitions. If laws mandated human-in-the-loop systems it would be a better outcome.
  • sillyfluke 7mo ago
    No one should apologize for feeling conflicted while giving an issue considerable thought. Constantly reassessing your position based on the changing nature of the world should be encouraged to be the default approach.("Constantly" within reason of course). I can imagine some Americans making a decision based on the threat of other authortarian states and being left completely bewildered when they have to grapple with the notion that their government may be the bigger threat to their own security.
  • deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  • elil17 7mo ago
    > If no one works on defense systems then all the things we have could become jeopardized The reality is that the US government has not historically been engaged in defense. They have been engaged in offense. If you live in the united states and work on "defense," you are working on offense. If even if you are designing something like missile interceptors, they have historically been used primarily to protect US assets in wars that the US started.
• ozzymuppet 7mo ago
  I don't think the world has changed. There's just a madman in the white house. Look at the "Presidents" tweet for god sake... how is this normal?! "THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WILL NEVER ALLOW A RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY TO DICTATE HOW OUR GREAT MILITARY FIGHTS AND WINS WARS! " "The Leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic have made a DISASTROUS MISTAKE trying to STRONG-ARM the Department of War, and force them to obey their Terms of Service instead of our Constitution. Their selfishness is putting AMERICAN LIVES at risk, our Troops in danger, and our National Security in JEOPARDY. Therefore, I am directing EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology. We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again!"
• thegreatpeter 7mo ago
  What are some examples of a tool the military wanted but the company refused to allow them to use it and getting away with it?
• amelius 7mo ago
  My guess is that Hegseth saw this tiktok showing a vision of robots deployed by the Chinese army: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/z5I8HDkrKbI https://www.youtube.com/shorts/z5I8HDkrKbI
• bayindirh 7mo ago
  The project management book we used in the university noted that if a person refused to work on weapons/military systems and similar, there's no other choice than to respect that, and even asking for its reasons would be borderline unacceptable (depending on your closeness with said person). Now the only reason models trained on any and every public data can't be attached to autonomous weapons is that we didn't fed enough data to these systems to carry this tasks reliably yet. You said the overton window is moved, yet there's no window to discuss about in today's world. As a human being you either get exploited or get exploded. In either case human is the product. We just serve machines at this point.
• throwpoaster 7mo ago
  What we now call Silicon Valley was created by the Navy in the late 19th century because they needed advanced radio technology to coordinate Pacific patrols. From then to about five years before the time you’re talking about, schools and tech companies worked closely with the military. On the timescale of the industry as a whole, working with the military has been the norm and we are seeing a reversion to mean after about two decades of aberrant divergence.
• jrsj 7mo ago
  These are kind of unrelated issues. You’re right that it used to be companies just didn’t want to be involved in war at all, & generally speaking that isn’t going to cause issues. The core of the issue here is having a private company which is trying to dictate terms of use to the military, which is not really something that has been done before afaik Originally this contract was signed with these terms included, and it wasn’t until Anthropic started investigating how its tech was used by Palantir in the Maduro operation that this became an issue. On a surface level it seems like Anthropic is doing the right thing here but this is really at the root of this & the outcome of the case (and whether or not Anthropic is a legitimate supply chain risk) depends entirely on the details of those conversations they had with Palantir.
• demorro 7mo ago
  I quit a job 8 years ago because I learned my code had been deployed inside missiles. Many of my colleagues had similar red lines. I doubt many would now.
• dfxm12 7mo ago
  Maybe not war, per se, but still relevant to this topic, around this time, there was a famous AT&T whistle blower (Mark Klein) who described the company's role in domestic surveillance by the NSA. Maybe companies are more open about it today, but it is hard to make such a wide assertion.
• micromacrofoot 7mo ago
  When I was a kid just the rumor of "selling out" could kill the popularity of something, now it's often the goal.
• observationist 7mo ago
  As much as I agree with a lot of these principles, in principle, the crux of the fight is Anthropic feeling and behaving like they're entitled to be involved in things far beyond anything they're legally allowed to be, and the military leadership telling them, rightly, to take a hike and not let the door hit them on the way out. Effective Altruism is a deeply silly, flawed, unserious, superficial way of engaging with the world if this, FTX, and shrimp welfare are the outcome of people putting it in action. What Anthropic wants is to be able to go back and pontificate and sue a government if they determine that their terms of service have been violated. In order to enforce that, they wanted oversight, access, and to intervene if they felt it was being put to a purpose they disagreed with, namely surveillance or autonomous weapons/killing, etc. As an AI platform, they can decide if they want the military to be able to use the software. I'm 1000% on board with this. They don't get to sit an Anthropic employee down and say "ok, now you watch these soldiers and make sure they follow the rules, and if they do anything wrong, you hit the big red button that shuts them down." They don't get to program a Claude oversight agent to do that, either. That messes with realtime operations. They don't get to go back and sue "ackshually, we looked at these logs and determined that you violated rule 102.3a in the contract, because one of the terrorists was participating from an IP address determined to reside in the continental US" or whatever. Anthropic doesn't get to hold the US military accountable. It doesn't get to do oversight. It doesn't get to constrain its scope of operation, through legal threat or active intervention or contracts or otherwise. Chain of command and rule of law constrain the US military. Congressional oversight and rule of law hold it accountable. A private contractor, no matter how noble or principled, doesn't get extra privileges. Anthropic playing political games, advocating for unelected and unaccountable power to be granted a private corporation, is what got them designated a supply chain risk, and I can see the argument for it. Depending on how much effort they put in to hassling the government and pushing for their side, it remains to be seen whether the designation sticks. And in principle, I also see the utility of being extremely heavy handed when slapping down a private company trying to make a power grab like that. Either through ignorance or incredible arrogance and entitlement, a private company and industry needs to learn their place in the grand scheme of things. Anthropic isn't special, their place is right alongside all the rest of we the people; they don't get extra privileges because they feel strongly that they're particularly right or righteous. OpenAI effectively said "yeah, rule of law, thumbs up, sounds good." and took the $200B on the table. Anthropic was pushing for extra private oversight and accountability, and it doesn't matter if it was surveillance, autonomous weapons, or not eating babies - the particular rule doesn't matter, the precedent being set of private corporations getting a say, at all, beyond legal limits, is the point. No company gets to tell the US military what to do or what not do, or hold them accountable post-hoc, or constrain available options, because if they absolutely need to break a technicality for a good reason, when national security and defense is under consideration, a private company's rules and terms of service is the very last thing in the world that should be important to that discussion. I'm a Snowden fan and absolutely want the global surveillance apparatus to vanish, and don't want an AI singleton dystopia, and I'm probably waaayyy more liberal and liberty minded than is reasonable, but even I can understand where this line in the sand is, and why it's there. I'd be shocked if Dario lasts the year as CEO, it's clear he's ill equipped for real world, adult decisions.
• pohl 7mo ago
  Aren't shifts in the Overton Window are qualitatively different from attempts to avoid the wrath of an organized crime syndicate in power?
• strangattractor 7mo ago
  VCs have mined all the low hanging fruit of the internet. Exactly how many attention grabbing advertising companies, crypto scammers and gambling sites can the world stand. Enshittification is forcing them to seek new horizons.
• gverrilla 7mo ago
  USA is collapsing.