alt Hacker NewsStatement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
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Congratulations, you just got a new $200 Claude Max plan customer.
Is it so normal that the USA should be in such a state of constant war, and war readiness that this even makes sense?
It's ok to mass survey foreign entities.
torment nexus creators are shocked, appalled even, to discover that people desire to use it to torment others at nearby nexus
Anthropic wants regulatory capture to advantage itself as it hypes its products capabilities and then acts surprised when the Pentagon takes their grand claims about their products seriously as it threatens government intervention.
This is why people should support open models.
When the AI bubble collapses these EA cultists will be seen as some of the biggest charlatans of all time.
I wonder whether what is really behind this is that they can’t make a model without the safeguards because it would require re-training?
They get to look good by claiming it’s an ethical stance.
They are playing a good PR game for sure. Their recent track record doesn’t show if they can be trusted. Few millions is nothing for their current revenue and saying they sacrificed is a big stretch here.
Good to them standing up to this administration. I doubt they actually want to put Claude in the kill-chain but this gives them a nice opportunity to go after 'woke AI' and maybe internal ammunition to go through the switching costs for xAI - given Elon more reason to line republican campaign coffers.
I'm guessing this is because Anthropic partners with Google Cloud which has the necessary controls for military workloads while xAI runs in hastily constructed datacenter mounted on trucks or whatever to skirt environmental laws.
Sound like they're following the google playbook, don't be evil, until the shareholders tell you to.
The official name of this organization remains _The United States Department of Defense_.
Sounds like following the google playbook, don't be evil, until the shareholders tell you to.
A significant part of Anthropic's cachet as an employer is the ethical stance they profess to take. This is no doubt a tough spot to be in, but it's hard to see Dario making any other decision here.
What I don't understand is why Hegseth pushed the issue to an ultimatum like this. They say they're not trying to use Claude for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weapons. If so, what does the Department of War have to gain from this fight?
It sounds to me like anthropic are basically 'all in' except for the caveats. Looking at the 2 examples they provide:
> We support the use of AI for lawful foreign intelligence and counterintelligence missions. But using these systems for mass domestic surveillance is incompatible with democratic values.
Why not do what the US are purported to do, where they spy on the others citizens and then hand over the data? Ie, adopt the legalistic view that "it's not domestic surveillance if the surveillance is done in another country", so just surveil from another data center.
> Even fully autonomous weapons (those that take humans out of the loop entirely and automate selecting and engaging targets) may prove critical for our national defense. But today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons. We will not knowingly provide a product that puts America’s warfighters and civilians at risk.
Yes, well that doesn't sound like that strong an objection: fully automated defence could be good but the tech isn't good enough yet, in their opinion.
this is.. a nothing burger? they don't exclude working for autonomous weapons, nor do they exclude mass surveillance. so what gives?
Anthropic has already cooperated too much with the US Intelligence Community, but better some restraint than none, and better late than never.
It is not the Department of War. He's towing the line from the get-go. Forget this guy.
The constant reference to "democracy" as the thing that makes us good and them bad is so frustrating to me because we are _barely_ a democracy.
We are ruled by a two-party state. Nobody else has any power or any chance at power. How is that really much better than a one-party state?
Actually, these two parties are so fundamentally ANTI-democracy that they are currently having a very public battle of "who can gerrymander the most" across multiple states.
Our "elections" are barely more useful than the "elections" in one-party states like North Korea and China. We have an entire, completely legal industry based around corporate interests telling politicians what to do (it's called "lobbying"). Our campaign finance laws allow corporations to donate infinite amounts of money to politician's campaigns through SuperPACs. People are given two choices to vote for, and those choices are based on who licks corporation boots the best, and who follows the party line the best. Because we're definitely a Democracy.
There are no laws against bribing supreme court justices, and in fact there is compelling evidence that multiple supreme court justices have regularly taken bribes - and nothing is done about this. And yet we're a good, democratic country, right? And other countries are evil and corrupt.
The current president is stretching executive power as far as it possibly can go. He has a secret police of thugs abducting people around the country. Many of them - completely innocent people - have been sent to a brutal concentration camp in El Salvador. But I suppose a gay hairdresser with a green card deserves that, right? Because we're a democracy, not like those other evil countries.
He's also threatining to invade Greenland, and has already kidnapped the president of Venezuela - but that's ok, because we're Good. Other countries who invade people are Bad though.
And now that same president is trying to nationalize elections, clearly to make them even less fair than they already are, and nobody's stopping him. How is that democratic exactly?
Sorry for the long rant, but it just majorly pisses me off when I read something like this that constantly refers to the US as a good democracy and other countries as evil autocracies.
We are not that much better than them. We suck. It's bad for us to use mass surveillance on their citizens, just like it's bad to use mass surveillance on our citizens.
And yet we will do it anyways, just like China will do it anyways, because we are ultimately not that different.
Hegseth is an unintelligent bully who will not accept thiz and does not want to appear weak to the maga base. The consequences will be severe and anthropic will be forced
Imagine being so cautious with your words, only to have 'Department of War' in your title
They should try Sam Altman. He's just the kind of guy who would bend over for this kind of authoritarian demand.
The worst part of this is if they do remove Claude, and probably GPT, and Gemini soon after because of outcry we are going to be left with our military using fucking Grok as their model, a model that not even on par with open source Chinese models.
I am incredibly proud to be a customer, both consumer level and as a business, of Anthropic and have canceled my OpenAI subscription and deleted ChatGPT.
Move your company out of the USA?
I don't think this is genuine concern, I think this is instead, veiled fear of the TDS posse being covered by feigned concern.
Foreign nationals are now embedded in the US due to decades of lax security by both parties. Domestic surveillance is now foreign surveillance also!
Department of War is just such a fucking joke title - when has the US stooped so low, I used to believe in you guys as the force of good on this planet smh
Am i the only one who understands the deparments position? Like if another country will have it without safeguards, why would I not want it without safeguards. I can still be the safeguard, but having safeguards enforced by another entity that potentially has to face negative financial consequences seems like a disadvantage, would be weird to accept that as department of war.
I understand the risk, but that is the pill.
in hindsight, the smart thing to do would have been to accept the contracts, knowingly enshittify the request, and protect other bad actors like Elon and xAI from ruthlessly compromising our democracies.
Why does DoD need claude? I thought xAI was "less woke" and far better than claude
Well, now if DoD moves to another AI provider, we’ll know what was compromised.
I mean you're all going to get killed by fully autonomous China AI war robots in 10 years anyway if you're not pure blood Han Chinese, but hey at least you'll provide something to laugh at for future Chinese Communist party history scholars. They will say, "Look at the stupid Baizuos, our propaganda ops convinced them all to commit collective suicide. Stupid barbarians. They proved they are an inferior race."
Not joking, I've heard from sources that hardliners in the CCP think they can exterminate all white people followed later by all non-Han, but just keep on going along disarming yourselves for woke points. This is like unilaterally destroying all your nuclear weapons in 1946 and hoping the Soviets do to.
huge if true.
they also took down their security pledge in the same breath, so, you know. if anthropic ends up cutting a deal with the DoD this is obviously bullshit.
The framing of this is that the United States conducts legitimate operations overseas, but that is extremely far from the truth. It treats China as a foreign adversary, which is nearly purely the framing from the U.S. side as an aggressor.
AI should never be used in military contexts. It is an extremely dangerous development.
Look at how US ally Israel used non-LLM AI technology "The Gospel" and "Lavender" to justify the murder of huge numbers of civilians in their genocide of Palestinians.
Well fucking done. Anthropic has just gained the “has bollocks” status. Also now we know what the govt is really up to with AI. G fucking g
Hegseth doesn't need autonomous drones, he's got the Treasury.
the government should not be using any private LLM, they should build their own internal systems using publicly available LLM's, which change frequently anyway. I don't see why they would put their trust in a third party like that. This back and forth about "ethics" is a bunch of nonsense, and can be solved simply by going for a custom solution which would probably be orders of magnitude cheaper in the long run. The most expensive part is the GPU's used for inference, which can be produced in silicon [1].
Now, I'm curious. How Bedrock/Azure Claude models work?
Do these rules apply to them too?
My man
"as an ai safety company, we only believe in -partially- autonomous weaponry"
Ads are coming.
Good to see one AI company not selling out their values in exchange for military contracts. This shouldn't be rare, but it is. Good for them.
”Defense of democracy” is just another version of ”think of the children”.
Amodei’s use of “warfighters” (a Hegseth-era neologism for “soldiers”) is truly nauseating.
It's the Department of Defense, not the Department of War ... only Congress has the legal authority to change the name, and they haven't.
Keep in mind: the government is very invested logistically in Anthropic.
So no matter what xAI or OpenAI say - if and when they replace that spend - know that they are lying. They would have caved to the DoW’s demands for mass surveillance.
Because if there were some kind of concession, it would have been simplest just to work with Anthropic.
Delete ChatGPT and Grok.
> Our strong preference is to continue to serve the Department and our warfighters—with our two requested safeguards in place.
It's absolutely disgusting that they would even consider working with the US government after the Gaza genocide started. These are modern day holocaust tabulation machine companies, and this time randomly they are selecting victims using a highly unpredictable black-box algorithm. The proper recourse here is to impeach the current administration, dissolve the companies that were complicit, and send their leadership to the hague for war crimes trials.
Big respect
Total humiliation for Hegseth, sure there will be a backlash
Didn't Cheney's company have the option to bid on contracts, by comparison?