HN is pretty polarised about this - they are either “the good guys” or “doing it for positive marketing”.

I’m on the camp “the world is so fucked up, take the good when you can find it”.

Beggars can’t be choosers when it comes to taking a stand against dictatorships.

How much value is there in individual values?

Many of us remember that OpenAI was also started by people with strong personal values. Their charter said that they would not monetize after reaching AGI, their fiduciary duty is to humanity, and the non-profit board would curtail the ambitions of the for-profit incentives. Was this not also believed by a sizeable portion of the employees there at the time? And what is left of these values after the financial incentives grew?

The market forces from the huge economic upside of AI devalues individual values in two ways. It rewards those that choose whatever accelerates AI the most over any individuals who are more careful and act on individual values--the latter simply loses power in the long run until their virtue has no influence. As Anthropic says in their mission statements, it is not of much use to humanity to be virtuous if you are irrelevant. The latter, as is true for many technologies, is that economic prosperity is deeply linked to human welfare. And slowing or limiting progress leads to real immediate harm to the human population. And thus any government regulations which are against AI progress will always be unpopular, because those values which are arguing future harm of AIs is fighting against the values of saving people from diseases and starvation today.

I think it's definitely true that you should never count on a company to do principled things forever. But that doesn't mean that nothing is real or good.

Like Google's support for the open web: They very sincerely did support it, they did a lot of good things for it. And then later, they decided that they didn't care as much. It was wrong to put your faith in them forever, but also wrong to treat that earlier sincerity as lies.

In this case, Anthropic was doing a good thing, and they got punished for it, and if you agree with their stand, you should take their side.

> However, in this instance, it does seem that Anthropic is walking away from money.

The supply chain risk designation will be overturned in court, and the financial fallout from losing the government contracts will pale in comparison to the goodwill from consumers. Not to mention that giving in would mean they lose lots of their employees who would refuse to work under those terms. In this case, the principles are less than free.

That's what worries me so much about the development that OpenAI is stepping in. OpenAI's claim is that they have the same principles as Anthropic, but that claim is easy because it's free now because the govt wants to sell the "old bad, new good" story.

Surely OpenAI cannot but notice that those values, held firmly, make you an enemy of the state?

principles are easy when they're free

Indeed. If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority; you only know that something is a real priority when you get an answer to the question "what will you sacrifice for this".

I call this being ethically convenient. I think anthropic is playing to the crowd. This admin will be gone soon enough so no need dragging the brand into mud. Just need to hold out. They have enough money that walking away from the money isnt impressive. But pissing off the gov is pretty fun and far more interesting.

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