alt Hacker NewsRespectfully, it's very hard to see how anyone could look at what just happened and come to the conclusion that one company ends up classed a "supply chain risk" while another agrees the the same terms that led to that. Either the terms are looser, they're not going to be enforced, or there's another reason for the loud attempt to blacklist Anthropic. It's very difficult to see how you could take this at face value in any case. If it is loose terms or a wink agreement to not check in on enforcement you're never going to be told that. We can imagine other scenerios where the terms stated were not the real reason for the blacklisting, but it's a real struggle (at least for me) to find an explanation for this deal that doesn't paint OpenAI in a very ethically questionable light.
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I agree with your assessment, but given the past behaviour of this administration I wouldn't be shocked to discover that the real reason is "petulance".
One explanation is that this is effectively a quid pro quo, given Brockman’s enormous financial support of the current president.
I agree it makes little sense, and I think if all players were rational it never would have played out this way. My understanding is that there are other reasons (i.e., beyond differing red lines) that made the OpenAI deal more palatable, but unfortunately the information shared with me has not been made public so I won't comment on specifics. I know that's unsatisfying, but I hope it serves as some very mild evidence that it's not all a big fat lie.
Are you saying that everything so far in this administration has been 100% rational?
anthropic has nothing but a contract to enforce what is appropriate usage of their models. there are no safety rails, they disabled their standard safety systems
openai can deploy safety systems of their own making
from the military perspective this is preferable because they just use the tool -- if it works, it works, and if it doesn't, they'll use another one. with the anthropic model the military needs a legal opinion before they can use the tool, or they might misuse it by accident
this is also preferable if you think the government is untrustworthy. an untrustworthy government may not obey the contract, but they will have a hard time subverting safety systems that openai builds or trains into the model
I agree with what you're saying, but given the egos involved in the current admin there's a practical interpretation:
1. Department of War broadly uses Anthropic for general purposes
2. Minority interests in the Department of War would like to apply it to mass surveillance and/or autonomous weapons
3. Anthropic disagrees and it escalates
4. Anthropic goes public criticizing the whole Department of War
5. Trump sees a political reason to make an example of Anthropic and bans them
6. The entirety of the Department of War now has no AI for anything
7. Department of War makes agreement with another organization
If there was only a minority interest at the department of war to develop mass surveillance / autonomous weapons or it was seen as an unproven use case / unknown value compared to the more proven value from the rest of their organizational use of it, it would make sense that they'd be 1) in practice willing to agree to compromise on this, 2) now unable to do so with Anthropic in specific because of the political kerfuffle.
I imagine they'd rather not compromise, but if none of the AI companies are going to offer them it then there's only so much you can do as a short term strategy.
> one company ends up classed a "supply chain risk" while another agrees the the same terms that led to that
Never discount the possibility of Hegseth being petty and doing the OpenAI deal with the same terms to imply to the world that Anthropic is being unreasonable because another company signed a deal with him.
> it's very hard to see how anyone could look at what just happened
I think what you are missing is their annual comp with two commas in it.