The Department of Defense was named as such after the detonations of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki

We - as a humanity - collectively recognized the weight of our creation, and decided to walk back

Discussing “AI alignment” in the same breadth as aligning with a “Department of War” (in any country) is simply not an intellectually sound position

None of the countries we’ve attacked this year pose an existential threat to humanity. In contrast, striking first and pulling Europe, Russia, and China into a hot war beginning in the Middle East surely poses a greater collective threat than bioweapons, sentient AI, or the other typical “AI alignment” concerns

Why aren’t there more dissidents among the researcher ranks?

Let me rephrase it for you:

"We both want a docile American public who go along with our desires so we can achieve goals that may be contrary to the interests of the American public."

My eyebrows basically left my face after reading the whole thing.

This is not the forbidden love story I would've asked for.

As someone looking at this from outside the US, the whole sequence of events is frankly terrifying.

I fear that frontier AI is going to be nationalised for military purposes, not just in the US but across the globe.

At the same time, I really don’t know what Anthropic were expecting when they described their technology as potentially more dangerous than an atom bomb while agreeing to integrate purpose-built models with Palantir to be deployed in high-security networks for classified military tasks.

Well I will say that if there's a word that describes what the Department has been up to in Venezuela and Iran, "Defense" does seem to be the least Orwellian option.

Would love to enumerate those commonalities. Run by a psychopath? Commitment to violent lethality? Burning billions of dollars for uncertain goals? (ok there's one)

I was actually very impressed with their post. It’s a work of art for how carefully it was worded.

My takeaway is that they are bending a knee to smooth things over. It’s business and it’s human behavior. They are actually furious and would love to tell Trump to crawl up his own ass, but that doesn’t help anyone in the long run. It’s in everyone’s best interest to get back to work and hope for the best tomorrow. It’s the adult thing to do. However, it's exactly why humanity is the shitshow it is right now. One side is trying to keep the world going by adulting while the other side keeps acting like complete fucking idiots.