> 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...

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.

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.

> 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.

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).

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.

> 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.

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 ) 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/fdc179d60dc88f0c9b76e5d38... .

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.

When I graduated, companies had mottos like Don't do evil.

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.

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.

> 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.

>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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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".

> 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.)

But ma, look at our stonk price!

> 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.

The only difference between now and 2007 is the curtain has been pulled back revealing how things have always worked.

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

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.

> 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.

Let's not imply the world changed on its own. Trump changed it.

> 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.

> 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.

As the Heritage Foundation has said, we are in a cold civil war for our country and right now, the authoritarians are winning.

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-dwigh...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_boomerang

[3]: https://www.amnestyusa.org/blog/with-whom-are-many-u-s-polic...

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

> 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.

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.

[flagged]

[flagged]

[flagged]

> 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.

Millenials were famously called "generation sell". It is all corporate now, DEI one day, ICE the next. Just follow your leaders.