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mempkotoday at 1:15 AM5 repliesview on HN

Long time ago I worked for a company that I learned was selling it's software to help target people during the Iraq war. I quit because I cannot support building software that kills people.

This is a message to people working for that line of business at Anthropic. You don't have to do it, you can quit. If you are helping this insane administration to conduct war on Iran quit. You don't need to have that kind of blood on your hands.

I saw a someone's hypothesis that a generative model was used to help classify buildings to decide what to bomb and that the Girls school was misclassified. If this was an Anthropic model, I can imagine what it feels like being a worker there in that line of business.


Replies

ryandraketoday at 1:25 AM

I've also quit a job where the products I was working were meant to be deployed to CBP to hunt down immigrants. It's a nice gesture, but it won't stop these companies. They just hired someone else without an ethical backbone, and continued the project like nothing happened.

Tech leadership is rotten to the core, and that can't be fixed by individuals making a stand.

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skybriantoday at 2:35 AM

At a technical level, I don't believe they're specifically working on targeting anyone. They're providing a general-purpose API that Palantir is presumably using to build the target-finding software.

I imagine that's why the implementation got so far along before this blew up. Someone at Anthropic talked with someone at Palantir and they had a "you did what? Did you read the contract terms" moment, and that was after it went into production.

gentleman11today at 4:05 AM

if all the good people leave all the important positions, what will happen?

khazhouxtoday at 4:55 AM

Normally I'd agree with this sentiment, but I'm having a hard time feeling bad we took out the Ayatollah. You know, what with him killing tens of thousands of Iranians who demanded reform. I didn't care one bit for him doing that.

camillomillertoday at 1:21 AM

Were you earning seven figures tho? That suppresses moral stances rather quickly I reckon

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