alt Hacker News> The required technology is not possible - 3D printers read code, not intent; they cannot tell what a shape is for.
"Anthropic announces Project Disarm, a new model designed for 3d printer manufacturers to quickly infer whether the intent of an stl file is a weapon. The printer first submits the job to the cloud, and only after it's approved will it print."
Not that I want this future, just that I can imagine it.
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The future is almost certainly the terrible path: "applications phoning home to judge whether a use case is approved by the company." All writing is on the wall, and directionally that's the way software and hardware has been moving. We have unfortunately normalized the idea that users must have this ongoing tethered relationship to the product manufacturers and software developers, who measure, change, and control the user's usage at their whim.
You can no longer just buy a tool and use it.
Yes, I can imagine it too. And, if such a 'safety nanny' is enacted into law, I'm confident it will A. Refuse to print a significant number of innocent projects, or B. Be trivially circumvented by bad actors. The odds are high that it will manage to do both.
Finally a llm trained on manufacturing weapons. "AI remove all the safe metal from a lower reciever so that the dangerous part can be safely destroyed without endangering the environment "
A dedicated model for this purpose could easily run locally. Recognizing shapes is not exactly cutting age AI.
The input to the detector could be not the G code instructions, but a 3D model representation recovered by simulating the G code. (That's a thing that exists.)
The requirements for a 3D printer which detects weapon shapes is actually fairly realistic.
It would likely have laughable false positives: 8-year-old Johnny not being able to 3D print a squirt pistol.
Some common tools have pistol-like form factors: spray guns, glue/grease/caulking guns, drills, hair dryers.
It is a cockamamie idea; but to claim that it is not doable seems a bit disingenuous.
They will also refuse to print 3D printer parts, especially spares for the printer to print them.
Knowing how governments do this stuff its going to be something lazy/easy to bypass like a list of stl files/hashes that are banned
When I was a kid I saw someone with a makeshift shotgun made out of a steel pipe, a strong spring, and and a rough striker. Not very effective, but it was working.
You missed the step where a DMV-clone of a state bureaucracy reviews the LLMs output before nixing the request a few weeks after the LLMs result.
Based on the fact that Claude Opus 4.8 decided I needed a cybersecurity exemption to debug a stupid pure virtual call bug (basically virtual method called inside of destructor) that I had already found, oh boy, I sure would love to have my 3D prints analyzed by Anthropic safe guards. We should also ensure that nothing shaped like a dildo can be printed without scanning our face and genitalia and keeping it on file with Persona while we're at it.
I'm not mad at you for suggesting this, you're right, I'm just generally aimlessly angry and ready for this world to burn.