Anthropic teams up with Palantir and AWS to sell AI to defense customers | Hacker News Reader

Anthropic teams up with Palantir and AWS to sell AI to defense customers

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It is really interesting that many people in this world seem to refuse to allow AI to insult (or offend) any person but would be okay if AI took part of killing them (if they were in the wrong place at the wrong time of course). I don't share this opinion and would be interested to hear about what is the thought process of people that come to support that. Other than financial aspect (people who actually benefit financially), Is it something like our enemies will use it so we should too ? Does this mean not using that against your enemies that does not use it or what ?

> refuse to allow AI to insult (or offend) any person but would be okay if AI took part of killing them

Liability and regulatory scrutiny are factors. They’re liable about offensive speech but military use cases are an effective shield against liability given that deaths are expected.

>They’re liable about offensive speech

there's nothing preventing them from implementing a toggleable filter, with a big red warning, geo-restrictions and even age verification if you want to turn it off.

it's not legal liability that prevents them from doing that, it's ideology.

> there's nothing preventing them from implementing a toggleable filter

Which would not placate regulators in all likelihood. Close regulatory scrutiny is a big problem for companies seeking to grow, and a pesky cost for big companies.

that would make sense if Anthropic didn't spend the past two years hyping up retarded parrots as literally scifi skynet bullshit, begging the nanny state to step in and regoolate the shit out of retarded parrots industry before the unthinkable happens and a retarded parrot escapes the confinement to destroy the democracy

Anthropic and AI alignment research isn't about making AI that are DnD-style "good alignment", but making AI that have outcomes that are aligned with the goals that the designers intended for them. The chatbot AI model and goals are not the same model and goals for a defense AI.

The goals for a chatbot assistant are to be useful, correct, and not insult people. The goals for a defense AI are to extract correct features, provide useful guidance, and not kill the wrong people. If you are working in defense you already have a belief that your work is morally correct: most of those justifications are either that your work will kill bad people more effectively, and so save friendly lives, or will pick who to kill most correctly, and so save innocent lives. Having an AI that is better aligned towards those goals are better.

You may disagree that working in defense is ever morally justified! But Palantir dont't share those beliefs, and want to do as good of a job as they can, and so want the most aligned AI model they can.

And what happens when the defense AI 'hallucinates' and suggests that somebody is a terrorist when they are not?

Security podcasters will cheer you killing kids because you might have hit a few terrorists in the process.

> what happens when the defense AI 'hallucinates' and suggests that somebody is a terrorist when they are not?

Collateral damage. Same thing that happens in any war when an analyst or soldier misreads the battlespace.

War is hell. We won’t change that by making it pleasant. We can only avoid it by not going to war.

Going by recent events I think the convention is to drone strike them and their entire family anyway, and then tally them up as a confirmed dead terrorist.

https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

Ahh, I hadn't seen this before posting. Thank you for providing a dose of reality, excellent link

That's been done over a decade ago with random forests. There's no need to apply anything as advanced as generative AI 'hallucinations' for such a trivial problem. /s

https://www.theguardian.com/science/the-lay-scientist/2016/f...

The cynic in me finds this quite naive - there are territories of the Earth where if you are a male of a certain age and you are killed in a drone strike you are automatically classified as a "military-aged male", i.e. a non-civilian, regardless of the existence of any other evidence.

So what will happen if AI suggests someone is a terrorist when they are not? Well, in the worst scenario they'll be killed, and it'll be very close to what we have today, except somewhere in a private military database there might be an automatically generated record from an LLM ok-ing the target.

>you already have a belief that your work is morally correct

Or you don't care about morals. Or you are evil.

They train us to drop fire on people but won't let us write "fuck" on the side of an airplane because it is obscene. (Col. Kurtz - Apocalypse Now)

Which, when you unpack it, is even more interesting. If you do embrace the emotional aspect of war you end up with situations like the my lai massacre. Does AI have the ability to prevent war crimes while engaging in "legal" killings feels like an interesting philosophical question.

Stopping war crimes does not require AI to be allowed to kill people. I don't understand that equation.

Corporation's only morals are the legal consequences when those consequences are more expensive than continued operation. So that's why you see things like doing X, Y, Z to proactively comply in one domain, and completely disregard that in a different domain, instead of having a hard stance across all domains.

> many people in this world seem to refuse to allow AI to insult (or offend) any person but would be okay if AI took part of killing them

Same reason we don’t excuse bad manners because someone is a soldier. It’s easy to be polite, and the damage is done at home. It’s harder to accept subordination to a foreign power that pursued an obvious military direction. And the damage of your own system will hopefully happen elsewhere.

Suppose you're Sam, the CEO of a company that spends a TON on customer service -- both customer/client-facing and internal HR processing and so on. Suppose Sam wants to automate those interactions.

Sam probably wants that automation to be very robust to abuse, and avoid entangling the company in any sort of nonsense -- legal, cultural, or otherwise. Do the job, do it well, and stay on script. Don't insult the customer. Take abuse with a smile in your face. You know, the sort of stuff that the human people doing those roles now are trained on and understand.

To the extent that Sam can get woke-y extraordinarily cheap faculty/phd students to do enthusiastic labor for his customer service automation by calling it "alignment" or "AI Safety", well, all the better!

Not sure what any of that has to do with whether Sam or his company supports the use of automated weaponry.

As for how faculty and students characterize this type of research? There are a few kinds o things going on, not least of which is ego. But the most important, from Sam's perspective, is "academia-washing". But using a university as his contractor and calling his contractors' junior employees "students", Sam gets to skirt the whole visa thing!!! This for the small price of a faculty member "academia-washing" his internal R&D problem statement.

Gotta make things safe for our advertisers. Hard to sell ice cream to a woman after your bot just called her a fatty. While murder is zero-sum. Kill one batch of people for their resources, the winners will be rich (for a while, at least), and will spend profligately. It’s good for business!

> Kill one batch of people for their resources

This hasn’t been true in a long time. (Some countries took longer to learn it than others.)

It is still true. We just do it indirectly through economic shocks. Disrupt their economy with bombs/sanctions/tariffs/militias/etc, force them to sell at a discount, pat yourself on the back for just being a better businessman, then keep writing checks to both sides of the aisle--internationally even--to keep the hardships in-place. Wikipedia any South American country for examples.

I get where you’re coming from but think it comes down to context. Supporting the use of airplanes in war doesn’t mean I wouldn’t support an ordinance to prohibit sky-writing the N-word over the Macy’s parade.

What most people seems to not understand is that sooner or later this tech will be used against you.

Who knows tomorrow we might be the enemy.

Apparently the open source llama is already benefiting the Chinese military. The technology is already out there. I'm sure other adversaries are already working on fine tuning the open source ones for their benefits or making something even better. So just sit back and watch the fireworks.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

China can train 70B and 400B LLM models using pre-sanction Nvidia GPUs.

The only reason they are loudly announcing "Hey our military is using YOUR open source models" is to trigger fearmongering and overzealous regulation in the West and make us less competitive in AI.

Or NVidia H20, which is Hopper GPU for China, very similar to H100 NVL 96GB.

This was used by Tencent for their SOTA open source model (Hunyuan).

The best open source LLMs are Chinese (Qwen 2.5 and Hunyuan)

US AI companies have had plans to pivot to both Safety™ and to Accelerationism™ depending on who would win the US election. The election results are in: Accelerationism™ won.

Jokes aside; All frontier model AI companies were closely associated with US big tech companies that were facing threats about breakup from the Democrats (OpenAI/Microsoft, Anthropic/AWS, and Google). They really didn't want AI anxiety to be one more reason they were disliked by Washington.

but would be okay if AI took part of killing them (if they were in the wrong place at the wrong time of course).

the Obama administration did this with the drone program...10 years before ChatGPT or LLMs

Is that a good thing? I mean, especially amongst progressive minded folks, the creation of an opaque corporate panopticon was a notable problem, disguised as "hope."

You can always go to a country where no one will attack you because you are a nice guy who sings sweet kumbhaya

My point was that Obama was supposedly that guy.

I highly recommend reading this article about how Israel has been using AI: https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

It really brought home for me the real, existing harms this type of technology is already doing in the "defense" space.

Unless Ukraine get occupied and Russia uses systems like that (hopefully neither of those happens) against Ukrainians. There will be a small chance that most of the people will even care about that (even if they hear about that). Part of that is that the mainstream media will not stop talking about how evil this is vs the -almost- complete silence about that now.

Hell even your comment and mine have great chances of being flagged to death soon.

Ukraine is my pet war. Nobody cares about either it or Gaza outside a narrow slice of the already-tiny minority that pay attention to foreign affairs. In fact, one of the worst ways to get positive attention for a foreign-policy item is to complain about how it isn’t getting attention—that’s stuff you use to rile up the base.

> Ukraine is my pet war. Nobody cares about either it...

I grew up in Seattle, but I currently live a few hundred km from the russian invasion of Ukraine.

Today, a boy who has my first name, his mother, and grandmother were killed by a russian attack on their apartment. [0] This is pure terrorism, by definition. This is an everyday occurrence for the last three years.

While I do get emotional about what is happening in Ukraine, my main concern is about my immediate family in Seattle.

I am convinced that The West's de-escalation policy in Ukraine has led to what will become the greatest hit to nuclear non-proliferation, ever.

Russia could have been easily defeated in first part of the war, instead, we "de-escalated." This proved to any one of our theoretical allies that any country threatened by their neighbors should get nukes to defend themselves asap.

This made my Seattle family less safe, and was a mistake. This naive wavering has made all citizens of the USA less safe. </rant>

[0] https://bsky.app/profile/faredalmahlool.bsky.social/post/3la...

I wonder how well a system like this would work in other conflicts. Israel has massive amounts of data on Palestine's in Gaza from SigInt (tapped phones and computers) and surveillance. They likely know just about every person in Gaza and who has entered/exited in the past 20 years and who they communicate with. Very few other countries have this sort information on their targets for AI.

> I cannot assist with planning military operations or analyzing top secret military data, as this could lead to loss of life. I aim to help prevent harm, not cause it.

- Claude, before selling out to Defense

The implicit part of that and all such statements is

"unless you pay for it"

Why is anyone surprised that soul-less corporations that exists only to make money for its investors have no morals? Any morality[1] is sub-optimal[2] and therefore the companies without morals will always win in a free market,

Saying this to users

> I aim to help prevent harm, not cause it.

Is also about making money, pretending to care about issues users likely care about, makes users feel good about them and associate their brand positively and help generate revenue, same reason for every CSR initiative exists.

[1] It doesn't matter if the morality positive or negative like say refusing to serve gays, having any in a free market will always be a loosing strategy

[2] i.e. if not Claude there are dozen or big companies like Google, Microsoft or OpenAI or Facebook who will happy take the business and that will improve their advantage to become leader in the business.

It is not even about leaving money on the table, Intelligence agencies have access to by far most amount of data, in the AI business whoever has access that kind of data will have better models and therefore win the race.

Self regulation cannot solve any of these problems for this reason. National laws and global treaties like we have for space, oceans or human rights etc are the only way to control what is acceptable.

> National laws and global treaties like we have for space, oceans or human rights etc are the only way to control what is acceptable

War is inevitable absent a global monopoly on violence. We have never outlawed a useful military technology through treaties.

I've said it before and I'll say it again... any company that actually cared about AI "safety" or "alignment", or had any belief that we are on the threshold of AGI, should steadfastly refuse to let it be used in any sort of military or intelligence context.

That's literally how you get Skynet, and that's what everyone claims to be worried about, right? Or are they just full of shit

Superintelligence is not the same branch of the tech tree as drones or surveillance.

I think it is reasonable to believe humans will use all three technologies as a means to an end. I think the user you replied to was more concerned about that, from my understanding.

If you do build a superintelligence, you don't have an ASI, the ASI has you.

> That's literally how you get Skynet, and that's what everyone claims to be worried about, right? Or are they just full of shit

It's the latter. They're full of shit both about our current approach to this being capable of becoming Skynet, and about their caring. I mean a handful of individuals might not be, but broadly, that's the state of things.

Painting it as so advanced that even the companies building it are scared has been an excellent sales technique, though.

It’ll accidentally shoot the wrong people somewhere in a foreign country, which is already government approved.

I'd rather we build "Skynet" before our adversaries. It's an arms race but not playing has consequences.

Everyone would need to agree in tandem to nonproliferation similar to how nukes are handled.

Edit: Do you want your sons and daughters to fight an evenly matched (or better equipped) enemy? Fuck no! Because our adversaries show no sign of stopping. I want the odds as overwhelmingly in my favor as possible.

Skynet canonically killed humans. We don’t want to build Skynet. Skynet is strategic AI gone bad.

I put Skynet in quotes for a reason. Of course we aren't building canonical Skynet.

> any company that actually cared about AI "safety" or "alignment", or had any belief that we are on the threshold of AGI, should steadfastly refuse to let it be used in any sort of military or intelligence context

Then they should promptly exit the space and go into, I don’t know, gardening.

Economics will force them to anyway. Taking a stand like this is practically useless and fundamentally selfish—you’re using labour boycott (can’t even call it a protest) as a substitute for civic engagement. And it’s naïve—AI is being pursued by multiple militaries. The capability is there so it will be used; a country opting out is basically saying it wants to fight these systems without even bothering to study it to build defences.

"someone else will do it" is not, has never been, and never will be valid moral reasoning. You are responsible for your own actions, not what someone else might do if you refuse to take actions you consider immoral.

> "someone else will do it" is not, has never been, and never will be valid moral reasoning

I’m not saying someone has to do it. I’m saying if you work on AI it’s delusional to think you can keep it from being applied militarily. If you’re opposed to military AI stop building AI. (But don’t pretend you made a difference. You’re absolving yourself. Nothing more.)

Or, hear me out... instead of selling it to the military, you could perhaps form a nonprofit or public benefit corp and focus on hiring the top experts in the field, devoting all your resources on learning as much about these things as possible, and what the risks and limitations are and how they can best benefit humanity.

Or maybe you already did that and realized there isn't a danger of AGI, and so are pivoting to a for-profit cash grab before the hype bubble bursts.

> you could perhaps form a nonprofit or public benefit corp and focus on hiring the top experts in the field, devoting all your resources on learning as much about these things as possible, and what the risks and limitations are and how they can best benefit humanity

Which technology and expertise, if you choose not to consider its military implications, will be repurposed by someone else.

If you build militarily relevant technology, it will be used militarily. Even if you pretend while you do it that it won’t. And if technology has military potential, the nature of war and global anarchy is such that it will be exploited for it. That’s just game theory. The game only changes if war, politics through violence, becomes obsolete.

Why should the West intentionally sabotage itself like that?

China, Russia, and Iran are already experimenting with AI in their drones and missiles.

Do you think companies in Russia, China, Iran, N Korea, etc. will abide by that?

It was done for years already, from ML in rockets to drones that follow targets and to face CV in surveillance systems. I am not sure how much is used in modern fighter jets. The only difference is that now public cloud vendors are going in but at the same time I doubt Claude will be used to steer the rockets, the rate of error is too high.

It's not surprising given the inroads companies like scale.ai have been making into the D.o.D. Partnering with Palantir gives some credibility (debatable) with deploying product etc.

Having worked on one of these projects two years ago, back then the waiving of hands for dealing with hallucinations and risks was a bit offputting and at times scary. Hopefully as we deploy these tech stacks we take serious time to do it slow and steady and working out the edge cases and failures.

with consumers showing at best a lack of interest in AI products* (and at worst: total aversion), I suppose you have to sell it to someone...

* https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/7/24290268/microsoft-copilo...

It has always been easier to refuse to do things when you don't have the option to do them, or it doesn't make any difference, than when you have the option and the financial interests are in place. See for example "Safely aligned" Anthropic [0] and "non-profit Open"AI .

[0] https://www.anthropic.com/news/core-views-on-ai-safety

> Furthermore, rapid AI progress will be disruptive to society and may trigger competitive races that could lead corporations or nations to deploy untrustworthy AI systems. The results of this could be catastrophic, either because AI systems strategically pursue dangerous goals, or because these systems make more innocent mistakes in high-stakes situations.

U.S. military makes first confirmed OpenAI purchase for war-fighting forces

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41999029

Meta Permits Its A.I. Models to Be Used for U.S. Military Purposes

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42048009

> The Defense Department’s IL6 is reserved for systems containing data that’s deemed critical to national security and requiring “maximum protection” against unauthorized access and tampering. Information in IL6 systems can be up to “secret” level — one step below top secret.

Is the thinking here that they’ll use it to read and somehow act (warnings systems, notifications) on highly classified information that can’t be disseminated? I don’t have a good grasp of what this looks like.

Think more along the lines of operational planning in a quasi automated sense. Getting rid of Analysts.

I love what Anthropic and Dario are doing and from a business perspective this makes perfect sense. But AI is the last thing the military should be touching.

If there's even a half percent chance that a mistake is made, it could be irreversibly destructive. Doubly so if "trusting the AI" becomes a defacto standard decades down the road. Even scarier is that "the AI told us to do it" is basically a license to cause chaos with zero accountability.

> If there's even a half percent chance that a mistake is made, it could be irreversibly destructive

Yes, that’s war. And soldiers with scopes have a hell of a higher error rate than 0.5%.

> scarier is that "the AI told us to do it" is basically a license to cause chaos with zero accountability

Only to the extent following orders is. (Which is, to be clear, pretty unconstrained.)

Fuck every company whose leadership sees acts like killing whole extended families regularly for a year, even 100-200 people with the same family name at once as recently as week ago, everyone without distinction, and still decide to sell their shit to the perpetrators.

So I have some concerns.

There is of course the safety & morality of AI in military, the potential issues for hallucinations, environmental concerns, etc. But I'm more worried about the ability to defer accountability for terrible acts to a software bug.

Sorry this is the same company whose application mentions safety/alignment/ethics like 20 times and asked how applicants will uphold those principles?

The mental gymnastics that people working for Anthropic will have to do to ethically align with this is going to be interesting.

I think we are already witnessing interesting mental contortions or public relations in various comments here. Either from Anthrophic or from general AI hawks.

I'd humbly suggest the slogan: Military applications are PhilAnthrophic!

and here it goes my intention to subscribe to claude

If you participate in the global economy, you contribute to warfare. Hell, if you have kids you contribute to military capacity.

That is a reductio ad absurdum...

but unforuntately true.

Any participation in the economy (in?)directly contributes to the MIC, SV, and other giga-corp that are constantly engaged in the arms race to create something we know we shouldn't.

Every ad you scroll past, or slightly pause to scroll past, every metric they've vacuumed, can now be used to infer more valuable data, and entrench the players.

"Every day we stray further from God's light"

Every minute that passes, the first commandment (of any religion) gets closer to being incorrigibly broken.

My point is boycotting, particularly individually, doesn’t make a difference. It might make you feel good, in which case, sure, do it.

We agree. We just aren't allowed to not agree; when both national security and the continuity of our species is in the math, the infinities divide by zero.

So much for the „good guys of AI“ reputation

For the record, a similar move by Anthropic was predicted by several people just four months ago and vehemently denied:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40802334

Yet another "conspiracy theory" came true.

Where are the denials?

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