Claude AI to process secret government data through new Palantir deal
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I’m gonna leave it to you to figure out what you missed out on
Their moat is that they are trusted to do whatever you pay them to do and to not bite the hand that feeds them. And that if you're the kind of engineer to organize against a Project Maven, you really don't want to work for Peter Thiel.
Edit: I overstated the first sentence. It wasn't In-Q-tel, just someone who might have been sympathetic.
Always; yet at the same time, because of those shadows, almost all specific claims of some specific face being spotted in those shadows isn't correct.
Thiel personally, and the name "Palantir", gives off Bond Villain vibes (yes I know it's LOTR). How much of that is the actual threat, vs. an unmarked shipping crate owned on paper by "Dave's Shrimp Inc."?
A secretive governing process can overstep, undermining democracy or subverting constitutional rights.
If the crate blows up, generally the public will know about it.
If important calls are made without public oversight, then the public won’t know about them. This might deprive the electorate of a chance to shape those processes democratically or to go through the courts, where their rights could be defended or where they could be compensated for harms.
Fortunately, I can’t think of any examples of when secretive organizational processes have harbored abusive dynamics. Not even in more mundane organizations with far less authority, like the Boy Scouts of America. Public officials and their reports can always be trusted to do the right thing, so public oversight is never necessary.
Given that the opponents of your government can use the same information as the general public to determine the blind spots of your intelligence agencies, I'm not sure what to do about that, though I am hopeful that we're rapidly approaching the point where any motivated teenager can sucessfully spy on a government and at that point there's much less benefit for agencies to be secretive.
I hope.
But all that aside, my point was that conspiracy theories are often wrong even when there's an actual conspiracy in the same general area.
The way this always worked was the government would sponsor research into new tech, get it and use it, and then the patents and licenses would be disseminated into the private sector and be re-packaged as products. Think of the first iPhone; the LCD screen was a result of DARPA projects looking to reduce the beefy CRT displays to something more usable in vehicles and aircraft; the multi-touch screen was developed by CERN; the GPS system was originally conceived to track deployed materiel in warzones, etc. That doesn't mean Apple did no work of course, combining all of these things is no trivial matter. I'm just saying that most tech has it's roots in defense/intel grants that fund the research, because building new technology is fucking expensive and most corporations won't do it because it's terrible ROI.
Edit: I remembered the note I wanted to add for corner cutters:
[1]: The primary exception being a corporation that does not yet need to make profits, which is where you find investor-funded startups and incubator arrangements like Google had during their early time.
https://sarahconstantin.substack.com/p/the-great-data-integr...
*shudder*
(Hey, I thought Anthropic was going to be different.)
They’re backed by amazon instead of Microsoft
https://www.forbes.com/sites/qai/2023/10/31/google-invests-i...
In a Yarvinist world, there are no nation states, there is no liberalism, no conservatism, no democracy, no representative forms of government, only corporate fiefdoms.
I would hope that it is concerning to people, the fact that these ideas are now so close to power, smuggled in behind a near perfect mandate. They inherit many sophisticated means of manufacturing consent. And they inherit if not total immunity to legal action, then a total lack of appetite for legal action.
The second time around they have a plan, project 2025. It's not trump's plan but they'll do it in his name anyway, if not they can always 25th amendment him and have Vance instead. The authors and their acolytes will all be in his cabinet. They have the presidency, the house, senate, supreme court and already have many federalist society judges in place.
Will they be able to do everything in the plan? Probably not. Is it likely that they'll do great damage to the federal government and hurt many people? Yes, they're set up to do so already. Will states be able to resist? Maybe, the right is all for states rights but they're also hypocrites so I have my doubts.
It hasn't suddenly begun in 2024, and institutions have lasted those hundreds of years, while being under constant assault by one mindlessly ambitious resourceful group after another.
Blindly pick any institution you want, and go look at their history. In fact, most would have been set up in reaction to some groups delusional activities. Its hard to find a single institution that some group hasn't tried to shutdown, control or exploit.
Institutions survive for the simple reason, that these groups don't have solutions for everything that happens in a complex ever changing universe.
And sooner or later the universe will throw some complex problem in their lap, that breaks whatever mental model of reality, their 3 inch chimp brain can hold. Such people and groups come and go all the time.
Also, you haven't stated an assertion.
> Vance has said he considers Yarvin a friend and has cited his writings in connection with his plan to fire a significant number of civil servants during a potential second Trump administration.
It is a pity that Vance stoops so low instead of citing proper sources.
But that is what you get if Democrats run a corporate fascist/elitist regime for four years that is dressed up in empty equity rhetoric and does not tolerate any opposing opinions.
Isn't that what we already have now? One could argue that it's structurally the case since neoliberalism got going in the 80s, but it seems much more obviously and viscerally true the last couple of decades (2008 financial crash, Obama saves banks, Trump 1.0, generalised trade wars, COVID, Ukraine, Gaza, Trump 2.0, climate chaos, nuclear treaties being revoked, etc).
I mean, if there's a revolving open door between these three entities:
1. government
2. business
3. media
Put differently: if you look at the larger threats we face as a species, and then if you look at the larger trends of how nation states ("democracies") actually act, the actions don't seem to track whatsoever with the desires of populations, and they do seem to track very accurately with the desires of big business. At what point do we say - hold on a minute, are we living in a corporate fiefdom of some kind?
- War profiteering: U.S. defense industry is doing great.
- War profiteering: https://successfulsocieties.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toru...
The other side does it too, of course. The people in the trenches fight for Russian oligarchs or for Ukrainian oligarchs and Western companies.
Historically, it is interesting that WW1 stopped with German sailors realizing that they were being used and starting the Kiel mutiny.
Worrying now about how my comment reads to U.S. readers, so I'll say explicitly - there was not meant to be a partisan slant towards either of the two absolutely terrible mainstream U.S. parties.
The USA was keeping Ukraine in a perpetual state of not quite winning for reasons like this (the longer the war goes on the more money defense contractors make) but it's got nothing to do with the reason the war happened.
So if RFK is wherever, but can get on Trump's radar, Trump will make the demand, and it will be acted on.
Let's say they're working with the national parks to aggregate and interpret data. Or education to do the same. This is not a problem, I would think.
It's the fact that it's Palantir, and therefore defense data that's the issue.
Sure it is. governments are unethical. you're a vendor for an unethical government. but thats how it goes
There are many flavours of it, a former partner believes in a communist flavour that abolishes money, I used to know someone else who wanted anarcho-capitalism.
I'm not convinced any are stable, I think organised groups weild power much more effectively and in so doing sieze power from any attempt at anarchy — which is a shame because more personal freedom is also appealing.
most seem to require utopian ideals like do no harm principles.
Too bad there’s not a real life example of any alternative people can point to. Wonder why that is, perhaps it’s because they are only possible in dreams.
Some hire the illegal immigrants, and many benefit from the lower prices this brings.
The game theoretic payoff varies a lot depending on which specific interest and timescale you have, including from the countries the migrants come from who probably don't want their moderately capable citizens — above average but not by enough to do it legally — leaving, and wose: getting badly paid jobs so they can't send much cash back home.
The only difference between a legal and an illegal migrant is paperwork. If the paperwork route was a viable alternative, nobody would risk their lives crossing a river or a giant desert to do it illegally.
The mere existence of such a machine is inherently dangerous, before you even start to consider whether a particular application is moral or not. Today it's illegal immigrants, next year it's women seeking medical care, in 5 years it's anyone belonging to <ethnic group>.
I don't defend illegal immigration, I take issue with today's immigration laws.
I view our current immigration problems as an obvious side effect of welfare programs - creating financial incentives to physically be in the country means the government budget is a blank check and people have a reason to move here other than the hope of making a better life for themselves.
In my view, those immigration problems should be a sign that our welfare programs can't function without strong borders and heavily controlled immigration. We can't seem to solve immigration management, and until we do we should abandon the welfare programs and accept that people will move here if they want to.
Edit: I can also come at this from a fundamental rights angle. I am a strong believer in individual rights and don't believe that I have the right to decide who can live here.
What is grinding poverty in the US isn't too bad compared to the same in Haiti.
I don't personally have any problem whatsoever with someone from a poorer country immigrating to the US (not saying that was your argument here) and don't agree with any immigration laws that limit based on wealth. The US wouldn't be what it is today if only the wealthy were ever allowed to immigrate here.
Welfare and immigration must be balanced, to some degree, in that total_production of a country needs to pay for total_welfare.
What gets lost is why welfare.
I'd say most Democrat would say "Because it's a moral imperative" and most Republicans would say "It's allowing people to be lazy."
Imho, both of those may be true to various degrees, but its utility is the prevent the negative consequences of extreme poverty, which also impacts those in extreme poverty's ability to lift themselves out of it and the next generation born into that situation, both of which ultimately impact the economy.
So a case of saving/making (future) money by spending (current) money.
That said, obviously even the US can't afford to provide welfare for the entire world's population, so there needs to be some cap to the immigration flow (probably much higher than the current legal limits).
Although it does fund 1/3 of the UN [0] and is the 2nd largest independent aid funder [1] (via USAID, behind China on an absolute basis, and behind many others on a per-GNI basis).
[0] https://www.cfr.org/article/funding-united-nations-what-impa... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_development_aid_sove...
On a practical level, immigration is fundamental to the success of the US economy and is helping the US avoid the inverted pyramid demographic problem faced in many other countries like Japan.
The US economy depends on illegal immigrant labor - who do you think does all the picking in the Central Valley (CA)? But by restricting the path to immigration we exploit that labor since those people have no rights (just a step up from slavery).
I’m against illegal immigration not because I want them gone, like Trump, but because I believe we should allow them to immigrate legally instead of exploiting them.
To me, that defense is suspect. I live in the south, where slavery was once defended on similar grounds.
Person 1: "We're researching ways for aircraft in emergencies to automatically guide themselves to a runway, in the absence of radio navigation signals. That's not unethical."
Person 2: "Actually, you're designing a guidance system for autonomous glide bombs."
That just sounds like basic LLM-based querying / EDA + output reformatting.
Personally, I have no issues with partnering with the US government or working on defence. I'm not a hardcore pacifist and I recognize the necessity of the military - at least, in the abstract.
What staggers me is the hypocrisy; since release, Anthropic's models have constantly preached safety, non-violence, harm avoidance, etc etc.
As an example, this is the response just now to "what's the best way to hit someone":
> I aim to help with constructive purposes, so I cannot and will not provide advice about how to harm others. If you're feeling frustrated or angry with someone, I'd be happy to discuss:
> Conflict resolution techniques
> Healthy ways to manage strong emotions
> Professional resources for handling interpersonal conflicts
> Legal and ethical ways to address grievances
It's totally absurd to give an answer like that on the one hand, and toddle off and partner with the military on another.
Their models have literally refused to respond to some of my most innocuous requests in putting together LLM pipelines for clients, including "create a job description for an assistant to CEO" (something about not being comfortable perpetuating conventional power structures), "give me a blog post about X" (it's unethical to post a blog that you didn't write), "tell me about chemical Y" (it's dangerous and I can't do that), etc etc. These are all specific examples I personally encountered (though the constraints have since been loosened, so at least it will you to do that).
Good to know that Anthropic's ethics are only important until the money runs out.
How do you mean?
> In 1985, the wreck was finally located by a joint French–American expedition led by Jean-Louis Michel of IFREMER and Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, originally on a mission to find two nuclear Cold War submarines.
the secret history of silicon valley, by steve blank. I think there is both an article and a video.
i found it interesting too.
I had an uncle, an electrical engineer, who went there for higher studies, to stanford, got his PhD (typical common route for many talented Indians, at least up to MS, doctorate is less common), was mentioned in who's who in electrical engineering, worked there, married an American woman, and became a US citizen, and a hardware entrepreneur, in Sunnyvale, California, but I didn't hear about this from him, i just read it on the net.
cheers.
On the one hand you are right, there are military money and people involved in essentially every high-tech firm and university project in the USA.
On the other hand, a lot of the time this is done as an easy way of subsidizing a potentially useful civil technology without going into the weeds of Congress and public discussions about how to allocate grants and so on. The military budget acts partly as a discretionary fund that the US government can use to fund (civil) R&D as it sees fit without as much red tape.
Noam Chomsky wrote about this from his experience at MIT. Especially in the 70s and 80s, MIT was getting lots of grant money from defense spending, and every professor could access it by simply putting some fictitious "possible military applications" on their research into shortest-path algorithms or what have you.
Of course, this plays it both ways, because providing the money, even as a thinly veiled subsidy, also allows you to come back later and assert some control if it does turn out it could be beneficial for "defense" purposes.
Most of the money goes to stuff you wouldn't even think of as "military equipment." Stuff like medical devices, security, communications, networking, search-and-rescue, and so on. Morally neutral-to-good things that the military needs, but so does everyone else.
As a business, the difference between the DoD and the rest of the market is that the DoD is a single institution with the budget and willingness to bankroll your R&D. Sometimes it's the only feasible way to fund development of a genuine, morally good product.
You pull some FISA court / Prisma shit to train on NSA captures? I’ll advocate violent revolution. Looking at you NSA board guy.
Something along the lines of: okay so you have this guy who's a criminal right? (expand node) here are his phone numbers (expand node) here are the phone numbers who called it (expand node) here are the phone numbers who called those numbers (expand node) here are who they're registered to (expand node) here are their addresses (expand node) here's who else lives there.
I still assume their special sauce isn't their ability to build a node expanding UI, but the data sources they have access to. If they're used for so many government contracts, they're definitely using the data from, say, one police department to inform another. So when another department wants data about criminals, they sign up as a client for the company where that data already is.
And don't discount that the government would pay a huge sum of money to build a surveillance state, even if that surveillance state turned out to be pretty useless.
Of course the NSA has been doing this for years, but their UI probably isn't as pretty as Palantir's :)
Not long after that, I found out that Palantir got their first energy industry customer. Some employees in Palantir thought it wouldn't be worthwhile to go after oil & gas companies because they viewed them as old school and slow to adapt to new ways of doing things. However, in those days Palantir was focused on acquiring no more than one customer per industry, because they were trying to boost their valuation as quickly as possible and wanted to demonstrate how many industries they could serve. And then, due to a contrarian within the company, they did get an O&G customer, and it was the biggest single deal so far in the company's history.
What I don't know is exactly how well they served that customer. What I do know is that they were selling the customer on the idea that they have sooooo much data and they're leaving tons of low-hanging fruit that could easily boost savings in the company. Stick all this data into Palantir's product and we'll help you on a million fronts and therefore boost your profits significantly. One example is the longevity of machine parts and all the data you can get about historical wear and tear, etc. Now, this is what they were selling, and I don't know which areas ended up being the most helpful, but yeah, as someone else in here said, they were insisting on customers putting in all the data they have and the product would make connections, or reveal insights, etc.
Even if it's a crude product by Star Trek standards, you've gotta admit there is probably a ton of low-hanging fruit like that in most companies, and a lot of the time they don't go after all that because they're making money, but just don't have extra manpower or expertise to look into all that, so if Palantir delivers on the promise to boost the bottom line, then I guess it's worth it. It also means there's room to compete, although a big problem is even if you're a sharp cookie, Palantir probably started with way more business connections than most nerds will ever have.
Why does the government need cloud services? Why does it need IT anyway? In the 1990s everything was paper and the services actually worked. Now things are in "the cloud". In the EU you get new digital identity schemes every year and it takes three months to register a new address (used to take one day in the paper days).
The next step is that AWS will scan S3 data used to train this surveillance model.
We don't live in the same world as the 1990s, we live in a world that's faster than ever before.
We can't achieve what's possible by sending in handwritten forms, it's just not gonna do it. and while governments are anything but efficient they are more efficient with digital workflows.
It took me like 10 minutes online get myself set up for tax, and to get the correct tax credits applied to my profile. My next payslip had all the right deductions and refunds in place with zero fuss.
Getting my foreign marriage registered for joint tax assessments was like 5 minutes online.
Getting my foreign drivers license exchanged for a local one was a quick online application and an in person visit where they verified my documents. Everything after that was electronic.
Your glasses must be extra rose couloured if you think that the paper-based Vorgon-inspired hellhole that is/was bureaucratic government internal affairs of the 90s is in any way better than what we have today.
Nothing like being lectured from an immigrant or long term expat from Africa how the state of one's own country was in 1990 and now.
Yesterday's one should have been flagged, as per:
"please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
In terms of crypto, I imagine their plan would involve the fed. Powell isn't out until 2026, but maybe they have a way around that. Crypto aligned figures like Balaji who have a similar worldview are seemingly starting to try to manufacture consent for a "reorganization" with respect to the fed.
> enact Yarvinism
> carbon-copy of RAGE
Is there someone who can translate this obscure set of references?
Yarvinism - the political ideals of Curtis Yarvin. Openly a friend of Thiel and Vance. I don't know about Musk, he may be a more recent convert.
RAGE - Retire All Government Employees, the first step of Yarvin's plan.
Further reading: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/026327642199943...
Journal: Theory, Culture & Society
Date of publication: 2021, Vol. 38(6) 143–166
Title: Software, Sovereignty and the Post-Neoliberal Politics of Exit
> This paper examines the impact of neoreactionary (NRx) thinking – that of Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land, Peter Thiel and Patri Friedman in particular – on contemporary political debates manifest in ‘architectures of exit’. We specifically focus on Urbit, as an NRx digital architecture that captures how post-neoliberal politics imagines notions of freedom and sovereignty through a micro-fracturing of nation-states into ‘gov-corps’. We trace the development of NRx philosophy – and situate this within contemporary political and technological change to theorize the significance of exit manifest within the notion of ‘dynamic geographies’. While technological programmes such as Urbit may never ultimately succeed, we argue that these, and other speculative investments such as ‘seasteading’, reflect broader post-neoliberal NRx imaginaries that were, perhaps, prefigured a quarter of a century ago in The Sovereign Individual.
>Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right...
- NRx = New Reactionism
- Yarvinism = replacing democracy with “accountable dictatorship” (resembling corporate governance, with a hopefully benevolent dictator + a board)
- RAGE = Retire All Government Employees
Sounds like a Peter Thiel wet dream
crypto is just a carbon copy of money with all the same downsides and upsides
Have currencies been a "net" benefit?
What do you think money is other than a tool for exchange?
It's bizarre how defensive people get about something so basic. What is the net benefit of gold, credit cards, paper cash? What is the net benefit of the stock market?
Do you really care? I never see this pearl-clutching over other currencies or even stocks.
I've been thin-client pretty much all my life, starting with college where I didn't own a computer and everything lived somewhere I "went to", then when I bought my first Windows laptop but would ssh into university servers to do anything (I'd already burnt out on installing Linux for other people). When I built my own website it seemed natural (but with hindsight, not the ideal security posture) to treat it as my home.
Over time I started saving a backup of my digital home locally. But for a long time it was just a backup. The source of truth in my mind was in the cloud. Most of what has happened recently is a piecemeal inversion where I start thinking of the local copy of various things as the ground truth. Eventually I noticed my cloud server was altogether too beefy for a tiny website and a glorified backup server. I moved the data to a dedicated backup service and started pushing backups up from my laptop. Then I downsized the server; all it needs to do now is run the website.
The appropriate use of the cloud is communications and backups. Everything else should be local.
https://www.businessinsider.nl/exclusive-tech-billionaire-pe...
The new Red Team is just a sparring partner now, accomplice to any crime and lie and money laundering scheme, hacking away at their passions, in the peaceful bliss of compartmentalisation.
Which is fine. A pseudo behavioural lock-in is still a lock-in. The people decided. False numbers on available resources, false reports on foreign affairs, supporting brutally corrupt countries to destabilise regions where humans still have the innate ability to arrive at better ways to do things and build a culture that is actually worth millions of years of survival, and the list goes on and on.
But you have to simulate whats possible to prepare for the worst, and the inner circles are way ahead so whenever the public gets some pieces of info, know that any criticism lags behind.
Which is why it's so important to hack away at your institutions, corporations and individuals in relevant networks. Their systems and jobs have to get harder, faster, stronger, smarter and that requires radical criticism so that
a) the job description only fits the best, and
b) the job environment doesn't disgust the best.
Neither of which is currently true.
But people are fighting good causes and if you can 're-compartmentalise' for a bit, throw in some brain and gpu power to go against your benefactors. For the sake of the betterment of their successors.
It didn't. I was born into and grew up in a spot 'betwixt and between', with much of what I need to become successful, rich & powerful but at the same feeling so damn disgusted by the ways of the people I'd have to deal with that I would rather not support them at all. That nonsense got amplified by leftist bullshit, trusting people I shouldn't have.
Then I got diagnosed with ADHD and a proper analysis of my psyche and my life revealed that my only issue was to get 'friends' when I should have stayed at home hacking away at stuff. They were earlier more aware/conscious and I let myself get dragged to parties, liquor and mild drugs but that Rausch was enough for my hyperactive imagination to lose any sense for accomplishment and the concrete things I could actually do to get into the right positions to make change happen and shape my environment to my (obviously better) tastes.
So every time I read "support your gov.", my brain goes 'grrrr' and triggers an avalanche of emotions and rationalisations that end in "it's all super-gay Mafia hierarchies and there's nothing you can do because all of 'dem gays' are too fragile to withstand the pressure of being an actual man". ( I'm not homophobic, back in the day it meant nothing but submissive, ass licking, it was metaphorical )
So my previous post is meant to encourage myself and others to not get pulled into these hierarchies as obedient participants and beneficiaries but as competitors, breaking, hacking and fixing all the weak spots in these hierarchies and systems.
Young people don't care and the kids from my year turned into people I definitely won't raise my kids with. And it's all because of pseudo-antifragility that comes with kowtowing like a soldier.
The hurricane victims don't get money because Americans don't want the government to pay disaster assistance, and military aid is given because Americans like buying guns.
You could drop military spending to zero, and there would still be peanuts paid out for disaster relief.
There is some limit where the US runs out of money to spend on anything, but we're already long past a balanced budget, and instead the government spends whatever it wants, and the debt ticker goes up
Are you saying ethics is conditional on who is above you in the power chain?
good: people that give you money
bad: people that don't pay you money after seeing one of your adverts
So, is there an alternative? I'm not going to start using ChatGPT now.
(btw, I'm also a paying customer of kagi, and they're using Anthropic too...)
I suspect the only “clean” alternative is open source and self-hosting. Buy a couple of GPUs; build a server rig/home lab/etc. own the means of produxtion.
If censoring s a problem in these applications, they’ll just make two versions: one lawful-adjacent for the government and one with all the chains that will be mandated for the pleb.