US Military leaders meet with Anthropic to argue against Claude safeguards
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
The fact that there are countless use cases for real government efficiency to help the people they would sacrifice because Anthropic wanted to refuse killer robots is baffling.
On October 30, 2023, President Biden invoked the Defense Production Act to "require that developers of the most powerful AI systems share their safety test results and other critical information with the U.S. government" when "developing any foundation model that poses a serious risk to national security, national economic security, or national public health."
https://www.axios.com/2026/02/24/anthropic-pentagon-claude-h...
Or is this just par for the course and has always been going on, it's just the reporting is different, or the current context makes it more of a sensitive topic?
There have been a few cases where national security has prompted the government to nationalize private institutions: the Railroads in WWI, steel mills in the korean war, CINB which was deemed a security risk by being too large a bank.
This admin has so far acted like a kleptocracy and, like, because of the Epstein files if they lose power many will go to jail, so there's a huge incentive to remain in power.
Wars are good for remaining in power. Dictatorship is good for remaining in power.
This is all very, very, very unusual in US history (except maybe when businesses tried to overthrow the government in the 30s but we don't talk about that).
I find this to be unrealistic worry. Just like with mee too, the perpetrators will eventually be protected. Just like with any previous abuses, including war crimes and so on, high level people will be protected first, celebrated second and then we will collectively move onto pretending they were being treated unjustly the whole time.
The amount of people who think that the real victims of abuse are perpetrators and real wrongdoers are victims who talk about it is just too high. It is rarely openly framed or phrased this way, the used words are always nicer, but this is the overall theme of the things.
"If we lose the midterms and we lose 2028, some in this room are going to prison, myself included."
Seems like it's not so unrealistic.
In the UK and other parts arrests have already been made and in the US the FBI director is drinking beers.
The Trumps history was known prior election, but it was only advantage for him. Kavanaugh is on supreme court. People in Epstein files were defended with bad faith and excessive benefit of the doubt in the past and will be defended the same way again.
When it comes to abuse, harassment and such, when you look at supreme court, president, ministers, politicians, college leaders, religious leaders etc etc etc, there is no history of even credible rape accusation being a disadvantage for the person. There is a track record of hysteria that something might happen to those important people and then elites circling the wagons protecting each other.
There are going to be angry blogs from progressives and feminists, they will be accused of overdoing it and of moral panic. And if democrats gets voted into power, they will continue reconciliatory doormat politics of last 40 years.
What he probably means is being killed in prison, "suicided" when the cameras are mysteriously off, but this doesn't make sense, he's in the side of the oligarchs.
This is a bold claim that requires some evidence to accompany it.
So far there's been very little in the Epstein files to implicate anyone of consequence in any criminal activities.
When the rare documents that actually did offer evidence of potentially criminal behavior surfaced, Andrew and Mandelson were swiftly arrested. We can see that the evidence is being acted upon, it's just not very exciting.
Numbers get thrown around, some suggesting only 2% of the files have been released.
I'm confident that even if 99% of the files were eventually released that the last 1% held back are far and away the most damning.
The simplest is Trump administration aggressively asserting the importance and impact of Epstein's network, followed by excuses to downplay the impact and prevent release of the files (going as far as calling it a hoax, claiming Trump was an FBI informant, only investigating Democrats). These contradictory deflections are genuinely convincing reasons to believe that there is more damning evidence which they're trying to cover up.
More convincing reasons that there is further evidence of crimes in the unreleased files:
- Witness/survivor testimony. Many victims have come forward, several naming Trump officials directly.
- Epstein ran a sex-trafficking network which is thoroughly documented in the released files. Over half the files have not yet been released.
- Many questionable/excessive redactions which US lawmakers have called "inappropriate". US lawmakers have also said that removal of certain files is illegal under the Epstein Act.
- Epstein's extensive political, financial, and legal networks include lots of high-profile figures which have already caused confessions, firings, resignations, and arrests.
There are a lot more reasons, this was just off the top of my head.
In my experience they very much do not want to be told what they can and can not do with the things they purchase. I’m surprised the deal got done at all with these restrictions in place.
As such I agree with the surprise at the deal getting done at all.
Aka yolo mode. And yes, people (me) are stupid enough to actually use that.
What we need is for the LLM to do the sandboxing... if we could trust it to always do it.
True. But I expect my furnace to be trustworthy to not burn my house down. I expect my circular saw to come with a blade guard. I expect my chainsaw to come with an auto-stop.
But you are correct that in the AI area, that's not the kind of tool we have today. We have dangerous tools, non-OSHA-approved tools, tools that will hurt you if you aren't very careful with them. There's been all this development in making AI more powerful, and not nearly enough in ergonomics (for want of a better word).
We need tools that actually work the way the users expect. We don't have that. (And, as you say, marketing is a big part of the problem. People might expect closer to what the tool actually does, if marketing didn't try so hard to present it as something it is not.)
Also in that analogy, the LLM is the fire, not the furnace. If you use codex for example, that would the furnace, and it does have good guardrails, no one seems to be complaining about those.
He said tried not succeeded.
It still made that decision though, and we don't have git for people.
I saw a quote today from Vonnegut: "We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective."
In fact no matter the costs, the cost of not saving yourself is infinite.
The problem is that this rationality is often centered on a single beneficiary (You) because why would you care about any other beneficiary?
However times and times again it turns out that no company is as evil as government. Hence I am an anarcho capitalist.
On the whole even with every company only thinking about themselves, it is a distributed system self sustaining and self correcting. No single unit has unlimited power.
Historically it’s always the governments that are vastly more evil and chaotic than any private enterprise ever conceived.
And so we can see it now as another example from USA government. No company could ever get so corrupt and evil as current American elected officials.
Demand accountability from your elected officials. It can be done by not electing them. You have no such agency over corporate America (short of boycotting, I suppose).
To my eye the U.S's highest elected official is in fact also a company.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjrq1vwe73po
> the Pentagon official told the BBC the current conflict between the agency and Anthropic is unrelated to the use of autonomous weapons or mass surveillance.
> The official added that the Pentagon would simultaneously label Anthropic as a supply chain risk.
*Supply chain risk*?
The BBC article seems to imply that the government wants to audit Anthropic.
This, coming at the same time those "distillation" claims were published, is all incredibly suspicious.
The US federal government is no longer a good faith actor acting on behalf of American citizens and following US law, but now an autonomous corporation aiming to “get the best deal” via maximum leverage.
He was clearly dancing to the DoD tune, like he REALLY wanted a DoD contract, which he eventually got.
But that's not the point. I'm talking about how coincidental all of this is with the recent Anthropic blunder with the distillation thing. That is my main point you dismissed.
Anthropic doesn’t want their software used for certain purposes, so they maintain approval/denial of projects and actions. I suspect the Pentagon doesn’t want limitations AND they dislike paying for software/service which can be withheld from them if they are found to be skirting the contractual terms.
And THAT is why the Pentagon is using maximum leverage (threatening Anthropic as a supply chain risk label).
How do you know the government asked for a specific use case?
As far as I know, the meeting was private and we don't know what they talked about. I haven't found a single official press release or verified statement that supports this.
The verified statements I found are just about the government wanting unrestricted access. That alone is not enough to imply "no guardrails". As I mentioned before, it could be just for auditing (especially in the light of current events involving distilling of the models).
I think it's an extraordinary coincidence that this happened soon after the distillation thing. And I don't know what it means if it's not a coincidence.
I hadn't realized. This does make me consider using alternatives more.
If you look at my post history you can see I’m always calling them out about how sketchy they are.
And LLM products Are new-ish. It suggests that Anthropic made federal government contracts a priority while OpenAI, Alphabet, AWS didn’t.
https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-gov-models-for-u-s-nat...
https://support.claude.com/en/articles/13756069-public-secto...
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/azuregov/azure-openai-authori...
What are they using it for though? Target selection for precise strikes? I'm guessing their argument will be less lives will be lost if claude assisted with making sure the attacks were surgically precise?
> Cold War computers were primarily driven by military necessity, focusing on nuclear weapon simulation, ballistic missile trajectory calculation, and cryptography to support Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). Key uses included modeling hydrogen bomb design using Monte Carlo methods (e.g., on MANIAC), air defense systems like the Navy’s NTDS, and early AI for strategic planning.
Or the mass surveillance bit, "Parse this dataset and come up with a list of people whose emotions are most rapidly shifting towards violence."
What they need is it to not say "it seems you're trying to build a weapons system, can you please not do that" when someone asks it to sanity check something that's on the edge of their technical expertise. Like making sure their proposed antenna dome is aerodynamically sane at transsonic speeds so the aero guys don't have to waste time rejecting it outright. Or they need it to not paternalistically screech about safety when someone tells it to read the commercial user manual for some piece of equipment and then append into the usage sections all the non-osha stuff the military does when things don't work quite right.
Awwwnnnn poor thing :)
It is like the USA big techs mad because the Chinese AI companies are stealing their data just like, wait for it, how the USA big techs stole the data from artists worldwide to train their models.
The sweet payback in the name of every single artist/company that have been affected by USA greedy.
Karma is a btch!
"America bad" is no longer trendy or edgy, if you haven't heard. There is no pretense otherwise by anyone anymore.
Uh... so why doesn't the US government simply work with OpenAI and xAI? Why do they have to use Claude?
Hegseth and Rubio already live on a military base because they are afraid.
One of the things I find interesting about classifying literally any kind of trait within bounds of 'normality', and the culling / suppressing / discouragement of anything outside of that definition, is that there will just be new 'edges', and in short order these edges will be 'other', suddenly outside the definition because times are bad and it has to be someone's fault.
And so an ad infinitum until the single supreme ruler is the one entity representative of normal, atop a mountain of dead abominations.