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Comment by bbatsell | Hacker News Reader

This headline unfortunately offers more smoke than light. This article has nothing to do with the current tête-à-tête with the Pentagon. It is discussing one specific change to Anthropic's "Responsible Scaling Policy" that the company publicly released today as version "3.0".

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> This article has nothing to do with the current tête-à-tête with the Pentagon.

The article yes, but we cannot be sure about its topic. We definitely cannot claim that they are unrelated. We don't know. It's possible that the two things have nothing to do with each other. It's also possible that they wanted to prevent worse requests and this was a preventive measure.

This is something they've been working on "in recent months". The Pentagon thing was today.

This cannot have been caused by that, unless they've also invented time travel.

You heard about the Pentagon thing today. Doesn't mean it wasn't started because of political pressure.

9 days ago: https://www.axios.com/2026/02/15/claude-pentagon-anthropic-c...

And I suspect that was not the first time the topic was discussed.

Definitely not the first time. Wall Street Journal reported it back on Jan 29:

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-ai-defense-department-...

My theory is that Anthropic has been wanting to make this change and doing it now while they’re making a (leaked to the) public stand in the name of ethics was a good opportunity.

Honest question: why have an elaborate theory with no evidence when the simple facts support a much simpler conclusion?

Anthropic is free to do what they want. I can’t imagine the board meeting where this triple bank shot of goading the government into threatening the company to do what they want.

I don't think it's that elaborate. I didn't mean to suggest they intentionally goaded the government into this confrontation. I figure it's a simpler "Oh look, we now have a good opportunity to make that announcement that we were worried about." Considering it's probably the same high-level decision makers on both choices it doesn't need a board meeting. And yes they're absolutely free to do what they want, but they're also not blind to how the public will view their decisions.

> The Pentagon thing was today.

Right because we are 100% aware of everything the pentagon does minute by minute...

It might have been contingency planning: you don't need a weatherman...

Pentagon issue was reported before today. It only made headlines again from Hegseth’s comments.

I think we can confidently claim that it is related. I wonder if I'm alone in thinking this.

I consider this a bigger deal than the Pentagon thing.

It’s the same deal

While not surprising at the least, it still kind of crazy that literal pdf files in charge is not concerning, but this is.

I just hope something happens to USA before it can do damage to the world.

What PDFs are you referring to? Do Anthropic or other LLMs using PDFs as some kind of 'SOUL.md' file or for training?

It's a joke way of saying pedophiles -> pdf files.

he means pedophiles

can't say paedophile on YouTube so people say PDF file

But we're not on YouTube.

Op sec is a thing. Gotta avoid the internet crawlers that look for key words.

Tell him that, not me.

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