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Comment by plaidthunder | Hacker News Reader

Words are cheap. Actions aren't. Dario Amodei is putting his company on the line for what he believes in. That's courage, character and... yes, morality.

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I have a feeling this is just a negotiation tactic leveraging public sentiment rather than a stance based on morality.

It's both - it's clearly at least partly for moral reasons that they're even in the negotiation that they need leverage for.

I am convinced that Amodei's "morality" is purely performative, and cynically employed as a marketing tactic. Time will tell, but most people will forget his lies.

How should he have acted instead?

We don't know how the military intended to use Claude, and neither do we know nor does the military know whether Claude without RLHF-imposed safety would have been more useful to them.

Ergo, this is a very convenient PR opportunity. The public assumes the worst, and this is egged on by Anthropic with the implication that CLAUDE is being used in autonomous weapons, which I find almost amusing.

He can now say goodbye to $200 million, and make up for it in positive publicity. Also, people will leave thinking that Claude is the best model, AND Anthropic are the heroes that staved off superintelligent killer robots for a while.

Even setting this aside, Dario is the silly guy who's "not sure whether Claude is sentient or not", who keeps using the UBI narrative to promote his product with the silent implication that LLMs actually ARE a path to AGI... Look, if you believe that, then that is where we differ, and I suppose that then the notion that Amodei is a moral man is comprehensible.

Oh, also the stealing. All the stealing. But he is not alone there by any means.

edit: to actually answer your question, this act in itself is not what prompted me to say that he is an immoral man. Your comment did.

His actions seem pretty consistent with a belief that AI will be significant and societally-changing in the future. You can disagree with that belief but it's different to him being a liar.

The $200m is not the risk here. They threatened labelling Anthropic as a supply chain risk, which would be genuinely damaging.

> The DoW is the largest employer in America, and a staggering number of companies have random subsidiaries that do work for it.

> All of those companies would now have faced this compliance nightmare. [to not use Anthropic in any of their business or suppliers]

... which would impact Anthropic's primary customer base (businesses). Even for those not directly affected, it adds uncertainty in the brand.

> to promote his product with the silent implication that LLMs actually ARE a path to AGI

That isn't implied. The thought process is a) if we invent AGI through some other method, we should still treat LLMs nicely because it's a credible commitment we'll treat the AGI well and b) having evidence in the pretraining data and on the internet that we treat LLMs well makes it easier to align new ones when training them.

Anyway, your argument seems to be that it's unfair that he has the opportunity to do something moral in public because it makes him look moral?

Yeah.

“Dario is saying the right thing and doing the right thing and not ever acting otherwise, but I think it’s just performative so I’m still disappointed in him.”

It’s possible Dario is a bad person pretending to be good and Sundar is a good person only pretending to be bad. People argue whether true selflessness exists at all or whether it’s all a charade.

But if the “performance” involves doing good things, at the end of the day that’s good enough for me.

Standing up to the US government has real and serious sequence. Peter Hegseth threatened to make Anthropic supply chain risk, meaning not only is Anthropic likely dropped as Pentagon’s supplier, but also risk losing companies doing business with the military as customers, such as Boeing or Lockheed Martin. Whatever tactic you think he is doing, that’s potentially massive revenue lost, at the time they need any business they can get.

Amazon does business with the DOD/W. That’s a pretty dangerous game of brinkmanship Anthropic is playing.

Don't be evil.

These are literally words. The DoW could still easily exploit these platforms, and nothing Anthropic has done can prevent it, other than saying (publicly), "we disagree."

It’s a contract dispute. Contracts are more than just talk.

While it is true that DoW could try to bypass the contract and do whatever they want, if it were that easy they wouldn’t be asking for a contract in the first place.

Should probably look up how many private companies are suing the government at any one time because of a breach of contract. And that's publicly breaching.

NSA and other three-letter agencies happily do it under cloak and dagger.

I agree with you that the govt can and does violate contracts. So the fact that they need Anthropic to agree signals that it’s more than just lawyers preventing the DoW from doing whatever they want.

What's the US history around nationalization? Would "confiscation", ever be a likelyhood on escalation?

On a quick search I came up with an article, that at least thematically, proposes such ideas about the current administration "Nationalization by Stealth: Trump’s New Industrial Playbook"

https://thefulcrum.us/trump-state-control-capitalism

The dispute seems to be specifically about safeguards that Anthropic has in its models and/or harnesses, that the DoD wants removed, which Anthropic refuses to do, and won’t sign a contract requiring their removal. Having implemented the safeguards and refusing their removal are actions, not “literally words”.

The "safeguards" you are referring to are contractual, i.e. words. There are no technical safeguards, per the article.

The memo literally says that the reason they have these policies is -because- actual technical guardrails are not reliable enough.

No, “safeguards” goes beyond that, it’s a whole process at Anthropic:

https://www.anthropic.com/news/building-safeguards-for-claud...

https://alignment.anthropic.com/2025/introducing-safeguards-...

Again, these are just words, and they're a salad of legal terms of art that provide cover for virtually any action. "We prevent the -illegitimate- use..." [define illegitimate plz?]

In your second link, that team was defunded; the person heading it just left ceremoniously: https://x.com/mrinanksharma/status/2020881722003583421?s=46

It's not so clear the company is actually on the line. They can compel Anthropic to do what they are not willing to do, maybe, this is not the final act. The government needs to respond, to which Anthropic will need to respond, courts may become involved at that point, depending on if Anthropic acquiesces at that point or not. Make a prominent statement against while in the news cycle, let the rest unfold under less media attention.

Is it morality or is it recognizing that providing the brain of autonomous weapons has a non-zero chance of ending up with him on trial in The Hague?

This action is far more likely to land him in prison than complying with the pentagon

I disagree. There is a class of leaders in this country that is complicit with the administrations use of violence on the tacit understanding that the violence not be directed at them. Arresting one of those people would be an act of desperation that would likely cause the rats to flea the sinking ship. And it isn't even clear if Trump could actually manufacture any charges here. Look at the dropped charges against Mark Kelly and those other politicians as an example. The administration might be able to make up stories to arrest random immigrants and college kids, but they clearly haven't been able to indiscriminately jail powerful political opponents.

Meanwhile, Dario knows his product can't be trusted to actually decide who should live and who should die, so what happens the first time his hypothetical AI killing machines make the wrong decision? Who gets the blame for that? Would the American government be willing to throw him under the bus in the face of international outrage? It's certainly a possibility.

The chance is zero. This won't be deployed in countries that he'd want to visit anyway and would extradite him to The Hague.

In all seriousness The Hague has no jurisdiction over Americans and Congress has already authorized military use of force against Brussels should they ever attempt to prosecute Americans.

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