Yes. Absolutely.
The US system doesn't empower a company to say no. It should though.
You own nothing but your opinion. (No offense to personal property aficionados)
However Anthropic situation is very different: there’s no ongoing invasion of the USA, and they traditionally attack other countries once in a while (no judgment) so the weapons upgrade will be "useful" on the field.
There are a lot of well meaning people that are very anti-weapon or anti-violence under any circumstances. The problem is that when those people actually need those weapons and that violence, they are so inadequate at it that they become a liability to themselves and others.
I'm not saying I have or know of a solution, but I remember the old saying (paraphrasing) that it's better to be a warrior working a farm than a farmer working a war.
> 1. Do not obey in advance.
> Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.
https://scholars.org/contribution/twenty-lessons-fighting-ty...
You can take issue with that argument if you want but it’s unconvincing not to address it.
I think you need to have people thinking through this stuff at a nuts-and-bolts level if you want to avoid getting dominated by a slightly less nice adversary, and so too with AI. Does a unilateral guarantee not to build autonomous killbots actually make anyone safer if China makes no such promise, or does that perversely put us at more risk?
I’d love to know that the “no killbots, come what may” strategy is sound, but it’s not clear that that’s a stable equilibrium.
China considers all lethal autonomous weapons "unacceptable", calling all countries to ban it. Countries like the US and India refuse to back such proposals. See China's official stands on this matter below.
https://documents.unoda.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Worki...
I totally understand that you got brainwashed by the media, but hey you appearantly have internet access, why can't you just do a little bit research of your own before posting nonsense using imagination as your source of information?
All the world powers are in a race to it.
https://cset.georgetown.edu/article/china-trains-ai-controll...
https://thediplomat.com/2026/02/machines-in-the-alleyways-ch...
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/ai-weapons-in-chinas-mili...
https://cset.georgetown.edu/article/how-china-is-using-ai-fo...
``` Basic characteristics of Unacceptable Autonomous Weapons Systems should include but not limited to the following:
- Firstly, lethality, meaning sufficient lethal payload (charge) and means.
- Secondly, autonomy, meaning absence of human intervention and control during the entire process of executing a task.
- Thirdly, impossibility for termination, meaning that once started, there is no way to terminate the operation.
- Fourthly, indiscriminate killing, meaning that the device will execute the mission of killing and maiming regardless of conditions, scenarios and targets.
- Fifthly, evolution, meaning that through interaction with the environment, the device can learn autonomously, expand its functions and capabilities in a degree exceeding human expectations.
Autonomous weapons systems with all of the five characteristics clearly have anti-human characteristics and significant humanitarian risks, and the international community could consider following the example of the Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons and work to reach a legal instrument to prohibit such weapons systems. ```
Charitably, you might say that China is worried about a nightmare scenario. Less charitably, you might say that the definition of an unacceptable weapon system is so tight that it does not describe anything that anyone would ever build, or would want to build. This posture would allow China to adopt the international posture of seeming to oppose autonomous weapons without actually de facto constraining themselves at all.
This, by contrast, is what China considers acceptable:
``` Acceptable Autonomous Weapons Systems could have a high degree of autonomy, but are always under human control. It means they can be used in a secure, credible, reliable and manageable manner, can be suspended by human beings at any time and comply with basic principles of international humanitarian law in military operations, such as distinction, proportionality and precaution. ```
So as long as the system has a killswitch (something that afaik absolutely no one is proposing to dispense with?), it's Acceptable.
Meanwhile, it would certainly seem that China's defense research universities are interested in developing this tech: https://thediplomat.com/2026/02/machines-in-the-alleyways-ch....
So, I did a bit of research with my internet access-- how do my findings square with your impressions?
- had four [!] terms, a move so anomalous it was subsequently patched by constitutional amendment
- threatened court-packing until SCOTUS backed down and stated rubber-stamping his agenda
- ruled entire industries by emergency decree in a way that contemporaries on the left and right compared to Mussolini
- interned 120k people without due process, on the basis of ethnicity
- turned a national party into a personal patronage system
- threatened to override the legislature if it didn’t start passing laws he liked
Not even saying any of this is even good or bad, clearly in the official history it was retroactively justified by victory in WWII. But it’s a bit rich to say that the bomb wasn’t developed under authoritarian conditions.
If Anthropic doesn't give the DoD what they want, does that mean that China, Iran, Russia, etc magically leapfrog not only Anthropic, but the entire US defense industry, and take over the planet?
No
> If Anthropic doesn't give the DoD what they want, does that mean that China, Iran, Russia, etc magically leapfrog not only Anthropic, but the entire US defense industry, and take over the planet?
The risks are high, so if you're the US, you want a portfolio of possible winners. The risks are too high to not leverage all the cutting edge AI labs.
However horrific the regimes in these countries are, the people behind the technology there are just as likely to be intelligent and moral human beings as the people in the USA and Europe working on these are.
The A-bombs were not the worst part of the attack on Japan. And thus were not "needed to end the war". They were part of marketing /the/ super power.
Was it the best path to end the war? Certainly.
The modern argument around targeting civilians or not was not even relevant at the time due to the advent of strategic bombing, which itself was seen as less-horrific than the stalemated trench warfare of WW1. The question was only whether to target civilian inputs to the military with an atomic weapon (and hopefully shock & awe into submission) or firebomb and invade.
After all, the regime already says such domestic dissenters are terrorists, and have, on multiple recent occasions, justified the execution of domestic dissenters based on that.
In any case, AI drones will largely be used for "defense" in the euphemistic sense.
Just one example of many, but the companies that make the CPUs you and all of use use every day, also supply to militaries.
I am unaware of any tech company that directly does physical warfare on the battlefield against humans.
What’s an example of a company that’s making killing machines that a typical consumer or someone HN might be buying product or services from?
Yes. Yes, that's precisely what we want.