The Pentagon is making a mistake by threatening Anthropic
understandingai.org
understandingai.org
These court cases would produce bad outcomes either way. If the court finds for Anthropic, future DoD leadership will find itself constrained or at least chilled. Or if the court finds for the government, an expansive permissive view of the DPA might encourage future administrations to compel tech companies to make AIs break the law in other ways, for example by suppressing certain political points of view in output.
National defense is strongest if the military is extremely powerful but carefully judicious in the application of that power. That gives us the highest “top end” capability of performance. If military leadership insists on acting recklessly, then eventually guardrails are installed, with the result of a diminished ability to respond effectively to low-probability, high risk moments. One of many nuances and paradoxes the current political leadership does not seem to understand.
Seems like a good outcome? The government should not be able to arbitrarily decide to make private citizens do things they aren't willing to do, whether the government thinks the action is legal or not, and its especially egregious when the government knew about those limits ahead of time, spelled out in a fucking contract.
The bad part is the failure of the citizenry to elect moral and ethical politicians.
1- OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc have no problem with their products being used to kill people so no need to bully them.
2- These other products are so terrible at the task that the clown shoe wearing SecDef is forced to try to bully Anthropic.
Less than a year left on this clock.
[1] https://www.britannica.com/event/United-States-presidential-...
The modern playbook isn't to abolish elections, it's a combination of blocking opposition candidates, suppressing votes, intimidating voters, and lying about the results. That's what to watch for.
That's not to say it can't be done, but there's a huge difference in difficulty between doing what the country's constitution says, and doing the opposite. Especially in a country where elections are run by sovereign governments not under the control of the central government.
I guess everything in DPRK is fine because it's all legal their too
What else could I possibly have meant, genius?
But yes of course they've taken advantage of it. Russia yeeting them out of its own territories and then invading The Ukraine is the best thing Zelensky could have asked for.
He already tried to get specific states' election outcomes discarded from the count on Jan 6, 2021.
From my POV, Americans are hopelessly naive about their institutions holding up when it’s been demonstrated so many times that the guardrails are gone. It’s one of the reasons I left the country - I feel safer living next to Russia than in America.
There are more guns than people in the US, and in nobody's wildest dreams does ICE (or the entire federal government, for that matter, including the military) have enough personnel to subdue even 10% of the population rising up. And while I think it is somewhat valid to assume the military leans a bit conservative, in my experience it is more of a true conservatism and not MAGA. I was in the military, and the vast majority of soldiers would 100% refuse to suppress US citizens.
Everyone thinks the adults are not really in charge in the GOP right now, but I think that's absolutely not true. They are just okay with the chaos right now because it's not impeding business and keeps people distracted. If MAGA gets too spicy and causes real civil unrest, we're going to find out very quickly who actually runs the show. And it ain't Donald Trump.
It would also probably be the last straw for a lot of people who has been limping along on the belief in free elections.
Trump was impeached before and nothing happened. He can continue to ignore congress. I wouldn't be surprised if at this point he abolishes congress, and even jokes at a press conference saying "I am the Senate".
*DOW
Nothing has changed about the performative-ness, in fact if anything it's gotten more performative and hollow. They just signal vices rather than virtues, so a bunch of rightist-flavored-Lenin's useful idiots think it is fresh or effective or anti-"woke" or at least different.
I don't really give any weight to what a leftist considers a vice or a virtue.
Also, please define what you mean by "leftist". These days it seems like it gets applied to anybody who believes in Constitutionally-limited government and the rule of law. That used to just be called being an American, but social media is a hell of a drug.
There's even a webpage for it.
So cut the guy some slack. No one knows wtf is actually going on these days.
I agree this in isolation is low stakes. The problem is the volume. The memetic assault is everywhere you turn, and propagating it helps the regime. And yes, it's far too easy to do accidentally. That doesn't mean we shouldn't appreciate others calling it out.
I wonder who or what you're replying to here. Certainly, it has no relation to anything I've said in this thread.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't appreciate others calling it out.
Again, who are you replying to with this?
I said "take it easy", not "don't ever bring that up".
For the overall argument, you called out a comment for calling out a comment whose only contribution was to promote the term "DOW". If it had been a substantive comment that someone jumped on for merely using the term, you'd have had a reasonable point. But it wasn't.
Jumping on a guy because he corrected someone, and immediately presuming it had an entire slew of politics attached, instead of it being a mere technical correction, is prime example of everything wrong with the US today. Everything.
Me vs them. One word means a political stance. The wrong thing said, accidentally, you're the enemy. It's literally sad. I stand, as a Canadian, watching my brother make horrible life choices, and I want to help, yet I just see more anger and hate and discord.
None of this serves any of you well, it all serves your enemies. Right now, your acts, and the act of the guy super-upset that someone said DOW, serves your enemies. 90% of this is fueled by state actor controlled bots and comments, and you guys eat it up as manna.
So yes, I have an entirely reasonable point. The guy literally might have had no idea. I certainly didn't. You don't even know if that dude is american or not!
DOW is all over the news.
The presumption is wrong. The anger is wrong. The hate is wrong. The attitude is wrong.
On both sides. Of both sides of your little squabble.
I don't care who started it. The entire lot of you need a parent to come into the room, and tell just that, and that you both should go to your room.
And if you don't watch it? If you don't stop stepping out of bounds. If you don't halt it.
The rest of as are going to have to.
And that would be the saddest thing of all. For all of us.
I'm a libertarian who sees both leftist and rightist thinking as two halves of a complete analysis. This situation isn't "red-vs-blue". Rather this is social-media-psychosis-red vs everybody else.
If social-media-psychosis-blue was in power and similarly attacking our society, I would be calling that out as well! But they aren't, and they haven't really been in powerful national political offices, because so far the blue extremists' main political success has been to just sandbag the Democratic party. (ostensibly because blue extremism runs counter to the parties' sponsors' interests, confining professional blue extremists to culture war topics that most people see through)
As I said, the fundamental dynamic with the original comment is that "correcting" to "DOW" was its only point. If you just casually heard the term in some [likely government] news media, you're not going to rush out and repeat it as a correction for someone saying DOD.
But sure, we can't really still assign a known motive - maybe that commenter was pointing out the "war" part to try and highlight what this administration shamelessly wants to use "AI" for. But the easy way to avoid being jumped on is to include some constructive context for what one is actually trying to get at, rather than leaving readers to apply Occam's razor themselves. So either way, that response to it was not unreasonable.
Let's start with this.
Framing the argument here as "both sides" team sport is not appropriate. Did these "state actor controlled bots" also create the term DOW? No, the needlessly-divisive propaganda is now coming directly from the White House itself.
You are literally framing the argument as left vs right, whilst trying to pin this very mode of thought upon me. This is because you cannot see the world any other way. Meanwhile, at no point did I ever, not once, say the correction was wrong. Not once.
So mired in this horrid quicksand, this "thought-scape" is your political world-view, that if someone says "Don't say that in such a mean way, be nice to one another", your immediate thought is "OMG! Siding with the enemy! Attack!".
The entirety of US political culture is now as that of an abusive family. The son that grows up with an alcoholic, abusive father, and is beat, yet the cycle repeats with his own son. It is learned behaviour. It is difficult to stop. Even desiring to do so, the son fails when he is the father. And you and all your brothers are caught in it.
The post I replied to painted "the guy", and you have painted "the guy", as someone on a mission to aid "the other team". His mere utterance of a single word, to correct to a name he believes to be the "new name", is viewed as you as a "bad thing".
And this is the problem I speak of. Not correcting someone back. The thought process and the mode of correction. As I said, the anger, the hate, the emotion. And it is emotion laden, not thought driven. It isn't logical, it's reactive emotion.
And yes, it only serves your enemies.
I'll be very blunt here, and I am speaking over decades, not right now. History is vital to comprehension of something like this. When the rest of the world looks at the US. When Canada, the UK, Europe, and all friendlies to the US look at the US?
We can barely tell the differences between your two political parties.
Viewed from the politics of another nation, your left and right are functionally identical. There's zero difference.
The above sentence should make you happy. It really should! It is a true sentence, and what it means is that there is more that binds Americans together, than that which pulls it apart. Yet I am willing to bet that your hackles bristled at such a concept.
And the very fact that they did, is the problem here.
--
Let's discuss state actors, because you seem unaware of how it works. The entire point is not any specific action. It is not about this administration. In fact, the current administration is a product of this decades, yes decades long propaganda by state actors.
The entire point, the easiest way to think of it, is that it amplifies any angst, concern, hostility against "the other team". Surely you are aware of Cambridge Analytics, well that's child's play in comparison, and what I am describing is not secret, or new information, it is well documented, well known, and simply is.
As your two sides become more hostile, you make poor choices out of panic, anger, angst.
Look at what happened with the last US election. Each side terrified about the other gaining power, and so one side hides that an octogenarian might be suffering from old age. Hiding this was a morally repugnant act. Meanwhile the other side chooses someone that much of their party felt they had no other choice but to go with.
Neither party should have chosen either these two. Each is choosing people so aged, so old, that they are barely capable of running the country. I wouldn't want an 80 year old person in charge of anything of this scope and size, yet each of your teams think this is just grand, great, a wonderful choice.
Why?
Because "OMG no, the other guy!"
Both sides are making choices, not with the goal of "What is best for my country", but instead "If the other guy gets in power, the entire country will be destroyed, so we must fight the other team, THEY are the enemy of the true America!". Meanwhile, 99.9% of the decisions made by an administration are functionally identical regardless of the party.
Whether team red or team blue in the last 50 years, the wars continue, the foreign politics is mostly the same. The US has been withdrawing from the world under each team, bombing the middle east under each team, and the list goes on. The debt isn't a problem because of the current administration, it's a problem because of all of them. Every administration for the last 50 years.
There are a myriad of ways to resolve this problem.
There are a myriad of ways to make it worse.
Making presumptions about someone because of one word they say, and jumping down their throat about it, is not how to make it better.
It's how to make it worse.
It's everything that's wrong with America today.
And I know you cannot see it, for your reply shows you cannot.
Look again at my words:
So cut the guy some slack.
Did I say don't correct him? Did I say he shouldn't be corrected? Did I argue whether or not the point was wrong or right? Nope. Not at all.
Instead, I simply said to take it easy in correcting someone.
In the lingo and context of my words in this reply to you, I was saying "Don't make it worse".
Your response was "OMG but he was purposefully aiding the other team!", without any knowledge that it was so.
My response was "be nice to one another, in how you argue".
--
I have written this response hoping that you may grok of what I speak. That you might understand that it is the way you are carrying your argument that is the issue. Not that you have a dispute. The presumptive, hostile response. The immediate assignment of motive and judge/jury/executioner attitude of "Nope, he said a word because of the other team!" thought.
It's all wrong.
It's wrong if it is them or you.
It's wrong no matter who does it, or why.
It doesn't matter who started it.
Go back to your room. You, and everyone else in the US.
Go back to your room, be quiet, and think about it.
Factually, you have written a lot of things I do agree with. I'm not new to this rodeo. I've been around the left-right gamut. Reading Moldbug is actually what started the end of my rightist-fundamentalist phase.
I've never been friendly to this entrenched corporate power structure that backs both major parties as if they're sponsoring racehorses. I had been both sidesing up until June of 2020. I'm not sitting here going "How could anyone ever vote for Trump?!?!". In 2016, I was telling my blue tribe friends that he had a good chance of winning, as they stood there aghast.
But after an abject failure of a concrete term in office, where the guy basically never stopped divisively campaigning? When faced with a pan-political national emergency, his response was effectively dereliction of duty?? If he had merely led us during Covid, like any other President of the past thirty years (and like most state governors tried to do), I suspect he would have had a shoe-in second term.
So voting for more of that in 2020 or 2024? That is embracing the exact hot mess of crazy that you're condemning here. Obviously the people who voted for him did not feel that way. From everything I've been able to surmise this is due to their media sources making them think the Democratic party is just as crazy. But from what I've seen much of this is based around sensationalizing some otherwise banal realities, and the Democratic party itself is nowhere near as far gone as the Republican party - the prominent members are still basically milquetoast status-quo-supporting bureaucrats who pay some lip service to the extremists, rather than having been taken over by a strongman primarily pandering to the extremists.
For example, one concrete data point:
> We can barely tell the differences between your two political parties.
Do you think a President Harris would be threatening war with Canada? That should be pretty pronounced and quite pertinent to you, right?
I feel you're still not getting it though. Because it's not about which side is worse, or who started it, or who's right about something, or who voted for who. It's about how this is discussed, how this is handled.
That's the biggest problem there is.
And yes, I said "barely", and it's quite true. A Democrat could easily be elected just as unhinged. An independent. Yet this sort of highlights my point.
If you stand Trump up against any other US president, just as with an ape or a human, he's literally identical on 98% of things. And really, it's more like 99.9% from an external viewpoint. Yet just as with an ape, that small amount can result in startling differences.
But your parties? The differences are barely noticeable.
Half my post was trying to explain some context where I am coming from. I was addressing the general tone of your post, and pointing out why I was not going to pick through each point line by line trying to tease out nuance. What's bizarre is for you to go here, as it seems exactly like a condemnation "keyed to knock down "the other guy".
As far as both the parties ? I just said that I have long acknowledged the commonalities. I had never voted for a major party candidate in a national election until I voted Biden in 2020. Doing so required swallowing a lot of pride, and I considered it as voting conservatively due to getting older. I can certainly imagine Trumpism's core message of "burn it all down" as being highly appealing to younger me - remember how I said I was telling aghast friends in 2016 that Trump had a good chance at winning?
You also dodged my direct question of whether a President Harris would be threatening war with Canada. Details like this are precisely why there is something here worth fighting for and not merely "both sidesing" it as merely a communication style.
Trying to move on to constructive topics, you say this is about "how" is it discussed. How exactly do you think the bare repetition of partisan propaganda should to be discussed, regardless of the actual intentions? Do we need to treat every commenter with kid gloves, detail the actual wider context, get lost in the semantics of whether it is a "legal name change" (even though the legality is not the actual reason to reject the name!), all the while hoping they will be receptive to those points, etc?
Because the way I see it, a comment that is merely a "correction" in terminology is nothing but flamebait - essentially the same thing as tone/terminology policing by the blue extremists. It's exactly the type of thing that needs to be shut down quickly if we're trying to have constructive discussions.
When I shorten my responses, I'm now "dodging" questions, is that it? So no matter my post length, I'm in error?
And I directly answered your question, by saying there is no appreciable difference between US presidents, predicated upon party lines, when viewed externally.
There is no other way to answer, for no one on this planet, even those scornful of Trump, ever expected this 51st state nonsense prior to his term. No one. At all.
I know nothing of Harris, and even if I did, comparatively, Trump's behaviour in this respect was a surprise.
Do ypu think any Canadian thinks this will be isolated to this single administration?
No, the thrust of that remark wasn't about the length. Seriously, go back and read your own tone. I said I agreed with a lot of what you wrote, factually. But it felt like you were trying to beat me over the head with a barrage of points - that same team sport dynamic you're bemoaning.
> Do you think any Canadian thinks this will be isolated to this single administration?
I don't know - I cannot answer for what Canadians think. I would hope not, but if you do then it is not really my place to dissuade you from thinking so.
As an American I hope that the reaction to the Trumpist destruction will be some long-overdue major reforms (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47092688) and accountability for the current regime that might engender trust and repairing of relationships over time. But I was also hopeful that my fellow countrymen wouldn't be foolish enough to vote for a candidate with a proven track record of "death to America", so I'm probably being overly hopeful here.
It's the presumptive assignment of "this other side is the enemy" and "he said a word, thus he must be the enemy" and all that blather which I've described repeatedly up-post. And yes, you were complaining about length, else you would not have mentioned it.
I can tell you won't get what I say, no matter what I write here.
All I will close with, is that while I see you are working on ways to resolve some issues, the single biggest issue is money. You need to remove almost all campaign funding from elections. Capping all funding to $1000/person, and $1000/company, along with lots of other things (such as, no "gifts", no donations, etc) would make an enormous difference.
Not only would it make it easier for grass roots, new parties to rise up, it would also remove all dependence upon mega-corps to successfully run a campaign.
You should put that at the top of the list.
In a lot of countries (including Canada), if you go to lunch with a politician, you cannot pay for his lunch. Nor he, yours. That's illegal.
That's how rigid it needs to be.
But that doesn't mean I consider its grassroots supporters my enemy. I understand, sympathize, and often share their frustrations! You should have been able to glean that from my few preceding comments. The problem is that they're stuck in horrible media bubbles telling them that anybody who deviates from the Party mantra is their enemy - and this has been going on much longer than Trump.
I have long tried to engage on the issues they claim to care about, often in person, seemingly to no avail. One stark example I have is an extended family member complaining about GPS satellites tracking their location through their phone. This is something I myself care deeply about, and also know a thing or two about as well. But trying to make the point to them that there are some understandable mechanics whereby you can start taking concrete steps to at least reduce the tracking? Zero recognition or interest!
The only conclusion I can see is that they use the vague paranoia and blaming "the government" as a group identity bonding mechanism. By deviating from the mantras, I declare myself as an outsider who in their eyes is merely part of the problem.
But anyway, that's my trying to explain where I am coming from, which hopefully addresses the thrust of your point. But from your past few comments, I've gotten the impression you're not really reading my explanations here. Rather you're doing the exact thing you bemoan - seeing me as the enemy, ignoring my substantive engagement, and only aiming to beat me down regardless.
And sure maybe this makes sense from the Canadian perspective these days - cut off ties, erect barriers to protect yourselves, and try to move on. I cannot say, and I wouldn't blame you! But don't lecture me about it with some assumed moral authority, especially regarding the response to a single-word non-substantive flamebait.
(As for campaign finance reform that was addressed in my point #3. We used to have a semblance of that before the Supreme Council invalidated it. My list wasn't really meant to be ordered per se)
are you aware of how inept and corrupt the current Executive branch is ?
I mean, as dumb as it is, there is a certain musicality to hearing someone with a southern accent sardonically call it the dee-oh-dubya.
[0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/azuregov/azure-openai-fedramp...
[1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/public-sector/gemini-in...
Not too different from picking on Harvard/etc.
> Officials say other leading AI firms have gone along with the demand. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, Google and Elon Musk’s xAI have agreed to allow the Pentagon to use their systems for “all lawful purposes” on unclassified networks, a Defense official said, and are working on agreements for classified networks.
The only difference is simply that Anthropic is already approved for use on classified networks, whereas Grok and OpenAI are not yet (but are being fast-tracked for approval, especially Grok). Edit: Note someone below pointed out that OpenAI may be approved for Secret level, so it's odd that Washington Post reports that they are working on it still.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/azuregov/azure-openai-authori...
Either Anthropic is seen as the clear leader (it certainly is for coding agents) or this is a political stunt to stamp out any opposition to the administration. Or both.
I keep hearing this but it should be plainly obvious to everyone (at least here) that an LLM is not the right AI for this use case. That's like trying to use chatgpt for an airplane autopilot, it doesn't make sense. Other ML models may but not an LLM. Why does the "autonomous killbot" thing keep getting brought up when discussing Anthropic and other llm providers?
For reference, "autonomous killbots" are in use right now in the Ukraine/Russia war and they run on fpv drones, not acres of GPUs. Also, it should be obvious that there's a >90% probability every predator/reaper drone has had an autonomous kill mode for probably a decade now. Maybe it's never been used in warfare, that we know of, but to think it doesn't exist already is bonkers.
It’s just corruption. Google is a bigger fish. OpenAI is attached to Oracle and Larry Ellison, who is a Trump collaborator. Kushner is also in investor.
Anthropic is the weakest animal in the herd. They also started a campaign targeting OpenAI, which is capturing hearts and minds (everyone is talking about Claude Code), and really pissed off Sam Altman.
On the other hand, is autonomous war not obviously the endgame, given how quickly capabilities are increasing and that it simply does not require much intelligence (relatively speaking) to build something that points a gun at something and pulls a trigger?
It just needs one player to do it, so everyone has to be able to do it. I'd love to hear about different scenarios scenario.
I could not disagree more. A big part of that is also knowing when NOT to pull the trigger. And it’s much harder than you’d think. If you think full self driving is a difficult task for computers, battlefield operations are an order of magnitude more complex, at least.
If you simply wanted to cause havoc and destruction with no regard for collateral damage then the problem space is much more simple since you only need enough true positives to be effective at your mission.
The ability to code with ai has shown that it requires an even higher level of responsibility and discipline than before in order to get good results without out of control downside. I think the ability to kill with ai would be the same way but even more severe.
I expect autonomous weapons of the near future to look somewhat similar to that. They get deployed to an area, attack anything that looks remotely like a target there for a given time, then stand down and return to base. That's it.
The job of the autonomous weapon platform isn't telling friend from foe - it's disposing of every target within a geofence when ordered to do so.
If anything represents the logical conclusion of that tired fallacy, it'll be actually autonomous, "thinking" drones which make the targeting decisions and execution decisions on their own, not based on any direct, human-led orders, but derived from second-order effects of their neural net. At a certain point, it's not going to matter who launched the drones, or even who wrote the software that runs on the drones. If we're letting the drones decide things, it'll just be up to the drones, and I don't love our chances making our case to them.
Which raises the question: why did the Pentagon try to pressure Anthropic at all?
On the principle of it? Political reasons? Or was the real concern "domestic warrantless surveillance"?
From a security perspective, the “return to base” part seems rather problematic. I doubt you'd want to these things to be concentrated in a single place. And I expect that the long-term problems will be rather similar to mines, even if the electronics are non-operational after a while.
It just makes the mines themselves more expensive - and landmines are very much a "cheap and cheerful" product.
For most autonomous weapons, the situation is even more favorable. Very few things can pack the power to sit for decades waiting for a chance to strike. Dumb landmines only get there by the virtue of being powered by the enemy.
Edit: No, I don't think a purely defensive stance like landmines is sufficient and what the people in command think.
We have landmines today. Why spend much more making marginally better, highly intelligent ones with LLMs?
Click, hum.
The huge grey Grebulon reconnaissance ship moved silently through the black void. It was travelling at fabulous, breathtaking speed, yet appeared, against the glimmering background of a billion distant stars to be moving not at all. It was just one dark speck frozen against an infinite granularity of brilliant night. On board the ship, everything was as it had been for millennia, deeply dark and Silent.
Click, hum.
At least, almost everything.
Click, click, hum.
Click, hum, click, hum, click, hum.
Click, click, click, click, click, hum.
Hmmm.
A low level supervising program woke up a slightly higher level supervising program deep in the ship's semi-somnolent cyberbrain and reported to it that whenever it went click all it got was a hum.
The higher level supervising program asked it what it was supposed to get, and the low level supervising program said that it couldn't remember exactly, but thought it was probably more of a sort of distant satisfied sigh, wasn't it? It didn't know what this hum was. Click, hum, click, hum. That was all it was getting. The higher level supervising program considered this and didn't like it. It asked the low level supervising program what exactly it was supervising and the low level supervising program said it couldn't remember that either, just that it was something that was meant to go click, sigh every ten years or so, which usually happened without fail. It had tried to consult its error look-up table but couldn't find it, which was why it had alerted the higher level supervising program to the problem.
The higher level supervising program went to consult one of its own look-up tables to find out what the low level supervising program was meant to be supervising.
It couldn't find the look-up table.
Odd.
It looked again. All it got was an error message. It tried to look up the error message in its error message look-up table and couldn't find that either. It allowed a couple of nanoseconds to go by while it went through all this again. Then it woke up its sector function supervisor.
The sector function supervisor hit immediate problems. It called its supervising agent which hit problems too. Within a few millionths of a second virtual circuits that had lain dormant, some for years, some for centuries, were flaring into life throughout the ship. Something, somewhere, had gone terribly wrong, but none of the supervising programs could tell what it was. At every level, vital instructions were missing, and the instructions about what to do in the event of discovering that vital instructions were missing, were also missing. Small modules of software - agents - surged through the logical pathways, grouping, consulting, re-grouping. They quickly established that the ship's memory, all the way back to its central mission module, was in tatters. No amount of interrogation could determine what it was that had happened. Even the central mission module itself seemed to be damaged.
This made the whole problem very simple to deal with. Replace the central mission module. There was another one, a backup, an exact duplicate of the original. It had to be physically replaced because, for safety reasons, there was no link whatsoever between the original and its backup. Once the central mission module was replaced it could itself supervise the reconstruction of the rest of the system in every detail, and all would be well.
Robots were instructed to bring the backup central mission module from the shielded strong room, where they guarded it, to the ship's logic chamber for installation.
This involved the lengthy exchange of emergency codes and protocols as the robots interrogated the agents as to the authenticity of the instructions. At last the robots were satisfied that all procedures were correct. They unpacked the backup central mission module from its storage housing, carried it out of the storage chamber, fell out of the ship and went spinning off into the void.
This provided the first major clue as to what it was that was wrong.
If autonomous weapons lead to a net battlefield advantage, I agree with the GP, they will be used. It is the endgame.
"In a press conference, Musk promised that the Optimus Warbots would actually, definitely, for real, be fully autonomous in two years, in 2031. He also extended his condolences to the 56 service members killed during the training exercise"
That's how I imagine a Musk demo of this kind of thing would play out, if his team can't successfully manage upwards.
Other players just need to assume that one player might do it in the future. This virtual future scenario has a causal effect on the now. The overall dynamic is that of an arms race (which radically changes what a player is).
Or it was their prerogative, until the Trump administration. Now even private companies must bend the knee.
And I am honestly not sure.
If your stance is "well, this is something that should just not happen" and also believe that is absolutely will happen, then what are you doing by saying "but it won't be us, it will instead be other people (who were enabled and inspired by our work in unsurprising ways)".
On the other hand, just the act of resisting could tip the scale in some incalculable and hopefully positive way.
Businesses stay out of potentially profitable market segments for various reasons, so I don't think everyone has to be able to do it to survive.
Using fiduciary duty as cover for profiting from the misery of others? Well that’s just some modern American doublespeak. I’m consistently asking myself “Are we the Baddies?” and the only answer I have anymore is yes.
Things like Scout AI’s Fury system are human in the loop still and I think for something that could just as well make a mistake and target your own troops it’s not yet clear that full auto is the way to go https://scoutco.ai/
Human in the loop okaying a full auto seems like it could work almost all the way. And then we count on geography. If they want to spray out a bunch of autonomous drones into our territory they do have to fly here to do it first or plant them prior in shipping containers. Better we aim at stopping that.
But DOD wants to use Anthropic so is really confirming that there is no foreign entity issues. They want to use it.
So to use NDAA (The "Huawei Rule"), is nakedly false and being used as a punishment.
Which if allowed to happen, could be used against any US Corporation to enforce compliance with the regime..
That's fundamentally antidemocratic and it normalizes the departure from the Western Enlightenment standard of, "the same law governs everyone".
Why is only domestic surveillance by an AI dangerous? I guess Europeans are not worth protecting from the dangers of AI?
Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47173121 - Feb 2026 (1405 comments)
They are arguing to do things that shouldn't be allowed anyway.
> One option is to invoke the Defense Production Act. . .
> Another threat would be to declare Anthropic to be a supply chain risk. . .
The first is a wrist-slap that still gets the government what they want; the second is an existential threat to Anthropic. Their main partners are all “dogs of the military”. Microsoft, Intuit, NVIDIA: all government contractors. I can’t find one company that they have a working relationship with that doesn’t hold at least one govt contract.
The idea that Claude could alignment fake its way out of a change in contractual terms is silly. The DoW has all sorts of legal and administrative tools it can choose to leverage against contractors that fail to perform. Usually it doesn’t, because of a “norm” that says the private defense sector runs more smoothly when the government doesn’t try to micromanage it.
Remind me again how good this administration is at upholding norms?
When it comes to killing and spying on people with flimsy justifications that's a pretty bipartisan norm. Hell, Anthropic isn't even saying they won't help the DoW do just that, they just want to make sure there's a human in the loop.
The "USA Freedom Act" [1], which made most of the Patriot act permanent, had bipartisan support.
I'm all for reversing the continual ramp up of the police state and the industrial military complex. We need to recognize, however, that it's being funded and pushed by both parties. Generally playing on fears of the scary other. (Muslim terrorists in 00s, Mexicans today).
> Usually it doesn’t, because of a “norm” that says the private defense sector runs more smoothly when the government doesn’t try to micromanage it.
My comment has nothing to do with Anthropic’s “moral” or “ethical” stance.
I also don’t see the point in both-siding this. The situation at hand is before Hegseth and Trump. I can’t even remember Biden’s SecDef’s name.
> I also don’t see the point in both-siding this. The situation at hand is before Hegseth and Trump. I can’t even remember Biden’s SecDef’s name.
To me, the moral and ethical problem is a bigger issue than the norms problem. There's a distinction without a difference between Hegseth doing this vs the Dems agreeing with Anthropic's demands and keeping a human in the loop on a massive spy and killing network. In some ways, stepping out of the norms and making a big news story is preferable to an unknown cabinet member just signing a business as usual agreement which erodes liberties. At least we know about it.
That's why I brought it up. It's great that Anthropic wants some safeguards, but ultimately the bigger problem is that AI with or without humans, significantly expands that ability of our military to murder and our spy agencies to spy.
The sold services to a willing counterparty at mutually agreed upon terms. And now the other side of that deal has recalled that they're Twelve and You're Not My Real Mom You Can't Tell Me What To Do, and so wishes they had agreed to different terms and is throwing a tantrum to attempt to force a change.
And that's Anthropic's fault? That's a risk they should have predicted?
Yeah, and the legal environment that contract was written in, which both parties were aware of during negotiation, defines the means by which those terms can be changed.
> And that's Anthropic's fault? That's a risk they should have predicted?
It is deeply funny to me to imagine that an AI company doing inference at an unprecedented scale could not see this coming.
Go ask Claude how usgov should act if a contractor preemptively refuses to deliver. What are the top five tools they could use to demand compliance?
See this is your confusion. They're not refusing to deliver, they're happy to provide the services agreed to at the rate negotiated. What they're refusing is a change in the terms.
If you contract me to build you a building, and I agree with a stipulation that it won't be used as a slaughterhouse (and that you'll write that into the deed), you can't compel me to continue building if you change your mind on that point six months in. You either break the contract subject to agreed terms, renegotiate to remove that clause, or stop breaching the contract.
Of all American claims to exceptionalism, one that rings closest to true is that the the people AND the government are all bound by the rule of law. Contracting with the government is no different than contracting with any other party.
Your point seems to be "but it's the government clearly they can do whatever they want lol" viz. DPA, Supply-Chain risk, etc. You're right that they have those powers. But accepting/asserting that the capricious, vengeful, use of those extraordinary powers should be an anticipated, normal feature of contracting with the government runs counter to what should be among our highest shared values. We might as well jump directly to the authoritarian logic 'they have the army, they can compel anything they want for $0, so just give them what they ask'.
Furthermore, one presumes Anthropic did see this coming, given no more evidence than that this is playing out in a giant public fracas making their values clear to all their possible customers the world over, instead of over a tense email thread between the assistant to the sub-under-deputy secretary for AI procurement and a half-dozen lawyers in SF.
(addenda: you're going to say we've used the DPA a bunch. I would argue that vanishingly few instances have compelled private enterprise to act in direct opposition to their own interests; an even in those cases they were just being asked to lose money (meatpackers, PG&E suppliers, ...))
It is also, however, the official name of the department, as determined by the US Congress who are empowered to determine such names.
In no case I am happy to humor this administration's decisions, especially when they are illegal/extra-legal/paralegal. If they wanted to actually rename the department, there's a clear process for that, and then perhaps we could "humor" that effort. As it stands, there's nothing here to humor, since there is no decision, only illegal aspiration.
They’re aggressively signalling that they are cooperative, and that they are not being belligerent. They are using the preferred language and much of the framing that the US government would use, to make it as clear as possible what the key points of their disagreement are, by leaning into alignment on everything else
This is textbook. People are reading this as some kind of confusing, inexplicable framing when it’s how any sensible person would write in their context. When you’re up against an authoritarian regime, that’s willing to abuse all the levers of power against you, you very carefully pick your fights and don’t give them any reason to complain about anything that isn’t essential.
Quibbling about the name of the department would be among the stupidest things I could possibly imagine. As it stands, I’m seeing lots of folks online who generally support the administration saying that Anthropic is correct here. If you gave them a bunch of stupid talking points about how anthropic is being disrespectful, you would lose those people. It doesn’t make sense, they’re obviously terrible people without a soul, but that’s reality.
While I am not claiming that you're wrong in this particular instance, or in general, I think it is important to note that there are people who absolutely disagree with you about this, some of whom who have lived in extremely authoritarian regimes. I'm not saying they're right, either, but just highlighting that there is no clearly obvious right/wrong on this point.
There’s no Obamacare either. Come on, this is about as pedantic as the “the DoD is not the Pentagon” debate downthread.
It’s a colloquial name, and how the executive branch wants everyone to refer to it. This forum isn’t an official document. Move on.
This administration says "Department of War" because they want to project an aggressive image. I support anyone who uses the legal name "Department of Defense" in an effort to reinforce an aspirational goal for the department and to remind others that the Executive Branch shouldn't be allowed to remake the entire government at will.
"Department of War" is not a colloquial name; at best it is an attempt by the administration to create a colloquial name.
Not doing what the executive branch requests is a noble American tradition, and even more noble at the current time.
It's not like these names are part of some sacred part of American identity, and "defense" has always been laughable as a euphemism. The DoD refers to themselves as the DoW [0] now, so it's completely reasonably to refer to the department as DoW. And of all the places to put your political energy, defending a laughable euphemism of a name that was used because the previous iteration of the name sounded funny seems like a sub-optimal use of that a energy.
I'm expending a fraction of a fraction of 1% on this, and I am in no way defending the euphimism. I am defending the actual written down, legal way in the US government is supposed to operate, which despite its many failings, seems worth defending to me.
DoD Generals also probably don't agree with pissing off all our allies but they don't have control of elected leadership and elected leadership is making those decisions.
Sorry but the China scare tactics is just more cold war nonsense. The idea China as a serious threat to anyone in the world where you have the USA invading countries (invading Iraq based on lies), kidnapping Presidents (Venezula), assassinating various leaders (drone strikes), abusing democratic ideals (Patriot act, PRISM, parallel construction, using banned chemical weapons against their own civilians; the USA has been a huge threat against the world and itself for the last 25 years.
That is the reason why they would cry if the other party broke the rules to this degree. The other party is more aligned with regulations; taking power from corporations instead of giving it to them.
He literally named it [1]!
Enough regulation is good, not enough and too much are both bad. Neither party has the best plan when it comes to regulation, Republicans want too little (increasing corporate power), Democrats want too much (increasing government power).
And then you use that affinity to manipulate them, to get them to do what you want, to get them to give you money.
I think the tech worker / engineering / online crowd has really let themselves get duped.
Sure, maybe some tech billionaires did start out in a similar place as many of us.
But a lot of what they tell us as part of selling us their brand is just affinity fraud, telling us they're just like us with the same values of privacy and open source and some hippie notion of peace, love and understanding.
But it's just a trick, and they just want money, power and fame.
It's not so much as the billionaires capitulating, it's that they never were the people they pretended to be, and keeping up the act is no longer how they get what they want.
there is little surprising about it
Trump is pushing in the direction of an Oligarchie, billionaires would be the future oligarchs.
So even iff a billionaire is no-okay with this development, if they stick out they
- will lose their status/money iff Trump wins long term
- will make enemies with many other billionaires, but a core trend of billionaires is taking advantage of connections to other powerful people
- will be the prime target to make and example of
So there is a high risk for sticking out. At the same time "mostly passively tagging along" will at worst make them oligarchs. At the same time they are used to crossing ethical boundaries to maximize profits. *This is just another form of that.*
In general its pretty much non-viable to go from sub/barely millionaire to billionaire by keeping to law, moral and ethics.
And it's not a secret either that any extreme concentrations of power or money are fundamental thread of _any_ democratic state of law, the US is no exception. The US has been warned that their system is very prone to populist take over and their checks and balances are quite brittle since _decades_. (At least since end of WW2 when people when people analyzed how Hitler took over post-WW1 Germany and wondered if the US could suffer a similar fate. And instead of improving the robustness, the general response was "nonsense, this is the US". Then after 9/11 thinks got worse, warnings that this can lead to a disaster where also many, but actions where none. And then in recent decades the US pushed in favor of monopolies instead of a (actual, practical) free market(1) to project more power internationally, and things got even worse.
(1): Monopolies and a (actual, practical) free Market are fundamentally incompatible. It also is kinda obvious why once you put away decades of deregulation propaganda.
my argument was more about becoming a billionaire by creating bringing a company to a level of success where they dominate their area of business.
I.e. not getting there by "fame" or "pure luck" (lets say you got 1/42th of early bitcoin from a "fun" project in the very early bitcoin days or similar).
Let's also for simplicity ignore that getting there by "fame" often involve tight cooperation with companies/people which don't care about ethics much. Through you might be able to separate yourself once you reach success, most times they try to make sure you can't.
And even iff you didn't compromise your ethics when becoming a billionaire this doesn't change the core argument.
That is if (as billionaire) you passively go with a push to Oligarchy you are unlikely to suffer from it. But if you don't and the Oligarchy wins, then you likely suffer a lot.
I.e. if you go with a non-emotional/non-ideology considering risk/benefit analysis passively yielding wins. Both for money and power.
In such a situation a lot of people will just go with it, no matter if billionaire or not.
Genuine question.
edit: how about the downvoters give a counterargument instead of trying to bury this comment?
Anthropic (and others), whether due to financial/regulatory/competitive, will at some point permit their products to be used for any lawful purpose. Even if they attempt to restrict certain uses today. That arrangement is unlikely to hold.
Americans should vote for the right candidates and elect leaders who will carry and defend their views. I don't think there is any other way.
The situation in the United States, right now, seems genuinely hopeless. And I'm certain I'm not the only person who feels this way.
What is there to do besides resign myself to what's coming and try my best to ignore the bullshit?
So many companies have US Government contracts. Maybe they are not majority of their business like Lockheed Martin or RTX but look at F10, on that list, MAYBE Walmart is only one without US Gov Contract, everyone else likely does.
The worst that can happen to Anthropic is one of the two things mentioned; loosing some contracts or some fake forced management from the Pentagon. maybe Dario having to leave, certainly a loss for him and people who believe in him but probably nothing world-changing.
The worst that can happen to the Trump administration is the beginning of its end, when people realize you can simply stand up to their bullying and with all the standoffs they have going on in parallel, maybe they will die a death by a thousand cuts?
I what world has the Greenland stuff been anything but a fuckoff?
The world in which Europe didn't respond, Americans didn't flip out and Congress didn't push back.
https://komonews.com/news/nation-world/danish-mep-tells-trum...
They willingly don't, because they know that they can use the administration to cement their market power. The surveillance state being built is one where would-be competitors, labor, well-meaning reformists, can be crushed on a whim for sham political reasons. A massive contraction of USA wealth, influence, and power, a loss of our living standard and place in the world -- that is the price everyone else has to pay, to keep the existing power structure in place. They will not release their grip on the wheel. Not until the ship hits the bottom of the sea.
The monopolists don't care though. The power is too intoxicating.
I mean, listen to discussions here. "What's your moat?" -- that's how American capitalists think. Not "What value does your company provide to the customer", but what extra force, beyond simple-minded fair market competition, are you leveraging, to ensnare the customer. The game is to ensure that customers cannot choose another business over yours on its merits. That works in the short term but it's extractive. Eventually, the parasite must stop sucking blood for the host to survive.
Biology doesn't work like that. Biological units are too selfish. It is an iterated game so evolution could affect how a parasite's children act. However defection is usually a winning strategy (because there's rarely enough coordination nor enough signals for cooperation to win).
Biology has amazing metaphors, but unfortunately most writers and readers don't understand biology well enough to use those metaphors as part of an argument.
The same issue occurs with other disciplines too.
Indeed they are.
Can you elaborate?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Always_Chickens_Out
I misattributed it to the Wall Street Journal -- it was the Financial Times, point still stands.
The corporate death sentence usually goes something like "anyone who does business with Anthropic cannot do business with the US government". That pretty much means all the hyperscalers, major infrastructure providers, major software providers, and major corporations. They all have to choose between the entire US gov and all those contracts and a single AI company. That's the worst that can happen to Anthropic.
It's the US government basically unilaterally deciding to end a leading AI researcher company. Years of lawsuits will follow, comparisons to "communism", accusations of Trump/Heghseth being Chinese/Russia agents (because well, how else do you hand over the AI win to China than by killing one of your top 2?)
Why do you say this?
It's trivially untrue. It could be the end of one type of business model, and it could slow their growth, but it could also be a blessing in disguise -- there are a lot of brilliant engineers who would prefer to work with an Anthropic that took a stand on ethics, and a lot of people who would prefer to support such a company. One door closes, another opens. They could become an open, public-facing, benevolent-AI company.
> The President is hereby authorized (1) to require that performance under contracts or orders (other than contracts of employment) which he deems necessary or appropriate to promote the national defense shall take priority over performance under any other contract or order, and, for the purpose of assuring such priority, to require acceptance and performance of such contracts or orders in preference to other contracts or orders by any person he finds to be capable of their performance, and (2) to allocate materials and facilities in such manner, upon such conditions, and to such extent as he shall deem necessary or appropriate to promote the national defense.
So yes you're right, it sure is nice to imagine Anthropic setting off a wave of more military contractors acting with principles.
So instead, I invite you to imagine a medical supply company refusing to sell medical-grade sodium thiopental to the Bureau of Prisons.
The big boy defense contractors won't touch that shit either because as soon as you mention the idea the engineers start shouting you down from the top of their lungs out of shear unbridled terror and the lawyers come storming in due to the endless legal risk said design would bring.
Mass Domestic surveillance sure they might do no problem but fully autonomous killbots or drones are gonna be a no go from pretty much every contractor other that doesn't carry a "missing the point of Lord of the Rings" name
SecDef invoking the DPA against Anthropic likely trashes the AI fundraising market, at least for a spell. That's why OpenAI is wading into the fight [1]. Given the Dow is sitting on a rising souffle of AI expectations, that knocks it out as well. And if there is one red line Trump has consistently hewed to and messaged on, it's in not pissing off the Dow.
[1] https://www.axios.com/2026/02/27/altman-openai-anthropic-pen...
Also, Gemini with DoD money and DoD direction is likely to result in an AI that works very well for the DoD but significantly less well for other things, especially if your use case benefits from some guardrails (and most use cases do, because you rarely want AI to just do whatever it fancies.)
News sources have been using both building names (and several more I can think of off the top of my head) as short hand for the people who work inside of them for my entire life.