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Comment by solenoid0937 | Hacker News Reader

The people that need to see this are the VPs and execs at Apple, Meta, Google, OAI so they can perhaps reflect on what it looks like to be a good & principled person as opposed to just a successful person.

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DoD/DoW can't strong-arm these companies into unreasonable demands if they present a united front... and that's exactly why collective action (or even unionization) matters.

If the government really wants to, it could try building its "Skynet" on open-source Chinese models.. which would be deeply ironic.

So your position is that the United States doesn't get to have it's own Skynet, because Skynet is bad, and that if it really wants to it should fork the Chinese Skynet so that it can have a Skynet if it wants it so much.

Do you see the problem here. Genuinely don't think we would've won WWII if these people were running things back then.

Without English and German scientists and engineers, the United States would not have had a first nuclear weapon or the first successful rocket to land on the moon.

The United States government held scientist at essentially gunpoint in secret towns to make the bomb happen. Not sure what your point is, other than to note that in a previous era people had a better gauge of what time it was.

Are you saying that we should consider the Chinese government to be an existential threat and menace to world peace on the same level as Nazi Germany?

What if the side that did Operation Paperclip and is currently champing at the bit to impose Total Surveillance on its own citizenry maybe isn't The Good Guys?

There is no evidence that this was a condition of the deal for working with the government on this. PRC already is a Total Surveillance state. The claim made by Anthropic is very specific, and it's that they feel that the law has not caught up to how AI can be used to aggregate very large amounts of data that can be obtained without a warrant through data brokers. The government already does this. Maybe you agree with Anthropic's point here, and it's certainly a good one, but they are building up a face-saving argument over what is already established precedent. An is vs. ought dichotomy and raising it as a redline is ridiculous.

At the end of the day I think many people simply want the United States to lose this race so they can feel good about their principles.

Okay but then why is that also seemingly a red line must have for the Department of War? Isn't it just a tool of domestic surveillance and counterinsurgency for them? Seems like a distraction from any real U.S. national security objectives.

It’s not, the memo that set all this off says nothing about the Terminator or Big Brother. The real objective in this case is that if Anthropic sells the United States a weapon then the United States’ elected leadership gets to decide how to use it. It is not more complicated than this.

What a ridiculously nonsensical statement. Several scientists refused to participate, and at least one left part way through. Nobody was held at gunpoint.

Skynet nukes humanity.

This is ridiculous. These aren't unreasonable demands and the government has tools to compel tech companies to support the country regardless of any "collective action" shenanigans -- ask your AI to tell you about the Defense Production Act and the history of its use.

The demands are not only unreasonable they are in violation of the contract the DoD signed. Do you really think LLMs should be used in autonomous weapons systems? Do you think they government should use them in mass domestic surveillance? That is reasonable?

Are you an American? Do you understand that your safe easy life depends on a mostly autonomous nuclear deterrence capability maintained by the military you oppose? Deeply think about why you still have right to free speech, and what it takes to sustain those rights.

"safe easy life" != "free speech"

but even if it did, the nuclear bit is a bold claim, especially when one of the most famous nuclear escalation in the u.s. was resolved by cooler heads in charge going around traditional war hawks and negotiating instead.

What a uniquely American view of the world - yes the only reason you have free speech is by threatening to nuke out of existence the rest of the world lmfao get a load of yourself

Answer the question instead of deflecting.

The posters question was itself a deflection - and your response is moral blackmail. Why don't you answer my question? Why are you deflecting? See how that works?

Mostly autonomous is extremely different from fully autonomous.

Also people like me who are paying for a 20x Claude Max subscription and am feeling really good about it right now. I'll never even glance at OpenAI Codex or Gemini. Not to mention my divestment of OpenAI. It's just a drop I guess, but it's probably not the only one.

No offense,but this is where having immigrants throughout the power structure of these companies becomes an issue. We have a administration who clearly is not above using all avenues to apply pressure to get the things that they want done done,

How can we expect the VPs of these companies to make to make tough decisions like this when half can be pressured via immigration status? It’s hard enough being a normal citizen sticking your neck out in these circumstances.

Google walked out in 2018 from project Maven, which is what this is about:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Maven

The Epstein adjacent crew (Palantir) took over. Palantir was using Anthropic. No one could possibly have foreseen this. /s

None of them are 'good'. Execs at Anthropic just perceive the long-term damage from a potential Snowden-level leak showing how their model directed a drone strike against a bunch of civilians higher than short-term loss of revenue from the DoD contracts.

I understand why you are cynical, but you should read more about the people who founded Anthropic, and specifically why they left OpenAI.

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