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Comment by jazzyjackson | Hacker News Reader

So dumb, I have to think it's astroturfed. Anthropic states they're not willing to help with autonomous weapons because it's not good enough yet, and suddenly everyone cancels their OAI subscription? I just don't get it

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People don't want salt on their injuries. If OpenAI announced the military contract a few months later no one would care. But they announced it on the same day and that pissed many people (read: maybe 0.1% of ChatGPT users) off.

I think it’s from a perception (right or wrong) that OpenAI engineered this kerfuffle to hurt a competitor and cozy up to the administration

I can't prove there was no astroturfing, but I was personally absolutely furious and hard-deleted my account Friday evening. I'm not sure how to bridge the gap in understanding, this story was extremely radicalizing for me, I'm genuinely hoping now that OpenAI burns to the ground.

Why not let Anthropic burn to the ground too? They are still partnered with Palantir offering the same service one incorporation removed.

They are not opposed to autonomous weapons in principle and surveillance on foreigners is fair game. The only moral stance is to use no AI at all (it’s not that hard)

Most people’s LLM use cases don’t involve autonomous weapons

Do any autonomous weapons have an LLM usecase yet? As opposed to say, specialized visual ML stuff that can fit on a small portable system.

The DoD office staff using it for information analysis, similar to Palantir providing data integration software, isn't quite the same as using it for weapons.

>As opposed to say, specialized visual ML stuff that can fit on a small portable system.

What do you think writes the code for that and trains the models?

That’s part of why this is all so stupid. Anthropic’s red lines seem very reasonable. Feels incredibly arbitrary for the DoD to cancel the contract and declare it a supply chain risk.

That's the way I see it. I've commented previously that I see this mostly as a Soviet-style loyalty test not really about the specific technical concerns of developing weapon systems or surveillance.

They stated 2 red lines, mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons, as a result Trump admin threw a hissy fit and cancelled all military contracts going forward and designated them a supply chain risk to further punish them. https://x.com/SecWar/status/2027507717469049070 OpenAI on the other hand after all this is openly partnering and seemingly has no such red lines and has given milquetoast explanations as to why this is acceptable. What is surprising about the boycott?

Some might be but dont be so sure. Theres a lot of hatred in our country over politics and sides dont matter, all sides can be quite hateful.

The sticking point seems to be that Anthropic didn't want to help the Trump regime spying on its own citizens (by using Claude to sift through mass-surveillance data)

“everyone” could be one person. these internet reported movements rarely have meaningful impact

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