And sure enough, my reading of it left the impression the OAI conditions were basically "DoW won't do anything which violates the rules DoW sets for itself."
He also claimed that they would build rules into the model the DoD would use, preventing misuse. Aka he claims OpenAI will quickly solve alignment and build it right in...I wouldn't hold my breath.
Probably because most don't want to end up in russia?
It wasn't as if there weren't any other contractors like Snowden, but there were no other whistleblowers like Snowden
and where'd that leave him? In a country far away from his motherland and being worried about his safety. Being called god knows what by the country at home and most general people don't even care.
Snowden didn't do it for the money, he did it for what he felt was right and that's so rare.
Its so sad how when I searched up on Snowden on youtube, the first thing I found was ex CIA agent claiming Snowden wasn't innocent and how he had to befriend russia but at the same time, that was only because US would have literally killed him and made an example out of him to whistleblow about such a large-scale mass surveillance
“What kind of asshole reveals the fact we’re the assholes, then doesn’t let us kill him!” is one heck of a comment I found.
Also, We will charge the whistleblower with death but we will not take any action against the act which was whistleblown in the first place (:
Russia stopped him because US had cancelled his passport.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident
All Lawful Use is a tautology with fascists because they cannot break laws by definition.
Soviet Union - The show trials of the 1930s were conducted with full legal apparatus: confessions, judges, verdicts. Stalin's purges operated through legally constituted troikas. Entirely "lawful" by Soviet law.
East Germany (DDR) - The Stasi's surveillance and harassment programmes were codified in law. When the wall fell, many Stasi officers genuinely argued their conduct was legal under GDR statute: a defence that West German courts largely rejected.
Castro's Cuba - Mass executions after the revolution were conducted by legally constituted revolutionary tribunals. Castro explicitly defended this on legality grounds when challenged by foreign press in 1959.
Chavez/Maduro's Venezuela - Suppression of opposition media, jailing of political opponents was consistently defended as operating within Venezuelan law, which was progressively rewritten to make it so. Classic self-referential legality.
Mao's Cultural Revolution - The revolutionary committees had legal standing. Persecution of intellectuals and landlords proceeded through formal (if kangaroo) legal processes.
DoD: I will make it legal.
Ignoring the definition, what would be required for individual alignment is exactly the same as collective alignment. The only difference is the goals and who writes them, for the LLM it is being somehow forced to follow those rules no matter what.
If you have so little faith in them that they won’t honour the privacy controls you should also delete your non-consumer account too.
The bigger picture is that the DoW got what it wanted and it got it by threatening one company while the other did its bidding.
Did voting for Bernie Sanders in the last two primaries (especially the ones when Trump won for the first time) amount to anything?
I wonder how long can the American public keep the self delusion that the elections are anything but a theater for the naive, to keep the pretense the public has any say in things that matter.
How much has the current administration asked the public about going to war with Iran?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Democratic_Party_presiden...
Skill issue. Run your candidate. Convince people to vote for them.
> How much has the current administration asked the public about going to war with Iran?
THE ELECTIONS are how the public weighs in.
But you are saying: You lost fair and square, wait 4 years to have any say in what is going on.
Re: THE ELECTIONS are how the public weighs in.
When the choice is between Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the public's choice is meaningless.
To say nothing about politicians outright shamelessly lying (e.g. Trump campaigning on 'no more wars').
Sorry I didn't invent the idea that there are federal elections every two years, I'm just telling you that you have to win them. Bonus points: this is also how you can change the election schedule or political system!
If you're saying both candidates were bad when one was Trump, and the other was Hillary, Kamala, or Joe, then you don't have very good judgement. I agree Trump lying about not starting a war was bad. Many of us have said for years that he is a terrible liar. Please help us.
Trump is monstrously bad (= force the shit hitting the fan NOW), the democratic alternatives were just 'normally' bad (= continue the same old crap driving the shit closer to the fan, ignoring the looming disaster).
(Also, political donors are unusually engaged upper-middle-class people which means they are left of the average voter.)
That's the second box only. There's also the soapbox (that you also referred to), the jury box and ultimately the ammo box.
He didn't win the primaries though. It would have amounted to something if he got enough votes.
2) If he won the primaries, there is still no guarantee that that would have amounted to anything.
First, he might not have won the elections (mainstream media and the whole ruling elites were heavily against him). And even if he won, he might not have been able to do much against the permanent state.
I still think the main cause of Trump's wins is the deep disillusionment of the democratic voters by Obama's failure (inability/unwillingness) to impact a meaningful change.
Sadly, it is also factually correct (i.e. not delusional).
Which of my statements are you contesting?
From my point of view, your stance (play fairly, according to the rules set by your stronger opponent) is delusional. Note that the opponent is not 'republicans', but the whole ruling elites.
And no, I can't help you, I am not USian, just an outside observer. Sadly, due to its weight, whatever USA does, heavily influences everybody else as well.
No, it isn’t. Sanders’ supporters didn’t have the votes. That’s a fact.
If people believe in something, they should call their electeds and vote. The fact that a lot of people with a certain confluence of views (privacy, anti-war, et cetera) are too lazy to do either (regardless of post rationalization), but not self aware enough to not complain about it, is delusional cynicism.
I said the leadership of the democratic party did dirty tricks to prevent him winning.
The mainstream media was also against him.
Not anywhere close to a level playing field.
Note, that I am not against voting or calling your elected officials and all the related stuff. That is necessary. But, sadly, far from sufficient. If you think that that is sufficient, you are delusional.
Your subsequent generalizations are lazy and unsubstantiated, in fact they fit the classical smear patterns established by the mainstream media.
But still, ultimately, turnout was turnout. Media saying mean things about your side isn’t a real excuse, Trump has been saying the same for a decade.
> they fit the classical smear patterns established by the mainstream media
Of course they must. In the meantime, the issues I care about seem decently reflected (outside privacy and war, where I concede most Americans who share my views are lazy, delusional and nihilistic). I’ve even had the opportunity to help write some state and federal legislation. So I guess I should be okay with the lack of political competition.
Here is the 2026 Senate map [1]. Do you suggest any of them will flip over Iran? (I don’t. The folks who regularly vote simply don’t show any sign that this is a priority. Folks who stay at home grumbling don’t matter.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_United_States_Senate_elec...
Uh, yeah? I voted for Biden/Harris.
And in any case, focusing almost exclusively on one race is part of the problem. Where I live, we also had a Dem primary for the house district, and a more electable candidate won - and then went on to win in the general. It was one of the very few red->blue flips in 2024.
Our former congresswoman, incidentally:
https://newrepublic.com/post/207234/trump-labor-secretary-ch...
Then there are all the races for school boards, city council, county commission and all those things that provide the base and the bench to build off of.
... But the government flooding cities with thousands of masked thugs with a license to do whatever they want... has so far been an entirely Republican thing.
There are more colours to the world than pure black and pure white. There are also a million shades of grey in between, and most of us have the ability to distinguish between them.
See PRISM.
https://www.wyden.senate.gov/issues/domestic-surveillance-re...
He may not be perfect on everything, but elect more people like him and it starts moving the needle. Or elect some more that are even more opposed to some of these things. It doesn't happen overnight. Change is difficult.
I agree, though notice that the GOP/MAGA have and continue to make enormous changes. The difference is that they believe they can do it while others sit around talking about hopelessness and powerlessness. The only difference is belief.
You're conceding that the name has already changed, without voting.
> It doesn't change if the government wants mass surveillance.
That can be prevented by Congress with enough political will.
Also maybe not seeing the message or connection here... That myth isn't really about who has power or not, right? It's kind of just a trite little "why you should do good even when no one is watching" thing. It just serves Socrates for his argument with Thrasymachus, and leads us into book 2 where it really gets going with Glaucon and all that. This is from memory so I might be a little off.
The story is asking whats the source of morality? Who decides where the lines are? And its not scientists. Science produces the Ring.
> According to the tradition, Gyges was a shepherd in the service of the king of Lydia; there was a great storm, and an earthquake made an opening in the earth at the place where he was feeding his flock. Amazed at the sight, he descended into the opening, where, among other marvels, he beheld a hollow brazen horse, having doors, at which he stooping and looking in saw a dead body of stature, as appeared to him, more than human, and having nothing on but a gold ring; this he took from the finger of the dead and reascended. Now the shepherds met together, according to custom, that they might send their monthly report about the flocks to the king; into their assembly he came having the ring on his finger, and as he was sitting among them he chanced to turn the collet of the ring inside his hand, when instantly he became invisible to the rest of the company and they began to speak of him as if he were no longer present. He was astonished at this, and again touching the ring he turned the collet outwards and reappeared; he made several trials of the ring, and always with the same result—when he turned the collet inwards he became invisible, when outwards he reappeared. Whereupon he contrived to be chosen one of the messengers who were sent to the court; whereas soon as he arrived he seduced the queen, and with her help conspired against the king and slew him, and took the kingdom. Suppose now that there were two such magic rings, and the just put on one of them and the unjust the other; no man can be imagined to be of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice. No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a God among men. Then the actions of the just would be as the actions of the unjust; they would both come at last to the same point. And this we may truly affirm to be a great proof that a man is just, not willingly or because he thinks that justice is any good to him individually, but of necessity, for wherever any one thinks that he can safely be unjust, there he is unjust.
1. Some other AI company would cut a deal with the Pentagon. There's no world in which all the labs boycott the Pentagon. So who? Choosing Grok would be bad for the US, which is a bad outcome, but Amodei would have discounted that option, because he knows that despite their moral failures, the Pentagon is not stupid and Grok sucks.
That leaves Gemini or OpenAI, and I bet they predicted it would be OpenAI. Choosing OpenAI does not harm the republic - say what you will about Altman, ChatGPT is not toxic and it is capable - but it does have the potential to harm OpenAI, which is my second point:
2. OpenAI may benefit from this in the short term, and Anthropic may likewise be harmed in the short term, but what about the long game? Here, the strategic benefits to Anthropic in both distancing themselves from the Trump administration and letting OpenAI sully themselves with this association are readily apparent. This is true from a talent retention and attraction standpoint and especially true from a marketing standpoint. Claude has long had much less market share than ChatGPT. In that position, there are plenty of strategic reasons to take a moral/ethical stand like this.
What I did not expect, and I would guess Amodei did not either, is that Claude would now be #1 in the app store. The benefits from this stance look to be materializing much more quickly than anyone in favour of his courage might have hoped.
Wikileaks and Assange got popular too. What happened to them?
The State Dept and CIA do exactly what Assange did. They pick and choose who to target with leaks. They get away with it (mostly even when exposed) because they officially are in power. Assange was not in power. If you take a moral position do it when you have real power.
If the condition for getting real power is having no morals, this is hard to accomplish.
They chose Grok and OpenAI. The story was drowned out by the Anthropic controversy, but an xAI deal was signed the same week.
Not adding up
Pete is also facing a lot of risk from AI, power structures will be forced to change once a few teams can take over entire departments of people. The military ecosystem is very much like the private sector in where the number of butts in seats is a metric for people. The dynamics will be changed if your group can just hand-roll what they relied on others for.
3. Talent migration to Anthropic. No serious researcher working towards AGI will want it to be in the hands of OpenAI anymore. They are all asking themselves: "do I trust Sam or Dario more with AGI/ASI?" and are finding the former lacking.
It is already telling that Anthropic's models outperform OAI's with half the headcount and a fraction of the funding.
App Store rankings are meaningless, I have Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini all in top five, with a electronic mail app being 1 and a postal tracking service app (for a very small provider) being 3.
if we consider AIs as "force multipliers" as we do with coding agents, it's easy to see how any AI company can harm the republic if the government they are serving is unethical and amoral.
If US & A really goes full-Huawei on Anthropic, they can't IPO. It's an existential crisis for them. I think they can survive in some form, somehow, because their model is really good, probably the best.
And in other times, I would think the US government had sufficient intellectual horsepower to not cut off its own dick, and the golden goose's head, over some idiotic morning-drinker road-rage type beef. But these are not other times. These are these times.
“Oppenheimer was clearly an enormously charming man, but also a manipulative man and one who made enemies he need not have made. The really horrible things Oppenheimer did as a young man – placing a poisoned apple on the desk of his advisor at Cambridge, attempting to strangle his best friend – and yes, he really did those things – Monk passes off as the result of temporary insanity, a profound but passing psychological disturbance. (There’s no real attempt by Monk to explain Oppenheimer’s attempt to get Linus Pauling’s wife Ava to run off to Mexico with him, which ended the possibility of collaboration with one of the greatest scientists of the twentieth, or any, century.) Certainly the youthful Oppenheimer did go through a period of serious mental illness; but the desire to get his own way, and feelings of enormous frustration with people who prevented him from getting his own way, seem to have been part of his character throughout his life.”
Seems more like Sam Altman, who is known to get his way, than Dario.
As you suggest, it is easy to imagine Altman in the same hot seat. Never mind his sexual orientation, which the Republican theocrats will eventually use against him as surely as the knives came out for Ernst Röhm.
There were people working in government who successfully attacked Oppenheimer for personal and/or policy reasons, people who stood by, and people who unsuccessfully supported him, voted to clear him, or condemned the proceedings.
Oppenheimer still paid the price, and arguably, the risks to someone like him today are considerably higher, as the current administration isn't exactly like Eisnehower's.
Nevertheless it's reductionist, reifying sentimentality to talk about "the government" turning "viciously" on someone who "served them well" because they are defying its agenda. The government isn't a character in Game of Thrones. The responsibility lies with the specific individuals who attacked him, and those who stood by.
I'm sure that was of great comfort to Oppenheimer, as it will be to Altman and/or Amodei. "It's not you, it's us."
When combined with a somewhat paradoxical large ego and occasionally fanciful reshaping of his own life story or exaggeration, it's entirely plausible (if not likely) that this was in reality a brief intrusive thought or a partially realized fantasy blown up into a catchy anecdote that better fit his self-image of being unable to control his typically human qualities of anger and envy.
If it was Sam Altman, we'd have heard the story from the guy he tried to poison, who instead of filing a police report thought it showed Sam was a real go-getter and offered him his first job on the spot as VP at the company he founded (later forced out by Sam replacing him as CEO, but still considers him a friend with no hard feelings).
But besides Sam Altman, this whole episode has made me totally and completely lose all respect for Paul Graham. I used to really idolize pg, and I really used to like his essays, but over the years I've found his essays increasingly displayed a disturbing lack of introspection, like they'd always seem to say that starting a startup is the best thing anyone can do, and if you're not good at startups then you kind of suck.
But his continued support of Altman in this instance (see https://x.com/paulg/status/2027908286146875591, and the comment in that thread where he replies "yes") is just so extra disappointing and baffling. First, his big commendation for Altman is that he's doing an AMA? Give me an f'ing break. When someone is a great spin doctor I'm not going to commend them for doing more spinning. It's like he has total blinders on and is unwilling to see how sama's actions in this instance are so disgusting and duplicitous. Maybe subconsciously he knows he's responsible for really launching sama into the public consciousness, so he now just is incapable of seeing the undeniably shitty things sama has done.
Oh well, I guess it's just another tech leader from the late 90s/early 00s who has just shown me he's kind of a shitty person like a lot of us.
> However, only an act of Congress can legally and formally change the department's name and secretary's title, so "Department of Defense" and "secretary of defense" remain legally official.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_De...
Verification requires access to classified logs. These logs would attract the spies of the whole world. Even if these logs are in principle for "past actions", in practice past logs (for war games, for example) would compromise future strategy.
Since these manual audits are too risky, the only alternative is to hard-code limits into the AI. But are we ready trust an AI to "judge" a mission and refuse to execute during a crisis?
Anthropic wanted technical enforcement, the Pentagon wanted trust.
It’s a choice between two bad options: an unaccountable military and an unreliable AI kill switch. They are both very dangerous, just in different ways.
This is my first thought as well. It's too obvious. He should have consulted ChatGPT before the announcement.
Secret FISA court decisions will say the use is lawful, but you’ll never get to read or challenge those decisions.
Just good 'ol fashion grifting mixed with a bit of government corruption.
This country has been boiling the frog of graft, grifting, and corruption too long.
I believe this understanding is correct. The issue many people have these days with Dept. of War, and most of Trump admin is that they have little respect for laws. They only follow the ones they like and openly ignore the ones that are inconvenient.
Dept of "War" should have zero problems agreeing to the two conditions Anthropic outlined, if they were honest brokers. But I think most of us know that they are not. Calling them dishonest brokers seems very charitable.
Ex: For the above statement, if they're truly dishonest brokers and openly ignore the rules that are inconvenient, they would have zero problems agreeing to Anthropic's terms and then violating them. So what you say may be quite true, but there would still need to be more to the story for it to make sense.
Ex: DoW officials are stating that they were shocked that their vendor checked in on whether signed contractual safety terms were violated: They require a vendor who won't do such a check. But that opens up other confusing oversight questions, eg, instead of a backchannel check, would they have preferred straight to the IG? Or the IG more aggressively checking these things unasked so vendors don't? It's hard to imagine such an important and publicly visible negotiation being driven by internal regulatory politicking.
I wonder if there's a straighter line for all these things. Irrespective of whether folks like or dislike the administration, they love hardball negotiations and to make money. So as with most things in business and government, follow the money...
"Find all of the terrorists in this photo", "Which targets should I bomb first?"
Even if the DoD wanted to ignore the legal terms, the model itself would not cooperate. DoD required a specially trained product without limitations.
I recommend reading Yuval Noah Harari's Nexus for a deep discussion around this.
He makes the point that what makes this AI age much more dangerous for mass surveillance isn't just the collection of data, which has indeed been possible for a while, but the new ability to have AI sift through that enormous volume of information, an ability which until recently has not been possible in a meaningful way without a ton of manual work to support it.
Older attempts at mass control of a population already involved mass surveillance, even in a large amount of detail, but even when capturing in detail all citizens' activities, there were just not enough people around to be able to dig through that and analyze it. This has been somewhat true even with the help of computers, though computers have certainly already been making this easier.
But now you can just give all that data to an AI with your instructions, and it'll apply some sort of "judgement" on your behalf, completely autonomously, and even perform actions against those folks it finds, again autonomously, without needing to manually build a whole infrastructure to do that with manual rules. That's a very meaningful upgrade for someone wanting to control a population.
like saying kids having internet-connected devices with built-in cameras doesn't increase the probability of sexting, they could do the same with film cameras and a fax machine
At the same time, it is expressly illegal in some circumstances; that was the whole core of the Snowden revelations. The NSA and CIA are expressly curtailed from doing that by law — there are cases where they may surveil citizens with a court order, but not "mass" surveillance. There are some restrictions on the military along those same lines.
Keywords: Executive Order 12333, FISA, National Security Act, Posse Comitatus Act
And while this administration is brazen about this, it's not really a drastic change anywhere.
In fact most EU laws (GPDR, AI regulation, Chat Control) are directly, up front, declaring they themselves won't respect it. They very directly have one set of rules for states, government employees, ... and ANOTHER set of rules for everyone else. And they're incredibly brazen. For private individuals, companies it goes very far, it's essentially impossible to even know what does and does not violate the GPDR, and you can't ask the courts, that's not allowed. You also cannot use the courts to compel government to do anything under these laws.
For governments, when it comes to what's allowed, it goes incredibly far. Governments can declare any action legal under the GPDR, before and after the fact, without parliament involvement. It does not matter if that action was done by the government themselves, or if it's an action by a private company (so the government can use subcontractors for any violation of the GPDR)
This means that, for THE example given for GPDR protection: medical information. Medical insurance in the EU is either state-owned or has exceptions, the law does the exact opposite of what it appears to do: it makes all your medical information available for medical insurers. And the police (e.g. to find you). And the tax office. And courts. And medical institutions themselves (to deny transplants to smokers). And ... And while doctors (and priests) used to be huge no-no's when it came to information gathering, that's no longer the case. If a doctor uses the state required medical file, your medical information flows straight into a state database, immediately searchable for everyone the GPDR supposedly protects you against.
I think it’s also possible DoW didn’t care about the conditions but just wanted some pretext to punish Anthropic because Dario isn’t a Trump boot licker like the rest of the SV CEOs.