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Comment by 6thbit | Hacker News Reader

> Our most important priority right now is making sure that our warfighters and national security experts are not deprived of important tools in the middle of major combat operations.

> we had been having productive conversations with the Department of War over the last several days, both about ways we could serve the Department that adhere to our two narrow exceptions, and ways for us to ensure a smooth transition if that is not possible.

Why are people leaving openAI when this is Anthropic's stance? Are their two narrow requirements enough to draw the ethical boundary people are comfortable with?

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What’s a “warfighter?” Do they come from the “Gulf of America?” We used to call them servicemen or service members. Emphasizing they served the people. I guess that’s too effeminate for our roided up and ironically hyper-insecure Secretary of Defense.

A new term was needed some decades ago. "man" titles have not been politically correct for a while, "member" sounds awkward and bureaucratic. In some other languages, "soldier" can be used for all military personnel, while English ended up with a more narrow meaning.

"Awkward and bureacratic" is literally the point of naming conventions commonly adopted by democracies. Titles like "president" or "prime minister", departments like "Department of Defense", referring to government employees as "civil servants", etc. are all intentional measures meant to strip away the prestige and egotism associated with positions of authority in an effort to avoid it going to people's heads, and to remind them that they are meant to serve the good of the public that pays for their existence rather than ruling over them.

"Service member" is awkward, because it has too many syllables. People won't use it when shorter alternatives are available. And it's bureaucratic because it's unspecific. It doesn't tell anything the service those people are members of, and it doesn't tell what kind of work they do.

It has one more syllable than ‘warfighter’, which also doesn’t do any of the things you said.

I'm not sure how much more clear warfighter could be. "One who fights wars."

Service member is extremely vague. "A member of a service."

Growing up, "the service" was synonymous with "the military" among my grandparents who, y'know, fought in WWII

The world wars were an unusual period. When I grew up, "veteran" usually meant an old man. Most men in my grandparents' generation had seen combat.

Except for extreme periods in history (that I hope we can avoid), most service members don't end up directly participating in a war.

> It doesn't tell anything the service those people are members of, and it doesn't tell what kind of work they do.

I'm pretty sure that term could even work for the Pods in some of my Deployments.

Reddit discussion from 2016 (so before Trump).

https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/4ta3hh/cmv_th...

There are many reasons to detest the current political landscape. Don't get distracted.

What term to you prefer for referring to sailors, pilots, soldiers, etc collectively?

Literally what they wrote: service members.

Warfighter is not a new term and has been used in the military since at least the 1990s and was used by Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden, and Trump.

Service members are anyone serving in the military.

Warfighter is used to describe combat roles.

If useful to distinguish between the two, warfighter is the correct term.

I was unaware that the secretary of defence was a combat role?

He (and his allies) have referred to him as "warfighter": https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/23/look-ma-im-a-warfighter...

In that context he is clearly referring to his previous combat roles on the ground in Iraq.

It would be like a barista becoming CEO of Starbucks and saying, "the employees are happy to have a barista as CEO."

You're right about the age of the term but it's nothing to do with combat, but rather just a nice sounding umbrella term that makes talking about joint forces easier because every military service has their own special name for their personnel (soldiers, sailors, Marines, etc..).

The POGiest of POGs are "warfighters" and individual organizations within the DoD proudly advertise how they serve runny eggs and chicken to warfighters every day or issue their uniforms/equipment with incredible lethargy or maintain their personnel records in 20+ different systems duct taped together.

"Service member" does get used a lot still. Usually abbreviated to "SM".

Source: Personal experience in both combat arms and non combat arms roles.

Not really a new term: “warfighter” always has made me cringe but it’s been commonplace in defense contractor pitches to DoD for many years. Basically, if you hear it being used you’re likely in the presence of someone who does (or did) DoD work. Totally unsurprising to see it here given this is a DoD contracting argument that we’re all watching from the sidelines.

The term war fighter is distinct from service member. War fighter means mission critical and typically in a theater, while a service member might be someone sitting behind a desk in a less critical role. Similar to having mission critical production systems and supporting production systems.

When you perform your business impact analysis, these will bubble up in different ways, requiring some differences to the playbooks.

There isn’t really a distinction day to day on this in practice. It covers everybody - just easier to say than all the official titles and typically for morale helps to carry the name all the way to the back office to connect to what’s happening at the pointy end.

I hate this glorification of war.

It’s a mistake to conflate “wants to spend money on the most ethical option available” with “ think the most ethical option available is perfect”

Why wouldn’t you move your dollars to someplace incrementally better?

You make it sound as if "the most ethical option available" is.. actually ethical?

Their statement doesn't make it sound they are incrementally better, they are trying to bend over backwards to keep working for war.

I am not greatly relieved by this post of Anthropic's. That said, they seem to have lines and are willing to stand by them; I don't see where OpenAI has done that. So, for now and from my point of view, the point goes to Anthropic.

Moving my subscription is not terribly consequential, but since the products are so similar and easy to substitute with one another for my uses, it seems best to participate in what in aggregate is a signal that is being noticed and commented on and interpreted to mean that a significant number of people who buy AI access do care about this.

There are so many inference providers not working for Department of War. Even Alibaba and sure China has lots of issues but they are not bombing anyone now if that's your first priority. Or else, smaller US / European / Asian companies with pure civilian focus. SOTA open weights models they serve are perfectly suitable for coding and chat. I run a local Qwen3.5-122B-A10B-NVFP4 instance and it writes entire Android apps from scratch and that's a midsized model.

Can you give a list of high quality alternatives? Morally speaking i would put China on par with the US if not worse (due to their ongoing Uyghur genocide). I will check out Qwen3 but would be interested in others.

I'm not sure there's really any good large model providers

Sorry for the off-topic but what hardware are you running Qwen3.5-122B-A10B-NVFP4 on? Is it physically local or just self-administered? Thanks in advance.

I have an NVIDIA Thor Dev Kit, a somewhat less known cousin of DGX Spark.

Because there aren't any actual good guys in this story. There is one group that is taking short term gains, and another group that feels rejecting this will lead to long term gains. Neither one of them gives any shits about the use of their technology in to kill people. They just are interested in their companies turning a profit.

Both of these companies have heavy PR teams that they use to convince you that they do, in fact, care about these issues. But that is PR and generally to be considered bullshit. They care about nothing other than their bottom lines.

This has been a wonderous PR move by Anthropic. It gets to make money off the US war machine while somehow being able to portray themselves as the "good guys" in the story leading to that whole #cancelOpenAI trend. If you're dumb enough to believe that Anthropic is really the "good guy" in this story, I have some meme coin to sell you.

Exactly, it’s all marketing seems to get new customers. And it worked.

Good PR moves.

Because Anthropic is called Anthropic and they have this really warm and inviting visual aesthetic.

Frankly it’s a shitshow all around. The truth is that nobody gives a fuck about this. They have no moral qualms, just practical. And these are the people that should bring us the future. Man what a depressing scenario.

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