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Comment by desugun | Hacker News Reader

I guess our conscience of OpenAI working with the Department of War has an expiry date of 6 weeks.

That number is generous, and is also a pretty decent lifespan for a socially-conscious gesture in 2026.

Most people just want to use a tool that works. Not everything has to be a damn moral crusade.

Yes, let take morality out of our daily lives as much as possible... That seems like a great categorical imperative and a recipe for social success

That's an incredibly uncharitable take on what I said. But that kind of proves my point.

Foist your morality upon everyone else and burden them with your specific conscience; sounds like a fun time.

Yeah, why actually engage with moral issues when we can just defer to a status quo that happens to benefit me?

What is the charitable way to look at it then?

How about assuming the positive intent of what I actually said? Not everything has to be a moral crusade. Let me use the tool without pushing your personal moral opinions on me.

The same person wringing their hands over OpenAI, buys clothing made from slave labor and wrote that comment using a device with rare earth materials gotten from slave labor. Why is OpenAI the line? Why are they allowed to "exploit people" and I'm not?

Taken to its logical conclusion it's silly. And instead of engaging with that, they deflect with oH yEaH lEtS hAvE nO mOrAlS which is clearly not what I'm advocating.

My most charitable interpretation of what you are saying is: Two wrongs make a right. If others exploit people that makes it an acceptable thing for me to do. No one can criticize me for doing a bad thing because others also do bad things. Is that what you are saying?

I genuinely cannot see how to interpret it in a way that is positive.

There's nothing moral about Anthropic. Especially to those of us who are not American citizens and to which Dario's pronouncements about ethics apparently do not apply, as stated in his own press release.

To me it just looks like a big sanctimonious festival of hypocrisy.

"Not everything" - sure, but mass surveillance and autonomous killing are kind of big things to sweep under that rug no?

Thing is that Anthropic was always working with DoD, too, and the line in the sand they drew looked really noble until I found it didn't not apply to me, a non-US citizen. Dario made it clear that was the case.

And so the difference, to me, was irrelevant. I'll buy based on value, and keep a poker in the fire of Chinese & European open weight models, as well.

We all liked the Terminator movies. Hopefully the stay as movies.

I quoted 2 weeks at the time. I think even that was generous.

neah, I believe most people here, which immediately brag about codex, are openai employees doing part of their job. otherwise I couldn't possibly phantom why would anyone use codex. In my company 80% is claude and 15% gemini. you can barely see openai on the graph. and we have >5k programmers using ai every day.

I’m thinking the same thing, Codex literally ruined the codebases that I experimented with it on.

You can believe whatever you want. I found claude unusable due to limits. Codex works very well for my use cases.

OpenAI replaced its founding engineers with Meta PMs. The shift towards consumer engagement metrics and marketing is apparent.

Currently GPT just works much better, and so does Gemini but it's more expensive right now. Going through Opencode stats, their claim is that Gemini is the current best model followed by GPT 5.4 on their benchmarks, but the difference is slim.

My personal experience is best with GPT but it could be the specific kind of work I use it for which is heavy on maths and cpp (and some LISP).

Not everyone is American, and people who are not see Anthropic state they are willing to spy on our countries and shrug about OAI saying the same about America. What’s the difference to us?

if you're not american you should be worried about the bit of using AI to kill people which was the other major objection by Anthropic.

(not that I think the US DoD wouldn't do that anyway, ToS or not.)

Not only is Anthropic perfectly happy to let the DoD use their products to kill people, but they are partners with Palantir and were apparently instrumental in the strikes against Iran by the US military.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/03/04/anthrop...

So uh, yeah, the only difference I see between OAI and Anthropic is that one is more honest about what they’re willing to use their AI for.

OK, I am worried.

Now, what can I actually do?

Vote with your wallet, just like Americans.

Vote with your dollar. Ask others to do the same and explain why. If we all did this, it might matter. There’s not a lot else an individual can do.

Dario in fact said it was ok to spy and drone non-US citizens, and in fact endorsed American foreign policy generally.

So, no, I'm not voting with my wallet for one American country versus the other. I'll pick the best compromise product for me, and then also boost non-American R&D where I can.

well, if they put in a fully automated kill chain, its gonna be weak to attacks to make yourself look like a car, or a video game styled "hide under a box"

the current non-automated kill chain has targeted fishermen and a girl's school. Nobody is gonna be held accountable for either.

Am i worried about the killing or the AI? If i'm worried about the killing, id much rather push for US demilitarization.

Anthropic's issue was only that the AI isn't yet good enough to tell who's an American, so it avoids killing them. They were fine with the "killing non-Americans" bit.

I don't think that is true at all, could you provide a source?

https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war

> But today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons. We will not knowingly provide a product that puts America’s warfighters and civilians at risk.

That’s interesting: I recall reading that sentence but I parsed it as “America’s warfighters” AND “civilians” (i.e., civilians in general), rather than as “America’s warfighters and America’s civilians”. I think the former reading is more plausible since American civilians are not normally at physical risk from American military operations. It’s unfortunate that this sentence is worded ambiguously, though.

Oh interesting, I didn't parse it as "civilians in general". Hm, yes, it is unfortunate that we won't know what he meant to write.

Longer than how long anyone cared about epstein.

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