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Comment by vrganj | Hacker News Reader

Its not Fable 5 that overstepped in the eyes of the US government.

It's Anthropic.

This is transparent revenge for them daring to try and push back a little on enabling war crimes.

Anthropic is perfectly fine with the US government using Claude to commit war crimes. The US military has done hundreds of extra-judicial killings in the waters around South America over the last year and Anthropic hasn't had anything to say about that.

Use nuance and judgement, friend. Anthropic notably pushed back on completely autonomous no-human-in-the-loop drone killings and mass surveillance of the US population, where others like OpenAI scrambled to agree. Anthropic isn't perfect but that doesn't make them equally bad.

I didn't say or even imply that OpenAI and Anthropic are equally bad on this front. It's just not accurate to say Anthropic has issues with the US military using Claude to commit war crimes. They don't.

They literally do -- see above, where the red line they refused to cross involved fully autonomous kill bots (which would be a war crime), and for which they were branded a supply chain risk, thrown out of Pentagon contracts, and now enjoined from releasing their product.

You can not like that Claude was involved in the planning that led to the murder of a bunch of schoolgirls, but stop playing pretend.

It's just a fact that Claude has already been used to commit war crimes and Anthropic has had zero issue with it. I don't know what else there is to say about it.

Also, not that it really matters but building a fully autonomous kill bot is not actually a war crime.

Claude has been involved in the planning of a war crime, for sure. But 'Anthropic has had zero issue with it' is an unfounded assertion that you are making up.

Fielding a fully autonomous kill bot is absolutely a war crime under the IHL; specifically, there is no current universe under which a bot can reliably tell a combatant from a non-combatant, or a civilian target from a military target, or act in a proportional manner.

Trust no one, friend. Believe what you want to believe.

Holy crap, I didn't realize that some many people had been killed, over 200 according to a New York Times report: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/31/world/americas/us-boat-st...

>This is transparent revenge for them daring to try and push back a little on enabling war crimes.

Anthropic wasn't pushing back on enabling war crimes. They said they didn't want the models to work with autonomous weapons because the the models weren't good enough.

Arguably it’s a worse (or different) war crime to knowingly target people incompetently and thus kill more innocent civilians. In this respect, they showed themselves against one war crime. Not “war crimes” in general but a specific misuse of ai in war.

That's pushing back. The regime doesn't care if the models are good enough, they want the optics of killing lots of people using cutting edge tech, they don't really care if it's the right people.

Whether you or me or Anthropic think it was pushing back or not is besides the point.

I can agree on revenge, but it's important to not paint it as a good vs evil when it isn't.

It's the AWS CEO being a little snitch to gain favor from the Government. That is what this is about.

Clarification: They want someone who isn’t them to make the decision to commit the war crime. They are happy to facilitate.

Why not both?

Antropic models are the ones that designated that school as valid target

People designated that school as a valid target - using fancy calculators does not remove that the pass/fail rests with people. AI models have no agency. Even if they are given autonomy - it is given.

What is the basis for that claim? There’s been lots of wild conjecture, but as The Guardian reported, “Almost none of this had any relationship to reality” and “LLMs-gone-rogue dominated coverage, but had nothing to do with the targeting.” https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blam...

That's wild misinformation. There was an outdated military database at play, and not just Claude. It doesn't exclude AI interference of course but your statement is just not correct.

>This is transparent revenge for them daring to try and push back a little on enabling war crimes.

Don't be so pessimistic, maybe they're just trying to give their buddy Musk and XAi a chance to catch up.

Anthropic is one of the two consistent revenue sources for XAI via their colossus deal. I have been critical of this man longer than most, but I don’t see him hurting his own bottom line.

He seems to have gone out of his way too alienate just about any demographic likely to buy an EV...

It could be the Trump admin incompetently attempting to help Trump’s primary benefactor? (As I haven’t yet seen anyone say that the current actions are a competent approach to AI regulation.)

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