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Comment by thinkcontext | Hacker News Reader

Good for Anthropic for standing up for themselves but think of the masses of companies that decided not to take the risk. The tone was definitely set at Trump's inauguration with all the tech execs front and center on display. They knew that if they didn't play ball Trump would use government power against them.

Law firms blackmailed into doing pro bono work for Trump's pet causes, intelligence analysts not able to tell the truth, energy companies giving up wind leases and switching to fossil fuels. And of course the constant shakedowns for cash.

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> energy companies giving up wind leases and switching to fossil fuels

If only it were them "giving up" leases -- we *paid them billions* to halt developments.

It's a shame companies like Google immediately folded instead of standing with them. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iKm2FhpWkuuBojm82/why-i-left...

In his recent interview Emil Michael (DoW undersecretary, "AI czar") even mentions that the Anthropic case served as motivation for Google folding.

It is a shame that Google's leadership is so spineless. On the minuscule off-chance any of those VPs are reading HN - you are bad and you should feel shame for increasing x-risk for a percentage point of profit.

Didn't google give up "not being evil" a long long time ago? Are you really surprised?

Just because you expect someone to do a bad thing doesn't mean you shouldn't shame them when they actually do the bad thing.

Google does plenty of evil. This has nothing to do with the slogan.

"Don't be evil" was never removed. But even if it was, the idea that Google just was champing at the bit to do all this evil but was held back by the pesky slogan is ridiculous.

They did remove the slogan.

And no, the slogan didn't prevent evil, but both its initial adoption and change might have reflected leadership intent (or maybe it was just PR?).

Why can I still see it then?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_be_evil

“Removed it from the preface and retained it as the last sentence.”

They moved where it appeared in the document. That’s not removing it.

> It is a shame that Google's leadership is so spineless.

This is wrong, just like the article you linked. Google has been a proud member of the military industrial complex for many years.

Alex Turner is naive when he thinks big psychopath corporation may have internal regulations to protect us from big psychopath government. He's somewhat deluded when he thinks this is a new problem and he personally has power against this. The only way we workers can enforce some level of ethics is via powerful unions (with strikes/sabotage), not as lonely individual "threatening" to leave the company.

I'm sorry he had to learn this the hard way. There's still plenty of time for you to realize that no or few company will grow a spine, because that's not what companies do, what they are for, or what they're directed to do (except maybe a small mom and pop shop).

Don't forget OpenAI, whose CEO bragged gleefully about taking the contract Anthropic refused to sign since it granted the DoW the ability to build Skynet (autonomous weapons) and a Chinese-style mass domestic surveillance system using their models.

> They knew that if they didn't play ball Trump would use government power against them.

And that friends, is capital-F Fascism.

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