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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

This isn't like using pens in a nuclear plant. AI obviously has tremendous military applications. And it's completely unsurprising that the U.S. military--whose entire doctrine for the last century has been about having the most advanced technology--demands to use frontier models without non-military people imposing restrictions.

Have you seen the movie Oppenheimer? The U.S. military did not care about the moral opinions of the nuclear scientists--they were going to get nukes first. This is like Truman telling off Oppenheimer for being upset after the U.S. used the bomb: https://www.biography.com/political-figures/a44361438/why-ha... ("Blood on his hands; damn it, he hasn’t half as much blood on his hands as I have. You just don’t go around bellyaching about it,” Truman said.... He called Oppenheimer a “cry-baby scientist” and said, “I don’t want to see that son of a b–– in this office ever again.”).

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> AI obviously has tremendous military applications.

Yeah, but also we can be reasonably confident they're not good enough for many of them yet:

What would be the military equivalent of all the things on https://www.felonybench.com/ ?

Machine learning needs a lot of examples to get good. Wars and wargames (including digital ones with unbounded self-play time) and all the textbooks together will at best, on the basis of what we see in other fields, get the equivalent of a new officer fresh out of training… and then, given current observed agentic AI behaviour, "follow orders" rather than "follow lawful orders".

> Yeah, but also we can be reasonably confident they're not good enough for many of them yet

What does “not good enough mean?” Who decides what is “good enough” and what tradeoffs are acceptable? Obviously it’s the military’s job to decide that.

In the context of my comment, "not good enough" includes "committing war crimes" and "would have started a war with China if there hadn't been a human in the loop".

We can also infer from other domains, vendbench or attempts to have an LLM play Star Craft, that these models are currently extremely mediocre at management roles.

> Who decides what is “good enough” and what tradeoffs are acceptable? Obviously it’s the military’s job to decide that.

In practice, in the case of the USA, Trump and Hegseth.

The US military, so far as I can tell, are rather less thrilled with these adventures.

Right—and deciding what constitutes “war crimes” isn’t within the expertise of AI developers. They can explain the abilities and limitations of their models to the military leadership. But the actual decision about how to use AI is up to the military through its chain of command. That starts with Trump as the duly elected president and Hegseth as the duly appointed civilian head of the military. They are the democratically accountable actors. And all this is being done in the open, so if the people have a problem with it they can hold it against Trump and his party.

That decision assuredly does not belong with people like Amodei, who are not democratically accountable.

> That decision assuredly does not belong with people like Amodei, who are not democratically accountable.

Has Amodei been conscripted?

If not, he's free to say "no", just as I'm free to refuse to work for e.g. a defence contractor if I don't like what's going on or if I don't feel competent for the role.

He, like me, is allowed to not want deaths on his conscience if he feels his own business' best product isn't good enough.

Oppenheimer was the guy who was pushing that opinion just as much as the military folks. In the case of AI, my understanding is that Amodei is not trying to beat the enemy to it.

What I don't understand is why the U.S. military is turning to a for-profit corporation when they could fund and pursue the development themselves. Why are they trying to "outsource" it to industry?

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