HN

Comments (750)

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  lebovic
  I used to work at Anthropic, and I wrote a comment on a thread earlier this week about the RSP update [1]. I's enheartening to see that leaders at Anthropic are willing to risk losing their seat at the table to be guided by values.Something I don't think is well understood on HN is how driven by ideals many folks at Anthropic are, even if the company is pragmatic about achieving their goals. I have strong signal that Dario, Jared, and Sam would genuinely burn at the stake before acceding to something that's a) against their values, and b) they think is a net negative in the long term. (Many others, too, they're just well-known.)That doesn't mean that I always agree with their decisions, and it doesn't mean that Anthropic is a perfect company. Many groups that are driven by ideals have still committed horrible acts.But I do think that most people who are making the important decisions at Anthropic are well-intentioned, driven by values, and are genuinely motivated by trying to make the transition to powerful AI to go well.[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47145963#47149908
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  jjcm
  This is the strongest statement in the post:> They have threatened to remove us from their systems if we maintain these safeguards; they have also threatened to designate us a “supply chain risk”—a label reserved for US adversaries, never before applied to an American company—and to invoke the Defense Production Act to force the safeguards’ removal. These latter two threats are inherently contradictory: one labels us a security risk; the other labels Claude as essential to national security.This contradictory messaging puts to rest any doubt that this is a strong arm by the governemnt to allow any use. I really like Anthropic's approach here, which is to in turn state that they're happy to help the Governemnt move off of Anthropic. It's a messaging ploy for sure, but it puts the ball in the current administration's court.
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  qaid
  I was reading halfway thru and one line struck a nerve with me:> But today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons.So not today, but the door is open for this after AI systems have gathered enough "training data"?Then I re-read the previous paragraph and realized it's specifically only criticizing> AI-driven domestic mass surveillanceAnd neither denounces partially autonomous mass surveillance nor closes the door on AI-driven foreign mass surveillanceA real shame. I thought "Anthropic" was about being concerned about humans, and not "My people" vs. "Your people." But I suppose I should have expected all of this from a public statement about discussions with the Department of War
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  tabbott
  An organization character really shows through when their values conflict with their self-interest.It's inspiring to see that Anthropic is capable of taking a principled stand, despite having raised a fortune in venture capital.I don't think a lot of companies would have made this choice. I wish them the very best of luck in weathering the consequences of their courage.
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  helaoban
  All of these problems are downstream of the Congress having thoroughly abdicated its powers to the executive.The military should be reigned in at the legislative level, by constraining what it can and cannot do under law. Popular action is the only way to make that happen. Energy directed anywhere else is a waste.Private corporations should never be allowed to dictate how the military acts. Such a thought would be unbearable if it weren't laughably impossible. The technology can just be requisitioned, there is nothing a corporation or a private individual can do about that. Or the models could be developed internally, after having requisitioned the data centers.To watch CEOs of private corporations being mythologized for something that a) they should never be able to do and b) are incapable of doing is a testament to how distorted our picture of reality has become.
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  flumpcakes
  This is such a depressing read. What is becoming of the USA? Let's hope sanity prevails and the next election cycle can bring in some competent non-grievance based leadership.
• aichen_tools
  The most important part of this statement is the explicit commitment to transparency around these discussions. In an industry where many AI companies engage with defense quietly, making a public statement — even if imperfect — creates accountability. The question is whether this standard will be adopted more broadly.
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  nkoren
  This makes me a very happy Claude Max subscriber.Finally, someone of consequence not kissing the ring. I hope this gives others courage to do the same.
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  QuiEgo
  I'd be amused beyond all reason if we saw this chain of events:- Anthropic says "no"- DoD says "ok you're a supply chain risk" (meaning many companies with gov't contracts can no longer use them)- A bunch of tech companies say "you know what? We think we'd lose more money from falling behind on AI than we'd lose from not having your contracts."Bonus points if its some of the hyperscalers like AWS.Hilarity ensues as they blow up (pun intended) their whole supply chain and rapidly backtrack.
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  alangibson
  It's not named the Department of War because Congress didn't rename it.Other than that, good on ya.
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  exabrial
  Brother in law did some "time with the brass" as he calls it. His take was that the DOD, er DOW would, as an example, never acquire a fighter jet that "wouldn't target and kill a civilian airliner", citing that on 9/11 we literally almost did that. The DOW is acquiring instruments of war, which is probably unconformable for a lot of people to consider.His conclusion was that the limits of use ought to be contractual, not baked into the LLM, which is where the fallout seems to be. He noted that the Pentagon has agreed to terms like that in the past.To me, that seems like reasonable compromise for both parties, but both sides are so far entrenched now we're unlikely to see a compromise.
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  atleastoptimal
  I was concerned originally when I heard that Anthropic, who often professed to being the "good guy" AI company who would always prioritize human welfare, opted to sell priority access to their models to the Pentagon in the first place.The devil's advocate position in their favor I imagine would be that they believe some AI lab would inevitably be the one to serve the military industrial complex, and overall it's better that the one with the most inflexible moral code be the one to do it.
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  kace91
  As someone who is potentially their client and not domestic, really reassuring that they have no concerns with mass spying peaceful citizens of my particular corner of the world.
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  zb1plus
  It would be hilarious if the Europeans got everyone visas and gave some kind of tax benefit to Anthropic and poached the entire company.
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  danbrooks
  Props to Dario and Anthropic for taking a moral stand. A rarity in tech these days.
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  ApolloFortyNine
  Idk if the reporting was just biased before, but from what I saw is that this time last week, it was thought you couldn't use Anthropic to bring about harm, and now they're making it clear that they just don't want it used domestically and not fully autonomously.Like maybe it always was just this, but I feel every article I read, regardless of the spin angle, implied do no harm was pretty much one of the rules.
• fnordpiglet
  I find the fact they used the vanity name “Department of War” and “Secretary of War” sad given Congress has not changed the name and the president doesn’t get to decide the naming of statutory departments or secretary level roles. Maybe it’s just an appeasement to the thin skinned people who need powder rooms and are former military journalists working for a draft dodger pretending to be tough guy “warriors,” and trying to glorify the violence for political purposes, but every actual war vet I’ve ever known has never glorified war for the sake of war and they felt very seriously that defense is the reason to do what they had to do. My grandfather was a highly decorated career special forces (ranger, green beret, delta force, four silver stars and five bronze stars, etc) from WWII, Korea, and Vietnam and he was angry when I considered joining the military - he told me he did what he did so I wouldn’t have to and to protect his country and there was no glory to be had in following his path. He would be absolutely horrified at what is going on and I thank god he died before we had these prima Donna politicians strutting around banging their chests and pretending war is something to be proud of.Good on anthropic for standing up for their principles, but boo on gifting them the discourtesy to the law of the land in acknowledging their vanity titles.
• freakynit
  Welp, I never thought "Person of Interest" show coming to life anytime soon, but, here we are. In case you haven't watched the show, it's time to give it a go. Bare with season 2 though, since things really start to escalate from season 3 onwards. Season 1 is a must though.
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  asmor
  As a "foreign national", what's the deal with making the distinction between domestic mass surveillance and foreign mass surveillance? Are there no democracies aside from the US? Don't we know since Snowden that if the US wants to do domestic surveillance they'll just ask GCHQ to share their "foreign" surveillance capabilities?
• Metacelsus
  I'm glad to see Dario and Anthropic showing some spine! A lot of other people would have caved.
• ninjagoo
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_NacchioPrevious case of tangling with the Government.https://youtube.com/watch?v=OfZFJThiVLIJolly Boys - I Fought the LawOverall, this seems like it might be a campaign contribution issue. The DoD/DoW is happy to accept supplier contracts that prevent them from repairing their own equipment during battle (ref. military testimony favoring right-to-repair laws [1] ), so corporate matters like this shouldn't really be coming to a head publicly.[1] https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/icymi-...
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  ramoz
  All completely rationale. Makes the us military here look fairly incompetent… embarrassing as a veteran.
• giwook
  I commend Anthropic leadership for this decision.I simultaneously worry that the current administration will do something nuclear and actually make good on their threat to nationalize the company and/or declare the company a supply chain risk (which contradict each other but hey).
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  ra
  > "mass domestic surveillance" - mass surveillance of non-domestic civilians is OK?
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  ccleve
  It's not clear to me whether Anthropic's limitations are technical or merely contractual. Is Anthropic actually putting the limitations in their prompts, so that the model would refuse to answer a question on how to do certain things?If so, that's a major problem. If the military is using it in some mission critical way, they can't be fighting the model to get something done. No such limitations would ever be acceptable.If the limitations are contractual, then there is some room for negotiation.
• altpaddle
  Props to Dario and Anthropic for holding firm on these two points that I feel like should be a no-brainer
• noduerme
  This is at best a superficial attempt to show that Anthropic objects to what is already in play.Personally, I'd rather live in a country which didn't use AI to supplant either its intelligence or its war fighting apparatus, which is what is bound to happen once it's in the door. If enemies use AI for theirs, so much the better. Let them deal with the security holes it opens and the brain-drain it precipitates. I'm concerned about AI being abused for the two use cases he highlights, but I'm more concerned that the velocity at which it's being adopted to sift and collate classified information is way ahead of its ability to secure that information (forget about whether it makes good or bad decisions). It's almost inconceivable that the Pentagon would move so quickly to introduce a totally unknown entity with totally unknown security risks into the heart of our national security. That should be the case against rapid adoption made by any peddler of LLMs who claims to be honest, to thwart the idiots in the administration who think they want this technology they can't comprehend inside our most sensitive systems.
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  karmasimida
  Label them as supply chain risk and move on. Enough of this drama already
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  freakynit
  People do realize there's a non-zero chance that Anthropic could have embedded some kind of hidden "backdoor" trigger in its training process, right?For example, a specific seed phrase that, when placed at the beginning of a prompt, effectively disables or bypasses safety guardrails.If something like that existed, it wouldn't be impossible to uncover:1. A government agency (DoD/DoW/etc.) could discover the trigger through systematic experimentation and large-scale probing.2. An Anthropic employee with knowledge of such a mechanism could be pressured or blackmailed into revealing it.3. Company infrastructure could be compromised, allowing internal documentation or model details to be exfiltrated.Any of these scenarios would give Anthropic plausible deniability... they could "publicly" claim they never removed safeguards (or agreed to DoD/DoW demands), while in practice a select party had a way around them (may be even assisted from within).I'm not saying this "is" happening... but only that in a high-stakes standoff such as this, it's naive to assume technical guardrails are necessarily immutable or that no hidden override mechanisms could exist.
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  kumarvvr
  All this is for nought.The power lies with the US Govt.And its corrupt, immoral and unethical, run by power hungry assholes who are not being held accountable, headed by the asshole who does a million illegal things every day.Ultimately, Anthropic will fold.All this is to show to their investors that they tried everything they could.
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  sbinnee
  As a non US citizen, this article sounds mildly concerning to me. My country is an ally of US. Good. But I don't know how I would feel when I start seeing Anthropic logos on every weapon we buy from US.Aside my concern, Dario Amodei seems really into politics. I have read a couple of his blog posts and listened to a couple of podcast interviews here and there. Every time I felt like he sounded more like a politician than an entrepreneur.I know Anthropic is particularly more mission-driven than, say OpenAI. And I respect that their constitutional ways of training and serving Claude models. Claude turned out to be a great success. But reading a manifest speaking of wars and their missions, it gives me chills.
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  muglug
  OpenAI and Google could have decided to make the same principled stand, and the government would have likely capitulated.
• mooglevich
  "You are what you won't do for money." is a quote that seems apt here. Anthropic might not be a perfect company (none are, really), but I respect the stance being taken here.
• paraschopra
  I’m very happy that Anthropic chose not to cave into US Dept of War’s demands but their statement has an ambiguity.Does this mean they’d be ok to have their models be used for mass surveillance & autonomous weapons against OTHER countries?A clarification would help.
• gdiamos
  This is why I like Dario as a CEO - he has a system of ethics that is not jus about who writes the largest check.You may not agree with it, but I appreciate that it exists.
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  protocolture
  Classic seppo diatribe."We will build tools to hurt other people but become all flustered when they are used locally"
• 0xbadcafebee
  Principles are the things you would never do for any amount of money. This might be the only principled tech company in the world.
• atleastoptimal
  I was concerned originally when I heard that Anthropic, who often professed to being the "good guy" AI company who would always prioritize human welfare, opted to sell priority access to their models to the Pentagon in the first place.The devil's advocate position in their favor I imagine would be that they believe some AI lab would inevitably be the one to serve the military industrial complex, and overall it's better that the one with the most inflexible moral code be the one to do it.
• DaedalusII
  They made it easy to generate powerpoint presentations, that is the real reason DoW is using themthis is a very chauvinistic approach... why not another model replace anthropic here? I sense because gov people like using excel plugin and font has nice feel. a few more week of this and xAI is new gov AI tool
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  mvkel
  Good optics, but ultimately fruitless.If preventing mass surveillance or fully autonomous weaponry is a -policy- choice and not a technical impossibility, this just opens the door for the department of war to exploit backdoors, and anthropic (or any ai company) can in good conscience say "Our systems were unknowingly used for mass surveillance," allowing them to save face.The only solution is to make it technically -impossible- to apply AI in these ways, much like Apple has done. They can't be forced to compel with any government, because they don't have the keys.
• anon
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  oxqbldpxo
  It may sound crazy, but they should just move the company to Europe or Canada, instead of putting up with this.
• anon
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  dzonga
  these guys are selling snake oil to the gvt - cz they know they can get cash based on fear.the Chinese are releasing equivalent models for free or super cheap.AI costs / energy costs keep going up for American A.I companieswhile china benefits from lower costsso yeah you've to spread F.U.D to survive
• anon
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• geophile
  I think it’s a pretty strong statement. It is unfortunately weakened by going along with the “Department of War” propaganda. I believe that the name is “Department of Defense” until Congress says otherwise, no matter what the Felon in Chief says.
• wiltsecarpenter
  Oh dear, what a mess of a statement that is. He wants to use AI "to defeat our autocratic adversaries", just what or who are they exactly? Claude seems to think they are Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. Is Claude really a tool to "defeat" these countries somehow? This statement also seems pretty messy: "Anthropic understands that the Department of War, not private companies, makes military decisions.", well then just how do they think Claude is going to be used there if not to make or help make military decisions?The statement goes on about a "narrow set of cases" of potential harm to "democratic values", ...uh, hmm, isn't the potential harm from a government controlled by rapists (Hegseth) and felons using powerful AI against their perceived enemies actually pretty broad? I think I could come up with a few more problem areas than just the two that were listed there, like life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, etc.
• dylan604
  "I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries."That opening line is one hell of a set up. The current administration is doing everything it can to become autocratic thereby setting themselves up to be adversarial to Anthropic, which is pretty much the point of the rest of the blog. I guess I'm just surprised to have such a succinct opening instead just slop.
• angelgonzales
  Bottom line up front it’s probably better to address the root cause of this situation with the general solution — making government drastically smaller and less pervasive in people’s lives and businesses. I remember not too long ago during the last administration very heavy handed unforgivable and traumatizing rhetoric and executive orders that intruded into the bodily autonomy of millions of Americans and threatened millions of American’s jobs. This happened to me and I personally received threats that my livelihood would be taken away from me which were directly a result of the Executive branch. This isn’t a problem where Congress has ceded powers to the Executive branch, it’s a problem that so much power to legislate and tax is in the hands of the government at all! Every election cycle that results in a transfer of power to the other party inevitably results in handwringing and panic but this wouldn’t be the case if citizens voted their powers back and government wasn’t so consequential.
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  zmmmmm
  I can't help but highlight the problem that is created by the renaming of the Deptartment of Defense to the Department of War:> importance of using AI to defend the United States> Anthropic has therefore worked proactively to deploy our models to the Department of WarSo you believe in helping to defend the United States, but you gave the models to the Department of War - explicitly, a government arm now named as inclusive of a actions of a pure offensive capability with no defensive element.You don't have to argue that you are not supporting the defense of the US by declining to engage with the Department of War. That should be the end of the discussion here.
• noupdates
  Why would the US security apparatus outsource the model to a private company? DARPA or whatever should be able to finance a frontier model and do whatever they want.
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  michaellee8
  Probably not a good idea to let Claude vibe-selecting targets, it still sometime hallucinates
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  maxdo
  Ukraine , Russia , China , actively develop ai systems that kill. Not developing such system by US based company will not change the course of actions.
• anduril22
  Powerful post - good on him for taking a stand, but questionable in light of their recent move away from safeguards for competitive reasons.
• sirshmooey
  Party balloons along the southern border beware.
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  SamDc73
  Didn't Dario Amodei ask for more government intervention regarding AI?
• anon
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• huslage
  It is not the Department of War. He's towing the line from the get-go. Forget this guy.
• jonplackett
  That is frikkin impressive. Well done sir.
• newAccount2025
  Impressive and heartening. Bravo.
• 2001zhaozhao
  Congratulations, you just got a new $200 Claude Max plan customer.
• alldayhaterdude
  I imagine they'll drop this bare-minimum commitment when it becomes financially expedient.
• Reagan_Ridley
  I restored my Max sub. I wish they pushed back more, so I went with $100/month only.
• adamgoodapp
  It's ok to mass survey foreign entities.
• stopbulying
  Didn't Cheney's company have the option to bid on contracts, by comparison?
• creatonez
  > Our strong preference is to continue to serve the Department and our warfighters—with our two requested safeguards in place.It's absolutely disgusting that they would even consider working with the US government after the Gaza genocide started. These are modern day holocaust tabulation machine companies, and this time randomly they are selecting victims using a highly unpredictable black-box algorithm. The proper recourse here is to impeach the current administration, dissolve the companies that were complicit, and send their leadership to the hague for war crimes trials.
• anon
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• joshAg
  torment nexus creators are shocked, appalled even, to discover that people desire to use it to torment others at nearby nexus
• 10297-1287
  They want to be nationalized, which is the most profitable exit they'll ever get.
• brooke2k
  The constant reference to "democracy" as the thing that makes us good and them bad is so frustrating to me because we are _barely_ a democracy.We are ruled by a two-party state. Nobody else has any power or any chance at power. How is that really much better than a one-party state?Actually, these two parties are so fundamentally ANTI-democracy that they are currently having a very public battle of "who can gerrymander the most" across multiple states.Our "elections" are barely more useful than the "elections" in one-party states like North Korea and China. We have an entire, completely legal industry based around corporate interests telling politicians what to do (it's called "lobbying"). Our campaign finance laws allow corporations to donate infinite amounts of money to politician's campaigns through SuperPACs. People are given two choices to vote for, and those choices are based on who licks corporation boots the best, and who follows the party line the best. Because we're definitely a Democracy.There are no laws against bribing supreme court justices, and in fact there is compelling evidence that multiple supreme court justices have regularly taken bribes - and nothing is done about this. And yet we're a good, democratic country, right? And other countries are evil and corrupt.The current president is stretching executive power as far as it possibly can go. He has a secret police of thugs abducting people around the country. Many of them - completely innocent people - have been sent to a brutal concentration camp in El Salvador. But I suppose a gay hairdresser with a green card deserves that, right? Because we're a democracy, not like those other evil countries.He's also threatining to invade Greenland, and has already kidnapped the president of Venezuela - but that's ok, because we're Good. Other countries who invade people are Bad though.And now that same president is trying to nationalize elections, clearly to make them even less fair than they already are, and nobody's stopping him. How is that democratic exactly?Sorry for the long rant, but it just majorly pisses me off when I read something like this that constantly refers to the US as a good democracy and other countries as evil autocracies.We are not that much better than them. We suck. It's bad for us to use mass surveillance on their citizens, just like it's bad to use mass surveillance on our citizens.And yet we will do it anyways, just like China will do it anyways, because we are ultimately not that different.
• siliconc0w
  Good to them standing up to this administration. I doubt they actually want to put Claude in the kill-chain but this gives them a nice opportunity to go after 'woke AI' and maybe internal ammunition to go through the switching costs for xAI - given Elon more reason to line republican campaign coffers.I'm guessing this is because Anthropic partners with Google Cloud which has the necessary controls for military workloads while xAI runs in hastily constructed datacenter mounted on trucks or whatever to skirt environmental laws.
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  willmorrison
  They essentially said "we're not fans of mass surveilance of US citizens and we won't use CURRENT models to kill people autonomously" and people are saying they're taking a stand and doing the right thing? What???I guess they're evil. Tragic.
• Teodolfo
  If these values really meant anything, then Anthropic should stop working with Palantir entirely given their work with ICE, domestic surveilance, and other objectionable activities.
• ethagnawl
  The official name of this organization remains _The United States Department of Defense_.
• m101
  I wonder whether what is really behind this is that they can’t make a model without the safeguards because it would require re-training?They get to look good by claiming it’s an ethical stance.
• seydor
  Hegseth is an unintelligent bully who will not accept thiz and does not want to appear weak to the maga base. The consequences will be severe and anthropic will be forced
• narrator
  I mean you're all going to get killed by fully autonomous China AI war robots in 10 years anyway if you're not pure blood Han Chinese, but hey at least you'll provide something to laugh at for future Chinese Communist party history scholars. They will say, "Look at the stupid Baizuos, our propaganda ops convinced them all to commit collective suicide. Stupid barbarians. They proved they are an inferior race."Not joking, I've heard from sources that hardliners in the CCP think they can exterminate all white people followed later by all non-Han, but just keep on going along disarming yourselves for woke points. This is like unilaterally destroying all your nuclear weapons in 1946 and hoping the Soviets do to.
• gnarlouse
  huge if true.they also took down their security pledge in the same breath, so, you know. if anthropic ends up cutting a deal with the DoD this is obviously bullshit.
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  gizmodo59
  They are playing a good PR game for sure. Their recent track record doesn’t show if they can be trusted. Few millions is nothing for their current revenue and saying they sacrificed is a big stretch here.
• anon
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  jwpapi
  Am i the only one who understands the deparments position? Like if another country will have it without safeguards, why would I not want it without safeguards. I can still be the safeguard, but having safeguards enforced by another entity that potentially has to face negative financial consequences seems like a disadvantage, would be weird to accept that as department of war.I understand the risk, but that is the pill.
• IAmGraydon
  They should try Sam Altman. He's just the kind of guy who would bend over for this kind of authoritarian demand.
• anonym29
  Anthropic has already cooperated too much with the US Intelligence Community, but better some restraint than none, and better late than never.
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  alach11
  A significant part of Anthropic's cachet as an employer is the ethical stance they profess to take. This is no doubt a tough spot to be in, but it's hard to see Dario making any other decision here.What I don't understand is why Hegseth pushed the issue to an ultimatum like this. They say they're not trying to use Claude for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weapons. If so, what does the Department of War have to gain from this fight?
• insane_dreamer
  Good to see one AI company not selling out their values in exchange for military contracts. This shouldn't be rare, but it is. Good for them.
• lvl155
  At this point, surveillance state is coming whether Dario does this or not. You can do all that with open source models. It’s sad that we don’t have the right people in charge in govt to address this alarming issue.
• Aeroi
  in hindsight, the smart thing to do would have been to accept the contracts, knowingly enshittify the request, and protect other bad actors like Elon and xAI from ruthlessly compromising our democracies.
• int32_64
  Anthropic wants regulatory capture to advantage itself as it hypes its products capabilities and then acts surprised when the Pentagon takes their grand claims about their products seriously as it threatens government intervention.This is why people should support open models.When the AI bubble collapses these EA cultists will be seen as some of the biggest charlatans of all time.
• dakolli
  This is a PR play by Anthropic, likely in coordination with the administration. They don't care, they just need the public to view them as a victim here, and then its business as usual.I prefer they get shutdown, llms are the worst thing to happen to society since the nuclear bomb's invention. People all around me are losing their ability to think, write and plan at an extraordinary pace. Keep frying your brains with the most useless tool alive.Remember, the person that showed their work on their math test in detail is doing 10x better than the guys who only knew how to use the calculator. Now imagine being the guy who thinks you don't need to know the math or how to use a calculator lol.
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  isamuel
  Amodei’s use of “warfighters” (a Hegseth-era neologism for “soldiers”) is truly nauseating.
• mrcwinn
  I am incredibly proud to be a customer, both consumer level and as a business, of Anthropic and have canceled my OpenAI subscription and deleted ChatGPT.
• marshmellman
  Well, now if DoD moves to another AI provider, we’ll know what was compromised.
• anon
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• mkoubaa
  >We will not knowingly provide a product that puts America’s warfighters and civilians at risk.Implying other civilians can be put at risk
• nova22033
  Why does DoD need claude? I thought xAI was "less woke" and far better than claude
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  impulser_
  The worst part of this is if they do remove Claude, and probably GPT, and Gemini soon after because of outcry we are going to be left with our military using fucking Grok as their model, a model that not even on par with open source Chinese models.
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  mvkel
  "as an ai safety company, we only believe in -partially- autonomous weaponry"Ads are coming.
• bamboozled
  Move your company out of the USA?
• coolca
  Imagine being so cautious with your words, only to have 'Department of War' in your title
• OrvalWintermute
  I don't think this is genuine concern, I think this is instead, veiled fear of the TDS posse being covered by feigned concern.Foreign nationals are now embedded in the US due to decades of lax security by both parties. Domestic surveillance is now foreign surveillance also!
• jijji
  the government should not be using any private LLM, they should build their own internal systems using publicly available LLM's, which change frequently anyway. I don't see why they would put their trust in a third party like that. This back and forth about "ethics" is a bunch of nonsense, and can be solved simply by going for a custom solution which would probably be orders of magnitude cheaper in the long run. The most expensive part is the GPU's used for inference, which can be produced in silicon [1].[1] https://taalas.com/products/
• shawmakesmagic
  My man
• parhamn
  Now, I'm curious. How Bedrock/Azure Claude models work?Do these rules apply to them too?
• techpression
  ”Defense of democracy” is just another version of ”think of the children”.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
• anon
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  jibal
  It's the Department of Defense, not the Department of War ... only Congress has the legal authority to change the name, and they haven't.
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  pousada
  Department of War is just such a fucking joke title - when has the US stooped so low, I used to believe in you guys as the force of good on this planet smh
• anon
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  tehjoker
  The framing of this is that the United States conducts legitimate operations overseas, but that is extremely far from the truth. It treats China as a foreign adversary, which is nearly purely the framing from the U.S. side as an aggressor.AI should never be used in military contexts. It is an extremely dangerous development.Look at how US ally Israel used non-LLM AI technology "The Gospel" and "Lavender" to justify the murder of huge numbers of civilians in their genocide of Palestinians.
• mrcwinn
  Keep in mind: the government is very invested logistically in Anthropic.So no matter what xAI or OpenAI say - if and when they replace that spend - know that they are lying. They would have caved to the DoW’s demands for mass surveillance.Because if there were some kind of concession, it would have been simplest just to work with Anthropic.Delete ChatGPT and Grok.
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  keeeba
  Big respectTotal humiliation for Hegseth, sure there will be a backlash
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  jiggawatts
  Brigadier General S. L. A. Marshall’s 1947 book Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command stated that only about 10-15% of men would actually take the opportunity to fire directly at exposed enemies. The rest would typically fire in the air to merely scare off the men on the opposing force.I personally think this is one of the most positive of human traits: we’re almost pathologically unwilling to murder others even on a battlefield with our own lives at stake!This compulsion to avoid killing others can be trivially trained out of any AI system to make sure that they take 100% of every potential shot, massacre all available targets, and generally act like Murderbots from some Black Mirror episode.Anyone who participates in any such research is doing work that can only be categorised as the greatest possible evil, tantamount to purposefully designing a T800 Terminator after having watched the movies.If anyone here on HN reading this happens to be working at one of the big AI shops and you’re even tangentially involved in any such military AI project — even just cabling the servers or whatever — I figuratively spit in your eye in disgust. You deserve far, far worse.
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  delaminator
  "so we'll do it and feel guilty about it"
• myko
  There is no Department of War. This is the dumbest fucking timeline.
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  alephnerd
  One piece of context that everyone should keep in mind with the recent Anthropic showdown - Anthropic is trying to land British [0], Indian [1], Japanese [2], and German [3] public sector contracts.Working with the DoD/DoW on offensive usecases would put these contracts at risk, because Anthropic most likely isn't training independent models on a nation-to-nation basis and thus would be shut out of public and even private procurement outside the US because exporting the model for offensive usecases would be export controlled but governments would demand being parity in treatment or retaliate.This is also why countries like China, Japan, France, UAE, KSA, India, etc are training their own sovereign foundation models with government funding and backing, allowing them to use them on their terms because it was their governments that build it or funded it.Imagine if the EU demanded sovereign cloud access from AWS right at the beginning in 2008-09. This is what most governments are now doing with foundation models because most policymakers along with a number of us in the private sector are viewing foundation models from the same lens as hyperscalers.Frankly, I don't see any offramp other than the DPA even just to make an example out of Anthropic for the rest of the industry.[0] - https://www.anthropic.com/news/mou-uk-government[1] - https://www.anthropic.com/news/bengaluru-office-partnerships...[2] - https://www.anthropic.com/news/opening-our-tokyo-office[3] - https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/anthropic/jobs/5115692008
• irenetusuq
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• fdefitte
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• theturtle
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• designerdada
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• ffsickempire
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• mahgnous
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• JohnnyLarue
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• techblueberry
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• someguydave
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  OutOfHere
  The Pentagon should be using open models, not closed ones by OpenAI/Anthropic/xAI. The entire discussion of what Anthropic wants is therefore moot.
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  probably_wrong
  I have read the whole thing but I nonetheless want to focus on the second paragraph:> Anthropic has therefore worked proactively to deploy our models to the Department of WarThis should be a "have you noticed that the caps on our hats have skulls on it?" moment [1]. Even if one argues that the sentence should not be read literally (that is, that it's not literal war we're talking about), the only reason for calling it "Department of War" and "warfighters" instead of "Department of Defense" and "soldiers" is to gain Trump's favor, a man who dodged the draft, called soldiers "losers", and has been threatening to invade an ally for quite some time.There is no such a thing as a half-deal with the devil. If Anthropic wants to make money out of AI misclassifying civilians as military targets (or, as it has happened, by identifying which one residential building should be collapsed on top of a single military target, civilians be damned) good for them, but to argue that this is only okay as long as said civilians are brown is not the moral stance they think it is.Disclaimer: I'm not a US citizen.[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY
• anon
  undefined
• ozzymuppet
  Wow, I expected them to cave, and they did'nt!I'll be signing up to Claude again, Gemini getting kind of crap recently anyway.
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  statuslover9000
  The Sinophobic culture at Anthropic is worrying. Say what you will about authoritarianism, but China’s non-imperialist foreign policy means their economy is less reliant on a military-industrial complex.All they have to do is continue to pump out exponentially more solar panels and the petrodollar will fall, possibly taking our reserve currency status with it. The U.S. seems more likely to start a hot war in the name of “democracy” as it fails to gracefully metabolize the end of its geopolitical dominance, and Dario’s rhetoric pushes us further in that direction.