I don't doubt that Claude is capable of mass surveillance, but surely it is not too much of a stretch to say it may not be suitable for automated killbots?
I assume the techs at the pentagon know that, and itd be more used for intelligence (Equally as worrying, because if theres one thing GPTs arent, its intelligent)
Step 1.5 is also the one being ignored by 95% of comments here: the leverage the Pentagon is using is the lucrative contract Anthropic signed with them. The only threat here is Anthropic sucking up less money from the DoD.
Exactly - step 2 should be sign $200MM contract with party obviously and extremely interested in mass surveillance and autonomous warfighting capabilities.
So the Pentagon is strongarming a company into cooperation? That reminds of how my alcoholic neighbor used to treat his family. It's almost as if someone let a mean drunk be in charge of the Pentagon.
Without reading every word of every embedded tweet, a part missing from the conversation is HOW they are strongarming.
It isn't in private. It's a public threat in the court of public opinion to apply societal pressure on the company. They are attempting to reshape Anthropic's decision into a tribal one, and hurt the brand's reputation within the tribe unless it capitulates.
> Without reading every word of every embedded tweet, a part missing from the conversation is HOW they are strongarming.
There are two possibilities:
> The government would likely argue that dropping the contractual restrictions doesn't change the product. Claude is the same model with the same weights and the same capabilities—the government just wants different contractual terms. […] Anthropic would likely argue the opposite: that its usage restrictions are part of what Claude is as a commercial service, and that Claude-without-guardrails is a product it doesn't offer to anyone. On this view, the government is asking for a new product, and the statute doesn't clearly authorize that.
and
> The more extreme possibility would be the government compelling Anthropic to retrain Claude—to strip the safety guardrails baked into the model's training, not merely modify the access terms. Here the characterization question seems easier: a retrained model looks much more like a new product than dropping contractual restrictions does. Admittedly, the government has a textual argument in its favor: the DPA's definitions of "services" include “development … of a critical critical technology item,” and the government could frame retraining Claude as exactly that. Whether courts would accept that framing, especially in light of the major questions doctrine, is another matter.
A more extreme situation: could the DPA be used to nationalize the model so the government has ownership, and then allow access to more amenable AI players?
There's a third possibility. Anthropic's management desires cover to remove limiters on some of its products for some of its customers. The Pentagon is more than happy to play the bad guy if it means that they get something that's even more useful to them than what they would have gotten otherwise.
"We made these compromises because national defense is really super important." has historically proven to be a really effective explanation for tech companies that want to abandon some of their previously-stated "nice and friendly" values in exchange for money.
The top line of the article gives a big old hint: Anthropic signed a contract with the “Killing people” part of the government and now they’re putting on a show. No contract, no leverage.
The only threat the Pentagon has is to terminate the contract.
The whole government 'strong-arms' many of its counter-parties in a variety of situations; this is unfortunately nothing new, and far from an innovation by Hegseth. A more clearly illegal example (because the government was acting as a regulator, not a purchaser) is Operation Choke Point, though there are many others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
As if governments throughout history haven't constantly used threats to gain leverage? No need to take a personal shot at the guy in charge when this is SOP throughout the administration.
Like...governments pressuring social media companies to censor/ban/deamplify unapproved views and making up an Orwellian term like "misinformation" to justify it?
COVID and election discourse was (and is) massively influenced by foreign actors, and social media companies were disinclined to take action on that front, as it was good engagement. Thus the government was motivated to do something about it. This leads us to now, where we're looking at ID/citizenship requirements for much of what people consider "the internet".
Isn't this just whataboutism? I can't tell if you're defending the practice described in the post, trying to distract from it, or just going off on a tangent for no reason.
,,Needless to say, I support Anthropic here. I’m a sensible moderate on the killbot issue (we’ll probably get them eventually, and I doubt they’ll make things much worse compared to AI “only” having unfettered access to every Internet-enabled computer in the world). But AI-enabled mass surveillance of US citizens seems like the sort of thing we should at least have a chance to think over, rather than demanding it from the get-go.''
Why would killbots be sensible moderate with the number of hallucinations LLMs have right now?
They just need to have one rm -rf bug somewhere to so something disasterous, and at least Antrhopic's CEO understands the limitations of the software.
Imagine a world where in order to do business in the US you must grant the government control of your company. This sounds worse than even the most alarmist China takes.
I don't even understand why it is thought that letting a small non-elected clique run economically important infrastructure and control the lives of thousands of employees isn't considered dystopian. Public ownership at least has democratic legitimacy.
This is exactly America’s path. All this time we were “fighting” regimes like Chinese and Russian and now it is like “can’t beat them, join them” banana republic
sing the "supply chain risk" designation against a domestic AI company is wild. Not sure that tool had vendors who won't rewrite their ToS on demand in mind.
Meanwhile the Pentagon could just build its own capacity. Commercial AI outspends federal science R&D 75:1 right now.
this pairs nicely with the finding of the supreme court:
Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. There is no immunity for unofficial acts.
Point blank one of the most nakedly evil things the government has ever tried to do. Apparently Anthropic's sticking points were no using the model for autonomous kill orders and no mass surveillance...
The voters and congress tell the military how to use technology, not Anthropic. Shifting the decision to Anthropic takes away power from the citizenship.
Say I own a spoon company. The government says "hey, I'd like to buy a million spoons from you!" I say "sure, sounds great." We sign a contract stating that I'll give them 1M spoons and they'll send me $1M.
Then the government comes to me and says "hey, actually, turns out we need 500,000 forks and 300,000 knives and only 200,000 spoons."
I say "no, we are a spoon company. Very passionate about spoons. Producing forks and knives would be an entirely different business, and our contract was for spoons."
The military now threatens to destroy my company unless I give them forks and knives instead of spoons.
You say "the voters and congress tell the military how to use utensils, not SpoonCo. Shifting the decision to SpoonCo takes power away from the citizenship."
The military can sign contracts if they wish! They can decline to sign contracts if they wish!
But private citizens can also choose whether to sign or not sign contracts with the military. Threatening to destroy their business if they don't sign contracts the military likes (or to renegotiate existing contracts in the military's favor) is a huge violation.
The poll linked in the article shows even trump voters have <30% approval for the pentagon’s actions here, so if the citizenship tells the military how to do things…
You might want to go look at the laws that were passed in the wake of WWII. The US could trivially nationalize Anthopic if they want to play games with a weapons technology.
This could kill the golden goose. There is a strong argument to be made that Anthropic has a leading model because of the principled people who built it, and I don’t see how they won’t leave, like many did to go to Anthropic from OpenAI and Google.
Forcing those people to make weapons to be used against citizens is nothing like the total war in WW2. Why wouldn’t the pentagon just buy from another LLM supplier?
Bingo, DoD does not want Anthropic to set guardrails on the technology it buys. If they don't want to abide they are free to deny service. We all know how that will turn our for them with the current administration. All while the DoD will just move to another provider that WILL abide. The only power really lies in whatever our elected officials want to do. Take the responsibility seriously.
I'm sorry but the Pentagon already had a contract with Anthropic and is now threatening to use the supply chain risk law to essentially kill their entire company because they wanted to re-write the contract. They could easily just not sign the contract and move to a competitor. Its an incredibly disturbing and chilling move by the Pentagon...
I'm really not understanding this. Doesn't the typical path for advanced technology making it into the hands of civilians start with military applications and end with it being modified for civilian use?
If the Pentagon wants Anthropic's technology because it has desirable characteristics, can it not just train its own AI models? Why can't the Pentagon build data centers full of GPUs and hire some smart people like the commercial AI providers did?
Why in this case, has the usual path for technology been flipped? Starting out as commercial tech for civilians, and then being re-purposed for military use feels unusual to me. Maybe Hegseth's "War department" has a recruiting problem.
This is going to be a controversial take but I don't agree with Anthropic on this one. My gut instinct says that the Pentagon should back down, but my gut is wrong because of political bias. I can't claim to be serious about AI governance if Anthropic is able to sidestep the interests of the Pentagon, whoever might be in charge. Anthropic is not stronger than the US government, and it would set a dangerous precedent if they don't comply.
At the end of the rabbit hole, it's all about enforcement, regardless of the contract. Who's going to enforce Anthropic's terms and conditions if they betray the Pentagon?
Our government notably derives its power from the rights we delegate to said government. We have not given our government the right to just tear up contracts willy-nilly.
I can't help but compare what happened with nuclear physics to what will happen with ASI/AGI. We could have used nuclear energy to provide abundant, clean energy. Instead we used it for warfare to kill people. All the of the brightest minds and frontier technology was directed towards killing people.
We could use AI for medical advances and to create a communist utopia without serfdom. But it's already looking like we're getting killer robots and more oppression.
Hope I'm thinking about this wrong. I fear very soon the government will begin nationalizing AI resources and forcing AI researchers to direct their efforts towards weapons systems. Similar to what happened in physics. "We have to be first to have autonomous robot armies" basically.
What, Dario is just going to turn on unlimited-token-CEO-mode and ask Claude to devise a plan to out maneuver the military and intelligence services? It’s not AGI yet, and this request would be far outside the training distribution: it would just hallucinate something based on Tom Clancy novels.
We know that the current administration functions like a cabal of sex-trafficking mobsters, so none of this is surprising; strong-arming is the norm, not the exception. I expect this to get ugly, and I hope Anthropic has the financial and legal resources to respond accordingly.
Might be a long stretch, but that every analyst I’ve heard talking about this is concerned about mass surveillance of us citizens again, and the Wyden Siren is hinting at illegal activities by the CIA.
Plus that the US military also used anthropics products in some form during the Venezuela operation as they publicly acknowledged, plus Hegseth seeming to be willing to put the boot down anthropics’ neck according to the options presented to them, are a lot of interesting things that happened in a very short amount of time for an environment that is usually known to work as frictionless as possible.
Even for Hegseth this is a lot of public eyes on something the pentagon of previous administrations would have handled probably with the same willingness to drown anthropic in their own tears but completely out of public sight.
But the Pentagon works in mysterious ways, and therefore there might be a very good reason for this kind of pressure, that the people who are responsible for national security even risk making a public fuss about it, that we peasants simply don’t see.
I also can’t wait to see how the us military is messing this whole AI superiority softporn up. It’s not a matter of if but only of when.
They have a track record misshandling weapons of mass destruction.
To be fair tho, for the amount of nuclear weapons they are handling overall they are doing a pretty good job. But no more open blast doors for the pizza delivery guy, ok?
The real question is how many broken arrow events can we even have with AI? Is it better luck next time baby skynet serious or we fucked up Sir, everyone is going to die as matchsticks bad, if whatever system they use decides every problem they throw at it can be solved by removing the human from the equation, all of them preferably.
I understand that Anthropic has one of the most popular products in the market.
But no one, especially the government, should get in bed with them, when anthropic leadership has a track record trying to use their early mover advantace, to effectively create an AI cartel [1]
I'm glad Anthropic is getting a taste of their own medicine.
Any company using a huge $$ war chest to shower themselves in regulation, is likely trying to usurp market powers from the public -via congressional bribes- to themselves.
You're smoking something funny. They have just shown they are willing to designate a US company as essentially a foreign spy agency because they wanted to try and renegotiate a contract and didn't get what they wanted and that's your reaction?
> I'm glad Anthropic is getting a taste of their own medicine.
I took that to mean that you support the Pentagon's threat which essentially IS to label Anthropic as a national security threat, simply because they wouldn't give the Pentagon the right to use Anthropic's AI to operate weapons or spy on American citizens.
Big fish tries to use their might to kill off small fish .
Anthropic uses big $$ it to become big fish in the AI pond.
Anthropic just found there are bigger fish in their pond.
I'm glad Anthropic have been reminded of this. THat doesn't mean I endorse the US govt using law to make companies a "national security threat" , although its an extremelt easy path from: monopolistic to -> active "national security threat".
Govt can, and in fact, has a mandate to, go after businesses when those businesses threaten a functioning market. Threatening is certainly part of that arsenal.
Anthropic cutting off the Pentagon is saying in no uncertain terms that they support allowing the PRC access to frontier military technology but not the US.
Incredibly dumb take considering Dario Amodei has been extremely hawkish on China and especially about selling them chips that may allow them to catch up to the US level of capabilities...
Trump gave China a bunch of Blackwell chips and accelerated their frontier AI deployment in exchange for a big payout to his crypto firm from the UAE, an act which would be considered straightforward high treason if we were in normal times with a functioning government.
There is exactly one party in this debate trying to help the PRC get advanced military tech, and it’s not Anthropic.
Techno futurist:
1. Builds tool extremely capable of mass surveillance and running autonomous warfighting capabilities.
2. Expresses shock — shock — when the Department of War insists on using the tool for mass surveillance and autonomous warfighting systems.
I don't doubt that Claude is capable of mass surveillance, but surely it is not too much of a stretch to say it may not be suitable for automated killbots?
I assume the techs at the pentagon know that, and itd be more used for intelligence (Equally as worrying, because if theres one thing GPTs arent, its intelligent)
IDK, depends on how much you care about outcomes.
I don't think Drunk Pete does, very much.
1. The article points out Claude has resisted being trained for that. AI in general could, but Claude can not.
Step 1.5 is also the one being ignored by 95% of comments here: the leverage the Pentagon is using is the lucrative contract Anthropic signed with them. The only threat here is Anthropic sucking up less money from the DoD.
Exactly - step 2 should be sign $200MM contract with party obviously and extremely interested in mass surveillance and autonomous warfighting capabilities.
Then comes the shock.
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus
So the Pentagon is strongarming a company into cooperation? That reminds of how my alcoholic neighbor used to treat his family. It's almost as if someone let a mean drunk be in charge of the Pentagon.
Without reading every word of every embedded tweet, a part missing from the conversation is HOW they are strongarming.
It isn't in private. It's a public threat in the court of public opinion to apply societal pressure on the company. They are attempting to reshape Anthropic's decision into a tribal one, and hurt the brand's reputation within the tribe unless it capitulates.
> Without reading every word of every embedded tweet, a part missing from the conversation is HOW they are strongarming.
There are two possibilities:
> The government would likely argue that dropping the contractual restrictions doesn't change the product. Claude is the same model with the same weights and the same capabilities—the government just wants different contractual terms. […] Anthropic would likely argue the opposite: that its usage restrictions are part of what Claude is as a commercial service, and that Claude-without-guardrails is a product it doesn't offer to anyone. On this view, the government is asking for a new product, and the statute doesn't clearly authorize that.
and
> The more extreme possibility would be the government compelling Anthropic to retrain Claude—to strip the safety guardrails baked into the model's training, not merely modify the access terms. Here the characterization question seems easier: a retrained model looks much more like a new product than dropping contractual restrictions does. Admittedly, the government has a textual argument in its favor: the DPA's definitions of "services" include “development … of a critical critical technology item,” and the government could frame retraining Claude as exactly that. Whether courts would accept that framing, especially in light of the major questions doctrine, is another matter.
* https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/what-the-defense-produc...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act_of_1950
A more extreme situation: could the DPA be used to nationalize the model so the government has ownership, and then allow access to more amenable AI players?
There's a third possibility. Anthropic's management desires cover to remove limiters on some of its products for some of its customers. The Pentagon is more than happy to play the bad guy if it means that they get something that's even more useful to them than what they would have gotten otherwise.
"We made these compromises because national defense is really super important." has historically proven to be a really effective explanation for tech companies that want to abandon some of their previously-stated "nice and friendly" values in exchange for money.
The top line of the article gives a big old hint: Anthropic signed a contract with the “Killing people” part of the government and now they’re putting on a show. No contract, no leverage.
The only threat the Pentagon has is to terminate the contract.
Can they not invoke the defense act without the public spat? Gag order?
I wouldn't start up a new company in the US knowing that they are going full tyrant like this.
The whole government 'strong-arms' many of its counter-parties in a variety of situations; this is unfortunately nothing new, and far from an innovation by Hegseth. A more clearly illegal example (because the government was acting as a regulator, not a purchaser) is Operation Choke Point, though there are many others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
As if governments throughout history haven't constantly used threats to gain leverage? No need to take a personal shot at the guy in charge when this is SOP throughout the administration.
Why do you personally feel the need to defend this person given his involvement in what the administration is doing?
Guy is an unqualified alcoholic in charge of our safety. All shots are warranted.
Personal shots at the guy in charge have happened many times in history. Aren't you violating the principle defined in your first sentence?
Like...governments pressuring social media companies to censor/ban/deamplify unapproved views and making up an Orwellian term like "misinformation" to justify it?
COVID and election discourse was (and is) massively influenced by foreign actors, and social media companies were disinclined to take action on that front, as it was good engagement. Thus the government was motivated to do something about it. This leads us to now, where we're looking at ID/citizenship requirements for much of what people consider "the internet".
Isn't this just whataboutism? I can't tell if you're defending the practice described in the post, trying to distract from it, or just going off on a tangent for no reason.
,,Needless to say, I support Anthropic here. I’m a sensible moderate on the killbot issue (we’ll probably get them eventually, and I doubt they’ll make things much worse compared to AI “only” having unfettered access to every Internet-enabled computer in the world). But AI-enabled mass surveillance of US citizens seems like the sort of thing we should at least have a chance to think over, rather than demanding it from the get-go.''
Why would killbots be sensible moderate with the number of hallucinations LLMs have right now?
They just need to have one rm -rf bug somewhere to so something disasterous, and at least Antrhopic's CEO understands the limitations of the software.
Imagine a world where in order to do business in the US you must grant the government control of your company. This sounds worse than even the most alarmist China takes.
I don't even understand why it is thought that letting a small non-elected clique run economically important infrastructure and control the lives of thousands of employees isn't considered dystopian. Public ownership at least has democratic legitimacy.
Sounds exactly like China to me.
Yeah except in their society some cool shit happens at least.
Not a Sino-apologist here, but I think this is the difference between managing growth and managing decline.
A lot of harms are glossed over in the former, which would be unthinkable in the latter.
Yeah I'm sure the Uyghurs there can tell you all about the cool shit going down for them!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_Chin...
Pot calling kettle black no? The rest of the world can see the US federal government detaining people in concentration camps right now
You can change just change the last word and get Latin American foreign policy for the past 130 years,
"Imagine a world where in order to do business in the US you must grant the government control of your country".
This is exactly America’s path. All this time we were “fighting” regimes like Chinese and Russian and now it is like “can’t beat them, join them” banana republic
sing the "supply chain risk" designation against a domestic AI company is wild. Not sure that tool had vendors who won't rewrite their ToS on demand in mind.
Meanwhile the Pentagon could just build its own capacity. Commercial AI outspends federal science R&D 75:1 right now.
this pairs nicely with the finding of the supreme court:
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdfBig Tech: you can just do things.
Corrupt, evil Government: OK.
Point blank one of the most nakedly evil things the government has ever tried to do. Apparently Anthropic's sticking points were no using the model for autonomous kill orders and no mass surveillance...
It's just another good example of why everyone should avoid doing business with US companies.
Crazy to me that they don't expect this reaction.
Between military threats and this, are they trying to slaughter the golden geese of things the US has going for it?
No, I believe they call this "winning" for some reason.
The voters and congress tell the military how to use technology, not Anthropic. Shifting the decision to Anthropic takes away power from the citizenship.
Say I own a spoon company. The government says "hey, I'd like to buy a million spoons from you!" I say "sure, sounds great." We sign a contract stating that I'll give them 1M spoons and they'll send me $1M.
Then the government comes to me and says "hey, actually, turns out we need 500,000 forks and 300,000 knives and only 200,000 spoons."
I say "no, we are a spoon company. Very passionate about spoons. Producing forks and knives would be an entirely different business, and our contract was for spoons."
The military now threatens to destroy my company unless I give them forks and knives instead of spoons.
You say "the voters and congress tell the military how to use utensils, not SpoonCo. Shifting the decision to SpoonCo takes power away from the citizenship."
The military can sign contracts if they wish! They can decline to sign contracts if they wish!
But private citizens can also choose whether to sign or not sign contracts with the military. Threatening to destroy their business if they don't sign contracts the military likes (or to renegotiate existing contracts in the military's favor) is a huge violation.
The poll linked in the article shows even trump voters have <30% approval for the pentagon’s actions here, so if the citizenship tells the military how to do things…
What percentage of voters do you think want the Pentagon to institute an AI-powered domestic mass surveillance program?
You might want to go look at the laws that were passed in the wake of WWII. The US could trivially nationalize Anthopic if they want to play games with a weapons technology.
This could kill the golden goose. There is a strong argument to be made that Anthropic has a leading model because of the principled people who built it, and I don’t see how they won’t leave, like many did to go to Anthropic from OpenAI and Google.
Forcing those people to make weapons to be used against citizens is nothing like the total war in WW2. Why wouldn’t the pentagon just buy from another LLM supplier?
Sounds like the voters and congress should buy from someone else then if this is what they want?
Bingo, DoD does not want Anthropic to set guardrails on the technology it buys. If they don't want to abide they are free to deny service. We all know how that will turn our for them with the current administration. All while the DoD will just move to another provider that WILL abide. The only power really lies in whatever our elected officials want to do. Take the responsibility seriously.
The government is bound by its contracts. The government is not Darth Vader: "I am altering the deal; pray I don't alter it any further."
I'm sorry but the Pentagon already had a contract with Anthropic and is now threatening to use the supply chain risk law to essentially kill their entire company because they wanted to re-write the contract. They could easily just not sign the contract and move to a competitor. Its an incredibly disturbing and chilling move by the Pentagon...
If voters had any say in how software services were delivered, Windows 11 would be such a s--t pile.
There is a name for a system of government whereby a ruling party dictates how industry should employ its property, and it isn't democracy.
Previously:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47140734
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47142587
I'm really not understanding this. Doesn't the typical path for advanced technology making it into the hands of civilians start with military applications and end with it being modified for civilian use?
If the Pentagon wants Anthropic's technology because it has desirable characteristics, can it not just train its own AI models? Why can't the Pentagon build data centers full of GPUs and hire some smart people like the commercial AI providers did?
Why in this case, has the usual path for technology been flipped? Starting out as commercial tech for civilians, and then being re-purposed for military use feels unusual to me. Maybe Hegseth's "War department" has a recruiting problem.
> anyone know what news it was reacting to?
Probably this https://time.com/7380854/exclusive-anthropic-drops-flagship-...
This is going to be a controversial take but I don't agree with Anthropic on this one. My gut instinct says that the Pentagon should back down, but my gut is wrong because of political bias. I can't claim to be serious about AI governance if Anthropic is able to sidestep the interests of the Pentagon, whoever might be in charge. Anthropic is not stronger than the US government, and it would set a dangerous precedent if they don't comply.
At the end of the rabbit hole, it's all about enforcement, regardless of the contract. Who's going to enforce Anthropic's terms and conditions if they betray the Pentagon?
Our government notably derives its power from the rights we delegate to said government. We have not given our government the right to just tear up contracts willy-nilly.
I can't help but compare what happened with nuclear physics to what will happen with ASI/AGI. We could have used nuclear energy to provide abundant, clean energy. Instead we used it for warfare to kill people. All the of the brightest minds and frontier technology was directed towards killing people.
We could use AI for medical advances and to create a communist utopia without serfdom. But it's already looking like we're getting killer robots and more oppression.
Hope I'm thinking about this wrong. I fear very soon the government will begin nationalizing AI resources and forcing AI researchers to direct their efforts towards weapons systems. Similar to what happened in physics. "We have to be first to have autonomous robot armies" basically.
Look who is in power (both of the US Govt and of Big Tech). Complete sociopaths.
How does Hegseth believe he's going to out maneuver the company with the best "AI" on earth? Anthropic will run circles around him.
What, Dario is just going to turn on unlimited-token-CEO-mode and ask Claude to devise a plan to out maneuver the military and intelligence services? It’s not AGI yet, and this request would be far outside the training distribution: it would just hallucinate something based on Tom Clancy novels.
Edit: typo
We know that the current administration functions like a cabal of sex-trafficking mobsters, so none of this is surprising; strong-arming is the norm, not the exception. I expect this to get ugly, and I hope Anthropic has the financial and legal resources to respond accordingly.
If the gov does the "nuclear option" described on article, what do you think Anthropic's AI can do about it?
because he has the nukes
Might be a long stretch, but that every analyst I’ve heard talking about this is concerned about mass surveillance of us citizens again, and the Wyden Siren is hinting at illegal activities by the CIA.
https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/wyden_letter_to_d...
Plus that the US military also used anthropics products in some form during the Venezuela operation as they publicly acknowledged, plus Hegseth seeming to be willing to put the boot down anthropics’ neck according to the options presented to them, are a lot of interesting things that happened in a very short amount of time for an environment that is usually known to work as frictionless as possible.
Even for Hegseth this is a lot of public eyes on something the pentagon of previous administrations would have handled probably with the same willingness to drown anthropic in their own tears but completely out of public sight.
But the Pentagon works in mysterious ways, and therefore there might be a very good reason for this kind of pressure, that the people who are responsible for national security even risk making a public fuss about it, that we peasants simply don’t see.
I also can’t wait to see how the us military is messing this whole AI superiority softporn up. It’s not a matter of if but only of when.
They have a track record misshandling weapons of mass destruction.
https://www.atomicarchive.com/almanac/broken-arrows/index.ht...
To be fair tho, for the amount of nuclear weapons they are handling overall they are doing a pretty good job. But no more open blast doors for the pizza delivery guy, ok?
The real question is how many broken arrow events can we even have with AI? Is it better luck next time baby skynet serious or we fucked up Sir, everyone is going to die as matchsticks bad, if whatever system they use decides every problem they throw at it can be solved by removing the human from the equation, all of them preferably.
I understand that Anthropic has one of the most popular products in the market.
But no one, especially the government, should get in bed with them, when anthropic leadership has a track record trying to use their early mover advantace, to effectively create an AI cartel [1]
I'm glad Anthropic is getting a taste of their own medicine.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-10-15/anthro...
I can't grok this comment. Are you pro or anti-cartel?
very much anti cartel
Any company using a huge $$ war chest to shower themselves in regulation, is likely trying to usurp market powers from the public -via congressional bribes- to themselves.
How is this different from… any of their competitors?
You have described here all of Silicon Valley, VC and Y Combinator lol.
You're smoking something funny. They have just shown they are willing to designate a US company as essentially a foreign spy agency because they wanted to try and renegotiate a contract and didn't get what they wanted and that's your reaction?
>>>> willing to designate a US company as essentially a foreign spy agency
Can you quote where I said that ?
You wrote:
> I'm glad Anthropic is getting a taste of their own medicine.
I took that to mean that you support the Pentagon's threat which essentially IS to label Anthropic as a national security threat, simply because they wouldn't give the Pentagon the right to use Anthropic's AI to operate weapons or spy on American citizens.
Big fish tries to use their might to kill off small fish .
Anthropic uses big $$ it to become big fish in the AI pond.
Anthropic just found there are bigger fish in their pond.
I'm glad Anthropic have been reminded of this. THat doesn't mean I endorse the US govt using law to make companies a "national security threat" , although its an extremelt easy path from: monopolistic to -> active "national security threat".
Govt can, and in fact, has a mandate to, go after businesses when those businesses threaten a functioning market. Threatening is certainly part of that arsenal.
That's what anticompetitive rules are all about.
can you quote where they claimed the above was your statement?
You are correct, but I can't change my comment now.
I stand corrected
Anthropic cutting off the Pentagon is saying in no uncertain terms that they support allowing the PRC access to frontier military technology but not the US.
Incredibly dumb take considering Dario Amodei has been extremely hawkish on China and especially about selling them chips that may allow them to catch up to the US level of capabilities...
The Chinese models are 3, maybe 6 months behind Anthropic, they’re not that special.
So, two or three generations.
Trump gave China a bunch of Blackwell chips and accelerated their frontier AI deployment in exchange for a big payout to his crypto firm from the UAE, an act which would be considered straightforward high treason if we were in normal times with a functioning government.
There is exactly one party in this debate trying to help the PRC get advanced military tech, and it’s not Anthropic.