> 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.
Those aren't contradictory at all. If I need a particular type of bolt for my fighter jet but I can only get it from a dodgy Chinese company, then that bolt is a supply chain risk (because they could introduce deliberate defects or simply stop producing it) and also clearly important to national security. In fact, it's a supply chain risk because is important to national security.
More like the government is treating this like the near term weapon it actually is and, unlike the Manhattan project, the government seems to have little to no control.
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.
Anthropic had the largest IP settlement ($1.5 billion) for stolen material and Amodei repeatedly predicted mass unemployment within 6 months due to AI. Without being bothered about it at all.
It is a horrible and ruthless company and hearing a presumably rich ex-employee painting a rosy picture does not change anything.
I have hit points in this in my career where making a moral stand would be harmful to me (for minor things, nothing as serious as this). It's a very tempting and incentivized decision to make to choose personal gain over ideal. Idealists usually hold strong until they can convince themselves a greater good is served by breaking their ideals. These types that succumb to that reasoning usually ironically ending up doing the most harm.
Ever since I first bothered to meditate on it, about 15 years ago, I've believed that if AI ever gets anywhere near as good as it's creators want it to be, then it will be coopted by thugs. It didn't feel like a bold prediction to make at the time. It still doesn't.
How do you reconcile the fact that many people in Anthropic tried to hide the existence of secret non-disparagement agreements for quite some time?
It’s hard to take your comment at face value when there’s documented proof to the contrary. Maybe it could be forgiven as a blunder if revealed in the first few months and within the first handful of employees… but after 2 plus years and many dozens forced to sign that… it’s just not credible to believe it was all entirely positive motivations.
The company has taken actions that have been publicly ruled illegal, and had to pay one of the largest settlements in history – just a few years into existence.
I don't think they're a perfect company; I think they're driven by values.
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 surveillance
And neither denounces partially autonomous mass surveillance nor closes the door on AI-driven foreign mass surveillance
A 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
I think it goes without saying that ones the systems are reliable, fully-autonomous weapons will be unleashed on the battlefield. But they have to have safeguards to ensure that they don't turn on friendly forces and only kill the enemy. What Anthropic is saying, is that right now - they can't provide those assurances. When they can - I suspect those restrictions will be relaxed.
Well, if they hadn't stated that were that far in line with the administration's ideals, they would likely already be fully blacklisted as enemies of the state. Whether they agree with what they're saying or not, they're walking on egg shells.
Anthropic doesn't forbid DoW from using the models for foreign surveillance. It's not about harming others, it's about doing what is best for humanity in the long run, all things considered. I personally do not believe that foreign surveillance is automatically harmful and I'm fine with our military doing it
So AI systems are not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons but they are reliable enough to end all white-collar work in the next 12 months?
do you really need to be told there is a difference in 'magnitude of importance' between the decision to send out an office memo and the decision to strike a building with ordinance?
a lot of white collar jobs see no decision more important than a few hours of revenue. that's the difference: you can afford to fuck up in that environment.
>Yes, if you fuck up some white collar work, people will die. It’s irresponsible.
A lot of the work in those sectors are not the ones that are being targeted for fully autonomous replacement. They likely would be in the future though.
> the door is open for this after AI systems have gathered enough "training data"?
Sounds more like the door is open for this once reliability targets are met.
I don't think that's unreasonable. Hardware and regular software also have their own reliability limitations, not to mention the meatsacks behind the joystick.
What else would you expect? The military is obviously going to develop the most powerful systems they can. Do you want a tech company to say “the military can never use our stuff for autonomous systems forever, the end”? What if Anthropic ends up developing the safest, most cost effective systems for that purpose?
I'd prefer companies not help the military develop the most powerful weapons possible given we're in the age of WMDs, have already had two devastating world wars and a nuclear arms race that puts humanity under permanent risk.
There is an extremely straightforward argument that WMDs are precisely what prevented the outbreak of direct warfare between major powers in the latter 20th. (Note that WWI by itself wasn’t sufficient to prevent WWII!)
You can take issue with that argument if you want but it’s unconvincing not to address it.
That's a little bit like saying the bullet in the gun prevented someone getting shot while playing Russian Roulette. We pulled back that hammer several times, and it's purely happenstance that it didn't go off. MAD has that acronym for a reason.
If Anthropic does give the DoD what they want, does that magically stop China, Iran, Russia, etc from advancing in AI arms development?
If Anthropic doesn't give the DoD what they want, does that mean that China, Iran, Russia, etc magically leapfrog not only Anthropic, but the entire US defense industry, and take over the planet?
> If Anthropic does give the DoD what they want, does that magically stop China, Iran, Russia, etc from advancing in AI arms development?
No
> If Anthropic doesn't give the DoD what they want, does that mean that China, Iran, Russia, etc magically leapfrog not only Anthropic, but the entire US defense industry, and take over the planet?
The risks are high, so if you're the US, you want a portfolio of possible winners. The risks are too high to not leverage all the cutting edge AI labs.
The only two atomic weapons ever deployed weren't even targeting Nazi Germany, but Japan. Dark but true: they were both deliberately and knowingly targeted at civilian populations.
Right - for the same reasons a Waymo is safer than a human-driven car, an autonomous fighter drone will ultimately be deadlier than a human-flown fighter jet. I would like to forestall that day as long as possible but saying "no autonomous weapons ever" isn't very realistic right now.
And that's the end of democracy. One of the safe guards of democracy is a military that is trained to not turn against the citizens. Once a government has fully autonomous weapons its game over. They can point those weapons at the populous at the flip of the switch.
It's only Anthropic with their current models saying no. Fully autonomous weapons have been created, deployed, and have been operational for a long time already. The only holdout I've ever heard of is for the weapons that target humans.
Honestly, even landmines could easily be considered fully autonomous weapons and they don't care if you're human or not.
If they had access to them in Ukraine, both sides would already be using them I expect. Right now jamming of drones is a huge obstacle. One way it's dealt with is to run literal wired drones with massive spools of cable strung out behind them. A fully autonomous drone would be a significant advantage in this environment.
I'm not making a values judgment here, just saying that they will absolutely be used in war as soon as it's feasible to do so. The only exception I could see is if the world managed to come together and sign a treaty explicitly banning the use of autonomous weapons, but it's hard for me to see that happening in the near future.
Edit: come to think of it, you could argue a landmine is a fully autonomous weapon already.
Hah, I had the same realization about landmines. Along with the other commenter, really it would be better to add intelligence to these autonomous systems to limit the nastiness of the currently-deployed systems. If a landmine could distinguish between a real target and an innocent civilian 50yrs later, it's be a lot better.
Considering he slept naked with his grandniece (he was in his 70s, she was 17), I'd say there are a lot of them in the corporate world. Though probably more in politics.
They’re being used today by the military. So, they are never going to be against mass surveillance. They can scope that to be domestic mass surveillance though.
The problem is that this is a decision that costs money. Relying on a system that makes money by doing bad things to do good things out of a sense of morality when a possible outcome is existential risk to the species is a 100% chance of failure on a long enough timeline. We need massive disincentives to bad behavior, but I think that cat is already out of its bag.
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.
This isn't a one-election thing. It's going to be a generational effort to fix what these people are breaking more of every day. I hope I live to see it come to some kind of fruition - I recently turned 50.
The post WWII system was imperfect in many ways, but it was also mutually beneficial and worked out pretty well despite the problems.
And we're throwing that all out the window.
US military bases aren't what made those countries modern, prosperous, democratic places. It took the will of the people to rebuild something better after the war.
Then it won't work. The current iteration of Germany is fully based on having been bombed to get a fresh start. If you already have something, you won't change it. If you have to re-build, you will implement improvements. No bombs, no reset, no joy.
Yes, but it is actually scientifically correct and proven on all sorts of layers. Biology, Maths, whatever. Not doomsdaying, just data analytics.
Societies are not operating like a sinus curve like say summer/winter cycles. They are upside-down "U"s. After the peak comes decline, but after the decline there is NOT recovery/growth again before you have a reset.
Germany was the huge winner of WW2 in the sense that after having had a high society they directly were allowed to get another such run. But as nobody wants to bomb us ) anymore, Germany is also in decline now waiting for a reset to come one day...
Sadly the USA will also need a reset before things can begin getting better again.
) I was born in Germany and lived there for 40 years.
James May did a documentary loosely based on this. "The Peoples Car"
Basically analysing the economies of WW2 participants via their automobile industries.
Its staggering how being bombed into the ground has forced technological and economic innovation. And how the inverse, being the bomber, has created stagnation.
I don't think it would matter even if the us did have to start again. The entire us alliance after ww2 benefited from the same structural causes of increased pluralism and egalitarianism. A fractured elite, complex international trade, expanding and increasingly difficult to control communication channels, and a growing bureaucracy. These all inhibit autocratic concentration of power. International trade became uncomplicated, there is one manufacturer that is not a consumer, and many consumers. This leads to an increasingly less fractured elite. The structural reasons for democracy and rules based order are all fading. The us is just a really big canary.
The people running the show are all building generational fallout shelters in new zealand. As seems to be the real 'whitehouse ballroom' plan too. They seem to be expecting that part.
That’s just historically inaccurate. You had massive upheavals across numerous countries throughout time, this is small in comparison to the civil war’s impact on the USA for instance. You think this is worse than half the government rebelling and revolting and killing an amount of young men that today would be equivalent to 6 million deaths? It’s bad now but your comment lacks historical evidence.
Not really. China only seems good because there is a war in Europe and the US is shooting themself in the foot. They're polluting and strip mining their country, suppressing wages and funneling the profit into companies all while increasing surveillance and decreasing freedom of opinion. Oh but they put down a few solar panels and then paid for people to write articles about it.
This doesn't make much sense. Since the late 19th century, every country that got rich also heavily polluted the environment, though increasingly less over time. As it stands, fossil fuel demand in China has plateaued. The "wage suppression" thing also doesn't track; their citizens got much, much richer since Nixon's visit, despite being on average poorer than Westerners.
They're also speedrunning a world class power distribution system and deploying a massive amount of renewable power amoung a whole mess of other infrastructure. They've got the ability to focus an entire nation into achieving technical goals and they're rapidly improving quality of life in average while maintaining an industrial base that the US can only remember fondly. They might not meet western standards for individual freedoms and rule of law, but they're undoubtedly a rising world power.
I used to pretend China wasn't absolutely smashing the USA, but it looks like it is. They basically make everything modern civilization relies on, that's an insane amount of leverage over the rest of the world. That combined with renewables and nuclear and their diminishing need for foreign oil because of that is pretty incredible.
Is this a joke that’s going over my head? The country we all know the term “century of humiliation” from has recovered and is literally a superpower right now?
You mean, what's been happening to the USA? this isn't a new trend. Militarization of police, open attacks on democracy, unilateral foreign policy moves.
the country jumped the shark post 9/11 and has been on a slow rot since then.
> Let's hope sanity prevails and the next election cycle can bring in some competent non-grievance based leadership.
Would be nice, but I have a bad feeling that the impact of widescale mostly unregulated AI adoption on our social fabric is going to make the social media era that gave rise to Trump, et al seem like the good ol' days in comparison.
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.
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.
During a war with national mobilization, that would make sense. Or in a country like China. This kind of coercion is not an expected part of democratic rule.
The question of whether or not the government should be able to use AI for targeting without the involvement of humans is a wartime question, since that is the only time the military should be killing people.
Under such a scenario, requisition applies, and so all of this talk is moot.
The fact that the military is killing people without a declaration of war is the problem, and that's where energy and effort should be directed.
Edit:
There's a yet larger question on whether any legal constraints on the military's use of technology even makes sense at all, since any safeguards will be quickly yielded if a real enemy presents itself. As a course of natural law, no society will willingly handicap its means of defense against an external threat.
It follows then that the only time these ethical concerns apply is when we are the aggressor, which we almost always are. It's the aggression that we should be limiting, not the technology.
It's also downstream of voters who voted in a president who promised to be dictatorial after failing at an attempted insurrection. We need to deprogram like 70M very confused people.
It's really not the right thing to be bikeshedding. The people calling the shots call themselves the Department of War. No need to die on hills that don't matter.
It's actually a good thing to point out, because it shows that those people are out of control and exceeding their authority, and need to be reined in.
No need to die on the hill, but point out that there's a consistent pattern of lawless power-grabbing.
TIL of Bikeshedding, or Parkinson’s Law of Triviality.
Defined as the tendency for teams to devote disproportionate time and energy to trivial, easy-to-understand issues while neglecting complex, high-stakes decisions. Originating from the example of arguing over a bike shed's color instead of a nuclear plant's design, it represents a wasteful focus on minor details.
It SHOULD be called the Department of War, as it was originally, since it makes its function clear. We are a society that has euphemized everything and so we no longer understand anything.
While I agree the name change has not (yet) been made with the proper authority, I'm quite partial to the name and prefer to use it despite its prematurity. I think it does a better job of communicating the types of work actually done by the department and rightly gives people pause about their support of it. Though I'm sure that wasn't the administration's intention.
While this action may indeed cause the DoD to blacklist Anthropic from doing business w/the government, they probably were being as careful as they could be not to double down on the nose-thumbing.
Often offensive and also often defensive of others.. so if renaming is on the table, it’s probably most apt to call it the Dept of Security since the vast majority of what it does is maintaining the security umbrella that has helped suppress world war since the last one. Of course, facts or opinions on whether it succeeds on the security front depend on which side of the umbrella you’re on.
> All that matters is that everyone calls it the Department of War, and regards it as such, which everyone does.
What you just described is consensus, and framing it as fascism damages the credibility of your stance. There are better arguments to make, which don’t require framing a label update as oppression.
The president has no authority to rename the Department of Defense, but he and his administration demand consensus under the threat of legal consequences.
Just as one example, they threatened Google when they didn't immediately rename the Gulf of Mexico to the "Gulf of America" on their maps. Other companies now follow their illegal guidance because they know that they will be threatened too if they don't comply.
There is a word for when the government uses threats to enforce illegal referendums. That word is "Fascism". Denying this is irresponsible, especially in the context of this situation, where the Government is threatening to force a private company to provide services that it doesn't currently provide.
Renaming the DoD does directly contradict the National Security Act of 1947, which renamed the Department of War to the Department of the Army, and put it under the newly named Department of Defense.
The National Security Act of 1947, as amended on August 10, 1949, establishes the name of the executive department overseeing the military as the Department of Defense.
I'm not framing consensus as fascism, I'm pointing out what the consensus is within the current fascist framework, and that consensus is that Congress doesn't make the rules anymore. And that consensus is shared by Congress itself.
Agreed. You don’t have to be an LLM maximalist or a doomer to see the opportunity for real, practical danger from ubiquitous surveillance and autonomous weapons. It would have been extremely easy for Dario to demonstrate the same level of backbone as Sam Altman or Sundar Pichai.
There is no moral leg to stand on here, he says here in plain english that if they wanted to use CLAUDE to perform mass surveillance on Canada, Mexico, UK, Germany, that is perfectly fine.
This is a public note, but directed at the current administration, so reading it as a description of what is or is not moral is completely missing the point. This note is saying (1) we refuse to be used in this way, and (2) we are going to use "mass surveillance of US citizens" as our defensive line because it is at least backed by Constitutional arguments. Those same arguments ought to apply more broadly, but attempts to use them that way have already been trampled on and so would only weaken the arguments as a defense.
If it helps: refusing to tune Claude for domestic surveillance will also enable refusing to do the same for other surveillance, because they can make the honest argument that most things you'd do to improve Claude for any mass surveillance will also assist in domestic mass surveillance.
Perhaps you just have different moral values? I suspect each of the countries you mentioned spy on us. I also suspect we spy on them. I’m glad an American company wouldn’t be so foolish as to pretend otherwise.
> Props to Dario and Anthropic for taking a moral stand.
For now. They will turn evil anyway. Just like the rest of Big Tech did.
When it IPOs it will be in the hands of pension funds, asset management companies and hedge funds who will be above the CEO and do. not. care. about "morals".
Then, eventually no matter what administration, Anthropic will betray you for a multi-year government contract worth tens of billions of dollars.
A moral stand? ... What? Did we read the same statement? It opens right out the gate with:
>I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries.
>Anthropic has therefore worked proactively to deploy our models to the Department of War and the intelligence community. We were the first frontier AI company to deploy our models in the US government’s classified networks, the first to deploy them at the National Laboratories, and the first to provide custom models for national security customers. Claude is extensively deployed across the Department of War and other national security agencies for mission-critical applications, such as intelligence analysis, modeling and simulation, operational planning, cyber operations, and more.
But when was the last time our "democratic values" were under attack by a foreign country and actually needed defending?
9/11? Pearl Harbor?
Maybe I'm missing something. We have a giant military and a tendency to use it. On occasion, against democratically elected leaders in other countries.
You're right; freedom isn't free. But foreign countries aren't exactly the biggest threats to American democracy at the moment.
You have the causality at least partially backwards. Why has it been so long and infrequent that the US has been in direct conflict with authoritarian adversaries? Because we have a giant military and a willingness to use it. Pacifism and isolationism do not work as defensive strategies.
Korea, Vietnam, Panama, Grenada, Libya, Lebanon, Iraq War I, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq War II were all fought for or over democratic ideals & the defense of democratic institutions.
All were driven by multiple competing and sometimes conflicting goals, and many look questionable in hindsight. It is fair to critique.
But it is absolutely not the case that the last time the US defended freedom through military means was WWII.
They are undeniably taking a moral stand. Among other things, the statement explains that there are two use cases that they refuse to do. This is a moral stand. It might not align with your morals, but it's still a moral stand.
Words are cheap. Actions aren't. Dario Amodei is putting his company on the line for what he believes in. That's courage, character and... yes, morality.
I am convinced that Amodei's "morality" is purely performative, and cynically employed as a marketing tactic. Time will tell, but most people will forget his lies.
“Dario is saying the right thing and doing the right thing and not ever acting otherwise, but I think it’s just performative so I’m still disappointed in him.”
We don't know how the military intended to use Claude, and neither do we know nor does the military know whether Claude without RLHF-imposed safety would have been more useful to them.
Ergo, this is a very convenient PR opportunity. The public assumes the worst, and this is egged on by Anthropic with the implication that CLAUDE is being used in autonomous weapons, which I find almost amusing.
He can now say goodbye to $200 million, and make up for it in positive publicity. Also, people will leave thinking that Claude is the best model, AND Anthropic are the heroes that staved off superintelligent killer robots for a while.
Even setting this aside, Dario is the silly guy who's "not sure whether Claude is sentient or not", who keeps using the UBI narrative to promote his product with the silent implication that LLMs actually ARE a path to AGI... Look, if you believe that, then that is where we differ, and I suppose that then the notion that Amodei is a moral man is comprehensible.
Oh, also the stealing. All the stealing. But he is not alone there by any means.
edit: to actually answer your question, this act in itself is not what prompted me to say that he is an immoral man. Your comment did.
> to promote his product with the silent implication that LLMs actually ARE a path to AGI
That isn't implied. The thought process is a) if we invent AGI through some other method, we should still treat LLMs nicely because it's a credible commitment we'll treat the AGI well and b) having evidence in the pretraining data and on the internet that we treat LLMs well makes it easier to align new ones when training them.
Anyway, your argument seems to be that it's unfair that he has the opportunity to do something moral in public because it makes him look moral?
His actions seem pretty consistent with a belief that AI will be significant and societally-changing in the future. You can disagree with that belief but it's different to him being a liar.
The $200m is not the risk here. They threatened labelling Anthropic as a supply chain risk, which would be genuinely damaging.
> The DoW is the largest employer in America, and a staggering number of companies have random subsidiaries that do work for it.
> All of those companies would now have faced this compliance nightmare. [to not use Anthropic in any of their business or suppliers]
... which would impact Anthropic's primary customer base (businesses). Even for those not directly affected, it adds uncertainty in the brand.
Standing up to the US government has real and serious sequence. Peter Hegseth threatened to make Anthropic supply chain risk, meaning not only is Anthropic likely dropped as Pentagon’s supplier, but also risk losing companies doing business with the military as customers, such as Boeing or Lockheed Martin. Whatever tactic you think he is doing, that’s potentially massive revenue lost, at the time they need any business they can get.
It’s possible Dario is a bad person pretending to be good and Sundar is a good person only pretending to be bad. People argue whether true selflessness exists at all or whether it’s all a charade.
But if the “performance” involves doing good things, at the end of the day that’s good enough for me.
These are literally words. The DoW could still easily exploit these platforms, and nothing Anthropic has done can prevent it, other than saying (publicly), "we disagree."
The dispute seems to be specifically about safeguards that Anthropic has in its models and/or harnesses, that the DoD wants removed, which Anthropic refuses to do, and won’t sign a contract requiring their removal. Having implemented the safeguards and refusing their removal are actions, not “literally words”.
It’s a contract dispute. Contracts are more than just talk.
While it is true that DoW could try to bypass the contract and do whatever they want, if it were that easy they wouldn’t be asking for a contract in the first place.
Should probably look up how many private companies are suing the government at any one time because of a breach of contract. And that's publicly breaching.
NSA and other three-letter agencies happily do it under cloak and dagger.
What's the US history around nationalization? Would "confiscation", ever be a likelyhood on escalation?
On a quick search I came up with an article, that at least thematically, proposes such ideas about the current administration "Nationalization by Stealth: Trump’s New Industrial Playbook"
I disagree. There is a class of leaders in this country that is complicit with the administrations use of violence on the tacit understanding that the violence not be directed at them. Arresting one of those people would be an act of desperation that would likely cause the rats to flea the sinking ship. And it isn't even clear if Trump could actually manufacture any charges here. Look at the dropped charges against Mark Kelly and those other politicians as an example. The administration might be able to make up stories to arrest random immigrants and college kids, but they clearly haven't been able to indiscriminately jail powerful political opponents.
Meanwhile, Dario knows his product can't be trusted to actually decide who should live and who should die, so what happens the first time his hypothetical AI killing machines make the wrong decision? Who gets the blame for that? Would the American government be willing to throw him under the bus in the face of international outrage? It's certainly a possibility.
In all seriousness The Hague has no jurisdiction over Americans and Congress has already authorized military use of force against Brussels should they ever attempt to prosecute Americans.
It's not so clear the company is actually on the line. They can compel Anthropic to do what they are not willing to do, maybe, this is not the final act. The government needs to respond, to which Anthropic will need to respond, courts may become involved at that point, depending on if Anthropic acquiesces at that point or not. Make a prominent statement against while in the news cycle, let the rest unfold under less media attention.
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?
You’re getting many replies, and having scrolled through much of them I do not see one that actually answers your question truthfully.
The reason why there is an explicit call out for surveillance on American citizens is because there are unquestionable constitutional protections in place for American citizens on American soil.
There is a strong argument that can be made that using AI to mass surveil Americans within US territory is not only morally objectionable, but also illegal and unconstitutional.
There are laws on the books that allow for it right now, through workarounds grandfathered in from an earlier era when mass surveillance was just not possible, and these are what Dario is referencing in this blog post. These laws may be unconstitutional, and pushing this to be a legal fight, may result in the Department of War losing its ability to surveil entirely. They may not want to risk that.
I wish that our constitution provided such protections for all peoples. It does not. The pragmatic thing to do then is to focus on protecting the rights that are explicitly enumerated in the constitution, since that has the strongest legal basis.
I agree with your premise because this seems to be the modern interpretation of the courts, but it is not the historical interpretation.
The historical basis of the bill of rights is that they are god given rights of all people merely recognized by the government. This is also partially why all rights in the BoR are granted to 'people' instead of 'citizens.'
Of course this all does get very confusing. Because the 4th amendment does generally apply to people, while the 2nd amendment magically people gets interpreted as some mumbo-jumbo people of the 'political community' (Heller) even though from the founding until the mid 1800s ~most people it protected who kept and bore arms didn't even bother to get citizenship or become part of the 'political community'.
The reason why there is an explicit call out for surveillance on American citizens is because there are unquestionable constitutional protections in place for American citizens on American soil.
Those unquestionable protections are phrased with enough hand-waving ambiguity of language to leave room for any conceivable interpretation by later courts. See the third-party 'exception' to the Fourth Amendment, for instance.
It's as if those morons were running out of ink or time or something, trying to finish an assignment the night before it was due.
Since at least the progressive era (see the switch in time that saved 9), and probably before, the courts have largely just post facto rationalized why the thing they do or don't agree with fit their desired pattern of constitutionality.
SCOTUS is largely not there to interpret the constitution in any meaningful sense. They are there to provide legitimization for the machinations of power. If god-man in black costume and wig say parchment of paper agree, then act must be legitimate, and this helps keep the populace from rising up in rebellion. It is quite similar to shariah law using a number of Mutfi/Qazi to explain why god agrees with them about whatever it is they think should be the law.
If you look at a number of actions that have flagrantly defied both the historical and literal interpretation of the constitution, the only entity that was able to provide legitimization for many acts of congress has been the guys wearing the funny looking costumes in SCOTUS.
I think it's slightly less ridiculous than it sounds, because governments have much more power over their own citizens. As an American I would dramatically prefer the Chinese government to spy on me than the American government, because the Chinese government probably isn't going to do anything about whatever they find out.
(That logic breaks down somewhat in the case of explicitly negotiated surveillance sharing agreements.)
> because the Chinese government probably isn't going to do anything about whatever they find out.
This really depends. If a foreign adversary's surveillance finds you have a particular weakness exploitable for corporate or government espionage, you're cooked.
Domestic governments are at least still theoretically somewhat accountable to domestic laws, at least in theory (current failure modes in the US aside).
Exactly and that danger grows as the ability to do so in increasingly automated and targeted ways increases. Should be very obvious now looking at the world around us.
Also, failing to consider the legal and rights regime of the attacker is wild to me. Look at what happens to people caught spying for other regimes. Aldrich Ames just died after decades in prison, and that’s one of the most extreme cases — plenty have got away with just a few years. The Soviet assets Ames gave up were all swiftly executed, much like they are in China.
Regimes and rights matter, which is why the democracy / autocracy governance conflict matters so much to the future trajectory of humanity.
> As an American I would dramatically prefer the Chinese government to spy on me than the American government, because the Chinese government probably isn't going to do anything about whatever they find out.
> spy on me
People forget to substitute "me" for "my elected representative" or "my civil service employee" or "my service member" or their loved ones
I, personally, have nothing significant that a foreign government can leverage against our country but some people are in a more privileged/responsible/susceptible position.
It is critical to protect all our data privacy because we don't know from where they will be targeted.
Similarly, for domestic surveillance, we don't know who the next MLK Jr could be or what their position would be. Maybe I am too backward to even support this next MLK Jr but I definitely don't want them to be nipped in the bud.
This is a political statement directed at the US public, Congress, and executive branch in the context of a dispute with the US executive branch that is likely to escalate (if the executive is not otherwise dissuaded) into a legal battle, and it therefore focuses particularly on issues relevant in that context, including Constitutional, limits on the government as a whole, the executive branch, and the Department of Defense (for which Anthropic used the non-legal nickname coined by the executive branch instead of the legal name.) Domestic mass surveillance involves Constitutional limits on government power and statutory limits on executive power and DoD roles that foreign surveillance does not. That's why it is the focus.
If we're asking "What's the deal" questions, what's the deal with this question? Do only people in democracies deserve protections? If we believe foreign nationals deserve privacy, why should that only apply to people living in democracies?
In every country, citizens have more rights than non-citizens. The right to freely enter the country, the right to vote, the right to various social services, etc.
In the US, one of the rights citizens have is the right against "unreasonable searches and seizures", established in the Fourth Amendment. That has been interpreted by the Supreme Court to include mass surveillance and to apply to citizens and people geographically located within US borders.
That doesn't apply that to non-citizens outside the US, simply because the US Constitution doesn't require it to.
I'm not defending this, just explaining why it's different.
But, you can imagine, for example, why in wartime, you'd certainly want to engage in as much mass surveillance against an enemy country as possible. And even when you're not in wartime, countries spy on other countries to try to avoid unexpected attacks.
The US has a strong history of trying to avoid building domestic surveillance and a national police. Largely it’s due to the 4th amendment and questions about constitutionality. Obviously that’s going questionably well but historically that’s why it’s a red line.
The reality is that the US Constitution only offers strong guarantees to citizens and (some of) the people in the US. Foreigners are excluded and foreign mass surveillance is or will happen.
I believe every country (or block) should carve an independent path when it comes to AI training, data retention and inference. That is makes most sense, will minimize conflicts and put people in control of their destiny.
An unwritten rule on the internet (and especially on HN/Reddit) has always been to take the educated and intellectual perspective that the Earth’s borders conveniently end where the USPS stops delivering. Considering life outside the U.S. is an archaic (and slightly exhausting) hobby for people with too much time on their hands from the so-called rest of the world.
If nothing else, the USA has learned that a lot of people outside their borders do not share the same ideas on basic human rights, and most of the world hates when we try to ensure them. Some countries are closely aligned with our ideals and are treated differently. There are many different layers of this, from Australia to North Korea.
Also the more the US openly treats the world like garbage, the more the rest of the world will likely reciprocate to US citizens.
It reminds me of some recent horror stories at border crossings - harassing people and requiring giving up all your data on your phone - sets a terrible precedent.
> what's the deal with making the distinction between domestic mass surveillance and foreign mass surveillance? Are there no democracies aside from the US?
I think it's just saying that spying on another country's citizens isn't fundamentally undemocratic (even if that other country happens to be a democracy) because they're not your citizens and therefore you don't govern them. Spying on your own citizens opens all sorts of nefarious avenues that spying on another country's citizens does not.
The distinction between foreign and domestic is a legal one.
The Supreme Court has ruled that the US Constitution protects any persons physically present in the United States and its territories as well as any US citizens abroad.
So if you are a German national on US soil, you have, say, Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure. If you are a US citizen in Germany, you also have those rights. But a German citizen in Germany does not.
What this means in practice is that US 3-letter agencices have essentially been free to mass surveil people outside the United States. Historically these agencies have gotten around that by outsourcing their spying needs to 3 leter agencies in other countries (eg the NSA at one point might outsource spying on US citizens to GCHQ).
In the US, we have the ability to either confirm or change a significant chunk of our Federal government roughly every two years via the House of Representatives. The argument here is that we, theoretically, could collectively elect people that are hostile to domestic mass surveillance into the House of Representatives (and other places if able) and remove pro-surveillance incumbents from power on this two year cycle.
The reasons this hasn't happened yet are many and often vary by personal opinion. My top two are:
1) Lack of term limits across all Federal branches
and
2) A general lack of digital literacy across all Federal branches
I mean, if the people who are supposed to be regulating this stuff ask Mark Zuckerberg how to send an email, for example, then how the heck are they supposed to say no to the well dressed government contractor offering a magical black box computer solution to the fear of domestic terrorism (regardless of if its actually occurring or not)?
I'd only add that the general public has a dangerously high tolerance for privacy invasion and government surveillance. Many will still tell you straight up that they have nothing to hide and that it's probably worth it. Congressional candidates run on platforms designed to cater to voter priorities.
The rejection of Flock cameras seems to be a step in the right direction.
This contradicts the opening of the Declaration of Independence, which recognizes all humans as possessing rights:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
I'm glad to see this as the top comment. I was, until recently, a loyal Anthropic customer. No more. Because the way non-Americans are spoken of by a company that serves an international market (and this isn't the first instance):
"Mass domestic surveillance. We support the use of AI for lawful foreign intelligence and counterintelligence missions. But using these systems for mass _domestic_ surveillance is incompatible with democratic values."
Second class citizens. Americans have rights, you don't. "Democratic values" applies only to the United States. We'll take your money and then spy on you and it's ok because we headquartered ourselves and our bank accounts in the United States.
Very questionable. American exceptionalism that tries to define "democracy" as the thing that happens within its own borders, seemingly only. Twice as tone-deaf after what we've seen from certain prominent US citizens over the last year. Subscription cancelled after I got a whiff of this a month ago.
(Not to mention the definition of "lawful foreign intelligence" has often, and especially now, been quite ethically questionable from the United States.)
EDIT: don't just downvote me. Explain why you think using their product for surveillance of non-Americans is ethical. Justify your position.
My guess is that they can't object to foreign intelligence, and would lose negotiating ground if they even tried.
Optimistically, they can still refuse to do work that would aid in foreign intelligence gathering, by arguing that it would also be beneficial for domestic mass surveillance.
I'll admit that the phrase "We support...foreign intelligence and counterintelligence" is awful as hell, and it's possible that my apologist claims are BS. But Anthropic has very little leverage here (despite having a signed contract and so legally fully in the right), so I could see why they're desperate to stick to only the most solid objections available.
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.
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.
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.
You, using normal Claude under the consumer ToS, cannot use it to make weapons, kill people, spy on adversaries, etc. The Pentagon, using War Claude, under their currently-existing contract, can use it to make weapons and spy on (foreign) adversaries, but not to (autonomously) kill people. I don't love this but I am even less excited about the CCP having WarKimi while we have no military AI.
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.
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.
I think it is a reasonable moral stance to acknowledge such things are possible, yet not wanting to be a part of it. Regarding making it technically impossible to do...I think that is what Anthropic means when they say they want to develop guardrails.
Ukraine , Russia , China , actively develop ai systems that kill. Not developing such system by US based company will not change the course of actions.
That said, it does impact whether Anthropic can sell to the British [0], German [1], Japanese [2], and Indian [3] government.
Other governments will demand similar terms to the US. Either Anthropic accedes to their terms and gets export controlled by the US or Anthropic somehow uses public pressure to push back against being turned into an American sovereign model.
Realistically, I see no offramp other than the DPA - a similar silent showdown happened in the critical minerals space 6-7 years ago.
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.
They don't have any brand poison, unlike nearly everyone else competing with them. Some serious negative equity in tha group, be it GOOG, Grok , META, OpenAI, M$FT, deepseek, etc.
Claude was just being the little bot that could, and until now, flying under the radar
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?
It’s not unusual for legal departments to take offense to these sorts of things, because now everyone using Claude within the DoD has to do some kind of audit to figure out if they’re building something that could be construed as surveillance or autonomous weapons (or, what controls are in place to prevent your gun from firing when Claude says, etc). A lot of paperwork.
My guess is they just don’t want to bother. I wonder why they specifically need Claude when their other vendors are willing to sign their terms, unless it specifically needs to run in AWS or something for their “classified networks” requirement.
Same reason they cut funding for universities that had DEI mandates, etc. and made a big spectacle of doing it despite it often being very little money etc. etc.
It's an ideological war, they're desperate to win it, and they're aiming to put a segment of US civil society into submission, and setting an example for everyone else.
He smelled weakness, and like any schoolyard bully personality, he couldn't help but turn it into a display of power.
He pushed the issue to an ultimatum because he is an unqualified drunk, and thinks that it's against the law for anyone to try and stop the US military from doing something they want to do. This isn't an isolated issue; he tried to get multiple US Senators prosecuted for making a PSA that servicemembers shouldn't follow illegal orders.
"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.
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 War
This 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.
One alternative would be to call the government's bluff: if they truly are as indispensable as they claim then they can leverage that advantage into a deal.
But at a more general level, I'd say that unethical actions do not suddenly become ethical when one's business is at risk. If Anthropic considers that using their technology for X is unethical and then decide that their money and power is worth more than the lives of the foreigners that will be affected by doing X then good for them, but they shouldn't then make a grandstand about how hard they fought to ensure that only foreigners get their necks under the boots.
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.
I think the warfighters are a distraction, a system could trivially say that there is a human in the loop for LLM-derived kill lists. My money is that the mass domestic surveillance is the true sticking point, because it’s exactly what you would use a LLM for today.
This of course raises the question on whether as an American I have more to fear from the Chinese government or the US one.. given everything happening in the Executive Branch here, that’s a disappointingly hard question to answer.
I think that's an easy question to answer, but obviously you don't fear the Chinese government you're not a Chinese citizen. You can actively talk about your disagreements with the US government, that not a right the Chinese have.
It shouldn't be. The US government is already sending armed and masked thugs to shoot political dissidents dead or sending them to concentration camps, threatening state governments and private companies to comply with suppressing free speech and oppressing undesirables, and openly discussing using emergency powers to suspend the next election.
What exactly is the commensurate threat from China? The real tacit threat, not abstract fears like "TikTok is Chinese mind control." What can China actually do to you, an American, that the US isn't already more capable of doing, and more likely to do?
To me it isn't even a question. Even comparing worst case scenarios - open war with China versus civil war within the US - the latter is more of a threat to citizens of the US than the former unless the nukes drop. And even then, the only nation to ever use nuclear weapons in warfare is the US.
If the American military was focused on defending the United States, it would be a very different beast. The 21st Century American military is a tool for transferring wealth from the public to influential parties, and for inflicting destruction on non-peer nations who pose obstacles to influential parties interests. Defending the United States against various often-invoked hobgoblins is at best a very distant concern, closer to pure lip service than reality.
I'm a natural-born American (many generations back) and firmly believe that if we ever get into a hot war with China, it will be because of American provocation, not Chinese.
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???
It's not inconceivable that AI could become better than humans at targeting things. For example if it can reliably identify enemy warcraft or drones faster than people can react. I'm not saying Claude's models are suited for that but humans aren't perfect and in theory AI can be better than humans. It's not currently true and would need to be proved, but it doesn't seem unreasonable. It could well be better than something like deploying mines.
We're living in a time where most tech companies are donating millions of dollars to the current leadership in exchange for favors. In that climate this is a more of a stand than what everyone else is doing.
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.
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.
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
When? Its entire history from the foundation of the Republic to 1947. The name was changed after WWII; now a faction wants to change it back. The difference in name never changed the behavior, in either direction.
The USA were pretty clearly on the "better side" of conflicts in 1941-1945, during the Cold War (at least as far as Europe and the Marshall plan was concerned). In Koweït and central Europe during the 90s. You may even argue for Afghanistan post 9-11 (although the state building was botched.) in the 2000s. ISIS is a footnote in history because of US intervention (from Trump first term, of all things.) And Ukraine would not be against getting the support it had in 2022 back under Trump.
Does not mean that very bad things were not happening at the same time.
But it's definitely easier to find some "supportable" interventions from the US than, say, Russia or China.
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.
I thought it was interesting he threw in the bit about the supply chain risk and Defense Production Act being inherently contradictory. Most of the letter felt objective and cooperative, but that bit jumped off the page as more forceful rejection of Hegseth's attempt to bully them. Couldn't have been accidental.
I see it as the opposite, its a lousy excuse of a message trying to get people not to think that they are giving in. Instead they list the horrible uses that they are already helping the government with. Dont worry, we only help murder people in other countries not the US. They also keep calling it the "Department of War" which means that this message is not for "us", its them begging publicly to Hegseth.
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 project — even just cabling the servers or whatever — I spit in your eye in disgust. You deserve far, far worse.
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.
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.
Look. I think the Chinese AI companies are doing a lot of good. I'm glad they exist. I'm glad they're relatively advanced. I don't think the entire nation of China is a bunch of villains. I don't think the US, even before the current era, is a bunch of do-gooders.
But China has some of the most imperialist policies in the world. They are just as imperialist as Russia or America. Military contracts are still massive business.
I also believe the petrodollar will fall, but it isn't going to be because China built exponentially more solar panels.
I think the part about China is just about projecting alignment with the USG in hopes that this will result in Anthropic being treated more favourably by the current administration.
For example, China operates 1 foreign military base, in Djibouti. How many do you think the U.S. has in the South China Sea alone?
Beyond that, how many people has China killed in foreign military conflicts in the past 40 years? How many foreign governments have they overthrown?
Instead of all this, they’ve used their resources not only to become the world’s economic superpower but also to lift 800 million people out of poverty, accounting for 75% of the world’s reduction during the past 4 decades. The U.S. has added 10 million during that same time period.
Tibet, the Philippines, and Taiwan would like to have a word, not to mention Chinese military action in support of its North Korea puppet state, and wars with Vietnam and India.
Are you serious? Don't you know how many wars did China wage? It tried to assimilate Vietnam for 1000 years. The last large scale war against Vietnam was just 1979. In fact, China had started war with all its neighbors, with no exception.
The one we live in, where they have control over a wide swathe of land mass through imperialism and have actively resisted relinquishing it?
The one we live in, where they are constantly surpassing international law in international waters in the South China Sea?
The one we live in, where they are constantly rattling sabers at South Korea and Japan when it comes to military expansion?
The one we live in, where they brutally cracked down on Hong Kong when they did not abide by the 50 year one country two systems deal, not even making it half of the way through the agreed period?
The one we live in, where there is constant threat to Taiwan?
It may have been a lazy post you're responding to, but anyone that is paying attention to this topic enough to talk about it is going to either say 'Of course China is imperialist, the same as every other global power' or take some sort of tankie approach to justify it.
“One country two systems” is definitionally not imperialism, and given that “One China” is still an internationally recognized thing, neither is Taiwan. “Imperialism” is not a synonym for “morally repugnant government policy”.
I can see the argument for Hong Kong. I don't agree, really, but I can understand it. Under the strictest of definitions, perhaps it isn't.
But Taiwan is very obviously a totally separate country no matter what fictions anyone employs. If you are trying to talk about the thin veneer of everyone going "Uh huh, sure, China, yep Taiwan is totally part of you, wink wink, nudge nudge" as somehow making China not imperialist when Taiwan basically lives under the perpetual threat of a Chinese military invasion and having their own democratic form of government overthrown and replaced with the CCP, then... I don't really know what to say.
I suppose we could argue about imperialism being more of an economic thing - in which case this all still holds up - China's investments in Africa are effectively the same playbook the US has run out in developing nations for years. The US learned it from prior imperialist nations but belts and roads is nearly a carbon copy of what the US has done in other places.
But let's look at what the original poster was actually talking about - saying that China is safe because they don't have a military industrial complex because they're not imperialist. The proper word to use, if we want to get down to the semantics of it all, would be expansionist - but it's still not true. China has the 2nd largest military industrial complex in the world, and the gap is shrinking every day between them and the US. And if you were to look at wartime capacity, where China's dual-use shipyards could be swapped to naval production instead of commercial, a huge portion of that gap disappears immediately.
Taiwan is a matter of perspective. From the Chinese perspective, there was a civil war and the KMT lost. That's also the official position of the US, the EU and most countries in the world. It's called the One China policy. And China seems happy to maintain the status quo and leave the situation unresolved. Is it really imperialism to say that ultimately there will be reunification?
Even if you accept Tibet as imperialist, which is debatable, it was in 1950. You want to compare that to US imperialism, particularly since WW2 [1]? And I say "debatable" here because Tibet had a system that is charitably called "serfdom" where 90% of people couldn't own land but they did have some rights. However, they were the property of their lords and could be gifted or traded, you know, like property. There's another word for that: slavery.
It is 100% factually accruate to say that the People's Republica of China is not imperialist.
This is the China that is not only threatening to invade Taiwan but doing live fire exercises around the island and threatening and attempting to coerce Japan for suggesting saying it will go to its defense.
It wasn't that long ago that Taiwan claimed to be the legitimate government of China; given that China still maintains the reverse claim, it's not outrageous that it would consider an outside country's defense to be interference in an internal matter.
Whether or not that claim is legitimate, it is consistent with the concept of china having a non-imperialist foreign policy, and claims regarding that need to look elsewhere for supporting evidence.
You know who else considers Taiwan to be part of the People's Republic of China? The US, the EU and in fact most countries in the world. It's called the One China policy. There are I believe 12 countries that have diplomatic relations with Taiwan.
The position of the PRC is that Taiwan will ultimately be reunified. That doesn't necessarily mean by military force. It doesn't even necessarily mean soon. The PRC famously takes a very long term view.
And those islands you mention are in the South China Sea.
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.
Those aren't contradictory at all. If I need a particular type of bolt for my fighter jet but I can only get it from a dodgy Chinese company, then that bolt is a supply chain risk (because they could introduce deliberate defects or simply stop producing it) and also clearly important to national security. In fact, it's a supply chain risk because is important to national security.
More like the government is treating this like the near term weapon it actually is and, unlike the Manhattan project, the government seems to have little to no control.
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
Anthropic had the largest IP settlement ($1.5 billion) for stolen material and Amodei repeatedly predicted mass unemployment within 6 months due to AI. Without being bothered about it at all.
It is a horrible and ruthless company and hearing a presumably rich ex-employee painting a rosy picture does not change anything.
I've thought the same about a few of my founders/executives.
"You either die the good guy or live long enough to become the bad guy"
The "bad guy" actually learns that their former good guy mentality was too simplistic.
I have hit points in this in my career where making a moral stand would be harmful to me (for minor things, nothing as serious as this). It's a very tempting and incentivized decision to make to choose personal gain over ideal. Idealists usually hold strong until they can convince themselves a greater good is served by breaking their ideals. These types that succumb to that reasoning usually ironically ending up doing the most harm.
Ever since I first bothered to meditate on it, about 15 years ago, I've believed that if AI ever gets anywhere near as good as it's creators want it to be, then it will be coopted by thugs. It didn't feel like a bold prediction to make at the time. It still doesn't.
mark my words, they will burn at some point. The government can nationalize it at any moment if they desire.
How do you reconcile the fact that many people in Anthropic tried to hide the existence of secret non-disparagement agreements for quite some time?
It’s hard to take your comment at face value when there’s documented proof to the contrary. Maybe it could be forgiven as a blunder if revealed in the first few months and within the first handful of employees… but after 2 plus years and many dozens forced to sign that… it’s just not credible to believe it was all entirely positive motivations.
The company has taken actions that have been publicly ruled illegal, and had to pay one of the largest settlements in history – just a few years into existence.
I don't think they're a perfect company; I think they're driven by values.
Saying an entity has values doesn't mean the entity agrees with every single one of your values.
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 surveillance
And neither denounces partially autonomous mass surveillance nor closes the door on AI-driven foreign mass surveillance
A 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
[0] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PeoplesRepublicO...
I think it's phrased just fine. It's not up to Dario to try to make absolute statements about the future.
And yet he’s quite happy to make just that when it’s meant to drum you up his own product for investors
He’s one of the most influential people when it comes to what future we’ll have. Yes, it’s up to him.
I think he's more pragmatic than that.
I think it goes without saying that ones the systems are reliable, fully-autonomous weapons will be unleashed on the battlefield. But they have to have safeguards to ensure that they don't turn on friendly forces and only kill the enemy. What Anthropic is saying, is that right now - they can't provide those assurances. When they can - I suspect those restrictions will be relaxed.
Well, if they hadn't stated that were that far in line with the administration's ideals, they would likely already be fully blacklisted as enemies of the state. Whether they agree with what they're saying or not, they're walking on egg shells.
Anthropic doesn't forbid DoW from using the models for foreign surveillance. It's not about harming others, it's about doing what is best for humanity in the long run, all things considered. I personally do not believe that foreign surveillance is automatically harmful and I'm fine with our military doing it
So AI systems are not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons but they are reliable enough to end all white-collar work in the next 12 months?
Odd.
do you really need to be told there is a difference in 'magnitude of importance' between the decision to send out an office memo and the decision to strike a building with ordinance?
a lot of white collar jobs see no decision more important than a few hours of revenue. that's the difference: you can afford to fuck up in that environment.
They’re not saying “AI can replace some menial white collar tasks”, they’re saying AI can replace all white-collar work.
Yes, if you fuck up some white collar work, people will die. It’s irresponsible.
>Yes, if you fuck up some white collar work, people will die. It’s irresponsible.
A lot of the work in those sectors are not the ones that are being targeted for fully autonomous replacement. They likely would be in the future though.
Shh! there's a lot of money riding on this bet, ahem.
> the door is open for this after AI systems have gathered enough "training data"?
Sounds more like the door is open for this once reliability targets are met.
I don't think that's unreasonable. Hardware and regular software also have their own reliability limitations, not to mention the meatsacks behind the joystick.
What else would you expect? The military is obviously going to develop the most powerful systems they can. Do you want a tech company to say “the military can never use our stuff for autonomous systems forever, the end”? What if Anthropic ends up developing the safest, most cost effective systems for that purpose?
I'd prefer companies not help the military develop the most powerful weapons possible given we're in the age of WMDs, have already had two devastating world wars and a nuclear arms race that puts humanity under permanent risk.
There is an extremely straightforward argument that WMDs are precisely what prevented the outbreak of direct warfare between major powers in the latter 20th. (Note that WWI by itself wasn’t sufficient to prevent WWII!)
You can take issue with that argument if you want but it’s unconvincing not to address it.
That's a little bit like saying the bullet in the gun prevented someone getting shot while playing Russian Roulette. We pulled back that hammer several times, and it's purely happenstance that it didn't go off. MAD has that acronym for a reason.
So would you have preferred the Nazis to develop the most powerful weapons and they win the world war? (which they were trying to do?)
If Anthropic does give the DoD what they want, does that magically stop China, Iran, Russia, etc from advancing in AI arms development?
If Anthropic doesn't give the DoD what they want, does that mean that China, Iran, Russia, etc magically leapfrog not only Anthropic, but the entire US defense industry, and take over the planet?
> If Anthropic does give the DoD what they want, does that magically stop China, Iran, Russia, etc from advancing in AI arms development?
No
> If Anthropic doesn't give the DoD what they want, does that mean that China, Iran, Russia, etc magically leapfrog not only Anthropic, but the entire US defense industry, and take over the planet?
The risks are high, so if you're the US, you want a portfolio of possible winners. The risks are too high to not leverage all the cutting edge AI labs.
Did WMDs have a meaningful effect on stopping the Nazis? I thought the bomb wasn't dropped until after they surrendered.
The only two atomic weapons ever deployed weren't even targeting Nazi Germany, but Japan. Dark but true: they were both deliberately and knowingly targeted at civilian populations.
Yes, I absolutely don’t want tech companies to use the money I pay them to harm people. How is that remotely controversial?
> I absolutely don’t want tech companies to use the money I pay them to harm people.
Just one example of many, but the companies that make the CPUs you and all of use use every day, also supply to militaries.
I am unaware of any tech company that directly does physical warfare on the battlefield against humans.
Because it's painfully short-sighted, or maliciously ignorant.
No, it’s just that I don’t want the money I spend to have blood on it. Trivially simple.
What if I told you that it's way too late for that?
Unfortunately I think the writing is clearly on the wall. Fully autonomous weapons are coming soon
Right - for the same reasons a Waymo is safer than a human-driven car, an autonomous fighter drone will ultimately be deadlier than a human-flown fighter jet. I would like to forestall that day as long as possible but saying "no autonomous weapons ever" isn't very realistic right now.
And that's the end of democracy. One of the safe guards of democracy is a military that is trained to not turn against the citizens. Once a government has fully autonomous weapons its game over. They can point those weapons at the populous at the flip of the switch.
It's only Anthropic with their current models saying no. Fully autonomous weapons have been created, deployed, and have been operational for a long time already. The only holdout I've ever heard of is for the weapons that target humans.
Honestly, even landmines could easily be considered fully autonomous weapons and they don't care if you're human or not.
If they had access to them in Ukraine, both sides would already be using them I expect. Right now jamming of drones is a huge obstacle. One way it's dealt with is to run literal wired drones with massive spools of cable strung out behind them. A fully autonomous drone would be a significant advantage in this environment.
I'm not making a values judgment here, just saying that they will absolutely be used in war as soon as it's feasible to do so. The only exception I could see is if the world managed to come together and sign a treaty explicitly banning the use of autonomous weapons, but it's hard for me to see that happening in the near future.
Edit: come to think of it, you could argue a landmine is a fully autonomous weapon already.
Hah, I had the same realization about landmines. Along with the other commenter, really it would be better to add intelligence to these autonomous systems to limit the nastiness of the currently-deployed systems. If a landmine could distinguish between a real target and an innocent civilian 50yrs later, it's be a lot better.
A landmine blowing up the enemy civilian 50 years later is probably seen as an advantage by the force deploying them. A bit like "salting the earth."
The Ghandi of the corporate world is yet to be found
Considering he slept naked with his grandniece (he was in his 70s, she was 17), I'd say there are a lot of them in the corporate world. Though probably more in politics.
They’re being used today by the military. So, they are never going to be against mass surveillance. They can scope that to be domestic mass surveillance though.
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.
The problem is that this is a decision that costs money. Relying on a system that makes money by doing bad things to do good things out of a sense of morality when a possible outcome is existential risk to the species is a 100% chance of failure on a long enough timeline. We need massive disincentives to bad behavior, but I think that cat is already out of its bag.
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.
This isn't a one-election thing. It's going to be a generational effort to fix what these people are breaking more of every day. I hope I live to see it come to some kind of fruition - I recently turned 50.
Some people are calling it the "American century of humiliation"
No other country that went through a phase like this has ever recovered. Not even in a century.
I won't give in to doomerism.
Germany, Italy and Japan are all wealthy, stable democracies right now. Not without their problems and baggage, but pleasant places in a lot of ways.
All three have active US military bases on their soil and enjoy the economic surplus of living under the US defense umbrella.
The post WWII system was imperfect in many ways, but it was also mutually beneficial and worked out pretty well despite the problems.
And we're throwing that all out the window.
US military bases aren't what made those countries modern, prosperous, democratic places. It took the will of the people to rebuild something better after the war.
Britain essentially ceded its bases to the US at the end of WWII - these things aren’t as durable as they may seem.
They got bombed to shit first
It'd be nice to avoid that part.
Then it won't work. The current iteration of Germany is fully based on having been bombed to get a fresh start. If you already have something, you won't change it. If you have to re-build, you will implement improvements. No bombs, no reset, no joy.
I am less confident about my predictions for an uncertain future. There's all kinds of ways different things could go.
I didn't say we needed to follow their example to the letter; it was just one counterexample to the "woe and ruin for 100 years" comment.
Yes, but it is actually scientifically correct and proven on all sorts of layers. Biology, Maths, whatever. Not doomsdaying, just data analytics.
Societies are not operating like a sinus curve like say summer/winter cycles. They are upside-down "U"s. After the peak comes decline, but after the decline there is NOT recovery/growth again before you have a reset.
Germany was the huge winner of WW2 in the sense that after having had a high society they directly were allowed to get another such run. But as nobody wants to bomb us ) anymore, Germany is also in decline now waiting for a reset to come one day...
Sadly the USA will also need a reset before things can begin getting better again.
) I was born in Germany and lived there for 40 years.
Ok what about the Netherlands, Spain, Nordic countries?
James May did a documentary loosely based on this. "The Peoples Car"
Basically analysing the economies of WW2 participants via their automobile industries.
Its staggering how being bombed into the ground has forced technological and economic innovation. And how the inverse, being the bomber, has created stagnation.
I don't think it would matter even if the us did have to start again. The entire us alliance after ww2 benefited from the same structural causes of increased pluralism and egalitarianism. A fractured elite, complex international trade, expanding and increasingly difficult to control communication channels, and a growing bureaucracy. These all inhibit autocratic concentration of power. International trade became uncomplicated, there is one manufacturer that is not a consumer, and many consumers. This leads to an increasingly less fractured elite. The structural reasons for democracy and rules based order are all fading. The us is just a really big canary.
The people running the show are all building generational fallout shelters in new zealand. As seems to be the real 'whitehouse ballroom' plan too. They seem to be expecting that part.
That’s just historically inaccurate. You had massive upheavals across numerous countries throughout time, this is small in comparison to the civil war’s impact on the USA for instance. You think this is worse than half the government rebelling and revolting and killing an amount of young men that today would be equivalent to 6 million deaths? It’s bad now but your comment lacks historical evidence.
China seems to have recovered pretty well.
Not really. China only seems good because there is a war in Europe and the US is shooting themself in the foot. They're polluting and strip mining their country, suppressing wages and funneling the profit into companies all while increasing surveillance and decreasing freedom of opinion. Oh but they put down a few solar panels and then paid for people to write articles about it.
Their economy lifted a bunch of people out of poverty. That's positive.
However, in terms of 'democracy' they're still way worse off than the US right now, even if the US is headed in a bad direction.
This doesn't make much sense. Since the late 19th century, every country that got rich also heavily polluted the environment, though increasingly less over time. As it stands, fossil fuel demand in China has plateaued. The "wage suppression" thing also doesn't track; their citizens got much, much richer since Nixon's visit, despite being on average poorer than Westerners.
They're also speedrunning a world class power distribution system and deploying a massive amount of renewable power amoung a whole mess of other infrastructure. They've got the ability to focus an entire nation into achieving technical goals and they're rapidly improving quality of life in average while maintaining an industrial base that the US can only remember fondly. They might not meet western standards for individual freedoms and rule of law, but they're undoubtedly a rising world power.
I used to pretend China wasn't absolutely smashing the USA, but it looks like it is. They basically make everything modern civilization relies on, that's an insane amount of leverage over the rest of the world. That combined with renewables and nuclear and their diminishing need for foreign oil because of that is pretty incredible.
Is this a joke that’s going over my head? The country we all know the term “century of humiliation” from has recovered and is literally a superpower right now?
Rome was 'in decline' for 1000 years... these things are mostly feel good blather and not realistic statements on the position of nations
Hope is not a plan, unfortunately, so if that's all we've got, I don't have much hope.
You mean, what's been happening to the USA? this isn't a new trend. Militarization of police, open attacks on democracy, unilateral foreign policy moves.
the country jumped the shark post 9/11 and has been on a slow rot since then.
Indeed. Bin Laden succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. He kickstarted our self-destruction.
> Let's hope sanity prevails and the next election cycle can bring in some competent non-grievance based leadership.
Would be nice, but I have a bad feeling that the impact of widescale mostly unregulated AI adoption on our social fabric is going to make the social media era that gave rise to Trump, et al seem like the good ol' days in comparison.
I hope I am wrong.
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.
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.
> The technology can just be requisitioned
During a war with national mobilization, that would make sense. Or in a country like China. This kind of coercion is not an expected part of democratic rule.
The question of whether or not the government should be able to use AI for targeting without the involvement of humans is a wartime question, since that is the only time the military should be killing people.
Under such a scenario, requisition applies, and so all of this talk is moot.
The fact that the military is killing people without a declaration of war is the problem, and that's where energy and effort should be directed.
Edit:
There's a yet larger question on whether any legal constraints on the military's use of technology even makes sense at all, since any safeguards will be quickly yielded if a real enemy presents itself. As a course of natural law, no society will willingly handicap its means of defense against an external threat.
It follows then that the only time these ethical concerns apply is when we are the aggressor, which we almost always are. It's the aggression that we should be limiting, not the technology.
It's also downstream of voters who voted in a president who promised to be dictatorial after failing at an attempted insurrection. We need to deprogram like 70M very confused people.
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.
They already kissed the ring, just not the asshole. They have a little dignity left.
It's not named the Department of War because Congress didn't rename it.
Other than that, good on ya.
It's really not the right thing to be bikeshedding. The people calling the shots call themselves the Department of War. No need to die on hills that don't matter.
It's actually a good thing to point out, because it shows that those people are out of control and exceeding their authority, and need to be reined in.
No need to die on the hill, but point out that there's a consistent pattern of lawless power-grabbing.
TIL of Bikeshedding, or Parkinson’s Law of Triviality.
Defined as the tendency for teams to devote disproportionate time and energy to trivial, easy-to-understand issues while neglecting complex, high-stakes decisions. Originating from the example of arguing over a bike shed's color instead of a nuclear plant's design, it represents a wasteful focus on minor details.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
---
I deal with this day in and day out. Thank you for informing me of the word that describes the laughable nightmares I deal with on the regular.
It SHOULD be called the Department of War, as it was originally, since it makes its function clear. We are a society that has euphemized everything and so we no longer understand anything.
Doublespeak, so to speak.
While I agree the name change has not (yet) been made with the proper authority, I'm quite partial to the name and prefer to use it despite its prematurity. I think it does a better job of communicating the types of work actually done by the department and rightly gives people pause about their support of it. Though I'm sure that wasn't the administration's intention.
How about the Department of Mass Murder? That would communicate its purpose even better, I think. Why stop at "War"?
That's a separate department, DoE actually controls the nukes.
Brevity.
But it sets the tone.
Of appeasement and bootlicking, yes.
Dude we had an election and this is what we’re doing. Maybe that’s not how you do things in the Kingdom of Sweden. Here it’s e pluribus unum.
There is a good share of collusion in Europe too, let's keep all continents open to critics. Elections doesn't imply unlawful dictates and corruption.
It's addressed to Hegseth, who insists on calling it that.
If they had called it DoD, then that would have been another finger in his eye.
Remember, this is the same administration that barred the AP from the Oval Office because they wouldn't rename the Gulf of Mexico. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/11/associated-p...
While this action may indeed cause the DoD to blacklist Anthropic from doing business w/the government, they probably were being as careful as they could be not to double down on the nose-thumbing.
This. They even put a "wArFiGhTers" in there.
Maybe this is the DoW Pam Bondi was referring to.
Less hypocritical than Defense. US has never been on the defense, always offense since it was renamed in 1947.
Often offensive and also often defensive of others.. so if renaming is on the table, it’s probably most apt to call it the Dept of Security since the vast majority of what it does is maintaining the security umbrella that has helped suppress world war since the last one. Of course, facts or opinions on whether it succeeds on the security front depend on which side of the umbrella you’re on.
It is called the Department of War because we live under fascism and Congress no longer matters.
All that matters is that everyone calls it the Department of War, and regards it as such, which everyone does.
> All that matters is that everyone calls it the Department of War, and regards it as such, which everyone does.
What you just described is consensus, and framing it as fascism damages the credibility of your stance. There are better arguments to make, which don’t require framing a label update as oppression.
The president has no authority to rename the Department of Defense, but he and his administration demand consensus under the threat of legal consequences.
Just as one example, they threatened Google when they didn't immediately rename the Gulf of Mexico to the "Gulf of America" on their maps. Other companies now follow their illegal guidance because they know that they will be threatened too if they don't comply.
There is a word for when the government uses threats to enforce illegal referendums. That word is "Fascism". Denying this is irresponsible, especially in the context of this situation, where the Government is threatening to force a private company to provide services that it doesn't currently provide.
Your keep using the word illegal but I don't think you know what it means
It means something violates the law. Am I right?
Yes, green account, it does. which law does renaming Gulf of Mexico or giving DoD an alternative name violate?
Renaming the DoD does directly contradict the National Security Act of 1947, which renamed the Department of War to the Department of the Army, and put it under the newly named Department of Defense.
The National Security Act of 1947, as amended on August 10, 1949, establishes the name of the executive department overseeing the military as the Department of Defense.
I'm not framing consensus as fascism, I'm pointing out what the consensus is within the current fascist framework, and that consensus is that Congress doesn't make the rules anymore. And that consensus is shared by Congress itself.
So anyone who doesn't mind the name going back to DoW is fascist?
Being honest increases credibility, not damages it.
> framing a label update as oppression
That strawman damages credibility.
true, if everything is 'fascism' then nothing is
https://archive.ph/YSAWU
Except this administration is certainly fascist, and the renaming is yet another facet of it. That article goes through it point by point.
'certainly' is in the eyes of the beholder, IMO they are doing great:
- Dismantling government bureaucracy/corruption
- Cutting waste in USAID and many other agencies we're paying for in taxes
- Stopping the illegal migrant flood
- Strong economy
- Reducing crime in cities
- Dismantling racist DEI policies
- Forcing reforms in academia (cracking down on woke indoctrination, restoring merit-based standards)
- Ending insanity around ‘gender-affirming care’ for minors
- Protecting women’s sports (no men competing against women)
- Standing firmly with Israel’s right to exist and keeping Iran in check
- Taking down Maduro's dictatorship in Venezuela, secured oil access & influence
- Strengthening US position while weakening China & Russia
That's what I voted for.
Props to Dario and Anthropic for taking a moral stand. A rarity in tech these days.
Agreed. You don’t have to be an LLM maximalist or a doomer to see the opportunity for real, practical danger from ubiquitous surveillance and autonomous weapons. It would have been extremely easy for Dario to demonstrate the same level of backbone as Sam Altman or Sundar Pichai.
There is no moral leg to stand on here, he says here in plain english that if they wanted to use CLAUDE to perform mass surveillance on Canada, Mexico, UK, Germany, that is perfectly fine.
This is a public note, but directed at the current administration, so reading it as a description of what is or is not moral is completely missing the point. This note is saying (1) we refuse to be used in this way, and (2) we are going to use "mass surveillance of US citizens" as our defensive line because it is at least backed by Constitutional arguments. Those same arguments ought to apply more broadly, but attempts to use them that way have already been trampled on and so would only weaken the arguments as a defense.
If it helps: refusing to tune Claude for domestic surveillance will also enable refusing to do the same for other surveillance, because they can make the honest argument that most things you'd do to improve Claude for any mass surveillance will also assist in domestic mass surveillance.
Perhaps you just have different moral values? I suspect each of the countries you mentioned spy on us. I also suspect we spy on them. I’m glad an American company wouldn’t be so foolish as to pretend otherwise.
We knew long before AI was a twinkle in Amodel's eye that if it were to be built, then it would be co-opted by thugs.
Anthropic's statement is little more than pageantry from the knowing and willing creators of a monster.
> Props to Dario and Anthropic for taking a moral stand.
For now. They will turn evil anyway. Just like the rest of Big Tech did.
When it IPOs it will be in the hands of pension funds, asset management companies and hedge funds who will be above the CEO and do. not. care. about "morals".
Then, eventually no matter what administration, Anthropic will betray you for a multi-year government contract worth tens of billions of dollars.
Do not believe any of them.
For now is all we ever have, unfortunately.
I miss the days when the mega-brands whose work I admired, still did such works.
> Anthropic will betray you for a multi-year government contract worth tens of billions of dollars.
What are the odds they will rebrand Misanthropic by then?
So you think we should never support them doing something "positive"? What incentive does that give?
Anthropic is a PBC and if they violate the terms of that the shareholders (you) can sue them for securities fraud.
You know this is pure PR right?
What do you mean? You think Hegseth and Anthropic are doing this for PR reasons?
A moral stand? ... What? Did we read the same statement? It opens right out the gate with:
>I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries.
>Anthropic has therefore worked proactively to deploy our models to the Department of War and the intelligence community. We were the first frontier AI company to deploy our models in the US government’s classified networks, the first to deploy them at the National Laboratories, and the first to provide custom models for national security customers. Claude is extensively deployed across the Department of War and other national security agencies for mission-critical applications, such as intelligence analysis, modeling and simulation, operational planning, cyber operations, and more.
which I find frankly disgusting.
Freedom isn’t free. Someone has to defend the democratic values that you and I take for granted.
Dario’s statement is in support of the institution, not the current administration.
The democratic values I take for granted is under direct threat from the us. Your government is literally funding separatist movements in my country.
I mean, obviously.
But when was the last time our "democratic values" were under attack by a foreign country and actually needed defending?
9/11? Pearl Harbor?
Maybe I'm missing something. We have a giant military and a tendency to use it. On occasion, against democratically elected leaders in other countries.
You're right; freedom isn't free. But foreign countries aren't exactly the biggest threats to American democracy at the moment.
You have the causality at least partially backwards. Why has it been so long and infrequent that the US has been in direct conflict with authoritarian adversaries? Because we have a giant military and a willingness to use it. Pacifism and isolationism do not work as defensive strategies.
The last time the US defended freedom through military means was WWII.
As Abraham Lincoln said, the greatest threat to freedom in America is a domestic tyrant, not a foreign army.
Korea, Vietnam, Panama, Grenada, Libya, Lebanon, Iraq War I, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq War II were all fought for or over democratic ideals & the defense of democratic institutions.
All were driven by multiple competing and sometimes conflicting goals, and many look questionable in hindsight. It is fair to critique.
But it is absolutely not the case that the last time the US defended freedom through military means was WWII.
They are undeniably taking a moral stand. Among other things, the statement explains that there are two use cases that they refuse to do. This is a moral stand. It might not align with your morals, but it's still a moral stand.
I feel like the deepest technical definition of autocratic is “fully autonomous weapons”?
This is not how the word "moral" should be used in a sentence that also has the name Dario Amodei in it.
Words are cheap. Actions aren't. Dario Amodei is putting his company on the line for what he believes in. That's courage, character and... yes, morality.
I have a feeling this is just a negotiation tactic leveraging public sentiment rather than a stance based on morality.
It's both - it's clearly at least partly for moral reasons that they're even in the negotiation that they need leverage for.
I am convinced that Amodei's "morality" is purely performative, and cynically employed as a marketing tactic. Time will tell, but most people will forget his lies.
How should he have acted instead?
Yeah.
“Dario is saying the right thing and doing the right thing and not ever acting otherwise, but I think it’s just performative so I’m still disappointed in him.”
We don't know how the military intended to use Claude, and neither do we know nor does the military know whether Claude without RLHF-imposed safety would have been more useful to them.
Ergo, this is a very convenient PR opportunity. The public assumes the worst, and this is egged on by Anthropic with the implication that CLAUDE is being used in autonomous weapons, which I find almost amusing.
He can now say goodbye to $200 million, and make up for it in positive publicity. Also, people will leave thinking that Claude is the best model, AND Anthropic are the heroes that staved off superintelligent killer robots for a while.
Even setting this aside, Dario is the silly guy who's "not sure whether Claude is sentient or not", who keeps using the UBI narrative to promote his product with the silent implication that LLMs actually ARE a path to AGI... Look, if you believe that, then that is where we differ, and I suppose that then the notion that Amodei is a moral man is comprehensible.
Oh, also the stealing. All the stealing. But he is not alone there by any means.
edit: to actually answer your question, this act in itself is not what prompted me to say that he is an immoral man. Your comment did.
> to promote his product with the silent implication that LLMs actually ARE a path to AGI
That isn't implied. The thought process is a) if we invent AGI through some other method, we should still treat LLMs nicely because it's a credible commitment we'll treat the AGI well and b) having evidence in the pretraining data and on the internet that we treat LLMs well makes it easier to align new ones when training them.
Anyway, your argument seems to be that it's unfair that he has the opportunity to do something moral in public because it makes him look moral?
His actions seem pretty consistent with a belief that AI will be significant and societally-changing in the future. You can disagree with that belief but it's different to him being a liar.
The $200m is not the risk here. They threatened labelling Anthropic as a supply chain risk, which would be genuinely damaging.
> The DoW is the largest employer in America, and a staggering number of companies have random subsidiaries that do work for it.
> All of those companies would now have faced this compliance nightmare. [to not use Anthropic in any of their business or suppliers]
... which would impact Anthropic's primary customer base (businesses). Even for those not directly affected, it adds uncertainty in the brand.
Standing up to the US government has real and serious sequence. Peter Hegseth threatened to make Anthropic supply chain risk, meaning not only is Anthropic likely dropped as Pentagon’s supplier, but also risk losing companies doing business with the military as customers, such as Boeing or Lockheed Martin. Whatever tactic you think he is doing, that’s potentially massive revenue lost, at the time they need any business they can get.
Amazon does business with the DOD/W. That’s a pretty dangerous game of brinkmanship Anthropic is playing.
It’s possible Dario is a bad person pretending to be good and Sundar is a good person only pretending to be bad. People argue whether true selflessness exists at all or whether it’s all a charade.
But if the “performance” involves doing good things, at the end of the day that’s good enough for me.
Don't be evil.
These are literally words. The DoW could still easily exploit these platforms, and nothing Anthropic has done can prevent it, other than saying (publicly), "we disagree."
The dispute seems to be specifically about safeguards that Anthropic has in its models and/or harnesses, that the DoD wants removed, which Anthropic refuses to do, and won’t sign a contract requiring their removal. Having implemented the safeguards and refusing their removal are actions, not “literally words”.
It’s a contract dispute. Contracts are more than just talk.
While it is true that DoW could try to bypass the contract and do whatever they want, if it were that easy they wouldn’t be asking for a contract in the first place.
Should probably look up how many private companies are suing the government at any one time because of a breach of contract. And that's publicly breaching.
NSA and other three-letter agencies happily do it under cloak and dagger.
What's the US history around nationalization? Would "confiscation", ever be a likelyhood on escalation?
On a quick search I came up with an article, that at least thematically, proposes such ideas about the current administration "Nationalization by Stealth: Trump’s New Industrial Playbook"
https://thefulcrum.us/trump-state-control-capitalism
Is it morality or is it recognizing that providing the brain of autonomous weapons has a non-zero chance of ending up with him on trial in The Hague?
This action is far more likely to land him in prison than complying with the pentagon
I disagree. There is a class of leaders in this country that is complicit with the administrations use of violence on the tacit understanding that the violence not be directed at them. Arresting one of those people would be an act of desperation that would likely cause the rats to flea the sinking ship. And it isn't even clear if Trump could actually manufacture any charges here. Look at the dropped charges against Mark Kelly and those other politicians as an example. The administration might be able to make up stories to arrest random immigrants and college kids, but they clearly haven't been able to indiscriminately jail powerful political opponents.
Meanwhile, Dario knows his product can't be trusted to actually decide who should live and who should die, so what happens the first time his hypothetical AI killing machines make the wrong decision? Who gets the blame for that? Would the American government be willing to throw him under the bus in the face of international outrage? It's certainly a possibility.
The chance is zero. This won't be deployed in countries that he'd want to visit anyway and would extradite him to The Hague.
In all seriousness The Hague has no jurisdiction over Americans and Congress has already authorized military use of force against Brussels should they ever attempt to prosecute Americans.
It's not so clear the company is actually on the line. They can compel Anthropic to do what they are not willing to do, maybe, this is not the final act. The government needs to respond, to which Anthropic will need to respond, courts may become involved at that point, depending on if Anthropic acquiesces at that point or not. Make a prominent statement against while in the news cycle, let the rest unfold under less media attention.
It's a little bit better than so many sniveling, cowardly elites are doing right now.
It may sound crazy, but they should just move the company to Europe or Canada, instead of putting up with this.
Classic seppo diatribe.
"We will build tools to hurt other people but become all flustered when they are used locally"
If you're using "seppo" as the Australian pejorative referring to Americans, I'm not sure what makes this uniquely American.
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?
You’re getting many replies, and having scrolled through much of them I do not see one that actually answers your question truthfully.
The reason why there is an explicit call out for surveillance on American citizens is because there are unquestionable constitutional protections in place for American citizens on American soil.
There is a strong argument that can be made that using AI to mass surveil Americans within US territory is not only morally objectionable, but also illegal and unconstitutional.
There are laws on the books that allow for it right now, through workarounds grandfathered in from an earlier era when mass surveillance was just not possible, and these are what Dario is referencing in this blog post. These laws may be unconstitutional, and pushing this to be a legal fight, may result in the Department of War losing its ability to surveil entirely. They may not want to risk that.
I wish that our constitution provided such protections for all peoples. It does not. The pragmatic thing to do then is to focus on protecting the rights that are explicitly enumerated in the constitution, since that has the strongest legal basis.
I agree with your premise because this seems to be the modern interpretation of the courts, but it is not the historical interpretation.
The historical basis of the bill of rights is that they are god given rights of all people merely recognized by the government. This is also partially why all rights in the BoR are granted to 'people' instead of 'citizens.'
Of course this all does get very confusing. Because the 4th amendment does generally apply to people, while the 2nd amendment magically people gets interpreted as some mumbo-jumbo people of the 'political community' (Heller) even though from the founding until the mid 1800s ~most people it protected who kept and bore arms didn't even bother to get citizenship or become part of the 'political community'.
The reason why there is an explicit call out for surveillance on American citizens is because there are unquestionable constitutional protections in place for American citizens on American soil.
Those unquestionable protections are phrased with enough hand-waving ambiguity of language to leave room for any conceivable interpretation by later courts. See the third-party 'exception' to the Fourth Amendment, for instance.
It's as if those morons were running out of ink or time or something, trying to finish an assignment the night before it was due.
Since at least the progressive era (see the switch in time that saved 9), and probably before, the courts have largely just post facto rationalized why the thing they do or don't agree with fit their desired pattern of constitutionality.
SCOTUS is largely not there to interpret the constitution in any meaningful sense. They are there to provide legitimization for the machinations of power. If god-man in black costume and wig say parchment of paper agree, then act must be legitimate, and this helps keep the populace from rising up in rebellion. It is quite similar to shariah law using a number of Mutfi/Qazi to explain why god agrees with them about whatever it is they think should be the law.
If you look at a number of actions that have flagrantly defied both the historical and literal interpretation of the constitution, the only entity that was able to provide legitimization for many acts of congress has been the guys wearing the funny looking costumes in SCOTUS.
I think it's slightly less ridiculous than it sounds, because governments have much more power over their own citizens. As an American I would dramatically prefer the Chinese government to spy on me than the American government, because the Chinese government probably isn't going to do anything about whatever they find out.
(That logic breaks down somewhat in the case of explicitly negotiated surveillance sharing agreements.)
> because the Chinese government probably isn't going to do anything about whatever they find out.
This really depends. If a foreign adversary's surveillance finds you have a particular weakness exploitable for corporate or government espionage, you're cooked.
Domestic governments are at least still theoretically somewhat accountable to domestic laws, at least in theory (current failure modes in the US aside).
Exactly and that danger grows as the ability to do so in increasingly automated and targeted ways increases. Should be very obvious now looking at the world around us.
Also, failing to consider the legal and rights regime of the attacker is wild to me. Look at what happens to people caught spying for other regimes. Aldrich Ames just died after decades in prison, and that’s one of the most extreme cases — plenty have got away with just a few years. The Soviet assets Ames gave up were all swiftly executed, much like they are in China.
Regimes and rights matter, which is why the democracy / autocracy governance conflict matters so much to the future trajectory of humanity.
Yes, exactly this.
> As an American I would dramatically prefer the Chinese government to spy on me than the American government, because the Chinese government probably isn't going to do anything about whatever they find out.
> spy on me
People forget to substitute "me" for "my elected representative" or "my civil service employee" or "my service member" or their loved ones
I, personally, have nothing significant that a foreign government can leverage against our country but some people are in a more privileged/responsible/susceptible position. It is critical to protect all our data privacy because we don't know from where they will be targeted.
Similarly, for domestic surveillance, we don't know who the next MLK Jr could be or what their position would be. Maybe I am too backward to even support this next MLK Jr but I definitely don't want them to be nipped in the bud.
This is a political statement directed at the US public, Congress, and executive branch in the context of a dispute with the US executive branch that is likely to escalate (if the executive is not otherwise dissuaded) into a legal battle, and it therefore focuses particularly on issues relevant in that context, including Constitutional, limits on the government as a whole, the executive branch, and the Department of Defense (for which Anthropic used the non-legal nickname coined by the executive branch instead of the legal name.) Domestic mass surveillance involves Constitutional limits on government power and statutory limits on executive power and DoD roles that foreign surveillance does not. That's why it is the focus.
>Are there no democracies aside from the US?
If we're asking "What's the deal" questions, what's the deal with this question? Do only people in democracies deserve protections? If we believe foreign nationals deserve privacy, why should that only apply to people living in democracies?
In every country, citizens have more rights than non-citizens. The right to freely enter the country, the right to vote, the right to various social services, etc.
In the US, one of the rights citizens have is the right against "unreasonable searches and seizures", established in the Fourth Amendment. That has been interpreted by the Supreme Court to include mass surveillance and to apply to citizens and people geographically located within US borders.
That doesn't apply that to non-citizens outside the US, simply because the US Constitution doesn't require it to.
I'm not defending this, just explaining why it's different.
But, you can imagine, for example, why in wartime, you'd certainly want to engage in as much mass surveillance against an enemy country as possible. And even when you're not in wartime, countries spy on other countries to try to avoid unexpected attacks.
The US has a strong history of trying to avoid building domestic surveillance and a national police. Largely it’s due to the 4th amendment and questions about constitutionality. Obviously that’s going questionably well but historically that’s why it’s a red line.
The reality is that the US Constitution only offers strong guarantees to citizens and (some of) the people in the US. Foreigners are excluded and foreign mass surveillance is or will happen.
I believe every country (or block) should carve an independent path when it comes to AI training, data retention and inference. That is makes most sense, will minimize conflicts and put people in control of their destiny.
Exactly. FVEYs been doing reciprocal surveillance on each other for decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes#Domestic_espionage_s...
An unwritten rule on the internet (and especially on HN/Reddit) has always been to take the educated and intellectual perspective that the Earth’s borders conveniently end where the USPS stops delivering. Considering life outside the U.S. is an archaic (and slightly exhausting) hobby for people with too much time on their hands from the so-called rest of the world.
Particularly so when those foreign nationals can be consumers. “fuck your basic human rights, but we can take your money just fine”.
If nothing else, the USA has learned that a lot of people outside their borders do not share the same ideas on basic human rights, and most of the world hates when we try to ensure them. Some countries are closely aligned with our ideals and are treated differently. There are many different layers of this, from Australia to North Korea.
Also the more the US openly treats the world like garbage, the more the rest of the world will likely reciprocate to US citizens.
It reminds me of some recent horror stories at border crossings - harassing people and requiring giving up all your data on your phone - sets a terrible precedent.
> what's the deal with making the distinction between domestic mass surveillance and foreign mass surveillance? Are there no democracies aside from the US?
I think it's just saying that spying on another country's citizens isn't fundamentally undemocratic (even if that other country happens to be a democracy) because they're not your citizens and therefore you don't govern them. Spying on your own citizens opens all sorts of nefarious avenues that spying on another country's citizens does not.
One of them is illegal for DoD to do and the other is not.
The distinction between foreign and domestic is a legal one.
The Supreme Court has ruled that the US Constitution protects any persons physically present in the United States and its territories as well as any US citizens abroad.
So if you are a German national on US soil, you have, say, Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure. If you are a US citizen in Germany, you also have those rights. But a German citizen in Germany does not.
What this means in practice is that US 3-letter agencices have essentially been free to mass surveil people outside the United States. Historically these agencies have gotten around that by outsourcing their spying needs to 3 leter agencies in other countries (eg the NSA at one point might outsource spying on US citizens to GCHQ).
In the US, we have the ability to either confirm or change a significant chunk of our Federal government roughly every two years via the House of Representatives. The argument here is that we, theoretically, could collectively elect people that are hostile to domestic mass surveillance into the House of Representatives (and other places if able) and remove pro-surveillance incumbents from power on this two year cycle.
The reasons this hasn't happened yet are many and often vary by personal opinion. My top two are:
1) Lack of term limits across all Federal branches
and
2) A general lack of digital literacy across all Federal branches
I mean, if the people who are supposed to be regulating this stuff ask Mark Zuckerberg how to send an email, for example, then how the heck are they supposed to say no to the well dressed government contractor offering a magical black box computer solution to the fear of domestic terrorism (regardless of if its actually occurring or not)?
I'd only add that the general public has a dangerously high tolerance for privacy invasion and government surveillance. Many will still tell you straight up that they have nothing to hide and that it's probably worth it. Congressional candidates run on platforms designed to cater to voter priorities.
The rejection of Flock cameras seems to be a step in the right direction.
100% - this is the shortsightedness and demonstrates hypocrisy.
Countries routinely use other countries intelligence gathering apparatus to get around domestic surveillance laws.
Are all democracies allies to you?
That still doesn't justify mass surveillance.
Never said that. Didn't even imply it.
> what's the deal with making the distinction between domestic mass surveillance and foreign mass surveillance?
A large portion of Americans believe in "citizen rights", not "human rights". By that logic, non-Americans do not have a right to privacy.
This contradicts the opening of the Declaration of Independence, which recognizes all humans as possessing rights:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Lots of lofty goals have been written on paper - when people take them seriously, they are even worth something.
The pendulum swings.
I'm glad to see this as the top comment. I was, until recently, a loyal Anthropic customer. No more. Because the way non-Americans are spoken of by a company that serves an international market (and this isn't the first instance):
"Mass domestic surveillance. We support the use of AI for lawful foreign intelligence and counterintelligence missions. But using these systems for mass _domestic_ surveillance is incompatible with democratic values."
Second class citizens. Americans have rights, you don't. "Democratic values" applies only to the United States. We'll take your money and then spy on you and it's ok because we headquartered ourselves and our bank accounts in the United States.
Very questionable. American exceptionalism that tries to define "democracy" as the thing that happens within its own borders, seemingly only. Twice as tone-deaf after what we've seen from certain prominent US citizens over the last year. Subscription cancelled after I got a whiff of this a month ago.
(Not to mention the definition of "lawful foreign intelligence" has often, and especially now, been quite ethically questionable from the United States.)
EDIT: don't just downvote me. Explain why you think using their product for surveillance of non-Americans is ethical. Justify your position.
That reasoning sounds confusing: are you actually in favor of US gov's surveillance on Americans?
If not, then why are you punishing that company for refusing to deal with the US gov?
Or is it just because they worded their opposition in a certain way that you dislike?
It's not confused. Are you?
I object, as a non-American, to being surveilled and then having it justified in a press release?
My guess is that they can't object to foreign intelligence, and would lose negotiating ground if they even tried.
Optimistically, they can still refuse to do work that would aid in foreign intelligence gathering, by arguing that it would also be beneficial for domestic mass surveillance.
I'll admit that the phrase "We support...foreign intelligence and counterintelligence" is awful as hell, and it's possible that my apologist claims are BS. But Anthropic has very little leverage here (despite having a signed contract and so legally fully in the right), so I could see why they're desperate to stick to only the most solid objections available.
>democracies aside from the US.
I mean, I guess from '65 to around 96? We had a good run.
I'm glad to see Dario and Anthropic showing some spine! A lot of other people would have caved.
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.
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.
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.
You, using normal Claude under the consumer ToS, cannot use it to make weapons, kill people, spy on adversaries, etc. The Pentagon, using War Claude, under their currently-existing contract, can use it to make weapons and spy on (foreign) adversaries, but not to (autonomously) kill people. I don't love this but I am even less excited about the CCP having WarKimi while we have no military AI.
those two stipulations were always their only ones, and they were included explicitly in their original contract with the DoW.
All completely rationale. Makes the us military here look fairly incompetent… embarrassing as a veteran.
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.
Take your pick from the many other choices offered by companies that don't care about mass spying on _anyone_.
It is not the Department of War. He's towing the line from the get-go. Forget this guy.
> "mass domestic surveillance" - mass surveillance of non-domestic civilians is OK?
A favourable take would be he meant "mass surveillance of non-democratic adversarial countries". I agree it's not phrased this way though.
Powerful post - good on him for taking a stand, but questionable in light of their recent move away from safeguards for competitive reasons.
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.
A little pessimistic of a take, IMO. You may very well be right, though.
I think it is a reasonable moral stance to acknowledge such things are possible, yet not wanting to be a part of it. Regarding making it technically impossible to do...I think that is what Anthropic means when they say they want to develop guardrails.
Are the guardrails not part of their core? Isn't that the whole premise of their existence?
Ukraine , Russia , China , actively develop ai systems that kill. Not developing such system by US based company will not change the course of actions.
Yep.
That said, it does impact whether Anthropic can sell to the British [0], German [1], Japanese [2], and Indian [3] government.
Other governments will demand similar terms to the US. Either Anthropic accedes to their terms and gets export controlled by the US or Anthropic somehow uses public pressure to push back against being turned into an American sovereign model.
Realistically, I see no offramp other than the DPA - a similar silent showdown happened in the critical minerals space 6-7 years ago.
[0] - https://www.anthropic.com/news/mou-uk-government
[1] - https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/anthropic/jobs/5115692008
[2] - https://www.anthropic.com/news/opening-our-tokyo-office
[3] - https://www.anthropic.com/news/bengaluru-office-partnerships...
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.
Yes, but also remember where they came from.
They don't have any brand poison, unlike nearly everyone else competing with them. Some serious negative equity in tha group, be it GOOG, Grok , META, OpenAI, M$FT, deepseek, etc.
Claude was just being the little bot that could, and until now, flying under the radar
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?
It’s not unusual for legal departments to take offense to these sorts of things, because now everyone using Claude within the DoD has to do some kind of audit to figure out if they’re building something that could be construed as surveillance or autonomous weapons (or, what controls are in place to prevent your gun from firing when Claude says, etc). A lot of paperwork.
My guess is they just don’t want to bother. I wonder why they specifically need Claude when their other vendors are willing to sign their terms, unless it specifically needs to run in AWS or something for their “classified networks” requirement.
It's that, as I understand it. Anthropic is the only vendor certified to run its models on DoD/DoW classified networks.
Same reason they cut funding for universities that had DEI mandates, etc. and made a big spectacle of doing it despite it often being very little money etc. etc.
It's an ideological war, they're desperate to win it, and they're aiming to put a segment of US civil society into submission, and setting an example for everyone else.
He smelled weakness, and like any schoolyard bully personality, he couldn't help but turn it into a display of power.
What makes you want to believe the Trump Administration when it claims it doesn't want to do domestic mass surveillance?
He pushed the issue to an ultimatum because he is an unqualified drunk, and thinks that it's against the law for anyone to try and stop the US military from doing something they want to do. This isn't an isolated issue; he tried to get multiple US Senators prosecuted for making a PSA that servicemembers shouldn't follow illegal orders.
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.
OpenAI and Google could have decided to make the same principled stand, and the government would have likely capitulated.
They both literally removed morality from their bylaws; that time has passed. They're openly corrupt because it pays to be so.
Props to Dario and Anthropic for holding firm on these two points that I feel like should be a no-brainer
I imagine they'll drop this bare-minimum commitment when it becomes financially expedient.
Probably not a good idea to let Claude vibe-selecting targets, it still sometime hallucinates
Just visibly wave the US flag and you'll be fine, don't worry.
Soon it will select targets in commie countries though, perhaps it already does. Who selected to bomb Chavez mausoleum btw?
I restored my Max sub. I wish they pushed back more, so I went with $100/month only.
That is frikkin impressive. Well done sir.
Impressive and heartening. Bravo.
"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.
Anthropic has already cooperated too much with the US Intelligence Community, but better some restraint than none, and better late than never.
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 War
This 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
What is their other possible move here, considering the government is threatening to destroy their business entirely?
One alternative would be to call the government's bluff: if they truly are as indispensable as they claim then they can leverage that advantage into a deal.
But at a more general level, I'd say that unethical actions do not suddenly become ethical when one's business is at risk. If Anthropic considers that using their technology for X is unethical and then decide that their money and power is worth more than the lives of the foreigners that will be affected by doing X then good for them, but they shouldn't then make a grandstand about how hard they fought to ensure that only foreigners get their necks under the boots.
Warfighters is a pretty common term though. There's a fair bit of nuance in when and how you'd use it.
It's a common term that comes with a lot of criticism in the vein of noticing the skulls.
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.
I think the warfighters are a distraction, a system could trivially say that there is a human in the loop for LLM-derived kill lists. My money is that the mass domestic surveillance is the true sticking point, because it’s exactly what you would use a LLM for today.
Grok in unhinged mode piloting an Apache, what could go wrong.
Apparently part of this whole battle is because Grok isn't up to part to be an acceptable alternative.
As far as we can tell, OpenAI and Google seem to be ok with it and not resisting. It would be easier for Anthropic's cause if they did.
Yea but every warfighter will get a waifu
It's better than actively aiding them. Make them struggle at every turn.
Are you Chinese? If not, I think you should prefer the people defending you to have the best tools to do so.
This of course raises the question on whether as an American I have more to fear from the Chinese government or the US one.. given everything happening in the Executive Branch here, that’s a disappointingly hard question to answer.
I think that's an easy question to answer, but obviously you don't fear the Chinese government you're not a Chinese citizen. You can actively talk about your disagreements with the US government, that not a right the Chinese have.
>that’s a disappointingly hard question to answer
It shouldn't be. The US government is already sending armed and masked thugs to shoot political dissidents dead or sending them to concentration camps, threatening state governments and private companies to comply with suppressing free speech and oppressing undesirables, and openly discussing using emergency powers to suspend the next election.
What exactly is the commensurate threat from China? The real tacit threat, not abstract fears like "TikTok is Chinese mind control." What can China actually do to you, an American, that the US isn't already more capable of doing, and more likely to do?
To me it isn't even a question. Even comparing worst case scenarios - open war with China versus civil war within the US - the latter is more of a threat to citizens of the US than the former unless the nukes drop. And even then, the only nation to ever use nuclear weapons in warfare is the US.
If the American military was focused on defending the United States, it would be a very different beast. The 21st Century American military is a tool for transferring wealth from the public to influential parties, and for inflicting destruction on non-peer nations who pose obstacles to influential parties interests. Defending the United States against various often-invoked hobgoblins is at best a very distant concern, closer to pure lip service than reality.
I'm a natural-born American (many generations back) and firmly believe that if we ever get into a hot war with China, it will be because of American provocation, not Chinese.
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.
It's not inconceivable that AI could become better than humans at targeting things. For example if it can reliably identify enemy warcraft or drones faster than people can react. I'm not saying Claude's models are suited for that but humans aren't perfect and in theory AI can be better than humans. It's not currently true and would need to be proved, but it doesn't seem unreasonable. It could well be better than something like deploying mines.
We're living in a time where most tech companies are donating millions of dollars to the current leadership in exchange for favors. In that climate this is a more of a stand than what everyone else is doing.
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.
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.
They want to be nationalized, which is the most profitable exit they'll ever get.
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.
Same with Gulf of America.
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
Well then I don't know where you've been for the last ~10~ ~20~ 70 years
When? Its entire history from the foundation of the Republic to 1947. The name was changed after WWII; now a faction wants to change it back. The difference in name never changed the behavior, in either direction.
I'm 33 years old, would you mind telling me which year you thought this was, force of good stuff? might be before my time
genuinely curious, I got nothing
The USA were pretty clearly on the "better side" of conflicts in 1941-1945, during the Cold War (at least as far as Europe and the Marshall plan was concerned). In Koweït and central Europe during the 90s. You may even argue for Afghanistan post 9-11 (although the state building was botched.) in the 2000s. ISIS is a footnote in history because of US intervention (from Trump first term, of all things.) And Ukraine would not be against getting the support it had in 2022 back under Trump.
Does not mean that very bad things were not happening at the same time.
But it's definitely easier to find some "supportable" interventions from the US than, say, Russia or China.
Now, I'm curious. How Bedrock/Azure Claude models work?
Do these rules apply to them too?
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.
"as an ai safety company, we only believe in -partially- autonomous weaponry"
Ads are coming.
I'll be glad if they could open their platform enough so that it could run on ads and not 200 dollar subscriptions
Big respect
Total humiliation for Hegseth, sure there will be a backlash
I thought it was interesting he threw in the bit about the supply chain risk and Defense Production Act being inherently contradictory. Most of the letter felt objective and cooperative, but that bit jumped off the page as more forceful rejection of Hegseth's attempt to bully them. Couldn't have been accidental.
I see it as the opposite, its a lousy excuse of a message trying to get people not to think that they are giving in. Instead they list the horrible uses that they are already helping the government with. Dont worry, we only help murder people in other countries not the US. They also keep calling it the "Department of War" which means that this message is not for "us", its them begging publicly to Hegseth.
What would the ideal response have been, in your view?
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 project — even just cabling the servers or whatever — I spit in your eye in disgust. You deserve far, far worse.
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
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!
The Pentagon should be using open models, not closed ones by OpenAI/Anthropic/xAI. The entire discussion of what Anthropic wants is therefore moot.
The best open models are from china though.
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.
Look. I think the Chinese AI companies are doing a lot of good. I'm glad they exist. I'm glad they're relatively advanced. I don't think the entire nation of China is a bunch of villains. I don't think the US, even before the current era, is a bunch of do-gooders.
But China has some of the most imperialist policies in the world. They are just as imperialist as Russia or America. Military contracts are still massive business.
I also believe the petrodollar will fall, but it isn't going to be because China built exponentially more solar panels.
> But China has some of the most imperialist policies in the world.
Citation needed?
US and allies have invaded or intervened in 20+ countries in last 20 years in the name of "western values" where values means $$$$ and hegemony.
Educate me please with a comparison of what China has done to be "some of the most imperialist policies"?
I think the part about China is just about projecting alignment with the USG in hopes that this will result in Anthropic being treated more favourably by the current administration.
In what world does China have a non-imperialist foreign policy?
For example, China operates 1 foreign military base, in Djibouti. How many do you think the U.S. has in the South China Sea alone?
Beyond that, how many people has China killed in foreign military conflicts in the past 40 years? How many foreign governments have they overthrown?
Instead of all this, they’ve used their resources not only to become the world’s economic superpower but also to lift 800 million people out of poverty, accounting for 75% of the world’s reduction during the past 4 decades. The U.S. has added 10 million during that same time period.
Historically speaking, he's right. China has never had an expansionist foreign policy.
Tibet, the Philippines, and Taiwan would like to have a word, not to mention Chinese military action in support of its North Korea puppet state, and wars with Vietnam and India.
Are you serious? Don't you know how many wars did China wage? It tried to assimilate Vietnam for 1000 years. The last large scale war against Vietnam was just 1979. In fact, China had started war with all its neighbors, with no exception.
In what world does China have a imperialist foreign policy?
The one we live in, where they have control over a wide swathe of land mass through imperialism and have actively resisted relinquishing it?
The one we live in, where they are constantly surpassing international law in international waters in the South China Sea?
The one we live in, where they are constantly rattling sabers at South Korea and Japan when it comes to military expansion?
The one we live in, where they brutally cracked down on Hong Kong when they did not abide by the 50 year one country two systems deal, not even making it half of the way through the agreed period?
The one we live in, where there is constant threat to Taiwan?
It may have been a lazy post you're responding to, but anyone that is paying attention to this topic enough to talk about it is going to either say 'Of course China is imperialist, the same as every other global power' or take some sort of tankie approach to justify it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_Wars
You forgot Tibet and the Uyghurs https://worldwithoutgenocide.org/genocides-and-conflicts/gen...
> where they have control over a wide swathe of land mass through imperialism and have actively resisted relinquishing it?
Was referring to Tibet.
The Uyghurs are also a major problem from a social perspective but not directly related to imperalism/expansionism/military industrial complex stuff.
“One country two systems” is definitionally not imperialism, and given that “One China” is still an internationally recognized thing, neither is Taiwan. “Imperialism” is not a synonym for “morally repugnant government policy”.
I can see the argument for Hong Kong. I don't agree, really, but I can understand it. Under the strictest of definitions, perhaps it isn't.
But Taiwan is very obviously a totally separate country no matter what fictions anyone employs. If you are trying to talk about the thin veneer of everyone going "Uh huh, sure, China, yep Taiwan is totally part of you, wink wink, nudge nudge" as somehow making China not imperialist when Taiwan basically lives under the perpetual threat of a Chinese military invasion and having their own democratic form of government overthrown and replaced with the CCP, then... I don't really know what to say.
I suppose we could argue about imperialism being more of an economic thing - in which case this all still holds up - China's investments in Africa are effectively the same playbook the US has run out in developing nations for years. The US learned it from prior imperialist nations but belts and roads is nearly a carbon copy of what the US has done in other places.
But let's look at what the original poster was actually talking about - saying that China is safe because they don't have a military industrial complex because they're not imperialist. The proper word to use, if we want to get down to the semantics of it all, would be expansionist - but it's still not true. China has the 2nd largest military industrial complex in the world, and the gap is shrinking every day between them and the US. And if you were to look at wartime capacity, where China's dual-use shipyards could be swapped to naval production instead of commercial, a huge portion of that gap disappears immediately.
100% agree. Any AI org that is that tied to a single nation's interest can only be detrimental in the long run.
I know "open-source" AI has its own risks, but with e.g. DeepSeek, people in all countries benefit. Americans benefit from it equally.
> China’s non-imperialist foreign policy
Really? Is China non-imperialist regarding Taiwan and Tibet?
Taiwan is a matter of perspective. From the Chinese perspective, there was a civil war and the KMT lost. That's also the official position of the US, the EU and most countries in the world. It's called the One China policy. And China seems happy to maintain the status quo and leave the situation unresolved. Is it really imperialism to say that ultimately there will be reunification?
Even if you accept Tibet as imperialist, which is debatable, it was in 1950. You want to compare that to US imperialism, particularly since WW2 [1]? And I say "debatable" here because Tibet had a system that is charitably called "serfdom" where 90% of people couldn't own land but they did have some rights. However, they were the property of their lords and could be gifted or traded, you know, like property. There's another word for that: slavery.
It is 100% factually accruate to say that the People's Republica of China is not imperialist.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
> China’s non-imperialist foreign policy
This is the China that is not only threatening to invade Taiwan but doing live fire exercises around the island and threatening and attempting to coerce Japan for suggesting saying it will go to its defense.
Your comment is ridiculous. It reads like satire.
It wasn't that long ago that Taiwan claimed to be the legitimate government of China; given that China still maintains the reverse claim, it's not outrageous that it would consider an outside country's defense to be interference in an internal matter.
Whether or not that claim is legitimate, it is consistent with the concept of china having a non-imperialist foreign policy, and claims regarding that need to look elsewhere for supporting evidence.
Your comment reads like propaganda.
You know who else considers Taiwan to be part of the People's Republic of China? The US, the EU and in fact most countries in the world. It's called the One China policy. There are I believe 12 countries that have diplomatic relations with Taiwan.
The position of the PRC is that Taiwan will ultimately be reunified. That doesn't necessarily mean by military force. It doesn't even necessarily mean soon. The PRC famously takes a very long term view.
And those islands you mention are in the South China Sea.