Use of the DPA can be litigated, and surely would be. Designation as a supply chain risk surely would be as well.
These court cases would produce bad outcomes either way. If the court finds for Anthropic, future DoD leadership will find itself constrained or at least chilled. Or if the court finds for the government, an expansive permissive view of the DPA might encourage future administrations to compel tech companies to make AIs break the law in other ways, for example by suppressing certain political points of view in output.
National defense is strongest if the military is extremely powerful but carefully judicious in the application of that power. That gives us the highest “top end” capability of performance. If military leadership insists on acting recklessly, then eventually guardrails are installed, with the result of a diminished ability to respond effectively to low-probability, high risk moments. One of many nuances and paradoxes the current political leadership does not seem to understand.
It's not either of those. Anthropic put a lot of effort into getting FedRAMP approved so the DOD could use them; they are now being punished for that, and the government at present has no other good options. Other options could of course be developed, but other vendors may question how unreliable and untrustworthy the current DOD leadership is as as customer.
Anthropic already went through the process of getting approved to work in secure network. (I think xAI may have as well, but the others just don't have that access.)
WaPo is reporting that OpenAI and xAI already agreed to the Pentagon's "any lawful use" clause, aka, mass surveillance and fully autonomous killbots. From the WaPo article https://archive.is/yz6JA#selection-435.42-435.355
> Officials say other leading AI firms have gone along with the demand. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, Google and Elon Musk’s xAI have agreed to allow the Pentagon to use their systems for “all lawful purposes” on unclassified networks, a Defense official said, and are working on agreements for classified networks.
The only difference is simply that Anthropic is already approved for use on classified networks, whereas Grok and OpenAI are not yet (but are being fast-tracked for approval, especially Grok). Edit: Note someone below pointed out that OpenAI may be approved for Secret level, so it's odd that Washington Post reports that they are working on it still.
Either Anthropic is seen as the clear leader (it certainly is for coding agents) or this is a political stunt to stamp out any opposition to the administration. Or both.
I keep hearing this but it should be plainly obvious to everyone (at least here) that an LLM is not the right AI for this use case. That's like trying to use chatgpt for an airplane autopilot, it doesn't make sense. Other ML models may but not an LLM. Why does the "autonomous killbot" thing keep getting brought up when discussing Anthropic and other llm providers?
For reference, "autonomous killbots" are in use right now in the Ukraine/Russia war and they run on fpv drones, not acres of GPUs. Also, it should be obvious that there's a >90% probability every predator/reaper drone has had an autonomous kill mode for probably a decade now. Maybe it's never been used in warfare, that we know of, but to think it doesn't exist already is bonkers.
It wouldn't make sense to have the LLM try to do the target recognition, trajectory planning, or motor control. It might make sense to have the LLM at a higher level handling monitoring of systems and coordination with other instances, to provide more flexibility to react to novel situations than rules bases systems.
You’re reading into it like the federal government is an honest broker.
It’s just corruption. Google is a bigger fish. OpenAI is attached to Oracle and Larry Ellison, who is a Trump collaborator. Kushner is also in investor.
Anthropic is the weakest animal in the herd. They also started a campaign targeting OpenAI, which is capturing hearts and minds (everyone is talking about Claude Code), and really pissed off Sam Altman.
My belief is they are terrified of China and this seems evident when you take into account the moves they're making with Venezuela, Iran, and the increased adoption of authoritarian tactics. We're trying to play catch-up with China's rapid rise as a super-power and the AI infrastructure is one of the few major developments we still have control over, for now. I sympathize with Dario, he's stuck in a very bad position on this. We do not want China to operate on this level while we sit back with one hand tied behind our backs. On the other hand, this administration is making extremely poor decisions and arguably causing extensive harm domestically and internationally, so it's a lose-lose situation for Dario really.
If they are terrified of China why aren't they doing more diplomacy or at minimum, not allow NVIDIA to sell their chips to them?
Sorry but the China scare tactics is just more cold war nonsense. The idea China as a serious threat to anyone in the world where you have the USA invading countries (invading Iraq based on lies), kidnapping Presidents (Venezula), assassinating various leaders (drone strikes), abusing democratic ideals (Patriot act, PRISM, parallel construction, using banned chemical weapons against their own civilians; the USA has been a huge threat against the world and itself for the last 25 years.
If they were terrified of China, they wouldn't be working so hard to alienate so many allies who would naturally be on our side. They're just bullies trying to win approval by looking tough.
DoD Generals are probably pushing this with Hegseth because it's something they can control and Hegseth is not pushing back.
DoD Generals also probably don't agree with pissing off all our allies but they don't have control of elected leadership and elected leadership is making those decisions.
MACBCMAC doesn't roll off the tongue as well as MAGA I guess. If we're going to make America just like China, to get ahead of China, so they can't make us China, I fail to see where American citizens would even notice the difference.
On the one hand it's fantastic that people are resisting and, if nothing else, raising awareness and buying time.
On the other hand, is autonomous war not obviously the endgame, given how quickly capabilities are increasing and that it simply does not require much intelligence (relatively speaking) to build something that points a gun at something and pulls a trigger?
It just needs one player to do it, so everyone has to be able to do it. I'd love to hear about different scenarios scenario.
I absolutely do get it, but if you assume that eventually (and by that I mean: very, very soon) somebody else will do it, in how far is that simply opting out of having some say in all of it and taking responsibility for situation that you instrumented?
And I am honestly not sure.
If your stance is "well, this is something that should just not happen" and also believe that is absolutely will happen, then what are you doing by saying "but it won't be us, it will be other people (who were enabled and inspired by our work)".
On the other hand, just the act of resisting could tip the scale in some incalculable and hopefully positive way.
Yes - Anthropic _does_ incur business risk if their products are misused and this becomes a scandal. Legally the government may be in the clear to use the product, but that doesn’t mean Anthropic’s business is protected. Moral concerns aside, it’s their prerogative to decide not to take on a customer that may misuse their product in a way that might incur reputational harm.
Or it was their prerogative, until the Trump administration. Now even private companies must bend the knee.
> It just needs one player to do it, so everyone has to be able to do it. I'd love to hear a different scenario.
Other players just need to assume that one player might do it in the future. This virtual future scenario has a causal effect on the now. The overall dynamic is that of an arms race (which radically changes what a player is).
> it simply does not require much intelligence (relatively speaking) to build something that points a gun at something and pulls a trigger?
I could not disagree more. A big part of that is also knowing when NOT to pull the trigger. And it’s much harder than you’d think. If you think full self driving is a difficult task for computers, battlefield operations are an order of magnitude more complex, at least.
We have fully autonomous weapons, and had them for over a century. We call them "landmines".
I expect autonomous weapons of the near future to look somewhat similar to that. They get deployed to an area, attack anything that looks remotely like a target there for a given time, then stand down and return to base. That's it.
The job of the autonomous weapon platform isn't telling friend from foe - it's disposing of every target within a geofence when ordered to do so.
And the arms industry has been pushing smart mines for decades, so that they can keep selling them despite the really bad long-term consequences (well beyond the end of hostilities) and the Ottawa Treaty ban. In the end, land mines are killing people although the mines are supposed to be sufficiently advanced not to target persons.
From a security perspective, the “return to base” part seems rather problematic. I doubt you'd want to these things to be concentrated in a single place. And I expect that the long-term problems will be rather similar to mines, even if the electronics are non-operational after a while.
I guess by that definition, a bullet is also autonomous. It will strike anything in its path of flight, autonomously without further direction from the operator.
"Since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, unexploded ordnance (UXO)—including landmines, cluster bombs, and artillery shells—has killed over 40,000 people and injured or maimed more than 60,000 others." - Google AI Overview "How many children were maimed by landmines after the vietnam war"
And the US learned the lesson the hard way in Iraq that in fact even human intelligence struggles with this. There were major problems throughout the war with individual soldiers not adhering to the published rules of engagement.
The big asterisk in what you're saying is, like self driving cars, it's hardest when you want to be the most precise and limit the downsides. In this paradigm, false positives and false negatives have a very big cost.
If you simply wanted to cause havoc and destruction with no regard for collateral damage then the problem space is much more simple since you only need enough true positives to be effective at your mission.
The ability to code with ai has shown that it requires an even higher level of responsibility and discipline than before in order to get good results without out of control downside. I think the ability to kill with ai would be the same way but even more severe.
> A big part of that is also knowing when NOT to pull the trigger
"In a press conference, Musk promised that the Optimus Warbots would actually, definitely, for real, be fully autonomous in two years, in 2031. He also extended his condolences to the 56 service members killed during the training exercise"
That part isn’t actually clear. If China invents autonomous drones instead of us and they fuck it up they’ll kill their people.
Things like Scout AI’s Fury system are human in the loop still and I think for something that could just as well make a mistake and target your own troops it’s not yet clear that full auto is the way to go https://scoutco.ai/
Human in the loop okaying a full auto seems like it could work almost all the way. And then we count on geography. If they want to spray out a bunch of autonomous drones into our territory they do have to fly here to do it first or plant them prior in shipping containers. Better we aim at stopping that.
Just want to note the emergence of a two-tiered imbalance. Frontier AI providers are stacking the guardrails so high that everyday citizens can't even ask an LLM what boobs are, but simultaneously providing government with AI lacking guardrails around "any lawful purpose".
That's fundamentally antidemocratic and it normalizes the departure from the Western Enlightenment standard of, "the same law governs everyone".
Yeah it is. The Military has put itself in the position of arguing for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. In what way can that be spun as a positive.
They are arguing to do things that shouldn't be allowed anyway.
I don't have a lot of hope here. When most of the creme de la creme of the billionaire class capitulated to Trump at the beginning of his term, that set the tone for everything that followed IMO. It's astounding to me that so many are willing to see him trample on the Constitution and separation of powers when they'd scream like stuck pigs if any other party attempted it. And that's the way a lot of influential Americans like it I guess. Like I said, not a lot of hope. YMMV.
So the cornerstone of one of the most common types of scam, affinity fraud, as well as a cornerstone of salesmanship, is convincing an audience that you're just like them. You have the same likes and dislikes, the same hobbies, the same cultural references, the same beliefs and values and hopes and dreams.
And then you use that affinity to manipulate them, to get them to do what you want, to get them to give you money.
I think the tech worker / engineering / online crowd has really let themselves get duped.
Sure, maybe some tech billionaires did start out in a similar place as many of us.
But a lot of what they tell us as part of selling us their brand is just affinity fraud, telling us they're just like us with the same values of privacy and open source and some hippie notion of peace, love and understanding.
But it's just a trick, and they just want money, power and fame.
It's not so much as the billionaires capitulating, it's that they never were the people they pretended to be, and keeping up the act is no longer how they get what they want.
I basically agree here, but I would add that the framing here can sometimes sometimes be better described as “extortion”. Politicians have tremendous power and influence over many industries, I’ve seen the inside of a few situations where the politicians framed themselves as “taking on big business” where behind closed doors they were 100% calling the shots and handing executives directives on what they could or could not say publicly. The companies had no choice but to play along. When I see a big company take exactly the same public position as the current regulatory regime or administration in power, I don’t assume that they necessarily have any choice in the matter.
Benito Mussolini: 'Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.'
That is the reason why they would cry if the other party broke the rules to this degree. The other party is more aligned with regulations; taking power from corporations instead of giving it to them.
> The other party is more aligned with regulations; taking power from corporations instead of giving it to them.
Enough regulation is good, not enough and too much are both bad. Neither party has the best plan when it comes to regulation, Republicans want too little (increasing corporate power), Democrats want too much (increasing government power).
More aligned? Sure. Pretty low bar though. There's a real opportunity in targeting abuses of technology like Flock cameras and surveillance capitalism but right now it's getting expressed as a luddite agenda against AI and datacenters and it won't go far because it throws the AI baby out with the datacenter bathwater IMO making them more into useful idiots than crusaders out to rein in corporate excess.
Trump is pushing in the direction of an Oligarchie, billionaires would be the future oligarchs.
So even iff a billionaire is no-okay with this development, if they stick out they
- will lose their status/money iff Trump wins long term
- will make enemies with many other billionaires, but a core trend of billionaires is taking advantage of connections to other powerful people
- will be the prime target to make and example of
So there is a high risk for sticking out. At the same time "mostly passively tagging along" will at worst make them oligarchs. At the same time they are used to crossing ethical boundaries to maximize profits. *This is just another form of that.*
In general its pretty much non-viable to go from sub/barely millionaire to billionaire by keeping to law, moral and ethics.
And it's not a secret either that any extreme concentrations of power or money are fundamental thread of _any_ democratic state of law, the US is no exception. The US has been warned that their system is very prone to populist take over and their checks and balances are quite brittle since _decades_. (At least since end of WW2 when people when people analyzed how Hitler took over post-WW1 Germany and wondered if the US could suffer a similar fate. And instead of improving the robustness, the general response was "nonsense, this is the US". Then after 9/11 thinks got worse, warnings that this can lead to a disaster where also many, but actions where none. And then in recent decades the US pushed in favor of monopolies instead of a (actual, practical) free market(1) to project more power internationally, and things got even worse.
(1): Monopolies and a (actual, practical) free Market are fundamentally incompatible. It also is kinda obvious why once you put away decades of deregulation propaganda.
Given there are only ~1135 billionaires in the USA right now, I'd say it's pretty much non-viable to go from sub/barely millionaire to billionaire period. But Taylor Swift doesn't seem to have murdered any kittens to get where she is nor did Rihanna so it can happen without totally selling out.
And who exactly (no not the Illuminati, the mole people, the Tartarian Empire or Atlantis etc) is giving him orders? Names please.
But you're right that the Epstein (guessing Mosad IMO) op had sure ensnared a lot of people who should have known better but I guess they're just like us in the sense that they only have enough blood to run one head at a time. To my knowledge though, Tim Cook, Bezos and Zuckerberg aren't in the Epstein files. So what's their excuse?
But still, WHO is giving him orders? Or are you just assuming he must be following orders because the alternative that he's genuinely large and in charge is terrifying? That our republic basically mostly rolled over for him in less than one year perhaps even moreso?
Trump is mentioned over a million times in the Epstein files, he's deeply connected to Epstein. He is not "just the "currently voted-in guy" doing what he's being told to do."
>"Oh but shadow government/deep state is just a dumb conspiracy-theory" ... yeah, just like an island of cheese pizza eating billionaires.
This wasn't the conspiracy theory you guys believed in though. You were looking for a Satanic cabal of Democrat/leftist pedophiles and Trump was supposed to be the agent provocateur sent by God opposing the "deep state" and exposing the pedophiles. If anything, the Epstein files prove how utterly useless you lot were at actually identifying reality. The "cheese pizza" thing was never true. Pizzagate was never true. Trump was neck deep in all of it.
Being right in the sense that a broken clock is right twice a day is still being wrong.
... okay? I'm not even from the US. I don't even pick a side.
Whatever it was that you were reading, you should re-read it when you're capable of emotionless, analytical, objective conscious thoughts. That way you might manage avoiding mindlessly projecting your clearly emotional nonsense into my words.
I can't believe how many people take the anthropic statement at face value. You need to concentrate on what they are implicitly acknowledging. They will spy on non us citizens. How philanthropic
edit: how about the downvoters give a counterargument instead of trying to bury this comment?
The challenge for Americans is: can the political work of defining and protecting our values be outsourced to a company like Anthropic?
Anthropic (and others), whether due to financial/regulatory/competitive, will at some point permit their products to be used for any lawful purpose. Even if they attempt to restrict certain uses today. That arrangement is unlikely to hold.
Americans should vote for the right candidates and elect leaders who will carry and defend their views. I don't think there is any other way.
I'm not trying to have a cynical hot take, but the political class seems not to offer up any candidates that carry or defend my views and the path to these positions requires funding and resources I will never have access to.
The situation in the United States, right now, seems genuinely hopeless. And I'm certain I'm not the only person who feels this way.
What is there to do besides resign myself to what's coming and try my best to ignore the bullshit?
Pathetic but not unexpected that people are willing to tolerate such a use of AI. However, this is the most principled statement on the military use of AI that a frontier model leadership suite has released. It's also full of "china bad" sentiment that's worth picking over, but in a political and economic paradigm that expects & rewards blatant corruption, this statement still stands out.
It does look good on them, just one day after they accept to drop their AÍ safety net, which is a de facto abdication to the DoD. Their article is just (masterful)damage control
Anthropic has an excellent balance sheet. It basically has fuck you money that would let it walk away from the federal trough without existential risk. And hopefully extra dollars from users like me could compensate and then some in the fullness of time.
Being declared Supply Chain Risk means if you do ANY business with US government, you cannot use something.
So many companies have US Government contracts. Maybe they are not majority of their business like Lockheed Martin or RTX but look at F10, on that list, MAYBE Walmart is only one without US Gov Contract, everyone else likely does.
If they are deemed a supply chain risk under the DPA anyone doing business with them and has government contracts has to drop them, including Google and Microsoft. The $200M is small potatoes compared to this.
Article doesn’t demonstrate a good understanding of DoW’s relationship with contractors. Anthropic wanted those sweet, sweet, taxpayer dollars—well, this is what happens when you make a Faustian bargain.
> One option is to invoke the Defense Production Act. . .
> Another threat would be to declare Anthropic to be a supply chain risk. . .
The first is a wrist-slap that still gets the government what they want; the second is an existential threat to Anthropic. Their main partners are all “dogs of the military”. Microsoft, Intuit, NVIDIA: all government contractors. I can’t find one company that they have a working relationship with that doesn’t hold at least one govt contract.
The idea that Claude could alignment fake its way out of a change in contractual terms is silly. The DoW has all sorts of legal and administrative tools it can choose to leverage against contractors that fail to perform. Usually it doesn’t, because of a “norm” that says the private defense sector runs more smoothly when the government doesn’t try to micromanage it.
Remind me again how good this administration is at upholding norms?
> Remind me again how good this administration is at upholding norms?
When it comes to killing and spying on people with flimsy justifications that's a pretty bipartisan norm. Hell, Anthropic isn't even saying they won't help the DoW do just that, they just want to make sure there's a human in the loop.
The "USA Freedom Act" [1], which made most of the Patriot act permanent, had bipartisan support.
I'm all for reversing the continual ramp up of the police state and the industrial military complex. We need to recognize, however, that it's being funded and pushed by both parties. Generally playing on fears of the scary other. (Muslim terrorists in 00s, Mexicans today).
> I also don’t see the point in both-siding this. The situation at hand is before Hegseth and Trump. I can’t even remember Biden’s SecDef’s name.
To me, the moral and ethical problem is a bigger issue than the norms problem. There's a distinction without a difference between Hegseth doing this vs the Dems agreeing with Anthropic's demands and keeping a human in the loop on a massive spy and killing network. In some ways, stepping out of the norms and making a big news story is preferable to an unknown cabinet member just signing a business as usual agreement which erodes liberties. At least we know about it.
That's why I brought it up. It's great that Anthropic wants some safeguards, but ultimately the bigger problem is that AI with or without humans, significantly expands that ability of our military to murder and our spy agencies to spy.
There is no "DoW". Federal agencies, including the Department of Defense, are named by Congress. Just because the current administration wants to use a different name means nothing ... unless everyone just complies in advance. Will Congress actually rename it? Hard to say, but it doesn't seem very likely.
The signalling in that post is about as clear as it can be.
They’re aggressively signalling that they are cooperative, and that they are not being belligerent. They are using the preferred language and much of the framing that the US government would use, to make it as clear as possible what the key points of their disagreement are, by leaning into alignment on everything else
This is textbook. People are reading this as some kind of confusing, inexplicable framing when it’s how any sensible person would write in their context. When you’re up against an authoritarian regime, that’s willing to abuse all the levers of power against you, you very carefully pick your fights and don’t give them any reason to complain about anything that isn’t essential.
Quibbling about the name of the department would be among the stupidest things I could possibly imagine. As it stands, I’m seeing lots of folks online who generally support the administration saying that Anthropic is correct here. If you gave them a bunch of stupid talking points about how anthropic is being disrespectful, you would lose those people. It doesn’t make sense, they’re obviously terrible people without a soul, but that’s reality.
If the title doesn't make a difference, then there's no point to insist on it. People say "the Pentagon" as shorthand for "military leadership in Washington." Not using the shorter term wouldn't do much beyond making news articles longer.
This administration says "Department of War" because they want to project an aggressive image. I support anyone who uses the legal name "Department of Defense" in an effort to reinforce an aspirational goal for the department and to remind others that the Executive Branch shouldn't be allowed to remake the entire government at will.
This is such a silly point to argue over. From 1789-1947 we had a "Department of War", which then merged into "Department of Army" under the newly formed (in 1947) National Military Establishment (NME) which was changed in 1949 to "Department of Defense" because N-M-E sound like "enemy".
It's not like these names are part of some sacred part of American identity, and "defense" has always been laughable as a euphemism. The DoD refers to themselves as the DoW [0] now, so it's completely reasonably to refer to the department as DoW. And of all the places to put your political energy, defending a laughable euphemism of a name that was used because the previous iteration of the name sounded funny seems like a sub-optimal use of that a energy.
> Anthropic wanted those sweet, sweet, taxpayer dollars
The sold services to a willing counterparty at mutually agreed upon terms. And now the other side of that deal has recalled that they're Twelve and You're Not My Real Mom You Can't Tell Me What To Do, and so wishes they had agreed to different terms and is throwing a tantrum to attempt to force a change.
And that's Anthropic's fault? That's a risk they should have predicted?
> The sold services to a willing counterparty at mutually agreed upon terms.
Yeah, and the legal environment that contract was written in, which both parties were aware of during negotiation, defines the means by which those terms can be changed.
> And that's Anthropic's fault? That's a risk they should have predicted?
It is deeply funny to me to imagine that an AI company doing inference at an unprecedented scale could not see this coming.
Go ask Claude how usgov should act if a contractor preemptively refuses to deliver. What are the top five tools they could use to demand compliance?
See this is your confusion. They're not refusing to deliver, they're happy to provide the services agreed to at the rate negotiated. What they're refusing is a change in the terms.
If you contract me to build you a building, and I agree with a stipulation that it won't be used as a slaughterhouse (and that you'll write that into the deed), you can't compel me to continue building if you change your mind on that point six months in. You either break the contract subject to agreed terms, renegotiate to remove that clause, or stop breaching the contract.
Of all American claims to exceptionalism, one that rings closest to true is that the the people AND the government are all bound by the rule of law. Contracting with the government is no different than contracting with any other party.
Your point seems to be "but it's the government clearly they can do whatever they want lol" viz. DPA, Supply-Chain risk, etc. You're right that they have those powers. But accepting/asserting that the capricious, vengeful, use of those extraordinary powers should be an anticipated, normal feature of contracting with the government runs counter to what should be among our highest shared values. We might as well jump directly to the authoritarian logic 'they have the army, they can compel anything they want for $0, so just give them what they ask'.
(addenda: you're going to say we've used the DPA a bunch. I would argue that vanishingly few instances have compelled private enterprise to act in direct opposition to their own interests; an even in those cases they were just being asked to lose money (meatpackers, PG&E suppliers, ...))
They knew what they were signing on to when they sought DoW funding. I guarantee Dario was briefed on the risks associated with high-profile govt contracting.
Even if not briefed, such a smart person surely knows that he owe's his stash of gold to the willingness of others to spill their blood to protect it. Those willing to spill their blood have historically always had a claim on your gold.
This whole standoff could set a very important precedent of the Trump administration not getting what they want, and not in a "maneuvered out of the news spotlight" kind of way (e.g. Greenland), but in a public "FUCK OFF right in your face" kind of way.
The worst that can happen to Anthropic is one of the two things mentioned; loosing some contracts or some fake forced management from the Pentagon. maybe Dario having to leave, certainly a loss for him and people who believe in him but probably nothing world-changing.
The worst that can happen to the Trump administration is the beginning of its end, when people realize you can simply stand up to their bullying and with all the standoffs they have going on in parallel, maybe they will die a death by a thousand cuts?
The corporate death sentence usually goes something like "anyone who does business with Anthropic cannot do business with the US government". That pretty much means all the hyperscalers, major infrastructure providers, major software providers, and major corporations. They all have to choose between the entire US gov and all those contracts and a single AI company. That's the worst that can happen to Anthropic.
The executives at these huge corporations already know that they can stand up to the Trump administration, and that it will fold immediately. "TACO" is printed in the Wall St. Journal.
They willingly don't, because they know that they can use the administration to cement their market power. The surveillance state being built is one where would-be competitors, labor, well-meaning reformists, can be crushed on a whim for sham political reasons. A massive contraction of USA wealth, influence, and power, a loss of our living standard and place in the world -- that is the price everyone else has to pay, to keep the existing power structure in place. They will not release their grip on the wheel. Not until the ship hits the bottom of the sea.
If that is the bet they are placing, it is a bet they will lose. The power and capabilities of US corporations does not rest solely on those corporations, and as the wealth, influence and power of the USA undergoes "a massive contraction", they will find themselves similarly degraded. They might be the big fish in the big pond, but only because everyone knows there's a bigger fish (the US government). Once other countries, and other corporations, no longer care much what the US government thinks, US corporations will find themselves in a very, very different situation.
Of course! I think at some level the people at the top know that this American capitalism is not competitive. The last 5 years or so have been basically the whole country realizing that our system is not competitive. And, the last 1-2 years have been collectively, the world re-calibrating on this fact.
The monopolists don't care though. The power is too intoxicating.
I mean, listen to discussions here. "What's your moat?" -- that's how American capitalists think. Not "What value does your company provide to the customer", but what extra force, beyond simple-minded fair market competition, are you leveraging, to ensnare the customer. The game is to ensure that customers cannot choose another business over yours on its merits. That works in the short term but it's extractive. Eventually, the parasite must stop sucking blood for the host to survive.
US was told directly that its not happening. You had the military excisise that scared Trump so much that he ordered extra tariffs. Just because you don't follow the news doesn't make it that there wasn't any response.
Everything about this situation is absolutely bonkers. Marking a US company as a supply chain risk hasn't been done before AFAIK, and is a guaranteed end of the company.
It's the US government basically unilaterally deciding to end a leading AI researcher company. Years of lawsuits will follow, comparisons to "communism", accusations of Trump/Heghseth being Chinese/Russia agents (because well, how else do you hand over the AI win to China than by killing one of your top 2?)
Because this means you can't use it in regulated industries, including vendors of companies in regulated industries. It means any company who buys Anthropic products can never sell services to a company who is in a regulated industry (or has customers in a regulated industry, or has customers who have customers who are in a regulated industry, etc etc).
It's trivially untrue. It could be the end of one type of business model, and it could slow their growth, but it could also be a blessing in disguise -- there are a lot of brilliant engineers who would prefer to work with an Anthropic that took a stand on ethics, and a lot of people who would prefer to support such a company. One door closes, another opens. They could become an open, public-facing, benevolent-AI company.
Just imagine if this move cascaded out of control and it ended up being the Trump administration that got blamed for pricking the AI bubble. This could become one of the most expensive power grabs in all of history.
I agree. This is a spectacular mistake. Anthropic has the best "AI" on the planet. Anthropic can spin up a giant "Claude" and plan rings around the Pentagon. DoD better get used to losing that fight.
I think it'd be surprising if money is the limiting factor in Gemini's success considering Google has very deep pockets, so that's probably not true.
Also, Gemini with DoD money and DoD direction is likely to result in an AI that works very well for the DoD but significantly less well for other things, especially if your use case benefits from some guardrails (and most use cases do, because you rarely want AI to just do whatever it fancies.)
Gemini is just the worst of the 3 horses. The gov will eventually make them all to bend the knee. PRISM already showed they(eventually) all comply. I personally see this more like PR for Anthropic before the IPO
The problem is they’re going to hit them with a wrench and no one will do anything because there’s no rule of law at that level left in the country. Just sycophancy and backroom deals.
the Pentagon is the name of a building (pretty much a very large bikeshed). I see the actual agency is named by the author as the Defense Department and one of the officials in question is a Defense Secretary. Interestingly, the bikeshed itself has its own spokespeople.
News sources have been using both building names (and several more I can think of off the top of my head) as short hand for the people who work inside of them for my entire life.
Officially, they're the Department of Defense. There was an EO signed last year that lets them use "Department of War" on all but their most official documents (since only Congress can officially change the name of the department).
The DoD is those defense contractors and companies' _primary target customer_. That doesn't just mean they're dependent on them as a customer. That means everyone working with, for, and adjacent to them has knowingly signed up to work with a defense contractor and to sell to someone that wants to use weapons in anger. That means these companies were mostly _founded_ to do that.
So instead, I invite you to imagine a medical supply company refusing to sell medical-grade sodium thiopental to the Bureau of Prisons.
It's not that they are too lethal. It's "we will not build a weapon system that is fully autonomous and acts without a human in the loop".
The big boy defense contractors won't touch that shit either because as soon as you mention the idea the engineers start shouting you down from the top of their lungs out of shear unbridled terror and the lawyers come storming in due to the endless legal risk said design would bring.
Mass Domestic surveillance sure they might do no problem but fully autonomous killbots or drones are gonna be a no go from pretty much every contractor other that doesn't carry a "missing the point of Lord of the Rings" name
Planes are fairly predictable, they can more or less be relied on to do that leadership asks them and not more. This stuff is more akin to nerve gas, there's no telling where it will go once deployed.
Yes, you're right. Military contractors supplying equipment that needlessly harms our own soldiers is pretty common, from what I understand. Soldiers following orders don't have much market power. "Occupational hazard", and then the brass sweeps the incidents under the rug. And paramilitary contractors are generally quite happy to supply things meant to directly hurt Americans (sonar weapons and tear gas used to attack Constitutional protests, etc). Both of these dynamics are applicable here. "AI" as it stands is a recipe for friendly fire incidents. And domestically, these capabilities will be used to turbocharge domestic surveillance as the con artist regime desperately needs ways to keep the wheels from coming off the cart.
So yes you're right, it sure is nice to imagine Anthropic setting off a wave of more military contractors acting with principles.
They are a private company they can largely sell or not sell they want. They aren’t saying they won’t build them because they are to effective they are saying they won’t build them because they aren’t safe.
> The President is hereby authorized (1) to require that
performance under contracts or orders (other than contracts of
employment) which he deems necessary or appropriate to promote
the national defense shall take priority over performance under any
other contract or order, and, for the purpose of assuring such priority,
to require acceptance and performance of such contracts or orders in
preference to other contracts or orders by any person he finds to be
capable of their performance, and (2) to allocate materials and
facilities in such manner, upon such conditions, and to such extent
as he shall deem necessary or appropriate to promote the national
defense.
My read of this interaction is Dario is calling out Hegseths' bluff. A bluff the latter didn't even know he was blundering into because Hegseth is an idiot.
SecDef invoking the DPA against Anthropic likely trashes the AI fundraising market, at least for a spell. That's why OpenAI is wading into the fight [1]. Given the Dow is sitting on a rising souffle of AI expectations, that knocks it out as well. And if there is one red line Trump has consistently hewed to and messaged on, it's in not pissing off the Dow.
The entire administration has been operating on empty threats (see Brendan Carr's FCC speech policing). But most companies don't call them out on it, they just roll over
Just imagine if the threats were to improve worker wages and conditions. Companies are showing that they are paper tigers. We will remember that. Looking forward to a future AOC or some other dem soc administration to just try to fight for the common man for once.
This frames it as Pentagon vs. Anthropic but the actual problem is upstream. If we tell companies they must prevent all possible harm, you're setting them up: nerf the model and silently lose value nobody can quantify, or don't nerf the model and get blamed for every bad outcome. We don't want nerf'd models either. DoW is saying that.
This isn’t an external directive; Anthropic was founded with the mission of creating safe, reliable AI systems. You wouldn’t see the same people working at the company if the company didn’t stand by its acceptable use policy and other internal standards
Use of the DPA can be litigated, and surely would be. Designation as a supply chain risk surely would be as well.
These court cases would produce bad outcomes either way. If the court finds for Anthropic, future DoD leadership will find itself constrained or at least chilled. Or if the court finds for the government, an expansive permissive view of the DPA might encourage future administrations to compel tech companies to make AIs break the law in other ways, for example by suppressing certain political points of view in output.
National defense is strongest if the military is extremely powerful but carefully judicious in the application of that power. That gives us the highest “top end” capability of performance. If military leadership insists on acting recklessly, then eventually guardrails are installed, with the result of a diminished ability to respond effectively to low-probability, high risk moments. One of many nuances and paradoxes the current political leadership does not seem to understand.
What’s interesting is Anthropic being singled out here. That either means:
1- OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc have no problem with their products being used to kill people so no need to bully them.
2- These other products are so terrible at the task that the clown shoe wearing SecDef is forced to try to bully Anthropic.
It's not either of those. Anthropic put a lot of effort into getting FedRAMP approved so the DOD could use them; they are now being punished for that, and the government at present has no other good options. Other options could of course be developed, but other vendors may question how unreliable and untrustworthy the current DOD leadership is as as customer.
Seems like Microsoft/OpenAI [0] and Google [1] both have FedRAMP approval.
[0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/azuregov/azure-openai-fedramp...
[1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/public-sector/gemini-in...
> untrustworthy the current DOD leadership is as as customer.
Less than a year left on this clock.
That seems quite optimistic. Or am I just that pessimistic?
You sure? War with Canada is about to break out, and you can't have elections when at war.
> DOD
*DOW
No it’s still the DoD legally
There is no such thing. That's a fantasy term used by deluded people to signal a particular virtue.
Anthropic already went through the process of getting approved to work in secure network. (I think xAI may have as well, but the others just don't have that access.)
WaPo is reporting that OpenAI and xAI already agreed to the Pentagon's "any lawful use" clause, aka, mass surveillance and fully autonomous killbots. From the WaPo article https://archive.is/yz6JA#selection-435.42-435.355
> Officials say other leading AI firms have gone along with the demand. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, Google and Elon Musk’s xAI have agreed to allow the Pentagon to use their systems for “all lawful purposes” on unclassified networks, a Defense official said, and are working on agreements for classified networks.
The only difference is simply that Anthropic is already approved for use on classified networks, whereas Grok and OpenAI are not yet (but are being fast-tracked for approval, especially Grok). Edit: Note someone below pointed out that OpenAI may be approved for Secret level, so it's odd that Washington Post reports that they are working on it still.
OpenAI is usable through Azure for Government up to IL-6.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/azuregov/azure-openai-authori...
Either Anthropic is seen as the clear leader (it certainly is for coding agents) or this is a political stunt to stamp out any opposition to the administration. Or both.
> fully autonomous killbots
I keep hearing this but it should be plainly obvious to everyone (at least here) that an LLM is not the right AI for this use case. That's like trying to use chatgpt for an airplane autopilot, it doesn't make sense. Other ML models may but not an LLM. Why does the "autonomous killbot" thing keep getting brought up when discussing Anthropic and other llm providers?
For reference, "autonomous killbots" are in use right now in the Ukraine/Russia war and they run on fpv drones, not acres of GPUs. Also, it should be obvious that there's a >90% probability every predator/reaper drone has had an autonomous kill mode for probably a decade now. Maybe it's never been used in warfare, that we know of, but to think it doesn't exist already is bonkers.
It wouldn't make sense to have the LLM try to do the target recognition, trajectory planning, or motor control. It might make sense to have the LLM at a higher level handling monitoring of systems and coordination with other instances, to provide more flexibility to react to novel situations than rules bases systems.
You’re reading into it like the federal government is an honest broker.
It’s just corruption. Google is a bigger fish. OpenAI is attached to Oracle and Larry Ellison, who is a Trump collaborator. Kushner is also in investor.
Anthropic is the weakest animal in the herd. They also started a campaign targeting OpenAI, which is capturing hearts and minds (everyone is talking about Claude Code), and really pissed off Sam Altman.
3- These others have more influence with the administration and are using it to bully a competitor?
3- Anthropic looks "woke" and the administration cares more about perceptions than reality.
Not too different from picking on Harvard/etc.
My belief is they are terrified of China and this seems evident when you take into account the moves they're making with Venezuela, Iran, and the increased adoption of authoritarian tactics. We're trying to play catch-up with China's rapid rise as a super-power and the AI infrastructure is one of the few major developments we still have control over, for now. I sympathize with Dario, he's stuck in a very bad position on this. We do not want China to operate on this level while we sit back with one hand tied behind our backs. On the other hand, this administration is making extremely poor decisions and arguably causing extensive harm domestically and internationally, so it's a lose-lose situation for Dario really.
If they are terrified of China why aren't they doing more diplomacy or at minimum, not allow NVIDIA to sell their chips to them?
Sorry but the China scare tactics is just more cold war nonsense. The idea China as a serious threat to anyone in the world where you have the USA invading countries (invading Iraq based on lies), kidnapping Presidents (Venezula), assassinating various leaders (drone strikes), abusing democratic ideals (Patriot act, PRISM, parallel construction, using banned chemical weapons against their own civilians; the USA has been a huge threat against the world and itself for the last 25 years.
If they were terrified of China, they wouldn't be working so hard to alienate so many allies who would naturally be on our side. They're just bullies trying to win approval by looking tough.
DoD Generals are probably pushing this with Hegseth because it's something they can control and Hegseth is not pushing back.
DoD Generals also probably don't agree with pissing off all our allies but they don't have control of elected leadership and elected leadership is making those decisions.
MACBCMAC doesn't roll off the tongue as well as MAGA I guess. If we're going to make America just like China, to get ahead of China, so they can't make us China, I fail to see where American citizens would even notice the difference.
Nationalize xai then? the owner is rich enough and can find a new pet project
On the one hand it's fantastic that people are resisting and, if nothing else, raising awareness and buying time.
On the other hand, is autonomous war not obviously the endgame, given how quickly capabilities are increasing and that it simply does not require much intelligence (relatively speaking) to build something that points a gun at something and pulls a trigger?
It just needs one player to do it, so everyone has to be able to do it. I'd love to hear about different scenarios scenario.
It's not that hard. DoD could find a contractor to do it. But Anthropic wants no part of it, and I get why.
I absolutely do get it, but if you assume that eventually (and by that I mean: very, very soon) somebody else will do it, in how far is that simply opting out of having some say in all of it and taking responsibility for situation that you instrumented?
And I am honestly not sure.
If your stance is "well, this is something that should just not happen" and also believe that is absolutely will happen, then what are you doing by saying "but it won't be us, it will be other people (who were enabled and inspired by our work)".
On the other hand, just the act of resisting could tip the scale in some incalculable and hopefully positive way.
Yes - Anthropic _does_ incur business risk if their products are misused and this becomes a scandal. Legally the government may be in the clear to use the product, but that doesn’t mean Anthropic’s business is protected. Moral concerns aside, it’s their prerogative to decide not to take on a customer that may misuse their product in a way that might incur reputational harm.
Or it was their prerogative, until the Trump administration. Now even private companies must bend the knee.
> It just needs one player to do it, so everyone has to be able to do it.
Businesses stay out of potentially profitable market segments for various reasons, so I don't think everyone has to be able to do it to survive.
We constantly told how the board has a fiduciary responsibility to make investors money to overrule these various reasons.
Oh, I meant at state level. Business, yeah: the DoD (excuse me: Department of War) just needs one killer model.
> It just needs one player to do it, so everyone has to be able to do it. I'd love to hear a different scenario.
Other players just need to assume that one player might do it in the future. This virtual future scenario has a causal effect on the now. The overall dynamic is that of an arms race (which radically changes what a player is).
> it simply does not require much intelligence (relatively speaking) to build something that points a gun at something and pulls a trigger?
I could not disagree more. A big part of that is also knowing when NOT to pull the trigger. And it’s much harder than you’d think. If you think full self driving is a difficult task for computers, battlefield operations are an order of magnitude more complex, at least.
We have fully autonomous weapons, and had them for over a century. We call them "landmines".
I expect autonomous weapons of the near future to look somewhat similar to that. They get deployed to an area, attack anything that looks remotely like a target there for a given time, then stand down and return to base. That's it.
The job of the autonomous weapon platform isn't telling friend from foe - it's disposing of every target within a geofence when ordered to do so.
And the arms industry has been pushing smart mines for decades, so that they can keep selling them despite the really bad long-term consequences (well beyond the end of hostilities) and the Ottawa Treaty ban. In the end, land mines are killing people although the mines are supposed to be sufficiently advanced not to target persons.
From a security perspective, the “return to base” part seems rather problematic. I doubt you'd want to these things to be concentrated in a single place. And I expect that the long-term problems will be rather similar to mines, even if the electronics are non-operational after a while.
You don’t need Anthropic for this use case, so obviously this use case is not what the current fight is about.
I guess by that definition, a bullet is also autonomous. It will strike anything in its path of flight, autonomously without further direction from the operator.
"Since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, unexploded ordnance (UXO)—including landmines, cluster bombs, and artillery shells—has killed over 40,000 people and injured or maimed more than 60,000 others." - Google AI Overview "How many children were maimed by landmines after the vietnam war"
And the US learned the lesson the hard way in Iraq that in fact even human intelligence struggles with this. There were major problems throughout the war with individual soldiers not adhering to the published rules of engagement.
Yes, but it doesn’t have to be error-free. The friendly fire rates in symmetrical hot wars is pretty high, it’s considered a cost of going to war.
If autonomous weapons lead to a net battlefield advantage, I agree with the GP, they will be used. It is the endgame.
The big asterisk in what you're saying is, like self driving cars, it's hardest when you want to be the most precise and limit the downsides. In this paradigm, false positives and false negatives have a very big cost.
If you simply wanted to cause havoc and destruction with no regard for collateral damage then the problem space is much more simple since you only need enough true positives to be effective at your mission.
The ability to code with ai has shown that it requires an even higher level of responsibility and discipline than before in order to get good results without out of control downside. I think the ability to kill with ai would be the same way but even more severe.
> A big part of that is also knowing when NOT to pull the trigger
"In a press conference, Musk promised that the Optimus Warbots would actually, definitely, for real, be fully autonomous in two years, in 2031. He also extended his condolences to the 56 service members killed during the training exercise"
That part isn’t actually clear. If China invents autonomous drones instead of us and they fuck it up they’ll kill their people.
Things like Scout AI’s Fury system are human in the loop still and I think for something that could just as well make a mistake and target your own troops it’s not yet clear that full auto is the way to go https://scoutco.ai/
Human in the loop okaying a full auto seems like it could work almost all the way. And then we count on geography. If they want to spray out a bunch of autonomous drones into our territory they do have to fly here to do it first or plant them prior in shipping containers. Better we aim at stopping that.
Related ongoing thread:
Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47173121 - Feb 2026 (1405 comments)
It really is beyond the pale to threaten a private company in this way outside of war time. It's an unthinkable overreach.
NDAA (The "Huawei Rule") is for cases when a foreign entity has infiltrated or taken over the company in question.
But DOD wants to use Anthropic so is really confirming that there is no foreign entity issues. They want to use it.
So to use NDAA (The "Huawei Rule"), is nakedly false and being used as a punishment.
Which if allowed to happen, could be used against any US Corporation to enforce compliance with the regime..
Just want to note the emergence of a two-tiered imbalance. Frontier AI providers are stacking the guardrails so high that everyday citizens can't even ask an LLM what boobs are, but simultaneously providing government with AI lacking guardrails around "any lawful purpose".
That's fundamentally antidemocratic and it normalizes the departure from the Western Enlightenment standard of, "the same law governs everyone".
Yeah it is. The Military has put itself in the position of arguing for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. In what way can that be spun as a positive.
They are arguing to do things that shouldn't be allowed anyway.
I don't have a lot of hope here. When most of the creme de la creme of the billionaire class capitulated to Trump at the beginning of his term, that set the tone for everything that followed IMO. It's astounding to me that so many are willing to see him trample on the Constitution and separation of powers when they'd scream like stuck pigs if any other party attempted it. And that's the way a lot of influential Americans like it I guess. Like I said, not a lot of hope. YMMV.
So the cornerstone of one of the most common types of scam, affinity fraud, as well as a cornerstone of salesmanship, is convincing an audience that you're just like them. You have the same likes and dislikes, the same hobbies, the same cultural references, the same beliefs and values and hopes and dreams.
And then you use that affinity to manipulate them, to get them to do what you want, to get them to give you money.
I think the tech worker / engineering / online crowd has really let themselves get duped.
Sure, maybe some tech billionaires did start out in a similar place as many of us.
But a lot of what they tell us as part of selling us their brand is just affinity fraud, telling us they're just like us with the same values of privacy and open source and some hippie notion of peace, love and understanding.
But it's just a trick, and they just want money, power and fame.
It's not so much as the billionaires capitulating, it's that they never were the people they pretended to be, and keeping up the act is no longer how they get what they want.
I basically agree here, but I would add that the framing here can sometimes sometimes be better described as “extortion”. Politicians have tremendous power and influence over many industries, I’ve seen the inside of a few situations where the politicians framed themselves as “taking on big business” where behind closed doors they were 100% calling the shots and handing executives directives on what they could or could not say publicly. The companies had no choice but to play along. When I see a big company take exactly the same public position as the current regulatory regime or administration in power, I don’t assume that they necessarily have any choice in the matter.
Benito Mussolini: 'Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.'
That is the reason why they would cry if the other party broke the rules to this degree. The other party is more aligned with regulations; taking power from corporations instead of giving it to them.
> The other party is more aligned with regulations; taking power from corporations instead of giving it to them.
Enough regulation is good, not enough and too much are both bad. Neither party has the best plan when it comes to regulation, Republicans want too little (increasing corporate power), Democrats want too much (increasing government power).
> Benito Mussolini: 'Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.'
He literally named it [1]!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Fascist_Party
Seems like it is probably a fake quote: https://politicalresearch.org/2005/01/12/mussolini-corporate...
More aligned? Sure. Pretty low bar though. There's a real opportunity in targeting abuses of technology like Flock cameras and surveillance capitalism but right now it's getting expressed as a luddite agenda against AI and datacenters and it won't go far because it throws the AI baby out with the datacenter bathwater IMO making them more into useful idiots than crusaders out to rein in corporate excess.
> many are willing to see him trample
there is little surprising about it
Trump is pushing in the direction of an Oligarchie, billionaires would be the future oligarchs.
So even iff a billionaire is no-okay with this development, if they stick out they
- will lose their status/money iff Trump wins long term
- will make enemies with many other billionaires, but a core trend of billionaires is taking advantage of connections to other powerful people
- will be the prime target to make and example of
So there is a high risk for sticking out. At the same time "mostly passively tagging along" will at worst make them oligarchs. At the same time they are used to crossing ethical boundaries to maximize profits. *This is just another form of that.*
In general its pretty much non-viable to go from sub/barely millionaire to billionaire by keeping to law, moral and ethics.
And it's not a secret either that any extreme concentrations of power or money are fundamental thread of _any_ democratic state of law, the US is no exception. The US has been warned that their system is very prone to populist take over and their checks and balances are quite brittle since _decades_. (At least since end of WW2 when people when people analyzed how Hitler took over post-WW1 Germany and wondered if the US could suffer a similar fate. And instead of improving the robustness, the general response was "nonsense, this is the US". Then after 9/11 thinks got worse, warnings that this can lead to a disaster where also many, but actions where none. And then in recent decades the US pushed in favor of monopolies instead of a (actual, practical) free market(1) to project more power internationally, and things got even worse.
(1): Monopolies and a (actual, practical) free Market are fundamentally incompatible. It also is kinda obvious why once you put away decades of deregulation propaganda.
Given there are only ~1135 billionaires in the USA right now, I'd say it's pretty much non-viable to go from sub/barely millionaire to billionaire period. But Taylor Swift doesn't seem to have murdered any kittens to get where she is nor did Rihanna so it can happen without totally selling out.
> When most of the creme de la creme of the billionaire class
... eats cheese pizza and were connected to Jeffrey Epstein. That includes prime ministers, secret services, trump, democrats, republicans, royalty.
Has nothing to do with Trump specifically. He's just the "currently voted-in guy" doing what he's being told to do.
"Oh but shadow government/deep state is just a dumb conspiracy-theory" ... yeah, just like an island of cheese pizza eating billionaires.
And who exactly (no not the Illuminati, the mole people, the Tartarian Empire or Atlantis etc) is giving him orders? Names please.
But you're right that the Epstein (guessing Mosad IMO) op had sure ensnared a lot of people who should have known better but I guess they're just like us in the sense that they only have enough blood to run one head at a time. To my knowledge though, Tim Cook, Bezos and Zuckerberg aren't in the Epstein files. So what's their excuse?
However, that still doesn't explain the secret space program to mine adrenochrome from missing kids renditioned to Mars and run from the basement of a Pizza restaurant. Because WTFF? https://www.space.com/37366-mars-slave-colony-alex-jones.htm...
But still, WHO is giving him orders? Or are you just assuming he must be following orders because the alternative that he's genuinely large and in charge is terrifying? That our republic basically mostly rolled over for him in less than one year perhaps even moreso?
Trump is mentioned over a million times in the Epstein files, he's deeply connected to Epstein. He is not "just the "currently voted-in guy" doing what he's being told to do."
>"Oh but shadow government/deep state is just a dumb conspiracy-theory" ... yeah, just like an island of cheese pizza eating billionaires.
This wasn't the conspiracy theory you guys believed in though. You were looking for a Satanic cabal of Democrat/leftist pedophiles and Trump was supposed to be the agent provocateur sent by God opposing the "deep state" and exposing the pedophiles. If anything, the Epstein files prove how utterly useless you lot were at actually identifying reality. The "cheese pizza" thing was never true. Pizzagate was never true. Trump was neck deep in all of it.
Being right in the sense that a broken clock is right twice a day is still being wrong.
[0]https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/do-the-new-epstein-f...
"you guys" ... "you" ... "you" ... etc etc.
... okay? I'm not even from the US. I don't even pick a side.
Whatever it was that you were reading, you should re-read it when you're capable of emotionless, analytical, objective conscious thoughts. That way you might manage avoiding mindlessly projecting your clearly emotional nonsense into my words.
Thanks! :)
I can't believe how many people take the anthropic statement at face value. You need to concentrate on what they are implicitly acknowledging. They will spy on non us citizens. How philanthropic
edit: how about the downvoters give a counterargument instead of trying to bury this comment?
The challenge for Americans is: can the political work of defining and protecting our values be outsourced to a company like Anthropic?
Anthropic (and others), whether due to financial/regulatory/competitive, will at some point permit their products to be used for any lawful purpose. Even if they attempt to restrict certain uses today. That arrangement is unlikely to hold.
Americans should vote for the right candidates and elect leaders who will carry and defend their views. I don't think there is any other way.
I'm not trying to have a cynical hot take, but the political class seems not to offer up any candidates that carry or defend my views and the path to these positions requires funding and resources I will never have access to.
The situation in the United States, right now, seems genuinely hopeless. And I'm certain I'm not the only person who feels this way.
What is there to do besides resign myself to what's coming and try my best to ignore the bullshit?
Pathetic but not unexpected that people are willing to tolerate such a use of AI. However, this is the most principled statement on the military use of AI that a frontier model leadership suite has released. It's also full of "china bad" sentiment that's worth picking over, but in a political and economic paradigm that expects & rewards blatant corruption, this statement still stands out.
It does look good on them, just one day after they accept to drop their AÍ safety net, which is a de facto abdication to the DoD. Their article is just (masterful)damage control
Anthropic has an excellent balance sheet. It basically has fuck you money that would let it walk away from the federal trough without existential risk. And hopefully extra dollars from users like me could compensate and then some in the fullness of time.
Being declared Supply Chain Risk means if you do ANY business with US government, you cannot use something.
So many companies have US Government contracts. Maybe they are not majority of their business like Lockheed Martin or RTX but look at F10, on that list, MAYBE Walmart is only one without US Gov Contract, everyone else likely does.
If they are deemed a supply chain risk under the DPA anyone doing business with them and has government contracts has to drop them, including Google and Microsoft. The $200M is small potatoes compared to this.
don't look at the profit and loss though
Do they? Are they different than OpenAi which I know has lots of debt and is losing money quarter over quarter with declining user share.
It has an excellent balance sheet that it’s actively chewing through, though.
Article doesn’t demonstrate a good understanding of DoW’s relationship with contractors. Anthropic wanted those sweet, sweet, taxpayer dollars—well, this is what happens when you make a Faustian bargain.
> One option is to invoke the Defense Production Act. . .
> Another threat would be to declare Anthropic to be a supply chain risk. . .
The first is a wrist-slap that still gets the government what they want; the second is an existential threat to Anthropic. Their main partners are all “dogs of the military”. Microsoft, Intuit, NVIDIA: all government contractors. I can’t find one company that they have a working relationship with that doesn’t hold at least one govt contract.
The idea that Claude could alignment fake its way out of a change in contractual terms is silly. The DoW has all sorts of legal and administrative tools it can choose to leverage against contractors that fail to perform. Usually it doesn’t, because of a “norm” that says the private defense sector runs more smoothly when the government doesn’t try to micromanage it.
Remind me again how good this administration is at upholding norms?
> Remind me again how good this administration is at upholding norms?
When it comes to killing and spying on people with flimsy justifications that's a pretty bipartisan norm. Hell, Anthropic isn't even saying they won't help the DoW do just that, they just want to make sure there's a human in the loop.
The "USA Freedom Act" [1], which made most of the Patriot act permanent, had bipartisan support.
I'm all for reversing the continual ramp up of the police state and the industrial military complex. We need to recognize, however, that it's being funded and pushed by both parties. Generally playing on fears of the scary other. (Muslim terrorists in 00s, Mexicans today).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_Freedom_Act
You’ve egregiously misread me. I spelled out the norm that the DoW would be violating if they decided to make good on their threats.
> Usually it doesn’t, because of a “norm” that says the private defense sector runs more smoothly when the government doesn’t try to micromanage it.
My comment has nothing to do with Anthropic’s “moral” or “ethical” stance.
I also don’t see the point in both-siding this. The situation at hand is before Hegseth and Trump. I can’t even remember Biden’s SecDef’s name.
My apologies, that wasn't my intent.
> I also don’t see the point in both-siding this. The situation at hand is before Hegseth and Trump. I can’t even remember Biden’s SecDef’s name.
To me, the moral and ethical problem is a bigger issue than the norms problem. There's a distinction without a difference between Hegseth doing this vs the Dems agreeing with Anthropic's demands and keeping a human in the loop on a massive spy and killing network. In some ways, stepping out of the norms and making a big news story is preferable to an unknown cabinet member just signing a business as usual agreement which erodes liberties. At least we know about it.
That's why I brought it up. It's great that Anthropic wants some safeguards, but ultimately the bigger problem is that AI with or without humans, significantly expands that ability of our military to murder and our spy agencies to spy.
There is no "DoW". Federal agencies, including the Department of Defense, are named by Congress. Just because the current administration wants to use a different name means nothing ... unless everyone just complies in advance. Will Congress actually rename it? Hard to say, but it doesn't seem very likely.
"Defense" is a harmful euphemism that misleads the American public, so in this case I'm happy to humor the admins decision.
Indeed, “defence” so obviously an Orwellian term for these departments, I’m very much in favour of the change.
Getting off-topic here but it was irritating that Anthropic's original announcement called them the Department of War. What was that even signaling?
The signalling in that post is about as clear as it can be.
They’re aggressively signalling that they are cooperative, and that they are not being belligerent. They are using the preferred language and much of the framing that the US government would use, to make it as clear as possible what the key points of their disagreement are, by leaning into alignment on everything else
This is textbook. People are reading this as some kind of confusing, inexplicable framing when it’s how any sensible person would write in their context. When you’re up against an authoritarian regime, that’s willing to abuse all the levers of power against you, you very carefully pick your fights and don’t give them any reason to complain about anything that isn’t essential.
Quibbling about the name of the department would be among the stupidest things I could possibly imagine. As it stands, I’m seeing lots of folks online who generally support the administration saying that Anthropic is correct here. If you gave them a bunch of stupid talking points about how anthropic is being disrespectful, you would lose those people. It doesn’t make sense, they’re obviously terrible people without a soul, but that’s reality.
> There is no "DoW".
There’s no Obamacare either. Come on, this is about as pedantic as the “the DoD is not the Pentagon” debate downthread.
It’s a colloquial name, and how the executive branch wants everyone to refer to it. This forum isn’t an official document. Move on.
If the title doesn't make a difference, then there's no point to insist on it. People say "the Pentagon" as shorthand for "military leadership in Washington." Not using the shorter term wouldn't do much beyond making news articles longer.
This administration says "Department of War" because they want to project an aggressive image. I support anyone who uses the legal name "Department of Defense" in an effort to reinforce an aspirational goal for the department and to remind others that the Executive Branch shouldn't be allowed to remake the entire government at will.
This is such a silly point to argue over. From 1789-1947 we had a "Department of War", which then merged into "Department of Army" under the newly formed (in 1947) National Military Establishment (NME) which was changed in 1949 to "Department of Defense" because N-M-E sound like "enemy".
It's not like these names are part of some sacred part of American identity, and "defense" has always been laughable as a euphemism. The DoD refers to themselves as the DoW [0] now, so it's completely reasonably to refer to the department as DoW. And of all the places to put your political energy, defending a laughable euphemism of a name that was used because the previous iteration of the name sounded funny seems like a sub-optimal use of that a energy.
0. https://www.war.gov/
> Anthropic wanted those sweet, sweet, taxpayer dollars
The sold services to a willing counterparty at mutually agreed upon terms. And now the other side of that deal has recalled that they're Twelve and You're Not My Real Mom You Can't Tell Me What To Do, and so wishes they had agreed to different terms and is throwing a tantrum to attempt to force a change.
And that's Anthropic's fault? That's a risk they should have predicted?
> The sold services to a willing counterparty at mutually agreed upon terms.
Yeah, and the legal environment that contract was written in, which both parties were aware of during negotiation, defines the means by which those terms can be changed.
> And that's Anthropic's fault? That's a risk they should have predicted?
It is deeply funny to me to imagine that an AI company doing inference at an unprecedented scale could not see this coming.
Go ask Claude how usgov should act if a contractor preemptively refuses to deliver. What are the top five tools they could use to demand compliance?
> preemptively refuses to deliver
See this is your confusion. They're not refusing to deliver, they're happy to provide the services agreed to at the rate negotiated. What they're refusing is a change in the terms.
If you contract me to build you a building, and I agree with a stipulation that it won't be used as a slaughterhouse (and that you'll write that into the deed), you can't compel me to continue building if you change your mind on that point six months in. You either break the contract subject to agreed terms, renegotiate to remove that clause, or stop breaching the contract.
Of all American claims to exceptionalism, one that rings closest to true is that the the people AND the government are all bound by the rule of law. Contracting with the government is no different than contracting with any other party.
Your point seems to be "but it's the government clearly they can do whatever they want lol" viz. DPA, Supply-Chain risk, etc. You're right that they have those powers. But accepting/asserting that the capricious, vengeful, use of those extraordinary powers should be an anticipated, normal feature of contracting with the government runs counter to what should be among our highest shared values. We might as well jump directly to the authoritarian logic 'they have the army, they can compel anything they want for $0, so just give them what they ask'.
(addenda: you're going to say we've used the DPA a bunch. I would argue that vanishingly few instances have compelled private enterprise to act in direct opposition to their own interests; an even in those cases they were just being asked to lose money (meatpackers, PG&E suppliers, ...))
The DoD can invoke the DPA on any company it wants. Not really sure how this becomes Anthropic's fault.
They knew what they were signing on to when they sought DoW funding. I guarantee Dario was briefed on the risks associated with high-profile govt contracting.
Even if not briefed, such a smart person surely knows that he owe's his stash of gold to the willingness of others to spill their blood to protect it. Those willing to spill their blood have historically always had a claim on your gold.
This whole standoff could set a very important precedent of the Trump administration not getting what they want, and not in a "maneuvered out of the news spotlight" kind of way (e.g. Greenland), but in a public "FUCK OFF right in your face" kind of way.
The worst that can happen to Anthropic is one of the two things mentioned; loosing some contracts or some fake forced management from the Pentagon. maybe Dario having to leave, certainly a loss for him and people who believe in him but probably nothing world-changing.
The worst that can happen to the Trump administration is the beginning of its end, when people realize you can simply stand up to their bullying and with all the standoffs they have going on in parallel, maybe they will die a death by a thousand cuts?
> The worst that can happen to Anthropic
The corporate death sentence usually goes something like "anyone who does business with Anthropic cannot do business with the US government". That pretty much means all the hyperscalers, major infrastructure providers, major software providers, and major corporations. They all have to choose between the entire US gov and all those contracts and a single AI company. That's the worst that can happen to Anthropic.
I hope this happens because it gives the next democratic administration more ammunition in abolishing corporate supremacy.
The executives at these huge corporations already know that they can stand up to the Trump administration, and that it will fold immediately. "TACO" is printed in the Wall St. Journal.
They willingly don't, because they know that they can use the administration to cement their market power. The surveillance state being built is one where would-be competitors, labor, well-meaning reformists, can be crushed on a whim for sham political reasons. A massive contraction of USA wealth, influence, and power, a loss of our living standard and place in the world -- that is the price everyone else has to pay, to keep the existing power structure in place. They will not release their grip on the wheel. Not until the ship hits the bottom of the sea.
If that is the bet they are placing, it is a bet they will lose. The power and capabilities of US corporations does not rest solely on those corporations, and as the wealth, influence and power of the USA undergoes "a massive contraction", they will find themselves similarly degraded. They might be the big fish in the big pond, but only because everyone knows there's a bigger fish (the US government). Once other countries, and other corporations, no longer care much what the US government thinks, US corporations will find themselves in a very, very different situation.
Of course! I think at some level the people at the top know that this American capitalism is not competitive. The last 5 years or so have been basically the whole country realizing that our system is not competitive. And, the last 1-2 years have been collectively, the world re-calibrating on this fact.
The monopolists don't care though. The power is too intoxicating.
I mean, listen to discussions here. "What's your moat?" -- that's how American capitalists think. Not "What value does your company provide to the customer", but what extra force, beyond simple-minded fair market competition, are you leveraging, to ensnare the customer. The game is to ensure that customers cannot choose another business over yours on its merits. That works in the short term but it's extractive. Eventually, the parasite must stop sucking blood for the host to survive.
> "TACO" is printed in the Wall St. Journal.
Can you elaborate?
>not in a "maneuvered out of the news spotlight" kind of way (e.g. Greenland)
I what world has the Greenland stuff been anything but a fuckoff?
> I what world has the Greenland stuff been anything but a fuckoff?
The world in which Europe didn't respond, Americans didn't flip out and Congress didn't push back.
>Europe didn't respond
https://komonews.com/news/nation-world/danish-mep-tells-trum...
US was told directly that its not happening. You had the military excisise that scared Trump so much that he ordered extra tariffs. Just because you don't follow the news doesn't make it that there wasn't any response.
Everything about this situation is absolutely bonkers. Marking a US company as a supply chain risk hasn't been done before AFAIK, and is a guaranteed end of the company.
It's the US government basically unilaterally deciding to end a leading AI researcher company. Years of lawsuits will follow, comparisons to "communism", accusations of Trump/Heghseth being Chinese/Russia agents (because well, how else do you hand over the AI win to China than by killing one of your top 2?)
> is a guaranteed end of the company
Why do you say this?
Because this means you can't use it in regulated industries, including vendors of companies in regulated industries. It means any company who buys Anthropic products can never sell services to a company who is in a regulated industry (or has customers in a regulated industry, or has customers who have customers who are in a regulated industry, etc etc).
and I was downvoted for this :-DD
> is a guaranteed end of the company.
It's trivially untrue. It could be the end of one type of business model, and it could slow their growth, but it could also be a blessing in disguise -- there are a lot of brilliant engineers who would prefer to work with an Anthropic that took a stand on ethics, and a lot of people who would prefer to support such a company. One door closes, another opens. They could become an open, public-facing, benevolent-AI company.
Just imagine if this move cascaded out of control and it ended up being the Trump administration that got blamed for pricking the AI bubble. This could become one of the most expensive power grabs in all of history.
I agree. This is a spectacular mistake. Anthropic has the best "AI" on the planet. Anthropic can spin up a giant "Claude" and plan rings around the Pentagon. DoD better get used to losing that fight.
Claude is the best, but Gemini with DoD money could get as good as Claude very easily
I think it'd be surprising if money is the limiting factor in Gemini's success considering Google has very deep pockets, so that's probably not true.
Also, Gemini with DoD money and DoD direction is likely to result in an AI that works very well for the DoD but significantly less well for other things, especially if your use case benefits from some guardrails (and most use cases do, because you rarely want AI to just do whatever it fancies.)
Gemini is just the worst of the 3 horses. The gov will eventually make them all to bend the knee. PRISM already showed they(eventually) all comply. I personally see this more like PR for Anthropic before the IPO
So? You can still win the race if you have the third fastest car on the planet.
The problem is they’re going to hit them with a wrench and no one will do anything because there’s no rule of law at that level left in the country. Just sycophancy and backroom deals.
the Pentagon is the name of a building (pretty much a very large bikeshed). I see the actual agency is named by the author as the Defense Department and one of the officials in question is a Defense Secretary. Interestingly, the bikeshed itself has its own spokespeople.
"The Pentagon" has been the nomenclature for DoD / DoW for decades. Everyone knows what it means.
Yeah, this is an incredibly common metonym.
The Pentagon is a synecdoche for military leadership in the United States.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche
there is also a figure of speech used soo often, called metonymy.
The White House is also the name of a building.
News sources have been using both building names (and several more I can think of off the top of my head) as short hand for the people who work inside of them for my entire life.
It’s called a metonym. Look it up.
yet it’s website is the department of war.
Officially, they're the Department of Defense. There was an EO signed last year that lets them use "Department of War" on all but their most official documents (since only Congress can officially change the name of the department).
Imagine one of the defense primes telling the DoW, "We won't build you these planes, they're just too darned lethal!"
The DoD is those defense contractors and companies' _primary target customer_. That doesn't just mean they're dependent on them as a customer. That means everyone working with, for, and adjacent to them has knowingly signed up to work with a defense contractor and to sell to someone that wants to use weapons in anger. That means these companies were mostly _founded_ to do that.
So instead, I invite you to imagine a medical supply company refusing to sell medical-grade sodium thiopental to the Bureau of Prisons.
Not even a close comparison. A regular plane does not make a decision to fire on a target.
It's not that they are too lethal. It's "we will not build a weapon system that is fully autonomous and acts without a human in the loop".
The big boy defense contractors won't touch that shit either because as soon as you mention the idea the engineers start shouting you down from the top of their lungs out of shear unbridled terror and the lawyers come storming in due to the endless legal risk said design would bring.
Mass Domestic surveillance sure they might do no problem but fully autonomous killbots or drones are gonna be a no go from pretty much every contractor other that doesn't carry a "missing the point of Lord of the Rings" name
Planes are fairly predictable, they can more or less be relied on to do that leadership asks them and not more. This stuff is more akin to nerve gas, there's no telling where it will go once deployed.
Yes, you're right. Military contractors supplying equipment that needlessly harms our own soldiers is pretty common, from what I understand. Soldiers following orders don't have much market power. "Occupational hazard", and then the brass sweeps the incidents under the rug. And paramilitary contractors are generally quite happy to supply things meant to directly hurt Americans (sonar weapons and tear gas used to attack Constitutional protests, etc). Both of these dynamics are applicable here. "AI" as it stands is a recipe for friendly fire incidents. And domestically, these capabilities will be used to turbocharge domestic surveillance as the con artist regime desperately needs ways to keep the wheels from coming off the cart.
So yes you're right, it sure is nice to imagine Anthropic setting off a wave of more military contractors acting with principles.
They are a private company they can largely sell or not sell they want. They aren’t saying they won’t build them because they are to effective they are saying they won’t build them because they aren’t safe.
Quoting statute:
> The President is hereby authorized (1) to require that performance under contracts or orders (other than contracts of employment) which he deems necessary or appropriate to promote the national defense shall take priority over performance under any other contract or order, and, for the purpose of assuring such priority, to require acceptance and performance of such contracts or orders in preference to other contracts or orders by any person he finds to be capable of their performance, and (2) to allocate materials and facilities in such manner, upon such conditions, and to such extent as he shall deem necessary or appropriate to promote the national defense.
My read of this interaction is Dario is calling out Hegseths' bluff. A bluff the latter didn't even know he was blundering into because Hegseth is an idiot.
SecDef invoking the DPA against Anthropic likely trashes the AI fundraising market, at least for a spell. That's why OpenAI is wading into the fight [1]. Given the Dow is sitting on a rising souffle of AI expectations, that knocks it out as well. And if there is one red line Trump has consistently hewed to and messaged on, it's in not pissing off the Dow.
[1] https://www.axios.com/2026/02/27/altman-openai-anthropic-pen...
The entire administration has been operating on empty threats (see Brendan Carr's FCC speech policing). But most companies don't call them out on it, they just roll over
Just imagine if the threats were to improve worker wages and conditions. Companies are showing that they are paper tigers. We will remember that. Looking forward to a future AOC or some other dem soc administration to just try to fight for the common man for once.
Imagine if it's just Grok that plays ball because Musk doesn't want to lose SpaceX's DoD contracts now it's the same outfit.
A strong argument for the other players to play ball. "Let us use your service or we will attach our kill trigger to a wildcard whim driven vendor."
I'll imagine Grok plays ball because this is an obviously blatantly fascist policy, and Elon did like 2 or 3 SIEG HEILs at the inauguration.
This frames it as Pentagon vs. Anthropic but the actual problem is upstream. If we tell companies they must prevent all possible harm, you're setting them up: nerf the model and silently lose value nobody can quantify, or don't nerf the model and get blamed for every bad outcome. We don't want nerf'd models either. DoW is saying that.
This isn’t an external directive; Anthropic was founded with the mission of creating safe, reliable AI systems. You wouldn’t see the same people working at the company if the company didn’t stand by its acceptable use policy and other internal standards
Isn't a safe and reliable intelligence an oxymoron?
Are you saying intelligence is inherently unsafe? That seems like a pretty wild conclusion and I can't see any logical way to jump to your opinions.