Hegseth gives Anthropic until Friday to back down on AI safeguards

Seems like a very astute move for Anthropic.

They don't have runway anymore, they are in the air. This isn't going to break them financially, at least not in the short to mid term.

There is space for at least one AI company to put themselves on firmly principled ground. So when this current clown car that is the political leadership of the DoD crashes in a ditch (and it will), they'll still be standing there ready to do business with a group that isn't a bunch of mustache-twirling cartoon villains.

Current polling for this administration is within a rounding error of the level it was after they gathered a mob and sacked the nation's capitol[1]. Publicly kicking them in the balls isn't an idealistic blunder, it's a plain-as-day sound business strategy.

[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/203198/presidential-approval-ra...

I do not understand why it is a big deal for Antropic to lose the pentagon contract? I mean, they’re already making forays in the enterprise space and there’s 10s of other contracts Anthropic has already won. What makes this one so special?

> Who on earth believed that Russia was anything but a de facto dictatorship for roughly the past two decades?

There were lots of people in the Western media who genuinely believed that Putin would be toppled by Russian oligarchs just after the war in Ukraine got more intense in February 2022, on account of "this war is bad for the business of Russian oligarchs, hence they'll get rid of Putin". From the horse's mouth, a CNN article from March of 2022 [1]:

> Officials say their intentions are to squeeze those who have profited from Putin’s rule and potentially apply internal pressure for Russia to scale back or call off the offensive in Ukraine.

That "internal pressure" is mentioned in connection with the bad oligarchs, in fact as an implicit anti-thesis of those bad oligarchs "who have profited from Putin’s rule", the implication being that there were other oligarchs, supposedly the good ones, who would have forced Putin's hand to end the war. That did not happen, was never in the cards to happen, in fact.

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/25/world/russian-oligarch-st...

>Interesting that Amodei is the only major tech executive I can think of at the moment with a spine or any semblance of a moral compass. OpenAI/Google et al

it doesn't strike me as interesting at all; anthropic was literally foundeded on the whole concept of 'a less evil and morally aligned LLM' when he broke from oAI. Google and oAI don't stand to uproot their entire origin raison d'etre when they participate in nefarious shit.

I wonder what kind of morally aligned and ethical work Amodei was doing for Baidu & Google, before he had leverage to appear moral and ethical in dealings with the US govt, you know -- two companies that are famously ethical and moral.