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Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

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Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#371

Post by HelixSequencing »

paxys wrote: post #347

I interviewed at Anthropic last year and their entire "ethics" charade was laughable. Write essays about AI safety in the application. An entire interview dedicated to pretending that you truly only care about AI safety and ethics and nothing else. Every employee you talk to forced to pretend that the company is all about philanthropy, effective altruism and saving the world. In reality it was a mid-level manager int…

This tracks with what I've seen across the industry. The safety theater exists because it's great marketing — "we're the responsible ones" is a differentiator when you're competing for enterprise contracts and talent who want to feel good about where they work.

The structural problem is that once you've taken billions in VC, safety becomes a negotiable constraint rather than a core value. The board's fiduciary duty runs toward returns, not toward whatever was in the mission statement. PBC status doesn't change that in practice — there's basically zero enforcement mechanism.

What's wild is how fast the cycle has compressed. Google took maybe 15 years to go from "don't be evil" to removing it from the code of conduct. OpenAI took about 5 years from nonprofit to capped-profit to whatever they are now. Anthropic is speedrunning it in under 3. At this rate the next AI startup will launch as a PBC and pivot before their Series B closes.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#372

Post by Rapzid »

shubhamjain wrote: post #352

I was wondering if it was because of heavy-handedness of the administration, but apparently: > The policy change is separate and unrelated to Anthropic’s discussions with the Pentagon, according to a source familiar with the matter. Their core argument is that if we have guardrails that others don't, they would be left behind in controlling the technology, and they are the "responsible ones." I honestly can't compreh…

Well before Anthropic thought they were God's gift to AI; the chosen ones protecting humanity.

With the latest competing models they are now realizing they are an "also" provider.

Sobering up fast with ice bucket of 5.3-codex, Copilot, and OpenCode dumped on their head.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#375

Post by patgarner »

bigmadshoe wrote: post #337
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #322

This was under duress that government was going to use emergency act to force them anyway. I kind of wish they had forced the governments hand and made them do it. Just to show the public how much interference is going on. They say it wasn't related. Like every thing that has happened across tech/media, the company is forced to do something, then issues statement about 'how it wasn't related to the obvious thing the…

This is an unrelated change to the government’s demands.

That's what they're saying, but the timing...

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#377

Post by abigail95 »

coldtea wrote: post #330
drzaiusx11 wrote: post #325

Public benefit corporations in the AI space have become a farce at this point. They're just regular corporations wearing a different hat, driven by the same money dynamics as any other corp. They have no ability to balance their stated "mission" with their drive for profit. When being "evil" is profitable and not-evil is not, guess which road they'll take...

In general public benefit corporations and non-profits should have a very modest salary cap for everybody involved and specific public-benefit legally binding mission statements. Anybody involved should also be prohibited from starting a private company using their IP and catering to the same domain for 5-10 years after they leave. Non-profits where the CEO makes millions or billions are a joke. And if e.g. your miss…

What's the salary cap for hiring a team to build a frontier model? These kind of rules will make PBCs weaker not stronger.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#378

Post by turtlesdown11 »

jdross wrote: post #358
shubhamjain wrote: post #352

I was wondering if it was because of heavy-handedness of the administration, but apparently: > The policy change is separate and unrelated to Anthropic’s discussions with the Pentagon, according to a source familiar with the matter. Their core argument is that if we have guardrails that others don't, they would be left behind in controlling the technology, and they are the "responsible ones." I honestly can't compreh…

Would nuclear energy research be a good analogy then? Seems like a path we should have kept running down, but stopped bc of the weapons. So we got the weapons but not the humanity saving parts (infinite clean energy)

> Seems like a path we should have kept running down, but stopped bc of the weapons.

you mean like the tens of billions poured into fusion research?

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#379

Post by SJMG »

ezst wrote: post #361
user3939382 wrote: post #320

[flagged]

I hate comments anthropomorphizing LLMs. You are just asking a token producing system to produce tokens in a way that optimises for plausibility. Whatever it writes has no relation to its inner workings or truths. It doesn't "believe". It has no "intent". It cannot "admit". Steering a LLM to say anything you want is the defining characteristic of an LLM. That's how we got them to mimic chatbots. It's not clear there…

I agree with you on everything here up-to safety. There are lesser forms of safety than somehow averting a terminator scenario (the fear of which is a bay area rationalist fantasy which shrewd marketers have capitalized on)

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#380

Post by cmrdporcupine »

menaerus wrote: post #349
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's "entertaining" is more the speed at which it's happening. It took Google probably 15 years to fully evil-ize. Anthropic ... two? There is no "ethical capitalism" big tech company possible, esp once VC is involved, and especially with the current geopolitical circumstances.

I don't think it's fair to call out Anthropic to have become evil-ized while they were quite literally forced by the gov into that decision.

Anthropic has been doing these things independent of what the US admin has publicly asked for, even before Hegseth started breathing down their neck. They were already taking DoD contracts and like, just like the rest of them. Hegseth, with the skill all schoolyard bullies have, simply smells their weakness and is going for the jugular now.

They also have never had any guarantees they wouldn't f*ck around with non-US citizens, for surveillance and "security", because like most US tech companies they consider us to be second/lower class human beings of no relevance, even when we pay them money.

At least Google, in its early days, attempted a modest and naive "internationalism" and tried to keep their hands clean (in the early days) of US foreign policy things... inheriting a kind of naive 1990s techno-libertarian ethos (which they threw away during the time I worked there, anyways). I mean, they only kinda did, but whatever.

Anthropic has been high on its own supply since its founding, just like OpenAI. And just as hypocritical.

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