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Statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth

anthropic.com

101–110 of 392 posts

Re: Statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth

#101
post #13

Doesn't NSA have a backdoor to all these companies by default? I could have sworn I read somewhere years ago that the government demands a backdoor to all US companies if they can't get in on their own.

A backdoor is a completely different thing when it comes to an AI company, as compared to a social media company. Not really even sure what it would mean when it comes to doing inference on an LLM. Having access to the weights, training data and inference engine?

The model of Claude the DoD is asking for more than likely doesn't even exist in a production ready form. The post-training would have to be completely different for the model the DoD is asking for.

Re: Statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth

#103

Anthropic is welcome to set up shop here in Canada! I hear Victoria BC is great. Absolutely brimming, overflowing with technology talent

Actually why is nobody in Cali just trying to join Canada - would be better for everyone in terms of more similar culture and values. Weird that it isn't discussed more

If I had to guess as a lifelong California resident, I'd say the salary discrepancy is probably the biggest factor. I'd also guess the weather and lack of available jobs would be the next biggest factors, not necessarily in that order.

Re: Statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth

#104
post #94

I used to work at Anthropic, and I wrote a comment on a thread earlier this week about Anthropic's first response and the RSP update [1][2]. I think many people on HN have a cynical reaction to Anthropic's actions due to of their own lived experiences with tech companies. Sometimes, that holds: my part of the company looked like Meta or Stripe, and it's hard not to regress to the mean as you scale. But not every patt…

So many tech companies have the "high values" screed that it really just seems like a standard step in the money plan.

Re: Statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth

#105
post #98
post #94

I used to work at Anthropic, and I wrote a comment on a thread earlier this week about Anthropic's first response and the RSP update [1][2]. I think many people on HN have a cynical reaction to Anthropic's actions due to of their own lived experiences with tech companies. Sometimes, that holds: my part of the company looked like Meta or Stripe, and it's hard not to regress to the mean as you scale. But not every patt…

[flagged]

All corporations are to an extent. It’s a question of magnitude, not absolutes.

You, too, are driven by money. Yet I’m certain you maintain a set of principles and values. Let’s keep the discussion productive yeah?

Re: Statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth

#107

The people that need to see this are the VPs and execs at Apple, Meta, Google, OAI so they can perhaps reflect on what it looks like to be a good & principled person as opposed to just a successful person.

DoD/DoW can't strong-arm these companies into unreasonable demands if they present a united front... and that's exactly why collective action (or even unionization) matters. If the government really wants to, it could try building its "Skynet" on open-source Chinese models.. which would be deeply ironic.

So your position is that the United States doesn't get to have it's own Skynet, because Skynet is bad, and that if it really wants to it should fork the Chinese Skynet so that it can have a Skynet if it wants it so much.

Do you see the problem here. Genuinely don't think we would've won WWII if these people were running things back then.

Re: Statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth

#108

This is kind of crazy. Instead of just cancelling a mutually-agreed upon contract where Anthropic refused to bow to sudden new demands, the Dept of Defense went straight to the nuclear option: threatening to label an American tech company as a "supply chain risk" which is a heavy-handed tactic usually reserved for foreign adversaries (think Huawei or DJI). It's also incoherent that the DoD/DoW was threatening to invo…

Are they just threatening to label? It seems to me like they have already labeled.

Re: Statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth

#109
Why is DoD contracting with Anthropic exclusively rather than OpenAI or Google? Their models are all roughly as powerful and they seem both more capable and more willing to cozy up with the military (and this administration) than a relatively scrappy startup focused on model sentience and well-being. Hell, even Grok would be a better fit ideologically and temperamentally.
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