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Anthropic employees accuse Trump administration of targeting them

nytimes.com

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Re: Anthropic employees accuse Trump administration of targeting them

#201

Post by bflesch »

inglor_cz wrote: post #141
bflesch wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing of value is lost for Europe because we mostly work with natural intelligence. The malinvestment bubble happens in the US, and hardware prices will come down. We're all dependent on Taiwan but others also depend on ASML which is located in Europe. Available AI services are good enough, and we sit and watch while US leadership and population is beta testing AI mass surveillance for us. In terms of AI-based warf…

"In terms of AI-based warfare Ukraine is very much ahead and they are also European for which we are very thankful." Note that the Hornet drones which are now devastating Russian logistics behind the lines are US manufactured.

Source? Even if this is true it is not noteworthy, because the damage done by US to their allies far outweighs such small "help".

Re: Anthropic employees accuse Trump administration of targeting them

#202

Post by ifwinterco »

bflesch wrote: post #200
ifwinterco wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am British and have no love for the US right now but in terms of talent it’s notable how many prominent researchers at the top US labs are originally European, and the contrast with the top European labs (of which there are ~none). Does this actually matter as much as some people think? Probably not because LLMs won’t lead to AGI, but it is indicative of a broader problem

US startups are trying to do a commercialization of AI, but their marketing is about being a "lab" and doing "research" - which they are not. They're trying to commercialize the hell out of the LLM approach, while fundamental research is still happening at universities.

Fair point, but the issue I’m getting at is all too often from a European perspective the pipeline is:

Expensive publicly funded European education for 25 years -> high paid job in the US.

Costs are all paid by Europe, tax revenue and job creation all accrue to the US.

If we’re not careful it ends up being a straight transfer of value from ordinary European taxpayers to the US government which seems… suboptimal.

If the US can short circuit that process by shooting themselves in the foot, Europe will benefit

Re: Anthropic employees accuse Trump administration of targeting them

#203

Post by bflesch »

ifwinterco wrote: post #202
bflesch wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US startups are trying to do a commercialization of AI, but their marketing is about being a "lab" and doing "research" - which they are not. They're trying to commercialize the hell out of the LLM approach, while fundamental research is still happening at universities.

Fair point, but the issue I’m getting at is all too often from a European perspective the pipeline is: Expensive publicly funded European education for 25 years -> high paid job in the US. Costs are all paid by Europe, tax revenue and job creation all accrue to the US. If we’re not careful it ends up being a straight transfer of value from ordinary European taxpayers to the US government which seems… suboptimal. If t…

Fully agree but it is still a risk for the US, because if the clever immigrants notice they can't get as rich as their American-born peers and on top of that US leadership publicly antagonizes their country of origin, those foreign-born engineers can quickly become foreign agents.

Re: Anthropic employees accuse Trump administration of targeting them

#204

Post by InsideOutSanta »

sanderjd wrote: post #156
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no policy.

Everything the government does is a policy. This is a policy. This is regulation. It's just a very bad policy, a very bad way to do regulation.

I'm not sure whether there is a widely accepted definition of "policy" that matches yours, but if there is, it's not a helpful one. In general, a policy is a deliberate system of rules or guidelines.

Re: Anthropic employees accuse Trump administration of targeting them

#205

Post by wahnfrieden »

realusername wrote: post #68
wahnfrieden wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will use the best available while it is available. 8 months ago with Codex would be intolerable today.

I believe we have somewhat plateaued and each percentage gained seems to be an exponential effort. Fable was around 10x GPT5 pricing and 100x Chinese models pricing, was it really 100x better? I Don't think so. If you want a personal story, I just solved a complicated coding problem with Kimi 2.7 that GPT 5.4 failed with.

5.5 is far ahead 5.4. I don't see any plateau (from using these 16+ hours a day 7 days a week)

Re: Anthropic employees accuse Trump administration of targeting them

#206

Post by InsideOutSanta »

0xy wrote: post #132
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I have read their own claims. Here's the relevant part: "When Fable’s classifiers detect a request related to cybersecurity, biology and chemistry, or distillation, the response is automatically handled by Claude Opus 4.8 instead. Users will be informed whenever this occurs." Asking Fable to fix bugs in a code base is not "a request related to cybersecurity." When Fable was asked to fix bugs and then proceeded t…

Fable specifically refused to harden the security of codebases. If you use misdirection to force Fable to do just that, that's the removal of a guardrail. Anthropic specifically stated that ANY security requests should be shunted to Opus 4.8. This was bypassable. I don't see what your confusion here is. Fable was prevented from working on any security tasks. A significant amount of people, myself included, witnessed…

> If you use misdirection to force Fable to do just that, that's the removal of a guardrail.

Asking a model to fix bugs is neither misdirection nor a security request.

> I don't see what your confusion here is.

That's because I'm not confused :-)

> Fable was prevented from working on any security tasks

I don't think that's true based on what Anthropic said, and I also don't think it can be true.

What do you propose Fable's behavior should be if you ask it to fix bugs, and it encounters a security issue? I'm assuming your solution is that when you ask Fable to "fix bugs," and it encounters a bug that could be exploited as a security vulnerability, it should fall back to 4.8. But that doesn't solve the problem, because as a user, I can now see where that occurred, so I still know where the vulnerability is. That's not substantially different from the current outcome, where it just fixes the bug.

It would also mean that Fable could barely make it through any code review without falling back to 4.8, because almost any non-trivial code base has aspects that could be interpreted as security vulnerabilities.

The alternative would be for the model to use its hidden thinking to decide not to fix the bug, but that seems even worse.

Re: Anthropic employees accuse Trump administration of targeting them

#207

Post by inglor_cz »

bflesch wrote: post #201
inglor_cz wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"In terms of AI-based warfare Ukraine is very much ahead and they are also European for which we are very thankful." Note that the Hornet drones which are now devastating Russian logistics behind the lines are US manufactured.

Source? Even if this is true it is not noteworthy, because the damage done by US to their allies far outweighs such small "help".

https://militarnyi.com/en/articles/american-hornet-destroyin...

Here right from a Ukrainian military server.

"it is not noteworthy"

From a peaceful office in Germany, it might not be. For a country fighting for survival, the perspective is different. I don't think you could persuade them to give up Hornets right now, in the name of abstractly getting back at the US in general. (With whom they have a lot of bad blood!)

Re: Anthropic employees accuse Trump administration of targeting them

#208

Post by ifwinterco »

bflesch wrote: post #203
ifwinterco wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair point, but the issue I’m getting at is all too often from a European perspective the pipeline is: Expensive publicly funded European education for 25 years -> high paid job in the US. Costs are all paid by Europe, tax revenue and job creation all accrue to the US. If we’re not careful it ends up being a straight transfer of value from ordinary European taxpayers to the US government which seems… suboptimal. If t…

Fully agree but it is still a risk for the US, because if the clever immigrants notice they can't get as rich as their American-born peers and on top of that US leadership publicly antagonizes their country of origin, those foreign-born engineers can quickly become foreign agents.

Yes true, and the US is maybe big enough to adopt that approach.

It’s what China does (except for poaching people from Taiwan), but they have 1bn people so for them it makes sense

Re: Anthropic employees accuse Trump administration of targeting them

#209

Post by sanderjd »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #204
sanderjd wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything the government does is a policy. This is a policy. This is regulation. It's just a very bad policy, a very bad way to do regulation.

I'm not sure whether there is a widely accepted definition of "policy" that matches yours, but if there is, it's not a helpful one. In general, a policy is a deliberate system of rules or guidelines.

Yes there is, and it is a helpful one. It is good and helpful to have words that just mean a simple thing. The things an administration does are the policy of that administration. That policy been be a deliberate system, or it can be haphazard and arbitrary. It is still their policy either way.

Re: Anthropic employees accuse Trump administration of targeting them

#210

Post by tiahura »

sanderjd wrote: post #195
tiahura wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Argue with Anthropic, Amazon, and the NSA. They all say it is.

I disagree with them, but they aren't the ones I'm discussing this with here. I'm discussing it with you. What do you think?

I think none of us know the real facts.
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