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Where things stand with the Department of War

anthropic.com

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Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#11

Post by nickvec »

stingraycharles wrote: post #8
nickvec wrote: post #4

Not sure why Dario apologized for the internal memo leak. Seems like an odd thing to backtrack on.

Probably because it hurts its position either in court or during negotiations with the DoW.

Right, I was hoping for Anthropic to stand its ground a bit more. There’s quite a bit of “ring kissing” undertones in today’s memo.

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#15

Post by ipnon »

stingraycharles wrote: post #8
nickvec wrote: post #4

Not sure why Dario apologized for the internal memo leak. Seems like an odd thing to backtrack on.

Probably because it hurts its position either in court or during negotiations with the DoW.

I think this is one of the weaknesses of rationalism and effective altruism, is that it tries to make a clean break from the common law legal reasoning that the government, and thus corporations, operate on. While I find rationalism to be a useful lens, the fact is that the common law legal framework is totally dominant, and so these deontological arguments made rationally collapse very quickly when translated to the dominant framework.

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#16

Post by jazzyjackson »

DoD still has not meaningfully moved to the DoW moniker, to me it represents the most fascist tendency, to make announcements and presume that’s enough to change the truth on the ground. The legal entity one contracts with is DoD. Going along with “DoW” is signal to me that a party has capitulated to the most absurd form of governance.

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#18

Post by hglaser »

It is incredible how far the overton window has moved on this issue.

When I graduated in 2007, it was common for tech companies to refuse to let their systems be used for war, and it was an ordinary thing when some of my graduating classmates refused to work at companies that did let their systems be used for war. Those refusals were on moral grounds.

Now Anthropic wants to have two narrow exceptions, on pragmatic and not moral grounds. To do so, they have to couch it in language clarifying that they would love to support war, actually, except for these two narrow exceptions. And their careful word choice suggests that they are either navigating or expect to navigate significant blowback for asking for two narrow exceptions.

My, the world has changed.

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