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Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War

anthropic.com

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Re: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War

#101

Post by mwigdahl »

easton wrote: post #82
alach11 wrote: post #50

A significant part of Anthropic's cachet as an employer is the ethical stance they profess to take. This is no doubt a tough spot to be in, but it's hard to see Dario making any other decision here. What I don't understand is why Hegseth pushed the issue to an ultimatum like this. They say they're not trying to use Claude for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weapons. If so, what does the Department of War hav…

It’s not unusual for legal departments to take offense to these sorts of things, because now everyone using Claude within the DoD has to do some kind of audit to figure out if they’re building something that could be construed as surveillance or autonomous weapons (or, what controls are in place to prevent your gun from firing when Claude says, etc). A lot of paperwork. My guess is they just don’t want to bother. I w…

It's that, as I understand it. Anthropic is the only vendor certified to run its models on DoD/DoW classified networks.

Re: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War

#102

Post by astrange »

rvz wrote: post #26
danbrooks wrote: post #14

Props to Dario and Anthropic for taking a moral stand. A rarity in tech these days.

[flagged]

Anthropic is a PBC and if they violate the terms of that the shareholders (you) can sue them for securities fraud.

Re: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War

#103

Post by davidw »

inigyou wrote: post #86
davidw wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a one-election thing. It's going to be a generational effort to fix what these people are breaking more of every day. I hope I live to see it come to some kind of fruition - I recently turned 50.

Some people are calling it the "American century of humiliation" No other country that went through a phase like this has ever recovered. Not even in a century.

I won't give in to doomerism.

Germany, Italy and Japan are all wealthy, stable democracies right now. Not without their problems and baggage, but pleasant places in a lot of ways.

Re: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War

#104

Post by roxolotl »

_cenw wrote: post #24

As a "foreign national", what's the deal with making the distinction between domestic mass surveillance and foreign mass surveillance? Are there no democracies aside from the US? Don't we know since Snowden that if the US wants to do domestic surveillance they'll just ask GCHQ to share their "foreign" surveillance capabilities?

The US has a strong history of trying to avoid building domestic surveillance and a national police. Largely it’s due to the 4th amendment and questions about constitutionality. Obviously that’s going questionably well but historically that’s why it’s a red line.

Re: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War

#105

Post by gtsop »

_cenw wrote: post #24

As a "foreign national", what's the deal with making the distinction between domestic mass surveillance and foreign mass surveillance? Are there no democracies aside from the US? Don't we know since Snowden that if the US wants to do domestic surveillance they'll just ask GCHQ to share their "foreign" surveillance capabilities?

[dead]

Re: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War

#106

Post by helaoban »

All of these problems are downstream of the Congress having thoroughly abdicated its powers to the executive.

The military should be reigned in at the legislative level, by constraining what it can and cannot do under law. Popular action is the only way to make that happen. Energy directed anywhere else is a waste.

Private corporations should never be allowed to dictate how the military acts. Such a thought would be unbearable if it weren't laughably impossible. The technology can just be requisitioned, there is nothing a corporation or a private individual can do about that. Or the models could be developed internally, after having requisitioned the data centers.

To watch CEOs of private corporations being mythologized for something that a) they should never be able to do and b) are incapable of doing is a testament to how distorted our picture of reality has become.

Re: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War

#107

Post by dabockster »

_cenw wrote: post #24

As a "foreign national", what's the deal with making the distinction between domestic mass surveillance and foreign mass surveillance? Are there no democracies aside from the US? Don't we know since Snowden that if the US wants to do domestic surveillance they'll just ask GCHQ to share their "foreign" surveillance capabilities?

In the US, we have the ability to either confirm or change a significant chunk of our Federal government roughly every two years via the House of Representatives. The argument here is that we, theoretically, could collectively elect people that are hostile to domestic mass surveillance into the House of Representatives (and other places if able) and remove pro-surveillance incumbents from power on this two year cycle.

The reasons this hasn't happened yet are many and often vary by personal opinion. My top two are:

1) Lack of term limits across all Federal branches

and

2) A general lack of digital literacy across all Federal branches

I mean, if the people who are supposed to be regulating this stuff ask Mark Zuckerberg how to send an email, for example, then how the heck are they supposed to say no to the well dressed government contractor offering a magical black box computer solution to the fear of domestic terrorism (regardless of if its actually occurring or not)?

Re: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War

#108

Post by probably_wrong »

I have read the whole thing but I nonetheless want to focus on the second paragraph:

> Anthropic has therefore worked proactively to deploy our models to the Department of War

This should be a "have you noticed that the caps on our hats have skulls on it?" moment [1]. Even if one argues that the sentence should not be read literally (that is, that it's not literal war we're talking about), the only reason for calling it "Department of War" and "warfighters" instead of "Department of Defense" and "soldiers" is to gain Trump's favor, a man who dodged the draft, called soldiers "losers", and has been threatening to invade an ally for quite some time.

There is no such a thing as a half-deal with the devil. If Anthropic wants to make money out of AI misclassifying civilians as military targets (or, as it has happened, by identifying which one residential building should be collapsed on top of a single military target, civilians be damned) good for them, but to argue that this is only okay as long as said civilians are brown is not the moral stance they think it is.

Disclaimer: I'm not a US citizen.

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY

Re: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War

#109

Post by orochimaaru »

qaid wrote: post #62

I was reading halfway thru and one line struck a nerve with me: > But today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons. So not today, but the door is open for this after AI systems have gathered enough "training data"? Then I re-read the previous paragraph and realized it's specifically only criticizing > AI-driven domestic mass surveillance And neither denounces partially a…

They’re being used today by the military. So, they are never going to be against mass surveillance. They can scope that to be domestic mass surveillance though.
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