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The Pentagon is making a mistake by threatening Anthropic

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Re: The Pentagon is making a mistake by threatening Anthropic

#121

Post by disillusioned »

mothballed wrote: post #96
ACCount37 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have fully autonomous weapons, and had them for over a century. We call them "landmines". I expect autonomous weapons of the near future to look somewhat similar to that. They get deployed to an area, attack anything that looks remotely like a target there for a given time, then stand down and return to base. That's it. The job of the autonomous weapon platform isn't telling friend from foe - it's disposing of eve…

I guess by that definition, a bullet is also autonomous. It will strike anything in its path of flight, autonomously without further direction from the operator.

Bullets don't kill people, etc. etc.

If anything represents the logical conclusion of that tired fallacy, it'll be actually autonomous, "thinking" drones which make the targeting decisions and execution decisions on their own, not based on any direct, human-led orders, but derived from second-order effects of their neural net. At a certain point, it's not going to matter who launched the drones, or even who wrote the software that runs on the drones. If we're letting the drones decide things, it'll just be up to the drones, and I don't love our chances making our case to them.

Re: The Pentagon is making a mistake by threatening Anthropic

#122

Post by Loughla »

gip wrote: post #108
khalic wrote: post #72

I can't believe how many people take the anthropic statement at face value. You need to concentrate on what they are implicitly acknowledging. They will spy on non us citizens. How philanthropic edit: how about the downvoters give a counterargument instead of trying to bury this comment?

The challenge for Americans is: can the political work of defining and protecting our values be outsourced to a company like Anthropic? Anthropic (and others), whether due to financial/regulatory/competitive, will at some point permit their products to be used for any lawful purpose. Even if they attempt to restrict certain uses today. That arrangement is unlikely to hold. Americans should vote for the right candidat…

I'm not trying to have a cynical hot take, but the political class seems not to offer up any candidates that carry or defend my views and the path to these positions requires funding and resources I will never have access to.

The situation in the United States, right now, seems genuinely hopeless. And I'm certain I'm not the only person who feels this way.

What is there to do besides resign myself to what's coming and try my best to ignore the bullshit?

Re: The Pentagon is making a mistake by threatening Anthropic

#123

Post by khalic »

MWParkerson wrote: post #119
khalic wrote: post #72

I can't believe how many people take the anthropic statement at face value. You need to concentrate on what they are implicitly acknowledging. They will spy on non us citizens. How philanthropic edit: how about the downvoters give a counterargument instead of trying to bury this comment?

Pathetic but not unexpected that people are willing to tolerate such a use of AI. However, this is the most principled statement on the military use of AI that a frontier model leadership suite has released. It's also full of "china bad" sentiment that's worth picking over, but in a political and economic paradigm that expects & rewards blatant corruption, this statement still stands out.

It does look good on them, just one day after they accept to drop their AÍ safety net, which is a de facto abdication to the DoD. Their article is just (masterful)damage control

Re: The Pentagon is making a mistake by threatening Anthropic

#124

Post by strangattractor »

b112 wrote: post #103
SecretDreams wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> untrustworthy the current DOD leadership is as as customer. Less than a year left on this clock.

You sure? War with Canada is about to break out, and you can't have elections when at war.

In the US elections cannot be canceled even when Martial Law is declared. That does not mean a certain someone will not try to simply ignore the Constitution given his track record of simply ignoring the Constitution

Re: The Pentagon is making a mistake by threatening Anthropic

#125

Post by rhfjfkfkf »

troyvit wrote: post #83
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no "DoW". Federal agencies, including the Department of Defense, are named by Congress. Just because the current administration wants to use a different name means nothing ... unless everyone just complies in advance. Will Congress actually rename it? Hard to say, but it doesn't seem very likely.

Getting off-topic here but it was irritating that Anthropic's original announcement called them the Department of War. What was that even signaling?

The signalling in that post is about as clear as it can be.

They’re aggressively signalling that they are cooperative, and that they are not being belligerent. They are using the preferred language and much of the framing that the US government would use, to make it as clear as possible what the key points of their disagreement are, by leaning into alignment on everything else

This is textbook. People are reading this as some kind of confusing, inexplicable framing when it’s how any sensible person would write in their context. When you’re up against an authoritarian regime, that’s willing to abuse all the levers of power against you, you very carefully pick your fights and don’t give them any reason to complain about anything that isn’t essential.

Quibbling about the name of the department would be among the stupidest things I could possibly imagine. As it stands, I’m seeing lots of folks online who generally support the administration saying that Anthropic is correct here. If you gave them a bunch of stupid talking points about how anthropic is being disrespectful, you would lose those people. It doesn’t make sense, they’re obviously terrible people without a soul, but that’s reality.

Re: The Pentagon is making a mistake by threatening Anthropic

#126

Post by chasd00 »

jasongill wrote: post #98
Eggpants wrote: post #52

What’s interesting is Anthropic being singled out here. That either means: 1- OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc have no problem with their products being used to kill people so no need to bully them. 2- These other products are so terrible at the task that the clown shoe wearing SecDef is forced to try to bully Anthropic.

WaPo is reporting that OpenAI and xAI already agreed to the Pentagon's "any lawful use" clause, aka, mass surveillance and fully autonomous killbots. From the WaPo article https://archive.is/yz6JA#selection-435.42-435.355 > Officials say other leading AI firms have gone along with the demand. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, Google and Elon Musk’s xAI have agreed to allow the Pentagon to use their systems for “all lawfu…

> fully autonomous killbots

I keep hearing this but it should be plainly obvious to everyone (at least here) that an LLM is not the right AI for this use case. That's like trying to use chatgpt for an airplane autopilot, it doesn't make sense. Other ML models may but not an LLM. Why does the "autonomous killbot" thing keep getting brought up when discussing Anthropic and other llm providers?

For reference, "autonomous killbots" are in use right now in the Ukraine/Russia war and they run on fpv drones, not acres of GPUs. Also, it should be obvious that there's a >90% probability every predator/reaper drone has had an autonomous kill mode for probably a decade now. Maybe it's never been used in warfare, that we know of, but to think it doesn't exist already is bonkers.

Re: The Pentagon is making a mistake by threatening Anthropic

#127

Post by intrasight »

TimorousBestie wrote: post #40
bpodgursky wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The DoD can invoke the DPA on any company it wants. Not really sure how this becomes Anthropic's fault.

They knew what they were signing on to when they sought DoW funding. I guarantee Dario was briefed on the risks associated with high-profile govt contracting.

Even if not briefed, such a smart person surely knows that he owe's his stash of gold to the willingness of others to spill their blood to protect it. Those willing to spill their blood have historically always had a claim on your gold.

Re: The Pentagon is making a mistake by threatening Anthropic

#128

Post by pavlov »

bhelkey wrote: post #106
b112 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sure? War with Canada is about to break out, and you can't have elections when at war.

Is this sarcasm? The US held elections during World War II [1]. [1] https://www.britannica.com/event/United-States-presidential-...

The US President in 1944 was someone who wanted to have elections. In 2026 this is not the case anymore. How much of a difference it makes, nobody knows.

Re: The Pentagon is making a mistake by threatening Anthropic

#129

Post by krapp »

5o1ecist wrote: post #99
LogicFailsMe wrote: post #21

I don't have a lot of hope here. When most of the creme de la creme of the billionaire class capitulated to Trump at the beginning of his term, that set the tone for everything that followed IMO. It's astounding to me that so many are willing to see him trample on the Constitution and separation of powers when they'd scream like stuck pigs if any other party attempted it. And that's the way a lot of influential Ameri…

[flagged]

Trump is mentioned over a million times in the Epstein files, he's deeply connected to Epstein. He is not "just the "currently voted-in guy" doing what he's being told to do."

>"Oh but shadow government/deep state is just a dumb conspiracy-theory" ... yeah, just like an island of cheese pizza eating billionaires.

This wasn't the conspiracy theory you guys believed in though. You were looking for a Satanic cabal of Democrat/leftist pedophiles and Trump was supposed to be the agent provocateur sent by God opposing the "deep state" and exposing the pedophiles. If anything, the Epstein files prove how utterly useless you lot were at actually identifying reality. The "cheese pizza" thing was never true. Pizzagate was never true. Trump was neck deep in all of it.

Being right in the sense that a broken clock is right twice a day is still being wrong.

[0]https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/do-the-new-epstein-f...

Re: The Pentagon is making a mistake by threatening Anthropic

#130

Post by snowwrestler »

Use of the DPA can be litigated, and surely would be. Designation as a supply chain risk surely would be as well.

These court cases would produce bad outcomes either way. If the court finds for Anthropic, future DoD leadership will find itself constrained or at least chilled. Or if the court finds for the government, an expansive permissive view of the DPA might encourage future administrations to compel tech companies to make AIs break the law in other ways, for example by suppressing certain political points of view in output.

National defense is strongest if the military is extremely powerful but carefully judicious in the application of that power. That gives us the highest “top end” capability of performance. If military leadership insists on acting recklessly, then eventually guardrails are installed, with the result of a diminished ability to respond effectively to low-probability, high risk moments. One of many nuances and paradoxes the current political leadership does not seem to understand.

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