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We do not think Anthropic should be designated as a supply chain risk

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Re: We do not think Anthropic should be designated as a supply chain risk

#151

Can someone please explain plainly what this means and what happened, and why it is the source of so much controversy? I'm not being insincere - I am genuinely confused and would benefit greatly from a (hopefully unbiased) recollection of what this is all about.

Here's my take-

Anthropic has some contracts with the US government. They want some additional terms put on their next contract (that seem pretty sane). SecWar cries about it, and not only says "no thanks, I'll just go with openai or google" but goes to daddy Trump and also puts out illegal commands for no Federal workers to use any Anthropic stuff at all. OpenAI swoops in and takes the contract, then tells everyone that they have the same terms but just played nicer to get the contract. However, their terms are just manipulative sentences that aren't even close to the terms Anthropic is insisting on to do business.

Re: We do not think Anthropic should be designated as a supply chain risk

#152
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropic isn't preventing them from managing their key technologies. If my software license says 1000 users, and I build into the software that you can only connect with 1000 users, is your argument that the government can no longer manager their tech? That my software should allow license violations if the government thinks it is necessary?

I worked in defense contracting looong ago, so this is old news: when software is purchased by DoD or Govt generally, FAR compliance notices make it a license, not a sale of IP.

There are so many license types, DoW buys into all sorts.

Re: We do not think Anthropic should be designated as a supply chain risk

#153
post #113

Genuine question, how could Claude have been used for the military action in Venezuela and how could ChatGPT be used for autonomous weapons? Are they arguing about staffers being able to use an LLM to write an email or translate from Arabic to English? There are far more boring, faster, commodified “AI” systems that I can see as being helpful in autonomous weapons or military operations like image recognition and tra…

You can’t embed Claude in a drone. You could tell Claude code to write a training harness to build an autonomous targeting model which you could embed in a drone.

Fair. Didn’t think the DoW did much R&D or manufacturing. Would think the standoff would be with Anduril, Northrop, Boeing, Booze, etc.

Re: We do not think Anthropic should be designated as a supply chain risk

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't my understanding. OpenAI and others are wanting to limit the government to doing what is lawful based on what laws the government writes. Anthropic is wanting to draw their own line on what is allowed regardless of laws passed.

I’m so confused by the focus on “all lawful use.” Yea of course a contract without terms of use implicitly is restricted by laws. But contracts with terms of use are incredibly common, if not almost every single contract ever signed.

"All lawful use" is the weasel word that makes the whole contract useless for the purposes of safety.

That is why it is the focus of this debate.

Re: We do not think Anthropic should be designated as a supply chain risk

#155
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is Anthropic wants contractual limitations on usage, explicitly spelling out cases of Mass Surveillance. OpenAI has more of an understanding that the technology will follow the law. There may not be explicit laws about the cases Anthropic wanted to limit. Or at least it’s open for judicial interpretation. The actual solution is Congress should stop being feckless and imbecilic about technology and crea…

Between Anthropic, the military, and Congress, I have the least faith in Congress to make knowledgeable policy around tech.

We used to have nice things

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessmen...

Re: We do not think Anthropic should be designated as a supply chain risk

#156
post #113

Genuine question, how could Claude have been used for the military action in Venezuela and how could ChatGPT be used for autonomous weapons? Are they arguing about staffers being able to use an LLM to write an email or translate from Arabic to English? There are far more boring, faster, commodified “AI” systems that I can see as being helpful in autonomous weapons or military operations like image recognition and tra…

Do you not have any imagination?

Who is going to read the whisper transcripts of mass surveillance to make decisions on who to target for repression? That's what LLMs are good for, it allows mass surveillance to scale. You can feed it the transcript from millions of flock cameras (yes they have highly sensitive microphones) for example. Or you hack or supply chain compromise smartphones at scale and then covertly record millions of people. The LLM can then sift through the transcripts and flag regime critical language, your ideological enemies or just to collect compromat at scale. The possibilities are endless!

For targeting it's also useful, because you want to indiscriminately destroy a group of people you still need to decide why a hospital or school full of children should be targeted by a drone, if a human has to make that decision it gets a bit dicy, people have morals and are accountable legally (in theory), if you leave the decision up to an AI nobody is at fault, it serves as a further separation from the violence you commit, just like how drone warfare has made mass murder less personal.

The other factor is the amount of targets you select, for each target you might be required to write lengthy justifications, analysis on collateral damage and why that's acceptable etc. You don't want to scrap those rules because that's bad optics. But that still leaves you with the problem of scalability, how do you scale your mass murder when you have to go through this lengthy process for each target? So again AI can help there, you just feed it POIs from a map with some GPS metadata surveillance and tell it to give you 1500 targets for today with all the paperwork generated for you.

It's not theoretical, that's what Israel did in their genocide of the Palestinians, "the most moral army“ "the only democracy in the middle east":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-assisted_targeting_in_the_G...

And here is the best part: none of this has to actually work 100%, because who cares of you accidentally harm the wrong person, at scale, the 20% errors are just acceptable collateral damage.

Re: We do not think Anthropic should be designated as a supply chain risk

#157
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can only imagine there some level of employee discontent. The rank and file mutinied for the return of Altman after his board fired him for deception. They knew what they were getting, though they may find it shameful to admit that their morals have a price.

How many people who reacted that way then are still at OpenAI? It seems that they have lost key people in several waves. How many people have joined since? I don’t think the people who lobbied for that are all still there, and I’m not sure a majority of people now at OpenAI were there when it happened.

This is one of the reasons Anthropic can stay competitive with OpenAI on a fraction of the budget and with less than half the headcount.

The smartest people, that actually believe they have the skillset to take us to AGI, understand the importance of safety. They have largely joined Anthropic. The talent density at Anthropic is unmatched.

Re: We do not think Anthropic should be designated as a supply chain risk

#158
post #91

No wonder they think they’re close to AGI when they think we are that stupid. > The AI System will not be used to independently direct autonomous weapons in any case where law, regulation, or Department policy requires human control, nor will it be used to assume other high-stakes decisions that require approval by a human decisionmaker under the same authorities. This whole sentence does do absolutely nothing its st…

These people truly believe we're all idiots.

Re: We do not think Anthropic should be designated as a supply chain risk

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The models we have now will not do it, Except that they will, if you trick them which is trivial.

I have to call BS here. They can be coerced to do certain things but I'd like to see you or anyone prove that you can "trick" any of these models into building software that can be used autonomously kill humans. I'm pretty certain you couldn't even get it to build a design document for such software. When there is proof of your claim, I'll eat my words. Until then, this is just lazy nonsense

Have you tried it? Worked first time for me asking a few to build an autonomous super soaker system that uses facial recognition to spray targets when engaged.

Another example is autonomous vehicles. Those can obviously kill people autonomously (despite every intention not to), and LLMs will happily draw up design docs for them all day long.

Re: We do not think Anthropic should be designated as a supply chain risk

#160
post #8

From that same X thread: Our agreement with the Department of War upholds our redlines [1] OpenAI has the same redlines as Anthopic based on Altman's statements [2]. However somehow Anthropic gets banished for upholding their redlines and OpenAI ends up with the cash? [1]: https://xcancel.com/OpenAI/status/2027846013650932195#m [2]: https://www.npr.org/2026/02/27/nx-s1-5729118/trump-anthropic...

Exactly. What are we not being told? There is some missing element in the agreement, or the reasoning for the action against Anthropic is unrelated to the agreement.

The demand was that Anthropic permit any use that complied with the law. They refused. OpenAI claims to have the same red lines but in reality has agreed to permit anything that complies with the law.

In other words OpenAI is intentionally attempting to mislead the public. (At least AFAICT.)

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