Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Anthropic walks back policy that could have 'sabotaged' researchers using Claude

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 41 posts

Re: Anthropic walks back policy that could have 'sabotaged' researchers using Claude

#21

Post by dannyw »

reasonableklout wrote: post #13
nmfisher wrote: post #5

Call me a cynic, but I don't believe this is a genuine change of heart at all. It feels much more like a panicked response to something that might undermine their IPO. Even if you trust Anthropic today (which I don't), they clearly don't want competition and there's no telling what other shady moves they'll pull in future. The only sustainable way forward is to support open models. I was already on the fence about wh…

I guess I don't understand why it's shady. It seems more like a poorly executed decision to enforce a publicly stated policy (it's been against Anthropic's ToS to use their models on frontier ML research for a while now). After all, people found out about this through their published system card. It is definitely a bad idea to do this without notifying the user, because users who are incorrectly affected will have no…

The trouble is the silence, not Anthropic setting guardrails. Claude saying "I'm sorry, I can't assist further because it looks like you're [XYZ]" is fine.

We all know the false positive rates for classifiers on Fable. Imagine being a ML researcher working on any kind of ML/AI project that isn't against their ToS, and having your codebase poisoned and sabotaged silently.

Re: Anthropic walks back policy that could have 'sabotaged' researchers using Claude

#22

Post by cyanydeez »

chatmasta wrote: post #10
LoganDark wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they are legitimately convinced that this model is so dangerous it could destroy the world and that they genuinely have the responsibility to prevent it from assisting other models to destroy the world. I don't think I agree that I should be forbidden from e.g. patching a binary to work on the latest macOS since the company behind it died and intentionally installed a time-based kill-switch (FUCK ADOBE for po…

The company was founded basically out of the effective altruism movement.

which is effectively a delusion about out racing entropy: guys, if we just make a lot of money, we can fix all thw problems that making a lot of money creates

Re: Anthropic walks back policy that could have 'sabotaged' researchers using Claude

#23

Post by cyanydeez »

LoganDark wrote: post #14
chatmasta wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s logical consideration with “logical” meaning Spock style logic, ie utilitarianism at all costs. Another prominent EA is SBF for example. It’s designed to sound innocuous and many of its cultish promoters may genuinely believe it’s innocuous, but it’s not.

Can you help me understand what costs? Utilitarianism alone would not necessarily be so obsessed with these safeguards -- Anthropic seems to have much more of an obsession with moral good than utilitarianism alone would suggest. I feel utilitarianism alone would likely be more obsessed with advancing the technology, making it generally available, and more generally compensating for attackers advancing at similar rate…

the problem is pretty simple. what do you think happens when you ignore the source of income needed to be "effectively altruistic" or the timelength needed to implement your altruism.

if I pollute your groundwater today, but promise you in the future to give you double the clean water, because ill make billions on some industrial process, youd understand.

the simple physics is about entropy: ignoring local effects and claiming youll do global good is effective altruism.

unless you misunderstand: the hard part of altruism is knowing whether you are actually doing good or just making yourself feel good by deluding the subject.

many social science fails to move social improvements from lab to real world implementation because of structural variables that cant be overcome.

so effective altruism is the belief you can reverse entropy by ignoring local effects...in practice

Re: Anthropic walks back policy that could have 'sabotaged' researchers using Claude

#24

Post by cindyllm »

cyanydeez wrote: post #22
chatmasta wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The company was founded basically out of the effective altruism movement.

which is effectively a delusion about out racing entropy: guys, if we just make a lot of money, we can fix all thw problems that making a lot of money creates

[dead]

Re: Anthropic walks back policy that could have 'sabotaged' researchers using Claude

#25

Post by LoganDark »

cyanydeez wrote: post #23
LoganDark wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you help me understand what costs? Utilitarianism alone would not necessarily be so obsessed with these safeguards -- Anthropic seems to have much more of an obsession with moral good than utilitarianism alone would suggest. I feel utilitarianism alone would likely be more obsessed with advancing the technology, making it generally available, and more generally compensating for attackers advancing at similar rate…

the problem is pretty simple. what do you think happens when you ignore the source of income needed to be "effectively altruistic" or the timelength needed to implement your altruism. if I pollute your groundwater today, but promise you in the future to give you double the clean water, because ill make billions on some industrial process, youd understand. the simple physics is about entropy: ignoring local effects an…

Thank you! So, this would cover things like ruining cities with datacenters under the impression that they'll understand once the global superintelligence cures cancer. Or etc.

I don't think Anthropic is the one aggressively expanding their datacenters to areas where literally everybody does not want them, but that's "effective altruism", right? Just justifying bads with a supposedly larger good?

Re: Anthropic walks back policy that could have 'sabotaged' researchers using Claude

#26

Post by Planktonne »

LoganDark wrote: post #19
EnPissant wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not real. It's like naming your movement "The Good People". It sprouted from the "Rationalist" community, which is even more self-aggrandizing. Neither has any hope of doing any good for the world as they don't understand evolutionary pressures. They are set up to reward making members feel smart, not accomplishing anything. And if they ever gain any real power, they will be corrupted immediately.

I don't see any of that in Anthropic at all. They're not intelligence above all else, not by a long shot. They're scared of intelligence and obsessed with ensuring it can't be abused, even as they advance the frontier.

That's what they claim, but it's not supported by their actions. As in the parent comment: saying you're the good guys doesn't make that real.

Re: Anthropic walks back policy that could have 'sabotaged' researchers using Claude

#27

Post by Balinares »

noduerme wrote: post #20
impulser_ wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah and their belief are fucking crazy and dangerous. They are literally sabotaging their users. They built in malware into their model if you prompt it about training a fucking AI model. It doesn't tell you, no it literally sabotages you by editing your prompt and intentionally goes against your request. You want fucking nut jobs like this building models? It's one thing to build safeguards on your model and have i…

Is it really crazy to nerf a proprietary model to prevent it from training another model? I don't think that's even remotely similar to giving bad medical advice.

Given that the "proprietary" model is built on stolen work at an unprecedented scale, it's at the very least hypocritical to a degree that would not be possible without a fundamentally amoral mindset.

Re: Anthropic walks back policy that could have 'sabotaged' researchers using Claude

#28

Post by maniacwhat »

One takeaway from this is that anthropic do not want their public-facing model to be good at advanced ML research.

With that incentive it seems reasonable to assume that future anthropic models will not be good at ML research, at least because they aren't incentivised to make it so, and therefore using other models perhaps open source will be the way to go.

This does make the large assumption that they can afford to train a parallel model for themselves to assist in their own research. But given their huge valuation, and incentives, that extra cost is feasibly worth it for them.

Re: Anthropic walks back policy that could have 'sabotaged' researchers using Claude

#30

Post by skeledrew »

impulser_ wrote: post #9
reasonableklout wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, nerfing Claude on frontier research tasks is consistent with Anthropic's stated beliefs. So in that sense you can trust them to always behave consistently if strangely. But this launch was done very poorly with the lack of transparency on when the frontier research policy was violated.

Yeah and their belief are fucking crazy and dangerous. They are literally sabotaging their users. They built in malware into their model if you prompt it about training a fucking AI model. It doesn't tell you, no it literally sabotages you by editing your prompt and intentionally goes against your request. You want fucking nut jobs like this building models? It's one thing to build safeguards on your model and have i…

> You want fucking nut jobs like this building models?

It takes *nut jobs" to advance tech like this at the speed it is. They have strong beliefs and they work hard to realize those beliefs.

Post reply on HN