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Did Anthropic ask for this?

verysane.ai

21–30 of 176 posts

Re: Did Anthropic ask for this?

#21
The premise here is rather ridiculous, and only entertainable if you don't know about the recent history of the admin declaring Anthropic a supply chain risk because they required the government to agree to ethical clauses that would've been considered unthinkable until recently.

Remember, all AI companies openly claimed to oppose military usage just a few short years ago. Now they all have government contracts that allow the government to use them "lawfully", while also being able to decide that anything they do with them is lawful. Anthropic is the only one who required clauses against killbots and domestic mass surveillance.

Anthropic never asked for arbitrary or opaque shutdowns. They asked for clearly defined regulations to apply equally (which would've helped their market position and advantage, coincidentally I'm sure /s), moreso to reduce their own risk and liability.

Re: Did Anthropic ask for this?

#22

Maybe this will be simpler for Anthropic to understand if they take their own high-minded philosophical nonsense and ego out of it and consider it the way a neutral party would. Suppose a company calls themselves The Doomsday Device Company. They make and sell excellent-quality doomsday devices. They regularly go online to proclaim that their doomsday devices are the best and most powerful, and also that doomsday dev…

It's quite a bit more complicated than that. The popular narrative is not exactly on Anthropic, as the general public is far more aware of OpenAI than Anthropic. The narrative is on AI and whether everything we know about society is going to change.

Also, as far as priorities and worries go, for most people cybersecurity is way down the list.

Re: Did Anthropic ask for this?

#23
When you are both the source of fear and hope people will always side with fear.

If you sold everyone on the idea of "safety is paramount, we urge everyone not to rush into development here" then certainly becomes hard to believe a blanket "we figured out safety, come play with our toys for 10x cost" when stuff is less than a month apart in your news page.

Re: Did Anthropic ask for this?

#24
To speak my mind without filtering, Amodei looks pretty terrible in this situation.

They've positioned their company as 'We're the serious AI company that understands safety, while others underestimate the risks.' That strategy itself is understandable. They're not like OpenAI, which carved out the pioneer position in LLMs, nor do they have a trustworthy brand like Google (Gemini isn't trustworthy, but still). So branding around 'responsibility' made sense.

The problem is that they pushed that narrative with the Trump administration. Without considering that LLM strategies need to change depending on the political context, they just input the same prompt into a different context and got bad results.

The Trump administration's stance emphasizes external enemies. I guess they didn't know what would happen if they started talking about military weapons in that environment.

We East Asians know authoritarian regimes 'very' well. So I guess people from the US, a country with so much freedom that they naturally lie flat on the ground, just didn't understand the difference.

If they had advocated for AI freedom and free expression, many people might have helped them, like in the PGP situation in cryptography. But instead, they got caught up in their own claims.

If you emphasize how dangerous AI is under an administration like Trump's that stresses external enemies, of course the government will say, 'Then let us manage it.' And the moment Anthropic says, 'Why just us?' it just looks ridiculous. They're the ones who went on about how dangerous it is, and now they're acting victimized for being treated as a dangerous entity.

To be even more honest, Amodei's style of communication sometimes looks like a morality superiority hustle.

They speak in a tone of 'We're not just a money focused company, we care about humanity,' but isn't Anthropic still a company that takes investments, sells models, rides the cloud, and tries to win government contracts? So it ends up looking like they use regulatory discourse as a shield and marketing when it benefits them, but complain 'it's not fair' when it works against them.

Personally, I think Anthropic needs to hire a Korean person as their marketing lead. We Koreans know very well how to behave under authoritarian governments. If you need a marketing person, feel free to contact me. I'll prepare my resume

Re: Did Anthropic ask for this?

#25
This was an opportunistic hit job by Amazon. After the SpaceX IPO, Amazon realized there was a good chance Anthropic's post-IPO market cap would exceed Amazon's. No doubt they are maneuvering behind the scenes for regulations that the big cloud vendors be the only authorized operators of LLMs for national security reasons.

Re: Did Anthropic ask for this?

#26
post #15

What I feel like is missing in the common discourse here is that Anthropic genuinely believes that AI poses an existential risk for humanity either in terms of literal survival or extreme mass surveillance, human disempowerment etc. So if you take these risks seriously, which the median commentor on HN obviously doesn't, what is the right thing to do? I.e. OpenAI just went full evil corpo mode and went all in on the…

> So if you take these risks seriously, which the median commentor on HN obviously doesn't, what is the right thing to do?

Easy. You oppose it. You dedicate all your resources to stopping not just OpenAI, but anybody trying to make these technologies.

With all those billions of dollars, you could get a lot done.

Anthropic doesn't do this, which exposes the fundamental hypocrisy in their stated philosophies.

Re: Did Anthropic ask for this?

#27
post #25

This was an opportunistic hit job by Amazon. After the SpaceX IPO, Amazon realized there was a good chance Anthropic's post-IPO market cap would exceed Amazon's. No doubt they are maneuvering behind the scenes for regulations that the big cloud vendors be the only authorized operators of LLMs for national security reasons.

Amazon owns 15-20% of Anthropic.

Re: Did Anthropic ask for this?

#28

No, Anthropic clearly did not ask for this. 1. "Dario is known for writing about regulation and the direction of AI as an industry and Anthropic in particular, and what he says is taken very seriously and is considered a definitive statement of the company’s position." This is patently ridiculous. A CEO's blog post is not an official company statement or any sort of binding agreement. 2. "Are there protective measure…

> A CEO's blog post is not an official company statement or any sort of binding agreement. Uh, then what is it? We should not take the words of the leader of the company published on the company's website to be the official stance of the company??

I don't know, maybe a published press release? A signed document? I'm not saying that Dario's words are meaningless, but it is simply not true that a CEO's public speech constituents a binding agreement.

Re: Did Anthropic ask for this?

#29
Anybody who isn't at least treating this situation as possibly just an authoritarian government picking winners and losers is not paying attention to the political environment.

Companies/countries/people are paying off the government in all sorts of various ways (crypto, gifts, bogus settlements, planes, inaugurations, ballrooms). The companies that pay off the government get big fat contracts and merger agreements, and the ones that don't get increased scrutiny, lawsuits and threats.

OpenAI and SpaceX are friends of the administration, and Anthropic is (politically at least), not friends with the administration.

Could this penalty be a rational and reasonable reaction to the new model? Perhaps. Or maybe it is just a made up excuse to do what the government wants to do, which is punish its political enemies. It wouldn't be the first, second, third or 10th time that has happened so far in this administration.

Re: Did Anthropic ask for this?

#30
post #25

This was an opportunistic hit job by Amazon. After the SpaceX IPO, Amazon realized there was a good chance Anthropic's post-IPO market cap would exceed Amazon's. No doubt they are maneuvering behind the scenes for regulations that the big cloud vendors be the only authorized operators of LLMs for national security reasons.

Amazon owns 15-20% of Anthropic.

The next % stake will be acquired at a discount, it seems.
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