Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s a $200M contract. That’s not nothing but it’s definitely not such a huge sum for these companies at their scale when they’re spending billions on infrastructure. I’m sure anthropic has signed up more revenue this week in response to this debacle to cover it. Where they’re actually screwed is if the gov follows through and declare anthropic a supply chain risk.
It's not "just" a $200m contract, it's the start of a lucrative relationship 1. Stargate seemed to require a dedicated press conference by the President to achieve funding targets. Why risk that level of politicization if it didn't? 2. Greg Brockman donated $25mil to Trump MAGA Super PAC last year. Why risk so much political backlash for a low leverage return of $200m on $25m spent? 3. During WW2, military spend shot…
> As the "alignment" folks on the AI industry are likely to learn
I will push back here. Dario & co are not starry-eyed naive idealists as implied. This is a calculated decision to maximize their goal (safe AGI/ASI.)
You have the right philosophy on the balance sheet side of things, but what you're missing is that researchers are more valuable than any military spend or any datacenter.
It does not matter how many hundreds of billions you have - if the 500-1000 top researchers don't want to work for you, you're fucked; and if they do, you will win because these are the people that come up with the step-change improvements in capability.
There is no substitute for sheer IQ:
- You can't buy it (god knows Zuck has tried, and failed to earn their respect).
- You can't build it (yet.)
- And collaboration amongst less intelligent people does not reliably achieve the requisite "Eureka" realizations.
Had Anthropic gone forth with the DoD contract, they would have lost this top crowd, crippling the firm. On the other hand, by rejecting the contract, Anthropic's recruiting just got much easier (and OAI's much harder).
Generally, the defense crowd have a somewhat inflated sense of self worth. Yes, there's a lot of money, but very few highly intelligent people want to work for them. (Almost no top talent wants to work for Palantir, despite the pay.) So, naturally:
- If OpenAI becomes a glorified military contractor, they will bleed talent.
- Top talent's low trust in the government means Manhattan Project-style collaborations are dead in the water.
As such, AGI will likely emerge from a private enterprise effort that is not heavily militarized.
Finally, the Anthropic restrictions will last, what, 2.5 more years? They are being locked out of a narrow subset of usecases (DoD contract work only - vendors can still use it for all other work - Hegseth's reading of SCR is incorrect) and have farmed massive reputation gains for both top talent and the next administration.