Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’ • Hacker News Board

Re: Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’

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Post by ImPostingOnHN » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 3:00 PM UTC

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #174

felipeerias wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reportedly, Anthropic didn't know about Claude's role in capturing Maduro until they saw it on the headlines.

And why would they have an objection to that? They sold a product to a customer. They should have no business in how that customer uses their software.

> And why would they have an objection to that? They sold a product to a customer. They should have no business in how that customer uses their software.

They sold a service to a customer, contractually subject to terms they both agreed upon. How do people keep missing this? The government changed their mind after agreeing to the restrictions and tried to alter the deal with Anthropic ex-post-facto.

Re: Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’

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Post by ipunchghosts » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 3:16 PM UTC

epicprogrammer wrote: post #122

It's easy to frame this purely as an ethical battle, but there's a massive financial reality here. Training frontier models requires astronomical amounts of capital, and the DOD is one of the few entities with deep enough pockets to fund the next generation of compute. Anthropic turning down this Pentagon contract over safety disagreements is a huge gamble. They are essentially betting that the enterprise market will…

> but there's a massive financial reality here.

Not a chance. The DoD has massive pockers which and INCREDIBLY SPREAD OUT. You can't underestimate how spread this money is. The DoD has maybe a 64 GPU cluster and ALMOST NO ONE USES IT FOR DEEP MODEL TRAINING. Even contractors end up working with DGX boxes to do all their training.

As of 2023, I was doing the largest Deep learning training runs out of anyone I have known in the industry and I've been in the industry for 20 yeras. The second best groups behind mine were using 4 GPU locally machines that they had to purchase on contract.

There's no way the DoD can train these models themselves, not even close. They are COMPLETELY DEPENDENT ON INDUSTRY. I was the PM for a DARPA program in 2023 and SAME PROBLEM. They had no compute or would rely on university compute if a program had a university partner. YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW FAR BEHIND THE DOD IS IN THIS SPACE.

Re: Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’

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Post by mithr » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 3:19 PM UTC

Tanjreeve wrote: post #292

aardvarkr wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t care who is in the whitehouse. Snowden revealed the crimes of the NSA in 2013 when Obama was president. They’re all going to want to use AI for mass surveillance

AI doesn't add anything to the ability to do mass surveillance. That genie was already out of the bottle from clouds and big data systems. At best AI might take on some of the gruntwork for drawing conclusions from profiles but it's doing it's usual thing of being a powerful interface built on top of other systems.

> AI doesn't add anything to the ability to do mass surveillance

I recommend reading Yuval Noah Harari's Nexus for a deep discussion around this.

He makes the point that what makes this AI age much more dangerous for mass surveillance isn't just the collection of data, which has indeed been possible for a while, but the new ability to have AI sift through that enormous volume of information, an ability which until recently has not been possible in a meaningful way without a ton of manual work to support it.

Older attempts at mass control of a population already involved mass surveillance, even in a large amount of detail, but even when capturing in detail all citizens' activities, there were just not enough people around to be able to dig through that and analyze it. This has been somewhat true even with the help of computers, though computers have certainly already been making this easier.

But now you can just give all that data to an AI with your instructions, and it'll apply some sort of "judgement" on your behalf, completely autonomously, and even perform actions against those folks it finds, again autonomously, without needing to manually build a whole infrastructure to do that with manual rules. That's a very meaningful upgrade for someone wanting to control a population.

Re: Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’

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Post by davidw » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 3:22 PM UTC

don_esteban wrote: post #290

ori_b wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you vote in the primaries for a candidate that might change it?

Did democrats offer primaries in the last elections? Did voting for Bernie Sanders in the last two primaries (especially the ones when Trump won for the first time) amount to anything? I wonder how long can the American public keep the self delusion that the elections are anything but a theater for the naive, to keep the pretense the public has any say in things that matter. How much has the current administration as…

> Did democrats offer primaries in the last elections?

Uh, yeah? I voted for Biden/Harris.

And in any case, focusing almost exclusively on one race is part of the problem. Where I live, we also had a Dem primary for the house district, and a more electable candidate won - and then went on to win in the general. It was one of the very few red->blue flips in 2024.

Our former congresswoman, incidentally:

https://newrepublic.com/post/207234/trump-labor-secretary-ch...

Then there are all the races for school boards, city council, county commission and all those things that provide the base and the bench to build off of.

Re: Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’

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Post by don_esteban » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 3:23 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #361

don_esteban wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, my stance is cynical. Sadly, it is also factually correct (i.e. not delusional). Which of my statements are you contesting? From my point of view, your stance (play fairly, according to the rules set by your stronger opponent) is delusional. Note that the opponent is not 'republicans', but the whole ruling elites. And no, I can't help you, I am not USian, just an outside observer. Sadly, due to its weight, whate…

> it is also factually correct No, it isn’t. Sanders’ supporters didn’t have the votes. That’s a fact. If people believe in something, they should call their electeds and vote. The fact that a lot of people with a certain confluence of views (privacy, anti-war, et cetera ) are too lazy to do either (regardless of post rationalization), but not self aware enough to not complain about it, is delusional cynicism.

Note that I did not say he won the primaries.

I said the leadership of the democratic party did dirty tricks to prevent him winning.

The mainstream media was also against him.

Not anywhere close to a level playing field.

Note, that I am not against voting or calling your elected officials and all the related stuff. That is necessary. But, sadly, far from sufficient. If you think that that is sufficient, you are delusional.

Your subsequent generalizations are lazy and unsubstantiated, in fact they fit the classical smear patterns established by the mainstream media.

Re: Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’

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Post by dirasieb » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 3:33 PM UTC

hintymad wrote: post #72

Honest question: why do people automatically equate "fully autonomous weapons" to something like killer robot? My immediate reaction is that even the best-in-class rapid-fire gun has a hard time identifying and tracking drones. So, we'd need AI to do better tracking, which leads to a fully autonomous weapon. And I really don't get why that's a bad thing. Of course, a company should have freedom to choose not to do bu…

assuming the worst from the government IS how you set up good legal frameworks to limit government's power, have you ever heard of the first and second amendments?

Re: Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’

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Post by bko » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 3:36 PM UTC

jfengel wrote: post #367

bko wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm saying they shouldn't write in their contract that they have some veto power of how their software is used if it's within the law of the land (ie laws written by congress) Is that more clear?

Sure. And since they can't reach a contract they do agree on, there is no sale. They cannot be compelled to sign a contract that they do not agree to.

Agree. Anthropic shouldn't require that in their contract (it is stupid). I'm glad the government resisted as it was an insane overreach. But since Anthropic insisted there should be no contract.

Re: Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’

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Post by neya » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 3:44 PM UTC

pton_xd wrote: post #332

neya wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Dario on the other hand seems to have an integrity that's particularly rare in this era. Anthropic actually partnered up with Palantir. They are not the saints you think they are, either. We should stop worshipping people and companies and stop putting them on pedestals. Just because one party is at fault, doesn't mean the other is automatically innocent. These are all for-profit companies at play here. https://inve…

> Anthropic actually partnered up with Palantir. They are not the saints you think they are, either. And now you've got people on here saying, well actually Palantir ain't so bad, you see! They're just one tool in the chain, basically just boring data integration, like IBM! The mental gymnastics is difficult to keep up with.

Haha, absolutely agreed. Morality is a moving goal post when it comes to everyone's personal favorites.

Re: Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’

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Post by don_esteban » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 3:46 PM UTC

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #327

don_esteban wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding Iran's future: You are describing Libya scenario, not a 'lived prosperously ever after'. There is no credible opposition in Iran to take the mantle.

No. Iran has almost all of its population part of the same ethnic group, which in Libya it was not true: all the tribes started fighting each other. It does not an established opposition because the current regime has the habit of killing anyone it doesn't like or goes against the official line. Now there is a chance for opposition to form.

Iran has significant Kurdish, Azeri, Baluchi and Arab minorities, Persians form cca 2/3 of the population.

With the US & Israel supporting the minorities (most likely offering them independence), in the hope of toppling the regime, and bombing mostly Persians, the most likely outcome (assuming they are actually able to force regime change, which is far from guaranteed) is fragmentation and general lawlessness.

Note that whoever inherits the regime would have to deal with wholesale destruction of the country, traumatized population and hate for those who bombed them and killed their relatives and children. Slavishly obeying the new foreign overlords will not be very popular. Have we not learned anything from Iraq and Afghanistan? How can you still believe the fairy tales of welcoming the liberators?

Re: Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’

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Post by xvector » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 3:51 PM UTC

kelnos wrote: post #333

xvector wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also: 3. Talent migration to Anthropic. No serious researcher working towards AGI will want it to be in the hands of OpenAI anymore. They are all asking themselves: "do I trust Sam or Dario more with AGI/ASI?" and are finding the former lacking. It is already telling that Anthropic's models outperform OAI's with half the headcount and a fraction of the funding.

I think that's wishful thinking. Just because someone is a "serious" researcher (careful, sounds like a No True Scotsman coming up), it doesn't mean that they care about AI guardrails or safety, or think our current administration is immoral.

I've hung out with this crowd and they are very idealistic, they care deeply about guardrails and safety, and definitely find the idea of handing the current administration AGI/ASI repulsive.