Live data from Hacker News

The Pentagon threatens Anthropic

astralcodexten.com

41–50 of 137 posts

Re: The Pentagon threatens Anthropic

#41
post #3

So the Pentagon is strongarming a company into cooperation? That reminds of how my alcoholic neighbor used to treat his family. It's almost as if someone let a mean drunk be in charge of the Pentagon.

[flagged]

Isn't this just whataboutism? I can't tell if you're defending the practice described in the post, trying to distract from it, or just going off on a tangent for no reason.

Re: The Pentagon threatens Anthropic

#42
Might be a long stretch, but that every analyst I’ve heard talking about this is concerned about mass surveillance of us citizens again, and the Wyden Siren is hinting at illegal activities by the CIA.

https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/wyden_letter_to_d...

Plus that the US military also used anthropics products in some form during the Venezuela operation as they publicly acknowledged, plus Hegseth seeming to be willing to put the boot down anthropics’ neck according to the options presented to them, are a lot of interesting things that happened in a very short amount of time for an environment that is usually known to work as frictionless as possible.

Even for Hegseth this is a lot of public eyes on something the pentagon of previous administrations would have handled probably with the same willingness to drown anthropic in their own tears but completely out of public sight.

But the Pentagon works in mysterious ways, and therefore there might be a very good reason for this kind of pressure, that the people who are responsible for national security even risk making a public fuss about it, that we peasants simply don’t see.

I also can’t wait to see how the us military is messing this whole AI superiority softporn up. It’s not a matter of if but only of when.

They have a track record misshandling weapons of mass destruction.

https://www.atomicarchive.com/almanac/broken-arrows/index.ht...

To be fair tho, for the amount of nuclear weapons they are handling overall they are doing a pretty good job. But no more open blast doors for the pizza delivery guy, ok?

The real question is how many broken arrow events can we even have with AI? Is it better luck next time baby skynet serious or we fucked up Sir, everyone is going to die as matchsticks bad, if whatever system they use decides every problem they throw at it can be solved by removing the human from the equation, all of them preferably.

Re: The Pentagon threatens Anthropic

#43
post #3

So the Pentagon is strongarming a company into cooperation? That reminds of how my alcoholic neighbor used to treat his family. It's almost as if someone let a mean drunk be in charge of the Pentagon.

As if governments throughout history haven't constantly used threats to gain leverage? No need to take a personal shot at the guy in charge when this is SOP throughout the administration.

Personal shots at the guy in charge have happened many times in history. Aren't you violating the principle defined in your first sentence?

Re: The Pentagon threatens Anthropic

#44
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>>> willing to designate a US company as essentially a foreign spy agency Can you quote where I said that ?

can you quote where they claimed the above was your statement?

You are correct, but I can't change my comment now.

I stand corrected

Re: The Pentagon threatens Anthropic

#46
I can't help but compare what happened with nuclear physics to what will happen with ASI/AGI. We could have used nuclear energy to provide abundant, clean energy. Instead we used it for warfare to kill people. All the of the brightest minds and frontier technology was directed towards killing people.

We could use AI for medical advances and to create a communist utopia without serfdom. But it's already looking like we're getting killer robots and more oppression.

Hope I'm thinking about this wrong. I fear very soon the government will begin nationalizing AI resources and forcing AI researchers to direct their efforts towards weapons systems. Similar to what happened in physics. "We have to be first to have autonomous robot armies" basically.

Re: The Pentagon threatens Anthropic

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't grok this comment. Are you pro or anti-cartel?

very much anti cartel Any company using a huge $$ war chest to shower themselves in regulation, is likely trying to usurp market powers from the public -via congressional bribes- to themselves.

How is this different from… any of their competitors?

Re: The Pentagon threatens Anthropic

#49
I'm really not understanding this. Doesn't the typical path for advanced technology making it into the hands of civilians start with military applications and end with it being modified for civilian use?

If the Pentagon wants Anthropic's technology because it has desirable characteristics, can it not just train its own AI models? Why can't the Pentagon build data centers full of GPUs and hire some smart people like the commercial AI providers did?

Why in this case, has the usual path for technology been flipped? Starting out as commercial tech for civilians, and then being re-purposed for military use feels unusual to me. Maybe Hegseth's "War department" has a recruiting problem.

Re: The Pentagon threatens Anthropic

#50
post #9

How does Hegseth believe he's going to out maneuver the company with the best "AI" on earth? Anthropic will run circles around him.

What, Dario is just going to turn on unlimited-token-CEO-mode and ask Claude to devise a plan to out maneuver the military and intelligence services? It’s not AGI yet, and this request would be far outside the training distribution: it would just hallucinate something based on Tom Clancy novels. Edit: typo

[dead]
Post reply on HN