Department of War is just such a fucking joke title - when has the US stooped so low, I used to believe in you guys as the force of good on this planet smh
Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
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Re: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
#42This is such a depressing read. What is becoming of the USA? Let's hope sanity prevails and the next election cycle can bring in some competent non-grievance based leadership.
Hope is not a plan, unfortunately, so if that's all we've got, I don't have much hope.
Re: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
#43It's the Department of Defense, not the Department of War ... only Congress has the legal authority to change the name, and they haven't.
Re: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
#44Props to Dario and Anthropic for taking a moral stand. A rarity in tech these days.
There is no moral leg to stand on here, he says here in plain english that if they wanted to use CLAUDE to perform mass surveillance on Canada, Mexico, UK, Germany, that is perfectly fine.
Re: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
#45It's not named the Department of War because Congress didn't rename it. Other than that, good on ya.
It's addressed to Hegseth, who insists on calling it that.
If they had called it DoD, then that would have been another finger in his eye.
Re: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
#46"as an ai safety company, we only believe in -partially- autonomous weaponry"
Ads are coming.
Re: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
#47The worst part of this is if they do remove Claude, and probably GPT, and Gemini soon after because of outcry we are going to be left with our military using fucking Grok as their model, a model that not even on par with open source Chinese models.
I think the warfighters are a distraction, a system could trivially say that there is a human in the loop for LLM-derived kill lists. My money is that the mass domestic surveillance is the true sticking point, because it’s exactly what you would use a LLM for today.
Re: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
#48Props to Dario and Anthropic for taking a moral stand. A rarity in tech these days.
There is no moral leg to stand on here, he says here in plain english that if they wanted to use CLAUDE to perform mass surveillance on Canada, Mexico, UK, Germany, that is perfectly fine.
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Re: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
#49As a "foreign national", what's the deal with making the distinction between domestic mass surveillance and foreign mass surveillance? Are there no democracies aside from the US? Don't we know since Snowden that if the US wants to do domestic surveillance they'll just ask GCHQ to share their "foreign" surveillance capabilities?
> what's the deal with making the distinction between domestic mass surveillance and foreign mass surveillance? Are there no democracies aside from the US?
I think it's just saying that spying on another country's citizens isn't fundamentally undemocratic (even if that other country happens to be a democracy) because they're not your citizens and therefore you don't govern them. Spying on your own citizens opens all sorts of nefarious avenues that spying on another country's citizens does not.
Re: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
#50A significant part of Anthropic's cachet as an employer is the ethical stance they profess to take. This is no doubt a tough spot to be in, but it's hard to see Dario making any other decision here.
What I don't understand is why Hegseth pushed the issue to an ultimatum like this. They say they're not trying to use Claude for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weapons. If so, what does the Department of War have to gain from this fight?