Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge • Hacker News Board

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#411

Post by metalliqaz » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 2:58 PM UTC

tyre wrote: post #384

shubhamjain wrote: post #352

I was wondering if it was because of heavy-handedness of the administration, but apparently: > The policy change is separate and unrelated to Anthropic’s discussions with the Pentagon, according to a source familiar with the matter. Their core argument is that if we have guardrails that others don't, they would be left behind in controlling the technology, and they are the "responsible ones." I honestly can't compreh…

“A source familiar with the matter” is almost certainly a company spokesperson. If they were unrelated, Anthropic wouldn’t be doing this this week because obviously everyone will conflate the two.

yeah that part is 100% BS

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#412

Post by kelvinjps10 » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 3:00 PM UTC

Forgeties79 wrote: post #389

drzaiusx11 wrote: post #325

Public benefit corporations in the AI space have become a farce at this point. They're just regular corporations wearing a different hat, driven by the same money dynamics as any other corp. They have no ability to balance their stated "mission" with their drive for profit. When being "evil" is profitable and not-evil is not, guess which road they'll take...

I feel like we went through this exact situation in the 2010s of social media companies. I don’t get why people defend these companies or ever believe they have any sense of altruism

Also, it seems to be the era where the government takes backdoor access to these services and data, as the did with social media

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#413

Post by logicallee » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 3:01 PM UTC

drzaiusx11 wrote: post #325

Public benefit corporations in the AI space have become a farce at this point. They're just regular corporations wearing a different hat, driven by the same money dynamics as any other corp. They have no ability to balance their stated "mission" with their drive for profit. When being "evil" is profitable and not-evil is not, guess which road they'll take...

>Public benefit corporations in the AI space have become a farce at this point. They're just regular corporations wearing a different hat, driven by the same money dynamics as any other corp.

Could you describe the model that you think might work well?

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#414

Post by ACCount37 » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 3:01 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #330

drzaiusx11 wrote: post #325

Public benefit corporations in the AI space have become a farce at this point. They're just regular corporations wearing a different hat, driven by the same money dynamics as any other corp. They have no ability to balance their stated "mission" with their drive for profit. When being "evil" is profitable and not-evil is not, guess which road they'll take...

In general public benefit corporations and non-profits should have a very modest salary cap for everybody involved and specific public-benefit legally binding mission statements. Anybody involved should also be prohibited from starting a private company using their IP and catering to the same domain for 5-10 years after they leave. Non-profits where the CEO makes millions or billions are a joke. And if e.g. your miss…

"A very modest salary cap" works if your mission is planting trees. Not so much if what you're building is frontier AI systems.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#415

Post by johnbellone » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 3:01 PM UTC

xd1936 wrote: post #335

Hopefully this is the short-term move made only under duress so that they can file a lawsuit.

You forgot the '/s'.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#416

Post by dibujaron » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 3:02 PM UTC

neya wrote: post #407

drzaiusx11 wrote: post #325

Public benefit corporations in the AI space have become a farce at this point. They're just regular corporations wearing a different hat, driven by the same money dynamics as any other corp. They have no ability to balance their stated "mission" with their drive for profit. When being "evil" is profitable and not-evil is not, guess which road they'll take...

I was a Pro subscriber until last week. When I was chatting with Claude, it kept asking a lot of personal questions - that seemed only very very vaguely relevant to the topic. And then it struck me - all these AI companies are doing are just building detailed user models for being either targeted for advertising or to be sold off to the highest bidder. It hasn't happened yet with Anthropic, but when the bubble money…

A less cynical explanation: It's heavily trained to ask follow-up questions at the end of a response, to drive more conversation and more engagement. That's useful both for making sure you want to renew your subscription, and also probably for generating more training data for future models. That's sufficient explanation for the behavior we're seeing.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#417

Post by t1234s » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 3:02 PM UTC

It would be interesting to experiment with one of these chat tools where you can throttle the safety, from zero to max.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#418

Post by johnbellone » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 3:04 PM UTC

menaerus wrote: post #349

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's "entertaining" is more the speed at which it's happening. It took Google probably 15 years to fully evil-ize. Anthropic ... two? There is no "ethical capitalism" big tech company possible, esp once VC is involved, and especially with the current geopolitical circumstances.

I don't think it's fair to call out Anthropic to have become evil-ized while they were quite literally forced by the gov into that decision.

They did not get forced.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#419

Post by jonathanstrange » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 3:05 PM UTC

That's exactly how it was predicted in various scenarios that were decried as science fiction not too long ago. AI is going to be weaponized at lightning speed, and it's going to kill people soon -- or, to be more precise, it has already killed a large number of people in a place I don't want to mention.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#420

Post by pixl97 » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 3:05 PM UTC

skeptic_ai wrote: post #402

shubhamjain wrote: post #352

I was wondering if it was because of heavy-handedness of the administration, but apparently: > The policy change is separate and unrelated to Anthropic’s discussions with the Pentagon, according to a source familiar with the matter. Their core argument is that if we have guardrails that others don't, they would be left behind in controlling the technology, and they are the "responsible ones." I honestly can't compreh…

OpenAI never open sourced anything relevant or in time. Internal email leaks they only cared to become billionaires. Claude only talks about safety, but never released anything open source. All this said I’m surprised China actually delivered so many open source alternatives. Which are decent. Why westerns (which are supposed to be the good guys) didn’t release anything open source to help humanity ? And always claim…

I mean, if you have a bunch of guns, it's not really helpful for humanity to dump them on the street, but it does bring up the question of what you're doing building guns in the first place.