Earlier quoted context omitted.
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There is a difference between a politician making a contradictory statement and the largest agency in the United States using probably unconstitutional pressure tactics against a business.
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
#412I can't help but highlight the problem that is created by the renaming of the Deptartment of Defense to the Department of War: > importance of using AI to defend the United States > Anthropic has therefore worked proactively to deploy our models to the Department of War So you believe in helping to defend the United States, but you gave the models to the Department of War - explicitly, a government arm now named as i…
it hasnt actually been renamed though.
the name is still the department of defence by law. department of war is a subheading tagline
Re: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This contradictory messaging puts to rest any doubt that this is a strong arm by the governemnt to allow any use. Why the hell should companies get to dictate on their own to the government how their product is used?
> Why the hell should companies get to dictate on their own to the government how their product is used? Well: """ Imagine that you created an LLC, and that you are the sole owner and employee. One day your LLC receives a letter from the government that says, "here is a contract to go mine heavy rare earth elements in Alaska." You don't want to do that, so you reply, "no thanks!" There is no retaliation. Everything i…
This is a terrible analogy. Imagine you’re an LLC that signed a contract to mine minerals, but your terms state you’d only mine in areas you felt safe. OSHA says it’s safe but you disagree, because….. any number of reason unknowable to an outsider. Maybe you just don’t like this OSHA leadership. That is more like what is happening.
Signing a contract with Anthropic assuming they wouldn’t rug pull over their own moral soapbox was mistake number one.
I love anthropic products and heavily use them daily, but they need to get off their high horse. They complain they’re being robbed by Chinese labs - robbed of what they stole from copyright holders. Anthropic doesn’t have the moral high ground they try to claim.
Re: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
What else would you expect? The military is obviously going to develop the most powerful systems they can. Do you want a tech company to say “the military can never use our stuff for autonomous systems forever, the end”? What if Anthropic ends up developing the safest, most cost effective systems for that purpose?
Yes, I absolutely don’t want tech companies to use the money I pay them to harm people. How is that remotely controversial?
Time to stop paying your taxes. :P
Re: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
#415Am i the only one who understands the deparments position? Like if another country will have it without safeguards, why would I not want it without safeguards. I can still be the safeguard, but having safeguards enforced by another entity that potentially has to face negative financial consequences seems like a disadvantage, would be weird to accept that as department of war. I understand the risk, but that is the pi…
they could use a different provider for the kill chain.
we must use claude to decide whether to nuke iran, or else our gun manufacturers arent allowed to use to to run spreadsheets
is a bit ridiculous.
Re: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
#416Brother in law did some "time with the brass" as he calls it. His take was that the DOD, er DOW would, as an example, never acquire a fighter jet that "wouldn't target and kill a civilian airliner", citing that on 9/11 we literally almost did that. The DOW is acquiring instruments of war, which is probably unconformable for a lot of people to consider.
His conclusion was that the limits of use ought to be contractual, not baked into the LLM, which is where the fallout seems to be. He noted that the Pentagon has agreed to terms like that in the past.
To me, that seems like reasonable compromise for both parties, but both sides are so far entrenched now we're unlikely to see a compromise.
Re: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
#417I used to work at Anthropic, and I wrote a comment on a thread earlier this week about the RSP update [1]. It's enheartening to see that leaders at Anthropic are willing to risk losing their seat at the table to be guided by values. Something I don't think is well understood on HN is how driven by ideals many folks at Anthropic are, even if the company is pragmatic about achieving their goals. I have strong signal th…
There's a simpler explanation than "billionaires with hearts of gold" here. If:
(1) this is a wildly unpopular and optically bad deal
(2) it's a high data rate deal--lots of tokens means bad things for Anthropic. Users which use their product heavily are costing more than they pay.
(3) it's a deal which has elements that aren't technically feasible, like LLM powered autonomous killer robots...
then it makes a whole lot of sense for Anthropic to wiggle out of it. Doing it like this they can look cuddly, so long as the Pentagon walks away and doesn't hit them back too hard.
Re: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
#418All of these problems are downstream of the Congress having thoroughly abdicated its powers to the executive. The military should be reigned in at the legislative level, by constraining what it can and cannot do under law. Popular action is the only way to make that happen. Energy directed anywhere else is a waste. Private corporations should never be allowed to dictate how the military acts. Such a thought would be…
The private corporation is not dictating to the military, it’s setting the terms of the contract. The military is free to go sign a contract with a different company with different terms, but they didn’t, and now they want to change the terms after the contact was already signed. No mytholgization needed, just contract law.
Re: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
#419Amodei’s use of “warfighters” (a Hegseth-era neologism for “soldiers”) is truly nauseating.
Re: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
#420I was reading halfway thru and one line struck a nerve with me: > But today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons. So not today, but the door is open for this after AI systems have gathered enough "training data"? Then I re-read the previous paragraph and realized it's specifically only criticizing > AI-driven domestic mass surveillance And neither denounces partially a…
I think it's phrased just fine. It's not up to Dario to try to make absolute statements about the future.
This doesn’t read to me like it was personally written by one person. It’s not Dario we should read this as being written by, it’s Anthropic as an entity.