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Anthropic signs a $200M deal with the Department of Defense

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Re: Anthropic signs a $200M deal with the Department of Defense

#51

Post by dmoy »

ghc wrote: post #20

As someone whose has been part of a company that has "signed" one of these large deals before, let me tell you that it doesn't mean the DoD is giving these companies $200M. If one of the companies is wildly successful, sure. But none of it is guaranteed money and the initial budget is likely 10-100x smaller than the cap.

Initial budget still bigger than a sbir/sttr phase 2 though. Different grant award structure for not-small companies, but my brain also breaks a little bit because anthropic isn't that far above the sbir employee # cap, but the $$ numbers are so big

Re: Anthropic signs a $200M deal with the Department of Defense

#52

Post by dttze »

pageandrew wrote: post #7
Argonaut998 wrote: post #6

Is this those ethics and safety they were talking about?

What's unethical about selling to DoD?

Yeah, I don't get what could be bad about selling to one of the largest exporters of death and misery in the world either.

Re: Anthropic signs a $200M deal with the Department of Defense

#53

Post by bgwalter »

leakycap wrote: post #36
ghc wrote: post #20

As someone whose has been part of a company that has "signed" one of these large deals before, let me tell you that it doesn't mean the DoD is giving these companies $200M. If one of the companies is wildly successful, sure. But none of it is guaranteed money and the initial budget is likely 10-100x smaller than the cap.

I believe you, but also: seems it isn't even worth the bad press for 10-100x less.

Misanthropic wants to get the foot in the door, like the others. The majority of people hate chatbots and surveillance is the only viable path.

It won't fix the lack of NATO 155mm shells though.

Re: Anthropic signs a $200M deal with the Department of Defense

#54

Post by int_19h »

schmidtleonard wrote: post #19
etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #8

LLMs are a key enabling technology to extract real insights from the enormous amount of surveillance data the USA captures. I think it's not an understatement to say we are entering a new era here! Previously, the data may have been collected, but there was so much that effectively, on average no one was "looking" at it. Now it can all be looked at.

I remember when PRISM was spooky. This is gonna be something else!

Imagine PRISM, but all intercepted communications are then fed into automatic sentiment analysis by a hierarchy of models. The first pass is done by very basic and very fast models with a high error rate, but which are specifically trained to minimize false negatives (at the expense of false positives). Anything that is flagged in that pass gets fed to some larger models that can reason about the specifics better. And so on, until at last the remaining content is fed into SOTA LLMs that can infer things from very subtle clues.

With that, full-fledged panopticon becomes technically feasible for all unencrypted comms, so long as you have enough money to handle compute costs. Which the US government most certainly does.

I expect attempts to ban encryption to intensify going forward now that it is a direct impediment to the efficiency of such system.

Re: Anthropic signs a $200M deal with the Department of Defense

#55

Post by paxys »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #45

> With CDAO and other DOD organizations and commands, we'll engage in: - Working directly with the DOD to identify where frontier AI can deliver the most impact, then developing working prototypes fine-tuned on DOD data - Collaborating with defense experts to anticipate and mitigate potential adversarial uses of AI, drawing on our advanced risk forecasting capabilities - Exchanging technical insights, performance dat…

Sounds about right for defense spending. If there was an actual deliverable the contract would have a couple more zeroes added to it. For context Microsoft was awarded a $22 billion contract for HoloLens headsets for the military, and not a single one made it to use.

Re: Anthropic signs a $200M deal with the Department of Defense

#57

Post by l0gicpath »

Alifatisk wrote: post #30
sna1l wrote: post #4

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-14/pentagon-... - they gave up to 200m to OAI, xAI, and Anthropic

I appreciate your comment, the post title makes it seem like it's Anthropic only!

The post links to an Anthropic announcement, on their own website. Not sure what are you expecting from the title?

Re: Anthropic signs a $200M deal with the Department of Defense

#58

Post by haiku2077 »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #45

> With CDAO and other DOD organizations and commands, we'll engage in: - Working directly with the DOD to identify where frontier AI can deliver the most impact, then developing working prototypes fine-tuned on DOD data - Collaborating with defense experts to anticipate and mitigate potential adversarial uses of AI, drawing on our advanced risk forecasting capabilities - Exchanging technical insights, performance dat…

You've just described the consulting industry.

Re: Anthropic signs a $200M deal with the Department of Defense

#59

Post by TZubiri »

ezst wrote: post #32
etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #8

LLMs are a key enabling technology to extract real insights from the enormous amount of surveillance data the USA captures. I think it's not an understatement to say we are entering a new era here! Previously, the data may have been collected, but there was so much that effectively, on average no one was "looking" at it. Now it can all be looked at.

NLP was a thing decades before LLMs and deep learning. If one thing, LLMs are a crazy inefficient and costly way to get at it. I really doubt this has anything to do with scaling.

LLMs are unbelievably effective at NLP. Most NLP before that was pretty bad, the only good example I can think of is Alexa, and it was restricted to English.
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