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Where things stand with the Department of War

anthropic.com

51–60 of 862 posts

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#51
post #39

Nothing brings home the Orwellian nature of USA 2026 more for me than the word "warfighter".

Just remember, we're not at war with Iran. The House Speaker said so.

We can use the word war because Iran used the word war. But it is not a War in the constitutional sense. Or something.

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#53
post #12

Raised an eyebrow a little at this sentence: "Anthropic has much more in common with the Department of War than we have differences."

The Department of Defense was named as such after the detonations of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki

We - as a humanity - collectively recognized the weight of our creation, and decided to walk back

Discussing “AI alignment” in the same breadth as aligning with a “Department of War” (in any country) is simply not an intellectually sound position

None of the countries we’ve attacked this year pose an existential threat to humanity. In contrast, striking first and pulling Europe, Russia, and China into a hot war beginning in the Middle East surely poses a greater collective threat than bioweapons, sentient AI, or the other typical “AI alignment” concerns

Why aren’t there more dissidents among the researcher ranks?

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#54
post #18

It is incredible how far the overton window has moved on this issue. When I graduated in 2007, it was common for tech companies to refuse to let their systems be used for war, and it was an ordinary thing when some of my graduating classmates refused to work at companies that did let their systems be used for war. Those refusals were on moral grounds. Now Anthropic wants to have two narrow exceptions, on pragmatic an…

As the Heritage Foundation has said, we are in a cold civil war for our country and right now, the authoritarians are winning.

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#57
post #18

It is incredible how far the overton window has moved on this issue. When I graduated in 2007, it was common for tech companies to refuse to let their systems be used for war, and it was an ordinary thing when some of my graduating classmates refused to work at companies that did let their systems be used for war. Those refusals were on moral grounds. Now Anthropic wants to have two narrow exceptions, on pragmatic an…

The reckoning will come.

Watch as the same people pushing for war today will pretend they were always against it 10 years from now.

I guess we're just doomed to repeat the same cycles.

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#58

What's next, bribing Trump with gold bars and donations to "charity"?

You got me wondering, so I checked to see how much Anthropic's bribed Trump so far. According to Dario, Trump has been soliciting bribes, but they refused to pay, and the contract "renegotiation" is retribution:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47269649

"Amodei claimed that tensions between his company and the Trump administration stem partly from the firm’s refusal to financially support Trump and its approach to AI regulation and safety issues."

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#59
post #18

It is incredible how far the overton window has moved on this issue. When I graduated in 2007, it was common for tech companies to refuse to let their systems be used for war, and it was an ordinary thing when some of my graduating classmates refused to work at companies that did let their systems be used for war. Those refusals were on moral grounds. Now Anthropic wants to have two narrow exceptions, on pragmatic an…

I'm a decade older so maybe I missed the memo but I think you'll have a hard time naming tech companies that actually refused to work with the military, which were large enough and important enough to be in danger of selling something to the military (i.e. not Be Inc. or Beenz.com)

Clearly, all of the traditional big leagues were lined up to take the Army's money. IBM, Control Data, Cray, SGI, and HP all viewed weapons research as a major line of business. DEC was the default minicomputer of the DoD and Sun created features to court the intelligence community including the DoD "Trusted Workstation". Sperry Rand defined "military industrial complex".

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#60
post #39

Nothing brings home the Orwellian nature of USA 2026 more for me than the word "warfighter".

Just remember, we're not at war with Iran. The House Speaker said so.

we are though, they plotted to assassinate the US president, not to mention being the #1 sponsor of terrorism in the middle east, attacking our allies
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