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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

#71

Post by int_19h »

kadushka wrote: post #48
int_19h wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropic specifically are the people who talk about "model alignment" and "harmful outputs" the most, and whose models are by far the most heavily censored. This is all done on the basis that AI has a great potential to do harm. One would think that this kind of outlook should logically lead to keeping this tech away from applications in which it would be literally making life or death decisions (see also: Israel's…

Why do you think humans would make better life or death decisions? Have we never had innocent civilians killed overseas by US military as a result of human error?

The problem with these things is that they allow humans to pretend that they are not responsible for those decisions, because "computer told me to do so". At the same time, the humans who are training those systems can also pretend to not be responsible because they are just making a thing that provides "suggestions" to humans making the ultimate decision.

Again, look at what's happening in Gaza right now for a good example of how this all is different from before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-assisted_targeting_in_the_G...

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

#72

Post by FredPret »

jMyles wrote: post #13
pageandrew wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's unethical about selling to DoD?

Do you really not know? It's a difficult question to answer in an HN thread, because on one hand, it requires a review of the history of empire and war profiteering. But on the other hand, it's just obvious to the point of being difficult to even articulate.

Genuine question, and with due regard to some of the valid concerns you have: what would your opinion on this have been in 1940-1945? What about the Cold War?

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

#73

Post by int_19h »

kadushka wrote: post #35
jMyles wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really not know? It's a difficult question to answer in an HN thread, because on one hand, it requires a review of the history of empire and war profiteering. But on the other hand, it's just obvious to the point of being difficult to even articulate.

If you live in US, taxes you pay directly fund DoD. So if you sponsor their activities, why can't Anthropic do business with them? Which other company would you rather get their (your) money?

Paying taxes is not voluntary, unlike business deals.

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

#74

Post by int_19h »

ghc wrote: post #37
jMyles wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really not know? It's a difficult question to answer in an HN thread, because on one hand, it requires a review of the history of empire and war profiteering. But on the other hand, it's just obvious to the point of being difficult to even articulate.

Is it unethical for a drywall installer to accept a contract for a building on a military base?

Depends. Is that military base Gitmo?

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

#75

Post by cpgxiii »

henry2023 wrote: post #21
pageandrew wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's unethical about selling to DoD?

[flagged]

Not everyone believes defense contracts are inherently unethical, or at least that they are any more unethical than all of the other consumers GenAI firms are already serving. Given that a (if not the) main business proposition for GenAI is massive reductions in employment costs (which means unemployment and massive economic disruption) this is not a business sector built on any ethical high ground.

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

#76

Post by leakycap »

bgwalter wrote: post #53
leakycap wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The majority of people hate chatbots and surveillance is the only viable path.

What are you considering when you formed this opinion? I find myself on the more cautious side of the equation, but AI seems popular even among my non-techy friends and family.

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

#77

Post by schmidtleonard »

int_19h wrote: post #54
schmidtleonard wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. An…

Yep, and that's assuming it is tuned to be reactive rather than tuned to proactively build cases against people, which is something that has been politically convenient in the past

> If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him -Cardinal Richelieu

and which the Vance / Bannon / Posobiec arm of the current administration seems quite keen on, probably as a next step once they are done spending the $170B they just won to build out their partisan enforcement apparatus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unhumans

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

#78

Post by xnx »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #70
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…

Also, apparently it's not just Anthropic. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/14/anthropic-google-openai-xai-... Google, OpenAI,and xAI also get $200M each.

That's a much better link

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

#79

Post by xnx »

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.

grep : NLP :: NLP : LLM

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

#80

Post by FredPret »

treetalker wrote: post #69
cynicalpeace wrote: post #14

When people ask "how do we fix our government?" I answer "Did you try turning it off and on again?"

There's more than a grain of truth here. I think we're in a Gall's Law situation. The system has evolved to extreme complexity and no longer works as intended because people learned to game the system, which keeps the best people for the job out of the system; emasculates the essential checks and balances; and creates a vicious cycle that adds further complexity and races to the bottom. The (likely) only way to fix t…

There's no simple system that will work on the scale of half a continent and 300M people, and a simple way to prove this is to look at large corporations. There's many of them, they compete with one another tooth and nail, (so there's real pressure to simplify and streamline) and they all suffer from complex internal systems. And they are all dwarfed by the US government.
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