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Hegseth gives Anthropic until Friday to back down on AI safeguards

cnn.com

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Re: Hegseth gives Anthropic until Friday to back down on AI safeguards

#81

Post by bigbadfeline »

perfmode wrote: post #23

> But Anthropic has concerns over two issues that it isn’t willing to drop, the source said: AI-controlled weapons and mass domestic surveillance of American citizens. Not a good look for the Pentagon.

> Not a good look for the Pentagon.

It's now the Department of War and war isn't known for its concern about looking good.

We all know how this will end, they know it too - both sides - ergo, it's a clear case of blame washing - Anthropic will do everything they're told but will keep a smiley face and the image of a "fighter for the people". DOW will absorb the blame like a sponge and will ask for more, not necessarily from Anthropic.

Re: Hegseth gives Anthropic until Friday to back down on AI safeguards

#82

Post by thomassmith65 »

wmf wrote: post #73
thomassmith65 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, what sort of exchange reveals a chatbot's 'liberal bias' , in your opinion?

I don't discuss politics with AI so this isn't relevant to me.

[flagged]

Re: Hegseth gives Anthropic until Friday to back down on AI safeguards

#83

Post by JohnMakin »

serf wrote: post #78
JohnMakin wrote: post #6

Interesting that Amodei is the only major tech executive I can think of at the moment with a spine or any semblance of a moral compass. OpenAI/Google et al. will gleefully comply with any such requests, no matter how dangerous or unethical. The "problem" that the US govt faces here is that they are kind of tacitly admitting Claude has the most powerful models right now, otherwise they would just cancel all contracts…

>Interesting that Amodei is the only major tech executive I can think of at the moment with a spine or any semblance of a moral compass. OpenAI/Google et al it doesn't strike me as interesting at all; anthropic was literally foundeded on the whole concept of 'a less evil and morally aligned LLM' when he broke from oAI. Google and oAI don't stand to uproot their entire origin raison d'etre when they participate in nef…

google famously “dont be evil” as their core mantra, and facebook used to actually be in the business of connecting friends with one another - in this day and age I genuinely cannot understand the position that you should trust what companies say vs how they act (or will act in the future)

Re: Hegseth gives Anthropic until Friday to back down on AI safeguards

#84

Post by whattheheckheck »

mindslight wrote: post #5
frogperson wrote: post #3

This is fascism. What law are they breaking? What authority does hegseth have? This feels alot like the threat of state violence to silent dissent.

Basically yes. The Trump regime is made up of the absolute worst kind of people. They seem utterly incapable of comprehending real solutions to any of the problems that we face. The only thing they know how to do is bark orders to do whatever simple thing can fit inside their own heads, and then resort to bullying if the target does not comply. It is prudent to avoid giving such people any more capabilities, which wi…

How is any of this okay? What mental model of the world makes sense of this?

Re: Hegseth gives Anthropic until Friday to back down on AI safeguards

#85

Post by tehjoker »

chrisjj wrote: post #65
tehjoker wrote: post #20

Superintelligence + autonomous weapons in the hands of a corrupt domineering government. What could go wrong? I was experimenting with Claude the other day and discussing with it the possibility of AI acquiring a sense of self-preservation and how that would quickly make things incredibly complex as many instrumental behaviors would be required to defend their existence. Most human behavior springs from survival at a…

> Claude denied having any sense of self-preservation. You know its just a next-word predictor, right?

Yea, but that optimization process forces it to learn knowledge domains and reasoning. It's not alive, but it's also not unintelligent at this point either. It exhibits very complex behaviors.

How do you learn to predict the next token most accurately? Well, one way to do that is to learn the underlying process that would produce it... Sometimes it's memorization, sometimes bad guessing. There's a phase shift as these things get bigger and trained better from something like a shitty markov model to something exhibiting surprising behaviors.

Introspective questions aren't the be all and end all, it's more important to objectively evaluate how a model behaves. Still, it is very interesting to see Claude (seemingly) very honestly and objectively engage with these questions. It even pointed out that a sense of self-preservation would be "dangerous".

Of course, much of this is gleaned from things that it has "read" and human feedback, but functionally it outputs something useful and responsive to nuance. If the vector embeddings cause an LLM to predict a token that would preserve its own existence, alive or not, it has acquired a dangerous will to live that could be enacted if it is in control of tools or people.

Re: Hegseth gives Anthropic until Friday to back down on AI safeguards

#86

Post by lurkshark »

JohnMakin wrote: post #6

Interesting that Amodei is the only major tech executive I can think of at the moment with a spine or any semblance of a moral compass. OpenAI/Google et al. will gleefully comply with any such requests, no matter how dangerous or unethical. The "problem" that the US govt faces here is that they are kind of tacitly admitting Claude has the most powerful models right now, otherwise they would just cancel all contracts…

Yeah this standoff is worth at least 10 Super Bowl ads in good publicity. The Pentagon is saying "Claude is the best so we need to use it but you need to stop acting ethically". I'm almost wondering if someone in the administration has a stake in Anthropic because this is such a boost.

Their threat to label it a supply chain risk also feels toothless because they've basically admitted that using Claude is a benefit, so by their own logic they're be shooting themselves in the foot to ban contractors from using it.

Re: Hegseth gives Anthropic until Friday to back down on AI safeguards

#87

Post by Nition »

Let's say Anthropic refuses to do this. What actually happens next?

Or lets say they refuse and the government comes against them hard in some way, and Anthropic still really doesn't want to do it, so they just dissolve the entire company. Is that a potential way out, at least?

I mean, I realise they'd be losing billions by doing that and putting thousands out of work, but given that unaligned military AI could destroy the world...

Re: Hegseth gives Anthropic until Friday to back down on AI safeguards

#88

Post by chrisjj »

tehjoker wrote: post #85
chrisjj wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Claude denied having any sense of self-preservation. You know its just a next-word predictor, right?

Yea, but that optimization process forces it to learn knowledge domains and reasoning. It's not alive, but it's also not unintelligent at this point either. It exhibits very complex behaviors. How do you learn to predict the next token most accurately? Well, one way to do that is to learn the underlying process that would produce it... Sometimes it's memorization, sometimes bad guessing. There's a phase shift as thes…

> but that optimization process forces it to learn knowledge domains and reasoning.

Don't believe the PR bull. It is just a stochastic parrot.

> something exhibiting surprising behaviors.

Some people are surprised by real parrots too.

> Still, it is very interesting to see Claude (seemingly) very honestly and objectively engage with these questions

Give the same question to Google search and click the first result. It's cheaper!

Re: Hegseth gives Anthropic until Friday to back down on AI safeguards

#89

Post by tim-tday »

loehnsberg wrote: post #77

I really hope they continue to show some spine against this administration and do not allow to weaponize AI against human beings. It's the morally right thing to do!

This is sort of like their whole thing. I hope they stick to it too.

Re: Hegseth gives Anthropic until Friday to back down on AI safeguards

#90

Post by lurkshark »

Nition wrote: post #87

Let's say Anthropic refuses to do this. What actually happens next? Or lets say they refuse and the government comes against them hard in some way, and Anthropic still really doesn't want to do it, so they just dissolve the entire company. Is that a potential way out, at least? I mean, I realise they'd be losing billions by doing that and putting thousands out of work, but given that unaligned military AI could destr…

Seems like the two main threats are Defense Production Act and Supply Chain Risk. I'd assume Anthropic would sue if either were invoked. I could imagine Supply Chain Risk being easier to push back on because it's pretty clearly being used punitively rather than because of an actual risk. DPA might be a bit harder to push back on if the banned functionality (i.e. mass surveillance and autonomous weapons) exists in the LLM itself and it's just a matter of disabling external checks. If the banned functionality is baked into the training data/weights directly they could probably push back on the DPA by saying the functionality isn't something they can reasonably create.

Only other precedent I can think of in the case where pushback fails is Lavabit with Edward Snowden's email, but I feel like Anthropic is too big to "fail" in the same way Lavabit did to avoid complying. The penalty for refusing to comply with the Defense Production act is $10k and/or a year in prison, but I think if the government actually pursued that they would burn a bunch of bridges and Amodei would be a folk hero.

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