The Department of War has stated they will only contract with AI companies who accede to “any lawful use” and remove safeguards in the cases mentioned above. They have threatened to remove us from their systems if we maintain these safeguards; they have also threatened to designate us a “supply chain risk”—a label reserved for US adversaries, never before applied to an American company—and to invoke the Defense Production Act to force the safeguards’ removal. These latter two threats are inherently contradictory: one labels us a security risk; the other labels Claude as essential to national security.
Regardless, these threats do not change our position: we cannot in good conscience accede to their request.
It is the Department’s prerogative to select contractors most aligned with their vision. But given the substantial value that Anthropic’s technology provides to our armed forces, we hope they reconsider. Our strong preference is to continue to serve the Department and our warfighters—with our two requested safeguards in place. Should the Department choose to offboard Anthropic, we will work to enable a smooth transition to another provider, avoiding any disruption to ongoing military planning, operations, or other critical missions. Our models will be available on the expansive terms we have proposed for as long as required.
So the government wants “full self-driving” attack drones. You know, just in case the military actually disobeys an unlawful order?
How many pieces of science fiction do we have where the “bad guys” are literally just killer robots we created and then realized we didn’t have control over? Why would we decide it is a good idea to literally build terminators? I’m convinced the government will actually build the “orphan crushing machine” next…
“… Without a subscription. For the full, unlocked dictatorship just the low low price of a bajillion dollars a month will give you the power you need to defeat your enemies.”
I read somewhere that Anthropic has $18,000,000,000 in commitments from last year alone, so conceivably, they can stand to lose a mere $200,000,000 and it won’t create a huge issue for them in the short term.
I hope that’s how they’re looking at it.
cannot in good conscience
🤣
Are those the same AI systems that recommended nuclear escalation in 90% of simulations?
Anthropic is now playing Good Cop in a charade. They don’t care about ethics.
Anthropic’s CEO admits compromising with authoritarian regimes to secure AI funding
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei backs President Trump on AI policy, pushes back on criticism
Those two safeguards they deny to remove must be quite the thing.
I was listening to NPR yesterday and heard the two are apparently mass surveillance of Americans and autonomous weapons systems with no human interaction…
Or they are just doing this for optics, with an understanding that the feds will end up forcing their hand in the future.
Can’t say I know what or why, but I was having issues this week with their desktop client. When I was viewing their status page, I saw that they have a new service for gov use that went online about 10 days ago.
I can’t see the name “anthropic” without thinking about furries.
Anthro pic.
Now you can’t either. You’re welcome.
Amodei “we cannot in good conscience allow this”.
Hegseth looks confused, turns towards his team and mouths “…in good what?”"
“Anthropic publicly praised President Trump’s AI Action Plan,” said CEO Dario Amodei.
“We have been supportive of the President’s efforts to expand energy provision in the US in order to win the AI race,” he continued, apparently talking about Trump’s new anti green energy, pro fossil fuel program.
yes… mine was just a play on the title of this post.
Look, I’m not saying that Amodei is a saint and I do find him as full of shit as Altman with their AGI promises, but would you expect Anthropic to take a stand against increasing AI investment, because it’s coming from Trump? And I don’t like that he went looking for funding in the Middle East either.
I just think there is an ethical line between “I do business with people who do bad things” and “I’m actively helping people who do bad things to do them in a more efficient way”. It might be a fine line and it might also be that they are just posturing, but it’s still more than other companies did (companies that are a lot richer than Anthropic and that don’t need to find a lot of funding just to stay afloat).
My reply was a continuation of your joke, just using Dario’s actual words. My point is that he too lacks a conscience (see also, the other links I’ve posted)
Gotcha! Shit, I barely understand my own jokes… 😅
I guess it’s good that they draw the line somewhere, but it is absolutely horrifying to me as a non-American that the moral stance is limited to:
- taking issue with fully autonomous AI weapons (purely for technical reasons according to this letter, they are working hard on making them possible)
- refusing to conduct mass surveillance of US citizens specifically (foreign nationals are fair game and the intelligence apparatus will surely only be used for good and to preserve democracy).
This is not Anthropic refusing to cooperate with the Trump administration as the title may suggest, they are in fact explicitly eager to serve the US Department of War. They are just vying for slightly better contract terms.
You’re spot-on. As some additional context, Anthropic is already working tightly with the US government. Until the recent announcement regarding Grok, Anthropic was the only approved AI for US government work, as it is/was the only one certified for safely woeking with classified data.
they are in fact explicitly eager to serve the US Department of War
I suppose you are a party to their closed-door meetings then.
I am only going off of what they are saying in this very press release, which is filled with fawning over the Department and pleading to remain its contractors. That’s what I meant when I called it explicit, they advertise it in the letter we are currently discussing. A few excerpts:
Anthropic has therefore worked proactively to deploy our models to the Department of War and the intelligence community.
Anthropic understands that the Department of War, not private companies, makes military decisions. We have never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit use of our technology in an ad hoc manner.
Our strong preference is to continue to serve the Department and our warfighters
We remain ready to continue our work to support the national security of the United States.
Yes, they have their reservations, but it is undeniable from the text that they WANT to serve the Department of War and are frustrated that it won’t give up on those two red lines.
They wouldn’t be negotiating if they didn’t want the co tract to begin with. It’s not like they can’t tell from 100 miles off who they’d be getting into bed with. I’m glad to see they have some lines drawn they won’t cross, but it’s laughable for you to question that they didn’t want to be here in the first place.
We have leaks, yes
I will admit that I am very cynical right now when it comes to multibillion dollar companies. I can also see it as being possible that he (the CEO) does not want his technology to be used for mass surveillance or Autonomous drone swarms. But seeing what we know, how corporations are acting and how they are protecting their own financial interest, this is, after all, capitalism, it would not surprise me if this is just a public facing statement that he is making so that he doesn’t lose public support. And privately, he is going to flip and help the US government. And of course Pete Hegeth is just going to say that he compelled them to do it through some law. But again, I am very cynical.
Doesn’t support mass surveillance on US Citizens
Apparently everyone else is fair game.
Ironically, Dario Amadei’s anti-China chauvenism might loop back around to supporting surveillance on U.S. citizens.
Anthropic founders are former OpenAI employees who left specifically because they disagreed with OpenAI’s stance on this kind of stuff and they wanted nothing to do with it. If this is just a PR stunt then I don’t see why they would’ve left OpenAI in the first place.
There have been some pretty high-profile departures from Anthropic over the past few months, so… I dunno, seems like there are plenty of insiders who are unhappy with the company’s current trajectory.
Every Anthropic PR release has been followed up by a huge infusion of cash from companies like Google and Amazon.
On January 21, 2025, Amodei said that he was “more confident than ever” that we’re “very close” to “powerful capabilities,” defined as “systems that are better than almost all humans at almost all terms,” citing his long, boring essay. A day later, Anthropic would raise another $1 billion from Google.
yes, too soon. It took years and several bajillions in profit for Google to remove the “don’t be evil” motto
something something onion headline
Wtf, I never would have expected this level of resistance. What’s the catch, fear of intentional reprisals?
They pitch their product as ethical. Go ahead, ask it about Israel committing genocide in Gaza and see how much it’ll gaslight you.
Optics, that’s all they’re going for.
They’re getting far more press than they ever would have had they capitulated like the other companies. Now they get to frame themselves as the “good guys”. They’ll end up doing (more of) the evil shit soon enough, but they just had a huge marketing coup. Smart play by one of the biggest grifters, bravo.
I imagine partly liability concerns, partly protecting their reputation.
Basically they don’t want their technology being used for something it’s not ready for, something going badly wrong, and them getting the blame.
How is a private company the voice of reason in this?
Because America elected unreasonable leaders.
What a company says and what a company actually does are not the same thing.
They’re not. Conscience has nothing to do with this.
They just don’t think the PR hit is worth it.
Whenever companies choose to act in a way that we perceive as good, we were the voice of reason, not them.
While I’m glad they’re drawing a line, they’re only splitting hairs. Anthropic is already deeply working with the US gov.
Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI employees who left largely due to ethical and safety concerns about how OpenAI was being run. This is just them sticking to their principles.
This is just them sticking to their principles.
I’m not so sure about that one.
AI company Anthropic amends core safety principle amid growing competition in sector
AI safety leader says ‘world is in peril’ and quits to study poetry
I still think they deserve some credit for at least trying to do the right thing. I don’t envy the position they’re in.
Everyone’s rushing toward AGI. Trying to do it safely is meaningless if your competition - the ones who don’t care about safety - gets there first. You can slow things down if you’re in the lead, but if you’re second best, it’s just posturing. There is no second place in this race.
“Right thing”: compromising with authoritarian regimes to secure AI funding
Anthropic’s “ethical” concerns were performative. They only fearmonger about fictional things that will make their product sound powerful (read: worth throwing money into).
They try to scare people with fictional stories of AGI, a thing that isn’t happening, while ignoring widespread CSAM and sexual harassment generation, a thing that is happening.
Are we not moving toward AGI? Because from where I stand, I only see three scenarios: either AI research is going backwards, no progress is being made whatsoever, or we’re continuing to improve our systems incrementally - inevitably moving toward AGI. Unless, ofcourse, you think we’ll never going to reach it which I view as a quite insane claim in itself.
If we’re not moving toward it, then I’d love to hear your explanation for why we’re moving backwards or not making any progress at all.
Whether we’re 5 or 500 years away from AGI is completely irrelevant to the people who worry about it. It’s not the speed of the progress - it’s the trajectory of it.
We are not “moving towards AGI” in any way with any modern technology, in the same way that we are not “moving towards FTL travel” because a car company added cylinders to an engine.
The real “AI” dangers are people like Eli Yudkowski, a man who scares vulnerable people, sexually abuses them, and has spawned at least one murderous cult.
Dario is one of the biggest AGI bullshit peddlers.
In October 2023, Amodei joined The Logan Bartlett show, saying that he “didn’t like the term AGI” because, and I shit you not, “…because we’re closer to the kinds of things that AGI is pointing at,” making it “no longer a useful term.” He said that there was a “future point” where a model could “build dyson spheres around the sun and calculate the meaning of life,” before rambling incoherently and suggesting that these things were both very close and far away at the same time. He also predicted that “no sooner than 2025, maybe 2026” that AI would “really invent new science.”
We are not “moving towards AGI” in any way with any modern technology
So that means you believe AI research is completely frozen still or moving backwards. Please explain.
Comparisons to faster-than-light travel are completely disingenuous and bad faith - that would break the laws of physics and you know it.
You can also keep your red herrings to yourself. I’m discussing ideas here - not people.
According to Dario Amodei, this is the year we are getting New Science. And apparently he believes in Dyson Spheres too. How do we feel about that?
Anthropic is not special. They’re doing the LLM thing like everybody else. The Godfather of AI, Yann LeCun himself, said LLMs were a dead end on this front. But even if he didn’t chime in, it’s your job to show they’ll lead to AGI, it’s your job to show us how, not my job to show you it won’t.
If you’re just gonna keep ignoring every single point I make and keep rambling about unrelated shit, then there’s nothing left to discuss here. If you actually had an argument, you would’ve made it by now.
…because every now and again, for the briefest of moments, one them shows themselves not to be run by entirely evil, lecherous humps?
Blink and you (or the shareholders) might miss it.
Don’t buy the hype. They’re not acting in good conscience, they’ve just weighed the pros and cons and decided that the PR hit isn’t worth it.
Having said that…let’s see how it shakes out. Sometimes, good things happen for good reasons.
When a CEO tells you who he is, believe him the first time.
I thought we had all learned this lesson with Elon Musk, who also pretended to be the good guy. We’ve already got a ton of red flags about Dario Amodei.
khoai oni saan 😭
