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.
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.
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.
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.
Your claim: AI seems to be getting better, therefore AGI will happen
My rebuttal: they aren’t linked
Other important things you must reconcile with: the sexual abuse, the death toll, etc from the True Believers
Does that clear matters up?
My argument is that we’ll incrementally keep improving our technology like we have done throughout human history. Assuming that general intelligence is not substrate dependent - meaning that what our brains are doing cannot be replicated in silicon - or that we destroy ourselves before we get there, then it’s just a matter of time before we create a system that’s as intelligent as we are: AGI.
I already said that the timescale doesn’t matter here. It could take a hundred years or two thousand - doesn’t matter. We’re still moving toward it. It does not matter how slow you move. As long as you keep moving, you’ll eventually reach your destination.
So, how I see it is that if we never end up creating AGI ever, it’s either because we destroyed ourselves before we got there or there’s something borderline supernatural about the human brain that makes it impossible to copy in silicon.