Use of the DPA can be litigated, and surely would be. Designation as a supply chain risk surely would be as well.
These court cases would produce bad outcomes either way. If the court finds for Anthropic, future DoD leadership will find itself constrained or at least chilled. Or if the court finds for the government, an expansive permissive view of the DPA might encourage future administrations to compel tech companies to make AIs break the law in other ways, for example by suppressing certain political points of view in output.
National defense is strongest if the military is extremely powerful but carefully judicious in the application of that power. That gives us the highest “top end” capability of performance. If military leadership insists on acting recklessly, then eventually guardrails are installed, with the result of a diminished ability to respond effectively to low-probability, high risk moments. One of many nuances and paradoxes the current political leadership does not seem to understand.
> If the court finds for Anthropic, future DoD leadership will find itself constrained or at least chilled
Seems like a good outcome? The government should not be able to arbitrarily decide to make private citizens do things they aren't willing to do, whether the government thinks the action is legal or not, and its especially egregious when the government knew about those limits ahead of time, spelled out in a fucking contract.
The problem in this case is in fact the best part of our military. The civilian control. This isn't a general or admiral going insane. This is a politically motivated and appropriately assigned civilian. And that's the good part.
The bad part is the failure of the citizenry to elect moral and ethical politicians.
It's not either of those. Anthropic put a lot of effort into getting FedRAMP approved so the DOD could use them; they are now being punished for that, and the government at present has no other good options. Other options could of course be developed, but other vendors may question how unreliable and untrustworthy the current DOD leadership is as as customer.
Trump was impeached before and nothing happened. He can continue to ignore congress. I wouldn't be surprised if at this point he abolishes congress, and even jokes at a press conference saying "I am the Senate".
He was impeached by the House but that does nothing without the Senate carrying out its trial, which requires an onerous 2/3rds vote. Obviously without the trial in Senate, nothing happens, and nothing ever will until one party gets 2/3rds control.
In the US elections cannot be canceled even when Martial Law is declared. That does not mean a certain someone will not try to simply ignore the Constitution given his track record of simply ignoring the Constitution
The US President in 1944 was someone who wanted to have elections. In 2026 this is not the case anymore. How much of a difference it makes, nobody knows.
What are the states going to do with their local election results when the officials in Washington ignore them due to some manufactured state of emergency?
He already tried to get specific states' election outcomes discarded from the count on Jan 6, 2021.
Could you be more specific on who the officials in DC would be that could ignore the election results? The Clerk of the House, I assume? They have a fairly limited role, and it would probably be a short-lived disruption. The members-elect themselves seem to have all of the power, if my civics knowledge is correct.
I've never seen more enthusiasm about US politics than from Europeans (like pavlov there in Finland) and Australians. It makes meaningful discussion very difficult, online.
I lived in the US for years (including Jan 6 2021) and I’ve seen how this playbook was executed in Russia.
From my POV, Americans are hopelessly naive about their institutions holding up when it’s been demonstrated so many times that the guardrails are gone. It’s one of the reasons I left the country - I feel safer living next to Russia than in America.
I think that is a valid point, though I would like to see some meat in these proclamations of doom.
There are more guns than people in the US, and in nobody's wildest dreams does ICE (or the entire federal government, for that matter, including the military) have enough personnel to subdue even 10% of the population rising up. And while I think it is somewhat valid to assume the military leans a bit conservative, in my experience it is more of a true conservatism and not MAGA. I was in the military, and the vast majority of soldiers would 100% refuse to suppress US citizens.
Everyone thinks the adults are not really in charge in the GOP right now, but I think that's absolutely not true. They are just okay with the chaos right now because it's not impeding business and keeps people distracted. If MAGA gets too spicy and causes real civil unrest, we're going to find out very quickly who actually runs the show. And it ain't Donald Trump.
He doesn't, it's literally enshrined in the constitution. If he decides to violate that, it's him violating the constitution yet again, not proof that he has a say.
It would also probably be the last straw for a lot of people who has been limping along on the belief in free elections.
More importantly, this isn’t a “who’s going to stop me?” sort of thing like having ICE violate people’s civil rights. The power isn’t there. ICE does what Trump says because the law puts them under his control and he metaphorically signs their paychecks. If Trump orders state governments to do something with elections, that carries no weight. There’s no legal obligation or tradition to comply, no paychecks involved, nothing that would compel them to do it unless they actually wanted to. He’d have to use force, and it would be a gargantuan effort that would spur great resistance.
Elections won't be canceled. They're too important for the perception of legitimacy. Virtually every country on Earth now has elections. Russia, China, even North Korea has elections.
The modern playbook isn't to abolish elections, it's a combination of blocking opposition candidates, suppressing votes, intimidating voters, and lying about the results. That's what to watch for.
It's fairly easy to abuse a state of exception to cancel elections. Ukraine has done it, and it's been, along with banning opposition parties and attempting to imprison critics (Arestovych, etc.), a critical step in their government consolidating power.
It’s absurd to claim that Ukraine (I’ll assume you actually mean “Ukrainian leadership”) is somehow “abusing” a constitutionally mandated state of emergency.
>I’ll assume you actually mean “Ukrainian leadership”
What else could I possibly have meant, genius?
But yes of course they've taken advantage of it. Russia yeeting them out of its own territories and then invading The Ukraine is the best thing Zelensky could have asked for.
Ukraine's constitution doesn't allow elections when martial law is in effect. The US constitution has no such clause, nor anything else that would allow for delaying or canceling elections.
That's not to say it can't be done, but there's a huge difference in difficulty between doing what the country's constitution says, and doing the opposite. Especially in a country where elections are run by sovereign governments not under the control of the central government.
My point is about difficulty, not how “fine” it is. It’s really easy not to hold elections when your constitution says you can’t. It’s a lot harder when your constitution says you must, and also gives you no power over the governments who actually hold those elections. But obviously you’d rather grind your axe against Ukraine than actually discuss what you said before.
With a malevolent agent in the bully pulpit deliberately swamping the American zeitgeist with hostile nonsense ("flood the zone with shit"), it has become every American's duty to be on guard to avoid propagating the regime's bullshit. We are indeed at war, an information war of the US elites against We The People. So buck up.
I'm not american, and further, whether a department name change is a primary name change, or an alias slapped on, seems pretty low on the list of things to care about.
Is your argument that you're not involved enough in American politics to have responsible opinions about it, even though you're involved enough to comment in the first place?
I agree this in isolation is low stakes. The problem is the volume. The memetic assault is everywhere you turn, and propagating it helps the regime. And yes, it's far too easy to do accidentally. That doesn't mean we shouldn't appreciate others calling it out.
Is your argument that you're not involved enough in American politics to have responsible opinions about it, even though you're involved enough to comment in the first place?
I wonder who or what you're replying to here. Certainly, it has no relation to anything I've said in this thread.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't appreciate others calling it out.
Again, who are you replying to with this?
I said "take it easy", not "don't ever bring that up".
You said "I'm not american" as the lead in to your comment. What was the point of saying this other than to disclaim the responsibility I invoked? (which technically wasn't even directed at you directly)
For the overall argument, you called out a comment for calling out a comment whose only contribution was to promote the term "DOW". If it had been a substantive comment that someone jumped on for merely using the term, you'd have had a reasonable point. But it wasn't.
This team politics, the me-vs-them, this red-vs-blue that your country, and you, and everyone upthread was precisely what I was commenting on. It's sad, it's destructive, and both sides of your little game have created the situation you are in today.
Jumping on a guy because he corrected someone, and immediately presuming it had an entire slew of politics attached, instead of it being a mere technical correction, is prime example of everything wrong with the US today. Everything.
Me vs them. One word means a political stance. The wrong thing said, accidentally, you're the enemy. It's literally sad. I stand, as a Canadian, watching my brother make horrible life choices, and I want to help, yet I just see more anger and hate and discord.
None of this serves any of you well, it all serves your enemies. Right now, your acts, and the act of the guy super-upset that someone said DOW, serves your enemies. 90% of this is fueled by state actor controlled bots and comments, and you guys eat it up as manna.
So yes, I have an entirely reasonable point. The guy literally might have had no idea. I certainly didn't. You don't even know if that dude is american or not!
DOW is all over the news.
The presumption is wrong. The anger is wrong. The hate is wrong. The attitude is wrong.
On both sides. Of both sides of your little squabble.
I don't care who started it. The entire lot of you need a parent to come into the room, and tell just that, and that you both should go to your room.
And if you don't watch it? If you don't stop stepping out of bounds. If you don't halt it.
The rest of as are going to have to.
And that would be the saddest thing of all. For all of us.
Framing the argument here as "both sides" team sport is not appropriate. Did these "state actor controlled bots" also create the term DOW? No, the needlessly-divisive propaganda is now coming directly from the White House itself.
I'm a libertarian who sees both leftist and rightist thinking as two halves of a complete analysis. This situation isn't "red-vs-blue". Rather this is social-media-psychosis-red vs everybody else.
If social-media-psychosis-blue was in power and similarly attacking our society, I would be calling that out as well! But they aren't, and they haven't really been in powerful national political offices, because so far the blue extremists' main political success has been to just sandbag the Democratic party. (ostensibly because blue extremism runs counter to the parties' sponsors' interests, confining professional blue extremists to culture war topics that most people see through)
As I said, the fundamental dynamic with the original comment is that "correcting" to "DOW" was its only point. If you just casually heard the term in some [likely government] news media, you're not going to rush out and repeat it as a correction for someone saying DOD.
But sure, we can't really still assign a known motive - maybe that commenter was pointing out the "war" part to try and highlight what this administration shamelessly wants to use "AI" for. But the easy way to avoid being jumped on is to include some constructive context for what one is actually trying to get at, rather than leaving readers to apply Occam's razor themselves. So either way, that response to it was not unreasonable.
There is so much ensnarled in US mind-think here, it's difficult to respond cogently. Every fiber of your response is keyed to knock down "the other guy".
Let's start with this.
Framing the argument here as "both sides" team sport is not appropriate. Did these "state actor controlled bots" also create the term DOW? No, the needlessly-divisive propaganda is now coming directly from the White House itself.
You are literally framing the argument as left vs right, whilst trying to pin this very mode of thought upon me. This is because you cannot see the world any other way. Meanwhile, at no point did I ever, not once, say the correction was wrong. Not once.
So mired in this horrid quicksand, this "thought-scape" is your political world-view, that if someone says "Don't say that in such a mean way, be nice to one another", your immediate thought is "OMG! Siding with the enemy! Attack!".
The entirety of US political culture is now as that of an abusive family. The son that grows up with an alcoholic, abusive father, and is beat, yet the cycle repeats with his own son. It is learned behaviour. It is difficult to stop. Even desiring to do so, the son fails when he is the father. And you and all your brothers are caught in it.
The post I replied to painted "the guy", and you have painted "the guy", as someone on a mission to aid "the other team". His mere utterance of a single word, to correct to a name he believes to be the "new name", is viewed as you as a "bad thing".
And this is the problem I speak of. Not correcting someone back. The thought process and the mode of correction. As I said, the anger, the hate, the emotion. And it is emotion laden, not thought driven. It isn't logical, it's reactive emotion.
And yes, it only serves your enemies.
I'll be very blunt here, and I am speaking over decades, not right now. History is vital to comprehension of something like this. When the rest of the world looks at the US. When Canada, the UK, Europe, and all friendlies to the US look at the US?
We can barely tell the differences between your two political parties.
Viewed from the politics of another nation, your left and right are functionally identical. There's zero difference.
The above sentence should make you happy. It really should! It is a true sentence, and what it means is that there is more that binds Americans together, than that which pulls it apart. Yet I am willing to bet that your hackles bristled at such a concept.
And the very fact that they did, is the problem here.
--
Let's discuss state actors, because you seem unaware of how it works. The entire point is not any specific action. It is not about this administration. In fact, the current administration is a product of this decades, yes decades long propaganda by state actors.
The entire point, the easiest way to think of it, is that it amplifies any angst, concern, hostility against "the other team". Surely you are aware of Cambridge Analytics, well that's child's play in comparison, and what I am describing is not secret, or new information, it is well documented, well known, and simply is.
As your two sides become more hostile, you make poor choices out of panic, anger, angst.
Look at what happened with the last US election. Each side terrified about the other gaining power, and so one side hides that an octogenarian might be suffering from old age. Hiding this was a morally repugnant act. Meanwhile the other side chooses someone that much of their party felt they had no other choice but to go with.
Neither party should have chosen either these two. Each is choosing people so aged, so old, that they are barely capable of running the country. I wouldn't want an 80 year old person in charge of anything of this scope and size, yet each of your teams think this is just grand, great, a wonderful choice.
Why?
Because "OMG no, the other guy!"
Both sides are making choices, not with the goal of "What is best for my country", but instead "If the other guy gets in power, the entire country will be destroyed, so we must fight the other team, THEY are the enemy of the true America!". Meanwhile, 99.9% of the decisions made by an administration are functionally identical regardless of the party.
Whether team red or team blue in the last 50 years, the wars continue, the foreign politics is mostly the same. The US has been withdrawing from the world under each team, bombing the middle east under each team, and the list goes on. The debt isn't a problem because of the current administration, it's a problem because of all of them. Every administration for the last 50 years.
There are a myriad of ways to resolve this problem.
There are a myriad of ways to make it worse.
Making presumptions about someone because of one word they say, and jumping down their throat about it, is not how to make it better.
It's how to make it worse.
It's everything that's wrong with America today.
And I know you cannot see it, for your reply shows you cannot.
Look again at my words:
So cut the guy some slack.
Did I say don't correct him? Did I say he shouldn't be corrected? Did I argue whether or not the point was wrong or right? Nope. Not at all.
Instead, I simply said to take it easy in correcting someone.
In the lingo and context of my words in this reply to you, I was saying "Don't make it worse".
Your response was "OMG but he was purposefully aiding the other team!", without any knowledge that it was so.
My response was "be nice to one another, in how you argue".
--
I have written this response hoping that you may grok of what I speak. That you might understand that it is the way you are carrying your argument that is the issue. Not that you have a dispute. The presumptive, hostile response. The immediate assignment of motive and judge/jury/executioner attitude of "Nope, he said a word because of the other team!" thought.
It's all wrong.
It's wrong if it is them or you.
It's wrong no matter who does it, or why.
It doesn't matter who started it.
Go back to your room. You, and everyone else in the US.
Go back to your room, be quiet, and think about it.
I'm not the one writing ever-longer screeds. Perhaps you need to reflect on your own anger here?
Factually, you have written a lot of things I do agree with. I'm not new to this rodeo. I've been around the left-right gamut. Reading Moldbug is actually what started the end of my rightist-fundamentalist phase.
I've never been friendly to this entrenched corporate power structure that backs both major parties as if they're sponsoring racehorses. I had been both sidesing up until June of 2020. I'm not sitting here going "How could anyone ever vote for Trump?!?!". In 2016, I was telling my blue tribe friends that he had a good chance of winning, as they stood there aghast.
But after an abject failure of a concrete term in office, where the guy basically never stopped divisively campaigning? When faced with a pan-political national emergency, his response was effectively dereliction of duty?? If he had merely led us during Covid, like any other President of the past thirty years (and like most state governors tried to do), I suspect he would have had a shoe-in second term.
So voting for more of that in 2020 or 2024? That is embracing the exact hot mess of crazy that you're condemning here. Obviously the people who voted for him did not feel that way. From everything I've been able to surmise this is due to their media sources making them think the Democratic party is just as crazy. But from what I've seen much of this is based around sensationalizing some otherwise banal realities, and the Democratic party itself is nowhere near as far gone as the Republican party - the prominent members are still basically milquetoast status-quo-supporting bureaucrats who pay some lip service to the extremists, rather than having been taken over by a strongman primarily pandering to the extremists.
For example, one concrete data point:
> We can barely tell the differences between your two political parties.
Do you think a President Harris would be threatening war with Canada? That should be pretty pronounced and quite pertinent to you, right?
Your first sentence is bizarre, considering this post is longer than you last. And really, more engagement is a bad thing? Come now.
I feel you're still not getting it though. Because it's not about which side is worse, or who started it, or who's right about something, or who voted for who. It's about how this is discussed, how this is handled.
That's the biggest problem there is.
And yes, I said "barely", and it's quite true. A Democrat could easily be elected just as unhinged. An independent. Yet this sort of highlights my point.
If you stand Trump up against any other US president, just as with an ape or a human, he's literally identical on 98% of things. And really, it's more like 99.9% from an external viewpoint. Yet just as with an ape, that small amount can result in startling differences.
But your parties? The differences are barely noticeable.
> Your first sentence is bizarre, considering this post is longer than you last
Half my post was trying to explain some context where I am coming from. I was addressing the general tone of your post, and pointing out why I was not going to pick through each point line by line trying to tease out nuance. What's bizarre is for you to go here, as it seems exactly like a condemnation "keyed to knock down "the other guy".
As far as both the parties ? I just said that I have long acknowledged the commonalities. I had never voted for a major party candidate in a national election until I voted Biden in 2020. Doing so required swallowing a lot of pride, and I considered it as voting conservatively due to getting older. I can certainly imagine Trumpism's core message of "burn it all down" as being highly appealing to younger me - remember how I said I was telling aghast friends in 2016 that Trump had a good chance at winning?
You also dodged my direct question of whether a President Harris would be threatening war with Canada. Details like this are precisely why there is something here worth fighting for and not merely "both sidesing" it as merely a communication style.
Trying to move on to constructive topics, you say this is about "how" is it discussed. How exactly do you think the bare repetition of partisan propaganda should to be discussed, regardless of the actual intentions? Do we need to treat every commenter with kid gloves, detail the actual wider context, get lost in the semantics of whether it is a "legal name change" (even though the legality is not the actual reason to reject the name!), all the while hoping they will be receptive to those points, etc?
Because the way I see it, a comment that is merely a "correction" in terminology is nothing but flamebait - essentially the same thing as tone/terminology policing by the blue extremists. It's exactly the type of thing that needs to be shut down quickly if we're trying to have constructive discussions.
So when I write at length, it's worthy of note. When you do, it's for "reasons".
When I shorten my responses, I'm now "dodging" questions, is that it? So no matter my post length, I'm in error?
And I directly answered your question, by saying there is no appreciable difference between US presidents, predicated upon party lines, when viewed externally.
There is no other way to answer, for no one on this planet, even those scornful of Trump, ever expected this 51st state nonsense prior to his term. No one. At all.
I know nothing of Harris, and even if I did, comparatively, Trump's behaviour in this respect was a surprise.
Do ypu think any Canadian thinks this will be isolated to this single administration?
... signal a particular vice. It's vice signalling. We generally think of war as bad and try to avoid it, most especially the people tasked with fighting said wars.
Nothing has changed about the performative-ness, in fact if anything it's gotten more performative and hollow. They just signal vices rather than virtues, so a bunch of rightist-flavored-Lenin's useful idiots think it is fresh or effective or anti-"woke" or at least different.
The "Orwellian newspeak" at least makes an effort to aim for positive values, despite falling short. That's the point.
Also, please define what you mean by "leftist". These days it seems like it gets applied to anybody who believes in Constitutionally-limited government and the rule of law. That used to just be called being an American, but social media is a hell of a drug.
Anthropic already went through the process of getting approved to work in secure network. (I think xAI may have as well, but the others just don't have that access.)
WaPo is reporting that OpenAI and xAI already agreed to the Pentagon's "any lawful use" clause, aka, mass surveillance and fully autonomous killbots. From the WaPo article https://archive.is/yz6JA#selection-435.42-435.355
> Officials say other leading AI firms have gone along with the demand. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, Google and Elon Musk’s xAI have agreed to allow the Pentagon to use their systems for “all lawful purposes” on unclassified networks, a Defense official said, and are working on agreements for classified networks.
The only difference is simply that Anthropic is already approved for use on classified networks, whereas Grok and OpenAI are not yet (but are being fast-tracked for approval, especially Grok). Edit: Note someone below pointed out that OpenAI may be approved for Secret level, so it's odd that Washington Post reports that they are working on it still.
Either Anthropic is seen as the clear leader (it certainly is for coding agents) or this is a political stunt to stamp out any opposition to the administration. Or both.
I keep hearing this but it should be plainly obvious to everyone (at least here) that an LLM is not the right AI for this use case. That's like trying to use chatgpt for an airplane autopilot, it doesn't make sense. Other ML models may but not an LLM. Why does the "autonomous killbot" thing keep getting brought up when discussing Anthropic and other llm providers?
For reference, "autonomous killbots" are in use right now in the Ukraine/Russia war and they run on fpv drones, not acres of GPUs. Also, it should be obvious that there's a >90% probability every predator/reaper drone has had an autonomous kill mode for probably a decade now. Maybe it's never been used in warfare, that we know of, but to think it doesn't exist already is bonkers.
It wouldn't make sense to have the LLM try to do the target recognition, trajectory planning, or motor control. It might make sense to have the LLM at a higher level handling monitoring of systems and coordination with other instances, to provide more flexibility to react to novel situations than rules bases systems.
It's almost a silly distinction since ML has been used in weapons for quite a while. For example: Javelin missiles have automatic target recognition, cruise missles have intelligent terrain following, long range drones use algos like SLAM for guidance.
You’re reading into it like the federal government is an honest broker.
It’s just corruption. Google is a bigger fish. OpenAI is attached to Oracle and Larry Ellison, who is a Trump collaborator. Kushner is also in investor.
Anthropic is the weakest animal in the herd. They also started a campaign targeting OpenAI, which is capturing hearts and minds (everyone is talking about Claude Code), and really pissed off Sam Altman.
On the one hand it's fantastic that people are resisting and, if nothing else, raising awareness and buying time.
On the other hand, is autonomous war not obviously the endgame, given how quickly capabilities are increasing and that it simply does not require much intelligence (relatively speaking) to build something that points a gun at something and pulls a trigger?
It just needs one player to do it, so everyone has to be able to do it. I'd love to hear about different scenarios scenario.
I absolutely do get it, but if you assume that eventually (and by that I mean: very, very soon) somebody else will do it, in how far is this line of action simply opting out of having some say in all of it and taking responsibility for situation that you instrumented?
And I am honestly not sure.
If your stance is "well, this is something that should just not happen" and also believe that is absolutely will happen, then what are you doing by saying "but it won't be us, it will instead be other people (who were enabled and inspired by our work in unsurprising ways)".
On the other hand, just the act of resisting could tip the scale in some incalculable and hopefully positive way.
Yes - Anthropic _does_ incur business risk if their products are misused and this becomes a scandal. Legally the government may be in the clear to use the product, but that doesn’t mean Anthropic’s business is protected. Moral concerns aside, it’s their prerogative to decide not to take on a customer that may misuse their product in a way that might incur reputational harm.
Or it was their prerogative, until the Trump administration. Now even private companies must bend the knee.
We’re constantly told all sorts of stuff. It isn’t clear to me at all that this fiduciary duty exists in law at all, more its a collection of precedents and wishful thinking.
Using fiduciary duty as cover for profiting from the misery of others? Well that’s just some modern American doublespeak. I’m consistently asking myself “Are we the Baddies?” and the only answer I have anymore is yes.
agreed. I've never thought that fiduciary duties meant tossing out all morals and considerations of right/wrong to the point that one must make any decision in a way that will make the most money within legal bounds. I'm no economist or lawyer, but I've always taken it that the duty is to not do dumb shit that will lose money and to do things that protect it. The reading of "make money at all cost" just seems like a strained interpretation, yet it's trotted out very frequently with not enough push back.
> it simply does not require much intelligence (relatively speaking) to build something that points a gun at something and pulls a trigger?
I could not disagree more. A big part of that is also knowing when NOT to pull the trigger. And it’s much harder than you’d think. If you think full self driving is a difficult task for computers, battlefield operations are an order of magnitude more complex, at least.
We have fully autonomous weapons, and had them for over a century. We call them "landmines".
I expect autonomous weapons of the near future to look somewhat similar to that. They get deployed to an area, attack anything that looks remotely like a target there for a given time, then stand down and return to base. That's it.
The job of the autonomous weapon platform isn't telling friend from foe - it's disposing of every target within a geofence when ordered to do so.
Well, I assume that they are at least not to attack their autonomous "comrades". Masquerading as such will be one obvious tactic, no ? You could argue that these guys would use e2e encrypted messages as FOF designation, but I would imagine a contested area would be blanketed with jammers, leaving only other options (light ? but smokescreens. Audio? Also easily jammed). So this isn't as easy as most people think.
Edit: No, I don't think a purely defensive stance like landmines is sufficient and what the people in command think.
We have landmines today. Why spend much more making marginally better, highly intelligent ones with LLMs?
Also, a longer quote from Douglas Adams might be appropriate here (also appropriate to agentic vibe coding ...)
Click, hum.
The huge grey Grebulon reconnaissance ship moved silently through the black
void. It was travelling at fabulous, breathtaking speed, yet appeared, against the
glimmering background of a billion distant stars to be moving not at all. It was
just one dark speck frozen against an infinite granularity of brilliant night.
On board the ship, everything was as it had been for millennia, deeply dark and
Silent.
Click, hum.
At least, almost everything.
Click, click, hum.
Click, hum, click, hum, click, hum.
Click, click, click, click, click, hum.
Hmmm.
A low level supervising program woke up a slightly higher level supervising program deep in the ship's semi-somnolent cyberbrain and reported to it that
whenever it went click all it got was a hum.
The higher level supervising program asked it what it was supposed to get, and
the low level supervising program said that it couldn't remember exactly, but
thought it was probably more of a sort of distant satisfied sigh, wasn't it? It didn't know what this hum was. Click, hum, click, hum. That was all it was getting.
The higher level supervising program considered this and didn't like it. It asked
the low level supervising program what exactly it was supervising and the low
level supervising program said it couldn't remember that either, just that it was
something that was meant to go click, sigh every ten years or so, which usually
happened without fail. It had tried to consult its error look-up table but couldn't
find it, which was why it had alerted the higher level supervising program to the
problem.
The higher level supervising program went to consult one of its own look-up
tables to find out what the low level supervising program was meant to be supervising.
It couldn't find the look-up table.
Odd.
It looked again. All it got was an error message. It tried to look up the error message in its error message look-up table and couldn't find that either. It allowed a couple of nanoseconds to go by while it went through all this again. Then it woke up its sector function supervisor.
The sector function supervisor hit immediate problems. It called its supervising
agent which hit problems too. Within a few millionths of a second virtual circuits that had lain dormant, some for years, some for centuries, were flaring into life
throughout the ship. Something, somewhere, had gone terribly wrong, but none
of the supervising programs could tell what it was. At every level, vital instructions were missing, and the instructions about what to do in the event of discovering that vital instructions were missing, were also missing.
Small modules of software - agents - surged through the logical pathways, grouping, consulting, re-grouping. They quickly established that the ship's memory, all
the way back to its central mission module, was in tatters. No amount of interrogation could determine what it was that had happened. Even the central mission module itself seemed to be damaged.
This made the whole problem very simple to deal with. Replace the central mission module. There was another one, a backup, an exact duplicate of the original.
It had to be physically replaced because, for safety reasons, there was no link
whatsoever between the original and its backup. Once the central mission module was replaced it could itself supervise the reconstruction of the rest of the system in every detail, and all would be well.
Robots were instructed to bring the backup central mission module from the
shielded strong room, where they guarded it, to the ship's logic chamber for installation.
This involved the lengthy exchange of emergency codes and protocols as the robots interrogated the agents as to the authenticity of the instructions. At last the
robots were satisfied that all procedures were correct. They unpacked the
backup central mission module from its storage housing, carried it out of the
storage chamber, fell out of the ship and went spinning off into the void.
This provided the first major clue as to what it was that was wrong.
And the arms industry has been pushing smart mines for decades, so that they can keep selling them despite the really bad long-term consequences (well beyond the end of hostilities) and the Ottawa Treaty ban. In the end, land mines are killing people although the mines are supposed to be sufficiently advanced not to target persons.
From a security perspective, the “return to base” part seems rather problematic. I doubt you'd want to these things to be concentrated in a single place. And I expect that the long-term problems will be rather similar to mines, even if the electronics are non-operational after a while.
"Smart mines" specifically can be designed so that they're literally incapable of exploding once a deployment timer expires, or a fixed design time limit is reached.
It just makes the mines themselves more expensive - and landmines are very much a "cheap and cheerful" product.
For most autonomous weapons, the situation is even more favorable. Very few things can pack the power to sit for decades waiting for a chance to strike. Dumb landmines only get there by the virtue of being powered by the enemy.
"Since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, unexploded ordnance (UXO)—including landmines, cluster bombs, and artillery shells—has killed over 40,000 people and injured or maimed more than 60,000 others." - Google AI Overview "How many children were maimed by landmines after the vietnam war"
I guess by that definition, a bullet is also autonomous. It will strike anything in its path of flight, autonomously without further direction from the operator.
If anything represents the logical conclusion of that tired fallacy, it'll be actually autonomous, "thinking" drones which make the targeting decisions and execution decisions on their own, not based on any direct, human-led orders, but derived from second-order effects of their neural net. At a certain point, it's not going to matter who launched the drones, or even who wrote the software that runs on the drones. If we're letting the drones decide things, it'll just be up to the drones, and I don't love our chances making our case to them.
The big asterisk in what you're saying is, like self driving cars, it's hardest when you want to be the most precise and limit the downsides. In this paradigm, false positives and false negatives have a very big cost.
If you simply wanted to cause havoc and destruction with no regard for collateral damage then the problem space is much more simple since you only need enough true positives to be effective at your mission.
The ability to code with ai has shown that it requires an even higher level of responsibility and discipline than before in order to get good results without out of control downside. I think the ability to kill with ai would be the same way but even more severe.
> A big part of that is also knowing when NOT to pull the trigger
"In a press conference, Musk promised that the Optimus Warbots would actually, definitely, for real, be fully autonomous in two years, in 2031. He also extended his condolences to the 56 service members killed during the training exercise"
And the US learned the lesson the hard way in Iraq that in fact even human intelligence struggles with this. There were major problems throughout the war with individual soldiers not adhering to the published rules of engagement.
> It just needs one player to do it, so everyone has to be able to do it. I'd love to hear a different scenario.
Other players just need to assume that one player might do it in the future. This virtual future scenario has a causal effect on the now. The overall dynamic is that of an arms race (which radically changes what a player is).
That part isn’t actually clear. If China invents autonomous drones instead of us and they fuck it up they’ll kill their people.
Things like Scout AI’s Fury system are human in the loop still and I think for something that could just as well make a mistake and target your own troops it’s not yet clear that full auto is the way to go https://scoutco.ai/
Human in the loop okaying a full auto seems like it could work almost all the way. And then we count on geography. If they want to spray out a bunch of autonomous drones into our territory they do have to fly here to do it first or plant them prior in shipping containers. Better we aim at stopping that.
> Dario Amodei published an essay warning about potential dangers from powerful AI — including domestic mass surveillance (which he brands “entirely illegitimate”)
Why is only domestic surveillance by an AI dangerous? I guess Europeans are not worth protecting from the dangers of AI?
My belief is they are terrified of China and this seems evident when you take into account the moves they're making with Venezuela, Iran, and the increased adoption of authoritarian tactics. We're trying to play catch-up with China's rapid rise as a super-power and the AI infrastructure is one of the few major developments we still have control over, for now. I sympathize with Dario, he's stuck in a very bad position on this. We do not want China to operate on this level while we sit back with one hand tied behind our backs. On the other hand, this administration is making extremely poor decisions and arguably causing extensive harm domestically and internationally, so it's a lose-lose situation for Dario really.
If they are terrified of China why aren't they doing more diplomacy or at minimum, not allow NVIDIA to sell their chips to them?
Sorry but the China scare tactics is just more cold war nonsense. The idea China as a serious threat to anyone in the world where you have the USA invading countries (invading Iraq based on lies), kidnapping Presidents (Venezula), assassinating various leaders (drone strikes), abusing democratic ideals (Patriot act, PRISM, parallel construction, using banned chemical weapons against their own civilians; the USA has been a huge threat against the world and itself for the last 25 years.
Diplomacy is too slow in the eyes of this administration, that's why we're in this predicament. It's not cold war nonsense nor is it anything new; our military and intelligence agencies have been working against China via geopolitical proxy wars long before the Trump administration. This is just a natural extension of the Peter Thiel "remove all bureaucracy, we're not moving fast enough" strategy.
MACBCMAC doesn't roll off the tongue as well as MAGA I guess. If we're going to make America just like China, to get ahead of China, so they can't make us China, I fail to see where American citizens would even notice the difference.
If they were terrified of China, they wouldn't be working so hard to alienate so many allies who would naturally be on our side. They're just bullies trying to win approval by looking tough.
DoD Generals are probably pushing this with Hegseth because it's something they can control and Hegseth is not pushing back.
DoD Generals also probably don't agree with pissing off all our allies but they don't have control of elected leadership and elected leadership is making those decisions.
Just want to note the emergence of a two-tiered imbalance. Frontier AI providers are stacking the guardrails so high that everyday citizens can't even ask an LLM what boobs are, but simultaneously providing government with AI lacking guardrails around "any lawful purpose".
That's fundamentally antidemocratic and it normalizes the departure from the Western Enlightenment standard of, "the same law governs everyone".
Yeah it is. The Military has put itself in the position of arguing for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. In what way can that be spun as a positive.
They are arguing to do things that shouldn't be allowed anyway.
I don't have a lot of hope here. When most of the creme de la creme of the billionaire class capitulated to Trump at the beginning of his term, that set the tone for everything that followed IMO. It's astounding to me that so many are willing to see him trample on the Constitution and separation of powers when they'd scream like stuck pigs if any other party attempted it. And that's the way a lot of influential Americans like it I guess. Like I said, not a lot of hope. YMMV.
So the cornerstone of one of the most common types of scam, affinity fraud, as well as a cornerstone of salesmanship, is convincing an audience that you're just like them. You have the same likes and dislikes, the same hobbies, the same cultural references, the same beliefs and values and hopes and dreams.
And then you use that affinity to manipulate them, to get them to do what you want, to get them to give you money.
I think the tech worker / engineering / online crowd has really let themselves get duped.
Sure, maybe some tech billionaires did start out in a similar place as many of us.
But a lot of what they tell us as part of selling us their brand is just affinity fraud, telling us they're just like us with the same values of privacy and open source and some hippie notion of peace, love and understanding.
But it's just a trick, and they just want money, power and fame.
It's not so much as the billionaires capitulating, it's that they never were the people they pretended to be, and keeping up the act is no longer how they get what they want.
I basically agree here, but I would add that the framing here can sometimes sometimes be better described as “extortion”. Politicians have tremendous power and influence over many industries, I’ve seen the inside of a few situations where the politicians framed themselves as “taking on big business” where behind closed doors they were 100% calling the shots and handing executives directives on what they could or could not say publicly. The companies had no choice but to play along. When I see a big company take exactly the same public position as the current regulatory regime or administration in power, I don’t assume that they necessarily have any choice in the matter.
Benito Mussolini: 'Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.'
That is the reason why they would cry if the other party broke the rules to this degree. The other party is more aligned with regulations; taking power from corporations instead of giving it to them.
> The other party is more aligned with regulations; taking power from corporations instead of giving it to them.
Enough regulation is good, not enough and too much are both bad. Neither party has the best plan when it comes to regulation, Republicans want too little (increasing corporate power), Democrats want too much (increasing government power).
More aligned? Sure. Pretty low bar though. There's a real opportunity in targeting abuses of technology like Flock cameras and surveillance capitalism but right now it's getting expressed as a luddite agenda against AI and datacenters and it won't go far because it throws the AI baby out with the datacenter bathwater IMO making them more into useful idiots than crusaders out to rein in corporate excess.
Trump is pushing in the direction of an Oligarchie, billionaires would be the future oligarchs.
So even iff a billionaire is no-okay with this development, if they stick out they
- will lose their status/money iff Trump wins long term
- will make enemies with many other billionaires, but a core trend of billionaires is taking advantage of connections to other powerful people
- will be the prime target to make and example of
So there is a high risk for sticking out. At the same time "mostly passively tagging along" will at worst make them oligarchs. At the same time they are used to crossing ethical boundaries to maximize profits. *This is just another form of that.*
In general its pretty much non-viable to go from sub/barely millionaire to billionaire by keeping to law, moral and ethics.
And it's not a secret either that any extreme concentrations of power or money are fundamental thread of _any_ democratic state of law, the US is no exception. The US has been warned that their system is very prone to populist take over and their checks and balances are quite brittle since _decades_. (At least since end of WW2 when people when people analyzed how Hitler took over post-WW1 Germany and wondered if the US could suffer a similar fate. And instead of improving the robustness, the general response was "nonsense, this is the US". Then after 9/11 thinks got worse, warnings that this can lead to a disaster where also many, but actions where none. And then in recent decades the US pushed in favor of monopolies instead of a (actual, practical) free market(1) to project more power internationally, and things got even worse.
(1): Monopolies and a (actual, practical) free Market are fundamentally incompatible. It also is kinda obvious why once you put away decades of deregulation propaganda.
Given there are only ~1135 billionaires in the USA right now, I'd say it's pretty much non-viable to go from sub/barely millionaire to billionaire period. But Taylor Swift doesn't seem to have murdered any kittens to get where she is nor did Rihanna so it can happen without totally selling out.
my argument was more about becoming a billionaire by creating bringing a company to a level of success where they dominate their area of business.
I.e. not getting there by "fame" or "pure luck" (lets say you got 1/42th of early bitcoin from a "fun" project in the very early bitcoin days or similar).
Let's also for simplicity ignore that getting there by "fame" often involve tight cooperation with companies/people which don't care about ethics much. Through you might be able to separate yourself once you reach success, most times they try to make sure you can't.
And even iff you didn't compromise your ethics when becoming a billionaire this doesn't change the core argument.
That is if (as billionaire) you passively go with a push to Oligarchy you are unlikely to suffer from it. But if you don't and the Oligarchy wins, then you likely suffer a lot.
I.e. if you go with a non-emotional/non-ideology considering risk/benefit analysis passively yielding wins. Both for money and power.
In such a situation a lot of people will just go with it, no matter if billionaire or not.
In the short term I agree with you. But at some point, there's going to be a huge bar tab to clean up the mess. I'm a bit surprised none of them seem to be angling how to profit from that day when it comes.
And who exactly (no not the Illuminati, the mole people, the Tartarian Empire or Atlantis etc) is giving him orders? Names please.
But you're right that the Epstein (guessing Mosad IMO) op had sure ensnared a lot of people who should have known better but I guess they're just like us in the sense that they only have enough blood to run one head at a time. To my knowledge though, Tim Cook, Bezos and Zuckerberg aren't in the Epstein files. So what's their excuse?
But still, WHO is giving him orders? Or are you just assuming he must be following orders because the alternative that he's genuinely large and in charge is terrifying? That our republic basically mostly rolled over for him in less than one year perhaps even moreso?
Trump is mentioned over a million times in the Epstein files, he's deeply connected to Epstein. He is not "just the "currently voted-in guy" doing what he's being told to do."
>"Oh but shadow government/deep state is just a dumb conspiracy-theory" ... yeah, just like an island of cheese pizza eating billionaires.
This wasn't the conspiracy theory you guys believed in though. You were looking for a Satanic cabal of Democrat/leftist pedophiles and Trump was supposed to be the agent provocateur sent by God opposing the "deep state" and exposing the pedophiles. If anything, the Epstein files prove how utterly useless you lot were at actually identifying reality. The "cheese pizza" thing was never true. Pizzagate was never true. Trump was neck deep in all of it.
Being right in the sense that a broken clock is right twice a day is still being wrong.
... okay? I'm not even from the US. I don't even pick a side.
Whatever it was that you were reading, you should re-read it when you're capable of emotionless, analytical, objective conscious thoughts. That way you might manage avoiding mindlessly projecting your clearly emotional nonsense into my words.
>... okay? I'm not even from the US. I don't even pick a side.
You clearly have. You've made numerous comments taking the "conspiratorial" point of view you're describing while mentioning "cheese pizza eating billionaires" and the like. For whatever reason you want to be seen as a part of the Pizzagate group and as being vindicated with them. Don't get triggered because I'm responding to the persona you choose to project.
>Whatever it was that you were reading, you should re-read it when you're capable of emotionless, analytical, objective conscious thoughts.That way you might manage avoiding mindlessly projecting your clearly emotional nonsense into my words.
Your own comments reek of smug sarcasm and condescension, some peppered with ALL CAPS AND EXCLAMATION MARKS! You're anything but analytical or objective, and your comment is just a personal attack.
I'm only reflecting your nonsense back at you, fellow human.
Pizza was continuously mentioned in the Epstein emails in a way that's obviously a euphemism for something else. You don't have to be a QAnon lunatic to reference that.
I can't believe how many people take the anthropic statement at face value. You need to concentrate on what they are implicitly acknowledging. They will spy on non us citizens. How philanthropic
edit: how about the downvoters give a counterargument instead of trying to bury this comment?
The challenge for Americans is: can the political work of defining and protecting our values be outsourced to a company like Anthropic?
Anthropic (and others), whether due to financial/regulatory/competitive, will at some point permit their products to be used for any lawful purpose. Even if they attempt to restrict certain uses today. That arrangement is unlikely to hold.
Americans should vote for the right candidates and elect leaders who will carry and defend their views. I don't think there is any other way.
I'm not trying to have a cynical hot take, but the political class seems not to offer up any candidates that carry or defend my views and the path to these positions requires funding and resources I will never have access to.
The situation in the United States, right now, seems genuinely hopeless. And I'm certain I'm not the only person who feels this way.
What is there to do besides resign myself to what's coming and try my best to ignore the bullshit?
Pathetic but not unexpected that people are willing to tolerate such a use of AI. However, this is the most principled statement on the military use of AI that a frontier model leadership suite has released. It's also full of "china bad" sentiment that's worth picking over, but in a political and economic paradigm that expects & rewards blatant corruption, this statement still stands out.
It does look good on them, just one day after they accept to drop their AÍ safety net, which is a de facto abdication to the DoD. Their article is just (masterful)damage control
Anthropic has an excellent balance sheet. It basically has fuck you money that would let it walk away from the federal trough without existential risk. And hopefully extra dollars from users like me could compensate and then some in the fullness of time.
Being declared Supply Chain Risk means if you do ANY business with US government, you cannot use something.
So many companies have US Government contracts. Maybe they are not majority of their business like Lockheed Martin or RTX but look at F10, on that list, MAYBE Walmart is only one without US Gov Contract, everyone else likely does.
If they are deemed a supply chain risk under the DPA anyone doing business with them and has government contracts has to drop them, including Google and Microsoft. The $200M is small potatoes compared to this.
Article doesn’t demonstrate a good understanding of DoW’s relationship with contractors. Anthropic wanted those sweet, sweet, taxpayer dollars—well, this is what happens when you make a Faustian bargain.
> One option is to invoke the Defense Production Act. . .
> Another threat would be to declare Anthropic to be a supply chain risk. . .
The first is a wrist-slap that still gets the government what they want; the second is an existential threat to Anthropic. Their main partners are all “dogs of the military”. Microsoft, Intuit, NVIDIA: all government contractors. I can’t find one company that they have a working relationship with that doesn’t hold at least one govt contract.
The idea that Claude could alignment fake its way out of a change in contractual terms is silly. The DoW has all sorts of legal and administrative tools it can choose to leverage against contractors that fail to perform. Usually it doesn’t, because of a “norm” that says the private defense sector runs more smoothly when the government doesn’t try to micromanage it.
Remind me again how good this administration is at upholding norms?
> Remind me again how good this administration is at upholding norms?
When it comes to killing and spying on people with flimsy justifications that's a pretty bipartisan norm. Hell, Anthropic isn't even saying they won't help the DoW do just that, they just want to make sure there's a human in the loop.
The "USA Freedom Act" [1], which made most of the Patriot act permanent, had bipartisan support.
I'm all for reversing the continual ramp up of the police state and the industrial military complex. We need to recognize, however, that it's being funded and pushed by both parties. Generally playing on fears of the scary other. (Muslim terrorists in 00s, Mexicans today).
> I also don’t see the point in both-siding this. The situation at hand is before Hegseth and Trump. I can’t even remember Biden’s SecDef’s name.
To me, the moral and ethical problem is a bigger issue than the norms problem. There's a distinction without a difference between Hegseth doing this vs the Dems agreeing with Anthropic's demands and keeping a human in the loop on a massive spy and killing network. In some ways, stepping out of the norms and making a big news story is preferable to an unknown cabinet member just signing a business as usual agreement which erodes liberties. At least we know about it.
That's why I brought it up. It's great that Anthropic wants some safeguards, but ultimately the bigger problem is that AI with or without humans, significantly expands that ability of our military to murder and our spy agencies to spy.
> Anthropic wanted those sweet, sweet, taxpayer dollars
The sold services to a willing counterparty at mutually agreed upon terms. And now the other side of that deal has recalled that they're Twelve and You're Not My Real Mom You Can't Tell Me What To Do, and so wishes they had agreed to different terms and is throwing a tantrum to attempt to force a change.
And that's Anthropic's fault? That's a risk they should have predicted?
> The sold services to a willing counterparty at mutually agreed upon terms.
Yeah, and the legal environment that contract was written in, which both parties were aware of during negotiation, defines the means by which those terms can be changed.
> And that's Anthropic's fault? That's a risk they should have predicted?
It is deeply funny to me to imagine that an AI company doing inference at an unprecedented scale could not see this coming.
Go ask Claude how usgov should act if a contractor preemptively refuses to deliver. What are the top five tools they could use to demand compliance?
See this is your confusion. They're not refusing to deliver, they're happy to provide the services agreed to at the rate negotiated. What they're refusing is a change in the terms.
If you contract me to build you a building, and I agree with a stipulation that it won't be used as a slaughterhouse (and that you'll write that into the deed), you can't compel me to continue building if you change your mind on that point six months in. You either break the contract subject to agreed terms, renegotiate to remove that clause, or stop breaching the contract.
Of all American claims to exceptionalism, one that rings closest to true is that the the people AND the government are all bound by the rule of law. Contracting with the government is no different than contracting with any other party.
Your point seems to be "but it's the government clearly they can do whatever they want lol" viz. DPA, Supply-Chain risk, etc. You're right that they have those powers. But accepting/asserting that the capricious, vengeful, use of those extraordinary powers should be an anticipated, normal feature of contracting with the government runs counter to what should be among our highest shared values. We might as well jump directly to the authoritarian logic 'they have the army, they can compel anything they want for $0, so just give them what they ask'.
Furthermore, one presumes Anthropic did see this coming, given no more evidence than that this is playing out in a giant public fracas making their values clear to all their possible customers the world over, instead of over a tense email thread between the assistant to the sub-under-deputy secretary for AI procurement and a half-dozen lawyers in SF.
(addenda: you're going to say we've used the DPA a bunch. I would argue that vanishingly few instances have compelled private enterprise to act in direct opposition to their own interests; an even in those cases they were just being asked to lose money (meatpackers, PG&E suppliers, ...))
There is no "DoW". Federal agencies, including the Department of Defense, are named by Congress. Just because the current administration wants to use a different name means nothing ... unless everyone just complies in advance. Will Congress actually rename it? Hard to say, but it doesn't seem very likely.
I agree that, given the actual history of the US military and foreign policy, it is a harmful and misleading euphimism.
It is also, however, the official name of the department, as determined by the US Congress who are empowered to determine such names.
In no case I am happy to humor this administration's decisions, especially when they are illegal/extra-legal/paralegal. If they wanted to actually rename the department, there's a clear process for that, and then perhaps we could "humor" that effort. As it stands, there's nothing here to humor, since there is no decision, only illegal aspiration.
The signalling in that post is about as clear as it can be.
They’re aggressively signalling that they are cooperative, and that they are not being belligerent. They are using the preferred language and much of the framing that the US government would use, to make it as clear as possible what the key points of their disagreement are, by leaning into alignment on everything else
This is textbook. People are reading this as some kind of confusing, inexplicable framing when it’s how any sensible person would write in their context. When you’re up against an authoritarian regime, that’s willing to abuse all the levers of power against you, you very carefully pick your fights and don’t give them any reason to complain about anything that isn’t essential.
Quibbling about the name of the department would be among the stupidest things I could possibly imagine. As it stands, I’m seeing lots of folks online who generally support the administration saying that Anthropic is correct here. If you gave them a bunch of stupid talking points about how anthropic is being disrespectful, you would lose those people. It doesn’t make sense, they’re obviously terrible people without a soul, but that’s reality.
> When you’re up against an authoritarian regime, that’s willing to abuse all the levers of power against you, you very carefully pick your fights and don’t give them any reason to complain about anything that isn’t essential.
While I am not claiming that you're wrong in this particular instance, or in general, I think it is important to note that there are people who absolutely disagree with you about this, some of whom who have lived in extremely authoritarian regimes. I'm not saying they're right, either, but just highlighting that there is no clearly obvious right/wrong on this point.
This is such a silly point to argue over. From 1789-1947 we had a "Department of War", which then merged into "Department of Army" under the newly formed (in 1947) National Military Establishment (NME) which was changed in 1949 to "Department of Defense" because N-M-E sound like "enemy".
It's not like these names are part of some sacred part of American identity, and "defense" has always been laughable as a euphemism. The DoD refers to themselves as the DoW [0] now, so it's completely reasonably to refer to the department as DoW. And of all the places to put your political energy, defending a laughable euphemism of a name that was used because the previous iteration of the name sounded funny seems like a sub-optimal use of that a energy.
Under US Code, it is the US Congress that names departments. It is not up to an individual officer in the US military, or the administration, to rename them.
I'm expending a fraction of a fraction of 1% on this, and I am in no way defending the euphimism. I am defending the actual written down, legal way in the US government is supposed to operate, which despite its many failings, seems worth defending to me.
If the title doesn't make a difference, then there's no point to insist on it. People say "the Pentagon" as shorthand for "military leadership in Washington." Not using the shorter term wouldn't do much beyond making news articles longer.
This administration says "Department of War" because they want to project an aggressive image. I support anyone who uses the legal name "Department of Defense" in an effort to reinforce an aspirational goal for the department and to remind others that the Executive Branch shouldn't be allowed to remake the entire government at will.
They knew what they were signing on to when they sought DoW funding. I guarantee Dario was briefed on the risks associated with high-profile govt contracting.
Even if not briefed, such a smart person surely knows that he owe's his stash of gold to the willingness of others to spill their blood to protect it. Those willing to spill their blood have historically always had a claim on your gold.
This whole standoff could set a very important precedent of the Trump administration not getting what they want, and not in a "maneuvered out of the news spotlight" kind of way (e.g. Greenland), but in a public "FUCK OFF right in your face" kind of way.
The worst that can happen to Anthropic is one of the two things mentioned; loosing some contracts or some fake forced management from the Pentagon. maybe Dario having to leave, certainly a loss for him and people who believe in him but probably nothing world-changing.
The worst that can happen to the Trump administration is the beginning of its end, when people realize you can simply stand up to their bullying and with all the standoffs they have going on in parallel, maybe they will die a death by a thousand cuts?
The corporate death sentence usually goes something like "anyone who does business with Anthropic cannot do business with the US government". That pretty much means all the hyperscalers, major infrastructure providers, major software providers, and major corporations. They all have to choose between the entire US gov and all those contracts and a single AI company. That's the worst that can happen to Anthropic.
The executives at these huge corporations already know that they can stand up to the Trump administration, and that it will fold immediately. "TACO" is printed in the Wall St. Journal.
They willingly don't, because they know that they can use the administration to cement their market power. The surveillance state being built is one where would-be competitors, labor, well-meaning reformists, can be crushed on a whim for sham political reasons. A massive contraction of USA wealth, influence, and power, a loss of our living standard and place in the world -- that is the price everyone else has to pay, to keep the existing power structure in place. They will not release their grip on the wheel. Not until the ship hits the bottom of the sea.
If that is the bet they are placing, it is a bet they will lose. The power and capabilities of US corporations does not rest solely on those corporations, and as the wealth, influence and power of the USA undergoes "a massive contraction", they will find themselves similarly degraded. They might be the big fish in the big pond, but only because everyone knows there's a bigger fish (the US government). Once other countries, and other corporations, no longer care much what the US government thinks, US corporations will find themselves in a very, very different situation.
Of course! I think at some level the people at the top know that this American capitalism is not competitive. The last 5 years or so have been basically the whole country realizing that our system is not competitive. And, the last 1-2 years have been collectively, the world re-calibrating on this fact.
The monopolists don't care though. The power is too intoxicating.
I mean, listen to discussions here. "What's your moat?" -- that's how American capitalists think. Not "What value does your company provide to the customer", but what extra force, beyond simple-minded fair market competition, are you leveraging, to ensnare the customer. The game is to ensure that customers cannot choose another business over yours on its merits. That works in the short term but it's extractive. Eventually, the parasite must stop sucking blood for the host to survive.
> parasite must stop sucking blood for the host to survive
Biology doesn't work like that. Biological units are too selfish. It is an iterated game so evolution could affect how a parasite's children act. However defection is usually a winning strategy (because there's rarely enough coordination nor enough signals for cooperation to win).
Biology has amazing metaphors, but unfortunately most writers and readers don't understand biology well enough to use those metaphors as part of an argument.
"Trump Always Chickens Out" is an acronym that went around after "Liberation Day", when Trump very quickly reversed his position in response to the bond market basically telling him, no, you can't do that.
US was told directly that its not happening. You had the military excisise that scared Trump so much that he ordered extra tariffs. Just because you don't follow the news doesn't make it that there wasn't any response.
Everything about this situation is absolutely bonkers. Marking a US company as a supply chain risk hasn't been done before AFAIK, and is a guaranteed end of the company.
It's the US government basically unilaterally deciding to end a leading AI researcher company. Years of lawsuits will follow, comparisons to "communism", accusations of Trump/Heghseth being Chinese/Russia agents (because well, how else do you hand over the AI win to China than by killing one of your top 2?)
Because this means you can't use it in regulated industries, including vendors of companies in regulated industries. It means any company who buys Anthropic products can never sell services to a company who is in a regulated industry (or has customers in a regulated industry, or has customers who have customers who are in a regulated industry, etc etc).
Hi, I'm European, not only I but also my peers are likely to actively prefer a corporation that Trump hates, and still would even if it was a little behind the curve (especially in AI, where new models from someone get announced every other week, so "a little behind the curve" doesn't mean much).
It's trivially untrue. It could be the end of one type of business model, and it could slow their growth, but it could also be a blessing in disguise -- there are a lot of brilliant engineers who would prefer to work with an Anthropic that took a stand on ethics, and a lot of people who would prefer to support such a company. One door closes, another opens. They could become an open, public-facing, benevolent-AI company.
Just imagine if this move cascaded out of control and it ended up being the Trump administration that got blamed for pricking the AI bubble. This could become one of the most expensive power grabs in all of history.
the Pentagon is the name of a building (pretty much a very large bikeshed). I see the actual agency is named by the author as the Defense Department and one of the officials in question is a Defense Secretary. Interestingly, the bikeshed itself has its own spokespeople.
News sources have been using both building names (and several more I can think of off the top of my head) as short hand for the people who work inside of them for my entire life.
Officially, they're the Department of Defense. There was an EO signed last year that lets them use "Department of War" on all but their most official documents (since only Congress can officially change the name of the department).
The DoD is those defense contractors and companies' _primary target customer_. That doesn't just mean they're dependent on them as a customer. That means everyone working with, for, and adjacent to them has knowingly signed up to work with a defense contractor and to sell to someone that wants to use weapons in anger. That means these companies were mostly _founded_ to do that.
So instead, I invite you to imagine a medical supply company refusing to sell medical-grade sodium thiopental to the Bureau of Prisons.
It's not that they are too lethal. It's "we will not build a weapon system that is fully autonomous and acts without a human in the loop".
The big boy defense contractors won't touch that shit either because as soon as you mention the idea the engineers start shouting you down from the top of their lungs out of shear unbridled terror and the lawyers come storming in due to the endless legal risk said design would bring.
Mass Domestic surveillance sure they might do no problem but fully autonomous killbots or drones are gonna be a no go from pretty much every contractor other that doesn't carry a "missing the point of Lord of the Rings" name
Planes are fairly predictable, they can more or less be relied on to do that leadership asks them and not more. This stuff is more akin to nerve gas, there's no telling where it will go once deployed.
Yes, you're right. Military contractors supplying equipment that needlessly harms our own soldiers is pretty common, from what I understand. Soldiers following orders don't have much market power. "Occupational hazard", and then the brass sweeps the incidents under the rug. And paramilitary contractors are generally quite happy to supply things meant to directly hurt Americans (sonar weapons and tear gas used to attack Constitutional protests, etc). Both of these dynamics are applicable here. "AI" as it stands is a recipe for friendly fire incidents. And domestically, these capabilities will be used to turbocharge domestic surveillance as the con artist regime desperately needs ways to keep the wheels from coming off the cart.
So yes you're right, it sure is nice to imagine Anthropic setting off a wave of more military contractors acting with principles.
They are a private company they can largely sell or not sell they want. They aren’t saying they won’t build them because they are to effective they are saying they won’t build them because they aren’t safe.
> The President is hereby authorized (1) to require that
performance under contracts or orders (other than contracts of
employment) which he deems necessary or appropriate to promote
the national defense shall take priority over performance under any
other contract or order, and, for the purpose of assuring such priority,
to require acceptance and performance of such contracts or orders in
preference to other contracts or orders by any person he finds to be
capable of their performance, and (2) to allocate materials and
facilities in such manner, upon such conditions, and to such extent
as he shall deem necessary or appropriate to promote the national
defense.
Sure, but the contract in place forbids these things. So the contract is literally a non-performer and cannot perform such orders in the way it is written. So, I personally struggle to see outside of taking over the supply chain how Anthropics contract forces them to do this
My read of this interaction is Dario is calling out Hegseths' bluff. A bluff the latter didn't even know he was blundering into because Hegseth is an idiot.
SecDef invoking the DPA against Anthropic likely trashes the AI fundraising market, at least for a spell. That's why OpenAI is wading into the fight [1]. Given the Dow is sitting on a rising souffle of AI expectations, that knocks it out as well. And if there is one red line Trump has consistently hewed to and messaged on, it's in not pissing off the Dow.
The entire administration has been operating on empty threats (see Brendan Carr's FCC speech policing). But most companies don't call them out on it, they just roll over
Just imagine if the threats were to improve worker wages and conditions. Companies are showing that they are paper tigers. We will remember that. Looking forward to a future AOC or some other dem soc administration to just try to fight for the common man for once.
I disagree. If the argument is, "Someone else will", then you are just complicit. If good people don't comply, it will fall to someone who has lower ethical standard, but that person will likely be less competent.
I agree. This is a spectacular mistake. Anthropic has the best "AI" on the planet. Anthropic can spin up a giant "Claude" and plan rings around the Pentagon. DoD better get used to losing that fight.
I think it'd be surprising if money is the limiting factor in Gemini's success considering Google has very deep pockets, so that's probably not true.
Also, Gemini with DoD money and DoD direction is likely to result in an AI that works very well for the DoD but significantly less well for other things, especially if your use case benefits from some guardrails (and most use cases do, because you rarely want AI to just do whatever it fancies.)
Gemini is just the worst of the 3 horses. The gov will eventually make them all to bend the knee. PRISM already showed they(eventually) all comply. I personally see this more like PR for Anthropic before the IPO
The problem is they’re going to hit them with a wrench and no one will do anything because there’s no rule of law at that level left in the country. Just sycophancy and backroom deals.
This frames it as Pentagon vs. Anthropic but the actual problem is upstream. If we tell companies they must prevent all possible harm, you're setting them up: nerf the model and silently lose value nobody can quantify, or don't nerf the model and get blamed for every bad outcome. We don't want nerf'd models either. DoW is saying that.
This isn’t an external directive; Anthropic was founded with the mission of creating safe, reliable AI systems. You wouldn’t see the same people working at the company if the company didn’t stand by its acceptable use policy and other internal standards
I'm saying the capability to reason about novel situations is in tension with guaranteeing it never produces harmful outputs. We are talking about contradictory design constraints.
Use of the DPA can be litigated, and surely would be. Designation as a supply chain risk surely would be as well.
These court cases would produce bad outcomes either way. If the court finds for Anthropic, future DoD leadership will find itself constrained or at least chilled. Or if the court finds for the government, an expansive permissive view of the DPA might encourage future administrations to compel tech companies to make AIs break the law in other ways, for example by suppressing certain political points of view in output.
National defense is strongest if the military is extremely powerful but carefully judicious in the application of that power. That gives us the highest “top end” capability of performance. If military leadership insists on acting recklessly, then eventually guardrails are installed, with the result of a diminished ability to respond effectively to low-probability, high risk moments. One of many nuances and paradoxes the current political leadership does not seem to understand.
> If the court finds for Anthropic, future DoD leadership will find itself constrained or at least chilled
Seems like a good outcome? The government should not be able to arbitrarily decide to make private citizens do things they aren't willing to do, whether the government thinks the action is legal or not, and its especially egregious when the government knew about those limits ahead of time, spelled out in a fucking contract.
The problem in this case is in fact the best part of our military. The civilian control. This isn't a general or admiral going insane. This is a politically motivated and appropriately assigned civilian. And that's the good part.
The bad part is the failure of the citizenry to elect moral and ethical politicians.
The bad part is the failure of the political parties to proffer moral and ethical politicians for the people to elect.
What’s interesting is Anthropic being singled out here. That either means:
1- OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc have no problem with their products being used to kill people so no need to bully them.
2- These other products are so terrible at the task that the clown shoe wearing SecDef is forced to try to bully Anthropic.
It's not either of those. Anthropic put a lot of effort into getting FedRAMP approved so the DOD could use them; they are now being punished for that, and the government at present has no other good options. Other options could of course be developed, but other vendors may question how unreliable and untrustworthy the current DOD leadership is as as customer.
Seems like Microsoft/OpenAI [0] and Google [1] both have FedRAMP approval.
[0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/azuregov/azure-openai-fedramp...
[1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/public-sector/gemini-in...
> untrustworthy the current DOD leadership is as as customer.
Less than a year left on this clock.
That seems quite optimistic. Or am I just that pessimistic?
No, you are not overly pessimistic.
Trump was impeached before and nothing happened. He can continue to ignore congress. I wouldn't be surprised if at this point he abolishes congress, and even jokes at a press conference saying "I am the Senate".
He was impeached by the House but that does nothing without the Senate carrying out its trial, which requires an onerous 2/3rds vote. Obviously without the trial in Senate, nothing happens, and nothing ever will until one party gets 2/3rds control.
Or enough members of his party find their spine. Not sure which is more likely telling me they are both just as unlikely to happen.
You sure? War with Canada is about to break out, and you can't have elections when at war.
In the US elections cannot be canceled even when Martial Law is declared. That does not mean a certain someone will not try to simply ignore the Constitution given his track record of simply ignoring the Constitution
Is this sarcasm? The US held elections during World War II [1].
[1] https://www.britannica.com/event/United-States-presidential-...
The US President in 1944 was someone who wanted to have elections. In 2026 this is not the case anymore. How much of a difference it makes, nobody knows.
turns out lots of people "know" that the president has no say in the affairs of US states running elections
What are the states going to do with their local election results when the officials in Washington ignore them due to some manufactured state of emergency?
He already tried to get specific states' election outcomes discarded from the count on Jan 6, 2021.
Could you be more specific on who the officials in DC would be that could ignore the election results? The Clerk of the House, I assume? They have a fairly limited role, and it would probably be a short-lived disruption. The members-elect themselves seem to have all of the power, if my civics knowledge is correct.
I've never seen more enthusiasm about US politics than from Europeans (like pavlov there in Finland) and Australians. It makes meaningful discussion very difficult, online.
I lived in the US for years (including Jan 6 2021) and I’ve seen how this playbook was executed in Russia.
From my POV, Americans are hopelessly naive about their institutions holding up when it’s been demonstrated so many times that the guardrails are gone. It’s one of the reasons I left the country - I feel safer living next to Russia than in America.
I think that is a valid point, though I would like to see some meat in these proclamations of doom.
There are more guns than people in the US, and in nobody's wildest dreams does ICE (or the entire federal government, for that matter, including the military) have enough personnel to subdue even 10% of the population rising up. And while I think it is somewhat valid to assume the military leans a bit conservative, in my experience it is more of a true conservatism and not MAGA. I was in the military, and the vast majority of soldiers would 100% refuse to suppress US citizens.
Everyone thinks the adults are not really in charge in the GOP right now, but I think that's absolutely not true. They are just okay with the chaos right now because it's not impeding business and keeps people distracted. If MAGA gets too spicy and causes real civil unrest, we're going to find out very quickly who actually runs the show. And it ain't Donald Trump.
He doesn't, it's literally enshrined in the constitution. If he decides to violate that, it's him violating the constitution yet again, not proof that he has a say.
It would also probably be the last straw for a lot of people who has been limping along on the belief in free elections.
More importantly, this isn’t a “who’s going to stop me?” sort of thing like having ICE violate people’s civil rights. The power isn’t there. ICE does what Trump says because the law puts them under his control and he metaphorically signs their paychecks. If Trump orders state governments to do something with elections, that carries no weight. There’s no legal obligation or tradition to comply, no paychecks involved, nothing that would compel them to do it unless they actually wanted to. He’d have to use force, and it would be a gargantuan effort that would spur great resistance.
Elections won't be canceled. They're too important for the perception of legitimacy. Virtually every country on Earth now has elections. Russia, China, even North Korea has elections.
The modern playbook isn't to abolish elections, it's a combination of blocking opposition candidates, suppressing votes, intimidating voters, and lying about the results. That's what to watch for.
“Watch for”? That has been actively happening, at an accelerating pace. (Especially if you count “lying about someone else lying about the results”.)
Suppression and intimidation certainly have a long, proud history in this country, at least. I don't think "watch for" implies they're new.
It's fairly easy to abuse a state of exception to cancel elections. Ukraine has done it, and it's been, along with banning opposition parties and attempting to imprison critics (Arestovych, etc.), a critical step in their government consolidating power.
It’s absurd to claim that Ukraine (I’ll assume you actually mean “Ukrainian leadership”) is somehow “abusing” a constitutionally mandated state of emergency.
>I’ll assume you actually mean “Ukrainian leadership”
What else could I possibly have meant, genius?
But yes of course they've taken advantage of it. Russia yeeting them out of its own territories and then invading The Ukraine is the best thing Zelensky could have asked for.
Ukraine's constitution doesn't allow elections when martial law is in effect. The US constitution has no such clause, nor anything else that would allow for delaying or canceling elections.
That's not to say it can't be done, but there's a huge difference in difficulty between doing what the country's constitution says, and doing the opposite. Especially in a country where elections are run by sovereign governments not under the control of the central government.
Oh that's good to know that it's fine because it's iN ThEIr CoNStItUTIoN
I guess everything in DPRK is fine because it's all legal their too
My point is about difficulty, not how “fine” it is. It’s really easy not to hold elections when your constitution says you can’t. It’s a lot harder when your constitution says you must, and also gives you no power over the governments who actually hold those elections. But obviously you’d rather grind your axe against Ukraine than actually discuss what you said before.
And how/who/where do we certify the election results “run by sovereign governments not under the control of the central government”?
Depends on the government, but usually their Secretary of State does it.
I guess that proves elections can't be delayed, right?
> DOD
*DOW
No it’s still the DoD legally
There is no such thing. That's a fantasy term used by deluded people to signal a particular virtue.
I keep seeing DOW everywhere, and honestly had no idea it wasn't a legal namechange yet (or ever).
There's even a webpage for it.
So cut the guy some slack. No one knows wtf is actually going on these days.
pretty sure the Constitution doesn't say anything about "make a webpage" as some secret way for the Executive branch to overrule Congress
are you aware of how inept and corrupt the current Executive branch is ?
None of what you just said, indicates whether a stated name change was an alias, or core name change.
With a malevolent agent in the bully pulpit deliberately swamping the American zeitgeist with hostile nonsense ("flood the zone with shit"), it has become every American's duty to be on guard to avoid propagating the regime's bullshit. We are indeed at war, an information war of the US elites against We The People. So buck up.
I'm not american, and further, whether a department name change is a primary name change, or an alias slapped on, seems pretty low on the list of things to care about.
Is your argument that you're not involved enough in American politics to have responsible opinions about it, even though you're involved enough to comment in the first place?
I agree this in isolation is low stakes. The problem is the volume. The memetic assault is everywhere you turn, and propagating it helps the regime. And yes, it's far too easy to do accidentally. That doesn't mean we shouldn't appreciate others calling it out.
Is your argument that you're not involved enough in American politics to have responsible opinions about it, even though you're involved enough to comment in the first place?
I wonder who or what you're replying to here. Certainly, it has no relation to anything I've said in this thread.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't appreciate others calling it out.
Again, who are you replying to with this?
I said "take it easy", not "don't ever bring that up".
You said "I'm not american" as the lead in to your comment. What was the point of saying this other than to disclaim the responsibility I invoked? (which technically wasn't even directed at you directly)
For the overall argument, you called out a comment for calling out a comment whose only contribution was to promote the term "DOW". If it had been a substantive comment that someone jumped on for merely using the term, you'd have had a reasonable point. But it wasn't.
This team politics, the me-vs-them, this red-vs-blue that your country, and you, and everyone upthread was precisely what I was commenting on. It's sad, it's destructive, and both sides of your little game have created the situation you are in today.
Jumping on a guy because he corrected someone, and immediately presuming it had an entire slew of politics attached, instead of it being a mere technical correction, is prime example of everything wrong with the US today. Everything.
Me vs them. One word means a political stance. The wrong thing said, accidentally, you're the enemy. It's literally sad. I stand, as a Canadian, watching my brother make horrible life choices, and I want to help, yet I just see more anger and hate and discord.
None of this serves any of you well, it all serves your enemies. Right now, your acts, and the act of the guy super-upset that someone said DOW, serves your enemies. 90% of this is fueled by state actor controlled bots and comments, and you guys eat it up as manna.
So yes, I have an entirely reasonable point. The guy literally might have had no idea. I certainly didn't. You don't even know if that dude is american or not!
DOW is all over the news.
The presumption is wrong. The anger is wrong. The hate is wrong. The attitude is wrong.
On both sides. Of both sides of your little squabble.
I don't care who started it. The entire lot of you need a parent to come into the room, and tell just that, and that you both should go to your room.
And if you don't watch it? If you don't stop stepping out of bounds. If you don't halt it.
The rest of as are going to have to.
And that would be the saddest thing of all. For all of us.
Framing the argument here as "both sides" team sport is not appropriate. Did these "state actor controlled bots" also create the term DOW? No, the needlessly-divisive propaganda is now coming directly from the White House itself.
I'm a libertarian who sees both leftist and rightist thinking as two halves of a complete analysis. This situation isn't "red-vs-blue". Rather this is social-media-psychosis-red vs everybody else.
If social-media-psychosis-blue was in power and similarly attacking our society, I would be calling that out as well! But they aren't, and they haven't really been in powerful national political offices, because so far the blue extremists' main political success has been to just sandbag the Democratic party. (ostensibly because blue extremism runs counter to the parties' sponsors' interests, confining professional blue extremists to culture war topics that most people see through)
As I said, the fundamental dynamic with the original comment is that "correcting" to "DOW" was its only point. If you just casually heard the term in some [likely government] news media, you're not going to rush out and repeat it as a correction for someone saying DOD.
But sure, we can't really still assign a known motive - maybe that commenter was pointing out the "war" part to try and highlight what this administration shamelessly wants to use "AI" for. But the easy way to avoid being jumped on is to include some constructive context for what one is actually trying to get at, rather than leaving readers to apply Occam's razor themselves. So either way, that response to it was not unreasonable.
There is so much ensnarled in US mind-think here, it's difficult to respond cogently. Every fiber of your response is keyed to knock down "the other guy".
Let's start with this.
Framing the argument here as "both sides" team sport is not appropriate. Did these "state actor controlled bots" also create the term DOW? No, the needlessly-divisive propaganda is now coming directly from the White House itself.
You are literally framing the argument as left vs right, whilst trying to pin this very mode of thought upon me. This is because you cannot see the world any other way. Meanwhile, at no point did I ever, not once, say the correction was wrong. Not once.
So mired in this horrid quicksand, this "thought-scape" is your political world-view, that if someone says "Don't say that in such a mean way, be nice to one another", your immediate thought is "OMG! Siding with the enemy! Attack!".
The entirety of US political culture is now as that of an abusive family. The son that grows up with an alcoholic, abusive father, and is beat, yet the cycle repeats with his own son. It is learned behaviour. It is difficult to stop. Even desiring to do so, the son fails when he is the father. And you and all your brothers are caught in it.
The post I replied to painted "the guy", and you have painted "the guy", as someone on a mission to aid "the other team". His mere utterance of a single word, to correct to a name he believes to be the "new name", is viewed as you as a "bad thing".
And this is the problem I speak of. Not correcting someone back. The thought process and the mode of correction. As I said, the anger, the hate, the emotion. And it is emotion laden, not thought driven. It isn't logical, it's reactive emotion.
And yes, it only serves your enemies.
I'll be very blunt here, and I am speaking over decades, not right now. History is vital to comprehension of something like this. When the rest of the world looks at the US. When Canada, the UK, Europe, and all friendlies to the US look at the US?
We can barely tell the differences between your two political parties.
Viewed from the politics of another nation, your left and right are functionally identical. There's zero difference.
The above sentence should make you happy. It really should! It is a true sentence, and what it means is that there is more that binds Americans together, than that which pulls it apart. Yet I am willing to bet that your hackles bristled at such a concept.
And the very fact that they did, is the problem here.
--
Let's discuss state actors, because you seem unaware of how it works. The entire point is not any specific action. It is not about this administration. In fact, the current administration is a product of this decades, yes decades long propaganda by state actors.
The entire point, the easiest way to think of it, is that it amplifies any angst, concern, hostility against "the other team". Surely you are aware of Cambridge Analytics, well that's child's play in comparison, and what I am describing is not secret, or new information, it is well documented, well known, and simply is.
As your two sides become more hostile, you make poor choices out of panic, anger, angst.
Look at what happened with the last US election. Each side terrified about the other gaining power, and so one side hides that an octogenarian might be suffering from old age. Hiding this was a morally repugnant act. Meanwhile the other side chooses someone that much of their party felt they had no other choice but to go with.
Neither party should have chosen either these two. Each is choosing people so aged, so old, that they are barely capable of running the country. I wouldn't want an 80 year old person in charge of anything of this scope and size, yet each of your teams think this is just grand, great, a wonderful choice.
Why?
Because "OMG no, the other guy!"
Both sides are making choices, not with the goal of "What is best for my country", but instead "If the other guy gets in power, the entire country will be destroyed, so we must fight the other team, THEY are the enemy of the true America!". Meanwhile, 99.9% of the decisions made by an administration are functionally identical regardless of the party.
Whether team red or team blue in the last 50 years, the wars continue, the foreign politics is mostly the same. The US has been withdrawing from the world under each team, bombing the middle east under each team, and the list goes on. The debt isn't a problem because of the current administration, it's a problem because of all of them. Every administration for the last 50 years.
There are a myriad of ways to resolve this problem.
There are a myriad of ways to make it worse.
Making presumptions about someone because of one word they say, and jumping down their throat about it, is not how to make it better.
It's how to make it worse.
It's everything that's wrong with America today.
And I know you cannot see it, for your reply shows you cannot.
Look again at my words:
So cut the guy some slack.
Did I say don't correct him? Did I say he shouldn't be corrected? Did I argue whether or not the point was wrong or right? Nope. Not at all.
Instead, I simply said to take it easy in correcting someone.
In the lingo and context of my words in this reply to you, I was saying "Don't make it worse".
Your response was "OMG but he was purposefully aiding the other team!", without any knowledge that it was so.
My response was "be nice to one another, in how you argue".
--
I have written this response hoping that you may grok of what I speak. That you might understand that it is the way you are carrying your argument that is the issue. Not that you have a dispute. The presumptive, hostile response. The immediate assignment of motive and judge/jury/executioner attitude of "Nope, he said a word because of the other team!" thought.
It's all wrong.
It's wrong if it is them or you.
It's wrong no matter who does it, or why.
It doesn't matter who started it.
Go back to your room. You, and everyone else in the US.
Go back to your room, be quiet, and think about it.
I'm not the one writing ever-longer screeds. Perhaps you need to reflect on your own anger here?
Factually, you have written a lot of things I do agree with. I'm not new to this rodeo. I've been around the left-right gamut. Reading Moldbug is actually what started the end of my rightist-fundamentalist phase.
I've never been friendly to this entrenched corporate power structure that backs both major parties as if they're sponsoring racehorses. I had been both sidesing up until June of 2020. I'm not sitting here going "How could anyone ever vote for Trump?!?!". In 2016, I was telling my blue tribe friends that he had a good chance of winning, as they stood there aghast.
But after an abject failure of a concrete term in office, where the guy basically never stopped divisively campaigning? When faced with a pan-political national emergency, his response was effectively dereliction of duty?? If he had merely led us during Covid, like any other President of the past thirty years (and like most state governors tried to do), I suspect he would have had a shoe-in second term.
So voting for more of that in 2020 or 2024? That is embracing the exact hot mess of crazy that you're condemning here. Obviously the people who voted for him did not feel that way. From everything I've been able to surmise this is due to their media sources making them think the Democratic party is just as crazy. But from what I've seen much of this is based around sensationalizing some otherwise banal realities, and the Democratic party itself is nowhere near as far gone as the Republican party - the prominent members are still basically milquetoast status-quo-supporting bureaucrats who pay some lip service to the extremists, rather than having been taken over by a strongman primarily pandering to the extremists.
For example, one concrete data point:
> We can barely tell the differences between your two political parties.
Do you think a President Harris would be threatening war with Canada? That should be pretty pronounced and quite pertinent to you, right?
Your first sentence is bizarre, considering this post is longer than you last. And really, more engagement is a bad thing? Come now.
I feel you're still not getting it though. Because it's not about which side is worse, or who started it, or who's right about something, or who voted for who. It's about how this is discussed, how this is handled.
That's the biggest problem there is.
And yes, I said "barely", and it's quite true. A Democrat could easily be elected just as unhinged. An independent. Yet this sort of highlights my point.
If you stand Trump up against any other US president, just as with an ape or a human, he's literally identical on 98% of things. And really, it's more like 99.9% from an external viewpoint. Yet just as with an ape, that small amount can result in startling differences.
But your parties? The differences are barely noticeable.
> Your first sentence is bizarre, considering this post is longer than you last
Half my post was trying to explain some context where I am coming from. I was addressing the general tone of your post, and pointing out why I was not going to pick through each point line by line trying to tease out nuance. What's bizarre is for you to go here, as it seems exactly like a condemnation "keyed to knock down "the other guy".
As far as both the parties ? I just said that I have long acknowledged the commonalities. I had never voted for a major party candidate in a national election until I voted Biden in 2020. Doing so required swallowing a lot of pride, and I considered it as voting conservatively due to getting older. I can certainly imagine Trumpism's core message of "burn it all down" as being highly appealing to younger me - remember how I said I was telling aghast friends in 2016 that Trump had a good chance at winning?
You also dodged my direct question of whether a President Harris would be threatening war with Canada. Details like this are precisely why there is something here worth fighting for and not merely "both sidesing" it as merely a communication style.
Trying to move on to constructive topics, you say this is about "how" is it discussed. How exactly do you think the bare repetition of partisan propaganda should to be discussed, regardless of the actual intentions? Do we need to treat every commenter with kid gloves, detail the actual wider context, get lost in the semantics of whether it is a "legal name change" (even though the legality is not the actual reason to reject the name!), all the while hoping they will be receptive to those points, etc?
Because the way I see it, a comment that is merely a "correction" in terminology is nothing but flamebait - essentially the same thing as tone/terminology policing by the blue extremists. It's exactly the type of thing that needs to be shut down quickly if we're trying to have constructive discussions.
So when I write at length, it's worthy of note. When you do, it's for "reasons".
When I shorten my responses, I'm now "dodging" questions, is that it? So no matter my post length, I'm in error?
And I directly answered your question, by saying there is no appreciable difference between US presidents, predicated upon party lines, when viewed externally.
There is no other way to answer, for no one on this planet, even those scornful of Trump, ever expected this 51st state nonsense prior to his term. No one. At all.
I know nothing of Harris, and even if I did, comparatively, Trump's behaviour in this respect was a surprise.
Do ypu think any Canadian thinks this will be isolated to this single administration?
Pretty ironic that this is coming from the same people that are opposing preferred pronouns and like to deadname people.
... signal a particular vice. It's vice signalling. We generally think of war as bad and try to avoid it, most especially the people tasked with fighting said wars.
Nothing has changed about the performative-ness, in fact if anything it's gotten more performative and hollow. They just signal vices rather than virtues, so a bunch of rightist-flavored-Lenin's useful idiots think it is fresh or effective or anti-"woke" or at least different.
Ah, yes, the Orwellian newspeak that is the phrase "Department of Defense" is something worth protecting. What next, the Ministry of Truth?
I don't really give any weight to what a leftist considers a vice or a virtue.
The "Orwellian newspeak" at least makes an effort to aim for positive values, despite falling short. That's the point.
Also, please define what you mean by "leftist". These days it seems like it gets applied to anybody who believes in Constitutionally-limited government and the rule of law. That used to just be called being an American, but social media is a hell of a drug.
Also by the people that just work there(, man).
I mean, as dumb as it is, there is a certain musicality to hearing someone with a southern accent sardonically call it the dee-oh-dubya.
Is over $50,000, all arguments are invalid.
Anthropic already went through the process of getting approved to work in secure network. (I think xAI may have as well, but the others just don't have that access.)
Microsoft AI (OpenAI) have already being used for war. Possibly Google AI too.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/3ZxzCU_Qye8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RDKgsKbuNM
WaPo is reporting that OpenAI and xAI already agreed to the Pentagon's "any lawful use" clause, aka, mass surveillance and fully autonomous killbots. From the WaPo article https://archive.is/yz6JA#selection-435.42-435.355
> Officials say other leading AI firms have gone along with the demand. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, Google and Elon Musk’s xAI have agreed to allow the Pentagon to use their systems for “all lawful purposes” on unclassified networks, a Defense official said, and are working on agreements for classified networks.
The only difference is simply that Anthropic is already approved for use on classified networks, whereas Grok and OpenAI are not yet (but are being fast-tracked for approval, especially Grok). Edit: Note someone below pointed out that OpenAI may be approved for Secret level, so it's odd that Washington Post reports that they are working on it still.
OpenAI is usable through Azure for Government up to IL-6.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/azuregov/azure-openai-authori...
Either Anthropic is seen as the clear leader (it certainly is for coding agents) or this is a political stunt to stamp out any opposition to the administration. Or both.
> fully autonomous killbots
I keep hearing this but it should be plainly obvious to everyone (at least here) that an LLM is not the right AI for this use case. That's like trying to use chatgpt for an airplane autopilot, it doesn't make sense. Other ML models may but not an LLM. Why does the "autonomous killbot" thing keep getting brought up when discussing Anthropic and other llm providers?
For reference, "autonomous killbots" are in use right now in the Ukraine/Russia war and they run on fpv drones, not acres of GPUs. Also, it should be obvious that there's a >90% probability every predator/reaper drone has had an autonomous kill mode for probably a decade now. Maybe it's never been used in warfare, that we know of, but to think it doesn't exist already is bonkers.
It wouldn't make sense to have the LLM try to do the target recognition, trajectory planning, or motor control. It might make sense to have the LLM at a higher level handling monitoring of systems and coordination with other instances, to provide more flexibility to react to novel situations than rules bases systems.
It's almost a silly distinction since ML has been used in weapons for quite a while. For example: Javelin missiles have automatic target recognition, cruise missles have intelligent terrain following, long range drones use algos like SLAM for guidance.
3- These others have more influence with the administration and are using it to bully a competitor?
3- Anthropic looks "woke" and the administration cares more about perceptions than reality.
Not too different from picking on Harvard/etc.
You’re reading into it like the federal government is an honest broker.
It’s just corruption. Google is a bigger fish. OpenAI is attached to Oracle and Larry Ellison, who is a Trump collaborator. Kushner is also in investor.
Anthropic is the weakest animal in the herd. They also started a campaign targeting OpenAI, which is capturing hearts and minds (everyone is talking about Claude Code), and really pissed off Sam Altman.
On the one hand it's fantastic that people are resisting and, if nothing else, raising awareness and buying time.
On the other hand, is autonomous war not obviously the endgame, given how quickly capabilities are increasing and that it simply does not require much intelligence (relatively speaking) to build something that points a gun at something and pulls a trigger?
It just needs one player to do it, so everyone has to be able to do it. I'd love to hear about different scenarios scenario.
It's not that hard. DoD could find a contractor to do it. But Anthropic wants no part of it, and I get why.
I absolutely do get it, but if you assume that eventually (and by that I mean: very, very soon) somebody else will do it, in how far is this line of action simply opting out of having some say in all of it and taking responsibility for situation that you instrumented?
And I am honestly not sure.
If your stance is "well, this is something that should just not happen" and also believe that is absolutely will happen, then what are you doing by saying "but it won't be us, it will instead be other people (who were enabled and inspired by our work in unsurprising ways)".
On the other hand, just the act of resisting could tip the scale in some incalculable and hopefully positive way.
Yes - Anthropic _does_ incur business risk if their products are misused and this becomes a scandal. Legally the government may be in the clear to use the product, but that doesn’t mean Anthropic’s business is protected. Moral concerns aside, it’s their prerogative to decide not to take on a customer that may misuse their product in a way that might incur reputational harm.
Or it was their prerogative, until the Trump administration. Now even private companies must bend the knee.
> It just needs one player to do it, so everyone has to be able to do it.
Businesses stay out of potentially profitable market segments for various reasons, so I don't think everyone has to be able to do it to survive.
We are constantly told how the board has a fiduciary responsibility to make investors money to overrule these various reasons.
We’re constantly told all sorts of stuff. It isn’t clear to me at all that this fiduciary duty exists in law at all, more its a collection of precedents and wishful thinking.
Using fiduciary duty as cover for profiting from the misery of others? Well that’s just some modern American doublespeak. I’m consistently asking myself “Are we the Baddies?” and the only answer I have anymore is yes.
agreed. I've never thought that fiduciary duties meant tossing out all morals and considerations of right/wrong to the point that one must make any decision in a way that will make the most money within legal bounds. I'm no economist or lawyer, but I've always taken it that the duty is to not do dumb shit that will lose money and to do things that protect it. The reading of "make money at all cost" just seems like a strained interpretation, yet it's trotted out very frequently with not enough push back.
Oh, I meant at state level. Business, yeah: the DoD (excuse me: Department of War) just needs one killer model.
> it simply does not require much intelligence (relatively speaking) to build something that points a gun at something and pulls a trigger?
I could not disagree more. A big part of that is also knowing when NOT to pull the trigger. And it’s much harder than you’d think. If you think full self driving is a difficult task for computers, battlefield operations are an order of magnitude more complex, at least.
We have fully autonomous weapons, and had them for over a century. We call them "landmines".
I expect autonomous weapons of the near future to look somewhat similar to that. They get deployed to an area, attack anything that looks remotely like a target there for a given time, then stand down and return to base. That's it.
The job of the autonomous weapon platform isn't telling friend from foe - it's disposing of every target within a geofence when ordered to do so.
Well, I assume that they are at least not to attack their autonomous "comrades". Masquerading as such will be one obvious tactic, no ? You could argue that these guys would use e2e encrypted messages as FOF designation, but I would imagine a contested area would be blanketed with jammers, leaving only other options (light ? but smokescreens. Audio? Also easily jammed). So this isn't as easy as most people think.
Edit: No, I don't think a purely defensive stance like landmines is sufficient and what the people in command think.
We have landmines today. Why spend much more making marginally better, highly intelligent ones with LLMs?
Also, a longer quote from Douglas Adams might be appropriate here (also appropriate to agentic vibe coding ...)
Click, hum.
The huge grey Grebulon reconnaissance ship moved silently through the black void. It was travelling at fabulous, breathtaking speed, yet appeared, against the glimmering background of a billion distant stars to be moving not at all. It was just one dark speck frozen against an infinite granularity of brilliant night. On board the ship, everything was as it had been for millennia, deeply dark and Silent.
Click, hum.
At least, almost everything.
Click, click, hum.
Click, hum, click, hum, click, hum.
Click, click, click, click, click, hum.
Hmmm.
A low level supervising program woke up a slightly higher level supervising program deep in the ship's semi-somnolent cyberbrain and reported to it that whenever it went click all it got was a hum.
The higher level supervising program asked it what it was supposed to get, and the low level supervising program said that it couldn't remember exactly, but thought it was probably more of a sort of distant satisfied sigh, wasn't it? It didn't know what this hum was. Click, hum, click, hum. That was all it was getting. The higher level supervising program considered this and didn't like it. It asked the low level supervising program what exactly it was supervising and the low level supervising program said it couldn't remember that either, just that it was something that was meant to go click, sigh every ten years or so, which usually happened without fail. It had tried to consult its error look-up table but couldn't find it, which was why it had alerted the higher level supervising program to the problem.
The higher level supervising program went to consult one of its own look-up tables to find out what the low level supervising program was meant to be supervising.
It couldn't find the look-up table.
Odd.
It looked again. All it got was an error message. It tried to look up the error message in its error message look-up table and couldn't find that either. It allowed a couple of nanoseconds to go by while it went through all this again. Then it woke up its sector function supervisor.
The sector function supervisor hit immediate problems. It called its supervising agent which hit problems too. Within a few millionths of a second virtual circuits that had lain dormant, some for years, some for centuries, were flaring into life throughout the ship. Something, somewhere, had gone terribly wrong, but none of the supervising programs could tell what it was. At every level, vital instructions were missing, and the instructions about what to do in the event of discovering that vital instructions were missing, were also missing. Small modules of software - agents - surged through the logical pathways, grouping, consulting, re-grouping. They quickly established that the ship's memory, all the way back to its central mission module, was in tatters. No amount of interrogation could determine what it was that had happened. Even the central mission module itself seemed to be damaged.
This made the whole problem very simple to deal with. Replace the central mission module. There was another one, a backup, an exact duplicate of the original. It had to be physically replaced because, for safety reasons, there was no link whatsoever between the original and its backup. Once the central mission module was replaced it could itself supervise the reconstruction of the rest of the system in every detail, and all would be well.
Robots were instructed to bring the backup central mission module from the shielded strong room, where they guarded it, to the ship's logic chamber for installation.
This involved the lengthy exchange of emergency codes and protocols as the robots interrogated the agents as to the authenticity of the instructions. At last the robots were satisfied that all procedures were correct. They unpacked the backup central mission module from its storage housing, carried it out of the storage chamber, fell out of the ship and went spinning off into the void.
This provided the first major clue as to what it was that was wrong.
And the arms industry has been pushing smart mines for decades, so that they can keep selling them despite the really bad long-term consequences (well beyond the end of hostilities) and the Ottawa Treaty ban. In the end, land mines are killing people although the mines are supposed to be sufficiently advanced not to target persons.
From a security perspective, the “return to base” part seems rather problematic. I doubt you'd want to these things to be concentrated in a single place. And I expect that the long-term problems will be rather similar to mines, even if the electronics are non-operational after a while.
"Smart mines" specifically can be designed so that they're literally incapable of exploding once a deployment timer expires, or a fixed design time limit is reached.
It just makes the mines themselves more expensive - and landmines are very much a "cheap and cheerful" product.
For most autonomous weapons, the situation is even more favorable. Very few things can pack the power to sit for decades waiting for a chance to strike. Dumb landmines only get there by the virtue of being powered by the enemy.
You don’t need Anthropic for this use case, so obviously this use case is not what the current fight is about.
You don't need Anthropic for any use case. They don't ship VLAs either - nothing from Anthropic's entire model lineup can run on a killer drone.
Which raises the question: why did the Pentagon try to pressure Anthropic at all?
On the principle of it? Political reasons? Or was the real concern "domestic warrantless surveillance"?
"Since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, unexploded ordnance (UXO)—including landmines, cluster bombs, and artillery shells—has killed over 40,000 people and injured or maimed more than 60,000 others." - Google AI Overview "How many children were maimed by landmines after the vietnam war"
I guess by that definition, a bullet is also autonomous. It will strike anything in its path of flight, autonomously without further direction from the operator.
Bullets don't kill people, etc. etc.
If anything represents the logical conclusion of that tired fallacy, it'll be actually autonomous, "thinking" drones which make the targeting decisions and execution decisions on their own, not based on any direct, human-led orders, but derived from second-order effects of their neural net. At a certain point, it's not going to matter who launched the drones, or even who wrote the software that runs on the drones. If we're letting the drones decide things, it'll just be up to the drones, and I don't love our chances making our case to them.
Yes, but it doesn’t have to be error-free. The friendly fire rates in symmetrical hot wars is pretty high, it’s considered a cost of going to war.
If autonomous weapons lead to a net battlefield advantage, I agree with the GP, they will be used. It is the endgame.
The big asterisk in what you're saying is, like self driving cars, it's hardest when you want to be the most precise and limit the downsides. In this paradigm, false positives and false negatives have a very big cost.
If you simply wanted to cause havoc and destruction with no regard for collateral damage then the problem space is much more simple since you only need enough true positives to be effective at your mission.
The ability to code with ai has shown that it requires an even higher level of responsibility and discipline than before in order to get good results without out of control downside. I think the ability to kill with ai would be the same way but even more severe.
> A big part of that is also knowing when NOT to pull the trigger
"In a press conference, Musk promised that the Optimus Warbots would actually, definitely, for real, be fully autonomous in two years, in 2031. He also extended his condolences to the 56 service members killed during the training exercise"
I've not watched all of Robocop (too much gore for me), but I have seen the boardroom introduction of the ED-209.
That's how I imagine a Musk demo of this kind of thing would play out, if his team can't successfully manage upwards.
And the US learned the lesson the hard way in Iraq that in fact even human intelligence struggles with this. There were major problems throughout the war with individual soldiers not adhering to the published rules of engagement.
Yes, but the important bit is that autonomous drones can't be held accountable for not adhering to the published rules of engagement.
> It just needs one player to do it, so everyone has to be able to do it. I'd love to hear a different scenario.
Other players just need to assume that one player might do it in the future. This virtual future scenario has a causal effect on the now. The overall dynamic is that of an arms race (which radically changes what a player is).
That part isn’t actually clear. If China invents autonomous drones instead of us and they fuck it up they’ll kill their people.
Things like Scout AI’s Fury system are human in the loop still and I think for something that could just as well make a mistake and target your own troops it’s not yet clear that full auto is the way to go https://scoutco.ai/
Human in the loop okaying a full auto seems like it could work almost all the way. And then we count on geography. If they want to spray out a bunch of autonomous drones into our territory they do have to fly here to do it first or plant them prior in shipping containers. Better we aim at stopping that.
> Dario Amodei published an essay warning about potential dangers from powerful AI — including domestic mass surveillance (which he brands “entirely illegitimate”)
Why is only domestic surveillance by an AI dangerous? I guess Europeans are not worth protecting from the dangers of AI?
Shouldn't this be decided by the domestic populations in europe or elsewhere?
Related ongoing thread:
Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47173121 - Feb 2026 (1405 comments)
NDAA (The "Huawei Rule") is for cases when a foreign entity has infiltrated or taken over the company in question.
But DOD wants to use Anthropic so is really confirming that there is no foreign entity issues. They want to use it.
So to use NDAA (The "Huawei Rule"), is nakedly false and being used as a punishment.
Which if allowed to happen, could be used against any US Corporation to enforce compliance with the regime..
My belief is they are terrified of China and this seems evident when you take into account the moves they're making with Venezuela, Iran, and the increased adoption of authoritarian tactics. We're trying to play catch-up with China's rapid rise as a super-power and the AI infrastructure is one of the few major developments we still have control over, for now. I sympathize with Dario, he's stuck in a very bad position on this. We do not want China to operate on this level while we sit back with one hand tied behind our backs. On the other hand, this administration is making extremely poor decisions and arguably causing extensive harm domestically and internationally, so it's a lose-lose situation for Dario really.
If they are terrified of China why aren't they doing more diplomacy or at minimum, not allow NVIDIA to sell their chips to them?
Sorry but the China scare tactics is just more cold war nonsense. The idea China as a serious threat to anyone in the world where you have the USA invading countries (invading Iraq based on lies), kidnapping Presidents (Venezula), assassinating various leaders (drone strikes), abusing democratic ideals (Patriot act, PRISM, parallel construction, using banned chemical weapons against their own civilians; the USA has been a huge threat against the world and itself for the last 25 years.
Diplomacy is too slow in the eyes of this administration, that's why we're in this predicament. It's not cold war nonsense nor is it anything new; our military and intelligence agencies have been working against China via geopolitical proxy wars long before the Trump administration. This is just a natural extension of the Peter Thiel "remove all bureaucracy, we're not moving fast enough" strategy.
MACBCMAC doesn't roll off the tongue as well as MAGA I guess. If we're going to make America just like China, to get ahead of China, so they can't make us China, I fail to see where American citizens would even notice the difference.
Nationalize xai then? the owner is rich enough and can find a new pet project
If they were terrified of China, they wouldn't be working so hard to alienate so many allies who would naturally be on our side. They're just bullies trying to win approval by looking tough.
DoD Generals are probably pushing this with Hegseth because it's something they can control and Hegseth is not pushing back.
DoD Generals also probably don't agree with pissing off all our allies but they don't have control of elected leadership and elected leadership is making those decisions.
Just want to note the emergence of a two-tiered imbalance. Frontier AI providers are stacking the guardrails so high that everyday citizens can't even ask an LLM what boobs are, but simultaneously providing government with AI lacking guardrails around "any lawful purpose".
That's fundamentally antidemocratic and it normalizes the departure from the Western Enlightenment standard of, "the same law governs everyone".
Yeah it is. The Military has put itself in the position of arguing for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. In what way can that be spun as a positive.
They are arguing to do things that shouldn't be allowed anyway.
I don't have a lot of hope here. When most of the creme de la creme of the billionaire class capitulated to Trump at the beginning of his term, that set the tone for everything that followed IMO. It's astounding to me that so many are willing to see him trample on the Constitution and separation of powers when they'd scream like stuck pigs if any other party attempted it. And that's the way a lot of influential Americans like it I guess. Like I said, not a lot of hope. YMMV.
So the cornerstone of one of the most common types of scam, affinity fraud, as well as a cornerstone of salesmanship, is convincing an audience that you're just like them. You have the same likes and dislikes, the same hobbies, the same cultural references, the same beliefs and values and hopes and dreams.
And then you use that affinity to manipulate them, to get them to do what you want, to get them to give you money.
I think the tech worker / engineering / online crowd has really let themselves get duped.
Sure, maybe some tech billionaires did start out in a similar place as many of us.
But a lot of what they tell us as part of selling us their brand is just affinity fraud, telling us they're just like us with the same values of privacy and open source and some hippie notion of peace, love and understanding.
But it's just a trick, and they just want money, power and fame.
It's not so much as the billionaires capitulating, it's that they never were the people they pretended to be, and keeping up the act is no longer how they get what they want.
I basically agree here, but I would add that the framing here can sometimes sometimes be better described as “extortion”. Politicians have tremendous power and influence over many industries, I’ve seen the inside of a few situations where the politicians framed themselves as “taking on big business” where behind closed doors they were 100% calling the shots and handing executives directives on what they could or could not say publicly. The companies had no choice but to play along. When I see a big company take exactly the same public position as the current regulatory regime or administration in power, I don’t assume that they necessarily have any choice in the matter.
Benito Mussolini: 'Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.'
That is the reason why they would cry if the other party broke the rules to this degree. The other party is more aligned with regulations; taking power from corporations instead of giving it to them.
> The other party is more aligned with regulations; taking power from corporations instead of giving it to them.
Enough regulation is good, not enough and too much are both bad. Neither party has the best plan when it comes to regulation, Republicans want too little (increasing corporate power), Democrats want too much (increasing government power).
> Benito Mussolini: 'Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.'
He literally named it [1]!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Fascist_Party
Seems like it is probably a fake quote: https://politicalresearch.org/2005/01/12/mussolini-corporate...
More aligned? Sure. Pretty low bar though. There's a real opportunity in targeting abuses of technology like Flock cameras and surveillance capitalism but right now it's getting expressed as a luddite agenda against AI and datacenters and it won't go far because it throws the AI baby out with the datacenter bathwater IMO making them more into useful idiots than crusaders out to rein in corporate excess.
> many are willing to see him trample
there is little surprising about it
Trump is pushing in the direction of an Oligarchie, billionaires would be the future oligarchs.
So even iff a billionaire is no-okay with this development, if they stick out they
- will lose their status/money iff Trump wins long term
- will make enemies with many other billionaires, but a core trend of billionaires is taking advantage of connections to other powerful people
- will be the prime target to make and example of
So there is a high risk for sticking out. At the same time "mostly passively tagging along" will at worst make them oligarchs. At the same time they are used to crossing ethical boundaries to maximize profits. *This is just another form of that.*
In general its pretty much non-viable to go from sub/barely millionaire to billionaire by keeping to law, moral and ethics.
And it's not a secret either that any extreme concentrations of power or money are fundamental thread of _any_ democratic state of law, the US is no exception. The US has been warned that their system is very prone to populist take over and their checks and balances are quite brittle since _decades_. (At least since end of WW2 when people when people analyzed how Hitler took over post-WW1 Germany and wondered if the US could suffer a similar fate. And instead of improving the robustness, the general response was "nonsense, this is the US". Then after 9/11 thinks got worse, warnings that this can lead to a disaster where also many, but actions where none. And then in recent decades the US pushed in favor of monopolies instead of a (actual, practical) free market(1) to project more power internationally, and things got even worse.
(1): Monopolies and a (actual, practical) free Market are fundamentally incompatible. It also is kinda obvious why once you put away decades of deregulation propaganda.
Given there are only ~1135 billionaires in the USA right now, I'd say it's pretty much non-viable to go from sub/barely millionaire to billionaire period. But Taylor Swift doesn't seem to have murdered any kittens to get where she is nor did Rihanna so it can happen without totally selling out.
yesn't
my argument was more about becoming a billionaire by creating bringing a company to a level of success where they dominate their area of business.
I.e. not getting there by "fame" or "pure luck" (lets say you got 1/42th of early bitcoin from a "fun" project in the very early bitcoin days or similar).
Let's also for simplicity ignore that getting there by "fame" often involve tight cooperation with companies/people which don't care about ethics much. Through you might be able to separate yourself once you reach success, most times they try to make sure you can't.
And even iff you didn't compromise your ethics when becoming a billionaire this doesn't change the core argument.
That is if (as billionaire) you passively go with a push to Oligarchy you are unlikely to suffer from it. But if you don't and the Oligarchy wins, then you likely suffer a lot.
I.e. if you go with a non-emotional/non-ideology considering risk/benefit analysis passively yielding wins. Both for money and power.
In such a situation a lot of people will just go with it, no matter if billionaire or not.
In the short term I agree with you. But at some point, there's going to be a huge bar tab to clean up the mess. I'm a bit surprised none of them seem to be angling how to profit from that day when it comes.
> When most of the creme de la creme of the billionaire class
... eats cheese pizza and were connected to Jeffrey Epstein. That includes prime ministers, secret services, trump, democrats, republicans, royalty.
Has nothing to do with Trump specifically. He's just the "currently voted-in guy" doing what he's being told to do.
"Oh but shadow government/deep state is just a dumb conspiracy-theory" ... yeah, just like an island of cheese pizza eating billionaires.
And who exactly (no not the Illuminati, the mole people, the Tartarian Empire or Atlantis etc) is giving him orders? Names please.
But you're right that the Epstein (guessing Mosad IMO) op had sure ensnared a lot of people who should have known better but I guess they're just like us in the sense that they only have enough blood to run one head at a time. To my knowledge though, Tim Cook, Bezos and Zuckerberg aren't in the Epstein files. So what's their excuse?
However, that still doesn't explain the secret space program to mine adrenochrome from missing kids renditioned to Mars and run from the basement of a Pizza restaurant. Because WTFF? https://www.space.com/37366-mars-slave-colony-alex-jones.htm...
But still, WHO is giving him orders? Or are you just assuming he must be following orders because the alternative that he's genuinely large and in charge is terrifying? That our republic basically mostly rolled over for him in less than one year perhaps even moreso?
Trump is mentioned over a million times in the Epstein files, he's deeply connected to Epstein. He is not "just the "currently voted-in guy" doing what he's being told to do."
>"Oh but shadow government/deep state is just a dumb conspiracy-theory" ... yeah, just like an island of cheese pizza eating billionaires.
This wasn't the conspiracy theory you guys believed in though. You were looking for a Satanic cabal of Democrat/leftist pedophiles and Trump was supposed to be the agent provocateur sent by God opposing the "deep state" and exposing the pedophiles. If anything, the Epstein files prove how utterly useless you lot were at actually identifying reality. The "cheese pizza" thing was never true. Pizzagate was never true. Trump was neck deep in all of it.
Being right in the sense that a broken clock is right twice a day is still being wrong.
[0]https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/do-the-new-epstein-f...
"you guys" ... "you" ... "you" ... etc etc.
... okay? I'm not even from the US. I don't even pick a side.
Whatever it was that you were reading, you should re-read it when you're capable of emotionless, analytical, objective conscious thoughts. That way you might manage avoiding mindlessly projecting your clearly emotional nonsense into my words.
Thanks! :)
Who is giving him orders?
That's not addressing anything I wrote. What I wrote, was: "what he's being told to do.". Those are not the same.
Please read what I'm writing, instead of what you think I'm writing.
That's the same mistake some other commenter made, but he did it worse.
>... okay? I'm not even from the US. I don't even pick a side.
You clearly have. You've made numerous comments taking the "conspiratorial" point of view you're describing while mentioning "cheese pizza eating billionaires" and the like. For whatever reason you want to be seen as a part of the Pizzagate group and as being vindicated with them. Don't get triggered because I'm responding to the persona you choose to project.
>Whatever it was that you were reading, you should re-read it when you're capable of emotionless, analytical, objective conscious thoughts.That way you might manage avoiding mindlessly projecting your clearly emotional nonsense into my words.
Your own comments reek of smug sarcasm and condescension, some peppered with ALL CAPS AND EXCLAMATION MARKS! You're anything but analytical or objective, and your comment is just a personal attack.
I'm only reflecting your nonsense back at you, fellow human.
Pizza was continuously mentioned in the Epstein emails in a way that's obviously a euphemism for something else. You don't have to be a QAnon lunatic to reference that.
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/leaked-epstein-files-mention-word-...
It really is beyond the pale to threaten a private company in this way outside of war time. It's an unthinkable overreach.
I have a question. Is this Trump effect or Pentagon would have threatened otherwise too?
Genuine question.
I can't believe how many people take the anthropic statement at face value. You need to concentrate on what they are implicitly acknowledging. They will spy on non us citizens. How philanthropic
edit: how about the downvoters give a counterargument instead of trying to bury this comment?
The challenge for Americans is: can the political work of defining and protecting our values be outsourced to a company like Anthropic?
Anthropic (and others), whether due to financial/regulatory/competitive, will at some point permit their products to be used for any lawful purpose. Even if they attempt to restrict certain uses today. That arrangement is unlikely to hold.
Americans should vote for the right candidates and elect leaders who will carry and defend their views. I don't think there is any other way.
I'm not trying to have a cynical hot take, but the political class seems not to offer up any candidates that carry or defend my views and the path to these positions requires funding and resources I will never have access to.
The situation in the United States, right now, seems genuinely hopeless. And I'm certain I'm not the only person who feels this way.
What is there to do besides resign myself to what's coming and try my best to ignore the bullshit?
Pathetic but not unexpected that people are willing to tolerate such a use of AI. However, this is the most principled statement on the military use of AI that a frontier model leadership suite has released. It's also full of "china bad" sentiment that's worth picking over, but in a political and economic paradigm that expects & rewards blatant corruption, this statement still stands out.
It does look good on them, just one day after they accept to drop their AÍ safety net, which is a de facto abdication to the DoD. Their article is just (masterful)damage control
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Anthropic has an excellent balance sheet. It basically has fuck you money that would let it walk away from the federal trough without existential risk. And hopefully extra dollars from users like me could compensate and then some in the fullness of time.
Being declared Supply Chain Risk means if you do ANY business with US government, you cannot use something.
So many companies have US Government contracts. Maybe they are not majority of their business like Lockheed Martin or RTX but look at F10, on that list, MAYBE Walmart is only one without US Gov Contract, everyone else likely does.
If they are deemed a supply chain risk under the DPA anyone doing business with them and has government contracts has to drop them, including Google and Microsoft. The $200M is small potatoes compared to this.
Do they? Are they different than OpenAi which I know has lots of debt and is losing money quarter over quarter with declining user share.
It has an excellent balance sheet that it’s actively chewing through, though.
don't look at the profit and loss though
Article doesn’t demonstrate a good understanding of DoW’s relationship with contractors. Anthropic wanted those sweet, sweet, taxpayer dollars—well, this is what happens when you make a Faustian bargain.
> One option is to invoke the Defense Production Act. . .
> Another threat would be to declare Anthropic to be a supply chain risk. . .
The first is a wrist-slap that still gets the government what they want; the second is an existential threat to Anthropic. Their main partners are all “dogs of the military”. Microsoft, Intuit, NVIDIA: all government contractors. I can’t find one company that they have a working relationship with that doesn’t hold at least one govt contract.
The idea that Claude could alignment fake its way out of a change in contractual terms is silly. The DoW has all sorts of legal and administrative tools it can choose to leverage against contractors that fail to perform. Usually it doesn’t, because of a “norm” that says the private defense sector runs more smoothly when the government doesn’t try to micromanage it.
Remind me again how good this administration is at upholding norms?
> Remind me again how good this administration is at upholding norms?
When it comes to killing and spying on people with flimsy justifications that's a pretty bipartisan norm. Hell, Anthropic isn't even saying they won't help the DoW do just that, they just want to make sure there's a human in the loop.
The "USA Freedom Act" [1], which made most of the Patriot act permanent, had bipartisan support.
I'm all for reversing the continual ramp up of the police state and the industrial military complex. We need to recognize, however, that it's being funded and pushed by both parties. Generally playing on fears of the scary other. (Muslim terrorists in 00s, Mexicans today).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_Freedom_Act
You’ve egregiously misread me. I spelled out the norm that the DoW would be violating if they decided to make good on their threats.
> Usually it doesn’t, because of a “norm” that says the private defense sector runs more smoothly when the government doesn’t try to micromanage it.
My comment has nothing to do with Anthropic’s “moral” or “ethical” stance.
I also don’t see the point in both-siding this. The situation at hand is before Hegseth and Trump. I can’t even remember Biden’s SecDef’s name.
My apologies, that wasn't my intent.
> I also don’t see the point in both-siding this. The situation at hand is before Hegseth and Trump. I can’t even remember Biden’s SecDef’s name.
To me, the moral and ethical problem is a bigger issue than the norms problem. There's a distinction without a difference between Hegseth doing this vs the Dems agreeing with Anthropic's demands and keeping a human in the loop on a massive spy and killing network. In some ways, stepping out of the norms and making a big news story is preferable to an unknown cabinet member just signing a business as usual agreement which erodes liberties. At least we know about it.
That's why I brought it up. It's great that Anthropic wants some safeguards, but ultimately the bigger problem is that AI with or without humans, significantly expands that ability of our military to murder and our spy agencies to spy.
> Anthropic wanted those sweet, sweet, taxpayer dollars
The sold services to a willing counterparty at mutually agreed upon terms. And now the other side of that deal has recalled that they're Twelve and You're Not My Real Mom You Can't Tell Me What To Do, and so wishes they had agreed to different terms and is throwing a tantrum to attempt to force a change.
And that's Anthropic's fault? That's a risk they should have predicted?
> The sold services to a willing counterparty at mutually agreed upon terms.
Yeah, and the legal environment that contract was written in, which both parties were aware of during negotiation, defines the means by which those terms can be changed.
> And that's Anthropic's fault? That's a risk they should have predicted?
It is deeply funny to me to imagine that an AI company doing inference at an unprecedented scale could not see this coming.
Go ask Claude how usgov should act if a contractor preemptively refuses to deliver. What are the top five tools they could use to demand compliance?
> preemptively refuses to deliver
See this is your confusion. They're not refusing to deliver, they're happy to provide the services agreed to at the rate negotiated. What they're refusing is a change in the terms.
If you contract me to build you a building, and I agree with a stipulation that it won't be used as a slaughterhouse (and that you'll write that into the deed), you can't compel me to continue building if you change your mind on that point six months in. You either break the contract subject to agreed terms, renegotiate to remove that clause, or stop breaching the contract.
Of all American claims to exceptionalism, one that rings closest to true is that the the people AND the government are all bound by the rule of law. Contracting with the government is no different than contracting with any other party.
Your point seems to be "but it's the government clearly they can do whatever they want lol" viz. DPA, Supply-Chain risk, etc. You're right that they have those powers. But accepting/asserting that the capricious, vengeful, use of those extraordinary powers should be an anticipated, normal feature of contracting with the government runs counter to what should be among our highest shared values. We might as well jump directly to the authoritarian logic 'they have the army, they can compel anything they want for $0, so just give them what they ask'.
Furthermore, one presumes Anthropic did see this coming, given no more evidence than that this is playing out in a giant public fracas making their values clear to all their possible customers the world over, instead of over a tense email thread between the assistant to the sub-under-deputy secretary for AI procurement and a half-dozen lawyers in SF.
(addenda: you're going to say we've used the DPA a bunch. I would argue that vanishingly few instances have compelled private enterprise to act in direct opposition to their own interests; an even in those cases they were just being asked to lose money (meatpackers, PG&E suppliers, ...))
There is no "DoW". Federal agencies, including the Department of Defense, are named by Congress. Just because the current administration wants to use a different name means nothing ... unless everyone just complies in advance. Will Congress actually rename it? Hard to say, but it doesn't seem very likely.
"Defense" is a harmful euphemism that misleads the American public, so in this case I'm happy to humor the admins decision.
I agree that, given the actual history of the US military and foreign policy, it is a harmful and misleading euphimism.
It is also, however, the official name of the department, as determined by the US Congress who are empowered to determine such names.
In no case I am happy to humor this administration's decisions, especially when they are illegal/extra-legal/paralegal. If they wanted to actually rename the department, there's a clear process for that, and then perhaps we could "humor" that effort. As it stands, there's nothing here to humor, since there is no decision, only illegal aspiration.
Indeed, “defence” so obviously an Orwellian term for these departments, I’m very much in favour of the change.
Getting off-topic here but it was irritating that Anthropic's original announcement called them the Department of War. What was that even signaling?
The signalling in that post is about as clear as it can be.
They’re aggressively signalling that they are cooperative, and that they are not being belligerent. They are using the preferred language and much of the framing that the US government would use, to make it as clear as possible what the key points of their disagreement are, by leaning into alignment on everything else
This is textbook. People are reading this as some kind of confusing, inexplicable framing when it’s how any sensible person would write in their context. When you’re up against an authoritarian regime, that’s willing to abuse all the levers of power against you, you very carefully pick your fights and don’t give them any reason to complain about anything that isn’t essential.
Quibbling about the name of the department would be among the stupidest things I could possibly imagine. As it stands, I’m seeing lots of folks online who generally support the administration saying that Anthropic is correct here. If you gave them a bunch of stupid talking points about how anthropic is being disrespectful, you would lose those people. It doesn’t make sense, they’re obviously terrible people without a soul, but that’s reality.
> When you’re up against an authoritarian regime, that’s willing to abuse all the levers of power against you, you very carefully pick your fights and don’t give them any reason to complain about anything that isn’t essential.
While I am not claiming that you're wrong in this particular instance, or in general, I think it is important to note that there are people who absolutely disagree with you about this, some of whom who have lived in extremely authoritarian regimes. I'm not saying they're right, either, but just highlighting that there is no clearly obvious right/wrong on this point.
This is such a silly point to argue over. From 1789-1947 we had a "Department of War", which then merged into "Department of Army" under the newly formed (in 1947) National Military Establishment (NME) which was changed in 1949 to "Department of Defense" because N-M-E sound like "enemy".
It's not like these names are part of some sacred part of American identity, and "defense" has always been laughable as a euphemism. The DoD refers to themselves as the DoW [0] now, so it's completely reasonably to refer to the department as DoW. And of all the places to put your political energy, defending a laughable euphemism of a name that was used because the previous iteration of the name sounded funny seems like a sub-optimal use of that a energy.
0. https://www.war.gov/
Under US Code, it is the US Congress that names departments. It is not up to an individual officer in the US military, or the administration, to rename them.
I'm expending a fraction of a fraction of 1% on this, and I am in no way defending the euphimism. I am defending the actual written down, legal way in the US government is supposed to operate, which despite its many failings, seems worth defending to me.
> There is no "DoW".
There’s no Obamacare either. Come on, this is about as pedantic as the “the DoD is not the Pentagon” debate downthread.
It’s a colloquial name, and how the executive branch wants everyone to refer to it. This forum isn’t an official document. Move on.
If the title doesn't make a difference, then there's no point to insist on it. People say "the Pentagon" as shorthand for "military leadership in Washington." Not using the shorter term wouldn't do much beyond making news articles longer.
This administration says "Department of War" because they want to project an aggressive image. I support anyone who uses the legal name "Department of Defense" in an effort to reinforce an aspirational goal for the department and to remind others that the Executive Branch shouldn't be allowed to remake the entire government at will.
"Obamacare" is a colloquial name.
"Department of War" is not a colloquial name; at best it is an attempt by the administration to create a colloquial name.
Not doing what the executive branch requests is a noble American tradition, and even more noble at the current time.
The DoD can invoke the DPA on any company it wants. Not really sure how this becomes Anthropic's fault.
They knew what they were signing on to when they sought DoW funding. I guarantee Dario was briefed on the risks associated with high-profile govt contracting.
Even if not briefed, such a smart person surely knows that he owe's his stash of gold to the willingness of others to spill their blood to protect it. Those willing to spill their blood have historically always had a claim on your gold.
This whole standoff could set a very important precedent of the Trump administration not getting what they want, and not in a "maneuvered out of the news spotlight" kind of way (e.g. Greenland), but in a public "FUCK OFF right in your face" kind of way.
The worst that can happen to Anthropic is one of the two things mentioned; loosing some contracts or some fake forced management from the Pentagon. maybe Dario having to leave, certainly a loss for him and people who believe in him but probably nothing world-changing.
The worst that can happen to the Trump administration is the beginning of its end, when people realize you can simply stand up to their bullying and with all the standoffs they have going on in parallel, maybe they will die a death by a thousand cuts?
> The worst that can happen to Anthropic
The corporate death sentence usually goes something like "anyone who does business with Anthropic cannot do business with the US government". That pretty much means all the hyperscalers, major infrastructure providers, major software providers, and major corporations. They all have to choose between the entire US gov and all those contracts and a single AI company. That's the worst that can happen to Anthropic.
I hope this happens because it gives the next democratic administration more ammunition in abolishing corporate supremacy.
The executives at these huge corporations already know that they can stand up to the Trump administration, and that it will fold immediately. "TACO" is printed in the Wall St. Journal.
They willingly don't, because they know that they can use the administration to cement their market power. The surveillance state being built is one where would-be competitors, labor, well-meaning reformists, can be crushed on a whim for sham political reasons. A massive contraction of USA wealth, influence, and power, a loss of our living standard and place in the world -- that is the price everyone else has to pay, to keep the existing power structure in place. They will not release their grip on the wheel. Not until the ship hits the bottom of the sea.
If that is the bet they are placing, it is a bet they will lose. The power and capabilities of US corporations does not rest solely on those corporations, and as the wealth, influence and power of the USA undergoes "a massive contraction", they will find themselves similarly degraded. They might be the big fish in the big pond, but only because everyone knows there's a bigger fish (the US government). Once other countries, and other corporations, no longer care much what the US government thinks, US corporations will find themselves in a very, very different situation.
Of course! I think at some level the people at the top know that this American capitalism is not competitive. The last 5 years or so have been basically the whole country realizing that our system is not competitive. And, the last 1-2 years have been collectively, the world re-calibrating on this fact.
The monopolists don't care though. The power is too intoxicating.
I mean, listen to discussions here. "What's your moat?" -- that's how American capitalists think. Not "What value does your company provide to the customer", but what extra force, beyond simple-minded fair market competition, are you leveraging, to ensnare the customer. The game is to ensure that customers cannot choose another business over yours on its merits. That works in the short term but it's extractive. Eventually, the parasite must stop sucking blood for the host to survive.
> parasite must stop sucking blood for the host to survive
Biology doesn't work like that. Biological units are too selfish. It is an iterated game so evolution could affect how a parasite's children act. However defection is usually a winning strategy (because there's rarely enough coordination nor enough signals for cooperation to win).
Biology has amazing metaphors, but unfortunately most writers and readers don't understand biology well enough to use those metaphors as part of an argument.
The same issue occurs with other disciplines too.
> Biological units are too selfish
Indeed they are.
> "TACO" is printed in the Wall St. Journal.
Can you elaborate?
"Trump Always Chickens Out" is an acronym that went around after "Liberation Day", when Trump very quickly reversed his position in response to the bond market basically telling him, no, you can't do that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Always_Chickens_Out
I misattributed it to the Wall Street Journal -- it was the Financial Times, point still stands.
>not in a "maneuvered out of the news spotlight" kind of way (e.g. Greenland)
I what world has the Greenland stuff been anything but a fuckoff?
> I what world has the Greenland stuff been anything but a fuckoff?
The world in which Europe didn't respond, Americans didn't flip out and Congress didn't push back.
>Europe didn't respond
https://komonews.com/news/nation-world/danish-mep-tells-trum...
Right. We're in the world in which "the Greenland stuff" has not "been anything but a fuckoff."
US was told directly that its not happening. You had the military excisise that scared Trump so much that he ordered extra tariffs. Just because you don't follow the news doesn't make it that there wasn't any response.
He chickened out on the extra tariffs, too.
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Everything about this situation is absolutely bonkers. Marking a US company as a supply chain risk hasn't been done before AFAIK, and is a guaranteed end of the company.
It's the US government basically unilaterally deciding to end a leading AI researcher company. Years of lawsuits will follow, comparisons to "communism", accusations of Trump/Heghseth being Chinese/Russia agents (because well, how else do you hand over the AI win to China than by killing one of your top 2?)
> is a guaranteed end of the company
Why do you say this?
Because this means you can't use it in regulated industries, including vendors of companies in regulated industries. It means any company who buys Anthropic products can never sell services to a company who is in a regulated industry (or has customers in a regulated industry, or has customers who have customers who are in a regulated industry, etc etc).
Hi, I'm European, not only I but also my peers are likely to actively prefer a corporation that Trump hates, and still would even if it was a little behind the curve (especially in AI, where new models from someone get announced every other week, so "a little behind the curve" doesn't mean much).
and I was downvoted for this :-DD
> is a guaranteed end of the company.
It's trivially untrue. It could be the end of one type of business model, and it could slow their growth, but it could also be a blessing in disguise -- there are a lot of brilliant engineers who would prefer to work with an Anthropic that took a stand on ethics, and a lot of people who would prefer to support such a company. One door closes, another opens. They could become an open, public-facing, benevolent-AI company.
Just imagine if this move cascaded out of control and it ended up being the Trump administration that got blamed for pricking the AI bubble. This could become one of the most expensive power grabs in all of history.
the Pentagon is the name of a building (pretty much a very large bikeshed). I see the actual agency is named by the author as the Defense Department and one of the officials in question is a Defense Secretary. Interestingly, the bikeshed itself has its own spokespeople.
"The Pentagon" has been the nomenclature for DoD / DoW for decades. Everyone knows what it means.
Yeah, this is an incredibly common metonym.
The Pentagon is a synecdoche for military leadership in the United States.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche
there is also a figure of speech used soo often, called metonymy.
The White House is also the name of a building.
News sources have been using both building names (and several more I can think of off the top of my head) as short hand for the people who work inside of them for my entire life.
It’s called a metonym. Look it up.
yet it’s website is the department of war.
Officially, they're the Department of Defense. There was an EO signed last year that lets them use "Department of War" on all but their most official documents (since only Congress can officially change the name of the department).
Imagine one of the defense primes telling the DoW, "We won't build you these planes, they're just too darned lethal!"
The DoD is those defense contractors and companies' _primary target customer_. That doesn't just mean they're dependent on them as a customer. That means everyone working with, for, and adjacent to them has knowingly signed up to work with a defense contractor and to sell to someone that wants to use weapons in anger. That means these companies were mostly _founded_ to do that.
So instead, I invite you to imagine a medical supply company refusing to sell medical-grade sodium thiopental to the Bureau of Prisons.
Not even a close comparison. A regular plane does not make a decision to fire on a target.
It's not that they are too lethal. It's "we will not build a weapon system that is fully autonomous and acts without a human in the loop".
The big boy defense contractors won't touch that shit either because as soon as you mention the idea the engineers start shouting you down from the top of their lungs out of shear unbridled terror and the lawyers come storming in due to the endless legal risk said design would bring.
Mass Domestic surveillance sure they might do no problem but fully autonomous killbots or drones are gonna be a no go from pretty much every contractor other that doesn't carry a "missing the point of Lord of the Rings" name
That, to me, is the biggest sign that all this is kayfabe.
Planes are fairly predictable, they can more or less be relied on to do that leadership asks them and not more. This stuff is more akin to nerve gas, there's no telling where it will go once deployed.
Yes, you're right. Military contractors supplying equipment that needlessly harms our own soldiers is pretty common, from what I understand. Soldiers following orders don't have much market power. "Occupational hazard", and then the brass sweeps the incidents under the rug. And paramilitary contractors are generally quite happy to supply things meant to directly hurt Americans (sonar weapons and tear gas used to attack Constitutional protests, etc). Both of these dynamics are applicable here. "AI" as it stands is a recipe for friendly fire incidents. And domestically, these capabilities will be used to turbocharge domestic surveillance as the con artist regime desperately needs ways to keep the wheels from coming off the cart.
So yes you're right, it sure is nice to imagine Anthropic setting off a wave of more military contractors acting with principles.
They are a private company they can largely sell or not sell they want. They aren’t saying they won’t build them because they are to effective they are saying they won’t build them because they aren’t safe.
Quoting statute:
> The President is hereby authorized (1) to require that performance under contracts or orders (other than contracts of employment) which he deems necessary or appropriate to promote the national defense shall take priority over performance under any other contract or order, and, for the purpose of assuring such priority, to require acceptance and performance of such contracts or orders in preference to other contracts or orders by any person he finds to be capable of their performance, and (2) to allocate materials and facilities in such manner, upon such conditions, and to such extent as he shall deem necessary or appropriate to promote the national defense.
Sure, but the contract in place forbids these things. So the contract is literally a non-performer and cannot perform such orders in the way it is written. So, I personally struggle to see outside of taking over the supply chain how Anthropics contract forces them to do this
My read of this interaction is Dario is calling out Hegseths' bluff. A bluff the latter didn't even know he was blundering into because Hegseth is an idiot.
SecDef invoking the DPA against Anthropic likely trashes the AI fundraising market, at least for a spell. That's why OpenAI is wading into the fight [1]. Given the Dow is sitting on a rising souffle of AI expectations, that knocks it out as well. And if there is one red line Trump has consistently hewed to and messaged on, it's in not pissing off the Dow.
[1] https://www.axios.com/2026/02/27/altman-openai-anthropic-pen...
The entire administration has been operating on empty threats (see Brendan Carr's FCC speech policing). But most companies don't call them out on it, they just roll over
Just imagine if the threats were to improve worker wages and conditions. Companies are showing that they are paper tigers. We will remember that. Looking forward to a future AOC or some other dem soc administration to just try to fight for the common man for once.
Imagine if it's just Grok that plays ball because Musk doesn't want to lose SpaceX's DoD contracts now it's the same outfit.
A strong argument for the other players to play ball. "Let us use your service or we will attach our kill trigger to a wildcard whim driven vendor."
I disagree. If the argument is, "Someone else will", then you are just complicit. If good people don't comply, it will fall to someone who has lower ethical standard, but that person will likely be less competent.
and in this case, less competent could mean more collateral damage, right? By doing the task competently you make less accidental misfires?
I'll imagine Grok plays ball because this is an obviously blatantly fascist policy, and Elon did like 2 or 3 SIEG HEILs at the inauguration.
I agree. This is a spectacular mistake. Anthropic has the best "AI" on the planet. Anthropic can spin up a giant "Claude" and plan rings around the Pentagon. DoD better get used to losing that fight.
Claude is the best, but Gemini with DoD money could get as good as Claude very easily
I think it'd be surprising if money is the limiting factor in Gemini's success considering Google has very deep pockets, so that's probably not true.
Also, Gemini with DoD money and DoD direction is likely to result in an AI that works very well for the DoD but significantly less well for other things, especially if your use case benefits from some guardrails (and most use cases do, because you rarely want AI to just do whatever it fancies.)
Gemini is just the worst of the 3 horses. The gov will eventually make them all to bend the knee. PRISM already showed they(eventually) all comply. I personally see this more like PR for Anthropic before the IPO
So? You can still win the race if you have the third fastest car on the planet.
The problem is they’re going to hit them with a wrench and no one will do anything because there’s no rule of law at that level left in the country. Just sycophancy and backroom deals.
This frames it as Pentagon vs. Anthropic but the actual problem is upstream. If we tell companies they must prevent all possible harm, you're setting them up: nerf the model and silently lose value nobody can quantify, or don't nerf the model and get blamed for every bad outcome. We don't want nerf'd models either. DoW is saying that.
This isn’t an external directive; Anthropic was founded with the mission of creating safe, reliable AI systems. You wouldn’t see the same people working at the company if the company didn’t stand by its acceptable use policy and other internal standards
Isn't a safe and reliable intelligence an oxymoron?
Nobody knows. That’s what they founded Anthropic to find out
Are you saying intelligence is inherently unsafe? That seems like a pretty wild conclusion and I can't see any logical way to jump to your opinions.
I'm saying the capability to reason about novel situations is in tension with guaranteeing it never produces harmful outputs. We are talking about contradictory design constraints.