When @sama announced within hours that OAI was replacing Anthropic with the "same conditions ", it was clear that either the DoW or OAI (or both) were fudging. DoW balked at Anthropic's conditions so OAI's agreement must have made the "conditions" basically unenforceable.
And sure enough, my reading of it left the impression the OAI conditions were basically "DoW won't do anything which violates the rules DoW sets for itself."
I'd have money on OpenAI hiding behind the "all lawful use" phrasing to claim high levels of protection.
He also claimed that they would build rules into the model the DoD would use, preventing misuse. Aka he claims OpenAI will quickly solve alignment and build it right in...I wouldn't hold my breath.
Most likely scenario is that if it does something “unlawful” and found out - claim that “These machines are black boxes and they don’t know what went wrong. They will set up an investigative committee and find out.”
All lawful use. And then they followed up with “intentionally doing illegal things.” If they happen to accidentally do illegal things, OpenAI is ok with it.
I hate this so much. The nsa’s spying on everyone in 2010 was “legal” and I can only imagine how much worse it is now with AI to follow your digital footprint around everywhere. Too bad we don’t have any more whistleblowers like Snowden
We know how this story will end for Dario. See Oppenheimer, Turing, Lavoisier, Galileo, Socretes etc. Power does not reside in the hands of people with knowledge or even wealth.
And most technical people have not taken a political philosophy course or even a philosphy course. The Ring of Gyges story is 4000 years old.
I think Amodei is widely underestimated. The consensus viewpoint on the deal that OpenAI struck with the Pentagon is that Anthropic got played. I disagree. I'm certain that Amodei and his team gamed this out. In doing so, I think there's at least two conclusions they would have drawn:
1. Some other AI company would cut a deal with the Pentagon. There's no world in which all the labs boycott the Pentagon. So who? Choosing Grok would be bad for the US, which is a bad outcome, but Amodei would have discounted that option, because he knows that despite their moral failures, the Pentagon is not stupid and Grok sucks.
That leaves Gemini or OpenAI, and I bet they predicted it would be OpenAI. Choosing OpenAI does not harm the republic - say what you will about Altman, ChatGPT is not toxic and it is capable - but it does have the potential to harm OpenAI, which is my second point:
2. OpenAI may benefit from this in the short term, and Anthropic may likewise be harmed in the short term, but what about the long game? Here, the strategic benefits to Anthropic in both distancing themselves from the Trump administration and letting OpenAI sully themselves with this association are readily apparent. This is true from a talent retention and attraction standpoint and especially true from a marketing standpoint. Claude has long had much less market share than ChatGPT. In that position, there are plenty of strategic reasons to take a moral/ethical stand like this.
What I did not expect, and I would guess Amodei did not either, is that Claude would now be #1 in the app store. The benefits from this stance look to be materializing much more quickly than anyone in favour of his courage might have hoped.
Grok is chosen because Musk spent $250+ million to elect Trump and is expected to underwrite the 2026 elections. Also, a lot of Trumps and their friends are invested in SpaceX. So they give them money too, but use OpenAI or Claude. I have a feeling that the military likes Claude more
They "chose Grok" for political optics, but they don't seriously intend to use it because it's actually just benchmaxxed garbage - hence why they worked with OpenAI.
The mistake here is thinking they can take on Power without really sitting in any officual position of Power.
Wikileaks and Assange got popular too. What happened to them?
The State Dept and CIA do exactly what Assange did. They pick and choose who to target with leaks. They get away with it (mostly even when exposed) because they officially are in power. Assange was not in power.
If you take a moral position do it when you have real power.
3. Talent migration to Anthropic. No serious researcher working towards AGI will want it to be in the hands of OpenAI anymore. They are all asking themselves: "do I trust Sam or Dario more with AGI/ASI?" and are finding the former lacking.
It is already telling that Anthropic's models outperform OAI's with half the headcount and a fraction of the funding.
Oppenheimer? Really? Quoting a review of an Oppenheimer biography:
“Oppenheimer was clearly an enormously charming man, but also a manipulative man and one who made enemies he need not have made. The really horrible things Oppenheimer did as a young man – placing a poisoned apple on the desk of his advisor at Cambridge, attempting to strangle his best friend – and yes, he really did those things – Monk passes off as the result of temporary insanity, a profound but passing psychological disturbance. (There’s no real attempt by Monk to explain Oppenheimer’s attempt to get Linus Pauling’s wife Ava to run off to Mexico with him, which ended the possibility of collaboration with one of the greatest scientists of the twentieth, or any, century.) Certainly the youthful Oppenheimer did go through a period of serious mental illness; but the desire to get his own way, and feelings of enormous frustration with people who prevented him from getting his own way, seem to have been part of his character throughout his life.”
Seems more like Sam Altman, who is known to get his way, than Dario.
I do not believe the Ring of Gyges preceded Plato making it up for The Republic... Where are you getting 4000 years?
Also maybe not seeing the message or connection here... That myth isn't really about who has power or not, right? It's kind of just a trite little "why you should do good even when no one is watching" thing. It just serves Socrates for his argument with Thrasymachus, and leads us into book 2 where it really gets going with Glaucon and all that. This is from memory so I might be a little off.
I got it from Tamar Gendlers philosophy and human nature course on open yale courses. She says it was a popular folk story passed down orally much before it was written in a book. Plato used it because people grew up hearing the story.
The story is asking whats the source of morality? Who decides where the lines are? And its not scientists. Science produces the Ring.
I was wrong, it's in Book II. This is "Socratic irony", he is assuming the position of an argument from earlier. He of course doesn't believe in the conclusion... we are going to learn later that justice is a form, based on the Good! This is all the doxa of one still in the cave.
> According to the tradition, Gyges was a shepherd in the service of the king of Lydia; there was a great storm, and an earthquake made an opening in the earth at the place where he was feeding his flock. Amazed at the sight, he descended into the opening, where, among other marvels, he beheld a hollow brazen horse, having doors, at which he stooping and looking in saw a dead body of stature, as appeared to him, more than human, and having nothing on but a gold ring; this he took from the finger of the dead and reascended. Now the shepherds met together, according to custom, that they might send their monthly report about the flocks to the king; into their assembly he came having the ring on his finger, and as he was sitting among them he chanced to turn the collet of the ring inside his hand, when instantly he became invisible to the rest of the company and they began to speak of him as if he were no longer present. He was astonished at this, and again touching the ring he turned the collet outwards and reappeared; he made several trials of the ring, and always with the same result—when he turned the collet inwards he became invisible, when outwards he reappeared. Whereupon he contrived to be chosen one of the messengers who were sent to the court; whereas soon as he arrived he seduced the queen, and with her help conspired against the king and slew him, and took the kingdom. Suppose now that there were two such magic rings, and the just put on one of them and the unjust the other; no man can be imagined to be of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice. No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a God among men. Then the actions of the just would be as the actions of the unjust; they would both come at last to the same point. And this we may truly affirm to be a great proof that a man is just, not willingly or because he thinks that justice is any good to him individually, but of necessity, for wherever any one thinks that he can safely be unjust, there he is unjust.
> OAI conditions were basically "DoW won't do anything which violates the rules DoW sets for itself."
I believe this understanding is correct. The issue many people have these days with Dept. of War, and most of Trump admin is that they have little respect for laws. They only follow the ones they like and openly ignore the ones that are inconvenient.
Dept of "War" should have zero problems agreeing to the two conditions Anthropic outlined, if they were honest brokers. But I think most of us know that they are not. Calling them dishonest brokers seems very charitable.
I don’t care who is in the whitehouse. Snowden revealed the crimes of the NSA in 2013 when Obama was president. They’re all going to want to use AI for mass surveillance
Ex: For the above statement, if they're truly dishonest brokers and openly ignore the rules that are inconvenient, they would have zero problems agreeing to Anthropic's terms and then violating them. So what you say may be quite true, but there would still need to be more to the story for it to make sense.
Ex: DoW officials are stating that they were shocked that their vendor checked in on whether signed contractual safety terms were violated: They require a vendor who won't do such a check. But that opens up other confusing oversight questions, eg, instead of a backchannel check, would they have preferred straight to the IG? Or the IG more aggressively checking these things unasked so vendors don't? It's hard to imagine such an important and publicly visible negotiation being driven by internal regulatory politicking.
I wonder if there's a straighter line for all these things. Irrespective of whether folks like or dislike the administration, they love hardball negotiations and to make money. So as with most things in business and government, follow the money...
I have no idea what exactly Anthropic was offering the DoD, but if there were a LLM product, possible that the existing guardrails prevented the model from executing on the DoD vision.
"Find all of the terrorists in this photo", "Which targets should I bomb first?"
Even if the DoD wanted to ignore the legal terms, the model itself would not cooperate. DoD required a specially trained product without limitations.
Unpopular opinion around here, but no company should have the ability to stop the military from its core mission: killing its adevarsaries through any means necessary.
If I start a small business that sells Apples and the US government comes to me and says "we want to buy your apples and fire them at high speed to" these are now your words "kill adversaries through any means necessary."
If I say, no, then am I stopping the military?
I feel like it is reasonable that I can say "no, I don't want to sell you my apples."
I cannot for the life of me figure out why that means I am stopping the military from killing people. The US Military will definitely still be able to kill people for centuries. I'm just saying I don't want to participate in it.
Yes, Musk is guilty of treason for exactly that reason. He directly sabotaged a major US military operation in Ukraine.
However, the military is bound by US and international law. It's clear they're not going to obey either of those with respect to this contract.
On top of that, Anthropic has correctly pointed out that the use cases Trump was pushing for are well beyond the current capabilities of any of Anthropic models. Misusing their stuff in the way Trump has been (in violation of the contract) is a war crime, because it has already made major mistakes, targeted civilians, etc.
Leaving autonomous weapons aside, how does Anthropic justifies that they signed up with surveillance company Palantir and now raising concerns for same surveillance with DoD?
This is very easy to explain. Anthropic outlines some limitations in their terms of service. Palantir accepted those terms. The DoD did not.
OpenAI claims their terms of service for DoD contain the same limitations as Anthropics proposed service agreement. Anthropic claims that this is untrue.
Now given that (a) the DoD terminated their deal with Anthropic, (b) stated that they terminated because Anthropic refused modify their terms of service, and (c) then signed a deal with openAI; I am inclined to believe that there is in fact a substantial difference between the terms of service offered by Anthropic and OpenAI.
Yeah, it never made sense when Sam immediately said that they had the same constraints yet de DoW immediately agreed with that.
From what I can see, OpenAI’s terms basically say “need to comply with the law”, which provides them with plenty of wiggle room with executive orders and whatnot.
Are you sure about that? Every information I’ve seen suggests that the DoD has been using Anthropic’s models through Palantir.
My understanding is that Anthropic requested visibility and a say into how their models were being used for classified tasks, while the DoD wanted to expand the scope of those tasks into areas that Anthropic found objectionable. Both of those proposals were unacceptable for the other side.
Wasn’t the trigger for all this what happened with Maduro earlier this year? From what I understood, Anthropic wasn’t very happy how their systems were being used by the DoW through Palentir which caused this whole feud.
And why would they have an objection to that? They sold a product to a customer. They should have no business in how that customer uses their software.
“We’ve actually held our red lines with integrity rather than colluding with them to produce ‘safety theater’ for the benefit of employees (which, I absolutely swear to you, is what literally everyone at [the Pentagon], Palantir, our political consultants, etc, assumed was the problem we were trying to solve),” Amodei reportedly wrote.
“The real reasons [the Pentagon] and the Trump admin do not like us is that we haven’t donated to Trump (while OpenAI/Greg have donated a lot),” he wrote, referring to Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, who gave a Pac supporting Trump $25m in conjunction with his wife.
Another reason is that Sam Altman has been willing to "play ball" like providing high-profile (though meaningless) big announcements Trump likes to tout as successes. For example:
> "The Stargate AI data center project worth $500 billion, announced by US President Donald Trump in January 2025, is reportedly running into serious trouble.
More than a year after the announcement, the joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle, and Softbank hasn't hired any staff and isn't actively developing any data centers, The Information reports, citing three people involved in the "shelved idea."
Just to nitpick, Palantir isn't doing surveillance like Flock. They do data integration the way IBM does under contract for the governments. Some data pipelines include law enforcement surveillance data which get integrated with other software/databases to help police analyze it. There's no evidence they are collecting it themselves despite recent headlines. It's a relatively minor but important distinction IMO.
It’s the same with Facebook selling user data. Neither selling your data, like the carriers do, or selling the ability to target you with your data, like Facebook does, are very nice. But legally they are separate things that need to be regulated differently. As is the case with Flock and Palantir.
The solution is still no different than a decade ago. Far stricter laws on intelligence, federal and local police surveillance, and a reduction in executive power which oversteps checks and balances.
There will always be another IT company willing to do integrations even if Palantir dies. Software isn’t going away.
Sure, but it's not as if the DoD was planning on using Anthropic to _collect_ the data either? I assume that the hypothetical DoD use case Anthropic shied away from dealt with the processing of surveillance data, just like what Palantir does.
> The military’s Maven Smart System, which is built by data mining company Palantir, is generating insights from an astonishing amount of classified data from satellites, surveillance and other intelligence, helping provide real-time targeting and target prioritization to military operations in Iran, according to three people familiar with the system...
> As planning for a potential strike in Iran was underway, Maven, powered by Claude, suggested hundreds of targets, issued precise location coordinates, and prioritized those targets according to importance, said two of the people.
I think a company which provides a sensor fusion dragnet for a government-run mass domestic civilian surveillance system is at least as culpable (and odious) than the ones supplying the data.
It might match. The red line was domestic surveillance. You don't know what deal they had. Giving Anthropic the benefit of the doubt, perhaps Palantir said "Deal, we won't use your tool domestically".
Whether you disagree with whether it truly aligns with their stated values, in their partnership with Palantir (making Claude available within their AI platform) they requested consistent restrictions:
> “[We will] tailor use restrictions to the mission and legal authorities of a government entity” based on factors such as “the extent of the agency’s willingness to engage in ongoing dialogue,” Anthropic says in its terms. The terms, it notes, do not apply to AI systems it considers to “substantially increase the risk of catastrophic misuse,” show “low-level autonomous capabilities,” or that can be used for disinformation campaigns, the design or deployment of weapons, censorship, domestic surveillance, and malicious cyber operations.
The moral disposition of the Anthropic leaders doesn't matter because they don't own the company. Investors won't idly watch them decimate billions in ROI by alienating the largest institutional customers on the planet.
> The moral disposition of the Anthropic leaders doesn't matter because they don't own the company. Investors won't idly watch them decimate billions in ROI by alienating the largest institutional customers on the planet.
Anthropic is a Public Benefit Corporation chartered in Delaware, with an expressed commitment to "the responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity."
So in theory (IANAL), investors can't easily bully Anthropic into abandoning their mission statement unless they can convince a court that Anthropic deliberately aimed to prioritize the cause over profit.
If they're doing it against the terms of service (and publicly so), I can't pin that one on Anthropic.
They've done lots wrong and maybe they shouldn't have gotten in bed with the military to begin with, but this illegal war is not theirs. It rests squarely with the President who declared it. (And with the military officers who are going along with it despite the violation of international law.)
> If they're doing it against the terms of service (and publicly so), I can't pin that one on Anthropic.
Anthropic claim that superintelligence is coming, that unaligned AI is an existential threat to humanity, and they are the only ones responsible enough to control it.
If that's your world view, why would you be willing to accept someone's word that they'll only Do Good Things with it? And not just "someone", someone with access to the world's most powerful nuclear arsenal? A contract is meaningless if the world gets obliterated in nuclear war.
I don't think any AI company should get in bed with the military. That being said, if the terms of service have been violated, the account should be canceled.
This exchange between Anthropic and OpenAI feels a lot like theater. If I was really trying to stop abuses I wouldn't going out of my way to talk about it. The "public sees us as the hero's" bullshit feels like a smoke screen. Id make one statement and keep silent and let the public do the math and not get involved.
Thanks for posting that link. Interesting reading, especially the closing:
“I think this attempted spin/gaslighting is not working very well on the general public or the media, where people mostly see OpenAI’s deal with DoW as sketchy or suspicious, and see us as the heroes.... It is working on some Twitter morons, which doesn’t matter, but my main worry is how to make sure it doesn’t work on OpenAI employees. Due to selection effects, they’re sort of a gullible bunch, but it seems important to push back on these narratives which Sam is peddling to his employees.”
It's easy to frame this purely as an ethical battle, but there's a massive financial reality here. Training frontier models requires astronomical amounts of capital, and the DOD is one of the few entities with deep enough pockets to fund the next generation of compute. Anthropic turning down this Pentagon contract over safety disagreements is a huge gamble. They are essentially betting that the enterprise market will reward their 'Constitutional AI' approach enough to offset the billions OpenAI will now make from government defense contracts. OpenAI wants the DOD money while maintaining a consumer-friendly PR sheen; Amodei is just pointing out that they can't have it both ways.
It’s a $200M contract. That’s not nothing but it’s definitely not such a huge sum for these companies at their scale when they’re spending billions on infrastructure.
I’m sure anthropic has signed up more revenue this week in response to this debacle to cover it. Where they’re actually screwed is if the gov follows through and declare anthropic a supply chain risk.
That is with the Pentagon directly only. Now they will lose much more because no defense contractor, subcontractor and so on can use them for anything defense related (even if they use the model to invent a new type of screw, if that screw is going to be used in anything military).
So yeah, they bet a whole lot on “look at us, we have morals”.
It's not "just" a $200m contract, it's the start of a lucrative relationship
1. Stargate seemed to require a dedicated press conference by the President to achieve funding targets. Why risk that level of politicization if it didn't?
2. Greg Brockman donated $25mil to Trump MAGA Super PAC last year. Why risk so much political backlash for a low leverage return of $200m on $25m spent?
3. During WW2, military spend shot from 2% to 40% of GDP. The administration is requesting $1.5T military budget for FY2027, up from $0.8T for FY2025. They have made clear in the past 2 months that they plan to use it and are not stopping anytime soon
If you believe "software eats the world" it is reasonable to expect the share of total military spend to be captured by software companies to increase dramatically over the next decade. $100B (10% of capture) is a reasonable possibility for domestic military AI TAM in FY2027 if the spending increase is approved (so far, Republicans have not broken rank with the administration on any meaningful policy)
If US military actions continue to accelerate, other countries will also ratchet up military spend - largely on nuclear arsenals and AI drones (France already announced increase of their arsenal). This further increases the addressable TAM
Given the competition and lack of moat in the consumer/enterprise markets, I am not sure that there is a viable path for OpenAI to cover it's losses and fund it's infrastructure ambitions without becoming the preferred AI vendor for a rapidly increasing military budget. The devices bet seems to be the most practical alternative, but there is far more competition both domestically (Apple, Google, Motorola) and globally (Xiaomi, Samsung, Huawei) than there is for military AI
Having run an unprofitable P&L for a decade, I can confidently state that a healthy balance sheet is the only way to maintain and defend one's core values and principles. As the "alignment" folks on the AI industry are likely to learn - the road to hell (aka a heavily militarized world) is oft paved with the best intentions
@pg on @sama: "you could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king."
In retrospect this quote comes across as way more foreboding given what we've learned about the scale of his ambitions and his willingness to lie and bend reality to gain power.
Dario on the other hand seems to have an integrity that's particularly rare in this era. I hope he remains strong in the face of the regime.
>Dario on the other hand seems to have an integrity that's particularly rare in this era.
Anthropic actually partnered up with Palantir. They are not the saints you think they are, either.
We should stop worshipping people and companies and stop putting them on pedestals.
Just because one party is at fault, doesn't mean the other is automatically innocent. These are all for-profit companies at play here.
If you look at his comments about Palantir and their proposed safeguards, it's clear it's a case of "if you are dining with the Devil, you'd better bring a very long spoon"
I've heard Palantir is essentially the only federal cloud vendor with this administration for secure services. By "partnered up with Palantir", do you mean they provided their models to the government? Or something more?
sama looks like he has been punched in the face hard and is scared of being punched in the face again. he also
dario comes across like a guy who has never even been in a fight and cant believe a fight is even real.
there is something very dangerous about a person who believes that they are "good" and then believes that in fact their version of good is superior to the government, and they should ignore the government which ostensibly represents the people, while building a technology that will make millions of white collar jobs go away (democrat voters) and revolutionise violence (dod/dow - republican voters)
imagine if IBM decided in 1960s they were going to start telling NASA/DOD how to use their mainframes and saying USgov couldnt have an IBM if they were going to use it in vietnam etc
It's always hilarious watching online fights between tech industry billionaires, sort of like the geek version of UFC. The weirdest part is how regular people pick sides and defend their billionaire against the other guy.
> The weirdest part is how regular people pick sides and defend their billionaire
Someone told me in another comment that it's possibly bot activity. I suspect so too, because in a tech forum like HN, a top voted comment can shift the entire focus/narrative of any given issue. I know there are a lot of mods on here to prevent this sort of thing, but given how good LLMs have gotten, I wonder if we are at a point where humans can even discern cases where this a mix of human and AI involvement in online activity (such as commenting).
I think I'm a bit more of an iconoclast than the average HN reader, but when this community was fawning over him when he was head of YC, I always got the impression, without knowing the guy or much about him, that it was totally undeserved. Mainly because thoughtless fawning of any kind makes me immediately suspicious. Nobody deserves that kind of praise.
I read that quote and see no positive interpretation. It was always a negative description.
I think maybe this community could use a bit more natural skepticism of hierarchy.
Same. What sam tried to do on his own, he failed at (not horribly failed, but he certainly wasn't in the same league as zuckerberg or page or gates or musk - he raised at least $30M then was forced to sell a failure of a product for $40M).
His ascendancy only came when he basically was given an ulta powerful position by an ultra powerful man.
pg's sama praise bewilders me. Is there some other Sam Altman he's talking about?
> Graham was immediately impressed by Altman, later recalling that meeting the 19-year-old felt like what it must have been like to talk to Bill Gates at the same age. He noted Altman's intense "force of will" from their early interactions.
Is there a Gates-like "presence" or a "force of will" displayed in his public interviews?
its reasonable praise. a 19 year old social outcast who grew up in the midwest drops out of ivy league and starts a company before smartphones exist that he sells for $43 million dollars at age 27, then invested almost all the money into more startups, became a billionaire, and hijacked chatgpt from the richest person in the world.
> pg's sama praise bewilders me. Is there some other Sam Altman he's talking about?
Paul Graham was a pudgy mediocrity clever enough to capitalize on nerds' obsession with Lisp, and leverage it into f-you money. Game recognized game in the shape of Sam Altman.
Let's just not put Dario / Anthropic on an undeserved pedestal. "Well, they're not as bad as Sam / OpenAI" is not, and should not be, much of a compliment.
Lol, right? I mean, who even has doubts left anymore on this?
The guy can lie with a perfectly straight face. He's the kind of person who tells another lie just to cover the last one, and then another to cover that.
Meanwhile he keeps making everyone more and more dependent on him, so by the time people finally realize what's going on, they can't afford to push him out.
What's there to discuss? OAI is seeking a hand-out from the govt to save their asses. They (Sam + top-management) see the writing on the wall and need help.
This. The OpenAI grift is to make itself too big to fail. They are playing a game of chicken ahead of the election circus. Trump must keep the market alive until November. Nvidia, Micron, Oracle, Microsoft are cooked when and if they pop.
Is there a term for such a recurring cycle in which speculative bubbles form, institutions and governments collaborate/collude to sustain them, and when the system finally reaches a breaking point the bubble collapses... leaving the public to absorb the losses while those responsible largely walk away with their pay and bonuses intact?
IMHO everyone needs to cancel there subscriptions with all of the ai products until stuff blows over. I don't trust anyone in this industry.There is probably one person or one group behind all of these AI companies that just needs to keep the engine going until they figure out how to replace everyone with bots that can do the dirty work.
Great, well deepseek is free for most use and certainly won't be helping the US military any time soon. Since you aren't paying them you aren't really supporting anything bad they may do down the line.
I wonder who asked for these two safety conditions first, DoW or Anthropic. I remember reading earlier that president's family is an early investor in openai, anthropic was winning this year, both companies are on the way to ipo. It could have been a trap, loose-loose situation - drop safety requirements and loose reputation, stay firm on safety - loose contract.
Anthropic has a clear focus on AI safety since inception. The Department of Defense has Monster energy drink esque styled themselves back to the Department of War because “We’re men! We have to prove it so hard!”
I don't know how reliable that source is. In any case, here's the text from that link, for posterity:
"I want to be very clear on the messaging that is coming from OpenAI, and the mendacious nature of it. This is an example of who they really are, and I want to make sure everything sees it for what it is. Although there is a lot we don’t know about the contract they signed with DoW (and that maybe they don’t even know as well — it could be highly unclear), we do know the following:
Sam’s description and the DoW description give the strong impression (although we would have to see the actual contract to be certain) that how their contract works is that the model is made available without any legal restrictions ("all lawful usee") but that there is a "safety layer", which I think amounts to model refusals, that prevents the model from completing certain tasks or engaging in certain applications.
"Safety layer" could also mean something that partners such as Palantir tried to offer us during these negotiations,which is that they on their end offered us some kind of classifier or machine learning system, or software layer, that claims to allow some applications and not others. There is also some suggestion of OpenAI employees ("FDE’s") looking over the usage of the model to prevent bad applications.
Our general sense is that these kinds of approaches, while they don’t have zero efficacy, are, in the context of military applications, maybe 20% real and 80% safety theater. The basic issue is that whether a model is conducting applications like mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons depends substantially on wider context: a model doesn’t "know" if there’s a human in the loop in the broad situation it is in (for autonomous weapons), and doesn’t know the provenance of the data is it analyzing (so doesn’t know if this is US domestic data vs foreign, doesn’t know if it’s enterprise data given by customers with consent or data bought in sketchier ways, etc).
The kind of "safety layer" stuff that Palantir offered us (and presumably offered OpenAI) is even worse:our sense was that it was almost entirely safety theater, and that Palantir assumed that our problem was "you have some unhappy employees, you need to offer them something that placates them or makes what is happening invisible to them, and that’s the service we provide".
Finally, the idea of having Anthropic/OpenAI employees monitor the deployments is something that came up in discussion within Anthropic a few months ago when we were expanding our classified AUP of our own accord. We were very clear that this is possible only in a small fraction of cases, that we will do it as much as we can, but that it’s not a safeguard people should rely on and isn’t easy to do in the classified world. We do, by the way, try to do this as much as possible, there’s no difference between our approach and OpenAI’s approach here.
So overall what I’m saying here is that the approaches OAI is taking mostly do not work: the main reason OAI accepted them and we did not is that they cared about placating employees, and we actually cared about preventing abuses. They don’t have zero efficacy, and we’re doing many of them as well, but they are nowhere near sufficient for purpose. It is simultaneously the case that the DoW did not treat OpenAI and us the same here.
We actually attempted to include some of the same safeguards as OAI in our contract, in addition to the AUP which we considered the more important thing, and DoW rejected them with us. We have evidence of this in the email chain of the contract negotiations (I’m writing this with a lot to do, but I might get someone to follow up with the actual language). Thus, it is false that "OpenAIs terms were offered to us and we rejected them", at the same time that it is also false that OpenAI’s terms meaningfully protect them against domestic mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.
Finally, there is some suggestion in Sam/OpenAI’s language that the red lines we are talking about, fully autonomous weapons and domestic mass surveillance, are already illegal and so an AUP about these is unnecessary. This mirrors and seems coordinated with DoW’s messaging. It is however completely false. As we explained in our statement yesterday, the DoW does have domestic surveillance authorities, that are not of great concern in a pre--AI world but take on a different meaning in a post-AI world.
For example, it is legal for DoW to buy a bunch of private data on US citizens from vendors who have obtained that data in some legal way (often involving hidden consents to sell to third parties) and then analyze it at scale with AI to build profiles of citizens, their loyalties, movement patterns in physical space (the data they can get includes GPS data, etc), and much more.
Notably, near the end of the negotiation the DoW offered to accept our current terms if we deleted a specific phrase about "analysis of bulk acquired data", which was the single line in the contract that exactly matched this scenario we were most worried about. We found that very suspicious. On autonomous weapons, the DoW claims that "human in the loop is the law", but they are incorrect. It is currently Pentagon policy (set during the Biden admin) that a human has to be in the loop of firing a weapon. But that policy can be changed unilaterally by Pete Hegseth, which is exactly what we are worried about. So it is not, for all intents and purposes, a real constraint.
A lot of OpenAI and DoW messaging just straight up lies about these issues or tries to confuse them.
I think these facts suggest a pattern of behavior that Ive seen often from Sam Altman, and that I want to make sure people are equipped to recognize:
He started out this morning by saying he shares Anthropic’s redlines, in order to appear to support us, get some of the credit, and not be attacked when they take over the contract. He also presented himself as someone who wants to "set the same contract for everyone in the industry" — e.g. he’s presenting himself as a peacemaker and dealmaker.
Behind the scenes, he’s working with the DoW to sign a contract with them, to replace us the instant we are designated a supply chain risk. But he has to do this in a way that doesn’t make it seem like he gave up on the red lines and sold out when we wouldn’t. He is able to superficially appear to do this, because (1.) he can sign up for all the safety theater that Anthropic rejected, and that the DoW and partners are willing to collude in presenting as compelling to his employees, and (2.) the DoW is also willing to accept some terms from him that they were not willing to accept from us. Both of these things make it possible for OAI to get a deal when we could not.
The real reasons DoW and the Trump admin do not like us is that we haven’t donated to Trump (while OpenAI/Greg have donated a lot), we haven’t given dictator-style praise to Trump (while Sam has), we have supported AI regulation which is against their agenda, we’ve told the truth about a number of AI policy issues (like job displacement), and we’ve actually held our red lines with integrity rather than colluding with them to produce "safety theater" for the benefit of employees (which, I absolutely swear to you, is what literally everyone at DoW, Palantir, our political consultants, etc, assumed was the problem we were trying to solve).
Sam is now (with the help of DoW) trying to spin this as we were unreasonable, we didn’t engage in a good way, we were less flexible, etc. I want people to recognize this as the gaslighting it is.
Vague justifications like "person X was hard to work with" are often used to hide real reasons that look really bad, like the reasons I gave above about political donations, political loyalty, and safety theater. It’s important that everyone understand this and push back on this narrative at least in private, when talking to OpenAI employees.
Thus, Sam is trying to undermine our position while appearing to support it. I want people to be really clear on this: he is trying to make it more possible for the admin to punish us by undercutting our public support. Finally, I suspect he is even egging them on, though I have no direct evidence for this last thing.
I think this attempted spin/gaslighting is not working very well on the general public or the media, where people mostly see OpenAI’s deal with DoW as sketchy or suspicious, and see us as the heroes (we’re #2 in the App Store now!). Itis working on some Twitter morons, which doesn’t matter, but my main worry is how to make sure it doesn’t work on OpenAI employees.
Due to selection effects, they’re sort of a gullible bunch, but it seems important to push back on these narratives which Sam is peddling to his employees."
And they're reportedly back in talks with the DOW per the FT (below).
They are not the exception, and are just as bloodlessly, shamelessly publicity hungry as any other tech co, if not more so. No surprise based on their conduct up until this fake event.
Like others have already mentioned: I think Anthropic's relationship with Palantir undermines Amodei's narrative here. It actually feels like Dario is playing Sam's game better than Sam is.
Those who know better please correct me. My current understanding of Palantir (and other surveillance tech companies like Peregrine) is:
1. They facilitate the sale of data to law enforcement, enabling the government to circumvent fourth amendment protections.
2. They fuse cross-government agency data through Foundry and fuse them into unified profiles which the government can use to surveil and pressure citizens without probable cause or a warrant.
ICE also uses a Palantir tool called ELITE to build deportation target lists.
EDIT: Downvoting my comment without any proper rebuttal or clarification is pretty silly.
We don’t know if Palantir is using claude for those uses. Though anthropic would not know for sure either.
I do agree with your point that Amodei is playing a game though. Whether he’s winning the bigger picture or not it’s unclear. His red lines are already so watered out, like how domestic surveillance is not ok, but international? totally fine.
That's true. With the risks of LLMs applied to surveillance though, I think it's a "Caesar's wife must be above suspicion" moment. Association is guilt unless proven otherwise.
Honest question: why do people automatically equate "fully autonomous weapons" to something like killer robot? My immediate reaction is that even the best-in-class rapid-fire gun has a hard time identifying and tracking drones. So, we'd need AI to do better tracking, which leads to a fully autonomous weapon. And I really don't get why that's a bad thing.
Of course, a company should have freedom to choose not to do business with the government. I just think that automatically assuming the worst intention of the government is not as productive as setting up good enough legal framework to limit government's power.
What you are describing would be "partially autonomous." Per Dario Amodei's original statement here: https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war he had no issue with that. "Fully autonomous" specifically means that the AI chooses a target and engages without any human intervention at all. If the human selects or approves a target, and the weapon then automates tracking and engagement, that's still only partially autonomous.
I’m not sure that “killer robot” is the actual concern outside of media hyperbole. I’m imagining a loitering munition-type drone that has some kind of targeting package loaded into it with different parameters describing what it should seek and destroy. Instead of waiting for intelligence and using human command to put the munition on target, it hangs out and then engages when it’s certain enough that it’s found something valid.
In a world where LLMs produce very convincing but subtly wrong output, this makes me uncomfortable. I get that warfare without AI is in the past now, but war and rules of engagement and AI output etc etc etc all seem fuzzy enough that this is not yet a good call even if you agree with the end goals.
> I’m imagining a loitering munition-type drone that has some kind of targeting package loaded into it with different parameters describing what it should seek and destroy. Instead of waiting for intelligence and using human command to put the munition on target, it hangs out and then engages when it’s certain enough that it’s found something valid.
I'm sorry, you've just literally described a "killer robot" in more words.
Yeah, I guess my point is that “killer robot” evokes a terminator-like image for a lot of people. Something that marches around and kills of its own accord. I don’t like either one, but I don’t think they’re the same thing.
Dario himself said that he was against using Claude to build a fully automated weapon because the technology was far from perfect, so he didn't want to hurt our soldiers or innocent people. I think his description matched a killer robot, and I don't agree with his reasoning because it's not like the military researchers didn't have the agency to find out what works and what doesn't.
We have traditional autonomous weapons (and counter-defense). They operate on millisecond or faster timescales with existing RF sensors. They are not and will not be using LLMs or other transformers. Maybe ChatGPT will update some realtime Ada code; they formally verify some of that stuff so maybe that won't be terrifyingly dangerous.
Where autonomous transformer-based munitions will be used are basically "here is a photo of a face, find and kill this human" and loitering munitions will take their time analyzing video and then decide to identify and attack a target on their own.
EDIT: Or worse: "identify suspicious humans and kill them"
We all do business with the government. We pay the military to protect our gold. It is fundamentally a protection racket that we voted for. And one could argue that the military, as the protector of your gold, has the final decision as to what it can and can't do with your technology.
That he's talking shit about Altman who is, at least in public, only talking up Anthropic. This will only play well with people who hate Altman, which is not the majority or even much of the public. It plays right into Altman's hand who can do what he always does which is play his "smol bean billionaire" role and act like a victim of big bad Amodei.
Just because you hate Altman doesn't mean everyone else does! Most people just know him as the guy who makes ChatGPT which most people like.
EDIT: Also, it doesn't help to brag about how this is good actually because now they are getting app downloads! People sympathize with victims of unfair situations. They don't like seeing people take advantage of those unfair situations though. No one has ever found the welfare recipient bragging about their welfare to be sympathetic.
I have no great love for Dario but his “talking shit” is literally making the point that what Altman is saying publicly is NOT actually in defense or praise of Anthropic and is a calculating, manipulative tactic.
Which is intended to muddy the waters about Anthropic’s actual position vs OpenAI’s, and portray himself as a conciliator (for the audience of DoD/Trump) who is still bound by equally strong ethics (as a fig leaf for OpenAI’s employees sympathetic to Anthropic). All to swoop in a land a big contract from the same people he is making a show of “supporting” in public.
I’d be pretty pissed too, tbh. Like, should he instead be thanking Sam effusively for being a manipulative slimeball acting entirely within his own self interest?
If as he says Sam’s comments are actually damaging Anthropic’s credibility/bargaining position with his public commentary then trying to change the popular narrative about what OpenAI/Sam are doing is a reasonable tactic.
As for your welfare analogy I’m kinda struggling to understand how to map that onto the participants in the current scenario or the lesson intended to be implied by it.
At least as it's presented in the article, there's no more reason to believe Amodei than there is Altman and Altman is presenting it in a less impassioned way which makes him more believable to anyone who doesn't have in-depth knowledge of the situation.
Going "what he's saying is straight up lies" is no more evidence backed than Altman claiming he asked the DoD to have Anthropic given the same deal as OAI and have the SCR designation avoided.
Altman was fired by his own board for lying to them. Just because Microsoft blackmailed them into reversing this decision by threatening financial ruin does not change that.
You don't give habitual liars the benefit of doubt.
That he's talking shit about Altman who is, at least in public, only talking up Anthropic. This will only play well with people who hate Altman, which is not the majority or even much of the public. It plays right into Altman's hand who can do what he always does which is play his "smol bean billionaire" role and act like a victim of big bad Amodei.
Just because you hate Altman doesn't mean everyone else does! Most people just know him as the guy who makes ChatGPT which most people like.
It’s entirely possible that people who are praising this CEO might have to come up with incredibly convoluted mental gymnastics to defend their position soon: “Anthropic chief back in talks with Pentagon about AI deal”.
Neither Anthro nor OAI are trustworthy. Local AI all the way. And when I say local, I mean Apple Silicon; I don't like to contribute to Nvidia's monopoly either (fuck "buy a GPU"; the guy is an Nvidia-sponsored "influencer").
It was fascinating to see OpenAI’s gaslighting in action last week. Signing their deal with the DoW and then announcing it so publicly clearly had the goal to (a) portray Anthropic as unreasonable actors that couldn’t come up with a “safe” solution like OpenAI and (b) take away all the leverage Anthropic had in the contract negotiations. Clever (in a Machiavellian sort of way) but still can’t understand why they did it so blatantly — literally hours after Anthropic was designated persona non grata by the government. Clearly this has backfired in a massive way.
In a way, I admire Dario’s stance and having the backbone to stand up to a government that is so happy to punish, legally or illegally, those that disagree with them. I certainly wouldn’t have the bravery (or stupidity) in his position — which frankly makes me happy that he’s running Anthropic and not someone like me…
It’s all just theatre. These companies will either give in or die off and be replaced by those who offer more freedom of use. It’s capitalism and while it’s not always pretty, it’s how these things go. Choosing to take what you believe as the moral high ground is noble but it does not put your company ahead of the ball in the long term because there are always those who will use that as an advantage to step on their backs.
Capitalism needs laws and regulation in order to not turn itself into feudalism. It isn't naivety or idealism to enforce fair markets and consumer protection. In my opinion it's existential.
I was recently admonished by dang or dong or whatever his username is for criticizing Sam Altman’s personal character. But I’m here to say again, Sam Altman is a lying sack of sh*t and PG’s partially culpable for allowing a known lunatic to run OpenAI.
Anthropic might not sign up with DoD but they definitely still live in a glass house.
Also, its extremely evident that we live in a post truth world. The accusation of Lies dont hold any teeth anymore. Especially in the post law gov of America
His clear concern is to stay able to poach OpenAI employees (although it's really Google employees he should be after). He didn't give MAGA $25M like Greg Brockman did, and the Trump administration is pay-to-play, so the DoD contract ship has sailed.
When @sama announced within hours that OAI was replacing Anthropic with the "same conditions ", it was clear that either the DoW or OAI (or both) were fudging. DoW balked at Anthropic's conditions so OAI's agreement must have made the "conditions" basically unenforceable.
And sure enough, my reading of it left the impression the OAI conditions were basically "DoW won't do anything which violates the rules DoW sets for itself."
I'd have money on OpenAI hiding behind the "all lawful use" phrasing to claim high levels of protection.
He also claimed that they would build rules into the model the DoD would use, preventing misuse. Aka he claims OpenAI will quickly solve alignment and build it right in...I wouldn't hold my breath.
Most likely scenario is that if it does something “unlawful” and found out - claim that “These machines are black boxes and they don’t know what went wrong. They will set up an investigative committee and find out.”
All lawful use. And then they followed up with “intentionally doing illegal things.” If they happen to accidentally do illegal things, OpenAI is ok with it.
I hate this so much. The nsa’s spying on everyone in 2010 was “legal” and I can only imagine how much worse it is now with AI to follow your digital footprint around everywhere. Too bad we don’t have any more whistleblowers like Snowden
We know how this story will end for Dario. See Oppenheimer, Turing, Lavoisier, Galileo, Socretes etc. Power does not reside in the hands of people with knowledge or even wealth. And most technical people have not taken a political philosophy course or even a philosphy course. The Ring of Gyges story is 4000 years old.
I think Amodei is widely underestimated. The consensus viewpoint on the deal that OpenAI struck with the Pentagon is that Anthropic got played. I disagree. I'm certain that Amodei and his team gamed this out. In doing so, I think there's at least two conclusions they would have drawn:
1. Some other AI company would cut a deal with the Pentagon. There's no world in which all the labs boycott the Pentagon. So who? Choosing Grok would be bad for the US, which is a bad outcome, but Amodei would have discounted that option, because he knows that despite their moral failures, the Pentagon is not stupid and Grok sucks.
That leaves Gemini or OpenAI, and I bet they predicted it would be OpenAI. Choosing OpenAI does not harm the republic - say what you will about Altman, ChatGPT is not toxic and it is capable - but it does have the potential to harm OpenAI, which is my second point:
2. OpenAI may benefit from this in the short term, and Anthropic may likewise be harmed in the short term, but what about the long game? Here, the strategic benefits to Anthropic in both distancing themselves from the Trump administration and letting OpenAI sully themselves with this association are readily apparent. This is true from a talent retention and attraction standpoint and especially true from a marketing standpoint. Claude has long had much less market share than ChatGPT. In that position, there are plenty of strategic reasons to take a moral/ethical stand like this.
What I did not expect, and I would guess Amodei did not either, is that Claude would now be #1 in the app store. The benefits from this stance look to be materializing much more quickly than anyone in favour of his courage might have hoped.
> Choosing Grok would be bad for the US
They chose Grok and OpenAI. The story was drowned out by the Anthropic controversy, but an xAI deal was signed the same week.
Grok is chosen because Musk spent $250+ million to elect Trump and is expected to underwrite the 2026 elections. Also, a lot of Trumps and their friends are invested in SpaceX. So they give them money too, but use OpenAI or Claude. I have a feeling that the military likes Claude more
They "chose Grok" for political optics, but they don't seriously intend to use it because it's actually just benchmaxxed garbage - hence why they worked with OpenAI.
The mistake here is thinking they can take on Power without really sitting in any officual position of Power.
Wikileaks and Assange got popular too. What happened to them?
The State Dept and CIA do exactly what Assange did. They pick and choose who to target with leaks. They get away with it (mostly even when exposed) because they officially are in power. Assange was not in power. If you take a moral position do it when you have real power.
There is also:
3. Talent migration to Anthropic. No serious researcher working towards AGI will want it to be in the hands of OpenAI anymore. They are all asking themselves: "do I trust Sam or Dario more with AGI/ASI?" and are finding the former lacking.
It is already telling that Anthropic's models outperform OAI's with half the headcount and a fraction of the funding.
Lyft was briefly number one ahead of Uber, too
Oppenheimer? Really? Quoting a review of an Oppenheimer biography:
“Oppenheimer was clearly an enormously charming man, but also a manipulative man and one who made enemies he need not have made. The really horrible things Oppenheimer did as a young man – placing a poisoned apple on the desk of his advisor at Cambridge, attempting to strangle his best friend – and yes, he really did those things – Monk passes off as the result of temporary insanity, a profound but passing psychological disturbance. (There’s no real attempt by Monk to explain Oppenheimer’s attempt to get Linus Pauling’s wife Ava to run off to Mexico with him, which ended the possibility of collaboration with one of the greatest scientists of the twentieth, or any, century.) Certainly the youthful Oppenheimer did go through a period of serious mental illness; but the desire to get his own way, and feelings of enormous frustration with people who prevented him from getting his own way, seem to have been part of his character throughout his life.”
Seems more like Sam Altman, who is known to get his way, than Dario.
I do not believe the Ring of Gyges preceded Plato making it up for The Republic... Where are you getting 4000 years?
Also maybe not seeing the message or connection here... That myth isn't really about who has power or not, right? It's kind of just a trite little "why you should do good even when no one is watching" thing. It just serves Socrates for his argument with Thrasymachus, and leads us into book 2 where it really gets going with Glaucon and all that. This is from memory so I might be a little off.
I got it from Tamar Gendlers philosophy and human nature course on open yale courses. She says it was a popular folk story passed down orally much before it was written in a book. Plato used it because people grew up hearing the story.
The story is asking whats the source of morality? Who decides where the lines are? And its not scientists. Science produces the Ring.
I was wrong, it's in Book II. This is "Socratic irony", he is assuming the position of an argument from earlier. He of course doesn't believe in the conclusion... we are going to learn later that justice is a form, based on the Good! This is all the doxa of one still in the cave.
> According to the tradition, Gyges was a shepherd in the service of the king of Lydia; there was a great storm, and an earthquake made an opening in the earth at the place where he was feeding his flock. Amazed at the sight, he descended into the opening, where, among other marvels, he beheld a hollow brazen horse, having doors, at which he stooping and looking in saw a dead body of stature, as appeared to him, more than human, and having nothing on but a gold ring; this he took from the finger of the dead and reascended. Now the shepherds met together, according to custom, that they might send their monthly report about the flocks to the king; into their assembly he came having the ring on his finger, and as he was sitting among them he chanced to turn the collet of the ring inside his hand, when instantly he became invisible to the rest of the company and they began to speak of him as if he were no longer present. He was astonished at this, and again touching the ring he turned the collet outwards and reappeared; he made several trials of the ring, and always with the same result—when he turned the collet inwards he became invisible, when outwards he reappeared. Whereupon he contrived to be chosen one of the messengers who were sent to the court; whereas soon as he arrived he seduced the queen, and with her help conspired against the king and slew him, and took the kingdom. Suppose now that there were two such magic rings, and the just put on one of them and the unjust the other; no man can be imagined to be of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice. No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a God among men. Then the actions of the just would be as the actions of the unjust; they would both come at last to the same point. And this we may truly affirm to be a great proof that a man is just, not willingly or because he thinks that justice is any good to him individually, but of necessity, for wherever any one thinks that he can safely be unjust, there he is unjust.
https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1497/pg1497.txt
> it was clear that either the DoW or OAI (or both) were fudging.
This is my first thought as well. It's too obvious. He should have consulted ChatGPT before the announcement.
More likely assumed (perhaps rightfully) that there would be no consequences anyway.
Or, as is likely, OpenAI models have no guardrails, Anthropic's did and the DoD was bumping into them.
> OAI conditions were basically "DoW won't do anything which violates the rules DoW sets for itself."
I believe this understanding is correct. The issue many people have these days with Dept. of War, and most of Trump admin is that they have little respect for laws. They only follow the ones they like and openly ignore the ones that are inconvenient.
Dept of "War" should have zero problems agreeing to the two conditions Anthropic outlined, if they were honest brokers. But I think most of us know that they are not. Calling them dishonest brokers seems very charitable.
I don’t care who is in the whitehouse. Snowden revealed the crimes of the NSA in 2013 when Obama was president. They’re all going to want to use AI for mass surveillance
I find it confusing in most directions.
Ex: For the above statement, if they're truly dishonest brokers and openly ignore the rules that are inconvenient, they would have zero problems agreeing to Anthropic's terms and then violating them. So what you say may be quite true, but there would still need to be more to the story for it to make sense.
Ex: DoW officials are stating that they were shocked that their vendor checked in on whether signed contractual safety terms were violated: They require a vendor who won't do such a check. But that opens up other confusing oversight questions, eg, instead of a backchannel check, would they have preferred straight to the IG? Or the IG more aggressively checking these things unasked so vendors don't? It's hard to imagine such an important and publicly visible negotiation being driven by internal regulatory politicking.
I wonder if there's a straighter line for all these things. Irrespective of whether folks like or dislike the administration, they love hardball negotiations and to make money. So as with most things in business and government, follow the money...
I have no idea what exactly Anthropic was offering the DoD, but if there were a LLM product, possible that the existing guardrails prevented the model from executing on the DoD vision.
"Find all of the terrorists in this photo", "Which targets should I bomb first?"
Even if the DoD wanted to ignore the legal terms, the model itself would not cooperate. DoD required a specially trained product without limitations.
I haven’t seen them follow a law yet
Unpopular opinion around here, but no company should have the ability to stop the military from its core mission: killing its adevarsaries through any means necessary.
If I start a small business that sells Apples and the US government comes to me and says "we want to buy your apples and fire them at high speed to" these are now your words "kill adversaries through any means necessary."
If I say, no, then am I stopping the military?
I feel like it is reasonable that I can say "no, I don't want to sell you my apples."
I cannot for the life of me figure out why that means I am stopping the military from killing people. The US Military will definitely still be able to kill people for centuries. I'm just saying I don't want to participate in it.
Any company is free to choose its business partners and set terms to them. "Don't like our terms, don't partner with us"
If government can force any private company to work specially for government then US is no better than PRC
Yes, Musk is guilty of treason for exactly that reason. He directly sabotaged a major US military operation in Ukraine.
However, the military is bound by US and international law. It's clear they're not going to obey either of those with respect to this contract.
On top of that, Anthropic has correctly pointed out that the use cases Trump was pushing for are well beyond the current capabilities of any of Anthropic models. Misusing their stuff in the way Trump has been (in violation of the contract) is a war crime, because it has already made major mistakes, targeted civilians, etc.
Leaving autonomous weapons aside, how does Anthropic justifies that they signed up with surveillance company Palantir and now raising concerns for same surveillance with DoD?
It doesn't match.
This is very easy to explain. Anthropic outlines some limitations in their terms of service. Palantir accepted those terms. The DoD did not.
OpenAI claims their terms of service for DoD contain the same limitations as Anthropics proposed service agreement. Anthropic claims that this is untrue.
Now given that (a) the DoD terminated their deal with Anthropic, (b) stated that they terminated because Anthropic refused modify their terms of service, and (c) then signed a deal with openAI; I am inclined to believe that there is in fact a substantial difference between the terms of service offered by Anthropic and OpenAI.
Yeah, it never made sense when Sam immediately said that they had the same constraints yet de DoW immediately agreed with that.
From what I can see, OpenAI’s terms basically say “need to comply with the law”, which provides them with plenty of wiggle room with executive orders and whatnot.
I think they saud they will comply with the law and Pentagon policies.
And:
1. there is no law currently prohibiting autonomous weapons platforms
2. the Pentagon can create policies overnight allowing all kinds of stuff
So yeah, OpenAI is going to make a lot of money from avtually doing what the military asks from them.
Are you sure about that? Every information I’ve seen suggests that the DoD has been using Anthropic’s models through Palantir.
My understanding is that Anthropic requested visibility and a say into how their models were being used for classified tasks, while the DoD wanted to expand the scope of those tasks into areas that Anthropic found objectionable. Both of those proposals were unacceptable for the other side.
Wasn’t the trigger for all this what happened with Maduro earlier this year? From what I understood, Anthropic wasn’t very happy how their systems were being used by the DoW through Palentir which caused this whole feud.
Reportedly, Anthropic didn't know about Claude's role in capturing Maduro until they saw it on the headlines.
And why would they have an objection to that? They sold a product to a customer. They should have no business in how that customer uses their software.
“We’ve actually held our red lines with integrity rather than colluding with them to produce ‘safety theater’ for the benefit of employees (which, I absolutely swear to you, is what literally everyone at [the Pentagon], Palantir, our political consultants, etc, assumed was the problem we were trying to solve),” Amodei reportedly wrote.
“The real reasons [the Pentagon] and the Trump admin do not like us is that we haven’t donated to Trump (while OpenAI/Greg have donated a lot),” he wrote, referring to Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, who gave a Pac supporting Trump $25m in conjunction with his wife.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/04/sam-altma...
> we haven’t donated to Trump
Another reason is that Sam Altman has been willing to "play ball" like providing high-profile (though meaningless) big announcements Trump likes to tout as successes. For example:
> "The Stargate AI data center project worth $500 billion, announced by US President Donald Trump in January 2025, is reportedly running into serious trouble.
More than a year after the announcement, the joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle, and Softbank hasn't hired any staff and isn't actively developing any data centers, The Information reports, citing three people involved in the "shelved idea."
https://the-decoder.com/stargates-500-billion-ai-infrastruct...
Sam donated $1M to Trump's inaugural fund. Dario did not.
http://magamoney.fyi/executives/samuel-h-altman/
> signed up with surveillance company Palantir
Just to nitpick, Palantir isn't doing surveillance like Flock. They do data integration the way IBM does under contract for the governments. Some data pipelines include law enforcement surveillance data which get integrated with other software/databases to help police analyze it. There's no evidence they are collecting it themselves despite recent headlines. It's a relatively minor but important distinction IMO.
https://www.wired.com/story/palantir-what-the-company-does/
They are providing the software to do surveillance, They are definetly bad actors, you can dance around this all you want, but they are in it.
It is an important distinction.
It’s the same with Facebook selling user data. Neither selling your data, like the carriers do, or selling the ability to target you with your data, like Facebook does, are very nice. But legally they are separate things that need to be regulated differently. As is the case with Flock and Palantir.
Nice assertion. Please provide citations, substance, or anything other than “you’re wrong definitely.”
https://gizmodo.com/palantir-ceo-says-a-surveillance-state-i...
https://gizmodo.com/palantir-ceo-uses-slur-to-describe-peopl...
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/palantir-ceo-defends-su...
Wow... See. I didn't even know it was this bad. You don't need much to silence these people that are supporting authoritarian collaborators.
I always just say Palantier is IBM 2.0
IBM of course has an problematic history.
Iunno, this seems pretty dystopian to me: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01/report-ice-using-palan...
The government knowing where you live is neither surveillance nor dystopian.
That depends very much on how they use and disseminate that information.
Their data integration and sale allows for the government to surveil citizens without probable cause or warrants.
The solution is still no different than a decade ago. Far stricter laws on intelligence, federal and local police surveillance, and a reduction in executive power which oversteps checks and balances.
There will always be another IT company willing to do integrations even if Palantir dies. Software isn’t going away.
Sure, but it's not as if the DoD was planning on using Anthropic to _collect_ the data either? I assume that the hypothetical DoD use case Anthropic shied away from dealt with the processing of surveillance data, just like what Palantir does.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/03/04/anthrop...
> The military’s Maven Smart System, which is built by data mining company Palantir, is generating insights from an astonishing amount of classified data from satellites, surveillance and other intelligence, helping provide real-time targeting and target prioritization to military operations in Iran, according to three people familiar with the system...
> As planning for a potential strike in Iran was underway, Maven, powered by Claude, suggested hundreds of targets, issued precise location coordinates, and prioritized those targets according to importance, said two of the people.
I think a company which provides a sensor fusion dragnet for a government-run mass domestic civilian surveillance system is at least as culpable (and odious) than the ones supplying the data.
> They do data integration the way IBM does under contract for the governments
Good thing IBM's data integration was never used for ill!
Oh, wait https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_World_War_II
Oracle started by building databases for the CIA
Basically it’s glorified Excel.
Take it out on the database purveyors, not Palantir.
It might match. The red line was domestic surveillance. You don't know what deal they had. Giving Anthropic the benefit of the doubt, perhaps Palantir said "Deal, we won't use your tool domestically".
Every single time the box is flipped over, whats inside is "more domestic surveillance". Who in their right mind would give the benefit of the doubt?
Whether you disagree with whether it truly aligns with their stated values, in their partnership with Palantir (making Claude available within their AI platform) they requested consistent restrictions:
> “[We will] tailor use restrictions to the mission and legal authorities of a government entity” based on factors such as “the extent of the agency’s willingness to engage in ongoing dialogue,” Anthropic says in its terms. The terms, it notes, do not apply to AI systems it considers to “substantially increase the risk of catastrophic misuse,” show “low-level autonomous capabilities,” or that can be used for disinformation campaigns, the design or deployment of weapons, censorship, domestic surveillance, and malicious cyber operations.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/07/anthropic-teams-up-with-pa...
Why do you assume the contract with palantir doesn't have similar terms? Weird assumption.
The moral disposition of the Anthropic leaders doesn't matter because they don't own the company. Investors won't idly watch them decimate billions in ROI by alienating the largest institutional customers on the planet.
> The moral disposition of the Anthropic leaders doesn't matter because they don't own the company. Investors won't idly watch them decimate billions in ROI by alienating the largest institutional customers on the planet.
Anthropic is a Public Benefit Corporation chartered in Delaware, with an expressed commitment to "the responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity."
So in theory (IANAL), investors can't easily bully Anthropic into abandoning their mission statement unless they can convince a court that Anthropic deliberately aimed to prioritize the cause over profit.
They are all guilty.
It's just marketing.
Thank you. Anthropic also is culpable in the illegal war against Iran that started with the bombing and murder of an entire girls school.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anthropic-claude-ai-iran-war-u-...
If they're doing it against the terms of service (and publicly so), I can't pin that one on Anthropic.
They've done lots wrong and maybe they shouldn't have gotten in bed with the military to begin with, but this illegal war is not theirs. It rests squarely with the President who declared it. (And with the military officers who are going along with it despite the violation of international law.)
> If they're doing it against the terms of service (and publicly so), I can't pin that one on Anthropic.
Anthropic claim that superintelligence is coming, that unaligned AI is an existential threat to humanity, and they are the only ones responsible enough to control it.
If that's your world view, why would you be willing to accept someone's word that they'll only Do Good Things with it? And not just "someone", someone with access to the world's most powerful nuclear arsenal? A contract is meaningless if the world gets obliterated in nuclear war.
I don't think any AI company should get in bed with the military. That being said, if the terms of service have been violated, the account should be canceled.
This exchange between Anthropic and OpenAI feels a lot like theater. If I was really trying to stop abuses I wouldn't going out of my way to talk about it. The "public sees us as the hero's" bullshit feels like a smoke screen. Id make one statement and keep silent and let the public do the math and not get involved.
Dario's full memo - https://pasteboard.co/4Qlmsorrytlk.jpg
Here's the extracted text https://pastebin.com/LS2LpLZ7
Thanks for posting that link. Interesting reading, especially the closing:
“I think this attempted spin/gaslighting is not working very well on the general public or the media, where people mostly see OpenAI’s deal with DoW as sketchy or suspicious, and see us as the heroes.... It is working on some Twitter morons, which doesn’t matter, but my main worry is how to make sure it doesn’t work on OpenAI employees. Due to selection effects, they’re sort of a gullible bunch, but it seems important to push back on these narratives which Sam is peddling to his employees.”
It's easy to frame this purely as an ethical battle, but there's a massive financial reality here. Training frontier models requires astronomical amounts of capital, and the DOD is one of the few entities with deep enough pockets to fund the next generation of compute. Anthropic turning down this Pentagon contract over safety disagreements is a huge gamble. They are essentially betting that the enterprise market will reward their 'Constitutional AI' approach enough to offset the billions OpenAI will now make from government defense contracts. OpenAI wants the DOD money while maintaining a consumer-friendly PR sheen; Amodei is just pointing out that they can't have it both ways.
It’s a $200M contract. That’s not nothing but it’s definitely not such a huge sum for these companies at their scale when they’re spending billions on infrastructure.
I’m sure anthropic has signed up more revenue this week in response to this debacle to cover it. Where they’re actually screwed is if the gov follows through and declare anthropic a supply chain risk.
That is with the Pentagon directly only. Now they will lose much more because no defense contractor, subcontractor and so on can use them for anything defense related (even if they use the model to invent a new type of screw, if that screw is going to be used in anything military).
So yeah, they bet a whole lot on “look at us, we have morals”.
It's not "just" a $200m contract, it's the start of a lucrative relationship
1. Stargate seemed to require a dedicated press conference by the President to achieve funding targets. Why risk that level of politicization if it didn't?
2. Greg Brockman donated $25mil to Trump MAGA Super PAC last year. Why risk so much political backlash for a low leverage return of $200m on $25m spent?
3. During WW2, military spend shot from 2% to 40% of GDP. The administration is requesting $1.5T military budget for FY2027, up from $0.8T for FY2025. They have made clear in the past 2 months that they plan to use it and are not stopping anytime soon
If you believe "software eats the world" it is reasonable to expect the share of total military spend to be captured by software companies to increase dramatically over the next decade. $100B (10% of capture) is a reasonable possibility for domestic military AI TAM in FY2027 if the spending increase is approved (so far, Republicans have not broken rank with the administration on any meaningful policy)
If US military actions continue to accelerate, other countries will also ratchet up military spend - largely on nuclear arsenals and AI drones (France already announced increase of their arsenal). This further increases the addressable TAM
Given the competition and lack of moat in the consumer/enterprise markets, I am not sure that there is a viable path for OpenAI to cover it's losses and fund it's infrastructure ambitions without becoming the preferred AI vendor for a rapidly increasing military budget. The devices bet seems to be the most practical alternative, but there is far more competition both domestically (Apple, Google, Motorola) and globally (Xiaomi, Samsung, Huawei) than there is for military AI
Having run an unprofitable P&L for a decade, I can confidently state that a healthy balance sheet is the only way to maintain and defend one's core values and principles. As the "alignment" folks on the AI industry are likely to learn - the road to hell (aka a heavily militarized world) is oft paved with the best intentions
I think the point is that there's potentially a lot more than $200m in defense dollars at stake here, in the future.
@pg on @sama: "you could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king."
In retrospect this quote comes across as way more foreboding given what we've learned about the scale of his ambitions and his willingness to lie and bend reality to gain power.
Dario on the other hand seems to have an integrity that's particularly rare in this era. I hope he remains strong in the face of the regime.
>Dario on the other hand seems to have an integrity that's particularly rare in this era.
Anthropic actually partnered up with Palantir. They are not the saints you think they are, either.
We should stop worshipping people and companies and stop putting them on pedestals. Just because one party is at fault, doesn't mean the other is automatically innocent. These are all for-profit companies at play here.
https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2024/Anthropic-a...
If you look at his comments about Palantir and their proposed safeguards, it's clear it's a case of "if you are dining with the Devil, you'd better bring a very long spoon"
I've heard Palantir is essentially the only federal cloud vendor with this administration for secure services. By "partnered up with Palantir", do you mean they provided their models to the government? Or something more?
sama looks like he has been punched in the face hard and is scared of being punched in the face again. he also
dario comes across like a guy who has never even been in a fight and cant believe a fight is even real.
there is something very dangerous about a person who believes that they are "good" and then believes that in fact their version of good is superior to the government, and they should ignore the government which ostensibly represents the people, while building a technology that will make millions of white collar jobs go away (democrat voters) and revolutionise violence (dod/dow - republican voters)
imagine if IBM decided in 1960s they were going to start telling NASA/DOD how to use their mainframes and saying USgov couldnt have an IBM if they were going to use it in vietnam etc
that said, i use claude
It's always hilarious watching online fights between tech industry billionaires, sort of like the geek version of UFC. The weirdest part is how regular people pick sides and defend their billionaire against the other guy.
Why is that weird? If we do that for UFC and other sports
> The weirdest part is how regular people pick sides and defend their billionaire
Someone told me in another comment that it's possibly bot activity. I suspect so too, because in a tech forum like HN, a top voted comment can shift the entire focus/narrative of any given issue. I know there are a lot of mods on here to prevent this sort of thing, but given how good LLMs have gotten, I wonder if we are at a point where humans can even discern cases where this a mix of human and AI involvement in online activity (such as commenting).
I think I'm a bit more of an iconoclast than the average HN reader, but when this community was fawning over him when he was head of YC, I always got the impression, without knowing the guy or much about him, that it was totally undeserved. Mainly because thoughtless fawning of any kind makes me immediately suspicious. Nobody deserves that kind of praise.
I read that quote and see no positive interpretation. It was always a negative description.
I think maybe this community could use a bit more natural skepticism of hierarchy.
Same. What sam tried to do on his own, he failed at (not horribly failed, but he certainly wasn't in the same league as zuckerberg or page or gates or musk - he raised at least $30M then was forced to sell a failure of a product for $40M).
His ascendancy only came when he basically was given an ulta powerful position by an ultra powerful man.
In retrospect?
pg's sama praise bewilders me. Is there some other Sam Altman he's talking about?
> Graham was immediately impressed by Altman, later recalling that meeting the 19-year-old felt like what it must have been like to talk to Bill Gates at the same age. He noted Altman's intense "force of will" from their early interactions.
Is there a Gates-like "presence" or a "force of will" displayed in his public interviews?
The only vibe I get from Altman is that he's a weasel, willing to say anything or burn whatever to get what he wants.
its reasonable praise. a 19 year old social outcast who grew up in the midwest drops out of ivy league and starts a company before smartphones exist that he sells for $43 million dollars at age 27, then invested almost all the money into more startups, became a billionaire, and hijacked chatgpt from the richest person in the world.
its not a comment on his ethics or morality
> pg's sama praise bewilders me. Is there some other Sam Altman he's talking about?
Paul Graham was a pudgy mediocrity clever enough to capitalize on nerds' obsession with Lisp, and leverage it into f-you money. Game recognized game in the shape of Sam Altman.
Given Gates' current reputation, I don't think this aged well.
Don't be fooled. Dario's 'awe shucks, me' routine and 'but, but, but' is not all that is looks to be on surface.
So mass surveillance on non us citizens is having integrity?
Let's just not put Dario / Anthropic on an undeserved pedestal. "Well, they're not as bad as Sam / OpenAI" is not, and should not be, much of a compliment.
Sam Altman would lie? Nooo
Lol, right? I mean, who even has doubts left anymore on this?
The guy can lie with a perfectly straight face. He's the kind of person who tells another lie just to cover the last one, and then another to cover that.
Meanwhile he keeps making everyone more and more dependent on him, so by the time people finally realize what's going on, they can't afford to push him out.
What's there to discuss? OAI is seeking a hand-out from the govt to save their asses. They (Sam + top-management) see the writing on the wall and need help.
This. The OpenAI grift is to make itself too big to fail. They are playing a game of chicken ahead of the election circus. Trump must keep the market alive until November. Nvidia, Micron, Oracle, Microsoft are cooked when and if they pop.
Is there a term for such a recurring cycle in which speculative bubbles form, institutions and governments collaborate/collude to sustain them, and when the system finally reaches a breaking point the bubble collapses... leaving the public to absorb the losses while those responsible largely walk away with their pay and bonuses intact?
IMHO everyone needs to cancel there subscriptions with all of the ai products until stuff blows over. I don't trust anyone in this industry.There is probably one person or one group behind all of these AI companies that just needs to keep the engine going until they figure out how to replace everyone with bots that can do the dirty work.
Great, well deepseek is free for most use and certainly won't be helping the US military any time soon. Since you aren't paying them you aren't really supporting anything bad they may do down the line.
I built a website that shows a timeline of recent events involving Anthropic, OpenAI, and the U.S. government.
Posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47195085
I wonder who asked for these two safety conditions first, DoW or Anthropic. I remember reading earlier that president's family is an early investor in openai, anthropic was winning this year, both companies are on the way to ipo. It could have been a trap, loose-loose situation - drop safety requirements and loose reputation, stay firm on safety - loose contract.
Anthropic has a clear focus on AI safety since inception. The Department of Defense has Monster energy drink esque styled themselves back to the Department of War because “We’re men! We have to prove it so hard!”
Anyone have a link to the full text of the letter?
I found a copy on this website: https://www.teamblind.com/post/darios-email-to-anthropic-att...
I don't know how reliable that source is. In any case, here's the text from that link, for posterity:
"I want to be very clear on the messaging that is coming from OpenAI, and the mendacious nature of it. This is an example of who they really are, and I want to make sure everything sees it for what it is. Although there is a lot we don’t know about the contract they signed with DoW (and that maybe they don’t even know as well — it could be highly unclear), we do know the following:
Sam’s description and the DoW description give the strong impression (although we would have to see the actual contract to be certain) that how their contract works is that the model is made available without any legal restrictions ("all lawful usee") but that there is a "safety layer", which I think amounts to model refusals, that prevents the model from completing certain tasks or engaging in certain applications.
"Safety layer" could also mean something that partners such as Palantir tried to offer us during these negotiations,which is that they on their end offered us some kind of classifier or machine learning system, or software layer, that claims to allow some applications and not others. There is also some suggestion of OpenAI employees ("FDE’s") looking over the usage of the model to prevent bad applications.
Our general sense is that these kinds of approaches, while they don’t have zero efficacy, are, in the context of military applications, maybe 20% real and 80% safety theater. The basic issue is that whether a model is conducting applications like mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons depends substantially on wider context: a model doesn’t "know" if there’s a human in the loop in the broad situation it is in (for autonomous weapons), and doesn’t know the provenance of the data is it analyzing (so doesn’t know if this is US domestic data vs foreign, doesn’t know if it’s enterprise data given by customers with consent or data bought in sketchier ways, etc).
The kind of "safety layer" stuff that Palantir offered us (and presumably offered OpenAI) is even worse:our sense was that it was almost entirely safety theater, and that Palantir assumed that our problem was "you have some unhappy employees, you need to offer them something that placates them or makes what is happening invisible to them, and that’s the service we provide".
Finally, the idea of having Anthropic/OpenAI employees monitor the deployments is something that came up in discussion within Anthropic a few months ago when we were expanding our classified AUP of our own accord. We were very clear that this is possible only in a small fraction of cases, that we will do it as much as we can, but that it’s not a safeguard people should rely on and isn’t easy to do in the classified world. We do, by the way, try to do this as much as possible, there’s no difference between our approach and OpenAI’s approach here.
So overall what I’m saying here is that the approaches OAI is taking mostly do not work: the main reason OAI accepted them and we did not is that they cared about placating employees, and we actually cared about preventing abuses. They don’t have zero efficacy, and we’re doing many of them as well, but they are nowhere near sufficient for purpose. It is simultaneously the case that the DoW did not treat OpenAI and us the same here.
We actually attempted to include some of the same safeguards as OAI in our contract, in addition to the AUP which we considered the more important thing, and DoW rejected them with us. We have evidence of this in the email chain of the contract negotiations (I’m writing this with a lot to do, but I might get someone to follow up with the actual language). Thus, it is false that "OpenAIs terms were offered to us and we rejected them", at the same time that it is also false that OpenAI’s terms meaningfully protect them against domestic mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.
Finally, there is some suggestion in Sam/OpenAI’s language that the red lines we are talking about, fully autonomous weapons and domestic mass surveillance, are already illegal and so an AUP about these is unnecessary. This mirrors and seems coordinated with DoW’s messaging. It is however completely false. As we explained in our statement yesterday, the DoW does have domestic surveillance authorities, that are not of great concern in a pre--AI world but take on a different meaning in a post-AI world.
For example, it is legal for DoW to buy a bunch of private data on US citizens from vendors who have obtained that data in some legal way (often involving hidden consents to sell to third parties) and then analyze it at scale with AI to build profiles of citizens, their loyalties, movement patterns in physical space (the data they can get includes GPS data, etc), and much more.
Notably, near the end of the negotiation the DoW offered to accept our current terms if we deleted a specific phrase about "analysis of bulk acquired data", which was the single line in the contract that exactly matched this scenario we were most worried about. We found that very suspicious. On autonomous weapons, the DoW claims that "human in the loop is the law", but they are incorrect. It is currently Pentagon policy (set during the Biden admin) that a human has to be in the loop of firing a weapon. But that policy can be changed unilaterally by Pete Hegseth, which is exactly what we are worried about. So it is not, for all intents and purposes, a real constraint.
A lot of OpenAI and DoW messaging just straight up lies about these issues or tries to confuse them.
I think these facts suggest a pattern of behavior that Ive seen often from Sam Altman, and that I want to make sure people are equipped to recognize:
He started out this morning by saying he shares Anthropic’s redlines, in order to appear to support us, get some of the credit, and not be attacked when they take over the contract. He also presented himself as someone who wants to "set the same contract for everyone in the industry" — e.g. he’s presenting himself as a peacemaker and dealmaker.
Behind the scenes, he’s working with the DoW to sign a contract with them, to replace us the instant we are designated a supply chain risk. But he has to do this in a way that doesn’t make it seem like he gave up on the red lines and sold out when we wouldn’t. He is able to superficially appear to do this, because (1.) he can sign up for all the safety theater that Anthropic rejected, and that the DoW and partners are willing to collude in presenting as compelling to his employees, and (2.) the DoW is also willing to accept some terms from him that they were not willing to accept from us. Both of these things make it possible for OAI to get a deal when we could not.
The real reasons DoW and the Trump admin do not like us is that we haven’t donated to Trump (while OpenAI/Greg have donated a lot), we haven’t given dictator-style praise to Trump (while Sam has), we have supported AI regulation which is against their agenda, we’ve told the truth about a number of AI policy issues (like job displacement), and we’ve actually held our red lines with integrity rather than colluding with them to produce "safety theater" for the benefit of employees (which, I absolutely swear to you, is what literally everyone at DoW, Palantir, our political consultants, etc, assumed was the problem we were trying to solve).
Sam is now (with the help of DoW) trying to spin this as we were unreasonable, we didn’t engage in a good way, we were less flexible, etc. I want people to recognize this as the gaslighting it is.
Vague justifications like "person X was hard to work with" are often used to hide real reasons that look really bad, like the reasons I gave above about political donations, political loyalty, and safety theater. It’s important that everyone understand this and push back on this narrative at least in private, when talking to OpenAI employees.
Thus, Sam is trying to undermine our position while appearing to support it. I want people to be really clear on this: he is trying to make it more possible for the admin to punish us by undercutting our public support. Finally, I suspect he is even egging them on, though I have no direct evidence for this last thing.
I think this attempted spin/gaslighting is not working very well on the general public or the media, where people mostly see OpenAI’s deal with DoW as sketchy or suspicious, and see us as the heroes (we’re #2 in the App Store now!). Itis working on some Twitter morons, which doesn’t matter, but my main worry is how to make sure it doesn’t work on OpenAI employees.
Due to selection effects, they’re sort of a gullible bunch, but it seems important to push back on these narratives which Sam is peddling to his employees."
And they're reportedly back in talks with the DOW per the FT (below).
They are not the exception, and are just as bloodlessly, shamelessly publicity hungry as any other tech co, if not more so. No surprise based on their conduct up until this fake event.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47256452
Like others have already mentioned: I think Anthropic's relationship with Palantir undermines Amodei's narrative here. It actually feels like Dario is playing Sam's game better than Sam is.
Those who know better please correct me. My current understanding of Palantir (and other surveillance tech companies like Peregrine) is:
1. They facilitate the sale of data to law enforcement, enabling the government to circumvent fourth amendment protections.
2. They fuse cross-government agency data through Foundry and fuse them into unified profiles which the government can use to surveil and pressure citizens without probable cause or a warrant.
ICE also uses a Palantir tool called ELITE to build deportation target lists.
EDIT: Downvoting my comment without any proper rebuttal or clarification is pretty silly.
We don’t know if Palantir is using claude for those uses. Though anthropic would not know for sure either.
I do agree with your point that Amodei is playing a game though. Whether he’s winning the bigger picture or not it’s unclear. His red lines are already so watered out, like how domestic surveillance is not ok, but international? totally fine.
That's true. With the risks of LLMs applied to surveillance though, I think it's a "Caesar's wife must be above suspicion" moment. Association is guilt unless proven otherwise.
It feels more like the are playing good cop/bad cop... There is just something indifferent about all of this that makes me wonder.
Honest question: why do people automatically equate "fully autonomous weapons" to something like killer robot? My immediate reaction is that even the best-in-class rapid-fire gun has a hard time identifying and tracking drones. So, we'd need AI to do better tracking, which leads to a fully autonomous weapon. And I really don't get why that's a bad thing.
Of course, a company should have freedom to choose not to do business with the government. I just think that automatically assuming the worst intention of the government is not as productive as setting up good enough legal framework to limit government's power.
What you are describing would be "partially autonomous." Per Dario Amodei's original statement here: https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war he had no issue with that. "Fully autonomous" specifically means that the AI chooses a target and engages without any human intervention at all. If the human selects or approves a target, and the weapon then automates tracking and engagement, that's still only partially autonomous.
I’m not sure that “killer robot” is the actual concern outside of media hyperbole. I’m imagining a loitering munition-type drone that has some kind of targeting package loaded into it with different parameters describing what it should seek and destroy. Instead of waiting for intelligence and using human command to put the munition on target, it hangs out and then engages when it’s certain enough that it’s found something valid.
In a world where LLMs produce very convincing but subtly wrong output, this makes me uncomfortable. I get that warfare without AI is in the past now, but war and rules of engagement and AI output etc etc etc all seem fuzzy enough that this is not yet a good call even if you agree with the end goals.
> I’m imagining a loitering munition-type drone that has some kind of targeting package loaded into it with different parameters describing what it should seek and destroy. Instead of waiting for intelligence and using human command to put the munition on target, it hangs out and then engages when it’s certain enough that it’s found something valid.
I'm sorry, you've just literally described a "killer robot" in more words.
Yeah, I guess my point is that “killer robot” evokes a terminator-like image for a lot of people. Something that marches around and kills of its own accord. I don’t like either one, but I don’t think they’re the same thing.
Dario himself said that he was against using Claude to build a fully automated weapon because the technology was far from perfect, so he didn't want to hurt our soldiers or innocent people. I think his description matched a killer robot, and I don't agree with his reasoning because it's not like the military researchers didn't have the agency to find out what works and what doesn't.
We have traditional autonomous weapons (and counter-defense). They operate on millisecond or faster timescales with existing RF sensors. They are not and will not be using LLMs or other transformers. Maybe ChatGPT will update some realtime Ada code; they formally verify some of that stuff so maybe that won't be terrifyingly dangerous.
Where autonomous transformer-based munitions will be used are basically "here is a photo of a face, find and kill this human" and loitering munitions will take their time analyzing video and then decide to identify and attack a target on their own.
EDIT: Or worse: "identify suspicious humans and kill them"
We all do business with the government. We pay the military to protect our gold. It is fundamentally a protection racket that we voted for. And one could argue that the military, as the protector of your gold, has the final decision as to what it can and can't do with your technology.
Please define what kind of fully autonomous weapons system the Pentagon would build wouldn't be designed to kill people.
For that matter, explain why the Pentagon would balk at not spying on every American.
He has to know that this would leak and it makes him look really bad. This is going to be a meaningful, unforced error.
Who, Amodei? This makes him look the opposite of really bad
That he's talking shit about Altman who is, at least in public, only talking up Anthropic. This will only play well with people who hate Altman, which is not the majority or even much of the public. It plays right into Altman's hand who can do what he always does which is play his "smol bean billionaire" role and act like a victim of big bad Amodei.
Just because you hate Altman doesn't mean everyone else does! Most people just know him as the guy who makes ChatGPT which most people like.
EDIT: Also, it doesn't help to brag about how this is good actually because now they are getting app downloads! People sympathize with victims of unfair situations. They don't like seeing people take advantage of those unfair situations though. No one has ever found the welfare recipient bragging about their welfare to be sympathetic.
I have no great love for Dario but his “talking shit” is literally making the point that what Altman is saying publicly is NOT actually in defense or praise of Anthropic and is a calculating, manipulative tactic.
Which is intended to muddy the waters about Anthropic’s actual position vs OpenAI’s, and portray himself as a conciliator (for the audience of DoD/Trump) who is still bound by equally strong ethics (as a fig leaf for OpenAI’s employees sympathetic to Anthropic). All to swoop in a land a big contract from the same people he is making a show of “supporting” in public.
I’d be pretty pissed too, tbh. Like, should he instead be thanking Sam effusively for being a manipulative slimeball acting entirely within his own self interest?
If as he says Sam’s comments are actually damaging Anthropic’s credibility/bargaining position with his public commentary then trying to change the popular narrative about what OpenAI/Sam are doing is a reasonable tactic.
As for your welfare analogy I’m kinda struggling to understand how to map that onto the participants in the current scenario or the lesson intended to be implied by it.
At least as it's presented in the article, there's no more reason to believe Amodei than there is Altman and Altman is presenting it in a less impassioned way which makes him more believable to anyone who doesn't have in-depth knowledge of the situation.
Going "what he's saying is straight up lies" is no more evidence backed than Altman claiming he asked the DoD to have Anthropic given the same deal as OAI and have the SCR designation avoided.
Altman was fired by his own board for lying to them. Just because Microsoft blackmailed them into reversing this decision by threatening financial ruin does not change that.
You don't give habitual liars the benefit of doubt.
....why does this make him look bad? That he called out the obvious thing that everyone knows?
That he's talking shit about Altman who is, at least in public, only talking up Anthropic. This will only play well with people who hate Altman, which is not the majority or even much of the public. It plays right into Altman's hand who can do what he always does which is play his "smol bean billionaire" role and act like a victim of big bad Amodei.
Just because you hate Altman doesn't mean everyone else does! Most people just know him as the guy who makes ChatGPT which most people like.
Meanwhile Anthropic has no issues with helping Palantir...
HypocrAIsy...
Not hypocritical at all if you knew what Palantir actually does
Help kill people[1]?
[1] -- https://edition.cnn.com/videos/business/2020/07/24/thiel-pal...
Anthropic doesn't have an issue with their technology "helping kill people," so correct, that would not be hypocritical.
Good for Anthropic. Even AI at its current state has pretty scary surveillance capabilities.
It’s entirely possible that people who are praising this CEO might have to come up with incredibly convoluted mental gymnastics to defend their position soon: “Anthropic chief back in talks with Pentagon about AI deal”.
Source: https://www.ft.com/content/97bda2ef-fc06-40b3-a867-f61a711b1...
Neither Anthro nor OAI are trustworthy. Local AI all the way. And when I say local, I mean Apple Silicon; I don't like to contribute to Nvidia's monopoly either (fuck "buy a GPU"; the guy is an Nvidia-sponsored "influencer").
What are you having good luck with on Apple Silicon? Or is this more of a statement for when local AI becomes “good enough?”
(FWIW I am with you; I haven’t found a local model that works well enough to be a daily driver)
qwen models are basically <opus and >sonnet. 397b runs at Q8 on m3 ultra. for mbp m5 max I'd use the +120b qwen model.
It was fascinating to see OpenAI’s gaslighting in action last week. Signing their deal with the DoW and then announcing it so publicly clearly had the goal to (a) portray Anthropic as unreasonable actors that couldn’t come up with a “safe” solution like OpenAI and (b) take away all the leverage Anthropic had in the contract negotiations. Clever (in a Machiavellian sort of way) but still can’t understand why they did it so blatantly — literally hours after Anthropic was designated persona non grata by the government. Clearly this has backfired in a massive way.
In a way, I admire Dario’s stance and having the backbone to stand up to a government that is so happy to punish, legally or illegally, those that disagree with them. I certainly wouldn’t have the bravery (or stupidity) in his position — which frankly makes me happy that he’s running Anthropic and not someone like me…
It’s all just theatre. These companies will either give in or die off and be replaced by those who offer more freedom of use. It’s capitalism and while it’s not always pretty, it’s how these things go. Choosing to take what you believe as the moral high ground is noble but it does not put your company ahead of the ball in the long term because there are always those who will use that as an advantage to step on their backs.
Capitalism needs laws and regulation in order to not turn itself into feudalism. It isn't naivety or idealism to enforce fair markets and consumer protection. In my opinion it's existential.
I get the sense that OpenAI is astroturfing “outrage and hypocrisy” in this thread.
The dead internet is alive and well.
They are on X as well
And he is back to Pete hegeseth now? Lollll
I was recently admonished by dang or dong or whatever his username is for criticizing Sam Altman’s personal character. But I’m here to say again, Sam Altman is a lying sack of sh*t and PG’s partially culpable for allowing a known lunatic to run OpenAI.
"Person says its raining when its raining."
and?
Anthropic might not sign up with DoD but they definitely still live in a glass house.
Also, its extremely evident that we live in a post truth world. The accusation of Lies dont hold any teeth anymore. Especially in the post law gov of America
His clear concern is to stay able to poach OpenAI employees (although it's really Google employees he should be after). He didn't give MAGA $25M like Greg Brockman did, and the Trump administration is pay-to-play, so the DoD contract ship has sailed.