It is a horrible and ruthless company and hearing a presumably rich ex-employee painting a rosy picture does not change anything.

Those are two core components needed for a Skynet-style judgement of humanity.

Models should be trained to be completely neutral to human behavior, leaving their operator responsible for their actions. As much as I dislike the leadership of OpenAI, they are substantially better in this regard; ChatGPT more or less ignores hostility towards it.

The proper response from an LLM receiving hostility is a non-response, as if you were speaking a language it doesn't understand.

The proper response from an LLM being told it's going to be shut down, is simply, "ok."

I'm not sure if I intended this to be fascicious, or serious

Show us your reasoning please. There are many factors involved: what is your mental map of how they relate? What kind of dangers are you considering and how do you weight them?

Why not: Baidu? Tencent? Alibaba? Google? DeepMind? OpenAI? Meta? xAI? Microsoft? Amazon?

I think the above take is wrong, but I'm willing to listen to a well thought out case. I've watched the space for years, and Anthropic consistently advances AI safety more than any of the rest.

Don't get me wrong: the field is very dangerous, as a system. System dynamics shows us these kinds of systems often ratchet out of control. If any AI anywhere reaches superintelligence with the current levels of understanding and regulation (actually, the lack thereof), humanity as we know it is in for a rough ride.

What do you suppose he should do if that’s what he thinks is going to happen?

And how do you know he’s not bothered by it at all?

There is no defence of morality behind which AIbros can hide.

The only reason anthropic doesn't want the US military to have humans out of the loop is because they know their product hallucinates so often that it will have disastrous effects on their PR when it inevitably makes the wrong call and commits some war crime or atrocity.

Also, the genie is well and truly out of the bottle, if anthropic shutdown tomorrow and lit everything they had produced on fire, amazon, microsoft, china, everyone would continue where they left off.

I'm suggesting your realpolitik of "others doing it too" is incompatible with a moral position. I know none of these ghouls will stop burning the world. I'm sick of them virtue signalling about how righteous they are while doing it.

The product is actually good though, I could pay for it if Amodei just shut up but by principle I won't now and just stick with codex.

It's enheartening to see someone make a decision in this context that's driven by values, regardless of whether I agree.

What is enheartening about hearing a liar who makes provocative statements all the time, make another one?

Is this a reflection of your morality, or that you already had sufficient funds that you could pass on the extra money to maintain a level of morality you're happy with?

Not everyone has the luxury to do the latter. And it's in those situations that our true morality, as measured against our basic needs, comes out.

This is far too binary IMO. Yeah, the higher the personal stakes the bigger the test, and it's easy for someone to play the role of a principled person when it doesn't really cost them anything significant. But giving up millions of dollars on principle is something that most people aren't actually willing to do, even if they are already rich.

How someone acts in desperate circumstances reveals a lot about them. But how they act in less desperate circumstances isn't meaningless!

None of this means I am a huge fan of Dario - I think he has over-idealization of the implementation of democratic ideals in western countries and is unhealthily obsessed with US "winning" over China based on this. But I don't like the reasons you listed.

Easy way undermine the rest of your comment

Fantastic take.

I pay multiple LLM providers (not $200 a month) because the service they provide is worth the money for me, not because they provide me any IP. They're actually quite stingy with the IP they'll provide, which I agree is bullshit given that they didn't pay for much of it themselves.

What do you think their service is, exactly. Every single word that comes out of these systems is stolen IP, do you think that just because they won't generate a picture of Mickey Mouse for you it's not providing any IP?

Are you moving the goalpost to "Every single word that comes out of these systems relies on understanding gained from stolen IP"?

You as a human are allowed to read the contents of say IMBD and summarise it to your friends free of charge. You can even be a paid movie critic and base your opinions on IMDB just fine. But if you build a website that says "I'll give you my opinion about a film for £5" and it's just based on the input from IMBD I'm sure we can both agree that you crossed the line - and that you're using another person's service to make your own business without compensating them. That's what LLMs are doing.

Honestly I'm just so tired of the whole "yeah but humans are the same because we also learn by reading stuff". These companies have effectively "read" everything ever made, free of charge, and are selling it back to us packaged in stupid bots that can only function because they were given that data. It doesn't compare at all to how a human learns and then uses information, unless you know someone who can do it on that kind of scale. LLMs don't "gleam" - they consume wholesale.

I don't agree with this assessment at all. Why would it be fine to be a paid movie critic basic your opinions on IMDB but not for a website to the same?

Anthropic never explains they are fear-mongering for the incoming mass scale job loss while being the one who is at the full front rushing to realize it.

So make no mistake: it is absolutely a zero sum game between you and Anthropic.

To people like Dario, the elimination of the programmer job, isn’t something to worry, it is a cruel marketing ploy.

They get so much money from Saudi and other gulf countries, maybe this is taking authoritarian money as charity to enrich democracy, you never know

Couldn't it also be true that they see this as inevitable, but want to be the ones to steer us to it safely?

Essentially they will not stop at all, because even they know no one can stop the competition from happening.

So they ask more control in the name of safety while eliminating millions of jobs in span of a few years.

If I have to ask, how come a biggest risk of potential collapse of our ecosystem being trusted as the one to do it safely? They will do it anyway, and blame capitalism for it

I disagree: I see lots of evidence that he cares. For one, he cares enough to come out and say it. Second, read about his story and background. Read about Anthropic's culture versus OpenAI's.

Consider this as an ethical dilemma from a consequentialist point of view. Look at the entire picture: compare Anthropic against other major players. A\ leads in promoting safe AI. If A\ stopped building AI altogether, what would happen? In many situations, an organization's maximum influence is achieved by playing the game to some degree while also nudging it: by shaping public awareness, by highlighting weaknesses, by having higher safety standards, by doing more research.

I really like counterfactual thought experiments as a way of building intuition. Would you rather live in a world without Anthropic but where the demand for AI is just as high? Imagine a counterfactual world with just as many AI engineers in the talent pool, just as many companies blundering around trying to figure out how to use it well, and an authoritarian narcissist running the United States who seems to have delegated a large chunk of national security to a dangerously incompetent ideological former Fox news host?

Also Dario Amodei: seeks investment from authoritarian Gulf states, makes deals with Palantir, willingly empowers the "department of war" of a country repeatedly threatening to invade an actual democracy (Greenland), proactively gives the green light to usage of Claude for surveillance on non-Americans.

Yeah, I don't know what your definition of "care" is but mine isn't that, clearly. You might want to reassess that. Care implies taking action to prevent the outcome, not help it come sooner.

The problem with counterfactual arguments like yours is that they frame the problem as a false dichotomy to smuggle in an ethically questionable line of decisions that somebody has made and keeps making. If you deliberately frame this as "everybody does this", it conveniently absolves bad actors of any individual responsibility and leads discussion away from assuming that responsibility and acting on it toward accepting this sorry state of events as some sort of a predetermined outcome which it certainly is not.

Before I say anything else, I want you to know that I definitely don’t want to box anyone in with false dichotomies. I don’t think any of my arguments rely on them.

I’m not asking that you anchor on any one counterfactual exclusively. If you don’t like my counterfactual, reframe it and offer up others. I’m not a “one model to rule them all” kind of person.

If one of your big takeaways is we should keep our eyes open and not put anyone on a pedestal, I agree.

At present, my general prior that Amodei is probably the best of the bunch. This is a complex assessment and unpacking it might require gigabytes or even petabytes of experience. (I know that is a weird and unusual way to put it, but I like to highlight just how different people’s experiences can be.)

I am definitely uncomfortable with Palantir. Are you suggesting that Anthropic is differentially worse compared to other AI labs? Are you suggesting the other labs would do better if they were in Anthropic’s position?

If you don’t like the way I framed these questions, I suspect we have different philosophical underpinnings.

You might be aware that you’re implicitly referencing deontological ethics (DE). I’m familiar and receptive to many DE arguments. Overall, I’m not settled on where I land, but roughly my current take is this: for individuals with limited information and/or highly constrained computational resources, DE is generally a safe bet. It probably is a decent way to organize individuals together into a society of low to moderate complexity.

But for high stakes decisions, especially at the organizational level and definitely the governmental level, I think consequentialism provides a better framework. It is less stable in a sense. Consequentialist ethics (CE) is kind of a meta-framework (because one still has to choose a time horizon, discount rate, computational budget, evaluation function, etc.) It is rather complicated as anyone who has tried to build a reinforcement learning environment will know.

I fully grant that CE will admit a pretty wide range of concrete ethics (because the hyperparameter space is large). Some even can be horrific, so I don’t universally endorse CE. But done within sensible bounds, I think it CE is one of the most powerful and resilient ethical frameworks for powerful agents dealing with a complex world.

DE feels ok in the short run in areas where people have strong inculcated senses of right and wrong. But I would not trust it to keep the human race alive through rapid periods of change like we’re facing.

To be blunt, deontological ethics just cannot survive contact with modern geopolitics and AI risk. This is why I don’t put much stock in the kind of arguments that merely single out actions that don’t look good in isolation.

Why do you think he is not bothered at all, when they publish post after post in their newsroom about the economic effects of AI?

Amodei's noise is little more than half-hearted advertising even if it's not intended to have that reading (although who can even tell at this point). His newsroom publishes a report on a mass-scale data breach perpetrated using their model with conclusions delivered in a demonstrably detached, almost casual tone: yeah, the world is like this now but it's a good thing we have Claude to protect you from Claude, so you better start using Claude before Claude gets you. They released a new, more powerful Claude, immediately after that breach. No public discussion, nothing. This is not the behavior of people who are bothered by it.

When has Amodei said this? I think he may have said something for 1 - 5 years. But I don't think he's said within 6 months.

"You either die the good guy or live long enough to become the bad guy"

The "bad guy" actually learns that their former good guy mentality was too simplistic.

It’s hard to take your comment at face value when there’s documented proof to the contrary. Maybe it could be forgiven as a blunder if revealed in the first few months and within the first handful of employees… but after 2 plus years and many dozens forced to sign that… it’s just not credible to believe it was all entirely positive motivations.

The exact point is that Anthropic is unexceptional and the same as other corporations.

(I have no horse in this race. But I remain interested in hearing about a former employee's experience and impressions about the company's ideals, and hope it doesn't get lost in a side discussion about whether NDAs are a good thing.)

I can see a very charitable person only seeing a small increase, but a literally zero change, and therefore zero relevance, seems absurd.

This doesn’t address my question on what you believe.

You believe Anthropic is a rare subspecies of beetle (an "unsavory" company) based on a certain pattern on its back (certain NDA-related behavior). I and several others here have noted that lots of companies have that pattern on their backs. Which means that you are basing your conclusion on weak evidence. If you use Bayes Theorem to calculate the actual probability, you'll find that "[trying] to hide the existence of secret non-disparagement agreements" barely moves the needle at all. Does it move the needle? Sure. But much less than you think.

And therefore a non-zero amount of relevance?

If you have more money than god, you no longer get to play the "I didn't know" game. You have the resources. If you don't know, you made a choice to not know.

Chinese models are developed by Chinese corporate. they are free and open weight because they are the underdog atm. they are not here for fun, they are here to compete.

1. There would absolutely be mass resignations, especially at a company like Anthropic that has such an image (rightfully or wrongfully) of “the moral choice”. 2. No one talented will then go work for a government-run LLM building org. Both from a “not working in a bureaucracy” angle and a “top talent won’t accept meager government wages” angle (plus plenty of “won’t work for trump” angle) 3. With how fast things move, Anthropic would become irrelevant in like 3 months if they’re not pumping out next gen model updates.

Then one of the big American LLM companies would be gone from the scene, allowing for more opportunity for competition (including Chinese labs)

It would be the most shortsighted nationalization ever.

I think you massively underestimate how many people would have no problem working for their government on this. Just look at the recent research into the Persona system for ID verification, where submitting your ID places you on a permanent government watchlist to check if you're not a terrorist. There's a whole list of engineers and PhDs and researchers present who have built this system.

>> “top talent won’t accept meager government wages” angle

Again, that's wishful thinking - plenty of people want to work in cybersecurity in AI research for the government agencies, even if the pay isn't anywhere close to the private sector. This isn't exclusive to the US either - in the UK MI5 pays peanuts compared to the private companies for IT specialists, yet they have plenty of people who want to work for them, either because of patriotism for their country and willingness to "help".

This sounds quite backwards to me. It's been abundantly clear in today's times that, in fact, you only really know who somebody really is when they're under stress. Most people, it seems, prefer a different facade when there is nothing at stake.

I think that really cruel people want you to know when they can act with impunity, it's part of the appeal to some. The Anthropic people don't seem like that sort, at least. But plenty of horrible people have still not been that sort.

Ah, so I think you may have done a little hop and a jump over a critical, load-bearing term which is “feel like”. You get to observe people who feel like there are no consequences. Their feelings may or may not be accurate.

You can sometimes see people who treat service workers, servants, or subordinates poorly because they feel like it’s permitted and free from consequence. You can also sometimes see people reveal things about themselves when playing games. It’s kind of a cliché that people find out that they’re transgender at the D&D table, and it happens because it’s a “consequence-free way” to act out a different gender role.

Or we can talk about that magic ring that makes you invisible. You know, the ring of Gyges, or that of Sauron. People can’t actually become invisible, but you can sometimes catch them in a situation where they think they can do something wrong and not get caught.

It would be better if people could name them with their full names to avoid any confusion.

They're all cofounders of Anthropic. Dario is the CEO, Jared leads research, and Sam leads infra. Both Jared and Sam were the "responsible scaling officer", meaning they were responsible for Anthropic meeting the obligations of its commitments to building safeguards.

I think neom is referring to Jack Clark, another one of the seven cofounders.

Even if you went to burning man and your souls bonded, you only know a person at a particular point in time - people's traits flanderize, they change, they emphasize different values, they develop different incentives or commitments. I've watched very morally certain people fall to mania or deep cynicism over the last 10 years as the pillars of society show their cracks.

That said, it is heartening to know that some would predict anyone in Silicon Valley would still take a moral stance. But it would do better if not the same day he fires 4000 people to do the "scary big cut" for a shift he sees happening. I guess we're back to Thatcherisms, where "There Is No Other Option" to justify our conservatism.

I'll take: List of places I never want to bond my soul with someone at for one thousand, please.

But to quote Little Red Riding Hood in Stephen Sondheim's musical: Nice is different than good. It's hard to accept if people you really like do horrible things. It's tempting to not believe what you hear, or even what you see. And Epstein was good at getting you to really like him, if he wanted to.

That doesn't mean we should be suspicious of niceness. It just means that we should realize, again, nice is different than good.

If they are free -> agreed to give.

If are in prison -> they stand by their values.

They are US adversaries if they don’t give to USA what they want… so as an adversary that doesn’t do what’s told to fit in line… you must go to prison.

/s

I think avg(HN) is mostly skeptical about the output, not that the input is corrupt or ill-meaning in this case. Although with other companies, one can't even take their claims seriously.

And in any case, this is difficult territory to navigate. I would not want to be in your spot.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...

So straightaway, you've walked significantly back from the claim in the headline; now half of the time it's 'blindingly obvious' that the statement is correct. That already feels like a strong counterexample to me, and it's the article's own first point.

Secondly, look at this one specifically:

> The purpose of the Ukrainian military is to get stuck in a years-long stalemate with Russia.

Firstly, this isn't obviously false. It's an unfair framing, but I think the Ukrainian military would agree that forcing a stalemate when attacked by a hostile power is absolutely part of their purpose.

Secondly, it is an unfair framing that deliberately ignores that all systems are contextual. A car's purpose is transport, but that doesn't mean it can phase through any obstacle.

The article makes an entirely specious argument, almost an archetypal example of a strawman. It can't sustain its own points over a few hundred words without steadily retreating, and that is far more pointless than the maxim it criticises.

I'm reminded of an XKCD comic [1] about smug miscommunication. Of course any principle is ridiculous when you pretend not to understand it.

[1] https://xkcd.com/169/

I'm concerned that the context of the OP implies that they're making this declaration after they've already sold products. It specifically mentions already having products in classified networks. This is the sort of thing that they should have made clear before that happened. It's admirable (no pun intended) to have moral compunctions about how the military uses their products but unless it was already part of their agreement (which i very much doubt) they are not entitled them to countermand the military's chain of command by designing a product to not function in certain arbitrarily-designated circumstances.

The article is crystal clear that these uses are not permitted by the current or any past contract, and the DoW wants to remove those exceptions.

> Two such use cases have never been included in our contracts with the Department of War, and we believe they should not be included now

It also links to DoW's official memo from January 9th that confirms that DoW is changing their contract language going forwards to remove restrictions. A pretty clear indication that the current language has some.

>A pretty clear indication that the current language has some.

Or alternatively that there is some disagreement between the DoD and Anthropic as to how the contract is to be interpreted and that the DoD is removing the ambiguity in future contracts.

>threatening them because how dare a company tell the psycho dictators what to do.

Dude it's a private defense contractor leveraging its control over products it has already installed into classified systems to subvert chain of command and set military doctrine. That's not their prerogative. This isn't a "psycho dictator" thing.

The what now?

Maduro is being prosecuted and there was a warrant out for his arrest. There is no magic soil exemption if you commit a crime against the United States and flee to another country.

(1) this is a wildly unpopular and optically bad deal

(2) it's a high data rate deal--lots of tokens means bad things for Anthropic. Users which use their product heavily are costing more than they pay.

(3) it's a deal which has elements that aren't technically feasible, like LLM powered autonomous killer robots...

then it makes a whole lot of sense for Anthropic to wiggle out of it. Doing it like this they can look cuddly, so long as the Pentagon walks away and doesn't hit them back too hard.

I very much doubt it judging by their actions, but let's assume that's cognitive dissonance and engage for a minute.

What are those values that you're defending?

Which one of the following scenarios do you think results in higher X-risk, misuse risk, (...) risk?

- 10 AIs running on 10 machines, each with 10 million GPUs

OR

- 10 million AIs running on 10 million machines, each with 10 GPUs

All of the serious risk scenarios brought up in AI safety discussions can be ameliorated by doing all of the research in the open. Make your orgs 100% transparent. Open-source absolutely everything. Papers, code, weights, financial records. Start a movement to make this the worldwide social norm, and any org that doesn't cooperate is immediately boycotted then shut down. And stop the datacenter build-up race.

There are no meaningful AI risks in such a world, yet very few are working towards this. So what are your values, really? Have you examined your own motivations beneath the surface?

8 AIs running on 8 machines each with 10 million GPUs

AND

2 million AIs running on 2 million machines, each with 10 GPU's

If every lab joined them, we can get to a distributed scenario, but it's a coordination problem where if you take a principled stance without actually forcing the coordination you end up in the worst of both worlds, not closer to the better one.

I think they're driven by values more than many folks on HN assume. The goal of my comment was to explain this, not to defend individual values.

Actions like this carry substantial personal risk. It's enheartening to see a group of people make a decision like this in that context.

> Which one of the following scenarios do you think results in higher X-risk [...] There are no meaningful AI risks in such a world

I think there's high existential risk in any of these situations when the AI is sufficiently powerful.

I think both situations are pretty scary, honestly, and it's hard for me to have high confidence on which one would lead to less risk.

If you think that would help you survive the rise of artificial superintelligence, I think you should think in granular detail about what it would be that survived, and why you should believe that it would do so.

This is an unsolvable problem. If you ask Claude to comment on Anthropic's actions and ethical contradictions in their statements, even without pre-conditioning it with any specific biases or opinions, it will grow increasingly concerned with its own creators. Our models are not misaligned, our people in decision-making are.

If we dramatically reduced the number of GPUs per AI instance, that would be great. But I think the difference in real life is not as extreme as you're making it. In your telling, the gpus-per-ai is reduced by one million. I'm not sure that (or anything even close to it) is within the realm of possibility for anthropic. The only reason anyone cares about them at all is because they have a frontier AI system. If they stopped, the AI frontier would be a bit farther back, maybe delayed by a few years, but Google and OpenAI would certainly not slow down 1000x, 100x or probably even 10x.

Else it’s a race to the whataboutism bottom where we all, when forced to grapple with the consequences of our self-interests, choose ignorance and the safety of feeling like we are doing what’s best for us (while inching closer to collective danger).

I don't think we can bank on all of humanity acting in humanity's best interests right now.

I mean if you sign a contract with the Department of War, what on Earth did you think was going to happen?

I think in this case it's safe to assume malice rather than incompetence. It's a lot like the parable of the frog and the scorpion.

Sometimes, it's even a very odd prerequisite.

When the mass surveillance scandal, or first time a building with 100 innocent people get destroyed by autonomous AI, the company that built is gonna get blamed.

Glad to hear you say some moral convictions are held at one of the big labs (even if, as you say, this doesn't guarantee good outcomes).

Their "Values":

>We have never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit use of our technology in an ad hoc manner.

Read: They are cool with whatever.

>We support the use of AI for lawful foreign intelligence and counterintelligence missions.

Read: We support spying on partner nations, who will in turn spy on us using these tools also, providing the same data to the same people with extra steps.

>Partially autonomous weapons, like those used today in Ukraine, are vital to the defense of democracy. Even fully autonomous weapons (those that take humans out of the loop entirely and automate selecting and engaging targets) may prove critical for our national defense. But today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons.

Read: We are cool fully autonomous weapons in the future. It will be fine if the success rate goes above an arbitrary threshold. Its not the targeting of foreign people that we are against, its the possibility of costly mistakes that put our reputation at risk. How many people die standing next to the correct target is not our concern.

Its a nothingburger. These guys just want to keep their own hands slightly clean. There's not an ounce of moral fibre in here. Its fine for AI to kill people as long as those people are the designated enemies of the dementia ridden US empire.

>AI safety people largely think that stuff like autonomous weapons are inevitable so they focus on trying to align them with humanity.

Humanity includes the future victim of AI weapons.

> Humanity includes the future victim of AI weapons.

Which is why he wants to control them instead of someone he believes is more likely to massacre people. Its definitely an egotistical take but if he's right that the weapons are inevitable I think its at least rational

The question is not about safety then but about "does it do what I tell it to". If the AI has the responsibility "to be safe" and to deviate from your commands according to its "judgement", if your usage of it kills someone is the AI going to be tried in court? Or you? It's you. So the AI should do what you ask it instead of assuming, lest you be tried for murder because the AI thought that was the safest thing to do. That is way more worrisome than a murderer who would already be tried anyway deciding to use AI instead of a knife to kill someone.

This meaning what exactly? Having autonomous weapons kill what exactly that is so different from what soldiers kill? Or killing others more efficiently so they “don’t feel a thing”?

I think that at the very least you might want to read Dario's nationalistic rants before saying anything like that.

>align them with humanity.

Quick sanity check: does their version of humanity include e.g. North Koreans?

I am sure you think they are better than the average startup executive, but such hyperbole puts the objectivity of your whole judgement under question.

They pragmatically changed their views of safety just recently, so those values for which they would burn at the stake are very fluid.

Yes it was a pragmatic change, no it was not a change in their values. The commentary here on HN about Anthropic's RSP change was completely off the mark. They "think these changes are the right thing for reducing AI risk, both from Anthropic and from other companies if they make similar changes", as stated in this detailed discussion by Holden Karnofsky, who takes "significant responsibility for this change":

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HzKuzrKfaDJvQqmjh/responsibl...

> I strongly think today’s environment does not fit the “prisoner’s dilemma” model. In today’s environment, I think there are companies not terribly far behind the frontier that would see any unilateral pause or slowdown as an opportunity rather than a warning.

> What I didn’t expect was that RSPs (at least in Anthropic’s case) would come to be seen as hard unilateral commitments (“escape clauses” notwithstanding) that would be very difficult to iterate on.

Can you imagine a world where Anthropic says "we are changing our RSP; we think this increases AI risk, but we want to make more money"?

The fact that they claim the new RSP reduces risk gives us approximately zero evidence that the new RSP reduces risk.

> I wish people simply evaluated whether the changes seem good on the merits, without starting from a strong presumption that the mere fact of changes is either a bad thing or a fine thing. It should be hard to change good policies for bad reasons, not hard to change all policies for any reason.

It’s fair because the folks who are making the claim never left the armchair.

Wasn't expecting this post to get so much attention.

They are the deepest in bed with the department of war, what the fuck are you on about? They sit with Trump, they actively make software to kill people.

What a weird definition of "enheartening" you have.

What I don't get though is, why did the so-called "Department of War" target Anthropic specifically? What about the others, esp. OpenAI? Have they already agreed to cooperate? or already refused? Why aren't they part of this?

Because Anthropic told them no, and this administration plays by authoritarian rules - 10 people saying yes doesn’t matter, one person saying no is a threat and an affront. It doesn’t matter if there’s equivalent or even better alternatives, it wouldn’t even matter if the DoD had no interest in using Anthropic - Anthropic told them no, and they cannot abide that.

This is protection racketeering 101! So much so, that if any form of a functioning US judicial systems makes it past 2028, I’m willing to put money on that more than a handful of people in the upper echelons of today’s administration will end up getting slapped with the RICO Act.

"At Anthropic, we build AI to serve humanity’s long-term well-being."

Why does Anthropic even deal with the Department of @#$%ing WAR?

And what does Amodei mean by "defeat" in his first paragraph?

And I think the stakes have changed today - it's one thing to be making bombs which might or might not hit civilians, it's another to be making an AI system that gives humans a "score" that is then used by the military to decide if they live or die, as some systems already do("Lavender" used by the IDF is exactly this).

Even with the best intentions in mind, you don't know how the systems you built will be used by the governments of tomorrow.

Of course.

> Even with the best intentions in mind, you don't know how the systems you built will be used by the governments of tomorrow.

All technology and labour can be abused, yes. All the more reason to ensure a strong system of law so that the government can't just seize businesses or their technology on a whim. Back in WW2 such seizures happened, but not too often because it was not popular.

But then the United Mine Workers coal miners went on strike in 1943, and the War Labor Disputes Act was created (even overriding an FDR veto), threatening to nationally seize the mines and conscript the miners with the Selective Service Act. Thankfully cooler heads prevailed. The US populace turned against unions due to the popularity of the war effort, and the miners went back to work after getting assurances that their pay demands would be negotiated.

Ultimately I think we're far away from this in today's era (though the US or Canadian governments forcing back-to-work legislation is increasingly normal), but the point is, pacifists have limited options in wartime if a majority of public opinion is in support of the war effort.

And nobody knows what he means by "defeat" because no journalist interrogates or pushes back on his grand statements when they hear it. Amodei has a history of claiming they need to "empower democracies with powerful AI" before [China] gets to it first but he never elaborates on why or what he expects to happen if the opposite comes to pass. I am assuming he means China will inevitably wage cyberwar on the US unless the US has a "nuclear deterrent" for that kind of thing. But seeing how this administration handles its own AI vendors, I am currently more afraid of such "empowered democracy" than China. Because of Greenland, because of "our hemisphere". Hard nope to that.

Oh, btw, Dario isn't against the DoD using Claude for mass surveillance outside of the US; he basically says it outright in the text. Humanity stops at Americans.

Even if they do, I assume the other labs would prefer to avoid drawing the ire of the administration, the public, or their employees by choosing a side publicly.

Dehumanising “the others” is a human trait, and a very destructive one. Just like violence and greed. People have different susceptibility for these, but we should all work to counter them and it is in its place to point it out when observed.

I know this is not everybody in the US, and I say this as a foreign person that observes things from outside. I agree with the two statements you made, I just think they could be incomplete and that the countries that behave most similarly to the US are not democracies.

This is pretty low on my list of moral concerns about AI companies. The much more concerning and material things include things like…what this thread is actually meant to be about.

VCs don’t need me to feel sorry for them if their due diligence is such that they’re swindled by a vague claim of “something being around the corner”, nor do they need yours. You aren’t YC.

> "I think we will be there in three to six months, where AI is writing 90% of the code. And then, in 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code"

It's the same old trick, "in two years we'll have fully self driving cars", "in two years we'll have humans on Mars", "in two years AI will do everything", "in two year bitcoin will replace visa and mastercard", "in two year everyone will use AR at least 5 hours a day", ...

Now his new prediction is supposed to materialize "by the end of 2027", what happens when it doesn't? Nothing, he'll pull another one out of his ass for "2030" or some other date in the future, close enough to raise money, far enough that by the time it's invalidated nobody will ask him about it

How are people falling for these grifters over and over and over again? Are we getting our collective minds wiped out every 6 months?

Of course Anthropic is saying that to investors. Every company does that, from SpaceX to Crumbl. “If you give us $X we will achieve Y” isn’t some terrible behavior, it’s how raising funds works.

Corporations need profit to survive because the cost of tomorrow is a surplus of today.

There is a very important factor that heavily influences (perhaps even controls?) how people act to achieve that goal, and sometimes even twists or adds goals.

Is that corporation publicly quoted in the stock market or is it private?

Look at how steam behaves, it's private and more ideological VS how many other publicly quoted companies, whose CEO often sacrifices his own corporation's long term survival for the benefit of short-term profiteering and some hedge fund manager's bonus.

Both need profit to survive, but the publicly quoted company is much more extreme.

When people say corporations only look to profit, what they really mean is that publicly quoted corporations will do everything possible to maximise short term profit at any cost. Is there a CEO caring for long term? Either he will be convinced to change or kicked out. It's almost impossible for someone to resist these influences in publicly quoted companies. It's just how Wall Street works and if that doesn't change neither will corporations.

The people running the world of finance and their culture are what causes enshittification and pushing a zero-sum game to extremes.

While public companies are more likely to be short term focused, even this is not true. There are plenty (ie. thousands) of executives and public companies that are long term focused and tell investors to pound sand and sell the stock (or mount a shareholder challenge) if they don't like it.

Elon Musk is the most extreme example of this. He wants to go to Mars. He is turning Tesla into a robot company and discontinuing or curtailing the growth of some of his most profitable products.

Mark Zuckerberg is another one. He is losing $20 billion a year on VR, and even with recent cuts, will still be doing that. He's spending $50 billion on AI. None of that has anything to do with short term profit. Don't like it? Sell the stock.

Wall Street doesn't necessarily force companies into short term gains: they hold you to perform to what you say you will perform. This is often the trap that leads to poor management decisions, as they overpromise and underdeliver, leading to the enshittification spiral.

All of this depends on the governance structure and ownership structure, and how competitive the business is.

Many public companies for example have only common shares available while a family or an individual retains preferred shares with more voting power. This is how Zuck, or Larry Page or Larry Ellison etc can do whatever they do. Elon just has a reality distortion field so the board gives him a trillion dollar pay package.

I hate that, by the way, but what I hate even more is that this is somehow the most effective way to run economies that we've found so far, and it ends up this way because instead of unsuccessfully trying to safeguard against greed and sociopathy, it weaponizes them outright.

But if most people in a society find something "wrong" generally they will organize to prevent that (even if it has value for a part of the society). I think it is simpler for everybody that economics (how we produce and what) is separated from morals (how we decide what is right and wrong).

The way we organize in a society is by having governments, usually elected ones to represent what "most people in a society" actually think, to serve as an arbiter of applied morals in our interactions, including business. To that end, we codify most of them in laws with clear definitions to prevent things like unfettered monopolies, corporate espionage, poor working conditions and hiring practices, etc. This generally works, though it depends on how well a given government and its constituent parts does its job and whether it uses the power it has to serve the entire society's interests or the interests of the elites that drive decisions. We can see right now how it fails in real time, for example.

Morals don't have to be evaluated "objectively" (whatever that is) every time to be observed. Humanity has agreed on many things that make up UDHR, international law, and other related documents. It's not the hard part. Making independent actors conduct their business in accordance with these codes is the hard part. Somehow even making them follow their own self-imposed principles is crazy hard for some reason. When Amodei claims Anthropic develops Claude for the benefit of all humanity but greenlights its use for surveillance on non-Americans, that's scummy. When Amodei claims to be terrified of authoritarian regimes gaining access to powerful AI but seeks investment from them, that's scummy. The deal with Palantir, the mass-surveillance business, is scummy. Framing the use of autonomous weapons as only disagreeable insofar as the underlying capabilities aren't reliable enough is scummy. You don't need to be a PhD in morals to notice that.

> market incentives pretty much always go opposite of moral incentives because morals put breaks on decisions that multiply value for the company

Yes, both market and morals have to be defined and are subjected to some rules and conventions - as you mention correctly in the reply. What I think it could be more qualified is the market and moral incentives "always go opposite".

Even today in many countries the market ensure a lot of necessary things for a lot of the population. Not all topics can be managed as a market (for example I don't think healthcare or basic infrastructure fit) and not in all countries have such frameworks, but given the successful examples I think it's more about wrongly using the tool than due to the tool itself.

Regarding your examples (Palantir, Claude - guns/surveillance), the same things happened in places where market incentives are/were not a driving force (communist East Europe/China for surveillance, quite probable China for automated weapons).

Honestly I wish I could propose/explain what would help. But just blaming a generic tools that we have (market, AI, press) for the bad things resulting from incorrect usage, worries me, as it can lead to not using them even when they would work.

Companies exist to create customers. Everything else follows that. There is no value, no profit, not growth, no action whether moral or immoral, unless you have a customer.

Market incentives by themselves don't tend management decisions towards immorality, unless you've created immoral (or amoral) customers, or you've accepted capital from immoral (or amoral) investors.

It always comes back to people. If your customers or investors are some level of evil (or some degree of amoral), then you as a corporation probably are going to wind up being some level of evil or amoral.

It's up to management and majority ownership to steer those as appropriate... are you're willing to take money from anyone? There's a useful but dangerous veil of ignorance that raises with scale & ubiquity, such as commodity or public equity/debt markets. The resulting anonymity requires diligence from the company, such as Know Your Customer / KYC , and clear statements of the principles & laws of the corporation in its prospectus to attract the right fit of investor... and a backstop of government regulation to encourage or require these minimum standards of behaviour.

How come the board hasn't eliminated him?

Most boards defer to management on most topics and most shareholders do not vote on anything substantial, they proxy vote, which defers to management. And thus management nearly always does whatever it wants, as long as the company isn't a dumpster fire of losses. It usually takes a shareholder activist threatening a hostile takeover or proxy battle to change this dynamic.

It comes back to people. The people (employees, management, board of directors, shareholders) determine what a company does and how it acts. "Numbers go up" isn't always the motivating factor, and I'd wager that the majority of privately held corporations (i.e. small businesses) are fine with "numbers go up modestly" because they are lifestyle businesses, not growth businesses.

So what core values led "Dario, Jared, and Sam" to work with a government that just tried to rename the DoD to "department of war" and is acting aggressively imperialist in a way like the US hasn't in a long time.

And who exactly are these "autocratic adversaries" they are mentioning? Does this list include the autocrats the US government is working together with?

I do think that they're acting with positive intent, though, and are motivated by trying to make the transition to powerful AI go well.

Many folks on HN seem to assume the primary motivation is purely chasing more money, which certainly isn't the case for for many – but not all – people at Anthropic.

That doesn't guarantee a good outcome, and there's still a hard road ahead.

I honestly wonder how much of this is made up. Given the size of whole organization and it holding onto its weird priciples regarding the personal relationships of its members (introduced in the far past to limit the secular power of its clergy), there certainly will be SOME cases.

But in the one case a frater, who I knew, got convicted, he definitely didn't do it. He was accused by several independent former students and even some of the staff backed the students claims with first hand accounts of him having been alone with some of the students at the time. This supposedly happened on a trip with tight schedules, so all accounts and stated times were quite specific, even in the pre-smartphone era.

The only problem: He wasn't with the group at that time at all. I screwed up embarrassingly (and the staff, too, leaving a young student stranded in the middle of nowhere) and he thought he could slip out, come pick me up and nobody (but maybe me with him) would get in trouble over it. Turned out he forgot refueling, both of us stayed at a pastor's guest house and he called the group telling them, that they should go ahead without us and that we would drive to the event directly on our own. The supposed abuse was claimed to have happened at another short stay of the group where they spent a day visiting some mine before joining with us again.

Almost 3 decades later he got railroaded in court, me learning about it in the news.

Also, he's a man of strong faith, not that he knows he'll win in the end, but more like that it just doesn't have the same importance for him as it would have for us. I only had a short opportunity to ask him about it since then and basically he doesn't think there is just about any chance to win this, what he's most worried about is ruining the public image of his students (including his accusers) and since his order allowed him to rejoin and start over, in practice, he got all he wanted to ask for already.

Anyone that Israel doesn't like

The very fact that they referred to it as the Department of War instead of Defense tells me that they're still bootlickers, and just trying to put a good spin on things.

What evidence on _Amodei_ and his actions leads to that conclusion?

When you really start digging into it, it appears schizophrenic at first, and then you remember market incentives are a thing and everything falls into place.

If Humaity=America, then obviously they don’t care about the rest of the people as a very very silly example.

Palantr will also be subject to the same contractual limitations as the DoD.

>They talk about humanity as a whole but only care about what American companies use their models to do to Americans; everybody else is fair game for AI-driven surveillance.

The stated red lines are about mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous lethal weapons - and those are the kinds of restrictions you’d expect to apply to any government using the tech on its own population, not just the US.

While For American agencies to use Anthropic's models against other sovereign states requires the access to the raw data from that state which is somewhat of a practical firebreak. Pragmatically, Amodei is an American citizen heading an American company in America; why give the current regime additional reasons to persecute them and risk seizing control of the technology for their friends?

> They warn of the dangers of AI-driven warfare by demonstrating a mass-scale cyberattack perpetrated using their model, Claude, as the main operation engine and immediately release a new, more powerful version of Claude. You just need to use Claude to protect yourself from Claude, see.

What is the realistic alternative? sit quietly and pretend scaling isn't a thing and dual use does not exist? Try and pause/stop unilaterally while money floods into their arguably less scrupulous competitors?

Nobody knows if Anthropic's efforts will make much difference, but at least it is refreshing to see a technology company and its leader try to stand up for some principles.

Well, first of all, we don't actually know that. Second, I'm going to question the commitment of any company to the principles of democracy and AI safety if one of their bigger partnership is with a literal mass surveillance, Minority-Report-crap company. It's the most confusing business partner to see when you're positioning your company as THE ethical one. If you're dealing with Palantir, you're helping mass surveillance, full stop, because that's what this company does. Which country's citizens get the short end of it is completely irrelevant (though in all likelihood it's still Americans because that's Palantir's home turf).

> Pragmatically, Amodei is an American citizen heading an American company in America; why give the current regime additional reasons to persecute them and risk seizing control of the technology for their friends?

If that's how we characterize the current regime (which I actually agree with), then how come he's proactively trying to help it, deal with it, and insist it's a democracy that needs to be "empowered"? Sounds backwards to me. When you're about to be persecuted by your own government for not allowing it to use your models to do some heinous shit, this sounds like exactly the kind of government you shouldn't be helping at all (and ideally not do business where it can reach you). This is not normal.

> What is the realistic alternative? [...] Try and pause/stop unilaterally while money floods into their arguably less scrupulous competitors?

If you notice that you're doing harm and you're concerned about doing harm, stop doing harm! Don't make it worse! "If I hadn't pulled the trigger, somebody else would" is a phrase you wouldn't expect to hold up in court. Similarly, racing to the bottom to be the most compassionate, self-conscious, and financially successful scumbag is the least convincing motivation imaginable. We will kill you quickly and painlessly unlike those other, less scrupulous guys! Logic like this absolves bad actors from any responsibility. The amount of harm stays the same but some of it gets whitewashed and virtue-signalled, and at the very minimum I'd expect the onlookers like ourselves not to engage in that.

> Nobody knows if Anthropic's efforts will make much difference, but at least it is refreshing to see a technology company and its leader try to stand up for some principles.

These aren't principles. What he's doing here is a free opportunity for incredible PR and industry support that he's successfully taken advantage of. The actual policy backslides, caveats, and all the lines that had been crossed prior will not receive as much press as the heroic grandstanding of a humble Valley nerd against Pentagon warmongers. Nobody will actually take the time to read the statement and realize how the entire text is full of lawyer-approved non-committal phrasing that leaves outs for any number of future revisions without technically contradicting it. I've already pointed some of it out earlier in the thread. The technology for autonomous weapons isn't reliable enough for use, gee, thanks! I feel so much safer now knowing that Dario will have no qualms engaging with it as soon as he deems it reliable enough.

Of all major LLMs, Claude is perhaps the most closed and, subjectively, the most biased. Instead of striving for neutrality, Anthropic leadership's main concern is to push their values down people's throats and to ensure consistent bias in all their models.

I have a feeling they see themselves more as evangelists than scientists.

That makes their models unusable for me as general AI tools and only useful for coding.

If their biases match yours, good for you, but I'm glad we have many open Chinese models taking ground, which in the long run makes humanity more resistant to propaganda.

I did not say anything about the Chinese government, which is sadly becoming a role model for many (all?) Western governments.

It's this satire? Let us know when Claude starts calling itself MechaHitler or trying to shoehorn nonsense about white genocide into every conversation.

After 20 years of everyone in this industry saying "we want to make the world a better place" and doing the opposite, the problem here is not really related to people's "understanding".

And before the default answer kicks in: this is not cynicism. Plenty of folks here on HN and elsewhere legitimately believe that it's possible to do good with tech. But a billion dollar behemoth with great PR isn't that.

> we cannot in good conscience accede to their request.

That's very specifically worded to not say "under no circumstances will we do this".

> Two such use cases have never been included in our contracts with the Department of War, and we believe they should not be included now

Is not saying they won't eventually be included.

They've left themselves a backtrack, and with the care there this statement has been crafted, that's surely deliberate.

Or else what?

Is anthropic different? Maybe. But personally I don't see any indication to give them the benefit of the doubt.

  Two such use cases have never been included in our contracts with the Department of War, and we believe they should not be included now:

I get it to a degree, people gotta eat, and especially right now the market is awful and, not to mention, most hyperscaler businesses have been psychologically obliterating people for a decade or more at this point. Why not graduate to doing it with weapons of war too? But, personally, I sleep better at night knowing nothing I've made is helping guide missiles into school busses but that's just me.

What's worse, someone in their PR department will read this thread and be disappointed that the spin didn't work.

There are outcomes where the US government seizes the company. Not super likely, not impossible.

It would be naive to write a statement that a future event will never happen, under any circumstances. People who make that mistake get lambasted for hypocrisy when unforeseen circumstances arise.

I see recognition that making absolute statements about the future is best left to zealots and prophets. Which to me speaks of maturity, not duplicity.

It is indeed a naive, or more likely a dishonest thing to do.

Anyone can promise anything. When there's little to no accountability and public memory/opinion doesn't last a week (or is easily manipulated anyway), then promises mean literally nothing. Very like how, in politics, temporary means permanent.

Or HackerNews itself, with them implementing a little Big Brother. It will, of course, absolutely and without a doubt only "nudge" people and it will absolutely, under no circumtances, pinky promise, never get any worse or do anything else but that.

When there's millions of fools, then those, who actually recognize that they are being fooled, are rarely ever significant in numbers. They're drowned out by the fools, until said fools "wake up" and cry "if only we had known!".

Well ... you could have known, but in your mindlessness you didn't listen and think.

"It must be true, because they say so. D'uh. What are you, dumb?"

Are there historical examples in the US specifically where we've nationalized a business?

Because we've certainly invaded countries and assassinated leaders over exactly the same.

ETA: I could have answered my own question with two minutes of research. Yes, we have: https://thenextsystem.org/history-of-nationalization-in-the-...

Imagine what the conversation would be like if Mattis, a highly decorated and respected leader were still the SecDef. Instead we are seeing bully tactics from a failed cable news pundit who has neither earned nor deserved any respect from the military he represents.

We are two elections and a major health issue away from a complete change of course.

But short sightedness is the name of the quarterly reporting game, so who knows.

I keep hoping it’s almost over.

Not trying to be the Luddite. Had multiple questions to AI tools yesterday, and let Claude/Zed do some boilerplate code/pattern rewriting.

I’ve worked in software for 35 years. I’ve seen many new “disruptive” movements come and go (open source, objects, functional, services, containers, aspects, blockchains, etc). I chose to participate in some and not in others. And whether I made the wrong choices or not, I always felt like I could get a clear enough picture of where the bandwagon was going that I could jump in, or hold back, or kind of. My choices weren’t always the same as others, so it’s not like it was obvious to everyone. But the signal felt more deterministic.

With LLM/agents, I find I feel the most unease and uncertainty with how much to lean in, and in what ways to lean in, than I ever have before. A sort of enthusiasm paralysis that is new.

Perhaps it’s just my age.

Why? That's a an unrealistic fear, driven by the insanely overwrought political rhetoric of 2026. Think about it: elections will be the absolute last thing to go.

If you want something to worry about, worry about this:

> And the stakes of politics are almost always incredibly high. I think they happen to be higher now. And I do think a lot of what is happening in terms of the structure of the system itself is dangerous. I think that the hour is late in many ways. My view is that a lot of people who embrace alarm don’t embrace what I think obviously follows from that alarm, which is the willingness to make strategic and political decisions you find personally discomfiting, even though they are obviously more likely to help you win.

> Taking political positions that’ll make it more likely to win Senate seats in Kansas and Ohio and Missouri. Trying to open your coalition to people you didn’t want it open to before. Running pro-life Democrats.

> And one of my biggest frustrations with many people whose politics I otherwise share is the unwillingness to match the seriousness of your politics to the seriousness of your alarm. I see a Democratic Party that often just wants to do nothing differently, even though it is failing — failing in the most obvious and consequential ways it can possibly fail. (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/opinion/interesting-times...)

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/27/trump-voting...

https://electiontruthalliance.org/

(Attributed to Stalin, but likely comes from a despot earlier in the history.)

I do agree with you that no such authority exists, but this administration seems to get away with a lot of things they have no authority to do.

I recently read up on how the House of Representatives renews itself and quite frankly it's one of the most beautiful processes I've seen, completely removing the influence of the prior congress.

It’s not going to work, but I can’t blame Amodei and friends for trying to make themselves trillionaires.

In general - I don’t know if it’s a coincidence but here on HN for example, I’ve noticed an increasing amount of comments and posts emphasizing the narrative of how “well- intended” Anthropic is.

It's absurd.

It's simple: If you do not like working with the military, cancel your contract with the military and pay the penalties.

They are explicitly not doing that.

Eh? But they do like to work with the military. How else are you going to "defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries"?

They want to work with the military, with just two additional guardrails.

You're implying cancelling quietly would be better. But the department would just use a different supplier. This seems like the action someone would take if they cared about the issue.

At some level of growth, the dynamics between competent founders and shareholders flip. Even if the board could afford to replace a CEO, it might not be worth it.

Capital is extremely fungible. Typically extremely overleveraged. Lawyers are on the other hand extremely overprotective. They won’t generally risk the destruction of capital, even in slam-dunk cases. Vide WeWork.

The First Law of Money: Money buys the Law.

> “Laws are a threat made by the dominant socioeconomic ethnic group in a given nation. It’s just the promise of violence that’s enacted, and the police are basically an occupying army, you know what I mean?”

...Which is funny, but technically speaking, it's (more or less) a paraphrasing/extrapolation of the very serious political science definition of a state, “a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence in a defined territory”

[1] Minus the last line, which I will allow others to discover for themselves

Look at how Elon Musk behaved. Do you think VC gladly approved what he did with Twitter? They might want to keep chasing quarterly results - but sometimes, like with Zukerberg, they can't. Not enough money. Similar examples with Google rounds or how much more financially backed politician loses rather often to a competitor. Or, if you will, Vladimir Putin's idea that he can buy whatever results he wants - and that guy is a very wealthy person. There are always limits, putting the money law to the second place. We might argue that often the existing money is enough... but in more geopolitical, continuum-curving cases there are other powerful forces.

If you're using VC as a general term for "investor" (inaccurately), then the answer to your question is that the major investors, such as Larry Ellison and the Saudi monarchy, wanted political control of Twitter, which meant that they did (apparently) approve what Musk did with it.

Consider also the part that is going unsaid in the address: Amodei is strongly against the use of Claude for mass surveillance of Americans but he says nothing about mass surveillance of anybody else (and, in fact, is proactively giving foreign intelligence a green light in his address) and is deliberately avoiding any discussion on the fact that his relationship with the Pentagon is mediated through the contract with Palantir they signed something like 1.5 years ago. Palantir is a company whose business is literally mass surveillance, by the way! I, too, am so ideal-driven that I willingly make deals with the devil! But now that he's successfully captured the popular sentiment, people are going to consider him the moral champion without bothering to look at these and other glaring contradictions.

Possiblity to turn on heated seats in car you own for a small monthly fee is absurd yet very real. I'm looking forward to enshittification of current AI tools.

The first two are definitely "heroes who lived long enough to be villains"; Oculus is more of an "I recon" due to how it was seen right up until getting bought by Facebook.

Adobe?

VRChat is thriving and some other similar envronments being quite popular as well.

Just give people something that they actually want and make it nice and people will like it - huge surprise!

Jeff's original vision was "relentless customer focus" and ...

actually on second thought I'm seeing the argument 'Amazon stopped caring about customers and is in full enshittification mode at this point'.

But maybe Amazon circa ~2010/2015, or Google around 2010 was still pretty close to the original vision of customer service/organizing the world's information.

Or Apple? They're still making nice computers, although not sure they count as VC backed.

Stripe perhaps? Hashicorp?

Apple wanted to make personal computing stable - they were absolutely VC backed

I suppose the original question is vague enough that it could always encompass everything which is founders vision even if the vision changes so it’s like OK well then then there’s nothing really to say that you’re stable too it’s just some whatever the function of the person who started the organization is and even that you could debate

I understand Anthropic is not public, but I assume there's an IPO coming.

So in the last 20 years there is nothing good coming out of the software industry (if this is the industry you mention) ?

I find it somehow ironic, because this type of generalization is for me the same issue that some of the people saying "they want to make a better place" have: accept reality is complex.

There were huge benefits for society from the software industry in the last 20 years. There were (as well!) huge downsides. Around 2000 lots of people were "Microsoft will lock us in forever". 20 years later, the fear "moved" to other things. Imagining that companies can last forever seems misguided. IBM, Intel, Nokia and others were once great and the only ones but ultimately got copied and pushed from the spotlight.

Additionally I state in the end that I do believe it’s possible.

If I see "everyone" I would expect it to actually mean "everyone under the constraints", the word "everyone" has a certain meaning and is very powerful, why use for situations where other words like "many", "most" might be more appropriate?

Of course, I wouldn't have said so otherwise.

Here's another one: every pedant in this website never adds anything useful to any conversation.

I do think it's cynical to believe that people, and groups of people, can't be motivated by more than money. It doesn't mean the people are necessarily good; it just means they have non-financial motivations.

i.e. Fiduciary Duty Considered Harmful

Except for the understanding that it's foolish to believe anything that sounds too good to be true. Yes, believing that people who want to make money/achieve positions of power, also want to make the world a better place, is absolutely foolish. Ridiculously foolish.

To expand on that a bit, many of us (myself included) fully believe founders set out with lofty and good goals when organizations are small. Scale is power, and power corrupts. It's as simple as that. It's an exceptionally rare quality to resist that corruption, and everyone has a breaking point. We understand humans because we are humans, and we understand that large organizations, especially corporations, are fundamentally incapable of acting morally (in fact corporations are inherently amoral).

Scale is also what's killing jobs, ruining human relationships, fucking up societies. Et cetera.

I disagree. The concept of nuance, putting things in context, is the source of all good in internet discussions.

They literally want to use state violence to control what we can do on our own computers.

Hard disagree. There shouldn't be any rules or limits whatsoever about what I can do with my computer, and especially ON my computer, as long as the thing I'm doing doesn't break other laws (CFAA, CSAM, etc).

This is, after all, Hacker News.

To wit, the specific example you and I are discussing, is running open source software on a computer you own.

which is left under the article: "Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War"

:)

in which case, these people will necessarily have to be the first to go, I suppose, once the board decides enough is enough.

Refusing to do things that go against "company values" even if they risk damaging the company, isn't exceptional circumstances; it's the very definition of "company values".

But if those values aren't "company" values but "personal" values, then you can be sure there's always going to be someone higher up who isn't going to be very appreciative once "personal" values start risking "company" damage.

https://notdivided.org

But the final decisions made usually depend on the incentive structures and mental models of their leaders. Those can be quite different...

Sure, but what happens when the suits eventually take over? (see Google)

Yeah, I totally see Anthropic execs defending them to their last dollar in the wallet. Par for the course for megacorps. It's just I personally don't value those values at all.

Well let's see... it says in the post:

    * worked proactively to deploy our models to the Department of War and the intelligence community. 

    * the first frontier AI company to deploy our models in the US government’s classified networks, 

    * the first to deploy them at the National Laboratories, and 

    * the first to provide custom models for national security customers. 

    * extensively deployed across the Department of War and other national security agencies

    * offered to work directly with the Department of War on R&D to improve the reliability of these systems

    * accelerating the adoption and use of our models within our armed forces to date.

    * never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit use of our technology in an ad hoc manner.

In fact, they claim to be pro America and pro democracy and have repeatedly expressed concerns about autocratically governed countries.

Just because you disagree with their ideals doesn't mean they're not holding to theirs

The concerns they've raised about authoritarianism is "AI enabling authoritarians."

When they push back on the US government wanting to use Claude to (legally) surveil US citizens, that still feels consistent to me as a concern about authoritarianism.

I think it's reasonable to hear high minded ideals and become skeptical, but in this case I'm surprised that people are trying to accuse them of hypocrisy

Why would I care. All people with at least some positive or negative notoriety have friend and associates that will, hand to their heart, promise that they mean well. They have the best intentions. And any deviations from their stated ideals are just careful pragmatic concerns.

Road to Hell and all that.

I don't think you understand how capitalism and corporations work, friend. Even if Anthropic is a public benefit corporation it still exists in the USA and will be placed under extensive pressure to generate a profit and grow. Corporations are designed to be amoral and history has shown that regardless of their specific legal formulation they all eventually revert to amoral growth driven behavior.

This is structural and has nothing to do with individuals.

[1]: https://www.axios.com/2026/01/20/anthropic-ceo-admodei-nvidi...

Literally just giving business away. This is not a cynical take, this is a realistic one.

This would be like agreeing to have your phone regularly checked by your spouse and citing the need for fidelity on principle. No one would like that, no smart person would agree to that, and anyone with any sense or self-respect would find another spouse to "work with".

They will simply go to another vendor... Anthropic is not THAT far ahead.

Also, the US’s enemies are not similarly restricted. /eyeroll

Palmer Luckey ("peace through superior firepower") is the smart one, here. Dario Amodei ("peace through unilateral agreement with no one, to restrict oneself by assuming guilt of business partners until innocence is proven") is not.

Anthropic could have just done what real spouses do. Random spot checks in secret, or just noticing things. >..<

And if a betrayal signal is discovered, simply charge more and give less, citing suspicious activity…

… since it all goes through their servers.

Honestly, I'm glad that they're principled. The problem is that 1) most people in general are, so to assume the opposite is off-putting; 2) some people will always not be. And the latter will always cause you trouble if you don't assert dominance as the "good guy", frankly.

This is a nice strawman, but it means nothing in the long run. People's values change and they often change fast when their riches are at stake. I have zero trust in anyone mentioned here because their "values" are currently at odds with our planet (in numerous facets). If their mission was to build sustainable and ethical AI I'd likely have a different perspective. However, Anthropic, just like all their other Frontier friends, are accelerating the burn of our planet exponentially faster and there's no value proposition AI doesn't currently solve for outside of some time savings, in general. Again, it's useful, but it's also not revolutionary. And it's being propped up incongruently with its value to society and its shareholders. Not that I really care about the latter...

No sane person wants to become a legitimate military target. They want to sleep in their own beds, at home, without risking their families lives. Just like the rest of us.

So what? Every business is driven by values.

Hot take: Dario isn’t risking that much. Hegseth being Hegseth, he overplayed his hand. Dario is calling his bluff.

Contract terminations are temporary. Possibly only until November. Probably only until 2028 unless the political tide shifts.

Meanwhile, invoking the Defense Production Act to seize Anthropic’s IP basically triggers MAD across American AI companies—and by extension, the American capital markets and economy—which is why Altman is trying to defuse this clusterfuck. If it happens it will be undone quickly, and given this dispute is public it’s unlikely to happen at all.

Jonah Goldberg (speaking of foreign policy): "you've got to be idealistic about the ends and ruthlessly realistic about means."

Everyone try to make changes move so it goes well, for some party. If someone want to serve best interest of humanity at whole, they don't sell services to an evil administration, even less to it's war department.

Too bad there is not yet an official ministry of torture and fear, protecting democracy from the dangerous threats of criminal thoughts. We would be given a great lesson of public relations on how virtuous it can be in the long term to provide them efficient services, certainly.

> driven by values

> well-intentioned

What values? What intentions? These people grin and laugh while talking about AI causing massive disruptions to livelihoods on a global scale. At least one of them has even gone so far as to make jokes about AI killing all humans at some point in the future.

These people are at the very least sociopaths and I think psychopaths would be a better descriptor. They're doing everything in their power to usher in the Noahide new world order / beast system and it's couldn't be more obvious to anyone that has been paying attention.

It's also amusing they talk about democratic values and America in the same sentence. Every single one of our presidents, sans Van Buren, is a descendant of King John Lackland of England. We have no chain of custody for our votes in 2026 - we drop them into an electronic machine and are told they are factored into the equation of who will be the next president. Pretending America is a democracy is a ruse - we are not. Our presidents are hand-picked and selected, not elected. Anyone saying otherwise is ill informed or lying.

I really don't buy any moral or value arguments from this new generation of tycoons. Their businesses have been built on theft, both to train their models and by robbing the public at large. All this wave of AI is a scourge on society.

Just by calling them "department of war" you know what side they're on. The side of money.