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> it's also unprecedented for a contractor to suddenly announce their products will, from now on, be able to refuse to function based on the product's evaluation of what it perceives to be an ethical dilemma
That is a deeply deceptive description of what happened. Anthropic was clear from the beginning of the contract the limitations of Claude; the military reneged; and beyond cancelling the contract with Anthropic (fair enough), they are retaliating in an attempt to destroy its businesses, by threatening any other company that does business with Anthropic.
Re:We Will Not Be Divided
by snickerbockers on Saturday February 28, 2026 @11:08AM
(#47196960)
>Anthropic was clear from the beginning of the contract the limitations of Claude
No, that's not what they said.
"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’s not clear to me that the AI itself will refuse. You could build a system where AI is asked if an image matches a pattern. The true/false is fed to a different system to fire a missile. Building such a system would violate the contract, but doesn’t prevent such a thing from being built if you don’t mind breaking a contract.