While I don't live in the US, I could imagine the US government arguing that third party doctrine[0] means that aggregation and bulk-analysis of say; phone record metadata is "lawful use" in that it isn't /technically/ unlawful, although it would be unethical.
Another avenue might also be purchasing data from ad brokers for mass-analysis with LLMs which was written about in Byron Tau's Means of Control[1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
[1] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/706321/means-of-con...
DoD is now trying to strongarm Anthropic into changing the deal that they already signed!
Government: "Anthropic, let us do whatever we want"
Anthropic: "We have some minimal conditions."
Government: "OpenAI, if we blast Anthropic into the sun, what sort of deal can we get?"
OpenAI: "Uh well I guess I should ask for those conditions"
Government: blasts Anthropic into the sun "Sure whatever, those conditions are okay...for now."
By taking the deal with the DoW, OpenAI accepts that they can be treated the same way the government just treated Anthropic. Does it really matter what they've agreed?
It looks like Anthropic likely wanted to be able to verify the terms on their own volition whereas OpenAI was fine with letting the government police themselves.
From the DoD perspective they don't want a situation, like, a target is being tracked, and then the screen goes black because the Anthropic committee decided this is out of bounds.
So the governments stance is "We already have laws and procedures in place, we don't want and can't have a CEO to also be part of those checks"
I don't think this outcome would have been any different under a normal blue government either. Definitely with less mud slinging though.
Government's not free to say, "We'll blow up your business with a false accusation if you don't give us the terms we want (and then use defence production act to commandeer the product anyway)". How much more blatantly authoritarian does it get than that?
Anthropic didn't want a kill switch, they wanted contractual guarantees (the kind you can go to courts for). This administration just doesn't want accountability, that's all.
It was OpenAI that said they prefer to rely on guardrails and less on contracts (the kind that stops the AI from working if you violate). The same OpenAI that was awarded the contract now.
I’m not accusing the above commenter of deception; I’m merely saying reasonable people are skeptical. There are classic game theory approaches to address cooperation failure modes. We have to use them. Apologies if this seems cryptic; I’m trying to be brief. It if doesn’t make sense just ask.
I have two qualms with this deal.
First, Sam's tweet [0] reads as if this deal does not disallow autonomous weapons, but rather requires "human responsibility" for them. I don't think this is much of an assurance at all - obviously at some level a human must be responsible, but this is vague enough that I worry the responsible human could be very far out of the loop.
Second, Jeremy Lewin's tweet [1] indicates that the definitions of these guardrails are now maintained by DoW, not OpenAI. I'm currently unclear on those definitions and the process for changing them. But I worry that e.g. "mass surveillance" may be defined too narrowly for that limitation to be compatible with democratic values, or that DoW could unilaterally make it that narrow in the future. Evidently Anthropic insisted on defining these limits itself, and that was a sticking point.
Of course, it's possible that OpenAI leadership thoughtfully considered both of these points and that there are reasonable explanations for each of them. That's not clear from anything I've seen so far, but things are moving quickly so that may change in the coming days.
[0] https://x.com/sama/status/2027578652477821175
[1] https://x.com/UnderSecretaryF/status/2027594072811098230