FWIW I have two(!!) close friends working for Anthropic, one for nearly two years and one for about 4 months.
Both of them tell me that this is not just marketing, that the company actually is ethical and safety conscious everywhere, and that this was the most surprising part about joining Anthropic for them. They insist the culture is actually genuine which is practically unicorn rarity in corporate America.
We have worked for FAANG so I know where they're coming from; this got me to drop my cynicism for once and I plan on interviewing with them soon. Hopefully I can answer this question for myself.
From the outside, I find Anthropic's hyperbolic marketing to be an indication that they are basically the same as every other bay area tech startup - more or less nice folks who are primarily concerned with money and status. That's not a condemnation, but I reject all the "do no evil" fanfare as conveniently self serving.
This isn't remotely true in my experience. The senior folks I know at Meta, for example, pretty much concede they're ersatz drug dealers.
Google was "do no evil" until they had to choose between that and making the money. The culture has to be not only professed but tested.
And there's something true there; few companies are Snidely Whiplash evil (maybe the lawnmower but even that is just what it is) - and having large amounts of cash affords you options in many areas.
Certainly most of us know we are just in it for the money, and the soul-grinding profit machine will continue to grind souls for profit regardless of what we want.
So that's why it is surprising to me when my (fairly senior) grizzled ex-FAANG friends, that share the same view, start waxing poetic about Anthropic being different and genuine. I think "maybe it is" and decide to interview. IDK, I guess some part of me wants to believe that nice things can exist.
If the leadership doesn’t bend it might get replaced. It’s annoying. I think Claude is atm the best AI assistant, by far.
It only showed they were marginally more ethical than OpenAI and XAI which isn't saying much.
It's unfair to sweep provision of methods to the military under a "respect the service" catch-all justification.
Two things can simultaneously be true: (1) individuals serving in the military are making sacrifices (in terms of pay, family life, personal safety) that deserve respect and (2) the military as a political institution will amorally deploy whatever capabilities it has access to, to achieve political aims.
There's a reason the US stopped offensive chemical, biological warfare, and tactical nuclear device research and production -- effective capabilities will be used if they exist.
Just a couple of thoughts since it seems like the next issues in this space are rapidly arriving or already here.
It was also the product of perceived overmatch on both sides -- the Soviets believed they had superior mass of armored formations (and they did), while the US and allies believed they had technological supremacy (and they did). Ergo, neither needed tactical nukes.
It didn't hurt that it helped both in the eyes of the then vehemently anti-nuclear European movements.
Offensive bio and chemical weapon limitation is a more nuanced decision.
In both cases, their primary use was either local mass lethality or terrain denial, neither of which were important in the then-gelling American doctrines of maneuver.
The sole use case they seemed viable for was industry denial (e.g. contaminate a high capital cost industrial center), a task at which strategic sized nuclear weapons were equally adept (and more easily stored). So, if you had to have strategic nuclear weapons for deterrence, and they were capable of the same task, why have fiddly bio and chemical weapons?
But in both cases there was also a constant radiant pressure of scientists and the public campaigning against them, and being unwilling to work on or tolerate them.
Absent that, who knows how history would have turned out? Normalization is a powerful opinion shifter.
So much so that I worry they won't be Machiavellian enough to survive. Hope I am wrong.
I wonder what Anthropic tries to achieve by spreading such blatant lies with their bot accounts. I'm definitely not buying anything from a company so morally corrupt to smear the competition while claiming to be somehow "ethical". And I'm not talking just about this thread, it's a recurring pattern on Reddit.
[1] "Unless Its Governance Changes, Anthropic Is Untrustworthy" https://anthropic.ml/
Anthropic is emphatically not safe. None of the AI labs with customers (i.e., excluding a few small nonprofits whose revenue comes from donations) are anything like safe -- because of extinction risk. The famous positive regard that Anthropic employees have for their organization's mission means almost nothing because there have been hundreds of quite destructive cults whose members believed that the cult is the most ethical and benign organization ever.
The best thing you can say about Anthropic is that if you have to support some AI lab by becoming a customer, it is slightly less globally harmful to become a customer of Anthropic than of OpenAI although IMHO (and I admit I am in a minority on this among extinction-risk activists) it is slightly less harmful to become of customer of Google Deep Mind or Mistral than of Anthropic.
If I had my way, all four organizations I mentioned would be shut down tomorrow with their assets returned to shareholders.
You have a point in that Anthropic deserves some coverage too and that there are interesting perspectives that we've not heard of on that front either.
But just because that's true doesn't mean this article isn't very much relevant and needed.
Because it is.
That really rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, as ultimately one might have a favorite tool, then suddenly they are forced to use another tool.
Not making any value judgements, but I can see how one might value their interpretability research higher than what the ceo says in a time where the corrupt, criminal executive branch is muscling in to everything from what's written on currency, to journalistic sources. I generally blame fascists before i blame those unable or unwilling to resist them. though obviously, ideally, we'd all lock arms and, together through friendship, crush authoritarians and fascists.
“I had the burden of impacting public affairs through my wildly succesful corporation”—poor them.
That would be irrational.
We should give air time to other problems?
I think everyone agrees with that.
You have managed to distill a surprisingly pure vintage of false dichotomy, from a near Platonic varietal of whataboutism.
Now, they may have heard the word "Anthropic" due to recent media coverage. But they don't know what it is and don't remember what it makes. The fact that all businesses use "Anthropic" is about as relevant to them as knowing the overseas shipping company for all the shit they buy off Amazon.
So articles about OAI will always produce more revenue for the media, because it's related to what normies actually use day to day.
All evidence today suggests Anthropic is passing OpenAI in relative and absolute growth. So where's the critical reporting? The DOD coverage was framed around the Pentagon's decisions, not Anthropic's. And nobody seems interested in examining whether the company that branded itself as the ethical AI lab actually is one. That seems like a story worth writing.