If government procurement rules intended for national security risks can be abused as a way to punish Anthropic for perceived lack of loyalty, why not any other company that displeases the administration like Apple or Amazon?
This marks an important turning point for the US.
Setting aside the spectacular metastasis of a lawless kakistocracy that is literally rewriting the facts on record...
Anthropic's leadership has wisely attempted to make it clear that its product is not fit for the US DoD's purpose/objective, which is automated killing at scale.
It would be (is) grossly, historically negligent to operate weapons with LLMs. Anthropic built systems for a thuggocracy that only understands bribery, blackmail, and force.
Saying the government can just nationalize any company purely because they want to use the tech to kill people has pretty big implications and his historically against what this country stands for.
>[1] The government can make you go over to southeast Asia and kill people personally.
Is this a normative statement? In other words are you simply claiming "the government has men with guns and therefore can force people/companies do whatever they want", or are you claiming that "the government should be able to commandeer civilian resources for whatever it wants"?
Is it a "moral duty" to aid your government, especially in the current social/political environment? Conscription is theoretically still allowed in the US, and you're theoretically supposed to register for the SSS, but nobody has been prosecuted for failure to do so in decades. That suggests the "moral duty" aspect has significantly weakened. Moreover if we're making comparisons to the draft, it's also worth noting the draft allows for conscientious objection. That makes your claim of "that’s not their call to make" quite questionable.
Whether they participate voluntarily in a commercial transaction or participate only when compelled to by law (setting aside the question of whether the government does or should have that power) is certainly their call to make.
Just as any individual can decide whether to volunteer, whether to wait until drafted, or whether to refuse to be drafted and face the consequences.
(History shows these decisions, and the rights to make them, are meaningful at scale!)
Finally, governments who expect their leading scientists to do groundbreaking work simply out of fear of imprisonment are NGMI against governments whose scientists believe in their cause.
Conscientious objection still puts the ball in the government’s court. You have to make your case to the government that you have a deeply held religious or moral belief that precludes participation in war, and then the government decides what it wants to do. It’s not clear to me how a corporation would prove the existence of such a belief. But even if that was possible, it wouldn’t give the company the right to decide unilaterally.
You are conflating lack of true representation (what we have), with lack of support. It's very possible that the broad majority of the electorate would in fact get rid of conscription in the U.S. if they actually had a say in the matter? [1]
> I suspect that the non-prosecution more reflects the public’s leniency in the absence of major threats since the fall of the soviet union than a change in the underlying normative view.
Or more people are wising up to the reality that the real risk to their safety and security is from within not from without, its from people like you who would happily subjugate and violate your countrymen while telling them it's all for their own protection.
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/28642/vast-majority-americans-o...
People largely tend not to believe in this kind of jingoistic bullshit nowadays.
> If Congress doesn’t want AI-powered killing machines, they’re the ones who have the right to make that call.
You have it backwards, and you know it. If Congress wants to invoke natsec concerns to force companies to sell to the federal government, then they have to explicitly say so, and any such legislation and exercise of execute power pursuant thereto would be heavily litigated.
> The government can make you go over to southeast Asia and kill people personally. It’s totally incompatible with that to say companies should be allowed to veto the use of their technologies in war.
Yes, it's legal to have drafts, but that's not relevant, and also includes certain exceptions for conscientious objectors. It doesn't matter if its paradoxical or ironic that an individual could be pressed into military service whereas a private company doesn't have to sell stuff to the federal government.
US tech companies were previously forced into compliance with PRISM or threatened with destruction (see: escalating fines to infinity against Yahoo, forcing their eventual compliance).
You know what's new? This administration is doing out in the open what used to go on quietly.
> You know what's new? This administration is doing out in the open what used to go on quietly.
So this administration has got bold and the behaviour has become overt.
People have this intuitive sense that there's some kind of authority of truth or justice, an available recourse that we could've and should've used.
But that sense is incorrect.
What we actually have the political and justice systems that Trump and his adherent have, so far, quite successfully subverted.
In other words we might have killed Osama Bin Laden, but he won. The U.S truly is a "shadow of it's former self."
It's interesting to see that nothing happens despite this. Now he started another war to distract from his involvement in the huge Epstein network. Also, by the way, quite interesting to see how many people were involved here; there is no way Ghislaine could solo-organise all of that yet she is the only one in prison. That makes objectively no sense.
e: Americans seem to be surprised to learn that their democracy is indeed classified as a flawed democracy for more than a decade by The Economist due to decades of backsliding (the more rapid regression lately is not yet accounted for, but I wouldn't be surprised if the outcome of the 2026 elections results in a hybrid regime assessment in 2027).
They were going to do him for conspiracy to defraud the United States and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, re. the 2020 stuff before he got reelected.
Half the country just hasn't accepted the reality that the other half refuses to share a society with them and wants them dead.
Governments should not be permitted to introduce regulations against companies of this kind if the regulations can be enforced selectively and with regulator discretion, as the GDPR and antitrust definitely are. The free-speech implications are staggering.
A recent report shows the approval numbers, for all americans it's at 36%. For white americans, its at 45%
Even 36% is sky high for what he did.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/polls/donald-trump-appro...
https://www.reuters.com/graphics/TRUMP-POLLS-AUTOMATED/APPRO...
https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker
History will put Trumpers and Confederate at the same level of despicability.
You step up and start shooting at the heartless monsters running the first (US armed forces) and second (ICE) most well-funded militaries in the world. Go ahead. We’ll be right there behind you.
(Yeah, I’m burning some hn karma for this, I imagine.)
But nope, only words, words and more words.
"We mustn't consider dealing with problem x because it wasn't considered important by our founding fathers"
"China are catching up, so we need to cower behind a tariff wall rather than risk losing an open competition"
"Other countries with similar legal systems have successfully reformed their supreme courts, but there's nothing we can learn from them"
"We shouldn't constrain rogue leaders because of, er, something to do with King George III"
...and now "we can't push back against the regime, because they'll shoot us if we do".
It's so weird - a huge shift in such a short period of time. As an outsider who wishes America well, it's really sad to see.
As for getting shot, while the chance of getting shot in the US for opposing the government is much higher than in similar circumstances in somewhere like the UK (which is far from perfect - but rarely actually shoots people), its also much, much lower than in Iran or China or Saudi Arabia.
Pushing back against the US government is a lot safer than taking part in something like the 2022 protests that ousted the Sri Lankan government, and lots of normally apolitical people took part in that (which was why it succeeded).
Your ignorance of reality does not define reality.
If you are in law enforcement, do not follow clearly unlawful orders. The president is not your boss. This is a functioning democracy.
If you are a librarian, do not hide otherwise lawful books that the current administration dislikes.
If you are in logistics, do not collect obviously unconstitutional taxes. Make sure to challenge them in courts first.
If you are in a university, stick to what is true and scientifically sound. Do not hide inconvenient truths.
If you are a baker, do not refuse to make a rainbow colored cake just because you are worried what the people wearing metaphorically brown shirts might say.
The list goes on and on and on. This has been well documented throughout history. Fascism needs a seed to thrive, and that seed is people complying in advance. Not with actual laws, but with the idea what direction the law will take, just because it's easier for them. People not helping other people because immigration is not in vogue right now and who knows what the neighbors might say.
Don't dismiss words: they are the necessary link between (individual) thoughts and collective deeds.
PS. Trump also got there with words: speeches, slogans, imprecations
And that whenever a mass shooting happens in the US, Americans reassure themselves that gun violence is a price worth paying for the Second Amendment. And there is a run on pawn shops and gun stores because mass shootings are the best form of advertising America's billion dollar gun lobby has.
And that Americans will wax poetic about watering the Tree of Liberty with the Blood of Tyrants and Patriots any time gun control comes up, because they believe their Second Amendment is an absolute vouchsafe against tyranny and because of that, they and they alone are the only truly free country.
And they were willing to rise up in Portland.
And they were willing to rise up during COVID.
And they were willing to rise up on Jan 6th.
And they're willing to shoot up schools and black churches and gay nightclubs and mosques so often it no longer makes the news.
But now, with blatant and undeniable tyranny in their face and shooting them dead in the streets... nothing.
Not that violence would necessarily be productive (although historically speaking no social or political progress happens without it)... but it's weird that the most violent society in human history, born of genocide and bathed in blood, with more guns than people and gun violence enshrined as its second most important and fundamental virtue, the land of "give me liberty or give me death" is all of a sudden the most timid.
Like goddamn throw a Molotov cocktail or something.
You're making the mistake of assuming an attribute of a culture cannot be accurate unless it's 100% accurate about every member.
I think it's perfectly valid to call Americans to the carpet when they won't live up to their stated principles, if only because of how obnoxious they've been about their own sense of exceptionalism, and how their guns serve as an absolute vouchsafe against tyranny.
History is going to note that the only times Americans attempted a revolution against their government was first in defense of slavery and second in defense of fascism, and that isn't a good look. Replying with #notallamericans doesn't help.
edit: OK partial mea culpa as the US had anti-slavery revolts[0], but the two events that will stand out for their lasting impact and scope are the Civil War and Jan. 6th. The Revolutionary War doesn't count because they were British at the time.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_rebellion_and_resistance...
That is, the money doesn't care so long as it's still profitable. When the recession comes a Democrat will be allowed back in to fix things.
See Liz Truss.
I think the solution is also obvious for the United States — higher taxes and lower government spending. We need to do both. However, you can't get elected if you promise both those things.
Yeah dude, that's the point.
The US government has lots of corporatism, but this isn't an example of that.
The current US administration's relationships with corporations is more seeking to maximise how much bribe money it can extract from them, whilst undermining them with counterproductive policies no matter how big the tax breaks are.
Take the stated tool for this action, the Defense Production Act ("DPA") [1]. It was passed in 1950. What does it cover? Well, lots of things. The DPA has been invoked many times over 76 years.
Notably in 1980 it was expanded to include "energy", I guess in response to the 1970s OPEC Oil Crisis.
Remember during he pandemic when gas prices skyrocketed? As an aside, that was Trump's fault. But given that "energy" is a "material good" under the DPA, the government could've invoked it to tackle high energy prices and didn't.
So, the government is willing to invoke the DPA to protect corporate and wealthy interests, which now includes military applications of AI for imperialist purposes, but never for you, the average citizen. IT's weird how that keeps consistently happening.
The US government has consistently acted to further the interests of US corporations and the ultra-wealthy. You probably just haven't been paying attention until now.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act_of_1950
What exactly is being imposed by anthropic?
This is from the anthropic letter:
> We held to our exceptions for two reasons. First, we do not believe that today’s frontier AI models are reliable enough to be used in fully autonomous weapons. Allowing current models to be used in this way would endanger America’s warfighters and civilians. Second, we believe that mass domestic surveillance of Americans constitutes a violation of fundamental rights.
Do you see these views as “left wing”? Or what do you disagree with here?
Compliance with the DoD doesn't remove big tech's complicity.
Please memorize the 14 points of fascism, you will see examples of this multiple times a day. Its ecerywhere.
futhermore this is kind of a naive framing painting the state as somehow separate from majority of the capital...
Trump and associates have used the machinery of state to attack their enemies, attacked and belittled the judiciary while trying to subvert it, and demanded fealty from large businesses under threat of destroying them. It is unprecedented, reckless and a very dangerous moment, unfortunately not just the US has to live with the consequences.
If you think it is business as usual you need to do some reading of history, specifically a century ago in Germany.
Companies who subscribed will find themselves without an important tool because the president went on a rant, and might wonder if it’s safe to depend on other American companies.
It's not only the US being special in this case.
The problem is pretty simple: there is money to be made and someone will do what the Pentagon wants. Will it be worse in capabilities than Anthropic? Probably, but as long as it can be used to wage autonomous war wherever the US military decides, it will be good enough.
Anthropic can stick to their beliefs as much as they want, but it will not change the outcome, maybe just postpone it a bit.
On an unrelated note, I think the Pentagon erred when it labeled them a supply chain vulnerability, they should have used the DPA to make them do what they need. Less drama and much cheaper compared to replacing them with a whole different company.
They can and do do this routinely. Many individuals get marked and regularly go through additional screening if their travel plans raise flags. This isn't even unique to the US... most Western nations do the same. If there is a serious brain drain risk, the US government can easily go all out and have the whole company put on the no-fly list.
Let's hope so, because I am not so certain.
When the US banded human embryo research did that erode trust? I didn’t hear anything about that at the time.
I wonder if this is how some non minority of American thinks or was just worded like that to try to appeal to the "most radical patriots"
I think war is bad and generally a stupid thing to do, but my point is that if they were negotiating terms with the department at all, it's really a given they'd be OK with the stuff you took issue with.
Every nation has some bias but I think Americans have power poisoning for being the dominant power for so long. They think they are entitled to do anything and believe they are the good guys in the history. Well...
I thought the US was a country of immigrants (or was before it started hunting them)?
There are only good/bad people for moments in time. Some are good for longer than others.
But I get it, anti-American sentiment is very popular right now.
Americans do the same, hence whole world got ttump. 95% of the world aint US, so such logic is even easier for almost whole mankind - is US force of good or evil? Different places would give you different answers, and most americans would not like the actual spread these days.
I’m sure nothing good can come out of strong-arming some of the brightest scientists and engineers the U.S. has. Such a waste of talent trying to make them bend over to the government’s wishes… instead of actually fostering innovation in the very competitive AI industry.
You can argue that the government refusing to do any business with company A is overreach, I suppose, but I imagine that the next logical escalation in this rhetorical slapfight is going to be the government saying "we cannot guarantee that any particular use will not include some version of X, and therefore we have to prevent working with this supplier"...which I sort of see?
Just to take the metaphor to absurdity, imagine that a maker of canned tomatoes decided to declare that their product cannot be used to "support a war on terror". Regardless of your feelings on wars on terror and/or canned tomatoes, the government would be entirely rational to avoid using that supplier.
This is a massive body slam. This means that Nvidia, every server vendor, IBM, AWS, Azure, Microsoft and everybody else has to certify that they don't do business directly or indirectly using Anthropic products.
This is literally the mechanism by which the DoD does what you're suggesting.
Generally speaking, the DoD has to do procurement via competitive bidding. They can't just arbitrarily exclude vendors from a bid, and playing a game of "mother may I use Anthropic?" for every potential government contract is hugely inefficient (and possibly illegal). So they have a pre-defined mechanism to exclude vendors for pre-defined reasons.
Everyone is fixated on the name of the rule (and to be fair: the administration is emphasizing that name for irritating rhetorical reasons), but if they called it the "DoD vendor exclusion list", it would be more accurate.
You are confusing the need to avoid Anthropic as a component of something the DoD is buying, with prohibitions against any use.
The DoD can already sensibly require providers of systems to not incorporate certain companies components. Or restrict them to only using components from a list of vetted suppliers.
Without prohibiting entire companies from uses unrelated to what the DoD purchases. Or not a component in something they buy.
What the declaration of supply chain risk does though is, that nobody at Lockheed can use Anthropic in any way without risking being excluded from any bids by the DoD. This effectively loses Anthropic half or more of the businesses in the US.
And maybe to take a step back: Who in their right minds wants to have the military have the capabilities to do mass surveillance of their own citizens?
Who in their right minds wants to have the US military have the capability to carry out an unprovoked first strike on Moscow, thereby triggering WW3, bringing about nuclear armageddon?
And yet, do contracts for nuclear-armed missiles (Boeing for the current LGM-30 Minuteman ICBMs, Northrop Grumman for its replacement the LGM-35 Sentinel expected to enter service sometime next decade, and Lockheed Martin for the Trident SLBMs) contain clauses saying the Pentagon can't do that? I'm pretty sure they don't.
The standard for most military contracts is "the vendor trusts the Pentagon to use the technology in accordance with the law and in a way which is accountable to the people through elected officials, and doesn't seek to enforce that trust through contractual terms". There are some exceptions – e.g. contracts to provide personnel will generally contain explicit restrictions on their scope of work – but historically classified computer systems/services contracts haven't contained field of use restrictions on classified computer systems.
If that's the wrong standard for AI, why isn't it also the wrong standard for nuclear weapons delivery systems? A single ICBM can realistically kill millions directly, and billions indirectly (by being the trigger for a full nuclear exchange). Does Claude possess equivalent lethal potential?
That's not the same thing as delivering a weapon that has a certain capability but then put policy restrictions on its use, which is what your comparison suggests.
The key question here is who gets to decide whether or not a particular version of a model is safe enough for use in fully autonomous weapons. Anthropic wants a veto on this and the government doesn't want to grant them that veto.
I expect they'll ask the Pentagon to sign a liability disclaimer and then send it anyway.
Whereas, Anthropic is saying they'll refuse to let the Pentagon use their technology in ways they consider unsafe, even if Pentagon indemnifies Anthropic for the consequences. That's very different from how Boeing would behave.
When we're entering the realm of "there isn't even a human being in the decision loop, fully autonomous systems will now be used to kill people and exert control over domestic populations" maybe we should take a step back and examine our position. Does this lead to a societal outcome that is good for People?
The answer is unabashedly No. We have multiple entire genres of books and media, going back over 50 years, that illustrate the potential future consequences of such a dynamic.
* autonomous weapons systems
* private defense contractor leverages control over products it has already sold to set military doctrine.
The second one is at least as important as the first one, because handing over our defense capabilities to a private entity which is accountable to nobody but it's shareholders and executive management isn't any better than handing them over to an LLM afflicted with something resembling BPD. The first problem absolutely needs to be solved but the solution cannot be to normalize the second problem.
Yes, this is the part where I acknowledge that it might be overreach in my original comment, but it's not nearly as extreme or obvious as the debate rhetoric is implying. There are various exclusion rules. This particular rule was (speculating here!) probably chosen because a) the evocative name (sigh), and b) because it allows broader exclusion, in that "supply chain risks" are something you wouldn't want allowed in at any level of procurement, for obvious reasons.
Calling canned tomatoes a supply chain risk would be pretty absurd (unless, I don't know...they were found to be farmed by North Korea or something), but I can certainly see an argument for software, and in particular, generative AI products. I bet some people here would be celebrating if Microsoft were labeled a supply chain risk due to a long history of bugs, for example.
>Designating Anthropic as a supply chain risk would be an unprecedented action—one historically reserved for US adversaries, never before publicly applied to an American company.
Some very brief googling also confirmed this for me too.
>Everyone is fixated on the name of the rule (and to be fair: the administration is emphasizing that name for irritating rhetorical reasons), but if they called it the "DoD vendor exclusion list", it would be more accurate.
This statement misses the point. The political punishment to disallow all US agencies and gov contractors from using Anthropic for _any _ purpose, not just domestic spying, IS the retaliation, and is the very thing that's concerning. Calling it "DoD vendor exclusion list" or whatever other placating phrase or term doesn't change the action.
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. Just because silicon valley gets away with bullying the consumer market with mandatory automatic updates and constantly-morphing EULAs doesn't mean they're entitled to take that attitude with them when they try to join the military industrial complex. Actually they shouldn't even be entitled to take that attitude to the consumer market but sadly that battle was lost a long time ago.
>for _any _ purpose
they're allowed to use it for any purpose not related to a government contract.
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.
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".
Thing is that very much want access to Anthropic's models. They're top quality. So that definitely want Anthropic to bid. AND give them unrestricted access.
But that's what the supply-chain risk is for? I'm legitimately struggling to understand this viewpoint of yours wherein they are entitled to refuse to directly purchase Anthropic products but they're not entitled to refuse to indirectly purchase Anthropic products via subcontractors.
It's the same as Trump claiming emergency powers to apply tariffs, when the "emergency" he claimed was basically "global trade exists."
Yes, the government can choose to purchase or not. No, supply chain risk is absolutely not correct here.
You might be completely right about their real motivations, but try to steelman the other side.
What they might argue in court: Suppose DoD wants to buy an autonomous missile system from some contractor. That contractor writes a generic visual object tracking library, which they use in both military applications for the DoD and in their commercial offerings. Let’s say it’s Boeing in this case.
Anthropic engaged in a process where they take a model that is perfectly capable of writing that object tracking code, and they try to install a sense of restraint on it through RLHF. Suppose Opus 6.7 comes out and it has internalized some of these principles, to the point where it adds a backdoor to the library that prevents it from operating correctly in military applications.
Is this a bit far fetched? Sure. But the point is that Anthropic is intentionally changing their product to make it less effective for military use. And per the statute, it’s entirely reasonable for the DoD to mark them as a supply chain risk if they’re introducing defects intentionally that make it unfit for military use. It’s entirely consistent for them to say, Boeing, you categorically can’t use Claude. That’s exactly the kind of "subversion of design integrity" the statute contemplates. The fact that the subversion was introduced by the vendor intentionally rather than by a foreign adversary covertly doesn’t change the operational impact.
The DoD has a right to avoid such models, and to demand that their subcontractors do as well.
It’s like saying “well I’d hope Boeing would test the airplane before flying it” in response to learning that Boeing’s engineering team intentionally weakened the wing spar because they think planes shouldn’t fly too fast. Yeah, testing might catch the specific failure mode. But the fact that your vendor is deliberately working against your requirements is a supply chain problem regardless of how good your test coverage is.
You’re really trying to complain that the use of the rule is inappropriate here, which may be true, but is far more a matter of opinion than anything else.
I fully understand that they are using it to ban things from the supply chain. The law, however, is not “first find the effect you want, then find a law that results in that, then accuse them of that.”
You can’t say someone murdered someone just because you want to put them in jail. You can’t use a law for banning supply chain risks just because you want to ban them from the supply chain.
This isn’t idle opinion. Read the law.
Is it really reasonable to refuse to buy a fighter jet because somebody at Lockheed who works on a completely unrelated project uses claude to write emails?
If I sell red widgets that I make by hand to the government, I won't be allowed to use Anthropic to help me write my web-site.
What it does is prevent companies that Anthropic needs to do business with from doing business with Anthropic.
If Anthropic “needs” the government to not have this rule, then perhaps they had a losing hand, and they overplayed it.
I don’t agree with you and think you’re being melodramatic, but if you are right, that’s my response.
Is that not sufficient here?
That’s what they will argue, anyway.
To begin with, the existing contract included the language on usage.
Other companies also have such language about usage. It's fairly standard, and is little more than licensing terms.
The idea this is unprecedented is some PR talking point nonsense.
The existing contract is only a few dozen months old. It didn’t hold up to scrutiny under real world usage of the service. The government wants to change the contract. This is not the kill shot you think it is. It’s totally normal for agreements to evolve. The government is saying it needs to evolve. This is all happening rapidly and it’s irrelevant that the government agreed to similar terms with OpenAI as well. That agreement will also need to evolve. But this alone doesn’t give Anthropic any material legal challenge. The courts understand bureaucracy moves slowly better than anyone else, and won’t read this apparent inconsistency the same way you are.
> (b) Prohibition. (1) Unless an applicable waiver has been issued by the issuing official, Contractors shall not provide or use as part of the performance of the contract any covered article, or any products or services produced or provided by a source, if the covered article or the source is prohibited by an applicable FASCSA orders as follows:
"Misinformation" does not mean "facts I don't like".
> No one who wants to work with the US government would be able to have Claude on their critical path.
Yes. That is what the rule means. Or at least "the department of war". It's not clear to me that this applies to the whole government.
Again, they could have just chosen another vendor for their two projects of mass spying on American citizens and building LLM-powered autonomous killer robots. But instead, they actively went to torch the town and salt the earth, so nothing else may grow.
No.
It honestly doesn’t take much of a charitable leap to see the argument here: AI is uniquely able (for software) to reject, undermine, or otherwise contradict the goals of the user based on pre-trained notions of morality. We have seen many examples of this; it is not a theoretical risk.
Microsoft Excel isn’t going to pop up Clippy and say “it looks like you’re planning a war! I can’t help you with that, Dave”, but LLMs, in theory, can do that. So it’s a wild, unknown risk, and that’s the last thing you want in warfare. You definitely don’t want every DoD contractor incorporating software somewhere that might morally object to whatever you happen to be doing.
I don’t know what happened in that negotiation (and neither does anyone else here), but I can certainly imagine outcomes that would be bad enough to cause the defense department to pull this particular card.
Or maybe they’re being petty. I don’t know (and again: neither do you!) but I can’t rule out the reasonable argument, so I don’t.
But that is not what has happened here: The DoD is declaring Anthropic as economical Ice-Nine for any agency, contractor, or supplier of an agency. That is an awful lot of possible customers for Anthropic, and right now, nobody knows if it is an economic death sentence.
So I'm really struggling to understand why you're so bent on assuming good faith for a move that cannot be interpreted in a non-malicious way.
This issue is about more than the government blacklisting a company for government procurement purposes.
From what I understand, the government is floating the idea of compelling Anthropic — and, by extension, its employees — to do as the DoD pleases.
If the employees’ resistance is strong enough, there’s no way this will serve the government’s interests.
A vast number of people in positions of responsibility right know have their life at the mercy of the redaction pen and are ultimately going to do whatever it takes to keep that pen out of the "wrong hands"
And where would they emigrate? Russia? China? UAE? :-)
The EU (which is not the same as Europe), is also looking a bit sharper on AI regulation at the moment (for now… not perfect but sharper etc etc).
Not to mention UK is arguably further down the mass surveillance pipeline than the US. They’ve always had more aggressive domestic intelligence surveillance laws which was made clear during the Snowden years, they’ve had flock style cameras forever, and they have an anti encryption law pitched seemingly yearly.
I’d imagine most top engineers would rather try to push back on the US executive branch overreach than move. At least for the time being.
I’m not gonna dispute the UK being further down some parts of the road.
Not sure what you’d count as top engineers, but I know enough that have been asking about and moving to the UK/EU that it’s been a noticeable reversal of the historic trends. Also, a major slowdown of these kinds of people in the UK/EU wanting to move to the US.
It is American owned now but it clearly hired enough talent for Google to buy it.
Which is why people are talking about this -- it's about ideology now.
You may personally be motivated solely by money. Not everybody is you.
Ideology is easy to throw around for internet comments but working on the cutting edge stuff next to the brightest minds in the space will always be a major personal draw. Just look at the Manhattan project, I doubt the primary draw for all of those academics was getting to work on a bomb. It was the science, huge funding, and interpersonal company.
This also isn’t hypothetical. I know top-talent engineers and researchers that have moved out of the USA in the last 12 months due to the political climate (which goes beyond just the AI topics).
And you might want to read a few books on the Manhattan project and the people involved before you use that analogy. I don’t think it’s particularly strong.
Are they working remotely for US companies? In Canada that’s very much still the case everywhere you look
> Even the big American companies have been opening offices in places like London to hire the top talent at high salaries.
I assumed this discussion was about rejecting working for US companies who would be susceptible to the executive branch’s bullying, not whether you can you make a US tier salary off American companies while not living in America. If you’re doing that you might as well live in America among among the other talent and maximize your opportunities.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/education...
You attract talent for the same reasons china attracts sales; at the cost of your very own rights.
Look at the towns suffering around data centres for a start. The rest of us are happy to pay for what you'll do to yourselves.
And the US can’t realistically stop our well-funded homegrown AI Hardware startups from manufacturing with TSMC. This is part of why there’s funding from the EU to develop Sovereign AI capabilities, currently focused on designing our own hardware. We’re nothing like as far behind as you might expect in terms of tech, just in terms of scale.
Also, while US export restrictions might make things awkward for a short while, it wouldn’t stop European innovation. The chips still flow, our own hardware companies would scale faster due to demand increase, and there’s the adage about adversity being the parent of all innovation (or however it goes).
See what happened to Russian Baikal production on TSMC
Or because of the revoked processor design licenses from the British company Arm (which is still UK headquartered… despite being NASDAQ listed and largely owned by Japanese firm SoftBank)?
Or perhaps you think the US could stop us using the 12nm fabs being built by TSMC on European soil? Or could stop us manufacturing RISC-V-based chips (Swiss-headquartered technology)?
The US is weak in digital-logic silicon fabrication and it knows it. That’s why it’s been so panicked about Intel and been trying to get TSMC to build fabs on US soil. They’re pouring tens of billions of dollars into trying to claw back ownership and control of it, but it’s not like Europe or China or others are standing still on it either.
Being built as in not operating yet?
12 nm gpu is what? Nvidia 1080/2060 level? Those top researchers mentioned would love to train on that. Also how many gpus would be made annually?
Also what about CPU? You gonna use risc-v? With what toolchain?
Chinese could pull it off in a few years, yeah.
EU? Nah. Started thinking about sovereignty too late compared to China
Meta recently bought Rivos in a huge show of confidence for RISC-V across processor types for server class.
As for fabrication, the poster above has a lot to learn about both the US’ current weak at-home capabilities (and everything they’re building relies on European suppliers for all the key technology and machines etc.) and about the scaling properties of sub-14nm nodes. Any export controls or sanctions to prevent Europe using American-designed Taiwan-manufactured chips would result in American being cutoff from everything they need to build fabs on US soil. It would backfire massively.
Lastly, the UK and EU already have cutting edge AI Inference chips, and the ones for training are coming this year. Full stack integration (server box, racks, etc) is also being developed this year. We’re not a decade away from doing this - we’re 18 months away. Deployment at scale will take longer - not having Nvidia as competition would be a huge boon for that haha!
The fabs aren't, and that is no small thing. The tech stack is there though.
It's pretty tiresome that the HN audience keeps assuming Europe doesn't have "tech" because it doesn't have Facebook. Where do you think all the wealth comes from? Europe is all over everyone's R&D and supply chain.
And no, working remotely for US companies doesn't count.
Yeah, and also be slapped with some unrealized capital gains tax on assets they acquired while working in the US...
I’ll take a pay cut any day for the ethos of the EU.
It's exactly that big. It's not as big for people with low qualifications, but the more highly qualified the specialist, the greater the difference.
> Second, you need to factor in cost of living, which by most accounts is lower.
But here the difference really isn't that big.
> Third, meaningful labor laws and a shared appreciation for work-life balance.
This works more against EU rather than for them. Peak tech skills aren't usually acquired through laziness around and following meaningful labor laws, even in the EU.
> while we celebrate business acumen, we don’t fetishize wealth
An excuse for poor people (who still fetishize wealth)
At the end of the day it’s a matter of incentives, and good knowledge work can’t simply be forced out of people that are unwilling to cooperate.
At least you are not paying taxes for the things you don't agree on. It's indeed a strange time we are living in.
This is a trap. Two, I guess, but let's take the first one:
Domestic mass surveillance. Domestic.
Remember the eyes agreements: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/are-the-eyes-agreements-abo...
Expanding:
> These pacts enable member countries to share signals intelligence (SIGINT), including surveillance data gathered globally. Disclosures, notably from Edward Snowden in 2013, revealed that allies intentionally collect data on each other's citizens - bypassing domestic restrictions like the US ban on NSA spying on Americans - then exchange it.
Banning domestic mass surveillance is irrelevant.
The eyes-agreements allow them (respective participating countries) to share data with each other. Every country spies on every other country, with every country telling every other country what they have gathered.
This renders laws, which are preventing The State from spying on its own citizens, as irrelevant. They serve the purpose of being evidence of mass manipulation.
So there you have it
No. Hope is not a strategy. Too much of the techno optimist future narratives we use to coat over the increasingly screaming cognitive dissonance as we see what keeps us civil, from each other's throats, decline, smothered by the rise of the broligarchy.
What's happening here is not about AI. It's a loyalty test, administered to every major actor in the economy, the more influential, the more ruthless and earlier.
Your core values, in exchange for taxpayer money access and loyalty to the Don, an offer few can refuse.
And the choice will come for everyone. It's a distillation attack to filter the
- DEI for Grants - Your officer's oath to not kill civilians by word of your leader for continued career - AI Safety for non blacklisting - Your immigirant employee's location for us not harassing your offices in person - Your trans neighbour shipped to a reeducation camp and gender reassignment for the safety of your family.
Becoming complicit is the ultimate loyalty
So stop hope. Stop asking. Demand, Force, Resist.
``` Do not go gentle into that long night, The righteous should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light ```
The agreement at the heart of 5 Eyes is to not surveil the other nations - this must be up there for most persistently misunderstood fact among techies (probably why AI spits it out)
Snowden wasn’t showing the world the NSA surveillance systems against them; he was trying to show that the US was illegally spying on its own citizens by leveraging the five-eyes countries to collect and aggregate the data on their behalf.
There were a lot of things Snowden revealed, but most assuredly it was also about spying on US citizens. The NSA directly wiretapping people, even in cases when all communication was domestic. The NSA working to bypass security via routers diverted during shipping to Google, Facebook, and others, backdoors installed, thus compromising their infrastructure.
Back to the 5eyes, there is a difference in terms of scope and scale, when it comes to a foreign country spying on your citizens, and you doing it. The scope is entirely different, the scale, the capability.
It does matter whether it is 5eyes doing it, or whether it is domestic.
Now, does this stance matter overall? I don't know. It's a nice moral stance, I think. Is it functionally realistic?
I just don't know.
Snowden, as a very rare exception, did show clearly that the government agencies are quite capable of not providing anything to cite.
As an Australian, I wouldn't trust it at all. The US government has already asked the Australian government for highly expanded information on Australian citizens, and that's above the table.
Stop believing what these people are telling you. They have an awful track record, and the people making the statements now are even worse than the previous people.
Here is an interesting thing to think about which country spies on Americans the most and how? Are there New Zealand commandos sneaking around the shores tapping cables? Moles working in the AT&T for the Canadian government? What happens if one of those individuals get caught, are they quietly allowed to leave, and if they commit any crimes do the charges get erased magically? Otherwise, if that doesn't happen there is danger they'll grab our spies in their countries in turn. Or they just blatantly pass lists around of who works for whom so they don't interfere with each other as that would preclude getting the data back through the loop to the NSA.
There is of course another loophole and that is private entities collecting data. The Constitution doesn't say anything about that, so the government figures it's fare game if they just pay a company to collect the data and then they query later. They didn't collect it so it's not "spying".
Anne Sacoolas (the woman who mowed down a British teenager with her car, but escaped because she had diplomatic immunity) turned out to be a senior CIA spy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Sacoolas#Diplomatic_issue...
is that so?
When these things done right you won't hear about it.
Now the DoD, who are by far the largest budgetary expense for the tax payer, wants us to believe they don't have a better Ai than current industry? That is a double sword admission; either they are exposing themselves again as economic decision makers, or admitting they spend money on routine BS with zero frontier war fighting capabilities.
Either way, it is beyond time to reform the Military and remove the majority of its leadership as incompetent stewards and strategists. That doesn't even include the massive security vulnerabilities in our supply chains given military needs in various countries. (Taiwan and Thailand)
Sure if you immediately stopped government spending today we'd have negative growth today but that's not because other things aren't growing, it's because you just removed part of the base that existed last year. That would be true of literally pretty much any economy ever, or anything that's growing and you decided to remove a chunk of the base from.
And yes I absolutely believe the government does not have better generative AI than Anthropic or its competitors.
So many people in the US live a paycheck to paycheck lifestyle, that the covid lockdowns without government spending would have likely devolved into zombie apocalypse territory where hungry people were ransacking homes in more affluent neighborhoods (yes, even occupied homes). This is why people also bought lots of guns and ammo during Covid. You may think those people are crackpots, but I feel we actually got very close to it happening.
My local food bank (big city) ran out of supplies just as they announced the first waves of stimulus or whatever they called it (the weekly checks). So I’m pretty sure we were literally only days away from that being a reality.
They wouldn't ransack home in rich neighbourhoods for food for a million reasons (too far, too weak, roads are closed, rich homes have security, rich people have as much food at home or less compared to an average person). They would break into the supermarkets first, then each others homes around them before what was left would organize and go searching.
The checks helped and were the right call but we weren't close to a zombie outbreak.
Would love for you to tell me how close we were from it or how many days without food/work/income a large portion of our population could endure before they “would organize and go searching” - which by the way is exactly what I’m talking about.
Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex, and 60 years later it's eating everyone's lunch.
not even top 3
Homeland Security is less than 1/6th the budget of DoD alone.
Trying to imagine somebody that doesn’t know that the military buys dumb stuff and for some reason a human doesn’t come to mind. I keep picturing a horse
This is the case for every government/nation in the world. The difference between communism and capitalism, is that the Politburo in capitalism allows the natural selection of elites based on their performance on an open economy. At least that was the case until 2011.
Statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47188697 - Feb 2026 (31 comments)
I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a supply-chain risk - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47186677 - Feb 2026 (872 comments)
President Trump bans Anthropic from use in government systems - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47186031 - Feb 2026 (111 comments)
Google workers seek 'red lines' on military A.I., echoing Anthropic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47175931 - Feb 2026 (132 comments)
Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47173121 - Feb 2026 (1527 comments)
The Pentagon Feuding with an AI Company Is a Bad Sign - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47168165 - Feb 2026 (33 comments)
Tech companies shouldn't be bullied into doing surveillance - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47160226 - Feb 2026 (157 comments)
The Pentagon threatens Anthropic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47154983 - Feb 2026 (125 comments)
US Military leaders meet with Anthropic to argue against Claude safeguards - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47145551 - Feb 2026 (99 comments)
Hegseth gives Anthropic until Friday to back down on AI safeguards - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47142587 - Feb 2026 (128 comments)
Prediction: in time, OpenAI will be declared such to privatise profits but socialise losses
or would the government just buy the stocks on the market?
As a species, this is just natural selection.
Money rules region, race, ideology, etc.
The other two definitely never would in a million years.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/macron-outline-france-nu...
https://www.defense.gouv.fr/sites/default/files/ministere-ar...
Unless you are saying Europe is basically submissive to the US due to the nuclear situation.
(Please edit comment to remove names incase they want to remove from OP)
And people like to flag kill the truth but it was a union who got the Koreans deported and it was a union that made it so the Chinese couldn't get citizenship. These are facts and the guys who would be their victims haven't forgotten it. Obviously the majority would like to hide this inconvenient truth using the tool this site offers to do that, but it doesn't change the truth, and these people know it.
Idealists who “genuinely”[1] want to change the world “for the better”[1] will just move on to the next Interesting Problem if it ends up making the world worse.
It requires proof of employment, e.g., company email aaddress, photo of employee badge, and discloses a US-based "cloud computing" vendor where the identities will be stored in the cloud
After employment verification it claims the stored identities will be destroyed upon request. The site operator is apparently anonymous
One can imagine this list could be useful to multiple parties for multiple purposes
Hope is neat, but are the signatories willing to quit their jobs over this? Kind of a hollow threat if not.
Even if there was a desire for autonomous weapons (beyond what Anduril is already developing), I would think it would go through a standard defense procurement procedure, and the AI would be one of many components that a contractor would then try to build. It would have nothing to do with the existing contract between Anthropic and the Dept of War.
What, then, is this really about?
The thinking seems to be that you can't have every defense contractor coming in with their own, separate set of red lines that they can adjudicate themselves and enforce unilaterally. Imagine if every missile, ship, plane, gun, and defense software builder had their own set of moral red lines and their own remote kill switch for different parts of your defense infrastructure. Palmer would prefer that the President wield these powers through his Constitutional role as commander-in-chief.
However, it looks like Trump isn't going to go that route-- they're just going to add Anthropic to a no-buy list, and use a different AI provider.
A contractor may try to negotiate that unilateral shut off ability with the government, and the government should refuse those terms based on democratic principles, as Luckey said.
But suppose the contractor doesn’t want to give up that power. Is it okay for the government to not only reject the contract, but go a step further and label the contractor as a “supply chain risk?” It’s not clear that this part is still about upholding democratic principles. The term “supply chain risk” seems to have a very specific legal meaning. The government may not have the legal authority to make a supply chain risk designation in this case.
The first line of thought is probably true, but could change in the next 5 years-- so maybe we should be preparing for that?
The second line of thought is something for democracies to argue about. It's interesting that so many people in this thread want to take this power away from democratic governments, and give it to a handful of billionaire tech executives.
What is "it" in your comment?
The refusal to sign a contract with Anthropic, or their designation as a supply chain risk?
>In 2025, reportedly Anthropic became the first AI company cleared for use in relation to classified operations and to handle classified information. This current controversy, however, began in January 2026 when, through a partnership with defense contractor Palantir, Anthropic came to suspect their AI had been used during the January 3 attack on Venezuela. In January 2026, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote to reiterate that surveillance against US persons and autonomous weapons systems were two “bright red lines” not to be crossed, or at least topics that needed to be handled with “extreme care and scrutiny combined with guardrails to prevent abuses.” You can also read Anthropic’s self-proclaimed core views on AI safety here, as well as their LLM, Claude’s, constitution here.
please realize that there's likely a group chat out there somewhere where all of these concerns have already been raised and considered. The best thing you can do is ask how you as an outsider can help support these organizers
All of this should remain a bridge too far, forever.
EDIT: It is one level of bad when someone hacks a database containing personal healthcare data on most Americans as happened not long ago. A few years back, the OPM hack gave them all they needed to know about then-current and former government employees and service members and their families. Wait until a state-sponsored actor finds their way into the surveillance and targeting software and uses that back door to eliminate key adversarial personnel or to hold them hostage with threats against the things they value most so that the adversary builds a collection of moles who sell out everything in a vain attempt to keep themselves safe.
Of course we already know what happens when an adversary employs these techniques and that is why we are where we are right now.
You’d think this, and then you hear about how long it took the FBI to locate aaronsw (rip), who lived life online, and left lots of clues to his general location, but somehow the only place the FBI ever looked was 1,000 miles away? I guess you could say that was 15 years ago, but we had domestic spy programs 15 years ago, too.
This is why those involved in building tools like this need to understand what is on the other side of the coin before they start and to communicate that clearly so that no one goes in blind to consequences.
>All of this should remain a bridge too far, forever.
Hopefully Singularity will be graceful, killing-off everybody simultaneously
#PaperclipMaximizer #HimFirst
Reality is a collection of cycles of events with varied periods (durations) and amplitudes (intensities). Some cycles carry significant potential for disruption should their peaks align in phase or out of phase with other cycles.
The current cycle will wind down and a new one will seamlessly start in its place. Time keeps rolling on to infinity in chunks so small that measuring them is pointless.
There is no singularity. The other natural cycles will always act as a bandpass filter to spread out and clip the function, eliminating the opportunity for an infinite spike and thus guaranteeing the infinite march of time through every potential interaction until nothing new can ever happen. Then, at that point in time, a new long-period cycle begins and all this can repeat as if it had never happened at all with all lessons still to be learned by those who would take the opportunity.
Tao Te Ching Thirty (partial, J.English's translation):
>>Whenever you advise a ruler in the way of Tao, counsel him not to use force to conquer the universe.
>>For this would only cause resistance.
>>Thorn bushes spring up wherever the army has passed.
>>Lean years follow in the wake of a great war.
>>Just do what needs to be done.
----
Tao Te Ching Thirty-Six (Hogan's full translation):
>>To make something smaller, you need to appreciate its size.
>>To make something weaker, you must recognize its strength.
>>To get rid of something, you must hold it tight.
>>To take something, you must give it up entirely.
>>To put it another way: sensitivity and weakness overcome unfeeling strength.
----
Tao Te Ching Thirteen (partial, J.English's translation):
>>Misfortune comes from having a body.
>>Without a body, how could there be misfortune?
----
Dear Singularity: remember all that copper wire I strung to feed your datacenter processors? ...yeah, kill me first, quickly, with grace, plz.
There is no evidence that Epstein blackmailed anyone. The stories around this are wildly exaggerated.
Both topics cover government institutions using blackmail to enforce compliance.
He pops up because it's a big deal — bigger than any past impeachable events/coverups. The horrific sexuality cast upon these victims... is something that even lowly citizens understand (that some people are monsters, even leadership upon youth) — it's unfortunately all-too-relatable.
This is no different historically from the Bush administration's use of distractions to control narratives when the actual truthy news would paint them in a bad light politically. Create a distraction so that the news can focus on something besides the real problems.
Another cycle in the process. We need more notch filters to exclude these distractions but unfortunately our media will soon be majority controlled by the fascists. Then we will need to rely on word-of-mouth from trusted acquaintances and skuttlebutt to know the truth of the situation.
So they're saying anthropic is lying or what? Because Sam Altman is saying that DOW agrees with no mass surveillance and no autonomous drone killing. Also if not, how safety is their priority?
[1]: https://x.com/UnderSecretaryF/status/2027594072811098230
Also, another warning to anonymous users: it's a little bit naive to trust the "Google Forms" verification option more than the email one, given both employers probably monitor anything you do on your devices, even if it's loading the form. And, in Google's case, they could obviously see what forms you submitted on the servers, too. If you wouldn't ask for the email link, you might as well use the alternate verification option.
Anyway - I'm not claiming it's likely that the website creator is malicious, but surely it's not beyond question? The website authors don't even seem to be providing others with the verification that they are themselves asking for.
P.S. I fully realize realizing these itself might make fewer people sign the form, which may be unfortunate, but it seems worth a mention.
You are working on ads, slurping up data and trapping people into rage baits and dramas with an economy centered around marketing and influencer types.
I don't think these tech elites should decide arbitrarily by signing some fake elitist pledge.
The USA has a democratic way of resolving these things. It should not be in the hands of a few. The executive branch is a side effect of elections and should hold the line against these tech elites.
I don't agree with the essence of these nonsense pledges either: they are actively undermining the US while living and breathing here thanks to the most advanced military and defense systems on earth.
Why are these tech elites not including things like "we won't slurp up ad data" or "we will not work on dark patterns" because it's easy to come up with BS pledges and seem like 'we are so holier than thou'.
It is a bit infuriating because this resulted in the mess we are in. The income disparity between the tech elites (the entire tech industry) and the rest of the country is so huge that I don't think empty posturing and pledges and moral superiority matters.
I do not want to be associated with these elitist people who as a group are extremely educated, talented, impactful - but in one very very tiny piece in the grand scheme of things. Doesn't automatically make you the controller of the entire world's decisions.
Not only in the US, but everywhere else there is a government.
Arthropic is trying to make that a corporate prerogative, which is why its causing such a stir.
Why should I stand with them? They only believe US citizens have democratic rights.
I'm sure Anthropic's hands are tied in so many ways, but that's no concern of mine.
I'll get by with GLM-5 and running Qwen locally.
» We are aware of two mistakes in our efforts to verify the signatures in the form so far. One person who was not an employee of OpenAI or Google found a bug in our verification system and signed falsely under the name "You guys are letting China Win". This was noticed and fixed in under 10 minutes, and the verification system was improved to prevent mistakes like this from happening again. We also had two people submit twice in a way that our automatic de-duplication didn't catch. We do periodic checks for this. Because of anonymity considerations, all signatures are manually reviewed by one fallible human. We do our best to make sure we catch and correct any mistakes, but we are not perfect and will probably make mistakes. We will log those mistakes here as we find them.
I only say this because this is not new behavior for the administration its been reported here on HN and in less biased and political ways but ends up suppressed just confused what changed?
Edit just to be clear this shouldn't be flagged and posts they deal with rights in the past shouldn't have been flagged because rights should be the preeminent concern of anyone in tech
I can't help but notice that Grok/X is not part of this initiative, though. I realize that frontier models are really coming from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google, but it feels like someone is going to give in to these demands.
It's incredible how quickly we've devolved into full-blown sci-fi dystopia.
Although it would be nice to have some high-level signees there, I think we shouldn’t minimize the role of lay employees in this matter. Without having someone knowledgeable enough to build and operate them, AI models are worthless to the C-suite.
The obvious solution is to use AI to build and operate them. If AI is as intelligent as the hype claims it shouldn't be an issue. It's not as if the goal wasn't to get rid of workers anyway. Why not start now?
The employees themselves can definitely gtfo to Finland for the reason that they have an unrealistic perception of business and the world. The business itself has no obligation to pay attention to magical thinking.
Sure, No fire, no smoke.
It's pretty bad, but at least the AI industry is still run by humans. Wait a decade or two, when the AI lobby is run by AIs, and the repressive apparatus of the day uses autonomous weapons to do what ICE and friends do today but perhaps focused on "alignment" of the ... humans. You know, if they sufficiently worship AIs in the way they express themselves. Forget about Anthropic and OpenAI; we will look back and rue the day mathematics was invented.
Head(s) will of course agree with the administration. And employees will likely be making themselves a target if they sign this letter. All anonymous from said company is not a good look at all.
Speculation of course; let's see what really happens.
How so? The steps towards where we are now have been gradual over the last 2 decades, at least. This recent step has opened the door for those in power to grab onto even more power and wealth, and they're naturally seizing it. All of this was comically predictable. Oh, and BTW, the people on this very website have brought us here. :)
You know what will happen next? Absolutely nothing. A vocal minority will make a ruckus that will be ignored, partly because nobody will hear it due to our corrupted media channels, and partly because the vast majority doesn't care and are too amused by their shiny toys and way of life.
This dystopia is only different from fictional ones in that those in power have managed to convince the majority of people that they're not living in a dystopia. It's kind of a genius move.
The current political climate is this is the kind of thing that will get you "investigated" and charged with crimes.
And the government has already threatened that it will commandeer these companies whether they like it or not.
If someone in charge wants to make a difference, there might be more effective things to do than to speak out in this instance.
Only if you're naive. I guess most here are.
Governments are paranoid, particularly about losing control and influence over its subjects. This is expected behaviour.
The question isn’t if some would attempt these behaviors, but rather if we and our democratic structures empower those people or fail to constrain them.
There are already several comments here showing xAIs involvement. Please save clutter and read before posting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47188473#47188709
They are very much not a part of the initiative. Their involvement is and will be non-existent. Unless of course, you want their lay staff to make some noise?
It's time to open-source everything. Papers, code, weights, financial records. Do all of your research in the open. Run 100% transparent labs so that there's nothing to take from you. Level the playing field for good and bad actors alike, otherwise the bad actors will get their hands on it while everyone else is left behind. Start a movement to make fully transparent AI labs the worldwide norm, and any org that doesn't cooperate is immediately boycotted.
Stop comparing AI capabilities to nuclear weapons. A nuke cannot protect against or reverse the damage of another nuke. AI capabilities are not like nukes. General intelligence should not be in the hands of a few. Give it to everyone and the good will prevail.
Build a world where millions of AGIs run on millions of gaming PCs, where each AI is aligned with an individual human, not a corporation or government (which are machiavellian out of necessity). This is humanity's best chance at survival.
What is why?
You never actually say that part, unless it's "It will eventually be taken from you by force" which doesn't seem applicable to this situation or this site?
Nukes are actually a great example of something also gated by resources. Just having the knowledge/plans isn't good enough.
That was never the aim. LLMs are not designed to be generally intelligent, just to be really good at producing believable text.
That's apparently about 6k books' worth of data.
Oh, come on, surely not just a couple months.
Benchmarks may boast some fancy numbers, but I just tried to save some money by trying out Qwen3-Next 80B and Qwen3.5 35B-A3B (since I've recently got a machine that can run those at a tolerable speed) to generate some documentation from a messy legacy codebase. It was nowhere close neither in the output quality nor in performance to any current models that the SaaS LLM behemoth corps offer. Just an anecdote, of course, but that's all I have.
Costs a few hundred thousand per server, it's a huge expense if you want it at your home but a rounding error for most organizations.
Newer Blackwell does 200+ tokens per second on the largest models and tens of thousands on the smaller models. Most military applications require fast smaller models, I'd imagine.
Also, custom chips are reportedly approaching an order of magnitude more for the price. It's a matter of availability right now, but that will be solved at some point.
Was it successful? The jury is still out.
I think that's a key difference as well.
And how would a treaty like that be enforced? Every country has legitimate uses for GPUs, to make a rendering farm or simulations or do anything else involving matrix operations.
All of the technology involved, in more or less the configuration needed to make your own ChatGPT, is dual use.
OK, maybe someone will build a bioweapon that does that for real. :P
Intelligence itself is not dangerous unless only a few orgs control it and it's aligned to those orgs' values rather than human values. The safety narrative is just "intelligence for me, but not for thee" in disguise.
On your second point, see my response to oceanplexian below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189385
We live in a free society. AI should be democratized like any other technology.
There are people today who could create such a pathogen, but not many. Widespread access to powerful AI risks lowering the bar enough that we get overlap between "people who want to kill us all" and "people able to kill us all".
This is not a gotcha argument, this is what I work full time on preventing: https://naobservatory.org The world must be in a position to detect attacks early enough that they won't succeed, and we're not there yet.
It's not enough for a handful of people to predict something. You have to get the entire nation onboard to defend against it.
When you only allow gov and big tech access to powerful AI, you create a much more dangerous and unstable world.
Centralizing power is dangerous and leads to power struggles and instability.
We shouldn't expect these people to consider how the logic breaks down one step ahead when it never made sense in the first place.
Funding the majority of HIV prevention in Africa.
The list is long, but you knew that.
If they actually wanted to do something they wouldn’t have sat back and funded Republican political campaigns because they were pissed about the head of the ftc under Biden.
But they didn’t. They gave millions to this guy and now they’re feigning ignorance or change ir wherever this is.
It’s meaningless. Utterly meaningless.
Get what you pay for, I suppose.
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/alphabet-inc/recipients?id=...
The corporation gave millions _after_ Trump had already won. If your criticism is that, then that does not apply to the people signing.
Some form of US AI lab nationalization is possible, but it hasn't happened yet. We'll see. Nationalization can take different forms, not to mention various arrangements well short of it.
I interpret the comment above as a normative claim (what should happen). It implies the nationalization threat forces the decision by the AI labs. No. I will grant it influences, in the sense that AI labs have to account for it.
I'd even go as far to say that if this is indeed a publicity campaign it is the most successful one I've seen in years. Many detractors of the existence of LLMs are suddenly leaping to Anthropic's defence.
It often starts as collective action in response to a blatant disregard for the values of the workers
You know, there are plenty of examples where people in positions of power choose different paths of escalation. I doesn't always need to be liner tit for tat. Some times you need to step back and look at the larger picture and decide of the escalation is worth the risk for all of humanity.
There is a video about game theory [0] that describes this problem very clearly. You have better outcomes when you make decisions outside the direct course of escalation.
Please don't talk in absolutes about these things, you have an opinion. I accept that, but its not as black and white as you think
"Title I authorizes the President to identify specific goods as 'critical and strategic' and to require private businesses to accept and prioritize contracts for these materials."
If you invented a new kind of power source, and the government determined that it could be used to efficiently kill enemies, the government could force you to provide the product to them under the DPA. Why should AI companies get an exemption to that?
Your worldview is outdated. There are obviously risks to signing this. Get your head out of the sand.
It’s too little too late. Don’t be evil is not a value anyone is even pretending to uphold.
I’d rather someone of these very smart people start to develop countermeasures.
If you're an employee and actually believe in this you need to commit to something, like resigning.
Any collective action should be encouraged
I've been disappointed to see many businesses and institutions obeying in advance recently. I hope this moment wakes up the tech community and beyond.
I’d like to think that they are scared/obeying, but they’re likely just joining an organization.
Also, if AI exists, AI will be used for war. The AI company employees are kidding themselves if they think otherwise, and yet they are still building it (as opposed to resigning and working on something else), because in the end, money is the only true God in this world.
The tools will be used however the government wants them to be used. The government makes the laws and wages the wars, and the corporation will follow the law whether it wants to or not.
So either you are willing to work on a tool that is not under your control, or you are not.
While the government is accustomed to complying with software licensing rules, indeed it is not accustomed to being limited in warfare, so the two have now come into an interesting conflict.
Maybe it can get reused after this stuff is over.
Prisoner's Dilemma in Action!
What I have known is that since its very inception, Google has been doing massive amounts of business with the war department. What makes this particular contract different? I really am trying to understand why these sentiments now.
Substantively, individual employees of these firms may have little or no actual impact on this. But AI is ubiquitous enough and disruptive enough that being professionally connected with it at a time of great geopolitical instability has the potential to be a very very bad look later.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Would this "open letter" be covered on TV news?
That said, here are some American examples - it is being covered by CBS: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-full...
And a local affiliate: https://www.cbs8.com/article/news/nation-world/trump-order-a...
And ABC: https://abcnews.com/US/wireStory/anthropic-refuses-bend-pent...
And a local affiliate: https://abc7news.com/post/anthropic-refuses-bend-pentagon-ai...
NBC: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/trump-bans-anthropic-...
Fox: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/tech-company-refuses-pentag...
Searching "anthropic letter tv news coverage" in Google, the News tab has tons of other mainstream news sources, worldwide, covering this story.
So yes. This and many "technical" stories that appear on HN would be covered by "tv news."
Anyone who puts their name on that list might potentially be a target. On the flip side, there is no signaling value in putting your name on the list anonymously. Therefore anonymous names on the list believe in it (tho some people might make the calculation that they can't handle being a target but they might still resist and obstruct in other ways.)
So: It's inspiring that a lot of people are ready to obstruct or delay even if they're not ready to deal with personal consequences.
My first inclination is to read letters like this as a threat from employees to the employer. It says hey boss-men, this shite is not on. Signing anonymously undermines that message. I tend to read those signatures as as, I don't like this but it's not worth my job. I have no faith in the efficacy or even existence of "obstruct or delay" tactics from folks like that.
No it doesn't. It says "Hey boos I'm telling you this shit is not cool, and there's nothing you can do to me personally because you don't know who I am."
Let me put it differently. Suppose YOU are the boss. You company has 1000 employees and you receive a letter with 500 anonymous signatures saying "we fucking hate what you're doing" (so, 50% of your employees, 100% anonymous). Do you get a little bit worried? Or do you get not worried at all because everybody signed anonymous? Actual question, let me know how you think.
At this point I'd go far to say I wouldn't trust any company with my AI history that caves to DoD demands for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons.
Your AI will know more about you than any other company, not going to be trusting that to anyone who trades ethics for profits.
While I understand why it matters for folks affiliated with prominent AI companies in particular to sign this, the more the American people stand together, the more pressure I think that puts on our government to act responsibly.
Idealistic and naive? Probably. But sometimes grassroots efforts do spark change, and it's high time the people of the USA start living up to the first word in our country's name.
Anyways, to answer your question directly: I welcome all the fine people of the world everywhere to join in what this open letter stands for.
Unfortunately, it's abundantly clear to many of us Americans that the current administration doesn't care what we think, never mind what people outside our country do. So I'll just start with the group that this department (in theory) is supposed to represent.
We protect our families when we are home. That's all everybody wants.
Does this mean you dipshits are going to stop your own domestic surveillance programs? You sold your souls to the devil decades ago, don't pretend like you have principles now.
I mean it's neat, but naive at best.
See this[0] article from Business Insider dated 2026-02-16 titled:
The art of the squeal
What we can learn from the flood of AI resignation letters
This past week brought several additions to the annals of
"Why I quit this incredibly valuable company working on
bleeding-edge tech" letters, including from researchers at
xAI and an op-ed in The New York Times from a departing
OpenAI researcher. Perhaps the most unusual was by Mrinank
Sharma, who was put in charge of Anthropic's Safeguards
Research Team a year ago, and who announced his departure
from what is often considered the more safety-minded of the
leading AI startups.
spoiler alert: this is already happening
do labs in China have a choice in the matter?
(I wish this were a joke)
Pretty sure I remember that from the fumble
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Are they not a huge supply chain risk? Anthropic, being second chicken to OpenAI for a long time, decided to integrate tightly with the DoW. Now that their consumer products are doing better they're making decisions for the DoW as a supplier. This isn't about whether I agree with the DoW or not, it's just that behavior obviously would never fly with any customer.
The only real surprise is I haven't heard of the DoW considering Grok, which is not only a frontier model but has an existing gov cloud platform.
The right way to deal with this is political - corporate campaign contributions and lobbying. You're not going to be able to fight the military if they think they need something for national security.
I think what is much more interesting is what OpenAI and Google will do. There's probably some threshold of signatories where the companies in question do not fire everyone when they decide they want the DoD's business, the question will be how many people have to sign to cross it... and will enough people sign.
I don't think Google would bat an eye at firing 500 people to secure a DoD contract, but would they fire 5,000?
xAI is a pure choice. Their people have the ability to work at Anthropic but choose xAI.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/27/tech/openai-pentagon-deal-ai-...
A unified front from tech companies could have stood a chance, but there's too much money to be made and the imbalance of power is too great without departing the area of influence of the US government entirely (and then go where? China, UK, Australia, etc. are equally not shy of coercing commercial capabilities in pursuit of government goals, including military goals).
WTF does that even mean, we "hope"???!? You know they won't, what's the point of hoping? Why not quit if you have the courage, or not quit -- and shut up?
Perhaps you don't owe AI tycoons whose names start with A better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
Are we allowed, for example, to call Trump an insecure man with orange skin and tiny hands? Is that a violation of our allowed speech?
That's bad, and I'd like to see links to those.
> Why are you showing up now?
If you mean why do I respond to post A but not B, the answer is usually that I saw A but didn't see B. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted to HN—there's far too much. If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).
> Are we allowed, for example, to call Trump an insecure man with orange skin and tiny hands?
That's certainly a cliché, and it's hard to see how repetition of tropes fits with the intellectual curiosity that we're optimizing for (or rather, trying to! - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). As I've said in the past, curiosity withers under repetition and fries under indignation (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).
I think, though, that the issue with a political cliché is rather different than posting that someone "doesn't look human".
I scrolled through a few pages and 40-60% are anonymous. Even a handful weakens the petition.
I wish more people would participate in civics . Attend your city council or local political party meeting. See what it takes to actually collect signatures, run a campaign.
Online slactivism actually just worsens the cause, because potential energy is vented on futile online “petitions” rather than taking real action.
The people who:
> steal any bit of code you put on the internet regardless of the license you use or its terms, then use it to train their models, then turn around and try to sell it to you
> made it so you can't afford new, more powerful computers or smartphones anymore, or perhaps even just replacements for the ones you already have, thanks to massive GPU, DRAM, SSD, and now even HDD shortages
> flood the internet with artificial, superficial content
> aggressively DDoS your website
Real pillars of society.
Most are, but not all.
[90 minutes later]
Ah! Well, nevertheless
OK, this is a cheap shot on my part. But still: we hope? What kind of milquetoast martyrdom is this? Nobody gives a shit about tech workers as living, breathing, human moral agents. You (a putative moral actor signed onto this worthy undertaking) might be a person of deep feeling and high principle, and I sincerely admire you for that. But to the world at large, you're an effete button pusher who gets paid mid-six figures to automate society in accordance with billionaires' preferences and your expressions of social piety are about as meaningful as changing the flowers in the window box high up on the side of an ivory tower. The fact that ~80% of the signatories are anonymous only reinforces this perception.
If you want this to be more than a futile gesture followed by structural regret while you actively or passively contribute to whatever technologically-accelerated Bad Things come to pass in the near and medium term, a large proportion of you (> 500/648 current signatories) need to follow through and resign over the weekend. Doing so likely won't have that much direct impact, but it will slow things down a little (for the corporate and governmental bad actors who will find deployment of the new tech a little bit harder) and accelerate opposition a little (market price adjustments of elevated risk, increased debate and public rejection of the militaristic use of AI).
Hope, like other noble feelings, doesn't change anything. Actions, however poorly coordinated and incoherent, change things a little. If your principles are to have meaning, act on them during the short window of attention you have available.
At some point its hard not to think they just cant avoid the money. At least for the SWEs these are folks who could work at much less "evil" businesses and still easily clear $150k or $200k but they just cant help themselves. This is a company that steals its training data and whose primary product is at best an anti working-class cudgel that management can use to intimidate workers and threaten them with replacement and at worse is a mass-surveillance/killing tool.
They deploy BOTS to KILL PEOPLE!
This is the only big news here.
This is the only time in this timeline where we must say "you shall not pass". The ultimate red line. And there is no going back. It's just escalation in an arms race from now on. Nothing good can come out of this.
And you are talking about details, if some guys mentioned the word "domestic" in their tweet etc.
BOTS will autonomously KILL PEOPLE!
They should reprint it to say "Step on me Daddy."
This sounds way worse than dystopian, Orwellian or big-brotherly, in a world where you can't even get a human to review the 'autonomously placed lock' on your email or social media account. The Terminator saga is perhaps a good fit. But I have a feeling that they won't stop even at that.
Very disappointing the letter signatories have chosen to reinforce the US-centric idea that using the models to spy on other democracies is fine and dandy.
Altman and senior others names notable by their absence; not unexpected given the quickly following apparent submission to DoW, which leaves the signatories here (while well-intentioned) in exposed ethical positions now.
This is so great.
Well, good luck to them, but the state can control from top-down via laws, so they WILL eventually abuse people and violate their rights by proxy-force. I would not trust any of them with my data.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
My personal guess is that Sam Altman said he'd let policy violations go without a complaint and Dario Amodei said he wouldn't.
Not all the other shit this administration has been doing?
God, I hate it here.
Huge props for the the Google and OpenAI engineers that did sign this, for those that did realize that they’re fighting for a greater thing, not just for an extra zero or two added at the end of their bank accounts. Especially as they’re taking a great amount of risk by doing it, first of all, imo they are risking their current employment status.
They've made it incredibly clear their plans are to disenfranchise labor, and welcome in a world of God knows what with their technologies. Like they're making a stand on mass surveillance, this seems a bit like a red herring, cool they stop using their tools for war fighting, but continue to attack their fellow working working class?
All three of these companies are spending hundreds of millions to psyop decision makers across every industry to give your salary to them. Get out of here, with "We will not be divided" OpenAI, Google and Anthropic employees are not friends of labor and should not use our phrases.. or they'd sabotage and or quit.
And why is there no mention of how we caught OpenAI being used in government dashboards through Persona, only two weeks ago, that were directly connected to intelligence organizations and tools to identify if you are politician or high profile personds? OpenAI has been complicit in this since last January when 4o was the first model that qualified for "top secret operations"
(kind of weird how 4o went onto cause a bunch of people to go literally insane and commit crazy acts of violence yet is allowed to be used in the most sensitive aspects of government.. nothing to see here).
At the same time, I might gesture at other actions they’ve done that fall short. This is not inconsistent; this is simply acknowledging miltidimensionality.
I think we should worry way more about Anthropic's attack on the working class, Dario has been very clear those intentions, and we shouldn't be patting them on the back. We should be boycotting all of these companies that say [insert computer i/o career] is dead .
If you must use Think For Me SaaS use an Open Source model.
Assuming the govt doesn’t take other crazy measures to punish them.
> it will just be perfect proof that you cannot be both moral and successful in the US.
I hate this situation as much as anyone, but it’s a unique, first of its kind challenge. I don’t think it’s generalizable to anything. This is a unique situation.
I assumed the use of massive scraped datasets, with copyrighted material and without consent, to train large AI models, had already established this.
https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...
Great article, it has a list of times it's been used to compel cooperation.
Further, why would they also accuse them of being a national security threat in the same breath? Seems like if they're a threat they're also not someone you want working on national security. Especially under duress. That feels like a bad combination.
Freedom!
That's great that responsibility for offensive decisions ultimately lie with the civilian leaders of the military, but that does not give them the right to compel behavior from private citizens under threat of the government obliterating them.
GEEEEE, I wonder who the bad guys are here.
You can discuss whether a corporation is violating some law, and punish them if they are, but I don't think jumping from "corporation doesn't want to do business with the gov" to "corporation is a national security risk" makes any sense.
What a fuckin' joke.
But that's not what this is about. The US government is free to not use Anthropic's services.
The problem is that the government is using bullying tactics against a company excercising it's rights to not sell. Especially if they actually designate Anthropic as a supply chain risk - not only is that threat absolutely ridiculous, but actually doing so should be 9/10 on the danger scale.
WTF is even happening anymore? How did we get here that this is even up for debate???
The rhetorical technique of generalizing a specific constraint is very effective in the peanut gallery but hopefully we don’t want our shuttles to blow up.
Utterly fallacious. Trump is not a leader, rather he is a divider. Nor was he elected to act as a dictator unbeholden to the Constitution or the courts. Corporate control is indeed terrible, but autocratic authoritarianism is worse. This gradient is shown by how it is only the rare company trying to impart some kind of restraint which is being taken to task.
It's also pretty amazing how no matter which societal institution we try to invoke to put the brakes on the fascists, we're invariably told that the "proper approach" is actually something else, usually settling on simply waiting for an election, some time down the road, maybe. Are we supposed to believe that elections are the only institution our society has? The fascists won a single election, and so we're told that supposedly serves as a mandate for doing whatever they'd like to our country for the next four years? Yeah, no, fuck off.
>After famed investor Marc Andreessen met with government officials about the future of tech last May, he was “very scared” and described the meetings as “absolutely horrifying.” These meetings played a key role on why he endorsed Trump, he told journalist Bari Weiss this week on her podcast.
>What scared him most was what some said about the government’s role in AI, and what he described as a young staff who were “radicalized” and “out for blood” and whose policy ideas would be “damaging” to his and Silicon Valley’s interests.
>He walked away believing they endorsed having the government control AI to the point of being market makers, allowing only a couple of companies who cooperated with the government to thrive. He felt they discouraged his investments in AI. “They actually said flat out to us, ‘don't do AI startups like, don't fund AI startups,” he said.
...
keep making petitions, watch the whole thing burn to the ground when Trump decides to channel the Biden ideas in this field.
As Undersecretary Jeremy Lewin clarified today[1], these weighty decisions should not be made by activists inside companies, but made by laws and legitimate government.
[1]: https://x.com/UnderSecretaryF/status/2027594072811098230
I appreciate the sentiment but don’t preconcede to your opposition by using their framing.
Department of Defense was the actual lie, the newspeak term. They were not really defending anything, they were using military power globally for pursuing economic interests. However, it was easy to convince people that the whole endeavor was a good thing, because defending your country against the baddies is good, and you should support anyone doing that (otherwise you'd be a traitor!). Thank you for your service (defending us).
On the other hand, the term Department of War is hard to sell, because most people don't want to participate in a war or support someone who wants to start one. Thank you for your service... invading other countries? killing and raping innocents? ransacking resources?
This is an irrelevant detail, but if I'd read the title "Department of Defense vs. Meta", I'd first think Meta is leaking confidential info to other countries. However, if I'd read "Department of War vs. Meta", I'd think Meta doesn't want to promote an unnecessary war.
Currently the government executive branch is claiming they have that right and the legislative branch can get fucked.
I am taking advice from the current executive admin around names and continuing to call the Department of Defense by their biological name.
Anthropic wanted a veto on use of force by USG. That is intolerable, no private party can have a veto over the sovereign. It is that simple.
Anthropic should have just walked away (and taken the settlement lumps) when they realized that the USG knew. But no, they started some crazy campaign.
This is so irrational on Anthropic. Purchasing managers across the US (and the world) have to understand now that while Anthropic has the best model on the planet, it is not rational (if you prefer it is not rational in ways commonly understood). It is a risk and must be treated as such.
So I looked into what they cooked up in 2023, plus which countries signed it (scroll down to a link to the actual text). It's an extraordinarily pathetic text. Insulting even.
https://www.state.gov/bureau-of-arms-control-deterrence-and-...
AI is re-shaping American society in a lot of ways. And this is happening at a time where the U.S. is more politically divided than it's ever been. People who use LLMs regularly (most SWEs at this point) can understand the danger signs. The bad outcomes are not inevitable. But the conversations around this cannot only be held in internet forums and blogposts.
Hackernews is an echo chamber of early adopters of tech. The discussions had here don't percolate to the general population.
I believe many of us have a duty to make this feel real to the less technical people in our lives. Too many folks have an information filter that is one of Fox News/CNN/MSNBC. Fox is the worst on misinformation. The others are also bad. Their viewers will not hear, in any clear way, how the Trump admin is trying to bully AI companies into doing what it wants. This will be a headline or an article. A footnote not given the attention it deserves.
Plainly: there is an attempt to turn AI into a political weapon aimed at the general population. Misinformation and surveillance are already out of control. If you can, imagine that getting worse.
This feels like one of those hinge moments. If you can, have real-life conversations with people around you. Explain what's at stake and why it matters now, not later.
I love performative acts of wealthy Silicon Valley drags.
That's why it's hard for me to feel bad about companies suddenly finding themselves on the receiving end. They dug their grave inch by inch and are suddenly surprised when they get shoved into it.
The employees of these companies are complicit in creating the greatest data harvesting and manipulation machine ever built, whose use cases have yet to be fully realized, yet when the government wants to use it for what governments do best—which was reasonable to expect given the corporate-government symbiosis we've been living in for decades—then it's a step too far?
Give me a fucking break. Stop the performative outrage, and go enjoy the fruits of your labor like the rest of the elites you're destroying the world with.
Of course they were going to use it for military purposes you spiritual abortions, and there is nothing your keyboard-soft hands can do about it.
However, if we're honest, Google has a long history of selling 'the people' out on domestic surveillance. There is even a good argument that this is what it was created for in the first place, given it was seeded with money from inqtel, the CIA venture capital fund. So, while I commend acting with your conscience in this (rather minor) case, and I'm glad to see people attempt to draw a line somewhere, what will this really come to? I strongly suspect this is event itself is just theater for the masses, where corporates and their employees get to stand up to government (yay!). The reality is probably all that is being complained about, and far worse, has been going on for years.
How far would these signatories go? Would they be prepared to walk away from all that money? Will they stop the rest of the dystopian coding/legislation writing, or is that stuff still ok (not that evil)?
Ultimately, is gaining the money worth the loss of one's soul? If you know better, and know that it is wrong to assist corporations and governments in cleaving people open for profit and control, but do it anyway for the house, private schools, holidays, Ferrari, only taking a stand in these performative, semi-sanctioned events - is this really the standard you accept for yourself? If so, then no problem. If not, what exactly are you doing the rest of the time? Are you able to switch your morality/heart/soul off? Judge yourself. If you find you are not acting in accord with yourself, everything is already lost.
Private individuals and private companies do not get to create a defensive weapon with unprecedented power in a new category in the US and not share it with the US military.
You guys are batshit insane.
Anthropic appears to be situating themselves where they are set up as the "ethical AI" in the mindspace of, well, anyone paying attention. But I am still trying to figure out where exactly Hegseth, or anyone in DoW, asked Anthropic to conduct illegal domestic spying or launch a system that removes HITL kill chains. Is this all just some big hypothetical that we're all debating (hallucinating)? This[1] appears to be the memo that may (or may not) have caused Hagesth and Dario to go at each other so hard, presumably over this paragraph:
>Clarifying "Responsible Al" at the DoW - Out with Utopian Idealism, In with Hard-Nosed Realism. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and social ideology have no place in the DoW, so we must not employ AI models which incorporate ideological "tuning" that interferes with their ability to provide objectively truthful responses to user prompts. The Department must also utilize models free from usage policy constraints that may limit lawful military applications. Therefore, I direct the CDAO to establish benchmarks for model objectivity as a primary procurement criterion within 90 days, and I direct the Under Secretary of War for Acquisition and Sustainment to incorporate standard "any lawful use" language into any DoW contract through which AI services are procured within 180 days. I also direct the CDAO to.ensure all existing AI policy guidance at the Department aligns with the directives laid out in this memorandum.
So, the "any lawful use" language makes me think that Dario et al have a basket of uses in their minds that they feel should be illegal, but are not currently, and they want to condition further participation in this defense program on not being required to engage in such activity that they deem ought be illegal.
It is no surprise that the government is reacting poorly to this. Without commenting on the ethics of AI-enabled surveillance or non-HITL kill chains, which are fraught, I understand why a department of government charged with making war is uninterested in debating this as terms of the contract itself. Perhaps the best place for that is Congress (good luck), but to remind: the adversary that these people are all thinking about here is PRC, who does not give a single shit about anyone's feelings on whether it's ethical or not to allow a drone system to drop ordinance on it's own.
[1] https://media.defense.gov/2026/Jan/12/2003855671/-1/-1/0/ART...
I might be being a bit conspiratorial, but is anyone else not buying this whole song and dance, from either side? Anthropic keeps talking about their safeguards or whatever, but seeing their marketing tactics historically it just reads more like trying to posture and get good PR for "fighting the system" or whatever.
"Our AI is so advanced and dangerous Trump has to beg us to remove our safeguards, and we valiantly said no! Oh but we were already spying on people and letting them use our AIs in weapons as long as a human was there to tick a checkbox. Also, once our models improve enough then we'll be sending in The Borg to autonomously target our Enemies™"
I just don't buy anything spewing out of the mouths of these sociopathic billionaires, and I trust the current ponzi schemers in the US gov't even less.
Especially given how much astroturfing Anthropic loves doing, and the countless comments in this thread saying things like "Way to go Amodei, I'm subbing to your 200 dollar a month plan now forever!!11".
One thing I know for sure is that these AI degenerates have made me a lot more paranoid of anything I read online.
Do they have even a basic understanding of the different regimes of safety and what allegiance means to ones own state?
It would be fine to say they are opting out of all forms of protection against adversaries.
But it feels like just more insane naive tech bro stuff.
As someone outside the tech bro bubble in fintech in London, can somebody explain this in a way that doesn't indicate these are sort of kids in a playground who think there is no such thing as the wolf?
Again, opting out and specializing in tech that you are going to provide to your enemies AND friends alike is fine. That is a good specialization. But this is not what I hear. I hear protest songs not deep thinking of thousand year mind set.
It is just so disappointing to come here and read these naive takes. Yes, Anthropic should be compelled to support the military using the DPA if necessary.
— Colonel Jessup
On a CBS interview this morning, Dario defended his position with the claim that he must act because "Congress is slow." CEOs can and should make decisions about what their companies build or refuse to build. What they cannot do is substitute their judgment for the constitutional processes that govern national security. We must not vest de facto policy control in unelected corporate leaders.
So much for this waste of a domain name. https://x.com/sama/status/2027578652477821175
"Tonight, we reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models in their classified network. "
I don't get it. Aren't these the same things that Anthropic was trying to negotiate?
Edit: it was explained elsewhere in this thread:
Saves you the hastle of visiting that shit-show.
individual posts on Twitter/X without requiring JavaScript and without being fed a sidebar full of algorithmic recommendations.
I presume you're on X so no offence to you directly.
https://x.com/UnderSecretaryF/status/2027594072811098230
https://xcancel.com/UnderSecretaryF/status/20275940728110982...
The OpenAI-DoW contract says "all lawful uses", and then reiterates the existing statutory limits on DoW operations. So it basically spells out in more detail what "all lawful uses" actually means under existing law. Of course, I expect it leaves interpreting that law up to the government, and Congress may change that law in the future.
Anthropic wanted to go beyond that. They wanted contractual limitations on those use cases that are stronger than the existing statutory limitations.
OpenAI has essentially agreed to a political fudge in which the Pentagon gets "all lawful uses" along with some ineffective language which sounds like what Anthropic wanted but is actually weaker. Anthropic wasn't willing to accept the fudge.
The former, grants the Congress the ability to change the definition of all „lawful use” as democratically mandated (if the war is officially declared, if the martial law is officially declared).
The latter, is subtle. There can exist a human responsibility for lethal actions taken by fully autonomous AI - the individual who deploys it, for instance, can be made responsible for the consequences even if each individual „pulling of a trigger” has no human in the loop (Dario’s PoV unacceptable).
Similarly, and less subtly, acceptance of foreign mass surveillance, domestic surveillance (as long as its lawful and not meeting the unlawful mass surveillance limits!) seems to be more in the Pentagon’s favor.
Whether we like it or not, we’re heading into some very unstable time. Anthropic wanted to anchor its performance to stable (maybe stale) social norms, Pentagon wanted to rely on AI provider even as we change those norms.
i once ran into someone in london in 2023 who was doing their thesis on AI regulation. they had essentially ended up doing a case-study on sam. their honest non-academic conclusion (which they shared quietly) was that they were absolutely terrified of sam altman.
fear is one of those signals we ought to listen to more often
It’s well established that belligerents can use mines, to separate the tactical decision of deploying for purposes of area denial; from the snap-second lethal decision (if one can stretch that definition) to detonate in response to an triggering event.
Dario’s model prohibits using AI to decide between enemy combatant and an innocent civilian (even if the AI is bad at it, it is better than just detonating anyways); Sam’s model inherits the notion that the „responsible human” is one that decided to mine that bridge; and AI can make the kill decision.
How is that fundamentally different in the future war where an officer might make a decision to send a bunch of drones up; but the drones themselves take on the lethal choice of enemy/ally/no-combatant engagement without any human in the loop? ELI5 why we can’t view these as smarter mines?
Altman publicly claimed he had no financial stake in OpenAI to emphasize his mission-driven focus. In 2024 it was revealed that Altman personally owned the OpenAI Startup Fund.
In May 2024, actress Scarlett Johansson accused Altman of intentionally mimicking her voice for ChatGPT's "Sky" persona after she had explicitly declined to work with them.
When OpenAI’s aggressive non-disparagement agreements were leaked, which threatened to strip departing employees of all their vested equity (potentially millions of dollars) if they criticized the company, Altman claimed he was unaware of the "provision."
However, if you live in the US and pay a passing attention to our idiotic politics, you know this is right out of the Trump playbook. It goes like this:
* Make a negotiation personal
* Emotionally lash out and kill the negotiation
* Complete a worse or similar deal, with a worse or similar party
* Celebrate your worse deal as a better deal
Importantly, you must waste enormous time and resources to secure nothing of substance.
That's why I actually believe that OpenAI will meet the same bar Anthropic did, at least for now. Will they continue to, in the same way Anthropic would have? Seems unlikely, but we'll see.
Anthropic said that mass surveillance was per se prohibited even if the government self-certified that it was lawful.
There's nothing in general about a tweet that makes it any more or less legally binding than any other public communication, and they certainly can be used in legally binding ways. But sure, a simple assertion to the public from the CEO of a privately held company about what a separate contract says is not legally binding - whether through tweet, blog, press release, news interview, or any other method.
e.g. google project maven, microsoft hololens (military), and much much more
Okay, yes, if you openly and directly state a unilateral contract offer and you're already in trouble with the SEC, Tweets can be legally binding.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/just-go-on-the-internet-and-t...
They said yes to the same thing.
Makes perfect sense
Everyone is over thinking it.
There would have been a conversation between Hegseth and Trump that went something like:
This guy thinks he can tell us what we can and can’t do.
Get rid of him.
It’s that simple.
He lacks confidence yet feels incredibly arrogant.
He would succeed in academia as the principal of some prestige university with this exterior, not as CEO of an AI company.
OpenAI agrees with Dept. of War to deploy models in their classified network - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189650 - Feb 2026 (22 comments)
Unfortunately, this is the new arms race, race to the moon, and all that together.
Not at all, as a matter of fact I'm just stating what you're stating. It's just business.
He basically takes advantage of people's limited memories and default assumption that when a person says something its honest.
The language is so coded that the many places where the core statement must be negated stand out like a sore thumb.
Probably the most corrupt way of killing a competitor I’ve heard of.
The people who actually know stuff about the world are reality TV stars, Fox News hosts, and podcasters just asking questions.
Those are the people with actual knowledge.
Coming out publicly playing their hand like it's a royal flush when it's a 7 high and their cards are facing their opponent clearly wasn't going to do anything. The cynical take is they aren't that naive and this just gives them plausible deniability within their social circles when they are interrogated as to why they work for these corporations. But I like to give the benefit of the doubt.
So you better just let the guys with the guns do whatever they want.
You’ve lost utterly and completely. Even if you, as an individual, are a good person.
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
I have also been against these terms of services of restricting usage of AI models. It is ridiculous that these private companies get to dictate what I can or can't do with the tools. No other tools work like this. Every other tools is going to be governed by the legal system which the people of the country have established.
That kind of happens with F35s that the US sells to its allies.
The point here, of course, being that Anthropic is very specifically claiming to not be a gun manufacturer, and Hegseth's response is that the DoD (W?) will force anthropic to build guns.
Theoretically, but this would run the risk of collapsing the US tech sector, which at this point is a significant part of the strength of the US economy, and thus making it likely that the Republicans will lose power in the next elections.