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In my experience Anthropic positions itself as the "safe" AI company more than the "ethical" AI company. They're related but not the same thing.

The only way you could be surprised that Anthropic wants to be in bed with the US military is if you just never listened to anything Dario has said publicly. He's very open about wanting the US government and the US military to use Claude to win against China. That's why Claude was in the Pentagon before all the others in the first place.

>LLMs are fundamentally incapable of controlling autonomous weapons anyway

This is obviously false, though that's not surprising from what I've seen from Zitron. Claude is probably too slow and clunky to go full mech warrior for the time being, but it would be trivial to hook Claude up to an autonomous drone with missile strike capabilities. Those things are mostly autonomous already, they just require a human to tell them where to shoot. Claude can easily do that with a simple API.

The rest is valid. I wouldn't describe Anthropic as an ethical company. On the contrary, if you believe that you losing the AI race is an existential threat to humanity, then it's easy to justify all sorts of unethical behavior for the greater good.

by aesthesia23 hours ago|

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There's some validity to these criticisms, but it would be a lot more credible to cite someone whose job isn't "loudly promote any claim that sounds negative for AI, regardless of how well-founded it is."

by petcat23 hours ago|

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> Despite cultivating a reputation as the "ethical" AI company, Zitron argues that Anthropic's actions show they are just as ruthless and ethically questionable as their competitors.

Anthropic has taken 10s of billions from investors just like everyone else has. There is no such thing as "ethics" or "morality" when the scale of obligation is that large.

So yes, this is obvious despite whatever image they try to cultivate.

by fwipsy23 hours ago|

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Anthropic is a public benefit corporation which limits liability to shareholders.

Just because they screwed up their billing doesn't mean every ethical commitment they've ever made is bunk.

by Capricorn248120 hours ago|

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> Anthropic is a public benefit corporation which limits liability to shareholders

What does this have to do with their ethics? This seems irrelevant unless your understanding of ethics ends at fiduciary duty to investors.

by fwipsy18 hours ago|

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It's the opposite. Parent comment was saying they must be unethical due to their duty to investors. As a public benefit corporation, they can take ethics into account even if it harms shareholders. The extent to which they do so is still up to them, as I understand it, but they aren't forced to be evil as parent was suggesting.

by bluefirebrand22 hours ago|

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> There is no such thing as "ethics" or "morality" when the scale of obligation is that large.

At that scale, ethics and morality should become more important, not discarded

by GolfPopper22 hours ago|

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Alternatively, finance at that scale ought not be permitted to exist, because of the moral hazard it represents.

by voakbasda22 hours ago|

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You will find that morals and ethics at that scale are too expensive to maintain.

by bluefirebrand21 hours ago|

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Then that scale should not be allowed to exist and we should fight aggressively to prevent it

by avarun22 hours ago|

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Ed Zitron has absolutely zero credibility, meaning these claims have zero credibility.

by rickydroll23 hours ago|

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I think all the AI companies want to hook up with the US military, as it's the only way they'll cover their debt. For investors.

by GolfPopper22 hours ago|

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"You must destroy the economy to keep us afloat, because National Security!" has been a clear goal of the LLM hucksters for a long time.

by fwipsy22 hours ago|

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"LLMS are fundamentally incapable of controlling autonomous weapons" -- This was Anthropic's stance too, right?

"Quietly remained an active part of the war effort" - anthropic was totally transparent about it, but yeah not great.

"Leaks were wrong" - and that's Anthropic's fault?

OpenAI agreed to assist the DoD with zero boundaries and then lied about it. Can we at least give them credit for not doing that? If we just throw up our hands and say "they're all awful, whatever" then the result is reduced pressure on them to be better. Like it or not, I do not think AI is going away and as far as I can tell, despite billing problems, Anthropic's still the least bad frontier lab.