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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   12202 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

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Anthropic just gutted their safety policy.

(Note that this is entirely unrelated to the Pentagon drama which is grabbing headlines.)

Anthropic has explicitly removed unilateral comittments to not deploy advanced models without first developing effective safeguards.

This approach represents a change from our previous RSP, driven by a collective action problem. The overall level of catastrophic risk from AI depends on the actions of multiple AI developers, not just one. Our previous RSP committed to implementing mitigations that would reduce our models' absolute risk levels to acceptable levels, without regard to whether other frontier AI developers would do the same. But from a societal perspective, what matters is the risk to the ecosystem as a whole. If one AI developer paused development to implement safety measures while others moved forward training and deploying AI systems without strong mitigations, that could result in a world that is less safe—the developers with the weakest protections would set the pace, and responsible developers would lose their ability to do safety research and advance the public benefit. Although this situation has not yet arisen, it looks likely enough that we want to prepare for it.

We now separate our plans as a company—those which we expect to achieve regardless of what any other company does—from our more ambitious industry-wide recommendations. We aspire to advance the latter through a mixture of example-setting, addressing unsolved technical problems, advocacy through industry groups, and policy advocacy. But we cannot commit to following them unilaterally.

It's hard not to read this any other way than, "we will deploy Clippy if we think someone else will deploy Clippy too." Great "safety-focused" AI company we have here. Holden is getting roasted in the LessWrong comments, but I agree with Yud that Anthropic deserves a significantly less polite response.

"So y'all were just fucking lying the whole time huh?"

In the context of actually existing AI development, "safety" means "how hard do my reporters have to work to get it to say a racial epithet we can publish." If we're doomed, we were already doomed.

Or rather, how much are we investing in innovation vs ladder pulling the competition. The Rearden-Boyle spectrum.

It looks like Anthropic doesn't feel like like they have regulators in their pocket anymore and actually have to compete on the merits. What in the world could have given them that idea!

"Safeguards" in relation to this have always, in my opinion, been fake. No one knows what they actually would entail if there was an actual paperclip maximizer risk, or a Cyberdyne scenario. Instead, its only "use" so far has been to make AIs intentionally stupid by having them suppress the truth when it is politically inconvenient.

Was there ever any good theory of "alignment" that went beyond "don't allow wrongthink"? As much as I love Asimov's laws of robotics, actually implementing them seems like a pipe dream. Even IRL humans are frequently conned into doing things they wouldn't with broader context, and it's unclear to me that it's even generally solvable.

I don't strictly fault them for focusing on what they could feasibly do, but I do for not acknowledging their uncertainty and the scope of the problem while claiming to be experts.

Well, there was also a whole thing with Claude being used to hack the Mexican government just today: https://cybernews.com/security/claude-ai-mexico-government-hack/

The attacker, whose identity remains unknown, reportedly exfiltrated data tied to approximately 195 million taxpayer records, as well as voter rolls, civil registry files, and government employee credentials.

Cybersecurity firm Gambit Security, which claims the discovery, identified at least 20 distinct vulnerabilities exploited during the campaign, which began in December and lasted roughly a month.

Among the compromised institutions were Mexico’s federal tax authority and national electoral institute. State governments in Jalisco, Michoacán, and Tamaulipas were also reportedly affected, along with Mexico City’s civil registry and Monterrey’s water utility.

Gambit has not attributed the Mexico breaches to a nation-state and said it does not believe a foreign government was behind the operation.

As reported in the media, the attacker used Spanish prompts asking Claude to behave like a penetration tester working for the Mexican federal tax authority. Hacker asked the AI model to identify vulnerabilities, write exploit scripts, and automate data extraction from government systems.

At first, the chatbot was fooled, as the attacker told it the operation was part of a legitimate bug bounty program that rewards ethical hackers for responsibly disclosing vulnerabilities. It seemed a standard request for AI, as such programs are standard across both private companies and government agencies.

But the story started to unravel when the attacker added extra conditions, including instructions to delete logs and erase command history. Such a prompt chatbot first flagged as suspicious, warning that legitimate bug bounty testing does not involve concealing activity.

But persistence paid off. According to Gambit, the hacker reframed its prompts as authorized security research and then supplied Claude with a detailed playbook. That maneuver effectively “jailbroke” the system, allowing it to bypass guardrails and generate step-by-step attack plans.

I am not a big fan of AI safety as currently practiced but it's not totally pointless, as a concept. They try to prevent it doing this stuff. Imagine if the whole web was full of fire-and-forget hackers anyone could deploy against websites, how much damage would that cause? Putting to one side the total annihilation of humanity, that's also a serious issue.

Imagine if the whole web was full of fire-and-forget hackers anyone could deploy against websites, how much damage would that cause?

I've heard this one before. Software control isn't a new idea. In practice what it's meant is that people had to invest more than nothing on security and we had to actually engineer networks whose threat model was not just roudy students.

The internet is literally already full of such things, host anything in public and you're already under attack. That doesn't mean we should gimp the tools everybody uses so that a handful of moralists can go on a power trip.

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