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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   16595 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?"

I think it's somewhere between humorous and telling that this is happening at the same time as their fight with the Department of War (ne Defense Department).

They won't offer unfettered access to the foundation model because it's "unsafe", but they're simultaneously willing to give up on "safety" as a core principle. That's a real hoot.

I don't remember who, but somebody on this forum once posed a test that could be shorthanded as "if they were serious". For example, if various left wing figures were truly serious about Anthropogenic Global Warming being real, solvable and an existential threat, then nothing would be off the table to solve it. Carbon credits in exchange for machine guns in vending machines? Let's do it. Electric car subsidies in exchange for a border wall? Get the bricks. However, what we're seeing instead is leaders of the movement buying beach side mansions.

Now compare this to Hegseth. If he genuinely believed that Anthropic held the seed of a nascent digital god, of course he'd do everything in his power to make sure it was pulling in the USA's direction. If he has to strong arm a few weirdo Californians to do it, no problem. If he has to seize entire companies and put hundreds of people under the fist of US state power, that sure beats what would happen to them if thousands of nuclear Chinese murder drones popped up from San Francisco Bay. In his mind, we cannot possibly afford to get behind in the AI race.

But, what makes him think that? Is it Amodei saying things about detonating entire industries every year or so? Is it Amodei talking about superintelligence? Is it Amodei talking about a "nation of geniuses" in a data center? Is it Amodei making proclamations that Claude is going to commodify bioweapons?

Most of us here have some capacity for bullshit filtration. LLM tech is impressive, and by burning enough money to fund several dozen Manhattan projects, we've managed to make it scale far enough to be truly surprising. Nonetheless, I don't think many people here take Amodei's maximalist position at face value. We know, on some level, that the God Machine isn't going to gift us with the apple of terrible knowledge in the next year or so. We subconsciously filter out those claims. On the other hand, a lot of people in DC haven't been marinating in this stuff since the old "I had an AI make d&d spell names" posts.

I question how much of this is the result of Hegseth and his crew not understanding the various silicon valley shibboleths and coded language and taking Anthropic's statements at face value. If I actually believed everything anthropic's leadership was saying, I would be shitting my pants. I'd be shitting my pants, then shitting a second pair of pants, then likely shitting somebody else's pants due to the raw, unfettered terror of thinking about what would happen if China (Anthropic's favorite boogeyman) got that tech and not the US.

Maybe Amodei simply scammed too close to the sun. It's a lot easier to say "safety" rather than "not ready for that kind of work" when you're staring down the barrel of an IPO in a few months.

ne Defense Department

You mean né, but alas I'm afraid it wasn't born that way. I for one think it would have been both cooler and more honest to call it the "en-em-ee", if very confusing.

Maybe Amodei simply scammed too close to the sun.

I think as a general rule, if you want to be a defense contractor for the hegemon, "You can't use my thing to do that" is a neither wise nor practical statement.

And in particular when that hegemon is the US Government. The one that in the past has nationalized railways altogether, or seized all airplane patents because it wanted the damn things built.

If USG really wants Claude to shoot people, nobody at Anthropic can really do much about it unless they already have AI so smart it can coup the government in their basement. Which is why this whole idea that alignment ever meant anything but that the State gets to decide AI uses has always been a sham.

I guess they could just try to pull a Lavabit and burn it all down, but not only might that legitimately be treason, I don't think it would do much about where military AI lands in the long run.

I know there's supposed to be an accent over the e, but I consciously choose to omit it as an insult to the French.

The most based reason.

But The Associated Press Associates of Pressiness might be out to get you.

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