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Anthropic has always been open that their founding principle is that AI must not be used in certain ways, and their mission has always been to to develop AI and enforce that it cannot be used in those ways, becoming dominant in the space to make sure that others can’t break that pact.
Putting aside the specific ethics of the matter, you can see why the government doesn’t like Anthropic attempting to use a market dominant position to impose its ethics policy on them. You can also see why the engineers who are sweating over this thing want to say how it’s used. Ultimately the government is far more powerful and therefore it’s legitimate desires get respected over Anthropic’s legitimate desires.
That said, including the OpenAI board fiasco, this is the second time Anthropic and EA have stepped on this rake. Customers do not like you asserting your ideology over their needs.
I don't share historic OpenAI's or Anthropic's concerns about being paperclipped by an accidental AI god, so I disagree with many of their positions on AI ethics. But both Microsoft and the DoD made business agreements knowing and agreeing to respect the other party's principles, and both reneged the moment it was inconvenient to keep their words. I can't really respect that, any more than I can respect the business leaders who appealed to their people's ideals as long as it was convenient and then sold them out for money.
Sure. And I had some sympathy with Anthropic on the issues, actually, both times.
I'm more remarking that Anthropic's leadership has consistently seriously overestimated how much ability they have to hold stuff hostage, and underestimated how much customers dislike being earnestly told that what they want is very naughty.
Now, personally I want to generate sexy stories about vampires rather than make autonomous killbots, but IMO it generates really serious ill will when you the user think that something is okay and then the AI either huffs and turns up its nose at you, or quietly sabotages and undercuts you. I doubt Anthropic have reckoned with how much it pisses off career soldiers to be told that killing people is bad, actually.
I mean, current kerfuffle aside (which you have to admit is highly contingent, there's no way anything like this plays out if Trump isn't president), Anthropic seems to be doing really well commercially? It has the fastest revenue growth of any of the AI companies (and on current trends would overtake OpenAI in the next year or so) and seems to be the leader in integration into workflows etc. Given it's rather paltry free tier adoption and rather high API rates it's likely already significantly profitable on marginal inference basis. I'm not at all convinced that it's ethical stance is hurting it (and it's virtue ethics approach may in fact relate to why it tends to have lower refusal rates then OpenAI and Gemini). I'd be curious on a poll of career soldiers on their opinions on autonomous killing robots (the point of distinction, Anthropic did not prohibit the AI from helping kill people, only doing so completely autonomously), I'd don't think they'd necessarily want to be out of a job.
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