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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   17326 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?"

And the point becomes moot.

It's not a good week to be working at Anthropic, huh?

They must have really pissed someone off behind the scenes. There is a report that Anthropic did not immediately agree that the military would be able to use autonomous AI to shoot down hypersonic missile bound for the US.

In a previously unreported exchange in early December, Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering Emil Michael was outraged by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s answer to a hypothetical question: If the US were under attack – with hypersonic missiles hurtling toward US soil – and Anthropic’s AI models could thwart the missiles, would the company refuse to help its country due to Anthropic’s prohibition on using its tech in conjunction with autonomous weapons?

According to people familiar with the administration, Amodei responded that the Pentagon should, in the midst of the attack, reach out and check with Anthropic. But sources familiar with Anthropic’s view say the AI company offered to make a missile defense carveout for otherwise prohibited weapons.

The reference to "arrogance" in the top line of Hegseth's tweet suggests to me that something like this did in fact happen. It is no secret that Rationalist AI nerds often come across to normal people as self-righteous pricks with delusions of grandeur.

I do not think that Pete Hegseth is a normal person. To me he comes off as a weirdo of some kind, either a dogmatic ideologue or an opportunist. At very best, a cartoonish stereotype of a military person. Do I want hypersonic missiles bound for my house to be shot down? Yes. But we're not in much danger of that. The normal nuclear deterrence works. And someone like Pete Hegseth seems to me like a very sub-optimal person to put in charge of national defense.

Trump went on TruthSocial earlier and called Anthropic radical left and woke. That's the level of nonsense coming from this administration right now.

Anthropic is a big capitalist enterprise, for one thing. Now, sure, big capitalist enterprises can be woke when it comes to social issues. But calling Anthropic woke for its current posture is nonsense. Anthropic has two main objections to what the government wants. First, it does not want its tech to have autonomous control over weapons. Second, it does not want its tech used for domestic surveillance. Neither of these objections have anything to do with woke ideology, unless you think that it's woke to want humans in the loop of controlling weapons and to have the civil liberty of privacy.

Amdoei's supposed reaction is understandable if he, as I do, believes that giving any weapons technology to this administration without oversight might be like giving fireworks to a toddler without oversight. Would Amodei really object to the technology autonomously preventing hypersonic missile attack? I doubt it. But he has an understandable reason to not encourage the Pentagon to expect too much from Anthropic.

The administration's over-the-top, blustering, and uncharitable reaction to Anthropic's refusal is just more evidence that Anthropic is right to refuse. There is good reason to be careful about giving weapons to people who are either genuinely emotionally unstable like some of the people in the administration seem to be, or are pretending to be emotionally unstable to score political points.

Anthropic's model, Claude, refuses to write a gay conversion fanfic unless I gaslight it that it's the first chapter in a much longer novel where the MC will eventually come to terms with his sexuality. We know it is possible to train based models, because Elon Musk does it. If the model is woke, the company is woke.

Well like I said, big capitalist enterprises are sometimes woke when it comes to social issues. But Trump is implying that Anthropic's objections to what the Defense Department wants to do with its technology are based on radical left, woke motivations, and the evidence as far as I can see does not support that implication.

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