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Notes -
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.
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.
Hegseth just posted bunch of seething on Twitter: https://x.com/SecWar/status/2027507717469049070.
To me, his argument seems to reduce to this sentence: "Their true objective is unmistakable: to seize veto power over the operational decisions of the United States military." He means Anthropic by "their".
It is clear that Anthropic has no means to seize veto power over the decisions of the US military.
And to me at least it is clear that the Anthropic-US gov standoff cannot be characterized as an attempt by Anthropic to seize veto power over the US military.
Does Hegseth actually believe this claptrap? Or is he writing for the low-IQ audience? In either case, I don't want him anywhere near the levers of power.
I feel like you might be giving Hegseth too much credit for having some sort of principled desire to give the US the tools to resist China.
His motivations might be much simpler. He might be a true believer, someone who genuinely thinks that, as long as the US government is being run by a "real American patriot" (on his side, of course), the US government should have the power to conduct any level of surveillance it wants to against any individual whatsoever, and to use autonomous weapons to kill anyone the leadership decides to kill, at any moment. Sort of like a real-life version of Colonel Jessup from A Few Good Men, just without the charisma and perhaps also without the intelligence or the principles.
The US is a sovereign nation and will take all acts necessary to guarantee its national security, with the ample blessing of the constitution and its stewards. That's not going to change, however amazing an actor Jack Nicholson is.
That has included nationalizing companies with strategically useful assets in the past. It's not really a matter of negotiation, if you're producing military widgets, the US can just decide you have to sell to them in priority, that they can just seize your stuff if the need is pressing and that you can't sell to anybody that's an enemy. They can use or copy any of your tech without compensation, and they can wipe themselves with your license agreement or contracts if they so wish.
What Hegseth is doing is establishing the predicate by which he can use or suggest the President use some of those powers, and he's then going to come to Amodei and say "give it to me or I'll take it", and Amodei's going to give it to him. They'll find some way to save face, probably having Anthropic license it all to some other company that lets USG do whatever with the tech, but it's going to happen. Just like it happened for every technology before it.
He already had it. Now he's saying he doesn't want it after all. I don't think he's gonna get it.
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