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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?

There's a lot of pushback against the DOD/DOW here, and it's not just leftists.

For example Dean Ball, the guy who literally wrote the Trump's admin own AI strategy as senior policy advisor is saying that this move is essentially destroying any trust investors could have in America AI companies.

This man isn't some leftie nutjob, again he literally worked for Trump on the AI action plan.

Scott Alexander who rarely wanders much into politics like this is straight up saying that the government should be ashamed here. He also made a prediction market if it'll be overturned and the chances look pretty good for anthropic right now

Comments on LessWrong which really really doesn't get political most of the time are basically calling the Trump admin an authoritarian danger.

Even the other AIs are saying this is insane.

The government's contradictory commands (it's a danger to have and also necessary) and abuse of power is really pissing off a lot of people who are otherwise rather neutral. Also a great example of how "woke" has lost all meaning, Trump is up there calling Anthropic a woke company just for not wanting to do domestic spying and killbots

Edit: Just came up in my feed, Greg Lukianoff the CEO of FIRE (the free speech org) is calling this dystopic https://x.com/glukianoff/status/2027390299845087740 He rarely speaks that much about general politics that much cause he wants FIRE to be 1st amendment focused, so another person really upset about this in particular.

I have never voted for either a Democrat or a Republican either in midterm elections or in Presidential elections, and this recent stuff with Anthropic is making me consider voting for the Democrats in the midterms even though normally I hate the Democrats as much as I hate the Republicans.

Personally I've always been an advocate for cross party control of the three branches. Party members themselves are too cucked to oppose their leader at all (Biden's age and Trump's tariffs, or whatever else) even on topics where people in the coalition differ. It forces less radical and more widely supported behavior if you actually have something of an opposition to get past. Leaders are far more cautious at spending political capital on things the populace doesn't like when there's more pressure coming down.

95% of party members are too sycophantic to go against the party line, but do be careful to research a bit before casting protest votes, in case your state has one of the other 5%.

I agree. Since I dislike both of the major power groups, I desire to balance them against each other. If I do vote for a Democrat in the midterms, it's very unlikely that this will be the start of some kind of long commitment to the Democrats on my part. And it's possible that I will vote for some Republicans in some local elections. But I do want to give the right a slap that tells them to stop the overreach and the deranged rhetoric, similar as how Trump getting elected in 2024 gave a slap to the woke telling them to cut out their overreach and deranged rhetoric.

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