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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   17310 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.

In my experience the "tech right" and the rationalist Austin/SF crowd all thought they were smarter than MAGA and that MAGA was something they could outsmart, which means they get very angry when they don't actually get their way.

That description probably includes the culture that informs this discussion forum.

In this case, this entire subculture wants to dictate tech policy to the administration and not the other way around.

But the military is the man with guns and the tech crowd is the man quoting laws. They don't get to bid for government contracts and then try to curtail what the government can do with their systems. They can try to make it about bigger moral issues, but this is very much a case of what happens when a stoppable force meets an immovable object.

Even the other AIs are saying this is insane.

I can get Claude to write a letter to Dario begging him to change his mind, what exactly is your mental model of what these AIs are doing here?

Trump is up there calling Anthropic a woke company just for not wanting to do domestic spying and killbots

This started when Anthropic asked whether their systems were used in the Maduro raid.

In my experience the "tech right" and the rationalist Austin/SF crowd all thought they were smarter than MAGA and that MAGA was something they could outsmart, which means they get very angry when they don't actually get their way.

No, the tech guys definitely are way smarter overall. It's just that smarts doesn't matter as much when one side has the guns and government.

But the military is the man with guns and the tech crowd is the man quoting laws. They don't get to bid for government contracts and then try to curtail what the government can do with their systems.

Anthropic already had agreed on contracts! It's the government that wants to tear it up.

I can get Claude to write a letter to Dario begging him to change his mind, what exactly is your mental model of what these AIs are doing here

It was just for humor. If you describe what is happening then the default response built in is "wow that's pretty bad". Of course you could manipulate it all you want, just a funny observation.

This started when Anthropic asked whether their systems were used in the Maduro raid.

Ah ok, it's woke because they were asking about how exactly it was deployed in the Maduro raid. That's what wokeness is, got it.

I know the tech guys and I know MAGA. The tech guys are way overestimating their intelligence or are applying success to domains where it doesn’t transfer. Otherwise you have to explain why the smart guys let the dumb guys get all the guns to order them around with.

Ah ok, it's woke because they were asking about how exactly it was deployed in the Maduro raid. That's what wokeness is, got it.

Yeah performative empathy in ways that only surface for America’s enemies is about as good a definition as I could imagine for woke.

you have to explain why the smart guys let the dumb guys get all the guns to order them around with.

In a democracy with lots of dumb people in the electorate, that’s not all that hard to explain. The electorate needs to be good enough at gauging authenticity to pick aligned dumb people over misaligned smart people as their rulers. Actually, the electorate doesn’t even need to be dumb, they could just be angry enough that none of the smart ruler options share their values to just say fuck it.

This is smart people cope. The voters are too dumb to understand us, we’re too rational. I guess the smart people also too honest and pure to lie, which is how anyone with intelligence might solve that problem. And too poor to buy power anyways, even though they’re definitely smart enough to get money if only they weren’t so unlucky etc etc

It’s perfectly possible for dumb people to disagree about policy and to outnumber smart people. Also, since we are talking about the tech right here, the thing about money is very silly. Yes the smart people are very rich in this case.

The point I’m making is that “if you were really smart, you would have power” just is not true in general. Intelligence can help in getting power but it doesn’t always.

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