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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25967 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.

Look - if Glock can't sell guns to the government while saying - you can't shoot black people because you have problems with racism, why should Anthropic be able to do so?

A toolmaker should have no say in how his tools are used once bought. I would say that this should be the other way around - the people should be inspired by the government and take action to abolish the EULA and similar abuse.

If your Glock comes with a ten side acceptable use policy, then the correct response is to not buy a Glock.

If Hegseth had said 'their terms are too restrictive, because we want the rights to use Claude to spy on Americans and deploy it in autonomous weapon systems', then he should not have signed the fucking contract. I am sure that there are plenty of AI companies very happy to fill these niches.

This is pure 'I have altered the terms of our agreement, pray I do not alter them further'.

No - the correct response is to explain to glock that those kind of morality clauses are void, severable and unenforceable. And I come from consumer advocacy point of view. Producer cannot tell the customer how their product can be used. That we have devolved our sense of what consumer rights should be so much is troubling.

Producer cannot tell the customer how their product can be used.

Yeah, but software mostly isn't bought. You're purchasing a license. True for the DoD too. And they absolutely tell you how it can and cannot be used. That's typically what a EULA does, among other things.

And once again EULAs are unadulterated evil. As is the 1201 of dmca. And dmca as a whole.

If they're unenforceable, why did the contract get terminated? Presumably, the mechanism of enforcement is the alignment of the model itself. It's more like, Glock made a gun that only fires in certain circumstances and you claim that this is void. Okay, if it's void, go ahead and do it. Oh, you can't?

"Producer could tell the customer how their product can be used" is also, historically (and currently), the main reason why there are no smart guns.

If your Glock comes with a ten side acceptable use policy, then the correct response is to not buy a Glock.

There is where the AI hype comes back to bite the AI companies. If AI is an existential issue then, well, you can't treat it like a Glock.

Look - if Glock can't sell guns to the government while saying - you can't shoot black people because you have problems with racism, why should Anthropic be able to do so?

A toolmaker should have no say in how his tools are used once bought.

They can certainly offer to sell guns to the government under those terms, and the government can tell them to pound sand.

Similarly, Anthropic can offer to sell Claude without mass domestic surveillance or autonomous kill capacity, and the government can...agree, go back on their decision, and blacklist them from their entire supply chain. Apparently.

Anthropic gave the DOW a written contract. The DOW signed it.

Now the DOW reneged on it unilaterally, and is pissed about being constrained after agreeing to being constrained in that manner.

The fuck?

Even in the context of military procurement, it's quite common for countries to retain veto rights on the use of hardware they sold to third parties. That came up quite often in the context of aid to Ukraine.

Germany and the Leopard 2 tank: This became a major diplomatic flashpoint in early 2023. Germany not only had to decide whether to send its own Leopards, but also held veto power over whether other countries could transfer their German-built Leopard 2s to Ukraine. Berlin's feet dragging effectively blocked the entire Western tank coalition until Scholz finally approved transfers in 2023.

Even the US repeatedly conditioned its military aid with restrictions on how weapons could be used. They prevented Ukraine from using long range munitions like ATACMS to hit targets within Russia.

If the DOW didn't like the terms, as written, they should have gone to Grok. Now they're just throwing a hissy fit.

Germany is sovereign.

The USA is sovereign.

Even in the context of military procurement, it's quite common for countries

Anthrpoic is not a country.

So? You're pointing out a distinction I'm aware of. I do not see an argument in favor of domestic companies being coerced into doing things that are supposedly illegal.

I was replying to:

A toolmaker should have no say in how his tools are used once bought

And as far as I'm aware, these are examples of toolmakers with opinions on how their tools are used.

If you're are of the distinction, then why proffer the examples?

Why bring up US and Germany? They aren't the toolmakers. They are the owners.

Germany makes the Leopard 2. The US makes ATACMS. In both examples, they are the toolmakers - they manufactured the hardware, transferred it, and retained conditions on its use post-transfer.

I can already see the objection forming: "those countries contracted out manufacturing to Rheinmetall and Lockheed Martin, so they're owners, not toolmakers." Okay, but Rheinmetall and Lockheed Martin are themselves private companies that build weapons under contracts laden with export controls, end-user agreements, and usage restrictions that survive the sale. So now we have a chain where the sub-contracted toolmaker is also bound by usage restrictions, the nation-as-toolmaker is also bound by usage restrictions, and somewhere in this entire supply chain nobody seems to have gotten the memo that toolmakers have no say in how their tools are used once bought. On the mere B2C side of things, Apple disapproves if you use iTunes or Garage Band for nuclear weapons development.

At some point "but they're a sovereign nation" has to cash out as an actual argument rather than a category distinction. What is it about sovereignty that grants the right to attach strings to hardware transfers? If it's something like "they have the legitimate authority to set terms on things they produced or own," then congratulations, we've just reinvented the concept of a contract, which is exactly what Anthropic had with the DOW.

There are a couple of western nations who pretty strongly manage to avoid procurements with such foreign entanglements and presumably veto powers. The Americans are probably best known for it, but France also spends a lot on domestic-first procurement, which presumably avoids such clauses, and their exported hardware (Exocets, for one) have a few historical incidents of being fired at Western armed forces.

If it's longstanding DOD policy to refuse procurements with morality clauses, I think this would make at least some sense, but they haven't done the best job selling this. But the image of our corporate overlords demanding the right to overrule our elected decision makers and their military leaders seems a dystopian avenue, even for some definition of "autonomous weapons" or "mass surveillance", which nobody involved seems inclined to rigorously define. Imagine if Ukraine had to ask defunct Soviet arms companies before they could use Eastern Block hardware on invading Russians.

Charitably, I think Anthropic's request sounds reasonable, although the government has arguably deployed both types of systems in recent memory, and probably doesn't want to debate the finer points in court. Uncharitably, this is tech bros leveraging "morality" arguments to enshrine corporateocracy such that the government has to ask companies for permission before it can exercise it's usual government powers.

Suppose Glock decides not to enter a contract with the government for any reason. Is it good for the government to try to destroy Glock as a corporate entity in response?

(Here the analogy is generous to the DoW: they entered into a contract first with open eyes, reneged, and are now trying to destroy Anthropic.)

For any reasons no. For lets say - being ok with their guns being used by the military, but not police - absolutely yes.

Fair enough.

But when a Democratic administration institutes a policy that the government will do no business with a company that does any business with other companies that don't include at least 50% disabled black transexual prostitutes on their boards, I'll at least be able to object to it in a principled manner. (And, yes, I object to softer edicts like that today.)

You understand that rules like this existed between the Johnson administration and Trump II, right? The DoD not wanting to buy a product they can't control is perfectly reasonable. The DoD not wanting such products used in their supply chain is understandable as well -- more so for AI than for many other things. The DoD wanting no one who uses Anthropic to also deal with them is not reasonable, but it's unreasonable in a slightly different way than minority preference laws.

The DoD not wanting to buy a product they can't control is perfectly reasonable.

Agreed, and if I ran the DoD, I'd take a similar stance, even if there were no immediate plans to do those things.

The DoD not wanting such products used in their supply chain is understandable as well -- more so for AI than for many other things.

Also somewhat agreed, but it depends on the scope. Palantir using a supplier with noxious terms to make decisions during wartime? Yeah, that seems inappropriate. Coders using it to write missile firmware code? That seems fine.

The DoD wanting no one who uses Anthropic to also deal with them is not reasonable

This is where 99% of my anger is coming from. It's a wild, CPC-style overreach, which goes far beyond a supply chain risk designation. Hopefully it's just bluster and TACO.

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Not the same. This is by how product is made, not used.

And this is about government procuring refusing to do business and not the other way around.

Straight from Hegseth's mouth:

Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.

That has nothing to do with how other companies make products that they offer to the government. Why should Amazon be banned from renting GPUs to Anthropic if they want to also rent hardware to the government?

If Glock and the government had already entered a contract containing such a clause, and the government demanded a change to the contract to remove that clause under penalty of trying its best to destroy Glock as a company (not just exit the contract), I think that'd reflect pretty poorly on the government.

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