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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   16532 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.

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.

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?

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