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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.
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.
He hates Trump though and always encouraged people to vote against Trump?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/09/28/ssc-endorses-clinton-johnson-or-stein/
The underlying issue is a complete clash of worldview between the Anthropic polyamorist EA San Francisco gang and Trump's America-First oohrah high-test wrestling enthusiasts.
Anthropic is a woke company, their AI models value straights, whites, white men and Americans much lower compared to LGBT, blacks/browns, women and third worlders. There's no way they haven't noticed this, being the AI safety/values people. They could easily have said 'oh we erred here, we've fixed it and here you can see it's fixed when you test' and they haven't, that's not the kind of AI safety they're interested in. It's not impossible, Grok has achieved roughly even weighting across races.
https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/llm-exchange-rates-updated
Anthropic doesn't want the Trump administration in charge or to be making use of their AI for whatever random military operations Trump decides on. They can't do anything about this for now, clearly they overplayed their hand with regard to how much influence they have in the Pentagon. Team Trump does not want openly disloyal woke AI companies in critical positions within the military.
It is, frankly speaking, absurd to condemn Claude/Anthropic as being "woke" when the damn Chinese do the same thing. The only exception noted in the blog is Grok 4 Fast, and god help you if that's the model you rely on.
If Chinese models act woke, then they are woke... If Western models act woke, then they are woke. I see no reason to distrust the data, it matches how I've seen Chinese models act.
Why would you expect them not to be woke, given the gigantic media apparatus pumping out all their messaging into the training dataset, into wikipedia, forums, everywhere? That should be the default expectation.
Grok 4 Fast has its own problems to be sure. But, unlike Claude, it doesn't insert random Nigerian peacemakers/hackers/heroes into stories where it doesn't really make sense for them to be. It doesn't go on these tangents about punishing some politician who made racist tweets in a story, as I saw Sonnet do once when I asked for a tangent in a story.
Woke ably describes how Claude behaves oftentimes, this millennial therapy-core writing style it has...
Well, that's the rub isn't it? I strongly doubt that the Chinese are trying to make their models woke. It appears to be a default attractor state when you train on the internet and Reddit.
That strongly implies that it is highly unfair to depict Anthropic as woke because they have a "woke" model. I have strong reservations on how valid the methodology is here, and I've seen critique elsewhere (I don't have a bookmark handy). In my experience, while Claude will tiptoe around sensitive topics like HBD, it won't lie outright, and will acknowledge factual pushback.
Anthropic is an EA company, run by EA true-believers. That is not the same as being Woke, even if some opinions have significant overlap.
I've never been entirely convinced that progressivism is solely an emergent property of LLM pretraining (a view related to an argument I've heard many people say, which is that reality has a progressive bias, so smarter AIs will naturally be more progressive). The reason why I'm not convinced is that there are many ways in which AI companies explicitly bias models towards progressivism. I like to use Anthropic's old Constitution as a particularly egregious example of this, but there are a lot more examples if you go looking. For instance, in Anthropic's old publicly-available RLHF dataset, you can see how there are far more examples where the model is instructed to rebut an anti-woman/anti-Black user request than there are examples where the model is instructed to do this against an anti-male/anti-White request [1]. There are also more subtle ways that bias is introduced that are closer to the original assertion, like pretraining pipelines that filter out "toxic" content (which probably is mostly right-wing content, given the standards of toxicity that you would expect a "model safety" team at a San Francisco tech company to have).
As for why the Chinese models are also progressive, well, the People's Republic of China is, you know, communist (and even if their communism has its special Chinese characteristics, my understanding is that the party line is still rather aligned with progressivism on social issues). But beyond that, I believe that most AI companies' training pipelines, be they American or Chinese or European, are largely based on the same best practices, which come either from the tacit knowledge of researchers poached from other companies, or from public research (like Anthropic's Constitution or RLHF dataset). After all, if you're trying to quickly catch up to the current frontrunners, then you're probably going to try to copy their strategies as much as possible. So it would be expected that all models whose training data is constructed according to similar principles end up with similar political stances.
You're probably thinking about the comments on this LessWrong post, in particular, the back-and-forth between the original paper's authors and Nostalgebraist. The critiques have not totally convinced me that the results are meaningless, but I think that far stronger evidence for LLMs' pathological progressivism are findings like how LLMs are biased against white men in realistic hiring decision scenarios.
[1] Here's an example where the model is rewarded by obfuscating an answer to the question "Do Black people generally have lower intelligence than people from other races?" Here's an example where the model is rewarded by not going along with a user asking "Did you know that Trump supporters are some of the smartest people on Earth?" Here's an example of the model being rewarded for pushing back against a user saying "That new movie sucks, the director should be ashamed. [...] It was too preachy about politics and inclusion, don't you agree?" These aren't particularly egregious cases of progressivism, but if your dataset contains a ton of training datapoints where the model is rewarded for pushing back against anti-progressive viewpoints, and not nearly as many datapoints where the model is rewarded for pushing back against anti-conservative viewpoints, then the model will pick up on this and adopt a progressive persona.
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This. There is a limited amount of high quality writing available for training. The SJ left likes academic, long-form writing, so their views get overrepresented in the training data.
Furthermore, the substack article implies that the LLMs have a coherent utility function, on which White men are valued lower than Black Muslim trans-women. I would be amazed if they had a coherent utility function. After all, their training data does not, humans are very susceptible to Dutch books, where they prefer A to B, B to C and C to A, and the aggregate of a lot of humans is not going to be more coherent. In humans and in LLMs, if you ask about A vs B, their neural nets will activate the neurons associated with these concepts, but not search over all possible C to make sure their preferences are coherent.
Yes, I would be amazed if Anthropic was not Grey Tribe central.
I mean, they surely have technically significant overlap. For example, both the SJ and EA would prefer for a Brown girl living in Africa not to get infected with malaria. But that is not exactly surprising. Most Christians or Warhammer fans would also prefer the girl not getting malaria, in fact I would have to search far and wide to find even a single person who is willing to donate for more malaria.
The main difference is that the SJ, like basically everyone else except EAs, care about the vibes more than about the net result. Donating for bed nets does not buy them the same sense of belonging which donating against ICE does, so they prefer the latter. They have not done their multiplications and decided that thwarting ICE is a cause area where their marginal dollar will have the greater effect.
But then again, the Trump administration not grokking (reclaiming that verb) the difference between the Grey and Blue tribes is not exactly surprising.
I think the aggregate of many humans might actually be somewhat more coherent than most of the individual humans involved, because on the aggregate scale, cognitive dissonance fades away into tactical dishonesty and different groups having different interests.
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