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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   18570 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.

https://x.com/i/status/2027578652477821175

Not insane enough for OpenAI, swooping in for the steal.

OpenAI will simply say that they have policies preventing mass domestic surveilance and autonomous weapons, and then not actually prevent their models from being used for mass domestic surveilance and autonomous weapons.

The Pentagon knows that Altman will play ball in a way that Dario will not.

OpenAI will simply say that they have policies preventing mass domestic surveilance and autonomous weapons, and then not actually prevent their models from being used for mass domestic surveilance and autonomous weapons.

Since when have typical San Francisco tech people cared about mass domestic surveillance or autonomous weapons more than they have cared about woke?

Since when have typical San Francisco tech people cared about mass domestic surveillance or autonomous weapons more than they have cared about woke?

I think you need to define "woke" here. In common parlance, woke is about things like "racial equity" "transphobia," and so on. But ultimately woke is just liberal self-righteous moralism, and attempts to impose that moralism on other people. It's about motte principles which seem reasonable on their surface combined with bailey attempts to control and persecute outsiders.

If a wokey says that he just wants to make sure that his technology can't be used for fully autonomous weapon systems, I would be pretty nervous. Who gets to decide what's a "fully autonomous weapon system," and what might that mean after some woke mental gymnastics?

It's the same reason I wouldn't buy a car with some kind of automatic collision avoidance system designed by Silicon Valley effective altruists. No, I get to decide where my car goes and whether I run over someone standing in my way.

I'm saying that for the SF tech crowd, actually removing so-called "cultural safety" (racial equity, transphobia etc etc) would be a much bigger deal than removing limitations on mass suirveillance. For evidence, see Google's transformation from "do no evil" to their ubiquituous spying on literally everyone.

You can't draw an equality sign between woke and self righteous moralism as wokism has no monopoly on it. See eg. the religious right, war on porn etc.

You can't draw an equality sign between woke and self righteous moralism as wokism has no monopoly on it

I absolutely agree with this, which is why I was careful to use the word "liberal" in my post. I said:

But ultimately woke is just liberal self-righteous moralism

See eg. the religious right,

Definitely that's true as to certain places and times. In the place and time where I live, I don't see much of evidence of this.

war on porn

I'm not sure what you are referring to here.

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