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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   19447 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.

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.

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.

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