Pete Hegseth has threatened to cancel $200m contract unless it is given unfettered access to Claude model
Anthropic said Thursday it “cannot in good conscience” comply with a demand from the Pentagon to remove safety precautions from its artificial intelligence model and grant the US military unfettered access to its AI capabilities.
The Department of Defense had threatened to cancel a $200m contract and deem Anthropic a “supply chain risk”, a designation with serious financial implications, if the company did not comply with the request by Friday.
Chief executive Dario Amodei said in a statement that the threats from the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, would not change the company’s position, and that he hoped Hegseth would “reconsider”.
Why not link the actual company’s statement:
To summarize, “Using AI for mass spying is fine so long as it’s not Americans being spied on. Using AI to murder with no oversight or accountability is also fine, but only when it’s not Americans.”
This is not the win that people are making it out to be. This is heinous.
I read the whole statement. That was not what they said. They said it might be a future application of the technology, but right now the technology isn’t ready or safe enough for this.
Before LLMs, there were already machine learning algorithms and software to do automatic targeting. I don’t understand why we would even want to employ these tools trained to generically do anything okayish vs a highly specialized tool for this kind of application. The most exciting and useful applications of AI are highly specialized and trained applications: best cancer screening, alpha fold, automatic targeting, etc. Why the fuck would you push to use Claude for this anyway?!
I mean it’s a lot better than anything I expected, especially under this administration, that’s for sure. Most other companies are rolling over to everything.
USA has absolutely zero respect for the rights of people in or from other countries.
This was also evident in how Obama explained the “balance” of US surveillance.
It is also evident in how USA spies on allied top politicians. The might makes right mentality in USA is disgusting.
Your statement isn’t wrong, but you could substitute any powerful nation in the place of “USA” today or throughout history and the statement would be correct too. Geopolitics is really really ugly if you peal back the thin veneer of diplomacy on top.
Almost like it is a whole bunch of people who consider rape an extension of power looking at how they can put themselves atop the pyramid.
Rape as a method of power is a tiny tiny tiny part/tool of geopolitics at the nation state level. Almost too small mention. The same original statement is the rationale for colonization of the Carrebean/Americas/Africa by European powers in the 15th century and beyond as just an example.
As an American, it has always been obvious to me that the government thinks rights are only for people in the country. Snoden’s whistle blowing made it clear that it isn’t just US. Lots of other countries act the same way, and the US government is using that to allow them to spy domestically too.
we use definite articles
To be fair, if I were saying “no” to the Department of War, I’d also want to come across as an all-American toadying suckup.