What are they using it for though? Target selection for precise strikes? I'm guessing their argument will be less lives will be lost if claude assisted with making sure the attacks were surgically precise?
The fact that there are countless use cases for real government efficiency to help the people they would sacrifice because Anthropic wanted to refuse killer robots is baffling.
Or is this just par for the course and has always been going on, it's just the reporting is different, or the current context makes it more of a sensitive topic?
There have been a few cases where national security has prompted the government to nationalize private institutions: the Railroads in WWI, steel mills in the korean war, CINB which was deemed a security risk by being too large a bank.
This admin has so far acted like a kleptocracy and, like, because of the Epstein files if they lose power many will go to jail, so there's a huge incentive to remain in power.
Wars are good for remaining in power. Dictatorship is good for remaining in power.
This is all very, very, very unusual in US history (except maybe when businesses tried to overthrow the government in the 30s but we don't talk about that).
That doesn't feel familiar at all! This clearly is just yet another wrong, completely bonkers conspiracy-theory! Just like all the others! No cheese pizza eating billionaires would ever even think of this!
In my experience they very much do not want to be told what they can and can not do with the things they purchase. I’m surprised the deal got done at all with these restrictions in place.
As such I agree with the surprise at the deal getting done at all.
I saw a quote today from Vonnegut: "We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective."
Awwwnnnn poor thing :)
It is like the USA big techs mad because the Chinese AI companies are stealing their data just like, wait for it, how the USA big techs stole the data from artists worldwide to train their models.
The sweet payback in the name of every single artist/company that have been affected by USA greedy.
Karma is a btch!
I hadn't realized. This does make me consider using alternatives more.
And LLM products Are new-ish. It suggests that Anthropic made federal government contracts a priority while OpenAI, Alphabet, AWS didn’t.
https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-gov-models-for-u-s-nat...
https://support.claude.com/en/articles/13756069-public-secto...
If you look at my post history you can see I’m always calling them out about how sketchy they are.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/azuregov/azure-openai-authori...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjrq1vwe73po
> the Pentagon official told the BBC the current conflict between the agency and Anthropic is unrelated to the use of autonomous weapons or mass surveillance.
> The official added that the Pentagon would simultaneously label Anthropic as a supply chain risk.
*Supply chain risk*?
The BBC article seems to imply that the government wants to audit Anthropic.
This, coming at the same time those "distillation" claims were published, is all incredibly suspicious.
Anthropic doesn’t want their software used for certain purposes, so they maintain approval/denial of projects and actions. I suspect the Pentagon doesn’t want limitations AND they dislike paying for software/service which can be withheld from them if they are found to be skirting the contractual terms.
And THAT is why the Pentagon is using maximum leverage (threatening Anthropic as a supply chain risk label).
The US federal government is no longer a good faith actor acting on behalf of American citizens and following US law, but now an autonomous corporation aiming to “get the best deal” via maximum leverage.
Hegseth and Rubio already live on a military base because they are afraid.
One of the things I find interesting about classifying literally any kind of trait within bounds of 'normality', and the culling / suppressing / discouragement of anything outside of that definition, is that there will just be new 'edges', and in short order these edges will be 'other', suddenly outside the definition because times are bad and it has to be someone's fault.
And so an ad infinitum until the single supreme ruler is the one entity representative of normal, atop a mountain of dead abominations.
There is a general rule I've discovered many years ago, through playing EVE ONLINE and learning understanding how society works. Not the modern EVE ONLINE, the old EVE ONLINE. It was really good for that.
Every new generation grows up with a new norm. Whenever hardship or challenges are being removed, then the new generation, having never needed to learn how to deal with them, will have a lower tolerance of them in general.
Your "new edges" generally aren't actually new. They've always been there. It was just that nobody really cared, because they weren't the end of the world: People knew worse.
It's a self-destructive downwards spiral.