And sure enough, my reading of it left the impression the OAI conditions were basically "DoW won't do anything which violates the rules DoW sets for itself."
He also claimed that they would build rules into the model the DoD would use, preventing misuse. Aka he claims OpenAI will quickly solve alignment and build it right in...I wouldn't hold my breath.
All Lawful Use is a tautology with fascists because they cannot break laws by definition.
The bigger picture is that the DoW got what it wanted and it got it by threatening one company while the other did its bidding.
If you have so little faith in them that they won’t honour the privacy controls you should also delete your non-consumer account too.
“Oppenheimer was clearly an enormously charming man, but also a manipulative man and one who made enemies he need not have made. The really horrible things Oppenheimer did as a young man – placing a poisoned apple on the desk of his advisor at Cambridge, attempting to strangle his best friend – and yes, he really did those things – Monk passes off as the result of temporary insanity, a profound but passing psychological disturbance. (There’s no real attempt by Monk to explain Oppenheimer’s attempt to get Linus Pauling’s wife Ava to run off to Mexico with him, which ended the possibility of collaboration with one of the greatest scientists of the twentieth, or any, century.) Certainly the youthful Oppenheimer did go through a period of serious mental illness; but the desire to get his own way, and feelings of enormous frustration with people who prevented him from getting his own way, seem to have been part of his character throughout his life.”
Seems more like Sam Altman, who is known to get his way, than Dario.
As you suggest, it is easy to imagine Altman in the same hot seat. Never mind his sexual orientation, which the Republican theocrats will eventually use against him as surely as the knives came out for Ernst Röhm.
1. Some other AI company would cut a deal with the Pentagon. There's no world in which all the labs boycott the Pentagon. So who? Choosing Grok would be bad for the US, which is a bad outcome, but Amodei would have discounted that option, because he knows that despite their moral failures, the Pentagon is not stupid and Grok sucks.
That leaves Gemini or OpenAI, and I bet they predicted it would be OpenAI. Choosing OpenAI does not harm the republic - say what you will about Altman, ChatGPT is not toxic and it is capable - but it does have the potential to harm OpenAI, which is my second point:
2. OpenAI may benefit from this in the short term, and Anthropic may likewise be harmed in the short term, but what about the long game? Here, the strategic benefits to Anthropic in both distancing themselves from the Trump administration and letting OpenAI sully themselves with this association are readily apparent. This is true from a talent retention and attraction standpoint and especially true from a marketing standpoint. Claude has long had much less market share than ChatGPT. In that position, there are plenty of strategic reasons to take a moral/ethical stand like this.
What I did not expect, and I would guess Amodei did not either, is that Claude would now be #1 in the app store. The benefits from this stance look to be materializing much more quickly than anyone in favour of his courage might have hoped.
if we consider AIs as "force multipliers" as we do with coding agents, it's easy to see how any AI company can harm the republic if the government they are serving is unethical and amoral.
They chose Grok and OpenAI. The story was drowned out by the Anthropic controversy, but an xAI deal was signed the same week.
Wikileaks and Assange got popular too. What happened to them?
The State Dept and CIA do exactly what Assange did. They pick and choose who to target with leaks. They get away with it (mostly even when exposed) because they officially are in power. Assange was not in power. If you take a moral position do it when you have real power.
3. Talent migration to Anthropic. No serious researcher working towards AGI will want it to be in the hands of OpenAI anymore. They are all asking themselves: "do I trust Sam or Dario more with AGI/ASI?" and are finding the former lacking.
It is already telling that Anthropic's models outperform OAI's with half the headcount and a fraction of the funding.
App Store rankings are meaningless, I have Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini all in top five, with a electronic mail app being 1 and a postal tracking service app (for a very small provider) being 3.
Also maybe not seeing the message or connection here... That myth isn't really about who has power or not, right? It's kind of just a trite little "why you should do good even when no one is watching" thing. It just serves Socrates for his argument with Thrasymachus, and leads us into book 2 where it really gets going with Glaucon and all that. This is from memory so I might be a little off.
The story is asking whats the source of morality? Who decides where the lines are? And its not scientists. Science produces the Ring.
> According to the tradition, Gyges was a shepherd in the service of the king of Lydia; there was a great storm, and an earthquake made an opening in the earth at the place where he was feeding his flock. Amazed at the sight, he descended into the opening, where, among other marvels, he beheld a hollow brazen horse, having doors, at which he stooping and looking in saw a dead body of stature, as appeared to him, more than human, and having nothing on but a gold ring; this he took from the finger of the dead and reascended. Now the shepherds met together, according to custom, that they might send their monthly report about the flocks to the king; into their assembly he came having the ring on his finger, and as he was sitting among them he chanced to turn the collet of the ring inside his hand, when instantly he became invisible to the rest of the company and they began to speak of him as if he were no longer present. He was astonished at this, and again touching the ring he turned the collet outwards and reappeared; he made several trials of the ring, and always with the same result—when he turned the collet inwards he became invisible, when outwards he reappeared. Whereupon he contrived to be chosen one of the messengers who were sent to the court; whereas soon as he arrived he seduced the queen, and with her help conspired against the king and slew him, and took the kingdom. Suppose now that there were two such magic rings, and the just put on one of them and the unjust the other; no man can be imagined to be of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice. No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a God among men. Then the actions of the just would be as the actions of the unjust; they would both come at last to the same point. And this we may truly affirm to be a great proof that a man is just, not willingly or because he thinks that justice is any good to him individually, but of necessity, for wherever any one thinks that he can safely be unjust, there he is unjust.
Secret FISA court decisions will say the use is lawful, but you’ll never get to read or challenge those decisions.
Just good 'ol fashion grifting mixed with a bit of government corruption.
This country has been boiling the frog of graft, grifting, and corruption too long.
I believe this understanding is correct. The issue many people have these days with Dept. of War, and most of Trump admin is that they have little respect for laws. They only follow the ones they like and openly ignore the ones that are inconvenient.
Dept of "War" should have zero problems agreeing to the two conditions Anthropic outlined, if they were honest brokers. But I think most of us know that they are not. Calling them dishonest brokers seems very charitable.
Ex: For the above statement, if they're truly dishonest brokers and openly ignore the rules that are inconvenient, they would have zero problems agreeing to Anthropic's terms and then violating them. So what you say may be quite true, but there would still need to be more to the story for it to make sense.
Ex: DoW officials are stating that they were shocked that their vendor checked in on whether signed contractual safety terms were violated: They require a vendor who won't do such a check. But that opens up other confusing oversight questions, eg, instead of a backchannel check, would they have preferred straight to the IG? Or the IG more aggressively checking these things unasked so vendors don't? It's hard to imagine such an important and publicly visible negotiation being driven by internal regulatory politicking.
I wonder if there's a straighter line for all these things. Irrespective of whether folks like or dislike the administration, they love hardball negotiations and to make money. So as with most things in business and government, follow the money...
"Find all of the terrorists in this photo", "Which targets should I bomb first?"
Even if the DoD wanted to ignore the legal terms, the model itself would not cooperate. DoD required a specially trained product without limitations.
If your company makes an herbicide that happens to be very good at killing off anyone who drinks it at a high concentration in their water supply, you're saying that there should be no way for your company to resist being used for mass murder (including unavoidable collateral damage)?
Also, the core mission of the military is not "killing its adversaries through any means necessary". It is to defend state interests. Some people have a belief that mass killing is the best mechanism for accomplishing that. I do not agree with, nor do I want to associate with, those people. They are morally and objectively wrong. Yes, sometimes killing people is the most effective -- or more likely, the quickest -- way. In practice, it doesn't work very well. The threat of violence is much more powerful than actually committing violence. If you have to resort to the latter, you've usually screwed up and lost the chance to achieve the optimal outcome. It is true that having no restrictions whatsoever on your ability to commit violence is going to be more intimidating, but it also means that you have to maintain that threat constantly for everyone, because nobody has any other reason to give you what you want.
The actual military is not evil. Your conception of it is.
> The actual military is not evil. Your conception of it is.
You're right, but there's a a real question here: should a company have the ability to control or veto the decisions of the democratically-elected government?
To give different hypothetical example: should Microsoft be allowed to put terms in its Windows contracts with the government, stipulating that Windows cannot be used to create or enforce certain tax policy or regulations that Microsoft disagrees with? Windows is all over, and I'm sure pretty much every government process touches Windows at some point, so such a term would have a lot of power.
I don't think "control or veto" is fair. Anthropic is not trying to prevent the US government from creating full autonomous killbots based on inadequate technology. They are only using contract law to prevent their own stuff from being used in that way.
But that aside, my opinion is that to a first order approximation, yes a company should very much be able to have say in its contract negotiations with any party including the government. It's very similar to the draft. I don't believe a draft is ethical until the situation is extreme, and there ought to be tight controls on what it takes to declare the situation to be that extreme. At any other time, nobody should be forced to join the military and shoot people, and corporations (that are made of people) should not be forced to have their product used for shooting people.
A corporation is a legal fiction to describe a group of people. Some restrictions can be placed on corporations in exchange for the benefits that come from that legal fiction, but nothing that overrides the rights of its constituent people.
Governments are made of people too. Again, a subset of people are given some powers in order to better achieve the will of the people, but with tight controls on those powers to keep the divergence to a minimum. (Of course, people will always find the cracks and loopholes and break out of their constraints, but I'm talking about design not real-world implementation here.)
So to look at your hypothetical, first I'd say it's not very different from the question of whether an individual person should be forced to personally enforce tax policy. Normally, I'd say no. There are many situations where the government needs more say and authority in such things, but that must only be achieved via representatives of the people passing laws to allow such authority. Other than that, yes: I believe a company should be able to negotiate whatever contract terms it wants. In a democracy, we are not subjects of a controlling government; the government is an extension of us.
In practical terms, if Microsoft were to insist on that contract stipulation, the government would not agree to the contract and would award its business to someone else. If the government were especially out of control and/or unethical, it might punish Microsoft with regulations or declarations of supply chain risk or whatever, but that is clearly overstepping its bounds and ought to be considered illegal if it isn't already. The usual fallback would be that the people would throw the people perpetrating that out on their asses. That's the "democratically-elected part".
Obviously, Microsoft would be stupid to insist on such a thing in their contract, and its employees would probably lose all confidence in the corporate leadership. Most likely, they'd leave and start Muckrosaft next door that rapidly develops a similar product and sells it to the government under a reasonable contract.
Basically, I'm always going to start from people first, and use organizations and laws only in order to achieve the will of the people. The fact that the people are stupid does make that harder, but the whole point of democracy is that we'll work out the right balance over time.
> The threat of violence is much more powerful than actually committing violence.
While I agree with this statement, the only way the threat works is if from time to time you apply violence to reinforce your capability and availability to actually do it. And the US is really good at actually being violent so others don't even think about doing something against it, at least the majority of countries anyway.
Now apply the same logic to the current Iran war.
If I say, no, then am I stopping the military?
I feel like it is reasonable that I can say "no, I don't want to sell you my apples."
I cannot for the life of me figure out why that means I am stopping the military from killing people. The US Military will definitely still be able to kill people for centuries. I'm just saying I don't want to participate in it.
If government can force any private company to work specially for government then US is no better than PRC
Legit war time measures can be a thing (that's why it's fucked if president can just start a war and then use that as excuse for any war time measures they like)
And for better or worse, it is actually good that it is like this. Otherwise, if Congress declares war on Iran or China or whatever, the whole country will be put on a war footing, companies will be directed to build whatever the Pentagon says it needs, drafts will be enforced and so on. And it would be pretty ugly.
However, the military is bound by US and international law. It's clear they're not going to obey either of those with respect to this contract.
On top of that, Anthropic has correctly pointed out that the use cases Trump was pushing for are well beyond the current capabilities of any of Anthropic models. Misusing their stuff in the way Trump has been (in violation of the contract) is a war crime, because it has already made major mistakes, targeted civilians, etc.
I think it’s also possible DoW didn’t care about the conditions but just wanted some pretext to punish Anthropic because Dario isn’t a Trump boot licker like the rest of the SV CEOs.
I’m sure anthropic has signed up more revenue this week in response to this debacle to cover it. Where they’re actually screwed is if the gov follows through and declare anthropic a supply chain risk.
So yeah, they bet a whole lot on “look at us, we have morals”.
Also, they got a huge PR win, and jumped to #1 on the Apple App Store. Consumer market share is going to decide which of the AI companies is the market leader, not fickle government contracts.
If you look at what generates cash, it's corp to corp. That's across most industries. While there are markets that are consumer mostly, LLMs have immense and enormous business facing revenue potential. The consumer market is a gnat in comparison.
1. Stargate seemed to require a dedicated press conference by the President to achieve funding targets. Why risk that level of politicization if it didn't?
2. Greg Brockman donated $25mil to Trump MAGA Super PAC last year. Why risk so much political backlash for a low leverage return of $200m on $25m spent?
3. During WW2, military spend shot from 2% to 40% of GDP. The administration is requesting $1.5T military budget for FY2027, up from $0.8T for FY2025. They have made clear in the past 2 months that they plan to use it and are not stopping anytime soon
If you believe "software eats the world" it is reasonable to expect the share of total military spend to be captured by software companies to increase dramatically over the next decade. $100B (10% of capture) is a reasonable possibility for domestic military AI TAM in FY2027 if the spending increase is approved (so far, Republicans have not broken rank with the administration on any meaningful policy)
If US military actions continue to accelerate, other countries will also ratchet up military spend - largely on nuclear arsenals and AI drones (France already announced increase of their arsenal). This further increases the addressable TAM
Given the competition and lack of moat in the consumer/enterprise markets, I am not sure that there is a viable path for OpenAI to cover it's losses and fund it's infrastructure ambitions without becoming the preferred AI vendor for a rapidly increasing military budget. The devices bet seems to be the most practical alternative, but there is far more competition both domestically (Apple, Google, Motorola) and globally (Xiaomi, Samsung, Huawei) than there is for military AI
Having run an unprofitable P&L for a decade, I can confidently state that a healthy balance sheet is the only way to maintain and defend one's core values and principles. As the "alignment" folks on the AI industry are likely to learn - the road to hell (aka a heavily militarized world) is oft paved with the best intentions
> As the "alignment" folks on the AI industry are likely to learn
I will push back here. Dario & co are not starry-eyed naive individuals as implied. This is a calculated decision to maximize their goal (safe AGI/ASI.)
You have the right philosophy on the balance sheet side of things, but what you're missing is that researchers are more valuable than any military spend or any datacenter.
It does not matter how many hundreds of billions you have - if the 500-1000 top researchers don't want to work for you, you're fucked; and if they do, you will win because these are the people that come up with the step-change improvements in capability.
There is no substitute for sheer IQ:
- You can't buy it (god knows Zuck has tried, and failed to earn their respect).
- You can't build it (yet.)
- And collaboration amongst less intelligent people does not reliably achieve the requisite "Eureka" realizations.
Had Anthropic gone forth with the DoD contract, they would have lost this top crowd, crippling the firm. On the other hand, by rejecting the contract, Anthropic's recruiting just got much easier (and OAI's much harder).
Generally, the defense crowd have a somewhat inflated sense of self worth. Yes, there's a lot of money, but very few highly intelligent people want to work for them. (Almost no top talent wants to work for Palantir, despite the pay.) So, naturally:
- If OpenAI becomes a glorified military contractor, they will bleed talent.
- Top talent's low trust in the government means Manhattan-project style collaborations are dead in the water.
As such, AGI will likely emerge from a private enterprise effort.
Finally, the Anthropic restrictions will last, what, 2.5 more years? They are being locked out of a narrow subset of usecases (DoD contract work only - vendors can still use it for all other work - Hegseth's reading of SCR is incorrect) and have farmed massive reputation gains for both top talent and the next administration.
As opposed to all those famous ethical battles where there's nothing in it for you to do the wrong thing?
It doesn't match.
OpenAI claims their terms of service for DoD contain the same limitations as Anthropics proposed service agreement. Anthropic claims that this is untrue.
Now given that (a) the DoD terminated their deal with Anthropic, (b) stated that they terminated because Anthropic refused modify their terms of service, and (c) then signed a deal with openAI; I am inclined to believe that there is in fact a substantial difference between the terms of service offered by Anthropic and OpenAI.
From what I can see, OpenAI’s terms basically say “need to comply with the law”, which provides them with plenty of wiggle room with executive orders and whatnot.
And:
1. there is no law currently prohibiting autonomous weapons platforms
2. the Pentagon can create policies overnight allowing all kinds of stuff
So yeah, OpenAI is going to make a lot of money from actually doing what the military asks from them.
If the contract says “all lawful use” it’s a blank check to the state.
My understanding is that Anthropic requested visibility and a say into how their models were being used for classified tasks, while the DoD wanted to expand the scope of those tasks into areas that Anthropic found objectionable. Both of those proposals were unacceptable for the other side.
“The real reasons [the Pentagon] and the Trump admin do not like us is that we haven’t donated to Trump (while OpenAI/Greg have donated a lot),” he wrote, referring to Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, who gave a Pac supporting Trump $25m in conjunction with his wife.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/04/sam-altma...
Another reason is that Sam Altman has been willing to "play ball" like providing high-profile (though meaningless) big announcements Trump likes to tout as successes. For example:
> "The Stargate AI data center project worth $500 billion, announced by US President Donald Trump in January 2025, is reportedly running into serious trouble.
More than a year after the announcement, the joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle, and Softbank hasn't hired any staff and isn't actively developing any data centers, The Information reports, citing three people involved in the "shelved idea."
https://the-decoder.com/stargates-500-billion-ai-infrastruct...
Just to nitpick, Palantir isn't doing surveillance like Flock. They do data integration the way IBM does under contract for the governments. Some data pipelines include law enforcement surveillance data which get integrated with other software/databases to help police analyze it. There's no evidence they are collecting it themselves despite recent headlines. It's a relatively minor but important distinction IMO.
It’s the same with Facebook selling user data. Neither selling your data, like the carriers do, or selling the ability to target you with your data, like Facebook does, are very nice. But legally they are separate things that need to be regulated differently. As is the case with Flock and Palantir.
There will always be another IT company willing to do integrations even if Palantir dies. Software isn’t going away.
> The military’s Maven Smart System, which is built by data mining company Palantir, is generating insights from an astonishing amount of classified data from satellites, surveillance and other intelligence, helping provide real-time targeting and target prioritization to military operations in Iran, according to three people familiar with the system...
> As planning for a potential strike in Iran was underway, Maven, powered by Claude, suggested hundreds of targets, issued precise location coordinates, and prioritized those targets according to importance, said two of the people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
Though, I guess IBM did get away with lots of stuff that... Actually, did any supply companies in the WWII German war machine actually get in trouble for war crimes, or did they just go after officers and the people actually working in the camps?
The company selling punchcards that were used for logistics was apparently fine. What about the people making the gas canisters, or supplying plumbing fixtures? The plumbers? Where's the line?
Wondering, since this is increasingly becoming a current events question instead of an academic concern.
I'm under no illusion that all the perpetrators of war crimes were held accountable but it's not a bad model.
Good thing IBM's data integration was never used for ill!
Take it out on the database purveyors, not Palantir.
> “[We will] tailor use restrictions to the mission and legal authorities of a government entity” based on factors such as “the extent of the agency’s willingness to engage in ongoing dialogue,” Anthropic says in its terms. The terms, it notes, do not apply to AI systems it considers to “substantially increase the risk of catastrophic misuse,” show “low-level autonomous capabilities,” or that can be used for disinformation campaigns, the design or deployment of weapons, censorship, domestic surveillance, and malicious cyber operations.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/07/anthropic-teams-up-with-pa...
Anthropic is a Public Benefit Corporation chartered in Delaware, with an expressed commitment to "the responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity."
So in theory (IANAL), investors can't easily bully Anthropic into abandoning their mission statement unless they can convince a court that Anthropic deliberately aimed to prioritize the cause over profit.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anthropic-claude-ai-iran-war-u-...
They've done lots wrong and maybe they shouldn't have gotten in bed with the military to begin with, but this illegal war is not theirs. It rests squarely with the President who declared it. (And with the military officers who are going along with it despite the violation of international law.)
Anthropic claim that superintelligence is coming, that unaligned AI is an existential threat to humanity, and they are the only ones responsible enough to control it.
If that's your world view, why would you be willing to accept someone's word that they'll only Do Good Things with it? And not just "someone", someone with access to the world's most powerful nuclear arsenal? A contract is meaningless if the world gets obliterated in nuclear war.
Also, doing that might have bad second order effects with bad ethical implications.
For example, when Musk decided to pull the plug on a bunch of starlink terminals, he (intentionally and knowingly) blocked a US-funded attack that would have sunk a big chunk of the Russian navy, which certainly prolonged the Ukraine war. That was clearly an act of treason (illegal).
Anyway, just turning off Claude could kill a bunch of civilians in the region or something. It depends on how deeply it's integrated into military logistics at this point.
Anyway, your point certainly holds for OpenAI:
They walked into a "use ChatGPT for war crimes, and illegal domestic surveillance / 'law enforcement'" deal with open eyes, and pretty obviously lied about it while the deal was being signed. I don't see any ethical nuance that would even partially excuse their actions.
Seriously, you're on HN, you can't possibly be that many degrees removed from someone at the company.
In any case it's absolutely not "just marketing", it suffuses their whole culture, and it is genuine.
Perhaps you think the law shouldn't allow such a contract; that's a valid position. But that's not what the law currently says.
Is that more clear?
The current administration has been caught flouting court orders in dozens of cases, to the point that courts are no longer even granting them the assumption that they’re operating in good faith.
I can think of a million good reasons not to give these people the tools to implement automated totalitarianism. Your proposal that they simply refuse service to the government entirely would be ideal.
If you don't question people in positions of power they will just do whatever they want. Democracy is sustained by action, not by acquiescence.
And with the lawlessness of this administration, I would make it a point to hold them accountable. I'm not going to let them do mass surveillance when they decide to change the law.
Are you native, or just ignoring what is going on?
The technology isn’t suitable for the purposes the regime wants.
I would like western Democratic powers to have the most advanced technology personally but you may disagree.
Are you really saying that if Anthropic sells a limited version of their product to Palantir at a certain price, the government should be able to demand access to an unlimited version of Anthropic's product for free because they are a customer of Palantir?
That would effectively mean the government gets an unlimited license to all IP of companies that do business with government suppliers... that would be terrible.
Anthropic has a contract for how their service is to be used, the government committed itself to following the contract by signing. Then it violated the contract.
Basically the government committed fraud by signing a contract that it clearly intended to violate. Then they tried to bully Anthropic into not doing anything about their breach of contract.
It’s mobster behavior. You’re saying Anthropic should just not sell services if it’s going to enforce the terms of service. You have it backwards: the government shouldn’t enter into contracts that it intends to violate.
Edit: Also openly calling OpenAI employees "gullible" and "twitter morons" seems sub-optimal if you like that talent to work for you at some point.
“I think this attempted spin/gaslighting is not working very well on the general public or the media, where people mostly see OpenAI’s deal with DoW as sketchy or suspicious, and see us as the heroes.... It is working on some Twitter morons, which doesn’t matter, but my main worry is how to make sure it doesn’t work on OpenAI employees. Due to selection effects, they’re sort of a gullible bunch, but it seems important to push back on these narratives which Sam is peddling to his employees.”
In retrospect this quote comes across as way more foreboding given what we've learned about the scale of his ambitions and his willingness to lie and bend reality to gain power.
Dario on the other hand seems to have an integrity that's particularly rare in this era. I hope he remains strong in the face of the regime.
Anthropic actually partnered up with Palantir. They are not the saints you think they are, either.
We should stop worshipping people and companies and stop putting them on pedestals. Just because one party is at fault, doesn't mean the other is automatically innocent. These are all for-profit companies at play here.
https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2024/Anthropic-a...
The contract was explicit - it was for defence purposes with a company known for spying activities. So, obviously spying is involved and they weren't just going to generate cat videos with it.
Again, nobody is innocent here.
"Anthropic and Palantir Partner to Bring Claude AI Models to AWS for U.S. Government Intelligence and Defense Operations"
Keywords: "Government Intelligence"
I read that quote and see no positive interpretation. It was always a negative description.
I think maybe this community could use a bit more natural skepticism of hierarchy.
His ascendancy only came when he basically was given an ulta powerful position by an ultra powerful man.
Someone told me in another comment that it's possibly bot activity. I suspect so too, because in a tech forum like HN, a top voted comment can shift the entire focus/narrative of any given issue. I know there are a lot of mods on here to prevent this sort of thing, but given how good LLMs have gotten, I wonder if we are at a point where humans can even discern cases where this a mix of human and AI involvement in online activity (such as commenting).
(Or, if the maximally cynical perspective is correct and 'principles' always actually means 'a company culture and public image that depends on the appearance of having principles, and which requires costly signals of principledness to maintain' -- well, why on earth shouldn't we favour the ones who have that property over the ones who are nakedly unprincipled, and the ones who have a paper-thin veneer that doesn't meaningfully affect their behaviour? It would be stupid to throw away the one bit of leverage we have to make powerful people behave better than they otherwise would.)
> Graham was immediately impressed by Altman, later recalling that meeting the 19-year-old felt like what it must have been like to talk to Bill Gates at the same age. He noted Altman's intense "force of will" from their early interactions.
Is there a Gates-like "presence" or a "force of will" displayed in his public interviews?
its not a comment on his ethics or morality
Paul Graham was a pudgy mediocrity clever enough to capitalize on nerds' obsession with Lisp, and leverage it into f-you money. Game recognized game in the shape of Sam Altman.
dario comes across like a guy who has never even been in a fight and cant believe a fight is even real.
there is something very dangerous about a person who believes that they are "good" and then believes that in fact their version of good is superior to the government, and they should ignore the government which ostensibly represents the people, while building a technology that will make millions of white collar jobs go away (democrat voters) and revolutionise violence (dod/dow - republican voters)
imagine if IBM decided in 1960s they were going to start telling NASA/DOD how to use their mainframes and saying USgov couldnt have an IBM if they were going to use it in vietnam etc
that said, i use claude
Barely represents the people. Especially not on the issue of domestic mass surveillance and fully autonomous killing machines. Or the war in Vietnam.
Neither know how to solve the alignment problem while market pressures are making them race towards capabilities (long horizon, continual learning) that will have disastrous consequences .
Maybe it’s not much and they probably won’t care but taking no action here it’s the same as being complicit.
The guy can lie with a perfectly straight face. He's the kind of person who tells another lie just to cover the last one, and then another to cover that.
Meanwhile he keeps making everyone more and more dependent on him, so by the time people finally realize what's going on, they can't afford to push him out.
This one is unusual in that the government started bailing out the AI companies last year. Usually, it waits until the bubble pops, and then starts the bail outs.
That's standard operating procedure for Trump though.
He did the same thing in 2016-19 with the zero interest rate policy + tax cuts even though the economy was strong. Any macroeconomics book (or NPR station during those years) will tell you that doing that creates short-term economic growth, but sets the next administration up for [hyper-]inflation.
Of course, that happened, and those same books go on to say "and, usually, because inflation takes a bit to kick in, the next president will be blamed. This is why we have an independent Fed".
So, this time around, he's trying to pull the same crap by dismantling the Fed, and, until then, lean hard into deficit spending to keep unemployment low. Last year, money went to data centers, and domestic paramilitary actions and prison build-outs. This year, we have those things and a new pointless forever war.
However, it's not working the same way as it did last time. He's done so much other collateral damage that we're in a "boomcession" where the economic indicators become untethered from reality. So, they show growth, but people's quality of life, spending power, job security, and so on all decrease.
For example, a piece of the GDP is "how much does your bank screw you per year on your checking account?". This is treated like discretionary spending, and it's gone up from a few hundred a year to over $2000 in 2025. That increase counts as economic growth, instead of institutionalized theft.
Medical spending increases drove all the US's GDP growth last quarter. The quarter before that, it was spending on AI datacenters that's backed by junk loans and federal dollars.
Anyway, I don't have an answer for your question better than "bubble", but the current economic cycle is not what you described. It is a "boomcession". As far as I can tell, it's a new class of economic disaster, at least in the US.
Posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47195085
They are not the exception, and are just as bloodlessly, shamelessly publicity hungry as any other tech co, if not more so. No surprise based on their conduct up until this fake event.
Those who know better please correct me. My current understanding of Palantir (and other surveillance tech companies like Peregrine) is:
1. They facilitate the sale of data to law enforcement, enabling the government to circumvent fourth amendment protections.
2. They fuse cross-government agency data through Foundry and fuse them into unified profiles which the government can use to surveil and pressure citizens without probable cause or a warrant.
ICE also uses a Palantir tool called ELITE to build deportation target lists.
EDIT: Downvoting my comment without any proper rebuttal or clarification is pretty silly.
I do agree with your point that Amodei is playing a game though. Whether he’s winning the bigger picture or not it’s unclear. His red lines are already so watered out, like how domestic surveillance is not ok, but international? totally fine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_(...
I suspect the 2007 in the title refers to the fact that bills were passed to ban this stuff in 2007, which is when the PRISM program (also illegal domestic surveillance) got started.
(The title makes it sound like warrantless surveillance lasted from 2001-2007, but I think it means the article only covers that date range.)
I don't know how reliable that source is. In any case, here's the text from that link, for posterity:
"I want to be very clear on the messaging that is coming from OpenAI, and the mendacious nature of it. This is an example of who they really are, and I want to make sure everything sees it for what it is. Although there is a lot we don’t know about the contract they signed with DoW (and that maybe they don’t even know as well — it could be highly unclear), we do know the following:
Sam’s description and the DoW description give the strong impression (although we would have to see the actual contract to be certain) that how their contract works is that the model is made available without any legal restrictions ("all lawful usee") but that there is a "safety layer", which I think amounts to model refusals, that prevents the model from completing certain tasks or engaging in certain applications.
"Safety layer" could also mean something that partners such as Palantir tried to offer us during these negotiations,which is that they on their end offered us some kind of classifier or machine learning system, or software layer, that claims to allow some applications and not others. There is also some suggestion of OpenAI employees ("FDE’s") looking over the usage of the model to prevent bad applications.
Our general sense is that these kinds of approaches, while they don’t have zero efficacy, are, in the context of military applications, maybe 20% real and 80% safety theater. The basic issue is that whether a model is conducting applications like mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons depends substantially on wider context: a model doesn’t "know" if there’s a human in the loop in the broad situation it is in (for autonomous weapons), and doesn’t know the provenance of the data is it analyzing (so doesn’t know if this is US domestic data vs foreign, doesn’t know if it’s enterprise data given by customers with consent or data bought in sketchier ways, etc).
The kind of "safety layer" stuff that Palantir offered us (and presumably offered OpenAI) is even worse:our sense was that it was almost entirely safety theater, and that Palantir assumed that our problem was "you have some unhappy employees, you need to offer them something that placates them or makes what is happening invisible to them, and that’s the service we provide".
Finally, the idea of having Anthropic/OpenAI employees monitor the deployments is something that came up in discussion within Anthropic a few months ago when we were expanding our classified AUP of our own accord. We were very clear that this is possible only in a small fraction of cases, that we will do it as much as we can, but that it’s not a safeguard people should rely on and isn’t easy to do in the classified world. We do, by the way, try to do this as much as possible, there’s no difference between our approach and OpenAI’s approach here.
So overall what I’m saying here is that the approaches OAI is taking mostly do not work: the main reason OAI accepted them and we did not is that they cared about placating employees, and we actually cared about preventing abuses. They don’t have zero efficacy, and we’re doing many of them as well, but they are nowhere near sufficient for purpose. It is simultaneously the case that the DoW did not treat OpenAI and us the same here.
We actually attempted to include some of the same safeguards as OAI in our contract, in addition to the AUP which we considered the more important thing, and DoW rejected them with us. We have evidence of this in the email chain of the contract negotiations (I’m writing this with a lot to do, but I might get someone to follow up with the actual language). Thus, it is false that "OpenAIs terms were offered to us and we rejected them", at the same time that it is also false that OpenAI’s terms meaningfully protect them against domestic mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.
Finally, there is some suggestion in Sam/OpenAI’s language that the red lines we are talking about, fully autonomous weapons and domestic mass surveillance, are already illegal and so an AUP about these is unnecessary. This mirrors and seems coordinated with DoW’s messaging. It is however completely false. As we explained in our statement yesterday, the DoW does have domestic surveillance authorities, that are not of great concern in a pre--AI world but take on a different meaning in a post-AI world.
For example, it is legal for DoW to buy a bunch of private data on US citizens from vendors who have obtained that data in some legal way (often involving hidden consents to sell to third parties) and then analyze it at scale with AI to build profiles of citizens, their loyalties, movement patterns in physical space (the data they can get includes GPS data, etc), and much more.
Notably, near the end of the negotiation the DoW offered to accept our current terms if we deleted a specific phrase about "analysis of bulk acquired data", which was the single line in the contract that exactly matched this scenario we were most worried about. We found that very suspicious. On autonomous weapons, the DoW claims that "human in the loop is the law", but they are incorrect. It is currently Pentagon policy (set during the Biden admin) that a human has to be in the loop of firing a weapon. But that policy can be changed unilaterally by Pete Hegseth, which is exactly what we are worried about. So it is not, for all intents and purposes, a real constraint.
A lot of OpenAI and DoW messaging just straight up lies about these issues or tries to confuse them.
I think these facts suggest a pattern of behavior that Ive seen often from Sam Altman, and that I want to make sure people are equipped to recognize:
He started out this morning by saying he shares Anthropic’s redlines, in order to appear to support us, get some of the credit, and not be attacked when they take over the contract. He also presented himself as someone who wants to "set the same contract for everyone in the industry" — e.g. he’s presenting himself as a peacemaker and dealmaker.
Behind the scenes, he’s working with the DoW to sign a contract with them, to replace us the instant we are designated a supply chain risk. But he has to do this in a way that doesn’t make it seem like he gave up on the red lines and sold out when we wouldn’t. He is able to superficially appear to do this, because (1.) he can sign up for all the safety theater that Anthropic rejected, and that the DoW and partners are willing to collude in presenting as compelling to his employees, and (2.) the DoW is also willing to accept some terms from him that they were not willing to accept from us. Both of these things make it possible for OAI to get a deal when we could not.
The real reasons DoW and the Trump admin do not like us is that we haven’t donated to Trump (while OpenAI/Greg have donated a lot), we haven’t given dictator-style praise to Trump (while Sam has), we have supported AI regulation which is against their agenda, we’ve told the truth about a number of AI policy issues (like job displacement), and we’ve actually held our red lines with integrity rather than colluding with them to produce "safety theater" for the benefit of employees (which, I absolutely swear to you, is what literally everyone at DoW, Palantir, our political consultants, etc, assumed was the problem we were trying to solve).
Sam is now (with the help of DoW) trying to spin this as we were unreasonable, we didn’t engage in a good way, we were less flexible, etc. I want people to recognize this as the gaslighting it is.
Vague justifications like "person X was hard to work with" are often used to hide real reasons that look really bad, like the reasons I gave above about political donations, political loyalty, and safety theater. It’s important that everyone understand this and push back on this narrative at least in private, when talking to OpenAI employees.
Thus, Sam is trying to undermine our position while appearing to support it. I want people to be really clear on this: he is trying to make it more possible for the admin to punish us by undercutting our public support. Finally, I suspect he is even egging them on, though I have no direct evidence for this last thing.
I think this attempted spin/gaslighting is not working very well on the general public or the media, where people mostly see OpenAI’s deal with DoW as sketchy or suspicious, and see us as the heroes (we’re #2 in the App Store now!). Itis working on some Twitter morons, which doesn’t matter, but my main worry is how to make sure it doesn’t work on OpenAI employees.
Due to selection effects, they’re sort of a gullible bunch, but it seems important to push back on these narratives which Sam is peddling to his employees."
HypocrAIsy...
[1] -- https://edition.cnn.com/videos/business/2020/07/24/thiel-pal...
Of course, a company should have freedom to choose not to do business with the government. I just think that automatically assuming the worst intention of the government is not as productive as setting up good enough legal framework to limit government's power.
In a world where LLMs produce very convincing but subtly wrong output, this makes me uncomfortable. I get that warfare without AI is in the past now, but war and rules of engagement and AI output etc etc etc all seem fuzzy enough that this is not yet a good call even if you agree with the end goals.
I'm sorry, you've just literally described a "killer robot" in more words.
Where autonomous transformer-based munitions will be used are basically "here is a photo of a face, find and kill this human" and loitering munitions will take their time analyzing video and then decide to identify and attack a target on their own.
EDIT: Or worse: "identify suspicious humans and kill them"
Its not fully autonomous ice cream machines, its fully autonomous _weapons_. are you stupid or are you dumb? I don't think you're asking an honest question.
For that matter, explain why the Pentagon would balk at not spying on every American.
Just because you hate Altman doesn't mean everyone else does! Most people just know him as the guy who makes ChatGPT which most people like.
EDIT: Also, it doesn't help to brag about how this is good actually because now they are getting app downloads! People sympathize with victims of unfair situations. They don't like seeing people take advantage of those unfair situations though. No one has ever found the welfare recipient bragging about their welfare to be sympathetic.
Which is intended to muddy the waters about Anthropic’s actual position vs OpenAI’s, and portray himself as a conciliator (for the audience of DoD/Trump) who is still bound by equally strong ethics (as a fig leaf for OpenAI’s employees sympathetic to Anthropic). All to swoop in a land a big contract from the same people he is making a show of “supporting” in public.
I’d be pretty pissed too, tbh. Like, should he instead be thanking Sam effusively for being a manipulative slimeball acting entirely within his own self interest?
If as he says Sam’s comments are actually damaging Anthropic’s credibility/bargaining position with his public commentary then trying to change the popular narrative about what OpenAI/Sam are doing is a reasonable tactic.
As for your welfare analogy I’m kinda struggling to understand how to map that onto the participants in the current scenario or the lesson intended to be implied by it.
Going "what he's saying is straight up lies" is no more evidence backed than Altman claiming he asked the DoD to have Anthropic given the same deal as OAI and have the SCR designation avoided.
You don't give habitual liars the benefit of doubt.
Just because you hate Altman doesn't mean everyone else does! Most people just know him as the guy who makes ChatGPT which most people like.
But of course we could live in different bubbles
Could you point me to one other $300B+ company that would be willing to do this?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47145963
Just trying to make sure folks aren't getting ahead of themselves, without having put some custom thought into it.
If you want to put them on a pedestal for reasons that make sense to you, all good.
If others are encouraged to form their own opinions by taking some pause for thought, then all the better.
If Anthropic still end up on the pedestal, it must be for the right reasons, as opposed to 'just because they're not the currently discussed villain'.
Source: https://www.ft.com/content/97bda2ef-fc06-40b3-a867-f61a711b1...
(FWIW I am with you; I haven’t found a local model that works well enough to be a daily driver)
In a way, I admire Dario’s stance and having the backbone to stand up to a government that is so happy to punish, legally or illegally, those that disagree with them. I certainly wouldn’t have the bravery (or stupidity) in his position — which frankly makes me happy that he’s running Anthropic and not someone like me…
Anthropic might not sign up with DoD but they definitely still live in a glass house.
Also, its extremely evident that we live in a post truth world. The accusation of Lies dont hold any teeth anymore. Especially in the post law gov of America
If youve spent even a small amount of time with llms you’ll know that these security measures are just window dressing.
It's a standard security practice to randomly generate usernames and so my name is like that. Account is 8 years old.
I asked as I was not clear about what Dario meant.
i.e. he worries that OpenAI employees could also be gaslighted by Altman
anthropic has the least attrition rate
and yesterday an openai employee left already and joined anthropic
I know most of you here dont quite have the imagination to see it. But feel free to screenshot my post and lets talk in a year ;)
openai is best fit for usa's interests. sam is smart enough to be politically flexible and keep his mouth shut on closing doors of opportunities.
musk's views are best fit for world's interests but he's really spread thin and xai still sub par compared to openai, anthropic, google. he's also play safe lately trying to be politically neutral after his stint with the republicans.
im rooting for anthropic given their product excellence but it pains me that the other side of it is the effective altruism, the politics of dems, so on.
