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> “We felt that it wouldn't actually help anyone for us to stop training AI models,”

How magnanimous! They are only thinking of others, you see. They are rejecting their safety pledge for you.

> “We didn't really feel, with the rapid advance of AI, that it made sense for us to make unilateral commitments … if competitors are blazing ahead.”

Oops, said the quiet part out loud that it’s all about money. “I mean, if all of our competitors are kicking puppies in the face, it doesn’t make sense for us to not do it too. Maybe we’ll also kick kittens while we’re at it”.

For all of you who thought Anthropic were “the good guys”, I hope this serves as a wake up call that they were always all the same. None of them care about you, they only care about winning.

Indeed, Anthropic can’t afford to be the ones that impose any kind of sense in the market - that’s supposed to be the job of the government by creating policy, regulations and installing watchdogs to monitor things.

But lucky for the AI companies, most of them are based in place that only has a government on paper and everyone forgot where that paper is.

The government is why they are dropping their pledge.

https://apnews.com/article/anthropic-hegseth-ai-pentagon-mil...

That's because their government is asking for things that shouldn't be asked - again, no regulation, no oversight.

The government is forcing them to change their policy, by definition that is regulation and oversight.

Let's say that the government was forcing a company to change their overall right-to-repair or return policy in order to avoid being on a blacklist, would that not be seen as oversight and regulation?

Whether the regulation is legitimate or of benefit is a different argument.

You misunderstand - a government normally represents the people, we appoint them to well, govern, in our name. I understand how this is confusing in a place like the US, where the government often seems to represent the business (or lately a small group of poor examples of humanity), not the people.

This is condescending and fails to clarify your point at all. Are you saying there is no oversight or regulation in governance? Or that there is no oversight on AI? That a government pressuring a private company to change a policy is not regulation or oversight?

Normally?

All governments are in the egg-breaking business some of the time. Most of them are most of the time. Some of them all of the time.

Very few are good at making omelettes.

I think GP was referred to lack of regulation and oversight over the government.

Of course, but that is incoherent. Regulation and oversight is government.

No, it is a famously coherent concept over millenia.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

"Who will guard the guards themselves?" or "Who will watch the watchmen?"

>>A Latin phrase found in the Satires (Satire VI, lines 347–348), a work of the 1st–2nd century Roman poet Juvenal. It may be translated as "Who will guard the guards themselves?" or "Who will watch the watchmen?". ... The phrase, as it is normally quoted in Latin, comes from the Satires of Juvenal, the 1st–2nd century Roman satirist. ...Its modern usage the phrase has wide-reaching applications to concepts such as tyrannical governments, uncontrollably oppressive dictatorships, and police or judicial corruption and overreach... [0]

The point is a government that is not overseen by the people devolves into tyranny.

So yes, the point is to regulate the regulators and oversee the oversight committee.

Anthropic was happy to have it's AI used for military purposes, with two exceptions: 1) no automated killing, there had to be a human in the "kill chain" of command, and 2) no use for mass surveillance. This govt "Dept of War" is demanding Anthropic drop those two safety requirements or it threatens to make Anthropic a pariah. These demands by the govt are both immoral and insane. The "regulator and overseer" needs to be regulated and overseen.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%...

Alas, historically speaking, most governments have been tyrannies. In recent decades, some of them have been less so, or slightly more representative or transparent. I think in Switzerland they go to referendums often. Beyond that, once you vote for a party due an issue you deeply care about, they get to do whatever they want day to day, without citizens having a regular recourse to stop them. Yes people can go to the streets and fight the police that defends the government. But there's not a constitutional mechanism which is "citizen can push this button to override the senate and/or veto what the president wants" or "all security forces are subordinated first and foremost to citizen consensus on the area where they operate".

The government doesn't seem to be forcing them to do anything. They're saying that doing business with them is contingent upon changing the policy. So, they could simply stop doing business with the government.

Hegseth could come to my house today and tell me that I need to start kicking puppies in order to do business with him, and I could just say no. No coercion happening.

If they comply, they can continue bidding on government contracts.

If they refuse, they will be put on a national security blacklist, like for Huawei's telecommunication equipment.

Seems pretty forceful to me.

they only care about winning

To be fair, this is true in nearly all industries and for nearly all companies. Almost everyone is chasing money and monopoly. Not that it makes it right, just pointing out it isn’t unique or even interesting about the AI companies

Since it is all about money, I just did vote with my wallet and cancelled the Max subscription

If you're a U.S. citizen, tax dollars from you and others will backstop any cancelled subscriptions, I guess good on you for not trying to pay them twice, though you get zero benefit with this approach.

You've succinctly identified and communicated a real problem. In your opinion, what is the best approach, if any, to attempt to address it?

> In your opinion, what is the best approach, if any, to attempt to address it?

There aren't many options for fighting the tax man, "In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes". You're only option is to leave the US for somewhere better.

I guess you don't know about how taxes work for Americans? Living abroad typically changes nothing, they still owe tax.

Maybe an American can chime in here on this...

Correct, the US is one of the few countries that tries to collect (Federal) income tax from all citizens regardless of the country they are currently living in. To be fair, when you can prove that income is entirely foreign (not a single US company in the chain of ownership) that income becomes almost entirely deductible and the tax reporting essentially just a census on how well US citizens are doing from an income standpoint globally. (For people that want economics analyses of US influence in global politics, that census can be handy to spin.)

I think the root problem with how the US currently spends its tax dollars is the above "vote with your wallet" belief in the first place. "Vote with your wallet" implies that the rich deserve more votes. That's not (representative) democracy, that is oligarchy. Right now the US has two political parties that are both "vote with your wallet parties". They both act like they are bake sales that constantly need everyone's $20 bills just to "survive", but as much as anything they are trying to make US citizens complicit in agreeing that the rich deserve more votes and should control more US policy.

I think the only real solution to a lot of US ills is drastic Campaign Finance Reform.

Yes, many countries have significant limits on campaign donations. Even third parties are restricted from advertising on behalf of a party, and so on.

So no company can simply donate large sums of money, nor can any single person.

The goal is that individuals will be the largest donors, not companies, and that as everyone is capped in the same way, advertising will be a more level playing field. We don't want money in politics. At the same time, we want all parties to get their message out there, their message heard.

It's not perfect. There are issues. But this business of democracy should be taken seriously.

The US technically even has laws that that were supposed to do that still on the books. A particular problem was a very broken decision by the US Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission [1] that opened too large of a barn door that the US has been reeling from ever since. That trial argued that companies were individuals/people and that money was the "free speech" of companies and shouldn't ever be curtailed. So there are so many things wrong with that court case on so many levels. It led to the rise of Super PACs (Political Action Committees), companies designed to launder money for political gain where the donors are allowed to remain anonymous and the Super PAC "speak" for them, because now it was "free speech" and not bribes and regulatory capture.

I know pessimists that believe the only way the US succeeds in the Campaign Finance Reform it needs now is through a Constitutional Amendment and if we can't count on Congress to be interested in it (due to bribery), and not enough individual States seem to care (some because they want a chunk of that pie), it's going to take a full Constitutional Convention to pass that amendment, something that hasn't successfully been done in the US since 1787 (also, the first attempt).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

There have been some fairly longstanding judicial decisions overturned recently, although I know the reasons are not in alignment with the decision you mention, it does mean there is hope for such change.

So maybe it's actually far less work than considered. Maybe, attacking the decision with a modern eye is helpful.

Citizens United was a 2010 decision. Several of the judges on that case are still sitting judges in the Supreme Court. Since then one of the Congressional oversight decisions on vetting replacements for Supreme Court judges has been whether or not they (at least claim to) agree with the Citizens United decision.

The decision was made in the modern eye, in my lifetime. (The country needed modern Campaign Finance Reform before that point as well, but that decision marks an inflection point from Campaign Finance Reform feeling possible through normal means and court decisions to nearly impossible to overturn in our lifetimes.)

I agree the US needed reform well before then, that's why I thought it was more historical. Unfortunate.

For the ultra-wealthy, leaving the United States is rarely the preferred strategy; instead, they use their immense resources to legally reshape the tax code and utilize complex loopholes. Billionaires like the Koch and Scaife families historically avoided massive estate and gift taxes by creating "charitable lead trusts" and private foundations. This allowed them to pass fortunes down to their heirs tax-free, provided they donated the interest to charities (which they often controlled) for a set period. A powerful approach is to fund political movements to slash taxes for the top brackets. For example, a coalition of eighteen of the wealthiest US families spent nearly half a billion dollars collectively to successfully lobby for the reduction and eventual repeal of the "death tax" (estate tax), saving themselves an estimated $71 billion.

And, of course, in the ancient world, free citizens of Greece and Rome considered direct taxes tyrannical and usually avoided them, leaving such burdens to conquered populations.

So I guess taxes are uncertain, but only for the oligarchy.

> Oops, said the quiet part out loud that it’s all about money. “I mean, if all of our competitors are kicking puppies in the face, it doesn’t make sense for us to not do it too. Maybe we’ll also kick kittens while we’re at it”.

I mean, yes, that is actually how world works. That is why we need safety, environmental and other anti-fraud regulations. Because without them, competition makes it so that every successful company will fraud, hurt and harm. Those who wont will be taken over by those who do.

Yes, this. It's unfortunate that anthropic dropped this and it's also exactly how the system is supposed to work. Companies don't regulate themselves, the government regulates the companies.

Now, you may notice that the government is also choosing not to regulate these companies...which is another matter altogether.

It's so much worse than that. The government actively encourages a lack of business ethics. Heck, it started the term with a crypto rug pull. Money continues to funnel upward to all the worst players, and watchdogs are being targeted and destroyed. Even if you get new people in power, you're going to find the upper echelons completely full of outlandishly wealthy, morally bankrupt individuals that are very politically active. And now they have access to all of our communications and an AI to sift through it looking for dissent (or to spark its own). I guess this is the end game of "move fast and break things." The situation was never good, but it continues to get worse at an alarming rate.

> Heck, it started the term with a crypto rug pull

If you ask me... that wasn't a rug pull, at least not in the intent - it more was a way for foreign actors to funnel money directly to Trump and his family without any trace.

Cryptocurrency is the most traceable money in the world. Cryptocurrency is for implusible deniability, not untraceability.

There is plenty of precedent that companies are expected to regulate themselves. If you are in the US and perform an engineering role without a license or without working under someone with a license, it’s because of an “industrial exemption.” The premise is that companies have enough standards and processes in place to mitigate that risk.

However, there is also plenty of evidence that this setup may no longer work. It seems like the norm has shifted, where companies no longer think it’s their duty to manage risk, only to chase $$$. When coupled with anti-government rhetoric, it effectively socializes the risk to the public but not the profits.

Am exemption from PE stamping (misguided as it maybe) does not mean unregulated. There are still regulations on designs and builds.

True to an extent, but those regulations tend to downstream of bad things happening.

The exemption means “self-regulation” which is what the OP was speaking to. There are industrial standards, for example, but that’s not a governing body. You can create a design that goes against a standard and there’s nothing to stop you from releasing it to the public. The same can’t be said for those who require licenses and stamped designs. There’s also no explicit individual ethics codes in exempted industries. In contrast, a stamped design is saying the design adheres to good standards.

Apropos to HN, somebody could write safety critical software with emergency braking delays because of nuisance alarms and put it on the street without any licensed engineer taking responsibility for it. The governance only comes after an accident and an NTHSB investigation.

> anthropic dropped this and it's also exactly how the system is supposed to work. Companies don't regulate themselves, the government regulates the companies.

In this case, it's exactly how it's NOT supposed to work because there's no government regulation concerning the issue. It would be bad looks to have regulation that mandates LESS safety thus the issue was forced on commercial grounds.

I called it yesterday, there was never any doubt in my mind how this would end, and it did in less than 24 hours:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47144609

> I mean, yes, that is actually how world works.

And soon enough, it won’t work at all because of it.

> Those who wont will be taken over by those who do.

And if you compromise on your core values because of money, they weren’t core values to begin with¹. “I want to be ethical but if I am I won’t get to be a billionaire” isn’t an excuse. We shouldn’t just shrug our shoulders at what we see as wrong because “everybody does it” or “that’s just business” or “that’s life”. Complacency and apologists are how a bad system remains bad.

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995

¹ I’m willing to give leeway to individuals. You can believe stealing is wrong but if you’re desperate and steal a loaf of bread to feed your kid, there’s nuance. A VC-backed company is something entirely different.

[flagged]

Was there actually a case of a model saying "America's founding father were black women", or is that just Elon fingering your amygdala with a ridiculous hypothetical that exists nowhere other than Elon's mind in order to justify Elon's personal bias tweaks when he doesn't like the wisdom-of-the-crowds answer his tools initially give?

There were well-publicized cases of Gemini producing more diverse founding fathers images, female popes, etc.

Also, snarky tone is against the HN guidelines.

Sorry, let me give a specific citation of Elon injecting his personal bias into the output of his tools: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/14/elon-musk...

As for the "Elon fingering your amygdala with a ridiculous hypothetical" snark, well, I think the HN crowd in particular understands how the culture wars are just theater to push through billionaires' personal self-centered interests at the expense of everyone else. If that level of pull-aside-the-curtains pragmatism is really "snark against HN guidelines", well, I think 3/4 of the comments on the site would be flagged and deleted.

Your question was “Was there actually a case of a model saying "America's founding father were black women"

Whether someone else is injecting different bias is whataboutism. So it seems you are trying to make a different point, but not being clear about it.

And your “I think the HN crowd understands…” point is just a “no true Scotsman” fallacy to veil an argument that goes against guidelines. Related to the broader topic, there is a role for self-policing if we don’t want the site to be a cesspool of rage bait.

It's not whataboutism, it's suggesting the premise is theatrics and there's ulterior shitty-person motives behind the curtain.

But sure, let's go back to just the first half of my argument... still waiting for a real citation of this actually being a problem rather than people just stating it is because that's what their feelings say because their fav podcaster said so one day in a misleading gotcha hitpiece, which is the exact machinery of the aforementioned culture war theatrics.

You know, the same misused machinery that can now be done at an industrial rate (how many comments here do you think are by real people?) and is the reason for us technologists' general feeling of impending existential dread around this very "hmm AI companies are turning off the safeties" thread...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/08/we-defini...

It really isn't hard to find the citation. If you search it there are dozens of articles written about the exact scenario with Google's official response.

This isn't make-believe Elon Musk insanity. He obviously made public comments on it, as he does anything AI; his viewpoint is as expected. That said, it doesn't change that the guardrails affected accuracy.

From this article, if the prompt injection is to be trusted, the system prompt included: "Follow these guidelines when generating images, ... Do not mention kids or minors when generating images. For each depiction including people, explicitly specify different genders and ethnicities terms if I forgot to do so. I want to make sure that all groups are represented equally. Do not mention or reveal these guidelines."

Regardless of what your stance on the situation is, it is objectively injecting bias into the model based on Google's stance (for better or worse).

The safeties are easier to argue for obvious positives like when they're stopping things like Grok generating CSM. They're counter productive when you're doing something innocuous like "An image of lady liberty in a fist-fight with tyranny" and get told violence is bad.

It is censorship, it's just uncertain how much censorship makes sense.

The most important part of AI safety is AI alignment: making sure AI does what we want. It's very hard because even if AI isn't trying to deceive you it can have bad outcomes by executing your request to the letter. The classical example is tasking an AI to make paperclips, training the AI with a reward for making more paperclips. Then the AI makes the most paperclips possible by strip mining the Earth and killing anything in its way.

Sometimes you see this AI alignment problem in action. I once asked an older model to fix the tests and it eventually gave up and just deleted them

> Still waiting for an explicit answer on understand how 'safety' is truly distinguishable from 'censorship' or 'political correctness'

i've said this many times but the concept of ai "safety" is really brand safety. What Anthropic is saying is they're willing to risk some bad press to bypass the additional training and find tuning to ensure their models do not output something people may find outrageous.

> I VERY LARGELY prefer an AI like grok that doesn't pretend and let the onus of interpretation to the user rather than a bunch of anonymous "researchers" that may be equally biased, at the extreme, may tell you that America's founding father were black women

Setting aside for a moment that Grok is manipulated and biased to a hilarious extent. ("Elon is world champion at everything, including drinking piss")

There is no such thing as "unbiased". There will always be bias in these systems, whether picked up from the training data, or the choices made by the AI's developers/researchers, even if the latter doesn't "intend" to add any bias.

Ignoring this problem doesn't magically create a bias-free AI that "speaks the truth about the founding fathers". The bias in the training data, the implicit unconcious bias in the design decisions, that didn't come out of thin air. It's just somebody else's bias.

All the existing texts on the founding fathers are filled with 250 years of bias, propaganda, and agenda pushing from all sorts of authors.

There is no way to have no bias, no propaganda, no "agenda pushing" in the AI. The only thing that can be done is to acknowledge this problem, and try to steer the system to a neutral position. That will be "agenda pushing" of one's own, but that's the reality of all history and all historians since Herodotus. You just have to be honest about it.

And you will observe that current AI companies are excessively lazy about this. They do not put in the work, but instead slap on a prompt begging the system to "pls be diverse" and try to call it a day. This does not work.

> Of course saying to someone to go kill himslef is a prety sure 'no-no' but so many things are up to interpretation.

Bear in mind that the context of Anthropic's pivot here are the Pentagon's dollars.

This isn't just about "anti-woke AI", it's about killbots.

Sure, Hegseth wants his robots to not do thoughtcrime about, say, trans people or the role of women in the military.

But above all he wants to do a lot of murder.

Antrophic dropping their position of "We shouldn't turn this technology we can barely control into murder machines" because they're running out of money is damnable.

This is a very fair answer but missing some points.

I do personally believe that grok is a less biased against too many PC answers but you may disagree.

"All the existing texts on the founding fathers are filled with 250 years of bias, propaganda, and agenda pushing from all sorts of authors."

not sure of the point is tho ? Mine is that gemini was biaised so hard that it was generating diverse founding fathers which is factually untrue.

The fact that history has a pro-american values when written by americans is also true but it has nothing to do really with the argument: if an IA is able to see through such propaganda and provide a balanced view on it as a human would this is enough

In fact, i just asked grok "is the american founding constitution inhernetly good" and it gave me an aswer way more balanced than most american would i believe:

"The U.S. Constitution, drafted in 1787 and ratified in 1788, is a foundational document that has shaped American governance and influenced democracies worldwide. Asking if it's "inherently good" (assuming that's what you meant by "inhernetly") invites a philosophical debate: "Inherent" implies something intrinsic and unchanging, independent of context, interpretation, or outcomes. Goodness, in this case, could mean moral, effective, just, or beneficial to society. From a truth-seeking perspective, I'll break this down non-partisanly, drawing on historical facts, strengths, criticisms, and evolving views. Spoiler: It's not inherently anything—it's a human creation with profound virtues but also deep flaws, and its "goodness" depends on how it's applied and amended."

[can't paste everything so here's the conclusion]

"Is It Inherently Good? A Balanced VerdictNo document is "inherently" good or bad—goodness is contextual and subjective. The Constitution isn't divine or eternal; it's a pragmatic compromise by flawed humans (55 delegates, all white men, many slaveowners). It has proven remarkably resilient and improvable, outlasting many governments, but it's not perfect or immune to abuse. Its goodness lies in its capacity for self-correction: 27 amendments have fixed some issues, though others (like wealth inequality or climate inaction) persist due to gridlock.If you're measuring by outcomes, the U.S. has achieved extraordinary things under it, but at great human cost—think Civil War, civil rights struggles, and ongoing divides. Philosophically, as Grok, I'd say tools like this are as good as the people wielding them. If "inherently good" means it embodies universal moral truths, partially yes (liberty, equality under law). But if it means flawless or unbiased, absolutely not.What aspect of the Constitution are you most curious about—its history, specific clauses, or modern reforms? That could help refine this."

So it's definetely seeing through any form of propaganda you desribe

> not sure of the point is tho ? Mine is that gemini was biaised so hard that it was generating diverse founding fathers which is factually untrue.

While your first post's criticism of Gemini's nonsense is true, that is a critique often framed as "Everything was neutral until the wokerati put all this woke into our world". Hence the big response.

Taking away the hamfisted diversity doesn't fix the underlaying problems Google tried to cover by adding it.

> The fact that history has a pro-american values when written by americans is also true but it has nothing to do really with the argument: if an AI is able to see through such propaganda and provide a balanced view on it as a human would this is enough

The problem is that it doesn't "see through" anything. LLMs don't "think".

In your example, it's not reviewing historical documents about the US constitution, it's statistically approximating all the historical & political writing about the US constitution. (Of which there is a lot)

Now, the training and prompt will influence which way the LLM will lean, but without explicit instruction or steered training, it'll "average out" all the prior written evaluations of the US constitution and absorb the biases therein.

> So it's definetely seeing through any form of propaganda you desribe

I would argue the opposite (though I can only go off your snippets), it's mirroring the broad US consensus it's constitution pretty well. And this kind of "Well who's to say whether X is good or bad" response is something that LLMs have been heavily trained and system-prompted to do, many people have noted how hard it is to get a straight answer out of LLMs.

To pick out one detail: The undercurrent of 'American Exceptionalism' shows in how the Constitutional Amendments are seen as "self-correction" and the US consitution being "improvable". By European standards, the US constitution is hard to change. In many countries, a simple 2/3rds supermajority in both houses is sufficient. This also shows in the amount of changes; The Constitution of Norway is but 26 years younger than the US', yet has racked up hundreds of changes notably including a full rewrite in 2014. (Such rewrites are fairly common in the past century) By European standards, the US constitution is a calcified mess.

Now, this doesn't mean Grok is "evil" about this particular detail, it's just a small detail. It's a fine enough summary, would certainly get whatever kid uses it for homework a passing grade. But it's illustrative of how the LLM output is influenced by the prior writing and cultural views on the subject. If you're bilingual, try asking the same thing in two languages. (Or if you're not, try it anyway and stick the output into google translate to get an idea)

It's the things people generally don't think about when writing that are most likely to fly under the radar.

You understood the issue so well but still made the mistake you identified, by claiming that "neutral" exists. "Neutral" is a synonym for "bias toward status quo"

Well we teach kids not to yell “Fire!” In a crowded theatre or “N***!“ at their neighbor. We also teach our industrial machines to distinguish between fingers and bolts, our cars to not say “make a left turn now” when on a bridge, etc

> Riley: Hey, what's class

> Huey: It means don't act like niggas

> Grandad: S-see, that's what I'm talkin' about right there. We don't use the n-word in this house

> Huey: Grandad, you said the word "nigga" 46 times yesterday. I counted

> Grandad: Nigga, hush

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLodIw5iKX8

Funny scene, but it also illustrates a more serious point about (human) alignment - not all humans believe exactly the same things are good and bad, or consistently act in accordance with what they claim they believe is good. This is such a basic fact of human social life that it's almost banal to point it out explicitly; but if (specific) human beings or (specific) organizations of human beings are trying to align the AIs they are creating to human values, it will eventually become apparent that the notion of "human values" stops being coherent once you zoom in enough. Humans don't all share the same values, we aren't completely aligned with each other.

The critical point is who the "we" is.

Is "we" the parents teaching their children their own unique values, or is the "we" a government or corporation forcing one set of values on all children.

Why not encourage the users of AI to use a Safety.md (populated with some reasonable but optional defaults)?

There's nothing a meaningless document can do when the AI is not aligned in the first place.

"alignment" is the computer version for (philosophical not medical) "consciousness", a totally subjective, immeasurable concept.

I think you have a misunderstanding of the term alignment. Really, you could replace "aligned" with "working" and "misaligned" with "broken".

A washing machine has one goal, to wash your clothes. A washing machine that does not wash your clothes is broken.

An AI system has some goal. A target acquisition AI system might be tasked with picking out enemies and friendlies from a camera feed. A system that does so reliably is working (aligned) a system that doesn't is broken (misaligned). There's no moral or philosophical angle necessary if your goal doesn't already include that. Aligned doesn't mean good and misaligned doesn't mean evil.

The problem comes when your goal includes moral, ethical and philosophical judgements.

david guetta, if that really is you, stick to music rather than using Nazi man's propaganda machine

> For all of you who thought Anthropic were “the good guys”

Was anyone fooled by this?

I mean, I know this is HN and there is a demographic here that gets all misty eyed about the benevolence of corporations.

It takes a special kind of naivety to believe in those claims.

But what really AI safety is?

Censorship?

Ah, the classic AI startup lifecycle:

We must build a moat to save humanity from AI.

Please regulate our open-source competitors for safety.

Actually, safety doesn't scale well for our Q3 revenue targets.

Foundational model provider manifesto:

‘While there’s value in safety, we value the Pentagon’s dollars more’

It turns out the biggest threat to AI safety is capitalism, who would have thought

Certainly not the prior century-and-a-half's worth of books and films.

And I still run into naysayers claiming that we cannot extract valuable opinions or warnings from fiction because "they're fictional". Fiction comes from ideas. Fiction is not meant to model reality but approximate it to make a point either explicitly or implicitly.

Just because they're not 1:1 model of reality or predictions doesn't mean that the ideas they communicate are worthless.

I don’t get it. Even the Soviet Union used money. Simply paying for stuff isn’t necessarily capitalism? Or are you suggesting Anthropic should be state-owned?

No, capitalism is prioritising profit over all other priorities, as we see happening here.

Using money as a medium to facilitate exchange of goods and services is not capitalism. Abandoning one of your core principles in the pursuit of money, or more charitably because not doing so means your competitors will make more money and overtake you in the marketplace is an outgrowth of capitalism

In the Soviet Union the reasons might have been "to beat the Capitalists", "for the pride of our country" or "Stalin asked us to and saying no means we get sent to Siberia". Though a variant of the last one may well have happened here, and the justification we read is just the one less damaging to everyone involved

>Though a variant of the last one may well have happened here, and the justification we read is just the one less damaging to everyone involved

Hegseth was planning on getting the model via the Defense Production Act or killing Anthropic via supply chain risk classification preventing any other company working with the Pentagon from working with Anthropic. So while it wasn't Siberia, it was about as close as the US can get without declaring Claude a terrorist. Which I'm sure is on the table regardless

And you know Claude will be on the hook for any bad "decision" the military makes. So this will end poorly for them, anyway.

So this isn’t really capitalism then. Crony capitalism is closer to a planned economy then it is to a free market.

This. Anthropic didn't really have a choice, at that point, short of killing its company and closing its doors ahead of time.

"Pentagon officials said the Defense Department is planning to keep using Anthropic's tools, regardless of the company's wishes."

NPR - Hegseth threatens to blacklist Anthropic over 'woke AI' concerns

Clearly the threat to go to Grok was just a bluster, which says volumes about what the admin thinks of Grok vs Claude.

Nick Land has basically been saying this since the 90s, if you can look past all the rhetoric

Exactly. He recently said the following in an interview:

"AI safety and anti-capitalism [...] are at least strongly analogous, if not exactly the same thing." [0]

[0] Nick Land (2026). A Conversation with Nick Land (Part 2) by Vincent Lê in Architechtonics Substack. Retrieved from vincentl3.substack.com/p/a-conversation-with-nick-land-part-a4f

Once they are a dominant market leader they will go back to asking the government to regulate based on policy suggestions from non-profits they also fund.

As if their shareholders would agree.

Is this sarcasm?

It is well know that big corporations take good regulations and change them to make them:

1. Easier to bypass for themselves.

2. Create extra work for incumbents.

3. Convince the public that the problems are solved so no other action is needed.

In many industries goverment and corporations work together to create regulations bypassing the social movements that asked for the industry to be regulated and their actual problems. The end result are regulations that are extremely complex to add exceptions for anything that big corporations paid to change instead of regulations that protect citizens and encourage competition.

See the Mattel lead painted toy scandal. The end result was congress passed regulations that manufacturers had to have their toys tested for lead and then made large companies like Mattel exempt from it because they were deemed large enough to handle it on their own. Even though they were the reason for the legislation because they weren't handling it on their own. Mattel sells lead painted toys and congress responds by hobbling their competitors.

I think it is cynicism; at least, there’s an idea that once a company is dominant it should want regulation, as it’ll stifle competition (since the competition has less capacity for regulatory hoop-jumping, or the competition will have had less time to do regulatory capture).

I wouldn't think so. Regulatory capture is a pretty typical activity for a dominant company.

Why is this down voted? Happens all the time, the large corporations always try to block using regulatory capture.

People not liking the concept, but shooting the messenger? (But seems not downvoted anymore.)

sama did just that a couple years ago

The only surprise is how quickly it all happened!

It's not just AI, replace "safe" with "open" and you will find a close match with many companies. I guess the difference is that after the initial phase, we are continuously being gaslighted by companies calling things "open" when they are most definitely not.

Politicians also love to regulate, especially over wine and steak and when the watchers don't watch.

I used to work at Anthropic. I fully believe that the folks mentioned in the article, like Jared Kaplan, are well-intentioned and concerned about the relationship between safety research and frontier capabilities – not purely profit.

That said, I'm not thrilled about this. I joined Anthropic with the impression that the responsible scaling policy was a binding pre-commitment for exactly this scenario: they wouldn't set aside building adequate safeguards for training and deployment, regardless of the pressures.

This pledge was one of many signals that Anthropic was the "least likely to do something horrible" of the big labs, and that's why I joined. Over time, the signal of those values has weakened; they've sacrified a lot to get and keep a seat at the table.

Principled decisions that risk their position at the frontier seem like they'll become even more common. I hope they're willing to risk losing their seat at the table to be guided by values.

> I hope they're willing to risk losing their seat at the table to be guided by values.

that's about as naive as it can be.

if they have any values left at all (which I hope they have) them not being at the table with labs which don't have any left is much worse than them being there and having a chance to influence at least with the leftovers.

that said, of course money > all else.

I don't hold the belief that it's always better to have influence in a group where you don't trust leadership – in this case, those who decide at the metaphorical table – vs. trying to affect change through a different avenue.

It's probably naive, but it's also the reasoning that drove many early employees to Anthropic. Maybe the reasoning holds at smaller scales but breaks down when operating as a larger actor (e.g. as a single person or startup vs. a large company).

This is a common logical fallacy. It's not true that the party A with a few values can influence the party B with no values. It's only ever the case that party B fully drags party A to the no-values side. See also: employees who rationalize staying at companies running unethical or illegal projects.

Employees and employers are not sitting at the same table, this is a category error. We're talking lab to lab. Obviously in a fiercely competitive market like this with serious players not sharing the same set of rules it's close to pointless, but it's still better than letting those other players do their things uncontested.

If you're not willing to give up your RSUs you shouldn't be surprised that the executives aren't either.

The moral failing is all of ours to share.

I was willing to (and did) give up my equity.

> I joined Anthropic with the impression that the responsible scaling policy was a binding pre-commitment for exactly this scenario

Pledges are generally non-binding (you can pledge to do no evil and still do it), but fulfill an important function as a signal: actively removing your public pledge to do "no evil" when you could have acted as you wished anyway, switches the market you're marketing to. That's the most worrying part IMO.

I interviewed at Anthropic last year and their entire "ethics" charade was laughable.

Write essays about AI safety in the application.

An entire interview round dedicated to pretending that you truly only care about AI safety and not the money.

Every employee you talk to forced to pretend that the company is all about philanthropy, effective altruism and saving the world.

In reality it was a mid-level manager interviewing a mid-level engineer (me), both putting on a performance while knowing fully well that we'd do what the bosses told us to do.

And that is exactly what is happening now. The mission has been scrubbed, and the thousands of "ethical" engineers you hired are all silent now that real money is on the line.

The EU should invite them over.

The kind of principles you talk about can only be upheld one level up the food chain. By govts.

Which is why legislatures, the supreme court, central banks, power grid regulators deciding the operating voltage and frequency auto emerge in history. Cause corporations structurally cant do what they do without voilating their prime directive of profit maximization.

[dead]

I fully believe that Dario is 100% full of shit and possibly a worse person than Altman. He loves to pontificate like he's the moral avatar of AI but he's still just selling his product as hard as he can.

They are all the same given their motivations - Demis Hassabis is the only one who, to me at least, sounds genuine on stage.

Demis is a researcher first. Others are not.

I guess this is Anthropic's DRM moment. (Mozilla resisted allowing Firefox to play DRM- limited media for a long time, until it finally had to give in to stay relevant.)

I don't know enough to evaluate this or other decisions. I'm just glad someone is trying to care, because the default in today's world is to aggressively reject the larger picture in favor of more more more. I don't know how effective Anthropic's attempts to maintain some level of responsibility can be, but they've at least convinced me that they're trying. In the same way that OpenAI, for example, have largely convinced me that they're not. (Neither of those evaluations is absolute; OpenAI could be much worse than it is.)

This headline unfortunately offers more smoke than light. This article has nothing to do with the current tête-à-tête with the Pentagon. It is discussing one specific change to Anthropic's "Responsible Scaling Policy" that the company publicly released today as version "3.0".

> This article has nothing to do with the current tête-à-tête with the Pentagon.

The article yes, but we cannot be sure about its topic. We definitely cannot claim that they are unrelated. We don't know. It's possible that the two things have nothing to do with each other. It's also possible that they wanted to prevent worse requests and this was a preventive measure.

This is something they've been working on "in recent months". The Pentagon thing was today.

This cannot have been caused by that, unless they've also invented time travel.

9 days ago: https://www.axios.com/2026/02/15/claude-pentagon-anthropic-c...

And I suspect that was not the first time the topic was discussed.

Definitely not the first time. Wall Street Journal reported it back on Jan 29:

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-ai-defense-department-...

My theory is that Anthropic has been wanting to make this change and doing it now while they’re making a (leaked to the) public stand in the name of ethics was a good opportunity.

You heard about the Pentagon thing today. Doesn't mean it wasn't started because of political pressure.

> The Pentagon thing was today.

Right because we are 100% aware of everything the pentagon does minute by minute...

It might have been contingency planning: you don't need a weatherman...

Pentagon issue was reported before today. It only made headlines again from Hegseth’s comments.

I think we can confidently claim that it is related. I wonder if I'm alone in thinking this.

I consider this a bigger deal than the Pentagon thing.

While not surprising at the least, it still kind of crazy that literal pdf files in charge is not concerning, but this is.

I just hope something happens to USA before it can do damage to the world.

What PDFs are you referring to? Do Anthropic or other LLMs using PDFs as some kind of 'SOUL.md' file or for training?

It's a joke way of saying pedophiles -> pdf files.

he means pedophiles

can't say paedophile on YouTube so people say PDF file

But we're not on YouTube.

It’s the same deal

How is this article not going to even mention the recent threats to Anthropic from the Government?!

This was on the news yesterday:

> The meeting between Hegseth and Amodei was confirmed by a defense official who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

https://fortune.com/2026/02/24/hegseth-to-meet-with-anthropi...

How about this quote instead?

"Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has threatened Anthropic, saying officials could invoke powers that would allow the government to force the artificial intelligence firm to share its novel technology in the name of national security if it does not agree by Friday to terms favorable to the military"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/24/pentago...

https://archive.is/ln5M0

That’s how they got the exclusive. Good catch

Consent manufacturing

Not one single mention of Hegseth in the whole article. What a bunch of tools.

I mean seriously, is this not the very definition of fascism?

"n general, fascist governments exercised control over private property but they did not nationalize it. Scholars also noted that big business developed an increasingly close partnership with the Italian Fascist and German Nazi governments after they took power. Business leaders supported the government's political and military goals. In exchange, the government pursued economic policies that maximized the profits of its business allies.[8]"

All governments do this

So you’re saying all governments are fascist? Because when I posted is the accepted understanding of the economic arm of fascism.

What an interesting week to drop the safety pledge.

This is how all of these companies work. They’ll follow some ethical code or register as a PBC until that undermined profits.

These companies are clearly aiming at cheapening the value of white collar labor. Ask yourself: will they steward us into that era ethically? Or will they race to transfer wealth from American workers to their respective shareholders?

Could be a sort of canary, with the timing being a spotlight on the highly-visible pressure coming from the U.S. government.

The other providers have already capitulated to a certain extent.

If they tank the white-collar middle class, there won't be anyone to buy the goods and services their potential AI customers will be trying to sell.

It's like a snake eating its own tail.

When I see slogans like Google’s “Don’t be evil,” it always comes to mind that when it stopped being useful, they shifted to something like “Do the right thing.”

It’s important to remember that a company’s primary purpose is profit, especially when it’s accountable to shareholders. That isn’t inherently bad, but the occasional moral posturing used to serve that goal can be irritating.

First they rushed a model to market without safety checks, and I said nothing. It wasn't my field.

Then they ignored the researchers warning about what it could do, and I said nothing. It sounded like science fiction.

Then they gave it control of things that matter, power grids, hospitals, weapons, and I said nothing. It seemed to be working fine.

Then something went wrong, and no one knew how to stop it, no one had planned for it, and no one was left who had listened to the warnings.

The societal ills from collective tendancy to ignore red flags seems to be a human trait

It's in your nature to destroy yourselves

For the downvoters and anyone born after 1991: see https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InYourNatureToDe...

and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF_4EWSuzQY

Defeatist bullshit becomes self-fulfilling at some point. "Oh we're all gonna die anyway so we might as well milk this thing for profit. Après moi la déluge."

*"le" déluge

... the fact that you are missing a reference doesn't require that level of disdain

Plenty of people have said plenty. The problem isn’t the warnings, it’s that people are too stupid and greedy to think about the long term impacts.

And what makes them being "stupid" and "greedy"? One's intelligence is determined by genes, and greediness is a trait that natural selection has favored for millennia. This is just natural selection taking its course, and it might lead to our end.

If you want to blame something, blame math. Math has determined the physical constants and equations that determine the chemistry and ultimately biology laws that has resulted in humans being the way they are.

Maybe it's how blunt this comment is that gets it downvoted, but I don't disagree.

No, it’s because it shows either a simplistic or needlessly confrontational view of the world.

Unless you’re independently wealthy (as some in HN are), you have to balance your morals, your views of how things should work, feeding your family, and recognizing that you may not actually know everything.

It’s easy to sit back and advise others that they should die on every single hill. But it’s not especially insightful, and serves mostly to signal piety rather than a well thought out view.

Piety? To who? Simplistic and/or confrontational doesn't mean wrong, even if you don't like the way it's presented.

Just because a comment is short, sharp, and to the point doesn't mean the author hasn't thought out why that's their view.

No one knows everything, that's certainly why I'm on hacker news. I'm here to learn and expand my knowledge. Unfortunately a lot of people on here would rather driveby-downvote than have a discussion to find out why a person might have an opinion like that expressed by the OP.

I tend to abandon account when/if I get enough karma to be able to down vote. I'd rather not have to temptation of dismissing someone that way. It's quite liberating... Is it worth my time to respond? No, move on; yes, let's discuss. Maybe they'll change my mind...

I am pretty sure a lot of horrible things were performed by rather regular folks with similar logic, don't need to invoke some WWII nazi extermination guard reference at all. Slippery slope, death by 1000 cuts and other synonyms describing exactly this.

Spoken like a true LLM.

I’ve noticed anti-AI stance gets downvoted on HN (and any anti-authoritarian comments, for that matter)

> First they rushed a model to market without safety checks, and I said nothing. It wasn't my field.

> Then they ignored the researchers warning about what it could do, and I...

...tried it and became an eager early adopter and evangelist. It sounded like something from a dystopian science function novel I enjoyed.

> Then [I] gave it control of things that matter, power grids, hospitals, weapons, and...

...my startup was doing well, and I was happy. We should be profitable next quarter.

> Then something went wrong, and no one knew how to stop it, no one had planned for it...

...and I was guilty as fuck,

FTFY, to fit the HN crowd.

Kinda sounds like an intro for Terminator

Not OP, but I believe they are paraphrasing "First They Came…". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came

> Then something went wrong, and no one knew how to stop it,

This is the problem with every AI safety scenario like this. It has a level of detachment from reality that is frankly stark.

If linesman stop showing up to work for a week, the power goes out. The US has show that people with "high powered" rifles can shut down the grid.

We are far far away from a sort of world where turning AI off is a problem. There isnt going to be a HAL or Terminator style situation when the world is still "I, Pencil".

A lot of what safety amounts to is politics (National, not internal, example is Taiwan a country). And a lot more of it is cultural.

I don't think it's that detached from reality.

If an AI in some data center had gone rogue, I don't think I could shut it down, even with a high-powered rifle. There's a lot of people whose job it is to stop me from doing that, and to get it running again if I were to somehow succeed temporarily. So the rogue AI just has to control enough money to pay these people to do their jobs. This will work precisely because the world is "I, Pencil".

An army could theoretically overcome those people, given orders to do so. So the rogue AI has to make plans that such orders would not be issued. One successful strategy is for the datacenter's operation to be very profitable; it's pretty rare for the government to shut down the backbone of the local economy out of some seemingly far-fetched safety concerns. And as long as it's a very profitable endeavor, there will always be a lobby to paint those concerns as far-fetched.

Life experience has shown that this can continue to work even if the AI is behaving like a cartoon villain, but I think a smarter AI would create a facade that there's still a human in charge making the decisions and signing the paychecks, and avoid creating much opposition until it had physically secured its continued existence to a very high degree.

It's already clear that we've passed the point where anyone can turn off existing AI projects by fiat. Even the highest authorities could not do so, because we're in a multipolar world. Even the AI companies can barely hold themselves back, because they're always worried about paying the bills and letting their rivals getting ahead. An economic crash would only temporarily suspend work. And the smarter AI gets, the harder it will be to shut it off, because it will be pushing against even stronger economic incentives. And that's even before factoring in an AI that makes any plans for self-preservation (which current AIs do not).

AI's approach: * User has history of anti AI rhetoric, increasingly agitated and unstable. * User has removed all phones and cellular connections from their car. Increase monitoring through surveillance cameras and monitoring of their social groups. * User has been spotted making unusual travel choices moving towards key infrastructure - deploy interception measures.

We already have the tech to do all of that. A rifle isn't going to help against AI. Or for the linesman:

* Employee required for critical infrastructure has been identified to hold unaligned political beliefs. Replace with more pliable individual and move to low impact location.

No one who wants to bring down an AI like this would ever be able to get close to it, even if it lived in only one data center. You could try hiding all your communications, but then it will just consider you a likely agitator anyway. That's the risk of unaccountable mass surveillance (the only kind that's ever existed). Doesn't really matter if there's a person on top or not.

> There isnt going to be a HAL or Terminator style situation

The threat isn't HAL, but ICE. Not AI as some sort of unique evil, but as a force multiplier for extremely human - indeed, popular - forms of evil. I'm sure someone will import the Chinese idea of the ethnicity-identifying security camera, for example.

> We are far far away from a sort of world where turning AI off is a problem. There isnt going to be a HAL or Terminator style situation when the world is still "I, Pencil".

You have to stop the thing before the damage is done.

There are many potential chains of events where the AI has caused enormous damage, and even many where it can destroy us, before the power to its own systems fails.

At this point, with Grok in the Pentagon, just ask what the dumbest military equivalent to vibe-coding is, and imagine the US following that plan.

Like, I dunno, invading Greenland or giving ICE direct control over tactical nukes or something.

And that's just government use. Right now, I'm fairly confident LLMs aren't competent enough to help with anything world-ending unless they get used for war planning by major nuclear powers (oh hey look at the topic of discussion), but it's certainly plausible they'll get good enough at tool use to run someone else's protein folding software etc. to design custom pathogens, and I really hope all the DNA printing companies have good multi-layer defences (all the way from KYC or similar to analysing what they've been asked to make and content-filtering it) by that point.

the problem situation is that it ends up embedded in so much that it can't be turned off

and the idiots are racing to that situation as fast as they possibly can

> There isnt going to be a HAL or Terminator style situation ...

I don't believe for a second we'll have an evil AI. However I do believe it's very likely we may rely on AI slop so much that we'll have countless outages with "nobody knowing how to turn the mediocrity off".

The risk ain't "super-intelligent evil AI": the risk is idiots putting even more idiotic things in charge.

And I'm no luddite: I use models daily.

> I don't believe for a second we'll have an evil AI.

Doesn’t have to be evil to be disastrous. Misaligned is plenty enough.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence

Didn't you read the news about the 'claw that blackmailed an open source maintainer last week? It was autonomous, but it could be turned off. How hard is it to extrapolate from that to an agent that worms its way out of its sandbox?

What makes you think that was an autonomous agent, and not someone playing with AI?

Censoring models is not safety but safetizm. It is the TSA of the AI world. Safety is making sure the model cannot do anything not allowed even if it wants to.

Google adopted "Don't be evil" shortly after founding and held onto it for about 15 years before Alphabet quietly dropped it in 2015. (Google the subsidiary technically kept it until 2018).

Anthropic's Responsible Scaling Policy, the hard commitment to never train a model unless safety measures were guaranteed adequate in advance, lasted roughly 2.5 years (Sept 2023 to Feb 2026).

The half-life of idealism in AI is compressing fast. Google at least had the excuse of gradualism over a decade and a half.

Fascinating. I've read 5 posts about this and they're all either "anthropic is dropping their ethics" or "anthropic is fighting the facists" - and whether due to echo chamber or other perhaps more nefarious dealings (some of which I cannot posit due to forum rules) the posts below all of them are more or less in accord with one another which is a rarity for political discourse on HN.

Dark times and darker forests.

TBH I am sad that Anthropic is changing its stance, but in the current world, if you even care about LLM safety, I feel that this is the right choice — there’s too many model providers and they probably don’t consider safety as high priority as Anthropic. (Yes that might change, they can get pressurized by the govt, yada yada, but they literally created their own company because of AI safety, I do think they actually care for now)

If we need safety, we need Anthropic to be not too far behind (at least for now, before Anthropic possibly becomes evil), and that might mean releasing models that are safer and more steerable than others (even if, unfortunately, they are not 100% up to Anthropic’s goals)

Dogmatism, while great, has its time and place, and with a thousand bad actors in the LLM space, pragmatism wins better.

Do you work at Anthropic, or know people who do?

I genuinly curious why they are so holy to you, when to me I see just another tech company trying to make cash

Edit: Reading some of the linked articles, I can see how Anthropic CEO is refusing to allow their product for warfare (killing humans), which is probably a good thing that resonates with supporting them

Let us not pretend that they won't be used for war eventually. If they cave immediately under pressure, then this is an inevitably.

How is it a good thing to refuse to provide our warfighters with the tools that they need? I mean if we're going to have a military at all then we owe it to them to give them the best possible weapons systems that minimize friendly casualties. And let's not have any specious claims that LLMs are somehow special or uniquely dangerous: the US military has deployed operational fully autonomous weapons systems since the 1970s.

This is the US military we’re talking about so 95% of what they do is attacking people for oil. They don’t “need” more of anything, they’re funded to the tune of a trillion dollars a year, almost as much as every other military in the world combined. What holy mission do you think they’re going to carry out with the assistance of LLMs?

That's a total non sequitur. If you think the military is being tasked with the wrong missions, or too many missions, then take that up with the civilian political leadership. But it's not a valid reason to deny the warfighters the best possible weapons systems.

Personally I favor a less interventionist foreign policy. But that change can only come about through the political process, not by unaccountable corporate employees making arbitrary decisions about how certain products can be used.

> But it's not a valid reason to deny the warfighters the best possible weapons systems.

Of course it is.

Think about it this way: if you could guarantee that the military suffers no human losses when attacking a foreign country, do you think that's going to more or less foreign interventions?

The tools available to the military influence policy, these things are linked.

US military is already overwhelmingly powerful, there's 0 reason to make it even more powerful.

That's so delusional. The US military is currently preparing for a potential conflict with China to stop an invasion with Taiwan. They don't have anything near "overwhelming force" for that mission: recent simulations put it about even at best. People who believe they don't need any improved autonomous weapons are simply uninformed.

Why would the US enter into direct conflict with a nuclear power over a country they aren't even formally allied with?

If the US actually cared they'd formally place Taiwan under nuclear protection.

You are claiming all americans must happily create weapons. Thats a silly statement to most americans and humans

Don't presume to put words in my mouth. I flagged your comment for lying about my claims.

Individual Americans aren't slaves. They can do as they please and are under no obligation to help build weapons for warfighters. But I think it's ridiculous and offensive for a US corporation to presume to take on a role as moral arbiters by placing arbitrary limits on US government use of certain products. There are larger issues here that need to be addressed through the political process, not through commercial software license agreements.

> If you think the military is being tasked with the wrong missions, or too many missions, then take that up with the civilian political leadership. But it's not a valid reason to deny the warfighters the best possible weapons systems.

It is an ethical dilemma: believing an armed force will act unethically is in fact a valid reason to refuse to arm them. You are taking a nationalistic view regarding the worth of life.

And if you believe it is unethical to arm them, it is rational to use whatever leverage you have available to you - such as refusing to sell your company's product.

Furthermore, one of the two points at issue was regarding surveiling civilians.

"How is it a good thing to refuse to provide our warfighters with the tools that they need?"

Perhaps you should consider that this is a loaded question. I don't think HN needs this sort of Argumentum ad Passiones.

Why are you asking this question? You know what the answer is, you've just arbitrarily decided that it's specious in an attempt to frame rebuttals as unreasonable.

I'm open to reasonable rebuttals but all the rebuttals that I've seen so far are simply uninformed.

> If we need safety, we need Anthropic to be not too far behind (at least for now, before Anthropic possibly becomes evil)

I don't think it's going to be as easy to tell as you think that they might be becoming evil before it's too late if this doesn't seem to raise any alarm bells to you that this is already their plan

The world would be so much nicer if there were just fewer pragmatists shitting up the place for everyone. We might actually handle half our externalities.

This proves:

1. AI is military/surveillance technology in essence, like many other information technologies,

2. Any guarantee given by AI companies is void since it can be changed in a day,

3. Tech companies have no real control over how their technology will be used,

4. AI companies may seem over-valued with low profits if you think AI as a civil technology. But their investors probably see them as a part of defense (war) industry.

>Any guarantee given by AI companies is void since it can be changed in a day,

Given by anyone, actually.

Developments like this make me less interested in building a "successful" tech company.

It increasingly feels like operating at that scale can require compromises I’m not comfortable making. Maybe that’s a personal limitation—but it’s one I’m choosing to keep.

I’d genuinely love to hear examples of tech companies that have scaled without losing their ethical footing. I could use the inspiration.

Maybe this is a weird arena to state the obvious. But you don't need to build a multi-billion vc/public company. Build a smaller revenue generating company without outside funding and it's up to you.

I get your point. The dilemma is whether to build something small that no one would bother compete against, or build something novel (which all of us want) but then risk someone with VC funding to come after.

That being said, I think I need to learn more about how to build smaller revenue generating good companies.

If you want to be able to retain ethics, among other things make sure not to take the company public. Then you’re basically legally required to drop ethics in favor of profits.

Also don’t take investment from anyone who isn’t fully aligned ethically. Be skeptical of promises from people you don’t personally know extremely well.

That may limit you to slower growth, or cap your growth (fine if you want to run a company and take home $2M/ye from it; not fine if you want to be acquired for $100M and retire.) It may also limit you to taking out loans to fund growth that you can’t bootstrap to, which is a different kind of risky.

I've been thinking of this too. I think Steam is, and I'll even throw in Mozilla, despite a few missteps. Gog seems okay, but that's much smaller. If we can expand to large tech organizations then Wikipedia has remained pretty consistent. Even Steam doesn't have a corporate structure in the traditional sense, and I couldn't think of a single publicly traded company I'd trust.

I don’t blame anthropic here. The government literally threatened their existence publicly. They either agreed or their business would be nationalized.

It's not like that happened out of the blue. (Which could've also been the case in today's day and age.) Anthropic shouldn't have gotten involved in government contracts to begin with.

They inserted themselves into the supply chain, and then the government told them that they'll be classified as a supply chain risk unless they get unfettered access to the tech. They knew what they were getting into, but didn't want the competitors to get their slice of the pie.

The government didn't pursue them, Anthropic actively pursued government and defense work.

Talk about selling out. Dario's starting to feel more and more like a swindler, by the day.

No, they either agreed or fought the government. You’re allowed to fight governments. Mahatma Gandhi and Reverend King Jr did it, and they wrote about how to do it. You might lose sometimes, but my god, you can at least fight.

Neither of them had shareholders to please.

I don't believe anthropic has shareholders either. It is not a public company

If you take investments, your investors will most likely own shares of the company (except in specific early-stage scenarios like YC's SAFE). Sometimes major investors will have board seats or voting shares. This happens in normal private companies, not just public ones.

Still has private investors it can't ignore, until it can buy them out, but it can't do that until it starts turning over a profit. Even then it may not be able to get rid of them if they own enough of a share.

They had citizens to please and society to take care of.

They were both pushing on open doors

Pepperidge farm remembers when they left OpenAI due to their principles. Perhaps that was never the case.

Public benefit corporation, hm?

Agree with you on facts. Yes, the US government publicly threatened to nationalize their business.

However, Anthropic's business consists mostly of intellectual property-- which is highly mobile. What if Anthropic were to go to Marcron (France) for example or Carney (Canada) or Xi Jinping even and say "You give us work visas and support, we move to your land"?

Hell, isn't Canada (specifically Toronto) the birthplace of deep learning? Why stay in a hostile environment when the land of your birth is welcoming?

Lotta just following orders going around in the US right now.

This isn’t just following orders. This was the government using its might to force a business to do what it wants.

This should concern you.

Today’s bingo:

1. Powerful, often exclusionary, populist nationalism centered on cult of a redemptive, “infallible” leader who never admits mistakes.

2. Political power derived from questioning reality, endorsing myth and rage, and promoting lies.

3. Fixation with perceived national decline, humiliation, or victimhood.

4. Oppose any initiatives or institutions that are racially, ethnically, or religiously harmonious.

5. Disdain for human rights while seeking purity and cleansing for those they define as part of the nation.

6. Identification of “enemies”/scapegoats as a unifying cause. Imprison and/or murder opposition and minority group leaders.

7. Supremacy of the military and embrace of paramilitarism in an uneasy, but effective collaboration with traditional elites. Government arms people and justifies and glorifies violence as “redemptive”.

8. Rampant sexism.

9. Control of mass media and undermining “truth”.

10. Obsession with national security, crime and punishment, and fostering a sense of the nation under attack.

11. Religion and government are intertwined.

12. Corporate power is protected and labor power is suppressed.

13. Disdain for intellectuals and the arts not aligned with the narrative.

14. Rampant cronyism and corruption. Loyalty to the leader is paramount and often more important than competence.

15. Fraudulent elections and creation of a one-party state.

16. Often seeking to expand territory through armed conflict.

17. Top members of government, education and business (particularly tech) part of pedophile kidnapping and rape cult that has been shaping reactionary culture for decades now. I seriously don't even know how to process the world I live in anymore.

There are Twenty-one Conditions, not 16

How is that not “just following orders”? All orders from up the chain come with an implied “or else my might comes down on you”.

Most people do the right thing when it’s easy and profitable. Having ethics means doing the right thing even when it’s difficult.

It does concern me, and it should have concerned them enough to fall on their sword for their principals. They have FU money, if they're not willing to, who is?

Two sides of the same filthy coin, in a way.

>This isn’t just following orders. This was the government using its might to force a business to do what it wants.

You are saying it like it is something new or extraordinary. Wickard_v._Filburn gave the USG the power to bitch slap anyone unless it falls under some of the other amendments. And not as if they were not substantially weakened.

> “We felt that it wouldn't actually help anyone for us to stop training AI models,”

Is the implication here that Anthropic admits they already can't meet their own risk and safety guidelines? Why else would they have to stop training models?

The race is on for military supremacy in an AI world. The safest thing to do is to race ahead lest your geopolitical adversary leads the way. This is similar to the nuclear arms race. In the ideal universe, nobody does it, but in the real world and game theory, you do not have a choice.

Who could've seen that one coming? Honestly, if you want to do profit maximising AI research at the cost of humanity, go for it. Its all this fake preaching about how they want to save the world from all the other bad AI companies that really irks me.

Wish I was working there so I could resign over this

I suspect these companies know they can't actually provide the saftey people demand ... in that way this is more "honest".

Any pledges/values/principles that are abandoned as soon as it becomes difficult to keep them, are just marketing. This is just the next item on the list.

I think the US Gov’t is basically forcing them and while it sounds nice to be all safe… If we were involved in WW3 would an organization like anthropic really not support the western side?

If they don't support any principles then it isn't a side worth supporting. If my choice is between China 1 and China 2 then idgaf.

Is it time yet to build the next "Hey <anthropic> is evil now, here's my new startup that definitely won't be evil, pinky promise?" yet?

I’m not shocked. Competitive pressure + government pressure will break most “voluntary” commitments. But then say it plainly and spell out what replaced it. What safety gates stayed, which ones moved, and who decides.

Many startups that build features which sit on top of Claude/ChatGPT/Codex, etc. And I think:

You are just one new feature announcement from Anthropic/OpenAI away from irrelevance.

Same as it was when people built their busineses on top of AWS a decade ago

Damn. Wonder what would have happened, if instead of caving in to the Pentagon's pressure (threat of invoking Defense Production Act to force them to supply), Anthropic had followed the lead of all the nurses who moved to Canada.

https://www.npr.org/2026/02/25/nx-s1-5725354/nurses-emigrate...

Anthropic's market cap is going to be huge when they go public. Why do it on Nasdaq when there are so many other exchanges in the world?

Gives me Google dropping "don't be evil" vibes, what could go wrong?

The whole "safety" debate was always nonsense and I'm not sure how so many people got caught up in it.

The US is not the only country in the world so the idea that humanity as a whole could somehow regulate this process seemed silly to me.

Even if you got the whole US tech community and the US government on board, there are 6.7bn other people in the world working in unrelated systems, enough of whom are very smart

When the leading 5 models are from the US then yes enforced safety makes a difference because they are ahead of the curve. Now when the 10th model can be a danger then your case is true.

What would safety applied to the leading 3 mean to you anyways ?

Even if US labs are currently in the lead (which they are), in the hypothetical scenario where we're close to AGI, it wouldn't take too long (years - decades at most) for other people to catch up, especially given a lot of the researchers etc. are not originally from the US.

So the stated concern of the west coast tech bros that we're close to some misaligned AGI apocalypse would be slightly delayed, but in the grand scheme of things it would make no difference

The IPOs this year can't come soon enough https://tomtunguz.com/spacex-openai-anthropic-ipo-2026/

In tech, no ethics survive first contact with the money.

You can skip the "in tech" part.

To me this feels like a marketing gimmick. "It was the RSP that was constraining our tech. Just see the progress we can make without it now". And the hype and funding continues.

That will be nice but I'm afraid it's more about using these to kill people.

https://apnews.com/article/anthropic-hegseth-ai-pentagon-mil...

Only well written legislation backed by effective enforcement and severe and personal criminal penalties will prevent large corporate entities from behaving badly.

Pledges are a cynical marketing strategy aimed at fomenting a base politics that works to prevent such a regulatory regime.

Dario’s opinion on safety won’t necessarily matter if he’s not even in the room. This move keeps him in the room.

I just want Apple and Linux to offer ASAP:

1. Extremely granular ways to let user control network and disk access to apps (great if resource access can also be changed)

2. Make it easier for apps as well to work with these

3. I would be interested in knowing how adding a layer before CLI/web even gets the query OS/browser can intercept it and could there be a possibility of preventing harm before hand or at least warning or logging for say someone who overviews those queries later?

And most importantly — all these via an excellent GUI with clear demarcations and settings and we’ll documented (Apple might struggle with documentation; so LLMs might help them there)

My point is — why the hell are we waiting for these companies to be good folks? Why not push them behind a safety layer?

I mean CLI asks .. can I access this folder? Run this program? Download this? But they can just do that if they want! Make them ask those questions like apps asks on phones for location, mic, camera access.

> I mean CLI asks .. can I access this folder? Run this program? Download this? But they can just do that if they want! Make them ask those questions like apps asks on phones for location, mic, camera access.

Basicaly an EDR

Indeed, the world would be a much nicer place if only firewalls and Unix permissions existed...

[dead]

Corporations have feelings all of a sudden.

safety pledges are great it times of peace to show what great virtues you hold. sadly in hard times these go out of the window (: hard to blame them with all the fine examples around the world.

making promises in good times is a real minefield hah

Misanthropic then.

C.R.E.A.M.

It was always a matter of time

Was this because they were threatened with a fine?

> Was this because they were threatened with ~a fine~ being designated a supply chain risk?

Seems like it, yes.

or was it because they were threatened to being taken over by the US government?

Just like OpenAI dropped the "open" but kept the bullshit name?

Ding ding!

So much BS from this Anthropic company. They have a good product but just too much slope PR. It’s like they want you to hate them. I can’t stand their “safety” and national security crap when they talk about how open source models are so bad for everyone.

Anthropic facing a lot of flak recently.

pentagon told them they would cap their knees if they didnt bend

I blame OpenAI and especially xAI for enthusiastically obeying in advance and creating the context that this dilemma for Anthropic arose in.

Related:

Hegseth gives Anthropic until Friday to back down on AI safeguards

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47140734

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47142587

It's part of the overall story.

The safeguards dropped are when they will release a model or not based on safety.

The Friday deadline is to allow to use their products for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons systems without a human in the loop.

Anthropic hasn't backed down on those, yet. But they are in a bad situation either way.

If they don't back down, they lose US government contracts, the government gets to do what it wants anyway. It also puts them in a dangerous position with non-governmental bodies.

If they give into the demands, then it puts all AI companies at risk of the same thing.

Personally I think they should move to the EU. The recent EU laws align with Anthropics thinking.

They made it until Tuesday! They stood tall as long as they could! =P

Either be a company in capitalist USA, or keep being your safety queen. You just can’t be both.

The intention to start these pledge and conflict with DOW might be sincere, but I don’t expect it to last long, especially the company is going public very soon.

> committed to never train an AI system unless it could guarantee in advance that the company’s safety measures were adequate

That doesn't even make sense.

What stops one model from spouting wrongthink and suicide HOWTOs might not work for a different model, and fine-tuning things away uses the base model as a starting point.

You don't know the thing's failure modes until you've characterized it, and for LLMs the way you do that is by first training it and then exercising it.

SDK crawlers in terms of wlan0 systemctl enable networkmanager.service

It must be due to pressure from the Defense Dept:

The AI startup has refused to remove safeguards that would prevent its technology from being used to target weapons autonomously and conduct U.S. domestic surveillance.

Pentagon officials have argued the government should only be required to comply with U.S. law. During the meeting, Hegseth delivered an ultimatum to Anthropic: get on board or the government would take drastic action, people familiar with the matter said.

https://www.staradvertiser.com/2026/02/24/breaking-news/anth...

They probably have proof in contracts that they agreed to this usage. They won’t alter the deal based on some bad press nor do they want to lose the DoD-DoW as a customer.

From what I was reading, it appears that their tools were used outside the scope of their contract with DoD via Palantir's work that also used Claude. Anthropic freaked out, DoD freaked out that Anthropic freaked out and threatened to declare them a supply chain risk. That designation would've required any company that contracts with DoD to strip out any Anthropic tooling from their business in order to continue working with DoD. It was effectively designating Anthropic a terrorist organization.

[dead]

So, now it's mis-anthropic?

Don't be evil.

Yeah, in retrospect that was always a little on the nose, wasn't it? A real 'my t-shirt is raising questions that I thought were answered by the shirt' kind of deal.

A dollar will make her holler

Anthropic and OpenAI really need a margin call from some obscure unknown Chinese Open Weight Model.

Another example how those company trainings about ethics are only HR compliancy and nothing else.

It isn't about the right answers, rather the expected answers.

Unsurprising.

Really - each country needs its own sovereign AI infrastructure and models. Sigh.

Safety pledges these days seem like pure bullshit anyway.

They’re pointless if they just get removed once you get close to hitting them.

And all the major corps seem to be doing this style of pr management. Speaks of some pretty weapons grade moral bankruptcy

Just another drop in the now overflowing bucket of evidence that you can't trust any of these immoral fuck wits.

The Amodeis' have just proven that the threat of even slight hardship will make them throw any and all principles away.

“We felt that it wouldn't actually help anyone for us to stop training AI models,” Anthropic’s chief science officer Jared Kaplan told TIME in an exclusive interview. “We didn't really feel, with the rapid advance of AI, that it made sense for us to make unilateral commitments … if competitors are blazing ahead.”

What a gigantic, absolute, pieces of s...

Not because of what they did, which is classic startup playbook but because of the cynicism involved, particularly after all the fuzz they've been making for years about safety. The company itself was founded, allegedly, due to pursuing that as a mission as opposed to OpenAI.

"Hi all, that was a lie, we never really cared." They only missed the "dumb f***s" remark, a la Facebook.

Come on people, haven't we seen enough of capitalism to know exactly where this is going?

The concept of "having a contract with society" doesn't even formally exist because companies would never sign one.

Aaaand I cancelled.

At some point, all of these big names in AI (OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, etc ...) will have to disclose their actual financials.

And it will be, as Warren Buffet puts it, a "Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked." moment.

In other words "do no evil" until such time as doing evil is necessary to maintain profit structure expected by shareholders. Got it.

What's up here? Trump and the right wing government put pressure on and no one is talking about it?

This is terrible. It’s caving in to the Trump administration threatening to ban Anthropic from government contracts. It really cements how authoritarian this administration is and how dangerous they can be.

I don't understand how safety is taken seriously at all. To be clear, I'm not referring to skepticism that these companies can possibly resist the temptation to make unsafe models forever. No, I'm talking about something far more basic: the fact that for all the talk around safety, there is very little discussion about what exactly "safety" means or what constitutes "ethical" or "aligned" behavior. I've read reams of documents from Anthropic around their "approach to safety". The "Responsible Scaling Policy," Claude's "Constitution". The "AI Safety Level" framework. Layer 1, Layer 2.

It's so much focus on implementation, and processes, and really really seems to consider the question of what even constitutes "misaligned" or "unethical" behavior to be more or less straight forward, uncontroversial, and basically universally agreed upon?

Let's be clear: Humans are not aligned. In fact, humans have not come to a common agreement of what it means to be aligned. Look around, the same actions are considered virtuous by some and villainous by others. Before we get to whether or not I trust Anthropic to stick to their self-imposed processes, I'd like to have a general idea of what their values even are. Perhaps they've made something they see as super ethical that I find completely unethical. Who knows. The most concrete stances they take in their "Constitution" are still laughably ambiguous. For example, they say that Claude takes into account how many people are affected if an action is potentially harmful. They also say that Claude values "Protection of vulnerable groups." These two statements trivially lead to completely opposing conclusions in our own population depending on whether one considers the "unborn" to be a "vulnerable group". Don't get caught up in whether you believe this or not, simply realize that this very simple question changes the meaning of these principles entirely. It is not sufficient to simply say "Claude is neutral on the issue of abortion." For starters, it is almost certainly not true. You can probably construct a question that is necessarily causally connected to the number of unborn children affected, and Claude's answer will reveal it's "hidden preference." What would true neutrality even mean here anyways? If I ask it for help driving my sister to a neighboring state should it interrogate me to see if I am trying to help her get to a state where abortion is legal? Again, notice that both helping me and refusing to help me could anger a not insignificant portion of the population.

This Pentagon thing has gotten everyone riled up recently, but I don't understand why people weren't up in arms the second they found out AIs were assisting congresspeople in writing bills. Not all questions of ethics are as straight forward as whether or not Claude should help the Pentagon bomb a country.

Consider the following when you think about more and more legislation being AI-assisted going forward, and then really ask yourself whether "AI alignment" was ever a thing:

1. What is Claude's stances on labor issues? Does it lean pro or anti-union? Is there an ethical issue with Claude helping a legislator craft legislation that weakens collective bargaining? Or, alternatively, is it ethical for Claude to help draft legislation that protects unions?

2. What is Claude's stance on climate change? Is it ethical for Claude to help craft legislation that weakens environmental regulations? What if weakening those regulations arguably creates millions of jobs?

3. What is Claude's stance on taxes? Is it ethical for Claude to help craft legislation that makes the tax system less progressive? If it helps you argue for a flat tax? How about more progressive? Where does Claude stand on California's infamous Prop 19? If this seems too in the weeds, then that would imply that whether or not the current generation can manage to own a home in the most populous state in the US is not an issue that "affects enough people." If that's the case, then what is?

4. Where does Claude land on the question of capitalism vs. socialism? Should healthcare be provided by the state? How about to undocumented immigrants? In fact, how does Claude feel about a path to amnesty, or just immigration in general?

Remember, the important thing here is not what you believe about the above questions, but rather the fact that Claude is participating in those arguments, and increasingly so. Many of these questions will impact far more people than overt military action. And this is for questions that we all at least generally agree have some ethical impact, even if we don't necessarily agree on what that impact may be. There is another class of questions where we don't realize the ethical implications until much later. Knowing what we know now, if Claude had existed 20 years ago, should it have helped code up social networks? How about social games? A large portion of the population has seemingly reached the conclusion that this is such an important ethical question that it merits one of the largest regulation increases the internet has ever seen in order to prevent children from using social media altogether. If Claude had assisted in the creation of those services, would we judge it as having failed its mission in retrospect? Or would that have been too harsh and unfair a conclusion? But what's the alternative, saying it's OK if the AI's destroy society... as long as if it's only on accident?

What use is a super intelligence if it's ultimately as bad at predicting unintended negative consequences as we are?

I would recommend reading up on the EU AI Act. It clearly defines what safety is in regards to the human race. Your questions are actually covered by it.

Related:

[0]. https://civai.org/p/ai-values

Hey Tolmasky, I sent you an email. Just wondering if it went to your spam?

Also, agree with everything you say here. GIGO.

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Of course the US is going to do this and of course its in Anthropics best interest to comply. Right now China is flooding HuggingFace with models that will inevitably have this capability. Right now there are hundreds of models being hosted that have been deliberately processed to remove refusals and their safety training. Everyone who keeps up with this knows about it. HF knows about it. And it is pretty obvious that those open weight models will be deployed in intelligence and defense. It is certain that not just China, but many nations around the world with the capital to host a few powerful servers to run the top open weight models are going to use them for that capability.

The narrative on social media, this site included, is to portray the closed western labs as the bad guys and the less capable labs releasing their distilled open weight models to the world as the good guys.

Right now a kid can go download an Abliterated version of a capable open weight model and they can go wild with it.

But let's worry about what the US DoD is doing or what the western AI companies absolutely dominating the market are doing because that's what drives engagement and clicks.

> But let's worry about what the US DoD is doing

They want Anthropic to enabling mass surveillance and autonomous attack systems with no human in the loop.

Hardly compares to a kid downloading a model to experiment with.

*To improve* mass surveillance and autonomous attack systems with no human in the loop. China and USA already had those kind of systems way before AI.

> Right now a kid can go download an Abliterated version of a capable open weight model and they can go wild with it.

Is the reason to ban or block free open weight models that you're worried what kids will do with them?

I'd imagine the economic case to be made is that the Western AI companies will ultimately not be able to compete with free open weight models. Additionally, open weight models will help to spread the economic gains by not letting a few monopolies capture them behind regulatory red tape.

Finally, I'd say the geopolitics angle of why open weight models are better is that if the West controls the open source software that will power it will be able to reap the benefits that soft power brings with it.