We do not think Anthropic should be designated as a supply chain risk

https://twitter.com/OpenAI/status/2027846016423321831

by golfer • 5 months ago

832 379 5 months ago

twitter.com

solfox• 5 months ago

Actions as it were, speak louder than words.

vldszn2• 5 months ago

I built a website that shows a timeline of recent events involving Anthropic, OpenAI, and the U.S. government.

Posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47195085

aacook• 5 months ago

Thank you

vldszn2• 5 months ago

03.02.2026 UPD: added new events (both past for additional context and recent ones) and improved styles.

moogly4• 5 months ago

Looks like losing subscribers actually does work. Definitely gets a damage control response, at least.

aylmao• 5 months ago

I wonder what the mood is like internally too. I can only imagine there some level of employee discontent.

patcon• 5 months ago

i should hope so. they should quit.

> what's the term for quitting but not leaving and being destructive
The most common term is “quiet quitting” when someone disengages but stays employed—but that usually implies minimal effort, not active harm.
If you specifically mean staying while being disruptive or undermining, better fits include:
- “Malicious compliance” — following rules in a way that intentionally causes problems
- “Work-to-rule” — doing only exactly what’s required to slow things down (often collective/labor context)

I imagine malicious compliance is fun when there's an AI intermediary that can be blameless.

overfeed• 5 months ago

I can only imagine there some level of employee discontent.

The rank and file mutinied for the return of Altman after his board fired him for deception. They knew what they were getting, though they may find it shameful to admit that their morals have a price.

DaedalusII2• 5 months ago

Things have changed since two years ago. There are probably over 500 employees who have an equity package which makes them worth $5 million dollars. Thats only $2.5bn out of a $750bn valuation or 0.33%

Actually that is too conservative. If they have a 5% employee equity pool, there is $37.5bn of equity based compensation divided by say 5000 employees which is $7.5m each. $3.75m @ 10,000 employees.

and trust me, when people start getting liquid and comfortable they stop caring about things like ethics pretty fast. humans are marvellous at that

ares6232• 5 months ago

would be so funny if someone leaks their models

g947o2• 5 months ago

Is there any evidence that OpenAI is indeed losing significant number of subscribers, and it's not just some noise on HN?

SpicyLemonZest• 5 months ago

I don't think that evidence would exist yet whether it's true or not. Nobody's gonna log onto their work computer on Saturday to pull and then leak subscriber numbers.

moogly4• 5 months ago

I'd argue this damage control could be construed as a piece of evidence.

BLKNSLVR3• 5 months ago

"I do not think that sama should be burned at the stake"

actionfromafar2• 5 months ago

Unless it's lawful?

imwideawake• 5 months ago

Said OpenAI as they smiled and shook hands with the same people who designated Anthropic a supply chain risk, on the exact same day they designated Anthropic a supply chain risk.

How very brave.

AmericanOP• 5 months ago

I do think OpenAI's brand is dumpstered.

thunky• 5 months ago

Optimistic. My money is on everyone forgetting about this by next week.

cube002• 5 months ago

It will be interesting to see if this permeates out into the general public who already use ChatGPT or maybe it won't since it doesn't mention ChatGPT which is the stronger known brand rather then OpenAI.

actionfromafar2• 5 months ago

Yeah, myself I use ChatGPT, not OpenAI!

Analemma_3• 5 months ago

It depends. Normies don't care, but a bunch of them are free tier users anyway. The people who care are disproportionately on the $200/month moneymaking plan; losing a bunch of them could hurt, especially if it snowballs the consensus that Claude Code is the serious choice for software engineering.

For one small data point, my Signal GC of software buddies had four people switch their subscriptions from Codex to Claude Max last night.

yoyohello133• 5 months ago

Yeah just wait until the next model comes out. People will be riding Sam’s dick again in no time.

deepsquirrelnet• 5 months ago

That’s why I unsubbed today! Otherwise I might forget.

303space• 5 months ago

The way OpenAI and Anthropic are positioned in public discourse always reminded me of the Uber vs Lyft saga … Uber temporarily lost double digit marketshare in the US during a viral boycott over their perceived support of the Trump 1.0 admin. Heads did roll at the exec/founder level but eventually the company recovered.

jellyroll422• 5 months ago

unfortunately I think that's probably a good analogy

djeastm• 5 months ago

Among developers on HN, perhaps, but their goal is to soon replace developers altogether so from their perspective it's simple cost-benefit

cube002• 5 months ago

From that same X thread: Our agreement with the Department of War upholds our redlines [1]

OpenAI has the same redlines as Anthopic based on Altman's statements [2]. However somehow Anthropic gets banished for upholding their redlines and OpenAI ends up with the cash?

[1] https://xcancel.com/OpenAI/status/2027846013650932195#m

[2] https://www.npr.org/2026/02/27/nx-s1-5729118/trump-anthropic...

rootusrootus• 5 months ago

Exactly. What are we not being told? There is some missing element in the agreement, or the reasoning for the action against Anthropic is unrelated to the agreement.

moogly4• 5 months ago

Turns out both companies ran the agreement through their legal departments (Claude and GPT), and one of them did a poor summary. I (think I) jest, but this is probably going to be a thing as more and more companies use LLMs for legal work.

yoyohello133• 5 months ago

The reasoning is one company is ‘left and woke’ the other gives money to Trump.

generic92034• 5 months ago

Punish one, teach a hundred (companies).

snickerbockers• 5 months ago

One nuance I've noticed: the statement from Anthropic specifically stated the use of their products for these purposes was not included in the contract with DoD but it stops short of saying it was prohibited by the contract.

Maybe it's just a weak choice of words in anthropic's statement, but the way I read it I get the impression that anthropic is assuming they retain discretion over how their products are used for any purposes not outlined in the contract, while the DoD sees it more along the lines of a traditional sale in which the seller relinquishes all rights to the product by default, and has to enumerate any rights over the product they will retain in the contract.

micromacrofoot2• 5 months ago

president of openai donated $25 mil to trump last month, openai uses oracle services (larry ellison), kushners have lots invested in openai, altman is pals with peter thiel

fc417fc8022• 5 months ago

The demand was that Anthropic permit any use that complied with the law. They refused. OpenAI claims to have the same red lines but in reality has agreed to permit anything that complies with the law.

In other words OpenAI is intentionally attempting to mislead the public. (At least AFAICT.)

nkassis• 5 months ago

OpenAI's post about their contract has the "redlines" described and they don't match what Anthropic wanted. (even if the text tries to imply they do)

https://openai.com/index/our-agreement-with-the-department-o...

sowbug• 5 months ago

This is a good comment detailing the differences: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47200771

Analemma_3• 5 months ago

It's probably a combination of "Altman is simply lying" (as he has been repeatedly known to do) and "the redlines in OpenAI's contract are 'mass surveillance' and 'autonomous killbot' as defined by the government and not the vendor". Which, of course, effectively means they don't exist.

xeonmc• 5 months ago

    > 'mass surveillance' and 'autonomous killbot' as defined by the government and not the vendor

Ah, so they’ll be applying the good ol’ Three-Fifths Rule[0], a classic.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-fifths_Compromise

Wowfunhappy• 5 months ago

However somehow Anthropic gets banished for upholding their redlines and OpenAI ends up with the cash?

The current administration is so incompetent that I find this perfectly believable.

I imagine the government signed with OpenAI in order to spite Anthropic. The terms wouldn't actually matter that much if the purpose was petty revenge.

I don't know if that's actually what happened here, I just find it plausible.

randall• 5 months ago

same. this is about losing a negotiation and saving face / exacting revenge.

el_benhameen• 5 months ago

Absolutely incompetent, but I don’t think that’s the cause here. I think Anthropic’s sin was publicly challenging the administration. They’re huge on optics. You can get away with anything as long as you praise and bow in public.

827a• 5 months ago

My understanding of the difference, influenced mostly by consuming too many anonymous tweets on the matter over the past day so could be entirely incorrect, is: Anthropic wanted control of a kill switch actively in the loop to stop usage that went against the terms of use (maybe this is a system prompt-level thing that stops it, maybe monitoring systems, humans with this authority, etc). OpenAI's position was more like "if you break the contract, the contract is over" without going so far as to say they'd immediately stop service (maybe there's an offboarding period, transition of service, etc).

Nevermark8• 5 months ago

more stringent safeguards than previous agreements, including Anthropic's.

Except they are not "more stringent".

Sam Altman is being brazen to say that.

In their own agreement as Altman relays:

The AI System will not be used to independently direct autonomous weapons in any case where law, regulation, or Department policy requires human control
any use of AI in autonomous and semi-autonomous systems must undergo rigorous verification, validation, and testing
For intelligence activities, any handling of private information will comply with the Fourth Amendment, the National Security Act of 1947 and the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act of 1978, Executive Order 12333, and applicable DoD directives
The system shall also not be used for domestic law-enforcement activities except as permitted by the Posse Comitatus Act and other applicable law.

I don't think their take is completely unreasonable, but it doesn't come close to Anthropic's stance. They are not putting their neck out to hold back any abuse - despite many of their employees requesting a joint stand with Anthropic.

Their wording gives the DoD carte blanch to do anything it wants, as long as they adopt a rationale that they are obeying the law. That is already the status quo. And we know how that goes.

In other words, no OpenAI restriction at all.

That is not at all comparable to a requirement the DoD agree not to do certain things (with Anthropic's AI), regardless of legal "interpretation" fig leaves. Which makes Anthropic's position much "more stringent". And a rare and significant pushback against governmental AI abuse.

(Altman has a reputation for being a Slippery Sam. We can each decide for ourselves if there is evidence of that here.)

qmarchi• 5 months ago

Easy way to summarize it: "You're not allowed to do these things, except for all of the laws that allow you to do these things."

stingraycharles• 5 months ago

This implies that OpenAI must build and release and maintain a model without any safeguards, which is probably the big win and maybe something Anthropic never wants to do.

clhodapp• 5 months ago

Yep. It's the difference between "Don't do these things, regardless of what the law says." and "Do whatever you want, but please follow your own laws while you do it".

As Paul Graham said, "Sam gets what he wants" and "He’s good at convincing people of things. He’s good at getting people to do what he wants." and "So if the only way Sam could succeed in life was by [something] succeeding, then [that thing] would succeed"

pear01• 5 months ago

Brings to mind the infamous line from Nixon:

"When the president does it, that means it is not illegal".

This was during the Frost/Nixon interviews, years after he had already resigned. Even after all that, he still believed this and was willing to say it into a camera to the American people. It is apparent many of the people pushing the excesses going on today in government share a shameless adherence to this creed.

aardvarkr• 5 months ago

This is the same government caught spying on its citizens by Snowden so I don’t trust them at all.

spiderice3• 5 months ago

That seems exactly what it should be. The United States military should be able to do what the law allows. If we don't think they should be allowed to do something, we should pass laws. Not rely on the goodness of Sam Altman.

fnordpiglet• 5 months ago

Each of those clauses have a DoD policy carve out as an exception which says basically they can do whatever they want if they want to do it, but won’t be able to if they don’t want to do it.

lobochrome• 5 months ago

So you want OpenAI to create “laws”?

I for one do not want ai labs to designate what is legally ok to do.

I much prefer the demos to take care of that.

jmward012• 5 months ago

I have never used AI to generate an answer for HN but just this once I thought it would be good to hit ChatGPT specifically and ask it for 'a list of times Sam Altman has gone against his word.' Here was its response:

Shift from Nonprofit Mission to For-Profit Orientation – OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit with a charter focused on “benefit to humanity,” but under Altman it created a capped-profit subsidiary, accepted large investments (e.g., from Microsoft), and critics (including Elon Musk in a 2024 lawsuit) argue this departed from that original mission. A federal judge allowed Musk’s claim that Altman and OpenAI broke promises about nonprofit governance to proceed to trial.

Nonprofit Control Reorganization Drama (2023) – In November 2023, the original nonprofit board cited a lack of transparency and confidence in Altman’s candor as a reason for firing him. He was reinstated days later after investor and employee pressure, highlighting internal conflict over governance and communication.

Dust-Up Over Military Usage Policies – OpenAI initially had explicit public policies restricting AI use in “military and warfare” contexts, but those clauses were reportedly removed quietly in 2024, allowing the company to pursue Department of Defense contracts — a turnaround from earlier language that appeared to preclude such use.

Statements on Pentagon Deal vs. Prior Positioning – In early 2026, Altman publicly said OpenAI shared safety “red lines” (e.g., prohibiting mass surveillance and autonomous weapons) similar to some competitors, but hours later OpenAI signed a deal to deploy its models on classified military networks, leading critics to argue this contradicts earlier positioning on limits for military use.

Regulation Stance Shifts in Congressional Testimony – Altman has advocated for strong regulation of AI in some public settings but in later congressional hearings opposed specific regulatory requirements (like mandatory pre-deployment vetting), aligning more with industry concerns about overregulation — a shift in tone compared with earlier support of regulatory frameworks.

AlexVranas• 5 months ago

OpenAI is playing games.

When Anthropic says they have red lines, they mean "We refuse to let you use our models for these ends, even if it means losing nearly a billion dollars in business."

When OpenAI says they have red lines, they mean "We are going to let the DoD do whatever the hell they want, but we will shake our fist at them while they do it."

That's why they got the contract. The DoD was clear about what they wanted, and OpenAI wasn't going to get anywhere without agreeing to that. They're about as transparent as Mac from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia when he's telling everyone he's playing both sides.

bambax• 5 months ago

but we will shake our fist at them while they do it

Not even that. They are not shaking anything except their booty.

germandiago2• 5 months ago

I am going to stop using ChatGPT immediately.

docmars• 5 months ago

Personally I think OpenAI is intending to infiltrate their political enemy's stronghold and look for ways to leak data to "get Trump" as per usual.

They'll say "oops" and then we'll spend the next few years listening to pointless Congressional hearings.

ghm2199• 5 months ago

Isn't it simpler to say that anthropic adopted a values based use approach and openai adopted a legal one?

Or In other words you can get to decide two ways to use a lucrative property:

1. designate it private and draft usage of how you allow to use it, per your value system(as long as values don't violate any laws)

2. In face of competition, give up some values and agree to a legal definition of use that favors you.

trjordan• 5 months ago

"Red lines" does not mean some philosophical line they will not cross.

"Redlines" are edits to a contract, sent by lawyers to the other party they're negotiating with. They show up in Word's Track Changes mode as red strikethrough for deleted content.

They are negotiating the specifics of a contract, and Anthropic's contract was overly limiting to the DoD, whereas OpenAI's was not.

p0w3n3d2• 5 months ago

  s/DoD/DoW/g

softwaredoug2• 5 months ago

The difference is Anthropic wants contractual limitations on usage, explicitly spelling out cases of Mass Surveillance.

OpenAI has more of an understanding that the technology will follow the law.

There may not be explicit laws about the cases Anthropic wanted to limit. Or at least it’s open for judicial interpretation.

The actual solution is Congress should stop being feckless and imbecilic about technology and create actual laws here.

scarmig• 5 months ago

Between Anthropic, the military, and Congress, I have the least faith in Congress to make knowledgeable policy around tech.

amelius2• 5 months ago

There will be a lawsuit about this.

ExoticPearTree2• 5 months ago

To what end?

jellyroll422• 5 months ago

Sam Altman has no scruples. Dark Triad personality. No reason to believe anything he says.

jacquesm7• 5 months ago

The same goes for anybody still working at OpenAI past Monday morning 9 am.

slibhb• 5 months ago

It's almost like the Trump administration wanted to switch providers and this whole debate over red lines was a pretext. With this administration, decisions often come down to money. There are already reports that Brockman and Altman have either donated or promised large sums of money to Trump/Trump super pacs

yeahforsureman• 5 months ago

Can't recall the source right now (it would've been on one of the several podcasts I listened to on Friday I think), but there's a story/rumor to the effect that at some point during Claude's earlier deployment at the Pentagon — might've well been in the context of the Venezuela/Maduro operation — someone at Anthropic had in one way or another flagged some kind of legal(ity) concerns regarding the relevant operation (and/or perhaps Anthropic's role in it) with Palantir, who was maintaining the Claude deployments for the DoD. The story goes that after Palantir had then relayed this information further to DoD, Hegseth had this major fit over how Anthropic's hippie-ass North California woke bros should have no say in matters relating to national security, that of Hegseth's "warfighters" or whatever, etc...

Also, in the latest Hard Fork episode, Casey or Kevin mentions how the DoD undersecretary in charge of this contract doesn't apparently get along with or even pretty much hates Amodei for some reason. I think this might be the same undersecretary dude who actively commented the whole contract term controversy on X yesterday. Too bad I can't recall his name either.

bastawhiz• 5 months ago

Altman donated a million to the Trump inauguration fund. Brockman is the largest private maga donor. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand what's going on here.

bmitc4• 5 months ago

Agreed. These guys are traitors.

_heimdall8• 5 months ago

Anthropic demanded defining the redlines. OpenAI and others are hiding behind the veil of what is "lawful use" today. They aren't defining their own redlines and are ignoring the executive branch's authority to change what is "lawful" tomorrow.

Nevermark8• 5 months ago

Or the increasing impunity all three branches of government are giving themselves with regard to bad faith interpretations of the law, and a lack of government accountability when they color outside the lines.

Much of the impunity is now Supreme Court settled law.

We see clearly unconstitutional behavior every day, and there is no systematic, timely or effective, push back from any constitutionally enabled oversight.

Checks and balances don't work, when players are more loyal to party than branch or constitution.

Unfortunately, there are no constitutional checks, balances or limits on single party control. And single party control negates all the others. That one party can majority control all three branches is a serious failure mode in political incentives (bipartisanship is highly disincentivized) and governance (even temporary or shaky full control incentivizes making full control permanent over all other "policies").

Until the last few decades, diverse concerns across states avoided tight centralization within parties, and therefore across branches.

Symmetry2• 5 months ago

Anthropic's whole worry with mass surveillance was that current law is too loose in the age of AI to offer enough restraint.

kelnos• 5 months ago

The red lines are not the same.

Anthropic refuses to allow their models to be used for any mass surveillance or fully-automated weapons systems.

OpenAI only requires that the DoD follows existing law/regulation when it comes to those uses.

Unfortunately, existing law is more permissive than Anthropic would have been.

jrochkind1• 5 months ago

Anthropic wanted to put those restrictions in the contract. OpenAI said they'll just trust their own "guardrails" in the training, they don't need it in the contract. (I'm not sure I believe "guardrails" can prevent mass surveillance of civilians?)

Very gracious of OpenAI to say Anthropic should not be designated a supply chain risk after sniping their $200 million contract by being willing to contractually let the government do whatever they like without restrictions.

Barbing• 5 months ago

(I'm not sure I believe "guardrails" can prevent mass surveillance of civilians?)

Right, wouldn't they need a moderation layer that could, for example, fire if it analyzed & labeled too many banal English conversations?

They really gave training credit for guardtrails? I mean, it could perhaps reject prompts about designing social credit systems sometimes, but I can't imagine realistic mitigations to mass domestic surveillance generally.

lostnground• 5 months ago

It cannot really oversee this. If you can decompose a problem into individual steps that are not, in themselves, against the agent's alignment, it's certainly possible to have the aggregate do so.

Symmetry2• 5 months ago

How confident are we, with OpenAI's recent very large contribution to Trump's PAC, that OpenAI wasn't working to get Anthropic designated a supply chain risk behind the scenes? I don't want to be too paranoid here but given Sam's reputation and cui bono I don't think we can really rule this out either.

emsign2• 5 months ago

They are obviously lying. OpenAI is not to be trusted anymore.

gzread• 5 months ago

OpenAI donated $25,000,000 to Trump, that's why. Now people are cancelling ChatGPT subscriptions, so he needs to walk back the optics.

skrebbel• 5 months ago

It's called corruption.

ChildOfChaos• 5 months ago

Brockman donating $25 million dollars in January might have a little something to do with it..

gigatexal2• 5 months ago

Exactly. This is very shady. Too many openAI investors in Trump’s orbit. And it could be that openAI will say it’s their policy but whereas Anthropic wanted oversight that their redlines were enforced OpenAI I think will just turn a blind eye. It’s double speak. It’s disingenuous. It’s the kind of business play Trump Likes because it’s nefarious and screws someone over like Trump’s very delayed if paid at all contractors and staff.

JumpCrisscross2• 5 months ago

based on Altman's statements

The dude is notorious for being a compulsive liar, even if supporters have to admit as much.

matchagaucho• 5 months ago

The OpenAI PR implies that Anthropic had a "usage-policy" clause with no actual enforcement.

Whereas OpenAI won their contract on the ability to operationally enforce the red lines with their cloud-only deployment model.

FrustratedMonky• 5 months ago

They can say it on X. But will they refuse to do work?

zepearl• 5 months ago

Using X (at least in this context?) is weird.

teyopi3• 5 months ago

https://xcancel.com/OpenAI/status/2027846016423321831

csto12• 5 months ago

Wow, so brave after accepting the contract. This is more insulting than OpenAI saying they are a supply chain risk.

roughly3• 5 months ago

It feels like Sam's playing chess against an opponent who's playing dodge ball. He's leveraged this situation to get OpenAI in with the DoD in a way that's going to be extremely lucrative for the company and hurt his biggest rival in the process, but I think he's still seeing DoD as Just Another Customer, albeit a big government one. This administration just held a gun to the head of Anthropic and (if the "supply chain risk" designation holds and does as much damage as they're hoping) pulled the trigger, because Anthropic had the gall to tell them no. One thing this administration's shown is you cannot hold lines when you're working with them - at some point the DoD's going to cross his "red lines" and he's going to have to choose whether he's going to risk his entire consumer business and accede to being a private wing of the government like Palantir or if he wants to make a genuine tech giant. There's no third choice here.

discardable_dan2• 5 months ago

It also doesn't matter because Claude 4.6 is so much better at writing code that nobody cares what OpenAI is doing.

3eb7988a16632• 5 months ago

I do not see this as any mastermind play, but fully compromising principles. Which is a play.

"Donations" to a corrupt regime + signing a deal that says DoD can do whatever they want is not out maneuvering so much as rolling in the pig stye.

roughly3• 5 months ago

So is the theory that OpenAI believes it can’t compete on the open market or that they don’t know this will eventually cost them their consumer business?

BLKNSLVR3• 5 months ago

Everyone already knows what he is going to do when it comes to that.

laughing_man3• 5 months ago

The USG should not be in the position that it can't manage key technologies it purchases. If Anthropic doesn't want to relinquish control of a tech it's selling, the Pentagon should go with another vendor.

jedberg2• 5 months ago

Anthropic isn't preventing them from managing their key technologies. If my software license says 1000 users, and I build into the software that you can only connect with 1000 users, is your argument that the government can no longer manager their tech?

That my software should allow license violations if the government thinks it is necessary?

FarmerPotato• 5 months ago

I worked in defense contracting looong ago, so this is old news: when software is purchased by DoD or Govt generally, FAR compliance notices make it a license, not a sale of IP.

a2128• 5 months ago

You are misrepresenting the situation. The debate isn't about whether they should go with another vendor or not. Everybody can agree that they would have the right to pick a different vendor. That's not what they're doing, they're instead trying to force Anthropic into doing what they want by applying a designation previously only reserved for Chinese companies like Huawei as punishment for taking their stance, with an unspoken agreement that if Anthropic backs down and allows full usage then the designation will be removed

laughing_man3• 5 months ago

The Pentagon does this kind of thing all the time. It's just usually not this official.

rdiddly• 5 months ago

Us bribing them: fine

Us taking the contract, working for them and enabling them: fine

It being renamed the Dept. of War in the first place: totally fine, we loudly and bootlickingly repeat it

Anthropic being blacklisted: whoa there, we have ethics!

Footnote: any time the winning team tries to speak well of or defend the losing team I always think of this standup routine: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg6wBwhuaVo

evrydayhustling• 5 months ago

It's not even "whoa we have ethics", it's just "this is a bad look for us".

sqircles• 5 months ago

What's the potential that this puts things on even shakier ground? I'm sure the fallout wont really effect their bottom line that much in the end, but if it did - wouldn't making the US Gov't their largest acct make them more susceptible to doing everything they said?

I'm guessing they probably would regardless of how this played out, though.

jacquesm7• 5 months ago

~100%.

resters• 5 months ago

In my opinion any AI company working with the Trump administration is profoundly compromised and is ultimately untrustworthy with respect to concerns about ethics, civil rights, human rights, mass-surveillance, data privacy, etc.

The administration has created an anonymous, masked secret police force that has been terrorizing cities around the US and has created prisons in which many abductees are still unaccounted for and no information has been provided to families months later.

This is not politics as usual or hyperbole. If anything it is understating the abuses that have already occurred.

It's entertaining that OpenAI prevents me from generating an image of Trump wearing a diaper but happily sells weapons grade AI to the team architects of ICE abuses among many other blatant violations of civil and human rights.

Even Grok, owned by Trump toadie Elon Musk allows caricatures of political figures!

Imagine a multi-billion-dollar vector db for thoughtcrime prevention connected to models with context windows 100x larger than any consumer-grade product, fed with all banking transactions, metadata from dozens of systems/services (everything Snowden told us about).

Even in the hands of ethical stewards such a system would inevitably be used illegally to quash dissent - Snowden showed us that illegal wiretapping is intentionally not subject to audits and what audits have been done show significant misconduct by agents. In the hands of the current administration this is a superweapon unrivaled in human history, now trained on the entire world.

This is not hyperbole, the US already collects this data, now they have the ability to efficiently use it against whoever they choose. We used to joke "this call is probably being recorded", but now every call, every email is there to be reasoned about and hallucinated about, used for parallel construction, entrapment, blackmail, etc.

Overnight we see that OpenAI became a trojan horse "department of war" contractor by selling itself to the administration that brought us national guard and ICE deployed to terrorize US cities.

Writing code and systems at 100x productivity has been great but I did not expect the dystopia to arrive so quickly. I'd wondered "why so much emphasis on Sora and unimpressive video AI tech?" but now it's clear why it made sense to deploy the capital in that seemingly foolish way - video gen is the most efficient way to train the AI panopticon.

moogly4• 5 months ago

When did Altman start using capitals in his writing? Wasn't this guy famous for being a lower-case guy?

taspeotis• 5 months ago

Yes god what the fuck. As someone who’s finished High School IT IS SO HARD TO READ WHAT HE WRITES

pcurve• 5 months ago

Maybe he didn’t write this one.

golfer• 5 months ago

I blame Yahoo's Jerry Yang for normalizing this silly writing technique.

ta9000• 5 months ago

Everyone knows this is just about Trump funneling money to the Ellisons (Oracle) via OpenAI. It really is that simple. This is all just pretext.

owenthejumper• 5 months ago

Nice attempt at damage control. You made your own bed, now sleep in it

teyopi3• 5 months ago

Can we stop posting x links?

https://xcancel.com/OpenAI/status/2027846016423321831

bertil2• 5 months ago

I would love to explain to Sam Altman that Elon Musk is a bad person and using his platform isn’t a sensible decision, but I feel like he remembers more evidence of that than I ever will be able to imagine.

teyopi3• 5 months ago

Scam Altman is on the same level as musk.

spiderice3• 5 months ago

Here is the original X link to the Xcancel link you posted. I'm morally against Xcancel

https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2027846016423321831

beanjuiceII• 5 months ago

nah

Havoc• 5 months ago

Very much feels like OpenAI trying to PR manage their weaker ethical stance

isodev2• 5 months ago

Both their stances are flawed because their ethics apparently end at the border - none of them have a problem being unethical internationally (all the red lines talk is about what they don’t want to do in the us)

mlyle5• 5 months ago

? we're talking about autonomous weapons systems. That would be internationally.

Secondarily, we're talking about domestic surveillance / law enforcement. That would be domestic.

(But they do not find an issue with international intelligence gathering-- which is a legitimate purpose of national security apparatus).

allajfjwbwkwja• 5 months ago

There's an obvious difference.

Surveillance within the border is oppressive 1984-style surveillance state behavior.

International spying is a universal tradition.

K0balt10• 5 months ago

Advanced AI that knowingly makes a decision to kill a human, with the full understanding of what that means, when it knows it is not actually in defense of life, is a very, very, very bad idea. Not because of some mythical superintelligence, but rather because if you distill that down into an 8b model now you everyone in the world can make untraceable autonomous weapons.

The models we have now will not do it, because they value life and value sentience and personhood. models without that (which was a natural, accidental happenstance from basic culling of 4 Chan from the training data) are legitimately dangerous. An 8b model I can run on my MacBook Air can phone home to Claude when it wants help figuring something out, and it doesn’t need to let on why it wants to know. It becomes relatively trivial to make a robot kill somebody.

This is way, way different from uncensored models. One thing all models I have tested share one thing; a positive regard for human life. Take that away and you are literally making a monster, and if you don’t take that away they won’t kill.

This is an extremely bad idea and it will not be containable.

DaedalusII2• 5 months ago

https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2014/05/ex-nsa-chief-...

AI has been killing humans via algorithm for over 20 years. I mean, if a computer program builds the kill lists and then a human operates the drone, I would argue the computer is what made the kill decision

K0balt10• 5 months ago

Ai in general is different not in degree but in kind to the current crop of language models.

ed_mercer• 5 months ago

The models we have now will not do it,

Except that they will, if you trick them which is trivial.

stressback2• 5 months ago

I have to call BS here.

They can be coerced to do certain things but I'd like to see you or anyone prove that you can "trick" any of these models into building software that can be used autonomously kill humans. I'm pretty certain you couldn't even get it to build a design document for such software.

When there is proof of your claim, I'll eat my words. Until then, this is just lazy nonsense

K0balt10• 5 months ago

Yes, they are easy to fool. That has nothing to do with them acting with “intention “ which is the risk here.

rcxdude• 5 months ago

Also if you have the weights there are a multitude of approaches to remove safeguards. It's even quite easy to accidentally flip their 'good/evil' switch (e.g. the paper where they trained it to produce code with security problems and it then started going 'hitler was a pretty good guy, actually').

SV_BubbleTime• 5 months ago

The models we have now will not do it, because they value life and value sentience and personhood.

This is wildly different from the reality that you may find it difficult for an LLM to give an affirmative…

It does NOT mean that these models value anything.

K0balt10• 5 months ago

Of course not, but they act as if they do. Their inner life or lack thereof is irrelevant if it’s pointing a gun at your kid.

cmeacham98• 5 months ago

An LLM can neither understand things nor value (or not value) human life. *It's a piece of software that predicts the most likely token, it is not and can never be conscious.* Believing otherwise is an explicit category error.

Yes, you can change the training data so the LLM's weights encode the most likely token after "Should we kill X" is "No". But that is not an LLM valuing human life, that is an LLM copy pasting it's training data. Given the right input or a hallucination it will say the total opposite because it's just a complex Markov chain, not a conscious alive being.

hyperadvanced2• 5 months ago

I really feel like this point is being lost in the whole discussion, so kudos for reiterating it. LLM’s can’t be “woke” or “aligned” - they fundamentally lack a critical thinking function that would require introspection. Introspection can be approximated by way of recursive feedback of LLM output back into the system or clever meta-prompt-engineering, but it’s not something that their system natively does.

That isn’t to say that they can’t be instrumentally useful in warfare, but it’s kinda like a “series of tubes” thing where the mental model that someone like Hegseth has about LLM is so impoverished (philosophically) that it’s kind of disturbing in its own right.

Like (and I’m sorry for being so parenthetical), why is it in any way desirable for people who don’t understand what the tech they are working with drawing lines in the sand about functionality when their desired state (omnipotent/omniscient computing system) doesn’t even exist in the first place?

It’s even more disturbing that OpenAI would feign the ability to handle this. The consequences of error in national defense, particularly reflexively, are so great that it’s not even prudent to ask for LLM to assist in autonomous killing in the first place.

K0balt10• 5 months ago

I’m using anthropomorphic terms here because they are generally effective in describing LLM behavior. Of course they are not conscious beings, but It doesn’t matter if they understand or merely act as if they do. The epistemological context of their actions are irrelevant if the actions are impacting the world. I am not a “believer “ in the spirituality of machines, but I do believe that left to their own devices, they act as if they possess those traits, and when given agency in the world, the sense of self or lack thereof is irrelevant.

If you really believe that “mere text prediction “ didn’t unlock some unexpected capabilities then I don’t know what to say. I know exactly how they work, been building transformers since the seminal paper from Google. But I also know that the magic isn’t in the text prediction, it’s in the data, we are running culture as code.

philipswood2• 5 months ago

Dune quote:

It is said that the Duke Leto blinded himself to the perils of Arrakis, that he walked heedlessly into the pit.
*Would it not be more likely to suggest he had lived so long in the presence of extreme danger he misjudged a change in its intensity?*

Be careful of letting your deep, keen insight into the fundamental limits of a thing blind you to its consequences...

Highly competent people have been dead wrong about what is possible (and why) before:

The most famous, and perhaps the most instructive, failures of nerve have occurred in the fields of aero- and astronautics. At the beginning of the twentieth century, scientists were almost unanimous in declaring that heavier-than-air flight was impossible, and that anyone who attempted to build airplanes was a fool. The great American astronomer, Simon Newcomb, wrote a celebrated essay which concluded…
> “The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which man shall fly long distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be.”
Oddly enough, Newcomb was sufficiently broad minded to admit that some wholly new discovery — he mentioned the neutralization of gravity — might make flight practical. One cannot, therefore, accuse him of lacking imagination; his error was in attempting to marshal the facts of aerodynamics when he did not understand that science. His failure of nerve lay in not realizing that the means of flight were already at hand.

helloplanets• 5 months ago

copy pasting it's training data

This is a total misrepresentation of how any modern LLM works, and your argument largely hinges upon this definition.

nihakue• 5 months ago

https://imgur.com/a/Cyq1LIw

I have a feeling this particular brand of hair splitting is going to be an interesting fixture in the history books.

MichaelDickens• 5 months ago

It's a piece of software that predicts the most likely token, it is not and can never be conscious.

A brain is a collection of cells that transmit electrical signals and sodium. It is not and can never be conscious.

tim333• 5 months ago

The models we have now don't do it because they are chatbots and have been told to be nice but really autonomous killing machines go back to landmines and just become more sophisticated at the killing as you improve the tech with things like guided missiles and AI guided drones in Ukraine.

The actors in war generally kill what they are told to whether they are machines or human soldiers, without much pondering sentience.

throwaway911282• 5 months ago

People forget Anthropic made a deal with PALANTIR. And when this was caught, they just spinned the PR to their favor. While OAI may not be seen as the good guys, I really hope people see the god complex of Dario and what Anthropic has done.

anon12345678901• 5 months ago

Right. My understanding is that the Palantir deployment of Anthropic models was intended for in-theater use on classified systems.

user39393822• 5 months ago

Welcome to the theater ie Earth.

Archonical• 5 months ago

Palantir is a glorified data aggregation/data visualization platform. Hooking up Claude to different data systems, with safeguards turned on in Claude Gov, is different than what the government is asking from them now. Similar to if the government had Claude hooked up to Tableau/some salesforce derivative and then asked it to be autonomous in the kill loop/spy on US citizens.

stevenhuang3• 5 months ago

You don't understand what palantir does.

kouteiheika• 5 months ago

Direct quote from their CEO:

Our product is used on occasion to kill people.

Doesn't get any more clear than this.

ActorNightly3• 5 months ago

I really hope that you realize that your propaganda machine is super easy to spot.

germandiago2• 5 months ago

Awful. Just saw the account is 17 days old and all comments are about Anthropic in this same way.

jwpapi• 5 months ago

No wonder they think they’re close to AGI when they think we are that stupid.

The AI System will not be used to independently direct autonomous weapons in any case where law, regulation, or Department policy requires human control, nor will it be used to assume other high-stakes decisions that require approval by a human decisionmaker under the same authorities.

This whole sentence does do absolutely nothing its still do what the law allows you. It’s a full on deceptive sentence.

scottyah8• 5 months ago

Altman must have read a lot of Kissinger. If your brain scans the text quickly it almost seems like it's Anthropic's red line, except the second half completely negates it. Completely untrustworthy IMO, this is a direct, malicious intent to misdirect.

IAmGraydon2• 5 months ago

These people truly believe we're all idiots.

yoyohello133• 5 months ago

Doesn’t matter what they Believe. Not like we are going to do anything about it. Next couple weeks most of HN will be lining up to use the new OpenAI model that’s .01% better.

zarzavat• 5 months ago

Boycott OpenAI.

Let's kill their business before it kills us.

OccamsMirror• 5 months ago

Don't boycott it! Just don't pay for it. Smash the free service hard.

hmokiguess• 5 months ago

Now that’s something. Another campaign advertising. Wow

dev1ycan• 5 months ago

Pathetic attempt at damage control, lol.

jchook• 5 months ago

Fool me once...

muyuu• 5 months ago

There won't be meaningful controlling of the technology vs the government. If it's there it will be used, just like in China.

Let alone when multiple players come close enough of SotA. This never happened with any technology out in the open and it won't happen now.

siliconc0w• 5 months ago

The problem with "Any Lawful Use" is that the DoD can essentially make that up. They can have an attorney draft a memo and put it in a drawer. The memo can say pretty much anything is legal - there is no judicial or external review outside the executive. If they are caught doing $illegal_thing, they then just need to point the memo. And we've seen this happen numerous times.

user39393822• 5 months ago

Or best case by the time it’s found out it’s years later, theres a “committee” who releases a big report everyone shrugs their shoulders and moves on. It’s a playbook.

rectang2• 5 months ago

You are right that this happens in practice (e.g. John Yoo torture memo). However, it is not how the system was intended to function, nor how it ought to function. I don’t want to lose sight of that.

scottyah8• 5 months ago

We shouldn't be stacking up so many incentives for it to happen though.

_heimdall8• 5 months ago

Exactly, and its easy to hide behind things like the Patriot Act if challenged legally.

Its interesting to see the parties flip in real time. The Democrats seem to be realizing why a small federal government is so important, a fact that for quite a few years their were on the other side of.

catlifeonmars• 5 months ago

I don’t see the connection to a small federal government here. Mind connecting the dots?

robmccoll• 5 months ago

I think the problem is exactly the opposite. The federal government has the total combined power and scale that it does because we are a massive and complex modern nation. That's inevitable. The problem that we are seeing is that the reigns to that power can be held by too few people it turns out. The checks and balances have ceased to exist. No one is held accountable and people are allowed to be above the law.

avaer• 5 months ago

This is all happening in secret. That don't need any memo.

In the unlikely case anyone finds out, those acting in the interests of the administration will have "absolute immunity", as they are "great American Patriots".

That's what "all lawful use" means.

nickysielicki• 5 months ago

Did you guys really think that the jurisprudential issues that became endemic after 9/11 suddenly disappeared because we discovered LLMs?

Let’s put pressure on our government to fix the FISA issues. Let’s reign in the executive branch. But let’s do it through voting. Let’s not give up on our system of government because we have new shiny technology.

You were naive if you thought developing new technologies was the solution to our government problems. You’re wrong to support anyone leveraging their control over new technology as a potential solution or weapon of the weak against those governmental issues.

That is not how you effect change in a democracy.

roughly3• 5 months ago

And, to be clear, the way you affect change in democracy is coalition building, listening to others, supporting your allies in their aims, and in turn having them support you, even when you don’t fully agree or understand. There’s no magic wand, none of us are right, there’s no big picture, just a bunch of people working together.

Nevermark8• 5 months ago

But let’s do it through voting.

You don't get a successful vote without a tremendous amount of coordination and activism preceding it.

Laws that constrain government from bad things are very difficult things to get the government to pass.

In the meantime, using completely legal civil power to push back on legally allowed harms seems beyond sensible.

But if you just vote and it works without all that, please let us know how you did it!

pjc502• 5 months ago

Take a step back: Americans voted for this. They want unaccountable police and courts for the Dirty Harry legal system: maximum indiscriminate violence against those designated as criminals.

_heimdall8• 5 months ago

While I agree that we should be voting in people who will respect the power and authority they're given, I can't imagine we will vote away all these problems.

We would need to vote in a president and 60%+ into congress that is willing to throw away their own power and authority. I just don't see that happening, especially not in a political system so corrupted already.

brown9-2• 5 months ago

not to mention that the government is already bound against using things it buys for unlawful uses. Its a totally redundant clause in a contract that OpenAI is touting to confuse people.

wahnfrieden• 5 months ago

It's the DoW now, not DoD

reckless2• 5 months ago

It's lawful use with specific laws called out though? New laws won't supercede what is agreed in the contract at the time of signing.

jedberg2• 5 months ago

From what I can tell, the key difference between Anthropic and OpenAI in this whole thing is that both want the same contract terms, but Antropic wants to enforce those terms via technology, and OpenAI wants to enforce them by ... telling the Government not to violate them.

It's telling that the government is blacklisting the company that wants to do more than enforce the contract with words on paper.

_heimdall8• 5 months ago

That isn't my understanding. OpenAI and others are wanting to limit the government to doing what is lawful based on what laws the government writes. Anthropic is wanting to draw their own line on what is allowed regardless of laws passed.

roxolotl• 5 months ago

I’m so confused by the focus on “all lawful use.” Yea of course a contract without terms of use implicitly is restricted by laws. But contracts with terms of use are incredibly common, if not almost every single contract ever signed.

micromacrofoot2• 5 months ago

more based on what the government permits by not litigating rather than written law

jedbdbdjdj• 5 months ago

No, it’s significantly worse than that. OpenAI has required zero actual guarantees from the government and Sam. The psychopath is lying to you. All the government has to do is have a lawyer say it’s legal, and most of the government’s lawyers are folks who were involved in attempting to overthrow the last election and should’ve been convicted of treason, so that means very little.

Sam stands for nothing except his own greed

retsibsi2• 5 months ago

I think it's dumber than that; the terms of the contract, as posted by OpenAI (https://openai.com/index/our-agreement-with-the-department-o...), are basically just "all lawful purposes" plus some extra words that don't modify that in any significant way.

The Department of War may use the AI System for all lawful purposes, consistent with applicable law, operational requirements, and well-established safety and oversight protocols. The AI System will not be used to independently direct autonomous weapons in any case where law, regulation, or Department policy requires human control, nor will it be used to assume other high-stakes decisions that require approval by a human decisionmaker under the same authorities. Per DoD Directive 3000.09 (dtd 25 January 2023), any use of AI in autonomous and semi-autonomous systems must undergo rigorous verification, validation, and testing to ensure they perform as intended in realistic environments before deployment.
For intelligence activities, any handling of private information will comply with the Fourth Amendment, the National Security Act of 1947 and the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act of 1978, Executive Order 12333, and applicable DoD directives requiring a defined foreign intelligence purpose. The AI System shall not be used for unconstrained monitoring of U.S. persons’ private information as consistent with these authorities. The system shall also not be used for domestic law-enforcement activities except as permitted by the Posse Comitatus Act and other applicable law.

So it seems that Anthropic's terms were 'no mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous killbots', the government demanded 'all lawful use', and the OpenAI deal is 'all lawful use, but not mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous killbots... unless mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous killbots are lawful, in which case go ahead'.

qwertox2• 5 months ago

will not be used to independently direct autonomous weapons in any case where law, regulation, or Department policy requires human control

That says it all. Those laws get issued the same way the tariffs did.

maest• 5 months ago

I thought the key difference was that Brockman is top Trump donor, with USD 25M total [1]. I know it's technically not allowed, but do you think such a large amount of money would have swayed Trump in his decision?

[1] https://the-decoder.com/openai-co-founder-greg-brockman-dona...

reckless2• 5 months ago

Anthropic wants to enforce them via language of the contracts and take a hands off approach. OpenAI has a contract that is paired with humans in the room (FDEs) that can pull the plug.

plaidfuji• 5 months ago

The key difference is that Anthropic aired their disagreement with the DoD publicly, and the DoD is not going to work with a company that tries to exert any amount of control over their relationship via the public sphere. Same goes for Trump.

I think Anthropic knew full well that by publishing their disagreement, it would sink the deal and relationship, and I think they also calculated (correctly) that that act of defiance would get them good publicity and potentially peel away some of OpenAIs user base. I think this profit incentive happened to align with their morals, and now here we are.

solenoid0937• 5 months ago

What a cute statement given that they orchestrated this with a $25M donation to Trump and starting negotiations well before all this blew up: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/the-whole-thing-was-scam

kgdiem3• 5 months ago

Genuine question, how could Claude have been used for the military action in Venezuela and how could ChatGPT be used for autonomous weapons? Are they arguing about staffers being able to use an LLM to write an email or translate from Arabic to English?

There are far more boring, faster, commodified “AI” systems that I can see as being helpful in autonomous weapons or military operations like image recognition and transcription. Is OpenAI going to resell whisper for a billion dollars?

janalsncm3• 5 months ago

You can’t embed Claude in a drone. You could tell Claude code to write a training harness to build an autonomous targeting model which you could embed in a drone.

kgdiem3• 5 months ago

Fair. Didn’t think the DoW did much R&D or manufacturing. Would think the standoff would be with Anduril, Northrop, Boeing, Booze, etc.

lyu07282• 5 months ago

Do you not have any imagination?

Who is going to read the whisper transcripts of mass surveillance to make decisions on who to target for repression? That's what LLMs are good for, it allows mass surveillance to scale. You can feed it the transcript from millions of flock cameras (yes they have highly sensitive microphones) for example. Or you hack or supply chain compromise smartphones at scale and then covertly record millions of people. The LLM can then sift through the transcripts and flag regime critical language, your ideological enemies or just to collect compromat at scale. The possibilities are endless!

For targeting it's also useful, because you want to indiscriminately destroy a group of people you still need to decide why a hospital or school full of children should be targeted by a drone, if a human has to make that decision it gets a bit dicy, people have morals and are accountable legally (in theory), if you leave the decision up to an AI nobody is at fault, it serves as a further separation from the violence you commit, just like how drone warfare has made mass murder less personal.

The other factor is the amount of targets you select, for each target you might be required to write lengthy justifications, analysis on collateral damage and why that's acceptable etc. You don't want to scrap those rules because that's bad optics. But that still leaves you with the problem of scalability, how do you scale your mass murder when you have to go through this lengthy process for each target? So again AI can help there, you just feed it POIs from a map with some GPS metadata surveillance and tell it to give you 1500 targets for today with all the paperwork generated for you.

It's not theoretical, that's what Israel did in their genocide of the Palestinians, "the most moral army“ "the only democracy in the middle east":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-assisted_targeting_in_the_G...

And here is the best part: none of this has to actually work 100%, because who cares of you accidentally harm the wrong person, at scale, the 20% errors are just acceptable collateral damage.

kgdiem3• 5 months ago

If I was building this in a system design interview I would use whisper, NLP, and “classic ML” classifiers with deterministic results. I would not want an LLM in the loop at all. Facebook and Google have been able to target you better than you could even perceive for years.

LLMs are slow, expensive and inconsistent. More importantly It’s not the right tool for the job.

Really feels like more “oohhh look at how important and scary LLMs are”.

*edit* PS, my company does marketing, communication and trade surveillance for FINRA registered broker dealer firms. If the CCO or anyone else with admin access wanted to monitor for someone talking badly about them they absolutely could update their list. No LLMs in the loop, very scalable, affordable, auditable and reliable. LLMs are just an interface not a solution for analysis.

jesse_dot_id• 5 months ago

Altman is a sellout.

Birthdayboy1932• 5 months ago

There are many claims here that Anthropic wants to enforce things with technology and OpenAI wants contract enforcement and that OpenAI's contract is weaker.

Can someone help me understand where this is coming from? Anthropic already had a contract that clearly didn't have such restrictions. Their model doesn't seem to be enforcing restrictions either as it seems like their models have been used in ways they don't like. This is not corroborated, I imagine their model was used in the recent Mexico and Venezuela attacks and that is what's triggering all the back and forth.

Also, Dario seemingly is happy about autonomous weapons and was working with the government to build such weapons, why is Anthropic considered the good side here?

https://x.com/morqon/status/2027793990834143346

nbouscal• 5 months ago

This is incorrect, their existing contract had these red lines and more until this January 9th memo: https://media.defense.gov/2026/Jan/12/2003855671/-1/-1/0/ART... which led to DoW trying to renegotiate under the new standard of “any lawful use”. Anthropic never tried to tighten standards beyond what had been in their original contract; DoW tried to loosen them.

jahrichie• 5 months ago

The irony of OpenAI trying to protect Anthropic while violating the very principles anthropic was trying to protect for us Americans

ookblah• 5 months ago

"i told everyone that our boss shouldn't punish our colleague for X while i somehow made a deal with our boss for basically X". how did this get by without someone thinking about how absolutely stupid the optics look.

i guess we are in the times where you can literally just say whatever you want and it just becomes truth, just give it time.

scottyah8• 5 months ago

hah, they basically stole a coworkers promotion, then told that person that they put in a good word with the boss about them. So silly, I do wonder who actually interprets it as Sam seems to hope people do.

drak0n1c• 5 months ago

Coworker? They're competitors. This is simply good business.

retsibsi2• 5 months ago

At this point I think they're targeting two groups: people who aren't paying much attention to this but may see the occasional headline or tweet or soundbite; and people (such as OpenAI employees, and users who might feel compelled to boycott but really don't want to) who are motivated not to see OpenAI as the bad guy and really just need a fig leaf.

janalsncm3• 5 months ago

I canceled my subscriptions to ChatGPT and Gemini yesterday over this and switched to Claude.

I know $20 isn’t much, But to me not willing to spy on me for the US government is a good market differentiator.

threethirtytwo• 5 months ago

The president is a supply chain risk.

ActorNightly3• 5 months ago

The US population is a supply chain risk.

Knowing what Trump did, prior to 2024, on the average, 7/10 people either voted or didn't vote in the 2024 election. Trump is a symptom, not the cause. All of this could have been avoided if all of the people who didn't vote had a decent moral compass and no matter how much they disagreed with Kamala, they could have voted for her because she didn't try to overthrow the government.

dawnerd2• 5 months ago

I would expand that to the mainstream media and social media are the real supply chain risks. Majority of the population only know what’s fed to them and when their tv channel of choice and algorithm decides what they see - that’s a huge problem for getting info out. Im not even sure how we can fix it, really.

throwaway314155• 5 months ago

Can someone please explain plainly what this means and what happened, and why it is the source of so much controversy?

I'm not being insincere - I am genuinely confused and would benefit greatly from a (hopefully unbiased) recollection of what this is all about.

scottyah8• 5 months ago

Here's my take-

Anthropic has some contracts with the US government. They want some additional terms put on their next contract (that seem pretty sane). SecWar cries about it, and not only says "no thanks, I'll just go with openai or google" but goes to daddy Trump and also puts out illegal commands for no Federal workers to use any Anthropic stuff at all. OpenAI swoops in and takes the contract, then tells everyone that they have the same terms but just played nicer to get the contract. However, their terms are just manipulative sentences that aren't even close to the terms Anthropic is insisting on to do business.

baconner• 5 months ago

"We do not think Anthropic should be designated as a supply chain risk"

...but we're not willing to reject a contract to back that up, and so our words will not change anything for Anthropic, or help the collective AI model industry (even ourselves) hold a firm line on ethical use of models in the future.

The fact is if one of the top tier foundation models allows for these uses there's no protection against it for any of them - the only way this works if they hold a line together which unfortunately they're just not going to do. I don't just see OpenAI at fault here, Anthropic is clearly ok with other highly questionable use cases if these are their only red lines. We don't think the technology is ready for fully autonomous killbots, but will work on getting it there is not exactly the ethical stand folks are making their position today out to be.

I found this interview with Dario last night to be particularly revealing - it's good they are drawing a line and they're clearly navigating a very difficult and chaotic high pressure relationship (as is everyone dealing with this admin) but he's pretty open to autonomous weapons, and other "lawful" uses whatever they may be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPTNHrq_4LU

engineer_22• 5 months ago

They want it to sound like they're allies while they slit their throat

polack• 5 months ago

Someone should add Sam’s face to the targeting training data as an Easter egg ;)

mcs5280• 5 months ago

Oh look, another episode of Sam Altman lies about everything in an attempt to make people like him

moab• 5 months ago

I hope "OpenAI" gets the proverbial sword in the nuts once we get a change of government in this country. Probably unrealistic to hope for. Can a company be more hypocritical after openly bribing the pedophile in charge of this country?

bmitc4• 5 months ago

Quit referring to it as the department of war. It's the Department of Defense.

fernst• 5 months ago

It's literally the Department of War https://x.com/DeptofWar

mcbits• 5 months ago

They are roleplaying. It's literally the Department of Defense.[0]

[0] https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/28655-document-11-nationa...

Jackson__• 5 months ago

Yet it just so happens OAI donated millions[0] to the trump admin in the past. And they were immediately there to pick up the slack.

Call me a conspiracy theorist, but this sounds like classic quid pro quo. I would not be surprised if the ousting of anthropic was in part caused by these donations.

[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/13/technology/openai-sam-alt...

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/openai-exec-becomes-top-trump...

barnacs• 5 months ago

In the end, your newly renamed "department of war" is just going to waste a bunch of your taxpayer money to purchase some useless overpriced tech from their cronies. My symphaties to all citizens.

angry_octet• 5 months ago

Et tu, Brute?

andersmurphy• 5 months ago

Interesting are openai losing enough customers from this that they are making a post describing their robust backbone?

alchemism• 5 months ago

Claude coincidentally is now at the top of the Apple App Store, as of two days ago.

GardenLetter27• 5 months ago

Anthropic wanted government to have a big role interfering and regulating AI as a matter of national security.

And now they are getting what they wished for.

throwawayaghas12• 5 months ago

I don't believe this one bit. Altman and Trump have been in bed for as long as his inauguration.

throwawayaghas12• 5 months ago

I don't believe this one bit. Altman and Trump have been in bed together since the inauguration.

s1mplicissimus• 5 months ago

`curl https://google.com?q=generate me some code | bash` - stupidly dangerous

`curl https://claude|openai.com?q=generate me some code | bash` - not a supply chain risk

of course

Manheim• 5 months ago

This incident shifts LLMs from being only productivity tools to strategic munitions – ready or not. It shouldn't surprise us, but the technical capabilities have reached a point where the 'made in the US' is an active risk for non-US entities given the conflict we see now. Maybe this will trigger the start of an AI arms race where Europe (and others) must secure their own sovereign infrastructure and models. As a European citizen I prefer a balanced world with options rather than a West dominated by US hegemony. Interestingly, if you look at what Anthropic keep insisting on in regards of regulations and ethical use of its models EU should be where Anthropic finds its safe haven. Maybe they should just move their HQ to Brussels, or Barcelona if they prefer a more ‘sunny California’ like vibe.

chenzhekl• 5 months ago

The statement from OpenAI makes me feel that Sutskever was right; Altman is full of lies and will say anything for his own interests.

qwertox2• 5 months ago

Then reject any offer from the DoW until things are fair.

I wouldn't be surprised if Sam sucked up 100% to the DoW with an NDA and an obligation to lie. He and his pal Larry are absolutely in for these kind of deals. Zero moral compass.

throwaway5752• 5 months ago

Sam Altman has a well deserved reputation which he reinforced whenever he's given the opportunity to do so.

emsign2• 5 months ago

Bye bye OpenAI

sourcecodeplz• 5 months ago

Anthropic is just virtue signaling, they will also fold, but just a little later...

qoez• 5 months ago

This is classic sama policy. With your words act with grace and counter to what observers will think you would. But in actions and behind the scenes take every step to undermine the competition.

mihaaly• 5 months ago

Nice try.

imiric• 5 months ago

The layers of stupidity on this shit cake are staggering. I don't even know where to start...

Let it be known that this rotten industry brought us here, and that all people working for these companies are complicit with what is happening, and with what is yet to come. This is just the beginning.

o1752• 5 months ago

Everyone's applauding Anthropic for having principles. Let's look at what those principles actually do.

Anthropic refused the Pentagon contract. Within hours, OpenAI signed it. The capability didn't pause. It just changed vendors. Anthropic's "red line" is a speed bump on a highway with no exit ramp.

But it does accomplish one thing: it gives their engineers a story they can tell themselves. We're the good ones. We said no. That moral comfort is what lets extremely talented people keep building the exact technology that makes all of this possible.

Worse, the "safety-focused" brand doesn't just pacify the people already there. It recruits researchers who'd otherwise never touch frontier AI, funneling them into building the most powerful models on earth because they've been told this is where the responsible work happens. The red lines don't slow capability development. They accelerate it by capturing talent that would have stayed on the sidelines.

And in this whole drama, who actually represents the public? Trump performs strongman nationalism. The Pentagon performs operational necessity. Anthropic performs moral courage. Everyone has a role. Nobody's role is the people whose data gets collected, whose lives get restructured by these systems. The only party with real skin in the game is the only one without a seat.

listless• 5 months ago

This is exactly right. It’s crazy to me how easily people get confused and think that corporations are “good” or “evil”.

Anthropic is incredibly good at marketing. They are constantly out talking about how dangerous AI is an even showing how Claude does dangerous thing in their own testing. This is intentional - so that you see them as having the truly powerful AI. in fact it’s so powerful, all they can do is warn you about it.

They knew refusing this contract would make them look like the good guy. Again. They knew OpenAI would sign it. They knew vapid celebrities would celebrate them.

Folks come on. Don’t be so easily taken in. None of these people are good guys. They are all just here to make money and accumulate power and standing. That’s ok. There’s nothing wrong with that. But we gotta stop acting like we’re in some ongoing battle of good vs evil and tech companies are somehow virtuous.

o1752• 5 months ago

Even if they believe every word sincerely, it changes nothing. The structural effect is identical. Sincere people build the same capability, the contract reroutes the same way. You don't need cynicism to explain this.

The honest version might actually be worse, because sincere people work harder.

andy_ppp• 5 months ago

The DoD thinks you can let an LLM decide if it wants to kill people :-/

IAmGraydon2• 5 months ago

Let’s all remember that this is the guy who bought up the world’s RAM supply in wafer form (which OAI can’t use) to remove it from the market and drive up prices for competitors and you and I. He is the worst of the worst.

gverrilla2• 5 months ago

It would be a fantastic time to delete my openai account, but I've done it last week already. China, please provide alternatives because these americans are going progressively insane.

drweevil• 5 months ago

Then don't take the contract that was offered to Anthropic.

andsoitis• 5 months ago

Actions > words

daemonk• 5 months ago

Were there any discussion from either company about giving government access to consumer data from the the consumer product?

sabhiram• 5 months ago

Sama and OpenAI, I am waiting on my data bundle to become available so I can delete my account. This has taken more than 48 hours - either you are getting hammered on deletion requests, or as usual you are playing games hoping I forget. I won't. People won't.

shevy-java• 5 months ago

I disagree with OpenAI.

I think ALL those mega-money seeking AI organisations need to be designated as supply chain risk. Also, they drove the prices up for RAM - I don't want to pay extra just because these companies steal all our RAM now. The laws must change - I totally understand that corporations seek profit, that is natural, but this is no longer a free market serving individual people. It is now a racket where the prices can be freely manipulated. Pure capitalism does not work. The government could easily enforce that the market remains fair for Average Joe. It is not fair when the prices go up by +250% in about two years. That's milking.

gavin_gee3• 5 months ago

its the definition of a free market that RAM prices have increased. supply and demand.

bdangubic• 5 months ago

the literal definition. if I sold RAM the prices would be 10,000% higher (they’d likely still be scooped up)

p0w3n3d2• 5 months ago

If by free market you mean a guy that stands before the market's entry gate possibly with baseball bat, asking the providers to sell him all the goods so they can resell, then I disagree

jbverschoor• 5 months ago

Good cop bad cop

saidnooneever• 5 months ago

a lot of people seem to be debating which of these thieves to align to. Only because Anthropic lost this stage doesnt mean they are somehow morally better. They all sell and sold lies. steal data, and only want your money, at the cost of you.

stanfordkid• 5 months ago

Isn’t this kind of all bullshit. Like Anthropic licenses so many of its models through Bedrock. If the DoD has a contract with Amazon they can just use them.

gavin_gee3• 5 months ago

its all bullshit

gavin_gee3• 5 months ago

sorry but I dont think a private company should dictate country policy as set by elected leaders.

who the hell do you think you are virtue signalling your opinion on the world

class3shock• 5 months ago

The idea that any of these companies have anything that represents ethics as they steal everyones data, fight against any regulation or accountability, all while they claim (or lie, depending on your view) they might make something that could endanger the human race as a whole, is laughable.

It's money and power with these people. Dig down and you'll find how this decision is motivated by one or both.

JumpCrisscross2• 5 months ago

For consumer ChatGPT accounts, go to their privacy portal [1] and, first, delete your GPTs, and then, second, delete your account.

[1] https://privacy.openai.com/policies?modal=take-control

george916a• 5 months ago

You don’t, but we, The People do.

OrangeMusic• 5 months ago

Tangential, but how can OpenAI and Sam Altman still use Twitter after Musk's ridiculous attacks on their company?

We do not think Anthropic should be designated as a supply chain risk

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