Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’

https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/04/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-calls-openais-messaging-around-military-deal-straight-up-lies-report-says/

by SilverElfin • 5 months ago

805 347 5 months ago

techcrunch.com

6Az4Mj4D• 5 months ago

Leaving autonomous weapons aside, how does Anthropic justifies that they signed up with surveillance company Palantir and now raising concerns for same surveillance with DoD?

It doesn't match.

ekjhgkejhgk3• 5 months ago

It might match. The red line was domestic surveillance. You don't know what deal they had. Giving Anthropic the benefit of the doubt, perhaps Palantir said "Deal, we won't use your tool domestically".

taurath2• 5 months ago

Every single time the box is flipped over, whats inside is "more domestic surveillance". Who in their right mind would give the benefit of the doubt?

tbrockman• 5 months ago

Whether you disagree with whether it truly aligns with their stated values, in their partnership with Palantir (making Claude available within their AI platform) they requested consistent restrictions:

“[We will] tailor use restrictions to the mission and legal authorities of a government entity” based on factors such as “the extent of the agency’s willingness to engage in ongoing dialogue,” Anthropic says in its terms. The terms, it notes, do not apply to AI systems it considers to “substantially increase the risk of catastrophic misuse,” show “low-level autonomous capabilities,” or that can be used for disinformation campaigns, the design or deployment of weapons, censorship, domestic surveillance, and malicious cyber operations.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/07/anthropic-teams-up-with-pa...

dmix3• 5 months ago

signed up with surveillance company Palantir

Just to nitpick, Palantir isn't doing surveillance like Flock. They do data integration the way IBM does under contract for the governments. Some data pipelines include law enforcement surveillance data which get integrated with other software/databases to help police analyze it. There's no evidence they are collecting it themselves despite recent headlines. It's a relatively minor but important distinction IMO.

https://www.wired.com/story/palantir-what-the-company-does/

trinsic26• 5 months ago

They are providing the software to do surveillance, They are definetly bad actors, you can dance around this all you want, but they are in it.

clipsy• 5 months ago

They do data integration the way IBM does under contract for the governments

Good thing IBM's data integration was never used for ill!

Oh, wait https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_World_War_II

ImPostingOnHN5• 5 months ago

I think a company which provides a sensor fusion dragnet for a government-run mass domestic civilian surveillance system is at least as culpable (and odious) than the ones supplying the data.

gjsman-10002• 5 months ago

Basically it’s glorified Excel.

Take it out on the database purveyors, not Palantir.

_jab• 5 months ago

Sure, but it's not as if the DoD was planning on using Anthropic to _collect_ the data either? I assume that the hypothetical DoD use case Anthropic shied away from dealt with the processing of surveillance data, just like what Palantir does.

SirensOfTitan4• 5 months ago

Their data integration and sale allows for the government to surveil citizens without probable cause or warrants.

hedora6• 5 months ago

It's funny you'd pick IBM:

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

Though, I guess IBM did get away with lots of stuff that... Actually, did any supply companies in the WWII German war machine actually get in trouble for war crimes, or did they just go after officers and the people actually working in the camps?

The company selling punchcards that were used for logistics was apparently fine. What about the people making the gas canisters, or supplying plumbing fixtures? The plumbers? Where's the line?

Wondering, since this is increasingly becoming a current events question instead of an academic concern.

trinsic26• 5 months ago

This exchange between Anthropic and OpenAI feels a lot like theater. If I was really trying to stop abuses I wouldn't going out of my way to talk about it. The "public sees us as the hero's" bullshit feels like a smoke screen. Id make one statement and keep silent and let the public do the math and not get involved.

elevation• 5 months ago

The moral disposition of the Anthropic leaders doesn't matter because they don't own the company. Investors won't idly watch them decimate billions in ROI by alienating the largest institutional customers on the planet.

bryant• 5 months ago

The moral disposition of the Anthropic leaders doesn't matter because they don't own the company. Investors won't idly watch them decimate billions in ROI by alienating the largest institutional customers on the planet.

Anthropic is a Public Benefit Corporation chartered in Delaware, with an expressed commitment to "the responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity."

So in theory (IANAL), investors can't easily bully Anthropic into abandoning their mission statement unless they can convince a court that Anthropic deliberately aimed to prioritize the cause over profit.

Madmallard• 5 months ago

They are all guilty.

sigmar• 5 months ago

Why do you assume the contract with palantir doesn't have similar terms? Weird assumption.

pfisherman• 5 months ago

This is very easy to explain. Anthropic outlines some limitations in their terms of service. Palantir accepted those terms. The DoD did not.

OpenAI claims their terms of service for DoD contain the same limitations as Anthropics proposed service agreement. Anthropic claims that this is untrue.

Now given that (a) the DoD terminated their deal with Anthropic, (b) stated that they terminated because Anthropic refused modify their terms of service, and (c) then signed a deal with openAI; I am inclined to believe that there is in fact a substantial difference between the terms of service offered by Anthropic and OpenAI.

stingraycharles3• 5 months ago

Yeah, it never made sense when Sam immediately said that they had the same constraints yet de DoW immediately agreed with that.

From what I can see, OpenAI’s terms basically say “need to comply with the law”, which provides them with plenty of wiggle room with executive orders and whatnot.

Loquebantur• 5 months ago

“We’ve actually held our red lines with integrity rather than colluding with them to produce ‘safety theater’ for the benefit of employees (which, I absolutely swear to you, is what literally everyone at [the Pentagon], Palantir, our political consultants, etc, assumed was the problem we were trying to solve),” Amodei reportedly wrote.

“The real reasons [the Pentagon] and the Trump admin do not like us is that we haven’t donated to Trump (while OpenAI/Greg have donated a lot),” he wrote, referring to Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, who gave a Pac supporting Trump $25m in conjunction with his wife.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/04/sam-altma...

felipeerias3• 5 months ago

Are you sure about that? Every information I’ve seen suggests that the DoD has been using Anthropic’s models through Palantir.

My understanding is that Anthropic requested visibility and a say into how their models were being used for classified tasks, while the DoD wanted to expand the scope of those tasks into areas that Anthropic found objectionable. Both of those proposals were unacceptable for the other side.

waterproof• 5 months ago

Sam donated $1M to Trump's inaugural fund. Dario did not.

http://magamoney.fyi/executives/samuel-h-altman/

df2dfs2• 5 months ago

What's there to discuss? OAI is seeking a hand-out from the govt to save their asses. They (Sam + top-management) see the writing on the wall and need help.

Spooky23• 5 months ago

This. The OpenAI grift is to make itself too big to fail. They are playing a game of chicken ahead of the election circus. Trump must keep the market alive until November. Nvidia, Micron, Oracle, Microsoft are cooked when and if they pop.

trinsic26• 5 months ago

IMHO everyone needs to cancel there subscriptions with all of the ai products until stuff blows over. I don't trust anyone in this industry.There is probably one person or one group behind all of these AI companies that just needs to keep the engine going until they figure out how to replace everyone with bots that can do the dirty work.

freakynit6• 5 months ago

Is there a term for such a recurring cycle in which speculative bubbles form, institutions and governments collaborate/collude to sustain them, and when the system finally reaches a breaking point the bubble collapses... leaving the public to absorb the losses while those responsible largely walk away with their pay and bonuses intact?

df2dfs2• 5 months ago

We need to create a special place where people who ‘get it’ congregate.

Sadly this place is full of noise and people who don’t get the big picture - leading to the down voting of posts and continual drowning out of stuff closer to the truth by noise and hysteria.

vldszn• 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

KnuthIsGod• 5 months ago

Meanwhile Anthropic has no issues with helping Palantir...

HypocrAIsy...

estearum2• 5 months ago

Not hypocritical at all if you knew what Palantir actually does

kouteiheika• 5 months ago

Help kill people[1]?

[1] -- https://edition.cnn.com/videos/business/2020/07/24/thiel-pal...

behnamoh2• 5 months ago

Neither Anthro nor OAI are trustworthy. Local AI all the way. And when I say local, I mean Apple Silicon; I don't like to contribute to Nvidia's monopoly either (fuck "buy a GPU"; the guy is an Nvidia-sponsored "influencer").

derwiki3• 5 months ago

What are you having good luck with on Apple Silicon? Or is this more of a statement for when local AI becomes “good enough?”

(FWIW I am with you; I haven’t found a local model that works well enough to be a daily driver)

behnamoh2• 5 months ago

qwen models are basically <opus and >sonnet. 397b runs at Q8 on m3 ultra. for mbp m5 max I'd use the +120b qwen model.

zug_zug• 5 months ago

Great, well deepseek is free for most use and certainly won't be helping the US military any time soon. Since you aren't paying them you aren't really supporting anything bad they may do down the line.

etchalon• 5 months ago

"Person says its raining when its raining."

_alternator_• 5 months ago

Anyone have a link to the full text of the letter?

GranPC• 5 months ago

I found a copy on this website: https://www.teamblind.com/post/darios-email-to-anthropic-att...

I don't know how reliable that source is. In any case, here's the text from that link, for posterity:

"I want to be very clear on the messaging that is coming from OpenAI, and the mendacious nature of it. This is an example of who they really are, and I want to make sure everything sees it for what it is. Although there is a lot we don’t know about the contract they signed with DoW (and that maybe they don’t even know as well — it could be highly unclear), we do know the following:

Sam’s description and the DoW description give the strong impression (although we would have to see the actual contract to be certain) that how their contract works is that the model is made available without any legal restrictions ("all lawful usee") but that there is a "safety layer", which I think amounts to model refusals, that prevents the model from completing certain tasks or engaging in certain applications.

"Safety layer" could also mean something that partners such as Palantir tried to offer us during these negotiations,which is that they on their end offered us some kind of classifier or machine learning system, or software layer, that claims to allow some applications and not others. There is also some suggestion of OpenAI employees ("FDE’s") looking over the usage of the model to prevent bad applications.

Our general sense is that these kinds of approaches, while they don’t have zero efficacy, are, in the context of military applications, maybe 20% real and 80% safety theater. The basic issue is that whether a model is conducting applications like mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons depends substantially on wider context: a model doesn’t "know" if there’s a human in the loop in the broad situation it is in (for autonomous weapons), and doesn’t know the provenance of the data is it analyzing (so doesn’t know if this is US domestic data vs foreign, doesn’t know if it’s enterprise data given by customers with consent or data bought in sketchier ways, etc).

The kind of "safety layer" stuff that Palantir offered us (and presumably offered OpenAI) is even worse:our sense was that it was almost entirely safety theater, and that Palantir assumed that our problem was "you have some unhappy employees, you need to offer them something that placates them or makes what is happening invisible to them, and that’s the service we provide".

Finally, the idea of having Anthropic/OpenAI employees monitor the deployments is something that came up in discussion within Anthropic a few months ago when we were expanding our classified AUP of our own accord. We were very clear that this is possible only in a small fraction of cases, that we will do it as much as we can, but that it’s not a safeguard people should rely on and isn’t easy to do in the classified world. We do, by the way, try to do this as much as possible, there’s no difference between our approach and OpenAI’s approach here.

So overall what I’m saying here is that the approaches OAI is taking mostly do not work: the main reason OAI accepted them and we did not is that they cared about placating employees, and we actually cared about preventing abuses. They don’t have zero efficacy, and we’re doing many of them as well, but they are nowhere near sufficient for purpose. It is simultaneously the case that the DoW did not treat OpenAI and us the same here.

We actually attempted to include some of the same safeguards as OAI in our contract, in addition to the AUP which we considered the more important thing, and DoW rejected them with us. We have evidence of this in the email chain of the contract negotiations (I’m writing this with a lot to do, but I might get someone to follow up with the actual language). Thus, it is false that "OpenAIs terms were offered to us and we rejected them", at the same time that it is also false that OpenAI’s terms meaningfully protect them against domestic mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.

Finally, there is some suggestion in Sam/OpenAI’s language that the red lines we are talking about, fully autonomous weapons and domestic mass surveillance, are already illegal and so an AUP about these is unnecessary. This mirrors and seems coordinated with DoW’s messaging. It is however completely false. As we explained in our statement yesterday, the DoW does have domestic surveillance authorities, that are not of great concern in a pre--AI world but take on a different meaning in a post-AI world.

For example, it is legal for DoW to buy a bunch of private data on US citizens from vendors who have obtained that data in some legal way (often involving hidden consents to sell to third parties) and then analyze it at scale with AI to build profiles of citizens, their loyalties, movement patterns in physical space (the data they can get includes GPS data, etc), and much more.

Notably, near the end of the negotiation the DoW offered to accept our current terms if we deleted a specific phrase about "analysis of bulk acquired data", which was the single line in the contract that exactly matched this scenario we were most worried about. We found that very suspicious. On autonomous weapons, the DoW claims that "human in the loop is the law", but they are incorrect. It is currently Pentagon policy (set during the Biden admin) that a human has to be in the loop of firing a weapon. But that policy can be changed unilaterally by Pete Hegseth, which is exactly what we are worried about. So it is not, for all intents and purposes, a real constraint.

A lot of OpenAI and DoW messaging just straight up lies about these issues or tries to confuse them.

I think these facts suggest a pattern of behavior that Ive seen often from Sam Altman, and that I want to make sure people are equipped to recognize:

He started out this morning by saying he shares Anthropic’s redlines, in order to appear to support us, get some of the credit, and not be attacked when they take over the contract. He also presented himself as someone who wants to "set the same contract for everyone in the industry" — e.g. he’s presenting himself as a peacemaker and dealmaker.

Behind the scenes, he’s working with the DoW to sign a contract with them, to replace us the instant we are designated a supply chain risk. But he has to do this in a way that doesn’t make it seem like he gave up on the red lines and sold out when we wouldn’t. He is able to superficially appear to do this, because (1.) he can sign up for all the safety theater that Anthropic rejected, and that the DoW and partners are willing to collude in presenting as compelling to his employees, and (2.) the DoW is also willing to accept some terms from him that they were not willing to accept from us. Both of these things make it possible for OAI to get a deal when we could not.

The real reasons DoW and the Trump admin do not like us is that we haven’t donated to Trump (while OpenAI/Greg have donated a lot), we haven’t given dictator-style praise to Trump (while Sam has), we have supported AI regulation which is against their agenda, we’ve told the truth about a number of AI policy issues (like job displacement), and we’ve actually held our red lines with integrity rather than colluding with them to produce "safety theater" for the benefit of employees (which, I absolutely swear to you, is what literally everyone at DoW, Palantir, our political consultants, etc, assumed was the problem we were trying to solve).

Sam is now (with the help of DoW) trying to spin this as we were unreasonable, we didn’t engage in a good way, we were less flexible, etc. I want people to recognize this as the gaslighting it is.

Vague justifications like "person X was hard to work with" are often used to hide real reasons that look really bad, like the reasons I gave above about political donations, political loyalty, and safety theater. It’s important that everyone understand this and push back on this narrative at least in private, when talking to OpenAI employees.

Thus, Sam is trying to undermine our position while appearing to support it. I want people to be really clear on this: he is trying to make it more possible for the admin to punish us by undercutting our public support. Finally, I suspect he is even egging them on, though I have no direct evidence for this last thing.

I think this attempted spin/gaslighting is not working very well on the general public or the media, where people mostly see OpenAI’s deal with DoW as sketchy or suspicious, and see us as the heroes (we’re #2 in the App Store now!). Itis working on some Twitter morons, which doesn’t matter, but my main worry is how to make sure it doesn’t work on OpenAI employees.

Due to selection effects, they’re sort of a gullible bunch, but it seems important to push back on these narratives which Sam is peddling to his employees."

cndg• 5 months ago

"person X was hard to work with"

Life is this simple: in any argument, when someone attacks the person, instead of the topic, that's when you discover that they understand the topic is indefensible.

senectus1• 5 months ago

and?

Anthropic might not sign up with DoD but they definitely still live in a glass house.

Also, its extremely evident that we live in a post truth world. The accusation of Lies dont hold any teeth anymore. Especially in the post law gov of America

fmajid4• 5 months ago

His clear concern is to stay able to poach OpenAI employees (although it's really Google employees he should be after). He didn't give MAGA $25M like Greg Brockman did, and the Trump administration is pay-to-play, so the DoD contract ship has sailed.

cm2012• 5 months ago

Good for Anthropic. Even AI at its current state has pretty scary surveillance capabilities.

aeon_ai• 5 months ago

I get the sense that OpenAI is astroturfing “outrage and hypocrisy” in this thread.

The dead internet is alive and well.

labrador• 5 months ago

They are on X as well

paxys• 5 months ago

Sam Altman would lie? Nooo

freakynit6• 5 months ago

Lol, right? I mean, who even has doubts left anymore on this?

The guy can lie with a perfectly straight face. He's the kind of person who tells another lie just to cover the last one, and then another to cover that.

Meanwhile he keeps making everyone more and more dependent on him, so by the time people finally realize what's going on, they can't afford to push him out.

SirensOfTitan4• 5 months ago

Like others have already mentioned: I think Anthropic's relationship with Palantir undermines Amodei's narrative here. It actually feels like Dario is playing Sam's game better than Sam is.

Those who know better please correct me. My current understanding of Palantir (and other surveillance tech companies like Peregrine) is:

1. They facilitate the sale of data to law enforcement, enabling the government to circumvent fourth amendment protections.

2. They fuse cross-government agency data through Foundry and fuse them into unified profiles which the government can use to surveil and pressure citizens without probable cause or a warrant.

ICE also uses a Palantir tool called ELITE to build deportation target lists.

EDIT: Downvoting my comment without any proper rebuttal or clarification is pretty silly.

trinsic26• 5 months ago

It feels more like the are playing good cop/bad cop... There is just something indifferent about all of this that makes me wonder.

cherioo• 5 months ago

We don’t know if Palantir is using claude for those uses. Though anthropic would not know for sure either.

I do agree with your point that Amodei is playing a game though. Whether he’s winning the bigger picture or not it’s unclear. His red lines are already so watered out, like how domestic surveillance is not ok, but international? totally fine.

SirensOfTitan4• 5 months ago

That's true. With the risks of LLMs applied to surveillance though, I think it's a "Caesar's wife must be above suspicion" moment. Association is guilt unless proven otherwise.

solenoid09376• 5 months ago

They engage with Palantir for non-domestic purposes.

hedora6• 5 months ago

"Non-domestic purposes" specifically includes wiretapping US citizens and residents, and has for at least 25 years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_(...

I suspect the 2007 in the title refers to the fact that bills were passed to ban this stuff in 2007, which is when the PRISM program (also illegal domestic surveillance) got started.

(The title makes it sound like warrantless surveillance lasted from 2001-2007, but I think it means the article only covers that date range.)

mrandish2• 5 months ago

When @sama announced within hours that OAI was replacing Anthropic with the "same conditions ", it was clear that either the DoW or OAI (or both) were fudging. DoW balked at Anthropic's conditions so OAI's agreement must have made the "conditions" basically unenforceable.

And sure enough, my reading of it left the impression the OAI conditions were basically "DoW won't do anything which violates the rules DoW sets for itself."

sakesun• 5 months ago

it was clear that either the DoW or OAI (or both) were fudging.

This is my first thought as well. It's too obvious. He should have consulted ChatGPT before the announcement.

shigawire• 5 months ago

More likely assumed (perhaps rightfully) that there would be no consequences anyway.

cheema33• 5 months ago

OAI conditions were basically "DoW won't do anything which violates the rules DoW sets for itself."

I believe this understanding is correct. The issue many people have these days with Dept. of War, and most of Trump admin is that they have little respect for laws. They only follow the ones they like and openly ignore the ones that are inconvenient.

Dept of "War" should have zero problems agreeing to the two conditions Anthropic outlined, if they were honest brokers. But I think most of us know that they are not. Calling them dishonest brokers seems very charitable.

reactordev• 5 months ago

I haven’t seen them follow a law yet

lmeyerov• 5 months ago

I find it confusing in most directions.

Ex: For the above statement, if they're truly dishonest brokers and openly ignore the rules that are inconvenient, they would have zero problems agreeing to Anthropic's terms and then violating them. So what you say may be quite true, but there would still need to be more to the story for it to make sense.

Ex: DoW officials are stating that they were shocked that their vendor checked in on whether signed contractual safety terms were violated: They require a vendor who won't do such a check. But that opens up other confusing oversight questions, eg, instead of a backchannel check, would they have preferred straight to the IG? Or the IG more aggressively checking these things unasked so vendors don't? It's hard to imagine such an important and publicly visible negotiation being driven by internal regulatory politicking.

I wonder if there's a straighter line for all these things. Irrespective of whether folks like or dislike the administration, they love hardball negotiations and to make money. So as with most things in business and government, follow the money...

aardvarkr3• 5 months ago

I don’t care who is in the whitehouse. Snowden revealed the crimes of the NSA in 2013 when Obama was president. They’re all going to want to use AI for mass surveillance

tqwhite2• 5 months ago

Mass surveillance is completely legal. It's just stupid to say its not.

oxdgd383• 5 months ago

We know how this story will end for Dario. See Oppenheimer, Turing, Lavoisier, Galileo, Socretes etc. Power does not reside in the hands of people with knowledge or even wealth. And most technical people have not taken a political philosophy course or even a philosphy course. The Ring of Gyges story is 4000 years old.

beepbooptheory3• 5 months ago

I do not believe the Ring of Gyges preceded Plato making it up for The Republic... Where are you getting 4000 years?

Also maybe not seeing the message or connection here... That myth isn't really about who has power or not, right? It's kind of just a trite little "why you should do good even when no one is watching" thing. It just serves Socrates for his argument with Thrasymachus, and leads us into book 2 where it really gets going with Glaucon and all that. This is from memory so I might be a little off.

adriand• 5 months ago

I think Amodei is widely underestimated. The consensus viewpoint on the deal that OpenAI struck with the Pentagon is that Anthropic got played. I disagree. I'm certain that Amodei and his team gamed this out. In doing so, I think there's at least two conclusions they would have drawn:

1. Some other AI company would cut a deal with the Pentagon. There's no world in which all the labs boycott the Pentagon. So who? Choosing Grok would be bad for the US, which is a bad outcome, but Amodei would have discounted that option, because he knows that despite their moral failures, the Pentagon is not stupid and Grok sucks.

That leaves Gemini or OpenAI, and I bet they predicted it would be OpenAI. Choosing OpenAI does not harm the republic - say what you will about Altman, ChatGPT is not toxic and it is capable - but it does have the potential to harm OpenAI, which is my second point:

2. OpenAI may benefit from this in the short term, and Anthropic may likewise be harmed in the short term, but what about the long game? Here, the strategic benefits to Anthropic in both distancing themselves from the Trump administration and letting OpenAI sully themselves with this association are readily apparent. This is true from a talent retention and attraction standpoint and especially true from a marketing standpoint. Claude has long had much less market share than ChatGPT. In that position, there are plenty of strategic reasons to take a moral/ethical stand like this.

What I did not expect, and I would guess Amodei did not either, is that Claude would now be #1 in the app store. The benefits from this stance look to be materializing much more quickly than anyone in favour of his courage might have hoped.

tmule• 5 months ago

Oppenheimer? Really? Quoting a review of an Oppenheimer biography:

“Oppenheimer was clearly an enormously charming man, but also a manipulative man and one who made enemies he need not have made. The really horrible things Oppenheimer did as a young man – placing a poisoned apple on the desk of his advisor at Cambridge, attempting to strangle his best friend – and yes, he really did those things – Monk passes off as the result of temporary insanity, a profound but passing psychological disturbance. (There’s no real attempt by Monk to explain Oppenheimer’s attempt to get Linus Pauling’s wife Ava to run off to Mexico with him, which ended the possibility of collaboration with one of the greatest scientists of the twentieth, or any, century.) Certainly the youthful Oppenheimer did go through a period of serious mental illness; but the desire to get his own way, and feelings of enormous frustration with people who prevented him from getting his own way, seem to have been part of his character throughout his life.”

Seems more like Sam Altman, who is known to get his way, than Dario.

_heimdall2• 5 months ago

I'd have money on OpenAI hiding behind the "all lawful use" phrasing to claim high levels of protection.

He also claimed that they would build rules into the model the DoD would use, preventing misuse. Aka he claims OpenAI will quickly solve alignment and build it right in...I wouldn't hold my breath.

conception2• 5 months ago

All lawful use. And then they followed up with “intentionally doing illegal things.” If they happen to accidentally do illegal things, OpenAI is ok with it.

thisisit• 5 months ago

Most likely scenario is that if it does something “unlawful” and found out - claim that “These machines are black boxes and they don’t know what went wrong. They will set up an investigative committee and find out.”

SoftTalker• 5 months ago

OpenAI: Is that... legal?

DoD: I will make it legal.

vasco2• 5 months ago

Alignment is with the user of the LLM not to some fuzzy interpretation of human rights. So solving alignment for the DoW is just "don't refuse to bomb people when I ask you".

fmajid4• 5 months ago

Or, as is likely, OpenAI models have no guardrails, Anthropic's did and the DoD was bumping into them.

galangalalgol• 5 months ago

Does anyone else notice claude is just plain better at reasoning? It may not just be post training guardrails. It would not surprise me of it was something anthropic couldn't simply disable. Either from reinforcement or even training corpus curation. Of all the models, claude is the only one that makes me wonder if they have figured out something beyond stochastic language generation and aren't telling anyone

JumpCrisscross4• 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

teruakohatu• 5 months ago

Why?

If you have so little faith in them that they won’t honour the privacy controls you should also delete your non-consumer account too.

Towaway69• 5 months ago

How do I cancel my subscription to the DoW?

The bigger picture is that the DoW got what it wanted and it got it by threatening one company while the other did its bidding.

LarsDu88• 5 months ago

Greg Brockman donated 25 million dollars, and DoW gives OpenAI 200 million dollar contract.

Just good 'ol fashion grifting mixed with a bit of government corruption.

This country has been boiling the frog of graft, grifting, and corruption too long.

cobbzilla2• 5 months ago

per other Snowden comments, “all lawful use” means whatever we want it to mean.

Secret FISA court decisions will say the use is lawful, but you’ll never get to read or challenge those decisions.

jaredklewis• 5 months ago

DoW balked at Anthropic's conditions so OAI's agreement must have made the "conditions" basically unenforceable.

I think it’s also possible DoW didn’t care about the conditions but just wanted some pretext to punish Anthropic because Dario isn’t a Trump boot licker like the rest of the SV CEOs.

sigwinch2• 5 months ago

I think this is supported. Hegseth has said numerous things about curly hair. I read that his reaction to Dario started with his hair.

hn_throwaway_99• 5 months ago

Agree with this completely.

But besides Sam Altman, this whole episode has made me totally and completely lose all respect for Paul Graham. I used to really idolize pg, and I really used to like his essays, but over the years I've found his essays increasingly displayed a disturbing lack of introspection, like they'd always seem to say that starting a startup is the best thing anyone can do, and if you're not good at startups then you kind of suck.

But his continued support of Altman in this instance (see https://x.com/paulg/status/2027908286146875591, and the comment in that thread where he replies "yes") is just so extra disappointing and baffling. First, his big commendation for Altman is that he's doing an AMA? Give me an f'ing break. When someone is a great spin doctor I'm not going to commend them for doing more spinning. It's like he has total blinders on and is unwilling to see how sama's actions in this instance are so disgusting and duplicitous. Maybe subconsciously he knows he's responsible for really launching sama into the public consciousness, so he now just is incapable of seeing the undeniably shitty things sama has done.

Oh well, I guess it's just another tech leader from the late 90s/early 00s who has just shown me he's kind of a shitty person like a lot of us.

jahnu• 5 months ago

Billions of dollars is a hell of a drug.

causal• 5 months ago

Yeah he has some great essays but also some that I find really dumb. Reading “Founder Mode” is when I realized he’s just as susceptible to fallacy as the rest of us.

nextaccountic• 5 months ago

Never meet your heroes

spwa4• 5 months ago

Except if there's one defining property of the last 4-5 administrations it is that they definitely and constantly violate the rules they set for themselves. With every new administration it gets worse and worse.

And while this administration is brazen about this, it's not really a drastic change anywhere.

In fact most EU laws (GPDR, AI regulation, Chat Control) are directly, up front, declaring they themselves won't respect it. They very directly have one set of rules for states, government employees, ... and ANOTHER set of rules for everyone else. And they're incredibly brazen. For private individuals, companies it goes very far, it's essentially impossible to even know what does and does not violate the GPDR, and you can't ask the courts, that's not allowed. You also cannot use the courts to compel government to do anything under these laws.

For governments, when it comes to what's allowed, it goes incredibly far. Governments can declare any action legal under the GPDR, before and after the fact, without parliament involvement. It does not matter if that action was done by the government themselves, or if it's an action by a private company (so the government can use subcontractors for any violation of the GPDR)

This means that, for THE example given for GPDR protection: medical information. Medical insurance in the EU is either state-owned or has exceptions, the law does the exact opposite of what it appears to do: it makes all your medical information available for medical insurers. And the police (e.g. to find you). And the tax office. And courts. And medical institutions themselves (to deny transplants to smokers). And ... And while doctors (and priests) used to be huge no-no's when it came to information gathering, that's no longer the case. If a doctor uses the state required medical file, your medical information flows straight into a state database, immediately searchable for everyone the GPDR supposedly protects you against.

qwertox• 5 months ago

@sama's did say: "[..] will not be used to independently direct autonomous weapons in any case where law, regulation, or Department policy requires human control". Law is what Trump decides.

hollosi• 5 months ago

Enforcement is the real issue, not the specific red lines, regardless of what Anthropic claims and news outlets repeat.

Verification requires access to classified logs. These logs would attract the spies of the whole world. Even if these logs are in principle for "past actions", in practice past logs (for war games, for example) would compromise future strategy.

Since these manual audits are too risky, the only alternative is to hard-code limits into the AI. But are we ready trust an AI to "judge" a mission and refuse to execute during a crisis?

Anthropic wanted technical enforcement, the Pentagon wanted trust.

It’s a choice between two bad options: an unaccountable military and an unreliable AI kill switch. They are both very dangerous, just in different ways.

filoeleven2• 5 months ago

It's not the department of war. Don't call it that.

However, only an act of Congress can legally and formally change the department's name and secretary's title, so "Department of Defense" and "secretary of defense" remain legally official.

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

_2d305• 5 months ago

He has to know that this would leak and it makes him look really bad. This is going to be a meaningful, unforced error.

websight• 5 months ago

Who, Amodei? This makes him look the opposite of really bad

_2d305• 5 months ago

That he's talking shit about Altman who is, at least in public, only talking up Anthropic. This will only play well with people who hate Altman, which is not the majority or even much of the public. It plays right into Altman's hand who can do what he always does which is play his "smol bean billionaire" role and act like a victim of big bad Amodei.

Just because you hate Altman doesn't mean everyone else does! Most people just know him as the guy who makes ChatGPT which most people like.

EDIT: Also, it doesn't help to brag about how this is good actually because now they are getting app downloads! People sympathize with victims of unfair situations. They don't like seeing people take advantage of those unfair situations though. No one has ever found the welfare recipient bragging about their welfare to be sympathetic.

madeofpalk• 5 months ago

....why does this make him look bad? That he called out the obvious thing that everyone knows?

_2d305• 5 months ago

Just because you hate Altman doesn't mean everyone else does! Most people just know him as the guy who makes ChatGPT which most people like.

hintymad2• 5 months ago

Honest question: why do people automatically equate "fully autonomous weapons" to something like killer robot? My immediate reaction is that even the best-in-class rapid-fire gun has a hard time identifying and tracking drones. So, we'd need AI to do better tracking, which leads to a fully autonomous weapon. And I really don't get why that's a bad thing.

Of course, a company should have freedom to choose not to do business with the government. I just think that automatically assuming the worst intention of the government is not as productive as setting up good enough legal framework to limit government's power.

intrasight• 5 months ago

We all do business with the government. We pay the military to protect our gold. It is fundamentally a protection racket that we voted for. And one could argue that the military, as the protector of your gold, has the final decision as to what it can and can't do with your technology.

unethical_ban• 5 months ago

Please define what kind of fully autonomous weapons system the Pentagon would build wouldn't be designed to kill people.

For that matter, explain why the Pentagon would balk at not spying on every American.

benlivengood• 5 months ago

We have traditional autonomous weapons (and counter-defense). They operate on millisecond or faster timescales with existing RF sensors. They are not and will not be using LLMs or other transformers. Maybe ChatGPT will update some realtime Ada code; they formally verify some of that stuff so maybe that won't be terrifyingly dangerous.

Where autonomous transformer-based munitions will be used are basically "here is a photo of a face, find and kill this human" and loitering munitions will take their time analyzing video and then decide to identify and attack a target on their own.

EDIT: Or worse: "identify suspicious humans and kill them"

yed• 5 months ago

What you are describing would be "partially autonomous." Per Dario Amodei's original statement here: https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war he had no issue with that. "Fully autonomous" specifically means that the AI chooses a target and engages without any human intervention at all. If the human selects or approves a target, and the weapon then automates tracking and engagement, that's still only partially autonomous.

el_benhameen2• 5 months ago

I’m not sure that “killer robot” is the actual concern outside of media hyperbole. I’m imagining a loitering munition-type drone that has some kind of targeting package loaded into it with different parameters describing what it should seek and destroy. Instead of waiting for intelligence and using human command to put the munition on target, it hangs out and then engages when it’s certain enough that it’s found something valid.

In a world where LLMs produce very convincing but subtly wrong output, this makes me uncomfortable. I get that warfare without AI is in the past now, but war and rules of engagement and AI output etc etc etc all seem fuzzy enough that this is not yet a good call even if you agree with the end goals.

ncallaway• 5 months ago

I’m imagining a loitering munition-type drone that has some kind of targeting package loaded into it with different parameters describing what it should seek and destroy. Instead of waiting for intelligence and using human command to put the munition on target, it hangs out and then engages when it’s certain enough that it’s found something valid.

I'm sorry, you've just literally described a "killer robot" in more words.

hintymad2• 5 months ago

Dario himself said that he was against using Claude to build a fully automated weapon because the technology was far from perfect, so he didn't want to hurt our soldiers or innocent people. I think his description matched a killer robot, and I don't agree with his reasoning because it's not like the military researchers didn't have the agency to find out what works and what doesn't.

supjeff• 5 months ago

Oh, you think the current administration only wants robots that kill other robots! Sweet Summer Child!

Its not fully autonomous ice cream machines, its fully autonomous _weapons_. are you stupid or are you dumb? I don't think you're asking an honest question.

dirasieb• 5 months ago

assuming the worst from the government IS how you set up good legal frameworks to limit government's power, have you ever heard of the first and second amendments?

cfloyd• 5 months ago

It’s all just theatre. These companies will either give in or die off and be replaced by those who offer more freedom of use. It’s capitalism and while it’s not always pretty, it’s how these things go. Choosing to take what you believe as the moral high ground is noble but it does not put your company ahead of the ball in the long term because there are always those who will use that as an advantage to step on their backs.

collingreen• 5 months ago

Capitalism needs laws and regulation in order to not turn itself into feudalism. It isn't naivety or idealism to enforce fair markets and consumer protection. In my opinion it's existential.

louiereederson• 5 months ago

And they're reportedly back in talks with the DOW per the FT (below).

They are not the exception, and are just as bloodlessly, shamelessly publicity hungry as any other tech co, if not more so. No surprise based on their conduct up until this fake event.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47256452

solenoid09376• 5 months ago

This is a total non issue if they hold their red lines, which they clearly intend to if you've read the memo.

Also if you've ever actually chatted with anyone at the company you'd know that they are not all the same and Anthropic genuinely does stand apart here.

freejazz4• 5 months ago

"which they clearly intend to if you've read the memo"

Do memos have special magic properties or something? What am I missing here?

hendzen• 5 months ago

@pg on @sama: "you could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king."

In retrospect this quote comes across as way more foreboding given what we've learned about the scale of his ambitions and his willingness to lie and bend reality to gain power.

Dario on the other hand seems to have an integrity that's particularly rare in this era. I hope he remains strong in the face of the regime.

beepbooptheory3• 5 months ago

In retrospect?

ProofHouse• 5 months ago

Don't be fooled. Dario's 'awe shucks, me' routine and 'but, but, but' is not all that is looks to be on surface.

phendrenad2• 5 months ago

pg's sama praise bewilders me. Is there some other Sam Altman he's talking about?

Graham was immediately impressed by Altman, later recalling that meeting the 19-year-old felt like what it must have been like to talk to Bill Gates at the same age. He noted Altman's intense "force of will" from their early interactions.

Is there a Gates-like "presence" or a "force of will" displayed in his public interviews?

sethops1• 5 months ago

The only vibe I get from Altman is that he's a weasel, willing to say anything or burn whatever to get what he wants.

neya8• 5 months ago

Given Gates' current reputation, I don't think this aged well.

DaedalusII2• 5 months ago

its reasonable praise. a 19 year old social outcast who grew up in the midwest drops out of ivy league and starts a company before smartphones exist that he sells for $43 million dollars at age 27, then invested almost all the money into more startups, became a billionaire, and hijacked chatgpt from the richest person in the world.

its not a comment on his ethics or morality

username223• 5 months ago

pg's sama praise bewilders me. Is there some other Sam Altman he's talking about?

Paul Graham was a pudgy mediocrity clever enough to capitalize on nerds' obsession with Lisp, and leverage it into f-you money. Game recognized game in the shape of Sam Altman.

skeptic_ai• 5 months ago

So mass surveillance on non us citizens is having integrity?

asveikau• 5 months ago

I think I'm a bit more of an iconoclast than the average HN reader, but when this community was fawning over him when he was head of YC, I always got the impression, without knowing the guy or much about him, that it was totally undeserved. Mainly because thoughtless fawning of any kind makes me immediately suspicious. Nobody deserves that kind of praise.

I read that quote and see no positive interpretation. It was always a negative description.

I think maybe this community could use a bit more natural skepticism of hierarchy.

IncreasePosts• 5 months ago

Same. What sam tried to do on his own, he failed at (not horribly failed, but he certainly wasn't in the same league as zuckerberg or page or gates or musk - he raised at least $30M then was forced to sell a failure of a product for $40M).

His ascendancy only came when he basically was given an ulta powerful position by an ultra powerful man.

nradov• 5 months ago

It's always hilarious watching online fights between tech industry billionaires, sort of like the geek version of UFC. The weirdest part is how regular people pick sides and defend their billionaire against the other guy.

derwiki3• 5 months ago

Why is that weird? If we do that for UFC and other sports

neya8• 5 months ago

The weirdest part is how regular people pick sides and defend their billionaire

Someone told me in another comment that it's possibly bot activity. I suspect so too, because in a tech forum like HN, a top voted comment can shift the entire focus/narrative of any given issue. I know there are a lot of mods on here to prevent this sort of thing, but given how good LLMs have gotten, I wonder if we are at a point where humans can even discern cases where this a mix of human and AI involvement in online activity (such as commenting).

retsibsi• 5 months ago

It's very easy to adopt a posture of above-it-all cynicism, and to think that anyone who sees an important distinction between two flawed powerful people is a sucker. But it's not particularly smart or sophisticated, and it's not helpful. In politics, the assumption that they're all equally corrupt and sociopathic is exactly what the worst of them want us to default to. In rich-guy PR wars, too, it's only going to work to the benefit of the ones with 0 principles, at the expense of the ones with some principles.

(Or, if the maximally cynical perspective is correct and 'principles' always actually means 'a company culture and public image that depends on the appearance of having principles, and which requires costly signals of principledness to maintain' -- well, why on earth shouldn't we favour the ones who have that property over the ones who are nakedly unprincipled, and the ones who have a paper-thin veneer that doesn't meaningfully affect their behaviour? It would be stupid to throw away the one bit of leverage we have to make powerful people behave better than they otherwise would.)

neya8• 5 months ago

Dario on the other hand seems to have an integrity that's particularly rare in this era.

Anthropic actually partnered up with Palantir. They are not the saints you think they are, either.

We should stop worshipping people and companies and stop putting them on pedestals. Just because one party is at fault, doesn't mean the other is automatically innocent. These are all for-profit companies at play here.

https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2024/Anthropic-a...

fmajid4• 5 months ago

If you look at his comments about Palantir and their proposed safeguards, it's clear it's a case of "if you are dining with the Devil, you'd better bring a very long spoon"

dota_fanatic• 5 months ago

I've heard Palantir is essentially the only federal cloud vendor with this administration for secure services. By "partnered up with Palantir", do you mean they provided their models to the government? Or something more?

xvector5• 5 months ago

If you actually read the memo they've clearly put in strict terms with Palantir and rejected many of the false "safeguards" offered by the company

devinplatt• 5 months ago

FWIW he gives his ethical reasoning on his website:

Broadly, I am supportive of arming democracies with the tools needed to defeat autocracies in the age of AI—I simply don’t think there is any other way. But we cannot ignore the potential for abuse of these technologies by democratic governments themselves. Democracies normally have safeguards that prevent their military and intelligence apparatus from being turned inwards against their own population, but because AI tools require so few people to operate, there is potential for them to circumvent these safeguards and the norms that support them. It is also worth noting that some of these safeguards are already gradually eroding in some democracies. Thus, we should arm democracies with AI, but we should do so carefully and within limits: they are the immune system we need to fight autocracies, but like the immune system, there is some risk of them turning on us and becoming a threat themselves.

Basically, he's afraid that not arming the government with AI puts it at a disadvantage vs. other governments he trusts less. Plus, if Anthropic is in the loop that gives them the chance to steer the direction of things a bit (what they were kicked out for doing).

It's not the purest ethical argument, but I also would not say that there is a clearly correct answer.

pton_xd• 5 months ago

Anthropic actually partnered up with Palantir. They are not the saints you think they are, either.

And now you've got people on here saying, well actually Palantir ain't so bad, you see! They're just one tool in the chain, basically just boring data integration, like IBM!

The mental gymnastics is difficult to keep up with.

arduanika2• 5 months ago

be the king

Which of these two CEOs wants to have an unelected spot in the decision loop of our government?

Once I dug into this story, I realized that only one of these companies was attempting a real power grab. Maybe the EAs are doomed to try coup after coup and lose every time.

The SCR part is excessive, though, especially if it's interpreted broadly. Altman gets credit for sticking up for Anthropic on that point, but not much credit, because it's so obvious that it's overkill.

virgildotcodes• 5 months ago

Dario's full memo - https://pasteboard.co/4Qlmsorrytlk.jpg

tkgally• 5 months ago

Thanks for posting that link. Interesting reading, especially the closing:

“I think this attempted spin/gaslighting is not working very well on the general public or the media, where people mostly see OpenAI’s deal with DoW as sketchy or suspicious, and see us as the heroes.... It is working on some Twitter morons, which doesn’t matter, but my main worry is how to make sure it doesn’t work on OpenAI employees. Due to selection effects, they’re sort of a gullible bunch, but it seems important to push back on these narratives which Sam is peddling to his employees.”

sgustard• 5 months ago

Here's the extracted text https://pastebin.com/LS2LpLZ7

cousin_it• 5 months ago

Did you use AI to extract the text? It rephrased the text along the way, I'm too lazy to point out all the differences, but if you for example search for the word "suspicious" (which is in the image but not in the extracted text) you should start to get suspicious yourself.

blueblisters2• 5 months ago

Wow. Surprising to see open hostilities between the leaders of the big ai labs. The differences appear to not just be competitive but also ideological.

Edit: Also openly calling OpenAI employees "gullible" and "twitter morons" seems sub-optimal if you like that talent to work for you at some point.

Example - https://x.com/tszzl/status/2029334980481212820

utopiah• 5 months ago

if you like that talent to work for you at some point.

They might not if they think everybody who stayed after Sam Altman was reinstated might be excellent technically speaking yet not have the culture they want, which seems to be the case with all the recent communication.

sinity• 5 months ago

Twitter morons wasn't referring to OpenAI employees, I think.

BLKNSLVR2• 5 months ago

Let's just not put Dario / Anthropic on an undeserved pedestal. "Well, they're not as bad as Sam / OpenAI" is not, and should not be, much of a compliment.

solenoid09376• 5 months ago

Could you please elaborate on why the pedestal is "undeserved" when they are willing to stick up for their principals at the expense of being designated a SCR?

Could you point me to one other $300B+ company that would be willing to do this?

BLKNSLVR2• 5 months ago

https://time.com/7380854/exclusive-anthropic-drops-flagship-...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47145963

Just trying to make sure folks aren't getting ahead of themselves, without having put some custom thought into it.

If you want to put them on a pedestal for reasons that make sense to you, all good.

If others are encouraged to form their own opinions by taking some pause for thought, then all the better.

If Anthropic still end up on the pedestal, it must be for the right reasons, as opposed to 'just because they're not the currently discussed villain'.

karmasimida• 5 months ago

And he is back to Pete hegeseth now? Lollll

sjfaljf• 5 months ago

I wonder who asked for these two safety conditions first, DoW or Anthropic. I remember reading earlier that president's family is an early investor in openai, anthropic was winning this year, both companies are on the way to ipo. It could have been a trap, loose-loose situation - drop safety requirements and loose reputation, stay firm on safety - loose contract.

conception2• 5 months ago

Anthropic has a clear focus on AI safety since inception. The Department of Defense has Monster energy drink esque styled themselves back to the Department of War because “We’re men! We have to prove it so hard!”

filoeleven2• 5 months ago

It's not the department of war. Don't call it that to appease the toddler in chief.

However, only an act of Congress can legally and formally change the department's name and secretary's title, so "Department of Defense" and "secretary of defense" remain legally official.

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

deanmoriarty• 5 months ago

It’s entirely possible that people who are praising this CEO might have to come up with incredibly convoluted mental gymnastics to defend their position soon: “Anthropic chief back in talks with Pentagon about AI deal”.

Source: https://www.ft.com/content/97bda2ef-fc06-40b3-a867-f61a711b1...

epicprogrammer• 5 months ago

It's easy to frame this purely as an ethical battle, but there's a massive financial reality here. Training frontier models requires astronomical amounts of capital, and the DOD is one of the few entities with deep enough pockets to fund the next generation of compute. Anthropic turning down this Pentagon contract over safety disagreements is a huge gamble. They are essentially betting that the enterprise market will reward their 'Constitutional AI' approach enough to offset the billions OpenAI will now make from government defense contracts. OpenAI wants the DOD money while maintaining a consumer-friendly PR sheen; Amodei is just pointing out that they can't have it both ways.

aardvarkr3• 5 months ago

It’s a $200M contract. That’s not nothing but it’s definitely not such a huge sum for these companies at their scale when they’re spending billions on infrastructure.

I’m sure anthropic has signed up more revenue this week in response to this debacle to cover it. Where they’re actually screwed is if the gov follows through and declare anthropic a supply chain risk.

fwipsy• 5 months ago

I think the point is that there's potentially a lot more than $200m in defense dollars at stake here, in the future.

ExoticPearTree6• 5 months ago

That is with the Pentagon directly only. Now they will lose much more because no defense contractor, subcontractor and so on can use them for anything defense related (even if they use the model to invent a new type of screw, if that screw is going to be used in anything military).

So yeah, they bet a whole lot on “look at us, we have morals”.

DesaiAshu• 5 months ago

It's not "just" a $200m contract, it's the start of a lucrative relationship

1. Stargate seemed to require a dedicated press conference by the President to achieve funding targets. Why risk that level of politicization if it didn't?

2. Greg Brockman donated $25mil to Trump MAGA Super PAC last year. Why risk so much political backlash for a low leverage return of $200m on $25m spent?

3. During WW2, military spend shot from 2% to 40% of GDP. The administration is requesting $1.5T military budget for FY2027, up from $0.8T for FY2025. They have made clear in the past 2 months that they plan to use it and are not stopping anytime soon

If you believe "software eats the world" it is reasonable to expect the share of total military spend to be captured by software companies to increase dramatically over the next decade. $100B (10% of capture) is a reasonable possibility for domestic military AI TAM in FY2027 if the spending increase is approved (so far, Republicans have not broken rank with the administration on any meaningful policy)

If US military actions continue to accelerate, other countries will also ratchet up military spend - largely on nuclear arsenals and AI drones (France already announced increase of their arsenal). This further increases the addressable TAM

Given the competition and lack of moat in the consumer/enterprise markets, I am not sure that there is a viable path for OpenAI to cover it's losses and fund it's infrastructure ambitions without becoming the preferred AI vendor for a rapidly increasing military budget. The devices bet seems to be the most practical alternative, but there is far more competition both domestically (Apple, Google, Motorola) and globally (Xiaomi, Samsung, Huawei) than there is for military AI

Having run an unprofitable P&L for a decade, I can confidently state that a healthy balance sheet is the only way to maintain and defend one's core values and principles. As the "alignment" folks on the AI industry are likely to learn - the road to hell (aka a heavily militarized world) is oft paved with the best intentions

tdeck• 5 months ago

It's easy to frame this purely as an ethical battle, but there's a massive financial reality here.

As opposed to all those famous ethical battles where there's nothing in it for you to do the wrong thing?

toraway3• 5 months ago

Based on OP's comment history, 50/50 chance AI wrote that...

dev_l1x_be• 5 months ago

Are you arguing against free market capitalism in favor of fascism? If OpenAI needs billions of taxpayers money to survive then should that project exist? Why?

ipunchghosts• 5 months ago

but there's a massive financial reality here.

Not a chance. The DoD has massive pockers which and INCREDIBLY SPREAD OUT. You can't underestimate how spread this money is. The DoD has maybe a 64 GPU cluster and ALMOST NO ONE USES IT FOR DEEP MODEL TRAINING. Even contractors end up working with DGX boxes to do all their training.

As of 2023, I was doing the largest Deep learning training runs out of anyone I have known in the industry and I've been in the industry for 20 yeras. The second best groups behind mine were using 4 GPU locally machines that they had to purchase on contract.

There's no way the DoD can train these models themselves, not even close. They are COMPLETELY DEPENDENT ON INDUSTRY. I was the PM for a DARPA program in 2023 and SAME PROBLEM. They had no compute or would rely on university compute if a program had a university partner. YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW FAR BEHIND THE DOD IS IN THIS SPACE.

biffles• 5 months ago

It was fascinating to see OpenAI’s gaslighting in action last week. Signing their deal with the DoW and then announcing it so publicly clearly had the goal to (a) portray Anthropic as unreasonable actors that couldn’t come up with a “safe” solution like OpenAI and (b) take away all the leverage Anthropic had in the contract negotiations. Clever (in a Machiavellian sort of way) but still can’t understand why they did it so blatantly — literally hours after Anthropic was designated persona non grata by the government. Clearly this has backfired in a massive way.

In a way, I admire Dario’s stance and having the backbone to stand up to a government that is so happy to punish, legally or illegally, those that disagree with them. I certainly wouldn’t have the bravery (or stupidity) in his position — which frankly makes me happy that he’s running Anthropic and not someone like me…

asey• 5 months ago

And yet https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47256452

blueblisters2• 5 months ago

In a broader context, both labs are engaging in "safety theater".

Neither know how to solve the alignment problem while market pressures are making them race towards capabilities (long horizon, continual learning) that will have disastrous consequences .

henry2023• 5 months ago

please treat this post as a reminder to cancel any subscription to OpenAI and delete your account from their platform.

Maybe it’s not much and they probably won’t care but taking no action here it’s the same as being complicit.

mbix77• 5 months ago

But now he's anyway at the table with them? Bullshitters all around. Fully open-source models are the only way.

vintagedave2• 5 months ago

I canceled my ChatGPT subscription today, and send support@openai.com a polite email saying why.

I encourage you to do the same.

Claude Desktop is better anyway -- and, as we have seen, Anthropic is a more ethical company.

throwaway9112822• 5 months ago

you must be delirious to think anthropic is an ethical company! they are the ones to first partner with the govt.

vintagedave2• 5 months ago

I know. I feel troubled for all providers. (I have never used Grok, for example, for obvious ethical reasons.) But Anthropic seems, currently, better than OpenAI. I always want to encourage the better behaviour and discourage the worst.

juleiie• 5 months ago

There are no ‘good’ companies but I like anthropic little bit more than the others as of this moment right now.

Would buy their stock, would sell OpenAI, maaybe. If it was public. Maybe instead of MSFT and AMZN I bought

blululu• 5 months ago

I appreciate them doing the right thing in this one particular instance but I can’t say that I feel anything but hatred toward the people who chose to enrich and empower themselves by casting the very existence of humanity at risk.

Havoc• 5 months ago

OpenAI never had a strong brand around truthfulness

navaed01• 5 months ago

To play devils advocate - why should a government supplier and private company (Anthropic) and 1 man there - get to decide what an organization with elected officials can and can’t do? Dario has no idea of threats facing the US and where national security needs to go. Dario has personal views on weapons and surveillance- that’s fine but national defense tactics by their nature is something many people are uncomfortable with.

hyttioaoa• 5 months ago

He doesn't get to decide that. But he can decide what he wants to do, just as you can decide what to do with your time and resources.

Also, that very much sounds like the government knows best and citizens should just trust it unconditionally.

gck1• 5 months ago

Claude is Anthropic's property which they rent to the government. Is there any other place where rental agreements don't come with clauses on how the property can and can't be used?

digitalPhonix• 5 months ago

You have a car (I assume, replace “car” with whatever else if not).

The government asks if they can rent your car. I hope we agree that you don’t have to say yes. (Specific exceptions exist to places of lodging etc.)

Anthropic is exercising their right to say no in the same way.

aprilthird2021• 5 months ago

why should a government supplier and private company (Anthropic) and 1 man there - get to decide what an organization with elected officials can and can’t do?

Misunderstanding of what is happening. They have terms and conditions with their private property that anyone can choose to accept or decline. The DoD wants to them turn around and say these terms for a private company's contract around licensing of their private property are so egregious that the government and all government contract holders should be forced out of using any products by that company

mentalgear• 5 months ago

Reminder that European LLM companies like Mistral's "LeChat" are also now really good!

Imustaskforhelp2• 5 months ago

OAI employees, please talk.

~93 Employees signed up the notdivided.org petition. Some of OAI employees could be reading this comment right now.

Let's be real, OpenAI backstabbed Anthropic. Even Dario has essentially just said it now.

(Shameless plug?) but I created an ASK HN about it: Ask HN: What will OpenAI employees do now who have signed notdividedorg petition [0] and not a single person from OAI responded when I just wanted to discuss :/ and hey that's fine I don't mind but please don't mind me either when I re-raise this topic

From a comment from the thread about OAI on hackernews by tedsanders (OAI employee) [Please don't harass anybody]

I'm an OpenAI employee and I'll go out on a limb with a public comment. I agree AI shouldn't be used for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons. I also think Anthropic has been treated terribly and has acted admirably. My understanding is that the OpenAI deal disallows domestic mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, and that OpenAI is asking for the same terms for other AI companies (so that we can continue competing on the basis of differing services and not differing scruples). Given this understanding, I don't see why I should quit. If it turns out that the deal is being misdescribed or that it won't be enforced, I can see why I should quit, but so far I haven't seen any evidence that's the case.

Ted, if you are reading this, I truly felt like you were right. I was still skeptic because part of me felt like it doesn't make sense and well it didn't. But I had trusted ya and I thought that you had far greater insights than us but now I am not sure...

Sir, I have no ill-will towards you but I just want to know, you have gone silent after this comment and one another about GPT 5.3 instant as far as I can see. You did say in the first that you will go out on a limb with public comment, so please don't mind me if I ask questions in public about that comment

The question is: But what now? Do you see now why you should quit?

That being said, I still respect you ted for atleast trying to say it on a community, you had no reason to but took the risk. I genuinely hope that you realize that this question is coming from a place of concern. OpenAI employees like you , were also deceived by OpenAI/Sam altman itself, in a way even more so than us. You had no monetary reason I suppose to go ahead and say it but you did based on your understanding at that time. and I respect it because it shows to me that maybe just maybe OAI employees aren't driven by just money as people would like to point out.

If this is what an OAI employee is saying, weren't they deceived too? weren't they humiliated in public by being proven wrong, losing their accountability/trust within a community?

The comments just turn to well money speaks, I agree, but does money speak so much that you cannot hear your peers/own community?

I still believe on the fringe thought that OAI employees have some say in all of this. 98 employees (no of employees who signed notdivided.org) leaving have 1000 fold more magnitude than 98 people not using OAI. You have power, and with it comes responsibility.

I just want a discussion with OpenAI Employees in general / especially with those who signed NotDivided.org or who are part of this community of hackernews like ted. what do YOU guys make up of all the situation?

A lot of this situation if historians ever write about it, would feel so close to "I was just following orders" than not. No sadly this is not hyperbole now because what we are talking about is the creation of autonomous killing machines which can kill anyone without any human in the loop.

People from the future are also gonna ask us general public why we didn't held the people working accountable, in a similar fashion as to the past.

Once again, I still mean to bring no hate towards anyone. Make peace not war. I just want to think that the world would be a better place for my future children and generation and I would like to hope that this comment can be meaningful towards it.

Have a nice day as one can in a situation like this. A lot of the things I say or do is the same things I asked the people of past when reading history in my classes, Why didn't you guys do X or Y, Why didn't the public say anything. Why was it silent? But we are gonna be history too and someone is gonna ask us why were we silent and I just want to make the answer I tried rather than I don't know. I sort of wanted to learn something from history.

Sincerely, We (the public) want a discussion with OpenAI employees about it. Please don't be silent as silence will be interpreted by the future generations as agreement. Please speak. Tell us what you all are doing

A lot of the times it feels like I am shouting in the void tho in these matters as these messages just straight up don't go to the right people and that feeling sucks because at some point, I am gonna get tired shouting in the void too.

If anyone also has contacts with OAI employees, please ask them such questions and share us the responses if possible. I just want some answers, that's all.

[0]: Ask HN: What will OpenAI employees do now who have signed notdividedorg petition: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47231498

salawat• 5 months ago

Why we didn't held the people working accountable, in a similar fashion as to the past.

You mean other than Nuremberg which was focused on prosecuting war criminals? Remember, IBM was never held to account for propping up the Nazi war and genocide machine. People who made Zyklon B weren't either. Corporate governance is the instrumental convergence of our time.

mellosouls• 5 months ago

Full text claimed on Reddit here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Anthropic/comments/1rl1ula/dario_tr...

andy_ppp2• 5 months ago

"not consistently candid in his communications"

I've now moved to Claude and it's much better actually, if like me you hate their fonts (Anthropic Sans) select System fonts in the Claude preferences and you can use this snippet in Safari's Settings -> Advanced -> Stylesheet to make everything your default system font:

[data-theme=claude] * { font-family: system-ui, sans-serif !important; }

kotaKat• 5 months ago

Sam a manipulative liar? Say it isn't so!

Not the first time, not the last time, add it to the list of shit he's done that should put him in a little cell for the rest of his life.

epsteingpt• 5 months ago

Sour Grapes

andy_ppp2• 5 months ago

How much better is an LLM at mass surveillance? Obviously RAG with everyone’s details in it is useful but it’s also likely prone to hallucinations. I’m not sure LLMs are the right AI for even finding patterns in such data. As for letting LLMs autonomously kill people they clearly won’t be ready for that any time soon.

Does the administration really believe these AIs are like digital humans?

pkaral• 5 months ago

There are various views on Dario's communication style etc. But in this, he is the guy we have been waiting for. The guy who is willing to say: "We built this company for America, and we're going to do what we believe is right for America, regardless of short term expediency." Also called having a spine.

He has my respect for that

pbiggar• 5 months ago

One issue is that he is indeed saying this is for America. But, like, there are many people in the world (most, even) who are not American. If companies are willing to throw non-American people under the bus, that's neither ethical nor good business practices.

Symmetry• 5 months ago

Is this the first time internal communications like this have leaked from Anthropic? It'll be unfortunate if Anthropic can't have honest conversations internally going forward for fear of leaks.

ekjhgkejhgk3• 5 months ago

but my main worry is how to make sure it doesn’t work on OpenAI employees.

It's difficult to get someone to understand something when their paycheck depends on their not understanding.

tqwhite2• 5 months ago

On what planet is mass surveillance illegal?

I've long thought that OpenAI was a corrupt bunch.

Except for embedding (which I plan to move soon), I have quit my OpenAI accounts. I don't like them.

lunias• 5 months ago

I know you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but we've seen quite of few pages from the Sam Altman book so far. It's hard to not recognize patterns of behaviour.

layer8• 5 months ago

OCR of the full memo as posted here [1], proofread and OCR errors corrected by this human:

I want to be very clear on the messaging that is coming from OpenAl, and the mendacious nature of it. This is an example of who they really are, and I want to make sure everything [sic] sees it for what it is. Although there is a lot we don't know about the contruct they signed with DoW [shorthand for the Department of Defense] (and that maybe they don't even know as well — it could be highly unclear), we do know the following:

Sam [Altman]'s description and the DoW description give the strong impression (although we would have to see the actual contract to be certain) that how their contruct works is that the model is made available without any legal restrictions ("all lawful use") but that there is a "safety layer", which I think amounts to model refusals, that prevents the model from completing certain tasks or engaging in certain applications.

"Safety layer" could also mean something that partners such as Palantir [Anthropic's business partner for serving U.S. agency customers] tried to offer us during these negotiations, which is that they on their end offered us some kind of classifier or machine learning system, or software layer; that claims to allow some applications and not others. There is also some suggestion of OpenAT employees ("FDE>" [shorthand for forward deployed engineers]) looking over the usage of the model to prevent had applications.

Our general sense is that these kinds of approaches, while they don't have zero efficacy. are, in the context of military applications, maybe 20% real and 80% safery theater: The basic issue is that whether a model is conducting applications like mass survelllance or fully autonomous weapons depends substantially on wider context: a model doesn't "know" if there's a human in the loop in the broad situation it is in (for autonorous weapons), and doesn't know the provenance of the data it is analyzing (so doesn't know if this is US domestic data vs foreign, doesn't know if it's enterprise data given by customers with consent or data bought in sketchier ways, etc).

We also know — those in safeguards know painfulty well — that refusals aren’t reliable and jailbreaks are common, often as easy as just misinforming the model about the data it is analyzing. An important distinction here that makes it much harder than the safeguards probiem is that while it's relatively easy to, for example, determine if a model is being used to conduct cyberattacks from inputs und outputs, it's very hard to determine the nature and context of the cyber attacks, which is the kind of distinction needed here. Depending on the details this task can be difficult or impossible.

The kind of "safety layer" stuff that Palantir offered us (and presumably offered OpenAI) is even worse: our sense was that it was almost entirely safety theater, and that Palantir assumed that our problem was "you have some unhappy employees, you need to offer them something that placates them or makes what is happening invisible to them, and that's the service we provide”.

Finally, the idea of having Anthropic/OpenAl employees monitor the deployments is something that came up in discussion within Anthropic a few months ago when we were expanding our classified AUP [acceptable use policy] of our own accord. We were very clear that this is possible only in a small fraction of cases, that we will do it as much as we can, but that it's not a safeguard people should rely on and isn't easy to do in the classified world. We do, by the way, try to do this as much as possible, there's no difference between our approach and OpenAl's approach here.

So overall what I'm saying here is that the approaches OAI [shorthand for OpenAl] is taking mostly do not work: the main reason OAf accepted them and we did not is that they cared about placating employees, and we actually cared about preventing abuses. They don't have zero efficacy, and we're doing many of them as well, but they are nowhere near sufficient for purpose. It is simuitaneously the case that the DoW did not treat OpenAl and us the same here.

We actually attempted to include some of the same safeguards as OAI in our contract, in addition to the AUP which we considered the more important thing, and DoW rejected them with us. We have evidence of this in the email chain of the contract negotiations (I'm writing this with a lot to do, but I might get someone to follow up with the actual language). Thus, it is false that "OpenAl's terms were offered to us and we rejected them", at the same time that it is also false that OpenAls terms meaningfully protect them against domestic mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.

Finally, there is some suggestion in Sam/OpenAl's language that the red lines we are talking about, fully autonomous weapons and domestic mass surveillance, are already illegal and so an AUP about these is unnecessary. This mirrors and seems coordinated with DoW's messaging. It is however completely false. As we explained in our statement yesterday, the DoW does have domestic surveillance authorities, that are not of great concern in a pre-Al world but take on a diferent meaning in a post-Al world.

Notably, near the end of the negotiation the DoW offered to accept our current terms if we deleted a specific phrase about "analysis of bulk acquired data", which was the single line in the contract that exactly matched this scenario we were most worried about. We found that very suspicious. On autonomous weapons, the DoW claims that "human in the loop is the law", but they are incorrect. It is currently Pentagon policy (set during the Biden admin[istration]) that a human has to be in the loop of firing a weapon. But that policy can be changed unilaterally by Pete Hegseth, which is exactly what we are worried about. So it is not, for all intents and purposes, a real constraint.

A lot of OpenAI and DoW messaging just straight up lies about these issues or tries to confuse them.

I think these facts suggest a pattern of behavior that I've seen often from Sam Altman, and that I want to make sure people are equipped to recognize:

He started out this morning by saying he shares Anthropte's redlines, in order to appear to support us, get some of the credit, and not be attacked when they take over the contract. He aiso presented himself as someone who wants to "set the same contract for everyone in the industry" — e.g. he’s presenting himself as a peacemaker and dealmaker.

Behind the scenes, he's working with the DoW to sign a contract with them, to replace us the instant we are designated a supply chain risk. But he has to do this in a way that doesn't make it seem like he gave up on the red lines and sold out when we wouldn't. He is able to superficially appear to do this, because (1) he can sign up for all the safety theater that Anthropic rejected, and that the DoW and partners are willing to collude in presenting as compelling to his employees, und (2) the DoW is also willing to accept some terms from him that they were not willing to accept from us. Both of these things make it possible for OAI to get a deal when we could not.

The real reasons DoW and the Trump admin do not like us is that we haven't donated to Trump (while OpenAl/Greg [Brockman, OpenAl's president] have donated a lot), we haven't given dictator-style praise to Trump (while Sam has), we have supported AI regulation which is against their agende, we've told the truth about a number of Al policy issues (like job displacement), and we've actually held our red lines with integrity rather than colluding with them to produce "safety theater" for the benefit of employees (which, I absolutely swear to you, is what literally everyone at DoW, Palanti, our political consultants, etc, assumed was the problem we were trying to solve).

Sam is now (with the help of DoW) trying to spin this as we were unreasonable, we didn't engage in a good way, we were less flexible, etc. I want people to recognize this as the gaslighting it is.

Vague justifications like "person X was hard to work with" are often used to hide real reasons that look really bad, like the reasons I gave above about political donations, political loyalty, and safety theater. It's important that everyone understand this and push back on this narrative at least in private, when talking to OpenAI employees.

I think this attempted spin/gaslighting is not working very well on the general public or the media, where people mostly see OpenAl's deal with DoW as sketchy or suspicious, and see us as the heroes (we're #2 in the App Store now!). [Anthropic's Claude chatbot later rose to no. 1 on one of Apple's App Store download rankings.] It is working on some Twitter morons, which doesn't matter, but my main worry is how to make sure it doesn't work on OpenAl employees.

Due to selection effects, they're sort of a gullible bunch, but it seems important to push back on these narratives which Sam is peddling to his employees.

[1] https://gcdnb.pbrd.co/images/4Qlmsorrytlk.jpg

NinjaTrance• 5 months ago

The scary thing is that Amodei only opposes to domestic mass-surveilance.

He doesn't seem to care if the DoW uses his AI for international spying.

That's one more reason why Europe needs sovereign tech.

throwaway9112822• 5 months ago

so much hatred

Frieren• 5 months ago

Capitalism is dead. Welcome to the age of aristocracy were image and standing with power is more important than creating any value whatsoever. Lies are rewarded and action on good faith punished.

It is a shame that CEOs act like Kings and Queens and there is no accountability anymore. This concrete example is just part of a bigger trend to lie to the public and get away with it.

Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’

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