Comment by nearbuy
1 day ago
Claude was used by the US military in the Venezuela raid where they captured Maduro. [1]
Without safety features, an LLM could also help plan a terrorist attack.
A smart, competent terrorist can plan a successful attack without help from Claude. But most would-be terrorists aren't that smart and competent. Many are caught before hurting anyone or do far less damage than they could have. An LLM can help walk you through every step, and answer all your questions along the way. It could, say, explain to you all the different bomb chemistries, recommend one for your use case, help you source materials, and walk you through how to build the bomb safely. It lowers the bar for who can do this.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/14/us-milita...
Yeah, if US military gets any substantial help from Claude(which I highly doubt to be honest), I am all for it. At the worst case, it will reduce military budget and equalize the army more. At the best case, it will prevent war by increasing defence of all countries.
For the bomb example, the barrier of entry is just sourcing of some chemicals. Wikipedia has quite detailed description of all the manufacture of all the popular bombs you can think of.
> Wikipedia has quite detailed description of all the manufacture of all the popular bombs you can think of.
Did you bother to check? It contains very high level overviews of how various explosives are manufactured, but no proper instructions and nothing that would allow an average person to safely make a bomb.
There's a big difference in how many people can actually make a bomb if you have step by step instructions the average person can follow vs soft barriers that just require someone to be a standard deviation or two above average. At two sigma, 98% will fail, despite being able to do it in theory.
> Yeah, if US military gets any substantial help from Claude(which I highly doubt to be honest), I am all for it.
That's not the point. I'm not saying we need to lock out the military. I'm saying if the military finds the unlocked/unsafe version of Claude useful for planning attacks, other people can also find useful for planning attacks.
> Did you bother to check?
Yeah I am not a chemist, but watch Nilered. And from [1], I know how all steps would look like. Also there are literal videos in youtube for this.
And if someone can't google what nitrated or crystallization mean, maybe they just can't build a bomb with somewhat more detailed instruction.
> other people can also find useful for planning attacks.
I am still not able to imagine what you mean. You think attacks don't happen because people can't plan it? In fact I would say it's the opposite. Random lazy people like school shooters precisely attacks because they didn't plan for it. If ChatGPT gave detailed plan, the chances of attack would reduce.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT#Preparation
2 replies →