Comment by probably_wrong
11 hours ago
I have read the whole thing but I nonetheless want to focus on the second paragraph:
> Anthropic has therefore worked proactively to deploy our models to the Department of War
This should be a "have you noticed that the caps on our hats have skulls on it?" moment [1]. Even if one argues that the sentence should not be read literally (that is, that it's not literal war we're talking about), the only reason for calling it "Department of War" and "warfighters" instead of "Department of Defense" and "soldiers" is to gain Trump's favor, a man who dodged the draft, called soldiers "losers", and has been threatening to invade an ally for quite some time.
There is no such a thing as a half-deal with the devil. If Anthropic wants to make money out of AI misclassifying civilians as military targets (or, as it has happened, by identifying which one residential building should be collapsed on top of a single military target, civilians be damned) good for them, but to argue that this is only okay as long as said civilians are brown is not the moral stance they think it is.
Disclaimer: I'm not a US citizen.
What is their other possible move here, considering the government is threatening to destroy their business entirely?
One alternative would be to call the government's bluff: if they truly are as indispensable as they claim then they can leverage that advantage into a deal.
But at a more general level, I'd say that unethical actions do not suddenly become ethical when one's business is at risk. If Anthropic considers that using their technology for X is unethical and then decide that their money and power is worth more than the lives of the foreigners that will be affected by doing X then good for them, but they shouldn't then make a grandstand about how hard they fought to ensure that only foreigners get their necks under the boots.
> What is their other possible move here, considering the government is threatening to destroy their business entirely?
You must not be American, then. We all know that these corporate favoring contract terms are managed through campaign contributions; savvy?
Anthropic must have high school interns as govt liaisons, and not very bright ones
Warfighters is a pretty common term though. There's a fair bit of nuance in when and how you'd use it.
It's a common term that comes with a lot of criticism in the vein of noticing the skulls.