Comment by techblueberry

1 day ago

"AI safety and wide distribution of benefits are the core of our mission. Two of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems. The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement."

So wait a second, the DoW let OpeAI put the exact same clauses in their contract, but Anthropic is a supply chain risk? What is going on?

See your answer below, from the BBC:

An Anthropic spokeswoman added on Thursday that while the company received updated wording from the DoD for its contract on Wednesday night, it represented "virtually no progress on preventing Claude's use for mass surveillance of Americans or in fully autonomous weapons."

"New language framed as compromise was paired with legalese that would allow those safeguards to be disregarded at will," she said. "Despite [the Department of War's] recent public statements, these narrow safeguards have been the crux of our negotiations for months."

https://bbc.com/news/articles/cvg3vlzzkqeo

I get the feeling they didn't like Anthropic from the start for whatever reason and just found excuses to dump them and find an alternative provider. There's also the possibility the DoW will still have its way and this is possibly only a statement for the public.

P.S I'm not political (no left/right drama), just speculative.

  • The question is why was it so urgent to bring this up right now. The answer is that the US Navy has carrier battle groups stationed off the coast of Iran right now.

    US F22 fighter jets have been spotted on Israeli airfields by Chinese commercial satellites in the past 3 days.

    A full scale strike on Iran is imminent and they want to leverage LLMs for data analysis and quite possibly automated target selection.

    Literally the SkyNet scenario both researchers and frickin pop culture have warned about for years.

This says OpenAI is happy with the law and DoW policy, and thinks those protections are adequate. In contrast, Anthropic seems to have imposed additional contractual guardrails, blocking apparently legal DoW use cases.

Was it a subtly different contract, or a notice of dispute? Unclear.

Because there are only two options really, anthropic and openai. Gemini is a year behind. Gov had no more options after those two.

Sam went second so he can obviously use the entire situation to warn the govt about designating all AI companies supply chain risk

What do you think could be going, seriously?

Obviously Altman agreed to whatever they asked him and is lying that the DoW is cool about the red lines.

Claude is not as ideologically willing as friends of the Trump administration are - like xAI's Grok and OpenAI's ChatGPT. And David Sacks, the AI czar, who is a PayPal mafia member and close friend of the Epstein class (Elon Musk, Peter Thiel), has been attacking Anthropic FOREVER. He views them as a woke threat to America. So all that supply chain risk and the ban from agencies is just a way of abusing power to suppress free speech.

But the most obvious reason, is that Greg Brockman - who's a founder and also the current president of OpenAI apparently, is the largest donor to the Trump MAGA PAC. I find it hard to believe that Sam Altman and the Trump administration would be so obvious about it, but I also find it hard to believe that tens of millions in donations and this kind of result can be anything but a bribe.