Comment by xrd
5 hours ago
If I start a small business that sells Apples and the US government comes to me and says "we want to buy your apples and fire them at high speed to" these are now your words "kill adversaries through any means necessary."
If I say, no, then am I stopping the military?
I feel like it is reasonable that I can say "no, I don't want to sell you my apples."
I cannot for the life of me figure out why that means I am stopping the military from killing people. The US Military will definitely still be able to kill people for centuries. I'm just saying I don't want to participate in it.
More to the point, if everyone stopped selling anything to the military they would still be able to kill people with their bare hands. People are arguably very good at killing people and it takes civilization to train us not to kill each other.
In the context of the larger discussion, if you already sold apples to the military, you cannot go to them and say you don't like how they're using the apples you sold them.
In the context of the larger discussion, Anthropic thought of that ahead of time and put the restrictions into the contract that the government agreed to. So "already sold" is a non-sequitur; that's not the situation under discussion.