Comment by smsm42
5 hours ago
Antropic: "We don't want our AIs to be used by the Army to do yucky Army things!"
Army: "OK, we will make sure not to use your AIs"
Antropic: "How dare you! We are suing! We intended for you to keep using it but do only what we want!"
Army: "..."
They weren't against military use of their AI. They were against using it to kill American citizens without oversight or mass surveil Americans.
> They were against using it to kill American citizens
No, they were against using it to kill people without oversight. I hope nobody thinks that there's a difference between murdering American citizens and murdering people.
Oh okay, makes their position even more moral then.
They didn't want their tech to be used to, I don't know, blow up a school with 120 children. But did want to allow other kinds of usage. Is that so weird?
Get rid of your high horse. Nobody wants to blow up a school with 120 children. The question is who is in control and making the decisions. Antropic wanted to be in control and make the decisions for the DOD. DOD refused. It's not so weird at all.
...I suggest you read about what actually happened:
Anthropic: "We'll sell you access to our AI as long as you don't use it for war crimes or mass surveillance."
DoD: "Ok, deal."
...time passes...
DoD: "Wait, no, we want to be able to use it for war crimes too."
Anthropic: "Too late, you agreed already, and we won't sign a contract for that. You can keep using it for everything we agreed to."
DoD: "Change the terms or we will destroy your business."
Anthropic: "No."
DoD then signs contracts with OpenAI and Google that permit them to commit war crimes and mass surveillance as long as they get legal cover, and proceeds to apply as much leverage as it can to destroy Anthropic's business.
----
And for the record, Anthropic agreed to all "yucky Army things" usage that was an extension of past yucky Army things, they just did not agree to a new class of yucky Army things: namely, fully autonomous killbots. Even there, it was only "not yet, it's not ready". Your whole comment is a gross mischaracterization.
I quit using ChatGPT entirely over this incident, and that's not because I find Anthropic's position to be saintly. They agreed to a contract where the DoD could and in practice is using their AI for committing war crimes.
The problem here - as you probably very well know but pretend not to - that "war crimes" is a very poorly defined term that is subject to many interpretations and subjective political and partisan opinions. Antropic wanted them to be the last word in every decision, and DOD could not allow that, because they are governmental agency, which is controlled by US government, not by Antropic. Nobody is destroying anybody's business - pretending that Anthropic could never find any users for their AI outside DOD is plain silly.
US Society has mechanisms for preventing and investigating war crimes. They may not be perfect, and you may not be happy about how they are working, but I doubt that "give control over it to some random guy that makes AI models" is an adequate solution for that. If Antropic decided the risk of DOD circumventing those mechanisms is too high for them to tolerate - they have full freedom not to sell to DOD. Which they used.
> I quit using ChatGPT entirely over this incident
And this is supposed to be an argument because....?
> They agreed to a contract where the DoD could and in practice is using their AI for committing war crimes.
You have a very vivid imagination. Not trying to use it to state things that could be misinterpreted as statements of fact would be nice. Not that I am new on the internet, so I know it's not going to happen.