Comment by sfink

Ok, I'll be precise: the main dispute was over fully autonomous decisions to use lethal force. Because if the AI chose incorrectly, the military would be attacking targets that it shouldn't. Whether that is a war crime hinges upon whether it was reckless. Anthropic's position was that AI is not capable of making such decisions, which is another way of saying that giving that decision wholly to an AI is reckless. I can stop using the term "war crimes" if it bothers you so much, but I'm failing to see a distinction between what Anthropic was fearing and the definition of what a war crime is. These are fears, so this isn't about whether one specific action was a war crime or not. This is just naming what Anthropic was worried about and why.

> Anthropic wanted them to be the last word in every decision, and DOD could not allow that

Cite one source for Anthropic demanding to be in the loop. This was about the terms of a contract. If I'm agreeing to sell you a medicine, under the condition that you do not use it to euthanize homeless people, that does not mean I am demanding to follow you around and make you ask me whether each use is ok.

> Nobody is destroying anybody's business - pretending that Anthropic could never find any users for their AI outside DOD is plain silly.

Strawman much? The question is about the US government using its influence in a competitive environment to hamstring one company. It doesn't matter whether there are other customers. It doesn't matter whether the company can survive the attack. What matters is whether it is legal and ethical for our public resources to be used for retaliation in this way.

> US Society has mechanisms for preventing and investigating war crimes....I doubt that "give control over it to some random guy that makes AI models"

This is an invented claim. Cite a source.

>> I quit using ChatGPT entirely over this incident > > And this is supposed to be an argument because....?

The argument was the first part of the post. This part was me giving my perspective on things, in this case it was about how I don't find Anthropic's position to be good, just that OpenAI's is far worse. My post was not for you exclusively; based on what you have written, I have concluded that there is no value in debating you or attempting changing your mind.

>> 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.

Ok, fair. Sticking to facts: the crucial part of the negotiation was about whether the DoD can use Anthropic's products for autonomous decisions on lethal force. Since then, it has come out that AI was used in the decision to target an elementary school for girls that killed 120 schoolchildren. (The Palantir Maven Smart System, fwiw, not Claude.) The Pentagon investigated and found that although a human was theoretically in the decision loop, in practice the oversight was minimal and ineffective. "No one remaining on those teams [the teams tasked with minimizing civilian harm] reviewed the strike plans in advance of the attack on the school, according to Bloomberg." Those teams had been gutted, with Hegseth explicitly stating that they were getting in the way.

My supposedly very vivid imagination translated this to reckless decisionmaking that led to a large number of innocent civilian casualties, aka war crimes.