alt Hacker NewsStatement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth
Comments
Looking through the comments here, I am repeatedly surprised how quickly we seem to have lost a shared understanding of fundamentals ever since Trump came into power. I still need inner adjusting to fully realize that it must have always been a misunderstanding?
1. I don’t understand what is controversial about any supplier making their own rules for trade. I don’t have to agree with their beliefs, but I find it the basis of a functioning society to allow others to hold beliefs that I do not share, and to develop products as they want, as long as they don’t pose any dangers. If I don’t like the product, I am free to shop elsewhere or develop my own.
2. I thought that there is was a shared understanding of the line between voluntary business deals, and coercion and punishment. I thought we agreed that the law should protect people and businesses in ways so that nobody can exert power over another. Not on the hows, but on the why. And not based on ethical considerations (beliefs) but purely on logical grounds that we know how violence begets violence, use of it will only escalate conflict, and we will ultimately lose.
3. I thought we all agreed that government agencies were bound by the law and its policies. If you were to use the designation of Supply Chain Risk, you would at least have to sufficiently provide logical arguments. Here, they even openly disclose how they plan to use the mechanism purely as punishment, against the spirit of the law, not because a product carries any risk and should be limited, but because it is too limited.
Is this some form of collective narcissistic psychosis? The desire to burn it all down in suicide?
You know what? I have not seen an American company take a stand like this… uh ever. I don’t think there should be any engagement with the military what so ever but I will offer a kudos to Anthropic.
I don’t really expect this to last but if it does I will happily continue to offer this kudos on an indefinite basis.
> If you are a Department of War contractor, this designation—if formally adopted—would only affect your use of Claude on Department of War contract work. Your use for any other purpose is unaffected.
/In theory./
In practice, if your biggest customer tells you to drop Anthropic, you listen to them.
>We have tried in good faith to reach an agreement with the Department of War
LMFAO
This makes it seem like they really like the Anthropic product and are using it quite a bit more than the others? Or is it just me making random connections?
People can still brush this off by saying Anthropic is doing this to create more buzz for its next round. But they are taking unpopular stances and could be burning bridges. Simply take a look at PLTR and it's obviously more lucrative to lean the other way.
I'm not sure if OpenAI knows that scooping this might hurt their brand by a lot.
I'm of the opinion that anthropic's "moral" stances are bullshit, not particularly coherent when you dig deep and more about branding. If so, this is grade A marketing.
They want to present themselves as moral. What better endorsement than by being rejected by the US military under Trump? You get the people who hate trump and the people who hate the military in one swoop.
At the same time its kind of a non story. Anrhropic says it doesn't want its products used in certain ways, US military says fine, you can't be part of the project where we are going to make the AI do those things. Isn't that a win for both sides ? What's the problem?
It would be like someone part of a boycott movement being surprised the company they are boycotting doesn't want to hire them.
Anthropic knew they were going to lose this contract to OpenAI, and this is an attempt to salvage publicity from the loss.
This administration is comfortable with blatantly picking winners and OpenAI is better connected with the admin than Anthropic.
> Protect _Americans_ from mass surveillance > Protect _American_ forces
What the actual fuck. How can anyone side with Anthropic. They are not the good guys by any means whatsoever. Mass surveillance against anyone is wrong and having killbots "when AI is ready" is totally fucked and dystopian. Imagine killbots rampaging while the good American people are at home living a nice peaceful life. Fuck any of that, fuck Anthropic, fuck ClosedAI, fuck Google, fuck Trump, fuck the DoD and fuck every American who is patriotic to the monster their country became. Fuck every country that also tries to do stuff like this. Fuck all companies taking part in such insanity.
There is literally no world where I take any organizations which has been strong armed by fucking Pete Hegseth seriously lmao. Thank you Anthropic both for building the best models for general engineering and for having a fucking backbone.
Amazing the Pete Hegseth is even a person that anyone would ever need to take seriously.
ChatGPT wasted no time bending over backwards to appease Trump.
"We'd sure love to turn our AI into a mass surveillance tool! Please, aim it at the Americans Population! And Kill Bots, we can't wait!"
Turns out that Dario was lying about not having heard from the Department of War, as reported by Undersecretary Emil Michael:
This is what real leadership looks like. Not the silence and complicity that you see from big tech, who regularly bend the knee and bestow bribes and gifts onto the Trump administration.
Hegseth is the, ultra unqualified, Secretary of Defense. Defense. JFC even when "pushing back" everyone is capitulating.
Hegseth is so pathetic.
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Title is off: "Statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth"
This is another statement, to their customers about Hegseth's social post, but perhaps resulting in further escalation because you know the other side doesn't like having their weaknesses pointed out.
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This an extremely polite “fuck you, make me”. It’s good to see that they have principles, and I suspect strongly that Anthropic will come out on top here if they stand firm.
I fundamentally do not like the idea of one adult determining what knowledge another adult is entitled to.
It’s the library of Alexandria all over again.
I think Anthropic sounds well-intentioned but is blundering this incident in a big way and they really needed to work better towards a deal instead of isolating themselves with a "principled stance" that sets up a competitor to swoop in and take the contracts they had
Doesn't NSA have a backdoor to all these companies by default? I could have sworn I read somewhere years ago that the government demands a backdoor to all US companies if they can't get in on their own.
Again, mass domestic surveillance of Americans is bad, otherwise it is okay. Disgusting.