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My lived experience with tech companies is that principles are easy when they're free - i.e., when you're telling others what to do, or taking principled stances when a competitor is not breathing down your neck.

So, with all respect, when someone tells me that the people they worked with were well-intentioned and driven by values, I take it with a grain of salt. Been there, said the same things, and then when the company needed to make tough calls, it all fell apart.

However, in this instance, it does seem that Anthropic is walking away from money. I think that, in itself, is a pretty strong signal that you might be right.

I applaud Anthropic choice. Choosing principle over money is a hard choice. I love Anthropic's products and wish them success!

> I think the decision was made because the people making this decision at Anthropic are well-intentioned, driven by values, and motivated by trying to make the transition to powerful AI to go well.

The entire problem is that this lasts as long as those people are in charge. Every incentive is aligned with eventually replacing them with people who don’t share those values, or eventually Anthropic will be out-competed by people who have no hesitation to put profit before principle.

I also think this will ultimately benefit anthropic in the long run. Outlined in this article: https://open.substack.com/pub/zeitgeistml/p/murder-is-coming...

Why did they work with Palantir then, which is the integrator in the DoD? It does not take a genius to figure out where this was going.

I don't know why a personal testimony to the effect that "these are the good guys" needs to be at the top of every Anthropic thread. With respect to astroturfing and stealth marketing they are clearly the bad guys.

>driven by values

Would the people who have invested in the company like that? Or would they like the company to make some money? Are they going to piss off their investors by being "driven by values"?

I mean, please explain it to me how "driven by values" can be done when you are riding investor money. Or may be I am wrong and this company does not take investments.

So in the end you are either

1. funding yourselves, then you are in control, so there is at least a justification for someone to believe you when you say that the company is "driven by values".

2. Or have taken investments, then you are NOT in control, then anyone who trusts you when you say the company is "driven by values", is plain stupid.

In other words, when you start taking investment, you forego your right to claim virtuous. The only claim that you can expect anyone to believe is "MY COMPANY WILL MAKE A TRUCKLOAD OF MONEY !!!!"

So many tech companies have the "high values" screed that it really just seems like a standard step in the money plan.

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This is a pretty classic mistake most people who are in high-profile companies make. They think that some degree of appealing to people who were their erstwhile opponents will win them allies. But modern popular ethics are the Grim Trigger and the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics. You cannot pass the purity test. One might even speculate that passing the purity test wouldn't do anything to get you acceptance.

Personally, I wish that the political alignment I favour was as Big Tent as Donald Trump's administration is. I think he can get Zohran Mamdani in the room and say "it's fine; say you think I'm a fascist" and then nonetheless get what he wants. But it just so happens that the other side isn't so. So such is life. We lose and our allies dwindle since anyone who would make an overture to us, we punish for the sin of not having been born a steadfast believer.

Our ideals are "If you weren't born supporting this cause, we will punish you for joining it as if you were an opponent". I don't think that's the path to getting what one wants.

“I think the decision was made because the people making this decision at Anthropic are well-intentioned, driven by values, and motivated by trying to make the transition to powerful AI to go well.”

Every single one of these CEOs happily pirated unimaginable amounts of copyrighted content. That directly hurt millions of real human beings. Not just the prior creators but also crushing the future potential for success of future ones.

https://www.susmangodfrey.com/wins/susman-godfrey-secures-1-...

It’s not just admirable it’s the obvious position to take and any alternative is head scratching.

It’s clear that this is mostly a glorified loyalty test over a practical ask by the administration. Strangely reminiscent of Soviet or Chinese policies where being agreeable to authority was more important than providing value to the state.

I'd admire them if they took a principled or moral stance on AI. As it stands, they're saying "we don't want fully autonomous weapons because they might kill too many Americans by accident while trying to kill non-Americans" and "we don't want AI to surveil Americans, but anyone else, sure".

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I don't know if I like Anthropic more, but I certainly like their competitors much less now.

The new thing that I know about leading AI companies that aren't Anthropic (i.e. OpenAI, Google, Grok, etc) is that they knowingly support using their tools for domestic mass surveillance and in fully autonomous weapon systems.

Actually why is nobody in Cali just trying to join Canada - would be better for everyone in terms of more similar culture and values. Weird that it isn't discussed more

whats going on round tectoria/viatec nowadays? im looking to go buy a house there next

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4339

The reason that no one involved in the game's development objected to the word "warfighter" is that the U.S. Defense Department has used "warfighter" as a standard term for military personnel since the late 1980s or early 1990s: Thus Earl L. Wiener et al., Eds. Human Factors in Aviation, 1988

Warfighter is literally the Department of War's Amazonian or Googler or any other cringe term you'd see in company PR or recruiting material.

It isn't a new thing at all, and the term has been around for a while. I was an Infantryman from 05-08 and heard it back then. I have also more recently been a defense contractor. I don't think members of the military prefer any title, honestly. In the most broad sense, good terms are soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines. Defense Contractors constantly refer to the military as "warfighter" and have for a while. In short, nobody in the military is going to flinch one way or the other if you use either term. Just don't call marines anything but marines.

They want to make sure the whole Diversity of our armed forces (soldiers, sailors, marines, …) feel an Equitable and Inclusive share of the mention.

"Warfighters" has been used for decades to describe service members, though usage picked up (in my experience) some time in the late 00s or 2010s. It's actually pretty common to describe "serving the warfighter" for all the all the missions that support combat roles but aren't combat roles themselves.

I’ve always heard this term in use from a defense contractor

It's a term that's been used at least back to the Bush 43 administration, probably older than that.

I always associate it with fighter aircraft

It's been controversial since 2002: https://bracingviews.com/2024/08/03/generation-warfighter-ne...

It has been in use for at least a decade, since the Obama administration if not earlier.

We have soldiers, sailors, airman/women, Marines (who really do not like being called soldiers), Coast Guardsman/women, and now the Space Force. Granted, I do not know why "service member" did not catch on. Perhaps because "warfighter" is a bit shorter.

Around the time Hegseth was appointed secretary of war. It's a trump thing.

Edit: so it's been around for longer, but the Trump regime seems to love it bigly so I'm sticking with my observation.

It's a trump regime thing.

It's a Hegseth malapropism, which is why it's slightly disturbing that Dario continues to use it.

edit: To be clear, Hegseth didn't create it, merely has popularized its use recently. Eg his speech at Quantico last Sept

Costco has been. When every other major company was scuttling their DEI initiatives Costco doubled down. Doesn’t seem to have impacted them yet.

No, a few law firms targeted by EOs fought them in court last year and won.

The usual suspects have stood up to it. Ben & Jerry's, Patagonia. In the former case it led to an illegal takeover by Unilever for which they're now being sued (or more accurately, the spinoff). Capgemini sold a US division over working with ICE, though that's a French company.

So yeah, extremely few have.

Harvard is an analogue in the academic sphere, if you include organizations beyond just companies.

The Supreme Court decision striking down IEEPA tariffs was from a number of small businesses standing up against the current administration. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_Resources,_Inc._v._Tr...

Hundreds of companies have filed lawsuits against the admin over the tariffs.

Are they just threatening to label? It seems to me like they have already labeled.

It is indeed kind of crazy. That's because the current US administration is composed of people whose sole qualification is being able to work for Donald Trump. Being competent, rational or ethical is career-limiting.

A question - being considered a supply chain risk is the same as being sanctioned? Or does it only affect their ability to be a defense supplier in the US (even if transitively?)

It's an honest question by the way - not trying to throw any gothas.

Just trying to understand if comoanies or people that don't orbit defense contracting are free to operate with Anthropic still or risk being sanctioned too.

It's kind of sad how an AI Startup defers more to its constitution than the actual government

Smaller government has always been code for bigger me, at least in recent American politics. Now me is government, so bigger government.

Yup. That’s pretty much how they make money. (Edit - in the context of contracting services to US government)

I'm wondering how this plays out in practice. Does the administration decide to strongarm contractors into cutting all ties? Will that extend to someone like google who provides compute to anthropic? Will the administration just plain ignore any court ruling? (as they've shown they're ready to do recently with the tarrifs situation)

If the legal system works as intended, the blast radius isn't too big here and something Anthropic will accept even if it hurts them. Maybe they even win and get the supply chain risk designation lifted. But I have zero faith that the legal system will make a difference here. It all comes down to how far the administration wants to go in imposing it's will.

Bleak.

They can also classify it as restricted data -- like nuclear weapons technology.

Sure, there will be a court battle, but I don't think these companies want to take that chance. They'll capitulate after the lawyers realize that option is on the table.

It gets so much money, compute and US user data. It won’t be allowed to operate as is as a foreign entity

Best scenario it will get TikTok-ed, otherwise it will become the real national security risk

Had the exit happen, well, as US has a monopoly of compute on this planet for next 2-3 years at least, the company, even though they would take the researchers with them, will certainly cease to exist as it exists now.

Would the US government attempt to apply export controls on the technology and prohibit this? I'm sure Lockheed Martin couldn't decide to move their proprietary technology to another country.

Hegseth's statement already leans towards accusations of treason and duplicity, I would say people trying to export the company would face significant risk of arrest or worse.

Every other country is significantly less free than the US. America is freedom's last stand.

DoD/DoW can't strong-arm these companies into unreasonable demands if they present a united front... and that's exactly why collective action (or even unionization) matters.

If the government really wants to, it could try building its "Skynet" on open-source Chinese models.. which would be deeply ironic.

Also people like me who are paying for a 20x Claude Max subscription and am feeling really good about it right now. I'll never even glance at OpenAI Codex or Gemini. Not to mention my divestment of OpenAI. It's just a drop I guess, but it's probably not the only one.

No offense,but this is where having immigrants throughout the power structure of these companies becomes an issue. We have a administration who clearly is not above using all avenues to apply pressure to get the things that they want done done,

How can we expect the VPs of these companies to make to make tough decisions like this when half can be pressured via immigration status? It’s hard enough being a normal citizen sticking your neck out in these circumstances.

Google walked out in 2018 from project Maven, which is what this is about:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Maven

The Epstein adjacent crew (Palantir) took over. Palantir was using Anthropic. No one could possibly have foreseen this. /s

None of them are 'good'. Execs at Anthropic just perceive the long-term damage from a potential Snowden-level leak showing how their model directed a drone strike against a bunch of civilians higher than short-term loss of revenue from the DoD contracts.

This letter is a public part of the negotiation process. It shouldn't be surprising that they are primarily using arguments that are, at least on the face, "patriotic".

This is the response to said twit

Can just see it now.

You're absolutely right to point that out -- thank you for catching it. I made a mistake in my previous response and that last act appears to have caused civilian casualties. Let me take a closer look and clarify the correct details for you.

(Will leave you to imagine the bullseye emoji, etc.)

The OpenAI contract was signed once Anthropic failed to yield before the deadline https://x.com/sama/status/2027578652477821175

Hopefully this causes an exodus of top talent from OpenAI. Anthropic needs all the help it can get.

early stage? shooting a woman in the face in her car for the crime of driving off by the brownshirts is not early stage my dude.

> What's the problem?

Think. The problem is that being branded a "supply chain risk" prohibits vast chunks of the US corporate landscape from doing business with Anthropic.

The problem is that the government is attempting to destroy a company rather than simply terminate their contract.

Everyone close to Anthropic leadership has claimed they’re the real deal and it’s not a stunt. I don’t think it’s bull. They are trying to find a reasonable middle ground and settled on some red lines they won’t cross.

> What's the problem?

Instead of just canceling the contract, the DoD is trying to destroy Anthropic to make it comply with their whims.

IMO this will probably be quickly defeated in court.

If it isn't, comrade Hegseth will have done an impressive job of weakening the American empire. You simply can't do business with an entity that would try to destroy you over dumb bullshit like this.

that doesn't even remotely represent what is happening here.

I think that choice of words to call them the Department of War and Secretary of War multiple times in that statement was very much intentional. And a point well made.

Fixed, thanks!

This applies to basically every military and company in every country in all of human history. Nearly every single other country tries to spy on every single other country, including on the US. That's just how these things go.

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If the Trump admin so chooses, they could absolutely obliterate Anthropic in an instant. They don't really care about tricky things like 'legality' or 'the court of law', they could just force everyone to stop interacting with them, raid their offices and steal all their shit.

Perhaps they should've found their spine a year earlier; right now their only hope is that the admin isn't stupid enough to crash the propped-up economy over petty bullshit. But knowing how they behave, well.

3 parts to this:

1) The US gov generally does have close partnerships with most large-scale, mature tech companies. Sometimes this is just a division dedicated to handling their requests, often it’s a special portal or API they can use to “lawfully” grab information from for their investigations. Often times these function somewhat like backdoors. Anthropic is large, but not mature. Additional changes must still take place for “backdoor” style partnerships to be effected.

2) The NSA can pretty much use any computer system they set their eyes on - famously including computers that were never connected to the internet secured in the middle of a mountain (Stuxnet). If they wanted to secretly utilize the Claude API without Claude finding out, that is within their capabilities. Google had to encrypt all their internal datacenter traffic to try to prevent the NSA from logging all their server-to-server traffic, after mistakenly thinking their internal networks were secure enough not to need that.

3) This isn’t about being “able” to do whatever the administration wants. This is the administration demonstrating the consequences of perceived insubordination to make other companies think twice about ever trying to limit use of corporate technology.

NSA legally isn't allowed to spy on US citizens directly, due to the NSA being a US military organization and the Posse Comitatus act prohibits the US military from being used as a US policing force.

It's one of the hidden and forgotten revelations about the Snowden leaks, where he showed that the NSA had a bunch of filters in their top-secret classified systems to filter out communications from US citizens. Those filters exist because of Posse Comitatus.

A backdoor is a completely different thing when it comes to an AI company, as compared to a social media company. Not really even sure what it would mean when it comes to doing inference on an LLM. Having access to the weights, training data and inference engine?

The model of Claude the DoD is asking for more than likely doesn't even exist in a production ready form. The post-training would have to be completely different for the model the DoD is asking for.

I have worked at a number of software companies that would be "interesting" to get access to, with enough intimate information to know if there was a super-sekret backdoor. If "all US companies" had to comply .. well .. I guess I was really lucky to work for those that somehow fell through the cracks.

And which one of their competitors do you imagine would swoop in and take their contracts while admitting to the rest of their customers that they're okay with their models being used for autonomous weapons and surveillance?