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> it was an ordinary thing when some of my graduating classmates refused to work at companies that did let their systems be used for war. Those refusals were on moral grounds.

(spoiler alert)

Wasn't this one of the plot points of the Val Kilmer movie Real Genius? They had to trick the students into creating a weapon by siloing them off from each other and having them build individual but related components? How far we've fallen! Nobody has to take ethics during undergrad anymore I guess...

Attitude towards war depends on context. In 2007 "war" meant "Iraq" which was extremely unpopular, pointless, and had an imperialist flavor. Today "war" means Gaza, Iran, and Venezuela, but it also means Ukraine and Chinese aggression, possibly ramping up to an invasion of Taiwan. I suspect Amodei and many Anthropic employees are thinking of the latter.

Yes, and even their two exceptions, only one is on moral grounds. They don't want to provide tools for autonomous killing machines because the technology isn't good enough, yet. Once that 'yet' is passed they will be fine supplying that capability. Anthropic is clearly the better company over OpenAI, but that doesn't mean they are good. 'lesser evil' is the correct term here for sure.

> I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee.

> I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.

Military isn't quite as aggressively catering to the people who historically have bullied techies as they used to.

Aside from that - there's a lot more people in tech now. It grew too fast too quick to maintain all the values it had back in the 00's and earlier.

In 2000 I worked for a company that was building a mobile telephony and data product. The partner company asked us to help them implement the lawful intercept function, as is required by law, which we did, however they were asking for 5+% LI traffic when the common practice was 2-ish%. Our hardware was exceptional, we could trivially have done 100% at line rate with zero impact. The engineers all stepped aside, and finally: "Fuck those guys. They get their 2%."

It's one of the better ethical moments I've had in my career of working for _mostly_ very ethical companies (so obviously not any social media or crypto).

> they have to couch it in language clarifying that they would love to support war,

This is what baffles me when I see people flocking to them for subscriptions based on these events.

>refuse to let their systems be used for war..

I don't want wars.

But tell me, what would you like your country to do when conflicts arise due to want of natural resources? Would you want your country to just give up that resource your people depend on, like may be 50/50?

Do you believe it will always be possible to settle on a solution in a peaceful way that works for everyone?

> my graduating classmates refused to work at companies that did let their systems be used for war

Holy mother of bubbles. No, for several decades it was a common thing for the L3 Harris, Lockheed Martin, etc to scoop up half the geeks from most graduating classes.

If you graduated in 2007, your classmates were born around 1985. Their parents were mostly born in the mid 50s to the mid 60s and came to political consciousness either during the Vietnam War or immediately thereafter. No war since has been even close to as unpopular or frankly as salient. It’s the passing out of cultural relevance of that war that you are noticing.

What tech companies were these? I was younger in 2007 but i feel like i would remember if companies were openly refusing to participate in war.

And probably some of the same companies where you could get fired for publicly expressing some mildly controversial sociological theories like James Damore did are also companies that would not hesitate to work with the CIA or the Pentagon on mass surveillance or weapons systems.

It's easy to say "I will never let the Department of Defense use my search engine for evil!" Or "the more money they spend on me, the less they have for weapons!" ( https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Theo_de_Raadt ) when you aren't really expecting money. But when somebody shows up with a check, it becomes much harder to stick to your principles. Especially after watching Palantir (and "don't be evil" Google) rake in plenty of dough.

Also: https://gist.github.com/kemitchell/fdc179d60dc88f0c9b76e5d38... .

It's certainly entertaining to read about ancient industry history, with people on DARPA grants objecting to military interest in the stuff the military was paying them to do.

2007 was 19 years ago. If you step back another 19 years, you'll find that the major tech companies of the era had huge defense contracts: IBM, HP, Oracle, SGI, Texas Instruments, etc. Not only that, the development of many technologies we take for granted today -- like integrated circuits, the Internet, even Postgres -- were directly funded by the DoD. Much of the growth of Silicon Valley in the early days was a direct consequence of working with the military.

It's not just that.

There was the 3 laws of robotics, where a robot/software was not to do any harm.

There was concerns over privacy and refusal of sharing your name and info on the internet. After all it's full of strategers and there was danger

Don't get into cars with strangers

It's because they need enormous amounts of money for their datacenters

And enormous amount of political support because of the negative perception of AI in society

I'm a decade older so maybe I missed the memo but I think you'll have a hard time naming tech companies that actually refused to work with the military, which were large enough and important enough to be in danger of selling something to the military (i.e. not Be Inc. or Beenz.com)

Clearly, all of the traditional big leagues were lined up to take the Army's money. IBM, Control Data, Cray, SGI, and HP all viewed weapons research as a major line of business. DEC was the default minicomputer of the DoD and Sun created features to court the intelligence community including the DoD "Trusted Workstation". Sperry Rand defined "military industrial complex".

But ma, look at our stonk price!

The only difference between now and 2007 is the curtain has been pulled back revealing how things have always worked.

I’d argue it’s come full circle and it hasn’t changed a bit.

There wouldn’t be a Silicon Valley without World War 2 and US gov. funding of Stanford to develop radar basically.

The initial investment from then gave critical capital mass for Stanford, the VCs, and the tech companies of today.

https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo?si=gGza5eIv485xEKLS

Let's not imply the world changed on its own. Trump changed it.

> they have to couch it in language clarifying that they would love to support war, actually,

Yes they do because they are trying to sell to the Department of War.

No one made Anthropic try to be a military contractor. It’s pretty much the definition of being a military contractor that your product helps to kill people.

> It is incredible how far the overton window has moved on this issue.

> When I graduated in 2007, it was common for tech companies to refuse to let their systems be used for war,

In 2007 the US was the sole world hegemon. It could afford to let the smartest people work on ad delivery systems.

In 2026, in certain fields, China has a stronger economy and military. Russia is taking over Europe. India and Brazil are going their own way. China is economically colonizing Africa.

The US can't afford to let it's enemies develop strong AI weapons first because of the naive thinking that Russia/China/others will also have naive thinkers that will demand the same.

---

People were just as naive with respect to Ukraine. They were saying that mines and depleted uranium shells are evil. But when Russia attacked, many changed their minds because they realized you can't kill Russians with grandstanding on noble principle. You kill them with mines and depleted uranium shells.

Hopefully people here will change their minds before a hot war. As the saying goes, America always picks the right solution after trying all the wrong ones.

> When I graduated in 2007, it was common for tech companies to refuse to let their systems be used for war, and it was an ordinary thing when some of my graduating classmates refused to work at companies that did let their systems be used for war. Those refusals were on moral grounds.

I don't think it was very common really.

I think for the most part it was tech companies whose systems were not being used for war who like to boast that they refused to let their systems be used for war. Or that they creatively interpreted "for war" that since they were not actually manufacturing explosives, they could claim it was not for war.

The reckoning will come.

Watch as the same people pushing for war today will pretend they were always against it 10 years from now.

I guess we're just doomed to repeat the same cycles.

> the world has changed.

It's the effect of a cult of personality. People don't feel like they want or need this. But they're on board with the cult.

When people (myself included FWIW) warn about the dangers of American imperialism, it's because:

1. As President Eisenhower said in his farewell address in 1961 [1], every dollar spent on the military-industrial complex is a dollar not spent on schools or houses or hospitals or bridges;

2. Every American company with sufficient size eventually becomes a defense contractor. That's really what's happened with the tech companies. They're moving in lockstep with the administration on both domestic and foreign policy;

3. The so-called "imperial boomerang" [2]. Every tactic, weapon and strategy used against colonial subjects are eventually used against the imperial core eg [3]. Do you think it's an accident that US police forces have become increasingly militarized?

The example I like to give is China's high speed rail. China started building HSR only 20 years ago and now has over 32,000 miles of HSR tracks taking ~4M passengers per day. The estimated cost for the entire network is ~$900B. That's less than the US spends on the military every year.

I really what Steve Jobs would've done were he still alive. Tim Apple has bent the knee and kissed the ring. Would Steve Jobs have done the same? I'm not so sure. He may well have been ousted (again) because of it.

Then again, I think Steve Jobs was the only Silicon Valley billlionaire not in a transhumanist polycule with a more than even chance of being in the files.

[1]: https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwigh...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_boomerang

[3]: https://www.amnestyusa.org/blog/with-whom-are-many-u-s-polic...

The world changed in many ways. America now resembles China or Russia in terms of authoritarianism and oligarchy.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47270470

> Dean Ball: What Secretary Pete Hegseth announced is a desire to kill Anthropic. It is true that the government has abridged private-property rights before. But it is radical and different to say, brazenly: If you don’t do business on our terms, we will kill you; we will kill your company. I can’t imagine sending a worse signal to the business community. It cuts right at heart at everything that makes us different from China, which roots in this idea that the government can’t just kill you if you say you don’t want to do business with it, literally or figuratively. Though in this case, I’m speaking figuratively.

> My, the world has changed.

No. Your tech experience was an aberration.

For almost all of history, including recent history, tech and military went together. Whether compound bows, or spears or metallurgy.

Euler used his math to develop artillery tables for the Prussian army.

von Neumann helped develop the atom bomb.

The military played a huge role in creating Silicon Valley.

However, to people who grew up in the mid to late 90s, it is easy to miss that that period was a major aberration. You had serious people talking about the end of history. You had John Perry Barlow's utterly naive Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace which looks more and more naive every year.

The Overton window has not shifted, at least not among rank-and-file tech workers. There was very loud and vocal internal opposition to building and selling weapons[0]. They all lost the argument in the boardrooms because the US government writes very big checks. But I am told they are very much still around.

CEOs are bound to sociopathically amoral behavior - not by the law, but by the Pareto-optimal behavior of the job market for executives. The law obligates you to act in the interests of the shareholders, but it does not mandate[1] that Line Go Up. That is a function of a specific brand of shareholder that fires their CEOs every 18 months until the line goes up.

In 2007, Big Tech had plenty of the consumer market to conquer, so they could afford to pretend to be opposed to selling to the military. But the game they were playing was always going to end with them selling to the military. Once they were entrenched they could ignore the no-longer-useful-to-us-right-now dissenters, change their politics on a dime, and go after the "real money".

[0] Several of the sibling comments are mentioning hypothetical scenarios involving dual-use technologies or obfuscated purposes. Those are also relevant, but not the whole story.

[1] There are plenty of arguments a CEO could use to defend against a shareholder lawsuit that they did not take a particularly short-sighted action. Notably, that most line-go-up actions tend to be bad long-term decisions. You're allowed to sell low-risk investments.

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As the Heritage Foundation has said, we are in a cold civil war for our country and right now, the authoritarians are winning.

Millenials were famously called "generation sell". It is all corporate now, DEI one day, ICE the next. Just follow your leaders.

Yes, the equivocal wording means nothing. It's clear that Anthropic has no moral qualms about participating in war crimes, since that's been America's MO since forever. America has provided free weapons to Israel to continue their slaughter in Gaza and has now joint forces with the same to assassinate leaders under the auspices of peace talks, and kill schoolchildren and other civilians as part of a terror campaign.

See in your case with the military you can directly say, hey my code will be used to bomb other people possibly. But in today's times it isn't (I am sure even then) so cut and dry. I worked in AdTech industry (like 60% of the bay area techies). So the ad tech I write gets shown to millions/billions. What about ads influencing elections and then politicians waging wars? Anti-vax ads which influence people and then kill them. Scam ads. Insurance ads and then people not getting cancer meds from the same insurance. Am I responsible for those deaths? I would say Yes.

But what is the option? I feel each of us wants to draw a line based off of our morality but the circumstances don't allow us to stick to it (still gotta pay rent)

We are all on a Titanic the way I see it. It's just the DARPA guy is gonna sink first. Rest of us are just pretending to be Jack trying to be the last ones to go.

That's just patently false. Tons of executives and board members in industry absolutely care. Some are in it just for philanthropic purposes.

My pet theory is that this has been accelerated due to the cultural rejection of the humanities as worthy of study.

Orwell wrote about this: https://orwell.ru/library/articles/science/english/e_scien

> "The fact is that a mere training in one or more of the exact sciences, even combined with very high gifts, is no guarantee of a humane or sceptical outlook."

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?

That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun

>” I inquired why founders, CEOs or developers weren't in part of the discussion or in attendance? Moderator responded that they couldn't find them qualified enough to take part in the discussion.”

This seems more like credentialist arrogance than a well-reasoned judgment.

So what is your solution? Let the Chinese and the Russians kill us?

Strangely these ethical discussions and attempts to suppress technology only occur in the west, and only when funded by our adversaries.

Nothing has destroyed my faith in humanity more than the frantic race to the bottom of the AI insanity the last couple years. You can feel the frenzied greed in the air, masses of investors piling over each other to get a piece of the golden pie at any cost. It’s fucking disgusting.

> what if the code you write or autonomous machine you contribute to used for killing?

This line of thinking, that creating machines that kill is unethical, will destroy the West. If the US wasn't so good at producing killing machines in WW2, you wouldn't be here to complain about DARPA ethics.

Instead of having engineers develop the most advanced machines for killing (i.e. protecting the West) such people go into producing the most addictive content delivery systems, destroying the brains of minors.

As Tom Lehrer sang:

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun.

Which is why on a human level I have zero respect for many CEOs. The world would be a better place without them and they are actively working on making it worse. In fact I believe the rest of the tribe should punish them for this anti-social behavior to disincentivize it in the future.

The one industry that people dislike that I haven’t been in is war. I hope to be in weapons one day. The ethics are pretty straightforward to me: kill as few as possible to protect your interests; and that may be many people; but it is not really that many people.

Anyway, I won’t guess at your friend’s motivation but if you gave me the ability to make America’s industry better at prosecuting war you’d better believe I’d do it with great enthusiasm.

Besides I’ve been around long enough to know that when the rubber hits the road the ethical people will find their way rapidly to the Paradox of Tolerance and suddenly find that violence is highly desirable. I find this kind of high variance behaviour is undesirable and leads to unhappiness all around.

What’s a “warfighter?” Do they come from the “Gulf of America?” We used to call them servicemen or service members. Emphasizing they served the people. I guess that’s too effeminate for our roided up and ironically hyper-insecure Secretary of Defense.

It’s a mistake to conflate “wants to spend money on the most ethical option available” with “ think the most ethical option available is perfect”

Why wouldn’t you move your dollars to someplace incrementally better?

Exactly, it’s all marketing seems to get new customers. And it worked.

Good PR moves.

Because Anthropic is called Anthropic and they have this really warm and inviting visual aesthetic.

Frankly it’s a shitshow all around. The truth is that nobody gives a fuck about this. They have no moral qualms, just practical. And these are the people that should bring us the future. Man what a depressing scenario.

The Department of Defense was named as such after the detonations of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki

We - as a humanity - collectively recognized the weight of our creation, and decided to walk back

Discussing “AI alignment” in the same breadth as aligning with a “Department of War” (in any country) is simply not an intellectually sound position

None of the countries we’ve attacked this year pose an existential threat to humanity. In contrast, striking first and pulling Europe, Russia, and China into a hot war beginning in the Middle East surely poses a greater collective threat than bioweapons, sentient AI, or the other typical “AI alignment” concerns

Why aren’t there more dissidents among the researcher ranks?

Let me rephrase it for you:

"We both want a docile American public who go along with our desires so we can achieve goals that may be contrary to the interests of the American public."

My eyebrows basically left my face after reading the whole thing.

This is not the forbidden love story I would've asked for.

Well I will say that if there's a word that describes what the Department has been up to in Venezuela and Iran, "Defense" does seem to be the least Orwellian option.

As someone looking at this from outside the US, the whole sequence of events is frankly terrifying.

I fear that frontier AI is going to be nationalised for military purposes, not just in the US but across the globe.

At the same time, I really don’t know what Anthropic were expecting when they described their technology as potentially more dangerous than an atom bomb while agreeing to integrate purpose-built models with Palantir to be deployed in high-security networks for classified military tasks.

Would love to enumerate those commonalities. Run by a psychopath? Commitment to violent lethality? Burning billions of dollars for uncertain goals? (ok there's one)

I continue to be surprised how many people haven't heard term until now, it's been in common use in the US for 20+ years.

To me the most Orwellian thing is everyone using the newspeak name for the DoD.

Just remember, we're not at war with Iran. The House Speaker said so.

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Really? You made it through Covidpocalypse, but the there warfighter is a big problem?

Because optically it makes him look terrible.

One of the things that Altman does great is that when he writes he writes as though it will be read by the public every time. It’s why he is able to constantly post his own internal memos/posts on twitter. It’s great too because it makes him look “transparent”.

Probably because it hurts its position either in court or during negotiations with the DoW.

Its incredibly simple - they want to get off the supply chain risk list.

Its very evident in his statement, he's trying very hard to clarify what that list means for corporations and downstream business with large commercial and strategic companies.

Imagine if Microsoft, Amazon, Google, etc decided that they don't want to ANY sort of minuscule risk (real or perceived) to their massive public sector business lines (via all their DoD DoJ NHS and other 3 letter agencies, state agencies, city and local municipals etc) - and decide to cancel their enterprise Anthropic licenses - which is a VERY possible scenario.

And these are the big players, theres a whole slew of medium and small players all with existing government contracts that need to tread carefully.

link to the memo?

Not everything has to be a conspiracy or some 4D chess business move. Dario is a morally motivated person and regretted the tone that was being conveyed in that memo, so he apologized.

We deserve to know if Claude was involved with targeting the girls’ school that was bombed in the first hours of the attack on Iran. 50-100+ girls are reported to have been killed.

Claude is integrated into Palantir’s Project Maven targeting system. The Pentagon has touted how many more targets they were able to attack with this system (1,000’s).

NY Times: Analysis Suggests School Was Hit Amid U.S. Strikes on Iranian Naval Base

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/05/world/middleeast/iran-sch...

People don't like to be captured and tend to run away.

It’s a business decision.

But a civilian should have the right to participate in defense and not offense without fear of retribution or being humiliated. They are not the only game in town. All the DOW had to do was drop them, pick Openai and support the latter including recommending it to all the nations that listen to the president. That would be good for Openai business.

Thanks for sharing. This is very interesting.

Watching this, I realised one thing: Germans, once upon a time phenomenally intelligent folks, got eroded by a bunch of stupid politicians’ ambitions.

They still want that contract so they'll continue to pander.

The correct name is the Department of War.

Calling it the Department of Defense implies a system of laws, checks and balances which no longer exists.

Department of War is correct.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/rest...

I've also quit a job where the products I was working were meant to be deployed to CBP to hunt down immigrants. It's a nice gesture, but it won't stop these companies. They just hired someone else without an ethical backbone, and continued the project like nothing happened.

Tech leadership is rotten to the core, and that can't be fixed by individuals making a stand.

At a technical level, I don't believe they're specifically working on targeting anyone. They're providing a general-purpose API that Palantir is presumably using to build the target-finding software.

I imagine that's why the implementation got so far along before this blew up. Someone at Anthropic talked with someone at Palantir and they had a "you did what? Did you read the contract terms" moment, and that was after it went into production.

if all the good people leave all the important positions, what will happen?

Normally I'd agree with this sentiment, but I'm having a hard time feeling bad we took out the Ayatollah. You know, what with him killing tens of thousands of Iranians who demanded reform. I didn't care one bit for him doing that.

Were you earning seven figures tho? That suppresses moral stances rather quickly I reckon

...is Anthropic "meaningfully better" though? They're still fine being a defense contractor, and they lack the tools to enforce the ethics they want to uphold. They seemingly contribute even less to FOSS than OpenAI does (low bar) and split hairs over IP ownership when open models distill their results. Am I supposed to root for them because of their manufactured internet drama?

It's very reminiscent of the half-assed security theater that Google and Apple fought over. Neither one of them resisted government coercion in the end, they just took different routes to end up as federal asskissers.

High! Look at Intel…

And the legal entity of Google is Google LLC yet most people don't use that name when talking about Google.

Pragmatically, it's for the best to use its preferred name instead of legal name when sucking up to the department and Trump to try to get back in good graces.

That seems overly vindictive. How would your opinion change in a hypothetical world where "AGI" was dependent on Anthropic's survival?

They have a crypto coin for explicit bribing

You got me wondering, so I checked to see how much Anthropic's bribed Trump so far. According to Dario, Trump has been soliciting bribes, but they refused to pay, and the contract "renegotiation" is retribution:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47269649

"Amodei claimed that tensions between his company and the Trump administration stem partly from the firm’s refusal to financially support Trump and its approach to AI regulation and safety issues."

It's disgusting honestly. There are likely at least 136 directly reported civilian and child deaths linked to the operations where their services were used. And they are very proud.

The one where he accuses Trump of retaliating against Anthropic after failing to solicit a bribe?

That should be the headline here. We know Trump personally made $4B last year, and we know he's been using the full power of the US gov't to retaliate against people that don't "support" him.

Come 2029, when there's an opportunity for the corruption trials to start, this sort of behavior needs to be front of the public mind, both at the top, and throughout his network of appointees.

Yes it does and yes we still can. Not sure how to describe it, but it’s not great!

that's not really what's happening, the US has never been stronger than it is now

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> How exactly do they want to use an llm for autonomous weapons

Probably the same way Claude can play Pokemon: give it a bunch of informations and let it make a decision by itself to achieve a specified goal.