What's "entertaining" is more the speed at which it's happening.

It took Google probably 15 years to fully evil-ize. Anthropic ... two?

There is no "ethical capitalism" big tech company possible, esp once VC is involved, and especially with the current geopolitical circumstances.

I know the Department of War wanted them to drop some features. Is this the response?

Just out of curiosity, which version of Claude?

I’m not a lawyer, but my understanding is that HIPAA wouldn’t apply to consumer use of Claude or ChatGPT in most cases, even if you’re giving it your health data. Look up what a HIPAA covered entity. This is another reason why the US needs a comprehensive data protection law beyond HIPAA.

I hate comments anthropomorphizing LLMs. You are just asking a token producing system to produce tokens in a way that optimises for plausibility. Whatever it writes has no relation to its inner workings or truths. It doesn't "believe". It has no "intent". It cannot "admit". Steering a LLM to say anything you want is the defining characteristic of an LLM. That's how we got them to mimic chatbots. It's not clear there is any way at all to make them "safe" (whatever that means).

> Katie Sweeten, a former liaison for the Justice Department to the Department of Defense, said she’s not sure how the Pentagon can both declare a company to be a supply chain risk and compel that same company to work with the military.

Makes perfect sense!!

This is an unrelated change to the government’s demands.

>This was under duress that government was going to use emergency act to force them anyway.

Or, more likely, adding the "core safety promise" was just them playing hard to the government to get a better deal, and the government showed them they can play the same game.

They have been caught lying multiple times, about this, about the system capabilities, about their objectives.

In general public benefit corporations and non-profits should have a very modest salary cap for everybody involved and specific public-benefit legally binding mission statements.

Anybody involved should also be prohibited from starting a private company using their IP and catering to the same domain for 5-10 years after they leave.

Non-profits where the CEO makes millions or billions are a joke.

And if e.g. your mission is to build an open browser, being paid by a for-profit to change its behavior (e.g. make theirs the default search engine) should be prohibited too.

Well, now I'm wondering, if the company was chartered with the public benefit in mind, could you not sue if they don't follow through with working in the public interest?

If regular corporations are sued for not acting in the interests of shareholders, that would suggest that one could file a suit for this sort of corporate behavior.

I'm not even a lawyer (I don't even play one on TV) and public benefit corporations seem to be fairly new, so maybe this doesn't have any precedent in case law, but if you couldn't sue them for that sort of thing, then there's effectively no difference between public benefit corporations and regular corporations.

> Public benefit corporations in the AI space have become a farce at this point.

“At this point”? It was always the case, it’s just harder to hide it the more time passes. Anyone can claim any bullshit they want about themselves, it’s only after you’ve had a chance to seem them in the situations which test their words that you can confirm if they are what they said.

PBCs are peak End of History liberal philanthropy that speak to the kind of person whose solution to any problem is "throw a startup at it"

What about "It's free and always will be"?

What if we start a company with "Always Be Evilin'?" Then gradually over time convert to "Don't be evil" *

* Our shareholders will probably sue us

It's not like the regime they operate under care much about the courts. Legally they're also obliged to let the state into pretty much every crevice in their operations.

the article specifically says:

> The policy change is separate and unrelated to Anthropic’s discussions with the Pentagon, according to a source familiar with the matter.

This tracks with what I've seen across the industry. The safety theater exists because it's great marketing — "we're the responsible ones" is a differentiator when you're competing for enterprise contracts and talent who want to feel good about where they work.

The structural problem is that once you've taken billions in VC, safety becomes a negotiable constraint rather than a core value. The board's fiduciary duty runs toward returns, not toward whatever was in the mission statement. PBC status doesn't change that in practice — there's basically zero enforcement mechanism.

What's wild is how fast the cycle has compressed. Google took maybe 15 years to go from "don't be evil" to removing it from the code of conduct. OpenAI took about 5 years from nonprofit to capped-profit to whatever they are now. Anthropic is speedrunning it in under 3. At this rate the next AI startup will launch as a PBC and pivot before their Series B closes.

> I generally think it’s bad to create an environment that encourages people to be afraid of making mistakes, afraid of admitting mistakes and reticent to change things that aren’t working

"move fast and break things" ?

This guy from Effective Altruism pivoted away from helping the poor to help try to control AI from being a terminator type entity and then pivoted to being, ah, its okay for it to be a terminator type entity.

> Holden Karnofsky, who co-founded the EA charity evaluator GiveWell, says that while he used to work on trying to help the poor, he switched to working on artificial intelligence because of the “stakes”:

> “The reason I currently spend so much time planning around speculative future technologies (instead of working on evidence-backed, cost-effective ways of helping low-income people today—which I did for much of my career, and still think is one of the best things to work on) is because I think the stakes are just that high.”

> Karnofsky says that artificial intelligence could produce a future “like in the Terminator movies” and that “AI could defeat all of humanity combined.” Thus stopping artificial intelligence from doing this is a very high priority indeed.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2022/09/defective-altrui...

He is just giving everyone permission to do bad things by saying a lot of words around it.

Would nuclear energy research be a good analogy then? Seems like a path we should have kept running down, but stopped bc of the weapons. So we got the weapons but not the humanity saving parts (infinite clean energy)

Well before Anthropic thought they were God's gift to AI; the chosen ones protecting humanity.

With the latest competing models they are now realizing they are an "also" provider.

Sobering up fast with ice bucket of 5.3-codex, Copilot, and OpenCode dumped on their head.

> Every frontier tech company is convinced that the tech they are working towards is as humanity-useful as a cure for cancer, and yet as dangerous as nuclear weapons

They're not really, it's always been a form of PR to both hype their research and make sure it's locked away to be monetized.

“A source familiar with the matter” is almost certainly a company spokesperson.

If they were unrelated, Anthropic wouldn’t be doing this this week because obviously everyone will conflate the two.

This is direct pressure from the government. Classic 'small government' Republican stuff.

https://apnews.com/article/anthropic-hegseth-ai-pentagon-mil...