Surely that might be naive but the entire issue is that they want to stick to the original contract, which is of course the purpose of a contract in the first place.
They explicitly allow it to be used in military operations, just not killing people without a human in the loop
source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pentagon-anthropic-offer-ai-unr...
It's honestly wild watching companies with common investors, and when you dig into the details, their executives are bragging about killing their enemies. And then people argue that when surveillance is used to systematically individually stalk all of us it's magically not illegal, even though if you did that to a bunch of your ex girlfriends tracking all their movements to work and the grocery store and argued 'muh free speech to record' your ass would be in jail lickity split because there is a big difference between recording the public and stalking people while conspiring with people who are literally bragging about the killing of their enemies.
Not only was what we built essentially, a scout-to-kill drone, it was also built on a ton of tracking literature which was basically built to track things to kill. No matter how far back you go, the military has always been a huge player (supply or demand side) in R&D.
I understand the argument that moving the decision making power to a black box would clear conscience of the operator, yadda yadda yadda, but newsflash, price of human life is falling so quick, that I think we're far beyond the point where it matters.
Centralized AI killbots with no safety controls are almost certainly bad.
Individually owned and controlled militias of defensive (and decentralized) AI killbots? Unclear.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47154983 The Pentagon threatens Anthropic (astralcodexten.com) ~1 day ago, 115+ comments
I can't say that I fully trust this at face value, but I will say, at least at face value, that this commitment to non-violence is something I wish more tech companies in history had made. Whether it's an authentic commitment or just PR remains to be fully seen.
The military has a problem on limiting its ability to do mass surveillance of the US public. Why? Why would it have a problem with that limitation?
The issues in the contract under dispute are things we shouldn't want the military doing.
Hegseth gives Anthropic until Friday to back down on AI safeguards
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47140734
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47142587
Tech companies shouldn't be bullied into doing surveillance
Jimmc414•3h ago