I'd prefer to see board (or executive) level signatories over lay employees -- the people who can enforce enterprise policy rather than just voice their opinions -- but this is encouraging to see nonetheless.
I can't help but notice that Grok/X is not part of this initiative, though. I realize that frontier models are really coming from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google, but it feels like someone is going to give in to these demands.
It's incredible how quickly we've devolved into full-blown sci-fi dystopia.
Head(s) will of course agree with the administration. And employees will likely be making themselves a target if they sign this letter. All anonymous from said company is not a good look at all.
Speculation of course; let's see what really happens.
By that logic we should expect all governments to regress to totalitarianism, which hasn’t happened, and isn’t what’s happening here.
The question isn’t if some would attempt these behaviors, but rather if we and our democratic structures empower those people or fail to constrain them.
Before you leave a comment about how meaningless this is unless they do XYZ,
please realize that there's likely a group chat out there somewhere where all of these concerns have already been raised and considered. The best thing you can do is ask how you as an outsider can help support these organizers
The best way for AI companies to fight this would be to remind those who request this capability that the AI knows exactly where they live, where they hang out, and that any one of them can also be targeted by a rogue AI system with no human in the loop. Capabilities that they are requesting could jeopardize them, their personal assets, and their families if something goes haywire or, in the much more common case, where the AI is used as an attack tool by an outside adversary who has gained unauthorized access.
All of this should remain a bridge too far, forever.
The problem with forcing public policy on companies is that companies are ultimately made from individuals, and surely you can’t force public policy down people’s throats.
I’m sure nothing good can come out of strong-arming some of the brightest scientists and engineers the U.S. has. Such a waste of talent trying to make them bend over to the government’s wishes… instead of actually fostering innovation in the very competitive AI industry.
I don't see how public policy is being "forced" on anyone here? It seems like the system is working as intended: government wants to do X; company A says "I won't allow my product to be used for X"; government refuses to do business with company A. One side thinks the government should be allowed to dictate terms to a private supplier, the other side thinks the private supplier should be allowed to dictate terms to the government. Both are half right.
You can argue that the government refusing to do any business with company A is overreach, I suppose, but I imagine that the next logical escalation in this rhetorical slapfight is going to be the government saying "we cannot guarantee that any particular use will not include some version of X, and therefore we have to prevent working with this supplier"...which I sort of see?
Just to take the metaphor to absurdity, imagine that a maker of canned tomatoes decided to declare that their product cannot be used to "support a war on terror". Regardless of your feelings on wars on terror and/or canned tomatoes, the government would be entirely rational to avoid using that supplier.
I think the bigger insanity here is the labeling of a supply chain risk. It prohibits DoD agencies and contractors from using Anthropic services. It'd be one thing if the DoD simply didn't use Anthropic. It's another when it actively attempts to isolate Anthropic for political reasons.
> It prohibits DoD agencies and contractors from using Anthropic services. It'd be one thing if the DoD simply didn't use Anthropic.
This is literally the mechanism by which the DoD does what you're suggesting.
Generally speaking, the DoD has to do procurement via competitive bidding. They can't just arbitrarily exclude vendors from a bid, and playing a game of "mother may I use Anthropic?" for every potential government contract is hugely inefficient (and possibly illegal). So they have a pre-defined mechanism to exclude vendors for pre-defined reasons.
Everyone is fixated on the name of the rule (and to be fair: the administration is emphasizing that name for irritating rhetorical reasons), but if they called it the "DoD vendor exclusion list", it would be more accurate.
That doesn’t sound right. Surely there’s a big difference between Anthropic selling the government direct access to its models, and an unrelated contractor that sells pencils to the government and happens to use Anthropic’s services to help write the code for their website.
> Surely there’s a big difference between Anthropic selling the government direct access to its models, and an unrelated contractor that sells pencils to the government and happens to use Anthropic’s services to help write the code for their website.
Yes, this is the part where I acknowledge that it might be overreach in my original comment, but it's not nearly as extreme or obvious as the debate rhetoric is implying. There are various exclusion rules. This particular rule was (speculating here!) probably chosen because a) the evocative name (sigh), and b) because it allows broader exclusion, in that "supply chain risks" are something you wouldn't want allowed in at any level of procurement, for obvious reasons.
Calling canned tomatoes a supply chain risk would be pretty absurd (unless, I don't know...they were found to be farmed by North Korea or something), but I can certainly see an argument for software, and in particular, generative AI products. I bet some people here would be celebrating if Microsoft were labeled a supply chain risk due to a long history of bugs, for example.
I'm not completely familiar with bidding procedures but don't bidding procedures usually have requirements? Why not just list a requirement of unrestricted usage? Or state, we require models to be available for AI murder drones or whatever. Anthropic then can't bid and there's no need to designate them a supply chain risk.
The latter is how the former is accomplished. Government employees cannot simply choose not to work with an otherwise winning bidder, so the government has pre-defined rules that allow pre-exclusion from the bidding process. This is one.
That is misinformation. It would be essentially a death sentence for a company like Anthropic, which is targeting enterprise business development. No one who wants to work with the US government would be able to have Claude on their critical path.
> (b) Prohibition. (1) Unless an applicable waiver has been issued by the issuing official, Contractors shall not provide or use as part of the performance of the contract any covered article, or any products or services produced or provided by a source, if the covered article or the source is prohibited by an applicable FASCSA orders as follows:
> The Department of War is threatening to […] Invoke the Defense Production Act to force Anthropic to serve their model to the military and "tailor its model to the military's needs"
This issue is about more than the government blacklisting a company for government procurement purposes.
From what I understand, the government is floating the idea of compelling Anthropic — and, by extension, its employees — to do as the DoD pleases.
If the employees’ resistance is strong enough, there’s no way this will serve the government’s interests.
The President is crashing out on X because a company didn’t do what they wanted. “Forcing” is not a binary. Do you seriously believe that the government’s behavior here is acceptable and has no chilling effect on future companies?
The EU and UK is a long way from attracting top AI talent purely from opportunity and monetary terms.
Not to mention UK is arguably further down the mass surveillance pipeline than the US. They’ve always had more aggressive domestic intelligence surveillance laws which was made clear during the Snowden years, they’ve had flock style cameras forever, and they have an anti encryption law pitched seemingly yearly.
I’d imagine most top engineers would rather try to push back on the US executive branch overreach than move. At least for the time being.
For sure we’re not currently attracting the talent. There’s more to that than just money, but money is significant factor. When it comes to compensation, AI is too broad a category to have a meaningful debate. Hardware or software or mathematics or what kind of person? Etc.
I’m not gonna dispute the UK being further down some parts of the road.
Not sure what you’d count as top engineers, but I know enough that have been asking about and moving to the UK/EU that it’s been a noticeable reversal of the historic trends. Also, a major slowdown of these kinds of people in the UK/EU wanting to move to the US.
I’m not an AI engineer but it’s not hard to imagine why some bright talent would want to work at the most exciting AI companies in the US while also making 3-10x what they’d make in Europe.
Ideology is easy to throw around for internet comments but working on the cutting edge stuff next to the brightest minds in the space will always be a major personal draw. Just look at the Manhattan project, I doubt the primary draw for all of those academics was getting to work on a bomb. It was the science, huge funding, and interpersonal company.
See my other comments around here. This idea that salaries in the US are so much higher than Europe for all these top AI roles just isn’t true. Even the big American companies have been opening offices in places like London to hire the top talent at high salaries.
This also isn’t hypothetical. I know top-talent engineers and researchers that have moved out of the USA in the last 12 months due to the political climate (which goes beyond just the AI topics).
And you might want to read a few books on the Manhattan project and the people involved before you use that analogy. I don’t think it’s particularly strong.
Do UK and Europe have hardware manufacturing for those researches to work with once US imposes GPU export restrictions to them at the first whiff of competition/threat?
And the US can’t realistically stop our well-funded homegrown AI Hardware startups from manufacturing with TSMC. This is part of why there’s funding from the EU to develop Sovereign AI capabilities, currently focused on designing our own hardware. We’re nothing like as far behind as you might expect in terms of tech, just in terms of scale.
Also, while US export restrictions might make things awkward for a short while, it wouldn’t stop European innovation. The chips still flow, our own hardware companies would scale faster due to demand increase, and there’s the adage about adversity being the parent of all innovation (or however it goes).
You mean because of the international sanctions that needed Taiwanese, British and Dutch support to be effective?
Or because of the revoked processor design licenses from the British company Arm (which is still UK headquartered… despite being NASDAQ listed and largely owned by Japanese firm SoftBank)?
Or perhaps you think the US could stop us using the 12nm fabs being built by TSMC on European soil? Or could stop us manufacturing RISC-V-based chips (Swiss-headquartered technology)?
The US is weak in digital-logic silicon fabrication and it knows it. That’s why it’s been so panicked about Intel and been trying to get TSMC to build fabs on US soil. They’re pouring tens of billions of dollars into trying to claw back ownership and control of it, but it’s not like Europe or China or others are standing still on it either.
The EUV and other factory equipment everyone's using is predominantly European. High-end testing tools used in R&D are largely European.
The fabs aren't, and that is no small thing. The tech stack is there though.
It's pretty tiresome that the HN audience keeps assuming Europe doesn't have "tech" because it doesn't have Facebook. Where do you think all the wealth comes from? Europe is all over everyone's R&D and supply chain.
You seem to have a very ill-informed view of UK/EU salaries in this particular sector; And also: yeah, people take salary hits to go do things they believe in (this is like, the entire premise of the underpaid American startup founder model) - it should come as no surprise that people are willing to forgo pay for reasons other than just building their own business / making themselves personally wealthy.
I agree. And even if those workers stay in the U.S., there’s absolutely no guarantee that they’ll do their best to favor the government’s interests — quite the opposite, if anything.
At the end of the day it’s a matter of incentives, and good knowledge work can’t simply be forced out of people that are unwilling to cooperate.
The USA showed itself to be a Command Economy that uses 'private enterprise' as a fascade of legitimacy during Covid. Without government spending, employment, and contracts, the USA would be net negative growth.
Now the DoD, who are by far the largest budgetary expense for the tax payer, wants us to believe they don't have a better Ai than current industry? That is a double sword admission; either they are exposing themselves again as economic decision makers, or admitting they spend money on routine BS with zero frontier war fighting capabilities.
Either way, it is beyond time to reform the Military and remove the majority of its leadership as incompetent stewards and strategists. That doesn't even include the massive security vulnerabilities in our supply chains given military needs in various countries. (Taiwan and Thailand)
Among other consequences, if Anthropic ends up being killed it’s going to be just another nail in the coffin of trust in America.
Companies who subscribed will find themselves without an important tool because the president went on a rant, and might wonder if it’s safe to depend on other American companies.
"We hope our leaders will..." I realize things are moving quickly, and the stakes are high here, but thinking about what happens if the hopes are not met might be a next step.
If they're truly principled, and these are true red lines, given no other recourse, I would be impressed if Anthropic decided to shut down the company. Won't happen, but I would be smashing that F key if they did.
The other two definitely never would in a million years.
Yeah, it's a nice gesture, but having watched Google handle the protests in recent years and their culture inching a step closer to Amazon, I do not foresee their leadership being swayed by employee resistance. They'll either quietly sign an agreement and discreetly implement it, or they will go scorched earth on their employees again.
The other unions are also run by their members. And they had a constitution. It's just the truth that most people who join a union are trying to kick out minorities. And when the minorities band together and the majority bands together one of these bands is bigger than the other.
And people like to flag kill the truth but it was a union who got the Koreans deported and it was a union that made it so the Chinese couldn't get citizenship. These are facts and the guys who would be their victims haven't forgotten it. Obviously the majority would like to hide this inconvenient truth using the tool this site offers to do that, but it doesn't change the truth, and these people know it.
I've gathered that the dispute is over Anthropic's two red lines: mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. Is there any information (or rumors even) about what the specific request was? I can't believe the government would be escalating this hard over "we might want to do autonomous weapons in the vague, distant future" without a concrete, immediate request that Anthropic was denying.
Even if there was a desire for autonomous weapons (beyond what Anduril is already developing), I would think it would go through a standard defense procurement procedure, and the AI would be one of many components that a contractor would then try to build. It would have nothing to do with the existing contract between Anthropic and the Dept of War.
My understanding is that it’s about the contract allowing Anthropic to refuse service when they deem a red line has been crossed. Hegseth and friends probably don’t want any discussions to even start, about whether a red line may be in the process of being crossed,
and having to answer to that. They don’t want the legality or ethicality of any operation to be under Anthropic’s purview at all.
I think you're right, this isn't about a specific request but about defense contractors not getting to draw moral red lines. Palmer Luckey's statement on X/Twitter reflects the same idea: https://x.com/PalmerLuckey/status/2027500334999081294
The thinking seems to be that you can't have every defense contractor coming in with their own, separate set of red lines that they can adjudicate themselves and enforce unilaterally. Imagine if every missile, ship, plane, gun, and defense software builder had their own set of moral red lines and their own remote kill switch for different parts of your defense infrastructure. Palmer would prefer that the President wield these powers through his Constitutional role as commander-in-chief.
It’s about punishing a company that is not complying. It’s a show of force to deter any future objections on moral grounds from companies that want to do business with the US gov.
At this point I'd go far to say I wouldn't trust any company with my AI history that caves to DoD demands for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons.
Your AI will know more about you than any other company, not going to be trusting that to anyone who trades ethics for profits.
This is why you can't gatekeep AI capabilities. It will eventually be taken from you by force.
It's time to open-source everything. Papers, code, weights, financial records. Do all of your research in the open. Run 100% transparent labs so that there's nothing to take from you. Level the playing field for good and bad actors alike, otherwise the bad actors will get their hands on it while everyone else is left behind. Start a movement to make fully transparent AI labs the worldwide norm, and any org that doesn't cooperate is immediately boycotted.
Stop comparing AI capabilities to nuclear weapons. A nuke cannot protect against or reverse the damage of another nuke. AI capabilities are not like nukes. General intelligence should not be in the hands of a few. Give it to everyone and the good will prevail.
Build a world where millions of AGIs run on millions of gaming PCs, where each AI is aligned with an individual human, not a corporation or government (which are machiavellian out of necessity). This is humanity's best chance at survival.
You never actually say that part, unless it's "It will eventually be taken from you by force" which doesn't seem applicable to this situation or this site?
I'm referring to the current situation. How is it not applicable? I think the government wants to eventually nationalize these companies and we have to stop them.
Open Source here is not enough as hardware ownership matters. In an open source world, you and I cannot run the 10 trillion param model, but the data center controllers can.
I agree. We will need hardware ownership as well eventually. But the earlier you open-source, the more you slow down the centralization because people will be more likely to buy hardware to run stuff at home and that gives hardware companies an opening to do the right thing.
I'd prefer something akin to the Biological Weapons Treaty which prohibits development, production and transfer. If you think it isn't possible you have to tell me why the bioweapons convention was successful and why it wouldn't be in the case of AI.
The point I would make: there are historical examples of international cooperation that work at least for some lengths of time. This is a good thing, a good tool to strive for, albeit difficult to reach.
There might be a small percentage of people nihilistic enough to want to unleash a truly devastating bioweapon, but basically everyone wants what AI has to offer.
I think that's a key difference as well.
And how would a treaty like that be enforced? Every country has legitimate uses for GPUs, to make a rendering farm or simulations or do anything else involving matrix operations.
All of the technology involved, in more or less the configuration needed to make your own ChatGPT, is dual use.
because bio-weapons labs take more to run than a workstation pc under your desk with a good graphics card. both in equipment material and training. Its hard to outlaw use of linear algebra and matrix multiplications.
A "world where millions of AGIs run on millions of gaming PCs, where each AI is aligned with an individual human" would be a world in which people could easily create humanity-ending bioweapons. I would love to live in a less vulnerable world, and am working full time to bring about such a world, but in the meantime what you describe would likely be a disaster.
There are plenty of physical and legal barriers to creating a bioweapon and that's not going to change if everyone becomes smarter with AI. And even if we really somehow end up in a world where everyone has a lab at home and people can easily create viruses, they can also easily create vaccines and anti-virals. The advancements in medicine will outpace bioweapons by a lot because most people are afraid of bioweapons.
Intelligence itself is not dangerous unless only a few orgs control it and it's aligned to those orgs' values rather than human values. The safety narrative is just "intelligence for me, but not for thee" in disguise.
There mostly aren't physical barriers. Unlike nukes, where you need specific materials and equipment that we can try to keep tabs on, bioweapons can be made entirely with materials and equipment that would not be out of place in an academic or commercial lab. The largest limitation is knowledge, and the barriers there are falling quickly.
Symmetry is not guaranteed. If someone creates a deadly pathogen with a long pre-symptomatic period (which we know is possible, since HIV works this way) it could infect essentially everyone before discovery. Yes, powerful AI would likely rapidly speed up the process of responding to the threat after detection, especially in designing countermeasures, but if we don't learn about the threat in time we lose.
There are people today who could create such a pathogen, but not many. Widespread access to powerful AI risks lowering the bar enough that we get overlap between "people who want to kill us all" and "people able to kill us all".
This is not a gotcha argument, this is what I work full time on preventing: https://naobservatory.org The world must be in a position to detect attacks early enough that they won't succeed, and we're not there yet.
For every person that thinks about creating the HIV-like deadly pathogen, there will be millions more thinking about how to defend people against such pathogen, how to detect it faster before symptoms arise, how to put up barriers to creating them, and possibly even how to modify our bodies to be naturally resilient to all similar pathogens. Just like what you're doing here. I don't think we should mark knowledge or intelligence itself as the problem. If that's true then we should be making everyone dumber.
This is just not thinking clearly. There are bad things that are asymmetric in character, dramatically easier to do than to mitigate. There’s no antidote or vaccine to nuclear weapons.
This is exactly the thinking that has characterized responses to new sources of power through history, and has been consistently used to excuse hoarding of that power. In the end, enlightenment thinking has largely won out in the western world, and society has prospered as a result.
Centralizing power is dangerous and leads to power struggles and instability.
It is not easy to create weapons. Why do you think the physical and legal barriers that exist today that prevent you from acquiring equipment and creating nuclear weapons will go away when everyone becomes smarter?
If they actually wanted to do something they wouldn’t have sat back and funded Republican political campaigns because they were pissed about the head of the ftc under Biden.
But they didn’t. They gave millions to this guy and now they’re feigning ignorance or change ir wherever this is.
We shouldn't be scammed by people who intend to get back on the Trump train once they've gotten what they want. But if someone's willing to openly oppose the Trump regime, even out of self-interest, I'm happy to let them feign as much ignorance as they'd like. If his power isn't broken the details of who resisted him when won't matter.
> This is why you can't gatekeep AI capabilities. They will eventually be taken from you by force.
Some form of US AI lab nationalization is possible, but it hasn't happened yet. We'll see. Nationalization can take different forms, not to mention various arrangements well short of it.
I interpret the comment above as a normative claim (what should happen). It implies the nationalization threat forces the decision by the AI labs. No. I will grant it influences, in the sense that AI labs have to account for it.
We all knew AI had the potential to be extremely powerful, and we all perused it anyways. What did we think would happen? The government/military always takes control of the most powerful/dangerous systems. If you work for a defense contractor or under ITAR then you already know this.
The right way to deal with this is political - corporate campaign contributions and lobbying. You're not going to be able to fight the military if they think they need something for national security.
Why are the signing employees (at least the anonymous ones) trusting the creators of this website? What if it was set up by someone who wanted to gather a list of all the dissidents who would silently protest or leave the companies or whatever? Do you know whom you are going to hold accountable if it turns out these folks don't delete your verification data, or share it with your employer, or worse?
Also, another warning to anonymous users: it's a little bit naive to trust the "Google Forms" verification option more than the email one, given such employers probably the ability to monitor anything you do on your device, even if it's loading the form. And, in Google's case, they could obviously see what forms you submitted on the servers, too. If you're anonymous, you might as well use the alternate verification option.
Anyway - I'm not claiming it's likely that the website creator is malicious, but surely it's not beyond question? The website authors don't even seem to be providing others with the verification that they are themselves asking for.
P.S. I fully realize realizing these itself might make fewer people sign the form, which may be unfortunate, but it seems worth a mention.
>We are the employees of Google and OpenAI, two of the top AI companies in the world.
Does this mean you dipshits are going to stop your own domestic surveillance programs? You sold your souls to the devil decades ago, don't pretend like you have principles now.
The book "On Tyranny: 20 lessons from the 20th century" by the historian Timothy Snyder is an excellent read for these times. The very first lesson is "Do not obey in advance". It's about how authoritarian power often doesn't need to force compliance, people simply bend the knee in anticipation of being forced. This simply emboldens the authoritarians to go further.
I've been disappointed to see many businesses and institutions obeying in advance recently. I hope this moment wakes up the tech community and beyond.
Sam Altman tells staff at an all-hands that OpenAI is negotiating a deal with the Pentagon, after Trump orders the end of Anthropic contracts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47188698
Would you like to see this extended globally? Could such a spirit exist multinationally? It’s asking a lot, because you’d be asking for a lot of courage from places like China, India, Russia, Middle East … anywhere that’s not Europe basically.
Well yes, but context matters here and this is the US government's decision to take with a US-based company.
While I understand why it matters for folks affiliated with prominent AI companies in particular to sign this, the more the American people stand together, the more pressure I think that puts on our government to act responsibly.
Idealistic and naive? Probably. But sometimes grassroots efforts do spark change, and it's high time the people of the USA start living up to the first word in our country's name.
Anyways, to answer your question directly: I welcome all the fine people of the world everywhere to join in what this open letter stands for.
Unfortunately, it's abundantly clear to many of us Americans that the current administration doesn't care what we think, never mind what people outside our country do. So I'll just start with the group that this department (in theory) is supposed to represent.
Imagine if a gun manufacturer sold a gun that you couldn't use against X or Y country. Private companies imposing such demands on our military should not be respected. Having weapons that can randomly detect a false positive and shut themselves down because they think you are using it wrong is a feature I would never want built in.
I have also been against these terms of services of restricting usage of AI models. It is ridiculous that these private companies get to dictate what I can or can't do with the tools. No other tools work like this. Every other tools is going to be governed by the legal system which the people of the country have established.
> Imagine if a gun manufacturer sold a gun that you couldn't use against X or Y country.
The point here, of course, being that Anthropic is very specifically claiming to not be a gun manufacturer, and Hegseth's response is that the DoD (W?) will force anthropic to build guns.
Both the automated verification methods depend on Google servers and Google can almost certainly retrieve that data if they want to regardless of if the signers or verifiers delete it.
You're assuming a lot about Elon's ability to assemble and execute a process competently. They will probably end up hiring people off this list and firing them later.
I think what is much more interesting is what OpenAI and Google will do. There's probably some threshold of signatories where the companies in question do not fire everyone when they decide they want the DoD's business, the question will be how many people have to sign to cross it... and will enough people sign.
I don't think Google would bat an eye at firing 500 people to secure a DoD contract, but would they fire 5,000?
You have 1) stolen everybody's shit and put it behind a paywall, 2) cornered the hardware market in some RICO-worthy offensive that has priced one of the few affordable pasttimes for young people out of reach, 3) changed your climate story (lie) on a dime, and started putting the horrible power-guzzling data centers on any strip of land within spitting distance of a power plant. I hope you all go out of business, and I hope it happens French Revolution style.
Of course they were going to use it for military purposes you spiritual abortions, and there is nothing your keyboard-soft hands can do about it.
They've already been using Signal - which is "commercial" app, meaning it's not meant to be used like that - for top-secret (or at least highly sensitive) military communications during the military strikes on Yemen. If that was fake, I apologise, I was deceived. I wouldn't be surprised if things turned out that way again, to be honest. That's something to be expected, actually (IMO).
I see comments like this all the time on HN, including between community members. Why are you showing up now? Altman may be former YC and friends with Paul Graham, but he’s nevertheless a public figure and does plenty to deserve ridicule.
Are we allowed, for example, to call Trump an insecure man with orange skin and tiny hands? Is that a violation of our allowed speech?
We have international laws and rules of war. We have weapon treaties (well, some of them are expiring). Sure, not everyone is signatory, or even follow the conventions they have ratified, but at least having these things in place makes it even remotely possible to categorize and document violations and start processes towards rulebreakers and antihumanist actions.
So I looked into what they cooked up in 2023, plus which countries signed it (scroll down to a link to the actual text). It's an extraordinarily pathetic text. Insulting even.
We will not be divided! United in obeying only orders from woke governments, be it on gender ideology, "misinformation", "fact checking" or takedowns, cancellations, blackouts and bans.
>After famed investor Marc Andreessen met with government officials about the future of tech last May, he was “very scared” and described the meetings as “absolutely horrifying.” These meetings played a key role on why he endorsed Trump, he told journalist Bari Weiss this week on her podcast.
>What scared him most was what some said about the government’s role in AI, and what he described as a young staff who were “radicalized” and “out for blood” and whose policy ideas would be “damaging” to his and Silicon Valley’s interests.
>He walked away believing they endorsed having the government control AI to the point of being market makers, allowing only a couple of companies who cooperated with the government to thrive. He felt they discouraged his investments in AI. “They actually said flat out to us, ‘don't do AI startups like, don't fund AI startups,” he said.
...
keep making petitions, watch the whole thing burn to the ground when Trump decides to channel the Biden ideas in this field.
We should care because if they win they empower others to stand up as well, and not just in the area of AI safety. Courage is contagious, and whatever else you think of Anthropic, they’re showing real courage here.
Yeah, I find it funny how we're now defending these AI companies, when they're clearly still an enemy of the working class.
They've made it incredibly clear their plans are to disenfranchise labor, and welcome in a world of God knows what with their technologies. Like they're making a stand on mass surveillance, this seems a bit like a red herring, cool they stop using their tools for war fighting, but continue to attack their fellow working working class?
All three of these companies are spending hundreds of millions to psyop decision makers across every industry to give your salary to them. Get out of here, with "We will not be divided" OpenAI, Google and Anthropic employees are not friends of labor and should not use our phrases.. or they'd sabotage and or quit.
And why is there no mention of how we caught OpenAI being used in government dashboards through Persona, only two weeks ago, that were directly connected to intelligence organizations and tools to identify if you are politician or high profile personds? OpenAI has been complicit in this since last January when 4o was the first model that qualified for "top secret operations"
(kind of weird how 4o went onto cause a bunch of people to go literally insane and commit crazy acts of violence yet is allowed to be used in the most sensitive aspects of government.. nothing to see here).
If the AI companies and the current administration are both enemies of the working class - I am not necessarily saying that they are, but for the sake of argument let's say that they are - then it probably makes strategic sense for the working class to encourage them to fight each other while supporting the side that is less dangerous. Which side is less dangerous to the working class, I do not know. My point is that there's not necessarily any strategic contradiction between defending the AI companies and supporting the working class.
Unless forced, I’m reluctant to score an organization as just one point on a one dimensional scale. (Some won’t even use one dimension; they reduce it to a single bit.)
Instead, I look at specific actions in context. What Anthropic did today was “amazing” to a first approximation in my eyes, even if it not purely altruistic. (Chris Anderson, the curator of TED, argues in favor of selfish generosity in his 2024 book, Infectious Generosity. I think a similar argument holds here with Anthropic.)
At the same time, I might gesture at other actions they’ve done that fall short. This is not inconsistent; this is simply acknowledging miltidimensionality.
Yes, I understand that it is sometimes useful to reduce dimensions for analysis. Just remember that doing so requires building a transformation from N dimensions to 1. And what are the chances that one person’s transformation is widely held? It depends, but it is safer to not assume. Therefore, it isn’t very helpful to get wrapped around the axle debating a one dimensional number. I find it more useful to gather good factual data, think about the problem at hand, and find good ways to understand it.
Anthropic has enough investment money and enough additional investor interest that they can ride this out longer than this administration. It won’t be good for business, of course, but it’s not the end of their world.
> it will just be perfect proof that you cannot be both moral and successful in the US.
I hate this situation as much as anyone, but it’s a unique, first of its kind challenge. I don’t think it’s generalizable to anything. This is a unique situation.
This reads a whole lot like the government gets to make you do whatever it wants because the president was elected?
Freedom!
That's great that responsibility for offensive decisions ultimately lie with the civilian leaders of the military, but that does not give them the right to compel behavior from private citizens under threat of the government obliterating them.
This conflict has zero to do with AI in the grand scheme of things. We had a whole supreme court case about refusing service to customers. Remember that? Private companies can choose which customers to service. And let's be clear about what's being sold. It's not a product that changes hands, it's a service provided continually. And as anyone except the enlisted military troops can, said vendor can choose which efforts to help with. If what the government wants is so onerous as to find no vendors to offer it then that says something doesn't it?
That link is specifically discussing actions the government takes in war. Like, a real, ongoing, war where it's accepted extraordinary actions may be necessary that conflict with peacetime rights to private property (it was written during World War 2).
"Seemingly innocuous terms from the latter like "You cannot target innocent civilians" are actually moral minefields that lever differences of cultural tradition into massive control."
Good grief - we happen to have a free market with multiple suppliers. But a defense contractor in deep with the current administration’s ideology might have a hard time remembering that.
I agree with Palmer that Corporations shouldn't control governments.
But that's not what this is about. The US government is free to not use Anthropic's services.
The problem is that the government is using bullying tactics against a company excercising it's rights to not sell. Especially if they actually designate Anthropic as a supply chain risk - not only is that threat absolutely ridiculous, but actually doing so should be 9/10 on the danger scale.
WTF is even happening anymore? How did we get here that this is even up for debate???
A lot of words and somehow still missing the point. This is a pretty straightforward question: should the US government be able to force a company to do business with it based the government's unilateral terms? I think the answer to that ought to be no, they should not be forced. And there's no other discussion to have.
You can discuss whether a corporation is violating some law, and punish them if they are, but I don't think jumping from "corporation doesn't want to do business with the gov" to "corporation is a national security risk" makes any sense.
Palmer Luckey is excusing the inexcusable for treats from the regime. If the regime gets away with this, when constitutional government is restored, I will be petitioning my congresspeople to destroy Anduril in retaliation.
None of this is relevant. They’re saying “our stuff can’t be used effectively for X but you can use it for Y”. It’s like if someone was saying “dude the o ring is going to fail on the shuttle launch” and you respond “if we have random people permitted to stop the shuttle launch every time we will never get off the ground”.
The rhetorical technique of generalizing a specific constraint is very effective in the peanut gallery but hopefully we don’t want our shuttles to blow up.
From Palmer Luckey who worshipped Trump as a teenager? Who has billions in contracts due to his sycophancy? Just like Joe Lonsdale and Peter Thiel? Yea his opinion is irrelevant.
> Should our military be regulated by our elected leaders
Utterly fallacious. Trump is not a leader (rather he is a divider). Nor was he elected to act as a dictator unbeholden to the Constitution or the courts. Corporate control is indeed terrible, but autocratic authoritarianism is worse. This gradient is shown by how it is only the rare company trying to impart some kind of restraint which is being taken to task.
It's also pretty amazing how no matter which societal institution we try to invoke to put the brakes on the fascists, we're invariably told that the "proper approach" is actually something else, settling around simply waiting for an election, some time down the road, maybe. The fascists won a single election, and so we're told that supposedly serves as a mandate for doing whatever they'd like to our country for the next four years? Yeah, no, fuck off.
The only way they survive is if their board fires the CEO and they bend the knee. The other option is they are given the green light to sell to one of the US Governments trusted partners: Microsoft/Oracle/X.
Good luck with that. I just don't see either Google or OpenAI listening to their employees on this. They might have their own reasons for not wanting to help build Skynet, but if they don't, I'm sure those employees can readily be replaced with somebody more compliant.
In this case I think the opponents made a huge mistake by calling themselves Department of War, and it's something that can be exploited.
Department of Defense was the actual lie, the newspeak term. They were not really defending anything, they were using military power globally for pursuing economic interests. However, it was easy to convince people that the whole endeavor was a good thing, because defending your country against the baddies is good, and you should support anyone doing that (otherwise you'd be a traitor!). Thank you for your service (defending us).
On the other hand, the term Department of War is hard to sell, because most people don't want to participate in a war or support someone who wants to start one. Thank you for your service... invading other countries? killing and raping innocents? ransacking resources?
This is an irrelevant detail, but if I'd read the title "Department of Defense vs. Meta", I'd first think Meta is leaking confidential info to other countries. However, if I'd read "Department of War vs. Meta", I'd think Meta doesn't want to promote an unnecessary war.
So big tech wants to court Trump with millions in donations and now that the big bully they supported is bullying them.. we’re supposed to feel some kind of sympathy? Am I missing something here? Why did Anthropic get involved with the military in the first place?
Anthropic appears to be situating themselves where they are set up as the "ethical AI" in the mindspace of, well, anyone paying attention. But I am still trying to figure out where exactly Hegseth, or anyone in DoW, asked Anthropic to conduct illegal domestic spying or launch a system that removes HITL kill chains. Is this all just some big hypothetical that we're all debating (hallucinating)? This[1] appears to be the memo that may (or may not) have caused Hagesth and Dario to go at each other so hard, presumably over this paragraph:
>Clarifying "Responsible Al" at the DoW - Out with Utopian Idealism, In with Hard-Nosed Realism. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and social ideology have no place in the DoW, so we must not employ AI models which incorporate ideological "tuning" that interferes with their ability to provide objectively truthful responses to user prompts. The Department must also utilize models free from usage policy constraints that may limit lawful military applications. Therefore, I direct the CDAO to establish benchmarks for model objectivity as a primary procurement criterion within 90 days, and I direct the Under Secretary of War for Acquisition and Sustainment to incorporate standard "any lawful use" language into any DoW contract through which AI services are procured within 180 days. I also direct the CDAO to.ensure all existing AI policy guidance at the Department aligns with the directives laid out in this memorandum.
So, the "any lawful use" language makes me think that Dario et al have a basket of uses in their minds that they feel should be illegal, but are not currently, and they want to condition further participation in this defense program on not being required to engage in such activity that they deem ought be illegal.
It is no surprise that the government is reacting poorly to this. Without commenting on the ethics of AI-enabled surveillance or non-HITL kill chains, which are fraught, I understand why a department of government charged with making war is uninterested in debating this as terms of the contract itself. Perhaps the best place for that is Congress (good luck), but to remind: the adversary that these people are all thinking about here is PRC, who does not give a single shit about anyone's feelings on whether it's ethical or not to allow a drone system to drop ordinance on it's own.
It's rather amusing that this is the proverbial 'red line', not y'know, everything else this administration has been tearing up and running roughshod over. Maybe this would've been less of an issue if companies were more proactive about this bullshit in the first place?
That's why it's hard for me to feel bad about companies suddenly finding themselves on the receiving end. They dug their grave inch by inch and are suddenly surprised when they get shoved into it.
>The executive branch can categorize AI technology as equivalent to nuclear weapons technology.
Theoretically, but this would run the risk of collapsing the US tech sector, which at this point is a significant part of the strength of the US economy, and thus making it likely that the Republicans will lose power in the next elections.
That's what taking a stand looks like... if any of these employees lose their job, they are welcome to come crash at my place for as long as they would like; they will have a roof over their head and I will cook them 3 meals a day.
My take is that none of the AI companies really care (companies can't care), they just realize that if they go down that road, public opinion will be so vehemently against AI in all forms that it will be regulated out of viability by the electorate.
Also, if AI exists, AI will be used for war. The AI company employees are kidding themselves if they think otherwise, and yet they are still building it (as opposed to resigning and working on something else), because in the end, money is the only true God in this world.
Anthropic does not object to its use for war. In fact Anthropic explicitly allows its semi-autonomous use in war, e.g. for identifying targets. They just won't permit its use for full autonomous war, yet, because they don't believe it's safe enough.
Since when has war been waged according to the whim of a corporation?
The tools will be used however the government wants them to be used. The government makes the laws and wages the wars, and the corporation will follow the law whether it wants to or not.
So either you are willing to work on a tool that is not under your control, or you are not.
I can't help but notice that Grok/X is not part of this initiative, though. I realize that frontier models are really coming from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google, but it feels like someone is going to give in to these demands.
It's incredible how quickly we've devolved into full-blown sci-fi dystopia.
Head(s) will of course agree with the administration. And employees will likely be making themselves a target if they sign this letter. All anonymous from said company is not a good look at all.
Speculation of course; let's see what really happens.
The current political climate is this is the kind of thing that will get you "investigated" and charged with crimes.
And the government has already threatened that it will commandeer these companies whether they like it or not.
If someone in charge wants to make a difference, there might be more effective things to do than to speak out in this instance.
Only if you're naive. I guess most here are.
Governments are paranoid, particularly about losing control and influence over its subjects. This is expected behaviour.
The question isn’t if some would attempt these behaviors, but rather if we and our democratic structures empower those people or fail to constrain them.
please realize that there's likely a group chat out there somewhere where all of these concerns have already been raised and considered. The best thing you can do is ask how you as an outsider can help support these organizers
All of this should remain a bridge too far, forever.
I’m sure nothing good can come out of strong-arming some of the brightest scientists and engineers the U.S. has. Such a waste of talent trying to make them bend over to the government’s wishes… instead of actually fostering innovation in the very competitive AI industry.
You can argue that the government refusing to do any business with company A is overreach, I suppose, but I imagine that the next logical escalation in this rhetorical slapfight is going to be the government saying "we cannot guarantee that any particular use will not include some version of X, and therefore we have to prevent working with this supplier"...which I sort of see?
Just to take the metaphor to absurdity, imagine that a maker of canned tomatoes decided to declare that their product cannot be used to "support a war on terror". Regardless of your feelings on wars on terror and/or canned tomatoes, the government would be entirely rational to avoid using that supplier.
This is literally the mechanism by which the DoD does what you're suggesting.
Generally speaking, the DoD has to do procurement via competitive bidding. They can't just arbitrarily exclude vendors from a bid, and playing a game of "mother may I use Anthropic?" for every potential government contract is hugely inefficient (and possibly illegal). So they have a pre-defined mechanism to exclude vendors for pre-defined reasons.
Everyone is fixated on the name of the rule (and to be fair: the administration is emphasizing that name for irritating rhetorical reasons), but if they called it the "DoD vendor exclusion list", it would be more accurate.
Yes, this is the part where I acknowledge that it might be overreach in my original comment, but it's not nearly as extreme or obvious as the debate rhetoric is implying. There are various exclusion rules. This particular rule was (speculating here!) probably chosen because a) the evocative name (sigh), and b) because it allows broader exclusion, in that "supply chain risks" are something you wouldn't want allowed in at any level of procurement, for obvious reasons.
Calling canned tomatoes a supply chain risk would be pretty absurd (unless, I don't know...they were found to be farmed by North Korea or something), but I can certainly see an argument for software, and in particular, generative AI products. I bet some people here would be celebrating if Microsoft were labeled a supply chain risk due to a long history of bugs, for example.
> (b) Prohibition. (1) Unless an applicable waiver has been issued by the issuing official, Contractors shall not provide or use as part of the performance of the contract any covered article, or any products or services produced or provided by a source, if the covered article or the source is prohibited by an applicable FASCSA orders as follows:
https://www.acquisition.gov/far/52.204-30
This issue is about more than the government blacklisting a company for government procurement purposes.
From what I understand, the government is floating the idea of compelling Anthropic — and, by extension, its employees — to do as the DoD pleases.
If the employees’ resistance is strong enough, there’s no way this will serve the government’s interests.
And where would they emigrate? Russia? China? UAE? :-)
The EU (which is not the same as Europe), is also looking a bit sharper on AI regulation at the moment (for now… not perfect but sharper etc etc).
Not to mention UK is arguably further down the mass surveillance pipeline than the US. They’ve always had more aggressive domestic intelligence surveillance laws which was made clear during the Snowden years, they’ve had flock style cameras forever, and they have an anti encryption law pitched seemingly yearly.
I’d imagine most top engineers would rather try to push back on the US executive branch overreach than move. At least for the time being.
I’m not gonna dispute the UK being further down some parts of the road.
Not sure what you’d count as top engineers, but I know enough that have been asking about and moving to the UK/EU that it’s been a noticeable reversal of the historic trends. Also, a major slowdown of these kinds of people in the UK/EU wanting to move to the US.
Which is why people are talking about this -- it's about ideology now.
You may personally be motivated solely by money. Not everybody is you.
Ideology is easy to throw around for internet comments but working on the cutting edge stuff next to the brightest minds in the space will always be a major personal draw. Just look at the Manhattan project, I doubt the primary draw for all of those academics was getting to work on a bomb. It was the science, huge funding, and interpersonal company.
This also isn’t hypothetical. I know top-talent engineers and researchers that have moved out of the USA in the last 12 months due to the political climate (which goes beyond just the AI topics).
And you might want to read a few books on the Manhattan project and the people involved before you use that analogy. I don’t think it’s particularly strong.
And the US can’t realistically stop our well-funded homegrown AI Hardware startups from manufacturing with TSMC. This is part of why there’s funding from the EU to develop Sovereign AI capabilities, currently focused on designing our own hardware. We’re nothing like as far behind as you might expect in terms of tech, just in terms of scale.
Also, while US export restrictions might make things awkward for a short while, it wouldn’t stop European innovation. The chips still flow, our own hardware companies would scale faster due to demand increase, and there’s the adage about adversity being the parent of all innovation (or however it goes).
See what happened to Russian Baikal production on TSMC
Or because of the revoked processor design licenses from the British company Arm (which is still UK headquartered… despite being NASDAQ listed and largely owned by Japanese firm SoftBank)?
Or perhaps you think the US could stop us using the 12nm fabs being built by TSMC on European soil? Or could stop us manufacturing RISC-V-based chips (Swiss-headquartered technology)?
The US is weak in digital-logic silicon fabrication and it knows it. That’s why it’s been so panicked about Intel and been trying to get TSMC to build fabs on US soil. They’re pouring tens of billions of dollars into trying to claw back ownership and control of it, but it’s not like Europe or China or others are standing still on it either.
Being built as in not operating yet?
12 nm gpu is what? Nvidia 1080/2060 level? Those top researchers mentioned would love to train on that. Also how many gpus would be made annually?
Also what about CPU? You gonna use risc-v? With what toolchain?
Chinese could pull it in a few years, yeah.
EU? Nah. Started thinking about sovereignty too late compared to China
The fabs aren't, and that is no small thing. The tech stack is there though.
It's pretty tiresome that the HN audience keeps assuming Europe doesn't have "tech" because it doesn't have Facebook. Where do you think all the wealth comes from? Europe is all over everyone's R&D and supply chain.
At the end of the day it’s a matter of incentives, and good knowledge work can’t simply be forced out of people that are unwilling to cooperate.
Now the DoD, who are by far the largest budgetary expense for the tax payer, wants us to believe they don't have a better Ai than current industry? That is a double sword admission; either they are exposing themselves again as economic decision makers, or admitting they spend money on routine BS with zero frontier war fighting capabilities.
Either way, it is beyond time to reform the Military and remove the majority of its leadership as incompetent stewards and strategists. That doesn't even include the massive security vulnerabilities in our supply chains given military needs in various countries. (Taiwan and Thailand)
not even top 3
Companies who subscribed will find themselves without an important tool because the president went on a rant, and might wonder if it’s safe to depend on other American companies.
The other two definitely never would in a million years.
(Please edit comment to remove names incase they want to remove from OP)
And people like to flag kill the truth but it was a union who got the Koreans deported and it was a union that made it so the Chinese couldn't get citizenship. These are facts and the guys who would be their victims haven't forgotten it. Obviously the majority would like to hide this inconvenient truth using the tool this site offers to do that, but it doesn't change the truth, and these people know it.
If you're an employee and actually believe in this you need to commit to something, like resigning.
Any collective action should be encouraged
Even if there was a desire for autonomous weapons (beyond what Anduril is already developing), I would think it would go through a standard defense procurement procedure, and the AI would be one of many components that a contractor would then try to build. It would have nothing to do with the existing contract between Anthropic and the Dept of War.
What, then, is this really about?
The thinking seems to be that you can't have every defense contractor coming in with their own, separate set of red lines that they can adjudicate themselves and enforce unilaterally. Imagine if every missile, ship, plane, gun, and defense software builder had their own set of moral red lines and their own remote kill switch for different parts of your defense infrastructure. Palmer would prefer that the President wield these powers through his Constitutional role as commander-in-chief.
What is "it" in your comment?
The refusal to sign a contract with Anthropic, or their designation as a supply chain risk?
At this point I'd go far to say I wouldn't trust any company with my AI history that caves to DoD demands for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons.
Your AI will know more about you than any other company, not going to be trusting that to anyone who trades ethics for profits.
It's time to open-source everything. Papers, code, weights, financial records. Do all of your research in the open. Run 100% transparent labs so that there's nothing to take from you. Level the playing field for good and bad actors alike, otherwise the bad actors will get their hands on it while everyone else is left behind. Start a movement to make fully transparent AI labs the worldwide norm, and any org that doesn't cooperate is immediately boycotted.
Stop comparing AI capabilities to nuclear weapons. A nuke cannot protect against or reverse the damage of another nuke. AI capabilities are not like nukes. General intelligence should not be in the hands of a few. Give it to everyone and the good will prevail.
Build a world where millions of AGIs run on millions of gaming PCs, where each AI is aligned with an individual human, not a corporation or government (which are machiavellian out of necessity). This is humanity's best chance at survival.
What is why?
You never actually say that part, unless it's "It will eventually be taken from you by force" which doesn't seem applicable to this situation or this site?
Nukes are actually a great example of something also gated by resources. Just having the knowledge/plans isn't good enough.
Costs a few hundred thousand per server, it's a huge expense if you want it at your home but a rounding error for most organizations.
Was it successful? The jury is still out.
I think that's a key difference as well.
And how would a treaty like that be enforced? Every country has legitimate uses for GPUs, to make a rendering farm or simulations or do anything else involving matrix operations.
All of the technology involved, in more or less the configuration needed to make your own ChatGPT, is dual use.
Intelligence itself is not dangerous unless only a few orgs control it and it's aligned to those orgs' values rather than human values. The safety narrative is just "intelligence for me, but not for thee" in disguise.
On your second point, see my response to oceanplexian below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189385
We live in a free society. AI should be democratized like any other technology.
There are people today who could create such a pathogen, but not many. Widespread access to powerful AI risks lowering the bar enough that we get overlap between "people who want to kill us all" and "people able to kill us all".
This is not a gotcha argument, this is what I work full time on preventing: https://naobservatory.org The world must be in a position to detect attacks early enough that they won't succeed, and we're not there yet.
When you only allow gov and big tech access to powerful AI, you create a much more dangerous and unstable world.
Centralizing power is dangerous and leads to power struggles and instability.
We shouldn't expect these people to consider how the logic breaks down one step ahead when it never made sense in the first place.
If they actually wanted to do something they wouldn’t have sat back and funded Republican political campaigns because they were pissed about the head of the ftc under Biden.
But they didn’t. They gave millions to this guy and now they’re feigning ignorance or change ir wherever this is.
It’s meaningless. Utterly meaningless.
Get what you pay for, I suppose.
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/alphabet-inc/recipients?id=...
The corporation gave millions _after_ Trump had already won. If your criticism is that, then that does not apply to the people signing.
Some form of US AI lab nationalization is possible, but it hasn't happened yet. We'll see. Nationalization can take different forms, not to mention various arrangements well short of it.
I interpret the comment above as a normative claim (what should happen). It implies the nationalization threat forces the decision by the AI labs. No. I will grant it influences, in the sense that AI labs have to account for it.
The right way to deal with this is political - corporate campaign contributions and lobbying. You're not going to be able to fight the military if they think they need something for national security.
Also, another warning to anonymous users: it's a little bit naive to trust the "Google Forms" verification option more than the email one, given such employers probably the ability to monitor anything you do on your device, even if it's loading the form. And, in Google's case, they could obviously see what forms you submitted on the servers, too. If you're anonymous, you might as well use the alternate verification option.
Anyway - I'm not claiming it's likely that the website creator is malicious, but surely it's not beyond question? The website authors don't even seem to be providing others with the verification that they are themselves asking for.
P.S. I fully realize realizing these itself might make fewer people sign the form, which may be unfortunate, but it seems worth a mention.
spoiler alert: this is already happening
do labs in China have a choice in the matter?
Does this mean you dipshits are going to stop your own domestic surveillance programs? You sold your souls to the devil decades ago, don't pretend like you have principles now.
I've been disappointed to see many businesses and institutions obeying in advance recently. I hope this moment wakes up the tech community and beyond.
Statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47188697 - Feb 2026 (31 comments)
I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a supply-chain risk - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47186677 - Feb 2026 (872 comments)
President Trump bans Anthropic from use in government systems - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47186031 - Feb 2026 (111 comments)
Google workers seek 'red lines' on military A.I., echoing Anthropic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47175931 - Feb 2026 (132 comments)
Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47173121 - Feb 2026 (1527 comments)
The Pentagon Feuding with an AI Company Is a Bad Sign - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47168165 - Feb 2026 (33 comments)
The Pentagon threatens Anthropic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47154983 - Feb 2026 (125 comments)
US Military leaders meet with Anthropic to argue against Claude safeguards - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47145551 - Feb 2026 (99 comments)
Hegseth gives Anthropic until Friday to back down on AI safeguards - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47142587 - Feb 2026 (128 comments)
While I understand why it matters for folks affiliated with prominent AI companies in particular to sign this, the more the American people stand together, the more pressure I think that puts on our government to act responsibly.
Idealistic and naive? Probably. But sometimes grassroots efforts do spark change, and it's high time the people of the USA start living up to the first word in our country's name.
Anyways, to answer your question directly: I welcome all the fine people of the world everywhere to join in what this open letter stands for.
Unfortunately, it's abundantly clear to many of us Americans that the current administration doesn't care what we think, never mind what people outside our country do. So I'll just start with the group that this department (in theory) is supposed to represent.
I have also been against these terms of services of restricting usage of AI models. It is ridiculous that these private companies get to dictate what I can or can't do with the tools. No other tools work like this. Every other tools is going to be governed by the legal system which the people of the country have established.
The point here, of course, being that Anthropic is very specifically claiming to not be a gun manufacturer, and Hegseth's response is that the DoD (W?) will force anthropic to build guns.
https://x.ai/news/us-gov-dept-of-war
I think what is much more interesting is what OpenAI and Google will do. There's probably some threshold of signatories where the companies in question do not fire everyone when they decide they want the DoD's business, the question will be how many people have to sign to cross it... and will enough people sign.
I don't think Google would bat an eye at firing 500 people to secure a DoD contract, but would they fire 5,000?
My personal guess is that Sam Altman said he'd let policy violations go without a complaint and Dario Amodei said he wouldn't.
Of course they were going to use it for military purposes you spiritual abortions, and there is nothing your keyboard-soft hands can do about it.
They should reprint it to say "Step on me Daddy."
https://bsky.app/profile/verdverm.com/post/3mfuuogxjpk2b
(I wish this were a joke)
Pretty sure I remember that from the fumble
Perhaps you don't owe AI tycoons whose names start with A better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Are we allowed, for example, to call Trump an insecure man with orange skin and tiny hands? Is that a violation of our allowed speech?
https://x.com/i/status/2027487514395832410
So I looked into what they cooked up in 2023, plus which countries signed it (scroll down to a link to the actual text). It's an extraordinarily pathetic text. Insulting even.
https://www.state.gov/bureau-of-arms-control-deterrence-and-...
>After famed investor Marc Andreessen met with government officials about the future of tech last May, he was “very scared” and described the meetings as “absolutely horrifying.” These meetings played a key role on why he endorsed Trump, he told journalist Bari Weiss this week on her podcast.
>What scared him most was what some said about the government’s role in AI, and what he described as a young staff who were “radicalized” and “out for blood” and whose policy ideas would be “damaging” to his and Silicon Valley’s interests.
>He walked away believing they endorsed having the government control AI to the point of being market makers, allowing only a couple of companies who cooperated with the government to thrive. He felt they discouraged his investments in AI. “They actually said flat out to us, ‘don't do AI startups like, don't fund AI startups,” he said.
...
keep making petitions, watch the whole thing burn to the ground when Trump decides to channel the Biden ideas in this field.
They've made it incredibly clear their plans are to disenfranchise labor, and welcome in a world of God knows what with their technologies. Like they're making a stand on mass surveillance, this seems a bit like a red herring, cool they stop using their tools for war fighting, but continue to attack their fellow working working class?
All three of these companies are spending hundreds of millions to psyop decision makers across every industry to give your salary to them. Get out of here, with "We will not be divided" OpenAI, Google and Anthropic employees are not friends of labor and should not use our phrases.. or they'd sabotage and or quit.
And why is there no mention of how we caught OpenAI being used in government dashboards through Persona, only two weeks ago, that were directly connected to intelligence organizations and tools to identify if you are politician or high profile personds? OpenAI has been complicit in this since last January when 4o was the first model that qualified for "top secret operations"
(kind of weird how 4o went onto cause a bunch of people to go literally insane and commit crazy acts of violence yet is allowed to be used in the most sensitive aspects of government.. nothing to see here).
Instead, I look at specific actions in context. What Anthropic did today was “amazing” to a first approximation in my eyes, even if it not purely altruistic. (Chris Anderson, the curator of TED, argues in favor of selfish generosity in his 2024 book, Infectious Generosity. I think a similar argument holds here with Anthropic.)
At the same time, I might gesture at other actions they’ve done that fall short. This is not inconsistent; this is simply acknowledging miltidimensionality.
Yes, I understand that it is sometimes useful to reduce dimensions for analysis. Just remember that doing so requires building a transformation from N dimensions to 1. And what are the chances that one person’s transformation is widely held? It depends, but it is safer to not assume. Therefore, it isn’t very helpful to get wrapped around the axle debating a one dimensional number. I find it more useful to gather good factual data, think about the problem at hand, and find good ways to understand it.
> it will just be perfect proof that you cannot be both moral and successful in the US.
I hate this situation as much as anyone, but it’s a unique, first of its kind challenge. I don’t think it’s generalizable to anything. This is a unique situation.
I assumed the use of massive scraped datasets, with copyrighted material and without consent, to train large AI models, had already established this.
Freedom!
That's great that responsibility for offensive decisions ultimately lie with the civilian leaders of the military, but that does not give them the right to compel behavior from private citizens under threat of the government obliterating them.
https://www.oyez.org/cases/2017/16-111
https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...
Great article, it has a list of times it's been used to compel cooperation.
GEEEEE, I wonder who the bad guys are here.
But that's not what this is about. The US government is free to not use Anthropic's services.
The problem is that the government is using bullying tactics against a company excercising it's rights to not sell. Especially if they actually designate Anthropic as a supply chain risk - not only is that threat absolutely ridiculous, but actually doing so should be 9/10 on the danger scale.
WTF is even happening anymore? How did we get here that this is even up for debate???
You can discuss whether a corporation is violating some law, and punish them if they are, but I don't think jumping from "corporation doesn't want to do business with the gov" to "corporation is a national security risk" makes any sense.
What a fuckin' joke.
The rhetorical technique of generalizing a specific constraint is very effective in the peanut gallery but hopefully we don’t want our shuttles to blow up.
Utterly fallacious. Trump is not a leader (rather he is a divider). Nor was he elected to act as a dictator unbeholden to the Constitution or the courts. Corporate control is indeed terrible, but autocratic authoritarianism is worse. This gradient is shown by how it is only the rare company trying to impart some kind of restraint which is being taken to task.
It's also pretty amazing how no matter which societal institution we try to invoke to put the brakes on the fascists, we're invariably told that the "proper approach" is actually something else, settling around simply waiting for an election, some time down the road, maybe. The fascists won a single election, and so we're told that supposedly serves as a mandate for doing whatever they'd like to our country for the next four years? Yeah, no, fuck off.
I appreciate the sentiment but don’t preconcede to your opposition by using their framing.
Department of Defense was the actual lie, the newspeak term. They were not really defending anything, they were using military power globally for pursuing economic interests. However, it was easy to convince people that the whole endeavor was a good thing, because defending your country against the baddies is good, and you should support anyone doing that (otherwise you'd be a traitor!). Thank you for your service (defending us).
On the other hand, the term Department of War is hard to sell, because most people don't want to participate in a war or support someone who wants to start one. Thank you for your service... invading other countries? killing and raping innocents? ransacking resources?
This is an irrelevant detail, but if I'd read the title "Department of Defense vs. Meta", I'd first think Meta is leaking confidential info to other countries. However, if I'd read "Department of War vs. Meta", I'd think Meta doesn't want to promote an unnecessary war.
Anthropic appears to be situating themselves where they are set up as the "ethical AI" in the mindspace of, well, anyone paying attention. But I am still trying to figure out where exactly Hegseth, or anyone in DoW, asked Anthropic to conduct illegal domestic spying or launch a system that removes HITL kill chains. Is this all just some big hypothetical that we're all debating (hallucinating)? This[1] appears to be the memo that may (or may not) have caused Hagesth and Dario to go at each other so hard, presumably over this paragraph:
>Clarifying "Responsible Al" at the DoW - Out with Utopian Idealism, In with Hard-Nosed Realism. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and social ideology have no place in the DoW, so we must not employ AI models which incorporate ideological "tuning" that interferes with their ability to provide objectively truthful responses to user prompts. The Department must also utilize models free from usage policy constraints that may limit lawful military applications. Therefore, I direct the CDAO to establish benchmarks for model objectivity as a primary procurement criterion within 90 days, and I direct the Under Secretary of War for Acquisition and Sustainment to incorporate standard "any lawful use" language into any DoW contract through which AI services are procured within 180 days. I also direct the CDAO to.ensure all existing AI policy guidance at the Department aligns with the directives laid out in this memorandum.
So, the "any lawful use" language makes me think that Dario et al have a basket of uses in their minds that they feel should be illegal, but are not currently, and they want to condition further participation in this defense program on not being required to engage in such activity that they deem ought be illegal.
It is no surprise that the government is reacting poorly to this. Without commenting on the ethics of AI-enabled surveillance or non-HITL kill chains, which are fraught, I understand why a department of government charged with making war is uninterested in debating this as terms of the contract itself. Perhaps the best place for that is Congress (good luck), but to remind: the adversary that these people are all thinking about here is PRC, who does not give a single shit about anyone's feelings on whether it's ethical or not to allow a drone system to drop ordinance on it's own.
[1] https://media.defense.gov/2026/Jan/12/2003855671/-1/-1/0/ART...
That's why it's hard for me to feel bad about companies suddenly finding themselves on the receiving end. They dug their grave inch by inch and are suddenly surprised when they get shoved into it.
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
Theoretically, but this would run the risk of collapsing the US tech sector, which at this point is a significant part of the strength of the US economy, and thus making it likely that the Republicans will lose power in the next elections.
Most are, but not all.
Also, if AI exists, AI will be used for war. The AI company employees are kidding themselves if they think otherwise, and yet they are still building it (as opposed to resigning and working on something else), because in the end, money is the only true God in this world.
The tools will be used however the government wants them to be used. The government makes the laws and wages the wars, and the corporation will follow the law whether it wants to or not.
So either you are willing to work on a tool that is not under your control, or you are not.