The public spat between the Pentagon and Anthropic began after Axios reported that US military leaders used Claude to assist in planning its operation to capture Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro. After the operation, an employee at Palantir relayed concerns from an Anthropic staffer to US military leaders about how its models had been used. Anthropic has denied ever raising concerns or interfering with the Pentagon’s use of its technology. (Ars Technica).
Undersecretary of State Jeremy Lewin: This isn’t about Anthropic or the specific conditions at issue. It’s about the broader premise that technology deeply embedded in our military must be under the exclusive control of our duly elected/appointed leaders. No private company can dictate normative terms of use—which can change and are subject to interpretation—for our most sensitive national security systems. The @DeptofWar obviously can’t trust a system a private company can switch off at any moment.Dario Amodei and Anthropic responded to this on Thursday the 26th with this brave and historically important statement that everyone should read.
Timothy B. Lee: OK, so don't renew their contract. Why are you threatening to go nuclear by declaring them a supply chain risk?
Dean W. Ball: As I have been saying repeatedly, this principle is entirely defensible, and this is the single best articulation of it anyone in the administration has made.
The way to enforce this principle is to publicly and proudly decline to do business with firms that don’t agree to those terms. Cancel Anthropic’s contract, and make it publicly clear why you did so.
Right now, though, USG’s policy response is to attempt to destroy Anthropic’s business, and this is a dire mistake for both practical and principled reasons.
The statement makes clear that Anthropic wishes to work with the Department of War, and that they strongly wish to continue being government contractors, but that they cannot accept the Department of War’s terms, nor do any threats change their position. Response outside of DoW was overwhelmingly positive.
by Zvi Mowshowitz, DWAtV | Read more:
Image: Truth Social
[ed. Another rant from the Mad King™. Anthropic had a contract with DOD that included terms DOD now wants to reneg on. Just cancel the damn contract. See also: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War (Anthropic). My admiration for Amodei and Anthropic has gone up ten fold in the last two weeks. What's at stake (DWAtV):]
Axios calls this a ‘first step towards blacklisting Anthropic.’
I would instead call this as the start of a common sense first step you would take long before you actively threaten to slap a ‘supply chain risk’ designation on Anthropic. It indicates that the Pentagon has not done the investigation of ‘exactly how big of a cluster**** would this be’ and I highly encourage them to check.
This goes well beyond those people entirely ignoring existential risk. The Very Serious People are denying existence of powerful AI, or transformational AI, now and in the future, even on a mundane level, period. Dean came in concerned about impacts on developing economies in the Global South, and they can’t even discuss that.
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Axios calls this a ‘first step towards blacklisting Anthropic.’
I would instead call this as the start of a common sense first step you would take long before you actively threaten to slap a ‘supply chain risk’ designation on Anthropic. It indicates that the Pentagon has not done the investigation of ‘exactly how big of a cluster**** would this be’ and I highly encourage them to check.
Divyansh Kaushik: Are we seriously going to label Anthropic a supply chain risk but are totally fine with Alibaba/Qwen, Deepseek, Baidu, etc? What are we doing here?An excellent question. Certainly we can agree that Alibaba, Qwen, Deepseek or Baidu are all much larger ‘supply chain risks’ than Anthropic. So why haven’t we made those designations yet? [...]
Dean W. Ball: At some point in 2024, for reasons I still do not entirely understand, global elites simply decided: “no, we do not live in that world. We live in this other world, the nice one, where the challenges are all things we can understand and see today.”
Those who think we might live in that world talk about what to do, but mostly in private these days. It is not considered polite—indeed it is considered a little discrediting in many circles—to talk about the issues of powerful AI.
Yet the people whose technical intuitions I respect the most are convinced we do live in that world, and so am I.
The American elites aren’t quite as bad about that, but not as bad isn’t going to cut it.
We are indeed living in that world. We do not yet know yet which version of it, or if we will survive in it for long, but if you want to have a say in that outcome you need to get in the game. If you want to stop us from living in that world, that ship has sailed, and to the extent it hasn’t the first step is admitting you have a problem.
But the question is very much “what are autonomous swarms of superintelligent agents going to mean for our lives?” as opposed to “will we see autonomous swarms of superintelligent agents in the near future?”What it probably means for our lives is that it ends them. What it definitely doesn’t mean for our lives is going on as before, or a ‘gentle singularity’ you barely notice.
Elites that do not talk about such issues will not long remain elites. That might be because all the humans are dead, or it might be because they wake up one morning and realize other people, AIs or a combination thereof are the new elite, without realizing how lucky they are to still be waking up at all.
I am used to the idea of Don’t Look Up for existential risk, but I haven’t fully internalized how much of the elites are going Don’t Look Up for capabilities, period.
