How magnanimous! They are only thinking of others, you see. They are rejecting their safety pledge for you.

> “We didn't really feel, with the rapid advance of AI, that it made sense for us to make unilateral commitments … if competitors are blazing ahead.”

Oops, said the quiet part out loud that it’s all about money. “I mean, if all of our competitors are kicking puppies in the face, it doesn’t make sense for us to not do it too. Maybe we’ll also kick kittens while we’re at it”.

For all of you who thought Anthropic were “the good guys”, I hope this serves as a wake up call that they were always all the same. None of them care about you, they only care about winning.

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

Their core argument is that if we have guardrails that others don't, they would be left behind in controlling the technology, and they are the "responsible ones." I honestly can't comprehend the timeline we are living in. 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.

We must build a moat to save humanity from AI.

Please regulate our open-source competitors for safety.

Actually, safety doesn't scale well for our Q3 revenue targets.

That said, I'm not thrilled about this. I joined Anthropic with the impression that the responsible scaling policy was a binding pre-commitment for exactly this scenario: they wouldn't set aside building adequate safeguards for training and deployment, regardless of the pressures.

This pledge was one of many signals that Anthropic was the "least likely to do something horrible" of the big labs, and that's why I joined. Over time, the signal of those values has weakened; they've sacrified a lot to get and keep a seat at the table.

Principled decisions that risk their position at the frontier seem like they'll become even more common. I hope they're willing to risk losing their seat at the table to be guided by values.

I don't know enough to evaluate this or other decisions. I'm just glad someone is trying to care, because the default in today's world is to aggressively reject the larger picture in favor of more more more. I don't know how effective Anthropic's attempts to maintain some level of responsibility can be, but they've at least convinced me that they're trying. In the same way that OpenAI, for example, have largely convinced me that they're not. (Neither of those evaluations is absolute; OpenAI could be much worse than it is.)

Then they ignored the researchers warning about what it could do, and I said nothing. It sounded like science fiction.

Then they gave it control of things that matter, power grids, hospitals, weapons, and I said nothing. It seemed to be working fine.

Then something went wrong, and no one knew how to stop it, no one had planned for it, and no one was left who had listened to the warnings.

This is how all of these companies work. They’ll follow some ethical code or register as a PBC until that undermined profits.

These companies are clearly aiming at cheapening the value of white collar labor. Ask yourself: will they steward us into that era ethically? Or will they race to transfer wealth from American workers to their respective shareholders?

General population: How will AI get to the point where it destroys humanity?

Yudkowsky: [insert some complicated argument about instrumented convergence and deception]

The government: because we told you to.

Again, not saying that AI is useless or anything. Just that we're more likely to cause our own downfall with weaker AI, than some abstract super AGI. The bar for mass destruction and oppression is lower than the bar for what we typically think of as intelligence for the benefit for humanity ( with the right systems in place, current AI systems are more than enough to get the job done - hence why the Pentagon wants it so bad...)

> I take significant responsibility for this change.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HzKuzrKfaDJvQqmjh/responsibl...

If we need safety, we need Anthropic to be not too far behind (at least for now, before Anthropic possibly becomes evil), and that might mean releasing models that are safer and more steerable than others (even if, unfortunately, they are not 100% up to Anthropic’s goals)

Dogmatism, while great, has its time and place, and with a thousand bad actors in the LLM space, pragmatism wins better.

Anthropic's Responsible Scaling Policy, the hard commitment to never train a model unless safety measures were guaranteed adequate in advance, lasted roughly 2.5 years (Sept 2023 to Feb 2026).

The half-life of idealism in AI is compressing fast. Google at least had the excuse of gradualism over a decade and a half.

Because at this point, it's too broad to be defined in the context of an LLM, so it feels like they removed a blanket statement of "we will not let you do bad things" (or "don't be evil"), which doesn't really translate into anything specific.

All it really takes to do some kind of crazy world-dominating thing is some simple mechanisms and base intelligence, which the machines already possess. Using basic tactics like coercion, spoofing, threats, financial leverage, an unsophisticated attacker could cause major damage.

For example, that Meta exec who had their email deleted. Imagine instead one email had a malicious prompt which the bot obeyed. That prompt simply emailed everyone in her contacts list telling them to do something urgently (and possibly prompting other bots who are reading those emails). You could pretty quickly do something like cause a market crash, a nationwide panic, or maybe even an international conflict with no "super intelligence" needed, just human negligence, short-sightedness, and laziness.

Examples would be things like saying there is a threat incoming, a CIA source said so. Another would be that everyone will be fired, Meta is going bankrupt, etc. Its very easy to craft a prompt like that and fire it off to all the execs you can find (or just fire off random emails with plausible sounding emails). Then you just need to hit one and might set off a cascade.

https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/2026181748175024510

I don't know where xAI got its training material from, but seeing Musk rewteeting that is refreshing.

It increasingly feels like operating at that scale can require compromises I’m not comfortable making. Maybe that’s a personal limitation—but it’s one I’m choosing to keep.

I’d genuinely love to hear examples of tech companies that have scaled without losing their ethical footing. I could use the inspiration.

The AI startup has refused to remove safeguards that would prevent its technology from being used to target weapons autonomously and conduct U.S. domestic surveillance.

Pentagon officials have argued the government should only be required to comply with U.S. law. During the meeting, Hegseth delivered an ultimatum to Anthropic: get on board or the government would take drastic action, people familiar with the matter said.

https://www.staradvertiser.com/2026/02/24/breaking-news/anth...

Write essays about AI safety in the application.

An entire interview dedicated to pretending that you truly only care about AI safety and ethics and nothing else.

Every employee you talk to forced to pretend that the company is all about philanthropy, effective altruism and saving the world.

In reality it was a mid-level manager interviewing a mid-level engineer (me), both putting on a performance while knowing fully well that we'd do what the bosses told us to do.

And that is exactly what is happening now. The mission has been scrubbed, and the thousands of "ethical" engineers you hired are all silent now that real money is on the line.

1. AI is military/surveillance technology in essence, like many other information technologies,

2. Any guarantee given by AI companies is void since it can be changed in a day,

3. Tech companies have no real control over how their technology will be used,

4. AI companies may seem over-valued with low profits if you think AI as a civil technology. But their investors probably see them as a part of defense (war) industry.

I can't help but think about how Google once had "Don't be evil" as their motto.

But the thing with for-profit companies is that when push comes to shove, they will always serve the love of money. I'm just surprised that in an industry churning through trillions, their price is $200 million.

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

Is the implication here that Anthropic admits they already can't meet their own risk and safety guidelines? Why else would they have to stop training models?

Pledges are a cynical marketing strategy aimed at fomenting a base politics that works to prevent such a regulatory regime.

https://www.npr.org/2026/02/25/nx-s1-5725354/nurses-emigrate...

Anthropic's market cap is going to be huge when they go public. Why do it on Nasdaq when there are so many other exchanges in the world?

I have not read “If Anybody Builds It, Everybody Dies” but I believe that's also its premise.

Current GenAI is extremely capable but also very weird. For instance, it is extremely smart in some areas but makes extremely elementary mistakes in others (cf the Jagged Frontier.) Research from Anthropic and OpenAI gives us surprising glimpses into what might be happening internally, and how it does not necessarily correspond to the results it produces, and all kinds of non-obvious, striking things happening behind the scenes.

Like models producing different reasoning tokens from what they are really reasoning about internally!

Or models being able to subliminally influence derivative models through opaque number sequences in training data!

Or models "flipping the evil bit" when forced to produce insecure code and going full Hitler / SkyNet!

Or the converse, where models produced insecure code if the prompt includes concepts it considers "evil" -- something that was actually caught in the wild!

We are still very far from being able to truly understand these things. They behaves like us, but don't necessarily “think” like us.

And now we’ve given them direct access to tools that can affect the real world.

Maybe we am play god: https://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/

I think the Dario of today is very different to the Dario 3 years ago.

The US is not the only country in the world so the idea that humanity as a whole could somehow regulate this process seemed silly to me.

Even if you got the whole US tech community and the US government on board, there are 6.7bn other people in the world working in unrelated systems, enough of whom are very smart

What a gigantic, absolute, pieces of s...

Not because of what they did, which is classic startup playbook but because of the cynicism involved, particularly after all the fuzz they've been making for years about safety. The company itself was founded, allegedly, due to pursuing that as a mission as opposed to OpenAI.

"Hi all, that was a lie, we never really cared." They only missed the "dumb f***s" remark, a la Facebook.

You are just one new feature announcement from Anthropic/OpenAI away from irrelevance.

Same as it was when people built their busineses on top of AWS a decade ago

Are people really attempting to have LLMs replace vision models in robots, and trying to agentically make a robot work with an LLM?? This seems really silly to me, but perhaps I am mistaken.

The only other thing I could think of is real-time translation during special ops with parabolic microphones and AR goggles...

1. Extremely granular ways to let user control network and disk access to apps (great if resource access can also be changed)

2. Make it easier for apps as well to work with these

3. I would be interested in knowing how adding a layer before CLI/web even gets the query OS/browser can intercept it and could there be a possibility of preventing harm before hand or at least warning or logging for say someone who overviews those queries later?

And most importantly — all these via an excellent GUI with clear demarcations and settings and we’ll documented (Apple might struggle with documentation; so LLMs might help them there)

My point is — why the hell are we waiting for these companies to be good folks? Why not push them behind a safety layer?

I mean CLI asks .. can I access this folder? Run this program? Download this? But they can just do that if they want! Make them ask those questions like apps asks on phones for location, mic, camera access.

I really miss the nerd profile who cared a lot more about tech and science, and a lot less about signaling their righteousness.

How did we get so religious/narcissistic so quickly and as a whole?

making promises in good times is a real minefield hah

ok lol what a coincidence.

but setting aside the conspiracy. the article actually spells out the real reason pretty directly: Anthropic hoped their original safety policy would spark a "race to the top" across the industry. it didn't. everyone else just ignored it and kept moving. at some point holding the line unilaterally just means you're losing ground for nothing.

Even if it were ever done with good intentions, it is an open invitation for benefit hoarding and margin fixing.

Do you realy want to create this future where only a select few anointed companies and some governments have access to super advanced intelligent systems, where the rest of the planet is subjected to and your own ai access is limited to benign basal add pushing propaganda spewing chatbots as you bingewatch the latest "aw my ballz"?

Netflix said that they'd never have live TV, or buy a traditional studio, or include ads in their content. Then they did all three.

All companies use principled promises to gain momentum, then drop those principles when the money shows up.

As Groucho Marx used to say: these are my principles, if you don't like them, I have others.

And it will be, as Warren Buffet puts it, a "Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked." moment.

I kind of wish they had forced the governments hand and made them do it. Just to show the public how much interference is going on.

They say it wasn't related. Like every thing that has happened across tech/media, the company is forced to do something, then issues statement about 'how it wasn't related to the obvious thing the government just did'.

Dark times and darker forests.

The largest predictor of behavior within a company and of that companies products in the long run is funding sources and income streams, which is conveniently left out in their "constitution". Mostly a waste of effort on their part.

That doesn't even make sense.

What stops one model from spouting wrongthink and suicide HOWTOs might not work for a different model, and fine-tuning things away uses the base model as a starting point.

You don't know the thing's failure modes until you've characterized it, and for LLMs the way you do that is by first training it and then exercising it.

* AI and states cannot peacefully coexist, and AI is not going to be stopped. Therefore, we must begin to deprecate states.

I think it's very unlikely that this is unrelated to the pressure from the US administration, as the anonymous-but-obvious-anthropic-spokesperson asserts.

We're at a point now where the nation states are all totally separate creatures from their constituencies, and the largest three of them are basically psychotic and obsessed with antagonizing one another.

In order to have a peaceful AI age, we need _much_ smaller batches of power in the world. The need for states that claim dominion over whole continents is now behind us; we have all the tools we need to communicate and coordinate over long distances without them.

Please, I pray for a gentle, peaceful anarchism to emerge within the technocratic leagues, and for the elder statesmen of the legacy states to see the writing on the wall and agree to retire with tranquility and dignity.

It isn't about the right answers, rather the expected answers.

The intention to start these pledge and conflict with DOW might be sincere, but I don’t expect it to last long, especially the company is going public very soon.

On the other hand, those organizations are operating in the best interest of Americans and the world right?

Surely, those agencies aren't just a trick of the rich people? Right?

They’re pointless if they just get removed once you get close to hitting them.

And all the major corps seem to be doing this style of pr management. Speaks of some pretty weapons grade moral bankruptcy

The Amodeis' have just proven that the threat of even slight hardship will make them throw any and all principles away.

The concept of "having a contract with society" doesn't even formally exist because companies would never sign one.

"We promise are not going to do __, except if our customers ask us to do, then we absolutely will".

What is the point? Company makes a statement public, so what?

Not the first time this company puts some words in the wind, see Claude Constitution. It's almost like this company is built, from ground up, upon bullshit and slop

It's so much focus on implementation, and processes, and really really seems to consider the question of what even constitutes "misaligned" or "unethical" behavior to be more or less straight forward, uncontroversial, and basically universally agreed upon?

Let's be clear: Humans are not aligned. In fact, humans have not come to a common agreement of what it means to be aligned. Look around, the same actions are considered virtuous by some and villainous by others. Before we get to whether or not I trust Anthropic to stick to their self-imposed processes, I'd like to have a general idea of what their values even are. Perhaps they've made something they see as super ethical that I find completely unethical. Who knows. The most concrete stances they take in their "Constitution" are still laughably ambiguous. For example, they say that Claude takes into account how many people are affected if an action is potentially harmful. They also say that Claude values "Protection of vulnerable groups." These two statements trivially lead to completely opposing conclusions in our own population depending on whether one considers the "unborn" to be a "vulnerable group". Don't get caught up in whether you believe this or not, simply realize that this very simple question changes the meaning of these principles entirely. It is not sufficient to simply say "Claude is neutral on the issue of abortion." For starters, it is almost certainly not true. You can probably construct a question that is necessarily causally connected to the number of unborn children affected, and Claude's answer will reveal it's "hidden preference." What would true neutrality even mean here anyways? If I ask it for help driving my sister to a neighboring state should it interrogate me to see if I am trying to help her get to a state where abortion is legal? Again, notice that both helping me and refusing to help me could anger a not insignificant portion of the population.

This Pentagon thing has gotten everyone riled up recently, but I don't understand why people weren't up in arms the second they found out AIs were assisting congresspeople in writing bills. Not all questions of ethics are as straight forward as whether or not Claude should help the Pentagon bomb a country.

Consider the following when you think about more and more legislation being AI-assisted going forward, and then really ask yourself whether "AI alignment" was ever a thing:

1. What is Claude's stances on labor issues? Does it lean pro or anti-union? Is there an ethical issue with Claude helping a legislator craft legislation that weakens collective bargaining? Or, alternatively, is it ethical for Claude to help draft legislation that protects unions?

2. What is Claude's stance on climate change? Is it ethical for Claude to help craft legislation that weakens environmental regulations? What if weakening those regulations arguably creates millions of jobs?

3. What is Claude's stance on taxes? Is it ethical for Claude to help craft legislation that makes the tax system less progressive? If it helps you argue for a flat tax? How about more progressive? Where does Claude stand on California's infamous Prop 19? If this seems too in the weeds, then that would imply that whether or not the current generation can manage to own a home in the most populous state in the US is not an issue that "affects enough people." If that's the case, then what is?

4. Where does Claude land on the question of capitalism vs. socialism? Should healthcare be provided by the state? How about to undocumented immigrants? In fact, how does Claude feel about a path to amnesty, or just immigration in general?

Remember, the important thing here is not what you believe about the above questions, but rather the fact that Claude is participating in those arguments, and increasingly so. Many of these questions will impact far more people than overt military action. And this is for questions that we all at least generally agree have some ethical impact, even if we don't necessarily agree on what that impact may be. There is another class of questions where we don't realize the ethical implications until much later. Knowing what we know now, if Claude had existed 20 years ago, should it have helped code up social networks? How about social games? A large portion of the population has seemingly reached the conclusion that this is such an important ethical question that it merits one of the largest regulation increases the internet has ever seen in order to prevent children from using social media altogether. If Claude had assisted in the creation of those services, would we judge it as having failed its mission in retrospect? Or would that have been too harsh and unfair a conclusion? But what's the alternative, saying it's OK if the AI's destroy society... as long as if it's only on accident?

What use is a super intelligence if it's ultimately as bad at predicting unintended negative consequences as we are?

The narrative on social media, this site included, is to portray the closed western labs as the bad guys and the less capable labs releasing their distilled open weight models to the world as the good guys.

Right now a kid can go download an Abliterated version of a capable open weight model and they can go wild with it.

But let's worry about what the US DoD is doing or what the western AI companies absolutely dominating the market are doing because that's what drives engagement and clicks.