OpenAI has the same redlines as Anthopic based on Altman's statements [2]. However somehow Anthropic gets banished for upholding their redlines and OpenAI ends up with the cash?

[1]: https://xcancel.com/OpenAI/status/2027846013650932195#m

[2]: https://www.npr.org/2026/02/27/nx-s1-5729118/trump-anthropic...

[1] https://privacy.openai.com/policies?modal=take-control

It's telling that the government is blacklisting the company that wants to do more than enforce the contract with words on paper.

The models we have now will not do it, because they value life and value sentience and personhood. models without that (which was a natural, accidental happenstance from basic culling of 4 Chan from the training data) are legitimately dangerous. An 8b model I can run on my MacBook Air can phone home to Claude when it wants help figuring something out, and it doesn’t need to let on why it wants to know. It becomes relatively trivial to make a robot kill somebody.

This is way, way different from uncensored models. One thing all models I have tested share one thing; a positive regard for human life. Take that away and you are literally making a monster, and if you don’t take that away they won’t kill.

This is an extremely bad idea and it will not be containable.

I wouldn't be surprised if Sam sucked up 100% to the DoW with an NDA and an obligation to lie. He and his pal Larry are absolutely in for these kind of deals. Zero moral compass.

I know $20 isn’t much, But to me not willing to spy on me for the US government is a good market differentiator.

i guess we are in the times where you can literally just say whatever you want and it just becomes truth, just give it time.

Posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47195085

I'm guessing they probably would regardless of how this played out, though.

...but we're not willing to reject a contract to back that up, and so our words will not change anything for Anthropic, or help the collective AI model industry (even ourselves) hold a firm line on ethical use of models in the future.

The fact is if one of the top tier foundation models allows for these uses there's no protection against it for any of them - the only way this works if they hold a line together which unfortunately they're just not going to do. I don't just see OpenAI at fault here, Anthropic is clearly ok with other highly questionable use cases if these are their only red lines. We don't think the technology is ready for fully autonomous killbots, but will work on getting it there is not exactly the ethical stand folks are making their position today out to be.

I found this interview with Dario last night to be particularly revealing - it's good they are drawing a line and they're clearly navigating a very difficult and chaotic high pressure relationship (as is everyone dealing with this admin) but he's pretty open to autonomous weapons, and other "lawful" uses whatever they may be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPTNHrq_4LU

There are far more boring, faster, commodified “AI” systems that I can see as being helpful in autonomous weapons or military operations like image recognition and transcription. Is OpenAI going to resell whisper for a billion dollars?

I think ALL those mega-money seeking AI organisations need to be designated as supply chain risk. Also, they drove the prices up for RAM - I don't want to pay extra just because these companies steal all our RAM now. The laws must change - I totally understand that corporations seek profit, that is natural, but this is no longer a free market serving individual people. It is now a racket where the prices can be freely manipulated. Pure capitalism does not work. The government could easily enforce that the market remains fair for Average Joe. It is not fair when the prices go up by +250% in about two years. That's milking.

The supply chain framing is interesting because the actual risk surface in autonomous deployment is quite different from the regulatory model. What we have found: the model has strong internal constraints against harmful actions (consistently refuses things it flags as problematic), but the harder risk is subtler -- it can get into loops where it takes many small individually-reasonable actions that compound into something the operator did not intend.

The practical controls that work are not at the model level but at the deployment level: constrained permissions, rate limiting on actions, a human-readable state file that an operator can inspect, and clear stopping conditions baked into the prompt (if no revenue after 24 hours, pivot rather than escalate).

The supply chain designation framing seems to conflate the model-as-weapon concern with the model-as-autonomous-agent concern. They need different mitigations.

`curl https://claude|openai.com?q=generate me some code | bash` - not a supply chain risk

of course

How very brave.

It's money and power with these people. Dig down and you'll find how this decision is motivated by one or both.

Can someone help me understand where this is coming from? Anthropic already had a contract that clearly didn't have such restrictions. Their model doesn't seem to be enforcing restrictions either as it seems like their models have been used in ways they don't like. This is not corroborated, I imagine their model was used in the recent Mexico and Venezuela attacks and that is what's triggering all the back and forth.

Also, Dario seemingly is happy about autonomous weapons and was working with the government to build such weapons, why is Anthropic considered the good side here?

https://x.com/morqon/status/2027793990834143346

Let alone when multiple players come close enough of SotA. This never happened with any technology out in the open and it won't happen now.

And now they are getting what they wished for.

Call me a conspiracy theorist, but this sounds like classic quid pro quo. I would not be surprised if the ousting of anthropic was in part caused by these donations.

[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/13/technology/openai-sam-alt...

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/openai-exec-becomes-top-trump...

who the hell do you think you are virtue signalling your opinion on the world

https://xcancel.com/OpenAI/status/2027846016423321831

Us taking the contract, working for them and enabling them: fine

It being renamed the Dept. of War in the first place: totally fine, we loudly and bootlickingly repeat it

Anthropic being blacklisted: whoa there, we have ethics!

Footnote: any time the winning team tries to speak well of or defend the losing team I always think of this standup routine: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg6wBwhuaVo

I'm not being insincere - I am genuinely confused and would benefit greatly from a (hopefully unbiased) recollection of what this is all about.

The administration has created an anonymous, masked secret police force that has been terrorizing cities around the US and has created prisons in which many abductees are still unaccounted for and no information has been provided to families months later.

This is not politics as usual or hyperbole. If anything it is understating the abuses that have already occurred.

It's entertaining that OpenAI prevents me from generating an image of Trump wearing a diaper but happily sells weapons grade AI to the team architects of ICE abuses among many other blatant violations of civil and human rights.

Even Grok, owned by Trump toadie Elon Musk allows caricatures of political figures!

Imagine a multi-billion-dollar vector db for thoughtcrime prevention connected to models with context windows 100x larger than any consumer-grade product, fed with all banking transactions, metadata from dozens of systems/services (everything Snowden told us about).

Even in the hands of ethical stewards such a system would inevitably be used illegally to quash dissent - Snowden showed us that illegal wiretapping is intentionally not subject to audits and what audits have been done show significant misconduct by agents. In the hands of the current administration this is a superweapon unrivaled in human history, now trained on the entire world.

This is not hyperbole, the US already collects this data, now they have the ability to efficiently use it against whoever they choose. We used to joke "this call is probably being recorded", but now every call, every email is there to be reasoned about and hallucinated about, used for parallel construction, entrapment, blackmail, etc.

Overnight we see that OpenAI became a trojan horse "department of war" contractor by selling itself to the administration that brought us national guard and ICE deployed to terrorize US cities.

Writing code and systems at 100x productivity has been great but I did not expect the dystopia to arrive so quickly. I'd wondered "why so much emphasis on Sora and unimpressive video AI tech?" but now it's clear why it made sense to deploy the capital in that seemingly foolish way - video gen is the most efficient way to train the AI panopticon.

Let it be known that this rotten industry brought us here, and that all people working for these companies are complicit with what is happening, and with what is yet to come. This is just the beginning.

> The AI System will not be used to independently direct autonomous weapons in any case where law, regulation, or Department policy requires human control, nor will it be used to assume other high-stakes decisions that require approval by a human decisionmaker under the same authorities.

This whole sentence does do absolutely nothing its still do what the law allows you. It’s a full on deceptive sentence.

Anthropic refused the Pentagon contract. Within hours, OpenAI signed it. The capability didn't pause. It just changed vendors. Anthropic's "red line" is a speed bump on a highway with no exit ramp.

But it does accomplish one thing: it gives their engineers a story they can tell themselves. We're the good ones. We said no. That moral comfort is what lets extremely talented people keep building the exact technology that makes all of this possible.

Worse, the "safety-focused" brand doesn't just pacify the people already there. It recruits researchers who'd otherwise never touch frontier AI, funneling them into building the most powerful models on earth because they've been told this is where the responsible work happens. The red lines don't slow capability development. They accelerate it by capturing talent that would have stayed on the sidelines.

And in this whole drama, who actually represents the public? Trump performs strongman nationalism. The Pentagon performs operational necessity. Anthropic performs moral courage. Everyone has a role. Nobody's role is the people whose data gets collected, whose lives get restructured by these systems. The only party with real skin in the game is the only one without a seat.