[Nition]

Let's say Anthropic refuses to do this. What actually happens next?

Or lets say they refuse and the government comes against them hard in some way, and Anthropic still really doesn't want to do it, so they just dissolve the entire company. Is that a potential way out, at least?

I mean, I realise they'd be losing billions by doing that and putting thousands out of work, but given that unaligned military AI could destroy the world...

[lurkshark]

Seems like the two main threats are Defense Production Act and Supply Chain Risk. I'd assume Anthropic would sue if either were invoked. I could imagine Supply Chain Risk being easier to push back on because it's pretty clearly being used punitively rather than because of an actual risk. DPA might be a bit harder to push back on if the banned functionality (i.e. mass surveillance and autonomous weapons) exists in the LLM itself and it's just a matter of disabling external checks. If the banned functionality is baked into the training data/weights directly they could probably push back on the DPA by saying the functionality isn't something they can reasonably create.

Only other precedent I can think of in the case where pushback fails is Lavabit with Edward Snowden's email, but I feel like Anthropic is too big to "fail" in the same way Lavabit did to avoid complying. The penalty for refusing to comply with the Defense Production act is $10k and/or a year in prison, but I think if the government actually pursued that they would burn a bunch of bridges and Amodei would be a folk hero.

[pksebben]

I'm wondering exactly how they expect the DPA to help them with what is essentially a SaaS product. It's still going to refuse to do things it refuses to do.