So the Pentagon is strongarming a company into cooperation? That reminds of how my alcoholic neighbor used to treat his family. It's almost as if someone let a mean drunk be in charge of the Pentagon.
Without reading every word of every embedded tweet, a part missing from the conversation is HOW they are strongarming.
It isn't in private. It's a public threat in the court of public opinion to apply societal pressure on the company. They are attempting to reshape Anthropic's decision into a tribal one, and hurt the brand's reputation within the tribe unless it capitulates.
The whole government 'strong-arms' many of its counter-parties in a variety of situations; this is unfortunately nothing new, and far from an innovation by Hegseth. A more clearly illegal example (because the government was acting as a regulator, not a purchaser) is Operation Choke Point, though there are many others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
As if governments throughout history haven't constantly used threats to gain leverage? No need to take a personal shot at the guy in charge when this is SOP throughout the administration.
Obviously, domestic surveillance of U.S. citizens is bad but before even getting to that, the thing that doesn't make sense is: it's illegal for the DoD to do that (unless the citizens are military or DoD employees).
And, does anyone seriously think developing autonomous kill-bots without a human in the loop in the next 3 years is something the DoD should be unilaterally doing now without congressional review? Personally, I think autonomous kill bots with a human in the loop, with congressional review, and even 10 years from now are categorically a terrible idea.
However, I can imagine some reasonable people perhaps quibbling over saying never by citing things like "sufficient safeguards", "congressional oversight" and at a future time where AIs don't hallucinate constantly. But none of that is in contention here. The DoD is publicly proclaiming their need to do things right now which are either A. illegal, or B. no serious person thinks is sane.
Personally, I think autonomous kill bots with a human in the loop, with congressional review, and even 10 years from now are categorically a terrible idea.
I don't doubt that Claude is capable of mass surveillance, but surely it is not too much of a stretch to say it may not be suitable for automated killbots?
Step 1.5 is also the one being ignored by 95% of comments here: the leverage the Pentagon is using is the lucrative contract Anthropic signed with them. The only threat here is Anthropic sucking up less money from the DoD.
,,Needless to say, I support Anthropic here. I’m a sensible moderate on the killbot issue (we’ll probably get them eventually, and I doubt they’ll make things much worse compared to AI “only” having unfettered access to every Internet-enabled computer in the world). But AI-enabled mass surveillance of US citizens seems like the sort of thing we should at least have a chance to think over, rather than demanding it from the get-go.''
Why would killbots be sensible moderate with the number of hallucinations LLMs have right now?
They just need to have one rm -rf bug somewhere to so something disasterous, and at least Antrhopic's CEO understands the limitations of the software.
Imagine a world where in order to do business in the US you must grant the government control of your company. This sounds worse than even the most alarmist China takes.
This is exactly America’s path. All this time we were “fighting” regimes like Chinese and Russian and now it is like “can’t beat them, join them” banana republic
I don't even understand why it is thought that letting a small non-elected clique run economically important infrastructure and control the lives of thousands of employees isn't considered dystopian. Public ownership at least has democratic legitimacy.
My strong initial reaction to even the idea of "fully autonomous AI killbots" made me miss a subtle distinction about what the real danger is. We already have a variety of non-AI killbots. Conceptually, any area denial weapon like a proximity triggered Claymore mine is a non-AI "killbot". And just tying one or more sensors to trigger a gun or explosive already works today without AI. . So what's gained by adding full AI?
Such non-AI automatic triggering and targeting can already be constrained by location, range, time frame, remote-control, etc using fairly sophisticated non-AI heuristics. If non-AI devices can already <always pull trigger if X, Y and Z conditions = TRUE>, this is really about not pulling the trigger based on more complex judgements. That really only enables leaving such systems armed and active in far larger, less constrained contexts where 'friend or foe' judgements exceed basic true/false sensor conditions. That the military feels such urgent need for that capability is much more worrying to me.
Point blank one of the most nakedly evil things the government has ever tried to do. Apparently Anthropic's sticking points were no using the model for autonomous kill orders and no mass surveillance...
The voters and congress tell the military how to use technology, not Anthropic. Shifting the decision to Anthropic takes away power from the citizenship.
Edit: The point is, go vote if you don't agree with what the administration is doing. Somebody will sell the DoD whatever they want no matter what Anthropic does.
sing the "supply chain risk" designation against a domestic AI company is wild. Not sure that tool had vendors who won't rewrite their ToS on demand in mind.
Meanwhile the Pentagon could just build its own capacity. Commercial AI outspends federal science R&D 75:1 right now.
> I’m a sensible moderate on the killbot issue (we’ll probably get them eventually, and I doubt they’ll make things much worse compared to AI “only” having unfettered access to every Internet-enabled computer in the world)
Crikey, this isn't sensible, this is completely misanthropic and nihilistic. How can anyone be ok with a machine unilaterally deciding (outside of the courts or any other check mechanism) to murder someone?
I also take issue with the author's postulation that the Defense Production act could be used here. It's one thing to make sheet metal companies build plane parts, but requiring companies to be put themselves "in the loop" so to speak with regards to actual military strategy or defense puts those companies and their employees at unwilling and extraordinary risk. It's basically enlistment. Plus, it can only be used in extraordinary circumstances.
There's actually another possibility here: Anthropic really doesn't care about being in the loop, and are protesting as theater, but behind the scenes, hammering out a deal with the Pentagon, and they'll help under classified status, and none of us will be the wiser.
this pairs nicely with the finding of the supreme court:
Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. There is no immunity for unofficial acts.
Look, you can't have a (working, democratic) government where one party can send the other to jail as soon as they get into power. If presidents could go to jail for doing their job, their opposing party would absolutely try to send them there.
This would then ultimately handicap the president: anything they do that the opposition can find a legal justification against could land them in jail, so they won't do anything that comes close to that. We do not want our chief executive making key decisions for the country based on fear of political retribution!
The Supreme Court has failed, miserably and repeatedly lately, and some of their decisions run directly counter to the law (often they even contradict past decisions!) But deciding the president won't face political retribution for trying to do his job was not a mistake.
Might be a long stretch, but that every analyst I’ve heard talking about this is concerned about mass surveillance of us citizens again, and the Wyden Siren is hinting at illegal activities by the CIA.
Plus that the US military also used anthropics products in some form during the Venezuela operation as they publicly acknowledged, plus Hegseth seeming to be willing to put the boot down anthropics’ neck according to the options presented to them, are a lot of interesting things that happened in a very short amount of time for an environment that is usually known to work as frictionless as possible.
Even for Hegseth this is a lot of public eyes on something the pentagon of previous administrations would have handled probably with the same willingness to drown anthropic in their own tears but completely out of public sight.
But the Pentagon works in mysterious ways, and therefore there might be a very good reason for this kind of pressure, that the people who are responsible for national security even risk making a public fuss about it, that we peasants simply don’t see.
I also can’t wait to see how the us military is messing this whole AI superiority softporn up. It’s not a matter of if but only of when.
They have a track record misshandling weapons of mass destruction.
To be fair tho, for the amount of nuclear weapons they are handling overall they are doing a pretty good job. But no more open blast doors for the pizza delivery guy, ok?
The real question is how many broken arrow events can we even have with AI? Is it better luck next time baby skynet serious or we fucked up Sir, everyone is going to die as matchsticks bad, if whatever system they use decides every problem they throw at it can be solved by removing the human from the equation, all of them preferably.
What, Dario is just going to turn on unlimited-token-CEO-mode and ask Claude to devise a plan to out maneuver the military and intelligence services? It’s not AGI yet, and this request would be far outside the training distribution: it would just hallucinate something based on Tom Clancy novels.
We know that the current administration functions like a cabal of sex-trafficking mobsters, so none of this is surprising; strong-arming is the norm, not the exception. I expect this to get ugly, and I hope Anthropic has the financial and legal resources to respond accordingly.
There's a lot of talk about "Future Claude", even Karpathy has mentioned something similar. But does anyone stop to think about how utterly dystopian this is?
We are creating a worse version of the Panopticon than was originally designed. A Panopticon that could have entirely devastating consequences. Not only is "the guard" able to see what any given "prisoner" is doing at any time, but they can look into the past. The self-regulation happens because the prisoners could be being watched. It is Orwellian. But this thing we're building? It can look at the prisoners' actions before it was even completed.
I think people don't think about this enough. Culture changes and in that time what is considered morally justifiable or even reasonable changes. Sometimes it is easy to judge people in the past by our current standards but other times it is not. Other times there is context needed, which is lost not only by time but in what is never recorded. How do prisoners self-regulate to future values that they do not know they are supposed to align to?
This creates a terrible machine where whoever controls it will likely have the power to prosecute anyone arbitrarily. Get the morals to change just slightly or just take things out of context and you have the public demanding prosecution. I think people think this seems far fetched but I'm willing to bet every single person on HN has fallen for some disinformation campaign. Be it the "carrots help you see in the dark", peoples misunderstanding between paper/plastic/canvas tote bags, a wide variety of topics related to environmentalism, and on and on. Even if you believe you have never fallen for such a disinformation (or malinformation) campaign, you'll have to concede that it is common for others to. That's all that is needed for someone in power to execute on this Panopticon, and it is a strategy people with power have been refining for thousands of years.
I really do support Anthropic pushing back here, but the discussions about "Future Claude" really are unsettling. It is like we are treating this as an inevitability. As if we have no choice in the matter. If that is true, then we are the mindless automata and then what does the military need killer-bots for? The would already have them.
Hard to imagine the difference between a dystopian future is whether or not Claude does this one thing as opposed to all the other things it does (completely eviscerates the arts and culture).
I can't help but compare what happened with nuclear physics to what will happen with ASI/AGI. We could have used nuclear energy to provide abundant, clean energy. Instead we used it for warfare to kill people. All the of the brightest minds and frontier technology was directed towards killing people.
We could use AI for medical advances and to create a communist utopia without serfdom. But it's already looking like we're getting killer robots and more oppression.
Hope I'm thinking about this wrong. I fear very soon the government will begin nationalizing AI resources and forcing AI researchers to direct their efforts towards weapons systems. Similar to what happened in physics. "We have to be first to have autonomous robot armies" basically.
I'm really not understanding this. Doesn't the typical path for advanced technology making it into the hands of civilians start with military applications and end with it being modified for civilian use?
If the Pentagon wants Anthropic's technology because it has desirable characteristics, can it not just train its own AI models? Why can't the Pentagon build data centers full of GPUs and hire some smart people like the commercial AI providers did?
Why in this case, has the usual path for technology been flipped? Starting out as commercial tech for civilians, and then being re-purposed for military use feels unusual to me. Maybe Hegseth's "War department" has a recruiting problem.
The old path of 'military invents it, civilians eventually get it' (like the Space Race or early ARPANET) hasn't been true for decades. Today, almost all major technological leaps like the modern internet, search engines, smartphones, commercial drones, etc. start in the commercial consumer sector first. The global consumer market dwarfs the defense market, which means the private sector has vastly more capital for R&D. Government payscale caps out ~$190k-$200k/year for specialized roles without some congressional workaround. The top AI researchers at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google etc. make ~$1m-$5m+/year for total compensation. The government couldn't afford to hire the right talent and the right talent likely would refuse based on moral, ethical, and rational principles with the current government.
I understand that Anthropic has one of the most popular products in the market.
But no one, especially the government, should get in bed with them, when anthropic leadership has a track record trying to use their early mover advantace, to effectively create an AI cartel [1]
I'm glad Anthropic is getting a taste of their own medicine.
You're smoking something funny. They have just shown they are willing to designate a US company as essentially a foreign spy agency because they wanted to try and renegotiate a contract and didn't get what they wanted and that's your reaction?
This is going to be a controversial take but I don't agree with Anthropic on this one. My gut instinct says that the Pentagon should back down, but my gut is wrong because of political bias. I can't claim to be serious about AI governance if Anthropic is able to sidestep the interests of the Pentagon, whoever might be in charge. Anthropic is not stronger than the US government, and it would set a dangerous precedent if they don't comply.
At the end of the rabbit hole, it's all about enforcement, regardless of the contract. Who's going to enforce Anthropic's terms and conditions if they betray the Pentagon?
Our government notably derives its power from the rights we delegate to said government. We have not given our government the right to just tear up contracts willy-nilly.
Anthropic cutting off the Pentagon is saying in no uncertain terms that they support allowing the PRC access to frontier military technology but not the US.
Trump gave China a bunch of Blackwell chips and accelerated their frontier AI deployment in exchange for a big payout to his crypto firm from the UAE, an act which would be considered straightforward high treason if we were in normal times with a functioning government.
There is exactly one party in this debate trying to help the PRC get advanced military tech, and it’s not Anthropic.
Incredibly dumb take considering Dario Amodei has been extremely hawkish on China and especially about selling them chips that may allow them to catch up to the US level of capabilities...
emsign|6 days ago
basch|6 days ago
It isn't in private. It's a public threat in the court of public opinion to apply societal pressure on the company. They are attempting to reshape Anthropic's decision into a tribal one, and hurt the brand's reputation within the tribe unless it capitulates.
ljm|6 days ago
nickff|6 days ago
brightball|6 days ago
[deleted]
CodingJeebus|6 days ago
mrandish|5 days ago
And, does anyone seriously think developing autonomous kill-bots without a human in the loop in the next 3 years is something the DoD should be unilaterally doing now without congressional review? Personally, I think autonomous kill bots with a human in the loop, with congressional review, and even 10 years from now are categorically a terrible idea.
However, I can imagine some reasonable people perhaps quibbling over saying never by citing things like "sufficient safeguards", "congressional oversight" and at a future time where AIs don't hallucinate constantly. But none of that is in contention here. The DoD is publicly proclaiming their need to do things right now which are either A. illegal, or B. no serious person thinks is sane.
NewJazz|5 days ago
Pretty sure these exist today...
unyttigfjelltol|6 days ago
1. Builds tool extremely capable of mass surveillance and running autonomous warfighting capabilities.
2. Expresses shock — shock — when the Department of War insists on using the tool for mass surveillance and autonomous warfighting systems.
Thrymr|6 days ago
diydsp|6 days ago
unknown|6 days ago
[deleted]
spidersenses|6 days ago
EA-3167|6 days ago
xiphias2|6 days ago
Why would killbots be sensible moderate with the number of hallucinations LLMs have right now?
They just need to have one rm -rf bug somewhere to so something disasterous, and at least Antrhopic's CEO understands the limitations of the software.
propagandist|6 days ago
bink|6 days ago
phkahler|6 days ago
bdangubic|6 days ago
ks2048|6 days ago
"Imagine a world where in order to do business in the US you must grant the government control of your country".
tehjoker|6 days ago
mrandish|5 days ago
Such non-AI automatic triggering and targeting can already be constrained by location, range, time frame, remote-control, etc using fairly sophisticated non-AI heuristics. If non-AI devices can already <always pull trigger if X, Y and Z conditions = TRUE>, this is really about not pulling the trigger based on more complex judgements. That really only enables leaving such systems armed and active in far larger, less constrained contexts where 'friend or foe' judgements exceed basic true/false sensor conditions. That the military feels such urgent need for that capability is much more worrying to me.
vonneumannstan|6 days ago
freejazz|6 days ago
emsign|6 days ago
colek42|6 days ago
Edit: The point is, go vote if you don't agree with what the administration is doing. Somebody will sell the DoD whatever they want no matter what Anthropic does.
7777777phil|6 days ago
Meanwhile the Pentagon could just build its own capacity. Commercial AI outspends federal science R&D 75:1 right now.
dclowd9901|5 days ago
Crikey, this isn't sensible, this is completely misanthropic and nihilistic. How can anyone be ok with a machine unilaterally deciding (outside of the courts or any other check mechanism) to murder someone?
I also take issue with the author's postulation that the Defense Production act could be used here. It's one thing to make sheet metal companies build plane parts, but requiring companies to be put themselves "in the loop" so to speak with regards to actual military strategy or defense puts those companies and their employees at unwilling and extraordinary risk. It's basically enlistment. Plus, it can only be used in extraordinary circumstances.
There's actually another possibility here: Anthropic really doesn't care about being in the loop, and are protesting as theater, but behind the scenes, hammering out a deal with the Pentagon, and they'll help under classified status, and none of us will be the wiser.
csours|6 days ago
hungryhobbit|6 days ago
Look, you can't have a (working, democratic) government where one party can send the other to jail as soon as they get into power. If presidents could go to jail for doing their job, their opposing party would absolutely try to send them there.
This would then ultimately handicap the president: anything they do that the opposition can find a legal justification against could land them in jail, so they won't do anything that comes close to that. We do not want our chief executive making key decisions for the country based on fear of political retribution!
The Supreme Court has failed, miserably and repeatedly lately, and some of their decisions run directly counter to the law (often they even contradict past decisions!) But deciding the president won't face political retribution for trying to do his job was not a mistake.
dqv|6 days ago
Probably this https://time.com/7380854/exclusive-anthropic-drops-flagship-...
ChrisArchitect|6 days ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47140734
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47142587
ks2048|6 days ago
Corrupt, evil Government: OK.
Jamesbeam|6 days ago
https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/wyden_letter_to_d...
Plus that the US military also used anthropics products in some form during the Venezuela operation as they publicly acknowledged, plus Hegseth seeming to be willing to put the boot down anthropics’ neck according to the options presented to them, are a lot of interesting things that happened in a very short amount of time for an environment that is usually known to work as frictionless as possible.
Even for Hegseth this is a lot of public eyes on something the pentagon of previous administrations would have handled probably with the same willingness to drown anthropic in their own tears but completely out of public sight.
But the Pentagon works in mysterious ways, and therefore there might be a very good reason for this kind of pressure, that the people who are responsible for national security even risk making a public fuss about it, that we peasants simply don’t see.
I also can’t wait to see how the us military is messing this whole AI superiority softporn up. It’s not a matter of if but only of when.
They have a track record misshandling weapons of mass destruction.
https://www.atomicarchive.com/almanac/broken-arrows/index.ht...
To be fair tho, for the amount of nuclear weapons they are handling overall they are doing a pretty good job. But no more open blast doors for the pizza delivery guy, ok?
The real question is how many broken arrow events can we even have with AI? Is it better luck next time baby skynet serious or we fucked up Sir, everyone is going to die as matchsticks bad, if whatever system they use decides every problem they throw at it can be solved by removing the human from the equation, all of them preferably.
bediger4000|6 days ago
shwaj|6 days ago
Edit: typo
epsilonic|6 days ago
ks2048|6 days ago
babelfish|6 days ago
godelski|6 days ago
We are creating a worse version of the Panopticon than was originally designed. A Panopticon that could have entirely devastating consequences. Not only is "the guard" able to see what any given "prisoner" is doing at any time, but they can look into the past. The self-regulation happens because the prisoners could be being watched. It is Orwellian. But this thing we're building? It can look at the prisoners' actions before it was even completed.
I think people don't think about this enough. Culture changes and in that time what is considered morally justifiable or even reasonable changes. Sometimes it is easy to judge people in the past by our current standards but other times it is not. Other times there is context needed, which is lost not only by time but in what is never recorded. How do prisoners self-regulate to future values that they do not know they are supposed to align to?
This creates a terrible machine where whoever controls it will likely have the power to prosecute anyone arbitrarily. Get the morals to change just slightly or just take things out of context and you have the public demanding prosecution. I think people think this seems far fetched but I'm willing to bet every single person on HN has fallen for some disinformation campaign. Be it the "carrots help you see in the dark", peoples misunderstanding between paper/plastic/canvas tote bags, a wide variety of topics related to environmentalism, and on and on. Even if you believe you have never fallen for such a disinformation (or malinformation) campaign, you'll have to concede that it is common for others to. That's all that is needed for someone in power to execute on this Panopticon, and it is a strategy people with power have been refining for thousands of years.
I really do support Anthropic pushing back here, but the discussions about "Future Claude" really are unsettling. It is like we are treating this as an inevitability. As if we have no choice in the matter. If that is true, then we are the mindless automata and then what does the military need killer-bots for? The would already have them.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
freejazz|5 days ago
fogzen|6 days ago
We could use AI for medical advances and to create a communist utopia without serfdom. But it's already looking like we're getting killer robots and more oppression.
Hope I'm thinking about this wrong. I fear very soon the government will begin nationalizing AI resources and forcing AI researchers to direct their efforts towards weapons systems. Similar to what happened in physics. "We have to be first to have autonomous robot armies" basically.
kraussvonespy|6 days ago
buellerbueller|6 days ago
mayhemducks|6 days ago
If the Pentagon wants Anthropic's technology because it has desirable characteristics, can it not just train its own AI models? Why can't the Pentagon build data centers full of GPUs and hire some smart people like the commercial AI providers did?
Why in this case, has the usual path for technology been flipped? Starting out as commercial tech for civilians, and then being re-purposed for military use feels unusual to me. Maybe Hegseth's "War department" has a recruiting problem.
iepathos|6 days ago
black_13|5 days ago
[deleted]
IG_Semmelweiss|6 days ago
But no one, especially the government, should get in bed with them, when anthropic leadership has a track record trying to use their early mover advantace, to effectively create an AI cartel [1]
I'm glad Anthropic is getting a taste of their own medicine.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-10-15/anthro...
bigyabai|6 days ago
vonneumannstan|6 days ago
kittikitti|6 days ago
At the end of the rabbit hole, it's all about enforcement, regardless of the contract. Who's going to enforce Anthropic's terms and conditions if they betray the Pentagon?
hungryhobbit|5 days ago
wan23|6 days ago
anon84873628|5 days ago
buellerbueller|6 days ago
oceanplexian|6 days ago
Analemma_|6 days ago
There is exactly one party in this debate trying to help the PRC get advanced military tech, and it’s not Anthropic.
tehjoker|6 days ago
vonneumannstan|6 days ago