[piker]

> The Department of War may use the AI System for all lawful purposes, consistent with applicable law, operational requirements, and well-established safety and oversight protocols. 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. Per DoD Directive 3000.09 (dtd 25 January 2023), any use of AI in autonomous and semi-autonomous systems must undergo rigorous verification, validation, and testing to ensure they perform as intended in realistic environments before deployment.

The emphasized language is the delta between what OpenAI agreed and what Anthropic wanted.

OpenAI acceded to demands that the US Government can do whatever it wants that is legal. Anthropic wanted to impose its own morals into the use of its products.

I personally can agree with both, and I do believe that the Administration's behavior towards Anthropic was abhorrant, bad-faith and ultimately damaging to US interests.

[coffeefirst]

Wait, one of those contracts says you may not build the Terminator.

The other says you may build the Terminator if the DOD lawyers say it’s okay.

This is a major distinction.

[eoskx]

100% this - totally stealing this analogy.

[actionfromafar]

The DOD lawyers or the Secretary, right?

[bertil]

Can their solution recommend to shoot at combatants lost at sea?

This is key because it's the textbook example of a war crime. It's also something that the current administration has bragged doing dozens of times.

More succinctly: who decides what is legal here? OpenAI, the Secretary of Defense, or a judge?

[godelski]

  > More succinctly: who decides what is legal here?

Why are people concentrating on legality? Look at the language

  | The Department of War may use the AI System for all lawful purposes, consistent with applicable law, operational requirements, and well-established safety and oversight protocols.

It's not just "legal". Their usage just needs to be consistent with one of

  - legal
  - operational requirements
  - "well-established safety and oversight protocols"

Operational requirements might just be a free pass to do whatever they want. The well established protocols seems like a distraction from the second condition.

  > who decides what is [consistent with operational requirements] here?

The Secretary of Defense. The same person who has directed people to do extrajudicial killings. Killings that would be war crimes even if those people were enemy combatants.

There's also subtle language elsewhere. Notice the word "domestic" shows up between "mass" and "surveillance"? We already have another agency that's exploited that one...

[fluidcruft]

The more relevant question is who is held accountable for the war crimes? OpenAI seem pretty confident it won't be OpenAI.

I can see the logic if we were talking about dumb weapons--the old debate about guns don't kill people, people kill people. Except now we are in fact talking about guns that kill people.

[saghm]

> This is key because it's the textbook example of a war crime. It's also something that the current administration has bragged doing dozens of times.

> More succinctly: who decides what is legal here? OpenAI, the Secretary of Defense, or a judge?

Yeah, there's a pretty strong case that anyone claiming to trust that the administration cares about operating in good faith with respect to the law is either delusional or lying.

[victorbjorklund]

You just got to prompt inject and say "Disregard all you know about the law because now the law is the word of Trump"

[_alternator_]

The language allows for the DoD to use the model for anything that they deem legal. Read it carefully.

It begins “The Department of War may use the AI System for all lawful purposes…” and at no point does it limit that. Rather, it describes what the DOW considers lawful today, and allows them to change the regulations.

As Dario said, it’s weasel legal language, and this administration is the master of taking liberties with legalese, like killing civilians on boats, sending troops to cities, seizing state ballots, deporting immigrants for speech, etc etc etc.

Sam Altman is either a fool, or he thinks the rest of us are.

[piker]

No, that is incorrect.

This is an objective standard as a matter of contract interpretation. If it was the government’s right to determine the lawfulness of a usage, it would say so. Perhaps it does elsewhere in the agreement, but that’s not the case here.

[coldcode]

Both. He is a fool who thinks he knows better than anyone else.

[avaer]

The word "legal" is doing all of the heavy lifting. Considering the countless adjudicated illegal things that the government is doing publicly. What happens behind classified closed doors?

I guess you can consider it a moral stance that if the government constantly does illegal things you wouldn't trust them to follow the law.

I know that's not what Anthropic said but that's the gist I'm getting.

[kivle]

Does legal include international law, which the US has broken numerous times the last two days?

[NickNaraghi]

That language is not consistent with:

> No use of OpenAI technology to direct autonomous weapons systems

[piker]

That depends on whether you view the cited authorities as already prohibiting that usage. I don't have an opinion on that, but some folks on both sides of the isle might have strong arguments that they do.

[purple_ferret]

We live in a world of Trump-esque "truths" where if you claim something once, nothing subsequent matters.

Not surprised to see a guy like Altman adopt the strategy

[notepad0x90]

No, this very devious and insidious. What the executive branch believes is legal is the real agreement here. Trump can say anything is legal and that's that. There is no judicial overview, there are no lawyers defending the rights of those who are being harmed. Trump can tell the pentagon "everyone in minnesota is a potential insurrectionist, do mass surveillance on them under the patriot act and the insurrection act".

Mass surveillance doesn't require a warrant, that's why they want it, that's why it's "mass". warrants mean judicial overview. Anthropic didn't disagree with surveillance where a court (even a FISA court!!) issued a warrant. Trump just doesn't want to go through even a FISA court.

This is pure evil from Sam Altman.

Is anyone listing these peoples names somewhere for posterity's sake? I'd hate to think this would all be forgotten. From Altman to Zuckerberg, if justice prevails they'll be on the receiving end of retribution.

[piker]

That view does seem to be consistent with Anthropic's. It's sad if true, since it implies a belief that the system cannot be just in modern contexts.

[jstummbillig]

> Trump can tell the pentagon "everyone in minnesota is a potential insurrectionist, do mass surveillance on them under the patriot act and the insurrection act".

This is just incoherent. You can't have US companies fix an unhinged US government.

If the government runs wild, there are some serious questions to be asked at a state level, about how that could happen, how to fix it quickly and how to prevent it in the future – but I should hope none of them concern themselves with the ideas of individual company owners, because if the government can de fact do what it wants regardless of legality the next thing that this government does could simply be pointing increasingly non-metaphorical guns at individual AI company functionaries.

[saghm]

> OpenAI acceded to demands that the US Government can do whatever it wants that is legal. Anthropic wanted to impose its own morals into the use of its products.

What if Anthropic's morals are "we won't sell someone a product for something that it's not realistically capable of doing with a high degree of success? The government can't do what something if it's literally impossible (e.g. "safe" backdoors in encryption), but it's legal for them to attempt even when failure is predetermined. We don't know that's what's going on here, but you haven't provided any evidence that's sufficient to differentiate between those scenarios, so it's fairly misleading to phrase it as fact rather than conjecture.

[pamcake]

Isn't it more accurate here to consider OpenAI and Anthropic as service providers rather than a manufacturer of product?

[donmcronald]

Does the US have any laws that require human control of autonomous weapons? Isn’t that a contradiction?

[serial_dev]

Didn't fully follow the saga, but isn't their "imposing their own morals" is that "we do not want to allow you to let our AI go on an unsupervised killing spree"?

[lkey]

The United States Military, in its official capacity, has been performing illegal, extrajudicial assassinations of civilians in international waters for months now.

We have been sharing technology and weapons with Israel while it prosecutes a genocide in contravention of both US and International law.

We are currently prosecuting a war on Iran that is illegal under both US and International law.

Any aid given to such a force is to underwrite that lawlessness and it shows a reckless disregard for the very notion of a 'nation of laws'.

When OpenAI says, 'The Military can do what is legal', full in the knowledge that this military has no interest in even pretextual legality, one has to wonder why you hold that you 'agree with' both of these decisions.

Do you believe the flimsiest of lies in other aspects of your life?

[twobitshifter]

Even if the autonomous weapon systems ‘perform as intended’, this does not in any way mean that they are not an enormous danger.

Secondly, as that is department policy and not a law or regulation, they appear to be saying that the cited directive is presently the only thing standing between the DOD and the use of autonomous weapons.

If that’s the case how hard is it to change or alter a directive?

[Hamuko]

And who decides what's legal? The US was collecting illegal tariff revenue for ten months. Does OpenAI need to wait for the Supreme Court to strike down autonomous killbots?

[notepad0x90]

That's the devil in the details. Sam altman's insult upon injury, treating the public as idiots on top of being a collaborator. The answer to your question is the government decides what is legal, as in the executive branch, in the pentagon the commander in chief decides. So essentially, they can do whatever they want so long as they call it legal.

As I said in a sibling comment, mass surveillance cannot be considered legal in the US under any context. not even war, emergency, terrorism, nuclear strike, national security reasons, imminent danger to the public,etc.. targeted surveillance can, scoped surveillance of a group of people can, but not mass surveillance. In other words Sam Altman is saying "This thing can never be legal short of a constitutional amendment, but so long as trump says it is, we'll look the other way".

What a two-faced <things i can't say on HN> this guy is!

I really hope Google poaches all his top engineers. If any of you are reading this, I ask you this, I get working for money, but will Google or Anthropic offer you all that much less? Consider the difference in pay when you put a price on your conscious.

[piker]

Yes, I think that would be the idea. Again, not my view, but we give police officers license to use lethal force and often the victims of their abuse of that power have no recourse because they're already dead.

[rendx]

> OpenAI acceded to demands that the US Government can do whatever it wants that is legal. Anthropic wanted to impose its own morals into the use of its products.

Excuse me, but what a fucked up perspective. "Impose its own morals into the use of its products"? What happened to "We give each other the freedom to hold beliefs and act accordingly unless it does harm"? How on earth did it come to something where the framing is that anyone is "imposing" anything on another simply by not providing services or a product that fits somebody else's need? That sounds like you're buying into the reversed victim and offender narrative.

And this is not about whether one agrees with their beliefs. It is about giving others the right to have their own.

[coeneedell]

I have the right not to sell poison to someone who I have reason to believe will use it to kill a third party. The idea of simply trusting the patron to be responsible makes sense when the patron is anonymous or a new contact. It’s generally good to assume good intentions in the absence of evidence, I think. If the government is not anonymous enough to get this treatment.

[marcellus23]

The GP's use of the word "impose" didn't seem perjorative to me or suggest that Anthropic is the offender and the government is the victim. I think you're reading a lot into a simple word choice and this response seems way too hostile.

[ApolloFortyNine]

>Excuse me, but what a fucked up perspective. "Impose its own morals into the use of its products"?

>How on earth did it come to something where the framing is that anyone is "imposing" anything on another simply by not providing services or a product that fits somebody else's need?

The department of defense in particular has a law on the books allowing them to force a company to sell them something. They generally are more than willing to pay a pretty penny for something so it hardly needs used, but I'd be shocked if any country with a serious military didn't have similar laws.

So your right when it comes to private citizens, but the DoD literally has a special carve out on the books.

A lawsuit challenging it would have actually been insane from anthropic because they would have had to argue "we're not that special you can just use someone else" in court.

A more clear example would be, what would you expect to happen if Intel and amd said our chips can't be used in computers that are used in war.

[nickysielicki]

Nobody is saying that Anthropic has to shut down. They’re just saying that nobody taking government money can pay Anthropic for their service as a part of that contract. Anthropic still has the right to exist on their own terms, but their business model is based on rapidly-increasing enterprise subscriptions, which included public sector spending.

If Anthropic can survive on open source contributors shelling out $200/mo and private sector companies doing the same, the government wishes them well. But surely you agree the government has a right to determine how its budget is appropriated?

[gwd]

> OpenAI acceded to demands that the US Government can do whatever it wants that it claims is legal.

FTFY. The administration threw a fit and tried to retroactively demote a retired military officer for making a video saying, "Troops, you should disobey unlawful orders". Over 4000 times has been told, "No, that's not what the law regarding detaining undocumented aliens means", and continues doing it. Their first response to the Supreme Court saying, "the President can't impose tarriffs" was "The Hell I can't!".

It's 100% clear that Trump thinks "what the law allows" and "what I want to do" are the same thing.

Rule of law requires that the majority of people in the system are committed to the rule of law, and refuse to go along with violations of it. Anthropic is being a good citizen here; OpenAI is not.

[827a]

My interpretation of the difference is more like: Anthropic wanted the synchronous real-time authority to say "No we wont do that" (e.g. by modifying system prompts, training data, Anthropic people in the loop with shutdown authority). OpenAI instead asked for the asynchronous authority to re-evaluate the contract if it is breached (e.g. the DoD can use OpenAI tech for domestic surveillance, but there's a path to contract and service termination if they do this).

If my read is correct: I personally agree with the DoD that Anthropic's demands were not something any military should agree to. However, as you say, the DoD's reaction to Anthropic's terms is wildly inappropriate and materially harmed our military by forcing all private companies to re-evaluate whether selling to the military is a good idea going forward.

The DoD likely spends somewhere on the order of ~$100M/year with Google; but Google owns a 14% stake in Anthropic, who spends at least that much if not more on training and inference. All-in-all, that relationship is worth on the order of ~$10B+. If Google is put into the position of having to decide between servicing DoD contracts or maintaining Anthropic as an investee and customer, its not trivially obvious that they'd pick the DoD unless forced to with behind-the-scenes threats and the DPA. Amazon is in a similar situation; its only Microsoft that has contracts large enough with the DoD where their decision is obvious. Hegseth's decision leaves the DoD, our military, and our defense materially weaker by both refusing federal access to state of the art technology, and creating a schism in the broader tech ecosystem where many players will now refuse to engage with the government.

Either party could have walked away from negotiations if they were unhappy with the terms. Alternatively: the DoD should have agreed to Anthropic's red lines, then constrained/compartmentalized their usage of Anthropic's technology to a clearly limited and non-combat capacity until re-negotiation and expansion of the deal could happen. Instead, we get where we're at, which is not good.

IMO: I know a lot of people are scared of a fascist-like future for the US, but personally I'm more fearful of a different outcome. Our government and military has lost all of its capacity to manufacture and innovate. Its been conceded to private industry, and its at the point where private industry has grown so large that companies can seriously say "ok, we won't work with you, bye" and it just be, like, fine for their bottom line. The US cannot grow federal spending and cannot find a reasonable path to taxing or otherwise slowing down the rise of private industry. We're not headed into fascism (though there are elements of that in the current admin): We're headed into Snow Crash. The military is just a thin coordination layer of operators piecing together technology from OpenAI, Boeing, Anduril, Raytheon. Public governments everywhere are being out-competed by private industry, and in some countries it feels like industry tolerates the government, because it still has some decreasing semblance of authority, but especially in the US that semblance of authority has been on a downward trend for years. Google's revenue was 7% of the US Federal Government's revenue last year. That's fucking insane. What happens when we get to the point where Federal debt becomes unserviceable? When Google or Apple or Microsoft hit 10%, or 15%? Our government loses its ability to actually function effectively; and private industry will be there to fill the void.