I thought it was interesting he threw in the bit about the supply chain risk and Defense Production Act being inherently contradictory.  Most of the letter felt objective and cooperative, but that bit jumped off the page as more forceful rejection of Hegseth&#x27;s attempt to bully them.  Couldn&#x27;t have been accidental.

What would the ideal response have been, in your view?

&quot;Regardless, these threats do not change our position: we cannot in good conscience accede to their request.&quot;

I see it as the opposite, its a lousy excuse of a message trying to get people not to think that they are giving in. Instead they list the horrible uses that they are already helping the government with. Dont worry, we only help murder people in other countries not the US. They also keep calling it the &quot;Department of War&quot; which means that this message is not for &quot;us&quot;, its them begging publicly to Hegseth.

Big respectTotal humiliation for Hegseth, sure there will be a backlash

&gt; All that matters is that everyone calls it the Department of War, and regards it as such, which everyone does.What you just described is consensus, and framing it as fascism damages the credibility of your stance. There are better arguments to make, which don’t require framing a label update as oppression.

It is called the Department of War because we live under fascism and Congress no longer matters.All that matters is that everyone calls it the Department of War, and regards it as such, which everyone does.

Maybe this is the DoW Pam Bondi was referring to.

This. They even put a &quot;wArFiGhTers&quot; in there.

Remember, this is the same administration that barred the AP from the Oval Office because they wouldn&#x27;t rename the Gulf of Mexico. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;us-news&#x2F;2025&#x2F;feb&#x2F;11&#x2F;associated-press-oval-office-gulf-of-america" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;us-news&#x2F;2025&#x2F;feb&#x2F;11&#x2F;associated-p...</a>While this action may indeed cause the DoD to blacklist Anthropic from doing business w&#x2F;the government, they probably were being as careful as they could be not to double down on the nose-thumbing.

I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s addressed to Hegseth, but to anyone who might be sympathetic to Hegseth. Which I think actually strengthens your point, the goal appears to be to make it so the only possible complaint with the letter for someone sympathetic to the administration is &quot;but mass domestic surveillance &#x2F; fully autonomous weapons are legal&quot; and not &quot;look at this lunatic leftist who calls it the department of defense&quot;.

It&#x27;s addressed to Hegseth, who insists on calling it that.If they had called it DoD, then that would have been another finger in his eye.

While I agree the name change has not (yet) been made with the proper authority, I&#x27;m quite partial to the name and prefer to use it despite its prematurity. I think it does a better job of communicating the types of work actually done by the department and rightly gives people pause about their support of it. Though I&#x27;m sure that wasn&#x27;t the administration&#x27;s intention.

Often offensive and also often defensive of others.. so if renaming is on the table, it’s probably most apt to call it the Dept of Security since the vast majority of what it does is maintaining the security umbrella that has helped suppress world war since the last one. Of course, facts or opinions on whether it succeeds on the security front depend on which side of the umbrella you’re on.

The Department of Defense was named in 1949, not 1947, and the thing that it was renamed from was the National Military Establishment, which was newly created in 1947 to be put over the two old military departments (War, which was over the Army only, and Navy, which was over the Navy including the Marine Corps)At the same time as the NME was created, the Army was split into the Army and Air Force and the Department of War was also split in two, becoming the Department of the Army and the Department of the Air Force.

Less hypocritical than Defense. US has never been on the defense, always offense since it was renamed in 1947.

Naming is important because it intuits what we expect to do with a thing. The Department of Defense invading Greenland is more invocative to inquiry than the Department of War invading Greenland because that&#x27;s what a department of war would do.It&#x27;s one of the reasons why people get annoyed at jargon or are pissed off about pronouns, because it highlights that they should be putting mental effort into understanding why they&#x27;re current mental model doesn&#x27;t fit. It&#x27;s much easier to ignore and be comfortable if there&#x27;s not glaring sirens saying you&#x27;ve got some learning to do.Most of us can&#x27;t (or won&#x27;t) be aware of everything that should be important to us, having glaring context clues that we should take notice of something incongruous is important. It&#x27;s also why the Trump media approach works so well it&#x27;s basically a case of alarm fatigue as republicans who would normally side against any particular one of his actions don&#x27;t listen because they agreed with some of the actions that democrats previously raised alarms about.

The Department of the Army is what was previously called the Department of War.  The Department of Defense is new, dating to just after WWII.

It&#x27;s a funny thing that the most war-loving people and the most peace-loving people both love calling it &quot;Department of War&quot; - just for different reasons.But the reason for &quot;Department of Defense&quot; name was bureaucratic. It&#x27;s also not true that DOD is hard to understand.

It SHOULD be called the Department of War, as it was originally, since it makes its function clear. We are a society that has euphemized everything and so we no longer understand anything.

TIL of Bikeshedding, or Parkinson’s Law of Triviality.Defined as the tendency for teams to devote disproportionate time and energy to trivial, easy-to-understand issues while neglecting complex, high-stakes decisions. Originating from the example of arguing over a bike shed&#x27;s color instead of a nuclear plant&#x27;s design, it represents a wasteful focus on minor details.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Law_of_triviality" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Law_of_triviality</a>---I deal with this day in and day out. Thank you for informing me of the word that describes the laughable nightmares I deal with on the regular.

It&#x27;s actually a good thing to point out, because it shows that those people are out of control and exceeding their authority, and need to be reined in.No need to die on the hill, but point out that there&#x27;s a consistent pattern of lawless power-grabbing.

&gt; It&#x27;s really not the right thing to be bikeshedding. The people calling the shots call themselves the Department of War. No need to die on hills that don&#x27;t matter.From the first chapter of the book On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder, an historian of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust:&gt; Do not obey in advance.* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;timothysnyder.org&#x2F;on-tyranny" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;timothysnyder.org&#x2F;on-tyranny</a>* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;on-tyranny-twenty-lessons-from-the-twentieth-century-by-timothy-snyder-z-lib.org&#x2F;mode&#x2F;2up" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;on-tyranny-twenty-lessons-from-t...</a>* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Timothy_Snyder" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Timothy_Snyder</a>

You&#x27;re talking about an administration that barred the AP from pressed briefings because they didn&#x27;t call it the Gulf of America. This is not a bikeshed.

I wouldn’t call a brief comment on the matter dying on a hill fcs

It&#x27;s really not the right thing to be bikeshedding. The people calling the shots call themselves the Department of War. No need to die on hills that don&#x27;t matter.

&gt; And what if congress renames it tomorrow?Then tomorrow it will be the Department of War. Just like When Congress voted to split the old Department of War into the Department of the Army and the Department of the Air Force, and to take both of those and the previously-separate Department of the Navy under a new National Military Establishment led by the newly-created Secretary of Defense (and when it later to voted to rename the NME as “Department of Defense”), things changed in the past.&gt; They have the votes.Perhaps, but the law doesn&#x27;t change because the votes are in a whip count on a hypothetical change, it changes because they are actually cast on a bill making a concrete change.

This is a willfully ignorant misreading of what&#x27;s actually going on. They&#x27;ve decided to use the &quot;Department of War&quot; moniker in part because they think it sounds cool, but more significantly because it demonstrates they can break the law with impunity. Hence, there has not been a vote on the matter.

And what if congress renames it tomorrow? They have the votes. These sort of procedural gotchas are as stupid as they are boring.

The name is extremely off-putting, but I can see how they would want to be diplomatic toward the administration in using their chosen name. Save the push-back for where it really matters.

It&#x27;s not named the Department of War because Congress didn&#x27;t rename it.Other than that, good on ya.

Yea but every warfighter will get a waifu

Are you Chinese? If not, I think you should prefer the people defending you to have the best tools to do so.

It&#x27;s better than actively aiding them. Make them struggle at every turn.

Apparently part of this whole battle is because Grok isn&#x27;t up to part to be an acceptable alternative.

As far as we can tell, OpenAI and Google seem to be ok with it and not resisting. It would be easier for Anthropic&#x27;s cause if they did.

I think the warfighters are a distraction, a system could trivially say that there is a human in the loop for LLM-derived kill lists. My money is that the mass domestic surveillance is the true sticking point, because it’s exactly what you would use a LLM for today.

Grok in unhinged mode piloting an Apache, what could go wrong.

The worst part of this is if they do remove Claude, and probably GPT, and Gemini soon after because of outcry we are going to be left with our military using fucking Grok as their model, a model that not even on par with open source Chinese models.

Yes, but also remember where they came from.They don&#x27;t have any brand poison, unlike nearly everyone else competing with them. Some serious negative equity in tha group, be it GOOG, Grok , META, OpenAI, M$FT, deepseek, etc.Claude was just being the little bot that could, and until now, flying under the radar

It&#x27;s much more than a few million? Being declared a supply chain risk means that no company that wants to do business with the government can buy Anthropic. And no company that wants to do business with those businesses can buy Anthropic either. This rules out pretty much all American corporations as customers?

They are playing a good PR game for sure. Their recent track record doesn’t show if they can be trusted. Few millions is nothing for their current revenue and saying they sacrificed is a big stretch here.

Words are cheap. Actions aren&#x27;t. Dario Amodei is putting his company on the line for what he believes in. That&#x27;s courage, character and... yes, morality.

It&#x27;s a little bit better than so many sniveling, cowardly elites are doing right now.

This is not how the word &quot;moral&quot; should be used in a sentence that also has the name Dario Amodei in it.

Perhaps you just have different moral values? I suspect each of the countries you mentioned spy on us. I also suspect we spy on them. I’m glad an American company wouldn’t be so foolish as to pretend otherwise.

This is a public note, but directed at the current administration, so reading it as a description of what is or is not moral is completely missing the point. This note is saying (1) we refuse to be used in this way, and (2) we are going to use &quot;mass surveillance of US citizens&quot; as our defensive line because it is at least backed by Constitutional arguments. Those same arguments ought to apply more broadly, but attempts to use them that way have already been trampled on and so would only weaken the arguments as a defense.If it helps: refusing to tune Claude for domestic surveillance will also enable refusing to do the same for other surveillance, because they can make the honest argument that most things you&#x27;d do to improve Claude for any mass surveillance will also assist in domestic mass surveillance.

There is no moral leg to stand on here, he says here in plain english that if they wanted to use CLAUDE to perform mass surveillance on Canada, Mexico, UK, Germany, that is perfectly fine.

Agreed. You don’t have to be an LLM maximalist or a doomer to see the opportunity for real, practical danger from ubiquitous surveillance and autonomous weapons. It would have been extremely easy for Dario to demonstrate the same level of backbone as Sam Altman or Sundar Pichai.

What do you mean? You think Hegseth and Anthropic are doing this for PR reasons?

If Anthropic is nationalized or declared a supply chain risk tomorrow, will you say the same?

I feel like the deepest technical definition of autocratic is “fully autonomous weapons”?

Freedom isn’t free. Someone has to defend the democratic values that you and I take for granted.Dario’s statement is in support of the institution, not the current administration.

They are undeniably taking a moral stand. Among other things, the statement explains that there are two use cases that they refuse to do. This is a moral stand. It might not align with your morals, but it&#x27;s still a moral stand.

A moral stand? ... What? Did we read the same statement? It opens right out the gate with:&gt;I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries.&gt;Anthropic has therefore worked proactively to deploy our models to the Department of War and the intelligence community. We were the first frontier AI company to deploy our models in the US government’s classified networks, the first to deploy them at the National Laboratories, and the first to provide custom models for national security customers. Claude is extensively deployed across the Department of War and other national security agencies for mission-critical applications, such as intelligence analysis, modeling and simulation, operational planning, cyber operations, and more.which I find frankly disgusting.

You&#x27;re right, we should never build anything because bad people might try to use it. Everyone that has progressed technology is a monster!

We knew long before AI was a twinkle in Amodel&#x27;s eye that if it were to be built, then it would be co-opted by thugs.Anthropic&#x27;s statement is little more than pageantry from the knowing and willing creators of a monster.

Props to Dario and Anthropic for taking a moral stand. A rarity in tech these days.

I&#x27;m glad to see Dario and Anthropic showing some spine! A lot of other people would have caved.

&quot;I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries.&quot;That opening line is one hell of a set up. The current administration is doing everything it can to become autocratic thereby setting themselves up to be adversarial to Anthropic, which is pretty much the point of the rest of the blog. I guess I&#x27;m just surprised to have such a succinct opening instead just slop.

&gt; Let&#x27;s hope sanity prevails and the next election cycle can bring in some competent non-grievance based leadership.Would be nice, but I have a bad feeling that the impact of widescale mostly unregulated AI adoption on our social fabric is going to make the social media era that gave rise to Trump, et al seem like the good ol&#x27; days in comparison.I hope I am wrong.

Hope is not a plan, unfortunately, so if that&#x27;s all we&#x27;ve got, I don&#x27;t have much hope.

Some people are calling it the &quot;American century of humiliation&quot;No other country that went through a phase like this has ever recovered. Not even in a century.

&gt; It&#x27;s going to be a generational effort to fix what these people are breaking more of every day.That assumes you have people wanting to fix what is broken - and I have a hard time believing even now that they are in the majority.MAGA and their supporters? They want to see the world burn, if only for different motives: the &quot;left behind&quot; people in flyover states just want revenge, the Evangelicals literally believe they can cause the Second Coming of Christ by it [1], the Russia fangroup wants to see Ukraine burn to the ground and the ultra-libertarians&#x2F;dont tread on me folks want all government but maybe a bit of military to go away. That is what unifies so many people behind the Trump banner.The problem is, on the left side you got a bunch of people completely fed up as well. Anarchists of course, then you got the &quot;left behind&quot; people who still want revenge on the system but aren&#x27;t willing to enlist the help of the far-right for that goal, you got revolutionaries of all kind... and you got those who believe that the rot runs too deep to fix by now.And let&#x27;s face the uncomfortable truth: every one of them, bar the Evangelicals and the Russia apologists, actually has a decent point in wanting to see the world burn. Post-Thatcher capitalism has wrecked too many lives, the US Constitution hasn&#x27;t seen a meaningful update in decades and no overhaul in centuries, the &quot;checks and balances&quot; that were supposed to prevent a Trump from reaching office or rising to the position of effective dictator have been all but destroyed, the &quot;American Dream&quot; has been vaporware ever since 2007...[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;c20g1zvgj4do" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;c20g1zvgj4do</a>

&gt; generational effort to fixYou imply that there are folks that willing to fix or even recognize that things are broken in the first place

This isn&#x27;t a one-election thing. It&#x27;s going to be a generational effort to fix what these people are breaking more of every day. I hope I live to see it come to some kind of fruition - I recently turned 50.

Indeed.  Bin Laden succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.  He kickstarted our self-destruction.

You mean, what&#x27;s been happening to the USA? this isn&#x27;t a new trend. Militarization of police, open attacks on democracy, unilateral foreign policy moves.the country jumped the shark post 9&#x2F;11 and has been on a slow rot since then.

The current situation in the US is the depressing thing- articles like this give me hope. Real Americans aren&#x27;t having these BS authoritarian violations of our constitutional rights.

Not at all. It&#x27;s a depressing read because the US Government is doing such things that would have been considered insane before 2016.

What do you mean? You think any company should do whatever the government tells them?

there&#x27;s more money and &quot;don&#x27;t rock the boat&quot; mentality on here as a consequence of that and they try to keep the moderation light. So its just not discussed enough to give people still tragically mired in that tribalism, the appropriate levels of shame.

I’ve been called bad things on HN for suggesting there’s even a whiff of corruption in this administration. That alone scares me. Deeply.

All of what&#x27;s happening is a symptom, there is no reason it would change course with the next elections, all of this is the logical development of decades of cultural, political and morale rot in the US society. Trump isn&#x27;t a bad moment we have to push through before we get back to the baseline, there has been no serious push back from anyone so far, it&#x27;s here to stay

&gt; What is becoming of the USA?There was a coup by a foriegn adversary and Americans lost.

This is such a depressing read. What is becoming of the USA? Let&#x27;s hope sanity prevails and the next election cycle can bring in some competent non-grievance based leadership.

Just visibly wave the US flag and you&#x27;ll be fine, don&#x27;t worry.

Soon it will select targets in commie countries though, perhaps it already does. Who selected to bomb Chavez mausoleum btw?

Probably not a good idea to let Claude vibe-selecting targets, it still sometime hallucinates

That still doesn&#x27;t justify mass surveillance.

Never said that. Didn&#x27;t even imply it.

100% - this is the shortsightedness and demonstrates hypocrisy.Countries routinely use other countries intelligence gathering apparatus to get around domestic surveillance laws.

Exactly. FVEYs been doing reciprocal surveillance on each other for decades.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Five_Eyes#Domestic_espionage_sharing_controversy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Five_Eyes#Domestic_espionage_s...</a>

&gt; what&#x27;s the deal with making the distinction between domestic mass surveillance and foreign mass surveillance? Are there no democracies aside from the US?I think it&#x27;s just saying that spying on another country&#x27;s citizens isn&#x27;t fundamentally undemocratic (even if that other country happens to be a democracy) because they&#x27;re not your citizens and therefore you don&#x27;t govern them. Spying on your own citizens opens all sorts of nefarious avenues that spying on another country&#x27;s citizens does not.

If nothing else, the USA has learned that a lot of people outside their borders do not share the same ideas on basic human rights, and most of the world hates when we try to ensure them. Some countries are closely aligned with our ideals and are treated differently. There are many different layers of this, from Australia to North Korea.

Particularly so when those foreign nationals can be consumers. “fuck your basic human rights, but we can take your money just fine”.

&gt;democracies aside from the US.I mean, I guess from &#x27;65 to around 96? We had a good run.

This is a political statement directed at the US public, Congress, and executive branch in the context of a dispute with the US executive branch that is likely to escalate (if the executive is not otherwise dissuaded) into a legal battle, and it therefore focuses particularly on issues relevant in that context, including Constitutional, limits on the government as a whole, the executive branch, and the Department of Defense (for which Anthropic used the non-legal nickname coined by the executive branch instead of the legal name.) Domestic mass surveillance involves Constitutional limits on government power and statutory limits on executive power and DoD roles that foreign surveillance does not. That&#x27;s why it is the focus.

&gt; because the Chinese government probably isn&#x27;t going to do anything about whatever they find out.This really depends. If a foreign adversary&#x27;s surveillance finds you have a particular weakness exploitable for corporate or government espionage, you&#x27;re cooked.Domestic governments are at least still theoretically somewhat accountable to domestic laws, at least in theory (current failure modes in the US aside).

I think it&#x27;s slightly less ridiculous than it sounds, because governments have much more power over their own citizens. As an American I would dramatically prefer the Chinese government to spy on me than the American government, because the Chinese government probably isn&#x27;t going to do anything about whatever they find out.(That logic breaks down somewhat in the case of explicitly negotiated surveillance sharing agreements.)

One of them is illegal for DoD to do and the other is not.

Also the more the US openly treats the world like garbage, the more the rest of the world will likely reciprocate to US citizens.It reminds me of some recent horror stories at border crossings - harassing people and requiring giving up all your data on your phone - sets a terrible precedent.

&gt;Are there no democracies aside from the US?If we&#x27;re asking &quot;What&#x27;s the deal&quot; questions, what&#x27;s the deal with this question? Do only people in democracies deserve protections? If we believe foreign nationals deserve privacy, why should that only apply to people living in democracies?

The US has a strong history of trying to avoid building domestic surveillance and a national police. Largely it’s due to the 4th amendment and questions about constitutionality. Obviously that’s going questionably well but historically that’s why it’s a red line.

In the US, we have the ability to either confirm or change a significant chunk of our Federal government roughly every two years via the House of Representatives. The argument here is that we, theoretically, could collectively elect people that are hostile to domestic mass surveillance into the House of Representatives (and other places if able) and remove pro-surveillance incumbents from power on this two year cycle.The reasons this hasn&#x27;t happened yet are many and often vary by personal opinion. My top two are:1) Lack of term limits across all Federal branchesand2) A general lack of digital literacy across all Federal branchesI mean, if the people who are supposed to be regulating this stuff ask Mark Zuckerberg how to send an email, for example, then how the heck are they supposed to say no to the well dressed government contractor offering a magical black box computer solution to the fear of domestic terrorism (regardless of if its actually occurring or not)?

My guess is that they can&#x27;t object to foreign intelligence, and would lose negotiating ground if they even tried.Optimistically, they can still refuse to do work that would aid in foreign intelligence gathering, by arguing that it would also be beneficial for domestic mass surveillance.I&#x27;ll admit that the phrase &quot;We support...foreign intelligence and counterintelligence&quot; is awful as hell, and it&#x27;s possible that my apologist claims are BS. But Anthropic has very little leverage here (despite having a signed contract and so legally fully in the right), so I could see why they&#x27;re desperate to stick to only the most solid objections available.

That reasoning sounds confusing: are you actually in favor of US gov&#x27;s surveillance on Americans?If not, then why are you punishing that company for refusing to deal with the US gov?Or is it just because they worded their opposition in a certain way that you dislike?

I&#x27;m glad to see this as the top comment. I was, until recently, a loyal Anthropic customer. No more. Because the way non-Americans are spoken of by a company that serves an international market (and this isn&#x27;t the first instance):&quot;Mass domestic surveillance. We support the use of AI for lawful foreign intelligence and counterintelligence missions. But using these systems for mass _domestic_ surveillance is incompatible with democratic values.&quot;Second class citizens. Americans have rights, you don&#x27;t. &quot;Democratic values&quot; applies only to the United States. We&#x27;ll take your money and then spy on you and it&#x27;s ok because we headquartered ourselves and our bank accounts in the United States.Very questionable. American exceptionalism that tries to define &quot;democracy&quot; as the thing that happens within its own borders, seemingly only. Twice as tone-deaf after what we&#x27;ve seen from certain prominent US citizens over the last year. Subscription cancelled after I got a whiff of this a month ago.(Not to mention the definition of &quot;lawful foreign intelligence&quot; has often, and especially now, been quite ethically questionable from the United States.)EDIT: don&#x27;t just downvote me. Explain why you think using their product for surveillance of non-Americans is ethical. Justify your position.

This contradicts the opening of the Declaration of Independence, which recognizes all humans as possessing rights:&quot;We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.&quot;

&gt; what&#x27;s the deal with making the distinction between domestic mass surveillance and foreign mass surveillance?A large portion of Americans believe in &quot;citizen rights&quot;, not &quot;human rights&quot;. By that logic, non-Americans do not have a right to privacy.

I agree with your premise because this seems to be the modern interpretation of the courts, but it is not the historical interpretation.The historical basis of the bill of rights is that they are god given rights of all people merely recognized by the government. This is also partially why all rights in the BoR are granted to &#x27;people&#x27; instead of &#x27;citizens.&#x27;Of course this all does get very confusing. Because the 4th amendment does generally apply to people, while the 2nd amendment magically people gets interpreted as some mumbo-jumbo people of the &#x27;political community&#x27; (Heller) even though from the founding until the mid 1800s ~most people it protected who kept and bore arms didn&#x27;t even bother to get citizenship or become part of the &#x27;political community&#x27;.

The reason why there is an explicit call out for surveillance on American citizens is because there are unquestionable constitutional protections in place for American citizens on American soil.Those unquestionable protections are phrased with enough hand-waving ambiguity of language to leave room for any conceivable interpretation by later courts. See the third-party &#x27;exception&#x27; to the Fourth Amendment, for instance.It&#x27;s as if those morons were running out of ink or time or something, trying to finish an assignment the night before it was due.

given that the US likes to declare jurisdiction whenever somebody touches a US dollar, any thoughts on why those same constitutional protections wouldnt follow?

You’re getting many replies, and having scrolled through much of them I do not see one that actually answers your question truthfully.The reason why there is an explicit call out for surveillance on American citizens is because there are unquestionable constitutional protections in place for American citizens on American soil.There is a strong argument that can be made that using AI to mass surveil Americans within US territory is not only morally objectionable, but also illegal and unconstitutional.There are laws on the books that allow for it right now, through workarounds grandfathered in from an earlier era when mass surveillance was just not possible, and these are what Dario is referencing in this blog post. These laws may be unconstitutional, and pushing this to be a legal fight, may result in the Department of War losing its ability to surveil entirely. They may not want to risk that.I wish that our constitution provided such protections for all peoples. It does not. The pragmatic thing to do then is to focus on protecting the rights that are explicitly enumerated in the constitution, since that has the strongest legal basis.

I believe every person should do that. LLMs should be free and run locally on our machines with no silly restrictions.

The reality is that the US Constitution only offers strong guarantees to citizens and (some of) the people in the US. Foreigners are excluded and foreign mass surveillance is or will happen.I believe every country (or block) should carve an independent path when it comes to AI training, data retention and inference. That is makes most sense, will minimize conflicts and put people in control of their destiny.

In every country, citizens have more rights than non-citizens. The right to freely enter the country, the right to vote, the right to various social services, etc.In the US, one of the rights citizens have is the right against &quot;unreasonable searches and seizures&quot;, established in the Fourth Amendment. That has been interpreted by the Supreme Court to include mass surveillance and to apply to citizens and people geographically located within US borders.That doesn&#x27;t apply that to non-citizens outside the US, simply because the US Constitution doesn&#x27;t require it to.I&#x27;m not defending this, just explaining why it&#x27;s different.But, you can imagine, for example, why in wartime, you&#x27;d certainly want to engage in as much mass surveillance against an enemy country as possible. And even when you&#x27;re not in wartime, countries spy on other countries to try to avoid unexpected attacks.

The distinction between foreign and domestic is a legal one.The Supreme Court has ruled that the US Constitution protects any persons physically present in the United States and its territories as well as any US citizens abroad.So if you are a German national on US soil, you have, say, Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure. If you are a US citizen in Germany, you also have those rights. But a German citizen in Germany does not.What this means in practice is that US 3-letter agencices have essentially been free to mass surveil people outside the United States. Historically these agencies have gotten around that by outsourcing their spying needs to 3 leter agencies in other countries (eg the NSA at one point might outsource spying on US citizens to GCHQ).

As a &quot;foreign national&quot;, what&#x27;s the deal with making the distinction between domestic mass surveillance and foreign mass surveillance? Are there no democracies aside from the US? Don&#x27;t we know since Snowden that if the US wants to do domestic surveillance they&#x27;ll just ask GCHQ to share their &quot;foreign&quot; surveillance capabilities?

A favourable take would be he meant &quot;mass surveillance of non-democratic adversarial countries&quot;. I agree it&#x27;s not phrased this way though.

&gt; &quot;mass domestic surveillance&quot; - mass surveillance of non-domestic civilians is OK?

They want to be nationalized, which is the most profitable exit they&#x27;ll ever get.

Are the guardrails not part of their core? Isn&#x27;t that the whole premise of their existence?

I think it is a reasonable moral stance to acknowledge such things are possible, yet not wanting to be a part of it. Regarding making it technically impossible to do...I think that is what Anthropic means when they say they want to develop guardrails.

A little pessimistic of a take, IMO. You may very well be right, though.

Good optics, but ultimately fruitless.If preventing mass surveillance or fully autonomous weaponry is a -policy- choice and not a technical impossibility, this just opens the door for the department of war to exploit backdoors, and anthropic (or any ai company) can in good conscience say &quot;Our systems were unknowingly used for mass surveillance,&quot; allowing them to save face.The only solution is to make it technically -impossible- to apply AI in these ways, much like Apple has done. They can&#x27;t be forced to compel with any government, because they don&#x27;t have the keys.

those two stipulations were always their only ones, and they were included explicitly in their original contract with the DoW.

Why be so worried about when the US is clearly the belligerent state that strikes others with impunity while China does no such thing?

You, using normal Claude under the consumer ToS, cannot use it to make weapons, kill people, spy on adversaries, etc. The Pentagon, using War Claude, under their currently-existing contract, can use it to make weapons and spy on (foreign) adversaries, but not to (autonomously) kill people. I don&#x27;t love this but I am even less excited about the CCP having WarKimi while we have no military AI.

Idk if the reporting was just biased before, but from what I saw is that this time last week, it was thought you couldn&#x27;t use Anthropic to bring about harm, and now they&#x27;re making it clear that they just don&#x27;t want it used domestically and not fully autonomously.Like maybe it always was just this, but I feel every article I read, regardless of the spin angle, implied do no harm was pretty much one of the rules.

The USA were pretty clearly on the &quot;better side&quot; of conflicts in 1941-1945, during the Cold War (at least as far as Europe and the Marshall plan was concerned). In Koweït and central Europe during the 90s. You may even argue for Afghanistan post 9-11 (although the state building was botched.) in the 2000s. ISIS is a footnote in history because of US intervention (from Trump first term, of all things.) And Ukraine would not be against getting the support it had in 2022 back under Trump.Does not mean that very bad things were not happening at the same time.But it&#x27;s definitely easier to find some &quot;supportable&quot; interventions from the US than, say, Russia or China.

it was before your time.In WWII, we saved the world from what is now seen as some really evil stuff. Not alone of course, Europe and Russia made huge sacrifices and that&#x27;s where much of the war was fought. But US arms and blood were the decisive factor, Germany was winning, Japan was winning.After WWII, the US decided to rebuild the world. We turned our enemies (Germany, Japan) into our close allies.And the people who did it were really and seriously morally committed to doing what they thought was right. It was about building a country, working together. Not the insane politics of today.Look, it wasn&#x27;t all rose-tinted glasses. Bad stuff happened, and McCarthy was worse that what we currently have. And the civil rights movement and all of that. And the stupid wars, Korea, Vietnam, all the smaller police actions. Bad shit was done.But on balance, the US was seen as the force of good, and the guaranteeor of world peace and the prosperity that allows.

I&#x27;m 33 years old, would you mind telling me which year you thought this was, force of good stuff? might be before my timegenuinely curious, I got nothing

When?  Its entire history from the foundation of the Republic to 1947.  The name was changed after WWII; now a faction wants to change it back.  The difference in name never changed the behavior, in either direction.

Well then I don&#x27;t know where you&#x27;ve been for the last ~10~ ~20~ 70 years

Department of War is just such a fucking joke title - when has the US stooped so low, I used to believe in you guys as the force of good on this planet smh

It&#x27;s the Department of Defense, not the Department of War ... only Congress has the legal authority to change the name, and they haven&#x27;t.

for sure. If they weren&#x27;t so self-righteous about not serving ads, it&#x27;d be a great revenue stream for them. It&#x27;d also align with Dario&#x27;s seeming obsession with profitability

I&#x27;ll be glad if they could open their platform enough so that it could run on ads and not 200 dollar subscriptions

&quot;as an ai safety company, we only believe in -partially- autonomous weaponry&quot;Ads are coming.

It&#x27;s that, as I understand it.  Anthropic is the only vendor certified to run its models on DoD&#x2F;DoW classified networks.

It’s not unusual for legal departments to take offense to these sorts of things, because now everyone using Claude within the DoD has to do some kind of audit to figure out if they’re building something that could be construed as surveillance or autonomous weapons (or, what controls are in place to prevent your gun from firing when Claude says, etc). A lot of paperwork.My guess is they just don’t want to bother. I wonder why they specifically need Claude when their other vendors are willing to sign their terms, unless it specifically needs to run in AWS or something for their “classified networks” requirement.

He pushed the issue to an ultimatum because he is an unqualified drunk, and thinks that it&#x27;s against the law for anyone to try and stop the US military from doing something they want to do. This isn&#x27;t an isolated issue; he tried to get multiple US Senators prosecuted for making a PSA that servicemembers shouldn&#x27;t follow illegal orders.

Same reason they cut funding for universities that had DEI mandates, etc. and made a big spectacle of doing it despite it often being very little money etc. etc.It&#x27;s an ideological war, they&#x27;re desperate to win it, and they&#x27;re aiming to put a segment of US civil society into submission, and setting an example for everyone else.He smelled weakness, and like any schoolyard bully personality, he couldn&#x27;t help but turn it into a display of power.

What makes you want to believe the Trump Administration when it claims it doesn&#x27;t want to do domestic mass surveillance?

A significant part of Anthropic&#x27;s cachet as an employer is the ethical stance they profess to take. This is no doubt a tough spot to be in, but it&#x27;s hard to see Dario making any other decision here.What I don&#x27;t understand is why Hegseth pushed the issue to an ultimatum like this. They say they&#x27;re not trying to use Claude for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weapons. If so, what does the Department of War have to gain from this fight?

I thought we were the allies and looked down on powerful secret police. Like the Nazis or the Soviets. Did we lose those wars?

Have a look at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thaura.ai" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thaura.ai</a>.

Take your pick from the many other choices offered by companies that don&#x27;t care about mass spying on _anyone_.

All the Chinese companies publishing open models that I can run on my own steel?

Is there a different AI company that IS taking that stance?Because as far as I know, Anthropic is taking the most moral stance of any AI company.

I can imagine that this will be the logical conclusion for many companies, I thought the same thing too, if it&#x27;s too hard in the USA, they will just move.

As someone who is potentially their client and not domestic, really reassuring that they have no concerns with mass spying peaceful citizens of my particular corner of the world.

Better than the rest. here&#x27;s $200, Dario!

They already kissed the ring, just not the asshole. They have a little dignity left.

Isn&#x27;t it nice to have virtues to signal though? In saying that, you&#x27;re saying you don&#x27;t have any worth signaling over.

A company being asked to violate their virtues refuses, and then communicates that to reestablish their commitment to said virtues?Tell me more about what they should do if a virtue signal in such a situation is a nothing statement.

The notion that it&#x27;s bad to signal virtue is one of the crazier propaganda efforts I&#x27;ve seen over the last 20 years or so.

How is it virtue signalling when sticking by these principles risks their entire business being destroyed by either being declared a supply chain risk or nationalized?

The whole article reads as virtue signaling to me. Anthropic already has large defense contracts. Their models are already being used by the military. There&#x27;s really no statement here.

I read the statement twice. I can&#x27;t understand how you landed on &quot;take my money&quot;.Looks like an optics dance to me. I&#x27;ve noticed a lot of simultaneous positions lately, everyone from politicians and protesters, to celebrities and corporations. They make statements both in support of a thing, and against that same thing. Switching up emphasis based on who the audience is in what context. A way to please everyone.To me the statement reads like Anthropic wants to be at the table, ready to talk and negotiate, to work things out. Don&#x27;t expect updated bullet-point lists about how things are worked out. Expect the occasional &quot;we are the goodies&quot; statements, however.

If you don&#x27;t cancel your account now, I don&#x27;t see what your problem is. Isn&#x27;t it standard practice for allies to spy on each other? No reason to wait for Mistral to catch up when EU foreign policy already sealed the deal.

As a European user, I‘m not happy at all. I can’t fail to notice that non-domestic mass surveillance is not excluded here. I won’t cancel my account just yet because Opus is the best at computer use. But as soon as Mistral catches up and works reasonably well, I‘ll switch.

I wonder if this might be a setup by competition. Certainly looks like one.

this article is _about_ kissing the ring and damage control. Are you seriously believing at face value? You&#x27;re ok with spying non us peaceful citizens?

This makes me a very happy Claude Max subscriber.Finally, someone of consequence not kissing the ring. I hope this gives others courage to do the same.

He’s one of the most influential people when it comes to what future we’ll have. Yes, it’s up to him.

And yet he’s quite happy to make just that when it’s meant to drum you up his own product for investors

How about the present and his personal beliefs?&quot;I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries.&quot;This reads like his objection is not on &quot;autocratic&quot;, but on &quot;adversaries&quot;. Autocratic friends &amp; family are cool with him. A clear wink to a certain administration with autocratic tendencies.

This doesn’t read to me like it was personally written by one person. It’s not Dario we should read this as being written by, it’s Anthropic as an entity.

&gt; It&#x27;s not up to Dario to try to make absolute statements about the future.Thats insane to say, given that he&#x27;s literally acting in the public sphere as the mouth of Sauron for how AI will grow so effective as to destroy almost everyone&#x27;s jobs and AGI will take over our society and kill us all.

He does it all the time when it helps selling his products though, strange

It&#x27;s not called The Department of War.It&#x27;s just incredible to me that people think this is some kind of bold statement defying the administration when it is absolutely filled with small and medium capitulations, laying out in numerous examples how they just jumped right in bed with the military.And no one seems disturbed by the blatant Orwellian doublespeak throughout. &quot;We thoroughly support the mission of the Department of War&quot;--because War is Peace.

I think it&#x27;s phrased just fine. It&#x27;s not up to Dario to try to make absolute statements about the future.

Right - for the same reasons a Waymo is safer than a human-driven car, an autonomous fighter drone will ultimately be deadlier than a human-flown fighter jet. I would like to forestall that day as long as possible but saying &quot;no autonomous weapons ever&quot; isn&#x27;t very realistic right now.

If they had access to them in Ukraine, both sides would already be using them I expect. Right now jamming of drones is a huge obstacle. One way it&#x27;s dealt with is to run literal wired drones with massive spools of cable strung out behind them. A fully autonomous drone would be a significant advantage in this environment.I&#x27;m not making a values judgment here, just saying that they will absolutely be used in war as soon as it&#x27;s feasible to do so. The only exception I could see is if the world managed to come together and sign a treaty explicitly banning the use of autonomous weapons, but it&#x27;s hard for me to see that happening in the near future.Edit: come to think of it, you could argue a landmine is a fully autonomous weapon already.

It&#x27;s only Anthropic with their current models saying no. Fully autonomous weapons have been created, deployed, and have been operational for a long time already. The only holdout I&#x27;ve ever heard of is for the weapons that target humans.Honestly, even landmines could easily be considered fully autonomous weapons and they don&#x27;t care if you&#x27;re human or not.

And that&#x27;s the end of democracy. One of the safe guards of democracy is a military that is trained to not turn against the citizens. Once a government has fully autonomous weapons its game over. They can point those weapons at the populous at the flip of the switch.

Unfortunately I think the writing is clearly on the wall. Fully autonomous weapons are coming soon

They’re being used today by the military. So, they are never going to be against mass surveillance. They can scope that to be domestic mass surveillance though.

US military cannot even offer those assurances themselves today. I tried to look up the last incident of friendly fire. Turns out it was a couple hours ago today, when US military shot down a DHS drone in Texas.

I think it goes without saying that ones the systems are reliable, fully-autonomous weapons will be unleashed on the battlefield.  But they have to have safeguards to ensure that they don&#x27;t turn on friendly forces and only kill the enemy.   What Anthropic is saying, is that right now - they can&#x27;t provide those assurances.   When they can - I suspect those restrictions will be relaxed.

I&#x27;d prefer companies not help the military develop the most powerful weapons possible given we&#x27;re in the age of WMDs, have already had two devastating world wars and a nuclear arms race that puts humanity under permanent risk.

Yes, I absolutely don’t want tech companies to use the money I pay them to harm people. How is that remotely controversial?

&gt; Do you want a tech company to say “the military can never use our stuff for autonomous systems forever, the end”?Yes. Absolutely.

Yes, that&#x27;s exactly what I want them to say.

&gt;Do you want a tech company to say “the military can never use our stuff for autonomous systems forever, the end”?Yes. Yes, that&#x27;s precisely what we want.

What else would you expect? The military is obviously going to develop the most powerful systems they can. Do you want a tech company to say “the military can never use our stuff for autonomous systems forever, the end”? What if Anthropic ends up developing the safest, most cost effective systems for that purpose?

<pre><code> &gt; I thought &quot;Anthropic&quot; was about being concerned about humans
</code></pre>
See also: OpenAI being open, Democratic People&#x27;s Republic of Korea being democratic and peoples-first[0].[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tvtropes.org&#x2F;pmwiki&#x2F;pmwiki.php&#x2F;Main&#x2F;PeoplesRepublicOfTyranny" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tvtropes.org&#x2F;pmwiki&#x2F;pmwiki.php&#x2F;Main&#x2F;PeoplesRepublicO...</a>

do you really need to be told there is a difference in &#x27;magnitude of importance&#x27; between the decision to send out an office memo and the decision to strike a building with ordinance?a lot of white collar jobs see no decision more important than a few hours of revenue. that&#x27;s the difference: you can afford to fuck up in that environment.

Shh! there&#x27;s a lot of money riding on this bet, ahem.

So AI systems are not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons but they are reliable enough to end all white-collar work in the next 12 months?Odd.

&gt; the door is open for this after AI systems have gathered enough &quot;training data&quot;?Sounds more like the door is open for this once reliability targets are met.I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s unreasonable. Hardware and regular software also have their own reliability limitations, not to mention the meatsacks behind the joystick.

Considering he slept naked with his grandniece (he was in his 70s, she was 17), I&#x27;d say there are a lot of them in the corporate world. Though probably more in politics.

The Ghandi of the corporate world is yet to be found

Well, if they hadn&#x27;t stated that were that far in line with the administration&#x27;s ideals, they would likely already be fully blacklisted as enemies of the state. Whether they agree with what they&#x27;re saying or not, they&#x27;re walking on egg shells.

If we are talking about what&#x27;s best for humanity in the long run.. thinking about human values in general, what makes American citizens uniquely deserving of privacy rights, in ways that citizens of other countries are not?Snowden revealed that every single call on Bahamas were being monitored by NSA [1]. That was in 2013. How would this be any worse if it were US citizens instead?(Note, I myself am not an US citizen)Anyway, regardless of that, the established practice is for the five eyes countries to spy on each other and share their results. This means that the UK can spy on US citizens, the US can spy on UK citizens, and through intelligence sharing they effectively spy on their own citizens. That&#x27;s what supporting &quot;foreign surveillance&quot; will buy you. That was also revealed in 2013 by Snowden [2][1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theintercept.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;05&#x2F;19&#x2F;data-pirates-caribbean-nsa-recording-every-cell-phone-call-bahamas&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theintercept.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;05&#x2F;19&#x2F;data-pirates-caribbean-n...</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;2013&#x2F;dec&#x2F;02&#x2F;nsa-files-spying-allies-enemies-five-eyes-g8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;2013&#x2F;dec&#x2F;02&#x2F;nsa-files-spyi...</a>

Anthropic doesn&#x27;t forbid DoW from using the models for foreign surveillance. It&#x27;s not about harming others, it&#x27;s about doing what is best for humanity in the long run, all things considered. I personally do not believe that foreign surveillance is automatically harmful and I&#x27;m fine with our military doing it

&gt; And neither denounces partially autonomous mass surveillance nor closes the door on AI-driven foreign mass surveillanceYou have to be deliberately naive in a world where five eyes exists to somehow believe that &quot;foreign&quot; mass surveillance won&#x27;t be used domestically.

I said exactly this a few days ago elsewhere. It’s disappointing that they (and often other American companies) seem to  restrict their “respect” and morals to Americans only. Or maybe it’s just semantics or context because the topic at hand is about americans? I don’t know but it gives “my people are more important than your people”, exactly as you said in your last paragraph

But then a person can be blamed for the outcome. We can&#x27;t have that!

We already have traditional CV algorithms and control systems that can reliably power autonomous weapons systems and they are more deterministic and reliable than &quot;AI&quot; or LLMs.

I don&#x27;t know where you might get your info from but Anthropic has only denied using Autonomous AI to kill humans without anyone pressing a button&#x2F;having some liabilty on and mass surveillance.I don&#x27;t think that your point makes sense especially when you can have enemies within your own administration&#x2F;country who can use the same weapons to hunt you.I don&#x27;t think that the people operating the drones are a bottleneck for a war between your country and your enemies but rather its a bottleneck for a war between your country and its people. The bottleneck is of morality as you would find less people willing to do the same atrocities to their own community but terminator style AI is an orphan with no community ie. it has no problem following any orders from the govt. and THIS is the core of the argument because Anthropic has safeguards to reject such orders and DOD is threatening to essentially kill the company by invoking many laws to force it to give.

US-controlled, AI-powered, fully-autonomous killbots are more likely to be used sooner against US civilians before any sort of invading enemy.Are you prepared to be the &quot;enemy&quot; of these soulless killbots? Do you personally have AI powered-weapons? You need to be at the cutting edge of capability, right?

Enemies will have AI powered weapons. We need to be at the cutting edge of capability.

Fully autonomous weapons are a danger even if we can reliably make it happen with or without AI.It essentially becomes a computer against human. And such software if and when developed, who&#x27;s going to stop it from going to the masses? imagine a software virues&#x2F;malwares that can take a life.I&#x27;m shocked very few are even bothered about this and is really concerning that technology developed for the welfare could become something totally against humans.

To stop a bullet flying at you you need a shield not another bullet.

The sentence prior explicitly says this. There’s no dishonesty here.“Even fully autonomous weapons (…) may prove critical for our national defense”FWIW there’s simply no way around this in the end. If your even attempts to create such weapons, the only possible defensive counter is weapons of a similar nature.

&gt; but carrying a huge stick seems to be the most effective way to reduce human death and suffering from armed conflict.Citation needed. I believe there&#x27;s at least some research showing the opposite: military buildup leads to a higher risk of military conflict

Given how unstable and aggressive the US government is at the moment others having these weapons seems to be a good idea for balance. Not sure you are aware of the damage Trump is inflicting on international relations.But personally I wouldn&#x27;t like to die because some crackpot with the right connections can will rest-of-world to that fate, no matter their affiliation. This escalation of destructive power and the carelessness with which it is justified pretty disheartening to see. Good times create bad people?

If the United States is ever, in the future, at war with an adversary using truly autonomous and functional killing machines; you may find yourself praying that we have our own rather than praying human nature changes. Of course, we must strive for this to never happen; but carrying a huge stick seems to be the most effective way to reduce human death and suffering from armed conflict.

I was reading halfway thru and one line struck a nerve with me:&gt; But today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons.So not today, but the door is open for this after AI systems have gathered enough &quot;training data&quot;?Then I re-read the previous paragraph and realized it&#x27;s specifically only criticizing&gt; AI-driven domestic mass surveillanceAnd neither denounces partially autonomous mass surveillance nor closes the door on AI-driven foreign mass surveillanceA real shame. I thought &quot;Anthropic&quot; was about being concerned about humans, and not &quot;My people&quot; vs. &quot;Your people.&quot; But I suppose I should have expected all of this from a public statement about discussions with the Department of War

Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War