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Comment by nilkn | Hacker News Reader

Obviously Anthropic does make a product that could do that -- just give Claude classified data and ask it who to target.

Obviously the military wants to use it for that purpose since they couldn't accept Anthropic's extremely limited terms.

One can easily and immediately infer the answers to both your questions are yes.

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The DoW has explicitly said they don’t want this, and what you are describing are not automated kill drones.

Anthropic’s safeguards already prevent what you are describing, again the thing thar DoW has said they don’t want.

I don't know what you're referencing, but it doesn't matter. I judge people by their actions more than their words. The actions in this case are simple: Anthropic doesn't want their models to be used for fully autonomous weapons or mass surveillance of American citizens, but everything else is fair game; in response, the sitting administration is attempting to kill the company (since a strict reading of the security risk order would force most of their partners, suppliers, etc., to cut them off completely).

Giving precedence to words over actions is how you get taken advantage, abused, deceived, etc.

GOOD. I don’t want Anthropic, or anybody else to have their tools used for these things either.

But Dario is showing weakness here by talking around it. Whatever they were asked to do, they should just be upfront about.

He didn't talk around it. He wrote down specifically what the two issues were, which is precisely why now the entire world knows what's actually going on. If risking your company's existence to prevent a (potential) atrocity is weakness, I don't know what strength is.

Strength is saying what they were asked to do. I want to know!

Did the DoW ask them to make kill drones? Because if so THAT IS A REALLY BIG DEAL.

The vagueness is irritating. He’s saying they won’t do something, the DoW is saying they don’t even want them to do that, which should resolve the issue, but hasn’t. There is obviously something else at play here.

You're confused because you're taking everything the people involved are saying literally and trusting everything plainly at face value. The existence of the contradiction you're pointing out should be evidence that you need to think a level deeper, i.e., that you need to look at actions more than words. There's an incredibly easy resolution of the contradiction that is troubling you, and it's already been pointed out clearly above.

> Whatever they were asked to do, they should just be upfront about.

Anthropic is not being asked to do anything, except renegotiate the contracts. The DoW Claude models run on government AWS. Anthropic has minimal access to these systems and does not see the classified data that is being ingested as prompts. It is very unlikely that Dario actually knows what the DoW wants to do with these models. But even if he did, it would be classified information that he is not at liberty to disclose.

However the product they provide likely has safety filters that cause some prompts to not be processed if it is violates the two contractual conditions. That is what the DoW wants removed.

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