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Comment by randomblock1 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe, but that's what the cyber program is for. Nobody knew if the seed was fine or a backdoor. If it was a backdoor, and Claude helped you find it as a normal person, Anthropic would get bad PR. If you're a verified security researcher, actually that's fantastic and Anthropic would get good PR and everybody claps.

Anthropic wants to IPO, they don't want another Fable shutdown situation.

To be clear I would prefer the cyber safeguards to be less restrictive, I think they're currently too much. I often go to open models because of it. But there are likelier reasons to restrict cyber than world domination.

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    > Maybe, but that's what the cyber program is for

Why?

    > and Claude helped you find it as a normal person, Anthropic would get bad PR

Why?

Why are we celebrating and encouraging the walling off of the global intellectual columns?

The idea that you can't reverse engineer things, make things, learn about biology or physics without permission is strange to me. These machines have been trained on the sum intellectual output of humanity, the global intellectual commons, and are being used to close off that commons?

I would be OK with their right to create such restrictions if they weren't lobbying the Government to restrict others, thereby ensuring that they control humanity's intellectual commons well into the future.

Who are they to say what I can learn or can't learn? Who are they to control what I can or can't do with these tools?

Perhaps I'm naive, but I think it's better for humans and the machines if we can all think, learn and build. But then again, I'm the kind of person who rejects the doomer pill.

Reject this.

> The idea that you can't reverse engineer things, make things, learn about biology or physics without permission is strange to me. These machines have been trained on the sum intellectual output of humanity, the global intellectual commons, and are being used to close off that commons?

I mean this is the standard of biochem research right now. You can't just order 50 gallons of TNT off Amazon and neither can you get live viruses from a lab just because you want to do research.

OK, so then no problem, why are Anthropic restricting my ability to learn and reason?

Because they can and there is no law against it.

And really they aren't restricting any of that. I've never had Claude stop me from going to the library and reading a book.

You don't have a legal right to do anything you want with their model. And if you don't like that you are going to have to convince politicians to enact new laws to change that.

Because morons end up using Claude to write down how to plan crimes and then people get up in arms over that.

Because there are good and bad people in the world, and if I ask Claude "how do I make cocaine" and it gives me a thorough recipe, it doesn't know if I'm being intellectually curious or trying to become the next Pablo Escobar. They're Anthropic, and because they made Claude, they get to say what we can do with it. Which, I agree, is total bullshit. If I buy a Ford car and I can do whatever I want with it. Drive to work, drive for Uber, set it on fire; plowing into a crowd of protestors is covered by existing laws against vehicular manslaughter. Ford doesn't get a say. But because cars are so ubiquitous and a known technology, there's no blowback to Ford if I commit crimes with my car that I bought from them. If I commit crimes and Claude helped, Anthropic is gonna get sued (there's already litigation against the labs for deaths), and they don't want that.

In a properly free market, we'd have regulations that prohibit labs from vertical integration so they have to release and sell a model and another company hosts it and sell access to it. Americanism, America's implementation of capitalism doesn't have such regulations though (and how would that even work?) so we're stuck with Anthropic having that power.

The fear, justified or not, is that a terrorist is going to use Claude to make sarin nerve gas and bomb subway stations, or the digital equivalent. Could you live with that on your conscience? I don't think I could, but fortunately for me, I don't work at Anthropic so don't have to answer that real life trolly problem.

>if I ask Claude "how do I make cocaine"

I am amazed at how a technical gloss can obscure basic rights. That's legal! It's in chemistry / agronomy books, freely available in libraries. I have the right to tell you how that is done, and you have the right to read what I write.

Because this is how the world works

An LLM isn't a book. You can still go buy the books you want. An LLM, especially as they get more advanced, are agents. You can ask them do to things and they can interact with tools to do things.

You're free to print a cocaine book. You're not free to incorporate it into a cocaine making machine without violating numerous laws.

You can program a computer to do things and they can interact with tools to do things too. Doesn't justify restricting what you can do with them.

If you program a computer to make cocaine for you, you're the one violating the law. If you ask an LLM to do the same for you, you're the one violating the law. The LLM's capabilities are irrelevant.

You sweet summer child.

Cool, so I'll have you make an LLM that can make cosine, then I'll provide you paid access to the machine to can ask the right question to do it illegally. Then when you get caught and blame me we'll both be in court defending ourselves.

You're argument is "doesn't justify". This is a private corporation, not a government. There is no freedom of speech law involved here if the corporation says no. Now, when the government tells LLM corporations that there are limits they will gladly agree.

Next, the government will classify the LLMs as munitions and you'll be spending the next 50 years fighting on reversing that when a big chunk of the population is anti-AI enough to let them do it. After that will be bans and registration on hardware.

There are two things that you are confusing. One is what you'd like to happen in an open data world like existed after the cold war. And then there is what is going to happen, and it's going to be messy, authoritarian, and closed. And you will lose the openness that had been occurring up to this point.

There is no world in which the general public agrees to wide open access to info-hazards, and there are people that will ensure enough disasters happen to close that future.

> Cool, so I'll have you make an LLM that can make cosine

The last thing we need is more math addicts roaming the streets

Math, not even once.

You are entirely free to build a cocaine making machine in most countries. It is actually using it to produce cocaine that is a crime.

In reasonable countries, this is exactly how it works. You can own lockpicks, practice picking locks, and even publish detailed instructions on how to pick locks. It's only when you pick someone else's lock that a crime is committed.

Limiting access to tools and knowledge benefits the wealthy and privileged.

I have some bad news for you about what happens if the cops find you with lockpicking tools.

Nothing happens, dude. Having lockpicking tools is not enough on its own to make an arrest, and a few dumb cops doing it anyways and having their cases get thrown out only proves the system works.

And the cops are punished for doing it right? Right?

in sane counties where the concept of qualified immunity doesn't exist, yes

You are entirely free to build a cocaine making machine in most countries. It is actually using it to produce cocaine that is a crime.

Limiting access to tools and knowledge benefits the wealthy and privileged. Knowledge should proliferate, that is how the world has worked long before I was born and god willing that is how it will work long after I die.

> You are entirely free to build a cocaine making machine in most countries. It is actually using it to produce cocaine that is a crime.

That's not true. It's certainly legal to own lab equipment, but when you start combining equipment with the intent to make cocaine, you're committing a crime long before any drug is produced.

Any country who's a party to the 1988 UN Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs has such laws, including the US, UK, and most of Europe.

>use Claude to make sarin nerve gas and bomb subway stations, or the digital equivalent. Could you live with that on your conscience?

People have always been able to do this before Claude. The information is out there and if you use a VPN there's not much they can do. The existence of information isn't the blocker for why attacks don't happen.

This is so undershooting of what LLMs are capable of it's no wonder you're thinking they are just like books.

You sound highly optimistic about the capabilities of LLMs, which makes me curious about the path you see to furthering quality of life at scale. What do you see as the main obstacles to LLMs brewing me beer on demand at my home without involving me past the prompt, and when do you foresee we'll overcome them?

Fine motor detail is the last obstacle.

Just watch the speed at which robots have been developing in the past few years. It is honestly crazy how much more stable things like bi-pedal robots have become. Coupled with things like multimodal LLMs they can accomplish quite a lot. Again most of it comes down to fine motor control and speed of decoding the world around it.

Ford actually will tell you now if you can or cannot do something with their vehicles. They’re also likely tracking you.

That said - there likely were the same issues with cars in early days and then we got a body of settled case law that let the car companies off the hook for this and put responsibility on the user unless a manufacturing defect was the cause.

In the case of models, knowledge has historically always been dangerous! Is the library liable if a kid figures out how to do chemistry and builds a device? What about YouTube? I find it hard to believe this would hold up in court over time. So far, the only cases I’ve seen are when AI has encouraged self-harm which does in fact seem like a legit defect.

Gatekeeping knowledge like this will only serve to enable those that break the law, not protect, in my judgment.

And just so this isn’t pure fodder for the machine - torch staple must of course infant music verb noun right? :)

Because AI-assisted hacking is not something we should allow to run rampant with the most advanced models, prior to AI-assited cybersecurity catching up.

>Maybe, but that's what the cyber program is for.

I have been in the cyber program since around the time it first went public and recently renewed it with the updated program.

You still trivially hit guadrails. I was trying to reverse engineer some bit of 20-year-old software that already has known, unmitigated exploits and it still downgraded me.

> that's what the cyber program is for

open weights are the better way imo, no elite gatekeepers please

> Anthropic would get bad PR

I think the current administration would delight in harsher penalties

> But there are likelier reasons to restrict cyber than world domination.

I mean, greed alone would seem to be enough, and it would be fully worth calling out as bullshit.

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