> For intelligence activities, any handling of private information will comply with the Fourth Amendment, the National Security Act of 1947 and the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act of 1978, Executive Order 12333, and applicable DoD directives requiring a defined foreign intelligence purpose. The AI System shall not be used for unconstrained monitoring of U.S. persons’ private information as consistent with these authorities. The system shall also not be used for domestic law-enforcement activities except as permitted by the Posse Comitatus Act and other applicable law.
My reading of this is that OpenAI's contract with the Pentagon only prohibits mass surveillance of US citizens to the extent that that surveillance is already prohibited by law. For example, I believe this implies that the DoW can procure data on US citizens en masse from private companies - including, e.g., granular location and financial transaction data - and apply OpenAI's tools to that data to surveil and otherwise target US citizens at scale. As I understand it, this was not the case with Anthropic's contract.
If I'm right, this is abhorrent. However, I've already jumped to a lot of incorrect conclusions in the last few days, so I'm doing my best to withhold judgment for now, and holding out hope for a plausible competing explanation.
(Disclosure, I'm a former OpenAI employee and current shareholder.)
Open ai, the former non-profit, whose board tried to fire the CEO for being deceptive, which is no longer open at all, isn't exactly about ethics these days.
Even on a personal level: OpenAI has changed it's privacy policy twice to let them gather data on me they weren't before. A lot of steps to disable it each time, tons of dark patterns. And the data checkout just bugs out too, it's a fake feature to hide how much they are using everything you type to them
This is exactly what it says: the only restrictions are the restrictions that are already in law. This seems like the weasel language Dario was talking about.
thanks for speaking out, and yes, that was my interpretation, as well, which I outlined below. This is nothing more than some sugar coating on "lawful use" despite what OpenAI says and the contractual "safeguards" they tout like the FDEs.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
It certainly was intended as such. In a commercial transaction, that's what they're doing. They don't think it's moral to use their product in certain ways. They are thus prohibiting their customer from using it in such ways.
But, as I've said, I tend to agree with both Anthropic and the Administration's positions. What was wrong here is that rather than just terminating the contract, the Administration went nuclear.
It seems value-neutral to me. It's descriptive. Particularly for anyone who understands that different groups of people will legitimately disagree on many moral questions.
A "simple word choice"?? This isn't just about the single word "impose", read the whole post:
> 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.
So first off, regarding that first paragraph, didn't any of these idiots watch WarGames, or heck, Terminator? This is not just "oh, why are you quoting Hollywood hyperbole" - a hallmark of today's AI is we can't really control it except for some "pretty please we really really mean it be nice" in the system prompt, and even experts in the field have shown how that can fail miserably: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
Second, yes, I am relieved Anthropic wanted to "impose" their morals because, if anything, the current administration has been loud and clear that the law basically means whatever they says it does and will absolutely push it to absurd limits, so I now value "legal limits" as absolutely meaningless - what is needed are hard, non-bullshit statements about red lines, and Anthropic stood by the those, and Altman showed what a weasel he is and acceded to their demands.
>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.
buts it not a national emergency. its not a time of war. and there is a different between demanding to be customer, and demanding that you change your products because they would like them to be a different way. that is actual conscription.
for many decades, the DoD has used a carrot to get what they want. this is a stick.
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?
Well it depends. Being that the federal government constitutes 20% of the US economy, telling federal agencies you cannot contract with someone because they are adversarial to the USA is indeed pretty severe. When in reality they are not adversarial. We have no choice but to pay taxes and make the federal government 20 percent of our economy. There is no single company or any other entity that is close. And extending it to everyone who has a government contract probably makes it the majority of the economy. So it is not at all equivalent to a private company making a choice
This is obviously subjective, and the only subject that matters in this case is the leadership at the DoD.
> We have no choice but to pay taxes and make the federal government 20 percent of our economy. There is no single company or any other entity that is close. And extending it to everyone who has a government contract probably makes it the majority of the economy.
I, too, hate big government and the all-powerful executive branch. Welcome to my tent. Let’s invent a time machine together so we can elect Ron Paul in 2008 and nip this in the bud.
> But surely you agree the government has a right to determine how its budget is appropriated
I think the government doesn't have rights, it is my elected representative. And I do not agree with it trying to punish a company for not agreeing to contract terms.
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.
> 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.
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.
It's still not consistent. OpenAI made a statement that simply isn't true. They agree to all lawful use, INCLUDING using it to deploy weapons as long as it's legal. It happens to not be legal at the moment, but that doesn't mean it can't be changed and authorized.
OpenAI and sama are literally sauing they are fine with facilitating (and even performing) any scale of killing and surveillance as long as they're not held accountable.
Rationalize the OpenAI position? Sam Altman gets money from DoD. He has no morals. He doesn't care if people die because of his product. It's not hard.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
mass surveillance is explicitly unlawful in the US. it is in the bill of rights. By definition it is injustice under the law. Even for terrorists in the US they have to go through a FISA court and get warrants.
Consider this, the bill of rights stipulates that a soldier cannot be stationed on your property in times of peace, but in times of war it will be allowed. It makes exceptions for times of war. but even in times of war, 4th amendment's search and seizure protection don't have an exception. Even in times of insurrection and rebellion. To deliberately violate that for personal and political reasons, that in itself is treason. With that intent alone, even without action, it invalidates all legitimacy that government has. If a clause in a contract is broken, the contract is broken. The bill of rights is the contract between the people and their government that gives the government its powers to rule, in exchange for those rights. With the contract explicitly, deliberately and with provable malicious intent broken, the whole agreement is invalidated.
I'll even say this, the US military itself is on the hook if they stand by and let this happen.
The current US government has a fundamentally different ontology for the derivation of human rights.
Wheras you and I likely agree that human rights are inalienable due to them being derived from the universe nature of human experience, the administration believes that human rights begin and end with them, the state. When they're the one able to affect the world with violence, it doesn't matter who's on the hook. The US electorate thought they could heal a status wound by authoritarianism instead of therapy and everyone else is paying the price.
> I'll even say this, the US military itself is on the hook if they stand by and let this happen.
That would most definitely not be the Constitutional recourse. Or a sensible approach. If that happens, the Constitution is past tense.
Congress and the Supreme Court are the recourse. If they don't hold up the Constitution then violence or even a non-violent military coup, however well intended, are not going to put the splattered egg back together again.
The last two and a half decades have seen all four presidents, congress, the Supreme Court and both parties allow blatantly unconstitutional surveillance become the norm (evolving an adaptive fig leaf of intermediaries), and presidential military actions entirely blur out the required Congressional oversight. That the weakening of loyalty to the Constitution has been pervasive on those serious counts, is one of the reasons it has been so easy to undermine further.
When governing bodies become familiar with the convenient practice of "deciding" what the constitution means, without repercussions, that lost respect becomes very hard to reinstate.
Right, which is probably the point made by the negotiators on behalf of the US Government. "We don't want Anthropic's standard, we want the Constitution."
Maybe I'm misunderstanding but are you taking the gov's side? Anthropic's standard was the constitutions. The executive branch has no authorization under US law to perform surveillance of any kind on its own. OpenAI will now be breaking US law, Anthropic simply decided to obey US law.
The US government can update its laws and come back to Anthropic, or do what they just did
No, I'm not taking the government's side. I'm telling the government's side. That's probably true that the executive branch can't do those things, but it may be able to do so in the future. Thus, Anthropic's rule would then be inconsistent with the laws applying to the government.
> The US government can update its laws and come back to Anthropic
No, this I do take issue with. It's the people who update the U.S. government's laws.
> 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.
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"?
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?
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
Not great? Seems kind of loose language? It isn't OpenAI saying no autonomous weapons use, but only that use must be consistent with laws, regulations, and department policies: "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."
More of the same here. Not a wonder why the DoD signed with OpenAI and instead of Anthropic. Delegating morality to the law when you know the law is not adequate seems like "not a good thing".
"For intelligence activities, any handling of private information will comply with the Fourth Amendment, the National Security Act of 1947 and the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act of 1978, Executive Order 12333, and applicable DoD directives requiring a defined foreign intelligence purpose. The AI System shall not be used for unconstrained monitoring of U.S. persons’ private information as consistent with these authorities. The system shall also not be used for domestic law-enforcement activities except as permitted by the Posse Comitatus Act and other applicable law."
It's a bit worse, because in the case of mass surveillance, they can't just make their own law, they need to make that law and have 2/3rds of US states sign off on a constitutional amendment.
Aiding someone while you know they're trying to break the law is conspiracy to break the law. OpenAI is culpable. You can't sue the government in many cases, but you can with OpenAI.
It's also good to demonstrate to these companies that we're willing to move. If these companies know their entire userbase will just pack up and move at the first controversy, there wont be any controversies.
> I don't think Anthropic is a saint that will never do anything unethical. I don't think ChatGPT is any better or worse.
I sort of agree and think that over a long horizon, Open weights models are going to be the best / are the best
I do think only a fraction of companies might do what Anthropic did here. There must have been quite a significant pressure on them to fold but they didn't. So to me, I'd rather try to do atleast something to show companies that people do care about such things and its best if we have at the very least some unconditional morals which are not for sale no matter the price.
I think that we can still have disagreements with Anthropic on matters and I certainly still have some disagreements about their thoughts on Open Models for example but in all regards I would trust them as more trustworthy than OpenAI imho.
That being said, I do think that its worth telling that given that I don't have good GPU, I am gonna stop using Chatgpt as well and will use either Claude/(Kimi?) as well like many people are doing too. I do think that it might be the path going forward.
How incredibly unsurprising. This is why it is pointless to make moral stands as employees when you do not ultimately have power over the companies decisions. The only power you have is to quit.
I wonder how many will do so, and how many will simply accept Sam’s AI written rationalization as this own and keep collecting their obscene pay packages…
And behind the quitting decision is very little safety net and usually substantial financial obligations keeping people handcuffed. Something has to give. The power employees had during covid was the way it should be, or something more closely approximating that.
Psychopaths tend to be dumb (but not always), and the smartest researchers that actually care about getting humanity to AGI tend to be safety conscious.
This has been a huge talent advertisement for Anthropic. Their recruiting just got easier for the next 6 months.
It's perhaps too late in this case, but this is what unions are for. Sam Altman + a handful of scabs can't keep the lights on at OpenAI if a critical mass of engineers refuse to work until this decision is reversed (or, even better, not made at all, since the union would be part of that process).
Employees often have the power to oust the owner and take over the company; and more often than that have the power to have business grind to a halt. It does take a strong union and a culture of solidarity and sticking together of course, which I doubt we would find in a place like OpenAI.
As a stealth ceo of a profitable SaaS. This is a nice reminder for my company to wind down its relationship with OpenAI. I have no doubt Anthropic will eventually become evil but at least they have a backbone today.
Goodbye Sam.
Edit: Also, referring to the DOD as the Department of War is cringe.
“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.”
So DoW did get the “all lawful purposes” language they were after, with reference to existing (inadequate, in my view) regulations around autonomous weapons and mass surveillance.
> Fully autonomous weapons. The cloud deployment surface covered in our contract would not permit powering fully autonomous weapons, as this would require edge deployment.
Can anyone explain this constraint?
Why do fully autonomous weapons require edge deployment?
Does "fully autonomous" in this context mean "disconnected from the Internet"?
If so, can a drone with Internet connectivity use OpenAI?
Or maybe it's about on-premise requirements: the military doesn't want to depend on OpenAI's DCs for weaponry, and instead wants OpenAI in their own DCs for that?
Does OpenAI enforce those red lines in all contracts?
From what I can tell the Anthropic issue was triggered by something Palantir was doing as a contractor for DoW, not anything related to direct contracts between DoW and Anthropic, and DoW was annoyed that Anthropic interfered with what Palantir was up to.
In other words will OpenAI enforce these "red lines" against use by a third-party government contractor?
If not, this seems pretty meaningless if they are essentially playing PR while hiding behind Palantir.
These communications offend me because they treat the audience like they’re stupid, stupid, stupid.
But I imagine that being honest about your corporate identity is suboptimal. It’s probably an important cognitive dissonance tool for the employees? It’s like when autocracies repeat big obvious lies endlessly. Gives those who want to opt out of reality an option.
"What if the government just changes the law or existing DoW policies?"
Our contract explicitly references the surveillance and autonomous weapons laws and policies as they exist today, so that even if those laws or policies change in the future, use of our systems must still remain aligned with the current standards reflected in the agreement.
So, this apply only if they changes the law, not if they break the law.
"What happens if the government violates the terms of the contract?"
As with any contract, we could terminate it if the counterparty violates the terms. We don’t expect that to happen.
This blog post really doesn't make it sound any better there is no clear refusal to participate in the questionable uses Anthropic was against. Merely must be legal and must be tested.
This feels like IBM in the 1930s selling tabulating machines to the Germans and downplaying their knowledge of their use. They seem to want us to naively believe they won't use it for exactly what the military has always wanted, autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. Further more there are much more mundane use they might make of the technology that is perfectly legal yet morally in gray areas.
I deleted my OpenAI account months ago. If LLMs and adjacent technology are truly a paradigm shift, I can’t think of many worse than Sam Altman to shepard us through that. He is a pure opportunist who has already shown how little he believes in outside of his own power and wealth.
I look forward to seeing more abusive tactics by the US government powered by AI and the language OpenAI will use to confuse the public into thinking they aren't responsible.
This is the same company that started as a nonprofit dedicated to open AI safety research, then became a capped-profit entity, then effectively closed-source, then dropped the cap, and is now pursuing full for-profit conversion. Every single guardrail they've set for themselves has been quietly revised or removed once it became inconvenient. Anyone want to bet on how long those exclusions last?
I used to write off Annie's statements as mad raving, but the more I see how Sam acts the more I'm starting to think she might be telling the truth after all.
The agreement puts no restrictions on the government beyond “all lawful purposes,” which is what Anthropic objected to.
> “ The Department of War may use the AI System for all lawful purposes… [proceeds to describe current law, with clear openings if the law changes]”
Thus, OAI is relying on the Trump administration’s interpretation of current law. Which, I will remind readers, suggests that it is legal to kill civilians on boats, kidnap foreign leaders, deploy troops in American cities, shoot American citizens protesting ICE.
It's not much but I was planning to cancel my Anthropic subscription to try Codex over the weekend, but I'll skip that. I don't want to support a company with someone like this at the top. Massive donations to the administration, sneaky backdoor deals. No thanks, fuck you.
> Why could you reach a deal when Anthropic could not? Did you sign the deal they wouldn’t?
Based on what we know, we believe our contract provides better guarantees and more responsible safeguards than earlier agreements, including Anthropic’s original contract.
Weak. You reached a deal that Anthropic could not because you demanded more safeguards than Anthropic?? (Based on what you know, of course).
In my opinion all this discussion of the contract language is a subterfuge. The real question is why the government was requesting this language in the first place. Clearly there’s more to it than a legal battle.
In my mind, the government would be fully happy to use this to surveil citizens (and indeed anyone) with or without any legal basis, but the issue was that Anthropic has a safety stack / training and inference protocols that it follows. Refusals, abuse models, and manual guardrails. They didn’t want to shut those off. Likely there were some very basic technical reasons, some being that the team’s safety posture is fully ingrained in the model itself and thus difficult to remove.
In this document, OpenAI admits that while they are not “turning off” their safety stack, they are completely willing to provide the government with a different model, different guardrails, etc. That should be incredibly concerning. Anthropic was unwilling to do this, cited their ToS, and ultimately had to walk away from the deal. Given that the government (DoW really) framed this in terms of a hilariously stupid position (surveillance and autonomous weapons), Anthropic felt that this was something they could voice to the public and therefore the entire guardrails discussion turned into a “we want the language changed”. Also the government can’t actually compel Anthropic to create new guardrails so they had no choice but to raise the stakes, make this a moral thing, and basically accuse Anthropic of being woke.
IMO this is really sad for OpenAI employees. Yet again Sam Altman proves that he wants to weasel his way around public perception. Folks at the company have to grapple with working for someone of that disposition.
I wonder if the autonomous weapon platforms they'll build will be surprisingly susceptible to friendly fire... I don't think the DoW knows what kind of Pandora's Box they just bought.
I don't really have anything against OpenAI's stance here. If that's how they want it to be, they have that choice.
But Sam pretending that he wanted the same restrictions as Anthropic *and* seeing how quickly they swooped in and made a deal with the DoD really skeeves me out. (But Sam always gave me the heebie jeebies).
Anyway, I've always preferred Claude, so I'm going to happily stay a paying customer there. This may end up being a big "branding" differentiator.
If I hadn’t already canceled my account over them including ads in a paid service, I’d certainly be canceling over this. Anthropic is lucky they have some spine, otherwise they’d have been binned as well.
Here is a point Mr. Altman might not have considered. Everyone in Trump's circle will probably get a pardon no matter what. but not the CEOs who were collaborators. not in the inner circle but still complicit.
Even Google and Microsoft should be worried. This is like 1936 germany, we have ways to go. Look at the tune this administration is singing, if they get their way these CEOs aren't looking at law suits and federal investigations, the current order of things will be long gone by the time people start asking who's responsible for all the blood on the streets.
by now, we all know the core characters of altman and trump and their enablers. press releases (hell any of their words) mean nothing. they are just distracting fodder for fools and sycophants.
OpenAI basically bribed the government into attacking Anthropic, via political donations to the MAGA PAC. They couldn’t not compete with an inferior product so Altman and Brockman went this route.
Well..The fact they reached out and not the other way around says a lot.
"According to The Wall Street Journal, Anthropic approached 1789 Capital for a potential nine-figure investment during its Series G funding round in early 2026. The venture firm, where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner, ultimately declined the investment for ideological reasons. Read the full report at The Wall Street Journal."
> > Do you think Anthropic should be designated as a “supply chain risk”?
> No, and we have made our position on this clear to the government.
Look, this is the most important thing that everyone needs to understand: Your opinion on this is not welcome here. Your opinion on how the government uses the tools it purchases are unimportant and a non-factor. It is not appropriate for you to share your opinion on this. The government that was elected by the people is the sole decision maker. That’s the agreed social norm that we have in this country. What you’re doing is a minor subversion of our democratic republic, even if it feels like you’re standing on firm moral ground.
The DoD can and will deploy eye watering amounts of capital in the pursuit of its mission. That mission includes artificial intelligence based war systems. If you want a piece of that pie, even indirectly, you need to shut the fuck up and kiss the ring. That’s the reality. You don’t have to like this, but you’re shockingly naive if you didn’t know the world worked this way. The DoD spends nearly a trillion dollars a year, did you really think that was entirely spent on raw materials?
Their systems will be built to their spec, one way or another. They will seize your source code and training sets. They will build data centers. Nothing can stop this. People are making this about Trump and Hegseth, but it’s bigger than that. This transcends political parties. Obama’s DoD would make the same stand, and you’re naive if you don’t think so. Our war machine never loses in the game of politics.
Do we really need to read the text of a statement entitled "Our agreement with the department of war"? If it weren't the US, it would still be something that any person of moral character would never get in the position to write.
And it _is_ the US department of war - just now entered into yet another war of aggression against Iran, with no cause nor legal basis (not even domestic IIANM), in and endless list of wars, direct and indirect. With another crown jewel being the support, funding and arming for the still-unhalted genocide in Gaza.
now DeepSeek and Qwen obtain similar or even more lenient terms, then a reckless slippery slope for supremacy and maybe at some point there won't be 2 player fighting, but a 3rd created by this exact dynamic, an autonomous unaligned undetected AI
> For intelligence activities, any handling of private information will comply with the Fourth Amendment, the National Security Act of 1947 and the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act of 1978, Executive Order 12333, and applicable DoD directives requiring a defined foreign intelligence purpose. The AI System shall not be used for unconstrained monitoring of U.S. persons’ private information as consistent with these authorities. The system shall also not be used for domestic law-enforcement activities except as permitted by the Posse Comitatus Act and other applicable law.
My reading of this is that OpenAI's contract with the Pentagon only prohibits mass surveillance of US citizens to the extent that that surveillance is already prohibited by law. For example, I believe this implies that the DoW can procure data on US citizens en masse from private companies - including, e.g., granular location and financial transaction data - and apply OpenAI's tools to that data to surveil and otherwise target US citizens at scale. As I understand it, this was not the case with Anthropic's contract.
If I'm right, this is abhorrent. However, I've already jumped to a lot of incorrect conclusions in the last few days, so I'm doing my best to withhold judgment for now, and holding out hope for a plausible competing explanation.
(Disclosure, I'm a former OpenAI employee and current shareholder.)
Open ai, the former non-profit, whose board tried to fire the CEO for being deceptive, which is no longer open at all, isn't exactly about ethics these days.
Even on a personal level: OpenAI has changed it's privacy policy twice to let them gather data on me they weren't before. A lot of steps to disable it each time, tons of dark patterns. And the data checkout just bugs out too, it's a fake feature to hide how much they are using everything you type to them
This is exactly what it says: the only restrictions are the restrictions that are already in law. This seems like the weasel language Dario was talking about.
Laws that can be changed on a whim by "executive orders", or laws that apparently can be ignored completely, like international law.
thanks for speaking out, and yes, that was my interpretation, as well, which I outlined below. This is nothing more than some sugar coating on "lawful use" despite what OpenAI says and the contractual "safeguards" they tout like the FDEs.
You are exactly correct and this is what Dario has been speaking up about.
He calls this exact scenario out in last night's interview: https://youtu.be/MPTNHrq_4LU
> 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.
> 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.
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.
Governments have a long, long history of using "poison to kill a third party", to use your analogy.
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.
Are you really going to pretend that “impose their morals” is a completely value-neutral statement?
It certainly was intended as such. In a commercial transaction, that's what they're doing. They don't think it's moral to use their product in certain ways. They are thus prohibiting their customer from using it in such ways.
But, as I've said, I tend to agree with both Anthropic and the Administration's positions. What was wrong here is that rather than just terminating the contract, the Administration went nuclear.
It seems value-neutral to me. It's descriptive. Particularly for anyone who understands that different groups of people will legitimately disagree on many moral questions.
What would be the value neutral way to phrase it?
"Anthropic wanted its product to not be used in ways that contradict its ethics".
"Impose" makes it sound like Anthropic is being hostile here. And also, I don't think this is a situation that calls for moral relativism.
A "simple word choice"?? This isn't just about the single word "impose", read the whole post:
> 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.
So first off, regarding that first paragraph, didn't any of these idiots watch WarGames, or heck, Terminator? This is not just "oh, why are you quoting Hollywood hyperbole" - a hallmark of today's AI is we can't really control it except for some "pretty please we really really mean it be nice" in the system prompt, and even experts in the field have shown how that can fail miserably: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
Second, yes, I am relieved Anthropic wanted to "impose" their morals because, if anything, the current administration has been loud and clear that the law basically means whatever they says it does and will absolutely push it to absurd limits, so I now value "legal limits" as absolutely meaningless - what is needed are hard, non-bullshit statements about red lines, and Anthropic stood by the those, and Altman showed what a weasel he is and acceded to their demands.
>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.
buts it not a national emergency. its not a time of war. and there is a different between demanding to be customer, and demanding that you change your products because they would like them to be a different way. that is actual conscription.
for many decades, the DoD has used a carrot to get what they want. this is a stick.
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?
Well it depends. Being that the federal government constitutes 20% of the US economy, telling federal agencies you cannot contract with someone because they are adversarial to the USA is indeed pretty severe. When in reality they are not adversarial. We have no choice but to pay taxes and make the federal government 20 percent of our economy. There is no single company or any other entity that is close. And extending it to everyone who has a government contract probably makes it the majority of the economy. So it is not at all equivalent to a private company making a choice
> When in reality they are not adversarial.
This is obviously subjective, and the only subject that matters in this case is the leadership at the DoD.
> We have no choice but to pay taxes and make the federal government 20 percent of our economy. There is no single company or any other entity that is close. And extending it to everyone who has a government contract probably makes it the majority of the economy.
I, too, hate big government and the all-powerful executive branch. Welcome to my tent. Let’s invent a time machine together so we can elect Ron Paul in 2008 and nip this in the bud.
Until then, this is what we’re stuck with.
> But surely you agree the government has a right to determine how its budget is appropriated
I think the government doesn't have rights, it is my elected representative. And I do not agree with it trying to punish a company for not agreeing to contract terms.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
100% this - totally stealing this analogy.
It's not an analogy but an example.
That language is not consistent with:
> No use of OpenAI technology to direct autonomous weapons systems
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.
It's still not consistent. OpenAI made a statement that simply isn't true. They agree to all lawful use, INCLUDING using it to deploy weapons as long as it's legal. It happens to not be legal at the moment, but that doesn't mean it can't be changed and authorized.
That's a fair point, and I'm not so much defending sama's statements after the fact but rather trying to rationalize the OpenAI position.
OpenAI and sama are literally sauing they are fine with facilitating (and even performing) any scale of killing and surveillance as long as they're not held accountable.
Rationalize the OpenAI position? Sam Altman gets money from DoD. He has no morals. He doesn't care if people die because of his product. It's not hard.
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
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.
Does legal include international law, which the US has broken numerous times the last two days?
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.
> 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.
Isn't it more accurate here to consider OpenAI and Anthropic as service providers rather than a manufacturer of product?
The service they provide is on-premises deployment, I guess. But what they are deploying is a product.
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.
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.
mass surveillance is explicitly unlawful in the US. it is in the bill of rights. By definition it is injustice under the law. Even for terrorists in the US they have to go through a FISA court and get warrants.
Consider this, the bill of rights stipulates that a soldier cannot be stationed on your property in times of peace, but in times of war it will be allowed. It makes exceptions for times of war. but even in times of war, 4th amendment's search and seizure protection don't have an exception. Even in times of insurrection and rebellion. To deliberately violate that for personal and political reasons, that in itself is treason. With that intent alone, even without action, it invalidates all legitimacy that government has. If a clause in a contract is broken, the contract is broken. The bill of rights is the contract between the people and their government that gives the government its powers to rule, in exchange for those rights. With the contract explicitly, deliberately and with provable malicious intent broken, the whole agreement is invalidated.
I'll even say this, the US military itself is on the hook if they stand by and let this happen.
On the hook for what?
The current US government has a fundamentally different ontology for the derivation of human rights.
Wheras you and I likely agree that human rights are inalienable due to them being derived from the universe nature of human experience, the administration believes that human rights begin and end with them, the state. When they're the one able to affect the world with violence, it doesn't matter who's on the hook. The US electorate thought they could heal a status wound by authoritarianism instead of therapy and everyone else is paying the price.
> I'll even say this, the US military itself is on the hook if they stand by and let this happen.
That would most definitely not be the Constitutional recourse. Or a sensible approach. If that happens, the Constitution is past tense.
Congress and the Supreme Court are the recourse. If they don't hold up the Constitution then violence or even a non-violent military coup, however well intended, are not going to put the splattered egg back together again.
The last two and a half decades have seen all four presidents, congress, the Supreme Court and both parties allow blatantly unconstitutional surveillance become the norm (evolving an adaptive fig leaf of intermediaries), and presidential military actions entirely blur out the required Congressional oversight. That the weakening of loyalty to the Constitution has been pervasive on those serious counts, is one of the reasons it has been so easy to undermine further.
When governing bodies become familiar with the convenient practice of "deciding" what the constitution means, without repercussions, that lost respect becomes very hard to reinstate.
Right, which is probably the point made by the negotiators on behalf of the US Government. "We don't want Anthropic's standard, we want the Constitution."
Maybe I'm misunderstanding but are you taking the gov's side? Anthropic's standard was the constitutions. The executive branch has no authorization under US law to perform surveillance of any kind on its own. OpenAI will now be breaking US law, Anthropic simply decided to obey US law.
The US government can update its laws and come back to Anthropic, or do what they just did
No, I'm not taking the government's side. I'm telling the government's side. That's probably true that the executive branch can't do those things, but it may be able to do so in the future. Thus, Anthropic's rule would then be inconsistent with the laws applying to the government.
> The US government can update its laws and come back to Anthropic
No, this I do take issue with. It's the people who update the U.S. government's laws.
> 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.
Does the US have any laws that require human control of autonomous weapons? Isn’t that a contradiction?
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"?
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?
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
Not great? Seems kind of loose language? It isn't OpenAI saying no autonomous weapons use, but only that use must be consistent with laws, regulations, and department policies: "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."
More of the same here. Not a wonder why the DoD signed with OpenAI and instead of Anthropic. Delegating morality to the law when you know the law is not adequate seems like "not a good thing".
"For intelligence activities, any handling of private information will comply with the Fourth Amendment, the National Security Act of 1947 and the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act of 1978, Executive Order 12333, and applicable DoD directives requiring a defined foreign intelligence purpose. The AI System shall not be used for unconstrained monitoring of U.S. persons’ private information as consistent with these authorities. The system shall also not be used for domestic law-enforcement activities except as permitted by the Posse Comitatus Act and other applicable law."
Exactly, they're letting the lawless administration decide what the lawful purposes and the policies in general are.
The "human approval" will be someone clicking a YES button all the time, like Israeli officers did in the Gaza bombing.
"Vibe killing"
Saying that an entity with the power to make its own laws can use something for "all lawful purposes" is saying they can use it for anything.
Are you saying we can't trust the words of a convicted fraudster?
Exactly. And not only can they make their own rules, but they can draft and enforce them effectively in secret.
It's a bit worse, because in the case of mass surveillance, they can't just make their own law, they need to make that law and have 2/3rds of US states sign off on a constitutional amendment.
Aiding someone while you know they're trying to break the law is conspiracy to break the law. OpenAI is culpable. You can't sue the government in many cases, but you can with OpenAI.
I don't think Anthropic is a saint that will never do anything unethical. I don't think ChatGPT is any better or worse.
But I do think my cancelling ChatGPT so I can try Claude, at this time, sends the message I want to send, which is why I did it.
It's also good to demonstrate to these companies that we're willing to move. If these companies know their entire userbase will just pack up and move at the first controversy, there wont be any controversies.
> I don't think Anthropic is a saint that will never do anything unethical. I don't think ChatGPT is any better or worse.
I sort of agree and think that over a long horizon, Open weights models are going to be the best / are the best
I do think only a fraction of companies might do what Anthropic did here. There must have been quite a significant pressure on them to fold but they didn't. So to me, I'd rather try to do atleast something to show companies that people do care about such things and its best if we have at the very least some unconditional morals which are not for sale no matter the price.
I think that we can still have disagreements with Anthropic on matters and I certainly still have some disagreements about their thoughts on Open Models for example but in all regards I would trust them as more trustworthy than OpenAI imho.
That being said, I do think that its worth telling that given that I don't have good GPU, I am gonna stop using Chatgpt as well and will use either Claude/(Kimi?) as well like many people are doing too. I do think that it might be the path going forward.
And a nice bonus is that Claude is way better than ChatGPT right now anyway
How so, it’s unstable like floating ice.
How incredibly unsurprising. This is why it is pointless to make moral stands as employees when you do not ultimately have power over the companies decisions. The only power you have is to quit.
I wonder how many will do so, and how many will simply accept Sam’s AI written rationalization as this own and keep collecting their obscene pay packages…
> The only power you have is to quit.
This is an incredible power when exercised en-masse.
And behind the quitting decision is very little safety net and usually substantial financial obligations keeping people handcuffed. Something has to give. The power employees had during covid was the way it should be, or something more closely approximating that.
Ironically this ends up with Chinese H1Bs remaining loyal while Americans have to fall on their sword
For now. We should change the immigration laws.
--and then, all the decent people no longer work there, and it's like certain other careers populated entirely with psychopaths
Wouldn't staying feel like implicitly condoning the actions of the "psychopaths"?
Psychopaths tend to be dumb (but not always), and the smartest researchers that actually care about getting humanity to AGI tend to be safety conscious.
This has been a huge talent advertisement for Anthropic. Their recruiting just got easier for the next 6 months.
I am sure openAI will struggle to find replacement for the lost headcount
At some point, yes, they absolutely would struggle.
Top researchers are more valuable than datacenters
It's perhaps too late in this case, but this is what unions are for. Sam Altman + a handful of scabs can't keep the lights on at OpenAI if a critical mass of engineers refuse to work until this decision is reversed (or, even better, not made at all, since the union would be part of that process).
> The only power you have is to quit.
Employees often have the power to oust the owner and take over the company; and more often than that have the power to have business grind to a halt. It does take a strong union and a culture of solidarity and sticking together of course, which I doubt we would find in a place like OpenAI.
OpenAI: "let's delegate morality to laws that we know are wholly inadequate for AI to absolve ourselves of any moral responsiblity."
As a stealth ceo of a profitable SaaS. This is a nice reminder for my company to wind down its relationship with OpenAI. I have no doubt Anthropic will eventually become evil but at least they have a backbone today.
Goodbye Sam.
Edit: Also, referring to the DOD as the Department of War is cringe.
Local inference might a better bet for you.
It's hard to believe that this was written in any good faith when there's so much beating around the bush and careful legalese wordplay.
“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.”
So DoW did get the “all lawful purposes” language they were after, with reference to existing (inadequate, in my view) regulations around autonomous weapons and mass surveillance.
> Fully autonomous weapons. The cloud deployment surface covered in our contract would not permit powering fully autonomous weapons, as this would require edge deployment.
Can anyone explain this constraint?
Why do fully autonomous weapons require edge deployment?
Does "fully autonomous" in this context mean "disconnected from the Internet"?
If so, can a drone with Internet connectivity use OpenAI?
Or maybe it's about on-premise requirements: the military doesn't want to depend on OpenAI's DCs for weaponry, and instead wants OpenAI in their own DCs for that?
Does OpenAI enforce those red lines in all contracts?
From what I can tell the Anthropic issue was triggered by something Palantir was doing as a contractor for DoW, not anything related to direct contracts between DoW and Anthropic, and DoW was annoyed that Anthropic interfered with what Palantir was up to.
In other words will OpenAI enforce these "red lines" against use by a third-party government contractor?
If not, this seems pretty meaningless if they are essentially playing PR while hiding behind Palantir.
I built a website that shows a timeline of recent events involving Anthropic, OpenAI, and the U.S. government.
Posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47195085
These communications offend me because they treat the audience like they’re stupid, stupid, stupid.
But I imagine that being honest about your corporate identity is suboptimal. It’s probably an important cognitive dissonance tool for the employees? It’s like when autocracies repeat big obvious lies endlessly. Gives those who want to opt out of reality an option.
Not saying it was, but the course of actions awfully look like a setup was made for Anthropic.
"What if the government just changes the law or existing DoW policies?"
Our contract explicitly references the surveillance and autonomous weapons laws and policies as they exist today, so that even if those laws or policies change in the future, use of our systems must still remain aligned with the current standards reflected in the agreement.
So, this apply only if they changes the law, not if they break the law.
"What happens if the government violates the terms of the contract?"
As with any contract, we could terminate it if the counterparty violates the terms. We don’t expect that to happen.
WE COULD [...]. Yeah, I believe
This blog post really doesn't make it sound any better there is no clear refusal to participate in the questionable uses Anthropic was against. Merely must be legal and must be tested.
This feels like IBM in the 1930s selling tabulating machines to the Germans and downplaying their knowledge of their use. They seem to want us to naively believe they won't use it for exactly what the military has always wanted, autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. Further more there are much more mundane use they might make of the technology that is perfectly legal yet morally in gray areas.
I deleted my OpenAI account months ago. If LLMs and adjacent technology are truly a paradigm shift, I can’t think of many worse than Sam Altman to shepard us through that. He is a pure opportunist who has already shown how little he believes in outside of his own power and wealth.
I look forward to seeing more abusive tactics by the US government powered by AI and the language OpenAI will use to confuse the public into thinking they aren't responsible.
This is the same company that started as a nonprofit dedicated to open AI safety research, then became a capped-profit entity, then effectively closed-source, then dropped the cap, and is now pursuing full for-profit conversion. Every single guardrail they've set for themselves has been quietly revised or removed once it became inconvenient. Anyone want to bet on how long those exclusions last?
Money always wins
The comment below mine is flagged but it shouldn't be. I believe Annie Altman.
I used to write off Annie's statements as mad raving, but the more I see how Sam acts the more I'm starting to think she might be telling the truth after all.
Those exclusions are very carefully worded to sound iron-clad while actually having the strength of wet tissue paper.
The agreement puts no restrictions on the government beyond “all lawful purposes,” which is what Anthropic objected to.
> “ The Department of War may use the AI System for all lawful purposes… [proceeds to describe current law, with clear openings if the law changes]”
Thus, OAI is relying on the Trump administration’s interpretation of current law. Which, I will remind readers, suggests that it is legal to kill civilians on boats, kidnap foreign leaders, deploy troops in American cities, shoot American citizens protesting ICE.
Yeah I’ve cancelled my OAI sub.
It's not much but I was planning to cancel my Anthropic subscription to try Codex over the weekend, but I'll skip that. I don't want to support a company with someone like this at the top. Massive donations to the administration, sneaky backdoor deals. No thanks, fuck you.
Ah, yes, OpenAI, org known for keeping the word they gave on the direction of the company, with literal lie about that in their very name.
> Why could you reach a deal when Anthropic could not? Did you sign the deal they wouldn’t? Based on what we know, we believe our contract provides better guarantees and more responsible safeguards than earlier agreements, including Anthropic’s original contract.
Weak. You reached a deal that Anthropic could not because you demanded more safeguards than Anthropic?? (Based on what you know, of course).
Makes total sense!
Remember that this is the future that Altman is building for “all of humanity”
OAI: “If they stretch, reinterpret or beak the law with our systems, well, that’s on them. Good luck everybody!”
Added to the ever growing commercial product shit list.
I’m going to be left with scrap PCs and Debian at this rate.
In my opinion all this discussion of the contract language is a subterfuge. The real question is why the government was requesting this language in the first place. Clearly there’s more to it than a legal battle.
In my mind, the government would be fully happy to use this to surveil citizens (and indeed anyone) with or without any legal basis, but the issue was that Anthropic has a safety stack / training and inference protocols that it follows. Refusals, abuse models, and manual guardrails. They didn’t want to shut those off. Likely there were some very basic technical reasons, some being that the team’s safety posture is fully ingrained in the model itself and thus difficult to remove.
In this document, OpenAI admits that while they are not “turning off” their safety stack, they are completely willing to provide the government with a different model, different guardrails, etc. That should be incredibly concerning. Anthropic was unwilling to do this, cited their ToS, and ultimately had to walk away from the deal. Given that the government (DoW really) framed this in terms of a hilariously stupid position (surveillance and autonomous weapons), Anthropic felt that this was something they could voice to the public and therefore the entire guardrails discussion turned into a “we want the language changed”. Also the government can’t actually compel Anthropic to create new guardrails so they had no choice but to raise the stakes, make this a moral thing, and basically accuse Anthropic of being woke.
IMO this is really sad for OpenAI employees. Yet again Sam Altman proves that he wants to weasel his way around public perception. Folks at the company have to grapple with working for someone of that disposition.
I wonder if the autonomous weapon platforms they'll build will be surprisingly susceptible to friendly fire... I don't think the DoW knows what kind of Pandora's Box they just bought.
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47197505
Are they not allowed to say department of defence? I know botj names are official now but this is a choice on their own blog.
I don't really have anything against OpenAI's stance here. If that's how they want it to be, they have that choice.
But Sam pretending that he wanted the same restrictions as Anthropic *and* seeing how quickly they swooped in and made a deal with the DoD really skeeves me out. (But Sam always gave me the heebie jeebies).
Anyway, I've always preferred Claude, so I'm going to happily stay a paying customer there. This may end up being a big "branding" differentiator.
The timing of the release and the phrasing used in the headline: Woof.
time to delete my account.
Sam won't even sign his name to this press release.
> AI-enabled mass surveillance is fine as long as it isn’t domestic.
> We want AI to be aligned with all of humanity.
One of many contradictions. Liars.
Wow, how incredibly anti-human. Humanity's only hope seems to be Anthropic getting to ASI first and locking OpenAI out.
If I hadn’t already canceled my account over them including ads in a paid service, I’d certainly be canceling over this. Anthropic is lucky they have some spine, otherwise they’d have been binned as well.
Why is everyone mad if they have better guaranties that anthropic use to have ?
You’re done, Sam.
I feel like I keep saying this but it's critical to remember what OpenAI says on its blog doesn't have to align with what it delivers to the Pentagon.
You’re done Sam.
All this says is that all uses must remain lawful. So what? As if this admin has been a shining example of lawful behavior.
This is weak.
Well worded. Plentiful protections for themselves and others.
Here is a point Mr. Altman might not have considered. Everyone in Trump's circle will probably get a pardon no matter what. but not the CEOs who were collaborators. not in the inner circle but still complicit.
Even Google and Microsoft should be worried. This is like 1936 germany, we have ways to go. Look at the tune this administration is singing, if they get their way these CEOs aren't looking at law suits and federal investigations, the current order of things will be long gone by the time people start asking who's responsible for all the blood on the streets.
More Sam Altman lies. Can’t believe anything that jerk says
by now, we all know the core characters of altman and trump and their enablers. press releases (hell any of their words) mean nothing. they are just distracting fodder for fools and sycophants.
It’s the fucking department of defense.
OpenAI basically bribed the government into attacking Anthropic, via political donations to the MAGA PAC. They couldn’t not compete with an inferior product so Altman and Brockman went this route.
As for OpenAI’s defense - not buying it.
“OpenAI’s President Gave Millions to Trump. He Says It’s for Humanity”: https://www.wired.com/story/openai-president-greg-brockman-p...
Well..The fact they reached out and not the other way around says a lot.
"According to The Wall Street Journal, Anthropic approached 1789 Capital for a potential nine-figure investment during its Series G funding round in early 2026. The venture firm, where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner, ultimately declined the investment for ideological reasons. Read the full report at The Wall Street Journal."
[1] https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/woke-ai-spat-...
> > Do you think Anthropic should be designated as a “supply chain risk”?
> No, and we have made our position on this clear to the government.
Look, this is the most important thing that everyone needs to understand: Your opinion on this is not welcome here. Your opinion on how the government uses the tools it purchases are unimportant and a non-factor. It is not appropriate for you to share your opinion on this. The government that was elected by the people is the sole decision maker. That’s the agreed social norm that we have in this country. What you’re doing is a minor subversion of our democratic republic, even if it feels like you’re standing on firm moral ground.
The DoD can and will deploy eye watering amounts of capital in the pursuit of its mission. That mission includes artificial intelligence based war systems. If you want a piece of that pie, even indirectly, you need to shut the fuck up and kiss the ring. That’s the reality. You don’t have to like this, but you’re shockingly naive if you didn’t know the world worked this way. The DoD spends nearly a trillion dollars a year, did you really think that was entirely spent on raw materials?
Their systems will be built to their spec, one way or another. They will seize your source code and training sets. They will build data centers. Nothing can stop this. People are making this about Trump and Hegseth, but it’s bigger than that. This transcends political parties. Obama’s DoD would make the same stand, and you’re naive if you don’t think so. Our war machine never loses in the game of politics.
Do we really need to read the text of a statement entitled "Our agreement with the department of war"? If it weren't the US, it would still be something that any person of moral character would never get in the position to write.
And it _is_ the US department of war - just now entered into yet another war of aggression against Iran, with no cause nor legal basis (not even domestic IIANM), in and endless list of wars, direct and indirect. With another crown jewel being the support, funding and arming for the still-unhalted genocide in Gaza.
now DeepSeek and Qwen obtain similar or even more lenient terms, then a reckless slippery slope for supremacy and maybe at some point there won't be 2 player fighting, but a 3rd created by this exact dynamic, an autonomous unaligned undetected AI
too late bro