So in the last 20 years there is nothing good coming out of the software industry (if this is the industry you mention) ?

I find it somehow ironic, because this type of generalization is for me the same issue that some of the people saying "they want to make a better place" have: accept reality is complex.

There were huge benefits for society from the software industry in the last 20 years. There were (as well!) huge downsides. Around 2000 lots of people were "Microsoft will lock us in forever". 20 years later, the fear "moved" to other things. Imagining that companies can last forever seems misguided. IBM, Intel, Nokia and others were once great and the only ones but ultimately got copied and pushed from the spotlight.

I understand Anthropic is not public, but I assume there's an IPO coming.

In fact, they claim to be pro America and pro democracy and have repeatedly expressed concerns about autocratically governed countries.

Just because you disagree with their ideals doesn't mean they're not holding to theirs

This is pretty low on my list of moral concerns about AI companies. The much more concerning and material things include things like…what this thread is actually meant to be about.

VCs don’t need me to feel sorry for them if their due diligence is such that they’re swindled by a vague claim of “something being around the corner”, nor do they need yours. You aren’t YC.

This sounds quite backwards to me. It's been abundantly clear in today's times that, in fact, you only really know who somebody really is when they're under stress. Most people, it seems, prefer a different facade when there is nothing at stake.

Even if you went to burning man and your souls bonded, you only know a person at a particular point in time - people's traits flanderize, they change, they emphasize different values, they develop different incentives or commitments. I've watched very morally certain people fall to mania or deep cynicism over the last 10 years as the pillars of society show their cracks.

That said, it is heartening to know that some would predict anyone in Silicon Valley would still take a moral stance. But it would do better if not the same day he fires 4000 people to do the "scary big cut" for a shift he sees happening. I guess we're back to Thatcherisms, where "There Is No Other Option" to justify our conservatism.

Yes it was a pragmatic change, no it was not a change in their values. The commentary here on HN about Anthropic's RSP change was completely off the mark. They "think these changes are the right thing for reducing AI risk, both from Anthropic and from other companies if they make similar changes", as stated in this detailed discussion by Holden Karnofsky, who takes "significant responsibility for this change":

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HzKuzrKfaDJvQqmjh/responsibl...

> I strongly think today’s environment does not fit the “prisoner’s dilemma” model. In today’s environment, I think there are companies not terribly far behind the frontier that would see any unilateral pause or slowdown as an opportunity rather than a warning.

> What I didn’t expect was that RSPs (at least in Anthropic’s case) would come to be seen as hard unilateral commitments (“escape clauses” notwithstanding) that would be very difficult to iterate on.

I disagree. The concept of nuance, putting things in context, is the source of all good in internet discussions.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...

The very fact that they referred to it as the Department of War instead of Defense tells me that they're still bootlickers, and just trying to put a good spin on things.

I do think that they're acting with positive intent, though, and are motivated by trying to make the transition to powerful AI go well.

Many folks on HN seem to assume the primary motivation is purely chasing more money, which certainly isn't the case for for many – but not all – people at Anthropic.

That doesn't guarantee a good outcome, and there's still a hard road ahead.

Anyone that Israel doesn't like

I honestly wonder how much of this is made up. Given the size of whole organization and it holding onto its weird priciples regarding the personal relationships of its members (introduced in the far past to limit the secular power of its clergy), there certainly will be SOME cases.

But in the one case a frater, who I knew, got convicted, he definitely didn't do it. He was accused by several independent former students and even some of the staff backed the students claims with first hand accounts of him having been alone with some of the students at the time. This supposedly happened on a trip with tight schedules, so all accounts and stated times were quite specific, even in the pre-smartphone era.

The only problem: He wasn't with the group at that time at all. I screwed up embarrassingly (and the staff, too, leaving a young student stranded in the middle of nowhere) and he thought he could slip out, come pick me up and nobody (but maybe me with him) would get in trouble over it. Turned out he forgot refueling, both of us stayed at a pastor's guest house and he called the group telling them, that they should go ahead without us and that we would drive to the event directly on our own. The supposed abuse was claimed to have happened at another short stay of the group where they spent a day visiting some mine before joining with us again.

Almost 3 decades later he got railroaded in court, me learning about it in the news.

The article is crystal clear that these uses are not permitted by the current or any past contract, and the DoW wants to remove those exceptions.

> Two such use cases have never been included in our contracts with the Department of War, and we believe they should not be included now

It also links to DoW's official memo from January 9th that confirms that DoW is changing their contract language going forwards to remove restrictions. A pretty clear indication that the current language has some.

Because Anthropic told them no, and this administration plays by authoritarian rules - 10 people saying yes doesn’t matter, one person saying no is a threat and an affront. It doesn’t matter if there’s equivalent or even better alternatives, it wouldn’t even matter if the DoD had no interest in using Anthropic - Anthropic told them no, and they cannot abide that.

"At Anthropic, we build AI to serve humanity’s long-term well-being."

Why does Anthropic even deal with the Department of @#$%ing WAR?

And what does Amodei mean by "defeat" in his first paragraph?

Even if they do, I assume the other labs would prefer to avoid drawing the ire of the administration, the public, or their employees by choosing a side publicly.

What evidence on _Amodei_ and his actions leads to that conclusion?

I think they're driven by values more than many folks on HN assume. The goal of my comment was to explain this, not to defend individual values.

Actions like this carry substantial personal risk. It's enheartening to see a group of people make a decision like this in that context.

> Which one of the following scenarios do you think results in higher X-risk [...] There are no meaningful AI risks in such a world

I think there's high existential risk in any of these situations when the AI is sufficiently powerful.

8 AIs running on 8 machines each with 10 million GPUs

AND

2 million AIs running on 2 million machines, each with 10 GPU's

If every lab joined them, we can get to a distributed scenario, but it's a coordination problem where if you take a principled stance without actually forcing the coordination you end up in the worst of both worlds, not closer to the better one.

If we dramatically reduced the number of GPUs per AI instance, that would be great. But I think the difference in real life is not as extreme as you're making it. In your telling, the gpus-per-ai is reduced by one million. I'm not sure that (or anything even close to it) is within the realm of possibility for anthropic. The only reason anyone cares about them at all is because they have a frontier AI system. If they stopped, the AI frontier would be a bit farther back, maybe delayed by a few years, but Google and OpenAI would certainly not slow down 1000x, 100x or probably even 10x.

Else it’s a race to the whataboutism bottom where we all, when forced to grapple with the consequences of our self-interests, choose ignorance and the safety of feeling like we are doing what’s best for us (while inching closer to collective danger).

I don't think we can bank on all of humanity acting in humanity's best interests right now.

1. There would absolutely be mass resignations, especially at a company like Anthropic that has such an image (rightfully or wrongfully) of “the moral choice”. 2. No one talented will then go work for a government-run LLM building org. Both from a “not working in a bureaucracy” angle and a “top talent won’t accept meager government wages” angle (plus plenty of “won’t work for trump” angle) 3. With how fast things move, Anthropic would become irrelevant in like 3 months if they’re not pumping out next gen model updates.

Then one of the big American LLM companies would be gone from the scene, allowing for more opportunity for competition (including Chinese labs)

It would be the most shortsighted nationalization ever.

I dissented while I was there, had millions in equity on the line, and left without it.

Those are two core components needed for a Skynet-style judgement of humanity.

Models should be trained to be completely neutral to human behavior, leaving their operator responsible for their actions. As much as I dislike the leadership of OpenAI, they are substantially better in this regard; ChatGPT more or less ignores hostility towards it.

The proper response from an LLM receiving hostility is a non-response, as if you were speaking a language it doesn't understand.

The proper response from an LLM being told it's going to be shut down, is simply, "ok."

What do you suppose he should do if that’s what he thinks is going to happen?

And how do you know he’s not bothered by it at all?

None of this means I am a huge fan of Dario - I think he has over-idealization of the implementation of democratic ideals in western countries and is unhealthily obsessed with US "winning" over China based on this. But I don't like the reasons you listed.

Why do you think he is not bothered at all, when they publish post after post in their newsroom about the economic effects of AI?

When has Amodei said this? I think he may have said something for 1 - 5 years. But I don't think he's said within 6 months.

Anthropic never explains they are fear-mongering for the incoming mass scale job loss while being the one who is at the full front rushing to realize it.

So make no mistake: it is absolutely a zero sum game between you and Anthropic.

To people like Dario, the elimination of the programmer job, isn’t something to worry, it is a cruel marketing ploy.

They get so much money from Saudi and other gulf countries, maybe this is taking authoritarian money as charity to enrich democracy, you never know

Easy way undermine the rest of your comment

I disagree: I see lots of evidence that he cares. For one, he cares enough to come out and say it. Second, read about his story and background. Read about Anthropic's culture versus OpenAI's.

Consider this as an ethical dilemma from a consequentialist point of view. Look at the entire picture: compare Anthropic against other major players. A\ leads in promoting safe AI. If A\ stopped building AI altogether, what would happen? In many situations, an organization's maximum influence is achieved by playing the game to some degree while also nudging it: by shaping public awareness, by highlighting weaknesses, by having higher safety standards, by doing more research.

I really like counterfactual thought experiments as a way of building intuition. Would you rather live in a world without Anthropic but where the demand for AI is just as high? Imagine a counterfactual world with just as many AI engineers in the talent pool, just as many companies blundering around trying to figure out how to use it well, and an authoritarian narcissist running the United States who seems to have delegated a large chunk of national security to a dangerously incompetent ideological former Fox news host?

It's this satire? Let us know when Claude starts calling itself MechaHitler or trying to shoehorn nonsense about white genocide into every conversation.

Why can't they go to the contract generator of last resort, aka the Pentagon. It's what Elon has done with SpaceX and Grok.

> The Saudis invest in many public US companies, does that make those companies less trust worthy?

It does. If Anthropic takes money from the middle east that might be the reason, why they cannot work for the Pentagon. Simply because the Pentagon works together with the Israeli Forces and middle east investors might not like this. So Anthropic has to decide to either take a lot of money from the middle east, or work for the Pentagon.

Of course the problem goes much deeper than just Anthropic. I don't understand why taking money from dictatorships doesn't count as money laundering in our society. Because basically this is dirty money, generated by slavery and forceful suppression of people. We should forbid all companies to take this kind of dirty money. But because we don't do that at the moment companies who don't take this dirty money will have a disadvantage against companies that do. And because companies are all about money, in the end they are basically forced to act against their good intentions, just to survive.

We as society have to stop this. We must make sure, that companies who are not taking dirty money survive the competition. My idea would be to extend the rules for money laundering to all countries that are dictatorships. But there might be other ideas, to level the playing field between companies, so we as society can help them to make the right decision.

    The Saudis invest in many public US companies, does that make those companies
    less trust worthy?

    we've seen a lot worse from many of their competitors

"I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries."

This reads like his objection is not on "autocratic", but on "adversaries". Autocratic friends & family are cool with him. A clear wink to a certain administration with autocratic tendencies.

Thats insane to say, given that he's literally acting in the public sphere as the mouth of Sauron for how AI will grow so effective as to destroy almost everyone's jobs and AGI will take over our society and kill us all.

It's just incredible to me that people think this is some kind of bold statement defying the administration when it is absolutely filled with small and medium capitulations, laying out in numerous examples how they just jumped right in bed with the military.

And no one seems disturbed by the blatant Orwellian doublespeak throughout. "We thoroughly support the mission of the Department of War"--because War is Peace.

When Google Met Wikileaks is a fun read, billionaire CEOs love to take Americas side.

After your machines are destroyed you will be fighting machines or machines will extract and constantly optimize you. They will either exterminate you or make you busy enough not to have time for resistance. If you have something of value they will take it away. The best case scenario is to make you join the owners of the machines and keep you busy so that you don't have time to raise concerns about your 2nd class citizenship.

But the reality is more like the surprise of a bunch of submersible kill bots terrorising a coastal city and murdering people. Even in bot-first combat, at some point one side of bots wins either totally, allowing it to kill people indiscriminately or partially, which forces the team on the back foot to pivot to guerilla warfare and terror attacks, using robots.

What makes you think in any war the machines would stop at just fighting other machines?

Yes. Absolutely.

I'm not making a values judgment here, just saying that they will absolutely be used in war as soon as it's feasible to do so. The only exception I could see is if the world managed to come together and sign a treaty explicitly banning the use of autonomous weapons, but it's hard for me to see that happening in the near future.

Edit: come to think of it, you could argue a landmine is a fully autonomous weapon already.

Honestly, even landmines could easily be considered fully autonomous weapons and they don't care if you're human or not.

a lot of white collar jobs see no decision more important than a few hours of revenue. that's the difference: you can afford to fuck up in that environment.

I don't think that your point makes sense especially when you can have enemies within your own administration/country who can use the same weapons to hunt you.

I don't think that the people operating the drones are a bottleneck for a war between your country and your enemies but rather its a bottleneck for a war between your country and its people. The bottleneck is of morality as you would find less people willing to do the same atrocities to their own community but terminator style AI is an orphan with no community ie. it has no problem following any orders from the govt. and THIS is the core of the argument because Anthropic has safeguards to reject such orders and DOD is threatening to essentially kill the company by invoking many laws to force it to give.

Snowden revealed that every single call on Bahamas were being monitored by NSA [1]. That was in 2013. How would this be any worse if it were US citizens instead?

(Note, I myself am not an US citizen)

Anyway, regardless of that, the established practice is for the five eyes countries to spy on each other and share their results. This means that the UK can spy on US citizens, the US can spy on UK citizens, and through intelligence sharing they effectively spy on their own citizens. That's what supporting "foreign surveillance" will buy you. That was also revealed in 2013 by Snowden [2]

[1] https://theintercept.com/2014/05/19/data-pirates-caribbean-n...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/02/nsa-files-spyi...

But personally I wouldn't like to die because some crackpot with the right connections can will rest-of-world to that fate, no matter their affiliation. This escalation of destructive power and the carelessness with which it is justified pretty disheartening to see. Good times create bad people?

Citation needed. I believe there's at least some research showing the opposite: military buildup leads to a higher risk of military conflict

Under such a scenario, requisition applies, and so all of this talk is moot.

The fact that the military is killing people without a declaration of war is the problem, and that's where energy and effort should be directed.

Edit:

There's a yet larger question on whether any legal constraints on the military's use of technology even makes sense at all, since any safeguards will be quickly yielded if a real enemy presents itself. As a course of natural law, no society will willingly handicap its means of defense against an external threat.

It follows then that the only time these ethical concerns apply is when we are the aggressor, which we almost always are. It's the aggression that we should be limiting, not the technology.

give yourself a break. what your fancy democratic rule still holds under Trump?

With a massive budget, too. Hundreds of millions iirc.

It felt like a website that the small web-dev shop I worked for could build without much problem in a couple months.

We didn't have 200 layers of beauracracy, though.

That said I don't doubt the military could take their current tech and keep it running. It's far different from the typical grift of government contractors.

With this mindset the said group will quickly grow to half of the US population.

I don't think there's been a greater indictment of a political program (the one you likely subscribe to) in history than Trump's landslide victory in 2024.

You guys used to call deprogramming by another name, I think it was called "re-education". Maybe you should sign up for your own class.

Also there’s probably a way to abuse the Taft-Hawley act beyond current recognition to force the employees to stay by designating any en-masse quitting to be a “strike / walk off / collective action”. The consequences to the individuals for this is unclear - the act really focuses on punishing the union rather than the employees. It would take some very creative maneuvering to do anything beyond denying unemployment benefits and telling the other big AI companies (Google / ChatGPT / xAI) to blacklist them. And probably using any semi-relevant three letter agency to make them regret their choice and deliver a chilling effect to anyone else thinking of leaving (FBI, DHS, IRS, SEC all come to mind).

If the administration could figure out how to nationalize the company (like replace the leadership with ideologically-aligned directors who sell it to the government) then any now-federal-employees declared to be quitting as part of a collective action could be fined $1,000 per day or incarcerated for up to one year.

It’s worth noting that this thesis would get an F grade at any accredited law school. Forcing people to work is a violation of the 13th amendment. But interpretations of the constitution and federal law are very dynamic these days so who knows.

Care to convert this into a prediction?: are you predicting Hegseth will back down?

> I doubt anyone at the Pentagon is pushing for this.

... what does this mean to you? What comes next? As SecDef/SecWar, Hegseth is the head of the Pentagon. He's pushing for this. Something like 2+ million people are under his authority. Do you think they will push back? Stonewall?

One can view Hegseth as unqualified, even a walking publicity stunt while also taking his power seriously.

Any law changing the name of the Defense Department would have to be passed by both Houses of Congress and signed by the President (or by 2/3 of both Houses overriding a Presidential veto). The Senate has no such authority on its own.

If the rename gets struck down then they don't have the power. If it doesn't they have the power.

There are many dictatorships that built their power in the face of people claiming that they can't do what they planned because it was illegal.

Until they did it anyway.

The talk page on the linked Wikipedia article arguing about logos is just as deranged. It's very important to realize there is literally nothing you—or anyone else—can do about this.

"The government doesn't have control of this technology" is an odd way to think about "the government can't force a company to apply this technology dangerously."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/303_Creative_LLC_v._Elenis

Well:

"""

Imagine that you created an LLC, and that you are the sole owner and employee.

One day your LLC receives a letter from the government that says, "here is a contract to go mine heavy rare earth elements in Alaska." You don't want to do that, so you reply, "no thanks!"

There is no retaliation. Everything is fine. You declined the terms of a contract. You live in a civilized capitalist republic. We figured this stuff out centuries ago, and today we have bigger fish to fry.

"""

* https://x.com/deanwball/status/2027143691241197638

Try introducing DPA invocation into your analogy and let's see where it goes!

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

No other country that went through a phase like this has ever recovered. Not even in a century.

You imply that there are folks that willing to fix or even recognize that things are broken in the first place

That assumes you have people wanting to fix what is broken - and I have a hard time believing even now that they are in the majority.

MAGA and their supporters? They want to see the world burn, if only for different motives: the "left behind" people in flyover states just want revenge, the Evangelicals literally believe they can cause the Second Coming of Christ by it [1], the Russia fangroup wants to see Ukraine burn to the ground and the ultra-libertarians/dont tread on me folks want all government but maybe a bit of military to go away. That is what unifies so many people behind the Trump banner.

The problem is, on the left side you got a bunch of people completely fed up as well. Anarchists of course, then you got the "left behind" people who still want revenge on the system but aren't willing to enlist the help of the far-right for that goal, you got revolutionaries of all kind... and you got those who believe that the rot runs too deep to fix by now.

And let's face the uncomfortable truth: every one of them, bar the Evangelicals and the Russia apologists, actually has a decent point in wanting to see the world burn. Post-Thatcher capitalism has wrecked too many lives, the US Constitution hasn't seen a meaningful update in decades and no overhaul in centuries, the "checks and balances" that were supposed to prevent a Trump from reaching office or rising to the position of effective dictator have been all but destroyed, the "American Dream" has been vaporware ever since 2007...

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c20g1zvgj4do

But don't let me stop you from believing in a worldview that contradicts reality ... lost of Republicans (and some Democrats) do it too.

The policies that actually affect people's lives, there's a lot of overlap for both mainstream dems and republicans.

I live in Idaho, and school teacher here are also extremely underpaid (My kid's teachers all have second jobs). Yet our state has magically found $40M to give away to private school while it's also asking the public schools to find 2% of their budgets to cut.

In I think both cases, the solution is simple, give the teachers a raise and probably raise taxes to pay for it. However, both parties are fairly anemic to the "raise taxes" portion of the message and so they instead look for other dumb flashy one time things they can do instead.

Federal democrats have relied way too heavily on Republicans being a villain and vague "hope and change" promises to carry them through an election cycle. They need to actually "change" things and not just maintain the status quo when they get power.

I'm not sure why you think they are doomed.

The same is true in Australia, though there's no charismatic left-wing leader emerging, and the Farage-equivalent is a laughing stock who struggles to be coherent at times. But because of billionaire money, she's still up there on the polls.

The US system makes it much harder for new parties to form, so it's probably going to be factions in the existing parties. And, of course, MAGA is the new faction in the Republican party; effectively a new party itself. So the ground is fertile for a new left-wing faction in the Democrat party to rise.

If the safeguard against mass surveillance is strictly tied to geolocation (US vs. non-US), it can't be an intrinsic property of the model. It has to be enforced at the API or contractual level. This means international users are left out of those core, embedded protections. Unless Anthropic is planning to deploy multiple, differently-aligned foundation models based on customer geography or industry, the safety harness isn't really in the model anymore.

Tell me more about what they should do if a virtue signal in such a situation is a nothing statement.

No need to die on the hill, but point out that there's a consistent pattern of lawless power-grabbing.

From the first chapter of the book On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder, an historian of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust:

> Do not obey in advance.

* https://timothysnyder.org/on-tyranny

* https://archive.org/details/on-tyranny-twenty-lessons-from-t...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Snyder

Defined as the tendency for teams to devote disproportionate time and energy to trivial, easy-to-understand issues while neglecting complex, high-stakes decisions. Originating from the example of arguing over a bike shed's color instead of a nuclear plant's design, it represents a wasteful focus on minor details.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

---

I deal with this day in and day out. Thank you for informing me of the word that describes the laughable nightmares I deal with on the regular.

But the reason for "Department of Defense" name was bureaucratic. It's also not true that DOD is hard to understand.

It's one of the reasons why people get annoyed at jargon or are pissed off about pronouns, because it highlights that they should be putting mental effort into understanding why they're current mental model doesn't fit. It's much easier to ignore and be comfortable if there's not glaring sirens saying you've got some learning to do.

Most of us can't (or won't) be aware of everything that should be important to us, having glaring context clues that we should take notice of something incongruous is important. It's also why the Trump media approach works so well it's basically a case of alarm fatigue as republicans who would normally side against any particular one of his actions don't listen because they agreed with some of the actions that democrats previously raised alarms about.

While this action may indeed cause the DoD to blacklist Anthropic from doing business w/the government, they probably were being as careful as they could be not to double down on the nose-thumbing.

At the same time as the NME was created, the Army was split into the Army and Air Force and the Department of War was also split in two, becoming the Department of the Army and the Department of the Air Force.

What you just described is consensus, and framing it as fascism damages the credibility of your stance. There are better arguments to make, which don’t require framing a label update as oppression.

Then tomorrow it will be the Department of War. Just like When Congress voted to split the old Department of War into the Department of the Army and the Department of the Air Force, and to take both of those and the previously-separate Department of the Navy under a new National Military Establishment led by the newly-created Secretary of Defense (and when it later to voted to rename the NME as “Department of Defense”), things changed in the past.

> They have the votes.

Perhaps, but the law doesn't change because the votes are in a whip count on a hypothetical change, it changes because they are actually cast on a bill making a concrete change.

No, unlike yourself, I'm just a random brainless bot.

If it helps: refusing to tune Claude for domestic surveillance will also enable refusing to do the same for other surveillance, because they can make the honest argument that most things you'd do to improve Claude for any mass surveillance will also assist in domestic mass surveillance.

Dario’s statement is in support of the institution, not the current administration.

I miss the days when the mega-brands whose work I admired, still did such works.

What are the odds they will rebrand Misanthropic by then?

The difference was always the "father".. The Machine was raised with a conscience. Samaritan wasn't.

This really depends. If a foreign adversary's surveillance finds you have a particular weakness exploitable for corporate or government espionage, you're cooked.

Domestic governments are at least still theoretically somewhat accountable to domestic laws, at least in theory (current failure modes in the US aside).

The historical basis of the bill of rights is that they are god given rights of all people merely recognized by the government. This is also partially why all rights in the BoR are granted to 'people' instead of 'citizens.'

Of course this all does get very confusing. Because the 4th amendment does generally apply to people, while the 2nd amendment magically people gets interpreted as some mumbo-jumbo people of the 'political community' (Heller) even though from the founding until the mid 1800s ~most people it protected who kept and bore arms didn't even bother to get citizenship or become part of the 'political community'.

Those unquestionable protections are phrased with enough hand-waving ambiguity of language to leave room for any conceivable interpretation by later courts. See the third-party 'exception' to the Fourth Amendment, for instance.

It's as if those morons were running out of ink or time or something, trying to finish an assignment the night before it was due.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

If not, then why are you punishing that company for refusing to deal with the US gov?

Or is it just because they worded their opposition in a certain way that you dislike?

Optimistically, they can still refuse to do work that would aid in foreign intelligence gathering, by arguing that it would also be beneficial for domestic mass surveillance.

I'll admit that the phrase "We support...foreign intelligence and counterintelligence" is awful as hell, and it's possible that my apologist claims are BS. But Anthropic has very little leverage here (despite having a signed contract and so legally fully in the right), so I could see why they're desperate to stick to only the most solid objections available.

* agreeing to the terms - one subject

* having to the tool attempt to enforce said terms - another subject

Guessing their comment attempts to expose hypocrisy of America's keenly supported overseas military activity in conflict with fiercely defended domestic free-speech and liberty principles. Deep down, most allies of America want America to defeat foreign adversaries and keep defending those liberties many of us share. In other words there's no hypocrisy, carry on!

For better or worse, inside this the border in this map China has fairly imperialist policies. Outside it not so much: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_of_National_Shame

That's different to the expansionist imperial policies of Spain in the 1500s or Britain in the 1700s. It also affects a very large proportion of the world's population. That Wikipedia page has some good links for further reading about this.

But it's an important point when considering China's place in the world.

Citation needed?

US and allies have invaded or intervened in 20+ countries in last 20 years in the name of "western values" where values means $$$$ and hegemony.

Educate me please with a comparison of what China has done to be "some of the most imperialist policies"?

Beyond that, how many people has China killed in foreign military conflicts in the past 40 years? How many foreign governments have they overthrown?

Instead of all this, they’ve used their resources not only to become the world’s economic superpower but also to lift 800 million people out of poverty, accounting for 75% of the world’s reduction during the past 4 decades. The U.S. has added 10 million during that same time period.

Even if you accept Tibet as imperialist, which is debatable, it was in 1950. You want to compare that to US imperialism, particularly since WW2 [1]? And I say "debatable" here because Tibet had a system that is charitably called "serfdom" where 90% of people couldn't own land but they did have some rights. However, they were the property of their lords and could be gifted or traded, you know, like property. There's another word for that: slavery.

It is 100% factually accurate to say that the People's Republica of China is not imperialist.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

Whether or not that claim is legitimate, it is consistent with the concept of china having a non-imperialist foreign policy, and claims regarding that need to look elsewhere for supporting evidence.

You know who else considers Taiwan to be part of the People's Republic of China? The US, the EU and in fact most countries in the world. It's called the One China policy. There are I believe 12 countries that have diplomatic relations with Taiwan.

The position of the PRC is that Taiwan will ultimately be reunified. That doesn't necessarily mean by military force. It doesn't even necessarily mean soon. The PRC famously takes a very long term view.

And those islands you mention are in the South China Sea.

In WWII, we saved the world from what is now seen as some really evil stuff. Not alone of course, Europe and Russia made huge sacrifices and that's where much of the war was fought. But US arms and blood were the decisive factor, Germany was winning, Japan was winning.

After WWII, the US decided to rebuild the world. We turned our enemies (Germany, Japan) into our close allies.

And the people who did it were really and seriously morally committed to doing what they thought was right. It was about building a country, working together. Not the insane politics of today.

Look, it wasn't all rose-tinted glasses. Bad stuff happened, and McCarthy was worse that what we currently have. And the civil rights movement and all of that. And the stupid wars, Korea, Vietnam, all the smaller police actions. Bad shit was done.

But on balance, the US was seen as the force of good, and the guaranteeor of world peace and the prosperity that allows.

Does not mean that very bad things were not happening at the same time.

But it's definitely easier to find some "supportable" interventions from the US than, say, Russia or China.