▲I don't see how OpenAI employees who have signed the We Will Not Be Divided letter can continue their employment there in light of this. Surely if OpenAI had insisted upon the same things that Anthropic had, the government would not have signed this agreement. The only plausible explanation is that there is an understanding that OpenAI will not, in practice, enforce the red lines.
reply▲I'm an OpenAI employee and I'll go out on a limb with a public comment. I agree AI shouldn't be used for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons. I also think Anthropic has been treated terribly and has acted admirably. My understanding is that the OpenAI deal disallows domestic mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, and that OpenAI is asking for the same terms for other AI companies (so that we can continue competing on the basis of differing services and not differing scruples). Given this understanding, I don't see why I should quit. If it turns out that the deal is being misdescribed or that it won't be enforced, I can see why I should quit, but so far I haven't seen any evidence that's the case.
reply▲Respectfully, it's very hard to see how anyone could look at what just happened and come to the conclusion that one company ends up classed a "supply chain risk" while another agrees the the same terms that led to that. Either the terms are looser, they're not going to be enforced, or there's another reason for the loud attempt to blacklist Anthropic. It's very difficult to see how you could take this at face value in any case. If it is loose terms or a wink agreement to not check in on enforcement you're never going to be told that. We can imagine other scenerios where the terms stated were not the real reason for the blacklisting, but it's a real struggle (at least for me) to find an explanation for this deal that doesn't paint OpenAI in a very ethically questionable light.
reply▲> it's very hard to see how anyone could look at what just happened
I think what you are missing is their annual comp with two commas in it.
Or the number of tech workers who signed that petition anonymously as if that is somehow meaningful and not pathetic. I'd love to know many of them have public LinkedIn profiles. Perhaps the petition has done us all a favor. Now we know what percentage of the company will compromise their values to hedge their bets.
reply▲the_real_cher1 hour ago
[-] This, for that check theyll be building the autonomous robots themselves, saying "theyre food delivery robots, thats not a gun that a drink dispenser!"
reply▲cheonn63848 minutes ago
[-] > theyre food delivery robots, thats not a gun that a drink dispenser!"
You underestimate how many top AI scientists are perfectly okay with building autonomous weapons systems and are not ashamed of it.
Me, and 99% of HN readers, will gladly pull the trigger to release a missile from a drone if we are paid even just US$1,000,000/year.
Now note that many L7+ at OpenAI are making $10 million+ per year.
readitalready15 minutes ago
[-] As an OpenAI employee, quitting wouldn't be a problem, as you have a much higher chance of being successful after quitting than anyone else. You could go to any VC and they would fund you.
reply▲One explanation is that this is effectively a quid pro quo, given Brockman’s enormous financial support of the current president.
reply▲ZeroGravitas1 hour ago
[-] Yep, theoretically it could just be oligarchic corruption and not institutional insanity at the highest levels of the government. What a reassuring relief it would be to believe that.
reply▲I agree with your assessment, but given the past behaviour of this administration I wouldn't be shocked to discover that the real reason is "petulance".
reply▲It’s obvious retaliation, and will be struck down by the courts.
reply▲I agree it makes little sense, and I think if all players were rational it never would have played out this way. My understanding is that there are other reasons (i.e., beyond differing red lines) that made the OpenAI deal more palatable, but unfortunately the information shared with me has not been made public so I won't comment on specifics. I know that's unsatisfying, but I hope it serves as some very mild evidence that it's not all a big fat lie.
reply▲Your ballooned unvested equity package is preventing you from seeing the difference between “our offering/deal is better” and “designated supply chain risk and threatening all companies who do business with the government to stop using Anthropic or will be similarly dropped” (which is well past what the designation limits). It’s easier being honest.
reply▲The supply chain risk stuff is bogus. Anthropic is a great, trustworthy company, and no enemy of America. I genuinely root for Anthropic, because its success benefits consumers and all the charities that Anthropic employees have pledged equity toward.
Whether Anthropic’s clear mistreatment means that all other companies should refrain from doing business with the US government isn’t as clear to me. I can see arguments on both sides and I acknowledge it’s probably impossible to eliminate all possible bias within myself.
One thing I hope we can agree on is that it would be good if the contract (or its relevant portions) is made public so that people can judge for themselves, without having to speculate about who’s being honest and who’s lying.
>Whether Anthropic’s clear mistreatment means that all other companies should refrain from doing business with the US government isn’t as clear to me.
That isn't what many of us are challenging here. We're not concerned about OpenAI's ethics because they agreed to work with the government after Anthropic was mistreated.
We're skeptical because it seems unlikely that those restrictions were such a third rail for the government that Anthropic got sanctioned for asking for them, but then the government immediately turned around and voluntarily gave those same restrictions to OpenAI. It's just tough to believe the government would concede so much ground on this deal so quickly. It's easier to believe that one company was willing to agree to a deal that the other company wasn't.
We all know who's lying... The guy who's track record is constantly lying.. your boss.
reply▲Friend, this reads like that situation where your paycheck prevents you from seeing clearly - I forget the exact quote. Sam doesn't play a straight game and neither does the administration - there are more than a few examples.
reply▲Never try to convince someone of something they're paid to not believe.
reply▲Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it”
reply▲OpenAI should not be agreeing to any contract with DOD under these circumstances of Anthropic being falsely labeled a supply chain risk.
reply▲I agree with what you're saying, but given the egos involved in the current admin there's a practical interpretation:
1. Department of War broadly uses Anthropic for general purposes
2. Minority interests in the Department of War would like to apply it to mass surveillance and/or autonomous weapons
3. Anthropic disagrees and it escalates
4. Anthropic goes public criticizing the whole Department of War
5. Trump sees a political reason to make an example of Anthropic and bans them
6. The entirety of the Department of War now has no AI for anything
7. Department of War makes agreement with another organization
If there was only a minority interest at the department of war to develop mass surveillance / autonomous weapons or it was seen as an unproven use case / unknown value compared to the more proven value from the rest of their organizational use of it, it would make sense that they'd be 1) in practice willing to agree to compromise on this, 2) now unable to do so with Anthropic in specific because of the political kerfuffle.
I imagine they'd rather not compromise, but if none of the AI companies are going to offer them it then there's only so much you can do as a short term strategy.
juggle-anyhow3 hours ago
[-] Well at least we know now that the department of war is less capable than before. All because the big man shit his pants while Anthropic was in view.
reply▲spongebobstoes4 hours ago
[-] anthropic has nothing but a contract to enforce what is appropriate usage of their models. there are no safety rails, they disabled their standard safety systems
openai can deploy safety systems of their own making
from the military perspective this is preferable because they just use the tool -- if it works, it works, and if it doesn't, they'll use another one. with the anthropic model the military needs a legal opinion before they can use the tool, or they might misuse it by accident
this is also preferable if you think the government is untrustworthy. an untrustworthy government may not obey the contract, but they will have a hard time subverting safety systems that openai builds or trains into the model
Are you saying that everything so far in this administration has been 100% rational?
reply▲willis93637 minutes ago
[-] >or there's another reason for the loud attempt to blacklist Anthropic
This one is very easy. Trump has a well established pattern of making a loud statement to make it appear he didn't lose, even when he did.
> one company ends up classed a "supply chain risk" while another agrees the the same terms that led to that
Never discount the possibility of Hegseth being petty and doing the OpenAI deal with the same terms to imply to the world that Anthropic is being unreasonable because another company signed a deal with him.
And Sam is a habitual liar.
reply▲And an abuser, but they keep covering that one up.
reply▲He literally just got community noted for lying.
So much for a non-profit CEO or whatever it is now.
reply▲(Disclosure, I'm a former OpenAI employee and current shareholder.)
I have two qualms with this deal.
First, Sam's tweet [0] reads as if this deal does not disallow autonomous weapons, but rather requires "human responsibility" for them. I don't think this is much of an assurance at all - obviously at some level a human must be responsible, but this is vague enough that I worry the responsible human could be very far out of the loop.
Second, Jeremy Lewin's tweet [1] indicates that the definitions of these guardrails are now maintained by DoW, not OpenAI. I'm currently unclear on those definitions and the process for changing them. But I worry that e.g. "mass surveillance" may be defined too narrowly for that limitation to be compatible with democratic values, or that DoW could unilaterally make it that narrow in the future. Evidently Anthropic insisted on defining these limits itself, and that was a sticking point.
Of course, it's possible that OpenAI leadership thoughtfully considered both of these points and that there are reasonable explanations for each of them. That's not clear from anything I've seen so far, but things are moving quickly so that may change in the coming days.
[0] https://x.com/sama/status/2027578652477821175
[1] https://x.com/UnderSecretaryF/status/2027594072811098230
Jeremy Lewin's tweet referenced that "all lawful use" is the particular term that seems to be a particular sticking point.
While I don't live in the US, I could imagine the US government arguing that third party doctrine[0] means that aggregation and bulk-analysis of say; phone record metadata is "lawful use" in that it isn't /technically/ unlawful, although it would be unethical.
Another avenue might also be purchasing data from ad brokers for mass-analysis with LLMs which was written about in Byron Tau's Means of Control[1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
[1] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/706321/means-of-con...
The term lawful use is a joke to the current administration when they go after senators for sedition when reminding government employees to not carry out unlawful orders. It’s all so twisted.
reply▲ChadNauseam4 hours ago
[-] Did Sam Altman say that he wouldn't allow ChatGPT to be used for fully autonomous weapons? (Not quite the same as "human responsibility for use of force".)
I don't want to overanalyze things but I also noticed his statement didn't say "our agreement specifically says chatgpt will never be used for fully autonomous weapons or domestic mass surveillance." It said something that kind of gestured towards that, but it didn't quite come out and say it. It says "The DoW agrees with these principles, and we put them in our agreement." Could the principles have been outlined in a nonbinding preamble, or been a statement of the DoW's current intentions rather than binding their future behavior? You should be very suspicious when a corporate person says something vague that somewhat implies what you want to hear - if they could have told you explicitly what you wanted to hear, they would have.
But anyway, it doesn't matter. You said you don't think it should be used for autonomous weapons. I'd be willing to bet you 10:1 that you'll never find altman saying anything like "our agreement specifically says chatgpt will never be used for fully autonomous weapons", now or any point in the future.
> you'll never find altman saying anything like "our agreement specifically says chatgpt will never be used for fully autonomous weapons"
To be fair, Anthropic didn't say that either. Merely that autonomous weapons without a HITL aren't currently within Claude's capabilities; it isn't a moral stance so much as a pragmatic one. (The domestic surveillance point, on the other hand, is an ethical stance.)
They specifically said they never agreed to let the DoD use anthropic for fully autonomous weapons. They said "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: Mass domestic surveillance [...] Fully autonomous weapons"
Their rational was pragmatic. But they specifically said that they didn't agree to let the DoD create fully automatic weapons using their technology. I'll bet 10:1 you won't ever hear Sam Altman say that. He doesn't even imply it today.
You're not overanalyzing anything, you're using critical thinking dissecting company communications. Kudos
reply▲Does he do employee town halls where they could ask?
reply▲throwawaywd89e4 hours ago
[-] "AI shouldn't be used for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons". The statement from OpenAI virtually guarantees that the intention is to use it for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. If this wasn't the intention them the qualifier "domestic" wouldn't be used, and they would be talking about "human in the loop" control of autonomous weapons, not "human responsibility" which just means there's someone willing to stand up and say, "yep I take responsibility for the autonomous weapon systems actions", which lets be honest is the thinnest of thin safety guarantees.
reply▲Why would you believe that? If that were the case what was the issue with Anthropic even about?
You, and your colleagues, should resign.
You tell me why an employee would believe something convenient to them continuing to receive their paycheck
reply▲Imo the more ethical thing is obstructionism. Twitter's takeover showed it's pretty easy to find True Believer sycophants to hire. Better to play the part while secretly finding ways to sabotage.
reply▲booleandilemma31 minutes ago
[-] That quote comes to mind...It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Obviously nothing is going to make Teddy quit his cushy OpenAI job.
Assuming this is real: Why do you think anthropic was put on what is essentially an "enemy of the state" list and openai didn't?
The two things anthropic refused to do is mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, so why do _you_ think openai refused and still did not get placed on the exact same list.
It's fine to say "I'm not going to resign. I didn't even sign that letter", but thinking that openai can get away with not developing autonomous weapons or mass surveillance is naive at the very best.
Why do you suppose OpenAI's deal led to a contract, while Anthropic's deal (ostensibly containing identical terms) gets it not only booted but declared a supply chain risk?
reply▲Giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming [1] does not play a role in your thinking:
I don't mean this in any way rude and I apologize if this comes accross as such but believing it won't be used in exactly this way is just naive. History has taught us this lesson again and again and again.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189650#47189970
You should quit because the only reasonable thing for your leadership to have done is to refuse to sign any agreement with DoW whatsoever while it's attempting to strongarm Anthropic in this fashion.
It doesn't even matter if OpenAI is offered the same terms that Anthropic refused. It's absurd to accept them and do business with the Pentagon in that situation.
If you take the government at its word, it's killing Anthropic because Anthropic wanted to assert the ability to draw _some_ sort of redline. If OpenAI's position is "well sucks to be them", there's nothing stopping Hegseth from doing the same to OpenAI.
It doesn't matter at all if OpenAI gets the deal at the same redline Anthropic was trying to assert. If at the end of this the government has succeeded in cutting Anthropic off from the economy, what's next for OpenAI? What happens next time when OpenAI tries to assert some sort of redline?
What's the point of any talk of "AI Safety" if you sign on to a regime where Hegseth (of all people) can just demand the keys and you hand them right over?
I can totally see why you should quit, but we see different things apparently.
reply▲sensanaty19 minutes ago
[-] Assuming this isn't a troll and you really think this, you should at least have the cojones to admit you're taking the blood money instead of trying to pretzel the truth so hard that you just look like a moron instead.
reply▲> My understanding is that the OpenAI deal disallows domestic mass surveillance and autonomous weapons
And you believe the US government, let alone the current one will respect that? Why? Is it naïveté or do you support the current regime?
> If it turns out that the deal is being misdescribed or that it won't be enforced, I can see why I should quit.
So your logic is your company is selling harmful technology to a bunch of known liars who are threatening to invade democratic countries, but because they haven’t lied yet in this case (for lack of opportunity), you’ll wait until the harm is done and then maybe quit?
I’ll go out on a limb and say you won’t. You seem to be trying really hard to justify to yourself what’s happening so you can sleep at night.
Know that when things go wrong (not if, when), the blood will be on your hands too.
Griffinsauce3 hours ago
[-] Aside from that unlikely read, this deal was still used as a pressure point on Anthropic, there's absolutely no way OpenAI was not used as a stick to hit with during negotiations.
What is your red line?
Thank you for responding. Everyone wants to think they will “do the right thing” when their own personal Rubicon is challenged. In practice, so many factors are at play, not least of which are the other people you may be responsible for. The calculus of balancing those differing imperatives is only straightforward for those that have never faced this squarely. I’ve been marched out of jobs twice for standing up for what I believed to be right at the time. Am still literally blacklisted (much to the surprise of various recruiters) at a major bank here 8 years after the fact. I can’t imagine that the threat of being blacklisted from a whole raft of companies contracting with a known vindictive regime would make the decision easier.
reply▲I won't trust a word coming from Sam Altman's mouth until I see official signed documents (which I won't).
reply▲You can't be this naive?
reply▲You may have missed that no single word said or written by any of the current US government’s members can be believed.
reply▲I don't know you, so maybe you're actually for real and speaking on good faith here but honestly this and your other responses in this thread read exactly like "...salary depends on not understanding"
reply▲This is not meant as a personal attack but this has got to be the most naive thing I've read.
reply▲Anthropic is deemed a betrayer and a supply chain risk for actually enforcing their principles.
OpenAI agrees to be put in the same position as Anthropic.
It seems like you must actually somehow believe that history will repeat itself, Hegseth will deem OpenAI a supply chain risk too, then move to Grok or something?
There's surely no way that's actually what you believe...
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
reply▲"domestic" "mass" surveillance, two words that can be stretched so thin they basically invalidate the whole term. Mass surveillance on other countries? Guess that's fine. Surveillance on just a couple of cities that happen to be resisting the regime? Well, it's not _mass_ surveillance, just a couple of cities!
reply▲Right beautifying lies are always going to head in the direction of doing whats self interested.
reply▲I have a bridge to Brooklyn to sell you if you believe this.
Standing up for whats right often is not easy and involves hard choices and consequences, your leader has shown you and the world that he is not to be trusted.
I can't tell you what to do but I hope you make the right decision.
>OpenAI deal disallows domestic mass surveillance
And the US Military is forbidden from operating on US soil, but that didn't stop this administration from deploying US Marines to California recently.
You're fooling yourself if you think this administration is following any kind of rule.
You can make blood money but you have to be aware it's blood money. Don't delude yourself in to thinking you work for an ethical or moral company.
reply▲Coward.
reply▲Sometimes brevity is the heart of wit or whatever the line is.
reply▲Scam Altman already got community noted btw
reply▲popalchemist3 hours ago
[-] Why would you trust anything out of Sam's mouth? He's a sociopath. Is that lost on you?
reply▲tempaccount4207 hours ago
[-] Didn't the safety-conscious employees already leave when OpenAI fired Sam Altman and then re-hired him?
In my mind the only people left are those who are there for the stocks.
AbstractH247 hours ago
[-] In all seriousness, what’s the average tenure at OpenAI and how much of the company in March 2026 was even around for that?
reply▲It's comforting to know that some of the brightest minds of our generation are going to work at OpenAI, then quitting a few months later horrified, only to post a short mysterious tweet warning everyone of the dangers ahead. So much for alignment and serving humanity.
reply▲And they will continue to work for Google / Meta et al to use novel AI techniques to sell us more and better ads, only to quit a few years later to do more soul searching where everything went wrong /s
reply▲> Surely if OpenAI had insisted upon the same things that Anthropic had, the government would not have signed this agreement.
But they did.
"Two of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems. The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement."
The difference is that Anthropic wanted to reserve the right to judge when the red lines are crossed, while OpenAI will defer to the DoD and its policies for that. In both cases, the two parties can claim to agree on the principles, but when push comes to shove, who decides on whether the principles are violated differs.
reply▲Seems Anthropic did not understand the questions they were asked. From the WaPo:
>A defense official said the Pentagon’s technology chief whittled the debate down to a life-and-death nuclear scenario at a meeting last month: If an intercontinental ballistic missile was launched at the United States, could the military use Anthropic’s Claude AI system to help shoot it down?
>It’s the kind of situation where technological might and speed could be critical to detection and counterstrike, with the time to make a decision measured in minutes and seconds. Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei’s answer rankled the Pentagon, according to the official, who characterized the CEO’s reply as: You could call us and we’d work it out.
>An Anthropic spokesperson denied Amodei gave that response, calling the account “patently false,” and saying the company has agreed to allow Claude to be used for missile defense. But officials have cited this and another incident involving Claude’s use in the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro as flashpoints in a spiraling standoff between the company and the Pentagon in recent days. The meeting was previously reported by Semafor.
I have a hunch that Anthropic interpreted this question to be on the dimension of authority, when the Pentagon was very likely asking about capability, and they then followed up to clarify that for missile defense they would, I guess, allow an exception. I get the (at times overwhelming) skepticism that people have about these tools and this administration but this is not a reasonable position to hold, even if Anthropic held it accidentally because they initially misunderstood what they were being asked.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260227182412/https://www.washi...
"It’s the kind of situation where technological might and speed could be critical to detection and counterstrike"
Missile detection and decision to make a (nuclear) counterstrike are 2 different things to me but apparently the department of war wants both, so it seems not "just" about missile detection.
Are you serious? This is the kind of thing you'd ask a clarifying question on and get information back immediately. Further, the huge overreaction from Hegseth shows this is a fundamental disagreement.
reply▲SpicyLemonZest4 hours ago
[-] The flip side of "Hegseth is an unqualified drunk", a position which I've always held and still maintain, is that he very well might crash out over nothing instead of asking clarifying questions or suggesting obvious compromises. This is the same guy who recalled the entire general staff to yell at them about the warrior mindset. Not an excuse for any of this, but I do think the precise nature of the badness matters.
reply▲pseudalopex5 hours ago
[-] > The difference is that Anthropic wanted to reserve the right to judge when the red lines are crossed, while OpenAI will defer to the DoD and its policies for that.
You learned this where?
pseudalopex5 hours ago
[-] reply▲It was pretty clear from Anthropic’s and Hegseth’s statements that they didn’t disagree on the two exclusions, but on who would be the arbiter on those. And Sam’s wording all but confirms that OpenAI’s agreement defers to DoD policies and laws (which a defense contract cannot prescribe), and effectively only pays lip service to the two exclusions.
reply▲nandomrumber5 hours ago
[-] From the referenced tweet;
who decides these weighty questions? Approach (1), accepted by OAI, references laws and thus appropriately vests those questions in our democratic system. Approach (2) unacceptably vests those questions in a single unaccountable CEO who would usurp sovereign control of our most sensitive systems.
Amodei is the type of person who thinks he can tell the US government what they can and can’t do.
And the US government should have precisely none of that, regardless of whether they’re red or blue.
And that’s where the authoritarian in you is shining through.
You see, Obama droned more combatants than anyone else before or after him but always followed a legal paper trail and following the book (except perhaps in some cases, search for Anwar al-Awlaki).
One can argue whether the rules and laws (secret courts, proceedings, asymmetries in court processes that severely compress civil liberties… to the point they might violate other constitutional rights) are legitimate, but he operated within the limits of the law.
You folks just blurt “me ne frego” like a random Mussolini and think you’re being patriotic.
SMH
> Amodei is the type of person who thinks he can tell the US government what they can and can’t do.
> And the US government should have precisely none of that, regardless of whether they’re red or blue.
This is a pretty hot take. "You can't break the law and kill people or do mass surveillance with our technology." fuck that, the government should break whatever laws and kill whoever they please
I hope you A: aren't a U.S. citizen, and B: don't vote.
If I'm selling widgets to the government and come to find out they are using those widgets unconstitutionally and to violate my neighbors rights you can be damn sure I'm going to stop selling the gov my widgets. Amodei said that Anthropic was willing to step away if they and the government couldn't come to terms, and instead of the government acting like adults and letting them they decided to double down on being the dumbest people in the room and act like toddlers and throw a massive fit about the whole thing.
pseudalopex5 hours ago
[-] > It was pretty clear from Anthropic’s and Hegseth’s statements that they didn’t disagree on the two exclusions, but on who would be the arbiter on those.
No. Altman said human responsibility. Anthropic said human in the loop.
> And Sam’s wording all but confirms that OpenAI’s agreement defers to DoD policies and laws (which a defense contract cannot prescribe), and effectively only pays lip service to the two exclusions.
All but confirmed was not confirmed.
I don’t understand your first comment. At that point, Altman’s tweet didn’t exist yet, and is immaterial to the reading of Anthropic’s and Hegseth’s statements.
To your second comment, it was clear enough to me to be the most plausible reading of the situation by far.
We state what we think the situation is all the time, without explicitly writing “I think the situation is…”.
outside12345 hours ago
[-] This. Sam is going to pretend they aren’t going to use it for that because his company is collapsing in losses. He will never audit.
Probably also got assurances about a bailout when OpenAI collapses.
I'm sure it's a matter of interpretation. Anthropic thinks the DoW's demands will lead to mass surveillance and auto-kill bots. The DoW probably disagrees with that interpretation, and all OpenAI needs to do is agree with the DoW.
My bet is that what the DoW wants is pretty clearly tied to mass surveillance and kill-bots. Altman is a snake.
> The DoW probably disagrees with that interpretation
Or perhaps, maybe, just a little maybe, DoW is getting absolutely excited about mass surveillance and kill-bots?
Why do you choose to call it the "DoW"? Its official name is the Department of Defense, it was titled that way by Congress and only Congress can change it. What is your motivation in using a term that the current administration has started to use? Do you also use the Gulf of America when referrring to the body of water that defines the southern edge of the USA?
reply▲Don't you think it is more to-the-point to call it what it is and what the people running it with, i'll bet everything i have, absolute immunity, are doing and intend to do with it?
It's like the one honest thing they've done
It's the term used by Sam Altman in the announcement. Maybe aim your anger there, to someone knowingly helping them in their attempt to turn the department into one of aggression.
reply▲The only more fitting name currently would be Department of Peace
reply▲charcircuit2 hours ago
[-] The president changed it back to its original name with an executive order. The administration did not just start spontaneously using it.
reply▲Exactly this! Just like the Gulf of Mexico is still called the Gulf of Mexico, if we just ignore his ramblings and continue calling the department of defense, we undermine his whole point. If we fall for all their crap and just accept it, then we loose in the end. Any resistance to a Fascist government is good resistance. Anything that makes their life's a little shittier is good. Better that they go around having tantrums about how they renamed it but no one is paying attention.
reply▲If someone is calling themselves a warmonger, they should be called a warmonger.
reply▲Not that this will matter on any individual level, but I canceled my ChatGPT subscription after this.
I didn't have much of an opinion of Altman before but now I think he's a grifting douche.
Anthropic has safeguards baked in the model, this is the only way to make sur it's harder for the DOJ to misuse it. A pinky swear from the DoD means nothing
reply▲propagandist6 hours ago
[-] Human responsibility is not the same as human decision making.
And they are crossing the picket line, which honestly I was sure they would do, though I did expect it to take a bit longer.
This is too transparent even for sama.
>Human responsibility is not the same as human decision making.
this is going to end up being interpreted as "well, the president signed off on the operation. see - there's a human in the loop!" - is it?
propagandist5 hours ago
[-] That's precisely how I read it. They're weasel words delivered by the master weasel himself.
reply▲Good ole Sammy has never lied
reply▲If your starting position is already that Sam Altman lies about everything that doesn't fit your preconceived positions, that doesn't seem like a very useful meaningful position to update.
reply▲The company started with a lie, it's in the name.
reply▲Unrelated, but want to buy a bridge?
You could recoup your investment in a year by collecting toll. Expedited financing available on good credit!
Please don’t do this here.
reply▲I think it is like a loyalty test to an authority above the law (executive immunity) in order to do business. “If we tell you to do so, you may do something you thought was right or wrong.” It is like an induction into a faction and the way the decisions could be made. Doesn’t necessarily mean anything about “in practice in the future”, just that the cybernetic override is there tacitly. If the authority thinks they can get away with something, they will provide protection for consequences too. Some people more equal than others when it comes to justice for all, etc. There are probably alternative styles for group decision making…
reply▲vander_elst46 minutes ago
[-] > I don't see how OpenAI employees who have signed the We Will Not Be Divided letter can continue their employment [...]
Sometimes money is more attractive than morality. So I guess money is the answer here.
This is not a turning point. This is the destination. Were you onboard the wrong train?
reply▲weatherlite4 hours ago
[-] > I don't see how OpenAI employees who have signed the We Will Not Be Divided letter can continue their employment there in light of this
Well some may voluntarily leave, some will be actively poached by Anthropic perhaps and some I suppose will stay in their jobs because leaving isn't an easy decision to make.
> some I suppose will stay in their jobs because leaving isn't an easy decision to make.
Anyone who chooses to stay shouldn’t have signed the letter. What’s the point of doing it if you’re not going to follow through? If you signed the letter and don’t leave after the demands aren’t met, you’re a liar and a coward and are actively harming every signatory of every future letter.
ivan_gammel3 hours ago
[-] Another plausible explanation that is familiar to a lot of people in other countries is banal corruption. Kick out one competitor on bogus allegations, then on the next day invite another one… what else that could be?
reply▲Yes, what is implied in this episode is that all big companies that do AI development or provide computing for Ai are now signing for these very shady uses of their technologies.
reply▲>Surely if OpenAI had insisted upon the same things that Anthropic had, the government would not have signed this agreement.
Have we been watching the same Trump admin for the last year? That sound exactly like something the government would do: pointlessly throw a fit and end up signing a worse deal after blowing up all political capital.
unethical_ban5 hours ago
[-] While that thought crossed my mind, someone in a sub thread of parent comment made a point: OpenAI made a statement about how "We insisted this be not be used in those ways and DoD totally says they won't". Which sounds to me like they ceded any hard terms oand conditions and are letting the DoD use it in "any lawful means" which is what Anthropic didn't stand for.
reply▲"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
reply▲For all I know Sam Altman orchestrated this via well timed donations and whatever the hell contacts he has in government, Trump specifically seems to have taken the man
So using Anthropic’s own words to cover a power play or pulling relationships to see if they could get anthropic to balk at it.
>
The only plausible explanation is that there is an understanding that OpenAI will not, in practice, enforce the red lines.Do you mean the same OpenAI that has a retired U.S. Army General & former director of the NSA (Gen. Nakasone) serving on its board of directors?
the_real_cher1 hour ago
[-] Have you seen the size of OpenAi employees comp?
Woolad theyll create the autonomous military robots themselves for that check.
outside12345 hours ago
[-] All of us can act too. Stop using the OpenAI models. Stop using the app. Design in other models no matter what. Screw these guys.
reply▲Do you expect that to work?
reply▲Its about network effect - The biggest issue is that ChatGPT is a household name like Google at this point. Everyone and their grandma knows it or are learning about it, while Claude is very well known in the tech circles. Getting tech people to switch is relativity easy (ignoring Enterprise contracts), but getting everyone else to switch is going to be very slow.
Honestly, the best thing to happen is that someone comes up with a new UI (think claw...like) that everyone starts using instead. A very cute, well integrated system that just works for everyone, has free tier, and has something that the others dont have.
It's a commoditized market so it doesn't hurt to try.
reply▲No, I expect you to die, Mr. Bond.
reply▲vineyardmike7 hours ago
[-] Nah. It's
possible that the agreement still supports the required terms.
There is more to this story behind the scenes. The government wanted to show power and control over our companies and industries. They didn’t need those terms for any specific utility, they wanted to fight “woke” business that stood up to them.
Supposedly OpenAI had the same terms as Anthropic (according to SamA). Maybe they offered it cheaper and that’s why they agreed. Maybe it’s all the lobbying money from OpenAI that let the government look the other way. Maybe it’s all the PR announcements SamA and Trump do together.
>Supposedly OpenAI had the same terms
"we put them into our agreement." is strange framing is Altman's tweet. Makes me think the agreement does mention the principles, but doesn't state them as binding rules DoD must follow.
None of those explanations are compatible with the pledge of solidarity in the We Will Not Be Divided letter.
reply▲harmonic183747 hours ago
[-] I prescribe literally zero truth value to what Sam says. He will say whatever he needs to get ahead. It is honestly irritating to me that you and many others here seem to implicitly assume his messages are correlated with truth, doing his social engineering work for him, as if his word should adjust your priors even slightly.
I don't necessarily think he's lying, but there's so much obvious incentive for him to lie here (if only because his employees can save face).
I'm not sure if I'd go down to zero, but he did get fired from OpenAI for lying.
reply▲harmonic183745 hours ago
[-] And fired from YC for lying. And lied to investors about how many Loopt employees he had. And lied about having 100x the actual number of users when he sold it. And lied to employees about the Microsoft deal. And lied to his safety team.
reply▲pseudalopex5 hours ago
[-] > Supposedly OpenAI had the same terms as Anthropic (according to SamA).
He said human responsibility. Anthropic said human in the loop.
And Anthropic refused to say any lawful purpose would be allowed reportedly.
It's this simple: Trump is a criminal. Larry Ellison is his pal. Sam Altman has a huge deal for cloud services from Oracle. Trump is using the DoD budget to backstop Ellison's business.
reply▲This is pretty much on the right take on it, although it's much more than that. It's very clear at this point, especially the first conclusion, but people insist in looking to the other side.
reply▲drivebyhooting7 hours ago
[-] Interesting thesis.
But regardless of the moral implications, will this improve America’s position on the global stage or further undermine it?
Only if you think that crime will somehow improve America. My opinion is that this is leading to its collapse, no matter how "powerful" they look.
reply▲MaxfordAndSons7 hours ago
[-] Attempting to kneecap the breakout front runner of the major American AI companies to ensure the shittier, politically compliant one wins in the short term? Gee I wonder.
reply▲drivebyhooting7 hours ago
[-] Anthropic is great but not the undisputed front runner.
I can also interpret this as Sam and the administration supporting accelerationism while Dario is more measured and wishes to slow things down.
SpicyLemonZest7 hours ago
[-] For better or worse, outright nationalization of military related companies is common on a global scale. I plan to do my best to ensure this is a domestic catastrophe, and I hope we'll succeed, but I don't expect other countries to care much about varying levels of regime alignment between two billionaire American defense contractors.
reply▲SpicyLemonZest7 hours ago
[-] Maybe Sam Altman said nicer things about Donald Trump. Maybe he promised that he would not revoke their API keys when Hegseth directs the military to seize ballots. Maybe he's jockeying for position to take over the government when AGI hits.
Ultimately, I don't know how much the specific reasons matter. Pete Hegseth must be removed from office, OpenAI must be destroyed for their betrayal of the US public, that's all there is to it.
1) Another OpenAI cofounder (Brockman) gave Trump’s superPAC the largest ever individual donation of $25m.
2) Trump’s son in law (Kushner) has most of his net worth wrapped up in OpenAI.
don't forget that Sama is a Thiel protege
reply▲> Trump’s son in law (Kushner) has most of his net worth wrapped up in OpenAI.
If true (too lazy to check but I honestly take your word for it), this should probably be bigger news. Not that the outright corruption when it comes to the highest position in the US Government constitutes news anymore, but because it puts the Government’s fight against Anthropic (and supposedly other potential OpenAI competitors) in a new light.
blueblisters6 hours ago
[-] My knee-jerk reaction to this was looks like an opportunistic maneuver that Sam is known for and I'm considering canceling my subscriptions and business with OpenAI
But what's the most charitable / objective interpretation of this?
For example -
https://x.com/UnderSecretaryF/status/2027594072811098230
Does it suggest that determination of "lawful use" and Dario's concerns falls upon the government, not the AI provider?
Other folks have claimed that Anthropic planned to burn the contentious redlines into Claude's constitution.
Update: I have cancelled my subscriptions until OpenAI clarifies the situation. From an alignment perspective Anthropic's stand seems like the correct long-term approach. And at least some AI researchers appear to agree.
I think Altman probably rationalised it to himself by thinking that if he doesn’t do it, Musk/xAI will, and they give zero fucks about safety. So maybe he told himself that it’s better if OpenAI does it.
reply▲Griffinsauce3 hours ago
[-] Is there a name for this phenomenon? I've taken to calling it "the nihilist's excuse"
reply▲ivanjermakov2 hours ago
[-] Similar to false dichotomy. "If we won't do it, <other evil guy> will".
reply▲Knowing Sam, that's exactly what happened -- and the echo chamber inside OpenAI wouldnt dare to disagree
reply▲Thinking that Scam Altman cares about anyone besides himself is crazy. The guy raped his own sister.
reply▲It doesn’t have to be genuine concern, it may just be his internal narrative.
He allegedly raped his own sister. No charges have been brought against him.
Unless you're using an enterprise plan or pay per token, you're not hurting their business at all by cancelling. The consumer plans are heavily subsidised.
reply▲Cancelling is the only language these companies understand.
Even Disney couldn't ignore the mass cancellations after dropping Kimmel and Disney+ bearly turns over a profit.
blueblisters1 hour ago
[-] I think their consumer plans are gross margin positive but OpenAI has ~50M paying subscribers driving >$10B in revenue.
Realistically, you need at least ~1M subscribers to cancel to make this painful.
But I suspect this will get drowned out in the face of other news.
Does it matter? These AI companies need to be able to prove that users are willing to pay at all, even if they're not paying a profitable amount of money. If investors see that they're dumping money into something that's not selling, why continue to do so?
reply▲It will hurt in future funding rounds if their subscriber metric is stalling or going backwards, regardless of how many of those subscriptions are profitable.
reply▲As people have repeatedly mentioned, if the War Department was unhappy with Anthropic's terms, they could have refused to sign the contract. But they didn't: they were fine with it for over a year. And if they changed their mind, they could've ended the contract and both sides could've walked away. Anthropic said that would've been fine. But that's not what happened either: they threatened Anthropic with both SCR designation and a DPA takeover if Anthropic didn't agree to unilateral renegotiation of terms that the War Department
had already agreed were fine.
It's absurd, and doubly so if OAI's deal includes the same or even similar redlines to what Anthropic had.
spongebobstoes4 hours ago
[-] it seems like oai deal does include the same red lines, plus some more, and the ability for oai to deploy safety systems to limit the use cases of the model via technical means
this seems strictly better than what anthropic had. anthropic has ruined their relationship with the US govt, giving oai a good negotiating hand
the oai folks are good at making deals, just look at all the complex funding arrangements they have
quantumwannabe7 hours ago
[-] More details on the difference between the OpenAI and Anthropic contracts from one of the Under Secretaries of State:
>The axios article doesn’t have much detail and this is DoW’s decision, not mine. But if the contract defines the guardrails with reference to legal constraints (e.g. mass surveillance in contravention of specific authorities) rather than based on the purely subjective conditions included in Anthropic’s TOS, then yes. This, btw, was a compromise offered to—and rejected by—Anthropic.
https://x.com/UnderSecretaryF/status/2027566426970530135
> For the avoidance of doubt, the OpenAI - @DeptofWar contract flows from the touchstone of “all lawful use” that DoW has rightfully insisted upon & xAI agreed to. But as Sam explained, it references certain existing legal authorities and includes certain mutually agreed upon safety mechanisms. This, again, is a compromise that Anthropic was offered, and rejected.
> Even if the substantive issues are the same there is a huge difference between (1) memorializing specific safety concerns by reference to particular legal and policy authorities, which are products of our constitutional and political system, and (2) insisting upon a set of prudential constraints subject to the interpretation of a private company and CEO. As we have been saying, the question is fundamental—who decides these weighty questions? Approach (1), accepted by OAI, references laws and thus appropriately vests those questions in our democratic system. Approach (2) unacceptably vests those questions in a single unaccountable CEO who would usurp sovereign control of our most sensitive systems.
> It is a great day for both America’s national security and AI leadership that two of our leading labs, OAI and xAI have reached the patriotic and correct answer here
https://x.com/UnderSecretaryF/status/2027594072811098230
It is a great day for both America’s national security and AI leadership that two of our leading labs, OAI and xAI have reached the patriotic and correct answer here
He's an administration official openly cheerleading his team. This should be characterized as the insider perspective/spin, not a neutral analysis of the relevant facts.
MostlyStable4 hours ago
[-] Even this most-charitable-possible (to DoW) explanation does not even come close to justifying the supply chain risk designation. It is absolutely enough (and honestly more than enough) for a contract cancellation and a switch to a competitor. DoW could have done that for any reason at all, or no reason at all. If they had issues with Anthropics terms, they 100%
should have done that.
Nothing in the quoted text comes anywhere close to the realm of justifying the retaliatory actions.
I find myself totally agreeing with the quoted text and also this sentiment. It just makes no sense to nuke Anthropic as a negotiation tactic if your interest is in preserving the republic long term.
reply▲advisedwang5 hours ago
[-] A government promise that they'll only do lawful things is not reassuring at all:
1. We've seen government lawyers write memos explaining why such-and-such obviously illegal act is legal (see: torture memo). Until challenged, this is basically law.
2. We've seen government change the law to make whatever they want legal (see: patriot act)
3. We've seen courts just interpret laws to make things legal
A contractor doesn't realistically have the power to push back against any of these avenues if they agree to allow anything legal.
(At the risk of triggering Godwin's Law, remember that for the most part the Holocaust was entirely legal - the Nazi's established the necessary authorization. Just to illustrate that when it comes to certain government crimes, the law alone is an insufficient shield.)
The DoW wants to only be beholden to the laws, and not to Anthropics TOS.
So the question is: do you trust the government to effectively govern its own use of AI? or do you trust Anthropic's enforcement of its TOS?
They DoW doesn't care about laws, that's the whole point. Anthropic did not believe the most law breaking administration in history when their drunkard incompetent leader said "lol trust us bro"
reply▲SpicyLemonZest6 hours ago
[-] You're quoting social media posts from a regime official who says he didn't participate in these negotiations and doesn't work for the relevant department.
If his characterization of the agreement is correct, which I will not believe and you should not believe until a trustworthy news outlet publishes the text, I suppose this would convince me that Hegseth does not literally plan to build a Terminator for democracy-ending purposes. There's a lot of inexcusable stuff here regardless, but perhaps merely boycotting OpenAI and the US military would be a sufficient response if this all checks out.
> which I will not believe and you should not believe
It seems like you chose to immediately disbelieve it.
> until a trustworthy news outlet publishes the text
If you've found one of these, let me know. I'm still looking...
SpicyLemonZest5 hours ago
[-] I did choose to immediately disbelieve it. If a Trump regime official tells me something, and they could plausibly benefit from lying to me about it, I assume until proven otherwise that they're lying. They've earned this reputation through a large number of consequential and later disproven lies; my apologies to Mr. Lewin if he personally is an honest man, although I might encourage him to think about whether the good he's doing in his role is so important that it outweighs the lies he's providing cover for and the gradual erosion of his integrity.
> If you've found one of these, let me know. I'm still looking...
I do not assume, and I would recommend that you do not assume, that there is such a thing as a text of the contract. It's much easier to lie about contents of documents that don't actually exist yet. Then you can craft the text in response to public feedback, writing it down in early March and telling people that it's totally a copy of what was agreed to on February 27.
As a corollary, you should be skeptical of any purported text that is not widely published soon. If there is indeed such a contract, and it says what Altman claims, he will desperately want to ensure that his employees have read a "leak" of the text by Monday morning.
It's only $200 from me for the remainder of the year but you're not getting it anymore OpenAI. Voting with my wallet tonight. Really sad, I've followed OpenAI for years, way before ChatGPT. It's just too hard to true up my values with how they've behaved recently. This sucks. Goodnight everyone.
reply▲I cancelled and deleted my account and I got an email immediately with a pro-rata refund. You can get that money back.
reply▲reply▲Look more carefully at what sam altman satd : he did not say he won't remove technical safeguards against surveilance and autonomous killing, instead he said "We also will build technical safeguards to ensure our models behave as they should"
reply▲You're expecting logic from the Trump administration and that's not really how they do things. Maybe it was never about the redlines? Maybe they decided Anthropic was their enemy, and that was their excuse.
reply▲yoyohello137 hours ago
[-] Anthropic was too public about being “good”. And if there is one thing the Trump admin cannot abide it’s morality.
reply▲westjerry354 hours ago
[-] israel controls us govt, israel has a deal with openai, sam's mentor is thiel, who was close with epstein+ehud barak and the whole israeli pedophilia ring
reply▲Do I understand this correctly:
An algorithm, an ML model trained to predict next tokens to write meaningful text, is going to KILL actual humans by itself.
So killing people is legal,
Killing people by a random process is legal,
A randomized algorithm deciding on who to kill is legal,
And some of you think you are legally protected because they used the word “domestic”?
techpression1 hour ago
[-] Domestic means nothing, it’s like the company Daniel Ek invested in saying they won’t sell weapons to ”Democracies”, in the context of warfare and control these words are meaningless.
They will deploy this on a domestic scale and claim to use it to locate non-domestic threats. I can’t believe anyone is falling for this.
Sorry, despite the public statements of some sort of solidarity with Anthropic by sama this looks like a plot to take over from losing position.
Sadly it would be very difficult for Anthropic to relocate to another country with their IP, models, and infrastructure.
(Guess I need to build everything I intended this year in a weekend.)
Just uninstalled the app and canceled subscription. OpenAI can't justify their insane valuation without an user base. Especially when there are capable models elsewhere.
reply▲Jcampuzano27 hours ago
[-] I would put bets on the issue probably being that it was pointed out that Anthropic's models were used to assist the raid in Venezuela, Anthropic then aggressively doubled down on their rules/principles and the DOD didn't like being called out on that so they lashed out, hard.
If theres anything this admin doesn't like, its being postured against or called out by literally anyone, especially in public.
I don't even think Anthropic balked at being used to assist, as long as a human has the final say.
reply▲This explains the "Free Codex" offer i just got in my email
reply▲So they agreed to the same red lines that had earlier led to the fallout with Anthropic? Kind of strange.
reply▲I bet Sam secretly pledged to DoD that the red lines were only temporary, for optics and to calm employees at the all hands meeting.
A few months down the line, OpenAI will quietly decide that their next model is safe enough for autonomous weapons, and remove their safeguard layer. The mass surveillance enablement might be an indirect deal through Palantir.
Very possible, double speaking is Sam Altman's specialty.
reply▲yoyohello137 hours ago
[-] Sam saw Anthropic was getting too competitive. So he called his buddies in the gov to knock them down a peg.
reply▲That's very possible! In the last few days Anthropic was getting a lot of attention, and OpenAI was looking weaker in comparison. It seems like a politically coordinated job to remove competition.
reply▲For sure, he's been pissed that OpenAI no longer has the Mandate of Heaven and Claude is all anyone has been talking about since December. (And it's not just an ego thing: because OAI isn't profitable yet, they need the hype to keep going to raise money on favorable terms, so loss of buzz is an existential threat). I absolutely believe that he started making calls to try and get buddies in the White House to take Anthropic down.
reply▲harmonic183747 hours ago
[-] I don't trust Sam to be telling the truth. It would be to his benefit to lie about this and make Anthropic look bad, so he of course would, even if it's not actually the case.
reply▲Hell, I would have thought it likely that anthropic was doing the same thing. Of course that was proven wrong, but for OAI I wouldn't even be guessing. This has always been what sama does.
reply▲Well you know how it goes... you need to read between the lines. I can agree with you on your "principles", but not enforce them myself.
reply▲It makes sense if you imagine the real motivation is “make sure the AI contracts go to my good friend Sam”, and all the red line stuff is just a way to pick a fight with Anthropic.
reply▲No, the difference is that the government agrees to no "unlawful" use as determined by the government.
Anthropic said that mass surveillance was per se prohibited even if the government self-certified that it was lawful.
throwaway2026117 minutes ago
[-] It is quite shocking that almost all AI companies are saying "we are not ok with domestic surveillance" but they'll happily sign up to surveilling the rest of the world population.
So by that measure the US govt can go get some Israeli software to surveill their domestic populace!
Homo sapiens deserve to become extinct.
Let me reiterate some points for people here:
Income and revenue sources always, inevitably, and without fail, determine behavior.
All OpenAI employees during the board revolt that vouched for sama's return are personally responsible.
reply▲OpenAI employees revolted for their millions worth of stock, not for principle.
Anyone thinking they have any virtue is naive.
>human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems
So there’s the difference, and an erasure of a red line. OpenAI is good with autonomous weapon systems. Requiring human responsibility isn’t saying much. Theres already military courts, rules of engagement, and international rules of war.
Sam Altman being a complete bell end? Who'd have thought it.
I hope everyone goes and works for Anthropic and OpenAI collapses.
Markets going to be interesting on Monday. This plus a war. Urgh.
We need some kind of group like "tech people with morals". I'm done with these people and their corruption and garbage.
reply▲It's why I think "software engineer" is a misnomer. We don't have a license, we don't have an ethics code, we don't sign off on stuff. In other disciplines, an engineer could topple a project they feel is unsafe or against code, and be backed by their union if replaced. A software engineer just says yes if their stocks aren't vested, and will be replaced if not.
reply▲Not a group per se but I maintain an index of 'good' people in tech here, and their contraries -
https://goodindex.orgSam has -6/100? How does that work? If you can go into the negatives, how low can you get?
reply▲Yeah some new banner to organise around- the hard part is easily communicating you're an ethical technologist and finding others.
reply▲Also, it's probably tricky to find a Schelling point that a broad range of people can agree to.
* no military use
* no lethal use
* no use in support of law enforcement
* no use in support of immigration enforcement
* no use in mass surveillance
* no use in domestic mass surveillance (but mass surveillance of foreigners is OK)
* no use in domestic surveillance
* no use in surveillance
* require independent audits
* require court oversight
* require company to monitor use
* require company to monitor use and divulge it to employees
* some other form of human rights monitoring or auditing
* some other form of restriction on theaters/conflicts/targets
* company will permit some of these uses (not purport to forbid them by license, contract, or ToS) but not customize software to facilitate them
* company can unilaterally block inappropriate uses
* company can publicly disclose uses it thinks are inappropriate
* some other form of remedy
* government literally has to explain why some uses are necessary or appropriate to reassure people developing capabilities, and they have some kind of ongoing bargaining power to push back
It feels normal to me that a lot of people would want some of those things, but kind of unlikely that they would readily agree on exactly which ones.
I even think there's a different intuition about the baseline because one version is "nobody works on weapons except for people who specifically make a decision to work for an arms company because they have decided that's OK according to their moral views" (working on weapons is an abnormal, deliberate decision) and another version is "every company might sell every technology as part of a weapons system or military application, and a few people then object because they've decided that's not OK according to their moral views" (refusing to work on weapons is an abnormal, deliberate decision). I imagine a fair number of people in computing fields effectively thought that the norm or default for their industry was the latter, because of the perception that there are "special" military contractors where people get security clearances and navigate military procurement processes, and most companies are not like that, so you were not working on any form of weapon unless you intentionally chose to do so. But, having just been to the Computer History Museum earlier this week, I also see that a lot of Silicon Valley companies have actually been making weapons systems for as long as there has been a Silicon Valley.
There is definitely a muddle on so many levels about signaling and agreeing on ethics in technology.
But as innovation slows globally, it is implementation, ethics, and ideology that will once again be the dominant metrics of progress, so there's a new window emerging to push for this social/moral change in technology once again.
So it's still critically important that we actively work towards finding a meaningful, socially contagious differentiator other than "ethical technologist" even if it's difficult- look at what OpenAI gets away with under that flimsy banner.
"Starting today I will be asking prominent members of the tech community to sign their name onto this. A code of conduct, authored by me, that pledges them to a universal ethos, which I created, that I call tech ethics or Tethics for short."
reply▲This, honestly. Seeing all those billionaires on inauguration day lined up to kiss the ring was utterly pathetic. Like what is the fucking point of having billions of dollars if you're just going to be someone else's bitch. And for what? A couple more billion dollars. Oof
reply▲Difference from Anthropic's deal is:
- OpenAI is ok with use of their AI for autonomous weapons, as long as there is "human responsibility"
- Anthropic is not ok with use of their AI for autonomous weapons
I had kept my Plus subscription just because I was lazy, and it was inexpensive and convenient… but this turn definitely helped me get off the fence. I am exporting and deleting my data now, and the cancellation is already done.
reply▲Cancel your subscription. It's the least you can do.
reply▲vander_elst39 minutes ago
[-] Subscribers should be aware what they are supporting. I think that keeping an OpenAI account can be considered an active support of this decision, at least for private people who can easily change providers.
reply▲So this week we've learned that even the government asseses Anthropic has the better model, and that OpenAI leadership has no concern for safety whatsoever.
reply▲I'm unsure how to feel about this whole dust-up. It doesn't seem like much has changed in substance. Maybe OpenAI outmaneuvered Anthropic behind the scenes. Possibly Anthropic was seen as not behaving deferentially enough towards the government. But this administration has proven comically corrupt, so it wouldn't surprise me if money was involved. Will be interested to see what journalists turn up.
reply▲SpaceL10n40 minutes ago
[-] Does deploying these models in "the classified network" also mean this technology is going to be used to help kill people?
reply▲Is there anyone who really understands what’s different about the OpenAI agreement? Or maybe these are just Sam Altman’s public statements that don’t actually reflect the real terms of the deal. I honestly can’t figure it out.
reply▲jordanscales8 hours ago
[-] reply▲BoiledCabbage8 hours ago
[-] So they agreed to the exact same clauses that Anthropic put forward but with OpenAI instead?
So it wasn't about those principles making them a supply chain risk? They're just trying to punish Anthropic for being the first ones to stand firm on those principles?
yoyohello137 hours ago
[-] I’m sure a big donor just used the US gov as a bludgeon to destroy their competition
reply▲eclipticplane7 hours ago
[-] Is the big donor among us?
reply▲yoyohello137 hours ago
[-] Now that OpenAI is going to be used for mass domestic surveillance you can assume Sam Altman is always in the room.
reply▲As I understand it, Sam's cofounder at OpenAI donated $25 million to the Trump 2024 campaign.
As Trump himself likes to say, "Promises made, promises kept."
Anthropic would probably not renegotiate in a year about the principles, while Sam Altman is known to be morally flexible so OpenAI will almost surely allow the military to do what they want in the future. Sam Altman might even have said behind closed doors that these restrictions will be removed once the drama has died down.
reply▲AbstractH247 hours ago
[-] It’s amazing how quickly the players keep shifting here.
Yesterday and the day before sentiment seemed to be focused on “Anthropic selling out”, then that shifted to “Anthropic holds true to its principles in a David vs Goliath” and “the industry will rally around one another for the greater good.” But suddenly we’re seeing a new narrative of “Evil OpenAI swoops in to make a deal with the devil.”
Reminds of that weekend where Sam Altman lost control of OpenAI.
deepfriedbits6 hours ago
[-] "There are decades where nothing happens and weeks where decades happen."
reply▲karmasimida7 hours ago
[-] Sam is a player and honestly the more interesting one in the whole thing.
Mad respect to Sam, now I believe OpenAI have better chance to win in the race
> Mad respect to Sam
And people wonder how we got here.
AbstractH247 hours ago
[-] He’s certainly solidified his place in the history of this era.
But I suspect the public sentiment will eventually turn against him. When society sets its pitchforks on big tech he’ll be the poster boy. A 21st century John D. Rockefeller.
Him, Musk, Bezos, and Zuck.
webdevver32 minutes ago
[-] the unwashed mindless masses, acting purely on impulse, emotion and social media agitation: Ah yes, the arbiters of justice, good taste, morality, etc.
the only thing pitchfork-armed peasants have ever accomplished were failed tax revolts.
sama running circles around these tech dorks. winning the software game is just a matter of not being a total sperg it seems.
webdevver30 minutes ago
[-] absolute truth nuke and the hysteria around it is yet more evidence that HN is a negative signal.
anything HN countersignals, go long on.
insane_dreamer7 hours ago
[-] Hitler won the race in the 1930s too. Totally crushed it.
reply▲AbstractH247 hours ago
[-] I considered that comparison, but in all seriousness, I’m not sure it’s apt.
Are he and his peers Hitler or they the naive oligarchs who think they can keep populist leaders and their constituencies under their thumb? Only to be out maneuvered by the people who the masses think have their back.
I know many folks who think their political leaders have the best interest at heart (rightly or wrongly). I know nobody who thinks tech leaders do. At best they want to be them.
iainctduncan7 hours ago
[-] Did anyone ever doubt sama would just follow the money?
weasels gonna weasel
operator_nil7 hours ago
[-] So does this mean that OpenAI will give whatever the DoD asks for and they will pinky swear that it won’t be used for mass surveillance and autonomous killing machines?
reply▲insane_dreamer7 hours ago
[-] yes
and we know we can trust openAI because they were founded on "open" and "safe" AI (up until they realized how much money there was to be made, at which point their only value changed to "make money")
Absolute disgrace of a person and organization.
reply▲Is the Pentagon signing a EULA confirming all their data will now be used, anonymised, for improving the service?
reply▲Obviously not? You know enterprise customers don't have the same EULA as consumers, right?
reply▲> OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shares Anthropic’s concerns when it comes to working with the Pentagon
The same day:
Pssst psst Samy Samy, come here we have money and data psst
> Tonight, we reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models in their classified network.
From an open non-profit to a war machine in such a short time is baffling.
reply▲>
In all of our interactions, the DoW displayed a deep respect for safetyRight. Pete "FAFO" Hegseth is a model of intelligence, moderation, and respect for due process. Nothing to see here.
If you're unhappy with this, an immediate way to signal it is with your wallet. In my case I've just uninstalled chatgpt from my phone, cancelled my subscription and will up my spend with anthropic.
reply▲Thanks for the reminder. Doing the same now.
The little respect I had left for Sam is now wiped. Makes me sick.
Growing up I always thought AI would be this beautiful tool, this thing that opens the gates to a new society where work becomes optional in a way. But I failed to think about human greed.
I remember following OpenAI way back when it was a non profit explaining how AI uncontrolled could be highly detrimental. Now Sam has not only taken that non profit and made it for-profit. It seems he’s making the most evil decisions he can for a buck.
Cancel your subscription, tell your friends to. And vote to heavily tax these companies and their leaders.
Perfect timing - Had already cancelled my Claude sub over their OAuth ban in external tools and was about to pick up a Codex sub as the next best alternative.
Ended up renewing my Claude sub today instead. Principled stances matter and I no longer trust OpenAI to be trustworthy custodians of my AI History.
Just canceled my subscription! I immediately received an email with the subject “We’d love your feedback on why you canceled your ChatGPT plus subscription” and a link to a survey.
I linked to https://notdivided.org/ as the reasoning why.
AbstractH246 hours ago
[-] I’d like to say I did that but I already canceled my subscription 4 months ago in favor of Claude and Gemini based purely on product quality.
Was shocking back then to think how far we’ve come.
Deleted all chats and deleted my account.
reply▲I tried doing that but I'm certain they didn't delete it, because I tried logging in after a week and it worked
reply▲Totally agree. Signed up for a claude code account and will not give OpenAI any money in the future. Let's see what Google does. I will definitely vote with my wallet.
reply▲Thanks for reminding me. Been meaning to cancel for months.
reply▲Yep I’m pulling the plug on my OIA account on Monday morning and switching to Anthropic.
reply▲outside12345 hours ago
[-] Exactly. Stop using OpenAI. Don’t design it into your software at work. Use Claude. Screw these guys.
reply▲I canceled my subscription, wiped my history, closed my account, deleted the app. Using Claude Max.
reply▲slopinthebag7 hours ago
[-] Personally I'm happy about this. OpenAI are being fair about letting the gov use their models to spy on everybody, doesn't seem right that Americans get a pass.
reply▲Do you honestly believe that cancelling a subscription makes a bit of difference to a company that is either committing accounting fraud on a monumental scale or shoveling venture capital money into a furnace? not to mention the whole collaborating with a fascist government thing.
taking real action is your choice, but stop pretending this kind of thing matters one iota
edit: to be clear, i'm not advocating for nihilism, but tricking yourself into thinking you made a difference to make yourself feel better isn't the play either
It absolutely matters, especially when done in unison like this.
Cancelling ChatGPT sends a signal that you don't agree with weaponizing AI. Switching to Claude says you support Anthropic's principled stance against it. If you have a strong opinion either way, today is the day to vote with your wallet.
Dismissing every small action as meaningless is just apathy and how nothing ever changes.
Anthropic isn't against weaponizing AI, it's just against two specific carve outs
for now. They happily accepted the Pentagon's money so long as it was only spying on other countries. And now that the leopard is eating their face they're claiming the moral high ground.
It's entirely possible for both Anthropic and OpenAI to be in the wrong here. This is a massive publicity win but it doesn't make them heroes in my book.
It sure does but it's hard to get a bigger wallet than public money in the US. I do think it's fundamental as an individual to take a moral stance, even if it's entirely pointless, for one owns psychological well-being but honestly here I believe the whole point is precisely to decouple from the need of consumers who are clearly NOT paying for AI. Relying on income from governments is a smart move.
So yes, do cancel if you were paying for OpenAI. Stop using it entirely even, but don't necessarily expect to slow down their encroachment, sadly.
sriram_malhar5 hours ago
[-] What has an impact is cancelling a subscription and then talking about it. The media will amplify it the pushback. The goal is to make the name OpenAI and ChatGPT toxic, that whatever you do will be converted into a technology that will surveil or bomb you.
reply▲At least I'm not getting my hands dirty.
reply▲Yes? Earnings matter to investors
reply▲Do they? What are those OpenAI earnings that you are talking about? That's a company that should have ceased existing some time ago if earnings were important
reply▲Investors want to see growth. If there’s no growth or even a loss in users the next round of funding will be more difficult to secure.
reply▲I think you have too much pessimism. It's not guaranteed to work, but as I mentioned in another thread, since around December, Claude (and Gemini to a lesser extent) has had all the buzz in tech circles, while Chat-GPT has seemed like the also-ran. And that matters: decision-makers in companies notice these things and momentum becomes self-reinforcing (you use Claude Code because everyone else uses Claude Code). If a large enough group of developers visibly defects from OpenAI because of this, it definitely could have consequences. It's not a sure thing, but it's far from hopeless.
I was not a Chat-GPT user even before this, but I'm bumping my Claude Code subscription to the next tier up. Fuck OpenAI.
> but stop pretending this kind of thing matters one iota
This is blatantly false and intellectually dishonest. Of course it matters. Your edit is also wrong; you are advocating for nihilism with statments like these.
idiotsecant6 hours ago
[-] It's the only thing that matters. These companies don't follow the rules of capitalism physics. They live or die on vibes alone and the tech community abandoning them en masse is bad for the vibes. Once they lose the vibes they are Wiley Coyote looking down at the canyon below.
reply▲Didn't the department of war announce that it would be working with xAI just this past December?
reply▲For the people that don't understand how they got a deal with the same redlines, it probably because OpenAI agreed to not question them. The safeguards are there, both parties agree now fuck off and let us use your model how we see fit.
Anthropic probably made the mistake of questioning the Military's activities related to Claude after the Venezuela mission and wanted reassurance that the model wouldn't be used for the redlines, and the military didn't like this and told them we aren't using your models unless you agree to not question us and then the back and forth started.
In the end, we will probably have both OpenAI and Anthropic providing AI to the military and that's a good thing. I don't think they will keep the supply chain risk on Anthropic for more than a week.
Anthropic vs OpenAI will probably be The Machine vs Samaritan
(Person Of Interest for those who haven't seen it, watched it a decade ago and it's actually quite surprising how on point it ended up being)
> I don't think they will keep the supply chain risk on Anthropic for more than a week.
Why? It is in the admin's interest to absolutely destroy Anthropic. Make them an example.
regardless of your opinion of ai in government, sam could not have picked a worse way for optics to swoop in and make a deal. it just looks incredibly bad.
reply▲cancelling my openai subscription, they're gonna miss my 20 USD
reply▲jstummbillig5 hours ago
[-] > Surely if OpenAI had insisted upon the same things that Anthropic had, the government would not have signed this agreement.
Under normal circumstances, that would seem really plausible. But given how far Trump continues to go just out of spite and to project power, it actually is the opposite.
I am fully prepared to believe that they got absolutely nothing else out of it (to date).
OpenAI was the biggest donor ($25 millions) to Trumps campaign. This is them getting their back scratched in return.
reply▲Funny that these are the same people that have been blasting the alarm on dangers of AI singularity. Now they cannot wait to put their tools in weapons.
reply▲Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic should all have each other's backs when it comes to hard lines like this. Sam can say whatever he wants, but signing this deal on the same day Trump and Hegseth went scorched earth on Anthropic — for standing up for the very values OpenAI claims to hold — is sleazy.
Screw Sam, and screw OpenAI. I've been a customer of theirs since the first month their API opened to developers. Today I cancelled my subscription and deleted my account.
I'd already signed up for Claude Max and had been slow to cancel my OpenAI subscriptions. This finally made the decision easy.
This is how OpenAI gets bailed out in an AI crash, too big to fail becomes too important to fail.
reply▲So this is indeed how OpenAI survives (a little bit longer ?) - government bailout.
reply▲Ah, is it the time when Skynet starts to manifest itself...
reply▲I know the reaction to this, if you're a rational observer, is "OpenAI have cut corners or made concessions that Anthropic did not, that's the only thing that makes sense."
However, if you live in the US and pay a passing attention to our idiotic politics, you know this is right out of the Trump playbook. It goes like this:
* Make a negotiation personal
* Emotionally lash out and kill the negotiation
* Complete a worse or similar deal, with a worse or similar party
* Celebrate your worse deal as a better deal
Importantly, you must waste enormous time and resources to secure nothing of substance.
That's why I actually believe that OpenAI will meet the same bar Anthropic did, at least for now. Will they continue to, in the same way Anthropic would have? Seems unlikely, but we'll see.
Another good question: If OpenAI knew Anthropic wasn't a competitor... was the price higher? Will the federal government also pay more for a worse product?
reply▲You'd have to think so. They're really the only serious player left - I doubt Google would want to be involved, and xAI is a significant step down.
reply▲Choosing to go along with calling it the "Department of War" tells you all you need to know.
reply▲Remember when openai was too afraid to release the full GPT-2 model (this one had only 1.5B params) because humanity apparently wasn't ready for it. Look where we are just a couple of years later. I really admired them back in the day for openai gym and PPO etc.
reply▲This seems full of loopholes.
> The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement.
(1) Well, did both sides sign the agreement and is it actually effective? Or is it still sitting on someone's desk until it can get stalled long enough?
(2) What does "agreement" even mean? Is it a legally enforceable contract, or just some sort of MoU or pinkie promise?
(3) If it's a legally enforceable contract, is it equally enforceable on all of their contracts, or just some? Do they not have existing contracts this would need to apply to?
(4) What does "reflects them in law and policy" even mean? Since when does DoW make laws, and in what sense do their laws reflect whatever the agreement was? Are these laws he can point to so everyone else can see? Can he at least copy-paste the exact sentences the government agreed to?
All that money and not a single ounce of integrity.
reply▲So now we are waiting for Anthropic to explain to us what Sam agreed to and what they rejected.
On the surface, it looks like both rejected 'domestic mass surveillance' and 'autonomous weapon systems', but there seem to be important differences in the fine print, since one company is being labeled a 'supply chain risk' while the other 'reached the patriotic and correct answer'.
One explanation would be that the DoW changed its demands, but I doubt that. Instead, I believe OpenAI found a loophole that allows those cases under certain conditions.
So there are two possibilities here:
1. There's no substantive change. Hegseth/Trump just wanted to punish Anthropic for standing up to them, even if it didn't get them anything else today -- establishing a chilling effect for the future has some value for them in this case, after all. And OpenAI was willing to help them do that, despite earlier claiming that they stood behind Anthropic's decisions.
2. There is a substantive change. Despite Altman's words, they have a tacit understanding that OpenAI won't really enforce those terms, or that they'll allow them to be modified some time in the future when attention has moved on elsewhere.
Either way, it makes Altman look slimy, and OpenAI has aligned with Trump against Anthropic in a place where Anthropic made a correct principled stand. It's been clear for a while that Anthropic has more ethics than OpenAI, but this is more naked than any previous example.
slopinthebag6 hours ago
[-] > OpenAI has aligned with Trump against Anthropic in a place where Anthropic made a correct principled stand.
Just to be clear, you believe that the correct, principled stand is that it's OK to use their models for killing people and civilian surveillance?
Both OAI and Anthropic have the same moral leg to stand on here, OAI is just not hypocritical about it.
If you believe that any country should have a military and intelligence apparatus, the job of that apparatus is to kill people and surveil foreigners. I do think the US government should have a military and intelligence apparatus. Therefore, any company that works with it, from suppliers of clothing and food to suppliers of compute and AI, are supporting an organization with that mission.
The US military _does not_ need to build autonomous weapon systems and _should not_ surveil US citizens broadly.
At this stage, everything OpenAi does is to try to keep investors investing.
They’re willing to let their brand go to trash for this government contract.
Pretty much every American is standing with Anthropic on this. No one left or right wants mass surveillance and terminators. In fact, no one in the world wants this, except the US military.
But Altman seems so desperate to keep the cash coming he’s ready to do anything.
I have just canceled all services and deleted my account with OpenAI. They can get money from the current US regime but I will not contribute to their violations of the constitution.
reply▲So it’s personal basically
reply▲Their models are crappy anyway, the "super intelligence" BS is nowhere to be seen. Just let them die or become a US government asset.
reply▲How did they agree to the terms that were initially put forward by Anthropic but with OpenAI? Surely there’s a catch here. Or is it just Sam negotiation skill?
reply▲outside12345 hours ago
[-] Screw OpenAI. Never opening that app again or using one of their models.
reply▲drivebyhooting7 hours ago
[-] In my experience ChatGPT is the most sanctimonious of the leading models.
When I need advice for my clandestine operations I always reach for Grok.
China has evacuated its embassies in Iran.
This is really about the imminent strike on Iran which is now super telegraphed. They are gonna use ChatGPT for target selection, and the likely outcome is that it will fuck things up and a bunch of civilians are going to die because of this decision.
When this happens, Altman will go from being merely a drifter to having blood on his hands.
Why would they use chatgpt for target selection?
reply▲The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has over 200,000 personnel. There are thousands of putative SAM sites and MANPAD launch sites. The amount of data to crunch is significant.
Alternatively, the DoW is simply incompetent and Trump or Hegseth wants to use AI to draft war plans.
Are LLMs actually decent at this sort of data crunching though? I thought at best they could write a script to help.
reply▲Iran, Cuba, and to classify people as "Antifa".
A lot of innocent people are about to be harmed because the cogs of fascism are lubricated with blood.
The Iran situation is unique. If it is true that Epstein was part of a blackmailing operation run by Israeli intelligence, then the time to act is limited. It may only be a matter of time before the US-Israel special relationship begins to deteriorate, especially as the House of Representatives starts digging into what was going on.
For hardline right wing Israeli government officials who would be privy to such information, the window of time to leverage to US to enact regime change on the Islamic Republic is closing. The survival of Israel over the long run really depends on not having a hardline Islamic regime in Iran developing nuclear weapons. Things like AI safety and US elections are secondary to such prerogatives. The question for voters in the US is whether it really is worth it to the average US citizen to shed blood and tax dollars for this stuff.
I hope there can be a peaceful regime change in Iran and that there will be peaceful relations with Iran and Israel in the future. But damn I wish things could go back to normal with our US political system once this is all settled.
Is OpenAI and ChatGPT nie a national security threat for other countries?
reply▲Oh yeah, from the company which raison d'etre was being open and being good.
shocked pikachu face
Come on by now we all know the only thing Altman (who else is still at OpenAI from the start?) wants it more money and more power, it doesn't really matter how.
Perhaps Trump's DOD objects specifically to Anthropic models themselves declining to do immoral and illegal things, and not something just stipulated in an ignorable contract. That would give room for Sam to throw some public CYA into a contract, while neutering model safety to their requirements.
reply▲How do llms get used in either survalience or for autonomous weapons. Using written English seems so inefficient?
reply▲If the "safety stack" (guardrails) bit is true, it's the exact opposite of their beef with Anthropic... which is not surprising given who's running the US right now.
I always assumed those folks need a way to look strong with their base for a media moment over equitable application of the policies or law.
transcriptase7 hours ago
[-] Sam must not be aware of what happened to any business or foreign nation/leader considered outwardly friendly to the first Trump administration when the democrats regained control in 2020.
reply▲yoyohello136 hours ago
[-] You’re assuming democrats will ever be allowed to regain control.
reply▲resfirestar6 hours ago
[-] If they earnestly believe in fast ASI timelines then political grudges have to be pretty low on OAI's list of worries about 2029.
reply▲We really need a plan for the scenario in which the US loses the trade war and decides to go homicidal AI on the whole world. Like, help them recover or something.
reply▲Department of War just killed OpenAI's brand
reply▲SilverElfin7 hours ago
[-] So basically Greg Brockman of OpenAI, currently the largest MAGA PAC donor, used his bribe to make the government destroy his main competition? I’m absolutely cancelling ChatGPT and will tell everyone I know to cancel as well.
I also absolutely do not trust sleezy Sam Altman when he claims he has the same exact redlines as Anthropic:
> AI safety and wide distribution of benefits are the core of our mission. Two of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems. The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement.
If Hegseth and Trump attack Anthropic and sign a deal with OpenAI under the same restrictions, it means this is them corrupting free markets by picking which companies win. Maybe it’s at the behest of David Sacks, the corrupt AI czar who complained about lawfare throughout the Biden administration but now cheers on far worse lawfare.
So it’s either a government looking to surveil citizens illegally or a government that is deeply corrupt and is using its power to enrich some people above others.
SA is a real weasel lol. Acted like he stood behind Anthropic's principles just to announce the deal with DoW a few hours later.
reply▲Sam Altman not being consistently candid or truthful would be the shock of the century.
reply▲is there a single thing left that altman promised that he hasn't broken with this company...
reply▲"We will not be divided!"
They got divided 12 hours later, lol.
This will backfire on Sam someday, he’s just a pawn in the agenda of the Trump admin.
reply▲I hope so but I am less optimistic. The oligarchy in Russia who remained loyal to the Putin regime have done just fine for decades as long as they did not attempt to overthrow the dictator. The regime in Washington is basically constructing the same type of kleptocracy and very little evidence is there that anyone who matters will get in their way. So far as I can tell the country is already a form of authoritarian regime where the loyalty to the supreme ruler is the main parameter of conducting business there.
reply▲Is this setting the stage for a bailout? Was the whole thing between the three parties smoke and mirrors to justify a bailout down the line? It's conspiracy theory territory but, you know who we're dealing with here.
reply▲Musk 100% right about this guy
reply▲romulussilvia5 hours ago
[-] I wonder if this will cause this to save open ai from the bubble! i am sure i am wrong;-)
reply▲neuroelectron2 hours ago
[-] Sam Altman is a psychopath and his only talent is lying to people and convincing them of his lies.
reply▲Honestly not even surprised. What else could you expect from a zionist?
reply▲There's a lot of people in this thread that assume that Sam Altman is the one who is being dishonest here, and I kind of understand, but the other two parties who could just as easily be lying are Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump, and of the three of them if you think sama is the _most_ likely to lie I feel like you have not been paying attention.
reply▲So nice of him! I am sure he believes they should offer these terms to all competitors.
HN: if you continue to subscribe to OpenAI, if you use it at your startup, you’re no better than the tech bros you often criticize. This is not surprising but beyond shady.
"Tonight, we reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models in their classified network.
In all of our interactions, the DoW displayed a deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome.
AI safety and wide distribution of benefits are the core of our mission. Two of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems. The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement.
We also will build technical safeguards to ensure our models behave as they should, which the DoW also wanted. We will deploy FDEs to help with our models and to ensure their safety, we will deploy on cloud networks only.
We are asking the DoW to offer these same terms to all AI companies, which in our opinion we think everyone should be willing to accept. We have expressed our strong desire to see things de-escalate away from legal and governmental actions and towards reasonable agreements.
We remain committed to serve all of humanity as best we can. The world is a complicated, messy, and sometimes dangerous place."
> We remain committed to serve all of humanity as best we can.
Serve Palestinians volleys of rockets, that is.
Sam is just about the least trustworthy person in AI, I don't trust his words as face value and I consider these weasel words:
> prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility *for the use of force*
propagandist7 hours ago
[-] That means autonomous killbots are a-ok. Human responsibility is not the same as human decision-making.
The president or anybody at DoD can be "responsible", and we know there will be zero accountability. The courts defer to the executive, and Congress is all-too-happy for the executive to take the flak for their wars.
> We also will build technical safeguards to ensure our models behave as they should
A bold statement. It would appear they've definitively solved prompt injection and all the other ills that LLMs have been susceptible to. And forgot to tell the world about it.
/s
Hey dang I know I’m not allowed to say this due to community guidelines, but Sam Altman is a lying sack of shit.
reply▲calvinmorrison7 hours ago
[-] perhaps us mere mortals should petition our lawmakers to ban mass surveillance.
reply▲Raise your hand if you actually read it or if you read the title and replied? I see a lot of comments that sure seem like they didn’t read it.
> Two of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems. The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement.
IF this is true, it SHOULD be verifiable. So, we wait? I mean, I am a dummy, but that language doesn’t seem too washy too me? Either it’s a bold face lie and OpenAI burns because of it or it’s true and the Trump admin is going after the “left” AI company. Or whatever. My point is, someone smarter than me/us is going to fact check Sam’s claim.
> Either it’s a bold face lie and OpenAI burns because of it
Do you really still genuinely believe in this? This is the same person that said ads is going to be the last resort, and yet we are getting ads. I just don't understand how people can trust a single word coming out of folks like Sam, Musk, Trump or whoever rich asshole.
I listen to these people talk and they literally do not have souls. They will say whatever it is they need to get ahead. I watched a couple of Sam speeches and videos, the man does not have anything interesting to say.
1-800-Come-on-now
DoW: WOKE Antropic tried to impose their 'values' on us? Friendship ended!! National security risk!
OpenAI: We just signed a deal that's strong on values, the exact same ones as Anthropic, no way we would mislead anyone about this
You: Seems legit
I mean, this is a company literally named "Open"AI, nominally a non-profit or whatever. I think they will survive quietly opening an endpoint for their customer. Unlikely anyone is under enough illusions about Sama's moral character to be scandalized by deception.
reply▲SpicyLemonZest7 hours ago
[-] The problem is that many of those would-be fact checkers have massive incentives to lie about it. So regardless of whether it is true, you're going to see a number of detailed and well-researched pieces over the weekend arguing that Altman is right and this whole thing is Anthropic's fault. The set of people who could cause OpenAI to burn and the set of people who have millions of dollars riding on its success substantially overlap; it may not take a particularly good argument to convince them.
reply▲Yeah, you’re right. I’m overly hopeful and naïve
Edit: as soon as I hit submit I realized this might sound condescending, but I actually mean this lol
I like the idea of seeing someone post “I dislike and distrust Sam Altman” and thinking “They must be saying that because they haven’t read the things that he writes”
reply▲operator_nil7 hours ago
[-] Do you know who isn't a dummy? Sam. The crucial part of that statement is that the DoD will use OpenAI systems "lawfully and responsibly," which I don't doubt is written somewhere in their contract. However, those terms are so open-ended that it's impossible for OpenAI to enforce. Sam could have clarified in his tweet that they explicitly prohibited the use of their technology for mass surveillance and autonomous killings, but he deliberately chose not to and to simply say, "We told them not to do bad things." which smells like bullshit
reply▲I guess I’m hanging on what
> reflects them in law
Means exactly. What law and what does it say?
I’m also sure he quietly bent the knee, but I want to know what “law and policy” it’s being reflected in to know.
No contract can require the government to “reflect” something in law, aside from the fact that the DoD is not a legislative body. So whatever Sam is talking about can only be lip service.
reply▲ImPostingOnHN4 hours ago
[-] "The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement" is incredibly wishy washy.
What does it even mean to reflect those principles in law? Did they pass a law that says they can't do it? Which one?
What does it mean to "put them into our agreement"? Did they just have a section in the appendix listing various principles, or is there agreement from both parties to not violate those principles? What system does the contract specify for verification of compliance?
reply▲charcircuit2 hours ago
[-] I am glad OpenAI stood up to do what's right and give the American people the ability to choose how AI is used for themselves rather than dictating it from their high horse.
Edit: It looks like the terms are similar in OpenAI's deal in what they prohibit so it isn't clear why they are any better. We should be the ones dictating what is and isn't prohibited. Not Sam. We will have to wait for more news on what is actually different.
Kim_Bruning11 minutes ago
[-] Any government is allowed to choose to do whatever it wants however it wishes; in a republic: given what is legally determined by the three branches. Obviously. They can contract with whomever they want, make any deal with whomever they want.
This also means that they should adhere to a deal once it is signed. That's part of the law too. They shouldn't suddenly turn around and try to alter the deal, then retaliate against their deal partner when they say no. "Pray we don't alter it further".
The government of a nation sets the example for others, and should be scrupulous in their dealings.
Yeah. And they are losing money from inference (HN told me so) so the US government is subsidizing our token usage!
reply▲charcircuit2 hours ago
[-] OpenAI is not losing money from inference. HN has told you the opposite repeatedly.
reply▲nateburke15 minutes ago
[-] Plain and simple this is revenge for the Anthropic super bowl ads, which were epic burns against openAI's primary future revenue stream.
reply▲madeofpalk13 minutes ago
[-] This seems like an exceptionally shallow reading of everything and everyone involved.
You think OpenAI decided to build MurderBot because someone made fun on them selling ads?