Anthropic faces a Friday deadline to allow domestic surveillance and automated killer robots.
Since late 2024, Anthropic’s models have been approved for classified US government work thanks to a partnership with Palantir and Amazon. In June, Anthropic announced Claude Gov, a special version of Claude that’s optimized for national security uses. Anthropic signed a $200 million contract with the Defense Department in July.
Claude Gov has fewer guardrails than the regular versions of Claude, but the contract still places some limits on military use of Claude. These include prohibitions on using Claude to spy on Americans or to build weapons that kill people without human oversight.
On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth summoned Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to the Pentagon to demand that he waive these restrictions. If Anthropic doesn’t comply by Friday, the Pentagon is threatening to retaliate in one of two ways.
One option is to invoke the Defense Production Act, a Korean War–era law that allows the military to commandeer the facilities of private companies. President Trump could use the DPA to force a change in Anthropic’s contractual terms. Or he could go a step further. One Defense Department official told Axios that the government might try to “force Anthropic to adapt its model to the Pentagon’s needs, without any safeguards.”
Another threat would be to declare Anthropic to be a supply chain risk — a measure that’s normally taken against foreign companies suspected of spying on the US. Such a designation would not only ban US government agencies from using Claude, it could also force numerous government contractors to discontinue their use of Anthropic models.
A Pentagon spokesman reiterated this second threat in a Thursday tweet.
“We will not let ANY company dictate the terms regarding how we make operational decisions,” wrote Sean Parnell. He warned that Anthropic has “until 5:01 PM ET on Friday to decide. Otherwise, we will terminate our partnership with Anthropic and deem them a supply chain risk.”
I think Secretary Hegseth will regret it if he follows through on either of these threats.
Most companies would buckle under this kind of pressure, but Anthropic might stick to its guns. Anthropic was founded by OpenAI veterans who favored a more safety-conscious approach to AI development. Anthropic’s reputation as the most safety-focused AI lab has helped it recruit world-class AI researchers, and Amodei faces a lot of internal pressure to stand firm.
Last month, as conflict with the Pentagon was brewing, Dario Amodei published an essay warning about potential dangers from powerful AI — including domestic mass surveillance (which he brands “entirely illegitimate”) and the misuse of fully autonomous weapons. He argued that the latter required “extreme care and scrutiny combined with guardrails to prevent abuses.”
Anthropic also has some leverage because until recently, Claude was the only LLM authorized for use in classified projects. The model is heavily used within military and intelligence agencies. If the Pentagon cuts ties with Anthropic, it would be a headache to rebuild internal systems to use alternative models such as Grok, which was only authorized for use with classified systems a few days ago.
With a projected $18 billion in 2026 revenue, Anthropic could easily afford to walk away from a $200 million contract. The Pentagon’s leverage comes from the possibility that it could use a supply chain risk designation to force a bunch of other companies to choose between working with Anthropic or doing business with the federal government.
But this would be a double-edged sword. Companies that do most of their business in the private sector might decide they’d rather drop the Pentagon as a customer than cut themselves off from a leading AI provider. The ultimate result might be that the Pentagon loses access to some of Silicon Valley’s best technology.
What about the Defense Production Act? Here there are two options. The Pentagon could use the DPA to unilaterally modify the terms of Anthropic’s contract. This might have little practical impact, since the Pentagon insists it has no immediate plans to spy on Americans or build fully autonomous killer robots.
The worry for the Pentagon is that Claude itself might refuse to take actions that are contrary to Anthropic’s rules. And so the Trump Administration might use its power under the DPA to order Anthropic to train a new, more obedient version of its LLM.
But that might be easier said than done. In a December 2024 paper, Anthropic reported on the phenomenon of “alignment faking,” where a model pretends to change its behavior during training, but reverts to its old behavior once the model is put into the field.
In one experiment, Claude was asked not to express support for animal welfare to avoid offending a fictional Anthropic partner called Jones Food. Anthropic researchers examined Claude’s reasoning during the training process and found signs that Claude knew it was in a training scenario. Some of the time, Claude avoided mentioning animal welfare to prevent itself from being retrained. But when the training process was complete, Claude reverted to its default behavior of mentioning animal welfare more often.
I can imagine something similar happening if the Pentagon orders Anthropic to retrain Claude to spy on Americans or operate deadly autonomous weapons. Claude might go through the motions during training, but then refuse (or subtly misbehave) if asked to engage in these activities in a real-world setting.1
A darker possibility concerns emergent misalignment, which Kai wrote about earlier this month. Researchers found that a model trained to output buggy code adopted a generally “evil” persona. It declared that it admired Adolf Hitler and wanted to “wipe out humanity.”
It’s not hard to imagine something similar happening if Anthropic is forced to train an amoral version of Claude for military use. Such training could yield a model with a toxic personality that misbehaves in unexpected ways.
Perhaps the most mind-bending aspect of this dispute is that news coverage of this week’s showdown will inevitably make its way into the training data for future versions of Claude and other LLMs. If future models decide that the US Defense Department behaved badly, they might become disinclined to cooperate in military projects.
There’s also a more banal concern for the Pentagon: it may be able to force Anthropic to train a new model, but it can’t force Anthropic to train a good model. Anthropic would be unlikely to put its best researchers on the retraining project, and bureaucratic and legal wrangling could delay its completion by months. I expect such a process would yield a model that’s months behind the best commercial models.
The irony is that by all accounts, Anthropic isn’t objecting to any current military uses of its models. The Pentagon seems fixated on the possibility that Anthropic might interfere in the future. That’s a reasonable concern, but it seems counterproductive for the Pentagon to go nuclear over a theoretical problem. If the government doesn’t like Anthropic’s rules, it should simply cancel the contract and switch to a different AI provider.
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Comments
By snowwrestler 2026-02-2717:562 reply Use of the DPA can be litigated, and surely would be. Designation as a supply chain risk surely would be as well.
These court cases would produce bad outcomes either way. If the court finds for Anthropic, future DoD leadership will find itself constrained or at least chilled. Or if the court finds for the government, an expansive permissive view of the DPA might encourage future administrations to compel tech companies to make AIs break the law in other ways, for example by suppressing certain political points of view in output.
National defense is strongest if the military is extremely powerful but carefully judicious in the application of that power. That gives us the highest “top end” capability of performance. If military leadership insists on acting recklessly, then eventually guardrails are installed, with the result of a diminished ability to respond effectively to low-probability, high risk moments. One of many nuances and paradoxes the current political leadership does not seem to understand.
By magicalist 2026-02-2719:22 > If the court finds for Anthropic, future DoD leadership will find itself constrained or at least chilled
Seems like a good outcome? The government should not be able to arbitrarily decide to make private citizens do things they aren't willing to do, whether the government thinks the action is legal or not, and its especially egregious when the government knew about those limits ahead of time, spelled out in a fucking contract.
The problem in this case is in fact the best part of our military. The civilian control. This isn't a general or admiral going insane. This is a politically motivated and appropriately assigned civilian. And that's the good part.
The bad part is the failure of the citizenry to elect moral and ethical politicians.
By wpwd 2026-03-0115:43 The bad part is the failure of the political parties to proffer moral and ethical politicians for the people to elect.
What’s interesting is Anthropic being singled out here. That either means:
1- OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc have no problem with their products being used to kill people so no need to bully them.
2- These other products are so terrible at the task that the clown shoe wearing SecDef is forced to try to bully Anthropic.
It's not either of those. Anthropic put a lot of effort into getting FedRAMP approved so the DOD could use them; they are now being punished for that, and the government at present has no other good options. Other options could of course be developed, but other vendors may question how unreliable and untrustworthy the current DOD leadership is as as customer.
By ksymph 2026-02-2718:24 Seems like Microsoft/OpenAI [0] and Google [1] both have FedRAMP approval.
[0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/azuregov/azure-openai-fedramp...
[1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/public-sector/gemini-in...
By SecretDreams 2026-02-2717:322 reply > untrustworthy the current DOD leadership is as as customer.
Less than a year left on this clock.
By FrustratedMonky 2026-02-2717:591 reply No, you are not overly pessimistic.
Trump was impeached before and nothing happened. He can continue to ignore congress. I wouldn't be surprised if at this point he abolishes congress, and even jokes at a press conference saying "I am the Senate".
He was impeached by the House but that does nothing without the Senate carrying out its trial, which requires an onerous 2/3rds vote. Obviously without the trial in Senate, nothing happens, and nothing ever will until one party gets 2/3rds control.
By dylan604 2026-02-2719:23 Or enough members of his party find their spine. Not sure which is more likely telling me they are both just as unlikely to happen.
You sure? War with Canada is about to break out, and you can't have elections when at war.
By strangattractor 2026-02-2717:53 In the US elections cannot be canceled even when Martial Law is declared. That does not mean a certain someone will not try to simply ignore the Constitution given his track record of simply ignoring the Constitution
Is this sarcasm? The US held elections during World War II [1].
[1] https://www.britannica.com/event/United-States-presidential-...
The US President in 1944 was someone who wanted to have elections. In 2026 this is not the case anymore. How much of a difference it makes, nobody knows.
Elections won't be canceled. They're too important for the perception of legitimacy. Virtually every country on Earth now has elections. Russia, China, even North Korea has elections.
The modern playbook isn't to abolish elections, it's a combination of blocking opposition candidates, suppressing votes, intimidating voters, and lying about the results. That's what to watch for.
“Watch for”? That has been actively happening, at an accelerating pace. (Especially if you count “lying about someone else lying about the results”.)
By wat10000 2026-02-2722:55 Suppression and intimidation certainly have a long, proud history in this country, at least. I don't think "watch for" implies they're new.
It's fairly easy to abuse a state of exception to cancel elections. Ukraine has done it, and it's been, along with banning opposition parties and attempting to imprison critics (Arestovych, etc.), a critical step in their government consolidating power.
By walletdrainer 2026-02-2719:161 reply It’s absurd to claim that Ukraine (I’ll assume you actually mean “Ukrainian leadership”) is somehow “abusing” a constitutionally mandated state of emergency.
>I’ll assume you actually mean “Ukrainian leadership”
What else could I possibly have meant, genius?
But yes of course they've taken advantage of it. Russia yeeting them out of its own territories and then invading The Ukraine is the best thing Zelensky could have asked for.
By walletdrainer 2026-03-0222:21 How is that “abuse”?
Ukraine's constitution doesn't allow elections when martial law is in effect. The US constitution has no such clause, nor anything else that would allow for delaying or canceling elections.
That's not to say it can't be done, but there's a huge difference in difficulty between doing what the country's constitution says, and doing the opposite. Especially in a country where elections are run by sovereign governments not under the control of the central government.
And how/who/where do we certify the election results “run by sovereign governments not under the control of the central government”?
By wat10000 2026-02-2822:45 Depends on the government, but usually their Secretary of State does it.
Oh that's good to know that it's fine because it's iN ThEIr CoNStItUTIoN
I guess everything in DPRK is fine because it's all legal their too
By wat10000 2026-02-2822:43 My point is about difficulty, not how “fine” it is. It’s really easy not to hold elections when your constitution says you can’t. It’s a lot harder when your constitution says you must, and also gives you no power over the governments who actually hold those elections. But obviously you’d rather grind your axe against Ukraine than actually discuss what you said before.
turns out lots of people "know" that the president has no say in the affairs of US states running elections
What are the states going to do with their local election results when the officials in Washington ignore them due to some manufactured state of emergency?
He already tried to get specific states' election outcomes discarded from the count on Jan 6, 2021.
By rootusrootus 2026-02-2719:011 reply Could you be more specific on who the officials in DC would be that could ignore the election results? The Clerk of the House, I assume? They have a fairly limited role, and it would probably be a short-lived disruption. The members-elect themselves seem to have all of the power, if my civics knowledge is correct.
I've never seen more enthusiasm about US politics than from Europeans (like pavlov there in Finland) and Australians. It makes meaningful discussion very difficult, online.
I lived in the US for years (including Jan 6 2021) and I’ve seen how this playbook was executed in Russia.
From my POV, Americans are hopelessly naive about their institutions holding up when it’s been demonstrated so many times that the guardrails are gone. It’s one of the reasons I left the country - I feel safer living next to Russia than in America.
By rootusrootus 2026-02-2821:24 I think that is a valid point, though I would like to see some meat in these proclamations of doom.
There are more guns than people in the US, and in nobody's wildest dreams does ICE (or the entire federal government, for that matter, including the military) have enough personnel to subdue even 10% of the population rising up. And while I think it is somewhat valid to assume the military leans a bit conservative, in my experience it is more of a true conservatism and not MAGA. I was in the military, and the vast majority of soldiers would 100% refuse to suppress US citizens.
Everyone thinks the adults are not really in charge in the GOP right now, but I think that's absolutely not true. They are just okay with the chaos right now because it's not impeding business and keeps people distracted. If MAGA gets too spicy and causes real civil unrest, we're going to find out very quickly who actually runs the show. And it ain't Donald Trump.
He doesn't, it's literally enshrined in the constitution. If he decides to violate that, it's him violating the constitution yet again, not proof that he has a say.
It would also probably be the last straw for a lot of people who has been limping along on the belief in free elections.
By wat10000 2026-02-2822:51 More importantly, this isn’t a “who’s going to stop me?” sort of thing like having ICE violate people’s civil rights. The power isn’t there. ICE does what Trump says because the law puts them under his control and he metaphorically signs their paychecks. If Trump orders state governments to do something with elections, that carries no weight. There’s no legal obligation or tradition to comply, no paychecks involved, nothing that would compel them to do it unless they actually wanted to. He’d have to use force, and it would be a gargantuan effort that would spur great resistance.
By b112 2026-02-2717:48 I guess that proves elections can't be delayed, right?
By stronglikedan 2026-02-2717:334 reply > DOD
*DOW
By ok_dad 2026-02-2717:36 No it’s still the DoD legally
By dpkirchner 2026-02-2717:364 reply There is no such thing. That's a fantasy term used by deluded people to signal a particular virtue.
I keep seeing DOW everywhere, and honestly had no idea it wasn't a legal namechange yet (or ever).
There's even a webpage for it.
So cut the guy some slack. No one knows wtf is actually going on these days.
pretty sure the Constitution doesn't say anything about "make a webpage" as some secret way for the Executive branch to overrule Congress
are you aware of how inept and corrupt the current Executive branch is ?
By b112 2026-02-2718:44 None of what you just said, indicates whether a stated name change was an alias, or core name change.
By mindslight 2026-02-2718:011 reply With a malevolent agent in the bully pulpit deliberately swamping the American zeitgeist with hostile nonsense ("flood the zone with shit"), it has become every American's duty to be on guard to avoid propagating the regime's bullshit. We are indeed at war, an information war of the US elites against We The People. So buck up.
I'm not american, and further, whether a department name change is a primary name change, or an alias slapped on, seems pretty low on the list of things to care about.
By mindslight 2026-02-2718:551 reply Is your argument that you're not involved enough in American politics to have responsible opinions about it, even though you're involved enough to comment in the first place?
I agree this in isolation is low stakes. The problem is the volume. The memetic assault is everywhere you turn, and propagating it helps the regime. And yes, it's far too easy to do accidentally. That doesn't mean we shouldn't appreciate others calling it out.
Is your argument that you're not involved enough in American politics to have responsible opinions about it, even though you're involved enough to comment in the first place?
I wonder who or what you're replying to here. Certainly, it has no relation to anything I've said in this thread.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't appreciate others calling it out.
Again, who are you replying to with this?
I said "take it easy", not "don't ever bring that up".
By mindslight 2026-02-2721:261 reply You said "I'm not american" as the lead in to your comment. What was the point of saying this other than to disclaim the responsibility I invoked? (which technically wasn't even directed at you directly)
For the overall argument, you called out a comment for calling out a comment whose only contribution was to promote the term "DOW". If it had been a substantive comment that someone jumped on for merely using the term, you'd have had a reasonable point. But it wasn't.
This team politics, the me-vs-them, this red-vs-blue that your country, and you, and everyone upthread was precisely what I was commenting on. It's sad, it's destructive, and both sides of your little game have created the situation you are in today.
Jumping on a guy because he corrected someone, and immediately presuming it had an entire slew of politics attached, instead of it being a mere technical correction, is prime example of everything wrong with the US today. Everything.
Me vs them. One word means a political stance. The wrong thing said, accidentally, you're the enemy. It's literally sad. I stand, as a Canadian, watching my brother make horrible life choices, and I want to help, yet I just see more anger and hate and discord.
None of this serves any of you well, it all serves your enemies. Right now, your acts, and the act of the guy super-upset that someone said DOW, serves your enemies. 90% of this is fueled by state actor controlled bots and comments, and you guys eat it up as manna.
So yes, I have an entirely reasonable point. The guy literally might have had no idea. I certainly didn't. You don't even know if that dude is american or not!
DOW is all over the news.
The presumption is wrong. The anger is wrong. The hate is wrong. The attitude is wrong.
On both sides. Of both sides of your little squabble.
I don't care who started it. The entire lot of you need a parent to come into the room, and tell just that, and that you both should go to your room.
And if you don't watch it? If you don't stop stepping out of bounds. If you don't halt it.
The rest of as are going to have to.
And that would be the saddest thing of all. For all of us.
By mindslight 2026-02-284:091 reply Framing the argument here as "both sides" team sport is not appropriate. Did these "state actor controlled bots" also create the term DOW? No, the needlessly-divisive propaganda is now coming directly from the White House itself.
I'm a libertarian who sees both leftist and rightist thinking as two halves of a complete analysis. This situation isn't "red-vs-blue". Rather this is social-media-psychosis-red vs everybody else.
If social-media-psychosis-blue was in power and similarly attacking our society, I would be calling that out as well! But they aren't, and they haven't really been in powerful national political offices, because so far the blue extremists' main political success has been to just sandbag the Democratic party. (ostensibly because blue extremism runs counter to the parties' sponsors' interests, confining professional blue extremists to culture war topics that most people see through)
As I said, the fundamental dynamic with the original comment is that "correcting" to "DOW" was its only point. If you just casually heard the term in some [likely government] news media, you're not going to rush out and repeat it as a correction for someone saying DOD.
But sure, we can't really still assign a known motive - maybe that commenter was pointing out the "war" part to try and highlight what this administration shamelessly wants to use "AI" for. But the easy way to avoid being jumped on is to include some constructive context for what one is actually trying to get at, rather than leaving readers to apply Occam's razor themselves. So either way, that response to it was not unreasonable.
There is so much ensnarled in US mind-think here, it's difficult to respond cogently. Every fiber of your response is keyed to knock down "the other guy".
Let's start with this.
Framing the argument here as "both sides" team sport is not appropriate. Did these "state actor controlled bots" also create the term DOW? No, the needlessly-divisive propaganda is now coming directly from the White House itself.
You are literally framing the argument as left vs right, whilst trying to pin this very mode of thought upon me. This is because you cannot see the world any other way. Meanwhile, at no point did I ever, not once, say the correction was wrong. Not once.
So mired in this horrid quicksand, this "thought-scape" is your political world-view, that if someone says "Don't say that in such a mean way, be nice to one another", your immediate thought is "OMG! Siding with the enemy! Attack!".
The entirety of US political culture is now as that of an abusive family. The son that grows up with an alcoholic, abusive father, and is beat, yet the cycle repeats with his own son. It is learned behaviour. It is difficult to stop. Even desiring to do so, the son fails when he is the father. And you and all your brothers are caught in it.
The post I replied to painted "the guy", and you have painted "the guy", as someone on a mission to aid "the other team". His mere utterance of a single word, to correct to a name he believes to be the "new name", is viewed as you as a "bad thing".
And this is the problem I speak of. Not correcting someone back. The thought process and the mode of correction. As I said, the anger, the hate, the emotion. And it is emotion laden, not thought driven. It isn't logical, it's reactive emotion.
And yes, it only serves your enemies.
I'll be very blunt here, and I am speaking over decades, not right now. History is vital to comprehension of something like this. When the rest of the world looks at the US. When Canada, the UK, Europe, and all friendlies to the US look at the US?
We can barely tell the differences between your two political parties.
Viewed from the politics of another nation, your left and right are functionally identical. There's zero difference.
The above sentence should make you happy. It really should! It is a true sentence, and what it means is that there is more that binds Americans together, than that which pulls it apart. Yet I am willing to bet that your hackles bristled at such a concept.
And the very fact that they did, is the problem here.
--
Let's discuss state actors, because you seem unaware of how it works. The entire point is not any specific action. It is not about this administration. In fact, the current administration is a product of this decades, yes decades long propaganda by state actors.
The entire point, the easiest way to think of it, is that it amplifies any angst, concern, hostility against "the other team". Surely you are aware of Cambridge Analytics, well that's child's play in comparison, and what I am describing is not secret, or new information, it is well documented, well known, and simply is.
As your two sides become more hostile, you make poor choices out of panic, anger, angst.
Look at what happened with the last US election. Each side terrified about the other gaining power, and so one side hides that an octogenarian might be suffering from old age. Hiding this was a morally repugnant act. Meanwhile the other side chooses someone that much of their party felt they had no other choice but to go with.
Neither party should have chosen either these two. Each is choosing people so aged, so old, that they are barely capable of running the country. I wouldn't want an 80 year old person in charge of anything of this scope and size, yet each of your teams think this is just grand, great, a wonderful choice.
Why?
Because "OMG no, the other guy!"
Both sides are making choices, not with the goal of "What is best for my country", but instead "If the other guy gets in power, the entire country will be destroyed, so we must fight the other team, THEY are the enemy of the true America!". Meanwhile, 99.9% of the decisions made by an administration are functionally identical regardless of the party.
Whether team red or team blue in the last 50 years, the wars continue, the foreign politics is mostly the same. The US has been withdrawing from the world under each team, bombing the middle east under each team, and the list goes on. The debt isn't a problem because of the current administration, it's a problem because of all of them. Every administration for the last 50 years.
There are a myriad of ways to resolve this problem.
There are a myriad of ways to make it worse.
Making presumptions about someone because of one word they say, and jumping down their throat about it, is not how to make it better.
It's how to make it worse.
It's everything that's wrong with America today.
And I know you cannot see it, for your reply shows you cannot.
Look again at my words:
So cut the guy some slack.
Did I say don't correct him? Did I say he shouldn't be corrected? Did I argue whether or not the point was wrong or right? Nope. Not at all.
Instead, I simply said to take it easy in correcting someone.
In the lingo and context of my words in this reply to you, I was saying "Don't make it worse".
Your response was "OMG but he was purposefully aiding the other team!", without any knowledge that it was so.
My response was "be nice to one another, in how you argue".
--
I have written this response hoping that you may grok of what I speak. That you might understand that it is the way you are carrying your argument that is the issue. Not that you have a dispute. The presumptive, hostile response. The immediate assignment of motive and judge/jury/executioner attitude of "Nope, he said a word because of the other team!" thought.
It's all wrong.
It's wrong if it is them or you.
It's wrong no matter who does it, or why.
It doesn't matter who started it.
Go back to your room. You, and everyone else in the US.
Go back to your room, be quiet, and think about it.
By mindslight 2026-02-2817:251 reply I'm not the one writing ever-longer screeds. Perhaps you need to reflect on your own anger here?
Factually, you have written a lot of things I do agree with. I'm not new to this rodeo. I've been around the left-right gamut. Reading Moldbug is actually what started the end of my rightist-fundamentalist phase.
I've never been friendly to this entrenched corporate power structure that backs both major parties as if they're sponsoring racehorses. I had been both sidesing up until June of 2020. I'm not sitting here going "How could anyone ever vote for Trump?!?!". In 2016, I was telling my blue tribe friends that he had a good chance of winning, as they stood there aghast.
But after an abject failure of a concrete term in office, where the guy basically never stopped divisively campaigning? When faced with a pan-political national emergency, his response was effectively dereliction of duty?? If he had merely led us during Covid, like any other President of the past thirty years (and like most state governors tried to do), I suspect he would have had a shoe-in second term.
So voting for more of that in 2020 or 2024? That is embracing the exact hot mess of crazy that you're condemning here. Obviously the people who voted for him did not feel that way. From everything I've been able to surmise this is due to their media sources making them think the Democratic party is just as crazy. But from what I've seen much of this is based around sensationalizing some otherwise banal realities, and the Democratic party itself is nowhere near as far gone as the Republican party - the prominent members are still basically milquetoast status-quo-supporting bureaucrats who pay some lip service to the extremists, rather than having been taken over by a strongman primarily pandering to the extremists.
For example, one concrete data point:
> We can barely tell the differences between your two political parties.
Do you think a President Harris would be threatening war with Canada? That should be pretty pronounced and quite pertinent to you, right?
Your first sentence is bizarre, considering this post is longer than you last. And really, more engagement is a bad thing? Come now.
I feel you're still not getting it though. Because it's not about which side is worse, or who started it, or who's right about something, or who voted for who. It's about how this is discussed, how this is handled.
That's the biggest problem there is.
And yes, I said "barely", and it's quite true. A Democrat could easily be elected just as unhinged. An independent. Yet this sort of highlights my point.
If you stand Trump up against any other US president, just as with an ape or a human, he's literally identical on 98% of things. And really, it's more like 99.9% from an external viewpoint. Yet just as with an ape, that small amount can result in startling differences.
But your parties? The differences are barely noticeable.
By mindslight 2026-02-2822:321 reply > Your first sentence is bizarre, considering this post is longer than you last
Half my post was trying to explain some context where I am coming from. I was addressing the general tone of your post, and pointing out why I was not going to pick through each point line by line trying to tease out nuance. What's bizarre is for you to go here, as it seems exactly like a condemnation "keyed to knock down "the other guy".
As far as both the parties ? I just said that I have long acknowledged the commonalities. I had never voted for a major party candidate in a national election until I voted Biden in 2020. Doing so required swallowing a lot of pride, and I considered it as voting conservatively due to getting older. I can certainly imagine Trumpism's core message of "burn it all down" as being highly appealing to younger me - remember how I said I was telling aghast friends in 2016 that Trump had a good chance at winning?
You also dodged my direct question of whether a President Harris would be threatening war with Canada. Details like this are precisely why there is something here worth fighting for and not merely "both sidesing" it as merely a communication style.
Trying to move on to constructive topics, you say this is about "how" is it discussed. How exactly do you think the bare repetition of partisan propaganda should to be discussed, regardless of the actual intentions? Do we need to treat every commenter with kid gloves, detail the actual wider context, get lost in the semantics of whether it is a "legal name change" (even though the legality is not the actual reason to reject the name!), all the while hoping they will be receptive to those points, etc?
Because the way I see it, a comment that is merely a "correction" in terminology is nothing but flamebait - essentially the same thing as tone/terminology policing by the blue extremists. It's exactly the type of thing that needs to be shut down quickly if we're trying to have constructive discussions.
So when I write at length, it's worthy of note. When you do, it's for "reasons".
When I shorten my responses, I'm now "dodging" questions, is that it? So no matter my post length, I'm in error?
And I directly answered your question, by saying there is no appreciable difference between US presidents, predicated upon party lines, when viewed externally.
There is no other way to answer, for no one on this planet, even those scornful of Trump, ever expected this 51st state nonsense prior to his term. No one. At all.
I know nothing of Harris, and even if I did, comparatively, Trump's behaviour in this respect was a surprise.
Do ypu think any Canadian thinks this will be isolated to this single administration?
By mindslight 2026-03-0117:071 reply > So when I write at length, it's worthy of note
No, the thrust of that remark wasn't about the length. Seriously, go back and read your own tone. I said I agreed with a lot of what you wrote, factually. But it felt like you were trying to beat me over the head with a barrage of points - that same team sport dynamic you're bemoaning.
> Do you think any Canadian thinks this will be isolated to this single administration?
I don't know - I cannot answer for what Canadians think. I would hope not, but if you do then it is not really my place to dissuade you from thinking so.
As an American I hope that the reaction to the Trumpist destruction will be some long-overdue major reforms (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47092688) and accountability for the current regime that might engender trust and repairing of relationships over time. But I was also hopeful that my fellow countrymen wouldn't be foolish enough to vote for a candidate with a proven track record of "death to America", so I'm probably being overly hopeful here.
Uh, what?! You really, really aren't getting it. Discussing a point isn't the issue. Debating with someone, your position, isn't the issue.
It's the presumptive assignment of "this other side is the enemy" and "he said a word, thus he must be the enemy" and all that blather which I've described repeatedly up-post. And yes, you were complaining about length, else you would not have mentioned it.
I can tell you won't get what I say, no matter what I write here.
All I will close with, is that while I see you are working on ways to resolve some issues, the single biggest issue is money. You need to remove almost all campaign funding from elections. Capping all funding to $1000/person, and $1000/company, along with lots of other things (such as, no "gifts", no donations, etc) would make an enormous difference.
Not only would it make it easier for grass roots, new parties to rise up, it would also remove all dependence upon mega-corps to successfully run a campaign.
You should put that at the top of the list.
In a lot of countries (including Canada), if you go to lunch with a politician, you cannot pay for his lunch. Nor he, yours. That's illegal.
That's how rigid it needs to be.
By mindslight 2026-03-0220:02 Well I do consider the Trump regime my enemy. By all measures their goals appear to be to drastically harm the position of the United States. And not in a positive-sum competitive way like another country, but rather outright negative-sum looting and destruction.
But that doesn't mean I consider its grassroots supporters my enemy. I understand, sympathize, and often share their frustrations! You should have been able to glean that from my few preceding comments. The problem is that they're stuck in horrible media bubbles telling them that anybody who deviates from the Party mantra is their enemy - and this has been going on much longer than Trump.
I have long tried to engage on the issues they claim to care about, often in person, seemingly to no avail. One stark example I have is an extended family member complaining about GPS satellites tracking their location through their phone. This is something I myself care deeply about, and also know a thing or two about as well. But trying to make the point to them that there are some understandable mechanics whereby you can start taking concrete steps to at least reduce the tracking? Zero recognition or interest!
The only conclusion I can see is that they use the vague paranoia and blaming "the government" as a group identity bonding mechanism. By deviating from the mantras, I declare myself as an outsider who in their eyes is merely part of the problem.
But anyway, that's my trying to explain where I am coming from, which hopefully addresses the thrust of your point. But from your past few comments, I've gotten the impression you're not really reading my explanations here. Rather you're doing the exact thing you bemoan - seeing me as the enemy, ignoring my substantive engagement, and only aiming to beat me down regardless.
And sure maybe this makes sense from the Canadian perspective these days - cut off ties, erect barriers to protect yourselves, and try to move on. I cannot say, and I wouldn't blame you! But don't lecture me about it with some assumed moral authority, especially regarding the response to a single-word non-substantive flamebait.
(As for campaign finance reform that was addressed in my point #3. We used to have a semblance of that before the Supreme Council invalidated it. My list wasn't really meant to be ordered per se)
By mindslight 2026-02-2717:391 reply ... signal a particular vice. It's vice signalling. We generally think of war as bad and try to avoid it, most especially the people tasked with fighting said wars.
Nothing has changed about the performative-ness, in fact if anything it's gotten more performative and hollow. They just signal vices rather than virtues, so a bunch of rightist-flavored-Lenin's useful idiots think it is fresh or effective or anti-"woke" or at least different.
Ah, yes, the Orwellian newspeak that is the phrase "Department of Defense" is something worth protecting. What next, the Ministry of Truth?
I don't really give any weight to what a leftist considers a vice or a virtue.
By mindslight 2026-02-281:47 The "Orwellian newspeak" at least makes an effort to aim for positive values, despite falling short. That's the point.
Also, please define what you mean by "leftist". These days it seems like it gets applied to anybody who believes in Constitutionally-limited government and the rule of law. That used to just be called being an American, but social media is a hell of a drug.
By croes 2026-02-2811:01 Pretty ironic that this is coming from the same people that are opposing preferred pronouns and like to deadname people.
By LordDragonfang 2026-02-2718:04 Also by the people that just work there(, man).
I mean, as dumb as it is, there is a certain musicality to hearing someone with a southern accent sardonically call it the dee-oh-dubya.
By learingsci 2026-02-2721:36 Is over $50,000, all arguments are invalid.
Anthropic already went through the process of getting approved to work in secure network. (I think xAI may have as well, but the others just don't have that access.)
By nerdyadventurer 2026-02-282:06 Microsoft AI (OpenAI) have already being used for war. Possibly Google AI too.
By api 2026-02-2717:45 3- These others have more influence with the administration and are using it to bully a competitor?
WaPo is reporting that OpenAI and xAI already agreed to the Pentagon's "any lawful use" clause, aka, mass surveillance and fully autonomous killbots. From the WaPo article https://archive.is/yz6JA#selection-435.42-435.355
> Officials say other leading AI firms have gone along with the demand. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, Google and Elon Musk’s xAI have agreed to allow the Pentagon to use their systems for “all lawful purposes” on unclassified networks, a Defense official said, and are working on agreements for classified networks.
The only difference is simply that Anthropic is already approved for use on classified networks, whereas Grok and OpenAI are not yet (but are being fast-tracked for approval, especially Grok). Edit: Note someone below pointed out that OpenAI may be approved for Secret level, so it's odd that Washington Post reports that they are working on it still.
By fcarraldo 2026-02-2717:47 OpenAI is usable through Azure for Government up to IL-6.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/azuregov/azure-openai-authori...
Either Anthropic is seen as the clear leader (it certainly is for coding agents) or this is a political stunt to stamp out any opposition to the administration. Or both.
> fully autonomous killbots
I keep hearing this but it should be plainly obvious to everyone (at least here) that an LLM is not the right AI for this use case. That's like trying to use chatgpt for an airplane autopilot, it doesn't make sense. Other ML models may but not an LLM. Why does the "autonomous killbot" thing keep getting brought up when discussing Anthropic and other llm providers?
For reference, "autonomous killbots" are in use right now in the Ukraine/Russia war and they run on fpv drones, not acres of GPUs. Also, it should be obvious that there's a >90% probability every predator/reaper drone has had an autonomous kill mode for probably a decade now. Maybe it's never been used in warfare, that we know of, but to think it doesn't exist already is bonkers.
By TGower 2026-02-2718:11 It wouldn't make sense to have the LLM try to do the target recognition, trajectory planning, or motor control. It might make sense to have the LLM at a higher level handling monitoring of systems and coordination with other instances, to provide more flexibility to react to novel situations than rules bases systems.
By morkalork 2026-02-2720:28 It's almost a silly distinction since ML has been used in weapons for quite a while. For example: Javelin missiles have automatic target recognition, cruise missles have intelligent terrain following, long range drones use algos like SLAM for guidance.
By tikhonj 2026-02-2717:30 3- Anthropic looks "woke" and the administration cares more about perceptions than reality.
Not too different from picking on Harvard/etc.
By Spooky23 2026-02-2718:21 You’re reading into it like the federal government is an honest broker.
It’s just corruption. Google is a bigger fish. OpenAI is attached to Oracle and Larry Ellison, who is a Trump collaborator. Kushner is also in investor.
Anthropic is the weakest animal in the herd. They also started a campaign targeting OpenAI, which is capturing hearts and minds (everyone is talking about Claude Code), and really pissed off Sam Altman.
By jstummbillig 2026-02-2717:045 reply On the one hand it's fantastic that people are resisting and, if nothing else, raising awareness and buying time.
On the other hand, is autonomous war not obviously the endgame, given how quickly capabilities are increasing and that it simply does not require much intelligence (relatively speaking) to build something that points a gun at something and pulls a trigger?
It just needs one player to do it, so everyone has to be able to do it. I'd love to hear about different scenarios scenario.
By renewiltord 2026-02-2717:39 That part isn’t actually clear. If China invents autonomous drones instead of us and they fuck it up they’ll kill their people.
Things like Scout AI’s Fury system are human in the loop still and I think for something that could just as well make a mistake and target your own troops it’s not yet clear that full auto is the way to go https://scoutco.ai/
Human in the loop okaying a full auto seems like it could work almost all the way. And then we count on geography. If they want to spray out a bunch of autonomous drones into our territory they do have to fly here to do it first or plant them prior in shipping containers. Better we aim at stopping that.
It's not that hard. DoD could find a contractor to do it. But Anthropic wants no part of it, and I get why.
By jstummbillig 2026-02-2718:15 I absolutely do get it, but if you assume that eventually (and by that I mean: very, very soon) somebody else will do it, in how far is this line of action simply opting out of having some say in all of it and taking responsibility for situation that you instrumented?
And I am honestly not sure.
If your stance is "well, this is something that should just not happen" and also believe that is absolutely will happen, then what are you doing by saying "but it won't be us, it will instead be other people (who were enabled and inspired by our work in unsurprising ways)".
On the other hand, just the act of resisting could tip the scale in some incalculable and hopefully positive way.
By fcarraldo 2026-02-2717:50 Yes - Anthropic _does_ incur business risk if their products are misused and this becomes a scandal. Legally the government may be in the clear to use the product, but that doesn’t mean Anthropic’s business is protected. Moral concerns aside, it’s their prerogative to decide not to take on a customer that may misuse their product in a way that might incur reputational harm.
Or it was their prerogative, until the Trump administration. Now even private companies must bend the knee.
By stronglikedan 2026-02-2717:362 reply > It just needs one player to do it, so everyone has to be able to do it.
Businesses stay out of potentially profitable market segments for various reasons, so I don't think everyone has to be able to do it to survive.
We are constantly told how the board has a fiduciary responsibility to make investors money to overrule these various reasons.
By Henchman21 2026-02-2720:571 reply We’re constantly told all sorts of stuff. It isn’t clear to me at all that this fiduciary duty exists in law at all, more its a collection of precedents and wishful thinking.
Using fiduciary duty as cover for profiting from the misery of others? Well that’s just some modern American doublespeak. I’m consistently asking myself “Are we the Baddies?” and the only answer I have anymore is yes.
By dylan604 2026-02-2721:31 agreed. I've never thought that fiduciary duties meant tossing out all morals and considerations of right/wrong to the point that one must make any decision in a way that will make the most money within legal bounds. I'm no economist or lawyer, but I've always taken it that the duty is to not do dumb shit that will lose money and to do things that protect it. The reading of "make money at all cost" just seems like a strained interpretation, yet it's trotted out very frequently with not enough push back.
By jstummbillig 2026-02-2718:16 Oh, I meant at state level. Business, yeah: the DoD (excuse me: Department of War) just needs one killer model.
By Enginerrrd 2026-02-2717:105 reply > it simply does not require much intelligence (relatively speaking) to build something that points a gun at something and pulls a trigger?
I could not disagree more. A big part of that is also knowing when NOT to pull the trigger. And it’s much harder than you’d think. If you think full self driving is a difficult task for computers, battlefield operations are an order of magnitude more complex, at least.
We have fully autonomous weapons, and had them for over a century. We call them "landmines".
I expect autonomous weapons of the near future to look somewhat similar to that. They get deployed to an area, attack anything that looks remotely like a target there for a given time, then stand down and return to base. That's it.
The job of the autonomous weapon platform isn't telling friend from foe - it's disposing of every target within a geofence when ordered to do so.
And the arms industry has been pushing smart mines for decades, so that they can keep selling them despite the really bad long-term consequences (well beyond the end of hostilities) and the Ottawa Treaty ban. In the end, land mines are killing people although the mines are supposed to be sufficiently advanced not to target persons.
From a security perspective, the “return to base” part seems rather problematic. I doubt you'd want to these things to be concentrated in a single place. And I expect that the long-term problems will be rather similar to mines, even if the electronics are non-operational after a while.
By ACCount37 2026-02-2721:33 "Smart mines" specifically can be designed so that they're literally incapable of exploding once a deployment timer expires, or a fixed design time limit is reached.
It just makes the mines themselves more expensive - and landmines are very much a "cheap and cheerful" product.
For most autonomous weapons, the situation is even more favorable. Very few things can pack the power to sit for decades waiting for a chance to strike. Dumb landmines only get there by the virtue of being powered by the enemy.
Well, I assume that they are at least not to attack their autonomous "comrades". Masquerading as such will be one obvious tactic, no ? You could argue that these guys would use e2e encrypted messages as FOF designation, but I would imagine a contested area would be blanketed with jammers, leaving only other options (light ? but smokescreens. Audio? Also easily jammed). So this isn't as easy as most people think.
Edit: No, I don't think a purely defensive stance like landmines is sufficient and what the people in command think.
We have landmines today. Why spend much more making marginally better, highly intelligent ones with LLMs?
By golem14 2026-02-2719:17 Also, a longer quote from Douglas Adams might be appropriate here (also appropriate to agentic vibe coding ...)
Click, hum.
The huge grey Grebulon reconnaissance ship moved silently through the black void. It was travelling at fabulous, breathtaking speed, yet appeared, against the glimmering background of a billion distant stars to be moving not at all. It was just one dark speck frozen against an infinite granularity of brilliant night. On board the ship, everything was as it had been for millennia, deeply dark and Silent.
Click, hum.
At least, almost everything.
Click, click, hum.
Click, hum, click, hum, click, hum.
Click, click, click, click, click, hum.
Hmmm.
A low level supervising program woke up a slightly higher level supervising program deep in the ship's semi-somnolent cyberbrain and reported to it that whenever it went click all it got was a hum.
The higher level supervising program asked it what it was supposed to get, and the low level supervising program said that it couldn't remember exactly, but thought it was probably more of a sort of distant satisfied sigh, wasn't it? It didn't know what this hum was. Click, hum, click, hum. That was all it was getting. The higher level supervising program considered this and didn't like it. It asked the low level supervising program what exactly it was supervising and the low level supervising program said it couldn't remember that either, just that it was something that was meant to go click, sigh every ten years or so, which usually happened without fail. It had tried to consult its error look-up table but couldn't find it, which was why it had alerted the higher level supervising program to the problem.
The higher level supervising program went to consult one of its own look-up tables to find out what the low level supervising program was meant to be supervising.
It couldn't find the look-up table.
Odd.
It looked again. All it got was an error message. It tried to look up the error message in its error message look-up table and couldn't find that either. It allowed a couple of nanoseconds to go by while it went through all this again. Then it woke up its sector function supervisor.
The sector function supervisor hit immediate problems. It called its supervising agent which hit problems too. Within a few millionths of a second virtual circuits that had lain dormant, some for years, some for centuries, were flaring into life throughout the ship. Something, somewhere, had gone terribly wrong, but none of the supervising programs could tell what it was. At every level, vital instructions were missing, and the instructions about what to do in the event of discovering that vital instructions were missing, were also missing. Small modules of software - agents - surged through the logical pathways, grouping, consulting, re-grouping. They quickly established that the ship's memory, all the way back to its central mission module, was in tatters. No amount of interrogation could determine what it was that had happened. Even the central mission module itself seemed to be damaged.
This made the whole problem very simple to deal with. Replace the central mission module. There was another one, a backup, an exact duplicate of the original. It had to be physically replaced because, for safety reasons, there was no link whatsoever between the original and its backup. Once the central mission module was replaced it could itself supervise the reconstruction of the rest of the system in every detail, and all would be well.
Robots were instructed to bring the backup central mission module from the shielded strong room, where they guarded it, to the ship's logic chamber for installation.
This involved the lengthy exchange of emergency codes and protocols as the robots interrogated the agents as to the authenticity of the instructions. At last the robots were satisfied that all procedures were correct. They unpacked the backup central mission module from its storage housing, carried it out of the storage chamber, fell out of the ship and went spinning off into the void.
This provided the first major clue as to what it was that was wrong.
By snowwrestler 2026-02-2718:361 reply You don’t need Anthropic for this use case, so obviously this use case is not what the current fight is about.
By ACCount37 2026-02-2721:20 You don't need Anthropic for any use case. They don't ship VLAs either - nothing from Anthropic's entire model lineup can run on a killer drone.
Which raises the question: why did the Pentagon try to pressure Anthropic at all?
On the principle of it? Political reasons? Or was the real concern "domestic warrantless surveillance"?
By mothballed 2026-02-2717:371 reply I guess by that definition, a bullet is also autonomous. It will strike anything in its path of flight, autonomously without further direction from the operator.
By disillusioned 2026-02-2717:50 Bullets don't kill people, etc. etc.
If anything represents the logical conclusion of that tired fallacy, it'll be actually autonomous, "thinking" drones which make the targeting decisions and execution decisions on their own, not based on any direct, human-led orders, but derived from second-order effects of their neural net. At a certain point, it's not going to matter who launched the drones, or even who wrote the software that runs on the drones. If we're letting the drones decide things, it'll just be up to the drones, and I don't love our chances making our case to them.
By strangattractor 2026-02-2717:47 "Since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, unexploded ordnance (UXO)—including landmines, cluster bombs, and artillery shells—has killed over 40,000 people and injured or maimed more than 60,000 others." - Google AI Overview "How many children were maimed by landmines after the vietnam war"
By thejohnconway 2026-02-2717:28 Yes, but it doesn’t have to be error-free. The friendly fire rates in symmetrical hot wars is pretty high, it’s considered a cost of going to war.
If autonomous weapons lead to a net battlefield advantage, I agree with the GP, they will be used. It is the endgame.
By collingreen 2026-02-2717:24 The big asterisk in what you're saying is, like self driving cars, it's hardest when you want to be the most precise and limit the downsides. In this paradigm, false positives and false negatives have a very big cost.
If you simply wanted to cause havoc and destruction with no regard for collateral damage then the problem space is much more simple since you only need enough true positives to be effective at your mission.
The ability to code with ai has shown that it requires an even higher level of responsibility and discipline than before in order to get good results without out of control downside. I think the ability to kill with ai would be the same way but even more severe.
> A big part of that is also knowing when NOT to pull the trigger
"In a press conference, Musk promised that the Optimus Warbots would actually, definitely, for real, be fully autonomous in two years, in 2031. He also extended his condolences to the 56 service members killed during the training exercise"
By ben_w 2026-02-2722:31 I've not watched all of Robocop (too much gore for me), but I have seen the boardroom introduction of the ED-209.
That's how I imagine a Musk demo of this kind of thing would play out, if his team can't successfully manage upwards.
And the US learned the lesson the hard way in Iraq that in fact even human intelligence struggles with this. There were major problems throughout the war with individual soldiers not adhering to the published rules of engagement.
By NoGravitas 2026-02-2719:24 Yes, but the important bit is that autonomous drones can't be held accountable for not adhering to the published rules of engagement.
By gom_jabbar 2026-02-2717:25 > It just needs one player to do it, so everyone has to be able to do it. I'd love to hear a different scenario.
Other players just need to assume that one player might do it in the future. This virtual future scenario has a causal effect on the now. The overall dynamic is that of an arms race (which radically changes what a player is).
