The Department of War has stated they will only contract with AI companies who accede to “any lawful use” and remove safeguards in the cases mentioned above. They have threatened to remove us from their systems if we maintain these safeguards; they have also threatened to designate us a “supply chain risk”—a label reserved for US adversaries, never before applied to an American company—and to invoke the Defense Production Act to force the safeguards’ removal. These latter two threats are inherently contradictory: one labels us a security risk; the other labels Claude as essential to national security.
Regardless, these threats do not change our position: we cannot in good conscience accede to their request.
It is the Department’s prerogative to select contractors most aligned with their vision. But given the substantial value that Anthropic’s technology provides to our armed forces, we hope they reconsider. Our strong preference is to continue to serve the Department and our warfighters—with our two requested safeguards in place. Should the Department choose to offboard Anthropic, we will work to enable a smooth transition to another provider, avoiding any disruption to ongoing military planning, operations, or other critical missions. Our models will be available on the expansive terms we have proposed for as long as required.
Better to be skeptical about everyone here, and there are certainly no heroes.
However it should be obvious that a country’s department of war surveilling its own citizens is a completely inappropriate overreach. They exist to protect the country from outside threats. You’re casting it as some kind of discrimination, and claiming it would be more moral to treat everyone the same, but that seems willfully obtuse to me. Calling it a “special carve out” for a country to protect its own citizens… come on. Obviously since you are not an American it does nothing for you but you are working way too hard to spin that up into a sin.
Obviously a country spying on its citizens is unacceptable overreach, I never claimed otherwise. And if my own government was conducting mass surveillance on me I would be particularly furious at the betrayal. But I would also not support it conducting surveillance on foreigners either. That is the “sin” Anthropic is guilty of, in my eyes.
Mass surveillance is simply immoral. It is targeting innocent people who have not even been accused of any crime and robbing them of their right to privacy. It is also giving states absolute leverage to harm, blackmail or manipulate anyone they want at will.
The argument that it is all done in the name of protecting its own citizens also falls flat in this case, as that is exactly the same excuse used for mass domestic surveillance - everyone loses their privacy, but the good, law-abiding citizens are protected from the criminal elements who would threaten them. “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”.
Let’s not kid ourselves, this is not about protecting anyone. They plan to spy not only on their “enemies” but also on their closest allies, as they have in the past. This is about gaining power. And states in general already have far too much power over individuals.
Kowtowing to the Department of War and offering to sell them an AI for mass surveillance is not OK, even if it truly were to limit itself to the common, genteel use case of spying on foreign people.
I’m hardly going to defend the Pentagon, but to say a country should not even have an intelligence operation whatsoever, that this isn’t elementary to protecting its citizenry, is beyond naive and unrealistic.
Well yeah, that’s true, but I didn’t say that, did I? Not even remotely.
We are specifically talking about mass surveillance. I will let you reflect on the implications of an intelligence apparatus with the ability to have a Claude-level AI scanning every piece of information on the internet by yourself.