Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by notavalleyman 718 days ago
Its possible that you may have misunderstood what happened.

Firstly, anthropic made an LLM, exposed it to the internet, and provided these terms of acceptable use.

https://www.anthropic.com/legal/archive/4903a61b-037c-4293-9...

There was no need for cynicism or kool aid at this stage.

Later on, presumably now-ish, anthropic changed the usage policy, to add an exception.

https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/9528712-exceptions...

> Exceptions to our Usage Policy

> Updated today

The exception is that, starting from now,

> Anthropic may enter into contracts with government customers that tailor use restrictions to that customer’s public mission and legal authorities if, in Anthropic’s judgment, the contractual use restrictions and applicable safeguards are adequate to mitigate the potential harms addressed by this Usage Policy.

I don't think any kool aid or cynicism is needed.

The change is that, if anthropic think the client use case meets the listed humanitarian goals, then the client may use the LLM.

1 comments

Modern version of "Do no evil"? Come on, no one believes that sort of thing any longer.
They changed their policy, it now says "if the governmental client can convince anthropic that the government client needs to use Claude for purposes of anti-human trafficking. Then, anthropic will allow the government client to use Claude."

It doesn't require you to believe anything. It is not a modern version of any slogan. It's simply that, anthropic will allow government clients to use Claude if anthropic are convinced it's for certain, listed purposes. You are looking at this and approaching it ass-backwards.

It used to be a forbidden use case, or not an expresssly permitted one, for governments to use Claude to fight human trafficking.

Now it expressly permitted. You don't have to drink kool aid to understand this.

The Kansas city FBI field office's human task force, can now get some api keys, as long as they can convince anthropic that it's for a "catch a predator" sting.