[tfehring]

> For intelligence activities, any handling of private information will comply with the Fourth Amendment, the National Security Act of 1947 and the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act of 1978, Executive Order 12333, and applicable DoD directives requiring a defined foreign intelligence purpose. The AI System shall not be used for unconstrained monitoring of U.S. persons’ private information as consistent with these authorities. The system shall also not be used for domestic law-enforcement activities except as permitted by the Posse Comitatus Act and other applicable law.

My reading of this is that OpenAI's contract with the Pentagon only prohibits mass surveillance of US citizens to the extent that that surveillance is already prohibited by law. For example, I believe this implies that the DoW can procure data on US citizens en masse from private companies - including, e.g., granular location and financial transaction data - and apply OpenAI's tools to that data to surveil and otherwise target US citizens at scale. As I understand it, this was not the case with Anthropic's contract.

If I'm right, this is abhorrent. However, I've already jumped to a lot of incorrect conclusions in the last few days, so I'm doing my best to withhold judgment for now, and holding out hope for a plausible competing explanation.

(Disclosure, I'm a former OpenAI employee and current shareholder.)

[gentleman11]

Open ai, the former non-profit, whose board tried to fire the CEO for being deceptive, which is no longer open at all, isn't exactly about ethics these days.

Even on a personal level: OpenAI has changed it's privacy policy twice to let them gather data on me they weren't before. A lot of steps to disable it each time, tons of dark patterns. And the data checkout just bugs out too, it's a fake feature to hide how much they are using everything you type to them

[tootie]

The coup against Altman looks prescient. They knew who he was.

[AndrewKemendo]

Clearly it didn’t matter

Capital always wins because there’s an infinite line of psychopaths at the ready to screw everybody over for slightly less money than the previous person did

[satvikpendem]

His own employees helped reinstate him, not the capital class which was actually the board that fired him.

[AndrewKemendo]

The board that fired him wasn’t really “the capital class” in the traditional sense. It was a nonprofit board with an unusual governance structure specifically designed to limit investor controlling. Ilya and Helen were acting on safety/governance concerns, arguably against the interests of capital (Microsoft, VCs).

Like literally he’s doing right now the thing that would not have been done had Ilya and the other board members retained their positions

[tootie]

Not psychopaths. I recall it being rank and file who were concerned about their options or whatever. Greed is fundamental human behavior.

[mannanj]

I wish more people just honestly called out deception and liars like you do.

If we had a simple lookup community maintained system for this, would you use it? What do you think its design would need to be to be used, gain traction and be valuable?

I want this so bad.

[eduction]

So why would we want them setting policy for the DoD? Laws are enacted through a fundamentally democratic process defined over hundreds of years. Why wouldn’t that be the way to govern use of tools?

Why would we want to trade our constitution for, effectively, “rules Sam Altman came up with”?

[harimau777]

Part of the problem is that due to a combination of the electoral college, gerrymandering, voter supression, propaganda, and Citizens United; America's government is not meaningfully democratic.

Even setting that aside, I don't think that people are saying that they want corporations to make the rules. Rather, what I think they are saying is that they don't want AI to be used for mass surveilance or autonomous weapons and cutting the DoD off at the corporate level is one way to accomplish that.

[eduction]

Democracy doesn’t work so we should let a tech oligarchy run things? No thanks. I think it works better than that would.

[edgyquant]

Voter suppression is not a large scale problem in American (neither is voter fraud.) I would be curious why you mentioned that?

America is an indirect democracy, which isn’t a flaw it’s a design choice. Things like the electoral college still follow a process where the people choose (same with the Supreme Court) it’s just staggered as a system that prioritizes stability over big swings/rapid change.

[gcanyon]

College kids in Texas can't vote where they go to school despite living there nine months out of the year. https://thebarbedwire.com/2024/09/06/5-ways-texas-politician...

Native Americans can't vote because they don't have a designated physical address. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/how-...

Millions of americans don't have the ID they need to vote: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/mill...

Voter suppression is a huge problem.

[macintux]

There’s a strong push right now to mandate voter ID requirements that could block married women from voting (if their last name doesn’t match their birth certificate).

And more stringent ID requirements are discriminatory against the poor, who often don’t have the time and resources to deal with the bureaucracy necessary to do things like travel to retrieve a new copy of their birth certificate.

Recent suppression efforts are documented at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite...

[tw04]

> Voter suppression is not a large scale problem in American

So you aren’t a person of color who lives in the south I assume? I could also make a couple educated guesses about where you consume news from as well but I’m refrain.

Needless to say, it absolutely is an issue exacerbated by Supreme Court actions pretending it wouldn’t quickly become one.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/its-very-much-a-racial-issue...

[Darvon]

Use its real name, the one orange shitler renamed it to: the department of war.

Why the fuck does the department of war get to dictate anything to a private organization?

Why does the constitution say that you have to let the government murder schoolgirls with your tools?

[code_duck]

He doesn’t actually have the authority to rename the department. That would be up to Congress.

[nicwolff]

The "funniest" thing about this is that in any other context, this administration absolutely insists that everyone should be called only by their legal name, not any other name that they prefer because they think it better suits their identity.

[DougN7]

Lol. As if a tiny thing like that would stop him. Have you heard about the tariffs? Or starting a war yesterday?

[daveguy]

The point is, the name of the DoD is still the Department of Defense. Just like his dumb ass calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America didn't change the fact that it's still the Gulf of Mexico. All it meant is him wasting money on new letterhead to sooth his fragile ego.

[eduction]

Calm down, reactionary.

Yes our democratically appointed government gets to tell contractors what to do not vice versa. I’d much rather that than have the contractors run things. You think Blackwater, Lockheed, Mark Zuckerberg should dictate how our military works? Who is the fascist here?

[rootusrootus]

I'm fine with the Dept of Defense deciding the terms of the contract are not acceptable to them and therefore not doing business with Anthropic. Where it becomes very much not okay is when they retaliate against (or coerce) Anthropic by assigning them the supply chain risk designation. This is not telling a contractor what to do, this is attempting to put them out of business.

[Cytobit]

If they just tell them what to do, then there wouldn't need to be a contract, would there?

[irthomasthomas]

Why would you want a duplicitous CEO in charge of your countries terminator systems?

[eduction]

Yes that’s precisely what I’m saying. The government should fully control the systems it buys.

[devinus]

A corporation, according to US law, is considered a "person" and afforded many of the same rights as an individual citizen (https://www.fincen.gov/who-united-states-person).

Even outside of the US, a corporation is widely considered to be a company of people with their own agency and rights.

A person or group of people should be able to set their own boundaries without being subjected to immoral and unjust retaliation, i.e. corporate murder (https://x.com/i/status/2027515599358730315).

Also, ask any frontier model what Pete Hegseth thinks about democracy.

[eduction]

Anthropic is free to set its own boundaries and military is free to say that’s absurd and we’re not buying things we cant control.

Are you going to tell a farmer they are violating John Deere’s rights for boycotting their enshittified tractors?

[_alternator_]

This is exactly what it says: the only restrictions are the restrictions that are already in law. This seems like the weasel language Dario was talking about.

[kivle]

Laws that can be changed on a whim by "executive orders", or laws that apparently can be ignored completely, like international law.

[godelski]

Like by an administration who is constantly ignoring and violating both domestic and international law?

Like by an administration that likes to act extra judiciously and ignore habeas corups?

I wonder where we'd find such a government. Probably shouldn't give them the power to "do anything legal NOR 'consistent with operational requirements'". That's the power to do anything they want

[shikon7]

No, executive orders can't change law and international law, unless ratified by congress, is not democratically legitimized and applicable law in the US to begin with

[pixl97]

You mean like the tariffs congress didn't approve?

Dictators rarely gain power legitimately, and always keep it with violence.

[wyldfire]

There's a stark difference between de jure and de facto here. Executive orders will brazen, tyrannical effects and are often reined in late or never.

[tapoxi]

We just started a war with Iran without congressional approval or briefing, so I'm not sure if law has meaning anymore.

[jonnybgood]

War Powers Resolution. Obviously, there’s a law of which multiple presidents have used. Congress can change this law but there is a law that does give the POTUS this authority.

[ekidd]

Nope, the War Powers Resolution gives the president broad authority to respond to an active attack on the United States (which makes sense). But it does not allow the President to unilaterally start an aggressive war against some random country without Congressional approval.

Not that we live in country where laws or the Constitution matter much right now. It's theoretically possible that some people might someday be prosecuted for breaking laws or violating people's Constitutional rights. But even there, I world expect that many of the law breakers will simply be pardoned.

[trinsic2]

LOL. you really believe that?

[wrsh07]

They do note that their contract language specifically references the laws as they exist today.

Presumably if the laws become less restrictive, that does not impact OpenAI's contract with them (nothing would change) but if the laws become more restrictive (eg certain loopholes in processing American's data get closed) then OpenAI and the DoD should presumably^ not break the new laws.

^ we all get to decide how much work this presumably is doing

[tredre3]

> They do note that their contract language specifically references the laws as they exist today.

Where?

> The system shall also not be used for domestic law-enforcement activities except as permitted by the Posse Comitatus Act and other applicable law.

Sounds like it's worded to specifically apply to whatever law is currently applicable, no?

[wrsh07]

Not that this means the big AI corps should relax their values (it truly doesn't), but I would be extremely surprised if the DoD/DoW doesn't have anyone capable of fine tuning an open weights model for this purpose.

And, I mean, if they don't, gpt 5.3 is going to be pretty good help

Given the volume fine tuning a small model is probably the only cost effective way to do it anyway

[ajyoon]

Contrary to benchmarks, open weight models are way behind the frontier.

[wrsh07]

My point is that you don't want a big model for the kind of analysis being discussed here

Even if they were paying frontier prices they would be choosing 5 mini or nano with no thinking

At that point, a fine tuned open source model is going to be on the pareto frontier

[operator_nil]

People often overlook how all the NSA-related activities and government overreach come with a nice memo from officials stating how "lawful" the questionable actions they're taking are.

[caseysoftware]

> For example, I believe this implies that the DoW can procure data on US citizens en masse from private companies - including, e.g., granular location and financial transaction data - and apply OpenAI's tools to that data to surveil and otherwise target US citizens at scale.

Third Party Doctrine makes trouble for us once again.

Eliminate that and MANY nightmare scenarios disappear or become exceptionally more complicated.

[xvector]

You are exactly correct and this is what Dario has been speaking up about.

He calls this exact scenario out in last night's interview: https://youtu.be/MPTNHrq_4LU

[dataflow]

This is hilarious. I see their lawyers got together to find the most confusing way they could word it to throw people off and let everybody claim it says whatever's best for their own PR.

"Shall not be used as consistent with these authorities"?

So they shall only be used inconsistently with these authorities? That's the literal reading if you assume there's no typo.

Or did they forget a crucial comma that would imply they shall not use it, to the extent this provision is consistent with their authorities?

Or did they forget the comma but it was supposed to mean that they shall not use it, to the extent that not-doing so would be consistent with their authorities?

You gotta hand it to the lawyers, I'm not sure I could've thought of wording this deliberately confusing if they'd given me a million dollars.

[irthomasthomas]

Even worse is the kill-bot policy. The eventual-human-in-the-loop clause. aka as yolo mode or --dangerously-skip-permissions

Imagine arming chatgpt and letting it pick targets and launch missiles from clawdbot.

[enceladus06]

Previously Snowden leaked that the NSA and FBI accessed data directly from major U.S. internet companies. Now we have generative AI that can help identify targets much faster. IMO the government is amoral and interested in getting the best technology available, and integrating it into their systems. So the CEO etc can say one thing, and will do another.

Other nations including Israel and the PRC will also be working with their own implementations respectively because if they are not they know that everyone else is. So this is just basic game theory.

But the kicker is that 5y from now we will be able to run Codex 5.3x or Opus 4.6 on a $5000 mac studio, so nations states will want to immediately implement this kind of technology into their defense apparatus.

[eoskx]

thanks for speaking out, and yes, that was my interpretation, as well, which I outlined below. This is nothing more than some sugar coating on "lawful use" despite what OpenAI says and the contractual "safeguards" they tout like the FDEs.

[carefulfungi]

Surely this is the main issue - Doge and others have assembled massive databases of information about all Americans from across the government and now they want to use AI to start making lists.

[agb123]

DoD* - the Department of Defense was named through statute, and only the Congress has the power to change it.

[mvdtnz]

As a non-US person I take absolutely no solace in sama's statement (even if I believed a single word that snake has ever uttered, which I do not).

[davesque]

i.e. Combing through public forums on the internet looking for evidence of thought crime, however, is fair game. The Trump admin will undoubtedly use tools like this to compile a list political enemies or undesirables, which they will then use to harass people or selectively restrict individual rights. They're already doing this and this is just going to make it easier for them.

[pkaeding]

Yes. And I'm sure the next administration will as well. These things only ratchet in one direction.

[derwiki]

File your CCPA delete requests now while you can still disappear on the Internet!

[godelski]

  > to the extent that that surveillance is already prohibited by law.

The problem with government contracts where you say "can't do anything illegal" is that THEY DECIDE WHAT IS LEGAL. We're lucky we live in a system where you can challenge the government but I think either side of the isle you're on you think people are trying to dismantle that feature (we just disagree on who is doing that, right?).

<edit>

THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT DARIO WAS ARGUING and it is exactly why the DOD wanted to get around. They wanted to use Claude for all legal purposes and Anthropic said moral reasons.

Also notice the subtle language in OpenAI's red lines. "No use of OpenAI technology for mass *domestic* surveillance." We've seen how this was abused by the NSA already since normal communication in the Internet often crosses international lines. And what they couldn't get done that way they got around through allies who can spy on American citizens.

</edit>

I think we need to remember that legality != morality. It's our attempt to formalize morality but I think everyone sees how easy it is to skirt[0]

  > I believe this implies that the DoW can procure data on US citizens en masse from private companies - including

Call your senators. There's a bill in the senate explicitly about this. Here's the EFF's take [1]. IMO it's far from perfect but an important step. I think we should talk about this more. I have problems with it too, but hey, is anything in here preventing things from continuing to get better? It's too easy to critique and then do nothing. We've been arguing for over a decade, I'd rather take a small step than a step back.

  > If I'm right, this is abhorrent.

Let's also not forget WorldCoin[2]. World (blockchain)? World Network?

I have no trust for Altman. His solution to distinguishing humans from bots is mass biometric surveillance. This seems as disconnected as the CEO of Flock or that Ring commercial.

Not to mention all the safety failures. Sora was released allowing real people to be generated? Great marketing. Glad they "fixed it" so quickly...

There's a lot happening now and it's happening fast. I think we need to be careful. We've developed systems to distribute power but it naturally wants to accumulate. Be it government power or email providers. The greater the power, the greater the responsibility. But isn't that why we created distributed power systems in the first place?

Personally I don't want autonomous unquestioning killbots under the control of one or a small number of people. Even if you don't believe the one in control now is not a psychopath (-_-) then you can still agree that it's possible for that type of person to get control. Power corrupts. Things like killing another person should be hard, emotionally. That's a feature, not a flaw. Soldiers questioning orders is a feature, not a flaw. By concentrating power you risk handing that power to those that do not feel. We're making Turnkey Tyranny more dangerous

[0] and law is probably our best attempt to make a formal system out of a natural language but I digress

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/04/fourth-amendment-not-s...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_(blockchain)

[popalchemist]

Bingo.