[jimmydddd]

I'm confused. Sam writes "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." How is this different from what Anthropic wanted?

[rickydroll]

As far as I can tell, and I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong, the OpenAI version was, we'll let the government do whatever it wants, that's specified in law. Whereas Anthropic seemed to say, we're not going to cross those lines, even if they are permitted by law.

Important distinction as there are now no laws against autonomous weapons and surveillance has been widespread and unhindered by judicial oversight for quite a while now.

[jimmydddd]

So I guess the question is, when Sam says "and we put them into our agreement," what exactly was in the agreement? I distrust Sam. But if you were to trust his statements, it seems like he's saying he implemented in his agreement with the gevernment the safety features Anthropic wanted.

[mnicky]

He's trying to make it sound so, but in legal domain, devil lies in the details.

It seems that government wanted to use Claude for mass analysis of commercially obtained data on American people and Anthropic wouldn't let them (source: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/03/inside-anthro... ).

DoD kept asking for changes of contract where at least the legalese would be changed to somewhat more permissive but Anthropic stayed their ground.

Sam Altman probably let them do that, while using language like "we have technical means of oversight and the same red lines as Anthropic". But in reality they will allow DoD to do what Anthropic didn't.

See this for more information: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PBrggrw4mhgbksoYY/a-tale-of-...