[BoxFour]

I don't think it's about lethal autonomy specifically as much as it's just about government autonomy period. They don’t think private companies should have any veto power over how the government uses some technology they're provided.

On its face that’s not a crazy stance: Governments are meant to represent the public, while private companies obviously aren't. I think it’s somewhat understandable why the government might reject that kind of "we know better than you" type of clause.

Of course, the reaction is wildly out of proportion. A normal response would just be to stop doing business with the company and move on. Labeling them a supply chain risk is an extreme response.

[dmschulman]

Additionally that kind of public trust only works if you have a government operating under the constraints of a legal framework, and to a lesser extent, an ethical framework. When a government serves the whims of an individual and instead of the function of their office, shirking agreed upon laws, etc, then you no longer have a government serving the people.

[BoxFour]

Sure, that’s why I said "on its face." This administration is obviously very different than most.

I don’t think Anthropic is wrong to include that clause with this particular administration, and I doubt the administration is internally framing the issue the way I did rather than defaulting to simple authoritarian instincts.

But a more reasonable administration could raise the same concern, and I think I would agree with them.

[whatshisface]

I don't think it's reasonable to take something the government is supposed to be protecting (right to contract) and turn them into its biggest threat. That's not security, it's letting the night guard raid the museum.

[BoxFour]

Sure, I said as such:

> Of course, the reaction is wildly out of proportion. A normal response would just be to stop doing business with the company and move on. Labeling them a supply chain risk is an extreme response.

[remarkEon]

Agree, and I think the labeling of them (Anthropic) a supply chain risk was handled poorly and will likely be reverted over time. That being said, I would be nervous if I was in the Pentagon and depended on Anthropic tooling for something, even if that something was unrelated to kinetic operations. How do they audit that Anthropic can't alter model outputs for contexts they (the ethics board or whatever it's called, can't remember) don't like? If you sell a weapon to the department that is in charge of killing people and breaking things, you don't get a say in who gets killed or how. It's never worked like that.

Maybe the argument is that they should, but I don't agree with that. If Anthropic or any of these other vendors have reservations about the logical conclusion of how these tools will be/are used then they should not sell to the government. Simple as. However ... if the claims Anthropic et al make about how these systems will develop and the capabilities they will have are at all true, then the government will come knocking anyway.

[BoxFour]

> the government will come knocking anyway.

Dario has even said something along these lines at one point: As the technology matures, it’s very possible the government either nationalizes or semi-nationalizes companies like Anthropic.

That doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility if they can’t land on a relationship similar to existing defense contractors like Raytheon, where these kinds of discussions obviously don't seem to happen.

[nradov]

If the government wants a frontier LLM for military purposes then they can just put out a tender. Defense contractors like Anduril will bid on it. The end product might be slightly worse than what Anthropic sells but, as my dad used to say, "close enough for government work".

[BoxFour]

They don’t even need to do that. Elon is almost certainly pushing Grok as hard as possible right now to them, and it’s not like this administration is especially concerned with running a fair procurement process.

So it’s probably some mix of two things:

1) A punitive “bend the knee us or we’ll destroy you,” which fits their track record.

2) Skepticism that Grok is actually as strong as the benchmarks suggest, which is also a pretty reasonable possibility.

[lejalv]

> If you sell a weapon to the department that is in charge of killing people and breaking things, you don't get a say in who gets killed or how. It's never worked like that.

I can't agree that this is the right comparison. What is being sold here is not just another missile or tank type, it is the very agency and responsibility over life and death. It's potentially the firing of thousands of missiles.

[spacemanspiff01]

> How do they audit that Anthropic can't alter model outputs for contexts they (the ethics board or whatever it's called, can't remember) don't like?

I was thinking that Anthropic would just be providing the models/setup support to run their models in aws gov cloud. They do not have any real insight into what is being asked. Maybe a few engineers have the specific clearances to access and debug the running systems, but that would one or two people who are embedded to debug inference issues - not something that would be analyzed by others in the company.

The whole 'do not use our models for mass surveillance' is at the end of the day an honor system. Companies have no real way of enforcing that clause, or determining that it has been violated. That being said, at least historically, one has been able to trust the government to abide by commercial agreements. The people who work in cleared positions are generally selected for honesty, and ability, willingness to follow rules.

[remarkEon]

I think what you are describing is technically possible (not my immediate domain, however). They don't have real-time insight into what the model is being used for, you are correct about this afaik. But the incident that kicked off this paranoia was Anthopic calling around after the fact to try to find out how JSOC was using the model during the Maduro raid. None of the context of those questions are public, and I doubt they will become public, but it stands to reason that the nature of the questions was concerning enough for the War Department to cause them insist on the "any lawful use" language to be inserted into the contract.

>The whole 'do not use our models for mass surveillance' is at the end of the day an honor system. Companies have no real way of enforcing that clause, or determining that it has been violated.

You are also correct here imo, with one important caveat. Even if private companies have the means for enforcing that clause, it is not their business to do so. Maybe that's the crux of the problem, one of perspective. The for-profit entity in these arrangements is not and can never be trusted as the mechanism of enforcement for whatever we, as a republic, decide are the rules. That is the realm of elected government. Anthropic employees are certainly making their voice heard on how they believe these tools should be used, but, again, this is an is versus ought problem for them.

[btown]

A counter-argument here: if a private company knows that its technology may be used for human-not-in-loop targeting/surveillance, and knows that its technology is not yet ready to fulfill that use case without meaningful unintended casualties... does that company have an ethical obligation to contractually delineate its inability to offer that service?

In a version of a trolley problem where you're on a track that will kill innocent people, and you have the opportunity to set up a contract that effectively moves a switch to a track without anyone on it, is it not imperative to flip that switch?

(One might argue that increased reaction times might save service members' lives - but the whole point is that if the autonomous targeting is incorrect, it may just as well lead to increased violence and service member casualties in the aggregate.)

And we're not talking about the ethics board manipulating individual token outputs subtly, which would indeed be a supply chain risk - we're talking about a contractual relationship in which, if a supplier detects use outside of the scope of an agreed contract, it has the contractual right to not provide the service for that novel use, while maintaining support for prior use cases.

The fact that the government would use the threat of supply chain risk to enforce a better contract is unprecedented, and it deteriorates the government's standing as a reliable counterparty in general.

[remarkEon]

It's an interesting question, but it's mostly irrelevant.

This problem is really difficult to discuss because we are all wrapping the capabilities of these tools into our response framing. These are tools, or weapons. Your hypothetical could just as easily be applied to GBU-39s, a smaller laser guided bomb that's meant to take out, say, a single vehicle in a convoy versus the entire set of vehicles. If you're not confident in what the product is supposed to do, and you've already sold it to the government, you have lied and they are going to come back to you asking some direct questions.

[crote]

> They don’t think private companies should have any veto power over how the government uses some technology they're provided.

On the other hand, why should the government have infinite power to override how a business operates? If you're not able to refuse to sell to the government, isn't that basically forced speech and/or forced labor?

[nradov]

If you want to engage on this topic then you should start by reading up on the Defense Production Act of 1950.

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R43767

[mlinhares]

It’s not obvious that the government should have to power to overwrite this, the US constitution was written as a collection of negative rights exactly to rein in government dictatorial impulses.

And now that we see the government blatantly disrespecting the constitution and the rule of law the civil community must react.

[BoxFour]

> It’s not obvious that the government should have to power to overwrite this

The government shouldn’t be able to set the terms of its contracts with private companies and walk away if those terms aren’t acceptable? That seems like a stretch.

The constitution is a wildly different premise from government contracting with private companies.

[mlinhares]

There was no contract, the government wanted to have a contract where they'd be able to use the tool to violate privacy rights of its citizens and issue kill orders without a human present and the company said no.

The government shouldn't be able to coerce a business to do whatever it wants.

[BoxFour]

> There was no contract, the government wanted to have a contract where they'd be able to use the tool to violate privacy rights of its citizens and issue kill orders without a human present and the company said no.

So the contract process worked. The seller wanted certain clauses, the buyer rejected them, and the deal didn’t happen.

Setting aside the supply chain risk designation, which I already said was an extreme overreaction, this is basically how it’s supposed to work.

> The government shouldn't be able to coerce a business to do whatever it wants.

Governments coerce businesses all the time to do what the government wants. Taxes are the obvious example, but there are many others like OFAC sanctions lists or even just regular old business regulations.

It mostly works because we rely on governments to use that power wisely, and to use it in a way that represents the wishes of the populace. Clearly that assumption is being tested with the current administration and especially in this particular situation, but the government coerces businesses to do what they want all the time and we often see it as a good thing.