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by cbb330 2 days ago
so deeply embarrassing that they published an eng blog about it
3 comments

If they quietly brushed this under the rug - especially given the PyPI malware that was involved - it would be a huge scandal.

Disclosure is the only ethical response to this.

The target audience of this blog post does not give a damn about PyPI. The affected parties get literally nothing from this post. They already disclosed behind the scenes, that was the ethical part.

Writing PR pieces competing to be the most dangerous model around (so give us money!) is the unethical part.

You are right, they should never tell the public about failures in AI safety. They should have disclosed to the affected parties and then brushed it under the rug.

JFC there really is no satisfying the HN crowd.

50% of web hits are now bots.

a charitable assumption is that is one that is poorly calibrated and trying to drive engagement.

Then disclose to real organizations. Not twitter
Ethical AI company ?

Is that a flock of flying pigs I see on the horizon ?

Companies post deeply embarrassing eng blogs all the time. See: every post about downtime or a security incident ever.
Wrong. These are always humblebrags about how good their ability to learn from their mistakes is, and how robust they were before, and how they are even more robust now.

The ones that are "deeply embarrassing" simply aren't posted.

AWS never "humblebrags" about an outage. No blog post looks as good as an extra 9.
Right? 100% this is them trying to make gold out of turds.
There's nothing Anthropic can do to satisfy the HN crowd, is there? If they don't post about this they're bad. If they post about this they're bad.

They are not bragging in this article or they would not have called the attacks unsophisticated.

they should post and it shows they are hypocritical about safety, moralizing and treating their users like children whilst acting like they are themselves the ubermensch.

anthropic have shown no motive higher than self interest, the rsp was a piece of toilet paper.

this stops in court, if we do not start the criminal prosecution of individuals there will become a culture of legal impunity coupled with an extreme concentration of wealth and control of intelligence

Wild comment. Making a mistake does not mean that AI safety is suddenly invalid. Calling for criminal prosecution for making a mistake is wild. No one would disclose their mistakes if this happened.
yes, a mistake can be a crime, depending on negligence and liability. the bigger problem at anthropic is this.

an ubermensch cannot admit to being wrong. a guilty ubermensch is logically impossible.

as such a moral wrong caused by an ubermensch must be blamed on a "mistake" in the abstract, and not blamed on the ubermensch. the ubermensch at anthropic does not admit responsibility or liability. the ubermensch must instead be commended and perhaps even rewarded, for discovering the reified "mistake" that caused the problem.

there is no ubermensch at anthropic. there are instead guilty people.

false ubermensch are dangerous because they centralize power with the belief that they are above the rest. über (above), and super ('beyond' the understanding). they do not admit to doing or being wrong, and never take responsibility for remediation. others must bear the costs of false ubermensch.

> and control of intelligence

They'd have first to acquire some.

> there will become a culture of legal impunity coupled with an extreme concentration of wealth and control of intelligence

There will be? We're living in that culture.

The real lesson here is still the boy who cried wolf. They’ve played this game for years. I have no reason to believe their worries are real now.
I see no fear mongering or "boy who cried wolf" in this article. They are admitting to a fairly mundane network misconfiguration and very basic unsophisticated actions taken by Claude thereafter