Anthropic

Well, so much for the no war President. So easily manipulated by Netanyahu. As I said when we invaded Iraq, much easier to start these sorts of conflicts than to finish them or get into that tedious, pesky stuff like running a country. Just lob a big missile in and see what shakes down later, I guess. Hope for the best.

And on to the next opponent, Denmark, Canada, Mexico, Cuba, NATO, take your pick. Whoever the daffy old octogenarian sets his errant mind on next.

I really don't feel like riffing on current events but kudos to the man at Anthropic for adhering to his internal red lines that disallow use of his technology to mass spy on ordinary Americans or in autonomous weapons systems.

“No amount of intimidation or punishment from the Department of War will change our position on mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons,” Anthropic spokesman

So rare to see a red line these days. Looks like a dangerous system in the best of hands.

...even AI’s creators “do not understand how our own AI creations work,” as Amodei once put it — or what they’re capable of. The risk, then, is not just that powerful AI would enable the government to “make a mockery” of the Fourth Amendment’s right to privacy by assembling “scattered, individually innocuous data [about individual Americans] into a comprehensive picture of any person’s life—automatically and at massive scale,” according to Amodei. Or that, in matters of life and death, “fully autonomous weapons cannot be relied upon to exercise the critical judgment that our highly trained, professional troops exhibit every day.”

The risk is also that whatever the phrase “all lawful purposes” encompasses today, it can’t possibly keep up with what AI could do tomorrow.

“Demanding unconditional access before [these] systems are ready is not an assertion of authority. It is a wager that the unknowns will not matter,”Thomas Wright, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, explained in the Atlantic. “The danger is not that Silicon Valley will wield too much power over the military. It is that neither will fully understand the systems it is rushing to deploy — and that the consequences of that ignorance will be tested not in a laboratory, but on the world.”

I read a government official try to explain this surveillance business the other day who admitted that there are a lot of gray areas here. I see a clear attack on our civil rights and freedoms, the rights to not be searched or unreasonably surveilled without warrant or probable cause. And as this article in Scientific American points out, there is a lot to be mined in those "gray areas."

The company was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives who believed the industry was not taking safety seriously enough. They positioned Claude as the ethical alternative. In late 2024 Anthropic made Claude available on a Palantir platform with a cloud security level up to “secret”—making Claude, by public accounts, the first large language model operating inside classified systems.

The question the standoff now forces is whether safety-first is a coherent identity once a technology is embedded in classified military operations and whether red lines are actually possible. “These words seem simple: illegal surveillance of Americans,” says Emelia Probasco, a senior fellow at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. “But when you get down to it, there are whole armies of lawyers who are trying to sort out how to interpret that phrase.”

All that personal liberty stuff goes out the window so easily. If the government has the technology, they will use it and justify it, no matter what are the supposed legal constraints. And if it is a right wing government, the Supreme Court will most probably back them up.

Was reading today about a mass surveillance project going on right now on highways 8 and 80 in San Diego, which is scanning every license plate that goes by and assembling a massive database. Ostensibly it is to further the war on drugs and find missing children, yada, yada. 

Citizen response was predictable, "Who cares if you have done nothing wrong." This surrender and blind meek acceptance of government intrusion is the way our personal rights evaporate on the road to a fascist state.

Let me know how that goes.

Peter Thiel is clearly the devil, Dario Amodei at least gives one hope.

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Funny postscript. After banning Claude, U.S. used it in its military strikes.

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John Bolton on the Iran strike.