Anthropic teams up with Palantir and AWS to sell AI to defense customers

It is really interesting that many people in this world seem to refuse to allow AI to insult (or offend) any person but would be okay if AI took part of killing them (if they were in the wrong place at the wrong time of course). I don't share this opinion and would be interested to hear about what is the thought process of people that come to support that. Other than financial aspect (people who actually benefit financially), Is it something like our enemies will use it so we should too ? Does this mean not using that against your enemies that does not use it or what ?

I highly recommend reading this article about how Israel has been using AI: https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

It really brought home for me the real, existing harms this type of technology is already doing in the "defense" space.

> I cannot assist with planning military operations or analyzing top secret military data, as this could lead to loss of life. I aim to help prevent harm, not cause it.

- Claude, before selling out to Defense

I've said it before and I'll say it again... any company that actually cared about AI "safety" or "alignment", or had any belief that we are on the threshold of AGI, should steadfastly refuse to let it be used in any sort of military or intelligence context.

That's literally how you get Skynet, and that's what everyone claims to be worried about, right? Or are they just full of shit

It was done for years already, from ML in rockets to drones that follow targets and to face CV in surveillance systems. I am not sure how much is used in modern fighter jets. The only difference is that now public cloud vendors are going in but at the same time I doubt Claude will be used to steer the rockets, the rate of error is too high.

It's not surprising given the inroads companies like scale.ai have been making into the D.o.D. Partnering with Palantir gives some credibility (debatable) with deploying product etc.

Having worked on one of these projects two years ago, back then the waiving of hands for dealing with hallucinations and risks was a bit offputting and at times scary. Hopefully as we deploy these tech stacks we take serious time to do it slow and steady and working out the edge cases and failures.

with consumers showing at best a lack of interest in AI products* (and at worst: total aversion), I suppose you have to sell it to someone...

* https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/7/24290268/microsoft-copilo...

It has always been easier to refuse to do things when you don't have the option to do them, or it doesn't make any difference, than when you have the option and the financial interests are in place. See for example "Safely aligned" Anthropic [0] and "non-profit Open"AI .

[0] https://www.anthropic.com/news/core-views-on-ai-safety

> Furthermore, rapid AI progress will be disruptive to society and may trigger competitive races that could lead corporations or nations to deploy untrustworthy AI systems. The results of this could be catastrophic, either because AI systems strategically pursue dangerous goals, or because these systems make more innocent mistakes in high-stakes situations.

Related:

U.S. military makes first confirmed OpenAI purchase for war-fighting forces

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41999029

Related:

Meta Permits Its A.I. Models to Be Used for U.S. Military Purposes

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42048009

> The Defense Department’s IL6 is reserved for systems containing data that’s deemed critical to national security and requiring “maximum protection” against unauthorized access and tampering. Information in IL6 systems can be up to “secret” level — one step below top secret.

Is the thinking here that they’ll use it to read and somehow act (warnings systems, notifications) on highly classified information that can’t be disseminated? I don’t have a good grasp of what this looks like.

I love what Anthropic and Dario are doing and from a business perspective this makes perfect sense. But AI is the last thing the military should be touching.

If there's even a half percent chance that a mistake is made, it could be irreversibly destructive. Doubly so if "trusting the AI" becomes a defacto standard decades down the road. Even scarier is that "the AI told us to do it" is basically a license to cause chaos with zero accountability.

Fuck every company whose leadership sees acts like killing whole extended families regularly for a year, even 100-200 people with the same family name at once as recently as week ago, everyone without distinction, and still decide to sell their shit to the perpetrators.

So I have some concerns.

There is of course the safety & morality of AI in military, the potential issues for hallucinations, environmental concerns, etc. But I'm more worried about the ability to defer accountability for terrible acts to a software bug.

Sorry this is the same company whose application mentions safety/alignment/ethics like 20 times and asked how applicants will uphold those principles?

and here it goes my intention to subscribe to claude

So much for the „good guys of AI“ reputation

For the record, a similar move by Anthropic was predicted by several people just four months ago and vehemently denied:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40802334

Yet another "conspiracy theory" came true.