Apparently The Real Reason Anthropic’s Models Are Offline: A Six-Year-Old Trump Grudge
23h 39m ago by lemmus.org/u/sundray in technology from www.techdirt.com
As promised, this story just keeps getting stupider.
“Anthropic has not done a great job at trying to speak to the administration and appreciate the ideological differences,” one source familiar with the administration’s thinking said.
“It’s like they just speak in different languages,” the source said, adding that the company has simply not figured out how to communicate with this administration.
"Why can't Anthropic just understand they have to bribe Trump? If he isn't getting a big piece of your action - you aren't getting any."
Anthropic thought sucking up to him was good enough. Remember these are the words of CEO Dario Amodei, spoken supposedly to ensure the public that he wasn't pro-warmonger:
Anthropic understands that the Department of War, not private companies, makes military decisions. We have never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit use of our technology in an ad hoc manner...
Our strong preference is to continue to serve the Department and our warfighters
That's not really a to the point I was making, but as you've brought it up, he said that in the midst of refusing to accede to the US militaries demands that they get to use AI for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons.
You've snipped his words tactically before the pivot to refusal. He said that private companies have no say in how a military chooses to wage war however they would not allow the use of their AI for those two things.
And he's right. If Lockheed decided they didn't like Obama or a military decision of his and grounded their drones to punish him, that would be inappropriate. Lockheed nor Anthropic get to dictate US military policy. That (among other things) is why we are supposed to elect a President with the wherewithal to make those decisions.
Now, I don't know Dario. He's a rich CEO and probably he belongs at the bottom of the sea with the rest. But Anthropic refused to allow their tech to be used that way, and that's more than Google or OpenAI, both of whom were audibly salivating to supplant them. Anthropic seems to be the least bad out of all the options.
That being said, I'm placing my hopes in local AI and getting rid of all the big players, including Anthropic. But in the meanwhile, I do respect them for taking a stand none of their competitors would.
There was no refusal beyond refusal to take responsibility. Dario said said he never complained about things like bombing schoolchildren. And he's horny for mass surveillance, just not of Americans (selective surveillance is okay though).
that's more than Google or OpenAI, both of whom were audibly salivating to supplant them.
I quoted Warfighter Dario salivating to help too. It's in bold. Don't be fooled by his slimy lies.
Might as well say Google truly does care about your privacy because they say they'll never sell your data.
Brilliant!
Honestly don’t understand why companies don’t just leave America.
Techdirt's assertion is that a key event driving the administration's decision to shut down Fable was a tweet from Krebs two days after the administration made that decision? Am I reading this right?
I was also confused. It's oddly worded. From Anthropic's news post:
We reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to identify a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities.
As far as I can tell, this review preceded the gov order, and it was at this point that Katie Moussouris was involved.
Oh no, they're offline...
Anyway
It's possible to not like AI and what it's doing to society and the planet but also to be concerned about executive overreach and corrupt abuse of power.
What, have a nuanced view? Impossible, must be a troll.
Let's yell at him for being on the opposite side.
Sure, and once we have remedied the ten thousand OTHER problems caused by executive overreach and corruption in this admin we can get around to addressing the hard done to this poor little AI company.
I'm kinda thinking that by the time we get done with the other 11,000 (a thousand more happened between your comment and mine), Anthropic won't be much of a going concern anymore.
And it's also possible that that's the exact position already held by the person you're lecturing.
Sure. But this is one of those stories that hits right down the middle in places like Lemmy: it's a fascist government causing harm to a company with a long history of anti-human operation. It's a total sweating-guy-two-buttons meme situation: "Trump is a fascist" vs "And Nothing Of Value Was Lost." Seems like most people are picking a side. I think we shouldn't.
Why not both?
That's...literally what I'm saying with this comment.
Fair enough. I interpreted it as "why not neither," but believe both (despite sounding hyperbolic) are actually, verifiably true.
I think people pick sides far less often than the internet likes to presume that they do.
I tend to agree, but the internet amplifies polarization. Not a great thing for discourse.
Axios, as it’s known to do, doesn’t emphasize how absolutely fucking bonkers all of this is, but does its usual horse race nonsense, suggesting that if only…
That’s not fair.
For the heck of it, I’ll quote the whole article. It’s not that long:
spoiler
Anthropic has once again found itself in the Trump administration's crosshairs over an inability to communicate effectively, sources tell Axios.
Why it matters: Governing the world's most consequential technology is coming down to speaking President Trump's language. Anthropic failed to "honor" a recent cyber executive order, administration officials claim, and the company's purported failure to take the matter seriously led to its most powerful products being scrubbed from the internet. "Everybody said Anthropic was a bad actor. Some of us said it was time to give them a chance. Now those people are questioning that. They screwed us," an administration official said. Catch up quick: On Thursday, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy called Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent expressing concerns that Anthropic's most powerful models, Mythos and Fable, could be jailbroken.
The administration official said Anthropic knew a jailbreak could happen and chose to distribute it anyway: "They came to every fork in the road and took the wrong fork." Anthropic says it received explicit approval from the government to deploy Fable. On Friday night, the government imposed stringent export controls that ultimately led Anthropic to take the models offline entirely. Behind the scenes: "Anthropic has not done a great job at trying to speak to the administration and appreciate the ideological differences," one source familiar with the administration's thinking said.
"It's like they just speak in different languages," the source said, adding that the company has simply not figured out how to communicate with this administration. The administration first threatened Anthropic with export controls a couple of weeks ago after learning that its cutting-edge Mythos model was made available to an entity in a foreign country with direct ties to the Chinese Communist Party, according to the White House.
A source close to Anthropic said the company has always worked closely with the government on expanding Mythos access — and in this case, involving a global telecom company, Anthropic revoked Mythos access without the threat of export controls. Amazon's report raised fresh concerns but Anthropic's "position at the outset was no, we're not going to do anything, this is not a real issue," the source familiar with the administration's thinking said. The source close to Anthropic said the company did not refuse to resolve the issue. Even before this breakdown, a previous fight between Anthropic and the Pentagon also came down in some ways to just not liking the person on the other side of the negotiating table.
A White House official told Axios that the Pentagon fight is completely unrelated — but Anthropic's inability to communicate effectively showed up in a similar, unhelpful way. "We never wanted this to happen. Our number one priority is innovation but our hands were tied," the White House official said. The optics added fuel to the fire. Anthropic came out with a blog post dismissing the Amazon report. Then the company enlisted a cybersecurity expert viewed by the administration as a "radical Democrat," who was then celebrated by Chris Krebs, who Trump just fired. The big picture: Anthropic has been the loudest of the frontier AI labs on safety concerns, calling for strong regulation and spooking the Trump administration and the public with their own model's cyber capabilities.
The White House led in thawing relations with the embattled company following the Pentagon spat. The technology is moving fast and the government is struggling to catch up, sources said. That — combined with the personality differences — led to a blunt instrument being hastily deployed instead of a scalpel. What's next: "The immediate crisis was averted but longterm we have a problem," an administration official said.
The Commerce Department will meet with Anthropic senior tech staffers Logan Graham, Dave Orr and Nicholas Carlini on Monday, officials told Axios. Meetings are also scheduled with the CIA and White House science advisor Michael Kratsios to work through adhering to that cyber executive order. The bottom line: One option is to make sure Anthropic's models can't be jailbroken — though perfect jailbreak resistance may be impossible. Absent that, a source familiar with the administration's thinking said it may simply come down to an attitude fix where, instead of feeling dismissed, "everyone feels safe, secure and happy."
…That’s it.
It’s just a bunch of sources.
That’s what journalism is supposed to be. The article author isn’t supposed to inject some heated take, they’re supposed to present what sources relayed, and let readers make the judgement. Anything beyond that is for opinion pieces.
And Axios didn’t suggest anything; the sources did.
In other words, that’s not Axios’s job.
I wonder what would happen if Anthropic sold it to china?
Now that a ban has been imposed, prison.