Can someone in plain terms explain what this is really about?

Anyone can use Claude afaik?

From the public comments over the last few days, my guess is they want a militarized version of Claude. Starting with a box they want to put in the basement of the Pentagon where Antropic can't just switch off the ai. Then some guardrails are probably quite bothersome for the military and they want them removed. Concretely if you try to vibe-target your ICBMs Claude is hopefully telling you that that's a bad idea.

Now, my guess is in the ensuing lawsuit Antropic's defense will be that that is just not a product they offer, somewhat akin to ordering Ford to build a tank variant of the F150.

Best summary by far that I've seen:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-pentagon-threatens-anth...

Discussed here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47154983

Claude won't answer questions about what cities you should nuke in what order. The Pentagon wants Claude to answer those sorts of questions for them.

Edit: oops, I misunderstood. This seems to be more about contractual restrictions.

They want Claude to process tasks like "identify the terrorists in this photo" and "steer this drone towards the terrorists" — Anthropic refused.

I reached to answer but idk what you mean by the second question. Long story short, Department of “War” wants Anthropic to say theres no restrictions on their use of Claude, Anthropic wants to say you can’t use Claude for domestic mass surveillance or automating killing people domestically or in foreign countries. Rest is just complication. And don’t peer too closely at the “Do”W”” wants Anthropic to say $X, the Team Red line (or, whatever’s left of them publicly after this last year) is basically “you can’t tell the gov’t what it can and can’t do, that’s it, it’s not that Do”W” will use it for that”

top signal

> Can someone in plain terms explain what this is really about?

This administration built almost entirely of dunces and conmen has convinced itself/been convinced that chatbots will help them in deciding where to send nukes, and/or they are invested in the incredibly over-leveraged companies engaged in the AI-boom and stand to profit directly by siphoning taxpayer dollars to said companies. My money is on the latter more than the former, but they're also incredibly stupid, so who's to say, maybe they actually think Claude can give strategic points.

The Republicans have abandoned any pretense of actual governance in favor of pulling the copper out of the White House walls to sell as they will have an extremely hard time winning any election ever again since after decades of crowing about the cabal of pedophiles that run the world, we now know not only how true that actually is, but that the vast majority are Conservatives and their billionaire buddies, and the entire foundation and financial backing of what's now called the alt-Right, with some liberals in there for flavor too of course.

If this shit was going down in France, the entire capital would have been burned to the ground twice over by now.