[flagged]

It's not recent news that Anthropic has (had?) DoD contracts. This is a lot of words to write while seeming ignorant of basic facts about the situation.

	▲	nelox 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The argument isn't that nobody knew Anthropic had DoW contracts. The argument is that there's a difference between "publicly known if you follow defense-tech procurement" and "trending on social media where Anthropic's core audience is now actively discussing it." Both can be true simultaneously. A fact being technically available and that fact commanding widespread public attention are very different things. Anthropic's communications team understands this distinction even if you don't find it interesting. The blog post wasn't written for people who already track federal AI contracts, it was written for the much larger audience encountering this story for the first time and forming opinions about it in real time. If the point you're making is just "I already knew this," that's fine, but it doesn't address anything about the incentive structure behind the public response.

▲

fwipsy 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is an interesting perspective, but I think the fallout from sticking to his guns here is probably greater than the public blowback he would receive from serving the DoD. Without this specific sticking point, the public would know that Anthropic was serving the DoD, but not what specifically the model was being used for, and it would be difficult to prove it wasn't something relatively innocuous.

▲

zephen 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> if the directive had never been made public, would that blog post exist?

You're ignoring the sequence of events on the ground.

If there hadn't been any been any internal pushback from Anthropic, would the directive have ever been made public?

▲

nelox 6 hours ago | parent [-]

That's a fair point about sequencing, but it actually reinforces the argument rather than undermining it. If Anthropic pushed back internally, and that pushback is what led to the directive going public, then Anthropic had every reason to anticipate that this would become a public story. Which means the blog post wasn't a spontaneous act of transparency, it was a prepared response to a foreseeable escalation. That's more strategic rather than less so.

Internal pushback and public damage control aren't mutually exclusive. A company can genuinely disagree with a client's demands behind closed doors and simultaneously craft a public narrative designed to make itself look as good as possible once those disagreements surface. In fact, that's exactly what competent communications teams do, they plan for the scenario where private disputes become public, and they have messaging ready.

The real question isn't who went public first or why. It's whether Anthropic's stated position, "we support these military use cases but not those ones", reflects a durable ethical framework or a line drawn precisely where it needed to be to keep both the contracts and the brand intact. Nothing in the sequencing you've described answers that question. It just tells us Anthropic saw this coming, which, if anything, means the messaging was more carefully engineered, not less.

▲

kalkin 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I already suspected the first comment was by an LLM, but deleted that from my reply as it didn't feel like a productive accusation. However, with "that's a fair point" as an opener, plus the sheer typing speed implied by replies, and the way that individual sentences thread together even as the larger point is incoherent, I'm now confident enough to call it.

▲

nelox 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I actually use assistive voice transcription as I am unable to type well with a keyboard.

[Edit: update]

I use assistive voice transcription because I'm unable to type well with a keyboard. But I'd point out that "you must be an AI" has become the new way to dismiss an argument without engaging with it. It's the modern equivalent of "you're just copy-pasting talking points", it lets you discard everything someone said without addressing a single word of it.

The fact that my sentences "thread together" is not evidence of anything other than coherent thinking. And speed of response says more about the tools someone uses than whether a human is behind them. Plenty of people use dictation, accessibility tools, or just happen to type fast.

^^^ This took me 30 seconds to speak aloud.

	▲	kalkin 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Ok, good to have that explanation. Your larger point, though, remains incoherent. Whether Anthropic saw this coming has nothing to do with the substance of the conflict here and is very much not "the real question".