Basically, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wants to be able to use Anthropic's AI models for things Anthropic is not comfortable with: mass domestic surveillance of Americans and fully autonomous weapons.

Anthropic said "no". Whiskey Pete is throwing a tantrum, and Trump is supporting him in it.

This is highly entertaining on many levels.

One level is that a company peddling dangerous technology to fascists is suddenly learning the hard way how instrumentally the fascists treat them.

Another level is that even in their rebuttals of Department of Defense (as it is still officially called!), Anthropic appeases the fascists by using the unofficial "Department of War" moniker:
https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-comments-secretary-war

That's one of the reasons why I am not taking Anthropic's pushback seriously. It's not about any actual moral stance, it's about being able to do business with the fascists while not looking too bad publicly.

@rysiek
The problem for the company is that if it loosens its grip and allows controversial use, its employees will leave the company and start another one.

Creating that technology is not easy.

And those employees can literally do whatever they want because they'll be welcomed with open arms by any other company, and any investor will put money into them.

And the money it loses on defense contracts is nothing compared to what it's gaining in other areas.

@pthenq1 all other big companies, the ones that can pay the salaries these important employees got used to, are working with the DoD on this shit.

If they want to have that kind of leverage, they need to unionize. They are not unionizing, so that leverage is completely illusory.

And the money from DoD contracts is usually the big bucks companies like this make. The whole shtick is to try to convince military to pay for their toys.