This honestly strikes me as a story people don’t understand. Mass surveillance is not lawful and the government thus agreed not to do that. However, they still needed the guardrails removed. People interpret this as them wanting mass surveillance, but that’s not necessarily true.

I work for a company that uses AI for legal work, processing and analyzing court cases, discovery documents, etc. We had problems with AI models like Gemini and GPT refusing to do what we needed because of guardrails against violence and abuse of minors. It refused to discuss and analyze cases that involved murders described in detail, or cases involving child molestation, etc. We weren’t used it for unlawful purposes, very much the opposite.

I feel like if people knew that we, like the DoD, had to use uncensored models that allowed such things, people would complain “Wow, you guys are trying to remove guardrails for child porn and violence! How terrible!”

Is it so shocking that a military needs their AI to work with such things even if they’re not implementing it? They cannot afford to have AI in critical moments be like “sorry, my guidelines say I can’t help with this.”

This seems like the time Trump advised against pregnant women against using Tylenol. So people started buying and using it in protest. This is yet another reaction to Trump punishing them, but people are pretending Anthropic is making a stand for the people and OpenAI is somehow not. It’s not that simple.