The Pentagon vs. Anthropic –

I am less struck by the fact that Anthropic is waging this battle, and more struck by the fact that no one else is. You know, in Silicon Valley. There was a long history of wanting to avoid these kinds of entanglements with the military, of wanting to ensure that the software that they were making would only benefit people. And so the fact that it seems like Google, OpenAI and xAI are all prepared to sign up for what could be mass surveillance and autonomous killing weapons, I actually find quite chilling. – But to me, the thing that really sticks out about this fight is that I think no one is actually clocking how powerful this technology is today and how powerful it could get very soon. You know, when you look at the quotes from the Pentagon side of this, you know, they really think that, like, they are buying a software product here, Like, the next instantiation of Google or, you know, something like Microsoft Word or Excel. Like, those companies don’t limit what the military can do. You know, if the military buys a big contract for Excel, it doesn’t come with a little thing that says, like, you can’t use this to, you know, conduct domestic surveillance. – Yeah. But I think if if everyone involved in this situation understood that this is something bigger than like Microsoft Word or Excel, that these systems are becoming capable of, like, judgment and autonomous action. I think we’d be having a different conversation.