In none of their statements do they say they won't do the things:

> we cannot in good conscience accede to their request.

That's very specifically worded to not say "under no circumstances will we do this".

> Two such use cases have never been included in our contracts with the Department of War, and we believe they should not be included now

Is not saying they won't eventually be included.

They've left themselves a backtrack, and with the care there this statement has been crafted, that's surely deliberate.

I share this sentiment.

In general - I don’t know if it’s a coincidence but here on HN for example, I’ve noticed an increasing amount of comments and posts emphasizing the narrative of how “well- intended” Anthropic is.

I'd love to see the financial model that offsets losing your single biggest customer and substantial chunk of your annual revenue with some vague notion of public trust.

It absolutely is a PR stunt. And the media is cheering.

It's absurd.

It's simple: If you do not like working with the military, cancel your contract with the military and pay the penalties.

They are explicitly not doing that.

To quote Brennan Lee Mulligan, "Laws are threats made by the dominant socioeconomic ethnic group in a given nation."

That's maybe the second law. The first one is: money is always finite.

Look at how Elon Musk behaved. Do you think VC gladly approved what he did with Twitter? They might want to keep chasing quarterly results - but sometimes, like with Zukerberg, they can't. Not enough money. Similar examples with Google rounds or how much more financially backed politician loses rather often to a competitor. Or, if you will, Vladimir Putin's idea that he can buy whatever results he wants - and that guy is a very wealthy person. There are always limits, putting the money law to the second place. We might argue that often the existing money is enough... but in more geopolitical, continuum-curving cases there are other powerful forces.

I'd counter that at this level of capital, if the CEO doesn't well align with the capital, then super-control shares will be overpowered by super-lawyers and if there is need some super-donations. OpenAI was a public interest company...

Anthropic has an odd voting structure. While the CEO Dario Amodei holds no super-voting shares, there are special shares controlled by a separate council of trustees who aren't answerable to investors and who have the power to replace the Board. So in practice it comes down to personal relationships.

So do you know everyone in the industry that made that such a claim? Sure, maybe you meant to restrict it further to "everyone I have noticed personally that said/wrote that" (or anything along the lines), but even then, do you know all the stuff that they did after saying it? (as the statement also included "doing the opposite" which I find quite strong).

If I see "everyone" I would expect it to actually mean "everyone under the constraints", the word "everyone" has a certain meaning and is very powerful, why use for situations where other words like "many", "most" might be more appropriate?

I think that's still too rosy a view; it's clear with a lot of big tech that they never had the ideals in the first place. They use claims of principle for marketing purposes and then discard them when it's no longer convenient.

Or, perhaps even more likely, the ideals inevitably get corrupted by access to unthinkable economic power/leverage, like it happened with more or less all other giants with strongly idealistic initial leadership and leadership may actually delude itself into thinking they're still on the right track as a sort of a defense mechanism. Back when they published the article on the Claude-operated mass-scale data breach last year, the conclusions were delivered in a bafflingly casual tone as if it was a weather report: yeah, the world has become a lot more dangerous now (on its own), so you may want to start using Claude for cyber-defense and we are doing our best to help you protect your business. I rolled my eyes at that so hard they popped out of their sockets. Weren't you... the guys... who made it that way and enabled that very attack? Very convenient to sell weapons to both sides, isn't it, not at all like a mafia business. Very responsible and ideal-driven.

Consider also the part that is going unsaid in the address: Amodei is strongly against the use of Claude for mass surveillance of Americans but he says nothing about mass surveillance of anybody else (and, in fact, is proactively giving foreign intelligence a green light in his address) and is deliberately avoiding any discussion on the fact that his relationship with the Pentagon is mediated through the contract with Palantir they signed something like 1.5 years ago. Palantir is a company whose business is literally mass surveillance, by the way! I, too, am so ideal-driven that I willingly make deals with the devil! But now that he's successfully captured the popular sentiment, people are going to consider him the moral champion without bothering to look at these and other glaring contradictions.

I believe that this is classical behaviour of every share holder driven business. You can build on ideals from start, but once you acquire some position, money making is on the menu. Eg. deliberately worsening user experience for better revenue.

Possiblity to turn on heated seats in car you own for a small monthly fee is absurd yet very real. I'm looking forward to enshittification of current AI tools.

Sure, sooner or later. I don't want to even guess where the new AI companies are on the path that leads to that destination, but right now it looks like Anthropic is not at that stage. Heck, even though a lot of people find Sam Altman slimy, even OpenAI isn't yet at that stage.

Yes, though Meta is a bad example as they started off with the values of Zuckerberg, and still have them.

All of Meta's VR stuff should rationally be cut loose and refunded if it were all about greed. That stuff only survives because Zuck is a nerd who wants it to happen (but it's not going to.)

Oh sure. I don't want to say everybody are driven by ideals and not greed, but that even people with strong ideals and good intentions can do a lot of bad by being blinded by those same ideals.

Can you provide an example of that for an American venture backed corporation older than a decade?