No, if you want my opinion it seems too risky of a move to make all of this so public if all they want is more money. It’s possible, but I’d be surprised. I believe them when they say that what they want is to have those two particular things, fully autonomous weapons and mass surveillance of US citizens, removed from the contract terms (for now). This could be out of genuine moral principles, or out of fear of bad PR when this would be found out. Most likely a combination of both. My point was that from my perspective it is a very minor difference. The conclusion I kept after reading this isn’t “good guy Anthropic bravely stands against pressure from Hegseth” as some of the Hackernews comments try to paint it. It is “Anthropic mostly bends over backwards and grovels for Pentagon money, willing to massively spy on all foreign nationals and working on creating autonomous weapons - other US AI companies likely to be even worse”. As I said, horrifying.